2009 ZOMBIELAND, short, sweet and a little bloody

A nerd is one of the few people left after a zombie plague takes over the world.  He meets up with other survivors and they make their way to California where they end up in an epic battle with zombies at an amusement park.

 

This is a zombie comedy, that has some good laughs, and has fun with the tiresome flesh eating zombie movie genre.  Zombieland is also smart enough to be only 80 minutes long.

I really don't get these zombie films, if you've seen one gross zombie film you've seen them all.  The only new twist to them lately has been to have the zombies running around like Olympic athletes instead of their usual lumbering stuff.

Bill Murray is the special guest star in this movie and the filmmakers keep his appearance nice and short.  Bill Murray is a comedian best put up with in brief scenes these days. Written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.

80 minutes.

2009 - GAMER, should have been stupid fun, just stupid not fun.

 

Computer chips in our brain's are allowing us to be controlled by teenage and weirdo computer game players.  They control criminals and make them kill each other for real, in a game televised to people all over the world. It's the Survivor TV show except everyone is killing each other instead of looking for the immunity totem. 

 Who says the world will end up like this, bi-polar writer/directors Neveldine and Taylor say so and they are intent on presenting their deep concepts in the most obscure manner possible.  The color is either oversaturated or desaturated.  The action is either over the top or more over the top.  The acting is virtually nonexistent since the cast has to work at staying in the camera frame because the camera NEVER stands still.

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There was probably a decent idea for an entertaining action movie in this hyper incoherent mess of a movie but the action scenes started to give me a headache with all the hand held jumping, shaking, rattling camera work, explosions and noise.   

The only thing interesting in this film is that actor from Dexter whose name escapes me.  He plays a creepy Bill Gates or Steve Jobs kind of guy intent on taking over the world (see Sherlock Holmes).  He's actually very funny and apparently figured out that this film was just a big stupid piece of crap and aimed his performance that way.

95 minutes.  Written by Neveldine & Taylor.

1928, FOUR SONS, John Ford's very moving and impressive World War 1 drama

Another good John Ford silent film.  This is a tragic and sentimental story about the destruction of a family in Germany during World War I.  Ford found the story and this was apparently one of his favorite films.

Ford had studied the German silent films and had even made a trip to UFA studios where Metropolis had been shot to understand and absorb their methods. Ford used what he had learned to tell this story with lots of symbolism and expressionist photography.   Four Sons was made entirely in the studio so he could carefully control the lighting and mood.

 

Ford was never afraid to put lots of emotion and sentimantality in his films and in Four Sons he achieves a better balance than usual.

Society destroying a family, was a theme Ford was to return to several times in other films like The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley,  Four Sons is one of his best films on this theme.

2009 - SHERLOCK HOLMES, hated it

A  boring movie about a guy named Sherlock Holmes/Matt Helm/James Bond/Indiana Jones, who saves the world from an evil genius bent on taking over, haven't seen that plot for about a week or so.  The movie is directed by Guy Ritchie who is attempting to recapture his glory days as one of England's most stylish directors.

What we have here is the typically expensive holiday movie with lots of CGI effects, over the top action scenes and some decent actors trying their best to make the film a little interesting.  This is the usual stuff a movie studio thinks audience's want to see.

The movie uses the Conan Doyle characters, but they really aren't like the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of the Doyle stories.  Sherlock Holmes, the ultimate "Mr. Know It All" is played by Robert Downey Jr., who is hot again thanks to Ironman.  Downey's OK if kind of tiresome.  Jude Law is an overly athletic Dr. Watson but at least he's British.  Rachel McAdams is Irene Alder who is in the movie as Sherlock Holmes's love interest which is a complete change in her character from the Conan Doyle story she appeared in.   It would have been nice if Rachel McAdams had bothered to attempt an accent or even to act.  She's not very sexy and wouldn't have made the  cut as one of Matt Helm's slay girls.

The director Guy Ritchie digs out his old tricks from his previous films Snatch and Lock Stock and  Two Smoking Barrels.  He uses lots of his slo-mo and sped up camera effects to make the action scenes interesting but after about the 2nd fight scene like that it's just tiresome.   The computer effects used to recreate late 1800's London look unusually phony even for computer effects. 

 

 Sherlock Holmes is one of the most famous and unique fictional characters ever created, to bad they couldn't have written a better story for him for this movie.  Some critics have pointed out the similarity in story between this movie and Young Sherlock Holmes and there is no question the plots have a lot in common.  This is not meant as a complement as that was a pretty lame original Sherlock Holmes movie as well. I'm all for new and original Sherlock Holmes stories but rehashing Goldfinger or even  Quantum of Solace or some other old James Bond movie isn't my idea of a good time.  

