W. David Lichty

YouTube video by Kermode and Mayo's Take Mark Kermode reviews Melania

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTyU...

YouTube video by Kermode and Mayo's Take Mark Kermode reviews Melania

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTyU...

Has anybody actually seen this yet? I'd love to hear what it's really like.

@kermodeandmayo.bsky.social
Looking forward to the review.

YouTube video by IntradaCD "Night of the Hunter" Zoom Roundtable

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiou...

Meet the people behind the recording we hope will be, and hear some of this haunting music...

www.kickstarter.com/projects/129...

www.kickstarter.com/projects/129...

It's close. The top two pledge amounts with rewards are basically great deals on the final product, such as the final CD, cheaper and with free shipping. It's some great music, too.

It's the team which rescued Jerry Goldsmith's The Chairman from 50 years of lousy sound quality with a new rerecording by The Royal Scottish National Orchestra. While discussing that project, we spent a little time on this one, and now that it has been revealed, here is that little conversation.

YouTube video by The Goldsmith Odyssey Night of the Hunter - Music by Walter Schumann to be recorded... we hope!

Our friends at Intrada hope to finally let the world hear the haunting music written for this film, free of the ravages of aged recordings and tape decay.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C2a...

YouTube video by The Goldsmith Odyssey Production Report - The Chairman (2025 Intrada Recording)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmJf...

Behind the scenes in the making of this great album!

December 10, 2007 - NY premier of the most Kubrickian movie not made by Kubrick, There Will Be Blood, some would say the last great American film.

I would not say that.

But it's pretty great.

On his blog post, one David Weaver described it wonderfully, "They accounted for everything except themselves." It's a winter film for a quieter night. But... awww heck, now you got me repeatin' mself.

Long forgotten, and when it turned 20, I forgot it myself: Sam Raimi and Scott B. Smith's film A Simple Plan, premiering... somewhere on December 11, 1998. It's one of Sam Raimi's best movies, a surprisingly gentle suspense film.

December 10, 1978 - Superman: The Movie, and the pivotal thing behind its success. Not his look, but his performance. Christopher Reeve pulled off one of the hardest kinds of characters to make believable, the genuinely nice, thoughtful person, the boy scout you believed.

December 10, 1962 - Lawrence of Arabia premiers in London.

63 years old today, and down from 48th to 62nd in this decade's BFI Director's Poll of the Greatest Movies Ever Made.

December 9, 2003 - Peter Pan, my favorite version of this story, from director P. J. Hogan. As I think Roger Ebert wrote, for the first time in a Peter Pan film when he leaves at the end it's more an escape than a triumph, fitting the story so well.

It works well in the movie, and just as music. The pictured, somewhat recent release of the score was kind of a revelation.

The music is often wistful and grand, what people expect from Spielberg enough that it was taken as a given, rather than a choice in this film. We get that when we're seeing events through the imagination of the lead. Otherwise, the music can be pretty cold, 'proper', atonal and the like.

It's also not a perfect movie, like Kubrick's aren't, or Lynch's, and many of the Coens'. Second and third viewings clear away the cobwebs with those, but this only got one chance, if that, from most. I wonder how it would fare today.

December 9, 1987 - Empire of the Sun

Not an easy movie, this one; too easy to dismiss, especially in its time. It doesn't force itself, and I think it was doing things people found it too hard to credit to Spielberg to allow them to manifest in the film.

News that John Carpenter, the most enjoyable and quality director of horror movies in his prime era was going to helm a book by his qualitative match in print, Stephen King, was well met by this stylish enough, likable, shiny movie.

December 9, 1983 - Christine. Sometimes you hear about a seeming perfect creative mix, and the results wind up being a little disappointing. This wasn't one of those.

December 9, 1965 - A Charlie Brown Christmas debuts. It remains the closest a cartoon has come to absurdist theater. To wit - every time anyone speaks for more than 3 seconds, the listener starts to look angry. Every single time.

There's Monty Wooley, next to Loretta Young. He's much more known for a slightly less Christmassy Christmas movie, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and as much as I enjoy that one, I love him much more in this. It's a great little role.

December 9, 1947, The Bishop's Wife.

This was one of my mother's favorites. I got to it pretty late, but I can see why she liked it so much. It's got a tone, this one, warm and serious. It's not heavy, just - well, things really matter. You won't get that idea from its posters.

December 9, 1944 - Murder, My Sweet

Apocalypto - December 8, 2006.

Unexpectedly, I *really* liked this movie. Colorful, adventurous, yes - bloody, but such an adventure movie. It's the best of the Gibson directed pictures I've seen, by a wide margin.

Those who stayed saw how much his character was being setup, challenged and even forced to become a real human being by the end of the film. What people call 'redemption' in cinema cannot occur if there isn't something to be redeemed. It's one of Cruise's best performances, my personal favorite.

Every movie of his after Sydney and before One battle has inspired consistent walkouts in movie theaters. With this one it was Tom Cruise's language. I understood those walkouts, as it was genuinely vile stuff, not just the particular words he used, but the ideas he was communicating.

December 8, 1999, Magnolia is released.

It's the second of Paul Thomas Anderson's Scorsese-ish movies. Others say Altman, but Altman's pictures are generally rougher, more thrown together while the Scorseses I think Anderson reflected were meticulously planned and steadicammed.