Movie Reviews
Blue in the Face
The small film Smoke appeared in the same year as this, a sort of sequel in that it takes place in and around the small tobacco store run by Auggie, played wonderfully by Harvey Keitel. Only it’s not, really, because very few of the characters carry over from the first film. What happened is that the director, Wayne Wang, watched some improvisational material ... Read more »
Smoke
This is the kind of small, no-budget film that I assume actors really love to do. There’s no money, but if the script is good you get a chance to really dig into some fascinating characters. This script is really nice. It happens mostly in a small tobacco store in Brooklyn. It’s on the corner of Prospect Park West and 16th Street, a block away from Prospect Park. The building is still ... Read more »
Hidden Figures
I am so conflicted about this movie. The reviews were uniformly good, it picked up a lot of Oscar nominations, and I quite enjoyed it. Then I read a little about the real story …
I don’t usually demand a really high degree of historical accuracy in a film. I will tolerate quite a bit of dramatic license. But it turns out that much, and I might even say ... Read more »
The Way West
We have a family connection to this film. It is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and concerns a wagon train heading out on the Oregon Trail back in 1843, when it was hardly a trail at all. The connection is that Lee’s family came out on the Trail in 1854! That was five years before statehood! Isn’t that amazing? By then it was a lot more defined, almost an actual road in some ... Read more »
Little Shop of Horrors
… twenty-two years later it was turned into an Off-Off-Broadway musical by the team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who later went on to write the songs for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, before Ashman was taken from us far too soon at the age of 41, one more artistic victim of AIDS.
I won’t say this ... Read more »
Little Shop of Horrors
I’m happy to say that Roger Corman, the King of Schlock, is still alive and well at age 91, and still producing Grade D movies. He ran his own unaccredited, street-level, hard-knocks sort of film school, much more interesting than those at USC and UCLA, starting in the 1950s. Students included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and James Cameron, and actors like Peter Fonda and Jack ... Read more »
Vincent and Theo
There is something that really bums me out about this film that has nothing to do with the film itself. It was originally a 200-minute series on the BBC. Then it was edited to a 138-minute version for theatrical release. That’s the one we saw, and we liked it so much that we felt cheated that we couldn’t see the whole thing. It seems it has been released in the UK, in the Region 2 format, ... Read more »
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
In the ‘70s and into the ‘80s I never missed an issue of the National Lampoon. I had a complete run from the first issue until at some point it just seemed to run out of steam, stopped being very funny. I wish I still had them. But in its heyday there was nothing funnier, nothing edgier, nothing more outrageous. Absolutely nothing was out of bounds. Nothing was ... Read more »
Rush
The business of illegal drugs is so filthy it’s hard to describe. And I’m talking both sides of the coin, both those who deal in them, and those who try to arrest them. My personal opinion is that the problem would be solved if the government just got out of our bloodstreams and let us get high any way we want to. This seems harsh to some, I know. There would be a lot of overdoses. (As if ... Read more »
Countdown
What a total disaster. It was Robert Altman’s third feature film, with That Cold Day in the Park still to come before his breakout hit with M*A*S*H. It was adapted from a novel by Hank Searles, who specialized in aviation stories. The science is garbage. James Caan is going to be the first man on the Moon, and he’s going there in a ... Read more »