Village Vidiot

I liked this ambiguous adaptation of Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-winning novel directed by Rikesh Batra. Curmudgeonly Tony Webster (an excellent job by the wonderful Jim Broadbent), curt, distant and formal, receives word of a bequest from the mother of an old flame, the diary of another old, deceased friend, and it sparks a host of…

I liked and was really disturbed by this twisted, very well-acted and well-written Korean mystery/thriller. A drunken and sort of obnoxious Korean salary man is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years before being inexplicably released, given money and sent on a mission to find his captor. His wife his dead, his young daughter gone, his…

I liked (?) this Robert Reich look at the ever-growing inequality in American society and the terrible cost it takes on us as people and as a people. Very much about his life, being short, and being vulnerable. The Clinton years and his view of both Bill and Hillary are less clear and critical than…

I liked “Ocean’s 11” a lot, enjoyed “Ocean’s 12,” and was bored by “Ocean’s 13”. This one is an all-female crew headed by Sandra Bullock as Danny Ocean’s sister Debbie and Kate Blanchett as her friend Lou lead their own gang to conduct a massive jewelry heist. Co-starring Anne Hathaway (surprisingly good),. Mindy Kalling as…

I know that most progressive critics disliked this animated Pixar piece about superheroes forced to deny themselves (it’s all in the blood, superheroes are born not made, it’s biology over environment, normals are totally fickle/superheroes are true to their nature), but all of us liked this engaging and very funny film. Wonderful send-ups of Edith…

I have really enjoyed Sasha Baron Cohen’s work in the past. I loved much of. “Borat”. I really liked his work in “Hugo” and “Talladega Nights”. He is, paradoxically, calculating and fearless. That’s why I was so disappointed in this film about a sociopathic dictator from somewhere (Middle East, Central Asia, N Africa?) who is…

I found this documentary interview/documentary of former Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by Errol Morris both very interesting and frustrating. Rumsfeld is smug, smart, and utterly cloaked in his own ideological balderdash. He has done none of the thoughtful introspection that characterized Morris’s excellent “Fog of War” with Robert McNamara. We are getting the…

I felt like I wanted to blow the whole thing up

I enjoyed Woody Allen’s very popular fantasy about a screenwriter from CA (Owen Wilson) in Paris with his obnoxious fiancé and her repulsive bourgeois parents. He adores the city, she could care less. They meet friends of hers by chance and they are the kind of pompous, pseudo-intellectual pedants Allen’s been ranting against since “Sleeper”…

I enjoyed this very funny, rude, inappropriate, crude Seth McFarlane fantasy about a lonely little boy who whishes his teddy bear came alive and it does. It also grows up to be his slacker buddy, stoner, letch. With Mila Kundris who. is wonderful and amazing, Mark Whalberg as the grown up kid, and McFarlane as…

I enjoyed this version of the Michael Lewis look at Billy Beane and his efforts to transform baseball with cybermetrics. Brad Pitt as Beane works as does Seymour Philip Hoffman as Art Howe (the A’s old-school manager). I found Jonah Hill as Peter Brand (a tribute to his costar in Get Him to the Greek?),…

I enjoyed this thoughtful flick that contains action, tension and some real character development. Starring Tom Hanks in the title role of a smart and genuine person under immense pressure, it looks at Somali piracy in the Indian Ocean. Barkhad Abdi as Muse, the leader of the pirate boarding party dealing with his own pressures…

I enjoyed this new entry in this franchise. Ryan Gosling plays K, a replicant blade runner, or cop who goes after rogue replicants, in 2049. He’s at the bottom of the cop and replicant heap as he kills his own kind. He’s appropriately as flat as Gosling usually is, a loner who lives with a…

I enjoyed this hagiographic biopic about the great Jewish slugger. He provided wonderful heroics for American Jews during the 1930s and 40s. But that is its only point. It is well but endlessly made. Really nice interviews with lots of his fans, including Walter Mathau who realized he didn’t have to be a cutter in…

I enjoyed this Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle more than Bronwen. When Keaton, caretaker for her aged and infirm father and aunt, comes down with leukemia, she calls on her estranged sister (Streep) who arrives with crazy son LD in tow. I find it a nice, and all things considered, reasonably unmelodramatic look…

I enjoyed this death-fest set in

I enjoyed this 2013 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language film from Italy although it bored Bronwen. It owes much to Fellini as it chronicles Rome’s superrich and mostly bored, foolish, banal, and sometimes very talented intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals and faux-prelates as they party and perform (what’s the difference?) their lives away. It’s viewed through…

I enjoyed this ‘based on a true story,’ Will Smith vehicle about Chris Gardner, a struggling bone density machine salesman, as he tries to take care of his family and, after his wife leaves, his son while risking all to make an unlikely career leap into becoming a stock broker. For some weird reason (and…

I enjoyed the film that really is a prequel, setting up Ricardo Montalban’s magic pecs, Corinthian leather, and Herman Melville fetish. It ‘explains’ and reframes the arrival of Kahn and his merry band of ubermenchen. Yes, there are things that don’t work:. why does one shot lay Kahn out like a carp at one moment…

I enjoyed parts of this Robert Downey, Jr vehicle despite myself. A mediocre plot with way too much action, I’m a Holmes traditionalist (no shock there), he and Watson (Jude Law) set out to thwart the plans of an evil cult to take over the government with faux magic and terror. Downey and Law are…

I don’t usually like concert movies. They usually don’t capture my imagination or really please me. I just don’t care for the pyrotechnics. This Eric Clapton/Ravi Shankar festival recorded a year after George’s death in 2001 (how can that be?) is a real exception. If you haven’t seen it do!. The first Indian/Western fusion pieces…

I forced B and b to watch this with me again. They hated it, I liked it, although I must admit it wasn’t as funny as it seemed when I saw it the first time in 1999. Doesn’t age perfectly, to be sure. Oh well, neither have I

I don’t normally like horror films but this one’s an exception. Written and directed by Jordan Peele, it has enough humor to make this work. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) are going to her house for a weekend to meet her parents. He’s a Black photographer and she’s a white woman. What does…

I don’t normally enjoy stories about those elite groups of socialites, heirs, and heiresses. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. But this look inside the life of one set of that elite group won me over. Set in the first couple of years of WWII, Meryl Streep plays the title character, Madame FFJ,…

I don’t get the rating system. A very, very tense fine drama from 2008 about two poor mothers: one white with an absent husband whose gambling has bankrupted the family in the impoverished part of Upstate New York, the other, a Mohawk widow who smuggles aliens into the US via the frozen river that has…