Ten Nights in a Barroom stands as another “race film” made by a white owned (or in this case co-owned) studio, in this case a Philadelphia based studio called the Colored Players Film Corporation. The CPFC was founded by David Starkman and Sherman H. Dudley, the former of whom was white and the latter of whom was black, though it appears to be that Starkman was the one more involved in producing the actual movies while Dudley was more the…
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Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore 1974
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has often seemed like a little bit of an aberration in Martin Scorsese’s filmography and I don’t think that reputation is not entirely unearned. The movie comes directly between Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, two gritty and highly masculine movies about 70s New York, and this female centric PG-rated movie set in Arizona feels like a bit out of place. In Christopher Nolan terms this was sort of Scorsese’s Insomnia: a movie he made to…
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Disraeli 1929
Was this the first lame by-the-numbers biopic to get a Best Picture nomination? It just might be. This is a pretty straightforward look at the life of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his purchase of the Suez Canal for the purposes of getting a one-up on the Russians during the Great Game. The film has all the usual problems you’d expect from an early talkie, lots of stiffness and questionable acting, although George Arliss does create a somewhat memorable…
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The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 2014
Man, what a misguided endeavor this whole Hobbit thing was. I’ve long maintained that the problems with this spinoff series run a lot deeper than the decision to split it into three movies but out of the three this is definitely the one that suffers most from the padding. It’s something I’ve noticed about a lot of the last parts of these needlessly split movies like The Matrix Revolutions or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows- Part 2,” they end…