2009 - THE COVE the Japanese kill and eat Flipper and his relatives

This was a well reviewed documentary about the slaughter of dolphins in a small Japanese fishing village.  The approach taken in the documentary is to present it as a Mission Impossible type of thriller with the filmmakers sneaking into the killing cove to document the dolphin slaughter.  There are lots of exciting scenes involving the filmmakers planning their caper, being harassed by the local police force, sneaking around and being threatened by the Japanese fisherman.  They also have cool high tech James Bondian gadgets to use in their mission.

The Japanese do not come off very well to put it mildly.  At times they almost seem like characters out of an old World War II movie.   The film's point of view is to stick with the heroic team documenting the dolphin slaughter.

But the film did not seem to engage me as emotionally as I thought it would.  The problem for me was the one sided presentation of the dolphin slaughter argument.  Sure this is a horrible thing to watch  but the questions being raised seem much more complicated than killing off Flipper and friends

Japan is known for having one of the healthiest diets and lifespans of any developed nation.  They certainly didn't get that way eating at McDonalds like we do in the good old United States. What about asking these fisherman to give up a way of life that has been ongoing for probably a long time?   THE COVE  doesn't want to touch any of those kinds of issues.  Too much complicated stuff to think about.  It's more interesting and fun to watch "the team" sneaking around with ominous and dramatic music playing in the background.  

Fun to pretend to be James Bond, less fun to make a complicated thought provoking film.

2009 - JENNIFER'S BODY failed feminist high school horror film

Diabo Cody's rework of Carrie where Carrie is now a cheerleader who is possessed by the devil and starts eating high school boys for nourishment.

This movie attempts to walk the line between horror movie, high school comedy and a tale of teenage girlfriends.  It belly flops at all of these things.  Diablo Cody's hipster slang talk is not that clever and it constantly shatters the mood of the horror in the film.   Mixing all of those different genres would  have taken a lot of skill and cleverness from a really talented writer, and Diablo Cody isn't there yet.   Besides nobody talks like this.

Megan Fox is sort of attractive in a barbie doll kind of way, but she wears an awful lot of makeup which gives her kind of a pasty look and she can't really act which is a huge issue for her.

Since Fox's acting sucks,  she can't create any sympathy for her character as the prettiest girl in school who is now a succbus.   Jennifer's Body was her shot at the brass ring but the film lets her down bigtime.  

If the intended audience was teenage girls the filmmakers really misjudged their audience, I doubt the subject matter would have ever appealed to them.   If the other intended audience was teenage boys,  scenes of the girls bonding wasn't going to lure them in.  Even a five minute girl on girl make out session obviously put in to titillate was pretty lame stuff.

Jennifer's Body must have seemed like a good idea, the production team was the same group that made Juno, Diablo Cody had won her academy award for writing Juno and they had  hired the supposed superbabe of the month Megan Fox.  The problem was that Megan Fox is pretty much a creation of US magazine, Diablo Cody writes like she grew up in the 1990's which she did and Juno really wasn't that good a film.

Running time 102 minutes.

1973 - THE TRAIN ROBBERS - another late career John Wayne film

Pretty mellow, laid back western probably a little more mellow and laid back then is should be. 

Duke is the leader of a group of gunfighters who are hired by a widow to bring back some gold that her dead husband stole from Welles Fargo.  Wayne and his gang head to Mexico pursued by another gang of outlaws determined to get the gold from them.  

Burt Kennedy was the writer/director and his specialty was this type of small scale western.  Kennedy had written the best of Budd Boetticher's Randolph Scott westerns so he knew how to take a basic story and situation like this and spin it with a few different variations. 

The cast was pretty good starting with Rod Taylor and Ben Johnson as Wayne's old civil war cronies.  Ann Margaret played the widow and she looks kind of weird with her Las Vegas hooker/showgirl makeup and hairstyle.  She's supposed to be the focus of the story but she really doesn't have much to do and at times it seems like she's barely in the film.  Wayne does his usual good job playing his typical western character.   

Probably the best thing about The Train Robbers is the photography by William H. Clothier.  The film looks very good and a lot of the compositions are really stunning and clear.

92 comfortable minutes.

1988 - John Carpenter's THEY LIVE, Republican party taken over by space aliens

Made during the end of the Reagan Presidency and probably containing about as much criticism of the Republican brand of leadership that a Hollywood film was going to have.  They Live is a B-movie dressed up with some mild social criticism.

 

Carpenter wrote the screenplay under an alias.  The story is about space aliens in disguise exploiting the Earth to enrich themselves financially.  They have devices that allow them to go undetected and only a special pair of sunglasses reveals what they actually look like.   

