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| The Stop Button |
| Incisive Film and comic book reviews. Titles range from silents to modern, avant-garde and blockbuster, non-English and so on. Comic book reviews are similarly varied. |
| Language: English |
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| Hotel Reserve. Lance Comfort, Mutz Greenbaum and Victor Hanbury. |
| 2008-02-15 07:39:12 |
Though Hotel Reserve is a British production of a continental story (in other words, British actors playing French and Germans), it does have a certain flare to the visual. It's a spy thriller set in the south of France with lots of models standing in for buildings and lots of sets. It very often looks good, even if the three directors only give the impression of tense shots. When the trio needs to be their best--at the end--they manage a nice set, a handful of good inconsequential shots and then fumble on the most important one in the film.
There's some problem with the timing--the film is set before the war and the script overdoes the foreshadowing, especially at the end. The film opens, uneasily because the espionage angle gets introduced right away, with people vacationing. At the end, instead of being about vacationeers, it's about the looming war. The combination of the misfired climax and the wrong-minded close really hurt the film.
Most of the film, with James Mason investigat...
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| Mare Nostrum. Rex Ingram. |
| 2008-02-14 07:02:46 |
Even if forgiving the melodramatic story, Mare Nostrum plays more like a travelogue with occasionally interesting effects scenes than anything else. Ingram's a fine director--except his awkward cuts to close-up, they're common, which is annoying since his other compositions are not--and the film moves quite well. It's predictable (the end is foreshadowed in the first scene and the big development is kind of obvious) and often too much... but it passes time well, using action scenes to get the interest up.
Of the action scenes, I suppose the chase through Marseille is the best. There are some excellent special effects sequences, but Ingram uses them sparingly. The movie's about a Mediterranean sea captain during World War I and there's some at sea sequences with well-shot models. Technically, it's a nice film. I love not being able to figure out how someone did special effects.
The performances are okay in general, with Pâquerette an excellent villain. Antonio Moreno is ineffective t...
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| Monument Ave. Ted Demme. |
| 2008-02-12 10:47:04 |
An utterly depressing Mean Streets knock-off--but beautifully directed by Ted Demme, who manages to make it both derivative and affecting--which might not have much potential, but certainly has the cast for it. Even though Denis Leary is over forty as the guy who wants to get out but they keep pulling him back in--and, honesty, if the film had taken Leary's age into account, it would have been a lot better--he's real good. It helps Demme shoots it so well, but the movie's got a great cast.
Besides Leary--and Billy Crudup, fantastic in a small role--there's, in particular, Ian Hart and Colm Meaney. Hart's got the sidekick role. He doesn't do anything to break out of it, but he inhabits it perfectly. Meaney's the heavy and he's great at it, looking like he should be having more fun than he is--but he never lets the character go wild like most heavies in the genre do and the result is a much finer performance. Meaney and Leary are both these exhausted men... one of the other nuan...
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| Rambo III. Peter MacDonald. |
| 2008-02-11 07:42:26 |
According to IMDb, Rambo III was the most expensive movie ever made at the time of its release. It shows. Enormous sets, lots of vehicles--Rambo versus a helicopter, Rambo versus a tank, Rambo in a tank versus a helicopter. For all the money, it ought to look fantastic--except director Peter MacDonald, a camera operator and second unit director... composes like a second unit director and camera operator. It's incredibly boring to watch, no matter what's actually going on. MacDonald shoots wide shots and long shots and close-ups of Stallone. For the majority of the movie, nothing else. His direction drains any energy the film might have.
With this one, Stallone changes it up a lot. Most importantly, the politics are essentially gone and the movie really does try for some humanism by giving a face to the Afghani people during the Soviet invasion. When Richard Crenna goes and calls it Russia's Vietnam, however, the metaphors and similes get confused (Rambo is siding against the imperi...
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| Love Actually. Richard Curtis. |
| 2008-02-08 06:26:43 |
Richard Curtis--I think--said he wrote Love Actually from all his unused ideas. Just threw them into the oven and baked them together. To some degree, it shows. Unlike the usual big cast films, with lots of incidental meetings and relationships (as P.T. Anderson wrote, these things "happen all the time"), Love Actually is very loose. The characters are connected by thin contrivances and a school play. Curtis is very visibly not working with themes here or making any insightful observations into the human condition.
Amusingly, though its thesis is... well, love is all around and people in love are filled with superhuman perseverance and fortitude, Love Actually... actually disproves its own thesis. In a couple ways. The most visible is the breaking marriage between Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. Rickman's got a wandering eye and, strangely, Curtis never tells the viewer how wrong he goes... which means it's impossible to know where he or Thompson are at the end of the fil...
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| The Natural. Barry Levinson. |
| 2008-02-07 11:01:21 |
The Natural is a strange one. It's a cheap success. The story is incredibly simple--you have the golden-haired hero and the evil monster who lives in the dark--and looking for anything more will leave one wanting. Even though the film taps into the baseball mythos, it's superficial. The Natural is the superhero movie Robert Redford never made... there's no question of his morality, his loyalty, his ability. Watching the movie is about enjoying what the movie does. The scenes of Redford knocking the ball out of the park aren't supposed to come as surprises, they're supposed to be Hollywood magic. And for the most part, they are.
