Movie Reviews
Titles starting with S
Shooter
A pretty good drive-in movie. I judge flicks a little differently when I’m sitting in the front seat of my car. I don’t cut them so much slack that I’d enjoy some of the brainless shit that comes along, but still, a C movie in the theater might be experienced as a B+ at the drive-in. This is a B+. It has its moments, and it has its gaping plot holes and lingering ... 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.
The Shop Around the Corner
In 1937 a Hungarian named Miklós László wrote a slight little comic play called Parfumerie. It was about a man and a woman who work in the same store and really don’t like each other. At the same time, each has a pen pal, having hooked up through a personal ad in the newspaper. These postal would-be lovers have agreed not to write about what they do, what they ... Read more »
The Shop on Main Street
When I left Texas to attend Michigan State I joined the film society and took film courses. I devoured these films, stuff that never made it to Port Arthur or Beaumont, Texas. Here was a film from Czechoslovakia, of all places. (Now just Slovakia.) I knew of the Holocaust, though not many details about it. And I have just scanned the IMDb and found that, as I suspected, there were ... Read more »
Shopgirl
An open letter to Steve Martin:
I love ya, baby, but you need to stop and evaluate your career. I’d suggest you sit down with Bill Murray to do so. What do you want, Steve? Big paychecks? I know your expenses are high, since you collect modern art. If so, keep churning out those remakes, and remakes of remakes, like Cheaper By the Dozen (two of ...
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Short Cuts
We had seen this before, but a few weeks ago we saw an Australian film, Jindabyne, that inspired us to see it again. I have a Laserdisc copy. The thing is, Short Cuts, by Robert Altman, is a longish movie (183 minutes) made from nine short stories by Raymond Carver, intertwined. The Aussie film takes just one of those stories and ... Read more »
A Shot in the Dark
A Shot in the Dark (1964) Here’s where the real Inspector Clouseau was born. The man who has never in his life hung a coat on a peg without seeing it immediately fall off, never walked past a small table without spilling its contents, never opened a door without the handle coming off in his hand, and infinite variations on these gags and others … and yet clings to his tattered dignity ... Read more »
Shoulder Arms
Charlie Chaplin goes to war, and ends up capturing the Kaiser and most of the German army … but it turns out to be just a dream. This is the shortest of Chaplin’s feature films, and the most popular up to that point. It is also the last Chaplin feature I had never seen. I don’t think it’s his strongest. In fact, I’d say it’s my least favorite silent feature. The dream structure feels like ... Read more »
Show Business: The Road to Broadway
Compared to the movies, they don’t make a lot of documentaries about Broadway. This is one of the better ones. The conclusion you have to reach at the end is quite simple. Theater on Broadway could be immeasurably improved by lining about a dozen people up against a wall in Shubert Alley and shooting them. I’m referring to the theater critics, of course, mostly New York critics, who used ... Read more »
The Show-Off
Here’s one from early in Spencer Tracy’s career. He plays a windbag who possibly doesn’t mean anybody any harm, but harms them nonetheless. As they say in Texas, he’s all hat and no cattle. A young woman inexplicably falls for him—okay, he’s glib, and she’s naïve, it happens—and they marry. He’s a liar and a fantasist, and I hated pretty much everything about him. He’s one of those guys ... Read more »