EppsNet Archive: Movies

The French Connection

Gene Hackman, 1930-2025

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Gene Hackman died in his New Mexico home, which is not shocking in itself, given that he was 95 years old. The shocking part is that his much-younger wife died and one of his dogs died at the same time. Well, that may not be quite right . . . they were all found at the same time, but had apparently been dead for a while. As I write this, the reasons for the more-or-less simultaneous deaths remain a mystery. Maybe it’s just a really, really amazing coincidence, three living beings all dying at the same time. I’ve seen Hackman in a lot of movies. I liked his work. The French Connection and Unforgiven are two of my favorite movies. French Connection was the first R-rated movie I ever saw. My dad took me when I was 14. RIP Gene Hackman Read more →

Garth Hudson, 1937-2025

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With the recent death of Garth Hudson, there are no more surviving members of The Band. They’re all gone, or maybe they’re all back together. Every member of KISS is still alive. And yet there are people who can’t understand why I don’t believe in God. RIP Garth Hudson View this post on Instagram A post shared by Robbie Robertson (@robbierobertsonofficial) Read more →

Mordecai: What happens after?
The Stranger: Hmm?
Mordecai: What do we do when it’s over?
The Stranger: Then you live with it.

— High Plains Drifter

David Mamet on Acting

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When they were shooting Casablanca . . . someone comes to [Humphrey Bogart] and says, “they want to play the ‘Marseillaise,’ what should we do? — the Nazis are here and we shouldn’t be playing the ‘Marseillaise.’” Humphrey Bogart just nods to the band, we cut to the band, and they start playing “bah-bah-bah-bah.” Someone asked what he did to make that beautiful scene work. He says, “they called me in one day, Michael Curtiz, the director, said, ‘stand on that balcony over there, and when I say “action” take a beat and nod,’” which he did. That’s great acting. Why? What more could he possibly have done? He was required to nod, he nodded. There you have it. The audience is terribly moved by his simple restraint in an emotional situation — and this is the essence of good theater: good theater is people doing extraordinarily moving tasks as… Read more →

EppsNet at the Movies: Emily the Criminal

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This movie probably doesn’t deserve the whole five stars but I have a real affinity for characters like Emily (played by Aubrey Plaza), who, like the Mark Baum and Vinny characters in The Big Short, are people with a code of honor, a sense of awareness, not looking for trouble, but not willing to put up with insolence or nonsense. To give you a sense of what I mean — and this may need a very minor spoiler alert — a group of criminals has stolen a significant amount from Emily’s boyfriend (also a criminal but less physical than the other criminals) and she’s making a case that they should go and get it back because, among other reasons, the boyfriend owes her a cut of what was stolen. The boyfriend is against the idea. “These are very serious people,” he says. Emily replies, “No, no, we’re serious people. Ok?… Read more →

It All Depends on Who’s Slinging the Hash

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‘This Is Shocking’: Some Democrats Demand CNN Apologize, Denounce Alleged ‘Islamaphobia’ Made Against Ilhan Omar https://t.co/PkDdBuwt6f via @dailycaller — Paul Epps (@paulepps) March 16, 2024 It is shocking! I haven’t been as shocked since Claude Rains discovered gambling at Rick’s Cafe. I think Democrats really do believe that the role of corporate media in general and CNN in particular is to serve as a public relations arm of the Democratic party. A journalist taking an adversarial position vis-a-vis a Democratic representative should not be allowed to have a job. What CNN commentator Scott Jennings said is that Ilhan Omar is a “public relations agent for Hamas living in the United States Congress.” To me, that’s a pretty good one-liner, no better or worse than political barbs I read every day. All the people that I see complaining about the remark are people who’ve called Donald Trump Hitler, Satan, a fascist,… Read more →

