Reviews

Impossible to appreciate young male lawyers generally behaving and sounding like freshmen frat boys. Absurd story line. Horribly predictable plot "twists" - her buying the cockroaches for their diner, Peter's outburst in the hearing, using the real Carmen Electra as the "gold digger", the mystery of the ICE agents turn around after scary, weird guy talks with them ... the only bright spot was Allison Todd. I loved her in Kate & Ally and in West Wing. Here, she wasted.

This feels written by pre-adolescents for high-schoolers. Not surprising it only went 40 episodes. Actually, I'm surprised the pilot sold.

I finally watched this movie after all these years. I had understood it was a classic.

Instead, I discovered it was yet another story flung at us by those who felt that our society did not deserve to celebrate what was edifying and encouraging about American culture. Abolished were films that made a person feel better about life after they left the theater than before they went in. A movement dedicated to instilling angst and guilt in us all. Not sure who should be held responsible: those who wrote these depressing tales of "reality" or those who gobbled up the books and crowded the cinemas.

Very little redeemed this tortured tale of despondency, despair and depression. Reminds me of a cynical phrase bandied about when I was a teen in the late '60s when the purveyors of putrid progressivism had saturated the creative landscape with their gloom and doom: "life's a 'beech' and then you die."

Too many improbables. Especially a cop with hay fever or a developing head cold trying to talk Mark Hamill (as if he were just a kid) into surrendering. And would everybody please stop blubbering helplessly "what's going on?" or "why is he doing this?" as if any of that matters.

Be afraid. Get mad. And get prepared.

Jimmy Dean. No police. No publicity.

Stupid rage "I just want the guy who killed Burt."

"Who shot the magnums?" Capt can tell just walking up on the scene?? (I've fired .38 spl and .357 magnums. The recoil is different. The holes in stuff aren't.)

Jimmy Dean's lying is tiring. Weakens the plot. Insults us viewers. By the time he fesses up, we don't care.

Whatever. Quinn Martin was better at 42 minute episodic stuff.

Even if one doesn't particularly like Westerns, the Magnificent Seven is requisite viewing. It deserves to be on everyone's Top 25 Movies You Must See.

And it has perhaps the best theme song written for any movie.

Be sure to watch the DVD extras. The background and analysis definitely enhance appreciate for this quintessential Western.

I loved this ever since I saw it in a Drive-In soon after its release. As my ability to comprehend the subtleties developed, my appreciation grew.

The collection of stars. "Clap your hands." The camera following the horses leaping the walls. Steve McQueen story-telling "so far, so good" and "seemed like a good idea at the time."

The dialogue between the mortician and the traveling salesman about getting old Joe buried on Boot Hill. Stop the DVD, back it up and replay it to catch ever word. The economy of dialogue belies how richly nuanced each word is.

Eli Wallach is superb. Not a dud in the lot. (I did get teary-eyed as several beloved actors' characters were killed. But I was ten then.)

61 minutes into this thing and I haven't managed even a grin. The horse stepping into hats? Not funny. Lady Beulah is supposed to be really that dense? And how did Sir Reginald Withers' niece Cecily meet and beguile Dick Garfield who helped her out of her life preserver.

Everybody shouts off their mouth without assessing the situation nor becoming aware of their audience. It's supposed to be fodder for laughs but it all falls flat.

And if Reggie and Beulah are broke just how are the my affording anything of fancy meals, 4 star hotel and the purchase of the stables speak-easy.

Of course JR Garfield has a volcanic temper.

Roland Young plays timid, reticent and daft expertly. But him being daft here is just annoying.

Opens with Lila and Freddie lip locked. They cannot stop even as her train is at final boarding. No character intros. No backstory. Lila gets picked up in Macklin City in Hattie's Baker Electric. She gives a backhanded compliment to Lila "Brains and character so seldom go with a beautiful face." At the mansion Lila is literally dragged to Hattie's study and told "I suppose you do excellent stenographic work." Hattie is vexed having been charged 25¢ more by Zambrogio for dry cleaning. A letter to right this wrong must be dictated. But Lila doesn't type. It is handwritten instead.

In her crusade to eradicate her town from the protection racket, it is Zambrogio's establishment that suffers considerable damage. Twice. Played for laughs, the two scenes completely bomb.

Hattie's enlists "Thorndyke" to form a faux-gang to fight the real gang. These six stumblebums are pathetically uncouth and collectively have an IQ far shy of 100. The meal scene cannot evoke a wry grin. The five gangsters are named after Dick Tracy villain names rejected by those writers.

Then the north which never happens is put on pause while Hattie rallies the troops with a plea for patriotism. "Be American," she extorts the Six Stooges.

I find a bad movie more forgettable watching the whole thing to completion. Converse to the Zeigarnik effect. This got cute when Lila joins Hattie but fumbles even more when Frederick tries to extract Lila from his mother's machinations.

