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!
Oak Of The Nineties: “The Oak”
Obviously Lucian Pintilie had no love for or faith in perilous Romania when it was Communist. In The Oak (1991), it is often a sick joke and Pintilie's film a dark but compassionate comedy. The two protagonists are smart and temperamentally strong, but a society...
Fairly Recent And Italian: The Film, “Come Undone”
I don't understand why Domenico (Pierfrancesco Favino) prefers his mistress Anna (Alba Rohrwacher) to his wife in the 2010 Italian film about an illicit love, Come Undone. Neither do I think the movie's moral neutrality is a good idea. Directed by Silvio Soldini,...
The Movie, “The Lineup” Never Gets Dated
The Lineup (1958) is one of Don Siegel's crime flicks, and the first third of it shows us nearly no one but the good guys as they investigate the killing of a fellow cop. Then it is predominantly the criminals who appear in this riveting story revolving around...
On The ’93 Leni Riefenstahl Doc
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) follows the wonderful, horrible career of Leni Riefenstahl: dancer, actress, master filmmaker. A German in Ray Muller's German documentary, she was of course hired by Hitler to make what was for him a Nazi...
Merits And Demerits In “Batman V. Superman”
In my opinion, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) is worth watching, just not to the end. Kyle Smith is right about its being rather sophisticated, but typically it gets boring too, and befuddling. On the other hand, the cast is good while production design...
The Sad End Of The Line: The Movie, “The End of the Tour”
One assumes from watching last year's The End of the Tour (2015) that author David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) committed suicide in 2008 because he was so out of synch with ordinary social life. Donald Margulies, the gifted playwright, provides a depiction of...
“This Gun For Hire” — This Movie For Viewing
I've never read any of Graham Greene's "entertainments," as opposed to his serious novels, but the 1942 This Gun for Hire smacks of a good adaptation. Alan Ladd is in it, and he ain't no Shane: he's an icy killer (suitably acted), while Veronica Lake rightly holds...
The Schlub Is The Rub: The Movie, “Sideways”
Sideways (2005), by Alexander Payne, is the one about the atypical road trip taken by the wine expert/aspiring novelist, Miles (Paul Giametti), and his horndog friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church). An absorbing comedy-drama, piercing and droll, it points up the theme of...
“Skirt Day” Pulls No Punches About French Society
The France wherein jihadists have slaughtered innocents is the France of the 2008 film, Skirt Day---a scathing picture indeed. Here, Sonia, a public high school teacher who often wears skirts, is trying to teach a drama course to wild, disrespectful immigrant kids...
