They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Archive for December, 1978
Ice Castles (1978)
When I was in the fifth grade, there was a girl that sat next to me who was forever reading a series of teen romance anthology novels, the pattern of which was always the same: two young upper-class white kids fall in love, have a tragedy and then eventually have to encourage each other enough […]
Beyond and Back (1978)
If an enterprising internet celebrity wanted to make a killing with videos about bad movies, then he or she could find no greater gold mine than Sunn Classic Pictures. This late 70s production house specialized as a fast-buck operation that would produce badly made tabloid-style documentaries for the easily led, dealing with everything from The […]
California Suite (1978)
I have a tendency to step into Neil Simon’s work with my hackles up because I generally know what I am going to get: good actors working through deep drama or high comedy using dialogue that sounds like they’re reading it from cue cards. Simon’s words can be fun, but most of the time I […]
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Back in ’78 when the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was reviewed by Siskel and Ebert (their show as then called “Sneak Previews”), Roger Ebert questioned why this property needed to be remade. Having (rather belatedly) seen the film, I have a simplistic answer. There is probably no other science fiction story that […]
Moment by Moment (1978)
As terrible as it is, I find it difficult to be mean to Moment by Moment. No, there isn’t a second of the movie that works, there isn’t a scene that shows promise and there isn’t a line of dialogue that doesn’t sound like it wasn’t discarded from your favorite soap opera. And yet, I […]
Every Which Way But Loose (1979)
My head was spinning when the final credits rolled on Every Which Way But Loose and, I can confidently tell you that it was not from all the laughter. This movie is such an unholy mess of weird tone shifts, misaligned subplots and basic narrative problems that by the end, I was dismayed to find […]
They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way (1978)
Tim Conway’s career peaked in the 70s largely because he was the secret ingredient to “The Carol Burnett Show,” an insane display of virtuoso slapstick comedy that seemed to come from his bones. In the mid-to-late 70s that success way parlayed into a movie career that, while not exactly skyrocketing, at least kept him employed. […]
Oliver’s Story (1978)
[written March 10, 2009] Here’s a confession with, I suppose, some meat on it: I didn’t like Love Story. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t appeal to me. Maybe it was the fact that I dislike melodramatic soap operas. Maybe it was my cynical state of mind. Maybe it was my personal dislike for […]
