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Reviews
The Ballad of Little Jo (1993)
Jo's "passing" not so unlikely
I really liked this film. I've been around enough real cowboys and stockmen to know that a woman could successfully masquerade as a slender, somewhat pretty young man. Especially if she deliberately gives herself a disfiguring scar (an old trick to discourage people from looking closely at your face). It was clear in the film that many of Jo's fellow miners and stockmen felt that she was a bit effeminate and, as Frank Badger puts it, "peculiar".
But being peculiar wasn't a crime and a small man who kept to himself on a remote ranch, didn't bother other men, and made an honest living in the hardscrabble world of livestock ranching probably wouldn't have been subject to close scrutiny. Plus, Jo went armed and it was always dicey to make trouble for an armed man. And, once Jo has saved Frank's life and killed two ambushers, her status as a man would have been pretty well assured.
I felt the final scene where Frank Badger is angrily smashing Jo's cabin furnishings was revelatory. I think Frank was angry that he never found out that his friend (for whom he had feelings he couldn't understand or acknowledge) was really a good-looking woman with whom he could have had a more intimate friendship without compromising his heterosexuality.
Touching the Void (2003)
Best mountaineering film ever!
Two nights before seeing "Touching the Void", I watched a rented copy of "Vertical Limit". Talk about a difference! Huge amounts of money and acting "talent" wasted on a totally unbelievable piece of schlock (carrying bottles of unstable nitroglycerin up K2 to blow open a crevasse!!) in the case of "Vertical Limit". A limited budget and unknown actors along with the actual principals in a harrowing tale of courage and stubborn perseverance in the case of "Touching the Void." For the scenery alone, "Touching the Void" is worth the price of seeing it on a big screen, but the story will really have you unable to look away. Highly recommended.
Fight Club (1999)
Not a film about guys knocking each around.
Close your eyes for the fist fights if you must (there's not as many as you probably think). This film is not about guys knocking each other around. Norton is fantastic and Pitt shows some great chops (acting, not karate). Fincher makes films you just can't look away from even when what's on the screen makes you flinch. A great movie!
Being There (1979)
Dimwitted political leaders
It's weird that no one else seems to have commented on what, to me, seems the incredible irony of this film. Two years after its release, America elected a dimwitted actor President and proceeded to regard his ridiculous pronouncements as avuncular wisdom for four years! And then re-elected him!!! Even today, when it is apparent that Ronald Reagan was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer's Disease during his presidency, no thought seems to be given to reinterpreting his utterances in that light.
Being There was first-rate political prognostication. Americans were treated first to the vision of a fool made to seem wise by media manipulation and then to the reality.
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
Not the Coens' best, but worthwhile nonetheless
This won't make many Coen Brothers fans' top 3 favorites list, but it is still worthwhile and features an outstanding acting job by Billy Bob Thornton, who mostly smokes rather than speaks his role (although he does provide a somewhat laconic narration, also). The photography is excellent and all the supporting roles are exactly right. Just about every craggy-faced, middle-aged white actor in Hollywood gets a line or two in this 'noir. And what __are__ we to make of that little bit of alien abduction stuff that pops up to raise Ed Crane's eyebrows and then is never heard about again?
Slattery's People (1964)
Hey, I saw it, too.
I saw it, too. I watched it regularly during its brief run (my senior year in high school). I, too, was a political junkie-to-be. I remember enjoying the show and being sorry when it was canceled. The show seemed to be modeled on the California Assembly and I lived in southern California.
Carol for Another Christmas (1964)
A great film
I actually saw this unique film on its one and only broadcast. I was in high school at the time and was very impressed. As a fan of The Twilight Zone, I never missed anything by Rod Serling. Not much detail sticks in my mind after 35 years, but I would enjoy an opportunity to see it again
The First Great Train Robbery (1978)
A wonderful double entendre conversation
This film includes one of the all-time great double entendre conversations between Sean Connery's rogue/gentleman and a lady (whose morals may not be what they appear). You will never again hear a discussion of tools and workmen without thinking of it and chuckling. Mae West would have loved it!
The Winslow Boy (1999)
Damn, Mamet is good!
It takes a director like Mamet to make a story this mundane this engrossing. As a Merchant-Ivory period piece, it would have been a real yawner, but with Mamet writing and directing, I was totally caught up in the story. Good, if subdued (veddy British, you know), performances from the all the cast.
The Cider House Rules (1999)
Goof: anachronistic telephone
In a film as beautifully done as this, pointing out a goof seems petty, but I'm pretty sure that I spotted one. In one of the final scenes, Homer sits down at the desk in Dr. Larch's office. In the background on is a desk telephone. It's the right shape and color (black) for the era (circa 1943), but it's a dial telephone. I'm not clear enough on the history of telephones to know exactly when dial phones began to be available, but I know that in many rural areas, dial phones did not become available until the early 1950's. Maybe there were dial phones is big cities and suburbs in 1943, but it seems highly unlikely that there would be one in a poorly-funded orphanage in rural Maine (itself something of a backwater state).
Three Kings (1999)
Don't miss it!
Roger Ebert sums it up, "some kind of weird masterpiece". Certainly it's the strangest "war picture" since MASH. It reveals, in several ways, just how much of what we think of as "the nineties" derives from the national orgasm that Operation Desert Storm provided this country. From national uncertainty, even a little humility as we watched the Soviet Union topple before our economic might in the late eighties, to gloating vanity as "the American Way" seemed to drive all before it. The idea of America as the world's policeman gained new popularity and the puissance of the American military became, once again, the conventional wisdom. It's all there peeking around the edges of this film and, occasionally, taking center stage.
Return to Oz (1985)
A more faithful evocation of the land of Oz than The Wizard of Oz
Having been entranced by the Oz books of Baum and Thompson as a child and having read many of them several times, I was always somewhat disappointed by the annual showings of The Wizard of Oz on TV. However charming the performances, and however colorful the sets, the Oz I read about just wasn't a place that looked anything like a musical shot on Hollywood sound stages.
When Return to Oz came out, it was dismissed by some critics as "too dark". Well, Oz was a pretty dark place, where Dorothy and various friends faced many enemies and Oz itself was surrounded by other lands of varying degrees of hostility.
Return to Oz did a much better job of capturing the look and feel of Oz as it was portrayed in the original books. The use of clay animation and other modern special effects techniques also helped to establish the truly magical "otherness" of Oz.
Child actress Faraiza Balk also made a much more believable Dorothy than teenaged Judy Garland with her breasts taped flat.