Change Your Image
snarlah-1
Reviews
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
What a lousy movie!
I do not believe that my fellow reviewer thought that this film was one of the best of the 1980s! Even Willem Dafoe, when he appeared on Lipton's show, said that people still thought he was a great actor even though he co-starred in "To Live and Die in LA." I have to say, it's among the worst movies I've ever seen, and I've seen a huge number of movies in my long life.
No, it's not as bad as, for instance, anything featuring the Mutant Ninja Turtles," or "Howard the Duck" but none the less...BAD. It was needlessly bloody, stiffly acted, and even though Friedkin directed many fine movies, this was not one of them.
Bright Angel (1990)
I don't enjoy this at all
It's odd. I like the actors so I thought I would like the movie, but the opposite was true. It was just unpleasant and not particularly entertaining. It seems to go on forever getting nowhere in particular and doing so unenjoyably. I don't like most of today's movies either, especially anime and other cartoons featuring famous voices. It seems that since the writers's strike Hollywood has done everything to spend a lot of money without using good writers,new ideas, repeating old movies that did not need to be remade ever. Most people cannot afford the prices of movies--$9.50 per show and the snacks are more expensive than they could possibly be worth. Where are people getting the money for these prices with virtually no jobs in the country and people losing their homes and having little or nothing to eat.
The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004)
This is an excellent and disturbing movie by a hero of our time
The movie is losing popularity for exactly the same reason that I cannot sell books published in the 1990s and not sold any. It is not new and hot and full of current stars. That does not mean that it is no longer the same movie, it means that the attention span of the average viewer, like the inability to read of the average student, is fading away under our system of non-education. We mentored a young man out of here to graduate school. And his headmaster wanted him put out of school when he was in junior high school because the new way is not what I learned by; staying in school was considered to be important. Now we make children prep for the tests created by Neil Bush, who was doing poorly before his brother got into office. And how did George W. Bush become President? By lies. Not that he's the first, most of our leaders have lied to us.
I call Sean Penn a hero because he is a fine actor who also cares enough about people to take his own boat down to New Orleans when the levees burst, the same levees that have not been fixed at all, so it will happen again. The police, or possibly the mercenaries we've hired at top dollar because we do not have many police, the National Guard is being used as soldiers, and we lack troops to fight our endless wars, turned him away at the border. He sneaked back in and rescued some people anyway. I admire him a whole lot.
We refused aid from Cuba (I cannot imagine how they could even give us aid after what we've done to their economy since the boycott began), Venezuela, (which has oil money) because we didn't like Chavez (because we did not choose him, and you can't be a leader if we don't choose you), so we called his election illegal.
His election was legal, it has been our elections that have been illegal, particularly the selection of Bush by his Republican Supreme Court (put in place by his father). A professor at Harvard Business School wrote a book saying that Bush would come in without his homework (because he is probably dyslexic, Barbara Bush told us that when Bush the First was President, though she did not say which son), and claim that the materials he needed at the library were not there. The professor checked the library. The materials were there and available. Bush is an alcoholic and a cocaine user who thought it was funny to use cocaine at his parents' vacation house in Kennebunkport, ME.
The fact is, neither Bush the first or the second is from Texas, they are from Connecticut. Bush cheated his way into office, committed countless war crimes and is currently rolling around in the money he was given for all the bad decisions he made (or more likely that Cheney forced on him).
And back to President Nixon--he should have gone to prison, but Ford was bribed to pardon him. Does anyone remember any of this? Reagan got a full state burial, when he should have died in prison for war crimes, and we have the nerve to have run a little trial after WWII called Nuremberg. We punished the Germans thoroughly, dropped atom bombs on Japan, and Nixon had a little thing called "The Side Show"--bombing and killing innocent Cambodians while pretending to end the war in Vietnam (a promise that got him elected). His actions softened the public so that Pol Pot could come down from the mountains and kill everyone who wore glasses--because that meant that they were intelligent.
The movie is great, and anyone with an interest in world leaders should watch it.
