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442,679 | 819,382 | 132,477 | 5 | Warms the Cockles of Your Heart . | There's not much original in this story of a high school kid who yearns to send rockets into the sky rather than work in the local coal mine . It's all pretty formulaic . But formulas are in such common use because they are dependable . Who would argue with A squared plus B squared equals C squared ? They get the job done . Jake Gyllenhaal is the obsessed kid . He looks ordinary and is fascinated by an arcane subject like rocket design in a way that only a teen ager can be . He lives in a small West Virginia town where everything revolves around the coal mine which , like the town itself , is moribund . He has his mother's love , of course , but his dad ( Chris Cooper ) grew up in the mines and is now a kind of manager , and Gyllenhaal's aspirations occasion some irritation in his father . Cooper wants him to come down in the mines like everybody else instead of fooling around with this nonsense and worshiping Werner von Braun . Cooper makes a particular point of never attending any of Gyllenhaal's experimental launches . Gyllenhaal's teacher ( Laura Dern ) recognizes that the kid is a wizard and supports him . At first the others in town treat him and his interest in rocketry as half loony . One by one , though , the kid draws others into his sphere . A pimply nerd and a handful of other alienated students join him in building rockets that at first explode if anyone looks cross-eyed at them . Eventually others , including a black machinist at the mine , help him build rockets that act , not like inverted pendulums , but like rockets . There are , naturally , some obstacles along the way . His father's constant belittling of him , for one thing . And then there's the matter of finding money for materials , which leads to one or two comic incidents . Then his father is injured in a mine accident for which the company won't pay , so Gyllenhaal must drop out of school and go down and work in the mines for a while , accompanied by plangent violins . But in the end , he is sent to the Science Fair in Indianapolis , where he displays his rockets and their components . The score swells into an orgasmic triumph . ( It's the International Geophysical Year of 1958 . ) Does Gyllenhaal win first prize ? No power on earth could force an answer from me . Gyllenhaal returns to Coal Community , WVA , where he sets off one last big celebratory rocket . The entire town of Coaldorf has attended , everyone bursting with pride . Gyllenhaal dedicates this rocket to everyone who has helped him in his travails , listing them one by one , before finally reaching " my father " - - and , lo , there is Dad edging his way to the front of the crowd ! Final shot : the space shuttle being launched from Cape Canaveral . It's got every cliché in the book but it's kind of sweet too . None of the performances stands out , although Chris Cooper does a good job with the role of the all-but-fossilized , but gentle , father . He's a pretty good actor . Of all the films about adolescents finding their own voice , this one is about average , but it's suitable for family viewing . The kids will understand it as well as the adults , and although their minds may not be exalted , neither will they be turned into suppurating boils . The location shooting is good , too , leading us to understand why Gyllenhaal would like to leave Coalton-sur-mont behind him . |
441,790 | 819,382 | 50,383 | 5 | Is there such a thing as trying too hard ? | A based-on-fact story of Jimmy Piersall , a major league player of the 1950s who suffered what looks like a major depression with some paranoid ideas . Not much could be done with major league mental illnesses at the time , before the French accidentally discovered anti-psychotic meds . The movie ends , as all such movies do whenever possible , on an up-beat note with Piersall ( Tony Perkins ) returning to the Red Sox after defeating his demons . I have no idea how closely the movie sticks to the real facts of Piersall's life , but it certainly hews close to the formula line . Basically , everything is blamed on Piersall's father ( Karl Malden ) , who pushed the kid too hard , brutally sometimes , to excel . Nothing would do but that Piersall not only play for the Sox but that he play the OUTFIELD . Shortstop wasn't good enough . Poor kid . While still in the minors , in Scranton , he brags to his pop that he's the third highest hitter in the league . Malden smiles and says , " Well , that's not first . " Think about that , next time your kid comes home with a B plus on his report card . You want to drive him nuts ? I don't doubt that Piersall's father was pushy about his son's training and career . For all we know there may be as many sports fathers as there are stage mothers . But it seems a bit unfair to make him the sole heavy . It's not easy to drive someone crazy , not as easy as it seems in the movies anyway . It helps a lot , especially with major affective disorders , if you bring something genetic to the party , as numerous studies have shown . Not that genetics explains everything , because one identical twin may " get it " while the other doesn't . Anyway , the movie isn't very satisfying , as a movie . The director , Robert Mulligan , has done better work elsewhere . And Tony Perkins gives a by-the-numbers performance as a madman , with his facial muscles trembling and his eyes bulging . How primitive can you get ? He was a much better ( if entirely different ) kind of psychotic in " Psycho . " An improved script might have helped him . Malden is okay as the well-meaning but destructive father whom Perkins finally tells off at the cathartic climax . Perkins ' wife's role is underwritten and doesn't contribute much as Malden's potential rival . It would have been nice too if we'd seen a little more about baseball , the sport and the career ladder , and less of the formulaic material on having a breakdown . At least your performance on the baseball diamond is something you can do something about . In the grip of mental illness like Piersall's , you're practically helpless , and that's not too dramatic . |
442,521 | 819,382 | 91,541 | 5 | Sometimes Funny , Always Loud and Fast . | Back in the 1950s there were a series of films dealing with problems encountered by an increasingly prosperous and suburban America . Building a house , having your daughter get married , your first child , your first grandchild . Most of them were well written and amusing . " The Money Pit " belongs to that series but , inasmuch as it's already been done , is a little retro . But it's also updated . This isn't the story of a bourgeois family erecting a rural estate , as in " Mister Blandings Builds His Dream House . " This couple ( Tom Hanks and Shelley Long ) aren't married ; they're ( gasp ) cohabiting . Furthermore , it isn't just Daddy who brings home the bacon . Shelley Long works as a violinist in the orchestra of her ex husband , Alex Gudonov . It's different from " Mister Blandings " in other ways too . It's less subdued . The earlier film , which followed in general the same paths to similar laughs , clearly was aimed at an audience of adults who were all moving to Levittowns in 1950 . The gags were mostly conversational and situational . Here the pace is pushed and people shout and have arguments , and the laughs depend far more on collapsing staircases and the disintegration of several stages of platforms against the walls . It's closer to Laurel and Hardy . But , aside from the jokes that the kids will appreciate , there are still some stingingly funny exchanges in the dialog , as when Hanks calls the local plumber and is quizzed by the plumber about things like his age , his insurance , his annual income , his job history . Some good lines are given to Gudonov as the orchestra conductor . At a rehearsal : " The union rules say I must release you for lunch . Those of you with a conscience and a taste for Haydn will not be able to eat it . " And , commiserating with Hanks after Long leaves him : " You have just lost the best woman you will ever meet and you will regret it the rest of your life . Of course , I lost the same woman but it doesn't matter because I am shallow and self centered . " I don't want to give away any more of the jokes because , pratt falls aside , there aren't really that many of them . You've seen most of the jokes before in earlier movies or in sitcoms . The filthy water coming from the faucet , the exploding oven , the collapsing mattress , the leaking roof . But they're still amusing and some of the dialog is sprightly , like Shelley Long , a pretty blond who assumes a most inelegant position while bending over or squatting . She's like a young kid who is unaware of the way she's throwing her limbs around . If there isn't much that's new , the film still floats along good-naturedly and gets the job of diversion done . |
442,616 | 819,382 | 120,787 | 5 | A Regular Sheepshank | SPOILERS . It's hard to imagine why they keep remaking classics , aside from the desire to make more money . Frederick Knott's mystery can be played a number of different ways . A TV production some years ago used Anthony Quayle , a splendid actor , as Chief Inspector Hubbard . It followed the script precisely and was dull . This version is updated , more explicit , and more complicated , a sheepshank compared to the original square Knott , and not only isn't an improvement over the play but is well below the standard set by Hitchcock's rendition in 1954 . Hitchcock only made the film because he'd had several flops in a row and needed something safe , something that had already proved its popularity , in order to " recharge the batteries " as he put it . He may have chosen it out of desperation but it is suffused with his idiosyncratic brand of irony , humor , and technique . Who could take Ray Milland as the roguish would-be killer Tony Wendice seriously ? He belongs up there in the pantheon of Hitchcock's villains along with James Mason in " North by Northwest . " Here we have the play spread out over several locations , more violence and blood , and Gywneth Paltrow taking a bath - - none of which really helps much . How can they botch up such a tightly bound plot ? By loosening it , introducing irrelevancies , losing the focus on the misplaced key , throwing in simulated sex , and reducing suspense while increasing the movement of the actors . As the head villain , Michael Douglas plays it dead seriously . He broods a lot . His occasional muted laughter is barren , his smiles as phony as they come . He may be rich as hell but he never seems to be having a good time . Of course it doesn't help when your wife is being boffed by some other guy , even if you don't care much for her . Vigo Mortenson , as the boffer , is the auxiliary heavy , and I suppose looks kind of sexy in a greasy , long-haired , unkempt sort of way , the kind of Byronic figure who cares for nothing except his art and the satisfaction of his sensual appetites , which may appeal to women who enjoy being invited to tame this brutishness , the kind of women who enjoy riding slightly spirited stallions . That's the way the part is written anyway . But Mortenson doesn't deliver on the " fine madness " business . His strong face is almost without expression and his voice close to toneless . He comes across as the con man he really is , underneath that painter's smock . Gwyneth Paltrow is the boffee . Her face is beautiful , architecturally structured . It seems all odd angles and large , queerly slanted blue eyes . Her appeal is a bit goofy , too , rather like her mother's , Blythe Danner's , but very real . Her bony frame under those chic outfits lends her image a gawky elegance . She looks inexperienced , vulnerable , easily exploited , manipulable . If she were a greeting card and you opened her up , she would read , " I'm so sorry . " I won't go into the plot details much except to say that the characters of Mark Halliday and Lesgatt / Swan are combined into one . Losing the key is a killer mistake as far as the narrative is concerned and it can't be made up for by giving additional screen time to big-name Hollywood stars . The direction is plodding , I'm afraid . The most gripping scene in Hitchcock's " Dial M for Murder " is when Grace Kelly answers the phone and keeps asking who is on the other end , while the killer , having appeared from nowhere , is standing in the shadow behind her , poised with a startlingly white scarf , waiting for Kelly to replace the phone so he can get it around her neck . The attempted murder is horrifying . It ends with Kelly grabbing a pair of scissors ( the presence of which , in that particular place , has been carefully but offhandedly explained earlier ) and stabbing the killer . The same scene here is more violent . The director shows us Paltrow being thrown all over the place , sliding on a butcher-block table with her robe flying open so we can get a glimpse of her bare legs ( she just got out of the bath ) , dishes smashing , pots being bonged against each other on the ceiling rack . Paltrow grabs a knife - - and here it comes - - but no . The killer manages to disarm her even while strangling her . ( Insert further description of plates falling , pans clanging , women screaming , Alaska being drilled for oil , a Keystone Kop falling off a cliff , a rotating kaleidoscope , a merry-go-round with the horses riding the children , a heroin addict trying to insert a suppository , and so forth . ) Finally , having run out of ideas , the writers have Paltrow fumble for a gratuitous - - get this - - meat thermometer and plunge it into the guy's neck so that blood shoots out of his carotid artery like a fireman's hose gone berserk . There's gore all over the place . The body seems to lie in gallons of it . There are bloody footprints along the floor , smeared hand prints on the wall , all the way from the kitchen to the bedroom where an incarnadined Paltrow winds up shivering . Maybe it's unfair to compare this murder scene to the way Hitchcock filmed it , but , really , bad taste is bad taste . Well , let's leave the corpse alone . You want to see an enjoyable version of this play ? Try " Dial M for Murder . " |
443,593 | 819,382 | 431,420 | 5 | A random walk through serial killer territory . | I kind of enjoyed this although it meandered all over the place and its characters were as lugubrious as the weather of the Canadian coast where the film was shot . It's extraordinary how little laughter is to be found in this sullen setting . Oh , there's sarcasm . Some of the characters trade wisecracks , but nobody laughs at them . By my count , there was one laugh . Or , rather , a brief , maniacal snort from a totally deranged serial killer , a woman , sounding like Natalie Wood's nervous snort . Nobody - - and I'm really thinking hard here - - nobody even SMILES except the two lunatics and , as I say , only ONE of them laughs . The film weaves together into a slightly uneasy plaid three unrelated stories . First , there is the serial killer business . Jane Adams is the female partner of this murdering yuppie couple and she's great . She has these wide and unblinking eyes - - not like a deer caught in the headlights but more like the headlights themselves . And she's always mincing around in these expensive slips . One of them is chocolate colored . I never even knew they MADE chocolate-colored slips in Singapore . When Tom Selleck , as the local police chief , first visits them as part of an innocent inquiry after the first body is found , the couple are amiable and sympathetic . So Selleck immediately leaps to the conclusion that they " did it . " Credo quia absurdum . Second , there has been a gang bang involving a 16-year-old high school girl who refuses at first to squeal on her attackers because they threaten to release naked pictures of her to the press . The three high-school jocks who raped her are real sleazebags too . The most brutish of them is caught by a short , black policewoman smoking some grass in the boy's room . He blows smoke in her face , makes some contemptuous remarks , and brusquely brushes her aside , in return for which she maces him and puts him away . The young girl finally agrees to testify and the criminals suffer . Third , there is the underdeveloped relationship between Tom Selleck and the defense counsel for the rapists , Mimi Rogers . Their first meeting is hostile and lasts about twenty seconds . On their second meeting , a few nights later , Rogers calls on Selleck at his apartment , tells him she wants to get him into bed , hikes up her skirt and sits athwart his thighs . Then she gets up and leaves , saying , " Call me sometime . I'll get dressed up . " Now , this may strike an ordinary viewer as improbable , but actually it may be quite common . It happens to me all the time . The narrative wanders around , gloomy , slow , and unfocused . Yet I enjoyed it because it's interesting to see Tom Selleck suppress his " Magnum , P . I . " persona . Laconic , you know . Given to replies like , " yes " and " no . " He's an alcoholic . The reason we know this is that several people , including Selleck , say so . We never actually see him drunk . And when he decides to quit drinking , there is no change in his dour personality . But then there's something fascinating about serial killers , even fictional ones . They've been done to death in feature films , but that preposterous quality remains . We can understand why a person might want to murder his or her spouse or friend . They are the people whom we've put into a position to hurt us . But a total stranger ? These two lunatics make tapes of their victims before shooting them , and they choose them almost at random - - " He looks nice , " says Jane Adams about Selleck before they try offing him . The killers are complete blanks here . They have no backgrounds and no discernible motives . ( Selleck tells his subordinate to check every detail of their background but nothing comes of it . No results , and no LACK of results , is even brought up again . ) Overall , what a comment on human nature - - and climate . |
442,331 | 819,382 | 105,391 | 5 | Moderately Entertaining WWII Spy Drama | Melanie Griffith is am ambitious , quick-witted , German-speaking , young secretary at the Office of Strategic Services who is enlisted by her boss , Michael Douglas , and sent to Berlin to work for high-ranking Germans and uncover secrets concerning their V-2 rockets now being built at Penemunde . She winds up as a nanny in the employ of the sympatico Liam Neeson . She doesn't fall in love with Neeson , though the usual dramatic trajectory might seem to call for it , because her heart already belongs to Michael Douglas . He's too dumb to realize it . Berlin is full of agents and double agents . One of the latter plugs Griffith . She's rescued by Douglas and carried in his arms across the Swiss border with the details of the V-2 program concealed in her glove . Douglas and Griffith marry and live happily ever after . None of the principals gives a bad performance but Neeson is perhaps the most interesting of the characters . His devotion to the party is suspected of being lukewarm and he's under suspicion by the Gestapo . Alas , he isn't on screen much and disappears completely as the climax approaches . Most impressive is the evocation of the early years of the war . The make-up strikes us as garish . Berlin seems dark and ominous . The fashions and accouterments seem appropriate . Griffith isn't bad . At least she's not embarrassing . Except for " Mulholland Falls , " it may be her best performance . She's supposed to have learned German at her Jewish father's knee and have the accent of " a butcher's daughter , " but she doesn't . She has an accent , but it's strictly an American accent . Speer's name comes out at " Shpear " instead of " Shpair . " Diverting at first viewing , but not really worth seeking out . |
442,698 | 819,382 | 418,763 | 5 | Jarheads Can Take It . | There's a scene in which Swofford and his fellow Marines are watching the scene in " Apocalypse Now " in which the Vietnamese village is attacked by napalm-bearing helicopters and the gooks are all blown to pieces in a shower of bullets and jellied gasoline . The Marines are cheering wildly and the killing . They couldn't be happier that the natives are being fried . That's what's supposed to happen to the enemy . They missed the whole ironic point of the scene , of course . The world is simply not a Biblical one of clear good and evil . But if they missed the point , it's not simply because a lack of sophistication and a desire to destroy is part of their adolescent nature , but because they now belong to a system that reinforces that view . I think I kind of missed the point of THIS movie myself . I'm not sure why it was made because it doesn't tell us much that's very new . The scenes in boot camp , I'm absolutely certain , were vital to the development of Swofford's character and those of his colleagues but it's not very new . We've seen it before in movies like " Full Metal Jacket . " Not that it's filled with clichés - - the bragging Texan , the Brooklyn wise guy . Those are absent . It's just that there's nothing much to replace them . A football game that must be played in heavy chemical suits in 110-degree heat for the TV cameras looks , sounds , and probably is real enough , at least until the Jarheads start ripping off all their clothes while the cameras roll . Other incidents , like a truck full of parachute flares that explodes accidentally on Christmas Eve , are a little weak in credibility although , okay , maybe it did happen . The film shows us that the Marines are bored to distraction while waiting to be deployed in a combat area . There is an interesting description of how latrine waste is dealt with . But it's a little more disgusting than it is funny . The antics of the bored aren't very funny to a mature audience either . And there's very little drama . Jake Gyllenhaal I don't find to be a very appealing actor , although I haven't seen him in anything else . Peter Skarsgaard is fine , and so is the staff sergeant . Chris Cooper , as a cheer-leading officer , is GENUINELY funny because he's not trying to be . He asks his troops something like , " What do we do with the enemy ? " " Kill ' em ! " " I must be going ' deaf because I can't HEAR you ! " " KILL ' EM ! " " Eww , now I got a real ( erection ) . " The movie needed more scenes like this . The first time most of us probably heard that routine - - I can't hear you ! - - was either in second grade or at a summer camp in the Poconos . And here are these bemuscled Behemoths eagerly playing the same game , so steeped in a subculture that promotes blowing heads off and producing " the pink mist " that they don't realize the reptilian level at which their brains operate . That's not to demean the Marine Corps . We need a Marine Corps , and in order to do the job they may have to do they must be trained to do that job without hesitation , in the unswerving belief that it is the right thing to do , the Biblical thing to do . And they're not " retards " or dummies who are easily brainwashed either . I taught at Camp Lejeune for a few years and was never disappointed in their cognitive abilities . The problem isn't with the Marine Corps or with the young people who buy into the organization's values but with a larger and deeper system that makes the Marine Corps and its members necessary . It's a system rooted in human nature that knows no national boundaries and doesn't recognize uniforms . But that raises Big Questions that a movie like this , of essentially ethnographic ambition , isn't designed to deal with . The spirit of Camus hovering overhead notwithstanding , the movie is careful to avoid controversial considerations . Skarsgaard says , " politics . We're here , and that's that . " What we get out of this movie is a picture of day-to-day life as it was for Swofford . And the photography is splendid . Otherwise , it left me a little unfulfilled . |
442,099 | 819,382 | 292,506 | 5 | Didactic spy thriller . | It's the kind of movie that's likely to have started off with someone asking , " Have they made any action movies or , er , spy thrillers that take you through the CIA boot camp at Langley ? You know , like " 13 Rue Madeleine " ? The one where Richard Conte is a Gestapo agent who enrolls and has to get found out ? Everybody seems to be talking about the CIA lately . Has anybody made this kind of movie ? " Well , they have now . We follow the young computer whiz , Colin Farrel , as he is recruited and sent to " The Farm " in Langley where , along with other recruits , he undergoes basic training . Most of what we see him learning is , I presume , made up . If not , how did this information get out of The Farm ? And , if it's not made up , do we REALLY have a device that can be plugged into any wall socket and melt every electrical circuit in the world ? What are we waiting for ? We Luddites will be dancing in the streets . Except , come to think of it - - no more Playboy Channel . The hell with it . As in " 13 Rue Madeleine " the protagonist becomes , let's say , good friends with a fellow recruit , Layla ( Bridget Moynihan ) . Also as in the earlier film , the Chief of the Program , Al Pacino , identifies her as an enemy plant and pits Colin Farrel against her . Farrel versus Moynihan . Sounds like Madison Square Garden in 1946 . The ending gets both complicated and rather slickly routine . Everyone seems , wittingly or otherwise , to have double crossed everyone else . There is , in fact , an evil genius at work ( though we don't know his motives , any more than the potential enemies are identified ) . He or she gets his or her comeuppance , right through his or her chests or breasts as the case may be . Colin Farrel is okay . He has even features and his acting stays on track . Is he unusually appealing to women or something ? His name seems to be all over the place . Al Pacino is hairy , wrinkled , gruff , shambling , flamboyant , puzzling , and cheerfully cynical in the Jimmy Cagney role . It's fun to watch , though the photography is dark and we don't enjoy seeing people we've come to like get knocked off . |
442,807 | 819,382 | 283,897 | 5 | Slow plot , sparkling dance . | Robert Duvall has turned in such interesting performances in films like " The Godfather , " " MASH " , and " True Grit " that " Assassination Tango " comes across as a disappointment . The plot , the direction , and the performances are weaker than we might have hoped . As an actor , Duvall lapses into too many of his familiar arid chuckles . He whooshes when he's out of breath , which is okay , but then he talks to himself in order to let us , the viewers , know what his character is thinking . The other performers , with one exception , seem as if they'd been recruited from among a crowd of extras with more attention being paid to appearance than to thespian skills . As a director , Duvall aims at a kind of street-level realism that winds up as what can only be called simulated vernacular . Actors repeat their lines . Not just something like , " Wait a minute , wait a minute , " but , " Wait a minute , wait a minute , wait a minute . " Some of the banter sounds embarrassingly spontaneous , as in some of Casavetes ' work . It isn't that Duvall doesn't expose himself to risks - - he doffs his shirt and murders several strangers without blinking - - but it's just that the risks don't pay off . Maybe it would be better if the dragged-out plot had the sinuosity and precision of the dance interludes . There's no particular reason for Duvall's developing obsession with the tango . It's just flatly there , as is his friendship and tentative amor with one of the dancers , Luciana Pedraza . And yet an emotional involvement with the dance is understandable enough . What elegance ! If anyone thinks of the tango at all , the notion is likely to evoke an image out of " Some Like It Hot . " Joe E . Brown and Jack Lemon ( in drag ) snapping around one way , then the other , switching a rose back and forth between their teeth . But the real tango is different . ( Cf . , Saura's " Tango " . ) The dancers clasp each other and seem glued together from the neck up while their torsos and legs execute these unimaginably complicated maneuvers beneath them and carry them around on the dance floor . One false move and they'd both be flat on their backs . ( Come on , babuh , let's do da twist ? ) There is one outstanding performance in the film and that is Pedraza's . We first see her as Duvall does , when witnessing his first tango . She is dancing on stage with a partner , her shimmering black hair pulled back in a severe bun ( ? ) , a captivating , almost hallucinatory hologram of femininity . Afterward , when she takes her seat at the table with some friends , Duvall signals her from across the room . A friend brings this to her attention and she turns her face to squint at him through the smoke . If one is expecting a staggering young beauty , one will be disappointed . This is a thirtyish woman with a small dimpled chin and slightly flaring ears . But her stare is filled with curiosity , understanding , and warmth . Que mujer ! Her performance has the faux spontaneous quality of most of the other actors but at times she manages to succeed in convincing us that this is the sort of voice you might hear across from you in a café - - ordinary , except for a certain insidious Spanish accent that causes her voice to undulate in unexpected directions , the way her feet slither and glide across the dance floor . You don't really get to learn much about the tango , and I'm not certain just how professional the dancers are because I know nothing of the dance form myself . The assassination is unpleasant , although we keep hoping that Duvall gets away with it . ( He does . ) The movie ends happily with Duvall back in New York with his girl friend and her child , and it leaves us wondering what the point of it all was . |
442,042 | 819,382 | 182,361 | 5 | The Adventure of the Cornish Fraud . | David Suchet as Poirot , and Hugh Frazer as Captain Hastings , take a vacation at a resort in Cornwall , where they meet Magdalena " Nick " Buckley , the beautiful young woman with the startling gray eyes ( Polly Walker ) who lives in the mansion called End House next door . The three are having tea al fresco when Nick , waving her fingers , complains about the bees that fly right in front of your face . She seems to be having a run of bad luck lately because she's barely escaped two accidents ( runaway car , falling boulder ) that would have been fatal . After she leaves , Poirot reveals that he has copped her bonnet . It has a bullet hole through it . It wasn't a pesky bee after all , it was a bullet , and to prove it Poirot produces the bullet , identifying it as having come from a Mauser . This initiates a quiet investigation by Poirot and his sidekick . Nick had recently written a will before her appendicitis operation . Could the motive be money ? Ah , but not . Nick may be living in End House but she is almost penniless and will soon have to move out . Except that her derring-do fiancé now dies in a plane crash and leaves her millions . At Poirot's urging , Nick invites her cousin Maggie to stay with her in End House , along with a few friends already there . But , helas , Maggie borrows a dress from Nick and is shot one night and killed , evidently by accident . Then it gets more complicated and I don't want to go on about it . You know how Agatha Christie's plots work - - everybody seems to be a suspect . And , as often happens , there is some subsidiary or embedded criminal activity involved too - - such as forging a will or trafficking in cocaine - - which tends to throw off the pursuit of the murderer . In the end ( and hereabouts there be spoilers ) , Poirot reveals that both " Nick " and her cousin " Maggie " had the same first names - - Magdalena - - a family tradition . And Poirot reveals that the love letters from the derring-do aviator , as well as his will leaving everything to Magdalena , were intended NOT for " Nick " but for the now defunct cousin " Maggie , " whom Nick deliberately murdered . The atrociously good-looking Nick sneers , calls everyone stupid , admits the murder , and goes off to snuff herself . This is one of those stories that has holes you could drive a Peterbuilt 18-wheeler through . Question . Okay , they're sitting outside having tea and a bullet whizzes through Nick's bonnet . Who fired that shot ? She's been faking all those attempts on her life , so who shot at her ? And how does Poirot , without ever getting out of his chair , produce the pristine Mauser slug that barely missed Mlle . Nick's noggin ? Magic ? Or magnets . Question . At the end , Poirot produces the love letters addressed to Magdalena , and the aviator's will leaving everything to Magdalena . How does he know that they were really addressed to the other DEAD Magdalena , the cousin with whom he was in love ? Poirot and the police don't have a shred of evidence . ( Evidence always comes in " shreds " and is a dichotomous variable - - you either have a shred or , more often , you don't have a shred . ) It's all conjectural . Yet , as in a Columbo episode , the real murderer throws up his hands on such flimsy speculation and says , " Okay , you got me . " The location filming is splendid and the acting is professionally competent and Polly Walker is so succulent that she should have done a gratuitous nude scene , but this plot won't hold water . Usually we can ignore holes in the story but in this case they are so in-your-face that they thrust themselves into your awareness . Or maybe not . I don't know . But I don't think of this as one of Dame Agatha's better-built narratives . |
443,286 | 819,382 | 120,749 | 5 | Bruce Willis as Loose Cannon Cop . | In this one , the FBI are the good guys , more or less . A little naive maybe , except for Bruce Willis . The National Security Agency ( NSA ) are a supersecret group who plant spies all over the place and want to kill a little autistic boy who has accidentally cracked their top secret code . The NSA as a secretive organization ? There's absurdity for you . Anyway , there are a couple of bad guys within the NSA , led by Alec Baldwin , who follow Willis and the kid around . ( " Gloria " , the original , was a far more innovative movie . ) There are some rather mopey scenes between Willis and the kid but more often the kid is a nuisance , screaming and kicking over minor matters like the fact that he can't play with the buttons on the ambulance dashboard and the fact that his mother and father have just been blown away by a murderer from the NSA . The murderer is one of those guys who smiles a lot but has a cruel face and an even crueler haircut . He uses a pistol with a noise suppressor and is absolutely ruthless . There is also the obligatory young woman introduced halfway through the story and she gets swept up in events . The kid isn't required to do much except scream , kick , look distracted , or chant statements repeatedly . In the last few seconds of the film , the kid gets up from his chair , moves slowly over to Willis , and embraces him . The movie , which has been tottering along trying to stay upright , finally collapses entirely in a shuddering heap . The slam-bang action is predictable but okay . But people are liable to come away from movies like this one and " Rain Man " believing that all autistics are savants , which is just not the case . Both conditions are real enough but they don't always occur together . Autistics aren't usually pathetic and charming like this kid either . They don't need other people , they like to tinker with things or play with glittering objects , and they don't like change . They like predictability , so they'd probably like this movie . It's a fascinating condition and nobody knows what causes it . Anyhow , nobody with any experience demands much of a movie like this . But the expectations , however low , aren't met . Forget this . |
443,579 | 819,382 | 45,877 | 5 | Insubstantial Kidnapping Thriller . | Two ordinary guys - - Frank Lovejoy and Edmund O'Brien - - are driving to Mexico to do some fishing and they pick up a hitch hiker , William Talman , who later became Hamilton Berger on the old Perry Mason TV show . That was a big mistake . Talman , with a hideous and slightly deformed face and a voice like Jason Robards , is one of those psychopaths who goes on a murder spree for no particular reason . He pulls a gun and Lovejoy and O'Brien become his captives . Talman plans to take them through the sparsely populated desert of Baja California to the town of Santa Rosalia , then bump the two of them off as he hops the ferry to Guaymas , on the Mexican mainland , where he figures he will elude any police who might be in pursuit . That is , if he figures anything at all . Talman's plans are so ill reasoned that you have to wonder if the guy has any frontal lobes left . As it happens , the policia finally catch up with them and capture Talman , much to the relief of the other two who , by this time , are thoroughly browned off at having been humiliated and abused . Talman is enough to creep anyone out . One eye never closes . So , for the several nights they spend camping together , the others never know whether he's awake or not . It's not a very good movie though . The characters are all one dimensional . The sneering Talman is pure evil . Not engagingly evil either , like Hitchcock's villains . Just nasty and a little sadistic . Lovejoy and O'Brien , two competent actors , are stuck in their roles . We learn practically nothing about them except that O'Brien is impulsive and Lovejoy more thoughtful . Both are unrelentingly morose . With a pistol pointed at your noggin , that's understandable , but even in the first few scenes , before they get into trouble , neither of them seems especially enthusiastic about their vacation , and Lovejoy is positively cranky . The most animated performances come from the Mexican characters they meet , and there aren't many of them . The plot has so many holes in it that it seems cobbled together out of patches and things . Talman tells them that he " needs " them because he doesn't want to be connected with their car , but that when they get to Santa Rosalia he's going to bump them off . Why does he need them alive to drive to Santa Rosalia ? Why not bump them off in the desert and just take the car ? It doesn't make sense . It makes even less sense after the car is fatally damaged and they must walk the remaining miles to Santa Rosalia . I understand this is based on historical events and , to the extent that that's true , I'd have to guess that the kidnapper let the real guys live because psychopaths have trouble with impulse control . Circumstances waft their intentions this way and that . The kidnapper might have let them live because he enjoyed their chats or because he felt like having company or because he was too lazy to pull the trigger or because he liked having two plain-vanilla folks to boss around . Like most men who take hostages , Talman has created his own social world consisting of one king and two slaves . And as a poet once said , ' It's good to be da king . " Ida Lupino's direction is sufficient - - no more than that , and sometimes less . Example . Lovejoy and O'Brien spend two nights in their sleeping bags while Talman watches over them . The scenes are clumsily staged . Lovejoy and O'Brien are wrapped up to their neck in their dark sleeping bags , as if in swaddling clothes , and they lie rigidly on their backs with their faces up . Who sleeps like that ? It's worth seeing once but not worth coming back to . Everything about it seems indifferent . The photographer , Nicholas Musuraca , has worked on some fine noirs but this isn't one of them . Or maybe his work is better than it seems . I watched it on a 5-disk DVD set of Noirs . The quality stinks . |