They Live was also an experiment by John Carpenter to make a science fiction film on a really low budget.  Carpenter cast a professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper who actually wasn't too bad as the lead.  Wrestlers after all are performers.  "Rowdy" Roddy gets to run around and shoot aliens and he has a very long fight with another guy that must go on about 10 minutes.

 

They Live is in the great tradition of B films. It runs about 90 minutes has a lot of shooting and fighting,  a couple of good lines and an amusing ending.  Carpenter didn't appear to be taking the film very seriously and the film is sort of a minor science fiction classic.

93 minutes.

1958 - Rod Serling's THE TIME ELEMENT, the first Twilight Zone episode

Presented as an episode of Desilu Theater by the man himself,   Desi "Ricky Riccardo" Arnez, this is the pilot for The Twilight Zone series.  The story is a typical Rod Serling time travel concept, where a man from the present journeys back into time for some unexplained reason and tries to change the course of history.

The Time Element is the story of a guy who dreams himself back to the day before Pearl Harbor, he visits a psychiatrist as he attempts to understand what is going on.  He goes from disbelief to what is happening, to exploiting the situation and finally to acceptance of his fate.  Serling reworked this basic plot line in different episodes of the Twilight Zone a few times. 

William Bendix a character actor from the 1940's plays the time traveler, and Martin Balsam another character actor is the psychiatrist,  they both give good performances.

 

Probably my only carp with this show is that it seems a little padded out because it had to fit a 1 hour time slot.  Episodes of The Twilight Zone always seem to play better at 30 minutes.  Audiences can only take so much of this fantasy stuff and it's usually best in small amounts.  Still, this is an interesting show and Rod Serling could usually deliver the "goods" when it came to this type of story.

Running time 60 minutes.

1966 - THE WRONG BOX a Robert Lewis Stevenson comedy

This is a funny British comedy based on a novel by Robert Lewis Stevenson an author not exactly known for his comedy writing.  The screenplay was co-written by Larry Gelbart a talented guy who had been a joke writer for Bob Hope and  created the TV series,  MASH.  Gelbart was a very American writer for such a British film.

The Wrong Box has an outstanding cast of Brit actors beginning with Ralph Richardson and John Mills as two ancient brothers trying to outlive each other so they can inherit a "tontine," a personal lottery.   They are surrounded by family members with various degrees of crookedness and intelligence who include Michael Caine, Dudley Moore, Nanette Newman and Peter Cook.

There are also  hilarious performances by Peter Sellers as a crazy cat loving doctor and Wilfrid Lawson as the very out of it family butler who hasn't been paid in 7 years.

The film was directed by Bryan Forbes a British screenwriter who had worked for and had been a friend of macho Warner Brothers action director Raoul Walsh.  Walsh supposedly got Forbes drunk and put him on a boat back to England after he told Forbes he had no business getting mixed up in Hollywood. 

A classic and funny British farce, the running time is 107 minutes.

2009 - Review of the film 2012

A lot of stuff got wrecked.

1978 - THE WILD GEESE is the Dirty Dozen with old guys

Patronized by film critics as an old fashioned film at the time it came out,  (I remember Siskel and Ebert really sticking it to this film).  The Wild Geese is a decent entertaining action adventure film about mercenaries in South Africa.  Their was a lot of criticism about the cast being too old, but the critics missed the point, the mercenaries were supposed to be an over the hill gang of soldiers fighting for a paycheck.

 

The Wild Geese has two of the British cinema's greatest functional alcoholics, Richard Burton and Richard Harris.  It also has Roger Moore who as usual struggles to show a little acting ability.

 

Directed by filmmaking hack Andrew V McLaglen who had an amazing career working with John Ford as an assistant director on The Quiet Man among other films.  McLaglen's  creative high point was directing something like over 200 episodes of the very good Have Gun Will Travel TV series.

McLaglen was  John Wayne's director of choice late in his career mostly because the Duke could  push him around while they were filming.  Still,  McLaglen did have an amazing working career as a director and certainly knew a thing about working with temperamental actors.

The real creative force behind The Wild Geese, was the producer Euan Lloyd.  Lloyd found the story developed it and took a chance on Burton and Harris who were uninsurable.  Lloyd was able to keep them sober throughout the shooting of the picture which was probably a challenge. 

Richard Burton looks old and puffy throughout the picture, but he is a commanding presence throughout the film and he is supposed to be playing a drunk.  Richard Harris  the idealist of the group comes off pretty well.  Roger Moore looks well groomed as usual.  

