Movie Reviews
Titles starting with 0-9
3-Iron
The Korean title means “empty house.” It’s a good title, though the one in English isn’t bad, either. Tae-suk is a young man who has a nice scam going. He hangs menus on doorknobs in the morning, and later goes back to see which ones were not removed. That house is likely to be empty, which he confirms by listening to the outgoing message on the answering machine. If the residents are out ... Read more »
3 Women
There’s Mildred (Millie) (Shelley Duvall) (Olive Oyl?) and then there’s Mildred (Pinky) (Millie) (Sissy Spacek) (Carrie?) and then there’s Willie (Read more »
3 Women
It got off on the wrong foot with me from the very opening frames. There was a long, long, slow, slow panning shot over a therapy pool full of old people and their attendants, and the music just instantly got on my nerves. It featured oboe, contra-bassoon, and flute. It was harsh, dissonant, random sounds like so much modern music. It was composed by Gerald Busby. Interesting side stuff: ... Read more »
300
Another comic-book movie. Another green-screen movie, shot entirely in a warehouse in Toronto with all scenery CGIed in later, like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but with no sense of humor. Based—very loosely—on the Battle of Thermopylae between the Spartan Greeks and the Persian Empire of Xerxes. I figure history may have ... Read more »
300
Another comic-book movie. Another green-screen movie, shot entirely in a warehouse in Toronto with all scenery CGIed in later, like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but with no sense of humor. Based—very loosely—on the Battle of Thermopylae between the Spartan Greeks and the Persian Empire of Xerxes. I figure history may have ... Read more »
3:10 to Yuma
SPOILERS HERE. This is a considerably pumped-up remake of a 1957 movie based on an Elmore Leonard short story. Outlaw and murderer Ben Wade has been captured because he did a really dumb thing. Now he has to be put on a train to the prison in Yuma, but his gang will ... Read more »
The 33
You probably remember the international story of the 33 Chilean miners trapped deep underground for 69 days, and the massive effort to rescue them. This movie attempts to show us just how hard it was to be down there, and just how resourceful the engineers aboveground had to be to drill those holes, one of them big enough to lower a man-sized cage (luckily, there were no fat men!) down to ... Read more »
36 Hours
James Garner and Eva Marie Saint in a “Mission: Impossible” scenario. Garner is a Allied intelligence agent who knows all the plans for the D-Day invasion. He is captured in Portugal, drugged, and taken to an elaborate Big Con in Germany where an entire veterans hospital has ... Read more »
The 39 Steps
Could be the prototype for a dozen “innocent man wrongly accused” Hitchcock movies. And still one of the best. It’s got everything, as Robert Donat is swept up in spy hugger-mugger by a mysterious foreign woman who soon collapses in his arms with a knife in her back, much like the man in the United Nations falls into Cary Grant’s arms in North by Northwest. It ... Read more »
4 Little Girls
Spike Lee’s heartbreaking documentary on the bombing murders of the four black teenagers, in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by sub-human white bombers who didn’t have to face justice for many, many years, until the South had changed enough that a prosecutor thought he had a chance to convict the piece of garbage named Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss. ... Read more »