Movies Til Dawn

The Tribeca Film Festival is officially over and our film, "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" is in mid-theatrical run in Los Angeles and New York. We were delighted with the entire experience and I thought I'd share a pile of reviews. We currently have a 100% Tomatometer rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Thanks to their aggregating the reviews, I won't have to cut and paste every single link. Click here to go to the official Tomato page for Booker's Place. This will lead you to all the necessary reviews that are out there. And click here for a Vimeo link to an appearance that Yvette Johnson and I did on Democracy Now this morning. Finally: below is the official trailer for our movie. But don't just watch the trailer. Read the comments thread below the trailer. The level of discourse we seem to have inspired is at once hilarious and appalling. As the headline in an English newspaper put it after George W. Bush was re-elected: HOW COULD SIXTY MILLIO...

 "Booker's Place" preemed (as they say in Variety-speak) yesterday afternoon at Tribeca and I couldn't have been happier with the reception. A ninety-minute black and white documentary about racism in the south isn't exactly a cinematic anti-depressant but the audience was rapt throughout and responded emotionally at the end. Saturday the New York Times ran a thoughtful and well crafted article on the film and the story behind the film. Click here to read it. Marcos Bernal Salas's fine review for Examiner.com appears here. Ronnie Scheib's Variety review is well worth reading. If it wasn't, would I have linked to it? You can here the audio of our interview on Leonard Lopate's radio show by clicking here. Here are some Zimbio photos of our red-carpet moment at yesterday's premiere. The lovely woman with me is, of course, Yvette Johnson--Booker Wright's granddaughter and the films "star" (and she IS a star). The guy in ...

As some of you may already know, Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story opens in Los Angeles on April 25th - less than a week away! We'll be running the film at the brand new Laemmle Noho 7 , so invite a friend, or ten. Showtimes will be as follows: 1:00pm; 3:30pm; 5:40pm; 8:00pm; 10:15pm   Subscribe in a reader

Here's a terrific 1960 interview with the Stooges--more accurately with Moe and Larry--conducted by Jack ("not Art") Linkletter. It's always odd to see actors who only ever appear as one character suddenly appear as themselves and Moe especially comes off as different as he could be from his screen persona: thoughtful, articulate, giving considered and measured answers to questions he must have been confronting for the first time. (I doubt very much that in all the years of their Columbia short-stardom they ever did press like conventional celebrities. The Stooges were like the mutant child who is kept locked in the upstairs closet, to be trotted out for the guilty pleasure of sadistic visitors). Among the subjects discussed are how Larry's hair got that way, how Moe commits violent acts on his cohorts but doesn't really hurt them (you get a complete education in the eye-poke--a Moe specialty) and a reflective moment wherein Moe discusses his lost theat...

In the wake of the Farrely Brothers new Three Stooges movie opening this Friday, I thought a little Stooge-ology might be in order. I've posted about the Stooges quite often over the years, discussing my favorite shots featuring Curly Howard, my friendship with Stooge writer-director Edward Bernds, the appearence of "Fake Shemps" in later Shemp movies (a double deployed when Shemp was either ailing or dead). But I've never gone into the declining years--the post-Shemp Joe Besser/Joe De Rita years--since it's just too, well, depressing. The truth is the Stooges should have hung it up when Shemp turned up his toes in 1955. But they didn't. A handful of awful shorts finished out their Columbia years, using comedian Joe Besser as the third Stooge. Besser felt about as comfortable with Moe and Larry as a pork chop might feel in a kennel of rabid dogs. He wasn't a physical comedian and his petulance and lack of pleasure at being there are impossible to ignor...

I'm hopelessly addicted to old television...well, crap. Commercials, station ID's, bumpers, end credit rolls, etc. Here's a compilation reel somebody --um--compiled of British mid-sixties commercials. The theme is MOD. Everything advertised--stockings, cigarettes, mens clothing--is shot, discussed and displayed through the lens of the then very vogue mod-ish-ness thing. Richard Lester seems to be peering over the shoulder of whomever the actual directors of these commercials are. Were. Whatever. BTW, the last cigarette advert allowed in Great Britain appears in this reel. (It's from 1965. The British were way ahead of us in banning cigarette advertising...I wonder why?) It features a bride lighting up at her wedding, literally moments after she's been married. Or is it moments before?   Subscribe in a reader