Company of Heroes (2013)

Director: Don Michael Paul                               Writer: David Reed
Film Score: Frederik Wiedmann                        Cinematography: Martin Chichov
Starring: Tom Sizemore, Jürgen Prochnow, Chad Michael Collins & Vinnie Jones

Unlike some people, I’m a lot more forgiving about inaccuracies in war films. I haven’t studied books on the planes, and tanks, and guns and so those things I don’t really notice. That said, however, the bar on war films was raised significantly by Saving Private Ryan and the subsequent Tom Hanks produced Band of Brothers. Even the last great war film prior to the new era, When Trumpets Fade, pales in comparison to something like The Lost Battalion in terms of visual impact and dramatic realism. The first thing to know about Company of Heroes is that it is a complete fiction, a lost company of U.S. soldiers who wind up completing an OSS mission to discover the Nazi nuclear weapons program--of which there wasn’t a working one. And though that doesn’t have to be the ruin of a war film, take The Dirty Dozen for example, this one combines it with a bad script and cartoonish action sequences that it never manages to recover from.

The film begins with the company on a routine patrol during the winter of 1944. When a sniper kills one of the men, Chad Michael Collins picks up a sniper rifle and takes him out, earning him a promotion to company sniper. Tom Sizemore, on the other hand, had his entire platoon killed shortly after D-Day and wound up being demoted to cook. When the lieutenant, Neal McDonough from Band of Brothers, gives the company a delivery mission of hams to the soldiers on the front, little does he know that they are heading right into the battle of the bulge. Soon they find themselves surrounded by a tank division and when they see an explosion in the distance, figure the Germans aren’t bombing themselves and decide to head in that direction. But what they find is a bombing test site where a dying OSS operative tells them of the nuclear program and the only way to stop it: going to Stuttgart and blowing up the factory.

The very first thing one notices about the film is the atrocious dialog. A certain amount of humor creeps into combat in order to diffuse the tension, but this film is like a wisecracking convention with crude jokes pouring out of the soldiers like they’re headlining in a Vegas showroom. It’s not just inappropriate, it actually completely destroys the suspension of disbelief. But that’s not the only thing wrong with the script. The soldiers make some absolutely idiotic choices. The first comes when they’re hiding in the woods while the Germans are taking control of a road. The German officer is standing out in the middle of the road in the headlights of the vehicles, a perfect target. If the U.S. soldiers had snuck away to avoid a confrontation that would have made sense, but instead they simply lurched out into the headlights themselves, forcing a firefight. If they were going to do that anyway, why not take out the German officer with the first shot. Later, the almost identical situation happens when they see their contact in Stuttgart being interrogated by two officers. The officers kill the contact while none of the Americans fire a shot. It’s maddeningly senseless.

For all of that, the film looks great. It has a nice color manipulation in post-production that gives it the same kind of washed out color as in Saving Private Ryan. The special effects when soldiers are shot are also very graphic and realistic. Unfortunately all of that is for naught when the story takes a sharp veer into the comic book realm. Machine guns that never need to be reloaded, narrow escapes not from the front lines but in the middle of Germany, and Russian and British pals who come to their aid are all fantastically unrealistic. Jürgen Prochnow is the brains behind the nuclear program, the scientist they must kidnap and his daughter, Melia Kreiling, of course falls in love with Collins, while Vinnie Jones and Dimitri Diatchenko come to the rescue at the end. Company of Heroes began its life as a video game, and perhaps that’s the problem. While it makes for an interesting fantasy, is certainly not something that is worthy of real veterans who fought and died for democracy in that most devastating of all 20th century wars, and in that light it’s a terrible film to watch.

The Ghost Writer (2010)

Director: Roman Polanski                              Writers: Robert Harris & Roman Polanski
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat                       Cinematography: Pawel Edelman
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Tom Wilkinson

The Ghost Writer began as a novel by the British author Robert Harris, who has written some very nice World War II related suspense novels like Fatherland and Enigma. The film has a distinctly European look to it, even when it supposedly moves to the United States. Normally this is something I like very much, and it’s obviously due to the fact that director Roman Polanski still can’t return to the United States and filmed the entire project in Europe. Unfortunately, the film has a very claustrophobic feel. The primary setting is an unnamed island somewhere on the eastern coast of the United States, and most of the time there is spent in a luxurious, though sparse and cold, house on the beach.

The film begins with a ferry unloading onto the island and a car in the front row that doesn’t have an owner. Eventually we see a body washed up on the shore of the island and we only learn later that it is the ghost writer for the former prime minister of England, Pierce Brosnan, who is living in exile on the U.S. island. With the ghost writer dead, Ewan McGregor’s agent gets him an interview with the publishing company in London and they offer him the job, on the contingency that he finishes in four weeks. When he arrives at Brosnan’s compound he finds the prime minister enigmatic, recalcitrant, and distracted. When allegations come out that he gave approval for terrorist suspects to be water-boarded, suddenly the publishers want the manuscript in two weeks. But Brosanan heads to Washington, leaving McGregor on the island and, he soon abandons the book in order to figure out who killed the previous ghost writer.

Harris’s story unfolds incredibly slowly, perhaps more than any of the films made from his novels, and without any real idea of what’s going on an hour and a half into the film it tends to drag. And it’s not as if there are a surfeit of suspects, either. In this case, literally no one could have done it. Motives are completely absent from the proceedings leaving the audience as clueless as McGregor as to what is going on. Eventually the answer comes, but by then it is little more than a disappointment. There is intrigue aplenty, but all of it going on behind the scenes and while the final reveal had the potential to be satisfying, I have the feeling that Polanski sabotaged it, for it’s vastly different than the ending of the book.

I can’t say that this is a good film because there is absolutely nothing suspenseful about it. McGregor is something of a poor man’s Kenneth Branaugh, younger but without the twinkle in his eye. Brosnan’s performance seems phoned in, as do practically all of his performances. He’s trying so damn hard to not be typecast that he has wound up typecasting himself and in the process has become an incredibly uninteresting actor. The supporting cast is about the only thing in the film that is good. Kim Cattrall goes back to her English roots to put on a British accent as Brosnan’s secretary, and Olivia Williams is tremendous as Brosnan’s wife. Tom Wilkinson has a brief turn as one of Brosnan’s fellow college students, and Robert Pugh is fantastic in a small roll as a former minister, while Eli Walach has a small cameo as an island resident. But even that isn’t enough to save the film. By the time the final reveal comes, the whole exercise seems corny. In the end, The Ghost Writer is little more than a rather tedious mystery.

