Movie Reviews
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
A bit of checkered history here. Abel Ferrara made a movie Bad Lieutenant in 1992. I’ve never seen it, and so also claims the director of this one, the always baffling but usually intriguing Werner Herzog. He claims it is a re-imagining, but Ferrara says he felt he had been raped. Both are clearly the same story, of a cop (Harvey Keitel in the original, Nicholas ... Read more »
Pulp Fiction
What can you say about this movie twenty years later that hasn’t already been said a thousand times before? It was totally ground-breaking, we had never seen anything remotely like it. Several stories twined together, each one of them original and totally off-the-wall. The amazing visual sense. The perfect use of music, one of the things Tarantino would become famous for. Another was his ... Read more »
Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
I never did quite get what one thing the thirteen conversations were about, and I’m not going to venture a guess. This is one of those movies where several stories are interconnected by the characters involved, though they may not even be aware of each other. That can work poorly or well, though I have to say most of them feature high-quality acting and writing. They are done as labors of ... Read more »
The Invisible Woman
It’s not an SF film, but a period piece that features Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens at the height of his fame, when he could fill a large hall with people who came to hear him read, and Felicity Jones as 18-year-old Nelly Ternan, the youngest of an acting family headed by Kristin Scott Thomas. Nelly is not very good. But she attracts the eye of Dickens, whose marriage is no longer ... Read more »
Revanche
It means “revenge.” A small-time hood plans a bank robbery with his Ukrainian prostitute girlfriend. “Nothing can go wrong,” he says. Yeah, right. A cop comes across her sitting in the getaway car, has no idea what’s coming down, but there he is when the idiot comes flying out of the bank. The robber puts the cop down on the ground and gets in the car, drives away. The cop gets up, fires a ... Read more »
Atlantic City
This is an excellent movie in almost any way you look at it, but it has one glaring weakness. Burt Lancaster plays a two-bit numbers runner, a man who has been a loser, a small-time hood all his life. Then, pretty much by accident, he comes into a large quantity of cocaine. Suddenly he’s in the chips, and he blossoms, dressing well and getting into a friendship with the great Susan ... Read more »
The Missing Picture
The Missing Picture (L’image manquante) (2013) (France, Cambodia) This has to be the first Cambodian film I have ever seen. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language film (and lost to the completely unexciting The Great Beauty. It is narrated in English or French, take your pick, from a script by the director, Rithy Panh. And of course it is about the ... Read more »
Tim’s Vermeer
Every once in a while a movie comes along that is not really like anything you’ve ever seen. This is one of them. It’s a documentary, produced and directed by Penn and Teller, and it tells the story of one of the craziest geniuses you’ll ever meet.
Tim Jenison made his money in electronics, and he must have a lot of it to finance all the things he does here, with no hope at all of ... Read more »
The Statement (second review)
Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Northam star. Supporting are Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates, and Frank Finlay. Norman Jewison directed a script from the great Ronald Harwood. What could go wrong?
It’s hard to put my finger exactly on it, but part of it was that I didn’t really care that much. Caine is a Frenchman who collaborated with the fucking Nazis during the occupation. ... Read more »
Miracle at St. Anna
Spike Lee is an uneven filmmaker, to say the least. Lately, except for some good documentaries, I can’t say I’m too impressed with his work. Which is a shame, as this is a story that needs to be told, but better than this.
The history of the Buffalo Soldiers, all-Negro cavalry units of the US Army, stretches back to 1866. In World War II, as most people know, most black soldiers ... Read more »