Decent version of this LeCarre classic, but it is really about Oldman's performance and not much else.

One of my favorite of Blake Edwards' films.

Solid little thriller.

You really need to list Ross Martin in this. He is on fire.

Colette has a great point. I would also recommend his work in the Columbo episode "Suitable For Framing" and the Twilight Zone episode "The Four OF Us Are Dying".

The jokes are funny, but the idea of parodying 80's sword and sorcery movies is icing on icing- the films they specifically parody ("The Sword and The Sorcereor", "Krull", "Conan The Barbarian") were already pretty ridiculous as it was. The McBride character's "arc" was weak, so his "redemption" doesn't work at all. Genre spoofing has been so elevated by Simon Pegg, that anything else seems pretty tired.

Maybe it's because I've seen "Extract" and "HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE" but "Paul" is one of the funnier movies I've seen this year. Yes, the lack of Edgar Wright's sharp editing and the film references he shares with Pegg and Frost are missed, but Greg Mottola brings an indie sense of the road movie, and, more importantly for a Pegg film, how to gently spoof it.

Solid little Predator movie. At the end of the day, you know in the seventies it would have been on the upper-half of a drive-in double bill. It also, reinforces an idea I've had for awhile that Danny Trejo has become Warren Oates.

Funny for the first 15 minutes and some of the Duvall/Favreau stuff, but Wild West needs to realize that Vaughn cannot save under-developed material with riffing. See- Couples Therapy, Fred Claus, etc.

One of the most underrated/overlooked films of the 00's, this is the directorial debut of George Clooney. If midnight movies were anything more than an excuse to watch The Goonies or Rocky Horror for the gazillionth time "Confessions..." would be the new midnight movie. Or at a repertory house (if they still existed) on a double bill with "Network". Indeed, it seems to have sprung from the mind of Howard Beale.

Frank Miller does not know what he is doing.

I get how some people could get pissed off at this movie and yet, I think it is so compelling it manages to overcome any argument against it.

A movie I will watch every bloomin' time it is on.

Other kids had Rocky Horror. But this was my midnight movie.

It's funny how, even though I only give a couple of the films listed here more than 3 stars, I still think Fosse is a genius. If he had been as prolific as Altman (and had lived as long), I think his oeuvre would have the same ratio of hits-to-misses.

The musical sequences and some of artier touches are great, but the ending is weak, late-sixties "getting hip with the kids" pandering.

I refuse to apologize. This film is awesome.

What, no Avengers?

This man has 2 great films to his credit. The Singing Detective, which you list here and Queen Of Hearts, which you don't. You should list Queen Of Hearts here.

I will forgive any movie that has Tom Waits in it.

Zombieland wants to be Shaun Of The Dead when it grows up.

Two words- Bru. Tal.

He has the looks of a man who just enjoyed a night of good laughs (probably alcohol-infused) and great friendship at someone’s barbecue. Just one of the suburban dads who does his crappy John Wayne impression when he’s had a few, but a good guy, and did I mention fun at parties? Always waving to you from over the fence? You know him, right? But, the thing is, you always see guys like that being led away on the evening news, their faces framed by the flashing lights of a patrol car, tears running down, their private shame having finally been found out… I first saw him on the kid’s show “Uncle Croc’s Block” (with Charles Nelson Reilly and Jonathan “Dr. Smith on TV’s ‘Lost In Space’” Harris- more on him later), playing a recurring character called “Steve Exhaustion, The $6.95 Man” . He would move in slow motion, rubber “bionic hand” on a spring up his sleeve, doing that John Wayne impression he could do. It was bizarre, that show, but he was someone who fit in this “Pee Wee’s Playhouse before Pee Wee’s Playhouse was cool” milieu. One of Robert Altman’s circle of friends before Altman hit the big time (there’s a picture of Ridgely and Altman at party, Ridgely in a straw Hawaiian hat playing bongos, looking like the life of the party), he moved on to jump between commercials, television (some of which was with Altman, who did a lot of episodic TV in the early-to-mid sixties) and working with prestigious film directors- not Altman, they had a falling out, but Jonathan Demme (the Public Television anthology series “American Playhouse”’s adaptation of Vonnegut’s “Who Am I This Time?”, “Melvin & Howard”, “Something Wild”, another PBS anthology show “Trying Times” episode- “A Family Tree”, “Philidelphia”) and Paul Thomas Anderson (“Sydney” and “Boogie Nights”, his last film and one of his great performances as “The Colonel James” tears running down his face as Burt Reynolds realizes how far the Colonel has fallen). It’s funny. When I moved to LA, I realized that (like I imagined as a kid) you can see a celebrity everyday. Maybe not Toms Hanks or Cruise, but certainly people you remember from childhood- no, never Bob Ridgely. But that culture, the culture of working-in-showbiz, on-camera Joes who you recognize, is there, in different neighborhoods like the Valley, the Hollywood Hills (at the bottom), etc. And Robert Ridgely, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s dad Ernie (Ridgely was a family friend), was someone in one of those neighborhoods honking his horn at you as he drove off for another commercial or voiceover gig. All in a day’s work.

