Over & Overs: "My Girl"

Over & Overs is a series where we talk about movies we've watched countless times.

by Camila Henriques

I don't recall the first time I watched My Girl, but I do remember where I've seen it the most. This Howard Zieff-directed coming of age drama was a fixture on TV as I was growing up, and, for the past 25+ years, it has been for sure one of these films that becomes something new with every rewatch.

Probably best known for being Macaulay Culkin's first on-screen kiss, My Girl tells the story of Vada (Anna Chlumsky, in her breakout role), a 11 year old girl experiencing change in various ways whilst being surrounded by death: her widowed father falls in love again, her grandmother is in that there-but-not-there situation, and, of course, she goes through her first love - and heartbreak...

Click to read more ...

April Showers: Home Alone 2

waterworks each weeknight at 11 as we turn on the cinematic shower. Here's Andrew Kendall on Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

No, it’s not December, but I'm taking a trip down memory lane to ubiqutious Christmas film. The Macaulay Culkin Home Alone films were ubiqutious during my childhood and I was obsessed with them. Kevin McCallister is just the kind of precocious child that children would be enamoured with. And, still, for all the obsession for some odd reason I never saw the first five minutes of the New York based sequel until a few years ago, which robbed me of some essential information regarding one of two important showers in it. As the family prepares to go out to a Christmas shower Kevin laments that his Uncle Frank is keeping him from getting dressed.

“My tie’s in the bathroom. I can’t go in there ‘cause Uncle Frank is taking a shower. He says if I walked in there and saw him naked I’d grow up never feeling like a real man. Whatever that means.”

Whatever that means - I wonder how many children left the movie asking their parents what that meant? Kevin's Dad just brushes him off and tells him to go get his tie. And, so he does.

Click to read more ...

Laura Linky

MovieFone records history: live blogging the midnight showing of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace in 3D.
Gawker and other outlets on the shocking appearance of Macauley Culkin. That's a lot of weight lost since the Mila Kunis days. Not that that breakup had anything to do with it. Sorry. My mind wandered.
ESPN Page 2 Rising actor Michael B Jordan on his color blind casting in Chronicle and his time with Friday Night Lights
Vulture Channing Tatum. The Cameron Diaz of Men?
24 Frames celebrities bitching about Oscar snubs
Playbill Lea Michele may reprise her breakthrough role for a Spring Awakening movie

Happy Birthday to 'The Face'
My New Plaid Pants celebrates the long strange enlightening career of Laura Dern, or "The Face" as we like to call her.
Nick's Flick Picks will also be celebrating her. But which movie? I keep refreshing my screen but nothing is there yet. Hurrrrryyyyyyy

... as soon as I typed the header up top, I realized you'd be thinking of The Lovely Laura Linney™ instead so, whaddya know, Nick provides there, too.  He wrote a provocative personal review of The Laramie Project, which features one of Linney's performances he hadn't seen. She's part of that telefilm's grand mosaic of real characters as a woman who can't comprehend the meaning of "hate crime". It's a must read if you remember where you were when you heard the news about Matthew Shepard all those long years ago.

Ten Lauras We Love ...

1. The Face
2. The Lovely Laura Linney
3. Laura Elena Haring whispering "Mulholland Drive" hypnotically
4. Laura (1944)
5. "Laura" by the Scissor Sisters,
6. "Laura Holt" on Remington Steele
7. "Laura" in Pariah
8. Lara Croft (what? that counts, right?)
9. Laura "Gloria" Branigan (*sniffle)
10. ...and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Sometimes. But she can be annoying.

No I don't know why we just went there either but go with it. We believe in following trains of thoughts especially when they spill right over into the c-o-m-m-e-n-t-s

Home Alink

Self Styled Siren on Margaret. She has no affinity for mess.
24 Frames talks to Anna Paquin about the resurrected movie.
Roger Ebert's Journal on the Oscar lalapalooza. Very strange piece. What's going on here? Ebert seems suddenly willfully ignorant of various Oscar rules claiming, among other things, that The Artist would be ineligible for Oscars if it were in French. Uh, not so, Ebert, not so.
Towleroad new photos from Magic Mike, Soderbergh's stripper movie.

IndieWire ten shooting stars of European film, Elena Anaya (The Skin I Live in) and Alexander's little brother Bill Skarsgård.
Boy Culture Joan Crawford is not one of Rick's (Santorum) Fans! I love it. 
Deja View pencil tests and the challenge of designing Gaston from Beauty and the Beast.
Stale Popcorn on rejected movie posters. I'd never seen some of these. Love a rejected poster from Bugsy that prominently features Annette Bening. 

We Need To Talk About Kevin McAllister...

The crazy thing is that if they wanted to go blonde for Kevin, couldn't Macaulay have worked?