Movie Reviews
Balls of Fury
Imagine an alternate universe where ping-pong is as popular as professional wrestling, with all the screaming fans and outrageous costumes and antics for the players. Okay, I know it’s not easy, but try. It is very big in China, you know. So we have Randy Daytona, a twelve-year-old prodigy competing in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, and he disgraces himself. He ... Read more »
Antonio Gaudí
It seems a little ironic to me that this celebration of the works of Antonio Gaudí (1852-1926) should have been shot and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara. The traditional Japanese esthetic is minimalist to the extreme. Absolutely nothing could be further away from that than the buildings of the great Catalan architect.
After some deliberation I have decided that Frank Lloyd Wright ... Read more »
Race
Since this is the story of Jesse Owens in the run-up to the 1936 Fucking Nazi Olympics, and his performance at same, the title has a double meaning. It is all a pretty standard story—you know, conflicts with the wife, moral decisions over whether to go or to boycott as the NAACP (as shown here, anyway) recommends, stuff like that. Since he wasn’t a case of an unknown athlete coming forward ... Read more »
Everest
Anyone who tries to climb Mount Everest is, by definition, an idiot. (Except for Sherpas. For them, it’s a living.) I mean, once Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made it to the top and back, what is the fucking point? Every conquest after that is just another fucking idiot on the top. Human beings were not designed to live at 29,000 feet. The things that can go wrong, short of death, ... Read more »
Insidious: Chapter Three
I TiVoed this in the expectation that it would be a gore-fest of the kind that bore me silly. I figured twenty minutes, tops, before I hit the erase button. But at thirty minutes I was still watching. This movie is actually a lot better than any movie with a three after the title has any right to be. The team of James Wan and Leigh Whannell created the mega-ugly but mega-profitable Read more »
The Fall
It’s 1915 in Los Angeles. A five-year-old Romanian immigrant named Alexandria was picking oranges with her family to make a living when she fell out of a tree and broke her arm. Now she is in a rather nice hospital, recovering. She is befriended by Roy, a wannabe stunt man whose very first stunt, a jump on a horse from a railroad trestle into river went badly wrong. He may be paralyzed, ... Read more »
Sausage Party
One of the more unusual animated films you will ever see. I never saw Fritz the Cat, Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 animated film based on a character created by Robert Crumb, which got an X rating from the MPAA, so I don’t know just how raunchy it was. But I’m betting it wasn’t as explicit as this.
The premise is simple: All the products for sale at your local ... Read more »
Pan
I don’t think the world was exactly crying out for a prequel to the Peter Pan story, and the worldwide box office proved it. This film was a big bomb. Partly it was the bad over-acting by Hugh Jackman as the Pirate Blackbeard and Garrett Hedlund as a young Hook before he became a captain. The kid playing Pan is nothing special, either. I will agree that the special effects, the design of ... Read more »
The Poseidon Adventure
At the time, the capsizing of the Poseidon was one of the greatest, most amazing sequences ever filmed. The whole movie was sold by a trailer that showed part of it, and it just stunned us all. The ballroom set was built with huge forklifts on one side, so that the whole thing could be tilted as much as 30 degrees. I’d like to have seen that. Then the whole set ... 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 »