Movie Reviews
Titles starting with B
Blackadder Back and Forth
The ever-craven Blackadder family has its last hurrah in this modern-day incarnation, made to be shown in the Millennium Dome in London. Intending to scam his friends, Edmund has Baldrick build a replica of Leonardo Da Vinci’s model for a time machine. But the blasted thing works! The first thing they see is a T. Rex eager to eat them. They slay it by slinging Baldrick’s filthy ... Read more »
BlacKkKlansman
I have now seen seven of the eight movies nominated for the Best Picture of 2018. (I haven’t seen Vice, and I don’t plan to. It’s about Dick Cheney. I’d rather watch a ten-part documentary about tooth decay, narrated by Peewee Herman.) As you may remember, the Oscar went to Green Book. That caused a lot of controversy. Spike Lee, who ... Read more »
Blackmail
We happened to see this one back-to-back with another Hitchcock film, Sabotage, made seven years later. It was interesting to note the similarities. In both films a woman kills a man. In this one, the man was trying to rape her. In the other, the victim was her husband who had set off a bomb that killed her brother. Both eminently justifiable, most people would ... Read more »
Blade Runner
I hadn’t seen this since it was new, in theaters. The chief reason I rented it is that we’ve now visited some of the locations they used, including the fabulous Bradbury Building where Deckard killed Pris and fought it out with Roy Batty, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown house, which now sits forlornly atop a hill only a couple miles from our apartment, derelict, ... Read more »
Blade Runner (Second Review + Blade Runner 2049)
When we managed to pick ourselves up off the floor after viewing the bloated, dim, incomprehensible, ponderous catastrophe that is Blade Runner 2049 I just had to pop this one into the DVD player to reassure myself that it actually was a damn good movie. Something to take the bitter taste of disaster out of my mouth. I’m happy to report that it is just as good as ... Read more »
Blade Runner 2049
There is not one goddam thing to praise in this film. Even the frickin’ music, by the vastly overrated Hans Zimmer, is horrible. And I hardly know what to say about it, because it is one of those films where, to my horror and disbelief, the critics loved it. At Metacritic there are 47 raves, 7 mixed, and Read more »
Blades of Glory
Will Ferrell is a hit or miss guy. I gave up watching “Saturday Night Live” a long time ago, so I don’t know much about his work there, but the clips I’ve seen are good. I first noticed him in Elf, which I liked a lot except for the ending. I liked him in Melinda and Melinda, The ... Read more »
Blame it on Fidel
What a find this movie was! It’s directed by Julia Gavras, daughter of the radical Greek political filmmaker Costa-Gavras, best known in the West for Missing and Z. One of the stars is Julie Depardieu, daughter of Gérard. But these offspring of famous people aside, this movie belongs to 9-year-old Nina Kervel-Bey. She plays Anna, who ... Read more »
Blazing Saddles
I have always felt that Young Frankenstein is Mel Brooks’s best movie, because not only is it very, very funny, it is also a work of art in its production design and photography. By making it actually look like it was made by James Whale in the 1930s, he enhanced every joke. But if you asked me what his funniest movie is, Read more »
The Bletchley Circle
If you know much about World War II, you will have heard of Bletchley Park, the old stone pile where Great Britain gathered her finest minds to crack the Nazi Enigma code machine, among other intelligence assignments. They were an odd lot: linguists, chess champions, crossword experts, and mathematicians. The best known is probably Alan Turing. (Who the UK treated shamefully after the war, ... Read more »