Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: Late Night Musings on Critics and Review Aggregation

Ken Hanke | 05/17/2013 | 76 Comment(s)

Sitting here, staring at my computer screen while not really watching—off to the side— a movie even I don’t recognize on TCM, I find my mind wandering into the realm of considering the state of film criticism in our media-saturated world—and I’m not all that happy by what I see. But it’s less the criticism that bothers me than the way the moviegoing public seems to be taking it.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: The Oscars for better, for worse

Ken Hanke | 02/25/2013 | 32 Comment(s)

So there we have it for another year — the Oscars. The question is if there’s anything new to be said about them, and while the answer is probably “not really,” some comment is called for about the curiously all-over-the-map nature of this year’s selections and the general weirdness and — let’s face it — galloping ennui of Oscar and this year’s program.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: The Place to Kvetch about Oscar

Ken Hanke | 02/06/2013 | 43 Comment(s)

OK, it’s Oscar season—you know, those awards that we all love to hate and call meaningless, but tend to mysteriously get worked about anyway. I have no idea why I care. I’ve sworn off them twice. I’ve called them embarassing on any number of occasions I’ve sworn at the TV profusely (and when I swear profusely even sailors turn beet red) and been tempted to hurl a brick at the screen (fortunately, I rarely have bricks at hand) more times than I care to think about. This year promises to be no different.

The best, the worst — and a few in between: 2012 at the movies

Ken Hanke | 01/08/2013 | 72 Comment(s)

Here it is: the biggest, the bestest, the baddest roundup of the year. Once again, Mr. Souther and I have worn ourselves to a frazzle — two frazzles, in fact — sifting through the excitement (and occassionally, the excrement) of movie year 2012. We will please some, displease others, and probably make a few folks downright peevish.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: The Strangest Serial Ever Made

Ken Hanke | 05/24/2012 | 9 Comment(s)

I’d seen The Lost City once before, so I knew just how seriously deranged it was, but it had been a while. So this past weekend I decided to check it out a little — mostly to be sure it played OK, which is often a dicey proposition on these public domain titles. That’s really all I planned on doing. Honest. And I know that these things tend to become wearisome if you watch too much of one in one sitting. (The rule should be two episodes max.) Imagine my surprise when I ended up watching all four hours worth of barely coherent and totally unhinged nonsense.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: Looking Askance at the 2012 Oscars

Ken Hanke | 02/28/2012 | 14 Comment(s)

Sitting here Monday morning with one eye on The Gay Divorcee on the TV—winner of the Best Song for 1934, back when the category made sense — the first thing that struck me about the previous night’s Oscar show was that the whole thing just plain needs rethinking. It probably won’t happen. After all, this is something put on by people who think Billy Crystal with a suspiciously too black beaver pelt glued to his head and looking one face-lift away from Joan Rivers is pretty edgy stuff. Still, it needs rethinking all the same.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: The Nominess Are Upon Us

Ken Hanke | 01/29/2012 | 21 Comment(s)

So there they were bright and early announcing this year’s Oscar nominees to an unseen audience. There must have been an audience, though, because there was some unseemly whooping over the nominations for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (I’m sure there was a good reason for this). And, no, I did not get up for this, I just happened to be up at the time. Now, the guessing and the kvetching begins—not to mention the studio shilling, which has already begun with the TV ads. Lotsa fun.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: The Best, the Worst — and the In-Between

Ken Hanke | 01/07/2012 | 34 Comment(s)

Here at last is the anxiously awaited (you were waiting anxiously, weren’t you?) honest-to-Lubitsch complete, in-depth, in detail, in all its debatable glory full list of the best and worse the movies of 2011 offered. At least, it’s such a list as things looked to Justin Souther and me. You may have seen our lists in the print edition a little while back. This expands on (and in one case at least alters) those earlier ones. Sit back and let’s see who we can please and who we can annoy this year.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: How to Spend Christmas

Ken Hanke | 12/24/2011 | 4 Comment(s)

I’m sure a lot of you view Chistmas as a moviegoing day. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of the idea myself, though I did get bamboozled into going to see Vanilla Sky in 2001, even though I’d aleady seen it once. That was also my first actual encounter with the idea of trooping off to a movie on Dec. 25, so imagine my astonishment when I found myself parked behind the theater in a section I thought only existed for romantic trysts and dealings of dubious legality. (Indeed, that does seem to be its function 364 days out of the year.) Assuming, however, that this is your cup of lapsang souchong, I’ll offer a few glimpses at what’s out there.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: Nymphomaniacs, Nuns, and Messiahs: Ken Russell As I Knew Him

Ken Hanke | 12/04/2011 | 39 Comment(s)

This is far and away the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. The very idea that Ken Russell could be dead is unthinkable to me. This isn’t just the passing of one of the—not always fully appreciated—true giants of cinema. This is the passing of a friend of nearly 30 years—a man I unreservedly loved. The very fact that I am—for the very first time—writing something that he will not be reading is strange and saddening in itself. And that makes this even harder, making various regrets snowball into something almost paralyzing.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: How I’m spending my Halloween

Ken Hanke | 10/30/2011 | 12 Comment(s)

As it happens Halloween falls on a Monday this year and while that’s a pretty crummy day for Halloween to permit itself the luxury of occuring for most people, it actually works out rather nicely for me. You see, to the degree that I have a day off—and let’s face it, this is generally a seven-day-a-week gig—Monday is that day. At least, I’m not writing reviews and I don’t have to go anywhere, so I can spend this Halloween in the company of my favorite horror movies. Sometimes I’ve been known to take the coward’s way out and just turn on TCM on Halloween, but I’m not that keen on their line-up this year, so I’ve come up with with nine choices of my own (that seems the largest number I might realistically get watched). And being that horror is one of my favorite genres, all this meant was a trip over to the shelves.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: Is 2011 really that bad?

Ken Hanke | 10/04/2011 | 23 Comment(s)

I know there are those who actually believe that 2011 has been a good year for movies. I can’t agree with that—nor it seems can most people. But there’s always the chance that I’ve been forgetting something. With that in mind, I went over all the new films I’ve seen that impressed me enough to get the full five stars. This came up to five titles: The Illusionist, 13 Assassins, Incendies, Midnight in Paris and Point Blank. It’s a point of debate as to whether The Illusionist can technically be counted as 2011, since it opened in limited release in 2010—and since I saw it in 2010. Incendies, on the other hand, counts, since it only opened enough to qualify for Oscar consideration in 2010. So I’ll discount The Illusionist, but keep Incendies as a possible “Best of” contender.

Cranky Hanke’s Screening Room: Back in my day…

Ken Hanke | 09/12/2011 | 16 Comment(s)

I have a friend who I sometimes think exists mostly to prove—even though he’s a few years my junior—that there are more curmudgeonly folks in the world than I. (Unfortunately, he hasn’t a name that rhymes with anything like “cranky.”) The other day he was celebrating the existence of a highly dubious article on the tanking of summer blockbusters this year (at least five of the films cited were not big-budget flops, just common garden flops). I took issue with this on the basis of factual wobbliness and the fact that a lot of the summer crap is what helps to keep the good stuff viable. The whole thing then escalated into the assertion that it wouldn’t matter to him if they never made another movie, which, of course, served to escalate the argument even more.