Neil Haskell

The Loved One
$19.98
The Loved One is a rare instance in which a film surpasses the novel on which it was based. Evelyn Waugh's original novella was a sharp but spare social satire. The screenplay, written by Waugh's old friend Christopher Isherwood (Berlin Stories, I Am a Camera) and Terry Southern (Candy, Dr. Strangelove, The Magic Christian, etc.) is a rich, snappy mockery of Hollywood, the British in Hollywood, and the American Way of Death. Jonathan Winters gives a tour de force performance as the siblings Harry and Wilbur Glenworthy, one a studio hustler down on his luck and the other a cynical and megalomaniacal CEO of a bizarre mortuary/cemetary. Rod Steiger is superb as an effete embalmer, Robert Morse is an excellent casting choice as the bemused young British poet accidentally thrust into the bizarre world-within-world of the upper crust mortuary Whispering Glades. Numerous smaller roles and cameos by John Gielgud, Robert Morley, Liberace, James Coburn, Tab Hunter, Milton Berle enrich the film enormously. It's unpredictable, intelligent, hilarious, and devoid of jokes about bowel movements, a genre that seems to form the exoskeleton of all current comedies.

9 To 5: The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
$17.98
I played this male-bashing mess through once, and tossed it in the "never play" again stack of CDs. I love Dolly. I love her writing. This show had a few cute lines, but the basic one is "All women are wonderful and virtuous. All men are oversexed, intolerant, pigs." I really expected more. There is a slight irony in that the CD arrived the day they announced the show's closing. I was not surprised.

Magnificent Seven [VHS]
$14.95
I am a big Michael Biehn fan and love westerns. This is an excellent movie.

The American Mall
$24.99
I found myself liking this sort of Partridge Family manufactured
for TV rock story about what else a romance between a singing boy and a singing girl.
Nina Dobrev is sort of the perfect modern x generation girl:
manufactured for Sterio HDTV: beautiful voice and a fashion manikin body.
The rich mall owner's daughter (Autumn Reeser) is the villain who wants to take the boy friend away.
My DVD gives no credit for the music.
"I must be dreaming wide awake
I must be dreaming
I must be dreaming wide awake"
Who ever wrote the music probably needs a good intellectual property lawyer?
I can't find a name anywhere...
Here you have a movie with one of the main themes being the
singer-song writer's rights to her song,
and then, you can't find who actually wrote that song
( they haven't given out that information?).
What kind of picture of the world does that give the young idealistic
people who will love this movie for generations?