Fourth Row Center

Recently there was a cast reunion worth mentioning. No, I am not writing about the Seinfeld reunion that is the subject of this season's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO. Think more David O. Selzenick and less Larry David. To honor the 70th anniversary of Gone With the Wind , surviving cast members gathered at a tribute event outside Atlanta recently. With Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh being off-planet, the cast reunion comprised actors who played children and babies and Beau Wilkes at various childhood ages in the classic 1939 film. I don't suppose there was much reminiscing going on at this reunion. But for those surviving performers in attendance , it must be marvelous to know that each was a part of such a remarkable feat of cinematic grandeur the likes of which are long gone in American motion pictures. I think I'll add Gone With the Wind to my Netflix queue. It's been a while for me, too. Oh, and George is divorced and is trying to get back with this ex-wif...

To follow up on Jay’s post, I have two films that follow the vein of The Blair Witch Project , but, does it right. The films are Quarantine and [*REC], but we only need to talk about the later as the former is an American remake of the later Spanish Film. Both are excellent, but, I have to admit to liking [*REC] better. Both stories follow a female reporter who host the show “While you were sleeping” and follows a group of fire fighters who are called to a tenement building to help with an old lady who has fallen. That’s when the film goes to hell. Literally. What makes both films great is that it does not start as a horror film. It lulls you into a false sense of security. The second thing is that the actors in the film feel like normal people who have gotten stuck inside the building. I prefer [*REC] because the main character is absolutely convincing and ending is…well…creepy. It has more in common with Aliens than Blair Witch, and makes for a pretty scary Halloween ...

Two films have been released this autumn that fall in the vein of The Blair Witch Project : feature motion pictures produced from purported actual archival video capturing elements of the unexplained. The newly released The Fourth Kind, starring Milla Jovovich, is one of those “let’s pretend this is real using actual video footage” movies, like Paranormal Activity , except here the filmmakers augment the archival “footage” with “dramatic reenactments.” The premise involves a close encounter of the fourth kind, abduction, and the aliens here are not the happy ET’s of Spielberg’s movies. These are bad beings with a grudge. The set up is intriguing: a psychologist in Nome, Alaska (Jovovich), has patients who seem to all have abduction accounts when placed under hypnosis. And so, too, as it turns out, does our heroine. But the result is uneven, and the climax never really wraps anything up, except to suggest that these bizarre nocturnal owl sightings are really alien abductions, which the...