Movie Reviews
Titles starting with L
Land Girls
In England in the early 1940s there were so many men in uniform fighting overseas or flying against the Luftwaffe that the Women’s Land Army was formed. Women were asked to join up and take over the agricultural jobs that had to be done to feed people: tilling the soil, planting turnips and potatoes, picking fruit, and shoveling pigshit. The program had worked well in World War I. Some ... Read more »
Land of the Lost
This movie seems to have been constructed from cast-off bits of other movies—the parts other writers deemed too stupid to include in their already fairly stupid plots. Will Farrell plays the most unappealing, obnoxious, idiotic character to be found even in his own portfolio of assholes, which is quite an asshole portfolio. At one point he is swallowed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and a bit ... Read more »
Lantana
This is a superior whodunit that is more concerned with the psychology of its main characters than in solving the murder. Anthony LePaglia is a detective who is having issues surrounding his divorce and other things. His wife is seeing Barbara Hershey, a psychiatrist. There is tension between two neighboring households, and there are salsa dance lessons … and hell, maybe the dead woman ... Read more »
Larger Than Life
Bill Murray is a sleazy motivational speaker whose father dies and leaves his estate to him. This is a big surprise, because his mother told him the old man had been dead for forty years. Turns out Dad was a circus clown and about all he owned was an elephant. Now Bill is going to owe a ton of money to a sleazy lawyer unless he can get the pachyderm to California and sell her either to ... Read more »
Larry Crowne
Tom Hanks really should stick to acting. He co-wrote and directed this one, with Nia Vardalos, and it just sort of lies there, gasping for breath, like a beached catfish. He is the best worker a mega-store ever had, so naturally they fire him. He looks for work, downsizes his house, and eventually decides to go to a small community college, where he is the oldest student by far. There he ... Read more »
Lars and the Real Girl
This is the other first feature movie, written by a woman, to get an Oscar nomination this year. (Nancy Oliver also wrote seven episodes of “Six Feet Under.”) Diablo Cody took home the iron, but Oliver has nothing to be ashamed of. In another year, she might have won. And I think it’s interesting that the two bravest and most unusual original screenplays this ... Read more »
The Last Angry Man
Most movie stars have only one real part they can play, which is themselves. This is not a bad thing, since what they’re selling is their charisma. But now and then someone shows up in Hollywood who can reinvent himself for every role. Laurence Olivier, Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman … I think they are more common now than they were years ago. Paul Muni was one of the first. He could play ... Read more »
Last Chance Harvey
Emma Thompson is 50. I hadn’t realized that Dustin Hoffman is 71. He doesn’t look it, I’d have guessed mid-sixties. They are both wonderful actors, and it’s a pleasure to see them working together in a romance. The script is pretty sharp, too, most of the time. I sort of wish it had gone on a little longer, with the growing relationship between the two of them. I’ll give it a marginal ... Read more »
The Last Detail
Has this ever happened to you? With a very few films (this one and The Caine Mutiny are the only ones that spring to mind, but there were a few others) my memory of them is that they were black and white movies. I’ve pondered this for a long time. It’s barely possible that the first time I saw them was on a B&W TV … but that seems unlikely. It’s been Read more »
The Last Five Years
There is a Sondheim musical titled Merrily We Roll Along that is told in reverse. It begins with some people who used to be friends, creating musicals, but have broken up. Each scene then takes us a little further into the past, until they are young and vigorous and full of hope. (It was a big flop, but I was lucky enough to see a production at the University of ... Read more »