tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54022436672291775952024-03-05T00:50:35.239-08:00It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad MovieFilms that Don't Quite Deliverneslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.comBlogger57125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-15790199915335907542023-01-23T01:34:00.005-08:002023-01-23T01:36:16.543-08:001917 (2019)Director: Sam Mendes Writers: Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns<br>
Film Score: Thomas Newman Cinematography: Roger Deakins<br>
Starring: George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Benedict Cumberbatch & Colin Firth<p>
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Honestly . . . I’m not sure what the point of this was. In 1948 the great Alfred Hitchcock proved with <b>Rope</b> that a film shot to give the appearance of a single, unbroken take could be done—and that it wasn’t really worth the effort. The proof of that assessment is that no one has felt the need to do it again for decades. But in the last few years the idea has been taken out of mothballs, shined up, and like a glossy turd, has been presented to filmgoing audiences as if it’s some unique, cutting-edge technique. It’s not. And it’s still just as boring as it always was. <b>1917</b> is a World War One film about two British soldiers sent across enemy territory to another part of the front lines to call off a planned attack that the general staff has learned is actually a German ambush. The two soldiers are Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay. The two friends are called in for a meeting with Colin Firth, a general who informs them that recent recognizance shows an apparent German retreat is actually a feint to draw in British troops in order to ambush them. Telephone lines have been cut, and the only way to reach the distant part of the front lines is to go out across no-man’s land. The reason Chapman has been tabbed for the job becomes clear when he’s told his brother is going to be among the assault troops and the only hope of saving him from certain death is to successfully complete the mission.
<p>
The film was something of a pet project for writer-director Sam Mendes, whose grandfather served in World War One. Mendes has done some pretty impressive work in his career, beginning with <b>American Beauty</b>, in addition to films like <b>Road to Perdition</b> and <b>Revolutionary Road</b>. To be sure, his work is heavily stylized as a rule, but with the added burden of the single-take gimmick—and it is most decidedly a gimmick—this film can’t sustain anything like basic cinematic artistry and is ultimately crushed under the weight of its own pretentions. The main problem is that, at the end of the day, the single-take gimmick simply isn’t cinematic. The story, however good it may or may not be as a story, winds up stripped of all cinematic grammar and not only does that fail to add anything to the story, in the process it jettisons everything that might have made the story great. There are no closeups, no cross-cutting, no ability at all for the editing to create tension and release, or even to allow the audience to stop and take a breath. No, as Maggie Smith said about a completely different subject in <i>Downton Abbey</i>, the “on and on-ness” of it is simply enervating. And because of that it doesn’t really qualify as a film anymore. The whole thing plays out like one, long pseudo-cinematic YouTube video of an unending screen shot from a video game.
<p>
The fact that this type of film is nominated for awards, and that people pay to see it, says a lot about the decline of motion picture art in the twenty-first century—and perhaps even more about the dimwittedness of modern audiences. It’s an abysmal time for cinema, and there’s little hope that it will ever recover. With absolute garbage like superhero movies, idiot teen (and now thirty-something) films that pass themselves off as comedies, trama-drama instead of genuine drama, and non-stop action films flooding the screens, there is no incentive anymore—much less the money—to make an actual, cinematic story. And story is really the key. Quentin Tarrantino has said that the one thing Hollywood used to be really great at, the best in the world in fact, was telling a story. Those days are long gone, however, and <b>1917</b> is a perfect example of why. It’s not a story. It’s a sequence—a long-ass sequence, to be sure, but little more than that. Without giving the audience time to stop and reflect; without time for the actors to narrate their feelings—the only way for the audience to know what they’re thinking; without the slightest effort on the part of filmmakers to actually use the cinematic language of editing, it’s not really a movie. And so in the end, what’s the point? <b>1917</b> might have been a good film, might even have been a great film. But with the gimmick of the single-take sucking the life out of it, it’s little more than a cartoon that debases not only the audience that watches it, but the honorable men who actually fought and died in the First World War. And that’s not something anyone should recommend.
neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-87320821679713431702021-05-08T20:53:00.001-07:002021-05-09T09:06:00.591-07:00Total Recall (1990)Director: Paul Verhoeven Writers: Ronald Shusett & Dan O'Bannon<br>
Film Score: Jerry Goldsmith Cinematography: Jost Vacano<br>
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Michael Ironside and Ronny Cox<p>
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<b>Total Recall</b> is based on a story by science-fiction author Philip K. Dick, and whatever merit there is in the original story was lost by the time it made it to the screen. Screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who had already penned <b>Alien</b>, were apparently attempting to write some kind of space-comedy-action-drama and failed miserably on all counts. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, however, considering that Shusett admitted they were trying to make “Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.” The real death knell of the film, however, came when it failed to materialize after several attempts by several studios and several directors, including David Cronenberg, and was eventually purchased by Carolco and Arnold Schwarzenegger was given complete creative control on the picture. It shows. While lots of fans love the zany antics, and the non-stop chase, the whole exercise is just so juvenile that there’s very little for an adult viewer to care about. After all, how many crotch kicks can Schwarzenegger take in one movie? It’s almost like a drinking game. While I will grant that it might have played better in its day, I never saw it at the theater then or even as a video rental. It seems like the kind of thing the film was striving for wouldn’t ultimately be realized until <b>Men in Black</b>, which is played completely for camp. This film, however, tries to have it both ways and it just doesn’t work.
<p>
The film opens up with Schwarzenegger walking around on Mars with Rachel Ticotin. Then he falls down an embankment and the shield on his helmet breaks, but just as he’s about to die he wakes up in bed with Sharon Stone. He’s obsessed with going to Mars, and she seems bent on keeping him in domestic bliss--when he’s not working his job in construction. Same with co-worker Robert Costanzo, who tries to warn him off after Schwarzenegger says he’s thinking about going to Recall, a company that implants memories. But he’s already made the appointment, and maybe if he has memories of going to Mars, he will finally be able to put the place out of his mind. Then he lets salesman Ray Baker convince him to upgrade to the Secret Agent package where he’ll think he’s a spy. But something goes very wrong. Before they can even implant the memory, Schwarzenegger wakes up thinking he’s an actual secret agent whose cover has been blown, and they have to sedate him. Recall tries to put his memories back, but when he meets up with Costanzo again he’s kidnapped as a rogue spy and winds up killing all four guys. When he gets home, Stone calls Michael Ironside, and then <i>she</i> tries to kill him too. It turns out Schwarzenegger really <i>had</i> been a spy, but his memory has been erased and Stone was set up as his wife to make sure he didn’t start remembering things from his past. His trip to Recall, however, only managed to erase the erasure and for the moment he doesn’t remember who he really was.
<p>
The central plot then becomes Michael Ironside, who works for The Agency, trying to terminate Schwarzenegger. But the longer he lives and tries to figure out what happened to him, the more his considerable skills reassert themselves, and the more dangerous he becomes--especially to Ronnie Cox and his attempt to quash a rebellion on Mars. Then, over halfway through the film, he’s finally reunited with Ticotin. Schwarzenegger had just come off of filming the comedy <b>Twins</b> before getting back to his bread and butter macho roles, and he does as well as he can given his limited acting range. But it’s difficult to judge exactly how much of the poor characterization is his fault. He could be fairly compelling in films like <b>Running Man</b> and <b>Predator</b> from three years earlier, but seems downright amateurish in this film. Whether the fault lies in the screenplay or the direction by Paul Verhoeven is anybody’s guess, but pretty much everyone overacts--and the cheesy sets don’t do them any favors. It’s always fascinating to see futuristic films that are now mired in outdated technology. Some things are cool, like the giant picture screens in the house that can show incredibly realistic nature scenes, or the fingernails that change colors with a touch of a pen, but with tube computer monitors all over the place and everything clean and sterile--as if things in the future aren’t just as dirty--it’s difficult to forget this is a thirty-year-old film.
<p>
The film’s still watchable, to a certain extent, but to enumerate all of the things wrong with it would need a dozen reviews of this size. Ultimately the film doesn’t know what it’s trying to be. Most of it feels Luc Besson’s failure with <b>The Fifth Element</b>, a lame attempt to inject comedy into the plot. But the humor doesn’t come from the situations or the characters, its just gags shoehorned in where they don’t belong. The result is that the entire suspense part of the story is completely undermined. And then there are practical considerations like a dome on Mars made of regular old breakable glass, that the idiot Agency men shoot through--as they seem to fire thousands of rounds at every turn--so that it sucks everyone out through the broken windows. The dialogue is insipid, the sets are phony and don’t make a lot of sense, and most of the supporting roles are so outsized as to be utterly unbelievable. But then maybe that’s the point. I don’t know. I’m not a big fan of these kinds of juvenile comedies anyway, in addition to the major eighties jet lag that this film has in abundance. Schwarzenegger is essentially himself, but in a bad role. Michael Ironside, who had done such a fantastic job in <b>Scanners</b> a decade earlier, is completely wasted in this film. And in trying for the same type of character Ronny Cox played in <b>RoboCop</b>, he goes completely over the top and chews the scenery whenever he’s on camera. The film even manages to make Sharon Stone seem kind of goofy. <b>Total Recall</b> is a total miss, probably not an outright horrible film for most people but close enough for me that I’ll never watch it again.
neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-87612990835117546382019-02-16T16:08:00.000-08:002019-03-17T15:19:33.196-07:00The Black Swan (1942)Director: Henry King Writers: Ben Hecht & Seton I. Miller<br>
Film Score: Alfred Newman Cinematography: Leon Shamroy<br>
Starring: Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, Laird Creger and Thomas Mitchell<p>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-42-Tyrone-Power/dp/B000FFJ83A/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1550362361&sr=1-1&keywords=black+swan+1942&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=be6c0bbb303575b001b77f53e11ffc62&language=en_US"><u>The Black Swan</u></a> is definitely lesser Sabatini--otherwise Warner Brothers would have purchased it long before Darryl Zanuck got his hands on it. The film was a Technicolor spectacular, however, a hit at the box office that went on to win an Academy Award for Leon Shamroy’s color photography. But seen today, the film pales in comparison to Errol Flynn’s best Sabatini films, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Blood-Casey-Robinson/dp/B00005JMR7/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1550362421&sr=1-2&keywords=captain+blood&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=49b1d0cfe72ead6ddfe8e955d626abc1&language=en_US"><u>Captain Blood</u></a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sea-Hawk-Errol-Flynn/dp/B00005JMR6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1550362462&sr=1-1&keywords=the+sea+hawk&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=e6585a6bcca78055f0445a22819509ea&language=en_US"><u>The Sea Hawk</u></a>, and can’t even approach the magnificence of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Robin-Hood-Various/dp/B00407PNWO/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1550362508&sr=1-4&keywords=robin+hood+1938&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=3fa8002be15945390d632528ce12fc60&language=en_US"><u>The Adventures of Robin Hood</u></a>. Even in black and white Errol Flynn was more vibrant onscreen than Tyrone Power is in color. The direction by Henry King is uninspired, the color rear projection by Shamroy painfully obvious compared to the same thing done in black and white, and Alfred Newman’s tepid film score doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the artistic triumphs achieved by <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sea-Hawk-Classic-Wolfgang-Korngold/dp/B000003F6H/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1550362569&sr=1-1&keywords=sea+hawk+korngold&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=d2a52c3deceebba73fa33cae684bd424&language=en_US"><u>Erich Wolfgang Korngold</u></a> in all three of the Warner Brothers films. After Flynn’s colossal success in swashbucklers in the thirties, he had already moved on to other types of leading roles by the time World War Two began, and so in many ways this film feels as if it’s five years too late. It had all been done before, much better, and every member of the cast seems like a poor man’s version of the ones in the Flynn films. Finally, as great as Ben Hecht was at writing certain other kinds of films, he definitely failed in this attempt.
<p>
The story begins with an attack on one the many Spanish possessions in the Caribbean by English pirates Tyrone Power and George Sanders. It’s an easy conquest and the two captains proceed to get drunk afterward. When Spanish soldiers stage a counter attack Power is captured and put on the rack by Fortunio Bonanova. The tables quickly turn when Thomas Mitchell arrives and frees Power, but when George Zucco arrives as the Governor of Jamaica and claims that the English have signed a treaty with Spain, Power ignores the news and captures Zucco as well. That’s when the pirate leader, Laird Creger, shows up, claiming to have been knighted by the king and sent to replace Zucco in Jamaica. Creger wants to clean up the Caribbean for the English, but Sanders is having none of it and wants only to continue plundering Spanish towns and ships. He is able to get a sizable number of the other captains to go along with him, while Creger only manages to enlist Power and Mitchell to his cause. Maureen O’Hara is Zucco’s daughter, betrothed to Edward Ashley, and so she is naturally antagonistic to Power and his friends. But it turns out Ashley is a traitor, selling information on the whereabouts of English ships so that he can split the treasure with Sanders. All is not as it seems, however, as he is working for Zucco who is actually using the attacks to discredit Creger and get his position back.
