Sunday, March 31, 2013

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.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Blood Creek (2009)

Director: Joel Schumacher                              Writer: David Kajganich
Film Score: David Buckley                              Cinematography: Darko Suvak
Starring: Henry Cavill, Dominic Purcell, Emma Booth and Michael Fassbender

I almost never watch modern horror movies for one reason: they’re bad. It’s the same kind of plots, the same kind of violence, the same kinds of stylized film manipulation that wind up making them a uniform mass of blandness. Blood Creek is no different. How can it be that people being tortured, mutilated, and killed could possibly be boring? It is the culture of violence, the parade of death on television, post 9-11 loss of innocence? No, it’s simply lack of imagination. Ever since the advent of the slasher film in 1978, there has been an increasingly unimaginative trend in a genre of film that no longer can count on death itself as something horrifying. What we see now in modern horror are simply old ideas reshuffled and packaged as something new but nothing we haven’t seen a hundred times before.

Blood Creek is yet another version of Night of the Living Dead. People trapped in a house with a madman outside trying to kill them. This madman can kill animals and people and then transform them into zombies in order to enter the house that he cannot because of the runic symbols on the doors and windows. There are also elements of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as well as a villain who is a combination of The Dark Man--this time the trench-coated shadow is the killer rather than the hero--and Michael Berryman from The Hills Have Eyes. In the film the impetus for evil is a Nazi scholar who studied ancient rune stones in America in order to satisfy their desire to acquire occult power. That’s the reason the film interested me, that and Joel Schumacher, a mainstream director who had done films like Flatliners and 8MM. But in the end the Nazi angle doesn’t really matter at all. It’s just Jason/Freddie/Michael holding hostage a group that needs to find a way to kill him.

Going in, the film looks like it at least has a chance. In addition to Schumacher there is some good talent onboard. Michael Fassbender, who was great in Prometheus and 300 is the Nazi villain. Dominic Purcell, who has done a lot of beefcake roles in action pictures, is the one who got away and now, with his brother Henry Cavill, is back to put an end to the violence. Cavill has had a short career and has a fairly eclectic body of work including historical drama as well as action films, but doesn’t bring anything to this picture that a dozen other actors couldn’t. And that’s another aspect of the boredom of these types of pictures: the cast is relatively unimportant, too. They are generic characters who would be replaced by any other competent actor and therefore we have nothing invested in them. I thought Blood Creek might actually have something new to bring to the modern horror film, via its focus on Nazi history, but I was wrong. It’s just another zombie slasher film.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

The Mark of the Wolfman (1968)

Director: Enrique López Eguiluz                       Writer: Paul Naschy
Film Score: Ángel Arteaga                              Cinematography: Emilio Foriscot
Starring: Paul Naschy, Dyanik Zurakowska, Manuel Manzaneque and Julián Ugarte

In 1943, after the success of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man but lackluster reviews for their Technicolor remake of The Phantom of the Opera, Universal commissioned a script for a new Technicolor film, this time featuring the monsters that the public obviously loved. It was to be called The Wolf Man vs. Dracula, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. and Bela Lugosi. Wartime belt tightening caused the studio to scrap the production, but the idea lived on and appeared twenty five years later in this Spanish film. This is the first time I’ve had to deal with a foreign film that’s had its title butchered beyond recognition. The Spanish title is La marca del Hombre-lobo, which I have translated above. The title that it was released under in the U.S., however, is the utterly incongruous Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, because the distributor had promised a Frankenstein film to his exhibitors.

The story is set in Germany and begins at a costume ball at the estate of Dyanik Zurakowska’s father. It’s clear that he and Manuel Manzaneque’s father want them to marry. However, Paul Naschy dances with Zurakowska and the two soon fall in love. Meanwhile, a Gypsy couple make their way to the abandoned castle of the Wolfstein’s and while grave robbing in the vault, unwittingly remove the silver dagger from a werewolf and unleash him on the countryside. A search for the “wolf” involving all the men winds up pairing Naschy and Manzaneque together. When the later is attacked by the werewolf Naschy kills the werewolf with the silver dagger but winds up being bitten himself. In searching for a way to cure him, they unwittingly send for “Dr. Mikhelov,” who turns out to be a vampire.

