Cinema Basement

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich Two LAPD detectives facing indictments from Internal Affairs flee to the small Alaskan fishing village of Nightmute to assist local police with a homicide. There senior detective Will Dormer, played by an unusually reserved Al Pacino, begins to suffer from insomnia, hence the title, and plays a game of cat and mouse with strange mystery writer Walter Finch, a chilling Robin Williams.  I truly believe that one of the greatest modern directors is Christopher Nolan. I think arguably he could be called the greatest modern director. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are better than the entire MCU combined and a lot of that is because of Nolan's astonishing visual eye and his attention to detail. That hot take aside I find that some of Nolan's work pre-Batman is sort of forgotten, either as a film entirely or people forget he directed one of them. Memento is the standout of his pre-Batman era and yes, it is a modern masterpiece. If you've never see...

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich A sophisticated Los Angeles psychiatrist murders his wife and then, with the help of his mistress, creates a near air tight alibi. He is seen boarding a plane with his “wife,” (really the mistress). They have an argument, she leaves, very much alive, and he flies to Mexico. A week later he returns to his apartment and is greeted by a man in a gray suit smoking a cigar, who introduces himself as "Lieutenant Columbo, police." While the greatest TV detective is hardly forgotten, I think people forget this movie from 1968 was actually the first time the legendary Peter Falk played the character. For those who don't know the formula of a Columbo episode, it's not a whodunit at all. Most episodes open with the killer plotting the murder, carrying it out, and then covering his tracks. A lot of times, Columbo doesn't show up for a good twenty minutes or so. Once he does though, the game is ...

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich For a film that won Best Picture and Best Picture, as well as three other Academy Awards, I don't think Billy Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment is as well remembered as it should be. I am sure it might not play as well to a modern audience, especially with some of the attitudes of the '60s in full display in the film, but I still really like it and it actually is condemning the sexual hierarchy of '60s corporate America.  Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a mild mannered employee at a big insurance company in New York City. He has a deal going with several executives in his company where he loans out his apartment to them so they have somewhere to take their mistresses, mostly women from the office. C.C.'s neighbors think he is a playboy as they see and hear women coming in and out of his apartment but in reality he spends his nights either at work or wandering the streets.  What works about this film is what I said earlier, the film does...

 A retrospective by Forrest Humphrey The 2014 reboot of “Godzilla” was a success both critically and commercially, and that would soon be followed by a reboot of the only giant monster who rivals ,or perhaps even surpasses, the Big G in prestige and cultural significance: King Kong. Initially a co-production of Legendary and Universal called “Skull Island”, the success of “Godzilla (2014)” prompted a swap from Universal to Warner Bros. in order to facilitate an eventual crossover and expansion of the “Monsterverse”. In 2017, directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts and with a hell of a cast in Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman and John C. Reilly we got “Kong: Skull Island”. Right off the bat, this is my favorite of the “Monsterverse” flicks. The movie plays exactly like a modern day, big budget version of old school monster movies like “The Land that Time Forgot” or “Journey to the Center of the Earth”. Its a glorified B-movie and is unashamed of being so. To th...

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich Two of my favorites genres are pissed off nature and pissed off animals. Whether it's a giant storm or volcano laying siege to a town, or some apex predator picking off the human cast, I love a good natural disaster or real life creature feature. Crawl from 2019 successfully combines both genres for a brutal and quick ride.  Haley, played by Kaya Scodelario, braves a Category 5 hurricane bearing down on Florida to look for her estranged father Dave, played by the awesome Barry Pepper, who is not answering any calls. Haley finds an unconscious Dave down in the crawl space of the old family house. She and Dave are attacked by alligators, who got in through an open storm drain. Now with the storm intensifying and the water rising, the two must fight the large prehistoric monsters and try to escape either a watery grave or a brutal death in the jaws of the great beasts.  This film is intense. Director Alexandre Aja, known for films like High Te...

 For the month of March we will be exploring the filmography of one Hollywood's best directors, Billy Wilder. His filmography reads like a list of some of the best films of all time, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, and yet I don't think Wilder is held up in high regard as he should be like, unlike some of his contemporaries like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. That is criminal as Wilder made the two films often argued as the best film noirs of all time. Wilder is one of the greatest directors of all time and this is our tribute to him. 

A retrospective by Forrest Humphrey After the disastrous effort from Tristar in 1998, Toho rebooted Godzilla themselves barely a year later with “Godzilla: Millennium” (Godzilla 2000 in the west). This began the “Millennium” era which lasted from 1999 to 2004's “Godzilla Final Wars”, celebrating the character's 50 th anniversary, when the character was retired for another hiatus of at least 10 years, according to Toho. In 2009, rumor began to circulate that Legendary Pictures might be negotiating with Toho to reboot the series and try again, later confirmed in 2010. Finally, in 2014, on time for his 60 th anniversary, we got “Godzilla”, directed by Gareth Edwards and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Watanabe and Bryan Cranston. Our story is simple. Opening in the late 90's, we follow Watanabe as a leader of Monarch, an organization which becomes important in later films, as they discover a massive fossil underground, and eggs inside it, one of which ...