Birds Years ago, when I saw Billy Elliot, my attention was drawn away from where it was intended. I saw instead a tragic film about a little girl whose mother was more interested in a talented outsider. That mother was played by the redoubtable Julie Walters; her presence compared to the weakness of the others… Continue reading Paddington (2014)
Category: Ones
Films rated one star out of three
Indestructible Man (1956)
Jack Webb at 287,000 Volts This is an absolutely horrid little film, not worth watching. It is a cheap blend of “Frankenstein” and the popular TeeVee show “Dragnet”, with a little “Third Man” thrown in. Dragnet started as a radio show and this project would have been better as a radio show. In fact, I… Continue reading Indestructible Man (1956)
In Her Shoes (2005)
Dislexika Once you know chronic problems faced by certain trades, you will notice how some projects reach to do some necessary thing. For instance, filming people around a dinner table is rarely done well, and almost never with great effect. So watch what the filmmaker does to change the geometry so that the shot can… Continue reading In Her Shoes (2005)
The Fifth Wave (2016)
Water Films made for kids, by kids. It seems safe enough: use a best seller from the YA bookshelf. Have some reasonable action scenes. Hire a known kid actor. Insert a romance and a twist, and take the money. It should not be fair for me to comment on this as if I were the… Continue reading The Fifth Wave (2016)
In Good Company (2004)
Weitz Up? Beginnings are everything. Almost no film has a good ending and few do much in the middle. But we let it all slide if we are given a good beginning. That’s because the whole enterprise of film is about creating an artificial world. Much other art isn’t so ambitious, abstraction in terms of… Continue reading In Good Company (2004)
Imagining Argentina (2003)
Until the Next Time I am pretty sure that it is not possible for someone other than an Argentine to make a film about this subject and have it matter. These are people who at the beginning of the terror supported it wholeheartedly. The military simply responded to what they saw was a terrorist threat… Continue reading Imagining Argentina (2003)
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
Imagination Imagine the standard paragraph here, the one others are writing about Gilliam’s grand ambition but lack of execution. The man made a very bad career decision, to try to map his very particular and limited imagination into film. He has two notions only. One is dear to my heart: the idea of an inner… Continue reading The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010)
Painful I suppose the science behind this content is solid, for this and the sequels. Many of our films — primarily romantic comedies — deliberately give us a surrogate with whom to identify. And then they set the situation to be similar to those we’d experience, but simplified and exaggerated so that we can both… Continue reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010)
Idiot’s Delight (1939)
Marooned Movies from this era often fade into incomprehensibility when we take them away from the context in which they were made. These were after all intended as a disposable product, to live for only a few weeks. In this particular case, the movie follows a play that had some persistence before and afterward, so… Continue reading Idiot’s Delight (1939)
Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2006)
Two Paths Full feature animation has settled into two paths which will never again pass. One is the long form narrative which makes animated films no different than most other movies, real movies. The other is a collection of jokes. Now there are lots of non-animated movies that have adopted this strategy as well, but… Continue reading Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2006)