For his second feature, Barry Levinson is perfect--just like his first--capturing the film's era. He's not so perfect at capturing or creating the wonderment. There are some problems. The biggest is the opening, with Redford playing twenty at fifty (or forty-nine)--only two years younger than co-star Wilford Brimley--while Redford playing thirty-six is d...
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| Die Another Day. Lee Tamahori. |
| 2008-02-06 08:58:58 |
Fun. I'm trying to think--besides the Ocean series--of fun Hollywood blockbusters these days. It seems like fun is out. Certainly with James Bond. Die Another Day is a lot of fun. In fact, unlike some of the other Bond movies--the ones I can remember well--it seems to be more concentrated on being fun than anything else. I avoided it when it first came out for a couple reasons. Halle Berry and the title. It's one of Berry's best performances because, well, she's supposed to be having fun and apparently she can (or can emulate it). As for the title... I mean, if Sony is going with Quantum of Solace... I don't think I can hold Die Another Day against the now-gone MGM.
So, anyway, I tried it out....
The movie opens with James Bond surfing, which I thought was going to be too much, but wasn't. Even though Lee Tamahori has some minor problems with hipster editing, for the most part he does a fantastic job. Die Another Day is a special effects extravaganza and the CG and practical m...
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| Black Sheep. Jonathan King. |
| 2008-02-05 09:05:43 |
Black Sheep plays like a more discreet, larger budgeted young Peter Jackson. Less ambitious too (I'm thinking of Braindead as the comparison). Both Jackson and King are New Zealanders and so on. Weta, who works with Hollywood Peter Jackson, did the effects for Black Sheep, turning in--besides the gore--were-sheep transformations with heavy American Werewolf in London overtones. And an Innerspace homage (or rip)... whichever, it's always nice to see something familiar one has to think about for a few minutes to get the reference.
The movie is part zombie, part werewolf, part Jurassic Park. There's the people's story, of course, about brothers squabbling about the family sheep farm--with a flaky animal rights activist and genetic experimentation thrown in (one's to provide the romantic interest, the other covers the rational explanation). Lots of gore--everyone commented on the intestines--unfortunately, King's just doing it to play for his intestine-seeking audience, not because ...
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| Rambo: First Blood Part II. George P. Cosmatos. |
| 2008-02-04 10:53:52 |
Rambo's pretty awful. It's not terrible--not too terrible to watch anyway (at least once, though New York Times critic A.O. Scott should probably be fired for supporting it to any degree). The main technical fault lies with George P. Cosmatos, who somehow managed to stock the crew with capable people (editor Mark Goldblatt is no slouch and Jack Cardiff--you know, the Archer's cinematographer--shot it), but can't shoot an action scene, establishing shot, anything. The second unit stuff of the helicopters is the best composition in the movie. The next big problem, then, lies with the script. And not even Stallone's political commentary, which I'll save for its own paragraph. No, the problem with the script is the movie's mostly action after fifty minutes. Forty or so minutes of chase scenes and shooting and explosions. None of these things, of course, look good. Cosmatos is awful at shooting them.
Next problem, the cast. Richard Crenna's terrible, Charles Napier's terrible, Ma...
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| The Thomas Crown Affair. John McTiernan. |
| 2008-01-16 08:23:11 |
Every time I watch Thomas Crown, I wonder if there’s some magical explanation for all John McTiernan’s other films (except Die Hard, which is, too, singular). Because The Thomas Crown Affair, as I love saying, is the last great utterly mainstream film. But there’s something more... the tone of the film, the Bill Conti score, the editing... it’s completely different but McTiernan knew what he was doing as he was making it. It’s clear from some of the longer sequences--the glider, for instance--but also from shorter ones, like Rene Russo despondent in the rain. McTiernan knew what he was putting together here.
But Thomas Crown is also--there’s a lot to get to, I’m hoping I remember everything--a New York movie. It’s not a New York movie in the sense a native made it, it doesn’t have that familiar excitement about the city, but it has the fan’s excitement, which makes me wonder if McTiernan just really liked shooting the third Die Hard there. The film has two major reminders of the original, Faye Dunaway’s excellent cameo (it’s the first time I can remember her having so much fun with a role) and the repeated uses of the song from the original (before the end credits Sting cover), and the original was not one of the famous 1970s New York movies, but McTiernan uses the city to--visually--set some of the film’s tone.
I’m thinking I should get Brosnan and Russo out of the way. I think, though I’m not a hundred percent sure (I’m remembering telling my mom about reading this tidbit), MGM was--back around 2000--thinking about a Thin Man remake with Brosnan and Russo. Saying it would work is about all I need to say about their performances and their chemistry. The film sets itself up to fail if the two of them don’t click, but also if Russo can’t pull off, essentially, becoming the lead in the second half. She and McTiernan handle the refocusing beautifully.
Since Russo does become the protagonist, it’s very important her supporting cast...
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| Ocean's Thirteen. Steven Soderbergh. |
| 2008-01-15 07:36:07 |
A friend of mine thinks this entry is the series’s most successful, but--while it is a tad confrontational--I prefer the outright hostility to the average viewer the second one exhibits. Ocean’s Thirteen seems to be made more for the remaining audience. The people who got Twelve. The scenes in Mexico, in particular, are the sort of absurdist humor only Soderbergh can get away with. I actually had to pause the film to laugh while the wife wondered why we were stopping.
