Movie Reviews
Titles starting with G
Grand Hotel
MGM boasted “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” and they brought out many of their big guns for this one. You get Greta Garbo (saying her famous line “I vant to be alone!” three times), Wallace Beery, Joan Crawford, and two Barrymores, John and Lionel, for the price of one. It has several intertwining stories, setting the example for later all-star stories. It ... Read more »
Grand Piano
I’m sometimes a bit of a pushover when it comes to the plots of thrillers. I’ll let a lot of improbable things go by for the sake of the movement of the story. But eventually I reach my limit, and I got there about halfway through this turkey.
The set-up: Elijah Wood is the “world’s greatest pianist,” but five years ago he choked and fled the stage after messing up “the unplayable ... Read more »
Grand Prix
I saw this when it was new at the Cinerama Dome at the corner of Sunset and Ivar in Hollywood. To give you an idea of how important movies have been in my life, I was living on the streets in Los Angeles at the time, crashing wherever I could find some floor space with other longhair dope-fiend hippies. I had no job, wasn’t looking for one, so funds were limited. Any money I had came from ... Read more »
Grandma
Lily Tomlin plays one of those goofy, out there, wild and crazy elderly woman I’m supposed to find delightfully funny, and quite often don’t. She does outrageous stuff, and what often pisses me off about characters like this is that, if she were a man, much of her antics would earn her a poke in the eye. But women get a pass, don’t they? She is a feminist, and would be outraged if I ... Read more »
The Grapes of Wrath
DIRECTED by John Ford
PRODUCED by Nunnally Johnson & Darryl F Zanuck
SCREENPLAY by Nunnally Johnson
FROM THE NOVEL by John Steinbeck
ORIGINAL MUSIC by Alfred Newman (Randy Newman’s uncle)
CINEMATOGRAPHY by Gregg Toland
ART DIRECTION by Richard Day & Mark-Lee Kirk
The Ideal was a little movie theater around the corner from the 5&10 ... Read more »
Gravity
There’s that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the ape man throws the bone into the air and we cut, four million years in 1/24 of a second, to the satellite orbiting the Earth. There’s that scene in Star Wars where the Imperial Battle Cruiser comes from behind us and spreads its titanic bulk across the sky. And now there’s another, a ... Read more »
The Great Bank Robbery
A western comedy that’s a lot better than I expected. There’s this un-robbable bank in a small Texas town. It’s full of gold from some of the great gangs of the time, like the Jameses and the Youngers, maybe Butch Cassidy. Guys who can’t just deposit it and who don’t trust their companions not to steal it. It’s protected by guards with Gatling guns. So no less than three gangs set out to ... Read more »
The Great Bank Robbery
A western comedy that’s a lot better than I expected. There’s this un-robbable bank in a small Texas town. It’s full of gold from some of the great gangs of the time, like the James’s and the Youngers, maybe Butch Cassidy. Guys who can’t just deposit it and who don’t trust their companions not to steal it. It’s protected by guards with Gatling guns. So no less than three gangs set out to ... Read more »
The Great Beauty
This movie is very colorful, and it is full of compelling images, like a giraffe in an empty courtyard at night. Some truly awesome images. A furious little girl hurling cans of paint at a giant canvas as “art critics” stand around and watch. Her paintings sell for millions. Another piece of performance “art”: a naked woman runs and hurls herself into a stone wall (actually Styrofoam), ... Read more »
The Great Buck Howard
A severe disappointment. Buck Howard is John Malkovich, and he’s a washed-up mentalist who used to be a frequent guest on the Johnny Carson show. He’s now playing half-full houses in Bakersfield and Akron. It’s a good performance. But the story concerns celebrity, how you get it and how you lose it. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Leap of ... Read more »