Portnoy’s Complaint (1972)

I saw a film! I've sort of been meaning to get around to it for a while. It'll still cost you on Prime (USA) a few bones to watch what was probably considered an outrage at the time and today something even more terrifying. It's a comedy, of course, but one of such invasive singular…

Avanti! (1972)

I Saw A Film! Jack Lemmon is a cute devoted CEO who gets news of his well respected father's death of a car accident in Italy, where the old fella often took his lone holidays to recuperate. This alone a sweet kind of silly naivete popular in movies of the age, though perhaps waning at…

Barefoot In the Park (1967)

I Saw A Film! A standard Neil Simon comedy, befitting of the time. The formula was not quite as silly as Lucy, not quite as neurotic as Woody Allen, and perhaps somewhat less madcap than Buck Henry's ideals with Barbara (cute prostitutes befitting Irma la Douce). Watching Fonda and Redford slog through these scenarios, some…

Light Sleeper (1992)

I Saw A Film! Willem DaFoe is a kind of high end drug dealer who writes compelling prose and wanders around with overwrought Michael Been music playing. It's a bit like Taxi Driver but much less menacing. DaFoe's character Tour is considering getting out of the game as Sarandon's character is considering getting out and…

52 Pick-up (1986)

I Saw A Film! Roy Scheider gets to reprise his action clout in this stodgy blackmail turned revenge story in which a well off - I forget what his job was -, married to a politician, is caught with a young prostitute on tape and pressured to pay the bold jackasses who present him the…

Fairfax (2021)

I Saw an Animation Series! A spoof of early teen, instantaneous and disposable commercial culture. The only things that survive are the relationships between the kids who obsess over the inconsequential products directed at them. Ironically they know nothing of the images or celebrities who are being processed as their culture, but they can't control…

Class (1983)

I Saw A Film! The notion that somehow a dorky, verdant Andy McCarthy, freshly enrolled in a teen prep school, his glistening wet baby gaze, could somehow captivate the love energy of Jacqueline Bisset, is one of those common film mistakes that somehow is imagined Playboy fodder. But who is it intended for? About mid-way…

How to Beat the High Cost of Living (1980)

I Saw A Film! Three desperate housewives, a popular theme, undertake a scheme to get their hands on money, what else? What's good about this potentially unwashed pile of laundry is that the individual circumstances are actually diverse and amusingly believable. One has a husband who needs to prove he gave the wife a loan,…

Topkapi (1964)

I Saw A Film! Here's the film from which they lifted the iconic Tom Cruise dangling from a rope stealing precious stuff in a vault for the Mission Impossible reboot. This elderly film, I daresay is actually more fun, more stylish and definitely more refined than any similar, too serious and too deadly, modern take…

Thunder Road (1958)

I Saw A Film! Another great old movie in need of remastering for high definition. Mitchum is in top droopy-eyed form as a whiskey runner, probably the film industry's most sympathetic criminal organization, next to prostitution, moonshine runner. I've known a few of the old timers myself. The film features a Mitchum penned tune about…