[3] What a shitty Best Picture winner Gigi is. It’s a musical about an unhappy playboy (Louis Jourdan) and an unhappy debutante (Leslie Caron) who fall in love, but then out of love, and back in love, and out, and finally in again. Apparently neither one feels right playing by the rules of Parisian upper-crust society and doing what is expected of them, so they …
[4] Ethan Hawke stars in this action comedy about a shy high school boy whose older brother sets him up on a date with the girl next door. While Mystery Date starts out like a John Hughes movie, it quickly transforms into a proto-Tarantino flick when Hawke’s character gets mistaken for his brother, whose been living a shady lifestyle behind the family’s back. Cue the …
[4] Bless Patrick Dempsey for acting his little heart out in this schmaltzy, cliche-ridden ’80s overdose. It’s basically a story of boy rents girl. Dempsey’s character is a loser who pays a popular girl (Amanda Peterson, also acting her heart out) one thousand dollars to be his girlfriend for a month. Since she’s in a pinch for the cash, she agrees and kinda falls in …
[4] The third-ever Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’ went to this somewhat clunky, melodramatic story spanning three decades in the lives of two British families — one upstairs aristocrats, the other downstairs servants. It may have been one of the most popular films of 1933, but it’s not one to which the passage of time has been particularly kind. Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook play …
[6] Just as Robert Zemeckis had to make Forrest Gump and Tim Burton had to make Big Fish, so did David Fincher have to make The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. All three directors are known for their visual and/or technical prowess, and all three felt the need to wring a tear-jerker out of their filmographies, maybe just to prove they could? Benjamin Button is …
[4] Errol Flynn clings to the last few years of his good looks in Montana, before his opium and alcohol addictions sent him to an early grave at the age of 50. Montana seems unintentionally silly to me — it’s all about cattle herders vs sheep herders, a sort of West Side Story for the northern plains. Alexis Smith plays Flynn’s love interest (making you …
[7] Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin star as a divorced couple who start to fall back in love with each other, despite the fact that he’s remarried and she is seeing Steve Martin on the side. Romantic comedies are my least favorite genre, but when the characters are older, wiser, and self-actualized — not to mention played by pros of this caliber — they can …
[8] This 2002 classic, period-piece rendition of Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby is sweet, sentimental, and beautifully executed. I personally found it irresistible. Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy, Pacific Rim) is perfectly cast as Nicholas, a young man who discovers his own strength of character when called upon to defend his family and friends from villainy. The main villain is his own uncle, played deliciously by …
[4] To give credit where credit is due, The Broadway Melody was the first sound film from MGM Studios, the second-ever Best Picture Oscar winner (the first with sound), and the first film in history to feature dance numbers filmed to pre-recorded music. It was the biggest money-maker of 1929 and spawned at least four sequels over the course of the next decade. It just …
[4] Frank Sinatra stars as a US army captain in charge of helping Kachin natives in WWII Burma defend themselves against the Japanese. Never So Few divides its attention between the gun battles in the jungle and Sinatra’s makeout sessions with Italian beauty Gina Lollobrigida. As a result, it excels in neither area — I didn’t much care about the troops or the lady, and …
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