The film isn’t just missing Julia Roberts, it’s missing needing her. The job becomes so central to the film from five minutes in, the particulars of the characters aren’t important. Clooney and Pitt do have some great scenes together--the Oprah scene is a winner, as is the film’s half-way point emotional scene, with the two back where they ended the first film for a nice moment. Damon’s role is smaller as well.
Instead of filling the empty space--even with the ultra-produced heist summaries, there’s empty space--by bumping up the supporting members of the team, Thirteen just gives it all to Al Pacino. Pacino’s a hilarious bad guy, embracing a touch of silliness I don’t think he ever has before. Besides his scenes with Barkin (she’s great too), he only really has contact with Clooney and, for a moment each scene, it’s jarring. Danny Ocean shouldn’t be talking to Al Pacino that way... it’s Al Pacino.
Even with the stylization of the second film, which was semi-referential as well as strangely affecting, Thirteen is--stylistically--Soderbergh’s tour de force for the series. The color palatte, lots of reds, lots of blues, is lush and complicated. It might be, in addition to the sound mixing, the way Thirteen is most hostile to the viewer. Obviously, with a film mostly set indoors, Soderbergh has lots of fun with his sets.
The general opinion of the cast, as I recall, is Thirteen is the series’s final entry. I agree a break--and a significant one--is in order, but (and someh...
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| A History of Violence. David Cronenberg. |
| 2008-01-14 07:21:00 |
There’s something about A History of Violence from the first scene, something about the way the titles become part of the motel exterior. It’s a nice long tracking shot from Cronenberg, with a great (small part though) performance from Stephen McHattie. After the opening, Cronenberg spends a lot of time introducing Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello and family. They live in a Hollywood-ized version of a small midwestern town (where everyone looks out for one another, where Bello has a son she had when she was eleven)--it’s a never never land, which is fine, because Cronenberg’s dealing with the role of violence in films here. He manages to make all the commentary on it he wants, while never once letting the characters slip from the most important position.
The film succeeds because of Mortensen and Bello. Bello’s good, but Mortensen is amazing. It’s been a while since the last time I read he was finally going to be big and Violence doesn’t show he can be a leading man... it shows he can act beautifully. The interesting thing about how Cronenberg treats Mortensen... he’s never anything but the protagonist. He never loses the viewer’s identification. Even when he’s scaring the hell out of everyone around him, he’s still the good guy. Because it’s a Hollywood movie. It’s not in the sense one could see Brad Pitt in the lead, but Cronenberg knows very well he can’t comment on Hollywood’s approach to violence without making the film Hollywood.
There is some distraction, given the high schoolers all being mid-twenties or later. I’m guessing it doesn’t have to do with Cronenberg commenting on... the Beach Party movies, but rather... well, regular Hollywood casting practices.
Cronenberg offsets the violence and the implications of it and Mortensen and Bello’s respective inner turmoil with a couple fantastic performances. First, Ed Harris. Harris plays a creepy mobster and he’s a joy to watch, but it’s not a stretch for him. Ed Harris doesn...
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| Good Night, and Good Luck. George Clooney. |
| 2008-01-11 08:31:55 |
George Clooney directs Good Night, and Good Luck with an absolute confidence. It’s Clooney’s second film, but he doesn’t just know how to make a restricted setting story (the film takes place in the CBS building, a bar, and two to three other locations) exciting... he also knows how to make an informative docudrama into an affecting and revealing look at people working together. So, Good Luck is about citizenship and working together. And some great filmmaking.
Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov have their main story--the plot--Murrow and McCarthy, but they add these subplots, some small, some very big. For example, the plight of secretly married couple Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson parallels the film’s main plot. But there’s also Ray Wise’s story (Clooney introduces Wise being filmed in studio, so discreetly, I thought it was a cameo). Or the relationship between Clooney’s Fred Friendly and David Strathairn’s Murrow, which is deceptively (at least as the film starts) deep. Their partnership is what enables the film’s main plot. It’s an incredibly interesting narrative, because the film is so short and... for the most part, most of the characters are only recognizable by their faces, not by names. Clooney cast a lot of good people who do good work, but they’re important to the film because they work with Strathairn and Clooney, not for any other reason (Downey and Clarkson being exceptions).
As for Strathairn’s performance... he brings an inestimable humanity to Murrow. His physical performance is perfect, of course, but there’s this sensitivity, which makes Murrow almost so real he’s fiction.
The film draws some definite parallels between the film’s era and the modern one, when the television industry has turned news in to an even cheaper, even more exploitative reality show (something Murrow warns about early on). But Clooney closes with Eisenhower, reminding modern conservatives Republicans weren’t always evil-minded idi...
