Romantic comedy about a group of Britons flying to Paris for the weekend.
deGaulled the war, France was a mess — an agricultural economy with a bad reputation world-wide because of near universal collaboration with the Nazis. America resolved to rebuild Europe and part of the plan was to cast Paris as a romantic place. The instruction went...
In 16th century Japan, peasants Genjuro and Tobei sell their earthenware pots to a group of soldiers in a nearby village, in defiance of a local sage's warning against seeking to profit from warfare. Genjuro's pursuit of both riches and the mysterious Lady Wakasa, as well as Tobei's desire to become a samurai, run the risk of destroying both themselves and their wives, Miyagi and Ohama.
Saki from the Potter's Hands my film project, I watch a lot of movies. Good and bad. Old, new; new as old, old as "timeless." Nearly all of them take from me. Making art is hard work. Bad artists make you work harder, investing perhaps everything...
The short-tempered Daffy Duck must improvise madly as the backgrounds, his costumes, the soundtrack, even his physical form, shifts and changes at the whim of the animator.
A Short History of Film Folds have a small list of films I think are essential viewing. This is on it, only one of two allowed for that year. Looking at my list, there are a few animated shorts, and I think that makes sense. Animators...
Told in flashback form, the film traces the rise and fall of a tough, ambitious Hollywood producer, Jonathan Shields, as seen through the eyes of various acquaintances, including a writer, James Lee Bartlow; a star, Georgia Lorrison; and a director, Fred Amiel. He is a hard-driving, ambitious man who ruthlessly uses everyone on the way to becoming one of Hollywood's top movie makers.
Just Bad are an astonishing number of movies about the movie business. many of these interest me because they use the situation as a way of engaging the audience: we are tricked into being the audience IN the film. This is a common trick,...
The year is 1940 and Pilot Officer T.B. Baird arrives straight out of flight school to join a front line RAF squadron at the height of the Battle of Britain. After an unfortunate start and a drumming down from his commanding officer, Baird must balance the struggle to impress his Group Captain, regain his pride, fit in with his fellow pilots, and survive one of the most intense air battles in history.
Definitions watching this right after the terrorist attacks on London. Immediately, the Brits snapped back to this period, the so-called Battle of Britain where a few outnumbered airmen held off that bad guys. They’ve since forgotten that the bad guys were the Germans (not the...
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.
Bad Kurosawa what a curse to be a genius! Here we have a nearly perfect film, perfect in all the ordinarily engineered respects. It is rather haunting, and if you choose to watch it you will find it memorable. But Kurosawa is not merely a...
When a wealthy business man is found dead reporter Philip Trent is sent to investigate. Against the police conclusions, he suspects the assumed suicide is really a murder, and becomes highly interested in the young widow and the dead man's private secretary.
Hidden should be a superb movie in the mystery tradition. It has a truly complex plot that has several reveals, and a suitably Holmes-like detective. The problem is that we see the detective working things out like a Poirot would. But we learn absolutely nothing...
In 1927 Hollywood, a silent film production company and cast make a difficult transition to sound.
Folded Eye Jazz is a nearly perfect film from my perspective: It feels naturally improvised. Its episodes are radically discontinuous, but feel like fluid transitions. It has some great numbers, including the incomparable Cyd Charisse. But what really puts this on my `must see' list is...
Jerry Mulligan is an exuberant American expatriate in Paris trying to make a reputation as a painter. His friend Adam is a struggling concert pianist who's a long time associate of a famous French singer, Henri Baurel. A lonely society woman, Milo Roberts, takes Jerry under her wing and supports him, but is interested in more than his art.
<strong>Sienna Shoes Red Shoes' changed the world of film. It was deeply self-referential (a performance about a performance with the two enfolded) and had the extra advance of sometimes making the camera a dancer. So Gene Kelly tried his own ‘Shoes’. MGM refused to...
Honorable saw this series, pretty much all of it, on TeeVee when I was a kid. I can speak from the remembered experience then as well as my reaction on seeing the series again now. The role we expect film to take now is rather complex,...