Movie Reviews
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Just what the title says. Greg’s pushy mother insists he drop by the house of Rachel, a girl he barely knows, to “cheer her up,” and “hang out,” because she has leukemia. Naturally, he would rather have his tonsils pulled out through his asshole. But against all odds they eventually hit it off. Greg and his friend Earl make funny little movies parodying great films, such as Read more »
Star Wars
We were planning to go see The Force Awakens, and then had the idea to see all the previous ones again, in order, to get up to speed on the history. Neither of us are exactly Star Wars fans, though we enjoyed the series well enough. It turned out to be a good idea, as neither of us recalled much at all about the three prequels. Great ... Read more »
That’s Dancing!
This is not, strictly speaking, a part of the That’s Entertainment! trilogy, but it is very much like them. The first one had a deep impact on me. I had always loved musicals, but it was mostly hearing the original cast or soundtrack albums. I hadn’t seen all that many of them.
It’s easy to forget these days when you can see just about anything you want, ... Read more »
White Oleander
Astrid (Alison Lohman) is fifteen and living with her single mother, Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer), just about the most toxic mom I have ever seen in a film. She totally dominates her daughter, but then murders her boyfriend. She is sent to prison, and poor Astrid bounces around between the nightmare of juvenile housing and the uncertainty of a series of foster homes. The chief attraction ... Read more »
5 Flights Up
In 1975 Korey Jackson and Claire van der Boom buy a cheap fifth-floor walk-up in unfashionable Brooklyn. By the time 2015 rolls around, they have grown old and turned into Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman, and the stairs are a real problem. Even their little dog can barely make the climb. But the good news is that their area of Brooklyn is trendy now, and the apartment which really has only ... Read more »
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
I don’t think there’s ever been a better or more successful comedy writer-director than the late John Hughes. His filmography is incredible, ranging from coming-of-age stories like The Breakfast Club to National Lampoon’s Vacation and its sequels, to more adult stuff like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and ... Read more »
Time Lapse
So this guy invents a camera that takes pictures one day into the future. It is bulky, bolted to the floor, and uses old Polaroid film, so it only takes pictures of the window of an apartment across the way from where it is installed. Three friends, Callie, Finn, and Jasper, live there, and discover the camera. They see themselves holding up a paper with the results of the greyhound races ... Read more »
Irrational Man
Woody Allen’s film-of-the-year this time around is about a murder, but since it’s Woody, there is a different slant to it. Joaquin Phoenix is a deeply depressed and disillusioned philosophy professor newly arrived at a small college in Rhode Island. Emma Stone is one of his students who quickly falls in love with him. It’s all pretty damn dry for the first twenty minutes or so. Watching a ... Read more »
Sicario
It’s a Mexican slang name for hitman. I was just reflecting that the only good thing to ever come out of our brain-dead, idiotic, useless, totally counterproductive War on Drugs (and a mighty small “good thing” it is) is that when book and movie writers ran out of Bad Guys like Fucking Nazis and Muslim Terrorists there were always Mexican Drug Cartels to fill in for them. The trouble is, ... Read more »
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
After the critical and commercial failure of Popeye, Robert Altman couldn’t really get the sort of projects he wanted in Hollywood, especially since many of his other films had had good reviews but bad box office. So he spent the whole decade of the ‘80s making films of plays. Some of them were good, and some not so good. He made one truly bad film, Read more »