Movie Reviews
Titles starting with J
Julia Misbehaves
I have always loved the pairing of Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in Mrs. Miniver, the role Garson won the Oscar for. I hadn’t realized that they co-starred no less than eight times! This is the fifth of them. It is a mere trifle, nothing to compare to that wartime masterpiece above. Greer and Walter were married 20 years ago, but the harpy mother-in-law managed ... Read more »
Julie & Julia
What a sweet little movie! It’s not going to bring about world peace, or solve global warming, or do anything about the oil shortage, but really, what movie is? Not all good movies have to be heavy, nor do they have to be joke-filled comedies. This movie has little in the way of actual plot, it’s more of a case of spending a pleasant two hours with some people you like. Two true stories, ... Read more »
Juliet of the Spirits
Federico Fellini has never been among my very favorites directors, though one of his films, Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria) is one my Top 25 of All Time list. He started off as a neo-realist, and then started shifting into his own unique brand of fantastic imagery. La Dolce Vita began the process, he jumped into it with both ... Read more »
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
I went in dubious, and came out liking it. I had gotten the impression that it was a remake of the 1995 film, but it is actually a sequel. I hadn’t realized this was a franchise, made from a book, and including the film Zathura and a TV series to boot. In the first one children discover a board game that has the power to bring the creatures of the game into the ... Read more »
Junebug
Let’s start with “outsider art.” Madeleine and George are recently married and live in Chicago. She deals in this stuff. You may have heard of it, it used to be called “primitive” art, and Grandma Moses is probably the most famous practitioner. (No, wait, it sez here that she’s called a folk artist.) (There’s also another term: naïve art. Henri ... Read more »
The Jungle Book
This movie’s chief claim to fame is that it was the last one produced by Walt Disney. There are those who speculate that if it had been a financial failure the studio might have ceased producing animated features altogether. To me, it is a second step in the decline of Disney animation that began with The Sword in the Stone and continued through the ‘70s and ... Read more »
The Jungle Book
Just when you think you have seen the best CGI special effects ever, that you can never be amazed like that again, another movie comes along that blows you away. This is that movie. It is now totally impossible to visually tell a CGI animal from a real one. The only way you can be sure is if that animal does something a real animal can’t, like talk. There are around seventy different ... Read more »
The Jungle Book
This is the first of what I think of as the Big Three versions of the Kipling book (there are innumerably other versions), long before the Disney animation in 1967 and the CGI “live action” one in 2016. The star is Sabu, who I recall from The Thief of Baghdad. It was made by the Korda brothers, Zoltan, Alexander, and Vincent, during the period when the war forced ... Read more »
Juno
The buzz on this one going in was so strong that I was half expecting a bit of a letdown. And to tell the truth, it did not capture me from the very first moments. I’ve been reading some of the message boards at the IMDb and Metacritic, and the main objection I’m seeing is that the two teenage girls were way too sophisticated in their dialogue. I felt that, a little, at first. But once it ... Read more »
Juno and the Paycock
What a rip-off! The only big name in the film is Barry Fitzgerald. He gets top billing. And what happens? Why, he delivers a stirring speech about freedom in Ireland, and then three minutes and twenty-seven seconds—by actual count—into the movie he gets machine-gunned to death! That’s all we see of him!
Paycock is the Irish pronunciation of peacock, and that’s exactly what this ... Read more »