The Wild Geese isn't a completely empty action film, it actually raises some interesting ideas about the politics of Africa and the exploitation of the African people by greedy white industrialists.   The film has good action sequences and decent performances, it gets the job done.

1958 - THE LINEUP, Dragnet on another channel

The Lineup was CBS's answer to the popularity of Dragnet, basically a police procedural crime drama. Columbia hired Don Siegel to turn it into a movie.

 

 
Siegel was a guy who had worked his way up in Hollywood starting in the 2nd unit department at Warner Brothers. He was enough of a pro to know how to put a modest film like this together. He was also lucky enough to be able to film a lot of The Lineup on location in San Francisco. The film is like watching a guided tour of the town in the late 1950's.

The film's story has to do with the cops stopping a heroin smuggling ring which is using unsuspecting couriers. A parallel story has two hired killers tracking down the people with the heroin and killing them off if they get in the way.

There is an exciting car chase at the end of the film which is kind of ruined by too much rear projection. The chase ends with a ballsy stunt on an unfinished piece of freeway which is pretty intense.

Probably the highlight of the film is Eli Wallach's performance as the killer "Dancer." This guy is truly scary. He pretty much kills anyone who even remotely pisses him off. In a way he's almost a warm up act for the Scorpio Killer in Siegel's film Dirty Harry.

86 minutes, written by Stirling Silliphant.

1976 - THE PAUL LYNDE HALLOWEEN SPECIAL, self explainatory

Paul Lynde spends Halloween night in a haunted house inhabited by two witches. One of the witches is played by of all people Margaret Hamilton in her Wicked Witch of the West costume from the Wizard of Oz. I think the other witch is the actor who played Witchiepoo in that Sid and Marty Kroft show H.R Pufenstuf.

Anyway, Paul gets 3 wishes from the witches. One of the wishes turns him into a rhinestone cowboy truck driver who is about to marry Roz "Pinky Tuscedaro" Kelly, who was Fonzie's girlfriend for a couple of Happy Days episodes. Paul's competition for Pinky is guest star Tim Conway. This sketch was not very funny.

Paul's second wish turns him into an Arab sheik where he romances special guest star Florence Henderson in a Rudolph Valentino silent movie bit, also not very funny. I can't remember what the last wish was, but I'm sure that bit wasn't funny as well.

Well, everyone ends up at a Halloween Disco party, where Florence Henderson does a disco version of "That Old Black Magic" which was kind of awful.

But the big guest stars are the rock group KISS, in what I believe is their first appearance on TV. KISS performs some songs and Paul gets to crack a lot of unfunny "KISS" jokes.

I am leaving out a couple of "special" guest stars. Betty White and Donny and Marie show up for a few minutes along with Billy Barty (Paul gets to do a few midget jokes). Paul does a Halloween version of the song "Kids" from Bye Bye Birdie and he is mighty campy and gay throughout the whole special.

Overall, this show was extremely strange. 

 

Incredibly 6 writers were involved, Bruce Vilanch, Ronny Graham, Ron Pearlman, Biff Manard, Howard Albrecht & Sol Weinstein.  The running time was 51 minutes.

1956 - EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS, Science Fiction before Kubrick, Lucas and Spielberg got their mitts on it.

A tight 83 minute science fiction film. Ray Harryhausen was persuaded to do the special effects although his interest was more in monsters than UFO's. His creativity made him stretch a low budget about as far as you could stretch it with impressive results. 

The film actually has a fairly decent story, about alien invaders coming to Earth and wanting to communicate with us. The United States military in it's own unsubtle way decides to shot first and talk later. The cast is what was usually called "B" actors but they get the job done and in a way having semi unknown actors actually helps the film's credibility.

But as usual Ray Harryhausen is the real show, he blends actual footage of World War II airplanes getting destroyed with his flying saucer attacks. Harryhausen also manages to animate what are essentially uninteresting spaceships in clever ways with lighting effects and other subtle touches.

 

Of course the real reason to watch this film is for the third act, the destruction of Washington D.C. an ongoing Republican party fantasy. Harryhausen really goes to town with flying saucers blasting and smashing into the various monuments and buildings. A lot of the shots still look pretty cool.

 
Earth Vs The Flying Saucers is in many ways more entertaining than 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and all the Star Wars films. It's not very long, it tells a fun action packed story and it makes sure to entertain the audience with an exciting battle at the end of the movie.

83 minutes.

2009 - JULIE AND JULIA Kill me now

Amy Adams cements her reputation as the most sexless young star in Hollywood. Meryl Streep has found a role where she manages to embarrass herself even more than in Mama Mia.

