Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me documentary review: music hath power
A harrowing yet also inspiring portrait of the American pop music icon as he copes with the rapid deterioration of Alzheimer’s.
Elvis Presley
Rock of Ages (review)
The story is almost beside the point, because Tom Cruise’s nude torso that I could be running my hands all over and because the young kittenish leads in this story cobbled together around awesome 80s hair-band stadium anthems are the weakest part of it.
Nowhere Boy (review)
Oh, we already know how it ends! John Lennon starts a band and ends up bigger than God. Before that, though… whew. There’s a whole lotta psychosexual stuff packed into Nowhere Boy, the tale of Lennon’s adolescence in Liverpool, which may or may not be true, but it sure makes for a smashing film.
the oh-no! DVD of the week: ‘Nazis – UFO Conspiracy’
This totally proves what that one guy was saying about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landings! Was Hitler trying to build a secret weapon that would move like a flying saucer and decimate Allied bombing fleets over Germany? We know that Nazi scientists were experimenting with flying wings as well as building the first ballistic … more…
the weirdest thing I’ve seen in Stratford (so far)
I dunno what this Elvis impersonator was doing there on the High Street, but he was kinda cute in a Bruce Campbell kind of way, and he came complete with his own white stretch American limo. I should have thought to get a picture of him with Nigel…
Bright Star movie review: cinematic poetry
John Keats is the intruder into the story of Fanny Brawne, and if you didn’t already know that he turned out to be the renowed poet and she turned out to be ‘merely’ the young woman who loved him, and was loved by him, and inspired some of his greatest poetry, you might be forgiven for assuming that she’s the one who surely washed up legendary years later, for how the film defies the convention of lavishing its focus not on him as the de facto presumptive natural center of attention, but on her.
the oh-no! DVD of the week: ‘Royal Circus of Moscow: On Ice’
I love how you can hear in the title the emphasis on the On Ice, as if it had an exclamation point after it and it was the guy who did the opening-credits voiceover for Police Squad: In Color! intoning it. It’s nice to know that kitsch is global. Maybe it’ll be the one thing … more…
Happy Feet (review)
Fluffy baby penguins dancing and singing and waddling around their world with wide-eyed wonder? You have to have a heart of stone not to be a puddle of goo after coming in contact with that.
Walk the Line (review)
I cannot stop listening to the *Walk the Line* soundtrack. No, seriously. I’ll play ‘Ring of Fire,’ like, half a dozen times over and over before I start to worry about my sanity and then let the CD continue… and then a few tracks later it’ll be ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ half a dozen times. I’m not well. I left the screening room on Monday afternoon with Johnny Cash’s voice– no, with Joaquin Phoenix’s where’d-he-get-*that*-from baritone echoing in my head, and I ran to Tower Records to snatch up the CD only to be thwarted: it would not be released until the next day. Torture, I tell you, to wait 24 hours for the thing, and it’s gonna be worn out before Christmas.
Bubba Ho-Tep (review)
Bruce Campbell makes me laugh just looking at him. Just thinking about him. But I never thought he’d almost make me cry. And I certainly never thought he’d almost make me cry in a movie called *Bubba Ho-Tep,* which is the funniest title of the year, hands down, except for *Gigli.* It’s not the funniest movie of the year, but, rather surprisingly for a movie called *Bubba Ho-Tep,* it’s not trying to be the funniest movie of the year.
