Movie Reviews
Pauly Shore is Dead
I didn’t bother to rent this, but I had to include it simply because when I saw it sitting on the shelf I felt a surge of joy. [Bite your tongue.] Reading it made me happy. [Bite your tongue.] Writing it down makes me happy. [Bite your tongue.] Pauly Shore is dead. Pauly Shore is dead. Pauly Shore is dead. [Bite your tongue. Bite your tongue. Bite your tongue.] Cheers me right up. [Bite ... Read more »
Paul
It’s funny how for many years now, my favorite SF movies have tended to be spoofs, satires, like Galaxy Quest or Idiocracy. Well, maybe it’s not so funny, since the reason these movies score so heavily is that most movie science fiction is idiotic, on the seventh-grade level (or lower). It’s so easy to satirize or lampoon, it’s such a ... Read more »
RED
Sometimes an action movie can be completely ridiculous and I can still have a lot of fun. This is one of them. It alternates between over-the-top but fun action scenes and comic releases of tension. Most of the humor comes from Mary Louise Parker, who is very good as a government worker Bruce Willis has been talking to simply because he is terminally lonely, and ends up fleeing for her ... Read more »
The Reckoning
A touring troupe of actors in 1380 come to a village where a deaf-mute woman is about to be hanged for murder. They begin to suspect she is innocent. The movie is well done, and reminds one a little of Hamlet (“The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king!”), and a little like Agatha Christie where Poirot gets everybody together to explain the murder, and something ... Read more »
Patton
I suppose that as long as the human gene pool throws up walking piles of shit like Kim Jong-il, Osama bin Laden, and Adolf Hitler, we will need men like George S. Patton to stand against them … but I sure wish we didn’t. I think most military historians would agree that he was America’s best fighting general since Robert E. Lee (who, technically, was on the other side, but he was a West ... Read more »
Rebel Without a Cause
I know it’s heresy, I know this was an incredibly influential movie, but, frankly, I thought it was pretty bad. I’ve never been a James Dean fan, I thought he was a haircut in search of a personality. His character here, Jim Stark, is a big crybaby. He don’t get enough love and understanding from his parents for his totally inexplicable angst and alienation, which he ... Read more »
Real Women Have Curves
Could be a good double feature with Raising Victor Vargas. A “traditionally built” (as Mma Precious Ramotswe from The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books would put it) Latino teen in Los Angeles wants to go to college but is being pressured by her overweight mother to (1) lose weight, and (2) go to work in the family dress ... Read more »
A Patch of Blue
Aside from figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I can’t think of a person who has done more for civil rights than Sidney Poitier. King was the man on the political side, pushing new laws and breaking old barriers on the battlefields. Poitier was up there on the silver screen, where his influence was arguably even more profound, because his movies showed how ... Read more »
The Reader
Michael is 15, Hanna (Kate Winslet in her Oscar-winning role) is 30-something. It’s Germany in 1958, and they’re having a torrid affair. But she wants him to read to her before they have sex. Then she leaves him. Years later (I think about 1965, but the movie jumps around a lot and can get confusing) he is in law school and learns she is on trial with five other women as an SS ... Read more »
Ray
It’s a formula biopic, okay? There are absolutely no surprises, and even though it’s all pretty much real, Ray Charles’ life was a success cliché: came from nowhere, struggled against his handicap with the help of a mother who wouldn’t let him be a cripple, has this musical genius, finds his sound, breaks out, turns on his early friends at Atlantic, makes a public moral stand, is almost ... Read more »