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!
Spurning “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”
Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) does appear to be far more truthful about the American West than other Westerns (i.e., mythological Westerns). However, I don't know which is more ill-written---the movie's Leonard Cohen songs or the Altman-Brian McKay...
No Calamity, This Movie: “Calamity Jane”
Initially, Doris Day's acting in the 1953 Calamity Jane is self-conscious, rather phony, but it improves as the movie goes on; and needless to say she performs outstandingly in her musical numbers. The choreography for the song, "Just Blew In From the Windy City,"...
More About Last Year’s “The Americans”
I finished watching on DVD the fourth season of The Americans. Like so many other Communists, from Lenin to Mao, from Beria to Che Guevara, Elizabeth and Philip are murderers. Out of self-protection, they kill people. It's pretty gripping when the distraught black...
The Case For “The Case for Christ”
A woman, Leslie Strobel, converts to Christianity in the new Pure Flix film The Case for Christ (2017) and, wisely, it is depicted with subtlety. Her husband Lee also converts (at the end of the film), but by then subtlety is gone. The unbelievers in the audience...
Violation: The Movie, “The Collector”
I stopped reading John Fowles's absorbing novel, The Collector, once it seemed to be getting philosophically dark; my own philosophy of life is not dark. The book's plot concerns an English art student, female, who is held prisoner by an unstable English bank clerk...
Goin’ “Rogue One”
There is stale armed rebellion stuff (the rebellion is justified) in the recent Star Wars pic, Rogue One (2016), but the film is typically pleasantly energetic and photographically flawless, with smart lighting, etc. To my mind, its jabba-the-hutt creepies do not make...
Wyler Presents Rice: “Counsellor at Law”
I don't quite understand what the film Counsellor at Law (1933), derived from a play by Elmer Rice, is about, but it certainly holds the viewer. This is thanks mostly to director William Wyler and his actors. John Barrymore carries the film beautifully, with force...
From FX To DVD: “The Americans” Last Year
The fourth season of The Americans on DVD---I'm watching it. Things start going wrong for Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell), the two Soviet spies with American accents in D.C., just when the Soviet Union itself is shown to be limping along (to the end...
Worth Digging For? “Under the Sand”
On Under the Sand (2000): Like Hirokazu Kore-Eda's Maborosi, this French film by Francois Ozon centers on the mysteriousness of an individual death, but it is far less effective than that masterly Japanese picture. For one thing, it seems to also center on a person's...
