Movie Reviews
The Jane Austen Book Club
Here’s one of those acting bonanza movies with a cast of some of the best actresses working today, and a script from a popular novel. Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Kathy Baker (who I persist in mistaking for Kathy Bates when I see the name), Amy Brenneman, some new young ladies, plus Jimmy Smits and Hugh Dancy. The idea is a good one. Five women and one man gather once a month to discuss a ... Read more »
Throne of Blood
Akira Kurosawa is my favorite Japanese director, and among my favorite directors of any ethnicity. I have seen every one of his movies that is available on video (which is almost all of them), though I watched most of them before I started writing these reviews. He made a few (a very few) stinkers, like everyone but Kubrick does, and he made a lot of very, very good films, and an amazing ... Read more »
A Walk Among the Tombstones
Lawrence Block is one of my very favorite authors. He is very prolific, and has several ongoing series, all of them good. The best of the bunch are the stories about Matthew Scudder, an alcoholic New York ex-cop who makes ends meet by “doing favors” for people, things a private detective might do, but off the books, because he doesn’t have or want a P.I. license. The reason he left the ... Read more »
Thieves Like Us
An interesting history here. It’s based on a novel, but it was made once before, in 1948, as They Live By Night. It was Nicholas Ray’s first picture. Both movies tell the story of Bowie (Farley Granger in the first one, Keith Carradine in the second) and his two partners in crime, Chickama (Howard Da Silva and John Schuck) and T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen and Bert ... Read more »
Sunday Bloody Sunday
It’s frequently the case that a movie that was ground-breaking and even a little shocking seems fairly ordinary after the passage of a few years. This one is more than forty years old now, and not nearly as revolutionary as it once seemed. It is a love triangle, two men (Peter Finch as a middle-aged doctor and Murray Head as a young sculptor) and a woman (Glenda Jackson), the twist being ... Read more »
Snowpiercer
Based on a comic book. What are you gonna do with a movie like this? The director, Bong Joon-ho, is a critical darling (and he made a terrific little movie, Gwoemul, AKA The Host), and the ratings among the critics were astronomical: 84 at Metacritic and 95% at Rotten Tomatoes. But the audiences didn’t like it nearly so well, and for my ... Read more »
Copying Beethoven
Did you know that in the final, hectic week before the premier of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, possibly the greatest single piece of music ever composed, while the Maestro was still revising it, his copyist got sick and called in a young woman music student to help out? Or that she not only helped him, but actually made suggestions and Read more »
Detour
There’s this down-and-out loser, see, staring into his glass of rye whiskey (okay, a Coke, actually, in a two-bit diner in Reno), thinking back on how his life has gone off the tracks. He’s a piano player, and he tickles the ivories pretty good, but he’s never had that Big Break. He sets out to ride his thumb from Gotham to Tinseltown to see his doll singer, with nothing in his pockets but ... Read more »
One False Move
This was Billy Bob Thornton’s first starring role, a few years before he broke out in Sling Blade. He also co-wrote the script, and it’s a dilly. A white psychopath (Billy Bob), and black psychopath (Michael Beach) and a really, really stupid half-black woman (Cynda Williams) rip off a lot of cocaine in Los Angeles. In the process the black guy kills three people ... Read more »
A Dangerous Method
Wow! A no-holds-barred, cage match smackdown between Siggy Freud and Carl “The Awful Archetype” Jung! Of course, the match is conducted by two men sitting together and chatting amiably or exchanging letters about psychoanalytic theory whilst analyzing themselves and each other … but the insights! The breakthroughs! For a while I thought the referee, Sabina Spielrein, was going to have to ... Read more »