Sunday, March 29, 2009

1978 - Irwin Allen's THE SWARM

My son has been laying for this one for a while.

The plot is about killer bees attacking the United States southwest.

The AMAZING cast most of who gets stung to death includes:
  • Michael Caine
  • Katharine Ross
  • Richard Widmark
  • Richard Chamberlain
  • Olivia de Havilland
  • Ben Johnson
  • Lee Grant
  • Patty Duke
  • Slim Pickens
  • Bradford Dillman
  • Fred MacMurray
  • Henry Fonda
The ending credits include this:
The African killer bee portrayed in this film bears absolutely no relationship to the industrious, hard-working American honey bee to which we are indebted for pollinating vital crops that feed our nation.
 
My son won't be watching this again.

 156 minutes.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

1945 - THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY and 1951 - PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

Viewed a couple of highbrow flicks this week by the Director/Writer, Albert Lewin. How did this guy ever get work? First up, "The Picture of Dorian Grey" the story of a guy who is not nice and never ages. He has a magic painting hidden in his house which reflects all of the corruption and evilness in his nature. This was actually very entertaining for a pseudo highbrow film. Lewin was clever enough to use a lot of the dialog and situations from Oscar Wilde's book. The production had that top MGM sheen which people like to talk about. The painting on the left used in the movie actually hangs in the Chicago Museum of Art much to my surprise when I went there.



 


 Next up, "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Ava Gardner is Pandora Reynolds, a woman so beautiful that a man will kill himself over her (he was drunk after all). Into her life comes the legendary Flying Dutchman, doomed to roam the seven seas in search of true love, etc. Ava just happens to be his reincarnated spouse, although she says that she is just a "singer from Indianapolis". Ava Gardner could never be a "singer from Indianapolis" if her life depended on it and her life does depend on it because if she hooks up with the Dutchman she will die. There is also a jealous bullfighter involved and a race car driver trying to break some sort of beach speed record in some sort of souped up jalopy. The film is narrated by a "Dr Quest" professor type who just assumes that the Flying Dutchman sailing into a party town on the coast of Spain is no big deal. I hope the above description conveys a small taste of the goofiness of this film which I enjoyed a lot.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

2006 - THE HOLIDAY, 1947 - LADY IN THE LAKE, 1951 - QUO VADIS...Three on the weekend


THE HOLIDAY-My wife and I took a road trip down to scenic south eastern Minnesota this Saturday. When we got back we were tired and vegged out in front of the tube that night. We ended up watching The Holiday on TBS. The plot is actually two stories. In the first story, the viewer has to decide who is prettier, Cameron Diaz or Jude Law. In the second story the viewer is forced to watch in horror as Jack Black is cast as the the romantic lead to Kate Winslet. Throw in a couple of cute kids and a colorful old geezer for no particular reason to make the movie drag on even more. This movie is full of tiresome inside movie jokes, no sale.

 136 minutes.


I had started Lady In The Lake a couple of weeks ago, so I finished it off on Sunday morning. This was one weird film. It's a movie made in 1947 by the actor Robert Montgomery using the camera as the main character. I guess they call it the subjective camera technique, as they said in the advertising "you are one of the characters". This movie was based on a Raymond Chandler story, and with all Raymond Chandler stories the mystery is so impossible to follow that by the end of the film I wasn't sure who had killed who and why they were killing anyone at all. This was an interesting failure but no sale.

 105 minutes

 

Finished off Sunday night with Quo Vadis a MGM spectacular. The odd thing about this movie was that it wasn't filmed in a wide screen process, so the movie looked great on our TV instead of the usual postage stamp size that you get with letterboxing. This is one of those ancient Romans persecute the Christians things. I enjoyed it a lot. The romantic leads Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr were a couple of stiffs but I doubt they could have done anything with these characters anyway. However Peter Ustinov is great hamming it up as Nero and Leo Glenn is also pretty darn great as Petronius, the author of the Satyricon. His death scene is pretty darn great as well. You also get to watch the burning of Rome, Christians getting eaten by lions, Christians burned at the stake and a "cast of thousands" enjoying it all in the Coliseum you gotta love all that debauchery. Highly recommended.

 171 minutes.

Friday, March 20, 2009

1926 - THE GENERAL Buster Keaton's masterpiece

Made my son sit through "The General" last night usually considered one of the high points in silent film.  
 


 Not a laugh out loud comedy for the most part. BUT Incredible stunts with apparently no movie tricks. Actual trains crashed and Keaton's amazing ability to effortlessly move around a moving train is an unbelievable sight to see. I tried to find a public domain clip to post but the grainy you tube clips don't do the film justice. Kino video has a new DVD of this film. It looks very good.