August Rush (2007)
Mozart and Oliver Twist
Many people understood the urban fairy tale that is "August Rush," and some may have noticed the relation between Mozart, child musical prodigy, and Oliver Twist, stolen by Fagin (as played here by Robin Williams,) but I don't think that anyone else here has noticed all connections or the third connection--the theft of brilliant musicians by the owners of music studios and those who have paid virtually nothing to great musicians for the rights to their music.
What a lovely score with 3 marvelous actors who look like a family.
Then there is Fagin, who stole children and had them steal money and pick pockets in lower-class England. Obviously, Mozart was not related to that aspect of the story, because the child prodigy who died too young was an amazing musician, but lived among the upper classes and was a wild child. Still, to miss two major connections--Oliver Twist and Mozart--is to miss very most important aspects of the movie.
The Chris Isaak Show (2001)
Should have made more
I loved the Chris Isaak show, especially Isaak and his band, who were very natural actors. I wished that it went on much longer. I saw most of the episodes and wondered what had happened to it. HBO and Showtime make the same mistake in my opinion, ending shows without any proper finish and without ever explaining why. HBO did it with "Deadwood" and "Carnivale", two fascinating and bizare shows.
There have been much worse shows on Showtime, which makes the canceling of Isaak even stranger. For instance "The Brotherhood" is still on, as far as I know, and it really isn't any good at all. They had this ridiculous idea that people don't know that Federal Hill in Providence is a heavily Italian neighborhood, and that Rhode Island is run by Italian Catholics, so they put the equivalent of the Bulger brothers from South Boston, an Irish Catholic neighborhood, in charge of the Providence mob and involved in Providence's filthy politics. Besides Jason Isaac, a very good English actor who, who when asked if he was tough like the sadist on "The Brotherhood" said, no, I'm a little Jew from Liverpool, or words to that effect, and Fionnula Flanagan there was nothing to recommend that show, but Chris Isaak--long since gone. It makes no sense.
Without a Trace: White Balance (2006)
I thought that I had missed the ending, but I guess not
I recently had DVR from Comcast installed in my home and it seems to me that when I select a program to record it sometimes ends short. I thought I was doing something wrong by not setting the recordings manually, but apparently those are the actual endings that I'm getting.
I say this because this particular show didn't tell me which teenager had been killed, the black boy or the white girl. But based on what I've read here among the comments, that information was not missing from my recording. That information was never there to begin with. We do not know which one was killed, which makes the entire show a loss.
Racism is a common theme for this kind of copping out at the end, but it is not the only one. I watched "Numbers" last week and they did the same thing about politics at the end of the show. They had a chance to be strongly against the current Administration, and at the last moment they did not come through.
Also, in general, although I enjoy those programs that feature the FBI as if it were a different organization than the one we know, or CSI shows us an incredible amount of resources and concern put into every single murder that takes place in Las Vegas, they are generally all a cop out in this way: these wonderful, intensely effective organizations do not exist in this country, and probably never did. Otherwise, why would so many people call the FBI the FEEBS? Why would so many murders go unsolved? And "Cold Case," oh, please. We go back 5-60 years to solve murders that were filed without solution. On what planet do these things happen? They have their enjoyable aspects, but they're like a law-enforcement dream--they do not happen in real life.
Land of the Dead (2005)
This is a bloody mess and a political movie
Yes, it's highly political, and as the first reviewer said it will upset all the right people (or all the right-wing people); except that most of them will not watch it. Too bad. As Jack Nicholson, The Joker, said in "Batman," 'This town (country) needs an enema!'
I have to assume, without really knowing about him, that Romero is one of those dreadful Hollywood liberals we're supposed to hate and fear. Well, I love them and I do not love those who are not liberal.
Dennis Hopper could easily pass for George W. Bush, although he lacks the look of a chimp. If Bush is lucky, he will live under a mountain after he brings on nuclear, chemical, or biological war--although I very much doubt that anyone will come along to get Bush and his family and friends, like Cholo gets Kaufman, if and when that happens.