Cold Mountain

Lee and I loved this book so much we both read it twice. So we were a bit nervous about the adaptation … with good reason. Though there is much good about it, it did not really capture the magic of the book. The big reason, for me, was the casting of pretty-boy Jude Law as Inman. I’m beginning to think he’s vastly overrated. Inman should have been more rugged. And why, ... Read more »

Cold Pursuit

It is a pleasure to find a movie I knew nothing about, and find it’s one of the best films I’ve seen all year. This is Liam Neeson again, a guy who has become a hell of an action hero in his 60s. But this isn’t really one of those. Here, he’s a fairly ordinary dude who drives a snowplow in a part of Colorado where it can drift ten feet high. His son dies of a heroin overdose. His wife ... Read more »

Collateral

There is more character development in the first five minutes of Collateral that the whole putrid mess of AVP. It’s fast, it’s smart, it’s good to look at, the music rocks. I applaud Tom Cruise for taking the role of a very, very bad man, though an interesting one.

SPOILER WARNING

… though ... Read more »

College

This is not one of Buster Keaton’s best features … but then, he didn’t make any bad ones, so it’s well worth your time.

The Color Purple

You gotta wonder if this could have been made today. By that I mean directed by a white man, Steven Spielberg, and scripted by a white man, Menno Meyjes. Wouldn’t someone cry cultural appropriation? Shouldn’t all films about black people be written and directed by black people, or at least by “people of color?” I ask this sincerely, not sarcastically. I can see ... Read more »

Colossal

This little low-to-medium-budget gem totally tanked at the box office. I don’t know why. Probably not enough publicity. I know I never heard of it until I happened on the DVD.

Anne Hathaway is an alcoholic writer who has to leave New York and return to Stephen King country to try to get her life together. Meanwhile, a giant Godzilla-like monster is ravaging its way through Seoul, ... Read more »

Comanche Moon

There is so much plot here that it would be crazy for me to try to do it justice, so I’ll just mention some highlights. Val Kilmer is Inish Scull, one of the weirder characters McMurtry ever wrote, and he’s written some weird ones. Woodrow and Gus are in an expedition to find Buffalo Hump (this time played by the great Wes Studi) and Kicking Wolf. They don’t get far when Kicking Wolf ... Read more »

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

After the critical and commercial failure of Popeye, Robert Altman couldn’t really get the sort of projects he wanted in Hollywood, especially since many of his other films had had good reviews but bad box office. So he spent the whole decade of the ‘80s making films of plays. Some of them were good, and some not so good. He made one truly bad film, Read more »

Coming Home

Sometimes you just wonder … why bother? People work to change things, and ten years later, twenty years later, a century later, not much is different. Civil War veterans were treated abominably. Things were so bad for WWI vets that they marched on Washington in 1932, camped in a Hooverville, and had their heads busted by Douglas MacArthur and George Patton, and later had their ... Read more »