Movie Reviews
Defending Your Life
Albert Brooks’s real birth name is Albert Einstein. No kidding! And his brother is Bob Einstein, better known as Super Dave Osborne, the world’s worst stunt man. Their father was a radio comedian, Harry Einstein, known as “Parkyakarkus,” who died during a Friar’s Club roast of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. You couldn’t make this stuff up!
Brooks has made several first-rate comedies, ... Read more »
Deep Water
In 1967 Francis Chichester became the first person to sail solo around the world (by one definition of circumnavigation, anyway). This feat so enthralled Britons and the world in general that The Sunday Times soon announced The Golden Globe Race. Chichester had made one stop in Australia. This race was to be non-stop. Nine boats entered. Only one boat completed the trip.
I had ... Read more »
Deep Impact
I liked this movie, though apparently I was one of the few. Sure, it’s a formula disaster picture, but I’m a fan of Tea Leoni, and Morgan Freeman is very good. Usually you don’t much care for the characters in a film like this, but I did this time. I was touched, and awed by the special effects, which were on a whole new level for the time. Of course there’s better now (see Read more »
Deep Crimson
A fat, schizoid woman meets a penny-ante, bald, vain, grifter lothario and she moves in with him, going so far as to abandon her two children because she “loves” him so much. Either of these two, alone, would have been relatively harmless. The woman would have continued to cluelessly raise her kids, the man would have continued to steal money from lonely women like her. But every once in a ... Read more »
The Debt
In 1965 three young Mossad agents, two guys and Jessica Chastain, are in East Berlin, assigned to kidnap the Surgeon of Birkenau, who experimented on living people in the death camps, and bring him to Israel for trial. He’s working as a gynecologist under another name. (The ploy to get to him involves Jessica visiting for fertility exams. He is empathetic and kind as she has her legs in ... Read more »
Death of a President
This mockumentary is rated PPP, for Pure Progressive Pornography.
I like porn. Any guy who tells you he doesn’t is either a eunuch or a liar. In porn, all girls are young and beautiful, perpetually horny, and willing to jump into bed in a split second and do a threesome and beg you to give it to them in the ass. What’s not to like? The director here, Gabriel Range, has ... Read more »
Death Defying Acts
Catherine Zeta-Jones and Saoirse Ronan are mother-and-daughter con women who set out to hoodwink Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) out of the $10,000 prize he has offered to anyone who can tell him the last words his beloved mother spoke to him. Not easy, since Harry has been exposing fraudulent psychics for a long time and knows all the tricks. Then, of course, love rears its head. This movie ... Read more »
The Circus
I don’t know how this one slipped by me. I became a Chaplin fanatic in college, when I discovered he wasn’t just this jerky (people often project old silents at 24 fps, when they were shot in 16 fps) little man, but a comic genius. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of his two-reelers, and thought I had seen all his features. But not this one. It is very, very good, like all his features (I’ll ... Read more »
Cinderella Man
As drama this is top-notch. As history … well, I’m not a boxing historian, but a little research shows me that it’s half right and half bullshit.
The correct part is that Jim Braddock was a genuinely good man. He did have early success, did go into a tailspin during the Great Depression, worked the docks when he could, got on relief when he had to. And paid the ... Read more »
The Cider House Rules
I rented this again because I’d just read John Irving’s book about the making of it: My Movie Business. It was quite a saga, even longer than the process of making my own movie, Millennium, though while we went through six directors, Irving only had four. There was George Roy Hill, another I can’t recall, then Philip Borsos who, believe ... Read more »