Movie Reviews
Free Eats
Two midget pickpockets disguised as infants infiltrate a charity dinner at the home of a rich woman, and steal all their jewelry. Only the gang know these “kids” can talk, and are packing heat. They aren’t believed at first, but eventually they expose the bad guys.
Hook and Ladder
More amazing vehicles, this time three fire trucks. They find a barn on fire, and it is full of dynamite. Stymie saves the day!
Moonrise Kingdom
Every once in a while a movie comes along that I find it difficult to describe. Sometimes it is even hard to explain why I liked it. I live for those moments. How many cookie-cutter CGI extravaganzas like The Avengers, The Hobbit, and The Dark Knight Rises do you think we get in a typical year? Thirty? Forty? And how many really unusual ... Read more »
Birthday Blues
Skinflint Pa won’t buy a new dress for Ma’s birthday. To raise money for a new dress, the son and his friends bake a cake with prizes in it and sell tickets to other kids. Naturally the kitchen is a disaster area.
Moonlight Mile
Excellent. Wonderful cast, led by Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon. A young man’s fiancée is murdered, and he moves in with her parents, and they all deal with their grief in different ways.
Fish Hooky
The school is going on a field trip to an amusement park on a pier, but the gang doesn’t know that, so they play hooky, only to find they have missed all the fun. When they go anyway there is a chase through the park, over all the rides.. Old Our Gangster Mickey Daniels plays a truant officer.
Moon
Several people have written to me, recommending this modest, independent movie, saying it was good hard SF. And it was, in some ways. However …
Plot: (CONTAINS SPOILERS) A man has a three-year contract to run a moon base, all alone. Already I’m frowning … but never mind. He’s going a little bonkers. (Well, duuuh.) He supervises four big robot harvesters that are collecting Helium-3 ... Read more »
Free Wheeling
The prop department at Hal Roach and MGM always outdid themselves in these little two-reelers. Here they create a donkey-powered taxi, a typical Rube Goldberg machine with ingenious linkages, cobbled together out of scraps and covered with misspelled words. The plot: A rich kid with a hypochondriac mother who is convinced he is sickly just wants to go out and play with Stymie and the gang. ... Read more »
Forgotten Babies
Impossible to make this one these days. The kids go fishing and elect Spanky to babysit all the really young kids, about a dozen of them. The kids wreck the house. One kid keeps tottering to the top of the stairs and then starting down. I hope they had a safety cable on him. These days, it would be child abuse to film that scene.
The First Round-up
They all go on a camping trip, but won’t allow Spanky and his younger friend to go. But when they get there, worn out and hungry, Spanky is already there. They hitchhiked! Only Spanky remembered to bring food, or a good sleeping bag … or much of anything else. At night they get spooked, and run home. A pretty good one.