To
Navigate: Click each title to collapse the article. Click again
to expand the article. If you are having difficulty viewing these
articles, e-mail Louis.
These reviews attempt the following:
• are likelier to focus on older movies,
rather than new releases
• examine movies that exhibit (in a positive way)
the maxim from CS Lewis that all that is out of date is eternally out of
date
• refuse to provide a formal plot summary
• are brief
Links to useful sites
allmovie.com For all the useful details
about a given movie that are not included here, search by movie title
here: "allmovie"
Movie Review Query Engine For access to
numerous reviews, search by movie title here: "Move Review Query
Engine"
My Rating (of five possible): * * * *
Starring a primary-school age boy and girl who play their parts with restraint and perfection.
Very few movies are so slow, yet inviting; so quiet, yet significant. Most Americans should see this movie if for no other reason than to remember the magical spell the smallest gift casts upon a grateful heart.
Very few movies present so many believable, good characters, children and adults alike. It takes some time to stop expecting a cynical turn of events, and then it takes some time to recover from a fully believable ending.
2009/05/22 ©
My Rating (of five possible): * *
Starring the voices of Robin Williams, Hugh Jackman, Elijah Wood, Nicole Kidman, and Brittany Murphy
This animated feature length movie presents a case of missed opportunity.
By diverting attention to wonderful photo-realistic ocean scenes and musical elements (if one enjoys musical animations), the movie succeeds in drawing the viewer (this viewer) into its world. That world lands the leading penguin in a zoo. There it finally finds an audience for its environmental plea. Looking up beyond the plate glass, the leading penguin sees the attentive face of a small, sympathetic girl, who is soon joined by hundreds of other people. At the top of its lungs, it begins explaining the pending starvation its community is facing. Certain it is being heard, it lifts its voice higher and louder, boldly asking its auditors to intervene in the commercial fishing industry.Suddenly the point of view switches to the humans in the viewing gallery. Looking down upon the icy penguin cage, the humans see dozens of penguins. One stands out from the rest as a performer. Each time, however, that it opens its mouth, they do not hear any environmental message in English. Instead they hear the cawing of a rather loud penguin, who, if they imagined, might be trying to sing to them. That is all. There is an impermeable barrier between the penguin and the human, and nothing will bridge it.
If Happy Feet ended there, it would have transformed itself from a children's animation to a serious existentialist statement on the isolation of the species. It would have been unforgettable.
2009/02/22 ©
My Rating (of five possible): * * * *
Starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Ritchie Valens, born Ricardo Valenzuela
Without the fateful day of February 3rd, 1959, when Valens, The Big Bopper (aka J.P. Richardson), and Buddy Holly died in the small plan crash due to inclimate weather, neither the movie nor Don McLean's "American Pie" would likely exist. Without "American Pie" (1971) the movie may not have existed. Making a good thing that leads up to the day the musicians died, the movie portrays Valens in a fully favorable light, the son-brother-boyfriend that looks out for others and not only himself.
Having watched this movie the day after my first (and most likely last) exposure to The Big Lebowski (1998), I found it refreshingly ... refreshing, showing that semi-documentary goodness can be more engaging than fictionalized, self-indulgent ennui (which is what The Big... conveyed to me). There is nothing deep in La Bamba philosophically, just as was intended by the music he and his peers created. But the movie depicts a good spectrum of humanity, where love is hard to find whether one is among migrant workers (Ritchie, Bob, Rosie, and Mrs. Valenzuela) or the upper middle class (girlfriend, Donna). Somewhere among the light, latin rock, the lyrical optimism surrounding success, and the commitment to music and mothers, love does appear.2009/01/17 ©
My Rating (of five possible): * * * 1/2
Starring lots of actors
Later I will revisit this movie. For now, it strikes me as a prototype of Crash (2005), with all the flaws and strengths a prototype entails. Unlike Crash, Magnolia requires more than suspension of disbelief in "likelihood." Both plots are unlikely (Magnolia explicitly challenging assumptions about probability). But Magnolia also requires a suspension of genre assumptions. The descent of the frogs might be explicable in terms of a tropical storm, but the simultaneous singing of "Wise Up" requires a switch from unlikely realism to unquestioned symbolism.
One must remain flexible throughout the movie. One of its strengths is its license to bring together so many characters at length that one is exposed to something like "God's plenty" that Dryden attributed to Chaucer's characters.
It brings together the reprehensible seducer and destroyer (Frank Mackey [Tom Cruise]) and the honorable officer (Jim Kurring [John C. Reilly]), with enough detail that, in the end, the distance between the two is not as far as one might have expected, and it is Mackey that moves against entropy, instead of Kurring who, in other movies, would likely have moved with it.
2009/01/17 ©
My Rating (of five possible): * * * * *
Starring Ralph and his critics
The title of the movie comes from a quote by G. B. Shaw, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." One could argue, though, that all Nader has done is to try to adapt the world to slightly higher standards of honesty and operation.
Either way (Nader as egoist or as reformer), this is the documentary that —along with the current financial crisis—led me to buy some stocks in Ford Motor Company, the least of the big bad American auto manufacturers. It was Ford who almost complied with Ralph Nader's initial critique of the careless design of American cars. (And it is Ford who recently groveled less for a federal loan.)
Tracing the consumer advocate of the 1960s through his emergence as a presidential candidate 91996, 2000, 2004, & 2008), the movie reveals a highly articulate man who finds himself the target of large organizations who are willing to break both the law and laws of human decency to silence him.
The movie gives some of Nader's harshest critics (including some of his former followers) a chance to speak, although it's main business is to present the profile of someone who, being smarter than average, attempts to help the average person, proving that to be often a thankless task. Anyone ignorant of Nader would do well to watch this documentary. Anyone who holds, as I do, an awareness of how smug both "conservatives" and "liberals" can be when challenged by a non-partisan force will delight in the movie.
For a short (~3 minute) trailer, see the right-hand sidebar of this page (http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/unreasonableman/film.html).
2009/01/28 ©
Return to L. Burkhardt's home page
Created 2009/01/17, Last updated 2009/05/22.