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!
A Smooch For The Classic “Kiss Me Deadly”
It is well known that Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) ends more or less apocalyptically---unique for film noir---but this isn't so strange considering how many deaths precede the climax and that the movie's hero, Mike Hammer, is capable of low-level sadism as...
Count Me Out For “Paradise Now” (The 2005 Film)
For starters, I do believe the Palestinians have legitimate grievances. But in Hany Abu-Assad's solemn film Paradise Now (2005), a new Arab terrorist, Said (Kais Nashef), after experiencing doubt and bewilderment, glumly sets off to do his dirty work in Tel Aviv. To...
Maggie, I Wish I’d Never Seen Your Film: “The To Do List”
Predictably, characterization means nothing in a movie as unspeakably raunchy as Maggie Carey's The To Do List (2013). Not a trace of insight arises about why the valedictorian virgin here (Aubrey Plaza) decides to experiment with every form of erotic gratification...
The Failure Of “The Best Man Holiday”
"Black" cinema in America still has not reached a level of high merit, as evidenced by the content in Malcolm D. Lee's The Best Man Holiday (2013). That I never saw the 1999 flick The Best Man, to which this is a sequel, hardly prevents me from forming a proper...
1967’s “Valley Of The Dolls” – A Guilty Pleasure
Mark Robson's '67 film version of Valley of the Dolls (novel by Jacqueline Susann) is a very hokey show-biz drama, more interesting than good. As millions are aware, poor Sharon Tate is in the film, but hers is not the only unsatisfactory acting. Barbara Parkins (as...
Comments on the Movie, “Girl With A Pearl Earring”
One wishes Girl With A Pearl Earring (2004) were better. The great Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer takes a shine to a new servant girl named Griet, but their relationship is chaste. He has her aid him in his work, instructs her somewhat about art, and makes her the...
“The Christmas Candle” Is Not Quite Lighting the Way
The Christmas Candle (2013) is a regrettably lame Christian movie in which thirty afflicted people, most of them born-again, in an English village receive exactly the miraculous gifts they were longing for, and then the movie ends. A man on his deathbed is thoroughly...
Garcia’s Look At A Lost City: 2005’s “The Lost City”
In Cuba before the revolution, Batista's men punish a Castro loyalist from a wealthy family by shoving him into a wooden cage and calling him a "rich bastard." Makes me wonder: I thought Batista's regime only snarled at the poor. In Andy Garcia's film The Lost...
Leave Orson Scott Card Alone
So: Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender's Game, is hated and insulted either primarily or exclusively because he opposes gay marriage. Woe and damnation to someone with a different point of view! "But Card doesn't think gay marriage is a civil-rights issue!" someone...