This is the first film by the famous Spanish screenwriter and actor Paul Naschy, who is the only other actor to appear in a series of werewolf films since Chaney, Jr. for Universal. Unfortunately, the films aren’t very good. In the first place, Naschy’s script brings nothing new to the table. The werewolf legend is kept in tack, as it should be, but other than the interaction with the vampires--which of course had already been done in Universal’s monster rally House movies--there is nothing here we haven’t seen before. His performance as the werewolf is also rather curious. In addition to the snarling and bared fangs he does a lot of jumping around and waving his arms, and this gives his creature more of an ape-like attitude rather than suggesting a wolf.

By far, however, the biggest cinematic problem with the film is that there are absolutely no transitions to indicate the passage of time. The film simply jump-cuts ahead hours, sometimes days, without letting the audience know and it has an incredibly jarring effect until we realize what has happened. One example: Naschy, Zurakowska and Manzaneque are in the library of the castle, looking through books to find a possible cure for Naschy. The next cut shows Zurakowska tip-toeing in a library and her father spies her. Is he in the castle too? And why? But then he chastises her for being out so late and we realize she must have gone home that night. The very next cut, however, has the original three still back in the library. Was the previous edit a mistake? No, through the dialogue we realize it’s the next night. And the entire film is like that, jolting from one scene to the next and relying solely on dialogue to orient us. It’s a challenge to watch, and a good film shouldn’t be.

The dubbing isn’t bad and, like most films of the period, even the original Spanish soundtrack would have been dubbed, so there’s nothing really missing from the lack of subtitles. There are a few nice set-ups by director Enrique López Eguiluz, and occasionally some nice direction of the actors, but not enough to save the picture. The production design is good for the period, not quite as artificial as Hammer’s product during the same period. There are also a few chilling moments that are very powerful, but again, these are just a few bright spots in a film that doesn’t have much else to offer. In the end, The Mark of the Wolfman is an interesting curiosity, but little more.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

The Italian Job (1969)

Director: Peter Collinson                                 Writer: Troy Kennedy-Martin
Film Score: Quincy Jones                              Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe
Starring: Michael Caine, Noel Coward, Margaret Blye and Raf Valloni

The original production of The Italian Job is a comedy. At least I think it’s supposed to be a comedy. In the end the film doesn’t really know what it wants to be. Is it a caper film, a madcap chase film, a farce, a crime drama, a mafia movie, or a disaster in attempting to be all of them at once? What it really seems like is a sort of G-rated, Disney movie filmed in Europe, only instead of Tommy Kirk and Fred MacMurray it stars Michael Caine and Noel Coward. It’s a ponderous and pompous production that barely gets off the ground and lingers on for nearly a hundred minutes.

The film begins with Michael Caine’s release from prison, ala George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven, but rather than any kind of wit or clever dialogue, the basis of the comedy relies on stupid jokes and visual gags. The build up to the actual caper seems to go on forever, and it soon becomes obvious that there is something being hidden from the audience that is the big surprise ending. Sigh. They even manage to make the getaway with the mini Coopers boring.

It’s difficult to know what to criticize, and this is always an indication of a bad film for me. Even a film that provokes a visceral negative response can often have a lot to recommend it. The biggest sin, for a piece of entertainment, is to be boring, and that’s what The Italian Job is. The music by Quincy Jones is uninspired. The acting seems phoned in. And even when the caper is in progress it’s only mildly interesting how they’re going to do it. And all of that is without even considering the magnificence of the remake from 2003. The Italian Job is simply the worst kind of bad movie: a complete waste of time.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Being John Malkovich (1999)

Director: Spike Jonze                                     Writer: Charlie Kaufman
Film Score: Carter Burwell                              Cinematography: Lance Acord
Starring: John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener and John Malkovich

I’m sure that when Being John Malkovich was first released people responded with peals of laughter and praise for its hilarity. I can see the humor in the situation, but I think surreal humor just isn’t that interesting to me. Because in the end, once you remove John Malkovich from the whole thing, it’s just another sex comedy, and not a very interesting one at that. I guess that’s the real tipping point for me. I’m not a fan of either Cusack or Diaz, and only marginally of Keener and Malkovich, and so there’s nothing to really keep my interest.

