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!
The “Labor Day” Movie Is Here
So far Jason Reitman's only failure has been Young Adult. His new movie version of Labor Day (2014), the Joyce Maynard novel (reviewed on this site), is a winner. I've written that the novel is "endlessly compelling on the subject of isolation." That is not...
Catastrophe In The Canadian Movie, “The Sweet Hereafter”
A school bus has skidded off a hillside and fourteen children, residents of a Canadian town called Sam Dent, have died in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997), this being the horrific incident the movie revolves around. I don't know about the Russell Banks book...
Nicole Kidman Shines In 1995’s “To Die For”
A Joyce Maynard novel based on a true story about a woman who persuaded her teen lover and his friends to murder her husband became, in 1995, a good film adaptation titled To Die For, with direction by Gus Van Sant and a screenplay by Buck Henry. Here, the murder of...
She’s A Beauty, It’s A Beauty, “The Great Beauty”
Paolo Sorrentino's new movie, The Great Beauty (2013), is itself a beauty (great or otherwise) set in beautiful Rome. It is the large-scale film Fellini should have made instead of La Dolce Vita and Satyricon, both failures, for it is a patently intelligent, always...
Throw That “Swordfish” (The 2001 Movie) Back!
I thought movie acting had gotten considerably better than it frequently was in the past, but after seeing the caper flick Swordfish (2001), directed by Dominic Sena, I'm not so sure. John Travolta starts out badly but gets better. Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry and Don...
Is Joyce Maynard’s “Labor Day” any Good? – A Book Review
The Joyce Maynard novel, Labor Day (2009) is, I think, interesting and competently written; but is it also forgettable? A prison inmate called Frank runs away from the hospital he is in for an appendectomy, then forces Adele, the divorced mother of Henry (the book's...
A Stone’s Throw, A Peckinpah Western: “Ride the High Country”
Director Sam Peckinpah had better material to work with in the days when censorship was still noticeably strong in American film, as witness his Ride the High Country (1962), an engaging Western starring Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. Originally written for the...
Would That The “Hood” Were Better: 1991’s “Boyz N The Hood”
Written and directed by John Singleton in his twenties, Boyz n the Hood (1991) is no two-bit feat. It's explosive. Even so, Singleton's youth hamstrung him into a great naivete, and a certain decadence develops in this film about South Central L.A. Hood's political...
Gay Marriage and the Resulting Madness (Politics)
Here we go. Two gay men take a Colorado baker, Jack Phillips, to court because he declined to bake them a wedding cake. The judge rules that Phillips either prepares the cake or pays a fine, his religious beliefs be damned. This is hardly the first time something...
