Movie Reviews
Flying Deuces
I would argue that the greatest comedy team of all time was better at their two-reelers, both silent and sound, than they were at feature films. But that’s not saying the features weren’t great. This one was made getting on toward the tail end of Laurel and Hardy’s peak feature period, near the beginning of a slow decline. Not that they ever got terrible, even in their uneven and, in some ... Read more »
Eddie the Eagle
If you are as old as me, you will probably remember Michael “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards. It was 1988 and I was in Toronto for the making of Millennium. Out there on the prairie, in Calgary, the Winter Olympics were happening. I am an Olympics junkie, and watched as much of them as I could. Eddie was an unlikely star. Great Britain had not had a ski jumper since ... Read more »
Timbuktu
Here is a movie that got fantastic reviews, and I list it here only because we watched about a half hour of it. This is in no way the fault of anyone connected to it. It is probably very good. The first half hour was, anyway. But it is a sad fact that neither of us were in the mood to see the atrocities committed in Mali by a deranged sort of cousin of ISIS and the Taliban. I know it was ... Read more »
The Conversation
This is simply a masterpiece, and probably the best film Francis Ford Coppola has made. And that is saying something, because he has made some doozies. It is probably the best performance Gene Hackman ever turned in, and that also is saying something. The opening sequence, set in Union Square in San Francisco, is pure genius, as Harry Caul tries to record a moving conversation between ... Read more »
Torch Song Trilogy
Harvey Fierstein was out way back when, before it was okay to be out, because it was usually a career killer. He didn’t give a shit. Being gay and swish was and is so much a part of him that toning his act down would probably have killed him. (Is swish a non-PC word now? It means acting in an exaggeratedly feminine way, and I don’t see it as insulting. Back in ... Read more »
Knight of Cups
If you thought Terrence Malick’s last film, The Tree of Life, was controversial, get a load of this one. Most people either loved or hated that one. I was in the minority: I loved some of it, didn’t care for some of it, didn’t hate any of it. But this one finally got me fed up with the stuff he’s doing these days.
It is the story of Rick (Christian Bale), ... Read more »
10 Cloverfield Lane
This one somehow fell off my radar, probably because I thought it was some sort of sequel to that pretty awful “found footage” movie, Cloverfield. And it is …but only sort of. The producer and director insist it has elements of that movie, but I don’t see it. Cloverfield was a sprawling, incoherent, impenetrable mess, and this is a ... Read more »
The Thin Red Line
Terence Malick made two films in the ‘70s: Badlands in 1973, and Days of Heaven in 1978. Both of them were awesomely good. And then he retired from directing. For twenty years. He was writing all that time, but not shooting film. Then he announced that he was going to be making this film, from the novel by James Jones, who also wrote ... Read more »
Remember
A very interesting idea here, and really swell execution. Zev (Christopher Plummer) and Max (Martin Landau, looking about 105 years old) are residents at an assisted living facility, what we used to call an old folks home. They were both inmates in the same barracks at Auschwitz, the only survivors. Martin has worked with Simon Weisenthal to identify fugitive Nazis, and thinks he has ... Read more »
Whisky Tango Foxtrot
It took me a few moments to understand the title. I mean, I was frowning at it, and thinking “What The Fu- … Oh. I get it. Clever.” If you still need a clue, think of the military alphabetic code: Able, Baker, Charlie, Delta …”
This is a mostly amusing story, as you would expect from the wonderful Tina Fey, based (broadly, I assume) on the experiences of Kim Barker, a largely ... Read more »