crunchykitten Reviews

Lark Rise to Candleford (2008–2011)

What an awful waste

[6/10 · 19 November 2012]

Years ago I read Flora Thompson's three little memoirs and since then have reread them several times- Lark Rise, Over To Candleford, and Candleford Green. They've stayed with me for 50 years, perfect vignettes of English village life in the transitional period of the Late Victorian Age. Recalled without romance or apology, Thompson nevertheless invests the time and places with the grace of her own memories. It's a shame that the writers of this series couldn't see the memoirs for what they were and instead obscured them with bad plots,cheap romance and ersatz emotion- like a venerable English oak being "improved" by glued-on plastic flowers.

But even discounting the wretched ravaging of a classic historical memoir, it's just another costume soap, and not a very good one. "Will The Beautiful Postal Carrier Choose the Good-Hearted Village Boy, or the Snobby Middle Class Rotter? Will The Village Slattern Go To Prison? How Will The Still Young And Beautiful Postmistress Resolve Her Unrequited Love For The Squire?" I mean, really. If you can't figure out those plot points you probably don't deserve to own a television.

The Voice of Bugle Ann (1936)

You'll never forget Bugle Ann

[8/10 · 15 August 2012]

I just watched this movie on TCM for the first time in more than 60 years. Like many other older reviewers, I didn't remember the plot with 100% accuracy. I just remembered how strongly I reacted to it emotionally- I think I can't have been more than 8 years old when I first saw it.

It was terrific. As a kid, I was first strongly impressed by the hunting scenes. I'm a southerner, and I knew many relatives and friend who hunted in the style shown in the film- sitting around a fire, listening to the hounds chase a coon or a fox. The film was adapted from a book by a great American writer, MacKinley Kantor. The book certainly has a lot of sentiment going for it. But it also has a strong, mysterious plot, fine performances from good actors, and a simple sweetness that's impossible to find in a contemporary film, even those aimed at sub-teens. Nor is it unintelligent- another quality that's currently hard to come by.

Once Upon a Time (2011–2018)

Unbelievable. In oh, so many ways...

[2/10 · 12 February 2012]

This series is so jaw-droppingly bad, my mind was boggled by the dribbling accolades of other viewers. Then I saw a review that said something like, "If you were a fan of "Lost" just stay tuned! You'll LOVE it!!!!" (I may have left out a ! or two.) Of course, that reviewer was absolutely right. I've watched maybe a half dozen episodes, and the writers have changed the paradigm at least four times. That is, they used the now-famous "Lost" principle of fantasy writing: if you introduce enough confusing minor side plots, oddly compelling but ultimately pointless minor characters, ersatz "mysteries" and alarming character about-faces that have the main actors alternately weeping for their lost innocence and true loves and then ripping out and eating the raw hearts of infants - well then by gum, this is the show for you! But- and I do absolutely and personally guarantee this- you will NEVER see anything like a real plot resolution, because the writers and producers plan to throw so many complications into the mix that they think, and past experience has shown, that the fans are too dim to remember more than a few of the most glamorous or grisly, so however they end it, no one will care, and few will notice that in any way that matters, the whole thing just stunk on ice.

The Beautiful Truth (2008)

Sad and scary

[1/10 · 27 August 2011]

This film is blatant promotion of the rankest health quackery, an "alternative cancer therapy" that bilks hundreds of desperate people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars- then sends them home to drink carrot juice, squirt coffee up their bums, and die. This film was made to appeal to the least discriminating and most vulnerable members of society, in an attempt to get their money before they die and it's no longer in reach. The film offers no clinical evidence for the Gershon Therapy (there is none) and no credible science to support it. It's sad and scary and more than unfortunate- it's criminal. But it's not new. The same ridiculous garbage has been sold- at the highest possible prices- to a gullible public, under different names, for a long time.

Downton Abbey (2010–2015)

Predictable and disappointing

[6/10 · 21 January 2011]

I've only seen the first 2 episodes of this series, watched back-to-back. It's perfectly beautiful, of course- if there's anything the English can do, it's period dramas, and they're usually worth seeing just for the sheer gorgeousness of the sets, the costuming, the countryside and sometimes the city streets of the past. The cast is also really good, and not overly familiar to American viewers.(Except for Maggie Smith,who's always a pleasure to watch, even if you do have to wonder if there's some obscure BBC regulation that whenever there's a dowager role in a period drama to be cast, she gets first right of refusal...) But the dialogue is sprinkled with anachronism and the plodding predictability of the script is a terrible shame. From the middle of the first episode, you'll know exactly who's going to fall in love with whom, who's going to get his/her comeuppance, which enemies are going to find a grudging respect for each other, which snotty upper-class person is going to discover the sterling qualities of the lower classes, etc etc etc. It's cheap, we've seen it, most of us movie fans could have written it, and it's a waste of time if you're looking for anything beyond the mediocre.

