About twelve years ago I watched my mother very rapidly go from being partially blind, which she had been for almost sixty years, to being competely blind in the span of just a few months. Watching Riz Ahmed portray the grief of a loss of something that is so vital to our humanity brought me back to my mother's fits of crying and anger during that time of her vision loss. She could not accept that her own body and…

Independent film starts here. Improvisation film starts here. John Cassavetes starts here.

There's a forgivable sloppiness to it all; I mean, it's hard to fault a pioneer. The fickle jazz score underlies the story's back and forth, student-like nature of the majority of the scenes Cassavetes and company give us. The volatile storyline only gives voice to the fraught finger in the wind of the racial change taking place in our nation at the time.

It's a hell of cocktail…

"Look Charles, I gotta do this. If I don't, I'll be nothing. I'll end up like my neighbor Ricky Smith. He just sits around crocheting all day and snorting nasal spray."

Even though I've seen more films overall, my wife somehow continues to introduce me to [mostly 80's] cult films I had no idea existed before setting eyes on them. I wanna know how the hell I missed this one, it being probably the Most 80's Film by quite a…

"One of the things I love most about this life is that there's no final goodbye. You know, I've met hundreds of people out here and I don't ever say a final goodbye. I always just say, 'I'll see you down the road'. And I do. And whether it's a month, or a year, or sometimes years, I see them again."

If you had told me ten years ago that it would take a decade for another woman to have…

"It's a shame, this would've made a hell of a commercial."

No one does mayhem like Joe Dante.

I hadn't revisited Dante's undervalued War of the Toys masterpiece, Small Soldiers, since I asked my dad to rent it for me from Blockbuster back when I was 12 years old. As far as I can remember, that was the only time I have seen it and while I did like it then, I didn't realize the wonderful (and now obvious) subtexts…