Movie Reviews
Titles starting with F
Fargo
(Second Season) And so one of the more unlikely television series moves on, with a new story that is many years before what was shown in the first season. You may recall that the first season dealt with events shortly after what happened in the brilliant movie. This one goes back to 1978, when Molly Solverson, the cop so nicely portrayed by Allison Tolman in the first series, is six years ... Read more »
Fargo (Fourth Season)
It is kind of amazing to me that each season of Fargo has been a little less wonderful than the one before, and yet the first season set the bar so high that they have all been very worth watching. Still, if this goes on, I fear for Season Five, if and when. This one is set in 1950 and follows a gang war between the Italians who have been established in Kansas ... Read more »
Fargo (Third Season)
This is the weakest of the three seasons of the TV series sort of “inspired by” the brilliant Coen Brothers movie. (The Academy has made some really poor choices for Best Movie over the years, and one of the worst, almost as bad as naming Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, was giving the Oscar to The English ... Read more »
The Farmer’s Wife
When a farmer’s wife dies, she tells her husband on her deathbed that he should marry again. He agrees, and sets out to pay court to all the eligible ladies in the area, using a list he compiles with his maid, who is secretly in love with him. It’s hard to see why, as he reveals himself to be something of a pompous ass when with each of these half a dozen young ladies. But it’s a comedy, ... Read more »
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
In the beginning, there was Andy Hardy. Okay, maybe there were teen movies before that, but I don’t know them. Andy was just so … so gosh-darn enthusiastic! By golly, you wanted to smack him around some! “Hey, kids, we can use Farmer John’s barn, and we can … put on a show! What do you say, Judy?” “Gosh, Andy, that would ... Read more »
Fast Company
Here’s something a little odd. Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice play a married couple who deal in rare books, and solve mysteries on the side. This movie was followed by two sequels, but in each of them the couple was played by different actors. There was Fast and Loose in 1939 with Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell, and Fast and ... Read more »
Fatal Instinct
I had never heard of this one. It aspires to be totally off-the-wall wacky, like Airplane! It doesn’t quite reach that level of zaniness, but it’s pretty good. A lot of it comes from Armand Assante playing totally against type. Usually he’s evil, menacing. Here he’s a total fuck-up, and never seems to know it. There’s verbal humor, references to dozens of ... Read more »
Father Goose
For some reason Cary Grant thought it would be a fun change of pace to play a sloppy, disreputable alcoholic in his next-to-last picture. Not one of his better ideas. There’s just no way you can make Cary Grant look disreputable. This is set in the early days of the war in the Pacific, and he is dragooned into being a lookout on a remote little island, calling in Jap sightings to Trevor ... Read more »
Father of Invention
Kevin Spacey is Robert Axle, a TV pitchman who has built a $1.6 billion-dollar company on the strength of his inventions, which are always the fusion of two products already on the market. We see his pitch at the beginning, showing several silly products. My favorite is a camera that also shoots pepper spray, so you can disable a mugger and take his picture at the same time. But one of his ... Read more »
Father of the Bride
Spencer Tracy could be very good at comedy. His sense of timing was flawless, and he knew how to make the smallest gestures tell volumes about what he was thinking. I’ve always really enjoyed this little trifle, about a man going through the horrific ordeal of marrying his daughter off. She wants a small wedding somewhere out in the country, and naturally it evolves into a huge shindig in ... Read more »