Penelope

It’s a fairy tale, it’s allegorical, I understand that. But still … As a result of an ancient curse, a girl is born with a pig’s nose. To break the curse she has to be accepted uncritically by a “blueblood.” Okay. But she’s been cloistered by her insanely over-protective mother, and every guy who sees her literally runs away in horror, leaping from windows. Okay, they’re spoiled rich kids, ... Read more »

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

We have been watching this in re-runs. There have been two seasons, with the third due to begin in April. The bad news is that it’s on Showtime, definitely the second-choice cable venue after HBO. It comes on right after Fat Scientologist. The good news is that it’s available on DVD, in the stores that aren’t put off by its very title.

P&T, the ... Read more »

Pennies From Heaven

Everybody wanted to see The Jerk 2. Hell, I wanted to see The Jerk 2, too, but I was more than willing to wait for it. Steve Martin trained for six months to learn how to tap dance, and he got to be damn good at it. He will never be Astaire, but he had the guts to put himself into an Astaire movie and not disgrace himself. And we did ... Read more »

People I Know

A has-been PR man with just one remaining client falls entirely by accident into the buzz saw of the real power players of the world. They are very nasty people, sort of like in Eyes Wide Shut. He witnesses a murder but is too stoned to even know he saw anything. He continues to try to put together a benefit opposing deportation of Nigerians, mostly because he ... Read more »

A Perfect Day

All wars are horrible, but the Yugoslav Wars from 1991 to 2001 seem to be particularly bad. You remember them? There were four different wars, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Croatia, and Slovenia, plus two “insurgencies.” People who had gotten along fine with neighbors of different faiths or ethnicities suddenly began shooting and blowing each other up. Horrible war crimes were committed. This is ... Read more »

A Perfect Getaway

When I say this is a better-than-usual thriller involving people out in the wilderness in mortal danger for their lives, you should bear in mind that the bar for that sub-sub-genre of scary movie has been set very, very low. That said, I have to say I enjoyed it up until the usual last ten minutes, when events blast their way over the top and into la-la land. But before that, the ... Read more »

A Perfect Murder

Up until about the halfway point, this is a remake of Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder. I’ve never really understood the impulse to do a movie over, except possibly when the original was in another language, and even that is suspect. The great majority of the time, the new version is inferior to the old, often vastly so. But this is one of the better ones. If you ... Read more »

Perfect Stranger

Halle Berry is a reporter whose friend is killed, and she suspects Bruce Willis, a high-powered ad exec. So she goes undercover in his company to smoke him out. She is helped in her quest by Giovanni Ribisi, a computer nerd. I can’t say a lot more without giving away the ending. I can only complain that the killer could only have been one of three people, and the one it turned out to be ... Read more »

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

They say that smell is the most primal of our senses, that the nose connects directly to the most primitive part of our brain. Humans have lost much of it, and still a scent can bring back memories when we least expect them. Imagine, then, a man whose sense of smell is as vivid as that of a dog. That’s what the German author Patrick Süskind did in his novel Read more »