THE JO-TEL … wishes it could remember how to change the banner picture.

15. Bedknobs and Broomsticks
14. Sleeping Beauty
13. Robin Hood (1973)
12. The Parent Trap (1998)
11. Peter Pan
10. Hocus Pocus
09. Alice in Wonderland
08. Return to Oz
07. Mary Poppins
06. Freaky Friday (2003)
05. Toy Story
04. Aladdin
03. Up
02. The Little Mermaid
01. The Parent Trap (1961)
-Patsy

Roger Ebert impacted my life. Since he died today, I thought I would put down a few words on this blog that no one reads. I’m trying to think why I followed Ebert so closely, most recently through his online reviews and blog, which I read often; why he seemed so deeply present [...]

A lot of things in Austin and elsewhere have changed since Richard Linklater’s Slackers. Some things have not:

Despite the title, the main reason for this post is not to write about the rightfully derided late-80’s drama Heartburn, in which respectable performances by Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep fail to resurrect banal, somewhat emotionally solipsistic material– no, the main point of this post is to talk about the song “Coming Around Again” by [...]

Lear addresses Cordelia in one of the early shots from the 1914 American film version of King Lear:

In my opinion, the key to performing Lear, the character, is to refrain from histrionics for as long as possible. The reason is that, for a majority of the play (except for portions of the opening scene [...]

No F.W. Murnau’s City Girl (1930) …

… no Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1971)

-Shark

I have probably seen the movie Beaches, starring Better Midler and Barbara Hersey, five times. The first time was when it first came out around 1985. I was five or six. Recently, I have been somewhat of an innocent bystander to Patsy’s penchant for watching it while hungover on the couch. [...]

Shark & Stove: Because We’re Better at Watching Movies Than You
_________________________________________
John Sutherland wrote a 2003 article in The Guardian that sought to examine the impact of Cassavetes’ well-known alcoholism on his artistic output. The article, while well-written, was unwilling to take a stand either way on whether he was an artist despite or [...]

Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 film Black Narcissus– often lauded (rightfully) for its expressive use of color landscapes– is also remarkable for it use of angle and light to extenuate grotesque poses, such as in this scene, where Sister Ruth’s malevolence first comes to the surface:

The startling effect of these shots, whose static nature did not [...]

Excerpt from the planning session for Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth:
Let’s make a movie starring David Bowie wherein, at the beginning of the third hour, he, an alien, will have sex with an aged, fattened version of his old fling on a ping-pong table while each take turns shooting each other with [...]