Movie Reviews
The Fall
There were two seasons of this show set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the second one in 2014. If I had been watching it as it came out I think I might have felt cheated by the first season, as there was very little resolution. The end of the second season, however, was quite satisfying, and left little room for a third …
Gillian Anderson is a police detective called in from London ... Read more »
Get On Up
I have a great admiration for James Brown as a music maker, and have enjoyed listening to his stuff, but I can’t say I’m a big fan. I guess this southern white boy just grew up liking other genres better than R&B and funk. I know very little about his life story. But boy oh boy, the man could put on a show. He deserved every bit of his two unofficial titles: The Godfather of Soul, and ... Read more »
The Interview
WARNING: Reading this review may make your computer vulnerable to hacking by North Korean saboteurs, who are watching you this very moment through the little camera bug that you use for your Skype conversations. Proceed at your own risk.
You didn’t think I could pass this one up, did you? No way in the world. Lee is not interested, and so be it. But I feel ... Read more »
What’s Next, Corporal Hargrove?
A sequel to See Here, Private Hargrove, which was based on the autobiographical novel by the eponymous hero, Marion Hargrove. The book detailed the exploits of the innocent, bumbling Hargrove (Robert Walker) and his scheming buddy, Mulvihill (Keenan Wynn) during boot camp. This movie takes them to France, and an artillery unit where they can continue their ... Read more »
Whiplash
There was R. Lee Ermy as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. There was Alan Rickman as Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movies. There was Coach Eisenman, the five-foot-four toad who made this six-foot-three (then) boy’s life a living hell in P.E. period in the ninth grade. And now we have J.K. Simmons as Terrence Fletcher in Read more »
All This and Heaven Too
They don’t come much weepier than this one. Bette Davis, corseted to within an inch of her life, is hired as governess by the Duc de Something, played with smoldering eyes by Charles Boyer. (Who was also corseted to within an inch of his receding hairline. In real life the famous French lover was paunchy, short, and balding!) Bette is hired as governess to the Duc’s children, four of the ... Read more »
It Happened Tomorrow
“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead—your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”
This would have made an excellent Twilight Zone episode … in fact, it may actually have been one. I certainly ... Read more »
Interstellar
Less than stellar, I’m sorry to say. I went so far as to see this one in the theater, something I’m doing less and less as time goes by, both because of the high prices and because it’s getting hard for me to sit still in a theater for a film as long as this.
And that was one of the problems. I thought it was way too long. They could easily have cut twenty ... Read more »
Volunteers
I thought I had seen all the Tom Hanks movies, but this one must have slipped through the cracks. It is not one of his classic best, but in the right mood you might find it entertaining. We did.
Tom is the worthless ne’er-do-well son of a rich father, played nicely by George Plimpton. But he has a gambling problem, a bad one. He is into some very bad people for $14,000, which he ... Read more »
Force Majeure
It means, more or less, “Act of God.” Something that couldn’t have been predicted, like an earthquake, a riot, a war, a tsunami … or an avalanche.
There’s this nice Swedish or Norwegian (I wasn’t clear) family on a ski holiday at a very nice resort in France. There is Mama, and Papa, and a little girl about ten and a little boy about seven. The nights are rattled by the booms of ... Read more »