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!
I Happened To Watch “It Happened Tomorrow”
Larry Stevens (Dick Powell), the main character in It Happened Tomorrow (1944), is a newspaper reporter who miraculously receives, for several successive days, tomorrow's newspaper with tomorrow's news---i.e., the future is revealed---and he begins to exploit this...
You Done Good, Miss Polley: “Away From Her”
Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" is a clever if almost dull short story about a married woman with Alzheimer's who, while in a nursing home, grows emotionally attached to another woman's husband, also with Alzheimer's. It makes for a truly impressive...
Written On The Soap: The ’56 Film, “Written on the Wind”
Co-starring the late Lauren Bacall and starring Rock Hudson, Written on the Wind (1956) is about a wealthy young alcoholic, Kyle (Robert Stack), who is in most ways inferior to his best friend Mitch (Hudson), but ends up marrying the pleasant secretary (Bacall) for...
Grow Up! “Small Change”
A Francois Truffaut film, Small Change (1976) is small potatoes. Full of vignettes, most of them mediocre, about young boys (and one girl), the flick is vapid, intermittently sentimental, even stupid. The old Truffaut charm registers much weaker than it does in The...
Herc At War: The 2014 “Hercules”
Hercules (Dwayne Johnson) in this new Brett Ratner movie is a trifle too naïve for my taste, and assuredly the dialogue isn't brainy. But the battle scenes, involving Hercules and the Thracian army, are fun and sweatily compelling. Also, it was savvily photographed...
Aging Man, Aging Westerns: The Movie, “The Shootist”
The tale of an aging gunman in 1901 bound to die of cancer, Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976) is not what a Western ought to be. John Wayne performs memorably as John Bernard Books, but far more pleasure is to be had from such energetic Wayne Westerns as Stagecoach,...
You Just Might Like “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”
We've certainly lived with electricity a long, long time. Now, in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), it's being used by Jamie Foxx as one of the most destructive weapons imaginable. The power was forcibly harnessed in Foxx's character, Max Dillon, via electric eels! ...
Marilyn And Crime: 1953’s “Niagara”
In Niagara (1953), Marilyn Monroe plays a tramp of a wife and Joseph Cotton her neurotic, harried husband. Sojourning in Niagara Falls, Ontario, the two wish to murder each other, the husband for revenge. . . Naturally, Marilyn's beauty (in Technicolor) is luminous,...
Celebrating Old York: The “Sergeant York” Movie
Sergeant York (1941) is a coming-of-age and coming-to-faith story. There is much that is wrong with it, but Alvin York's biography is interesting, even with the limited treatment it receives here. A hellion as a young man, he became a Christian and resisted...
