2008 - Academy Awards-if you can't say anything nice, blog about it...

It's easier to say nasty things than nice things. Sunday's Academy Awards show proves that. First off, this show is the same, it's always the same. It will never be any different. Hugh Jackman was the so called host, his opening musical number was lame, Anne Hathaway needs to eat some chips and dip, she looks very unhealthy. The show drags on endlessly once again. People producing this show and the Motion Picture Academy in general refuse to rethink this boredom, the endless lists of awards for technical achievements, the short films, the lame introductions are always the same. I drifted away to the computer to cruise the Internet for a while. Jackman returned with a musical number apparently staged by "Australia" director Baz Luhrmann. It's a disjointed mess, melding a piece of one song into another, vintage Luhrmann no doubt about that. Still no main awards but it's getting hard to remember at this point. The "Pineapple Express" guys showed up with a comedy bit where they play stoners watching the 2008 comedy films, they laugh their way through "The Reader", a movie I will never see and that's OK with me. They confuse "The Love Guru" with "Slumdog Millionaire", now that was funny I've seen "Slumdog Millionaire". That dead guy Heath Ledger, finally wins his Academy Award. Heath can use this award as a bargaining chip for his future salary demands or maybe not. Hopefully this will finally bury Heath. My wife and I drift off to bed, she turns on the TV in the bedroom and finishes the show. I fall asleep. When I wake up in about an hour or so, I ask her how the rest of the show went. She tells me that Kate Winslet won her award, which is only fitting, since Winslet has been kissing every person's ass that she can during awards season. My wife tells me that Sean Penn won for "Milk", apparently the Mickey Roarke road show finally came to an end, hopefully Mickey's got "The Wrestler II more wrestle" lined up. My wife tells me that "Slumdog Millionaire" won. Maybe that means that Danny Boyle can finally fix his tie and button his dress shirt, I'm puzzled why he is constantly wandering around with his tie half undone. Maybe the half undone tie symbolizes the intensity and seriousness yet lack of pretentious that he has as an artist. The next morning I wake up and realize that I haven't blogged about anything for a few days, I have a bunch of half started posts in the draft stage, I need to write something this week. I'll write about the 2008 Academy Award show, because if you can't say anything nice come hang out with me.

2004 - TEAM AMERICA-WORLD POLICE a time capsule into another era

I laughed a lot at this movie. It's basically a version of The Thunderbirds TV show with puppets doing all of the ridiculous stuff action movie actors usually do. Throw in a lot of inappropriate songs and some puppet violence and sex and you have a satire of some kind.

Probably 30 minutes of this would have been enough. There is a nude puppet sex scene that goes on way to long and a vomit scene that hammers you over the head, but by this point in the movie you get what you pay for. A creepy element to all of this is a strange fascination and focus on gay oral sex towards the end of the movie. It's pretty icky.

The tiresome whining about liberal Hollywood stars is kind of lame as well. The movie looks like a period piece from the Bush era. This movie could be a snapshot of the political mood and paranoia of the country during those 8 years. However, that might be a little bit of a stretch. Oh well. The jokes about the liberal actors acting as bad as the terrorists would seem to indicate where the true feelings of the filmmakers lie. The killer kitty cat jokes at the end were just lame.

98 minutes.

2006 - BABEL, It's a small world after all.

The title rises up to announce this will be an important picture. like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls or Transformers.

Four stories, are randomly introduced. As the stories develop we begin to see how they are interrelated. Two young boys in some unidentified middle eastern hellhole of a country are given a gun by their father to protect the goat herd from predators. Amazingly this irresponsible father leaves the boys and as you know "boys will be boys". They shoot at a tourist bus for the fun of it which happens to contain...

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as a married couple on the tourist bus. They are fighting about something and the marriage is in some kind of trouble I guess. Brad obviously decided a trip with his wife to revive the marriage was in order, so instead of a nice Hawaiian vacation he has picked the hellhole country in the middle east. After Cate gets shot Brad ends up stuck in a small village while Cate struggles to stay alive. Cate whimpers on about how she wants to talk to her children before she dies. Her children are in San Diego where...

Some Mexican woman is caring for Brad and Cate's kids. The woman is in a high state of anxiety since her son is getting married and she can't find anyone to take care of the little white kids for the day. She ends up taking the kids to the wedding in Mexico. After the wedding party, she gets in a car with the kids driven by her drunken nephew. The nephew is an unsavory person in the great tradition of Hispanic stereotypes. He tears off the head of a live chicken, drinks too much at the wedding and fires a gun into the air during the wedding dance. Unsurprisingly, at the border the nephew decides to run from the border police with the Mexican woman and the little white kids in the back of his car. The nephew dumps the woman and the kids in the middle of nowhere, and takes off. The woman also abandons the kids in the middle of nowhere in search of help and wanders off...

Which brings us to the last story about some teenage girl in Japan. She dresses in the traditional Japanese male fantasy dirty little teenage school girl school outfit and runs around with other slutty girls dressed like that as well. She decides not to wear underwear and rebuffs her father's attempts to go to lunch. It turns out she is a deaf/mute. Part of her handicap seems to be a need to hit on guys at inappropriate moments. Being a deaf/mute teenage girl in Japan clearly makes you sexually promiscuous. Forgot to mention an important plot point, the Japanese girl is required to take off all of her clothes by the director Alejandro González Iñárritu. This helps the audience look into the naked soul of the girl because we couldn't do that if the girl had her clothes on.

Anyway the point of all of this I guess is that we live in a world of babel. We all have issues with communicating with each other and we are all in it together. It's just like taking the "It's A Small World Ride" at Disneyland except the dolls aren't nude. The other point of the story is that young mute Japanese girls are kind of dirty little things.

The stories end up being interconnected in the end, although it seemed like the filmmakers strained to bring them all to a resolution.

143 minutes.

1953 - THE MAN BETWEEN, A Carol Reed Production

Carol Reed  a talented filmmaker was strong in the suspense genre like Hitchcock. Unlike Hitchcock,  Reed showed an empathy for his characters which Hitchcock struggled with throughout his career. Reed made lots of good movies like Odd Man Out, Outcast of the Islands, The Fallen Idol, The True Glory and The Third Man.

The general rap on him is that he had issues finding the right scripts later in his career. Films from that period were The Key, Trapeze, Our Man in Havana and The Agony and the Ecstasy. Whatever the problems and faults in these later films, they had a fundamental decency which, isn't seen much in modern storytelling anymore. He won an Academy Award for directing Oliver, which is not a film I like but is very well made.

Kind of a follow up to The Third man, The Man Between,  isn't his best film and does have some major  problems.   Its slow moving at times and has a somewhat weak script.  It does have James Mason and a cast of very good actors performing at a high degree of skill.   Filmed on location in postwar Germany, The Man Between still has many fine scenes of suspense and action

A cold war film about innocent people being exploited by gangsters in divided Berlin. The character that James Mason plays is extremely conflicted.  At one point he exploits his ex wife for his own interests and then trying to redeem his behavior during the last part of the film.  Mason works to save an innocent woman trapped in East Berlin during an extended chase scene through the city.

Again, not Carol Reed's best film but well worth watching.

100 minutes screenplay by Harry Kurnitz.

2004 - HOUSE-season one

The first season of House on DVD,  watched 8 episodes in a row. The show has been on for a few seasons now, so this was a chance to catch the early episodes when it was fresh. Dr. Gregory House is a brilliant diagnostic doctor, with a team of hot young professionals. He's basically the Sherlock Holmes character, with his team being the Dr. Watson character. Each episode they confront a strange disease killing some guest star of the week. They have to figure out before the top of the hour how to stop this mysterious disease.


 The show goes something like this: 8:00 pm-Dr. House walks around the hospital pissing people off. Meanwhile some person falls over in a coma or something like that. They rush him/her to House's hospital. Dr. House makes a bunch of smart ass wise cracks we're off and running.

8:15 pm-The sickie has been admitted to the hospital. Dr. House takes a 15 second glance at his chart and pronounces the diagnosis. 6 minutes later after treatment, something goes wrong. Dr House has no bedside manner at all but he's so smart it's excusable, just like real life.

I'm ashamed I added this picture but this post is dull.

 8:30 pm-The team and Dr. House realize that the initial diagnosis is wrong and figure out an entirely different diagnosis, they start a new treatment. 6 minutes later that treatment starts to go terribly wrong. Now the patient is even worse, this is not very cool.

8:45 pm- Well it's getting close to the top of the hour, they gotta wrap it up for this episode. Dr. House has a moment of insight based on information he missed at the 8:00 pm mark. Finally the team has the right treatment and saves the patient's life.

One of the cast of doctors on House, gratuitous picture.

All is well, after almost killing the patient a couple of times in the last 40 minutes or so. Dr. House and his team kind of suck as doctors.

 But to be fair nobody is watching this for the brilliant plotting of the shows, you tune in to see how much of a dick Dr. House is.

2008 - THE WRESTLER-It's all about Mickey, it's got good acting

And yet, another movie made to get awards.

Mickey Roarke in Mickey's comeback role plays Mickey as a broken down old wrestler with a bad heart. Marisa Tomei is the lucky actress who gets to be exploited by this director as his stripper friend. Mickey has a daughter he was never a proper father to, and in true movie tradition she has turned into a lesbian who now lives with a black lesbian. After a heart attack Mickey re-appraises Mickey's life and tries to start over. But probably even more frightening for Mickey is that Mickey is relentlessly stalked with a hand held camera and photographed in grainy color.

Things that happen to Mickey:

1. Mickey makes amends with his lesbian daughter.

2. Mickey gets a real job selling deli meat and salads.

3. Mickey tries to get a relationship going with the lap dancer with a heart of gold.

4. Mickey goes shopping for his lesbian daughter.

5. Mickey plays some old video games with a little kid.

6. Mickey hangs out with his old wrestling buddies

7. Mickey takes his lesbian daughter to an old broken down pavilion, where they share an imaginary but touching dance.

In the end this all to no avail. Because Mickey realizes Mickey can't change. Mickey gets back in the ring for the big match, because it's the only life Mickey has ever known. The movie ends with Mickey jumping off the ropes into the ring and landing hopefully on top of the academy award for good acting. The film fades to black and another Bruce Springsteen song blathers on about the working class as the credits scroll

2008 - AUSTRALIA - is a long movie it has a lot of cows

 Thank God for the 2nd run theaters especially if they are near a bar. If I had to pay full price for this dog I would have had to give up eating Shrimp on the Barbie, or something like that. 

 The director is Baz Luhrmann, who has been making overblown films for what seems like a long time. He was out of control in Moulin Rouge and Romeo and Juliet.  His style seemed to work better in Strictly Ballroom but that movie was short. This is his shot at making a large David Lean type epic love story.  Luhrmann and his 3 screenwriters should have read Kevin Brownlow's biography on David Lean. They would have understood that Lean would work for years on his screenplays prior to making his films. This seems to be one of the reasons that Lean's output was so small in the 1960's and 1970's. He was looking for the right material and then he wanted to get it right.

 In Australia no one worried much about getting it right. This is a mishmash of movie stuff. The major influence seems to be the Wizard of Oz, of which the song "Over The Rainbow" is used throughout the film, but I would almost guess that the actual influence is from Red River with Nicole Kidman in the role of John Wayne. I know every idea in the world has been made into a movie, but couldn't they have found a new way to spin it?  Kidman has to move those cattle out to feed a hungry nation. She and her hired hands must drive them to the coast of Australia during World War II or she will lose the ranch of course.  In this movie she gets to leave her clothes on this time. She talks Hugh Jackman into going along with her, so we can have lots of shots of the two actors striking various carefully composed poses throughout the landscape of Australia. These shots remind me of those Kodak picture taking spots at Disney world. 

 

 Kidman and Jackman also pick up a cute little half caste kid along the way so the audience can have an "awww" factor as in "awww that kid is so cute and sweet". He talks in that weird movie talk, saying things like "Boss Lady" and "Mr Drover". The kid gives a nice performance and looks good but he's a heavy handed symbol of what the white people did to the native people of Australia .  The little kid thinks that "Over the Rainbow" is a magic song and it must be real magical because they play it a lot. They get the cattle to the stockyards, and save the ranch, but miles of plot later we have to sit through a Japanese aerial attack blowing up stuff , saving some kids off of an island and a dance where Hugh Jackman gets himself cleaned up so all the women can go "awww." 

The original ending had Hugh Jackman's character killed off, but the studio demanded a happier ending. I think this was probably a mistake. The movie could have used a little spine in it, instead it comes off like a big bunch of nothing. I would recommend Red River if you want to see how to make a cattle drive movie. At least the gay subtext in that movie is a lot more interesting than the romance of Australia.

Written by 4 count em 4 writers, Baz Luhrmann, Ronald Harwood, Stuart Beattie and Richard Flanagan.  The running time is 165 minutes.

1987 - AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON, not to funny spoof of genre films

Pretty poor, a rehash of The Kentucky Fried Movie by people who should have been able to make this thing a WHOLE lot funnier. A very interesting cast was completely let down by a creative group behind the camera who should have been able to get the job done. Even the nudity ( and there is a lot of it) was extremely boring.  
 

THE CREATIVE TEAM

Joe Dante: He's made a career studying and speaking about cult and camp movies he should have been able to knock this out of the park with his eyes closed. Probably the only good section in the movie was "Reckless Youth". But even this wasn't as funny as "Reefer Madness".

John Landis: He's known for his admiration of movies that mix genres such as "Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein". He at times seems to have a sense of humor and he tries to incorporate traditions of slapstick and violence in his movies. However he didn't have one funny segment in the entire movie. His preoccupation with women running around topless is kind of disconcerting.

Carl Gottlieb: Is a veteran screenwriter, He wrote "Jaws". His segment "Son of the Invisible Man" was probably the funniest.

Peter Horton: Is an actor, director and production executive. He directed a couple of segments and starred in the very lame hospital scene with a very young Michelle Pfeiffer who was big time paying her dues.

Robert K Weiss: The real auteur. Is the producer of, (Superhero Movie, Scary Movie 4, Scary Movie 3). Michael Barrie: A writer for David Letterman for many years.

Jim Mulholland: A writer for David Letterman and Johnny Carson.

Running time, 85 minutes.

1994 - BEVERLY HILLS COP III, You can't go home again.

My son has been working his way through the Beverly Hills Cop trilogy, which is not to be confused with the Star Wars trilogy or the Samurai trilogy or the John Ford Cavalry trilogy.

It has a lot of gunfire, an unsubtly tries to get some laughs with staging a lot of shootouts at a Disneyland like amusement park. I think the point was to contrast the violence with this make believe world in a comedic way, a rather obvious point.

The director was John Landis, who at this point in his career is definitely on the downside. He does some of the commentary for the "Trailers from Hell" website that Joe Dante created. He is a very amusing guy on these commentaries.

 

However this film just doesn't work anyway you cut it.  This should have been a slam dunk of a film but clearly something went very wrong during the production of Beverly Hills Cop III.

 104 minutes written by Steven E. de Souza.