Movie Reviews
Titles starting with G
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
The inferior, American version. CONTAINS SOME MINOR SPOILERS!! One thing to get out of the way right off: I feared this would be horrible, and it’s not. I speak as one who adored the Swedish version, starring Noomi Rapace in the best performance by an actress in 2009. So, would I recommend this film to people? Yes, with the major ... Read more »
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
(The excellent Swedish version.) Apparently I was one of the last people in the literate universe to hear the sad story of Stieg Larsson, the Swedish journalist who wrote and sold a trilogy of books, then promptly keeled over dead. Since then, the books have sold 27 million copies in 40 countries, making him the second-best-selling author in the world in 2008, and the best-selling dead ... Read more »
The Glass Castle
We saw this several months ago and I have put off reviewing it because I hated one of the characters so much I was reluctant to write about him. It is the true story of Jeanette Walls, who is now an author and journalist, but who grew up in one of the worst households I’ve ever seen where the children were not actually physically beaten (much) or sexually abused. It was a total failure of ... Read more »
The Glass Key
I’m going to express a heretical opinion here: I don’t think Dashiell Hammett was that great a writer. Sure, he was an innovator, taking his characters into sleazy situations that no one else was writing about, and no question he pretty much invented the “hard-boiled” school of crime fiction. And for that I thank him. But I just have never been able to like his ... Read more »
The Gleaners and I
Maybe Agnes Varda is an acquired taste, or maybe this just wasn’t one of her best, or maybe I’m not an Agnes Varda type. It got hugely positive reviews, and I was with her for a while … but I couldn’t stay. Gleaners are people who go through the fields after the harvest and gather the fallen fruit and the trampled grain. She shows us modern-day gleaners, and it’s fascinating, given that ... Read more »
Glen or Glenda
AKA I Led Two Lives, He or She?, I Changed My Sex. Shot in four days, inspired by Christine Jorgenson. It’s a bit sad to look at, because it is clear that it was an important statement to Ed Wood, the writer-director, and it is a hot mess. He was a transvestite, and wanted people to understand the feelings he had, but you will cringe to see the total irrelevancy ... Read more »
The Glenn Miller Story
This and Old Yeller are the earliest films I remember seeing. I was seven, and my family lived in Fort Worth, Texas. We often went to the drive-in theater, with my younger sisters. We would dress in pajamas and play on the swings and slides up near the screen until it got dark, then it was back in the old Hudson with a coil of Pic burning on the floorboard and a ... Read more »
Go West
Some of Buster Keaton’s most memorable craziness involved large numbers of something chasing him. In Cops it was, as you might have guessed, the entire police force of a large city. In Seven Chances it was a thousand fat ladies in bridal gowns, hoping to marry him. In this one it’s a thousand cattle. They’re not really chasing him, ... Read more »
Go West
I’d say this one is about in the middle range of the Marx Brothers movies, somewhere between their half-dozen works of sheer genius and the lesser ones near the end of their career together. It’s good, but not really worth watching again and again. I had always thought that Groucho’s character’s name, S. Quentin Quale, was rather uninspired compared to wonderful names like Wolf J. ... Read more »
God Bless America
This is mostly satirical until the end, when it unaccountably gets too serious. Frank is an insurance executive who basically has no life. He spends his evenings zoned out on the couch watching the depths of depravity being mined by “reality” shows. Then he is fired, and told he has a brain tumor. He’s about to kill himself until he sees some of the excesses of a terrible family on TV, and ... Read more »