Possibly the high point in Keaton's career, but he has many fine films he has starred and authored during his silent film career.  This film was based on an actual Civil War incident.


The running time is 75 minutes, written by Al Boasberg, Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton, Charles Henry Smith and Paul Gerard Smith. 

Sunday, March 15, 2009

1969 -OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR-World War I was bad


Apparently Oh What A Lovely War was a piece of experimental theater. The creators used period songs to highlight the tragedy of World War I, a war which was probably as close as the human race came to a self fulfilling Armageddon. This film directed by Richard Attenborough is his version of this horror, a two hour plus horror of a boring slog fest the point of which is that unsurprisingly "war is hell".



 Part of the cast was made up of big name British actors playing the typical silly assed English military types. Even when this movie was made the idea that military leaders were grandstanding incompetent clowns was already a cliche. The other part of the cast is a group of nondescript actors playing the Smith family. The Smith family is a symbol for all of the British working and middle class people who were slaughtered during World War I. The actors are so bland and interchangeable, it was hard to care.



The closing scene  is a pullback helicopter shot showing a a hillside full of white crosses of the war dead, very cool.  However, Gone with the Wind also did that same shot back in 1939.  Gone with the Wind at least had interesting characters. The DVD has the usual making of features and tries to convince the viewer that this was an important project for everyone involved. Attenborough seems sincere about the film and I would almost buy into what he has to say except I watched the film first.


The ridiculous musical sequences have to be seen to be believed. This is after all a musical.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

2002 - JOHN FORD GOES TO WAR, interesting war documentary about an interesting guy

Cinema scholars, movie buffs and film geeks take note, this is a short documentary covering John Ford's years in the OSS. This is an interesting little film, but this is not for the "typical" movie viewer.


This film will only appeal to people who are interested in the career of John Ford. This film covers the most important part of his life, his involvement in photographing World War II. Ford saw a lot of action during the war. He photographed Midway, The Doolittle Raid, North Africa, and D-Day.


He also prepared and photographed the Nazi atrocities against the Jews in the various concentration camps throughout Europe. Oliver Stone is in it whining about Ford making propaganda films for the government, which is pretty rich coming from a message filmmaker like him.

 

  56 minutes, written by Tom Marksbury.

1963 - YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW, DeSica's trilogy

Three short stories directed by Vittorio De Sica with two of the stories written by Cesare Zavattini. These two gentlemen were part of the neo-realistic movement of Italian cinema. That movement primarily consisted of showing real people in real situations. Those films were made on location using non-actors when possible. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, is not one of those films. By the 1960's the Neo-realistic movement had pretty much ended and directors like De Sica were filming more commercial types of pictures. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow stars Sophia Loren with support from her frequent costar Marcello Mastroianni. The two of them each play three different parts in three different stories set throughout Italy.

1. "Adelina". In Naples Loren plays a woman supporting her family by selling black market cigarettes. The police attempt to arrest her but due to a loophole in the law she finds out that she can't serve time in jail as long as she is pregnant.

2. "Anna". In Milan, Loren plays a woman on a drive with her lover. She complains about her shallow, materialistic lifestyle to him as they race around the city in her Rolls Royce.

 


3. "Mara". In Rome, Loren is a prostitute who finds she is living next door to a would be priest in training. Mastroianni is one of her customers. Loren appears to be enjoying herself, particularly in the first and third stories. This shouldn't be too surprising. Sophia Loren had a tough childhood and could probably relate to the first story. Considering how long she stayed on top as an international star, she probably knew a thing or two about prostituting herself for the third story.


Mastroianni is pretty passive throughout most of the movie. He's smart enough to realize that the film belongs to Loren. He is funny in the third story as a "horn-dog" trying to get sex out of Loren and failing a lot. Vittorio De Sica does a decent job moving the film along, and he makes some small points about class, and sex in society.  De Sica knows he's not filming a masterpiece here, he puts in a professional job on the film, the long shots of Naples are particularly beautiful.

118 minutes.

Monday, March 9, 2009

2009 - PONYO ON THE CLIFF BY THE SEA, another good Miyazaki film.

 Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most interesting filmmakers working in the area of traditional animation. Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is one of his best films. It's a very simple story of a young boy who finds a magical goldfish who changes into a young girl. The film reminds me of Kiki's Delivery Service and Castle in the Sky

Miyazaki has always been interested in the themes of ecology and man's place in nature. He locates the story near the ocean and loads the film with lots of interesting imagery involving giant fish turning into waves. In one very amazing scene Miyazaki shows a house where a storm has flooded the backyard and has caused the yard to become a home to lots of odd sea creatures. 