443,350 | 819,382 | 37,193 | 5 | Frenetic Hope Comedy . | This is a splashy Technicolor comedy with Bob Hope as an impersonator on the run , Virginia Mayo as a kidnapped princess , Victor McLaglan as " The Hook " , and Walter Slezak as the ruler of an island that serves as a pirate's rest stop . It should be funnier than it is , and I was trying to figure out why it doesn't come off more satisfactorily than it does . It's certainly fast enough . Everyone seems to be running around , bellowing , and there are explosions and multiple sword fights , and a few minutes of romance . But it's not funny for the same reason that " Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd " isn't funny anymore . It's a child's idea of comedy in that it lacks any sophistication . I don't mean to be supercilious but kids laugh at things that don't demand much of them . Somebody takes a pratfall and a fifth-grader laughs . Kids don't need to know anything other than what they see happening on the screen . What made the Road movies so funny was that there were pauses so that the audience could take a breath while Bing Crosby crooned a silly tune to Dorothy Lamour . And Hope and Crosby were constantly trying to outwit each other in ways both shameless and sly . When they had a friendly embrace and picked each other's pockets at the same time , we could identify with them , or at least with their desires . There was somebody for a grown up to ROOT for on the screen . The Road team had a different set of writers - - Panama and Frank - - and they were better at giving Hope gags than the writers of " The Princess and the Pirate . " Hope is given a couple of anachronistic wisecracks - - " made in Japan , eh ? " - - but they don't save the day because the rest of the movie propels us at warp speed through the ludicrous plot . One of the more amusing scenes is a minor rip-off from the Marx Brothers ' " Duck Soup . " What's missing is the easy banter between Hope and Crosby , the more delicate touches provided for them . ( " Delicate " , here , being a relative term . ) Hope on his own could be hilarious , as he was in " They Got Me Covered . " Danny Kaye was making movies in this period that were just as funny and , like Hope , he always played the same character , but it was a different character : the shy , neurotic schlub . Hope always played the same part in the 1940s too - - the sniveling , greedy , libidinous coward - - but nobody was better at it . Woody Allen borrowed some of Hope's mannerisms for his own performances . If you give Hope the right settings and the right gags he runs with the ball like nobody's business . But this part could have been done by almost any comic actor , maybe Red Skelton . " The Princess and the Pirate " was released in 1944 . Hope had some splendid movies ahead of him . In the 1960s he was churning out one turkey after another . I suppose he must have enjoyed working . He surely didn't need the money by then . When he finally quit , he played golf , continued to make his well-known USO tours to troops overseas , and lived to a respectably old age . Not at all a bad career . |
442,483 | 819,382 | 43,660 | 5 | Woman in Jeopardy . | Valentina Cortese has an interesting face rather than a conventionally beautiful one . Startling eyes - - the right eye looks straight ahead while the left is canted somewhat outward , lending her every expression a kind of fey quality . From most angles her big features are full of bone structure , dominated by an aquiline nose , compellingly ordinary . She has the overall appearance of a northern Italian paisana from the Po Valley . She could be stomping on bitter rice next to Sylvana Mangano . In this film , Cortese is an inmate at Bergen-Belsen and adopts the identity of a friend who dies . Not that this makes any difference in the rest of the story . She might as well be who she claims to be . Anyway , with her new identity , she returns to a Gothic house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco that she has inherited from a deceased aunt . Her young son - - or rather the son of her dead friend - - lives there with his guardian ( Richard Basehart ) and a strangely distant maid servant ( Fay Baker ) . She and Basehart , after a too-quick romance , have been married , but the moment they move into this cockeyed American Gothic house things seem askew . Basehart has the difficult job of projecting politeness and caring towards his wife without even the underlying hint of warmth . And Margaret , the icy maid , seems to have wandered in from " Rebecca . " The only person Cortese can depend on for honesty and confidence is William Lundigan , in the Kent Smith role . In fact , everybody and everything seems to have wandered into this rather unfocused romantic drama from someplace else . The young kid has a playhouse in the back yard , bigger than the domicile I now occupy . It has a hole in the floor and wall and there is a scene in which Cortese , snooping around as usual , almost falls through to the street half a mile below when she is surprised by the ominous Basehart . I thought surely the climactic scene will involve that dangerous hole , but no . It's never seen again , thrown in willy nilly like so many other adventitious elements . The whole production is a patch work of vague threats , all seen from the point of view of the uncertain and perhaps imbalanced Valentina Cortese . I didn't much care for it . Not so much because it's a mixture of romance , mystery , and drama in which everyone seems to be scuttling around behind everyone else's back , but because little of it seems to hang together . Pretty thoughtless . Others might enjoy it more than I did . |
443,568 | 819,382 | 46,035 | 5 | Glen Ford : Sniveling Coward ? | Travis , Crockett , Bowie and the rest are back behind the barricades at the Alamo in 1836 . Budd Boetticher directed this tale of Glen Ford , the only escapee and survivor . Of course , Glen Ford would not have left except that he and a dozen other heroic defenders had families and ranches up there around Oxbow and they drew lots ( actually beans ) to select the single one of them to leave the Alamo and see that those families thrive . So when Travis draws his famous line in the sand and says , " All of you who are with me , step across this line , " only Glen Ford hangs silently back . Travis arranges Ford's escape and the others , who don't know beans about the lottery , sneer at him and call him a coward . Well , it didn't do the families of Ford or any of the others any good . It seems there are a gang of traitorous Texans who have been promised land grants by Santa Ana after the war . The gang is led by the ever-villainous Victor Jory as " Jess Wade " - - a name to conjure with - - and the ineffably viperous Neville Brand . They have murdered all the families and burned all the ranchitos . This fills Ford with rage . Ford rides into town to warn the residents of the approach of Santa Ana's troops but Hugh O'Brien's soldiers are already there , and O'Brien knows about Ford's leaving the Alamo . Complications follow , involving multiple shoot outs , a Mexican kid devoted to Ford , the pursuit of the town's wagon train by the gang , the slow melting of O'Brien's hatred towards Ford , the gathering warmth of Julia Adams ' schoolmarm , the destruction of Jory's gang , and the redemption of Ford . This is a thought-provoking movie . So , okay . Everyone considers Ford a coward and deserter because he fled under fire . The only men who knew the reason for it are dead . When townsmen , soldiers , women , and children spit on him and get ready to lynch him - - why doesn't he EXPLAIN why he left ? That's the principal thought the film provokes . But of course Glen is not the kind of man who talks excessively or " feels sorry for himself " or tries to excuse any of his actions . Here's another example of what I mean . He's in the midst of a shoot out with Victor Jory atop a mountain . The footpath gives way under his boot and he seems to roll down the slope for several thousand yards before sprawling , apparently dead , in the scree . Jory smiles down at the body way below and doesn't even bother to shoot him . The unconscious Ford is about to die but is rescued by the little Mexican kid and Julia Adams . They manage to pull him through after a day or so . Ford regains consciousness and begins to climb to his feet . No , no , say his two saviors , wait until you regain your strength . " A man's gotta get up sometime . Why not now ? " You don't seriously expect this guy to EXPLAIN himself , do you ? Now , I am not an historian or a gun freak , but my impression is that this movie does to historical accuracy what a bulldozer does to asphalt . The Old West ( roughly 1865 to 1895 ) depicted in movies can be divided into three tiers . ( 1 ) Absolute disregard for accuracy , as when John Wayne gallops his horse along a road lined with telegraph poles . ( 2 ) The Movie West , in which wardrobe and plot conventions are as taken for granted as our most primitive beliefs . ( 3 ) The " Realistic " West , in which somebody has done some research and spent some money on period props . This one purports to belong to the third tier but yearns with all its soul to leap down to the second tier and finally , unlike the defenders of the Alamo , surrenders willingly . The Battle of the Alamo took place in 1836 , not during the conventional period . And there are some nods to period accuracy - - soldiers wear the hats of sea captains , one carries a saber , there are a sprinkling of buckskin shirts , the ersatz Mexicans wear embroidered jackets , and the hat brims are sometimes wider than usual though not always . But that's it . The rifles and muskets are muzzle loading , as they should be , but they're shorter than usual so they don't get in the way of the action . And for only one brief moment do we see one being loaded the gals in the bonnets . Too much exposure to the inexpert use of balls , ramrods , powder horns and the like would slow the tempo from agitato to moderato . The pistols aren't flintlocks but the Colt and Remington six shooters common to all Westerns . At one point , Glen Ford fans his pistol and gets off a quick series of blasts . They're carried in conventional gun belts and holsters , not clipped to belts or stuck through them . The men wear ordinary shirts with string ties and vests . The tight bodices and wide skirts of the women are generic and ex post filmo . They all seem checkered and loud . They might have been seen at a Nebraska picnic in 1920 . I don't mean to suggest that this detracts in any way from Julia Adam's recherché appeal , any more than does the concave profile of her nose , which seems to begin in the middle of her forehead . If there's a lot of stereotypy in the plot , is it at least well executed , helped by the dialog ? No . Boetticher needed the poetic Burt Kennedy as a writer , and the marmoreal Randolph Scott as the lead . It's okay if there's nothing better to do or if you want to be wafted away into a world as remote from the real as Oz . |
443,276 | 819,382 | 47,947 | 5 | Not a bad period SF . | There is a space wheel in orbit around the earth , not unlike Kubrick's that came fourteen years later . Half a dozen of the crew are being trained for an exploratory trip to the moon . They take off as scheduled , but at the last minute their orders are changed . They will land on the planet Mars to find out if it is fit to add to earth's diminishing supply of basic materials . En route , the general in charge goes berserk and is accidentally killed while trying to destroy the ship . Another of the crew is hit by a tiny meteor fragment and is lost in space . The landing on Mars is successful and , in fact , it looks as if the planet can support crops for transport to earth . The final take off is perilous but the crew survive and their solidarity and confidence are enhanced . The effects aren't bad for the period . Oh , they look clumsy by today's standards , but not by the standards of , say , Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s and 1940s . Seen from space , the earth has at least a few scattered clouds and doesn't look like an illustration from a fourth-grade geography textbook . And there is a nod to weightlessness , with the crew having to wear the usual " magnetized boots . " The paintings of the Martian surface must have looked realistic at the time , and the soil is as red as in upland Georgia . That's about it for the good part . The bad parts fall into two classes . ( 1 ) Scientific implausibilities too outstanding to go unnoticed , and ( 2 ) an unfocused script involving stereotyped characters . I'll skip most of the questions about the technical aspects of the film except to wonder here how it is possible to grow a terrestrial flower in soil that has never known life and is bereft of nitrogenous waste . True enough that " only God can make a tree , " as one of the comments . ( Except in California , where anybody can make them . ) One more lapse can't go uncommented upon . A Japanese crew member ( actually Number One son from the Charlie Chan movies , born to a Chinese family in Sacramento ) explains earnestly why he wants to make the trip . Japan had just fought a bad war , but they were forced into it because they had no natural resources . ( More or less true . They still don't , except for labor and ingenuity . ) Well , in the absence of resources , the houses were made of paper and people ate with chopsticks because there was no metal for forks . And this idealistic Japanese doesn't want to see the rest of the world reduced to the condition the prewar Japanese occupied - - " Too many people and not enough food . " So he years to address the supply side of the equation without even mentioning the demand side . Too many people and not enough food ? Then fewer people = enough food . His perspective is strictly utilitarian and he leaves out any mention of population control . The mission is short-sighted and ultimately self-destructive . We've been there before . We're there now , and it's not working too well . One of the more majestic sights in the United States is the Giant Meteor Crater in Arizona . The first thing entrepreneurs did after it existence became public was to establish a mining camp at the bottom of this huge hole and dig for whatever might be left of the meteorite in order to retrieve the metal and melt it down into dollars . The remnants of the camp are still there , an irritating speck under the eyelid of the scenery . The crew themselves . Right out of a World War II movie . One a Japanese , another an Austrian , two stern officers ( father and son ) , an Irishman with a sweet temper , and the unavoidable Brooklyn wisecracker . Things cannot hold . The center falls apart . Why does the skipper start spouting gibberish from the Bible ? Or - - okay , let him quote verse - - but why does he try to destroy the ship ? What's the point of having the son kill the father and take over command in order to save the space ship ? Or should we call it " the mother ship " and start ruminating about Sophocles ? I mean , it's possible to be driven TOO far in trying to fit this meandering script into a coherent whole . Phil Foster , who plays the wise guy from Brooklyn , turns in a weak performance . When he speaks it's as if his speech organs were made of blubber . He and the other stereotypes are sometimes painful to watch and listen to . I don't mean to bomb the movie . I only wish that as much talent and skill had gone into the script as had obviously gone into the special effects . As it is , the former undermines the latter . |
443,155 | 819,382 | 23,793 | 5 | Underwater . | Something about a U-boat that sinks with a million dollars in gold bullion . After the war , the skipper enlists the help of an amoral floozie and an expert underwater diver ( Ralph Bellamy ) to retrieve the gold . They inveigle their way into the crew of a ship that is on a scientific expedition , with Fay Wray a prominent scientist and underwater photographer . The ship sails to the location of the gold . The scientists go about photographing underwater beasts from their diving bell while the undercover gold seekers continue their conniving . Bellamy , a thorough scoundrel , finds himself strangely attracted to Fay Wray . And who wouldn't ? Bellamy must have seen her in the previous year's " King Kong , " popping up out of the water en déshabillé , tumbling out of her torn slip . The libidinous swine . Fear not , though . He teaches her how to use his diving suit - - one of those old-fashioned encumbering types with a round metal headpiece , now replaced by SCUBA gear . In return , she teaches him how to be a gentleman . Towards the end of this shipboard romance / adventure , the German skipper and the amoral floozie double cross Bellamy by drugging him , then setting off the recover the gold and make an escape by themselves . Meanwhile , below the sea , the diving bell containing Fay Wray and some inconsequential male member of the cast is attacked and brought into lethal embrace by a giant octopus . Bellamy recovers from the drug in time to don his suit , drop to the sea floor , and amputate the octopus's arms with a cutting torch . He and the others barely escape . But the German doesn't escape at all . A loop of the heavy retrieval chain wraps around his ankle and when the trunk of gold falls apart , everything is yanked overboard . Full fathom five , the skipper will now guard the gold buried in mud for all eternity , while Fay Wray will live happily ever after with Ralph Bellamy , at a point in his career when he was capable of getting the girl . I felt kind of sorry for the octopus . Did you ever see a movie in which an octopus was presented in a positive light ? No . No , you didn't . On a beach near Pago Pago a recently speared octopus ( fe'e ) was thrown into my lap . There it lay , too pooped to move , but flashing different colors in a frantic but futile effort to match its surroundings , an agony that lasted almost five minutes . I would have released it , having been in its position a thousand times myself . I'm convinced that they have feelings too . Later , it was unceremoniously boiled stiff and then eaten in chunks dipped into its own ink . There's not enough to this movie to either recommend it highly or to criticize it harshly . It must not have taken long to write since the plot progresses by the numbers . But it's kind of fun to watch the ship at sea . I would guess those scenes were shot off Catalina . Bellamy tries on a gruff , half-articulate personality that doesn't seem genuinely his , and Fay Wray is shrill but beautiful . Not a masterpiece but a diverting Hollywood product of the early 30s . |
442,253 | 819,382 | 39,211 | 5 | Cheapt , nicely written drama . | It's really Claire Trevor's movie . She probably has more screen time than anyone else and hers is the only character that shows any development at all . The plot engine begins when she stumbles on two freshly killed bodies - - Lawrence Tierney is the executioner - - picks up the phone to call the cops , hesitates , then calls to buy railroad tickets to leave town instead . She's just divorced her husband , " a turnip " , in Reno , which was a big deal in 1945 so we know that she's weak to begin with . By the end her morals have crumbled and she's in cahoots with Tierney , who is now married to Trevor's rich foster sister . They carry on their affair under the sister's nose . Trevor lies to the police and to the private detective played by Walter Slezak in order to shelter Tierney . She seems to have gone all to pieces but in the climactic scene she recovers her wits and calls the police to pick up Tierney , in return for which Tierney offs her . Her performance is professional and convincing . She's at exactly the right age to be prompted to do impulsive things by having led a stagnant existence and currently being stricken with an acute attack of roiling glands . In some shots she looks like a beautiful young woman . In others she seems slightly used . Three years later she would win an Academy Award for her role in " Key Largo " as a good-hearted dedicated alcoholic . The other characters are interesting in their own ways but the performances are often routine . This isn't true for two of the others : Walter Slezak and the hapless Elisha Cook , Jr . Slezak , the P . I . , is plump , cynical , a little corrupt , and he keeps coming up with these quotes , usually from the Bible but also from a Missionary Hymn written by Heber and the most famous line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , or maybe it was from Plutarch . " Et tu , Brute ? " he asks of a waitress demanding that he settle his bill . " I don't care how much you et , " she replies , " but you owe me for the telephone calls . " It would be nice to have seen more of Slezak's character . Elisha Cook , as Tierney's " friend " , is oddly written and played . He's almost effeminate in his treatment of Tierney , cooing and reassuring him , willing to murder for him , while Tierney never treats him with anything but contempt , and finally kills Cook for reasons none of us can understand . Tierney himself - - well , is he handsome ? Does he look good to women ? I have to assume that he is and does , because I can't begin to imagine why else he is there on the screen . Certainly not because of his acting talent . He has only one expression , a formidable scowl . And when he tries to make believe he's smiling , it comes out as a pitiless smirk . " Born to Kill . " Right . He bashes in a rival's head with a poker or one of those knife sharpeners that resemble a rat-tail file . When his girl friend clumsily discovers him , he strangles her too . He arranges the murder of an inquisitive older woman . He winds up gutting Elisha Cook , Jr . He shoots and kills Claire Trevor and tries to shoot the cops . There are some people who , if they hadn't existed , it would not have been necessary to invent . Robert Wise directs with speed and efficiency . The story is wildly improbable but it flows along without any razzle dazzle . Some of the performances are quite good , and some of the dialog surprisingly graphic . ( I'm thinking of the scene in which Trevor , trying to save the inquisitive old gal , tries to warn her off by describing in some detail how it feels to have a knife stuck into your heart or a bullet go through your skin . ) Those virtues aside , it's a routine B movie . |
442,037 | 819,382 | 32,412 | 5 | The Incredible Shrinking Busybodies . | Albert Dekker is a reclusive mad scientist hiding away in a laboratory in the Peruvian jungle . Boy , are three scientists back in the states surprised to get an invitation from Dekker to join him . The three surprised scientists are Charles Holton , Janice Logan , and Thomas Coley . They make the arduous journey to Peru and are joined by a lowbrow miner , Victor Kilian , for reasons the script doesn't bother to deal with . At Dekker's laboratory they meet Pedro , Frank Yaconelli , a lovable and sometimes comic Peruvian peasant . I knew the minute I saw him that he was a tostada . That's the function of minorities in movies like this . Dekker , in a padded suit and thick spectacles , greets them and asks them to look through his microscope and tell him what they see . " Iron crystals . " Thank you - - and good-bye . The visitors are aghast . They made this trip just so that they could spend 30 seconds looking through Dekker's microscope ? Well - - yes . The scientists are offended and curious about what's going on . They discover that Dekker has built his lab next to a super-rich vein of radium ore , which he is using in experiments that shrink living organisms . When Dekker discovers that they have discovered the nature of his discovery , he shrinks them too . Alas , he finds that his now-shrunken five human beings are beginning to grow imperceptibly back to their normal size , so he asphyxiates one , blasts another with his shotgun , and pursues the remaining three until , with pluck and ingenuity , they send Dekker tumbling into a bottomless well . They grow back to normal size and return to civilization , vowing not to tell anyone because who would believe them ? Who would believe them indeed ? The set designer was obviously influenced by Universal's earlier monster movies because Dekker's lab is a crumbling stone affair like Frankenstein's castle . Most of the movie consists of the tiny humans running around , trying to escape . First they are dressed in white , toga-like strips of cloth , except for the Peruvian peasant who wears what appear to be diapers . Later , they appear in designer clothes of various colors , still modeled after the Romans , nicely tailored for Janice Logan , who looks awfully cute prancing around in her little ensemble . It's too bad she's not much of an actress , but then nobody in the story is particularly magnetic . Dekker huffs and puffs and does everything but cackle like a maniac . Thomas Coley , as the male lead , is a lankylooking galoot , to borrow a phrase , whose performance is actually embarrassing . To be fair , nobody could do much with the dialog . For some reason the main players don't use contractions when they speak , so that " can't " is always " can not " , and " I'll " is always " I will . " I don't know how important any of that is , though , or whether it was important at all to contemporary audiences . The special effects are the thing . And considering the period , they're not too bad : mattes , rear projection , over-sized sets - - sometimes a combination of effects . Not as good as " King Kong , " but still an extravaganza for the 1930s . And it's in Technicolor too . ( Supervised by the ubiquitous Natalie Kalmus , who never contributed anything to Technicolor except her name . ) Winton Hoch , a real scientist , had a hand in the photography . He was later to win awards with films like John Ford's " She Wore a Yellow Ribbon . " The runaways survive all kinds of threats or , in some cases , they don't . They're attacked by cats , alligators , a berserk blind man , and they're threatened by a chicken . Only Pedro's faithful dog plays it straight with them , man's best friend after all . One wonders if the people who made " The Incredible Shrinking Man " saw this film . It's difficult to believe they didn't . The improvised togas look familiar , and there's that pet cat , Satana , who tries to eat them in a frightening scene . An amusing diversion . |
443,477 | 819,382 | 6,177 | 5 | The Tramp's First Steps | Not much to be said about this Chaplin short . Charlie was introducing the tramp character , it was early in his career ( 1915 ) , he had responsibility for everything and was working like a coolie . So it isn't surprising that " The Tramp " lacks the wit , sophistication , sentimentality , and innovative quality of some of his later productions . ( The sentimentality could get pretty heavy handed . ) The gags are mostly crude here . Charlie hits somebody . Somebody hits Charlie back . Charlie kicks him in the pants , and so forth . Compare this with , say , " The Idle Class " to see what a difference time , intelligence , and talent made . By the way , Chaplin's status in the 1940s as persona non grata in the USA has been attributed to his being a communist / socialist / pinko / subversive / fellow traveling spy ( when in fact it probably had more to do with his fondness for young girls ) , but you'd never know it from this specimen . He takes advantage of just about everyone but Edna Purviance , and he abuses them for the fun of it , even his lessers on the social ladder . At this point , the tramp wasn't exactly a sympathetic figure . |
442,928 | 819,382 | 68,395 | 5 | The One With Patrick O'Neal as Villainous Architect | Peter Falk , as Lieutenant Columbo , the sartorial shambles , is always stumbling into some elitist milieu - - championship chess , haute cuisine , oenology , Beverley Hills , or whatnot . This time it's architecture . And Peter O'Neal , perennial heavy with the gargling baritone , is the bad guy who murders a client that objects to O'Neal's building a monument to his own vanity . Or something . The motive isn't really very clear , nor does it matter . The homicide is just a springboard for Columbo's adventures in a new setting , among snobby characters . But , man , does he deflate them . Not in the middle of the story , no . He's always polite . He's always puzzled when they take offense at his insinuations . In this one he doesn't drop the hammer until the last three or four minutes . Until then we have the usual dual of wits between the arrogant O'Neal and the self-deprecating detective . And the comic interludes , which we must not forget . I generally like the comedy a lot because it's built not around pratfalls or wit but around ordinary human foibles or the frustrations that seem built into quotidian experience . Here , a doctor gives him a quick exam and advises him sternly to quit smoking cigars . Columbo , looking worried , leaves the examining room feeling his chest . In another instance , he gets stuck in two of those long lines that everyone encounters at banks or post offices or bureaucratic services . It's pretty funny and not a word is spoken . O'Neal makes a good heavy , too . As the heroine tells him in " The Stepford Wives , " " You don't look like a person who would enjoy making others happy . " Pam Austin is still beautiful but her acting talents are modest . Janis Paige is a lot of fun as usual , just one of the guys except that she happens to be a pretty woman . Forrest Tucker appears in a few early scenes as the victim . Next to O'Neal , he seems a Mount Everest of accumulated flab . Peter Falk directed it competently and without flair . It's a journeyman job , overall . |
441,818 | 819,382 | 26,393 | 5 | Cagney as Good Guy | Until this movie appeared in 1935 , Jimmy Cagney had played roles in which he was a con man or a gangster of some sort . The formula having grown a little weary , Warners put him in " G Men , " in which he joins the FBI and pursues murderers and other people guilty of moral terpitude . Saw this for the first time tonight after having waited a good number of years and was satisfied but a little disappointed . What a cast - - Stu Erwin , Loyd Nolan , Robert Armstrong , Ann Dvorak ( pronounced roughly " Dvor-zhock " , like the composer , although her real name was McKim ) . Then there was Barton MacLane as a bad guy , Margaret Lindsay as a good girl . And the performances are about what you'd expect - - that is to say , pretty good , with the exception of Robert Armstrong of " King Kong " fame who would be better put to use as a traffic signal , only instead of " go " , " caution " , and " stop , " he could transmit " surprise " , " remorse , " and " anger . " Whatever happened to Ann Dvorak ? She's unconventionally stunning , was a gay , sexy , recklessly clumsy dancer , had the biggest , most expressive eyes in the business , and - - as we all know - - the eyes are the windows of the hootchy cootchy . Lamentably , the story is a crazy quilt of barely related plots stapled together out of old scripts and recent newspaper clippings . It might have made a good comic book . You can pretty much tell from the moment they're introduced who's going to be toast . There's the personal animosity between Cagney and the gang he knows back home , some stuff that tries to capture the headlines of the early 1930s about Midwestern gangs , and a faux history of the FBI's reactive development . Scenes alternate between rather dull and talky , and speedy , unimaginatively staged ambuscades . I think the same car crashes through the same store window twice . I felt more nearly complete after having watched it . Cagney's performance alone makes it worth watching . He lacks some of his usual mannerisms , the shrug of the shoulders , the hitch of the pants , but he's bouncy and smart-alecky . It's only the narrative and the direction that seems lacking or leaden . I mean , after all , I waited about twenty years to see it , and I think the Warner Brothers owed me more than they delivered . |
442,809 | 819,382 | 149,898 | 5 | Expectable rogue cop fare . | There are a couple of good things about this thoroughly routine cop mystery . Some of the performances are really pretty polished but they mostly come from actors in minor parts , such as Ron Silver and James Handy . And Silver looks great . His hair is combed back and up in what might be called a long brush cut . He's given a slight beard and mustache and a pair of rimless glasses which turns him into - - believe it or not - - a youngish Wolf Blitzer . None of the other performances are less than adequate with the possible exception of Allison Eastwood's , although she's certainly a beautiful woman . Painful to think that we may have lived through almost her entire film career , from " Tightrope , " when she was eleven , through such highlights as " Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , " to this . The plot's ordinary . One of the cops is shooting people through the eyeball for reasons no one can quite figure out . All they know is that it's a cop . Suspicion falls on one guy , then shifts to Gina Gershon , then shifts to - - well , enough . The last few minutes turn things around in a strictly predictable way . The photography is cheap-looking and nothing is made of the location so there is nothing in the way of local color . The script is meant to be dramatic rather than humorous but sometimes it sounds as if the writers ' naturally occurring sense of the sardonic could no longer be repressed . Discussing some sort of perversion , one cop remarks : " So what ? Sex is legal in this state . A couple more Democrats in the house and it'll be compulsory . " The commercial plot develops in such a way as to keep a viewer interested , though not engaged . |
442,216 | 819,382 | 23,775 | 5 | Iron Face in the Velvet Glove . | Whew , Barbara Stanwyck plays one tough babe in this film . She begins as a waitress in a saloon owned by her father ( who has been pimping her out since she turned fourteen ) . Yes , he's heartless . So's a professor who gives her a book , " The Power of Will " by Nietzsche , advising her to go to the big city and USE men to get what she wants . She's a quick learner . When she and Theresa Harris , a pretty young black woman who was to be the waitress at Sally Lund's restaurant in " The Cat People , " are about to be booted off a train , Stanwyck simply seduces the guy in a scene that , while in no way explicit , leaves no doubt about what's going on . There follows employment at a bank and a string of men , each one higher up the socioeconomic ladder , until she reaches George Brent at the top . ( One of the juniors she leaves behind is John Wayne , whose acting style already seemed fully matured . ) At the end , the bank collapses ( 1933 ) and Brent loses his position and is indicted and set free on half a million dollars in bail . Perhaps because of his loss of status , the realization that Stanwyck has no intention of cashing in her jewels and bonds to help him , or the fact that his character is saddled with the improbable WASP name of Trentholm , he poisons himself . But does he die ? Nah . Stanwyck comes to her senses . The money means nothing to her and Brent means everything . She breaks into sobs over his wandering narcotized stare in the ambulance as it rushes , sirens wailing , to the hospital . It's kind of crummy . None of the characters is especially developed except in the most shallow ways . The acting is professionally competent , no more and no less . The score , the direction , the settings are undistinguished . I kind of enjoyed it . Wardrobe did a fine job with Stanwyck's outfits . She begins in ill-fitting rags , progresses to her " Baby Face " outfits in which her face and figure are virtually smothered in ruffles and lace , and winds up in sleek gown bedecked with bangles - - and a blond . Her on-screen image was always so steely , especially later in her career . It isn't until you see her in some of her earlier films that you realize how tiny and slender she was - - how vulnerable she seemed . But she was also lit from within by some kind of thoughtful determination , whether it led to good or to bad . It's an interesting film , practically a prototype , more than seventy years old now . Watching it is a little like peering into a time capsule . My - - what long skirts they wore ! |
442,565 | 819,382 | 47,878 | 5 | Rather routine late noir . | Maybe some of us have been spoiled by more modern ethnographies of hoodlumism . " Goodfellas , " for instance , showed us just how it worked on the streets . " The Big Combo , " solidly noir though it is , deals with the big boys at the top , like many others of the genre , including " The Big Heat . " Richard Conte plays Mister Brown , the head honcho . We don't even know what he does for a living . We just know that he is ruthless , has lots of dough , drips with pheromones so that women fall all over him , and causes several murders to be committed in the course of the story . His nemesis , an officer on the police force , is Cornel Wilde , who tracks Conte down and constantly tries to pin on him criminal acts for which he is , or is likely to be , responsible . But as Wilde's superior officer , Robert Middleton , keeps telling him , " There isn't enough proof . " And Middleton is right . There isn't enough evidence unless Wilde can turn one of Conte's gang against him , or his wife ( Helen Walker ) , or his girl friend ( Jean Wallace ) . Conte has two goons working for him , Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman , who I think would better have been called Mister Pink and Mister Lavender rather than Fante and Mingo . That most perceptive of moral arbiters , Pat Robertson , who could find homosexuality in a Teletubby character would have no trouble with THESE two . I mean , they appear to sleep naked in twin beds , and when they're in trouble one lays his hand tenderly on the other's shoulder and says , " When this is over , let's go away and never come back . " Jean Wallace has this great mane of gorgeous , shimmering blond hair , a pretty but not stunning face , and little in the way of acting talent . She was , I think , Mrs . Cornel Wilde at the time , wasn't she ? Helen Walker , playing a sane woman who is playing an insane woman , is past her prime and lost the dove-like beauty she had ten years earlier . Not to knock her for it , though , because it happens to all of us except me . Richard Conte is a version of his usual cocky gangsterish film self , played a little more animato than usual . He seems to revel in his own villainy and has no excuse for it either , having started with nothing and double-crossed his way to the top . None of this , " I was an abused child " junk . He's given the best lines too , as suits a vicious crime king at the top of his game , while the earnest , slightly dour Wilde is stuck with righteous indignation . The story really isn't very new , nor gripping except in the usual way . That is , we like to see good people not get killed and we like to see evildoers punished . What keeps this solidly in the rank of the traditional noirs are certain directorial nudges and , above all , the photography . If there was an outdoor daytime scene , I missed it . Well , okay , one or two , probably done by the second unit . And these shadows , which are all over the place , are not just gray but almost impenetrably dark . And they're ominous shadows too , shadows in which we might see a match flicker as someone lights a cigarette before emerging from the darkness bearing a Tommy gun . The visual composition is both esthetically satisfying and functional , as they were in " The Spirit " , Will Eisner's noir comic strip . But overall it's a kind of fagged out example of noir . Any style , no matter how fresh it may have been at or near the beginning , eventually exhausts itself , in artistic and organizational contexts alike . That's why so many American genres ( eg . , Rambo-like action movies , Westerns ) are so seldom seen anymore . Time to revamp ? |