<p>
First of all, Tyrone Power is just too little to be playing a pirate of any consequence--while at the same time Cregar is far too fat to be believable as a pirate at all. Only Thomas Mitchell and Maureen O’Hara from the principal cast were shorter than Power, and even then not by much. But the worst problem is with the screenplay. Unlike the Warner Brothers films, which were written by Casey Robinson, Howard Koch and Norman Raine and contain clever and compelling dialogue and action, the screenplay by Hecht and Seton Miller is so bogged down by cliché and a lack of ingenuity that it goes nowhere. What’s so ironic is that Miller had worked on both <b>The Sea Hawk</b> and <b>Robin Hood</b> at Warners. What happened here is hard to fathom. Alfred Newman had already tried to copy Korngold when he scored another Power film earlier that year, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Son-Fury-Leonard-Carey/dp/B000NTPFJO/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1550362661&sr=1-1&keywords=son+of+fury&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=f9125048e0f0e80de5b565e0bec0d82a&language=en_US"><u>Son of Fury</u></a>, with dismal results. Incomprehensibly, this score is even worse. There’s no subtlety to the characterizations at all, and Sanders, Creger, and Zucco chew the scenery all the way through, and even manage to make the great Thomas Mitchell look bad by association. O’Hara’s acting is just as blunt, and she’s like a bad B-film actress compared to Olivia de Havilland. Everything, from Power’s blustering to the cartoon-like speeded up duel at the end, is just bad. In the end <b>The Black Swan</b> is just that, the very opposite of what it should be.
neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-50998973944242695042019-02-02T19:03:00.002-08:002019-02-02T19:11:54.344-08:00The FBI Story (1959)Director: Mervyn LeRoy Writers: Richard L. Breen & John Twist<br>
Film Score: Max Steiner Cinematography: Joseph F. Biroc<br>
Starring: Jimmy Stewart, Vera Miles, Murray Hamilton and Nick Adams<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHCXhW2j3i2dTo8Iyd3N_7_WG68l0RcnwQvb_WM4yxTNf7hyyP4HlMYuP6gav8dicz6aizdaHRFEkGou_jNFDwZdVsvyHe7Z2yqzKIZK7JnHW2RNUkkYepaLjbv1q5Cl4MhKBB4XMzdIFl/s1600/fbisty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHCXhW2j3i2dTo8Iyd3N_7_WG68l0RcnwQvb_WM4yxTNf7hyyP4HlMYuP6gav8dicz6aizdaHRFEkGou_jNFDwZdVsvyHe7Z2yqzKIZK7JnHW2RNUkkYepaLjbv1q5Cl4MhKBB4XMzdIFl/s200/fbisty.jpg" width="142" height="212" data-original-width="142" data-original-height="212" /></a></div>
There’s nothing that can kill a screenplay faster than working in cooperation with a government agency in trying to come up with a story they’ll accept. The only exception to this rule seems to be the U.S. Navy. Two great films came out of collaboration with the Navy, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Caine-Mutiny-Combat-Classics/dp/B000MGTQ7K/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1549163163&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=f81b46c860df645c2f4c0266410822d2&language=en_US"><u>The Caine Mutiny</u></a> in 1954 and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Final-Countdown-Widescreen-Kirk-Douglas/dp/B000096IAC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1549163205&sr=1-1&keywords=final+countdown+dvd&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=203ab5881f1696602360d3052360ddcc&language=en_US"><u>The Final Countdown</u></a> in 1980. But these seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule. This 1959 effort by Warner Brothers, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/FBI-Story-James-Stewart/dp/B000FTCLQM/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1549163079&sr=1-1&keywords=fbi+story+with+james+stewart&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=76a443d0b82ad3fb1a12e26ac441db63&language=en_US"><u>The FBI Story</u></a>, is a case in point. It’s a tepid, watered-down drama that turns nearly every impressive feat in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation into a bad TV show. To make matters worse, because they had Jimmy Stewart the screenwriters then attempted to compensate by making the rest of the story into a combination of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Its-Wonderful-Life-James-Stewart/dp/B01JCV3NF6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1549163262&sr=1-2&keywords=it's+a+wonderful+life+dvd&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=fbaba2478535ff2c6945a380a5050dc3&language=en_US"><u>It’s a Wonderful Life</u></a> and an afternoon soap opera. The associations with Capra’s great post-war film are too pointed to miss. Vera Miles is simply a more modern version of Donna Reed. It rains on their honeymoon, just like it did on George and Mary’s wedding day. Their car could be the very one used in the Capra film, and the train station he leaves from is named Granville--just like the old Granville house the Bailey’s own in Bedford Falls. By the time Miles becomes pregnant, the fact that he doesn’t say, “Lucy, you’re on the nest?” is almost a shock.
<p>
The film begins with the worst possible opening there is, something they teach students in grade school to avoid: the dreaded dictionary definition. But here we have Jimmy Stewart on the voiceover quoting the Webster’s International Dictionary definition of murder. The prologue tells the story of Nick Adams, who plants a time bomb in his mother’s suitcase and blows her and the plane she’s on out of the sky. Even J. Edgar Hoover has a cameo in the beginning. The tale of how Adams is caught turns out to be a speech by Stewart to new recruits to the FBI. Then he takes his audience back to his own beginnings as an FBI agent and the way his career mirrored the growth of the national investigative police force. Stewart was working for Parley Baer in the twenties, and courting Vera Miles. She doesn’t want to marry him because being an FBI agent seems like a dead-end job, but she agrees when he says he’ll quit. When he meets Hoover, however, he reneges and they spend the next two decades moving all over the country. The film spends what seems an inordinate amount of time on the Osage Murders in the twenties, which is interesting to a point, but when it comes to the excitement of hunting down the gangers of the thirties each one is given between thirty seconds and a minute before moving on to the next. Finally Miles has had enough and moves back in with her parents and takes the three kids with her, but she eventually comes back. And that’s only half the film. The rest is just as mind-numbing.
<p>
When you stop to consider that this film was made the same year Hitchcock made <a href="https://www.amazon.com/North-Northwest-Cary-Grant/dp/0790749815/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1549163433&sr=1-1&keywords=north+by+northwest+dvd&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=99f92a67bf2940a6d0bfcba59b32deaf&language=en_US"><u>North by Northwest</u></a> with Cary Grant, it seems shockingly bad by comparison. Murray Hamilton is Stewart’s partner for much of the film but, like the rest of the principals, the dialogue is so bland and the drama so torpid that no actors could have made it interesting. Stewart’s character is also strangely drawn. He says incredibly inappropriate things at the wrong times, behaving selfishly when his wife has a miscarriage and his son dies. World War Two, the Cold War, the film just keeps going on and on. Any one of the vignettes might have made an interesting film, but strung together as they are in digest form there’s no possibility for any real dramatic arc or central conflict to emerge. And further, the idea that Jimmy Stewart’s character is in on every major development of the agency is patently unbelievable. Mervyn LeRoy’s direction is pedestrian at best, and even Max Steiner’s score is unable to provide any real artistry to the production. Apparently Hoover himself wanted to approve every frame of film, forcing the director to re-shoot several scenes--and it shows. It’s also said that Hoover wouldn’t let the production go forward until he had collected a file full of “dirt” on Mervyn LeRoy. In the end, what was such a shock for me is that this is the first time I’d ever seen Jimmy Stewart in a really bad film--which is the only way to describe <b>The FBI Story</b>.
neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-35773903635872505502016-11-24T14:00:00.001-08:002016-11-25T09:35:48.546-08:00Westworld (1973)Director: Michael Crichton Writer: Michael Crichton<br>
Film Score: Fred Karlin Cinematography: Gene Polito<br>
Starring: Yul Brynner, James Brolin, Richard Benjamin and Dick Van Patten<p>
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For all his popular success, Michael Crichton was never a great writer. Most of the time it’s not that evident in his film productions, when someone else is adapting screenplays from his novels. But Crichton wrote and directed <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Westworld-Yul-Brynner/dp/B0045HCJKS/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1480024955&sr=1-2&keywords=westworld&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=a3b99c0ca9aa43865e8fd742c8da2186"><u>Westworld</u></a>, and it shows. It was his first original screenplay and none of the studios wanted to go near it. But he finally was able to strike a deal with MGM, and filmed it primarily on their back lot. Even compensating for the fact that it was filmed in the early seventies, the film still looks like a television production rather than a feature. The sets are clearly TV sets rather than anything remotely realistic, and much of the crew was from television as well. The cheapness of the sets can be explained away by the premise of the film in which a sort of computerized theme park gives guests a realistic experience of being able to kill or sexually dominate robots, allowing visitors to experience the illicit without the illegality. So it stands to reason that the park wouldn’t be that realistic. Still, while the premise is intriguing, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The special effects, especially the shots out of the windows of the futuristic plane in the beginning, might have been advanced for the day but they are hopelessly phony here. The practical effects, on the other hand, are well done. Even so, the production was never going to be able to rise above its obvious artistic deficiencies.
<p>
The film begins with television reporter Robert Hogan interviewing people who have finished vacationing at a futuristic resort that allows visitors a full immersion experience in either Roman times, the Middle Ages, or the American West. All of the interviewees are gushing in their praise. Then the scene shifts to James Brolin and Richard Benjamin who are on their way to Westworld. After landing and being outfitted they wander down to the saloon where Yul Brynner verbally abuses Benjamin at the bar. Brolin, who has been there before, urges Benjamin to confront him. When he finally does, the two draw and Benjamin kills him with three shots to the chest. Brynner is dragged away soon after and back in their room Benjamin wonders aloud if Brynner might have been a guest rather than the realistic robots that inhabit the theme park. Brolin suggests he try to shoot him, but the gun won’t work when aimed at a warm target. Later the two go to a whorehouse and have sex with robot prostitutes, and all the while a bank robbery is going on across the street. In a somber scene that night, workers come out and remove the robot bodies that litter the street. They are taken behind the scenes and repaired, with head “doctor” Alan Oppenheimer in charge of the operation. He notices that there has been an increasing rate of central mechanism breakdowns in the robots in all three worlds and, most disturbing, it’s acting like a virus that threatens to infect all of the robots.
<p>
Eventually a series of minor mishaps leads to the death of one of the guests in the Medieval World, and though the technicians try to turn off the power in the complex it does no good and the robots begin to go rogue, especially Yul Brynner in Westworld. Brynner, who earned his western bona fides in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Magnificent-Seven-Special-Yul-Brynner/dp/B000059TFW/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1480025333&sr=1-3&keywords=magnificent+seven&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=402fed4cba66caefd47105513c843f3f"><u>The Magnificent Seven</u></a> in 1960 and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Invitation-Gunfighter-Yul-Brynner/dp/B0007O391Q/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1480025412&sr=1-1&keywords=invitation+to+a+gunfighter&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=22f1afb9869d536c1e5d76f1b20d87d7"><u>Invitation to a Gunfighter</u></a> four years later, is the perfect relentless robot in the film. The look of his character was even based on that from the earlier movie. Barrel chested, with pale eyes and a hard face, he shows no signs of stopping as he pursues Richard Benjamin. But there are a number of things that strain credulity, chief among them the fact that the entire complex was apparently designed so that the technicians will be locked in if the power goes out. Of course they shut down the power and then can’t get it back on, trapping themselves inside, powerless to do anything as the robots go on their rampage. Also, for no apparent reason, they upgrade Brynner’s optical and audio systems, enabling him to chase down Benjamin with even greater efficiency. This was also one of the first films to use pixelated imaging to suggest the robot’s point of view. But that is sort of negated by the bulk of the computer screens in the control room displaying nothing but meaningless computer art of the kind found on early screensavers.
<p>
One of the things Crichten is able to do well early on in the film is to inject the repair scene with a lot of pathos. The technicians are dressed like doctors, and computer readouts look and sound like medical machines in a hospital. The effect--as intended--is jarring. There’s also no denying the influence of the Brynner character on the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/TERMINATOR-DVD-BOX-SET-MOVIES/dp/B006HTFYZ4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1480025801&sr=1-1&keywords=terminator+collection+dvd&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=5948593196c32693106db46cec8e3e7e"><u>Terminator</u></a> films. But overall the film is little more than a string of clichés, from the TV sets, the corny music by Fred Karlin, the costuming, right down to the acting. Yul Brynner is the best actor of the bunch and he’s playing a robot. While James Brolin and Richard Benjamin made a lot of feature films in the seventies, they are primarily associated with television as well, and for good reason: they’re just not that convincing. Add to that Dick Van Patton as the new sheriff in town, as well as a host of low-level television talent rounding out the rest of the cast and it was always going to look like a TV movie. Nevertheless, fans at the time made it a huge hit, but to Crichton’s dismay it was more because of its camp value than for the cautionary tale he had tried to tell. The film spawned a sequel, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Futureworld-Peter-Fonda/dp/B004LB5FDG/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1480025483&sr=1-2&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=eeb3c6e85754ccd86282e3e056c98398"><u>Futureworld</u></a>, that starred Brynner again but that Crichton had nothing to do with, and quite naturally a television series called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Westworld-Complete-Jim-McMullan/dp/B00MIYRZAE/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1480025578&sr=1-1&keywords=beyond+westworld&linkCode=ll1&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=e47369c939d805ceb202f936f82ed80e"><u>Beyond Westworld</u></a>. And it has been recently revived by HBO as a series as well. The concept of <b>Westworld</b> is intriguing, and there is much that could have been done with it, but it never really rises above its television pedigree and remains a missed opportunity.
neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-56465668943146720502016-01-02T16:34:00.000-08:002016-01-02T18:29:44.113-08:00The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)Director: Wes Anderson Writer: Wes Anderson<br>
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman<br>
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Tony Revolori and Jude Law<p>
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While Wes Anderson’s film <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JAQJMJ0/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00JAQJMJ0&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=ZSTM2HJHTAZUZRIA"><u>The Grand Budapest Hotel</u></a> was something of a critical darling, and was even nominated for a best picture Oscar, it is actually more of a disappointment than anything else. It seems as if what he’s attempting here is a cross between the Coen Brothers and Tim Burton, but Anderson lacks the narrative sophistication of the former and the visual imagination of the later and so what results is the worst version of both. The story is based upon the writings of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian author who was popular between the World Wars but had nevertheless received mixed reviews for his numerous works. Anderson’s story takes from some of the fictional and some of the autobiographical incidents in Zweig’s work and fashioned from them an abstract tale that attempts to make up for in humor what it decidedly lacks in artistry. I fully admit to finding these types of work distasteful because of the dearth of intellect they display, so it’s not that I don’t get it. But like a Jackson Pollack “artwork” or an Ornette Coleman “song,” Anderson’s “film” is utterly bereft of the kind of intellectual discipline that has informed genuinely great films from the inception of the art form. The fact that critics like it is almost a warning label for those who see film’s greatness as a narrative art being slowly eroded by the increasingly vacuous intellects of young filmmakers like Anderson.