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| Goldfinger. Guy Hamilton. |
| 2008-01-10 08:25:40 |
How can a film, with such a beautiful, awe-inspiring fight scene (Bond and Oddjob), have such terrible editing overall? In fact, how can the technical side be so contradictory... terrible direction from Guy Hamilton on most scenes, but fine or excellent when he’s on set. Terrible editing for most of it, but then the rest of the time, perfect editing. Or the rear screen projection. All the rear screen projection is atrocious, but the second unit photography is inspired. The only non-contradictory production element is the music. John Barry’s score is a masterpiece of effectiveness. The sequences where it overpowers the scenic audio are... they’re amazing. It’s like watching a scored sequence the way it should be.
Oddly, I have nothing but good things to say about Sean Connery too. He plays his role with a smile and a great deal of athleticism. He’s just a lot of fun to watch and he does great with his co-stars, particularly Gert Fröbe and Cec Linder. Fröbe and Linder, besides Harold Sakata’s fantastic performance as Oddjob, are the two best in the supporting cast. Problematically, the romantic interests in the cast leave a lot to be desired... Shirley Eaton is probably the best, with Honor Blackman not doing particularly well, but much better than Tania Mallet, who is awful.
Unfortunately, the movie is unaware of its own silliness (in terms of plot)... but once Bond is done using all his gadgets, it gets real good... starting with a great scene between Connery and Fröbe. That scene, though too short, comes after one of the film’s worst... when Fröbe meets with all the American gangsters (they aren’t called them the Mafia, of course, which makes it both dated and hilarious). That one good scene kicks off the last part of the film, which does very, very well....
And even though the last scene is poorly paced, Goldfinger comes off fine (thanks to Sean Connery of all people, which I find... given his work post-1970, rather amusing).
★★½
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| Blade Runner. Ridley Scott. |
| 2008-01-09 07:27:55 |
I’m having trouble working up the enthusiasm for a Blade Runner post. Not because it isn’t a great film, but because I don’t really want to engage in this “Final Cut” business, which I guess I’m going to do anyway. I’ll get it out of the way... Ridley Scott’s “Final Cut” is, so far as I can tell--with the exception of the filmic equivalents of sound bytes--no different from the studio-produced “Director’s Cut.” Or, if he did add or remove anything, it doesn’t change the experience. I kept waiting for something to provide further evidence for his overall thesis on the piece and it isn’t there (having the actor and writers working against you--not to mention the source novel, though I can’t see Ridley reading the source novel--can’t help). It’s cleaner, clearer and the same as the last time I watched it. Or as I recall.
Trying to figure out how Ridley Scott could have turned out such a delicate and subtle film--Blade Runner is, essentially, a film noir set in the future, but down to the subtext of people and their work and their relationship to that work, which figures greatly in to all film noir (and, actually, Ridley’s “truth” behind the film would invalidate). It’s a film noir in the classic, non-neo-noir sense. Sure, the Rutger Hauer scenes break away a little, but it’s really about the detective. And, in the truest film noir sense, it’s about the detective spending a long time figuring something out he could have figured out in a minute had he not been drunk and feeling sorry for himself.
And even though he becomes secondary for a lot of the last act, Blade Runner is one of Harrison Ford’s best performances. He’s the Dick Powell of the future. While Hauer is excellent too, I think Sean Young was the most surprising. She’s perfect in the role. The supporting cast is also excellent, but it’s mostly about those three.
As for Ridley. I really cannot reconcile the excellence he does in this film with anything e...
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| Spaceballs. Mel Brooks. |
| 2008-01-08 10:32:31 |
It’s kind of amazing how much of Spaceballs is actually funny--pretty much everything with Rick Moranis and Mel Brooks as the Spaceballs president--given how everything with Bill Pullman and Daphne Zuniga falls flat. It doesn’t even fall... it’s a zero degree plane. Some of it has to do with the writing of that portion--Brooks and his co-writers aren’t particularly interested in the good guys because they aren’t funny (the jokes are cheap and substandard and Brooks tries to give it a narrative--and romantic tension--instead of playing against narrative for laughs, like the Moranis parts). But it’s not all poor writing--Pullman’s terrible and Zuniga’s worse, giving one of the abysmal performances in a Hollywood studio film from the 1980s.
There aren’t any good performances on the good guy side--John Candy’s probably the best, if only by comparison (he’s not good by any means and his character is unfunny) and Joan Rivers’s vocal work as the robot is obnoxious. It...
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| The Presidio. Peter Hyams. |
| 2008-01-07 09:50:14 |
I can’t forget so I need to open with it. In this ‘rah-rah, go USA’ twiddle, Sean Connery actually hijacks a eulogy at a Medal of Honor winner’s funeral to resolve his issues with his daughter. It’s a hilarious close to the movie, which has such bad jokes throughout, a laugh track wouldn’t be out of place.
The film’s actually incredibly important in terms of 1980s film history--it’s Paramount trying to repeat pass success without the people involved with those successes. The Presidio is basically a Simpson/Bruckheimer production (down to the terrible script from Larry Ferguson), just without their particular brand of cinematic styling--for all the lame chases and exploding cars, Peter Hyams is not a bad director... he has a good understanding of using a Panavision frame to tell narrative, apparently just not the sense to know how to fix a bad script. The film’s missing a hip score and Eddie Murphy. Mark Harmon’s in the Eddie Murphy role, though I’m not sure if Si...
