Book Review: Identifi Yourself: A Journey in F**k You Creative Courage

From June 5, 1981 to December 30, 1988, The USA Network was the home of Night Flight—one of television’s most innovative attempts at capturing the pop culture zeitgeist.  Created and directed by Stuart S. Shapiro, Night Flight was a four-hour program comprised of music videos (featuring mainstream and alternative artists), cult movies (it's where I…

Adventures in Blu-ray: The Addiction (1995)

Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), an NYU student preparing for her doctorate in philosophy, is attacked one night by a mysterious woman (Annabelle Sciorra as "Casanova"), who insists that Kathleen forcefully tell her to go away and leave her alone.  Kathleen is unable to do this, and so Casanova does a number on her neck, calling…

Cinematic Vegetables (Part two in a continuing series)

I’ll say this for AT&T U-Verse: in the short period of time since we switched to the service in January, the House of Yesteryear has been blessed with two, count ‘em, two free preview weekends of HBO/Cinemax.  (One of them is currently in progress this weekend, and next weekend we’ll get our second look at Showtime/The…

Movies I’ve stared at recently on TCM (and IFC and Sundance TV) #66

Barring any cataclysmic planetary interruptions for the rest of this weekend, it will be Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s pleasure to resurrect its long dormant Doris Day(s) feature beginning tomorrow, April 21—so don’t anyone complain that they didn’t get prior warning.  In the meantime, here are a few random features that I’ve watched courtesy of (ka-ching!) AT&T U-Verse’s…

Cinematic Vegetables (Part one in a continuing series)

The last time sister Kat was in town to pay us a visit (for the uninformed, she moved to the wilds of the PNW with her partner and my nephew back in April of 2013) she cracked a Napoleon Dynamite joke after seeing a half-gallon of 2% milk in our refrigerator.  She then learned, as I have in similar situations,…

“Fish don’t fry in the kitchen/Beans don’t burn on the grill…”

I’m pleased to announce that this is the very first post composed at the new Rancho Yesteryear, into which the ‘rents and I officially moved this afternoon (though this time they were ahead of me; they brought their stuff in last night).  There will be a gradual phasing out of the old House of Yesteryear…

I don’t like Mondays

In the Franz Kafka story The Metamorphosis, the protagonist—a traveling salesman named Gregor Samsa—wakes up one morning to find he’s been transformed into a gigantic insect (generally considered to be a cockroach, though it depends on the German translation).  I’ve been experiencing a series of similar misadventures here at Rancho Yesteryear lately, although my transmutation is more…

Magic moments

Turner Classic Movies has announced a memorial tribute to the late Patricia Neal that’s slated for Monday, September 13 beginning at 8:00pm. The lineup will include: 08:00pm Private Screenings: Patricia Neal 09:00pm The Fountainhead (1949) 11:00pm The Subject Was Roses (1968) 01:00am A Face in the Crowd (1957) 03:15am In Harm’s Way (1965) Ben Walsh of the Independent tallies thirty “movie moments that tell the whole…

“I lift up my finger and I say tweet tweet, now now, shush shush, come come…”

As I was tooling around the VCI website this morning, I came across this interesting DVD release scheduled for a street date of May 25th: Old Mother Riley: British Cinema Collection. It’s a set of six films—Old Mother Riley in Paris (1938), Old Mother Riley, MP (1939), Old Mother Riley's New Venture (1949), Old Mother Riley, Headmistress (1950), Old Mother Riley's Jungle Treasure (1951), and Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952)—from…

Risky business

The ‘rents are officially out of town as of this posting…which means I’m pretty much on my own here at Rancho Yesteryear until tomorrow evening. (They need prescriptions filled, and have journeyed to Savannah for the doctor’s appointment needed to accomplish this.) My mother has been staying with me since my release from the hospital and will probably keep…