![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() Adult date night movies get no more surefire than The Railway Man. It starts with Nicole Kidman falling in love with Colin Firth on a train. He is – after all – the Railway Man. The pathos comes later, when we encounter the hell that Eric Lomax underwent as a POW, slave laborer for the infam…
WikChip Video
Nicole Kidman on meeting Patti Lomax
|
||||||
![]() Big thing Godzilla, been around a long time, sixty years on screen, millions more in Godzilla story years. Archetype and moviestar, it’s a 350’ T-Rex that thrives on nuclear energy, making it a metaphor for nukes in general and nuclear bombs in particular. Godzilla 2014 proffers little new, ye…
WikChip Image
Traffic is slow leaving the Bay Area.
|
||||||
![]() The pantheon of essential WWII movies has a new entrant. David Ayer’s Fury stars Brad Pitt as an American Staff Sergeant who must lead a platoon of Sherman tanks against the Germans’ superior Panzers. Think Chevies vs. Benzes, with Brad and his battle-hardened crew in an outgunned Sherman named…
WikChip Image
Bad Brad etches another Rushmorian pe...
|
||||||
![]() A father of computer science and nerdy war hero makes a fine subject for a rather dreamy biopic. Oh yeah, Alan Turing was also a persecuted gay man, back when homosexuality was criminalized in Great Britain. The Imitation Game thus has several storylines running through it, perhaps explaining w…
WikChip Image
The real Alan Turing, with a rare smile
|
||||||
![]() Howard Hughes is a name that evokes American mythos to those of us of a certain age. He made and flew the fastest planes, made and directed the biggest movies and was the world’s richest man. Most of us forget about the movies, enormous though they were. Martin Scorsese – cinema’s number one …
WikChip Video
Love Kate lovingly looking at Howard
|
||||||
![]() Newton Knight is a newly essential Matthew McConaughey role that finally knights Newt Knight as a true American hero. Even more, Free State of Jones is an only-in-America story, so corny it could only be true. A deeply moral white man frees enslaved blacks and marries a black woman during the C…
WikChip Video
CBS Sunday Morning feature on Newt Kn...
|
||||||
![]() Okinawa was once a byword for the savagery of war. Hacksaw Ridge plumbs the depths of that savagery and the grace that also attended it in the form of Medal of Honor recipient Desmond Doss. A conscientious objector, Doss was unsurpassed in bravery, personally rescuing 75 wounded men from the "t…
WikChip Video
Vince Vaughn talks war movie
|
||||||
![]() Casablanca it’s not, but Allied is a damn good romantic thriller set in WWII Casablanca, or at least initially set there. Most of the movie then takes place in London during the blitz, with Brad Pitt’s proto-007 thrust into domestic espionage against his wife, played by Marion Cotillard. It’s…
WikChip Video
Brad, Marion & Zemeckis talk Allied
|
||||||
![]() Kong has no dong. It’d be too dangerous, which is why Legendary Pictures won’t go there, even with a post-modern blonde playing the strong woman who has a moment or two with him. Hey, how do we even know Kong is male? No dong, no proof. Beautiful Brie Larson may have had an I kissed a girl expe…
WikChip Video
Land of the Giants
|
||||||
![]() Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk sets a new standard in faux cinéma vérité, so extreme is its IMAX-sized verisimilitude. As to its subject, it’s not as if the Miracle of Dunkirk has been ignored in World War II movies, most recently forming the backdrop of Their Finest…
WikChip Video
Historical Context of Dunkirk
|