Movie Reviews
Youth
The director of this rather dull and pretentious film was Paolo Sorrentino, who won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2013 for The Great Beauty, a movie which left me mostly unimpressed. (Admittedly, it wasn’t a strong year for foreign language nominees.)
This one concerns two old friends, Michael Caine as a great retired composer and conductor, and ... Read more »
French Kiss
Meg Ryan can’t accompany her fiancée, Timothy Hutton, on a trip to Paris because of a terrible fear of flying. So he goes alone, and he soon informs her, by trans-Atlantic phone call, that he has fallen wildly in love with a French girl. (If there were text messages back then, he probably would have broken up with her that way, that’s how much of a shit-heel he is.) She is determined to ... Read more »
How I Live Now
Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) arrives at a highly militarized Heathrow Airport in England from America. There is some sort of terrorist crisis going on. She stays with her cousins in the country as their mother is off to Geneva for a “peace conference.” At first she hates it, but soon develops a crush on Eddie.
Then a nuclear weapon is exploded in London. Hundreds of thousands dead, ... Read more »
Revanche
It means “revenge.” A small-time hood plans a bank robbery with his Ukrainian prostitute girlfriend. “Nothing can go wrong,” he says. Yeah, right. A cop comes across her sitting in the getaway car, has no idea what’s coming down, but there he is when the idiot comes flying out of the bank. The robber puts the cop down on the ground and gets in the car, drives away. The cop gets up, fires a ... Read more »
The Revenant
Revenant [noun] rev·e·nant \ˈre-və-ˌnäⁿ, -nənt\ 1. Someone who returns from a long absence. 2. A person or thing reborn. 3. A supernatural being that returns from the dead; a zombie or ghost.
Hugh Glass could certainly qualify as a revenant. In 1823 he was terribly mauled by a bear and left to die by his companions. A few months later he stumbled into ... Read more »
Sisters
Wow. You trust that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will give you some great comedy. They have both done so in the past, repeatedly. So you rent this piece of shit. And I’m being kind calling it that. I was stunned at how bad it was. Somehow it managed to get a 6.1 from viewers at the IMDb, but I browsed through the first two pages there and found only two favorable reviews. The rest … ... Read more »
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
It’s not like the current glut of vampire books and movies and TV shows is something new. There has been a steady stream of such stories for a long time. Endless variations have been worked on this tired old trope, some of them quite ludicrous. It’s easy to forget that it was all invented by one man, back in 1897. Yes, it’s all there, all totally made up, and often misinterpreted. For ... Read more »
Dark Matter
How is it that a movie starring Meryl Streep managed to fly totally under my radar? I had literally never heard of it until I saw the DVD on the shelf at Goodwill. It came between The Devil Wore Prada and Rendition, and seems to have had a very limited release.
Now I can see why. I hated this piece of shit. It is loosely based ... Read more »
Deli Man
I have been fortunate enough to have eaten several times at the Carnegie Deli on 7th Avenue in New York, the place that was the setting for a tableful of Jewish comedians in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose. The sandwiches there are big enough to require a forklift to get them to your mouth. In the L.A. area there are Nate and Al’s in Beverly Hills and ... Read more »
Hinterland
Yes, apparently Wales is a country … but in a strictly limited sense. It is part of the United Kingdom, like Scotland, but has no seat in the United Nations, nor embassies in other countries. It is represented in and governed by the British Parliament, and they sing “God Save the Queen.” Yet it has its own language, which is much more a living tongue than I had ... Read more »