Drugstore Cowboy / Gus Van Sant 1989 - Heather Graham, James LeGros, Matt Dillon & Kelly Lynch

James LeGros Leda and the swan

POINT BREAK 1991

You're a real blue flame special, aren't you, son? Young, dumb and full of come, I know. What I don't know is how you got assigned here. Guess we must just have ourselves an asshole shortage, huh?

Enemy of the State (1998)

Director - Tony Scott, Cinematography - Dan Mindel

"Well, if they're big and you're small, then you're mobile and they're slow. You're hidden and they're exposed. You only fight battles you know you can win. That's the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time."

Phantasm II (1988) // dir. Don Coscarelli

248 - Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

We are returning to the work of Jennifer Jason Leigh this week, and Jourdain Searles is joining us once again with an underrated and underseen gem. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle takes on the life of indelible writer Dorothy Parker, capturing her days with the insular Algonquin Circle and her later dissolution with the group, all with Jennifer Jason Leigh as the noted wit. Launched at Cannes, the film was celebrated for her performance even with a limited audience, including Golden Globe and Independent Spirit nominations for Best Actress. But even in a famously uncompetitive Best Actress lineup, Leigh was left out.

This episode, we talk about Leigh's several close calls for a nomination in the 1990s and our feelings about the nomination that she eventually received for The Hateful Eight. We also talk about Pulp Fiction's domination on the independent film scene, the Cannes Film Festival, and the influence of producer Robert Altman.

Topics also include writer/director Alan Rudolph's filmography, the film's massive (and nepotism baby-inflected) ensemble, and the person-not-company Condé Nast.

Links:

The 1994 Oscar nominations

Jourdain on Jennifer Jason Leigh

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Floundering

Summary: John Boyz (James LeGros) is an unemployed, aimless young man who knows people and talks to them.

A Zach Braff movie before Zach Braff started making movies. Best characters have about five minutes of screentime each.

Rating: 0.75/5

Photo credit: Film Obsessive

Film after film: The Rapture (dir. Michael Tolkin, 1991)

Featuring Duchovny in a sexy-ass period, this film belongs to Rogers, who is magnificent as a character discovering a need for believing in God. It's an interesting counterpart to Todd Haynes's Safe, whose protagonist also catapults herself (or is catapulted, her agency is a bit more complicated here) away from her social setting and explores an "alternative" way of living – I use quotation marks to mark the arbitrariness of what this term describes. This and the following year's The Player are the peak of Tolkin's writerly powers.

Point Break

Benvenuti o bentornati sul nostro blog. Nello scorso articolo abbiamo discusso di un’opera di John Carpenter, un’opera che oggi pochi conoscono ossia Avventure di un Uomo Invisibile. Questo fu un film che Carpenter fece su commissione e non è uno dei suoi lavori migliori, ma è certamente interessante sotto diversi punti di vista. Nonostante gli manchi quell’energia presente nelle opere precedenti…

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CERTAIN WOMAN:

Small Montana Town

Three tales of strained connections

And just getting by

Bad Girls (1994)

In today's review, I find that a woman's world may lay out west. As I attempt a #positive review of the 1994 western, Bad Girls #MadeleineStowe #MaryStuartMasterson #AndieMacDowell #DrewBarrymore #JamesRusso #JamesLeGros #RobertLoggia #DermotMulroney

The Old West is filled with complicated legends of pioneers, of mighty men with chequered pasts, carving out chequered futures. However, even then the full story of life in the West isn’t represented, from its realities to its legends. You don’t get as many as you did during its heyday, with modern standards reevaluating the genre. In 1994, a Wild West tale about four women, avoiding persecution…

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Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead

It’s not as good as the original and not as bad as the first sequel, though the latter phrase is rather damning with faint praise when you’re discussing Don Cascarelli’s PHANTASM III: LORD OF THE DEAD (1994, Shudder). Picking up where Part II left off, with scenes reedited to bring back the original Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) in place of the sequel’s James LeGros, the film opens with Baldwin’s rescue by his friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister). When Mike is kidnapped by The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), Reggie takes off on a tour of Iowa towns decimated by Scrimm. Along the way, he picks up a sharp-shooting kid (Kevin Connors) and a black kung fu lesbian (Gloria Lynne Henry; great image, lousy performance). Coscarelli claims these films have the logic of a dream, but for him that means no logic at all. Mike’s dead brother (Bill Thornbury) returns as a sphere that’s escaped Scrimm’s control. Sometimes the sphere works. Sometimes it doesn’t. I have no idea what governs that. And sometimes it morphs into Thornbury, who’s aged 15 years while dead. Not the best argument for a career as a ghost. There’s one effective sequence. A trio of vile killers and scavengers break into an isolated house to be confronted by Connors, who’s wearing a plastic face mask and a hoodie. It’s an obvious rip-off of ALICE, SWEET ALICE (1976), but that doesn’t keep it from being creepy. The scene also borrows from HOME ALONE (1990), but it’s still fun watching Connors defend himself with a series of homemade booby traps. Then it’s back on the road and into the toilet, as the cast fights off zombies, Scrimm and an increasing number of the franchise’s flying Cuisinarts.