The Tree of Life (2011)

Director: Terrence Malick                              Writer: Terrence Malick
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat                       Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain and Fiona Shaw

The Emperor has no clothes . . . again. And I’m not shy about standing up and telling the world. This is yet another attempt at subverting film conventions for nothing more than the sake of doing it, a pretentious, pompous, self-important attempt at being “artistic.” I came to this film through David Denby’s terrific book Do The Movies Have a Future In it he very astutely identifies what is wrong with the film industry today, but he also mentions a few films made in the last few years that he thought were exceptional. Unfortunately, his choices show him to be in the thrall of the critical camp that believes the more unintelligible a film is the more artistic it must be. Well, I picked all of them up at his recommendation and at this writing it’s no surprise that all of them have eventually found their way to this blog.

The Tree of Life is not a movie. It’s an image collage. And like most collages, which take other people’s pictures from magazines and the Internet and use them to create an “original” piece of art, Terrence Malick has taken images from the Hubble space telescope, BBC’s Planet Earth series, and the International Space Station, thrown them together with some pretentious shots of people doing random things and randomly emoting and called it a film. Fair enough. He certainly has the right to do that, just as I have the right to call it crap. The thing is, this is nothing new. In writing we call it plagiarism. And unlike a film like Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which has a definite purpose in reassembling existing film, Malick apparently hoped no one would notice he was passing off someone else’s imagery as his own.

Experimentation with film imagery has been going on since the birth of cinema. Just one early example is the short film Lot in Sodom from 1933, but I’m sure there are many examples from the silent era as well. There is absolutely nothing new in Malik’s film. The entire piece has a distinct air of artificiality, just as similar attempts in art and music and literature are equally artificial. And this is incredibly ironic for a film that seems to want desperately to connect the characters to the history of life on earth. His painfully crafted shots of characters, like something from a pharmaceutical commercial, feel distinctly unreal. The immaculate houses that they wander through as they emote, do not look lived in. The front yards and streets and summer houses are not their own. They are interlopers masquerading as people, pretending to have emotions and daring us not to be “moved.” But we’re not. Like the blank canvas pretending to be a painting, or the dead silence pretending to be music, The Tree of Life is simply vacuous imagery pretending to be a film.

And I’m critical not because I don’t “get” what Malick is attempting to do. Oh, I get it all right, which is exactly the reason I hate it. I would actually love to see a film in which characters who are so deep in their delusions of god that they eventually become disillusioned at what is in actuality a random and indifferent universe that they so desperately want to impose order upon. But this isn’t that film. I would love to see a film about a family who genuinely struggles to make sense of the death of one of it’s own even decades later. But this isn’t it. And if I want to see gloriously photographed images of space and planet Earth, there are plenty of other vastly more interesting and entertaining documentaries I can watch. At the end of the day, however, there is one positive thing I can take away from The Tree of Life: I never have to watch another Terrence Malick film again.

Out of Sight (1998)

Director: Steven Soderbergh                        Writer: Scott Frank & Elmore Leonard
Film Score: David Holmes                           Cinematography: Elliot Davis
Starring: George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames and Albert Brooks

I could say this is a poor man’s Get Shorty, but since both films came from the mind of the same author I can only say this is a lesser Elmore Leonard. Out of Sight tries valiantly to capture the magic of the earlier film, but just can’t do it. The direction is of lesser quality and the story isn’t quite as interesting, but the most glaring difference is that the cast is decidedly second-tier. Instead of John Travolta and Rene Russo, here we have George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. They’re good, but . . . nowhere close to the lighting up the screen the way the earlier pair did. At the same time the story itself, while entertaining in a way, is ponderous and slow and ultimately disappointing, especially when compared to the earlier film. I don’t think it’s Elmore Leonard’s fault, I think the reason for the failure is attempting to make the film in a very different style, and yet being unable to resist trying to capture the magic of the earlier film.

The structure of the story is fairly interesting. The opening is an out of sequence shot of Clooney coming out of an office building, throwing his tie on the ground in anger and walking across the street to rob a bank. The robbery is ingenious, but he’s caught when his car won’t star. In a Florida prison he plans a breakout that works, but runs smack into federal agent Jennifer Lopez and he winds up in the trunk with her car as his driver, Ving Rhames, makes their getaway. But once the pair has gone their separate ways they can’t stop thinking about each other. Clooney is on his way to Detroit, the reason shown in a flashback of his time in a California prison where he became the protector of white-collar criminal Albert Brooks. It’s when he’s out of that prison that he goes to ask Brooks for a job and, insulted, leaves the building in a huff, precipitating the bank robbery in the introduction. In Detroit the caper goes horribly wrong but in the end love triumphs, with Samuel L. Jackson as the unwitting matchmaker.

As with all of Leonard’s novels, it’s a twisted tale that includes lots of comedy. Director Steven Soderbergh deliberately steers away from Quentin Tarantino’s style, using a very interesting color palate and inserting a dream sequence that is wonderfully surprising. The supporting cast also includes some great actors. Don Cheadle plays the convict shaking Brooks down in prison, but his role is a strange one, inconsistent, and just seems odd rather than compelling. Dennis Farina has a nice turn as Lopez’s daughter, but Michael Keaton has little more than a cameo as her current boyfriend. The great Viola Davis plays Cheadle’s girlfriend, and Luis Guzmán is the convict Clooney ratted out to make his escape in Florida. By far the worst casting choice, however, is Steve Zahn. He is totally out of place in this film, so much so that the first time I tried to watch it I turned it off as soon as he showed up.

With all this talent it seems as if the show should have worked. I absolutely love Albert Brooks, and the straight roles he’s been doing lately, like the one in Drive, are fantastic to watch. But even Brooks isn’t enough to save it for me. It’s an interesting film to watch, but I wouldn’t call it entertaining. David Holmes serves up a standard score. Perhaps if they’d had some iconic musical hook, like Booker T. and the M.G.s in Get Shorty, it would have helped. I don’t know. Out of Sight is a film that, on paper, seems like it should work and, to be fair, a lot of people really like it. I’m just not one of them. It’s a disappointing film for me and, in the end, anything that I have to make three attempts to get through is not something I’ll ever go back to.

Phantom Ship (1935)

Director: Denison Clift                                 Writer: Denison Clift
Film Score: Eric Ansell                               Cinematography: Eric Cross
Starring: Bela Lugosi, Shirley Grey, Arthur Margetson and Edmund Willard

I’ll say it right up front: I love Lugosi. And that can be problematic. There are bad Bela Lugosi movies, plenty of them, but there are also bad movies with Bela Lugosi in them, and for me there is a distinct difference. Unfortunately, this is one of the former. Unlike Return of the Vampire, where the rest of the film is fairly banal but Lugosi’s presence makes it worth watching, Phantom Ship is just bad, and even Lugosi can’t save it. A British version of the Mary Celeste story, the ship that was found adrift in the Atlantic in 1872 with no one onboard, the conceit here is that someone stowed away on the ship seeking revenge and killed off everyone. Unfortunately, this makes the film little more than a floating old dark house mystery, and a bad one at that.

