Movie Reviews
Odd Man Out
James Mason is a soldier for “the cause,” which is never specified to be the IRA or the Sinn Féin, but obviously is. He has been in prison, got out, and holed up for many months in a safe house. A robbery is planned, and he is leading it, but the others have doubts, feeling he is a little stir crazy. And he is. In the middle of it all he freezes up. There is a struggle for a pistol and he ... Read more »
The Judge
Robert Duvall and Robert Downey, Jr. Gotta be a heck of an acting lesson, right? And it is, as both of them do a great job. The story isn’t quite up to it all, though. Daddy is the small-town judge, son is the sort of defense lawyer you (well, maybe not you, but certainly me) just really hate. Willing to try any dirty trick to get his always-guilty clients off. There is no love lost ... Read more »
Radio Flyer
Sometimes it’s just a bad idea, and sometimes it gets made anyway. Seldom so true as with this one. A very young and almost unrecognizable Elijah Wood, before he grew hair on his feet, has a younger brother who Mom’s new piece of shit boyfriend is abusing. They don’t tell on him because it would make her sad. Bad mistake, but understandable. To get little bro out of the reach of the ... Read more »
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Here’s something a bit unusual. I don’t think this was the Best Picture of 2014. That would be (in my opinion, but hey, it’s all opinions anyway, right?) that would be either Boyhood or The Grand Budapest Hotel. I go back and forth on that one. (Haven’t seen Selma or American Sniper, ... Read more »
The Theory of Everything
Well, we’ve now seen all five of the nominees for Best Actor, 2014, and it’s official: Michael Keaton got robbed.
He was the victim of a well-known quirk of Academy voters. They seem to believe that it’s harder to contort yourself into a pretzel, to show obvious suffering, than it is to do a straight role. It can be summed up as, “When in doubt, vote for ... Read more »
The Imitation Game
I think it’s really true that Alan Turing belongs in the short list of people who affected the course of WWII, right along with FDR, Churchill, Stalin (that monstrous motherfucker), Eisenhower, Yamamoto, Halsey, Montgomery, Zhukov, Patton, McArthur, and John Wayne. (Well, we would never have won without the Duke guarding the home front and dodging fake Jap bullets, would we?) And until ... Read more »
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
FULL DISCLOSURE: For several years in the 1980s I was one of the judges for the “L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Awards.” I was never completely comfortable in that role, but let’s face it, those fuckers were rich, and they knew how to throw a party. They flew you to L.A. every year for a week of celebrations, all expenses paid. Then in 1989 (I think) they ... Read more »
Seven Samurai
What can you say? It’s simply one of the best films ever made … and I don’t even think it’s Kurosawa’s best. (That would be Ikiru.) But it would be in the top three, along with Ran. I just learned that it is an example of a genre of Japanese films that they call Jidaigeki, which means “period dramas.”
This one takes place in ... Read more »
Chris Rock: Never Scared
This was an HBO special. What surprised me is how hard he was on black folks. I mean, you expect a black comedian to take white folks to task, and we sure enough deserve it. But he really lays into some things that many people would see as black stereotypes. The trouble is, most stereotypes came from somewhere, didn’t they? Where I grew up, the black people ... Read more »
Brainstorm
I happen to have some actual, from the horse’s mouth, inside information on this film. The director, Douglas Trumbull, and I had been working together for about a year, hammering out several drafts of my short story “Air Raid” to turn it into the film, Millennium. (That was Doug’s title; I couldn’t think of anything better, so we went with it.) At the same time, ... Read more »