Movie Reviews
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
(Second Review) After seeing Moonrise Kingdom, and loving it, I set out to see the delightful Wes Anderson’s earlier pictures, including ones I’d already seen. Thus, I found that I liked The Royal Tenenbaums a lot more than I had the first time, when I didn’t completely get the joke, so to speak. Anderson has developed his own screen ... Read more »
Go West
I’d say this one is about in the middle range of the Marx Brothers movies, somewhere between their half-dozen works of sheer genius and the lesser ones near the end of their career together. It’s good, but not really worth watching again and again. I had always thought that Groucho’s character’s name, S. Quentin Quale, was rather uninspired compared to wonderful names like Wolf J. ... Read more »
God Bless America
This is mostly satirical until the end, when it unaccountably gets too serious. Frank is an insurance executive who basically has no life. He spends his evenings zoned out on the couch watching the depths of depravity being mined by “reality” shows. Then he is fired, and told he has a brain tumor. He’s about to kill himself until he sees some of the excesses of a terrible family on TV, and ... Read more »
Transcendence
I tried my best to like this, but in the end it’s just another out-of-control supercomputer story. Ancestors include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Colossus: the Forbin Project (1970), Resident Evil (2002) and its sequels, the Terminator films. Even my novella “PRESS ENTER.” That would be okay if it brought something new to the table, but there really wasn’t ... Read more »
The Fountain
The “story” is incomprehensible. The pace is slow as a glacier. I didn’t like the main character—of which there are three incarnations, but let’s don’t even get into that. The music is monotonous. The science is silly. There’s something about a “Tree of Life,” apparently from the Bible, and Queen Isabella of Christopher Columbus fame, and her conquistador lover, and a scientist whose ... Read more »
3-Iron
The Korean title means “empty house.” It’s a good title, though the one in English isn’t bad, either. Tae-suk is a young man who has a nice scam going. He hangs menus on doorknobs in the morning, and later goes back to see which ones were not removed. That house is likely to be empty, which he confirms by listening to the outgoing message on the answering machine. If the residents are out ... Read more »
Non-Stop
The plot is as unlikely as most of these airplane thrillers (exception, Flightplan with Jodie Foster, which I quite enjoyed), but Liam Neeson has turned into such an attractive action hero for older folks like me, that he managed to sell it, just as he did in Taken, and even in Taken 2. (I see there will be a ... Read more »
Noah
Did you know that Noah had helpers when building the Ark, in the form of animated rock monsters bigger than elephants? Did you know that thousands of angry people gathered near the big boat and fought to get in? Did you know that, after the animals were all loaded, two by two, they were all put to sleep for forty days and forty nights, so Noah and his family wouldn’t have to feed them and ... Read more »
The Lunchbox
A sweet little movie. In Mumbai, there is a cadre of men known as dabbawallas. Every workday, they circulate through the suburbs collecting home-cooked lunches and then taking the train into the city, where they distribute them to workers. The service must be incredibly cheap, to compete with the numerous food stalls and carts. The system is all but infallible … but no system is perfect. ... Read more »
Under the Skin
Every once in a while there is a movie that is a critical darling and I just can’t stand it. This is one. Scarlett Johannson is some sort of alien. She cruises the night streets of London, picking up men and taking them to an apartment that is a lot larger inside than it is outside. There they are assimilated (I guess) into a black sea … oh, it’s all too ridiculous, and totally ... Read more »