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Reviews
Kateo (2022)
Awesome action
Some of the best action I have seen in years, with brilliant, breathtaking stunt work. A chase involving a train and helicopters. A chase involving not one but three cars with the protagonists jumping between them. Stunning work. Some of the story doesn't make sense - it's sci-fi sort of - but with such nonstop action, who cares?
Sijipeuseu: The Myth: Episode #1.10 (2021)
Terrific action sci-fi
Love this show. The pieces all fall in place from episode to episode. Very well plotted, especially given that the whole setup is outlandish. The actors are excellent.
Seutateueob (2020)
Kept getting better
Wonderful series. Unlike some K dramas that lose steam midway, this built to a natural jumping off/reset that let the series gather momentum toward the very satisfying conclusion. Great characters, terrific expressive actors. Loved it.
Naui ajusshi: Ji An (2018)
Sublime
A perfect ending to an extraordinary series. So rich and thoughtful. So moving.
Naui ajusshi (2018)
A real beauty
This is one of the best things I have ever seen. The writing, the acting, the cinematography. "My Mister" explores the human heart, our troubled relationships with each other and ourselves. A mix of corporate intrigue and personal longing, of betrayal and friendship - and unexpected warmth and even hope. I was sorry to leave this world and these characters. But I was so grateful to have spent time with them. What an accomplishment. Bravo.
Hyena: Episode #1.16 (2020)
Wonderful series
One of the most entertaining series in a while. Interesting and original characters. Great actors. An absolute treat. Takes the law drama and runs with it. Give it the time to charm you.
Intersections (2013)
Nifty, modest thriller
A very enjoyable B movie, along the lines of the minor 1940s classic, "Detour," with surprises, betrayals and brutality. Tough-minded yet likable. More intricately plotted than one would have supposed, given its disarming beginning, with a couple on honeymoon in Morocco. But almost immediately things begin to take a turn for the intriguing. And you don't quite know whom to believe. Everyone is hiding something from another person or persons, and no one, or hardly anyone, is who he or she seems. It's quite fast-moving, with sudden turns and acts of violence and revenge and retribution. There is one quite spectacular car crash that comes out of nowhere. The plot has already been set in motion, in some sense, but this ramps everything up. "Intersections" or "Collision," as it's also known, is one of those finds you're glad to come upon - - and it more than holds your attention. In fact, it repays your regard by offering you a satisfying movie that you didn't see coming (like the action that unfolds).
La peinture à l'huile (2011)
A simple portrait
This is a simple, charming film, a sort of comedy, but perhaps more to the point a sort of slice of an artist's life. Nothing special happens, but it holds your interest, as you watch a painter as he paints some paintings -- which you don't see until the end of this sort film -- and you see people who speak to him as he works. The artist Joël Brisse is the painter in the film (his paintings are on display at the end). You rarely come across a film so unpretentious about an artist's working day; there are no grand moments of tortured genius. But this is more to the artist's life: work, a sort of solitude, concentration, observation, creation. I find myself drawn into it whenever I look at it (I've saved it to my DVR).
Remember the Night (1939)
Memorable romantic drama
A sadly under-noticed Prston Sturges drama. Mitchel Leisen directed, but Sturges, working in dramatic mode here, has crafted a beautiful story of romance that has moral underpinnings. There are comic moments, to be sure, but overall the story builds with exquisite finesse (thanks to director Leisen's deft touch) toward a moving denouement. Stanwyck proves why she was a star. In one scene, in particular, when she's combing her hair at a vanity table and looking at her interlocutor, she holds the screen with remarkable power and at the same time, the fragility of someone who has been found out. It is a great performance in a movie that should be far better known -- it is a classic. It's long overdue for classic deluxe DVD treatment -- especially given that it's by Preston Sturges.
East Side, West Side (1949)
Likable melodrama
Stanwyck and Heflin have a palpable chemistry here, and Ava Gardner is a most alluring vixen. Cyd Charisse is a delectable ingenue (and a tall drink of water), while Gale Sondergaard is hilarious as a hard-bitten, hoydenish Amazon floozie. Stanwyck is playing about 10 years younger than her actual age (her film mother admits to being 55, when Stanwyck is in her early forties here, and while still handsome, she does look her age).
Mervyn Leroy did a nice job of combining the noir/woman's-picture genres, though its ennoblement of Stanwyck robs her of her strengths as a no-nonsense woman, good or bad. Her scene with Gardner is a standout -- both actresses are well matched; Gardner's feline beauty and laissez-faire romantic approach nicely complements Stanwyck's humane fatalism -- and Stanwyck and Van Heflin are an appealing couple. Mason is rather a chump, however -- he seems to be underplaying to the point of lethargy, though his handsome charm surfaces here and there; yet he and Stanwyck, though matched in terms of age (she was younger by a couple of years) are not the type for each other; he doesn't suit her, screen-wise. Heflin's naturalism -- a performance of great charm and likability -- is more suited to Stanwyck's style and one longs for them to get together. Great use of sets to evoke New York, teeming with nightlife, and Leroy always had a knack for directing extras so that the city scenes seem peopled with real lives rather than populated with stand-ins. Costumes, though late 1940s, seem a bit recherche, as if the designer hadn't left the 1930s, with the women's gowns too ornate for such a sophisticated post-war milieu.
Not a great picture by any means, but a highly enjoyable one; a viewer wishes the director and screenwriter -- the talented Isobel Lennart, who later wrote "Two for the Seesaw," among many others -- had trusted more in the chemistry between Heflin and Stanwyck, and discarded some of the Marcia Davenport source material, juicy as it must have been. This is from Stanwyck's late-1940s string of women's flicks, which did not play to her strengths. But middling Stanwyck is usually better than anyone else's best. And the underrated Van Heflin is worth rooting for, too.