Movie Reviews
The Magdalene Sisters
One of the best of the sub-genre of movies dealing with the atrocities committed by the Catholic Church, or the Catholic-dominated government, of Ireland. I’ve seen half a dozen of them, and they all boggle the mind. This particular one lasted until 1996, if you can believe it. Young women were consigned to “laundries” that might horrify a San Quentin inmate, without trial, for ... Read more »
Mafioso
Antonio is a Sicilian who left the island years ago and has made a life for himself in Milano, where he is happily married with two daughters. But he feels the pull of Sicily, and returns with them to visit his family. He’s sort of an Italian Clark Griswold, he overdoes anything he attempts, so he assures the wife that it’s not what she’s heard it is, crawling with Mafia thugs, in fact, ... Read more »
Made in Dagenham
Here’s a fun movie about labor organizing that will surely remind you of Norma Rae, and possibly of The Pajama Game. Who can resist a story about the little people rising up against the people who are exploiting them? I sure can’t. This one is about a strike in 1968 at a Ford plant just outside London. Ford employs 40,000 men and 187 ... Read more »
Made For Each Other
I usually cut a lot of slack for these movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s, but this one just got my goat. It reminded me of a much superior film also starring Jimmy Stewart, It’s a Wonderful Life, but doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence. Jimmy and Carol Lombard meet and get married in 24 hours. Even I found myself agreeing with his boss and his mother ... Read more »
Madame Curie
You don’t watch these ‘40s biographies to learn about the people being profiled, at least not if you have any sense. They will follow the grand outlines of the life of the person in question, where they were, the notable things they did (though those events can be seriously skewed, too), but everything else is made up by the screenwriter. I have no idea—though I strongly doubt it—if Pierre ... Read more »
Madagascar
Like The Lion King, this movie has to deal with the paradox of a carnivore associating with herbivores. Simba solved it by eating grubs and maggots (uh, no thanks, but I will have some of the BBQ meerkat, thank you), which just made me wonder, what about insect rights? Here, Alex the lion learns to eat sushi (actually, I don’t think he’d dig the rice, though he’d ... Read more »
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him in some weird dome thingy.
Mad Hot Ballroom
For quite some time now, schools in the five boroughs of New York City have been running a program from the American Ballroom Theater called Dancing Classrooms. About 6,000 kids enter the program, all of them 5th graders, 10 or 11 years old.
Try to remember what you were like in the 5th grade. You’d passed through that brief period when it didn’t much matter which sex you were; ... Read more »
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
I’m not a fan of concert movies, but there are a handful of exceptions, and this is one. It follows the triumphant tour of Joe Cocker and his band—actually more like a family, in the good old hippie sense—through North America, the tour that made him a big star. There has never been and probably never will be again a singer like Joe Cocker. The first time I saw him I seriously thought he ... Read more »