Author: Village Vidiot

Overrated Spike Lee film (from the book by Richard Price) with Harvey Keitel and some fine supporting folk. (John Turturro) in a cops and drugs in the hood piece. OK if predictable If you can see just one drugs and boys in the hood type film, see Fresh

Overrated film based on John Irving novel about an orphanage, an orphan, his mentor the doctor/abortionist well played by Michael Caine, and apple picking in the 1940s A good but not a great movie. I much preferred the novel although it also was about 100 pages too long. Even so, it’s important to note that…

Our traditional Christmas Eve movie, this time we chose an inspirational one “that the whole family could enjoy” or at least watch. And we did enjoy it. Matthew McConaughey. (spelling?) stars along with David Straithorn in this telling of the true story of a town/university/and individuals who rise from disaster. In 1970, almost the entire…

Our friend Rebecca suggested this one and b4 insisted we watch it and I’m glad she did!. [Note: Our dear friend Rebecca died in a tragic accident two weeks after we saw this film. We miss her deeply. She and I spent many hours comparing films and we treasured her suggestions on this front as…

Our daughter selected this story of two sisters, gorgeous/dyslexic/party girl/user/slut/failure Maggie (Cameron Diaz) and plain/style-challenged/hardworking/lawyer Rose (Toni Collette). They share a shoe size. Maggie is thrown out of her father’s home, comes to live with Rose, sleeps with her ‘boyfriend’ and wrecks that bad relationship, gets thrown out again, and then tracks down their ‘lost’…

Other marginals, most notably Mark Braun (the ever-more wonderful Steve

Oskar Shell (Thomas Horn) is 11 when his dad (Tom Hanks) dies in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Oskar is different, a genius but wracked by fears and, perhaps Aspbergers Syndrome (not clear but very likely). His mom, Sandra Bullock, is struggling to make it through and now care as a single parent for this…

Oscar for Best Actress for Julianne Moore for this terribly sad story of a woman slipping into early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Who amongst us over 60 hasn’t lost a word or two and become scared?. For me it was “anchovies”and “eugenics”. I’m not sure why but I just couldn’t find those two words. As Alice says…

Only occasionally funny, nasty piece about a beauty contest in Lutheran Minnesota. Kirstie Allie is the over-the-top stage/contestant mother with the rich spoiled brat daughter. Painfully boring to watch her. Can’t she simply be barred from the big screen?. Ellen Barkin is the trailer-trash mom with the sweet kid, Amber. Competitor/contestants and boys uninterested in…

One of my all-time favorite living actresses, Li Gong (Feng) stars with Chen Daoming (Lu) in this Zhang Yimou drama without much melodrama of political oppression, love, amnesia, and devotion in post-Maoist China. Lu is an academic sent down on trumped-up charges as a rightist during the Cultural Revolution and, having escaped, he is shopped…

One Israeli’s animated documentary look at the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Excellent and profoundly honest and brutal film. Nominated for Oscar, it’s a unique look at a horrible history. Personal, detached, intimate and universal, it struggles to understand guilt and responsibility in young, old and society as a whole. It doesn’t assert Palestinian purity so…

On ok film version of the children’s story about a young girl and the dog she finds who changes her life and the life of her father, a poor Baptist preacher (Jeff Daniels). It is a kid’s film but has an ok little bits by Eva Marie Saint and Dave Matthews (who sings the title…

Oliver Stone’s football as war spectacular with good acting by a grizzled Al Pacino as the head coach, Jim Brown as an assistant coach, Jamie Foxx as the upstart young quarterback, and Cameron Diaz as the MBA-holding owner of the Miami team who inherits the club from her father. Good small parts from Lawrence Taylor,…

Older Chinese-American film about family and assimilation. Good, if a bit slow. The acting is not the best, but the plot and cultural views are the things to watch

Old Bill Murray film that’s charming. I very much enjoyed this third (or is it the fourth?) viewing. In the “It’s a Wonderful Life” tradition. Bill Murray plays an arrogant tv-weatherman who goes to Puxatawny, Pennsylvania to cover the groundhog ceremonies. Gets caught in a time loop and learns to be a much better person…

OK. baseball film about a 20-yo Dominincan kid Miguel “Sugar” Santos who tries to make it from the DR to the bigs. He falls apart in Iowa and flees to New York. Slow and sad film about this kid losing faith in himself and perhaps desire to do this. His decline isn’t really clearly explained….

Ok, so this wasn’t my first choice of a film for the evening. My daughter wanted to see it and we wanted to watch something with her, hence the selection Still, it could have been much worse than this bitter-sweet morality tale/comedy about a recent college grad (Annie, Scarlett Johanson) with no sense of what…

OK, but predictable black detective story from Walter Mosley tales. Very atmospheric about LA and race in 1946, and Denzel Washington is very good, but the film is too stylized and pat for its own good. .

OK look at the Ali-Foreman fight from 1975 in Kinshasa, Zaire. I actually think this was overrated as a PC homage to Ali and boxing. I liked it less than others did

OK documentary about the wonderful late poet. Very interesting interviews. However, clearly a self-congratulatory puff piece, with little in the way of critical comment about his weaknesses as a person or poet

Ok comedy with some very nice and funny bits about a Jewish family going from cheap apartment to cheap apartment, all to keep their Beverly Hills address. Weirdness about the daughter’s coming of age and sexuality (painfully, if well played), and some very deep oddness about the failure of the father (Alan Arkin) and a…

OK but not great film about wacky Brooklyn neighborhood characters and thieves. Nice work by Anne Meara, Nick Tutturo, and several other character actors. Worth seeing, but stops being funny or serious at the half-way mark

OK action comedy about surveillance and state intrusion into the lives of private individuals. Will Smith, Gene Hackman, and John Voight (as the villain) star. Well made, commercial piece of work. Fun to place this in Hackman’s ouvre next to the much more serious and fascinating The Conversation from about 1973

OK 20-something love story/comedy about black intellectuals trying to come together. Witty, very cerebral, he’s a novelist/poet, she’s a photographer. Both are beautiful. Their friends range from sharp, professional homeboys and girls to creeps who haven’t a clue about how to deal with issues of men and women. Their lives come together, slip apart, and…

Off to the movies a second time this week. What an excruciatingly painful film looking at a collapsing marriage and divorce in Park Slope (Brooklyn) 1986. This is an autobiographical piece by the director The shallow, no longer successful novelist father (Jeff Daniels is stellar, although the piece gets old as it goes on) with…