Da 5 Bloods
Newly released on Netflix, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods seeks to rectify the whitewashing of war movies – think 2012’s Red Tails but with more Marvin Gaye and less George […]
Author Archives: Dan Meier
Cinderfella
Cinderella gets gender-swapped in this 1960 comedy about a put-upon housekeeper called Fella (Jerry Lewis), a name unnecessary for the title to work. You might as well call him Jupiter. Brimming […]
Another Shark Movie 2
The eagerly unticipated sequel to 2017’s 47 Meters Down, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is now on Netflix. Where else would it be? Boasting a cast list that reads like the […]
Stay Hungry
A dodgy businessman (Jeff Bridges) tries to buy a gym in 1976 drama Stay Hungry, not a film so much as an answer to the trivia question: name the movie […]
The Last Stand
This is the 2013 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, not the X-Men film with which it shares a name and magnet-based prison van escape sequence. Arnie’s post-gubernatorial comeback has a few key ingredients […]
Been So Long: My Life and Music
The autobiography of Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen is now out in paperback, a book so beautiful it quite literally attracts butterflies. Been So Long charts the musician’s journey from […]
Red Heat
A Russian officer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a Chicago cop (Jim Belushi) team up to bring down a drug kingpin (Ed O’Ross) in 1988’s Red Heat. There are parallels with Rocky […]
Shivers
All this business with Dominic Cummings has got me thinking about David Cronenberg’s Shivers. Movies about viruses were spreading in the early ’70s (George A. Romero’s The Crazies and Robert […]
On iPlayer: Paint Your Wagon
Clint Eastwood heads westward in 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon AKA Purty Harry. In a possible attempt to rebottle the success of Oklahoma!, Lerner and Loewe’s (My Fair Lady) musical […]
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
As these are “unprecedented times” (by which I mean a year without Eurovision), here’s a book review: the new novel by the great horror writer Grady Hendrix, in which a […]
