Fat City Movie Review

From the annals of long since forgotten films comes Fat City from 1972. Every calendar year is overloaded with movie releases that, even if modestly successful at the time, are destined to recede into memory as the years pass. The status of classic or cult classic is reserved fro only a handful of films each year. You need only go back eighteen years to find a Best Picture nominee called The Full Monty, for example. It was a small British film that found great success in the United States. But how many people think of it now? How highly regarded is it by those who do recall it? Now consider that film’s status with another twenty-five years of age. So The Full Monty is no Fat City, of course, if for no other reason than the latter was directed by John Huston, a Hollywood legend. But even his fame never elevated the film above the level of New Wave Hollywood footnote.

The Fisher King Movie Review

Although The Fisher King is definitely much more of a Terry Gilliam film than a Robin Williams show, I’d never seen it before and so took the unfortunate occasion of Williams’ death to watch and review it. I say it’s a Gilliam film, but thtat’s based almost entirely on the visual style. The story elements contain themes that continually come up in Gilliam’s films such as the age-old conflict between good and evil. But in the character of Parry, a homeless ex-college professor suffering traumatic delusions owing to the witnessing of the brutal murder of his wife, it also becomes, in retrospect, a great Robin Williams vehicle.

TRON: Legacy Movie Review

I’m not really sure there were legions of fans or even the box office pedigree from TRON to warrant a sequel nearly 30 years later, but since the Hollywood studios have all but run out of ideas, Disney went ahead and made one. TRON: Legacy picks up several years after the conclusion of the original and then leaps many years into the future to bring us to the present. It also follows thematically from the first film’s warning (more quaint than foreboding) about the impending computer age.

TRON warned of the potential dangers of machines creeping more and more, ever so insidiously into our lives, depicting the consequences of a megalomaniac giving rise to a computer system that could eventually take over.  Legacy follows in a grand tradition of cinema depicting man vs. machine conflicts from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Matrix in upping the ante from a human villain operating a computer system for nefarious purposes to artificial intelligence attempting to create a more perfect world at the expense of their human designers.

True Grit Movie Review: Jeff Bridges Dons the Eye Patch for an Iconic Role

Proverbs 28:1 tells us “The wicked flee where none pursueth.” So it is with the coward Tom Chaney, the wanted outlaw in Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Charles Portis’s True Grit. Their title card at the beginning of the film leaves out the second part of that proverb: “But the righteous are bold as a lion.” So it is with Mattie Ross, the 14 year old girl who hires Marshal Rooster Cogburn to take her on an expedition into Indian country to capture the man who shot and killed her father. Although Mattie seeks out Cogburn because she heard he’s a man with “true grit,” the story reveals that in fact she is the one with that attribute.

Old Movie Review of Tron: Not exactly a classic, but a staple long missing from my diet

It’s easy to forget in the digital age, when nearly every film (a nearly obsolete word, come to think of it), if not shot digitally, has some digital elements, that computer computer generated images had its origin somewhere. CGI and digital technology inundate movies nowadays. They’re used to build action sequences from the ground up; create fantastic creatures; eliminate unwanted elements such as safety wires, boom mikes, and even an actor’s skin imperfections, from the frame.

Disney Studios’ Tron was one of the first feature films to employ heavy use of 3D CGI animation. It’s remarkable to consider that only eleven years passed between this film and Jurassic Park, two films that are hardly in the same league as far as CGI animation goes. And yet the latter film owes a great debt of gratitude to the former.