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| Phantom Lady. Robert Siodmak. |
| 2007-12-31 11:36:15 |
There’s a distinct, definite brilliance to Siodmak’s direction. The film itself is unique in casting a woman as the hero in a film noir, essentially Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, while maintaining her as female. Ella Raines’s boss (played, in the film’s only mediocre performance, by Alan Curtis) is falsely convicted, due to perjury. Raines goes after the three perjurers and Siodmak creates, in each case, a magnificent sequence, whether it’s chase or just discomfort. Phantom Lady’s most well-known for the sexually charged scene with Raines and Elisha Cook Jr. at a jam session, but Siodmak’s just as impressive during the subsequent resolution to that scene.
All of or most of Phantom Lady was shot on set and Siodmak even uses matte paintings--quite effectively--for one of the pursuit scenes. Early on, during the trial, Siodmak gets the acknowledgment of artifice out of the way, summarizing the trial with voiceovers, tracking time with a court stenographer’s shorthand, fo...
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| The Secret War of Harry Frigg. Jack Smight. |
| 2007-12-28 15:45:01 |
Paul Newman can’t play stupid. Harry Frigg is, for the first thirty to forty minutes of the movie, stupid. Even after he’s not stupid anymore--Sylva Koscina, quite believably, inspires him to improve himself--Newman’s stuck with the dumb, New Jersey from a Planters Peanut commercial accent. It doesn’t bother much in the scenes with Koscina, since the pair have great chemistry (though hearing Newman talk about going to college and having the Depression take the opportunity away is goofy sounding).
The Secret War of Harry Frigg is a war farce. Newman’s trying to rescue a quintet of generals from an Italian resort, where the guards are friends, et cetera, et cetera. He’s also pretending to be a general himself, so there’s plenty of opportunity for humor. Except the film’s not very funny, because Newman’s too good an actor for such a slight script. And his scenes with Koscina suggest a straightforward take on their relationship would be much more rewarding.
The problem--...
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| Battlefield Baseball. Yamaguchi Yudai. |
| 2007-12-27 12:05:49 |
Japanese manga adaptations tend to be absurd--at the same time amateurish and sublime, as all the actors in Battlefield Baseball keep a straight face throughout. The movie’s low budget, so very few of the punches connect and waiting for Versus’s Sakaguchi to have similar, beautifully choreographed fight scenes (even with Kitamura producing) is in vain. Most of the fight scenes are slow motion, absurdly stylized. Battlefield Baseball, while keeping (I imagine) the manga’s plot line, is also a very well-conceived rip on sports movies. Not being a fan of that genre, I didn’t notice any direct references, but the overbearing, sappy melodramatic music as the characters embrace or realize baseball’s all about friendship... it works beautifully.
There’s a significant problem with the film’s structure though. It’s split in to three parts, the lengthy introduction--complete with Sakaguchi singing about himself (one of two great musical sequences)--the baseball game, then the a...
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| It Happened One Night. Frank Capra. |
| 2007-12-26 07:41:26 |
There’s something particularly tragic about It Happened One Night: somehow, Capra and Riskin let it get away from them. It’s possible--likely even--the awkward conclusion was a result of not having access to the stars (Gable and Colbert were both on loan to Columbia), but it doesn’t really matter. Riskin went from a deliberate pace--the majority of the film takes place over three or four nights, these days and nights being the film’s content for the first ninety minutes (I suppose the opening scene is an indeterminate period of time before these days begin, but probably not more than seven hours)--to a rushed one... the third act takes place over a week and takes up about fifteen minutes of time. However, were it not for Riskin’s change in point of view, futzing with the pace wouldn’t matter. The point of view change, combined with the pace (and the lack of the main characters) kneecap It Happened One Night when it needs to be its best.
The point of view in the film is, fo...
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| I Am Legend. Francis Lawrence. |
| 2007-12-24 15:10:22 |
There should be laws against remaking terrible Charlton Heston movies worse than the source movie. Though, given I Am Legend plays a little like Christian Scientist propaganda... I doubt Republicans would do it... even if it did give Heston a legacy besides being a heartless liar (Bowling for Columbine). It’s also interesting how the material appeals so much to Republican leading men. First Heston, then Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to get it made, and now Will Smith. It’s odd....
The movie is one of the stupider films--just in terms of suspension of disbelief... it constantly contradicts itself. Obviously, screenwriters Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman are terrible (Goldsman wrote, for example, Batman and Robin among other attacks on filmic decency). But it’s really, really dumb. Almost impossible to describe how stupid. These jokers don't, apparently, even know what the word 'legend' means and misuse it horribly.
Francis Lawrence is an okay director, though. He switches...
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| Young Dr. Kildare. Harold S. Bucquet. |
| 2007-12-21 13:43:57 |
Young Dr. Kildare is very hard to watch. Not because it’s bad or because it’s insanely rare, but because Elmo Veron is one of the worst editors I’ve ever seen on a Hollywood film. Some of the fault--for shooting too many medium-long shots--belongs to director Bucquet, Veron’s incompetent eyes and ears for film cutting makes Kildare a constant intrusion. It’s like someone clanks a hammer repeatedly against a pan whenever the film cuts to a one-shot. It’s like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. It’s unacceptable. There’s no reason a film should have such bad editing.
