Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

This Happy Breed (1944) – A Movie Review

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This Happy Breed is a fictional portrayal of life in working class England from the end of the First World War to the eve of the Second world War.  I won’t give any spoiler warnings because it’s not that kind of movie.  It’s an intimate look at a family in suburban London between the wars and all of the important and trivial things that make up human life.

Frank Gibbons (played by Robert Newton) returns from war to his family; wife Ethel (played by Celia Johnson), his teenage son Reg, his daughters Vi and Queenie, his mother-in-law Mrs. Flint and his sister Sylvia, all living under his roof.  His next-door neighbor Bob Mitchell is a war buddy and becomes Frank’s best friend.  And Bob’s son Billy will eventually become Queenie’s boyfriend.

Over the course of the twenty years that the movie covers we watch the children grow up, navigate the troubled economy of Britain between the wars, fall in love, marry and in one case die tragically.  Children rebel against their parents’ expectations and mores and come out the other side older and sadder and much like their parents.

The movie is a slice of life in three acts and a total of nine scenes spread across those twenty years.  I guess what I liked about the film is the feeling of believability about the characters but at the same time the likeability of most of them.  Even though they were Brits and from a time period before I was born, they felt strangely familiar.  And I was invested in their stories.  You could actually care how things turned out for them because they were decent people trying to muddle through their lives during a period of history when England was still reeling from the loss of a generation of young men in World War I and staggering under the global economic changes that would reduce them to a poorer nation.  Frank and Ethel love their family and try their best to steer their children in the right direction.

There are moments of pathos and humor.  And the acting is top notch without any flashiness or highbrow dialog.  Just simple people living their lives.  I’m not sure who I would recommend this movie to.  First remember that for Americans the British locale might make it a little strange.  But actually, I didn’t think it was off-putting.  Events like the death of their king or the 1926 General Strike might seem unfamiliar but not mysterious.  If the description I give here doesn’t sound interesting then give this a pass.  But I consider it a gem of a film that I’m surprised I never saw before.  Highly recommended.

The Steel Trap (1952) – A Movie Review

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The Steel Trap is a crime/suspense thriller starring Joseph Cotton as Jim Osborne an assistant bank manager in Los Angeles who is tempted to steal a million dollars from his bank.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Jim has become bored with the slow plodding progress in the career of a bank manager and realizes that his bank has close to a million dollars of cash in its vault every Friday at closing which will not be missed until Monday at about 8:30 am.

He quickly and uncarefully concocts a plan to steal the cash and fly to Brazil with his family before the theft is discovered.  From the very beginning holes in his plan appear.  The upcoming weekend is the last time the bank won’t be open on Saturday until next year so the theft has to be tomorrow.  This means getting passports for himself and his wife will have to be expedited.  His wife Laurie balks at bringing their young daughter so a babysitter has to be located for the “two weeks” that Jim tells Laurie he’ll need to be in Brazil on the bank’s business.  He didn’t know that plane flight reservations to Rio De Janeiro are booked weeks in advance and now he’ll have to chance getting cancellation seats.  And he’ll have to fly first to New Orleans and then connect to his flight.

And all the things that can go wrong do.  His wife isn’t in time to get the passports while the Brazilian embassy is open so Jim has to break in after hours and is caught by a building security guard and only some luck with an embassy worker who vouches for him saves him from arrest.  The one-hundred-and-fifty-pound suitcase full of cash catches the airline’s attention and they have a customs agent open it and find the cash.  Jim has to tell a bunch of unlikely stories about how the bank needs cash to transact a business deal in Brazil and barely survives the calls to his boss when it turns out he’s on the golf course.  But eventually all of this is for nothing when the cancellations on his flight never materialize.  Now Jim is faced with catching a flight on Monday after the bank has discovered the theft.

At this point Laurie has put two and two together and figures out that Jim has stolen the cash in the suitcase and confronts him.  When he admits to it, she refuses to continue with the plan and goes home to her daughter.  Meanwhile back at home Jim’s work friend dropped off a present at Jim’s home and hears about Jim making an unscheduled “business trip” to Brazil.  Finding this strange he tries to get in touch with Jim’s boss to get the details on the trip but has trouble reaching him.  Meanwhile Laurie reaches home and finds out about Jim’s friend hearing about their trip so she calls him and makes some excuse about how it wasn’t a business trip but a story they used to disguise a surprise for their daughter.

Early Monday morning Jim calls up Laurie at home and tells her he realizes he’s made a terrible mistake and says he’s going to try to get the money back in the vault before anyone knows it’s missing.  He flies home and reaches the bank right after the security guard has opened it.  He manages to get the suitcase to the vault and the money back in and hide the suitcase just as the opening team reaches his position outside the vault.  At this point the actual strain of the deception overcomes Jim and he sinks to the floor.  His colleagues think he’s been struck with a flu and tell him to go home.  In the last scene Jim reunites with Laurie at their home in an embrace that shows their relief at the end of the nightmare.

