2021 movie viewings, #4. So what had me thinking recently about the 1981 Gary Coleman comedy On the Right Track? Well, it's a roundabout and frankly pretty stupid story; see, I follow the Twitter account of Conan O'Brien, and one day recently they reposted a video from the '90s in which Conan and Andy Richter visit Chicago, and the text tag said "Watch as Conan and Andy visit Andy's old Chicago apartment" but the screenshot accompanying it showed the two…

Buried deep in the New York Times' recent obituary for Hal Holbrook, after the pages and pages of material about his Mark Twain one-man show, was a curious fact that made me intrigued; namely, that he had once starred in an ABC television movie in 1972 in which he was gay lovers with Martin Sheen, faced with turmoil when it became time to come out to his teenage son. That then led me to the movie in question, That Certain…

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…

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…