Month: December 2021

Johnny Depp is a rare books dealer who finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy involving a book that was allegedly written in collaboration with the devil. I enjoy a good story with old books and this one has a decent mystery regarding the provenance of copies of the specific book. Unfortunately it quickly verges on the silly as soon as it beings to involve satanic cults. Satan worship is a tough theme to present without getting absurd and this one doesn’t manage, particularly with its cheesy special effects. Frank Langella does his best to try to sell the occult theme as the collector who initially hires Depp to investigate his copy. It’s also ridiculous how Depp roughly handles the supposedly rare books with complete disregard.

Bette Davis is a hostess at a nightclub that has recently switched its ownership to a notorious gangster. District Attorney Humphrey Bogart tries to get any of the hostesses to testify against their boss, but none of them are willing to until a series of circumstances give them no choice. Bogart’s role is a relatively small one for him, but Davis brings along her A-game. She’s tough-as-nails and streetwise, but capable of a soft vulnerability when necessary.

Casually working through Richard Pryor’s filmography, I stumbled upon this one where he is a con artist who attempts to get committed to a mental hospital to avoid jail. Instead he finds himself stuck at the hospital during a severe hurricane, impersonating a visiting doctor who was unable to make it in the storm. Pryor isn’t in top form here and the film mostly fails to connect, not really knowing if it wants to be a comedy or drama and deciding to stay in a safe , but boring, middle level. It’s by no means awful but it is entirely forgettable.

Naïve prep schooler Andrew McCarthy is encouraged by his new roommate, Rob Lowe, to find someone to first have sex with. Unfortunately the one person he finds is Lowe’s still-married mother Jacqueline Bisset. The relationship between McCarthy and Bisset is oddly sweet, a meeting of two individuals currently at odds with their current life situations. Unfortunately the rest of the film settles for being a fairly typical 80s sex comedy which results in a very disjointing tone trying to put those two parts together. Along with McCarthy, the film does mark the debuts of a number of the generation’s actors: Virginia Madsen, John Cusack, and Casey Siemaszko.

I imagine it’s hard to create a Christmas classic. Somehow Jon Favreau managed to capture the right magic with the story of Buddy the elf, played by Will Ferrell, an orphan who was accidentally brought as an infant to the North Pole by Santa and thus raised by an elf father. After Buddy learns he is actually a human, he journeys to the big city to meet his father who horror of horrors resides firmly on the Naughty List. Ferrell carries most of the load as he perfectly encapsulates the fish out of water innocence of a pure soul first encountering the ‘real world’ for the first time. I could probably do fine without the love interest or the younger brother, but it’s still quite endearing.