Author: Greg DeLiso

A Rebuttal to a Rebuttal: Favorite Equals Best, or, Why Back To The Future is Better Than The Godfather

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John,

I’ve been interested in movies for as long as I can remember.  The story I tell is that Jurassic Park started it all.  It certainly didn’t hurt, but movies had definitely been on my mind for way longer than that.  And my parents and grandparents were both movie buffs, so when the AFI released their ill-conceived 100 Best Movies of the First 100 Years of Movies, it was the talk of our family for an entire Thanksgiving dinner.  I was ten or twelve at the time.  By the time I was fifteen, I had seen 92 of the movies listed.
Continue reading A Rebuttal to a Rebuttal: Favorite Equals Best, or, Why Back To The Future is Better Than The Godfather

The Idea of What a Movie Is: A Very Greg Journey Through Film

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A movie.

Just a Bunch of Footage

Security camera footage is not a movie, but screened at a film festival with a name like ‘Big Brother’s Kung Fu Grip’ (or some artsy crap) it is.  Andy Warhol filming the Empire State Building for nine hours is a movie—the video the real estate agent showed you of the interior of the house on Maple is not.  It’s all about context and intention.
Continue reading The Idea of What a Movie Is: A Very Greg Journey Through Film

The Guy Who Made ‘Kundun’

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As you can probably tell by my posts here so far, I don’t like many movies.  Movies suck.  But even an old curmudgeon like me can’t help but love Martin Scorsese.
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Stone Reader: This Review Does Not Contain Spoilers, Read It and Go Watch the Movie

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Stone Reader
Written and Directed by Mark Moskowitz
127 min.

Mark Moskowitz could have easily just hired a private investigator and called it day.  Thank god he decided to make a movie rather than just find someone.

Stone Reader is a documentary about a guy who reads a book, likes it a lot, and wants to read the author’s other work.  He can’t find any, and decides to track down the author and find out why he never wrote anything else.  This may seem like a pretty thin, simple premise, but the movie transcends that.  It is literary, with a clear narrative and linearity, and it tackles an overall theme (that unfolds beautifully). Like a great novel, it also meanders—’hangs out’ and ebbs and flows.  It’s a movie made by a writer-at-heart who just happens to be a filmmaker and not an author, and a wonderful journey that you can’t help but melt into.
Continue reading Stone Reader: This Review Does Not Contain Spoilers, Read It and Go Watch the Movie

Eventually, This Will Be a Review of the Movie ‘Husbands’ by John Cassavetes

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Rob Fortucci, one of my best friends, commissioned this review.  I met him in tenth grade—in film class, no less.  First hour at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School, in affluent/middle class Shelby Township, Michigan.

By the time we met we had each already cultivated our respective cinephile statuses.  Mine was completely traditional—my parents and grandparents are movie buffs and introduced me to all the kid-friendly classics, everything from Spielberg to Chaplin.  At around 12, I started venturing out on my own into more ‘subversive’ territory, as one does.  By the time I met Rob at 14, I was already a Kubrick, Scorsese, and Allen fanatic, and a true student of the 70’s and ‘golden age cinema’.
Continue reading Eventually, This Will Be a Review of the Movie ‘Husbands’ by John Cassavetes