Movie Reviews
The Indestructible Man
At lunchtime I have been enjoying watching some of the old SF B&W B-movies they show on TCM. Watch a half-hour at a time, so your brain doesn’t get too fried. Some of them are even good. But I am not a fan of purely bad cinema, unless it is screamingly, unintentionally funny. This one isn’t scary, isn’t funny, isn’t even campy. It’s just sad, purely from ... Read more »
The Twonky
Henry Kuttner was one of the best short story writers of the 1950s Golden Age of magazine SF. Along with C. (for Catherine) L. Moore, often writing as “Lewis Padgett,” they produced some of the best stuff I ever read as a kid. Much of it was very, very funny.
I wish I could remember more about “The Twonky.” I liked the word enough that I used it in the early stages of writing my ... Read more »
The Captain is a Lady
Charles Coburn is one of my favorite character actors from this period, in movies like The Devil in Miss Jones and The More the Merrier. But even he and Beulah Bondi can’t rescue this off-the-shelf script about a crusty old sea captain forced to live in a retirement home for old women. I gave up at about the 30 minute mark.
Crime and Punishment
I ain’t never read none of them high-falutin’ Russian novels like Warren Pease or The Brothers Kutchyakokov, and I ain’t really interested in reading them, either. So my understanding is that this is a little like a Cliff’s Notes version of C&P. Fine with me. I think I got most of the plot points, though looking through the Wiki ... Read more »
Rectify
The Sundance Channel has been doing original series programming lately. We watched one of them, Top of the Lake, and liked it, so we decided to give this one a try. We’re three episodes in just now, and I’m still not sure if I want to continue.
Dan (played by Aden Young, who looks a little like Aiden Quinn to me) was convicted of raping and murdering a ... Read more »
Funny Girl (Second Review)
(Second review, written before I realized I had already reviewed it.) If I believed in God, I would thank him every day for Barbra Streisand. She can sing, she can act, both drama and comedy, at which she is one of the best ever. She can sell a song better than anyone before or since, except maybe Judy Garland. This was her first film, and she won an Oscar for it (tied with Katherine ... Read more »
Gingerbread Man
A bit of an odd history here. Robert Altman had never done a straight thriller before and wanted to try it. The screenplay is credited to “Al Hayes,” which is John Grisham. Seems it was based on a novel he abandoned, and then sold as a screenplay. But he didn’t like Altman’s insertion of profanity, so the pseudonym. It got fairly good reviews from the critics, not so much from the ... Read more »
The Guard
I sometimes wonder how they do it. All over Europe and in other places around the world, people are making damn good films that should make the Hollywood sausage machine deeply shamed. They scrounge together some money. This one had at least a dozen companies listed in the opening credits, plus something called An Bord Scannán na hÉireann (the Irish Film Board, for you non-Gaelic ... Read more »
Alice in Wonderland
A little gem like this film is, to me, worth ten of that overblown, dark, depressing warthog of a film by Tim Burton in 2010. SFX does not have to improve a movie. It’s even better than the Disney version, which I loved. This one, though it had a high budget for its time, is so much simpler and more true. It was a flop, and the consensus opinion is that few of the stars were recognizable ... Read more »
The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming
The era of glasnost was still decades away when this little comic plea for understanding between nations was made. It was during the bad old days of the Cold War, which was the war I grew up under. Nikita the K. had said “We will bury you!” and pounded his shoe on the table at the U.N. Our own side was not much more conciliatory, with our talk of “Godless communism.” Stockpiles of nuclear ... Read more »