Bite Me, Tony

As a hardcore mystery buff, I recently had the great fortune to watch two not-so-recent films that I hadn't seen in awhile. Let's be honest, the pickings of whodunits available on streaming services and in local movie houses have been mighty slim in recent years, consisting largely of Kenneth Branagh's pretty-but-vapid forays into overtrod Christie territory, Britwit non-coms such as  See How They Run , and adaptations of bestselling wallows that are more soap opera than actual mystery. But, whatever. As a fan of the genre, I'm thankful for what I can get (excepting, of course, those tiresome and dreadfully overrated Rian Johnson collabs with Daniel Craig).  And so it was with a happy heart that I rediscovered Costa Gavras' all-but-forgotten 1965 film debut Compartiment Tueurs ( English title: The Sleeping Car Murders) , and Dario Argento's Cat O'Nine Tails , a once-despised Eurodud that has received a limited reappraisal in the ensuing 50+ years since its ...

                                                                         It is Thanksgiving Day and we are sitting in our living room watching the National Dog Show on NBC while our pre-ordered dinners are reheating in the kitchen. We were supposed to be in Wilmington NC today celebrating the holiday with loved ones (and their Frenchie) but if you've followed this blog at all, you know that our excursions out of town don't often turn out well. In this case, we didn't even get the luggage loaded in the car before potential disaster struck, necessitating a last-minute cancellation and two holiday meals hastily ordered from the Publix deli. Of course, when we went to pick up the meals last night, there was no record of them ever being ordered and the lady in charge shrugged and (rather flippantly) said " sor...

The midterm elections happened last night but the votes in some key states are still being counted. We voted by mail weeks ago because we weren't certain we'd be back from the ill-fated road trip in time to cast our ballots. Well.....   Florida, unsurprisingly, went totally RED but, frankly, I've given up on expecting anything better from a state run, and largely populated, by.... Florida Men  (and their obliging womenfolk). The undisputed upside of the election is that we won't have to see any more of those obnoxious campaign ads for another year and a half (give or take a month). So, no matter what happens, there's that, and that is no small blessing.  Also, Dr. Mehmet Fucking Oz--thanks a lot for that , Oprah--got beat by the phenomenal John Fetterman in the Pennsylvania Senate Race, thanks to Fetterman's absolute refusal to be sidelined or distracted by the stroke he suffered last May. Amazing man, Fetterman! Georgia, on the other hand, is headed to a run...

This year, Halloween came and went with barely a blip on the radar. It wasn't meant to be this way but my usual month-long festival of horror films was never going to be in the cards since we'd planned on being away the last half of October. Actually, we did go away on an oft-postponed Bucket List Road Trip to view the Autumnal splendor of western New England.  Well, that was our intention, anyway. As sometimes happens with the best intentions, shit backfired and we ended up returning to southeast Florida a mere 9 days after first setting out. There was a cracked windshield along the way, and then a roofing nail found its way into a front tire as we drove around the historic district of Alexandria, VA. After getting the tire repaired, we headed out to Mount Vernon, George Washington's picturesque home on the Potomac River, where we toured the property with hordes--literally, hordes --of high school and middle school students, all of us jammed tightly together in the long, ...

October is here and Halloween is in the air! We've already started buying Halloween candy from the store, not with the intention of giving it out to trick-or-treaters, mind you, because it's only the third of October and any way you look at it, the candy bought now won't be around come the end of the month. No, we buy it for ourselves: there are no altruistic motives at all. When that favorite of all holidays does finally arrive, there will be nary a nugget of chocolate-y goodness left in the house. In fact, we'll have undoubtedly been through 4 or 5 bags of Snickers Juniors or Reese's Mini's by then. Sorry kids, it's a hard-knock life.  September came and went and so much happened that I could barely keep up with it, and once I wrote it all down as a blog post I decided I didn't even want to read about it. So I deleted all, or most, of September's posts. A couple of days ago I even wrote a post about Blonde , the new Marilyn Monroe  movie on Netflix...

The following post was written a couple of weeks ago but I forgot to post it before we went on vacation. Consequently, it's been languishing here amongst my drafts, which may have been for the best. Although we'll never know since I'm posting it now.  I have to say that I'm impressed with myself. In a single week, I've managed to watch 2 movies that I actually ended up liking. That rarely happens. I love movies, just not necessarily the ones film critics and audiences seem to love. Not that my taste in movies is all that unique--it's not. Eccentric maybe, but only because I'm not a big fan of recent trends in filmmaking. Luckily, I discovered that South Florida's  OUTshine Film Festival (formerly the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale Gay & Lesbian Film Festival) was hosting a special Cocktails and Cinema screening of Francois Ozon's new film Peter von Kant at the relatively  nearby (a term dictated by traffic and time of day) Paradigm Cinemas.   Peter vo...