The Last Unicorn

The Last Unicorn (1982) (US, UK, Japan, West Germany) This weekend (5/26/16) we will be meeting our old friend Peter Beagle at Balticon 50 in Baltimore. We are looking forward to it, even though Peter is involved in some awful litigation with his former manager who seems to have stolen all his money and his copyrights. It might be a little awkward, as I used to be friends with the former ... Read more »

The Last Waltz

If there has ever been a better concert movie, it’s not coming to mind. (Woodstock is not a concert movie.) The farewell performance by The Band and friends like Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, and Muddy Waters took place in Winterland (sadly, demolished in 1985), in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day in 1976. I went to a few concerts in that big old ... Read more »

The Last Wave

Peter Weir followed up the international success of Picnic at Hanging Rock with this one. I met him, briefly, at the premier of The Year of Living Dangerously on the MGM lot in 1982. Always fun to drop a name!

The movie deals with conflicts between white and aboriginal culture in Australia. The Aboriginals believe there are two ... Read more »

Late Marriage

At some point watching this, Lee said something like “This is the anti-My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” She’s right. In that one, ethnic families were a jolly thing to be endured. It was funny, trying to live with old-country values in modern America.

This movie is in an ethnic Georgian community in Israel, and these Georgians don’t fuck around. A 31-year-old ... Read more »

A Late Quartet

The Fugue string quartet has been performing together for 25 years, and consists of First Violin (Mark Ivanir, a Ukrainian-Israeli with a lot of supporting film credits), Second Violin (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Viola (Catherine Keener) and Cello (Christopher Walken). Cello is the heart of the ensemble, the oldest of them, the man that keeps them all together and on the straight and narrow. ... Read more »

The Late Show

Robert Benton doesn’t have a lot of screen credits, but they’re mostly good ones. He’s won three Oscars, for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer, and for writing Places in the Heart. He also wrote Bonnie and Clyde. He hails from Waxahatchie, Texas, a place in my heart, a little ... Read more »

Laura

Beautiful female movie stars were so thick on the ground in Hollywood in the 1940s that you couldn’t turn around without tripping over one. But was there ever one as beautiful as Gene Tierney? It’s a matter of endless debate, of course, and there are dozens of candidates for “Most Beautiful,” but she would be hard to beat. If you like film noir (and I love it) this is one of the absolute ... Read more »

Laurel Canyon

Has Frances McDormand ever been bad in a film? I sure can’t remember one. I’m so glad she got her Oscar for Fargo, because she doesn’t have the glamour to be a leading lady except in quirky roles like that. This was a good film, three stars or so.

Laurel or Hardy Shorts

This is one of those “public domain” DVDs that gives you fairly poor prints of movies that have gone out of copyright. I don’t mind much, because anyone who had a financial interest in these films is long dead. In this case it is two feature-length movies, and eleven two-reelers of varying quality. Only one of them has the two together, and it has nothing to do with the beloved characters ... Read more »

The Lavender Hill Mob

There were sixteen or seventeen of the so-called Ealing Comedies from 1947 to 1957, depending on who is counting. I’ve seen about half of them. They vary in quality, but I’ve never seen one that is actually bad, and among them are some of the best comedies ever made. The most famous are probably Kind Hearts and Coronets and The ... Read more »