<p>
The film begins with Tom Wilkinson as a famed author, talking about the tedious question of where an author’s stories come from. He states that, if one is willing to listen to others, the stories will come to the author. From there he relates his visit as a young man to the Grand Budapest Hotel in the fictional Eastern European country of Zubrowka. In the flashback the younger author is played by Jude Law. Curious one day about the appearance of an old man, F. Murray Abraham, he is told he is the owner of the hotel. In the baths the two strike up a conversation and over dinner Abraham tells Law the story of his life. In this flashback, the young Abraham is played by Tony Revolori who suddenly appears at the hotel as a Lobby Boy. The officious but charming concierge, Ralph Fiennes, at first dubious about his capabilities, nevertheless takes him under his wing and this sets Revolori off on numerous adventures that he experiences traveling in the wake of the eccentric hotel manager. This includes seducing wealthy old women like Tilda Swinton, confronting her son Adrien Brody and the family’s lawyer Jeff Goldblum over the will, talking himself out of an arrest by de facto Nazi Edward Norton, evading hit man Willem Dafor, escaping from prison with the aid of Harvey Keitel, and calling on the network of hotel managers led by Bill Murray to help him find the man responsible for his false arrest.
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The film itself is highly stylized, with no real concession to realism in either the look or the narrative. This is done through the use of miniatures of exteriors of the hotel, and wide-angle lenses in the interiors. The colors are manipulated to give the film a faded, sepia-toned look to invoke the historical nature of the tale while the set design verges on a sort of steampunk aesthetic to go along with the surreal nature of the story. The real draw of the film seems to be the number of well-known actors in the piece, as well as the bizarre nature of the narrative. But while it was nominated for nine Academy Awards, the categories in which it won the Oscar are indicative of its failure as a captivating piece of filmmaking, winning for production design, costume design, hair and makeup, as well as the Eastern European folk music score by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HGGUTPW/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00HGGUTPW&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=U6O5NIWSDID5ZE5Q"><u>Alexandre Desplat</u></a>. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many big stars are in a film if they are given one-dimensional characters to portray in the screenplay. And that is certainly the case here. The characters are cartoons, mirroring the kind of graphic novel approach of the visuals. There are some funny lines, and some winning moments, which seems almost inevitable given the density of acting talent shoehorned into the film, but on the whole endeavor lies flat and curiously unengaging through most of its running time. <b>The Grand Budapest Hotel</b> will certainly have a lot of fans who have been weaned on Twitter feeds and YouTube videos, but I’m never going to be one of them.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-34276137633118788032016-01-01T11:49:00.000-08:002016-01-01T12:04:48.169-08:00Double Jeopardy (1999)Director: Bruce Beresford Writers: David Weisberg & Douglas Cook<br>
Film Score: Normand Corbeil Cinematography: Peter James<br>
Starring: Ashley Judd, Tommy Lee Jones, Bruce Greenwood and Annabeth Gish<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgih7omxum3y6ZXtV9WQu0essUEQlgcjzrss_xjne5T1AP5qa3dqTBmbvEMSDOludADT4MQAU9pVcl1mbth0t2XuQ6CFvov3cbOqWvOeI_l0moJMMxDtY-PAe9cN8rdg-YO7KM7O8xDmTY7/s1600/djeop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgih7omxum3y6ZXtV9WQu0essUEQlgcjzrss_xjne5T1AP5qa3dqTBmbvEMSDOludADT4MQAU9pVcl1mbth0t2XuQ6CFvov3cbOqWvOeI_l0moJMMxDtY-PAe9cN8rdg-YO7KM7O8xDmTY7/s320/djeop.jpg" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AEFXT1S/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00AEFXT1S&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=SHPTZUFOEJ6XTHLX"><u>Double Jeopardy</u></a> makes a valiant attempt at being an action movie, at being suspenseful, and at telling an engaging mystery story. Unfortunately the film can’t bear the weight of all the mistakes it makes and, as such, is a huge disappointment. Despite star power and a veteran director with two Oscar nominations, the screenplay is so incredibly bad that it drops like a rock tossed into Puget Sound. The set up is interesting enough, but it is over by the time the credits have finished. Ashley Judd and her businessman husband Bruce Greenwood live on the beautiful shores of Whidbey Island in Washington State, just north of Seattle. They have a small son, Benjamin Weir, and Greenwood is throwing a lavish party to raise money for his small school on the island. The boy’s teacher is Annabeth Gish, who also acts as something of a nanny for him. Judd has always wanted a particular sailboat and when Greenwood buys it for her they set out on the water that evening. The first head scratcher is when Judd is pointing out the geography while they are out of sight of land. She claims that while Alaska is to the north, and Japan is to the east, that the Straight of Juan de Fuca is off to the south of them, but the Straight runs slightly northwest and it couldn’t be south of them unless the were practically on top of Vancouver Island. Granted, that one depends on a knowledge of the setting, but there are plenty more to come that don’t.
<p>
After a night of romance and drinking Judd wakes up covered in blood like John Marley in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0019L770A/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0019L770A&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=5OU3YVN6SPS57JWY"><u>The Godfather</u></a>, but instead of a horse’s head she finds a trail of blood leading up to the deck and no Greenwood. She sees the bloody knife on the deck and, of course, she picks it up, just in time to have the coast guard arrive and see her with it. I realize that this film is already fifteen years old, but that was a tired trope even then and I think it’s time to retire it. Soon she’s thrown in jail, with no bail, and then brought to trial . . . even though Greenwood’s body has never been found! None of the trial preparation is shown at all. Suddenly we’re in the courtroom with her hearing a tape of Greenwood sending a distress call to the Coast Guard saying he’s been stabbed. Prosecutor Betsy Brantley tries for the sarcasm of Glenn Close in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0043X1FNQ/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0043X1FNQ&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=6XQD4IIMG7K24VB6"><u>Jagged Edge</u></a>, but the writing is so poor and juvenile that it’s actually embarrassing. Even with the tape, and the insurance policy, a murder conviction without a body is incredibly rare and so it doesn’t just strain credulity it utterly torpedoes any suspension of disbelief. But wait, there’s more. Since she doesn’t get the money, Judd begs Gish to adopt their son so that she’ll have access to the money in trust, and then is sent to prison. Again, however, the abysmal pacing destroys the story. Absolutely no time is taken to establish her relationship with the great Roma Maffia, who happens to have been a lawyer and holds the key to the title and the rest of the film.
<p>
When Judd hasn’t heard from Gish or her son in a month she makes a call to the school, pretending to be Gish and checking on the address for her “severance check.” First of all, there is no such thing as severance pay for teachers. And secondly, the school wouldn’t handle it even if there was. The state handles all of that from the teacher’s individual retirement fund. Anyway, Judd manages to find out Gish’s new address and phone number in San Francisco. She chews out Gish first, but when she’s talking to her son Greenwood walks in the door and he calls out, “Daddy,” which Judd hears. Now she knows he’s faked his death. Maffia, in another brief drive-by appearance, tells her to do her time quietly and try to get out on parole because of double jeopardy, which means no one can be tried twice for the same crime. “That means you can walk right up to him in Times Square, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.” Wrong. When she gets out she’ll be on parole, which means that any violation of parole, including that gun, will send her right back to prison to finish her original sentence, I’m guessing, without another chance of parole. It’s maddening just how stupid this film is. So then she starts buffing up while she waits to get out, but she’s not Linda Hamilton in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001VLBDD0/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001VLBDD0&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=LRIDFH6N4M2NWZTW"><u>Terminator 2</u></a>, and when she’s done she looks just as skinny and fragile as when she went in. She doesn’t meet Tommy Lee Jones, the head of the halfway house, until after she gets out but by then it’s too late. The film is already a lost cause and it’s only a half hour old.
<p>
Ultimately the screenplay is the downfall of the film. David Weisberg had only written three films prior to this . . . and wasn’t able to sell another one for fifteen years, which makes sense considering how bad this one was. His partner on all of those previous films was, no surprise, Douglas Cook. What’s so mystifying about all of this is that the director, Bruce Beresford, didn’t demand that changes to the screenplay be made. Beresford actually earned an Academy Award nomination for his own screenplay on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZVBG2VY/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00ZVBG2VY&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=QY4BB4Y2QLFV2GZJ"><u>Breaker Morant</u></a>, and another for his directing on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001VC99HQ/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001VC99HQ&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=3E4352CUZKNBWRGT"><u>Tender Mercies</u></a>. In addition he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his direction of <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002VWNIBI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002VWNIBI&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=FNONTZOX5AUPBYUA"><u>Driving Miss Daisy</u></a>. In this film he seems to have gleefully purchased a ticket on the Titanic and decided to go down with the ship. Judd’s journey of revenge lurches along with no time to develop anything like concern for the characters including, ironically, Judd herself. Her miraculous escapes that Weisberg and Cook have written for her are as sophomoric as they are unbelievable, and Beresford just went ahead and filmed them. Tommy Lee Jones is wasted, Roma Maffia is wasted, and so is Bruce Greenwood, all of which renders the star power of the film moot. If you though the <i>deus ex machina</i> was working overtime in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002NZK5UU/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002NZK5UU&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=HQNXI5RGQDVPOMEE"><u>The Pelican Brief</u></a>, you’ll want to steer well clear of <b>Double Jeopardy</b>. neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-12131919486315345382015-07-30T10:55:00.000-07:002015-12-13T13:12:10.083-08:00Be Cool (2005)Director: F. Gary Gray Writer: Peter Steinfeld<br>
Film Score: John Powell Cinematography: Jeffrey L. Kimball<br>
Starring: John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel and Christina Milian<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0begRXylMNRMU1KemMy4ks3EBIwyM38zuq5v-EaQkSC5uUdczOrjWu3pgAfdQO0gURwrwkI3UEOC8RHY839ogmHYkfruVsMV2zqg_wg6DmkouFNVS-QYWTO1MsqI_gvhll2AdbDLtyv1V/s1600/becool.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0begRXylMNRMU1KemMy4ks3EBIwyM38zuq5v-EaQkSC5uUdczOrjWu3pgAfdQO0gURwrwkI3UEOC8RHY839ogmHYkfruVsMV2zqg_wg6DmkouFNVS-QYWTO1MsqI_gvhll2AdbDLtyv1V/s320/becool.jpg" /></a></div>
At the beginning of the film <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0008FXT1Y/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0008FXT1Y&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=YSGUS7MSSBQNRPDH"><u>Be Cool</u></a>, movie producer John Travolta bemoans Hollywood’s insistence on sequels. “It was the only time I gave in in my life, but sometimes you gotta do it the studio way . . . I got hustled into doing a sequel.” Travolta should have read the screenplay closer because he go hustled into this picture, too. It’s absolutely terrible. There was no reason to make this film because the character of Chili Palmer had already made it in Hollywood. Where else was there to go? <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0792833279/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0792833279&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=ALBARRIRIHZ6NKQQ"><u>Get Shorty</u></a> had been made over a decade earlier and it’s a terrific film. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it was funny in an intelligent way and was able to wring humor out of the characters because of their believability. Sure, they were exaggerated, but in a way that made sense within the structure of the film and the characters’ own motivations. This film, however, is like a <i>Saturday Night Live</i> skit. It’s juvenile, and you can almost see the pained expression on Travolta’s face the entire way through, as if he can’t believe he’s in such an incredibly bad film. The original was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who has a real feel for a certain kind of comedy, while the sequel was directed by F. Gary Gray, who is much better in serious films that have a small vein of humor running through them.
