356 – Doug Benson Movie Interruption: The Long Kiss Goodnight

It’s time again for another Doug Benson Movie Interruption at Cinefamily in Los Angeles. For those who are unfamiliar, movie interruptions consist of Benson, a standup comedian/podcast kingpin, and his funny friends making jokes over a movie MST3K-style. Usually Doug chooses recent blockbusters (such as Thor: The Dark World) or recent critical failures (such as Maleficent), but lately he has been tackling movies with a better reputation, hence tonight’s interrupting of the Shane Black-written, Renny Harlin-directed 90’s artifact The Long Kiss Goodnight.

296 – Hard Eight (1996)

My Alejandro González Iñárritu retrospective did not go as planned; I only made it halfway through his filmography before Birdman was released. I have resolved not to make the same miscalculation with Paul Thomas Anderson before his latest film, Inherent Vice, hits theaters. So despite the fact that that movie doesn’t come out until mid-December, my new review series starts tonight, with one of the two Anderson films I had not seen: 1996’s Hard Eight.

281 – Pulp Fiction (1994) 20 Years Later

Remember October 1994? The leaves we’re falling from the trees; children prepared their costumes for trick-or-treating fun; and a 4-year-old Steven Cohen was brought along to Pulp Fiction by his incredibly progressive parents. Nope. Just kidding. My parents are pretty liberal, but that would be a huge stretch. In fact they were pretty strict when it came to the media my sister and I ingested. I wasn’t even allowed to watch The Simpsons (though I snuck one in every once in a while). I missed some touchstones, but I don’t blame them for sheltering me in that way – parenting is an evolving process for everyone (he said as if he knew first-hand). But now, almost exactly twenty years later I can correct one injustice by finally seeing Pulp Fiction on the big screen.