Midnight on December 19, 2001. Having missed the press screening due to a clerical error on the part of New Line Cinema, I was waiting impatiently for the movie to start while lounging in a seat near the back of my then-local theater. The seats weren...
"James, you take movies too seriously." Those words (or ones nearly like them) were spoken to me 24 years ago by my college girlfriend, Tracie. They were true then and, if anything, they are truer today. Ironically, her theatrical experience (among ...
The American appetite for junk food has escalated over the past two decades. When I was a kid in the dark ages of the 1970s, the concept of "fast food" was more a novelty than a necessity. Most of the time when I went out with my mother and ...
Star Wars was not my first love. By the time it came out in 1977, I had already enjoyed flirtations with baseball, astronomy, dinosaurs, and monster movies. I had developed an unrequited crush on Jessica Lange. I had spent countless afternoons ...
In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. But now, heaven knows, anything goes. (Cole Porter)For boys of a certain age (my age, that is), many experienced their first glimpse of the mature, naked female form via Hugh ...
How much do you pay to see a movie?At one time, "the cinema" was viewed as one of the most economical forms of entertainment. My grandfather told of times when he could get into a Saturday matinee double feature for a nickel. (Okay, so a nickel was ...
As Meatloaf crooned, "Two out of three ain't bad." Or, to be precise, 13 out of 21 for 62%. My gambit of thinking a pro-The King's Speech surge would carry the film to wins in a number of the lesser categories didn't pay off, but it still won the ...
As FDR famously declared, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." To that end, we have an entire holiday dedicated to the experience. Haunted houses, once the province of local impresarios who gathered a few friends and opened an amateur ...
It is said we re-invent ourselves every seven years. I don't know if that's true or not, but the objects of my childhood and teenage passions are not necessarily the things that occupy my thoughts today. This inconstancy explains better than anything...