Reviews

Lucy Ricardo is a self-centered, spoiled, and childish woman.

She lies to her husband, spends money they don't have, (always on herself) and cries like a three year old when she doesn't get her way.

Lucy is an awful friend, she constantly asks her neighbor to do things for and with her that she doesn't want to do and it's never the other way around, It's all about Lucy all the time.

Lucy is a self-centered person never seen to make a birthday cake for her friend or sew a button on for her husband. Charity work never occurs to her or even simple kindness to anyone.

Most people must find her funny, and I know I did until I was about six years old, but after that I was just annoyed and embarrassed for her.

Half way through this season because, for some reason I can't seem to stop but I have become so fed up with almost every single character in this little town I simply can't stand them.

They are so incredibly violent! Men and women kick, punch, slap and hit each other. They SCREAM every word they say. The defense attorney even screams at her son when she visits him in jail -- something no prison guard would put up with for one second.

Even our protagonist Ellie kicks and beats her husband knowing full well she could blow the whole case with her actions. Most women who found out their husband was a murderer would be in shock, going over all their memories looking for clues, but not Ellie she's handling this crisis like a three year old having a tantrum.

Beth is the worst. I dislike both the character and the actress. Her reaction to all things is the same -- bend her knees and sob and scream. She does it when she finds out her son has been killed -- fine. But she also does it when she decides to beat up Ellie who has done nothing to her, and over Joe's change in court room plea, and while she is in labor, and when she runs into the woman her husband has had an affair with. In between hysterics, she stands around and mouth breaths.

Ricky comes to town for the sole reason to beat up Lee.

Ellie smacks Hardy and yells at him constantly in spite of his condition.

Whatever happened to the British stiff upper lip.

Where is anyone's maturity and dignity?

It's as ridiculous as the way they meet up in the field or on the beach and totally surprise one another, as though they couldn't have been seen for miles.

Adapted from a novel written in1902, this production faithfully follows the morals and customs of the period without the usual anachronisms.

Anna is an intelligent young woman who does a fine job keeping house for her father and raising her younger sister, she also teaches Sunday school for the Methodist church, a position of great responsibility and gravity at the time.

On her 21st birthday her father informs Anna that she has inherited 50,000 pounds and so she is instantly flung into the world of business management and a much higher social circle.

The story becomes complicated and compelling as Anna is torn between the demands of good money management and the demands of her natural Christian kindness. She is also torn between a charming and appropriate suitor and a natural and unconditional love.

We get warnings about violence, sex and smoking (it's a bad health habit people, like eating too much sugar, relax already) so why weren't we warned about the little dog?

I started watching this because the mini-dachshund was in the cover picture and almost quit watching halfway through when he was violently killed. But I stayed with it and got to see his tiny life avenged. Unfortunately, also long enough to see the movie completely lose it's way.

The first half was interesting and funny as we watch a timid young man build confidence through his karate classes. Then the darkness took over, the "comedy" disappeared, and by the time we arrived at the fairly good ending it had all quit being fun.

There's a convoluted contradiction in many feminist minds that says any job traditionally held by men is superior to work traditionally done by women.

It's this thinking that strives to make Griselda Blanco into an icon, a girl power super star for the rest of us to admire. The truth is that Griselda broke the glass ceiling in her line of work, because she murdered her competitors and didn't hesitate to destroy families and children with her product.

There's nothing to relate to here, no saving graces in her actions or personality. Early in the first episode the friend who has kindly given her a job and a room in her own home, tries to talk Griselda out of turning to the drug business, but it's the lure of easy money that takes her away from the straight life before the week is out. It isn't brains or energy that causes her to rise to the top. Just greed and and a ruthless disregard for human life.

We see it stars Melissa McCarthy and Chris O'Dowd and expect a comedy, and there is plenty of humor here, but it is so much more.

Lilly Maynard (Melissa) works in a grocery store, absentmindedly putting five cent prices on everything, then goes home to try and work in her yard in spite of frequent attacks from a territorial starling. On Tuesdays she visits her husband who has been in a mental hospital for the past year.

This entire movie is an emotional ride of the very best kind, we laugh and cry with this couple, with their therapists, their co-workers, and even the bird.

One of the sweetest movies I've seen, and the acting is so good in this you won't even see it.

I gave this series a chance. I hoped that once the wedding night was over we could go to the other characters for some interesting plot points and dialogue, and we did get a few minutes of Miranda being the entitled victim and George the horrible criminal, over their consensual affair, in the typical contemporary view.

However, 90% of the episode was Daphne and Simon having sex. Really? Is that what the screen writers do when they can't think of anything else? Is that all the 14 year-old audience wants to see?

Well, I'm an adult and I think watching sex is like watching people eat. It's nice when you're doing it, but boring when it's someone else.

