Movie Reviews
Bigger Than Life
Hard to remember that not all that long ago, cortisone was a “miracle drug.” I’ve had cortisone injections into my knees. I wasn’t aware that it can turn you in a paranoid bipolar megalomaniac, but apparently it can. This movie stars James Mason as a man with a disease that will kill him soon, and can only be treated by the new drug. But they aren’t as cautious as they might be about the ... Read more »
Water For Elephants
I love circuses. I love trains. I love elephants. Here’s a movie about an elephant on a circus train. What’s not to like? Well, the life on the train can be brutal if it’s run by a psychopathic sadist (Christoph Waitz, once again very good.). I also like Reese Witherspoon. Robert Pattinson left me as unmoved as I was by his performances in the first two of those boring Read more »
Water
Water (Canada/India, 2005) I hate fundamentalists of any religion, but Hinduism is particularly foul. There seems to be little of love in the Hindu pantheon, a collection of psychotics who would make a hyena queasy. One of the vilest traditions in the religion concerns widows, and even Muslim women fare better. You have three choices if your husband dies: Throw yourself on his funeral ... Read more »
The Big Picture
This 1989 movie was the directorial debut of the guy who turned out to be the best there is at a very small sub-genre, the “mockumentary.” Christopher Lord Haden-Guest (yes, he is a peer of the realm) was a writer for SNL and The National Lampoon during their glory days, then co-wrote the amazing progenitor of the genre: This is Spinal ... Read more »
Washington Heights
A fairly average story of a man trying to break out of his origins in a predominately Dominican neighborhood in Manhattan. He’s a cartoonist, his dad owns a bodega that’s in debt. Dad get shot and paralyzed and the son must take over the business. I enjoyed it, it’s well acted and photographed. For a first-time director, not a bad effort at all.
Warm Bodies
Just when you think a genre is totally burned out, that there’s nothing else you could possibly do with it, somebody comes up with an idea that has a bit of freshness to it. In this case, it’s the zombie movie. And the new idea is, why not tell a zombie story from the point of view of the zombie?
It will only work if you stick more or less to the conventions of the zombie movie. So ... Read more »
Big Man Japan
Poor, poor Tokyo. As I’m sure you know, the city has been plagued by monsters ever since Gojira (better known on these shores as Godzilla) kicked it apart way back in 1954. If it ain’t one critter, it’s another, from Ghidorah the three-headed monster, Mathura, and Rodan, to Dogora the space monster, Mechagodzilla, and the worst of the bunch, Hedora the smog monster. There have been many ... Read more »
War of the Worlds
First, the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense … but when did it ever? I mean, going back to the original story? Alien creatures invade, whip the pants off us, and then die from our teeny little germs. This element remained in the radio play, in the first movie, and in this remake. This one attempts to inject a little “logic” into it, showing the alien machines sucking our blood, using ... Read more »
War Horse
I can’t resist quoting a line from a review in the Boston Globe: “War Horseis the best film of the year. The year, unfortunately, is 1942.” First, let me assure you that I am a sentimental fool. I often cry at sad movies; hell, I can cry at happy movies. But I really resent being asked to cry every ten minutes during a 2½ hour movie, ... Read more »
The Big Lift
Here’s a really interesting movie, though not really a great one. It was filmed entirely in Berlin which, five years after the end of WWII, was still picking up the pieces after the Allied bombings. Actually, much of the city was still in ruins, and they make great backdrops for the movie. So the Russians decided to blockade West Berlin, cutting off all road and rail and river traffic, ... Read more »