About the only thing of note in this film are the ending credits which are kind of stylish, but that's only after sitting through 2 hours of this  junk.

 

Wtitten by  Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg, the running time is 129 minutes.

1950 - WHEN WILLIE COMES MARCHING HOME, John Ford copies Preston Sturges

Even four time Academy Award winning directors have to eat which can be the only reason that John Ford got involved in this comedy.

A small town man who enlists in the Army at the start of World War II and ends up being stationed in his hometown for the duration of the war much to his embarrassment.  This is a very mild satire on patriotism and was clearly influenced by Preston Sturges much better comedy,  Hail The Conquering Hero.

The movie stars Dan Dailey who was a song and dance man in some Fox musicals, naturally Dailey does a couple of musical numbers which seem completely out of place.  Ford must have gotten along pretty well with Dailey since he appeared in two more of his  films.

Towards the end of the film, Dailey accidentally goes on a secret mission to France where he meets a beautiful French resistance fighter and brings back secret information on the Nazi V2 rockets.  This  mostly involves Dailey getting drunk on the secret mission and I guess that's supposed to be funny.  Ford was somewhat of a notorious binge alcoholic when he wasn't filming, he must have been able to relate to these scenes.

The movie ends with Dailey finally being recognized for his heroism, and it shows him flying off to be honored by the President of the United States.

The best thing you can say about this movie is that it's 82 minutes and that Ford keeps the broad comedy situations moving along at a fast pace.No underrated classic here, just a director putting in a day's work.

Written by Richard Sale and Mary Loos. The running time is 82 minutes.

1954 - RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11, this is a great film

Finally a great movie.  The producer Walter Wanger, had shot a guy who was having an affair with his wife Joan Bennett.  He ended up going to jail for assault and while in jail he was shocked at the horrific conditions that the convicts were living in.  When he got out he decided to make a film about prison life.

Wanger hired Don Siegel a talented B movie director in the best sense of the word.  Siegel brought speed to this film.  Riot in Cell Block 11 moves fast and doesn't have a dull moment in it.  Siegel and Wanger got permission to shoot a lot of the film on location in Folsum Prison and that really adds to the look of the film.

 

The cast has a bunch of talented character actors.   The film is around 76 minutes long and makes it's points about overcrowding and the poor treatment of the convicts without hammering your head over it like a good liberal would.

 A very impressive film.

1971 - THE TOUCH, Ingmar Bergman films a story about a violent love affair in English and flops at both

Even a master filmmaker like Ingmar Bergman has to screw up once and a while and The Touch is his flop.

Bibi Andersson is in a comfortable marriage to nice guy doctor Max Von Sydow.  Into her life comes a very violent neurotic Jewish archeologist played by American actor Elliot Gould.  They have a wild semi violent affair which ends up in the breakup of her marriage.

Since the film has the production credits for ABC films,  I can only assume to get financing for this film Bergman agreed to shoot this in English instead of his native Swedish language. 

The end result is not so hot.  It's like Bergman didn't really think through his characters motivations or much less his characters.  Hard to understand exactly with Andersson sees in the Gould character since at one point he basically rapes her.  Bergman was known for his skill in writing female characters, but in The Touch he acts like he has barely spent any time with any woman.

It's also hard to understand exactly what the Gould character was angry about.  At one point he talks about how he lost all of his family in concentration camps, but Gould seems a little young to have had  an experience like that.

Max Von Sydow comes off best in this film.  He seems entirely reasonable about the situation and  understands how screwed up the Andersson and Gould characters are, even more than Ingmar Bergman the director/writer.

Bibi Andersson has the thankless job of trying to put some life into Bergman's flat dialog. Plus she is unlucky enough to play the love scenes in the nude with Elliot Gould.   Gould's pawing at her breasts is kind of icky to watch, Bergman seems very uncomfortable directing these scenes.  By the way a naked Elliot Gould is a very hairy guy.

In English, Bergman's themes about alienation, the absence of God, love and passion, sound very trite and cliche ridden.  The symbolism of the rotting statue of the Madonna and child as a representation of Andersson and Gould's love is a little obvious even for Ingmar Bergman.

The Touch is a parody of a typical Ingmar Bergman film.

115 minutes.