441,796 | 819,382 | 95,341 | 5 | Exploitation | What an infuriating documentary . Actually , as I write this , it has been almost exactly ten months since Al Qaida flew two passenger jets into the World Trade Center . A shocking event which killed more than two thousand innocent people and forever altered the skyline I admired so much as a kid . I wondered at the time if any entrepreneurs would have the chutzpah to somehow turn this appalling thing into a marketing gimmick and concluded that no one would . But I was wrong . Six months after the fact , ads began cropping up for medals made out of the actual steel frames of the collapsed towers . Little by little , other somber commercials appeared . Some brokerage firm now has TV commercials featuring real-life , actual SURVIVORS of the tragic WORLD TRADE CENTER catasrophe ! The survivors , their pockets stuffed full of cash , face the camera and tell us of their experiences , ending with the conclusion that the best way to fight terrorism is to go right on working and to invest with Salomon Smith Barney or whomever . I'm afraid " Hotel Terminus " generates the same feeling , a mixture of anger and disgust . The deportation , imprisonment , and murder of Jews and other minorities is far too horrifying an historical fact to serve as a vehicle for such an on-screen display of self righteousness . Ophuls did a superb job in " The Sorrow and the Pity , " mainly by letting the participants and the newsreels speak for themselves about a situation filled with ambiguities . And how eloquent those sources were ! Here , we get way too much of Marcel Ophuls telling us what we're supposed to be thinking and feeling , and about a situation in which good and evil were relatively clear cut . It isn't that his self display fails to be engaging . He's a good performer . Searching for an unwilling interviewee , he wanders through the guy's garden patch , lifting cabbage leaves and asking , " Are you under here ? " And he does a splendid reenactment of a telephone call to another prospective interviewee , playing both parts . Those participant who agreed to be interviewed do a pretty good job of hanging themselves , by the way . One of them comes up with something like , " Oh , yes , Barbie wasn't a bad fellow . He loved his dog . " ( No kidding . ) It would have been fine if Ophuls had left it at that , although a viewer might understandably wonder how many snippets of conversation had been edited out , and what they consisted of . Weren't there any good guys at all ? Can an entire population be so stupid and unfeeling ? And Ophuls ridicules on camera those witnesses were were unwilling to speak to him about the carryings on that they clearly feel guilty about , or at least ashamed of , because , as they frequently argue , it all happened so long ago . What does Ophuls expect of them ? That they should " come forward " like guests on Oprah Winfrey ? If they could ablate their memories as easily as Ophuls can edit his film , they would surely do it . One scene is especially irritating . On camera Ophuls visits a house or hotel that Barbi presumably once lived in . The proprietor emerges and begins to speak to Ophuls . The only language he knows is French . ( Ophuls is equally good in French , German , and English . ) As Ophuls begins to throw him some change-ups , though , the proprietor begins to back off , saying he'd rather not talk anymore . Ophuls then begins shouting accusations at the guy - - in ENGLISH . The guy is backing dumbly away , with occasional protests , while Ophuls screams things like , " The reason you don't want to talk is that you KNOW he lived in your house , " and so on . Well - - this isn't an interview . This is Marcel Ophuls playing Yaweh for the rolling cameras , for the English-speaking audience . It will be a sad day for the entrepreneurs when all of the participants and witnesses to these events have grown old and died . There will be no one left alive to humiliate and to blame . We'll need to start all over again , with only the historical record providing us with a guidebook about what not to do next . |
443,189 | 819,382 | 32,993 | 5 | Prologue | The first of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby " Road " series , and not the best . What's wrong with it ? People have complained that it is plot heavy but that's a little hard to swallow because the plot could be used to stuff a portobello mushroom . The problem , I think , is that it's too serious , if you can believe it . When one of the guys loses Dorothy Lamour he acts as if he's really hurt , which destroys the ethos of the film . Too many songs , although none of them is worse than any of the ones that were to follow . No ipsative gags . How could there be ? There can't be any reference to earlier movies like this because there were no earlier movies like this . Bob Hope acts as if he is trying to follow the plot , instead of improvising and winging it . He hasn't become quite the cowardly miles gloriosus of the later films . Crosby is saddled with a past from which he's trying to escape . And the gags - - though lingered over - - just aren't there . Yet it's not a bad movie . Two guys go to Southeast Asia and meet a girl . Everybody's good humored . It's diverting . You won't be depressed after you see it . |
442,230 | 819,382 | 478,134 | 5 | Murderous Drums . | Charlize Theron's agent has finally stopped shoveling her into heavily made-up and unglamorous roles like " Monster " and " The North " . Here , she wears her dark hair short and severely pulled back with a kind of diminutive pony tail . Her features seem freshly washed , washed out even , plain and beautiful . And she must be keeping as fit as the ballerina she once was because she sprints a lot better than I do . ( I'm more of a stroller . ) Tommy Lee Jones is getting older and his face now resembles a relief map of Afghanistan . His hair line is creeping back towards his occiput , his ears are enormous , and the pouches under his eyes monumental . He looks great and has lost none of his acting skills . Susan Sarandon has a relatively small role as the mother of a soldier whose chopped-up and barbecued remains have been found near his base in New Mexico . The son , Mike , recently returned from a year and a half in Iraq . Jones is the father , an ex career army man himself , who drives down from Tennessee to find out what happened , since neither the army nor the local police seem to have any clear idea . It seems to be a genuine mystery , along the lines of " Courage Under Fire " , " A Few Good Men , " and " Friendly Fire , " perhaps involving an army conspiracy to cover up unpleasant facts . And it's the uncovering and unraveling of this mystery that the bulk of the film is devoted to . Yet , it both more than just a murder mystery - - and less . Theron , as the local detective in charge of the case , helps Jones track down the three or four men who may have been with Jones ' son the night of his murder . There are hints of drug smuggling and Mexican gangs , but none of it turns out to be material . I'm about to give away the ending here , so be careful . Jones , a former sergeant in the MPs who has served in Vietnam , doesn't believe for a moment that his son was involved in smuggling OR that the men from his unit were involved in his son't murder . " You don't go into combat with a man , then come back and do THAT to him , " he pronounces . Well , the fact is - - that's precisely what happened . The four men got drunk at a strip bar and Mike turned truculent and abusive , and he stayed that way on the drive back to the base until one of the others , a nice-looking , well-spoken , sympatico kid , confesses that he found himself stabbing Mike repeatedly , over forty times in fact . One of the others had worked in a butcher shop and knew how to cut carcasses up . Then they tried and failed to burn the remains . There WAS no real motive , no drugs or anything , just the usual kind of brawl that young military men are liable to get into with each other . The kid whose confession we see chuckles at the thought of the murder and says they didn't bury the remains because they were hungry and wanted to visit a fried chicken joint . " I'm really sorry for your loss , " he tells Jones , and he seems to mean it , but he doesn't quite understand why the others don't quite understand . That turns it into an indictment of an unpopular war . War brutalizes the people who participate in it , the winners as well as the losers . Okay , as far as it goes , though the proposition is debatable and certainly doesn't apply to all or most combat veterans , who are more likely to damage themselves than damage others . But the Reveal also makes the rest of the movie - - about the unraveling of a traditional mystery involving motives - - tangential . Most of the movie is wasted on following a red herring . And there are times when a sanctimonious tone creeps into the film . Susan Sarandon insists on seeing her son's burned and disarticulated remains . ( We've already been through this formulaic event before , with Jones . ) " I'm very sorry for your loss , Ma'am , " says the army's Criminal Investigation officer , and he means it . Sarandon has been looking into a refrigerated room and asks to enter the room to be with her son . " I'm afraid not , Ma'am . I'm sorry . " Sarandon begins to leave , then turns around and says to the officer in an accusatory tone , " You don't have any children , do you ? " The film is on her side . But what the hell is the officer supposed to do ? Let her into the morgue so she can smell the burned flesh ? How about if she wants to fondle the lopped off limbs ? He's just doing his job and he clearly sympathizes with her . It's too easy a shot . There are in addition some emphatic layings on of the story of David and Goliath in the valley of Elah . If it's supposed to pump up the profundity quotient of the plot , it doesn't work because it has nothing to do with the plot . I'll just skip over the retro and rebarbative male-chauvinist-pigism . The direction and performances are fine . But the script has some glaring weaknesses , as if it either hadn't been thought through or - - worse - - HAD been deliberated over and a choice had been made to go with formulaic scenes , though the scenes themselves be as disarticulated as Mike's body . It's moving , of course , but it's cheap too . + |
443,375 | 819,382 | 41,610 | 5 | Raw Rudimentary Western | We don't often get a chance to see Glenn Ford as a bad guy , but he's pretty nasty here . He's a mean German who finds a fortune in gold in the Lost Dutchman mine in the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix , Arizona . Carries a Sharp's carbine . Shoots comarades in the back . Torments women while watching them die of thirst . Snarls a lot . Speaks with an accent , or tries to . But then , come to think of it , nobody is any good in this movie . It has no hero . The narrator in the framing story , William Prince , is a contemporary , a grandson of Ford's . He's not exactly a bad guy , but he's certainly not a good guy either . He's given one of those hard-boiled narratives , ripped still quivering from the flank of a nearby film noir . " I figured I had it comin ' to me . Nothing ' else mattered . " That sort of thing . Ida Lupino sells her body for the gold . Gig Young pimps his wife . Will Geer smiles sardonically and wipes out people with his rifle . Everybody is corrupted and some die because of their greed . The lust for gold is disgusting and uncivilized . Where do I get some ? |
442,903 | 819,382 | 460,792 | 5 | I'll Have the Soyburger , Thank You . | Judging from the title , I'd expected this to be something along the lines of a fable like " Supersize Me " or some documentary on The Learning Channel teaching us a lesson on hot dogs and french fries . But no . It's am ambitious drama about the illegal importation of Mexicans to work in a meat-processing plant to service a chain of burger joints called " Mickeys . " There are multiple narratives . They cover the story of a marketing agent for Mickeys ( Gregg Kinnear ) who finds out more about how Mickey's burger patties are produced than he cares to know . Then there are the illegal Mexicans who include the magnetic Colombian actress Catalina Sandino Moreno from " Maria Full of Grace . " Actually I got some of the Mexicans mixed up . Not Moreno or Luis Guzman , because they're familiar faces , but some of the other characters blend into one another , especially in the meat-packing plant where all of them wear the same uniforms and surgical masks . We get to know a little about some high school kids who are offended by the conditions the cattle live under , and by the fact that there excreta are dumped into ponds and eventually reach the river . There are relatively short scenes involving Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Willis . The movie is a polemic that demonstrates how money and the need to make as much of it as possible corrupts . " Everything's being taken over by machines , " intones Kristofferson , an old curmudgeon who loves " the land . " That's pretty much the point of the whole movie , as long as we can define " machine " broadly to include mechanisms made up of socially agreed-upon rules . I was generally sympathetic to the film's agenda but it might have been better if the script had stuck with one person and one narrative thread - - maybe Kinnear's . The script is guilty of pandering though . Mickey's Burgers corrupts , and absolute Mickey's Burgers corrupt absolutely . There's something hateful about everyone associated with Mickey's . The foreman bones all the good-looking young women . Even the guy working at the local outlet spits a ginder into one of the burgers before passing it on to the customer . ( Cf . , " Casino " in which the same thing was done . ) And what , asks the film , can be done about it all ? Nothing . The dice of the gods are loaded . The governor of Colorado received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Uniglobal Meat Packing , and the chief of the state's EPA is married to one of its executives . The high schoolers get a lecture from an experienced activist and they cut the wires surrounding the cattle pen . Alas , the cattle are too stupid to know they have been freed and they refuse to leave . That's one advantage cattle have over us . They don't suffer from ontological Angst . They don't ask themselves questions like , " What the hell am I doing , standing here up to my shakra points in my own manure ? " They probably don't have any fear about their fates because they don't have the concept of " death " . It comes as a surprise when one of them is beaned with an air gun , drained of blood , gutted , sawed up , slashed to pieces , and fed to happy families . The writers and director have the good taste to save this scene for the climax of the movie . I mean that sarcastically . Eating meat represents a low level of ecological efficiency . Instead of eating 100 calories worth of grass , we feed the grass to cattle , butcher them , and get 10 calories out of it . The rest of it goes to waste , in both senses of the word . Yet the movie is offensively preachy . Why must an important message be spelled out as if to a class of first graders , encased in lectures ? Seeing the chunks of meat and fat being processed is enough to turn anyone into a strict vegetarian . The problem is that Homo sapiens is , and has always been , an omnivore . And the problem behind THAT problem is that there are too many Homo sapiens and their number is increasing exponentially . The more of us there are , the more pressure we must by necessity put on the natural and the economic environments . If things continue as they are , there won't be any Kris Kristofferson's boasting about protecting his land from machines . We'll all be chewed up and spit out like hamburger patties because people have to eat , don't they ? The only nation on earth that seems to have this figured out is China . It doesn't take a computer to nail down the figures . An abacus will do . Something just occurred to me . Suppose you're a vegetarian restricted to a kosher diet ? And in addition you were committed to organically grown food and averse to genetically engineered food , artificial additives , preservatives , and you avoided fats because they cause cancer , and salt because of concerns about blood pressure , and proteins because of the possibility of gout , and carbohydrates because they might lead to diabetes ? That might ease the problem of overpopulation . |
443,049 | 819,382 | 387,055 | 5 | Deliberately paced , stylized , abundantly empty . | I guess I'm going to have to give Reygadas A for effort . What we see on screen certainly LOOKS good . The photography is splendid and the human or humanoid figures are memorable in one way or another . It sounds good too . There's no noticeable score but the situational music ranges from rap through military marches to Bach , and the otherwise silent background sometimes is filled with clicking heels , peeps , and ticks . That's about it for me . The residual impression is a failed attempt at an artistic masterpiece . In the opening scene , before the credits , we see the inexpressive face of an ordinary middle-aged man . The camera , always slowly and deliberately , moves down his overblown torso and we see the back of some blond woman's head covering his groin , her hair sprouting up in ungainly spears and tangles . At a glacial pace the camera sidles sideways and we see ( explicitly ) that she is fellating the guy , her movements about as unsprightly as the camera's , and her eyes are closed . The camera moves verrrry slooowly in until we see only her closed lids . They pop open , her irises stare wildly at us , and a tear rolls out of one of them and down her cheek . That's not too bad , but it's an example of the director's technique at just about its peak . A few other scenes are equally shocking but for the most part watching this is like rolling a giant stone up a hill . There are one or two underlying plots in all this artistry . One has to do with a general's daughter , Ana , working for kicks in a cathouse . Several people have argued that this is the only way male directors can think about women with sexual appetites , which strikes me as a pretty cheap interpretation . Anyway , Marco , the fat guy we see in the opening scene is her chauffeur and for some reason agrees to get it on with him . They make love joylessly . " Marco , calm down , " she tells him as he lies there passively , staring at the ceiling . Marco also makes love to his wife , a human butterball , which is like making love to one of the monumental Mayan pyramids at Chitchen Itza . It's easy to make fun of people who are visually imperfect but you have to give these actors credit for being willing to expose their flawed bodies on screen like this . ( I can only make these statements because my own physical manifestation is without blemish . ) Not to say that the young Ana's figure is unusual . She looks pretty good . But all the sex is made to look about as much fun as riding an exercise bicycle . If it were no more alluring a sport than as presented here the human race would have died out thousands of years ago . Well , anyway , it fits the overall gloom of the other story , the one about the child that Marco and his wife kidnapped , the child who died while a captive . The climactic scenes bring the problem of guilt and penance to a head but we don't really get to know much about it until half-way through the film , and then only through minimalist conversation . You know , if you were to play a DVD or a tape of this movie and stop it somewhere at random , you'd probably get an image of two people gazing silently at one another . Failing that , you can expect a tableau of a dozen or so people standing together motionlessly as if they were dolls placed there by a child , staring silently at the camera . There is one spectacular shot in which Ana and Marcos are getting it on and the camera moves verrry slooowly out onto the balcony of the room and then takes us on a slooow tour of the Mexico City neighborhood , looking no better and no worse than any other big-city neighborhood , before completing its 360 degree travelogue and returning to the now-exhausted couple on the bed . It reminded me of the spectacular shot towards the end of Michelangelo Antonioni's " The Passenger . " While Jack Nicholson is getting murdered quietly in his room , the camera passes through the bars of the window and takes us on a scenic tour of the street outside before pulling back through the bars and showing us Nicholson's corpse . I got the point of Antonioni's camera movement . The bars in the window were removable so the camera could get outside and replaceable so it could get back in - - a self-conscious display of technique . This whole movie reminds me of that shot . Still , the visuals are beautiful , the film does have its moments , and a lot of effort clearly went into the production . So they still use storyboards ? Because if they do , this was thoroughly storyboarded . If you're in a contemplative and patient mood , and if you don't mind quite a lot of experimental technique , you should find this film an interesting one . |
443,139 | 819,382 | 422,295 | 5 | Alice in Wonderland . | This is a love story . That it happens to be based on an interpretation of Diane Arbus ' life is supervenient . This could be any young woman from an artistic but conventional background living in Greenwich Village in 1958 . Or it could be Alice in Wonderland . When Nicole Kidman , as Arbus , first enters Lionel Sweeney's ( Robert Downey's ) apartment upstairs , she can't find him in the colored shadows but when a teapot whistles she finds a note next to it . " Pour the boiling water into the tea cup . Let it steep . Drink it . " It might as well be Alice's little bottle that is labeled " Drink me . " Anyway , that visit introduces Kidman to a world quite different from the one she's used to . Downey is covered with more hair than Lawrence Talbot whom he , in fact , resembles . In some ways it works to his advantage . All we can see of him , his tresses aside , are his dark liquid eyes , and all we hear is his deep , sonorous , mysterious , monotonic voice . He tells her what to do , in detail . " Take off your slippers . " " Close your eyes and don't turn around . " " Disrobe . " At that point I would already be out of there . It wouldn't be because he's Jo-Jo the Dog Faced Boy but because I don't like being ordered around - - except by particular women at a time and place of my own choosing . Downey begins to take her around town to meet his friends . While traveling in public , Downey wears a hood something like the elephant man's . Yet it serves more to call attention to him than to deflect it , because the hood is clumsily made of white cloth and crudely stitched with horrifyingly over-sized black thread . The hood screams , " Look at ME . " But Kidman is no stranger to the moral power of victimhood and she knows how to use it . When Downey first addresses her as " Dye-anne " she quickly corrects him , " Actually it's ' Dee-onne ' . " She's probably been correcting other people all her life and may have gotten to enjoy it , otherwise why not let the solecism glide a time or two , or soften the correction somehow , maybe something like , " My friends pronounce it ' Dee-onne ' . " Imagine if the man we know as Mario Cuomo abruptly began demanding that people call him " Mah-rio " , as in Italy . He could be the equivalent of Leonard Bernstein who used to really chew people out for saying Bern-steen when he insisted on Bern-stine . Or was it the other way round ? I forget . Where was I before I was overcome by these sociological insights . Yes , " fur . " That's right . Thank you . It's an extremely and consciously artistic movie and it's atmosphere is stunning , as is Nicole Kidman . The problem is that it falls into an all-too-familiar trap . The victims ( in this case the human anomalies ) are good and the ordinary people are not so good . Kidman's husband , the holotypical normal , is distant , humorless , and rather dull . In actual life he couldn't have been quite that inexpressive since he at least grew a beard which , in 1958 , was still an object of public comment . But when Kidman invites her new friends in for dinner , he can't stand them and walks out . Kidman's parents are presented as a pair of prunes . The anomalies , on the other hand , may be a bit shocking to look at or to watch . I mean , there's the otherwise limbless woman who does everything from eating to painting with one foot . But , heck , they're a lot of fun too . They have parties together , listen to jazz , drink , laugh , and smoke dope . The climactic scene has Kidman shaving the ape man - - all over . He comes out looking remarkably like Robert Downey , Jr . After that they make love , and after that he takes a last swim out to see . And Diane - - that's Dee-onne - - Arbus wasn't far behind him . The movie generates a good deal of pathos but it suffers from the stereotyping of its characters . It would have been nice to have just one mean dwarf . Or if the anomalies had just one other normal-looking friend . However , the introduction of even that small amount of ambiguity might have undercut the sympathy and the tears that the movie works so hard to jerk . |
442,324 | 819,382 | 83,190 | 5 | One Last Caper and I Retire . | James Caan is a thief recently released after eleven years in the slams . Somebody owes him money and he collects it - - out toughing the possessors . This boldness impresses the Big Man , Robert Prosky . Prosky , who has a finger in every meretricious pie , delivers the money personally and invites Caan to join him in his organization . The benign , agreeable , avuncular Prosky and his team will plan out jewel robberies , pay for equipment , and so forth , and Caan and his partner , Jim Belushi , will execute the plan for a given percentage of the take . Caan , an expert thief in every way , is reluctant . He's always been his own boss . But he has a problem . He needs money to hire a good lawyer to get his friend , Willie Nelson , out of the slams . Nelson is terminally ill and would rather die on the outside than on the inside , though he never explains the logic of that position . Caan meets Prosky and agrees to one last caper . Prosky not only agrees but sees to it that Caan gets a ranch house in the suburbs and that he and his wife , Tuesday Weld , are able to adopt a baby . Well , I pretty much foresaw a bad end for Jim Belushi as the cheery partner of the main character , close enough to be on hugging terms with him . And when the Belushi family and the Caan family spend a few days frolicking on the beach together , with still almost half an hour to go in the film , I figured Belushi was dead meat . Most of the movie is about as formulaic as that . Prosky has promised Caan almost a quarter of a million for pulling off a long , risky , highly technological heist , but after the job he hands Caan an envelope with only a tenth that amount . Additional expenses and all that . Not to worry , though , because Prosky has a dozen other scores lines up for Caan . Caan balks and winds up semi-conscious on the floor with Prosky standing over him , viperous in his wrath . Before his goons dump Belushi's body in what seems to be a vat of acid , Prosky tells Caan that Caan has no gratitude . That Prosky now OWNS him and he will do as he's told , otherwise he and his family will find life increasingly unpleasant . " I'll put your of a wife on the street and and will her in the ! " Caan gives all his accumulated money to his wife and child and kicks them out . Then he walks away from the final shoot out wounded but alive . The story is basically sound and Caan's part is well written , if not as well delineated or nuanced as Dustin Hoffman's in " Straight Time . " Caan plays it nicely too . He's particularly good in a scene in a coffee shop in which he explains the subculture of inmate life to an engrossed Tuesday Weld . If the plot is predictable , it's still engaging . The problem is that the direction sucks . I'll give an unimportant example . Near the beginning , after Caan has warned the white-collar crook that he expects his money back , he has to leave the office and walk through a room full of nerds and female secretaries . They're all sitting and staring at him and his gun - - except one woman who is standing in the corner . Caan lifts his pistol in a two-handed grip , aims it at her , says " Sit down , " then lowers it and walks out the door . Why did he do that ? Why aim a pistol at a terrified young woman in order to get her to sit down ? Why get her to sit down ? What the hell does Caan care whether she's standing or sitting ; she's in a state of tonic immobility like a frozen mouse . How did that take find its way to celluloid ? Caan has been drawn as the essence of cool . He should have strode through the room like an expressionless Superman , his pistol at his side . I said the example would be small , but there are too many multiple small examples . I think there are four shooting deaths and one wounding . Every one of them is in slow motion . So is the body dumped in the acid . There are two explosions - - ditto . Ho hum . And the musical score is atrocious - - pounding , edgy , distracting , loud electronic guitars and percussion that could have come straight from a skin flick . That approach isn't necessarily inappropriate in a crime thriller - - if it's used judiciously . Wang Chung had it just about right in " To Live and Die in L . A . " But this score is simply unimaginative noise and should be reserved for the exclusive use of the CIA in torturing prisoners . On the whole , above average performances ; average script ; bad marks for direction and score . |
443,590 | 819,382 | 69,902 | 5 | The Last Refuge of Scoundrels . | One of the less interesting episodes in the otherwise splendidly amusing early series . I don't know why it doesn't quite work . If the plot were described here , in print , it would sound typically promising . Jackie Cooper is a candidate for the US Senate . He's received a couple of death threats which have prompted police protection . His bloviating campaign manager tells him he must get rid of the skeleton in his closet because Cooper is supposed to be a happily married man . The skeleton is in the form of Tish Sterling , which is a very nice skeleton indeed . With her pale face , gracile form , and big blue eyes , she looks like a kind of kewpie doll . If you lay her gently on her back , her eyes might close . Well , Cooper understandably doesn't want to jettison Sterling , but on the other hand his bossy , loud-mouthed campaign manager is getting to be a pain in the neck , so Cooper lures the guy outside of police protection and shoots him three times and - - well , then it gets complicated . Cooper starts staging phony attempts on his own life that seem completely adventitious . He doesn't need to do it . It's over-reaching and it undoes him in the end , with Columbo the instrument of the undoing . The writers must have had a slight block in putting this together . There are a couple of attempts at humor - - Columbo goes to a tony Beverley Hills tailor and is treated like the idiot he is , Columbo is stopped for a spot auto inspection by the state police , Columbo stumbles and fumbles more than usual , more than balance demands . And Jackie Cooper as the heavy is no help . There are only one or two notes on his instrument . The one we see most of is authoritative bluster and shouting . His character doesn't really seem to love Tish Sterling enough to kill for her . He manipulates her throughout . Well , the golf course of life is filled with sand traps . It's still worth watching if you enjoy Columbo , just a bit disappointing in its serial context . |
442,922 | 819,382 | 69,904 | 5 | Martin Landau is Twins . | In this one , Martin Landau , plays estranged identical twins who team up on the sly to knock off their rich uncle , Paul Stewart . Stewart , the old goat , plans to marry a new-age Julie Newmar who is half his age . I didn't mind so much seeing Paul Stewart die by batter mixer in his own bathtub , but throwing Julie Newmar out the window was unforgivable . The entire sequence of events isn't revealed until the end , which is an anomaly in the Columbo series . But of course Columbo , Peter Falk , is gifted with his usual second sight . The mere notice of a damp bath towel in the laundry hamper puts him on the right track . A TV screen that turns too purple at the wrong moment clinches it for him . And , as usual , the culprits crumble in the end before a positive molehill of suggestive evidence . Columbo's villains tend to have brains but no guts . He's his usual disheveled self - - cigar , rumpled raincoat , a man of infinite hesitations . He has comic encounters with the Martin Landau twin who is a television personality . Landau invites Columbo to leave the audience and come up and join him before the cameras in making hollandaise sauce . Columbo makes a fool of himself , but Landau laughs too loudly and so does the audience . The hilarity is forced and the incident is rather more silly than funny . ( See Columbo try to separate the yoke from the white ! ) The scene would have been far funnier if Landau had played it straight and the audience was permitted only the occasional snicker . It's the director's job to see this done . His most amusing encounters are with Jeanette Nolan as the housekeeper , the impeccable Mrs . Peck . You could perform surgery on the floors she's kept for thirty years for the horny old Paul Stewart character , and here comes Columbo , bumbling along , trailing cigar ashes , using a three thousand dollar silver dish as an ash tray , trying to fix Mrs . Peck's TV set only to pull off the knobs . It's not the best in the series , but it's early Columbo , when the ideas were still fresh - - Steven Bochco was the writer - - and overall it's an entertaining divertimento . |
442,830 | 819,382 | 83,169 | 5 | Kids shouldn't play with real guns . | We are at Bunker Hill Military Academy , a prep school with students ranging in age from , say , high-school seniors to boys so small that they can't possibly have experienced any of the delights of puberty . The cadet corps is run by proud Timothy Hutton . His immediate subordinates include the sensible Sean Penn - - yes , sensible - - and the semi-psychotic Tom Cruise . In overall command is the avuncular General George C . Scott . The problem is that , as Scott announces to the cadets , the school will be closed and sold for its real estate value next Fall . They are going to mow the place down and build condominiums . Scott dies promptly of a heart attack and , led by Cadet Major Hutton , most of the kids confiscate the stores of weapons and lay down a list of demands before they will allow the school to be dissolved . I was all on the side of the cadets . Not that I love military academies but that I hate condominiums . It's rather like why I'm a vegetarian . I hate the taste and texture of vegetables but I love to kill them by eating them raw or boiling them . This film sounds like it has a lot of social relevance - - the military and patriots and men of honor on one side , and the peace-mongering wussies who never had a fist fight on the other . Now we're all going to refight the Vietnam War . But it's not like that at all . Timothy Hutton is a bright kid with leadership qualities only , as it's explained somewhat clumsily , he has reason to hate his father , who is a Sergeant Major , and has found a substitute in General George C . Scott . And therein lies the problem . Hutton has absorbed only part of Scott's message about self discipline , and death before dishonor , and all that elementary stuff . After all , he's only seventeen . It's only with a little seasoning that we can begin to look behind the buzz words . Hutton is supported by Penn because Penn has " never walked out on a friend , " and it's Penn who finally talks Hutton into ordering the adoption of another common tactic - - " declare victory and depart the field . " But Tom Cruise is the genuine nut job aboard for this adventure into terra incognito . Throughout , he's always been something of a martinet . He is the leader of a group of red berets . I don't know exactly what they're function is but it appears to be something like the Gestapo's . And while the rest of the cadet corps is marching sullenly and weaponless towards the gate where the National Guard is waiting , Cruise cuts loose from an upper window with an M-60 screaming , " It's beautiful ! It's BEAUTIFUL ! " The performances are all pretty good without any being exceptional . The chief weakness is in the script . It's opened up a whole can of worms and doesn't want to get its fingers dirty by digging into it . The problem with pride , honor , and a feeling of knowing more than others , is that that whole assemblage of attitudes can't exist without an enemy . If you're superior , then you must by definition be superior to someone else . In this case , there are only off-hand references to the pencil-pushers and bean counters . Not that the film presents external forces - - the local cops and the National Guard - - as anything other than reasonable or even perfect . But solidarity is self reinforcing . It feels so good to be part of a group that's even only temporarily powerful that often the original goal is lost sight of . That's what happened during the prison riots at Attica . The governor granted some of the inmates demands and the inmates ripped up the concession to great cheers from the throng . Finally the governor granted ALL their wishes - - and an inmate in the center of the yard ripped them up to great cheers from the throng . The point was no longer to have their wishes granted but to relish the momentary sense of power . And the distinction between civilian power over the military is hardly mentioned . It's one of the lessons that Scott apparently never passed on , but it's a fundamental one . It's why our Commander-in-Chief is called a " president " and not a " generalissimo . " Here's something the governor and the National Guard might have tried . They might have simply waited the kids out . What the heck . They couldn't have had that much food . The electricity and water could have been shut down . Enthusiasm for the cause was hardly universal - - about half of them quit . Morale would have crumbled eventually . Fads fade quickly among teens . And Tom Cruise's final insane outburst was completely unjustified by what we'd learned of his character earlier , but then it had to happen or we'd all have been denied the pleasure of the final shoot out . We're built for speed and action , not waiting patiently , not thinking things through logically . In a sense , Tom Cruise stands in for part of all of us . And so do the proud Timothy Hutton and the sensible Sean Penn . I hope when we face our next crisis , whether national or personal , we can find some middle ground . |
442,950 | 819,382 | 56,931 | 5 | A puzzle wrapped in an enigma and so forth . | Unlike the original , " Village of the Damned , " this film skips the introductory stuff and begins in medias res , with the kids already six or seven years old , half a dozen of them , spread around the world in different countries . There is no explanation of how they were born except in the claim of an English mother that she'd " never been touched . " In principle , that's okay . But in this instance it means there is no dramatic introduction that's the equivalent of those disquieting first scenes in the original , in which Midwitch is shrouded in some kind of invisible cloud that renders people unconscious the moment they enter it . What I mean is that there isn't a lot of mystery in most of this movie . We see the kids drawn together in London . They hardly speak . Some of them never utter a word . And they hole up with their pretty , blond adult servant in a dilapidated church , resisting all efforts to get them to return to their normal lives . Why are they there ? ( Or , let's say , why are they here ? ) We don't know . They don't know either . They manage to share thoughts with one another without speaking . They put together some solar-powered machine that blows the minds of anyone approaching them with even the slightest of hostile intents . And they don't hesitate to kill people who try to exploit them . They're both sinister and lethal . And nobody knows their goal . There is a big argument among the military and the scientists about whether they should be destroyed or not , and one of the children is shot dead during a killing spree . Finally , the community deems them too dangerous to survive and brings to bear enormous ordinance to exterminate them and clobber the deconsecrated church they've barricaded themselves in . There's a lot of rather obvious Cold War intrigue going on . Every nation wants to take its own superchild and put its brain to use . ( For a surreal example of this theme , read John Hersey's novel , " The Child Buyer . " ) The Cold War material is right up front , but when that dilapidated church first appeared I wondered whether religion were behind the story . It was . The child who was killed is brought back to life . And the children stand hand in hand while they're martyred . I won't get into too detailed an explanation of exactly HOW religion fits in because , mainly , I can't . I didn't understand the thing . The narrative seemed to be going in a direction similar to that of " The Day the Earth Stood Still . " I am sacrificing my life to convince you that you should stop your bickering . And yet , if that is in fact the message , it comes across as if written in proto-Indo-Hittite . What's left at the end resembles the cloud of dust that settles over the now-demolished church . I'd like to be able to recommend it more highly but it's left me as confused as the screenplay . I think , if I hadn't a clearer idea of what I was aiming for , I'd have left the original alone . |
