Movie Reviews
Bosch
I didn’t even know that Amazon was producing content now. One thing they’re doing is making seven or eight pilots every year and then letting the people who watch them vote on whether the series should continue. This one is based on the books by one of my favorite mystery writers, Michael Connelly, starring LAPD detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. It is very, very faithful to the books. ... Read more »
Nicholas Nickleby
Hopeless sentimentality, unbelievable coincidences, inhuman villains, saintly women and protagonists … these are all things that couldn’t be sold in a book today, and they’re the things I cherish about Charles Dickens. It was a different world. Monsters like Mr. and Mrs. Wackford Squeers (Jim Broadbent and Juliet Stevenson) (and nobody could find more amusing names than Dickens) really ... Read more »
Fatal Instinct
I had never heard of this one. It aspires to be totally off-the-wall wacky, like Airplane! It doesn’t quite reach that level of zaniness, but it’s pretty good. A lot of it comes from Armand Assante playing totally against type. Usually he’s evil, menacing. Here he’s a total fuck-up, and never seems to know it. There’s verbal humor, references to dozens of ... Read more »
20 Feet From Stardom
I really wish I’d taken notes while I was watching this, because the only name I remember is Darlene Love. Remember her, from when the producers of this movie brought her up with them to accept the Oscar for Best Feature-Length Documentary? She sang her acceptance, and it was the best acceptance in a night full of good ones. She was a member of The Blossoms, way back in 1957, and was part ... Read more »
Oscar Nominated Shorts
When we lived in Hollywood some friends turned us on to one of the best reasons for living in the LA area. Every year when the Oscar nominated short films are announced, the Academy has a one-night-only showing of all ten at their headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. It’s a great theater. You have to be on your toes to get inside. The tickets are five dollars (maybe the best bargain in ... Read more »
City of Industry
Here is a nice heist film. Harvey Keitel and Timothy Hutton and some others plan and pull off a theft of about $3,000,000 in diamonds. Then, as so often happens, there are problems afterward. About halfway through there is a huge surprise, something I never expected to happen. After that it gets pretty brutal. I thought it was damn good. The only thing that really bothered me is something ... Read more »
The Shooting
Warren Oates and Will Hutchins (who gets first billing!) are hired by a mysterious woman to find somebody. Jack Nicholson is tracking them. It’s weird and quirky, and I lost interest about halfway through, even though that was the point where Jack showed up.
Red Dawn
Here’s one I watched when I was in the hospital recently, because the choices were pretty bad. And the movie is pretty bad. North Korea (North Korea!) has launched a takeover of the American West Coast. Why doesn’t the US Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force move in and kick some Korean butt all the way back over the Pacific, and then clean out that pesthole known as North Korea? Some ... Read more »
I.Q.
It sounded real promising. It’s the early 1950s at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. Meg Ryan is the niece of Albert Einstein. Tim Robbins is an auto mechanic. To win her hand, he pretends to be a sort of natural physics genius, helped along by Albert (Walter Matthau, who hardly needs much makeup to look like Einstein) and his friends, including real characters like Kurt ... Read more »
Larry Crowne
Tom Hanks really should stick to acting. He co-wrote and directed this one, with Nia Vardalos, and it just sort of lies there, gasping for breath, like a beached catfish. He is the best worker a mega-store ever had, so naturally they fire him. He looks for work, downsizes his house, and eventually decides to go to a small community college, where he is the oldest student by far. There he ... Read more »