TV

  • Various – Boris Karloff’s Thriller [Season 1] (1960)

    1951-1960ThrillerTVUSAVarious

    Thriller (aka. Boris Karloff’s Thriller) was an hour-long TV Horror anthology series that originally aired on NBC from 1960 to 1962. Horror fans who grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s were nearly enraptured with the content and structure of this show. Indeed, in his non-fiction book on horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King calls Thriller “the best horror series ever put on TV” (224; 1983 ed). At the beginning of each hour, Hollywood’s master of the macabre himself, Boris Karloff, would set the tone and prime the viewers for frightful and chilling dramatizations based on the works of some of the era’s greatest writers in the genre – writers like Robert E Howard, Cornell Woolrich, Richard Matheson, and Robert Bloch. Each episode was shot in eerie black and white and offered at least one story, with a few episodes dividing the hour between two or three shorter plays.Read More »

  • David Zieff – Escape From It’s a Wonderful Life (1996)

    1991-2000ComedyDavid ZieffTVUSA

    Quote:
    In 1996, the influential improv troupe that had come to New York from Chicago, the Upright Citizens Brigade — Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, Matt Besser, and Ian Roberts, and my former Rolling Stone colleague Jay Martel — took advantage of a bizarre loophole in the copyright to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which put the video into public domain.

    Comedy Central, still in its scruffy pre-South Park days when the Daily Show starred Craig Kilborn, let the UCB recut the movie down to about 50 minutes, and redub all the voices, telling a very different story.Read More »

  • Ursula Meier – Des épaules solides AKA Strong Shoulders (2003)

    Ursula Meier2001-2010DramaSwitzerlandTV

    Quote:
    A teenage girl struggles to achieve perfection as a distance runner amidst the intense surroundings of a specialty academy for athletes. Not content to run with the female squad, she tries to prove that she can run as fast as any of the male athletes. As she works to build her body into a high performance machine, she discovers some unsuspected obstacles from puberty and an unfortunate genetic predisposition. A smart coming of age story, Urusla Meier’s directorial debut features a remarkable physical and emotional performance from Louise Szpindel.Read More »

  • Joseph Sargent – Day One (1989)

    1981-1990DramaHiroshima at 75Joseph SargentTVUSA

    The complicated relationship between physicist Leo Szilard, scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves. Assigned to oversee the project, Groves chooses Oppenheimer to build the historic bomb. However, when World War II inspires the government to use the weapon, Szilard reconsiders his opinions about atomic warfare.Read More »

  • Xavier Dolan – La nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s’est réveillé AKA The Night Logan Woke Up (2022)

    2021-2030CanadaThrillerTVXavier Dolan

    In October of 1991, an unspeakable event rocks a small town in Quebec, haunting a family who tries to hide their dark secret. Thirty years later these secrets resurface, sending the family on an unstoppable pursuit of reconciliation.Read More »

  • Marty Pasetta – The American Film Institute Salute to John Huston (1983)

    1981-1990DocumentaryMarty PasettaTVUSA

    From The New York Times:
    The tone of the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award dinner each year is foreshadowed in its opening minutes, when a man or woman whose films ”have stood the test of time” walks past the 1,100 stars, directors, and studio presidents who form his honor court.

    Thursday night as he ambled in, the 11th winner of the award, 76-year-old John Huston threw up his arms like a conqueror. ”All of us,” said Orson Welles later in the evening, ”are doomed to play the hero in our own life story” but are haunted by the fear that a understudy will somehow take over. John Huston, he added, could never be overtaken by an understudy.Read More »

  • Benoît Jacquot – Jacques Lacan: la psychanalyse 1 (1974)

    1971-1980Benoît JacquotDocumentaryFrancePhilosophy on ScreenTV

    Quote:
    In 1973 Benoit Jacquot shot two films on Jacques Lacan, Psychanalyse I and II, broadcast on French television the same year. Les Éditions du Seuil published the text the following year; the English version appeared in 1990 under the imprint of W.W. Norton.Read More »

  • David Hugh Jones – BBC2 Play of the Week: Langrishe, Go Down (1978)

    Drama1971-1980David Hugh JonesTVUnited Kingdom

    Based on the novel by Aidan Higgins

    In the late 1930s, three reclusive middle-aged spinster sisters live on their run down family estate in Ireland. Otto Beck, a perpetual graduate student from Bavaria with a habit of making pompous declamations, rents the back lodge to work on his esoteric thesis. Imogen Langrishe, the least repressed of the sisters, begins an affair with Otto. Imogen takes the love affair seriously, but Otto just enjoys the cheap lodging and the comfort of Imogen.

    Stars Judi Dench, Jeremy Irons, and Annette CrosbieRead More »

  • Kyôsuke Mikuriya & Hayao Miyazaki – Meitantei Holmes AKA Sherlock Hound (1984-1985)

    1981-1990AnimationHayao MiyazakiJapanKyôsuke MikuriyaTV

    Before he went on to create Totoro and Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki captured a whole generation of children’s imaginations with his retelling of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries using a loveable cast of canines. Sherlock Hound, released as either Famous Detective Holmes or Detective Holmes in Japan, is an anime based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series where all the characters are depicted as anthropomorphic animals, the majority dogs, though Holmes is a fox and his enemy Professor Moriarty is a wolf. The show featured regular appearances of Jules Verne-steampunk style technology, adding a 19th-century science-fiction atmosphere to the series.Read More »

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