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443,456 | 819,382 | 43,590 | 6 | Glory . | Perversely , the thing reminds me of " Glory , " without the taken-for-granteds . I mean , now we take for granted that African-Americans are as good in the military as anyone else . ( God knows , they were the tidiest sailors on my ship . ) But at the time this film was released the accomplishments of the 442nd were still news to most people . Japanese ? Fighting on OUR side ? Gosh . Alas , the performances leave a lot to be desire . Van Johnson does no more than a workmanlike job , and the Japanese soldiers are hard to distinguish . It isn't that they all look alike so much as that so many are given similar motivations . Only two of the enlisted men are really outstanding - - the bitter guy ( the equivalent of the Denzel Washington figure in " Glory " ) and the educated guy ( the Andre Braugher character in " Glory " ) . It's a good move though , and the action scenes are right up there among the better ones . Particularly good is the wounded guy wielding the mortar all by himself . Mortars don't ordinarily loom large in combat movies , although read Sledge's " With the Old Breed . " Weaknesses ? Not too many . One outstanding is that Van Johnson's racism is not made more explicit . Throughout , he objects to his assignment because , mainly , he wants to stay with his Texas division . His racism is sort of , well , masked . Good movie though . Stay way from the only available DVD , which is junk . |
442,527 | 819,382 | 32,467 | 6 | Fast , Corny , Fun . | Cagney is often an Irish-American on screen but in his personal life he was proud of his Norwegian grandfather ( " Nelson " ) . The problem with casting him was that he LOOKED and ACTED so Irish . He was so often a cocky bantamweight , as he is in this movie . He had a unique style . A bouncy half-psychotic body language , the kind that befits an ex-dancer . In this movie , watch him literally bounce from foxhole to foxhole . And his working-class New York accent was always singularly clipped and informed by some inner characterological melody . The style , unmistakable , was adapted to different genres - - to comedy ( " One , Two , Three " ) and with a complete absence of success to Westerns . My God , " The Oklahoma Kid " in painful to watch . That's the Cagney we think of when we think of " Cagney , " and yet the guy may have been under-rated as an actor . For instance , I can't really imagine another actor doing Cagney's breakdown scene in the big house in " White Heat . " And whatever one might think of " The Gallant Hours " as a film , Cagney cannot be blamed for anything that's wrong with it . The same can be said for " Come Fill the Cup . " Cagney's performance here is pretty much his street-wise tough guy character transported to France by the U . S . Army , shows his cowardice , and then is redeemed by some kind of epiphany known only to Hollywood screenwriters . During those few scenes when he's not making wisecracks in Yiddish or insulting priests ( " Oh , Hi , St . Francis . How's all ' em monks ? " ) he does a decent job , even an engaging one . His terror during combat , his remorse before he dies , is as convincing as his bravado on the sidewalks . But this movie is a product of its times and a viewer has to go with the flow . Mischa Moskovitz , for instance , assumes the alias of Mike Murphy in order to go overseas with the 69th . He's a flat-out stereotype , a clever guy with a Semitic face . In one of his earlier movies his character was called something like Freddy Bignose . And yet he dies honorably and is prayed over in Hebrew by Father Duffy in a moving scene . The action scenes look stage bound and of course the effects are primitive by today's standards , but the movie plunges along at such a pace that a viewer is likely to be drawn into it . The only slow scenes are those that drag in religion more or less by the heels . Kind of like Padre Alan Hale talking to Dennis Morgan while both fly through a thunderstorm . Of course anyone might think religious thoughts during extreme stress , but this movie makes it so relentlessly obvious . Those dull moment aren't enough to make it unwatchable . It's kind of fun . You just need to work a little harder to get past some of the more dated stuff . |
442,852 | 819,382 | 217,723 | 6 | The MGM Version is Marginally Better . | Everyone knows the basic story . Basil Hallward ( Jeremy Brett ) paints a portrait of young Dorian Gray ( Peter Firth ) that perfectly captures his innocence and beauty . Lord Henry ( Sir John Gielgud ) is entranced by both the portrait and the model . He more or less woos Dorian Gray and corrupts him with his cynicism . Gray begins to treat people heartlessly in his selfish search for sensation , beginning with his rejection of the actress he was in love with ( Judi Bowker ) because , being distracted by Gray's presence in the theater , she gave a poor performance as Juliet . She kills herself but Gray is unmoved . In the end , the butler discovers Gray , dead apparently by his own hand , shriveled and ugly , as wicked-looking as his portrait has become over the years . The performances aren't bad , and neither is the script . ( Adaptation by John Osborne . ) But it's a filmed play , after all , and it looks like one . Peter Firth doesn't look particularly unsullied to me at the start , or especially handsome either . In the MGM film , Hurd Hatfield wasn't especially attractive either but he DID look like he was ready to be thoroughly debauched . And George Sanders in 1945 was the equal of John Gielgud here , slinging around those Wilde aphorisms . The early film , sadly , had been cleaned up by MGM to promote domestic consumption , I suppose , so some anti-Americanisms and anti-feminist barbs were deleted . " America has never actually been ' discovered , ' merely ' detected ' . " And " When good Americans die they go to Paris . When bad Americans die they go - - to America . " Both the play and the novel had a little trouble depicting Gray's descent into the obscene . In the novel , Gray engages in such morally corrupt enterprises as examining rare stones , viewing barbaric paintings , and fondling fabrics . It's doubtful that a Victorian audience would have approved of what Gray was really up to , namely hanging around and having love affairs with both sexes . The MGM version couldn't deal with it either , but this play makes the homoeroticism about as explicit as it can . Basil the artist is clearly jealous of Sir John . The men talk of " loving " one another . And in the penultimate scene , Gielgud is awed by Gray's perpetual beauty and kneels to kiss his hand , a gesture Firth rejects with contempt . Sir John's witticisms come thick and fast and they're always amusing but I found this version a little static and was disappointed . The 1945 movie had its flaws but the production values were higher and it showed . |
442,540 | 819,382 | 58,997 | 6 | Entertaining , offbeat mystery from Preminger . | Carol Lynley joins her brother Keir Dullea in England , bringing her daughter Bunny . On her first day Lynley drops Bunny off at a day school , whence Bunny disappears . It seems that no one at the school or anywhere else remembers meeting Bunny . The police , in the form of Superintendent Lawrence Olivier , are brought in on the case and eventually suspect that Bunny may be imaginary . Is she ? Well , we can be sure of one thing . Carol Lynley's landlord , Horatio Wilson ( Noel Coward ) doesn't care . He's the most entertaining character in the film , a seedy , egomaniacal alcoholic poet and BBC person who collects artifacts associated with the Marquis DeSade , such as his whips and his skull - - " At least they told me it was his in Caledonia . " He sounds as if he'd written his own dialog . His voice is appallingly plummy as he tells the succulent Lynley how , at the BBC , there are " persons who bear , like medals , bruises signifying the love of Horatio Wilson . " He's designed to be a chief suspect , I suppose , what with his greasy self display , and since nobody else around seems to be sufficiently crazy to kidnap a kid , if indeed there was a kid to be napped . But there the casting stumbles , because to whom could Noel Coward be a threat except himself ? Carol Lynley and Keir Dullea , on the other hand , are ideally matched . They look in their bland beauty as if they really MIGHT be brother and sister , smiling mannequins in the window of some boutique clothing shop . And they act within the same strictures too . The sing-along quality of their voices are similar . Dullea in particular speaks oddly . If he asks a simple question - - " Did you search the place ? " - - each syllable is pitched slightly higher than the preceding one , so there is a monotonic ascending scale , and the terminal contours of " place " reach for the ionosphere . Yet none of this comes across as amateurish . Instead it sounds deliberately stylized , as if Lynley and Dullea had been instructed to sound somewhat artificial . That sense of pretense casts further doubt on the truth of Lynley's story about a missing daughter , and as it turns out , Dullea has every right to sound like a child reading lies from off-stage cue cards . Lawrence Olivier is hardly short of amazing in what he does with an almost stereotyped character that John Williams could have walked through without leaving a footprint - - the calm , logical , not insensitive police detective who unravels the case . What a magnetic actor . The score is based on a simple , nearly infantile melody , and handled nicely , featuring flutes and at one particularly apt point a harpsichord in counterpoint . At its best it reminds one of Elmer Bernstein's pretty tune in " To Catch a Mockingbird . " But it's all over the movie , whether it's needed or not . And sometimes the score lapses into jarring dissonant chords and bonking xylophones that distract the viewer . The last fifteen minutes or so are tense but idiotic . |
442,428 | 819,382 | 43,560 | 6 | Being and Nothingness . | This is , I think , what they called a " high concept " film . Let's have a young man climb out on the ledge of a New York hotel and build up a back story about his tsuris and at the same time tell small tales of the diverse witnesses to the guy's dilemma . That precisely how the movie moves along from point to point , a little mechanically , but suspenseful and engaging . It's professionally handled by Henry Hathaway , a director who probably had little sympathy for a temperamentally unstable fellow who couldn't handle his hysterical and self-indulgent Mamma , Agnes Moorehead . The goods are delivered . Most of the work is done by Richard Basehart as the would-be suicide and Paul Douglas as the traffic cop who befriends him and alternately wheedles and lambastes him . Movies mavens will be left agog after they see the list of supporting and bit players , many uncredited , who were to go on to climb to dazzling heights in Hollywood , either as stars or as indispensable supports - - Grace Kelly , Jeffrey Hunter , Jeff Corey , Brian Keith , Richard Beymer , and John Cassavetes among them . The movie doesn't wallow in easy sentiment . It's pretty tough-minded . But a modern treatment , if it had any pretense to realism , would be far more cynical . The only characters here who exploit Basehart's impending self destruction are a nutty preacher who naturally belongs to no recognized church , a cabbie who organizes a pool to bet on when Basehart jumps , and of course the press . But nobody in the streets complains that a weakling like Basehart , who is probably a sissy just out for attention , deserves to die . And if any of the bystanders jumps up and down yelling , " Jump ! Jump ! " , it must have been while I was in a period of microsleep . In 1951 , it's my impression , Americans in general weren't so anxious to see a sensational splash on Broadway , not even New Yorkers . Worth catching . |
442,736 | 819,382 | 91,474 | 6 | Tidy FBI vs . Serial Killer Story . | William Peterson is a traumatized FBI agent drawn back to duty by his colleague , Dennis Farina , to track down a serial killer , named " the tooth fairy " for his habit of removing his victims ' teeth , played by William Noonan . Brian Cox is Hannibal Lecktor , who remains safely locked away and plays a minor part in the hunt . Joan Allen is a blind woman taken captive by Noonan and saved from slashing at the last moment . It precedes " The Silence of the Lambs , " by the same author , William Harris , but is independent and not quite so commercial . I GUESS it wasn't as commercial anyway , since it didn't receive nearly the media attention that " Silence of the Lambs " did . I'm not sure why . Maybe because it didn't have Jody Foster in the lead , and lacked Anthony Hopkins ' touches as Horrible Hannibal . But William Noonan brings his own kind of menace to the role of the tooth fairy . Noonan is a strange-looking guy . The character is supposed to be seven feet tall and he's shot in such a way as to make the claim convincing . He's balding and dolichocephalic and always speaks in a direct , matter-of-fact mid-American voice . He's far more ambiguous a character than Hopkins , to whom I'm comparing him because he and Hopkins are the chief villains in each film . Noonan can feel human emotions . He sensitive . He meets the blind photographer , Joan Allen , and is attracted to her , so he takes her to a veterinarian friend and lets her feel the fur and the fangs of a giant narcotized tiger . Well , that's quite a thrill for her , so she seduces him . Can you imagine Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector being seduced ? It's only later , when Noonan comes to believe that Allen has betrayed him , that his cool rage emerges . Tightly directed , except for a couple of action-scene clichés that appear in slow motion . The image of a red dragon has cropped up now and again during the film , and when Noonan's bullet-riddled body is spread eagled on the floor , the blood spreads out from his torso like dragon wings . The photography is uninviting - - not that it's inappropriate - - with all the lights apparently being fluorescent . Or , if they happen to be blue or pink , they seem to be coming from neon signs . It's summer but the entire film seems to be filled with chill . There are some gruesome scenes that might disturb some people , though maybe not much more exuberantly horrifying than some of those in " Silence of the Lambs . " Okay , so there's a man strapped in a wheel chair , set on fire , and rolled down the ramp of a parking lot into the camera with flame streaming behind him . True , it's worse than what my dentist does to me , but it's no more shocking than what Richard Widmark did with a wheelchair in " Kiss of Death . " |
441,736 | 819,382 | 47,889 | 6 | Atmospheric comic-strip adventure story . | John Wayne is an American sea captain imprisoned by the Chinese Commies for Impure Thoughts and Eating With Forks . He is sprung by Lauren Bacall , an American doctor's daughter who is also the leader of a nearby village . His Mission : To shepherd the entire village of 180 people on a stern-wheeled ferryboat down the Chinest coast to sanctuary in Hong Kong where a man can breathe free and wear something other than ballet slippers on his big Caucasian feet . Of course there is a large family of communists in the village and they must be taken aboard too , to save them from reprisals . They don't seem to appreciate this gesture because they poison the food supply aboard the boat and stage a mutiny during a terrific storm . Well , it's okay , though because they all convert in the end except the pompous , bloated family head who moans his humiliation out loud just before being blown to bits by a shell from a Chinese destroyer . The Chinese villagers are a zany laff riot . They include such dyed-in-the-wool Asians as Paul Fix ( Dobbs Ferry , NY ) , Paul Mazurki ( Ukraine ) , Berry Kroger ( Texas ) , and Anita Ekberg ( Sweden ) . Anita EKBERG ? There's also one of those cigar-smoking Oriental wise guys who serves as chief engineer , a pregnant woman , lots of children and old people , and all that . Wayne took over as the star when the director , William Wellman , fired Robert Mitchum for pushing the Transportation Director into San Francisco Bay , claiming it was just " a practical joke . " And Wayne hefts his bulk around effectively enough . The visuals are pretty good . The film was shot around San Francisco and Suisun Bay and on the Sacramento River but the production design gives a pretty good imitation of what we imagine the coast of China to look like . Lots of fog . The old paddle-wheeler skulks among the reeds . There is a " graveyard of ships " , old hulks piled alongside one another , drying and rotting , where wood for the boiler is gathered . A kid would have a heck of a good time crawling in and out of those skeletal remains . And it's exciting too , though we don't doubt for a moment that the ship and the majority of its crew and passengers will make it to Hong Kong . Wittingly or otherwise the writers have caught some of the features of East Asian culture . When the food is poisoned and must be dumped overboard , the passengers crawl around on the floor picking up individual grains of rice . And the grand ballroom or whatever the compartment is called , serves as a giant bedroom at night with sleeping bodies all over the deck . In the morning , the mats are rolled up , stacked tidily against the bulkheads , and , lo , the bedroom is now the grand ballroom again . I lived with Koreans of modest income for a while and that's kind of how it's done . Every scrap of nutrients is made use of . When they boil rice in a pot of water , the cooking water is served as a beverage along with the rice . And the bedroom cum living room was a simple fact of life . The dialog has nothing much to recommend it . When Wayne is faced with the difficult task of telling Bacall that her father has been stoned to death by the Commies , he slaps her across the jaw and tells her , " That's right . Get mad . Get GOOD and mad . Then ya'll be ready for what I have ta tell ya . " Wayne also gives the speech that converts the Commie villagers to capitalism or democracy or whatever they're converted to . " Your old China is dead ! " he announces . Actually , we can't be sure he's right . China has a long long history of being conquered by internal or external agencies and it has usually taken them about 500 years to shake off the yokes . The Commies still have 442 years to be gotten rid of . You know what would have given this movie a good kick in the pants ? Not that it needs one . But - - okay , Lauren Bacall is good enough in an inessential role . But imagine Gong Li as the doctor's daughter ! Whew . |
442,064 | 819,382 | 83,722 | 6 | There are cat people and then there are dog people . | This comment may contain spoilers There are two pretty extraordinary shots in this film . In the first , Nastassja Kinski is sitting with her head back on the seat rest . She's traveling in a train . She stares into the camera . And the background changes into a busy railway station where she opens a door and walks into an oneiristic room of tangerine and black leopards and all is explained to her by the image of her brother , Malcom MacDowell . The second is the last shot in the film . We see a screen full of the panther's face . The panther roars open mouthed , then closes its jaws and the frame freezes on the gigantic cat staring into the camera with its hypnotic green eyes and vertical irises . The shot lasts for many seconds . There seems to be no one else in the world but the viewer and that panther , staring at each other . By this time we know pretty much what the panther is feeling . And , our gaze locked on the frozen image , we can easily imagine that the cat's stare is a knowing one , that she knows what we feel too . We seem to be at one with the beast . It's like Rilke on mushrooms . But , apropos , maybe we'd better not make too much of that shot . Many years ago I used to feel the same way after a refreshing dose of herbal tea , staring at the four Beatles staring back at me from the open cover of the Sergeant Pepper album . And besides , when you come right down to it , I'm not sure it's a good idea to have a man-eating carnivore reading your mind . Anyway the director , Paul Schrader , should have his hand shaken for those two scenes . His work throughout is professionally competent . He has a tendency to see the world in terms of good and evil - - usually with someone caught between - - and the results aren't always pretty . " The Cat People " isn't too different in that regard . Alas , though , the thing is another remake . The original was done by Val Lewton at RKO on a budget that was probably one nanobillionth of what was spent on this one , and the earlier version is at least as good , and better in some respects . We must at least give the first version bonus points for originality . I don't want to get into the story because it's either simple enough to have been adequately described elsewhere or so complicated that it would take too much space . Essentially it's about a brother and sister - - MacDowell and Kinski - - who inhabit a world between black panthers and human beings . MacDowell and Kinski seem to be the only specimens around , although the legend suggests they ought to form a community through chain migration . They remain human as long as they mate with their own kind . ( MacDowell wants to put a little something in the kitty . A frisson of incest here . ) If they mate with humans they turn into killer panthers and in order to get well again they must kill . But how can they pass on this catabolic capacity without belonging to a community of cat people ? Right away there's a problem with the plot , similar to the one in the original . Simone Simon in the original was apparently human UNLESS she mated with a human . ( Her long-suffering husband was Kent Smith . ) She morphs into a panther when her psychiatrist puts some moves on her and she tears him to shreds . It took me many years to realize that he must have raped her before this happened , but it couldn't be shown on screen . The problem is that Simone Simon morphs at will twice earlier in the movie , in two truly spooky scenes involving a bus and a swimming pool . Kinski , virgo intacta , also apparently morphs in order to kill a rabbit . The acting is pretty good . John Heard comes across as a likable kind of guy . Annette O'Toole , as the colleague who loves him , is too good to be true . In real life , she'd be a woman who disarticulates her rival Kinski from top to bottom . Now there's an idea . How many more magnetic actresses have there been than Nastassja Kinski ? Not too many . She seems so innocent , with her softly modulated infantile voice . Her lips are askew . Her right eye is open and clear , her left is heavily lidded . She seems rarely to look straight at someone else , so the other person can't know whether Kinski is being shy or sly . She glows with an inner heat , a human Franklin stove with trim legs and a saucy rear . Madre de Dios , that crabbing scene with Heard , when she bends over in her shorts and waders ! The original is the better movie , I think , partly because it was a true original and partly because of the producer's good taste and imagination . You only saw the cat for a few seconds . Here , the animal should get second billing . And in the original too , one had a sense of everyone's leading an ongoing unhurried happy life until Simone brought her sad , diseased nature into it . In this one everything seems at least slightly deranged from the outset . |
442,032 | 819,382 | 21,508 | 6 | In the Beginning , There Was the Cellulose . . . . . | This wouldn't be much more than a routine early comedy except for its historical interest . I mean , a John Ford talkie , the debuts of Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart . Tracy and Warren Hyman , two roughnecks , break out of prison , meet again in Kansas City , get into a fist fight in public , wind up back in the slams again . Here they meet Humphrey Bogart , a nice kid from a good family who is taking the rap for someone else . Bogart meets a pretty blond inmate from the women's section , a victime of a frame , and they fall for each other . Bogart is released and goes home to wait for his girl to be sprung . ( His family thinks he's been in China . ) But the dirty rat for whom the blond took the fall shows up and threatens to expose Bogart unless he pimps some phony stocks . Bogart is in a quandary . Hearing of this , Tracy and Hyman break out again and visit Bogart's home in New England . After they straighten things out , they cheerfully go back to the prison in time for the big baseball game . Bogart is unexceptional in his one-dimensional role . Tracy is rather a fuller character . Both were to have distinguished careers but in this early film Bogart seemed to be still learning his craft while Tracy was already what he would be later . Warren Hymer is stuck in the role of the dummy and is the source of much of what humor there is . When he and Tracy are first invited into Bogart's upper-class home for dinner , they meet Bogart's family and Tracy is self-conscious . Hymer , though , is swept up into the prevailing decorum and rushes to help Bogart's mother into her chair , while Tracy gawks in silence . And when Hymer completes Mom's saying grace , Tracy drops his spoon in amazement . There are minor Fordian touches . Before a game , the manager explains to the visiting team of prisoners that certain actions are not allowed - - and he demonstrates each of them on the team . ( Cf . , " Rio Grande . " ) The inmates put on a show and one of them sings the sentimental ditty " Mother . " ( " M is for the million things she gave me . . . " ) And Ford pans slowly across the faces of the audience as they tear up . And he seems to be serious . But , overall , the story is nothing to write home about and one gets a sense that , Tracy aside , the chief elements were yet to hit their stride . It's not a bad movie . It's just nothing special . |
442,789 | 819,382 | 43,540 | 6 | Sketched from a forgotten war . | Sam Fuller , the director , could sometimes give interviews that were as interesting as his movies . No baloney , and his cynicism was up front and cheerful . He'd been a Chicago newspaperman , straight out of " The Front Page " , and there is a photo of him leaning back in his chair , feet propped on the desk , a cigar in his mouth , his fedora tilted back with a " press " card in its band . A kind of caricature of a hard-boiled reporter , almost a cartoon . That , for some reason , is how many of his war films strike us today - - as cartoons rather than reality - - and " Fixed Bayonets " isn't an exception . I know the story is from a novel but it might as well have been a comic book with stereotyped soldiers uttering sentences short enough to fit into dialog balloons above their heads . Don't know why . Fuller was in the First Infantry Division during the war , the Big Red One , already in his mid-30s , and he never got over it . Years later , when the war was all over , when Fuller was safely back home , he could tell interviewers that he couldn't even listen to a noise like this ( and here , he'd rap his knuckles lightly against a wooden surface ) without leaping to his feet . The guy had been through hell . One of his fellow sufferers was nicknamed Griff , and there is a character named " Griff " , sometimes unseen , in most of his movies . " Fixed Bayonets " is the story of a platoon picked to provide a rear guard while the rest of the regiment retreats . Their mission is to engage any communists in pursuit and try to convince them that the entire regiment is present at this last ditch stand . The central figure is a lowly corporal ( Richard Basehart ) who is both brave and intelligent but who cannot bring himself to kill another man or to order someone else to do it . Three men are above him in the chain of command . You can guess what happens to them . There's nothing much to be said about the performances . The lines being so rudimentary , there is hardly any performance to be given . " I'll get you back alive , Sarge . " " Hey ! Watch it . That's an open wound ! " Richard Basehart is at least believable as the unfortunate corporal . He's never been a bravura actor and that slight , stiff reticence is precisely what the part calls for . He seems to be thinking , and thinking doubtful thoughts , while he performs the requisite tasks . I don't mean to suggest that the film stinks in any way . Fuller may use stereotypes but he uses different stereotypes from the ones we expect . It's an in-your-face report of a handful of men doing a dangerous job requiring skill . No prattling on about why they're fighting . ( The enemy are simply " gooks " . ) And nobody dreamily describes the main street in Basset , Nebraska . Nor does some illiterate from Brooklyn tell the story of the goil me met on the Steeplechase at Cony Island . They're all too busy and too scared for that . There are a lot of close ups too , of sweaty , smudged , bearded , determined faces . In a way , it's primitive movie-making , in the way that Grandma Moses is a primitive painter . The most memorable feature of the movie is its set-bound , snow-bound pseudo-location . There is no wind to speak of , and although everyone's feet are in danger of frostbite , nobody's breath steams in the supercold air . And yet the rugged , snowy set is claustrophobic and as effective in invoking an atmosphere as anything short of a " Lawrence of Arabia " epic . On a low budget , this is about the best you can do , and it's pretty good . |
443,530 | 819,382 | 37,316 | 6 | Smile , boys , we're almost home . | This is a good role for Gary Cooper . He's tall , sun-tanned , speaks with what is supposed to be an Arkansas accent although it doesn't approach the saturation level of his Sergeant York , and is a humanitarian doctor with an inventive streak . He's also nattily dressed , but that's hardly worth mentioning since just about everyone in the movie is dressed in clean , pressed clothes . Combat has no effect on their grooming . Basically , Dr . Wassell , formerly an investigator of snail-vectored diseases in China , joins the Navy and is voluntarily left behind with a few nurses and a dozen or so patients too disabled to walk about the last ship departing the island of Java , threatened by the Japanese in 1941 . The wounded are all sailors from the USS Marblehead and Houston , which were sunk in the battle of the Java Sea . The Japanese blew the American - British - Dutch - Australian force out of the water . That is to say , we lost , which is to say you will see multiple movies about the battle of Midway ( we won ) but absolutely none about the battle of the Java Sea . There are two scenes of violence . In the first , the hospital housing the wounded is bombed by Japanese planes . It's quite well handled . The ordinary war flick of the time would have multiple bombs falling at once , lots of outdoor models with paper-machie palms trees doing flips , and heroic Allies pumping machine guns up in the air . But DeMille doesn't do it that way . Everything is seen from inside a single hospital ward , the men and staff hiding under mattresses . There are only three or four bombs , with intervals between them , and they're nothing more than a long and eerie whistle before they hit . The first lands far away . The second and third are more of a jolt , and the last one blows in the windows , upends some of the hospital beds , and kills a patient . Instead of mindless action we get a scene full of suspense . The middle part of the movie involves a long and painful journey by trucks and other British vehicles across Java to another port . One man - - and his devoted native girlfriend - - run off the road in their jeep and find themselves surrounded by Japanese soldiers . " They no take prisoners - - in jungle . " " I got an idea . Hand me that Tommy gun , " he tells her , eyes blazing , and there is a fade out on Hoppy spraying lead around in the general direction of the camera . Sure , it's a cliché , but again DeMille spares us the shots of a thousand barbaric monkeys tumbling over as they charge the doomed couple . Gary Cooper , as I say , is neat . He manages to save the remaining wounded and link up again with his lost love , Lorraine Day . He's awarded the Navy Cross ( I think ) for his efforts . A long movie , but not a bad one for its time . |
442,198 | 819,382 | 106,661 | 6 | Routine romantic intrigue , interestingly played out . | There isn't much new in the idea . Two women , both hungry , living alone . A handyman comes in . He does both of them . One , in the course of an unrelated subplot , knifes a man to death and is sent to jail , carrying the handyman's baby . After a year or so , she gets out and is reunited with the handyman , her baby , and the other woman - - happily , it seems . What I kind of like about it is mostly the acting . Barbara Hershey is glamorized and stunning . And Debra Winger gives her character a real life of her own . Man , is she homely . She wears thick glasses , has her hair tied back like the head of a mop , wears no makeup , and pinches her lips together and twitches from time to time . It's the kind of performance - - playing an inadequate socially challenged semi-loony - - that wins Academy Awards . And I appreciated Gabriel Byrne's character and performance too . A by-the-numbers route here would have brought in a ruggedly handsome , perfectly gorgeous , virile , flawless guy , brimming with danger and testosterone . Instead the movie gives us Gabe Byrne . Yes , he's a kind of ne'er do well and a rogue but he's not Vigo Mortenson or Brad Pitt . His face looks as if it's been molded out of candle wax that has begun to melt . He gets drunk just about every night and can't hold a job . He admits he's a lying thief . And - - for this I was particularly grateful - - he never ONCE takes off his shirt and shows us his sweaty chest while splitting logs or , er , plowing a field . One night , drunk , he stumbles into Winger's little bungalow . He's filled with remorse , poses her as a priest in a confessional , asks her , " Are you Catholic ? Ah , never mind , you don't know what the I'm talking about anyway . " Then he begs this rudely shaped lump of clay for absolution and weeps in her lap before kissing her . ( Her first time , we don't doubt . ) She's alternately charmed and horrified . The language and the sex are fairly explicit . The sex includes masturbation , defloration , and - - well , normal intercourse , I guess , if the definition is extended to include coupling on a floor full of broken crockery with one of the partners so deliriously drunk that she believes the man is someone else . It's nicely directed too . No razzle-dazzle . No , " Hey , Ma , look at me ! I got a camera ! " Just one or two shots involving a pair of eyeglasses draw attention to themselves . The rest is very efficiently done . When Strathairn dies , he does so in a most unexpected way , stabbed multiple times , and whining about , " Hey , what did you do to me . " There's blood all over the place , as there should be when someone is bleeding to death , but not a single shot of a knife piercing flesh . And his killer reassuring him as he expires , " It's okay . It's okay . " She can't dial 911 because she can't find her glasses . The end is a little disturbing if you bother to think about it . After all , Debra Winger has stabbed a guy to death over some squabble at her workplace . " A Dangerous Woman " is right . And it appears that Byrne is finally going to make an honest woman out of her . I hope she never gets mad at HIM . The photography is very nicely done . I don't know where it was shot but it looks a bit like the Coachella Valley in California . Nice ranch house . Nice lines of fruit-bearing trees in the orchards . Mountains all around . Fan palms . The Garden of Eden with humans in it . |
442,976 | 819,382 | 97,493 | 6 | Critique of Pure Shalloness | Hard to understand why some people become leaders if they have no more in the way of personal qualities than the rest of us . No - - I mean high school , not politics . In a way , high school status spheres seem to echo those of the society around them . The men compete for power and the women for popularity . In " Heathers " the most powerful boys are on the football team and the most popular girls are the best groomed and prettiest , in this case the three girls named Heather . Veronica ( Ryder ) is an acolyte . The lower rungs on the status ladder are represented by a tall girl with thick glasses and an ordinary pony tail instead of an elaborate coif whose name is Betty . ( Betty and Veronica ? Is this a literary allusion ? ) On the lowest rung of all is " Dumptruck " Dunnstock , an overweight reject . Christian Slater is Dean , the new boy in school , whose mother committed suicide and whose father rejoices in destroying wetlands and endangered species and historic landmarks through his demolition company . How Slater's dad chuckles as he watches the collapse of a big hotel on VHS . Basically , the story is this . Slater and Ryder kill the chief Heather by accident and fix the death up to look like a suicide . Slater then finagles Ryder into shooting and killing two stars of the football team , leaving a suicide note claiming the deaths were the result of a lovers ' pact . Teen suicide acquires a kind of cachet because , after all , people come to your funeral and laud you and your picture appears on TV and all , so other innocent teens begin to attempt suicide . Slater gets swept up in the destruction until by the end he has an apparatus in place to take out the entire high school , but Ryder has come to her senses and prevents him , after which Slater blows himself up . Lots of laughs here . Actually it's a pretty acid comment on being a teenager today . And let's face facts . It does give you ontological pause to discover that you have every material thing you need and therefor nothing to live for except 15 minutes of fame . None of these kids experiences anything remotely resembling a Calvinist " calling . " Whatever they're studying is never brought up . Nobody has ambitions that go beyond acceptance to " an Ivy League college , and please let it be Harvard . " I can believe their anxiety . I can believe their shallowness and spitefulness and cruelty and narcissism . Heather # 1 is defined by a sticker in her locker - - " I Shop , Therefor I am . " What's harder to believe is that Heather # 2 has read " Moby Dick " and has even underlined passages in it . As it appears in this movie , this is a generation that has lost touch with its cultural data base . A joke about a new novel , " Moby Dick , Part Two : Ahab's Revenge " , would be lost on them . They wouldn't get a reference to King Kong . The dialog is pretty snappy , the acting generally okay , and the gradually revealed bitterness in the script makes it different from most movies about teens . Yet the subject of middle-class high-school cliques has been so overdone that it's a little tedious to watch still another spiel , along the lines of " Clueless " and " Pretty in Pink " and the rest of them . Ho hum . It's interesting to note though that the farther removed in years I am from my high school days the more interesting high school cheerleaders in those tiny-skirted carnival-bright outfits become . Not just because they're attractive . All young girls are willy nilly attractive and sexy . It's their innocence that's captivating . Imagine being so willing to lend your allegiance to an organization that you are willing to dress up that way and jump around on a wooden floor , shaking your pom poms and kicking your bare legs up in front of hundreds of strangers . The film makers kind of missed the boat there . The school can't be all THAT dead with such a naked affirmation of devotion on the basketball court . Fewer movies about suicide and more movies about high school cheerleaders , I say . |
