My Life as a Dog

My Life as a Dog (aka "Mitt Liv Som Hund") (Lasse Hallström, 1985) Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius) is having a tough time being a kid (as they all do, until they learn they're a grown-up).  Curious, precocious (and, as they say in Airplane!, has a severe drinking problem), he's surrounded by adults who know more than he does, but seem to not know how to enjoy it.  His older brother is a bullying creep, his Mom (Anki Lidén) has TB and can't handle her two kids. Dad's half a world away, absent.  All he can do is go through life with his dog, Sickan, and his schoolmates.  Life is routine enough to control (barely) but once Mom gets sent off to a sanatorium, he gets shipped off to his Uncles.'  One's officious and no fun at all.  The other works in a glass factory amongst a collection of misfits.  Much more fun.  There's his Uncle perpetually building or repairing, the grandfather who likes to be read to from lingerie catalogues, the acrobat who's a little crazy, the sculptor who specializes in erotic glass (which the foreman habitually shatters), and the plant hottie, who everyone has designs on.

Then, there are the kids, especially Saga (Melinda Kinnaman), a tomboy, who's trying to pass, and takes out her frustrations by boxing.  For Ingemar, it's a virtual smorgasbord of curiosities and mysteries, even as he OCD's his way through life, pin balling from one misadventure to another, trying to fir in and missing the most important things.

Like Fate.

He's young enough to think "out of sight/out of mind"—Sickan's in a kennel, Mom's in the hospital. Nothing changes. He rolls with the punches, and he'll hook up with the missing later. Life is the day-to-day. The future there's always time for. When he thinks—over a book, or on the odd story that's stuck, burr-like, in his brain, like the first pooch in space, Laika, who went on a one way trip—it's over the backdrop of a star-filled sky, visible but unreachable, and the visual representation of an uncaring Universe—beautiful, cold and beyond comprehension.

But his most important aspect, that informs all of us, is he doesn't know what he doesn't know, and slowly, if unsurely, he's growing, becoming more aware.

And the title is apt.  He is living a dog's life—kept, with the advantage of being cared for, but never in control, always at the mercy of the world and its random charities and acts of kindness.  But also, a victim of its constant indifference.  In the process of making our way across the river of life, we are buoyed by the rocks beneath our feet, occasionally losing our footing, attempting to stand straight and not go under.  We learn our way, negotiate our path and find our place.

My Life as a Dog is a fine portrait of the child's experience, and everybody's.  It ends with a sense of becoming and is Hallström 's best display of life's messy, unruly experience.  Even though he's gone further in his ambitions, taken more risks, this is his most well thought out, complete and realized film on the complexities of the shared experience he has been reaching for his entire career.

The Trip to Bountiful

"The Trip to Bountiful" (Peter Masterson, 1985) If "The Trip to Bountiful" resembles one of those "Hallmark Hall of Fame" vehicles, there's a reason: the HHOF is one of the last kin of the Golden Age of Television that specialized in Anthology programming, a happy confluence of an up-tick in stage-writing (with no venues) and the work coming out of the Actor's Studio. "The Trip to Bountiful" is a product of that Golden Age, Horton Foote writing it in 1953 and being broadcast with a cast including Lillian Gish, Eileen Heckart, and Eva Marie Saint (then going to Broadway for 309 performances with Gish and Saint, becoming a staple of village theater groups ever since). Spare in stage-craft and language, it is a showcase for what actors bring to it.

And besides Foote's intuitive, empathetic play, the highlight is Geraldine Page's portrait of a wilting flower seeking its home soil. One could be cynical about Page beating out (in that year of years) Anne Bancroft in "Agnes of God," Whoopi Goldberg in "The Color Purple," Jessica Lange in "Sweet Dreams," and Meryl Streep in "Out of Africa," for the Best Actress Oscar as a mere lifetime achievement award. That is, until you see the movie. All of those actresses did stellar, award-winning, even personal best, work. Page's performance, however, is bone-deep, with a devastating arc punctuated by brave choices and amusing filigrees. It has a deep-rooted embrace of desperation, where to reclaim one's dignity one will do the most undignified things—to lose one's self in the search for self. Amidst the brio and excitement of setting off to her home-town, Page's Carrie Watts is crumbling at each new set-back, each new piece of old news.

