
The Office: A Survival Guide
Book
Whether it's how to style out a crippling hangover, behave at the Christmas party or identify the...

Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900
Book
"I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad," Lord...

Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters
Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud, Wallace Fowlie and Seth Whidden
Book
The enfant terrible of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) was a defiant and...

The Collini Case
Book
Ferdinand von Schirach's The Collini Case has been at the top of the German charts since publication...

News of the World: A Novel
Book
National Book Award Finalist-Fiction It is 1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through...

What Lot's Wife Saw
Ioanna Bourazopoulou and Yiannis Panas
Book
It's been twenty-five years since the Overflow flooded Southern Europe, drowning Rome, Vienna and...

Phillip McSween (751 KP) rated Duck Soup (1933) in Movies
Jun 29, 2020
Acting: 10
Beginning: 10
Characters: 10
Main character Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) is absolutely hilarious. He has quips for days and he’s always doing something to liven up a scene. The other characters, while good, get lost in the greatness of his funny antics.
Cinematography/Visuals: 10
Numerous setpieces abound here which keeps the movie fresh. The movies’s consistent change of scenery and large visual spectacles propels Duck Soup to almost passable heights. I can appreciate a movie with a constant change of pace, especially older films.
Conflict: 3
I spent a decent amount of this movie trying to figure out just what exactly was going on. The conflict never seemed strong enough for me to think the stakes were worth it. It was clear the focus was more on the comedy aspect rather than driving the story.
Entertainment Value: 8
Memorability: 3
Pace: 10
Plot: 7
Resolution: 5
The ending was meh and that’s me being generous. It was essentially a compounding of the story as a whole which totally lost steam for me towards the back half of the movie. it felt like, by the time we reach the end, the writer forgot what initially made the story great in the first place.
Overall: 76
When you don’t really know what’s going on right off the nose, it makes it hard to settle into the story. Duck Soup does a lot of things rights. However, a solid main character and grandiose scenes aren’t quite enough to mask the fact that the movie falls just shy of being good. Not terrible, but definitely not great.

Charlie Cobra Reviews (1840 KP) rated Cooties (2015) in Movies
Jul 7, 2020 (Updated Oct 26, 2020)

A Historian in Exile: Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, and the Jewish-Christian Encounter
Book
Solomon ibn Verga was one of the victims of the decrees expelling the Jews from Spain and Portugal...

Age of Anger: A History of the Present
Book
'The kind of vision the world needs right now...Pankaj Mishra shouldn't stop thinking' Christopher...