Movie Reviews
Dead Poets Society
We have seen several films lately that I would call “recent classics.” That is, twenty or thirty years old. Several of them have been minor disappointments, not as good as I remember them. Which is not to say they are bad, just that they don’t quite pack the punch that they used to. Among these are The Graduate and Read more »
Fracture
There are people who will tell you there is no such thing as a perfect murder. One that really annoys me is some ex-cop named Joe Something, who looks at the camera and says, “If you commit a murder, I will find you!” Bullshit, Joe. I’ll bet there are “open” (that is, “unsolved”) cases in your files. Every homicide detective has them. Most stranger killings, for ... Read more »
Die Hard With a Vengeance
Number Three in a series! Collect them all! Location: New York City. For once Bonnie Bedalia is not tied to some railroad track somewhere with Snidely Whiplash looking on and chortling. In fact, she is nowhere to be seen, nor is scumbag reporter William Atherton. John McClane’s Negro sidekick (so far, there has always been a black ally) is a big star this time around, Samuel L. Jackson. ... Read more »
Die Hard 2
When you get to five films in a franchise it can sometimes be hard to remember who did what to whom, where, and why. I had to refresh my memory about this one. Okay, it’s happening at Dulles Airport, it’s Christmas Eve again, and the baddies are about nine hundred and ninety-nine renegade soldiers, including most of the people we were led to believe are good guys, who want to free a Latin ... Read more »
Joe vs. the Volcano
When you win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, as John Patrick Shanley did for Moonstruck, you can pretty much write your own ticket for your next film, even if you want to write and direct. Just ask Michael Cimino. He won for The Deer Hunter, and then made Heaven’s Gate. And when your picture is as big ... Read more »
Victor Frankenstein
We seem to be inadvertently having a Daniel Radcliffe Film Festival. The last one we saw was the deeply weird Swiss Army Man, where he played a dead body. This time he is an ex-hunchback. Igor, to be precise. The concept is an interesting one. There have been at least fifty movies and such that have stolen Mary Shelley’s idea of a man creating life, but none have ... Read more »
The Big Sleep
I know I risk controversy by saying I think Humphrey Bogart was the second-best Philip Marlowe to appear on the silver screen. My personal favorite is Robert Mitchum in Farewell, My Lovely from 1975. It’s certainly open to debate, and if you prefer Bogey and Bacall I won’t argue with you. But to me, Bogart’s Marlowe never quite achieved ... Read more »
Sons of the Desert
This has to be in my list of Top Five Laurel and Hardy features, a list I don’t actually keep. In fact, it is the first of their really classic features, the first in a long string of some of the best comedies ever made, a streak that didn’t really peter out until the mid-1940s when they left Hal Roach and the other studios didn’t really understand what they were all about. Sons of the ... Read more »
The Pawnbroker
I saw this at an “art house” in East Lansing my first year at Michigan State. It hit me like a freight train. I had never seen a movie like it. Hollywood was still not into making really down and dirty, gritty movies yet. Things like The Blackboard Jungle, billed as hard-hitting, are very, very tame compared with this. I knew very little about the Holocaust, ... Read more »
The Adventures of Mark Twain
I guess this is about normal for a biopic of this era. Get some of the basic facts of a man’s life right but don’t let it bug you if you don’t because no one cares. Get a lot of it wrong. Fill it in with the standard nice-guy episodes that could apply to Abe Lincoln or Robert E. Lee or George Armstrong Custer or Thomas Edison as well as Samuel Clemens. I mean, really, there is hardly a ... Read more »