m10001 Reviews

The Killing (1956)

Stanley Kubrick's Breakthrough Picture

[9/10 · 3 February 2019]

This is a moving story. Hayden's no-nonsense protagonist feelings arc affectingly from one emotional place to another and another and another. Other scenes were so emotionally affecting I found them hard to watch-- a key subplot about a husband and wife. A scene that gathers much of the cast together at the end is about twelve years ahead of its time, and a scene shortly afterwards recalls Citizen Kane and samurai movies.

This is a great gangster picture, great film noir right up there with Double Indemnity, High Sierra, Key Largo, The Petrified Forest, The Postman Always Rings Twice (I'm thinking of the John Garfield version.), and White Heat,

Stanley Kubrick made this movie. Six years later he made one of his masterpieces- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb- also shot in black-and-white, also featuring Sterling Hayden in a key role. You like one, you'll probably like the other.

After Kirk Douglas saw this film, he moved heaven and earth to get Kubrick to direct his next project, Paths of Glory, and championed him when a new director was needed in the epic Spartacus.

Some technical problems in the film distracted me- use of some footage over and over and over, an obviously fake rear projection, that the money is obviously play money.

Hvordan vi slipper af med de andre (2007)

Interesting, with Many Marks of Quality, but Really, Really Heavy

[6/10 · 9 December 2018]

This is a brilliant idea. There are a number of great performances in here: Mr. Pilmark's, Ms. Mieritz's, and Ms. Tiemroth's among others. There are a number of clever writing twists-- surprises popping up later in the film. Save for one absurd image in the beginning, and the trope of interviews in different classrooms of a school, there is nothing comic here. Mr. Pilmark's character's smile on the cover of the video is misleading. Still, in the time of America's 45th president and in a time of compassion fatigue, what we do with the intractible problems of the least of us is worthy of discussion. This is not light though, and it is not funny.

Free Solo (2018)

An Excellent Movie for People Who Don't Like Movies

[9/10 · 27 October 2018]

Like sports, but think that practically all movies are for wimps? In this film, you will see someone who may be the mentally and physically toughest athlete in the word. Don't like dramas, because the emotions are all pretended? Not this movie. Don't like movies because the heroes in them are unrealistically flawless. Not the hero of this movie-- Alex Honnold. Don't like movies that aren't true-- this is a documentary. Don't like adventure movies because the dangers are all pretend? The dangers here are very real. Coaches, teachers, military leaders, law enforcers, professional religious leaders, and business leaders need to see this film-- don't miss it!

The Tim McGraw song in the movie did suck.

Chuck Norris vs. Communism (2015)

Needs a supplement

[9/10 · 14 April 2017]

I never knew a historical document about a conflict- book, film, whatever, that was perfectly balanced, but I believe that this film is better than many on this score. I urge you to listen to the podcast of Irina Nistor's interview on the public radio program Fresh Air, which includes important details left out of the film and also recounts what happened immediately after the incidents in the film. I liked the music and the lighting, but they seemed derivative of the documentary The Thin Blue Line, which is also excellent and which I commend to your attention.

The Mouse That Roared (1959)

A Well-Realized Post-World War Two Satire

[9/10 · 23 October 2016]

The more you know about the aftermath of World War Two, the funnier this film is. It was a very timely satire, making fun of the Marshall Plan, American shirt advertising, the price of agricultural goods (a very important issue in the '50s). It makes fun of "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil" and "The Bridge Over the River Kwai" British misunderstanding of baseball, American military men romancing British women when the Americans were stationed there. There are echoes of the great radio show Sellars appeared in-- The Goon Show. The movie is in no way obscene or dirty, but sexuality is a strong current all through it in that way in which Freudianism sexualized nearly everything in the popular mind back then. Jean Seberg in her prime is of the first rank of all beautiful women in human history. I saw a bit of this on black-and-white TV, and color adds a great, great deal to this film-- more than I expected. It's an excellent satire-- better if you know '50s history. It made me laugh out loud.

Witness to Yesterday (1973– )

An Episode of This Show Was Life-Changing for Me

[10/10 · 10 May 2015]

A local television station ran this show late, late on a weekend night. I think one night my sister watched with me, but most of the time it was just me. I remember that the Sandy Dennis Joan of Arc was amazing. I remember not caring much for the the episode in which the presenter Patrick Watson interviewed himself as Leonardo da Vinci. But the episode I'm talking about was the Bernard Shaw episode, which liberally quoted from Man and Superman. I had never heard of Shaw and it was clear that his-- Shaw's-- writing was profound and novel. I got the play including The Revolutionist's Handbook and Maxims for Revolutionists, and that was the beginning of my education about Nietzsche and the criticism of conventional morality.

Detective Story (1951)

Great Set, Great Cast,Scenery-Chewing, Over-Simplified Melodrama

[7/10 · 8 March 2015]

William Wyler brings his famous sensitivity to this film adaptation of a successful Broadway play of the time. The mores around 1950 are so different from ours, that the main conflict seems overwrought in 2015. Lee Grant debuts in a role so utterly unlike what she played in the rest of her career. If you look carefully at the supporting players, you'll see actors you remember from great TV and high-end movies performances in the 1970s. This movie was made before the inundation of cop shows we have to day, and those tropes look fresh here. Eleanor Parker gives a great performance that will not remind you in any way of the Duchess in The Sound of Music. William Bendix plays a tough cop straight-- not for laughs in any way. Frank Faylen (Dobie Gillis's TV father and the cab driver in It's a Wonderful Life) gives a refreshing turn as a detective.