And the corrupt mayor, at last under arrest at the movie's end, is brought back to pronounce Fred and Lila man and wife. Really?

First time I watched, only saw Sea 1. Now I've seen S2, I'm let down. Love period pieces and history and science of The Bomb. S2 descended into a morass of intrigue, bizarre machinations based on imagining the scientists' moral dilemma and convoluted character development that incomprehensibly vacillated individual players as good guys then bad guys. I found it wholly unrealistic that Winters and Isaacs could subvert and even sabotage their work as their supreme arrogance about the Device's deployment. And the Abby character? Sufficient support for her idiotic naïveté was written in. But still! I hated her meddling, intrusive and elitist Keystone Kops behaviors.

The series devolved horribly and the end was the pinnacle of confusion.

Stilted acting, yelled lines, schmaltz in boxcar loads makes this double episode tedious.

I had forgotten how bad 1980s TV was.

Unbelievable that Lonnie Andersen would not be recognized in blonde and brunette hair. Robert Stack is a good actor. Here, he's miscast as a debonair womanizer. Julie being swept off her feet in hours?? Isaac and Gopher somehow acquire a horse having no money, no experience, and no trainer?? I wanted to see Betty White in something older; her story line is hackneyed as well. Even the Doc couldn't cite his limitations examining the horse. Equine medicine is highly specialized. Now that I remember better, we audiences were treated like idiots during the '80s. Pity.

I wanted to like this movie a lot. Really. John Payne. Betty Grable. Edward Everett Horton. Cesar Romero. Harry James. Big Band. But Carmen Miranda's mangling the English language was hackneyed. And the jealousy Grable attempts to express sounds like preadolescent gibberish. Very little makes sense. Her reasons lack nuance and sophistication, just sounding like childish ranting. And Payne's expressions of devotion are all over the map.

Horton is the only character who seems to be able to think and express himself intelligently and articulately. Yeah, I know. That's the gag. But the dialogue between the three, Grable, Payne and Romero, leave us wondering.

And then Romero's concession declaration. Really? The best man won? Such an afterthought. Ugh.

I really wanted to like this one. Sigh.

I am old enough to have seen this stalemate played before. Throwing in grief and guilt is quite unoriginal, also.

At the end, I was feeling like the good guys survived but nobody won. Least of all us in the audience.

OK. This isn't the best movie I've ever seen. It isn't even in the top ten. But it has many hilarious moments, good story telling and lots of simple charm. From the opening scenes as giant sculpted zucchini go past you know this low budget effort isn't going to dazzle with special effects. But the SFX are done well enough to support enjoying the story.

The characters are each well developed, the Martians' names crack me up and several lines are considerably well written, such as this gem "I must remind you. I'm just a little kid and highly susceptible to nightmares," never fails to get laughs. The old folks on the porch are a hoot. "I'll go get the bucket."

Martian poo fluorescing in the night sky will get all the five to nine year olds chuckling. I love the dynamite's nickname "farmers' all purpose helper." And the subtle but significant revision of its attributes as motivation for its use changes.

Insider references cleverly abound as well as the homage in the main premise-the Martians' overhearing Mercury Theater's HG Wells' War of the Worlds broadcast and mistaking it for real. It's rich.

I've never figured out why Wrenchmuller's camera never had a lens on it. And "where do you grow your Wrenchmullers?" as a reply to "meet you at the Wrenchmuller farm" is played for laughs but the delivery or timing doesn't quite support the pun. I love the line but it misses my funny bone.

In no special order: White Christmas. Wizard of Oz. Sleepless in Seattle. The Rocketeer. Holiday Inn. Casablanca. Back to the Future I & III. Bringing Up Baby. Star Trek IV. Spaced Invaders deserves a place in the lineup of family sit down together viewing.

BTW. Bad movies? Traded. 211. Vanna White in that Goddess thing. Howard the Duck. Star Wars part I. Tom Laughlin's Master Gunfighter... Calling this a bad movie is a gross injustice.

I guess I was a great deal younger then, when I first saw this movie. I remembered the rocks taken along despite Desi's instruction and the tension he had piloting all that tonnage. I was really looking forward to a wonderful, nostalgic romp from the past. Instead, I received a reality check. The sight gags didn't tickle my funny bone, I found Lucy's failure to take any responsibility for endangering their lives with her boulder collection somewhat an antidote to humor, and I looked for, and didn't see, any on-screen chemistry between these two. There was none of the sparkle of romance, and mere lip service to their repeatedly foiled honeymoon. It was far too easy to forget they were newlyweds. I found myself looking to identify each of the old cars (did you see that 46 Buick? the 50 Studebaker?) instead of letting myself be drawn into the movie. And I began worrying about that poor 53 Mercury more than was conducive to enjoying the movie.