View image: Mickey Spillane Strips Down to Naked Fury! Mickey Spillane, the creator of hard-fisted private eye Mike Hammer, has died at the age of 88. Several of his kiss-kiss, bang-bang pulp novels -- including "I, the Jury," "The Long…
View image: "The Crowd" (King Vidor, 1928) View image: "The Apartment" (Billy Wilder, 1960) View image: "The Rapture" (Michael Tolkin, 1991) View image: "Fight Club" (David Fincher, 1999) View image: "Office Space" (Mike Judge, 1999) Ken Wiley, a jazz historian…
View image: The cubicle jungle. From "Office Space." Just published at MSN Movies (which reportedly recently passed Yahoo! as the highest-trafficked movie site on the web -- even more than IMDb!): my survey of ten movies about the tortures and…
An empty landscape, an endless, desolate (and TechniScope-horizontal) landscape... ... suddenly replaced by another enormous sun-baked landscape, and the long shot is instantaneously transformed into a close-up of... ... a human face, staring into the camera -- and, by extension,…
View image: Harvey Keitel as a prison priest on the set of "It's Pat" with Gene and Dean Ween. Unfortunately, this framing device got cut! In my review of "You, Me and Dupree," (which, to meet Sun-Times deadlines I had…
Comedy Central is still just a little afraid of this... ... and this. "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have finally explained some of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that prevented their Tom Cruise/Scientology-ridiculing episode, "Trapped in the Closet" from…
From Dennis Cozzalio, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Glendale, CA: When Jim invited me to participate in this survey, I accepted with enthusiasm and then immediately began to worry. Every example of a great opening shot that was…
"Life's a laugh and death's a joke it's true. / You'll see it's all a show, / Keep 'em laughing as you go. / Just remember that the last laugh is on you..." "For life is quite absurd / And…
View image: The crawl recedes... View image; The camera tilts down. View image; The surface of a planet spans the lower part of the frame as a ship passes through the top. "Star Wars" has, not surprisingly, been the popular…
View image: It starts here... View image ... and ends here. And nearly everything that happens, except for a slow movement in on the house, happens off-screen. From Richard T. Jameson, Editor, Movietone News, 1971-81; Editor, Film Comment, 1990-2000: The…
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