Possession (1981) is one of those movies you see get routinely mentioned, but very rarely with *specifics* as to why it's on lists and recommended.
Look, this is not a movie where one bops along with an A-B-C plot. It's absolutely one of those movies - maybe likeInland Empire - where folks sure seem certain about what it is about but nobody agrees, including critics. It is an easy movie to get engrossed in and like, mostly because it falls just on this side of adding up, and your brain is working overtime trying to stitch the pieces together. Is it religious symbolism? Is it not? Is this a commentary on Berlin or using Berlin to make a point about divorce? What's with... you know... the, uh... creature, I guess?
In 1960, Jane Goodall was not even a trained scientist when she was first sent for education and employed by the famed primatologist Louis Leakey to observe chimpanzees in the wild. Goodall would spend years in the Gombe Preserve.
Goodall's research informed much of what is now common knowledge regarding chimpanzees, from their social bonds and communication to their use of tools and quick study. She also observed and described the intelligent hunting and sharing behaviors of chimpanzees, previously unknown.
For the last few decades, Goodall has crisscrossed the globe sharing her good reputation, wit and incredible mind in order to further the causes of conservation - especially for great apes.
If you ever get a chance, watch an interview with Goodall. A truly remarkable human.
First - it's remarkable how messed up the music industry was in the 1990's that I realize I kind of disliked some of the music from the artists in Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery (2025) not because of the music, but because if a song was any good in the 1990's, you kind of couldn't escape it for months at a time. I think half of why I got weird about music in college and decided "I'm gonna go listen to Cole Porter standards" was because if I heard Hootie and the Blowfish one more time, I was going to shove pencils through my ear drums. On the whole, radio, Muzak and MTV had a real "you like ice cream? Great. We're force feeding you a gallon of mint chocolate chip every hour for the next two months" sort of vibe.
It did not help that I was working in a Camelot Records during the period when the artists who would become the headliners at Lilith Fair in the first years were releasing their music. (So tired were we of Paula Cole's "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" that, behind the counter we would whisper to each other in response to Cole's query, "Up my butt". But almost 30 years later, that song is a-ok, Paula Cole.)
The documentary of Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery charts the origins, rise, challenges to, and eventual final wrap-up of the initial go at Lilith Fair, and its place in culture in the 1990's. It shows how the very suddenly popular Sarah McLachlan parlayed both her position and organization into recruiting other female artists and playing multiple summers of tours from the mid-90's to 1999. Along the way, luminaries like Patti Smith, Bonnie Raitt, Erykah Badu, Emmylou Harris, Suzanne Vega and countless others joined McLachlan on the road to help change perceptions of how women fit into the music industry.
In late summer 1990, I saw the trailer for Miller's Crossing (1990) at my local cinema in Spring, Texas. I don't remember what movie I saw that day, but I remember seeing the lush, lyrical trailer for a movie that seemed to jump off the screen with its imagery, language and violence. Coming off of my first high of mob movies with The Godfather around that time, as well as seeing the guys who had madeRaising Arizonawere behind the movie, I was ready to see the film on opening day.
But the Coen Bros. were not yet famous, and Fox, which had distribution rights, didn't really push the movie. I kept looking for it in show listings. But it played downtown Houston, not out in the 'burbs, and I was still something like eight months away from my license. And, so it was that I missed the film until it came out on VHS.
I'm the first person to say Alien and Aliens are two great films, each for different reasons. And while I understand people love Alien3, I just wasn't onboard. And it's safe to say, I've wrestled with the subsequent sequels, including Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The desire to combine the Alien storyline with the Predator franchise, with the wink-wink connections to Blade Runner strikes me as a curious obsession in sci-fi fandom - even if I shared the excitement of everyone else when Predator 2 came out.
I'd skipped the last Alien movie. If Ridley Scott couldn't make me care, I'm not sure who could.
But part of that was, even as Romulus was in post-production, I heard Noah Hawley got his hands on the franchise and had a TV show coming.
For those unfamiliar, Hawley is the person responsible for Legion, maybe the most interesting superhero adaptation (loosely based on the Marvel X-character Legion) to hit a screen, big or small, and which ran on FX for three seasons. But, more important, Hawley has helmed Fargo for five seasons and across ten years. And, in this blog's opinion, it's one of the best shows to have graced screens, full stop.
Fargo is an oddball spin-off of the Coen Bros. film of the same name. And I won't get into it here, but if Legion showed Hawley knew how to take a nut of an idea from source material and grow something fascinating with it, Fargo took the well-defined themes and characters of a Coen Bros. movie as inspiration and exploded their stories into multi-faceted noir epics, borrowing elements and ideas from across the Coen Bros. filmography.