442,063 | 819,382 | 412,260 | 5 | So this is Paree ? | Paris Hilton is an attractive blonde with a keen figure . She was 19 when she and her lover filmed this homemade production . But she might as well have been 9 instead of 19 . Her lover Rick and Paris , or " Paree " as he calls her , act throughout like two kids playing Doctor in a sandbox . They coyly enact the universal ritual in which the horny male pursues the shy female . " You like that , don't you ? " , asks Rick . " Ewwww , no ! , " squeals Paree . Behind the role enactment , neither is particularly shy or modest . The film opens with Paree filming a close up of her own respectable breasts . Showing Paree rolling around nekkid on the hotel bed , Rick asks , " Do I have the hottest bitch in town , or what ? " The male keeps growling playfully about sex . The female responds by talking about love as if she knew what it meant . In the end sex and love diffuse into one another and everything else melts together in a fluid resolution of any oppositions expressed earlier . I'd never seen Paris Hilton before and had only heard of her through brief references on TV news and photos in news magazines . I missed out , therefore , on the bonus points that come from the titillation of seeing a celebrity exposed . If you haven't seen the soap operas in which she's appeared or any of the movies she's made , she's just another stranger in a skin flick . And how IS the skin flick ? Not too bad as cinema verite . It's like watching Andy Warhol's " Blue Movie " in which two kids joke around and have sex on screen . Unfortunately this one has about a third of its footage filmed through what seems to be some kind of the military night scope that turns everything a different shade of green . It's hard to make out what's going on . In addition , when a participant looks up at the camera his or her tapidums gleam like electric arcs . The phrase that comes to mind is " a deer caught in the headlights , " except that these two are anything but frozen in tonic immobility . The - - uh - - the most important part of the film is shot clearly , thank heavens . Women may be able to fake it but men can't . On the whole it's worth watching , even aside from the raw sex . I just love to see the young folks enjoy themselves , frisking around , capering , winking at the camera . |
442,169 | 819,382 | 55,031 | 5 | Verdict Guilty - - Defendants AND Movie | SPOILERS . I watch this once in a while if it happens to be on TV because the performances are as good as they are . Tracy is the epitome of rock-ribbed Republican rectitude . Widmark is good . Maximilian Schell is nothing less than great . He deserved his awards . Burt Lancaster should avoid any part that calls for an accent unless the movie is a comedy . But Garland and Monty Clift are truly pathetic , for more reasons than the script gives them . But that's the problem with the movie - - the script . The trial is a court set up in such a way that we must fight the values behind World-War-Two Germany all over again . Except for Lancaster's character the defendants are inhuman caricatures . Werner Klemperer is compelled to be a malignant version of Colonel Klink . The others are plain nasty . And Schell must try to get them off by defending their actions , which is impossible . The best he can do for Lancaster is to argue that Lancaster knew the justice system was rotten but was determined to minimize the harm it did by working against it from the inside , occasionally letting rotten things happen because the rottenness was prescribed by the law . If you think about it , that's kind of what a judge is supposed to do , isn't it ? See that the law is carried out ? Here's how two analysts posed the dilemma : " The criminal law usually punishes people that break laws , not carry them out . The responsibility imposed by such a standard requires a judge to choose between resigning immediately or becoming an international criminal if he enforces an unjust law or becoming a German criminal if he refuses to enforce it . This is a lot to ask of anyone . " ( Bergman and Isamov , " Reel Justice , " 1996 . ) But it's best not to think too hard about this movie . Some idea of its self-congratulatory and self-righteous nature is given by Abby Mann's speech when he won the academy award , accepting it not only for himself but " for all intellectuals everywhere . " Really . He's very mistaken if he actually believes that this movie is in any way " intellectual . " It doesn't invite analysis . It invites judgment based on hatred of the Nazis . Or , let's be honest about it , hatred of Germans . There isn't a good German in it . Tracy's butler and his wife seem compliant and obedient but " we knew nothing of what was going on . " Then there is Marlene Dietrich , cultivated and intelligent and helpful and friendly towards Tracy . When the guilty verdict comes in , her true nature reveals itself and she refuses to answer his phone call , sitting alone in the dark , filled with the kind of anger that brought Hitler to power . ( The Germans will never change , not even the best of them . ) Tracy has a last jailhouse conversation with Lancaster , at Lancaster's request . Burt has been mute throughout most of the trial , refusing to speak in his own defense , but here he tries to tell Tracy , as one morally upright man to another , that he , Lancaster , didn't know Germany was going to turn into what it did . Tracy sneers at him and says , " You knew what was going to happen the first time you sent an innocent man to jail . " That's judgment at Nurenberg for you . The movie never asks what a moral person might do in Lancaster's circumstances . Mann and Kramer don't bother to ask because they already know the answer . The rest of us may not be quite so sure what we might do because we are aware of our moral flaws , our weaknesses , our desire to get along trying to do well without stepping on too many toes or striking useless heroic poses . But the writer and director haven't really thought about it . The worst scene in the movie , perhaps , among so many , has Schell grilling Judy Garland ( Judy Garland ! ) , who as a young girl had some innocent dalliance with an elderly Jew who was then convicted of consorting with Aryans and was disappeared . The most damning evidence was that she'd been seen sitting on the man's lap . She stutters neurotically while Schell bears down on her and he finally shouts at her - - " DID YOU - - SIT - - ON - - HIS - - LAP ? ? ? " Enough is enough , finally . I really dislike this movie for its fake humanitarianism . The victims were innocent , but does that make all of their countrymen evil ? That's the kind of stereotypica , digital , black-and-white thinking that will lead to the next war , the next genocide . If the Nazis hadn't existed we would be almost forced to invent them because as a society we need bad examples . Without evil , how can we possibly convince ourselves that we are good ? So we can all leave the theater or switch off the TV , eyes brimming with tears at the tragedy that has been brought to our attention again , cheapened though it is by this film , and go to bed glowing with self satisfaction . |
442,022 | 819,382 | 116,213 | 5 | Lights , Camera , Speed , Action , Action , Action . . . . n . | In this outing , Arnold is a lone operator within the Justice Department's Witness Protection Program . His assignment : Prevent the delectable Vanessa Williams from miscreants because she has discovered a high-level plot in her defense-contractor employer to sell super-ray guns to the enemy . As it turns out , there's a lot of money changing hands around here . And , as we all know , money corrupts and absolute money corrupts absolutely . ( Okay , that's not exactly what Lord Acton said but I don't care . ) One of those corrupted is a highly placed colleague in the Witness Protection Program - - James Caan by name . Well , all of this fol de rol doesn't amount to much more than an excuse for Arnold and Vanessa to run full tilt through cavernous offices and airplanes and secret facilities and docks on which ships are being loaded with those X-ray rifles . You have rarely seen so much action before . Vanessa is beautiful , resourceful , but vulnerable . Schwarzenegger is simply made of steel . His best stunt is this . An emergency parachute has been thrown from a crippled airplane . Arnold exchanges a few more shots with his enemies . ( He rarely misses ; they almost always do . ) Then he plunges out of the open door to chase the parachute towards earth . Overtaking it in mid-air , he slips into it the way you or I might slip into a windbreaker . The errant airplane , trailing smoke , manages to foul his chute . No matter ; he tears it off and opens another chute that we didn't know he had , just soon enough to land with a crash on top of a clunker in an automobile graveyard . Unhurt , of course . Unfazed , even . A second later he's cracking jokes with a couple of black tots . The most interesting thing about these movies is the kind of villains they come up with . Germans are always a good stand-by . Never forgiven them for World War II . And then Russians are also good . The Cold War . The Mafia also made splendid heavies , but not so much since " The Godfather . " Then there were Latino members of " the cartel . " Latterly , a few swarthy Arabs have been sneaked in . But this film transcends such simple-mindedness . Get this , now . Aside from the corrupt individuals in the Justice Department , the heavies are the Mafia okay - - but the Russian Mafia this time ! THEY'RE the ones who have paid for the ex-ectoplasmic-X-ray guns and intend to run off with thirty thousand of them . And who are they going to sell them to ? The " terrorists . " How's that for permutations ? Russian Mafia Terrorists . As a matter of fact , Arnold cashes in some IOUs and the Italian Mafia are on OUR side during the shoot out - - mostly for comic effect . I can't recommend it and I can't NOT recommend it . You've seen it all before in one or another version . If you like this sort of thing , well , then , you'll like it . It's just more of the same . |
442,987 | 819,382 | 360,717 | 5 | Gorilla My Dreams | I won't bother with the story . If you don't know it by now you have been living in Plato's cave . Kong breaks free of his shackles in a huge New York theater , bursts through the walls , and finds himself in the middle of a busy , night-time Times Square , crowded with electric lights , cabs , pedestrians , trolleys , and a Pepsodent Sign . It's mid winter and the streets are slippery with slush . Well , Kong just trashes hell out of the place , and that's the part of the movie I liked best , although I'm compelled to admit to having seen it only in disjointed snippets . There's something soul satisfying in seeing this big ape skidding around at top speed , deconstructing all these taxis , smashing through huge marquis , stomping on crowds , picking up people and throwing them away because none of them is his true love , Ann Darrow ( Naomi Watts ) . I really liked that Times Square . I mean , that was before it turned into a gallery of whores in the 1960s , and before it became a family-friendly extension of Disneyland . Times Square was livable then , without King Kong in it anyway . Everything zips right along from one repetitious and familiar scene to another . Man - - this gorilla really moves quickly . He holds Watts in one hand while he fights off a couple of T . rex with the other , and he whips her around at such speed that in real life intertia would tear off her head . The jungle scenes became a little boring after a while . Too many things zap menacingly towards the camera , especially dinosaurs with wide-stretched fang-filled jaws . One of those goes a long way . And , in an excess of bad manners , Kong simply has too many combative encounters with too many other unevolved creatures . Cripes , if this is a typical day he should be glad to move to New York . There's a lot of money on display here . If my source is accurate , the movie cost only $50 million less than China gives in aid to North Korea every year . I had a problem with the , um , the central romance too . On the one hand we have King Kong who is nothing if not BIG . On the other hand we have the diminutive Naomi Watts who seems to be made of egg shell . He loves her . We know that from the original . But in THIS version she clearly falls for him too , all watery-eyed and sighing and smiling with delight as he picks up her Barbie-doll figure and they twirl around together on the ice of a lake in Central Park , Big Fred and little Ginger . But what - - precisely - - are his intentions towards her ? And hers towards him . This is the 1930s , so how does he propose to support her ? Is he interested in a career in medicine ? Does he have a college degree ? Has he even graduated from HIGH SCHOOL ? And what after the marriage ? What THEN ? Do they sleep together in the conjugal bed ? Suppose he rolls over ? What happens if a baby comes along ? Can they truly say they've thought this thing THROUGH ? Well , enough of that . And enough of dinosaurs too . I don't want to see any more on the screen , especially the man-eating kind . And can we call a moratorium on King Kong remakes while we're at it ? They're getting to be so common that even I worked in one , the far superior , art house hit and cult classic , " King Kong Lives . " No more King Kongs , okay ? And no more Gustav Klimt prints either . And I'm getting pretty tired of girls being named " Jamie " too . |
443,202 | 819,382 | 262,699 | 5 | Its Not About Sex , It's About Power . | As I read it , this rambling film is a case study of declining potency . Jean-Pierre Leaud is surprisingly unprepossessing as a dumpy , long-haired director who's made a couple of well-received skin flicks with titles like , " I'm Hard , I Come , I Sing , " but has had - - well - - director's block since 1984 . It's a sad tale . And you feel sorry for the actor right away , if you remember Leaud in Truffaut's earlier films or in " Belle de Jour , " a dark and sometimes menacing vibrant presence . Felt sorry for his character as well . The film makes it clear that sex is like power is like life . Leaud's 1968-style political activism is now obsolete . The new activism opposes a government that treats us " like a statistic . " Its ultimate response is elective mutism , so Leaud winds up communicating with his son by reading his notes instead of having a conversation . We can see Leaud's power - - his vision , if you will - - being taken away from him . He's directing a scene in which a fake chauffeur is seduced by a 16-year-old heiress . ( I think I'm getting this right . It was a little confusing . ) He lays out his plan for the rest of the crew . As usual , the cameras will stay perfectly still while filming this sexual encounter . One camera for closeups of organs and faces , the other for a medium shot . The actress will not emote while the chauffeur does her . No phony moaning or wild gyrations . Leaud , the director , will take care of that part for her . Finally , he wants her to , well , swallow aa she might offscreen . Those are his directorial intentions . Just before shooting starts , the Assistant Director plays some romantic music , thinking it may help the scene . " No music , " says Leaud politely but firmly . The scene begins the way Leaud wants it . But Leaud is staring at the floor . The AD asks , " Aren't you going to direct it ? " Leaud replies : " I've already directed it . " But not to the AD's satisfaction . First the AD begins prompting the actress - - " Louder . We can't hear you . " Then , little by little , the AD takes over the scene . He instructs the actress to shout and move around more . He plays the forbidden romantic music . He moves the cameras around . And the actress gets a cliché right in the face . What might have been a more or less personal scene has been turned into something that the industry grinds out like Wendy's Whoppers . And all this time , Leaud has been moping in his chair , without a whimper of protest . That scene summed it up for me in many ways . Other scenes got by my interpretive apparatus entirely . I don't know what's going on when Leaud leaves his wife . I have no idea why Leaud asks permission to build a house on a friend's land and then , after laying out a sketchy floor plan of a tiny shed , simply sits there staring at it for scene after scene . Is it " symbolic " ? If so , the symbolism whizzed past me without doing any damage and went on its way . I think I DID get symbolism elsewhere . When Leaud's son and his girlfriend make love in a meadow , we don't see them " doing it " but we get a lot of shots of sheep running around all woolly and sweaty looking . Very mammalian stuff . Is the movie worth watching ? Probably . Nice photography , good acting . Definitely , if you're a 50-year-old and your vision is increasingly impaired by senile cataracts . |
442,002 | 819,382 | 60,748 | 5 | Routine but picturesque revenge Western . | It's got most of the stuff you'd expect in a longish Western involving the moral maturation of half-breed , orphaned Steve McQueen . All he knows as an awkward and unskilled young man is that three guys blew his father's brains out , chopped up his mother and made a tobacco pouch out of her skin , and burned the house down . McQueen runs into a gun dealer , Brian Keith , who takes him under his wing and teaches him to shoot . ( First things first . ) He tracks down the first killer and sends him to his reward . The second murderer , Arthur Kennedy , selfish and whining , is a little harder to get at because he's in a Louisiana prison camp . But McQueen gets himself sent to the same camp anyway , which demonstrates an abundance of will power because who would want to be sent to a prison in the Louisiana swamps in the late 19th century ? Devil's Island would be an improvement . He and Kennedy manage to escape with the help of Susanne Pleshette . Pleshette passes on after being bitten by a water moccasin and chewing McQueen out for his desire to kill . We can understand her humane impulses but they seem a little out of place in a Cajun woman who freely spends the night with anonymous prisoners in their barracks from time to time . And as an uneducated , backwoods Cajun girl , Pleshette gives a fine performance as a New York sophisticate . None of this saves Kennedy from McQueen's wrath . McQueen emerges from under water holding his pistol and plugs Kennedy several satisfying times . Kennedy's terror and pain at least distract us from wondering how you can fire a pistol whose barrel is full of water . Next in line - - some Catholic monks . They rescue him , starving and being beaten by hooligans , and give him a Bible to read while they shelter him and preach the pointlessness of revenge . The only lesson McQueen absorbs from the Bible : " An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth . " Bless you , my son . The third guy is Karl Malden - - REALLY slimy , a leader of an outlaw gang that kills in cold blood to steal payroll money . Of course ALL the murders are without any redeeming qualities . All of them embody the seven deadly sins . Malden , however , is the first one to know that the vengeful son of that murdered family is after him . He only knows the guy's name - - Max Sand - - not what he looks like . And he puts McQueen through a couple of impromptu tests , showing him the pouch made of his mother's skin and whatnot , but McQueen is prepared for this and doesn't bat an eye . After a robbery McQueen reveals his identity and Malden tries to scoot away . I have no idea why McQueen chose this particular moment for the Big Reveal , and you won't either . In any case , Malden and McQueen shoot it out , resulting in a wounded Malden crawling out of a stream and cursing McQuee - - even throwing the pouch at him . But - - wait for it . McQueen , having plugged Malden painfully through three hinge joints , decides in the face of Malden's ranting that , " You're not worth killing . " Again , why McQueen , who has never shown the slightest compunction about taking the lives of his targets , should suddenly decide to spare Malden , the head honcho , the big cheese , the great decider , is one of those mysteries that will have film scholars scratching their heads in bemusement for centuries to come . It's not an insulting movie and it doesn't pander . It goes so far as to deprive the viewer of the bloodbath expected at the end . " FINISH IT ! " Malden screams through his pain , but McQueen leaves him to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair . There's something else good about it too . Henry Hathaway , no artist , was always an efficient craftsman and his skill is on display here . And the photography in Inyo National Forest is superb . Makes one want to ride a horse - - a gentle , philosophical kind of horse - - through the sagebrush and scattered , twisted fir trees of the Sierra Nevada - - in the sunshine - - breathing nature's own pine-scented terpines . |
442,505 | 819,382 | 93,773 | 5 | Combat , mano a pseudopod . | As action flicks go , this one's pretty typical . Arnold leads the usual band of expert musclemen into some tropical country on a mercy mission , or was it a mercenary mission , picks up a pretty young Latina ( Elpidia Carillo ) after a furious battle with well-armed swarthy guerrillas who make easy targets , and encounters a - - well , an alien , while on his way back to meet the chopper at the rendezvous . As Arnold pointed out at the time of release , you really get two movies for one . A regular excursion action flick and a science-fiction action flick . Boy , are these guys macho . ( One of them is one of those North American Indians with an intuitive , spiritual collective unconscious who senses when the thing is nearby . ) And they carry the ugliest guns ever seen on screen . It's the kind of " lost patrol " movie in which the characters get picked off one by one by an unseen enemy until , in this example , only Arnold and Carillo are left alive to hop on the chopper . The major difference between most examples of the genre and this one is that the other examples ordinarily take breathers and give the characters a chance to chat , so we get to know them a little . Not much time for that here . A coffee break would mean one less opportunity for the group to shred the banana plants with their slugs and grenades . The alien gave me a bit of a problem , I have to say . Here he is , all decked out in high-tech equipment including a helmet that gives his vision infra-red capabilities . ( He presses Arnold's head up against a tree and examines it carefully through this heat-registering device and you can tell what great shape Arnold is in because his nose is cold . ) He's also got some kind of rocket launchers built into his arms and carries some strap ons that enable him to heal quickly or , failing that , to set off an atomic explosion . All of that high-tech stuff didn't bother me . But his organic evolution hasn't seem to have kept up with his technology . Okay , he's got opposable thumbs . Thank heaven for small favors . And he's bipedal . But that's about it . How do you design and build delicate equipment like that when your fingers end in claws ? And when he removes his helmet we see that his mouth is surrounded by four maxillapods , crab-like claws that can serve no other purpose than to shovel food into his diminutive mouth . They've invented space travel but not the fork ? Finally , his hair is made up into dreadful dreadlocks , which looks pretty retro from our perspective . What's this alien doing here anyway ? " He comes when the summer is hot , " Elpidia intones . ( A sissy after all . ) He seems to be a trophy hunter . He skins the people he kills but then seems to do nothing with the body except burn it so he can add the skull to his collection . He fawns proudly over those skulls . Does he show any other values aside from the desire to kill other living beings and preserve their heads as trophies ? What I mean is , does he have any NON-HUMAN traits ? Well , actually no . While they are being pursued , Elpidia drops a weapon and Arnold stops her and says , " No ! He didn't gill you befawh because you vair unahmed . " Later on , though , he shows no such compunction about deciding to kill a wounded and unarmed Arnold . Then , too , when challenged directly by Arnold at the end , the alien unburdens himself of his technological accoutrements and faces Arnold hand to hand , raising the question of whether they have Roy Rogers movies on the place from whence the alien came . If you're a fan of action movies , Arnold , earth-bound science fiction , or any combination thereof , catch this one if you haven't seen it yet . |
443,129 | 819,382 | 109,458 | 5 | Episode in Later Series Meets With Modest Success | Colombo solves this murder by figuring out that a call could not have been made from a cell phone in the mountains behind Malibu . Falk still has some dash , but the writers have slowed his intellect more than usual . He's not familiar with satellite dishes and television . He's only " heard about dem things . " And he's not so sure about cellular phones either . " Dey give you tumors . " Colombo , however , is savvy enough to stage a bicycling accident on a rural road in order to trip up the killer . Colombo is a constant in these movies . His character never changes . If he's more amusing in some episodes than in others it's because he's sometimes given better lines . ( My favorite , from another episode involving Janet Leigh , is " cadaveric spasm ? ! " ) But if the villain is dull , so is the story . And Colombo's murderers come generally in two categories : the flamboyant and the icy cold . My vote for best icy murderer : Patrick McGoohan , the Colonel in charge of the military college . Here , William Shatner makes a pretty effective flamboyant murderer , hammy to the point of outrageousness . Some actors coast along on their normal off-screen personalities , but Shatner gives it everything he's got , huffing and puffing , the theatrical contours of his voice taking us on a roller coaster ride , sneering and strutting and superior and entirely unbelievable . He seems to be having a hell of a good time , barely able to keep from laughing out loud . Maybe it's partly because he regularly checked his appearance in a mirror and found that his mustache couldn't make up its mind about its color . Still it's a bit sluggish . I guess that in order to make the story and the flagging energy behind the series seem a little more contemporaneous , the writers have brought in an openly gay love affair and a hint of incestuous feelings . Neither is particularly interesting , nor are they relevant to the plot . And I have no idea what the title means : " Butterfly in Shades of Grey . " Did I miss something ? The plot is somewhat hard to follow at times too . A Senator is destroyed , somehow , on the air for no special reason and some minutes are spent on this incident . Enjoyable though . If not among the best , it's not among the worst either . |
442,407 | 819,382 | 43,435 | 5 | Where's the noir ? | It's never been clear to me what a film noir is . A treacherous woman ? The traditional iconography of black sedans and snub-nosed revolvers ? Black and white ? Seedy surroundings or exotic ones ? Murder or grand larceny ? Revenge ? Charlie Chan had all of them . This one would seem to have all the proper elements though . Here is Dick Powell , who gave a good performance as Philip Marlowe in " Murder My Sweet . " A . 38 and a . 45 caliber pistol . Rhonda Fleming , a femme than whom no one is more fatale . A semi-comic sidekick in Richard Erdman . Good old Los Angeles setting , and well chosen too . Fine noir title . Yet the whole thing just doesn't jell . If film noir has anything , it has two basic elements , as Alain Silver pointed out - - dramatic photography and unusual camera placements . This has neither stylistic element . It's shot mostly during the daytime and Robert Parrish , an intelligent guy , has shot it as the straightforward unraveling of a mystery surrounding a double cross . You could substitute Cagney and Bogart and you'd have a typical , inexpensive Warner Brothers ' gangster movie from the 1930s . Dick Powell looks good in his neatly tailored suits and flat-brimmed fedora . He gets to drive a two-ton Nash as well . He's just been released from the slams after serving five years for a robbery he did not take part in . But , man , is he expressionless . When he makes a wise crack or is supposed to be sad , his face takes on a look of agony , as if trying to rearrange its own musculature is a colossal effort . And the script doesn't help him . The hospitalized Erdman asks about his , Erdman's , girl friend . " What about Doreen ? How bad is she ? " Powell : " As bad as she can get . " William Conrad gives a stereotypical performance too but it is probably the best one because , cliché or not , the evil fat man is invariably a colorful role . Think of Sidney Greenstreet . Regis Toomey as the cop with whom Powell has a suitably ambivalent relationship looks like General George Marshall . In fact , I'm not entirely convinced they're not one and the same person . Let me put it this way . Have you ever seen the two of them in the same room together ? And the end , such as it is , kind of collapses in on itself . There isn't the expectable shootout . The villain doesn't twist around and fall from the roof with a splash . There is no clinch followed by a dissolve . Instead , after learning the true story from an unwitting Fleming , Powell tells her they're leaving for Timbuctoo and tells her to pack . Then he walks out , spills the beans to the waiting police , and strolls away . I'm kind of making fun of it but I rather enjoyed it too . Everyone likes to see a puzzle solved . |
442,427 | 819,382 | 45,082 | 5 | Good Example of the Genre . | It's surprising that there isn't a decent DVD available for " Retreat , Hell ! " It's a good example of the kind of war movie that was produced during World War II and a few of the post-war years , before the war was reexamined and faced more realistically . It has elements of all the generic conventions . Frank Lovejoy is the Marine colonel who has to whip his battalion of raw recruits ( is there any other kind ? ) and retreads into shape . His tactic for achieving this is to morph into Frank Lockjaw . Only towards the end does he begin to show his more sensitive side . Yes , on the surface he may be crusty and hard-hearted . But underneath that , he's a real softy . It's a good thing they didn't dig any deeper into his character or they might have found another layer in which he was a real MEAN SOB . Richard Carlson is the retread from World War II , a reservist pulled back into active duty as a company commander . He's forced to move his wife and two lovely kiddies into a Quonset hut and he's deprived of their company , despite his whining to Lockjaw . He toughens up though and learns to be a Marine first . There is the kid , Russ Tamblyn , who at this stage of his career could not yet act , who must prove himself as much a Marine as the rest of the men in his family . ( He looks about fourteen . ) One of his brothers is an officer serving near Tamblyn's unit and we know at once , when Tamblyn asks for permission to visit after a battle , that the brother is KIA . Then there is the somewhat slow , drawlin ' Southrin boy who provides a bit of comic relief , though not much . And the Gunnery Sergeant who must harden his men for battle . The usual conventions are followed . There is the mail call ritual , the fierce climactic speech about how we'll fight on and reach our goal , outnumbered and surrounded though we may be . The final entrance of the troops and equipment into Allied lines . And when some bystanders ask this ragged group what outfit they belong to , Frank Lovejoy ( now thoroughly humanized ) straightens up and replies proudly , " First battalion , United States Marines . " It really does hark back to World War II movies . The enemy are faceless . The rifle shots don't sound like rifle shots at all . A fired weapon emits a modest ka-Whoosh instead of a loud pop . There is the tension of waiting while the enemy approach like black cockroaches over the snowy hills and our troops are out of ammunition until , at the last moment , the skies clear and cargo planes make the necessary drop , just as in " Battleground " , a superior example of the genre . Some of the engagements are shot in the hills around Hollywood , but there is some combat footage from Korea inserted too . The actual events have been cleaned up a bit for public consumption . The reason the Marines and the Army had been caught with their pants down is that they had sailed northward through the British lines as if on a picnic . MacArthur had found little resistance in North Korea and was determined to thrust quickly through to the Manchurian border , while the more prudent British adopted a cautious advance on a broad front . MacArthur had assured President Truman that there was no chance of Chinese intervention , a big misjudgment . MacArthur had also declared the men would be home by Christmas which didn't happen and this is mentioned by one or two characters in the film , but sadly , without bitterness . The retreat from the reservoir was genuine hell . The weather was bitterly cold and frostbite was common . The Chinese troops had more protective clothing than ours . And omitted from this movie are newsreel scenes of frozen bodies being dragged on sleds behind trucks during this slow , sixty-mile retreat . I'd give this movie bonus points for having taken a chance on its being about a retreat instead of a victory . We don't hear much about Korea these days . It ended in a stalemate . Retreats , defeats , and stalemates are the stuff neither of legends or commercially successful movies . They don't follow the accepted scenario in which we either win or put up a gallant fight before being wiped out by a treacherous foe . " A Bridge Too Far " was another risky production . I doubt that this one would have been made in quite the way it was except for a proclamation by one Marine officer who , when asked if they were retreating , said , " Retreat , Hell . We're just advancing in a different direction . " A ringing line like that is enough to transform our perception of what we are witnessing on the screen . |
442,655 | 819,382 | 470,705 | 5 | Folie a Deux | William Friedkin , who usually knows what he's doing , directed this unusual movie about a lonely woman , Ashley Judd , who waitresses in a lesbian bar somewhere in the ruder parts of the American Southwest . She meets a guy , Michael Shannon , at the bar and he spends the night on the floor of her dumpy motel room . Shannon is as weird as he looks - - a little shy , taciturn , perceptive , but off kilter in a way that's hard to define . Judd herself has been thoroughly deglamorized by wardrobe , makeup , and age . Her character seems to have little imagination and an awareness that might kindly be described as a bit below normal . She's a tough babe , though . Judd and Shannon seem to get along well together , even if no sparks fly . Enter Harry Connick , Jr . , her ex husband out on parole . He's all pumped up after a couple of years in the Crowbar Hotel for armed robbery . He's slightly disappointed when he shows up and Judd tells him to get out , bringing up a name from their past . He belts her in the face , knocks her down , then explains , " I told you never to talk about that . Now whose fault is that ? " He means it's her fault she was bashed because she did something he'd told her not to do . Right off the bat I had this plot figured out . Judd and Shannon fall quietly in love - - two people who need each other desperately - - but Connick is going to keep intruding into their lives , becoming more threatening , until he assaults them and is killed by Shannon and everyone thinks " good riddance " and breathes a big sigh of relief . Boy , was I wrong . By the end of the movie I had nothing but sympathy for Harry Connick , Jr . ' s , character because he was the only person in the entire flick I could understand . What begins as a naturalistic , slice-of-life study of a couple of marginalized people turns into a precipitate descent from simple acedia into some simulacrum of madness consisting mostly of delusions about bugs . Literal bugs . Insects . Shannon , who is completely bananas and covered with self-inflicted wounds , identifies the bugs that surround and infect them as " aphids . " Sometimes , he rattles on about them as if they were inorganic , some kind of nano-intelligence , computer chips . The pace of both events and dialog increases from largo to prestissimo without going anyplace at all . Shannon has evidently escaped from some Army hospital where he may or may not have been a subject in an experiment with mind-altering drugs . A doctor , who calls himself " more of a consultant " , seeks him out and explains things rationally to Ashley Judd . He's calm and sensible . But then , out of nowhere , he decides to sit down and light up a crack pipe . And when Judd and Shannon are sitting next to the dead body , which they believe to be a robot , Judd goes into this nonsensical , hysterical rant about she being the " drone mother " and how the egg sacks of the bugs spread and I defy any human being to interpret what she's talking about . Maybe a robot could do it . The two are by this time ensconced in a room papered with aluminum foil ( " to interrupt the signals " ) , lighted by neon-blue insect repellent lamps , and festooned with fly paper and citronella candles . They end by hallucinating a helicopter landing nearby , perhaps on the roof , everything trembling and whirling in the wind , and they blow themselves and the motel up . It's a daring movie . I don't know what it's supposed to mean . Take , for instance , the scene in which Shannon is stabbing the doctor's dead body over and over and over . Judd isn't freaked out by the gruesome murder . She's screaming about the six-year-old son she lost in a supermarket ten years ago . The logic simply isn't there . At the same time this is not a real picture of schizophrenia , which , to an outside observer , is a lot duller than what we see on the screen . I've given this flick a rating of five . By that , I don't mean to suggest that this is in any way an " average " movie . In some ways it's just plain awful , and in others it's superb . The performances of everyone involved , for example , could hardly be improved upon . Ashley Judd has been good before ( and sometimes not so good ) but she's never been better than here , especially in the first half when her exchanges with others are more naturalistic and nuanced . You know , when she screams less . Friedkin's direction I suppose does the best it could with such a nebulous story . Judd and Shannon only spend one night in bed together and at the moment of maximum fluidity the score jangles electronically and there are momentary inserts of seeds spilling and , finally , the head of a praying mantis staring into the camera . What the hell has that praying mantis got to do with it ? Oh , it's a BUG . I know that . But why a mantis instead of the aphid that plays a central role ? When praying mantises copulate the female manages to turn her head and decapitate the smaller male , which , both headless and heedless , keeps on copulating . Here it's the other way round . |
