The Water Engine

David Mamet is an odd guy. His various award-winning plays full of stylized, gritty dialogue are well known- Glengarry Glenn Ross being the quintessential Mamet example. His own film directing betrays an odd preference for a stilted, wooden delivery of his dialogue, done quite on purpose but to baffling results. It's like the characters all …

Poison Ivy

If you were alive but below the drinking age in the 80's, this one's for you. And if you weren't, this one is still for you. Poison Ivy is the quintessential 80's TV teen movie- a ridiculous, groan-inducing yet ironically fascinating window into what Hollywood believed America represented during the Reagan years: sex, sex, money, …

Guilty Conscience

By 1985, Anthony Hopkins was an accomplished British actor in both theater and film, having garnered acclaim in David Lynch's The Elephant Man... but he wasn't so big a star that he could turn down the lead in a CBS Television Movie-of-the-Week about a well-known criminal defense attorney who spends his entire time dreaming up …

T-Bone N Weasel

Made-for-TV Movies are a fascinating and forgotten artifact of American mass culture. Basically B-Movies "not good enough for the theater," they still took time and money to produce, still required name actors, and still basically all have the potential to be quality work, if only the scripts were better... but they rarely are. Steven Spielberg's …

The Cube

When I say "Jim Henson," you say.... Kermit, or Miss Piggy, or Ernie & Bert, or probably one of a hundred memorable characters he created out of felt and foam. What you probably won't say is "a trippy, artsy filmmaker exploring the boundaries of his medium." But that's what Henson was, too- especially in his …