The Testament of Professor Mortis

Our Hero? Night Part III: Bulletproof

2009-07-15T20:42:37Z

After the surprisingly entertaining Stand Alone, Stalwart Dan and I were hoping that the night's last film, Bulletproof would end the evening with a bang. At first it seemed poised to do just that. The film starts off seeming like it's going to be a Lethal Weapon rip-off with Gary Busey (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) playing the Mel Gibson part and blaxpo regular Thalmus Rasulala (Cool Breeze) playing Danny Glover's. If that's not promising enough (and trust me, if the whole movie was ridiculous, over the top and entertaining as the opening it would've been amazing), the film is directed by Steve Carver, director of my personal favorite Chuck Norris film, Lone Wolf McQuade. It really does seem to be headed for some kind of insane McQuade/Lethal Weapon mash-up, at first, as a mixed grab-bag of mid-1980s U.S. bogeymen (i.e. Libyans, A-rabs, Sadinistas, and Cubans) have set up just south of the border in Mexico, led by Colonel Kartiff (Henry Silva, Escape from the Bronx, in another one of his thankless villain roles) and a Russian major played by William Smith (Black Sampson). It's almost as if it's some sort of weird prequel to Red Dawn!

In any case, the government's response is to send Sgt. O'Rourke (L.Q. Jones, The Ballad of Cable Hogue) and Devon Shepard (Darlanne Fluegel,To Live and Die in L.A.) along with some absurdly incompetent National Guardsmen to send their latest super tank on maneuvers, then deliberately veer into the part of Mexico Kartiff is in and get captured. Why in the hell would they do this? Because apparently only Frank "Bulletproof" McBain (Busey) can wipe them all out single handed, and the only way to convince him to do so is to get his ex-Devon captured. What? That's the best plan they could come up with?

The film therefore abandons the highly amusing, and ridiculous, buddy cop antics of the first scene for a pretty stupid series of "Gary Busey does something retarded, but it all works out in the end via the magic of killing" scenes. There's a subplot about how McBain left his secret agent position because he shot his partner while trying to shoot William Smith's evil Russian, but it amounts to next to nothing, and the film is full of an odd combination of retarded and vile. McBain isn't really bulletproof, but does all his own bullet wound surgery and keeps the bullets he digs out in a mason jar in his apartment (the hell?) and we get a Silva/Fluegel rape scene that's just there to show us how evil Silva's Libyan is. Mostly, though, the film is just dull, in a way that a film about a super cop/agent played by Gary Busey recruited to steal back a tank from William Smith and Henry Silva has no right to be. I can't decide if director Carver is to blame or if it's writers T.L. Lankford and Fred Olen Ray (Alienator). Certainly Busey delivers on the crazy and the villain actors give their usual performance. Hell, there's even small parts for Danny Trejo (Con Air), Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Vampires), Lincoln Kilpatrick (Fortress) and R. G. Armstrong (Mean Johnny Barrows). It's all for naught, however, as Bulletproof simply doesn't recapture the magic "totally ludicrous 80s action movie" genie that Lone Wolf McQuade apparently let out of the bottle.

The worst part, undoubtedly, is that the promising start of Gary Busey and Rasulala, of all people, ripping off Lethal Weapon is completely abandoned for a lukewarm Red Dawn/Invasion U.S.A. on a budget movie. Hell, the entire "cop" cast-Kilpatrick as the angry supervisor, Rasulala as the partner who just wants to live long enough to collect his pension-are simply abandoned once the rest of the plot kicks in. Its a shame, because that would've been much more interesting than the completely unbelievable idea that somehow Gary Busey's McBain is the only one who can possibly stop the evil Commies and the only way to get him to do it was to allow the evil Commies to steal our newest tank and rape McBain's ex.

Here's a bit of the madness (WARNING: This clip will make you want to see this)

Our Hero? Night Part II: Stand Alone

2009-07-13T17:48:33Z

Stand Alone was the second film of the night, and it's so obscure that I can't even find a decent screen grab, VHS cover, or title card to use for an image. Stand Alone was released by New World Pictures, whether only to video (most likely) or to theaters I'm not entirely sure. It was made by a one off Texas production company and shot in Dallas though it is set in L.A. I'd love to know the story of how this one got made/pitched; director Alan Beattie (The Rundown) has mostly worked as a producer, while writer Roy Carlson has worked on just two additional films. Was Charles Durning (Breakheart Pass) their first choice to play the lead? Was Durning's son Douglas (who plays Durning's character in flashback) somehow involved, or was he brought on because they needed a younger actor who could plausibly play Durning forty years earlier? Charles Durning has no further credits with the film, so it doesn't seem to be a vanity project.

Whatever, the case, the film has a limited budget but makes reasonable use of it. They keep the violence down to just a few key scenes, mostly presenting an almost Western-style conflict: Louis Thibadeau (Durning), a decorated WWII hero, witnesses a murder by "cocaine cowboys" at his friend Paddie's (Bert Remsen, Code of Silence) diner. The cops on the case-Detectives Isgrow (James Keach, Cannonball!) and Macombers (Willard E. Pugh, CB4) want Thibadeau to testify, but his friend Cathryn Bolan (Pam Grier, Sheba, Baby) fears that the drug dealers will kill Louis and his daughter-in-law and grandson (Cory 'Bumper' Yothers, Dreamscape). Durning tries to do the right thing while dodging attacks, but finally sets himself up as bait, sets traps throughout his home, gets out his WWII surplus weapons and goes back into stone cold killer mode to take out the trash.

The film was an interesting piece. As far as riffing goes, like the MST3K boys doing Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, a nearly unending array of "fat guy" jokes came up, mainly because Durning, even in 1985, was hardly svelte. The actual story is smart enough to stay within budget, using some good locations-it feels like its happening in a rundown section of the city. None of the actors give bad performances, but the situations themselves are a little over the top at times. It's hard to understand why Bolan, a public defender, is so against having Thibadeau testify, but is perfectly okay getting some OTHER guy to do so. Mostly its just there to continue the "cops are incompetent at protecting Thibadeau so he has to do it himself" thread. There's also a remote control tank that fires a projectile that is introduced early on, and you just know it will show up; and some weirdness wherein somehow Thibadeau was on Okinawa in 1943 (did he just arrive early?) and killed five Japanese soldiers with a "pearl handled" (the hell?) bayonet.

Overall it's a reasonably easy going flick that is inexplicable mostly because Durning is just not bad ass material; if they had worked more with that it might have been okay, but it felt like they couldn't get an actor like Lee Marvin to show up for it. I felt worse for Pam Grier, who's given a pretty weak part (though she does show up to take out one of the bad guys in the end herself!) that's a far cry from her action roles of the 1970s. Of interest only to Pam Grier or Durning completeists (is there such a thing?) or hard core fans of the "they pushed him too far" sub-genre of action fans.

Our Hero? Night Part 1: McBain

2009-07-13T13:24:51Z

McBain, originally uploaded by ProfessorMortis.

When I first caught Quiet Cool I thought a great movie night might be to show a bunch of action films with horribly miscast leads. The candidates included Christopher Walken's McBain, Gary Busey's Bulletproof (where he, bizarrely also plays a character named McBain), and Stand Alone where Charles Durning, of all people, gets pushed too far and has to fight evil drug dealers. Stalwart Dan got behind the idea, and even did the leg work (and actually paid) to get copies of all three movies-only Bulletproof is actually available on DVD and thus available on Netflix. We decided that the sanest way to do this would be to have the "known quantity" (I had seen the beginning of Bulletproof, which was like the brain damaged step son kept in Lethal Weapon's attic) go last, with the most likely worst film (Stand Alone) in the center to dull its impact. Strangely, the film we thought would be the worst (Stand Alone was actually the most riffable by a long shot and thus the most enjoyable.

McBain was another one of NYC action "auteur" James Glickenhaus's (The Soldier) productions. Like William Lustig (Vigilante), Glickenhaus was a New Yorker who made low budget action films independently for first the grindhouse, then the burgeoning video market. Both have a sort of rabble rousing working class right wing bent. I imagine the idea was to hit the old "hard hat" section of the American audience, with films that typically feature the heroes killing off gang members and/or drug dealers in the urban environment. If you can't tell, I'm not a big fan of either Lustig or Glickenhaus-I feel that their films lack any real energy and are now mostly of interest due to the severe dating of their "messages" and the ludicrous nature of some of the ideas they put out there.

McBain is a perfect example of this. We start out with some fairly typical shot-in-the-Philippines Vietnam War stuff. On the last day of the American front line involvement a group of Rangers-including Santos, Frank Bruce (Michael Ironside, Top Gun), Eastland (Steve James,Johnny Be Goode), Dalton (Jay Patterson, Nobody's Fool), and Gil (Thomas G. Waites, The Warriors)-decide to pull one last job and save some POWs. McBain (Christopher Walken, A View to a Kill) is one of those POWs and Santos, who is inexplicably Columbian, inexplicably gives McBain one half of a hundred dollar bill and tells him that if McBain ever sees the other half, he will then be called to return the favor.

Cut to 1991 (though I strongly suspect the film may have been shot in 1989 or 1990 and sat around for a while before it was released). Santos is now a revolutionary leader seeking to take down El Presidente (Victor Argo, Her Alibi), the current leader of Columbia who is a brutal tyrant funded by drug money. His whole plan is to take El Presidente hostage and ask for aid from the U.S. on international television (the CIA has assured him it will help him). Unfortunately for Santos, the President of the U.S. resents the CIA going over his head and refuses to help. He is executed on international TV by El Presidente, and so his sister (Maria Conchita Alonso, The Running Man) flies to NYC to find McBain to get his aid. Luckily, McBain is a welder, okay, no, luckily McBain is insane and in touch with the crew that rescued him (apparently they were from the same unit, though this is never made explicit) and he gathers them up-Dalton is now a Doctor, Eastland a bodyguard for a corrupt businessman, and, most conveniently of all, Frank is an international arms dealer.

