Cinematic Soulmates: Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol

It’s Christmas time in Hollis, Queens (and other non-Run-DMC approved locales), so in honor of this most beloved of holidays, Cinematic Soulmates will turn its attention to a couple of films that (at the time) put a fresh and fun spin on the most famous Christmas story of them all, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  Both Scrooged (1988) and A […]

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Cinematic Soulmates: The King of Comedy and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

For some people, fame is like a drug, and their desire to attain it becomes the driving force of their lives.  This has been the case for a very long time, but it seems to have reached a sort of fevered pitch in the modern era.  The rise of “reality television” would seem to bear this out.   Indeed, for over […]

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Great Moments in Cinema: Alien

Part of the brilliance of director Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is the way in which it demystifies space travel.  His characters aren’t heroic astronauts or brilliant scientists or mystic space knights.  Instead, they are blue-collar working stiffs who just happen to make their living on a mining ship that traverses the stars.  It is a clever (if not wholly original) […]

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Great Moments in Cinema: The Great Dictator

Carol Burnett once said “Comedy is tragedy plus time.”  What she meant is that anything can be considered funny given enough time and distance.  George Carlin agreed with her to a point.  He believed that everything could be considered funny, and it didn’t matter how much time had passed.  His contention was that “It all depends on how you construct […]

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Ms. Silver Screen: Don’t be Afraid of the Dark

MiracleFrank: Okay, we’re doing something a little different for our review of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. Since both of us paid to see this hunk of shit, we’re going to have a discussion about it, and then post the transcript of the discussion, because I read somewhere that “movie review discussion transcript” is now like the number 3 most-searched item […]

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Cinematic Soulmates: Spirited Away, Pan’s Labyrinth and Coraline

Stories that follow the traditional “hero’s journey” template are often geared toward adolescent boys, and feature easily identifiable male characters in the lead role.  Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and countless other properties can be placed into this rather broad category, and they all tend to reinforce the notion of the young male protagonist as champion or […]

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