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!
Paris By Way Of South Korea: The Movie, “Night and Day”
In the Hong Sang-soo film, Night and Day (2008), Seong-nam is a soiled Korean fellow who is in Paris after fleeing the police (the crime was smoking pot) in Seoul. A painter, he meets several young Korean women affiliated with the Paris art scene and, though married...
Pixar’s “Inside Out”: Mostly Inside
The new animated movie, Inside Out (2015), has the effect of instructing us that human beings are truly important. This is not only because of their emotions---the inner being of the little girl Riley contains Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger, all...
That’s One Needy Mother: The ’03 Film, “The Mother”
Roger Michell knows how to direct, and Hanif Kureishi is a serious screenwriter. Early in their 2003 British film, The Mother, a cocky carpenter, Darren (Daniel Craig), meets and chats with an elderly man called Toots (Peter Vaughn) while ignoring Toots's aging wife...
His First “Story of a Love Affair” (The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni #1)
The best thing about the late Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni was his perennial interest in the human condition. His first feature film, 1950's Story of a Love Affair, offers an original screenplay wherein a husband investigates his young wife's obscure past...
FYI, It’s C.O.D. : “The Bride Came C.O.D.”
A screwball item, The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941) is stale in several ways and obtuse in several others, but you could certainly do worse for sight gags and one-liners. It tells of a charter pilot (James Cagney) hired by a tycoon to keep the latter's daughter (Bette...
A Quick Look At “Tokyo Story”
An elderly couple visit their grown son and daughter and widowed daughter-in-law in Tokyo Story (1953), the great classic Japanese film directed and co-written (with Kogo Noda) by Yasujiro Ozu. The couple's children are harmless people who are nevertheless not as...
“The Humbling” On Screen
I saw the film version of The Humbling (2014)---Philip Roth's novel, which I reviewed on this site---on DVD the other day. Barry Levinson directed the picture imaginatively and Al Pacino is extraordinary as the malfunctioning great actor who gets involved with the...
“Nothing” Is Something: The 2013 “Much Ado About Nothing”
Joss Whedon filmed, with a contemporary setting, Much Ado About Nothing, a 2013 release. In writing about a stage production of Shakespeare's comedy, John Simon averred that "Much Ado is a shrewd play in which comedy and near-tragedy chase each other like a kitten and...
“How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life)”: Dean Martin’s Life, That Is
The Doris Day mode continued as late as 1968, the year of The Graduate, with Dean Martin and Stella Stevens in the romantic comedy, How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life). Eli Wallach is superb as a fiftyish man who cheats on his wife. His buddy David Sloane...
