Screening Log
This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.
May 2006 activity
Total Log Entries: 54
- Adam (7)
- Andrew (0)
- Chet (0)
- Chiranjit (1)
- David (0)
- Eva (0)
- Evan (0)
- Ian (7)
- Jenny (2)
- Katherine (0)
- Leo (5)
- Megan (0)
- Rumsey (9)
- Teddy (0)
- Thomas (4)
- Timothy (0)
- Victoria (0)
Total Comments: 16
- Iraq in Fragments (0)
- The Running Man (0)
- X-Men: The Last Stand (7)
- Possession (0)
- The Late Shift (0)
- The Long Goodbye (0)
- Landscape After Battle (0)
- A double tour (0)
- The Damned (1)
- Good Night, And Good Luck. (0)
- Powder (0)
- Three Times (0)
- The Da Vinci Code (1)
- Time Walker (0)
- Days of Heaven (0)
- The Dark Corner (0)
- Mission: Impossible III (0)
- They Live! (0)
- One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing (0)
- High Fidelity (0)
- Tirez Sur La Pianiste (0)
- X- Men (0)
- Deconstructing Harry (0)
- In the Realms of the Unreal (0)
- Down in the Valley (0)
- Breaking the Waves (0)
- Hoosiers (1)
- Birth (0)
- The Curse of the Werewolf (0)
- Versus (0)
- Evil Dead II (0)
- The Best of Youth (0)
- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (0)
- A Prairie Home Companion (0)
- The Asphalt Jungle (0)
- The Maltese Falcon (0)
- Mission: Impossible III (0)
- Repulsion (0)
- Trouble Every Day (3)
- Bambi (0)
- Mission: Impossible 3 (0)
- The Village (0)
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (0)
- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (1)
- Overnight (0)
- Dig! (1)
- Gates of Heaven (0)
- The Outsiders (0)
- Mystery Men (1)
- Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (0)
- C.R.A.Z.Y. (0)
- The Empire in Africa (0)
- My Grandmother’s House (0)
- Psycho (0)
Full Archive
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The Late Shift / USA / 1996
A brutal and at times aggrandizing portrait of the infamous Late Night Wars between Jay Leno and David Letterman, The Late Shift is a menagerie of off-beat and sometimes awful celebrity impersonations. Though John Michael Higgins’ Letterman is for the most part admirable—he has the deliberate awkwardness and paced delivery down perfectly, but alas, the famed gap-toothed grin is absent—Daniel Roebuck’s from-the-nose rendition of Leno evokes a whiny Adam Sandler rather than a comedy legend, with prosthetics transforming his face into something distractingly swollen and abnormal. Rich Little hits the right vocal tone as Johnny Carson, but the look doesn’t match the impersonation. Nonetheless, the film is dominated by Kathy Bates as Leno’s foul-mouthed and controlling agent, an astonishing performance forestalling her foul-mouthed role in Primary Colors. Contrasting her is Steven Gilborn, whose turn as a compassionate friend of Letterman infuses the overly unhappy and combative storyline with some buoyancy.
Though Bates’s magnetism doesn’t last the entire film, there’s enough here to deserve some serious attention, despite the ridiculous over-reliance on make-up and bad impression-driven masquerades.
by Adam Balz | Source: HBO Home Video VHS
23 May 2006 11:12 PM | Submit Comment