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!
Evaluating “The Shape of Things” (the LaBute Film)
Written and directed by Neil LaBute, The Shape of Things (2003) is based on LaBute's play of the same name. What the four-character piece tells us is that amatory love is squalid, innocence is repulsively assaulted, and contemporary art---yes, there's even something...
The Problematic 2000 Movie, “Traffic”
Re Traffic (2000), I like this movie's thoughtful rejection of the U.S. war on drugs, but not its relative lack of sophistication. Michael Douglas's newly appointed drug czar has a teenage daughter constantly hungry to shoot up, and Douglas's wife (Amy Irving) has...
I Doff My Hat to “Two English Girls”, the Truffaut Film
There is a lot of darkness in Francois Truffaut's films, but he never had a well-developed sense of tragedy. We see that in 1972's Two English Girls. He could certainly handle pathos, though, and we see this too in Girls' terrifically lyrical framework. The film...
Dom & Co. Are Back: “Fast and Furious 6”
The plot of the new Fast and Furious 6 (2013) has Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's cop approaching Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his ex-criminal crew to help him vanquish the toughest, smartest international crime team, based in London, you've presumably ever seen. Dom...
Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate”: A Quick Comment
Sooner or later we come to understand that quality in life is what we want and will strive for. For young Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) in The Graduate (1968), this quality is represented by the daughter of the forty-something mother Benjamin is adulterously sleeping...
“Love Is All You Need”: I Don’t Think So
It's increasingly hard for movies to be interesting. A Danish picture with a lot of English dialogue (as well as a lot of subtitles), Susanne Bier's Love Is All You Need (2013) is wispy and largely unimaginative---in short, a yawner. Not at all is it redeemed by the...
A Word About the Allen Flick, “Sleeper”
Artistically the 1973 sci-fi farce, Sleeper, is one of Woody Allen's best films. Except for the physical comedy, it's hilarious. Nevertheless: Woody wants us to know 1) he is justified in his (1973) atheism, 2) sex is sort of the summum bonum in life, and 3) his...
“Unbreakable” by Night
M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable (2000) begins auspiciously but eventually self-destructs. It raises the question of whether a middle-aged security guard (Bruce Willis) possesses comic-book hero superpowers. A physically fragile, slightly annoying black man (Samuel...
Sex and Brutality in the Original “Straw Dogs”
In 1971's Straw Dogs, a Sam Peckinpah film, a fearful, reluctant man must prove he is a man by battling macho fools. The man is David (Dustin Hoffman), an American mathematician who moves to a Cornish village with his English wife Amy (Susan George). There, hayseed...
