Movie Reviews
The Lone Ranger
I’ve got to stop listening to “the Buzz.” You know, the consensus that emerges among critics and cinema wonks that a particular film is a disaster. It happened with John Carter, which wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone was saying. I feel that the same thing happened here. The director, Gore Verbinski, went so far as to publish a rant where he maintained that the ... Read more »
Europa Report
I had never heard of this, and it fills me with fear that I might have somehow missed it. It basically never got a theatrical release, and is relying on home “On Demand” downloads to make back its small budget. IMDb doesn’t say just how small that budget was, but for whatever they spent they were able to obtain results in the space scenes that rival those in Read more »
The Russia House
John le Carré has had an enviable career in Hollywood. So far as I know he has never set foot in the town, and he has no screenwriting credits. What he does is sell his complicated, difficult, cerebral, seldom violent novels to filmmakers and lets them run with it. And because the novels are so difficult and have so little slam-bang action, no hack writers or directors are interested in ... Read more »
Across the Pacific
John Huston brought the trio of Bogey, Mary Astor, and Sidney Greenstreet back a year after The Maltese Falcon for this rather cobbled-together story of the last weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact, the original script dealt with Bogey discovering that the attack was going to happen … but reality trumped fiction, and when the Japs bombed us they ... Read more »
Billion Dollar Brain
A billion dollars didn’t buy you much of a computer, by today’s standards. This one used huge spools of jerky magnetic tape (!) and cardboard punch cards (!!!!). I imagine it had about as much computing power as your average microwave oven these days. But it filled a gigantic set, and Honeywell was proud to put its name on the side of the units. Well, why not? It was state of the art at ... Read more »
The Iceman
During the ‘50s and ‘60s and into the ‘70s (and possibly going back to as early as 1948) Richard Kuklinski murdered between 100 and 300 people, depending on whose figures you believe … and even he gave various numbers while he was still alive. He may have been exaggerating, but it’s clear that he killed a whole bunch of people. When he started off he did it for fun, but later he was a ... Read more »
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
The IMDb lists 16 screen credits for Kubrick, but three of them are short subjects, not worth mentioning. Of the remainder, Fear and Desire (1953) is basically not available for viewing. That leaves 12. I have seen Killer’s Kiss (1955) once, and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) once. I have seen all of the others ... Read more »
Syriana
The advance word on this was very good, and I entered the theater with high hopes. And it was very good … just not quite as good as I had hoped. A case of too much expectation, I guess, because it is by no means a bad film, in fact it is quite good. But it is very confusing. Half the time I didn’t have a very clear idea of what was going on. And when I found out, it wasn’t always ... Read more »
Synecdoche, New York
Here’s an object lesson in why you shouldn’t get your hopes up too high. In my opinion, Charlie Kaufman is the most exciting writer working in Hollywood today. After an apprenticeship in TV, he exploded onto the scene with Being John Malkovich, one of the most amazing films ever made and a great favorite of mine. When I saw John Cusack manipulating a puppet of ... Read more »
Swiss Miss
Say you had a piano that had to be taken up a narrow path on the side of a mountain, over a swaying rope bridge with only one rope handrail over an almost bottomless chasm, and delivered to a tree house on the other side. Who would you choose for the job? Well, based on their classic two-reeler “The Music Box,” I think you’d have to go with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. They had to take ... Read more »