Movie Reviews
The Cosmic Monster
Also known as Cosmic Monsters, The Crawling Terror, and The Crawling Horror. Wow! That’s a lot of titles for a quite small film only 75 minutes long. And it’s actually sort of appropriate, since in many ways this crazy thing looks like it was cobbled together from several movies, like Frankenstein’s monster. In parts, it actually has ... Read more »
Dark Blue
Director Ron Shelton is best known for his cynical and funny sports movies like Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, and Tin Cup. The story (but not the screenplay) is by James Ellroy, and this movie is solidly in his territory, the dark side of Los Angeles and the LAPD. We all know of the scandals the L.A. cops have been involved in, but ... Read more »
Iris
I’ve never read anything by Iris Murdoch. Maybe I should. She sounds like she was a fascinating person. Here she is portrayed by Kate Winslet as a young woman, just starting out as a writer, and by Judi Dench as a woman rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer’s. Both of them are great in the roles. Then there is Jim Broadbent, who won the Supporting Actor Oscar for playing her husband, John ... Read more »
Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At her
This odd little movie is not my usual cup of tea, but I found myself drawn in.
Glenn Close is a doctor caring for her extremely old mother. She consults a tarot card reader, Calista Flockhart, who seems to be right on target in her reading of the doctor.
Holly Hunter is a bank manager who becomes fascinated by a crazy shopping cart woman. She finds she is pregnant, gets an ... Read more »
Call the Midwife
Jessica Raine plays Jenny Lee, the new name for Jennifer Worth, upon whose memoirs this series is based. In the mid-‘50s she begins work at an Anglican nunnery (though she is not a nun herself) in London’s poverty-stricken East End as a midwife. She herself was gently-raised, though not of the upper classes, and soon finds herself immersed in a culture she knows little or nothing about. ... Read more »
Philomena
What would you call a group that imprisons pregnant women at slave labor in unpaid workhouses, indistinguishable from debtor’s prisons in that you can’t get out until you pay an impossible amount? All without the slightest due process of law? What would you call a group that forces pregnant women to undergo childbirth without pain medication of any sort, and without the presence of a ... Read more »
12 Years a Slave
Now I’ve finally seen the winner of Best Picture of 2013, and I have to say I was only slightly impressed. I knew it was going to be an ordeal to watch it, and I was right. The torture, the humiliation, the degradation, all come with the territory of movies about slavery. Which is not to say they shouldn’t be made, not by any means. But … and I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying this … ... Read more »
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
Now that Neil deGrasse Tyson has made a sequel to this, we thought it might be fun to take a look at the original series before we watched the new one. It would be a real treat for me, too, since I never saw the first one. When you stop to think of just how much we have learned about the universe in the twenty-four years since Carl Sagan first took us on a tour of the cosmos as we knew it ... Read more »
Indiscreet
According to IMDb Cary Grant said this was his personal favorite of all the films he made. This, from a man who made Charade, North By Northwest, Notorious, Arsenic and Old Lace, The Philadelphia Story, Gunga Din, and Bringing Up Baby, among many other classics. I guess there’s no accounting for taste. Walt Disney was said to be proudest of So ... Read more »
The Hunt
“Children don’t lie!” Who on Earth comes up with these cockamamie ideas, anyway? And who are the idiots who believe it? Children are born liars, they don’t even have to be taught. Usually they’re no good at it until they’ve had some practice, but they don’t lie? Give me a fucking break!
“Well, they don’t lie about sexual abuse, anyway.” Nothing can be further from the truth. The ... Read more »