Otherwise, Kildare’s a not quite genial (the case gets solved because hospital intern Lew Ayres lets paramedic Nat Pendleton convince him they need to beat men with a wrench) medical drama. Well, not exactly... there’s a case, a few of them even, but it’s mostly a setup for the subsequent series. MGM must have had some idea there’d be more, since the movie stops instead of concludes. But back to the ...
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| Death Wish. Michael Winner. |
| 2007-12-20 12:02:04 |
I’m having a hard time deciding where the start with Death Wish. I wanted to open with a glib comment about how much I appreciated (even though it’s counter to some expository dialogue in the film) more of the criminals being white than black. Very progressive (or cautious) for 1974. But then I thought maybe starting with director Michael Winner--who actually does achieve one well-directed sequence in the entire film (and Death Wish shot on location in New York, so it’s hard to mess up, but Winner makes it look like a Mentos commercial). Or the writing, which is more Hollywoodized than an episode of “Friends.” I never thought about starting with Bronson’s performance, because I wanted to positive comments to come as a surprise. And Vincent Gardenia being terrible isn’t particularly interesting. I even thought about outlining how the story elements could have been juxtaposed to create something good. But then I finished watching the movie and the ending sort of messed it ...
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| The Great Moment. Preston Sturges. |
| 2007-12-19 10:22:27 |
There are a handful of “Sturges moments” in The Great Moment. I suppose I’d define those moments as the ones where the predictable or familiar filmic device transcends artifice (even if it’s as artificial as the text a character is reading appearing on the screen for the viewer to read as well) and becomes... ideal. Sturges’s understanding of how to make a comedic scene work is amazing. His pacing is perfect, the editing, everything. But The Great Moment isn’t a comedy. It’s the rather depressing story of the discoverer of anesthesia, played by Joel McCrea.
Sturges is visibly passionate about the story (the film’s thesis being the discoverer got a raw deal), but he allows that passion to blind him from his strengths. So, even while there are those good Sturges moments and the film’s generally well-written, there’s a lot of problems. First, Sturges frames it as a flashback with, presumably, bookends. But he quickly discards the framing. Second, the end... once it be...
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| The Killer That Stalked New York. Earl McEvoy. |
| 2007-12-18 12:09:48 |
The premise behind The Killer That Stalked New York (shouldn’t it be Who?) is almost beyond goofy. The movie mixes one part film noir and one part medical thriller and... I mean, I don’t even know what to say about the story. It’s such a ludicrous idea (the fate of the city, under threat from a smallpox outbreak, hinges on a wronged woman on the run), it really does work to some degree. Some of it might have to do with Evelyn Keyes turning in a rather good performance as the hunted woman, but a lot of it also has to do with that wacky story.
While the movie has to take itself seriously (otherwise, it’d be a farce), it goes a little far, utilizing a voiceover narration (from someone who is not a character in the film), who hurries things along, particularly at the beginning. There’s also the problem of not defining the risks. The mayor orders the entire city vaccinated after five cases, damn the expense, but it’s never explained why they’re so worried if all the cases sho...
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| No Country for Old Men. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. |
| 2007-12-17 11:01:08 |
There’s something untranslatable about the last line of a novel. Even though maybe it shouldn’t, it essentially sums up everything--not just the scene or the story or the characters, but the reader’s experience as well... (whether the writer’s experience of writing the book is summed up in the line is, obviously, immaterial). With No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers translate that moment in to filmic terms, which is a film first in my experience.
The film is a masterful immersive experience, the wide open Texas plains, the gradual, somehow disinterested narrative, Tommy Lee Jones’s soothing performance of an also somewhat disinterested character. The minute Josh Brolin walks across the plains, looking for the money he and the viewer knows must be there, No Country opens up and swallows the viewer. The maw invisibly closes. Javier Bardem is a red herring. While he’s fantastic, the character is fantastic, he’s not the compelling aspect. Brolin’s generally unlikable...
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| The Departed. Martin Scorsese. |
| 2007-12-14 12:35:14 |
It’s hilarious, of course, Scorsese finally won an Oscar for the film least like his work. The Departed is the really serious movie Mel Gibson and Richard Donner never got around to making in the late 1990s... but Scorsese--I don’t know if Scorsese adds something to the mix or if he just knew how to package the product. I imagine he finally won because The Departed showed he was firmly committed, finally, to being commercial. But there’s something subversive in Departed’s commercial sensibilities. Scorsese and his technical crew (cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and editor Thelma Schoonmaker) loose on a Hollywood picture (the connections to, say, The Devil’s Own are more plentiful than not). Schoonmaker’s editing in the film is her most innovative work because it’s new--the way the story’s being told is new... from Ballhaus’s lighting, Schoomaker’s editing, and Scorsese’s digital happy (but it’s shot on film) shots. The IMDb trivia section talks about CG compo...
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| Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Robert Wise. |
| 2007-12-13 10:44:50 |
In addition to being one of the more intentionally boring films ever made, Star-Trek">Star Trek: The Motion Picture features some of the more amazing science fiction special effects. The work Douglas Trumbull does in this film is without equal--he makes the unimaginable visual. It’s astounding (and I was watching the pan-and-scan only “Special Longer Version” and it still looked amazing). So, since Trumbull did all the special effects and Jerry Goldsmith’s music went to all those special effects, it was kind of hard to figure out what--if anything--Robert Wise contributed to the film.