The Core (2003)

One of the Very Best Bad Movies

[8/10 · 13 August 2013]

George Orwell used to write about "good bad books," a "good bad book" is "the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished." This is one of the very best bad movies ever. High production values, generally skillful, first-rate, acting. It's an adventure movie about saving the world from a preposterous cataclysm. I'ts as if a really smart teenager had listened to my friends and my playing when were seven or eight and made a movie about it. Not sure why this movie is not held in the same class as Armageddon, except that Aaron Eckhart is no Bruce Willis, and that Armageddon has funnier supporting characters and a better romance.

Predators (2010)

People Blow Up Real Good in This

[7/10 · 15 July 2010]

If you keep your expectations low, this film will exceed them.

The characters in this spend a lot of time figuring out what we know by having watched the trailer. As they get bad news about their situation, it doesn't have much impact on us because we knew how badly screwed they were by the trailer.

I had figured out the mystery of Topher Grace's character before it was revealed.

Adrian Brody's casting as one of the toughest guys struck me as strange at first. His haircut is so smooth. He seems very urbane given his line of work. My wife was gratified to see him without his shirt, though. His eyes were right. His words were right. He just did not look as though he had spent as much time out-of-doors as someone like him would have to. Real life super-tough warriors don't all look like body-builders— a lot of them do look like Brody. By the end of the movie, I'd made a little peace with the idea.

It may sound that I am more critical of the film than I am. It starts out fast. The situation does not have to gather speed. War starts at the beginning and keeps going. A parachuting sequence is beautifully photographed as is the far-off geographical and astronomical scenes around the third act.

As for their language, they do not merely speak as soldiers and killers do, they speak like especially foul-mouthed soldiers and killers from the beginning through the end. There is also blood and death and maiming of aliens and people from stem to stern.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

First-Rate Actors Can't Save a Muddled Plot

[4/10 · 12 April 2010]

I had read and enjoyed Jon Ronson's book that was the basis for this film. That book was an expose of the U.S. Army's attempt to develop the capacity to view faraway things by extrasensory perception and to kill merely with mental energy and to pass through solid objects as a ghost would. That the Army was doing those things had a kind of political point-- the commander-in-chief at that time was regularly consulting an astrologer. What was comic about the situation was that the people doing this work were deluded and foolish. Their officers and administrators were deluded, foolish and had more money for their work than they prudently knew what to do with. But you can't make a feature film where practically everyone on screen is a deluded fool, they have to have something noble about them. Which nobility the stars of this movie have. But their beliefs have to be vindicated, at least a little, at least symbolically. In the end, the movie is unsatisfying, because what those guys believed is ridiculous. An army that thinks that it might be able to do remote viewing, etc., is not serious. This film is an entertainment, a comedy. It may well be intended to give people relief from their deadly serious lives. Still, after the movie, I was concerned that the makers of the movie were not serious about serious things: evasions of reality with or without drugs. Ewan McGregor is miscast-- hard for me to accept him as a nebbish.

Brother (I) (2000)

Bloody, foul-mouthed, stylish gangster pic with heart

[7/10 · 12 April 2010]

I like gangster movies. I like Japanese movies. You see that Beat Takeshi stars, directs and edits the movie and you may fear that he's an egomaniac and the film will be self-indulgent. It's not. It's got a unique point of view. It's got nobility. Takeshi's character is noble. One of his followers is noble. One would say that the family feeling in this movie is sweet, if it would not be weird to talk about the sweetness of a movie as blood-spattered as this one is. And this one is blood-spattered. My wife, whose taste in movies is usually much more sanguinary than mine, stopped watching it before it was over, so violent were the obeisances made to show faithfulness. This movie would be utterly unsuitable for children because of blood and guts and language. But it's funny. It's funny and honorable people gain moral victories and family members as well as people unrelated by blood show each other brotherly love. I fear for this culture-- our world culture-- that the only movie where I have seen honor and brotherly love lately is this film filled to overflowing with buckets of blood.

Tell Tale (2009)

A Strange Left-Handed Kind of a Movie, a Good B Movie

[6/10 · 20 March 2010]

After watching a lot of movies shot in Canada for the tax credit, I thought this was another one of them. Providence is a strange looking place, and except for the capitol building, it looked like Canada to me. I am glad to have gotten to see what it looks like. It's kind of disappointing that it turns out to look like some place not so much different from Quebec, down to the French business names. A movie about vigilantism usually gets its tension from the conflict between the morality of the vigilante's actions and the prudence of having and using a legal system. This movie tends to minimize even the imprudence of vigilante action, which waters down his desperation and the tension in the film. The continuity of this movie is noticeably off. The protagonist's hair style is noticeably different between one scene and the next one in continuity. Josh Lucas's performance is narrow in range. So is Brian Cox's, but that may be attributable to the murkiness of his motivation in the script. Lena Hedley's performance is spellbinding. She's a convincing medical expert, always dignified and caring, but a passionate lover. Beatrice Miller's a cute kid and a good actor.