Movie Reviews
Babel
As I write this, Babel is nominated for Best Picture of the Year, and is considered a favorite. (It won the “Golden Globe,” right? And that’s a really, really good indicator, right? Not!!!) As I write this, we have seen four of the nominees, all of them except Letters From Iwo Jima, and I ... Read more »
Baadasssss!
The story of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the 1971 Melvin Van Peebles film that was the first real “black” movie. I saw it when it was new, in San Francisco, and I’d like to see it again. I remember that it was hard to watch, as a white person, that it opened my eyes a little to how black people experienced the world. I suspect it wouldn’t look so good ... Read more »
The Yes Men
The Yes Men (2003) I love movies about con games. It is not true that you can?t cheat an honest man, as current phishing schemes are proving (all it really takes is a stupid victim), though 90% of con scams involve someone eager to make a quick buck or who is convinced he?s about to cheat somebody else. I also love media hoaxes, in which people who really ought to be more careful are ... Read more »
The Young Victoria
There seems to be genetically mandated need to make one of these “History of England” costume dramas about once a year. Sometimes it’s “History of France,” but it’s still the same movie. If we’re lucky there will be some decent acting and a reasonably accurate historical script, and this is a good one. (Though Prince Albert did not get hit when a madman shot at Victoria.) It’s all a matter ... Read more »
The Young Savages
Three teenage punk gangsters of the wop persuasion attack, knife, ands kill a young spic standing peacefully on his doorstep with his saintly mother and sister. (I used those offensive terms here because that is what they call each other.) Their idiotic claim: it was self-defense. Tough enough to believe when it’s three against one, but the kicker is, the young Puerto Rican was blind. ... Read more »
Young People’s Concerts
We saw this multi-disc set for sale at the Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown, but it was way out of our price range. Then we subscribed to Netflix…. What a find this was! I had never seen them, but Lee was a music student studying piano and had watched them when they were new. She had a big crush on Leonard Bernstein, and it’s easy to see why. The man was dynamic, charismatic, and ... Read more »
Young Frankenstein
Blazing Saddles is probably funnier, overall, with its willingness to go way, way, way over the top. Mel Brooks was breaking new comic wind in that one. (It’s hard to remember after films like There’s Something About Mary and American Pie just how shocking it was to have a fart joke in a movie. But it was, and ... Read more »
The Young and the Dead
What a stroke of luck to have happened on this title. We have visited the Hollywood Forever cemetery, it’s about a mile from where I’m writing this, and seen the graves of all the celebrities there and much of the rest of the place. What we didn’t know is that, by the late ’90s, the con-man who had owned the place (and refused to allow Hattie McDaniel to be buried ... Read more »
Young Adult
I’ve seen a lot of movies about toxic prom queens, but few as well-written (by Diablo Cody) and acted as this one. Charlize Theron left her crappy little home town after graduation and set up in the big city, ghost-writing a series of crappy novels for teenage girls. Now she’s 37. She still has her looks, but that won’t last much longer, and nothing else is really going right for her. ... Read more »
Young Adam
Based on a book by the Scottish Beatnik Alexander Trocchi. (I’m sorry, that phrase just makes me laugh, I see a guy in a kilt and a beret. “Hoot mon, daddy-o!”) Ewan McGregor is a deck hand on a canal barge and has affairs with various women. In the process he is faced with a moral question, and ducks it, existentially. Nice to watch but not my thing. Best thing in it is Tilda Swinton, a ... Read more »