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Steven Spielberg was playing with house money as he prepared to make his fifth feature. His previous two films, "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," had combined to gross the 2024 equivalent of $4.4 billion. He could've gotten a shot-for-shot remake of "Andrei Rublev" greenlit if he'd pressed the issue. He also could've hedged his bets and directed "Jaws 2." Whatever he made next, he was going to make it wholly on his own terms.

Spielberg turned that house money into f***-you money, and shot an anarchic comedy that's like watching the richest kid in town craft an immaculate model train set over the course of months, mainline Jolt Cola for a day, and lay complete and total waste to his creation in a shade under two hours.

"1941" is a madcap movie about reckless and irresponsible Americans who've gone wild over an impending Japanese sneak attack on the shores of California.

Steven Spielberg's "1941" is one of the most blissfully chaotic movies ever made. It is obscenely expensive, narratively scatterbrained, and unabashedly irreverent about one of the most devastating acts of war ever carried out by a foreign nation on American soil. It's more of a model train set than a movie, one operated by a spoiled brat who'd rather send the cars soaring off the track into the basement wall than keep his meticulously constructed railroad running smoothly. Crammed somewhere in the movie is an unruly satire about self-destructive, run-amok jingoism, but it's also a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon where a runaway Army tank crashes through a paint factory and then a turpentine factory.

After the back-to-back blockbuster triumphs of "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Spielberg could call his tune at Universal, and he threw his all into this nutty World War II flick scripted by...

Manhattan goes nuts as thousands of Beatles fans arrive to celebrate the arrival of the Mop Tops from Liverpool. Experts at wringing manic fun from crazy chaotic farces, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s first film to hit the screen is still one of their best, due to its brilliant craft and a fresh-faced cast of relative newcomers that deliver old-fashioned enthusiasm and big-time laughs. Not since the Marx Brothers have hotel corridors and backstage shenanigans added up to so much mirth. The image of Beatlemania at full flower is dead-on accurate, and more nostalgic than a bag of Beatle wigs.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 967

1978 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 104 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date March 26, 2019 / 39.95

Starring: Nancy Allen, Bobby Di Cicco, Wendie Jo Sperber, Eddie Deezen, Theresa Saldana, Marc McClure, Susan Kendall Newman, Dick Miller, Christian Juttner, Will Jordan, Vito Carenzo, Newton Arnold,...

The Big Red One

Written and directed by Samuel Fuller

USA, 1980

When a director like Samuel Fuller finally gets the chance to make his passion project, rest assured, there’s going to be more than a little of the man himself in the movie. With Fuller, this would have undoubtedly been the case no matter what type of film it was, but when the film is an autobiographical World War II yarn about the first infantry division — the “fighting first” — the filmmaker’s stamp is evident from start to finish. The Big Red One is an episodic chronicle of this military assembly, here focused on The Sergeant (Lee Marvin, adding classic film respectability), and the “four horsemen,” Pvt. Griff (Mark Hamill, adding contemporary film marketability), Pvt. Zab (Robert Carradine), Pvt. Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco), and Pvt. Johnson (Kelly Ward). The men who make up the four horsemen, a label that...

Odd List Ryan Lambie 12 Feb 2014 - 06:36

From faked lunar landings to invisible WWII warships, here are six conspiracy theories and the genre films they inspired...

"Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face," Sterling Hayden's General Jack D Ripper coldly announces in Stanley Kubrick's breathtakingly funny satire, Dr Strangelove.

Ripper's conspiracy theory, that the commies are secretly trying to compromise our "precious bodily fluids", becomes his harebrained reason for unleashing a missile strike on the Ussr. And just as Ripper was inspired by this strange notion to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, so filmmakers have been inspired by conspiracy theories to make all kinds of science fiction and horror movies - some funny, some tense and absorbing, others terrifying.

Here, then, is a selection of six real-world conspiracy theories and the varied movies they inspired - and funnily enough, Stanley Kubrick...

Birthday shoutouts go to Josh Duhamel, who is 41, Patrick Warburton is 49, and Sandahl Bergman is 62.

In ratings news, Arrow hit a season high, and tied its series high in the demo.

Wall Street Courting Gay Students to Bolster Bottom Line

Ryan Murphy has revealed the details about the Stevie Nicks guest appearance on American Horror Story: Coven. Here’s a fact – It’ll take place on Episode 10, right after the winter break.

Jake Gyllenhaal Punches Mirror on Set, Is Briefly Hospitalized.

Oh, and surprising no one, here’s Alec Baldwin calling a photographer a “cocksucking fag.”

Why Rep. Kaniela Ing voted for the Marriage Equality bill. In case you missed it, here’s the speech.

Desmond Child was one of the most prolific and successful songwriters of the 80′s (a small sampling of his hits includes “You Give Love A Bad Name, Living On A Prayer, Just Like Jesse James,...

Men in Black III, Hellboy II: The Golden Army and Fantastic Four are big time films that make-up/visual effects artist Bart J. Mixon has had a hand in. His name doesn’t jump out at you like Rob Bottin and Rick Baker, but the man is one of the best in the business. Today we go old school with Bart and look at the southern fried zombie flick The Supernaturals.

Jason Bene: The field of special make-up FX took off in the 80′s. How did you start out in the business?

Bart J. Mixon: I started out as a fan doing make-ups on myself and friends in Houston, Texas, in the ‘70’s. I was a member of a comic book club (the Hcca) and one of the other members new some very basic information on make-up effects – taking life casts with plaster, slip latex casting, etc. – so I...

The Big Red One: The Reconstruction is director Samuel Fuller’s (Fixed Bayonets, The Steel Helmet, Merrill’s Marauders) autobiographical account of his experiences with the legendary 1st U.S. infantry division throughout World War II. Lee Marvin leads the cast of raw recruits which include Griff (Mark Hamill, fresh from success in Star Wars), Zab (Robert Carradine, who doubles as Fuller and the film’s narrator), Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco), Kaiser (Perry Lang), and Johnson (Kelly Ward).

This version of the 1980 film was released several years following Fuller’s death, which was in 1997, as a tribute to his lasting work and the version he intended his audiences to see. When this version was released in early 2005, I was overjoyed to see the original forty seven minutes which Fuller was forced to cut by the Warner Bros. executives.

The film opens as the guns fell silent on the Western...