Movie Reviews
Where the Wild Things Are
First, let me say I don’t know from Maurice Sendak. I’ve never looked at any of his books. I have a CD of a performance of The Nutcracker for which he designed the sets and the CD cover, and that’s the sum total of my contact with Maurice Sendak. So this movie is not a rendering of a beloved classic to me. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Maybe if I’d loved ... Read more »
Bonnie and Clyde
I remember where I saw this during its first, controversial re-release. (It was re-released because Warners hated it so much they banished it to the drive-in circuit until a growing number of critical voices began to be heard.) It was in a packed theater in Sausalito, Marin County, and we were closer to the front than I like—and I like to sit pretty close. It stunned me, and pretty much ... Read more »
Where the Truth Lies
Atom Egoyan wrote and directed The Sweet Hereafter, a film that was critically acclaimed but which I didn’t like that much. In this one he seems to be trying for a David Lynch Mulholland Drive sort of atmosphere, a ‘40s film noir sensibility, with maybe a bit of Chinatown thrown in. The background music is moody and intrusive and the story is fairly ... Read more »
When Worlds Collide
When I heard someone was remaking this I just had to dust off my old LaserDisc and take a look at the original again. I am something of an authority on the book, (I say “something of,” because I’m no SF scholar), because a few years ago I wrote an introduction for a new Bison Books edition.
I learned a bit about one of the authors, Philip Wylie, and not very much about the other, ... Read more »
Bon Voyage
A delightful French bon-bon. It reminded me most of those sophisticated Hitchcock thrillers of the ‘40s, such as Foreign Correspondent, with people running all over the place, plenty of comic relief, glamour, Nazis … the whole magilla. There is even a Macguffin in the form of some bottles of heavy water. It stars Gerard Depardieu, who apparently is in every ... Read more »
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
Our problem in the US seems to be short attention span. We can’t seem to stay angry very long. Lots of people were angry in the months following Katrina, but now, almost two years later, only the people of New Orleans are still pissed off. The rest of the country seems to pretty much have forgotten the criminal—and I’m not using the term figuratively, I mean people should have gone to jail ... Read more »
When Billie Beat Bobby
What a delightful little movie this is! I’d never have run across it except after we saw, and loved, The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom I looked up the director, Jane Anderson, and saw she had teamed with Holly Hunter once again on this movie. She also did The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, which we loved. This ... Read more »
Bon Cop, Bad Cop
(Minor spoiler) Here we have a Canadian take on the “reluctant buddies” action/thriller/comedy genre that has more examples than you can shake a hockey stick at. Think Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, or Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, with guns. Colm Feore is a cop from Toronto (the buttoned-down, stuffy one) and Patrick Huard is a cop from Montreal ... Read more »
Bombshell
Jean Harlow is wonderful in this comedy about the excesses of Hollywood. She plays a big movie star, an airhead supporting a family of moochers, subject to wild enthusiasms that typically last about ten minutes. When she decides to adopt a child she approaches it the same way she did when she bought her goldfish or her three bumbling English sheepdogs, cared for by her long-suffering black ... Read more »
Body Heat
A mournful saxophone. Lots of cigarettes. The tinkle of ice in a cocktail glass. Mist, smoke, fog, long shadows … a sultry woman, a world-weary, cynical man. Faces half in darkness. Venetian blinds … (Why Venetian blinds? Because of the way they throw shadows, I guess.) And sweat. Buckets and buckets of sweat. There you have Body Heat, Lawrence Kasdan’s homage to ... Read more »