1973 - ENTER THE DRAGON, Bruce Lee's very entertaining violent musical

All you have to do is watch the hilarious Fistful of Yen segment from Kentucky Fried Movie, to see how closely they followed the plot of Enter The Dragon, and it's pretty darn close all right.

The direction in this film is poor, the acting is almost nonexistent, the bad guys are way over the top for bad guys and the fight scenes are so loud with the hitting and bone crunching it's really kind of stupid.   The plot is basically a rehash of a James Bond movie like Goldfinger or Thunderball.

Still this was a very enjoyable movie.  Enter The Dragon was carefully filmed to completely entertain an audience.

Bruce Lee staged the action and fights, and as the critic Pauline Kael said at the time, they are basically dance numbers from a musical.  Bruce Lee's howling and screaming during the fight scenes is certainly no worse than Fred Astaire's attempts to sing in his musicals.  Besides, no one watches an Astaire musical to listen to his singing anyway.

The cleverness of the movie lies in the fact that early on the audience realizes that Bruce Lee is almost undefeatable.  The movie then channels the conflict over to John Saxon.  Saxon has to do the heavy lifting and acting to keep the story in focus.  Saxon also has the pivotal fight at the end of the film with some scary bone crunching henchman of evil Mr. Han. 

The final fight is between Bruce Lee and the evil Mr Han.  Mr. Han looks like he can barely hold his arm up with that crazy metal claw he has attached to it much less take on Bruce Lee.  The fight is staged in a room full of mirrors which is a clear rip off from Orson Welles's  Lady from Shanghai room of mirrors finale.

 

If you're going to steal, steal from the best. The running time is 102 minutes, written by Michael Allin.

1970 - DANCE OF THE SEVEN VEILS, Ken Russell's goofy quasi biography on Richard Strauss

Over the top and over just about everything, director Ken Russell made his reputation with a series of biographies on the lives of great composers for the BBC.  Russell a filmmaker with an outlandish visual sense to put it mildly became enough of a success that he was able to indulge himself even more with each film.  He finally hit the peak or rock bottom if you will, with this little gem that came out in 1970.

Dance of the Seven Veils is apparently an interpretative version on the life story of composer Richard Strauss who actually lived in Germany during the Nazi years and apparently walked a careful line between collaborating and avoiding the Nazi's.

Russell gets to indulge himself yet again with one of his favorite visual themes, crazy nuns withering

around in some sort of  psychotic frenzy.

No one would ever argue that Russell didn't have an eye for an interesting camera angle or crazy effect.  I did enjoy the scene where the trombone section crushed all of Strauss's critics and stabbed them with their slides.

OK, Ken Russell wasn't really interested in making a biography on Richard Strauss, he just wanted somebody to finance his silly film so he could provoke and outrage the BBC television audience.  It's all stupid stuff and 1 hour of it was plenty.

Understandably the Strauss family was not very amused with this portrait of Daddy Strauss and the film hasn't seen the light of day until it showed up as a work print on You Tube in 6 parts. 

1967 - THE STOLEN AIRSHIP, Zeman's got a fun technique, but no story to hang it on.

Karel Zeman's The Stolen Airship, features his really amazing old fashioned special effects, but he sure could have worked a little harder on the story.

The film is a mash up of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Swiss Family Robinson, maybe The Mysterious Island, and some sort of half baked comedy about a spy trying to steal a secret formula.  It's a fairly hard film to track what's happening while you're watching it.

 

Zeman's got a quirky understated sense of humor and he's great with visual gags.  He's particularly good at mixing his incredible special effects with his sense of humor,  there is some very funny stuff in this film.  The airships and balloons not only look cool but Zeman has designed them to be odd Rube Goldberg contraptions that can fly.

 

This film really could have been a classic film fantasy, it's unfortunate that attention wasn't paid to a more coherent story line.

The Stolen Airship is under 90 minutes and in spite of it's flaws it's still visually a cool film to watch.

2009 - THE HANGOVER, character driven but pretty lame comedy

Can't believe the money this sort of funny but mediocre comedy made this summer.  Apparently people were desperate for some sort of mindless comedy, after having to endure action crap like G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Seen it all before.  Mix up some over the top outrageous situations and throw in a little T&A but nothing to offensive to upset the girlfriend and apparently you have a recipe for a comedy success.

 

This is a guy movie for couples.  The story is about four buddies on the loose for a wild bachelor weekend before one of them gets married.  They party down and loose the groom to be.  The next day the remaining three start an all out search for him by recreating their wild night.  This gets them into more zany adventures.  It's sort of like the story structure of Citizen Kane except Orson Welles didn't direct and write it.

