Movie Reviews
Looper
There’s a problem inherent in all time travel stories, and it’s quite simple to state: They’re impossible. You may have heard of the grandfather paradox, which is that you invent a time machine, go back in time, kill your grandfather or do something that causes him to die, in which case you were never born, never built the time machine, never killed your grandfather. Everything’s okay ... Read more »
Mamma Mia!
I don’t know much about ABBA. I know a few of their songs, ones that got so much play that you could hardly have missed them, like “Dancing Queen” and “Take a Chance on Me” and something about Hernando or Fernando or Orlando (I’m terrible at hearing lyrics). I also know it’s hip to look down your critical nose at them, like the Bee Gees and John Denver and Neil Diamond. I don’t care about ... Read more »
The Lookout
This is a little gem, not quite on the order of Red Rock West, Fargo, or A Simple Plan, but very good nonetheless. High school hockey star is driving like an idiot with three friends, crashes the car, killing the friends and leaving himself brain damaged. He’s not stupid, but has ... Read more »
Malta Story
I’m a sort of WWII buff, but I hadn’t known much about the siege of Malta. The little island is smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and thus, in wartime, was a vital place for airfields used to attack convoys coming from any direction The British held it, but it was a very tenuous hold. The British troops and RAF pilots and the Maltese people were hammered every day by ... Read more »
Major League
The owner of the Cleveland Indians dies and his ex-showgirl wife inherits the team. She hates Cleveland (well, who doesn’t?), and wants to move to Miami. But she can’t do it unless the team draws fewer than 800,000 fans. So she fires all the best players—not that Cleveland had any at that time—and hires a bunch of weirdos, rejects, retreads, and assorted losers. Naturally, they overcome ... Read more »
Major Barbara
I’ve not seen a lot of George Bernard Shaw’s plays, just Saint Joan on the stage, Pygmalion (1938) with Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard, and of course My Fair Lady on stage and screen, if that counts. Here is Hiller again in the title role, this time opposite Rex Harrison. It left me a bit confused, and I guess ... Read more »
The Major and the Minor
This was Billy Wilder’s first film as a director. It is also a real education in just how much the world had changed in 70 years. Ginger Rogers doesn’t have enough money to take the train home, so she dresses down and pretends to be 12 to qualify for the youth fare, but the conductors aren’t buying it when they catch her smoking. (No 12-year-old could possibly ... Read more »
The Maid
There was a time in my life when I had a cleaning service come to the house once a week and tidy things up. That’s my only experience of household help. Even that little bit made me uncomfortable. I think if I got rich I could get used to having employees to garden, clean, and polish the Rolls and feed the polo ponies, but I think I’d want to keep it on an employer/employee basis. Some ... Read more »
The Magnificent Ambersons
This was the second film Orson Welles made in Hollywood, and the first one he didn’t control entirely. He never again had the sort of blank check he had for Citizen Kane, and spent much of his life trying to raise the money he needed for his independent projects. So the studio took control of this one when it was finished, and cut one ... Read more »
The Magnetic Monster
Here’s a perfect illustration of two sort of sad facts. One, I’ll bet a lot of drive-in audiences were pretty pissed off at this film. There is no “monster,” as most patrons would expect. It’s about some mysterious “element” that absorbs energy and turns it into matter, doubling in size every 11 hours. Soon, it will be heavy enough to knock Earth out of its orbit. It also manifests ... Read more »