Movie Reviews
Valley of the Dragons
Here is a movie notable mainly for its unabashed stealing of special effects monsters from other movies. The thefts were from such masterpieces as Cat Women of the Moon, One Million B.C., and a Japanese movie I saw in my youth: Rodan. What surprised me was how good some of the monsters were. I mean, though they were obviously ... Read more »
Behind the Candelabra
Up until about when I was in the third grade my family didn’t have a television. Most of the TV I saw was when we visited my grandparents in Corsicana, Texas, and naturally most of that was the things Granddaddy wanted to see. The ones I remember are The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, which was mostly boxing, and The Ed Sullivan Show. ... Read more »
The Badlanders
What a dumb idea. Let’s take the novel that was made into a masterpiece by John Huston in 1950, The Asphalt Jungle, and downdate it (the opposite of updating) to the Old West. Instead of a big jewel heist, let’s make it a vein of gold ore. Instead of Sam Jaffe let’s cast Alan Ladd. Instead of Sterling Hayden, Ernest Borgnine. Sounds like a recipe for ... Read more »
Copycat
An otherwise ordinary super-smart serial killer movie that is elevated considerably by the performances of two of my favorite actresses: Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter. Weaver is a psychologist who studies serial killers and is almost killed herself by a creepy Harry Connick, Jr. at the beginning of the film. The attack traumatizes her so badly that she hasn’t set foot outside of her ... Read more »
Little Big Man
There was a real Little Big Man, but he was a Lakota who rode with Crazy Horse (whose name apparently translates literally as “His Horse is Spirited”; I like the traditional name better, don’t you?).
I can’t say this was the very first movie to treat Indians as complete and interesting human beings, but it had to be one of the first, and is still one of the best. It’s based on a ... Read more »
The Onion Movie
Filmed in 2003 and put on the shelf when the test screenings didn’t go well, then released direct to DVD. Sketch comedy movies are just about always hit and miss, so what you want is a good ratio of stuff you laughed at to stuff you just sat there and watched. I’d give this one a ratio of about 80%, which is pretty good for this kind of thing. And it gets even better when you realize, as I ... Read more »
Dracula: Dead and Loving It
This was the last film Mel Brooks made before switching over to the very, very, very successful and lucrative business of converting his earlier movies into Broadway musicals. And it was a good thing for Hollywood, and a good thing for Broadway. The movie just isn’t any good. He makes the fatal mistake of sticking quite closely to the book by Bram Stoker, with the same characters and the ... Read more »
The Great Waldo Pepper
William Goldman has written about seeing his original screenplay shown to an audience for the first time. Everything was going well, the audience was with him, enjoying the flamboyant antics of the barnstormers and flying circuses of the 1920s. Robert Redford was at his most dashing, romance was developing between him and Susan Sarandon. Then they were doing a wing-walking stunt … and ... Read more »
Kon-Tiki
Thor Heyerdahl was an idiot. A brave and intrepid adventurer, sure. Charismatic, handsome, an original thinker, no question. Norwegian, don’t you know. But what kind of nut would you have to be to build a raft out of balsa logs and try to sail it from Peru to Polynesia when you can’t swim (like me) and have a phobia of being underwater (also like me)? Sure, he wanted to do this to prove ... Read more »
Rosemary’s Baby
Roman Polanski has made a lot of good movies, a dud or two, and two masterpieces. This is one of them. (Chinatown is the other, if you were wondering.) It is a movie that simply could not be improved on. I was lucky enough not to have read the book—and it might be a fine book, I still haven’t read it, but the luck part is that I didn’t know if Rosemary was going ... Read more »