Truth

As journalistic stories go, this is no All the President’s Men, but that’s not really a put-down. It’s interesting and well-made, but the bottom line is, what’s at stake here is really not all that Earth-shattering. Will Dan Rather be disgraced and have to resign? Um … color me not too damn worried.

The story here concerns one of the nastiest dirty tricks ... Read more »

The Truth About Charlie

It takes balls to remake one of the best romantic-comedy-thrillers of all time. Balls, and a generous helping of idiocy. Jonathan Demme has certainly made some good movies (Philadelphia, Silence of the Lambs), but what possessed him to replace Cary Grant with Mark Wahlberg and Audrey Hepburn with … Thandie Newton??? And to let it all degenerate into a ... Read more »

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

There is a strange little genre called “horror comedy” that is clearly not for everybody. But when they are done well, I really love them. Probably the best one I’ve seen is Shaun of the Dead. This one is almost that good.

It’s an ingenious concept. One of the popular tropes in real horror movies is the degenerate redneck or hillbilly who preys on college ... Read more »

Tulip Fever

Before the dot.com bubble popped in the 1990s, before the stock bubble burst in 1929, there was tulip mania in Holland in late 1636. Prices for rare bulbs soared to ridiculous heights. Wikipedia lists this as the price paid for a single bulb of the Viceroy strain:

Two lasts of wheat 448ƒ
Four lasts of rye 558ƒ
Four fat oxen 480ƒ
Eight fat swine 240ƒ
Twelve ... Read more »

Tully

This turned out to be less a movie review than a rant. Sorry about that.

I like to think that there really isn’t any particular “type” of movie that I either totally love or totally hate. I’m kidding myself, of course, though there are very few genres of cinema where there hasn’t been at least a few examples that I thought were above the rest. There have been a (very) few superhero ... Read more »

The Tunnel

This is a re-make of the Danish-Swedish TV series The Bridge, AKA Bron, AKA Broen. There are several possible bridges they could have used in the UK, including the Tower Bridge in London and the massive Firth of Forth bridge in Edinburgh. In France there are the famous bridges over the Seine and, I assume, ... Read more »

Tuntamaton sotilas

Here’s a true rarity. It’s not available on DVD in the US; the only way to see it is probably the way we got it, as a gift from Jarmo, our friend in Finland. I get the impression it’s sort of like a Finnish Gone With the Wind, the definitive epic of a critical time in the history of the young republic, their greatest threat and their finest ... Read more »

Turnabout

I’m a fan of the movie Topper, written by Thorne Smith, a writer of humorous, racy (for the time) fantasy fiction. There was usually something off-the-wall about his stories, like the ghosts (played by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in the film), or a fountain of youth, or some sort of transformation. In this one a husband and wife switch bodies. Mostly this ... Read more »

Turtles Can Fly

(Kurdish language) A joint Iran-Iraq production, and the first film produced after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It takes place in a Kurdish refugee camp along the Iraqi-Turkish border, in an area hopefully called “Kurdistan” by the people who live there. Kurds are a people without a homeland, being unwelcome guests in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Nobody wants them, but everybody wants their ... Read more »