My Favorite Martian (review)
My Favorite Martian is the ultimate in movie fluff — while the credits are rolling you’ll forget what you just watched. It’s inoffensive and innocuous and… What was I saying?
Year: 1999
Tom Jones (review)
Tom Jones is one of those movies I appreciate more than I enjoy. Though based on Henry Fielding’s classic 18th-century novel, it seems at times little more than an excuse to revel in the licentiousness of the burgeoning free-love atmosphere of the 1960s.
Lawrence of Arabia movie review: gone native
T.E. Lawrence was what a friend of mine calls a “transethnic,” like the couple of Italian guys you always see playing bagpipes in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. David Lean’s gorgeous film captures this enigmatic man beautifully.
West Side Story (review)
West Side Story is a brilliant updating of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the two warring families of Verona now two streets gangs of kids from two different immigrant cultures coexisting in one New York City neighborhood.
The Apartment (review)
Only a man could have written this movie (it was Billy Wilder, and he directed, too). And only men could have written all the glowing reviews of The Apartment that I’ve found both online and off. The Apartment is a perfect demonstration of why ‘nice guys’ get a bad rap from women, but that seems to go right over the head of all those men praising it.
Ben-Hur (review)
Make no mistake — Ben-Hur is not great art. But it is great fun. Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a contemporary of Jesus, is a Jewish prince in Roman-ruled Judea newly reunited with his boyhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd). Messala, a Roman, has just returned from the empire’s capital to reign as tribune, a sort of lieutenant governor, of Judea. These old pals now find themselves separated by politics — one is the ruler, the other the ruled.
Gigi (review)
Gigi was kinda the Pretty Woman of the 50s. I hate to say that, because I hate that stupid movie (a fairy tale about a hooker!), and Gigi is simply a charming delight. But this Lerner and Loewe musical does bear the tiniest superficial resemblance to that other flick, though it ends up offering a much more positive moral.
The Bridge on the River Kwai movie review: rumble in the jungle
Instantly one of my favorite films, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a tense, terrifying, absolutely riveting film about the ironies of war and the deadly psychological games enemy soldiers play with each other.
Around the World in 80 Days (review)
Around the World in 80 Days is a huge, leisurely production, chock full of starry cameos and astounding scenery. There’s not really much of a plot, and the characters are little more than cardboard, but the whole point of this movie is to linger with Fogg and Passepartout as they drink in the beautiful countryside and exotic cities as they float languorously by. This is what Technicolor and 70mm prints were invented for.
Payback (review)
There’s a character in Payback, Pearl (Lucy Alexis Liu), a prostitute who likes to dispense physical abuse as much as she likes to receive it, and it was somewhere between a scene in which she gets turned on watching Val take a thrashing and one of the almost pornographically violent scenes in which Porter gets the stuffing kicked out of him when it struck me that the audience is almost as sadistic as Pearl. The audience likes watching Mel Gibson get beat up. The audience loves it.
