Movie Reviews
Going Hollywood
Marion Davies gets top billing. Poor Marion Davies. She was good at comedy, but her asshole boyfriend, William Randolph Hearst, insisted she do dramatic roles, so her career tanked. Pretty much exactly as shown in Citizen Kane. Of course, it’s a little hard to be too sorry for a woman who got to preside at the parties at San Simeon, and who, thanks to her good ... Read more »
A Hole in the Head
In the 1930s Frank Capra owned Hollywood, along with a handful of other directors. No less than three Oscars for best directing, and his movies made tons of money. In WWII he made some of the best war documentaries ever. Then it all sort of stopped. Though he was never called before the treasonous HUAC, his association with blacklisted writers made him a little ... Read more »
God Is Great and I’m Not
Audrey Tautou is one of my all-time favorite actresses, but not even she can rescue a hopeless mess like this. It seemed to be almost randomly assembled, and we bailed out at the 30-minute mark when we realized we were bored and uninvolved. Avoid this.
Hobson’s Choice
Directed and co-written by David Lean, starring Charles Laughton. What more could you possibly ask for? It’s based on a 1916 play set in the late 19th century. Hobson is a blowhard tosspot of the kind Laughton can do better than anyone. He has three daughters, who pretty much run his boot shop for him, and he’d be happy to keep it that way. But the eldest has other ideas, and she’s Read more »
Go West
I’d say this one is about in the middle range of the Marx Brothers movies, somewhere between their half-dozen works of sheer genius and the lesser ones near the end of their career together. It’s good, but not really worth watching again and again. I had always thought that Groucho’s character’s name, S. Quentin Quale, was rather uninspired compared to wonderful names like Wolf J. ... Read more »
Go West
Some of Buster Keaton’s most memorable craziness involved large numbers of something chasing him. In Cops it was, as you might have guessed, the entire police force of a large city. In Seven Chances it was a thousand fat ladies in bridal gowns, hoping to marry him. In this one it’s a thousand cattle. They’re not really chasing him, ... Read more »
The Hoax
What are you going to believe about a movie made from a book written by one of the biggest liars of the 20th Century? Clifford Irving was damn good at it, and it’s a pleasure to see him putting a world-class snow job on some supposedly smart, savvy New York publishers, never backing down from his ridiculous assertions, always upping the ante. The first half plays light-hearted, and I think ... Read more »
The Gleaners and I
Maybe Agnes Varda is an acquired taste, or maybe this just wasn’t one of her best, or maybe I’m not an Agnes Varda type. It got hugely positive reviews, and I was with her for a while … but I couldn’t stay. Gleaners are people who go through the fields after the harvest and gather the fallen fruit and the trampled grain. She shows us modern-day gleaners, and it’s fascinating, given that ... Read more »
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Believe it or not, I have never read Mr. Adams’ wildly popular books. My understanding is that the whole Hitchhiker phenomenon was born from a BBC radio series, which I never heard, later became 4 or 5 books, a TV mini-series which I never viewed, a record album which I never spun, several stage adaptations which I never attended, and a video game which I never viddied.
I ... Read more »
Guiliani Time
The officers who thrust a toilet plunger up Abner Louima’s ass, puncturing his colon and bladder (and costing the city of New York $8,750,000) are said to have shouted “It’s Giuliani Time!” as they sodomized him. Well, bend over, America, he’s after your ass this time. This is not a particularly good documentary, it seemed to slant ... Read more »