but that was thirty years ago, when they used to have a show

The Tailor of Panama: Profoundly disappointing. When someone pitches you a film directed by John Boorman, based on a novel by John le Carre, starring Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush, Jamie Lee Curtis and Daniel Radcliffe, you bank on the project paying off. Only after the credits roll (in Comic Sans) and the introductory scenes stumble [...]

I am a visitor here; I am not permanent

The Visitor: A well-tailored little indie film. Like a very nice suit. Richard Jenkins (Intolerable Cruelty, Step Brothers, etc – one of those actors you recognize but don’t know) stars.* He plays Prof. Walter Vale, a Connecticut professor who’s stagnating following his wife’s death. When he’s coerced into attending a conference in Manhattan, he sets [...]

now every chain has got a weak link

I watched Sneakers again on Saturday, out of a desire to learn more about screenwriting. (In unrelated news, how great is the Internet? Twenty years ago, I couldn’t have learned how to write or format a screenplay without schlepping to the public library, checking out one of their four dog-eared books on screenwriting – which [...]

freedom, that’s just some people talking

Lone Wolf McQuade: Wow. Everything that’s ridiculous about this movie can be gleaned, like nuggets panned from a river, in its first 10 minutes. After a credit sequence that begins with a photo-negative montage of a wolf crossing sandy scrub, we cut to a convoy of Mexicans rustling horses. The local sheriff and some deputies [...]

you can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice

Sherlock Holmes: first, a word about the source material. The Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, written by Arthur Conan Doyle, are a lot of fun. I could read them for hours, and, as a bookish teenager, did. But you could hardly call them classics of detection. Doyle didn’t assemble clockwork mysteries for his protagonist, [...]

we were so in phase in our dance hall days

To Live and Die in L.A.: 1985: The Motion Picture. Everything about this movie screams “it’s the 80s!” The jackets. The slang. The edgy selfishness. The gritty crime. The soundtrack. The montages used to set scenes. Put this movie in a time capsule so future generations will know that no, we weren’t kidding about the [...]

the decade in film: 2006-09

The end of a decade brings out the End Of Decade lists. I have little qualification to talk about the Best Movies of the Decade. Better critics than I have already put their lists together; I could only re-arrange the order. So the following list does not contain the Best Films of the Decade. But [...]

the decade in film: 2000-03

On vacation this week. This post was scheduled long ago. The end of a decade brings out the End Of Decade lists. I have little qualification to talk about the Best Movies of the Decade. Better critics than I have already put their lists together (see Leonard Pierce’s 20 best of the decade, for instance); [...]

will I see you tonight, on a downtown train?

While Boston didn’t get it as bad as the rest of the East Coast, nine inches of snow fell on us from late Saturday night into early Sunday afternoon. This wouldn’t have been enough to dissuade us from jiu-jitsu (grr! we’re tough!), but since Watertown declared a snow emergency, we couldn’t have parked on the [...]

if you’re lonely, you can talk to me

Media blow: Talk To Me: Uneven biopic. Don Cheadle plays Ralph “Petey” Greene, a fast-talking ex-convict who becomes a DJ in the D.C. area in the Sixties. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Dewey Hughes, the radio producer who takes a chance on the street-smart jiver who talks to The People! And so forth. While the details of [...]