Epinions Recent Reviews for ArnieHarris

George's Joyful Farewell

Sun, 29 Jun 2003 18:08:34 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - What a pleasant surprise this CD was to listen to for the first time, a year and a half following...

Laugh -I Thought I'd Never START!!

Sat, 28 Jun 2003 21:06:20 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - While waiting impatiently for this film to end, I imagined Mike Meyers' SNL character Linda Richma...

A Delectable Fairy Tale -but not much more.

Wed, 23 Jan 2002 19:54:11 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - While finishing "Still Life With Woodpecker"(the first Robbins book I've read, and one that had been recommended for a long time), the Emily Dickinson lines, "Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye, Much sense starkest madness"...

Thrown for a Loss

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 00:20:29 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris -

If "The Replacements" was any more formulaic, it would have been made in a test tube!

And speaking of "replacements", one suspects the makers of this travesty took the script of "Major League", changed the uniforms from baseball to those...

An Ingenious Extra Turn of the Screw

Mon, 20 Aug 2001 14:23:21 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - When I saw previews for "The Others", my first reaction was, "Oh God, here we go again! Hollywood yet again plunders a horror classic(in this case "The Turn of the Screw", the basis for 1961's classy spine-tingler, "The Innocents"), and, like 1998's...

Curious George Goes to Washington

Wed, 15 Aug 2001 15:06:03 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris -

After reading Molly Ivins and Lou Duboses'

"Shrub:The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush", one can only hope it is indeed a fleetingly short one. For despite the authors' somewhat mystifying assertions that Dubya "is not...

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cad

Fri, 3 Aug 2001 16:53:51 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown", although liberally sprinkled with the writer-director's delightfully humorous touches - is both an unsparing dissection of a brilliantly talented, but seriously emotionally flawed musician, and a meditation on the...

A Great Man's Final Crusade.

Fri, 3 Aug 2001 14:03:28 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - With the passing of Steve Allen in the fall of 2000, America -and the world - lost one of its truly great citizens. It had become somewhat of a cliche -which made it no less true - that Steve was a true Renaissance Man. He was not only an accomplished...

A Mardis Gras of a Masterpiece

Fri, 20 Jul 2001 19:30:52 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - John Kennedy Toole's posthumously published "A Confederacy of Dunces" is a reading delight that virtually beggars description. When I finished it, I promptly re-read it, aware that I had just experienced something

as baroque, off-beat and wildly...

Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence: Definitely NOT Summer Beach Reading

Fri, 6 Jul 2001 16:55:20 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - If it's good, relaxing summer reading you're looking for, leave "Close to Shore" at home. Much to the contrary, for maximum reading pleasure and comfort, it should be read in a landlocked Midwest state.

For Michael Capuzzo's "Close to Shore" is...

Not To Be Forgotten

Mon, 2 Jul 2001 13:57:46 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance" is the engrossing continuation of "The Winds of War", and if anything this installment is even more poignant, absorbing,and exciting than its predecessor.

Picking up where the former left off in the days...

"Enemy at the Gates":A Skewed Sense of Proportion

Mon, 21 May 2001 19:37:51 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - The makers of "Enemy at the Gates" would have done well to have heeded Bogarts's words to Ingrid Bergman at the end of "Casablanca":"The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans" while the world was engulfed in the bloody...

Hitler's Waterloo

Mon, 14 May 2001 18:42:18 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - When Civil War General Sherman uttered the famous words, "War is all hell!" he could not have foreseen that some 80 years later, on the steppes of Russia, his dictum could almost be deemed an understatement. For the Battle of Stalingrad, the subject...

"Deja Vu" All Over Again

Tue, 8 May 2001 20:22:57 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - "Memento", a strikingly original film noir with an audacious narrative gambit is decidedly not for viewers with even a mild case of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Inspired perhaps partially by the famous "Seinfeld" backwards episode,...

"Something Fishy Going On"

Mon, 7 May 2001 18:42:14 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - Those familiar with Carl Hiaasen's more recent novels may be a little dismayed and disappointed by "Double Whammy", his sophomore effort written 14 years ago.

To be sure, "Double Whammy"'s cast of characters is comprised of the author's...

Lincoln: Triumph in Crisis

Thu, 26 Apr 2001 18:00:28 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - "Lincoln" is an unforgettable reading experience, not only for its provocative picture of a president who assumes greatness at a watershed moment in American hstory, but for the way Gore Vidal transports the reader, as if in a time machine, back to...

A 20th Century "War & Peace"

Fri, 6 Apr 2001 02:52:01 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - Herman Wouk has written what may be called,

not without justification, a "War and Peace" for the 20th century. In this monumentally engrossing tour de force of fiction, Wouk has captured the anxieties, uncertainties, fears and essential human...

A 21st Century Sherlock Holmes Looks Back

Sat, 17 Mar 2001 20:09:37 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - In his aptly titled book, "The Cases that Haunt Us", master FBI profiler and criminologist John Douglas turns the illuminatiion of his state-of-the-art forensic methodology, and knowledge of the criminal mind on several bedeviling cases,"from Jack...

The Lindbergh Case Reduced to Revisionist Falsehood

Mon, 5 Mar 2001 19:13:03 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - HBO's "Crime of the Century" is such an evocative, powerful and skillfully rendered, but ultimately dishonest piece of historical revisionism that the viewer must keep reminding himself that it was not directed by Oliver Stone.

The film, which...

Hauptmann Guilty-But Did He Act Alone?

Mon, 5 Mar 2001 02:14:28 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - As Mark Twain was said, "Lies race around the world while the truth is still putting on its socks".

Such has been the status of the truth in the case of the Lindbergh Kidnapping. As author of "The Ghosts of Hopewell", Jim Fisher illustrates, in...

Mann Trouble

Sun, 11 Feb 2001 21:02:35 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - Judging from this film, and his previous "Heat", Michael Mann's aesthetic principles as a director seem to be: 1) Make the movie 45 minutes to an hour longer than is necessary, and 2) Induce severe eyestrain headaches in your viewing audience by...

One Little Indian Girl

Sat, 27 Jan 2001 14:49:41 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - Barbara Kingsolver's uniquely eccentric, free-wheeling, poetic literary voice is, to the readers' delight, amply on display in "Pigs in Heaven".

In a story brimming with off-beat humor, poignance, and powerful insights into human foibles,...

Victorian Horror

Fri, 26 Jan 2001 21:04:58 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - Aside from its being the great granddaddy of the the durable vampire genre, one that seems, like the fiends themselves, to have achieved a perverse immortality, the horror classic "Dracula" offers revealing glimpses into the ambiguities and paradoxes...

Robinson Crusoe Redux

Tue, 26 Dec 2000 20:21:01 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - One leaves "Cast Away" with the conviction that director Robert Zemeckis is trying,as usual, to deliver a profound message. The problem, as evidenced by Zemeckis's earlier efforts is that he seems either unclear himself over exactly what...

Invaders from Mars

Fri, 22 Dec 2000 16:30:04 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ArnieHarris - Written in 1898 by visionary author H.G. Wells, "The War of the Worlds" stands today not only on its own merits as a thrilling, terrifying work of the imagination, but as the granddaddy of all the extraterrestrial-invasion fiction that has...