<p>
The film begins with Travolta wanting to get out of the movie business. When record producer James Woods is gunned down at a restaurant where they’re eating together, he begins thinking about getting into the music business. Woods had told him about a singer he wanted to sign, Christina Milian, and when Travolta goes to see her at a club singing seventies songs, he takes her away from her current manager, Vince Vaughn. Then he goes over to see Woods’ widow, Uma Thurman, and tries to shoehorn himself into her record label, but she doesn’t want any help. That is, until big-shot producer Cedric the Entertainer comes looking for his pay and Thurman can see in the books that the company is broke. Now Travolta begins working the principals against each other. These include Vaughn and Cedric as well as Vaughn’s bodyguard, Dwayne Johnson, a gay dandy who wants to be an actor, Vaughn’s partner Harvey Keitel, who is continuously on the phone, the police in the form of detectives Debi Mazar and Gregory Alan Williams, and a bunch of idiot Russians. Throw in a hit man who gets himself hit, the members of Aerosmith, and Cedric’s clichéd posse of rappers and the film rapidly turns into farce.
<p>
There are three major problems with the film. The first is the lack of quality production. Elmore Leonard may have participated on the screenplay, but it wasn’t his story. As a result, the script is little more than in-jokes referencing the first film and doing the same bits but with different actors. It also rehashes the same story arc but with music this time instead of film. And this leads to the second major problem. In the first film most of the actors spent time talking about the films they were going to make and the audience was able to suspend disbelief pretty easily because they obviously couldn’t read the scripts or see the films. But in a film about music the audience can hear Christina Milian sing and, as producer Paul Adelstein points out in the film, with shows like <i>The Voice</i> the audience has heard hundreds of girls who can do the same thing. So when everyone from Uma Thurman to Steven Tyler is gushing about how great she is--while we can hear she’s just like everyone else--it doesn’t work. The final misstep is that the movie is filled with stereotypes and over-exaggerated characterizations that are simply not funny unless you’re in grade school. And it’s pretty clear from the look on Travolta’s face that he knows it. I had high hopes going into this film because I had loved the first one so much. But <b>Be Cool</b> is a bad film that never should have been made, and if you value the memory of Elmore Leonard or Chili Palmer, you’ll run the other direction when you see it coming.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-25129368188483983002015-07-11T17:58:00.000-07:002015-12-13T13:11:36.146-08:00End Game (2006)Director: Andy Cheng Writers: Andy Cheng & J.C. Pollock<br>
Film Score: Kenneth Burgomaster Cinematography: Chuck Cohen<br>
Starring: Cuba Gooding Jr., Angie Harmon, James Woods and Anne Archer<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRrpyedagYWhISVKlvez_JHLtknXqWlnqfEbU33E0O_RQvwFSTEqlbdSz33YyUsx8XduDhBDZfpuFzwIz9bBekop8uvbAN4mbgFYwUHc6viZuolkrpiUNcpLdazQyTSB86RHZcsfsevjyl/s1600/endgam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRrpyedagYWhISVKlvez_JHLtknXqWlnqfEbU33E0O_RQvwFSTEqlbdSz33YyUsx8XduDhBDZfpuFzwIz9bBekop8uvbAN4mbgFYwUHc6viZuolkrpiUNcpLdazQyTSB86RHZcsfsevjyl/s320/endgam.jpg" /></a></div>
I’ve seen some bad political thrillers, but <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000ENUYGS/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000ENUYGS&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=2BP5YXRSUMNBBKG4"><u>End Game</u></a> goes beyond bad and well over the line into offensive. In fact, it’s difficult to understand how this film was even made because the screenplay alone makes no sense whatsoever. But add to that the world’s worst direction by Andy Cheng, and terrible acting by everyone involved and you have a project that should have been shelved during rushes as a lost cause. Fortunately MGM was acquired by Sony in 2005, just as the film was nearing theatrical release, and it’s not far fetched to think that execs at Sony took a one look at the finished product and balked, choosing instead to send the thing directly to video stores the following year. The direction seriously looks as if it was from 1985 rather than thirty years later. It wouldn’t even have made a good TV movie, there are so many plot holes. Motivations are not only unclear, but it’s as if the assassination is just another assignment for the killers. No angst, no worries about investigations, no concern at all about getting caught. And the people responsible seem even less concerned. In fact, there’s no sense that anyone in the country cares that this happened. The film wants to be a lot of things, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0790732149/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0790732149&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=DXET3HA7JVT4Y62G"><u>Murder at 1600</u></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ASLJIQ/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B003ASLJIQ&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=ONF67OODGU7IIKXS"><u>Absolute Power</u></a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000055Y0Y/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000055Y0Y&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=EBE6U42NHM5TCUC7"><u>In the Line of Fire</u></a>, but it falls flat at every level to the point where the audience, literally, doesn’t care either.
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Things go bad right from the beginning as the film opens with the president of the United States and first lady being driven to a speaking event. The first lady is Anne Archer, still best remembered for her role in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AEFXX9Q/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00AEFXX9Q&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=ZAXDLOFY6ZMSKF3U"><u>Fatal Attraction</u></a>. The president, on the other hand, is a complete no-name soap star. At this point it’s obvious to anyone who has ever seen a movie that he’s going to wind up dead. And sure enough, that’s what happens. Cuba Gooding Jr. is the secret service agent assigned to the president, and while he’s shot in the hand, he can’t move fast enough to save him. James Woods, head of the secret service, tells him to take some time off and Gooding proceeds to get drunk that night. Meanwhile Angie Harmon, a newspaper reporter, is investigating the shooting and talks to homeless man David Selby, another soap star, and he shows Harmon the house where the killer stayed. She discovers that he was dying of cancer, but the audience can see she’s being watched. After she leaves to talk to the killer’s sister, Selby is killed. Then after she leaves the sister and mother, their trailer is blown up. By the time she gets to Gooding’s house, she’s left a wide swath of death behind her but doesn’t know it yet. Fortunately, Gooding senses something is wrong and they narrowly escape being blown up in his boat. It’s a conspiracy, to be sure, but when they tell Woods he inexplicably tells them to wait a few days.
<p>
The killers, on the other hand, aren’t waiting around and take another crack at Gooding and Harmon, so Gooding gets tired of waiting and seeks out a general, Burt Reynolds, and Reynolds is never seen again the entire film. Cuba Gooding Jr. is obviously going through the motions and doesn’t have a lot to give to the production, but it’s not as if he has a lot to work with given the script. Meanwhile, Angie Harmon looks as if she’s taking an Acting 101 class and flunking badly. She has no range, whatsoever. Woods and Reynolds have what amount to cameo roles, with Woods at least looking his age. Reynolds has so much plastic surgery and an obvious black toupee, that he’s little more than a joke. Anne Archer doesn’t fare much better. She only has a couple of scenes and the corny work of art she’s painting that must be seen from a certain angle to understand is a real groaner. But even the bad guys suck. Peter Greene initially looks as if he’s trying to be Christopher Eccleston from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00004Z4WR/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00004Z4WR&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=5SSNVH5MM2P2CHQD"><u>Gone in 60 Seconds</u></a>, but he gets little in the way of screen time, except as a boogieman at the end of the film, and even then it’s in the dark. And then, after all that, as if to add insult to injury, the ending is the worst part of the film--and that’s saying something. Essentially, Gooding knows who did it and won’t tell anyone. <b>End Game</b> cost approximately five million to produce and only made back one point two million in video sales and rentals. The only surprise is that it made that much. neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-7615772072583710972014-12-30T12:09:00.000-08:002015-12-13T13:10:34.351-08:00Big Fan (2009)Director: Robert D. Siegel Writer: Robert D. Siegel<br>
Film Score: Philip Watts Cinematography: Michael Simmonds<br>
Starring: Patton Oswalt, Kevin Corrigan, Matt Servitto and Michael Rapaport<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL-rvFxKabcMv3bMn18_cjjJ3kr1JYpYyL4Q6ZBMWyxVZAYW7OcVvNfP3gh9__P5cQOJ6t8H0Ix3Ru3TjDAuSwVYKal9h-rYQ0zmRvapf-h2-054FMGcoX3jiZslCAoXj07VNJE4837Zod/s1600/bigfan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL-rvFxKabcMv3bMn18_cjjJ3kr1JYpYyL4Q6ZBMWyxVZAYW7OcVvNfP3gh9__P5cQOJ6t8H0Ix3Ru3TjDAuSwVYKal9h-rYQ0zmRvapf-h2-054FMGcoX3jiZslCAoXj07VNJE4837Zod/s320/bigfan.jpg" /></a></div>
This is a film that tries to do a number of things and, unfortunately, fails at nearly all of them. On the surface, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002VJVCGY/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002VJVCGY&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=WEOOBWGILQ4GWCQ7"><u>Big Fan</u></a> seems to have a fascinating premise, which is why I took a chance on it. The idea of the rabid, modern day, sports fan has yet to be seriously explored in film, and the addition of Patton Oswalt as the protagonist made it that much more intriguing. But at the end of the day the central idea of the film, of obsession that leads to a cognitive break, has already been done in a much more powerful way in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00007976T/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00007976T&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=JUAOXY74XOEPFBUF"><u>One Hour Photo</u></a> starring Robin Williams. And in comparison, the sports film winds up being a pale imitation that disappoints in every way. Surprisingly, the choice of Oswalt as the protagonist turns out to be a poor choice. While he brings a certain comedic element that, again, would emulate the crossover of Williams going to drama, he doesn’t quite pull it off. While Williams exudes malevolence in his role, Oswalt as the schlub who still lives at home with his mother is more pathetic than anything else. In addition, writer-director Robert Siegel brings very little to his character study in the way of interest or to his story in terms of plot and before too long the film simply becomes boring.
<p>
Patton Oswalt plays a parking lot attendant who sits in his booth all evening collecting money and listening to sports radio. He is a dedicated New York Giants fan who is a regular caller to a local New York talk show hosted by Scott Ferrall. Oswalt spends his evening writing out what he wants to say when he gets on, and has a running feud with a caller from Philadelphia, Michael Rapaport. Oswalt’s best friend is Kevin Corrigan, another Giants fan who at least seems to have an apartment of his own. The two of them go to the home games on Sunday, but sit in the parking lot of Giants stadium and watch the game on TV. One night in their neighborhood on Staten Island they see the Giants’ star linebacker Jonathan Hamm filling up his SUV at a gas station and decide to follow him. The star’s first stop is at a drug house on the island, then he goes to a strip club in Manhattan. Oswalt and Corrigan follow him inside, buy a drink for him, then get up the nerve to approach him. When Oswalt lets it slip that they saw him buying drugs Hamm goes crazy and beats Oswalt severely enough that he has to go to the hospital. It takes several days for Oswalt to wake up after a brain operation and when he does he finds out the Giants have lost their last game because Hamm has been suspended during the investigation.
<p>
From this point on Oswalt gets nothing but pressure from everyone around him. Police detective Matt Servitto wants to know everything that happened that night, while Oswalt’s lawyer brother, Gino Cafarelli, wants to sue the football player for millions, and at the same time his mother becomes fed up with him living at home and wants him to pursue a real career and a life of his own. Add to that a losing streak by the Giants, which threatens to eliminate them from the playoffs, and it’s not long before Oswalt snaps. The focus of the piece is clearly on Oswalt, and director Siegel’s camera setups favor close-ups much of the time. What he’s trying for is a sense of the claustrophobia of Oswalt’s life, but before long the technique wears thin, especially as there is very little in the way of introspection that we get from the protagonist, even when he’s with his best friend. Had the ending gone a different way it might have saved the film, something on the order of Talk Radio, but in hewing so close to the idea of <b>One Hour Photo</b> the comparisons are decidedly to its disadvantage. There are other ideas the film could have explored, money, fame, family, and the role of sports in society, but they are never even touched upon, which ultimately makes the film that much more vacuous. As a result, <b>Big Fan</b> is just a big flop. neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-13837002185159889852014-12-28T22:19:00.003-08:002015-12-13T13:10:01.128-08:00Lake Noir (2011)Director: Jeffrey Schneider Writer: Abel Martinez Jr.<br>
Film Score: Bentley Michaels Cinematography: Jeffrey Schneider<br>
Starring: Geno Romo, Heather Wakehouse, Michael Gonzalez and Benjamin Farmer<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy0a1HlBwZQD6R4SjzWzOkPIHvJOIKGwpx0h9rjDC8vLGAHlqMReEVHelysa-D9vlkM1bU5krQDUvYG6UizoVlQrYjpt8mJa3r0JtLTL2UYuwVjCr_90zW5HUQRts8PfUIILSGA0GlAM9T/s1600/lknoir.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy0a1HlBwZQD6R4SjzWzOkPIHvJOIKGwpx0h9rjDC8vLGAHlqMReEVHelysa-D9vlkM1bU5krQDUvYG6UizoVlQrYjpt8mJa3r0JtLTL2UYuwVjCr_90zW5HUQRts8PfUIILSGA0GlAM9T/s320/lknoir.jpeg" /></a></div>
Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t go anywhere near a film like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AN874E4/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00AN874E4&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=7MHE4BTTVIFE64Y4"><u>Lake Noir</u></a>. In fact, after reviewing <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002USF1TU/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002USF1TU&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=VB7UKLSSATBLCFY7"><u>Blood Creek</u></a> early on in this blog, I decided to add low-budget, independent horror films to the list of things I wouldn’t review at all (a list that already included teen movies, stupid comedies starring Seth Rogen, Steve Carell or former Saturday Night Live cast members, superhero comic book movies, or action/martial arts films). That said, two of the most impressive films I have ever seen are <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00996RSYM/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00996RSYM&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=QUQXFHDIBGHZIW7N"><u>The Falls</u></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F98FOPE/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00F98FOPE&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=53P5X66LGW7734OO"><u>The Falls: Testament of Love</u></a> by Jon Garcia, a writer/director working out of Portland, Oregon. One of the brilliant stars in those two films is Benjamin Farmer, and so in seeking out other things he has appeared in I wound up taking a look at this film by another Portland director, Jeffrey Schneider. For using a hand-held digital video camera the cinematography by Schneider is pretty good, but that’s about the only thing that is. The tagline for the film is, “Nothing good happens at this lake,” and that would include this movie.
