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!
Mamma Mia! ABBA Goes Mediterranean Again
Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again (2018) is a delightful sequel to the fine Mamma Mia---er, wait a minute. Mamma Mia (of 2008) is not fine: it's unspeakably insipid. Here We Go Again is superior to it. It is delightful. With Oliver Parker as director, the moviemakers...
Shepherds of Sardinia, “Bandits of Orgosolo”
Italy's Bandits of Orgosolo (1961), by Vittorio De Seta (not De Sica), is about Sardinian shepherds---a man and his younger brother---and their troubles with bandits, other shepherds, and uncompassionate policemen. These two are persons of nature, working with and...
On “A Married Man” By The Catholic Novelist Piers Paul Read
The married man in the 1979 English novel A Married Man, by the Catholic writer Piers Paul Read, is a sometime adulterer named John Strickland. A barrister and a socialist who intends to run for political office, Strickland is also an atheist married to a Catholic...
Fun With Noir: “I Wake Up Screaming”
In I Wake Up Screaming (1941) a model called Vicky Lynn (Carole Landis) gets murdered, and the investigating police department is pretty inept about the matter. It allows big Ed Cornell (Laird Cregar) to do some very shoddy police work, for he tries to pin the murder...
Along Came Mary: “A Child of the Big City”
A short silent film about a big-city poor girl, who becomes well-to-do, in Russia, A Child of the Big City (1914) was made several years before the Bolshevik revolution and the vile slaughter of the royal family. It presents pre-Soviet Russia, with urban activity and...
The Movie, “Melancholia” Gets An F, Dunst Gets An A
2011's Melancholia is the silliest pessimistic film I've ever seen. That a stray planet is heading for a collision with the earth is acceptable---it's merely the movie's creator, Lars von Trier, lying like truth---but almost everything else in Melancholia is laughably...
“The Simplest Thing Is To Complicate Everything” (?): A Bueno Film
The new Mexican movie, Lo mas sencille es complicarlo todo (2018) features English subtitles but not an English title. Netflix, which picked it up, translates it as "The Simplest Thing Is To Complicate Everything"---not the simplest title. No wonder the Spanish...
Is The Welfare State My Friend?
A July 12 article for The Federalist website is titled, "How Expanding Medicaid To Able-Bodied Adults Is Stripping Care For Disabled People." Penned by Charlie Katebi, it informs us that "When a state expands Medicaid, the federal government covers 95 percent of the...
“L’avenir”—Call It “The Future.” Or “Things to Come”
Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a philosophy professor married to another philosophy professor (Andre Marcon), and this is yet another film about a husband who blandly leaves his wife for another woman. Nathalie takes it . . . philosophically, which does not...
