Movie Reviews
We Are The Best!
In 1980 three pre-teen girls of the type always categorized as “losers” are fans of punk rock and refuse to believe it’s dead. They form their own band, despite not knowing if you plug in a drum set or not. I wish I could tell you more, but the fact is that between the shaky camera work and the loud, obnoxious, and talentless music, I was beginning to get a headache fifteen minutes in, so ... Read more »
Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning
She was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, a pioneer in going out into the real world and photographing real people, and she is Lee’s favorite shutterbug … and probably my own, too. It’s a toss-up with Ansel Adams, but their work is so totally different it’s useless to compare them. She was also in the right place at the right time, what with the Great ... Read more »
Catch a Fire
Based on the true story of Patrick Chamusso. He was from Mozambique and came to South Africa and got a job in a coal liquefaction plant. Some years later he was arrested, interrogated, and tortured as a suspect in a bombing at the plant. He maintains he didn’t do it, but ironically, he was so enraged by his treatment that he went back home and joined the ANC. He trained as a soldier, and ... Read more »
Rushmore
We’re just about done going back over the early films of Wes Anderson. This is one of his most acclaimed ones, and neither of us liked it very much. Jason Schwartzman is an overachieving student at an exclusive prep school, in everything but grades. He is involved in so many extra-curricular activities that he has no time for studying. He’s a real go-getter, and something of a con man. He ... Read more »
Belle de Jour
An upper-class wife who seems to be frigid with her loving husband finds out that she has a compulsive need to work in a high-class bordello. She doesn’t repsond well at all to tenderness, but when she is attacked in any way she immediately becomes totally passive. (There is a hint in one very quick scene that she was sexually abused as a child, but this was 1967, and you couldn’t come out ... Read more »
Bottle Rocket
Since I really liked Wes Anderson after seeing Moonrise Kingdom and fell in love with him after The Grand Budapest Hotel, I’ve been going back and taking either another look or a first look at his other stuff. Loved The Royal Tenenbaums, thought The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou ... Read more »
The Rover
It’s “Ten years after the collapse.” The nature of the collapse is never specified. It might be economic. Whatever it is, it hasn’t altered life in the Australian outback all that much. It’s still hot and dry and dusty and flat and just a totally miserable place to live. Traveling across South Australia on the train from Sydney to Perth, I wondered almost constantly, how do people live out ... Read more »
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History
And the Ken Burns entry for 2014 … gives us fourteen hours over nine episodes, all about the lives of what I think is the most influential family in American history. The complex relationships between the Oyster Bay Roosevelts (Teddy and clan) and the Hyde Park branch (FDR and, by marriage, Eleanor) is explored in depth. We get to know these powerful individuals as people.
I ... Read more »
Violet and Daisy
The main reason I decided to see this is that I want to go back and take a look at some of the movies Tatiana Maslany was in before her brilliant breakout roles in Orphan Black. That was a bit of a waste of time. She appears only at the very end of the film, a scene that lasts about one minute, with only one line of dialogue. Other than that, there are pictures ... Read more »
Dawn Anna
That’s her name, last name Anna, which she has spent most of her life explaining, like I have to point out that my name doesn’t begin with a B. It’s based on a true story. She’s played by Debra Winger, and she is a schoolteacher with four teenage kids who comes down with some awful malady that even she can’t recall what it’s called, so I sure can’t. But there’s more, and I have to issue ... Read more »