I wanted to like this HBO biopic of dwarf actor Hervé Villechaize way, way more than I actually did, and in fact I bet the same could be said of the people who actually created it, that they all sincerely wanted to make a great film about this surprisingly fascinating man, but just didn't have the real-life material to do it. That's because, as interesting as the interesting bits of Villechaize's life were -- born in Nazi France, the youngest…

Watched as part of the August 2018 Letterboxd Scavenger Hunt
My list | KB Burke's master list
10. On the Waterfront - watch a 1950’s film preserved in the National Film Registry

This is the second film this year I've watched from the 1950s that, back when I was a teen in the '80s, still had a reputation for showcasing the coolest of the cool that one could ever be, but that, now that I've finally watched it in the…

FILM SCHOOL DROPOUT: A 2017 year-long movie challenge
My list | Disgustipated's master list
Week 1: Pioneers of Film - Lumière Brothers, Georges Méliès and Alice Guy-Blaché

Unlike other forms of artistic output like painting, whose origins stretch all the way back to the forgotten realm of pre-history, we can put very specific dates on the beginnings of such modern artistic media as photography and filmmaking; in the former case, that's quite literally the year 1838 (the year the very…

FILM SCHOOL DROPOUT: A 2017 year-long movie challenge
My list | Disgustipated's master list
Week 12: Orson Welles

Ah, genius youth -- is there any greater curse? After a charmed early career in which he could literally do no wrong, first in live theater (where among other accolades he produced the first-ever all-black Shakespeare production on Broadway), and then radio (where his infamously realistic modern updating of War of the Worlds caused a national panic), the 24-year-old Welles then hit…