Movie Reviews
The Dragon Tattoo Trilogy: Extended Edition
Here’s a remarkable thing. We loved the three movies made from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2 hours and 32 minutes), The Girl Who Played With Fire (2 hours and 9 minutes) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2 hours and 27 minutes). That adds up to a bit over seven ... Read more »
Dr. T and the Women
Robert Altman was one of my favorite directors. He labored in the television chain gangs for many years, and then broke out with one of my Top 25 films: M*A*S*H. After that he skyrocketed with one popular and/or critical hit after another … for about a decade. After that, his record became a bit spotty. We all remember Nashville and ... Read more »
Downhill Racer
We’ve been watching the Vancouver Winter Olympics the last two weeks, so it seemed logical to take another look at this film, which I believe is a classic. Michael Ritchie made two terrific films with Robert Redford early in his career, films that went behind the scenes to tell it like it really is: The Candidate, and this one, which I think is one of the best ... Read more »
Downfall
The story of Hitler’s last days in the Berlin Bunker. This story has been fictionalized at least once before in 1973 with Alec Guinness playing Der Fuhrer, in Hitler: The Last Ten Days, and in countless documentaries, and though the reviews were way beyond excellent (it currently sits at an astonishing #59 on the IMDb’s Top list), I kept wondering: What new could ... Read more »
Coneheads
I first saw the Coneheads in Philadelphia, I believe in 1976. I was a guest at an SF convention there, and many of us were gathered in the con suite to watch this fairly new show, “Saturday Night Live.” On the TV Dan Aykroyd comes through a door wearing a very tall stocking cap. He takes it off … and his head is 18 inches tall! People began to laugh, and kept laughing more and more as the ... Read more »
Down With Love
I’m sort of surprised at how much I liked this movie. I mean, the main thing it has going for it is the perfect way it replicates those awful Doris Day-Rock Hudson oddities of the early ‘60s, with their gigantic Technicolor sets with no shadows, the costume changes in every scene, and the coy sexual humor. They weren’t very good even at the time, and they haven’t aged well. However, it is ... Read more »
Doubt
First, I have to state that the Catholic Church is a culture as alien to me as Hindus, holy rollers, ultra-orthodox Judaism, Islam, or creatures from the planet Tralfamadore. They lost me long before the totally idiotic doctrine of Papal infallibility. So I’m admitting—no, declaring—a Reformationist, lapsed-Lutheran prejudice before I even get started. I’ll try ... Read more »
Double Wedding
Between 1934 and 1947, William Powell and Myrna Loy made 14 movies together, all but three of them more or less screwball comedies. Six of those were in the Thin Man series, which seems to have had very little relationship to the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name. This one is their seventh pairing, which doesn’t quite put them in a par with Laurel and ... Read more »
Double Jeopardy
Sometimes a good director like Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies, Breaker Morant) just gets involved with the wrong material. This story is lame, predictable , easy to figure out. Don’t bother.
The Door in the Floor
This movie has so much going for it, mostly in the acting department, that it’s a shame that it really doesn’t amount to much in the end. A couple has lost two sons in some sort of accident, and their marriage is coming apart. They’ve had another child, a girl of 4, but the mom (Kim Basinger) is too deep in her grief to have bonded with her. Her husband is Jeff Bridges, and he’s a writer ... Read more »