Movie Reviews
Titles starting with M
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
Woody seems to have set out to make nothing more than a light entertainment here, a bon-bon, a fantasy, and that’s just what he delivered. Woody is an inventor who floats around in a couple of flying machines that obviously could never get off the ground. Six people gather around the turn of the century—1900—for a weekend at a swell old house. Jose Ferrer is a blowhard philosopher that ... Read more »
Mighty Aphrodite
Woody Allen and Helena Bonham Carter are a more-or-less happily married couple who are childless. She doesn’t want to bear a baby (or can’t, I can’t remember) but is eager to adopt. Woody is opposed to it … until he has the child home, when he becomes wildly infatuated with him. But as the boy gets older he becomes obsessed with finding the birth mother. He does, and it is Mira Sorvino ... Read more »
A Mighty Heart
The problem with a story whose outcome you know is simple: How do you build and sustain suspense in such a situation? There are various ways, some better than others. In an epic like The Longest Day, for instance, you know the invasion will be successful, but you don’t know who will live and who will die. One of my favorite examples of a smaller incident is Read more »
The Mighty Quinn
Denzel Washington in one his very early roles. Damn, but the man looks young, and quite the handsome devil. He is the chief of police on an unnamed Caribbean island. His childhood friend, Maubee, is in trouble with some pretty powerful white people, and Quinn must try to catch him and find out what’s going on. But Maubee isn’t capable of taking anything seriously. There isn’t much under ... Read more »
A Mighty Wind
One of my favorite movies of the year. Christopher Guest has done several of my favorite movies: Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, and This is Spinal Tap (writer and actor). He has a knack of taking a group of people with an obsession (dog shows, heavy metal rock, small-town theater groups and, in A Mighty Wind, has-been folk ... Read more »
The Mikado, or The Town of Titipu
I am on record as favoring reinterpretations of classic works. I enjoy it in music, where it has a long tradition. Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, for instance, was originally a piano piece, but it is now far more well known as Ravel’s later orchestration. I was a big fan of Walter Carlos’s performances of Switched-On ... Read more »
Mike Fright
The gang forms The International Silver String Submarine Band and wreak havoc in a radio station before performing a pretty good rendition of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.”
Miles Ahead
Here’s a film about Miles Davis, possibly the most innovative (along with Charlie “Bird” Parker) jazz musician ever, and it’s not really about the life of Miles. Here’s what director-writer-star Don Cheadle had to say: “The approach to the film was not to produce a biopic but to create plausible though largely fictional vignettes of Davis’ life that interpreted the creative process ... Read more »
Milk
This is a rather surprisingly traditional bio-pic. I say surprisingly given Gus Van Sant’s tendency to experiment, with results sometimes intriguing (Elephant) and sometimes disastrous (the horrible Gerry, and the loathsome Psycho remake). It avoids tracking Harvey Milk from his no-doubt awful childhood. You ... Read more »
Millennium
What a disaster. I’ve always enjoyed stories by this John Varley dude, but maybe he should stick to short stories and novels. (Both the story and the novel this turkey are based on are lots better than the movie.) The writing credit blames only him, so I don’t see how he can foist the responsibility on anybody else. Just simply an awful movie.