EppsNet at the Movies: The Big Short

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My connection with the events depicted in The Big Short is that I worked in the information technology department of a mortgage bank in the run-up to the 2007 implosion of the subprime mortgage market. Many of the big players in that market, like New Century and Countrywide, were based here in my backyard — in Orange County and Pasadena. Given that it was fairly evident at the time that complicated financial instruments were being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it, it’s remarkable that very few people foresaw the catastrophe and that even fewer actually had the nerve to bet on it to happen. Long story short, the major rating agencies — Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s — were incompetent in their rating of subprime mortgage bonds, giving investment-grade and, in some cases, triple-A ratings to high-risk instruments. A lot… Read more →

EppsNet at the Movies: Man From Reno

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You probably haven’t seen this. Or heard of it. It was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, released on iTunes, then later on Netflix. The synopsis should note that it’s a neo-noir. Some of the marketing materials make it look like a Murder, She Wrote crime caper. It isn’t. It’s dark. I just sat staring at the screen for several minutes after it ended. Rating: Director: Cast: IMDb rating: ( votes) Read more →

EppsNet at the Movies: Dumb Money

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I laughed non-stop through Dumb Money, except during the parts that weren’t intended to be funny. I had to take off a star because (minor spoiler alert, since the movie’s based on a true story that everyone knows) it’s a David vs. Goliath movie, and the Goliaths get their comeuppance, but that’s conveyed principally through explanatory text on the screen after the movie is essentially over. The comeuppance should be on-screen! Show, don’t tell! Rating: Director: Cast: IMDb rating: ( votes) Read more →

How to Tell If You’re a Violent Extremist

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NEW: Docs we obtained show how @FBI equates protected online speech to violence. According to @FBI using the terms “based” or “red pilled” are signs of "Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism" pic.twitter.com/JSQiCoiKdT — Oversight Project (@OversightPR) April 3, 2023 The FBI uses a “glossary of terms” to look for online that could indicate someone is involved with “violent extremism. According to the FBI glossary, “based” means “someone who has been converted to racist ideology.” “Red pill” or being “redpilled” means someone is accepting racist, antisemitic or fascist beliefs, according to the FBI. I’ve never heard those definitions. I’ve heard “based” used in tech culture to admire, sometimes ironically, someone’s authenticity and boldness. Let’s run it by ChatGPT: The word “based” is often used to indicate that something has a foundation, source, or origin in something else. It means that a particular thing, person, or concept is rooted or founded… Read more →

All is Well! All is Well!

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Microsoft to Lay Off 10,000 Workers as It Looks to Trim Costs — msn.com Google to lay off 12,000 employees, the latest tech giant to cut thousands of jobs — usatoday.com Regal Cinemas is closing 39 more movie theaters. See the list — cnn.com Another day, another round of layoffs and closures, another sunshine up the butthole economic report from the Biden administration: We’re not in a recession! Employment numbers are great! Someone is lying to me and I don’t think it’s Microsoft, Google and Regal Cinemas. Read more →

The Difference Between Television and Movies

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The thing about TV series that I don’t understand and I think is hard for both of us to get our minds around is, you know, feature films have a beginning, a middle and an end. But open-ended stories have a beginning and a middle — and then they’re beaten to death until they’re exhausted and die. They don’t actually have an end. And thinking about that in the context of a story is rather alien to the way we imagine these things. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it. That’s how a lot of long-form television works, so it’s a… Read more →

Billy Eichner Laments

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Billy Eichner Laments Box Office Flop of His LGBTQ Rom-Com — mediaite.com “Laments.” It’s lamentable that no one paid to see his gay rom-com. But really, who did anyone think was going to see it? Billy Eichner fans? Maybe I’m not up to speed on popular culture but I’ve never heard of Billy Eichner. Rom-com fans? I hate rom-coms, as does every adult male that I know. I don’t like movies about love. Why do people cry over love stories with a happy ending? Are they crying tears of joy? No . . . I think they’re crying because we’ve all lived long enough to know that there probably is no such thing as true love and if there is, we’re all going to get old and die without finding it. Still, women love rom-coms — why else would Sandra Bullock be famous? — and sometimes they can get a… Read more →

