Movie Reviews
Titles starting with S
Stranger Things
This Netflix series is clearly a homage to several books and films from the ‘80s, and is set in that decade. There is Stephen King, with a bit of Stand By Me, a bit of Firestarter, and even an idea from the book From a Buick 8. (One of the characters is even named Steve King.) There is Steven Spielberg, with ... Read more »
Strangers on a Train
Here’s a perfect example of what I think of as Novelist’s Despair. Hitchcock bought the rights to Patricia Highsmith’s novel … and a short digression here, he bought them for $7500, through a dummy—which he did a lot, he was a cheapskate—because his name attached to it would jack up the price. Highsmith was pissed, and rightly so. Where was I? Oh, right, despair. ... Read more »
Straw Dogs
The late ‘60s and most of the ‘70s was a time of change in the movie business. The Motion Picture Code breathed its last, dying breath (and good riddance), so writers and directors were free to explore much stronger sex and violence, as well as tell stories where the good guys didn’t always win, and evil wasn’t always punished. Sam Peckinpah was in the forefront of the violence part of ... Read more »
Straw Dogs
I always wonder why someone has the urge to remake a movie that was perfectly good the first time around. I’m on record as saying it’s usually a bad idea. But not always. This remake is astonishingly faithful to the original. Scene for scene, it replays the Dustin Hoffman version. I had expected that the action at the end would be ramped up horribly, but that’s not the case. Aside from ... Read more »
The Strawberry Statement
I never called them pigs. Many of the people I hung out with and many that I was friends with used that term, but I never did. I didn’t think that dehumanizing the very folks who were dehumanizing us was a good idea. It’s the sort of thinking that leads us to words like Jap, gook, wetback, and nigger. Which is not to say that some of them didn’t behave like pigs ... Read more »
Streamers
It couldn’t be more obvious that this was the film version of a play. It all takes place in a barracks with a small group of sergeants and draftees waiting for their orders to ship out to Vietnam. The play was by David Rabe.
These soldiers are in the 101st Airborne, the “Screaming Eagles.” A streamer is a chute that fails to open. I just looked it up, and it is as I thought: There ... Read more »
Streets of Laredo
The last of the stories of the life of Woodrow Call takes place around 1890. Woodrow is getting old, doesn’t get around as well as he used to. But he takes a job to hunt down Joey Garza, a psychopathic young murderer who is robbing too many trains, and killing the passengers. He kills for fun, just for the kick of it. The railroad owner wants him stopped. Actually, he wants him killed. ... Read more »
Strictly Ballroom
Now that I’ve seen this, I’m even more sure that Baz Luhrmann should never have wasted his time doing that overblown old-fashioned epic, Australia. He was all wrong for that. He should have given it to another Aussie director, maybe Peter Weir, or Bruce Beresford. Strictly Ballroom was Luhrmann’s first of only four movies so far, and it ... Read more »
Strictly Dishonorable
Before Preston Sturges became one of the very best writer/directors in Hollywood in the 1940s, he wrote a great many screenplays, but he got his start on Broadway with several hit shows. This was one of them, and it was filmed in the static manner made necessary in the early sound days by the bulkiness of the equipment and lack of technology for overdubbing and other sound tricks. So it is ... Read more »
Strike
This is the fictionalized story of Anna Walentynowicz, who worked at the same Polish shipyard as Lech Walesa during the labor unrest that eventually led to the collapse of the Polish Communist regime, and, it can be argued, the downfall of communism in Europe and Russia. If this story is to be believed (and from what I can find out, it’s pretty accurate) she really had more to do with the ... Read more »