Now this must sound like a ridiculous story.  And it is.  It’s absurd.  But it’s also enormously suspenseful.  Jim Osborne has done such a poor job of anticipating the multitude of things that need to be coordinated for a successful theft of this type that he’s left himself open for an almost endless series of problems that provide suspense.  His bad humor and fear grow from minute to minute and alarm his wife because they clash with his normally friendly and calm attitude.  The tension is ratcheted up throughout the movie.  I was surprised just how much I enjoyed it.  Highly recommended.

Even Barabbas Couldn’t Dampen This Day

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Such a good day.  Camera Girl cooked up a storm.  Beef and pork roasts, vegetables, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, stuffed mushrooms and more.  And then the desserts. At my insistence there were five different flavors of ice cream.  That’s because I know the kids crave it (well me too).  But she also made eclairs, tiramisu, ricotta cheesecake, chocolate cake (for the kids) and pineapple upside down cake.  I never even got to the pineapple cake.  I was too stuffed.  And the coffee was hot, strong and good.

The kids were busy with all kinds of silly games and gadgets.  But they were good.  When they started to get bored, I put on the original “King Kong.”  The family Godzilla aficionado was unimpressed with King Kong’s susceptibility to fifty caliber machine gun bullets.  He informed me that a real monster is unkillable with anything up to and including a thermonuclear warhead.  What could I say?  I pointed out that he did manage to kill a T Rex and also a Manhattan elevated subway train.  But apparently Godzilla is so incomparably superior to actual dinosaurs that conquering them is as nothing in the context of what Godzilla can do.  I was made aware that if Godzilla needed to, he has a mode called “thermonuclear” whereby he can emit the equivalent of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb against his surroundings.  This I was informed would utterly consume everything within a forty-mile radius around him.  I confessed defeat and asked if we could still watch the end of the movie where Carl Denham tells the cop that “It was beauty killed the beast.”  He rolled his eyes at the screen and shook his head.  Well, anyway, I still think Fay Wray is pretty good looking.  I don’t blame old Kong for carrying her off twice.

After they went home, I watched Barabbas.  That’s an old Dino DeLaurentis swords and sandals epic from the 1960s with Anthony Quinn as the title character who in the Bible is released instead of Jesus for the Passover clemency.  I’ll say with no hesitation that this is one of the worst biblical epics hands down.  Quinn is playing the same part he plays in Zorba the Greek and many other Mediterranean dramas.  His struggles in a Jerusalem prison, a Sicilian sulfur mine and the Roman Coliseum all seem self-inflicted and by the end of the movie I had to wonder if even St Peter wasn’t ready to kick his butt up and down the Roman jail.  Because Barrabas mistook Nero’s blaming the Christians for the burning of Rome with a real Christian plan to “burn the old world” Barabbas gets caught torching an oil warehouse and claims he’s doing it because he’s a Christian.  So, because of this St Peter and the rest of the real Christians are crucified by Nero.  What a genius!

As Barabbas is hanging on a cross at the end of the movie making what seem to be fairly meaningless comments, it seemed to me that the whole movie was absolutely pointless from every perspective; artistically, religiously, even logically.  As spectacle it was borderline ridiculous.  Quinn has a showdown in the Coliseum with Jack Palance in a chariot and himself on foot.  I’ve never seen a less convincing, more boring fight sequence.  At the end of the battle even the actor playing Nero looked like he wanted to be somewhere else but just couldn’t escape.

I also watched an old film noir called “Steel Trap.”  That was much more satisfactory.  I’ll review it soon.  Well, this will have to do for today.  A good day and a busy day.

16APR2025 – Wednesday Coffee Walk Zoom Call – To Boldly Go Where No Hag Has Gone Before

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It’s always good talking to the boys.  What will be the topic for the week?  What will be the funniest or the craziest or the most annoying topic for the Left?  There were several candidates; NYC subway necrophilia, General Flynn’s call for Obama’s arrest and NY AG Leticia James’ real estate fraud scandal.  But everyone’s favorite by a lot was “Leftist Hags in Space!”  We all got a good laugh out of the likes of Gayle King, Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, washed up pop star Katy Perry and nobodies Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn and Amanda Nguyen squealing around on top of a comically phallic “Blue Origin” rocket that rose to an unimpressive 62 miles above Earth and then parachuted back.  The whole roundtrip took place within a ridiculously short 12 minutes.

