Movie Reviews
Titles starting with W
Wallander
Henning Mankell wrote a dozen novels featuring Swedish detective Kurt Wallander between 1991 and 2009, and he sure did get a lot of mileage out of them. There was a series of Swedish TV movies from 1994 to 2007, starring Rolf Lassgard. Then there was another Swedish TV series from 2005 to 2013, starring Krister Henriksson. As if that weren’t enough, there is this BBC production, shot in ... Read more »
The Walls of Malapaga
First, I have to say a word about VHS and box televisions. How quickly we get spoiled!!! Our odyssey through all 69 of the Best Foreign Film Oscars has to include a few VHS tapes, because they are only available in that format in the World’s Best Video Store, Movie Madness in Portland, or anywhere else. We feel lucky that MM has them at all. But I’ve been having trouble getting a VHS to ... Read more »
Walt: The Man Behind the Myth
This documentary delivers. That is, it tells me some things I didn’t know. Unless you’ve read a biography of Walt Disney, it will probably do the same for you. I didn’t know that Walt and Roy’s father was killed by a gas leak in a house the sons had bought for their parents. That must have been devastating. I didn’t know his second daughter was adopted. There are a lot of nuggets like ... Read more »
Waltz With Bashir
Here’s a movie that was one of the major upsets of the 2009 Oscar ceremonies. It was considered a shoo-in to win for Best Foreign Film, but it lost out to a Japanese entry. I wonder why? Possibly the stodgy old Academy members just couldn’t get behind an animated movie as Best Foreign Film. Or possibly, since it is an Israeli film that doesn’t depict Israel in a good light, the large ... Read more »
Waltzes From Vienna
Hitchcock described this film as the lowest point in his career. He had no real interest in it, but he had to do something, He had just come off of the pretty bad Rich and Strange, followed by the truly awful Number Seventeen. His next film would be the classic The Man Who Knew Too Much, and he would follow ... Read more »
Waltzes From Vienna
Waltzes From Vienna (Strauss’ Great Waltz) (1934) Hitchcock described this film as the lowest point in his career. He had no real interest in it, but he had to do something, He had just come off of the pretty bad Rich and Strange, followed by the truly awful Number Seventeen. His next film would be the classic The Man Who Knew Too Much, and he would follow that with a long string of ... Read more »
Wanted
Another comic book. And I thought it was sort of interesting—even though bloody and sadistic, but that goes with the territory, doesn’t it?—for about the first hour. Shooting the wings off flies and making bullets curve with your mind fall within the parameters of speculative fiction, I have no problem with that. (I do wonder, though, how in some scenes Angelina Jolie can curve the ... Read more »
The War
Each of the seven episodes of this Ken Burns documentary begins with these words:
The Second World War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting. This is the story of four American towns and how their citizens experienced that war.
How are you going to tackle something with the scope and breadth, sacrifices and bravery and sheer horror of World War ... Read more »
War and Peace
My review will be brief. I thought I had reviewed this before, since we saw it a few months ago, but apparently it slipped through the cracks. And since then we have seen the overwhelmingly better Soviet version. Not that this one is really bad. It just pales in comparison to the Russian epic. Henry Fonda seems miscast as Count Pierre Bezuhov, the main protagonist. Audrey Hepburn, as ... Read more »
War and Peace
First I have to say something that has nothing to do with the movie itself. This is the most sloppily produced DVD I’ve ever watched. It is a mixture of subtitled and dubbed, and the really weird thing is that it seems to have been decided entirely at random. Even within one scene, a character will start out speaking Russian with subtitles, and suddenly switch to speaking English! Even ... Read more »