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gwithers
Reviews
Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star (2003)
A waste of good film and time!
I must agree with the comments from Canada. I've never thought that David Spade was remotely amusing and I don't understand why people find him talented at all. Maybe this prejudiced me against the movie but I thought this was one movie that didn't need to get made.
Columbo: It's All in the Game (1993)
Faye Really Steals the Show
This one was very intriguing. Faye Dunaway didn't actually "fall in love with" Columbo, nor he with her. They were playing mind games with each other. At the end, Columbo called his wife and told her he loved her. You were supposed to wonder "Where on earth is Mrs. Columbo" and why is he acting like he really cares about Faye Dunaway's character? FD's character underestimated the wily Lt. and her vanity made her think that Columbo was too distracted by her charms to risk making her angry. There was also a not-so-subtle lesbian implication, because the viewers weren't sure whether Claudia Christian was her daughter or her former girlfriend.
Faye Dunaway looks more attractive as she ages which is rare for a fair-skinned woman. She looked like white trash when she was young and now she has style and sophistication and classic good looks.
I think she really deserved an Emmy for her role here, and it shows what a fine actor she is when given a decent role (unlike that over-the-top cartoonish Mommie Dearest).
Against All Odds (1984)
Film Noir - You've Gotta Be Joking!
What is it with some people? You find a word that sounds like you are knowledgeable about the film industry and use it to death. Never mind if its correct, just use it and sound like you are some intellectual film critic. Ha!
That said, why were we supposed to care about the lives of two washed-up bores? By the time Terry (Jeff Bridges) found Jessie (Rachel Ward) in Mexico, I had long stopped caring whether she was alive or dead.
The so-called plot - a bad-tempered, rebellious brat (acting more like a silly teenager than a grown woman) lives with a gangster to spite her wealthy family. They fight, she leaves him and is supposedly so intriguing that he hires a has-been football player to find her and bring her back. When Terry finds her, he falls in love with her. Why? She was a rude, cold, manipulative liar. Neither one of these characters was fleshed out enough to make them appealing.
I felt sorry for Jake (James Wood). Yes, he was a shady type but he genuinely cared about Jessie and trusted Terry to find her. I don't think he would have tried to hurt her or make her stay if she really let him know that she was through with him. He just wanted a second chance and was willing to do whatever it took to get it. He was betrayed both by Terry and his hired help, Tommy (Dorian Harewood). He even defended the goon when someone made an insulting comment about him. He had loyalty to the people who worked for him, which doesn't make him seem that bad. At least he was honest enough to know what he was and not make excuses. How was Jessie's mother's friend Ben any better? Ben was Jake's boss but because he was wealthy and hid behind a cloak of "respectability" he pretended to be superior to the Jakes of the world.
Terry should have counted his lucky stars in escaping from the clutches of these repulsive people. I think he should have taken a second look at that legal secretary. She put her life and job on the line to help him and nearly became a doberman's dinner for her trouble!
Columbo: Columbo Likes the Nightlife (2003)
Peter Falk is looking worn out and appears as if he no longer enjoys being Lt. Columbo
Contains Spoilers! This was a very strange episode and I'm not sure whether enjoyable is the right word. Its seems as they are trying to attract a younger, hipper audience for Columbo. The music was loud and intrusive and the death was a little more graphic than we are used to seeing in this mystery series.
Basically: the young, ex-wife of a mobster accidentally kills him in her home in the middle of an argument. She is supposedly some sort of minor television actress who calls on her club manager boyfriend for help in disposing of the body. He is the owner of a new "rave" dance club and is preparing for its grand opening after receiving the necessary funds. The ex-husband is an investor and the club owner needs the guys check to clear so that he can proceed with his grand opening. He is all too willing to help his girlfriend for business and personal reasons. I don't know the actor's name. He appears to have a middle-class English accent and is a little more aggressive than Columbo's usual suspects. The girl is a blond with too much black eye make up and too tight clothes. She is a real bimbo without a conscious and a total airhead. They hide the body and use the man's credit cards to pretend that he is still alive until the money is released. Unfortunately a sleazy tabloid reporter has pictures of them rolling the body into a rug and he asked the club owner for $250,000 in return for the negatives or he will publish the pictures.