Frank takes some convincing, however and demands 10 million of the guns the revolution will need and the planes to transport it. So the rest of the guys decide to rob drug dealers-first hitting Papo (Luis Guzmán, Out of Sight), a low level drug dealer whose group includes a slumming Karen "Duff" Duffy, who they spare when he points out, quite reasonably, that he's just a small fish. So they kidnap a Mafia don named John Gambotti (Dick Boccelli, My Blue Heaven) and convince him that they're Mossad via the magic of Walken's horrible accent and that they need 10 million as a goodwill payment or else they'll kill everyone he knows. Uh-huh. Did they get their plan from Duke Mitchell?

Since that worked (ooookaayyy) Ironside sets them up-and after an unexplained at the time assault on a plane (seriously, they cut to the next scene and Ironside joins up and then they shoot a bunch of guys and take their plane) that I guess was them taking over a courier plane from the drug dealers, they're off to Colombia-but no, wait, the Colombian air force wants to intervene! Luckily McBain has a magic pistol that can shoot through the cockpit of two airplanes without breaking the glass in either (did he learn that trick from Alain Deleon and his magic Concorde with a window you can open to shoot flares out of?) and so he takes out one of the planes, then via the magic persuasive powers of Walken the escort pilot that's not supposed to get involved in any combat decides to go for it and takes out the planes in fairly ludicrous fashion, then joins the revolution. More planes are coming, though, but they have Stingers and take them out. Whee!

The revolutionaries, by the way, spent the time the air battle was on getting housed by government troops so badly that you're amazed there are any left to join Walken's group. One even used a bow. This is still being shot in the Philippines, by the way, so just pretend that Colombians look Filipino. So Walken's big plan is to again take over the news stations and ask for U.S. help/call for more revolutionaries, then drive a big gas truck into the Presidential palace gates and fight his way in. He does so and, after a spectacularly lame final confrontation with the Presidente the good guys win. Oh, and the president of the U.S. introduces red white and blue money that will replace the old green backs in a year; you can exchange your old money for new but any transaction greater than ten thousand will be investigated; somehow this ends drug dealers. Right.

McBain is a very lackluster but odd film. Glickenhaus films have glacial pacing and zero energy, so scenes that might have been theoretically exciting-battles in a POW camp, battles with drug dealers and huge battles between the two sides in Colombia-end up being dull as all get out. On top of that he seems to have the logic of a ten year old, hence the red white and blue money and magic guns that can shoot through two airplane cockpits without breaking either. Some of it is budget related (no way could Glickenhaus have afforded to blow up even one plane) but some of it is just Glickenhaus's way. There's also the fact that a lot of things aren't really explained-you have to guess at character and event connections. Probably the most amusing thing should have been Walken's performance, but he's actually incredibly restrained here and seems to not care, so instead you just marvel at the fact that your action hero is a really, really thin weird guy who sort of minces through the action scenes; worse, its written that he basically stands behind walls of mooks in many scenes, so that tons of unarmed Colombian peasants get killed while a (probably shot elsewhere) Walken occasionally emerges from behind a pillar to shoot an Uzi. The only amusement left are Glickenhaus's many axes to grind-we get unflattering portrayals of politicians, business men, the mob, and street criminals, all of whom are bested by Walken's band of working class heroes. I think its telling that people keep saying that Walken is a welder-clearly Glickenhaus has an audience in mind for his film.

Overall I wouldn't recommend tracking this down-the Walken performance is too restrained and Glickenhaus's plot/direction is too dull to warrant the attention. If you do happen to find this on cable, stick around long enough for either an action scene or Walken's ludicrous "Israeli" accent; there's little else worth watching, however.

Hell, here's the "Walken takes down a plane with a pistol scene". Now you never need to see this.

Quick reviews

2009-07-13T02:52:15Z

Role Models: I didn't realize this was from largely the same group that did Wet Hot American Summer, but the fact that it was probably accounts for why it is way more amusing than I expected it to be. Paul Rudd and Sean William Scott star as a promotion team for a horrible energy drink that gets sent from high school to high school hawking the vile stuff. Rudd is having a "1/3 life crisis" and flips out, going on a minor rampage that results in the pair facing 30 days of jail or community service. The community service ends up being with a "Big Brothers" type of organization, and each is assigned a problem child-one is an out of control, sex obsessed kid who swears constantly, the other is a high schooler whose parents have enrolled him since they find his chosen social activity, which is basically a NERO style LARP organization. I found the whole thing hilarious, even if it follows basic buddy/romantic comedy rules and is thus fairly predictable. Worth a look if you ever LARPed or participated in the SCA and have a sense of humor about it, and especially if you're a fan of Rudd, Elizabeth Banks or David Wain.

Milk: I don't know enough about the real life figures in the film, but as far as biopics go its one of the best. The cast is uniformly excellent and it seemed relatively free of Hollywood cheese. Excellent drama; I intend to watch the documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk soon.

To Live and Die In L.A.: I have NO idea what possessed me to put this on my "to watch" list, but it was definitely a mixed bag. William Friedkin once again reminds us that just about no one can put together a chase through a crowded city as well as he can, but the over powering 80s-ness gets to one after a while. I found William L. Peterson and John Pankow's Secret Service investigators relatively unsympathetic so it was hard to get 100% behind them; meanwhile, Willem Dafoe's counterfeiter is kind of creepy. Still, it's not bad as far as "ambiguous" crime films go, and it certainly had an ending that I did not see coming at all. Nice to see Steve James in a big budget film, even if its an unrewarding small part (and has him losing a fight to Dafoe and his bodyguard, which was somewhat unbelievable to say the least) and John Turturro as a double crossing crook in Dafoe's group.

28 Weeks Later: Totally crap sequel to a great horror film that completely abandons the first film's sticking to its internal logic and attention to creating likable characters to care for in favor of every character making completely bizarre decisions, mostly retarded behavior by a prepared military force and the entire story being driven by the bad decisions of the cast of characters. Bizarro Tim warned me not to watch it, but for some reason I chose not to listen to him. Completely skippable.

Quick Reviews

2009-06-30T01:09:43Z

Fallen behind a lot with the massive library project sucking out a lot of my normal off-work time and some of the energy. So here are some fast reviews to catch up with:

Flirting With Disaster: Part of my library haul, I had heard good things about this 1996 Ben Stiller film. While it's certainly different from most Stiller vehicles-no doubt to due to David O. Russell's direction and a great cast that includes Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, David Patrick Kelley, Josh Brolin, Richard Jenkins, Patricia Arquette, Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda, ultimately there's a lot of the same kind of "uncomfortable" humor that the Baroness really doesn't like, so she was not a fan. I enjoyed some of the weird places the story went and there are definitely great moments here and there due to the ensemble cast.

Synecdoche, New York: I know this is going to prove once again that I'm a middle brow film lover, at best, but I just could not get into this film. I ended up fast forwarding it and then finally giving up entirely after about the half-way mark. I felt like the ever building layers of artifice and the house of cards structure that was being built, along with the ever increasing misery and unpleasantness was just too much for me. The cast is quite good, but in the middle of an exhausting project at work I just wasn't in the mood for this kind of film.

Punisher: War Zone: A totally irredeemable exercise in extreme violence for extreme violence's sake that borders on self parody should probably not end up being highly entertaining, but somehow it was. While I feel that the third time was not the charm, at least at finding whatever I found so appealing about the Punisher comics back when I was a huge fan in the late 80s, the film certainly gets closer than either of the previous outings. The film had me laughing at its absurdity/shittiness but I do wish they'd put in a little more effort-some bits I thought were going to take the film to even more ludicrous heights were merely forgotten/left out. Similarly, I thought that including more characters from the comic-Microchip, Jigsaw-was a good idea, but then the film either didn't do anything with them, subordinated them to another "PUNISHER SEARCHES FOR HIS SOUL" plot done even worse than in the previous two adaptations, or changed them in ways that hurt the original idea's charm (specifically, I always liked that originally Jigsaw was just a no-name punk who the Punisher threw through a plate glass window, rather than a low budget version of The Joker). Watching this immediately after starting The Wire was a little odd since Dominic West is in both, as very different characters.

And Then There Were None: Okay 1945 Christie adaptation with Barry Fitzgerald and Walter Huston headlining. Definitely entertaining, but the copy I had was a low budget DVD and I felt that the comedy was a little OTT for a murder mystery. Easy to see how this was a big influence on the slasher genre that would follow.

Harvey: Jimmy Stewart has his life ruined by a Pooka. Wackiness ensues. Okay but I have a feeling this was more fun on the stage.

Let the Right One In: I really need to watch this again on a cold winter night, preferably with snow on the ground, then try and walk down the road to the liquor store. I have a feeling that would decide if I really liked it. I thought it was atmospheric but I couldn't quite get into it.

Executive Decision: Caught this randomly on cable; totally, utterly ridiculous, and thus fairly entertaining. The fact that it has Kurt Russell, Oliver Platt and Joe Morton AND features Steven Segal going down like a moron helps too.

Happy-Go-Lucky: I liked this for the most part but I found that the lead character did not wear on me well, but on the plus side it was nice to have a movie like this that did not focus on a romantic relationship but was basically just a character study; I enjoyed seeing the "happy go lucky" mask finally come down as well. Good performances all around.

The Wire: Amazing! I can't wait to get into Season 2. Should've listened to everyone who said to watch it much, much sooner. Great performances all around, great multi-dimensional characters, real emotion.

Cowboy Bebop: Still working my way through the series, still really digging it. Again, I waited WAY too long to get around to checking this out.