Simply put, he made it real. The Enterprise actually seemed to function on a believable level, people walking around doing menial, but necessary, tasks. Shatner and Kelley have a cup of coffee at one point, because they’ve been up forty hours straight. That cup of coffee is a significant contribution, because even though Star Trek fails in the final act, the film’s more about the journey than the outco...
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| Cry Danger. Robert Parrish. |
| 2007-12-12 10:35:44 |
Cry Danger is a strange film noir... it takes place almost exclusively during the day. It also relies almost solely on humor to move itself along through the first act--not Dick Powell, who spends the whole film with a slightly bemused look on his face, but Richard Erdman. Erdman’s the whole reason to watch Cry Danger... when he’s not around, I just kept waiting for him to show up again. He never disappointed.
Erdman’s so important because Cry Danger is not a particularly involving mystery. It establishes the good guys and the bad guys very early and doesn’t do much to make things interesting between the setup and the resolution. The problem is the lack of a mystery and the foils throughout are spare. Eventually, everything comes to rest on Powell’s shoulders. He’s got to carry the movie through and, while he’s able to do it, it’s at the expense of quite a bit.
The story takes place over three or four days and is occasionally confusing--someone refers to last night and...
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| Defence of the Realm. David Drury. |
| 2007-12-11 12:45:00 |
Defence of the Realm starts--and spends about a half hour being--a British variation of the Hollywood newspaper reporter story. There’s the story and the reporter’s dilemma about his morality--there’s even the wise old mentor (Denholm Elliot) for the young reporter getting his first big break (Gabriel Byrne). It’s not particularly good, it’s not particularly bad. Never good enough to care about what’s happening, never bad enough to stop watching--even though Richard Harvey’s musical score has got to be one of the worst I’ve heard in recent memory.
Then it turns in to a British variation on the conspiracy thriller, which is problematic, because Gabriel Byrne’s reporter is the stupidest reporter on to a big case in the cinematic history. He knows he’s being watched, so he hides his notes in full view of the people watching him (checking before and after and seeing they’re watching) and is then upset when they’re gone.
I’m trying to remember what happens in bet...
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| The Runaround. Charles Lamont. |
| 2007-12-10 10:10:13 |
It takes a while for The Runaround to get started... actually, I suppose it’d more accurate to say it stalls out after the first fifteen minutes, then takes another twenty or so to get started again. The film starts out strong with Frank McHugh in a sidekick role--McHugh’s perfect in that role--and lead Rod Cameron is appealing (even if he’s not the most emotive actor). The first fifteen minutes are a comedic chase between Cameron and opponent (they’re private detectives competing--whoever brings home the missing heiress wins) Broderick Crawford. Crawford’s really broad in this role, so broad it got me thinking about the use of the term to describe performances. It doesn’t hurt the film much (though, obviously, a really good performance would have been nice), but it is a surprise coming from Crawford. There’s not much in the script, but it’s open enough he could have done something with it.
Then Ella Raines shows up (as the missing heiress) and the movie stalls out. T...
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| Moonlighting. Jerzy Skolimowski. |
| 2007-12-04 11:32:31 |
I’ve been trying to see Moonlighting for ten or eleven years... first forgetting about it, then putting it off for a widescreen DVD (remember the excitement, back in 1999, when all of a sudden... films were going to come out OAR? No longer a question of if, just of when?), and finally further putting it off, worried the content was going to require near infinite attention. The film does not require infinite attention, in fact it’s very straightforward and self-explanatory (that self-explanatory tag might have something to do with Jeremy Irons narrating the whole thing). It’s definite letdown after so long, but it’s also a letdown after the film’s first fifteen or twenty minutes. Moonlighting is more about tone than anything else--it creates a sense of dread and propels the viewer through it; the film cuts off during the most important scene and ends, in hindsight, it’s a predictable close, but still unexpected. Besides some third act red herrings, Skolimowski spends minut...
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| Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Steven Spielberg. |
| 2007-12-03 10:14:29 |
I don’t know where to start with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The jokey open would be something about listing the defects and not having any, but then flipping it and not being able to list everything Spielberg does right because his successes are so difficult to work out, particularly in to an easy-to-read, bullet-pointed list. Spielberg makes strange narrative choices in Close Encounters--to a point of confusion regarding the main storyline of the film... is it Richard Dreyfuss and his personal involvement or is it Francois Truffaut and his official involvement? While Dreyfuss probably has more screen time, quite a bit of that time is spent in expository scenes--introducing the UFOs to the audience, showing the experience of those affected--and then the ending is mostly told from the official point of view. But it never feels funny; Spielberg slaps the two stories together and makes it work--even after, at least for the first two-thirds of the film, it becomes clear we are...
