Movie Reviews
The Cooler
Just as good as everybody said it was going to be. I don’t believe for an instant that luck can rub off, but accepting that one unlikelihood, this is exactly how the life of a professional Jonah would be. The theme of luck, getting it and losing it, even justifies the highly unlikely happy ending.
Cookie’s Fortune
I’ve seen most of Robert Altman’s movies, but as with most directors, there are a few gaps here and there. For some reason I had pigeonholed this one as being not one of his best. Don’t know why. And while it is not one of his very best—a high standard indeed—it sure ain’t the worst. In fact, I liked it a lot.
Patricia Neal is Cookie, an aging woman in ... Read more »
Doc Martin, Series 2, 3, & 4
Read my review above. We never got bored, and in fact watched three or even four episodes a night until we had completed the series. It’s very good, we highly recommend it. The only trouble for Americans might be understanding all the dialogue, and unfortunately it is not subtitled for the Brit-English-Impaired. I didn’t miss many lines, but I’ve watched a lot of British movies. Martin ... Read more »
Doc Martin, Series 1
This was recommended to us by Devin, a fan who came by and took us out to lunch after I had signed all his books. Nice guy, and we loved this British series that you could call a sitcom, as it is certainly funny enough, but it’s not written purely for hoots. The humour is situational, there are few big punch lines of the sort that real people would never say, the sort that finally turned ... Read more »
Dive Bomber
Here’s a story that was never destined for any acting or writing awards, but is worthwhile just for the airplanes. It was groundbreaking for its extensive use of color aerial photography, which was almost impossible with previous equipment. Before this, color film had been a three-strip process. They shot in B&W with a color filter on each film strip. This made the cameras very bulky. ... Read more »
Conviction
Based on a true story, and it’s an incredible one. Betty Ann (Hilary Swank) and her brother (Sam Rockwell) are very close. They come from trailer trash, their mother was good at getting pregnant and nothing else. They had seven siblings, and the nine of them had seven different fathers. (Sounds like a Grimm fairy tale, doesn’t it? With emphasis on the grim.) He is convicted of murder, ... Read more »
Distant
Shot one: A guy is walking across a snowy field toward the camera. This takes two minutes. He passes out of camera view. Shot two: a bus appears in the far distance. It approaches. This takes one minute. Now we see the credits, black with unintelligible noises over it. We’re six minutes into the film, 8640 frames of film have been wasted, and nothing has happened! Nothing continues to ... Read more »
Control
Rented this one on the strength of the cast: Ray Liotta and Willem Dafoe. Got off to a bang-up start. An unrepentant killer is being put to death by lethal injection. His life flashes before his eyes: his mother’s murder, abuse, juvie hall, it’s a real horror. We see him committing his murders. Then they wake him up. He’s been chosen to test a new drug that could make him a good citizen. ... Read more »
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
For some years now I’ve kept a few stories in my head, horror stories that prove to me that sometimes it is much, much better not to survive.
There was the guy who was burning trash in a barrel and, when the fire was getting out of hand, threw a bucket of water on it, only it turned out to be a bucket of gasoline. He survived. 80% third degree burns. No ... Read more »
The Contender
What a script, and what a story! The writing is incredibly sharp, and the cast of Joan Allen, Gary Oldman, Jeff Bridges, and Christian Slater, has never been better. This movie shows just how dirty politics can be, in a way that has seldom been done so convincingly, and then drives the knife deeper into the back, and then twists it. And then … it goes all soft and mushy, sort of a ... Read more »