They Were Expendable (1945)

[See “Entry from June 18, 2008” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Rough Magic written and directed by Clare Peploe has got to be a contender for worst movie of the year. It’s a real stinker. The worst thing about it is its preposterous plot, full of what is obviously meant to look like bits of “magic realism” but coming across instead as a sort of cartoon…

A brutish husband, two funny girlfriends, a handsome doctor, folksy Andy Griffith and pie — could this be a recipe for a chick flick?

Pay it Forward by Mimi Leder is meant to be another in what I take to be a new series of heart-tugging, inspirational tales like Music of the Heart or American Beauty (which also starred Kevin Spacey) that derive their oomph from the assumption that life in America is pretty grim and miserable but that…

I really wanted to like Mouse Hunt, which was officially directed by Gore Verbinski but unfortunately bears the hallmarks of the directorial style of Steven Spielberg, out of whose “Dreamworks” studio it comes. Every now and then, it is true, the skills of the comic duo of Nathan Lane and Lee Evans as the brothers…

If I should happen to mention that the music in Mon Homme by Bertrand Blier consists entirely of selections by Barry White and Henryk Gorecki, you may get some idea of what a mess the picture is. At one level, it is, as are many of Blier’s earlier films, a masculine fantasy. The heroine is…