Movie Reviews
The Accountant
Boy, there’s a title that makes you want to run right out and see it, right? I mean, whose life is more exciting than a CPA? But no, really, how do you make an accountant’s life interesting? By thinking up a highly unlikely plot device … but I have to admit, an interesting one.
Ben Affleck is the title character. He is on the autistic spectrum, what is known as a high-functioning ... Read more »
Reds
When it is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad … it’s not horrid, exactly. But it can be damn slow. Warren Beatty is one of those obsessed, perfectionist directors who can demand literally a hundred takes. During the filming of this one, when Beatty was about to order the 101st take of a simple scene, Gene Hackman said fuck this, and walked out. And ... Read more »
Kubo and the Two Strings
People keep writing the obituary for stop-motion animation, and then something like this comes along. It was produced by Laika, the successor to Will Vinton Studios, probably best known for the claymation commercials for California raisins and the song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” They did a lot of other stuff, of course.
Technically it is stunning. Two things made it better ... Read more »
Two Brothers
It is the mid-1920s and Kumar and Sangha are tiger cubs from the same litter. (I just learned that though tigers usually have two or three cubs, they can have as many as six!) Their father is killed trying to protect them, and one is sold to a small circus while the other goes to a young boy who raises him as a pet until his mum puts her foot down. After that he is caged and abused by a ... Read more »
Oscar Nominated Shorts 2016
Once more we set out for the balcony of the Hollywood Theater in Portland to see this year’s crop of short, non-documentary films. It turned out to be not a very good year, though my picks for the winners are all deserving.
Animated. You quickly notice the lack of diversity here. All five are from either the US or Canada. Even one of the runners-up ... Read more »
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
As with The Boyfriend, I figure there are two ways of looking at this movie. You can gripe about what it is not, or you can just enjoy what it is. Many people who saw The Boyfriend on the stage complained that that crazy man, Ken Russell, took what was a sweet, silly little musical ... Read more »
All Quiet on the Western Front
There had been anti-war films before, but nothing remotely on this scale. And there had never been one nearly as bleak as this. Not a single frame in this movie makes war seem the tiniest bit fun, glamorous, exciting, heroic, or even patriotic. No, this movie correctly portrays war as the terrifying, horrifying, gut-spilling, miserable, screaming-in-agony-and-terror atrocity that it is. ... Read more »
The Bad and the Beautiful
Certainly a star-studded cast here. Lana Turner gets top billing because she was the bigger star in 1952, but it’s really Kirk Douglas’s picture. He is a movie mogul who is the son of a producer who bankrupted his own studio, so Kirk had to work his way up from the bottom. Along the way he stabs his best friend, a director (Barry Sullivan) in the back, humiliates the woman who loves him ... Read more »
Wonder Boys
Curtis Hanson seems to be one of the better directors I have not really taken note of. (It’s too late now. He died of some horrible strain of dementia in late 2016) His credits include small but heartfelt films like The Big Year, which we loved, and big ones, like L.A. Confidential, which in addition to being an outstanding noir ... Read more »
Ben-Hur
Now let me get this straight. The Hur family were rich Jews in Jerusalem. They got along fine with the Romans, and raised little Massala as their own. He and Judah Ben-Hur thought of themselves as brothers. But Judah’s sister, Tirzah, was involved with a group called the Zealots, who wanted to kick the Romans out of Judea. This is fine with me. I would have been on their side.
(On ... Read more »