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Reviews
The Addams Family (2019)
Nice refresh
A family friendly reintroduction to the Addams Family for a new generation of movie goers. Perfect for grandma and grandpa to watch with the grandkids. Now, let's hope that we will see a similar refresh of The Munsters soon.
The Wacky World of Mother Goose (1967)
Good animated feature for small children
This was made in 1967 and therefore seems dated to adults, but small children should love it. It even teaches boys that girls are just as ready for "rough" adventures as boys are. Good ultimately triumphs over evil in the traditional Mother Goose fantasy world that Frenchman Charles Perrault originally created.
Do not look for the racial and ethnic diversity that we see added to later revisions of such traditional European fantasy tales. Mother Goose lived in an all-Caucasian world, but we don't see much racial diversity in any of the ancient Old World cultural traditions in Asia or Africa either.
Time After Time (2017)
Nice try, but we need Irwin Allen to time travel here now!
Good enough if you are capable of ignoring the obvious flaws in the story line and setup.The characters are agonizingly prone to making the worst possible on the fly decisions, regularly getting themselves into terrible situations. This series is a somewhat clumsy attempt of retelling the 1979 movie, but the screen writing undermines the fine acting by a wonderful cast. I love The H.G. Wells and time travel stories, but what I really want to see is a quality revival of The Time Tunnel, which was by far the best time travel themed TV series so far. Too bad we can'talk go back in time and bring Irwin Allen to the year 2017.
The Peanuts Movie (2015)
Peanuts updates a classic without turning off older fans.
Good grief! Charlie Brown continues his struggle for respect in this pleasant and relaxing return to the familiar neighborhood where the most threatening presence is the Kite-eating Tree.
Peanuts is an ideal movie for parents and grandparents to share with the little ones. There are, naturally, a couple of slightly annoying "politically correct" refinements tailored for 2015 moviegoers, but the overall positive spirit of Peanuts gang is left intact.
As with all of the animated Peanuts works, the soundtrack music is essentially a central character. Millions of Peanuts fans received their first exposure to jazz music while watching the Peanuts Television specials and this animated feature continues that tradition for the benefit of another generation of kids.
30 for 30: You Don't Know Bo: The Legend of Bo Jackson (2012)
An excellent, but all too brief snapshot of the world's greatest athlete.
Bo Jackson's story deserves a feature-length film. This documentary is very well done, but it left me wanting to see more.
I saw Bo do things that most people would think are impossible feats. There was the time when he outran a group of challengers who had as much as a 30-yard head start in a foot race from one end of Auburn's football field to the other. I also saw Bo at bat one day when some of rival University of Alabama fans were hurling ice and racial epithets at him from behind the backstop. Bo turned around, smiled and waved at the hecklers, and then hit a tremendous home run that sounded like a Howitzer going off. I also saw him with tears running down his cheeks after visiting his dying mother at UAB hospital in Birmingham. For all of his blessings, he is still as mortal as the rest of us are. He really is a fine human being in addition to being the greatest athlete to ever walk this planet.
Star Trek: Assignment: Earth (1968)
People from the future visiting people in our past.
I must confess that time travel is one of my favorite subjects, but both the acting and story-telling in ASSIGNMENT EARTH are exceptional. This is one STAR TREK tale that should be re-visited in a feature film. The regular STAR TREK cast is joined by the fabulous Teri Garr and the ever combat-ready Robert Lansing, veteran of the 12 O'CLOCK HIGH series, a cult classic about the U.S. Army Air Corps of World War II that went downhill as quickly as Lansing's character was killed-off in the second season. Lansing was a very fine actor who was sort of a rougher, tougher, American version of Michael Rennie, the splendid star of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951).
I won't spoil the story for you, but this episode features some splendid B-toll of NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and a REAL Apollo Saturn V rocket.
This episode offers a delightful combination of magic and speculative science. We are talking about people back in the late 1960s telling a story about people from their future visiting them. Well, we are also people in their future, but we are still far behind the 23rd century characters from the Star Trek Federation of Planets.
Overall, ASSIGNMENT EARTH is a quaint, very pleasant look back at ourselves at a time when there was a lot of optimism about technology and the future in spite of the dark clouds of a potential nuclear holocaust hanging over our heads. The Cold War was raging back then, with Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia and the brutal North Koreans seizing the crew of the USS Pueblo and their ship. TV science fiction like this offered us a hopeful glimpse of a possible future. Thank you, STAR TREK. Watch this episode, if you haven't already, and you will emerge a little smarter than you are right now.