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Miracle at St. Anna is a Spike Lee movie or Joint as he says. Spike Lee is an excellent director and he really weaves the story and subplots in and out of this movie.
There is a mystery of the stone head, a kid with an imaginary friend, who is the traitor and what happened in the Post Office.
I didn't recoginize any of the main actors, but they were all excellent and even though it's a movie of 2:46, it moves right along. Lots of Italian & German, so there are subtitles.
I enjoyed this movie and I especially liked this line: "Franco, the mailman will show you the way." Some people get what they deserve and some get what they don't deserve, but there is a happy ending.
Watchmen is a movie that explores a lot of mythology of the characters and the world they inhabit, where Richard Nixon is elected to a 3rd term because a Giant Blue Atomic naked guy named Dr. Manhattan wins the Vietnam War.
I couldn't really identify with any of the characters and I'm sure that it was an overstuffed script to satisfy the loyal viewers and fans of the graphic novel. It was a bit much for me, especially when they are going back and forth in time.
It's definite action packed and a thriller and it's watchable and I'm glad I watched it at the movie theater, but I don't think I'll be adding it to my Netflix list.
It Came From Outer Space is a more sophisticated 50's SciFi movie than most, mainly because the story was written by Ray Bradbury.
It's about an alien ship that took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and ended up crashing on Earth. All they want to do is fix the ship and take off. They just have to take over a few local folks to carry some tools and spare parts because they are a Giant Eyeball clouded in fog and that makes it hard to drive a truck.
The high point for me was the line: "Hiya, Frank". Frank the telephone lineman and victim of the Xenomorphs. We have real Frank, maybe dead Frank and zombie Frank. Plenty of Franks.
Richard Carlson plays the writer/amateur astronomer who sees more than everyone else and Barbara Rush plays his girlfriend. Barbara won a Golden Globe for best newcomer and she's got 3 really great screams.
There is excellent music and lots of fun Theremin sound effects - Click here to hear a Theremin sample.
No chickens, but some vultures and a tumbleweed. It was originally shown in 3D and there are some nice extras.
The Theremin wav file is the following sound files from Freesound (http://www.freesound.org): thereminecho.wav
For some excellent reason Sony Pictures decided to put It Came From Beneath The Sea on BluRay! And they made it wide screen and also put on a colorized version. It looks fantastic and it sounds fantastic. The 4 note Monster theme that got used over and over again in a bunch of 1950's SciFi B movies - Bah Bah Bah Baaaaah!
The movie starts out with the brand new Atomic Sub going on a test run with Kenneth (Whirleybirds) Tobey as the commander getting attacked by a mysterious blob on the Sonar. I kept yelling: "Electrify the hull!!" like it was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but the US Navy didn't think of that back then.
So they bring in the scientist, which you always need in this kind of a SciFi movie and the babe scientist played by Faith Domergue first tells Tobey he's too dumb for her to converse with, then later after they figure out that the sub was attacked by a giant Octopus, Kenneth makes his big romantic play for Faith, smoking a cigarette in front of a giant "No Smoking" sign and then as some romantic music comes on, first he and then she grab and fondle a very long test tube!!! What a double entdre-unendo. I was cracking up big time! Such subtlety from a Scheer Production.
Then the Octopus, who's mad and radioactive, because of a Hydrogen bomb test in the South Pacific floats around the Japanese current over to San Francisco, where the master genius of stop-motion action, Ray Harryhausen, takes over with his lead models of the Golden Gate Bridge and his minature Sixtopus (he made it with only 6 legs) started crushing the bridge, smashing a lead police car and then messing up the commute by ripping down the Ferry Building and knocking down the clock tower. It's a lot of fun and just looks great on the BluRay. Of course, I've only seen it before on a small TV in B/W.
Lots of good extras: 20 minute interview with Ray Harryhausen and another short that went too long about the music, but it was fun to see and hear how they used music from other movies because of the low budgets.
The tops is the final line of the movie after Kenneth tries to get Faith to give up her big time career and settle down and get married. He says to the other scientist: "Well, Doctor. You were right about these modern women!"
MacBeth by any other name would smell just as sweet, except if it's the version called Scotland, PA.
It's a weird interpretation of the MacBeth story in a well done B Movie kind of way. I didn't remember the whole MacBeth story, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and for some reason, they didn't mention this version, although they didn't mention any movie version, which they usually do. I guess whomever is keeping the MacBeth page up to date distains the movies.
It's not a bad movie and it has some good old songs that I like and Maura Tierney walks into a pharmacy and says: "Thanks, Frank", which is great because Shakespeare didn't put a Frank in his original play. I'm not sure what the point was for this movie, but the director has only directed this one movie, so maybe that was the point.