Only the third film produced by the nascent Hammer Films in Britain, it would take a couple more decades before the company would find its sea legs and begin to make a major impact on the international film industry. This film tries, with the meager resources at hand, but just can’t overcome them. The British actors are, for the most part, fairly unremarkable and the crude acting styles tend to drag the whole production down. Oddly enough, one of the worst things about the film is actually the editing, an element that is usually invisible. But John Seabourne leaves too much film prior to reaction shots and it causes the reactions to feel as if they’re lagging. In terms of Lugosi, whose style could be somewhat stilted anyway, it has the effect of making the audience wonder if he is actually going to say anything at all.

Arthur Margetson is the ship’s captain. He is sailing for Italy with a cargo of raw alcohol and taking along his fiancée, Shirley Grey. The one complication is that he has stolen Grey away from another captain, Edmund Willard, who had been set on marrying her himself. When Margetson finds himself one hand short, he’s forced to ask for a sailor from Willard’s crew who sends his man off to Margetson with the implied instruction to make Margetson pay. Meanwhile Lugosi has just finished an arduous trip after being shanghaied and when he is offered a berth on the Marry Celeste he unexpectedly accepts. Unlike the old dark house mysteries, however, several sailors are killed openly, one while attempting to kill the captain and one while attempting to rape his fiancée.

Lugosi’s performance is just a bit too hammy and difficult to believe. After he kills the sailor who was attempting rape, he practically breaks down, seemingly horrified that he has “killed his fellow man.” And while Shirley Grey is very good, she has too little screen time. The Hammer film was released as The Mystery of the Mary Celeste in Britain, but in the United States the title was changed in addition to excising twenty minutes of the film, mostly onboard the ship. There are characters in the credits who don’t even appear in the American version. Unfortunately, the original British version doesn’t exist any more, so we’ll never know what was cut. While Phantom Ship is an interesting historical piece for Lugosi and Hammer completists, but not something that’s going to appeal to most viewers.

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980)

Director: John Sayles                              Writer: John Sayles
Music: Mason Daring                              Cinematography: Austin De Besche
Starring: Bruce MacDonald, Maggie Renzi, David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp

I had heard about this film for decades, beginning with Siskel and Ebert’s rant when The Big Chill came out and how much better this film was. It’s not. I can see the merits of the film, and understand why people like it, but ultimately it doesn’t hold up as a work of art for me. It’s like My Dinner with Andre, only with a dozen boring conversations instead of just one. This is the directorial debut of John Sayles, whose work I haven’t really been motivated to explore. Return of the Secaucus Seven is a small, independent film that has been lovingly restored but still shows its humble beginnings. I’ve written on many occasions that just because a film did something first, doesn’t mean that it is deserving of praise despite its flaws. It is still a flawed film, and Kasdan’s remake is still a better film.

The title of the film is not the setting, and the story takes place in New Hampshire. A group of college friends who were arrested in Secaucus while heading to a protest in Washington D.C. ten years earlier, are reuniting at the home of Bruce MacDonald and Maggie Renzi. Interestingly, none of the actual seven, apart from Adam LeFevre, became actors of any significance. The gas station attendant in town who went to high school with some of them is David Strathairn, who has had a slow but steady climb into stardom, and the straight-laced boyfriend of Jean Passanante is Gordon Clapp, best known for his work on NYPD Blue. Sayles himself plays another high school grad who got married and has three small children. Most of the first half of the film is spent establishing which of the group used to be sleeping with whom, for Clapp’s and the audience’s benefit. The rest is an awkward attempt at recreating banal sounding dialogue that feels incredibly forced.

For me, this is the biggest failure of the film. In attempting to be painfully realistic with his dialogue, Sayles has inadvertently done the opposite. There is a certain artistic quality that must be present in a screenplay that makes it worth watching. The kind of gossip and tedious details of life that might be interesting to those characters themselves, seems maddeningly pointless to outsiders. This is the strength of The Big Chill. First, Kasdan creates a far more compelling reason for the reunion: the death of one of their members. Secondly, the characters are differentiated into recognizably types: TV star, business owner, doctor, lawyer, writer, housewife, etc. In this there is something to anchor each character, and the death of the other focuses their conversations. In Sayles’ film it is all too random, too specific to the characters and, at the end of the day, too phony because of it.

Another issue is, of course, the acting. I understand that this is a small film, with relatively unknown actors. Fine, but all that serves to do is make the stilted dialogue that much worse. Technically, it’s not a poorly made film. Sayles clearly has some talent. A lot of the scenes, like the skinny-dipping, the basketball, and the bar scenes are well done, but the greatest frame in the world can’t make a bad picture any better. At the end of the day Return of the Secaucus Seven is what it is, a small film by a beginner who was learning his craft. To make it any more than that does not only a disservice to the film itself, but is an insult to the greater works to come. The film has interest as a curiosity, but is not something I’ll ever return to for entertainment.

Logan's Run (1976)

Director: Michael Anderson                            Writer: David Zelag Goodman
Film Score: Jerry Goldsmith                           Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo
Starring: Michael York, Richard Jordan, Jenny Agutter and Peter Ustinov

Perhaps it’s because I didn’t see this as a kid when it was released in theaters and therefore have no associations with the film, but I thought Logan’s Run was terrible. I understand it was made nearly forty years ago and so there are many apologists for the cheesy special effects, but seriously, Star Wars came out the following year and it still holds up. But lest you think it’s just me, even Siskel and Ebert, the big name critics at the time, didn’t like it. Ebert, in keeping with his personality, thought it was fun in a goofy way, but that’s not really an endorsement. Siskel, whom I always felt more of an affinity for--though not always agreeing with his assessments--hated it. For me, the entire project is weak in every way and as much as people might like it--even Ed Wood has his fans--I think it’s a bad movie.

The opening shot of what is supposed to be a domed city in the 23rd century, after a catastrophic war--I’m guessing the nuclear kind--looks more like seventies automobile headlights, completely destroying any semblance of suspension of disbelief. The more the camera lingers lovingly on the model train set exteriors, and the doll house interior of the domes, the less I wanted to continue watching. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from 1927 looks more realistic, and yet the film won a special Oscar for special effects. Really? Inside, it looks as if the people are living in a shopping mall, simply wandering around doing nothing. People are born through artificial insemination--merely to avoid the pain of child birth, as these kids are having sex all the time--and when they reach the age of 30 they go to the Carousel to be “renewed,” which of course means they are killed to allow room for those who have recently been born.

