Movie Reviews
Stoker
Sometimes it just all goes wrong. The director, Park Chan-Wook, was going for a Hitchcock suspense movie, but he paced it horribly. It was never quite clear to me what was going on until near the end—and that’s okay, I don’t mind trying to figure it out—but this was just a lot of too-slow dialogue, mysterious expressions on the part of all concerned, and just plain annoying people. ... Read more »
The Whisperers
Edith Evans got the “Dame” added to her name for her extensive work in the legitimate theater, but she did some movies and was swell in all the ones I have seen. She was good enough for an Oscar nomination for this one, made when she was 79. She would continue working for 15 more films, until her death in 1976.
Here she is an elderly woman living alone in a squalid two-room flat in ... Read more »
Sidewalks of London
This is how it was listed at TCM, where we watched it, so I was a little surprised to see the title come up as St. Martin’s Lane. Seems that was the orginal title. I think the change was a good idea, at least for foreign audiences, since it’s about buskers, who perform on the sidewalks. This is the best thing about it, exploring the lives of these hard-working Brits who entertain people ... Read more »
The Abyss (Special Edition)
I saw a documentary of the making of this movie, and I was enough to give me the willies. There was more underwater shooting than in any previous movie, and it was dangerous, tedious (as all movie-making is, but this was more), and most of all, uncomfortable. Much of it was shot in a gigantic tank that was deep enough that some decompression time was needed if you were going to come out, ... Read more »
Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers
I don’t know how I managed to miss this one, since I went faithfully to the Saturday matinees in Port Neches and, later, to the dusk-to-dawn nights at the Don Drive-in in Port Arthur, where we would see as many as five of these kind of silly SF pictures in one night. And of course the stills from this movie appeared thousands of times in Famous Monsters of ... Read more »
Dead Man Down
Dead Man Down (2013) Revenge! Sounds so good when you think about it, but if you’re really going to do it, in the most extreme possible ways, it may not be as easy as you thought it would be.
Noomi Rapace’s face has been disfigured in a car accident by a drunk driver, who only got a three-week jail sentence. She got over a year of reconstructive surgery and a hideous band of little ... Read more »
Aliens
Aliens (1986) I didn’t recall that this movie ran a bit over two and a half hours the first time I saw it. There’s a reason for that. It didn’t. What I have on my DVD is the Special Edition, or director’s cut, I guess, that adds seventeen minutes. Reading about what was added, I think it was a good idea, as the new scenes have mostly to do with Ripley’s character development.
I ... Read more »
56-Up
56-Up (2012) The amazing experiment started in 1964 with the TV show Seven-Up! is now almost half a century old. For the briefest of re-caps: Fourteen children were chosen, from across the social spectrum, with the intention of revisiting them seven years later to see how they had changed, and what their prospects were in class-ridden British society. It was a ... Read more »
Broadway’s Lost Treasures
Broadway’s Lost Treasures (2003) Technically, they weren’t lost, just buried for a while. I’m not completely clear where these song and dance numbers came from, but it seems to be a mix of segments from a PBS program archive and performances done at the Tony Awards. Some feature just the one performer doing his or her Big Number from the Smash Hit Musical, or seven or eight on an ... Read more »
The Heat
Rex Reed called Melissa McCarthy “tractor-sized,” “humongous,” and “a female hippo” in his review of The Identity Thief, a movie I haven’t seen. I was surprised to find that Reed wasn’t dead, he has had so little impact on my life as a film critic. I can only say I won’t mourn his death. Take your review and shove it up your Holland-tunnel-sized asshole, you ... Read more »