Orion Pictures released The Silence of the Lambs on Valentine’s Day 1991. Somebody in that office had a sense of humor.
Thirty-five years later, Jonathan Demme‘s thriller still works on every rewatch, even when you know what’s waiting at the end. If you want something for Halloween weekend that scares you without a hockey mask, start here.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
The Miracle of Marcelino opens the way a lot of great fables do, with an ending. A priest is called to the deathbed of a woman he doesn’t know, and to comfort her he tells the story of a boy named Marcelino. From there the film drops back decades, to a war-scarred Spanish monastery where the friars find an abandoned infant on their doorstep. They decide, over the objections of at least one grumbling brother, to raise him themselves.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope opened on May 25, 1977, written and directed by George Lucas, produced by Gary Kurtz, with a score by John Williams that did as much to define the movie’s identity as anything on screen. A desert-planet farmhand named Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill, gets pulled into a galactic rebellion after a droid hides a stolen set of plans inside its memory banks. He falls in with an aging hermit named Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Alec Guinness, a smuggler named Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, and a captured rebel leader named Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher.
Standing against them is Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing, and his enforcer, Darth Vader. The plot is simple enough to draw on a napkin. Everything interesting happens in how it’s executed.
Continue readingFiled under Crave, Steven Doyle
High Noon opens on the happiest morning of Marshal Will Kane’s life. Played by Gary Cooper, Kane has just married Amy Fowler, played by Grace Kelly, and turned in his badge, ready to leave the small New Mexico town of Hadleyville behind for a life running a store. Then word arrives at the train station: Frank Miller, the outlaw Kane sent to prison years earlier, has been pardoned and is arriving on the noon train, with three of his old gang already waiting at the depot to meet him. Kane and Amy start to drive out of town. He stops the wagon himself, turns it around, and goes back to face what’s coming.
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Annie Hall opens with Woody Allen, as neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer, addressing the camera directly, working through a Groucho Marx joke about never wanting to belong to a club that would have him as a member, before announcing flatly that he and Annie have broken up and he’s still trying to figure out why. From there the film abandons any pretense of a straight timeline. It jumps back to Alvy’s childhood in a house literally built under a Coney Island roller coaster, then forward through a first marriage, then to the night he meets Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton, at a Manhattan tennis club.
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When La La Land came out in 2016, nobody quite knew what to do with it. A full-blown Hollywood musical, shot in widescreen Technicolor, with tap dancing and a jazz club and two beautiful people falling in love against the Los Angeles skyline — it won six Oscars and broke something loose in audiences that had forgotten musicals could do that. Then came the think pieces. Then came the people who decided loving it was embarrassing. The backlash arrived so fast it practically lapped the film.
A decade out, neither the worship nor the dismissal quite fits. What La La Land actually is — what it has quietly become — is one of the more honest films about ambition and romantic love that Hollywood has produced in a long time. It just hid that honesty inside a lot of pretty colors.
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The Trentadue La Storia Petite Sirah is a striking example of the depth and nuance that a small, focused vineyard can produce. Visually, it presents a deep, almost opaque ruby color, hinting at concentration and power, while the nose is rich and layered, offering dark blackberry, black cherry, hints of dried violet, and a subtle graphite minerality that speaks to its Sonoma Coast wine origin.
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There are comedies that entertain, and then there are comedies that dismantle the very idea of structure itself. The Marx Brother’s Duck Soup belongs firmly in the latter category—a film so sharp, so relentless, and so unconcerned with convention that it continues to feel disruptive nearly a century after its release.
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