 

The buddies are the usual Hollywood bunch of stereotypes.  One guy is the "chick magnet," another is an up tight dentist with a bitchy girlfriend.  The third  buddy is the groom who is supposedly the most mature of the bunch.  The fourth guy is some weirdo in a beard who is along to say and do nutty things just for the sake of being strange. The weirdo gets the biggest laughs of course, since everyone likes a movie with a zany weirdo in it.    In reality these guys would never be friends much less have a wild night together in Las Vegas.

This movie is an OK rental for a Friday night at home when you're stuck in the house during the winter.

100 minutes written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore.

2009 - FANTASTIC MR FOX, coy, smartass junk from Wes Anderson

Tiresome film from Wes Anderson who has finally managed to beat me down with his his oddball style of humor and filmmaking.

Artistic arrogance can be the only explanation for this film.  The animated characters are the typically quirky and weird characters Anderson puts into his human films.  The problem is that their constant pseudo hip chatter makes them sound more elitist than normal, nobody ever talks like this,  humans or animals.

The deliberate jerky stop motion animation technique also comes off as just another stunt when it's supposed to be retro clever.  Ray Harryhausen worked for years to perfect this technique, Wes Anderson only uses it because he thinks a whole 90 plus minute movie of  jerky animal characters will be funny.

This ongoing trend of using name actors for animation characters continues with this film.  George Clooney, and Meryl Streep bring nothing to the voice work on this film other than to remind the viewer that Mr. Fox sounds like Academy Award winning actor George Clooney and Mrs Fox sounds like Academy Award winning actor Meryl Streep.  To me it just comes off as a couple of actors slumming for an easy paycheck for a few hours of work.

I've liked some of Anderson's films in the past but The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was just plain  indulgent crap for the sake of indulgence.

Fantastic Mr Fox is another Wes Anderson film in a similar style, I hated this film.

90 minutes.

1992 - DIRK BOGARDE: BY MYSELF interesting documentary on screen acting

There are plenty of lame documentaries about film directors kicking around these days, here's an interesting one about an actor who actually sounds like he has a brain in him.

The English actor Dirk Bogarde, sat down for the BBC and talked about his career as a screen actor and it's actually pretty good talk.  He looks back at his early days as an actor when he was basically a pretty boy screen personality.  His comments on what it took to maintain this screen personality are very interesting as he talks about how he needed to wear his hair and dress to maintain his public persona.

Bogarde recognized early on that he needed to understand the fundamentals of filmmaking, so he spent time with the crews on his films, learning about camera lens, lighting and editing.  Bogarde apparently got along with most of the directors he worked with and his thoughts on, Visconti, Losey, and the very crazy Fassbinder are fascinating.

Bogarde didn't seem to  have much time for the method school of acting.  To be a professional film actor meant knowing his lines, showing up on time and not pissing anyone off.

Probably one of the better documentaries I've seen on film making.

2009 - AN EDUCATION, well made, well written, nothing of a film

Since the arrival of the internet the claim "based on a true story" can now actually be verified after watching a film like this.

An Education is the supposedly true autobiographical story of a pretty, smart and precocious 16 year old girl who becomes involved with an older handsome con man.  The guy is such a piece of work, that he even cons her stupid parents into getting her to give up her dream of getting an Oxford Education.  At the last minute she discovers the truth about the guy dumps him and is able to live her dream of going to Oxford through her own resourcefulness, blah, blah, blah.

Back to the internet check.  The film is based on the life of a journalist named Lynn Barber and for the most part it follows her story fairly closely.  The problem it seems, is after spending some time reading about Lynn Barber,  she is kind of nasty and unpleasant woman.  Barber apparently holds a large grudge against the world and her parents in particular.  Even at the age of 66 she blames her now 90 year old parents for her involvement with the con man and doesn't take a whole lot of responsibility for what happened to her at age 16.

What actually happened to Lynn Barber, was that she basically screwed up her chance to get into Oxford by getting herself kicked out of her prep school.  The movie insists that she approached her teachers to get back in and because they always recognized how bright she was, they helped her out.

But real life is a little more messy than her fantasy ending.  Apparently her despised father ended up begging her principal to let her test for Oxford, and eventually ended up hiring private tutors to help her get into school, not exactly the self empowering ending of the film.  Life is a little more messy.

Even without the internet check, An Education is nothing special.  Just another "coming of age" film about a younger girl who gets involved with an older man, seen this one a million times before.

 100 minutes.

