My cousin Vinny

A good one. In rottentomatoes, 85% from critics, 81% from the audience approved. It has aged fairly well, though the difference in age between Vinny and Mona Lisa is a little obvious now. I don't remember thinking that then.

The film deals with two young New Yorkers traveling through rural Alabama who are put on trial for a murder they did not commit, and the comic attempts of a cousin, Vincent Gambini, a newly minted lawyer, to defend them. Much of the humor comes from the contrasting personalities of the brash Italian-American New Yorkers, Vinny and his fiancée Mona Lisa, and the more laid back Southern townspeople.
Lawyers have praised the comedy's realistic depiction of courtroom procedure and trial strategy. Pesci and Tomei received critical praise for their performances, and Tomei won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

 She was fabulous.

La Mission

Watched La Mission last night. Enjoyed it a lot. Some reviewers liked it. Times review panned it; Ebert gave it 2½ stars. I give it 3: powerful acting overcomes some clichéd dialogue; great story; beautiful cars, wonderful music. Rex Reed, whom I did not realize is still around, gives it warm praise and 3 out of 4 eyeballs.

La Mission

April 7, 2010, 6:00 PM ET: New Benjamin Bratt Film ‘La Mission’ Highlights Car Culture.

“La Mission,” a film starring Benjamin Bratt and directed by his brother, Peter, is set in San Francisco’s Mission District. It focuses on a father named Che Rivera, played by Bratt, who struggles with the revelation that his son is gay. 

Check out this story and other articles about cars on our sister blog Driver’s Seat.

Gran Torino

Excellent. Eastwood plays a gruff retired auto worker who has just buried his wife. Cantankerous, he is aggravated by everything. Hmong have moved next door. Walt lives in the past, his Korean War service informing and haunting his every day. A chance encounter with his neighbors leads to friendships, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Funny, poignant, exceedingly well acted, directed and photographed, this is American film making at its best.

One-Vehicle Presidential Motorcade

"Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure"
By Matthew Algeo
Chicago Review Press, 262 pages, $24.95

973.918 A

When Harry and Bess Truman took their vacation, they were part of a growing American pastime: the automobile vacation. Postwar prosperity, brand-new highways and an itch to see the country made road travel popular with the middle class. In the golden age of the American family vacation, Detroit's Big Three auto makers manufactured family-friendly cars that were both roomy and affordable. The price of gas was 27 cents per gallon, and uniformed attendants filled up the tank and cleaned the windshield. Motels -- where you could pull right up to the door of your room -- were a new phenomenon.

27 cents? A gallon of regular gas went for 29.9 cents in 1970, 1971.

In keeping with one of the book's conceits, Mr. Algeo makes a pilgrimage to the Grand Ballroom of Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, where Truman spoke. "I was standing in the very spot where Harry had stood exactly fifty-five years earlier, front and center in his white dinner jacket, under the blazing klieg lights, measuring an imaginary fish, and giving Ike hell." Through such vignettes Mr. Algeo takes us back to a time, despite Cold War anxieties, "of unbridled optimism," then brings us forward to our supposedly more cynical age.

Truman was criticizing Eisenhower for the latter's proposal to cut defense spending. A rich irony.












Harry Truman drinks a Coke at a service station in Frederick, Md.

The author retraced the Trumans' trip in stages from fall 2006 to summer 2008, hunting down the service stations where the couple bought gasoline, the diners where they ate a square meal and the hotels where they stayed the night. He even tracked down eyewitnesses who remembered the Trumans passing through, including one man who had saved the Coke bottle that Truman drained at a Gulf gas station in Maryland. The station owner asked the former president to take his mechanic to task for being a Republican, Mr. Algeo reports, but Truman replied that it was "too hot to give anybody hell." We even see the former president polishing off the soda in one of the many charming snapshots of the traveling Trumans that Mr. Algeo unearthed.

Former President Harry Truman unloads his car's trunk at a motel in Decatur, Ill., on June 19, 1953.








The small-town America that Truman visited -- where he seems to have been enthusiastically greeted by folks eager to thank him for his service -- is of course much changed when Mr. Algeo arrives, following in the president's footsteps. Those same towns are now generally in a decline that began a few years after Truman passed through, when President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and created the interstate highway system that sent travelers whizzing past towns where once they might have stopped for gas or a meal or an overnight stay. As Mr. Algeo reports, the Parkview Motel in Decatur, Ill., where the Trumans stayed in 1953, is now owned by the Illinois Department of Corrections, home to prisoners finishing out the last year of a sentence.







Harry Truman speaking in Philadelphia

The Lookout

After seeing Definitely, Maybe, I looked for films that the actors were in, and found this film with Isla Fisher. Didn't work. I'd give it a 5.

An admired high school hockey player with a bright future, drives in the night with his girl friend and two other friends with his headlights off with devastating results. The former athlete is left with a brain injury that prevents him from remembering many things for extended periods of time. To compensate, he keeps notes in a small notebook to aid him in remembering what he is to do. He also lives with a blind friend who aids him. He is unable to have meaningful job and he goes to work as a night cleaning man in a bank. He comes under the scrutiny of a gang planning to rob the bank. The leader befriends him and gets him involved with a young woman who further reels him in. Confused, but wanting to escape his current existence, he initially goes along with the scheme. When he realizes he is being used, he attempts to stop the robbery, which of course immediately goes awry.

That's the summary in Alisweb. An interesting idea, but quite a violent film that runs mostly on empty. Acting is good, especially the lead, Joseph Gordon-Levitt; even Matthew Goode, who plays the chief bad guy, acts well. Isla Fisher is wasted as a damsel who is used to reel in the bait with her body. The film simply relies on the premise of the accident and its effects, and, ultimately, on violence. Maybe a 5.

And Jeff Daniels again gets stuck with bad hair (though not as bad as when he played Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in Gettysburg.