443,446 | 819,382 | 111,143 | 5 | Comic Book Adventure . | I don't know why they make these kinds of movies . Just for a chance to spend a lot of money ? I can think of 57 better ways of spending it , beginning with " Send some to me . " Alec Baldwin is handsome and Penelope Ann Miller is yummy and John Lone is a good actor . The sets are phenomenal , the score epic in dimension , the special effects special . The plot , in an exemplary case of arrested development , is stuck at the fifth-grade level . It's hardly worth describing but let's just say John Lone , as the passionate villain Kahn , has made an " atomic bomb " and wants to take over the world with it - - the world as it was in the late 1930s . ( Kahn ? How does a Chinese guy come to have an Arabic name ? Never mind . ) It ought to appeal to kids , what with its dusty sarcophagi creaking open , it's Kung Fu Chinoiserie , its magic daggers and hypnotic trances . There are little tid-bits for adults too . A villain invites the luscious , silk-clad Miller down to the laboratory to see his beryllium spheres , part of the bomb he's working on . " I'm not interested in your spheres , " she tells him with gelid disdain . There was a time when everyone who had a radio tuned in to programs like this - - " The Shadow , " " Inner Sanctum , " " The Whistler , " " Suspense . " ( " The Shadow " often featured the voice of Orson Welles . ) Some of the programs weren't bad , as a matter of fact , and many of them were adapted for noir films of the 40s . " The Shadow " must have been fun for a kid but it's the kind of fun one tends to outgrow , rather like Abbott and Costello . I can see , though , where a family might enjoy this spectacular spectacle . The kids certainly will , and there's just enough in it to keep the adults from nodding out . |
442,857 | 819,382 | 435,705 | 5 | Leaves You Numb . | An action movie with a gimmick . Nicholas Cage is a Las Vegas illusionist who actually has the power to see into the future - - but only insofar as the events are connected with his own body sheath . He can tell , for instance , if he's about to be hit by a car while crossing the street , and thus avoid it , but he can't tell if somebody else a block away is about to be run over . A gang of international terrorists has smuggled a nuclear device into the United States and is going to demolish a city . The FBI , chiefly in the rather attractive form of the no-nonsense agent in charge , Julianne Moore , once they find out , are naturally enough interested in enlisting the help of Cage . He's reluctant , for reasons having to do with adding some tension to the plot , but finally agrees after the FBI track him down , capture him , and convince him of his misperception of the circumstances . Oh - - and Jessica Biel is thrown into the mix to provide Cage with a threatened girl friend and a bit of sex . The movie is directed at a frenetic pace . The music pounds us into insensibility . The action is speeded up and the camera revolves around Cage's figure like a manic merry-go-round . But all this is to be expected in an action movie designed to hold your breath until you feel dizzy . We get to know virtually nothing about the dozen or so young terrorists , male and female , who want to destroy us . None has a dog or a stamp collection . I keep thinking of how Hitchcock handled villains . Hitchcock's villains , even in his most patriotic and simple-minded films , were always interesting and highly individuated . The polite Nazis in " Saboteur " and James Mason's suave heavy in " North by Northwest . " These guys are just devoted nihilists , no more than that . The only thing of interest about them is the language they speak . This varies from one dumb action movie to another , and it's always revealing to follow their evolution in Hollywood scripts . For years after World War II , they spoke German . During the Cold War they became Russians . After the collapse of the USSR they morphed into Spanish-speaking cocaine drug lords from " the cartel . " More recently , they've begun speaking Arabic and looking vaguely Middle Eastern . ( Sometimes there were retrograde dips : the gang of thugs in " Die Hard " spoke German with Russian accents . ) This particular gang speaks three languages . English - - but with a British accent - - German , and French . The first two are traditional in the genre . But French ? When did they become terrorists , and how do you say " freedom fries " in French ? In any case , whatever language they happen to be speaking , with whatever accents , they are dismissable except as plot engines , their animus driving the story along at breakneck speed . Fast , yes , but confusing too . Cage is leading the FBI agents through one of those warehouses with lots of catwalks and plumes of steam . He can tell when a sniper is around the corner by imagining himself turning the corner and being shot . But then , with no fanfare , he goes overboard and begins purposefully imagining himself turning both right AND left at the same time , to see what will happen to him in either case . Soon enough , he is morphing in his mind into three or four Nicolas Cages striding off in different directions , and each of these splits again into three or four . By the end of this sequence there are more than a dozen Cages scurrying around in this warehouse , each independent of the other , and each representing a possible future that the ORIGINAL Cage , half a mile back there , is imagining . And - - are you keeping this straight ? Because there were times when to me they began to make the same impression as a horde of cockroaches scurrying away from a fruitcake . This movie is not the type that will deny the viewer the catharsis of a nuclear explosion that demolishes Los Angeles and kills all the principles , so don't worry about that . However , after we have the satisfaction of viewing the cataclysm , the camera takes us back to Cage lying in bed beside his girl friend . It's all been in his mind . ( Whew . ) He immediately contacts Moore and tells her he's made a mistake . They have to adopt a different approach because once you change the future , that changes everything . I suppose this is his version of " the grandfather paradox " of time travel . If you go back into the past and murder your own grandfather before he has had a chance to reproduce , how can you exist ? But does it apply to the future ? The answer isn't self evident , and the whole thing is dismissed with Cage's offhand dictum . It's the last line in the movie , and it's a cop out . But then the whole movie is nothing more than a high-concept cop out . I kind of enjoyed seeing it - - once . I often enjoy action movies . They aren't high art . They're not the Guggenheim Museum or the Brooklyn Bridge . They're vernacular art , like a colorful and ergonomic gas station . We need both , but " Next " is more like some sprawling wooden shack all by itself at a dusty crossroads , with decrepit gas pumps in front and a sign , " Red's Pit Stop and Car Wash . " But there's a cardboard sign tacked to the door , " Closed Due to Exhaustion . " I think at this point I should either quit or ask the waitress for a fresh analogy . |
443,268 | 819,382 | 60,814 | 5 | No , Paris is Not Burning . | I'd like to recommend this movie because it deals with a subject of such historic significance , but I found it confusing . It meanders all over the place , like the Seine . The Germans have been ordered to destroy the city , including its historical monuments , by an insane Adolf Hitler , if it is ever in danger of falling into Allied hands . That's clear enough , but then the waters turn turbid . The General in charge , Gert Frobe , is reluctant to follow the order for humanitarian reasons but will evidently do what he's told . He's held up by the French resistance , who gather their small arms and fire on German patrols . ( They were a lot more organized than I'd realized . ) A messenger is sent to the Americans to ask them to divert from their plans to destroy the German army and aid in the liberation of Paris . The request reaches General Bradley who agrees . The Free French Army enters Paris , followed by the Amis , and shortly the Germans are subdued and the city saved . For me , the most stirring moment is when two men activate the bells of Notre Dame . What a job . The huge old chimes weight tons and are covered with cobwebs and it takes a heap of huffing and puffing to get the clappers going but this is the liberation of Paris . It's one of those " spot-the-stars " movies , with more famous faces than you can count , and every other time one of them first appears on screen , the director , Rene Clement , moves the camera in for a close up in case you might miss the dimple in the middle of Kirk Douglas's chin . Well , maybe it's understandable since you've only got about 30 seconds to spot it . A central character would probably have helped to integrate these loosely linked tesserae . The sound is so terrible it distracts a viewer from the already fragmented story . The voices are all dubbed , of course , and only occasionally by their real-life owners , like Orson Welles and Tony Perkins ( in a stereotypical and dispensable role ) . The gun shots sound as if they were lifted from an inexpensive Italian war movie . Loud incidental noises have been added to the sound track - - the crunching of boots on gravel , the clicks of a bolt action rifle . Maurice Jarre's score isn't bad , however closely it resembles some of his other works during this period . The visuals are okay . Some black-and-white news footage from the street fighting is integrated into the drama . But it's not a gripping film and not very innovative . If a man is shot , he twirls around and dies in conventional Hollywood fashion . Nice shots of some Parisian tourist spots though . We get a good look at Napolean's tomb . I'm glad that Paris wasn't destroyed . The greatest sandwich I ever had was at a nondescript café in the Gare du Nord . And it's good to see the Free French Army in combat in a movie like this . They may have been organized in exile but they did a splendid job alongside the rest of the Allies in Italy , particularly at Monte Cassino . |
442,902 | 819,382 | 116,040 | 5 | The Holland Tunnel Adventure ! | Once while being towed through the Holland Tunnel my old Ford lost a wheel that rolled placidly down the left lane before wobbling and flopping to a halt . It must have held up traffic for half an hour , but that's nothing compared to what happens to the Holland Tunnel in this typical disaster flick . Boy , if things can go wrong they surely will . Fortunately there is always the short chance of a last-minute escape , light at the end of the tunnel , so to speak , and only a few dispensable characters must be left behind to pump up the sentiment quotient that the formula requires . Some hazardous material blows up in the middle of the tunnel that links New York City and New Jersey . A huge fireball whooshes out of both ends of the traffic conduit , killing everyone except the handful of survivors who Sly Stallone , in his magnanimity , volunteers to reach from the outside and lead to safety . You've met most of these trapped characters in one form or another . There is the beautiful young woman , terrified but still able to make wisecracks and perform improbable physical feats . There is the heroic black cop mortally injured while saving others and begs them to leave him behind and save themselves . There is the antagonist , usually dumb , who pipes up at every roadblock to castigate the only leader who can save them . " This is IT ? You told us you knew what you were doing ! " There's the endangered child . There's the elderly couple who don't think they can make it and the old lady doesn't . ( Cf . , " The Poseidon Aventure , " here and everywhere else . ) The menace follows a predictable trajectory . First fire , then collapse , then monstrous rolling objects , then collapse , then water . At one point Stallone must slip through a series of three gargantuan exhaust fans , any one of which could slice and dice him if he doesn't get through it before his fourteen seconds run out . It's like playing a game in a video arcade . Still , it's diverting enough , if that's the sort of thing you're looking for . It's total lack of originality keeps it from being an Ideal Type , but so what ? It's only a movie . |
442,697 | 819,382 | 70,074 | 5 | The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters | In the prologue , the script has James Mason , the actor , come out and show us Mary Shelley's grave and explain the origin of the story . Then the script more or less buries Shelley's original under a collapsing iceberg of additional myth , fantasy , and whimsical repetition . This TV miniseries comes in two parts . Part One isn't bad . Leonard Whiting is Victor Frankenstein . David MacCallum is his mentor in building the creature ( Michael Sarazzin ) using electrical energy and parts of cadavers . Christopher Isherwood was behind the script and - - well , I'll tell you . If this isn't an allegory I don't know what is . Sarazzin , as the creature , climbs from his gurney wearing only a few strips of bandages , his jewels prominent , his face and hair carefully groomed . " Beautiful ! " gasps Frankenstein . And with a sweet and beckoning smile the creature repeats , " Beautiful . " The two handsome young men get along quite well together , though to be sure one of them is rather dead . Frankenstein's fiancée , Elizabeth , turns pretty much into the beard . Oh , sure , he's engaged to her but we know in which direction his affections lie . But now our story turns a bit . The creature suffers the agonizing fate of every narcissist . He ages - - and quickly . And as he ages his features collapse and seem to rot , so that he shortly begins to look like Dorian Gray's portrait . ( Another allegory there , which we needn't go into . ) The creature , discovering that he's turned ugly and feeling bitter , begins to brood , and Frankenstein locks him up and begins to pursue his plans with Elizabeth again . The creature gets out and visits Frankenstein and Elizabeth at a fancy ball . He turns out to be one of those rowdy guests you find at every party - - smashing mirrors , windows , and furniture , and killing a few guests . Somewhere around here , Part One ended and Part Two began . Part Two was a mistake . The creature takes a back seat most of the time . Instead , enter Dr . Polidori ( James Mason ) , no relation to the Polidori who shared that weekend with Shelley and the rest . Polidori informs Frankenstein that the BEST way to bring a fabricated body to life is by using chemicals , not electrical energy , and for a moment we expect them to begin arguing like two yentas over the back fence discussing a recipe . At any rate , Polidori enlists Frankenstein's help in creating a female body - - this time using HIS methods . She turns out to be Jane Seymour , which is a considerable improvement over Michael Sarazzin if you ask me , even though we don't get to see her wearing three or four bandages . There's a problem , however . If Frankenstein's monster was flawed in that it aged too quickly , Polidori's creature ( whom Polidori names " Prima " ) turns out to be thoroughly cuckoo . She strangles a cat for no reason . Well , I guess there's ALWAYS a reason to strangle a cat , but some of her other behavior is just plain shocking . I forget most of the other things , but it doesn't matter . Seymour too interrupts a fancy ball , doing a charming , impromptu pas de seul . Now Victor Frankenstein begins to look upon Prima with more than the usual admiration a scientist feels for an invention . Who wouldn't ? Elizabeth , now Frankenstein's bride , begins to get jealous - - and so does the original CREATURE , who wrenches off Seymour's head . What a dirty trick . They all wind up dead in the arctic . That includes Frankenstein's creature , although he's described as having an " iron body " impervious to cold and is shown to be immune to bullets too . But I guess he not only doesn't age well . He doesn't travel well either . The acting's not bad and the production values are good for TV . There are many cameos - - Gielgud , Wilding , Moorehead , Richardson , and others - - but the parts aren't substantial . It didn't really matter that the story didn't follow Mary Shelley's original very closely , although many of the issues it raised ( science vs . theology ) are still relevant . The main problem was that most of Part Two was unnecessary , almost redundant . In Part One Frankenstein invents a flawed male creature . In Part Two Polidori invents a flawed female creature . Almost everything between the end of Part One and the arctic climax could have been snipped out with little loss . Not a badly done movie , though . It's not trashy and it's not insulting . It's just without much significance . Worth seeing once . |
441,826 | 819,382 | 104,502 | 5 | Pedantic and sketchy police story . | The sociologist Robert E . Park wrote in the 1920s about marginal people , by which he meant individuals stuck between two statuses , neither fish nor fowl , unable to identify with either . His analysis focused on roles that stood in some shady area between " management " and " labor . " As examples he used white-collar workers and factory foremen . According to this movie , which is " based on a true story " , he could have included police detectives on NYPD who were opposed to the death penalty . The story is set in 1968 and illustrates the two attitudinal poles . It begins by showing us the takeover by students of Columbia University in New York . Then , immediately after Detective Mitchell wins a decoration from the department , it shows him turning down what amounts to an order from a public relations officer to broadcast a message in favor of New York's death penalty , which was then under review . Boy , is this guy marginal . His fellow officers do everything but spit on him , even after he heroically brings down the killer of a brother officer . His family , his friends , the DA's office , all turn against him . He could be Frank Serpico . One wonders whether that critically and commercially successful earlier film was in the minds of the people who greenlighted this rather sketchy and overdone tale . The film has the feeling of having been rushed through production . The acting is perfunctory . The locations unevocative . The moral lesson is that we should all do our jobs and tell the truth and justice , as the community defines it , will out . That's what Detective Mitchell says on the witness stand during a critical scene at the end . Of course we've heard it before , only it usually comes at us as , " I'm a soldier , not a politician . " The movie is stacked against the death penalty , not so much by any logical or ethical argument , as by direction . Mitchell has a couple of nightmares of people being electrocuted and wakes up gasping for breath . Everyone who counsels him in favor of execution seems either grasping or mentally stunted . Fortunately we are spared scenes of the victims actually being electrocuted , which have come to be practically de rigeur since they seem to satisfy some morbid sentiments in some of the audience members , those who can't pass a highway accident without hoping for a glimpse of the mangled body . I found the film preachy and not well executed though , for what it's worth , I would endorse its message . |
443,476 | 819,382 | 5,044 | 5 | Ab initio . | An early rendition of Chaplin's tramp that lacks much of the inventiveness of his later works . Much of what is enjoyable about it , at least for me , is the picture it yields of a Los Angeles that is underpopulated . There are beach scenes in which a background bather , heedless of the working crew and camera , runs down the strand and jumps into the water . In another shot , a man walks his dog through the seagulls . In still another , a pack of careless and innocent dogs romps and loafs in the background . In 1915 rural roads were unpaved and dusty . Malibu was an empty beach . The San Fernando Valley was home not to strip malls but acre after acre of orange groves . " Smog " was not yet a word . The movie is funny enough to watch , but not achingly so . Better things were to come . |
442,265 | 819,382 | 74,452 | 5 | Perplexing war movie . | No , it's not about the first moon landings , although it sounds as if it should be . It's about a group of German soldiers led by Michael Caine and aided by Donald Southerland as an Irishman , who parachute into England in an attempt to kidnap Winston Churchill and bring an end to the war . They fail , which can't be too big a surprise . The movie's plot is all over the place . Caine and his men are disguised as British paratroopers and they more or less take over a small British village , claiming to be on an exercise . But they wear their German uniforms under their fake British uniforms , and one of the men while saving the life of a young girl , dies and has his true identity revealed . This happens rather early in the movie , so the whole disguise business lasts only about 15 minutes . After that , the movie becomes routine . The Germans strip to field gray and hole up in a church . They are surrounded and outnumbered by American rangers and fight to the death , although it's not clear why they just don't surrender . The war is nearly over . What lifts the movie a bit above the expectable - - and this may be completely accidental - - is that it's not easy for the average viewer , used to watching less complicated material like Funniest Home Videos , to figure out which side to root for . The Germans of course have been fighting for an evil cause . Yet , in this instance at least , they are men of probity and honor . Their goal is not to assassinate Churchill ( if that can be avoided ) but to put the snatch on him and try to negotiate a settlement with the Allies . And you can tell the people who made the movie did not want a horde of hairy Huns playing goose-stepping Nazi types because the soldiers look like young men . One of them seems to be still in his teens and plays Bach on the church organ . And the U . S . Army that we see is led by a Colonel who is , as far as it's possible to tell , a complete idiot . The actor , Larry Hagman , hams it up outrageously , but it doesn't come across as comic , just stupid . His Colonel is so puffed up with ego , so angry at not having been allowed to see combat , that he chews out subordinates all the time and struts around with tiny mincing steps . When a woman finally puts a bullet through his head and he looks a little indignant - - well , it almost funny but not quite . Donald Southerland is a stage Irishman of a type we've seen before - - all charm and rosy cheeks . He laughs gaily at the prospect of putting his life in danger . He's romantic , falls in love with the wrong girl , likes a drop now and then , and is always ready for a fist fight . At the end , Caine finds himself in a position to shoot and kill Churchill . His face turns grim . He approaches the PM who stares at him with horror , and he deliberately shoots the guy . ( Who turns out to be a mere stand-in for the real Churchill . ) I don't know why he did that . It's not really in keeping with what we've seen of Caine's character so far . He's a proud man but not a cold-blooded murderer . I suspect the scene is in there to give the audience a momentary frisson - - " WHAT ? Churchill DEAD ? " It's pretty corny but then there are other banal scenes throughout the movie . The true identity of the Germans is revealed only through the hoary device of having one of the soldiers save an enemy's daughter from drowning and giving his own life in the process . The script is poor and the direction ordinary but the performances are competent enough , given what the actors have to work with . Jenny Agutter's nose turns up like a ski jump , like the inverted clipper bow of a Japanese battleship , like the trajectory of a freshly launched shuttle from Cape Canaveral . Any normal man would want to kiss it and bite it a little . Judy Geason looks just fine too . It wasn't nice of the writers to have her shot , but at least she survives . |
443,525 | 819,382 | 349,467 | 5 | Tour de force for Julianne Moore | I'd like to give this a higher rating . This is a first-rate cast to begin with , and every one of them delivers the goods . And I almost always know where the writer , Richard Price , is coming from , in his screenplays and his essays . ( Haven't read any of his novel . ) But somehow this disjointed story doesn't get pulled together . There are really two plots . Julianne Moore is a mother who claims her four-year-old son was taken away by a hooded black man . Moore is a working-class single Mom living in a mostly black project in some dumpy town in industrial New Jersey , whose projects ought to go the way of Pruitt-Igoe . Jackson , along with his partner Bill Forsythe , are cops investigating the case . Well , Moore is hysterical half the time and seems to be overacting the part of the desperate mother . There is a general sense among the residents of the project that she killed her own child and is blaming a black man , so we get a lot of threats and speeches from African-Americans who believe they're being set up . Jackson finds himself in the middle . The climax gives us a slow-motion battle between enraged black guys and the white helmeted cops who nettle them . That's plot number one . And they are being set up . Moore , as it turns out , returned to her apartment to find her son dead of a deliberate overdose of the cough medicine she'd been giving him to keep him quiet . With the help of a friend in the projects she buried the boy in the kind of densely wooded area where dead bodies tend to be discovered . Little by little the true story is squeezed out of her by Jackson and by a sympathetic but savvy social worker ( Edie Falco ) . Moore winds up lashing out and screaming and is put in the slams . That's the other plot , and it's more important than the first . Anyone expecting an action movie will be disappointed because this is not an action movie . It's hardly even a crime thriller or a police story . It's a character study , mostly of Julianne Moore's character - - and what a job she does . She seems to be wearing no makeup . And her face , which is not Hollywood glamorous to begin with , looks washed out and a little haggard . She has a broad jaw and thin lips . Her eyes are close together . And her nose , what there is of it , seems plopped on in a topological afterthought . She looks like a cartoon character who has just run face-first into a frying pan . Yet this lack of stereotypical beauty fits the part admirably . She radiates an inner intelligence . And there is a lengthy ( somewhat overwritten ) scene in which she must ramble on about what it means to have a child - - the rewards and the burdens . And she shows us the conflict between having a wind-up toy that will love you when you need it , and a whining crying kid who won't shut up and go to sleep . ( Get out the cough syrup . ) It's a long and demanding scene and she handles it with near perfection . In another noteworthy scene , the social worker , Falco , is trying to ease the truth out of the distraught Moore . Falco is telling Moore about another case in which a father took his son away . " I told him that I didn't want him to bring the child back . I just wanted to know if the child was alive or dead . He didn't have to speak . All he had to do was nod his head and give me a straight answer . Yes or no . Was he dead ? Just nod your head . Is he dead ? " And we realize that Falco is no longer talking about a hypothetical kidnapper but is speaking gently but directly to Moore . These are outstanding scenes and yet I felt the two subplots were cobbled together with staples . The black rage seemed to be there only to juice up a story which , it might otherwise have been argued , belonged on Lifetime Movie Network . And dramatic high points aside , the story does at times become sluggish . A curious but irrelevant search of an abandoned orphanage . The movie is about parent / child relationships . Jackson has a son of his own in the same prison that Moore winds up in . The dilapidated orphanage reeks of sewage and futility . The film certainly demonstrates Moore's range as an actress and , that aside , ought to prompt all of us to wonder if people should have babies before they're prepared to care for them . Not to be perfect parents , but to be what Freud would have called " the good-enough parent . " |
442,431 | 819,382 | 35,614 | 5 | Diverting Genre Film . | It conforms to all the conventions of its particular genre or rather combination of two sub-genres : ( 1 ) the training camp movie , and ( 2 ) the war movie . Two city guys grew up together but don't like each other much . The guy who turned out good is Richard Arlen . The guy who turned sort of mean is Chester Morris . They both wind up in the Army Air Force gunnery school in Texas . Both are sergeants but , by virtue of his having run a shooting gallery , Morris is an instructor and Arlen is one of his dozen students . It's kind of interesting watching the training regimen . The students learn to assemble machine guns blindfolded , shoot skeet , shoot at a moving target , and finally do some practice in the air at a target sleeve being towed behind another airplane . I could never understand how they could hit anything moving in three dimensions from a shooting platform that was also moving in three dimensions . Imagine a formation of lumbering Flying Fortresses flying at 250 mph . being attacked by a horde of Messerschmidts zipping around at 325 mph . Then put yourself in one of the gun turrets . It would be like trying to shoot a fly with a beebee gun while jumping on a trampoline . As in all training camp movies , the two acquaintances have a beef over a local girl . And among the students there is the dummy , the washout , the weakling who gives it his best effort and dies trying . Then it's overseas for a crack at those Japs . By this time , the good Richard Arlen has become a commissioned officer and a pilot . The mean Chester Morris is still a gunner . A bombing mission . They are attacked by five Japanese fighters after they've dropped their bombs . Rat-a-tat-tat . All the fighters are gone , but the Lockheed bomber is seriously shot up . Two men are dead , pilot Arlen is wounded , and " the motors are gone . " ( I have to insert here that they are called " engines " , not " motors , " and that Maxwell Shane , the writer , was evidently not in the Air Force nor an engineer . ) A landing on an isolated airstrip in Japanese territory while the mechanic repairs the engines and wounded Arlen gets patched up . They're almost done when Japanese troops appear in the brush and start popping rifle shots into the plane . Morris deplanes with his Tommy gun and mows them down , giving his life , while the others barely manage to escape . It's not a bad movie , given its intent and its modest budget . Chester Morris was a stalwart B-movie actor , a decent Boston Blackie . He's only of medium height but tough as hell . Morris always seems to be biting his lower lip and glowering . He puffs up his beefy chest , tucks his chin in , and struts around with his arms swinging manfully at his side , a kind of parodic masculinity . As an actor , Richard Arlen causes a great big hole to appear wherever he is on the screen . The role of the babe is perfunctory . Some of the supporting players can't act as well as I can - - and I can't act . I don't think a heck of a lot of thought or effort went into this quickie . At times it's almost painful to hear the corny dialog . Yet it's not without interest . It probably helps if you like airplanes but if you're looking for originality , look elsewhere . |
442,466 | 819,382 | 516,919 | 5 | Emma Goes Underground . | Like the other episodes , this one is completely unbelievable . It's fantastic , along the lines of some feature films that were appearing at the time - - " Our Man Flint " , in which the " Telephone Company " plans to take over the world ; " Funeral in Berlin , " in which Harry Palmer fights a billionaire who plans to take over the world . Here , it's an underground city filled with a population organized into castes . The leaders plan to irradiate the world above , then when things quiet down , emerge and occupy an empty Britain . As usual , what it lacks in believability , it makes up for in style . I mean , that's what it's GOT - - style ! Neither the dialog nor the plots are particularly witty or thought provoking . But what clothes ! What make up ! What cars ! What loony incidental music ! What Emma Peel ! Enjoyable and diverting piece of fluff . |
442,990 | 819,382 | 340,919 | 5 | Loose-limbed , ambitious thriller . | Basically a chase thriller in which an experienced hit man working for an unnamed government agency ( Scott Glenn ) takes personal revenge on a former friend , irritating his employers and prompting them to send a team of two other hit men ( including Harvey Keitel ) to rub him out . But the wily Glenn takes two hostages ( Craig Wasson and Giovanna Zacarias ) and leads the pursuing pair on a merry chase along " the highways and by-ways of this dysentery factory . " In the end , the unnamed government agency is satisfied that Glenn is offed and the incident closed . In reality , Glenn and Zacarias have fallen for one another , made a successful escape , and are living a happy life in a mountain cabin . The fact that the government agency is unnamed should give you a hint about what kind of story this is . It's one that won't step on anybody's toes , including the CIA and Mexican law enforcement agents . The story as sketched in above is really rather skeletal , I know , but there's not really that much more to the plot . The performances vary a lot in their quality . Scott Glenn is his taciturn icy self , his face and torso more etched with experience than ever . Giovanna Zacarias is by no means beautiful in any ordinary sense , yet her character is intelligent , empathic , and proud . She has strong features and glistening black eyes and although she may have been a whore ( " the woman of desperation " ) she might just be the kind of puta you would think about taking home to Mamma . Keitel combines being laid back with being as tense as an unsprung jack-in-the-box . Craig Wasson sounds like Albert Brooke and looks a little like him . He does not deliver anything I could detect as a believable line . If you are being kept captive by a CIA hit man and wanted to sneak away , would YOU constantly argue with him and your girl friend ? Would you shout at him in a public restaurant ? In other words , would you do everything you possibly could to make him keep his eye on you ? That's not entirely Wasson's fault . He can only say what the script orders him to , and the script doesn't really give anyone too much to work with . The betrayed hero of Vietnam is already a cliché , with his flashbacks and bitterness leading him into violence . In the course of the film , he is humanized by Zacarias ( " Luz " , great name ) . And once she understands the source of his torment she undergoes a kind of Mazatlan Syndrome and bonds with him . There's something else that creeps into the story , or tries to , from time to time . There's religious imagery all over the place . And there's a good deal of talk about God and forgiveness . It simply doesn't hang together though . ( The novel might have dealt with these questions a little more effectively . ) The last time Glenn prayed was when he was being tortured by the Vietnamese , and he prayed for death . When God didn't answer , he gave up on God and believes God now reciprocates . Well , Luz still believes in forgiveness and she must have been right because that mountain cabin at the end is sure idyllic . |
442,948 | 819,382 | 35,689 | 5 | Not uninteresting but routine genre film . | Flag-waver about the training and tsuris of bombardiers during World War II . It's kind of interesting to hear about the motives of these cadets and informative to learn about their training program . The uniforms are nice , and sometimes Randy Scott as the only pilot involved in the program wears a dashing white scarf under his leather flight jacket . The aerial scenes are actually pretty well done , considering what the budget must have been . There's very little air combat but the effects are effective . During a night raid by B-17s on Nagoya ( which never happened ) the bombers are attacked by Japanese fighters and someone went to the trouble of showing us that the line of tracer bullets lags behind the traverse of the gun firing them . It's like spraying a garden hose rapidly from side to side . Considering that the target is moving in three dimensions it's a wonder that any of them are hit . Let's see . I think that's about it for the best parts . The movie seems a slapdash affair with some miscasting and a weak script . Pat O'Brian is not a hard-nosed disciplinarian of a commanding officer . Pat O'Brian is Father Duffy . The actor who plays " Chico Rafferty " can't do a believable Hispanic accent . Abner Biberman is a Japanese sergeant who simply cannot do a Japanese accent . " Sooo - - you sink you vill not speak ? You are long about zat . " There's a lot of unengaging friendly competition for the affection of one young woman who happens to work as O'Brian's secretary . It's made manifest at the beginning of the film that most of the office staff will be women because " they're more efficient at it than men . " But everybody's after this one babe . ( Maybe because she's the daughter of the millionaire pioneer airman who built the field . ) O'Brian even proposes gruffly to her . I half expected her to say " you're married to the Air Force . " A terrible song is pounded into our ears - - " Rah , Rah , Rah , for the BOMBARDIERS ! " ( I couldn't help being reminded of Mel Brooks ' parody , " Jews in Space . " ) One of the trainees is doing poorly because , although he's bright and capable , he seems timid . Before the board , he explains that he keeps thinking of the people who will be under his bombs . His mother had called him a " murderer " . The general patiently explains that , well , son , don't think of them as people . Think of them as the enemy's arsenal . Don't believe everything your mother tells you . And pray to God for the courage to bomb the crap out of those monkeys . Something very much like that , no kidding . One of the more exhilarating moments is near the end . Scott's lead bomber has been shot down . He and ( a miscast ) Barton MacLane as the comic relief sergeant are captured . Scott escapes and drives a flaming truck into the middle of an ammunition dump to provide a fire that will guide the B-17s . He leans out of the window , grins up at the sky , and shakes his fist , shouting , " Come AWN , you BOMBARDIERS ! " ( They come . ) The film was thrown together , I guess , and the script left deliberately at a level that school kids would understand . I don't mean to loose an entire salvo on the film . I've watched it two or three times now and find much of it enjoyable , particularly the scenes of action aloft and training below . But I can't get through it without wincing now and then when it turns into a berserk kind of " kill ' em all and let God sort ' em out " piece of lowbrow propaganda . It isn't the propaganda that I mind , so much as the fact that it's pretty brutally presented . " Triumph of the Will " is propaganda too - - and propaganda in an evil cause - - yet it's a far superior film . For effective propaganda from our side , delicately blending training , romance , and action , see " Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo . " Still , as I say , the kids may enjoy " Bombardier " from beginning to end . |