La Cage Aux Folles

2009-06-20T02:19:35Z

When The Birdcage was released I saw it in the theater, and I remember that I really enjoyed only one thing about the film-Hank Azaria. Between reading Cult Movies and Bergerjacques advocating the original, I figured that at some point I should see how it stacked up. While the basic plot is the same "sitcom in drag" set-up, somehow I found it to be dialed down enough to be enjoyable here. Renato (Ugo Tognazzi, Barbarella), the owner of La Cage Aux Folles, a drag cabaret, has raised his son from a heterosexual fling along with his partner of 20 years (and the star of his cabaret), Albin (Michel Serrault, Les Diaboliques). When Renato's son arrives home and announces his engagement, Renato is disappointed, but it gets worse when it turns out the bride-to-be is the daughter of the vice president of a ultra-conservative political party, and has told her parents that Renato is a diplomat and that he is married to a house wife. Laurent, Renato's son, manages to cajole his father into playing along, but Albin eventually ends up showing up in drag as Renato's wife. To make matters worse, the conservative party's president is in a major scandal and the press is everywhere.

Most of what follows is pretty standard sitcom stuff, the basic "mistaken identity" and people's lies coming apart while they desperately try and keep them together that's as old as comedy itself. I think the main advantage here over the remake is that the leads are excellent, and everything is not quite what you'd get in an American comedy, while everything in The Birdcage is exactly what you'd expect from a Robin Williams film-big, over the top, and ultimately very sentimental. Probably the only real weakness is the irritating score by Ennio Morricone, of all people, which sounds like he farmed it out to a guy with a Casio. While I don't think it was one of the great comedies, La Cage Aux Folles had plenty of amusing moments, and is definitely worth a look.

Quantum of Solace

2009-06-12T00:21:29Z

The Baroness was a big fan of Casino Royale. I was not-I thought that while Craig made an interesting departure for Bond, that overall the film was TOO much of a departure from Bond films and that I was not fond of the "re-boot" set up. I'm getting very tired of seeing the "original story" for various characters and franchises, although I think Bond is more forgiving since so many actors have already had a crack at it and the film series has tried just about everything. Quantum of Solace, if anything, only made solid my objections. I'm tired of "Oooh, he's not your grandfather's Bond, because he's a thug who cares nothing for anything pretentious" and I'm tired of the few trappings from Brosnan's Bond that made it in here. Dench needs to stop being M already. I like her a lot, but this whole "Bond's Mum" shit is awful, and really hurts her credibility. I'm sure it's some writer's stab at making Dench's M more than Lee's M in drag, but come on, did you have to go for the Mother Hen route? Can we put a moratorium on Bond being a rebel who gets his funds cut off only to have him fix it all in the end? One of the things I miss about the oldest Bond movies is that he usually had help-there's something comforting to me about the cavalry showing up at the end to wipe out the bad guy's mooks while Bond does something pivotal. I'd be fine with the "rogue" shit if it happened once in a while in the films; when it happens EVERY SINGLE FILM it gets tiring. I'm also really not buying into new Emo Bond, who grieves over the fact that "everything he touches withers and dies". I'm also finding this whole Shadow Conspiracy crap with Quantum irritating. I love the idea of an updated SPECTRE-the opera meeting, for example, was cute-but can we make them slightly less hyper competent? Finally, the action. I understand we need more modern action, but, you know, make fun of Moore's Bond films if you like, at least they understood the need for absolutely spectacular stunts in them. Sure they ruined them sometimes with bad jokes, but I'll take that over lame ass CG PARACHUTE JUMPS and clockwork Rube Goldberg fights any day. This wasn't a problem with Royale and it needn't have been here either. Oh, and continuity-I know the first series of Bonds with Connery had a loose continuity, but I hope they don't continue too long with the direct continuity here. Bond movies need to have a certain sense of fun and romance, or else what's the point, and I feel like that is missing with these grim new outings. One thing I did like was the soundtrack, which did a great job of creating a very 60s Bond score feel while still being modern. If Jack White's theme had just been an instrumental it might have been very good, but the vocals killed it for me.

Dressed to Kill

2009-06-11T02:31:11Z

Dressed to Kill was one of the most frustrating to watch films I've seen in years. On the one hand, Brian DePalma brings some of his most technically accomplished, flashiest directing to the the table. On the other, the writing is so bad that I can only hope that it's intended to parody Hitchcock's worst impulses, and the misogyny is laid on incredibly thick. Was this also intended as parody or comedy? I have no idea, but it makes it very hard to take the slickness of the film very seriously.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

The film is basically Hitchock's Psycho done DePalma style. Hitchock famously used bait-and-switch on his audience in Psycho-the biggest name in the film is killed off a third of the way in, and the plot that seems to be developing-a woman having an affair steals money from her employer-is dropped in favor of a plot about an insane hotel owner with a split personality and a penchant for killing off any woman that turns him on. DePalma has Angie Dickinson (Rio Bravo), the biggest name in the film, in a "dissatisfied married woman has a fling with a man who has VD" plot going when the woman is suddenly slashed to death in an elevator. I guess having the elevator be the murder site sort of inverts how Hitch had the murder happen in a private place where you are vulnerable but feel safe, but that's really the only novelty that DePalma offers, other than some spectacular SteadyCam shots and an unnecessary "Body double for Miss Dickinson masturbates in the shower then gets humped by her uncaring husband before throwing herself at Michael Caine's psychologist." In my view this whole scenario is hardly a "bonus' and DePalma treats it like a sick joke, at best.

The murder is witnessed by a prostitute, in a turn that really recalls several Argento gialli films where the protagonist witnesses a murder but is then coerced into investigating the crime by the police. In this case a woman-Nancy Allen-witnesses, the crime, but of course she turns out to be a prostitute! No issues with women at all, Mr. DePalma! She's a smart prostitute, and we know this because she pumps her clients for stock information, and not because after she randomly gets the murder weapon from the killer, she runs around with it while asking a maid to call for help. Right.
In addition to the shower scenes (there are two, including another lame DePalma "dream attack" "twist" ending a la Carrie) and basic set up recalling Psycho, there's also the killer, who is Michael Caine's psychologist. Turns out he wants to have a sex change but "the male" side of his personality rebels and so the "female" side dresses up and kills Angie, not just because she came on to him. Somehow this is handled in a much more ridiculous fashion than Norman Bates split personality was-somehow Caine has been in a sanitarium but is right out there treating patients, even though he has a severe case of split personality. DePalma even keeps Hitch's clunkiest scene in Psycho, when the psychologist clumsily explains the plot to us. Unfortunately, this doesn't end the film-there's also a totally random "Caine kills a nurse in the asylum, then kills Nancy Allen's prostitute, but it was all a dream", which doesn't even really make sense-is it all a dream, or just the attack?

Finally, I've touched on the treatment of women here, but one thing that really rankles me is that Nancy Allen can't even take care of herself-she has to be saved repeatedly by Keith Gordon, who's playing Dickinson's son. I hate the whole "Mary Sue" phenomena, but I felt like Gordon's young genius who plays around with cameras seemed very much like he could be a stand-in for the director at that age. There is one female cop who does her job to perfection, but she's older and less of a knock-out, so perhaps Mr. DePalma thinks unattractive women can have substance.

It really is a shame that the film isn't better written, because it looks absolutely fabulous. Lots of set pieces with sweeping cameras, good use of New York City locations, and the cast could have easily handled a better script. Ultimately the film is a failure, but an interesting failure to check out once if you want to see another beautiful but empty headed DePalma pastiche of Hitchcock. In a lot of ways it really is an American Giallo, from the Hitchcock worship to the nonsensical ending and occasional logic lapses and treatment of women. It also made me think about how much De Palma tries to cheat to hide the identity of the killer-he has a woman standing in for Caine in most of the scenes that "Bobbi" shows up in, he uses a different actor for "Bobbi"'s voice, etc. I feel like Hitchcock didn't resort to these tricks as much in Psycho and yet still managed to surprise audiences. Also, I noticed that the "unedited" cut adds nothing to the film-I think the kills might have been more shocking/scary if they left more to the imagination and the lingering extra nude shots and extra dirty dialog just helped heighten the sleaziness of it all.

Quick Reviews

2009-06-11T01:57:55Z

Down with Love: I remember when the trailers came out for this six years ago (has it really been that long?) and thinking that it look sort of stilted and mostly forgetting about it, though I seem to recall that some BMMB-oid or other had affection for it. As the Baroness has a thing for Ewan MacGregor (Attack of the Clones) this ended up being the first movie from my haul that we watched. The Baroness had seen the movie and knew she enjoyed it, so I went along for the ride. While I think they did a reasonable job of approximating the look of a film of the type they were referencing, the feel of it seemed off-too much modern Rom-Com and "oh, look how quaint everyone was" crept in for my taste. Still, the supporting couple-Sarah Paulson (Serenity) and David Hyde Pierce (A Bug's Life)-were amusing enough, and Ewan dapper/goofy enough that the film was reasonably entertaining. I disliked the 9th hour twist which I took as a little creepy, and Renée Zellweger (Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation) is her usual combination of off looks and irritating spunky, but it doesn't quite kill the film overall. It's an odd exercise in style, if nothing else.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: I am sure that I saw this years ago on the Creature Double Feature, but that means it's probably been 25 years since I've sat down and watched the film from start to end (if I ever did). In a lot of ways its actually a step up from the previous two Universal Monster Mash movies; at least here they were trying to be silly. Abbott and Costello's routines don't seem to have too much energy here-I think I preferred them in Hold that Ghost-but there are some cute/funny moments. Certainly Bud's sad sackness was amusing, particularly how he kept being unable to get a date while Lou has two women vying for his attention (of course the audience knows that both are using him). I enjoyed, too, that for a time we almost get a reprise of Son of Dracula's weird femme fatale putting one over on Drac theme that borders on Film Noir. Glenn Strange, is, as always, a horribly uninspired Frankenstein's monster, and Bela is on his last legs here but puts in a reasonable showing for himself as Dracula. Lon Chaney's does his usual Larry Talbot act, which after four movies is wearing a bit thin-luckily some of the best gags are based on poking fun at it. Worth a look for Universal fans.