<p>
The story, if you can even call it that, begins with Michael Gonzalez being beaten by Benjamin Farmer with a baseball bat and dumped into the lake while his girlfriend is raped by one of Farmer’s buddies. Flash forward and virgin Heather Wakehouse wants to go to the lake for the weekend with her boyfriend, Geno Romo, and some mutual friends. Her mom says no and so she lies and says she’s going to a girlfriend’s house, then jumps into Romo’s truck and they’re off to pick up their friends along the way. In another truck are four other late teens who stop off at a gas station to fill up and are told by crazy old man Bob Olin the story of Gonzalez, who enacted revenge on his abusers by killing them as well as everyone else who stays up at the lake at night. But the kids ignore the warning, pitch their tents in the woods near the lake and proceed to get drunk and have sex with each other. Everyone that is except Romo, who becomes increasingly frustrated with Wakehouse’s abstinence the more he drinks. Finally, as night falls, Gonzalez emerges from the swampy lake and begins working his way through the copulating couples just like every other slasher film you’ve ever seen.
<p>
Actually, that’s not quite right. Most other slasher films are at least somewhat inventive. Unfortunately Abel Martinez Jr.’s screenplay is absolutely pointless. The dialogue he has the actors speaking is the most inane I think I’ve ever heard in a film. I’m sure he was striving for something like “realism” but simply comes off as unimaginative in the extreme. And so are the killings. In most of them, you don’t even see anything happening. When Marzell Sampson is killed there is no blood at all, and the audience doesn’t even see what happens to the girl he’s having sex with. And when Calvin Morie McCarthy is beheaded it takes a few moments to realize that the mannequin head rolling in the dirt is supposed to be his. There’s not much gore to speak of, not much sex to speak of, and not much story to speak of. The acting, not surprisingly, is fairly poor as well. Geno Romo probably would have been the best of the lot had he had a decent script and some kind of direction. And while Benjamin Farmer is a brilliant actor, and the reason I watched the film in the first place, you wouldn’t know it as he is really wasted in a tiny role. Michael Gonzalez looks like a cross between Tor Johnson and Santo and, while he is fine as the killer, it probably would have been better to have someone else play the young boyfriend who is left for dead. <b>Lake Noir</b> is a bad movie, but then it was always going to be. So while it’s unfair to include it in a blog like this, I just can’t pass up the opportunity to promote Portland area talent like Jon Garcia and Benjamin Farmer.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-50443638882178070112014-12-07T14:46:00.000-08:002015-12-13T13:09:18.072-08:00The Raven (2012)Director: James McTeigue Writers: Ben Livingston & Hannah Shakespeare<br>
Film Score: Lucas Vidal Cinematography: Danny Ruhlmann<br>
Starring: John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve and Brendan Gleeson<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAOTYYR5bsPQ2lwAY8dK1ztEIuRql5QHqV6AwYmA6DHCep4nTPaPsRxwn7k0zCUL_hmw6Aov7t5fnfWeTQlx5LZg1cctHOl5HAFd-F9U1v_Cp5hpZh-6UItG7OwldlCwHZvgaUOjTXw8Ql/s1600/raven2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAOTYYR5bsPQ2lwAY8dK1ztEIuRql5QHqV6AwYmA6DHCep4nTPaPsRxwn7k0zCUL_hmw6Aov7t5fnfWeTQlx5LZg1cctHOl5HAFd-F9U1v_Cp5hpZh-6UItG7OwldlCwHZvgaUOjTXw8Ql/s320/raven2.jpg" /></a></div>
Ever since the success of Robert Downey Jr.’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001OQCV6A/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001OQCV6A&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=O6K6OLLTWO2EJA22"><u>Sherlock Holmes</u></a> films, filmmakers have been attempting to create their own spin on Victorian era detection in the hopes of emulating that success. In Britain, their new Sherlock Holmes television series <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004132HZS/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004132HZS&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=GWVXD355KRBE45GI"><u>Sherlock</u></a> is set in the present day so they came up with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AATGDUC/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00AATGDUC&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=WFVWSSM2G7LOSR5N"><u>Ripper Street</u></a>, centered on the time and the place of the Jack the Ripper killings. That series stars the great Matthew McFadden as a police detective solving rather intricately planned murders. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005S9EJ8W/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B005S9EJ8W&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=OLD4DWYI37DNJWDR"><u>The Raven</u></a> is an attempt to do the same thing in America, with Edgar Alan Poe as the detective. Unfortunately the filmmakers chose as their star John Cusack, who not only pales in comparison to Robert Downey Jr., but pales in comparison to Edgar Alan Poe. The film tries for the same type of humor and action, and isn’t bad in the later. The screenplay by TV writer Hannah Shakespeare is definitely helped by Hollywood veteran Ben Livingston and had some real potential, but the acting is really bad, so bad in fact that despite the writing the end result is a tired, clichéd film that goes nowhere and is incredibly disappointing.
<p>
The film begins with a shot of John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe sitting in the park. He leans his head back, shot from above, while a raven flies beneath the daytime moon. As the sky turns dark, a scream is heard and police race through the streets to an apartment building where two women are strangled and the killer has escaped the locked room. The scene then shifts to a bar where Cusack attempts to get a drink on the promise of a review of his to be published, but instead he winds up being forcibly ejected from the premises. When Baltimore homicide detective Luke Evans looks at the crime scene and realizes it’s exactly like the story “Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Poe, he calls Cusack in for questioning. It’s only when a second murder, of a critic of Poe no less, done in the style of “The Pit and the Pendulum” happens that Evans looks to Cusack for help rather than as a suspect. Meanwhile, Cusack has fallen in love with a young woman, Alice Eve, whose father, Brendan Gleeson, hates him. She wants him to announce their engagement at the costume ball her father is throwing for Baltimore society, but when the killer leaves a clue that the next murder will be done in the style of “The Masque of the Red Death” he thinks it may not be the right time. Evans fills the party with his men, but when a horse and rider enter the ballroom, Eve is kidnapped in the confusion and Cusack is forced to write more stories to keep her alive.
<p>
The screenplay probably looked very good. While not an original idea--a murderer being inspired by the macabre tales of a horror writer--the addition of Edgar Allan Poe as the writer and the nineteenth-century setting must have seemed like a great way to capitalize on the popularity of films like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007K3JFUQ/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B007K3JFUQ&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=EPUWVTRLC23LJU53"><u>Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows</u></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005LAIHYU/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B005LAIHYU&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=UFOKP2AIJR4DIKGQ"><u>Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter</u></a>. And it should have worked. The major problem is with the acting, and it absolutely sinks the film. John Cusack is horribly miscast as the haunted writer. Most of the time he simply looks bored, which is how he plays in most of his films. Add to that the unbelievably bad acting of Alice Eve, a minor actor with an unimpressive resume of films, and the wooden stiffness of Luke Evans and there is no way for the film to recover. In their hands the lines become hollow and unbelievable and their actions perfunctory. The production design, by Roger Ford is by far the best thing the film has going for it. The settings are all equally impressive and while a similar blue tint as is used in the <b>Sherlock Holmes</b> films is used on the negative in places, the sepia tone of most of the interior scenes is a vast improvement over that film. Director James McTeigue, who helmed the first <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000P0J0AQ/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000P0J0AQ&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=GQARIG3JBGPYW365"><u>Matrix</u></a> film, does what he can with what he’s given, but despite some terrific setups--the shot with Eve buried alive, for instance--the bad acting foils him at every turn. Being a huge fan of Poe, I wanted to like <b>The Raven</b> a lot, and had the production been able to afford a better cast I might have. As it stands, however, it is another example of a promising screenplay gone horribly wrong.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-28818305738678577372014-11-23T11:54:00.000-08:002015-12-13T13:08:22.321-08:00The Way of the Gun (2000)Director: Christopher McQuarrie Writer: Christopher McQuarrie<br>
Film Score: Joe Kraemer Cinematography: Dick Pope<br>
Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Ryan Phillippe, James Caan and Geoffrey Lewis<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF7VxnA5KbhgyW1kzN3bVaE0yJXG6SuJbqFR2vnOnZMfzGX9Quwq4N7Mbm7vnY8zAKbwEmb5caoAjXwJ8YSDurdPbSZR6mDmGpFJkcPt-RS9THb9FUFa_eQkMlGWKmbI3XQUl_dqyPDg0m/s1600/waygun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF7VxnA5KbhgyW1kzN3bVaE0yJXG6SuJbqFR2vnOnZMfzGX9Quwq4N7Mbm7vnY8zAKbwEmb5caoAjXwJ8YSDurdPbSZR6mDmGpFJkcPt-RS9THb9FUFa_eQkMlGWKmbI3XQUl_dqyPDg0m/s320/waygun.jpg" /></a></div>
Maybe this seemed new and fresh back in 2000, I don’t know, but it sure seems dull and lifeless today. I came to this film because of Christopher McQuarrie’s reputation. Though I wasn’t a big fan of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005V9HH/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00005V9HH&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=NHCIOTP3375ZES2V"><u>The Usual Suspects</u></a>--and quite frankly think that his winning the Academy Award for that film is a bit suspect--I have been a big fan of his ever since, especially the films he has written for Tom Cruise, including <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001TUZG4K/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001TUZG4K&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=4YJ2TNZ7O55DNO4F"><u>Valkyrie</u></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00SW99ZM0/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00SW99ZM0&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=J4WHMDYLVZMKRCV3"><u>Jack Reacher</u></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00K2CHX9C/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00K2CHX9C&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=XMQY4MWMGCADVEBF"><u>Edge of Tomorrow</u></a>. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005QJHP/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00005QJHP&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=F63LQZKMBEA57S4H"><u>The Way of the Gun</u></a>, however, was made in the wake of his Oscar success and unwisely puts him in the director’s chair as well. It’s a recipe that doesn’t work, in my estimation, and fails on nearly every level possible. It’s not a bad movie, per se, it simply sets up expectations all across the board and lives up to none of them. It tries for a Tarantino or Leonard type humor but only achieves it occasionally and even then in a lesser way. It seems to also try for a Peckinpah or Tarantino style of violence, but then seems to completely shy away from it. And while attempting a Leone type of visual style, the digital images and artificial set designs make it look more like a TV movie. It’s a combination crime-western-noir film that doesn’t do any of the genres justice.
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The film begins outside of a nightclub. Benicio Del Toro is sitting on the car of Henry Griffin who is tricked out with the kind of super-perm worn by Dee Snider of Twisted Sister. The alarm goes off and Griffin’s girlfriend, the great Sarah Silverman, simply goes off, cursing every name in the book at Del Toro and companion Ryan Phillippe. When Phillippe confronts them in the street Silverman is still delivering a continuous stream of insults and images of how Griffin is going to beat him up. In what is probably the best moment of the film, Phillippe begins the fight not by hitting Griffin but by punching Silverman right in the face with all his might. Del Toro and Phillippe are small-time hoods, faced with the choice of crime or minimum wage. In a sperm donor clinic--the one other humorous scene in the film--they overhear a phone conversation about a surrogate mother, Juliette Lewis, who is having a baby for a rich couple and decide to kidnap her for the ransom. What they don’t realize is that the husband is a mob front man who has bodyguards on the surrogate and an expert cleanup man in James Caan. It’s a convoluted story that includes Geoffrey Lewis as one of Caan’s operatives, and red-haired Dylan Kussman--who never really broke free from his role in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6305144168/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=6305144168&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=O7PUGNY55XHF2XIT"><u>Dead Poet’s Society</u></a>--as an obstetrician.
