Mr. Burke Reviews

Reviews #43-46: The Sword in the Stone / The Sword and the Rose / The Moon-Spinners / The Reluctant Dragon 43: The Sword in the Stone (1963) The next stop on my Disney deep dive was going to be a disappointment. It was as I remembered it. The Sword in the Stone premeired in 1963, before I was born, and returned to theaters a couple of times. I never saw it in one. And as luck would have it, it didn't surface on video when my niece or nephews were little. I was interested because it was King Arthur. And for decades, I've had an unread copy of The Once and Future King, of which, The Sword in the Stone is the first chapter. I was really looking forward to this movie the first time we rented it. And it was just boring. Arthur's lessons are dragged out but not very entertaining. There isn't a song worth singing, and most of the songs are just nonsense words, which I guess work for magic, but not from repeatability. You won't hear any of these son...

Reviews #40-42: The Parent Trap / The Sign of Zorro / Jungle Cat Every now and again, I think about the blogs I've started and let fall dormant. This is one of them. There's a good reason for this one: it's not like anyone is going to find this blog and ask me to review anything for them! And, yes, I did have that in mind when I first started this blog. I've given some thought to restarting this ever since I took a bunch of DVDs from my brother's apartment when I was cleaning it out. Most of the DVDs I donated to a local church for its community center. Another thing that happened was that I recently got a cheap deal for Hulu with Disney (with commercials) last Christmas (or was it Thanksgiving?). The last time I had Disney Plus, I started doing a deep dive into the catalogue going all the way back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , using a list I found on Wikipedia. A couple of discoveries: There were more movies than I remembered and...

Reviews #28-39: 12 Abbott & Costello movies It's been a little over a year since I posted my last review on this blog. That's not to say that I haven't expressed my opinions anywhere in social media. Just not here. For one thing, keeping a weekly schedule isn't easy. For another, I wasn't watching enough to warrant posting weekly. (Posting "weakly" would be more like it, amirite?) And, to be honest with myself, no one is reading these reviews, except me. Maybe at a future date, someone came back to find out what else I've done, for good or for ill, but that's not happening now. Several times I thought about it. And, at times, I kept track of some of the things I binged, in case I wanted to include them here. And maybe I will, if I recall the details. Anyway, a couple months ago, while cleaning in the basement, I found a stack of DVDs that needed to be watched and passed along. "Found" might not be the correct word. They wer...

Review #23: Los Parecidos a.k.a. The Similars Some friends of mine have watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. I am not among those who have viewed it. It's labelled as being very intense, and that's not something I'm going to binge. I don't need anything that's going to prevent me from sleeping well (more than the usual things that already prevent me from sleeping well). However, I am enough of a fan of the "classics" that one of the aforementioned friends invited a lot of us over to view the 1963 movie The Haunting (which was remade in the 90s). This movie is more of a thriller than a horror film, and it's always a bit off-kilter. Mini-review within a review: you should want this film. The problem was that when the movie ended, the evening was still young, and we needed something else to watch. Trying to figure out what to put on next is as difficult as trying to pick a place to eat. We looked through the horror listings, not wanting an...

Review #22: Like Father If you're old enough to remember when there were only three networks which would fill out their weekly programming schedules with "Movies of the Week", then this Netflix film might be of interest to you. Like Father , starring Kelsey Grammar and Kristen Bell , is reminiscent of some of the better movies of the week of years gone by, only with a slightly better budget and bigger names to drive them. To be fair, Bell has top billing and is the central character, but Grammar is the actor I'm more familiar with and the reason I decided to give it a go. The only thing that I know I've seen Kristen Bell in might be a single episode of Veronica Mars . (Note to self: see if that's available to binge.) Life Father is the story of Rachel Hamilton, a workaholic who gets left at the altar because she can't leave her phone home even on the day of her wedding. (She was late walking down the aisle because she took a work call.) Her estranged...