Movie Reviews
Titles starting with C
The Committments
DIRECTED by Alan Parker
PRODUCED by Lynda Myles & Roger Randall-Cutler
WRITTEN by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, & Roddy Doyle
BASED ON A NOVEL by Roddy Doyle
MUSIC by The Commitments
CINEMATOGRAPHY by Gale Tattersall
PRODUCTION DESIGN by Brian Morris
The Commitments is an artificial band. They were assembled for this picture from the ... Read more »
The Commuter
Bang-bang chop-socky shoot-‘em-up pictures starring Liam Neeson, the world’s most elderly action star, can be engaging, in spite of their sheer improbability. We enjoyed Taken, because it was tense and well-made, and stayed just within the knife edge of possibility. He was 56. Then they made Taken 2, when he was 60, and it slid over ... Read more »
The Company
I’m a little conflicted about this one. I love Robert Altman for his willingness to take risks … but sometimes it works better than others. The dance numbers are all well worth watching, some are really great. The story never really comes together; in fact, there is very little story at all, which makes it seem strange, because we know Malcolm McDowell and Neve Campbell are actors, ... Read more »
The Company Men
You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t get real upset when I see people in “middle management” lose their jobs. I’m not without sympathy, really I’m not, I know they suffer. But still … Ben Affleck works for a company called GTX. They started out small, just Tommy Lee Jones and Craig T. Nelson, building boats, then ships. Now one of their clients is Royal ... Read more »
Concussion
It’s not really possible to completely dislike this film, it is so earnest and sincere. But I found it easy to be bored by it, several times. The tale of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born pathologist who discovered Chronic Traumatic Encepalopathy (CTE) and his subsequent fight with the paid medical whores of the NFL is a classic David and Goliath story, and proceeds exactly as expected, ... Read more »
Coneheads
I first saw the Coneheads in Philadelphia, I believe in 1976. I was a guest at an SF convention there, and many of us were gathered in the con suite to watch this fairly new show, “Saturday Night Live.” On the TV Dan Aykroyd comes through a door wearing a very tall stocking cap. He takes it off … and his head is 18 inches tall! People began to laugh, and kept laughing more and more as the ... Read more »
Coneheads
I first saw the Coneheads in Philadelphia, I believe in 1976. I was a guest at an SF convention there, and many of us were gathered in the con suite to watch this fairly new show, “Saturday Night Live.” On the TV Dan Aykroyd comes through a door wearing a very tall stocking cap. He takes it off … and his head is 18 inches tall! People began to laugh, and kept laughing more and more as the ... Read more »
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Anybody who believes that Chuck Barris, creator of “The Gong Show” and other television brain rot (that look positively tame compared to the unthinkable pustulent atrocities currently being broadcast as “reality television”) actually worked as a hit man for the CIA is probably dumb enough to vote for George Bush again. I personally think Barris never intended that ... Read more »
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
Quite an unusual movie here. It was the first to boldly name who the bad guys were—German fucking Nazis—and the first to have Nazi in the title. As such, it was very controversial in some quarters of America: the fascist German-American Bund of traitorous turncoats, for one. It has been said that, after the movie was released, the FBI or someone in government told the producers not to make ... Read more »
Confessions of a Superhero
One of the pleasures of living maybe a mile and a half from Grauman’s Chinese Theater is that we get to drive by that two-block tourist stretch quite often. There’s always something going on; in fact, that street is closed off about as much as it’s open, for one thing or another, for as much as 10 days at Oscar time. One of the things that is always happening is the costumed characters ... Read more »