Epinions Recent Reviews for rytr_1

terrified... mortified... petrified... stupefied... by you

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 01:48:53 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - All right, I admit it!! I did not see A Beautiful Mind in the theatre. Despite its release on video some months ago, I did not get around to renting it until late last week. (That last sentence, by the way, was not an attempt to make this...

I'm kind of a jerk, and I'll take 96 minutes telling you why

Sat, 11 Aug 2001 14:39:53 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Aside from Zelig and Radio Days, I had never seen a Woody Allen film until this week. (I know that sounds impossible considering he makes about fifty movies a decade, but it's nonetheless true.) I understand that Woody's films fall under...

barrels and bodyguards

Wed, 25 Jul 2001 23:03:18 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - We don't know why they stowed away. We don't know where they're going. We don't even know their names. None of these things are important in a movie that positively celebrates anarchy and nonconformity. I've written about two other Marx Brothers...

left-handed moths

Sun, 22 Jul 2001 20:39:57 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - This is the first Marx Brothers film I ever saw. Airing on late-night public television one Christmas Eve during the 1980's, it took a while for me to get into. I was only about ten or twelve at the time, and hadn't seen many old-time comedies outside...

in the secret city

Sat, 21 Jul 2001 15:48:37 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - The first time I read Insomnia was shortly after its release in 1994, back in my early college days when a lot of books fell by the wayside due to course reading assignments. I read the first 150 pages or so, then had to read "intellectual"...

nobody likes Neil Diamond this much

Sat, 21 Jul 2001 04:24:53 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Here we have another madcap comedy I missed during its original theatrical run - and in a lot of ways I'm thankful. However, Saving Silverman has an oddball high-school charm, owing largely to co-stars Steve Zahn (the funny guy from That Thing...

ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our descent...

Fri, 20 Jul 2001 16:10:27 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - At first director Mike Nichols and producer Lawrence Turman wanted a muscular leading man, someone you'd expect to play a young man having an affair with an older married woman. After many auditions and a lot of script rewrites, it became glaringly...

you may ask yourself... whatever happened to Peggy Sue?

Wed, 18 Jul 2001 23:08:56 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Maybe it's wrong to try to find some deeper purpose behind your standard feel-good Nicholas Cage movie. The Family Man belongs to that ever-widening category of film that many have called the "what-if": What if a twelve-year-old boy made a wish on a...

a true gentleman, a tragic hero

Mon, 16 Jul 2001 01:06:30 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Beginning with a quote:

"I am happy every hour of the day. My life is full of good. I know that I am loved."

There are an amazingly small number of people in the world who can truthfully make this claim. I know I'm not one of...

sometimes they call me "The Great Unwashed"... I don't mind...

Sun, 15 Jul 2001 03:18:57 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - The story of the Rutles is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent (and Ringo).

The Rutles were a fictional Liverpool rock 'n' roll quartet who did not really exist back in the decade known to today's top-notch historians...

my 12th review!

Thu, 12 Jul 2001 21:10:56 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - It's been roughly a decade since I saw the original 12 Angry Men from the 1950's, so I'm not sure how this cable remake holds up to it. But this one always intrigued me, and I was not disappointed. I rented it as sort of a private tribute to Jack...

"it'th a lady!"

Sun, 8 Jul 2001 22:17:22 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Some of the movies that have been wrung out of the SNL washcloth have been (I must confess) pretty good: be they ninety-minute character summaries (Superstar - Molly Shannon), collections of jokes and puns charming enough in their silliness to actually...

only true in fairy tales?

Sat, 7 Jul 2001 05:09:09 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Okay. I know I'm the 223rd reviewer to write about Shrek on Epinions. Perhaps that doesn't put me on the top of the list of originality for this site. And that's something I can live with. But I'm going to have to go along with the majority here who...

monkey-doodle-what?

Wed, 4 Jul 2001 16:21:51 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - One of these days when the world collapses and I get some spare time, I plan to compile a long videotape editing together highlights of Marx Brothers films. It shouldn't be tough: all I have to do is edit out all the lifeless romantic subplots and any...

lost in the maze

Wed, 4 Jul 2001 03:42:02 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Wow. You can just imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to find, buried deep inside a cardboard box in my garage, my old copy of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I first came into contact with this wonderful, poignant story back in junior high (I...

triangle and bounce

Sun, 1 Jul 2001 12:44:14 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - I'm not sure I can honestly call this a review, since I half-slept through a twenty-minute chunk near the end. But I went in a group of six, and at least one of the others was taking naptime too. We all came up with some good whispered one-liners...

"a new phase BEATLES album"

Fri, 29 Jun 2001 20:13:57 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - I wonder how we would regard this album had there been four or five more Beatles records released after it during the seventies. We now know Let it Be as the swansong of the Fab Four, released some eighteen months after its tracks were recorded...

it's actually a pretty dark film

Fri, 29 Jun 2001 00:55:39 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - I knew little about Andy Kaufman when I first saw Man on the Moon. I did know that he was something of a "method" comedian who embodied his characterizations to the point of neurosis, and that some believe he faked his own death as the ultimate...

"I Duddits!"

Thu, 28 Jun 2001 22:23:57 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Stephen King was going through a lot of pain as he wrote this novel, which is about the average length for one of his books. I think he found a way to channel that pain into his prose. That isn't a putdown of the writing style at all because...

like I've never been born

Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:40:55 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Rubber Soul paved the way toward increasingly more experimental albums for the Beatles, striving for something of a different sound on a couple of its tracks (particularly "Norwegian Wood" and, in a completely different way, "In My Life"). As with that...

he's my son! I adopted him!

Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:00:35 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Anyone out there who has never seen a silent movie or who dislikes black-and-white movies should watch Chaplin's The Kid before rejecting them outright. This is one of my favorites of Charlie's films, and there are so many things in this film,...

it's a dead man's party

Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:51:24 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author rytr_1 - Recently I re-read The Stand in its complete edition, and although it's the version I read first (this being my third time through in seven years, actually), I must say that the extra bits do much to contribute to the plot and overall feel of the novel...