Movie Reviews
Trainwreck
I loved Amy Schumer’s one-woman stage show. And she is about the hottest thing in comedy right now, I know that. These days I’m used to seeing comedies where I don’t laugh much, and I realize that they are not making them for me, but for younger generations that often laugh at things I don’t really find all that risible. But (aside from the abominations of Adam Sandler) I don’t expect ... Read more »
What We Do in the Shadows
It’s a clever idea, and it worked … for a while. Four vampires are living in a modern New Zealand city, venturing out at night to suck blood. There is Viago, 379 years old, Vladislav (known as Vlad the Poker for his penchant for poking people with things) aged 862, Deacon, a youthful 183. Then there is Petyr, an 8,000-year-old spitting image of Nosferatu, who they keep in the basement and ... Read more »
David Attenborough: Life Stories
A three-part series on PBS’s Nature show. They are a retrospective on his life as the world’s most famous and beloved naturalist, and the changes that have happened since his television debut on a BBC show called Zoo Quest, first shown in 1954.
Life On Camera Back then, it took weeks to get to Borneo, ... Read more »
Les cousins
I’m okay with movies made about people I don’t like. But they need to be interesting. Halfway through this one, I wasn’t interested in anyone or anything that was going on. It was a lot of pretentious French men and women from the Parisian “Beat” generation, who thought they were quite cool. And they weren’t. This was the second film of Claude Chabrol, one of the “New Wave” directors who ... Read more »
The Hook
It seemed like a pretty interesting movie, up to about a third of the way through. Four G.I.s in Korea are charged with loading fuel drums onto a small freighter and destroying everything else that might be of use to the advancing North Korean Army. An enemy plane flies over and strafes them, burning one alive. But the plane is hit. A parachute opens, and the remaining soldiers take the ... Read more »
Land Girls
In England in the early 1940s there were so many men in uniform fighting overseas or flying against the Luftwaffe that the Women’s Land Army was formed. Women were asked to join up and take over the agricultural jobs that had to be done to feed people: tilling the soil, planting turnips and potatoes, picking fruit, and shoveling pigshit. The program had worked well in World War I. Some ... Read more »
Luther
Luther (2010) Somewhere in London a little girl is sealed in an airtight box, and her oxygen is running out. The only man who knows where she is (the psychopath who put her there) is dangling by his fingertips over a three- or four-story drop. DCI John Luther (Idris Elba) is standing over him. The psycho pleads for Luther to pull him up, and Luther says tell me where the girl is first. The ... Read more »
Love and Mercy
I inherently mistrust biopics, and musical ones are often the worst. But a cursory examination of the Wiki entry on Brian Wilson seems to support most of what we see here, except for some time compression that doesn’t bother me much. This is an exceptionally good example of a questionable genre.
First, I liked how they started somewhere quite a bit after the beginning, the formation ... Read more »
Childhood’s End
I’ve heard it many times, and I’ll bet you have, too. “Wouldn’t it be great if they made (some classic SF novel) into a movie?” I’ve even said it, for books like Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Alfred Bester’s The Stars, My Destination, Larry Niven’s Ringworld, or John Varley’s Read more »
Ricki and the Flash
Four Oscar winners right up front. Written by Diablo Cody, directed by Jonathan Demme, co-starring Kevin Kline. And of course starring the incredible Meryl Streep. She is a rock singer who abandoned her family a long time ago to follow her dream. She had one album that went nowhere, and now fronts a group of oldies but goodies in a medium-sized dive in Tarzana, where they have been the ... Read more »