I'm not counting myself out yet. I work in a small team of eight people who are dispersed across four different cities in four different states. Only one is in San Francisco, he's reasonably new to the team and he needs some major training over the next couple of months to bring him to speed on a lo...

Recent discoveries? Contemporary French cinema. That's where all the great women's films are being made today. Interesting! Any key examples? I'm English, so I'm supposed to an enemy to the French, but I keep finding my all time favourite lists filling up with French films: The Passion of Joan of A...

Oh wow, this looks awesome! I'm only a hop, skip and a jump away in Phoenix too, but sadly I doubt this is viable for me. I guess it's possible we could fly over for a weekend or so but even if we do, we wouldn't be able to benefit from the great prices for the whole event. My wife and I bought VIP ...

Dawtrina -- The best 100 sounds like a good idea. I might do that on my blog soon. That would be awesome! I'll keep an eye open for it and look forward to discovering some more gaping holes in my cinematic knowledge... : ) To my mind, the best part of exploring classic cinema is the process of disc...

I'd be really interested in seeing an answer to this one too, but I have a feeling it's as simple as it had become less and less viable to keep it and it had become less and less effective over time. While there are great names in world cinema from day one, it was Hollywood by the thirties. Look at ...

Andy Hardy? From an English perspective, those are the films that featured Lewis Stone after Garbo retired, right?

: )

I enjoyed Juliet of the Spirits but don't think I got it, even though I tried very hard. Here's what I wrote in my reviews blog: --- Of all the great world directors that I'm discovering of late, Federico Fellini may be the one that I most enjoy without really understanding why. My first Fellini was...

Hi Mick and welcome. I'm pretty new here myself and in fact signed up precisely because I saw you were going to be a guest. I've read both Complicated Women and Dangerous Men. As I'm sure is the case with many, they are what introduced me both to precodes in general and to certain new favourite film...

Oh now that's a whole new argument for a whole new thread! And before I end up setting myself up as the controversial newcomer that's going to attempt to slay everyone's sacred cows, I should quickly point out that I'm travelling through the world of classic cinema with open eyes and an open mind. I...

Aha, can of worms indeed! jdb, I loved your description of the Boston Tea Party ship. I'd love to have turned up to that and taken the part of the British... I could have wandered around collecting taxes. That would have been fun! MissGoddess, those are interesting points. I've been working through ...

Exchange rates right now are scary. I've been reading stories where people in England are flying to the States to do their Christmas shopping, because they get so many dollars now for their pounds that it's cheaper than shopping at home. I'll make out like a bandit this year when my mother puts Chri...

I got to see Drums Along the Mohawk this morning, after recording it earlier in the week. Precodes took precedence! Being English, it's always a little strange watching American films set in the American War of Independence (and other wars, but especially this one) and I end up with a different pers...

Surely this has to be one of my favourite actors of the era: Dwight Frye. Like everyone else, I first saw him play Renfield in Dracula, and he's still the definitive Renfield to me even though Tom Waits did a solid job many years later. Then I caught up with the rest of the Universal horrors and rec...

I thought that there was a lot of good to be said about this film but that I had to really pay attention to discover any of it, because Otto Kruger's performance was so dynamic and so obvious over the top of everything else that it effectively blanketed it all out. Yes, there are other people in thi...

My impressions of Casablanca have always been a little different from most other widely acknowledged classics, mostly because it really shouldn't be that good but somehow is. It's that 'somehow' that's the magic and it may not be definable. Magic rarely is, that's why it's magic. Everything I read a...