Movie Reviews
The West Point Story
Two New York gangs, the white boy Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, compete for the same turf while singing and dancing to the music of Leonard Bernstein and the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim … wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right. Where are my notes? Oh, yeah, looks like I misfiled them. Okay, then … Jimmy Cagney is a Broadway director who is on the skids and persuaded to direct the ... Read more »
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
One thing leads to another. We watched Fitzcarraldo, and then the documentary about the making of it, Burden of Dreams, and this little 20-minute documentary was thrown in for free on the DVD. As a way of motivating Errol Morris to find a way to make his first feature film, Werner Herzog swore he’d eat his shoe if Morris could ... Read more »
Welcome to the Rileys
One of those nice little small movies. James Gandolfini (who has been trying to shake off the image of Tony Soprano, and doing a pretty good job of it, I think) lost his daughter ten years ago, and his marriage is coming apart because his wife won’t leave the house. On a trip to New Orleans befriends a young stripper. They set up housekeeping together in a bad neighborhood. When the wife ... Read more »
The Black Book
Paul Verhoeven has directed and co-written a real old-timey war movie, refreshingly seen not from the American viewpoint, but that of an occupied country, Holland. There’s lots of action, some of it fairly improbable, but as long as you can keep moving with characters I’m interested in that’s okay. Rachel (Carice van Houten) is a Jew in Holland in 1944. Trying to flee to allied lines with ... Read more »
Welcome
If we can believe this movie—and I think we can—France is very harsh with illegal aliens. You can go to jail just for feeding or housing them. This is the story of Bilal, a 17-year-old Kurdish boy from Iraq. He has walked 4000 kilometers to get to Calais, in the hope getting to England to be with his girlfriend in London, who is about to be married off to someone she doesn’t love. When all ... Read more »
Week-end at the Waldorf
Sort of a cut-rate Grand Hotel. In fact, at one point one of the characters compares her situation to a story line from that movie. Robert Benchley narrates a description of the workings of a big luxury hotel, and we follow several stories that don’t necessarily interlock. In fact, at least two of the stories start off and then are just abandoned. The two main ... Read more »
Wedding Crashers
This one might as well have had Wait For The Video! written right into the trailers. I was skeptical going in, and it won me over within five minutes. Early on, wondering why I was smiling so much, I realized that it had jumped right in and got my feet thumping and my eyes delighted. The music is very good.
These guys crash weddings, for the partying and free food and the ... Read more »
The Weather Underground
One of the most depressing documentaries I’ve ever seen. Did I ever think these people were worthy of following? Well, not actually, I was never a radical activist, but I believe I mostly enjoyed it when these wackos lashed out at the government … and just about everything else in sight. The Weathermen hijacked the Students for a Democratic Society in 1970, and proceeded down a ... Read more »
We Own the Night
Well-written, well-acted, well-photographed (minimal use of shaky-cam, hurray!) … and ultimately just a bit disappointing. I don’t know who to blame it on, except to say that it’s territory that I guess I’ve grown a little tired of. New York City, 1988, and the motto of the NYPD was “We Own the Night.” I don’t know exactly what that little bit of bravado was meant to translate as ... Read more »
We Need to Talk About Kevin
To quote Roger Ebert (not about this film), I hated, hated, hated this movie. Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, how bad could it be? Well, the acting is fine, as I expected, but everything else about it rubbed me raw.
Tilda is a rather awkward, nervous, tentative woman who bears a child who, right out of the womb, reveals himself to be the devil’s seed. He never stops screaming when ... Read more »