Tag: 1983
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Vintage Cable Box: “Brainstorm, 1983”
“Why do you have to die to let go?” Brainstorm, 1983 (Christopher Walken), MGM/UA Where does our yearning for technology originate? Is it the most foolish form of narcissism; the desire to create “artificial” life to earn god-like stature in the pantheon of universal nature? Where does virtual reality fit? Is that our fatal flaw…
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Vintage Cable Box: “Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, 1983”
“Us loners got to stick together.” Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, 1983 (Peter Strauss), Columbia Pictures So three babes straight out of a Poison music video crash land on a planet of freaks who abduct them, as love-starved freaks are want to do. I’ve never understood that. Are women some incredible commodity in the…
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Vintage Cable Box: “The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956”
“Sorry we were gone so long, but we had to pick up Hank!” The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956 (James Stewart), Paramount Pictures In what may have been (for the time) the boldest examination of American exceptionalism and “xenophobia” (though I hate to bandy that term in the wake of overuse), The Man Who…
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Extreme Cinema! “I’d Buy That For a Dollar!”
Tonight, we discuss the selected work of Paul Verhoeven, from 1983’s De Vierde Man to his most recent movie, Elle, which earned Isabelle Huppert an Academy Award nomination in 2016. The credits appear to be a fly caught in a web, interspersed with images of Christ on the crucifix. A spider catches the fly and…
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Extreme Cinema! “Go Ahead, Make My Day!”
Clinton “Clint” Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor, filmmaker, musician, and political figure. After earning success in the Western TV series Rawhide, he rose to international fame with his role as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy of spaghetti Westerns during the 1960s, and as antihero cop…
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Vintage Cable Box: “Silkwood, 1983”
“It doesn’t matter whether you work in plutonium or dog food because they ain’t gonna give you a thing, there’s nowhere left to go! You close this plant down and then what? You’re gonna be up in Washington, but we’re gonna be down here outta work!” Silkwood, 1983 (Meryl Streep), ABC Motion Pictures Karen Silkwood…
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Vintage Cable Box: “Krull, 1983”
“Power is fleeting. Love is eternal.” Krull, 1983 (Ken Marshall), Columbia Pictures American novelist Stephen King once described Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his book, The Shining, as a “… great big beautiful Cadillac with no engine under the hood. You could sit in it, enjoy the smell of the leather upholstery … the only thing you…
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Vintage Cable Box: A Christmas Story, 1983
“Aunt Clara had for years labored under the delusion that I was not only perpetually 4 years old, but also a girl.” A Christmas Story, 1983 (Peter Billingsley), MGM/UA It used to be that you would unknowingly discover a film, and with such an innocuous title as A Christmas Story, you’d likely flip to the…
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Vintage Cable Box: Octopussy, 1983
“Mr. Bond is indeed of a very rare breed… soon to be made extinct.” Octopussy, 1983 (Roger Moore), United Artists Graphic and intense violence was crucial to mid 1970s-early ’80s action films, and Roger Moore’s final three James Bond films were no exception. These were cranked up; shot and edited in the fashion of American…