Not-Oscars 2019

Hello, and welcome to the awards announcement you have not been waiting for, The Not-Oscars! My annual list of accolades is not the talk of the town during awards season. The nominees are not thrilled to be nominated… because they will never even hear about it! The winners would not like to thank the Academy […]

Best Of The Decade: 2010s

A decade at the movies is serious business. When the 2010s began, Avatar had just opened in theaters. It went on to top the all-time box office and spawned the short-lived resurgence of 3D, a fad that has mostly died out (again). Netflix, then known for its DVD rental services, was just beginning to expand […]

Top Ten Films: 2019

Hello. Thank you all for coming. We are gathered here today in remembrance of The Motion Picture. The Movies were born in March 1895. They lived a vibrant, storied life. It was not until 1927, at the age of 32, that they learned to speak. Soon after, they learned to sing, too. They became more […]

Something Witchy: ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’

Controversial opinion: Quentin Tarantino films are mixed bags. More often than not, it’s a pretty good mix! But I’ve never unabashedly loved one. Pulp Fiction is vital and iconic, but I don’t care what happens to any of its characters; after a near-perfect setup, Inglourious Basterds mostly forgets its title characters, and can’t stop introducing new […]

‘Hateful’ Dead: The Eighth-Best Film By Quentin Tarantino

I’m not a total Tarantino fanboy, because I’m not generally a fan of any filmmaker who keeps making different variations of the same movie. (I have this problem with Wes Anderson, too.) Some people just love a particular filmmaker’s obsessive patterns, and love returning to that same formula again and again. I don’t. After a […]

Top Ten Films: 2003

(A Then & Now perspective.) The further back I go in time, the less secure I am in my Top Ten choices. That’s largely because I haven’t seen all these movies again since, and I have no idea how, say, House Of Sand And Fog measures up to The Last Samurai. On the other hand, […]

Hard In The City’s “Best Of Google” Volume 3

Happy New Year! This little blog of mine has existed for a little over three years now, and you know what? The more I blog, the more I realize what ignorant freaks the human race can be, thanks to the magic of Google. Google has helped a handful of people find my blog for perfectly […]

‘Django’ Fuck Yourself: Oscar’s Also-Rans

Well, I finally saw Django Unchained, and where to begin? I avoided it for quite some time because it seemed most everyone had already seen it, and a Tarantino film is not a thing I like to embark on alone. For one, I’d heard about the over-the-top violence, which seemed like a thing best taken […]

Twenty ’12: The 20 Most Anticipated Films Of 2012

It’s a brand new year, which means brand new movies. Largely, 2012 promises more of the same — more sequels, more comic book adaptations, more prestigious literary adaptations, more zombies and vampires. But at least a few motion pictures look to break the mold this year.

The Bleak List

The Black List 2011 is out, featuring the loglines of the “most liked” as-of-yet unproduced feature screenplays out there. It’s a pretty bleak list of titles as well.