Movie Reviews
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
This is a loving recreation of those gawdawful B&W monster movies from the ‘50s by Ed Wood and other hacks. It is very well done, some real howlers in the script, but it’s caught in a strange irony. They duplicate everything, including the deadening pace. It works for about 45 minutes. Unfortunately, it’s 90 minutes long. If you really love those old movies you might have fun. I don’t ... Read more »
Lost in Translation
Great performances, intelligent script, fascinating settings. Why didn’t I like it more? Richard Roeper said people have actually come up to him, angry that he recommended it. There’s a theory going around that if you saw it in a theater you were likely to love it; if you saw it on DVD, you didn’t. We saw the DVD. [I liked it.] So did I; just not as much as I expected to.
Lost in La Mancha
A heartbreaker, all about the best movie you ever didn’t see because it didn’t get made, and why it didn’t get made. Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote would have been at least fabulously interesting visually, to judge from the pre-production we see. A basic course on all that can go wrong in the production of a movie. And you thought Read more »
The Making of Miss Saigon (The Heat is On)
The Making of Miss Saigon (The Heat is On) (1989) Here is one of the Broadway smash hit musicals I’d most like to see. No movie has ever been made from it (nor Sunset Boulevard, as well), unlike The Phantom of the Opera and The Producers. I recently saw a story that suggested the investors are waiting to see ... Read more »
Lost Highway
What are you going to do about a guy like David Lynch? He went right from Eraserhead, one of the only independent “underground” films I thought was really brilliant, right to the big-studio and equally brilliant The Elephant Man, produced by Mel Brooks, of all people. Then he made the disastrously awful and expensive Read more »
The Man From Planet X
If you read every issue of magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and others like it back in the ‘50s, the critter from this movie will be very familiar to you. All those magazines suffered from a real shortage of images to use. It’s not like today, where every other movie is a creepy slasher or bad SF or monster or vampire movie and there are endless ... Read more »
Lord Love a Duck
So Roddy McDowall is this 38-year-old high school student at a soulless new school run by a wildly overacting Harvey Corman … George Axelrod obviously had been watching films from “Mods and Rockers” London in the Swingin’ ‘60s, in particular two films by Richard Lester: A Hard Day’s Night and The Knack … and How to Get It. He attempts ... Read more »
The Man From Elysian Fields
An undiscovered gem. Andy Garcia is a novelist who wrote a good first novel and a bad second one. He meets Mick Jagger, of all people, who runs an escort service for rich women. Complications ensue. James Coburn is very good, too, as a Hemingway figure.
The Man From Earth
Here’s a rare thing. A true SF story that has not an ounce of violence or special effects. It is so talky and static, in fact, that it could easily have been presented on the stage. This is not a complaint. It is a movie of ideas, and intelligent discussion among smart people. The premise is that a man is 14,000 years old, and for the first time in his life is telling his story to friends ... Read more »
Mammoth
Since I recently published a book with the same title, I felt it was my unpleasant duty to watch this. So I recorded it while we watched The West Wing and The Sopranos, then watched the tape the next night.
Very soon I was making a lot of mental notes, various nasty things to say, really vicious cuts and overhand chops and knees ...
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