Big Fan (2009)

Director: Robert D. Siegel                               Writer: Robert D. Siegel
Film Score: Philip Watts                                  Cinematography: Michael Simmonds
Starring: Patton Oswalt, Kevin Corrigan, Matt Servitto and Michael Rapaport

This is a film that tries to do a number of things and, unfortunately, fails at nearly all of them. On the surface, Big Fan 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 One Hour Photo 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.

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.

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 One Hour Photo 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, Big Fan is just a big flop.

Lake Noir (2011)

Director: Jeffrey Schneider                              Writer: Abel Martinez Jr.
Film Score: Bentley Michaels                          Cinematography: Jeffrey Schneider
Starring: Geno Romo, Heather Wakehouse, Michael Gonzalez and Benjamin Farmer

Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t go anywhere near a film like Lake Noir. In fact, after reviewing Blood Creek 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 The Falls and The Falls: Testament of Love 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.

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.

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. Lake Noir 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.

The Raven (2012)

Director: James McTeigue                              Writers: Ben Livingston & Hannah Shakespeare
Film Score: Lucas Vidal                                  Cinematography: Danny Ruhlmann
Starring: John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve and Brendan Gleeson

Ever since the success of Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes 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 Sherlock is set in the present day so they came up with Ripper Street, 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. The Raven 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.

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.

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 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. 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 Sherlock Holmes 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 Matrix 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 The Raven 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.

The Way of the Gun (2000)

Director: Christopher McQuarrie                   Writer: Christopher McQuarrie
Film Score: Joe Kraemer                              Cinematography: Dick Pope
Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Ryan Phillippe, James Caan and Geoffrey Lewis

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 The Usual Suspects--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 Valkyrie, Jack Reacher and Edge of Tomorrow. The Way of the Gun, 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.

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 Dead Poet’s Society--as an obstetrician.

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. The Way of the Gun 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.

Jumper (2008)

Director: Doug Liman                                   Writers: David S. Goyer & Jim Uhls
Film Score: John Powell                               Cinematography: Barry Peterson
Starring: Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson and Samuel L. Jackson

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. Jumper began its existence as a young adult novel by Steven Gould, 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, The Bourne Identity, 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.

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.

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--which he was going to have to do anyway--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. Jumper was a great idea that was worth filming and was unfortunately ruined by a bad screenplay.

The Long Gray Line (1955)

Director: John Ford                                       Writer: Edward Hope
Film Score: George Dunning                          Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr.
Starring: Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp and Robert Francis

The Long Gray Line 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 The Lady from Shanghai. 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 Marty Maher, 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.

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.

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 The Caine Mutiny. 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. The Long Gray Line 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.

America (2014)

Director: Dinesh D’Souza                              Writers: Dinesh D’Souza & John Sullivan
Music: Bryan E. Miller                                  Cinematography: Andrew P.C. Smith
Starring: Dinesh D’Souza, Ted Cruz, Jagdish Bhagwati and Stanley Kurtz

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. America 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.

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 People’s History of the United States, 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.

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 Howard Zinn's film instead and stay away from Dinesh D’Souza’s America. It’s not anyplace I want to live.

Sylvia Scarlett (1935)

Director: George Cukor                                   Writers: Gladys Unger & John Collier
Film Score: Roy Webb                                    Cinematography: Joseph H. August
Starring: Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Brian Aherne and Edmund Gwenn

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 Sylvia Scarlett 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 Bringing up Baby. The only thing of any note about the picture is that it was the very first teaming of Hepburn and Grant.

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.

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. Sylvia Scarlett is one of those films where the audience of the day got it right and it was a box office dud for good reason.

Lady in the Lake (1947)

Director: Robert Montgomery                           Writer: Steve Fisher
Film Score: David Snell                                   Cinematography: Paul Vogel
Starring: Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Leon Ames and Jayne Meadows

Lady in the Lake 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. Raymond Chandler’s original novel begins at a perfume company, not a magazine, and so the whole charade seems unnecessary.

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.

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. Lady in the Lake 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.

The Buster Keaton Story (1957)

Director: Sidney Sheldon                                  Writers: Sidney Sheldon & Robert Smith
Film Score: Victor Young                                  Cinematography: Loyal Griggs
Starring: Donald O’Connor, Ann Blyth, Rhonda Fleming and Peter Lorre

The Buster Keaton Story 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 Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow. 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.

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 The Saphead, 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.

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.

As I said in my review of Chaplin, 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 Man of a Thousand Faces 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 The Buster Keaton Story 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.

Red Tails (2012)

Director: Anthony Hemingway                            Writers: John Ridley & Aaron McGruder
Film Score: Terence Blanchard                          Cinematography: John B. Aaronson
Starring: Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Brian Cranston and Gerald McRaney

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 Company of Heroes, 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, Glory and A Soldier’s Story among them. I have no tolerance for this kind of trash. Red Tails is the worst kind of bad film.

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.

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.

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 Saving Private Ryan and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers over a decade ago. Since then there have been films like The Great Raid which, while not necessarily great, are at least interesting. But films like Company of Heroes and Red Tails 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, Red Tails is the quintessential bad movie.

Forrest Gump (1994)

Director: Robert Zemeckis                                 Writer: Eric Roth
Film Score: Alan Silvestri                                  Cinematography: Don Burgess
Starring: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise and Sally Field

I hate this film. Hate, as an emotion, is by definition irrational but this actually makes sense. The first few times I saw Forrest Gump 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 Forrest Gump “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.”

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:

         Even when a person rejects his culture (as the phrase goes) and rebels against it, he does so in
         a culturally determined way: we identify the substance and style of his rebellion as having been
         provided by the culture against which it is directed. (Trilling 1965, iv)

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 Forrest Gump.