Movie Reviews
Titles starting with O
Oklahoma!
My Aunt Cora Van “Cokie” Bradford in Corsicana, Texas, was a big fan of musicals. If a roadshow production came to Fort Worth or Dallas, she would probably be there in the audience, and she would buy the original cast album afterward. At first, these were actual albums (and I’ll bet a lot of kids in this downloading age have no idea where that term came from), big books with four or five ... Read more »
An Old Fashioned Thansgiving
I grew interested in Tatiana Maslany after seeing her in the first several seasons of Orphan Black, where she played eight major characters and a dozen minor ones, often in the same scene. I don’t know of any other actors who could pull that off. She says she has been acting since age nine, in her native Regina, Saskatchewan, then moving to Toronto and getting ... Read more »
The Old Guard
Don’t much care for comic books or graphic novels, but every so often one comes along that is intelligent and worthwhile as an action movie. This is one, very much so. Greg Rucka wrote the book and the screenplay, and it is about a small group of “immortals,” who can recover from any injury. This is unexplained, and unlikely, but qualifies as the One Big Given that any SF story is allowed. ... Read more »
The Old Man and the Gun
The true story of Forrest Tucker, a man who gave new meaning to the term “career criminal.” He spent most of his life in prison, but managed to escape custody no less than eighteen times, once from San Quentin! He was also known as the Gentleman Bank Robber. He was always polite and well-dressed, and seldom even had to draw the gun he had under his coat. He may very well never have fired ... Read more »
Old Yeller
The first question I ask myself is, if I were seeing this for the first time, at age 72, would I have cried as hard as I did when I was 10? Probably not, though I won’t rule it out. I cried again this time, just not as hard, but I can’t tell if it might have been the memory of that first, traumatic viewing that made it inevitable that I would cry. It’s even worse ... Read more »
Olive Kitteridge
Writing about a person who is really, really unlikable and still making it interesting enough that people will still keep reading or watching is very difficult. I’d never attempt it. This four-hour HBO mini-series is based on a book that won the Pulitzer Prize. Reading about the book at Wiki, it’s clear that there was much more going on. The cast of characters ... Read more »
Oliver and Company
The Disney take on Oliver Twist, set in present-day New York City. Oliver is an abandoned kitten. Dodger (voiced and sung by Billy Joel) is a streetwise mutt, leader of a gang of stray dogs. Fagin is a human bum (voiced by Dom DeLuise) who is in debt to Sykes, a loan shark who drives a big black Cadillac and has two Dobermans named DeSoto and Roscoe. All the dogs ... Read more »
Oliver the Eighth
Laurel and Hardy Two-reeler. Stan and Ollie both plan to marry a rich widow, not knowing the reason she wants to have Ollie in her house is that she has declared war on Olivers because it was an Oliver who broke her heart. She has killed seven Olivers, in cahoots with her mad butler who plays cards with an invisible deck. It’s a hoot, except for the cop-out ending that it was all a bad ... Read more »
Oliver Twist
You often wonder why someone chooses to remake a film, even if it is based on a classic book. Oliver Twist has been made no less than 20 times, according to the IMDb. Most critics agree that David Lean’s 1948 version is the best, with Alec Guinness’s Fagin the definitive one. (Ron Moody in Oliver! is a close second, though ... Read more »
Oliver Twist
For years I have asked myself, why would someone want to make this story when the great David Lean did it perfectly in 1948? But Roman Polanski decided to do it, and I can’t say it’s bad. I have never read the book, but it seems both Lean and Polanski took some liberties about the ending. It looks good, suitably muddy and brown and nasty, the acting is good, especially Ben Kingsley as ... Read more »