Movie Reviews
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs
Google Translates renders the French title as Prepare Your Tissues. I like the title they went with better. And it’s quite an odd little movie. Gérard Depardieu is Raoul, married to Carole Laure as Solange. Things are not well between them. She is depressed, and he is distraught, believing that she is no longer interested in him. He accuses her of staring at a ... Read more »
Cherry 2000
Here’s a hoot. This film takes place in 2017! I am writing this on January 8, 2018.
This is a fairly strange post-apocalyptic world. It seems there are pockets of stability. Los Angeles, for instance, looks pretty futuristic and normal, but people aren’t making things anymore, they are using up the stuff they already have. Such as female love robots called gynoids that are a hell ... Read more »
The Glass Castle
We saw this several months ago and I have put off reviewing it because I hated one of the characters so much I was reluctant to write about him. It is the true story of Jeanette Walls, who is now an author and journalist, but who grew up in one of the worst households I’ve ever seen where the children were not actually physically beaten (much) or sexually abused. It was a total failure of ... Read more »
Horsefeathers
This is one of Groucho’s least interesting character names. Professor Quincy Wagstaff just doesn’t measure up to Rufus T. Firefly, Otis P. Driftwood, Hugo Z. Hackenbush, J. Cheever Loophole, or Wolf J. Flywheel. But the Marx Brothers never made a really bad film, though Love Happy is not very good. This I’d say is in the mid-range. I personally think Read more »
Dick Tracy
I remember that I was very, very impressed by the special effects, which were amazing for its time, and by the production design. It is all in primary colors, and I mean all. Seven primary colors, in fact. Seven colors with no different shades. The red they use, for instance, is the same for a neon light, a man’s coat, a car, or a wall. Tracy’s yellow coat is the ... Read more »
Fanny and Alexander
Ingmar Bergman made this to be released in two versions. The first was as a television series running 312 minutes. As it happened, he had to edit it down to 188 minutes for theatrical release, a process he described as “cutting into the nerves and lifeblood of the film.” Luckily, the TV series still happened, and it is that version that is on the Criterion DVD, the version we saw. I don’t ... Read more »
Mephisto
Klaus Maria Brandauer delivers an acting tour de force in this movie which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. He portrays an actor, Hendrik Höfgen, who is just bursting with energy, and wants to move up in the world but is stuck in regional theater. He moves to Berlin from the provinces and soon begins to be noticed. The role he is most famous for is Mephistopheles from the ... Read more »
The Tin Drum
How strange that in only a little more than twenty years, two of those four countries would cease to exist. It is adapted from a 1959 novel by Günter Grass, who won the Nobel Prize in 1999.
There are some things in this movie to like, but I’m afraid they were overwhelmed by the bad stuff. And I’m not talking about the extremely controversial scenes where Oscar, who was supposed to ... Read more »
The Sky Above, the Mud Below
I have often said, while viewing one of the marvelous nature videos we have seen from David Attenborough and others, “I am so glad they went there and filmed this, so I don’t have to.” Seldom have I meant it more. This was a rather notorious film back when it was released, simply because it may have been the first film publicly shown in the US to show full-frontal nudity. (Remember, in ... Read more »
Tank
The best thing I can say about this light entertainment is that I’ve always like James Garner, in any role. Here he’s a battalion sergeant major, which I gather is about as high as a non-commissioned officer can get in this man’s army. He happens to own a WWII Sherman tank which he has restored, even down to the ammunition. (Is that legal?) Anyway, he brings it along with his family to ... Read more »