Spoilers and such-if you haven’t read the book or seen the film, go do so now. Right now. Like countless authors before and since, Truman Capote didn’t like what Hollywood did to his book. F. Scot Fitzgerald walked out on The Great Gatsby, Stephen King hated The Shinning, Anne Rice didn’t want Tom Cruise to play Lestat, and Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holiday Golightly, Traveling. I think she would have been brilliant in the role, just as she was in everything she ever did, but I’m not sure the 1960 edition of Marilyn would have been…
Category: movie review
The Rewrite
The Rewrite is a nice old fashioned comedy film with a number of actors who were popular about twenty years ago. Nice to see them all again. Hugh Grant, Marisa Tomei, and Chris Elliott are people I like but haven’t seen in a while. J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney are two more members of the Older Folks here. There are a number of pretty young people who play students to Hugh’s screenwriting Professor. In classic Gray’s Anatomy style, our hero sleeps with a student the moment he steps off the plane. He doesn’t see anything wrong this, as he likes…
American Sniper
I read an article written during the The Bosnian War where the writer was meeting an old friend. This friend was fighting in the war. He was a sniper. The writer of the article made it clear that this was not a good thing. A lot of people have this kind of fantasy idea of war, where Arthur stands toe-to-toe with Lancelot and doesn’t draw his sword until he sees the whites of his eyes. The idea is that there is honor in facing an enemy and giving them a chance to kill you as you try to kill them.…
Predestination
Time travel stories were all the rage back in the 1950s. Everyone was writing them, and most of them weren’t all that good. Grandmaster of Scifi Robert A. Heinlein decided to write the ultimate time travel story. The result was the poorly named All You Zombies. Predestination is a movie that was based on this 1959 short story. We start off with two people moving through shadowy places, we don’t get a good look at their faces. One of them is a bomber, one of them is trying to stop the bomber from succeeding. Things go wrong and a time…
Mr Turner
Timothy Spall scrowls, grunts, spits, and snarls for two and half hours as he portrays British painter J.M.W.Turner. The makers of Mr Turner assume that everyone viewing this film is fully versed in the early Victoria art scene. We are told next to nothing about Mr Turner, his fellow artists, his patrons, his family, or much of anything. We watch as Mr Turner paints, stomps around, gropes the occasional woman, and attends the occasional art show. I have to wonder if he ran into Dickens at some point and inspired the creation of Mr Scrooge. Mr Turner is a collection…
Tim’s Vermeer
Something interesting happened to art in the 1600s, it started to look a lot more like reality than it ever had before. The work of Johannes Vermeer has an especially realistic quality. About the time Vermeer was working artists were using mirrors and lenses and various secret tracing methods. A number of paintings from this period have photographic details, such as lens aberrations and depth of focus errors. Tim Jenison, a gazillionaire with way too much time on his hands, decides to play around and see if he can figure out how Vermeer painted his paintings. He decides it was…
Inherent Vice
Thomas Pynchon writes odd books and Joaquin Phoenix makes odd films, so this is a match made in heaven. Or maybe in a backroom in Hollywood after a few too many lines of coke, a few too many puffs of weed, and just a touch of PCP. Set in 1970 and featuring a lot of drugs and nudity, it’s the story of one of the more unusual Private Eyes in fiction. Doc is a drugged out loser who solves crimes by karma, luck, and chutzpah. He spends most of the film stoned. He flirts with just about everyone he meets.…
The Imitation Game
Alan Turing had the great fortune to be born in an age where he could get funding for a machine that no one understood or really believed would work. He had the great misfortune of being born into an age that thought who he had sex with was more important than his work. The Imitation Game tells the story of Alan Turing, a singular genius on a par with Einstein and Tesla. Our modern world lacks such men because they lacked the vision of Edison, who saw that genius could be harnessed for profit. Any potential Turings or Teslas are…
The Little Death
La petite mort is French for “the little death” and refers to the moment of orgasm. This little death is the story of a number of people and the kinks in their sex lives. We follow a series of small stories about couples exploring a few variations. For old timers like me, it is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). We have a setup and then a little slide that gives the name of the desire to have sex with someone who is sleeping or crying. We then see…
Appropriate Behavior
The opening scene of Appropriate Behavior sees our hero packing up a cardboard box as she prepares to move out of her girlfriend’s apartment. The ex-girlfriend insists that she takes something with her. She protests that it was a gift, the Ex says she doesn’t want it. It turns out to be a strap-on dildo. No lesbian home should be without, eh? Our hero is an Iranian bisexual who never says quite the right thing to her gay lover. When they first met, she called her a dyke and she makes reference to her strong masculine features from time to…