Movie Reviews
Irresistible
Something weird is happening in the house artist Susan Sarandon shares with Sam Neill. Toys are going missing, an owl vase is full of wasps, things are getting moved around. She suspects Emily Blunt, Sam’s co-worker. She is soon driven slightly around the bend, breaking into Emily’s home looking for proof. A restraining order is issued. Then …
I’m trying to think of a movie where ... Read more »
22 Jump Street
Every once in a while a movie leaves me groping for a new word to describe the awfulness of it. Grim? Gruesome? Not quite bad enough. Jaw-droppingly, synapse-shatteringly, bone-breakingly, head-explodingly, bowel-looseningly, I’d-rather-get-ebola-than-watch-this-again awful? That comes close, I guess. Here’s an example of how bad it is: The end credits were far funnier than anything that ... Read more »
The Sure Thing
Here’s a whole lot of people very early in their careers. It was Rob Reiner’s second movie, after This is Spinal Tap. Daphne Zuniga was 19, Anthony Edwards was 23, Tim Robbins was 27 but looked a lot younger. All of them were playing 19-year-old college students. Then there was John Cusack, and a bit of a puzzle. Wiki says he was only 16, and had to get ... Read more »
King of California
Comedies about crazy people are a hard sell with me. They have to be handled in a certain way. One example I can think of is the classic King of Hearts, where the inmates of a French asylum are temporarily freed during World War I, and take over a small town. They are all delightfully loony, in the way almost no real people are. And it’s clearly metaphorical and ... Read more »
Slums of Beverly Hills
In 2013 Natasha Lyonne became well known for her role as Nicky Nichols, one of the inmates in the Netflix show Orange is the New Black. She got her start at age seven as one of the moppets on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and then landed a series of minor roles until this movie came along, where she got top billing over Alan Arkin and Marisa ... Read more »
The Congress
Okay, I tend to like weird movies, but it helps if there is just a smidgen of sense to them. This one starts off pretty wacky, and then goes completely off the rails. At the same time, it is a delight to look at. It is broadly (very broadly) based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, a book I’ve never read, as I never could ... Read more »
Fading Gigolo
Kind of an odd movie. It was written and directed by, and stars John Turturro, for once not playing a creepy guy, and co-stars Woody Allen, in one of his few roles in a movie he didn’t write and direct. Through circumstances too ridiculous to describe, Turturro becomes a high-priced gigolo, and Woody is his pimp. We are asked to believe that really, really rich women (there is a four-story ... Read more »
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
If Jodie Foster has ever played the part of a ditsy blonde during her career, I’m not aware of it, and I’d expect it to be the worst bit of miscasting in the history of cinema. There is just something about the girl, and then the woman, that radiates smarts. And of course it’s not an illusion; she speaks fluent French and can get by in German, Spanish, and Italian, and took time off from ... Read more »
Kill Your Darlings
I just have to start out with my Alan Ginsberg story. Me and my friend Chris Kingsley set out to thumb our way west around New Year’s Day in 1967. Just outside of Fort Worth we got a ride with a discharged sailor who was coming from Atlanta, driving his really, really hot Chevy Nova. He needed drivers, as he was falling asleep. At speeds approaching or even exceeding one hundred miles per ... Read more »
Love Actually (Second Review)
Films don’t come much more feel-good than this one. It’s fairly long for a romantic comedy, and even so doesn’t have time to fully develop all the many characters. But enough time is given to each that I was able to have a rooting interest in them.
The best of the stories (all of them centered around Christmas in London) is about Bill Nighy—the first time I actually noticed this ... Read more »