The only other option besides “renewal” is to become a runner. They, however, are hunted down by Sandmen, men with ray-guns who kill runners on sight. Michael York and his pal Richard Jordan are Sandmen and enjoy their jobs. When York meets Jenny Agutter and she questions the whole “renewal” process he thinks she’s nutty. But the giant computer that runs the entire city--what would a sci-fi film be without one of those--presumably worried he might start thinking for himself, sends him on a mission to hunt down the runners who have disappeared over the years, in excess of a thousand. He’s supposed to infiltrate the group of those who want to run, find their sanctuary, and bring in the Sandmen to wipe them all out. What actually happened to them is ludicrous, and it turns out the rest of them have been living under the dome for so long they don’t even realize everything is fine outside.

The premise might have been okay, but the way York manipulates Agutter rather than slowly understanding the truth, ruins the film for me. He even takes her to a detention dome housing juvenile delinquents who only live to age fifteen in order to deceive her further. And those kids are right out of the Star Trek episode “Miri” from 1966. You half expect them to call York a “grump.” In fact the entire film is reminiscent of a Star Trek episode and is otherwise derivative of any number of sixties sci-fi films, Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, you name it. The acting is horrible, the script is banal, the ending is happy . . . it’s maddening. The long sequence with Peter Ustinov doing a corny American accent made me want to be “renewed.” I know the film has its fans, and we all have our guilty--or not so guilty—pleasures, but for me, Logan’s Run is a complete failure.

Band of Angels (1957)

Director: Raoul Walsh                                 Writers: John Twist & Ivan Goff
Film Score: Max Steiner                              Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Starring: Clark Gable, Yvonne De Carlo, Sidney Poitier and Rex Reason

Twenty years after Gone With the Wind, Warner Brothers made an attempt at something similar. They returned Clark Gable to the antebellum South, combined with Max Steiner’s music, this time to explore the theme of race. In Band of Angels Yvonne De Carlo has far more to deal with than Vivien Leigh, as she finds out not fifteen minutes into the film that her mother was black, a slave, and by law that makes her a slave even though she was brought up to believe she was a fine Southern white woman. Her father’s plantation is sold to pay his debts and she is taken to New Orleans by Ray Teal, a slave trader who has his eye on De Carlo as a sex slave until he gets to the city to sell her.

Clark Gable is a former slave trader living in New Orleans and owns several cotton plantations. He salves his conscience by buying slaves and treating them well, little compensation for a life without freedom. He pays five thousand dollars for De Carlo and buys her clothes, treats her well, and plans on allowing her to go to the North, to freedom, before the Civil War begins. But of course they’re in love, so she stays. It’s a difficult melodrama to watch. Gable and De Carlo are okay in their respective roles, but most of the other actors are cartoon characters, especially the blacks. Steiner also made the unfortunate choice of adding vocals to the score, ala Showboat, and it only makes the proceedings even more unbearable. Sidney Poitier is Gable’s right hand man, a strange take on the sort of defiant roles that defined his career.

Patric Knowles is a wealthy plantation owner of the traditional style. He’s after the affections of De Carlo, just so he can humiliate Gable. The whole thing is a soap opera that tries so desperately to deal with blacks in a way that exposes the truth, but it doesn’t go anywhere, doesn’t explain anything and ultimately doesn’t resonate in any way. Gable justifies his early life by his later actions, which I suppose is good, but he’s certainly no abolitionist. I suppose the main emphasis of the picture is for white audiences to identify with De Carlo and imagine the degradation of being treated as black. But try as she might, De Carlo never really sells it. She’s too willing to submit at the beginning, and too ashamed at the end. It’s a very strange script.

Ultimately it’s difficult to know how to feel about this film. Whatever message that existed in Robert Penn Warren’s original novel, doesn’t seem to come across here. The novel was written in first person from the De Carlo character’s point of view, and we seem to get none of those thoughts and feelings in the dialogue. Also, one of the main characters was her boarding school teacher who was onscreen for only a few minutes. The De Carlo character doesn’t even go to college as she does in the book. It’s a simplified version that seems to have left out all of the best parts of the story. The film seems like a missed opportunity and apparently audiences at the time felt the same way as it was the Clark Gable film that lost the most money. Band of Angels certainly had the potential to be an important film, but it became mired in melodrama by the screenwriters and wound up as a failure.

Salomé (1923)

Director: Charles Bryant                              Writer: Natacha Rambova
Film Score: Ulderico Marcelli                       Cinematography: Charles Van Enger
Starring: Alla Nazimova, Mitchell Lewis, Rose Dione and Nigel DeBrulier

Called an “Historical Phantasy” in the opening titles, it certainly is that. Salomé makes no attempt to be historically accurate and the film suffers for it, relying too heavily on Oscar Wilde’s stage play it’s completely stage bound, the entirety of the action taking place on one set. More of a showcase for Natacha Rambova’s production design and costumes the picture is avant garde, similar to a minimalist Shakespearian production rather than a realistic telling of the biblical story. The sets are minimalist, painfully “artistic” and actually distracting from the performance, but it’s pretty clear that was the point. But it’s not just the sets, the acting is heavily stylized as well, and in the end it’s a pretty disappointing silent film.

The story is a familiar one as the scene opens on a banquet given by the King Herod in which Nazimova, as the title character, is ogled by everyone, especially the king. She leaves the banquet and goes to the jail cell of John the Baptist, who is being held prisoner and fascinates to her. She asks him to kiss her, but of course he refuses because he believes that her ways are wicked. It’s then that she takes the King up on his offer. Herod has told her that if she dances for him that she may have anything she wishes. She dances for him and then, in a petulant rage, asks for the head of John the Baptist on a silver tray so that she may kiss him after all.

In terms of the costumes Nazimova has her hair done up like she wearing a head full of electrified curlers, very Medusa like. She was actually 42 years old at the time of the production, bringing to mind the plot of Sunset Boulevard when Gloria Swanson wanted to play the character as well. Perhaps she was remembering Nazimova’s middle-age performance and thought she could do better. With her small, lithe body she does manage to pull it off as long as she’s not in close up where her age becomes obvious. Rose Dione as the queen looks as if she’s in a conditioner commercial her hair is so frizzed out. The rest of the costumes make the actors look like clowns. With the paucity of silent films still in existence, it’s a shame so many enticing films are gone while this one still exists. Salomé may be an attempt at art for art’s sake but, ultimately, it fails to entertain.

Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997)

Director: Billie August                                 Writer: Ann Biderman
Film Score: Hans Zimmer                           Cinematography: Jörgen Persson
Starring: Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, Richard Harris and Robert Loggia

I remember when Peter Høeg’s novel first came out and was such a big hit. It was not surprise, then, that the book was turned into a film. At the time, however, I had sampled neither but knowing how popular the book had been I had high expectations. Unfortunately I was incredibly disappointed in Smilla's Sense of Snow. It wasn’t the kind of bad that made me want to turn it off instantly, it just fell so incredibly below my expectations that I couldn’t find anything positive to say about it. I have a strong feeling that the audience was split when it was first released and that those who had read the book enjoyed it because they had so much background from the novel to fill in the blanks. But for those, like myself, who hadn’t read the novel, it felt like watching a Cliff’s Notes version of a story where almost all of the character development had been left out.

