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!
Grant, Woody: The Movie, “Nebraska”
In the film Nebraska (2013), it is driven home to David Grant (Will Forte) that two people he is expected to love---and must love---have always had feet of clay: his elderly parents. No, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) and his scrappy wife (June Squibb) are not like such...
Receptive To “The Letter” (The 1940 Film)
It's rather too bad that countless American movies of the Thirties and Forties (and up) had to have literary sources, but how agreeable it is that director William Wyler knew how to handle an author's theatrical drama, as witness his film version of The Letter...
On Kieslowski: Seeing “Red”
The late Krzysztof Kieslowski of Poland directed and co-wrote in the early Nineties a film trilogy named after the three colors of the French flag---blue, white and red---which was intended to express something about the virtue-ideals represented by those colors....
Soaring Entertainment: The Movie, “Sky High”
Re Sky High (2005): The teen son of a world-saving husband and wife not unlike the animated couple in The Incredibles begins attending a secondary school for kids with superhuman powers. There, the enrollees are assigned the place of either hero or sidekick depending...
Left Cool By “Medium Cool”
In the 1969 picture, Medium Cool, Robert Forster skillfully purveys a TV photographer's calm extroversion and no-nonsense defiance. He is true, and Peter Bonerz, as the sound man, is even truer. Verna Bloom (as Forster's love interest) does everything possible to...
“Elf”: Limited Fun
Plenty of belly laughs are to be had from Jon Favreau's Elf (2003), but this holiday picture is not very smoothly and sensibly scripted. Favreau proves he can direct comedy, and Will Ferrell is nothing less than marvelous as an oversized elf . . . er, I mean a human...
Briefly, “Alice Adams”
Alice Adams (1935), directed by George Stevens, is about unambitious husbands, vexed, money-emphasizing wives and optimistic girls with an instinct for social climbing. The tone isn't properly fixed, but Katharine Hepburn is fetchingly youthful as the...
“Moira”: A Christian Novel, But . . .
A French Catholic writer named Julian Green wrote a novel, set in America, about an evangelical young man who sees Catholics as idolaters. He is also too puritanical for his own intellectual and perhaps spiritual good (he believes his friend David, a sturdy...
French Film Today: Young Love
Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love, Goodbye First Love (2012), from France, should have been titled by the U.S. "Young Love" (the correct translation of the French title). But at least it was distributed to the U.S., for it's a good film. Fifteen-year-old...