The premise is fairly simple, that on the 7 1/2 floor of a Manhattan office building is a portal that puts people inside the brain of John Malkovich. For fifteen minutes they get to experience what Malkovich experiences before they are ejected out onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. But if you really stop to think about it, there’s no actual script in that. The humor comes from the incongruity of the situation, not from anything the characters say. In fact, I would even argue that you don’t even get John Malkovich. What we experience of him is simply the experience of any generic celebrity, and that’s it. My expectation before watching the film was that I would see things that were specific to Malkovich’s life, but of course that doesn’t happen.

So, what are we left with? The puppeteer played by John Cusack is so incredibly pathetic that there’s little to associate with or cheer for. Diaz is just as bad as his wife, mother to both a monkey and Cusack, and not much difference between the two. When he locks Diaz in the cage with the chimp toward the end of the film, he has unconsciously symbolized his life with her. Both of them wind up lusting after Catherine Keener, who is the best actor in the bunch, but even her character lacks anything remotely sympathetic. Given all of that, who is the protagonist? Obviously it’s supposed to be Cusack, but in the end it must be Malkovich himself. And that’s another problem, because Malkovich isn’t even Malkovich. As stated above, he could be anybody.

There was only one place where I actually laughed out loud, and that’s the scene where Malkovich enters the portal to himself. He lands in a restaurant where everyone around him, men, women and children, are all versions of himself, and the only word anyone can say is, “Malkovich.” In the end, however, that’s not enough to carry an entire film. I wanted to like the film, but there was just too little to hang on to, and too much to dislike, especially the actors. The ultimate irony is that the most likable character in the entire film is Charley Sheen, in a beautiful cameo. It’s too bad, because I would have thought it would be impossible to make Being John Malkovich boring . . . but unfortunately it is.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Point of No Return (1993)

Director: John Badham                                       Writer: Robert Getchell
Music Supervisor: Hans Zimmer                          Cinematography: Michael W. Watkins
Starring: Gabriel Byrne, Bridget Fonda, Harvey Keitel and Anne Bancroft

Based on the film La Femme Nikita by the great French filmmaker Luc Besson, Point of No Return is an Americanized version of the transformation of a drug addicted waif into a government sponsored killer--sort of a cross between Pretty Woman and The Bourne Identity. Even though we’re into the 1990s by now, there’s still a lingering 80s sensibility to the film. Hans Zimmer’s film score has some nice moments, but then he gives in to the synthesizer and drum machine ethos. Also, there’s little development of Bridget Fonda’s character to draw the viewer in at the beginning of the film. What we’re left with, then, is action. And that is a preview of the sensation films to come in the following decades, devoid of all the things that make film great.

Fonda is picked up by the police after a burglary gone bad, her death is faked by the government, and she is brought into a secret agency by Gabriel Byrne--who, mercifully uses his own Irish accent in the film. Once she’s been trained to fight and kill, along with etiquette lessons by Anne Bancroft, she’s released on her own to await instructions. Meanwhile, there’s a pathetic love story with Dermot Mulroney that is not only unbelievable, but kind of tedious. At the same time, Byrne is obviously in love with her and still sends her out on missions, ala Notorious. But this is light years away from Hitchcock. John Badham, who did a nice job on Stakeout, can’t break loose from his 80s style and the film suffers for it. Fonda is more of a cardboard cutout than a character, and the rest of the cast seems like they’re working in a television show.

In the end, there is too little character development and too much of an emphasis on action and violence to make the film remarkable in any way. Twenty years later, even the violence seems tame, again, like something from a television show. At this point it’s too early in Byrne’s career for him to have developed anything like depth in his characters today, and Harvey Keitel and Anne Bancroft have little more than cameo roles. Honestly, there’s nothing really offensive in the film that would lead one to instantly claim it a bad movie, but sometimes that is the offense. Had it been made even five years later it probably would have been a significant improvement. But as it stands, Point of No Return is not something that bears watching.