442,249 | 819,382 | 120,633 | 6 | Poisoned Wells | SPOILERS . Actually this is a pretty well-done movie about environmental law . There have been quite a few of them around over the last decade or so but this is one of the better ones . It follows the usual configuration - - the lone hero beginning as a materialist and contracting a bad case of ideals , making sacrifices , risking everything . But in this case it's an entire law firm instead of just one guy , and basically they lose the case . John Travolta , ably supported by Bill Macy and others , is Jan Schlichtmann , a " personal injury lawyer " ( we know what that means ) is approached by a woman who , along with eight others in Woburn , have lost children because the drinking water was polluted with toxic waste . He is sympathetic but he demurs , seeing an expensive case from which he will profit only if he wins , and no money in the pockets of the guy who owns the polluting tannery . Then he discovers that the land is owned by W . R . Grace and Beatrice , two mega giant corporations . Between them they own every brand name you can think of . They own Heinz ketchup . Travolta can think of 57 different ways of squeezing $150 million out of them . But , as they say , pride goeth before a fall . The salivating Travolta brings suit and is opposed by Robert Duvall , playing Jerry Facher . ( All of these are real people with real names . ) The movie doesn't give Travolta an obvious flaw like Paul Newman's disillusioned alcoholism in " The Verdict , " but it doesn't hagiographize him either . He has more guts than brains . He gets caught with his pants down a few times when he makes courtroom errors that Facher is teaching his Harvard law students are elementary . ( " Never ask a witness why , unless you already know the answer . " You can learn that from watching Perry Mason . ) This Facher is pretty quick on his feet and he clobbers Travolta's character , all the while smiling politely , seemingly distracted , fiddling with pens , wrapping a string absent-minded around the fraying handle of his ancient briefcase . It's a very good performance . Travolta is good too . We never know how serious he is about his motives , or whether he has any idea what they are . He stares ahead and speaks sternly of " eight dead children " and " looking for justice " , but at a formal meeting with the two mega giant's lawyers he makes such impossible financial demands that they walk out on him - - and he never discussed his plans with his partners . While the jury is out , Duvall offers him TWENTY million bucks to settle and Travolta oozes dignity as he rips up the offer and tosses it in the trash , to Duvall's amusement . Well , he may seem like Gary Cooper in " High Noon , " but when you come right down to it he , like Cooper , is playacting . What happened to the interests of his clients ? Heroic gestures in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement aren't going to help the families of those " dead children " living up there in Nowheresville . Stripped of the frame the film tries to give him - - a selfish man who discovers he has ideals - - Schlichtmann becomes not just an ambulance chaser but an ambulance chaser who overreached . In the end Travolta's firm , largely because of his own intransigence , sees the suit against Beatrice thrown out and has to settle for eight million from W . R . Grace . The meeting between Travolta and Sidney Pollack , playing Grace's representative , is hilarious . Travolta walks into the Harvard Club to meet Pollack , carrying a bundle of facts , all business and formality . But Pollack , like Duval , is way ahead of him in every regard . Man , has Pollack got " condescension " down pat . Pollack : " What kind of Harvard man are you ? " Travolta : " The Cornell kind . " Pollack : " You didn't go to Harvard ? Somebody told me you went to Harvard . Don't get me wrong , Cornell's a fine school . ( Pause ) A damned good school . " In the end , Travolta goes back to personal injury cases , his partners split , and he declares bankruptcy ( after a two-year vacation - - in Hawaii , which the movie omits ) . He devotes a lot of personal time to digging up new evidence but has no resources to pursue leads , so he turns the case over to the Environmental Protection Agency , which finds merit in it , convicts the corporations ' lawyers of various offenses , and levies fines against them . That was in , what , 1988 ? I wonder if the EPA would be so zealous today . Here's an assessment of the present administrator from the organization Earthjustice , a prominent , respectable legal organization . " Governor Leavitt's appointment to head the EPA puts an anti-environmental politician in charge of regulating industries that pollute the nation's air and water , " said Earthjustice Denver attorney Jim Angell . " We know from his history on environmental issues in Utah that his preferred method is to exclude the broader public from the process when he wants to make decisions that could harm the environment . " Of course it's good that the corporate giants were made to pay , even if the amount was the equivalent of a licensure fee . And no need to feel too sorry for Jan Schlichtmann . A book about the case made him famous , and this movie made him even MORE famous - - and rich too . He now lives in the exclusive mansion-besotted suburb of Beverly , Mass . It's quite a good movie . Yes , there's a lot of ambiguity to be found in it , if you don't simply accept it as a Manichaean struggle between black and white , but in that respect it resembles real life , which is rarely anything other than fuzzy . |
441,872 | 819,382 | 111,001 | 6 | You Are What You Eat . | Saw this movie twice . The first time I thought it was tasteless and boring , except for Bridget Fonda's bathtub scene . I recently saw it again after several years and it didn't seem nearly so bad . Maybe I was able to get past the initial feeling that the writers and the director thought that gags about enemas and the like were themselves laugh-worthy . It now seems that the folks behind this production were trying something a little more ambitious than " Porky Goes to a Health Club . " Maybe it's really meant as a seriocomic Martian's eye view of the current bizarre goings on regarding our own health . A few years ago we were told to avoid butter ( high in calories and cholesterol ) . So we switched to margarine . Oops . The health police have now thrown up their hands and pointed to the trans-fatty acids ( " partially hydrogenated vegetable oil " ) which knocks your internal cholesterol-producing apparatus into a cocked hat . When I was a kid we were admonished to consume the health foods du jour - - whole milk and liver . ( Liver was supposed to supply the body with abundant iron but I really think it was recommended so highly because nobody liked it , therefor it must be good for you . ) Of course that's all history , right ? We now know so much better , which is exactly what Dr . Kellog and his colleagues thought in 1895 . Each generation believes it stands on the pinnacle of knowledge and science has nothing left to do but fill in a few missing dots . What colossal arrogance . I suspect that a hundred years from now our current hysteria will seem as deranged to scientists as Kellog's theories seem to us now . If the movie is seen from this perspective , it's a lot funnier than if you look at it simply as a series of jokes about sex and excretion . The score is enjoyable too . The composer has matched her talents to the visuals with a deftness that's hard to describe . The performances are good , as you might expect from such a cast . But Sir Anthony ( " call me Tony " ) Hopkins is more than merely good . He's been kind of careless in his choice of roles and one might think he's an actor of little range , his métier being the thoughtful , sensitive , quiet , quietly suffering man of reticence . But here he's great . He's got a set of false buck teeth on him that turn his every utterance into a comic statement . Not that he relies entirely on such props . Notice the scene in which he informs Mathew Broderick that his wife , Bridget Fonda , is being regularly masturbated by Dr . Spitsvogel . " It's her womb , " he says confidentially , " it's being ma-NIP-ulated ! " And some of the scenes , regardless of any resonance they may have with the present concern with health , are funny in themselves . The scene in which Dr . Kellog's children are all singing Christmas carols in what appears to be a church - - all except one dopey looking kid ( who grows up to be Dana Carvey ) . The kid stands there in the line of singers , sullenly silent , except for the occasional but highly audible rectal zephyr . It seems the perfect response to the health police who have forced Olestra from the store shelves because it causes " anal leakage . " I worked in this scene as an extra in the audience . It was filmed in the attic of one of Wilmington , North Carolina's old mansions and it was a rather spooky experience . The floor was clearly not designed to hold dozens of people and several long tons of cinematic hardware . It was like walking on a trampoline . The director kept pausing and trying to redistribute the weight but it was no use . All I could think of was the scene in Nathaniel West's " Day of the Locus " in which Napolean's army or something crashes through the fake mountain and tumbles to its death . PS : It didn't happen here . |
443,588 | 819,382 | 33,021 | 6 | Slam Bang Pseudo History . | For history buffs this must be more of a Santa Fe trial . Here is John Brown ( a real historical figure played by Raymond Massey ) demanding money from Boston abolitionists ( also real ) just before the Civil War . Give me the money , he shouts , and I'll start a slave revolution in the upland South . He knows that country . It's filled with hiding places for guerrilla warriors . So he and his handful devoted followers take over the federal arsenal and settle down in Harper's Ferry , Virginia . The tiny town was , and is , a sinkhole at the confluence of two rivers . If you stand in the main street of Harper's Ferry and look in any direction , all you see are tall wooded hills looming over you . It's about the least defensible place on the planet . There are a few African-Americans in the movie . The script has one of them say something like : " Mistuh Brown , he promised us da freedom . But if dis here Kansis is freedom , I wants to go back to Texas where Ah kin live mah lahf in PEACE . " You bet . However , let us skip over the anachronisms - - the absence of muskets , the presence of generic Colt pistols , the fact that Jeb Stuart ( Errol Flynn ) , George Armstrong Custer ( Ronald Reagan ) , Bell , Sheridan , Longstreet , Hood , and Pickett didn't graduate from West Point in the same year - - and examine the movie as a Ding an Sich . The errors of time are lost in the headlong pace of this Western . And it IS a Western , though some scenes are set in the East . There is never any doubt who the good guys are . They're the ones who shoot their pistols jauntily , without aiming , and hit their targets . John Brown and his followers are bad guys , yes , but with mitigation , your Honor . His passion to free the slaves was all right , but his violent methods were all wrong . Every Western , though , must have a genuinely evil guy and in this case it's Van Heflin . His character seems lashed together in haste . At West Point , before he's thrown out , he reads treasonous literature to the other cadets and gets into fist fights ( with Flynn ! ) over the issue of slavery . By the end , he's revealed as a craven money-grabber who only joined Brown's movement for the moolah , and when it's denied him he squeals on Brown to the government . That's known as discontinuity . I speak here not of historical inaccuracy but of dramatic clumsiness . God help me , my phraseology has been contaminated by listening to John Brown's dialog . You ought to see this movie if only for Raymond Massey's overblown portrait of John Brown . He never blinks . His eyes bulge - - and I swear I'm not making this up - - his eyes bulge until the dark irises are completely surrounded by white . I just tried it in the mirror and I can't even come close . There is an attempt at comedy . Its instruments are Alan Hale and Guinn " Big Boy " Williams . It fails dismally . Nothing they say or do would be funny to anyone with a sensibility quotient higher than that of a head of broccoli . The delightful Olivia de Havilland plays " Kit Carson " Halliday , the girl Flynn marries while rival Reagan stands by , shrugs good-naturedly , and smiles . The real Custer later married a smashing brunette named Libby , almost as attractive as de Havilland . It's a straightforward Warners production with Flynn , Reagan , Michael Curtiz , Max Steiner , Perc Westmore , and Sol Polito all hard at work in the factory , turning out their fast , unpretentious , actioners and dramas in their classic style . |
442,959 | 819,382 | 363,029 | 6 | Eerie and engaging | What an odd film . The first ten minutes or so establish the ethos concisely . An Oriental woman enters Bill Pulman's office for a job interview . He asks , " Didn't Laura tell you I was busy and ask you to wait outside ? Either she did or she didn't . If she didn't , I call down and fire Laura . If she did , you close the door and wait outside until I'm finished . Which is it ? " When he's finished with his business ( which is twitting his boss over the results of a football game ) he asks the woman in and scans her resume . " So , Monica , you'd like to work here . " " Michelle , " she corrects him . " Hmm . So you're Chinese . " " My grandparents were from Japan , " she says . Pullman then draws out his denial of her application , relishing every moment of her humiliation , telling her , " I won't hire anyone who sits there and corrects me all the time just because I didn't memorize every goddam item on her resume . " There is another terrific scene in those first few minutes , when Pullman visits the office of his Big Boss , Duke . ( Everybody seems to be named Duke or Rick or Buck or Nick . ) Pullman teases Duke about having lost the bet on the game and the two of them start playing grabass in this masculine way that high school kids do , ragging one another and calling names and jabbing each other in the ribs , chuckling all the while . However , after 30 or 40 seconds of this rough house we realize that the razzing is becoming more one sided . Duke - - Pullman's superior - - is now shouting all the insults while Pullman is groaning with mock pain . " I'm gonna kill your family and you , then I'm gonna take a red hot poker and shove it up your a and cut off your b and set ' em on fire . " Pullman ( doing a splendid job ) shields himself with his hands , says , " No , no - - not THAT ! " , and crawls under the desk while Duke follows him , still shouting threats . It's an extremely funny scene but there's an element of sadism in it too , a kind of Schadenfreude , since the main reason it's funny is that it's happening to someone else . It's the same reason we might laugh at some poor guy who realizes in a public place that his fly is open and quickly zips up . We wouldn't want to trade places with him . It's all the more humiliating for Pullman because his boss looks about 10 or 20 years younger than he is . Man , is that a degrading position to be in . I once applied for a job at a pizza place and was interviewed by a kid less than half my age . " Ever had any delivery experience - - sir ? " , he inquired . The movie follows a not uncommon trajectory , from whimsically amusing through seriousness to tragedy . I kind of wish it had stayed funny , because the tragic part doesn't really tell us much . We don't emerge from the experience epiphanied or anything . Basically , Pullman hates his boss so much , particularly after finding that his boss has been diddling Pullman's daughter , that he hires somebody to kill Duke . There is a mistake in identity and the wrong person is killed . Hello ? The performances are all good , especially Pullman . I'm coming to respect him as an actor more and more because he can accomplish so much while seeming to do so little . ( Listen to his phony groans through clenched teeth when Duke is tormenting him during that first scene . A perfect blend of pretending and feeling . ) The dialog scintillates when it sticks to arrogance and humiliation . In the second half it turns rather pedestrian , but still - - that first half is very nicely done . The direction is efficient without being flamboyant . The score is unique . Without really paying much attention , I was able to identify only four instruments - - base , drums , guitar , and accordion . Not a quartet though . They don't play at the same time , and rarely in any combination at all . One rather lengthy scene is scored using only up-tempo solo drums . The only tunes I could discern were Christmas songs or variations on them . The movie has its weaknesses but it's an original effort . It imitates nothing that's gone before . The people involved should get a pat on the back , even if some viewers might find it a little simple in its message . If you are too greedy for material things , you will regret it later . I think the Greeks may have called this sin " pleonaxis . " In this case the punishment seems to have been brought on by the Jade Emporer through a Chinese curse . |
442,960 | 819,382 | 332,452 | 6 | How do you like them Golden Apples ? | The movie is colossal , spectacular , stupendous , gongoristic , monumental , and secular . What happened to the GODS ? I mean the whole thing started with Eris and that damme golden apple and vain Aprhodite - - whom I would not want backing me in a war , I'll tell you . Yes . It's a godless movie , no doubt propagated by some leftist Commies in Hollywood . Oh , sure . Lots of people entreat the gods , or propitiate them , or insult them , but does anything happen as a result ? They don't . No , they don't . You may call it secular humanism but I call it hubris . The best thing about the movie is Peter O'Toole . He practically gives acting lessons to the leads . Brad Pitt I feel kind of mixed about . He's not bad actually - - humorless , narcissistic , and relentless except when he's in a snit . By the way , didn't Achilles hide in drag among the women in order to avoid being drafted ? Maybe not . My memory is a little rusty after all these years . I didn't have a problem with Brad Pitt , the actor , but rather with his role as written and directed . We already know that Achilles is full of love for himself , but must we be too ? Pitt is all pumped up and musclebound and the camera gives us more than one shot of his bare behind . That's okay as far as it goes because the Greeks were pretty casual about nudity ( " gymnasium " , etc . ) but then , well - - why not a bit more of Helen too ? Or Briseis ? What's the matter with their behinds ? Speaking of Briseis , the erstwhile temple virgin with whom Achilles falls in love , brings up a couple of creaky places in the construction of the story . Alright , they don't have to hew too closely to Homer's original . He probably didn't hew very closely either . After all it was an oral tradition and there wasn't too much to hew to . But the introduction of the romance between Achilles and Briseis , which I don't remember being in The Iliad , almost turns the movie into a Harlequin romance punctuated by scenes of battle and intrigue . In fact all the romances are handled through dialog that is positively an embarrassment . Near the beginning Paris sneaks into Helen's room and she says , " You shouldn't be here . " Paris : " That's what you said last night . " Helen : " Last night was a mistake . " I kept waiting for one of the lovers to turn to the other and say , " We have to talk . " At least the Helen / Paris romance was required . Her sleek Teutonic beauty is what launched those thousand ships . But Achilles and Briseis is off track . It's the story of a man who " found himself " through the love of a good woman . ( Ho hum . ) It turns out , according to this version of the story , that Paris didn't shoot Achilles with an arrow before the walls of Troy after all . Instead Achilles is killed because he foolishly rushes around the burning palace searching for Briseis , his missing love . When Briseis yields to him and agrees to leave , he sweeps her up in his brawny arms and Paris , mistaking this for a coerced abduction , plugs him in the heel . There follow the few last words to his lost love , from a man who died tragically just as he found the true meaning of life . The real Achilles must be begging the boatman to take him back across the Styx so he can strangle the writers . Visually of course the movie is overwhelming . Maybe too much so . We see a horde of about two thousand Greeks in dark armor plodding relentlessly towards Troy , while ominous music throbs in the background . It owes something to the score for Alexander Nevsky , but if you're going to rip somebody off it might as well be Prokoviev . The fact is , there are too many guys . In The Iliad Homer gives us two lines of warriors - - the Greeks and Trojans - - shouting insults and shaking spears at one another until some of them rush out of line to do battle . This puts the spotlight on individual mano a mano combat , like that between Hector and Patroclus . But when you have a myriad of men hacking away at each other , who's to notice , and stop to watch , when two heroes swear off against one another ? It's not a bad movie at all . Rarely does one's mind drift . But why did the writers try to hammer that round peg of a romance into the square hole of the narrative itself ? Is Brad Pitt such a bustier-melting hunk that someone thought the audience wanted to see his tender side ? And his backside as well ? Was he so expensive that somebody figured he ought to be given more lines of dialog ? And get that stupid helmet off so we can all see how handsome he is ? I was reassured to see that the guys I enjoyed and admired most in the original - - the morally upright Hector and the clever , ironic Odysseus - - receive fair treatment here . I never liked Paris much . I always thought of him as a handsome namby-pamby and an idiot to boot . Happily he doesn't get much better play in the movie . |
443,208 | 819,382 | 51,198 | 6 | Rambling , ambiguous , and funny . | All the critics have called John Ford's humor " broad " and I guess this is a pretty good example of what they mean . The opening scenes involve ancient float planes , a Stutz Bearcat , people falling into water , and a crash into the swimming pool at the Admiral's tea party . ( Tea party ! ) Subsequent scenes involve gala fist fights between matched hordes of Army and Navy pilots , led by Kenneth Toby and Wayne respectively . There are cakes smashed into faces . The whole thing could have been a silent comedy . And yet the humor , by no means ever sophisticated , is pretty funny at times , and not always slapstick either . A good example is the scene in Spig Wead's ( John Wayne's ) office , with Pincus ( Tige Andrews ) and Carson ( Dan Dailey ) . Dailey is having difficulty trying to make a long-distance call . Andrews is sitting with his shoe off . Wayne asks what's wrong , did he stub his toe ? " Ah , no , " says Andrews , " ya see , I keep my money in my shoe and every time I step on it - - " and he's interrupted when Admiral Moffat enters the room . Wayne , Dailey , and Andrews snap to attention and listen to the Admiral's speech . There is a brief pause after Dailey suddenly shouts into the phone , " Why don't you GET OFF THE PHONE , you dumb head ! " In the sudden silence everyone stares at Dailey who then looks embarrassed and apologizes to the Admiral . When the Admiral has finished his speech to his respectful listeners he turns to leave the room and notices Pincus , a mere enlisted man , goes over to him and greets Pincus warmly . Pincus smiles easily , shakes the Admiral's hand , and inquires after his family . " How's da wife , sir ? And dem lovely kiddies ? " " Fine , fine . Good to see you , Pincus , " says the Admiral and exits . Wayne and Dailey gape speechless at Pincus before getting back to business . I've described this scene in extenso because it could NOT have come from a silent comedy . None of the humor is physical . It's what might be called interactional humor . And Ford explains absolutely none of it . We have no idea why Dailey began shouting into the phone during the Admiral's speech , or what the hell kind of background the Admiral and the lowly Pincus share . There is no set-up for the gags whatever . They come as a shocking surprise and that's what makes them funny . There's a similar unstated quality at the climax of the film . Dailey has saved Wayne's life by taking the bullets himself . He winds up in sick bay playing poker with the other patients . Wayne visits him to thank him . The two have been lifelong friends . Ordinarily , under these conditions , a viewer expects to see a lot of sentiment , even between two plain-speaking macho loudmouths . Instead , Dailey brushes off Wayne's thanks brusquely . And later the two don't get together for Wayne's retirement from the ship and from the Navy after a heart attack , as if Wayne were leaving a drinking party for a few minutes to visit the bathroom . The sense of loss - - of almost tragic finality - - is underscored by the absence of any emotional display . And it is left unexplained by Ford , just as Dailey's phone call and Pincus's friendship with the Admiral was . This is anything but a routine scene . It's not among Ford's best films . He wanted to call it , " The Spig Wead Story , " but the studio objected that no one would want to see it and they were right . Spig Wead sounds like a quarterback for Notre Dame . And the script , following Wead's real life meandering , is all over the place , switching in the middle from a service comedy to a complicated and unfocused story about a screen writer . And it doesn't tell us much about Wead's second career . " I didn't want to make it , " said Ford about the movie , " but I didn't want anybody else to make it . " Probably no one else would have made it . The romance between Wayne and O'Hara is handled clumsily . They're forever breaking up and getting together again - - or almost getting together . O'Hara is , as always , drop-dead gorgeous in Technicolor . And I doubt that anyone but Ford could have forced John Wayne to doff his toupee . Yet the acting itself is schematic , partly because the dialog is so burdensome . Who could possibly have made believable Wayne's lines after he has fallen down the stairs and broken his back ? " Don't move me . My back . Can't feel anything . Call . . . hospital . Navy . . . hospital . " Sounds like . . . comic book . At one point in the film , Ford ridicules himself ( " John Dodge " ) instead of someone in his cast . The director was beginning to run out of steam by this time . He was over 60 and had a lot of scar tissue . Still , the movie is worth watching . |
442,180 | 819,382 | 412,244 | 6 | Fairly familiar but exciting story . | Based on letter written home by English , Canadian , American , and German soldiers , this is a mixture in roughly equal proportions of newsreel footage , reenactments , and shots of the sites of battle as they stand today . It's good to see a docudrama about the Normany landings from the UK . So many of them have come from America , so that other countries seem like supporting players . At that , though , I must say that the handsome young German doesn't have much to say to his folks except that everything is going swimmingly . Interesting , too , to see how the mistakes and the gratuities of fate are handled . Treatments in other sources range from the outright propagandistic ( we did everything right , and they were stupid ) to apparently objective analyses of what went on , with judgments left suspended . ( The British series , " Battle Order " , is about as good as it gets . ) Propaganda is understandable in wartime . But now , sixty years after the fact , it seems like political spin to gloss over our own failures . For instance , the amphibious rehearsals at Slapton , on the Channel , are mentioned and even described as " tragic " but we're not given any reasons . The fleet of Allied landing craft was intercepted at night by German E-boats and several were sunk . The men were wearing inflated life preservers shaped like inner tubes but had not been instructed in their proper use . Most of the men wore them like belts around their waists , rather than up under their arms . If you wear the preserver like a belt when you jump into the water , you will become an inverted pendulum , turned upside down and drowned . The disastrous raid on Dieppe is described in a bit more detail . Well , not every incident can be covered in two hours , and there is some new material here . The new information isn't at the high-echelon level . We already know that Eisenhower and Churchill agonized over triggering the landings during uncertain weather . Instead , the new information is at a rather touching anecdotal level . A young French boy living in St . Mere Eglise visits his sister , a nurse at the local hospital . The hospital has just been damaged by Allied bombs . So he and his sister gather together blood-soaked sheets , take them out into the open , and form a sanguinary red cross on the pavement . At that moment an Allied reconnaissance plane flies over and , spotting the cross , rocks its wings in recognition . Three British soldiers are killed by shelling while investigating a church . The French villagers come and place flowers on the bodies . And the chaplain takes a snippet of the French tricolor used to hold one of the bouquets together and sends it to the dead soldiers family , along with a moving , yet dignified , letter of explanation and condolence . It's very much worth seeing . Particularly as the reenacted events recede into the past and those who carry the memories with them disappear . |
443,330 | 819,382 | 37,382 | 6 | Only the Names are Retained . | It's kind of like " Sex and the Single Girl " or " What You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex . " The titles are familiar or engaging enough to justify building a complete story from scratch . ( See also , " The Best of Sex and Violence , " which is the greatest title ever dreamed up , far superior to , say , " Henry IV , Part Two . " ) The novel opens and closes with slam bang action scenes and there isn't much in between to draw us to the characters . One-armed guys can be good heroes or villains , but not heroes who lose . The story is that Howard Hawks and Hemingway were having drinks and that Hawks claimed he could take even Hemingway's lousiest novel and make a successful movie out of it . They agreed that " To Have And Have Not " was about the lousiest and the bet was made . Evidently Furthman threw the contents of the novel out of the window except for the general Caribbean setting , Harry Morgan's occupation as skipper , and the names of some of the characters . It's doubtful that Hawks truly enjoyed himself during the shooting . He had a habit of hiring delicious young women for his movies and then , well , then bonding with them . In this case , he had his eye on Bacall , who was 18 years old , but she bonded with Bogart instead . Hawks also had a habit of avoiding actors who stole his women and punishing the women too , so it was Bogart's next-to-last film with Hawks . It wasn't the first time . In Kirk Douglas's movie with Hawks , the actor stole Elizabeth Threatt , a major masochist , who came like water and like the wind she went . And it was good-bye to both John Ireland and Joanne Dru after " Red River . " Poor Hawks . The writers , which evidently included Jules Furthman and William Faulkner , built up a story that sizzled with sexuality at the time of its release but seems like of loose-limbed , gangly , and amusing today . ( The oft-parodied scene in which Bacall tells Bogart how to whistle - - " You just put your lips together - - and blow . " ) Hawks had an affinity for boy's adventure book values . You know , a man rediscovers his pride or sobriety and overcomes his demons and whatnot . It's pretty lowbrow stuff unless you want to get into conjectural homoerotic themes . But Hawks had a solid sense of humor too . He had a tendency to rework scenes so that they had gag lines in them or amusing bits of business . This one has its funny moments too , as well as a bit of action . None of it is either gripping or believable but it's fun to watch . Bogart and Bacall really hit it off on screen . Her movements are so languorous . She hunches over a bit when she walks , like some tall women do . And her voice - - it's down there in the subwoofer range . At the end , when she and Bogie and Walter Brennan walk out of the bar , Hoagy Carmichael plays a lively little tune and Bacall does a sort of shimmy that must have sent shivers up the male spines of 1944 . While I think of it , I'll give an example of what I meant by " amusing bits of business . " The scene - - a French patriot must have a bullet extracted from his shoulder by Bogart . Several people stand around watching tensely . As Bogart probes the bullet hole , another beautiful woman , who Bacall is jealous of , faints to the floor . Bacall is administering ether from a spray can and Bogart tells her to fan the fumes away from the bed or they'll all be out . When Bacall notices that no one is watching her , she hastily fans the gas down towards the body of her unconscious rival . It isn't much , just a second or two , but it adds to our understanding of what's going on and is meanly funny . Not Hawks ' best but enjoyable viewing . |
442,071 | 819,382 | 399,146 | 6 | The Stalls Identity . | I was interrupted after about two-thirds of the movie and could only listen to the last part , but the film seemed interesting enough to warrant a few notes . First of all , for Cronenberg , this is a linear narrative . Basically , Tom Stalls ( Vigo Mortensen ) is an ex-hood who has begun a new life as the owner of a small café in Indiana . He becomes a hero by overcoming two really nasty armed robbers , his face appears in the news , and his former associates in Philadelphia seek him out to settle a few old scores . The associates include Ed Harris and William Hurt in relatively small roles . Cronenberg invests the story with none of his usual grotesqueries . That is to say , nobody rots on screen . Nobody's head explodes . Nobody has a sexual thing for overripe pumpkins or anything . The first half hour is finely done . Ordinary people doing ordinary things , until Mortensen unexpectedly does something quite extraordinary . There is a subplot involving his teen aged son who goes through something of the same personal revolution regarding the bullies at his high school . Nice picture of peaceful , rather dull small-town life at first . But when Stall's true identity becomes apparent , the story weakens and turns into a more nearly traditional action / crime flick . And it becomes less believable . When Mortensen's wife finds out who he has been she runs to the bathroom and vomits . The incident makes the point dramatically , but would it really happen ? She's lived with this peace-loving gentle , caring guy now for years but in a few seconds the love is turned to revulsion . There's another angry exchange later that ends with an animal-like coupling on a staircase . Both Mortensen and his wife ( Maria Bello ) turn from fury into lust in the blink of an eye . Would you want to make love to someone who has just cursed you and slapped your face ? Well , maybe you would . The vagaries of your erotic life are certainly none of MY business . Personally I would prefer to be the slapper than the slappee , but only if it were consensual and deeply caring . Where was I ? Oh , yes . And Mortensen's kid . When the boy finds out his father has a " history of violence " he too gets irritated - - whining and demeaning his Dad . But , again , why ? It has been estimated that every cell in the human body dies and is replaced every seven years . Don't we ALL deserve another chance ? Especially when , as in this instance , it is never clear exactly what Mortensen ever did that was so damned bad ? I kind of like Vigo Mortensen . He's handsome without being conspicuously so . And his acting style is minimalist , kind of like Robert Redford or Gary Cooper . He never really does very much with his face , but as in the Kuleshov studies his feelings are suggested by their context . He may not look disappointed , but we know he must be disappointed because these are disappointing circumstances . Ed Harris is great , with his hideous scar from the barbed wire . He uses a ripe Tenafly , New Jersey , accent in the part . Sounds great . He's turning into a very good supporting player . And William Hurt is interesting , as he invariably is . |
