Leo Grin

At heart, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and even the often bleak and sad Silmarillion — are kindly works, not bitter and cynical ones. He was not interested in leaving his readers

I used to think I was a fan of the genre known today as fantasy, and specifically the subgenres of High Fantasy and Sword-and-Sorcery. This was due to a number of factors. A childhood imagination dominated by Dungeons & Dragons.

Living in California and having as friends many artists, writers, and poets (all of them, to a one, blissfully, unreflectively liberal), I often have the opportunity to hear them wax poetic about the Golden Age of their lives: the late

Over the last year I watched an interesting mini-social experiment play out: my sixty-something parents trying out Netflix. The company’s now-famous little red envelopes first gained fame around the time the dot-com boom went bust in early 2000. Video rental

Cleaning out some old books in preparation for an impending move, I came across some items that reminded me about how precipitous the drop in the quality of the moviegoing experience has been. Believe it or not, there was a

When the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, announced that they were going to remake True Grit, it sparked all of the usual arguments about the merits and demerits of such undertakings. The first film, released in 1969, sits in the

Much has been made about James Agee’s affectionate judgment of Buster Keaton: “Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his

One day in early 1896, a toddler barely able to walk accidentally tumbled head-over-heels down a long flight of stairs. People gasped and rushed to help, but when they reached the bottom of the landing they saw the little boy

The Cameraman marks an exact crossroads in the career of Buster Keaton. It was his last genuine silent film, made after his previous three pictures (all now hailed as classics) had underperformed at the box office. Coming at the very

On September 5, 1949, a largely unknown forty-year-old writer named James Agee had an essay published in Life magazine. Titled “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” it was a paean to the silent screen comedians of yesteryear, and to the fine art of

Yesterday I walked into my local supermarket to find they already had a massive Christmas tree up ornamented with gift cards. Yes, it’s quickly approaching “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and that means gifts to buy, preferably before

With Hallowmas upon us, I thought I would go over the reasons why I consider zombies to be the greatest monsters yet invented, a sort of grand synthesis of all of the best elements of previous fright-mongers. See if you

There’s an Ed McBain police procedural novel (Poison, I think it was), where the cops take a statement from a man accused of gunning someone down in a movie theater. The suspect explains how the deceased kept talking and talking

We’ve all watched well-known, highly regarded actors for the umpteenth time on screen — perhaps even raucously enjoying both their performance and the movie — and thought about how painfully derivative and self-referential they’ve become. Somewhere along the way, over

In the Age of the Hollywood Sucker Punch, betting your time and dollars on movies and TV is more perilous than ever. As often as not, you can expect to fork over $20-$40 at the theater expecting to laugh, cry,

A good argument can be made that the period 2000-2009 was the single worst decade for movies in Hollywood history. Unfortunately, judging by what we’ve seen so far in 2010, the next decade could conceivably dip even lower into mediocrity.

Few franchises have had a steeper fall than the Alien series. In 1992 Alien3 appeared to near-universal derision. James Cameron nailed the essential problem when he said, “[director David] Fincher pissed me off by killing off Newt, Hicks, and Bishop,

Science fiction is a strange genre, liberally blending the past, present, and future into wonderful new forms. It takes a special mind to seamlessly achieve this mixture, to get an audience to truly believe that what they are seeing on

One of the things that I find most unpleasant about the current movie-going experience are the trailers. They’ve become slicker and louder than ever, but nevertheless a relentless homogenization has set in. The reason that a spoof video called A

When Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane first appeared in France, the translator did a curious thing: he snuck Brandon De Wilde’s famous movie line “Shane! Come back!” into the text. That bit, of course, never appeared in the novel. But the

Rumor has it that Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables marks a return to the glory days of 1980s action mayhem and pro-American machismo. Its appearance on the cultural horizon has certainly stirred up memories of my mid-Eighties, Midwestern suburban adolescence. It

The man on the podium was short and stocky, grizzled and growling, with a chewed cigar in one hand and an elegant conductor’s baton in the other. One contemporary newspaper described him as looking “more like a fight promoter than

A Los Angeles Times article I read recently made me chuckle. It began by wearily tossing an exhausted barb at the 3-D phenomenon sweeping Hollywood: “With sighs of relief, critics last week took off their Polaroid glasses and looked at

Back in the summer of 1951, Jackson, Wyoming was a sleepy town nestled amidst a vast untamed wilderness, and George Stevens was there in the valley shooting a film called Shane. To maintain as much creative control as possible, he

Pop quiz: what do the following movies have in common? Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), The Sound of Music (1965), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Ten Commandments (1956), Titanic (1997), Jaws (1975), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Exorcist

One of George Stevens’ filmmaking maxims was: “The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.” Nowhere in his oeuvre is this more evident than in Shane, perhaps the most peculiarly cast A-grade Western in Hollywood history. It

When director George Stevens decided to film Shane in the early fifties, it was a momentous decision on a number of levels. Born in 1904, he was the product of a family of actors, and grew up in San Francisco

Everyone, it would seem, has an idol — someone who looms large in one’s imagination, and whose example irrevocably changes the direction and purpose of one’s life. For author Jack Schaefer (1907–1991), one such figure was Wilbur Daniel Steele, a

After waxing poetic about John Woo’s talent for the last month, it may surprise you to learn that I consider his later career an embarrassing falloff from his Hong Kong prime. That such sad declines are all-too-common among directors (and

AUTHOR UPDATE: It’s been brought to my attention by a commenter that this excellent article on Pixar in the June issue of Wired magazine, written by Jonah Lehrer, begins by riffing off of the exact same William Goldman quote that

John Woo is a director’s director, often causing other practitioners of the trade to gape and wonder “How on earth did he do that?” When they hear that a technically audacious movie like Hard Boiled cost only four million dollars

A 1995 Los Angeles Times Magazine cover proclaimed him “The Coolest Actor in the World,” and yet most Americans to this day have never heard of him. For fans of Hong Kong films, though, he is Asia’s answer to Steve