Ulysses

2009-06-01T00:56:07Z

Two years before Helen of Troy, Dino De Laurentiis produced an adaptation of Homer's work himself. Intelligently for an Italian production with more limited resources, The Odyssey, a tale more easily scaled down, was chosen. The film itself more-or-less gives us the tale; we open in Ithaca with the suitors parasitically living off Ulysses's household while holding Penelope (Silvana Mangano, Dune) to an agreement to chose one of them when she finishes her weaving. The secret, of course, is that she unravels her work every night. Telemachus, however, is restless, and wants to journey out to find his father, or at least talk to his compatriots that have successfully returned home. Ulysses himself, meanwhile, has washed up on Phaeacia, and is found by the king's daughter, Nausicaa (Rossana Podestà, here with a more natural hair color and quite fetching), and has amnesia (again with the simplifying by using different cliches!). Nausicaa falls in love with Ulysses, but he is uneasy at his lack of memory, though his performance in the Phaecians games shows that he was once a warrior. Finally he remembers and we get the story of his wanderings told in flash back.

The film plays fast and loose with the story and offers us only a few episodes. We, of course, get the famous cyclops episode, and, though the gods are largely not seen in the film, we do get an actual giant cyclops reasonably accomplished with the usual camera tricks and giant stuff. Ulysses hear introduces Polyphemos to wine, rather than simply providing him with very strong wine, and somehow he and his men are able to make wine just by stepping on grapes. Surprisingly the film includes the nasty blinding of Polyphemos, but not the giant sheep (too expensive or silly?) and Ulysses easily escapes. Later we get the Sirens, and then on Circe's island we get an abbreviated version of Ulysses's encounter that's combined with his time on Calypso's island. We also get the Underworld episode, though here Ulysses mother tells him to go home, to see his wife. When Ulysses does return home, after explaining to Nausicaa that he can not marry her and getting a ride on a Phaecian ship, we get a pretty solid version of Ulysses homecoming with Anthony Quinn (Caravans) as the most dangerous of the suitors.

Overall, I think if you're going to cut The Odyssey down into a two hour movie you could do worse that this. The episodes chosen were clearly chosen both for their popularity, and for the ease at which the film could accomplish them, and it's good that it doesn't overreach. Apparently the Italian version is a full 23 minutes longer, and that probably accounts for the abbreviated nature of the version I saw; it might also mean some goofy effects (or maybe more of Telemachus's side of the story?). Certainly Kirk Douglas is an inspired choice to play Ulysses and he's a joy to watch here; Anthony Quinn makes for a good rival. The lead actresses are attractive and give good performances, the suitors are cartoonishly parasitic, and the whole film has an air of fun about it. What a contrast with the bombastic Helen of Troy! I did find the choice to remove the gods from the story strange, as was Ulysses pose as a man who doesn't believe in Gods. Still, this is a minor complaint overall. Definitely worth a look if you're a fan of pepulum, sword-and-sandal or mythological films, or if you like Douglas.

Helen of Troy

2009-06-01T00:25:53Z

When I came across Helen of Troy and Ulysses in our book sale shelves, I was surprised. How had I not heard of a lavish 1956 Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still) adaptation of the Trojan War myths (come on, no "adaptation" of the Iliad that confines itself to just the story of Achilles and his wrath is going to ever be made) before now? Or a version of The Odyssey starring Kirk Douglas as Ulysses? Naturally I absconded with both films. Months later after watching both, I can say there are very good reasons that each film is now relatively obscured. With Helen of Troy this is especially true-this was, after all, a prestige film, made at great expense and promoted with great fanfare by Warner Brothers for one it's anniversaries. This shows in the huge sets constructed for the film, the then top-of-the-line special effects use for the Trojan Horse and the big battle sequences, location filming in Italy and the large number of extras.

What went wrong? Well, for one thing, there aren't a lot of people currently considered "big names" in the cast (I suspect the film and its cast were a bid by Warner Brothers to make a killing in the European film market, which was quite lucrative at the time), and those that are are mostly miscast. We get Stanley Baker (Woman in a Lizard's Skin) as an aloof, arrogant, and thoroughly unlikeable Achilles. While Baker was certainly in good shape, he was only 5'10", not really big enough to be playing Achilles in my book. Cedric Hardwicke (Suspicion) puts in a professional performance in a limited role; Niall MacGinnis (Island of Terror) is good as a slimy and jealous Menelaus; Torin Thatcher (The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad) makes for a devious but somewhat old Ulysses; Harry Andrews (The Blue Bird) makes for an appropriately intense and likable Hector, but, like Achilles he's not quite the impressive warrior I'd imagined; Janette Scott (The Day of the Triffids) is a hysterical Cassandra; and Brigitte Bardot (Contempt) has an early role here as a servant to Helen (Italian star Rossana Podestà, who had appeared earlier in Ulysses). While Rossana is quite fetching, the make-up and terrible blond wig they make her wear (inexplicably) for the role is highlighted by having her servant be the much sexier Bardot. The rest of the cast are actors I'm less familiar with-Maxwell Reed is tall enough as the giant Ajax, but he's got a bit of a belly and is too goofy to be the intense fighter who would later off himself out of a sense of injustice. Jacques Sernas is pretty enough as Paris; Podesta isn't much of an actress and could have been much better served by wardrobe and make-up as I learned in Ulysses. I think having any actress play Helen is tough, but handicapping her with a terrible wig is beyond the pale.

So the cast is mixed-this certainly brings the film down. There's not a single really good performance. The blame does not clearly lie on the actors, however. The script, by Hugh Gray (who also wrote the screen play for Ulysses, N. Richard Nash and John Twist decides that the story of the Trojan War should be a star-crossed-lovers romance told from the point of view of Helen and Paris. While this could probably make a decent film, here it means that the Greeks become cartoony villains-Agamemnon lusting for power, Achilles for glory, and Menelaus a paranoid, jealous and greedy older man. This turns the tale into a straight "poor Troy" tragedy, and it doesn't really work, mainly because the two leads aren't strong enough-and too peripheral to the "action" parts of the story. In addition, the decision to completely strip the Gods out of the story leads to a lot of substitution-Paris has an older, greedy brother Polydorus (Robert Brown, who would go on to replace Bernard Lee as M in the Bond films) who thirsts for war with the Greeks, who are war-lovers who are aching for an excuse to plunder Troy. A shipwreck leads to Paris meeting Helen, who fools him into thinking her a slave, while she does not know at first that he is, himself, a royal, and not just some ship wrecked fool. Thus instead of the gods we have a much more believable (hah) and less tired (double hah) "incognito" meeting of the leads where status is not an issue (how American).

What follows is a dull and pompous treatment of the basic legend, with second unit action scenes directed by legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt occasionally revealing his work on many westerns (they even use the old "arrow through the neck"). Any scene between Helen and Paris is just tolerable, while the many conference scenes are completely emotionless and quite dull. Only Thatcher and MacGinnis seem to have any fun with their roles, and the famous fight scenes are handled very perfunctorily. The bombastic Max Steiner score only serves to highlight how little energy the film has. From what I understand, Robert Wise had two speeds-he could make a great film, or he could make bombastic films that spent a lot of time tediously showing off the high production values and/or effects that went into creating the film. This is definitely a case of the latter direction; whether Wise recognized that he was on a hopeless prestige epic with a terrible script, or whether his direction is responsible for how badly the movie misfired, is difficult to say without knowing more about the production's history and/or seeing the script; in any case the film is not worth tracking down unless you're trying to see all the Hollywood epics and/or adaptations of Classical texts and myth; or possibly if you want a good laugh, as there are some truly terrible lines of dialogue.

You can see in this clip the high production values of the film:

In Bruges

2009-05-24T20:58:21Z

I could do a full review of this detailing why I disliked it so much, but I'm going to pass. Mainly because I did not pay close enough attention to be totally qualified to review it. Still, it lost me fairly early on, as it basically seemed like yet another "introspective yet comedic indy look at the lives of hit men". I enjoy Brendan Gleason a lot, but I found that Colin Farrell was 100% ass in this-I just didn't like him, and if this is what he has to offer I don't get the appeal. Ralph Fiennes was okay as a nasty angry crook (sort of like Ben Kingsley's turn in Sexy Beast, but no where near as cool) and the city itself is stunning, but beyond that, the whole Purgatory metaphor and "ponder your miserable life while sexy lady crooks and racist midgets wander in and out of the picture and people swear constantly" just wasn't hitting for me the night I watched it.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot

2009-05-23T02:23:27Z

Michael Cimino is legendary for having "killed" Hollywood Westerns with his famed 1980 critical and box office failure Heaven's Gate. While I have yet to see that bloated epic, nor have I gotten around to seeing his successful Vietnam epic, The Deer Hunter, I did manage to watch on of his last films to date, the terrible 1996 buddy drama The Sunchaser, which should have warned me about going in for Cimino buddy films. That's not to say that his 1974 directing debut is anywhere near as terrible as The Sunchaser, but there are some definite commonalities between the two films. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot used to show up a lot during basic cable (TNT and TBS, mostly) "Clint Eastwood" weeks and marathons, and in theory it should fit right in-a buddy-heist film with Clint Eastwood (Space Cowboys) and an extremely young Jeff Bridges (The Door in the Floor). I wonder how many viewers of those marathons were severely disappointed when they figured out that Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is more Midnight Cowboy than Every Which Way But Loose?

The film starts off with a bang, with John Doherty (Eastwood) preaching (!) a sermon only to be interrupted by a gunman wearing spats and carrying a Mauser (Roy Jenson, Demonoid). Lightfoot (Bridges), meanwhile, is busy ripping off a car straight off the lot. For some reason he saves Doherty (first time viewers will probably assume, like me, that they are working together) and the pair begin a long and "wacky" 70s road/buddy style partnership. While I don't think it's the best such partnership put to film (certainly Bridges Lightfoot is ludicrously sketchy as a character, and often does things for no apparent reason), it's amusing to see Clint Eastwood actually laugh for once and not always be the in-control tough guy. That being said, it also has quite a bit of cheesy 70s road/buddy movie cliches and the women are treated awfully-there isn't one woman character of any import in the film and nearly any woman who shows up is oogled, nude, or humiliated.

