Last year sucked for movies just as it did for everything else

I will always prefer a big screen in the dark with strangers instead of my living room but we had no choice. 2020 was a sad, bizarre year in which we had to watch movies at home. I…

They do make them like they used to

The timing of the release of Mank on Netflix could not be more poignant. A movie about the writing of Citizen Kane, which some consider the greatest American movie ever made, if not the greatest movie of all time, Mank comes at…

Jagshemash Plus 1

Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat is now so well known that Americans recognize him on the street so it is increasingly difficult for him to pull stunts. His kind of semi-documentary humor is not an easy premise to sustain but as Baron Cohen demonstrates, there will always…

Those were the days

Aaron Sorkin writes highly entertaining “message” movies. The Trial Of The Chicago Seven is a timely and spirited cri de coeur about civil disobedience. It represents in a courtroom the two sides of America that are, as in those days, at loggerheads today. That is, the…

Not so cute.

American conservatives are up in arms about this French Netflix movie about a group of tween girls from the projects in Paris who like to dance like strippers. Politicians like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, those paragons of moral probity, have chimed in, and people are calling…

And Mucho, Mucho Makeup: the Story of Walter Mercado

I had no idea of who Walter Mercado was until I arrived in the US in the early 90s and discovered his campy astrological readings on Spanish language TV. At the time, I thought he was a total fake. Too much…

Why?

The long-running musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber with lyrics from “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”, an anthology of delightful poems by T.S. Eliot, worked on the stage because the cast was wearing theatrical makeup, spandex bodysuits and, having been conceived in the early eighties, legwarmers. No one expected…