Movie Reviews
Titles starting with B
Being Julia
A 45-year-old acclaimed actress is dealing with the fact that her star may be fading. She has an affair with a younger man, he dumps her, and she gets her revenge. The details of the story didn’t go the way I expected, and I liked that. I didn’t believe the ending for a minute, but I didn’t mind that, because it was so clever. Annette Bening is so much fun to watch that she makes this ... Read more »
Belle de Jour
An upper-class wife who seems to be frigid with her loving husband finds out that she has a compulsive need to work in a high-class bordello. She doesn’t repsond well at all to tenderness, but when she is attacked in any way she immediately becomes totally passive. (There is a hint in one very quick scene that she was sexually abused as a child, but this was 1967, and you couldn’t come out ... Read more »
Belle Époque
The title does not refer to the French period from 1871 to 1914, as it is commonly used. This is Spain in 1933, a period I don’t know much about. What is important is that it is just a few years before the horrible Spanish Civil War, when Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who is still dead, by the way) began his authoritarian, fascist rule. But the early ‘30s were a time of hope, as the ... Read more »
Bellman and True
When I learned that this had been cut down from a 150-minute TV series to a 117-minute theatrical release, a few things became clearer. Namely, why much of it seems so disjointed. It’s probably why a movie that had so many good parts in it just never quite came together for me. A systems engineer and computer expert (Bernard Hill, using a computer that is laughably antique these days) is ... Read more »
Ben-Hur
Yes, adding glorious Technicolor, breathtaking CinemaScope, and stereophonic sound makes for a more exciting movie, but this is really very little different from the original version 34 years before. There were more ships in the original sea battle, but they interacted better in this one. The chariot race in this one is a bit longer, but so is the whole movie, and not to its benefit. If ... Read more »
Ben-Hur
Now let me get this straight. The Hur family were rich Jews in Jerusalem. They got along fine with the Romans, and raised little Massala as their own. He and Judah Ben-Hur thought of themselves as brothers. But Judah’s sister, Tirzah, was involved with a group called the Zealots, who wanted to kick the Romans out of Judea. This is fine with me. I would have been on their side.
(On ... Read more »
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
I’d recently seen the one you’ve probably seen, starring Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur, and I wanted to look at this one to see how it compared. The answer is: a lot better than you might expect. Yes, you do have to make allowances for the wild overacting by all the actors, but remember, they had little choice in the matter. A silent movie actor had to convey everything with gestures, ... Read more »
Bend it Like Beckham
Children of immigrants growing up in a different culture has become a genre all to itself, and this is one of my favorites.
Benny and Joon
Here is a film about someone with a mental illness that is a little more honest than two we have seen recently, those being Silver Linings Playbook and King of California. Both those movies annoyed me, as I was expected to somehow go along with the fanatical self-centeredness of the main characters. Here, Mary Stuart Masterson is a ... Read more »
Beowulf
I don’t know why they chose this title. It’s really the story of a poor, abused young man and his mother. We don’t get a lot of his back story, but from appearances he was horribly burned at some point. He seems to be profoundly retarded. He has no genitals, and not much is left of his face. His body is twisted, whether from deformity or mutilation it’s hard to say. (I wouldn’t be ... Read more »