Fun with Dick and Jane

I remember the original version of this fondly because Jane Fonda took a leak. Think about it. In how many movies, before or since, have you ever seen a woman urinating? Guys piss all over the place in the movies, but women almost never. Actually, I just can’t think of another instance. Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m not a golden showers freak. It’s just such an unusual thing and I like ... Read more »

Funny Face

Audrey Hepburn was 29, Fred Astaire was 58. A bit old to play a romantic lead with a woman so young, probably, though the chemistry works well enough. Fred wasn’t past his sell-by date, but it was coming up. This was his next-to-last dancing film, just before Silk Stockings. Neither film made money, and he hung up his tap shoes.

He really hasn’t lost a ... Read more »

Funny Farm

Here’s a comedy that can’t decide what it wants to be. It begins as an amusing fish-out-of-water story, like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. City couple move to the country for the idyllic peace and quiet, and it doesn’t quite work out that way. You’ve seen a dozen of them. It’s well done, Chevy Chase was always good at this sort of thing. Then it shifts ... Read more »

Funny Girl

Barbra Streisand was already a singing star when she reached Broadway with a small part in I Can Get It For You Wholesale. I had thought she then became a big Broadway star … and she was, in the sense that her next appearance was this smash hit. But those were her only two Broadway appearances, she was not a queen of the Great White Way ... Read more »

Funny Girl (Second Review)

(Second review, written before I realized I had already reviewed it.) If I believed in God, I would thank him every day for Barbra Streisand. She can sing, she can act, both drama and comedy, at which she is one of the best ever. She can sell a song better than anyone before or since, except maybe Judy Garland. This was her first film, and she won an Oscar for it (tied with Katherine ... Read more »

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

As with The Boyfriend, I figure there are two ways of looking at this movie. You can gripe about what it is not, or you can just enjoy what it is. Many people who saw The Boyfriend on the stage complained that that crazy man, Ken Russell, took what was a sweet, silly little musical ... Read more »

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Writers and directors can get some pretty weird ideas. Sometimes these experiments work, sometimes they don’t. Maybe the all-time worst was Gus Van Sant’s decision to remake Psycho shot-for-shot, and in color. Then there was I’m Not There, where six different actors, including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, and a ... Read more »

Furious 7

First, for the first hour I was pretty much at sea as a host of characters was introduced who meant nothing to me. I may have seen the original Fast and Furious (I just don’t recall), but I didn’t see two through six, and there seems to have been a ton of back story. Marriages, deaths, a woman who has lost her memory. It’s like trying to watch the fifth Read more »

Fury

Directed by Fritz Lang, starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney. Maybe only a foreigner could have made this indictment of lynching in a small town. Lang had just arrived from Germany, fleeing the Nazis, and this was his first film in Hollywood. Tracy is suspected of a kidnapping, and for the first half of the movie the tension builds as the usual loudmouths and non-thinkers decide to ... Read more »