Movie Reviews
Divergent
Several times while watching this film I was a little confused. Is this The Hunger Games? Or is it Ender’s Game? Or even Full Metal Jacket. Young people are going to extremely brutal military schools in all of them. The recent ones also all feature protagonists who are “special,” in some way. What’s the deal ... Read more »
700 Sundays
Billy Crystal adapted his biographical book into a one-man show in 2004. This year, it was revived, and HBO taped a performance. The show covers the fifteen years, around 700 Sundays, that he had with his dad before he died. And what a fifteen years it was! Did you know that Billy was taken to see his first movie by Billie Holiday? (It was Shane.) Or that both ... Read more »
Leatherheads
Most people don’t know it, but the NFL is a comparatively recent thing. Back in the ‘30s, pro football was a joke. Teams would form, play for a while in tiny stadiums, go broke, disband. College football was huge, as it still is today, but once you graduated, there was nowhere to go. The NFL, and the NBA, had not yet invented the system that allowed them to use ... Read more »
Locke
A man gets into his BMW at night at a massive construction site and starts out toward London, about an hour and a half away. He is the man in charge of this construction. He starts making calls and getting calls on his hands-free phone. A gigantic concrete pour, the largest (non-military) one ever in Europe, is to start at 5:30 AM, and he has to be there to ... Read more »
The Italian Job
Something quite rare here, a movie to which a sequel was made, and the sequel is pretty good. Not quite up to the standard this one set, but good in its own way. The newer version takes the physical concepts of an elaborate plan carried out by a large crew of experts and jazzes it up with newer technology, but largely misses on the humor of this one. Michael Caine is a criminal planner who ... Read more »
Game of Thrones (Season One)
George R.R. Martin is a friend from way back, albeit one I haven’t seen in a long time. We first met when both of us were new to the SF scene, each having sold a few stories here and there, each of us working the convention circuit. I think he worked it harder than I did, and suspect he enjoyed it more. He was, and still is, one of the very best stylists and storytellers in the ... Read more »
Pompeii
… in which we learn, among many other things we never needed to see again … that no matter how thick the falling debris, it never harms the hero or the bad guy in any way … that the sidekick or the hero will always pause in the middle of a crisis to rescue one little girl among thousands who has lost her mother … further, that the sidekick will die a glorious death shortly before the hero ... Read more »
Her
One of the odder love stories you will ever see. From the degree of building in Los Angeles, and the fact that we see few cars and a lot of trains, I’m guessing it is meant to be around thirty or forty years from now, but the writer-director, Spike Jonze, wisely never specifies a date. It is a world not hugely different from our own, which I think was also a wise choice. It is bright and ... Read more »
American Gigolo
Opening note: This film was produced by my friend the late Freddie Fields, famous mostly for being a Hollywood Super Agent to people like Judy Garland. He worked with just about everybody in Hollywood, including Redford, Monroe, Gibson, Gere, McQueen, and Woody Allen. He was married to Polly Bergen, and then to a former Miss Universe (I hadn’t known that; if I had I’d have angled an ... Read more »
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
Neil deGrasse Tyson has taken it on himself to update the classic Cosmos series on PBS that was done by his old friend, Carl Sagan. It’s a daunting task, but I think he’s up to it.
First, and to no one’s surprise, the visuals are way, way, way better than in the original. That’s no aspersion on the good folks who did the original; they used the best ... Read more »