Cinema Basement

A review by Brooks Rich Today we have one of my favorite films of all time and one of the most critically acclaimed films we've had on Forgotten Film Friday. I think people probably forget how good Ryan O’Neal was as an actor before he went crazy. His is a tragic Hollywood story that shows how crazy celebrities can get. He became a train wreck whose personal relationships were volatile and were tabloid fodder for years. But today let’s discuss what I think is his best acting performance.... maybe rivaled only by his work in Walter Hill's The Driver . Paper Moon is one of the best grifter films ever made.  Ryan O’Neal plays Moses "Moze" Pray, a con man who during the Great Depression visits widows and convinces them to complete payment on Bibles with their names inscribed on them which he pretends were purchased by their deceased husbands.   He attends the funeral of a former lover and the mourners suspect he is the father of the woman's nine-year-old daugh...

Chasing Amy An essay by Azzam Abdur-Rahman I would like to preface that I am writing this review on a phone as my laptop is dealing with issues so our wonderful editing team will likely be cleaning up an assload of mistakes! But it seems fair that I write this here because this movie impacted me when I was a young man and my phone was my world. Kevin Smith is a lot of things. To most he is the director who made that weed movie on credit cards, to others he is the guy from Degrassi, he is the guy who was too fat to fly but what he always is, is honest. Smith's filmography as a whole is an honest reflection on his views and where he is at during trying moments of his life. Chasing Amy is the rare film in his filmography that is a timeless movie that muses on what Clerk’s started with but really focuses on something people cannot handle, who your partner was before you, and how that can drive away people we love. At 16, that hit me like a ton of bricks.  Chasing Amy is about a str...

A review by Brooks Rich Kevin Smith's 1995 follow up to Clerks takes on mall culture and is told from the point of view of the people who spend their days at the mall… this is where they solve their problems, try to find their place in the world. Mallrats is deinfetly more comedic than Clerks – though it does have some of the bittersweet musings that come from Dante and Randall's conversations. This film’s two main characters, TS and Brodie, argue about whether the cookie stand is part of the food court or if Lois Lane could carry Superman's child. Like in Clerks, these are important arguments.  The loose plot revolves around TS and Brodie, Jeremy London and Jason Lee, trying to reunite with their girlfriends. They have just been dumped! They also need to avoid the dreaded mall security guard and the jerk salesman from a men's clothing store – played by a very fun and douchey Ben Affleck. Along the way they enlist the help of Jay and Silent Bob, (my least favorite cha...

A review by Brooks Rich In this new feature we'll be covering films that are generally considered to be not good and sometimes are often just called pieces of shit. Sometimes we like films others don't and it's important to find out why. So I'll kick it off with a film I have no shame for loving, 1997's volcano disaster film Dante's Peak. Every once in awhile you'll get two films released in very close proximity to each other which are virtually the same film. One film is always superior to the other one though. Most recently it was White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen , two terrorists seize the White House films. Olympus was much better in my opinion. Armageddon and Deep Impact were released around the same time and say what you want about Michael Bay's giant asteroid film it's much better than the snooze fest that is Deep Impact . In 1997 Dante's Peak and Volcano both came out, movies about volcanoes laying waste to everything arou...

A review by Brooks Rich Oscar season is officially here with the first Oscar-bait release of 2019… the highly anticipated adaptation of Donna Tartt's 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Goldfinch. For awhile it seemed like the early front runner for the big prize of Best Picture. However the reviews have not been kind, and the film is being called a shallow adaptation of the book. I couldn't agree with that sentiment more. This film fails at almost every level and is a borderline insult to Tartt's masterpiece.  The plot revolves around thirteen-year-old Theodore "Theo" Decker, whose mother is killed in a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. On his way out he comes across a dying art dealer who directs Theo to his business and also instructs him to take a painting with him, the titular Goldfinch.  So as to not ruin any beat of this novel,(I couldn't care less if I ruin the movie,) I won't say anymore about the plot....

A review by Brooks Rich Happy Friday the 13th. This is probably the first slasher film covered on this blog. It seems appropriate that we cover  Friday the 13th  on Friday the 13th. I'll be honest. Slasher films aren't usually high cinematic art, unless we're talking about the Italian giallo films or  Halloween  from 1978.  Slasher films usually have a formula and stick with them. A bunch of twenty somethings playing teenagers go somewhere and are picked off one at a time by some sort of killer. Before being killed, they smoke pot and have unprotected sex...... a death sentence in the world of the slashers. These films rarely go beyond that outline. Nothing wrong with that and even though  Friday the 13th  is a sort of ripoff of  Halloween,  it is still a fun and entertaining movie.  The plot is simple. A group of teenagers, played by twenty somethings and Kevin Bacon, are renovating an old summer campground that was the site of...

A review by Brooks Rich We kick off Kevin Smith month with his first film, Clerks, a small independent film made for less than $28,000 dollars. It grossed over three million dollars in theaters! The indie boom was in full swing in 1994 and Clerks was a new kind of movie. This wasn't a film about action heroes or gangsters or superheroes. This was about the workers at the local convenience store and their views on life. They'll serve you, but they don't have to like you. Dante and Randall are real people. Every town in America has a Dante and Randall.  The story takes place over the course of one day. Dante Hicks is called in to work. Throughout the film he keeps expressing that he wasn't supposed to be there that day. And finds out his high school sweetheart is getting married. He discovers this after having a fight with his current girlfriend about the number of ex-lovers she has. Dante must also contend with his friend, Randall, who works at the video store nex...

Poor John McTiernan had his month ruined by that bitch Dorian that threatened the coast of eastern Florida. I apologize for the collapse and we will get to more of his filmography but for the month of September we will be covering a director that we admire but don't always love. Kevin Smith has made some films I absolutely adore but sometimes I don't know what he was thinking. Hopefully we can break the films we don't love as much down and reason out what doesn't work for us. Spoiler: I will defend Zack and Miri Make a Porno at one point. So sit back, put on a hockey jersey, grab your silent hetero life partner, and enjoy a month of Kevin Smith. Snoochie boochies!

A review by Brooks Rich A remake of a film originally made my Alfred Hitchcock is a cinema sin. Gus Van Sant's Psycho is a cinematic disaster of epic proportions. There's no need to remake the master. But today we have a film that does share a plot with a film by Hitchcock but it's more a reimagining of the source material and not the film. A deeply underrated thriller from 1998 called A Perfect Murder. Michael Douglas is excellent as Steven Taylor, an investment banker in deep financial trouble. After discovering his wife Emily, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, is having an affair with struggling artists David Shaw, an up and coming Viggo Mortensen, he blackmails Shaw into concocting a plot to murder Emily. When Emily kills her would be murderer, who isn't Shaw, a game of cat and mouse begins. This film is directed by Andrew Davis, a director who does not get the love he deserves. Davis directed such films as The Fugitive and Under Siege and A Perfect Murder is one of ...

An editorial by Brooks Rich September is the start of Oscar season. All those high profile films that will be vying for the big prize of best picture, (it's never the true best picture of the year, but I won't get into that here,) are released starting in September. The first major contender will be the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel  The Goldfinch , releasing  on September 13  and directed by John Crowley, who gave us the film  Brooklyn  in 2015, which was very good. Roger Deakins is the cinematographer and the cast is stacked, maybe the most stacked cast of the year. All signs point to a major Oscar contender.  Personally I don't think the film is going to work. Now I do have some amount of bias because this is one of my favorite novels. I adore this book and have read it a ridiculous amount of times. The plot, in the very basic of terms, centers on thirteen-year-old Theodore "Theo" Decker, an adolescent growing up in New York City w...