The story opens with a meteor killing an Inuit fisherman in Greenland. Flash forward to present day Copenhagen and Smilla Jasperson, played by Julia Ormond. She comes home to discover her five-year-old neighbor has died falling off a roof. Neighbor Gabriel Byrne tries to offer her comfort and she is incredibly rude and crude in her dismissal of him. She thinks it’s murder so she goes to ask her father, Robert Loggia, for money, and is just as contemptuous toward him. She begins her investigation by talking to the coroner, Tom Wilkinson, and he gives her some information. She attempts to get a police case opened, but they think it’s an accident and haul her in to blackmail her into stopping by threatening her with solitary confinement, something her Greenlandic heritage would make tortuous for her.

I can see where Høeg was going in his characterization of Smilla, tough, no-nonsense, direct to the point of bluntness, and there is something admirable about it. The biggest problem is none of that is explained. There is absolutely no character development, save that of the police interrogator telling the audience her background when he reads her dossier to her. Gabriel Byrne’s character is just as maddening. A seemingly simpering milquetoast, he somehow manages to be every place she is and saves her in the nick of time on numerous occasions. He is even seen by her talking to the villain, Richard Harris, and yet he manages to talk his way out of it. There is no sense of urgency, though Ormond and Byrne both claim the opposite. And the deus ex machina is working overtime, allowing her access to vital information and helping her escape from the most impossible of predicaments in a way that would make even The Pelican Brief seem realistic.

In the end there just wasn’t enough for me to like. Neither the characters or their motivations are explained, there is a medical mystery with parasites that seems to be nothing more than a red herring, and the finale strains credulity. Smilla’s Sense of Snow seems to me one of those cases where a best-selling novel is either badly translated to film, or incapable of being done so well because of the time constraints. Either way, it was a big disappointment.

Picture Perfect (1997)

Director: Glenn Gordon Caron                       Writer: Arleen Sorkin & Paul Slansky
Film Score: Carter Burwell                            Cinematography: Paul Sarossy
Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Jay Mohr, Kevin Bacon and Olympia Dukakis

I had, of course, seen Jennifer Aniston on Friends, but had never ventured into her feature films. Apparently I haven’t missed much. And in this case, I wish I had. Picture Perfect is far from it: flawed in concept, flawed in execution it is really the definition of a bad film. As the credits flashed by I saw the name Sorkin, which has carried a lot of weight in Hollywood ever since Arron Sorkin’s incredible first screenplay, the smash hit A Few Good Men. But this film was scripted by Arleen Sorkin, a soap opera actress married to Christopher Lloyd the writer, and that makes sense. The screenplay is full of the unprincipled characters that populate daytime television, and not the sort of thing that most people want to see in a feature film, especially a romantic comedy.

Director Glenn Gordon Caron has a little bit more credibility. Having written for romcom TV shows like Remington Steele and Moonlighting he then moved into directing films, including Warren Beaty and Annete Benning’s remake of An Affair to Remember, which was probably why he was given the helm of this film. But his directing career never really recovered after this and he has only directed three TV episodes since while returning to writing. Add to that a score by Carter Burwell, whose music I have never really enjoyed, and the whole thing adds up to much less than the sum of its parts.

Aniston plays a minor advertising executive in a big, New York firm. She comes up with a great idea that lands the firm a big account, and yet she is not put on the team to work the account. Before she can quit in a fit of rage, her boss, Illeana Douglas, tells her to go to the wedding she is attending that weekend and they will iron things out on Monday. At the wedding Aniston meets Jay Mohr, a friend of the groom who is filming the occasion for the couple. At one point she is also caught with him by one of the numerous Polaroids at the reception. When she has her meeting with the boss, he claims the reason she’s not being promoted is that she’s single, she doesn’t need the job and therefore he can’t depend on her not to quit. So Douglas takes it upon herself to show the Polaroid to the boss claiming that Mohr is her fiancé, and suddenly she’s on the team. Another reason Aniston goes along with the deception is because the slimy guy she wants to be with at work, Kevin Bacon, only becomes attracted to her when he thinks she’s cheating on her fiancé.

So of course Aniston lies in order to bed Bacon, lies to her boss in order to move up, asks Mohr to pretend to be her fiancé and then lies to him. How he falls in love with her, when she makes it perfectly clear she doesn’t want him, makes no sense at all. When her boss finally learns of the deception, even he thinks it’s great. Olympia Dukakis is completely wasted as Aniston’s mother, acting more like the child in the relationship. Aniston is very unlikable, so seemingly brainless about her personal life it strains credulity to believe she is that successful professionally. Mohr is really the only likeable character in the film, but by allowing himself to be manipulated and treated so poorly, the audience can’t help but lose sympathy for him by the end. Picture Perfect is simply a bad romantic comedy and, as such, should be avoided.

Morocco (1930)

Director: Josef von Sternberg                       Writer: Jules Furthman
Film Score: Karl Hajos                                 Cinematography: Lee Games
Starring: Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Adolphe Menjou and Francis McDonald

This is an interesting attempt at a film, part Algiers, part The Blue Angel but without the personality or interest of either. Morocco is one of Marlene Dietrich’s early American films, and while she’s not nearly as exotic looking as Garbo of the same period that’s to her advantage as she’s far more inviting. Where Garbo is the aloof sphinx you admire from afar, Dietrich is a gal you want to pal around with. The story, if you can call it that, is very slow in getting going, and the delivery by Dietrich is so stilted it seems at times as if she can’t remember what to say or how to pronounce it until it all comes out in a couple of staccato syllables. But it seems as if the rest of the actors have the same problem. It’s the oddest delivery of a screenplay I’ve ever witnessed and one that is decidedly unpleasant.

The film begins with Adolphe Menjou and Dietrich on the way across the Mediterranean to Morocco. She is apparently some kind of performer, as the officer tells Menjou that she only has a one-way ticket. When the scene shifts to Morocco, Gary Cooper is a French Foreign Legion soldier who seems bored with it all. He has women everywhere pulling down their face coverings and trying to get his attention. At the cabaret that night Dietrich comes on stage in a full man’s tuxedo, complete with top hat, and entertains the crowd with a couple of songs. What evolves is sort of a love triangle, if not a quintet. Cooper has been sleeping with the Adjutant’s wife. But when he sees Dietrich he tosses her aside. When she tries to have Cooper assassinated in revenge, he kills the Moroccans and is put in jail. Dietrich is beside herself because she has fallen for him too, but the only way to get him out is for Menjou to pull strings, which he does, but the price is Cooper must be transferred to another town and she must transfer her own affections to Menjou.

