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!
We Love “The Fantasticks” – A Theatre Review
The Fantasticks ran in New York from 1960 to 2001, and has been revived there of late. This Tom Jones-Harvey Schmidt musical has a certain artistic purity---not just merit but purity---to complement the lovely ballads and nice love story. It's small but endearing....
The Real Deal Navy SEAL: The “American Sniper” Movie
The Iraq War was disturbing; it is so in American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood and scripted by Jason Hall. It was also a war where jihadist savages needed, for more reasons than one, to be killed, and the American sniper of the movie, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle...
Bailey 1, Potter 0: “It’s a Wonderful Life”
It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the Frank Capra picture, is a strange work of art. Perhaps never has sentimentality been so smartly and lovingly filmed, never has facile optimism been so impressively crafted. Patently the film is faulty. Indeed, it's stupid about...
Reviewing “Jane the Virgin” Again
The criminal activity in Jane the Virgin is getting complicated---for me, anyway---but it's good to see something other than the working-out of human relationships (Jane's still working it out with Rafael). The stakes never seem very high here, but I guess that's what...
Pulp Of An Artist: The French Movie, “Shoot the Piano Player”
In Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, a 1960 example of cinema as the free exercise of imagination (complete with jokes), a man has a blighted past because of what happened to his wife and now a blighted present because of his crooked brother. The film begins...
On The Film Version Of “Memoirs of a Geisha”
Though very pretty, Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) could use some visual and histrionic restraint (I don't care for the acting here of Gong Li, Kaori Momoi and Youki Kudoh). But the film in toto, an adaptation of the Arthur Golden novel, is an interesting...
Another Look At The Christian Film, “Fireproof”
The objection has been made that in 2008's Fireproof, rediscovering harmony in marriage requires salvific grace from Jesus Christ instead of just efforts to mend the marriage. But the moviemakers were not going to leave firefighter Caleb (Kirk Cameron), a...
One Of Our Candid Comedies: “My Super Ex-Girlfriend”
If you want it, you got it. A surfeit of sex jokes, that is. Maybe adolescents want it, for this Ivan Reitman turkey, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), IS an adolescent film. (It also moves at a rather leaden pace.) In fact, the two principal females, played by Uma...
On 1951’s Powerful “A Place in the Sun”
This is the one that borrows the plot of An American Tragedy, the Theodore Dreiser novel. George Eastman (Montgomery Clift, more interesting here than in I Confess), a poor man with rich relations, courts a blue-collar girl named Alice (Shelley Winters) and is...
