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 Undervalued: “The King of Masks”
In the West, the lives of most little girls are hardly devoid of privileges and delights. In China of the 1930s, however, little girls were rigidly undervalued and sold by their impoverished parents (or keepers) to ensure all-around survival. "Doggie" (Zhou...
The Guys And Dolls Who Do And Do Not Pass Muster: “Guys and Dolls”
Brando sings! Yes, and he spoils the song "Luck Be a Lady" in the 1955 movie adaptation of Guys and Dolls. He is miscast as a crooning illicit gambler, whereas Frank Sinatra clearly is not. It's a pleasurable role he is in, with Vivian Blaine, as his inamorata,...
No Musique To My Ears Here: “Notre Musique”
I want nothing to do with Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique (2004), which I had to see on DVD since it was never shown in a Tulsa theatre. No wonder. It has no entertainment value despite a few moments of striking insight, and its middle section is interminable. ...
So Close To Greatness: The Movie, “So Close to Paradise”
A terrific film noir produced in China, So Close to Paradise was made in the late Nineties, banned for three years by the Red government, and---hooray!---subsequently released in the U.S. It didn't make me think of Forties and Fifties Hollywood, though, but rather of...
“The Bride Wore Black”: Truffaut Made Too Many Movies
Francois Truffaut admired the films of Hitchcock, but his thriller The Bride Wore Black (1968) is certainly more Truffaut than Hitchcock, which is wise. However, this is the only good thing about the movie---an utterly lousy one. It is much, much sillier than...
The Anti-Monument Vandals
The fools among us are desecrating the monuments to Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson and others. I agree with the writer for The Federalist website who propounded that these monuments "mark our progress as a nation," but this would never occur to the fools. It's only...
Deprivation, Etc.: The New Movie, “The Wedding Plan”
Filmmaker Rama Burshtein is able to make believable the peculiar, unlikely actions of her chief character, Michal (Noa Koler), in the fascinating, not-very-comic The Wedding Plan (2017). Michal deeply yearns to be married that she might be "normal" and "respected"...
Again, Wayne Is “Tall in the Saddle”
In the John Wayne Western from 1944, Tall in the Saddle, land seizures are interrupted when a man threatens to tell the authorities about the sell of marked playing cards. The man, never shown, is killed. John Wayne plays the newly hired worker and good shot who,...
A Word About “Ordet” (The Dreyer Film)
Carl Theodore Dreyer's Ordet ("The Word", 1955) is tedious and too theatrical---it is adapted from a play---but also sufficiently strange to end with an astonishing miracle the likes of which humanity never sees anymore. The film shows us the persistence of religious...
