Change Your Image
Marrenp
Reviews
Endeavour: Ride (2016)
The Great Bixby
The Great Gatsby's murder in Oxfordshire... solved by Endeavour Carraway. Enough differences from Fitzgerald to make it worth the watching. A nice bridge from the previous season-ending cliff-hanger.
Nobody's Fool (1994)
Everything about this film just gets better with time.
Great writing, a great cast, several laugh-out-loud moments, realistic portrayals of the way people interact, and best of all, it leaves you feeling a little better about life. This may be my single favorite film of all time. Wonderful. Don't pay attention to some of these jaded cynical reviews. You will never regret giving this movie 2 hours of your life.
Monk: Mr. Monk and the Airplane (2002)
A Couple of Funny Moments.
First funny moment is when Monk acts strangely when talking to the flight attendant who wants his ticket. The flight attendant is played by Maud Adams, who happens to be Tony Shalhoub's real-life wife.
Second one was when they go on the plane and meet actor Tim Daly, playing himself. Sharona tells Monk he's a famous actor. Monk doesn't recognize him. Sharona tells Monk, "He was on 'Wings.'" Monk says, "I never saw it." Of course, Tony Shalhoub was in the cast of "Wings" with Tim Daly.
And Tony Shalhoub continues to exasperate his wife Maud Adams for the rest of the flight. Quite amusing.
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005)
Just awful.
I love Sandra Bullock and I am a fan of Diedrich Bader, but this was one of the worst movies I have ever sat through in my entire life. A fine cast wretchedly served by whoever was responsible for extruding this cowpat of a film. The drop-off from Caddyshack to Caddyshack II is known as the industry standard for Sequel Wretchedness, but in my book, the falloff from the wonderful "Miss Congeniality" to this...thing... is even steeper. There is really nothing else to say about this film, but reviews here require ten lines, and that was only four, so I will recapitulate my opinion: this film is so utterly devoid of worth that the best performance was probably Miss Congeniality star Benjamin Bratt's inaudible phoned-in breakup with Sandra Bullock's character. Certainly Bratt's judgment in sitting this one out is superior to that of any other person associated with this unmentionable excrescence, this waste of perfectly good celluloid, this quintessence of crap. I could be bound in a nutshell watching Plan 9 from Outer Space and count myself king of infinite, well, Outer Space, in comparison to sitting in my comfy bouncy American triple-butt-wide Monster Megaplex seat with the photons emitted from this scientific experiment in boresomeness optimization eye-raping me and my innocent confreres. Do I convey my point? Do you get the gist? This is a bad movie. There. That must be ten lines.
Maxie (1985)
The Worst Movie I've Ever Seen
I was really rooting for this movie. I really liked the actors. My wife and I sat there, more and more aghast at how horrible it was, when it took a plot turn that was SO stupid, so VERY stupid, that my wife and I looked at each other and wordlessly got up, put on our coats, turned around -- and found that we were the only people left in the theater.
It's really that bad. Wretched. It's written as though the idea of a ghost was something no one had ever thought of before. To say it insulted my intelligence would be an overstatement, because it was too incoherent and stupid to even mount an insult.
Avoid this film like the bubonic plague.
Good Morning, Miami (2002)
Terrible Show
They mailed this one in. The Will & Grace guys tried to branch out, but there was almost literally nothing to this show. As Samuel Johnson once wrote in a review of a work someone had sent him, "What is good in your work is not original; and what is original in your work is not good." Waste of some talent here, specifically Constance Zimmer, Ashley Williams (a classically-trained stage actress), and the dependable Jere Burns. And, of course, Suzanne Pleshette. Good to see Constance Zimmer on Boston Legal.
On top of this truly being "a show about nothing" (at least, nothing that wasn't entirely predictable and/or unoriginal), the lead character was simply not likable. Why should I root for a guy who grows up affluent and is handed a senior job at an early age? Why should I care whether he gets the hot shiksa? This was one of the millstones that dragged NBC's Thursday night "Must-See TV" to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
The Love Letter (1999)
Dammit, I enjoy this picture
I'm a large scarred heterosexual male ex-bouncer, ex-rugby player, and ex-boxer, and I love this movie.
It's no "Mystic River." It's a piece of fluff. But there is room in life for fluff, and when that fluff is engagingly shot, well-acted by attractive, likable people, cleverly plotted and full of good dialogue, there's even more room for it.
I'm not the biggest Tom Selleck fan. But he's good in this. So are Julianne Nicholson (love her bald head and freckles), Ellen Degeneres, Kate Capshaw and even Tom Everett Scott (That Thing You Do!).
The scenery is nice, the mood is upbeat, there's heartache and wistfulness and farce and even a little redemption.
Any (male) reviewer who disses this movie is, shall we say, not perfectly confident in his masculinity. In the meantime I'll continue to catch bits and pieces of it without apology whenever it shows up on cable.
Topsy-Turvy (1999)
FANTASTIC Movie
As another previous commenter has stated, that this movie might be of limited interest. I can see that, as it took me a while to get around to it.
That said, this movie is just outstanding, and Jim Broadbent's (Gilbert)performance is simply titanic. You start out thinking he's a jerk, but by the end, you cannot get enough of him. He has never been nearly this good, and he has been PLENTY good many other times.
The craftsmanship of this movie is outstanding. Practically every scene bears re-watching. The love and detail that went into making "T-T" is evident from the first scene. Making it must have been hard work, but it also must have been the most rewarding thing a lot of these actors ever have been associated with.
There is at least one scene (toward the end) that is difficult to watch because it is so suddenly and unexpectedly close to the bone emotionally, after a number of scenes of comedy and triumph. But I think it added further depth to the movie.
To paraphrase Dr. Johnson clumsily, "If one is tired by 'Topsy-Turvy,' one is tired of life."
Tempest (1982)
A Flawed Masterpiece
"Tempest" is a somewhat self-indulgent, uneven, discursive movie. But as Lord Byron, another visitor to Greece, protested to his friend John Murray about his similarly self-indulgent and discursive "Don Juan," "It may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing?"
The connections to Shakespeare's "Tempest" may seem, as another commentator here claims, a bit tenuous. But watch the film again after re-reading "The Tempest," and they'll seem far closer. What makes this film flawed is its uneasy mixture of straightforward normal narrative and sudden jarring apparent improvisation, particularly between Cassavetes and Rowland. But to be honest, these scenes are the most remarkable and gripping in the film, if the hardest to watch.
The music of this film, composed by Stomu Yamashta, is also overlooked. Particularly fine is the perfect little piece played to accompany the afternoon siesta, as people, animals, and seemingly the entire island collapse to sleep away the hottest part of the afternoon. It's a sublime moment, and representative of the best aspect of this movie and the one thing that keeps it somewhat unified, the fact that (aside from extensive flashbacks and the very end) it is the story of one day on an island, from awakening to night.
Overall, I'd rather watch this film a hundred times than see some bombastic Hollywood piece of crap once. And in fact, I probably have watched it several dozen times. Most times, I see something I missed before.
(Confession: I'm biased. This was the second movie I took my Greek-American goddess wife to see.)
Trivia notes on this flick:
- It was Molly Ringwald's first movie, as well as Sam Robards';
- It was actually not filmed on an island, but in Gytheion, the southern tip of the remote Mani peninsula of the Peloponnesus of Greece;
- The (by today's standards) primitive special effects were done by Bran Ferren, who later became head of Disney Imagineering, and still later was an adviser to the US intelligence community;
- Paul Mazursky, the director, chose the title of his recent autobiography, "Show Me the Magic," from the script of "Tempest."