Movie Reviews
The Nanny
Joey is ten, and returning home after a two-year stay at a special school because he refused to sleep or eat after his toddler sister drowned in the bathtub. He feels his nanny, Bette Davis, killed the girl and now might kill him. Neither his oblivious father nor his emotionally shattered mother believe him. We are probably meant to wonder if he is nuts, if in fact it was him who killed ... Read more »
Cinderella
A live-action re-telling of the Disney classic animated one. But some changes were made that I don’t think benefited the story. Here, Prince Charming (“call me Kit!”) meets her before the ball at the palace, and during the ball gets some quality time with her before she has to flee at the stroke of midnight. This may be better in the real world, but of course there is nothing real about ... Read more »
A Mother’s Son
The wonderful Martin Clunes (best known as Doc Martin) is a widower with a teenage son and daughter. Hermione Norris is bitterly divorced, and also has a son and daughter. They have been living together for a fairly short time, and there are tensions between the two sets of kids, but nothing really out of the ordinary.
Then a fifteen-year-old girl is stabbed to death out on the ... Read more »
The Swarm
What a cast! Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Lee Grant, Patty Duke, Slim Pickens, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Jose Ferrer, Bradford Dillman, Fred MacMurray, and Henry Fonda! And by the end, only the first four are alive. It was clearly a paycheck movie for most of these stars. And don’t forget, trillions and trillions of super-smart African killer ... Read more »
Deathtrap
Ira Levin wanted to emulate the genius of Anthony Shaffer’s masterpiece Sleuth. He didn’t (I doubt anyone ever will) but he came close. This play ran on Broadway for 1,793 performances, a record for a comedy-drama. The film version stars Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve, and Dyan Cannon. The plot is sufficiently twisty to satisfy the most discerning mystery buff, ... Read more »
City Island
This was a new one on me. There is a place in The Bronx, almost in Connecticut, which is essentially a small fishing village. It is being relentlessly gentrified, I just checked Zillow and you can’t buy a house there for less than $500,000, up to a million or so. But they still fish. It is an island, though it looks like you could wade across from New York City Proper. Here a lifelong ... Read more »
No
Long before our September 11th, that date was infamous in South America. That day in 1973 a military junta led by a murderous thug named Augusto Pinochet and enabled by our very own CIA overthrew the freely-elected government of Chile and murdered the president, Salvador Allende. In the years to come he, and we, were responsible for well over a thousand other murders, 30,000 cases of ... Read more »
The Money Pit
Though there is no attribution, this was inspired by the much better Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. Tom Hanks is a great actor, but he’s no Cary Grant, and he’s a bit over the top here in some scenes. Of course, the whole movie is over the top, but that’s not all bad. Tom and Shelley Long can’t resist buying a million-dollar ... Read more »
Women in Love
Here is the film that really put Ken Russell on the map. Adapted from a story by D.H. Lawrence. It’s a powerful ensemble of Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, Alan Bates, and Jenny Linden, the only one who did not go on to a major career. (She bore a surprising resemblance to Julie Christie. I wonder if that was a factor?) They are two middle class sisters who manage to hobnob with the upper ... Read more »
Kill the Messenger
Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner) was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News when he discovered the history of some of the dirty dealings by those motherfuckers Ronald Reagan and Oliver North concerning arming the Contra “rebels” in Latin America, and what he claimed as active participation by American agents in the importation and distribution of crack cocaine into ... Read more »