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!
One More Time With “Jane the Virgin”, Report #7
The actors in this week's Jane the Virgin (April 27) really get to emote. And why wouldn't they? The episode, Chapter 20, is replete with figurative wrestling matches as well as a literal one (which, like everything else in the show, is not allowed to become...
Walking Away From “Run All Night”
The Jaume Collet-Serra movie, Run All Night (2015), held me for a long time with its rowdy drama (now that's a car chase sequence), but then it turned into a tired Liam Neeson picture rather too much like one of the Taken flicks. The mobster's cruel disloyalty to a...
Review #6 Of “Jane the Virgin”
I've been staying away from novels that are primarily about human relationships. I see all the relationships, mostly male-female, I need to see on the CW's Jane the Virgin. Episode 19 (a.k.a. Chapter 19) on Monday night, April 20th, brought us breakups: between...
Money Shots: The French Film, “L’Argent”
The plot of the 1983 Robert Bresson film, L'Argent ("Money") is sometimes weak, and the same old Bressonian defects emerge as well, yet none of this renders the picture unwatchable or unmemorable. Unlike, say, Mouchette, it is one of the Frenchman's better efforts....
One Crime In Particular: The ’56 Movie, “Crime in the Streets” (The Films of Don Siegel #2)
He looks too old for the part, but John Cassavetes is vividly first-rate as an 18-year-old gang leader in Don Siegel's Crime in the Streets (1956). Here, a trio of punks plan to murder a working-class gent who caused a fellow street tough to be arrested. Frankie...
Furious Fun: “Furious 7”
1. Okay, so we see the ultimate that a movie can do with cars---in Furious 7 (2015), the seventh The Fast and the Furious pic---when five sleek autos drive out of a plane and drop by parachute to the mountain road below. Subsequently, of course, the drivers zoom them...
“Sullivan’s Travels” By Preston The Cool
Sullivan's Travels (1941) produces an appreciable number of laughs, especially in its big slapstick sequence, before being deprived of its comedic tone. It's a Preston Sturges picture, less successful than The Palm Beach Story and The Great McGinty but still engaging...
“Friends” And A Sick Hubby: “Such Good Friends”
The 1971 film Such Good Friends, by Otto Preminger, is like a comic An Unmarried Woman with a sick and dying husband. The wife of this husband, Julie (Dyan Cannon), firmly and understandably sees her marriage to Richard (Laurence Luckinbill) as a good one. But then...
The Promising “Wolf Hall” Is On PBS
Hilary Mantel's two novels about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII have been transferred to television with the title of Wolf Hall, and the first episode (on PBS) was---is---tastefully and intelligently presented. At present Cromwell (Mark Rylance) is secretary to...