This all female “crew” followed in the footsteps of 90+ year old fake rocket man James T Kirk, (AKA William Shatner) as he also failed to reach Earth orbit in the painfully underpowered suborbital rocket.  It was the opinion of all on the zoom call that a better effect could have been achieved if Bezos had instead equipped the ship with a female crew composed entirely of professional strippers.  There was disagreement as to whether weightlessness was a problem or a bonus from the point of performance.  Also, it was debated whether a stripper pole would be a safety hazard in the “cockpit.”

I noticed Camera Girl looking disapprovingly at me as she walked by at this point during the zoom call but free speech is a cherished right of the coffee walk tradition so I ignored the implied censorship and laughed along with the rest of the jackasses.  Ah, good times.

So, we compared the press coverage of this absurdly unimpressive publicity stunt and compared it to Space-X planning and executing a critical rescue of actual astronauts from the orbiting space station where Boeing’s failure stranded them for over half a year.  Basically, other than Fox News the rest of the media performed a virtual black out of the Space-X mission while the Bezos stunt was given 24/7 coverage by all the news stations as if it were something worthy of discussion.

And it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that Jeff Bezos has managed to make space travel uncool.  Now I’ll qualify this.  Suborbital rocket flight is not really space-travel.  It’s really just air travel of a very inconvenient and useless kind.  But he has managed to attach a taint to rocket flight which I wouldn’t have thought possible.  And I should have expected nothing less from the founder of Amazon.com.  After all, the company who has his annoying trucks delivering things at my house seemingly before I order them would obviously be able to make rocket ships annoying too.

Well, I can always hope that the next all female crew will be Democrat politicians.  Let’s say Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Hillary Clinton and Maxine Waters.  Put all four of them in blue jumpsuits and at least for ten minutes I can hope against hope for some real excitement.  Engine, O-ring, parachute, whatever.

She-Hulk X

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I was watching the 1930s King Kong movie yesterday and thought, “That was a damn good idea for a motion picture.”  It had a love story, a damsel in distress, prehistoric monsters, an ocean voyage to a tropical island, a battle scene involving the latest weapons technology of the time, a strange culture, a scantily clad pretty woman and the capitol city of the world as a backdrop.  It was a fantastic story and considering the special effects technology of the time it must have been a truly exciting movie to watch.

Now I compare this to what passes for adventure movies today and what have we got?  Most of what is out there are superhero movies.  One or more characters dressed up in spandex running or flying around battling each other to cause or prevent mayhem to the human population around them.  And after two hours of this, usually nothing much has happened.  Some space jewel or other has been found or lost and some bad guys have been captured or chased off.  But to all intents and purposes nothing substantive has been achieved or lost.  For the most part no one even dies.  It seems rather pointless.

I think something has been lost from the art of storytelling.  Now this isn’t completely the case.  There are still movies with a beginning, middle and end.  I guess a decent example would be Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.  Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises; beginning, middle and end.  We see why Bruce Wayne became Batman.  We see him defeat his greatest adversary and we see him walk away when he can do no more.  It’s not Shakespeare but it is decent story-telling and effective spectacle.

Now compare this to the Marvel “Avengers” series.  There have been dozens of these movies if you count all of the sequels, spin-offs and television productions.  Each “hero” has a sequence of movies and then there are the ensemble films and basically nothing meaningful happens.  And now they’ve gotten to the point where they want to swap out the older white male heroes with black and female successor heroes.  The most laughable one I’d say is “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”  I have to assume that if she loses a case she hulks out and rampages through the court building until her client can escape the pulverized masonry.  Basically, these people have no conception of story-telling and are just building boring envelopes that they can fill with CGI effects.

Even something as absurd as the John Wick movies is better than this.  At least it started with an original movie that had a character and a plot.  Granted the character is a cartoon and the plot is as simple minded as any imaginable but there is an arc to the story and things definitely happen; mostly flying bullets and dead Russian mobsters but within the confines of the story it keeps your interest mostly.  Now it is almost unbelievable that they’ve been able to turn this into a series.  The body count in the first movie was in the high two figures.  In the second movie, which was the last one I watched, the action was so frenetic I couldn’t even tell how many people he killed.  The automatic weapons fire was almost continuous for ten minutes at a time.  I don’t even know how we’re supposed to believe that the guns don’t start to melt from the heat.  But even this absurdity is preferable to the boring Marvel movies.

I understand that Hollywood is solely driven by return on investment and pumping out sequels to existing intellectual property like the comic book characters is one of the only allowed pathways to getting a film made.  The exception is someone like Christopher Nolan whose reputation for success will allow him to make a movie like Oppenheimer.  But you can count those trusted movie-makers on the fingers of one hand.  And they’re getting old.  What happens when they’re gone?  She-Hulk II or III or X?

