Movie Reviews
Garden State
I was reminded of The Graduate, and wasn’t surprised to see several reviewers mention it. It’s not that good, but it’s not bad. The first scene is totally off the wall: Our hero is in an airliner which seems to be crashing, everyone is screaming and running about, and he sits there calmly, almost asleep, even adjusts the air blower overhead. Turns out this is ... Read more »
The Garden
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature. The 14 acres of land in the middle of one of the most desolate districts of Los Angeles has a checkered and complicated history, and I’m not sure I have it all right. But, more or less … After the Rodney King riots the owner sold it to the city, and the city allowed people—almost all of them Hispanic—to open a community garden there. Each person had ... Read more »
Gangs of New York
Beautifully composed, nicely written … and a big yawn, as far as I was concerned. Too bad.
Game 6
It’s October 25th, 1986. In the sixth game of the World Series, the Boston Red Sox are leading the New York Mets 3 games to 2. The score is Sox 5, Mets 4 in the bottom of the 10th inning. There are two outs and two men on base. Mookie Wilson comes to the plate for the Mets. The count is 2 and 2, and then a wild pitch scores the fifth Mets run. All tied up, 5 and 5. It’s 3 balls and 2 ... Read more »
Galaxy Quest
Here is one of my favorite … well, I was going to say little movies, but judging from the special effects it must have had a respectable budget. It is a send-up of SF TV shows in general, and of Star Trek in particular. William Shatner could probably sue for defamation, but he’s so conceited he probably thinks it’s an homage. What happens is, twenty years after ... Read more »
Faces of November
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the assassination in Dallas, TCM has been showing Kennedy-related movies. This one is from documentarian Robert Drew and is only twelve minutes long. It focuses almost entirely on the faces of the people filing past the coffin in the Capital rotunda, and standing outside to watch the funeral cortege pass by. It is heartbreaking.
Fuzz
I’ve been a faithful reader of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels for decades now, seeking out the original paperbacks going all the way back to the first one, Cop Hater, in 1956. Often there were as many as three or four of them per year, but they were far, far from hack work, just like John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books. In later years they were less ... Read more »
Fury
Directed by Fritz Lang, starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney. Maybe only a foreigner could have made this indictment of lynching in a small town. Lang had just arrived from Germany, fleeing the Nazis, and this was his first film in Hollywood. Tracy is suspected of a kidnapping, and for the first half of the movie the tension builds as the usual loudmouths and non-thinkers decide to ... Read more »
Funny Girl
Barbra Streisand was already a singing star when she reached Broadway with a small part in I Can Get It For You Wholesale. I had thought she then became a big Broadway star … and she was, in the sense that her next appearance was this smash hit. But those were her only two Broadway appearances, she was not a queen of the Great White Way ... Read more »
Funny Farm
Here’s a comedy that can’t decide what it wants to be. It begins as an amusing fish-out-of-water story, like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. City couple move to the country for the idyllic peace and quiet, and it doesn’t quite work out that way. You’ve seen a dozen of them. It’s well done, Chevy Chase was always good at this sort of thing. Then it shifts ... Read more »