Of course, what sets this apart from most road/buddy movies is that two hoods-Eddie Goody (Eastwood regular Geoffrey Lewis, The Way of the Gun) and Red Leary (George Kennedy, Radioactive Dreams) are hunting and attempting to kill John along the way. Eventually we learn that all were once bank robbers and Leary blames Doherty-formerly known as "Thunderbolt"-for his stint in prison. After all parties duke it out and realize the money from their job is gone, Lightfoot convinces them all to take the exact same place down again, using the same method, since their planner is dead.

What follows is a fairly odd heist film that's more focused on the characters' relationships than the actual heist. For the most part it works and there are quite a few amusing scenes-George Kennedy arguing with a kid in a fashion highly reminiscent of Mitchell, only with a much dirtier comeback from Kennedy, Lewis driving a tiny ice cream truck, and so on. Ultimately I think the main issue with the film is the 1974 obligatory "unhappy ending" that comes basically out of nowhere and you can see coming a mile away. It's handled very poorly and doesn't really work the way it's intended to. I felt too the running "Wacky" cameos from character actors-Dub Taylor (Creature from Black Lake) as a crazy gas station attendant, Gary Busey (Under Siege and Vic Tayback (Blood and Lace) as co-workers of Lightfoot's, and Bill McKinney (Cannonball!) in a truly weird cameo as a completely insane driver-was a little forced. On the plus side the leads have decent chemistry, the action is well mounted and the scenery and locations used are beautiful. This would have been a joy to see on a big screen. Worth a look for Bridges/Eastwood fans but expect a character piece not a heist film.

Miracle at St. Anna

2009-05-23T01:48:16Z

Imagine that you've only seen 3 films all the way through of a major director. Now imagine that those three films are not only largely widely seen as, at best, the lesser films of that director, but which you generally enjoyed with some reservations. Spielberg, for example, perhaps you've only seen Empire of the Sun, 1941, and Minority Report. Or you've only seen The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, and The Stranger. You get the idea. This is my relationship with the works of Spike Lee. I've seen bits here and there of School Daze, Bamboozled, Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X and Jungle Fever. Which films have I seen all the way through? Clockers, Summer of Sam and, this week, Miracle at St. Anna. Everything I've seen of Spike Lee gives me the same sense of his work-it all has a similar feel, strongly his own, but he seems to always have moments where he reaches a bit further than he seems to be able to manage. This feels especially true in his more generic films-I've seen a war picture, a crime film and a "true crime" thriller he's directed. Still, when I looked up others opinions on Miracle at St. Anna I seemed to have a much higher opinion of it than the majority of the reviews I read. I wonder if this is because my expectations for Lee are lower due to having seen only minor films he's directed.

Miracle at St. Anna tells the story of a small group of "Buffalo" soldiers who get separated from the rest of their unit in Italy during World War Two. They end up in a very small village and there enjoy a brief respite from the fighting and muse a bit about the war, their precarious position in society and whether it is right for them to fight and die for a nation that, as we see in one memorable flashback, is more willing to serve ice cream to Nazi POWs than to black soldiers. This idea-a group of soldiers, not necessarily friends, who stop and think about the insanity of what they're caught up in and their position in it, is a fairly traditional hook for a war story (one might argue that even The Iliad, one of the oldest extant war tales uses this very device, at least in part) and this core of the film is often very good.

Unfortunately, either Lee or scriptwriter and writer of the novel the film is based upon, James McBride, choose to load up this basic story with too many flourishes and complications. My guess is that these worked much better in the novel than in the span of the nearly three hour film. The film starts and ends with book end segments set in the 1980s. A postal worker is working one day at Christmas when a man shows up at his window and when the pair recognize one another, the postal worker shoots the man with a old Luger. We switch perspective to a young reporter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brick), who shows up late for a story and wants anything he can get. The cop on the case (John Turturro, Collateral Damage) sends the reporter with his men to the perps apartment-and their they discover another mystery-the head of an Italian statue that has been missing since the Second World War. After a totally bizarre and needless interlude of Enrico (John Leguizamo, Revenge), a dealer in black market Nazi art trying to keep his horny girlfriend at bay and failing, the article about the head falls out of his window onto the table of a mysterious man who very dramatically drops his coffee. Armed with this fact the reporter visits the postal worker in the sanitarium he's being kept in and we are graced with flashback to World War II.

The war section is pretty straight forward-we get a very Saving Private Ryan style combat over a river. The unit of the 92nd Infantry we're following is already on edge before Axis Sally starts broadcasting to them propaganda about how racist America does not want them and why should they die for it, and so on. Four men escape from the carnage but get stuck on the other side of the river-Sgt. Stamps (Derek Luke, Pieces of April), a straight laced type whose joined the 92nd to help build the future for his people; Bishop (Michael Ealy, Never Die Alone), a ladies man cynic who seems to have either been drafted or lost his belief in the Army and merely wants to survive; Negron, a radio man, the postal worker from the opening and a Puerto Rican who can communicate reasonably well with the locals thanks to his knowledge of Spanish; and Train (Omar Benson Miller, Transformers), a gentle giant in the "Lenny" tradition who carries the statue head with him for luck and because he believes it makes him invisible.

After Train saves a local shell shocked boy the group ends up in a nearby village where local hottie Renata waits with the other widows and elderly for the end of the conflict. Her husband is missing at the Russian front; her father is a Fascist who hates the Germans but keeps a photo of Mussolini up on his wall. The Germans are preparing a counter attack and racist General Almond (Robert John Burke, Fled) orders incompetent racist Captain Nokes (Walton Goggins, House of a 1,000 Corpses) to get intelligence by capturing Germans, and so he tasks Stamps men to do so. When local partisans led by "The Butterfly" show up with a Nazi prisoner, everything seems to be coming together-unfortunately there is a traitor in their midst and the Nazis themselves are hunting the partisans' prisoner, for reasons of their own....

You can see just from this summary how complex what could (and should have been) a relatively straight forward story became. Why not do the tale up Steel Helmet or Castle Keep style, with an isolated group behind lines that has to hold out until help arrives, and while they reflect on the war and their position in it? Lee gets very good performances out of his lead group, and to a lesser extent the rest of the cast, but I found many of the subplots unnecessarily distracting. The scenes between Train and the shell shocked kid were decent enough, but did we need scenes showing us how the Germans, too, had good men and bad men? Why not cut the opening and closing sequences, which, while they do whet our appetites for the reasons the likable Negron would murder a man in seeming cold blood, add little else but a lame Shawshank style ending? Certainly the opening act is startling and creates a mystery, but do we really need the scenes with Tutturo and Leguzamo? I understand they are actors in Lee's stock company, but why not have them play partisans, officers, or even the reporter who asks the questions? There's also D. B. Sweeney who has a small part as an officer who is not a racist asshole; but I feel that the other white officer who chides Nokes for his mistakes shows enough balance that he could be eliminated. The combat scenes themselves are very reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan but that is the dominate paradigm in war films, and Lee makes the scene at least believable, if not necessarily exciting or ground breaking. Finally, I found the women in the film very odd. We mostly get old biddies and then horny young women. The character of Renata is mostly just there to react to Stamps and Bishop's come-ons and to add a bit of nudity to the proceedings. Oh, there's also Axis Sally, who apparently records her shows in full make-up and a slinky outfit and vamps it up while she does so.

Ultimately Miracle at St. Anna is a decent but over long war film. Worth a look if you want to see Spike Lee's response to (mostly) white dominated war films or see a film which shows the highly decorated 92nd Infantry in action. I would not call it a wholly successful film, but it certainly is a watchable and interesting film regardless.

Quick review: Star Trek

2009-05-17T18:40:25Z

I don't feel like doing a full review of this flick, so I'll confine myself to a quick summary. I enjoyed the film, and for a big dumb summer event movie it was decent. It did, however, have all the limitations of that genre. Characters are very thin (which would probably be more acceptable since we know the characters already, but since a temporal anomaly has resulted in major changes to some it makes it much less acceptable), the plot is full of stupid things that happen so they can look "cool", and there's a lot of the "bad boy hero" school of thought that's just plain retarded (re: Kirk driving a vintage car-a vintage car that's gotta be at least 200 years old-off a Grand Canyon like cliff in Iowa-in IOWA-when he's 12 or so). While I liked most of the principles, I thought Quinto was pretty weak as Spock and the actual Spock stuff was kind of ham handed, but at least it was actually Nimoy. I actually would've preferred the guy who played Kirk's dad play Kirk. Finally, the guys I've seen in film before-Karl Urban as McCoy, Simon Pegg as Scotty, and John Cho's Sulu were all pretty good. The other supporting cast members were decent. I could actually see this being MORE enjoyable as a TV show, because then they wouldn't feel the need to (fail) to make everything EPIC (seriously, Eric Bana's Nero is one of the lamest villains in the Trek film franchise history, it's not EPIC) and maybe they could stop trying to make sure we all knew that "THIS ISN'T YOUR FATHER'S STAR TREK" and "'SPLOSIONS" and "OH MY GOD DID YOU JUST SEE THAT". The cast is likable with good chemistry, the slant on the original show keeps enough of the charm while doing its own thing, why not make a series of it? I feel like movies are never going to be able to slow down enough and stop being ADD long enough to be truly enjoyable in the way a good TV version of this could be.

