Movie Reviews
Altered States
The script is by “Sidney Aaron,” from the only novel Paddy Chayefsky ever wrote. But it’s all really Paddy, whose real given name was Sidney Aaron Chayefsky. He quickly got into a dispute with madman director Ken Russell, feeling that Russell was having the actors speak his words too quickly. Maybe he was concerned that a lot of the words, having seldom been used in a motion picture, would ... Read more »
How the West Was Won
Before there was IMAX, there was Cinerama. In some ways it was even better than IMAX. It was shot with three cameras, and projected onto a special curved screen only in dedicated Cinerama theaters. The screen took up 146 degrees, which meant that if you sat in the center of the theater, it totally filled your field of vision. There was a seven-channel sound system, this before other ... Read more »
The Romantic Englishwoman
Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson are a well-off married couple, but she is restless. She takes off to Baden-Baden to “find herself.” While there she has a brief encounter in the lift. The man she speaks to, Helmut Berger, is a thief, a con man, a gigolo, and a drug smuggler. He loses a briefcase full of heroin and must flee. Through a series of unlikely circumstances, he ends up a guest at ... Read more »
Oklahoma!
My Aunt Cora Van “Cokie” Bradford in Corsicana, Texas, was a big fan of musicals. If a roadshow production came to Fort Worth or Dallas, she would probably be there in the audience, and she would buy the original cast album afterward. At first, these were actual albums (and I’ll bet a lot of kids in this downloading age have no idea where that term came from), big books with four or five ... Read more »
White God
Every once in a while a movie comes along that totally blindsides me. You think you are going to see one thing, and it turns out to be something entirely different. Here’s how it starts out:
Lili (Zsófia Psotta) is a twelve-year-old girl living in Budapest, who has a beloved mutt named Hagen. Her mother is off to Australia for a few months, and she has to stay with her father, who ... Read more »
Cas and Dylan
Richard Dreyfuss is Cas Pepper, a 61-year-old doctor who is dying of a brain tumor. (Yes, he really is Dr. Pepper.) Dylan is a flighty 21-year-old aspiring writer played by Tatiana Maslany. Through a series of implausible events, they find themselves on a road trip in an orange VW bug, crossing the Canadian plains and then the Rockies on their way to Vancouver. She discovers several drafts ... Read more »
Guys and Dolls
Frank Sinatra really hated making this movie. The main character, Sky Masterson, is played by the non-singing Marlon Brando, the world’s biggest star at the time. Sinatra felt he should have had that part, but had to settle for the second banana, Nathan Detroit. And he was right, it was silly casting, Frank would have been better as Sky. But, being Sinatra, he was a total dick about it. ... Read more »
21 Days
Later re-titled as 21 Days Together. Also known as Three Weeks Together and The First and the Last, which was the original title of the source, a short story and play by John Galsworthy. Seems like nobody could make up their minds about this one.
I was trying to figure out if this movie was pre-Scarlett ... Read more »
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Gotta love the title. They could have just stuck a 2 on the end of the original title, but this one is a nice play on words. And I just learned that the full title of the original movie was The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly & Beautiful. Now, why didn’t they use that one? Afraid of letting people in on the fact that this was a movie about old ... Read more »
Good Morning, Vietnam
Back in 1987 I was still stunned at the ability of Robin Williams to improvise stuff like this off the top of his head, non-stop, faster than a machine gun of comedy. Now, I find it all a bit too fast. I wish for just a wee bit of time to savor some of the jokes. But I guess that’s just the way it came out of his head. You get the impression that he had little ... Read more »