Monthly Archives: April 2019

If “Dumbo” taught us nothing else, it’s that if you’re going to make a movie with children interacting with animals, you need real animals for that to connect with an audience. So if you’re making a movie about a girl … Continue reading →

Sure, they don Catholic habits and call themselves nuns, even though they aren’t Catholic or even practicing Christians. But that’s neither here nor there. Other religions have devout sisters who call themselves “nuns” just to keep it simple. And it’s … Continue reading →

A boom town is always more attractive on the outside looking in. For many of those there before the gold, oil, timber or Big Ag rush began, the despair and isolation isn’t lessened by the fact that suddenly a lot … Continue reading →

A modern day Western about women who work “outside the law” to get what they need? I’m there. The town of the title, “Little Woods,” is supposedly in North Dakota. I used to LIVE in North Dakota. They told me, … Continue reading →

Back in 1970, Dr. Edwin Land, the genius who invented the Polaroid/Land Camera, did a cryptic short film — just him in a lab coat wandering through a gutted factory talking about the future. Land pulled a wallet for size … Continue reading →

Bob Probert was a hockey goon from the Golden Age of Hockey Goons, a two-fisted brawler who made Detroit fans care more about the fights than the scoreboard when he skated for the Red Wings. From the mid-80s into the … Continue reading →

“The Goodbye Girl” is, like any modern classic, a film you not only remember seeing, you remember where and who you saw it with if you’re of a certain age. I remember those facts because of an argument I lost. … Continue reading →

The creators of “Penguins,” this year’s DisneyNature Earth Day gift to moviegoers, walk a fine line between cute and “cutesie.” The producers hired comic actor Ed Helms (“The Office,””The Hangover”) to narrate. They anthropomorphize the Adélie penguins the film is … Continue reading →

Most righteous thing Disney does as a movie studio is celebrate Earth Day with a nature doc Every year.

As I said in my review, “They killed ‘Hellboy.‘” Early marketing, trailers etc., showed promise. But the Neil Marshall/David Harbour “Hellboy” experience, a debacle of a reboot, opened to awful reviews — Lionsgate didn’t screen it widely enough to suggest … Continue reading →