Movie Reviews
Titles starting with F
Flushed Away
I liked this, but I think I would have liked it better if I hadn’t sort of … seen it all before. I mean, really. Animation and CGI have reached a point where you can now be amused and engaged, but I’m afraid the sensation we got with, say, Toy Story, or with Lord of the Rings, the feeling of being blown away, ... Read more »
Fly Away Home
Carroll Ballard has only made six films in almost forty years, and four of them are very, very good. This one is good fun, and dramatizes the way a man taught a flock of Canada geese to follow him in an ultra-light aircraft. I worked with Carroll for a while on a project that never got beyond the development stage, and I can say he is a swell guy, and really the best there is at making ... Read more »
Flyboys
One of the greatest aviation movies of all time was Wings, in 1927. Another was Hell’s Angels, in 1930. There have been a few other movies about flying in the Great War, but not lately. I love movies about planes and flying, but there is something special about these men who went up in those fragile old kites and shot at each other. ... Read more »
Flying Deuces
I would argue that the greatest comedy team of all time was better at their two-reelers, both silent and sound, than they were at feature films. But that’s not saying the features weren’t great. This one was made getting on toward the tail end of Laurel and Hardy’s peak feature period, near the beginning of a slow decline. Not that they ever got terrible, even in their uneven and, in some ... Read more »
Flying Padre: An RKO-Pathe Screenliner
Screenliner? Maybe the reference is to streamliner, or airliner, but to me it brings to mind plastic garbage can liners, which probably didn’t exist in 1951. At only eight and a half minutes, this is the shortest and, to me, the most interesting. If you are of my generation or older, you will recall that movies often used to play as double features. You could really make a night of it at ... Read more »
The Fog
… or, The Curse of the Lepers! Or … Sort Of Like The Blob, Only Not So Solid and Gray Instead of Red. But you gotta admit, this movie is not an underachiever. It has managed in a very short time to appear on the coveted IMDb’s Bottom 100, at #100. With a bullet. Which is what John Carpenter should have put through his head ... Read more »
The Fog of War
Most of the film is an interview with Robert McNamara, going back over his career in government, mostly dealing the war in Southeast Asia. He also deals with W.W.II, where he served with Curtis LeMay, the man behind the firebombings of mostly civilian Japanese targets, and he observes that if the Axis had won the war, they would all have been tried as war criminals. True in a sense, though ... Read more »
Follow the Fleet
Another one of those musicals with silly, totally forgettable plots, this one involving sailors. Lucille Ball and Betty Grable make brief appearances, singer Harriet Hilliard is the second lead and Randolph Scott is there, wooden as usual, but of course it’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers who make the cash register ring. The saving grace is some great music by Irving Berlin, such as “Let ... Read more »
Fool For Love
Another of the plays Altman filmed when he wasn’t able to put together a major movie. It is written by Sam Shepard, and he is the male lead, with Kim Basinger. Harry Dean Stanton, that great actor who sadly died just a month ago as I write this, is an enigmatic old man. He worked right up to his ninetieth birthday!
There was one basic problem with this filming of the play, for me, ... Read more »
Foolproof
A neat little heist film, and I dearly love heist films. In a way, I guess I have something in common with the guys in the movie. What I do is follow along, almost pretending that I’m part of the gang. What they do, they set themselves a problem, some criminal enterprise, and try to figure out how they would go about pulling it off. They never do these robberies, see, but they map it all ... Read more »