442,094 | 819,382 | 387,059 | 6 | Indolent look at a kaleidoscope of themes . | Well , just about every kind of quirk you might expect to find in a nice Jewish academic family in Berkeley is tucked away somewhere in this leisurely trip through misunderstandings . Richard Gere , gone white and looking great , does most of the talking and most of the moving . He teaches Hebrew Studies , he coaches his son on the cello , he always cooks dinner at home . ( Pretty liberated , eh ? ) Now Gere isn't frenetic as he sometimes has been , as in , say , " Power " . His buzzing activity mostly stands out because nobody else has much of it . His wife , Juliette Binoche , has lost her family and wanders around with all the substance of a wisp of smoke . It turns out she's covering up some quirky activities , even for a family like this . She has a garage full of broken trinkets she's collected from other people's properties . They hang from the ceiling in a multitude of sparkling threads , tinkling a little bit , as Gere discovers them and goggles at the sight . Then there's the son , Aaron . Gere is a devoutly religious man who would like to be a mystic but is reduced to merely studying Jewish mysticism . But the son ? Well , he's a whiz on the cello . With a father like Gere you could hardly be other than a whiz at whatever he urged you to try . And Aaron is searching for God too . But where does he find God ? In the now-defunct Hare Krishnas . Of course it could have been worse . Aaron might have dug up some suicide cult . But still , for some people it must be getting a bit tiresome to deal with people who have learned that God is communicating with them . Andy Warhol once claimed that he'd been given a dead phone but that God was supposed to be on the other end waiting for his call . Warhol never made the call because he could never think of anything to say . Doctor Fielgut's advice is this : Do find God , if you can , but then whatever he tells you keep it to yourself . Oh , yes . Then there's the little daughter , reserved , soft , vulnerable , unamazing in any way until she discovers that she has some form of synesthesia regarding words . When she hears " cotyledon " defined , she closes her eyes and is swirled about with leaves . When Gere finds this out - - WOW ! TWO geniuses in the family , not including him and Juliette Binoche who is " a scientist . " Aaron and his cello are put on the back burner while Gere hovers over his daughter and tells her emphatically that God is in the letters . In the end she teaches him a valuable lesson too , humility . There's something distasteful about judged performances like spelling bees though . I say this not only because Barbara Lukashinsky came in first , to my second , in a fifth-grade spelling bee , just because I misspelled a stupid word like " nickel " and she got it right . No , it's not that at all , even though she didn't deserve first prize . It's that like other judged performances , spelling bees are a zero-sum game . One can only " win " at the expense of someone else . It's competition in its purest form . You win the prize by beating everyone else . But who wins a prize for cooperation ? Or self sacrifice ? Roger Bannister was the first person to run a 4-minute mile . Does anyone remember who was the second runner to break four minutes ? It isn't that competition is necessarily bad per se . It can boost team solidarity and even be fun . The main problem with spelling bees is that they encourage lazy , categorical thinking about either " victory " or " defeat " , while " compromise " has no part in the contest . This is a pretty slow movie . It's almost European . It's stuffed with far too many themes , like the kaleidoscope ( did I spell that right ? ) that Binoche hands down to daughter Emily . Impossible to grasp them all . But it's a nice change to see a film that challenges us . |
442,260 | 819,382 | 287,963 | 6 | Power as an aphrodisiac . | The anthropologist Jules Henry once wrote that " men compete for power ; women compete for men . " Okay , it's kind of simple minded , but this movie neatly illustrates the point Henry was trying to make . Two women , Sandrine and Nathalie , meet by accident and begin an affair . Nathalie , the older and more experienced of the two , teaches Sandrine how to seduce her way up the corporate ladder , including instructions on how to improve your fake orgasms . Treat them nice and then dump them for someone better , but do it subtly . The first guy at this huge corporation is nothing more than target practice for Sandrine . She works through him to get at the next guy in the bigger office , a happily married winsome man with a face that has all the sympathetic appeal of road kill . Sandrine , following Nathalie's instructions , works overtime at the office and spurns all hits until one night she allows the 47-year-old boss in the bigger office to catch her in a do-it-yourself mode . The older man , Delacroix , whom I'd supposed to be dead since 1863 , begins a passionate affair with the delectable young Sandrine . She teases and taunts him and makes him feel vigorous again . He can't do without her . Then after tricking him into visiting her unannounced at her home , she lets him wander in on her and Nathalie while they are making love . Only in a French movie would his first question be , " Are you in love with her " ? No bothering with the fact that he's got two women humping in front of him . That is what we blue-blooded church-goers call " sang-froid . " Anyway - - skipping some additional steps - - Sandrine finally makes it into the office of the boss's son , a young rich hunk , Christophe . The real boss doesn't count because he's old and moribund . ( He's my age . ) But now our story turns a bit and begins to get REALLY creepy . It develops that Nathalie has having an affair with Christophe and has been spying for him too . And this Christophe is a match for the two plotting women , believe me . " Me , cruel ? Am I more cruel than God or creation ? " What a cold blooded cad . Or cod . Let's see . The film turns into what could have been a soft-core porn film from any country except that in France they do it to an oratorio by Handel . We have ordinary intercourse , but not much of that . Then there's the lesbian affair of course . And , let me think , oh yes , incest and orgies . Christophe winds up marrying Sandrine and as a special treat on their wedding night he has her dragged screaming down to a dungeon and gang banged by a bunch of strangers . All this to the tune of Bach's Missa Solemnis or something and the reassuring sight of softly billowing scarlet curtains . When Nathalie finally plugs Christophe ( seven times ) he begs her not to commit suicide because then she will follow him to hell and harass him for eternity . When Christophe dies on the staircase his body is enshrouded by white smoke and a hawk lands on his chest and begins tearing at the bullet holes around his heart . Don't ask . Well , Nathalie doesn't kill herself . She goes to prison for seven years , marries her prison guard , and has a family with him . Sandrine , having lost her husband , inherits everything he had , meaning their vast estate and the huge corporation . She runs the business with the now-chastened Delacroix as her loyal assistant . I'm not trying to hack the movie to pieces , although I have made fun of some of it . I found myself genuinely interested in where it was going - - in where it could POSSIBLY go next . And I was sincerely happy that both women wound up evidently satisfied with their secure circumstances . And I appreciated the way Sandrine presented herself . She's attractive without being beautiful . And she has a way of grooming herself and walking and posturing that makes the most of what the Intelligent Designer has given her , a trait more commonly found in Europeans than Americans , if I may make such an Olympian generalization . The story , and some of the scenes , are pretty erotic but they're done with style . There's little nudity and what there is of it isn't vulgar . I kind of liked the whole thing . |
443,601 | 819,382 | 470,765 | 6 | A runner up . | I haven't seen all of Christopher Guest's parodies , or rather the parodies of Guest and gang , which always include Eugene Levy ( he of the Groucho eyebrows ) , Catherine O'Hara , Parker Posey , Fred Willard , and other familiar faces . " Best in Show " was a real winner . This one is a runner up , close but no cigar . It's about a cheap film that comes to have critical raves . Three actors are buzzed about as Oscar Nominees , but they don't quite make the cut . An epilogue shows us the heights they went on to conquer despite their disappointment - - one teaches acting to a handful of puzzled and untalented students , another is doing a product commercial voice over , the third is an hysterical performance artist . The writers seem able to dig up some humor out of any situation . But the film has an improvisatory quality that goes beyond that of " Best in Show . " People SOUND as if they're improvising . The editor does what he can to keep the pace snappy but sometimes the scenes are more puzzling than funny . The winner , again , is Fred Willard , playing the same stoop he played in " Best in Show , " but this time with a cartoon hair do . The host of a morning TV show , he ambushes the losers at their various tasks - - trying to have breakfast alone in a diner , auditioning for a role in a commercial , or staggering drunk out of the house to empty the garbage . It doesn't hit the high spots of the earlier film but it's still pretty amusing . Nothing is sacred to these guys . |
443,011 | 819,382 | 69,903 | 6 | Above average entry . | This is the one in which Robert Culp is a murderous motivational research scientist who uses subliminal cuts in an advertising film to lure his victim , Robert Middleton , out into the lobby of the screening room . It's pretty good too . Culp is a cool , thoroughly organized killer . He's more amused by Columbo's antics than irritated by them - - except when they screw up his golf game . And it has two truly likable supporting players : Chuck McCann and Louise Latham . McCann is intrinsically funny . There's something about his clown-like smile and the blubber that surrounds it that evokes smiles in his audience . He had a children's TV show in New York that was so outrageous that , even as an adult , I caught it whenever I could . Louise Latham will be immediately recognizable . She's not at all unattractive although her eyes almost meet each other , separated only by the thin bridge of her nose . As an actress , she's hard to beat . Her range is from mean and Southern to vulnerable and appealing , as she is here . I hope no one takes this subliminal motivation business too seriously . The impact is debatable but no one has claimed it can be used in a conspiracy to corrupt the population or get everyone to rush out and buy Nokia . I used a tachistoscope in some studies at Cornell and the results were minimal - - probably real for some people , but not very important . If you want to change someone's attitudes towards things or thoughts , there are more efficient ways of doing it . |
442,344 | 819,382 | 217,505 | 6 | Fine acting , spectacle . | Man , this doth bestride the world of 1860s New York like a colossus . It begins with a battle on the streets of the ( now disappeared ) Five Points of New York City , between the Irish immigrants led by Liam Neeson , head of the Dead Rabbits gang , and the nativists , led by Daniel Day-Lewis , sporting the most down-home working-class New York accent you ever heard , a real phoneme-mangler , and the waxiest mustache as well , playing Bill the Butcher . Neeson is killed in battle , which stops the fight , as it did in ancient times , and Day-Lewis bellows out to the stunned mob , " The Dead Rabbits is gone forever . Let their name never be spoken from this time onward ! " Neeson's son grows up to be Leonard DeCaprio and when he returns to Five Points he his taken under the wing of Day-Lewis , until his identity is revealed . Cameron Diaz is around here somewhere , swishing through bar rooms , half-built churches , and underground caves . Another street battle is arranged . Coincidentally it takes place during the historic draft riots of the Civil War period . Day-Lewis is killed by DeCaprio , and the feud is buried . I couldn't tell one gang from another but I loved their names . They are rooted in historical reality , I think , and they include not just the Dead Rabbits but the Chichesters , the Bowery Boys , and the Plug Uglies . The Plug Uglies derive their name , I understand , from a " volunteer fireman's group . " There were thirty-seven such groups . There being no fire department to speak of at the time , volunteer groups were paid by the fire , which led to the expected results . Not only competition by rival groups to reach the fire first , but sometimes co-opting the fire by having a handful sit on the fire plugs and reserving them for their own group . ( Arson by the firemen themselves also generated profits . ) That's the kind of detail that Scorsese jimmies into this movie . We get to see some historical figures , such as Boss Tweed , and we witness their machinations . But the director's real interests lie elsewhere - - intrigues among the gang members and their molls , revenge , murders , public assassinations , things like that . I know . It sounds like the Corleone family . Unfortunately that's probably the weakest part of the film . There is usually a great sense of " place " and " tribe " in Scorsese's work . The Five-Points set is splendidly done but I couldn't get a sense of what was where . Transitions from exteriors to interiors , and the relation of community features to each other , were confusing . And although Day-Lewis's character was nicely delineated , and our attitude towards him necessarily ambivalent , I wasn't itching for DeCaprio to off him and stand victorious over his body - - which is part of the gangs ' code . ( " Ears and noses are alright , but nobody touches this body ! " That's another order from Day-Lewis about taking post-battle trophies . Another guy gets paid by the new notches he carves into his sheleghly or whatever it is . ) Nobody in the film is entirely admirable , although just about everyone is treacherous . A black orphanage is burned down during the draft riots but this eludes mention . Also , okay , this is about the poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhood in New York City . Day-Lewis is a butcher and Cameron Diaz is a hooker , but what kind of work do the others do ? We don't see anyone making a living . We don't even hear them talk about it . To whom does Day-Lewis sell his lamb chops ? None of that detracts from the power of the images we see on the screen , or from some of the superb performances , the least effective of which come from DeCaprio and Diaz . The film paints a moving portrait of near anarchy . We only get to see one or two cops and they're thoroughly corrupt . Nobody balks , no committee is formed to investigate , when a battle between street gangs leaves dozens dead . The street has its own code . Plus ca change . |
442,365 | 819,382 | 69,900 | 6 | Mainstream Columbo | Better than average . This episode is from the second season and Columbo was hitting its stride . The cast is excellent . Will Geer , in particular , is always outstanding . Anne Francis is beautiful and one wonders if she and Peter Falk reminisced about the old days in Ossining , New York , where both of them grew up . I especially liked Nita Talbot as Marcia . She's given the most amusing lines and the most romantically desperate of characters . Explaining to a sleep-deprived unshaven Columbo why she feels guilty : " I chose to work for a plastic surgeon in Beverley Hills , but I don't meet any single men until they're ready for face lifts . " The motivation may be a little weak . One scientist invents a new surgical technique and tries to kill another because he wants all the credit . Well , maybe the motive isn't so weak at that . I spent 30 years in research settings and am filled with resentment at the credit I should have gotten for my work , credit which was taken by rivals out to make me look small and insignificant . May their souls rot in - - well . I believe in karma and they'll get theirs alright . The plot is great though . Columbo gets to display his aversion to hospital sights , sounds , and odors , which is perfectly understandable . And we learn just enough about surgical procedures to follow the machinations of the heavy , Leonard Nimoy . This is the one in which Columbo loses his temper and slams a water pitcher down on Nimoy's desk . Excellent distraction . |
443,389 | 819,382 | 37,408 | 6 | Lively Romantic Musical Comedy . | June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven are two sisters who fall for the same sailor , Van Johnson , at a party for servicemen in 1944 . Johnson comes from a very wealthy family and anonymously buys the girls ( they were " girls " then , not yet " women " ) a huge warehouse where our boys ( they were " boys " , etc . ) can REALLY be entertained . Of course only one of the girls can wind up with Van Johnson but , not to worry , Sergeant Tom Drake is always hanging around in the background and he gets the other . More MGM stars than you can shake a baton at - - Harry James , Xavier Cugat , Gracie Allen , Jimmy Durante , Jose Iturbi , everybody . Most of the names will not be familiar to people who weren't around at the time but they were big ones in 1944 . Every girl had a crush on Van Johnson . All of the musical numbers are pleasant in their own quiet way but none are outstanding although they were popular at the time . Never entered the Great American Songbook . Sic transit gloria mundi . Exception : Harry James gets to play " Estrellita " , a sentimental love song written around 1912 by the Mexican composer Manuel Ponce , which was immensely popular and never aspired to membership in the Great Songbook . You will probably recognize it . June Allyson , in her first major role , already looks and sounds like the steadfast , loyal wife she would become in later movie . Gloria DeHaven , on the other hand , had a relatively short career and wound up hosting a TV program in New York . Don't know why her impact was so ephemeral . She has long , fluffy hair , the eyes of a gazelle , and a lower lip that droops sensually , invitingly . She should have gone on to erotic thrillers , the kind in which the babe is rescued from the murderer with her dress half ripped off and some of her underwear showing . What a waste . Nothing much to the plot - - a series of coincidences and pedestrian interludes between musical numbers . But what a time capsule this is . |
441,776 | 819,382 | 69,906 | 6 | Good Early Columbo | You can't help wondering what Lieutenant Columbo's first name was , but maybe it's better that we don't know . Suppose it had turned out to be something like " Jason " or " Brad " . In this entry the epic bumbler is thrust into the world of championship-level chess , more specifically the professional enmity that Lawrence Harvey , the reigning champ , feels towards his good-natured challenger , the older Jack Kruschen , playing an obvious Russian . It's an interesting story , a little complicated , there being not just one secret but several of them , involving shoves into giant garbage disposals , tricking the victim into writing a suicide note , switching medicines , setting up a red herring about a flight to Mexico . I suppose all that is to be expected in a story about chess . It's a complicated game . I should know . I was a child genius at chess and once played ten games simultaneously while blindfolded , losing every one . Something I didn't get comes at the end , though , the climactic reveal . That giant garbage grinder into which Harvey has shoved his opponent shuts off automatically but Harvey doesn't realize it because his hearing aid battery is shot , and he doesn't know the chopper has stopped . Columbo tricks Harvey into demonstrating that , in the absence of his hearing aid , he can't tell the blasted machinery has stopped . And a glow of satisfaction spreads across Columbo's face . But , when you think about it - - so what ? Aside from that , plenty of interesting stuff going on . Escargot with garlic in what passes for a French restaurant in L . A . Made me kind of hungry , watching Kruschen stuff himself . Harvey taking a glance at one of those indecipherable doctor's scrips for four or five medicines and immediately memorizing the whole list . Hart Bochner speaking Russian with a gloopy accent . Kruschen flat-lining with a satisfying stomach full of snails with garlic sauce . |
441,707 | 819,382 | 69,905 | 6 | Right Up There on the Plus Side . | This is the one in which Vera Miles , as the head honcho of a tony cosmetics corporation , bashes in the head of subordinate Michael Sheen who has falsified the results of an experiment in such a way that he now has sole possession of the secret formula of a skin cream that will remove wrinkles . Enter Columbo , the paragon of sartoriality , into the women's world of haute couture and tony fat farms where they practice " body realization " and nude sunbathing . He stumbles around and catches poison ivy before unraveling the case with an intuition that is supernatural in its magnitude . I don't know why , when Vera Miles discovered that Sheen had cooked the books and was going to blackmail her into making him a partner in the firm , she just didn't go to the cops instead of braining him . After all , stealing a secret wrinkle remover while in the employ of the corporation is stealing property that is rightly theirs , not to mention the blackmail that is extortion , a felony . There's some comedy , but not that much , and not that much teasing repartee between Miles and Peter Falk . Sheen isn't around long . Sian Barbara Allen has more screen time and she uses it pretty well , even adding a suggestion of the kind of love that dare not speak its name in her devotion to Miles . Allen has a most idiosyncratic face . Not unattractive in any way , but slightly askew . Vincent Price is always good to see on the screen . He doesn't get to use his considerable flair for comedy in this relatively straight part of Miles ' competitor in the cosmetics business . If you like this sort of thing , as I do , you probably should catch it . It's up there with the other mainstream entries . |
441,770 | 819,382 | 96,193 | 6 | Great Garner | This movie has been kicking around on cable TV lately and I've put off watching it because I expected it to be another very stretched version of a buddy cop movie . The story seems made for it . Experienced old real-life marshal Wyatt Earp teaches callus young phony cowboy Tom Mix how to solve a crime . " Dragnet " on a 1920s back lot . But it wasn't that way at all . It's true enough that Earp ( Garner ) hung around Hollywood at the time , or maybe a bit earlier . We don't really get to know much about his past . But although Mix ( Willis ) drove expensive cars and wore flashy suits and big hats , he wasn't a phony . He'd been a real cowboy too , was a great rider , fought in the Spanish-American war , and could take care of himself . Instead of the expected clash between the master and the tyro , we get two guys who pretty much hit it off with one another right away , and show mutual respect . It's an interesting friendship . But then the movie turns darker . A murder takes place . There are fist fights ( mostly comic ) and several shootouts ( done seriously ) . Willis is kind of cocky . Garner displays the laconic off-hand dignity he showed in " Murphy's Romance , " or whatever it was . He's an icon here , with that black outfit and mustache . He's never been a flashy actor , but invariably a competent one . Off-screen he's come up with some dandy spontaneous comments about how the social world of Hollywood and the rest of the country is structured . He's got my vote . Willis isn't bad either . The rest of the cast does yeoman work but no one has roles that are as interesting as those of the two leads . And the murder story fails to grip the viewer , at least this viewer . I didn't really find myself caring who did it , although it was clear from the beginning who the villains were . There was an exception , though , the British actress playing Garner's former lover . She's simply outstanding in a supporting part , and provides a great example of how to be beautiful without being " beautiful . " I wish the film didn't seem kind of - - I suppose lost is the word . It meanders between comedy , drama , and warmth , without seeming to know just what it wants to do . This isn't a total failure on Edwards ' part . It holds together as a story but the characters bounce off one another . Henry Mancini , who wrote many scores for Edwards ' films , shows his versatility here . The score is quiet and unobtrusive ( except for one or two brass bands that seem to follow Tom Mix around ) and is punctuated by contemporary recordings , including one by Duke Ellington . The photography is first rate . It must be getting hard to find locations that look like Southern California looked in the 1920s before the irruption of humans and their artifacts . It's worth watching . But I don't know where that title came from . " Sunset . " What is the sun setting on ? Not Earp . He's old but not doddering , and he can shoot and make love even at the " risk of permanent damage . " It's not setting on Hollywood , which would continue to book for another two generations or so . I suppose we'll settle for its being one of those generic titles that could mean anything . " Another Dawn . " " Guns of Darkness . " " On the Edge . " " Sunset . " " The Muppets Conquer the Mustang Ranch . " |
443,569 | 819,382 | 107,302 | 6 | Serial Killer Movie With Some Thought Behind It . | This is a strange movie . It's as if it had been cobbled together independently by several different intellects and sensibilities . It's not a particularly dumb movie , a pointless slasher product , despite its fashionably misspelled title . It's not a rerun of , say , " The Texas Chainsaw Massacre . " It's not arty either , not like , say , " Badlands , " although the people behind it must unquestionably have seen both earlier movies . Let me get an abstract of the story out of the way . A writer of stories about serial killers ( David Duchovny ) wants to travel out west to California with his photographer girl friend ( Carrie Laughlin ) and visit the scenes of mass murders , then write a book about them . To share expenses he agrees to take along two strangers , the bearded and vulgar Brad Pitt and his girl friend Juliette Lewis . He shouldn't have done it . Pitt turns out to be an exemplar of the type . There is a violent and gory climax . Each of the four main characters could be described in a couple of words , I suppose . Duchovny is the cheerfully tolerant , analytic writer who wants to get into the heads of serial killers but is happy enough to allow Pitt to liberate the occasional , well-controlled wild streak in him . ( Grinning like a little boy , he lets Pitt show him how to shoot a pistol . ) Laughlin is the snooty Eastern artist who is revolted by Pitt and Lewis and irritated by Duchovny's interest in them . Pitt is the hair ape who spits all the time , wears a cap with a Confederate flag , whips his woman when she drinks or cusses , and takes the shoes off his smelly feet in a restaurant . Lewis is the nincompoop who believes that since Pitt rescued her from a gang bang years ago he's her savior and master . She's romantic to the point of delusion and more interested in her yo-yo than in Pitt's transgressions . As for character development , Laughlin and Pitt don't change at all , from beginning to end . Duchovny's change is formulaic . The liberal finds that , under extreme circumstances , he can shoot and kill another human being because the script calls for it . Actually , Duchovny's character isn't very bright . When Pitt commits his first murder on the road , Duchovny peppers him with penetrating questions like , " You didn't have to kill that guy . Why did you do it ? For the power ? Because he reminded you of your father ? " Really . Well , as Duchovny admitted earlier , all he knows about serial killers is from library books , and he's evidently read Freud . Juliette Lewis is the most interesting character . She's full of " um " s and " ah " s and other hesitations and her performance is informed by a childish excitement until , near the end , when her fundamental decency is awakened and she turns on Pitt . In turn , Pitt has a better grasp of the character than the one he showed in the popular " Se7en , " another insulting title . Here , he's nicely animated . I have to say that the photography is fine too , and so is the location shooting and the set dressing . These kinds of skills are often neglected because they form a kind of background to the figures in the foreground , but they're important skills nonetheless . For what it is - - and it doesn't really pretend to be more than what it is - - a story of two ( or three , depending ) innocents who are emotionally and physically savaged by a serial murderer - - it's not nearly as bad as it might be . Here's how bad it might be . A couple of simple-minded happy-go-lucky college kids on spring break pick up two venomous hitch hikers and after assorted mayhem , including a couple of student deaths and considerably nudity , one or two of the surviving students manage to slaughter the hitch hikers . This film isn't that bad . |
441,789 | 819,382 | 39,645 | 6 | Should be better . | Bob Hope's comedies could be hilarious , but this one isn't . He plays his usual character , a coward who imitates his private-eye neighbor and gets into all kinds of hot water with Dorothy Lamour while searching for a map that will break up a ring of international gangsters who want to locate a uranium mine that " some other country " is interested in . ( This is 1947 . ) There were a plenitude of mock private-eye movies that came out about this time , generated by the popularity of the 1940s noir films and , later , given a second-stage rocket boost by the Mike Hammer novels . The climactic ballet of " The Bandwagon " is another example , from a musical yet . But I don't care about that . Well-done parodies can stand on their own , even if the target becomes a bit dated . The problem here is that the wisecracks and gags , though delivered by Hope with his usual élan , just aren't funny enough . Hope's dithering cowardice is amusing , but the rest of the film is below par for him . I'm trying to think of a gag that I can use as an example of mediocrity , but although I just finished watching the movie on DVD , none of them comes to mind . That's symptomatic . Good cast too . Lon Chaney , Jr . , Peter Lorre , other good supporting players , cameos by Alan Ladd and Bing Crosby . And nice location shooting in San Francisco and on the Monterey Peninsula . The mansion that's the principal setting is still there , and visible from the nearby drive . The movie isn't an insult to the audience and not exactly a blot on the record of the participants . It has its comedic qualities . Kids might get a big kick out of it , especially if they're not acquainted with Hope's work elsewhere . If you want to join in the laughter , rent one of Hope and Crosby's better " On the Road " movies . |
441,696 | 819,382 | 70,000 | 6 | Efficient update | You can't help comparing this 1973 TV version to the 1940s original directed by Billy Wilder and starring Fred MacMurray , Barbara Stanwyck , and Edward G . Robinson . As expected , the original comes out light years ahead , a classic of genuine film noir . The story line is still here . The skull shows through the skin . An insurance salesman connives with a manipulative seductress to murder her husband and collect double indemnity on the insurance policy they've just taken out on him . The claims manager , Lee J . Cobb here , unravels the plot . The criminal couple shoot and kill one another . That much is the same . So what's the problem ? Well , there are a couple of problems , and some other changes that aren't necessarily problems but don't add anything to the experience of viewing the film . The story belongs in the 1940s . When Wilder and Raymond Chandler ( in his sober period ) put the thing together it had a good , old-fashioned black-and-white pizazz in its dialog and setting that just doesn't fit well into the 1970s . Phyllis Dietrichson belongs in a slightly cramped but very comfortable old house , a slightly dated mission-style multi-story dwelling with honeysuckle around it and windows that can be closed and shuttered . People in this film live in comparative luxury . The plush carpets are the color of rust . Phyllis ( Samantha Eggar ) lives in a modern house that resembles a cement box on the outside . No honeysuckle vine would dream of trying to creep up the walls because the Mexican gardener would snip it off in a jiffy . Walter Neff ( Richard Crenna ) lives in a pad in Marina del Ray with a view of the yacht moorings , instead of the somewhat seedy hotel flat in the original . In Crenna's apartment , you'd probably have to use coasters . Everyone here seems too - - comfortable . When Eggar complains of her husband that he has no money it's impossible to believe her . The wardrobe too is updated , of course , or rather it WAS up to date in 1973 . Never saw so many turtlenecks . And such fashionably long hair on the men . And 1973 was part of an era - - let's call it pre-Godfather - - when you still had to watch it in using ethnic names . So Lola's no-good boyfriend ( a med-school dropout in the original , a law student here ) is no longer Nino Sachetti but somebody with a barbaric and WASPy name like Don Franklin . That's not a name for a resentful , misguided kid . That's the name of a TV game show host . " Chris Martin Productions presents RING MY BELL - - with your host , Don FRANKlin ! " Incidents , themes almost , are elided . Not much goes on in the way of affection between Neff and his boss . In the original it's symbolized by Neff's always having to provide Keyes with a match to light his cigar and Keyes ' growling thanks . The match business is simply left out of this version . So is the witness's ( John Fiedler ) trying to pry some extra money out of the Insurance company to cover his overnight visit to LA from Medford , Oregon . " There's a chiropractor I need to see , " Porter Hall wheedles in the original . " Just don't put her on the expense account , " snarls Keyes . It's one of the few humorous moments in the story . What's gained by leaving it out ? Left out too is what is surely the funniest incident in the original , when Keyes gives his boss a big speech spelling out in humiliating detail precisely how dumb his boss is , then grabs a glass of water out of his boss's hand , asks , " Mind if I have this ? " , and nervously gulps it down . Otherwise the dialog is almost identical to the original , except for the addition of a wisecrack near the beginning , when Neff tells Phyllis , " I gave up a Rhodes scholarship to peddle insurance door to door . " Performances . Crenna is probably as good as MacMurray was in the original . And although Lee J . Cobb as Keyes isn't the human buzz saw that Edward G . Robinson was in the original , he carries the part in his own exasperated way . Samantha Eggar , alas , is no Barbara Stanwyck . Stanwyck was pretty in a sluttish way , with that fake blonde wig , and a better actress too . Watch Stanwyck's face when the camera focuses on it and her husband is getting his neck broken in the seat next to her . There's a slight smile curling up the edges of her lips . And that nasal Brooklyn voice helps . Eggar with her fresh modelesque beauty , deep red fluffy hair , freckled face , Brit accent , and big green eyes is all innocence . When HER husband is killed , she simply stares into the camera when the shot is duplicated . Most shots , however , are not duplicated . Not that it matters much because the director , Jack Smight , who has done interesting work elsewhere ( " No Way to Treat a Lady " , eg . ) , seems to have approached this project the way we might approach commuting to work in the morning . Nothing much goes on . The wheels aren't turning . Oh , well . You may appreciate this more if you've never seen the original . At that , I'm surprised that there hasn't been another remake yet . It's been thirty years and more since this copy . And there must be a nickel left in the story yet , especially if it has much more blood and explicit sex in it , and something on the sound track other than , " I'll Remember April . " |
443,445 | 819,382 | 449,059 | 6 | Comedy has charm , humor , and is a commercial product . | We are introduced to the Hoover family : the mother ( Toni Collette ) , the achievement-obsessed father ( Greg Kinnear ) , the vulgar grandfather ( Alan Arkin ) , the depressed teen-aged son suffering from elective mutism ( Paul Dano ) , the scholarly , gay uncle who is recovering from a suicide attempt ( Steve Carrell ) , and the cutely plain little girl who wants to be a candidate for Little Miss Sunshine ( Abigail Breslin ) . " A family of losers , " someone calls them . ( Well , they are , after all , the Hoovers . ) Actually , once we get the introductions over with , it isn't a promising picture . This is the way TV situation comedies are planned - - throw together a group of dissimilar nuts into one house and have them stumble all over each other while making wisecracks . If you try to stretch it out to feature length you're liable to wind up with Chevy Chase in a Griswold family vacation movie , with a dead body strapped to the roof . ( This one has a dead body in the back of the VW microbus . ) The little girl , Olive , wins a crack at the title of Little Miss Sunshine in Redondo Beach , California , an apt location , but the whole family must pile into the VW and drive the 800 miles from Albuquerque and must arrive the day after tomorrow by 3PM to register . All sorts of things go wrong that cause delays - - surprise ! Not only does gramps die in his sleep , but the local hospital's " bereavement counselor , " after offering them her condolences in a practiced voice , begins handing them thousands of pages of forms that have to be filled out . What's more , they can't just transport gramp's remains across the state line because that involves the personal endorsement of the Federal Trade Commission and would be a violation of the Mann Act . I just made that up , but I want to suggest that if the Hoover family follows the rules , Olive's entry in the contest is forfeit . So , the Little Miss Sunshine contest being of paramount importance , they don't follow the rules . Instead , they smuggle the remains out of a hospital window and stuff it into the back of the bus in a scene that lacks the laughs that the smuggling of a dead body ought to have . Actually , there aren't many laughs in the film , although it is replete with incidents that generate smiles . As in any successful sitcom , the characters ' quirks are milked for all the laughs that can be gotten from them . At breakfast in a café , for instance , Olive orders waffles a la mode . Kinnear , his eye ever on the game , explains to her that ice cream is made from cream and that it has a lot of fat and that beauty contest winners are - - well , would you call them fat or skinny ? Olive replies doubtfully , " Skinny ? " Kinnear smiles down at her . Smart kid . The beauty contest must have provided the writers with a challenge . The other contestants look like porcelain dolls . They are of various races but share bulbous foreheads , bouffant hair styles , lots of make up , great big false lashes , pasted-on smiles full of capped teeth , flashy outfits of sequins and bangles , and a way of prancing around on stage while shaking their little tushies , to the delight of a burly , bearded guy smothered in tattoos who appears to represent the pedophiles in our midst . Well , Olive is a nice kid , but she's no beauty and her talent is modest compared to the yodelers and the gymnasts . Does Olive win ? It would defy our suspension of disbelief . Does she lose ? What kind of happy ending would that be ? So the writers plump for having her get on the stage in front of these professional stage mothers and do a kind of raucous strip tease , using some lascivious steps taught to her by her degraded grandfather . Some members of the audience get up and leave in disgust . They prefer a more disguised pornography . The bailiffs , or the guards , or the corrections officers , or the civilian contractors rush to remove Olive from the stage . BUT - - the whole family runs on the stage , beats off the agents of social control , and JOINS IN OLIVE'S DANCE ! Not only do the concepts of " winning " and " losing " become irrelevant , but Olive has brought the whole family together again ! Let's hear it for Olive ! The movie has its moments of desperation . At one point , the horn of the VW begins bleating by itself . But on the whole there are enough laughs to keep a family entertained . The kids aren't likely to get the mostly unsuccessful gags about homosexuality ( or maybe they will ) and they'll surely miss the references to Proust and Nietzsche , but they'll appreciate gramp's filthy mouth and the sillier jokes . It ends on a warm , up-lifting note . I wish it had ended with a capper of a comedy caper . |
