Movie Reviews
Head
This isn’t the worst film that tried to cash in on the peace and love phenomenon. That would be the abomination by Otto Preminger called Skidoo, which came out in the same year. This plays like some misbegotten mash-up of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! There is no story as such, but ... Read more »
Chicago 10
This is a movie about what we usually refer to as the Chicago Seven: Abbie Hoffman (no relation to Julius Hoffman, the hanging judge), David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner (pronounced WINE-er, as he pointed out to the judge, and no relation to the notorious weenie-wagging ex-congressman). (Sobering thought: Most of them are dead now.) When ... Read more »
The Other Guys
Get a load of this cast: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Samuel L. Jackson. You could hardly go wrong with them, right? And I must say the critics mostly liked it. It’s a satire of cop buddy pictures. To say it’s over the top … well, there’s over the top and then there’s stratospheric. Jackson and Johnson are supercops, in the mold of ... Read more »
Chicken Every Sunday
Dan Dailey and Celeste Holm are a couple in Tucson, slightly before and after 1900. He has a pattern, which is to start a business and then, just as it is about to make a nice profit, he gets tired of it and embarks on another business. His long-suffering wife has to take in boarders to make ends meet, and they are forever adding to the house to make a room for one more. When his ... Read more »
Black Mirror, Season Two
Well, it’s back, the most dystopian science fiction anthology series I’ve ever seen. I mean, these stories are black, really black. Normally I’m much in favor of stories that take the protagonist from a terrible situation, through a series of hardships and struggles, but it all comes out okay in the end. These stories do not. But they are so imaginative, so ... Read more »
George Lucas in Love
I almost passed over this title on the DVD shelf at Goodwill, but then my eyes snapped back, wondering what the hell this could be. What it is, is a USC student film that very cleverly combines Shakespeare in Love with just about every Star Wars reference you could imagine. It’s 1967 and poor George is banging ... Read more »
Rome
This huge series was originally planned to run for five seasons, but was cancelled after two because it was too expensive even for HBO. But the writer-showrunner knew it was coming after the first season, so he packed all the planned story into the second season. Which doesn’t seem to have hurt it. We found it to be addictive, and binged the whole thing in not much more than a ... Read more »
Genius
Colin Firth. Jude Law. Nicole Kidman. Guy Pierce. Dominic West (from The Wire). For this quintessentially American story, all about Americans writing great American literature, who do they cast in the major roles? Three Brits and two Aussies. You have go all the way down to sixth billing to find an American: Laura Linney. What’s up with that? Now, I’m not one of ... Read more »
An American Haunting
It is barely possible that this movie is better than I experienced it, because this was the night of the most disastrous election in American history. We were switching back and forth because we couldn’t bear to watch the results unfold. But I don’t think so. It’s pretty lame, almost devoid of scares. But again … maybe it was the fact that the horror in the real world that night was so ... Read more »
Gabriel Over the White House
A very strange movie. Walter Huston is the newly-elected president. He seems a jovial fellow, a back-slapping politician. Then he gets a head injury in a car crash, and when he comes out of the coma he is a changed man, a driven man, a man who is determined to get America out of the Great Depression by any means necessary. And oh brother! The means …
First he fires his entire ... Read more »