The Perils of Pauline

Betty Hutton was sort of the female equivalent of Danny Kaye (or vice versa), both of them known for comic songs and athletic performances. Here she is playing Pearl White. Pearl began in a shirt factory, but always dreamed of being on the stage. Delivering costumes to a traveling troupe, she was given a chance to audition, and even though her acting was terrible, she got the job. She ... Read more »

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Do we really need another High School Angst film? Do we really need another coming of age film? These are the questions whirling through my head as I slid the DVD into the player last night. Well, I needn’t have worried. This is a first-rate film.

In one of those coincidences that seem to keep happening if you watch a lot of films, one of the three stars here was Ezra Miller, who ... Read more »

Persepolis

Every once in a while you see a movie that’s not like anything you’ve seen before. It can be so different, in fact, that at first you don’t know how to react, your eyes and your mind have to adjust. It was that way for me with ::Persepolis}}, for the first ten minutes or so, and then I realized I was seeing something special and beautiful.

It is based on a series of ... Read more »

Person of Interest

We started watching this four-season series (with a fifth season planned) not too long ago, streaming and semi-bingeing. It has the fascinating premise that someone has invented a computer that can simultaneously watch all the CCTV cameras in the world, listen to all the cell phones, monitor all the emails, etc. From all this info it can extrapolate when and where and by whom a terrorist ... Read more »

Personal Shopper

Kristin Stewart is the personal assistant for a supermodel, which is a pretty weird job if you ask me. She buys stuff for the model to wear. She believes she is a medium of some sort, and tries to contact her twin brother who died recently. They made a pact that whoever died first would try to contact the other. Then the model gets murdered.

I felt this was really a mess. She gets ... Read more »

Peter Pan

I will always love the Disney animated version, as it is the very first movie I remember seeing. But in retrospect, it’s a few pints of pixiedust short of a great movie. This one is much better. It is wonderful to look at, and has much more of a dark side. There is real coming-of-age sexual tension between Wendy, whose story this is, and both Peter and Hook. Interesting trivia: the boy ... Read more »

Pete’s Dragon

Disney seems determined to subject many if not most of its classic animated features to live-action remakes. Offhand I would not have recommended this, but I have to say that so far, on the strength of two movies (this one and The Jungle Book), they have done a damn good job of it. Soon the new Beauty and the Beast will be out, and we ... Read more »

The Petrified Forest

Even film buffs like me have a few classics here and there that we’ve never seen. I’d never caught this one. This film is on just about everybody’s list of classics, but if you look closer, you’ll realize that it’s seen as a Humphrey Bogart classic, not a Leslie Howard classic. So I was a little surprised to see him getting fifth billing. What no one had mentioned to me (and probably it’s ... Read more »