442,525 | 819,382 | 47,279 | 6 | Toledo tycoon toe to toe with Himmler & the Russkies . | It's a fast-paced thriller about a mob of Himmler's goons in post-war Berlin who kidnap an American GI , the son of a big wheel in the ferris business , and who want to trade the kid back for a pair of burnt-out old anti-Nazi Germans so they can torture and kill them as revenge . Get that ? If not , it's not too important . The movie will make things almost clear enough . It's a lot of fun to watch . The acting required is negligible - - the plot is everything . Broderick Crawford does his " junkman " number from an earlier movie , a blustering materialist who comes to Germany to cut through the red tape and see that his kidnapped son is returned regardless of the cost . The price is the return of those two anti-Nazis , one of them already deliberately blinded by the Gestapo because of his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler . By the end of the movie , Crawford has seen the human face of Cold War intrigue and decides that the elderly couple should be saved . His feelings , of course , are as irrelevant after his change of heart as they were before . The job is in the hands of stern but human Major Gregory Peck . Peck snaps out orders and calls everyone by diminutives - - Stansman is " Stanzy , " Frau Hoffmeier is " Hoffy , " Colonel Ludovich is " Ludy " , Petrochine is " Petey " , and so on , so obsessively that one wonders if Nunally Johnson actually visualized the script . There's a little hole in the plot too , or maybe it's somewhere in my frontal lobes . Peck discovers that his former girl friend Hoffy is actually a spy for the Russkies ( or for Himmler's thugs , it's not clear ) . And she realizes at a critical point that Peck knows . How does she realize it ? I don't know . In the scene , Peck seems to do nothing that would arouse her suspicions . Maybe she is a Jungian intuitive type . But who cares ? You can't really take any of this seriously , not even the deaths that crop up in the story , because we have never seen the people who die . And the film is leavened with occasional shots of humor . Barnaby Jones - - I mean Buddy Ebson as the wisecracking sergeant keeps poking his head into a room full of guys listening to the radio and asks who's ahead - - the Yankees again ? And Ebson also has to go through one of those scenes in which he samples a bottle of absinthe , grimaces , shudders , and starts to speak in a hoarse whisper before clearing his throat and speaking normally . There is a running gag about a doctor who is trying to quit smoking by never carrying any cigarettes around , except that he keeps bumming them off other people . In my opinion the most amusing scene is one in which a British intelligence agent visits Peck and the two of them have soft drinks . On his way out , the Brit pauses at the door then walks back and leans over the secretary and asks what that stuff was in the brown bottle . " Root beer , sir , " she replies . He thinks for a moment , then comments , " Curious sort of stuff , don't you think ? " and leaves the room . Enjoyable minor film kind of drags you along with its quick unfolding of events . |
442,676 | 819,382 | 217,579 | 6 | Not bad for a TV movie . | Gary Lewis and the Playboys , Buddy Holly and the Crickets , Jason and the Argonauts . Sounds like a 1950s rock band but this outfit has legs , the story being at least 2300 years old - - and an oral tradition before that . It's a complicated narrative too . In order to save his mother's hide , Jason is forced by the king ( Dennis Hopper ) to undertake a dangerous sea voyage with two-dozen crew to a distant island and bring back the golden fleece , which is a sheepskin made of golden wool . The crew is full of familiar names . There are Castor and Pollux ( who speak with Slavic accents ) , Hercules , Orpheus , Atalanta , and some others . Well , they're not household worlds exactly , but famous nonetheless . Along the way they encounter dragons , clashing rocks , harpies who are half-bird and half-women and resemble my second-grade teacher , an army of women led by Natasha Henstridge , an angry Poseidon , clashing rocks , armed skeletons born of dragon's teeth , the witch Medea ( Jolene Blalock ) , the jealous king who wants to keep the golden fleece for himself ( Frank Langella ) , and various other dilatory things and events that happen to ordinary people who are in a hurry to get someplace . This movie , splendidly photographed , comes to us from Hallmark , along with their superior production of The Odyssey . There have been a couple of other retellings of the Greek myths lately and I think I know why . It's a chance for a special effects extravaganza . Willis O'Brian of " King Kong " fame was replaced by the more sophisticated effects of Ray Harryhausen , and now it's time for computer-generated images . They're pretty good too . The argonauts land on a rocky island and plant a spear and a giant eyeball appears nearby - - it's not an island at all , but the barnacle bedecked Poseidon taking a snooze , and , man , is he cranky when he wakes up . The weakest part of the film is in the performances . Jolene Blalock , who looks like Hilary Swank , is the image of a beautiful model - - and she acts like one . Adrian Lester , the African-American yuppie in " Primary Colors " , still looks like a yuppie . Olivia Williams as Hera isn't bad at all , but most of the gods and goddesses are no more than competent . For a great Zeus , a Zeus who has a touchy relationship with Hera because she knows he's been getting it on with mortal women , posing as a shower of coins or a swan or something , watch Lawrence Olivier in " Clash of the Titans . " The central figure of Jason is given to Jason London . Now , he may be a great guy in real life for all we know . He probably loves his dog . But he's gotten the pretty boy treatment in this movie . His hair looks done by a fashionable salon on Rodeo Drive . Every female in the film falls in love with him . They fawn over him , give him presents , happily rub oil or wine on his body ( twice ) . It's disgusting . And as if that weren't enough , London's acting is as flat as a pancake , perfectly suitable for a high-school play . Dennis Hopper is a great maniac , but he has to be seen ( and heard ) as a murderous Greek king to be believed . The best performance , surprisingly , is by Brian Thompson as Hercules . You'll recognize him when you see him . He's been an alien on the X-Files and a lank-haired greaseball of a heavy in some features . Still , this would make a good movie for the family . I suppose there are a few semi-nude scenes involving Natasha Henstridge - - not enough to suit me , but not enough to make any 10-year-old's eyes goggle either . The kids will probably treat it as nothing more than another action flick with plenty of CGI , but if they remember it at all , they'll be remembering a Greek myth . It might get them a bonus point on an IQ test sometime later in life . |
442,502 | 819,382 | 89,360 | 6 | Neat Courtroom / Romance Drama | The plot's probably familiar . Man seems falsely accused of killing his wife . Hires attractive woman as his defense counsel . They seem to fall in love . She discovers he's guilty . Justice is served . What separates this from a Lifetime Movie Network flick is that it's actually pretty well thought out and splendidly acted . Glenn Close is fine as the defense attorney . Watch her expression as the early victim from Santa Cruz describes her ordeal in the witness chair . She's a good actress . She has a nice figure too , although wardrobe seems to have cinched her waist so that her rump seems too pronounced . Jeff Bridges always brings something interesting to the party . Here he plays it relatively straight as the accused husband , relying on a relaxed sort of charm that is appropriate to the character . Pete Coyote as the villainous but clever prosecutor is surprisingly good . John Dehner is as reliable as a war horse as the judge . I can't think of a role that he hasn't invested with a certain dignity . Leigh Taylor-Young has only a single scene but she's devastating . It isn't simply that she has aged a bit and yet looks fine . The delivery of her lines is splendidly matched with her body language . The director is a big help with her scene but elsewhere seems to condescend to the audience . A woman testifies to being trapped by a masked stranger at her home , tied up , and having he breasts carved . It's a horrifying story . Being that , it can carry its own weight but the director has the witness sobbing from the beginning instead of showing the gradual rise in the trajectory of her emotions . And when Glenn Close , watching her , projects that exquisite empathy , the camera slowly dollies in closer so that we don't miss it . We wouldn't have missed it anyway , even without the director's hitting us over the head with it . There isn't much of a score and what there is of it is effectively programmatic , kind of like an updated version of Max Steiner's " Mickey Mouse " score for King Kong , in which the music imitates the events and situations we're watching on screen . ( During the requisite silent wait for the jury to come back with a verdict we don't actually hear a clock ticking . Instead , the music imitates the ticking of a clock . ) I wonder if this isn't the kind of movie that will be seen differently by different audiences . For men it might be a story about conflict in the courtroom with a romance thrown in . For women , on the other hand , it might more likely be seen as a story of the emotional relationship between Bridges and Close that is tested in a courtroom . I'm not at all sure that men would read it the way women would . Close's attraction to Bridges would seem - - not exactly inexplicable but rather taken for granted . Women might be able to tap into Bridges ' appeal more effectively . They're better at reading these kinds of situations than men are . ( I am speaking to you as your psychologist . That will be fifteen cents . ) Look at Jeff Bridges from a woman's point of view . He has all the qualities it takes to attract an unattached young woman . He is - - in no particular order - - rich , powerful , handsome , casual and unpretentious , polite , athletic ( plays racquetball , which replaced tennis as the game de jour of the aristos ) , sensitive ( he weeps when he enters the room where his wife was killed ) , intelligent ( she quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes and he identifies the source ) , doesn't smoke tobacco , and he's misunderstood by everyone else . Oh - - and he LOVES horses , which women also love . What more could you ask for in an alpha male - - pheromones ? Well , he's probably got them too , with more flavors than Baskin-Robbins . After the verdict is in , the movie kind of collapses in upon itself . Close finds irrefutable evidence that Bridges is the murder and rushes home with it . She tells Bridges on the phone that she has it . Of course this puts her in immediate danger of being slaughtered by him . Then she calls her friend and investigator , the vulgar but empathic Robert Loggia , and hysterically tells him , " Sam ! I need to talk to you ! I need you right away ! " He asks her what it is , but she abruptly falls silent . Loggia urges her to tell him what it is , but she smiles and replies , " It's nothing , Sam . I just wanted to thank you . " It's a cheap , old way of getting the audience to squirm and urge her to TELL HIM for Bog's sake ! Nobody can get through a scene like that and make it believable yet again . Still , nicely done . Well worth watching . |
443,034 | 819,382 | 109,444 | 6 | Okay , Clancy-Type International Action Thriller | Set between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the global war on terrorism , the films settles on Colombian cocaine cartels for a convenient set of villains . At that , however , it's a bit unusual for Tom Clancy , presuming the movie incorporates details from his novel . For one thing , the story allows at least one of the real murdering heavies to have a couple of kids that he delights in . And , BANG , the American Navy blows up a house full of drug lords and children . Unwittingly , to be sure , but still - - Secondly , the bad-guys-in-chief are not the Colombian drug lords . Their evil is taken for granted . Instead , the worst people are American politicians who undertake to do " the Potomac two-step " by engaging in illegal operations in a foreign country while preserving " plausible deniability " for the slyly knowing President . The PRESIDENT , mind you ! What we seem to have here is not exactly a film a clef , but at least an approximation of the Iran / Contra affair under President Reagan , in which Admiral Poindexter , F . B . I . head Casey , and Col . Oliver North did some sub rosa trading , which Reagan had no knowledge of . But those real-life events only provide a framework for a fantasy in which sneaky Washington politicians agree to help a drug lord put a lock on cocaine shipments in return for his guarantee that he'll turn over all the information he gains on his rivals , which will double our drug arrests and boost the president's popularity . The price to be paid for this agreement is that the slimy pols immediately shut down a Special Ops mission involving a dozen of our armed forces ' picked men . They do so , betraying the mission in the process . This leads to a couple of American deaths and the capture of the rest of the unit . A fierce fire fight at the end results in their extraction by helicopter , led by the stalwart Jack Ryan ( Harrison Ford ) and the better trained Willem DaFoe . I hope that some of us , those who paste bumper stickers on their cars that say things like , " Surrender is Not an Option , " will note that the Special Ops guys here , hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded , not only sensibly surrendered but lived to fight another day . In case you might miss the irony , the director cross cuts between the pious pompous platitudes given by the president at a state funeral , and the terrifying hell our doomed men in Colombia find themselves trapped in . It worked better during the baptism / slaughter at the climax of " The Godfather " but it's still effective . The film is pretty well done and must have been expensive to shoot . Lots of action scenes and an entire hacienda is blown to bits by a laser-guided bomb in a most spectacular boom . ( Actually several spectacular booms as the special effects detonations went off in different places at slightly different times . ) The technical stuff about paper-made bombs is pretty interesting . What a techie Clancy must be . In one earlier boom , Jack Ryan tumbles forward toward the camera while a slow-motion fireball explodes behind him . If I see this unbelievably hoary cliché one more time , I'm going to call the police , the FCC , the Environmental Protection Agency , and the Holy Name Society . What happens in franchises like the Jack Ryan saga is that as time goes by , as the characters become familiar , as the story lines coalesce insensibly into one another , the writers start killing off some of the people we've gotten used to seeing . Children , of course , are always at risk , but usually one of the first guys to go is a mentor . It took Rocky Balboa three cracks to kill Burgess Meredith . I think it's taken the same amount of time for Jack Ryan to lose Greer ( James Earl Jones ) , the admirable Admiral . Situation report . If you liked the earlier Jack Ryan stories , you'll like this one too . It's a little more disjointed in its plot , but has just as much in the way of intrigue and action , and Ryan remains the same boy scout he's always been . |
442,693 | 819,382 | 111,149 | 6 | The weed of crime bears bitter fruit . | The story is pretty threadbare . Three roommates or flatmates ( Eccleston , MacGregor , and Fox ) find their fourth roommate or flatmate dead , evidently a suicide . They're pretty nonchalant about the naked dead body in bed . They go through his drawers and his luggage and find thousands of pounds sterling , which gives them ideas about disposing of the body and keeping the cash . They matter-of-factly saw the body into parts , disposing of the hands and feet in acid , bashing in the face , and bury it in a shallow grave in the kind of densely wooded area where all dead bodies are found , as this one soon enough is . One of the three conspirators , Eccleston , a creepy guy with glasses to begin with , starts acting - - well , a little twisted . He sequesters himself in the attic and drills holes through the floor so that he can peek down on the other two . Two business-like goons looking for the missing cash show up and are killed by Eccleston , and disposed of in the same way as their erstwhile roommate or flatmate . The police find their remains as well . The police investigate . Things get a little more tense . Eccleston takes up with Fox and they are about to leave for Rio together , but it develops that there have been one or two , or maybe three , double crosses concerning the lolly . Everybody winds up dead . What this film has going for it are a number of things . For one , the performances are uniformly splendid . The principles and subordinates do a fine job . And Kerry Fox is attractive in a non-conventional way , slightly plump , but with magnetic eyelids . MacGregor looks as if he stopped having zits the day before yesterday . The direction is more than just functional . I think we notice it mainly when the film deals with the two detectives . There is one shot of these two goofy looking characters - - one who looks like Happy of the Seven Dwarfs and the other like a scarecrow - - seated next to one another on a sofa . They are silent . The shot lasts so long that the image itself turns slightly grotesque . But then these two detectives are really Doozies . Their dialog is almost surreal at times . " Only three people in the flat , not four , " says the senior detective to the other , " Write that down , would you ? ( Long pause ) You can use either letters or numbers . ( Long pause ) Which did you use ? " Answer : " Both . " It's quite stylishly done , especially given the budget , and worth catching . |
443,084 | 819,382 | 24,368 | 6 | Dementia Praewax . | A fast-paced , enjoyable thriller , directed by Michael Curtiz , anticipating the 1953 " House of Wax " . That's the one with Phyllis Thaxter and Vincent Price . This one has the cast you'd associate with a 1933 production - - Fay Wray , Frank McHugh , Lionel Atill , Glenda Farrell as a snippy reporter , and others . The stories are similar . A deranged sculptor , unable to use his burned hands any longer , begins to kill people and kidnap their bodies , coating them in wax for his museum display . An inquisitive young lady discovers the truth . A girl is captured and stripped and bound under a spigot which will soon spout boiling wax . The cops interrupt the proceedings . Ordinarily , compared to their originals , remakes are odious . In this case , I don't know . Actually , both are pretty good . The chief difference is that this was shot in two-strip Technicolor , which gives the viewer not only black and white , but a choice of two designer colors - - albino pink and ghoul green . The photography in the 1953 version is not only more sophisticated and colorful but was 3-D when it was shot . ( Watch out for that bouncing paddle ball ! ) The photography aside , this one has hammier acting , a slightly different plot , and was clearly written before the deranged minds of the censors tried to encase wholesomeness in a waxen shell . Everyone here seems to rush around throwing wisecracks at each other . " He's in the hoosegow . " " How's your sex life ? " " Everyone knew they were living together . " A female figure in the wax museum is , as they used to say , undraped . In the 1953 version the police withhold a drink from an alcoholic until he breaks and spills the beans . Here , it's a " junkie " . There are times when this one is pretty funny , which the later version never was . There's a scene in which Glenda Farrell , the reporter , tries to convince her boss , Frank McHugh , that something is wrong at the museum . Joan of Arc looks too much like a recently disappeared corpse . Farrell : " You ever hear of a death mask ? " McHugh : " I sure have . I was married to one for years . " Farrell : " I know . Then she came to life and divorced you . " The slam-bang quality of the direction and the snappy script cut a bit into the terror of the story , which the later version preserves intact . There's nothing here as scary as the scene in 1953 in which the helpless Phyllis Kirk is being chased through the stylized , deserted New York streets by the hideously disfigured artist . Both are kind of enjoyable in their slightly different ways , though . I always wonder what happens when , not the wax , but the too too solid flesh under it should melt . You ever hear of " the lost wax method " ? |
443,281 | 819,382 | 516,878 | 6 | Shall we dance ? | The usual capricious nonsense , this time about a school of ballroom dancing that recruits lonely bachelors as students and then bumps them off at graduation and replaces each with a foreign agent . Steed enrolls as a client . Mrs . Peel gets a job as instructor . Clues include a rose tattoo and a garlic sausage . Bizarre , yes . This episode has two things going for it , in addition to its intrinsic appeal . One is that Emma Peel's bare foot is cast in plaster in order to create a pair of hand-made dancing pumps . The man at the shoe shop casts Mrs . Peel's foot but not before examining it with a fetishist's fascination . He speaks in a fey continental accent to the foot as he caresses it , scolding the toes for speaking to him , " Naughty chatterboxes . " The second is the studio's alcoholic band leader . There are few people who can play drunks on the screen while making them both funny and believable but this guy is one of them - - maybe his name is Larry Cross . In the neighborhood of roles like this , Lee Marvin is his only neighbor that I'm aware of . He stumbles precariously around . He smiles but in a way that signals confusion . His every word must be completed by someone else . It's all pretty amusing . |
442,218 | 819,382 | 124,718 | 6 | All over the court but sometimes compelling . | The director , Spike Lee , has got talent . No question about it . He stylizes the film with momentary flashbacks and slow motion - - but just enough . Not so much as to interfere with the narrative or attract attention to the director . And the photography , as is usual in his films , is truly splendid . Coney Island never looked quite so inviting , at least not for the last fifty years or so . The story - - the best high school basketball player being tempted with all sorts of material benefits to sign up for prestigious schools - - gives Lee a chance to indulge his fascination with basketball . I must admit that basketball never fascinated me . When I was a kid there was nothing but baseball . But , now , it seems that instant gratification trumps patience . Who wants to wait for the pitcher to dig his cleated shoe into the mound , remove his hat and wipe the sweat from his brow , acknowledge signals from the catcher , glance at first base , the wind up , the pitch , the call - - yawn . Basketball is all motion by regulation . Still , " White Men Can't Jump " was a pretty good movie about basketball . And " He Got Game " doesn't have that much basketball in it , and nothing at all that's technical . It's chiefly a story of Ray Allen , who must choose a lesser school or see his father ( Denzel Washington ) go back to Attica . And it's the story of the relationship between Washington , who accidentally offed his wife , and Allen , who despises his father . There isn't really a boring moment in it , although , to be sure , it wanders all over the place and explores , however briefly and unsatisfactorily , a number of issues and the conflicts they generate . Lee has chosen to use Aaron Copeland's music to provide a symphonic score that is curiously at odds with the lives we're watching . The visuals get down on their knees and sob for hip hop . Yet the score is appropriate because it helps to universalize a story that otherwise might seem locked into too narrow a cultural setting . Ray Allen , sports figure , can't act very well . He's an object of envy anyway . Full of principle , for one thing . Old Denzel's future would have been lost the moment that Italian salesman offered me the two-million dollar platinum watch . Also , is there a greater imaginable thrill on Planet Earth than getting it on with Rosario Dawson while in the cage of one of those giant swings in the amusement park ? Denzel Washington gives one of his best performances and the others are easily up to par , especially Bill Nunn as Allen's new Dad who is unable to see any future that doesn't include diamond pinkie rings and a new Lexus . He's hilarious . I've always been chary of Spike Lee since " Do the Right Thing , " which closes with admonishments from Martin Luther King , Jr . , and Malcom X - - in that climactic order . The last words were " by any means necessary . " When the goal to be achieved is something as vague and general as " freedom " or " democracy " , using any means you consider necessary can get you into trouble . Instead of achieving freedom you're liable to achieve jail , and instead of achieving democracy you're liable to achieve a somebody else's civil war . There are sentiments that belong on bumper stickers and nowhere else . However , Lee's films generally have been far from rabble rousers , and " He Got Game " is no exception . It's a well-done drama with a couple of clunkers in it . ( A magic basketball sails all the way from Attica's exercise yard to the court at Big State University . ) The whole thing , weaknesses notwithstanding , is odd but gripping . We really DO want to see how it turns out . |
442,997 | 819,382 | 109,417 | 6 | Miami Bitch | Anyone seeing this will recognize it as a variation on " Body Heat . " In some ways it's better , but in most it's not as good . " Body Heat " had several things going for it that " China Moon " does not . Its sultry score was distinctive . This score is generically blue . So's the photography . In " Body Heat , " the images actually looked hot . In the café scenes you could almost smell the humidity and the fat molecules hanging in the air , although in fact they were probably shot through a Vaseline-coated lens . Here , instead of heat , we get a harsh icy blue tint to many of the scenes . When we are out of doors , in the rain and mud , under the blue lights , it seems positively chilly . ( And the director was a photographer himself ! ) The acting in both films is mixed . Kathleen Turner sounds breathless but doesn't exude a particularly high level of heat energy , whereas Bill Hurt is excellent as a dumb lawyer . Ed Harris here is less inventive that Hurt but does a solid job . As for Madeleine Stowe . It isn't easy to measure physical beauty accurately . Lately psychologists have been fiddling around with various mathematical ratios based on the idea that facial symmetry per se is attractive , but the results so far have been mostly good for laughs . A more reliable , if rougher , way to get at it is to filter one person's appearance through someone else's perception of it . Build an ordinal scale of ranks . You can get a pretty good idea of how attractive a face looks if you ask 100 members of the opposite sex to rank it from one to ten , ten being highest . Stowe , I should think , would come out pretty high on such a scale , although symmetry would have absolutely nothing to do with it , anymore than it would with Nastassja Kinsky or Gwyneth Paltrow . Not a bit of it . Stowe's anthracite irises are slightly crossed under their long black lashes , and her lips are appealingly askew . She may not be symmetrical , but man she could play a Franklin stove and get away with it . The plot , such as it is , isn't as filled with the kind of intrigue and uncertainties of the original model . It has a certain familiar mechanical quality to it . Much more stuff about switched and hidden guns . And it ends in a kind of tragic shootout , instead of a full-throated blast of irony . It's also a bit hard to follow , in a way the original was not . Until the shooting of Stowe's husband , I could understand all of it . Stowe genuinely loved Harris . After that , when the frame begins to take shape , I became confused about when the sinister plot was planned and hatched . And why and when did Stowe's emotion toggle from love to exploitation ? The story no longer made sense , having lost its continuity with the first half . And , surprisingly , it lacks evocative touches and local color . No tinkling wind chimes . No humor to speak of . And Florida ? It could as easily have been Nebraska . |
442,395 | 819,382 | 71,970 | 6 | A puzzling puzzle . | I guess I get the general idea . There is this ultra-secret organization , The Parallax Corporation , that specializes in - - what ? - - assassinations ? And Warren Beatty is a reporter who gets suspicious after the public killing of a politician and begins to investigate . He assumes an undercover identity and manages to have himself hired by Parallax . He thinks he is being hired as an assassin but it turns out he's being set up for the fall after the next political assassination . Jim Davis is knocked off and Beatty , mistaken for a " lone gunman " , is shot down . I also get the general sense of paranoia , of preposterous conspiracies , of unfathomable power , of utter ruthlessness , that permeates the air . And I can understand it . There was a wave of assassinations in the 1960s and this is a gut response to the improbability of it all . Yet this story is as unbelievable as the assassinations themselves . The Parallax Corporation is a paranoid's fantasy . How do they recruit members ? By having them fill out and mail in printed application forms , as if for a credit card ? And the recruit is simply hired ? There is no training program ? And the assassination business is so lucrative that a monumental enterprise like Parallax can sustain itself and make a profit on its fees ? And despite the recruitment of psychopaths and assembled nuts of loose virtue and looser lips , nobody has ever been able to blab to the New York Times or Rolling Stone or Tim Russert ? Bill McKinney is the chief hands-on assassin . Disguised as a waiter or somebody he shoots people in public , plants bombs on airplanes , and carries out , presumably , other dastardly deeds . But he should be EASY to spot and catch . One All Points Bulletin from one honest police department - - just pick up everyone who looks like Bill McKinney , the sodomite in " Deliverance . " That man has no future as an assassin . I can't just dump this movie , though , because conspiracies do exist in real life , though not to this grand and immaculate an extent . The film is beautifully shot and well edited . Gordon Willis's photography is glossy and dark and draws its images in primary colors , almost like a TV movie . There's nothing wrong with Warren Beatty's performance and he has exceptional support from people like Hume Cronyn , Paula Prentiss , and William Daniels . And the casting is nicely done . The recruiter for Parallax , the man who first contacts Beatty , is not at all slimy or threatening . He's short , unprepossessing , polite , sympathetic , believable . When Beatty is posing as a troubled , violent liar , and the recruiter tells him , " I like you . I want to be your friend , " we can almost trust him . It's exciting too . There is both action and suspense . Beatty is almost swept away in a flood , which makes sense in the context of the story . And he is taunted for his long hair in a redneck saloon and gets into a fight and proves his manliness , which is nothing more than a sop to the more tolerant among us . And when Beatty is on an airliner and discovers there is a bomb aboard , how does he warn the cadre without getting nailed himself for having planted it ? ( Otherwise , how would he know ? ) Allen J . Pakula was a talented director , as we know from his other work , and drawn to bureaucratic conspiracies . It's well worth seeing but I don't enjoy watching it often . It's pretty depressing when you come right down to it . |
442,692 | 819,382 | 47,209 | 6 | Down these mean streets . . . . . | A minor film about Jack the Ripper who , in this instance , is named Slade and played with unrelenting intensity by Jack Palance . It's not bad . The two Jacks are a little more sympathetic here than usual , though no less suspicious . It's essentially a remake of Laird Cregar's " The Lodger " and , if I remember , Alfred Hitchcock's silent movie . Since much of the film's impact depends on our not knowing for certain whether Palance is the Ripper , we can't see him committing any crimes . That's just as well , considering the nature of the crimes . The near absence of violence leaves the weight of the movie on the increasing number of incidents suggesting that Palance is in fact the man that his landlady suspects him of being . ( And the husband , Rhys Williams , does not . ) But what a clumsy Jack he is . If the Ripper was seen carrying a brown bag , Palance must burn his in his attic and stink up the place . If the Ripper was seen wearing a certain kind of coat , Palance must sneak down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and stuff his into the kitchen stove . And he gets caught every time ! Palance , possibly as the result of an airplane accident during WWII , has a face that looks chiseled out of marble . It's spooky as hell without being ugly . So , while Laird Cregar might not have elicited any interest from his hosts ' niece , a " showgirl " , Palance conceivably could , and does . The saucy babe is played by a pretty young woman decked out in period clothes , period grooming , singing period songs . The period is the early 1950s . " Ohh la la ! " she chirps while attempting a chaste cancan at the local club . Well , she may be attracted a little to Palance , but her true love is some blandly handsome greasy detective who could benefit from a bit of Jack the Ripper's attention without doing irreparable damage to the movie . A couple of botched nips and tucks might have made him more engaging . Alas , the course of true love never does run smooth . The attraction is asymmetrical . Palance may love her but she's frightened to death when he hits on her too forcefully . There is a chase and Palance is sent up the river . ( " So cool , so clean , " he says earlier about the Thames . In 1875 you could get cholera just by looking cross-eyed at it . ) I enjoyed it , and you might too . Slickly done . |
443,305 | 819,382 | 516,887 | 6 | Age regression . | This episode conforms to the usual template . Someone is killing off a couple of aristocrats who head a hush-hush missile program . The secret is that when these Lords and Viscounts and Honorables pick up a toddler's bouncing ball , a psychedelic drug enters their bodies through their fingertips ( cf . , Woody Allen's sphere in Sleeper ) . The substance regresses them to the age of toddlers and then , under the influence of a phony nanny , they either spill the beans or are shot . It's kind of amusing to see the contrast between the impeccably mannered noblemen and the near-infants they become under the influence . The performers do a fine job of being childishly enthusiastic or passively petulant if scolded . Mrs . Peel doesn't have much to do , but Steed infiltrates the nanny school that is the organization's headquarters . |
442,204 | 819,382 | 516,884 | 6 | Kind of cute . | This is an endearing episode , full of the usual whimsical , antinomian nonsense of the series . There's little logic and not much suspense . It's a comic adventure strip more than anything else , without a laugh track . Some gaggle of manufacturers has invented an anti-fertilizer that kills every living thing it's sprayed on , from earthworms to martlets . They plan to grab 40 million pounds in exchange for not wiping out Dorset . The dialog is keen and underplayed , just as the action scenes are outrageously overplayed . Mrs . Peel and one of the heavies trade snips of poetry about roses ( from Francis Thompson and Robert Herrick ) and before a fox hunt , Steed throws off a well-known epigram from Oscar Wilde . Mrs . Peel mentions the name of one of the hoods , a game keeper named Mellors . Steed replies , " Not Mellors THE game keeper , " and Emma throws him a glance with the density of basalt . I take the exchange to involve an allusion to Lady Chatterly's ithyphallic man-of-the-earth but don't want to take the time to make sure . Other curious exchanges are not so literary . Steed is speaking to an attractive woman who comments that he's a bit tall in the saddle , and Emma does a double take . Emma later also mentions something sarcastic about the babe's having " a good seat , " on which judgment Steed concurs . Emma shows one or two other signs of jealousy , and it raises the question of just what the hell these two have got going between them . The episode ends with two fox hunters riding Mrs . Peel down in a field before Steed charges on his white horse in to save her , the music intimating Wagner . That's some fox alright . |
442,491 | 819,382 | 126,886 | 6 | A Pleasant Surprise | I wasn't expecting much from the movie - - another audience-specific story of high school intrigue and bitchiness and comic one liners , along the lines of " Clueless " and what seems to be an interminable string of others . The setting is a high school in Omaha , and the focal point the election for the president of the Student Government Association . Not too promising , is it ? But it's a surprisingly engaging tale of morality - - not just among teen agers but adults as well . Nothing spectacular in the direction or the acting . Mathew Broderick is fine as the geometry teacher at Carver High School . Reese Witherspoon does nicely in the part of the tight-lipped , friendless , ambitious bitch , and the rest of the cast is at least up to professional standards . It's the writing that lifts this story out of the ordinary . The machinations of the high school students ( whose characters vary from smart and selfish to too dumb to be anything other than generous ) are paralleled by the sins of the adults , the chief one of which is Broderick having a fling with a colleague's wife . Not that there are a lot of cute zingers in the dialog , as there are in " Pretty Persuasion " . The comedy is distributed in dribbles throughout the development of the plot . And if the comedy is figure , the ground is always moral drama . A slight adjustment of the viewer's perception and what we're watching isn't really so funny . There are lines in the dialog that embody a piquant irony . The night before the SGA election , the three most prominent candidates get down on their knees and pray to God . The fustian Witherspoon's prayer runs along the lines of , " You know I hardly ever ask You for anything , God , but in this case I must insist . " The angry lesbian's prayer goes something like , " I don't often pray to You , but that's only because I don't believe in You . Can you punish my enemies ? " The rich , stupid , gangling skiier says , " I want to thank you for all my blessings . I have a new car for my 16th birthday and a new watch and , I've been told , a big penis . " I won't go on , I guess . Things turn out more or less as they might in real life . People pay for their inadequacies and live with the consequences . Except I have some doubts that a teacher fired from an Omaha high school for moral terpitude would find a lucrative job as a guide at the American Museum of Natural History . That aside , it's not a bad movie , all sugary-looking on the surface but unleavened bread underneath . |
