Movie Reviews
Idiot’s Delight
Made from a rather forgettable anti-war play by Sherwood Anderson. Clark Gable is an itinerant entertainer, doing anything that comes to hand, from trained penguins to mentalist acts, and Norma Shearer is more or less a con woman. They meet after a 20-year separation in an unnamed alpine country as the border is closing due to Nazi aggression. She is married to a Nazi and posing as a ... Read more »
The Illusionist
This is one of those movies where even a spoiler warning wouldn’t do much good, because I wouldn’t want to be discussing the ending, but the marvelous set-up, and by doing that I’d be clueing you in to more than I want to. About all I can say about the plot is that the title of the film gives you a warning, and that it then proceeds to bamboozle you with that most useful ... Read more »
Idiocracy
I was wondering why many of my favorite SF movies lately are comedies, or even more to the point, parodies. In fact, just about all of them. It’s been a long time since there has been a “serious” SF movie that I could take seriously. What’s going on here?
I recall that the two SF movies that rocked me the most were 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Read more »
Joyeux Noël
… and Fröhliches Weihnachten, if you please. This is a film about the “Christmas Truce” during the winter of 1914. It actually happened, at several places along the trenches, though many details are unconfirmed and possibly apocryphal, including a soccer match between the enemies, Scots and French on one side, Germans on the other. This tale has ... Read more »
Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind, A Life Story
Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s I doubt that I ever put a Joni Mitchell record on the player. Not once. I didn’t have to. My ex-wife played them till she wore holes in the vinyl. I know all the early albums by heart to this day.
I liked Joni, I liked her a lot, but she was totally in love. Then Joni recorded Mingus, and we ... Read more »
Johnny English
Rowan Atkinson is one of the funniest men alive, with his British television shows Mr Bean, The Thin Blue Line and, best of all, the Blackadder series, all of them 10 times as funny as anything that has ever been on American TV. So why are his movies so disastrous? Maybe that’s too harsh for Read more »
John Dies at the End
No, not me, another John. The reason this interested me is that it was directed by Don Coscarelli, who also directed one of my favorite small, sleeper movies, Bubba Ho-Tep. That one was written by my favorite gonzo writer, Joe R. Lansdale, an East Texas boy like myself. This one was scripted by Coscarelli and based on a book by David Wong, which is the pseudonym ... Read more »
John Cleese on How to Irritate People
Should have been funny, mostly just … irritating. Michael Palin and Graham Chapman are aboard, as well as Connie Booth from “Fawlty Towers,” but nothing jells. I’m afraid that when these Pythons bring their gifts to mundane situations, the results are just mundane. They need something off the wall, surrealistic, to make it all happen.
John Carter
We liked it well enough, without getting wild about it. From what I know of the books, which I’ve never read, it seemed fairly faithful. Much of it, particularly Dejah Thoris, looked nicely like those old Frazetta covers that were on the reissues which really brought Edgar Rice Burroughs back into public consciousness.
It was a huge bomb, and I think their problem making money ... Read more »