Sunday, February 08, 2004

Movie review from The Movie Snob:

The Fog of War. (B) The critics have been going crazy over this documentary. It is basically an extended interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (85 years old but still sharp), with lots of quick shots from his childhood, WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War interspersed throughout. On the annoying side, the film is divided into 11 "lessons" that McNamara has supposed learned over the course of his life, and pretty much every lesson is a cliche to a greater or lesser degree. Ignore this artifice, though, and you have a pretty interesting movie about a guy who was a confidant of two presidents and had a ringside seat to American foreign policy in the 1960's.

And a DVD review:

Secondhand Lions. (C+) This would-be family movie set back in the 50's was a disappointment. Haley Joel Osment plays Walter, a lad whose unreliable single mother can't take care of him. She drives him out into the middle of nowhere, Texas, and drops him off for the summer at the farm owned by his two eccentric great-uncles, played by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine. Rumor has it (among traveling salesmen and some other annoying relatives who keep dropping by) that the brothers have a huge stash of money hidden somewhere on the property, probably obtained by activities that were, at best, semi-legal. Gradually, Caine tells their story to Osment (and the story is illustrated on screen via flashback), and it's supposed to be full of excitement, romance, and derring-do. Unfortunately, the movie falls strangely flat. For a much better movie with a somewhat similar theme, see Big Fish.

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