Brianland

Beat Movie Guide (dramatizations  —  not documentaries) Last Updated:  Feb 19th, 2023 With not one, not two, but three movies based on Jack Kerouac books coming out this year (2013) it makes sense to make sense of the world of cinematic dramatizations based on Beat works. Since real people are given different fictional names in […]

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“On The Road” Comes Home — The New York Premiere The day of the “On The Road” premiere in New York (Dec. 13th, 2012) I was up at the NYPL trying to get through the doors of the hermetically sealed vault of the Berg Collection, home to a gazillion literary papers from Emerson to Shelley […]

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Making better time On The Road So, I get to the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto at 7PM for a 9:00 show (on Sept. 6th) and there’s already a whole scene.  It’s the World Premiere of the new and forever “On The Road” — the first-ever screening of the director’s revised and final cut. There’s a […]

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On The Road to On The Road Sex, Drugs & Jazz A very abnormal thing happens — it’s post-movies Wednesday night (August 15th) when Carolyn & I normally part ways for our own offices and computers, but by fortune we met up in the kitchen and started talkin about the movie premiere tomorrow night, and […]

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Here’s an article I wrote on the film Festival Express, published in Relix Magazine, April 2004. Drivin’ That Train . . .         The Festival Express Rolls Again After 30 Years by Brian Hassett “That was the best time I’ve had in rock and roll,” said Jerry Garcia. “There were no straight people.” In the summer […]

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This is an ever-evolving work-in-progress — last updated:  April 17th, 2024. Every blue title is a link to the movie’s IMDb page — the industry-standard Internet Movie Database. If this makes just one person see one great movie, it’ll be worth it.   If you want you can click on any of these section titles […]

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. It was written / created post Monty Python (1969-74), by John Cleese and his wife, Connie Booth.  He had an opportunity to do “something” for the BBC, so they came up with doing a grumpy hotel manager, which was based on a recent film shoot by the Pythons making Holy Grail or something in […]

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  film review:  Lucky Numbers (2000) Directed by Nora Ephron; starring John Travolta, Lisa Kudrow, Tim Roth, Ed O’Neil, Richard Schiff, Bill Pullman, Michael Rapaport, Michael Moore. First of all – this is made by Nora Ephron!  Heartburn!  Sleepless!  Her and Penny Marshall have to be the two best female filmmakers going – at least […]

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  I’m Not There — film review “Life is a crazy, dark circus.” FANTASTIC, inspired filmmaking.  (I gotta look for more Todd Haynes.)  Maybe I was super-well prepared for it by this late date, but as it was, I could easily follow it, and it painted a brilliant million-dollar-picture. Obviously the unsuspecting could be caught […]

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. It’s funny when some Americans talk about who is an American and who isn’t . . . It made me think of some commonly-perceived “Great Americans” who weren’t born here, like  . . . Christopher Columbus (Italian)  (“discovered” America, and for whom cities & holidays, and circles & squares are named after) William Penn […]

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