Movie Reviews
Five Easy Pieces
One of those seminal movies, the kind that when you look back you realize there was before Five Easy Pieces and after Five Easy Pieces. It sort of meanders from one scene to the next, and nothing is really resolved, as so often happen in real life. After laboring for years in low-budget potboilers, Jack Nicholson had just broken out ... Read more »
The Last Wave
Peter Weir followed up the international success of Picnic at Hanging Rock with this one. I met him, briefly, at the premier of The Year of Living Dangerously on the MGM lot in 1982. Always fun to drop a name!
The movie deals with conflicts between white and aboriginal culture in Australia. The Aboriginals believe there are two ... Read more »
All Is Lost
I still haven’t seen most of the Oscar-nominated movies this year, but I feel that 2013 is an exceptional year if only for this film and one other: Gravity. Why? Because they are both different. Different from the depressing sameness of most movies these days. (I’m talking about the big blockbusters; they are still making smaller, more thoughtful movies, too, I ... Read more »
Stand Up Guys
Al Pacino is just getting out of prison after serving twenty-eight years. He’s met on the outside by Christopher Walken. We soon discover that Walken is under orders from a mob boss to kill Pacino, his best friend, because the reason he was in jail was for murder, and the person killed was the mobster’s only son. Doesn’t matter that it was an accident, because the idiot son started ... Read more »
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
It really is a matter of what you’re in the mood for. In other moods, I’m sure I would have thought this was a real dud. But I was up for some brainless but exciting action, and it worked for me. I’m sure not saying it would work for you. Most of the critics in the US didn’t like it, but oddly enough, it played well in Europe, particularly in Germany, where it was made.
I love the ... Read more »
Ender’s Game
The book, written in 1985 by Orson Scott Card and updated in 1991, has been quite popular, and engendered a series of sequels and parallel stories. I have never read any of them, but I just found a copy of this one and will soon be reading it so that 1) I can see if I like it as well as so many other people did, and 2) to see if the movie does it justice.
As for the movie … the ... Read more »
Nebraska
Every year, now that the Academy has expanded the Best Picture category to up to ten films each year, there are one or two movies that seem to have wandered over from some less prestigious award show. The Golden Globes, maybe. This year it was Philomena and this one. Don’t get me wrong, they are both perfectly fine little movies, telling good stories with humor ... Read more »
August: Osage County
In the opening scene a young Cheyenne woman named Johnna (Misty Upham) is being hired by Sam Shepard as a cook-housekeeper-caretaker for his increasingly out-of-control pillhead wife, Meryl Streep. She is unflappable and outwardly impervious to the occasional racial digs offered by Meryl, but you just know that inside she is wondering “What is it with these crazy ... Read more »
The Bletchley Circle
If you know much about World War II, you will have heard of Bletchley Park, the old stone pile where Great Britain gathered her finest minds to crack the Nazi Enigma code machine, among other intelligence assignments. They were an odd lot: linguists, chess champions, crossword experts, and mathematicians. The best known is probably Alan Turing. (Who the UK treated shamefully after the war, ... Read more »
Perfect Stranger
Halle Berry is a reporter whose friend is killed, and she suspects Bruce Willis, a high-powered ad exec. So she goes undercover in his company to smoke him out. She is helped in her quest by Giovanni Ribisi, a computer nerd. I can’t say a lot more without giving away the ending. I can only complain that the killer could only have been one of three people, and the one it turned out to be ... Read more »