1950 Buick Woodie Station Wagon
1953 Pontiac Chieftain Deluxe Eight Catalina Coupe
1953 Pontiac Chieftain Deluxe Eight Catalina Coupe
Hollywood Suicide
She was just another vapid Hollywood blonde who tried to become a movie star and failed. Her name was Peg Entwistle. She was only in one movie (Thirteen Women, released in 1932). She is famous today for climbing to the top of the “H” on the Hollywoodland sign and jumping fifty feet to her death in 1932. She was 24 years old.
1954 Mercury Monterey Convertible
1954 Mercury Monterey Convertible
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri ~ A Capsule Movie Review
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
With the multiplex given over almost entirely to comic book super heroes, sequels, and animated films for the kindergarten set, it’s hard sometimes to find a movie for grown-ups. Such a movie is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It’s a wry look at the after-effects of a murder in a small town.
Middle-aged mother Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) will do almost anything to find the person who murdered her daughter, Angela, seven months ago. Mildred is tough and fearless; if you have a confrontation with her, she might hit you in the stomach and humiliate you in front of your friends. When the local police in all that time don’t have a suspect, Mildred decides to take some drastic action. For $5,000 a month she rents three unused billboards on the old highway that hardly anybody uses anymore to advertise her message: “My daughter died while being raped. Why no suspects?”
People sympathize with Mildred over the loss of her daughter, but most believe the billboards are a bad idea. Mildred’s belief is that the police will work harder to find the murderer if their laxity is made public via billboard advertising. The foul-mouthed police chief of the town, Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), has plenty of problems of his own. He’s dying of cancer and doesn’t have long to live. A glimpse inside the police station shows us that this police force is anything but efficient. Maybe it is time for somebody to hold them accountable for something. Their bumbling is personified by dim-witted officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who lives with his strange mother and makes Barney Fife look like a genius.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was written and directed by Martin McDonagh who, despite being English, seems to have a feel for small-town Americana and the American way of speaking. Despite the movie’s somber theme (trying to find a murderer), there’s lots of clever dialogue and some funny lines. Some of the plot twists are implausible, such as the no-consequences torching of the police station, but the whole thing is so unexpected and original that we don’t care. Originality is a rare quality these days in American movies. There’s even a town midget and a middle-aged divorced father with a ditzy nineteen-year-old girlfriend who turns every statement she says into a question. What more could you want from a movie?
Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp
One Way Passage (1932)
They meet on a passenger liner bound for San Francisco from the Orient. Joan Ames (Kay Francis) is ill and doesn’t have long to live. Dan Hardesty (William Powell) is in police custody and is being taken to San Quentin to be hanged. They are doomed from the start, but as long as they are at sea they have Paradise Cocktails and each other.
Joan Crawford
Peel away the layers of his psyche and inside you find…Joan Crawford?
Scary Baby
A scary baby with adult teeth and terrible eyes is balancing a ball off his knuckles in which a very large, live bee is trapped, while, in the background, a man wearing a mask is doing a manic dance. Just a normal day.
A Separate Peace ~ A Capsule Book Review
A Separate Peace ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
John Knowles’ 1959 novel, A Separate Peace, has become a modern classic, has sold millions of copies, and is regularly found on high school reading lists. It’s a coming-of-age story about life in a boys’ prep school in New Hampshire in 1942, focusing on two boys in particular, Gene and Phineas. Gene is an introspective intellectual with a dark side and Phineas an outgoing star athlete, liked by all. As different as they are, they are best friends and roommates.
The sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys at the Devon School are on the threshold of adulthood, but they are also on the threshold of something else: World War II is raging, in Europe and elsewhere, and it is a given that all of the boys are preparing in some way to enter the war when they finish school. The war influences everything they do and think. Will they make it through alive? Will they be brave, or will they follow their natural instincts and preserve their own lives at any cost? These are questions that young men have been asking themselves for as long as wars have been waged.
Through Gene Forrester’s first-person voice narration, we get a sense of how different Phineas and Gene are. Phineas seems to be above rivalry or competitiveness (or any “ugly” emotion), but is there something in Gene’s nature that would force him to deliberately hurt Phineas because Phineas is always the best at any athletic endeavor and in a way insufferable? An incident involving a tree during the last fateful summer at school causes a tragedy that fuels the second part of the story and forces Gene, and others, to question his motives and his character.
A Separate Peace is a readable classic, just under 200 pages, on the universal themes of friendship and growing up. It has a feeling of truth and authenticity to it; that’s why people are still reading it sixty years after its first publication.
Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp
