Movie Reviews
Escape From Planet Earth
I knew it was bound to happen. A few months ago I was in the hospital having my left knee replaced. It hurt quite a bit … unless I popped an oxycontin every hour on the hour. There wasn’t much to do there except watch the extremely limited selection of movies playing on a blurry little lo-def TV screen, so I did that. And I must have been even more loaded than I thought because, though I ... Read more »
The Lorax
The Lorax (2012) Sometimes, as with movies like Mary Poppins, it’s better if you don’t know the source material. I was able to enjoy that movie unreservedly because I’d never read the book. Likewise, though I have been madly in love with Dr. Seuss since I read the books like McElligot’s Pool and If I Ran the ... Read more »
Support Your Local Sheriff!
Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) Nobody could have played the laid-back drifter who comes to town and reluctantly agrees to clean it up (“I’m just on my way to Australia.”) any better than the great James Garner. It was a role tailor-made for him, and he just always seems to be having a terrific time strolling through the idiots who surround him. The idiot-in-chief is Bruce Dern, a man ... Read more »
The East
Here is a nifty little film about misbehaving CEOs of major companies, and a group that set about to expose them and make them pay. Britt Marling plays an undercover agent who is suffering from the stresses of leading a double life, and undergoing a crisis of confidence in that she begins to see that her employers are much, much worse than the environmental nuts … who are not all that ... Read more »
After Earth
Man, it must be nice to have Will Smith for a daddy. “What do you want for your 14th birthday, Jaden my darling?” “I’d like a movie, Papa.” “You got it, son. Let me call up the studio and ask them to write a check for one hundred and thirty million dollars!” I don’t really want to beat up too hard on the little apple of his father’s eye. He seems a quite ordinary ... Read more »
Black Rain
I’m a big fan of Ridley Scott, but even the greats sometimes fall short. This one is more interesting to look at than to think about. Michael Douglas, transplanted from New York to Tokyo, is pretty irritating most of the time. Occasionally it comes alive here and there with examples of the culture clashes between East and West, and some of the settings are almost as alien to me as if they ... Read more »
This Is the End
God, I hated this movie. And I was stunned to see how many critics thought it was great. The premise is that James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogan, and a couple people I don’t know, playing themselves, hole up in Franco’s ugly, pretentious hillside home after Los Angeles is hit by some Biblical Armageddon. And act like total assholes. ... Read more »
The Great Bank Robbery
A western comedy that’s a lot better than I expected. There’s this un-robbable bank in a small Texas town. It’s full of gold from some of the great gangs of the time, like the Jameses and the Youngers, maybe Butch Cassidy. Guys who can’t just deposit it and who don’t trust their companions not to steal it. It’s protected by guards with Gatling guns. So no less than three gangs set out to ... Read more »
See No Evil
Blind lady in peril. Audrey Hepburn did the same sort of thing four years earlier in Wait Until Dark, which was based on a stage play. That one worked even better than this one (though this one is quite good) because of the real menace generated by Alan Arkin as the bad guy. We get to know who he is fairly early on in the movie.
This one takes an opposite tack. We don’t discover ... Read more »
A Boy and His Dog
Good lord! Reading up on this I learned that my friend Harlan Ellison (who wrote the story this is based on) was going to write the screenplay … but he got writer’s block! Writer’s block? Harlan? This is the man who has written stories while sitting in bookstore windows. I find it hard to believe, but I’m not going to call Harlan up and ask him if it’s true.
Be that as it may, it ... Read more »