Movie Reviews
Spanglish
It’s hard for me to watch an Adam Sandler movie because of the possibly irreparable damage he has done to the American comedy movie … but he’s okay in this. No vain mugging. And I liked a lot of the parts of the movie, particularly the two Hispanic actresses. But it comes up short. It just isn’t believable.
Flor goes to work for a woman who thinks she is liberal and ... Read more »
Source Code
This is about as close as we get to “hard” science fiction these days. I’m not complaining. I liked it, a lot. The premise is that it’s possible to somehow transport a consciousness back in time to the body of someone who is dead, relive his last eight minutes of life … and do something about it. In other words, every time you go back to the same eight minutes, ... Read more »
Tycoon: A New Russian
The “new Russian” of the title is a breed that sprang up following the end of the USSR. Things were chaotic, stuff was up for grabs, nobody was looking out for much but themselves. A clever fellow could make a lot of money. A lot of money, and at a rate that would make Bill Gates blink. People became overnight billionaires, if they were willing to kill a fair number of people on the way up ... Read more »
Songs From the Second Floor
Written and directed by Roy Andersson. Hardly a film I’d recommend to everybody, and yet I find that many of the images of it have lingered. Call it a Beckett play staged in Edward Hopper paintings. If anything, it reminds me of Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), the famous surrealist short by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. Any “plot” here is an ... Read more »
Two Weeks Notice
Another Sandra Bullock attempt at light romantic comedy, this time with Hugh Grant. Again, it doesn’t work. Maybe she needs to get back on a speeding bus.
Two Tars
Laurel and Hardy would only make seven more silent films before they switched to talkies, which the did better than any of their peers. That’s because in their talkies, they didn’t talk, talk, talk. They stayed with the kind of thing they had been doing, and when you watch these you can pretty much fill in the conversations all by yourself, even if you aren’t a lip reader. The same ... Read more »
A Song Is Born
To remake a film is not an unusual thing in Hollywood. To remake it with virtually the same script is almost unheard of. Not only that, but this film and its predecessor, Ball of Fire, were made only 6 years apart, and by the same director, Howard Hawks. Both were based loosely on the Snow White story (only there actually are seven professors in this one, not ... Read more »
The Two Jakes
It’s sad what happened to this one. I suspect that any film that tried to follow up on Chinatown would be destined to fall short, but this one could have been better than it is. At the same time, I think it’s been somewhat unfairly maligned precisely because it invites comparisons to Chinatown.
Part of the problem is that the ... Read more »
Son of Rambow
Two young misfit boys set out to make an action-adventure movie in the style of Stallone. The director tries for whimsy, but whimsy is hard. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and a lot of it is subjective. It didn’t work for me. See Millions for something very like that, except that it works.
One of the boys is being raised in one of those ... Read more »
Two For the Seesaw
Robert Wise directed this filming of a successful play by William Gibson (no, not the father of cyberspace; he was ten at the time). The stars on the stage were Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft, her Broadway debut. I’d like to have seen that. Originally it was to star Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, but it was eventually made with Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine.
I could tell ... Read more »