Julie Taymor uses Beatles songs (many, many Beatles songs) to hold together her story of a working class Liverpool boy (Jude) who comes to America in the 1960s and meets and falls for preppy teenager Lucy. When her brother is drafted for Vietnam, the film takes a decidedly political turn and Jude and Lucy’s relationship [...]
You have to synopsize Bollywood films in two parts, because really, they’re all two movies mashed up into one. The first half of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam concerns Sameer (Salman Khan) coming to visit Nandini’s (Aishwarya Rai) family and the two of them falling in love; unfortunately, Nandini’s father has already arranged for her [...]
Once is an Irish film about a Dublin man working in his dad’s vacuum repairshop by day but spends his nights performing as a street musician, hoping to eventually record a demo CD. He meets a Czech woman one night, and they become friends–turns out she’s also a musician and they team up to record [...]
Second-rate vehicle for Fred Astaire. He and Burgess Meredith play college buddies (note that Astaire was in his forties at the time) who play together in a band. When both of them are forced to graduate–apparently they’ve been failing on purpose to continue getting lucrative college engagements–they both go after a spot in Artie Shaw’s [...]
This is something of style over substance, in that the story is fairly routine (despite being based on the real life story of the Supremes; sometimes real life is routine)–a girl group in the sixties makes it big after leaving behind its strongest singer for image reasons, but was it worth it? We all know [...]