In the early stages of my career I used to work with the director, Larry Fessenden and his production company @glasseyepix. Over the years, I got to illustrate a few comic adaptations of movies, do storyboards, pre-production art, and in the later stages I even worked on some special effects and I directed an audio play! Working with all the lovely people there was integral to my development as an artist and I feel very lucky to have had that opportunity. This is a crop of the cover of the comic adaptation I did of Fessenden’s movie, The Last Winter, starring Ron Perlman and James LeGros. It was actually the second cover I did. For the original cover, we didn’t want to give away the monster before you even opened the book. But for the second time around, we thought, “hey, this is comics!” so we went full monster! - #monster #wendigo #lastwinter #movieposter #larryfessenden #glasseyepix #charactersketch #comicartist #comicartwork #comicartists #comicartistsoninstagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CeRWaGvqmM-/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

BLACKOUT Reviews of Larry Fessenden's werewolf movie plus trailer

Blackout is a 2023 horror film in which a painter is convinced that he is a werewolf wreaking havoc on a small American town under the full moon. Written and directed by actor-filmmaker Larry Fessenden (Depraved; Beneath; Habit). The American movie stars Alex Hurt, Addison Timlin, James LeGros, Kevin Corrigan, Barbara Crampton and Joe Swanberg. Plot: Small-town artist Charley (Alex Hurt) is a…

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But the two men had one advantage over the two women. Convention made for them to strike up friendships with other artists whom they met casually in the great gallery. One of Fantin's companions was the povertystricken Burgundian, Alphonse Legros, but he befriended others, such as an ebullient northerner calling himself Carolus Duran. Then in 1857 Fantin met Edouard Manet. They quickly became firm friends. And in the following autumn, when a figure in a large, wide-brimmed Rembrandt hat stopped to admire Fantin's copy of a Veronese, he soon struck up another warm friendship, with the Americanborn etcher and painter, James Whistler (who — and this point must have interested Fantin — had spent his childhood in St Petersburg). This casual association of artists with varied credentials intrigued Berthe and Edma, coming as they did from a closed and cosseted background. In addition to this, there was an unexpected link between Berthe Morisot and Fantin-Latour: By a remarkable coincidence (which they may not have realized immediatelty), they actually shared a birthay , 14 January .

Fantin's self-portraits show a pale face, stubby nose and a shock of wiry dark hair brushed back off his low forehead. Often there was an apprehensive expression in his eves; “timid” and “introspective” were the adjectives most often applied to him, But for all that, he was a bit of an enigma. Behind the shy and serious exterior was a likeable man to whom people gravitated and in whom they seemed willing to confide. He was a mine of personal information and for a few years he was the go-between, the inveterate gossip of his circle.?

Fantin bent the ear of many a Louvrist with his enthusiasms. He and Whistler sat in bars like the Café Moliere talking endlessly about art. Some of this percolated through to Berthe and Edma. Whistler learned from Fantin the technique of using the bottom of a picture frame or a mirror as background for a genre painting, to give it a sense of structure.!* Berthe picked up the same device, using it, for instance, in her well-known double portrait of The Artist's Mother and Sister. Fantin also seems to have told Berthe and Edma about the radical concepts of his former teacher, Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Only a few months earlier he had introduced these theories to Whistler; and in 1858 they had received fresh praise and publicity with the publication of an article in L'Artiste by the architect Viollet-le-Duc. Lecoq de Boisbaudran was a professor at the Ecole Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin — some say the greatest teacher of draughtsmanship of the century. He had evolved a method of systematic memorization which made it pe traditional, classical subject matter and the modernity of present-day settings. His theories were widely disseminated after 1847 through his book, Training in Visual Memory. He acquired a number of enthusiastic pupils and advocates, including Rodin, Tissot, Legros and Fantin.