For every Bill Murray and Will Ferrell who made the successful transition from “Saturday Night Live” to big-screen acclaim, there were more who either never made the jump or had a spurt of movie stardom before petering out. ArmchairCinema.com’s Jerry Dean Roberts returns to the “Online Movie Show” podcast to discuss why some SNL comics became movie stars and others didn’t.
BOOTLEG FILES 785: “Paradise in Harlem” (1939 all-Black feature).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: On public domain labels.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: An absence of a copyright dooms the film to endless public domain duping.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Unlikely.
From the 1910s through the late 1940s, there was a distinctive cinema geared exclusively to Black American audiences. These films starred all-Black casts and were distributed only to theaters in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
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Being born in 1983, I grew up around the period where Rocky Balboa was a household name, and the movies were wildly popular. “Rocky” and the sequels are childhood favorites, and I very fondly remember watching the worn VHS copies on our VCR, and catching their airings on my local television station WPIX. With Stallone re-releasing “Rocky IV” this year with a brand new Director’s Cut, I thought it’d be fun to re-visit the original series and rank the entire franchise from best to worst.
Feel free to post your ranking in the comments.
Fans have long awaited the proper third film in the “Ghostbusters” series, and while it’s become very apparent that the original cast is much too old to carry the series further, “Afterlife” is a great step in to a new world. Like most legacy sequels of beloved movie series, “Afterlife” pays great reverence to the original, while also carving out a path for a new direction and brand new cast of ghost fighting heroes. While “Afterlife” is very light in laughs and levity, it stills comes out in the end as a fantastic follow up that clicks right in to the first two films beautifully.
We’re in an age of modern filmmaking where audiences and even directors are demanding that studios allow them to re-cut their past works. In all of the director’s cuts and recuts I’ve seen, “Rocky vs. Drago” is exactly how the Director’s Cut should be done. I say that with immense surprise as I fully expected to dislike “The Ultimate Director’s Cut.” For fans that viewed “Rocky IV” religiously since 1985, when we get down to it, the film is recut to click better with “Creed II.” That’s either great or disappointing, depending on how you value the original 1985 film.
A chef dealing with problems in his personal life arrives at work as the health inspector is starting his tour of the restaurant. As they are given a lower-than-expected grade and have an overly full evening ahead of them, he tries to keep the restaurant running smoothly and deal with what is waiting for him at home.
Nella Larsen’s 1929 provocative and emotionally unsettling novel about two light-skinned Black women who are able to pass for White has been adapted into a dismal and emotionally enervated film.