Now we know where Harry got his talent for self-pity. Both his parents were whiners, but this latest, boring episode consisted almost entirely of Diana explaining her sadness, describing herself as a celestial creature doomed to a life of desperate loneliness and ready to try a frog after her prince "broke her heart."

Dr. Khan is the haplessly described frog, bewildered by this famous woman's pursuit of him. Was she even his type? Was she anywhere close to an intellectual equal? We'll never know.

Other things we may never know is just why Diana had no friends or close family, but had to pay for confidants by way of acupuncturists and astrologers. Even people like Al Fayed sometimes make dear friends from their servants, but we do know that Diana fired 40 of her maids for very little reason. In this episode we see her kindness to the sick but that other side of her is safely tucked behind the curtain as it is to this day.

Here we also see how easily the Spencers, never noted for their brains, were fooled by the dishonest journalist and it is a disgraceful moment in the BBC's history. But as con-men are fond of saying, you can't con someone who isn't greedy and Diana was always greedy for the public's adoration so she's more than eager for her TV debut.

Those of the population who were also divorced, had the in-laws turn against us, and felt strongly that our own side was the right side, might envy Diana her chance to tell the world about her husband's infidelity while leaving out her own, and garner loads of sympathy about all she'd been through. However I think most of us would have stopped ourselves before airing our dirty laundry in public and hurting our children in the process.

How nice to see, after all these years, a few drops of sympathy for a woman whose marriage had become an "in name only" situation for the sake of the children, and had fallen back in love with her old flame, Prince Charles. Why the world chose to idolize the self-centered, chronically adulterous Diana and direct so much hate to Camilla is a mystery to me.

It's always nice to see scenes between Princess Ann and Charles, their sibling relationship seems to have been one of the best parts of their childhood and extended into adulthood.

It's still jarring to see Dominic West play Prince Charles, they are such opposites in every way, but it was a good episode.

I'll put aside my suspicion that so many people top their favorites list with this movie because it's the only Golden Age movie they've seen besides Christmas films and just ask, why, ladies?

I can see why the men like to identify with Rick, he's cool and cynical and in the end he makes a big sacrifice, but Ilsa? Ilsa is one of the most passive characters to ever lead in a movie. She allows Rick to decide the rest of her life for her, I guess because he's a man and men know best.

Her passivity comes across even more ridiculous because Bergman is several inches taller and a good forty pounds heavier than Bogie. With her wrestler's neck and broad shoulders, I kept expecting her to pick him up and toss him on the sofa for old times sake.

Just an okay story, badly cast.

This show is so unique, so warm, and so funny, if you haven't seen it find a way to watch, get some snacks, put your dog in your lap and binge it!

We've all seen TV shows and films where a human inhabits a dog's body but this is different, This dog thinks like a dog and we hear his thoughts as he looks calmly into the camera. Those thoughts are so funny and totally spot on!

For example when his beloved owner (who he worships of course) leaves for work and gets in the car, he pictures her speeding down the road with the window down and her head out the window, "Sure," he thinks, "we all love to go for a ride, but for nine hours?"

This is wonderfully written and acted. Give yourself a treat!

I watched the whole boring thing just to see what happened to Sophy, the only bearable one. I guess we're supposed to like these people because they have posh accents and lots of money, but they were all just insufferable. One woman sneers at her war damaged husband for having lost a leg, Polly uses and discards men, "Like a sailor at a brothel" and Oliver is unfailingly crude without wit.

The worst part is our main character Calypso, played by Jennifer Ehle with her small, smug mouth pursed like a disapproving schoolmarm and the loudest, harshest voice in acting. The director has tried to make Ehle and her sexy with lots of nude scenes but I'm not sure it helps much.

Throw in a pedophile who we're supposed to find charming and the whole thing is just ugly and humorless.

I once read that when the American soldiers returned from the war they said the English girls were the easiest in all of Europe and I suppose it might be true, if sad,

The first few minutes of this film, with it's twee flute music and happy family scenes, lead us to think it's just another silly 80's TV movie, but stick with it and you'll see a riveting, harrowing story of a family facing the devastation of a member developing schizophrenia.

Sadly, it's been 33 years since this was made and nothing much has changed. Schizophrenia is still the number one disabler of young people and the prime cause of homelessness. It still effects 20 million people world wide. It still traps it's victims inside a nightmare that lasts from early twenties until they die of old age. It's time we found a cure.

Every time I hope a documentary will give me an inside look at a different, interesting way of life, I get the usual, tired, "breaking away from" Amish/ Hassidim/ Mormonism/ whatever. Always with an assumption that religion is oppressive and evil and has nothing good to offer, so why tell us about it?

This was so disappointing, we had practically no information about the Hassidic way of life, only three people who had experienced unusually bad situations, the same sort of things, domestic abuse and molestation that can happen in any walk of life. They were part of the only 2 percent who want to leave the sect.

The counselor in the beginning exclaiming over the woman's number of children and saying "Where was your choice? You had no choice!" was such an obvious use of a trigger word, it was laughable.

