Movie Reviews
The Illusionist
When Jacques Tati died in 1982 he had directed only 5 feature films in a career spanning more than 40 years as actor, writer, producer and director. But he left behind this screenplay, written in the 1950s, that he never tried to produce because of some disputes with his family that I don’t want to get into. Eventually his daughter gave it to Sylvain Chomet, the incredibly inventive man ... Read more »
Japanese Story
Toni Collette is wonderful. I can’t say much about the story because it contains one of the most surprising twists in the middle since Psycho, but it isn’t a thriller at all. It simply doesn’t go where you expect it to go. Recommended.
The Ides of March
I’ve always known politics is a dirty game, but I’ve seldom seen it played as dirty as this. And in this movie the Democrats, fighting it out in the Ohio primary! No telling what the Republicans were doing. It would have been so much easier for director George Clooney to have this be Republicans doing all these shenanigans, but I think it has more of an impact ... Read more »
Jane Eyre
This story by Charlotte Brontë has been filmed no less than twenty-two times, all the way back to 1914. Somehow, I was able to avoid every one of them until now, so I won’t be comparing it to past performances. This is a beautiful production, great photography, great acting, great adaptation. But it’s still a gothic romance, and I’m afraid that’s a genre that holds few attractions for me, ... Read more »
I’m Not Scared
Maybe the title resonates better in Italian, but I found it incomprehensible when I tried to fit it with the story that unfolded. A 10-year-old boy in a tiny town—hardly a town at all, just half a dozen crumbling buildings—in southern Italy in 1978 (which, I learn, was the hottest summer on record) discovers a boy his age living at the bottom of a well.
(Another thing I discovered ... Read more »
James’ Journey to Jerusalem
I enjoyed this film, which is presented as a modern-day fable concerning a young African on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but I have to say I don’t know what the moral was unless it is Never Trust a Jew. Since this was made by an Israeli, that’s probably not it. But everyone James meets in Israel, without exception, is a thief and a cheat, interested only in shafting everybody in sight. ... Read more »
I Served the King of England
Sometimes I see a film and enjoy myself quite a lot … and afterward just don’t know what to say about it. I’m not even sure I understood what it was doing. This one is like that. It concerns a little go-getter in Czechoslovakia in the pre-war years. He aspires to get rich, gets a Nazi girlfriend, there is a war, he gets rich, then the communists make it a crime to be rich and he goes to ... Read more »
J. Edgar
Of all the sorry sacks of shit this country ever spawned, J. Edgar Hoover was the sorriest until Dick Cheney came along. Forget Benedict Arnold, forget all the other spies and traitors, Hoover presented the greatest threat to our constitution and freedoms than anyone else. Like all super-patriots, his real interest was personal power, and he accumulated it every year of his life, until he ... Read more »
I, Robot
Everything about this ho-hum thriller goes for the safe and totally predictable and awesomely boring. We are way, way past the point where seeing thousands and thousands of robots on the attack is mind-blowing.
But the heck with it. It’s what we know how to do.
Let’s see, a film about robots … I know! They run amok! There’s some flaw in the programming … or, ... Read more »
Helvetica
If you can make a whole movie about a typeface, I guess it’s true that you can make a movie about anything. Helvetica is the ubiquitous typeface of the modern age. It’s everywhere, and believe me, after you’ve seen this movie, you’ll see it everywhere. It was designed in 1957 in Switzerland (Helvetia, as I learned as a young philatelist, is the name on Swiss stamps) as a reaction to the ... Read more »