Title Tws summary Trust Year ▲ Viewable | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Minions aren’t just evil, they’re bad, or at least their movie is bad. It’s a children’s movie and I’m an adult, sure. But other kiddie pix work for parents as well as kids, and not just those from Pixar. Part of the problem is that the villain is more ridiculous than scary and isn’t funny a… |
||||||
The future of TV politics hit the ABC News airwaves during the 1968 presidential nominating conventions. Best of Enemies, a transcendent documentary, brings it all back to life. William F. Buckley debating Gore Vidal is the proximate focus, but the larger story is the rise of opinion-centric TV…
WikChip Video
Brilliant and Brilliantly Entertaining
|
||||||
Nina Simone’s name and presence had occasionally penetrated my consciousness and always piqued my interest. Happily, this well done documentary finally brought her consequential music and politics alive. Dubbed the High Priestess of Soul, she was a unique and uniquely transfixing artist, fusin…
WikChip Video
Liz Garbus on her Nina Simone doc
|
||||||
Chet Baker was bodaciously gifted. The James Dean of Jazz had his own style of cool, West Coast Swing. Plus, he was supermodel handsome. Ethan Hawke – the moviestar who plays Chet Baker – isn’t nearly as handsome as Baker was, even allowing for Hawke being in his 40s, playing a music idol in h…
WikChip Video
The real Chet does real Born to Be Blue
|
||||||
A moviestar who directs himself playing an iconic figure in a dramatic biopic has a fool for a leading-man. Don Cheadle provides proof of this as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead, following in the footsteps of Kevin Spacey, who stubbed his toe directing himself as Bobby Darin in the similarly flawe…
WikChip Video
Kind of Blue is Kind of Perfect
|
||||||
National Lampoon – the maidenhead of post-modern comedy – was the ultimate risqué magazine for “well-to-do nobodies” in the Seventies. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon lists in its title four conditions associated with the Lampoon, another being being ROFL. This gr…
WikChip Video
Doug Kenney, comedy genius
|
||||||
Eat That Question is well titled. Frank Zappa in His Own Words is FZ waxing loquacious, repeatedly. Zappa, the pugnacious, contradictory and iconoclastic rockstar, indeed the consummate rockstar, trades heavily on his privilege and arrogance, by turns funny, shocking and ridiculous, a Trump t…
WikChip Video
Václav Havel was a big Zappa fan.
|
||||||
Hands of Stone is a ham-fisted biopic of boxing great Roberto Durán. Raging Bull it’s not, notwithstanding Robert De Niro in a major role. That said, it does provide clear insight into Durán’s impoverished childhood, rise to prominence and fall from grace after his “No Mas” capitulation to Suga…
WikChip Image
Ana de Armas has star quality.
|
||||||
Beatlemania boggles because of the Beatles and the mania around them, especially from ‘62 to ’66 when they exploded on the world and toured to rabid crowds of hormonal girls. Ron Howard’s fun and insightful doc about those halcyon days doesn’t stint on John, Paul, George & Ringo, or the mania…
WikChip Video
"Eric, here is the American public" -...
|
||||||
An intriguing tale of a botched UN mission in the Congo in 1961. Irish Commandant Pat Quinlan leads resilient crew of Irish soldiers against French and other mercenaries loyal to the mining interests. The movie does a great job conveying the gallantry during the battle by the neophyte Irish sol…
|