The Lost Boys Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

Before Anne Rice’s gothic horror novel based on young vampires was immortalized in a film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and long before pre-adolescents became obsessed with the Twilight series of books and films, there was The Lost Boys, one of the first films to deal with teenaged vampires in a dramatic way. Once Bitten and Fright Night were both comedies released two years earlier. Director Joel Schumacher made The Lost Boys in the middle of a stint of making several films focused on young people. I consider it his best period as a director.

25 Years Ago Movie Review: Woody Allen's Radio Days

This review was originally posted on 20 May 2010. I am re-posting in recognition of its 25th anniversary this month. This year I would like to add one review per month as part of my "25 Years Ago This Month Series" in which Radio Days was featured this month. All the other options from January 1987 are not worth my time.

Whereas watching The Purple Rose of Cairo 12 years on allowed me to bring a new perspective that allowed my appreciation to deepen, the intervening years have not been quite as generous with Woody Allen’s Radio Days from 1987.

Each film is a manifestation of Allen’s deep appreciation for two very different media: film and radio. While the earlier film focuses on the ability of cinema to transport individuals to a fantasy world (or as in the reversal that his film does so brilliantly – to move a fictional character from screen to reality) and has a single central character, the latter has the radio itself as the central figure including the ways it carries information to people, affects individuals in different ways (including the performers), and brings people together emotionally and socially.

Having been born in 1935, Allen would have spent much of his childhood listening to radio programs, either actively or passively. That makes this his most autobiographical film. He doesn’t appear in the film, but provides a voiceover narration for the events depicted and the connections between them. There’s no single main character, but the film centers on the narrator’s family with himself as a child (a young Seth Green) figuring in the occasional scene.

John Cusack Focus: Bullets Over Broadway Movie Review

This may be less a John Cusack film than a Woody Allen film, but it's far enough against type for Cusack that I think it's interesting to include it in this short compendium. I could just as easily file this review under my "Modern Classics" heading. This film almost made my list of the top 5 Woody Allen films. So close!

Of all of Woody Allen’s films, Bullets Over Broadway might be the most underrated. And though John Cusack is just one in a long line of actors to basically perform the Woody role on screen, his is probably the best. Not only does he get the mannerisms, the rhythms of speech, and the mania one hundred percent right, but somehow he makes the role his own. It’s less straight imitation than internal adaptation.

Rabbit Hole Movie Review: The Reverberations of Unbearable Loss

When a neighbor greets Becca (Nicole Kidman) in her garden and invites her to dinner, there’s something noticeably strained in the conversation. Likewise when her husband, Howie (Aaron Eckhart), arrives home from work, there is something not altogether right in their interactions. When Becca learns, after bailing her out of jail for a barfight, that her little sister is pregnant, she is uncomfortably happy. When she asks Izzy (Tammy Blanchard) why she told their mother first, she responds, “Why do you think?” Something seems dreadfully wrong in the opening moments of Rabbit Hole, so wrong that the crisp and clean suburban Long Island surfaces can’t cover it up, no matter how hard everyone seems to be trying. Becca and Howie are grieving over the death of their four year old son, killed eight months earlier chasing their dog into the road.