Oscar Nominated Shorts 2016

Once more we set out for the balcony of the Hollywood Theater in Portland to see this year’s crop of short, non-documentary films. It turned out to be not a very good year, though my picks for the winners are all deserving.

Animated. You quickly notice the lack of diversity here. All five are from either the US or Canada. Even one of the runners-up ... Read more »

Oscar Wilde

The story of Oscar Wilde is one of the great tragedies of the Victorian age. He was homosexual (a word never actually uttered in this film, though we hear of “The love that dare not speak its name”) though able to function as a straight man, fathering two sons. He was the greatest wit of the times, endlessly quotable today. He wrote short fiction, the best known being Read more »

Othello

This was included on the DVD of O, so I thought I’d give it a look. (The IMDb lists no fewer than 35 versions of Othello for movies and TV!) It stars Emil Jannings as the Moor. Jannings was very good in The Last Laugh, and he starred in The Blue Angel and won the very first Best Actor award for Read more »

The Other Guys

Get a load of this cast: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Samuel L. Jackson. You could hardly go wrong with them, right? And I must say the critics mostly liked it. It’s a satire of cop buddy pictures. To say it’s over the top … well, there’s over the top and then there’s stratospheric. Jackson and Johnson are supercops, in the mold of ... Read more »

The Other Man

Liam Neeson thinks he is happily married to Laura Linney, but in the early scenes it is clear that she is at least thinking about having an affair. And then she is gone, without explanation. Sorting through her stuff, he finds evidence that she has been seeing Antonio Banderas for at least a few years. He is enraged, tracks him down. He is a handsome and wildly romantic Latin lover, ... Read more »

Our Hospitality

One of Buster Keaton’s best. It involves a family feud but the plot isn’t nearly as important as the highlight of the movie, a working recreation of Stephenson’s Rocket, which has a pretty good claim to being the first railroad locomotive engine. The train and cars are amusing enough, but the track … oh, my. Instead of moving a log, the builders just made the track hump over it. At one ... Read more »

Our Kind of Traitor

There’s no one better in the world for spy stories than John le Carré. He is also maybe the luckiest novelist in the world, because well over half of his books have been made into movies, and there is not a bad one in the lot. I’ve seen all but two of them. Several of them are actual masterpieces, such as the Alec Guinness version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, ... Read more »

Our Man Flint

There was a rash of spy spoof films shortly after James Bond became such a huge hit. They stretch right down to the present day, with the Austin Powers franchise. Most of them were pretty lame, such as the awful Dean Martin “Matt Helm” movies. Most of them concentrated on exaggerating the whole Bond girl gadget-ridden double-O shaken-not-stirred paradigm of the Bond movies.

This ... Read more »

Our Man in Havana

Here’s something unusual. A comic spy story from Graham Greene. He wrote the screenplay as well as the novel, and it seems the movie had more of a comic touch than the book, which I haven’t read. The cast is terrific: Alec Guinness, Noël Coward, Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara, Ralph Richardson, and Ernie Kovacs. The story concerns Guinness trying to support a loving daughter with rather ... Read more »

Our Souls At Night

I have to say I hate the title. I’ve never been able to remember it. Aside from that, it’s a pretty good, if small, movie. Jane Fonda and Robert Redford had co-starred in Barefoot in the Park, one of Neil Simon’s better comedies, way back in 1967. They had good chemistry at ages 30 and 31, and they still do at 80 and 81. Neither of them really look their age, ... Read more »