So... yeah, I was jazzed when I heard Hawley was getting his hands on Alien. And eight episodes later, I feel like my trust was warranted.
One of the only book series I've read in its entirety, and re-read multiple volumes, has been the Parker series of books by Richard Stark (aka: Donald Westlake). I tend to think of Parker as a criminal project manager, and that works for me in my world.
A while back I'd read of the casting of Robert Downy Jr. for the role of Parker in the Shane Black helmed film, but that seems to have gone away with Avengers stuff back on RDJ's slate. To my surprise, the role here is occupied by Mark Wahlberg. I'm not anti-Wahlberg, but after spending 20-something books with Parker, I was of the opinion that RDJ could do it, but he wasn't my first choice. Look, Parker is supposed to be a towering figure and RDJ Is like 5'9". I am a bit baffled by the casting of Wahlberg, but no one asked me. We have a whole Dave Bautista out there.
There have been many adaptations of Parker books to film, and all of them make the mistake of wanting Parker to have... feelings. He does have feelings, like anger, mild-irritation, general crankiness... but he's not a joker or hugger. He does not quip. And that's hard for folks writing him or playing him, and why Lee Marvin's take in Point Blank was probably closest. He's largely amoral, and will put a bullet in you if you cross him, even if he's known you for years as a colleague. He *does* have unspoken feelings and maybe even what he considers friendships, if Butcher's Moon is any indication.
So, long story long, the trailer doesn't reflect the novels.
Nor is it, exactly, one of the books. It seems to be melding elements from The Handle and another book or two. But it's its own thing, in the end.
But what I have heard twice now is that the movie is not the Ocean's 11-vibe that I'm getting from the video above. In my humble opinion, the closest to the vibe of the books is probably Payback with Mel Gibson, or the aforementioned Point Blank.
If I may... Amazon is doing the wrong thing here in general, and should just make 3 Parker movies per year for maybe 3 years, and just stick to the books, setting the movies in the era in which the novels were released. Stop at The Rare Coin Score, I think. Bring in Claire and then decide if it's worth continuing.
Cardinale, who hailed from Italy, appeared in a handful of American films. She's most famous for 8 1/2 and one of my personal favorite films, Once Upon a Time In The West, where she plays Jill - a deeply complicated woman arriving on the frontier just as industrialization arrives on the front porch.
Here's one of my favorite sequences in cinema, featuring Cardinale (with an American voiceover, because Sergio Leone).
Some time around the turn of the century, I was an avid reader of Texas Monthly, a periodical covering a wide range of topics which I considered to have some of the finest writing one could come by in that era. And in one issue appeared the odd story of a serial killer, pre-dating Jack the Ripper, who had lurked in my own backyard - killing women and girls in Austin the mid-1880's, when Austin was the capital, but still just sprouting up as a municipality.
I was stunned.
Like a lot of young folks with too much time on their hands, I was aware of details around particularly famous serial killers, having read up on Jack the Ripper as far back as middle school. And I recall being aware of Henry Lee Lucas, Ted Bundy, and a handful of other killers by the time I graduated high school, back when all of it was sort of an abstraction. So to find out that Austin had it's own Victorian-era killer, and that we had our famed Moontowers because of the killer? That was mind-boggling.
Since that article, the general knowledge that Austin had a 19th-century serial killer has become more pronounced. And, these days, if you want to go on one of those Ghost Tours of Austin, I believe there's some that cater to hitting up the spots where folks were killed.
But I'd never read Skip Hollandsworth's follow up to the article, his 2017 book The Midnight Assassin: The Hunt for America's First Serial Killer. I'd planned to read it in October as my Hallow-read, but... I get excited and jump the gun sometimes. And here we are. And, yes, I took the book in as an audiobook read by Clint Jordan.
Longtime readers will know that The Bride of Frankenstein is, full stop, one of my favorite movies. And Frankenstein is such a favorite book, I think I'm starting a re-read soon.
I'm not really much of a purist, as these things go. The book is 200+ years old, and folks can do as they please. What *does* bother me is when folks either have never seen Bride of Frankenstein or gravely, somehow, against all odds, misunderstood the movie. In either case it's believing that the movie is not 100% about the folly of believing you can make someone love you. (in this case, make someone to love you) And so we get all the cutesy merch with Franky and The Bride as a cute couple, and... well, I have to remind myself it's all in good fun.
So, I could care less if someone does *an entirely new story* that doesn't just bobble the 1935 movie. Take those basics of the Frankenstein movies and/ or book and go bananas. And, this looks bananas. Good on director Gyllenhaal. I'm in. I could care less that we already had Poor Things andCreature Commandosrecently. Keep it coming.
Your guess what this will be is as good or better than mine.
