Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 30th, 2004
Synopsis
Meryl Streep is Nora Ephron and Jack Nicholson is Carl Bernstein. Well, the names aredifferent, but Ephron’s script is based on her novel, which in turn is based on her fractiousmarriage to the Watergate journalist. He is the inveterate womanizer, while she is one of thosefemale protagonists so beloved of romantic comedies that are supposed, I think, to be“charmingly insecure” but read instead as “high-maintenance neurotic.” They get married, andvery swiftly things begin to...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 28th, 2004
Synopsis
Tormented by the tyranny of SAT scores, which will determine university acceptance andfuture opportunities, six high school students band together to steal the answers to the dreadedtest. Personalities clash, but their common need unites the unlikely band (mixing basketball star,cynical rich girl, class brain, stoner, and so on). The night comes for the big heist, and by the nextmorning, everyone will have learned Valuable Life Lessons.
The Perfect Score trip...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 25th, 2004
The 1970s was a fertile time for feminist movements. This film was amazingly cited by both sides of the argument, never seeming to please either. Feminists considered the film to be a slap in the face of the “modern woman”. It was accused of undermining years of progress to the age-old stereotypes of a woman’s place. At the same time anti-feminists citied it as a mockery of what were considered wholesome American values. It’s strange that a film that was never intended to be part of these controversies couldn’t seem ...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 18th, 2004
Everyone’s favorite television psychiatrist is back for his third go around. Frasier and his emmy award winning cast return for one of the better seasons that the series produced. The third season sees more wackiness, more Eddie jokes, and more shenanigans at the radio station. The biggest story shift this year is Niles' (David Hyde Pierce) separation from the still unseen Maris, leaving him more free time to moon over Daphne (Jane Leeves). In a half-season arc, Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) finds himself at odds with, an...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 14th, 2004
Synopsis
William Holden is an artist in Hong Kong. After an inane meet-cute, he falls in love withSusie Wong (Nancy Kwan), who turns out to be a prostitute. After the initial romance, all sorts ofteeth-clenching and agonizing of this and that make up the rest of the film. Pure soap-operatics,in other words. Having Holden fall in love with a forbidden woman in Hong Kong is just a bittoo reminiscent of Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (which itself is prettyunintentionally funny...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 13th, 2004
Synopsis
Just For You is a Technicolor musical with Bing Crosby as a Broadway producer,and Jane Wyman as his leading lady/fiancee. Though a big financial success, Crosby has beenfalling down on the job as a father, neglecting his adolescent children. At best. He comesperilously close to losing all audience sympathy when he tears into his son’s attempts atsongwriting. He determines to turn over a new life, but his parenting skills are really put to thetest when his son falls i...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 13th, 2004
Synopsis
Bob Hope plays a hopeless American actor in England during the early 1900s. Lucille Ballis the daughter of a newly rich family, and though she may be dressed in finery, she’s very mucha bull in the china shop of English society. Believing Hope to be a butler, Ball’s mother hireshim to teach Ball some etiquette, and hauls the poor soul back to the American frontier, where allmanner of indignities ensue.
The comedy hasn’t aged particularly well, though some of the sma...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 13th, 2004
Synopsis
When three Vietnamese men are found dead, the prime suspect is a war vet who promisedto kill them after they were acquitted of assaulting his wife. Said vet slaughtered an entire villageduring the war, and the man who got him acquitted then, Brian Dennehy, is reluctantly convincedto take on the case. Though at first it seems that the prosecution has an iron-clad case, bit by bitDennehy finds clues that point to a frame-up.
About as typical a made-for-TV mystery as o...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 8th, 2004
Summer School is one of those films that I really enjoyed as a boy growing up in the 80’s. It had crazy characters, pretty girls, funny one-liners and cool people, like Mark Harmon. Watching the film today, I can honestly say that it is as good now as it was then. The only problem is, I have matured as a person and as a movie viewer. The characters are still crazy, but they are also largely annoying. The girls are still pretty, and the foreign exchange student is the same woman who played Allota Fagina in A...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 2nd, 2004
Synopsis
Tupac Shakur narrates his own life (almost, it would seem, from beyond the grave), taking usfrom his birth (and even before -- he discusses his gestation inside his imprisoned activistmother) to his childhood, and then through the ups and downs (emotional, legal and otherwise)of his career. Personal beliefs, politics, and the whole nine yards are laid out for us.
The editing is very clever, and one notes this particularly in the opening. Immediately afterthe sound o...