The club owner goes to the reporter's office and when his back is turned, attempts to strangle him. It gets rather ludicrous at this point, because the guy is struggling and fighting back. Finally, the club owner thinks he has killed the guy and turns his back on him. The reporter recovers from this "little choking incident" and tries to get away. The club owner tries choking him again and finally ends up pushing him out of the window! He leaves a note to make it look like suicide.
Of course, Columbo knows better but he does some really weird things while investigating the murder scene: he sniffs the dead guys feet and looks at his toes, he puts his hand in the toilet bowl and stirs the water around, disgusting! He tells a police patrolman that the dead guy recently clipped his toenails and used mouthwash. From this he deduces that the guy must have been expecting to be with a woman and it is unlikely that he committed suicide.
This conclusion is unbelievable and ridiculous! Maybe the guy always freshened up in his office at that time of day, or any number of reasons. But Columbo decides this case is indeed a homicide.
The mob is also interested because the dead ex-husband was the son of a big time mafia leader and he was being followed by the reporter whom the club owner pushed out the window. The mobster (he was the guy who formerly played the part of Big Pussy Bompinsero on the Sopranos) tells Columbo that they are also interested in finding out who killed the ex-husband.
I won't tell you how the club owner was "busted" by Columbo but the manne r in which he obtained proof was farfetched and disappointing. I don't think there is a police investigator on earth who would have come up with the evidence.
Anyhow, on the opening night of the club, Columbo barges in with a warrant and the owner and his girlfriend are handcuffed and arrested in front of a crowd of "ravers" The mob rep is standing in the doorway of the club looking approvingly at Columbo.
This entry was less than I expect from this wonderful series and I've seen all of the episodes of Columbo from the very beginning. Peter Falk is looking worn out and appears as if he no longer enjoys being Lt. Columbo. Even Lt. Colbumo seems like he is just going through the motions of investigating the crime. Its like the challenge of pursuing some arrogant rich criminal is no longer interesting to him. He is a little mellow and complacent in this one.
I give this one a 6 out of 10.
The Birds (1963)
I can't believe these nasty birds have bitten holes in my Edith Head suit!
I love this movie and I watch it about once every couple of months. The genius of Alfred Hitchcock is undisputed and has been well-documented so I'm not going discuss that. If a viewer doesn't understand the subtleties and layers of meaning in this film, then it really wasn't for them. These are the same people who like in-your-face scares, and can't understand a movie that doesn't beat you over the head with violence and bloodshed.
There are enough things to be read into the characters and scenes in this movie, that it would take endless reviews to cover them. Many of them have been touched upon in the reviews here, but I would like to add a few more comments about Melanie Daniel's character:
Did you notice the coy simper on her face just before the seagull attacked her in the boat? She's posing for Mitch, her head is cocked to one side and she has this annoying, fake look on her face and the bird swoops down and ruins it. I wonder what her first words to Mitch would have been if the bird had not attacked her?
I didn't feel sympathy for her when she was at Cathy's birthday party talking to Mitch about her mother and how she had abandoned her when she was a child. Her voice gets this phony catch when she says, `I don't know where she is.' She is so obviously trying to be the poor little rich girl and elicit Mitch's sympathy. Why would she sound near tears talking about a mother who had to have been out of her life for at least the last 15 years? [Tippi Hedren's voice really got on my nerves too.]
Melanie seems a little too smug and self assured in her attractiveness and she expects all men to find her enchanting. The only reason she goes after Mitch is because he didn't seem to be impressed with her. She is like a child who sees something she can't have and immediately sets out to try and get it any way she can. She seemed like a selfish, relentless sort; buying the love birds, driving 60 miles to Mitch's home town to find him ostensibly to deliver the birds to Cathy in time for her birthday.
