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Julianne Moore's Romanticization of Suffering
I used to be a big fan of Julianne Moore all the way back to the early 1990s when I saw her in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" (1993) and thought she was superb in it. In a short amount of time, I saw...
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Genuine Accomplishment and Achievement in "The Right Stuff"
I was reminded earlier that today is the 50th anniversary of Astronaut Gordon Cooper's flight in the Faith 7 spacecraft around the Earth 22 times over 34 hours in space in what would be the final...
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I Don't Worry About Barbara Harris' Albuquerque in "Nashville"
Whenever critics and film buffs get into discussions of the top actors and actresses working in films throughout the 1960s and 1970s, one person who doesn't get mentioned enough is Barbara Harris....
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The Nobility of Steve Forrest (1924-2013)
It's been announced this evening that veteran actor Steve Forrest passed away earlier this week at age 88. Most obituaries will tout him as the star of the 1970s police drama "S.W.A.T." (1975-76),...
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Charlie's Best and Most Underrated Angel
I admit that I've always been a big fan of "Charlie's Angels" (1976-81), which I already discussed in the early days of my blog. As I've grown older, my affection for the show continues, as I have...
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Stop Trashing "The Junkman" (1982)
For my tenth birthday, my father took me to see a film that I had been dying to see for weeks called "The Junkman" (1982). I had seen the crudely made TV advertisements for weeks, knowing nothing...
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Discovering More Than "Who is Julia?"
I feel sorry for young people who grew up in the 2000s with reality television and millions of repetitive cable channels characterizing their childhood TV experiences. They didn't grow up with only...
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The Single-Handed Destruction of "Falcon Crest" by Kristian Alfonso's Pilar...
One of the worst instances of both eliminating an established character, and introducing a brand new one, on a long-running series took place 25 years ago in 1988 at the start of the 8th Season of the...
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Lynda Day George Made it Easy to Watch "Mission: Impossible"
I've never enjoyed the Tom Cruise "Mission: Impossible" movie series because I don't think they ever truly understood what made original television series (which ran on CBS from 1966 to 1973) so...
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Shannon Tweed Guest Stars on A Very Special Episode of "Cagney & Lacey"
Shannon Tweed is best known these days as Gene Simmons' wife, after having been his longtime companion for years, as well as a reality TV personality for A&E's "Gene Simmons Family Jewels." She is...
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Anna Massey brings Beauty and Humanity to Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom"
The first time I ever saw director Michael Powell's disturbing masterpiece "Peeping Tom" (1960) was on a late night airing on the KHJ Channel 9 TV station in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. As I...
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Sue Lyon Demonstrates Courage and Integrity as one of John Ford's "7 Women"
I've always considered Sue Lyon, best known as the star of Stanley Kubrick's controversial adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Lolita" (1962) as one of the most underrated actresses of the 1960s....
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Jayne Mansfield Makes "The Wayward Bus" a Worthwhile Journey
I've always liked Jayne Mansfield ever since I discovered her while I was in college by watching her in director Frank Tashlin's "The Girl Can't Help It" (1956) and "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?"...
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Anita Ekberg Made Everyone Want to Live "La Dolce Vita"
When I was in college, I wanted to move to Italy after graduation. That never happened, and it's just as well, because my desire was purely influenced by the glamorous image of Italy that had been...
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A Gaggle of '60s Starlets Make Fools of Themselves Fighting Over...
There are some movies that you want to like, because an actor you always enjoy stars in it, but you ultimately conclude that you don't like it at all for a variety of reasons. The NBC-TV movie...
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Cristina Raines and Yaphet Kotto are "Prisoners" on "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"
In the mid-1980s, one of my favorite hours of television was the back-to-back half-hour anthologies that NBC offered for the 1985-86 season. On Sunday at 8:00 PM, we were treated to an episode of...
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Universal Appeal: An Interview with actress Ana Alicia
By the late-1970s, the classic era of the traditional Hollywood studio system had virtually ceased to exist. Almost all of the major studios no longer had a roster of actors under contract that they...
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Lesley Ann Warren, Sandra Dee, and Karen Valentine are "The Daughters of...
Lesley Ann Warren, Sandra Dee, and Karen Valentine are three actresses whose names you would never expect to see in a sentence, much less appear in the same film together. But appear together they do...
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Please Don't Bring Back Audrey Raines!
Before I became disillusioned with it for being a lazy and pretentious show, I was as big a "24" fan as there ever was. Having been a fan of the 1980s prime time soaps, I eagerly welcomed another...
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"There's No One Left to Fly the Plane!"
Karen Black's passing this week of cancer at the age of 74 has brought back a flood of memories of how following her career, and watching her movies, greatly expanded my knowledge of cinema and...
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