Movie Reviews
Titles starting with C
City of Gold
I wish I had been aware of Jonathan Gold’s restaurant reviews while we were living in Los Angeles. He has written for the alternative newspaper LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, where he currently resides, as well as contributing to such varied venues as Gourmet, Rolling Stone (where he wrote music ... Read more »
City of Industry
Here is a nice heist film. Harvey Keitel and Timothy Hutton and some others plan and pull off a theft of about $3,000,000 in diamonds. Then, as so often happens, there are problems afterward. About halfway through there is a huge surprise, something I never expected to happen. After that it gets pretty brutal. I thought it was damn good. The only thing that really bothered me is something ... Read more »
City of Lost Children
The story is obscure and possibly a little pretentious, but this is well worth seeing just for the amazing images and sequences. By the director of one of the most charming and biting comedies I’ve ever seen, Amelie.
Class Action
I felt tired no more than fifteen minutes into this. Gene Hackman is a Crusading Lawyer who is beginning a case against a car maker whose vehicles have a slight tendency to bursts into flames when rear-ended. We’ve seen him a million times before, and usually played better. His daughter, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, has sold her soul to a huge firm and cares about nothing but making ... Read more »
Cleaner
Nice idea, not so good execution. Samuel L. Jackson is an ex-cop who has started his own “biohazard clean-up” business. That can mean a lot of things, but mostly it’s cleaning up after murders, suicides, and bodies that weren’t found until they were pretty ripe. It’s nasty work, but somebody has to do it, and not many families are up to it. There has already been another movie about this, ... Read more »
The Clearing
There’s a paradox at work here, or at least a big inconsistency. People are all the time complaining that most thrillers follow a formula so rigid that you can predict, almost to the minute, where a particular tired scene will happen. So when one comes along that doesn’t follow the mold, that goes off in directions you don’t expect … nobody goes to see it. This film pulled in less ... Read more »
Cleopatra
We decided to see this Claudette Colbert, C.B. De Mille epic before the Liz Taylor, Rex Harrison, Richard Burton one. It was filmed just as the horrible Hays Code was being introduced, and so it got away with scenes racier than anything which would be seen onscreen until well into the 1960s. Some of Colbert’s costumes are very sheer, and clearly show the outline of nipples. Gasp! ... Read more »
Cleopatra
There are so many superlatives associated with this film that I couldn’t possibly cover them all except at book length. I’ll mention just a few. The Alexandria set was possibly the largest ever constructed … and they had to build it {twice,}} once in England and again in Italy. Filming any outdoor scenes at all in England’s clammy climate was a big mistake. Liz Taylor came down with ... 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 »
Click
Sort of a combination of It’s a Wonderful Life and Bruce Almighty. A man gets a miraculous device that works like a TV remote, fast forwarding, pausing, with director’s DVD commentary … the whole works. For a while they work some pretty funny variations on this. But, it being an Adam Sandler movie, there is a mean streak to some of the ... Read more »