1959 - TARZAN'S GREATEST ADVENTURE, is actually very good.

Let's give the producers of this film their due, this is actually a good Tarzan film with a great cast.

The Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films are pretty bad.  They were always filmed on phony jungle sets with Tarzan fighting the same phony alligator in the river and the films always had way to many scenes with Cheetah the monkey. Weissmuller  sounded and looked like a half wit when he spoke,  you would hardly know the guy was a five time Olympic gold medal winner.

Somehow the producers of the 1950's Tarzan films got their act together for Tarzan's Greatest Adventure.  They hired a pretty good action director in John Guillermin, they actually filmed most of the movie on location in Africa for a change and most importantly they hired an excellent cast for the film.

Anthony Quayle, Sean Connery and Neil MacGinnis are the bad guys heading up river on a boat in search of a diamond mine.  Gordon Scott as Tarzan is in pursuit, he's stuck with the usual woman in tow played by a British actress named Sara Shane, who actually has a personality. Their relationship almost seems realistic considering the situation. 

Probably the big change in this Tarzan film was giving the Tarzan character a vocabulary.  He doesn't sound like a dumb jock although I'm not so sure about his American accent.  You know you're in for a different kind of Tarzan film, when Tarzan tells Cheetah to stay behind and take care of the tree house. 

The on location filming and the action scenes really make this picture.  There is an exciting scene on the river where Tarzan attacks the bad guys and the final fight on a cliff with an animal snare is very exciting.

Tarzan's Greatest Adventure is a fast moving 90 minutes and this is a movie where you get to see Sean Connery in black face.

88 minutes.

1964 - THE CARPETBAGGERS, an interesting companion piece to Scorsese's The Aviator

One trashy piece of movie crap. Probably the kind of film that Hollywood does best, create entertaining junk out of a trashy book.

The producer Joesph E. Levine, was famous for foisting garbage on movie audiences like Godzilla and all of those Italian dubbed Hercules movies.  He had a second career making high quality films like The Graduate, Two Women and Contempt.  But he always seemed to be more interested in producing  things like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Mad Monster Party.

 

The Carpetbaggers was based on a book by Harold Robbins who used the life story of Howard Hughes to drive his plot.  Levine hired screenwriter John Michael Hayes to adapt the book.

John Michael Hayes is an interesting person in Hollywood.  A writer who began his career on the top of the mountain writing for Alfred Hitchcock on films like Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.  He had a fight with Hitchcock and it was all down hill from that point.  Hayes ended up being under contract to Joseph E Levine where he wrote junk like Harlow, Walking Tall and Where Love Has Gone.

John Michael Hayes was a pro.  He was good at characterization and dialog and very good at the pseudo sex talk dialog thing that worked really well on his Hitchcock films.  The Carpetbaggers however was not one of his high points.  In this film all his smutty dialog is pretty bad.  However, it is also very funny.
Levine put together a pretty high class production with a good cast.  George Peppard plays the Howard Hughes part, Carroll Baker is the Jean Harlow character.  1940's star Alan Ladd has second billing in the cast but doesn't have much to do although he does get in a good fight with Peppard towards the end of the film.  

Getting back to the Martin Scorsese connection.  Scorsese also did a film on Howard Hughes, called The Aviator.  But the legendary Marty missed one important detail in his film.  He forgot to make it entertaining.

The life of Howard Hughes, with the airplanes and the films and all the girls was a real life Harold Robbins novel.  Scorsese never figured that out.  Joseph E. Levine did, that's why The Carpetbaggers is a more superior and entertaining film compared to The Aviator.

The film runs 150 minutes.

1951 - THE ENFORCER, good Bogart crime drama

Pretty good and short Bogart film about a gang of professional killers.  Bogart plays the District Attorney trying to bring them to justice.

The Enforcer, has some interesting things going on in it.  The cast with the exception of Bogart is  unknown character actors. The cops and crooks actually look like the real thing for a change.  The photography is by Robert Burks.  Burks was Hitchcock's longtime photographer on most of his greatest films.  He gives the film a nice noirish look.

The film is blessed with no love interest for any of the characters.  There is none of that "honey don't go out and fight crime stuff" to deal with that always slows the story down.  The action is subtle and nasty which is not an easy combination to achieve.

The screenplay is composed of a series of flashbacks within flashbacks, but somehow that narrative  structure works without become confusing.  There is a rather stupid plot device to build up some suspense towards the end of the film that is pretty contrived.  But the film wraps things up with an exciting conclusion.