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Christopher McQuarrie claims that he wanted to do something unique in film, that the imposed morality from as far back as the production code days was still ubiquitous in Hollywood and that he wanted to change that to a more realistic look at crime. The problem is there’s a reason for the Hollywood style and that is because fantasy is more interesting than reality. While most of the characters lack any kind of moral center, it doesn’t lend any more interest to the film. In fact, Phillippe, who narrates some of the film, says that he and Del Toro have made an effort to fly under the legal radar, and then wind up shooting two of the bodyguards as well as an innocent woman as they are kidnapping Juliette Lewis. It doesn’t make sense, and it weakens the association for the audience with the protagonists. James Caan is about the only interesting character in the film, and his direction is ponderously slow. He lacks the vitality that we know he has in abundance, and instead of using that to his advantage McQuarrie quashes it under a misguided attempt at gravitas. Geoffrey Lewis is wasted in a small role, while Juliette Lewis and Kussman never achieve anything like verisimilitude. <b>The Way of the Gun</b> has its moments--and inventive five-mile-per-hour car chase among them--but they are too far and few between, and the rest of the film unfolds like a long stretch of Midwestern interstate. Not recommended.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-85604019393808035972014-08-11T09:14:00.001-07:002015-12-13T12:59:05.597-08:00Jumper (2008)Director: Doug Liman Writers: David S. Goyer & Jim Uhls<br>
Film Score: John Powell Cinematography: Barry Peterson<br>
Starring: Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson and Samuel L. Jackson<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMvcEgUXPs02HYQ_5N7vn077GtKfo3LcPf8OP2HVWS-wr1kWWQEvYu_OQ1f_6fJDGMVIh0wQxC4OeAcUfKs4YbZPTrbCSYnXQN8Ok7__LI2M_XIGN7mqa2YQnYXK8TgV3w0cnfJBLPMwpY/s1600/jumper.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMvcEgUXPs02HYQ_5N7vn077GtKfo3LcPf8OP2HVWS-wr1kWWQEvYu_OQ1f_6fJDGMVIh0wQxC4OeAcUfKs4YbZPTrbCSYnXQN8Ok7__LI2M_XIGN7mqa2YQnYXK8TgV3w0cnfJBLPMwpY/s320/jumper.jpg" /></a></div>
This film is absolutely maddening. There is nothing worse that watching characters who make stupid, nonsensical choices. You want to grab them by the shirt and smack some sense into them but, no, they go right on being idiots. It’s a shame because the premise had so much potential, and to be honest the film looks great and should have been a huge hit. But when the script has characters behaving like morons, and there’s no one around to tell them to change it . . . it’s absolutely maddening. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00177Y9ZC/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00177Y9ZC&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Jumper</u></a> began its existence as a young adult novel by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765357690/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0765357690&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Steven Gould</u></a>, but when it came time to produce a screenplay the studio combined elements of the first three novels in the series and left all of the motivation on the writing room floor. Director Doug Liman should have known better. He directed the first film, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00023B1LC/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00023B1LC&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>The Bourne Identity</u></a>, in the Bourne franchise and went on to produce the next two. The fact that he didn’t take the screenwriters to task for their glaring omissions is disappointing in the extreme.
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The film begins with teenager in school who falls through the ice in a river in Ann Arbor and suddenly teleports to the public library. Once he learns how to control this power he leaves his father, Michael Rooker, and heads out on his own. First stop, robbing a bank. But instead of taking a little money and moving on to the next bank, no, he takes as much as he can carry, which alerts Samuel L. Jackson that there must be a jumper involved. This is only the first of the boneheaded decisions that this character makes. Eight years later he’s Hayden Christensen and he’s living in style, traveling the world, and oblivious that Jackson is onto him. Then we see Jackson capture another jumper with electricity and kill him. Why? We never learn any reason why Jackson is so angry or why he feels he has to kill jumpers. There is simply no explanation. In one of Christensen’s hops he goes to London and visits a bar where Jamie Bell is and Bell knows he a jumper. How? I have no idea. Going through the videotapes at the bank, Jackson is able to trace Christensen back to his apartment and nearly captures him. But Christensen escapes and after taking some time to recover, he goes to find his childhood sweetheart back in his hometown and they plan a trip to Rome together. But when they get there Bell is waiting, along with two of Jackson’s associates called Paladins. And speaking of Paladins, Diane Lane is wasted in a tiny role whose purpose is only to set up a sequel that, mercifully, never came.
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Just one example of the moronic choices that Christensen makes is when he goes back to find his girlfriend, Rachel Bilson. She manages to escape from Rome and gets on a plane while Christensen jumps to follow Bell and discovers that the Paladins not only want to kill the jumpers but their families too. And that includes Bilson. Christensen makes his way to her apartment and when he sees Jackson coming up the stairs all he has to do is jump with Bilson somewhere, anywhere, and explain it to her in relative peace. Does he do that? Of course not. He doesn’t want to shock her, I get it, but it’s too late for that. So he dinks around and waits until the last possible second, when Jackson is already through the door, before jumping with her--<i>which he was going to have to do anyway</i>--leaving a hole that Jackson can come through and follow him. And there are a half dozen more similar hesitations that make no sense. Jump already, then figure things out. Unfortunately the screenwriters were trying to manufacture suspense where it didn’t actually exist and ruined what otherwise could have been a very effective film. And I wanted to like the film. It was slick and the effects were great, but unfortunately it was all for nothing. <b>Jumper</b> was a great idea that was worth filming and was unfortunately ruined by a bad screenplay.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-80447670357534669882014-08-04T20:51:00.002-07:002015-12-13T12:58:31.745-08:00The Long Gray Line (1955)Director: John Ford Writer: Edward Hope<br>
Film Score: George Dunning Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr.<br>
Starring: Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp and Robert Francis <p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgULKmUC5d3Fl5sPwlkYjWb64TiHHWBwDhDrVAjGKBQRWfXcoTgV_IRy2jT35NFgVY6N71yYGLHppmaXt_gDVO8SDTEhh6q8-onuF6cWo3ovruhksjNUYH6phLIAYTuDXztW3i-DC59Aj60/s1600/lgrayl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgULKmUC5d3Fl5sPwlkYjWb64TiHHWBwDhDrVAjGKBQRWfXcoTgV_IRy2jT35NFgVY6N71yYGLHppmaXt_gDVO8SDTEhh6q8-onuF6cWo3ovruhksjNUYH6phLIAYTuDXztW3i-DC59Aj60/s320/lgrayl.jpg" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005RYKW/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00005RYKW&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=YHEVP5EBOI6YDCAR"><u>The Long Gray Line</u></a> is sentimentalized story of the life of a West Point sergeant. John Ford is at the helm, but even with his gravitas he can’t save it from descending into schmaltz. Tyrone Power isn’t any more convincing with his Irish brogue than Orson Welles was in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00004W229/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00004W229&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=KCVYVFSH4QLI74EP"><u>The Lady from Shanghai</u></a>. It’s a widescreen Technicolor dud of a film that boasts a ton of character actors but can’t seem to get it’s bloated expectations off the ground. The film is based on the autobiography of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0911853170/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0911853170&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=XSOP4FOFEYIR6OCA"><u>Marty Maher</u></a>, and the title is a reference to the continuation of the tradition at the school and the gray uniforms the cadets wear. Producer Jerry Wald originally planed to make the film at RKO but the studio felt that his price was too high and declined. Wald eventually managed to convince Columbia to purchase the rights and John Ford was brought in to direct. This was Ford’s first film after undergoing eye surgery and it was the first film he shot in CinemaScope. The production also received permission from the school and the exteriors were shot on the West Point campus.
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Tyrone Power plays an aging West Point sergeant whom the military wants to retire. In desperation he goes to see President Eisenhower to ask to keep his job. Once there, he tells the story of coming to the U.S. from Ireland in 1905 and working as a busboy in the school chow hall. After falling too far into debt from breaking dishes, he takes his citizenship test and enlists as a cadet. His nemesis in these early days is corporal Peter Graves, but there are plenty of other corny turn-of-the-century cadets like Martin Milner to go around. When he decks Graves, he gets transferred to Ward Bond’s sports outfit and falls in love with an Irish cook, Maureen O’Hara. That is, until he sees her going on a picnic with Graves. It turns out, however, that this was just a ploy by Bond, and when Power proposes she says yes. After a few years O’Hara saves enough money to bring his father, Donald Crip, over from Ireland as well. While Power wants to get out and make his way in the world, circumstances conspire to keep him in West Point for the rest of his career.
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Though John Ford’s westerns are some of my favorite films his family dramas, like How Green was my Valley, leave me utterly cold. And this one is no exception. I came to the film through actor Robert Francis, who had been so compelling in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000MGTQ7K/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000MGTQ7K&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=LXBWN26JTWRUM5ED"><u>The Caine Mutiny</u></a>. Unfortunately he died in a plane crash after finishing this film. He had been voted one of the screen’s “Promising Personalities” of 1954, but only made four films in his brief career. That alone makes the film worth watching, but little else does. The acting is broad and phony and the characterizations are very one-dimensional. All of the principals seem as if they are on a Broadway stage, yelling their lines and with little actual motivation. Power and O’Hara are Irish stereotypes with absolutely no subtlety. It’s the story of a man who gave his life to an institution, but the audience has absolutely no sense of who he is as an actual man. <b>The Long Gray Line</b> is decidedly not my kind of film but, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, for people who like this sort of film this is the sort of film they will like. neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-69832450949850195802014-07-08T14:59:00.003-07:002015-12-13T12:57:40.809-08:00America (2014)Director: Dinesh D’Souza Writers: Dinesh D’Souza & John Sullivan<br>
Music: Bryan E. Miller Cinematography: Andrew P.C. Smith<br>
Starring: Dinesh D’Souza, Ted Cruz, Jagdish Bhagwati and Stanley Kurtz<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWJ1MvFRtb660G_riZpvBiUe8Bkggf0pOpaGzmZD0BHNOkDqRZN6u2o97sEkfQReNJX7tYuqePOcsENfJwtmm3BqwRwkaClU7EX49F5HUGtqYdTPZalq9uw4x_0S1hyphenhypheni2vY4PBDLiM3YfB/s1600/DSOUZA.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWJ1MvFRtb660G_riZpvBiUe8Bkggf0pOpaGzmZD0BHNOkDqRZN6u2o97sEkfQReNJX7tYuqePOcsENfJwtmm3BqwRwkaClU7EX49F5HUGtqYdTPZalq9uw4x_0S1hyphenhypheni2vY4PBDLiM3YfB/s320/DSOUZA.png" /></a></div>
Well, I really fell face-first into this one, but it serves me right. I don’t like to know a lot about films before I see them. To get the full impact, the less I know the better. The very misleading tag lines I read for this were something about what the world would be like if America didn’t exist. Sound’s cool, right? An alternative history story that imagines British control of North America. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. <b>America</b> is a jingoistic, right-wing propaganda piece full of lies and misdirection, something that feels more like a Fox News special report than a feature film. It’s nothing that sane people need to concern themselves with and is better off ignored. I had a weird feeling right from the start--after, of course, I realized I was watching a documentary--when the host, director and writer Dinesh D’Souza, called his previous film a runaway hit. Really? I’d never heard of it. But that’s only because I don’t watch films that lie to my face.
<p>
D’Souza, like all good right-wing radicals in this country, has only one purpose: to gain control of the government so that it can continue exploiting and robbing the poor and lining the pockets of the wealthy and taking a scorched-earth policy in doing so. He begins his screed by attempting to discredit historian Howard Zinn, saying that the author is only trying to make us ashamed for being Americans. In the first place, that’s not what Zinn ever tried to do. In the second place, D’Souza’s ultra simplistic summarizing of Zinn’s most famous work, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060838655/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060838655&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=7MPG6ACOZH6356ZG"><u>A People’s History of the United States</u></a>, is in itself a pack of lies. But be that as it may, he then goes on to say that Euro-Americans were not responsible for the genocide of the native populations of North America, it was just the diseases that wiped them out. He says that it was totally okay for the United States to appropriate half of Mexico, because Mexicans like it here. Worst of all, he makes the completely unethical argument that slavery was okay because everyone was doing it, even blacks. He uses isolated instances of individuals to make his specious arguments and then spins them to make it appear that it applies in all cases, completely ignoring the mountains of facts that show his arguments to be bald-face lies.
<p>
Once he’s finished fabricating history, he takes us up to the present and begins the right-wing radical approach to any argument: making stuff up. He goes on to bash the president’s push to get Americans health care coverage with more lies. He makes up all kinds of lies about how great capitalism is by telling us that we don’t have to buy that I-Phone or see that movie if we don’t want to, completely ignoring the fact that we do have to buy energy for homes and transportation, as well as insurance and health care, and that corporations are raping the land and polluting our natural resources and gouging us in every conceivable just to turn a buck. It’s the same garbage we’ve all heard before and it isn’t any more convincing now. Lies never are. Finally he comes to his real point, a preemptive smear campaign against Hillary Clinton before the run up to her presidency. It’s pathetic. It’s incredibly disingenuous. It’s downright evil. Do yourself a favor and don’t be sucked into the misleading advertising surrounding this sham of a film. Watch <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002W1HBNO/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002W1HBNO&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=3NC6UWNHXMFCPWOW"><u>Howard Zinn</u></a>'s film instead and stay away from Dinesh D’Souza’s <b>America</b>. It’s not anyplace I want to live.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-9918003319372302812014-05-24T19:51:00.000-07:002015-12-13T12:57:15.290-08:00Sylvia Scarlett (1935)Director: George Cukor Writers: Gladys Unger & John Collier<br>
Film Score: Roy Webb Cinematography: Joseph H. August<br>
Starring: Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Brian Aherne and Edmund Gwenn<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHXP7BfxT_q1NWY1bUF-UobmxCzLoSCTkScdbCHnPpT1yP9uY1YLN6bZUcnrXWXHQA8rLcktOWcaumf-7nF8Ng2zm04xuVaBNtoEYTbMgbPSB9WhxWJh6uBfQ5CPPFDqadHGMfxA3BTvnX/s1600/sylvia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHXP7BfxT_q1NWY1bUF-UobmxCzLoSCTkScdbCHnPpT1yP9uY1YLN6bZUcnrXWXHQA8rLcktOWcaumf-7nF8Ng2zm04xuVaBNtoEYTbMgbPSB9WhxWJh6uBfQ5CPPFDqadHGMfxA3BTvnX/s320/sylvia.jpg" /></a></div>
In 1935 Katherine Hepburn went to RKO studio head Pandro Berman on the success of only a few films she had made, and all but bullied him to allow her to film <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000KJT7QE/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000KJT7QE&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=LLSBWGS3VKVXWOYH"><u>Sylvia Scarlett</u></a> based on the novel by Scotsman Compton Mackenzie, so sure of its success that they also lobbied for a percentage of the profits. But at a test screening, when Hepburn and Cukor realized how bad it was, they begged Berman not to release it in exchange for making their next film for free. Already out a million dollars on the production, however, he was hardly going to shelve it, and probably thought it would teach them a lesson when he released it anyway. The film tanked so bad at the box office that she was indebted to Berman for the rest of her time at RKO, and her career only really recovered after teaming with Cary Grant again in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004GJYR7I/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004GJYR7I&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20&linkId=BVNQHW3AZCWC4SK3"><u>Bringing up Baby</u></a>. The only thing of any note about the picture is that it was the very first teaming of Hepburn and Grant.
