Movie Reviews
Titles starting with V
Vanishing Point
After seeing The Driver for the first time, I just had to check this one out again. I saw it for the first and last time when it was only a few years old, in the Embassy Theater on Market Street in San Francisco, where you could see three second-run feature films for not very much money and get a Depression-era spinning-wheel game called Ten-O-Win into the ... Read more »
Vanishing Point (Second Review)
In the Haight-Ashbury in the late ‘60s if you needed to get back to the East, everyone knew the best way to do it. “Yeah, man, far out! You just go to one of these drive-away companies. They’ll give you a groovy set of wheels and they’ll pay you to drive it all the way!” And it was true, though I’ve always thought it probably wasn’t quite as easy as that. ... Read more »
Vanity Fair
This is one of those classics that I managed to avoid in high school. I haven’t even read the Classics Comix or the Cliffs Notes version, so I came into it knowing nothing at all except the name Becky Sharp. I am informed that the novel is “funny and quietly savage” (Roger Ebert). This film version by Mira Nair is great to look at and has some funny stuff, but it’s basically about a lot of ... Read more »
Vantage Point
How would you go about assassinating POTUS? Security around the great man (or whatever jack-off currently occupies the office) was already extremely high before 9/11, and now it’s reached surreal levels. I’ve given it some thought (hypothetically, of course, in story terms), and have concluded that it would either have to be something insanely complex, or something very, very simple. Under ... Read more »
Vegas Vacation
Oh, how that lovable Griswold family has fallen. The first two movies were terrific, I thought. The third one, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, was not nearly as good. This is the first one to drop the National Lampoon brand. There is only one good thing I can say about it: I heard it was terrible, so my expectations were so low ... Read more »
Venom
The well of “Marvel Universe” characters, something I know very little about, is apparently bottomless. Lower your bucket to the upper waters and you pull up Spiderman. Drop down a lot lower and you dredge up concepts like this one. It’s some sort of symbiote that has no trouble erupting from its host, increasing its mass tenfold instantaneously, and then slipping back inside and hiding, ... Read more »
Venus
Premiere magazine ran a list of the Top 100 movie performances of all time, and Peter O’Toole as T.E. Lawrence came in #1. I can think of a few other contenders, but I wouldn’t argue very hard against him. And it was his very first role! We had just seen him in Lawrence of Arabia, and I looked into him a bit and found he held the ... Read more »
Venus Beauty Institute
We rented this one mostly because of Audrey Tautou. She is very good, as usual, but she has a minor part. The star is Nathalie Baye, who is outstanding. The story leaves a bit to be desired, but I’d recommend it just for her performance.
Vera Drake
Sometimes I wish I didn’t follow the movie biz so closely. By watching the news, Ebert & Roeper, and reading reviews I usually know a lot about a movie before I see it, sometimes more than I’d really like to know. I wish I hadn’t known Vera Drake was a housekeeper who, to help out poor girls in trouble, also performs abortions. That way the scene where she casually pulls out her ... Read more »
Veronica Guerin
This lady was incredibly brave, and she paid for it, but the film lacked something for me. The ending was overdone, too. Nothing really new or interesting here.