Movie Reviews
Chi-Hwa-Seon
As far as I can remember, this is the only Korean film I’ve ever seen. I am profoundly ignorant of Korean history, culture, and art. (It seems they wore a great variety of funny hats.) This is the story of Jang Seung-ub, a peasant who lived in the last half of the 19th Century and is acknowledged to be the greatest Korean artist ever. He took the name of Ohwon and revolutionized the whole ... Read more »
Dead of Night
A premonition, a ghost, an evil mirror, an evil ventriloquist puppet … these are the tales of extraordinary happenings seven people tell each other in the drawing room of an English country house. The tales are prompted by the appearance of a man who swears he has been dreaming of this house and these people for years, though he’s never been there before. The guests in turn tell their ... Read more »
Dead Like Me: Life After Death
If you aren’t familiar with the series: When we die, a certain percentage of us are tapped—apparently at random—to be Grim Reapers. Reapers are dead, but don’t seem so, and other than the fact they can’t be killed, are just like you and me. Their job is to remove the souls of people who are about to die. They gather every morning in a Waffle House where their boss, Rube (Mandy Patinkin), ... Read more »
Dead Like Me
This is on Showtime, and it’s killing me that the new season is starting in a few weeks and we don’t get it. The first season is on 4 DVDs: the 75-minute pilot on the first one, and about a dozen 45-minute episodes on the others. George (Georgia) Lass is an 18-year-old girl who is killed by a re-entering toilet seat from the Mir space station. This is only the first of the unlikely ways to ... Read more »
Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round
One of the all-time great titles, huh? It has nothing to do with the story, but what the hell. You have to call it something, and this is a lot better than Just Another Heist Movie.
I love caper/heist movies, and this is an outstanding one. Not quite in the class of Topkapi or The Hot Rock, maybe, but ... Read more »
Cheyenne Autumn
They say that John Ford’s last film was done partly in penance for all the nasty, murdering Indians he put into so many of his earlier westerns. This time he wanted to show how badly they were treated, show it from the Indian’s point of view. Well, cripes, John, would it have killed you to cast a few actual Indians in the picture? Instead we get a lot of whites (Sal Mineo, I shit you not) ... Read more »
The Dead Girl
Toni Collette finds the body of a girl who has been raped, mutilated, and murdered in a field where she is walking. She reports it to the police, earning a blistering scolding from her bedridden, crazy mother, Piper Laurie, who is basically channeling her own performance in Carrie. There is a deep, dark secret in this household. Toni wants to be tied up and raped ... Read more »
Dead Calm
Nicole Kidman’s breakout role, I think. She has a lot of credits before this, but I’ve never heard of any of them. They might have been big in Australia. After this, her next role was in Days of Thunder, with soon-to-be-wacko-Scientologist hubby Tom Cruise. From there it was onward and upward. This is a dandy little thriller with only three characters (Sam Neill ... Read more »
Cheaper by the Dozen
What a disaster. Steve Martin can be the funniest man on the planet, but if he keeps making doo-doo like this and Bringing Down the House, people are going to forget …
A Day Without a Mexican
We were looking forward to this one. It’s a great idea: All the Hispanics in Cahleefornia disappear one day, and the state is cut off from the rest of the world. It’s a situation ripe for satire, and there are a few laughs here and there. But the execution is dismal. The acting is bad, the cinematic technique is non-existent, and it switches right in the middle from light-hearted to soapy ... Read more »