The rest of the cast—John Heard, Carlin Glynn, Richard Bradford—do excellent work, but Page leaves them in the dirt with a performance in turn mournful, sly, agitated, effervescent and transparent. It's a primer on making the ordinary extraordinary.

Lillian Gish and Eva Marie Saint in
"A Trip to Bountiful," 1953

Olde Review: Young Frankenstein

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

"Young Frankenstein" (Mel Brooks, 1985) In my review of last quarter's bill of comedies,* I stated that Mel Brooks is just about the only remaining graceful comedy filmmaker**--his films have a flow along with the jokes. After a couple of false starts,*** Brooks achieved his cinematic sense with "Young Frankenstein," and achieved it, as most film-makers do today, by following the example of a predecessor in film-making--in this case. the director of the original "Frankenstein" films, James Whale. His coming of age didn't occur only because of the help of Gene Wilder's script (Wilder's own "Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother" was an abysmal failure), but through the realization by Brooks that the best movie spoofs are those that poke fun at and embrace their cinematic progenitors. And so, in tandem with the humor, good and bad, we are treated to the charms of two-dimensional castles, rain-washed cobblestones, studio-built forests and the glories of black and white photography. And you have to have a special love to go to the trouble to obtain the lab equipment from the original "Frankenstein." Brooks' love of the original gentles this film. His love makes him understand the charms of the original "Frankensteins." "Young Frankenstein" turns serious when Gene Wilder screams out during the experiment because Brooks understands that he is challenging God's right to be the sole source of life. It turns serious when Wilder confronts his creation, and is able to conquer his fear to become the loving father-creator to his very lonely, dependent creation, a moment coupled with the young scientist's first ecstatic re-affirmation of his family name. Brook's understanding goes so far as to present its own version of the wierd sexuality that was in the old "Frankenstein" films. Brooks also has the melancholy understanding of the monster's plight--the plight of all those different enough to be rejected by society. However, there is one thing different about "Young Frankenstein," as opposed to the originals--this one has a happy ending for all concerned--for Brooks' "Young Frankenstein" is a sentimental, gentle film--a rarething these days--a quality that only adds to my enjoyment and appreciation of the films of Mel Brooks.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM on January 6th, 1977


As far as that goes, and it didn't go far. Brooks made a wonderful, financially-risky movie called "Silent Movie," (and it was silent, except for one word, spoken by mime Marcel Marceau), then came "High Anxiety," a somewhat haggard Hitchcock parody, then "History of the World, Part 1," "Spacebals," "Life Stinks," and on. And sadly on. Brooks is now a Broadway entrepreneur with his wildly successful Broadway production of "The Producers," and his fine staging of a musical version of "Young Frankenstein." And his company, Brooksfilms, is still in business--except for his own films Brooks rarely played it safe.

*Those being "The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film," "Love and Death" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"--I just found those reviews, we'll get to them eventually.

** I hope I changed my mind on this. Blake Edwards was still active at the time, as was Woody Allen.

*** Presumably, "The Producers," (clumsy, but funny as Hell) "The Twelve Chairs," (better, but not terribly funny), and "Blazing Saddles," (which was rude, crude, hilarious, and one of the worst looking movies I've ever seen)

Poltergeist: Of Gods and Clowns

Here is the third and final part of Lowcoolant's re-viewing of "Poltergeist" as an adult.

Of God & Clowns

I probably should have called this post something like "The Final Chapter" because I'm writing about a horror movie. But no.

The most unexpected moment for me - as an adult watching "Poltergeist" with his eyes open - was the mother's desperate appeal to God. Rare in movies. I had to run it back and watch the scene a second time, because I wasn't sure what I'd just heard. But sure enough, when the mother is trying to rescue her children from The Beast in the final scene, she screams "GOD! HELP ME!" begging The Almighty to give her strength. It almost seems inappropriate, like a lens that suddenly focuses all the spookiness into a real struggle of good and evil where a woman is saving her kids from the jaws of Hell. Though I guess it completes the momentum built throughout the movie, hitting you over the head that this is not a joke. This ghost is not a prankster. Look, you're not listening. I'm a bad ghost. I'm not just here to hide your car keys. I'm the devil. The fucking DEVIL! Do you hear me? You people never LISTEN to me! Gosh!

