I am pleased to announce my short story Blissful Ignorance will be published in Issue 8 of Midnight Echo magazine. The issue will be available on November 30th. Here’s a link to the table of contents for the issue, which reveals my story will be in the company of such great writers as Joe R. […]
Joe Dante has spent most of his career making quietly subversive exploitation films. Movies like Piranha, The Howling, The Burbs, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Small Soldiers, Matinee, and his segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, while meeting genre requirements, also gently poke fun at different aspects of American culture. From commercial overdevelopment of […]
The Woman is an incredibly difficult film about which to write without getting into spoiler territory. Because of this problem, I have decided to split this piece into two parts. The first part will be a straight review that steers clear of plot specifics beyond the first act setup. The second part will be a […]
An early scene in Last Ride, director Glendyn Ivin’s stark road movie, finds Kev (Hugo Weaving), a low-rent criminal on the run, cutting his long hair and shaving his beard in a restaurant bathroom. It’s a half-hearted and largely useless attempt to change his appearance because of the actor playing Kev. It doesn’t matter his […]
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen Bone holds several distinctions in Larry Cohen’s filmography. It’s his first feature film as a director. It’s a straight social satire, eschewing many of the genre trappings on which Cohen often likes to hang his social commentaries. It’s also one of his few films where the female lead […]
Story by Larry Cohen There’s a subtext to Cellular that is inadvertent and generally more interesting than the actual movie. Even though the filmmakers weren’t trying to make a film that points out how quickly technology changes and becomes obsolete, the space of a few years has turned the film into just such a story. […]
I realize it’s been quite while since my last post and I apologize. My life is settling down and I will soon have time again to regularly update the blog. Next week will find a new Cohen Case File being posted. In the meantime, I have opened a Twitter account where you can catch my […]
The common perception of a dramatic story is one that surprises or shocks the audience with unexpected twists. I think a better case can be made for the opposite approach. I don’t refer to mundane, by-the-numbers storytelling. I mean the power of inevitability. The ability of a filmmaker to draw from the audience the recognition […]
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen Q (aka Q: The Winged Serpent) hit theaters in 1982. But for me the film came along circa 1984-85. You see, that’s when the film was in heavy rotation on cable. I was a terribly impressionable ten year old, watching in shock and disgust by peeping through the […]
Let’s take a brief break from talking about movies. This has been in the news lately and it really struck a chord for me for several reasons. On Monday, July 25, the Republic (MO) school board voted to remove two books from the high school library. The first book, Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer, is […]
Obsessive Movie Nerd 