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The film begins in Marseilles in the aftermath of the death of Katherine Hepburn’s mother. When father Edmund Gwenn confesses that he has embezzled funds from his company, she gives him her dowry and dresses like a man so that they can escape to England ahead of the police. They meet Cary Grant on the passage over. He looks at them with great suspicion and he eventually turns them into the customs officers who discover the lace that Gwenn was smuggling over from France. It turns out that Grant is a thief himself, and used the two as decoys so that he could get his own good smuggled in. When the three meet again on the train they make a pact to go in together and begin running small cons in London together. The only problem is Hepburn is entirely too moral to go through with them all, much to the consternation of Grant. Eventually they take to the countryside with a comedy variety show where they meet Brian Aherne, the only one who is able to coax her back into a dress.
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By far the biggest problem with the film is Hepburn, but it seems everyone in the cast is guilty of overacting. She is utterly unconvincing as a man, and whether it’s putting on a Cockney accent or speaking French or pretending to be drunk, Hepburn’s performance is entirely too broad and over the top. It’s actually painful to watch. Most of the plot is simply an excuse to get the cast into costumes and act crazy. Brian Aherne, as the painter playboy is just as loud and obnoxious as the rest of the cast when he shows up, though Dennie Moore as the wacky maid out shouts just about everyone. Cary Grant seems to be trying way too hard, which seems to me the sign of a weak script and poor direction, but he was the only one in the production who garnered positive notices. On loan from Paramount, he had been doing far more serious roles, and the comic lightness he displayed was more like what he would play later in his career. <b>Sylvia Scarlett</b> is one of those films where the audience of the day got it right and it was a box office dud for good reason. neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-68584536709338251552014-04-11T16:00:00.001-07:002015-12-13T12:56:46.153-08:00Lady in the Lake (1947)Director: Robert Montgomery Writer: Steve Fisher<br>
Film Score: David Snell Cinematography: Paul Vogel<br>
Starring: Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Leon Ames and Jayne Meadows<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJLHZspx_NTtXQ7TzAacv-PiM6CSBZiuU3GXAq715FZbpiJ8gOVGemltWZp9S_abJGdJ6-Kl9O46TLsOh8WNJazEsQgu0pjY45MzMeut0a2LU8MimjK0wGMF_CK2Wcx1CmTWcJkFMClID1/s1600/litl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJLHZspx_NTtXQ7TzAacv-PiM6CSBZiuU3GXAq715FZbpiJ8gOVGemltWZp9S_abJGdJ6-Kl9O46TLsOh8WNJazEsQgu0pjY45MzMeut0a2LU8MimjK0wGMF_CK2Wcx1CmTWcJkFMClID1/s320/litl.jpg" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000H0JD88/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000H0JD88&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Lady in the Lake</u></a> should have worked. On paper, why wouldn’t the audience be drawn in to a completely subjective experience, where they see everything through the eyes of the protagonist? Well, because it’s weird, that’s why. To an audience thoroughly steeped in a particular kind of subjectivism that still relies on a third-person perspective, it’s just odd. What’s also strange is that Robert Montgomery begins the film with a prologue, just him sitting at a desk talking straight into the camera at the audience. Here he tries to turn the first person narrative around by making out that he’s also the writer of the piece. Again, the attempt at manipulation is off-putting. Even in the first-person narratives of detective fiction there’s no conceit that the detective is actually writing the story on paper, with a typewriter, much less submitting the thing to a publisher. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394758250/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0394758250&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Raymond Chandler</u></a>’s original novel begins at a perfume company, not a magazine, and so the whole charade seems unnecessary.
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The camera (as Montgomery) goes to the publisher to see about a story, when he’s told that it was just a ruse to get him to work on a case for the Leon Ames without his knowledge. His assistant, Audrey Totter, wants to find out where Ames’ wife has disappeared to so that divorce papers can be signed, one assumes so that she can become the next Mrs. Ames. Montgomery’s first stop is the boyfriend’s house. Dick Simmons invites him in, but winds up decking him and the detective wakes up in jail. Police chief Tom Tully would like to arrest him, but since he’s a private detective he’ll settle for running him out of town. The next lead, a murder up at the lake house of Ames, sets him into the mountains, though not really because the audience never sees it. It’s here that Montgomery takes another break in the action, another desecration of the fourth wall, and talks to the audience. It’s not until Montgomery goes back to see Simmons, and finds him dead, that a real murder mystery emerges. Of course there are times when the audience sees Montgomery, whenever he looks into a mirror, and I found myself wishing he would do it more often. One of the annoying traits that Montgomery also indulges in is whistling while he’s off camera, just to let the audience know he’s still there, that we are still in his viewpoint.
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The first time I watched this film I though I had the wrong disc in the player because it began with Capraesque Christmas title cards. Ironic? Perhaps, but it simply adds to the general confusion of the picture. The biggest flaw by far is that the entire film seems as if it’s all exposition. It’s just Montgomery telling Totter what he found out without the audience getting to experience very much of it. And that’s the worst sin for any narrative medium: telling instead of showing. There are a couple of good scenes, the discovery of Simmons’ body and the car wreck toward the end, but for the most part there’s a sense that the scripting arose out of a desire to write around the gimmick instead of attempting to work the gimmick around a good script. The actors behave oddly as well because of this and so none of the performances are very good. All one has to do is imagine how the film would have looked without the subjective viewpoint and it would be incredibly boring to watch, which it almost is now. All of this self-conscious manipulation is what ruins the film. <b>Lady in the Lake</b> is a valiant attempt at something new and different for Hollywood, but like all risk-taking there’s a chance of failure. And this one definitely failed.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-37022807014958727442014-03-16T14:37:00.001-07:002015-12-13T12:56:19.694-08:00The Buster Keaton Story (1957)Director: Sidney Sheldon Writers: Sidney Sheldon & Robert Smith<br>
Film Score: Victor Young Cinematography: Loyal Griggs<br>
Starring: Donald O’Connor, Ann Blyth, Rhonda Fleming and Peter Lorre<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy-lFxiiAYEuOR3VLBrHI6KcBZ2QJW-7XhVLCg1rRr1eqIFS3nkKjpQTRGtq13fIgAt63LwPECk8FmjhlYyEW4g3DZzyTCSfaCo-Zg8eXY5IJGktUOYtbD1JA9o7ERVIwFCVEC_LbnHzdJ/s1600/bkstory.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy-lFxiiAYEuOR3VLBrHI6KcBZ2QJW-7XhVLCg1rRr1eqIFS3nkKjpQTRGtq13fIgAt63LwPECk8FmjhlYyEW4g3DZzyTCSfaCo-Zg8eXY5IJGktUOYtbD1JA9o7ERVIwFCVEC_LbnHzdJ/s320/bkstory.jpg" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009X23JFO/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B009X23JFO&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>The Buster Keaton Story</u></a> is a train wreck of a film. Every single solitary thing in the film is a lie. Even worse, though, is that it makes one of the most wonderful human beings ever to grace the screen into something he never was: a loser. Keaton had his ups and downs to be sure, and the downside was considerable, but he never felt sorry for himself and he never doubted his own talent. This film makes him out to be an idiot, something else Keaton never was. If you want to see the real Keaton in all his glory, I cannot recommend highly enough the BBC series <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000F2NF/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00000F2NF&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow</u></a>. This three part miniseries tells the story of his life with incredible reverence and accuracy, the story of an everyman comedian who is impossible not to fall in love with. This film, on the other hand, is such a complete distortion of that life that it leaves nothing left of the truth with which it supposedly began.
<p>
To detail all of the inaccuracies of the film it would be necessary to go over every single shot, but I’ll make it as brief as I can. The film begins with his parents in a vaudeville road show with Buster part of the act as a child, getting big laughs when he falls off a table and is knocked out cold. This is probably the most realistic part of the story, but it only lasts a few minutes. The film then has Buster going to Hollywood in 1920, sneaking his way onto the lot and demanding to direct his own pictures. Nothing of the sort ever happened. In 1917 Buster went to work with Fatty Arbuckle in New York City and spent three years with the comedian doing everything from stunts, to extra work, to co-starring. His first feature didn’t come about until 1920, but in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6305701245/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=6305701245&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>The Saphead</u></a>, replacing Douglas Fairbanks who had played the role on stage. Only with the success of that film did Joseph Schenck, Buster’s brother-in-law, then give Keaton his own unit to make shorts.
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A couple of gags from his shorts are recreated, though inexplicably they use different names for the films, but his features are barely mentioned at all and only then in headlines in Variety. Most of the picture focuses on an asinine pursuit of a famous movie actress, Rhonda Fleming, who looks more like Marilyn Monroe in the film than a twenties starlet. Meanwhile, a studio assistant, Ann Blyth, falls head over heels for Donald O’Connor as Keaton and yet he completely ignores her. She even marries him while he’s in a drunken haze--all off camera, of course--and stands by his side while he is broke and out of work, another lie since he was always working for small studios because of his reputation and never walked the streets destitute. In actuality Keaton first married Natalie Talmadge and had two sons with her, and it was after this marriage that he built his giant mansion in Beverly Hills. He married Mae Scriven during his alcoholic binge, and finally Eleanor Norris whom Blyth is supposed to represent.
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As I said in my review of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001DE29SS/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001DE29SS&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Chaplin</u></a>, it’s almost impossible to impersonate a famous silent screen star. O’Connor does all right at mimicking some of Keaton’s physicality, but in no way does he remind anyone of Buster Keaton. And while the film is supposedly set in the twenties and thirties, it all looks pretty much like the fifties, from the phony sound stages to the residential Hollywood streets, to the insipid TV-style direction by Sidney Sheldon. The female characters are straight out of a fifties soap opera, and Peter Lorre is the most improbable director of comedies one could ever think of. Unlike <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016B6ZK6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0016B6ZK6&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Man of a Thousand Faces</u></a> from the same year, in which Lon Chaney’s story was romanticized but much of his actual story still kept intact, this film is so false, and feels so false, that it has almost nothing to recommend it. The one positive thing <b>The Buster Keaton Story</b> did, however, was to pay for Keaton’s “ranch” in Woodland Hills where he spend the remainder of what he called, “a good life.” As great as Buster Keaton was, that’s how bad this film is.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-16778001073704627852014-02-17T12:45:00.000-08:002015-12-13T12:55:24.581-08:00Red Tails (2012)Director: Anthony Hemingway Writers: John Ridley & Aaron McGruder<br>
Film Score: Terence Blanchard Cinematography: John B. Aaronson<br>
Starring: Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Brian Cranston and Gerald McRaney<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicTjP1T5PHaOagKdUxuLx_YRV0e0_qjdN_crKGhIBFGxsJF5LA4w3F05v_6RvbmFvHxGYTghBM2iYqRMBK-oeiINuwtqGrYaQBKlLYlkVlp6wGojcopbTE0EXWtDUxqwoyXE3lKkYzErD6/s1600/redtls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicTjP1T5PHaOagKdUxuLx_YRV0e0_qjdN_crKGhIBFGxsJF5LA4w3F05v_6RvbmFvHxGYTghBM2iYqRMBK-oeiINuwtqGrYaQBKlLYlkVlp6wGojcopbTE0EXWtDUxqwoyXE3lKkYzErD6/s320/redtls.jpg" /></a></div>
Wow, this film is so incredibly disappointing that I’m almost beside myself. It’s one thing to besmirch the memory of citizen soldiers who gave their lives by mining World War II for video game films like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ALCBTWU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00ALCBTWU&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Company of Heroes</u></a>, but to do the same to men who not only fought the Germans but had to fight their own white, racist comrades as well unconscionable. George Lucas should be ashamed of himself for allowing this script, and this director to produce something this horrible. How you read this script and say “okay,” here’s 60 million, go and make it is difficult to believe, but how can you watch the dailies and not pull the plug on it in the first week? It’s embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t have to be this way. There have been great films about blacks in war, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000JRYOP6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000JRYOP6&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Glory</u></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00441GZ1Y/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00441GZ1Y&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>A Soldier’s Story</u></a> among them. I have no tolerance for this kind of trash. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005LAIGN2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B005LAIGN2&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Red Tails</u></a> is the worst kind of bad film.
