Movie Reviews
What’s Up, Doc?
Peter Bogdanovich in his heyday, when he made one lovely movie after another. This time he set out to do a screwball comedy in the fashion of those old movies starring the likes of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Here we have Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Streisand, with Madeleine Kahn and Kenneth Mars, script by Buck Henry, David Newman, and the great Robert Benton. The plot is insanely and ... Read more »
What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
I have special memories of this film. That’s because I was briefly attending Michigan State University that year, and the world premiere was held at the Campus Theater (now long gone) on November 2, just a month before I left for good. World premiere! Don’t get to go to one of those every day, unless you live in Hollywood. I remember there was a pretty good crowd. I’ve always wondered if ... Read more »
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
Has any movie title ever more openly invited sarcastic wisecracks than this one? I won’t resist, then. The worst that could happen is that a perfectly wonderful and funny book by the great Donald E. Westlake should fall into the hands of cretins from Hollywood who have no idea how to make a movie with any wit or intelligence. John Dortmunder and his gang are among the best comic creations ... Read more »
What’s New, Pussycat?
Woody Allen’s rise to fame in the 1960s was pretty meteoric. When he was eighteen years old he was on staff writing gags for Sid Caesar, making more money than his parents were. He moved on to stand-up comedy, which made him so nervous he frequently threw up. Soon he became a successful playwright (Don’t Drink the Water), and wrote this movie. He is on record ... Read more »
Blood Diamond
This movie suffers from not being able to decide what it wants to be. It effectively exposes the terrible human cost of that rock on your finger, showing how diamonds prop up the sort of “revolutionaries” that are the only thing on Earth worse than the governments they plan to overthrow. But it is so overloaded with the sort of wildly overdone action scenes that we could accept ... Read more »
What’s Cooking?
This is a food movie, like several others we’ve seen and liked, that centers around family and cooking. Usually it’s one particular culture that is explored in these things; this time it is wildly multi-cultural. I have to quote Roger Ebert here about the director, Gurinder Chadha: ” … an Indian woman of Punjabi ancestry and Kenyan roots, who grew up in London and ... Read more »
Blockheads
Like most people of my generation, I grew up with B-western cowboy heroes like Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson and Bob Steele, and comedies from the Little Rascals and Laurel and Hardy on the black and white TV. I think it was because they were out of copyright, in the public domain, and so the stations could fill their after-school hours until the local news with stuff they didn’t have to ... Read more »
Blind Horizon
I kept wondering how and why a film like this got made. Terrific cast, looks good, keeps you wondering for almost an hour … then falls apart into tripe and foolishness. The answer is it was funded by a New Mexico film program that Val Kilmer is involved in, so when he signed on the money was there. But it was shown only at a film festival in the US, and then went direct to DVD. Don’t ... Read more »
Blazing Saddles
I have always felt that Young Frankenstein is Mel Brooks’s best movie, because not only is it very, very funny, it is also a work of art in its production design and photography. By making it actually look like it was made by James Whale in the 1930s, he enhanced every joke. But if you asked me what his funniest movie is, Read more »
Blame it on Fidel
What a find this movie was! It’s directed by Julia Gavras, daughter of the radical Greek political filmmaker Costa-Gavras, best known in the West for Missing and Z. One of the stars is Julie Depardieu, daughter of Gérard. But these offspring of famous people aside, this movie belongs to 9-year-old Nina Kervel-Bey. She plays Anna, who ... Read more »