85% (3)  After Hours  97 min,  R,  [Comedy, Crime, Drama, Thriller]  [Martin Scorsese]  [11 Oct 1985]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 77%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 88%,   Metacritic: 90%,   External Reviews
Awards:  Nominated for 1 Golden Globe. Another 3 wins & 8 nominations.
Actors:  Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Tommy Chong, Verna Bloom
Writer:  Joseph Minion
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English    Country:  USA
Plot:  A meek word processor impulsively travels to Manhattan's Soho District to date an attractive but apparently disturbed young woman and finds himself trapped there in a nightmarishly surreal vortex of improbable coincidences and farcical circumstances.
Rotten Tomatoes:   A Manhattan Yuppie's night out becomes a comic nightmare, courtesy of director Martin Scorsese. Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette star in a "wild, funny and wonderful original" (Judith Crist) Year: 1985 Director: Martin Scorsese Starring: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom
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80% (3)  High Plains Drifter  105 min,  R,  [Mystery, Western]  [Clint Eastwood]  [22 Aug 1973]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 76%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 96%,   Metacritic: 69%,   External Reviews
Actors:  Clint Eastwood, Marianna Hill, Mitchell Ryan, Verna Bloom
Writer:  Ernest Tidyman
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English    Country:  USA
Plot:  A Stranger rides into in the dusty mining town of Lago, where the townspeople are living in the shadow of a dark secret. After a shootout leaves the town's hired-gun protectors dead, the town's leaders petition the Stranger to stay and protect them from three ruthless outlaws who are soon to be released from prison. The three have their sights set on returning to Lago to wreak havoc and take care of some unfinished business. A series of events soon has the townspeople questioning whether siding with the Stranger was a wise idea as they quickly learn the price that they each must pay for his services. As the outlaws make their way back into Lago, they discover that the town is not exactly as they had left it, and waiting in the shadows is the Stranger, ready to expose the town's secret and serve up his own brand of justice.
Rotten Tomatoes:   "Who are you?" the dwarf Mordecai (Billy Curtis) asks Clint Eastwood's Stranger at the end of Eastwood's 1973 western High Plains Drifter. "You know," he replies, before vanishing into the desert heat waves near California's Mono Lake. Adapting the amorally enigmatic and violent Man With No Name persona from his films with Sergio Leone, Eastwood's second film as director begins as his drifter emerges from that heat haze and rides into the odd lakefront settlement of Lago. Lago's residents are not particularly friendly, but once the Stranger shows his skills as a gunfighter, they beg him to defend them against a group of outlaws (led by Eastwood regular Geoffrey Lewis) who have a score to settle with the town. He agrees to train them in self-defense, but Mordecai and innkeeper's wife Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom) soon suspect that the Stranger has another, more personal agenda. By the time the Stranger makes the corrupt community paint their town red and re-name it "Hell," it is clear that he is not just another gunslinger. With its fragmented flashbacks and bizarre, austere locations, High Plains Drifter's stylistic eccentricity lends an air of unsettling eeriness to its revenge story, adding an uncanny slant to Eastwood's antiheroic westerner. Seminal western hero John Wayne was so offended by Eastwood's harshly revisionist view of a frontier town that he wrote to Eastwood, objecting that this was not what the spirit of the West was all about. Eastwood's audience, however, was not so put off, and an exhibitors' poll named Eastwood a top box-office draw for 1973. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
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84% (2)  Medium Cool  111 min,  R,  [Drama]  [Haskell Wexler]  [06 Feb 1970]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 74%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 95%,   External Reviews
Awards:  2 wins & 4 nominations.
Actors:  Marianna Hill, Peter Bonerz, Robert Forster, Verna Bloom
Writer:  Haskell Wexler
External Links:  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English    Country:  USA
Plot:  John Cassellis is the toughest TV-news reporter around. His area of interest is reporting about violence in the ghetto and racial tensions. But he discovers that his network helps the FBI by letting it look at his tapes to find suspects. When he protests, he is fired and goes to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
Rotten Tomatoes:   "I love to shoot film" is the sanguine motto of TV lensman John Cassellis (Robert Forster) in Haskell Wexler's 1969 Medium Cool, a semi-documentary investigation of image-making and politics. With his soundman, Gus (Peter Bonerz), John films such events as gruesome car wrecks with frosty detachment, considering himself a mere recorder of circumstances, his only responsibility to get his film in on time. Even his girlfriend, Ruth (Marianna Hill), cannot understand or penetrate John's complacency. Encounters with signs of the late '60s times, however, raise John's consciousness about the implications of his job, as he films a verbal attack by black militants on the media's racism, gets fired after he objects to having that footage turned over to the FBI, and meets Vietnam War widow Eileen (Verna Bloom). John witnesses the violence of the state firsthand as he and Eileen search for her son amidst the real-life demonstrations and riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Even though he realizes the political power of pointing a camera at anything, John finally cannot extricate himself or his loved ones from a culture obsessed with recording any sensational, gory incident. Scripted (from a novel by Jack Couffer), directed, and shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer and political activist Wexler, Medium Cool systematically questions the ideological power of images by combining documentary techniques such as "talking heads" and cinéma vérité with staged scenes between the actors. By the time Wexler and his crew start filming Forster and Bloom among the actual events at the convention, all barriers between fiction and fact are broken down, as Wexler's assistant can be heard warning, "Watch out, Haskell, it's real," when tear gas is thrown. The footage of cops clubbing people in the crowd is real, but Wexler's presence also turns it into part of a fictional story, revealing filmed "reality" to be as artificially constructed as any other fiction, subject to the interpretation of whoever holds the camera and, perhaps, to larger institutions of power. Funding Medium Cool partly out of his own resources, Wexler had free reign during production, but when the execs at Paramount saw the result, they were not pleased. Despite the timely subject matter, Paramount delayed and then curtailed the film's release, tempering its impact on critics and audiences. Regardless of that record, Medium Cool stands as a vital late-'60s film for its incisive narrative and formal dissection of the visual politics of "truth," and its awareness of how coolly seductive televised violence might be as entertainment, especially in a historical moment marked by incendiary images of political assassinations, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and counterculture protests.
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81% (2)  The Hired Hand  90 min,  R,  [Drama, Western]  [Peter Fonda]  [27 Sep 1971]
Ratings & Reviews:  IMDb Reviews: 70%,   Rotten Tomatoes: 92%,   External Reviews
Awards:  2 nominations.
Actors:  Peter Fonda, Robert Pratt, Verna Bloom, Warren Oates
Writer:  Alan Sharp
External Links:  Wikipedia  Rotten Tomatoes  IMDb     Language:  English    Country:  USA
Plot:  Harry Collings returns home to his farm after drifting with his friend, Arch. His wife, who had given up on him, reluctantly allows him to stay, and soon believes that all will be well again. But then Harry has to make a difficult decision regarding his loyalties and priorities.
Rotten Tomatoes:   In his debut behind the camera, Peter Fonda also stars with Warren Oates as a drifter who returns to the wife (Verna Bloom) Fonda deserted seven years before.
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