Finding Neverland

My respect for Johnny Depp grows with each movie he makes. Here’s a dude who could easily have forged a career as a romantic leading man or an action hero, he’s got the looks and the charisma. Instead, he chooses odd roles and makes them entirely his own. Not that he hasn’t had a few stinkers; who hasn’t? But the movie never stinks because of his performance. Finding ... Read more »

Finian’s Rainbow

This film probably should never have been made. Big, old-fashioned musicals were really on their way out. The show harked back from 1947 and was seriously dated, somehow mixing the story of a leprechaun and his gold with race relations in the mountains. For some reason novice Francis Ford Coppola was chosen to direct. He insisted this totally insignificant bit of fluff be made more ... Read more »

Fire Over England

Fire Over England (1937) This is the first time Lawrence Olivier and his lover, Vivien Leigh, appeared together in a film, and is rumored to be the film that landed her the plum part of all time: Scarlett O’Hara. It’s a swashbuckler, taking place in the lead-up to the Spanish Armada. Larry is sent to spy on the Spanish. He only got fourth billing, since Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth was ... Read more »

Firecreek

Sometimes an older movie works for me, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ll admit that it’s quite possible that a film doesn’t work just because I’m not in the mood for it. We didn’t finish this one. It just didn’t stir our interest, despite starring people like Jack Elam, Dean Jagger, Ed Begley, Jay C. Flippen, Louise Latham, Inger Stevens, and Gary Lockwood, the same year he was in Read more »

Firewall

It took Hollywood a while, but they finally got it. I’m talking about putting technology, and in particular, computers, on the screen. Remember War Games? Nice little movie, but the computer stuff sucked. Or even farther back, Colossus: The Forbin Project. Computers were never like that, and never will be like that.

Later ... Read more »

The First Amendment Project

Three segments of a program produced for the Sundance Channel and Court TV, each a little over 20 minutes long.

Fox vs. Franken is the best. You may recall that Fox News brought a lawsuit against Franken and his book Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. The case was thrown out of court, but not before Al got enough material ... Read more »

First Man

Well, just like I feared, they went and fucked it up. The story of Apollo 11 is one of the greatest stories of exploration in human history, and it’s kind of surprising that it’s taken so long to tell it. I guess it has to do with the fact that Apollo 13 was a near disaster, easy to dramatize, whereas this mission came off without a ... Read more »

First Men in the Moon

… and a woman. She, of course, is fairly useless, taken along by accident, but still, she’s there. This is one of my favorite fun SF movies. It’s broadly based on a novel by H.G. Wells, who thought that when you got there it would be possible to breathe the atmosphere. The filmmakers had the people wear diving suits with no gloves, which would have been as useless as street clothes, of ... Read more »

The First Traveling Saleslady

A turn-of-the-century comedy starring Ginger Rogers, who was pretty much at the end of her movie career. She was 45, and really too old for this sort of role. She still had 40 years to live. She did a little television and appeared on stage, but her glory days were over. With the exception of the wonderful Monkey Business with Cary Grant, all her films of the ... Read more »