And I guess that's the real genius of this production - that it starts out as a harmless ghost story with humorous family elements, and ends up in a very dark, religious-and-therefore-serious place. The appeal to God drives the point home that this woman is really at her wit's end, she's got nothing left and CAN'T DO IT. Rather than conveniently overpowering evil and saving the day she shows a bit of struggle and weakness. Even though I don't believe in any of it, I felt somehow comforted watching that scene.

Just before the climax there's another pants-soiling scene where the clown doll attacks the son. As in, it comes to life and drags the boy under the bed. Refer to my previous statement about total hell. When we, the audience, saw that the clown's chair was empty and collectively wondered "hey where's the clo-- UH-OH!" the crescendo of fear just made everything worse. We wailed and whimpered while simultaneously wishing everyone would shut up because it was making us more scared. Every second between that sight and the eventual attack was like suffocation, as we watched and waited, too young and stupid to realize we could physically exit the theater. (In fact it wasn't until "Ghostbusters" that I actually did exit a theater. Those hellhounds were just too darn mean looking. I did go back in and finish the movie.)

So the clown attacked. I never saw what happened next because I was hiding my face, which in hindsight was unfortunate, because witnessing the boy's next move probably would have helped my developing psyche. After a good minute of screaming in absolute helplessness, the boy decides he's done playing the victim and channels his fear into a berserker rage, tearing the fluffy white guts out of that clown. It almost looks like the film was sped up to accentuate his anger. "I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU" he screams while shredding the doll to pieces. I really wish I'd seen that when I was 7, so I'd know what to do if I got jumped by a possessed clown doll. Not that it ever hap... FYI, I just looked over my shoulder while I was typing that, I really need more lights on in this room... not that it ever happened, but little boys need all the help they can get fighting evil.

the eternal struggle of man versus clown

Doctors have told us time and again that the scarring situations in our youth are sought out in our adult lives on a constant loop. People who are sexually abused subconsciously seek out more sexual abuse. People who competed with their siblings for the last cookie or greater approval from the parents end up as fiercely competitive adults who just don't get things like sharing or cooperation, or maybe they never feel like they're good enough no matter what they win or achieve.

Those of us who were always scared as children grow up subsisting on fear, surfing on it and wielding it like a flaming sword, I guess. As adults we laugh at the prospect of safety or predictability in anything because we can't control our own fear and can't fathom a world without it. We like reading Nietzsche or Kant, or Revelation. I know I sure do. We like scary movies. We take it in like fuel and serve it up, sometimes artistically, sometimes physically. We like scaring others, because the fear is still with us. Or maybe we're just trying to feel less alone by forcing that fear into our surroundings.

At some point our nerves became overloaded and our circuits fried, maybe due to a low capacity for shock. As adults our capacity is limitless because our meters are busted. It's like the strained emotional transmission eventually faltered and quit, so we've grown into things unable to trust or love, paranoid and nihilistic to the point of suicidal bouts of depression and an inability to understand emotional bonds.

Fuckin' Spielberg. :)

"Low Coolant" writes at www.lowcoolant.blogspot.com, and doesn't care who the harlequin belongs to or how cute it is, it's toast.

"Poltergeist" was written and produced by Steven Spielberg, and directed by Tobe Hooper

Poltergeist: It Knew What Scared Me

Here's Part Two of "LowCoolant's" wrestling with "Poltergeist."


It Knew What Scared Me

So there I was. 32 years old, climbing back into the ring with my own personal heavyweight champion of fear. You know what they say about anticipation often being worse than the experience itself? Several moments had me cringing and pushing my lips together because I knew what was going to happen. But in many cases it wasn't that bad. In fact, when the giant head lunged out of the closet I actually ran it back and paused it, marveling at the low-budget embarrassment it really was - a pinata? A giant paper-mache thing with... what is that... a car tail light in its mouth? Seriously, a red light in its mouth?

scary as hell to seven-year-old boys

Another revelation was the tree's arm-like branches reaching in to grab the boy - arms obviously mounted on a forklift driving up to the window. Despite my adult brain deducing these things almost immediately, my child brain remembered the fear precisely. I found myself taking extremely deep breaths and leaning away from the monitor when those moments filled the screen. I can still remember the sounds inside the theater - total hell.

