Movie Reviews
Anomalisa
There’s not much in this world that is truly unique, but you would think puppets making love would be one of them. No, that dubious honor goes to Team America: World Police, by the creators of South Park. But those were obviously marionettes, with actual strings. The couple here is fairly realistic, for stop-motion animated characters. ... Read more »
All the Way
I think they might as well start engraving Bryan Cranston’s name on the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Movie. This is a stunning, towering, almost uncanny performance. If I closed my eyes I could imagine it was actually LBJ speaking.
(BTW: I once shook the hand of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson at the Mid-County Airport in Nederland, Texas, when he came through on a ... Read more »
Dirty Harry
They originally wanted John Wayne, or Steve McQueen, or Robert Mitchum, or Frank Sinatra, fer cryin’ out loud. Can you imagine any of them delivering Harry’s famous line: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, punk?” I can’t. Of course, no one knew how popular it was going to be. In retrospect any of those action heroes must have looked like ... Read more »
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
I was really interested to see how much, if any, of the feeling of awe I had when first seeing this movie would hold up, almost forty years later. The answer, sad to say, is not much. In fact much of it looks plain silly, and I couldn’t help noticing a lot of things that I just didn’t worry about too much the first time in the manic sweep of Spielbergian technique. This time, the technique ... Read more »
The Magnificent Seven
The difference between this and the Japanese source material can be summed up very simply: This is a good action movie. Seven Samurai is a great movie. And one of the main reasons is simple, too. There is no macho posturing in Kurosawa’s masterpiece. Shamada, played by the great Takashi Shimura, and his six sidekicks would Read more »
Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Menace From Outer Space
Many years ago I wrote a trilogy of novels about the adventures of one Cirocco “Rocky” Jones. They sold reasonably well, and everybody assumed that the name was a play on this old serial. But it wasn’t! I swear to you, I had never heard of it! Or, to be fair, if I did know of it, I had forgotten, and the choice of name was entirely a subconscious one.
I found this DVD at Goodwill, ... Read more »
The Year of Living Dangerously
I feel I have a special relationship to this movie. Back in 1982 I had an office on the MGM lot for several months while working with Richard Rush (writer-director of The Stunt Man) on one of the earlier re-writes of Millennium. It was right at the entrance beside the Thalberg building. (You can see my office window in any number of ... Read more »
Apollo 13
Other than actual astronauts and the pilots and crew of NASA’s famous Vomit Comet, very few Earthlings have experienced more time in weightlessness than Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Ron Howard, and the camera operators and other crew who filmed this movie. There are many ways to fake showing people in zero gee in a movie—such as in Gravity, where no ... Read more »
Joy
For some reason this reminded me of another little gem about a spunky housewife and mother, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. (My mother was born and raised on a farm outside Defiance!) Looking into it, it seems this one is like most “inspired by true events” stories; that is, only partially true. Joy Mangano did invent the Miracle Mop, and used it and other ... Read more »
The Water Diviner
Somebody handed me a copy of this at the Balticon 50 over the Memorial Day weekend, and I can’t recall why. It has a sort of supernatural, or maybe I should say paranormal, element to it in the water divining, AKA dowsing, which is bullshit. Dowsing is also said to be able to locate graves and dead bodies, which comes in useful when Russell Crowe sets out to Turkey to find the bodies of ... Read more »