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!
Poppins In ’64
Critic David Edelstein has called the new flick, Mary Poppins Returns, which I probably will not see, "a bit of a dud." I see the original Mary Poppins (1964) the same way, except for the songs. The agreeable score deserves a better, tighter story. Again, what...
Goebbels’ Lover, “The Devil’s Mistress”
Lida Baarova, a Czechoslovakian movie star of yesteryear, goes from being the mistress of a German actor to being the mistress of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis' propaganda minister, in The Devil's Mistress (2016). Directed by Filip Renc, the film is clearly marred by...
A Further Decline
For the third year in a row, life expectancy in the U.S. has declined, mainly because of drug overdoses. Probably a further decline will occur in the years ahead as people commit suicide out of fear of Alzheimer's. To be specific, the fear of being in a nursing home...
The Makers Of “Don’s Party” Don’t Play Nice
Australia's Bruce Beresford did a perfect job of filming Don's Party (1976), a play by David Williamson, and of guiding his actors to a sound representation of a message---that marriage and hedonism do not mix. An Australian political race between the liberal Labor...
“Seven Beauties”: Seven More Than I Can Afford
I liked Lina Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy and Swept Away, two Italian films from the Seventies, but her Seven Beauties (1975) I consider an almost unwatchable dud. The premise is good: a little Naples coxcomb who is a gangster at heart inadvertently kills a...
“The Black Book” Of The French Revolution
Serving up the French Revolution as an adventure story, Anthony Mann's The Black Book (1949), also called Reign of Terror, centers on a beastly Robespierre (Richard Basehart) and his missing death list. http://gty.im/1277178218 Here, the brute...
“David and Bathsheba”: I’d Rather Read It Than See The Film
David in the 1951 Biblical movie David and Bathsheba, by Henry King, is not a man of much religious fervor, as the real David must have been. The film is more serious about grief and sin and doubt than other old Hollywood movies, but it needs a major jolt of energy. ...
Spending Time In The “Dept. Of Speculation”—The Jenny Offill Novel
I like that Jenny Offill's novel, Dept. of Speculation (2014), is short and has short paragraphs. Sans a plot, it concerns the marriage and motherhood of an unnamed woman writer, and although I lack interest in what it, or any other contemporary novel, has to say...
Post-True Grit Coen Brothers: “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”
Six Western stories make up the new Netflix film by Joel and Ethan Coen---The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)---and in toto it is terrific. My favorite is probably the touching, beautifully acted "The Gal Who Got Rattled" starring Zoe Kazan as a nice young woman in a...