True Grit (2010)

Best Western in years and certainly the most original in decades

[9/10 · 1 January 2011]

A terrific effort- respectful of the novel in a way that Hollywood movies almost never are, with a wonderful primary cast and a large number of character actors who all do a great job. I'm an old (63)Texan who's watched a lot (dozens and dozens)of Westerns set in Texas, set in Arizona, set in Mexico, New Mexico, you name it- and they all, oddly, looked exactly like they were set in southern California. This movie was filmed in the Texas Hill Country, and the scenery is perfectly in accord with much of south eastern Oklahoma and Arkansas. There are scenes in scrub timber and on rocky hillsides that are perfectly beautiful and quite fresh to the Great American Western.

I am astonished by the number of reviewers who rate this movie as inferior to the film starring John Wayne. You know, there's a reason nobody ever tapped Wayne for an Old Vic revival of King Lear. In any film Wayne ever made, the script, the story, the other actors were all there in secondary importance to the great Wayne, and no one watching the film ever was allowed to forget it - the movie belonged to John Wayne. He played the same character over and over and over again, he played him at age 30 and age 65, in all kinds of settings, but he was the same guy. Wayne was hugely popular and is still, but he was never much of an actor. He was a movie star. The film he made of True Grit was a John Wayne movie.

In contrast, the Coen Brothers movie was cast with accomplished, versatile actors playing realistic characters from a brief but distinct period of American history, respectfully and skillfully adapted from a marvelously original novel. The only reason I didn't give it ten stars is that I believe the highest rating should be reserved for relatively few films.

Can-Can (1960)

Peee-Yerr!!

[5/10 · 19 May 2010]

I saw this movie when it was new- I was thirteen- and it embarrassed me then. It embarrasses me now. Sinatra and MacLaine were rather obviously miscast because they were big box office at the time and the assumption was that they could carry anything. Of course, in order to make the sly, intelligently witty and musically sophisticated Cole Porter vehicle appropriate for these limited performers, the show had to be completely denatured and stripped of every modicum of wit and intelligence- as well as all the best Porter songs. MacLaine was a fine dancer, but the non-dance portions of her performance combined strident shrieking and self-conscious cuteness in a particularly strange mix which the audience is supposed to somehow find charming. Sinatra, at the very height (or depth) of his finger-snapping, "Hey, Kooky, crazy, ring-a-ding-ding" phase simply sleepwalks through the non-singing portions of his role. Urk. Jourdan and Chevalier looked embarrassed, too- I hope they made enough money to make up for suffering through this mess.

V (2009–2011)

Oh, man, what a stinker

[3/10 · 4 November 2009]

Who wrote this cr*p? Didn't anybody in pre-production ask, "Didn't anybody see the enormous spaceships coming?" Or, "How did they get combat troops onto the streets about ten seconds after the hot alien chick finished talking?" Or, "Wouldn't extremely technologically superior aliens who've been here secretly for decades have key broadcasters in place and ready to go?"

Fans of science-fiction are always and forever ready to cut the TV space operas some slack- I mean, a LOT of slack- because A. All prime-time television (and almost all television, period) is written for 12-year-olds with low-normal IQs, and B. Television producers don't read science-fiction so they don't know which ideas are sort of fresh and which were first proposed by Wells, Verne, and the pulp writers of the 1930s through the 1950s. But I'm willing to bet, with anyone who cares to, that V will just get worse and worse, because Purveyors of prime time television don't care about either A or B.

The Illustrated Man (1969)

Period Piece

[6/10 · 29 September 2009]

Lyrical language, though it may make for unforgettable literature, does not necessarily make for great movies. In the Sixties Ray Bradbury was America's premier fantasist, for excellent and unarguable reasons. All of the familiar adjectives used by his reviewers - lyrical, poetic, haunting, charming and etcetera- were (and are) true. He wrote GREAT fantasies, and we all, all of us who were his fans in the Sixties, we all wanted to see movies made from the stories. We looked forward to The Illustrated Man with huge and pleasurable anticipation. I don't believe that it occurred to any of us that our own, personal visualizations were not necessarily shared by all other readers. And certainly not, it turns out, by film makers.

