“GoodFellas is one of the great sustained acts of virtuosity in American cinema, the artistry so in-your-face and swaggering that even a fifteen-year-old kid who only knew what he was talking about half the time could see the man behind the curtain working the levers, and that made it all the more thrilling. I finally understood what it meant for a movie to be directed.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/21/2015
“The white suit, that lighted dance floor, the strut — so many tropes have become part of our shared pop iconography that a lot folks tend to just assume they’ve seen the movie at some point, if only through cultural osmosis. Here’s a good way to tell for sure: If you’re laughing derisively about it, you haven’t watched Saturday Night Fever recently.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 09/21/2015
“A compromised work about how compromise eats the soul, it has a boozy, slouchy grandeur that troubles your dreams for weeks after the closing credits roll. This is Peckinpah’s final word on a genre he helped to define, and what a hopeless, despairing word that is. It’s the greatest movie you almost never got a chance to see.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/10/2015
“There was no subject nor any genre that he couldn’t somehow turn into a Robert Altman movie. Other filmmakers tell stories, Altman created ecosystems. He built minutely detailed worlds, mostly governed by sadness and systemic corruption, and then sent his iconoclastic heroes ping-ponging off the walls of their limitations, often failing spectacularly” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/30/2015
“On second viewing I was able to see Jackie Brown for the movie it is, instead of the movie I’d wanted it to be. It’s slow, it’s sad and it’s very funny in ways that don’t really revolve around punchlines. It’s about characters who have been around the block one too many times and they’re exhausted, full of dreams deferred, just trying to scrape by.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/04/2015
“Watched again today, the Twin Peaks pilot loses none of its hypnotic grandeur. Swaddled in Angelo Badalamenti’s gorgeous synth score, with foreboding bass-thrums occasionally making way for a recurring, cascading piano theme of faltering heartbreak — soaring into lonely, plaintive high notes before falling back into a busier, lower register of despair.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/27/2015
“Invariably, professional success leads to personal destruction, with these men (and they’re always men in this Mann’s Mann’s world, baby) sacrificing their families, loved ones and quite often their souls in these pursuits. Whoever wins is the guy willing to lose the most. Victories are muted, so pyrrhic they feel like defeats.” – RogerEbert.com, 01/14/2015
“All the academic discussions of Star Wars and pornography, the non-stop masturbation jokes — Clerks was the closest thing I’d ever seen to my own life in a movie. Hell, not only did I work in a video store, I worked in a video store where Kevin Smith bought LaserDiscs. Watching that movie at the Angelika felt like somebody farted in church.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/19/2014
“Not to say that Will Ferrell and company were ubiquitous this past December, but when Emerson College announced it was renaming one of its schools the Ron Burgundy School of Communication, the entire cast followed me into the bathroom of a Tremont Street bar and tried to sell me a Dodge Durango.” – The Improper Bostonian, 02/19/2014
“I don’t go to the movies to see my life reflected back upon myself. I always thought the most wonderful thing about movies is that they allow us to get outside of ourselves for just a little while, to experience different worlds and circumstances that we’d otherwise never know. Superman is an aspirational figure, not a mirror.” – RogerEbert.com, 06/14/2013
SPLICED PERSONALITY 