And then, we have the famous scene where she goes upstairs by herself. Who in their right mind would decide that `Gee, everybody is asleep and even though this isn't my house, I think I'll just nip upstairs with this flashlight and see if the birds are gone.' Wouldn't it have made more sense to wake up Mitch and ask him to go with her? Why did she even care? I think she got exactly what was coming to her. No more did bad things happen to other people, here was the golden girl herself being assaulted like any other fool who blundered into a nasty situation that they couldn't control. I think the shock of the birds actually daring to attack her, shocked her so much that she couldn't move. She couldn't believe it was really happening. Otherwise, why not swat a few of them off with that big flashlight and open the door and get the hell out of there?
I think the ending was inevitable. Melanie Daniels thought that she could do whatever she wanted in life because she was rich and attractive and felt that she didn't have to suffer the consequences of her actions. She thought life would always be like this but her experience in Bodega Bay proved her wrong.
I'd like to discuss Annie Heyworth too, but I'll leave it for another time.
Children of a Lesser God (1986)
What Movies Were Meant To Be
This is one my favorite movies of all time. The quality of the acting leaves me breathless. The scene where Sarah is dancing slowly to a song by the Staples Singers says so much - the tempo is fast and most people were disco dancing or "stepping" to "I'll Take You There." Sarah feels the real underlying slow beat of the music and responds to that. It was a very moving scene.
Piper Laurie as her mother was phenomenol. Her expressions and body language said so much more than her words. You could tell she really loved Sarah and was frustrated that she didn't really understand her. She also had a little bit of the "bury your head in the sand" approach to Sarah's deafness.
Sarah was determined to have the world accept her on HER own terms and simply turned her back on it when it did not. Sarah was intelligent, beautiful and fun. She couldn't understand why people seemed to define and categorize her by her deafness. She was so much more than that and William Hurt's (I don't remember his name in the movie) character was sensitive enough to recognize that. His character was a little condescending and pushy, and I can see where he would get on any girl's nerves because he was not a good listener. He wanted Sarah to be the person he though she should be and justified it under his guise of "helping" her to cope in a hearing world. She was smart enough to figure him out and reject his attempt to mold her.
You could feel Sarah's loneliness in her silent world and you knew that she wanted love, friends and happiness just like the rest of us, but didn't know if she would ever get them.
I really loved the character and the whole movie. It gave us a brief glimpse into a deaf person's world through some extraordinary scenes: Sarah swimming and describing to William Hurt exactly how she imagined waves sounded, and getting it right; Marian Lesser communicating only in sign language at the party which gave William Hurt's character a chance to see things from another perspective. I think he learned that there is more than one standard way to live and enjoy life and being unable to hear isn't the worst thing that could happen to a person.
Martin (1992)
An Urban Minstrel Show for the '90s
This was one of the stupidest, most embarrassing black sitcoms I have ever watched in my life! This was just the kind of "minstrel show" that Bill Cosby mentioned as demeaning to black people everywhere. Why not call this show "YO, Y'all" or "Coon Man"?
Contrast Martin with two excellent family shows like The Cosbys and Family Matters. Both of those sitcoms gave an accurate portrayal of black family interaction (not income necessarily, because the Cosbys were not your average middle-class family), which gave other races a chance to really see that black families are no different than their own middle-class relatives. The positive benefits of an honest look at black family life are totally reversed by low-class shows like Martin.
I'm sure the majority of people who just loved Martin were young, ebonics-speaking, neck rolling, head shaking clowns who thoroughly identified with him. I used to think that Tisha Campbell-Martin had style and class but this show really lessened her appeal as an actress and as a person in my opinion. Why would an attractive, well-educated business executive be attracted to (let alone marry) a loud-mouthed, uncouth, uneducated, immature "Negro" (because he didn't epitomize a real African American, middle-class male at all) with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever and who took every opportunity to embarrass her in public and in front of her friends? Their relationship wasn't even close to being realistic to me.
Tichina Arnold has always played the role of the hard-faced, little ghetto mama in whatever show she's in. Pam and Martin would have been a more plausible couple, than all of you ignorant "yos" out there could have really had some laughs.