Happy Thanksgiving...
...a holiday that, despite whatever the meanies at Big Hollywood would have you believe, is frequently enjoyed by counter-culture/"progressive"/leftie types, as the above screen cap from Arthur Penn's 1969 Alice's Restaurant testifies.It's been an...interesting year, and it ain't over yet. For today let me extend my very best wishes to you, my readers, old and new, and to your families. As you

My Seventy Greatest Films Of The Decade
So, you don't wanna talk about Spencer Tracy or James Brown? Okay, fine, be that way. I see now that the crew over at Time Out New York has posted its Top 50 Movies of the Aughts, so now's the time, as Charlie Parker would put it, when I might as well counter with my own list, and create what some call "added value" by citing 20 more than 50, because why the hell not. I will try to be more aphoristic and less portentous than the TONY crew in my film assessment. I don't mean that as a slam

Godfather and company
Twelve years after his groundbreaking Apollo performance, 10 years after the TAMI Show, the Godfather of Soul continues to do it to death in 1974, headlining the Zaire '74 Music Festival, conceived as an adjunct to the "Rumble In The Jungle" Ali-Foreman rematch in that country. The fight had to wait several weeks because Foreman got a cut above his eye while sparring, but the concert couldn't wait. Its story is told in a very cool documentary,

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #6: "The People Against O'Hara," directed by John Sturg
Last week's installment, #5, here. Follow the links at that post to access the other prior films in the series.Farber: "An adroit, scholarly example of sound storytelling that every Message Boy should be made to study as an example of how good you can get when you neither sla

"The heavenly electricity:" Douglas Sirk's "Summer Storm" (1944)
This, recently released on DVD, really is a must-see, a terrific piece of cinematic storytelling and a key early Hollywood work from the great Sirk. Dave Kehr gave it a nice write-up in the Times last Sunday, but