The Driver

I had been hearing about this movie for years. It was dumped by the studio, no publicity, but it has gained a cult following, like Vanishing Point, which it somewhat resembles. It is minimalist cinema, neo-noir (which, I think, means a noir sensibility but in color), and a heckuva lot of fun. What it’s about is cars going very fast through improbable Los Angeles ... Read more »

Driving Miss Daisy

Best Picture. Best Actress: Jessica Tandy. And yet here’s another film that has become a bit problematic. There are these memes circulating out there under the names like “white savior” and “magic Negro.” I think this one has been accused of being the latter. I’m not entirely sure what the term means, and am not really moved to make a search. It sometimes seems to me that there are a lot ... Read more »

The Drop

First there was a short story, “Animal Rescue,” by Dennis Lehane. The author then turned it into a screenplay, and wrote a novel from it after that. (This was the same creation sequence of my short story, “Air Raid,” and my movie script and novel, Millennium.)

This is a competent but not ground-breaking crime story. Well, they can’t all be ... Read more »

Drumline

I admit to a lot of prejudice in favor of this one. I was in the high school band, and it was the best part of my education. So I love marching bands. Having said that, there was a lot of difference between the white school and the black school styles of marching and playing. (I grew up in the segregated South, in Texas.) My band would not, could not, have done the sort of things they do ... Read more »

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon

In the ‘70s and into the ‘80s I never missed an issue of the National Lampoon. I had a complete run from the first issue until at some point it just seemed to run out of steam, stopped being very funny. I wish I still had them. But in its heyday there was nothing funnier, nothing edgier, nothing more outrageous. Absolutely nothing was out of bounds. Nothing was ... Read more »

The Duchess

What did I tell you? Mount a period production like this, with good actors and a decent script, and you are guaranteed a nomination in one of these categories: Art Direction, or Costume Design. This one got both. Academy members have very little imagination. How hard is it to open history book and see what the useless upper class was wearing and what sort of obscene piles of rock they were ... Read more »

Duck Soup

The Marx Brothers didn’t make all that many films—just 13 from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1949—but I’d say that all but one of them (the last; even Groucho didn’t like it) are classics. This one is probably my favorite, even over the wonderful A Night at the Opera. The wild anarchy reaches new ... Read more »

Duck, You Sucker

Duck, You Sucker (1971) Original title: Giù la testa, which my online translator renders as “Down the head.” As in “keep your head down,” I guess. Online translators suck at idiom. (Which would probably translate as “perform fellatio on a figure of speech.”) To complicate matters further, the VHS tape I watched had retitled it to A Fistful of ... Read more »

The Dukes of Hazzard

The Dukes of Hazzard (2005)

When I saw in the New Times that the double feature at the Sunset was what were, by all accounts, the two dumbest movies of the summer, and maybe of all time, I briefly considered going anyway. But then I remembered what my granddaddy used to say when some unpleasant course of action was suggested: “Let’s don’t and say we did.” He’s right. Some movies ... Read more »

Duma

Try these titles on for size: The Black Stallion, Never Cry Wolf. Most people I know who have seen them would put them high on their list of favorite movies of their type. Now try two more: Fly Away Home, Wind. I think most people have never seen them, and it’s their loss, as they are as good as the first two. They are all beautifully photographed, ... Read more »