Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
America, America (1963; Elia Kazan) GRADE: C By Daniel Barnes Throughout his long career, Elia Kazan was often defined by his work with actors. A professional stage actor and director before becoming an award-winning Hollywood filmmaker, Kazan was one of the foremost cinematic proponents of the “Actor’s Studio” […]
Forty Guns (1957; Sam Fuller) DANIEL’S TAKE: GRADE: B+ Sam Fuller only made a handful of westerns in his long career, and it’s a damn shame — the logistic and thematic possibilities of the genre give Fuller the perfect opportunity to indulge in his penchants for violent romanticism, […]
Shock Corridor (1963; Samuel Fuller) GRADE: A By Daniel Barnes In his 1963 film Pierrot le Fou, Jean-Luc Godard cast B-movie deity Sam Fuller as a Fuller-esque partygoer who declares, “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, death…In one word, EMOTION.” It’s ostensibly a Godard line, but […]
Chairman of the Board (1998; Alex Zamm) GRADE: F By Daniel Barnes It is quite common in vulgar juvenile comedies for the hero, usually a socially maladjusted and borderline deranged man-child, to be found irresistible by beautiful (usually blonde) women. Whether it is the lascivious skirt-chasing of Harpo […]
Krippendorf’s Tribe (1998; Todd Holland) GRADE: F By Daniel Barnes *Rewritten from a Dare Daniel review published on The Barnesyard blog on November 14, 2005. Tim Conway’s legendary Dorf character was a bumbling Germanic dwarf who waddled his way through a series of faux-instructional videos in the 1980s […]
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964; Billy Wilder) GRADE: A By Daniel Barnes Dean Martin occupies a fascinating area in the American imagination. He is famed for being a lecherous boozehound, yet there is nothing he could have done on the screen or in public to stain his crushed velvet […]