Known as Evil Angels in Australia, A Cry in the Dark, is mostly known for Meryl Streep saying: "The dingo ate my baby!". Another case of a mistaken quote - she says: "The dingo took my baby!".
She also was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress. It's kind of long at 122 minutes, but it is an 1980's version of the media circus and massive public frenzy and I kept thinking about how it would be played these days if it was like that back in 1980-1988 when the real story took place.
They had a bunch of bad forensic tests back then and after watching all the different CSI's and knowing about DNA, this couldn't happen any more.
"Round up the usual suspects." "I'm shocked, shocked to see that gambling is going on." "Here's looking at you, kid." "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." Four of the all time movie quotes
Who am I to review Casablanca, the #3 all time movie on the American Film Institute's (AFI) list of 100 all time movies? It won the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay in 1942 and is the very definition of a Classic. Romance, intrigue, patriotism and memorable characters
It's one of my all time favorites and I could watch it over and over again. No matter how many times I've seen it, the scene when they sing La Marseillaise over the top of the German national anthem, gives me the goosebumps and it did again tonight.
I like all the Transporter movies, 1, 2 & 3. What's not to like? The main character, played by Jason Statham, is named Frank, so you start out with a plus.
Jason Statham is a bad ass with rules. He's the kind of bad ass I would like to be if I was a bad ass, not that I aspire to be a bad ass, but I like watching them in movies. In Transporter 3, he has to break a bunch of rules, which keeps things interesting and fun.
His French Detective buddy is back again and the babe is the most freckliest (is that a word?) actress I've ever seen. She turns likeable as the movie goes on.
It's the usual thing - Fast cars, Frank kicking ass and taking names of massive multiple bad guys, crazy stunts and beautiful scenery. All good stuff. I say see it.
The Ruins. Really? The title says it all. It ruins your evening or afternoon, it ruins about 93 minutes of your life and it just sucks big time.
Really? Singing man eating plants? Didn't the Little Shop of Horrors do that in a much more fun way?
Really? Leave the guy with broken legs right near the edge where the singing vines can grab hold of him easier, then make his legs all nasty, so you have to chop them off after breaking them with a boulder? Really? Move the poor loser to the center of the pyramid where there is some space or grab some of the salt the natives are sprinkling around the edge and put it on top to protect you.
It is such a slow moving agonizing horror, horrible movie. Why did I watch it? Who knows. It was on free HBO and I was bored.
The First Deadly Sin is a 1972 best seller that was turned into a 1980 movie that was Frank Sinatra's last big movie role. I just finished reading the novel, which of course was a lot more complex than the movie could ever be.
I can see how the book would have been extremely cutting edge 37 years ago, so it was amusing to me in 2009. Unfortunately, they had to cut all that out of the movie because it would have been about 5 hours long.
The first thing I noticed was in the credits, there was a huge and specific credit for Faye Dunaway's Wardrobe & Costume designer. Since Faye, who plays Frank's sick & dying wife, starts out in surgery and stays in bed the whole movie, she didn't really have much elaborate wardrobing & costuming. So every time she shows up on the screen I paid a lot of attention to the differences from the previous scene. Faye must have had a lot of clout to get her designer that big of a credit.
The 2nd thing I noticed is how great the DVD looked. Even though it wasn't a BluRay, it looked fantastic. The DVD player really does enhance regular DVD's. I didn't recognize him, but I noticed in the IMDB.com extended credits, that this is Bruce Willis' first movie. He's uncredited, but he walks into a restaurant as Frank Sinatra walks out.
As you can tell, there's not much to say about the movie. It's OK for an old 80's thriller, but I was distracted by other things. No character named Frank, but when you've got Frank Sinatra, he takes care of that. It had a tape drive and even more special for me, old Hi Tech - a big noisy, nasty Centronics 703 dot matrix printer and giant disc drive platters. They were GREAT! I've worked on all that stuff.
Owning Mahoney is a very scary movie for me. It's all about a GA (Gambler's Anonymous) who gets sucked way, way into high rolling and steals money from his bank in Toronto. It's scary because it seems real and I guess since it's based on a real story, it is real. Sometimes reality sucks.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman is Dan Mahoney and Minnie Driver is his long suffering girlfriend. I didn't recognize Minnie with her blond hair in the first scene. The hardest part of the movie to believe is that this big loser's GF stays with him when he treats her so badly.
