Movie Reviews
Amadeus
Winning an Academy Award usually helps an actor get better parts, have a shot at real stardom … but not always. Remember Louise Fletcher? There’s a good chance you don’t, though she won an Oscar (and just about every other award) for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s not that she hasn’t had a career, she has worked regularly ever since. But she is not a ... Read more »
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
First I will get the obligatory name dropping out of the way, okay? I mean, what’s the point of meeting famous people if you can’t brag about it? In this case it involves a stage production in Toronto while we were filming Millennium. Joanne Woodward was playing Maggie the Cat, and Charles Durning was Big Daddy. The cool thing was that I saw it as a member of ... Read more »
Cool Hand Luke
Back in the late ‘60s we didn’t have much money, and so we seldom got out to see first-run movies. But that was okay, as there were several places in the Haight-Ashbury that showed movies for free. One of them was a Methodist church on Waller Street, a few blocks from our flat. It was pretty basic stuff: A large sheet, a 16mm print and one projector, so there was a wait while reels were ... Read more »
MI-5
This one is a spin-off of a television show titled Spooks. I’m not clear on just how the two relate, whether characters carry over or if plot lines coincide, but I guess it doesn’t matter, really. It is well made, though I have to admit I had a hard time telling what was going on and who was who, sometimes. Which shouldn’t surprise me, since the main character is ... Read more »
Zootopia
The 55th animated feature to come out of the Walt Disney Animation studios in Burbank premiered on March 4th, 2016. As of this writing (6/22/16) it has earned $1,012,150,383 on a budget of $150,000,000.That makes it the fourth-highest grossing animated movie ever and it’s still playing in some theaters. Only this last week it faces some real competition in Finding ... Read more »
Deliverance
Most of us around my age remember the shock of seeing this picture for the first time. There were things in here we just weren’t used to seeing, like homosexual rape. Graphic rape of any kind was not something we were used to seeing, for that matter. And this was about as graphic as you could get. I hadn’t realized that this was Ned Beatty’s first movie role. It ... Read more »
Phoenix
An interesting idea here. Nelly was recently released from a concentration camp, probably around 1946. She had been shot in the face by a fucking Nazi, and left for dead. This screwed up her face pretty badly (and we never see that), but a very good plastic surgeon re-builds her. She wanted to look just like she did before, but that is beyond his powers. Still, she is quite pretty. Her ... Read more »
Paulette
Back in the ‘60s Paulette and her husband opened and ran a small neighborhood café, and seemed to have a ball doing so. We see all this in home movies playing under the credits, and it was smart to do that, because later in life she becomes a nasty old bitch and it would have been hard for me to stick with the story otherwise. Ten years ago, on September 11, 2001, her husband died. (No, ... Read more »
Magnum Force
Number two in the Dirty Harry saga. I have to say I found this one a little improbable. There is a secret group of rookie motorcycle patrolmen who are carrying out vigilante justice in San Francisco. The folks they kill all richly deserve killing, but this is too raw for even Harry Callahan. And actually, aside from a few lapses like torturing the kidnapper in the first film, Harry ... Read more »
Byzantium
Byzantium (2012) (Ireland, UK, USA) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m fed up to my eyebrows with films about zombies and vampires. I won’t say it’s impossible to make a good film about either one, but it seems unlikely at this point. If a good one is made, I expect it will be another comedy like Zombieland.
I thought I just might have found ... Read more »