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!
Surveying “Casualties of War”, Brian DePalma’s Film
How melodramatically directed, by Brian DePalma, Casualties of War (1989) is!--so much so that the film almost fails. As it is, it is neither quite a failure nor a success; it's just worth seeing. Based on a true story about a war crime---the rape and murder of a...
No Rash to Judgment on “The Way Way Back”
The new Nat Faxon-Jim Rash movie, The Way Way Back (2013) doesn't quite work. Fourteen-year-old Duncan (Liam James) takes a trip with his mother, his mother's boyfriend and the boyfriend's teen daughter to a beach house whose locale is inhabited by sundry interesting...
Bring Me What?: Sam Peckinpah’s Alfredo Garcia Movie
There are several memorable scenes in what is a truly lousy Sam Peckinpah film---Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)---which quickly nosedives with an insane script. Undeniably, a pretty raw experience is offered in this enterprise---raw enough to be...
Nick, Billy and Google: “The Internship”
Actor Vince Vaughn (a libertarian Republican?) knows perfectly well we have a sub-par economy these days and has co-written, and stars in, The Internship (2013), about two watch salesmen whose company folds and thereby leaves the gents jobless. Afterwards Billy...
The Trashiness of “M*A*S*H” the Movie
A 1970 Robert Altman film, M*A*S*H is a war comedy too desultory and frivolous, not to mention unrevealing about character. We learn very little, really, about Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and nothing about Trapper John (Elliott Gould). It has some of the most...
Bachelorettes Behaving Badly: “Bachelorette”
The comic movie Bachelorette (2012) is slight. Not slight-but-good, in my view; just slight. And it shouldn't be. The three main women in the film (based on a play by Lesyle Headland, the movie's director) are obnoxious and distasteful, two of whom (Isla Fisher and...
See How They Run in “Chicken Run”
Notwithstanding I am one who never wants to see chickens escape their farmyard concentration camps, I had a good time observing the efforts of all the freedom-seeking fowls in Chicken Run (2000), by the creators of the well-known "Wallace and Gromit"---viz. Peter Lord...
Sorry, Dude, Going Back to “River’s Edge”
River's Edge, a 1987 film directed by Tim Hunter and scripted by Neal Jiminez, is a mankind-bashing drama which borrows its subject from an incident in Milpitas, California in 1981. A teen boy has just strangled his girlfriend and left her naked body on a riverbank....
Again with the Undead: “World War Z”
World War Z (2013)---Z stands for zombie---is a war movie. Or, at any rate, it is until it reaches the World Health Organization facility where it proves itself to be a medical thriller as well. But, yes, the film displays the continual military firing upon...
