Distant

Shot one: A guy is walking across a snowy field toward the camera. This takes two minutes. He passes out of camera view. Shot two: a bus appears in the far distance. It approaches. This takes one minute. Now we see the credits, black with unintelligible noises over it. We’re six minutes into the film, 8640 frames of film have been wasted, and nothing has happened! Nothing continues to ... Read more »

District 9

What a huge letdown. This has been touted as the SF movie with a brain, a subtext, a message. It’s all about intolerance, and it was made in South Africa, that former poster country for institutionalized discrimination. And it is, for about 2/3 of the movie. Then it gets as dumb as Transformers or Terminator Salvation …
It starts ... Read more »

Disturbia

Poor LB Jefferies. All he had was a telephone (dial-up!), a pair of binoculars, and a camera with a long lens. (Oh, and Grace Kelly to keep him company now and then.) Don’t remember old Jeff? He was the guy with the broken leg in Rear Window, which is the obvious inspiration for this film. The guy in this one is a teenager, naturally, and bored out of his ... Read more »

Dive Bomber

Here’s a story that was never destined for any acting or writing awards, but is worthwhile just for the airplanes. It was groundbreaking for its extensive use of color aerial photography, which was almost impossible with previous equipment. Before this, color film had been a three-strip process. They shot in B&W with a color filter on each film strip. This made the cameras very bulky. ... Read more »

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 »

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

For some years now I’ve kept a few stories in my head, horror stories that prove to me that sometimes it is much, much better not to survive.

There was the guy who was burning trash in a barrel and, when the fire was getting out of hand, threw a bucket of water on it, only it turned out to be a bucket of gasoline. He survived. 80% third degree burns. No ... Read more »

Django Unchained

Archie Bunker said “Revenge is the best way of getting even.” Quentin Tarantino is into revenge. His last movie, Inglourious Basterds (and that spelling still grates on my nerves) went so far as to immolate Hitler and most of his top fucking Nazis in a theater fire, which I’m reasonably sure didn’t happen. But wouldn’t it have been nice if it had?

So that ... Read more »

Doc Martin, Series 1

This was recommended to us by Devin, a fan who came by and took us out to lunch after I had signed all his books. Nice guy, and we loved this British series that you could call a sitcom, as it is certainly funny enough, but it’s not written purely for hoots. The humour is situational, there are few big punch lines of the sort that real people would never say, the sort that finally turned ... Read more »

Doc Martin, Series 2, 3, & 4

Read my review above. We never got bored, and in fact watched three or even four episodes a night until we had completed the series. It’s very good, we highly recommend it. The only trouble for Americans might be understanding all the dialogue, and unfortunately it is not subtitled for the Brit-English-Impaired. I didn’t miss many lines, but I’ve watched a lot of British movies. Martin ... Read more »

Doctor Foster

The discovery of a single long blonde hair leads Dr. Gemma Foster to begin spying on her husband. She thought she had the perfect marriage, but does she? That’s a question I was less and less interested in finding the answer to as the minutes went by. I didn’t like her, and if (as seems pretty certain) he really is cheating on her, I don’t like him, either. This is the kind of sordid story ... Read more »