There must be something deep within our memory as a species that is pleased by being able to look at what is making us warm.
So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.
As we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do, after all, amount to more than a hill of beans.
Perhaps it is the nature of man not to wish to know too much about his own nature.
In our lives, we surf the wave of chance.
It is commonplace to say that silent films are more “dreamlike,” but what does that mean? In Nosferatu, it means that the characters are confronted with alarming images and denied the freedom to talk them away. There is no repartee in nightmares. Human speech dissipates the shadows and makes a room seem normal. Those things that live only at night do not need to talk, for their victims are asleep, waiting.
And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.
Steak ’n Shake!
When a movie character is really working, we become that character. That’s what the movies offer: escapism into lives other than our own.
When, in a free society, the press is criticized for negativity, that almost always means it has dared to question the policies of the party in power. ‘Patriotism,’ Samuel Johnson said, ‘is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ He could have been speaking of those who use it to shield themselves from dissent.
The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today’s audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in The Third Man?
Drama holds a mirror up to life, but needn’t reproduce it.
You know a movie is slow when you start looking to see what time it is. You know it’s awful when you start shaking your watch to see if it has stopped. One.
The story is recycled out of a 1983 French film named Les Comperes, as part of a trend in which Hollywood buys French comedies and experiments on them to see if they can be made in English with all of the humor taken out.
A man goes to the movies. The critic must admit that he is this man.
We piled into the back of his big red Sun-Times truck: Robertson, McHugh, a bagpipe player, assorted other regulars, and Good Sydney Harris. Good Sydney Harris was a Spanish Civil War veteran, not to be confused with the Bad Sydney Harris, the Daily News columnist. Good Sydney had fallen into conversation with a dominatrix named Jake, who joined us.
Of that one, I wrote: “Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.
As the man says in the play, for this relief, much thanks.
If I were more of a hero, I would spend the next couple of weeks breaking into theaters where this movie is being shown, and leading the audience to safety.
Most courtroom movies feel it necessary to end with a clear-cut verdict. But 12 Angry Men never states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It is about whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt.