1944 - COBRA WOMAN Starring Maria Montez "When I look at myself, I am so beautiful I scream with joy!"

 STRANGE LOVES, UNBELIEVABLE ADVENTURES in the SOUTH SEAS! EXOTIC LOVE! featuring the Stars of "Arabian Nights" TOLLEA! TEMPTRESS OF TERROR! Gorgeous, glorious adventure romance in a pagan paradise !

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The quote in the header is supposedly from Maria Montez after she saw herself on screen. Supposedly a "camp classic". But is it anymore stupid than 2008's Indiana Jones meets Space Ghost, or the Kinda Incredible Hulk?  Both of which I sat through this summer.

The young lovers are torn apart on their wedding day when on a beautiful south seas island the bride is kidnapped by members of the cobra cult. It seems that the bride is actually descended from royalty and has a very evil twin sister who resides on Cobra Island. Here her evil twin, rules in terror. As an appeasement to the "fire gods" which is a model volcano, the evil sister dances around her subjects choosing sacrificial victims like she was picking people for her grade school dodge ball team. She wears some sort of glittery snake dress outfit while she struts her stuff, all very cool.

Our hero sails to the rescue of the nice twin sister along with help from his sidekick Sabu, who is armed with a lethal blow gun. The action really doesn't let up for the entire running time of the film.

This movie is only 70 minutes, written by Richard Brooks and Gene Lewis.

1999 - EYES WIDE SHUT, Kubrick;'s final film.

Rummaged through my collection and pulled out Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's last film. I viewed the film in 30 minute pieces while on the treadmill, so it allowed me to think about it each day. I doubt this was the viewing experience Kubrick had in mind when he made it, but hey you go with what works.

 

This film is about SEX. It has major stars in it, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Since it was directed by a male director, guess which star gets to take her clothes off, a lot. But this is in an odd way a very anti sex film. Apparently all of the critics are in agreement that the movie kicks into gear with the confession by the wife to her husband of a sexual fantasy. This freaks the husband out and sets him off on a night of supposed sexual debauchery which he never fulfills. 

The night reaches a climax in a high class orgy where men and women run abound in cloaks and masks. Correction, the women run around with no clothes on while the men run get to wear their clothes. After this scene we still have another half an hour of red herrings.  It seems that Kubrick was trying to build some suspense but it just seemed to add length to an unfocused story. The movie ends with the husband confessing his wild night to his wife (or lack of it) and the implication is that they will have a stronger marriage. There's no place like home I guess

 

 Kubrick was in his 70's when he made this, but it's no masterpiece. As an older filmmaker was this his attitude towards relationships at the end of his life?  Is he just a voyeur sending the Tom Cruise character through a series of weird sexual situations staring at lots of naked young women, only to have him running to his wife at the end of the film? So what, what's the point? Maybe the point is Kubrick gets to film "neeked" women.

Kubrick kind of lost his way after 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It seems to me that his later films lacked a clear structure. I like Barry Lyndon, but Barry Lyndon is pretty slow moving. His films were always very well made, but somehow they always seem to be lacking something. I can't put my finger on it yet. He has been described as a cold filmmaker. The films are fun to watch for their technique but it's really only on a movie nerd level that a film like this can be appreciated.

159 minutes, screenplay Frederick Raphael and Stanley Kubrick.

Watching THE NINES-while making carmelized onions

Found an interesting recipe for making carmelized onions on the LA Times website this weekend. Since it was really cold (I mean really cold), I decided to make the onions. You take 5 pounds of onions and put them in a cast iron pot with about 1/2 cup of oil and some salt. You then proceed to cook them for the next 4 hours on low heat. You have to stir them every 15 minutes. Cook and stir repeatedly. Anyway, while the onions were cooking, I threw on a movie I had heard about called "The Nines". It is basically 3 stories interconnected with some mystical spiritual "god stuff" and "what is reality?" junk thrown in for good measure. I found out that the onions were taking longer than I thought, so I took the cover off of the pot, to let some of the liquid cook out of the onions. There is a lot of water in onions. The Nines, had a small cast that was in each story, and I have to say the dialog was pretty sharp in the first story. The second story had an awful lot of inside Hollywood stuff, about testing TV shows things people probably don't care about. The third story was sort of a pseudo Twilight Zone type of thing. I had started the onions in the morning but since I had kept the heat so low it was actually taking about 6 hours instead of 4 hours. I think the trick is to keep the heat moderately high and then turn the heat way down towards the end of the cooking and reducing process. I enjoyed "The Nines" although I wouldn't even pretend to understand what it meant. For all I know the film was just a big puzzle wrapped in a lot of pseudo intellectual concepts about what man's place in the universe is. Indeed man may actually be the center of his own universe, although this doesn't really pay the cable bill. The onions turned out really well, incredibly the 5 pound bag was reduced to about 16 ounces when all was said and done.

2008 - HAPPY GO LUCKY - Happy is one thing!

To quote Pauline Kael (see above). This is one of those "slice of life" things that are made to illuminate the lives of the ordinary "little people" and give us insight into them.

 Lots of short musical interludes with a clarinet signals the audience that the character of Poppy is cute, quirky and spunky and is about to do some cute, quirky and spunky thing. Sally Hawkins is funny, but to hang a movie on her entire character's shtick and personality, is asking a lot. She is either a genuinely positive person or a complete goofball you decice.

Hate to sound like a crude American, but man those accents make it pretty hard to understand the actors at times.

The director Mike Leigh also wrote the story probably using his technique of improvising with the actors before actually settling down to write the screenplay.

Running time:  118 minutes.

2008 - STEP UP 2 THE STREETS is 3 Margaritas + Mexican food

My wife and I went out for happy hour last night at the local Mexican place. After we weaved back home I put on a movie I have been hearing about since I listened to the/film podcast last summer. I drifted in and out of this movie in an alcoholic haze, while my wife yelled at me throughout the movie, "are you awake."

 

But let the people speak:

Step Up 2 has only a few points of correlation with its predecessor. It’s also probably the single most racist movie that will be released by any major American studio in the first 10 years of the twenty-first century

With a script cut-and-pasted from every other dance movie, this film is shockingly corny.  

Completely predictable.

Somehow Streets is even more loathsome than its predecessor...offers gaudy choreography more reminiscent of a Kenny Ortega masturbation session than awe-inspiring foot magic. 

Evigan might have an attractive midriff, but she sometimes starts to give a William Shatner-like delivery of lines with odd pauses and exaggerations.

98 magical minutes.

Surviving the James Bond/Martin Luther King Weekend Marathon

Well I foolishly suggested to my son that he have a weekend watching all of the James Bond movies. He took me up on the offer with the suggestion that I lay in at least 12 frozen pizzas. The agreed upon date was his long school weekend, the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. I could think of no better way to celebrate this giant of civil rights that watching a film series that features a whole bunch of white people. Anyway Friday rolled around and the movie watching commenced with DR NO. This is a movie I have seen many times, and I was able to get through it basically because it's one of the shorter ones. Re-watching it this weekend my mind drifted to the thought, that this was basically a high class B movie,. A lot of it was filmed on location in Jamaica and that certainly helped the look of the film. I enjoyed it. We next rolled into FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. I made it about halfway through this one before falling asleep. It's not like I haven't seen this one before, so it wasn't like I was missing anything. Istanbul looked pretty exotic, and the producers stuck pretty close to the Fleming book. I woke up as Evan was starting GOLDFINGER, drifted back to sleep immediately after the pre-credits sequence, woke up towards the end of the movie and dragged myself off to bed at around 12:40 am. Gave Evan orders to go to bed after this film. Woke up around 5:40 in the morning, noticed the kitchen light was on downstairs. Stumbled my way down to the family room and found Evan on the couch finishing up YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, the remake of DR. NO. Things were blowing up so that signaled the end of the movie. Evan had been up all night and apparently made it through THUNDERBALL. Ordered Evan to bed, he decided to sleep on the couch in the family room. He woke up after 2 hours and started ON HER MAJESTIES SECRET SERVICE. I actually sat down and watched a large chunk of this movie. I still think the movie has a deadly dull long stretch where nothing happens. I guess you would say Bond falling in love in this movie is nothing happening, even if it is with Diana Rigg. The last hour is still pretty entertaining, it does have some pretty cool ski chase footage which they obviously worked incredibly hard to capture on film. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER was next on Evan's list. He was starting to crack, lack of sleep and the general suckeyness of this film caused him to shut it off a couple of times. But being a total trooper he finished the movie out. I had enough. This film was the beginning of the general jokey tone in the films which is frequently blamed on Roger Moore, but it actually starts with this film. Apparently Ian Fleming's plots weren't good enough to use anymore, although interestingly enough when they remake Casino Royale they use Fleming's story for the most part. Evan finally cracked during LIVE AND LET DIE, which to me has always represented the worst of the films. (Actually the Brosnan films aren't very good and QUANTUM OF SOLACE was pretty unwatchable. ) LIVE AND LET DIE IS pretty bad, the producers stuffed it with lots of chases, car chases, boat chases, a very strange airplane chase. Roger Moore doesn't even seem to be trying and the stuff with the black mob is borderline offensive. They didn't even have the guts to use a black actress as the leading lady and ended up with the very bland Jane Seymour. Seymour reached her career peak as the tiresome "Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman". We took a long break and finished up Saturday night with MOONRAKER, probably the ultimate comic book movie in the series. I actually enjoyed this one. I always thought this movie was kind of stupid, but looking back at it now, its pretty entertaining. Roger Moore actually holds it all together as it bumbles along from one ridiculous situation to another. You can say what you want about this movie, but you have to admit it is professionally assembled by a group of people that deliver the goods for the teenage boy audience. This audience consists of the age range from 12-72 for males. Evan was completely exhausted and dragged himself off to bed. There have been no more Bond movies after this one.

1968 - HELL IN THE PACIFIC, disappointing sort of war film from John Boorman.

During World War II, a Japanese soldier and an American pilot are stranded together on a pacific island.  At first they try to kill each other, or at least I think they are trying to kill each other. They seem to yell and chase each other around a whole lot. At one point they capture and tie each other up to a post and they take turns forcing the other one to walk up and down the beach in some sort of Christ like "Stations of the Cross" thing (it's very symbolic). Eventually they decide to work together to build a raft and escape from the island, because it's all about that brotherhood thing and working together is good, fighting with each other is not good.

After lots of artistic raft floating on the Pacific Ocean camera shots, they reach yet another island where they find the remains of a military base and finally they get cleaned up (they were looking mighty stinky). They find some booze get drunk and start arguing, in the distance you can hear explosions. Suddenly the building blows up and that's the end of the movie. But wait...you can go to the alternate ending on the DVD to see Boorman's original ending which is...the two of them get mad at each other and just walk away. What ever they learned about brotherhood has been erased by their return to civilization, it's all very sad, in this rather heavy handed ending.

 

 Hell in the Pacific is a rather dreary disappointing film, Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin the stars of the film were WWII veterans, but they must have had more interesting stories to tell than this time waster of a film.

Written by Reuben Bercovitch, Alexander Jacobs and Eric Bercovici, the running time is 103 minutes.

1977 - EXECUTIONER FROM SHAOLIN-Hong Kong fighter action

It's about a million degrees below zero here in Minneapolis. Thought this would be a good day to try to get through this film. Supposed to be a Shaw Brothers classic. Picked it up for a couple of bucks at Best Buy a few years ago. Lasted about 30 minutes until I fell asleep. Lots of people running around Kung Fuing each other. I have no idea what the hell is going on. Looks like it's going in the "donate to the poor people" box.

2008 - GHOST TOWN / 1999 - GO

Ghost Town-a sort of rehash/remake of that Demi Moore movie (whose name escapes me) except it's not as corny and sappy this time. Ricky Gervais plays a dentist who has the personality of an asshole. He is chased around by Greg Kinner the dead husband of Tea Leoni, because the spirit of the dead husband is not at rest etc etc. It's a decent movie, made by professionals. Tea Leoni is typecast as the wife of a guy who likes to screw around on her. Ricky Gervais obviously added a lot of jokes to the final screenplay. I enjoyed it.

Go-I'm not the first to mention this, but Quentin Tarentino is the influence all over this one as we follow multiple stories around the sale of some ecstasy tablets. Everything gets very screwy. The actors are all pretty good, the stories are fairly interesting. The movie sort of runs out of steam towards the end, but I enjoyed it.

1961 - John Ford's TWO ROAD TOGETHER

Filmed in 1961, about 6 or 7 years after The Searchers. Best known as Ford's reworking of that film.   Frank Nugent the script writer on The Searchers wrote using the same story line and theme. 
Two Rode Together an even darker version of The Searchers is a grim story.

Ford, wrapping up his long career when he made this, was working on material that was often well below his standards.  Ford just liked to work and he had a hard time pulling together projects that interested him.

The script starts out with some humor and a light tone but it quickly gets serious with the arrival of Stewart and Widmark at the army fort.  Stewart and Widmark, sent on a mission to negotiate with an Indian tribe to return some white captives taken years ago,  find is that the captives are now fully integrated Indian society.  They return some of the captives to the fort and their waiting families with disastrous results.

Ford  lost interest towards the end of the film and the scenes of the Indian captives being reintegrated into white society seem kind of rushed. He wants to make a point about the two different cultures, but  is conflicted himself on what direction he wants to take the story.

The idea of Stewart as a greedy vain opportunist doesn't work.  Stewart worked a lot better with Anthony Mann who always managed to keep his Jimmy Stewart caricatures under control.   Richard Widmark has to adopt himself to the usual Ford low humor stuff which he does pretty well.  Shirley Jones plays the tomboy love interest a character completely unnecessary to the story.

Ford's contempt for white society seems pretty evident throughout Two Rode Together.  Ford has a more complex view of Indian society than usual in a early 60's Hollywood film.   It's usually a given  that Ford became very pessimistic about America towards the end of his life.  The bottom line on this, the film is only OK.

A disappointment, Two Rode Together looks pretty good  compared to a bloated self righteous piece of film like Dances with Wolves.

109 minutes.