Our Town

Talk about full circle. One of Paul Newman’s early roles, before he’d done any movies, was as George Gibbs in a 1955 television production of Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece, Our Town. (It must have been an ideal property for those early, poverty-stricken TV days, as it requires no sets at all.) And but for Empire Falls and his voice work ... Read more »

Out Cold

John Lithgow and Bruce McGill were army buddies who opened a butcher shop in San Pedro. Now it’s ten years later. John is the worker bee nerd, Bruce is lazy, married to Terri Garr, and unfaithful (so is she, with a real estate agent hiding under the bed). They both loved her ten years ago. She chose badly. He hits her, and keeps a tight rein on the purse-strings.

She hires the ... Read more »

Out of the Past

There have been many attempts to define the genre known as film noir, but none that are really satisfactory. Damon Knight once said that science fiction was whatever he was pointing at when he said science fiction. A Supreme Count justice once defined pornography by saying he knew it when he saw it. Either of those suit me fine when it come to noir. I know what it looks like, and boy, is ... Read more »

Out of Time

Denzel Washington. Goes along pretty well until the last reel, which is always the toughest. Not totally stupid, but no more than an entertaining time-waster.

The Out-of-Towners

This is a minor work by Neil Simon, written directly for the screen, but it’s still funny. I don’t think any actor who ever lived could have played the character of George Kellerman and taken me through the whole movie without driving me crazy. George is a whiner, though he never actually whines. He feels he is entitled to a better deal from everybody else, including God. As soon as things ... Read more »

The Outfit

Between 1962 and 1974 Donald E. Westlake writing as “Richard Stark” wrote 16 terrific novels featuring Parker (no first name), a relentless, unstoppable, remorseless robber. He laid off the character for a while, then in 1997 he started in again and wrote eight more. (The first five were titled Comeback, Backflash, Flashfire, Firebreak, and Read more »

The Outrage

As I said in my review of Rashomon, this is a much-maligned remake of that Japanese masterpiece by Akira Kurosawa. And it’s really not all that bad. Paul Newman plays the outlaw, here a Mexican bandito with maybe a little too much of an accent. Claire Bloom and Lawrence Harvey are the woman and her murdered (or was he?) husband. The three gathered at the Rashomon ... Read more »

Outsourced

Here is a bright and funny little romantic feel-good comedy set mostly in India, maybe an antidote to the horrific early scenes in Slumdog Millionaire. A guy from Seattle is sent to India to train the people who are taking over the phone-ordering jobs of a company that is interested in only the bottom line. He tries to make them work like Americans, but has a lot ... Read more »

Over the Hedge

How we got this DVD is more interesting than the movie itself. Bruce Willis was finally getting his star on Hollywood Boulevard on October 16th, at 11:30 in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Now, when Vanna White gets a star they close off one lane of the street for a few hours and the one or two hundred people showing up for the ceremony squeeze in there. When Bruce gets his, they ... Read more »

Overnight

See, what happened was, this bartender named Troy Duffy wrote a screenplay called The Boondock Saints and got it to Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films. Harv loved it. Next thing you know, Troy’s got a $300,000 salary to direct the film, and a $15,000,000 budget, and also a contract for his band. Whoopee! Suddenly Troy is the Hollywood golden boy. He figures he’s ... Read more »