Movie Reviews
The Good Dinosaur
This is the first Pixar movie that was made mostly for children. And it shows. That is, all the previous ones could be enjoyed by youngsters, but they always had plenty of attractions for larger kids, like me. This one, not so much. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, I did, but the story is about as simple as they come, about a dwarfish brontosaurus kid who has to go out and find his ... Read more »
The Big Short
What a fantastic movie! You would think (or I would, anyway) that the least interesting and most impenetrable subject you could ever make a movie about would be the Republican real estate collapse of 2008. I mean, finance at the level they are talking about is much like quantum physics to me. That is, I can sort of understand it when I’m reading about it, but ask me about it the next day ... Read more »
Creed
I liked the original Rocky, and think I saw Rocky II, though I can’t remember it. Other than that, the other four films in the saga are unknown to me. So I know nothing of what happened between the first one and this one. It doesn’t really matter. All I need to know is that the young fighter an aging Rocky trains in this film is the ... Read more »
Concussion
It’s not really possible to completely dislike this film, it is so earnest and sincere. But I found it easy to be bored by it, several times. The tale of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born pathologist who discovered Chronic Traumatic Encepalopathy (CTE) and his subsequent fight with the paid medical whores of the NFL is a classic David and Goliath story, and proceeds exactly as expected, ... Read more »
Dicte
When looking through the TV series available to stream on Netflix and coming upon this, the last thing in the world I would have thought this word was would have been a woman’s name. But that is what it is, and it must be a fairly common one in Denmark. No one, when introduced to Dicte Svendsen, says “What a strange name!” Dicte is a reporter for a newspaper in Aarhus, and is played by a ... Read more »
Spotlight
Once more, the Academy chose the safe and traditional route, as it did the year before in giving Eddie Redmayne the Best Actor Oscar for playing a cripple. This is a perfectly good movie, and I liked it a lot, but it is not the best picture of the year, and I haven’t even seen The Revenant or Brooklyn yet. I ... Read more »
The Hateful Eight
Quentin Tarantino drives me crazy. Usually when I hear him speak, I think “What an asshole!” And then I see his new film, and he stuns me once again. Of his eight films (and the opening credits proclaim “The Eighth Film by Quentin Tarantino!”) the only one I didn’t like at all was the Deathproof segment of Grindhouse, though I thought ... Read more »
Occupied
Here’s an unusual one. In the near future Norway decides to go ultra-Green, shutting down its oil operations in the North Sea and relying on thorium reactors. But this means that Russia and the EU no longer have Norwegian oil to use, and this is unacceptable. So Russia simply takes over. The EU pretends that the fucking Russkis were invited in, and the US doesn’t want to get involved. Not ... Read more »
Hap and Leonard
Joe R. Lansdale is an East Texas boy, like myself, though he comes from quite a bit north of me, in Nacogdoches (pronounced Nack-a-DOCH-is). He writes what he calls Mojo fiction, which often means down and dirty. In a series of books he has created the unlikeliest buddy team I’ve ever come across. Hap is a white redneck, has never amounted to much. Leonard is a gay black man, former ... Read more »
What Just Happened?
There have been many movies made exposing the monstrous egos, soul-destroying greed, and backstabbing viciousness of Hollywood. (And as Hunter S. Thompson is quoted here, “There is a downside, too.”) Most of them I’ve seen are pretty good, and I guess it’s because the screenwriters are writing about what they know. The best, by far, is Robert Altman’s The Player. ... Read more »