Movie Reviews
Titles starting with W
Welcome to Marwen
One evening in 2000 Mark Hogencamp, an artist in Kingston, New York, was beaten, stomped, and kicked nearly to death by five sub-humans because he had the audacity to admit that he liked to wear women’s shoes. (I wasn’t able to find out what happened to all of them, but one was sentenced to nine years. He appealed. Lost. Hurrah! I would have given him at least ... Read more »
Welcome to Me
Borderline Personality Disorder is not insanity, it’s not quite schizophrenia, it’s not bipolar disorder, it’s not quite neurotic depression or dysthymia. It is said to be on the borderline between psychosis and neurosis, but what I think it really is, is a crock of shit. It is one more chunk of the population, carved out by the headshrinking profession in their steady march toward the ... Read more »
We’re the Millers
A man who deals small quantities of marijuana is forced to go to Mexico and pick up a load of grass. Since a single man would draw too much attention, he hires a stripper to pretend to be his wife, and they convince two younger people to pose as their children. They set out in a big RV, trying hard to look like normal middle-class people. But when they get to Mexico, they find out the load ... Read more »
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
One thing leads to another. We watched Fitzcarraldo, and then the documentary about the making of it, Burden of Dreams, and this little 20-minute documentary was thrown in for free on the DVD. As a way of motivating Errol Morris to find a way to make his first feature film, Werner Herzog swore he’d eat his shoe if Morris could ... Read more »
The West Point Story
Two New York gangs, the white boy Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, compete for the same turf while singing and dancing to the music of Leonard Bernstein and the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim … wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right. Where are my notes? Oh, yeah, looks like I misfiled them. Okay, then … Jimmy Cagney is a Broadway director who is on the skids and persuaded to direct the ... Read more »
West Side Story
Surely one of the top 5 musical movies ever made. (The others? Let’s see … Singin’ in the Rain, The Boy Friend, An American in Paris, Les parapluies de Cherbourg, Cabaret, 42nd Street, Top Hat, Across the Universe … oh, bother … I’ll never get it down to five.) It was one of the biggest selling soundtrack albums of all time. I played it so often I wore it out, ... Read more »
Whale Rider
I didn’t like this quite as much as some of the critics … but don’t take that as a negative; I liked it quite a lot. And Keisha Castle-Hughes is about as good as it gets.
What Did You Do in the war, Daddy?
Between 1941 and 1945 or ’46, most American males of a certain age were in one branch or another of what my dad always called “the service.” (He was in the Army Air Corps.) For just about all of them, it was the most intense experience of their lives to date, and for most of them, afterwards as well. And whether they were in the nightmare of combat or the endless boredom of the rear areas ... Read more »
What Happened To Monday?
Noomi Rapace plays identical septuplets. They are named Monday, Tuesday Wednesday … you get the idea, in a future world where over-population, crop failures, and climate change have led to a policy of one child per family. Siblings are illegal, and the younger one has to go into the deep freeze to “wait for a better time.” Yeah, right, tell me another one. Clearly things are never going to ... Read more »
What Just Happened?
There have been many movies made exposing the monstrous egos, soul-destroying greed, and backstabbing viciousness of Hollywood. (And as Hunter S. Thompson is quoted here, “There is a downside, too.”) Most of them I’ve seen are pretty good, and I guess it’s because the screenwriters are writing about what they know. The best, by far, is Robert Altman’s The Player. ... Read more »