443,465 | 819,382 | 223,954 | 6 | Money is the Root of All . | Ed Harris , freshly out of the slams , hires a bunch of telemarketers to make cold calls and sell a gold mine . Julia Ormond , his girl friend , is his right-hand woman . Vince Vaughn is the most hard-headed and cynical of the hired salesmen . Harris tells Vaughn and the rest that this is not a scam . That he truly believes in this venture , that they will all make a lot of money and will do good while amassing their fortunes . As in much of life , these windy promises with their pellucid purity , turn out to be part of a mega-scam and everyone winds up sucking wind except Harris and Ormond . Vaughn winds up sadder - - and certainly broker - - but not necessarily wiser . This conspectus , I realize , makes the film sound like a poor man's independent production of " Glenngary Glenn Ross , " and it is . It could have been written by David Mammon himself . I mean Mamet . Actually this is a good film , nicely done in every respect . The script especially is a winner through and through . Inquiring about a new job , an applicant asks , " Are there benefits ? " " Yeah , you get to eat and pay the rent . " A caller is being turned down by a potential customer and hollers into the phone , " you , you dried-up old bag . I hope the cancer kills you ! " " GENE ! " , his boss shouts in alarm . " Okay , okay , " Gene continues reasonably into the phone , " I was just kidding . But listen , suppose the cancer does spread and kill you , and you've never been to Hawaii . How's THAT going to make you feel ? " The boss advises another recruit , " It's a bad idea to greet your customer by asking , ' Are you high ? ' " When Vaughn quizzes Harris about the job , he demands daily cash payments . " Okay , " says Harris , " you got it , but instead of 20 percent it's 17 percent because it's a pain in the ass for book keeping . " A less thoughtful and realistic script , sticking to the bare conventions , would not have added that final fillip . All the characters are surprisingly well fleshed out , and the direction is functional without being in any way splashy or full of self display . There is no Big Message behind the film , unless you want to get into something too chiliastic for human consumption , but it's well worth watching , amusing and instructive . |
442,018 | 819,382 | 516,908 | 6 | Beware of Old Ladies Bearing Knitting Needles . | Enjoyable whimsy . Diana Rigg disappears and is replaced by an innocent paid impostor , Liz Fraser , who has no idea why she's been hired for the job . Steed ( Patrick MacNee ) and Fraser try to track down the villains , who happen to run a knitting circle for elderly female persons . Some of them are programmed to go around stabbing people with their knitting needles . Steed and Fraser , on the trail of Diana Rigg , visit one of their classes where an effete man is instructing them on the rhythm of knitting - - " Worm and parcel with the lay , turn and serve the other way , " he sings - - or something like that . The wit is subdued and veddy British . Steed winds up getting coshed with large vases by accident , several times . That's about the closest anyone comes to a pratfall . Some of the quiet gags may get past younger viewers . The trail of clues leads to a team of lawyers called Barret , Barret , and Wimpole . Then to a costumiers led by a team named John , Paul , George - - and Fred . ( This is England , 1963 . ) After Diana Rigg is kidnapped at the start , very little is seen of her . Or - - well , she disappears for most of the film , but it would be inaccurate to say that little is seen of her . She appears at the beginning for a few seconds dressed in the tiniest swimsuit known to man or beast . It's short , but it's a very artistic scene . The whole thing is nonsense but an engaging divertimento . |
441,706 | 819,382 | 47,191 | 6 | I Love Lucy Writ Large . | We've come to take for granted that successful TV series will be made into full-length feature films . Even those that are extraordinarily dumb make it onto the big screen . But transferring " I Love Lucy " to the screen was an unusual move in the early 1950s . For one thing , the movies hadn't needed to adapt series from television since they had their own - - Charlie Chan , Abbott and Costello , Mr . Moto , Joe Palooka , Nancy Drew . Tarzan . For another , there was some question of whether people who could watch " I Love Lucy " at home for nothing would pay to see her and her husband , Desi Arnaz , in the theater . Well , they paid and the movie was a commercial success leading to a sequel , " Forever Darling , " which was not . Lucy and Ricky , here trying to slip past us under the noms de film of Tacy and Nicky , get married and go on their honeymoon out West in a new trailer and car they can't afford . " I Love Lucy " was sometimes pretty funny in its own silly way and the humor stays at about the same level , but the larger budget allows the writers to open the story up and show us more expensive and exotic gags . One of them has Lucy trying to prepare an elaborate dinner while alone in the jouncing trailer . The huge bowl of Caesar salad winds up on her head and she's covered with flour from head to foot , right out of " Sullivan's Travels , " but still amusing . You wouldn't know this was directed by Vincent Minelli if you didn't already know it . The acting must have come easily to the two stars since they'd been playing the same characters on TV for a couple of years . Lucy does bring a bit more drama to a scene at the end , but it's misplaced and unexpected . I've always found Dezi Arnaz to be engaging . Not his acting , but his accent . At the trailer park , " I'm goeen to talk to the manayer . " Where ? " At the garotch . " On the show , " Fred Mertz " always came out as " Frat Murse " , and " recognize talent " became " recognize Stalin . " We've certainly progressed from trailers since 1950 . Big ones , like that shown here , were novelties . As late as 1959 , John Steinbeck had to have a pick up truck customized to provide a built-in bunk . Now , of course , we have recreational vehicles of various sizes and classes - - A , B , C , and Elephantine . RV parks provide the traveler with water and power and landscaped terrain and TV cables and internet plug-ins . Question : Why leave home ? |
442,379 | 819,382 | 70,022 | 6 | Stylized study of murder and character . | Everybody likes to ride around on a motorcycle in the sunshine , and , what with the desert climate of southern Arizona , you get not only the wind in your hair and the scent of sagebrush but a rosy tan as well . Unfortunately , Robert Blake and his partner , Zipper ( Billy Green Bush ) , are constrained by their police uniforms and what they call proper police procedure , or PPP . The movie is essentially about how closely the police force follows that procedure when murder is involved . Two old weirdos live in a desert trailer and when one is found murdered the other ( Elisha Cook , Jr . , more flamboozled than ever ) is arrested . But did he do it ? And , if so , why ? The written story is dated . The affable and sympathetic Blake is taken under the wing of his superior , Mitch Ryan , a big blustering detective who beats up hippie informants while Blake must stand silently by . Yes , this is a movie which pits the ugly cops against the far-from-innocent but still human hippies . The hippies dress in rags , do dope , and - - hold on - - they have long hair . All they want is to be left unhassled , but Ryan is intent on cementing community relations by beating them to a pulp . Mitchell is not only a bully but , even worse , his drunken girl friend explains to Blake that he is also impotent , causing Mitchell to almost pop his cork and hate Blake , finally demoting him and putting him back in uniform on his hated police motorcycle . ( He'd love to have a more colorful machine with Electraglide transmission . ) I think Blake's motorcycle represents the police force , which in turn represents the society which the hippies must live in and which hates them for reasons that are " accidental " rather than " essential . " Mainly , they look funny . ( None of them can act , either . ) In fact , I think Robert Blake's character must illustrate Edmund Burke's dictum , " All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing . " How else can we explain this good man's assassination by previously harassed hippies at the end ? Why else does Blake suffer ? He's guilty of no wrong doing , intelligent enough to solve a rather complicated homicide , and in the end courageous enough to tell his sadistic boss that the boss is full of horse hockey . The dialog is kind of stylized , especially Mitch Ryan's . He carries on with his rodomontade as if speaking to Jesus . It isn't exactly realistic . That's okay because at least it's an attempt to be original . The narrative , though , sometimes falls flat . After being promoted to detective by Ryan , Blake lovingly dresses himself in expensive new civilian clothes , if a modified cowboy outfit can be considered civilian , and strides outside only to look down and see that he's forgotten to put on his trousers . It's not really either credible or amusing , though it's supposed to be cute , I guess . The direction is okay . The camera is where it should be , and at the proper times , but - - can we have some kind of moratorium on slow-motion violence ? Sheez ! A pursued hippie on a motorcycle crashes through a cafe window and I fell asleep before he finally hit the floor . The climactic scene was shot in Monument Valley . Warning to all film makers . Lay off . That's John Ford territory . |
442,786 | 819,382 | 516,924 | 6 | eHarmony : The Prequel . | It gets a little wearisome explaining who John Steed and Mrs . Peel are , what their characters are like , the villains they typically encounter , and all the rest of the continuous features of this series . So I'll just point out one or two of the ways in which each episode is distinctive . In this case , men and women seeking marital partners through a matchmaking agency are being killed . I mean , like , eleven in a row . Steed and Mrs . Peel sign up separately and discover a nefarious plot in which the wealthier applicants are killed off , sometimes by each other , in order somehow to benefit the agency itself . ( The usual double entendres and underplayed jokes are present . When asked what kind of mate she is seeking , Mrs . Peel mentions good breeding and " stamina . " The interviewer raises his eyebrow . ) As a matter of fact , Steed is encouraged and finally persuaded to knock off Mrs . Peel , in return for another client knocking off the ( non-existent ) cousin who stands between Steed and the family fortune . Mrs . Peel is forced by circumstances to play possum and be displayed in an open coffin . She is almost caught by the heavies when , tipsy with the champagne that Steed has thoughtfully hidden with her , she climbs out and dances around in her shroud . There is a final brawl at a wedding display and someone gets hit in the face with a cake . Capricious incidents abound , barely rising above the silly . During a serious analysis of the goings on , Mrs . Peel is stretched on the sofa playing " The Ride of the Valkyries " on a tuba and Steed is chipping golf balls about the room . One of the balls bounces into the bell of the tuba and the scene dissolves with Steed trying desperately to extract the lodged golf ball with his putter . The episode is by no means below the average for the series . |
443,224 | 819,382 | 35,612 | 6 | Wartime Sabotage . | The Adventures of Tartu . Sounds like a children's movie , doesn't it ? Maybe about an orphan elephant or a unicorn . But it's more serious than that . Robert Donat is a British chemist sent into Rumania , through Germany , into Czechoslovakia to sabotage a huge industrial plant where the Nazis are manufacturing vast amounts of poison gas . Since he is fluent in Rumanian and German , he is able to impersonate a real Rumanian " Iron Guard " officer named Jan Tartu . In Pilsen , Czechoslovakia , whence " Pilsener " beer , he lodges with a patriotic Czech family , along with Valerie Hobson , the soul of elegance . The youngster in the family , a factory worker , is the teen-aged Glynis Johns , she of the wide brow and slanted eyelids . Donat is given one of those black Nazi uniforms with the tight boots and wide riding breeches that the movies required of the Nazis at that time , and he is appointed supervisor of the workers at the plant . He needs the help of the Czech underground but he doesn't know how to get in touch with them . Can he trust Valerie Hobson , who seems like a closet patriot under all that arrogance ? The Gestapo keep nosing around though , so he must be ever vigilant . Identities get mixed up . Mistakes are made . Glynis Johns is caught sabotaging some of the shells being manufactured in the plant and is executed . But Donat succeeds in his mission , blows the plant to smithereens , and makes a suspenseful escape with Hobson and a few other patriots in a Junkers 88 . For such a complicated yet slight tale , the story generates a good deal of suspense . And it's an appealing piece of work , due in large measure to Donat's performance as the ersatz Iron Guard officer . He overplays the womanizing trait of the character but that's a problem with the script and the direction , not Donat's performance . He's charming in the role and seems a likable kind of guy . The rest of the cast consists of seasoned players and provides good support . The story seems a little trite now . There were so many like it during the war . Errol Flynn's " Desperate Journey " was a lot more fun , and Fritz Lang's " Hangmen Also Die " did a better job of capturing the ethos of occupied Czechoslovakia . Still , this is not a bad example of the genre . It's too bad that Czechoslovakia has been split into the Czech Republic and that other independent nation whose name I can never remember . It makes one of the London Times ' crossword puzzle entries obsolete . Quick - - name a major seaport in the middle of Czechoslovakia . Oslo . CzechOSLOvakia . Get it ? What can you do with a name like The Czech Republic ? " Name a British saloon near the end of The Czech Republic " ? That's ridiculous . |
442,498 | 819,382 | 43,379 | 6 | Run Out Your Larboard Guns ! | C . S . Forester's Captain must have been part of the global collective consciousness at one time . Lyndon Johnson's Vice President was once mistakenly introduced at a public gathering as " Hubert Horatio Hornblower . " I'm not sure anything like that could happen today since the art of reading novels has all but died and this film isn't shown so often on television . This is an above-average adventure film , a salubrious blend of sea battles , romance , politics , and history . It lies somewhere between the comic fantasy of " The Crimson Pirate " and the earnest drama of " Damn the Defiant " - - maybe in the suite next to " The Sea Hawk . " Hornblower , a stern but fair captain , somewhat stiff , takes the British frigate Lydia to the coast of central America to deliver arms to a would-be dictator whose ambitions will draw ships of Spain - - Napolean's ally - - away from Europe . Well , I'll tell you , the dictator , who calls himself El Supremo ( " The Supreme " ) is one nasty banana eater . Half mad , he crucifies dissidents , tries to order the very proper Hornblower around , and is made up to look like he just crawled out of a vat of grease . He fairly drips with it . Fortunately , Spain switches sides in the wars and Hornblower discovers that El Supremo is now an enemy , which gives Hornblower a chance to take his small frigate and blow the much larger Natividad , and her captain , El Supremo , to smithereens in a well-staged and exciting battle . Hornblower is forced by adventitious circumstance to take aboard the sweet but tangy Virginia Mayo . She's supposed to be the sister of the Duke of Wellington but she looks and speaks as if she's been raised on Midwestern corn and cream . Come to think of it , amid all the rest of the English cast , Gregory Peck as Hornblower doesn't try for an English accent , which is just as well , if his pronunciation of French is any indication of his talent with dialects . Anyway , pfui with the romance . It's just thrown in there as a sop to the women in the 1953 audience . This is an adventure movie . The Lydia arrives back in England where Hornblower is treated as a hero and given a ship of the line to command . Against orders he sails her into the harbor at Nantes or someplace , under the guns of the French fort , sinks four of Napolean's ships , which by a chain of contingencies too circuitous to detail would have supplied Napolean with the arms he needed to fight Wellington . ( In other words , Hornblower more or less saves the continent of Europe . ) He sinks his punctured ship of the line in the main channel , bottling up the entire French fleet . The French are ridiculed too , but not nearly as much as El Supremo . For his sins , he is captured and he and two subordinates are being sent to Paris for trial as pirates . They escape , disguise themselves as Dutchmen , capture another ship , and sail her out of France to England , where all is resolved , including the nascent romance with the Duke of Wellington's sister . I almost wrote Duke of Ellington . The whole thing is done breezily and with few serious moments . Peck seems to be enjoying himself during some of the action scenes but is otherwise his rather wooden professional persona . In this case , as in some of his other films , it fits the character well . Just enough attention in paid to period detail to mask any carelessness . The outdoor scenes were shot on the French Riviera ( which may in part account for Peck's seeming to enjoy himself ) and every scene , whether in Central America or England or France's Atlantic coast , is bright , sunny , and very temperate . The sailors never even have to wear coats or change their wardrobe . In the romantic scenes aboard ship - - on the weather deck , with the wind billowing the sails above - - Peck's hair is jelled to perfection with not a strand out of place . I gather that Forester's novels were more dramatic in tone and full of details about seamanship . But that doesn't matter . The movie is easily digested . Sit back and enjoy it . |
441,738 | 819,382 | 51,019 | 6 | Tightly written military school drama . | Ben Gazzara is Jocko de Paris , a senior cadet at a military school and a real sadistic rat . His fellow students include some familiar names including Pat Hingle and George Peppard . This is one of those military schools in which senior cadets constantly rag the plebes , making them do and say foolish things , within reason . The problem is that Gazzara doesn't seem to recognize the limits of the permissable . At the very beginning , he sets up a phony poker game in the room of two freshman , Peppard and Storch . Gazzara and pal Hingle intend to cheat a rather dull football-playing senior , James Olson , out of ninety-some dollars - - after they get Olson drunk . So far , so good , except that Hingle's reactions clue us in to the fact that two bottles of liquor in the cadets ' room is a bit much . But then we are sort of blindsided by a shift in the plot . The bilking of Olson is shunted aside as Gazzara pounds on the wall in a deliberate attempt to arouse the cadet , Geoffrey Horne , sleeping in the next room - - knowing all the while that Horne , the son of the commanding officer , is bound to report the noisy and illegal goings on . Horne duly reports the ruckus but when the guards investigate , all seems to have been restored to normal . Then some important events occur but are elided from the narrative . At the next morning's roll call , Horne is absent but is found bloody and drunk elsewhere on the campus . Subsequent dialog , which is a little fuzzy , indicates that Jocko de Paris beat Horne unconscious , then shoved a tube down into his belly and poured whiskey into it from a douche bag . Peppard , Hingle , Richards , and Olson were also involved somehow , but it's not clear how . " The room was so dark Ah didn't know whut was happenin ' , " explains Hingle . Anyhow , Horne is convicted of enough offenses to get him expelled , which happens apace , though it breaks his father's heart ( Larry Gates , not the only 50s utility player with no discernible talent ) . Does Gazzara feel any remorse ? Like heck . Then why did he do it , having nothing against Geoffrey Horne to begin with ? He did it because he enjoys seeing people in pain , a statement that reminds me a little of my marriage , so better to say Gazzara did it for reasons similar to those of the two dudes who first climbed Mount Everest . Or maybe Rhoda in " The Bad Seed . " Not only does Gazzara get another cadet kicked out , but when Hingle questions him about the ethics of the deed , Gazzara tells him that he , Hingle , will be held responsible as the ringleader . " I used to think you was a card , Jocko , and you are . You the ace of spades , boy . " Well , very briefly , the other cadets involved have a crisis of conscience , and confess to the cadets ' honor society . They kidnap Gazzara after making him sign a confession , blindfold him , tote him around while he threatens them and screams with fear , and dump him on a train that departs the town . The end . It's an interesting film for a number of reasons , if not an especially important one . The problems dealt with seem rather minor in some ways . We don't get to know Goeffrey Horne's victim at all , so his victimization is drained of some of its dramatic potential . And although we want to see Jocko punished for his misdeeds , it would be nicer if the system itself handed out justice . Instead we have to rely on a couple of dozen cadets who take matters into their own hands , coercing a confession out of Gazzara and then committing crimes in the course of getting rid of him . Gazzara aptly compares them to the Ku Kux Klan . The plot also isn't true to itself . Throughout , Gazzara has displayed cunning and self discipline , yet at the end is shrieking with horror , whining not to be hurt , babbling beggarly pleas . The climax would have been more effective had Gazzara faced his punishment bravely , if not necessarily with dignity . What's interesting about it is seeing so many familiar faces so near the beginnings of their careers . Can you imagine Pat Hingle as a young military cadet ? Or James Olson with a full head of hair ? Gazzara gives what is probably his best performance as the sinister , sadistic Jocko , although his outrageous hamminess as Al Capone later in his career , an imitation Marlon Brando , his cheeks stuffed with what appear to be rolls of toilet paper , is much funnier . There are also intimations of homosexuality on the part of two of the cadets . ( One is not very covert . ) There were to be a number of films in the two decades to follow that were set among the cadet community at The Citadel or somewhere , splashier than this one , but this was an original by Calder Willingham . The one I enjoy most , actually , is an episode in the TV series " Colombo , " called " Dawn's Early Light . " The heavy is Patrick McGoohan and in his acting he outshines anyone else in any of the military cadet movies . |
443,353 | 819,382 | 39,515 | 6 | Noir is unfocused . | Well , it's got all the right trimmings - - Dick Powell , Thomas Gomez , Lee J . Cobb with a cigar . Names that sound phony and semi-ethnic - - " Guido Marchettis , " " Johnny O'Clock " . Released in 1947 , black and white . High-class setting with diversions into the seedier parts of an unnamed city . Tough cop , greasy heavy , lying ex-girlfriend , innocent blond new girlfriend , treacherous jealous friend . Edgy dialogue . ( Gunshots offscreen ) " What's that noise ? " " Somebody's got a nasty cough . " " I've got a bullet in my gut and fire in my brain . " " You were in the army . What did you learn ? " " What I already knew . " " My man was killed . " " Accident ? " " Yes - - the war . " The photography is neat and crisp . Rossen's direction is efficient . He moves the bodies about with ease . But the plot is simply lacking in real drama and doesn't have much in the way of character development . There seem to be several unrelated subplots . A young woman seems to have committed suicide , but maybe it's murder . Her sister arrives in town and falls for Johnny O'Clock ( Dick Powell ) but will they marry ? A bad cop disappears . But we don't really get to know any of them to care much about them . And everything is pulled together with a few offhand words by Dick Powell just before the end . I kind of wanted to like it because I'm fond of noirs and think that Rossen's work elsewhere has sometimes been superb , but this one got by me . People walk around and talk to one another . There are card games and two shootings . Girls smile at men , who dismiss them . It's all on the surface . As the detective says in " Psycho , " " If it doesn't jell , it isn't aspic . And this isn't jelling . " It's still interesting to watch - - once . |
442,592 | 819,382 | 24,453 | 6 | Effective Drama | You'd never know this was directed by John Ford if his name weren't in the credits . There's not a bottle of booze in sight , no fist fights , no comedic interludes . Henrietta Crosman is a tough , domineering Arkansas mother who denies her grown son every privilege of independence . Of course , no woman is good enough for him either . And when he falls for some blond , and she for him , Crosman signs a waiver , has the boy drafted , and sent to France , leaving behind his now-pregnant girl friend . The son is killed in the Argonne . Ten years go by , during which Crosman avoids any contact with the girl , now a school teacher , and her illegitimate son . Then Crosman is approached by an organization sponsoring a pilgrimage of Gold Star Mothers to the American cemetery in France . She's a bitter old lady by now and spurns their offer but , soon enough , finds herself joining the few dozen other ladies on the trip . Aboard the ship Crosman gets to know some of the other mothers , including one from Carolina who has three sons buried in France . The two rustic Southern ladies , each pretty tough , get along well and , with the other's good-natured self confidence induced in her , Crosman begins to see that there may be a bit of warmth and amusement in life , after all , that one need not be a carbuncle on the integument of one's community . In France she accidentally runs into a young man who is having almost the identical problem with his mother that Crosman's son had with his . The authoritative mother is driving the young couple apart . Crosman visits the rich , aristocratic mother and tells the story of her own self discovery . There is a good deal of sniffling and embracing before Crosman throws herself on her son's grave and begs his forgiveness . Back home , she embraces her grandson and his mother . If it isn't mainstream Ford and it isn't a masterpiece , it's nothing to be ashamed of . It's inevitable sentiment is balanced by the gruff , no-nonsense demeanor of some of the characters . It's all helped enormously by Henrietta Crosman's appearance . ( Her acting skills are no more than modest . ) She is unable to look at anything without " glaring " at it . Her big black eyeballs in that pale face and under that white coif are overwhelming . They seem not to look at objects so much as look into them . The surprising thing is not that she has a little trouble becoming a warm and loving mother at the end , but that she can do it at all . ( I still wonder how she's going to treat her grandson if he shows signs of becoming uppity . ) Overall , it's a rather artfully done but routine drama about a person who never had any doubt whatever about what was right and what was wrong . That's an inhuman position . And by the end of the film the character has become human . |
442,856 | 819,382 | 516,945 | 6 | Portent of Things to Come . | A man dies in a car accident and 50 , 000 pounds worth of diamonds are found in his stomach . It's Steed's and Mrs . Peel's job to find out where they came from and where they were headed . The story involves a couple of Russian wolf hounds , a cigar-aficionado club , something about a high-end necktie shop , a financier who has been murdered and buried in a pet cemetery and assorted villains , all of them colorful . The usual sly wit is always there . When the diamonds are discovered in the dead man's gut , the radiologist remarks that the breakfast was " high in carats , low in calories . " Steed informs Mrs . Peel that the victim's father had been a sword swallower and fire eater in the circus and that " obviously he inherited the talent . " Mrs . Peel : " Perhaps he just enjoyed a rich diet . " In the tie shop , the sales girl shows Mrs . Peel about and describes the various items of neckwear . " This tie is for the Anonyon Club . " Expatiate , please ? Well , there are " old boy " ties for Etonians and Harrovians and this tie is for those who have never attended public school - - the anonymous . One of the heavies , a super-polite butler and dog-walker , is played deliciously by Cecil Parker . When his participation in the smuggling scheme is uncovered , Parker reveals that blackmail wouldn't work against him because the dead financier's will had left him eleven million pounds . An astonished Steed asks why , then , did he do it ? He did it because he wanted the power . He wanted a chance to be rude , especially to women . " In fact , sir , I expect to be RUDE to a considerable number of HANDSOME WOMEN . " If you haven't seen any episodes of the series yet , you must understand that the delivery of lines like these is entirely serious . There's no laugh track and no one chuckles at anyone else's gags . Ditto for the action sequences , which tend to be fast and animated but perfunctory . A good , solid backhand from Mrs . Peel will knock a man out . But the combat scenes aren't presented as amusing . A good deal of furniture is smashed but no one slips on a banana peel . |
442,673 | 819,382 | 30,044 | 6 | Bloody Hell ! | Fast-paced yarn of the Royal Flying Corps in 1915 France . The crates are falling apart , the death rate grows apace , but the seasoned fliers keep a stiff upper lip and all that . Flynn and Niven are two of the aviators under Squadron Commander Basil Rathbone . Everyone seems to be having a good time , except when they're being shot to pieces , except Rathbone who has been turned into a bundle of nerves by his responsibility for sending men up to die in those fragile crates . Rathbone is promoted out , and Flynn is made commanding officer . Now the burden rests with him and he gives up his profligate ways . Niven's brother arrives fresh out of flight school and Flynn , following orders , sends him on a mission from which he doesn't return . Riddled with guilt , Flynn flies a suicide mission , blows up a huge ammunition dump , and downs a couple of enemy planes before he himself is killed by von Richter , the ace . Niven is promoted to command and the whole lousy cycle begins again . ( Kids : This story is about what we call " World War One . " That's the war that came before " World War Two . " The British were fighting against the Germans . The US entered the war late , on the side of the British . PS : We won . ) The performances are okay , but the story now seems pretty dated , what with its heavy moral message in tow - - war is hell . I suppose it's an anti-war movie . The drunken recreation between missions is desperate and frantic . And in a climactic speech after Flynn's death , Donald Crisp as the adjutant spells it all out for us . The war is savage and destructive , just as the next one will be . Crisp might have done us all a greater favor if he'd explained exactly why it is that we feel compelled to get into another Big One every twenty years or so . But never mind that . Some exciting flying scenes here - - grafted on , I gather , from the earlier version of " Dawn Patrol " , directed by Howard Hawks . Edmund Goulding's direction here is pedestrian . This territory belongs to Hawks or William Wellman or maybe Merian C . Cooper . ( Perhaps the best WWI flying film is " The Blue Max , " which is a different story , a little confused , but captures the thrill of flying exquisitely . ) The script leaves something to be desired . It now seems formulaic , though it may not have seemed so to audiences of the time . Events follow one another at a rapid and predictable tempo . No sooner is David Niven's younger brother mentioned early on , than we know he's going to show up as a novice member of the squadron . Flynn's death came as something of a surprise , though . The schematic diagram calls for his successful return to base - - wounded , and with his airplane shot to pieces , but alive . And the scenes of drunken men between missions , singing " Hurrah For The Next Man to Die , " fall flat . The drunkenness I can grasp , but the hilarity , no - - no matter how forced I understand it to be . Anyway , if you lose a young friend , you don't get happy if you drink . You get morose and have a crying jag . Freud was often wrong , but he was probably right when he said that grief work must be done . Paul Rosenblatt's content analysis of diaries shows that it doesn't disappear all at once , nor does it subside monotonically over time . The intensity of mourning does go down , but the decline is interrupted by irregular peaks , prompted by anniversaries , the discovery of a forgotten letter , or something . What we see here is the kind of grief work a screenwriter thinks up to help a story along . Not to bash the movie , though . It's enjoyable enough in its old-fashioned way , and the moral message , though trite , is sound enough . |
443,370 | 819,382 | 53,143 | 6 | Genial 1950s Comedy . | Cute and amusing . Cary Grant is the skipper of a submarine stuck in a remote Phillipine base at the beginning of World War II . Damaged in an air attack , the submarine barely gets under way , with Tony Curtis as a dapper last-minute replacement who shows up for duty in natty and immaculate dress whites . Curtis is a born social climber . He is also , however , a born thief and Grant appoints him Supply Officer for the boat . In some funny scenes , accompanied by some clever dialog , Curtis manages to steal enough supplies from various depots to keep the boat going . He also steals such luxuries as toilet paper and a pig for a New Year's luau . At one such wayside stop he manages to pick up five stranded Army nurses , one of them being the hypermastic Joan O'Brian . You can pretty much predict the gags that will follow - - five beautiful women aboard a submarine with a crew of horny young men . The men make a point of squeezing past O'Brian in the narrow passageways at every opportunity . The Chief Motor Mac improvises a piece of machinery out of somebody's girdle . Curtis gives up his dream of marrying his rich girl friend back in the states when he falls for the elegant , blond Dina Merril ( who , in real life , probably had a fatter portfolio than Curtis's fictional girl friend ) . Cary Grant falls for O'Brian and after the war we see both couples , now friends , with Grant an admiral and Curtis the skipper of the submarine , a dedicated navy man . Some of the jokes now seem dated , the current Zeitgeist being what it is . An officer showing the nurses around the boat is embarrassed and stutters fiercely while trying to tell them that the loo is called " the head . " On the whole , though , the film is disarming enough to be pretty funny . Grant is fine in this light comedy . He grumbles a good deal at the disorder brought to his command , as if practicing for his later " Father Goose , " but he's done this so often that he could have done it all in his sleep . Tony Curtis is often criticized for his " mannerisms " but I don't know why . He's very good indeed at this sort of thing . He knows how to deliver a gag line without dwelling on it , almost running over it , so that if it's a clunker the viewer hardly notices . He's convincing in expository dialog as well and usually brings something fresh to his lines . He could do drama too , and better than Grant . The submarine winds up being painted pink . It is attacked by an American destroyer ( DD 568 , which should be USS Wren ) and Grant desperately sends up the nurses ' underwear . The destroyer picks up some of the " debris " and the captain holds Joan O'Brian's brassiere up , staring at the capacious thing , and mutters , " The Japanese have nothing like this . " You may or may not think you'll get a kick out of it , but you probably will . |
442,017 | 819,382 | 33,740 | 6 | Proto-noir | Betty Grable as the heroine has that cream-fed complexion and chirrupy optimism of the American Midwest . She doesn't really belong in what purports to be a film noir . Well , it isn't a film noir anyway , exactly . It's a murder mystery set in the kind of uptrodden Manhattan milieu in which people like Alan Mowbray as an aging ham hang out , drinking champagne , smoking endless cigarettes , and making urbane wisecracks . The non-noir elements , the film blanc elements , so to speak , create the kind of environment that suits Betty Grable well . The women are in cocktail dresses and the men in tuxedos adorned with carnations , like a Fred Astaire movie , or like the one she made with Astaire years earlier , " The Gay Divorcée . " The angles are sometimes crooked and tilted , though , and the lighting does at times cast strange shadows from oddly placed lights - - chicken-wire cages , venetian blinds . But the characters , for the most part , belong to an old , familiar genre . Victor Mature is breezy in double-breasted suits and triple-breasted grins . The police who are hunting the killer of Betty Grable's sister are nasty but not rough . Mature , being grilled as a suspect in the murder , insults them and gets away with it , without his head being turned to squash . The only truly noir figure in the film is Laird Cregar , almost always shot from below , the lighting emphasizing his porcine features . He's sinister in a way no one else in the film is . And that voice ! Insinuating , soft but rapacious . Towards the end of the film , you're convinced he's going to be the murderer , but no - - the solution to the mystery is shrugged off in a few seconds and lands instead on the shoulders of poor Elisha Cook , Jr . , a creepy mouse . Not that the bulky and threatening Cregar is let off the hook entirely . He turns out to be what we would now call a fetishist . I won't describe the details but he puts an end to his self loathing in a way that turns him very neatly from uncovered villain to pathetic nobody . Summing it up , a kind of upscale murder drama shot with the noir techniques that were to become so common in films over the next fifteen years or so . This was 1941 . The unquiet lighting and camera angles are there but they hadn't found the right property yet . |
