Review – Pumping Iron

For your entertainment dollar it’s hard to beat a 28-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about orgasms. Seriously, here’s the movie that brought body building into the spotlight and helped launch Arnold’s acting career. If you like muscle guys from the mid-70s, this is the flick for you. On the other hand, if you think the whole muscle obsession is kinda freakish, then for your taste this probably won’t amount to much more than a freak show. Mildly amusing

Review – Double Indemnity

This noir classic is very much a creature of its time. If nothing else, it’s hard to watch beloved TV dad and Disney regular Fred MacMurray playing a villainous anti-hero. Then there’s the dialogue, no doubt biting and innovative in 1944 but now more than a little cliché. But despite the dating, this is still an entertaining piece of movie-making. We all go into it knowing that the salesman and scheming woman plotting to murder her husband for insurance money are going to come to no good, especially when the plan becomes more complicated than necessary due to the need to kill hubby on a train in order to bring a double-indemnity clause into effect. But even the predictable outcome doesn’t detract from the pleasure of watching Edward G. Robinson as a claim investigator taking the scheme apart piece by piece. Worth seeing

Review – Bowling for Columbine

Michael Moore is mad, but he seems to be having some trouble figuring out exactly what he’s mad about or whom he’s mad at. Americans kill each other with guns, something that seems to peeve Moore to no end (as well it might). But he’s so excited about pinning this on large corporations that he shorts or bypasses altogether a lot of the root causes of violence. At least I didn’t hate this as much as I thought I was going to, except of course for the ambush nagging. And that brings me mindful of the “South Park” summary of American history, in particular the part that theorizes that early European immigrants shot the Indians due to fear, omitting the property aspects of Manifest Destiny. This inspired me to plan a documentary in which someone shows up unannounced at Moore’s home with a camera and a sad photo of Indian children, demanding that the Limbaugh of the Left deed his property over to the people from whom it was stolen. Mildly amusing

Review – Searching for Debra Winger

The concept had a lot of potential: famous Hollywood actresses – particularly though not universally those who at one time made their livings primarily off their looks – talk about the perils of getting old in an industry with little use for older actresses. Occasionally director Rosanna Arquette manages to get in a somewhat interesting discussion with someone like Frances MacDormand (ambushed in a bathroom during the Cannes Film Festival, no less) or get a worthwhile thought or two out of one-on-one or group chat. But for the most part these women are disappointingly insight-free. For openers, many of them communicate mostly in thick psycho-babble, suggesting that extensive therapy long ago rendered them incapable of genuine emotion or other mental processes. Even when valid points about balancing careers and family start to emerge, the wealth and fame factors rob the conversation of any sort of “washing the floors to send you to college” impact. And though Arquette asserts that Debra Winger’s decision to retire from the business served as the impetus for starting the project, she also appears to have been motivated at least in part by poorly-concealed jealousy of her younger sister’s success. Overall this isn’t bad. I just expected something better. Mildly amusing

Review – Cat People

Even all these years later it’s downright impressive what can be done with a decent script and a little careful attention to lighting and editing. Even the casting is good, using actors who fit their parts rather than big name stars. This particularly applies to Simone Simon, who really looks like a cat. In fact, she looks like a cute little kitten, which makes it all the more intriguing when it turns out that she’s got a dark, shape-shifting secret tied to her sexuality. Though I guess it was only natural that this movie got lost in overall events in 1942, it now deserves a place in horror movie history. A must-see for any fan of the genre. Worth seeing

Review – Frazetta: Painting with Fire

If you’re a big – or even moderate – fan of Frank Frazetta, you should get a real kick out of this production. It comes across as a bit random, moving from topic to topic in an episodic but somewhat disorganized manner. Even so, it’s fairly comprehensive and occasionally insightful, despite the emphasis on interviews with artists, film-makers and other folks who would apparently prefer to heap praise on the subject rather than sharing anything interesting about him. Mildly amusing

Review – Goya in Bordeaux

I should start by admitting that I dozed through part of this movie. But I think I got enough of the general gist of things to form an opinion about the overall quality of the work. Here we have Goya’s life retold through theatrically-staged flashbacks as the old guy slowly dies in exile in France. I liked the attempts to make the flashbacks resemble the artist’s work, especially when the filmmakers actually manage to pull it off. However, the production tends throughout to strongly resemble a stage play, giving it the distinct flavor of the movie Paul Schrader made many years ago about Yukio Mishima. In Schrader’s case the look-and-feel was justified, as his subject was – among other things – a playwright. But here I was hoping for something a little more painterly and a little less stagy. Mildly amusing