Movie Reviews
Gwoemul
Gwoemul (Korean, 2006) The title means “Monster” in Korean, but instead of a literal translation the distributors decided to re-name it The Host, which pretty much sucks. I guess the idea, on the surface, is that the creature is supposed to be the host of a deadly virus. It’s not, that’s all a phony tactic cooked up to keep people more scared than they need to ... Read more »
The Hunting Party
Simon Hunt (Richard Gere), a down-at-heels reporter, and his cameraman, Duck (Terrence Howard), set out to find and interview one Radoslav Bogdanović—known as “The Fox”—in the Bosnian enclave of Srpska (no wonder the fought a war; there must have been a severe vowel shortage in Yugoslavia, and everybody wanted to get as many as they could). The war is over, but most of the ... Read more »
The Hunting of the President
This is basically the story of Whitewater, the biggest non-scandal of the 20th and maybe any century. There was never anything there, not a shred of evidence of anything, and yet the radical right spent $80 million of your money to find that out, and finally got one little scrap of red meat after about 5 years of turning over rocks and listening to the worms that crawled out, and used that ... Read more »
The Guys
A pretty straightforward filming of a stage play that dealt with the experiences of an editor who volunteered to help a New York Fire Department captain write the eulogies for eight of his men who died on 9/11. Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia do a good job. A small film, and a good one.
Gunner Palace
Everybody should see this movie.
It is not the story of George W Bush’s war, and doesn’t set out to be. It is the story of one unit, stationed in one of Uday Hussein’s palace/whorehouses, partially bombed out but still looking like Jed Clampett’s idea of a really swanky hotel. Though the setting and the climate and the people couldn’t be more different from Southeast Asia, it was ... Read more »
The Hunted
An almost complete abomination. I say almost, because it got off to a good start, so when it degenerated into a mindless slugfest with men doing things men simply cannot do, when it turned into a comic book like so many movies these days, it was even more of a letdown. This movie was shot all around Portland while we were living there so we had high hopes. And it ... Read more »
The Hunger Games
I enjoyed the books (I have read all three), and was curious to see how this one would turn out as a movie. I guess they didn’t dare change much, since the books have such a huge fan base of ‘tween and teen girls. And they didn’t. The premise is so awful that I think a lot of people would be put off. As punishment for an uprising over 70 years ago, the government of a future nation called ... Read more »
Guess Who
This is sort of “inspired by” the 1967 groundbreaking Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a movie I never really liked much. Yeah, it was an important movie, it got people talking and thinking, and it probably did a lot of good, but it was sort of a stiff, dramatically. Hard to watch it now. Which is good. The fact that a “re-make” in 2005 could only work as a comedy is wonderful, when you think ... Read more »
The Human Stain
Two students have never shown up for the class taught by a respected college professor, Anthony Hopkins, who idly wonders aloud, “What are they? Spooks?” The missing students are black, which the prof didn’t know, and they take offense. He is brought up before a committee, and resigns in a rage. His wife dies that very day from an embolism brought on by the stress. But he has a ... Read more »
The Human Face
This is a 4-part BBC mini-series hosted by John Cleese. Pardon me, it was hosted and written by Cleese. Some people at the IMDb discussion of this series were grumping that any science series these days has to be hosted by some “big name” who probably knows nothing about the subject. Aside from a great big “Who cares, ... Read more »