442,942 | 819,382 | 41,362 | 5 | Scott Western , Routine and Reliable | Scott is arrested by James Millican , a detective for the Pleasonton Agency . The two have nothing personal against each other . When the detective is accidentally killed , someone has to cut off his hand to free Scott from the handcuffs . Scott takes the detective's place and , a bit later , is made sheriff of Lanyard , Kansas . He makes friends . He makes enemies . There are unscrupulous businessmen . Scott cleans the whole place up and gets the girl . By this point in his career Scott had decided , wisely , to turn out nothing but Westerns . He looked and acted the part well . According to Bob Osborne's commentary on TV , Scott enjoyed working out of doors , sitting back and reading the Wall Street Journal while the stunt men did the rough work . Scott was a keen investor and retired a wealthy man to the golf country of North Carolina without ever looking back at Hollywood . He bowed out after Sam Pekinpaugh's " Ride the High Country , " a good note to leave on . He managed his career - - his life - - pretty well , all in all . Most of his Westerns were , if not exactly identical , cut from the same mold so the comparison of one to any of the others must depend on fine judgments about details . Is the film in glorious color ? This one is not . Is the location interesting and evocative ? Not this one , which looks like the San Fernando Valley used to look before the last inch of it was paved over . Better than usual support ? No . Is Scott given any help from the script ? An oddity of character ? A quirk ? An occasional wry turn of phrase ? Not here . The result is a typical and not unrewarding Randolph Scott Western that doesn't distinguish itself from the many others he made in these years . Nice to see Victor Jory as something other than an open sleaze bag . |
442,016 | 819,382 | 516,936 | 5 | St . Andrew Frowns . | Steed and Mrs . Peel find that one of their colleagues has disappeared while playing golf . Investigating the club and its management , they find that there have been several other disappearances , all at the 13th hole . They discover that the 13th hole is rigged to explode when a stranger sinks his golf ball , in order for the hole to later extrude a TV antenna that bounces its signal off a passing communications satellite and allows the gang of spies who run the club to communicate by directed TV with the USSR scientists to whom they are passing scientific secrets . Got that ? Good . I had a spot of bother myself . Patrick MacNee , as Steed , is his usual nonchalant self . He smiles and wisecracks his way through the episode , wearing a hat lined with chain mail . His golf outfit looks like something Edwar VI might have worn . Diana Rigg , as Emma Peel , is criminally beautiful and sexy to boot . She finds herself the target of a couple of golf-oriented double entendres - - " Like to play ? I'll give you a few strokes , on or off the course . " Her response , as always , is never more than a cold glance . Nothing is to be taken seriously , of course . When Steed and Mrs . Peel destroy the spies ' laboratory , the villains flee but Steed knocks them all unconscious from a distance by driving golf balls at them . There's nothing that marks this episode as unusual or outstanding in any way . It's all nonsense , along the lines of Maxwell Smart but with a rather more subdued wit , don't you know . |
442,471 | 819,382 | 41,368 | 5 | Wendell Corey : No Vincent Bugliosi . | Not entirely without interest , this is a rather dark story of Wendell Corey , an Assistant D . A . alienated from his wife and two children , who bumps into Barbara Stanwyck by accident and falls for her . They have a secret affair . Then Stanwyck's wealthy old auntie is shot and killed during a burglary and the evidence all points to Stanwyck , who is brought to trial . It seems like an easy case for the D . A . ' s office except that the records show that Stanwyck has been receiving phone calls from a man who continually identifies himself by different names . Corey's boss , Paul Kelly , calls him " Mister X " , and worries that the defense may introduce reasonable doubt using Mister X as the fomenter . Now , Corey is in an uncomfortable position , to say the least . He's assigned to try the case , convict his lover , and send her to the gas chamber . But he has all kinds of problems . Not only is he devoted to her , not only is HE the mysterious Mister X , but he believes Stanwyck when she tells him she's innocent . He winds up sending her notes , advising her on who to hire as defense counsel , and he sends her five thousand bucks to manage expenses . Corey also decides to bungle the case in as nuanced a way as possible . I ask you , the experienced viewer of old black-and-white crime dramas , is she innocent or is she setting up Corey as the fall guy ? Stanwyck is set free . And Corey discovers there is another man in the picture . There have probably been OTHER men , as well . If he is Mister X , there was first a Mister A , then a Mister B , and then . . . . Mister n . ( That's the way you denote a finite string of variables of unknown length in statistics . ) Stanwyck spills the beans to Corey . This is known as " cooling out the mark " . But she does a very clumsy job of it , leaving Corey in a state of humiliation and despair . Stanwyck has shown no remorse so far . But as she is driving away towards a new life with her Greaseball boyfriend behind the wheel , she decides to coagulate his eyeball with the car's red-hot cigarette lighter and , well , there is a fiery plunge off a cliff , and she winds up dying on a hospital bed . After she makes her final confession to Paul Kelly , she passes away peacefully , the vehicular catastrophe not having disfigured her in any way , her hair and make up impeccably done . Not even her false eyelashes have been disturbed . This movie must have been made after " Double Indemnity " because it follows the same trajectory , more or less . I much prefer the original , or even the remake , of " Double Indemnity , " but this isn't an insulting copy , only a less original one . |
441,894 | 819,382 | 382,077 | 5 | The imaginary playmate comes out of the woods . | Famke Janssen is no longer the wide-eyed teenager of her early movies but is definitely in contention for the title of World's Tallest Danish Pastry . She's ravishing . Alas , she has little to do except give a bit of good advice to Robert DeNiro's psychologist near the beginning and to show up just in time to save his daughter Dakota Fanning's bacon at the end . Robert DeNiro is surprisingly good in what is for him an unusual role , a quiet , thoughtful , analytical humanistic type . With eyeglasses . It isn't until near the end that he become a somewhat more familiar figure . Elizabeth Shue does very nicely by the part of a sensitive and warm woman , of just about the right age too , who wouldn't mind taking the place of DeNiro's recently deceased wife , which she does too , in a curious kind of way . She's quite attractive with her long curly hair the color of straw , schlepping around that magnificent bosom . No wonder Charlie gets jealous . I'm just throwing in these observation seriatim , trying to avoid an outline of the plot , because the plot take the road less traveled and I don't want to give too many hints . Still - - Charlie is the playmate of ten-year-old Dakota Fanning . He may or may not be imaginary . The acts he performs have real enough consequences and they could NOT have been performed by a skinny little ten-year old , so that leaves only two possibilities . Either this movie has a genuine supernatural element , or one of the apparently normal human beings is nuts . Rolling right along with the performances , and passing quickly over a sheriff who has a disconcertingly suspicious habit of smiling at the wrong times ( such as when querying a possible witness to a murder ) , that leaves Dakota Fanning . A ridiculous name , a splendid performance . Where do they find kids who can hold their own against veterans like DeNiro . She shows considerable range and is at least as convincing as anyone else in the cast . And she has this quirky appearance too . In profile , and with her hair styled as it is in this film , she looks amazingly like one of Lewis Carrol's photographs of Alice Liddel . She has the wide face of a child . Her eyes are like two gigantic marbles , white with big blue irises , that seem barely to be held in their sockets by their lids , which slant outward and upwards like a kitten's . If she can make it through adolescence she may have a future in films . The photography is quite good . It captures the gray overcast and denuded thickets of a wintry northeastern forest . The interiors are neatly done as well , except that the lights have an irritating habit of going on and off for no perceptible reason . Each time they go off , there is a loud BANG on the sound track . Ditto , for each time they go on . In the last scene , even a flashlight flicking on and off emits what seems like a sonic boom . Doesn't leave much to discuss except the plot , does it ? And this movie depends a lot on its resolution of the puzzle it's been posing , so I don't want to reveal it . I'll just say it reminded me a bit of the climax of " The Shining . " In fact , the whole business could have been written by Stephen King . Come to think of it , there's a similar movie written by King , about a writer in a cabin by a lake who - - Well , enough of that . The plot doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense . Why does the daughter treat Charlie the way she does until the very end ? Some misleading slight of hand there , if you ask me . Worth seeing for the performances , the photography , and the easy shocks . It will not occupy a prominent place in anybody's resume . |
442,839 | 819,382 | 96,087 | 5 | By the Numbers | It starts off with an interesting if already familiar problem : How do we dig out corruption in the NYPD when there is so much crack money floating around ? In " Serpico " a Brooklyn narc hijacks the hero off the street and threatens him , saying , " This is serious money . " That's the milieu we find ourselves in here . Peter Weller is a nobody Legal Aid lawyer trying to get his drug-dealing client off because the suspect actually killed in self defense . An undercover cop tried to rip off his drugs and cash in Central Park , shooting him in the process . The opposing prosecutor is Weller's ex-lover , Patricia Charbonneau . Weller enlists the aid of an undercover friend of his , Sam Elliot , in trying to uncover the truth . The questions addressed are important , and the script sounds literate for the first half hour . Someone went to the trouble of ferreting out apt quotes about justice from the New Testament . But after that it goes downhill fast . It's as if somebody had handed in a decent and thoughtful script about the characters , then another party had taken the script and doctored it , putting in a quote from Dirty Harry ( twice ) , a shootout in what looks like Times Square , a funny car chase through the streets of New York ( twice ) , wisecracks in times of mortal danger ( " You drive , I'll shoot . " ) , and finally a rip off of a physically impossible feat from Schwarzenegger's " Commando . " Too bad . Charbonneau and Weller are well matched , each with prominent bony facial features . Charbonneau sounds like Sondra Locke if you close your eyes . Sam Elliot is reliable too , and he demonstrates his range here . At one end , he can lower his face then cock it over his shoulder at someone and offer sage advice with a smirk and a baritone . At the other end , he can chuckle . Peter Weller I've always liked , though he shows his limitations as an actor here . Whatever prompted him to pursue a Master's degree in , what ? , Ancient Civilizations ? And then look for positions as Adjunct Professor at places like Franklin and Marshall and Syracuse University ? ( I've got it . He needed the money a part-time teacher makes ! ) Whatever his motives , I admire him for his intellectual curiosity . Weller's character is no invincible superhero either . When somebody holds a gun to his head he's scared to death and tells them what they want to know . Notwithstanding all that , this isn't a movie designed to appeal to grown ups . There's no point in listing the plot loopholes or loose ends . The evil people are plain evil . The good people are plain good . There's none of the ambiguity of real life . One can only wonder what a yeoman director like Don Seagal or Sidney Lumet might have done with material like this . |
441,972 | 819,382 | 20,142 | 5 | Mr . Christian - - take a hike . | Here , the director seems to be in search of a style . What we see of this love triangle on the Isle of Mann , involving an honest fisherman , his gorgeous wife , and his principled but weak friend , is all overacting . The conventions of silents like this must have been imported from the stage though , to be sure , Hitchcock's grounding was in film from the beginning . Still it's distracting to see the characters over-do every expression and gesture , as if making sure that no one in the rear of the theater misses the reactions of the live people on stage . Pete Quilliam ( Carl Brisson ) is the fisherman who loves the daughter ( Anny Ondra ) of the dour pub owner . Anny is flirtatious but uncertain . Pete wants to marry her but her father objects that Pete is too poor to be a husband . Off sails Pete to Africa to make his fortune , or his misfortune if it comes to that . He leaves Anny's welfare in the hands of his best friend , Phillip Christian ( Malcolm Keen ) , which is always a mistake . During honest Pete's absence , Anny and Phillip fall in love , and when they receive a telegram saying that Pete has met his demise , they are free to marry . But they've kept their love a secret , partly because Phillip is ashamed and partly because he is in line for a judgeship , and the outcome of that election might get a little problematic if he were mixed up with a mere barmaid . Meanwhile , nothing prevents Anny and Phillip from doing the horizontal mambo in out-of-the-way places . But - - surprise ! Pete isn't dead at all ! He debarks from his ship , rich , ebullient , but dumb . Anny marries him out of a sense of obligation while Mr . Christian sulks in the background , carrying his burden of guilt . Anny gives birth to Phillip's child and Pete exults , " I'm a father ! " ( Still as dumb as ever . ) Then things get twisted . Phillip becomes the judge his family wanted him to be , Anny tries to commit suicide , and Pete finally wises up . Phillip resigns . He , Anny , and their child , march off bravely into the sunset , scorned by the villagers but determined to start anew - - somehow . As distracting as the overblown acting is , I forgive Anny Ondra because , let's face it , I'm a latent heterosexual . My God , she's cute . A tiny blue-eyed blond with winsome features , narrow shoulders , and gracile form . Any normal man would want to squeeze and bite her . It's Malcolm Keen's duty , as Phillip Christian , to look glum and contrite . As Pete , Carl Brisson acts as if he needs a clinical dose of lithium . His eyes bulge with effervescence and his smile is like that of a chimpanzee with its lips pulled back in that sly way that chimps have . And when you come right down to it , it's mostly Anny's fault . After all , as a flighty young girl , she flightily gave her word to Pete that she would remain faithful to him . And she was morally loose with Mr . Christian the moment Pete's ship was hull down on the horizon . Then she allowed good old Pete to think the baby was his . And instead of resigning herself to a career as a dutiful wife in marriage to a man she liked but didn't love , she has to leave the baby , take off , live in Phillip's closet for a week or so , and then jump in the harbor . She thinks of nobody but herself . Yet , again , I forgive her . The two guys are no paragons either . Pete belongs in a home for the criminally naive , and Phillip should have sentenced himself to one week in the Hudson County Jail in Jersey City . That would have taken some of the starch out of him . It's not a bad film , just rather ordinary . Hitchcock had yet to find his métier , and this isn't it . |
442,829 | 819,382 | 33,774 | 5 | Crook Gives Up Rackets For Succulent Blond . | Robert Taylor is Johnny Eager , one of several Johnnies with strange last names to come out of Hollywood during the 1940s - - Johnny Apollo , Johnny O'Clock , Johnny Belinda , Johnny Logical Positivist , Johnny Be Good , and what not . Of course Taylor has small room for complaint when it comes to names . He was born Spangler Arlington Borough in Nebraska . In this film he's on parole , see , and pretends to be nothing more than your honest cab driver but he really runs some kind of underhanded business involving dog racing . He uses everybody around him , a real nasty guy . The only trustworthy friend he has is the alcoholic Van Heflin . Then Taylor meets and falls for a real classy dame , Lana Turner , born Julia Mildred Turner in Wallace , Idaho , navel of the universe . She's the daughter of the morally upright and thoroughly obnoxious DA , Edward Arnold , who has sent Taylor up the river once and wants nothing more than to find an excuse to do it again . Arnold's character's name is O'Hara but , though he looks a little Irish , he looks a lot more like a German burgher , which is not surprising . He was born Gunther Schneider in New York . Okay . End of names . I don't know what got into me but I feel a lot better now . Taylor really has the hots for Lana Turner and it doesn't come as a shock . She has the beauty and sensuality of a perfectly mature pinot blanc grape , all ready to pop when squeezed . But she's a little stand-offish with Taylor , though obviously attracted to him , so Taylor arranges a phony scene in which she seems to murder someone and he saves her from her mock crime . This puts her in a dependent position and it also gives him a bit of leverage with her father so that illegal activities can be carried on apace . Two birds with one gun . It takes Van Heflin the entire movie to convince Taylor that he's a moral pustule , and in the end Taylor gives it all up for the sake of Lana Turner and his own self esteem . Taylor and Turner were both MGM products and the studio certainly proved its loyalty . Neither could act very well and both had short peaks in their popularity arc , but both kept soldiering on in MGM's movies , aging but still useful in that they didn't get in the way of the scenery . Taylor was a reasonably nice guy , personally if not politically , but as he grew older his features became coarser and he was handed roles that were increasingly villainous and sometimes downright sadistic , as in " Westward the Women , " in which he seems to relish punishing his female charges with a bull whip . Turner's career faded less dramatically . The two characters in this film are obviously from different socioeconomic strata . Van Heflin quotes Richard III to him . And aptly too : " I can smile , and while I smile , can cut your heart out with an ax . " Turner quotes Cyrano de Bergerac of whom Taylor says , " That don't go with me . I don't care how ugly a guy is if he don't go all the way . " Everybody quotes Shakespeare and Rostand and all those other high-falutin ' Greeks and Taylor , a total numbskull , keeps coming up with ripostes like , " Ahh , you're going ' daffy . " The most interesting character , although not the most original , is Van Heflin's Jeff . What's he doing here anyway ? He keeps hanging around Robert Taylor , guzzling whiskey and making moon eyes at his boss . Of course the function of the character is to provide Taylor with a gently reproving superego . " Gee , Johnny , what'd you have to clip her in the mug for ? " But the audience already knows that Taylor is possessed by terpitude , a snake . An equally compelling motive for his being here is that he's got a crush on Taylor - - and maybe vice versa . Not a bad flick . Mervyn LeRoy , of " Little Caesar " , was a decent director . It's just not very original , not nearly as tough as it sounds or as unpredictable or penetrating as was probably hoped . |
442,895 | 819,382 | 50,963 | 5 | Scott Western , Routine | Spoilers . The story is simplicity itself . Scott is the marshal keeping the town ( referred to several times as a wild beast ) peaceful despite the efforts of two corrupt businessmen to take it over and run it on their terms . They hire a gunman ( Pate ) to come in and knock off Scott . At about the same time Scott's showgirl wife ( Lansbury ) shows up . They've separated because she doesn't want him using guns to earn a living . Or something like that . ( Where have we seen this before ? ) Pate shoots Scott , who recovers later and shoots Pate . The businessmen are subdued by the rest of the townspeople who have come to their senses and acquired ethics . Scott hands over his badge because the beast has been tamed and the town no longer needs his kind of marshal . He rides off into the sunset with his wife and a carriage full of luggage and mulligan stew . The end . Angela Lansbury is a first-rate actress . She wows the audience in pieces as different as " The Manchurian Candidate , " " Death on the Nile , " and " Sweeney Todd " on Broadway . But she's given practically nothing to do here . Warner Anderson's acting is flat and matter-of-fact but he's okay . The other villainous businessmen are less than interesting , which is too bad because movies like this depend as much on the character of their heavies as they do on the star . Wally Ford is in the Thomas Mitchell / Edgar Buchanan part . The movie's score blossoms during the overture to Lansbury's stage appearance . Elsewhere the score is overblown and sounds hastily assembled with comic notes where none are called for . The second half of the movie deteriorates . I cannot imagine why the rich ranchers and the rest of the townspeople ( the wild beasts ) have a sudden and entirely unmotivated change of heart and rally to Scott's side . Also , Scott gets to beat hell out of a human being the size of Man Mountain Dean , without using a gun . The two men have a lengthy and brutal fistfight and wind up with their shirts torn to shreds but not a drop of blood is spilled . But the first third of the movie gives Scott some scenes and dialog that are outstanding for him , considering his usual persona . He shoots a man in self defense and is , if not ashamed of having done it , at least remorseful . The victim's widow has some sensible and believable lines too , and not favorable to Scott . Scott doesn't go on about his sadness - - he never goes on about anything . But we can sense the writers and the director giving him a chance to play something more than a heroic marble statue . It would have been nice had the rest of the movie been so played . |
443,141 | 819,382 | 24,484 | 5 | Mildly Diverting Comedy . | It's the depression and everyone is hard up except the very wealthy . ( Plus ca change . . . ) Ginger Rogers is a working girl forced to share an attic or loft with Norman Foster , an artist who refuses to take any money from the society matron ( Laura Hope Crews ) who pursues him . George Sidney is Mr . Eckbaum , the slightly frantic landlord who tries to keep everything going . He arranges it so that Rogers , who is a telephone salesgirl by day , and Foster , who has a job as a night watchman , never meet . Trying to keep the place " respectable , " you know . Well , the two roomies who don't know each other take a long time to meet . In the meantime , leaving nasty notes for one another and playing painful pranks , each comes to loathe the other . But - - guess what ! - - they meet accidentally outside their attic , assume false identities for different reasons , and fall for each other . This plot , I'm sure , goes back farther than " You've Got Mail " or " The Shop Around the Corner . " I honestly don't know how far back in the mists of ancient history it goes . When did they invent rentals ? It's a bit slow at first . George Sidney is funny , though , as the wisecracking Jewish landlord . His son Julius brings him a bowl of noodle soup for the famished Rogers but spills some on the carpet . " Ahh , next time I ask you for TWO bowls of zoop - - one for the lady and one for the carpet . " If you don't think that's funny , I ought to warn you that that's about as good as it gets . Robert Benchley is in it too , as the amorous boss of Rogers at the Icy Air Refrigerator Company , but his particularly Ivy League brand of humor may be an acquired taste . Except for " Foreign Correspondent , " come to think of it , where his non sequiturs were superb . Guinn ( Big Boy ) Williams also appears in the small role of a comic taxi driver . Foster isn't much of an actor but Ginger Rogers is delightfully piquant as a tough but vulnerable proletarian . She has a wonderful figure , which she gets to display , but her movements are stiff and no one could have predicted that within the next few years she would be a partner in the most famous dancing team in the world . Everything about the movie is smooth and logical and never rises above the level of " nice " - - slightly amusing , slightly warm , and with a happy ending . |
443,227 | 819,382 | 20,103 | 5 | Stanwyck's Past Catches Up With Her . | Kind of a historical curiosity . Here it is , 1929 , and it's a talkie . The microphones were hidden in bouquets and under lapels . The noisy camera was hidden within a sound-resistant " blimp . " On those many occasions when people weren't walking or dashing around , they stood in staged groups facing the camera , as if for a wedding photograph . And the truth is they didn't need to dart around that often . The story rests with the dialog , which , without too much in the way of perspiration or creative frenzy , could have been a radio play . Barbara Stanwyck's character is young , pretty , vulnerable , and innocent , and she is talked into accompanying the womanizing cad , Rod La Roque ( his real name , more or less ) onto an offshore ship where liquor can be served legally - - this being Prohibition and all . The ship drifts within territorial boundaries and Stanwyck is arrested and her reputation stained . Hiding this scurrilous incident , she manages to marry an older and very wealthy man , William " Stage " Boyd , and she lives with him and his sister , Betty Bronson , in their mansion . But , lo . Rod La Roque shows up again , this time trying to seduce Stanwyck's young sister-in-law , Bronson . Both Stanwyck and La Roque remember that night from eighteen months earlier but neither lets on in front of the others . I don't want to make this exposition too long so - - an abbreviated version would simply say that La Roque makes a date with Bronson in his hotel room , but Boyd , having discovered what a cad La Roque is , shows up first and shoots him by accident . He leaves . But Stanwyck had shown up first and hidden upstairs . Then the cops arrive and Stanwyck's tryst with La Roque is uncovered . Then Betty Bronson shows up . Then Zasu Pitts , the hotel switchboard operator who has overheard the shooting , is brought in - - and , trust me , she is a DEAD RINGER for Betty Bronson . It would require a DNA EXPERT to tell one from the other . La Roque lives long enough to tell the true story and absorb whatever blame is to be distributed . Everyone goes home happy , except for La Roque , of course , who is completely dead . The film generates a certain amount of suspense and pity , but not much of either . But it's pleasant to think of a time in history when a woman's reputation could be ruined by her having been swept out to a ship that served liquor . Kind of nostalgic , like those cloche hats the ladies wear or the caviar and champagne that the rich could afford . There is no directorial stamp worth noticing and the plot , as I say , seems to come from the radio plays that were becoming popular at the time . A curious artifact , this movie , like a cuckoo clock . |
443,318 | 819,382 | 408,790 | 5 | Better To Listen to WGBH . | The first thing that you may notice about this film , and the last , is the sound track . It's all pretty quiet . You don't hear the big jet engines screaming . People can speak softly . The only person who shouts is Jodie Foster , and then only to scream : " WHERE'S MY BABY ? " There's no musical score worth mentioning , but the incidental sounds - - Wow ! If a door aboard the airliner closes , or if a body falls softly to the carpeted deck , the action is accompanied by a loud WHOMP on the sound track , sometimes with a cowbell or two thrown in . And if somebody should be struck in the face by a small woman wielding a fire extinguisher , the sound rivals Krakatoa . Sometimes you get " whomps " for no reason at all except that there's a cut from one scene to another . The basis for all this , of course , is the disappearance of Jody Foster's daughter on an airplane flying from Munich to New York . There is no record of her having been aboard . No one has seen her , and so forth . The Captain searches the ship but never believes her . This is familiar territory for anyone who's seen Alfred Hitchcock's " The Lady Vanishes . " Hitchcock's effort was kind of rollicking fun , full of japes and wisecracks , sometimes outright silly . But it was fun . " Flightplan " begins along the same lines , but as a dramatic mystery . From there it turns into a " woman in jep " movie . And by the climax has reached the caligian depths of Your Standard Typical Action Movie , with a crazy hijacker pursuing a child-carrying Foster through the bowels of the giant airplane , which altogether seems about the size of the Vanderbilt House in North Carolina . And a darn good thing it is , too , that Foster should happen to be a propulsion engineer , because she knows her way around that monstrous crate to the extent that she can disable the plane without endangering the passengers . She has an awesome memory when you come right down to it . The interior of the avionics section looks like the inside of Hal's brain , yet she knows precisely which jack to pull out of which plug to cause the oxygen masks to pop out of their cabinets , and which lead to short out so the lights blow in the passenger cabins . Now that's saying a lot for a propulsion engineer , I would think , but I was glad anyway , because without that eidetic imagery she would have been even harder put to outwit the hijackers . ( Yes , there's a hijack plot , but it doesn't involve the Arabs aboard . They're nothing but red herrings , or red couscous . ) Knowing , as we do , that there are explosives aboard that can be detonated with the flick of a finger , we expect an explosion and we get it . ( So does the heavy . ) Foster The Child-Carrier , to give her a suitably Homeric epithet , manages to survive the gigantic blast and emerges from the smoke in slow motion and intact , to the awe and delight of the onlookers . Jody Foster is pretty good , as usual . She an accomplished actress . And she's finally beginning to look more mature than she did 36 years ago in " Taxi Driver " . Peter Sarsgaard is , regrettably , not a good heavy . He's not a heavy at all . He's somebody's reserved but sensible cousin or best friend , that's what he is . I mean , if the movie is going to go this cheap route , then please , for God's sake , spare us the complexity involved in matching Sarsgaard's benign presence with his role . ( He was a good maniac in " Boys Don't Cry , " though . ) There's a really enjoyable movie out there about the disappearance of a person from a moving vehicle . It doesn't involve an airplane though . ( I don't care much for airplanes anyway , since I was once involved in a coincidental encounter between an airplane on the one hand and the Atlantic Ocean on the other . ) This enjoyable movie that I'm referring to takes place on a train . It's called " The Lady Vanishes . " |
441,873 | 819,382 | 319,262 | 5 | Wretched excess . | In movies like " Twister " you only get one real disaster , although admittedly it's a doozie . In movies like " Earthquake " you can get several disasters for the price of one - - the ground shakes , dams burst and cause floods , there may be a fire . In movies like " The Day After Tomorrow " you get no end of disasters , and you flirt with the end of the world too . Let me see . Floods . Tsunamis . Cold snaps beyond belief . Tornadoes . ( No fires . ) A sick child threatened with abandonment . A sick adult who needs medicine that can only be found in a super dangerous place . A gigantic crevasse in the ice into which men and machines fall . ( This will have to do in lieu of an earthquake . ) Hurricanes . Blizzards . Airplane crashes . The doomed team having a final drink of twelve-year old scotch . A middle-aged man hiking in snowshoes from Washington to New York hauling a sled , in order to be with his trapped son because " I promised him . " Other things of similar ilk . I didn't mind so much seeing LA get it . Nothing against the Capitol Records Building ( which takes off in a tornado like a stack of frisbees ) . It's just knowing that the storm is taking along with it several dozen Taj Mahal Motels painted day-glo purple . And the " Hollywood " sign , which , to borrow a phrase , looks like " an explosion in a shingle factory . " On the other hand it was tragic to see New York first inundated by seawater and then frozen solid . The notion of patrons in The White Horse Tavern frozen stiff while still hunched over their chessboards brought tears to my eyes . And the frosty statues in Julius's , immobilized during a sip of a martini , pinkies still pointed upward . Actually , the special effects are very good . The flood in New York is naturally much better than George Pal's justly celebrated earlier version . And there's something appealing about scenes in which people creep about on deserted ships . That , by the way , reminds me of the one big surprise in the movie . Hundreds of people are trapped by the flood on the upper stories of the New York Public Library , shouting at one another , and suddenly everyone goes quiet . A very low rumble is heard from the avenue outside . People rush to the windows and what we see is shocking - - the prow of a huge Russian tanker proceeding uptown with slow majesty . I guess , from reading the " trivia " entries , that the director was serious in his concern about global warming - - as he should be . The movie doesn't really convey that anxiety . I know a little about climatology but the explanation got passed me . ( Maybe the book made more sense . ) As it is , the science we hear is very sketchy and given by fiat . ( Why does atmospheric subsidence over the Canadian north bring with it storm and snow instead of stability and low temperatures ? ) Because Dennis Quaid's model says it does ? Anyway , I was lost . The last ice ages left us with our immediate hominid ancestors ( " Cro-Magnon " ) , woolly mammoths , and who knows what else ? This one seems to leave us in thrall to tropical third-world countries , which should make for an interesting sequel . I enjoyed the movie's visuals . ( It's impossible to comment on the acting . ) What's worrisome is that global warming - - despite a multitude of attempt to muddy the scientific waters - - is now pretty much universally accepted by investigators without vested interests . " The Day After Tomorrow " turns it into an excuse for just another expensive disaster flick . It's worth watching though . That Russian ship groaning past the Public Library is a gem . |
442,281 | 819,382 | 62,883 | 5 | The Detective as non-Cartesian | Lee Remick , with fluffy hair and overactive glands , tells separated hubby Frank that she wishes they could get together again . She doesn't know why not . " We know the reasons , Karen , but understanding's not enough , is it ? " It's not what you think that counts , it's how you act . Boy , this movie is pretty dated . The local gays are rounded up like cattle and shoved around , sometimes brutally . This generally doesn't happen anymore . Not that the NYPD has become more tolerant ; it's just that they don't care so much . Homosexuality here is treated as " the love that dare not speak its name . " ( Now it's become the love that sometimes can't seem to shut up . ) I've never understood the nature of Sinatra's appeal . He doesn't seem the least bit handsome to me , and his voice deteriorated badly after his late 1950s hits . But he has turned in a few good performances , " From Here to Eternity , " " The Manchurian Candidate , " " Suddenly , " and this one . He's not bad . He brings a lot of autobiographical stuff to the part . " I'll give you a rap in the mouth " was a common expression in the urban corridor of New Jersey when he was growing up in Hoboken . My old man used to say it all the time . The other performances are okay too . Interesting to see Duval in an early role . And Loyd Bochner is his usual , smooth , hair-slicked-back overwhelmingly Hollywoodian handsome self . ( But the cinematography is pretty low . All gloomy blues and greens , like " Madigan , " or maybe it was just the film itself . ) The director has a bad habit . He has the characters speak their lines to one another while looking directly into the camera . ( Damn Godard ! ) I don't know what he expected to accomplish by overusing this technique . I don't feel more " involved " with the characters or with the story . When Lee Remick stares at me from the screen , her lips aquiver , and tells me some secret , I just think that she must be uncomfortable talking to a machine . And when old blue eyes stares at me in close up and tries to give me a big smile , it is I who feel uncomfortable ! ( The technique might work quite well in some interactive skin flick . ) Detective Leland is not an uninteresting character . It must have been a revelation in 1968 that a cop could know anything about playwrights like Shaw and O'Casey . But we've learned that lesson by now , what with Serpico and the ballet and all . Also , like Serpico , we have a cop here who is guided by very strict ethical values . This is a guy who knows right from wrong , and who believes in personal responsibility , a moral paragon . He has some interesting exchanges with Bochner , the doc , toward the end , when he discovers that he , Frank , is responsible for the death of an innocent man , and not for innocent reasons either . The Doc ( Frank hates shrinks ) tries to relieve him of his guilt , but Frank is not to be had so easily . He sees through the Doc's ploy and takes responsibility for his own acts , as the pop psychologists used to say . It isn't what you think , it's how you behave that counts . There is a subplot involving some organization called " Rainbow . " The leaders of the borough all belong to it . What they do is buy up property and sell it to each other . Then when the price is high enough , they put on their borough-leader hats and buy it from themselves as property for a hospital or whatever , at a profit . " Once that's done with , " says Frank , " there isn't enough money left to build a birdhouse . " I don't get this , not having an MBA or anything . Where is Sir John Templeton when we need him . At times Frank sounds not only like a drama critic but a positive liberal as well - - " We're sitting on the lid of the garbage cans ( ie . , the ghetto ) and when that lid blows off . . . . . " Even after the obligatory resignation from the force , he is mumbling about doing some sort of social good , but it doesn't sound too convincing . When I was growing up , the local police weren't what most normal people would call liberal . I was clubbed around for throwing a snowball into an empty parking lot . I've seen guys who were kind of drunk in public get pounced on by a dozen men in blue and literally get their teeth pounded out . ( The guy was so drunk , he got up from the cement , said , " Hey bobareebop , somebody got his teeth knocked out , " and he spit them out of his bloody mouth all over the pavement where they bounced about like navy beans . ) You know what ? In any real urban police force in this country , I'd give Frank two minutes before he's out of a job permanently . Know what's striking about this film ? Sinatra plays the Montgomery Clift part in " From Here to Eternity " - - the hard-headed loner , the best man at his job , with his own sense of honor who will not bend his principles to become a success in the organization he loves . |
