Film clips - Cruise's tantrum, Woody's New York and movie characters never use the bathroom

The year 2020 is coming to an end and I haven’t been inside a cinema since March…..Disappointed by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) website redesign. As often happens when web sites are supposedly made “better” it’s the opposite. Pages can take up to a minute to load…..Tom Cruise’s temper tantrum on the set of the latest Mission Impossible schlock film? Ya, I can understand his impatience with people breaking Covid protocols on set but then again his crew is allowed to work while hundreds of thousands of small businesses aren’t. Figure this: he has his own money invested in the project, he can easily jet home stateside for Christmas, and now several people on the set have quit in disgust. There’s even a conspiracy theory: his tantrum leaked to create movie publicity…….Steven Soderbergh’s latest No Sudden Move stars Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Jon Hamm, Ray Liotta. It’s the crime world of 1950s racially charged Detroit……The title of the – continually – release-delayed new Bond film No

Time to Die? How apropos for the times.....Speaking of, since March New York City has descended into a dystopian nightmare, being the early epicenter of Covid deaths, then Antifa and Black Lives Matter-related rioting following George Floyd’s death, soaring crime, and one of the harshest restaurant lockdowns in the US in a city where dining is synonymous with living. So, it makes me wonder how Woody, as in Allen, feels these days about his beloved metropolis, so evocated in films like Manhattan (1979) and even this year’s A Rainy Day in New York. He must be crying into his bucket hat……Has anyone else noticed that in every film, no matter when made, whenever a character is carrying a suitcase, it seems as lightweight as a feather? Has anyone also noticed that you can watch thousands of movie scenes and there is never, ever, a situation where a character actually has to use the bathroom? Except, that is, for bygone female characters to powder their noses and tough guys to snort cocaine or beat the living daylights out of someone. But not, you know, to use them for what they were designed for.

Local film notes: Windsor filmmaker Otto Buj, a founder of the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF), has a new film about Detroit’s early 1980s punk music scene, and Windsor’s contribution to it. Dope, Hookers and Pavement premiered this fall at Detroit’s Freep Film Festival and will have its Windsor (Canadian) premiere in the new year……And Windsor’s Media City Film Festival, one of the world’s most critically acclaimed avant-garde festivals, started in 1994, is making its catalogue of films available online. The THOUSANDSUNS CINEMA - some 60 films – is available through Dec. 23.