Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas

(1931)

Our friend David Crosby’s father, Floyd, was a cinematographer. The IMDb lists 112 credits for him, from 1931 to 1967. Many if not most of them were for B movies, westerns and horror, and some of my personal favorites from my teenage years, like Beach Blanket Bingo, Bikini Beach, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. (Yeah, I know they were ... Read more »

Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War

(Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo, Korea, 2004)

Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo) (Korea, 2004) I learn that this movie is both the most expensive and the most popular Korean film of all time. $12,000,000 is hardly enough to shoot a one-minute commercial in Hollywood, but apparently Korean won go farther. Actually, that’s about 12 billion won. And they certainly got every won of it up on the screen. Literally a ... Read more »

Take Care of My Cat

(Goyangileul butaghae, South Korea, 2001)

Take Care of My Cat (Goyangileul butaghae) (South Korea, 2001) Five girls get out of high school and face life in the real world. The movie is mostly a character study, not a lot happens plot-wise, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. This is the 3rd Korean movie I’ve seen recently, and all are totally different. You may realize, intellectually, that places like Korea and Japan are very, very ... Read more »

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

(1949)

The thinnest possible plot holds together a series of song and dance numbers by Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin, Betty Garrett, and Esther Williams. (Right after this one the first four co-starred in the vastly superior On the Town.) Kelly and Sinatra are ballplayers who spend their winters as a vaudeville act. Yeah, right. Sinatra prefers baseball, Kelly prefers the stage. Esther ... Read more »

Take Shelter

(2011)

Michael Shannon is a blue-collar worker in Ohio who begins having very vivid, apocalyptic nightmares. They are so real that when a dog bites him in a dream, his arm hurts for days. His mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1986 and has spent the rest of her life in an institution. Naturally, he fears he is going crazy, but he is so obsessed with his visions that thoughts of ... Read more »

Take the Money and Run

(1969)

So this is the first movie Woody directed that had actual actors and an actual script, and used real cameras to shoot the action. Learned a little about it, as usual, from the IMDb. His first cut was a disaster, no one laughed. The studio hired an editor who transformed it, which just shows to go you that editing is one of the underrated skills in the movies. Originally, Virgil ... Read more »

Taken

(2008)

I guess you have to call this one a guilty pleasure. I’m almost ashamed to admit how much I enjoyed it, because it contains many of the elements I’ve railed against in past reviews of action/thriller movies. The worst one is the bad guys who can’t shoot straight, even with Uzis at almost point-blank range. There is a car chase that is almost incoherent, no way of telling which person is in ... Read more »

Taken

(2008)

I guess you have to call this one a guilty pleasure. I’m almost ashamed to admit how much I enjoyed it, because it contains many of the elements I’ve railed against in past reviews of action/thriller movies. The worst one is the bad guys who can’t shoot straight, even with Uzis at almost point-blank range. There is a car chase that is almost incoherent, no way of telling which person is in ... Read more »

Taken 2

(2012)

I was in the mood for an action picture. I knew the reviews had not been kind, saying it was basically a remake of Taken, same plot line and everything. But I liked Taken, like Liam Neeson as an action hero So I figured how bad could it be?

Not bad at all, in my opinion. It’s all true there is the same basic story, but this time ... Read more »

Taking Chance

(2009)

An HBO movie. If you have a sentimental bone in your body, this short movie will make you cry. Like most humans, I have 206 bones, and at least 205 of them are sentimental slobs who will weep at the drop of a hat. (One bone is hard-hearted enough that it didn’t even cry when Old Yeller died.) Naturally, I was tearing up before the first five minutes were done, and the hardest parts were ... Read more »