442,179 | 819,382 | 39,808 | 6 | Amusing farce | Whatever the setting , and there were many , Danny Kaye always played himself - - the hypochondriacal , stuttering , cowardly , nervously fiddling neurotic . That's pretty much what he is here , and if you haven't seen a Danny Kaye movie this is a pretty funny introduction . The plot violates James Thurber's short story , the point of which was that Walter Mitty daydreamed so much because his own life was so dull . It's probably Thurber's most popular story , although " If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomatox " has more outright laughs . Here Kaye is involved in one richly comic episode after another . The famous fantasies are pretty much gotten out of the way before the movie is half over . The " real " scenes are at least as amusing . He's a copy editor at a pulp magazine in New York and Boris Karloff , he of the ominous lisp , is pitching him a story about a doctor who murders people without leaving a trace by pressing on a nerve at the base of the skull . " Oh , we've already used that in ' The Revenge of the Gland Specialist ' , " objects Kaye . The plot is a mystery about the planned theft of the Dutch Crown Jewels . Something to do with a murder Kaye witnesses ( nobody believes him ) , a black book , Kaye singing silly songs , a chief conspirator nicknamed " the Boot , " and a dazzling innocent blond - - Virginia Mayo - - who has a pretty sassy figure . Watching her and Kaye talking about corsets reminded me that when I was a teen , all women seemed to be wrapped up in inexplicable buckles , plastic straps , and clips that only a deranged mechanical engineer could design . Come to think of it , I'm still out of it . I don't know whether women leave body gel on or wash it off , or what bath beads are . And when did " lipstick " turn into " lip rouge , " and " rouge " turn into " blush , " and " mascara " into " kohl " - - or DID it ? Somebody is pulling the wool over somebody's eyes around here . You ought to see this if only for the costume design and hair styles . Wow - - what exotica ! It's impossible to believe that women ever dressed like this , or hoped to , despite Fritz Feld's glutinous paean to a hat that , although it looks like something Calder might have dreamed up during a horrible hangover , can be disassembled into three - - count ' em - - three separate parts and then be piece together into yet another arrangement . Put a tiny quail under that feathery apparatus and you're talking a two-hundred dollar entree at a four-star Parisian restaurant . There's a likable element of running gags in here too . On three occasions Kaye's blustery boss is holding important business meetings when Kaye enters unexpectedly - - once simply late , and twice more crawling backward in through the tenth floor window pursued by pigeons . Kaye's decline was sad . He wound up singing " Thumbelina " to a nearly empty night club in later years . But he's at his peak here , and his peak was pretty good . |
441,819 | 819,382 | 29,870 | 6 | Why , you dirty rat ! | This isn't the best of the Warner Brothers ' 1930s gangster movies but it's the clearest statement of the formula . It's got everything . It's like a Romanesque mosaic . Here's Jimmy Cagney as Rocky Sullivan , the ex-choir boy gangster who hitches up his pants and greets people with , " Whaddaya hear , whaddaya say ? " His childhood pal is Pat O'Brian , now a priest living in the same neighborhood and trying to save the new generation of kids from turning into hoodlums . We have the Dead End Kids ( or whatever they're called here ) who think Cagney is a swell guy . Humphrey Bogart is Cagney's lawyer who swindles him out of his stash , then tries to have him killed when Cagney is released from jail . The familiar girl with the pig tails grows up to be Anne Sheridan , who has big , pretty eyes but no New York accent . ( Neither does Pat O'Brian , from Wisconsin , but I've given him absolution . ) After the final shoot out , with Cagney's foes dead and himself trapped in a tenement with tear gas coming through the windows , O'Brian shows up and takes the speaker . " Rocky , you've got to come out ! " " Go on back to da choitch where ya belong , Fodder ! " ( I just made that line up , but there are a couple of similar ones in the scene . ) Rocky is convicted and sentenced to death . But he's a tough guy and won't break down . The Dead End Kids mope over the headlines and promise themselves that Rocky will never turn yellow at the end . O'Brian gets word of this and tells Rocky that he holds the fate of these innocent kids in his hands . If he doesn't turn yellow as he's marched to the chair , the kids will turn into miscreants . If he shows he's frightened , his myth will die with him and the kids will all become champion polo players overnight . Does Rocky develop a social conscience in his last moments and fake hysteria as he walks the last mile ? Guess . The thing is , this isn't anybody's best performance and it is no one's idea of the tightest script , yet you can gain a rather full grasp of what these genre movies were all about by watching this single movie , and not having to sit through half a dozen others . If that's what you want . This is like reading an abstract in a professional journal , except that it's fun to see it all laid out . |
443,329 | 819,382 | 95,897 | 6 | Exciting action , good acting . | In the first few minutes we witness the shooting of a woman who is a stranger to us . This is followed by a car chase through the Presidio and up and down the hills of the city . One of the cars in pursuit runs off the road . The remaining car in pursuit smashes into another vehicle , twirls through the air , and explodes on impact with the pavement . The next scene involves one of those police-station encounters in which a prisoner grabs a gun from one of the cops , and is faced down by the hero while the other police offers stand nonplussed . Not a promising start , right ? We've seen it all before . More than once . Yet I kind of enjoy this movie and watch it once or twice a year if nothing else is on . The action sequences are well staged even if they're not believable . ( Sean Connery , confronted by an ornery Hells Angels type , defeats him in combat while using only one finger . ) But Connery is as good as ever , which is to say ultra-reliable and likable . Mark Harmon may not produce celluloid magic but he's likable as well , given that the role isn't especially original . He's an ex football player and it shows . He does at least some of his own physically demanding stunts while chasing a bad guy through Chinatown . He leaps nicely from roof to roof along a row of stalled cars . Meg Ryan is foxy and aggressive and there is a sexy and funny scene between her and Harmon . I've always admired Jack Warden too . Anyone who successfully leaves Newark , New Jersey , behind gets my vote . The plot . Alas . I hate seeing characters we've learned to truly like turn out in the end to be sneak thieves , even if they are reborn just before they pay their dues . Furthermore , the gospel truth is that I've seen this movie innumerable times and I still can't figure out the deal with the smuggled diamonds . Why the hell do they wind up in jugs of water ? Who's kidding whom around here ? The direction is competent and the story unfolds without complicating flashbacks or directorial razzle dazzle . The location shooting is admirable . If I were in the army I'd be happy to be stationed at the Presidio , although it IS right on the bay and therefor often foggy . My understanding is that the Presidio will be closed as a military base and made available to the public . I hope things don't change too drastically . A horde of tourists will spoil the currently empty beauty of the place with its manicured lawns and eucalyptus and Washingtonia palms . Worth seeing as a cool mystery / love / action movie , despite its weaknesses . |
443,160 | 819,382 | 29,864 | 6 | Zippy Crime Story | The renowned Dr . Clitterhouse ( Edward G . Robinson ) , interested in the criminal personality , joins a gang of thieves anonymously . He finds himself strangely thrilled in their presence . He carries out research , pupilary dilation and whatnot , and eventually plans their big heist . ( He gives his part of the proceeds to charity . ) Then , his work accomplished , he bids the gang adieu . Alas , one of the more obnoxious of the gangsters , Rocks ( Humphrey Bogart ) , unravels Robinson's professional identity , tracks him down in his office , and tries to blackmail him into coming up with more master plans . Robinson coolly poisons Bogart and dumps his body in the river , believing that the police will attribute the death to accidental drowning . Some doctor ! He neglects to put Bogart's body in the bathtub and fill his lungs with water , so the cops find a stomach full of paraldehyde chloride and a homicide . It doesn't take them long to find that Dr . Clitterhouse is responsible . The trial is a mockery ( co-written by John Huston ) . Robinson's lawyer put on a psychiatrist who befogs the air with psychiatric gibberish . Catch-22 applies , the jury concludes . Robinson , the defendant , has only one chance of getting off without being fried - - he must be insane . However , Robinson takes the stand and declares repeatedly and emphatically that he's perfectly sane . Therefore , if he's so convinced he's sane , he must be insane . He gets off with a trip to a psychiatric hospital . " Remarkable , " comments Robinson . Humphrey Bogart was making a slew of movies around this time , usually in the same roles - - secondary and villainous . He always made fun of his performance in this film , and of the film itself , lending its title a vulgar change . But , although Bogart's part is stereotyped , the film isn't that bad . The protagonist , Robinson , does a fine job of projecting professional cool . He's believable as a supercilious doctor . He did a much different job of showing a professional man's anxiety in Fritz Lang's superior " The Woman in the Window " . Litvak hurries the film along . The motto of the later gangster films was abbreviated to ODTAA - - one damned thing after another . Characters whiz in and out of door . When they speak on the phone , it sounds like this : " Hello , gimme Leftie - - Leftie ? Take the envelope and get rid of it - - What ? - - No , don't do that - - Yeah , just what I told you - - No , don't come here - - Right . " ( Hangs up . ) The pauses between these snapped-out comments don't last long enough for anyone on the other end of the call to take a deep breath , let alone make a comment or ask a question . Not a second is wasted . Nobody even says good-bye . I kind of like it . |
442,208 | 819,382 | 765,443 | 6 | Low-key , atmospheric crime drama . | David Cronenberg must be growing up . His early movies depended largely on the shock value of disgusting special effects . Watching them was like skimming through a medical text of skin diseases . Then he made " Dead Ringers , " which was vertigenously creepy without being revolting . And now " Eastern Promises , " which is a richly atmospheric story of the Russian mafia set in London . There are two or three scenes of violence , but mostly brief in their gore . The problem here is that Cronenberg has dispensed with much of the facile special effects but , unlike " Dead Ringers " , there isn't a single dramatic trajectory to replace them . The characters and the status-sphere they inhabit are confusing . Well - - the story first . Naomi Watts is a London nurse who attends a birth at which the underage mother dies and the baby girl is saved . Watts finds a diary in the girl's purse , written in Russian , and her attempts to have it translated by a local restaurateur , Armin Mueller-Stahl , leads to some sticky business with the Russian mob . It seems the diary reveals that Mueller-Stahl's reckless son is the father of the baby , and has committed some other unsavory and illegal acts . Vigo Mortenson is the Russian go-between , with Watts on one side trying to save the baby , and the mob on the other , trying to cut the throat of anyone who is in a position to endanger the mob and its activities . It's an indication of the script's confused logic that it's never made clear just what these activities are - - something about smuggling something in television sets imported from Afghanistan . It's probably heroin , though no one mentions it . Watts and her story could easily have been written out of the script , leaving us with a quasi-mafia movie . The Russian gangsters all have complicated family ties , rival mobs , and traitors . They do a lot of fulsome eating in Russian-themed restaurants . ( More Russian than the Russian Tea Room used to be . ) They have " made men , " who wear multiple tattoos . The highest ranking capos have stars of loyalty tattooed over their hearts . The favored murder technique is the slit throat . There are three killings - - the last being a thoroughly brutal one between three men in a Spritzbad . Performances are pretty good . Naomi Watts is big-eyed and beautiful . Mortenson seems made of steel and speaks slowly and sparely , the way Robert DeNiro did in " The Godfather II . " Armin Mueller-Stahl is miscast , in my expert and unimpeachable opinion . He's not a ruthless capo . He's somebody nice uncle who shows up with Christmas presents . About a third of the dialog is in Russian and the accents are passable , especially considering that none of the main players are Russian , but rather American of Danish descent , Welsh , German , French , and Polish . I don't claim this judgment is flawless but I believe my friend Julieta Vladimirovna would back me up on it . Or maybe she wouldn't . Let's not ask her . The pace of the movie is slow and deliberate , which doesn't help clear up any of the confusion . Much of the time , it rather sits there with the animation of a stuffed golupke . It's worth seeing because of the luscious texture , the settings , but probably not worth seeing twice . |
442,932 | 819,382 | 87,268 | 6 | Engaging Border Patrol Mystery . | I'll skip the plot except to say that two Border Patrol agents find a horde of money in the desert , have a fight with nasties in which one agent is killed , and the survivor takes off with the stash for Mexico . You can't help watching this without thinking of Jack Nicholson in " The Border . " " The Border " is far more believable . The heavy turns out to be Nicholson's best friend . And when Nicholson tries to rescue a damsel in distress in a Mexican cat house the bouncers clobber him and throw him into the street . ( There's a moral lesson there somewhere . ) And the social problem dealt with is real - - illegal immigrants . In " Flashpoint " everything is simpler . Except maybe the editing , which lost me here and there , someplace along Soledad Mountain and Thor Mountain and La Bonza Pass . Instead of commonplace human smuggling , " Flashpoint " has a Big Mystery that needs unraveling . There are James-Bond sorts of geophysical " ovulators " that are hidden in the ground and can tell when something passing is more than two feet tall . There's very little ambiguity . We know right away which of the boys is strong and which is weak . Treat Williams comes to work drunk and the taller , older , deeper-voiced Kris Kristofferson must sober him up . And we know that Williams is the more idealistic of the two because there is a scene in which Kristofferson tells his girlfriend so . There are two women involved - - Tess Harper and Jean Smart - - and I like them because neither is staggeringly beautiful , but they really add nothing to the plot except to establish the fact that Kristofferson and Williams are not lovers themselves . The women disappear when no longer needed . We know right away who the bad guys are too . Why ? Because they LOOK bad . Kurtwood Smith . There's a name to conjure with . Like Michael Ironsides the poor guy is a die-stamped heavy . He looks like the kind of guy of whom the neighbors say , " He mostly kept to himself . " He cannot speak without sneering . He's insulting when he doesn't need to be . He's cynical and vulgar . He wears street shoes instead of boots - - and a SUIT . And of course he's a remorseless killer . He represents a problem though , for those viewers given to trying to figure out just what the hell is going on . What is he actually DOING there ? At one point he deliberately foils a drug bust . Is he there because of something to do with drugs ? Evidently not , because later on he tries frantically to cover up the Big Mystery . Maybe that's his job . But in that case , why do he and his assistants show up before anyone even realizes that there is a Big Mystery to be solved ? And what agency does he represent ? Well , here's his explanation . Kristofferson : " Who are you ? " Smith : " I'm a fixer . I fix things . " Kristofferson : " What do you fix ? " Smith : " Whatever needs fixing . " The mind is inexorably whisked back to " The Border " because Harvey Keitel is in " The Border , " and those are roughly his lines in two or three movies he's made with people like Quention Tarantino . On the other hand , similar job specs crop up pretty commonly all over the place , like chicken pox among third graders . The acting is adequate . No more than that . There is a scene in " The Border " in which Nicholson and Keitel are leaving work and Keitel is rambling on thoughtfully about how little difference their work makes to anyone . The employers want the illegals , and the illegals want the work . Sometimes , Keitel muses , it almost seems like we're on the wrong side . At this point , Nicholson halts , half turns to Keitel , and asks , " What are you fishing for ? " The scene only last thirty seconds yet it illustrates the difference between ordinary actors and very talented actors indeed . There is nothing like this scene in " Flashpoint . " The lines all sound written out , and not always well . Treat Williams , who was great in " Prince of the City , " is underwhelmed by the script here . He's given a joke to tell in a bar - - something about a car full of penguins - - and everyone at his table is drinking beer and flushed with laughter - - and the joke just isn't funny . Yet the movie is engaging . Pale green Border Patrol jeeps bounce around on rough sandy desert roads . The Sonoran desert has never looked better . And Roberts Blossom as a wiry and sharp old aeronautical engineer is fun . I think the performance I most enjoyed was Rip Torn's . He's almost always good , but in the role of the sheriff he could easily pass for the home-grown Texan that he is . A real pro . Worth seeing . No messages . A little confusing , but well paced and packed with mystery and color . |
443,267 | 819,382 | 115,906 | 6 | Family Values . | This is a hard movie to interpret . Not the story , but the intended message , because surely there is one . The story is straightforward enough . Ruth Stoops ( Laura Dern ) is a drug-abusing , loud-mouthed , selfish girl who has had a couple of illegitimate kids and is now pregnant again . She's been in and out of jail and rehab programs so often she can't remember how many times . Now she's picked up for sniffing glue again and the court puts her back in the slams and advises her , strongly , to abort this new child . But she is bailed out by a devout working-class family ( Kurtwood Smith , Mary Kay Place ) who want to save her and her baby . They're sincere enough . They have a tough time scraping together the $400 bail . The home they take her to is a stifling nest of conventional religiosity and hypocrisy . They don't smoke , don't drink , don't swear , say grace before each meal , and their teen-age daughter sneaks out at night to get drunk and party . And hubby can't stop himself from eying Dern's nubile figure when she's careless with her garb . ( " You know , I used to be quite a sinner , " he tells her while they lie side by side in his old bed . ) The family introduce her to a " counseling agency " who do their best to talk her into saving her baby . The medical staff congratulate her on her pregnancy and show her a doll about the size of the fetus she's now carrying . ( " It's even got a little thing on it , " she says . " Sure , because it's a boy doll ! " ) They show her a movie of dead , aborted children , which compares abortion to Buchenwald and Auschwitz , and she winds up changing her mind . " Gee , I slept on dumpsters . Maybe I slept on some babies . " But she's spirited away by a pro-abortion spy ( Swoozie Kurtz ) who has been undercover in The Baby Savers movement , and she's taken home to be brainwashed by Kurtz and her girlfriend , who apparently worship Selene , the moon , because they keen a kind of folk song at the night sky . They massage the acupuncture points in her bare feet while they propagandize her and Dern loves it . " Do my spleen again . " So she decides to abort . But then The Baby Savers come up with a $15 , 000 check if she decides to save the baby . So she decides to have the baby . And then a Vietnam vet among the pro-choicers matches the reward , so she decides to abort . By this time the issue has become nation-wide and has drawn in the leader of the Baby Savers , Burt Reynolds , who ups the ante to $27 , 000 if Dern will save the baby . So she decides to save the baby . ( During all this , she's been swilling and sniffing everything in sight . ) I won't give away the ending except to say that Ruth steals some money and makes off with it before anyone notices . Final shot : Dern marching off alone into the distance , accompanied by a triumphant theme , strong-willed , street savvy , a bag full of cash slung over her determined shoulder , still lacking in the frontal lobes that might allow her to plan for a future . It's a satirical look at the abortion debate , and more black than comedic , although it has its laugh lines . Nobody comes off at all well , except maybe the Vietnam amputee who sees through Ruth and offers his $15 , 000 anyway . That is , she's been planning on how she might spend the windfall . She'll make a down payment on a new house , then buy a new car , then maybe travel to Europe . The vet listens to this then tells her it's baloney , that both of them know the $15 , 000 will last her about three days . The cast is littered with familiar names , none of whom do an outstanding job but all of whom are competent enough . As a stimulus-hungry , self-destructive , mentally challenged teen-ager , Laura Dern is an attractive and sexy young woman but not a teen-ager . Burt Reynolds brings his usual role distance to the job . He proudly introduces the first boy he ever saved by adopting , the boy who's now about fifteen , the boy who fetches the ice for Reynolds ' drinks , the boy who now massages Reynolds ' tanned and muscular shoulders on command . But where is the movie headed ? I was all in favor of the pro-abortionist lesbians but I don't think that's what was intended . Most black comedies at least give you someone to root for , even if he's not victorious . " Dr . Strangelove " was a black comedy , too , but President Merkin Muffley at least was sane and rational . Here , the Vietnam vet's role is far too minor for us to identify with him in any way . This reminds me more of Tom Wolf's " Bonfire of the Vanities . " Everybody in it is stupid and / or rotten . And the intentions of the producers is ambiguous , along the lines of one of Randy Newman's songs - - " I Love L . A . " or " Short People " . Is Newman really defiantly saying he loves Los Angeles , or is he kidding ? Maybe the message is that of the Buddha , who was a very practical man . All things in moderation . Avoid zealotry . An excess of passion always leads to disappointment and pain in one form or another . |
442,828 | 819,382 | 65,820 | 6 | Big Fella Along Him Speakee Plidgen Engrish . | You have to admire James Michener's resolve . He's the guy who wrote the book this screen play is based on . Michener wrote one novel or non-fiction work after another , each of them requiring an unconscionable amount of historical and geographic research . There are a couple of dozen doctoral dissertations scattered among his books - - " Centennial , " " Texas , " " Alaska , " " Poland , " " Iberia . " This is about a certain part of Hawiian history , a sprawling epic , as they say , following multiple narrative threads through three generations . The principal thread belongs to Charlton Heston , who begins as a reckless and uncaring sea captain and winds up as a cigar-puffing prosperous land owner , the evolution being the result of his willingness to take risks . The other main thread belongs to Tina Chen , who begins as an outcast young Chinese woman and becomes a socially prominent leader of the Chinese community in Honolulu . She's a minority among the Chinese in that she is Hakka , an internally marginal group in China . Her minority status isn't Michener's literary trick either . Hakka is one of half a dozen or so common dialects in Chinese and in one of my classes we had representatives of all of them lined up at the front of the room pronouncing one familiar word after another . There was an obvious family resemblance among most of them . You could " hear " the buried Cantonese word when it was spoken in Mandarin Chinese . But not Hakka . It was to the other dialects what Rumanian is to the other Romance languages . Wait a minute . Was that " off topic " ? Well , it doesn't matter much . There's no describing the plot of this movie . If anything ever happened in Hawaiian history , it happens to somebody in this movie . You want to talk leprosy ? Racism ? The switch from a monarchy to a territory of the United States ? The plague ? Let it simply be said that it's all here . Charlton Heston is his usual monolithic self and fills the character appropriately . Tina Chen is a beautiful woman who is , at best , professional . We don't get to see much of Geraldine Chaplin , who rediscovers her native Hawiian genes and appears to go nuts . John Phillip Law isn't around much either . Tina Chen's husband is Mako ( who is Japanese ) and he's quite good in what is essentially the same role he played in " The Sand Pebbles . " Some of the supporting players appear to have been chosen for their looks rather than their talent . I rather like Hawaii , at least as it was when I was last there , years ago . There's a good deal of solidarity to be found on the islands . During the turmoil of the 1960s when American cities were in the grip of violent revolutions or their simulacrums , Honolulu went quietly about its business , and that in a city more ethnically diverse than any found on the mainland . Anyway the film is worth watching . I can't say I was especially gripped by any of the incidents or characters . I'd recommend it if only for its educational properties . Michener was only rarely effective as a dramatist but all that time he put into his research certainly paid off . |
443,364 | 819,382 | 37,691 | 6 | Not bad noir . | This was Otto Preminger's and 20th-Century-Fox's follow-up to the highly successful " Laura " of the previous year . Many of the same personnel were involved , both on the screen and behind the camera . David Raksin , who'd written the theme song for " Laura " ( " not classical , but sweet " ) wrote " Slowly " for this one . Dana Andrews stars again . The bug-eyed maid from " Laura " - - Effie or whatever her name was - - appears here briefly as a bug-eyed neighbor . The themes have one or two isomorphisms . A cop falls in love with a girl he can't have . The girl is murdered . But that's about it . " Laura " was a one-of-a-kind achievement . This film doesn't quite cohere . The screenplay is less focused , because the murder doesn't take place at the beginning , so there is no central mystery . Instead we have Dana Andrews playing an exploitative and selfish meany , hanging around a small town with no money and no prospects , in hope of getting the local slut ( Linda Darnell ) to run off with him . Andrews , who is an advance man for a phony spiritualist , can't even afford his own hotel room so he appropriates the shabby quarters of Olin Howland . Now , you may or may not recognize the name of Olin Howland , but you will recognize the face and the voice . It will be more than usually easy if you think back to the science-fiction Big Bug thriller " Them " and imagine hearing a hospitalized dipsomaniac singing , " Make me a sergeant in charge of the booze ! " and hiding under the covers . Where was I ? Oh , yes . I was wondering where Dana Andrews was . And Linda Darnell , the sloe-eyed slut . And Alice Faye , the blond contrast to Darnell's dark beauty . Alice Faye doesn't have much money but Andrews plans , successfully , to marry her so he can have access to whatever she owns . This , you see , will give him a stake which he can then use to run off with that brunette baggage from the hamburger shop . Fortunately , before he commits any irreparable crime , Andrews comes to his senses and recognizes that there are such things in the world as truth , beauty , goodness - - and Alice Faye . Actually , Faye is rather bland compared to the dangerous and treacherous Darnell . I could have understood Andrews going through with his original plan , but then that wouldn't have been Dana Andrews with his chiseled features , up-tilted Dick Tracy chin , and heroic baritone . ( It might easily have been a whining and manipulative Kirk Douglas . ) All of these intrigues and romances take up about three quarters of the film . Once Darnell is out of the way - - her head bashed in - - a local cop ( Charles Bickford ) enters the picture , and he's pretty rough trade too . He wallops suspects around , trying to force them to confess . But it turns out that he's hiding a secret which , in the end , undoes him . A curious irony , if I remember correctly , is that Bickford himself had been involved in a homicide in his youth . At any rate , the murder is solved , and Dana Andrews ends up a wiser man for his having stuck around this small town for an extra few days . ( Also , a richer man , perhaps not as coincidentally as the rest of us would like to believe . ) I had the same uneasy feeling at the end of " Fallen Angel " that I did at the end of " Laura . " What happens after Dana Andrews marries Gene Tierney in " Laura " and , for the hundredth time , she begs him to go to a concert and he insists on a ball game ? And what happens here when the trickster Andrews realizes that the virginal teetotaler Faye is actually pretty cloying ? Still , if it's not " Laura , " it's enjoyable in its own right . The first hour or so will keep you wondering where this all can possibly be headed . |
441,831 | 819,382 | 104,839 | 6 | Cute film about a serious subject . | Okay , there's this weird scientist , Sean Connery , who's hidden himself away in the tropical rainforest of South America and has been incommunicado for years . A " foundation " sends down a youngish , award-winning scientist , played by Lorraine Bracco , to monitor his behavior , find out what's up , and decide whether or not to cut off his funding . Lots of barbed exchanges here between the old curmudgeon and the independent new woman . Some comedy too as he slips her a psychedelic that cures headaches . As it develops , Connery , with Bracco's help , finds the source of a cure for lymphoma in the top terrace of the rainforest . Alas , before he can harvest enough of the stuff to explore the possibility of its being synthesized , some big industrial operation plows a road through the forest and destroys the trees in which the stuff grows . Bittersweet ending . Humankind is hoist by its own petard by what some ecologists call a " progress trap . " As compensation the old fox and the young feminist become friends . It's a bad trade . Between 1960 and 1990 one fifth of the world's rainforest was lost . In Brazil , where this film is supposedly set , the Amazon rainforest between 1991 ( when the film was shot ) and the year 2000 has lost between 415 and 587 square kilometers , an area about twice the size of Portugal . The tragedy is not that the forest is gone . Who cares about wood ? It's the consequences , many of them falling into the category of " unknown unknowns " that counts . WOULD a biochemist of Sean Connery's persistence and quirkiness have found a way of combating lymphoma ( or anything else ) ? We're not going to find out now . Among the " known known " consequences , the deforestation has eliminated entire species of plants and animals at an alarming rate , including one primate . ( Humans are primates too . ) Lorraine Bracco seems a likable woman . You can tell because in all of her performances she seems to be playing herself . She can be loud and stubborn but one never senses genuine contempt behind her shouting . I wouldn't mind having an argument with her . It might be amusing . Sean Connery plays a role that must by now be familiar to him , almost shopworn , and he does his schtick well . There appears to be a lot of half-naked Guaranis running around , acting as translators and comic relief , but this is really a two-person picture . At one point Bracco is tripping on this native stuff and having a hell of a good time . She babbles on about marketing it for adults , putting sugar in it , and calling it by some pronounceable name . I wish that she'd have accomplished that because unless we recognize a progress trap when we see one coming , we may need that psychedelic elixir . |
442,569 | 819,382 | 71,838 | 6 | Nothing Original , But Entertaining . | This could easily have been a script leftover in some shoebox from an unmade 1949 noir . It's a complicated story of blackmail and betrayal . Burt Lancaster is an ex-cop just released from prison , given a job by an old friend ( Cameron Mitchell ) as night watchman at a college , who falls in love with his parole officer ( Susan Clark ) . A murder takes place . Several murders take place . And some of the signs seem to point to the innocent Burt . There's a blackmail plot with lots of money involved . Well , now , Burt may have just gotten out of the slams but he hasn't unlearned the investigative skills he picked up while on the job in Chicago . Fighting against the local cops every inch of the way , he cracks the case , but not to his satisfaction . He's been used and betrayed by everyone he was close to . No one looks out of place . Susan Clark actually looks pretty darned smokin ' , with her slender figure and queer beauty , a little goofy , like Nancy Travis ' . The local cops are villainous . There is a trio of redneck heavies that - - well , they shouldn't look out of place but they do . This was shot in South Carolina , but it's winter , and it doesn't look like the South , whereas these three unkempt miscreants ( including Ed Sauter with his working-class New York accent ) look like they're straight out of some Southern Gothic slasher movie - - I EAT YOUR HEAD AND SPIT DOWN YOUR NECK CAVITY ! ! ! One is fat , one is scrawny , all are dumb drunks who tote shotguns and pitchforks and allow themselves to be run over by tractors . They even have one of those mean mothers in Bibb overalls and boots who sneers at captive Burt and says , " Wait'll Lem gets back . He'll take care of you proper-like , " or something . There isn't a touch of anything original in the direction , the script , the performances , or anything else . Dave Grusin's score is loud and conventional - - lots of electric guitars and harmonicas and nerve-jangling percussion . Nobody seems to have put any effort into it , which is a little surprising , given Burt Lancaster's tendency to see to it that some social message informs his story , or at least that there is the occasional arty touch . But not here . Everything is functional . No tag lines worth remembering . Instead of Burt Lancaster it might as well have been Charles Bronson . Yet I like the thing and I look forward to seeing it on those infrequent occasions when it shows up on TV . I don't know why . I guess the location shooting captures a particular time and place rather well , though for a college in session it looks really underpopulated . I like Burt as a nobody watchman instead of an important muck-a-muck in the justice system . He looks so terribly humble in that shabby uniform . And I kind of like its lack of pretension . Better a crime thriller that knows its limits than a failed attempt at significance . |
442,596 | 819,382 | 47,577 | 6 | Mixed Bag of SF Conventions . | The film divides itself more or less clearly into two parts . In the first part , electronic genius and atomic power researcher , Rex Reason , is challenged by an unknown source to build an interociter . He successfully passes the test . The interociter acts like a big , triangular TV except that it has a self-destruct mechanism and can emit deadly rays that melt lead . When Reason turns it on , he is able to communicate with Exeter ( Jeff Morrow ) , who describes himself as " a scientist like yourself . " Morrow invites Reason to take a trip on a mysterious , pilot-less airplane , which he does . The plane lands at a fully equipped laboratory complex which houses a handful of the most famous scientists in the world . All of them seem to be working on the conversion of matter into energy . Morrow warns them not to discuss their work with each other and , in fact , the place is a bit like a fancy prison . Reason and another scientist , Faith Domergue , are spirited away in a space ship and the other scientists destroyed . In Part Two , we get a load of the flying saucer's innards , which have a familiar look about them . These plastic tubes come down over the occupants and rev up their ability to withstand pressure on the planet they are heading for . Similar tubes prepared the crew of the ship in " Forbidden Planet " and I don't know how many times Captain Kirk and Scotty went through them . Metaluna , the planet on which they land is in sorry straits . It's under constant attack by meteors guided by space ships from the enemy planet of Zygon . It's only defense is an ionization layer maintained by nuclear power , and Metaluna is fast running out of energy , which is why the earth expedition was mounted . It turns out to be too late to save Metaluna . Only Morrow , Reason , and Domergue are able to escape in the saucer and return to earth , where Reason and Domergue land safely and Morrow does not . Part One is the more interesting of the two . I kind of enjoyed the way Reason responded to the challenge of building an interociter from a schematic diagram the size of a football field . " Where do we start ? " asks his assistant . " Right here , " replies Reason , planting his fingertip firmly on a sketch of what looks like a power tube . And the scenes at the laboratory complex were fun , too . Morrow keeps complimenting the others on their " curiosity " but they didn't seem to have much in the way of curiosity to me . The first thing I'd have asked upon landing was how come Morrow and his henchman have such terribly big heads . The gradual realization by the earth people that not all is as it seems , is well done too , except that it's rather brief . Reason asks Morrow over dinner , " How do you like Mozart ? " " Mozart ? " , says Morrow , " I don't think I know the gentleman . Oh - - you mean your composer . " " Our composer ? " , says Reason . " I'd have thought Mozart belonged to the world . " It's a nice little touch , a snag in the texture of conventional life , like catching your coat sleeve on a nail , but it's about the only one . It needed more incidents like that , so that the suspicion would grow . As it is , it's already there , full blown . Part Two is less interesting because there are few surprises and little to wonder about . Everything seems overwhelmed by the special effects . Why do all the inhabitants of Metaluna speak English ? And why is the name of the planet in Latin . Why does Exeter have such an echt-British name ? And why is there a war between Metaluna and Zyglotz or whatever it is ? Now THAT'S an interesting question . All these eggheads on two planets who can zip between galaxies as easily as you and I take a spin in the car - - and they can't help exterminating each other ? It's so very Buck Rogers . Rex Reason is tall , masculine , and has a deep voice . Faith Domergue isn't and doesn't . Jeff Morrow isn't an especially interesting actor but he has the most complex role . He's in conflict with his boss , the " monitor " , who is concerned about nothing but saving Metaluna , even if it means the earthlings are expendable , and , on the other hand , his genuine liking for his earthly friends and his worry about their welfare . There have been better , and there have been worse . |
