Saving Private Ryan on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day

Saving Private Ryan on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day

Posted inFilms, Random Musings
Watched Saving Private Ryan in honor of the 70th anniversary of D-Day yesterday. I still remember when I first saw this in the theater. I live in a retirement area with a huge senior population.When we went to see this the theater was full, and it was a sea of white heads in every aisle. My wife and I were some of the only young people there. It was harrowing. That opening sequence, no one had ever done anything like it before. For 20 minutes you're assaulted with graphic violence and noise and fury that relentlessly pounded your senses. By the end of the sequence, you were out…
Hitchcock's Villains

My new book comes out soon…

Posted inAlfred Hitchcock, Films, Works by Eric, Writing
... so that's kind of cool. The follow-up to A Year of Hitchcock is due out in, damn, just a few weeks! Called Hitchcock's Villains: Murders, Maniacs and Mother Issues, this collaboration with Jim McDevitt is a full exploration of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest villains, what makes them tick, the themes that drive the darkness in his movies, and of Hitchcock's own psyche. I think it's pretty great. This will be my fifth book, collaborative or otherwise, with a sixth hopefully coming out next year in ebook form via the Philadelphia Weekly. (That project is still up in the air.) The…

A midnight visit from the Vampyr

Posted inFilms, Videos
Surprise! It's midnight on Halloween. You thought my week o' public domain horror films was over with Night of the Living Dead. You were wrong. Director Carl Dreyer directed one of the great films of all time, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I once called "a blessing to the world of cinema." Four years later he would direct Vampyr, a ghostly, ostentatious, bold, experimental film. It's dark and slow and brooding and moody and forgoes an engrossing story in exchange for an engrossing atmosphere. Twilight this ain't. Happy midnight. Enjoy the film. (I've changed the embedded video to…

Night of the Living Dead!

Posted inFilms, Geek Stuff, Videos
For Halloween, I thought I'd go with the big daddy. One of the kings of them all. Grandfather of one of the most popular subgenres of horror today. I'm talking, of course, about George Romero's classic, Night of the Living Dead. Now THIS is a legendary film. When it comes to modern zombies, it's the one that started it all. And it's still fantastic. It also happens to be in the public domain (see below), so for this Halloween take a gander back at a flick you probably haven't seen in a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_f2Enn8x5s Some things to note: * When…

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)

Posted inFilms, Videos
We'll cap off this Halloween season foray into public domain horror films tomorrow with the biggest classic of the classics, but for now let's just have fun with the schlocky B-movie fun of The Brain That Wouldn't Die, a 1962 flick about a doctor who keeps his girlfriend's decapitated head alive and goes in search of a body to attach it to. Two of the characters in this movie are billed as "Blonde Stripper" and "Brunet Stripper," so you know this is good cinema. Oh yeah. It's in the public domain, so check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ljDDpEg2ZM The movie is freely…