And away we go…

1. Barbara Stanwyck: Number one for no reason more complicated than the fact that I’m desperately in love with her.

-

2. Judy Garland: Because there will never be another. Not even close. (more…)

Here, edited a touch, is my review from May of 2007. Re-reading and reliving just what a diseased thing The Good German is, I’m not at all surprised its creator, Steven Soderbergh, has moved on to exalting a mass-murderer like Che. Not surprised at all.

THE GOOD GERMAN

The sound design isn’t bad. There, I promised myself I would start with something positive. Wait there’s more: Cate Blanchett makes it out unscathed.

Am I gushing too much?

Oh, brother, what a disaster. And I’m certainly not alone in thinking that. Produced for an estimated $35 million, this bomb barely cleared $5 million worldwide despite the presence of two fellas Hollywood and its media minions swear are box office draws: George Clooney and Tobey Maguire. But The Good German fails on more than just the financial front, it fails on every front (I was kidding about the sound design and Blanchett). (more…)

Dirty Harry aka John Nolte can be found over at Big Hollywood.

Please sends tips and correspondence through the Big Hollywood contact page.

Revolutionary Road opens its story just after the conclusion of a disastrous community theatre production of The Petrified Forest where, on a small, suburban public school stage, April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) has suffered more than just humiliation, her self image as a unique individual with a special place in the world has been destroyed. Her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), obviously tired of April’s latest attempt at self-actualization, isn’t exactly sympathetic. The argument that follows is bitter, the film that follows is probably worse than that play.

What say we don’t argue over whether or not the suburbs, especially the suburbs of the 1950s, are killers of the human spirit. To each their own, right? But does anyone really want to defend that portraying the suburbs as such hasn’t become the most tiring of tiring cliches? Almost as tiring as the mentally unbalanced character with a unique, penetrating insight into the human condition … which Revolutionary Road also employs.

Years ago, when April and Frank first met, they were not yet twenty-five, had their whole lives ahead of them and were positive they were special. She was studying to be an actress and he was a longshoreman dreaming of a life lived in Paris. Like all of us, things didn’t quite turn out as planned. For instance, I don’t drive a choo choo train and go home to a fur bikini holding Raquel Welch. The difference between by myself and the Wheelers, though, is that I grew up.

(more…)

Hollywood Values when it comes to a 36 year-old woman having sex with a 15 year-old boy:

I’m so sorry, “statutory rape”? I’ve got to tell you, I’m so offended by that. No, I really am. I genuinely am. To me, that is absolutely not this story at all. That boy knows exactly what he’s doing. For a start, Hanna Schmitz thinks that he’s seventeen, not fifteen, you know? She’s not doing anything wrong.

That offends her. A script that gets her naked with a 17 year-old actor, not so much.

At first the whole story about her character having sex with a young boy confused me. Isn’t Leo like 19 now?

Nearly two and a half hours pass before The Curious Case of Benjamin Button hits you with any real warmth or poignancy and that’s an awfully long row to hoe in order to finally feel the way the lush trailer promised. The real failure of the film isn’t due to its frustrating lack of a central story and emotional through-line, or even two very unappealing love interests. It fails because wistful isn’t a theme, and other than a series of episodes under the impression they’re more important than they really are, Benjamin Button simply isn’t about anything. 

Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is born the size of a baby but the rest of him is an old man in his eighties riddled with arthritis, cataracts and wrinkled skin. His mother dies during child birth leaving his father emotionally devastated and in no condition to deal with his seemingly deformed son. He leaves the baby at the doorstep of an old folks home run by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) who, under the belief the child will die soon, takes little Benjamin under her protective wing. Benjamin doesn’t die, though. Instead he grows younger and younger with each passing year.  

Benjamin’s mind is still that of a child’s, so he learns to read and write like any toddler must. And while he’s smallish like a child, in every other respect he’s an old man in need of eyeglasses and a wheelchair. Eventually, over the years as he grows younger, he will grow into the fine physical specimen we call Brad Pitt.

(more…)

As documented here, here, and here, through the portrayal of the sympathetic child molester, the onscreen hyper-sexualization of young girls, and child characters liberated through sexual behavior, for a number of years now the film industry has waged a drip-drip campaign in favor of the normalization of sex between adults and underage children. The offensive is a quiet, insidious one slowly slithering into the mainstream, and like all Leftist movements, will not stop until it gets what it wants.

The most recent drip on this wicked front comes from the well-reviewed Doubt, which might just earn an Oscar nomination for a “daring” use of nuance when it comes to what decent people call “the rape of a child.”

(more…)

Isn’t any film with a turkey that doesn’t stop its story dead to lament our whipping of Indian butt a pretty conservative one? Thanksgiving is by its very nature a conservative holiday because it celebrates the last day of the Utopia that was North America before Western European Whitey began our rape and plunder. Because as we all know this land was without sin before we arrived. Indians didn’t own slaves. Indians didn’t damage the environment. Indians didn’t start wars or steal land.

So, this is a fairly easy list to compile because Thanksgiving’s a holiday that celebrates the seeds of a very successful act of my kind of imperialism … Western Imperialism.  

1. The Ice Storm (1997)

(Deep breath…) Okay, this is how it works: In the 1960’s the best fed, best housed, most ungrateful and spoiled generation ever didn’t want a bunch of non-white, non-Christians in Vietnam to share the freedoms they enjoyed… So, they turned on their parents, turned on their country, ignored the noble civil rights movement, and became the hippie generation whose legacy is AIDS, drug abuse, and unwed mothers. The hippies told us they were protesting the war on moral grounds and yet the protests stopped when the draft did. Hmm? So, as the war raged on, the hippies became yuppies, embraced materialism in excess of anything their bourgeois parents ever imagined, moved to the suburbs, and clung to their self-destructive free-love-entitlement lifestyle at the expense of their kids. (Exhale.)  And The Ice Storm is a damning indictment of that generation, that thankfully uses Thanksgiving somewhere along the way allowing me the pretense to get the above off my chest. (more…)

Donald Westlake was the prolific author behind some brilliant cinema pulp. We’re talking about small, smart, memorable films — too many of which are not available on DVD, including The Stepfather and The Outfit.

From Westlake’s novel “The Hunter,” came John Boorman’s brilliant Point Blank (1967), a study in the relentless summed up by an unforgettable shot of Walker (Lee Marvin) making his determined way down a long airport terminal. The story was simple. Walker, a low-level thug betrayed and left for dead, wants back the money stolen from him; not a penny more, not a penny less — and he’ll kill his way through the hierarchy of the mob to get it. Filling his simple concept with a treasure of emotional complications and details surrounding mob life, Westlake gives us the unflinching anti-hero who’s more watchable than sympathetic thanks to a skewed, fascinating, personal code of honor. The novel was somewhat successfully remade as Payback in 1999 with Mel Gibson, but from the opening scene the remake undermines itself straining for anti-heroism. If Payback served any purpose it was in bringing people to Point Blank. (more…)

Worst lists are somewhat disingenuous. The truly worst films of the year are always the cheapie slasher flicks and pretentious independent films Blockbuster only buys a single copy of. But my definition of worst is “worst experience,” as in crushing disappointment, as in There’s A Special Place In Hell For All Involved And We Call It “The George Lucas Wing.”

So are the films on my list really the worst of the year? Worse than The Eye or the remake of Prom Night? Probably not. But those films are what they are. Mine is a list of soul eaters and hack jobs. Mine is a list that makes you rethink your love of the medium and wonder why you would ever plunk down ten-bucks again. These are films that should be unspooled, turned into nooses, and all involved in the making of them hanged on pay-per-view… (more…)