Ultimately, it’s a let down. With all of the star power involved, not only the actors but director Josef von Sternberg, one would expect a more artistic production. But even considering the limitations of the time, the film has little energy and even less drama. The dialog is sparse, and when it comes--from all of the actors--it is in short bursts and incredibly banal. The exotic local is clearly on the studio set, but later films like Algiers and Casablanca had the same limitations and yet had a lot more atmosphere. It’s almost maddening to watch because the pacing makes no sense, all fits and starts and completely unable to find any real dramatic momentum. Morocco is one of those early thirties films that, despite all of the positive things it had going for it, is simply an artistic failure.

Tequila Sunrise (1988)

Director: Robert Towne                                 Writer: Robert Towne
Film Score: Lucas Vidal                                Cinematography: Danny Ruhlmann
Starring: Kurt Russell, Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Raul Julia

Tequila Sunrise tries . . . so . . . very . . . hard, but just can’t pull off what it promises. From the outside it looks like it has a lot going for it, superstar actors, an interesting premise, and cool location. But it doesn’t go anywhere, and Robert Towne’s script is the major problem. Towne is the Oscar winning writer of Chinatown, but had plenty of other credentials going into the picture, doing uncredited work on the screenplays for Bonnie and Clyde and The Parallax View as well as credited script for The Last Detail. This story has Mel Gibson and Kurt Russell as best friends. The only problem is Gibson is a drug dealer and Russell is the head of the L.A. narcotics squad. Right. I’m gonna believe that Gibson is going to be working in the back yard of his friend who knows what he’s doing.

But that aside, it gets even worse. Gibson is apparently trying to go straight, owning and operating a landscaping business and apparently working nine to five. The real impetus that drives the plot is DEA agent J.T. Walsh. Now the late Walsh is one of my favorite character actors of all time, in any era. He can make a ten-minute scene--which is all he had in Outbreak--and nearly steal the film. But Towne makes a joke out of him here and it’s painful to watch. Walsh becomes obsessed with catching Gibson and so he taps every phone he uses. Listening back to the conversations he believes that everything Gibson says is code for drugs or the drug trade. Since Gibson knows they’re looking at him Russell is equally sure that Gibson is never going to allow himself to get caught.

When Gibson starts frequenting an Italian restaurant owned by Michelle Pfeiffer, Walsh becomes convinced that the business is just a front for Gibson’s drug trade. Sigh. Since the phone taps aren’t getting anywhere, Russell decides to go in and attempt to woo Pfeiffer in order to find out, but he winds up falling for her instead. When she becomes curious herself about whether or not Gibson is a drug dealing she begins spending time with him, finds out the reason he wants to go straight is so he can woo her himself. It’s not an interesting love triangle because everything is just as it seems. There are no secrets and so that part of the script just bogs down the rest of the proceedings.

The scenes, and the plot line, involving Raul Julia are probably the best part of the film. Another actor who is no longer with us, he was a riveting personality onscreen, but even he can’t bring the necessary suspense to the film because his role is as a revelation, not suspense. The film tries desperately for neo-noir but can’t quite make it. The one bright spot is the film score featuring the brilliant David Sanborn. But at the end of the day that’s just not enough. The wild finish isn’t enough. The love triangle isn’t enough. Tequila Sunrise is a valiant attempt by a filmmaker who would go on to make some great films. But this isn’t one of them.

Avatar (2009)

Director: James Cameron                              Writer: James Cameron
Film Score: James Horner                             Cinematography: Mauro Fiore
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver & Stephen Lang

Ah, yes, James Cameron, the poet who brought us immortal line: “So, what are you, some kind of artist or something?” And who can forget the gripping drama of hocking loogies off the starboard deck? And now, from the beat-you-over-the-head-with-a-baseball-bat school of figurative writing he gives us the rare element . . . unobtanium. I guess it’s appropriate that, since Cameron’s writing seems to be geared toward fifth graders, that is the same audience that Avatar seems to be aimed at as well. If you like to play video games and watch Saturday morning cartoons, I suppose it might be interesting, but as an adult I just don’t see anything in the film that is even remotely original or entertaining.

First of all, the film is highly derivative of numerous others, most notably Dances with Wolves. But the story has nowhere near the sophistication or the character development. In fact, it is a far more juvenile approach along the lines of Atlantis or FernGully. The story begins on one of the moons of Jupiter. How there happens to be enough heat and water that far beyond the Sun is cheerfully ignored. A company attempting to obtain . . . you know, soon realizes that there is a huge deposit under a giant tree where a clan of the indigenous people live. In order to smooth the way for takeover clones are made, part human part aboriginal, that the humans can operate remotely. The hope is that the avatars will be able to convince the natives to leave without the need for military action.

Sam Worthington is an injured marine, a paraplegic, who is sent in and is able to make an actual connection with the natives. Sigourney Weaver is the scientist aboard responsible for the liaison with the natives. While he’s there, Worthington falls in love with Zoe Saldana and begins to question his mission objectives. She teaches him the people’s ways and he excels. And when the head of the mission, Giovanni Ribisi, and his military leader, Stephen Lang, begin to get impatient and decide to take the tree by force, he rebels. It’s a highly simplistic tale that is so clichéd that there is almost no suspense whatsoever. Everything you’ve seen before in similar tales happens exactly the same way.

One of the things I really hate about supposed science-fiction is when it treats alien civilizations exactly like Native-Americans. There’s nothing “fictional” about that at all. You can say the film is an allegory, but it’s so thinly veiled I don’t think it qualifies. The one good part of the film, doesn’t even happen until the very end. There’s a point in Dances with Wolves when Kevin Costner simply becomes a native himself, unable to go back to the life he lived before. How much more powerful then, if that transition were visible? There was a brilliant opportunity for Worthington to transition permanently to his aboriginal body well before the final battle. With no going back, it would have been tremendously satisfying. But Cameron goes for the cheap suspense, by keeping him human, though it’s about as suspenseful as whether or not Batman or Superman will die. Yawn.

There’s no denying the visual beauty of the film, but ultimately that’s all the viewer is left with and, for me, it simply wasn’t enough. Cameron had a string of hits early in his career, Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and those stories were more satisfying--with the exception of the ending of The Abyss--because of their originality. But ever since Titanic, Cameron has seeming thrown away any pretense of originality and fallen back on the banal. And yet, still managed to rake in unprecedented amounts of cash in the process. It used to be that great films were the ones that made huge money at the box office. With Avatar, that trend has obviously changed. Evidently audiences only want to pay money for the familiar. Well, as long as James Cameron is alive, they’ll have plenty of that.

