Movie Reviews
Hotel Transylvania
Frantic. Frenetic. Frenzied. Hyperactive. The English language is rich in words that mean “too damn fast.” There is hardly a moment to breathe in this story. Only ninety minutes long, but it feels a lot longer because there’s no place to rest.
The story is not bad. Count Dracula has built a resort for all the persecuted monsters of the world to hide out from the torch-waving, ... Read more »
Gran Torino
Somebody once proposed putting Ronald Reagan’s photogenic puss up on Mount Rushmore. If they did, I’d have to sneak up there in the dead of night, like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau in North by Northwest, and either blow up his loathsome face, or else dump a ton of free-market, union-busting chickenshit down over it. If anybody’s face ought to ... Read more »
Hotel Rwanda
This is a hard movie to watch and a hard movie to review. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that this all happened just a decade ago. I don’t know just why it should be hard to accept; it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, it’s not like it’s not happening right now, in Sudan. Maybe it has something to do with hanging on to one’s comfortable faith in ... Read more »
Gothika
Five minutes into this movie Lee said “Another blue movie.” No, not porn, not smut. We’ve seen a lot of blue movies recently. What it means is, they are shot almost entirely in the dark, in shades of blue. Things are obscured by shadows and intervening objects. There’s a lot of lightning and rain. This is a pretty good sign that the script is a mess. People blunder around without any good ... Read more »
Gorky Park
Martin Cruz Smith has written seven novels about Russian cop Arkady Renko, with another one coming up later this year (2013). He is one of the great fictional creations, up there with Philip Marlowe and Matthew Scudder and one less well-known, Stuart Kaminsky’s Porfiry Rostnikov, also a Moscow cop. This was the first one, back in 1981, and the book was an immediate hit.
It was ... Read more »
The Hotel New Hampshire
John Irving novels are big, complicated, full of quirky characters and bizarre events that come at you out of the blue. This works okay in a novel, because someone of Irving’s confidence can sell me on it. In a movie, too much summarization and simplification is necessary. The World According to Garp worked pretty well for me, but this doesn’t. It just feels ... Read more »
Hot Millions
I suspect there is nothing more alien to a child or young adult growing up today than what computers were then, as compared to what they are now. Here we have a million-pound “big brain” that fills a big room, has tape drives the size of refrigerators, and is certainly not nearly as powerful nor as fast as a $10 pocket calculator today. This is a caper movie, and I love caper movies, but ... Read more »
Good Night Mister Tom
An abused boy is sent to the country during the London Blitz. He stays with a crusty old goat who lost his wife 20 years ago. Guess what happens? You want to see the home front during the Big War, take a look at the classic Mrs. Miniver, which will make you cry if you have a heart, or the devilish Hope and Glory, which will make you ... Read more »
Hot Fuzz
The last two films we saw (Hard Candy and Deliver Us From Evil) prompted reviews from me that were more like essays, since they both punched a lot of my rant buttons. Both concerned child molestation, oddly enough. What a relief to be able to write a short rave, about a film containing nothing more than buckets of old-fashioned blood ... Read more »
The Good Shepherd
Robert De Niro wanted this to be a sort of Godfather of the CIA, an epic covering a lot of time about a mysterious organization. And there are a lot of similarities between the Company and the Cosa Nostra, except the Mob whacks mostly people who the world is better off without, and the CIA whacks elected heads of state and entire countries. You tell me who is ... Read more »