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!
The Tim And Roald Show: “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”
Re the writing by John August, Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) is not much of a movie version of Roald Dahl's humanity-scolding book. The final few minutes go nowhere, and Charlie (Freddie Highmore) is a somewhat hollow character. Burton's...
No Lollypop For Lemon Drop: “The Lemon Drop Kid”
A talented Bob Hope stars in The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), and although much of it is funny, I don't consider it a successful movie. Hope's character is a chiseling skunk who is only a little less than a chiseling skunk at the flick's end. Naturally he has a girlfriend...
Lively In The Water: “The Shallows”
We could use a fiction film about sharks that's better, more consequential really, than Jaws. Despite its preposterousness, The Shallows (2016) is it. Following some Blue Crush pop crud, Blake Lively escapes a shark by climbing onto the back of a dead whale, but is...
Came, Saw, Rescued: “The Finest Hours”
A Coast Guard boat attempts to rescue the men on a ruined oil tanker in Craig Gillespie's based-on-fact Disney film, The Finest Hours (2015), and when nature isn't unpleasant in one way (a sea storm) it's unpleasant in another (a blizzard). Re the blizzard, it's no...
Big Country Western: “The Sundowners”
George Templeton's The Sundowners (1950) leaves the sense that there are blanks in the film needing to be filled, but it is also very involving. Written by Alan Le May, the flick is a Western in which a man accepts the help of his criminal brother (Robert Preston) to...
Fools And Boobs In “That Obscure Object of Desire” (1977)
In the 1977 Luis Bunuel picture, That Obscure Object of Desire, fifty-something Mathieu (Fernando Rey) is crazy about, and forever frustrated by, a much younger woman, Conchita (alternately played by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). It has been...
Not So Long Ago, They Were “Arguing the World”
Joseph Dorman's Arguing the World (1998) is a dandy documentary about those who constitute what we universally call the New York Intellectuals, who reached adulthood during the early years of the 20th century. The men featured are Irving Howe, Daniel Bell,...
Teresa Abandoned?: The Movie, “The Letters”
The letters in the subdued religious film, The Letters (2015), by William Rieard, are those of Mother Teresa, and they incite a discussion between Teresa's spiritual director and a priest from the Vatican. Coinciding with this is a dramatization of the nun's work...
A Devout Field: A Children’s Book Review
Rachel Field's Prayer for a Child (1944) is a deeply Christian picture book for children---and, yes, for everyone else as well---which deserves its fame and Caldecott award. Its domestic idyl might as well be Heaven itself, and a finely, lovingly depicted female...
