Movie Reviews
The Frankenstein Chronicles
This British ITV series easily sustained us through two six-episode series, the second one coming in 2017. It seems unlikely there will be a third, as things wrap up pretty neatly at the end. I will issue a SPOILER WARNING, because at the end of the first series there is a considerable surprise.
The premise is a good one. It is 1837 and William IV is dying, soon to make way for ... Read more »
Baby Driver
Like so many action movies these days, it got off to a good start, and then succumbed to the worst of the action film stuff. The best thing about it is the driving, which was largely done in real life and in real time. There is a making-of documentary on the DVD that shows how a lot of it was done. I can also give a shout-out to the fact that not everything ... Read more »
The Candidate
Is there any field of human endeavor where the bullshit is piled deeper and higher than a political campaign? I don’t think so, and I include cattle feedlots. This film pretty much stunned me when it first came out, and I know I wasn’t alone. Back in 1968 we had all talked about being “Clean for Gene!”, meaning Eugene McCarthy, or had high hopes for George McGovern. Remember him? The ... Read more »
Notes From the Field
I don’t really know much about Anna Deavere Smith, except that she played a hospital administrator in Nurse Jackie. This is a filming of her one-woman stage show where she dramatized what she calls the school-to-prison pipeline, where poor young black kids seem to have little or no choices in what happens in their lives. I don’t entirely buy the premise, but I ... Read more »
Ghost (2nd review)
It’s just gotta be way up there on the list of best romantic dramas ever. I think it’s one of the hardest genres to get right, and this movie does everything right. That thing they call chemistry in the movies is actually pretty hard to quantify. You can’t really define it, but you know it when you see it. It is when the male and female ... Read more »
The Phantom of the Opera
The IMDb lists eleven versions of this story. There is a German one from 1916 and of course the musical version from 2004. This is the most famous, the one everybody remembers … but I don’t think many people have actually seen the movie. What we all know is the famous scene of Lon Chaney being unmasked, and the horrific ordeal he had to endure to look like that.
It’s actually hard ... Read more »
Hatari!
This one blew me away when it was new. With today’s wildlife photography that gets you right up the asshole of a tick on a rhino’s behind, it is easy to forget just how revolutionary the hunts in this movie were in 1962. No one had ever filmed some of the stuff we see here. The actors and crew chased and roped wildebeest, Cape buffalo (the most dangerous large animal in Africa), antelope, ... Read more »
Leap!
I don’t want to be too nasty with this film, because I’m sure its heart is in the right place. Families with young children will like it, as will pre-adolescent girls who wish to become ballerinas. But the plot is by the numbers, message being “Follow your dreams, and everything will turn out all right!” Which flat-out isn’t true, but children don’t need to be ... Read more »
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
Writers and directors can get some pretty weird ideas. Sometimes these experiments work, sometimes they don’t. Maybe the all-time worst was Gus Van Sant’s decision to remake Psycho shot-for-shot, and in color. Then there was I’m Not There, where six different actors, including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, and a ... Read more »
Scrooge
I knew that A Christmas Carol had been made a lot of times, but I hadn’t realized just how many. The IMDb lists 32 feature-length movies. There are dozens of shorts, dating back to 1908. It has been made in many languages. Ebenezer Scrooge has been played by Fredric March, Ralph Richardson, Jim Carrey, George C. Scott, Alastair Sim (in 1951 and still the best, in ... Read more »