Movie Reviews
Titles starting with 0-9
13 Going On 30
Think big. No, I mean thinkBig. The movie, with Tom Hanks. This is the same deal, a young person wishing to be a grown-up and getting her wish. The difference is it’s more like amnesia; she’s had a life those 17 years, and seems to have been a conniving cu— … ... Read more »
13 Moons
Not much info was available on this, but I rented it on the strength of Steve Buscemi and Peter Dinklage being in it. What it tries to do is capture the weirdness of Scorsese’s Read more »
1408
I guess you could think of this as The Shining Lite. (Hey, is that a pun?) That movie dealt with a haunted hotel, this one is just a haunted hotel room. (A suite, actually, and quite a nice one before the SFX people get at it.) But that makes it a little more manageable. The Shining was filmed twice, and the problem in the first was ... Read more »
15 Minutes
This movie is a cracking good thriller for about 90 minutes. Unfortunately, it still has 30 minutes to go.
16 Years of Alcohol
This Scottish film can’t seem to decide what it wants to do. It’s narrated by a dead man, and most of what he says could be on a Zen Hallmark card, and he says it over and over. We see a man with serious issues around violence, not alcohol, and he’s smart enough to realize he’s capable of ... Read more »
1776
1776 (1972) I’ve always had a soft spot I my heart for this one, though I know it’s wildly inaccurate. I saw a stage production of it in Eugene, Oregon, before I saw the movie, and it seemed quite faithful. The Wiki article about it goes on and on about things that it got wrong, and things that we re-arranged for dramatic purposes. The fact is, we don’t know what happened in Independence ... Read more »
1776
I’ve always had a soft spot I my heart for this one, though I know it’s wildly inaccurate. I saw a stage production of it in Eugene, Oregon, before I saw the movie, and it seemed quite faithful. The Wiki article about it goes on and on about things that it got wrong, and things that were re-arranged for dramatic purposes. The fact is, we don’t know what happened in Independence Hall when ... Read more »
2019 Animated Short Subject Academy Award Nominees
It’s an oddly lackluster set of animated shorts this year. There’s nothing wrong with any of the films, unlike last year when the perfectly awful Dear Basketball beat out four genuinely good ones. (It should have been subtitled I, Kobe Bryant, Am Just So Damn Wonderful!!!) It’s just that none of them really ... Read more »
1917
Directors like to show off with long takes, as long as possible. The most extreme example in classics is Hitchcock’s Rope, which takes place in real time. Cameras in those days could only hold so much film, so Hitch had to use a few little tricks which are easy to spot. Much later was Russian Ark, a lovely 96-minute film which was a ... Read more »