2009 - UP, typical smooth Pixar production

Another very well assembled Pixar production.  Probably by now, everyone knows the story of the old man and the house full of balloons that he floats away in to South America.

As always with the Pixar films their technical stuff is at a very high standard.  Visually the film looks very cool.  The house floating in the sky is a pretty remarkable image.  The backgrounds look very photo realistic at times.

On the other hand, Pixar still seems to be sticking to having it's animated figures look more cartoonish instead of realistic which is kind of interesting.  Disney actually took the opposite track as it developed it's cartoons, it made the cartoon characters in their films look more like people and less cartoonish.

Probably the best thing about UP is the thoughtful and careful way the story has been worked out.  The importance of the house in the old man's life is shown at the start of the picture.   When his house is in danger of being destroyed, his actions seem completely reasonable and understandable.

My only complaint with Pixar is their tendency to throw in a big action sequence climax towards the end of their films.  Wall-E turned into a mess towards the end with robots and overweight humans racing around in some sort of frenzied climax that unfortunately shattered the gentle mood of the first half of that film.

No problems with this one, the action wasn't as completely cartoon crazy this time.  Certainly it had it's silly moments, I could have done without the talking dogs, but this is after all is said and done, an animated film.

1934 - MAN OF ARAN, Flaherty's classic if suspect documentary

An acknowledged film classic, whatever that is.  Robert Flaherty lived and shot a lot of film for 2 1/2 years on the Aran Islands.  Considered a documentary at the time, the film was about people surviving in a very harsh north sea island environment off the coast of England.

As reviewers and film scholars looked into the film, it was apparent that Flaherty had recreated many of the scenes in the film.  The shark hunting sequence on the Atlantic Ocean had been completely staged. The growing food with seaweed scenes were apparently something that the islanders had abandoned years ago.  Even the family was phony, the husband, wife and son were not even related, they had been hand picked by Flaherty to play a "typical" Aran family unit.

 

What wasn't faked was the amount of danger Flaherty put the Aran islanders through while filming.  The scenes at sea are still amazing to watch and seeing people out rowing in boats with a hull that looks like it was made out of paper mache is an unnerving sight.

Flaherty's film making technique was to shoot lots of film and then watch it over and over looking for a story to emerge.  Slowly he would eliminate film footage as the basic story revealed itself to him during the editing process.  Unsurprisingly, the editor John Goldman got an additional credit on the film as a story consultant.   Goldman's editing used a lot of the techniques that Eisenstein and the Russians had pioneered with fast moving montages. 

The film had a lot of inaccuracies but Flaherty had a deeper purpose in mind.  Robert Flaherty was  a romantic.  He distrusted modern civilization and found it a corrupting influence on the human race.  Flaherty liked a more simpler, world where people lived and tested themselves against nature.  If he couldn't find sequences in his films to fit into his theme while filming, he ended up faking them.

Man of Aran is pretty spectacular to watch,  with amazing photography, incredible scenery and very exciting sequences, definitely on the required viewing list.

 76 minutes.

1953-THE MAZE a 3D movie in 2D on my TV set

Short, minor and not exciting 3D horror film.  If the film is to be remembered at all, it's mostly because it was directed by William Cameron Menzies.  Menzies was the man who the word "Production Designer" was invented for.

Starting out in silent films, William Cameron Menzies became responsible for the look of the film, he was an influence on almost every director and photographer he worked with.

David O Selznick recognized his genius early on and used him on a number of his pictures.  He gets a large credit on Gone With The Wind with the credit,  "Production Designed by."  Menzies was responsible for the overall unifying look of the film as well as directing the burning of Atlanta sequences.  Selznick went through so many directors, photographers and writers on Gone With The Wind that it was amazing he actually produced a film that made sense, much less  a film classic, a lot of the credit for this went to Menzies.

Towards the end of his career Menzies took a shot at directing a couple of cheap films for Allied Artists.  Invaders from Mars and The Maze. For working with some pretty small budgets Menzies got a lot of atmosphere and feeling into those films.

The Maze is about some strange stuff going on at a Scottish Castle, the fiance of the current Lord of the Castle, attempts to get to the bottom of it and the story climax takes place in a maze naturally.

Frankly the story is pretty stupid but it does allow Menzies to show his stuff, with people sneaking around creepy noirish stairways and halls which leads to an inevitable showdown with a scary monster lurking in the castle maze.  As for the 3D stuff, well I don't have 3D.

The final explanation of the monster is so entertainingly ridiculous it has a silly charm to it.

A strange minor piece of a brilliant filmmaker's career.

80 minutes.