It’s Called Acting, My Dear Boy

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Bros Actor Guy Branum Blasts The Whale and Brendan Fraser’s Casting — movieweb.com In which a couple of fat gay actors complain that Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming move The Whale casts Brendan Fraser, who is not gay or especially fat, as a 600-pound gay man. “Who knows more about being an obese queer man than an obese queer man?” asks Daniel Franzese, an obese queer man. This reminds me of a story (which admittedly Dustin Hoffman has said is not quite accurate) about Marathon Man, in which Hoffman starred with Laurence Olivier. Hoffman showed up one day having not slept the night before so he could shoot a scene in which his character had not slept the night before. Olivier thought it was absurd. “It’s called acting, my dear boy,” he said. Olivier in that movie played a cold-blooded Nazi killer, that is, a cold-blooded Nazi who killed people, not a… Read more →

Frolicking in the Rain

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Maybe black creators invented "frolicking"? Is it different from dancing and singing in the rain? I saw Gene Kelly doing that in the 1950s. It looked a lot like frolicking to me. Granted, Gene Kelly didn't post to TikTok. Maybe black creators invented the TikTok part. https://t.co/FnjXU2ohtp — Paul Epps (@paulepps) August 28, 2022 Read more →

People I Thought Were Dead

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John Amos, actor Meredith Baxter, actress Lou Christie, pop singer Jaime Farr, actor David Hartman, TV host Judd Hirsch, actor Stacy Keach, actor Bernie Kopell, actor Michael Learned, actress Lee Majors, actor Lee Meriwether, actress Ryan O’Neal, actor Gene Shalit, film and book critic Leslie Uggams, singer/actress Liv Ullmann, actress Burt Ward, actor Updates John Amos, died 8/24/2024, age 84 Ryan O’Neal, died 12/8/2023, age 82 Read more →

EppsNet at the Movies: Dark Waters

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The system is rigged. They want us to believe that it’ll protect us, but that’s a lie. We protect us. We do. Nobody else. Not the companies, not the scientists, not the government. Us. I’ll tell you how the movie ends but without a spoiler. It ends with the closing credits, over which we hear Johnny Cash singing “I Won’t Back Down,” the Tom Petty song, which perfectly summarizes the Mark Ruffalo character, who won’t back down, not as an act of defiance but just as a quiet refusal to give up. Whether or not that strategy works for him, I will not reveal here. Because the movie is based on real-life events, it’s also a good watch for anyone who believes that government agencies will protect us from all of the bad things in life, and that anyone who thinks otherwise must be crazy. Rating: Director: Cast: IMDb rating:… Read more →

Hollywood 1969

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“You’ve got people your age just coming into the business who will be running Paramount in five years, along with Warners and Columbia and Fox and MGM — all of which will be run by companies that have nothing to do with pictures — who have never heard of Minnelli or Preminger, or just might be erudite enough to think of Liza when you say her father’s name. Then you’ve got people like me who have been around long enough not to have much romance about any of it anymore and are just trying to find some cover because we have no idea what’s going on. Biker pictures are winning prizes at Cannes and pictures about cowboy hustlers in New York getting sucked off in the cheap seats are winning Oscars, so the execs upstairs who are old enough to be my grandfather — which means we’re talking Dawn of… Read more →

Is Christmas a Joyous Day? (A Movie Review)

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SPOILERS AHEAD! The central character in this movie is a Buddhist monk who has achieved immortality, he looks about 50 but he no longer ages. There is, however, a prophecy that a girl born in the same town that he was born in, but 100 years later, will kill him. [SPOILERS START HERE] So for the last 14 years, he has had his disciples locate and murder every girl born in that city in the year 1999. In most cases, the bodies were disposed of so the cases were treated as missing persons, or in some cases, as accidents. (As I write this, it does seem like the police should have been able to connect the dots a little sooner.) When you see it in a movie like this, it seems grotesque and inhuman that a religious leader would order a mass murder of children in order to preserve his… Read more →

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