443,190 | 819,382 | 115,964 | 5 | Autoerotic and grotesque . | Kids , read no farther . In fact , leave the room and play Nintendo . And put your dirty socks in the hamper . If you think YOU'RE warped wait until you see the characters who populate this movie . You'll not only emerge from the experience reassured , you'll wind up feeling like a paragon of normality . The story ( if that's the word for it ) has Spader getting into a head-on smasheroo with a car in which Hunter is a passenger . Her husband is thrown through the windshield and killed . Spader is hospitalized with various pieces of shiny steel holding his long bones in place . He finds the pain and discomfort and immobilization so arousing that when his wife ( Unger ) visits him it leads to masturbation . There's a lot of that sort of thing in this movie . You'd never think Holly Hunter would suffer from such a paraphilia but she does . So does Spader's wife . Hunter and Spader run into each other , figuratively , in a garage full of wrecked cars and make furious love in one of the surrealistically twisted carcasses . Before you know it , the Spader family and Hunter have fallen in with a group of - - well , there's no easy name for people of this quality . Koteas , the head of this underground cohort , is some sort of show-business stunt driver who , with a few associated , restages fatal car crashes of celebrities . Spader and Hunter are one of a dozen or two spectators who come to watch the staging of the 1955 crash between James Dean's Porsche and a Ford driven by somebody named Turnipseed . None of the men involved in the stunt wear helmets or seat belts and there are no roll bars or any of that wimpy stuff . Koteas ' shiny Porsche Spider backs up , then speeds full blast into the front of the Ford . Kaboom . Sirens burping , the cops arrive and everyone scuttles for cover . It is never explained exactly how Koteas makes enough money to smash up beautifully restored Fords and Porsches . ( His next big show will involve the decapitation of Jane Mansfield . ) At Koteas ' home they watch movies of test crashes with dummies instead of porn . Spader's wife has seemed relatively reasonable up to now but she finds herself turned on by crashes , stunt men , and the rest . When she and Spader are making love ( this time in bed , not in the back seat ) , she asks about Koteas . " Did you see his penis ? " Spader : " He says it's all scarred from a motorcycle accident . " Unger ecstatically : " Ewwwww . " Anyway , to get on with it , one thing leads to another - - one thing being crashes and the other being flaming death amidst twisted metal . What with everyone being swept up in the craze and wanting still more of the excitement , the only sensible way to arouse and satisfy your wife is to smash into her car and kill her , right ? Two Big Os for the price of one - - Orgasm through Obliteration . So Spader continually rams the convertible driven by his willing wife until it flips over on the side of the highway . But she's not dead after all . " I'm all right , " she mumbles . " Maybe next time . Maybe next time , " he whispers to her and then does her bloody and half conscious body in the sere grass . So what's it all about , you ask ? You might find that SOME people have no idea but I have a very firm answer . I don't know . At one point Spader asks Koteas why he's so interested in this stuff and Koteas replies portentously : " It's the reshaping of the human body by modern technology . " Gosh . It's an awesome statement but what does it mean ? How is modern technology reshaping the human body ? Does he mean that vehicular accidents tear it all to bits ? Is he somehow thinking of the Thighmaster or simulacrum that imitate rowing or cross-country skiing or walking upstairs ? Is Cronenberg really after ROCK HARD ABS ? Here's what I think he's up to . It's been called self testing . It's seeing how far you can violate ordinary tastes and still get away with it , rather like a toddler who insists on wobbling along by himself until he either falls down or somebody picks him up . The real message of the movie is that there is no message . It's a highly ritualized violation of the viewer's expectations of taste . A Halloween prank . What else could it be ? It's certainly not a realistic portrayal of a bunch of perverts . Where could they possibly get insurance after the first dozen crashes ? And the fear and sexual responses are antagonistic , the former mediated by the sympathetic nervous system and the latter by the parasympathetic . Somebody who jumps off a cliff might have a spontaneous ejaculation , a sympathetic reflex , but he's not going to have an erection . I don't mean to pan the movie entirely . Unger and Hunter and Roseanna Arquette are sexy and attractive women . ( There's a homosexual encounter involving Spader and Koteas , but it's not sufficiently prolonged or explicit to be anhedonic . ) At any randomly chosen moment , the screen will show cars on the highway , cars crashing , people having sex in cars , or people talking about cars crashing and people having sex in cars . And it's neatly directed too . What shiny metal and what frangible flesh ! Everything but the bodies seem gleaming and cold . My only problem was that I didn't like it . Not my perversion . |
441,880 | 819,382 | 307,479 | 5 | Deep space . | At the end , George Clooney is reunited with his dead wife . He stares at her unbelievingly and asks , " Am I alive or am I dead ? " " We no longer have to think like that , " she replies with a smile . " We're together - - and we're happy . " Well I would insist on knowing if I were alive or dead . Instead of ending with a big smooch , the movie would end with my whipping out a notebook and giving Natascha MacElhone a long interview aimed at finding out what the hell is going on . I never really could figure it out , but here's my best guess . Early in the movie we have a scene of Clooney , MacElhone , and some friends having an intellectual post-prandial discussion of evolution . " Nothing special about us , " argues Clooney , " because it's all a matter of probability . We are a statistical inevitability . " ( MacElhone frowns . Maybe this is why she shortly commits suicide . ) Okay . So Clooney believes in a mechanistic universe . And now - - remember that I'm guessing - - the movie sets out to prove him wrong . The universe is designed after all . And the planet Solaris , which Clooney and a few others are investigating - - is GOD . Yes , God . Actually this would be a kind of relief because it would end all the power struggles around whether God is a male or female figure . Since Solaris is a planet , it has no gender and can properly be called " it , " unless there is a lot about planets that we don't know yet . In the end , Solaris seems to absorb the space ship and everyone and everything on it . In other words , at the very end , when Clooney asks his formerly dead wife whether he is alive or dead , the answer is that he's dead . Specifically , he's gone to heaven to be reunited with his loved one . Now , I hope that's true . That our spirits ( and maybe our bodies ) go to a nice place called heaven , but this idea has been around for years and the movie raises all the old questions about heaven . Did Vlad the Impaler go to heaven too ? Did Adolph Hitler ? And what about my dog , Phoebus ? And my cat , Oscar the Wild ? My delicate delphinia ? The movie seems like a long one . It goes on and on . Clooney reaches the space ship to find out what's happened to it . The two surviving crew members give him nothing but elliptical answers . " You'll find out . " Or , " If I were you I'd just keep my door locked tonight . " It turns out that the planet is reproducing figures of loved ones from the crew's memories of them as kind of an experiment . ( I guess , but cf . , " The Martian Chronicles . " ) The other crew already know this when Clooney gets there . Why didn't they just tell him ? As it is he has to discover it for himself . The locked door doesn't help . Well , okay . So MacElhone is nothing more than a simulacrum of reality , although she doesn't know it . When this is made clear , she asks to be deconstructed because , after all , she doesn't exist anyway . But Clooney can't dispose of her even though she's not human . ( Cf . , " Blade Runner . " ) MacElhone is neat looking . She has high zygomatic arches , a bony nose and pointed chin , and enormous dark eyes . She's a knockout . And she's photographed splendidly . In fact the whole movie is photographically super-par . Clooney seems a likable guy , enough so that , even though I've heard him described as devastatingly handsome , I can forgive him for it . He has the everyman quality that Clark Gable or Spencer Tracey had . He'd be a good guy for a fourth at bridge and a couple of beers . The movie , though , whew , it's confusing and dreary . Not a single shot is taken outdoors in daylight . And the absorption of the space ship into Solaris seems patterned after a similar scene in " 2001 " but without the psychedelic whammies . It aims to provoke thought and I suppose it does that , but it is anything but emotionally gripping . We never get to know the other two crew members , one of whom seems nuts and the other downright hostile . And the relationship between Clooney and MacElhone is sketchy . It's worth seeing - - once . |
441,660 | 819,382 | 37,674 | 5 | A Long Movie About Flirtation and Jealousy . | I wish I had something better to say about " Les Enfants du Paradis . " I understand it was shot under almost impossible conditions during the Nazi occupation and the cast and crew are held in an esteem almost Olympian in height . Helas , it seemed to drag for me . Three hours of a mime pursuing a flirtatious woman who attracts all kinds of men , high and low . It's a long time and I had some trouble keeping my eyes open . God knows , I'm not asking for the kind of warp-speed movies we're bombarded with today , nor does everything need to be dumbed down to the level of a grade-school kid . But , really , it could have been snipped here and there and been more of an eyeball magnet than it is . There's a good ten minutes , for instance , of a mime's performance on the stage of a kind of Commedia del'Arte . He prances in silence with a child , a blustering policeman , and a coquettish laundry woman . The mime is no Marcel Marceau , and nothing comes of the performance that couldn't be communicated in two minutes . Instead , we watch him for ten . And I couldn't figure out why all the men fall for Arletty . As Randolph Scott said in one of his Westerns , " She ain't ugly . " But she ain't exactly enchanting either . The film's longueurs stretch on and on , like the Street of Crime , as far as the half-open eye can see . Nothing much happens . A bit of trouble with the police . A duel . The mime beats a huge bouquet of flowers to death . Some suggestive dialog that must have seemed wicked in 1945 . Mostly people stand on a stage and play catch with words . It's said to be the " Gone With the Wind " of French cinema . I've seen enough of " Gone With the Wind " for one lifetime too . However , " Gone With the Wind " has its adoring fans . So does " The Sound of Music , " though , and that's bound to induce some sort of digestive problem in a viewer who is not a fan . " Les Enfants " has its fans , including some people whose opinions I respect , so maybe others will get more out of this than I was able to . |
443,449 | 819,382 | 117,883 | 5 | Effective use of clichés . | I runne to death , and death meets me as fast , wrote John Donne . In this case - - the deaths are designed to be one step removed from reality , recorded on videotapes and shown as " snuff " films . Everybody seems to runne even faster to somebody else's death , or so the movie keeps telling us . We gawk at automobile wrecks along the road , hoping for a glimpse of a mangled body or two . On television news programs , " if it bleeds , it leads . " Anyone can go to a P2P site and download video clips with such ennobling titles as , " Marine blows off Iraqi's arm . " Who needs " snuff films " anymore ? But , actually , that's not the subject of this film anyway . It's really a Brian DePalma ripoff , with every cliché in the book . Ana Torrent is the student-in-jeopardy . When she's investigating a kind of dungeon with a young man she believes is a friend , the door slams shut , locked , behind them and , pop , the lights go out and they only have half a box of matches to find their way through the cobwebs . If that's not enough , at the climax she's in a deserted house with a sadistic murderer and , pow , a fuse blows and the lights go out yet again . As a sinister professor of cinema argues , the American film industry is flooding the market with junk . In defense of our national pride we should give the public exactly what they want right here in Spain - - more junk , better junk , bigger junk . I think the director of this film really believes it because he's done a superlative job of following the formula . For instance , in a DePalma film , there may be a guy that the woman-in-jeopardy might think of as a friend , perhaps a non-conditional love psychiatrist , but she may find some bit of evidence , some small thing , that throws suspicion upon him . I can't count the number of times some artifact or some factoid throws Ana's suspicions on a friend here . I mean it . I really couldn't count them . The switcheroos come so thick and fast they become glutinous and indistinguishable from one another . One's flicker fusion threshold is exceeded . Is Ana Torrent really the little dark-haired girl who whispered her way through " The Spirit of the Beehive " ? Well , as Marlon Brando tells Eva Marie Saint in " On The Waterfront , " " You grew up nice . " She has no chin to speak of , great big dark wet orbs , clean features , and looks vulnerable and smart , not unlike Thalia Balsam but less loose-lipped and more remote . Chema , who may or may not be her weird friend , looks like Johnny Depp with stringy hair and a beard . The murderer looks like some heart throb exhumed from a movie of the 1950s , maybe Frankie Avalon or Fabian . The professor , although a pervert and a murderer , looks handsome and distinguished . All professors look that way . I looked that way when I was a professor . I still look that way , despite what you may have heard from my psychotherapist or my so-called friends . The director might think he's preaching to us about our taste for violent imagery . ( If he's saying that we have one , he's certainly right about that . ) But he's pandering too . He's showing us the very thing he's condemning us for wanting to see , and he's guiltless but hardly guileless . It doesn't help to know that we're watching fake sadism exercised by actors in a fictional movie , that it's like watching Daffy Duck looking at himself in a mirror , with neither image real . That's a joke between the cartoon and the audience . Here , the joke is entirely on the audience . The more apt comparison is to one of those war movies in which we witness suffering and see blood all over and the movie is called an " anti-war movie " , but our side always seems to win . I thought " Thesis " was captivating because it was so well executed , but considered it insulting as well . |
442,750 | 819,382 | 102,757 | 5 | Waiting for God | SPOILERS . I'm trying to remember the story of Job . Let's see . God and Satan were having a conversation and God claimed he could test any believer without breaking him . I don't remember why he picked Job , a devout man , but , boy , did God test him . ( Woody Allan might ask why God didn't give Job a written exam instead . ) This is a kind of Job story . I began watching it because , frankly , I was hoping Mimi Rogers might uncover part of her magnificent torso but I stayed because I got caught up in this complex story of a rather simple belief system . Mimi is put to the test too . And there is a sort of cultish group thrown in , made up of people who have seen the light . What does the light look like ? According to the script it has something to do with a dream about a pearl . I am being a little vague on this point because the film is vague . ( Also I don't know how pearls figure so markedly in a mythos with a desert background . ) And the version of Christianity the film present us with is truly primitive . There are constant references to Jesus Christ , although the acts of God we witness reflect the temper of the angrier God of the Old Testament more than the merciful God of the New . How can you be saved ? It's easy . You love Jesus Christ and do whatever God orders you too . A reasonable person , as the spouse-swapping Rogers is at the beginning , might ask , " The Buddhists seem to get along without Jesus Christ , " and the Hindus and Moslems too , and the converted come right back with a smiling answer , " But they are not saved . " I guess that leaves out the Jews too , although Christians worship the same God , but only through an intermediary , and with different rituals . The movie was especially gripping when Rogers apparently has a vision in which she is to take her daughter to the desert and wait for the end of the world . She takes only the necessities - - no money and no food - - expecting the arrival of Gabriel and the rest at any moment . Her date stands her up . She turns more raggedy with each day and finally does something terrible and is brought to jail by a sheriff's deputy ( Will Patton in a sympathetic role for a change ) . Then the world ends with a minimum of special effects . Her daughter and Patton wind up in heaven , but Rogers is bitter about having been disappointed by God and evidently winds up spending eternity in Purgatory . That's it , folks . I don't know whose side the movie is on - - the born-agains who glow with the inner light of sanctimony , or people like Rogers who find that a God capable of such cruelty is not worth loving unconditionally . I suppose if Heaven is a good idea , it's better to surrender to God , especially if you're looking for an " exclusive neighborhood " to live in . Yet we're left admiring Rogers for having made up her own mind . She believes fiercely , first in God , and then in her distaste for Him . All the while I kept thinking that this movie deals with the kind of Big Issues that European directors are so fond of . I have a feeling that if it had been shot by the French , the story might have been very similar , beginning with all that ontological Angst , but that the central question would have dealt not with God but with Marx or Marcuse or somebody . |
442,410 | 819,382 | 416,315 | 5 | Naturalistic spooky moved turns slasher . | It starts out rather well - - an Australian guy and two British tourist girls visit a tourist spot far from anywhere , Wolf Creek , site of a huge meteor crater . The director and photographer do a splendid job of capturing the neverending vistas of the Australian outback . Majestic , yes , but strangely ominous too . The desert landscape ought to be sunny but it seems instead to suffer from an eternal twilight . And thunder sometimes rumbles overhead . And then there is a cloudburst , and the tourists can't get their car started , and their stuck inside shivering , and a beat-up truck comes trundling through the night towards them . The tourists are scared , naturally . At firs they aren't even sure it's a vehicle . But the spell of the Dreamtime ends and it's a jovial old bushman who examines their engine and tells them he'll have to tow them to a small town for repairs . He'll do it for nothing . First , though , a brief stop at his isolated encampment . The four of them sit around an outdoor fire cracking jokes , everyone joining in the laughter and having a hell of a good time . Things turn a little grim as the weathered older bloke describes his occupation - - killing things and tearing them apart . And things get a little more puzzling when the young fellow makes a joking remark at the Bushman's expense . The old guy cocks his eye at the speaker and stares silently at him for about 30 full seconds while the others begin to squirm . So far , so good . Then it turns into an outright slasher movie with screaming women tied to poles and covered with blood , a villain beaten into unconsciousness who leaps back to life at the wrong time , rape , a speeding car escaping from a murderer , a muddy slide into a ditch , dressed carcasses hanging from meat hooks , and I don't know what all . Well - - see Texas Chainsaw Massacre for another example . I didn't watch the end . What's the point of watching innocent young people slaughtered by a maniac ? Or watching the maniac get it in the end , as he probably did ? The acting was fine on the part of all the principals . The young folks are disarming , innocent and carefree . They're attractive without being drop-dead gorgeous . And the old coot was great , grinning like a skull while telling stories about dismembering ' roos . I mean , if this guy weren't totally round the bend , living in a garbage dump and raping tourists , he'd be great to have a couple of beers with . I didn't like it after the first 45 minutes or so but if you're a fan of this sort of thing , you'll enjoy it . |
442,729 | 819,382 | 50,874 | 5 | A Rorschach of a Western | The eminent , mad Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote of UFOs that there was something out there , but what it was , was a mystery . As such they permitted us to project our own thoughts and emotions onto them . They provided us with a kind of Rorschach ink blot test . We could interpret them according to our social values . Many routine Westerns provided us with the same opportunities . The Westerns generally stuck with the conventions - - a clip on the jaw and the recipient is unconscious for as long as the plot requires . But within that framework we could explore our problems in model form . It's like playing around with a toy instead of facing the real thing . For instance , it might not be such a hot idea to deal directly with racism . Why bleed the box office returns from the traditional South ? But , hey , Indians can serve as stand-ins for African-Americans , as in " The Searchers " ( 1956 ) . Movies designed for audiences with the Great Depression fresh in mind could use " big business " as the heavy . We could even win the Vietnam war with Rambo . This movie , " The Quiet Gun " ( a generic title if there ever was one ) explores social issues common to the late 1950s - - divorce , adultery , prudery , racism , lynching , conformity , gossip , and the impartiality of the justice system . No African-Americans , though , just a " half-breed " Indian . It's not a bad little film , though it does seem almost flamboyantly dated now . ( Living in sin ? ) Forrest Tucker is a professional and competent actor and it shows . Lee Van Cleef , of the ophidian eyes , is what he is . Jim Davis plays a somewhat sympathetic victim for a change . Some of the minor parts are just terrible . What were the town fathers in real life - - the producers ' uncles or something ? It's inexpensively shot on a ranch set . No spectacular vistas here . And it's in black and white , which isn't necessarily bad . If the script lacks sparkle , and if Hank Worden replays his goofy dumb role yet again , the movie still is watchable and has something to offer us , as if it had been recently exhumed from a time capsule . Not at all terrible . |
442,811 | 819,382 | 97,880 | 5 | Where's Belafonte when you need him ? | Relaxed - - very relaxed - - murder story , with Denzel Washington as a detective ordered to find and capture his friend so the murder can be rapidly cleared up and the tourist trade flow along liquidly . Halfway through , Washington begins to believe that there is more to the case than meets the eye , and that his buddy will be no more than a scapegoat . Very nice location shooting in Jamaica . If you like reggae , you will LOVE this film's score . There are lots of shots of the beautiful beach . Hey , mon , why you jomp in dee wah-tah faw ? The more desperately seedy areas of Kingston are avoided , as they would be in one of Hitchcock's movies set in an exotic locale . The viewpoint is that of the tourist used to saying in nice hotels , the kind with jacuzzis but no venomous snakes . Denzel Washington handles the accent pretty well without quite shedding his own phones . Sometimes it fades more than others . The other performers don't really have too much to do . Everyone seems to be enjoying himself , as if on vacation . The movie is rather good-natured considering the plot . The white guys tend to be bad , while the local people of color are at worst raffish . Is there still such racial friction in Jamaica ? I don't know , but in the Bahamas the races get along well with one another , as they do in much of the Caribbean . Maybe big cities breed animosities spontaneously . There's nothing truly outstanding about this routine flick , except , as I've noted , the score . It's not especially exciting , mysterious , amusing , or engaging in any other way . It's not a bad flick if you're prepared to let it take you by the hand and lead you along the colorful streets , pointing out sites of interest , suggesting you taste the jerky and try one of those pink drinks in a tall glass with a flower and a paper umbrella sticking out of it . We call it Captain Bluebeard's Mango Flavored Rum Punch . Mind the umbrella . One of awah tourists lost an eye last year . Don't drink ? Fine , bad faw the health . Care for one of awah Jah-may-can cigars ? You might not remember much of it later but you won't object to having watched it . |
441,967 | 819,382 | 109,161 | 5 | Worthy Attempt | This is a somewhat retro TV movie . It probably should have been made some years ago , when many people in the USA were unaware of these issues , basking in fantasies of every man being equal . A black cadet at West Point is victimized , is blamed for it himself , and discharged from the Army . It's hard to figure out what point the movie is trying to make . It certainly isn't that " it takes all kinds , " as the aged Johnson Whittaker says philosophically . Because we only see two in this movie , the simply good and the simply bad . Well , I guess Sam Waterston's lawyer seems like an upright and just man , but even he is revealed as a closet racist at the end . The problem lies almost entirely with the script . It reads as if it were something that won a high school prize in Dubuque . Points that are already obvious are spelled out for us . Points that could easily have been made visually are put into indignant speeches . The dialog wobbles all over place and time and social register . Sometimes contractions ( " won't " ) are used , sometimes they aren't ( " I will not . " ) . Sometimes the dialog is American ( " will " ) and sometimes British ( " shall " ) . Anachronisms are thrown haphazardly into the text . Jackson is made to say things like , " Sham , my a , they beat the s out of him ! " And , " You just don't get it , do you ? " And - - this one's clever - - " Right now the wind is behind your back , but some day it's going to change and all the s you're writing will blow back in your face . " Even that's not enough . Jackson has to add , " Some day you are going to eat your words . " There's no score worth mentioning . The photography is competent . The acting is generally good , despite the miscasting . Sam Waterston is not a stiff-necked hypocrite and crypto-racist . Sam Waterston is Jack McCoy , and Abraham Lincoln , and Nick Carraway . Jackson does quite well in a clunky role , but someone like Morgan Freeman might have projected more thoughtfulness and masked intensity . The actor in the role of Whittaker as a cadet hasn't got much going for him , but Al Freeman , Jr . , as the older Whittaker is professional and dignified , although his final obiter dictum on how the country is doomed if it doesn't shape up soon falls rather heavily to earth . ( It's not Freeman's fault . ) Two performances are outstanding , though , because the actors ham it up delightfully and bring some absurdity to a project overburdened with solemnity . John Glover is a remarkably slimy and supercilious villain . I love the guy in everything he's been in . He never disappoints - - and he's slightly cross eyed too . The other performance , surprisingly , comes from Mason Adams , whose voice you will recognize from commercials . I will always remember and honor him for the deathless line , " And I thought mustard had to be yellow to be good . " He's phenomenal as a Southern racist Harvard-grad lawyer who will brook no nonsense from anybody . Those performances are among the reasons I can think of to see this film . It will also serve to enlighten those who are unaware of the racism so prominent in our national history . It's a sad truth that so many of us still need that issue brought to our attention . |
441,817 | 819,382 | 33,455 | 5 | Parade Rest . | For Bob Hope , in the 1940s , this is pretty routine stuff . Hope pretends to enlist in order to impress his girl friend , Dorothy Lamour , and winds up in the army by mistake . I don't know why this isn't funnier than it is . It has a cast of seasoned comedy actors , of which Lynn Overman is the best , with his dry Edgar-Buchanan wisecracks . The problem is with the script . It has a ground-out quality . Abbott and Costello , Laurel and Hardy , Mickey Rooney - - everyone seemed to be making the same movie , and this role could have been handed over to anyone . Hope is an extremely funny guy in the right context but this isn't the context . The script is unimaginative . The direction by David Butler is leaden . There are long pauses after a gag , before the dissolve , while the audience is supposed to be laughing . It seems at times that eons come and go , dynasties rise and fall , geological epochs pass , while we wait for the dissolve to the next scene in a silent room . Hope was a lot better later on , especially in the Road movies with Bing Crosby to play off . And he would be much better by himself too , in such outings as " My Favorite Spy . " This one is worth watching and at times is engaging fun , but , for Hope , strictly by the book . |
442,994 | 819,382 | 175,142 | 5 | A Deconstruction of Ludic Elements in Contemporary Parodistic Cinematic Syntax | I suppose there are three major elements to consider in figuring out what kind of spoof you're watching . ( 1 ) The dumbness of the gags . ( 2 ) The kind of genre being referenced . And ( 3 ) the level of self awareness of the characters . The gags can range from elegant to really visciously vulgar . The stupid ones have broader audience appeal and probably make more money . This movie probably made a lot of money . ( Eg . , one of the gay characters is assaulted by having a phallus thrust in one ear and out the other . ) They're not all that gross . When Cindy runs to her room and contacts 911 on her PC , she gets the question , " What is your problem ? " and types in , " White woman in trouble . " But the run of the mill gags are pretty lowbrow . Over the final credits is a rap song with lyrics like , " Take your tongue , and cut it out your mouth . Take it home , feed it to my trout . Fry him in a pan , shoot him out my can , right into your face , so you know your place . " If you find that level of wit funny , it's your kind of movie . The genre being spoofed here is the teenage horror / slasher flick . Not something like " The Shining " or " The Innocents , " but something like , " Scream , " and " I Know What You Did Last Summer . " I can catch most of the cliches being skewered in something like , " Big Deal on Madonna Street " ( a caper movie ) or " Fatal Instinct , " ( a private eye noir ) but I'm certain that most of the allusions here got past me because I don't find the original films very entertaining so I'm not familiar with them . The characters here are more self aware than in any spoof of recent memory . They know they are in a movie - - all of them . At one point two young people are going to make love for the first time and the guy says , " Just like in a movie . " The girl says , " No , this isn't a movie . " And he says , " Sure it is , " and begins naming the crew while we see them gathered around the camera . It isn't that this hasn't been done before . There's a deliberate , fleeting shot of the director and crew in " Candy , " and in " Blazing Saddles " the characters break into the set of a musical being filmed on the neighboring sound stage . " Shakespeare in Love " flirted with this , when one of the characters says , " I own tobacco plantations in Virginia . I think there may be a future in tobacco , " and glances furtively into the camera . It's just that here , we are always aware of their awareness , whether we actually see the camera or not . I didn't find the movie very funny . It doesn't seem instrinsically funny when a retarded character named Dufus walks around with his lips twisted into an odd sneer , any more than it was funny when Mel Brooks made twitching faces as the mayor of the town in " Blazing Saddles . " Teenagers seemed to enjoy " Scary Movie , " or at least that's the impression I get . There must have been some respectable activity at the box office and at Sam's Blockbuster after all the hype that accompanied this release . |
442,199 | 819,382 | 327,162 | 5 | Less funny than the original . | This is an updated and revised version of the 1975 original . The first version was presented to us as a serious story about the subjugation of women but , like " Mommie Dearest " , turned out to be more amusing than dramatic . In this version the comedy inherent in the conceit is out in the open . The only problem is that it's not too funny . Not the fault of the performers , who are all good . Nicole Kidman is a fine actress and comedy is well within her range . Bette Midler , by contrast , is always comic and always Bette Midler . Midler's post-conversion sweetness is hilarious mainly because we see Bette Milder trying so HARD to play " sweet . " Mathew Broderick is not bad either , perhaps a bit bland but it fits the part . Glen Close , trapped in her robotic role , is almost unrecognizable beneath the makeup . Christopher Walken gives the best performance of the bunch , as he so often does . Every line he utters has some sort of quirky quality . And he must have enormous self control because he gets the funniest lines and never cracks a smile . Watch him present the TV commercial that will be used " when we go global . " He wears a white lab coat , like a TV doctor , and walks the viewer through the robotization process with careless ease . He's even funny after he gets his head knocked off and the sparks fly out . I said it was updated , and what I meant is that there is now a gay couple living in Stepford . And Paula Prentiss has been replaced by Bette Midler , so a lot of jokes about Jews show up - - " why not decorate your menorah with pine cones ? " " How about if I just arrange a lot of pine cones on my front lawn so that they spell out BIG JEW ? " The original had to do with men feeling threatened by their wives ' desire to raise their consciousness , whatever that means , and to develop interests outside the home . This version has gone beyond that vague feeling of oppression . The Stepford Wives are now all ex-CEOs , brain surgeons , and Pulitzer Prize winners . Even the robot terrier was a prize winner . The men no longer feel threatened . They stopped worrying about that years ago . Now they just feel humiliated and beaten by their more successful spouses . What humor there is can be found mostly in one-liners . Wisecracks that are sometimes funny imposed on an essentially humdrum script . The situations themselves aren't amusing . There is , for instance , no scene to equal the one in which Katherine Ross stabs the now-robotic Paula Prentiss in the vicinity of her belly button , shorts out a couple of anodes , and sends Prentiss into a stereotyped infinite loop of behavior - - going through the motions of serving coffee but letting the cups drop on the floor and so on . Now THAT'S funny . |
442,148 | 819,382 | 35,369 | 5 | Rousing fight , otherwise average . | It gets off to a slow start , a story about miners being cheated out of their claims by crooked bureaucrats and gangsters . Takes an hour before you find out who the spoilers are . They do not include Marlene Dietrich , who plays the owner of the local " dance hall " or whatever it's called , and whose affections Randolph Scott and John Wayne compete for . Boy , is she blond in this one , and with a wig that makes her resemble an olive on a toothpick . Wayne is a cocky guy , rarely serious , with a smile that eerily combines shyness with self-confidence . Scott beams with virility . There is a sneaky " good girl " too , who is actually one of the gangsters . No one puts much effort into any of the roles . It's the kind of movie in which one of the minor villains takes a bead on a good guy having a conversation , is shot dead , and the talk continues without any remarks relevant to the recently deceased . If someone says something even vaguely offensive to another man , his reward is a sock in the law and his lights go out . All of the fist fights take place in accelerated motion which , at the time , must have added zest to the action but today draws attention to itself as the expression of a souped-up camera . The climactic fist fight lasts longer than most . Bodies tumble all over the place - - through doors , down staircases , over bars , onto tables , and through huge plate glass windows . Clothing is ripped to shreds and there are bruises and a trickle or two of blood , but nobody's nose is bleeding and no one loses any teeth or breaks a finger . It's shot in California although it's supposed to be the Yukon . You can tell it's a Yukon-type Western because all the characters wear high-laced boots with woolen socks folded down over the tops , instead of cowboy boots . Otherwise it's a cowboy Western . Diverting enough , especially when it gets down to business in the second half . What I want to know is , where the hell is Gabb Hayes ? |
441,949 | 819,382 | 83,284 | 5 | Fussbol with gravitas . | This kind of football is serious business . Oh , I know it seems silly for a group of Allied prisoners during World War II to sacrifice their chance to escape just so they can go back and whup the pro team of Nazis . A ridiculous fantasy . It's just a game , after all . But there seems to be something about what Americans call soccer that really gets the testosterone flowing . There have been several riots over the last decade or two in soccer stadiums , some with fatalities . And in 1968 , shortly after a three-game series between El Salvador and Honduras , we had the so-called soccer war between the two impoverished Central American countries . The armed forces were engaged . A C-47 flew over the enemy's lines , rolling 50 gallon drums and other ammunition out the door , hoping some of it might somehow explode . It would have been comic had not 2 , 000 people died , 8 , 000 been wounded , and perhaps 50 , 000 displaced . John Huston must have made this kind of movie for that kind of audience . It's one of his minor works and we don't get to see the director having any real fun putting it together . It's about a rag tag team of POWs thrown against a Nazi team and passing up their opportunity to escape in order to finish the game . ( Guess who wins . ) I gather that our team is made up of real-life soccer heroes . Even a provincial American has heard of Pele . Except for Rocky Balboa , who is the world's heavyweight boxing champion . Oh , and Michael Caine , whose paycheck couldn't have been of sufficient magnitude to compensate him for the waste of his natural acting talent in this movie . It's really not much more than a big soccer game climax grafted onto a standard POW escape movie . You ought to hear the Shastakovich-like heroic music when one of the teams wins . I'll bet that gets the old testosterone flowing , but I think I'll stick with those lines of wooden figures that kick a ball bearing back and forth on a table top . That way , if I have a chance to escape from prison , I can just say the hell with it and run away . |
442,348 | 819,382 | 104,743 | 5 | Which color do you like - - the red or the green ? | Action / thriller about Pierce Brosnan as a troubled but wisecracking FBI explosive expert . There's really nothing much new here , but what you see is pretty well done . It's just another professional genre piece . There is the corrupt senator ( Ron Silver ) who's made a fortune from a crooked arms deal . There is the freelance explosive artist ( Ben Cross ) who has learned how to make an explosive substance out of something that looks , acts , and tastes like water until it is activated by stomach acid , when it throws the victim into fits and turns him into a monster bomb . ( ! ) The senator has been making love to Brosnan's wife , which causes Brosnan to drink too much , but they get together at the end , and there is an African-American sidekick who manages to analyze the explosive water , and when Brosnan is cornered by the evildoers in the senator's kitchen he saves himself by making bombs out of ordinary household substances like Vaseline , acetone , alcohol , arugela , salt , pepper , and a touch of marjoram , and - - well , you can guess the rest . It's interesting to watch a human drink a glass of water , fall into an epileptiform seizure , burst his eyeballs with blood , and blow up , leaving only bits and pieces of flesh and shards of bone behind to mark his passing . Pierce Brosnan is a lightweight actor but a likable one . If Ron Silver were more intense he'd be a black hole . Ben Cross is the kind of villain who - - well , here's a scene . Cross is hurrying through his laboratories and the man who invented the secret explosive is scuttling along beside him , reminding Cross that he hasn't been paid yet . Cross says something like , " Yes , you're right . I owe you . " Then he borrows a pen to write a check and , instead , stabs the natterer to death right through the apricot . Near the end , another henchman is stupid enough to claim he's done his job and is leaving now . Right . Cross plugs him in the back . There's no reason for any of this , except to provide a few more colorful deaths , as if there weren't enough . You might find it satisfying if you're in the mood , but I doubt you'll be surprised at much that happens . |
