Tokyo Godfathers

I’ve never been a fan of Japanese Anime, but films like this are winning me over. Maybe the problem is the definition. It seems to cover everything from stuff suitable for 3-year-olds where nothing moves but the mouth (like “Speed Racer,” which was endlessly fascinating to my son when he was 3), to masterpieces like Princess Mononoke and Read more »

Tolkien

For some reason the writers elected to have J.R.R. Tolkien’s story center around his horrible experiences in WWI. He saw carnage almost unimaginable to me, and came down with trench fever at the Battle of the Somme, which almost killed him. (Oddly, two other famous fantasy writers also suffered from it: C.S. Lewis and A.A. Milne. You think the virus is attracted to initials?) It seems an ... Read more »

Tom Dowd & the Language of Music

In 1946 Tom Dowd faced a career decision. During the war he had been working at Columbia University for the Army Corp of Engineers, Manhattan District. Seemed logical; Columbia is in Manhattan. What he was working for, without knowing it, was the Manhattan Project, studying neutron beams for use in atomic weapons. Later, he was one of the witnesses to one of the Bikini tests. So … ... Read more »

Tomb Raider

I’ve allowed a back-up of un-reviewed movies to accumulate in my To Do file. That means that some of these reviews are of films I may have seen a month or more ago. This is not a good thing for many movies, because I find that a month later I don’t recall much about them. The majority of action movies are like that. Pretty generic action. I remember being mildly entertained by this one. I ... Read more »

Tommy

I really miss Ken Russell. He may have been one of the most uneven directors to ever stand behind a camera, his work being all over the map including some dreadful ones, but that’s largely because he was always willing to take a chance, to try something new. When he was at his best, there was no one in the world who could touch him for startling imagery, except maybe Stanley Kubrick. His ... Read more »

Tomorrowland

Sometimes a movie has monster hit written all over it, and it lays an egg. There’s no way of forecasting this; it seems the buzz was that this was a solid story, starring George Clooney, and it looked great. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as William Goldman famously said in his phenomenal book Adventures in the Screen Trade, “Nobody knows ... Read more »

Too Many Husbands

I can’t help wondering if the people at Columbia knew while they were making this picture, which was released in March, that across town at RKO they were lensing (as they say at Variety), for May release, My Favorite Wife, which is based on the same “Enoch Arden” premise? A man (or in the case of the other film, a woman) is stranded on ... Read more »

Tootsie

One thing I didn’t notice when this was new was how until Michael shows up for work as Dorothy, no woman has the courage (might one say balls?) to call out a man for treating her like shit, for objectifying her. It takes a man to do that. I don’t have any political point to make about this. It was still fairly early in the modern feminist movement, and I wonder ... Read more »

Top Of the Lake

This was the first TV miniseries ever to be shown at Sundance. The seven-hour running length was broken up for lunch and another intermission. It is currently running on the Sundance Channel, and I can only hope that not too much has been excised to make room for the goddam commercials.

People have been reminded of both Twin Peaks and Read more »