No, I never experienced Vietnam, or the Holocaust, or the mall where parents got trampled trying to get the Cabbage Patch Dolls, but those two hours in that theater were total hell. Dozens of children just like me screaming themselves shitless. Little did we know we would be the last generation to sit through a psychologically-scarring movie like "Poltergeist" before the standards would forever change and force kids to become jaded 13-year-old teenagers before they could see scary movies. Say what you will about 13-year-olds still having the capacity to get scared - there's a world of difference between 7 and 13, and you can go eat a decroded demon clown if you disagree.

The first scene that made me jump, like way back from my monitor with matching verbalization, was the hand coming out of the television. Once my pulse returned to normal I realized that I had no memory of that scene. Either I was covering my eyes when it happened in the theater, or I blocked it out. I'm going with Option B. The music on that scene has to be some of the most disturbing stuff ever. No wonder Jerry Goldsmith got more work. I thought back to Scotty Walsh (also an adult) exclaiming in the middle of "The Changeling" as we watched in 2006, "Why are we DOING this to ourselves?!" I also thought about my friend John pointing out that my sociopathic fantasies all seem to revolve around making other people feel scared.

Much of the terror in "Poltergeist" is compounded by the reactions of the people in the movie. Not just "whoah! a gargoyle!" with crappy acting and all the emphasis on the gargoyle, but "whoah! that guy is so scared he puked and then his head exploded!" For example, when the father screams as the giant head lunges out of the closet, it's repeated from several angles in a rapid-fire style that makes your own scream struggle to keep up. The little girl's scream is particularly piercing. The little boy's scream is coupled with a look of serious fear. The girl's facial expressions, eh, limited at best. But the boy? Those eyes! That mouth! He looks like he's staring at THE DEVIL HIMSELF!

Speaking of the devil, I was too young to know what "the beast" referred to. I now know what it means. It makes the story way more interesting.

ooh! ooh! And when the husband says "Never!" to his wife just before she enters the closet! Doesn't that just make you say awwwwwww? Leave it to Spielberg to blindside the audience with a glowing romantic moment in the midst of dimension-shredding chaos. I bet the new "Indiana Jones" will have something like this. But oh yeah, I totally remembered that line and said it as it happened. And it felt great! I still got it! Of course it probably helped that the father's name was Steven.

"Low Coolant" (aka "Steven") writes at www.lowcoolant.blogspot.com

Poltergeist: The Original Demon

I read this re-examination of "Poltergeist" (with hands removed from eyes) and enjoyed it so much that I asked the author if I could steal it from him and re-publish it here. With his kind permission, we'll be presenting it over the next three days. Here's Part One.

The Original Demon

As part of a video project, yesterday I had the pleasure... well no, it wasn't pleasure. More like dread and mild nausea. Let me start again.

Yesterday I had the dread and nausea of watching "Poltergeist," a movie I kind of saw in a movie theater in 1982 and haven't seen since. I say "kind of" because there were parts I didn't see - I was too busy covering my eyes, or putting my head down into my knees to insure zero visual input, or in some cases having out-of-body experiences brought on by cardiac arrest.

So yeah. Video project. Nice opening credits. Nice font choice. I captured three good visuals that happen early in the movie - the static-filled television, the clown doll just sitting there, and the spooky tree outside the boy's room. And that was all I needed or wanted to see. I ejected the disc.

I had the DVD in its case and made it all the way to my front door, intent on driving straight to Blockbuster, when a voice in my head snarled, "You COWARD!" I couldn't tell if it was my father's voice or my own, but it stopped me.

I stood there with my hand on the doorknob. It's a rare thing when you insult yourself and know, through and through, that you're absolutely right. When you stop yourself at a pivotal moment and commence to wrestle internally. We hear all kinds of internal things about daily errands, what to say on the phone, instructions for small talk, etc, but it's mostly harmless. And our courage gets challenged by others all the time - come on, chicken, do it! But when the calm subconscious addresses the surrounding haste and denial, it's pretty powerful.

"You miserable sacka shit pathetic loser," it continued. How convenient that my subconscious was as eloquent as my mouth. "Go the fuck back in there and watch this fucking movie. Swallow it whole, like the tree tried to swallow the kid. Make some fucking popcorn and BE A MAN FOR ONCE." I furrowed my brow and gritted my teeth a little and, well, made some fucking popcorn.

