As High as the Sky ★★★★☆ Dir: Nikki Braendlin Cinema Libre 90 minutes Released on DVD May 6, 2014 and On Demand June 6, 2014 – Margaret (Caroline Fogarty) is a tightly-wrapped party planner who shuffles around her home in cleaning slippers, adjusting every perfectly-appointed pillow and tchotchke to within an inch of its…
A lot of people for a lot of years tried to make Johnny Mack Brown happen. The handsome All-American halfback-turned-actor cut his teeth on a few silent films before being cast as the ostensible male lead in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), with Joan Crawford, Dorothy Sebastian and Anita Page originating a trio of what would…
Proxy ★★★☆☆ Dir: Zach Parker IFC Midnight 120 minutes Released in select theaters April 18, 2014 – Esther (Alexia Rasmussen), a heavily pregnant woman on her way home from a routine ultrasound, is jumped by an assailant, knocked unconscious, her abdomen repeatedly smashed with a brick. It’s an attack more on her unborn child than…
Spunky, beautiful heiress Kay Bentley (Joan Crawford) decides to go ashore when her father’s yacht docks in the Greek Islands. While there, she meets handsome Irish archaeologist Terry O’Neill (Brian Aherne) on an important dig, and after the standard debutante flirtation-via-irritation method doesn’t work, she decides to try again the next day. Discovering he has…
Tasting Menu ★★★☆☆ Dir: Roger Gual Magnolia Pictures 85 minutes Released in select theaters April 18, 2014 Chakuta, the world-famous restaurant located on the beaches of Spain, is closing its doors after 15 years. Owner and celebrity chef Mar Vidal (Vicenta N’Dongo) has invited 30 guests for the final dinner, and though one…
Are you a fan of crazy weird 1970s made-for-TV movies? Then have I got a doozy for you: The Girl in the Empty Grave. What you need to know about this film before you even think about watching it is that Empty Grave was intended as a pilot for a new series starring Andy Griffith,…
Regis Toomey, Dick Powell and Richard Erdman in Cry Danger (1951). I neglect SBBN so often it seems pointless to even apologize anymore, but I promise, a couple of new posts are coming shortly, and finally (finally!) I’ll start on the series-shaped thing I spoke about, probably in the coming weeks. Thanks to…
Some exciting news from the world of lost silents: Courtesy Rhett Bartlett on Twitter and David Hudson’s Daily, news that EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam has discovered more silent films that were either thought lost or existed only in poor and incomplete prints. The L.A. Times article is here, and the entire list of films is…
William Shatner Born March 22, 1931 Courtesy Star Trek Daily Pic Detail from the 1967 “Star Blecch” parody Shatner and Nimoy were reading in the pictures above. You can find my Flickr set of all the original artwork…
There’s probably no such thing as a nice, quiet little film noir, but Roadblock is as close as you can get. It’s likely that director Harold Daniels just stumbled into this low-key style that works so nicely within the genre — Daniels was known for very little except television and those terrible horror flicks that…