Movie Reviews

Spaceballs

(1987)

I don’t know what the hell happened to Mel Brooks. After making some of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, he just sort of petered out beginning with this one. Then came Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and finally Life Stinks, which stunk. As for the others … something about the ... Read more »

The Killing (Season Three)

(2013) Spoiler Warning

Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder (Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman) are back fighting crime in the sodden streets of Seattle for a third year. The Rosy Larson case was solved, after larking off on a dozen dark alleys. Linden isn’t even a detective anymore; she either left the force or was fired at the end of last season, I can’t recall.

1. The Jungle: She’s now a ferry boat operator ... Read more »

Gorky Park

(1983)

Martin Cruz Smith has written seven novels about Russian cop Arkady Renko, with another one coming up later this year (2013). He is one of the great fictional creations, up there with Philip Marlowe and Matthew Scudder and one less well-known, Stuart Kaminsky’s Porfiry Rostnikov, also a Moscow cop. This was the first one, back in 1981, and the book was an immediate hit.

It was ... Read more »

Operation Crossbow

(1965)

This one was directed by my friend Michael Anderson. So far as Wiki knows, Michael is still alive at age 93! I wish him many more happy years.

The opening scene is worth commenting about. It’s in an ornate office of the fucking Nazi in charge of the German rocket program, and after two men speak to each other the camera moves in and focuses on two steel things on his desk. One is a ... Read more »

Eye of the Needle

(1981)

Donald Sutherland is a Nazi spy who has been working in England four years. He is assigned to get a closer look at General Patton’s army and air force, assembling in Anglia for an invasion over the Pas de Calais. Only as all us WWII buffs know, Patton wasn’t leading anything because he slapped a soldier. What was happening out there in the fields was a deception. The planes were made of ... Read more »

Hemingway and Gellhorn

(2012)

First, I in no way take any of this as being historical gospel. I assume that changes were made, as they always are. The incidents showing what a bastard “Papa” could be might have been made up. Having said that, I must say that I believe Ernest Hemingway was the most over-rated writer, and possibly the most over-rated man of the twentieth century. Hardly anyone these days disputes that he ... Read more »

House of Cards

(2013)

First, what makes this unique, is that it was the first big production from Netflix, which is trying to get into the game with HBO and all the other cable players. Even stranger, all the episodes were debuted on the same day, all thirteen hours of it. Very strange. Since we don’t subscribe to Netflix streaming service, we had to wait until they brought it out on DVD, and now we’re ... Read more »

Portrait of Jenny

(1948)

It’s a classic, but not one that really held a lot of attraction for me. It’s all a little too solemn, too reverent. Jenny is Jennifer Jones, who appears to have come unstuck in time, a little like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. She first appears to Joseph Cotton, a struggling and not-too-talented artist, at the age of about twelve. She has ... Read more »

Night of the Comet

(1984)

There’s this comet, see, that’s going to pass real close to the Earth. It’s gonna be a real spectacular show, so everybody’s out in the streets with comet parties, to watch it all. Only, it drops this red dust all over everything, and people turn into red dust themselves, right in their clothes. (It might remind you of The Day of the Triffids, where a meteor shower blinded everyone who ... Read more »

The Great Gatsby