The Fifth Element (1997)

Director: Luc Besson                                    Writer: Luc Besson
Film Score: Eric Serra                                  Cinematography: Thierry Arbogast
Starring: Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm and Milla Jovovich

Another bit of craziness from the mind of Luc Besson. The Fifth Element, released the same year as Men In Black, is a similar story of aliens who want to destroy earth and, like Armageddon, it’s going to take Bruce Willis to stop them. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good film. In the first place it tries to do too many things at once, and in the second it doesn’t do any of them particularly well. Bruce Willis plays, what else, a sci-fi cab driver. In how many other films have we seen that before? When Milla Jovovich falls into his cab he begins to feel responsible and tries to help her find what she’s looking for. Yet another pretty standard cliché.

The whole thing really is a mess. Aliens from another world first land in 1919 and tell of a great evil that will return to Earth in three hundred years. The only thing that can save the planet is the fifth element. But the aliens don’t say exactly what that is. Flash forward a few centuries and the Earth is indeed threatened by a giant sphere of evil coming through space. The original aliens attempt to deliver the fifth element, but their ship is destroyed. With what remains, the Earth scientists are able to reconstruct a being from the genetic material and thus Mill Jovovich is recreated. She quickly escapes, however, and runs into Willis. When the president’s general calls on his top man, who happens to be Willis, to save the day, he does so for Jovovich’s sake.

Then there’s Gary Oldman as the super goofy arms dealer. Ian Holm plays the last in a long line of priests who guard the stones necessary to unlock the defensive temple. But of course Oldman has them. Or does he? Then there are gunfights with other aliens, an opera aria sung by a blue alien, and a time bomb set by Oldman that they have to diffuse before it destroys all of them. Is there any more that can be jammed in there? The film tries desperately for comedy, but never really achieves anything genuinely funny. There is also plenty of John McClane action from Willis, but it’s never really believable action. The sci-fi elements also suffer because that part of the film is never really taken that seriously. And don’t even get me started on Chris Tucker!

You know, the first Men in Black came out the same year as this film. And even though I’m not a big fan of the MIB franchise, I watched them and enjoyed them to a point. But those films are far superior to Besson’s. It’s a shame. I really love Besson and he’s become one of my favorite directors. It’s the single reason I watched the film, and I was extremely disappointed by how utterly unentertaining it was. I think I know what he was trying to achieve, and certainly it works for some people. But I need much more out of a film than goofy humor that isn’t that funny, a scantily clad heroine, and Bruce Willis. For me, The Fifth Element suffers conceptually and never really recovers. I had much greater expectations for Luc Besson here, but fortunately he has many more films that not only deliver, but make great cinema.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960--1993)

Director: Michael Curtiz, Stephen Sommers          Writer: James Lee, Stephen Sommers
Film Score: Jerome Moross, Bill Conte                 Cinematography: Ted McCord, Janusz Kaminski
Starring: Eddie Hodges, Archie Moore, Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance

There has yet to be a definitive version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for one simple reason: screenwriters just can’t leave well enough alone. Every time they try to “improve” the original work by changing it, they undermine the intention of the novel and thereby destroy the message that Twain was attempting to impart. In fact, I’m half convinced that screenwriters don’t even bother to read the novel and continue to make the same mistakes because they don’t know any better. Even the great Michael Curtiz, though he was saddled with a bad lead actor and a weak script, was unable to imbue his Huck Finn with anything like Twain’s intention. Stephen Sommers 1993 version, despite its better actors, is even worse. The biggest problem with both films is the complete misinterpretation of the character of Jim.

In Twain’s novel, Jim serves two purposes, to be the moral center of the book, not in words but in deeds, and that he be thoroughly a slave, adhering to all the stereotypes and not changing throughout the entire story. In this way it is incumbent upon Huck to do the changing, to realize for himself that what society has taught him about blacks is wrong. And he does this through spending time with Jim and eventually coming to realize that he is every bit as human as whites. What both films do to pervert this, in a gesture of political correctness I’m sure, is to make Jim the “smart” one, who both manipulates Huck--thereby losing his moral superiority--and by teaching him--thus destroying Huck’s ability to learn for himself through experience. It’s maddening to watch and it’s doubtful we’ll ever see a film that’s faithful to the novel because people just don’t understand what Twain was doing. This shouldn't be surprising, however, considering it took critics over fifty years before they realized the book was more than just a sequel to the children’s book Tom Sawyer. The reality is, Huck Finn is very much for adults because of its commentary on race in America.

The 1960 version suffers the most from poor acting by its two principals. Eddie Hodges has just the right look, with the red hair and big white teeth, but has a difficult time attenuating his facial and vocal expressions to give him any kind of emotional range. Boxer Archie Moore as Jim has a similar problem. The novel has three distinct sections, before the trip, during the trip, and after the trip downriver. Screenwriter James Lee apparently put the book in a blender and pulled out pages at random because characters from all over the book show up at any time. This, of course, destroys the episodic nature of the piece and deprives it of any sense of real storytelling. Apparently the feeling is, when approaching this piece, is that it can be treated as a series of interchangeable gags. It’s too bad, because the possibility for a dramatic treatment on film is so desperately needed. The appearance by Buster Keaton is great but again, it has nothing to do with the book. And the ending is completely ruined with Jim confessing his sins to Huck and never acquiring the free status he should have.

The 1993 Disney version of the film by Stephen Sommers has the opposite problem. The actors are all very good, including Wood and Vance who make a fantastic Huck and Jim. And while the script sticks to the basic structure of the novel, it does leave out the last section with Tom Sawyer. This version is also improved by the use of voice-over for Huck, replicating the first-person viewpoint of the novel. Where this version really takes a dive is the complete undermining of Jim, making him a master manipulator, using Huck to help him, lying to him to get what he wants, and making him, ironically, more unlikeable it trying to change him to be politically acceptable. Sommers also makes the poor choice of using a slave plantation to show Huck the evils of slavery rather than letting him learn on his own. Jim tries to atone for his sins at the end, but the utterly unbelievable conclusion in which they just let him go makes it even worse. Ultimately, both versions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have their entertaining moments, but they are nowhere near Twain’s vision and purpose and can only be a let down for fans of the novel.

Remember Last Night? (1935)

Director: James Whale                                    Writers: Harry Clork & Doris Malloy
Film Score: Franz Waxman                             Cinematography: Joseph A. Valentine
Starring: Robert Young, Constance Cummings, Edward Arnold & Reginald Denny

A non-horror outing for director James Whale at Universal, Remember Last Night? seems to begin as an attempt at screwball comedy but comes off as more of a bad mash-up of the RKO Astaire and Rogers pictures, and the Thin Man series at MGM. The plot concerns a group of wealthy couples participating in a progressive dinner, only this time the banquet is booze. Their reckless abandon and destructiveness harkens back to the 1920s jazz era more than it does a celebration of Prohibition’s repeal. After a group of thugs appear and talk about kidnapping one of the party, the film turns into a murder mystery when one of the guests is found dead in bed. The title refers to the fact that the mystery is so difficult to solve because none of participants can remember what they did the night before.

