Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

I’ve only read the first book in the series of 11, going on 13, and I enjoyed it immensely … though I have some reasonable doubts as to whether younger children should read it. It is downbeat. What I love is, it warns you right up front that it is, and even urges you to put the book down and read something more cheerful. (What better way to sell a book to a child, huh?) The movie was ... Read more »

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

I am a huge fan of the thirteen books, whose actual author is Daniel Handler. The movie was not awful, but really could not convey a tenth of the verbal magic in the text. But now we have this Netflix original, and we binge-streamed it in two nights, and it’s wonderful! Handler is a producer, and wrote several of the scripts, so I ... Read more »

Lenny

Bob Fosse made five films in his too-short life, and for three of them he was nominated as Best Director. He won for only Cabaret. This one had the bad fortune to be up against Chinatown and The Godfather, Part II. In most other years I think it could have won. It’s an amazing achievement in writing and ... Read more »

Les Diaboliques

One more gap in my cinema knowledge filled in. There are still a few real classics out there I haven’t seen, but now there is one less.

Henri-Georges Clouzot was the French Hitchcock, though with less of a sense of humor and the absurd. In fact, Hitch wanted this script, and Clouzot beat him out by a matter of hours, or so the legend goes. Before this he made Read more »

Les liaisons dangereuses

Believe it or not, this story, based on a novel by Choderlos de Laclos, written in 1782, has been filmed 10 times that I know of, and we’ve now seen 2 1/3 of them:

1. 1959, by Roger Vadim, with Jeanne Moreau.
2. 1978, Kiken na kankei, in Japanese.
3. 1980, French television.
4. 1980, Nebezpecne znamosti, ... Read more »

Let Me In

This is a remake of the excellent Swedish film Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in). That was a tale of a modern-day vampire, a twelve-year-old girl, who becomes friends with a boy. But the movie’s best line is when he asks her how old she is. “I’m twelve … but I’ve been twelve for a very long time.” Wow! For more about it check out my review of the ... Read more »

Let the Right One In

A vampire movie! Just what the world needs now, right? This one got very good reviews so I thought we’d give it a try. We lasted 20 minutes. I have sometimes reviewed movies we didn’t finish, but it was always because the movie was either bad or it just didn’t involve me. This one is different. It is dubbed, and I can’t stand dubbed movies. It actually looked ... Read more »

Let the Right One In

Say you’re a twelve-year-old boy in frigid Sweden, and you’re falling for a weird twelve-year-old girl who has just moved in next door … only she has been twelve for a long time, as she puts it. She can also climb a seven-story building as fast as she could run on flat ground, snap a man’s neck like a dry twig, and can’t enter a room unless you invite her in. In short, she is a ... Read more »

Lethal Weapon

Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him in a rainstorm in Los Angeles while a bunch of cops watch.

Lethal Weapon 2

Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of him for the second time in Los Angeles.