Movie Reviews
The Loved One
Long before Six Feet Under there was The Loved One. Not that they have that much in common, as SFU is about a compassionate, family-run funeral home, and TLO is about the excesses of the Death Business, particularly in Southern California, very much lampooning such overblown and ... Read more »
The Man On the Train
An entrancing and mysterious French film starring a guy named Johnny Hallyday, who apparently is a rock and roll legend over there. He looks a bit like a world-weary Elvis, though lots smarter. Plot is hard to describe, but I liked it.
The Man On Lincoln’s Nose
This was the working title for North by Northwest. This film is a 40-minute documentary about Robert Boyle, who did the art direction for that movie and half a dozen other Hitchcock films, and was the production designer for many more movies. (He’s still alive, and if he makes it to October he will be 100 years old!) Since we’d just seen NxNW I thought it might ... Read more »
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Shakespeare’s comedies are silly. All of them. Take the plot of this one: Four dudes decide to swear off women for three years and devote themselves to the insane pleasures of study. Yeah, right, and you sort of know that one ain’t gonna last beyond Act Two. The delights here, as always in these plays, is the ... Read more »
Man On Fire
Denzel Washington apparently wants to be an action film leading man. I got no problem with that, I hope he gets very, very rich. But if he keeps making routine shoot-em-ups like this he’s going to lose my respect as one of the finest actors we’ve got. The first half is good, the little girl is amazing. The second half is unbelievable. Pretty much like Denzel’s last three or four films.
The Man in the White Suit
The Man in the White Suit (1951) Another of the classic Ealing comedies, once more starring Alec Guinness. This one has more of a political message than any of the others I’ve seen. Sidney Stratton is an eccentric, obsessed chemist who invents a fabric that is pretty much indestructible, and never gets dirty. At first a mill owner is eager to produce this stuff and get it on the market. ... Read more »
A Love Song for Bobby Long
Two ex-college professors are drinking themselves to death in a rundown house in New Orleans, quoting literature at each other. The woman who owns the house dies, and her estranged daughter shows up. They don’t tell her the house belongs to her. Fairly predictable complications ensue.
The Big Easy settings are great, and that’s a plus. John Travolta tries to do a southern accent, ... Read more »
Love Liza
Philip Seymour Hoffman is a fine actor and he works real hard here, but it was just too depressing and pointless.
Love and Other Drugs
The main attraction here seemed to be that Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway got naked a lot. He’s a drug rep—one of the lowest life-forms on the planet—and she’s a patient suffering from early-onset (very early) Parkinson’s Disease. The best thing here is the exposure of the totally corrupt, totally disgusting, illegal and immoral practices of Big Pharma [PigPharma]. I liked it that they ... Read more »
Love Actually
Full of clichés, overlong, predictable (I knew the curtain would rise to reveal Hugh Grant kissing his sweetie in front of an audience) … and yet we sort of liked it. The best part is Bill Nighy as a has-been rocker who records a truly awful Xmas song, and manages to accidentally turn it into a huge hit by going on radio and TV speaking about what an awful turd of a song it is. A ... Read more »