Movie Reviews
Burn After Reading
You could call this the Coen Brother’s take on the spy thriller genre, but you’d be stretching a point. It has a few spies in it, and the chief thing that distinguishes them from the civilians is that they are not quite as dumb. But it’s a close call, especially the Department Head played wonderfully by J.K. Simmons, who never quite understands what’s going on ... Read more »
A Serious Man
The Coen Brothers’ film Fargo begins “Based on a true story.” It’s not. This one begins with a vignette that has absolutely nothing to do with the main story. The Coens like to mess with your head like that, and they make films like no one else, and 90% of the time I love them. This is one of those times. It takes place in about 1967, a time I recall fondly, and ... Read more »
True Grit
This is so rare a thing that I can’t even recall another example. How often does someone remake a great film … and improve on it? I can think of some times where a bad film or an okay film has been improved the second time around, but never a great one. The Coen Brother have managed it. I loved the original True Grit movie. It contains one of the all-time classic ... Read more »
Throw Mamma From the Train
EXTRA BONUS HITCHCOCK MATERIAL: This movie was inspired by Strangers on a Train, and even uses some footage form it to explain what’s going to happen:
The night was … humid. The night was … moist. The night was …….. Billy Crystal is a writer who has written one book that his ex-wife stole from him and it became a best-seller. Now he’s blocked from the very ... Read more »
Family Plot
It’s too bad Hitchcock couldn’t have gone out on an higher note than this. It’s a good film, but doesn’t show a lot of the Hitchcock trademarks. A lot of it is pretty funny. At one point Bruce Dern is driving a car down out of the mountains when the accelerator gets stuck and the brakes go out. Barbara Harris panics, and is all over the car. I imagine that in 1976 the scene was pretty ... Read more »
Topaz
Hitchcock should have stuck to suspense and given the spy stories a pass. With this and with Torn Curtain before it, he never really seemed to have a handle on the material. It’s adapted from a novel by Leon Uris, and concerns spies from America (John Forsythe, the only real “name” in the cast) and France in the days leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s ... Read more »
Torn Curtain
I feel that The Birds was the last really great film—a film that shocked you right out of your socks—that Alfred Hitchcock made (though Frenzy was damn good). This is not a put-down; this film is good, too, just not up to the standards of those masterpieces of the 1950s. And it’s showing its age in some ways. ... Read more »
Marnie
I don’t think this movie appears on many lists of The Best of Alfred Hitchcock, although Peter Bogdanovich speaks highly of it. I recall being not too impressed the first time I saw it, in high school, but I’ll admit my girlfriend and I were up in the balcony and we were making out pretty hot and heavy. I don’t think I’d seen it in its entirety since then, though I’ve caught a few scenes ... Read more »
The Birds
This was quite a departure for Hitchcock, and quite a revolutionary film in all ways. Hitch had always been into suspense, action, and adventure, and there was always some explanation for what was going on. Here, there is no puzzle to figure out. The birds are attacking in waves, and no one knows why, and no one really has any way of trying to explain it, and in fact it is never explained. ... Read more »
Psycho
Every once in a while a movie comes along that changes everything. It may be a new technology, or an expansion or new use of an old one. (These don’t even have to be good, they just have to be new.) It can be a way of handling a story that is new. It can be a societal breakthrough, in dealing with sex or violence or racial issues. Everybody will have their own list, but mine includes Read more »