She was a regular on the McLean Stevenson punchline, “Hello Larry”. And really that should have been the epitaph on her career, except that she could always go back to the theater, which she did, getting acclaim and a gazillion nominations, and, finally, winning the Tony for Sondheim’s “Into The Woods” in 1988. She is someone who knows how to move on, a trait she inherited from a Canadian father who changed careers mid-stream to become “Monty Hall” the longtime host of “Let’s Make A Deal”. From New York, she made enough Woody Allen films (two of his best- “Hannah And Her Sisters” and “Crimes And Misdemeanors”) and did more theatre (another potential epitaph- the notorious musical flop “Nick And Nora”), until she was thought of as a “New York actress” (when you see her in “Sex And The City- The Movie” you think, “Oh, of course…”). And yet, she was also in one of the most quintessential and trenchant takes on the San Fernando Valley, as Mark Wahlberg’s emotionally abusive mother in “Boogie Nights”. Maybe the character was so upset because she was from New York? And just wanted to move away from the land of the right-turn on red?

No matter who he plays, he always seems a little dyspeptic. Gassy. Something isn’t sitting right with his characters. A Polito character is not a calm man, not at peace, certainly not serene. Even when he is a boss, he is not happy. The first time I noticed him was his opening aria as Johnny Caspar in the Coens’ “Miller’s Crossing”. It is the song of trying to find balance in the world, of being able to bet on a sporting event that one has fixed without there being anyone in on it. And the disappointment when things don’t go to plan. And the frustration of being given the high hat from the very people (competitors though they may be) who could set things right. I believe I read somewhere that the Coens tend to write their scripts for people. M. Emmet Walsh benefited from this, as did Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand, Tony Shalhoub… and the list goes on and on. So I keep wondering what was the thing they saw him in that told them “We gotta do something for this guy”? Come to find out, they saw him in the Dustin Hoffman “Death Of A Salesman” television production, when Polito weighed 150 and thought of him for The Dane. Well, the guy’s a fighter (he apparently took his fight for better pay/more screen time on “Homicide: A Life On The Streets” into the newspapers and subsequently his character Crocetti committed suicide… and didn’t return again until the reunion TV Movie) and got them to see him for Johnny Caspar. Frustration and passion are what you get when you see Jon Polito. Who will never stop working.

The daughter of a double bassist for the NBC Symphony, she grew up in New York theatre, first as a graduate from the High School for Performing Arts (remember her name- FAME!), then as a student at Stanford Meisner’s (then you repeat “Stanford Meisner” and so on- that’s the “Meisner Technique” in all it’s mind-numbing glory) Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre (her classmates were James Caan and Christopher Lloyd). She came up through the theatre and then sixties television. Television is where I remember her first (and most, really), but for many cult movie fans she will be fondly remembered in Clint Eastwood’s one-night-stand-becomes-crazy-stalker-movie “Play Misty For Me” as playing the Glenn Close part (before the Glenn Close part was cool- the film predated “Fatal Attraction” by several years and was not the zeitgeist phenom that the later film would turn out to be). On TV, a persona becomes apparent. For no matter old (the Auntie Mame we deserve- Lucille Bluth in “Arrested Development”) or young (countless upper class, “with it” girls in the sixties and early seventies) Walters was always sophisticated with a sense of the worldly or having “lived”, whether it was true or not. Even her Emmy-nominated starring role in the “Ironsides” spin-off “Amy Prentiss” (a feminist chief of detectives in San Francisco, her job supported by former chief Robert Ironsides) was someone who looked like they had taken a junior year off to go backpacking in Europe. Sometimes these things are a trick of the voice, or a light in the eyes (from all accounts, she grew up comfortably in Brooklyn through the forties and fifties, but no posh Euro-finishing school). The first time I really noticed her was in the late-seventies TV-movie pilot version of Marvel Comics’ “Dr. Strange” as his arch-foe “Morgan LeFay”. Please allow the comic book geek to interject that they made up an Arthurian enemy for the movie, as the network probably didn’t have the money to set a character’s head on fire for an appearance from the dread Dormammu (sp.?). And, to tell the truth, Walters had enough presence to distract a geek from being too picky. She is now appearing in the CW’s “90210” as the grandmother movie star, while waiting for the movie version of “Arrested Development” to be finalized. That this is still an issue boggles the mind.