Almost without exception, the screen adaptations of Bradbury's stories failed, to one degree or another. The Illustrated Man is probably the worst of the lot, excepting the dismal Twilight Zone segments. The script is bad, yes, but the design is worse - an ugly and dated "Sci-Fi" Hollywood modernism- unbelievable a decade before this movie was made, and laughable in 1969. Not surprisingly the best segments are those in which Steiger and Bloom are simply allowed to act their characters. And as other reviewers have pointed out, those scenes were hardly Oscar-bait.

Even so, it's worth watching- as a failed example. Fahrenheit 451 is just as bad, and even more turgid, if possible. The TV adaptation of The Martian Chronicles is much better, a real attempt at a faithful rendering. But the absolutely best Bradbury adaptation is the Disney film of Something Wicked This Way Comes, and those who dismiss it as a "kid movie" are, I think ignorant of Bradbury's work. It's just terrific.

Eureka (2006–2012)

Just ridiculous

[4/10 · 1 September 2009]

In spite of the entirely unbelievable premise, antique B-movie formula plots, tired characterizations and a droolingly idiotic presentation of science, "Eureka" undeniably has charm. The charm is almost entirely reliant on an excellent cast, which against all odds has managed to invest this (literal and figurative) farce with warmth and plausible emotional engagement. However, in the latest season (2009)even those lightweight justifications for existence have disappeared.

The premise: America's best scientific minds are sequestered in a charming but entirely secret little town in (apparently) California's mountains. Despite the fact that Eureka has existed since the 1950s, no one outside the town has notice the steady stream of miraculous explosions, implosions, disappearances, multiple-duplications of heavenly bodies, contamination of the atmosphere, interferences with the order of the solar system and the inner workings of planet Earth, etc. Ever. The resident scientists are unbelievably brilliant, able to effect all the above happenings, sometimes while still in grade-school, but are also somehow completely incompetent at controlling them. They must be repeatedly rescued and set straight by the slightly dim, handsome-but-ordinary good-guy sheriff. Heroically, using a pencil eraser and a bottle of milk of magnesia.

It's not Science Fiction. It's not Sci-Fi (or SyFy, whatever that is). It's Skiffy, and it's not even good Skiffy. It's too silly.

Grey Gardens (2009 TV Movie)

Much better than expected

[6/10 · 19 April 2009]

This is a respectable cinematic comment on the 1975 documentary of the same title, which was a gem of a film about a mother and daughter who considered themselves and each other, and very little else, endlessly fascinating. The principals, Barrymore and Lange (both of whom are generally considered to be lightweights), did a wonderful job with their characterizations. In general the script and the actors very competently deepened the audience understanding of a narcissistic folie a deux - or my understanding, anyway. You always wonder, "How the hell could that happen? How could people do that, become that, lose themselves so completely?" Here at least is a partial answer, made plain to the viewer without the usual simpleminded Hollywood spelling out.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (2008–2009)

Charming, funny, bright as rainbows

[2 April 2009]

The pilot for this series is very very close to the book(s), in tone and in content, if a little lightweight. The book series was perfectly charming, original in concept, playful and dignified and respectful of the human hearts at the center of this African culture, and so was this pilot. I do very much look forward to watching the series - the actors are a pure pleasure, and there's plenty of time to beef up the plots - PLUS- some great music! NO murderous cops, rotting corpses, drooling vampires, autopsies upon which the ME and his assistant eat their sandwiches, waggling, eye-level rump/crotch shots, convoluted quasi-Machiavellian mafia mobsters, sub-literate scriptwriters, howlingly ignorant plot devices. An original premise ... What a concept...

Australia (2008)

Worst in years

[2/10 · 29 March 2009]

How did they do it? Australia is marvelous, majestic, unique; Kidmann wears clothes beautifully, is lovely and is an almost competent actress; Jackman is the best looking man on at least ONE continent and rides like a pro- would it have killed them to find a decent script? There is literally (yes, it's a pun as well as true) NOTHING good about this movie. Australia's indigenous people, supposedly central to the story, are given embarrassingly cursory and inexcusably sentimental attention. The "thoroughbred" English lady is a pommie parody who minces and flounces for a few frames and then drops her drawers the minute she gets a look at a real man. Jackman, playing the "real" man, belts up pretty well but has nothing to do, really, except a he-man swagger. He doesn't even have a name, or, apparently, any character to speak of. The villain does everything but lurk behind trees, twirling his mustache. The white inhabitants of Darwin are cardboard cutouts. This is a terrible, TERRIBLE movie!