Noirvember Day 10: The Fellas Always Ring Twice (or something like that)

Because of my fondness for the femmes fatales of film noir, I admit that an overabundance of my posts focus on these deadly, duplicitous dames. (I also admit to a fondness for alliteration, but that’s not the story I’m telling today.) But turnabout is fair play, so they say, so today’s Noirvem... Read full article

TCMFF Musical Monday: It’s Always Fair Weather (1955)

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 600. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is my weekly feature about musicals. This week’s musical: It’s Always Fair Weath... Read full article

Always touched by their presence, dear: Carole, Debbie, Mamie

Above is Carole Lombard "singing" in the 1933 Columbia film "Brief Moment"; I put quotation marks around the word because she was dubbed on screen. But Lombard was among several blonde icons whose images influenced a flaxen-haired musical goddess of several decades later.It's Debbie Harry of Blondie... Read full article

Late night writing, or: Roman DeBeers wasn’t always 100% wrong, you know

I would rather exhaustedly write this blog post than watch another episode of “Becker.” I still swear it gets good, but it’s rather rough going. Ken Levine wrote about it and Ken Levine’s solid on his sitcoms. Old time blog reading. I think a lot about The News Blog, which was a thing back i... Read full article

There’s Always Tomorrow (1956)

The film begins with that old storytelling standard, Once upon a time in sunny California…and it’s raining outside. Not a minute has gone by and the tone of the picture has already been set with this opening taste of irony. It unravels on a smaller, less grandiose scale than other Sirk p... Read full article