Movie Reviews
Enduring Love
This movie has an absolutely stunning opening, and then sort of petered out. A couple are having a picnic in an open field. Suddenly a hot air balloon hits the ground. A man falls out, the balloon starts up again, the man grabs a rope. There is a boy inside. Other people appear, and five of them wrestle the balloon to safety … but then a wind rises, the boy accidentally turns on the ... Read more »
Finding Neverland
My respect for Johnny Depp grows with each movie he makes. Here’s a dude who could easily have forged a career as a romantic leading man or an action hero, he’s got the looks and the charisma. Instead, he chooses odd roles and makes them entirely his own. Not that he hasn’t had a few stinkers; who hasn’t? But the movie never stinks because of his performance. Finding ... Read more »
The Endurance
An excellent documentary about the ill-fated voyage of Captain Shackleton to Antarctica, back when it was almost completely unexplored. It is almost impossible to believe, but after incredible hardships over the course of a year, including the loss of the Endurance, crushed by pack ice, he lost not one man. Best of all, he had a cameraman aboard, and much footage was taken until all the ... Read more »
End of Watch
The first thing that has to be addressed is that there really are some movies that I’m glad I didn’t go see in the theater, that it was much better to have waited for the DVD. Usually it’s the other way. A huge spectacle looks better the wider it gets. A small drama works just as well on a wide screen or a 5-inch iPad (I guess; I don’t have a tablet and don’t plan to get one). But these ... Read more »
Find Me Guilty
Sidney Lumet has a long and distinguished career in courtroom drama, among many other genres, going all the way back to the classic 12 Angry Men. This one is about the longest criminal trial in US history, at least up until then, and most of the dialogue is taken from actual court transcripts. Twenty defendants, 70-some charges. All mobbed up pieces of shit from ... Read more »
Encounters at the End of the World
These days Werner Herzog seems to be doing almost as many documentaries as dramatic films. And, Werner being Werner, they tend to be about extreme places and/or obsessed—not to say crazy—people. You can’t get much more extreme than Antarctica. Did you know it’s one of the driest places on Earth? Less than two inches of precipitation per year in the interior, less than the Sahara. Of ... Read more »
Employee of the Month
What a mess of a movie. We gave up at the 1-hour point because we simply weren’t interested in what it seemed to be. Then I read a little of the very sparse reviews and found out it was not what it seemed. I collect movies about capers and cons and treasure the good ones. So we started it up again, and sure enough, there was a twist ending. In fact, there were about six twist endings, ... Read more »
The Final Season
And at long last we come to the end of our October World Series Movie Marathon. The goddam Yankees won the goddam pennant, and then the goddam World Series, so we’re goddam glum. (Lee used to be a Yankee fan, but Steinbrenner finally got to be too much for her, especially when she heard they had built a new pigcapitalist “Yankee Stadium.”) But it’s been a fun ride, and it seems appropriate ... Read more »
The Final Destination
Horror movies are really the perfect genre for hack writers, especially in these days of the horror movie “franchise.” Halloween I through Halloween XX (some of which haven’t even been made yet!) are all the same movie. How easy it must be to simply write the same script twenty times! You name it: A Nightmare on Elm ... Read more »
The Final Cut
Pretty much a total mess. People have implants which record every waking moment, then these memories are edited after death into a cleaned-up bio to show the relatives. All the nasty stuff is put aside. The memory recording is an interesting idea here and there are a thousand possibilities worth exploring, none of which the writer/director uses. The idea that this is the only use this ... Read more »