Movie Reviews
Titles starting with H
The Heat
Rex Reed called Melissa McCarthy “tractor-sized,” “humongous,” and “a female hippo” in his review of The Identity Thief, a movie I haven’t seen. I was surprised to find that Reed wasn’t dead, he has had so little impact on my life as a film critic. I can only say I won’t mourn his death. Take your review and shove it up your Holland-tunnel-sized asshole, you ... Read more »
The Heat Is On: The Making of Miss Saigon
Here is one of the Broadway smash hit musicals I’d most like to see. No movie has ever been made from it (nor Sunset Boulevard, as well), unlike The Phantom of the Opera and The Producers. I recently saw a story that suggested the investors are waiting to see whether or not Les ... Read more »
Heaven’s Gate
I have heard that Erich von Stroheim was such a stickler for detail that, when he had extras in Prussian uniforms in one of his films, he insisted that they wear authentic Prussian Army skivvies. This is a classic example of violating the prime principle of movie-making: Put your money up on the screen. If it ain’t in the shot, it doesn’t exist. If those Prussian ... Read more »
Heights
Lee pretty much summed it up: Forgettable. I just know that if you ask me about this movie a month from now, I won’t have a clue what it was about. It’s based on a play by Amy Fox, a first-time playwright, and some of the cast are great. Glenn Close (no surprise) and Elizabeth Banks are very good. It’s nice to see George Segal again … whatever happened to him? (I ... Read more »
Hell or High Water
Chris Pine and Ben Foster are brothers on a dirt-poor ranch somewhere in the prairie hell known as West Texas. (The picture was actually shot just across the state line in New Mexico. Same difference.) But oil has been discovered on the land, which leave them with a big problem. The bank owns a lien and they need about $40,000 to pay it off, and they have to have it by Friday or the goddam ... Read more »
Hellboy
Seems to me there’s entirely too many comic book movies lately. Maybe because that’s I’m not a fan of comic books. However, if you’re going to make one, it seems best to have reasonably good source material, and this is superior. Hellboy is a troubled and witty and flawed hero, his origin is imaginative, and the movie is well-executed. Nothing is going to make this seem like a serious ... Read more »
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
I think I may have to just give up on comic book movies. Even if they’re well-reviewed. Even if it means that I might miss the occasional one that has some wit, some humor, like Iron Man, that is onto itself and understands how frickin’ goofy the whole thing is. I mean, what the hell has happened to our culture, that we spend multiple ... Read more »
Hell’s Angels
The story is ludicrous, the acting laughable, and the American accents of these British upper class people are way beyond hilarious … but boy oh boy, those airplanes! Never before or since have so many authentic aircraft been assembled and flown with such derring-do. Howard Hughes himself flew the final scene, when his stunt pilots refused to attempt it. He crashed the plane, but he got ... Read more »
The Help
There’s been a lot of controversy, of the kind I try not to pay a lot of attention to. How dare a white woman write a book that tries to get into the heads of black maid/nannies in 1963? That sort of thing. But there was one article that made me think, about “White savior movies.” You know the story, you’ve seen it dozens of times. A white person comes into a community of (insert non-white ... Read more »
Helvetica
If you can make a whole movie about a typeface, I guess it’s true that you can make a movie about anything. Helvetica is the ubiquitous typeface of the modern age. It’s everywhere, and believe me, after you’ve seen this movie, you’ll see it everywhere. It was designed in 1957 in Switzerland (Helvetia, as I learned as a young philatelist, is the name on Swiss stamps) as a reaction to the ... Read more »