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!
I’m Into U: The Movie, “CQ”
In the late Sixties, Roger Vadim directed Barbarella. In the late Sixties of the movie, CQ (2001), a young film editor named Paul directs Dragonfly, a silly sci-fi picture with a toothsome heroine. Like Barbarella. This the debut feature of Roman Coppola (Francis'...
In The Bosom Of “Swamp Thing”
If there were any critics in 1982 who praised the movie Swamp Thing, I don't want to know about it. It is ludicrous and cheap and poorly acted. As well, it is the most sensual movie apropos of a woman's breasts I have seen. Usually covered, the breasts are those of...
Caper With A “Man Bait”
The 1952 Man Bait is the first British film noir for Hammer (Brit)/Lippert (U.S.), and a tasteful, civilized film noir it is. But most certainly there is heinous behavior: killings and a near-killing most foul. Actor George Brent, an American, is not very good, but...
Bogart The Lonely: “In a Lonely Place”
In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray, is a love story with dangerous neuroticism. Screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) loves one woman (Laurel, acted by Gloria Grahame) and is indifferent to the mysterious murder of another (a hat-check girl...
Poison-Pen “Pretty Persuasion”
Marcos Siega's tragicomic Pretty Persuasion (2005), scripted by Skander Halim, isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. But it didn't win me over. The plot is literally incredible, concerning three high-school girls, one of them a bashful Muslim, who avenge...
On The Oscar Winner, “All About Eve”
First it was a short story and a radio play, then it became a Hollywood classic with direction and script by Joseph Mankiewicz. All About Eve (1950) is an appealing picture about two faulty women, especially Anne Baxter's Eve Harrington. The themes are self-seeking...
Ms. Coppola Going Places: “Somewhere”
With the 2010 Somewhere, Sofia Coppola wrote and directed a film that has more in common with the films of Olmi and Antonioni than with today's serious pictures, which is to the good. It has to do with a popular, recently divorced movie actor (Stephen Dorff) and his...
On The 2011 Novel Of A Christian Writer: “To Die For”
Once again, in 2011, we had Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, this time from the perspective of Anne's close friend Meg Wyatt. Sandra Byrd's novel, To Die For, is about both Anne and Meg, with the latter as narrator---and, I might add, nonsupporter of Katherine of...
George And “The Women”
George Cukor, in filming Clare Booth Luce's play, The Women, put out in 1939 a jangled, vivacious---almost too vivacious---domestic comedy about female dreadfulness and female resilience. There is also an element, to be sure, of a woman-needs-a-manism (i.e. a...
