What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Has any movie title ever more openly invited sarcastic wisecracks than this one? I won’t resist, then. The worst that could happen is that a perfectly wonderful and funny book by the great Donald E. Westlake should fall into the hands of cretins from Hollywood who have no idea how to make a movie with any wit or intelligence. John Dortmunder and his gang are among the best comic creations ... Read more »

What’s Up, Doc?

Peter Bogdanovich in his heyday, when he made one lovely movie after another. This time he set out to do a screwball comedy in the fashion of those old movies starring the likes of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Here we have Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Streisand, with Madeleine Kahn and Kenneth Mars, script by Buck Henry, David Newman, and the great Robert Benton. The plot is insanely and ... Read more »

When Billie Beat Bobby

What a delightful little movie this is! I’d never have run across it except after we saw, and loved, The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom I looked up the director, Jane Anderson, and saw she had teamed with Holly Hunter once again on this movie. She also did The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, which we loved. This ... Read more »

When Harry Met Sally …

Have you ever been to a restaurant where one person takes about half an hour to order? Someone who questions each ingredient in each menu item, wanting to know if it was cage-free, free-range, gluten-free, mercury-free, organic, and all the spices it will be cooked with? Then tells the waited to eliminate half those spices? Who wants three references from the waiter to be sure he or she is ... Read more »

When the Bough Breaks

I’ve been a fan of Jonathan Kellerman and his novels about Los Angeles child psychologist Alex Delaware ever since this first novel was published. I do have to admit, though, that after thirty-two of them they are getting a little stale, and I don’t think I’ve read the last two.

As for this movie, it’s a cheap made-for-TV production and doesn’t look all that great. And Ted Danson ... Read more »

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

Our problem in the US seems to be short attention span. We can’t seem to stay angry very long. Lots of people were angry in the months following Katrina, but now, almost two years later, only the people of New Orleans are still pissed off. The rest of the country seems to pretty much have forgotten the criminal—and I’m not using the term figuratively, I mean people should have gone to jail ... Read more »

When Worlds Collide

When I heard someone was remaking this I just had to dust off my old LaserDisc and take a look at the original again. I am something of an authority on the book, (I say “something of,” because I’m no SF scholar), because a few years ago I wrote an introduction for a new Bison Books edition.

I learned a bit about one of the authors, Philip Wylie, and not very much about the other, ... Read more »

Where the Truth Lies

Atom Egoyan wrote and directed The Sweet Hereafter, a film that was critically acclaimed but which I didn’t like that much. In this one he seems to be trying for a David Lynch Mulholland Drive sort of atmosphere, a ‘40s film noir sensibility, with maybe a bit of Chinatown thrown in. The background music is moody and intrusive and the story is fairly ... Read more »

Where the Wild Things Are

First, let me say I don’t know from Maurice Sendak. I’ve never looked at any of his books. I have a CD of a performance of The Nutcracker for which he designed the sets and the CD cover, and that’s the sum total of my contact with Maurice Sendak. So this movie is not a rendering of a beloved classic to me. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Maybe if I’d loved ... Read more »