Blog

Anyone who's a music lover should check out the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major. It's an outstanding composition whose first movement gets feverish as well as lightheartedly lovely, whose second movement is strikingly jaunty, and...

The first half of the new version of Spider-Man--The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)--is quite captivating and even disturbing as it tells of Peter Parker's becoming the titular hero and his fighting the Big Mutant.  But the second half is clunky and somewhat boring.  Why,...

I have no use for Oliver Stone's wrongheaded movies, and not surprisingly his latest, Savages (2012), is more interesting than truly good.  It is very interesting, though, in my view; an intriguing drug-cartel drama.  For the most part it is poorly written--forget the...

1963's Seduced and Abandoned, which received a Big Apple showing in 2007, was said by someone at New York magazine to make Judd Apatow's film, Knocked Up, look tame by comparison.  That it does, and like Knocked Up, Pietro Germi's Italian gem concerns a non-slutty...

Is Canadian Idol as rotten as American Idol?  Don't know, but one of the past contestants on the Canadian version, Carly Rae Jepsen, was handed a great pop song in 2011.  It's the energetic "Call Me Maybe," which opens with--a pizzicato?--before providing very simple...

Though something more than a commercial Hollywood film, People Like Us (2012) is flatly unsatisfactory.  I found it hard to swallow nearly everything that goes on in it, as when a deceased father leaves his neglectful, irresponsible son a boatload of money to turn...

Kick-Ass (2010) has the title it does because that's what Dave (Aaron Johnson), the adolescent superhero, calls himself after he immaturely decides that costumed superheroism is what someone needs to attempt and that he might as well be the someone.  So he dons a...

Much of the dialogue in Nicholas Stoller's The Five Year Engagement (2012) is strictly for adolescents.  It's childishly raunchy.  Also, it's a movie other people have found funnier than I have. And yet . . . it's not bad. Tom (Jason Segel), a chef, and Violet (Emily...

The overrated Richard Linklater has a good film in Bernie (2012), which is based on a true story.  He collaborated on the movie's screenplay with Skip Hollandsworth, author of a 1998 magazine article about one Bernie Tiede of Carthage, Texas. Acted by Jack Black,...