Movie Reviews
Titles starting with T
The Tuttles of Tahiti
Charles Laughton is the head of a family that seems to number about 10,000 (probably more like 50), all talking at once, who live in a big ramshackle house in the tropical paradise. They enjoy fishing and cock-fighting and gambling, and none of them has a lick of sense about money. A huge windfall is quickly pissed away and in the end they are as poor as they started out, but happy, and ... Read more »
The Twelve Chairs
Mel Brooks made this right after The Producers, and it wasn’t a roaring success. But I’ve always liked it. It’s much different from any of his other films, telling the old Russian tale of a set of dining room furniture, one chair of which contains a fortune in jewels concealed against the depredations of the Bolsheviks. Ron Moody of Read more »
Twilight
Very popular series of books (which I’d never heard of), and boffo BO: Cost only $37 million, and earned $70 million just on opening weekend. But the reviews were pretty bad. To my surprise, I liked it. Now, let me add that I don’t want anyone to take this is a recommendation. I don’t think it will be everyone’s cup of tea, though it must be raw meat to adolescent girls. Kristen Stewart, ... Read more »
Twilight
What a cast! Paul Newman, James Garner, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, Stockard Channing, Reese Witherspoon (back before she was a big star and was hungry enough to do a nude scene), Liev Schreiber, John Spencer. And written and directed by Robert Benton, who did The Late Show, Places in the Heart, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Nobody’s Fool. ... Read more »
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
It’s amazing the dreck you see when you go to a double feature at the drive-in. We’ve sat through some stinkers, but this was the worst yet. If you look at my review of the first one you’ll see I gave it a marginal thumbs up, mostly because it had a slightly new take on the wheezing old vampire trope, and because the idea of being super-powerful and living forever appealed to me. This ... Read more »
Twin Sisters
Quite a tearjerker, adapted from a novel that was very popular in Holland and Germany. Twin orphaned sisters, 8 or so in age, are divided up between uncles. One goes to live on a farm in Germany, the other with well-off Dutch people. Both families are horrible, the farmers physically and the city folks mentally. They aren’t allowed to communicate, and never told that letters aren’t being ... Read more »
Twisted
A totally routine thriller, and a big disappointment from Philip Kaufman, the man who directed The Right Stuff.
Two Brothers
It is the mid-1920s and Kumar and Sangha are tiger cubs from the same litter. (I just learned that though tigers usually have two or three cubs, they can have as many as six!) Their father is killed trying to protect them, and one is sold to a small circus while the other goes to a young boy who raises him as a pet until his mum puts her foot down. After that he is caged and abused by a ... Read more »
The Two Faces of January
Quite a strange little movie, taken from a book by Patricia Highsmith, who was known for unusual protagonists and plotting. Viggo Mortensen is a fugitive financier who bilked some of the wrong people, such as Mafia guys, but thinks he has gotten away with it and is relaxing in Athens with his wife, Kirsten Dunst. They encounter an ex-pat American tour guide/street hustler, Oscar Isaac, and ... Read more »
Two For the Road
Two actors I really like a lot: Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. A director I like: Stanley Donen, who did any number of classic musicals and Charade, probably my favorite romantic comedy-drama of all time. So why didn’t it work for me? For one thing, I just don’t think the chemistry was there. For another, though I don’t object to hopping around in time when ... Read more »