Blog
These stories have been around a long time. Some of them I have updated. Many of them I haven’t. This started out when blogs were like, new!
The Importance Of “Never Let Me Go” – A Movie Review
Kathy is a child raised in the English boardingschool, Hailsham, before becoming a young woman played by Carey Mulligan in Never Let Me Go (2010)---and Kathy is a clone. So are the other children at Hailsham, among them Kathy's friend Ruth and the boy she has a crush...
“Here Comes The Boom”: Here Comes The Flop – A Movie Review
I like Kevin James, but I don't like Here Comes the Boom (2012). It's an inspirational comedy starring and co-written by James, and, although the comedy is reasonably funny, the inspirational content is spurious and ridiculous. Sometimes I thought the movie was...
A Silver Overlay in “Silver Linings Playbook” – A Movie Review
David O. Russell's first film, Spanking the Monkey (1994), is not a crowd pleaser. Mediocre as it is, it's tougher than that. His new picture, Silver Linings Playbook (2012) is a crowd pleaser---and it isn't mediocre. It's a seriocomic piece that manages to be a...
Old West Death and Scheming: “The Last Days of Wolf Garnett” – A Book Review
Clifton Adams's The Last Days of Wolf Garnett, published in 1970, is a fine Western. It's mostly well written, though Adams does incorrectly use "disinterested" (which means "impartial", not "uninterested"), and it eschews becoming formulaic. Up to a point I like...
A Look At “Toy Story 3” – A Movie Review
Something needs to be done with Andy's charming toys now that Andy is 17 years old and bound for college in the outstanding Toy Story 3 (2010). Almost all of them are supposed to go in the attic (which is good---it's still the owner's house) but they're somehow...
The Brilliance of Leos Janacek’s “Sinfonietta”
Leos Janacek, a Czech composer, completed his Sinfonietta just a couple of years before his death in 1928. It is over 20 minutes long and consists of five movements, the first of which is bold with horns. Timbre and harmony delight during the second movement, a...
The Future is Stupidity: “Idiocracy” – A Movie Review
All the accepted ignorance and universal dumbing-down, all the pop culture foolishness and great-unwashed breeding have taken their toll in the world of Idiocracy, a 2006 film by Mike Judge. A science experiment goes wrong: an otiose soldier (Luke Wilson) and a...
“The Next Three Days” of 2010 – A Movie Review
I'm glad I never saw the deeply leftist films, if that's what they are, of Paul Haggis. But his The Next Three Days (2010), a thriller that means business, I did happily see---and do recommend. It's a remake of a French picture I'm unfamiliar with, so, yes, it's...
Get ‘Er Done, Abe: “Lincoln” – A Movie Review
The world Steven Spielberg creates in Lincoln (2012) truly does not seem far removed from the one in which no one saw slavery as a moral issue: the world of colonial America, for example. It's the nineteenth century, however, and President Lincoln insists on the...
