Northern Exposure (1991) – Goodbye to All That, and The Big Kiss

The truncated second season of Northern Exposure got underway on 8 April, 1991 with Goodbye to All That. Written by Robin Green the show opens with Chris-in-the-morning (John Corbett) giving us the broad strokes of the series for any new viewers. Chris is living at the radio station because his trailer got pancaked by a…

High Plains Drifter (1973) – Clint Eastwood

High Plains Drifter marked the first time Eastwood directed a western. Keeping in line with the work he put in on his spaghetti westerns, the movie is a darker, grittier style western, as opposed to the type of film made prior to them. To illustrate that the Stranger he’s playing is a bad dude, Eastwood…

Road House (1989) – Rowdy Herrington

Patrick Swayze plays Dalton, a lethal but zen bouncer in the cult-favorite, Road House, which also features the famed blind Canadian guitarist Jeff Healey as the bar band of the Double Deuce. Dalton is hired by Tilghman (Kevin Tighe) to help change his bar, the Double Deuce, into something a little more profitable. It has…

Running Scared (1986) – Peter Hyams

Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal are Chicago cops who are toying with the idea of retirement and moving to Key West to run a bar in the buddy-cop film Running Scared. Director Peter Hyams was coming off some success following 2010: The Year We Make Contact and recruited the actors for he film, and other…

TIFF ’23: The Dead Don’t Hurt

Viggo Mortensen wrote and directed this Western drama that is filled with recognizable Western tropes but Moternsen neither completely rejects them nor subverts them, he simply uses them to fill out his story about an immigrant couple that finds themselves living and loving on the edge of a corrupt Nevada town in the 1860s. The…

Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991) – Simon Wincer

I saw Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man the summer it opened in ’91, while I was working in Toronto. Something about it just clicked for me. I like the sense of history to the characters and the world they live in. Set five years down the road in 1996, the world is going to…

Green Room (2015) – Jeremy Saulnier

Two Star Trek alum star in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, Anton Yelchin and Patrick Stewart (in a way you’ve never seen him before), and with a couple of other recognizable faces like Imogen Poots and Alia Shawkat, Saulnier is intent on plunging the viewer into a gruelling and brutal experience as a punk band attempts…