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 Undefeated” (Sarah Palin, That Is) – A Movie Review
The Undefeated, Stephen K. Bannon's 2011 documentary about Sarah Palin, begins with footage of familiar people speaking about Palin in words ranging from insulting to disgusting. Sarah Palin is not Hitler; she is not a monster. The loutish haters treat her as though...
Dancin’ and Shortchangin’: “Footloose” – A Movie Review
I never saw the original Footloose movie from 1984, but the story told in Footloose the Remake (2011) is pure rubbish. It rattles along indecorously and, in spite of everything, it's dated. Yet filmmaker Craig Brewer concentrates on it as carefully as he does the...
“The House of Mirth” on Film – A Movie Review
In The House of Mirth (2001), a Terrence Davies film, Gillian Anderson offers no real surprises as Lily Bart. But she does offer skill, having an almost childlike quality and the capacity to move us. Eric Stoltz, as Laurence Seldon, does nothing either particularly...
Won’t Be Moving to the “House of Flying Daggers” – A Movie Review
China's Zhang Yimou is a great film director, but House of Flying Daggers (2004) is no Ju Dou or To Live or Not One Less. These films are gripping successes, whereas the '04 effort is a mildly serious entertainment with the absurd action of the cheap 1980s Hong Kong...
Ugh! “The TV Set” – A Movie Review
In addition to being very foul-mouthed, Jake Kasdan's The TV Set (1997) is an obvious, not always credible, and eminently unfunny satire on the squalid thinking we've witnessed for years in the television industry. In many ways it's the poor man's--no, the...
When Eminem Was Hot Stuff: 2003’s “8 Mile” – A Movie Review
Eminem, in 8 Mile, plays a Detroit post-teenager who dreams of becoming a rap singer, who both has black friends and receives hostility from blacks who don't like his career intentions. For all its hokiness it's a good movie, chiefly because of its depiction of...
The Unusual “Martha Marcy May Marlene” – A Movie Review
Not long after Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) begins, the eponymous main character (Elizabeth Olsen) runs away from the young people's commune she's been living in for two years and begins to live with her sister and her sister's husband in Connecticut--and, boy,...
The 1960 “Spartacus” in Tulsa – A Movie Review
I was going to see Tower Heist this weekend, but I got a chance to see an old epic on the big screen and opted for that instead. It was Spartacus (1960), one of Stanley Kubrick's better films--good on the small screen, a gem on the big. Therein, Kirk Douglas plays...
A Word About “The Lives of Others” – A Movie Review
The 2006 German film, The Lives of Others, successfully does what today's movie critics declined to mention in their reviews: it condemns Communism. Too, it exposes a government, East German in 1984, that is slowly getting weary of Communism, whether the death...