We Have Some Good News and Some Bad News

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It’s very rare that New York City newspapers can trumpet good news about crime in the city.  But last week they could:

“Major crimes in the subways, including robberies and felony assaults, declined 18 percent from Jan. 1 through March 31, to the second-lowest level in nearly three decades, police officials said at a news conference last week. There were no murders during the same period for the first time in seven years, the officials said.”

Unfortunately, this good news was nestled near the end of a crime story that was entitled:

“Police Seek Man Who They Say Violated a Corpse on an R Train.”

For the non-New Yorker, the R Train (or RR as it used to be known in my day) is a local subway line that plies the underground between Brooklyn and Downtown Manhattan.  The details were sparse but sufficient:

“The police were searching on Thursday for a man investigators believed violated a dead man Wednesday night on a train in a Manhattan subway station, according to an internal police document.

The person who died boarded an R train at around 8 p.m., according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter and the internal document. It was unclear on Thursday when or how the person died.

A man entered the same train car at around 11 p.m. at the Whitehall Street-South Ferry station in the Financial District, according to the official.

Within 45 minutes, the man saw the dead man and began to rummage through his pockets, the official said. The man then began to have sex with the body, according to the official and the document.

The sexual acts were captured on surveillance cameras inside the train car, the official said.

Soon after, the man got off the train and fled, the police said.”

Well, at least it’s good to know that the surveillance cameras were doing their job even if no one else was.  So, a man can drop dead and be lying there for three hours in a subway train without anyone including the crew aware of the fact and in fact another patron can take the opportunity to bugger the departed at his leisure without fear of interruption.

So, this 18% reduction in subway crime is being touted as a great success by the Mayor and the Police Commissioner’s offices but the fact that corpses are being sodomized on the R Train is to be taken in stride.  Call me a glass half empty kind of guy but somehow the 18% crime reduction rings a little hollow when necrophilia has surfaced in Gotham City.

I used to live in New York City during the time when crime was considered at its worst.  I can remember several gruesome murders and some aberrant behavior but I will say I’ve never heard that anything like this ever happened on the subway.  And the fact that the New York Times is trying to paint this “reduction in crime” as a triumph in law enforcement can only be described as Kafkaesque.

I like how the New York Times article describes the crime, “Police Seek Man Who They Say Violated a Corpse on an R Train.”  “Who they say” as if it’s in dispute.  What else could it be?  Could he have had prior consent from the deceased in the event his corpse happened to be found on the train?

I have friends and relatives who still live in the city.  I can only assume it would be too expensive for them to relocate.  Otherwise, I cannot imagine anyone who can get out, not doing so.  The public schools have become a sad joke.  The streets are covered with filth and the homeless and crime is at the point that you probably have to fear for your life on a regular basis.

But up until now you never had to consider that after you were murdered your corpse might be sexually abused by your attacker.  This does seem like an inflection point.  Or am I being oversensitive?

Critical Drinker Re-reviews “Falling Down”

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The Critical Drinker is a movie reviewer who provides a very entertaining product.  He’s a younger guy but he’s actually quite astute.  I like the movie “Falling Down” and I like this review for the insights he brings to it from his point of view as a foreigner (Scot).

I think I’ll rewatch it and review it myself.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 06APR2025 – Trade, Tariffs and Time

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Whatever the agenda is it must be cast before January 27. If it delays, it dies. After the next swearing in of Congress any progress not completed will probably be smothered in it’s afterbirth.
The usual suspects are screaming for blood, and don’t understand the way tariffs should work.
If you penalize products coming from my country to yours, I should do the same to your goods in order to keep a balance of trade. We are bit by tariffs, excise taxes, and down right bans on our exports, but are expected to forget that on their exports. Some actually make sense, like the ban on beef since we turn cattle into unwilling cannibals by reprocessing animal offal into cattle feed, some are just a protectionism by the other countries.
We need to either play reciprocally or refuse to play at all. Rumour has it mothballed cardboard plants in Maine are being looked into as a consequence of the tariffs with Canada.
European social practices have been indirectly supported by our bearing their defense burdens freeing up their Treasury for bribing the masses with healthcare, work breaks, and other bennies. Let them sort their own issues in their home since we are only uncultured upstarts according to them.
Asian economies get the same bribery, Japan was able to direct the monies that would have been used for defense into industries post WWII, and allowed them to specialize in electronics, Korea directly benefits by having our tripwire troops in place permitting them to focus on commerce instead of having to secure their borders. Post Kim rule in NK might collapse and actually allow for reunification of the two societies, but not under the one family rule it has had for 75 years.
If we did what the world is asking and tended to our own interest and business, because power hates a vacuum some entity would club to the top of the dung heap and declare themselves king of the pile.
It would be interesting to see as a thought experiment whether it would be an eastern invasion into the power vacuum, or another global jihad. Time may tell.