  

The animation style is in the classic traditional style and demonstrates the hollowness of the over stimulated computer generated imaging techniques that have replaced classic animation.  I trongly recommend viewing all of Miyazaki's work.

 

Written by Miyazaki, the running time is 101 minutes.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

THE CLASSIC UNIVERSAL SCIENCE FICTION FILMS!!


1957 - THE MONOLITH MONSTERS: Rocks from outer space fall to earth and when they get wet, they begin to grow and move (fall?) towards a small town threatening to smash it to pieces. Rocks aren't exactly the scariest monsters in the world. 77 rocky minutes.





1956 - THE MOLE PEOPLE: People who went underground during the Noah's Ark flood have now evolved into albino mutants. They just happen to control a group of mutant mole people as their slaves. Two scientists from the outside world armed with only a flashlight but no extra batteries are forced to fight them off. 78 burrowing minutes.


1955 - TARANTULA: A scientist for no particular reason, decides that the world needs giant animals such as bunny rabbits and tarantulas. The giant tarantula escapes and is finally destroyed by fighter pilot Clint Eastwood. Directed by Jack Arnold who was also responsible for directing many episodes of "The Brady Bunch" and "The Love Boat".  80 spray it with some Raid minutes.



 1957 -  THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN: Probably the best film in the series, Richard Matheson wrote a great screenplay and the movie is very well directed by Jack Arnold. Jack Arnold may be one of the most important keepers of American cultural taste, he directed episodes of "Peter Gunn," "Perry Mason," "Rawhide," "Gilligan's Island," "The Mod Squad," "Wonder Woman," "The Love Boat," "The Bionic Woman," and "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century."   77 minutes.


2006 - PETER AND THE WOLF, 1999 - THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, 2 short animated films


Viewed a couple of short films last week:

PETER AND THE WOLF: A short film that won the Academy award in 2006, but don't hold that against it. Filmed in the stop motion animation process that is usually associated with Ray Harryhausen and is basically considered a dead technique these days. The film uses Prokofiev's score and generally follows the story. This is a very well made film. The stop motion actually brings the characters to life, unlike WALL-E where the human character design seemed to be the weakest part of the film. This film was written and directed by Suzie Templeton.


 32 minutes.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA: Hemingway's most overrated story won him the Nobel prize for literature. This was also an Academy Award winner in 1999. Apparently it was animated using glass panels painted with pastels. It has a unique look to it. The filmmaker was Aleksandr Petrov.


 20 minutes.

Monday, March 2, 2009

2001 - PEARL HARBOR another big budget mess

Pearl Harbor was yet another big  Michael Bay film. He was shooting for an epic love story against the background of the Japanese attack on December 7th. Making a movie like this is a tricky business, a filmmaker has to have a pretty strong story to hang against a big event like the Pearl Harbor attack. This movie doesn't really have that going for it.


Pearl Harbor is the typical love triangle between "two friends and the woman they love". The one friend is presumed lost in combat, so his buddy moves in on his girlfriend to comfort her, and well one thing leads to another, the girlfriend gets pregnant, the dead friend returns from the dead and we end up with a big mess on our hands. This is the kind of junk that television soap operas could do in their sleep, but for some reason the screenwriter couldn't seem to work up the energy to make this interesting.


The love story is resolved by having the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, destroy the United States pacific fleet, kill thousands of sailors and blow up most of Hawaii which seems like overkill to resolve everyone's personal and romantic problems.

There are a few positives to this movie.   Nobody stages big action scenes like Michael Bay, he is the master. You actually get a feeling for what the attack might have been like that day, with the planes flying in low, the men trapped in the sinking ships, and the panic of the US military during the attack.


As usual the Japanese military plans the attack moving little toy ships around a big map, and a lot of the dialog is pretty lame. The actors actually are pretty decent. Ben Affleck does a good job as the guy who returns from the dead. The woman playing the nurse and girlfriend of Ben Affleck, isn't bad.   Jon Voight is good as FDR, as is Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle.  What's his name, Josh Hartnett makes no impression at all, but he is a nice pretty boy.   Dan Ackroyd is extremely miscast as a naval intelligence officer, and shatters the believably of the film whenever he's on screen.

Pearl Harbor is a failure but it's not the worst epic ever put on screen. However it doesn't appear to be what was intended when they filmed it.

Written by Randall Wallace, the running time is an epic 183 minutes