Ryan Stewart

William Shatner’s genetics should be studied. I’ve personally never heard of a 95-year-old who is out riding horses, eating cereal at traffic stops, talking shit on the internet, mixing it up with fans at q & as and all the rest of it. It’s just kind of wild.

Revisited Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS to decide if I wanted to flash sale it. I think the film would be a little better if Cary Grant remained cold and indifferent all the way through to the end and saved Ingrid Bergman out of duty. His last-minute conversion into a romantic feels off.

"My father is patient and loyal to a movie. The rest of us keep saying let's go, come on, this is lousy, but he says no, let's wait a bit and maybe it will get better. No matter how terrible the first reel is, he always thinks it will get better." -- Tricia Nixon, 1971

Found this at the used book store: Nixon at the Movies, by Mark Feeney. It tries to reveal Nixon's personality through the 500-plus films he screened at the White House. He liked Audrey Hepburn & Kim Novak. He screened THE NOTORIOUS LANDLADY the night of the Watergate break-in.

[CARRIE] De Palma, a master sadist, prolongs her moments of happiness; he slows the action down to a trance while we wait for the trap to be sprung, knowing that it will unloose her bottled-up telekinetic anger. It’s a beautiful plot—a teen-age Cinderella’s revenge. (1976)

MS. 45 IN PERSON—A teenage Zoë Lund outside the NUART Theatre in LA, 1981

Watching MANIAC COP 2. This is the T2: JUDGMENT DAY of movies that feature a maniac cop. Bigger budget, funnier, edgier, more stylish, a stunt-heavy centerpiece car chase. I gather it's Nicolas Winding Refn's favorite of the three, he has a commentary on the 4K. No complaints!

Two weeks after I bought a lovely, vintage one-sheet for Wes Craven's DEADLY BLESSING to hang on my wall Kino Lorber announces this morning that they are bringing it to 4K, with a new HDR/DV master. I must be in sync with the physical media universe!

Filled in a blind spot: Wayne Wang's SMOKE. Some nice character sketches, I liked the scene with the book of photos. Ashley Judd brings the crazy in her one scene. William Hurt's monologue about the son who's older than the father beat No Country for Old Men by about ten years.

Had a talk w/a friend about how many of the actors/performers who were so omnipresent in the world when we were younger are entering their 70's/80's/'90s. And like in most cases, even up to 10 years ago they didn't seem *that* old at all. But *now* we're realizing it all at once.

Watching MIRACLE MILE. Few locations have ever gotten the kind of attention Johnie's Coffee on Fairfax & Wilshire gets here. We see the inside, the outside, the Googie fixtures, we even get Anthony Edwards & Mare Winningham running toward it across the intersection at magic hour!

@JagrWatch68 Locke, The Strangers, Assault on Precinct 13, Judgement Night, Identity, Miracle Mile.

@crsryan Watched this last month for the first time. Pretty terrific, and Stan Lee’s cameo is great too. Off-topic but are there any all-in-one-night horror/thriller movies you’d recommend?

Watching Larry Cohen’s THE AMBULANCE. This movie is a wild ride, man. It’s basically SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, only instead of searching for Matt Damon they are searching for Janine Turner who has been kidnapped by an organ harvesting ring that is headquartered inside a dance club.

Watching Larry Cohen's IT'S ALIVE. This was shot in the Benedict Canyon area of L.A. in 1973 and you can feel a post-Manson malaise. High anxiety, pill bottles, police presence. It used to be paradise and now there's an evil out there and everyone's coping with it. It's alive.

Susan Sarandon photographed by Robert Picard at Cannes Film Festival, 1978.

Watching AT CLOSE RANGE. This is a beautifully shot film, peak James Foley, but boy is it dark and depressing. I'm not surprised Madonna didn't want the Mary Stuart Masterson role. Also, after watching this I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Sean Penn is a good actor.

Watching a clip of penguin wranglers herding penguins on the set of BATMAN RETURNS with missile backpacks on. Dozens of them, being coaxed with fish. It’s a bygone world. No producer will ever spend time/money on something like that ever again. That era of moviemaking is over.

Watching Q: THE WINGED SERPENT. This film is a neat little sleight of hand trick. Michael Moriarty plays his leading man role like an escaped mental patient in order to distract you from the fact that you're watching a monster movie with no monster until the end. And it works!

Watching John Sayles’s LIMBO. I appreciate that Sayles isn’t interested in hewing to the normal rhythms of a character drama or a thriller, he wants to mix them up, fine. I still find this unwieldy, juddering. Good showcase for MEM, though, she gets to act and sing. Great ending.

Once in a while you see a shot in a low-budget movie and you just know it inspired a much more famous shot. Example: the tracking shot in SPECIAL EFFECTS where Zoë Lund's body is discovered in a car on Coney Island unquestionably inspired the "Layla" sequence in GOODFELLAS.