<p>
Right from the beginning you know you’re in for something bad. The opening has a mass of American bombers flying a mission and as soon as a few German fighters fly through the formation all--that’s right, all--of the American escorts go chasing after them, leaving the bombers unprotected. This, of course, allows the next wave of German fighters to come through and strafe the hell out of the bombers. From there we cut to the black squadron of clichéd blacks blowing up a train like they’re the Harlem Globetrotters taking down the Washington Generals. Flying back home, one of them sees an Italian woman hanging out laundry, blows her a kiss, then shows up at her door the next day. Cuba Gooding Jr., smokes a pipe and winks at their lack of discipline, while Terrence Howard is in Washington begging Brian Cranston to let them fight in combat or pull the plug on the whole operation and gets them an air cover mission for a landing.
<p>
Almost everything in the script is bad. There’s no angst among the pilots. They’re glib braggarts who care more about how many planes they shoot down than the success of the soldiers they’re supporting at the landing. When the German planes approach, the one German bad guy talks into his mic and tells his flyers that the American pilots are rookies. How the hell could he possibly guess that? And speaking of the mics, no one wears their oxygen masks and so they have to use their free hand to hold the mic up to their mouths when they speak. The fight scenes are so completely done with digital effects that it looks like a video came. None of it looks realistic. The blacks disobey orders whenever they feel like it and leave the landing sight to follow a shot up German plane. That’s right, they abandon their mission! And if that wasn’t enough, all of them call the Germans “Jerries.” Now that’s the British name for the Germans and I can believe that Americans used the term once in a while, but ALL the time, by ALL the blacks? It makes no sense at all.
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And this is just in the first forty minutes of the film. There are, literally, hundreds of things wrong with this film, unbelievable things, insulting things, racist things, historically inaccurate things. The genre reached its zenith with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001NBLVI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0001NBLVI&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Saving Private Ryan</u></a> and the HBO miniseries <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006CXSS/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00006CXSS&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Band of Brothers</u></a> over a decade ago. Since then there have been films like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004U7MQWY/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004U7MQWY&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>The Great Raid</u></a> which, while not necessarily great, are at least interesting. But films like <b>Company of Heroes</b> and <b>Red Tails</b> are not just bad by comparison, they are bad in their own right and should not be allowed to proliferate. To not even make a cursory attempt at historical accuracy is one thing, but to simply overlay a modern sensibility onto an important time in our country’s history and an important struggle for a large part of our population and treat it all like a joke, is insulting. By that definition, <b>Red Tails</b> is the quintessential bad movie.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-84021530099285889772014-02-12T18:14:00.000-08:002023-12-15T06:47:39.870-08:00Forrest Gump (1994)Director: Robert Zemeckis Writer: Eric Roth<br>
Film Score: Alan Silvestri Cinematography: Don Burgess<br>
Starring: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise and Sally Field<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_jqG0h4AMyUPdvxXSxnaA2jTYHaDFbwf3S71KKi7X-ynDKFZPkdBy2twnjyTaawkzgdO0oCBXEd43a9pZU8Z_jfqfy6Oy5N_uLoCloGq9PffSN1IJlVQFfEDZOmU4B4m2s5ROcmYqVsvH/s1600/gump.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_jqG0h4AMyUPdvxXSxnaA2jTYHaDFbwf3S71KKi7X-ynDKFZPkdBy2twnjyTaawkzgdO0oCBXEd43a9pZU8Z_jfqfy6Oy5N_uLoCloGq9PffSN1IJlVQFfEDZOmU4B4m2s5ROcmYqVsvH/s320/gump.jpg" /></a></div>
I hate this film. Hate, as an emotion, is by definition irrational but this actually makes sense. The first few times I saw <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AEFY0F2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00AEFY0F2&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Forrest Gump</u></a> on cable I actively disliked it but couldn’t figure out exactly why. It was this huge blockbuster success and won six Academy Awards, but there was something wrong about the whole thing for me. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I figured out why when I read the awkwardly titled but incredibly insightful essay by Joseph E. Green, “Reality and the Moving Image: The Paranoid Style in American Cinema.” In his essay he calls <b>Forrest Gump</b> “one of the most insidious films ever made. To postulate that utopian societal reconciliation is depicted in the relationship between a mental deficient and a suicidal drug addict is lunacy. The fact that Forrest learns nothing, is in fact incapable of learning, never made a dent in the fantasy-seeking audience. Gump is the perfect soldier and the perfect citizen, one who is happy and content in a world of meaningless symbols, following the orders of authorities and reveling in the wisdom of convention.”
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But this is only the start of the problem for me. Of course everyone is familiar with the story. Gump starts out life both physically and mentally disabled, and while he overcomes the physical challenge nothing changes the mental. He’s in love with his childhood friend, Jenny, but she goes her own way. They cross paths many times during the decades, with Gump conforming to society’s expectations and Jenny doing the opposite. Director Robert Zemeckis manages to insert Gump digitally into some famous scenes and fans simply ate it up. But Green’s point can be taken another step further. Gump is obviously the ultimate conformist, doing whatever society expects of him. What is less obvious, and far more insidious to use Green’s word, is the role that Jenny plays in the film. The reality is that she is just as much under the sway of society as he is. She is a reactionary, plain and simple. Every action she takes is a direct attempt to go against society’s expectations and in that way she is every bit as much a conformist as Gump. This is a concept that was articulated by Lionel Trilling back in 1965:
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Even when a person rejects his culture (as the phrase goes) and rebels against it, he does so in<br>
a culturally determined way: we identify the substance and style of his rebellion as having been<br>
provided by the culture against which it is directed. (Trilling 1965, iv)
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Mykelti Williamson’s role as Bubba is far from “touching,” and felt insultingly racist to me, while Sally Fields’ Mama is trite and clichéd. The only character that I felt was real in any way was Lieutenant Dan. The anger and frustration Gary Sinise displayed in the film was at least honest, and made the one-dimensional conformist characters that inhabit the rest of the film all the more transparently meaningless. And yet Lieutenant Dan is written as a joke in the film, the guy who doesn’t “get it.” But it’s the audience that didn’t get it, and winds up being just as lemming-like as the characters they love in the film. In the end, that is the most telling thing about the popularity of Forrest Gump: the joke is on the audience. They love Forrest and Jenny because they’re just like them, going along with the crowd or reacting against it, totally controlled by what others do and not even realizing it. And then paying millions of dollars for the privilege . As the great Somerset Maugham put it: “If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.” So I won’t lie to you. I hate <b>Forrest Gump</b>.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-23800890207710371552013-12-22T23:24:00.001-08:002015-12-13T12:53:52.128-08:00Company of Heroes (2013)Director: Don Michael Paul Writer: David Reed<br>
Film Score: Frederik Wiedmann Cinematography: Martin Chichov<br>
Starring: Tom Sizemore, Jürgen Prochnow, Chad Michael Collins & Vinnie Jones<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo5u_zm5YaVazMd2KtOFWBKSrllkXqRnh8omDaJoXRpIfWBqKTBOKDy-7Uc6zmEfr-T5Xo3s8PfoJdUargX7G9gNrUB8eycESAWu4cbNpg0_R8kUfBnAJfoU1pfcX3dk092Kaf6krXqZbK/s1600/company.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo5u_zm5YaVazMd2KtOFWBKSrllkXqRnh8omDaJoXRpIfWBqKTBOKDy-7Uc6zmEfr-T5Xo3s8PfoJdUargX7G9gNrUB8eycESAWu4cbNpg0_R8kUfBnAJfoU1pfcX3dk092Kaf6krXqZbK/s320/company.jpg" /></a></div>
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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001NBLVI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0001NBLVI&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Saving Private Ryan</u></a> and the subsequent Tom Hanks produced <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006CXSS/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00006CXSS&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Band of Brothers</u></a>. Even the last great war film prior to the new era, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6305161941/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=6305161941&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>When Trumpets Fade</u></a>, pales in comparison to something like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005U8F4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00005U8F4&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>The Lost Battalion</u></a> in terms of visual impact and dramatic realism. The first thing to know about <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ALCBTWU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00ALCBTWU&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Company of Heroes</u></a> 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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007TKNM4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0007TKNM4&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>The Dirty Dozen</u></a> for example, this one combines it with a bad script and cartoonish action sequences that it never manages to recover from.
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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 <b>Band of Brothers</b>, 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.
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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.
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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 <b>Saving Private Ryan</b>. 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. <b>Company of Heroes</b> 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. neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-62940406324690477762013-11-24T09:25:00.000-08:002015-12-13T12:52:49.521-08:00The Ghost Writer (2010)Director: Roman Polanski Writers: Robert Harris & Roman Polanski<br>
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat Cinematography: Pawel Edelman<br>
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Tom Wilkinson<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh41bpup-7VHU2ouBTTDiWxI0hmnxATQdi3gsSTgHOb4BOui_3adyWV9KZhjxyFbFWlnTAWbMEu5YII8IjIHLvg_yrfmcEd9TFh5O55ZNTwbWxVYoGhwS_AGNoSwx8ejAHiWjJ7y2FCsn9_/s1600/ghostwr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh41bpup-7VHU2ouBTTDiWxI0hmnxATQdi3gsSTgHOb4BOui_3adyWV9KZhjxyFbFWlnTAWbMEu5YII8IjIHLvg_yrfmcEd9TFh5O55ZNTwbWxVYoGhwS_AGNoSwx8ejAHiWjJ7y2FCsn9_/s320/ghostwr.jpg" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0036TGSR6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0036TGSR6&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>The Ghost Writer</u></a> began as a novel by the British author <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439190550/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1439190550&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Robert Harris</u></a>, who has written some very nice World War II related suspense novels like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812977211/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0812977211&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Fatherland</u></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804115486/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0804115486&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Enigma</u></a>. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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, <b>The Ghost Writer</b> is little more than a rather tedious mystery.neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-60716774021988021072013-11-17T13:55:00.001-08:002015-12-13T12:52:10.264-08:00The Tree of Life (2011)Director: Terrence Malick Writer: Terrence Malick<br>
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki<br>
Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain and Fiona Shaw<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOTXx84stt8EaXrzcPG4idu1zbwp2lxwKXTuG8buMIQczNeHq0-FBc8LdfwLqWIv6VDmTXuXIiplMFx1dR274VhZTykmfHjmINF4R7pqfNYLeo5CTVCT3Al0k2AAKBZ9cIKp7eQ1OPwcX2/s1600/treelife.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="202" width="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOTXx84stt8EaXrzcPG4idu1zbwp2lxwKXTuG8buMIQczNeHq0-FBc8LdfwLqWIv6VDmTXuXIiplMFx1dR274VhZTykmfHjmINF4R7pqfNYLeo5CTVCT3Al0k2AAKBZ9cIKp7eQ1OPwcX2/s320/treelife.jpg" /></a></div>
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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416599487/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1416599487&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Do The Movies Have a Future</u></a> 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.
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005LLX582/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B005LLX582&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>The Tree of Life</u></a> 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, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000MR9D5E/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000MR9D5E&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>BBC’s Planet Earth</u></a> 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 <b>The Clock</b>, 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.
<p>
Experimentation with film imagery has been going on since the birth of cinema. Just one early example is the short film <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009Q4W9/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00009Q4W9&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Lot in Sodom</u></a> 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.
<p>
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 <b>The Tree of Life</b>: I never have to watch another Terrence Malick film again. neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5402243667229177595.post-48199324603299792042013-11-16T08:54:00.001-08:002015-12-13T12:51:18.912-08:00Out of Sight (1998)Director: Steven Soderbergh Writer: Scott Frank & Elmore Leonard<br>
Film Score: David Holmes Cinematography: Elliot Davis<br>
Starring: George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames and Albert Brooks<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3yUa2uNYLLx8fP10K5Po2ZGfk3y_DJMQqAwVFOgKadW3-TigmFL0QBDofi1WVb4knwQndGaF53c7ZQ2tItoBQ0h31a0_t4aaqFNOJbIH0r4DrWO5GpdbzqU4TTiuKrZk4jOVJj9lgITaz/s1600/outsight.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3yUa2uNYLLx8fP10K5Po2ZGfk3y_DJMQqAwVFOgKadW3-TigmFL0QBDofi1WVb4knwQndGaF53c7ZQ2tItoBQ0h31a0_t4aaqFNOJbIH0r4DrWO5GpdbzqU4TTiuKrZk4jOVJj9lgITaz/s320/outsight.jpg" /></a></div>
I could say this is a poor man’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0792833279/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0792833279&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Get Shorty</u></a>, but since both films came from the mind of the same author I can only say this is a lesser Elmore Leonard. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0783229402/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0783229402&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Out of Sight</u></a> 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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0064NTZQ2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0064NTZQ2&linkCode=as2&tag=theliclfire-20"><u>Drive</u></a>, 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 <b>Get Shorty</b>, it would have helped. I don’t know. <b>Out of Sight</b> 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. neslowehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17447091120039630701noreply@blogger.com0