Shoot the Glass

I love epics. Grand sweeping shots of beautiful landscape, stories spanning decades, characters larger than life. I rarely mind the runtime and I love just sitting down on a Sunday afternoon to watch a three- or four-hour movie. Lawrence of Arabia is among my favourite movies ever.
Australia though, was just a little too much. Baz [...]

For some reason, this second movie in Leone’s “dollars” trilogy was the only one I hadn’t seen. Well, calling it a trilogy is really something of a misnomer, since the three are only loosely connected. And using “the man with no name” is not really correct either, since Clint Eastwood’s characters do have names (or [...]

If it hadn’t been for the IMDb Top 250 list, I doubt I would have heard of this movie. It seems to have gotten lost in time somehow, perhaps because it’s not quite a western, not quite a noir. But believe me, it’s excellent.
Two men come to a town where news are spreading that a [...]

What intrigued me most about High Noon was the story I had heard about how John Wayne and Howard Hawks both hated it, and went on to make Rio Bravo as a right-wing response to it. Apparently, Wayne saw it as an allegory for blacklisting, which he himself had actively supported. In an interview, he [...]

I feel it’s only fair for me to admit something right away. I didn’t see the original “silent” version from 1925. My online rental service sent me the 1942 re-release. This version has the Chaplin narration added in, a completely different score, all title cards removed, and it’s a fair bit shorter.
I had heard this [...]