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!
Oliver Stone’s “Heaven and Earth” With Its Earthly Doings
An unacceptable artist, not least because he is intellectually shallow, Oliver Stone has what is at bottom a Buddhist movie in the 1993 Heaven and Earth. Stone is fond of Buddhist thought here, but also he can be hard on the people of Buddhist Vietnam. Both the...
The New Movie, “Christine,” Is Excellent
1970s society, in Christine (2016), has its mass media technology everywhere as well as its small and trivial consolations and "solutions", e.g. Transactional Analysis, for life's burdens. None of it does 29-year-old Christine Chubbuck any ultimate good. She is...
’68, New York City, “Madigan”
A police tale meant for adults, Don Siegel's Madigan (1968) is sort of a superfluous film without being a bad one. It makes clear what we already know: Cops are only human, notwithstanding Detective Don Madigan (Richard Widmark) is essentially a mensch. Like other...
Jane, Etc. On TV (November 2016)
This week's Jane the Virgin had a nice flow to it and sensibly dealt with the difficulty of financially getting by. It was also briefly moving in its treatment of sad Luisa (a sapid acting job by Yara Martinez). But probably nothing on TV this week will be as...
The Opposite Of Sophistication: An Indie Called “The Opposite of Sex”
The teenaged girl acted by Christina Ricci in the 1998 Don Roos film, The Opposite of Sex, is unsavory and callow and makes a number of politically incorrect remarks about homosexuals (the impetus: her gay half-brother). Despite this, the movie is every bit as...
“Duel”: Naw, It Ain’t “Jaws” On Wheels
Man-made cars and the interstate highway system are not the modern wonders to make us forget, and not be shocked by, the strange brutality in human behavior. Indeed, it is on the interstate that businessman David Mann (Dennis Weaver)---in Steven...
Zwick Blew It Yet Again In ’98: “The Siege”
The Siege is exciting balderdash. Do I accept it? Not when the balderdash is this strong. About the only item to be taken seriously here is that, even in 1998, Arab terrorism in the United States is, to whatever degree, a continual threat. The most preposterous item...
Yet Another Review Of “Jane the Virgin,” Season 3
The virginity of Jane The Virgin, now married, is gone. She and Michael had sex, and the show is sophisticated enough to present Jane feeling rather dismayed as though part of her identity has fallen away. But, hey, she'll get used to it---already is used to it by...
The Life And Death Of Rachel Scott: The Christian Film, “I’m Not Ashamed”
Rachel Scott was the first person---and the first Christian---killed by the pathological murderers at Columbine High in Colorado in 1999. In the new film I'm Not Ashamed (2016), there is supposed to be some fictionalizing of Rachel's story, but how much...
