by Richard Subber | Jul 16, 2024 | Theater and play reviews
“Wolverines!”
Movie review:
Red Dawn
Red Dawn is more than a shoot ‘em up movie.
Red Dawn (1984, PG-13, 114 minutes) is all-American stuff—the mountaineering teenage heroes, with Boy Scout gear and some guns, prevail over the invading Russian paratroopers. It makes you want to shout “Wolverines!” It was still a Cold War environment in 1984, just sayin’.
Jed (Patrick Swayze) and his friends try to talk out their issues of patriotism, humanity, privation, and growing up. There is death, and triumph, and betrayal, and pride, and growing up.
It helps that the Russian soldiers are by-the-book brutal characters, not too smart, and they can’t seem to beat a small gang of teens (“Wolverines!”) who are “hiding” in the mountains.
There’s another Red Dawn film, done in 2012 (PG-13, 93 minutes), with a similar story line. It’s a remake, but it’s not fully baked, it’s mostly action and shooting. Don’t bother with it.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Go Down Together…Bonnie and Clyde (book review)
they were violent criminals
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jun 18, 2024 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
jungle story
Movie review:
Medicine Man
1992
PG-13
106 min
Medicine Man is a completely predictable story about a man and a woman chasing each other as they close in on finding a cure for cancer in the deep jungle. You can guess how it ends.
The real treasure of Medicine Man is watching Sean Connery create the very believable Dr. Robert Campbell character: a quirky, endlessly earnest, and somewhat sloppy bachelor who gets a bit mixed up when Dr. Rae Crane (Lorraine Bracco) shows up in his jungle laboratory to be his assistant.
Campbell has discovered—and mysteriously lost—the chemical component of a cure for cancer. Crane wants to help him find it again, but she’s “a girl” and that complicates the quest.
Campbell can’t escape the private and professional windmills that he fruitlessly charges, repeatedly. Crane very gradually realizes that adapting to a humanitarian mission in the deep jungle is not completely out of the question.
At the end, they’re happy about the way things turn out.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
New England Encounters (book review)
…the complex relations between Indians and colonists
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 21, 2024 | Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
doing the right thing…
Movie review:
Arrival
2016, 116 min, rated PG-13 (brief strong language)
Arrival is a reflective experience of first contact with aliens who are not like us. These are aliens who, ultimately, want to do good, but the humans have to learn how to deal with this reality.
Amy Adams plays the linguist Louise Banks, and Jeremy Renner plays the physicist Ian Donnelly. They combine their robust talents to learn how to communicate with the aliens, and to try to convince their human superiors to do the right thing.
Banks and Donnelly fall in love. She saves the world. The aliens depart in peace. Her life is changed.
It’s a movie you can enjoy, no matter how many times you watch it.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: “The Gentle Boy”
The Puritans had a dark side…
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Apr 23, 2024 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
you see it coming…
Movie review:
Body Heat
Some like it hot. If that’s you, you’ll like Body Heat (1981, rated R, 113 minutes).
Ned Racine (William Hurt in one of his most intense performances) is a caricature of a small town lawyer who doesn’t mind dealing with small town crooks. He also likes the ladies, and he gets snared by a big-thinking criminal lady that he can’t handle.
Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner is an archetype of ambitious, erotic, and nasty) wants to kill her rich husband. She picks Ned to help her do it.
Ned doesn’t figure it all out until he’s in a prison cell.
Matty takes the money and runs.
Body Heat has a lot of sweating, a lot of smoking, some humor (thank you, Ted Danson), and quite a bit of richly filmed hot love and fully expressed humanity in full view.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Movie review: Same Time, Next Year
all-American adultery, oh yeah…
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Mar 26, 2024 | History, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
more than a war story….
Movie review:
Eye of the Needle
Good vs. evil is the undercurrent of Eye of the Needle (1981, rated R, 112 minutes) but the drama is in the living and the dying of the fully believable characters: Donald Sutherland as the WWII German spy—“die Nadel”—and Kate Nelligan as Lucy, who becomes his nemesis.
A worldly viewer can easily guess the ending of this movie, so it’s not really a spoiler to say that Sutherland, the brutal German spy, has the Allies’ Normandy invasion plans and is trying to get them to Germany when he is shipwrecked on a remote island off Scotland. Lucy, a patriotic English woman who is the wife of a sheep farmer on the island, falls in love with die Nadel before she figures out what he is and kills him.
Die Nadel is desperate, but human. Lucy is lonely, but ultimately she rages to do the right thing. The brief seduction scene is a lover’s delight (brief nudity). The awkward interaction of the two reluctant lovers is credible. The violence is matter-of-fact and vicious.
Eye of the Needle works as a war story, a spy story, and a love story. It won’t put you to sleep.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire Divided
King George and his ministers
wanted the Caribbean sugar islands
more than they wanted the 13 colonies…
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Feb 27, 2024 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
“We all love you, preacher!”
Movie review:
Pale Rider
“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
Revelation 6:8
Pale Rider (1985, rated R, 115 minutes) goes a bit deeper than your usual Clint Eastwood action thriller.
As “the preacher,” Eastwood creates a mostly low-key character who mostly waxes philosophic about life and its vicissitudes, but also persistently urges the good guys to do some good, and (you’re not surprised) straps on his big pistol when he needs it.
The beleaguered “tin pan” miners, emboldened by “the preacher,” battle the vicious takeover attempts by the big bad rich guy, and you can guess who savors victory.
There’s an almost completely platonic love interest with the mother, Sarah (Carrie Snodgress is divinely demure), and 15-year-old Megan (Sydney Penny) learns a lot about unrequited love.
Pale Rider invites you to look into the hearts of realistic people.
The obvious allusion to Revelation 6:8 (“…behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death…”) is puzzling. The preacher is not apocalyptic, there is no hint of theology in his role, and he mysteriously and provocatively rides away into the mountains at the last minute, leaving everyone else to resume their lives.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
They didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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