Movie Reviews
Monsters University
There’s nothing really wrong with this movie, except for the feeling that we’ve been here before and no one really had anything all that new to say in this one. Pixar has proven with the Toy Story trilogy that it’s perfectly possible to make good sequels, but I had the feeling with this one and Cars 2 that it ... Read more »
The Story of Film: An Odyssey
This is indeed the story of film … but it may not be what you expect. It is fifteen episodes, one hour each, and was put together by Mark Cousins, an Irishman. (The only thing I kind of wish he hadn’t done was narrate it himself. He has a boring, monotonous voice with that Irish up-tilt on the last word of a sentence. Oddly, he sounds a lot like Werner Herzog.) He indeed covers it all, ... Read more »
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Thom Anderson is a born-and-bred Angeleno with a big inferiority complex. In his perception, L.A. don’t get no respect. I can see his points, here and there, but frankly, some of the things he asserts strike me a sheer paranoia. For instance, when filmmakers use real modernistic houses in the Hollywood hills as the abodes of loathsome gangsters, he feels they are insulting the Read more »
How I Won the War
Oh, my, how long I have waited to see this film again. It has never been available in NTSC video, but I stumbled on this at Movie Madness (“The Biggest Video Store in the World!”) in a PAL version that the clerk said would play on my Blu-Ray. And it did.
I’m not saying it’s a masterpiece. It isn’t. But I am a huge fan of Richard Lester, and this was the only film of his I hadn’t ... Read more »
In the Electric Mist
The original title continued to say With Confederate Dead. I’ve been a fan of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels since the very first one. I grew up in the area he writes about, Cajun country, but just across the state line in Texas. He sure handles the settings well. This was not actually my favorite of the books, but it’s good enough. One thing I can’t ... Read more »
Gun Crazy
Every once in a while a story will transcend a low budget and emerge as a “noir” classic. Movies like White Heat, for instance. This is another example. The story is very simple. A young man breaks a store window because he wants the pistol on display there. He is literally gun crazy, he just has to have firearms. And it might have ended there, with him target ... Read more »
10 Rillington Place
10 Rillington Place (1971) A recreation of one of the most notorious crimes in Great Britain, the murders of eight (and maybe more) people by John Christie. The address is the house where he did his nasty deeds, and this movie was filmed at the actual location. Richard Attenborough is nicely creepy in the role of Christie.
The Challenger Disaster
Richard Feynman is on my very short list of heroes. Few people have ever been as cogent and persuasive when talking about science. He worked on the Manhattan Project, but was best known for his contributions to quantum physics. This movie is a recreation of the investigation into the failure of the solid rocket boosters on the Challenger which, just behind the scenes of 9-11, ranks as the ... Read more »
My Name is Julia Ross
This is the movie that was later remade (and jazzed up a bit) as Dead of Winter, with Mary Steenburgen, Roddy McDowell, and Jan Rubeš. This time it is Dame May Whitty and George Macready who kidnap a young woman, Nina Foch, but this time they try to fuck with her mind while she’s drugged. She is told she is George’s wife and while she never buys into the story, ... Read more »
Destroyer
Edward G. Robinson is the salty of veteran who helped build a destroyer and is now sailing on it, and mightily unhappy at the new ways of the officers and crews. The fact is that the destroyer is a piece of shit, falling apart almost before she slides down the timbers and into the water. But through pluck and luck, they manage to operate the leaking old tub, shooting down six Jap planes ... Read more »