Movie Reviews
Titles starting with S
The Searchers
This is the movie that made John Wayne a superstar. He had done well enough before, but he was known for just making westerns, and everybody knew westerns were B pictures. John Ford, working with John Wayne, pulled them out of the genre ghetto (much like George Lucas did with science fiction) with this and other really good movies.
I love this movie, but I don’t kid myself about ... Read more »
Searching
Though it’s hard to believe it can be done, this entire movie unfolds on computer and phone screens. And it’s fascinating! I am not very tech savvy. For instance, I’ve never logged on to Facebook, have no idea how to tweet, don’t understand what a hashtag is. I’ve never even sent a text message, if you can believe that. But it was all perfectly understandable to even such as me. ... Read more »
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Gotta love the title. They could have just stuck a 2 on the end of the original title, but this one is a nice play on words. And I just learned that the full title of the original movie was The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly & Beautiful. Now, why didn’t they use that one? Afraid of letting people in on the fact that this was a movie about old ... Read more »
Secondhand Lions
Maybe Michael Caine and Robert Duvall just wanted to work together, I don’t know. I can’t find any other way to account for casting Caine as one of two crotchety old Americans living out in the boonies. Caine is one of my favorite actors, but a convincing American accent is beyond him. This is not a bad movie, but not really memorable.
A Secret
I guess there are six million Holocaust stories, and it sometimes feels that I’ve seen five million of them. I’m not trying in any way to be flippant here, nor am I saying it’s time to stop making movies about the Holocaust. That should never happen. Maybe the thing I’m trying to articulate in trying to figure out why this well-made story just didn’t grab me is that, if you Read more »
Secret Agent
The chief pleasure of this one is to see Hitchcock refining many of the things that became his trademarks. He always favored showing close-ups of people doing things without showing their faces, for instance, a woman hands as she packs her bags to leave her lover. He tells the story in a silent manner when he can. There is an extended scene in an incredibly loud chocolate factory. People ... Read more »
Secret Honor
Here is the prologue: “This work is a fictional meditation concerning the character of and events in the history of Richard M. Nixon, who is impersonated in this film. The dramatist’s imagination has created some fictional events in an effort to illuminate the character of President Nixon. This film is not a work of history—or a historical recreation. It is a work of fiction, using ... Read more »
The Secret Life of Pets
It got off to a good start, showing pets who actually behaved like real animals. A nice example: The dog in the window across the street asks Max, the main character, what he will be doing today. He replies that he figured he would stand at the front door and stare at it until his owner came home. Sounds like a good plan, says the other dog. That’s cute. Also, dogs are fundamentally unable ... Read more »
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
I wanted to see this because a re-make just opened, with Ben Stiller in the title role. I’m a big Danny Kaye fan … but I have found that some of his movies stand up better than others. With this one, the story was good, with Danny daydreaming his various heroic fantasies (a good running gag has something going “pocketa-pocketa-pocketa” in every scenario) until getting caught up in a real ... Read more »
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Once again the spirit of the famous James Thurber short story has been violated. It starts off okay, with today’s amazing visual effects used well for Walter’s daydreaming fantasies. But then, for some reason, it takes Ben Stiller off on real adventures, from Greenland to Iceland to the farthest reaches of Afghanistan. It takes place in some alternate universe where Read more »