Movie Reviews
Titles starting with W
The Water Diviner
Somebody handed me a copy of this at the Balticon 50 over the Memorial Day weekend, and I can’t recall why. It has a sort of supernatural, or maybe I should say paranormal, element to it in the water divining, AKA dowsing, which is bullshit. Dowsing is also said to be able to locate graves and dead bodies, which comes in useful when Russell Crowe sets out to Turkey to find the bodies of ... Read more »
Water For Elephants
I love circuses. I love trains. I love elephants. Here’s a movie about an elephant on a circus train. What’s not to like? Well, the life on the train can be brutal if it’s run by a psychopathic sadist (Christoph Waitz, once again very good.). I also like Reese Witherspoon. Robert Pattinson left me as unmoved as I was by his performances in the first two of those boring Read more »
The Wave
How about that? A Norwegian catastrophe film! It’s not just Jerry Bruckheimer anymore. And though it does not have the epic, world-destroying scope of most American catastrophes, I think it is all the better for that. And it’s based on reality! What a concept. It not only could really happen, it will really happen. It’s just a matter of time.
In a Norwegian county called Møre og ...
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The Way Back
Peter Weir doesn’t make a lot of movies (his last one was the wonderful {{Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
}} in 2003), and when he does I pay attention. This one is based on the true story of an escape from a Russian gulag in the early days of The Great Patriotic War, a 4000-mile trek through Siberia, the Gobi Desert, and the Himalayas … that is almost certainly a ...
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Way Out West
Made by Hal Roach, but distributed through MGM. Like Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy were not treated well when they moved to the big studios. No one there understood the sort of creative process used by these geniuses, they wanted everything to be scripted, no improvisation, and they released the movies as B-pictures, not the A treatment they deserved. Stan Laurel (the creative side of ... Read more »
The Way to the Stars
The Way to the Stars (1945) For some reason this was re-titled Johnny in the Clouds for American release. It was Trevor Howard’s first real film role (his first was uncredited) and an early bit part for Jean Simmons. The cast is a roll call of some of the best British stars and character actors of the day: Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Stanley Holloway, Basil Radford, David Tomlinson, many ... Read more »
The Way to the Stars
The Way to the Stars (1945) For some reason this was re-titled Johnny in the Clouds for American release. It was Trevor Howard’s first real film role (his first was uncredited) and an early bit part for Jean Simmons. The cast is a roll call of some of the best British stars and character actors of the day: Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Stanley Holloway, Basil ... Read more »
The Way Way Back
Teen angst movies are often some of the most boring things I can think of, but this one rises above that. Duncan (Liam James) is the 14-year-old son of Toni Collette, a divorced mother. She has been seeing Steve Carell for about a year, and they and his teen daughter are going to his cottage on Cape Cod for a summer vacation. Steve has one of those giant ‘60s station wagons, perfectly ... Read more »
The Way We Were
On the AFI’s list of 100 Years … 100 Passions this is #6, behind Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, West Side Story, Roman Holiday, and An Affair to Remember, and just above Doctor Zhivago. I wouldn’t put it that high, myself. I wouldn’t drop it off the list entirely, but for some ... 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 »