442,731 | 819,382 | 386,751 | 6 | Mystery , leisurely but intense . | This deliberate mystery about the death of a young man at an exclusive boy's school is surprisingly good . Edward Burns is a local police officer who suspects that foul play was involved . The body was found drowned in the local ice-laden river but his lungs contained traces of things found in toilet bowls . Was it a hazing accident ? Well - - close but no cigar . Burns ' investigation must struggle through a thicket of opposition . His colleagues don't want to push the matter because the Haddon School is their benefactor . The school , with its frigid headmaster , isn't interested in probing too deeply because , well , after all - - foul play at Haddon ? Burns himself is impelled mainly because he once helped his older brother commit suicide and perhaps , in solving the riddle of this case , he can partly redeem himself . Along the way , he spends a good deal of time with the dead boy's girl friend , a frizzy red head . And he meets and makes love to Jennifer Ehle , a blond photographer who is about to wed someone else . In the end , Burns , having found out the answer , decides that disclosure isn't necessary and certainly won't promote anyone's happiness , so he invents an explanation that absolves everyone of guilt . The performances are all good , mostly from unfamiliar performers . Rachel Lefevre is the dead student's girl friend , not exactly gorgeous , plump-lipped and long-haired and sturdy looking , but she's quite attractive in an everyday way . Jennifer Ehle as the slightly whimsical photographer is Meryl Streepish and her romance with Burns isn't in the least convincing . Burns is rather good . He's a fine actor , and a fine actor without the brutish charm of a Johnny Depp or a Brad Pitt . His voice is high and it cracks often . Its most important feature is that it sounds believable . If Burns himself is particularly handsome , the fact was beyond my grasp , but I hope not . If he gets the applause he deserves , it would be cheapened a little if he were a heart throb . WILL KEN DITCH JENNIFER ? I can see him in the tabloids now . But with any luck he'll be no more supermarket fodder than Anthony Hopkins or Ian McKellar . If there's a problem with the film it's that it's a little TOO deliberate . And it swings from one sub-plot to another and back again and sideways , like a simple harmonic oscillator , just passing through the central story line from time to time . There are moments when it's entirely possible to forget what the movie is about . Partly because any viewer is likely to be distracted by the gorgeous , wintry Nova Scotia settings . At time the snow is blue or yellow and seems to have leaped straight out of a post-impressionist painting . The small-town streets are choked with drifts and the village itself , which ought to be pretty dismal , looks more like a vacation snapshot . Rarely has a winter landscape had such luster . One of the qualities that makes it so easy to recommend this is that it's made for adults - - or , more precisely , for people with an attention span that hasn't been cut off at the knees by MTV and commercials and glitzy news sound bites . You have to settle back to watch it , fold your hands behind your head , relax , and sort of slit your eyes slightly . |
441,678 | 819,382 | 470,929 | 6 | The Mystery of the Severed Ears . | This is a fantasy , a mosaic made out of three complementary sets of tesserae . We have the " biographer " Selden ( Tim McInnerny ) whose assignment is to try to dig up any links between Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle ( Douglas Henshall ) and his fictional creation , the detective Sherlock Holmes , although it is agreed that any results will not be published . There are also contemporary episodes from which Selden is excluded , for good reason . These include a couple of women - - Doyle's own devoted wife and a knockout babe he would like to disarticulate with his tongue . And then there are flashbacks to Conan-Doyle's own earlier years , including his medical tutelage at Edinburgh under Doctor Joseph Bell ( Bryan Cox ) . The three sets of episodes are woven together in a way that is sometimes confusing , the way a dream is confusing , but gradually revealing , until , by the end , all is explained . Or almost all . I didn't get the recurring images of the severed ears crawling with maggots . Okay - - " The Cardboard Box . " But why is this image repeated ? Why is it IN there in the first place ? I missed the first few minutes and perhaps the answer lies there , though I can't imagine how . Of course I could speculate , but it is always dangerous to theorize before one is in possession of all the relevant facts . The most interesting moments - - not necessarily the most dramatic - - are when Dr . Bell pulls of one of those stunts that were later to become inferential staples of the Holmes character . Given a watch to examine , a watch that has been owned by a perfect stranger , Bell complains that the watch has recently been cleaned and this robs him of his most important clues to the owner's character , so he can only say that the man was careless , came from a good family but found his fortunes drop , punctuated by intervals of prosperity , that in later life his habits declined , probably because of drink , and that he had a penchant for 17-year-old blonds all his life . ( I made that last one up . ) Conan-Doyle must have represented one of the last twitches of the Scottish enlightenment that enthroned reason and empiricism , because when he was old , after he'd lost a son in the war , Conan-Doyle turned to mysticism and the séances that were fashionable at the time . The mystery that is investigated in some detail is the reason why Conan-Doyle decided to " kill " his creation , Sherlock Holmes , at a time when Holmes was probably the most famous fictional character in the world , much as Brittany Spears is now . I failed to catch any big reveal towards the end , but at the climax Conan-Doyle resurrects his detective and they march off together into the sunlight . If the viewer is left still a little mystified , evidently Conan-Doyle wasn't , and that's what counts . However , the detective figure that is Holmes in the last few shots on the Great Grimpen Mire is not by any definition Sherlock . It is MYCROFT Holmes that we see . Who's kidding whom around here ? It's an inexpensive production from the BBC and it's about an interesting guy , Conan-Doyle . He was at his peak during the Jack-the-Ripper murders in 1875 . Too bad he didn't tackle Saucy Jack . Of course Conan-Doyle can't be counted among the world's most graceful prose artists . On a dark and stormy night , " the wind sobbed like a child in the chimney . " ( How did the child get into the chimney ? ) And , true , our introduction to Holmes , in " A Study in Scarlet " , makes him look an awful lot like Poe's August Dupin in " The Murders in the Rue Morgue . " But what does that matter ? Conan-Doyle ground out these entertaining mysteries with sprezzatura , hiding his art by making it look so easy , and he gave us some deathless lines . " The curious incident of the dog in the night . " " She was always THE woman . " And , " Quick , Watson , the needle . " ( Well , he never said exactly that , but , again , so what ? ) You may have to be in the right mood to watch this . It's rather slow . But it's a must-see for the Irregulars . |
443,542 | 819,382 | 113,552 | 6 | Not bad for a makeover . | Ben Hecht's original story had enough strength to be carried over into this successful remake , aided by a strong cast . I'm not sure how much the modernization of the script adds to it , but it's worth seeing . Caruso is a con who , out of concern for his family , rats on some friends when the prosecutor promises him freedom . Things go legally awry and Caruso finds himself and his family being hunted by the chief thug ( Nicholas Cage ) while the police ( Stanley Tucci and Steven Jackson ) provide a simulacrum of protection . Finally Caruso takes matters in his own hands , confronts Cage in a night club , and is beaten like hell before the cops arrive and put things back in order . The original script depicted what now seems like an old-fashioned model of the justice system . Good cops vs . bad guys , with the good guys hampered by laws that are too lax . This is brought up to date in that EVERYBODY is corrupt in one way or another , with a few exceptions . Caruso is family-oriented , though a con , and his family and Jackson have their hearts in the right place . But the agents of social control - - both federal and state - - are petty and bickering . Tucci , the head cop , isn't really interested in bad guy Cage . He wants a federal judgeship or judgehood or judgedom . It's a much more cynical model of the justice system . The brutality quotient is cubed . Somebody's brains get shot out and splattered all over somebody . Or a suspected snitch is beaten to death with fists and his blood splashes against the wall . I think the earlier version is superior . For one thing , it was an original , not a copy . And some of the performances don't measure up to the original's . Kathryn Erbe - - great name in German , by the way - - is a pretty and talented actress but she does not exude the winsome cheerful devotion of Colleen Gray . David Caruso is a more convincing New Yorker than Louisvilleian Victor Mature was , but his performance is understated compared to Mature's nervous clumsiness . Some of the roles are just differently interpreted . Where Brian Donleavy was a stolidly ethical prosecutor , Stanley Tucci is transparently reptilian . Who would believe Tucci when he claims to be " a man of honor " ? And , of course , there is nothing in this remake that looks even vaguely like Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo , nor any scene quite as terrible as Widmark's pushing the old lady strapped in her wheelchair down the stairs . At the time THAT was more shocking a scene that all the current bloodshed and poundings put together . That's what I mean by " original . " Still , not a bad movie on its own . |
443,274 | 819,382 | 516,824 | 6 | Shenanigans in a Shop . | If you've seen and enjoyed any of the episodes of " The Avengers " you should find this one satisfying . One of Steed's and Mrs . Peel's agents is shot dead while visiting a London shop . The receipt in his pocket indicates that he was shopping in the Baby Department , although she has no family . Mrs . Peel signs on as a store assistant while Steed noses around , discovers an old curmudgeon ( Andre Morell ) in the Discontinued Lines Attic , wheeling himself around in a clutter of old automobiles and other artifacts of a by-gone age . Food is being pilfered from the Food Department . What's going on ? Well , for one thing , the shop is holding " the professor " prisoner while he invents things for them , and the pilfered food serves as his special treat , rather like a dog being rewarded for having learned to roll over on command . Legal considerations prevent me from revealing more of the plot - - except , I guess it's safe to say that it's all pretty whimsical . Any time one sees Mrs . Peel draping a translucent nightie around a brassier-clad mannequin , he knows he's in the realm of fantasy . ( Boy , does she look fine . ) It's a diverting series , on the whole , and amusing in a capricious way . Many of the subtle jokes - - and they're ALL subtle - - are built around men hitting on Mrs . Peel for reasons that would be unimaginable if it weren't for her wide-set eyes , her forceful yet delicately feminine stride , the big and dazzling smile that appears so unexpectedly on her tiny lips , and the skin-tight costumes that the wardrobe lady has seen fit to clothe her in . The jokes are frequently from Steed himself as the unflappable man in the bowler hat . When he asks the floor manager where Mrs . Peel is , he's told that she upstairs in lady's underwear , and rattles up the steps three at a time . |
442,695 | 819,382 | 113,540 | 6 | Urban tragedy | Send these kids to camp - - fast ! Or do SOMETHING . Wow , what a life . Basically this is a picture of the life kids who occupy a certain social space lead during their summer vacations . It jumps from episode to episode with a few continuing characters , including Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson . To the extent that there is a story at all , it is this . The movie opens with the teen aged Leo Fitzpatrick successfully seducing the teen aged Chloe Sevigny , who is a virgin . Shortly afterward Sevigny is told she tested positive for HIV , meaning that Fitzpatrick is an asymptomatic carrier . Sevigny spends the rest of the movie looking for Fitzpatrick to tell him about it and prevent him from infecting anyone else . She is waylaid by encounters with strange teenagers , although to be sure they are all strange , and when she finally locates Fitzpatrick at a raucous party he is already putting the blocks to yet another virgin . Sevigny closes the door and staggers away to crash on the couch . Later that night , another creepy teenager wakes up , wanders about , notices the unconscious Sevigny , and does her in what appears to be two different ways . So much for AIDS . That's the thread the movie hangs on , but it serves not as a point in itself but as an illustration of the absence of any point . The kids do everything that ordinary people would consider revolting . They begin using dope the minute they wake up . They shoplift clumsily . They pee on walls in public places . They get drunk . They vomit . They fornicate at will . They don't work . They litter freely . They swear constantly . They ogle each other's mother's breasts . They get into fist fights on the slightest of pretexts . They recognize no checks on their appetites . We hardly see any adults and the ones we do see aren't necessarily much better - - an overweight and ill-groomed mother smoking while she nurses an infant . It's all distasteful but you can't really disengage yourself from what's happening on the screen . It would be like looking away from a gory traffic accident . Maybe that's a problem , too , because the film is so impregnated with debauchery that after a while it becomes frankly unbelievable . One DAY of this kind of life would stun an elephant . More than that , it's too much of a bad thing . Not a single kid we see has any redeeming qualities whatever , except for two virgins who yield readily enough to Fitzpatrick's snake oil . And for all the vulgarity and all the violence done to our ideas of good taste , I'm not sure that the film makers have really gotten it all down accurately . I'll just give two examples in which a viewer might become conscious of the effort it takes to suspend disbelief . ( 1 ) In a drug dealer's apartment ( where kids who look about nine years old are doing dope ) the music from the boombox is what sounds like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins . I don't think so . I hate to buy into stereotypes too easily , but what I expect to hear is not demanding , classical jazz but hip hop . ( 2 ) In Central Park during a drug score , an exojuvenile intrudes on the gang and takes offense at some remark about a skateboard . The alien is a black guy . The gang of dopers who are buddies are racially mixed . They all gang up on the stranger and beat hell out of him , ending it with a possibly lethal whack full in the face with the skateboard . It doesn't jibe with experience . I have a feeling that the fist fight would gradually divide the group along racial lines . This is a heck of a movie . Man , the kids should bottle that energy . They'd be on the Big Board in no time . It could be found in cans in Quick-Stop reefers . ADENORUSH - - for that " scootch " feeling . But it's too spelled out . There isn't a moment's rest . I'm not talking about sitting down to ponder Marcus Aurelius . I mean just shutting up for a few minutes . The final shot may be symptomatic . Dawn is crashing around the sleeping , benumbed and benighted bodies the morning after a party . During the night the place has been thoroughly trashed and two girls have probably now caught HIV from our index case . One body , still holding a bottle , stirs a little and comes to life . Its eyes open . It stares blearily into the camera lens and wonders aloud , " What happened ? " In " The 400 Blows , " 45 years earlier , Truffaut made the same point simply by ending on a freeze frame of the delinquent kid caught on the run , staring fixedly and silently at the camera . " Kids " suggests that at the end the director doesn't trust us enough to have gotten the point , although we've been hit over the head with it for an hour and a half . |
443,179 | 819,382 | 47,542 | 6 | Inexpensive , unprepossessing thriller . | Basically it's a B movie script that is slightly elevated in significance by the fact that the intended victim is the President of the United States instead of , say , an anonymous guy with his face down on the bar of some tavern in Bloomfield , New Jersey . The fact that is stars Frank Sinatra along with Sterling Hayden and a couple of reliable utility players doesn't change things . The year before , Sinatra had won an Academy Award for his ( very good ) performance in " From Here to Eternity , " rescuing his career from its downward spiral . He wanted the role of the gun-crazy assassin in " Suddenly " because he wanted to demonstrate his range as an actor . And the director gives him every chance . In more than one scene , Sinatra begins a monologue and , turning from the others , stalks towards the camera until he delivers his punch line , his face - - distorted by the wide-angle lens - - twisted with some demonic passion . Well , he does his best but the role is so limited and the dialog so clumsy that nobody could overcome those limitations . Actually , his most effective moment - - and again , it's good - - takes place near the beginning , when Willis Bouchey , a Secret Service agent , enters the house and is introduced to Sinatra's fake FBI man . Bouchey realizes it's a set up , and Sinatra knows that he twigs it . And the camera holds on Sinatra's lunatic smile and such an exopthalmic stare as to suggest he is being taken by thyrotoxic storm , just before he pulls his pistol and plugs Bouchey . In that scene , Sinatra has no dialog at all and it's for the best . Who wrote this thing anyway ? I've seen the movie a few times before but only just now realized how utterly corny the dialog is , even for its time . " Todd , what in Hades is going on in this town anyway ? Did some galoot strike a uranium mine or something ? " " Ellen , will you please stop being such a WOMAN ? " I swear I'm not making that up - - and there's worse . Most of the characters are familiar stereotypes . Sinatra's is intended to be the most complex role , and it is complex compared to the others , but in fact isn't too complicated for a Saturday-afternoon audience to grasp in a few minutes . Sinatra was a nobody until he found his place in the infantry , killing Germans and winning a Silver Star , until he was booted out for some outrage we can only imagine . He did however learn a trade in the Army and has now set out to be all he can be . Sinatra did make a few good movies . He gave this one his best effort . " From Here to Eternity " was fine , and " The Manchurian Candidate " was quite good . In all of them he played someone other than Frank Sinatra , whereas in something like " Tony Rome " he seemed to be on vacation . But here , the script and direction make any plaudits insupportable . It would be enough to make you feel sorry for Frank Sinatra if he were anyone but Frank Sinatra . One wonders if he and Sterling Hayden , the Mount Rushmore of bulk , reminisced about the old days back in Montclair and Hoboken , where each grew up , only a few miles from one another . |
443,203 | 819,382 | 107,050 | 6 | Corny , enjoyable comedy | I wasn't expecting much of this movie - - another rip off of " The Odd Couple " - - but my kid insisted on watching it and I was pleasantly surprised . Matthau and Lemon have hated each other since one stole the other one's girl away . ( Both wives are gone now . ) They play nasty pranks on one another , relishing the other's frustration and anger . Meanwhile Matthau's son and Lemon's daughter are getting to know one another in a subplot . Also meanwhile a ravishing redhead from liberated California ( Anne-Margaret ) moves in across the street in this small , snow-bound , Minnesota town , and she falls for Lemon . At Lemon's insistence though she has a brief fling with Matthau before the inevitable ending . They're not really the odd couple here . They're new characters who happen to suffer adimadversions to each other . The gags are quick , fast , and sometimes pretty funny . Burgess Meredith , Lemon's Pop , declaims , " The first ninety years go by real fast ! Then one day you wake up and realize you're not eighty-one anymore ! Mount the woman ! " At one point during an argument , Matthau attacks Lemon with a frozen fish and the two old men ( 68 and 73 , I think ) go through all the motions of a carefully choreographed action-movie combat scene - - Matthau pinning down Lemon , Lemon holding the threatening fish at bay as Matthau forces it down slowly towards Lemon's chest , both men puffing and grunting . It shoulda stayed a comedy . But it's tough to make a movie about old age that's consistently funny . Death is always around the corner , and impotence and failing health and financial crises are already here . It's easy enough to make a heart-wrenching movie about it , even with an uplifting ending . ( " Umberto D . " ) This one tempers the comedy by putting all of the deficits of old age on ready display . A friend dies in his sleep . ( " Lucky bastard . " ) Anne-Margaret - - " Tell me , Gustaffson , when did you last make love ? " Lemon - - " October 19th - - 1978 . " ( First used in " Harry and Tonto . " ) Thanksgiving and Christmas are captured on screen in all their sentimentality and anguish . Lemon has a heart attack while Nat King Cole is singing " Walkin ' in a Winter Wonderland " on the soundtrack . Speaking of the soundtrack , the soapy score belongs in a Walt Disney fairy tale from the 1940s . Yes , folks , there are heart-wrenching scenes galore . Uplifting ones too . Lemon and Anne-Margaret making snow angels . All of them done is a cornball manner . " Old age isn't for sissies , " as Bette Davis is supposed to have said , but this movie is . The funny parts redeem the expectable misfortunes . Here is Burgess Meredith watching Ossie Davis visit Anne-Margaret's house on Thanksgiving - - " Looks like he's going to play pat the pony " or something like that . Stick around for the out-takes under the end credits . Looks like they had a good time making this film . It's worth watching too . Thank you , Chopsticks . |
443,047 | 819,382 | 60,490 | 6 | Hired by a # $ @ $ % to find scum . | It ought to have everything going for it . What a cast ! And they're all good - - with Paul Newman's Lou Harper at the top of his game , and , somewhere closer to her usual norm , Pamela Tiffen . Newman's performance is among his best . He's a gum-chewing cynical PI who's determined the find the truth behind the disappearance of millionaire Sampson . He has all the necessary tics , nudges , winks , and shrugs . And he registers exquisite pain when somebody clobbers him . There is , for instance , a scene in which a big thug named Puddler sucker punches Newman in a bar , then takes him out back and begins to deliver one or two heavy , deliberately placed body blows . R . J . Wagner sneaks up on Puddler , knocks him out , then gaily begins to help Newman walk back to his car . But Newman groans and leans against the wall , puffing and holding his belly , and begs Wagner , " Wait a minute . " A less imaginative actor would have had the character shake his head a few times to clear it , then stride off snapping out orders . Shelly Winters is equally good in a comic role as an overripe over-the-hill ex-movie star and alcoholic . I can't imagine anyone doing better than Winters when she's berating a hotel orchestra for not playing La Cucaracha , shouting that they can't be REAL " Mescins " or they'd have their guitars , and then stumbling off the platform . Shelly Winters is often nailed for spoiling the pictures she's in but I'm not sure why . Her whining evokes both irritation and pathos . She's brought some pizazz to some other films she's been in too . Ham should always be considered a part of any proper buffet . So why doesn't the picture come together ? Why is the sum less than its parts . Where is the subtrahend ? It has a flattish made-for-TV quality . Settings are all comfortably upscale , as in an episode of " Colombo . " The L . A . locations seem to be carefully chosen but because of the photography or Mandel's below-average score , they have little impact . Compare " Chinatown " or " Farewell My Lovely . " William Goldman's script tries for the telling wisecrack ( " Only cream and bastards rise " ) but there aren't enough of them and they're mostly cracks without wit . The best repartee is between Lauren Bacall and Pamela Tiffen , two women who hate one another and delight in mutual insults . " I love your wrinkles . I revel in them . " Still , Goldman's script does manage to hold together a plot that is bilaterally symmetrical . On the one hand , Newman is hired to rescue the kidnapped millionaire Samson and save the half million paid for his return . On the other hand Newman stumbles into an unrelated plot having to do with the smuggling of illegal aliens . The two stories have absolutely nothing to do with one another until more than halfway through the film when Newman alerts one gang to the operations of the other . It's all pretty easy to get lost in , especially when so many disparate characters are involved . The plot lacks an engine too . I didn't believe for a moment that Newman was genuinely dedicated to his craft , that it was a point of pride with him to " crack this thing , " as he puts it . Humphrey Bogart was a cynical , wisecracking PI in " The Maltese Falcon " but what was driving him , as we discover at the end of the film , was the murder of his partner , Miles Archer . Certainly , concern about the fate of the kidnapped rich guy isn't much of a motive . We never even meet him and everybody hates him anyway . What drives Newman's character ? Nothing that we can discover . His marriage is a disaster , he lives in his office , he drives a beat-up car , he has practically no friends . In fact , when you come right down to it , Newman is not a particularly admirable guy in this film . He has a nasty habit of using people . He gets Winters ' weak character drunk and then insults her as she lies passed out . He charms some information out of a good-natured barmaid with his New York accent and , when he's finished with her , blows her off by asking directly , " Where's the boss ? " , and her face falls with the realization that she's been had . He deliberately lies to his emotionally vulnerable but estranged wife , from whom he gets some sympathy and a night in bed before leaving her flat the next morning . He , in turn , has no sympathy for anyone else . And then there's the end of the film , a freeze frame that leaves us wondering whether Newman will turn his only friend Arthur Hill over to the police or whether Hill will shoot to stop him . The technique may be an integral part of the movie , as it is in " The Four Hundred Blows , " in which a delinquent child is frozen while looking at the camera , as if waiting for the audience to judge him . Or it may , as in this case , be an arbitrary gesture , a way of ending a movie that nobody could think of a good ending for . You know , though , having said that , I still prefer an ending like this to the phenomenal shootouts that have since become so commonplace . See it for the performances . |
443,210 | 819,382 | 320,661 | 6 | Piece Be Upon You . | Some of the names are real enough - - King Baldwin and Saladin - - but I don't know how accurate a picture this is of what looks like the Second Crusades . ( I missed the first couple of minutes . ) I vaguely remember that Tiberia was captured by Salahudin , but maybe not . Basically , Jerusalem is run by the Christians here but threatened by Moslems . There's a good deal of treachery , especially by some of the rogue Christians . Oh , and there are references to Jews being in the city too . The city winds up in the hands of a blacksmith-turned-nobleman , Orlando Bloom , who's true blue and gallant and smart and handsome . His ultimate foe , Salahudin , is played by a guy who resembles Lee Van Cleef in his villainy mode , but who is clever , determined , and honorable . ( A riveting dramatic performance by the Syrian actor . ) I would like to add " wise " to that list , because that's what the writers evidently intended , but Salahudin is only given one chance to display his smarts . " What is Jerusalem worth ? " asks the blacksmith . Salahudin shrugs , says , " Nothing , " and begins to walk away - - then stops to look back , smiles , and says , " Everything . " This prompts the viewer to wonder if he's a Moslem at all because he sounds like a closet Buddhist to at least one viewer , namely me . The climax of the movie is an epic battle at the walls of Jerusalem in which both sides suffer appalling losses , and the blacksmith finally accepts Salahudin's offer of safe passage for everyone out of the city , and the Christian surrenders Jerusalem to save lives in the face of impossible odds . The blacksmith I should add , as if it were necessary , gets the stunning widow of a nasty Christian . The movie's point of view is the sort that can be called balanced . The Crusaders were a jealous and scheming lot , when you get right down to it . ( We don't get to know so much about the Moslems . ) The Knights Templars were hanged regularly . The children's crusade ( not in the movie ) was exploited by Christian communities they passed through and resembled the rush of lemmings off a cliff . Still a Christian is a Christian . And during the climactic battle , Bloom the blacksmith organizes the most effective and deadly possible defense of his city . He sites in his artillery and blows the swarthy Wogs and their terrible siege towers apart . The movie may be balanced but we've seen this sort of thing so often before . A noble band of blooders defending a position against an overwhelming force . They hunker down and take a beating then , when the enemy is smirking and coming in for the kill , the survivors rise and clobber them with all sorts of unexpected devices and techniques . ( If you doubt it's a familiar scenario , cf . " Wake Island " or " Bataan . " ) Yes , it's a balanced movie except that the entire audience will be whistling and cheering when the Crusaders disarticulate their attackers . I hate to keep carping but if I remember , this is putting the cart before the horse . Actually , the Crusaders learned about the art of fortification from the Moslems and brought it back to Europe . There followed the Age of Great Forts . Richard the Lionheart , who is glimpsed at the end as he leads still another Crusade , built a monster of a fort in Normandy . I can see why this film was made when it was - - 2005 . The Middle East in turmoil once again . Zealots on both sides . Treachery abounding . I suppose the message is that " plus ca change , plus c'est la meme chose . " The world is full of constants , such as the speed of light and conflict in the Middle East . The movie gives us the blacksmith as hero - - but he surrenders Jerusalem , rather than fight to the death and have his women and children butchered by Saladin , as the Christians butchered everyone when THEY first took the city . Oh , it's all sugary sweet , and the city cheers when he announces that they are all safe . But it's " cut and run " nonetheless , isn't it ? We see Bloom in battle . He's heroic . But in some ways the most courageous thing he does in the entire long movie is surrender a few square miles of stones and streets in order to save a thousand innocent lives . Jerusalem itself had no value except as a symbol . Salahudin , come to think of it , is given a second wisecrack that suggests a certain perspicacity . When Bloom tells him that before he , Salahudin , takes the city , he , Bloom , will burn it to the ground and destroy every sacred stone . " Maybe that would be the best thing , " replies Salahudin . |
443,221 | 819,382 | 441,774 | 6 | People You Don't Want to Meet . | This is a re-telling of the story featured in Kastle's earlier and inexpensive black-and-white film . Martha Beck ( Salma Hayek ) and Ray Fernandez ( Jared Leto ) are two lovers who live in the own version of Cloud Cuckooo Land , traveling about the country in 1947 , meeting lonely widows through ads in Lonely Hearts tabloids , then emptying their bank accounts and sometimes disposing of the inconvenient women and , in one case , a child who is a few years old . They are finally caught , largely through the efforts of Nassau County detective Elmer Robinson ( the director's grandfather ) and executed at Sing Sing . Kastle's film is the better of the two , I think . It gets bonus points for having been made on a budget that would hardly accommodate a high school production of " Our Town . " And it's an original , not a remake . And , although there are no bad performances in this new version , the casting in the 1970s was more accurate . It's easy to see here why Leto might be under the spell of somebody who looks like Salma Hayek . She's a beautiful woman with a bosom that bespeaks authority . But in the original , Shirley Stoler was so obese she could be seen from outer space . In that , she resembled the historical Martha Beck . And in the original , Tony LoBianco gave a more convincing performance as the seductive sleazebag . A lot of people saw Lared Leto here as a charm boy , but his appeal slipped past my apperceptive apparatus . He doesn't exude the kind of confidence and reassuring qualities that a good con man must have . He seems uncertain and nervous much of the time , an anomalous trait in what I suppose would technically be called an anti-social personality , socialized type . Hayek at least brings a good deal of passion to her role . I can understand why John Travolta's role was written into the tale . The murderous duo travel around on their spree , from New York to Florida to Michigan , and Travolta's detective , along with his sidekick ( James Gandolfini ) provide the audience with an anchor . They sort of stand in for us . But I'm at a loss to understand why the tsuris in Travolta's family life is dragged in . The wife who was a suicide , the son he argues with , the young lady ( Laura Dern ) he's dating . They have nothing to do with the story and they don't really tell us much about the character of Elmer Robinson . He comes off as a morose cop , just a bit less cynical than his colleagues . I found the chronology a little confusing too . In some cases I lost track of how the bodies were disposed of , and how many there were , and where , and how exactly the scam worked since we never see a single example played out from beginning to end . The two victims we get to know a little about ( not very much ) are Alice Krige and Dagmara Dominczyk . They're the only ones we're allowed to pity . It isn't a poor movie . Everyone involved displays a generous amount of talent , some more than others . ( Even the little kid is pretty good , as little kids go . ) But the production is Hollywoodized in a way the original was not . Everything seems carefully planned . The 1940s cars glisten brilliantly in the sunlight . A woman fastidiously apples lipstick after oral sex . The victims we see are attractive and relatively young , not the pathetic oldsters that provided the couple with grist for their gory mill . There is a tasteless scene in which we must see Jared Leto forced into the electric chair and then watch the " fish fry " in its entirety . There is no trial , just the execution . What did the writer have in mind when he put this scene in ? Are we supposed to revel in the extinction of life , even if that life was thoroughly evil ? |
441,740 | 819,382 | 120,202 | 6 | Easygoing Mamet Comedy . | It's not hilarious but it's consistent in its good-natured cynicism , from which most of its amusement quotient is derived . Mamet takes us to a small town in New Hampshire where Bill Macy is trying to set up locations for a film he is directing , ( Some problems there with the old watermill , the centerpiece of the story , which doesn't exist anymore . ) Alec Baldwin is a little careless about his attraction to young girls and this adds to the difficulties when he's put upon by the authorities . He has the best line though - - the last in the film - - when he shuffles off to the set and mutters , " It beats working . " Philip Seymour Hoffman has a strange face , indeed a strange presence , and brings a good deal of talent to the role of a screenwriter with principle , probably the closest to a protagonist the movie offers us . He quits his job at one point before having an epiphany and returning to work . And he has a romance with the attractive , perceptive , flatly matter-of-fact Rebecca Pigeon , who projects an extraordinary intelligence and sexiness despite her ski boots and overgrown running shoes , which any normal viewer would love to pluck off and turn into soup . As their romance is nudged forward by events , she asks Hoffman , " How do you feel about children ? " He stares back open mouthed , his mind whirling , before he replies , " I never could see the point . " I just claimed his mind was whirling but he gives no evidence of it in his behavior . He simply stands there agog and hesitates for some seconds before speaking . But a viewer KNOWS his brain is clicking , even though it's moving in an unanticipated direction . That's acting talent , and pretty good writing too . It will probably leave you smiling , so go ahead and watch it if you can . |
