Movie Reviews
Bob le flambeur
One of the seminal caper movies, like Rififi the previous year. I must say right off that I don’t think I ever encountered a Frenchman named Bob, in all my reading and viewing. Considering they call Robert “roh-BARE,” I don’t see how the diminutive could happen in their language. I assume they’re imitating Americans, which was a hip thing to do in France in the ... Read more »
Blue Valentine
Here’s a couple who have been married for six years, and it’s coming apart. We flash back to their meeting and falling in love—a bit confusingly for me, at first, until I noticed Ryan Gosling’s receding hairline—contrasting it with the mess they are in now. He has no ambition, he’s perfectly happy to have things just as they were when they met, and is incapable of understanding that people ... Read more »
Blue Skies
Lots of sings by Irving Berlin, lots of crooning by Bing Crosby, lots of dancing by Fred Astaire. Who cares that the plot is pretty standard? Fred is in love with Joan Caulfield, but she is in love with Bing. But Bing is unable to settle down, even after they’re married. He compulsively closes nightclubs just as they’re getting successful, and opens a new one with a new theme—which ... Read more »
The Blue Dahlia
This was an original screenplay by Raymond Chandler, and an excellent example of the noir genre. Alan Ladd is a veteran returning from the war with two buddies, including William Bendix, who has a head wound, poor impulse control, and gets blinding headaches when he hears “monkey music,” which is jazz, and which I assume is music played by monkeys, i.e., Negroes. Ladd’s tramp of a wife has ... Read more »
Blow-Up
Every once in a while a movie comes along that changes how we see movies, and how they are made. This is one. A photographer in Swinging Sixties London takes a series of pictures that may have recorded a murder. He makes enlargements and studies them, over and over. The larger he makes them the grainier they are, hard to interpret. But Michelangelo Antonioni is not interested in solving a ... Read more »
Blow Out
Brian De Palma has always wanted to be Alfred Hitchcock (except when he wants to be George Romero), and when he’s good, he comes close. This is one of the good ones, maybe his best. It’s good enough that I almost forgive him for the awful mess he made of The Bonfire of the Vanities. (My own favorite of his is The Phantom of the ... Read more »
Blotto
This is one of those films that was shot three times. One in English, and once with Laurel and Hardy reading Spanish cue cards, La vida nocturns, and still again in French, Une nuit extravagante. (See my review of Be Big!)
This is one of their very best. Once more they are escaping from a henpecking ...
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Blossoms in the Dust
Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson did eight films together, and this is the first. Their next one would be Mrs. Miniver, for which she won the Oscar. This is the story … more or less … of Edna Gladney, an early social reformer who crusaded for the rights of orphans and abandoned children. And the true story is so good that it’s a damn shame they made most of it up. ... Read more »
Bloom
This is the third attempt that I know of to film James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve never read it, but there are scholars who have devoted entire careers to it. Just Google the title and you’ll find some fascinating sites that map out the day’s journey of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through Dublin, and long analyses and comparisons to The ... Read more »
Blood Work
Good movie based on a good book by a writer I read, Michael Connelly, who was first known for his series of cop novels starring Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch. However, a year later, I can’t remember much of it.