Change Your Image
buckshomo
Reviews
Bill Kennedy at the Movies (1956)
Grandfather figure
As a kid, one of the treats of staying home sick (aside from Vernor's, a local Detroit ginger ale) was getting to watch Bill Kennedy at the movies. He would ramble on about "the good old days" in Hollywood, and had a tendency to reveal the denouement of the film during the last commercial break, but he seemed to have a lot of heart. To this day, if I pronounce "WWII" as "double-u double-u eye eye," it evokes knowing laughter from others who were raised on Bill's quirky ways.
Especially fun were movies with Bill in them. He would give background information about the filming and the other actors on the set. Then, he would point out his scene - he might be the young thug to the left of the screen brandishing the gun, or cowpoke number seven, but there was always a vicarious thrill. Years later, Spalding Gray made high art out of describing his thoughts at playing a minor character in "The Killing Fields." For those of us from Detroit, we already knew a bit of what it was like.
Every Time We Say Goodbye (1986)
Window into a unknown world
I saw this while flipping channels and stopping on the local Canadian broadcast. It's not the best project Tom Hanks has ever been in, but the character is much more subdued than others he was playing at the time - it gave insight to the "serious" actor that Hanks was evolving to become.
The most fascinating part of the film is the look at the world of the Ladinos - Jews who were expelled from Spain during the Reconquest ending in 1492 and who retain the language and cultural traditions that they had in Spain centuries later.
Although some may raise an eyebrow about a film that takes place during WWII centering around Jewish people, and there's not even a mention of the ongoing Holocaust, to me, this underscores the inertia of human relations, that even when the entire planet is in the midst of war, and the fate of an entire people is at stake, we still have a tendency to cling to our differences.