Jazz Odyssey: Odds Against Tomorrow
Three desperate New Yorkers (Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan and Ed Begley) plan a bank job in Robert Wise’s 1959 film noir. If you’re wondering what this heist movie is doing […]
Author Archives: Dan Meier
Jazz Odyssey: All Night Long
Welcome to Jazz Odyssey, a week of jazz-related film reviews because this blog isn’t nearly alienating enough as it is. No spoilers but these include a thriller, a documentary, a […]
Bananas
Separating the art from the artist sounds great in theory but there’s something about Woody Allen that makes it difficult in practice, though I can’t quite put my finger on […]
The Grateful Dead Movie
When the late, great Robert Hunter wrote the Grateful Dead lyric “Such a long long time to be gone, and a moment to be there” he was probably describing life […]
The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
When is a director not a director? And I don’t mean M. Night Shyamalan; I’m talking about films with misleading director credits, such as Poltergeist secretly being directed by Steven […]
Species
An alien hybrid escapes containment and hits the LA clubs for some procreational activities in this 1995 sci-fi/horror that they should have called Sex Predator. Itself a hybrid of Rabid […]
Little Monsters
A kindergarten trip to a petting farm is gatecrashed by a zombie outbreak in this Australian zom-com, or perhaps a zoombie movie. You don’t have to be Edgar Wright to […]
WITCH: We Intend To Cause Havoc
WITCH is a rockumentary which celebrates the rich history and present-day sitch of Zambian rock band WITCH. Rockumentaries have a tendency to conform to type, a consequence of there being […]
Brick
Claire from Lost gets lost and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (currently MIA from acting) tracks her down in Rian Johnson’s debut feature. I’ve seen this film three times and still have no […]
Hustlers
Based on a real case from 2008, Hustlers follows a group of New York strippers (including Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu and Scream Queens‘ Keke Palmer) who withstand the financial crisis by […]
Screen Goblin 