Movie Reviews
Easy Rider
They say that Captain America (AKA Wyatt, Peter Fonda) was based somehow on Roger McGuinn and Billy (Dennis Hopper) was based on our friend David Crosby, both from the original Byrds group. I can see that Croz at that time and Hopper had a certain resemblance. They also say that Wyatt was a play on Wyatt Earp, and Billy was William Bonney, AKA Billy the Kid. They say (and I believe) that ... Read more »
Fahrenheit 9/11
For years Lee and I have been devoted fans of documentaries. People don’t make them to get rich, they are almost always a labor of love. But they sneak into art theaters and play for about a week, often in December to quality for the Oscars. Then they’re gone. So you may not have heard of this film, but it’s worth your time. It’s made by an obscure filmmaker from Flint, Michigan, of all ... Read more »
Facing Windows
An outwardly appealing movie that suffers from a lack of focus. A couple in Rome find an old man wandering, amnesic, and take him home. He gradually becomes part of the family. He revives some old dreams the wife has. Meantime, a weird romance blossoms with the man across the street, who is obsessed with the wife. The old man is a Holocaust survivor … and it never really comes ... Read more »
Eastern Promises
I met David Cronenberg in Toronto while I was working on Millennium and he was doing Dead Ringers. Both production companies were using the same screening room for dailies. He seemed nice enough, not what you’d imagine if you’d seen any of his films up to that point. He was an early explorer of the goo school ... Read more »
The East
Here is a nifty little film about misbehaving CEOs of major companies, and a group that set about to expose them and make them pay. Britt Marling plays an undercover agent who is suffering from the stresses of leading a double life, and undergoing a crisis of confidence in that she begins to see that her employers are much, much worse than the environmental nuts … who are not all that ... Read more »
Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers
I don’t know how I managed to miss this one, since I went faithfully to the Saturday matinees in Port Neches and, later, to the dusk-to-dawn nights at the Don Drive-in in Port Arthur, where we would see as many as five of these kind of silly SF pictures in one night. And of course the stills from this movie appeared thousands of times in Famous Monsters of ... Read more »
Eagle Eye
One of the things I hate most in the movies is when someone takes a good idea and ruins it. This movie has an intriguing premise, though it is not new, concerning just how much surveillance of all types there now is in the world. We are being watched, and the people watching don’t always have our best interests in mind. It is my understanding that there is now no public place you can stand ... Read more »
Adventureland
Sometimes it just doesn’t work. For me, I mean. This film was well-reviewed (75% at Metacritic), and I read some of the best ones, and kept nodding. Yes, they’re all pretty much right. The writing was good, the acting was good, this was not your run-of-the-mill coming-of-age film … and yet it never engaged me. Jesse Eisenberg is getting almost as tiresome as Hugh Grant with his awkward, ... Read more »
Upside Down
What a horrible mess this movie is. The premise: somewhere in some topsy-turvy universe is a pair of planets literally within spitting distance of each other. Here are the three rules:
1. All matter is pulled by the gravity of the world that it comes from, and not the other.
2. An object’s weight can be offset using matter from the opposite world (inverse matter).
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