Movie Reviews
Matchstick Men
I am a collector of movies about con games. This is one of the better ones, and Nicholas Cage is very good.
The Matador
Pierce Brosnan is a hit man who is losing his touch, big time. Greg Kinnear is a businessman recently out of a job. They meet in Mexico City and, through a series of drunken and sober encounters, become friends. Part of it is that the hit man is undeniably charismatic and seems to be a genuinely nice guy. Part of it the sneaky fascination we all have with someone who is way out of the ... Read more »
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
The best sea adventure movie I have ever seen. I am now reading my way through the Aubrey/Maturin novels upon which the movie is based (apparently picking scenes from half a dozen of the books for a rip-roaring adventure that may not be historically accurate but is wonderfully rousing), and they are wonderful at capturing a brutal and heroic age very different from our own.
The Navigators
Ken Loach is a highly political left-wing director who specializes in little gems about the British working class. Though this one was reviewed very well, it didn’t work too well for me, maybe because it compares unfavorably with some of Loach’s other films, like Sweet Sixteen and Ladybird Ladybird.
The Master
The rumors were that this was to be a biography of that miserable charlatan, L. Ron Hubbard, and that the Scientologists were prepared to go to war over it. And brother, when those psychopaths go to war, you don’t want to get in their way. According to the producers, no one from the so-called church ever complained to them. The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, says he screened it for his ... Read more »
The Navigator
Buster Keaton liked huge props, and he found his biggest one here. In other films he employed a locomotive, a house built on a turntable and then moved onto railroad tracks, a steamboat, and a hurricane. But The Navigator tops them all. That’s the name of a passenger ship that was about to be scrapped and he was able to buy cheaply. The story is pretty thin, and ... Read more »
National Treasure
Once again, the reviews were so dismal we expected nothing, and were surprised. I was a blatant attempt to cash in on The Da Vinci Code … and so what? I thought that book was stupid, false, and very poorly written. Didn’t believe it for a nano-second. Still, Ron Howard is making it, starring Tom Hanks, and it is certain to be a blockbuster and may even be ... Read more »
The National Parks: America’s Best Idea
This is Ken Burns’ fifth series for PBS, after the monumental The Civil War, and the extremely good Baseball and Jazz. We haven’t seen The War yet, but we’re about to start it. There’s nobody better at documenting the American experience, and this series carries on like all the ... Read more »
National Lampoon’s Lost Reality
Lord, how the mighty have fallen. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, National Lampoon magazine was the funniest thing going. I owned every issue, and read them from cover to cover. Remember the cover where a revolver was pointed at a dog’s head, with the line If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Shoot This Dog? Something to offend everybody, but with wit. Then they started ... Read more »
Masked and Anonymous
This is a fairly incoherent movie, and not in a fun way. No surprise, since it was co-written by the star, Bob Dylan. One critic called it a collection of lines from Chinese fortune cookies. Dylan plays Jack Fate (heavy!) a washed up singer in some sort of future place that is very dismal and Orwellian. Or maybe it’s Mexico. Whatever, it’s the sort of mean streets that Dylan himself hasn’t ... Read more »