Movie Reviews
The Hitch-Hiker
It’s probably a good thing that this film had faded from memory when my friend Chris and I, and tens of thousands of other hippies, stuck out our thumbs with nothing but our backpacks and high hopes back in the late 1960s. Back then, people would still stop for you, and sometimes take you quite a distance. (Our record was from Fort Worth, Texas, to San Mateo, California, in about ... Read more »
A Million Ways to Die in the West
Sometimes it can be hard for me to put my finger on exactly why a comedy film isn’t working. With this one I came up with two.
This Seth MacFarlane’s second directorial effort, after the sweet little sleeper Ted, about a living teddy bear. In that one he pulled off a very difficult thing to do: blending raunchy humor with a sentimental story. Here he ... Read more »
Manon of the Spring (Manon des Sources)/ Jean de Florette
I’m going to treat these movies as a single film, since they were taken from a single story and were filmed at the same time. They are so closely paired, in fact, that I think it would be a mistake to see Manon first. You would miss a lot of the delicious pleasure of seeing two really bad men get what’s coming to them, because you wouldn’t know just how dastardly ... Read more »
Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring (Manon des Sources)
I’m going to treat these movies as a single film, since they were taken from a single story and were filmed at the same time. They are so closely paired, in fact, that I think it would be a mistake to see Manon first. You would miss a lot of the delicious pleasure of seeing two really bad men get what’s coming to them, because you wouldn’t know just how dastardly ... Read more »
House of Wax
If you watch any TV at all, you will be familiar with Geico. Over the last decade or so they have had seven or eight different ad campaigns, starting with Ned the Banker (“Lost another loan to Geico!”), and going through many more, each one, incredibly, more stupid than the last. The worst of them all is that fucking gecko with the accent (Cockney? Aussie? Why?), the reptile I would most ... Read more »
Edge of Tomorrow
The best part of this unexpectedly intelligent SF movie is right at the first. Tom Cruise is a public relations flak drafted into the army which is fighting a deadly alien invasion. No combat training, and not the slightest desire to have any. Suddenly a general decides Tom needs to write his copy from the front lines. He reminds me of James Garner in The ... Read more »
Olive Kitteridge
Writing about a person who is really, really unlikable and still making it interesting enough that people will still keep reading or watching is very difficult. I’d never attempt it. This four-hour HBO mini-series is based on a book that won the Pulitzer Prize. Reading about the book at Wiki, it’s clear that there was much more going on. The cast of characters ... Read more »
The Pit and the Pendulum
Me and two or three other guys used to borrow my father’s 1953 Hudson and go to dusk-to-dawn shows at the Don drive-in in Port Arthur, Texas. One or two of us would get in the trunk (it was a big trunk) and we would watch four or even five usually trashy movies until the sun came up. We saw the previews of this movie, and we thought it was Read more »
Jodorowski’s Dune
This is probably the most famous movie that never got made. Second place is probably Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, about which another film about not-making was made: Lost in La Mancha. This one didn’t get as far along as Gilliam’s film did (and he is currently still trying to get it made) but there was a great deal of ... Read more »
Kwaidan
(The title means, literally, ghost story.) Lafcadio Hearn was a strange sort of fellow. After a writing career in Ireland, Cincinnati, and New Orleans, he was sent to Japan in 1890 and fell in love with the place. He married a woman from a samurai family, became a naturalized citizen, and changed his name to Koizumi Setsu. Then he started writing articles and stories that helped introduced ... Read more »