The Wages of Fear

2009-05-14T20:11:26Z

If you've spent anytime reading about film history or in film classes, you've probably heard of The Wages of Fear or if you're French Le Salaire de la Peur. After years of "meaning" to watch the film, I finally watched it last weekend. The plot summary you've heard: desperate European ex-pats who live as near vagabonds in a village in an unnamed South American country are hired to drive truckloads of nitro across 300 miles of rough road in old trucks that are not equipped with many safety features. This is only part of the film, and I wish I knew that going in. We do not cut straight to desperate men on a desperate journey. Instead we spend quite a bit of time in the village the men are stranded in, meeting them and others of their class. There are German, French, English, Italian and even an American ex-pat, although most Americans in the area are able to find work with the oil company that eventually needs the men to drive the nitro to an oil well fire, where the nitro will be used to snuff out the flame. The men live slow lives doing odd jobs and occasionally getting sick and dying; most dream of getting out. Mario, the lead in the film, also goes out with the local hottie Linda (Véra Clouzot, Les Diaboliques) when he can scratch up the cash, and sponges off Luigi (Folco Lulli, The Longest Hunt), an Italian concrete worker that is saving up to go home to Italy.

Then Jo (Charles Vanel, Les Diaboliques,), a crook on the lam, shows up and the equilibrium of the town is upset. He's a go-getter, and French, so Mario gravitates to him and ignores Luigi and Linda. Jo's connection to the American head of the oil operation, also an old crook, "pays off" when the oil wells explode and they need someone expendable to drive the trucks of nitro down to the wells. After some competition, Luigi (who's found out that he has concrete dust in his lungs and has only 6 months to live), Mario, a German named Bimba (Peter van Eyck, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) and another German named Smerloff are chosen to drive (mainly because Jo's friend won't pick him) but Jo gets Smerloff to beg off the assignment.

What follows is probably the best use of suspense I've seen in a while. The film played me like a violin as I repeated was driven to yell things at the screen like "Don't do it!" You will come to love some of the drivers and when they go, you will be crushed. My only real complaints are that I did not expect the long build up (I think it works, it just wasn't what I expected) and that I found both Jo and Mario, as the main characters, fairly unsympathetic. I also hated the ending, which seemed arbitrary and stupid where it was meant to be ironic, I think. It was the kind of downbeat foreign film ending that you come to expect, and here I think it was totally unnecessary. I understand the idea is that the capitalist machine will eat you alive, but come on, did the rest of the film not illustrate that already? It felt tacked on.

An excellent suspense film that you owe it to yourself to see.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

2009-05-14T19:47:43Z

The Baroness is an X-men fan thanks to the 1990s cartoon and her love of things superhero and animated. I, meanwhile, was raised in a house where anti-mutant prejudice was the normal order of things. Brother Grimm is seven years older than me, and thus, for better or worse, had a lot of influence on me, especially when it comes to all things geeky. Grimm was a HUGE Mavel fan in those days, but he hated the X-men. He came into comics just around the time that the biggest Marvel team book was shifting away from the Avengers to the X-men, and he never forgave Marvel for a litany of times they had the X-men show up the Avengers. I think he also at least partly resented their huge popularity, as well as the fact that their central metaphor, that Mutants=oppressed groups starts to break down in the larger Marvel Universe, and often writers would have the Avengers stand in for the "good but misguided" part of the oppressors. When I finally did see some X-men titles it was at least the mid-1980s, and the title was definitely in a decline, and I did not get what all the fuss was about.

Years and years later I actually read the first "Essentials" TPB of the Claremont run on the title and I FINALLY understood how the characters became so popular. The movies I've found to be a mixed bag-I know just enough of the characters to be able to play "Spot the Cameo" and they have been amusing enough to qualify as good popcorn films for me. I'm including the last one in there, which, while less ambitious and definitely not as good as the ones that preceded it, was still entertaining. Wolverine, however, is deep enough into the origin of a character I've always felt was over rated and over exposed, so I had real trouble playing "Spot the Cameo". Add in a lot of messing with the source material (or so I hear, anyway) and the worst job of establishing a period in a film that's alleged to take place 25 years ago or so, and we have a serious case of muddiness. It doesn't help that the film's script is not what one could call "tight".

Wolverine was a film I saw because the Baroness wanted to. We had some gift certificates from Christmas, so it was fun to just drop in and check out a movie, any movie. That's pretty much the critical level I approached it at-I'm not judging this as a fan, and I'm not judging this on the level of "I expected this to be really good". I heard the word-of-mouth, and I saw the declining quality of (what I felt) was an already middling film series, and yet this film still managed to be very mixed for me.

On the one hand, Hugh Jackman (The Prestige) delivers the goods you expect from him-he's ripped, charismatic, and shows off his hard work at the gym quite often. While you could probably ask for a more beat looking, Bronson-Marvin style Wolverine, for modern Hollywood Hugh is probably the best you could ask for. Now, I barely know Sabertooth as a comic character, but for this film, anyways, I doubt you could ask for a better one than Liev Schreiber(The Manchurian Candidate). While he's not as jacked up as he probably should be for the role, he's jacked up enough that you can believe he can take on Jackman's Wolverine. Furthermore, the guy is a great actor, very charismatic, and he and Jackman play off each other wonderfully. What else can I say about the film? The action is great when it sticks to basics and doesn't go too CGI on us, and some of the outdoor scenes are spectacular. Danny Huston (21 Grams) is decent as the devious William Stryker; goon actor Kevin Durand (3:10 to Yuma) makes a somewhat inexplicable version of The Blob, but that's the script/effects fault not his and Dominic Monaghan (The Lord of the Rings) is in the film for what amounts to a far too short cameo.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is not quite as good as Jackman and Schreiber, or even tolerable like those mentioned above. Lynn Collins is completely blah as Wolverine's love interest, Taylor Kitsch (Snakes as a Plane) is horrible as a very weak Gambit, Ryan Reynolds (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) does his usual act as Wade Wilson, and Will i Am is completely non-descript as John Wraith. The plot doesn't make a terrible amount of sense, and is full of typically big "Summer Movie" moments with little pay off. Some cliches are introduced to be immediately discarded and will leave you wondering why they even bothered (my favorite is "Wolverine taken in by kindly old people, then killed instantly). You never get a sense of time or place-this feels like it's happening today even though it's supposedly to be happening in-the early 80s? 1979? Damned if I could tell. Everything has that "grey filter" look I've come to associate with modern CGI driven action films, and personally I'm tired of it. If you can't make the effects look convincing, dialing down the colors isn't going to win me over, either. How about those effects? They're decent except when they get too ambitious. I can't speak to the faithfulness to the books, since I haven't read them, but the films version of Deadpool is so dumb that I think it actually made me a little more brain dead than when I came into the theater.

Ultimately I think the film is worth a look if you're a forgiving Jackman, Schrieber or superhero movie fan. Personally, I thought it was worth watching once, but definitely not a film I'll be watching again.

The Ex-Mrs. Bradford

2009-05-14T18:53:16Z

During the 1930s if you wanted to have a comedy-mystery, William Powell (Manhattan Melodrama) was a very good choice. He had played detectives often, first as Philo Vance, then in the tremendously successful Thin Man series. Jean Arthur (Shane) had also appeared in several Philo Vance movies with Powell, and was a very popular comedic actress. RKO put the pair together again in The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, which is a pretty obvious attempt to create a pairing similar in chemistry (and therefore box office success) to that of Myrna Loy and William Powell in the Thin Man films.

Unfortunately, The Ex-Mrs. Bradford doesn't quite succeed. I don't think the failure is really due to either performer, but to the script. For one thing, it adds a relatively weak third wheel butler character (Eric Blore, Sullivan's Travels). Arthur's Paula Bradford is as eager to help Powell's sleuth as Myrna's, but she is less inexperienced and out-of-her element (pretty acceptable, I think, for an heiress to be so in a criminal investigation!) and much more "wacky", and I think that hurts the film a bit too. Also, instead of the loving tit for tat of the Charles relationship, the Bradfords do more of a "Paula is wacky and demanding but Dr. Bradford will give. The conceit that Bradford is unwillingly dragged into the investigation is pretty weak, overall, as is the mystery. The idea that Paula is a mystery writer is also COMPLETELY underused here-I'm not even 100% they ever say it in the film itself. It's too bad as I think it could have been a nice twist on the Thin Man formula, with Paula Bradford being the one who knows the score and Powell the medically knowledgeable but otherwise out-of-his-element half of the pair.

This is not to say the film isn't entertaining, just that there's a reason there was never a sequel with these characters. As a riff off of the Thin Man series formulas its fairly entertaining, and the cast is full of entertaining character actors doing what they do best-Robert Armstrong (Blood on the Sun) as a gambler, James Gleason (Arsenic and Old Lace) plays another speed talking cop, Grant Mitchell (also of Arsenic and Old Lace) places a race horse owner, and Ralph Morgan (Gangbusters, i.e. the original Professor Mortis, i.e. the guy in my icon) plays an industrialist suspect. The leads are entertaining and have decent chemistry, and the mystery is about what you'd expect from a mid-1930s screwball comedy/mystery film in the Thin Man vein. Worth a look if you've run out of Nick and Nora films or if you really dig any of the principals or old comedy/mystery film.

BMMB Greatness

2009-05-13T20:02:35Z

For the record, the idea of a "New York City Really Has It All" movie night is phenomenal.

The Man with the Golden Gun

2009-05-11T16:48:38Z

James Bond films have arguably always been a mixed bag, but for my money they didn't really start to go down hill in any way until Thunderball, and even then I would say it was only due to a bit of bloating and too much under-water photography. Even though You Only Live Twice sees the franchise descended into near self-parody, the film is SO over-the-top that you can't enjoy it. The film feels like a culmination of the Connery Bonds and the series could probably have just stopped right there. On Her Majesty's Secret Service might have been a re-vamping of the series with a new star, but, though it does cover some new ground by having 007 fall in love, in many ways it really is a continuation of what had gone before. Diamonds Are Forever feels even more like a last, unwanted trip to the 1960s Bond well.