Gratuitous John Hurt as a sleazy casino manager and Maury Chaykin as Frank the bookie. Besides having a main character named Frank, they have a wire tap on the bookie, so that means tape drives! Yay.
The funniest part is when the cop says that there's no way Mahoney is stealing money because of all the bank regulations! Hardy Har Har!!! Yeah, right. Maybe in 1982, when this took place, but not any more, Monty.
Now I know why I stopped gambling and took up poker, which is skill & luck.
Good luck, sucker.
The Hindenburg is one of those 70's movies that are probably remembered as better than they are 30 years later. Of course, it's got the Titanic problem of already knowing the ending.
George C. Scott plays a German security officer, who's along to protect the giant bag of explosive hydrogen. He finds out who's got the bomb, but doesn't like the Nazis because they made him bomb some Basques as practice for WWII.
The Hindenburg crashed on May 6, 1937 in Lakehurst NJ and even though it burst into a giant fireball 400 feet high, 62 of the 97 on board survived.
Robert Wise is the director and he used archival footage in B/W at the beginning and end of the movie. The production notes on the DVD are interesting. George C. Scott plays Franz, so I guess that counts as a Frank and there is another character named Frankel, so that's at least 1.5 Franks.
It's a very slow moving movie, but it does have Anne Bancroft and Burgess Meredith playing poker, so that's a plus.
Here is the real photo of the Hindenburg as it's on fire. 
I'm watching Eagle Eye and about in the middle of the movie, before it's revealed to everyone, I figure out who the mysterious evil woman that is making the new Cary Grant/Jimmy Stewart of Hitchcockian style movies, LA BOOF (Shia LaBeouf) and Michelle Monoghan running all over the place.
I always like a movie where I can figure out the clues and foreshadowing that are always there, but not always seen. I still remembering sitting in the movie theater with my bro, Lawrence, watching the Crying Game in 1992 and whispering in his ear: "She's a guy" about 10 minutes before Stephen Rae gets his "big surprise". Eagle Eye wasn't that mysterious, but still... If you haven't seen it yet, the next paragraph might be a spoiler if you know all the movie references.
I can just see the pitch for this movie: "Hal 9000 meets Seven Days In May meets the Colossus: Forbin Project meets The Manchurian Candidate meets the Demon Seed.
It moves non-stop and it's a very watchable movie. No Franks, but gratitious Billy Bob Thorton plays a character named Thomas and later another character is named Tom, so it's a rare 2 Tom movie.
Kingdom of Heaven is a Ridley Scott epic movie. It's one of those movies that I usually see in the movie theater and I did when it was released. It's got some humongous set piece battle scenes that really seem like there are 400,000 real horses galloping across the desert and hundreds of giant fireballs getting flung by giant trebuchets into the castle walls of Old Jerusalem.
It's the story of the last Christian King of Jerusalem with the final battle vs. Saladin, so it's got some historical basis, which I like and this was the Director's Cut, so there were some extra scenes that helped explain some of the sub-plots that were overwhelmed by the big action in the theatrical release. I had the sound cranked up, so those horses and fireballs were shaking the Dreamland Theater. Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons and Eva Green keep the plot moving. Orlando is kind of a modern day peacemaker and environmentalist who has to turn into a warrior to save the people and he's got a couple of excellent villians in Brendan Gleeson & David Thewlis who chew up the whole middle east and generally causing trouble.
Everyone gets what they deserve, no Franks, but that's to be expected in a movie set in the 1100's. I highly recommend Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut.
Pineapple Express is a big waste of 112 minutes. It's got a couple of funny scenes. I think my big mistake after the one where I put it on my Netflix list was to watch the extended version. I could tell where there were scenes that were just prolonging the agony.
I think you probably have to be really stoned to watch this "Stoner comedy". It's got the worst shoot out scene ever shot. It's brutal.
Here is a BIG CLUE!! If the Netflix description includes the words: "Acclaimed indie auteur", stay far, far away. I had to create a new label for this movie: Lame Movie
Greenfingers is an excellent example of a gentle, fun English comedy, very much in the old Ealing Studios style. Eccentric and finely drawn characters inhabit Greenfingers.
From the first line, "Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, I'm about to F**k up again, So what else is new?" to the end, it's easy to enjoy this movie.
It stars Clive Owen, Helen Mirren & David Kelly (who was in Waking Ned Devine). It's based on a true story of prisoner gardeners who got to enter the prestigious Hampton Court Flower Show and actually won.
It's a lot of fun - zero Franks, but some chickens.
Miracle at St. Anna is a Spike Lee movie or Joint as he says. Spike Lee is an excellent director and he really weaves the story and subplots in and out of this movie.
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