We're led to think of the Hassidim as terrifying people keeping their members prisoner, even though "freedom" is just a few blocks away. These young people have left a secure world of warmth, community, tradition, and purpose for a world of drugs, violence, crime and prostitution, but the documentary is careful not to hint at any of that. The positive side of Hassidim was never shown and the secular life was a false promise. A fantasy in the guise of a documentary.

The sister is obnoxious to the point of cruelty to her mother. Maybe that's the typical teen today, but my father would have slapped my face into the next county if I had talked to my mother that way, and I would have deserved it. This father is just a self-centered and ineffectual. Jennifer Jason Leigh is playing the same monotone mumbler she has always played but it's more annoying as she ages. Also annoying is watching her constantly jerk her head to get her hair out of her face. Maybe Sam, the only sensible person in the family, will buy her a barrette.

This could have been a much better film with a little more realism and a little more sympathy for the female character.

In many ways it's just another film about a gay man deliberately using an unsuspecting young woman as a cover for appearances sake. It's sad that Michael and Thomas lived in a time when they couldn't be together openly, but that does not, in any way, excuse Michael treating Flora like a non-person whose life could be so casually ruined for his convenience.

In the end we see Flora crying with guilt that she "ruined two lives" meaning Michael and Thomas when it was they who "with malice aforethought," brought her into the middle of their own love affair.

There was also a strange, often repeated, association with sex and urinating. Who makes romantic advances to someone while they're in the middle of going to the bathroom?

It's great to have a comedy with a little bit of ethics inside it. Those who are upset that our protagonist isn't starting wars or shedding blood should remember that the Bible is not just a book of rules but also a history of the Jewish people. Like most history, it's not meant to be repeated. Even many of the Old Testament laws were only intended for the locale. Cooking rules for a hot climate before refrigeration (no shellfish for example) don't apply today.

I read the book and enjoyed it and although it only covered the Old Testament, I'm glad the show has included both Old and New so as to have more scope. I hope people give this a chance. It's is a great way to have a few laughs, but it can also be an interesting look at where and why we first got some of out ideas about wrong and right.

This film is still with me a week after watching. That tells me that besides a fast feast of entertainment, there were layers it took me longer to digest.

Ray Kroc is a fascinating individual right from the start. We meet him on a typical day, driving long distances between restaurants, attempting to sell milkshake machines to distracted owners, using the same clever spiel over and over. He does it with an hyper enthusiasm that contrasts with his stillness as he sits in his motel room at the end of the day, absorbing a motivational record through his pores.

When his secretary tells him that one restaurant has ordered eight of his milkshakes he decides, on a whim, to drive hundreds of miles out of his way to check the place out and that is when he first sees the small but thriving restaurant invented by the MacDonald's brothers.

The contrast between their quiet, innovative brilliance and Ray Kroc's talent as a visionary, drives the movie and it flies from that point on. Yet there are things in common with all three men that exemplify mid 20th century America. The work ethic in these men and the young couples who bought the franchises was phenomenal, so was their power of positive thinking and their almost religious belief in "family."

A considerable percentage of Americans had their first job at MacDonald's and we see a little of what they learned from the training they had there; courtesy, focus, and attention to detail. The teen who flipped the most perfect burgers really did go on to the top of the company.

Ray Kroc's drive for success encounters the usual ethical problems that come with the territory, but that's only one part of this film which covers much more than just one man's success story. This is American history.

Absolutely no one could have played this part as well as Michael Keaton.

This is Hitchcock at his best. Once I start watching this I can't stop and that's after a dozen viewings. Anyone who wants to know what's special about Hitchcock only needs to watch the "shoe," scene with it's silent, real time action, so far ahead of it's time and electrifying in its suspense.

The acting from the entire cast was flawless. Tippi Hedren was still very young and new to acting, but perfect for this role, a more experienced actress might have tried to bring too much to what should be a rather stiff character. Laura Latham as Marnie's mother gave a stunning, raw performance. Sean Connery, without the self-importance of his Bond character was more charming, attractive and believable than I've ever seen him in any role. This is a unique, fascinating film.

These were certainly some strange aliens. They were so pale and washed out they had to work in darkened rooms because even the artificial light would have burned them. Whenever they were frightened, or needed to think hard, their tiny noses ceased to function and they had to breathe through their mouths. Their voices were so weak they couldn't speak above a whisper, even when trying to communicate through glass partitions or during important, intense meetings. They were all absolute slaves to their clocks and could not stop maneuvers even when the experts needed a few more minutes.

I heard so many people call this a sci-fi for smart people. Really? Other than a few brainy quotes thrown out in the beginning, it was a boring, romance movie with such trite statements as "He wouldn't leave your side until he knew you were okay." I wont spoil the ultimate message but it reminded me a little of Rodney King's famous remark after the LA riots.