My Dear Miss Aldrich (1937, George B. Seitz)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 17, 2012
All My Dear Miss Aldrich is missing is a good script. Well, it’s missing some other things, but with a good script, it could have survived. The film has a lot of events in the first thirty or forty minutes, with the remaining minutes centered on a mystery. But it’s not really a mystery because Aldr read more
How to Be a Detective (1936, Felix E. Feist)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 11, 2012
How to Be a Detective is a disjointed Robert Benchley miniature. He sets it up as a lecture on detecting practices and director Feist (and Benchley and his co-writers) miss the jokes. Towards the end, Feist mimics detective movie filmmaking techniques, which gives the short a boost, but it’s read more
Miss Pinkerton (1932, Lloyd Bacon)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 10, 2012
It’s not difficult to assign blame for Miss Pinkerton‘s failings, it’s difficult to identify anything good about it. I suppose Joan Blondell bad in the lead, but she isn’t good. She’s just doing a persona. Wait, George Brent is good. He’s the police inspector wh read more
One Wet Night (1924, William Watson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 9, 2012
One Wet Night is profoundly unfunny. It’s not terrible or anything, just not funny. It even might deserve points for having the idiot butler be a white guy (Bert Roach). But Roach is the butler to two more idiots, a couple played by Alice Howell and Neely Edwards. Wet is a great example why u read more
The Spiral Staircase (1945, Robert Siodmak)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 8, 2012
The Spiral Staircase opens with this lovely homage to silent cinema. Director Siodmak takes great care with the setting in time–Nicholas Musuraca’s sumptuous cinematography helps–and then Spiral becomes a waiting game. Certainly if Siodmak took such great care with one sequence, h read more
The Hobbit (1966, Gene Deitch)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 4, 2012
Director Deitch does a couple brilliant things with The Hobbit. First, he condenses a novel of some three hundred pages to eleven minutes. I’m fairly sure it’s not a faithful adaptation, but there’s a wizard, a hobbit and a ring so it’s fine by me. Second, he turns The Hobbi read more
Our Lady of the Sphere (1972, Larry Jordan)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 2, 2012
Our Lady of the Sphere has two definite narratives. Jordan’s cut-up animation seemingly defies narrative, as eggs are landing on the moon, which then grows flowers, but I found two definite ones. The first has to do with a falling child. Jordan opens Sphere with the child falling, later showi read more
Monkey Business (1931, Norman Z. McLeod)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 28, 2012
It takes about seventeen minutes for Monkey Business to start. The first seventeen minutes are the Brothers running around a cruise ship, on the run from the ship’s officers. In those seventeen minutes–about a fifth of the picture–they manage to get in a number of gags, including read more
Diagonal Symphony (1924, Viking Eggeling)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 27, 2012
If I knew how Eggeling made the shapes in Diagonal Symphony move–or if I was really into geometry (but probably not)–I might appreciate it more. The short is some shapes doubling and duplicating until they eventually start rescinding. The shapes aren’t interesting; in fact, when E read more
All Night Long (1924, Harry Edwards)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 18, 2012
Harry Edwards flops on every sight gag in All Night Long, seemingly a combination of his inability to direct comedy and star Harry Langdon’s lack of comic timing. However, otherwise Edwards does a great job with the short. He’s got an excellent dinner table sequence and a lot of special read more
Boys Will Be Joys (1925, Robert F. McGowan)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 16, 2012
Boys Will Be Joys is a strange Our Gang outing, simply because the story doesn’t belong to the Gang. Instead, sixty year-old industrialist Paul Weigel has grown bored being a successful grown-up and just wants to goof off. Luckily, he happens to be developing a plot of land the Gang has built read more
Love’s Surprises (1915, Max Linder)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 15, 2012
Calling Love’s Surprises a tepid comedy would be an understatement. Writer-director-star Linder fails to understand the very basics of drama, which puts the whole short in the dumps right off. It opens with a dinner party. The three men at the party all run off to grab hidden flowers for a gi read more
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, Jack Arnold)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 14, 2012
Almost all of Creature from the Black Lagoon is a compelling mix of science fiction, workplace drama and horror. The Creature makes a great “villain” because there’s nothing human about him (except maybe his fixation on leading lady Julie Adams) so it’s possible to both fear read more
Geometria (1987, Guillermo del Toro), the director’s cut
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 13, 2012
About the only thing good about Geometria is Juan Carlos Muñez’s photography. It’s very stylized, very red and blue, but it’s competent throughout and there are a couple great shots. It’s clear Muñez and del Toro shot it in an apartment or house, but Muñez gives it real scal read more
The Glass Key (1942, Stuart Heisler)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 12, 2012
The Glass Key‘s a murder mystery, but its solution–and even its investigation–is incidental to the rest of the picture. From about seven minutes in, director Heisler defines Key as something quite different. Leading man Alan Ladd isn’t a detective, he isn’t even partic read more
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955, Val Guest)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 10, 2012
“No character development, please, we’re British.” There’s nothing to recommend The Quatermass Xperiment. Walter J. Harvey’s black and white photography is fantastic, but it can’t recommend the film. Xperiment is so stupid, it appears screenwriters Richard H. Lan read more
The Vampires: The Ring That Kills (1915, Louis Feuillade)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 8, 2012
In The Ring That Kills, Feuillade goes with a gradual build-up and a rather tense finish. There’s no recap of the previous Vampires entry, which gets confusing towards the end, when a supporting character returns. Feuillade uses that character, played by Marcel Lévesque, as comic relief. He&# read more
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, Robert Zemeckis)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 7, 2012
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, even with the absolute mess of a final act, would have really benefited from a better director. Oh, Zemeckis isn’t bad. With Dean Cundey shooting the film, it’d be hard for it to look bad and it doesn’t. But Zemeckis doesn’t–apparently–kn read more
Halloween 5 (1989, Dominique Othenin-Girard)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 3, 2012
Halloween 5 shouldn’t be mind-numbingly boring. There’s no chance something called Halloween 5 is going to be smart, so I was expecting mind-numbing stupidity… but not boredom. The movie opens with a recap of the previous entry, with some changes to the ending to keep Michael Myer read more
Tummy Trouble (1989, Rob Minkoff and Frank Marshall)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 2, 2012
Tummy Trouble goes out of its way to pay homage to Tex Avery (down to a Droopy cameo) and director Minkoff does a decent job of it. Not to say Tummy‘s successful, however. While Minkoff apes Avery all right, it’s a combination of too obvious and too reverential. Outside being an “ read more