Movie Reviews
The Squid and the Whale
Bad title, great film. The squid and whale is a famous life-size diorama in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and it has great symbolic significance to this story, but the story is about a bad ongoing divorce and the effect of narcissism (mostly the father’s) on the two young boys in the family. A better title might have sold more tickets. These are Woody Allen ... Read more »
The Squaw Man
There is some niggling among film historians, but this is probably the first feature-length movie to be filmed in Hollywood, beating out The Birth of a Nation by about a year. It was produced by Cecil B. DeMille, a man with zero movie-making experience. (He knew so little he filmed it with two different cameras, each of which used a different format for the ... Read more »
The Square
Here is an Australian version of the story of catastrophic mistakes and bad choices that can stand comparisons to such films as Blood Simple and A Simple Plan. Not quite as good as that first one, but that was a masterpiece, and this one is just very good. Oddly, it was also made by a team of brothers, the Edgertons, one of whom is an ... Read more »
The Spy in Black
US title: U-Boat 29. Here we have the very first teaming of “The Archers,” England’s best team of writer-directors. They were Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, best known for The Red Shoes, but were also producers of twenty different collaborations over more than twenty years, some of them very, very good. They are always at least ... Read more »
Springtime in a Small Town
This is remake of a 1948 film by Mu Fei that is widely regarded as one of the best examples of Chinese cinema. I haven’t seen that one. Mu was suppressed when Mao’s boys took over, and the director of this version, Zhuangzhuang Tian, was in the doghouse for 10 years under Mao’s descendants, not allowed to make films after some political incorrectness in a film called Read more »
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring
A small boy and a Buddhist monk live together on a tiny temple floating on a lake. The boy amuses himself by tying a rock to a fish, then a frog, then a snake. The master observes this, then ties a big rock to the boy’s back while he sleeps. When he wakes, he is told he must find the animals and release them or he will carry a stone in his heart all his life. The boy finds the animals, but ... Read more »
The Spongebob Squarepants Movie
Hooray for the MVP program at Hollywood Video! For $15/month you get unlimited rentals, except for the ones that came out the previous 30 days or so. Since I already waited for the DVD, I have no trouble waiting another month to see the new releases. And it means that I can rent something like this that I normally wouldn’t touch, because who wants to risk $4 on a piece of shit? I figure I ... Read more »
Split Second
This is a tidy little thriller made on a low budget out in the Nevada (or possibly California) desert. A dangerous killer and his buddy make a jailbreak, killing two guards in the process. But the buddy is wounded in the belly, and getting worse and worse. The pair, and a mute accomplice called “Dummy,” take a bunch of hostages, including Alexis Smith, a down-on-her-luck dancer, a ... Read more »
Spirited Away
I am not a fan of Japanese anime, but I make an exception here. Hayao Miyazaki is a genius, with a visual imagination that takes him to some very strange place. I intend to see his other well-known feature, Princess Mononoke.
The Spiral Staircase
It was a dark and stormy night … window shutters bang, stairs creak, thunder and lightning are almost continuous, cobwebs coat the wine cellar, and there’s that spiral staircase … thankfully, there is no cat to jump out at you from the shadows. Here is a very nice little suspense thriller that takes place in a spooky old mansion that isn’t inhabited by spooks. ... Read more »