Folks, in 1982 I was but a wee lad. A mere seven years old, with soft, angelic sensibilities. A mind full of curiosity and wonder. Ripe for traumatization at the hands of frightmaster Steven Spielberg.

It scared the hell out of me. This movie took my happy kid brain and splattered it all over the sharp rocks of holy shit horror. This movie didn't just give me phobias, it cleared a whole swath of my cerebral cortex and built a state-of-the-art neurosis facility just to store the phobias, then special-ordered a dozen previously-unknown phobias and installed them free of charge. Anyone who invents a time machine and takes young children back to see "Poltergeist" - you're going to burn in hell. Because no child needs that much so soon in life.

In fact, this movie and its misleading PG rating were what spawned the PG-13 rating back in the 80s. Millions of parents, disgusted with the vast gray area between PG and R, and understandably furious over the widespread psychological trauma that resulted from this movie, demanded a system upgrade. (They were infuriated even further when they learned that "Poltergeist" was originally going to be rated R but somehow managed a PG, for reasons only Satan fully understood.) While "Gremlins" was the eventual nail in the PG coffin, "Poltergeist" launched the movement with a nuclear thunderclap.

Childhood phobias created by this movie included, but were not limited to: large spooky trees, television sets in empty rooms, closets, the space under the bed, thunderstorms, clown dolls, pink attic insulation, and dark places in general. I guess every child has a "first fear" experience that turns normal things into paranormal, dangerous things. Prior to that experience, things like darkness might be just fine. Then the child witnesses something come out of the dark in a scary movie and, well, suddenly the dark's not okay anymore. (For example, I know people who liked meeting stray doggies until they saw "Cujo" or read the short story "The Stuffed Dog.") In my case the first taste of the emotion we call terror was "Poltergeist." It was a baptism by fire for the entire theater.

Note: my refusal to own a television doesn't come from this movie, but that's a good guess. ;)

"Low Coolant" publishes at www.lowcoolant.blogspot.com

Silverado

Silverado (1985)

What a Western is, is a picture frame, and you can put any kind of picture you want in there. With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

Lawrence Kasdan interviewed March 21, 2003 IGN.com


"Now, I don't wanna kill you and you don't wanna be dead".


Silverado is like every Western you have ever seen and, inevitably, like no other. It feels like it is director Lawrence Kasdan's homage and reinvention to the Westerns of his past in the way that his screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark seemed to be his updated tribute to the Saturday morning serials of his youth. It has just about every cliché you can remember: the four heroes with their code of honor who come riding across the scrubland; the crooked sheriff; the rapacious cattle rancher; the vulnerable wagon train; the saloon; the whore with a heart of gold; the slick gambler (called Slick); the classic Western town; the final gun duel in the empty street; the gun slinger with his twirling Colt 45's; a rousing score by Bruce Broughton that sounds like every Western score you have ever heard and most of all, 'that' landscape and so on and so on. Copies they may be but ones that have a faithfulness that comes from an appreciation for the genre rather than a mockery.

Kasdan keeps the action going with a shoot-out every fifteen minutes even as it builds to the classic confrontation. The script fairly crackles with cowboy dialogue melded with witty one-liners. Even the anachronisms seem to work: an African-American gunslinger (Danny Glover) and a feminist pioneer (Rosanna Arquette). Yet the movie has a modern sensibility too - the heroes aren't quite the pure 'white hats' - Kevin Kline plays Paden, a drifter, who is happy to casually kill a man for stealing his hat even though he will risk jail to save a stray dog and throws his lot in with the villainous Sheriff Cobb (Brian Dennehy) before he is forced to act on his better instincts. Kevin Costner is surprisingly bearable (given his later outings) as the happy-go-lucky sociopathic brother of Scott Glenn who comes to the rescue time and time again. Added to this you also get John Cleese as an ex-pat sheriff and Jeff Goldblum , the aforementioned Slick as well as Linda Hunt, who comes close to stealing the whole movie as Stella the owner of the Midnight Star Saloon.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure

