Movie Reviews
It
No doubt cashing in on the release of the theatrical version of this Stephen King blockbuster, the SPIKE network recently showed this four-hour made-for-TV version. The book was well over 1000 pages, and I couldn’t help wondering how the new movie was going to compress all that story into a little over two hours. The answer was simple: They didn’t. The book has two basic parts, following a ... Read more »
Giant
I never much cared for James Dean. Though he did a lot of TV in the early days, he only made three movies. I thought Rebel Without a Cause was ludicrous. I wasn’t much taken with East of Eden. Dean’s agonizing, his mannered and phony-looking screen presence … hell, just about everything about him irritated me. It’s no different here, in ... Read more »
Two For the Road
Two actors I really like a lot: Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. A director I like: Stanley Donen, who did any number of classic musicals and Charade, probably my favorite romantic comedy-drama of all time. So why didn’t it work for me? For one thing, I just don’t think the chemistry was there. For another, though I don’t object to hopping around in time when ... Read more »
The Naked Jungle
A few years ago we visited the San Francisco Academy of Sciences in its temporary location on Howard Street while the quake-damaged old building was largely torn down and replaced by a new, modern facility that I hope to visit someday. (I spent many a happy hour in the old building with my family when we lived in The City. I hope they have preserved the old-fashioned dioramas with stuffed ... Read more »
The Break
Lately we have been enjoying European TV series like this one more than most American shows. I’m not sure why this is. It’s certainly not because nothing good is being made in the USA. But there is a certain sensibility that just seems to speak to us. This is a good one, a complex story full of twists and turns as a disgraced policeman with amnesia tries to remember his actions in ... Read more »
Harold and Maude
Here is the very definition of a cult movie. When it was released neither the reviews nor the box office were very good. But the people who did like the film, loved the film. Its reputation grew over the years and now it has made many lists of the 100 Best Comedies, or best romances, or even best movies of all time. I guess it’s also a great example of movies the ... Read more »
Brassed Off
The finest experience of my high school life was being in the Nederland High School Band, the Golden Pride of the Golden Triangle …
… that would be Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange, Texas. Nederland is right in the middle of that triangle, and as I write this, the whole area is still mostly underwater from Hurricane Harvey. It’s not only Houston that is drowning, and in fact some ... Read more »
When the Bough Breaks
I’ve been a fan of Jonathan Kellerman and his novels about Los Angeles child psychologist Alex Delaware ever since this first novel was published. I do have to admit, though, that after thirty-two of them they are getting a little stale, and I don’t think I’ve read the last two.
As for this movie, it’s a cheap made-for-TV production and doesn’t look all that great. And Ted Danson ... Read more »
Bank Shot
There are no funnier books ever written than Donald E. Westlake’s stories of John Dortmunder and his hard-luck criminal gang. No less than seven of them have been filmed (including two I haven’t seen, one in Italy, starring Teo Teocoli, and a German one, with Herbert Knaup), and Dortmunder has been played by Robert Redford, George C. Scott, Paul Le Mat, Christopher Lambert, and Martin ... Read more »
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
I think Oprah Winfrey really wanted to make a good film about this incredible story, but somehow she ended up making it mostly about herself. It’s far too complicated and technical for me to detail it all here, but the short version is that cancer cells taken from Ms. Lacks in 1951 and cultured in a lab are still in use today, and though various companies and institutes have made fortunes ... Read more »