Leatherheads

Most people don’t know it, but the NFL is a comparatively recent thing. Back in the ‘30s, pro football was a joke. Teams would form, play for a while in tiny stadiums, go broke, disband. College football was huge, as it still is today, but once you graduated, there was nowhere to go. The NFL, and the NBA, had not yet invented the system that allowed them to use ... Read more »

Leave Her To Heaven

Watching the final courtroom scene in this movie makes it abundantly clear why America needed the Miranda decision. If anyone in the audience in 1945 believed five seconds of this farrago of idiocy, then it’s clear they had absolutely no idea of their civil rights. Looking at a few online reviews, I came ... Read more »

Lebanon

There is a very small sub-genre of what I think of as claustrophobic movies. The granddaddy of them all was Rear Window, which took place entirely in a small apartment. Another stellar entry was Das Boot, which happened mostly aboard a German submarine. I haven’t seen it yet, but 127 Hours sounds like one, in ... Read more »

Lee Daniels’ The Butler

First, I need to apologize to Lee Daniels. When I saw his name above the title, I thought this was one hell of an egotist. Then I learned that Warner Brothers, who had inherited the defunct Lubin Company, was challenging his right to use the title. Why? Because there was a film of the same title in 1916!! Not only that, but the fucking film doesn’t even exist ... Read more »

Legally Blonde

Most of the people I’ve asked about this one liked it, and so did I, though it’s hard to point out just why. I guess it’s mostly Reese Witherspoon, who is just so out there, all smiles and fashion sense, you just can’t help smiling along with her. If anything is made in pink, she owns one. Her dorm room looks like someone set off a cherry bomb in a vat of ... Read more »

Legally Blonde 2

I was in a bad mood when we saw the first LB; Lee liked it, I didn’t even watch the whole thing. This one wasn’t an improvement.

The Legend of Suriyothai

Wow! What an epic! A cast of tens of thousands, hundreds of painted war elephants, beheadings, and enough skullduggery to make Lady MacBeth queasy. This is a history of a critical time in Siam, around the 1500s, and frankly it’s hard to get really involved in the story. It is a glimpse of a life-style so ritualized that it makes the court of Louis the Sun King look like anarchy. It ... Read more »

The Legend of Zorro

We’re such determined drive-in goers that we will pop the corn, buy the Subway sandwiches, and tootle off to one of our two local places even if the outlook is bad. It sure was bad last night, but we went anyway … (The second feature was The Fog.)

I had forgotten that Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones had made one of these before, back in ... Read more »

A Lego Brickumentary

We didn’t have Lincoln Logs or LEGO when I was growing up. My granddaddy managed a Duke & Ayres 5&10 store in Corsicana, Texas, so what we had was what he sold, at a discount. I remember Tinkertoys, and I had an Erector set, but what I mostly had was something called American Plastic Bricks. They came in a big rigid cardboard tube, and you could have the bricks in any color you ... Read more »

The Lego Movie

My first reaction: Oh boy, how low and basic will they sink to find an idea for a movie? Lincoln Logs Xtreme? Parcheesi? Canasta? Tic-Tac-Toe, the Movie? My second reaction: Well, if you have a good story and interesting characters, do I really care if they are all Legos? I like Legos. I really wish I had visited Legoland when we lived in Southern California. The ... Read more »