I first noticed him playing Stephanie Powers’ father in the show “Feather and Father”, a show about a con artist and the attorney daughter who tries to reform him every episode. “Switch” did it better, but I liked Gould as he brought an enthusiasm to his part that Robert Wagner couldn’t muster through his “cool”. And indeed, Gould probably got the part through playing “Kid Twist” in “The Sting” (a movie that inspired TV executives to say “How about con artist shows?”). What I like about Gould is what I referred to as an enthusiasm before, but really it is the joy of being paid to say the words of others (other characters? other writers?) aloud. Watch him in anything (and he has been in almost everything from the early sixties on), and see an actor who, no matter what he plays, shows the former teacher of speech and drama that he was. As I get older, I tend to appreciate people who have a love of what they do and in Harold Gould you get someone who goes from father (he was “Rhoda”’s) to G-man (an FBI foil for a shabby, brilliant homicide officer in “Ransom For A Dead Man” the second TV movie pilot for the “Columbo” series) to con artist and all of them are excellent enunciators. Also, he is often seen with a moustache, just a touch of difference to make us wonder “Hey, isn’t he the same guy who was ____ in ____?”

Ironically, for someone who worked for as long (and as much as she did), there is not much written about her. She was born (and died) in Los Angeles. Got her start in radio and, like so many radio actors (including Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, the list goes on), got her start in films with fellow radio actor, Orson Welles in his film version of “Macbeth”. Played Lady Macbeth (Her only lead in a film), and like so many character actors, was known for playing older and older parts, so that, by the time she hit her 50’s, she had been known as an elderly person for the better part of 25-30 years. Her husband was another character actor (and former radio actor) John McIntire and they would appear together a lot as husband and wife. You see them in “Psycho” as the kindly sheriff and his wife, but it is a credit to what you got in the McIntire/Nolan package that she was also the voice of Norman’s mother. Nolan always had an edge, even when playing the gazillion little old ladies, a glint of steel in her eye as if to say “this far- and no further”. Like the movies, she only ever had one lead in television and that was a short-lived “Gunsmoke” spin-off in the early seventies called “Dirty Sally”.

I’ve never seen him play a bad guy(although I’m aware of at least one film- “Moontide”, playing a character that Charles Laughton made a late career out of- the sweaty, sleazy fat guy), but he’s capable of it. He played everything else. Drunken Doc Boone (“Stagecoach”), Simple Uncle Billy (“It’s A Wonderful Life”), Reporters and Editors (“Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”, “While The City Sleeps”), Scarlett O’Hara’s father, Cary Grant’s mentor (“Only Angels Have Wings”). The list goes on and on. Permit me to say a word about the Irish. Natural-born storytellers (and aren’t actors part of that process?), the cliché of having a spark in their eye as they bring you further along, well it has to come from some truth, somewhere. And Mitchell was one of the great examples of the sparkling-eyed, whopper-telling, man of the old sod. Even when Uncle Billy is being brutalized by George Bailey for losing the $5000, you can almost detect a glint of “You think this is bad? Did I ever tell you about the time…?”. Finally, I think it’s worth noting that when Levinson and Link first created the character of “Lt. Columbo” for the play (that was later adapted by them into the TV-movie pilot) “Prescription Murder”, they cast Thomas Mitchell as the apologetic detective. Who got a standing ovation every night. And that was when they thought “Maybe the policeman should have more lines than the clever murderer?”

By sheer presence of bulk (not always though… he started out as a leading man in silents) and a voice like what you will hear if the Angel Gabriel speaks with a foghorn on Judgment Day, Pallette makes an entrance. The barrel-chested father in “My Man Godfrey” and “The Lady Eve”, the Oklahoma-accented Friar Tuck to Flynn’s Robin Hood and a member of Edward Arnold’s media machine in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”, Eugene always comes in with a full head of steam. Probably from his stage training, he knows how to bring the eyes to him and keep them there, even when he is reacting to the madness of screwball heroines or how this young upstart in green could mistake him for a simple friar. Like a lot of character actors, the movie didn’t need him to be good. But how could it be great without him?