442,036 | 819,382 | 43,129 | 5 | Modest Comedy From Ford . | You have to keep your eyes open to see John Ford as a motivating force behind this slender but still successful comedy . If it weren't for the rituals - - civil and military - - and the booze , well , it would be hard to tell . Dan Dailey is the first man from Punxatawy , West Virginia , to enlist after Pearl Harbor but his boyish thirst for action goes unslaked when he is posted as a gunnery instructor at a local airfield . Two years pass , during which the townspeople who were so proud of him become used to his always hanging around while the war goes on elsewhere . ( Some hero . ) Despite his insistence , the Air Force will not give him combat duty . Instead he collects stripes and good conduct medals at home . His father , William Demarest , is frankly irritated with him . Suddenly Dailey is assigned to a B-17 bound for England , as a last-minute replacement for a crew member . The plane runs out of fuel and Dailey accidentally bails out over France instead of England . Here he is picked up and quizzed by the maquis in the person of Corrine Calvet , tempting as creme brulee . She gives him some important film about the German V-2 rocket sites and , to get him through German lines , pretends to marry him during a loud party . He drinks too much wine and the next morning is hustled aboard a British Motor Torpedo Boat suffering from lack of sleep and a calamitous hangover . The crew of the MTB believe he's sea sick and force feed him a tot of rum which mostly spills down his chest . He delivers the film to the astounded authorities in England . He can barely keep awake so they give him a belt of scotch to revive him . He's immediately flown back to Washington , crowded behind the pilot in a P-38 . He's groggy from lack of sleep so the pilot gives him a shot of cognac which Dailey feebly pushes away . During his report to General Marshall , he mumbles and weaves before passing out , so they try to give him some bourbon to revive him before he is whisked away to a hospital . By this time , Dailey is incoherent and the physicians try to put him in a straight jacket before he manages an escape . He makes it back to Punxatawny on a freight train , staggers to his home and begins to crawl in through the kitchen window . His father mistakes him for a burglar and whops him over the head with a night stick . To revive him , his mother gives him a glass of cooking sherry . Mistaking it for milk , Dailey takes a gulp or two then spews out the rest all over the floor . All is resolved and Dailey is to be given a medal by the president . As he is being flown away , the CO of the local airfield smiles and says , " Remind me to give that boy a good conduct medal . " It's nothing like the comic interludes of " What Price Glory , " more amusing than funny . Dailey worked with Ford on two other pictures and there are a few familiar faces here and there - - Jack Pennick as a drill sergeant . It's never slow . The pace is fast but somehow feels forced , as if Ford were anxious to get through it and begin something that interested him more . A lot depends on Dan Dailey as the central figure , and actually he's pretty good . He never seems to have found a niche in Hollywood . He was tall and was a decent hoofer but was mostly confined to supporting roles or as part of an ensemble . His acting style was bluff and straightforward but perhaps he didn't have the face of a leading man . And he didn't grow into an interesting character actor either . All of it a minor puzzle . Ford didn't provide much help . All of Ford's movies had comic elements in them but , like Alfred Hitchcock , his essays at pure comedy , like " Donovan's Reef , " didn't quite click . Comedy was Howard Hawks territory . It's worth seeing , this movie , a perky and good-natured comedy . |
442,257 | 819,382 | 41,198 | 5 | Interesting but dated crime drama . | What a dark movie ! Everything seems to happen at night . Ricardo Montalban is a member of " the Mexican FBI " and George Murphy his counterpart at the INS . They form a partnership to investigate the illegal smuggling of braceros ( Mexicans with temporary worker programs ) across the border where they are exploited by unscrupulous American interests , then robbed by bandits when they return to Mexico . Talk about your contemporary problems ! It's a decent mystery . The acting is up to snuff . The direction and the photography are professionally competent . And that's about it . Ricardo Montalban gives a good performance and the rest are middling . I prefer Sig Rumann in comic roles , maybe alongside the Marx Brothers , whereas he's a serious heavy in this one . There is always Alfonso Bedoya , along with one of his henchmen from " The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , " but he doesn't have much to do except mangle the English language and his character provides no deliberate relief from the intensity of the story . There's something - - unconvincing ? Is that the word ? Not a moment goes by when you forget you're watching a movie . No matter how hard I tried I was unable to suspend my disbelief . Ricardo Montalban may be too handsome to be a bracero . His haircut is not that of a poor laborer but a Hollywood star . In fact all of the braceros seem too well groomed . Their clothes don't seem lived in , although they are all provided with bundles wrapped in serapes , and they all wear straw sombreros . They're burdened with lines like , " Tell me , my husband , is it dangerous ? " And it's impossible to sense any feelings of social responsibility behind or in front of the camera . Watch " Viva Zapata " with its screenplay by John Steinbeck for an illustration of what's lacking here . And watch " Traffic " for a treatment of the systemic problem that does not devolve into a Manichaean struggle of the good guys versus the bad guys . There are ethical problems on both sides of the border , although the ones on the Mexican side seem to dwarf those on the other , as that perceptive reviewe Howdymax has observed . There is one unforgettable scene though , in which George Murphy is sliced and diced by an agonizingly slow-moving diesel-pulled harrow . ( I think that's what it is . There wasn't much farm machinery in Newark . ) Murphy , by a curious coincidence , was elected to the Senate from California back in the 60s . There was a small furor at the time over the ethics of the bracero program . They were getting pretty shabby treatment and some wanted to end the program . Murphy's position on the issue was firm . He approved thoroughly of the bracero program . Braceros , he argued , were better at picking lettuce and carrots and melons because " they were built closer to the ground . " I swear I'm not making that up . Well , the movie may be obsolete but the questions aren't . It makes for interesting viewing . |
443,271 | 819,382 | 50,722 | 5 | A doggy bag for this escargot ? | I managed to catch this only in snatches but , judging from those , it's not as bad as it might be . Tim Holt ( " The Treasure of the Sierra Madre " ) is the new commanding officer of a naval base on the edge of the Salton Sea in the California desert . There have been nuclear tests nearby and an earthquake releases some giant mollusks with great shells that seem built around the Fibonacci numbers , two hideous eyes , and an overall resemblance to my drill instructor in boot camp . A number of sailors and civilians mysteriously disappear . They were eaten , of course , by these snails . One of the eaten people is Barbara Darrow , which is a damned shame , if you ask me , edible though she may be . Commander Tim Holt manages to catch on to what's up with the help of the scientists that are unavoidable in this kind of movie - - Hans Conreid and Max Showalter , familiar faces . Holt's romantic interest is Audrey Dalton , a striking , pale brunette beauty who looks a little like Jean Simmons but without the intimations of insanity . There's some development of character too , which reflects a refreshing attention to narrative on the part of the writers . Holt is at first stern , demanding , and impatient but , under Dalton's influence , becomes more forgiving and human . Most of the clams or whatever they are get blown up by the Navy scuba divers , but one manages to get loose in the lab . Dalton grabs up her child and locks the door to a store room . The hungry monster has spotted them and begins to chew its way through the wall . After a brief attempt to get the child through a small window , Dalton gives up and , weeping , terrified , tells the youngster to hug here . Then the two of them sit there waiting to be eaten . Now , it is in no way politically correct to say this , I know , but there is pretty good evidence that the tendency of females , like Audrey Dalton in this scene , to sit and accept negative circumstances without trying to overcome them may be constitutional . Seriously . If you take a boy baby and hide his plaything behind a wall of wooden blocks , the likelihood is that he'll get angry , knock the wall down , and grab his toy . Little girls have a greater tendency to sit passively and cry , knowing that the toy is just behind that little wall . Trust me on this . I taught Developmental Psychology . You may be displeased with this factoid but you should be grateful for having learned something you didn't know before . That will be fifteen cents . For what it's worth , we'd all be better off if we stopped knocking down things that were in our way , now that we've got nuclear bombs . At any rate , Holt comes to the rescue and tries out various weapons on this monstrous creature . It has no shell at this point . It looks like a giant banana slug the size of a rolled up king-sized mattress . He distracts it from Dalton and the child long enough for sailors to rush into the lab and shoot it dead with M 1s . As I say , it wasn't as bad as I'd expected , but it was clear by this time ( 1957 ) that the atomic monster business was getting fagged out . We'd already had giant ants , spiders , praying mantises , locusts , and whatnot . And you can see that snails are pretty far down on the fear factor . Nice echt-1950s black-and-white photography , though , and the location shooting isn't bad . The acting doesn't really amount to much but it gets the job done . Tim Holt is a likable kind of fellow and Audrey Dalton is pretty and the snails are unspeakably ugly . What more could you ask for , if it's late and you can't sleep ? |
442,599 | 819,382 | 50,720 | 5 | Rocks Around the Clock | The Monolith Monsters follows the usual scenario of Universal's 1950s monster movies . An ill-understood menace threatens the town ( or the country or mankind ) . Men wearing uniforms try to deal with it , but it's the scientists who come to the rescue . ( Sounds like the Cold War . ) In this case - - in this inexpensive and late case - - the imagination of the writers had just about reached rock bottom . The " monsters " are rock pylons generated by a meteorite . They grow at a phenomenal rate when they are in contact with water , sucking all the silicon out of whatever material they touch , including human flesh . The victims are turned to stone . The meteorite has landed on a mountain top in the desert , but unfortunately a rain storm activates it . These huge black towers grow visibly , then crash and splinter into hundreds of smaller pieces , which grow in turn . The rock itself looks something like obsidian , flinty , shiny , and smoothly fractured . The local geologist and the sheriff are at a loss and they call in " the professor , " whom everyone calls " the professor . " Together with the local newspaper editor ( the reliable Les Tremayne ) and with the help of the supernumerary Lola Albright , they experiment on rock samples and try to find something that will check their growth . Nothing seems to work . The colossal towers are crashing inexorably towards San Angelo and , beyond that , " the citrus region , " after which there will be no stopping them . At the last moment , the antidote is discovered . The rocks stop growing when they are exposed to salt water . And fortunately there is a salt mine just outside town , and next to it a dam which must be blown up , so that the released water can rush over the salt mine and out into the salt flats and tell those rocks where to get off . The formula was getting kind of old by 1957 , I guess . Much of the story is easily anticipated . Some of it is shamelessly ripped off . A young girl at the site of an early and mysterious catastrophe that has killed her parents , is found wandering about in shock . She doesn't blink when a hand is waved in front of her eyes . ( Cf . , " Them " . ) Sherwood's direction is strictly functional . If a group of six people is standing together , as in the last shot of the film , they don't huddle together . They stand in line and congratulate each other sideways , so that we can see them and all their faces at once in medium shot . And though the monsters make a lot of noise , crashing about through the canyons , they're not really as scary as , say , a giant tarantula would be , because they move so slowly . On top of that , they're insensible . They aren't alive , so they can't see anything or chase anything or eat anybody . The dialog seems to have been written in a hurry . Lola Albright : Dr . Higgins says that the girl has only eight hours . Maybe . Les Tremayne : And maybe - - not ? Albright : Maybe not . Yet , there is something unspeakably creepy about the sinuous colonies of black towers . The texture of the colony is revolting . It's like looking at a photo of a skin disease with pustule crowding against pustule . Yukk . And the fact that the rocks are mindless puts them in the category of things that can't be outwitted , like disease or death itself . It's a short , minor film , but I kind of enjoyed it . Despite the urgency , the tone of the movie is relaxed , as if nobody was really putting too much effort into it . And it's always fun to see the 1950s monster formula invoked for still another go . |
443,325 | 819,382 | 95,836 | 5 | Who Wants to be Liberated ? Raise Your Hands . | It's hard to believe that we once took this sort of stuff seriously - - all those stale bumper-sticker slogans , the merry-go-round minds . It seems like fiction now , but it surely wasn't at the time . I enjoyed wearing funny clothes in Berkeley , getting stoned with everyone else in New York , and observing the goings on at peace rallies in Philadelphia . But if we're going to be nostalgic for the late 60s and early 70s , this is a reminder that in some ways they were pretty lousy years . When they move to LA , one of the ladies in the SLA says , " No gas . No electricity . At LAST we're really poor ! " The SLA , a couple of black ex-cons and their white slaves , were seen as legitimate by a lot of people . Honest , there was widespread sympathy for them , especially academics and the kind of people who wished they could be poor and black . " Rolling Stone " s Man of the Year in , I think , 1970 was Charles Manson - - and the tribute wasn't sarcastic . Violent revolution had acquired functional autonomy : revolution because it was good in and of itself . The movie is like a trip to Disneyland . It's so dated that it's hard to believe it wasn't faked . It depends entirely on Patty Hearst's memoirs of her captivity , so its perspective is limited to what she sees . It was supposed to reveal " all the secret things , " but the fact is that the book , like the movie , isn't really very enlightening . Her movements are spelled out okay , but Natasha Richardson's narration doesn't really tell us anything much about the reasons for Patty's change from frightened captive to frightened but willing accomplice . " I went deeper and deeper into myself , " says the narration . ( How do you do that ? ) Richardson is really about as good as you can get . If she can't tell us very much that we can't already guess ( Patty was scared to death ) at least she manages to bring a certain idiosyncratic quality to the blank that Patty seems to have been . Ving Rhames is Great - - a fine BOOMING baritone who is scary as hell as he pounds his big bear chest and shouts , " I AM a prophet ! " Right on , Bro ! The other SLA members are less distinguished . I couldn't remember their names . Dana Delaney is the " nice " SLA member who combs Patty's hair and clues her in on what the rules are around here . Bill Forsythe ( my supported player in " Weeds " ) is also good if a bit monotonous as the white guy who wants to be black and kill lots of pigs . After the bonfire in LA , Forsythe sits morosely with a new group of white SLA recruits and moans , " We need black leadership . " Frances Fisher is also memorable , bitter , and as cold as an icicle . Schrader's compositions and lighting are sometimes arty , but seldom enough so to distract from the story . He gets in a few good licks at the middle-class hypocrites too . While the LA safe house is burning on TV , Patty shuts herself away in the bathroom of a motel across the street from Disneyland . ( " All the bourgeois comforts , " says Forsythe when they enter the room . ) And here is how Schrader shows us Patty's suffering while the safe house burns and she realizes that the cops and the media are kind of hoping she's inside , dying . Patty is curled up against the bathtub at the left of the screen . On the right of the screen is a blindingly white sink . In the middle of the screen is an equally antiseptic closed toilet with one of those paper ribbons across the top that signify that no one has opened the toilet since the ribbon was placed there . It's neatly done . Patty a blotch of color in the fetal position , surrounded by middle-class comforts , but on the other side of the bathroom door , between her and the exit , between her and safety , are two insanely furious SLA members watching the death of their comrades on the news . Was she guilty ? Well , what is guilt ? Look , if a man loses his arm , can he be blamed for being a lousy driver ? Patty didn't suffer a physical loss . It was a social loss but as Durkheim argued , social facts are as real as physical ones . All of us are products of our experiences . That's why those of us who did not undergo her travails can afford to condemn her as a criminal . She was brainwashed . In a sense we've been brainwashed too , only in a different direction . |
442,632 | 819,382 | 80,402 | 5 | All this time we thought it was the big sleep . . . | This movie isn't as terrible as some reviewers have made it out to be . Let's say , overall , about average for its type . The photography is more than adequate , the locations unmistakably including Egypt . The score does its job well . And the acting is on par with Charlton Heston's usual . He can do better when he wants to , as in " Khartoum . " Stephanie Zimbalist is fresh , attractive , and seductive - - both before and after she is possessed by the spirit of Kara . She's pretty sexy too , decked out in tight bell-bottomed slacks and wearing her long auburn hair held back by a barette - - is that the word ? One of her more exciting moments comes when she steps down in the tomb and kisses her father warmly on the lips . She seems to have not much more than a few expressions to work with , which is okay ; Gary Cooper only had one and a half . She relies mainly on an intense stare and half smile , which can signal either happiness or evil intent . The editing is confusing and the ending leaves the story open for a sequel which will probably never come . The story itself is dated , although spiced up with some Omen-like executions . Heston would never get away with removing those artifacts from Egypt today . Not unless there was a huge under-the-table payoff made . No more Elgin-marble controversies . The archaeological techniques are dated as well . The archaeologists we seem to think of as heroes would be considered criminally sloppy by today's standards . If you excavate a site now , you don't just dig into it to see what you can find . You dig a trench into the site , from the outside inward , so you leave most of the site intact for future research . We don't know what analytic techniques will be available a hundred years from now , anymore than Carnaveron and the rest could foresee Carbon dating . Brouilloin , the information theorist , called this " the principle of fundamental surprise . " If we knew now what we will have discovered a hundred years from now , we would already have discovered it . What Schliemann did at Troy was simply dig it up until all the information was gone , the archaeological equivalent of strip mining . King Tut's tomb was handled just as badly . When they first cracked the wall of the as-yet unsullied part of the tomb , a breath of air whooshed out from the opening . That air was three thousand years old . It was the same air breathed by the Egyptians who built the tomb . We will never know its chemical composition or what kind of particulate matter might still have been floating around . And the soil of the tomb , which surely contained biological materials like pollen and the residue of three-thousand-year-old microorganisms , was treated like - - well , like ordinary dirt . The movie has few zingers . It moves slowly and deliberately , a pace that many modern moviegoers are no longer used to , after so much exposure to MTV techniques . And the director - - all directors - - need to have it pounded into their skulls that when a character looks into a mirror on screen , the audience is not supposed to see her staring obliquely into the camera lens . Not only does the use of this stupid trick contribute absolutely nothing , but it is distracting and jarring , and an insult to at least some of the viewers . |
442,192 | 819,382 | 113,451 | 5 | What's Going On ? | Practically a ideal exemplar of " routine thriller . " Friedkin had a marvelous time in the 1970s , coming up with some original genre pieces like " The Exorcist " and " The French Connection . " All of his work is commercial but Exorcist was gripping because it was so successfully manipulative , and French Connection gave us a cop who was unexpectedly mean and embedded his character in a fascinating mystery story . Here , though , there's not much originality on display . There's nothing wrong with the direction or the performances . ( I think this is the second movie in which Linda Fiorentino makes a phone call in the nude . Rather a nice touch . ) Friedman makes good use of San Francisco locations but some of the scenes do come through as derivative . The first chase through one of the city's Oriental theaters that I can remember is in Orson Welles ' " Lady From Shanghai . " There is also a car chase up and down the city's streets . It will never match the car chase in " Bullett " but in order to make the scene look new the director has these two cars not only racing downhill and being jolted at the intersections on the way down . They actually leave the pavement entirely and rocket into the air . And the chase extends through a parade in Chinatown , a scene in which a couple of pedestrians get flattened . Something similar appeared in a movie directed about 20 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich . Friedkin does open his film with an excellent exploration of a well-appointed house in the city . The camera takes its time examining the tribal masks , the Degas on the wall , while the less outrageous excerpts from Stravinksy's Rites of Spring serve as background . ( We gradually become aware that someone is being murdered off screen . ) It's well done . There's a good deal of realistic gore too , and about the same amount of sex involving Fiorentino . Evidently she likes to dominate the man , tying his hands behind his back and making him do things that only rabid subordinates would do . Her expression during ordinary love making suggests it's more of a nuisance than a pleasure . And we see one murder that has produced about a bathtub's worth of blood and another in which the victim's brains are exposed . I'd better quit now . Old memories are being redintegrated and I can't tell whether they're from a traffic accident , my marriage , or both . But basically the problem is with the script . Instead of a murderer , there turn out to be several murderers , none closely related to the others . A lot of surprises pop out at us in the last few minutes , complicated and with little in the way of groundwork . Some questions are left unanswered . I still don't know who Caruso was chasing through Chinatown . Nobody involved in the film seems to have cared enough to polish this into a more acceptable shape . Too bad . |
442,225 | 819,382 | 303,353 | 5 | Biography Channel , Writ Large . | Well , according to this biographical documentary , the producer Robert Evans has lived the life of an elevator , or maybe a toilet seat , with a couple of truly good highs - - " Marathon Man , " " Chinatown , " and others - - and some down periods involving cocaine , murder , and the loss of his beloved mansion in Woodland Hills . It's based on Evans ' own autobiography , and he narrates this doc . One might expect it to be filled with self justification , along the lines of , " Yes , I brought suit and left him destitute but it was never about the money . " Instead , he's pretty generous with praise for his pals and surprisingly " understanding " towards those who have brought him down . I put quotes around the word " understanding " because what I mean is that he doesn't heap his calumny upon his undoers . He leaves them pretty much blameless . But I don't believe for a moment he " understands " them , or if he does he's not being frank about it . His wife , Ali McGraw , didn't leave him for Steve McQueen because Evans stayed away from home too long while working . No respectable Hollywood producer would include such a hoary cliché in a movie , unless John Wayne was the hero . How about , " You're married to your job " ? As Evans himself says in the narrative , " I was never psychiatrically oriented . " Evans seems to have a decent sense of humor about himself . He can poke fun at his early acting efforts . Once you've achieved great success , you're at liberty to do that . If Picasso had once been a bicycle repairman he might have joked about how bad he was . Yet the role distance is there , even though Evans ' narration undermines it with an excess of dramatization . There may always be tragedy just around the corner , but when you're hearing Evans tell you this in a voice that sounds like Rock Hudson's after chain smoking two packs of Gauloise , it remains less than convincing . The images reflect the volatility of his career , as does the music . At his height , living in his mansion , accepting awards , dating models , being interviewed while wearing a pair of tinted glasses whose color matches the tint of the pullover sweater he chose to wear that day , the cuts arrive con brio . Later , during the dark years of the late 1980s , the music turns mournful and melancholic , and there are dismal shots of Evans ' deserted swimming pool with maple leaves scattered across the surface like Evans ' wasted dreams , like his hundred-dollar bills . Some of it is not entirely believable . Depressed , Evans checks himself into some sort of sanatorium . He describes himself as being " behind bars " and his room is " like a cell . " He relates the story of his close escape from the " goons " that guarded the hallway . ( He was picked up by his chauffeur . ) What the hell is this - - The Betty Ford Clinic or The Snake Pit ? He's a perceptive guy , no question about it , and had a string of good luck too . Life , though , has left him battered . The epilogue suggests he's made a successful comeback with movies like " Jade " and " Sliver . " That's arguable . But , to be perfectly honest , despite the suffering Evans has endured and now put on display , I'd have traded places with him at any point in his life and so would anyone else . |
443,545 | 819,382 | 104,006 | 5 | I'll lend you mine if you lend me yours . | Two neighboring couples become friendly . One husband ( Spacey ) talks the other husband ( Klein ) into sneaking into each other's house one night and making love to the wives in the dark . Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his wife for a friend . Klein's wife ( Mastrantonio ) and Spacey's wife ( Miller ) will compliantly permit these goings on without realizing that the men on top of them or underneath or beside them are not , in fact , the proper husbands . Right away , you've got major plausibility problems . This sort of stuff is just fine in a Feydeau farce , but in a serious movie ? Anyhow , Spacey's wife apparently winds up with her head bashed in the next morning and Klein is blamed for the murder . Spacey , who has set Klein up , takes over Klein's family when Klein is subsequently arrested . Klein is out on bail pronto , though , so he can go about unraveling the plot . Forrest Whitaker is a private investigator working for an insurance company . He appears after the murder and we think , at last , Klein has someone who believes him and will help him . But , no . Whitaker shows up for one or two more brief conversations and nothing more is heard of him . I don't think I'll reveal any more of the plot for fear that if I did , news of such an indiscretion might reach the ears of someone in the National Security Agency , but I think it's safe to say that it all works out okay in the end , if under the definition of " okay " you're willing to include the bashing in of two innocent heads with a baseball bat , the jailing and ruin of an ordinary man , the near-destruction of a middle-class family , adultery , listening to country music , and other assorted mishigas . Hard to believe that Sidney Pollack directed this . It has none of his usual dash and most of the generic clichés . Nothing wrong with the performers . Rebecca Miller , especially , looks stunning and has incredible sky-blue eyes , almost as mind boggling as the plot . The most extraordinary thing about the film - - or the most revealing anyway - - is the location shooting . Every region of the country has its own distinctive architecture , usually from old models . I mean , like New York's brownstones , Baltimore's marble-stepped row houses , the shotgun houses of the rural South , the pastel stucco of San Francisco , and the unending variations of hot dogs , hats , and taj mahals of LA's restaurants . The Georgia shore has new housing too and it seems to be establishing its own regional presence . It's not urban though , it's suburban . If you see the movie you'll know what I mean . It reaches at least as far north as Cape Hatteras . A bit of regional subculture there . I didn't want to skip it because it's one of the movie's more interesting features , the story being what it is . I think that about sums it up for " Consenting Adults . " A pair of blue eyes you could dive into , and wooden frame houses , painted in dull primaries , with oddly shaped windows . |
442,013 | 819,382 | 164,108 | 5 | Comedy , edgy and diverting . . | Albert Brooks , who wrote this and acted in it , is a Hollywood screenwriter who's being rejected with every script he submits . He lives in a mansion with his wife , Andie MacDowell , and is going nuts because he won't be able to support his family . A successful writer friend , Jeff Bridges , puts him in touch with a muse , a Greek spirit known for inspiring artists . The muse is Sharon Stone . And she is some work of art . She not only impinges on the lives of Brooks and his family . She takes them over . She has demanding tastes , grows quickly bored with the suite at the Four Seasons that Brooks is paying for . She has a whim of iron , sending Brooks out for Waldorf salad from Spago in the middle of the night . She's friendly towards Brooks ' wife and urges her to begin the commercial cookie-making career that she's discarded over the years . MacDowell follows Stone's advice and finds self-fulfillment before the oven . Meanwhile , Brooks is going nuts . He's spending money and time keeping Sharon Stone satisfied but he's getting very little inspiration out of her . An occasional , off-the-cuff suggestion - - that's all . Brooks develops a script based on her hints but reaches a block at the end of Act II , with his protagonist owning an aquarium and nowhere else to go . He presses her abjectly for an idea and she suggests that , since they must use drilling equipment to build the foundation for the aquarium , why not have them strike oil ? Right out of " The Beverley Hillbillies . " In the end , Stone turns out to be not a muse but a multiple personality who has escaped from a private psychiatric hospital in Ohio . Last time out , she was Picasso's daughter . Brooks of course is a neural shambles by now , but - - Lo - - Paramount buys his script and everything is fine - - except that the producer at Paramount turns out to be Sharon Stone in another disguise . There are a lot of cameos in the film , some easily recognizable , others not - - from Wolfgang Puck to Martin Scorsese who does a hilarious turn as himself , planning a remake of " Raging Bull , " only this time the guy is really THIN . " You see it ? Can you see it ? " Scorsese speaks faster than a normal person can think . Overall , it's mildly amusing , and that's about it . Nothing wrong with the professional players . Brooks is the anxiety-ridden middle-class character that he's perfected by now . Sharon Stone is seasoned . Andy MacDowell is beguiling . But the script is full of logical holes . This is okay in a comic fantasy , in itself , but there are so many of them here that they become noticeable . We can contrast " The Muse " with a comedy like " Groundhog Day " to illustrate when I mean . In " Groundhog Day , " with an equally preposterous premise , one thing follows inexorably from what has happened before , so the film DEVELOPS . That sense of inexorability is lacking here . If Stone is really not a muse at all , but just a psychiatric case with an occasional shopworn notion , then what are people like Scorsese and Ian Cameron and Rob Reiner courting her for ? And , shortly after she escapes from the doctors who have come to fetch her back to the institution , how does she suddenly show up as a producer at Paramount ? It's good for a laugh but nothing has set the situation up , so it's a shallow chuckle rather than the conclusion of any plot thread . It's like : A man walks along the street , slips on a banana peel , and falls on his bum . Ha ha , but so what ? Another instance : When he brings that Waldorf salad back to Stone's suite at night , she's lost interest in it and turns him away . Still holding the big bowl of salad , he backs into another hotel guest and crashes out of sight to the floor . We see the guest's face looking down as he asks , " Are you alright ? " Well , we already KNOW what the gag is going to be . But instead of keeping the camera on the guest's face and hearing only a moan from the floor - - or seeing Brooks ' salad-covered head very slowly emerge from the bottom of the screen - - there's a cut to Brooks on his back , decorated with salad . Where was the muse when she was most needed ? The best feature of the film is Albert Brooks ' performance . He's done it before just about perfectly , and here he does it again . It may be that no one in the history of movies has better expressed astonishment mixed with self-righteous indignation . What a terrific whiner he is . |
442,264 | 819,382 | 362,269 | 5 | Doggie Style | They took the easy way out on this one . Liam Neeson - - who , for the first time , I must judge to be in over his head - - gives us a Kinsey who is a prophet without honor in his own country , a scientist first and always , practically a saint . Beginning as an entomologist he finds himself wondering what EXACTLY goes on in the human boudoir . We have to take into account that this is the mid-40s and nobody knows from sex . What I mean is that many believed that if you did something bad to yourself you'd grow hair on your palms . Things like that . A little outre . And here comes Kinsey . What Darwin was to biology , and Freud to psychology , Kinsey was to the physical and social aspects of human sexuality . He used what are called " snowball samples , " which are what you have when , say , you interview one gay guy and ask if he knows any other gay guys that might agree to an interview , and so on . This is not a very good way to get a sample , but Kinsey was operating in difficult times . Not a good sample ? Nobody else HAD any samples ! The chief source of data on sexuality was " clinical experience , " the province of MDs who brought their own ideas to the discussion . Before Kinsey there was only Van deVelde's marriage guide , the most shocking message of which was that sex was for more than just reproduction , and when you went on your honeymoon don't expect to spend all your time coupling in a locked hotel room . Leave some space for skiing . The more literary among us in elementary school would sneak the guide off the library shelves and furtively skim through it looking for the dirty parts . But overall the movie is rather dull . It's a simple-minded picture of Dr . Kinsey , the ex wasp man . He was not only a knight in unshining armor , although he was that too . He was a pretty weird guy . The movie shows him going about gaily collecting " data " , disinterested and coolly eager , but he had a lot more in the way of personal involvement than the movie suggests . There is a scene in which he is alone with a young man in a hotel room and they both agree that on a scale of one to ten - - ten being completely homosexual - - they're about a three . Then they do something about finding out if that's true . That's all we see of Kinsey the man exploring his own sexuality . However he knew something about his bisexuality before undertaking the study , and he explored it in his adulthood . He got his wife into the picture more than once too . And there were group gropes that grew a little , well , what might later have been called kinky . Kinsey enjoyed himself by tying ropes around his penis with plenty of knots ( in the ropes ) and then tugging on it to the point of pain as well as pleasure . There were times when he went a bit too far and suffered unpleasant infections . I hope I'm remembering this accurately . It's mostly from a profile in the New Yorker from some years ago . Now , the REAL Kinsey sounds like an interesting fellow , whereas this paragon of objectivity is rather a bore . He can't seem to talk about much except how badly we need more information on sexual habits . ( He was entirely right about that . ) But he talks like that at parties too , and it gets repetitious after a while . The movie ends sadly , after a cinematic biography whose trajectory is familiar to most of us . Genius has great idea and devotes his life and his talent to its exploration . He goes too far and alienates others . Runs out of money . Loving wife sticks with him . But we all know that though he may have died thinking he was a failure , his work will long outlive him . The direction is flat , the dialog lacks sparkle , and Liam Neeson has a haircut that only Kim il Chong could envy . What an interesting movie could have been made about this man and his career . |
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