Movie Reviews
The Mighty Quinn
Denzel Washington in one his very early roles. Damn, but the man looks young, and quite the handsome devil. He is the chief of police on an unnamed Caribbean island. His childhood friend, Maubee, is in trouble with some pretty powerful white people, and Quinn must try to catch him and find out what’s going on. But Maubee isn’t capable of taking anything seriously. There isn’t much under ... Read more »
With a Friend Like Harry… (Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien)
(Apparently also known as Harry, He’s Here to Help.) I almost didn’t watch this when, five minutes in, I knew for sure that it was dubbed. I HATE dubbed movies. But I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.
Michael and Claire and their three young daughters encounter Harry and Brynn on the way to an old farmhouse they’ve spent five summers renovating. Michael ... Read more »
Faces of November
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the assassination in Dallas, TCM has been showing Kennedy-related movies. This one is from documentarian Robert Drew and is only twelve minutes long. It focuses almost entirely on the faces of the people filing past the coffin in the Capital rotunda, and standing outside to watch the funeral cortege pass by. It is heartbreaking.
4 Little Girls
Spike Lee’s heartbreaking documentary on the bombing murders of the four black teenagers, in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by sub-human white bombers who didn’t have to face justice for many, many years, until the South had changed enough that a prosecutor thought he had a chance to convict the piece of garbage named Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss. ... Read more »
My Fellow Americans
James Garner and Jack Lemmon are ex-presidents who loathe each other, so naturally they are thrown together in an unlikely circumstance as they realize someone in the government is out to kill them. They have to make their way across the country, getting more actual contact with We the People in a few hours than either of them got in four years in the White House. It’s all good clean fun ... Read more »
The Group
Eight (or was it nine?) young women graduate from Vassar (or something like it, anyway) in the 1930s and we follow their lives up until near the start of the War. The acting talent here comprises most of the most talented young women just starting out in Hollywood in the ‘60s, including Candice Bergen. It all felt a little rushed to me, because there were too many stories to tell and not ... Read more »
Recording “The Producers”: A Musical Romp With Mel Brooks
Exactly what it sounds like. Cameras were brought in to the recording session for the Original Cast album of Mel Brooks’s huge Broadway hit. I’m fascinated by this sort of thing. I’ve seen several of them. The one for Sondheim’s Follies got rather heated before the end, but it turned out to be worth all the berating and bad feeling as Stephen S. kept demanding more, more, more from Alexis ... Read more »
Frankenweenie
I never saw the original 30-minute live action short Tim Burton made before he was well-known. He must have had a lot of affection for it, because he made this version, three times as long. Both films concern a boy who brings his pet dog back to life. There are a lot of visual sight gags involving his tail falling off, and so forth. The story is not bad, but I might have wished for a ... Read more »
Monster House
I can think of a hundred haunted house movies, but nothing immediately comes to mind where it is the house itself that is alive and malevolent. (I’m sure there are such; I just can’t think of them.) This one is handled pretty well. I might have enjoyed it a bit more if I hadn’t been sitting in a hospital bed, my brand new knee flayed open and sewn back up, high out of my mind on oxycontin.
Jack the Giant Slayer
Sometimes an animated adventure has all the bells and whistles you could possibly want, looks real good, but it somehow lacks a soul. I was underwhelmed.
(A FEW MONTHS LATER) I had to give this film another shot, as my initial review was unfair. That’s because I was stoned out of my mind on oxycodone, lying in a hospital bed recovering from knee surgery when I saw the movie. It ... Read more »