Movie Reviews
White Sands
A fairly standard noir whodunit involving dirty FBI and CIA agents and a small-town deputy sheriff who gets in over his head. This is not a bad film, but it’s not good enough for me to recommend it, either. Its best feature is probably the New Mexico scenery. I rented it to see what kind of work Mickey Rourke was doing before his long meltdown. He’s pretty good. By the way, Willem Dafoe is ... Read more »
The White Ribbon
Here is a very mysterious film shot in black and white, about a little German village on the eve of WWI. Outwardly all seems fairly normal, but underneath all sorts of nastiness is seething. Awful things happen and you wonder why, but if you think your questions will be answered, you are watching the wrong film. I was glad I saw it, but I can’t say I recommend it unless you like this sort ... Read more »
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
So, is it as funny as all the hype made it out to be? Audiences love it, except those who hate it. Critics love it (89% positive at Metacritic, 92% at Rotten Tomatoes). We had to see, despite severe misgivings on both our parts. And I have to say, I didn’t find it funny at all …
… NOT!!! I laughed my ass off. I would Read more »
White House Down
A very weird situation here. This movie was released in June of 2013, and it was preceded by Olympus Has Fallen in March. Both movies concern takeovers of the White House, and in both the building is pretty much destroyed. And frankly, I’m having a hell of a time remembering which one was which. In one of them Jamie Foxx was the president. In another it was Aaron ... Read more »
White Heat
Everybody remembers Cagney’s masterly performance. “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” He was a gangster, which was familiar, but in earlier pics like this there was a sub-text of admiration, of the lone cowboy who doesn’t play by society’s rules but has some of his own. Not here. He is a psychopath with a very sick mother complex, plain and simple, there is ... Read more »
White Chicks
This was #2 at the drive-in with Spiderman 2. Thank god it wasn’t first. You don’t expect wit from a movie like this, you can tell that from the trailers. So can’t they at least make the low-brow humor funny? Two things are guaranteed to make Lee laugh: pratfalls, and fart jokes. (Okay, fart jokes get me, too.) In the first ten minutes they passed up golden ... Read more »
The Whistleblower
Sometimes a movie can make me so angry I just want to shout to the heavens, enough! This is one. It’s the true story (compressed and rearranged for dramatic purposes, as all these things are) of Kathryn Bolkovac, a cop from the Midwest who took a job policing for the UN in Bosnia after the wars. But she didn’t actually work for the UN, she worked for one of those “independent contractors,” ... Read more »
The Whisperers
Edith Evans got the “Dame” added to her name for her extensive work in the legitimate theater, but she did some movies and was swell in all the ones I have seen. She was good enough for an Oscar nomination for this one, made when she was 79. She would continue working for 15 more films, until her death in 1976.
Here she is an elderly woman living alone in a squalid two-room flat in ... Read more »
The Boogie Man Will Get You
This one was labeled a “spoof” of horror movies, starring Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre and no one else you’ve ever heard of. As if you weren’t sure it was a spoof, the music under the opening credits was so Munster-like that I seriously wondered if it had been the inspiration for that show. Boris is a kindly (not obviously mad) scientist who lives in an old ... Read more »
Whip It
This is Drew Barrymore’s first job as a director. She has a small part, but the star is Ellen Page, who was so good in Juno and Hard Candy. The story concerns a girl in a small Texas town not far from Austin. Her mother is entering her in beauty pageants, which she is totally uninterested in. She discovers the world of roller derby, ... Read more »