Cinema Basement

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich There has been a recent string of new content for TV shows that ended their runs years ago. Shows like Will & Grace and Mad About You returned with new episodes to moderate success. The big one was The X Files getting two more seasons, which as a die hard X Files fan I find average at best. Leave things in the past. Focus on new content and not this devotion to nostalgia. It is never the same. Case in point, The X Files's abysmal return to the big screen in 2008, I Want To Believe.  The worst sin this movie commits is being boring as sin. This film is painfully slow and at times also self righteous and up its own ass. It moves at a glacial pace and the characters just over analyze everything and go over everything we've already seen and heard from the show. Writer director Chris Carter, the creator of the X Files, said he wanted this to be a standalone film for both fans and non-fans but that doesn't work. The non-fans are probably uninte

 A retrospective by Forrest Humphrey In the mid 90's, Toho was wrapping up their second run of Godzilla films, called the “Heisei” series. Am American producer, named Henry Saperstein, had been distributing Godzilla films to the US and acquired permission to pitch a Godzilla film to Hollywood, and after years of changing hands and development hell, we got this film in 1998. Made by the duo of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin for Tristar and starring Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno, Godzilla (1998) came out to negative reviews and a modest profit, but has since spent its time in relative infamy, scorned by the fanbase as a terrible adaptation of a beloved Japanese icon. Im going to break from my usual pattern of going into more detail for the creation of Godzilla films, as I actually find the aftermath of Tristar's Godzilla to be more entertaining. But for those who want a nice, digestible look at how every freaking decision made for the film was the wrong one, I highly recomme

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich Doing some cleanup for the first week fo February for Sydney Pollack month. Just hitting films I want to make sure are covered. A good underrate gem on Friday. Today we have one of Pollack's best. There is something called the paranoia trilogy from the seventies. Director Alan J. Pakula made three different films about the US government doing shady stuff and that everyone is out to get you. It is. trilogy of films not to watch in one sitting. The films were Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men. I think an honorary member of that club should be Sydney Pollack's 1975 film, Three Days of the Condor.  Robert Redford is Condor, a lowly CIA analyst who comes back from getting lunch to find his co-workers murdered. When he is nearly killed during an extraction attempt by the CIA, he goes on the run, trying to piece together what happened. It is a tight and paranoid ride where nothing is what it seems and we as an audience have no id