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!
It Ain’t No Barrel Of Monkeys; To Me, It’s Better: “They Came Together”
The quicksilver farce in They Came Together (2014) is reminiscent of that in the TV shows Arrested Development and 30 Rock. Just as both of those series were low-rated, David Wain's movie failed to open in very many theatres and few people have heard of it. It's now...
“Spanking the Monkey”: Give Russell the Spanking
The 1994 David O. Russell film, Spanking the Monkey, has, or seems to have, something important to say about family incohesiveness and breakdown, but that didn't prevent me from seeing it on my first viewing as shoddy and on my second viewing as a shoddy bore. All...
Pop Music Lovers Will Love The Film, “God Help the Girl”
The best pop songs, besides being melodic, intelligently concern the human condition, which is exactly what the pop musical God Help the Girl (2014), by Stuart Murdoch, does, book and all. That book and those songs were penned by a bloke who proves he is one heck of...
Bunuel, That Creepy Pseudo-Thinker: “The Milky Way”
The work of cinema's most notorious nonbeliever, the Spanish lapsed Catholic Luis Bunuel, The Milky Way (1968) is a surrealistic and of course sardonic potpourri picture about 1) Catholic history, and 2) our Christ-haunted Western civilization. Toward some things...
Hogan and His Marshal: “The Doomsday Marshal” — A Book Review
The Doomsday Marshall, from 1975, is another transport-the-prisoner Western with flinty Marshall John Rye as the transporter and disgraceful Luke Braden as the prisoner. Braden is en route to being hanged, but has a purty wife hoping to free him and former friends...
Okay, Budd, Time For Your “Decision at Sundown”
Budd Boetticher's candy-colored Western, Decision at Sundown (1957), is a fine movie. It presents us with Randolph Scott aiming to kill the man with whom his wife, before committing suicide, had an affair. But Bart Allison (Scott's character) is misguided, intent on...
North-South, North Carolina: The Movie, “Junebug”
In the 2005 Junebug, the appallingly vulgar art of a Southern crank brings Chicago art dealer Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), with her odd taste, to North Carolina to make him an offer. Madeleine travels there with her Southern-born husband George (Alessandro Nivola) and...
“If I Stay”: I’ll Be Headin’ Out, Thank You
A tenuously supernatural love story, the film If I Stay (2014) lies to us about comatose people having the inner power to cheat death. Pretty deplorable. Chloe Grace Moretz does a good job of creating a character: that of Mia, the cello-playing girl who becomes...
Football, God, Etc. In The New Movie, “When the Game Stands Tall”
Declaring it was "inspired" by the true story of a supremely successful high school football team (that of De La Salle High), When the Game Stands Tall (2014) simply does not make its material believable. Example #1: Christian coach Bob Ladouceur, played by Jim...
