Dont Look Back

(No, we didn’t forget the apostrophe; that’s how the title is spelled.) You’ve probably heard of that silly old theory that somebody else wrote all of William Shakespeare’s plays. Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth, Jack the Ripper, PeeWee Herman … I dunno. Stupid. But I kept thinking, watching this for the first time since it was new, that you can’t listen to Bob Dylan talk and ... Read more »

Don’t Think Twice

Modern “Improv” as we know it today began in Chicago with a group called The Compass Players, later Second City. Among the alumnae who later made it big were Nichols and May, Stiller and Meara, and Shelley Berman. What you do is, you all go out on stage without a script of any kind, and make up comedy as you go along. You gotta be fast, and you gotta be funny. I’d rather have my appendix ... Read more »

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot

Here’s a movie where possibly I should recuse myself. See, Lee knew John Callahan pretty well. In fact, she typeset the manuscript for the book this movie is loosely based on! And she tells me he was pretty much a total asshole. She says if Callahan were still alive she would #metoo him for showing her that a semi-quad can still get a hard-on. I met him once.

It is undeniable that ... Read more »

The Door in the Floor

This movie has so much going for it, mostly in the acting department, that it’s a shame that it really doesn’t amount to much in the end. A couple has lost two sons in some sort of accident, and their marriage is coming apart. They’ve had another child, a girl of 4, but the mom (Kim Basinger) is too deep in her grief to have bonded with her. Her husband is Jeff Bridges, and he’s a writer ... Read more »

Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning

She was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, a pioneer in going out into the real world and photographing real people, and she is Lee’s favorite shutterbug … and probably my own, too. It’s a toss-up with Ansel Adams, but their work is so totally different it’s useless to compare them. She was also in the right place at the right time, what with the Great ... Read more »

Double Jeopardy

Sometimes a good director like Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies, Breaker Morant) just gets involved with the wrong material. This story is lame, predictable , easy to figure out. Don’t bother.

Double Wedding

Between 1934 and 1947, William Powell and Myrna Loy made 14 movies together, all but three of them more or less screwball comedies. Six of those were in the Thin Man series, which seems to have had very little relationship to the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name. This one is their seventh pairing, which doesn’t quite put them in a par with Laurel and ... Read more »

Doubt

First, I have to state that the Catholic Church is a culture as alien to me as Hindus, holy rollers, ultra-orthodox Judaism, Islam, or creatures from the planet Tralfamadore. They lost me long before the totally idiotic doctrine of Papal infallibility. So I’m admitting—no, declaring—a Reformationist, lapsed-Lutheran prejudice before I even get started. I’ll try ... Read more »

Down the Shore

Da shore dey talkin’ about is da Joisey Shoah. Bailey (James Gandolfini) runs an almost-defunct small amusement park near the ocean. (This was actually filmed in 2008, and the park was later nearly wiped out by Hurricane Sandy.) His beloved sister has died from cancer in Paris, and the first he hears of it is the arrival of a Frenchman who married her over there. He has inherited half of ... Read more »