Movie Reviews
The Five
Technically this is known as Harlan Coben’s The Five, but I want it to be alphabetized under F, so I’ll know where to look for it. Coben is one of the best thriller writers working today. His plots always involve some almost impossible to believe circumstance, and the gradual revelation of a ton of buried secrets. The explanations at the end are plausible … if ... Read more »
Dark Horse: The Incredible True Story of Dream Alliance
One of the better feel-good documentaries. A barmaid in a working-class town in Wales buys a broken-down racehorse for £350. She breeds him and the result is a horse called Dream Alliance. They name him that because there is a group of working-class investors who each contribute £10 a month, a considerable sum for most of them. There is no group of people snobbier than the British ... Read more »
Firecreek
Sometimes an older movie works for me, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ll admit that it’s quite possible that a film doesn’t work just because I’m not in the mood for it. We didn’t finish this one. It just didn’t stir our interest, despite starring people like Jack Elam, Dean Jagger, Ed Begley, Jay C. Flippen, Louise Latham, Inger Stevens, and Gary Lockwood, the same year he was in Read more »
Turnabout
I’m a fan of the movie Topper, written by Thorne Smith, a writer of humorous, racy (for the time) fantasy fiction. There was usually something off-the-wall about his stories, like the ghosts (played by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in the film), or a fountain of youth, or some sort of transformation. In this one a husband and wife switch bodies. Mostly this ... Read more »
Baghdad Cafe
A nice little small movie that has a cult following. Jasmin, (Marianne Sägebrecht) a German woman traveling through the Mojave Desert, has an argument with her husband and she leaves him, or rather he leaves her, at the side of the road. She makes her way to the Baghdad Café, sitting out there all by itself on Route 66. Since Interstate 40 bypassed the place, hardly anybody ever shows up ... Read more »
Silence
This was a passion project for Martin Scorsese, something he worked twenty-five years to make. It concerns the awful trials of three Catholic missionaries in Japan in the 1630s. I’ll admit that I had no idea that there were any Catholics in Japan that far back. But there were, and they were not welcome. They and their faithful followers were tortured and killed for refusing to renounce ... Read more »
Winter’s Bone (Second review)
I tried to watch this when it was new, but I got so depressed after about half an hour that I just had to quit. I mean, who were these horrible people? Did the meth they cook and sell and snort fry their brains, or were they that disgusting all the time? I could not stand watching them as they brutalized poor Jennifer Lawrence. Hillbilly inbreeding, I ... Read more »
In Like Flint
Some movies age better than others. This one has aged catastrophically. I remember sort of liking it, though as a sequel to Our Man Flint it was distinctly inferior. It is populated almost exclusively by Playboy bunny-playmate types. That’s probably why I liked it. I’ll admit it, I was a devotee of Hefner’s rag back then, and I won’t ... Read more »
Alice’s Restaurant
The first time you hear it, it’s pretty funny. The second time you might chuckle here and there. By the third time you are mighty tired of hearing about those “twenty-seven 8 x 10 colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin’ what each one was.” By the fourth time, you’re sprinting across the room to change the radio station ... Read more »
The Strawberry Statement
I never called them pigs. Many of the people I hung out with and many that I was friends with used that term, but I never did. I didn’t think that dehumanizing the very folks who were dehumanizing us was a good idea. It’s the sort of thinking that leads us to words like Jap, gook, wetback, and nigger. Which is not to say that some of them didn’t behave like pigs ... Read more »