Movie Reviews
Introduction to The Films of the Coen Brothers
I stumbled across a list of the 50 Best Directors Working Today at the IMDb. It looks like it was compiled by one person (screen name michaakchoti) and he ranked them in order. Here are his first 10:
1. Steven Spielberg
2. Terrence Malick
3. Martin Scorcese
4. David Fincher
5. The Coen Brothers
6. Francis Ford Coppola
7. Darren Aronofsky
8. ...
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Introduction to The Films of Stanley Kubrick
We were so pleased with our Coen Brothers retrospective that we decided to embark on another trip down memory lane. The question was: Who? There were a lot of possibilities. Hitchcock, Scorsese, Kurosawa? All great choices, but they each have a lot of movies. It would be a long project. Or, another thing we considered was to watch a lot of movies set in Los Angeles. We lived there for ... Read more »
Introduction to The Films of Alfred Hitchcock
We enjoy “projects” when we’re watching films. We looked at all four versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and I read the book), and then went so far as to visit all the filming locations we were able to find.
So our latest project includes several projects. We’ve been picking a director and seeing all of his (so far; no woman I know of has a huge ... Read more »
Introduction to Saturday Night at the Toons
November 14, 2009. Note to readers: Lee and I have decided to make our way through my collection of every Walt Disney animated feature. (Sadly, they’re all on VHS tape, and may not be playable in 20 years.) We are going to watch one every Saturday until we get to Home on the Range. I’m not sure if Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Read more »
Introduction to Our Gang Two-Reelers
TCM was having a day-long marathon of what we used to call “Little Rascals” back when they were showing public domain copies on early TV. I TiVoed ten of them. Our Gang is what they were originally called, and that’s what I’ll use here. We loved them. I find myself wondering if kids still do, or if the world they show is now hopelessly alien to them. I mean, little kids going out in the ... Read more »
The Way Way Back
Teen angst movies are often some of the most boring things I can think of, but this one rises above that. Duncan (Liam James) is the 14-year-old son of Toni Collette, a divorced mother. She has been seeing Steve Carell for about a year, and they and his teen daughter are going to his cottage on Cape Cod for a summer vacation. Steve has one of those giant ‘60s station wagons, perfectly ... Read more »
The Guilt Trip
I’m always up for a Barbra Streisand movie, even if it doesn’t turn out to be very good, because I’ve never seen her be bad. That is, she has such a powerful screen presence that even in material that is less than first rate, I can’t keep my eyes off of her and she manages to make something out of it. And this isn’t a bad one. She is paired up with Seth Rogan, who mostly acts as her ... Read more »
Love Is All You Need
Though the film is in Danish, a lot of English is spoken. I have to say, the Danish title makes a lot more sense than what it was released as over here—she was a hairdresser, and she was bald, from chemotherapy—but I guess that title might be hard to market. The story concerns the son of Pierce Brosnan getting married to the daughter of the hairdresser, Trine Dyrholm, at a nice old house ... Read more »
Clerks
Every once in a while even a film fanatic like me misses a big one. That is to say, this movie was influential, and put the director-writer-actor on the cinema map, got mostly great reviews, and I hadn’t seen it. What finally inspired me to was seeing another film by Kevin Smith, Dogma, and mostly liking it. The story is of two slackers, two guys who really could ... Read more »
Ladies in Lavender
Judi Dench and Maggie Smith are elderly sisters living in a scenic cottage on the Cornish coast in 1936. A young Polish man, Andrea, washes up on the shore and they save his life and nurse him back to health. But Judi, a spinster and virgin, becomes fixated on him in an unhealthy way. They discover that he is a violin prodigy, and he is soon attracted to the lovely neighbor, Natascha ... Read more »