Celebrated director and ‘real article,’ John Hughes dies before 60th candle

We’ve lost a true artist. John Hughes, prolific director of such culturally significant films such as The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Home Alone has died suddenly of a heart attack while taking a morning walk during a trip to Manhattan to visit family. John Wilden Hughes, Jr., born [...]

Action Movies: First Rate One-liners of the Heroic Homicide #2 – Sylvester Stallone as Marion Cobretti in Cobra

Spoiler warning: First Rate One-liners of the Heroic Homicide is a weekly column devoted to examining the character of the archetypal action hero. The one-liner jokes quoted in this article reveal pertinent information to the plot of the movie from which they’re taken. Crime is a disease. Meet the cure. Remember this tagline for Cobra [...]

Action Movies: First Rate One-liners of the Heroic Homicide #1 – Arnold Schwarzenegger as John Matrix in Commando

Spoiler warning:  First Rate One-liners of the Heroic Homicide is a weekly column devoted to examining the character of the archetypal action hero.  The one-liner jokes quoted in this article reveal pertinent information to the plot of the movie from which they’re taken. What a surname. Matrix. Commando (1985) is proof that Arnold Schwarzenegger had [...]

First Rate One-liners of the Heroic Homicide #0 – An Introduction to Action Movies

As a nine-year-old staunch realist, I found myself utterly offended by the archetypal heroes of eighties action films. Granted, the action genre was being successfully spoofed by 1965 with TV’s Get Smart using a pretty simple method, according to Mel Brooks: “Do what they did except just stretch it a half an inch.” “They,” meaning [...]