Movie Reviews
The Sisters Brothers
I really can’t find much to say about this except that it is a quirky western, and I enjoyed it. The plot is never predictable, it is quite complicated, and John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix are very good as hired guns in the gold rush days. This won’t be to everyone’s taste, but if you like things a little different, you might like it.
Valentine Road
This is the sad story of Lawrence King, an openly gay boy of fifteen who was gunned down in a classroom in Oxnard, California, in 2008, by a piece of shit named Brandon McInerney, who was fourteen. And the piece of shit got off! And there are interviews with several people, including at least one teacher and a couple of jurors, who think it was all King’s fault. Served the little faggot ... Read more »
Stan and Ollie
The make-up jobs on Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy is just uncanny. Particularly Reilly, who is not a fat man, but you wouldn’t know it from the quivering jowls and deep-set eyes we see. The acting is very good, too. I kept thinking, it was a shame they didn’t pick some other point in the careers of the greatest comedy team of all time. They were going for ... Read more »
Johnny English Strikes Again
Once more it’s a case of Rowan Atkinson not being as funny on the big screen, with a big budget, as he is on TV with no budget at all. The premise is that Johnny English thinks he is far, far cooler than James Bond, but is actually a total incompetent. Once again, as in the first one, some of the jokes work, and some of them fall flat. Try looking at some 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 »
Good Omens
I’m sorry to admit that I don’t know much about the fiction of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. And it’s clear from this that I’ve been missing a hell of a lot. I was bowled over by this 6-episode Amazon series. I laughed out loud more times than I could count. Did you know that the Universe really is only around 6,000 years old, and all those old dinosaur bones are a joke God (the voice ... Read more »
Dumbo
The list of classic movies Disney has been making over the last decade or so continues to lengthen, with mixed results. So far, I’ve been surprised at the quality of some of these “live-action” (and brimming with CGI enhancements) remakes. I thought Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book were pretty damn good. Read more »
Under the Silver Lake
This gets off to a promising start, and we always enjoy seeing our old neighborhood around Echo Park and Silverlake in Los Angeles, but it soon gets too clever for its own good, trying to be some sort of air of arty superiority. By the middle of the film I was debating whether or not to finish it. I did, but I’d advise you not to.
Catch-22
Not only did they miss it, they butt-fucked it, they spit on it, they bastardized it, they turned out a cinematic abortion. They fucking re-wrote it!
If you haven’t read the book, much of this will not make much sense to you. And if you haven’t read the book … get it and read it, damn it!
Damn it, they got off to a ... Read more »
Catch-22
I have read a lot of great books, but there are only two that changed my life. The first was Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein. It is the reason I am a science fiction writer.
The other was Catch-22, and it is quite possible that this book is the reason I’m alive today, and not a name on The Wall in Washington, D.C. When I read ... Read more »