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!
Seeing May in The Month Of May: “The Heartbreak Kid”
The Heartbreak Kid is a 1973 picture directed by Elaine May and written by Neil Simon. In it, a Jewish newlywed, Lenny (Charles Grodin), sees just how vulgar and tiresome his wife Lila (Jeannie Berlin) is, and he regrets marrying her. But during his honeymoon he...
“Bathing Beauty”: This One Can Be All Wet
Without its music, Bathing Beauty (1944) would have nothing. Red Skelton is deeply unsatisfactory, even repelling, as the leading man in the film, and has no business being the love interest for Esther Williams. Williams, of course, is the star who swims, who does...
Erring People In The Movie, “The Eel”
The Eel (1997), a Japanese film by Shohei Imamura, adapted from a story, centers on two sinners trying to find peace. One is a man, Yamashita (Koji Yakusho), the other a woman, Keiki (Misa Shimizu). Keiki, who attempts suicide over a romantic attachment to a married...
Nice Is “The Good Fairy”
Ferenc Molnar probably wrote a delightful play when he wrote The Good Fairy, since it was turned into a delightful 1935 movie by William Wyler. With cool subtlety Margaret Sullavan (once married to Wyler) enacts a friendly, callow girl raised in an orphanage...
Seriously Cheeky: The Movie, “A Serious Man”
A film by the Coen Brothers, A Serious Man (2009) begins with a prologue, set many decades ago, in which a Jewish peasant woman believes the man her husband has been speaking with is a ghost. After he comes to the couple's home, the woman coldly stabs him, expecting...
The Homage To “The Maltese Falcon”: “Chinatown”
In The Maltese Falcon, Bogart's Sam Spade is blunt and mildly neurotic but also self-confident. In Chinatown (1974), an homage to Falcon, private investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is ordinary, straightforward, coarse but also respectful, and rather fragile in...
Huston’s First: “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)
I have never desired to see the 1931 film of The Maltese Falcon, but only John Huston's acclaimed 1941 version. This is because Huston had the ability to make any movie a Big Deal, an event, without pretentiousness but certainly not without artistry, as is the case...
Love And Mass Murder: The New Movie, “The Promise”
The Promise (2017), by Terry George, is a film about love and mass murder in the Ottoman Empire in 1914. An Armenian medical student, Michael (Oscar Isaac), is engaged to be married but drifts into an easy love for another man's sweetheart, Ana (Charlotte Le Bon),...
Cinderella Fella
Directed by Ron Howard, Cinderella Man (2005) serves up so much caricature and obviousness it's almost as dispiriting as Howard's A Beautiful Mind. On the caricature side, in this chronicle of the early-adult life of boxer James Braddock (Russell Crowe), there is 1) a...
