Change Your Image
lewy-2
Reviews
Miami Blues (1990)
Great adaptation of Charles Willeford novel
"Miami Blues" is a great adaption of Charles Willeford's first Hoke Moseley novel. Willeford was well known for pitch black humor and his writing is grim to the nth degree. This isn't a very nice movie and it's easy to see that's turned off a lot of the reviewers here. On the other hand despite the violence it's genuinely quirky and funny. The scene where Fred Ward as homicide detective Hoke Moseley and his cop buddy (Charles Napier!) crack jokes over the body of a murder victim while the victim's friend weeps a few feet away is priceless.
Alec Baldwin does great work as Freddy Frenger, sociopath and ex-con, who immediately after his release from prison goes right back to beating people up and robbing them. Ward may have gotten top billing but Baldwin gets most of the screen time and dominates the movie. He first hires and then moves in with a dumb but innocent prostitute Susie Waggoner played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Leigh, Baldwin and Ward all do excellent work and the movie looks like it was as much fun to make as it is to watch. Leigh's prostitute is easily the most sympathetic character of the bunch and what happens to her is quite frankly a little heart breaking. She easily deserves better, and given the way the universe works that pretty much guarantees that she's not going to get it.
Speaking of Waggoner and Frenger a lot of the reviewers here are misinterpreting the nature of their relationship. They both really do want that house with the yard and the white picket fence, and they really do love each other. When Leigh's Waggoner, normally an excellent cook, deliberately ruins a vinegar pie she's cooking for desert Frenger forces himself to down every forkful while praising her culinary skills.
Highly recommended.
'94 du bi dao zhi qing (1994)
Great martial arts flick
Grim, fatalistic story of a young man kidnapped from his father and then raised to assassinate him. The film is colored with a sense of melancholy that permeates the story and its subplots, from the inevitable love interest to the final bloody resolution, to the beautiful cinematography.
Hotaru no haka (1988)
Good but flawed anime
The first half of this film is very fine--its ability to quietly show horrible events and the effects they have on the innocent is reminiscent of Imamura's "Black Rain". But the ending descends into bathos and ruins the effect that the movie's earlier restraint had built up.