Movie Reviews
Titles starting with T
Tangled
There’s a short list of movies that I will remember for their sheer visual beauty. Films like Barry Lyndon and Baraka and Days of Heaven and An American in Paris and Ran and Across the Universe. I can now add this one to the list. ... Read more »
Tank
The best thing I can say about this light entertainment is that I’ve always like James Garner, in any role. Here he’s a battalion sergeant major, which I gather is about as high as a non-commissioned officer can get in this man’s army. He happens to own a WWII Sherman tank which he has restored, even down to the ammunition. (Is that legal?) Anyway, he brings it along with his family to ... Read more »
Tanner ’88
This was a six-hour HBO mini-series, a one-hour pilot and then ten half-hour episodes. The idea was to follow a fictional presidential campaign at the same time the real campaigns were going on, and it works quite well. It was scripted by Garry Trudeau (did you know that Doonesbury is still running in newspapers? Or … somewhere, anyway, because who can find a ... Read more »
Tanner on Tanner
It is now sixteen years later. Tanner lost the nomination (it inexplicably went to the totally colorless Michael Dukakis, the worst Democratic decision until 2016), and his daughter is trying to make a documentary about her father’s run for the White House. She is pretty much a disaster at all aspects of filmmaking. Her rough cut is shown at a film festival and falls totally flat. She is ... Read more »
Targets
We rented this because we had just seen Easy Riders, Raging Bulls on video, and it was mentioned as Peter Bogdanovich’s first movie. It has an odd history. Roger Corman told Bogdanovich he could make a film but he had to use Boris Karloff because Karloff owed him two days’ work, and he had to use some stock footage from The Terror, an awful grinder from 1963 that ... Read more »
Tarnation
This film goes directly onto my list of scariest films of all time … and it’s all true, not a drop of blood or an act of violence in it. A gay man named Jonathan Caouette grew up in Texas in a family that you’d need to invent a new word for; dysfunctional just doesn’t cover it. His mother was subjected to years of shock treatment and a lithium overdose, and is now a giggling, ... Read more »
Tarzan
The 900-pound gorilla (so to speak) of Computer Generated Imagery really begins to make it self felt in this feature. CGI had been used by Disney as far back as The Great Mouse Detective in 1986, and in scenes here and there in all the movies after that. But this one relies on a program called Deep Canvas for most of its backgrounds, which are three dimensional ... Read more »
Taxi
Going to double features, we end up watching a few movies we wouldn’t even have rented, the reviews were so bad (see White Chicks, or better yet, don’t). Metacritic gave this one a 22, just about the lowest score I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t low enough. The premise of the movie seems to be that cars going very fast is funny. Ha. Ha. Jimmy Fallon is an utter ... Read more »
Taxi Driver
I can still recall how slowly the tension built in this movie as we saw Robert De Niro become Travis Bickle, a cab driver who is rapidly sinking into insanity in reaction to all the ugliness he sees every night in his taxi. And back then, the shoot-out at the whorehouse was shockingly bloody and violent. I’d never seen most of a man’s hand blown off by a .44 Magnum before, and I don’t ... Read more »
Team America: World Police
Lee was extremely dubious, I wasn’t sure what to expect. In the end, it just didn’t quite work. There are basic problems, and the biggest is that the puppet stuff wears pretty thin after about 30 minutes. I got tired of looking at the blank faces. Sure, they’re more expressive than Howdy Doody, but not much, and they all walk exactly like Howdy. There are some very funny moments, and the ... Read more »