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3 weeks ago | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns |Sean Burns
It is perhaps a bit rich that the doomed romance in one of cinema’s most beloved tear-jerkers begins with someone getting something in their eye. One can easily imagine screenwriter Noel Coward and director David Lean having a laugh about being so on the nose. (Or in the eye?) Nevertheless, the inciting incident of their Brief Encounter occurs when Cecila Johnson’s Laura Jesson is ophthalmologically agitated on a train platform by errant bit of coal dust from a nearby steam engine.
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2 months ago | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns |Sean Burns
A woman and a man sit beside each other in a quiet café. They’re at separate tables, both facing forward, sipping their drinks and pretending not to notice one another. She steals a glance at him. He returns it when he thinks she isn’t looking. He moves to pay his check and she quickly does the same. He gets up to leave and she gathers her purse, a “now or never” look on her face as she screws up the courage to stand in front of him. The two hurl themselves into each other’s arms.
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Dec 20, 2024 | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns
My friend Heather used to watch White Christmas every December. This was notable because she didn’t watch many movies. I knew her for five years and we only ever saw three films together, which seems odd when you consider that I watch them for a living. But Heather always wanted to be out and about — seeing people, doing stuff and getting into silly adventures. She didn’t like sitting still for two hours. I don’t think she had the attention span for most movies.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns |Sean Burns
There are a lot of arguments as to what constitutes a Gen-Xer and when the proper cutoff dates are, but a pretty good rule of thumb is that you’re one of us if your first John Huston movie was Annie.
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Jul 26, 2024 | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns
I was haunted by At Close Range long before I actually saw it. See kids, in ye olden days when MTV actually used to show music videos, the clip for Madonna’s “Live to Tell” was in semi-constant rotation. In it, the Material Girl has on an uncharacteristically dowdy dress and sits curled up in a wooden chair, wearing far less makeup than usual while singing her doomiest ballad directly into the lens.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns
There’s no shortage of movies about free-spirited, sixties idealism curdling into seventies malaise, but give Cisco Pike credit for getting there early. Shot in late 1970 but unreleased in the U.S. until early 1972, writer-director Bill L. Norton’s bad-vibes debut chronicles the washed-out death rattle of a counterculture numbed and reeling from Altamont and the Manson murders.
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Jun 28, 2024 | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns
Madame Desnoyers has it bad for Roland, the bookish dreamer a few too many years her junior. Her 12-year-old daughter Cecile is secretly smitten with Frankie, an American sailor who will be shipping out soon. Frankie shacks up with Lola sometimes, but it’s nothing serious. Lola’s a cabaret dancer still waiting for the return of Michel, the love of her life who’s been gone so long he doesn’t know he left her with a son who’s now seven years old.
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Jun 26, 2024 | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns
For an artist who’s spent the past 50 years foregrounding the same pet themes and preoccupations, Paul Schrader has amassed an unexpectedly eclectic – some might say erratic – filmography, applying his lapsed Calvinist brand of spiritual turmoil across a wide expanse of films about artists, criminals and cat people. But missing from most retrospectives is the rock n’ roll family melodrama Schrader wrote and directed starring Michael J. Fox, Joan Jett, and Gena Rowlands.
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Jun 14, 2024 | 
crookedmarquee.com | Sean Burns
Hal Ashby’s Shampoo begins and ends with The Beach Boys’ 1966 hit “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the opening track to their seminal Pet Sounds album in which the soaring, Spector-ish Wall of Sound is tempered by lyrics of wistful longing. Brian Wilson said he wrote the song while harboring a secret crush on his wife’s sister, making it the perfect de facto theme music for Ashby’s melancholy sex farce about a habitually horny hairdresser and the comings and goings of California girls.
