Fewer things drive me crazier than the notion that some stories are so “important” that they demand to be serialized.  As much as I love the first two parts of The Godfather, the third one does nothing to improve the story (or my life, for that matter). The Lord of the Rings quickly becomes repetitive, while Star Wars takes narrative...

There are a lot of rules when it comes to comedy: “Less is more.”  “Never play the joke.”  “Small and smart is better than big and dumb.”   “It’s not a job for amateurs,” or, as the great tragedienne Edmund Keane put it, “Dying is easy.  Comedy is hard.” Of course, good filmmakers can occasionally get...

I was a newspaper boy in the late 60’s.  This meant that it was my responsibility to deliver a lot of bad news.  The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, these were all things I learned about as I walked from house to house. ...