Movie Reviews
Creature With the Atom Brain
A sort of early Terminator. A scientist creates zombie-like robots from reanimated corpses, who are fully as determined to carry out their missions as Arnold was. They are pretty creepy, inexorable, hard to kill because they’re already dead. I actually enjoyed this potboiler a lot more than I expected to, but it takes a taste for B-movies.
World Without End
Just as in today’s cinema people of the future tend to live in horrible poverty, overcrowded, hungry, living in ruins or the overbuilt cities so beloved by set designers, in the ‘40s and ‘50s visions of a future world were usually of sanitized uniformity. This one is a great example. A quartet of astronauts are hurtled into the future and when they land, they find that humanity is divided ... Read more »
The Demi-Paradise
One of those morale builders of this era. Remember, the Soviets were our allies until after the war. Here we see Lawrence Olivier as a Russian engineer traveling to England to get a new ship’s propeller he has designed made by British shipbuilders. This is just months before the war begins.
You’ll be reminded of Ninotchka, except that Greta Garbo was the ... Read more »
42
There is absolutely nothing in this biopic of Jackie Robinson that you haven’t seen in a hundred other baseball films … and that’s okay. You go into something like this understanding that. If you aren’t interested in baseball or the great Jackie Robinson, you won’t be seeing this film, anyway, right? No one is out to dish dirt here (not that I’m aware of any dirt to dish in Robinson’s ... Read more »
Broadchurch
The reviews of this new BBC series were very good, so we decided to look in on it. (Actually it was ITV, but is showing in this country on BBC America.) It was filmed in Clevedon, a town near Bristol in Devon, on the west coast of Great Britain, in the Severn estuary. It looks like a nice place, with a broad beach and some towering cliffs.
1. In the first episode Danny Latimer, an ... Read more »
Room 237
Here’s an odd little movie. Too odd for me, actually. It’s a study of Stanley Kubrick’s controversial love-it-or-hate-it movie The Shining, and I can’t quite decide why it was made. It is in nine sections, wherein people discuss the movie and their personal reactions to it. We never see these people and they aren’t famous, and must have been selected with only ... Read more »
Never Wave at a WAC
The grandmother of Private Benjamin, but without most of the fun. All through the ‘50s and into the ‘60s the WWII generation, of whom most of the males had served in the armed forces, were gaga for “service comedies.” These films made the Army and the Navy seem like fun places to be. This time it was the Women’s Army Corps’s turn. The WAC was founded in 1942 and ... Read more »
Total Recall
Is there anything less exciting, more boring, than the sixth fistfight in the same movie? If there is, I can’t think of it. It really tempts me to FF through the whole thing. Here’s a movie that begins with a good premise (the second time we have seen Phil Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” filmed), and some good action scenes, and quickly degenerates into mindlessness. I am ... Read more »
Transatlantic Tunnel
In 1972 Harry Harrison published a novel in Analog called A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (alternate title: Tunnel Through the Deeps). I remember liking it. I think it was an early example of the SF genre known as steampunk. These stories take place in alternate futures where steam power is still king, inspired by the novels of Wells ... Read more »
Dead of Winter
Mary Steenburgen is a struggling actress. She also plays bad twin sisters. The actress is hired to impersonate one of the sisters, thinking she is auditioning for a role in a movie where the star died. But the real goal of the tape she makes is hidden from her. She is trapped in an old house in the dead of winter, with no way to get out, and increasingly certain that they intend to kill ... Read more »