Editorial Product Review: :John Huston was eager for a lightweight lark, and The List of Adrian Messenger was just the project he needed. Philip MacDonald's upper-crust British murder mystery allowed Huston to work close to his Irish estate, including fox hunting and quail shooting well suited to Huston's lord-of-the-manor lifestyle. The mystery itself is clever enough: As a former MI-5 agent, George C. Scott is lured into the case when writer Adrian Messenger (John Merivale) gives him a list of 11 names to ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal, Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled: both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonist's imprisonment in his apartment, convalescing in a wheelchair, from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors. Cheerful voyeurism, as well as the behavior glimpsed among the various tenants, affords a droll comic atmosphere that gradually darkens when he sees clues to what ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Ever since this convoluted thriller dazzled audiences and critics in 1995 and won an Oscar for Christopher McQuarrie's twisting screenplay, The Usual Suspects has continued to divide movie lovers into opposite camps. While a lot of people take great pleasure from the movie's now-famous central mystery (namely, 'Who is Keyser Söze?'), others aren't so easily impressed by a movie that's too enamored of its own cleverness to make much sense. After all, what are we to make of ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Ever since this convoluted thriller dazzled audiences and critics in 1995 and won an Oscar for Christopher McQuarrie's twisting screenplay, The Usual Suspects has continued to divide movie lovers into opposite camps. While a lot of people take great pleasure from the movie's now-famous central mystery (namely, 'Who is Keyser Söze?'), others aren't so easily impressed by a movie that's too enamored of its own cleverness to make much sense. After all, what are we to make of ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Alfred Hitchcock takes on Sigmund Freud in this thriller in which psychologist Ingrid Bergman tries to solve a murder by unlocking the clues hidden in the mind of amnesiac suspect Gregory Peck. Among the highlights is a bizarre dream sequence seemingly designed by Salvador Dali--complete with huge eyeballs and pointy scissors. Although the film is in black and white, the original release contained one subliminal blood-red frame, appearing when a gun pointed directly at the camera goes off. ...
Editorial Product Review:Album Description:16 track collection of hits for Mercury and Warner Brothers from 1971-1990. All cuts included fared well to phenomenallyin Billboard's singles chart. Includes Rod's three biggest hits, the chart-toppers'Maggie May', 'Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?'& 'Tonight's The Night', plus 'Downtown Train', 'This Old Heart Of Mine', 'You're In My Heart', 'Young Turks' & more! Never released in the U.S., four of the tunes are unmarked bonus tracks not included on the original LP & cassette release! 1989 release. Album ...
Editorial Product Review:Album Description:16 track collection of hits for Mercury and Warner Brothers from 1971-1990. All cuts included fared well to phenomenallyin Billboard's singles chart. Includes Rod's three biggest hits, the chart-toppers'Maggie May', 'Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?'& 'Tonight's The Night', plus 'Downtown Train', 'This Old Heart Of Mine', 'You're In My Heart', 'Young Turks' & more! Never released in the U.S., four of the tunes are unmarked bonus tracks not included on the original LP & cassette release! 1989 release. Album ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Although it wasn't a box-office success when originally released in 1958, Vertigo has since taken its deserved place as Alfred Hitchcock's greatest, most spellbinding, most deeply personal achievement. In fact, it consistently ranks among the top 10 movies ever made in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound international critics poll, placing at number 4 in the most recent survey. (Universal Pictures' spectacularly gorgeous 1996 restoration and rerelease of this 1958 Paramount production was a tremendous success with the public, ...
Editorial Product Review: :Undoubtedly the first movie in history to have played in theaters with three different endings (depending on which theater you attended), Clue is a silly whodunit based on the familiar board game featuring Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, and all the other usual suspects. A broadly comic cast play the sundry suspects gathered in a mansion to solve a murder, knowing that one of their numbers is the culprit. Michael McKean, Eileen Brennan, and Tim Curry are the best of the ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:The debut film of director Joel Coen and his brother-producer Ethan Coen, 1983's Blood Simple is grisly comic noir that marries the feverish toughness of pulp thrillers with the ghoulishness of even pulpier horror. (Imagine the novels of Jim Thompson somehow fused with the comic tabloid Weird Tales, and you get the idea.) The story concerns a Texas bar owner (Dan Hedaya) who hires a seedy private detective (M. Emmett Walsh) to follow his cheating wife (Frances McDormand ...
Small and light enough for a shirt pocket, Samsung's Helix YX-M1 is a one-stop audio entertainment center with an XM radio, a digital music player, and room for 50 hours of tunes, but it comes up short on battery life.
