therubicon Reviews

Topaz (1969)

Frederick Stafford

[10/10 · 23 July 2007]

I have to put a 10 in, cause I loved it, and I loved that Mr. Hitchcock went for unknowns and foreign performers.

What I can't fathom is what led so many contemporaries to say that Stafford wasn't anything but Amazing, a French intelligence officer friends with a CIA man, who have a working friendship/exchange going on.

He is a man of conscience, and when he sees what Castro has planned despite his nations neutrality on the subject is moved by conscience.

AND the fact that he knew what he was risking did it anyway, and It was an amazingly believable and compelling story.

I just don't get fickle critics.

Johnny Stecchino (1991)

Santa Cleopatra

[9/10 · 10 October 2005]

I think I learned Italian from this movie, I watched it so many times.

I've simply never loved a movie as so cute and funny as this, its well worth tracking it down, Its still pretty available if you know the right places to look.

Roberto and Nicoletta are perfect together on and off screen, truly a mating of Eagles as the Romans would say.

take the perfect vaudeville act, Where you have some idiot who is just a heart of Gold, mix in a scheming Mafia donna, take a bunch of Italians in good suits add a little illegal narcotics done by politicans.

Steal a banana or two, and then change places with a murderous Cut throat assasino. What do you get? Superb cinema.

On the Beach (1959)

true horror is truly subtle

[9/10 · 7 September 2005]

I read the book when I was about 15, before I knew there was a movie, But being I was always a fan of Peck I decided to see it.

since everyone seen it, and knows the ending. I think whats so insane is that its still a real possibility, I would much rather be one of the people that dies in a vivid blast of thermonuclear heat, rather than wait for the ambient radiation to raise to the point of killing me far from the war zone.

The true horror is the plain truth that since no one has yet to make any drugs that counteract radiations nuclear death, and likely never will... this is what would happen, and could still happen if an all out nuclear war happened.

Chernobyl has people that still live in the blast zone so does Hiroshima and Nagasaki despite their high radiation levels. Who knows maybe pockets could survive Damn I'm thinking about it all over again, I'm going to vomit now I'm sorry, Its just this is true horror not that slasher flicks we've become so accustomed to.