Movie Reviews
Titles starting with B
Be Big!
Laurel and Hardy, when they are married to women in a film, are always terrified of their wives. And the ladies are always formidable, quite pretty, but quick to pick up a shotgun and go after their mates. Here they have convinced the ladies that Ollie is too sick to go to Atlantic City as they had planned. What they want to do instead is attend a lodge meeting in their honor, at which ... Read more »
Be Cool
Elmore Leonard’s books have been almost as popular as movie sources as Stephen King’s. Many were done for TV and I haven’t seen them. He’s been fairly lucky, too, with a high percentage of decent adaptations like Out of Sight, 52 Pick-Up, Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and Read more »
Be Kind Rewind
Mos Def works in a tiny video store owned by Danny Glover, certainly the last one on Earth that rents VHS tapes. His friend is Jack Black, playing the usual crazy Jack Black verbal and physical volcano. Jack becomes magnetized by a nearby power plant (at which point we abandon all connection to reality, but that doesn’t have to be bad) and accidentally erases all the tapes in the shop. But ... Read more »
Bean
Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean television series is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Several times I’ve had to pause the tape because I was laughing so hard I hurt. So what happened here? Lack of imagination, I guess. The film consists largely of recycled stuff that was funny on the small screen but just doesn’t work here. See Johnny English.
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
There’s an interesting history here. Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen are friends (both are still alive!). Ray H. was working on a movie called Monster From the Sea and asked Ray B. if he’d like to do some script doctoring. Bradbury reported back that the studio might have a plagiarism problem, as there was a scene where the monster attacked a lighthouse that was ... Read more »
Beast From Haunted Cave
In the opening credits it says “The producers would like to thank the people of South Dakota, without whom this picture would not have been possible.” I suspect the people of South Dakota are still trying to recover. It was a Corman production (not Roger, but his older brother Gene), and one of the stars was Sinatra (not Frank, or Frank Jr., or even Nancy, but Richard, the son of Frank’s ... Read more »
The Beast With Five Fingers
Much better than the title would indicate. It’s not a horror film as we think of them today, though a few people get strangled. It’s more of a ghost story … though only a part of the ghost is involved. A partially paralyzed pianist has learned to play certain pieces with just his left hand. He’s bitter, and possibly crazy. He changes his will to leave everything to his nurse. Then he falls ... Read more »
Beasts of the Southern Wild
It’s being touted as an Oscar contender, though it probably doesn’t have much chance of winning. We were quite impressed. It’s part fantasy, in the mind of a 6-year-old girl named Hushpuppy, who lives in a group of rugged individualists in a place called the Bathtub, on the wrong side of the levees. This place is several levels below a shanty town; it’s pretty much ... Read more »
Beau Hunks
Laurel and Hardy Two-reeler. The opening credits list 3,897 Arabs, 1,944 Riffians, and 4 Native Swede Guilders. It’s a take-off on Beau Geste, with Ollie going into the French Foreign Legion to forget a failed romance. (Turns out every man in the army is mooning over the same picture he is; it’s Jean Harlow.) At 37 minutes it’s neither a short nor a feature. ... Read more »
The Beautiful Country
In Vietnamese the children of American G.I.s and Vietnamese women are called bui doi, which translates as “less than dust.” How horrible. I can certainly understand the bitterness of the people over all the horrors we visited on them, but it’s so unfair to take it out on the children. Binh is bui doi, too tall when he visits the marketplace, with hair that has a little bit of a curl and a ... Read more »