"Pee-wee's Big Adventure" (Tim Burton, 1985) Could there be two more kindred souls than Tim Burton and Paul Reubens? Well, beside Burton and Johnny Depp...or Michael Keaton? Burton had made only a couple short films before being given the candy store of trying to do something with the admittedly cultish figure of Pee-Wee Herman, and the two skipped, giggling, away with it. The ideas may be Reubens and co-screenwriter Phil Hartman's (...sigh), but Burton brings them to sub-adolescent life with animation, bizarre mechanics and stop-motion clay-animation, with more than a hint of the dark side that he would explore in his later films. As much as Reubens' Pee-wee is known for his antic behavior, its in moments when Herman is at his most frustrated and still, fire burning in his eyes that he's at his funniest. The movie becomes a bit frayed at 2/3 mark, as if everyone was getting just a little tired of the maintaining that much energy for so long, like their sugar buzz was wearing off, but the film has a fine final sequence that pokes fun at Pee-wee and his fantasies that's danged funny. For Burton's first full-length film, it's amazing that he could sustain the energy as long as he did.

Edge of Darkness

What the hell is this? It’s not a classic movie!

Oh, it’s worse than that! It’s not even a movie! It’s a British mini-series.

Okay, so what’s so special about it that it squeezes into the “Wild Card” position of the “Anytime Movies” list over, say, “Casablanca” or “Gone With the Wind,” or your favorite film?

1. It’s a police procedural, as steeped in the gritty realism of shabby interrogation rooms and bad neon-tube-lighting as “NYPD Blue” or “Prime Suspect.”

2. It’s a spy story, with rogue undercover operatives (particularly an eccentric CIA operative by the name of Darius Jedburgh, played in the performance of his career by Joe Don Baker), chases (two stand out--an edge-of-your-seat hacking exercise, and another through an abandoned nuclear facility) and intrigue on the part of goverment, and commerce.

3. It’s a political thriller, with investigations into government corruption and collaboration with a privatized nuclear industry, that involves Union-busting, suppression of environmental groups, and murder.

4. It’s a revenge story, as a police investigator attempts to find who murdered his daughter...or was the bullet meant for him?.

5. It’s a ghost story, as she keeps coming back to advise and inspire her father’s efforts, as he sinks deeper and deeper into an ever-expanding investigation, that he is being encouraged to abandon.

6. It’s a psychological thriller—because maybe she isn’t really there, and is just a figment of his severe grief.

7. It’s a black comedy—it has some of the most absurd sequences ever put to film (a sumptuous dinner in an underground "hot" room), and some of the funniest lines ("He's in the field," but you have to be there).

8. On top of that, it’s a story of myth, although grounded in reality, for, impossibly, one of the main protagonists (and an alarming participant) would seem to be the Earth goddess, Gaea.

9. It has one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, by the hawk-faced Bob Peck (you might remember him as the big game hunter Muldoon in “Jurassic Park.” You don’t? One line: “Clever girl…” Now you know him)

10. It crosses genres, and expectations and always keeps you guessing not only what will happen next, but what COULD happen next. It seems to revel in going 90° from normal at every juncture. It is truly a thrilling film.

11. It has one of the most down-beat endings ever put to film. But it’s okay—it's assured the bad guys will lose. The Good Earth will win.

Sad to say, there’s no DVD release of this thing in the U.S., although it has been released in Britain. For all the crap out there that has been “digitally mastered,” there evidently is no room for this rough little gem of a movie despite its pedigree of being directed by Martin Campbell, director of two James Bond movies and the two Antonio Banderas Zorro films. One should also make note of the exceptional Troy Kennedy-Martin screenplay, and the music by the late Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton. Peck is gone now, as well, and it would have nice to see him in other things, so good is he in this. But it’s another in a long string of sad eventualities for this odd, crazy, thrilling piece of film-making.

You gotta love the British. We could never do this in the States.

They deserve the Falklands.

Craven (Bob Peck) finds a gun in his daughter's teddy-bear

Northmoor - a site dedicated to "Edge of Darkness"

"Edge of Darkness" at the IMDB

Anytime Movies are movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, some times it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). This is just a bonus.

2. Citizen Kane
3. Once Upon a Time in the West
4. -Only Angels Have Wings
5. The Searchers
6. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
7. Chinatown
8. American Graffiti
9. To Kill a Mockingbird
10. Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness