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!
Enjoying Taylor Swift’s “Red”
Re Taylor Swift's Red CD (2012), which I recently heard for the first time. (I'm not much interested in her current CD, 1989.) 1) Predictably, there are too many love songs on this 16-track recording. 2) When Taylor isn't boring me with "I Almost Do," "Sad Beautiful...
Havin’ “Happy Times” With Zhang Yimou
The director of Ju Dou, To Live, and Not One Less, China's Zhang Yimou is a brilliant master. Small, amusing and sad, his Happy Times (2002) concentrates on a shortchanged person, a pared-down life---that of Wu Ying, a girl made blind by a brain tumor and treated...
Again, A Girl And A Gun: The 1948 Movie, “Pitfall”
Beware if a man in a film noir complains about his humdrum life, as Dick Powell does in Pitfall (1948). He's destined to have his life stimulated by violence and, possibly, the kiss of a woman who's not his wife. The said woman is played by Lizabeth Scott, whose...
A Loser Called “Marianne and Juliane”
At bottom Margarethe von Trotta's German film, Marianne and Juliane, is a bore, just ultra-leftist or radical enough not to condemn a woman who has gone from activism to terrorism in the (figurative) war to end Third World agony, and even in 1981, the year of the...
I Never Gave “The Second Chance” A Second Chance
Jake, a black pastor in The Second Chance (2006), is abrasive and insulting, although at other times he is too good to be true. Not a well-drawn character. Ethan, a white associate pastor, is poorly acted by Michael W. Smith. Steve Taylor's Christian movie doesn't...
Power And Cynicism: The Preston Sturges Film, “The Great McGinty”
The Great McGinty (1940) is not a great movie but it's pure Preston Sturges, which means it's fanciful and personal. "It has mainly to do with the rise through city politics from soup line to Governor's mansion of a toughie (Brian Donlevy) who learns very fast" (Otis...
Searing And Meaningful: “Gabrielle”
On Gabrielle (2006): From France, this Patrice Chereau picture borrows Joseph Conrad's fine 1897 story, "The Return," for cinematic treatment. A wife, Gabrielle, leaves her home to run off with a recent lover, but abruptly changes her mind and returns to her husband....
“No Escape”: Nope
The only good thing about No Escape (2015) is that it is wildly suspenseful. Critics who have called it trashy---trashy in the sense of sloppily dumb---are right. The film stars Owen Wilson and Lake Bell (acceptable). Sterling Jerins, the young girl who plays one...
Listen, Hoss: The Movie, “Phoenix”
The German movie Phoenix (2015), by Christian Petzold, brought certain thoughts to mind. First, if people will not behave humanely during wartime, when will they behave humanely? Second, the film concerns ordinary people living in a defeated Germany after WWII, and...
