Bird on a Wire (1990)

Mel Gibson's mullet and wild-eyed "loose cannon" routine feels self-conscious and tired here - after Lethal Weapon 1 and 2 - but he and Goldie Hawn generate chemistry together, and occasional laughs, as former lovers fleeing killers from his pre-witness protection life, and helping bind the wafer-thin plot, action and comedy together into a palatable something is the Neville Brothers' easy-listening cover of Leonard Cohen's Bird On A Wire.

★★★☆☆

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Storm boy (1976)

I understand Colin Thiele makes it clear in his book that Mister Percival, the pelican raised by Storm Boy, is trained and responds to voice commands, but the movie springs this idea on its audience right when Mister Percival is needed to save a boatful of fishermen, resulting in a laughable Skippy moment that slightly strains the otherwise faithful adaptation, an emotional, likeable, and touching Australian classic, with the ten-year-old Storm Boy living a lonely but - to me - dream existence, quietly at the beach with the Coorong - its beaches, birdlife, and Ngarrindjeri culture (as taught to Storm Boy by David Gulpilil's Fingerbone Bill) - resplendent around him.

★★★★☆

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Featuring Dashiell Hammett's gumshoe Sam Spade - a character played in film twice before but immortalised here by Humphrey Bogart - this noir classic gives Sam Spade plenty of opportunity to stand up to big 'fat men' crime bosses, deflate femme fatale molls, and talk smart to cops-on-the-beat while being hired and rehired to chase an invaluable jewel-encrusted bird statue.

★★★★☆

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Bird Box (2018)

Sandra Bullock does her best with stupid material that tries to do A Quiet Place with sight-deprivation rather than voice-deprivation affecting the survivors of a never clearly elucidated apocalyptic event - these characters, either blindfolded or with eyes clenched tightly closed, are left unable to do anything (the most exciting thing that happens over the course of 48 hours blindfolded on a boat is one character falls overboard only to be plucked back out of the water a moment later) or the characters do manage to do things and it is ludicrous, like driving to the supermarket or running around a forest for the first time, blindfolded.

★★☆☆☆

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Lady Bird (2018)

Any teenager transported to post 9/11 Sacramento - Anne of Green Gables, Kevin Arnold, Arnold Jackson, any - might behave something like Saoirse Ronan's character in Lady Bird, a complacent work-averse Sacramento teenager coming of age and wanting so badly to escape reality (her family's financial straits, her mother's discipline, and the tiresome realism of school nuns) that she bestows upon herself the made-up name Lady Bird, lies to friends about living in a mansion and acts sophisticated about the topics of sex and drugs even though she is a novice in both areas, and the problem with this amiable, perfectly entertaining movie is that so might any teenager act the same way - even those NOT transported to post-9/11 Sacramento, because there is not much that is remarkable about this particular journey into adulthood and nothing especially interesting about its context.

★★★☆☆

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