Movie Reviews
Junebug
Let’s start with “outsider art.” Madeleine and George are recently married and live in Chicago. She deals in this stuff. You may have heard of it, it used to be called “primitive” art, and Grandma Moses is probably the most famous practitioner. (No, wait, it sez here that she’s called a folk artist.) (There’s also another term: naïve art. Henri ... Read more »
Juliet of the Spirits
Federico Fellini has never been among my very favorites directors, though one of his films, Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria) is one my Top 25 of All Time list. He started off as a neo-realist, and then started shifting into his own unique brand of fantastic imagery. La Dolce Vita began the process, he jumped into it with both ... Read more »
Julie & Julia
What a sweet little movie! It’s not going to bring about world peace, or solve global warming, or do anything about the oil shortage, but really, what movie is? Not all good movies have to be heavy, nor do they have to be joke-filled comedies. This movie has little in the way of actual plot, it’s more of a case of spending a pleasant two hours with some people you like. Two true stories, ... Read more »
Julia Misbehaves
I have always loved the pairing of Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in Mrs. Miniver, the role Garson won the Oscar for. I hadn’t realized that they co-starred no less than eight times! This is the fifth of them. It is a mere trifle, nothing to compare to that wartime masterpiece above. Greer and Walter were married 20 years ago, but the harpy mother-in-law managed ... Read more »
Julia
Here’s the story of a woman who is such a train wreck, such a toxic waste dump of a human being, that I was surprised she survived through the credits, much less made it to the end of a 2½-hour movie. She gets involved in a hare-brained kidnapping scheme, pretty much making it up as she goes along. She is so awful, so unsympathetic that no one but the great Tilda Swinton could have carried ... Read more »
Imagine Me and You
Imagine Me and You (2005) The Beatles sang:
“Do you believe in a love at first sight?”
“Yes I’m certain that it happens all the time.”
This movie is about love at first sight. Does it happen, or is it wishful thinking? Well, it’s never happened to me, but it happens to a woman in this film who is, literally walking down the aisle to get married, glimpses a person and ... Read more »
If Only You Could Cook
Herbert Marshall and Jean Arthur in a minor screwball comedy. Marshall is the head of a car company, about to be married to a conniving bitch, who gets fed up and walks out of everything. He meets Arthur on a park bench. She’s desperately looking for a job and mistakes him for another victim of the depression. She persuades him to pretend they’re married so they can take jobs as cook and ... Read more »
Juggernaut
I suppose there have always been disaster movies, but the real fad for them began in 1970 with Airport. (Wikipedia has a pretty exhaustive list, running to hundreds of films, and you’ll see that the vast majority of them were made in the 1970s and later.)
They are almost invariably ponderous, with standard plug-in characters and situations, and most of the ... Read more »
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
What’s the deal with Terry Gilliam? If I was a believer, I’d almost think God was out to get him. He has had more trouble getting his films made and distributed than anyone I can think of. The story of the legal fight over Brazil is legend in Hollywood. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was hardly released at all due to a regime change ... Read more »
Judgement at Nuremberg
In 1947 four German judges are themselves on trial for having enforced Nazi laws concerning eugenic sterilization and race. One is an unrepentant Nazi, two are party hacks who did what they were told, and one (Burt Lancaster) was a highly respected jurist. Spencer Tracy is the homespun country judge tapped to head the three-judge panel in the winding-down days of the Nuremberg war crimes ... Read more »