Cuba

There really isn’t a typical Richard Lester movie, but I tend to think of him as a comic filmmaker because of things like A Hard Days Night, Help!, The Mouse on the Moon, The Ritz, Royal Flash, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The films often had a very dark twist, as in How I Won the War ... Read more »

The Culpepper Cattle Company

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s we began to see something called “revisionist westerns.” That is, many of the familiar tropes of traditional westerns, which were largely bullshit, were abandoned in favor of a more realistic depiction of what the Wild West was really like. So the saloons are not brightly lighted, populated with gorgeous girls, with a tinkling piano playing. They are ... Read more »

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Beautiful to look at. Technically stunning (I know how they can change faces in a computer, which sure saves a lot of hours in the make-up chairs, but how did they make him shorter?). A moving and intriguing story. And … looooooong. The pace was often deadly slow. Couldn’t they have found a way to pep it up a little? David Lean made movies as long as this, but he tossed in a spectacular ... Read more »

Curse of the Demon

Original title: Night of the Demon. Most monster movies don’t give up a good look at the monster until somewhere around the half-hour mark or later. The best ones don’t let you see it until near the end, i.e. Jaws, Alien, on the belief (which I heartily endorse) that what you don’t see is scarier than what you ... Read more »

Cut Bank

A couple are out on the flowery prairie filming a promo for their little town when, in the background, a USPS truck stops and someone gets out of another car and shoots the mailman. Or does he? Very quickly we find out that all is not what it seems.

This will remind you of Blood Simple or A Simple Plan, maybe even of Read more »

Cutter’s Way

Alternate title: Hamlet Goes to Santa Barbara. Jeff Bridges is Richard Bone (the source novel was called Cutter and Bone), friends with Alex Cutter (John Heard, in a very loud performance), a bitter alcoholic missing an arm and a leg. Cutter is the kind of guy who just grates on my nerves, all the time. My advice to bitter alcoholic ... Read more »

The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing

Everybody knows about the director’s role in making a film. The French even went to far as to call him or her the “author” of a film. (What’s French for bullshit?) Most people are aware that a film has a writer, who begins the whole insane, marvelous collaborative process that is movie-making. Real movie lovers know the cinematographer is responsible for much of the look of the film. Most ... Read more »

Cyrano de Bergerac

In 1990 Gérard Depardieu made a damn good version of this in the original French, and I sure wish I understood French. But I don’t, so the next best thing is the Brian Hooker translation. Jose Ferrer won a Tony in this role, and then went on to win the Oscar in this film. How one translates a play written in French, in a formal mode known as an Alexandrine, and preserve the beauty of the ... Read more »