Do we thank you, or what?
I’d say I fall in the “or what” category.
The hero of this film is an insomniac (Jeff Goldblum) who doesn’t really know where his life is headed. Watching Into the Night left me with a similar feeling, and I don’t necessarily mean that as a criticism. This whole movie seemed infused with that groggy, discombobulated feeling you get when you’ve been awake for thirty-six hours straight. Read the rest of this entry »
Now, if you’re on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a marriage?
Poor old Michael Mann. Here he was getting ready to make what was going to be the Lawrence of Arabia/Citizen Kane of cops-and-robbers movies, and he thought he had the legendary Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino working together for the first time. What happens? They pull a switcheroo on him and stick him with the world’s worst Pacino impersonator. Read the rest of this entry »
The bundle is probably a better deal at only five bucks more for both movies.
In the past all a King had to do was look respectable in uniform and not fall off his horse.
A truly excellent movie always manages to boil its story down to the essentials. It’s the mediocre ones that fumble around trying to figure out what they’re about. I won’t say what the bad ones do, but it often involves some hand lotion and a back issue of National Geographic.
He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.
It’s best to think of this movie as the estranged fraternal twin of Dr. Strangelove. Fail Safe is the sober, humorless one. Both films cover virtually the same territory, that of an inadvertent nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, but while Stanley Kubrick treated Armageddon as a subject worthy of absurdist gallows farce, Sidney Lumet takes it seriously for some reason. Read the rest of this entry »
You got something against the English language, Colonel?
Directed by John Frankenheimer, this film teams with his masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate to form a potent one-two punch of Cold War paranoia. The earlier film, with Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, boasted a more complex plot and a layer of political satire that’s not found here. That doesn’t make Seven Days in May a lesser film, just a different one with different goals. Read the rest of this entry »
For what it’s worth, I never stole from anybody who would go hungry.
If North by Northwest was a roller coaster ride, then To Catch a Thief was a slightly more sedate roller coaster in a ritzier neighborhood. About as inconsequential as a movie can be, this third collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant succeeds effortlessly on wit, scenery and star power. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben: I’ve seen week-old corpses that looked healthier.
Cully: But not happier.
I don’t think William Holden’s presence in this movie is a coincidence, because he almost automatically puts you in mind of Sunset Boulevard, and Blake Edwards’ 1981 movie is obviously meant to make Billy Wilder’s 1950 poison pen letter to Hollywood look like a Shakespearean love sonnet. Read the rest of this entry »
Creation myths need a Devil.
When I started this website, Facebook was just starting to be a blip on everyone’s radar. At that time, anyone stepping into the arena we call social networking was seen as MySpace’s prison bitch. If you need to be reminded about what MySpace is, you can Google it. It used to be big.
The King’s F Word
I had a few additional thoughts regarding The King’s Speech, apart from my actual review of the film. If you haven’t heard (and apparently a lot of people didn’t), the Weinstein company released a PG-13 cut of last year’s Best Picture. The original film was rated R in the U.S. because of a pair of scenes where Prince Albert/King George uses streams of profanity as an exercise to conquer his stammer. The PG-13 version excises those naughty words.
There are two reasons why the very existence of this cut is a joke. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Paul McElligott in Commentary | Comments Off