In both Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun it feels like the producers are desperately feeling about and trying to regain their footing in creating a new style for the new Bond. In both cases, however, the films do so by attempting to ape then-popular action film types-first in Live and Let Die we get an attempt to do an urban crime film/blaxploitation film and in The Man with the Golden Gun there's a lot of martial arts going on. Overall I feel like Live and Let Die does a much, much better of integrating the other film style-it really does feel like someone mashed up a Bond film and a Blaxpo film, with some rather bizarre results (surely this is the only time that Bond has been called "Honkey" on film). The Man with the Golden Gun, however, takes what might have been a breath of fresh air for the series-instead of a world-conquering super villain we have Bond vs. the world's greatest assassin-and botches it, not the least because it insists on throwing a bunch of lame chop socky moments into the proceedings. Surely there's a better way to have Bond get into a fist fight than to have the villain's death trap be to have him fight at his martial arts school in a fair fight? That's not to mention the nearly random "Chinese villain in Thailand just happens to have some sumo wrestlers sitting around" fight or the several fights that Bond just happens to watch.

Worse, The Man with the Golden Gun takes the steadily increasing level of lame komedy in the Bond series and pushes it to the max, while simultaneously making it not funny at all. We get an unnecessary return of the good ole boy sheriff from Live and Let Die, but instead of keeping the racism mostly implied and just having the joke be on him, we get Pepper spouting off endlessly about the "pointy heads" in Thailand. Furthermore there are plenty of jokes relating to Nick Knack (Hervé Villechaize, whose later fame as Tattoo on Fantasy Island simply has to be traceable to his very similar role here), as well as assorted other lame gags throughout. While Moore can be depended on to deliver goofy lines with aplomb, the script writing is not co-operating here. The other issue with the film is that it simply isn't scripted in such a way as to be boring, which shouldn't be an issue in a film where the villain, Scaramanga, not only has a carnival house style arena set up to kill other great hit men, but is played by Christopher Lee (Caravans)!

The terrible early 70s fashion and cheap feel of the affair-far too many scenes look like poorly dressed sets, and for a film that involves Bond traveling from the Middle East to Hong Kong and Macao to a mysterious island the film never feels like a globe trotting adventure. Finally, Bond is at his most-terrible to women here, between the coercive way he gets Scaramanga's mistress Andrea Anders (Maud Adams, Rollerball) into bed to the way he treats Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland, The Wicker Man), the agent assigned to his case. The fact that she's 100% incompetent just rubs salt into the wound. The usual foreign operative who helps Bond role is also noticeably weak here, as the guy can't even manage to drive Bond away from the villain's dojo! I'd also point out here that Scaramanga's solar energy scheme is kind of random, as well, and seems to be there to give viewers just a taste of the usual Bond villainy not unlike how Kanaga's scheme in Live and Let Die is revealed as if it's a world-conquering scheme, when in realty he's just cornering the heroin market.

It's a shame, really, that the producers couldn't get a better entry out of this. Surely Bond vs. a great hit man could have made for a suspenseful and engagingly different entry in the series. Instead the film goes half-way, while including some of the worst jokes and female characters in the series. The only good thing to be said for the film are some truly spectacular stunts (the corkscrew car jump is amazing), as even Lee's performance seems off.

Stop Entertainment Cannibalism: The Mortis Manifesto

2009-05-06T17:54:39Z

By decree of Professor Mortis the following will be done:

1) No new stories with old comic book characters in comics. New characters can be created but can not reference, rip-off, or use old ones. Movies can be made using old story lines, reasonably faithfully adhered to.

2) No new entries in the following franchises:

A) Star Wars
B) Star Trek
C) Rocky
D) Rambo
E) James Bond
F) Halloween
G) A Nightmare on Elm St.
H) Friday the 13th
I) Chucky
J) Leprechaun
K) Hellraiser
L) Texas Chainsaw Massacre
M) Psycho
N) Indiana Jones

3) No remakes except for movies that bombed on original release, were critically poorly received and have never gained a cult following. (This includes "Reimaginings")

4) No more zombies

You will follow these rules for 20 years at which point they'll be further reviewed.

Death Race

2009-05-05T23:53:31Z

"Fuck with me and we'll see who shits on the sidewalk."

As they said in the old days at Marvel Comics, if you can explain how that line makes you a bad ass and what it's supposed to mean, you'll get a No Prize. More importantly, the enigma of the line could easily stand in for the whole production...loud, vulgar and thinks it's more tough and funny than it is. Whereas the original cult classic Death Race 2000 is a very funny, absurd satire of America's love of sports, patriotism, heroes and violence, the 2008 remake makes no attempt to say anything other than "OH DAMN THAT CAR JUST SMASHED THAT GUY INTO BITS ROCK!" As near as I could tell there's nothing in here that's satirical. Instead video game movie hack Paul W.S. Anderson (Event Horizon) takes the plot of The Running Man and subs in a violent, armed to the teeth car race around a stable, closed track ala games like Vigilante 8 for the more typical Most Dangerous Game knock-off pursuit of condemned criminals on foot by cartoon gladiators. That is, criminals participate in a nationally streamed (the Internet means its the future!) death sport. Here all of the racers are criminals and each drives a customized, heavily armed vehicle (how they get them and how the armaments are chosen are chosen is completely ignored) whose weapons are activated, video game style, by driving over sensor plates on the track when they light up. The first two races they merely have to survive; the third the winner has to cross the finish line. After five wins you go home.

Naturally our hero can not be a crook so Jensen Ames (Jason Statham, The Ghosts of Mars) is a former race car driver whose framed for murdering his wife. Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen, Face/Off) offers him release and seeing his daughter again in exchange for him taking the place of Frankenstein, the four time winner of the Death Race and most popular Death Racer of all time. Frankenstein was so badly damaged by the race that he wore a mask, so subbing in Ames should be easy. Ames has no option but to agree. He will be helped by his pit crew Coach (Ian McShane, The Battle of Britain), Gunner (Jacob Vargas, Ernest Goes to Camp) and idiot savant Lists (Frederick Koehler, Mr. Mom), as well as his navigator, Elizabeth Case. Navigators man the defensive weapons and function as R2 units, keeping the car running. They're also extremely hot women who are there to boost ratings, except for in the case of arch rival Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson, Transformers), who uses men either because he's gay or because he kills them so fast (sometimes 2 or 3 in one race) and the audience was disturbed by this.

While Joe is certainly out to kill Frankenstein, Ames himself has to watch out for Pachenko (Max Ryan, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), who has a mysterious in for him (which could be because he's under the warden's thumb, but he persists even after that makes any sense, just one of many incredibly retarded points in the film). Further more, it's clear that the Warden wants him not to win, but to keep racing purely for ratings. Her desire to kill him is less explicable. In any case, the rest of the movie is mostly just the races, with the occasional stupid scowling match with the Warden, fight with Joe or Pachenko off the track, or strategy session with his guys. Don't get me started on the retarded happy ending that makes no sense, or the number of other, better movies (and even worse movies-the whole opening crawl about privatized prisons could be have been taken directly from The Story of Rikki-Oh).

Is the film worth a look? Well, for fans of Jason Statham, I'd say yes. The man is extremely charismatic and I'd say he's the 00s answer to the 70s Charles Bronson (better looking, though). That is, he's never going to be in an A-List film, but if you need an ensemble player tough guy or a guy to head a B-list action film, he's an excellent choice. Similarly, way-too-good-for-this-crap Joan Allen and Ian McShane put in good performances. Like the character actors of old you can rely on them to get the job done. The rest of the cast ranges from acceptable (Ryan, Gibson) to the awful but hot (Nathalie Martinez, who plays Case) to the plain awful (Jason Clarke as a sneering guard who's entirely pointless). Mostly the film is just there for a series of decent and occasionally fun action scenes (I loved the video game style traps the racers can activate and the kill truck) set in the most predictable and derivative "Plot" ever..it's really just a framework. So if you're looking for a dumb sci-fi action rehash to watch over a few beers or on a lazy Saturday afternoon, and you aren't a fan of the original or can put the title out of your mind while you watch, it's worth a look. Otherwise stay far away. Personally I just wish they'd called this "The Racing Man" and left poor old Death Race 2000 alone.

Night Moves

2009-05-05T23:15:57Z

Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman, The Birdcage) is a retired footballer-turned-private-detective. His marriage to Ellen (Susan Clark, Airport 1975), a antiques dealer, is on the rocks, and he's taken to tailing her to find out if she's cheating on him (she is). Harry takes a job given to him as a favor from Nick (Kenneth Mars, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), an associate who runs a big firm-a recurring argument with Ellen is about whether he should join this big firm that Harry disdains. The client is Arlene Iverson, a rich old former starlet who married well. Arlene wants Harry to find her runaway daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith, Nobody's Fool), who, in classic noir fashion, she presents as a wild spoiled rich girl who will sleep with anyone. Arlene suggests that Harry start looking with Quentin (James Woods, Vampires), who, instead of the freak she suggests he is, turns out to be a mechanic who works on films, prepping vehicles for stunts.

Harry follows the trail which seems to run though stuntmen like Joey Ziegler (Ed Binns, 12 Angry Men), Marv Ellman and finally Tom Iverson (John Crawford, The Enforcer), Delly's stepfather who's moved to the Florida Keys. Sparks fly immediately between Harry and Tom's girl, Paula, and Harry is left simultaneously trying to figure out what's going on while keeping his failing marriage together-and trying to stay alive.

Night Moves was one of many 1970s films that took long discarded and outmoded genres and updated them to the modern day. Before Star Wars, which changed the whole game, most of these updates were downbeat and tended to show that, in the real world, the good guys do not solve the mystery and everything will not be okay. More often than not the films kept to the structure of the older films while changing the outcome and giving us flawed heroes. Generally I find these films mixed; when they mostly play by the rules of the genre and don't get too deep into homage or date themselves too badly by being too contemporary they can be quite good (Chinatown, for example, or McCabe and Mrs. Miller). Others, such as Altman's The Long Goodbye, simply infuriated me, most likely because Altman took a character I loved from his less complicated film incarnation and turned him into schlubby Elliott Gould.

