Movie Reviews
Let Me In
This is a remake of the excellent Swedish film Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in). That was a tale of a modern-day vampire, a twelve-year-old girl, who becomes friends with a boy. But the movie’s best line is when he asks her how old she is. “I’m twelve … but I’ve been twelve for a very long time.” Wow! For more about it check out my review of the ... Read more »
Executive Action
There are those who say that America blew up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor to get us into a war. The Lusitania was sunk for a similar reason. Ditto the attack on Pearl Harbor, which FDR knew all about in advance. And of course, the Pueblo incident never happened. I just chanced on a website claiming that very ... Read more »
The Fall (Season Three)
I re-read my review of the previous two seasons, and saw that I had really been kind. While Season One was very good, and Season Two was pretty good, it only lasted until the last half hour, when it all went haywire. It concluded with some of the shoddiest police work the world has ever seen since Dallas in 1963. People who had been doing smart things suddenly started doing stupid things. ... Read more »
Trading Places
It’s about the old nature-nurture debate. Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, two horrible old billionaire brothers, make a bet, one claiming that it’s all about genetics, the other that it’s all about how one was raised, in what sort of environment. To that end, they totally ruin the life of Dan Aykroyd, a smug and smarmy member of the upper classes, and put Eddie Murphy, a fast-talking ... Read more »
Kick-Ass 2
As is so often the case, the sequel can’t recapture the zip and freshness of the original. It follows the usual path of trying to one-up by putting in more of what the producers wrongly feel is what made the first movie work: ordinary people acting out as superheroes. So we get dozens of them, and not a one of them is interesting. (One of them is Jim Carrey and we didn’t even recognize ... Read more »
Kick-Ass
Here’s a real wonder: a comic book movie that I actually liked. I hasten to add that it’s not for everyone. Roger Ebert hated it, as did a few other critics, but it was mostly reviewed positively.
Chloë Grace Moretz is Mindy Macready, an eleven-year-old whose obsessed father (Nicholas Cage) is training her to be a super-Ninja killer so they can avenge her mother’s death at the ... Read more »
The Blues Brothers
The movie clearly set the record for number of cars destroyed in its final car chase. They had a full-time garage to restore the cars to drivable condition. I wondered how much that all cost, and it turns out, not much. Not for the cars, anyway. They bought a lot of clapped-out highway patrol cars from California, for $400 a pop. Junked them afterward. Filming the chase in the city streets ... Read more »
The Sixth Sense
M. Night Shyamalan made one really good movie (this one), one okay movie (Unbreakable), and everything else his hand has touched has been garbage. Yes, I can see that most of his movies have made money, and some have even been critical successes, but they have all been stupid, as he tried over and over to duplicate the “twist ending” success of this one, and ... Read more »
Café Society
I’d have to call Woody Allen’s latest film a trifle, a bauble. Which doesn’t mean it’s no good. It’s just that the visuals, the locations and cars and costumes, are really of more interest to me than the actual plot. And wow, they are terrific! Woody really was born at the wrong time. He should have been an adult right about here in the 1930s, because it’s clear he loves everything about ... Read more »
By the Sea
When a movie really sucks, sometimes the writer can blame the director or the director can blame the writer. But when you are the writer and the director, you have to own the whole dud yourself. Angelina Jolie is both, and a co-star with her hubby at the time, Brad Pitt. (Are you deeply sorry that “Brangelina” is breaking up? Please, get a life!) He is a writer ... Read more »