Nora Ephron the writer/director/producer of this epic chick flick pitches this movie to the most baseless stereotype, stupid, insecure, neurotic, females.

The story tells two tales:

1. Perky Julie Powell is suffocating in an office cubicle working in the horror of New York City. Her high powered successful friends intimidate her with their wonderful careers but sweet Julie finds empowerment by cooking and blogging her way through the Julia Child cookbook, success follows. By the end of the film Julie has a really cool dinner party on the rooftop of her apartment in Queens with the twinkling lights of New York in the background.

2. Zany Julia Child married to a mid level career diplomat gets a posting in France where to fill her time she takes a cooking class and becomes a master chef. She authors a cookbook on french cooking, success follows. By the end of the film the audience gets to watch a clip from the Dan Ackroyd, Saturday Night Live skit where he played Julia Child oh boy haven't seen that for a while.

The "J's" both have supportive husbands, however Julie is a big meanie to her sweet husband and she has a temper tantrum when a recipe doesn't turn out and oh boy I mean she drives her really wonderful husband out of their apartment. Julia doesn't do anything that mean but she does have to endure Meryl Streep's terrible impersonation of her with that stupid Julia Child voice for almost two hours.

This movie is a witless mess. An episode of Sex in the City had more clever dialog than this piece of junk, it was also better acted. The above picture is Amy Adams recreating the "cooking the lobster" scene from Annie Hall because if it was funny in that movie it will be funny in this film..maybe.

1978 - MOVIE MOVIE too much good taste

Another well made film that bombed with the general public. The idea here was to spoof 1930's movie genres, a black and white fight film and a Busby Berkley musical. The film was written by Larry Gelbert a funny guy, and directed by Stanley Donen, a classy guy.

George C. Scott stars in both of the double features and it has a cast of very talented veteran and at the time new actors and talent. The production design is perfect the black and white and color photography very good. Michael Kidd the choreographer did a good job recreating the 1930's musical numbers. The film was just too well made for it's own good.

If you were going to make fun of old Hollywood movies in 1978, you would probably need to really go way over the top with the poor humor and taste. This was the approach Mel Brooks got away with when he made Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.
 

But in the end maybe recreating and spoofing old movies is self defeating. Even Mel Brooks finally ran out of ideas by the time he made Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Stanley Donen's problem was that he had too much taste and style too lower himself to Mel Brook's level of humor.

 105 minutes.

1930 - THE KING OF JAZZ starring the King of Jazz

By 1930 sound was here to stay. Early sound films virtually had no camera movement in them. As the novelty of people actually talking in movies wore off the studios hit on the idea of filming musical revues with popular Broadway and Vaudeville performers. A camera would be set up as if an audience were watching a play and it was deadly dull to watch as a film.

Coming in at the end of the "all singing all dancing all talking" film fad. Paul Whiteman "The King of Jazz," filmed his orchestra at Universal. Whiteman insisted on prerecording the music before filming started. He apparently realized that he would get better results with the sound quality that way. He also performed a highly abridged version of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue which had he had commissioned for his orchestra in 1924.

This film is kind of a mess. Paul Whiteman actually seems to have pretty good camera presence. He is certainly more interesting than the colorless announcer who plagues the film. The Whiteman Orchestra is fun to watch (although they don't seem to be particularly jazzy) and some of the big production numbers are pretty over the top. Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys sing a couple of songs and it's easy to see why they were a successful act. Bing was apparently a big partier and gave Whiteman a lot of problems while he was in the band.

The problem with the film isn't so much the primitive film technique. The problem is the now forgotten vaudeville acts and comedy relief that are interspersed throughout the film. It appears they are forgotten for a pretty good reason, their acts are major endurance contest to and they really kill this film. If a viewer can tough it out, you will get to hear The Rhapsody in Blue performed as it was originally presented and before symphonic orchestras got their hands on it and drained the life out of it.

2009 - GODZILLA FUBAR REEL

Watch GODZILLA Fubar Reel in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

1954 - 20000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, Disney/Jules Verne

The Disney corporation seems hell bent on remaking this film they've hired the non talented director McG, who did such a great job on Terminator Salvation

McG wants to add more humor to the film and has supposedly approached Will Smith and that guy who played the "good terminator" from the last Terminator film to possibly play Captain Nemo. I'm sure the film will be filmed in the wonder of 3-D as well.

Before all that happens, pick up the DVD that Disney released for their first version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea to see how a team of real professionals put an adventure movie together.

I know it's all about money these days but really...