The Boxtrolls

Down below the town of Cheesebridge, “Eggs” is a young boy rescued by underground creatures and raised as a boxtroll. Which are … human-shaped, but they wear boxes with holes cut out for the head, arms, and legs. When threatened, they pull into the boxes like hermit crabs. At night, they emerge to raid garbage in search of junk they can make into clever but largely useless machines. Each ... Read more »

A Boy and His Atom

First there was The Kiss (1896). May Irwin and John C. Rice cuddle, snuggle, then he grooms his huge mustache and plants a great big smackeroo on her lips. Total elapsed time, about forty seconds.

Then there was ... Read more »

A Boy and His Dog

Good lord! Reading up on this I learned that my friend Harlan Ellison (who wrote the story this is based on) was going to write the screenplay … but he got writer’s block! Writer’s block? Harlan? This is the man who has written stories while sitting in bookstore windows. I find it hard to believe, but I’m not going to call Harlan up and ask him if it’s true.

Be that as it may, it ... Read more »

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

There have been so many Holocaust movies made that you’d think there was no new angle to come at it from. And yet, this movie (adapted from a juvenile book) manages to. It’s all seen through the eyes of Bruno, an 8-year-old whose father is a Nazi SS officer transferred to the country to run a concentration camp. The son finds the barbed wire and makes friends with a Jewish boy his age on ... Read more »

Boyhood

Actually, the dates that should be in parentheses up there are (2002-2013). That’s when it was filmed. This is one of the most remarkable films ever made if only for that reason. We see the entire cast age over a twelve-year period. With the adults there’s obviously not a lot of change. With the kids … the boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), is six when they started filming, eighteen when they ... Read more »

The Boys & Girl From County Clare

The box just said “The boys …” but the movie started with the title above, so I’m going with that one. In the UK it was released as The Great Ceili War. Ceili is a type of Irish music.
Two brothers who haven’t seen each other for 20 years bring competing bands to the Isle of Man for a competition. They have issues going way back. Who will win? It ... Read more »

The Boys of 2nd Street Park

Engrossing small movie about a group of mostly Jewish boys who grew up in Brighton Beach in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Nothing too surprising; they go through the changes we all went through in that generation: hanging out together, high school, getting into drugs and/or Vietnam, marriages, breakups, tragedies. It’s all handled very well, and though the urban setting is totally alien to me, a ... Read more »

Brainstorm

I happen to have some actual, from the horse’s mouth, inside information on this film. The director, Douglas Trumbull, and I had been working together for about a year, hammering out several drafts of my short story “Air Raid” to turn it into the film, Millennium. (That was Doug’s title; I couldn’t think of anything better, so we went with it.) At the same time, ... Read more »

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

It’s not like the current glut of vampire books and movies and TV shows is something new. There has been a steady stream of such stories for a long time. Endless variations have been worked on this tired old trope, some of them quite ludicrous. It’s easy to forget that it was all invented by one man, back in 1897. Yes, it’s all there, all totally made up, and often misinterpreted. For ... Read more »