443,438 | 819,382 | 57,129 | 6 | Very Spooky . | This ought to make your hair stand on end and there's not a special effect or a drop of blood in a cartload . Julie Harris is Nell , a complete wimp of a woman , who spends a couple of days and nights with three other folks in a supposedly haunted house . The others are Dr . Markway ( Johnson ) , and anthropologist with an interest in psychic phenomena , Theo ( Bloom ) , a lesbian with ESP , and Luke ( Tamblyn ) , the heir apparent of Hill House who is there to provide comic relief . Nell doesn't have much going for her at home . She practically has to steal her own car . She's spent eleven years taking care of her invalid mother and feels responsible for her death . She doesn't drink or smoke . She doesn't do anything . For the first time in her life she feels part of a community and loves Hill House even though it scares the hell out of her at night , what with wall poundings and automatic harps and whatnot . Robert Wise does a fine job as director . He makes good use of every unsettling knob of mahogany furniture in the place . A door knob with one of those sunny faces embossed on it takes on ominous qualities . Shirley Jackson , on whose novel this was based , was a true screwball herself but a great writer within the limits of the genre . Her approach was similar to Alfred Hitchcock's . You take some ordinary person and put him or her in a situation that rapidly escalates into the extraordinary . The novel in fact is probably better in some ways than this movie . There's an occasional narrative , and it's Nell's . Of all the characters in the film , Nell is the one we'd least like to be , and not just because of her destiny . She never has any FUN ! And the screenplay leaves out a few details that make the story more interesting . The handwriting on the wall incident , for example . In the novel it leaves behind a sulfuric stink . Oh , and that's another thing . In the movie , they read the inscription , taste the substance with which it was written , and leave Luke to erase it . No photos . No samples . No nothing . What kind of anthropologist does Markway call himself ? Okay , okay . You expect rough edges in any case study , but Markway doesn't do ANYTHING . He doesn't even have a tape recorder . I happen to be an anthropologist with an interest in anomalous phenomena too , having once pursued ghosts through a graveyard in a culture where a ghost was something to be contended with . And I always had a tape recorder . My question is : Who is funding Markway ? The standards for grants must be much more lax than they are at my sources . Well , that's a problem with Markway , not the movie . The movie is pretty good , especially in comparison to the recent remake . The remake looks like it was designed to be nothing more than a CGI extravaganza with a kind of boring story holding the phony images together . In the remake you can see the statues almost doing a tarantella . In this one , the original , you see nothing , and the film is the spookier for it . |
441,759 | 819,382 | 102,820 | 6 | Marginalized Persons | Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh are two undercover narcs who must be part of the drug world they inhabit and yet retain their identities as cops . In a way they're marginal people , like shop foremen - - no longer just workers , yet not part of management either . Or like cultural anthropologists , for that matter , participant observers . Two of us were studying psychedelic drug use in New York way back when and were doing on-site observation at a party where everyone else was getting stoned , me and my trusty tape recorder . The dope turned my hosts paranoid and they accused us of being narcs . My partner and I agreed that I would partake of the illicit substance - - just a hit or two to reassure our subjects - - and he would not . It reflected really poor judgment on my part . ( How long is the statue of limitations in effect , again ? ) But watching this movie , I could understand pretty much exactly where these two narcs were coming from . In their case , life and death were involved . If you don't participate , you don't do your job . If you do , you're breaking the law . If one side finds you out , your prosecuted . If the other side finds you out , you're spanked . What's important in a movie like this are the performances and they're quite good . Not just Patric and Leigh , but even the smaller parts . I was pleasantly surprised by the direction as well . Let me see . The producer is Richard Zanuck . The director is Lili Fini Zanuck . When you see a combination of names like those with statuses like those , you have to suspect nepotism . But , nepotism or no , the direction is unhurried and dark and humorless and very effective . The photography is outstanding , its colors drawn from the cool end of the spectrum . The music is by Eric Clapton and he does a great riff on Texas Rock , though we still hear his vibrating chords through the cow flops . It isn't a happy movie . But it's unusually well done . |
442,622 | 819,382 | 369,339 | 6 | A Desert of the Mind | In this one , Tom Cruise is a hit man who's job is to wipe out five witnesses scheduled to testify against a drug lord , and then beat it . He's a real pro . He's a steel gray inside and out , from his hair to his suit and socks . He kills ruthlessly , with no regard for whether the victim deserves it or not . " I do this for a living . " But he explains to the cab driver ( Jamie Foxx ) whom he has coerced into driving him around that he was abused as a child , so that explains everything . There are a couple of minor subplots . An LAPD detective ( Mark Ruffalo ) begins to twig to the fact that the people being murdered so quickly , one after another , seem to form a pattern among the drug community . It's the serial murderer routine . There is even a boss ( Peter Berg ) who refuses to believe Ruffalo and says , " I'm tired . I'm going home . " Then there's the woman . Jada Pinkett Smith , looking and acting pretty good . Her main function in the film is to give Jamie Foxx somebody to get hysterical about saving . There is the expectable scene in which he calls her on a cell phone and warn her that Cruise is inside her building , looking for her . " Max , " she tells him , " isn't it kind of late to be calling ? " And will his cell phone cutting out , Foxx stutters , " Anna , Anna ! Listen . You've go to listen to me ! Anna ? " Tom Cruise is a killer made of ice except that he saves Foxx's rear end in a shoot out for no discernible reason . He seems to stalk through the movie like The Terminator on meth . Jamie Foxx isn't a seasoned actor but his very tentativeness , his awkwardness , contribute to the effectiveness of his performance as the pleasant unreflective dutiful son who is satisfied with keeping the cleanest cab in town . None of the other characters registers much except for one - - the city of Los Angeles at night . You know how they say , " You're always loneliest in a crowd " ? Well , you would never be lonely in L . A . because the streets are completely deserted . A few exceptions , true , such as when the plot requires a couple of street muggers . But , otherwise , we can be sure that if we happen to glimpse a pedestrian he is only walking a short distance , from one car to another probably . There is practically no traffic on the streets . The marmorial office buildings themselves are flourescently lit and morgue-like in their carpentered right-angled purity . The director , the photographer , and the art director have this urban desert in their grasp and it makes the entire movie better than an average action flick , although the skeleton of that primitive structure still shows through what we see on the screen . But - - well , take a scene like this . Cruise is forcing Foxx to drive him to another destination along an empty thoroughfare . They stop for a red light . There is no music or other sound . The cab rolls to a halt in slow motion . Neither of the two men speak . And then , out of nowhere , trotting across the city streets in front of the car , two coyotes with gleaming eyes go about their business while the two men follow them with their gaze . The animals seem certain of being ignored , and why not ? Everybody ignores everything in L . A . It's brief but telling . Someone had to actually think about shooting that footage and editing it in . There is a final shootout on a ghostly subway train . The damsel in distress is saved . It's an ordinary action flick in its conception . No doubt about it . But its execution is more impressive than the original imitative script deserved . |
442,469 | 819,382 | 37,761 | 6 | The Killing Sickness . | Laird Cregar , whose last movie this was , was one of those actors whose kind we seldom see today . Tall and bulky , with the features of a flabby puppy and a smoothly articulated voice , he made a few films in which he played maniacs . Clearly , he was headed towards interesting character roles but died before any such career could be realized . His previous movie was " The Lodger " , an fictional examination of Jack the Ripper . You know Jack the Ripper ? That guy who murdered those " dance hall girls " in Victorian London ? This is a variation on that theme . He's George Harvey Bone , a noted composer of the period , who suffers from blackouts that last an hour or two , after which he's amnesic . He doesn't realize it but , as John Brahm's long opening pan shows us , Craigar murders people during those blackouts . Bone sees a doctor who specializes in brain diseases , George Sanders . Sanders suggests that Bone take time off from writing his new symphony and get to know ordinary people . It's too bad that Sanders didn't specify who those people should be , because , before he knows it , the somewhat unworldly Craigar finds himself being exploited by the treacherous chanteuse , Linda Darnell , looking just fine . She seduces him into writing popular songs for her act . All the music is written by Bernard Hermann . And Hermann's pop songs sound like ballads straight out of 1945 , with titles like " Forever Yours . " This George Sanders is a curious shrink . Suspecting - - no more than intuiting , really - - that Craigar may be up to no good during his blackouts , he sics a private investigator on the composer and alerts the police to his conjectures . This doesn't prevent a confrontation between Craigar and Linda Darnell . He strangles her , disguises her body as a Guy Fawkes dummy , and burns the corpse atop a community bonfire . Sanders and the police twig . They visit Craigar's apartment , reveal the evidence against him , and tell him that he must come with them and be sent to a hospital for the criminally insane . But he bolts because this is the opening night of his symphony and he must play the piano . The symphony begins as planned , with Craigar the featured musician , but when the cops show up all hell breaks loose and there is a final shot of Craigar playing out the last few melancholy chords while the empty music hall burns down around him and provides him with a Wagnerian exit passage . Not a bad movie , if a little depressing . Craigar isn't an ordinary murderer . He kills people he doesn't even know . And , as for Linda Darnell's lying , selfish tart - - well , she doesn't deserve to be strangled , but there's no reason he couldn't have turned her over his knee and giving her a darned good pranging . In fact , that might have been fun . Whatever illness Craigar suffered from is fictional , of course , but looks like some ungodly combination of psychomotor epilepsy and explosive personality disorder . And as for Sanders ' shrink , I wouldn't have paid his bill . Sanders should have sent Craigar , not out into the streets of London , but off to the Sussex downs where he might have quietly kept bees . |
442,991 | 819,382 | 80,474 | 6 | New Broom Exposes Dirt . | A thoughtful film , it is also sprinkled with all sorts of features designed to increase its box-office appeal . Redford is Brubaker , the new reform warden who enters the prison in the guise of a prisoner in order to get a worm's eye view of the goings on . ( They're pretty crummy , what with patients having to pay for their own medical care from a corrupt doctor , insurance premiums paid to cover non-existent tractors but not collapsing roofs . ) After ten or fifteen minutes he reveals his true identity and begins snapping out orders and cleaning things up . At this point it's rather like Superman emerging from the phone booth that Clark Kent entered , or Destry finally picking up a gun . But Redford learns that prisons , like wars , must operate within political constraints . He is told of a field full of buried bodies and begins to dig them up , despite the entreaties of his political friends and advisers , who try to talk him out of it or buy him off with the prison improvements he's been fighting for . It's not even clear that the bodies have been illegally buried , much less murdered as he suspects . The place used to be a pauper's graveyard , he's told . But nothing will wreck a reform agenda faster than zealotry . Before you can say Reign of Terror , Redford is relieved of his job and is driven away - - to the sad but appreciative applause of the prisoners he's leaving behind . That should leave the viewer uplifted alright . What a complicated and dynamic place a prison must be to be properly run . Some of the inmates have been railroaded but most of them have been ( or have become ) the cold-blooded psychopaths they're so often labeled . A warden must walk a tightrope between seeing that the men are treated decently but not given Jacuzzis . Redford , as it turns out , has pretty good balance in this regard , but if he were really concerned about getting his job done he would have compromised and stopped digging quite so hard . Nice cast of supporting players . Jane Alexander is always good . Matt Clark is effectively devious as Redford's clerk ( he's about the only inmate who can read and write ) who participates in the murder of a helpless and naive old prisoner . Redford is about as authoritative as he can be in his minimalist way . He's not George C . Scott playing Patton . The movie rolls along smoothly and takes us with it . We WANT Redford to succeed . But the box-office stuff just doesn't ring true . The sudden emergence of Redford's latent identity as the warden , a shootout with shotguns resulting in two deaths , the inmates applauding and whistling for the disgraced warden as he leaves . It detracts from the more important story and leaves us happy but with an armful of unanswered questions . ( Just who ARE those guys buried on prison property ? ) The inmates may now " respect themselves as human beings " , as Redford claims , but how long will it take the new replacement warden to reduce them to their original rags and despondency ? I wish it had been better , though it's involving enough . It was directed by Stuart Rosenberg who injected a lot more life into Don Pearce's " Cool Hand Luke . " Pearce , by the way , like Warden Brubaker , was a true original . |
441,916 | 819,382 | 41,178 | 6 | Mitchum and Greer - - Together Again ! | The Big Steal , pairing Robert Mitchum with Jane Greer again , the couple from " Out of the Past . " It sounds profoundly noir . But in fact it's not . It's more of a romantic adventure with comedic and dramatic elements sprinkled around in it . You see , Mitchum is Halliday , an Army lieutenant in charge of the payroll . While carrying the $350 , 000 he was held up by Jim Fiske , Patric Knowles . Mitchum reported the robbery to his superior , Captain Blake , William Bendix . But Bendix doesn't believe him . Knowles takes the money and flees to central Mexico where a fence , John Qualen , is waiting to launder the money in the local lavanderia or something . Knowles speeds through quaint villages and through the kinds of resorts wherein you sit next to the swimming pool and sip pink drinks with umbrellas protruding from the glasses . Mitchum is in hot pursuit of Knowles and the stash , and has picked up Jane Greer along the way , a woman that Knowles has somehow betrayed . In hot pursuit of Mitchum and Greer is William Bendix , armed and dangerous , carrying extradition papers regarding Mitchum . Mitchum and Greer had made the successful " Out of the Past " just earlier and this presumably was an attempt by RKO to cash in on their popularity . Mitchum is big and hefty and embodies momentum in his stride . I'm not so sure that this is his kind of role . It wouldn't take much to imagine Cary Grant doing a far better job . Jane Greer is an interesting woman . Her acting isn't more than professional in caliber but she LOOKS so exotically familiar . Her eyelids are like a lizard's eyelids and her irises and lips glisten sensually at times . She was in a Columbo episode when she was over fifty and still looked as good if not better . And take a dekko at " No Way Out . " John Qualen is nobody's cynical fence , though . He's a poor but honest farmer working for John Ford . Patric Knowles gets the job done . William Bendix is shown as an angry but somewhat foolish avenger . His hot pursuit is constantly frustrated by road construction or a herd of goats loose on the road . The Mexican actors , by and large , are played for laughs , except for the Inspector General , Ramon Navarro , who may be cute but who is savvy as well . Given all the light-hearted wisecracking that goes on between Mitchum and Greer , the action scenes are discordantly realistic . When Knowles gets slapped around by Mitchum , he remembers it later and takes revenge . A punch in the face leads to a bloody nose instead of a comely trickle from the corner of Mitchum's lips . The location shooting is nicely evocative . For some reason the talent are almost always shot in interiors or in isolated stopovers . The use of doubles in second-unit shooting is conspicuous . And the special effects are sometimes clumsy . Why undercrank the camera when the cars are already spinning around dangerous curves ? By 1949 the audience was wised up to such tricks . And why , when a driver is seen in a car mock up against a rear projection screen , does the car lean INTO the curve ? Yes , if you're piloting an airplane . No , if you're driving a car . The f / x guys have to bone up on " inertia " . Don Siegel directed but this was an early effort and he was yet to hit his stride . By no definition is this a film noir , but it's not bad for what it is . |
443,036 | 819,382 | 144,546 | 6 | Not as bad as it ought to be . | Kind of unpromising material , if you think about it . A dozen people in different vehicles thrumming through the Oklahoma night while a mad killer is offing women and leaving their corpses holding their own hearts . ( Wow . ) What an opportunity to slather Technicolor Red Number Nine all over the screen . Instead the writer and director have given us a series of character studies that , if schematic , are at least not in-your-face revolting . The violence is no more than is required and the acting is pretty good . Especially good are Robert Forster as a good-natured truck driver , Lois Red Elk as a Navaho mother who wants to see the Gulf of Mexico before she dies , and Penelope Anne Miller as a sleazy but compliant lap dancer . Complaints from others that the script is overwritten , so that the dialog sounds speechy , while understandable , should compare this attempt at naturalism with the arty " Night on Earth . " I have a complaint too , though . That damned dog ! The doomed mutt that Forster picks up at a truck stop . We already KNOW that Forster's Odell is a nice guy . We don't need his saving the dog . Makes you feel as if it weren't enough that Cardone , the writer and director , had touched our hearts - - he had to cut them out and hand them to us . |
443,196 | 819,382 | 37,820 | 6 | Not dead , but liminal . | This isn't Val Lewton's best , although it's by no means a failure , given the strictures of the production - - budget , schedule , and so on . The story has a handful of people quarantined on a Greek island so as not to spread the plague . Half of them die of the disease , two are murdered by a crazed woman who was prematurely buried , and one is a suicide . Only the gentlemanly host and the two young lovers survive . The acting varies in quality , with Boris Karloff being noticeably more professional than anybody else , as the stern , protective General whose skepticism about vorvolaka ( some kind of night-time demon from the grave ) is finally ground away by the stress and by the whispers of the old crone who believes in the superstition . Unfortunately , the script lets everyone down . Halfway through the film , the wind changes and the plague is forgotten . The rest of the story has to do with that escapee from the premature burial who runs around with a miniature version of Poseidon's trident , using it to the distress of the others . It wouldn't be bad if the two sources of horror were somehow fused and hinged together - - the plague and the vorvolaka - - but they're not . The superstition actually arises out of an illness that has nothing to do with plague , as the film makes clear from the start . We wind up with the impression that we're watching the same actors in the same wardrobe on the same set - - but making two different movies . The direction by Mark Robson is okay , and Lewton will have his little touches . The eeriest scene is a simple one - - a vulnerable woman in a peasant dress following the chirping of a bird through a dark and windy forest . Night . And she's all by herself . And there's a madwoman with a sharp object somewhere . Little Red Riding Hood all ready to be eaten . But that's about it . Whatever scare factor is built into the movie comes from the images on screen , not from the story . What always surprises me about Val Lewton's productions at RKO is that , even when they're no more than middling , they are B movies that manage never to insult the audience . They are never done by the number , or at any rate not by any numbers that exist outside of Val Lewton's head . |
442,597 | 819,382 | 107,207 | 6 | Original Sin | Daniel Day-Lewis is Gerry Conlon , a Belfast Catholic . He's a young guy who leads a reckless life , throwing rocks gleefully at British armored cars , stealing from a prostitute's apartment . But things are getting rough in Belfast . A resolution has just been passed that allows for the arrest and retention of suspected terrorists for seven days without charge . ( Seven days , nothing . How about infinity ? Betrayed by neighboring and competitive falafel-stand owner , the despicable and damned-forever Shaymala , who is forever after me . May her tribe be cursed . Signed : Abdul Abulbul Amir , Guantanamo . ) Well , Day-Lewis ships over to London where he leads a reckless , heedless , drug - and booze-besotted , frolicsome , life of hippiedom in a shoddy commune of like-minded dope-smoking friends . We don't believe in eating animals . Only love . The next thing he knows , he's in the slams with his father . He's been convicted of setting off a bomb in a pub , and his Da of running a safe house . The scene in which the explosion occurs is very well done . Here is the happy , fur-bedecked Day-Lewis in the equivalent of Central Park or Golden Gate Park , having his usual unthinking good time , when there comes to the gay group a distant but loud THUMP . They rise and look grimly in the direction of the sound . " Sounds like Belfast , " says one of them . It would have been easy to make the Crown the heavy and the poor IRA folk the awesome victims , but that's not what this is about . It's about the relationship between Day-Lewis , a delinquent , and his father , Pete Postelthwaite , who committed sins a long time ago . Inmates have an interesting subculture . And it's different , evidently , from one country to another . These inmates are almost benign compared to Americans . American inmates have ritual verbalisms that excuse their acts - - murder or whatever . " It wasn't personal . " ( Probably taken from " The Godfather . " ) Or , " He had no business being there . " American cops have the same convention : " It was just a natural act , " said when a police officer shoots or beats the crap out of a bystander . No problem . If one inmate has a fit and falls down an iron staircase , another inmate who witnesses it might - - might - - call the center and say , " Somebody just fell down , " without helping . And the slams themselves are better kept up in Britain than in all but the newest slams in America . The direction is zippy without being maddening , and the acting superb . It's well worth seeing . |
442,528 | 819,382 | 37,795 | 6 | Classic of the genre . | It really IS a classic of the genre , but the problem is that the genre itself is so dated as not to be taken seriously anymore . That happens to genres . Would you watch a Western in which the good guy wears a white hat and the bad guy wears a black hat and one " calls the other out " and they have a mano-a-mano shootout in the middle of the dusty street and the good guy wins and gets the girl ? I mean , that's asking a lot of a modern audience . This film was one of a series of semi-documentaries that came out with the end of the war . Often , as here , Henry Hathaway was the director and the stentorian baritone Reed Hadley was the narrator . I can't vouch for the historical accuracy of the plot , although regardless of the facts I'm sure J . Edgar Hoover was tickled pink when he saw it . Hoover , President-for-Life of the FBI , was a media savvy character . Early in his career he had a skilled partner in Melvin Purvis , the guy who tracked down Dillinger . Such rivalry was not to be tolerated . Purvis's part in the affair , in fact in the FBI , was purged like Akhenaten's until Hoover became the hero . Purvis quit in disgust . Hoover refused to cooperate with Warner's " G-Men " because Jimmy Cagney patronized a saloon , but he gave the FBI's all to this film because the FBI was morally upright and flawless . One scene was of particular interest . A real Nazi spy insists on testing the American counterspy's radio set to see if it can actually reach Hamburg . It doesn't . It transmits directly to a nearby FBI station which then relays the information to Germany , in a slightly altered form . The FBI operator hears the Nazi calling . He looks up and says , " That isn't Bill . I know his fist . " A " fist " is the particular style that an individual operator uses in sending Morse code . It's about as distinctive as his handwriting . I was a radio operator for a few years in the Coast Guard and had a great fist . Most of the other men at my station set their keys to automatic " fast " so they could sound hot . Only they overreached and wound up sending erratically and making a lot of errors . I set mine to " slow " and developed a fist that was heaven to listen to and easy to read . Two Coast Guard radiomen from a ship visited the station in dress blues one afternoon and asked who " LL " was - - those were my sign-off letters . They came over to my console and one said , " We just wanted to tell you that it's a pleasure to copy you . " The two men shook my hand , the three of us blushed , and they made a hurried exit , because real men don't say things like that to one another . Pardon me , that may have been what you call " off topic . " Oh , yes , the movie . Alas , the conventions of the genre demand that the Nazis be evil in every respect . Worse than that , they're rude . When the American counterspy is introduced to them , they don't shake his hand . They don't even greet him , they just scowl . None of them is in love , none of them has a home , none has a dog or a cat or collects stamps . They sacrifice one another for the cause at the drop of a solecism and - - well , you get the picture . The conventions doom the characters as human beings . Loyd Nolan and Signe Hasso are the most watchable , but all of the performances are colorless . Even the hero is dull , despite the danger he often finds himself in . It's still an interesting and exciting flick , once you adapt to its weaknesses . Fascinating to see the way in which two-way mirrors are presented as the high-tech novelty they were at the time . And the pre-computer FBI's fingerprint storage - - " Five THOUSAND fingerprints on file ! " , Hadley announces proudly . It's worth catching if it is convenient . |
442,935 | 819,382 | 481,522 | 6 | Random comments on a tragic event . | If you're going to assess the movie AS a movie , you have to try to separate it from the events it purports to describe . The events are far too horrible for us to grasp fully , but the movie is accessible to us , fully formed , financed , edited , and marketed for our enlightenment . I guess that doesn't really make it easy to make judgments about the film , because there is still so much emotional baggage in tow . If this were entirely fictional , I'd say it was about average for a TV movie , may a bit less . I expect that men and women will respond differently to it . Most of the footage seems taken up with phone calls between the victims and their families or agents on the ground . This ought to appeal disproportionately to women . Nothing sexist is meant by that . It's just a scientific observation as well as an everyday one . As an example , a few years ago a young woman was driving her car across some railroad tracks and a locomotive smashed into the car . As the monstrous engine pushed the car along the track for a quarter of a mile or so before finally coming to a stop , the woman was frantically working at her cell phone , trying to call her mother . Men will respond more to the instrumental activities on the ground and aboard the doomed flight . What did they DO ? What did they plan to do with the airplane if they succeeded ? Did any of them know anything about flying a huge aircraft ? I wouldn't argue that the instrumental concerns were more important than the expressive ones in this instance . The passengers and the hijackers were dead the moment the pilot and copilot were killed . If I had a last phone call to make , it might well be to a family member . Yet the film seems to pander to common sensibilities . Do ALL of the victim's families have to be so pure and middle class ? Were all of the loved ones really blond ? Why do we see so MANY kids ? And why are they thrust in our faces ? The first family member to receive an alarming phone call from her husband is simultaneously watching television , trying to cope with three noisy young children , and understand what her husband is trying to tell her . The kids are all cute as buttons but they keep getting underfoot and interrupting her - - " Who's dead , Mommy ? " And the movie - - understandably - - must take dramatic license . But in doing so , in fabricating conversations and events aboard the plane , in concentrating on isolated phone calls home , it loses something of real importance - - how did the passengers get to know each other well enough to bond together and combat a common enemy ? Nobody seems to discuss their takeover plans with anyone else . It seems to come out of the blue . The film raises questions about the truth value of some of the things we see on screen too . How did one of the fruitcakes manage to get on board with a simulated bomb strapped around his waist ? My impression is that the interceptors were nowhere near the hijacked airplane , so why the agonized speculation about whether they should shoot it down or just ram it ? And did anyone really say , " Let's roll " ? I know Bruce Willis would have said it , but did anyone in real life ? I don't want to carp on this any longer because the attacks are still painfully clear in our memories . But although this movie isn't actually insulting , it needs to show more respect for the victims and for the audience as well . When catastrophes are bent and reshaped into typical movie fare , the events and the victims are both cheapened . Tears are easy . Handle with care . |
441,900 | 819,382 | 100,404 | 6 | These Lawyers Keep Writing Novels | It used to be doctors that boasted about the literary artists that rose from their ranks - - William Carlos Williams , Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle , Michael Crighton , Frank Slaughter . ( Frank Slaughter ? ) Now it's coming to be lawyers . Back in 1959 , " Anatomy of a Murder " was a lonely best seller . Lately there has been a cascade of more or less autobiographical books about lawyers from the likes of Turow and Gresham . And the movies inevitably follow the bucks , I mean the books . I wish Turow had used a little more imagination in cooking up the names for his characters , especially since they seem designed to represent a little microcosm of ethnic identities . I guess Sabich is properly Polish , and Horgan irretrievably Irish , and lawyer Stern can be a Jewish lawyer who looks and speaks like a Puerto Rican . Polhemus may be a little unusual but not everyone can claim a hyphenized national allegiance . The attempt is weak with the Italian characters , though . Molto ? Too much for me to believe . And Della Guardia is plumb wrong . La Guardia is an occupational name , meaning " guard , " pretty much like " Steward " in English . But " de la " indicates a place name , like " von " in German or " van " in Dutch . " Della " and " Guardia " are a mismatched couple . " From the guard " ? It would be like an Italian novelist making up a character name like " Cookson " or " Bakerson . " The animal doesn't exist . Oh - - the movie ? It's okay . It rolls along in its sexy , suspenseful , stereotypical way , an efficient example of how to reconstruct in an unidentifiable manner a story already familiar from " The Big Clock " and " No Way Out " and " Where the Sidewalk Ends " and a couple of others . Harrison Ford mopes efficiently through his part . I like Brian Dennehy a lot better as a nice guy than a heavy . Raul Julia is reassuring , almost comforting , in the role of Ford's defense counsel . If I were to be tried for murder I would want him and his underplayed confidence and his big dark gentle eyes to represent me rather than the skulky guilty-looking Ford . Bonny Bedelia is okay . Greta Scacchi is a knockout , so to speak , so it's a double tragedy when she gets her head bashed in . John Spencer is always reliable - - or was . He died a month ago . Too bad , a reliable New Jerseyish everyman . It's worth catching but not worth commenting further on . |
442,817 | 819,382 | 462,200 | 6 | Dual Redemption . | Christina Ricci is a nymphomaniac in a small Southern town . That's a good start right there . In her previous films I found myself so wound up in her broad forehead , Walter Keane eyes , and tiny lips and mental process that I never realized she had a figure . But that she does , and it's pretty much on display here . She spends half the movie running around in the remnants of a polo shirt and a pair of tiny underpants that emphasize her pubic symphisis . A soupcon of bondage too , for those interested in such things . She's more or less engaged to Justin Timberlake who is often away on National Guard assignments , including combat in the Middle East . He's a good soldier but he gets buck fever when he has to shoot at another human being . When he's out of town she floods out with testosterone . One night her lovers take her to a woodland , beat the hell out of her , and leave her lying unconscious in the grass . Samuel L . Jackson is a blues-playing Jesus-driven guitarist who has alienated his estrange wife and now lives alone in a generic wooden shack on a dirt road . He finds Ricci , picks her up , and takes her home . So far , so formulaic . We immediately think that somehow Jackson is going to " cure " Ricci . And he DOES . But there are many twists and turns along the way . Jackson comes to realize that you can't dominate others ' lives , which is presumably what cost him his family . Ricci overcomes her nymphomania . Timberlake conquers his rage when he finds out everyone in town has been doing his girl friend when he's away , and he winds up marrying her , though still burdened by anxiety attacks . We all feel , as the couple drive away to start a new life , that she will help him find peace . I wasn't surprised at Jackson's superior performance as a rickety and crotchety old man . He's always fine . And this role is a challenge . He must project both a protective impulse towards Ricci and at the same time an uncontrollable desire to exercise power over her . He chains her to a radiator in his shack and keeps her captive - - for her own good . Well , that's the sort of thing he expect from the heavy in an ordinary slasher movie . What comes next - - the torture ? The branding with red-hot pokers ? But the writers and the actor keep it clean . It's still a tough role though . Ricci in her minimalist clothing keeps offering herself to Jackson - - " If you want me you can have me . I'll do anything you want . " Of course , he brushes off her advances , as any normal eunuch would . Ricci's performance is pretty good too and that was a bit of a surprise because I'd never seen her do much more than hit her marks before . But then she's never really had a chance to play such a flamboyant Lulubelle before , or to take off all her clothes for that matter . Justin Timberlake doesn't have a very large role but he's not bad at doing rage and anxiety . Or rather " anxiety " , because it seems clear the writers have never had anxiety attacks as I've had . Yet the writing and the direction is subtle enough to suggest the kind of thing that precipitates anxiety attacks , what shrinks call " low-probability catastrophes . " For example , on their final getaway in the car , Timberlake is driving slowly , as anxiety neurotics are want to do , and is being passed by one of those loud , threatening eighteen-wheelers loaded with timber . The monster truck takes an agonizingly long time to pass in the outer lane , sometimes appearing to slow down to the speed of Timberlake's own sluggish vehicle . Meanwhile another loud monster with a grill the size of a king-sized box spring has pulled up behind him , its air horn screaming . Stuck between threats , Timberlake adjusts the rear-view mirror nervously a few times then tells Ricci he has to pull off onto the shoulder . The symptoms may not be right , but the trigger and the behavior are spot on . The musical score is steeped in blues played on an electric guitar , and I found it lugubrious and ultimately tiresome . " Shot a man in Memphis - - bullet hole in his haid . " Well , not that . The lyrics actually underline the development of the characters . I also wish the writers hadn't thoughtlessly thrown in the abuse excuse for Ricci's nymphomania . As if it were that simple . Something else I'm compelled to add . If I don't , nobody will get it . In the third sentence above , both the words " mental " and " process " are puns . They have independent meanings in anatomy and psychology , and both usages are apt . I'd pat myself on the back if I could reach it but I really can't claim credit . The voices tell me these things . The movie's pace is a bit slow too , but it's obvious that a good deal of effort has gone into it . Not badly done . |
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