Movie Reviews
Titles starting with S
The Split
This is taken from the book The Seventh, one of the twenty terrific novels about the one-named thief named Parker, written by “Richard Stark,” a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake. I’m sorry to say there is very little here that’s terrific. They changed Parker’s name to McClain, and cast Jim Brown to play him. Making Parker black poses no problem for me. What I ... Read more »
Split Second
This is a tidy little thriller made on a low budget out in the Nevada (or possibly California) desert. A dangerous killer and his buddy make a jailbreak, killing two guards in the process. But the buddy is wounded in the belly, and getting worse and worse. The pair, and a mute accomplice called “Dummy,” take a bunch of hostages, including Alexis Smith, a down-on-her-luck dancer, a ... Read more »
The Spongebob Squarepants Movie
Hooray for the MVP program at Hollywood Video! For $15/month you get unlimited rentals, except for the ones that came out the previous 30 days or so. Since I already waited for the DVD, I have no trouble waiting another month to see the new releases. And it means that I can rent something like this that I normally wouldn’t touch, because who wants to risk $4 on a piece of shit? I figure I ... Read more »
Spotlight
Once more, the Academy chose the safe and traditional route, as it did the year before in giving Eddie Redmayne the Best Actor Oscar for playing a cripple. This is a perfectly good movie, and I liked it a lot, but it is not the best picture of the year, and I haven’t even seen The Revenant or Brooklyn yet. I ... Read more »
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring
A small boy and a Buddhist monk live together on a tiny temple floating on a lake. The boy amuses himself by tying a rock to a fish, then a frog, then a snake. The master observes this, then ties a big rock to the boy’s back while he sleeps. When he wakes, he is told he must find the animals and release them or he will carry a stone in his heart all his life. The boy finds the animals, but ... Read more »
Springtime in a Small Town
This is remake of a 1948 film by Mu Fei that is widely regarded as one of the best examples of Chinese cinema. I haven’t seen that one. Mu was suppressed when Mao’s boys took over, and the director of this version, Zhuangzhuang Tian, was in the doghouse for 10 years under Mao’s descendants, not allowed to make films after some political incorrectness in a film called Read more »
Spy
For many years now I have approached movie “comedies” with an increasing degree of trepidation. I have seen too many of them without a single laugh. I admit, I worry that the fault (at least partly) might be my own. Have I lost my comedy mojo? I am pushing seventy, hard, and I realize these movies are not made for me or my generation. But in the end, I don’t ... Read more »
Spy Game
This is a doozy of a spy film, dealing more with the dirty, amoral, back-stabbing real side of espionage than the Bourne or Bond type of action. More of an American John le Carré novel, I would say. And as such, it is insanely complicated. Several times it left me struggling frantically to catch up. It is at its best when demonstrating old-fashioned tradecraft, the kind that doesn’t need ... Read more »
The Spy in Black
US title: U-Boat 29. Here we have the very first teaming of “The Archers,” England’s best team of writer-directors. They were Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, best known for The Red Shoes, but were also producers of twenty different collaborations over more than twenty years, some of them very, very good. They are always at least ... Read more »
Spy in the Wild
I figure Walt Disney was the father of the modern wildlife documentary. I remember features like White Wilderness, which famously faked footage of lemmings hurling themselves over a cliff. (The photographers were throwing them!) There was The Vanishing Prairie and The Living Desert. There were also short ... Read more »