Movie Reviews
Un Chien Andalou
Written and directed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. Roger Ebert has this to say in his excellent review: “In collaborating on the scenario, their method was to toss shocking images or events at one another. Both had to agree before a shot was included in the film. ‘No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted,’ Bunuel remembered. ... Read more »
Umberto D.
If I had to pick an Italian director as the “best,” it would not be Fellini, but Vittorio de Sica, even though I’ve seen only a small fraction of De Sica’s films and I’ve seen almost all of Fellini’s. Federico was all about fantasy, even in his most realistic films. His metaphors were the church and the world of the theater. De Sica (at his best; I admit ... Read more »
Ultraviolet
I was expecting a poor-woman’s Aeon Flux, and was surprised. It was better than AF, at least at first. After a while it got tedious, as it only had one thing to do, which was put Ultraviolet (Milla Jovovich) up against thousands and thousands of bad guys at once, and have her kill them all, very fetchingly. The basic tactic of the bad ... Read more »
The Ugly Truth
Why is it that Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in a restaurant—an unlikely situation, I think we could all agree—is hilarious, a classic that no one will ever forget, while Katherine Heigl having an involuntary orgasm in a restaurant as a result of forgetting to take off her vibrating knickers just lies there, flat, dead on arrival? I sure don’t know, but that’s the case. Nothing in this movie ... Read more »
Bye Bye Birdie
I understand that those who love the Broadway musical hate this movie, and reading about how much they butchered it, how many songs they left out and how they changed the plot, I can see why. But I was not handicapped by that knowledge when I saw the movie, so I enjoyed it a lot, and still do, though I have seen the play on stage now. (Which I enjoyed also, and can’t choose which is the ... Read more »
Butter
I love films about small groups of fanatics, “fans,” of stuff that the huge majority of humanity is indifferent to or even unaware of. This year we got a great one, The Big Year, about the cutthroat world of bird-watching. Not long ago there was Little Miss Sunshine, about the twisted, perverted world of dressing pre-teen girls up like ... Read more »
Wuthering Heights
This is one of the “classics” on everybody’s list that I somehow never got around to seeing. I always wondered what “Wuthering” meant, and now I learn it’s a Yorkshire term for turbulent weather. Yorkshire sure looks turbulent here. Most of the time it’s raining or snowing, and the wind is howling. (Yes, I know it was all filmed in Hollywood.) This was Emily Brontë’s only novel … or, in ... Read more »
The Wrong Man
Although this is in some ways the quintessential Hitchcock film, in that it revolves entirely around an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime, it is in every other aspect miles away from anything else he ever did. First, it is based on fact, and apparently sticks pretty rigorously to the real events and characters. Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda, in a wonderfully restrained performance) ... Read more »
The Busy Body
Though I don’t have an actual list, Donald E. Westlake in all his various incarnations would be in my Top Five favorite authors, no question. He got his start churning out soft-core porn in the early ‘60s, mostly under the house name of “Alan Marshall.” Here and there he produced a more quality book under his own name. Then he created “Richard Stark,” who wrote some of the best tough-guy ... Read more »
Wristcutters: A Love Story
The afterlife for suicides turns out to be a lot like Oakland, or Detroit. You get a boring job and live in a shitty apartment and drive a POS car. I think there was good potential here, but the director didn’t find it. We ejected the DVD about halfway through.