The set is huge, an opulent mansion owned by the deceased, and Whale uses it effectively, especially on traveling shots that move from room to room. There is also an interesting hypnosis scene in which Young remembers everyone going for a swim in the pool, with one of the women, a towel around her shoulders, saying, “I’m Dracula’s daughter,” a year before that film was made. But there is very little Whale to be found here, save that of the extreme close-ups he’s known for. Unfortunately, there are also some scenes that are difficult to watch, one being the destruction that the partygoers revel in. It’s hard to imagine Depression era audiences relating to this at all, much less seeing it as entertainment. Even worse, however, is the song performed by the party in blackface masks, complete with racist minstrel jokes and dialect. It’s not one of Whale’s better moments.

Another Whale trademark is the use of some notable character actors, among them Arthur Treacher, who began his film career playing a butler and never really recovered from it. Whale regular E.E. Clive plays the coroner’s photographer, and a couple of castaways from King Kong are also featured, Frank Reicher and Robert Armstrong. This was Whale’s first film after the successful Bride of Frankenstein, but once the Laemmle’s were forced to sell the studio the new management at Universal was uninterested in his non-horror films at the same time that Whale had completely lost interest in the genre that made him famous, and his relationship with the company became strained thereafter.

At the end of the day, the picture is really a failure. Not only the behavior of the characters, but the characters themselves are unlikable. Young and Cummings are rude and abusive, and have none of the charm of William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man. Edward Arnold is far too over the top in his gruff district attorney role, and his detective Edward Brophy is nearly unwatchable as the stupid cop. The brilliant Franz Waxman’s score is sparingly used and even that is fairly generic, especially considering the magnificence of his score for Bride of Frankenstein. Whale is said to have like the film, but he must have been one of the few. Remember Last Night? is ultimately a film best left forgotten.

Boxing Helena (1993)

Director: Jennifer Chambers Lynch                   Writer: Jennifer Chambers Lynch
Film Score: Graeme Revell                              Cinematography: Frank Byers
Starring: Julian Sands, Sherilyn Fenn, Bill Paxton and Kurtwood Smith

Julian Sands is NOT a good actor, period. For some reason his role in A Room with a View worked for him, his spaced-out lack of facial expression was just what the part needed and made him an overnight sensation. But everything since has sucked. You look at his face and you don’t know what he’s thinking. He has all the animation of a department store mannequin. It’s that bad. In the late eighties he was a hot commodity and starred in dozens of films, but by the early nineties he had been relegated to mostly mediocre horror and suspense films, and since then has languished, justifiably so, on television. Boxing Helena is a case in point.

I had heard the name of the film at the time, but never had the opportunity to see it. Watching it recently it’s clear the film is simply a sexually charged version of Stephen King’s Misery, or if you want to go back even further, The Collector by John Fowles, although I’m sure there are hundreds of stories with a similar captive theme. This one suffers primarily from its reliance on Sands to create a credible protagonist, which he doesn’t have the skills to do. Casting him as the simpering, spurned lover is ludicrous. At least in his malevolent parts his blank expression brings a shred of believability. Here we’re supposed to believe that he is tortured in his desire for Sherilyn Fenn, but we get absolutely nothing from him emotionally. He looks like as if he’s just “pretending” and doing an incredibly bad job of it.

Fenn, who had her start in television, was good in Gary Sinise’s Of Mice and Men and scored roles in a few films after this before returning to the small screen. But she is given nothing to do here, except be a bitch. After attending a party that Sands has set up just so she’ll be in attendance, she becomes fed up with his stalking and manipulation. Walking away from his house in a huff, she is suddenly hit by a car. He brings her back to his home and, brilliant surgeon that we’re supposed to believe he is, he uses his medical skills to keep her imprisoned with him until she submits. Sigh. Bill Paxton is wasted as a horny player, as is Kurtwood Smith playing a doctor and Art Garfunkel as the improbable friend of Sands. The whole thing is weird, and not in a good way.

This was writer-director Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s directorial debut, and she tanked so badly that she didn’t get another film project for fifteen years. She was attempting to draw on the same kind of mysterious obsession present in the work of her father, David Lynch, but with her incredibly weak script and even worse actors the project was doomed from the start. Parts of it are little more than soft-core porn, the rest is very un-suspenseful suspense, and the ending is utterly abysmal. Ultimately Boxing Helena, while trying to be edgy and provocative, simply winds up flat, an unentertaining waste of time.

Timeline (2003)

Director: Richard Donner                                 Writers: Jeff Maguire & George Nolfi
Film Score: Brian Tyler                                   Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel
Starring: Paul Walker, Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly and Frances O’Connor

I don’t mean to disrespect the dead, but the last good novel Michael Crichton wrote was The Andromeda Strain. That’s right, his first. The unfortunate thing about Crichton’s novels are his penchant for hackneyed plots and atrocious dialogue. Yeah, Jurassic Park was popular, but it’s not a good film. Disclosure was about the best film adaptation of his work since The Andromeda Strain, and even that looks dated now because of the computer applications. It’s too bad. Even though his novels were not very well written, that didn’t mean that the films had to be poorly written and directed as well . . . but they were.

Timeline is a perfect example. First of all, the plot is almost a direct rip off of The Final Countdown from 1980. Now that had an interesting plot, and the motivations of the time travelers made sense. In Crichton’s novel a scientific corporation discovers a wormhole in the midst of their experiments in teleportation. Sigh. I'm sorry, but didn’t David Hedison demonstrate the dangers of that in The Fly? Anyway, Billy Connolly, for reasons that never were explained in the film, goes through the wormhole into 1357 France. Paul Walker, Gerard Butler, and several others go back to rescue him, with predictable results. Most of them never come back, Walker gets the girl, Frances O’Connor, and technology saves the day.

It’s difficult not to watch this and think you’re watching a TV movie. The situations are not only predictable but inane, and the dialogue is even worse. Screenwriter Jeff Maguire has written a total of five films and, no surprise here, only one since Timeline. His co-author George Nolfi has a total of seven, but more successful films. Even so, the two of them seem so married to Crichton’s awful dialogue that it drags the whole film down. Of course looking at the films director Richard Donner has directed, it’s not a big surprise either that he was unable to lift the production above it’s pedestrian beginnings. In the end, Timeline is just another bad movie, no more, no less. Certainly not worth expending any more words on.