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Watching Movies with Emma: The Breakfast Club

by Sasha Stone on July 29, 2010

When the Breakfast Club first came out, I was a teenager myself.  I was just a year or two out of high school.  I don’t even remember where I was or what I was doing. I probably was commuting to Santa Barbara, attending the city college up there, and had some involvement with a theater group.  I remember this because I was given an assistant director position and quickly began dating the lead actor.  The play had something to do with Henry David Thoreau.  This is neither here nor there except that I vividly remember no being pretty enough to be cast as either of the two lead.  One of the actresses who was pretty enough, told me she’d been trained at the Los Angeles Theater Academy.  Not too long after my relationship with that actor ended (how could it go? I was 19, he was 31), I fled to Los Angeles to attend the Theater Academy.  Much fun, that.  But that is a story for another day.

I remember The Breakfast Club not being a very cool film to like.  If you hung out with my crowd, John Hughes was lame and the Brat Pack were a group of entitled, talentless hacks. The worst of the bunch, to us, was Ally Sheedy.  For some reason, she was the object of our scorn.  We didn’t like the character she played in the film, none of it rang true at all.  The only slight uptick from the film for us was Judd Nelson, the object of our young girl fantasies.

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Universal Studios Thirty Years Later

by Sasha Stone on July 29, 2010

I grew up in California. I was a movie kid. That means, at some point during my young life I checked out of the normal world and folded into the cinematic one. Part of this was due to our moving around a lot — between fourth and sixth grade we moved to five different towns, five different schools, and five different ways of life.

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Before Facebook, After Facebook

by Sasha Stone July 15, 2010 Movies
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I still don’t know what to make of Facebook.  It is both the coolest thing ever and the weirdest.  It is a way of keeping tabs on people, networking for one’s job and a personal public relations tool all in one.  So in a way, it’s all PR.  Some are better at it than others.  This upcoming David Fincher movie about Facebook and the dudes who thought it up (young hot shots with no real sense of the bigger picture) was written by Aaron Sorkin (my own personal writing god). Thing is, to what end this? Can you imagine yourself at 80 years old clicking on Facebook? Myspace ended because Facebook took it over. Then Twitter came but Twitter and Facebook work nicely together, except when people make the mistake of turning either into a sloppy seconds information spill. You have to make them separate and they serve two separate [...]

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Twofer – ’80s Thrillers Run Amok

by Sasha Stone June 2, 2010 Movies
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My favorite film genre of all time is ’80s thrillers. There was something about them that sets them apart from thrillers released in any other era, and we aren’t just talking about the plethora of bad perms throughout. One such perm is nice and prominent in Against All Odds (right in the sweet spot of 1984). Swoozie Kurtz’ red and stringy perm, along with Rachel Ward’s shoulder pads and Danskins, not to mention the Phil Collins power ballad? ’80s all the way. But I happened upon two other gems this past week: Without a Trace (1983) and Betrayed (1988). If you have Debra Winger in it, a young Debra Winger in her prime you are in the thick of the bad ’80s films in general, but many of them fantastic thrillers, like Black Widow. Without a Trace seems like the film that spawned the TV series, only it did it [...]

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Carrie, or When Women Had Pubic Hair

by Sasha Stone July 18, 2009 Movies

It’s strange to think that there was a time when it was okay to not shave.¬† Shaving is weird to me because it always seems like we’re trying to infantalize women.¬† I know that’s the cliched “feminist” viewpoint, but don’t we all find it a little strange that women are made to look like younger and younger girls?¬† It hit home during a recent viewing of the exceptionally well-made horror classic, Carrie.¬† First off, they just don’t make ‘em like they usta.¬† This a hard, cold fact.¬† They don’t make movies with this much artistry, that good of acting, writing and directing in a horror movie.¬† And when they do they aren’t about such deep and haunting themes as this one.¬† From the opening shot of Carrie we are swept away into the sad world of Carrie White (played so brilliantly by Sissy Spacek) and the horrors of high school.¬† [...]

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Top Ten Most Memorable Scenes from The Hangover

by Sasha Stone June 16, 2009 CELEBS

I’m just going to list them – because this movie, like Napoleon Dynamite, just gets funnier in retrospect. 10. The first naked embrace 9. “I’m not allowed within fifteen feet of a school.” 8. The wedding singer’s inappropriate song. 7. Mike Tyson 6. Butt-f*&$%ed by a “tweaker” 5. Sunburned on the roof. 4. Waking up with a pulled tooth. 3. The wedding photos. 2. The hangover photos. 1. The taser sequence.

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What if Jack and Rose Docked

by Sasha Stone June 8, 2009 Movies

Watching Titanic again I am reminded what a hack James Cameron is.¬† He’s a hack because his script sucks balls.¬† He’s a genius because his direction in the film saves it from utter ruin.¬† Forget everything before the ice berg hits but once it does the best part of the film kicks into gear.¬† Before that, one can marvel only at the flawless art direction, costume design, makeup and lastly, Leo’s shimmering shafts of hair waving seductively across his golden brow. He is really cute in this movie even if he looks about 14.¬†¬† The movie is about the ship, and how lovingly they recreated it.¬† But the dialogue, oy, the dialogue.¬† Why is it Rose is the only one aboard who wonders about the life boats? Anyway, this film’s major flaw, it occures to me, is that Rose and Jack’s union is doomed anyway.¬† If somehow the boat managed [...]

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Watching Movies with Emma: Angels & Demons

by Sasha Stone May 19, 2009 Movies
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My daughter is at an age where she can mostly follow a full-length adult movie. She’s one week from 11 years old. As I always tell her, hoping my words will one day blossom into a great story of her own, ahem, narcissist that I am, she began going to the movies on an almost weekly basis since she was around 6 months old. Back then and until she was around 4, I could time her afternoon naps to the film I wanted to see and most of the time she slept pretty well through. She would sometimes wake up at the end and it would be a challenge to see the film’s ending with babbling baby or complaining toddler. I’m not admitting that there were many films’ endings I never saw. I’m not admitting it. But if it did happen, it happened back then. The end result was that [...]

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Slumdog Millionaire

by Sasha Stone January 1, 2009 Movies

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDC47NsoRE0[/youtube] 2008 delivered some transcendent films, and it’s a tough thing picking a top ten.¬† So many of them will play better on the second and third viewings.¬† For instance, I fell asleep the first few times I tried to watch both Frost/Nixon and Man on Wire.¬† Because I’m peripherally in the business I get the swag and screeners (not all but enough).¬† But both films turned out to be among my favorites of the year.¬† But I have to say that, for me, the year has been defined, really, by three films: The Dark Knight, Wall-E and Slumdog Millionaire, which will probably win, and may deserve to win, Best Picture.¬† It is a film that everyone in my family was able to sit down together and watch and not a single person didn’t like it.¬† This isn’t true of any of the other films released this year that I [...]

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Keep Your Geek Cred After Seeing Wall-E

by Sasha Stone July 7, 2008 Movies

I can’t post any more Wall-E articles on my other site so I have to post them here.¬† The folks at Wired have some suggestions for geeks looking to keep up their image after seeing Wall-E: To fail to nitpick after seeing a movie is to lose a certain measure of geek cred, particularly if you saw the movie with other geeks.¬† To prevent this catastrophe from befalling our readers who see WALL-E (which by the way is the best movie I’ve seen this year and you should all go out and see it right now), we hereby provide a list of things you can nitpick about after seeing it.¬† Send it to your iPhone/Blackberry, or‚Äîif you must‚Äîprint it out for your hipster PDA and take it with you so you can sit back and enjoy the film without having to find the little things you can find fault with [...]

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