Night Moves is in between these extremes. Gene Hackman is very good here as the atypical detective Harry. Sure, he's got the "Harry Moseby....Confidential" on his door and the classic office with wood furniture, where he works alone, but unlike his predecessors he knows he's a quaint relic and is all too ready to joke about it. At the same time, his past as a football player perhaps sets up the audience to accept the fact that Harry never really seems to figure anything out. Sure, he can find the pieces, but there's no way he (or, to a certain extent, the viewer) can fit it together. There are too many pieces and too many of them wind up dead. The update of the "femme fatale" with Paula is also very nice-I quite enjoyed her sort of lazy 70s take on the idea, and also the fact that she's attractive but no knockout-which is believable when you consider she makes her living as a diver out in the Keys. In fact the whole movie works to de-glam not just the genre and the profession of detective, but the movie industry as a whole, focusing on the bit players in the industry and those who profit off it. Unfortunately, I found the subplot of Harry's failing marriage to be particularly unrewarding-it sort of feels like "Hey, Detectives have miserable real lives too!" and it takes up a good chunk of the film. In addition, there's the fact that Harry's an ex-ball player...while it somewhat fleshes out the character and makes him different, it really adds nothing except a weird extra layer to the film where everything feels pretend. Perhaps that's the point but I don't think it worked particularly well.

Finally, while I enjoyed the cast of character actors, and James Woods is his usual self as a weird, lanky fuck up of a guy, Griffith's character is awful. I wouldn't blame Griffith-she didn't write the character, after all-but Delly acts like a ten year old for most of the film yet is somehow supposed to be sex on two legs. She is attractive, no doubt-and nude quite often-but her character is irritating and underwritten. She's in a tough spot, no doubt, and seems to come out of her character's act towards the end, but it was too little, too late. While I am often a fan of ambiguity and lack of big reveals that explain everything, here it was a little rough-the film seems constructed to leave us scratching our heads like Harry, eternally locked in a boat going in circles at the end of the film. Director Arthur Penn (Alice's Restaurant) also gives us plenty of scenes that homage famous noirs-from The Postman Always Rings Twice to The Big Sleep to Key Largo but somehow these references seem self conscious and are always there to give us a warped version of those films where our hero is always on the outside, never to understand the mystery or play the hero. While I wouldn't say the film doesn't work at all, I think that your enjoyment of the film is going to hinge on how much you dig Hackman and how much you dig "deconstruction" of genre.

Massacre at Central High

2009-04-29T00:44:50Z

Massacre at Central High is a relatively unknown film, though it did make Cult Movies 2, so it must have had a cult at one time. Currently it languishes unreleased-consistent searching for old video copies proved difficult, and even TCM dropped it from it's "Underground" schedule. Whether that is due to a rights issue I am not sure, but eventually Stalwart Dan and I managed to locate a copy. While it was an interesting film-sort of a "high school conflicts as metaphor for society at large" film wrapped up with a more typical "bombs and boobies" 70s exploitation film-and definitely influential (Heathers, Massacre at Central High called and it wants its street cred back), the film also has it's share of flaws, some of which are easily attributable to the nature of low budget independent movie making in the 1970s.

The plot is relatively straight forward. David is a new student at a high end high school, Central High. His friend Mark (Andrew Stevens, Day of the Animals) preceded him to the school and has arranged for David to meet the ruling clique-Bruce, Craig (Steve Bond, The Prey) and Paul (Damon Douglas, From Noon Til Three). David first encounters them in the hall, however, where he's asking for directions while they harass a stoner named Spoony (Robert Carradine, Cannonball!) for painting a Swastika on a locker. He finally gets directions from the very attractive Theresa (Kimberly Beck, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter), who we will later find out is Mark's girl. David is a loner, and you get the vibe from him that he's an angry guy in general (in dialog he tells us that he runs to get out his angry energy), but Mark wants him to see that they've got it pretty good there.

Unfortunately the ruling clique is more interested in maintaining order and appearances to an alarming degree, going so far as to trash the poor guy Rodney's car because it's an eye sore-it's pretty much attack of the super preps. David's having none of this and is soon attempting to befriend the various people the super preps oppress, including the nerdy library volunteer, the fat guy, Spoony, and even Theresa, who's becoming uncomfortable with the clique. It gets worse when they decide that Mary (Cheryl Smith, Laserblast) and Jane should be raped into heterosexuality. When Mark chickens out he gives a cryptic warning to Theresa, who attempts to help but is saved only when David shows up and kicks all three of the super-preps asses. Mark is sent to try one last time to get David on the preps side, but when he finds David skinny dipping with Theresa, all out war is declared and soon a lot of kids are getting killed in "accidents".

Rene Daalder, who had previously worked as a cameraman for skin flick giant Russ Meyers, was apparently recommended to the producers by his old boss. Daalder seems to have wanted to make the film into something more than a pure "new kid shows up at school, is pushed to far and kills a bunch of mofos" exploitation flick. Therefore we get the film's half-baked political philosophy, where the school stands for society at large (there are no adults seen in the film until the last scene and even then there are little more than window dressing). The super-preps are society's current leaders, Mark and Theresa are kept around like discarded royalty after they fall, David is the force of revolution, the library geek rule by intellect, Spoony, Mary and Jane are the leftist elite, Rodney is labor, and the fat kid is...ah...like I said, it's kind of half-assed. Eventually every oppressed kid attempts to get David to go in on him to "run the school", and David kills them all, even going so far as to attempt to destroy the school (society?) itself. Perhaps David is just force in general. In any case it works out to meaning that the film has some crazy death scenes and nudity sprinkled throughout (for the exploitation crowd) while the characters spout some very odd and not very teenage seeming dialog from time to time. Due to the budget, I'm sure, there's some gaffes left in and some serious padding at points where we are "treated" to extend footage of people driving cars and floating in hang gliders, and the pacing throughout is a little off. The acting is very mixed, with the later-to-be-pro actors really standing out (and if Carradine and Stevens are your ace-in-the-hole acting wise you know you're in trouble). It's easy to see how the film came to have a cult following, and it's certainly worth a look if it ever becomes easily available. I'm not sure the "political and exploitation" film bit really works, but it's definitely worth thinking about.

Here's the trailer which has about every exciting moment in the whole film:

Red River

2009-04-28T23:50:09Z

Red River is widely regarded as a classic Western; even if it is not on the same pedestal as films like The Searchers, it's definitely close. Directed by Howard Hawks (To Have and Have Not), one of Hollywood's most dependable directors, and starring John Wayne (Donovan's Reef) in a tale of a cattle baron's desperate attempt to move 10,000 head of cattle a then unheard of distance on an untried route from Texas to Missouri, and Red River seems like a sure thing. With Montgomery Clift (The Misfits) to put things a bit out of whack and Walter Brennan (Rio Bravo) on hand to provide comic relief, that certainty grows. Unfortunately, however, the film never reaches greatness, and now seems to be shown mostly for Wayne, Clift and Hawks devotees and is notable mainly for the large amount of (un)intentional(?) subtext in the relationship between Clift's character, Matt Garth and a gunslinger named Cherry Valance (John Ireland, Gunslinger), especially a famous piece of dialog where Cherry admires Matt's gun and says "There are only two things more beautiful than a gun: a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. Ever had a good... Swiss watch?" The basic outline of the plot certainly could make for a compelling film: A Texas rancher, Thomas Dunson (Wayne) desperate to get money for their cattle by getting them out of the economically depressed post-war South, drives his cattle to Missouri. The route is dangerous, and deadly, and the rancher uses violent methods to put down any thought of mutiny by his cowhands. His adopted son, Matt, meanwhile, begins to see that Dunson is wrong and that the only way to save the cattle drive is to move the destination to Abeline, which might now be on the railroad. When Matt finally rebels, leaving Dunson behind, can he escape Dunson's wrath and finish the cattle drive?

Unfortunately the film does not make it to greatness, for several reasons. One, though Wayne, for possibly the first time in his career, is up to the part of Dunson, the conservative Hawks (or possibly screenwriter) does not allow Dunson to be completely in the wrong, even when he is. The film ends not with a strong confrontation, but instead with Cherry's death and then a fist fight between the leads that is broken up by the near non-entity love interest Tess (Joanne Dru, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) with a motherly tongue lashing. This is all the comeuppance Dunson gets for killing multiple insubordinates on the cattle drive, and all the end we get after a tense half of the movie where the entire group of cowboys dread the return of Dunson.

The fact that Tess is such a non-entity is another problem I had with the film. The two women seen in the film have truly terrible dialog, and both are hastily sketched and mainly serve to move the plot along. The beautiful Coleen Grey (Kiss of Death) gets a tiny part at the beginning of the film as Dunson's love interest, who he leaves behind when he leaves a wagon train headed to California. The wagon train is ambushed by Indians and she is killed. Tess we meet in a wagon train (full of whores and gamblers if I understood the dialog properly) that is currently being attacked and she spends nearly every scene talking constantly, even when she has an arrow in her back. By all means, have a film with just one sex or the other in it, or where one sex is peripheral; just don't have the other sex show up purely to move the plot along and be completely stereotypical.

The other problem I had with the film, is it's unmoderated and endless praise of beef, the American way, and the right of Americans to slaughter whomever is on the land and take it for themselves. Now, I love John Ford, and John Ford has hardly shied away from using terrible stereotypes when it suited him. I feel like he usually at least somewhat modified those very stereotypes, however and I can think of no film of his I've seen yet that has the full on "settlers rights to any land they can hold by force of arms" scene. As a western and old movie fan I recognize that these films were made in different times, but I felt like Hawks was particularly flagrant in this one.

I should add that aside from a very few films, I'm not a huge Hawks fan, and I feel that his movies are solid but not truly great films for the most part. This is definitely true here. Technically the film is brilliant, with great use of scenery and a real feeling that we're seeing an epic cattle drive take place. The action is rare but has a lot of impact when it's used, and the performances are largely good. Red River is worth a look if you're a fan of any of the principals or if you're into American Westerns; others can probably stick to watching one of the greats and moving on to another genre.