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| Between the Lines. Joan Micklin Silver. |
| 2007-11-30 11:51:29 |
There are some good scenes in Between the Lines and some good performances... but thanks to director Micklin Silver’s direction, a lot of it feels like a really unfunny episode of a sitcom. “A very special episode” or something. It’s like maudlin moment strung over ninety-some minutes only to bounce up at the end. The film also suffers an aimless, meandering story. There are four subplots making up the film and it manages to go pretty well without a real plot, because the romance between John Heard and Lindsay Crouse, which is aimless and meandering too, but Heard’s good--for the most part--and Crouse is appealing. Micklin Silver doesn’t direct the actors very much and some of takes she went with really shouldn’t have been printed. Anyway, the film pretends it doesn’t have these plots and is somehow anti-plot... which only makes the plots more obvious.
There’s the love story, the young American author and girlfriend, the scandal and the buying of the newspaper. The f...
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| Goliath Awaits. Kevin Connor. |
| 2007-11-29 13:03:32 |
Goliath Awaits stars Mark Harmon as Doug McClure. Well, sort of. Harmon plays the Doug McClure role if Goliath was one of director Kevin Connor’s American International lost world pictures. And Goliath really is nothing but those four films rolled into one and modernized and given a budget (for a mini-series) far beyond whatever Connor had on the Time Forgot films. At the beginning, McClure would have been a real improvement over Harmon, who sports a mustache... oh, he was thirty? He seems like he was twenty-three... Anyway, Harmon can’t handle the lead in the teaser (since it’s a mini-series, the teaser runs about a half hour) and I was getting ready for a dreadful two and a half hours, then Robert Forster shows up as the other lead and Harmon moves over to a supporting position and he’s fine. Forster’s great, of course.
The film is oddly never slow. At three hours, it ought to be slow, but it’s really only two hours and fifteen minutes because it starts when Harmon and ...
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| Ruthless People. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker. |
| 2007-11-28 12:27:55 |
Clocking in at a whopping ninety minutes, Ruthless People feels a tad undercooked. Lots of trailer-ready sequences, lots of memorable moments, nothing to really connect them. The ZAZ directing team (it’s probably been sixteen years since I’ve thought about them) is adequate, but they don’t really direct actors very well here, so the casting goes a long way (Bill Pullman suffers the most, having the easiest character to play and most of his scenes fall flat).
Danny DeVito is great--turning in a performance so good I thought about renting Twins--but he’s not really getting any help from the directors and the script just plays him as a jerk, so DeVito isn’t really doing anything very difficult. Weight loss figures greatly in to the story--it saves kidnappers Helen Slater and Judge Reinhold from doing jail time--as Bette Midler loses twenty pounds in four days and has the Stockholm diet going in full effect.
The movie’s mostly missed opportunities--not counting the cartoon ...
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| Upperworld. Roy Del Ruth. |
| 2007-11-27 16:44:43 |
Upperworld starts incredibly strong--Warren William and his son (I knew I’d seen Dickie Moore’s name in credits before--he’s in Out of the Past) feeling abandoned by Mary Astor, who’s more interested in throwing costume parties than spending time with her husband and son. The scenes with William and Moore are great throughout, even after the change I’ll get to in a second... but it’s the whole film for the beginning. The scenes with William and Andy Devine are fantastic, even the scenes with William going to work are great. Upperworld sets itself up as a traditional story--successful businessman becomes unhappy with his disaffected life--and does it real well.
Even the scenes with William and Ginger Rogers are excellent, because neither of them play it as a romance until, obviously, the script forces them to do so and then Upperworld turns in to something else entirely. It turns in to a goofy movie with William running around trying to destroy evidence, pursued by angry ex...
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| The Bonfire of the Vanities. Brian De Palma. |
| 2007-11-26 07:22:44 |
It’s amazing anyone could screw up The Bonfire of the Vanities--and I’m only making that statement based on the movie and the material in it (never having read the book)--but if anyone was going to do it, adapter Michael Cristofer is the one to do it. When the movie started--it has a beautiful opening title sequence, followed by a wonderful De Palma steady-cam shot (the following seventeen million steady-cam shots are not, unfortunately, wonderful)--I thought David Mamet wrote the screenplay and the worst I was really in for was a bad Melanie Griffith performance.
Was I wrong.
Blaming Cristofer for all the film’s problems--even the majority of them--is a mistake. The producer--oh, it’s De Palma, how convenient--or the executive producer who didn’t realize making Bruce Willis’s reporter the main character would create a fantastic black comedy are the ones who made the biggest mistake. Whoever saw Tom Hanks’s performance the first day of shooting and didn’t realize he h...
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| Ground Zero. Michael Pattinson and Bruce Myles. |
| 2007-11-23 15:16:44 |
Until the current administration, I could always take comfort knowing the British probably did more terrible things than the Americans ever could. For instance, they might test atomic bombs in Australia and radiate the aborigines, which is the public service announcement of Ground Zero. It isn’t only a PSA, it’s also a reasonably thrilling thriller and a strange father and son story. But the relevance--the British trying to cover up killing a bunch of innocent people--makes Ground Zero an odd film. By all other elements, it’s an Australian take on the mid-1980s thriller--it was shot in Panavision (though the only releases to date have been pan and scan and it’s obvious there’s often something or someone missing) and it’s got a really annoying, mid-1980s synthesizer score booming throughout... sometimes too loud to hear dialogue.
But it’s a good mystery thriller. It fetishizes filmmaking a little--the camera operators in particular--and its handling of that material is v...
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