In small-town Carthage, Texas, local assistant mortician Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), a beloved member of the community, becomes the only friend of the wealthy, recently widowed Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), who is widely considered cold and unpleasant by the other townsfolk. Tiede, in his late 30s, and the elderly Nugent quickly become inseparable, frequently traveling […]
Archives for July 2011
Sisters
Sisters is not Brian De Palma’s first film, but in many ways it is the first Brian De Palma film, or at least the first to reveal (and revel in) his affinity with Hitchcock. A pre-Superman Margot Kidder struggles with a French-Canadian accent as an aspiring actress whose one-night stand leads to a homicidal morning-after. […]
I Am Sam
I Am Sam makes you laugh, cry, and recoil all at the same time. Perhaps no other film of recent memory has epitomized the shameless sentimentality of Hollywood as succinctly as director and screenwriter Jessie Nelson’s story of a mentally challenged man fighting to retain custody of his 7-year-old daughter. Sam (Sean Penn), who has […]
Unbreakable
Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) is born with Type I osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare disease in which his bones break easily. Based on what he has read in comic books during his many hospital stays, he theorizes that if he is frail at one extreme, then there may someone else who is unbreakable at the […]