By this time in his career, Humphrey Bogart had been acting long enough that he could do a part like this without breaking a sweat.   Bogart always was a pretty commanding presence in a film and he was probably one of the few actors who could spew out this kind of "tough guy" dialog without sounding silly.

Television has beaten this type of crime story to death, but The Enforcer  still does a very good job telling an exciting and interesting story.

87 minutes, the film was written by Martin Rackin and directed by Bretaigne Windust with uncredited help from Raoul Walsh.

1957 - THE RISING OF THE MOON, stupid sentimental Irish slop from John Ford

The Rising of the Moon was apparently filmed after Ford had completed working on The Searchers.  You would never know that the same guy made both of these films.
 

The Rising of the Moon was a small film based on a series of short stories about Ireland that Ford did to try and jump start the Irish film industry.  Ford appeared to have run amuck with the Irish humor and sentimentality at the expense of the film.  The humor is very very very broad and very very very corny.  The Irish characters in each of the stories act like they have some sort of mental handicap.

The visual style of the film is pretty boring with Ford staging scenes almost like he was photographing a stage play.  Ford was considered an expert in black and white film composition, but it would  be hard to know that watching this film.

 

The final story called 1921 about an IRA leader escaping from the British has a little more going for it visually with lots of tilted camera angles and atmospheric photography, but I'm not so sure Ford had much to do with the look of this segment, since the photographer is Robert Krasker, who had filmed The Third Man.   Frankly, 1921 pretty much looks like the outtakes from The Third Man.

John Ford was apparently going for a feeling of nostalgia with this small film, unfortunately he makes the entire Irish nation look like they could barely walk and chew gum at the same time.  The film is mercifully only 80 minutes long.

1938 - OLYMPIA, Leni Riefenstahl's film on the 1936 Olympic games

The Nazi's favorite filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl created this documentary from her photographed record of the 1936 Olympic games.  Olympia is considered a classic in the documentary film form, and although a very long film it still has parts that hold up pretty well watching the film today.

Rifenstahl stuck hundred's of cameras everywhere to get some amazing shots of the athletes competing. She spent almost two years editing the miles of film footage she got back. The finished film was split into two parts.

The film is somewhat unnerving to watch with Hitler in the stadium and all the thousands of good little Germans "heiling" him with their creepy Nazi salutes.

Part One,  The Festival of Nations contains a brilliant prologue and opening to the Olympic games and consumes almost thirty minutes of running time.  The Festival of Nations primarily focuses on track and field competition and gets pretty tiresome.

Riefenstahl frequently photographs the athletes very closely and uses lots of slow motion tricks to keep it interesting but it's a pretty long slog for much of the film.  Towards the end of the film, Riefenstahl sharpens the focus of the film with a pole vaulting competition that goes into the night.  The Festival of Nations concludes with a marathon running race which is very well filmed.

Part 2:  The Festival of Beauty, is a little shorter than part one, and has more variety in the athletic events which makes it easier to watch.  The sailing sequences and most entertainingly, the horse competition events which are hilarious.  The horses frequently throw their riders and appear to have a lot more common sense about jumping dangerous parts of the Olympic track then the people riding them.  Olympia ends with the famous diving/flying sequence which is primarily achieved through editing.

In spite of the dated aspects and somewhat repetitious nature of some of the athletic events,  Olympia is still an impressive film.

126 minutes for The Festival of Nations.

100 minutes for The Festival of Beauty.

1995 - GAMERA GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE, is not Godzilla

Giant ancient birds are flying around Japan eating people.   Fortunately,  the ancient Atlantians, created a flying turtle with rockets for feet called Gamara.  Gamara does battle with these things called the Galos and saves the day.

 

This is the first in a trilogy of Gamara films from the late 1990's, and it's a reboot as they like to say these days, of the older silly children's series from the 1960's.  

Probably no stupider that the first three Star Wars movies and at times a whole lot more entertaining,  the movie combines models and miniatures with some OK digital computer effects.  The Japanese like to call these films "kaiju's" which means strange beasts AKA  "monsters."

The prepared English language dub of the movie has some funny lines.  "Someday I'd like to show you around a monster-free Tokyo,"  says the boy to the girl while the Galos is ripping Tokyo apart.

Written by  Kazunori Itō ,  the running time is 95 minutes.

1922 MANSLAUGHTER - More outrageous DeMille Sex and Sin stuff.

Cecil B DeMille and his writer/mistresses Jeannie MacPherson put together an "everything but the kitchen sink" story for this film.  A rich, shallow woman  accidentally kills a cop and ends up going to prison. Prison life redeems her and turns her into a good church going Christian.  The synopsis can't even begin to cover the amount of plot and melodramatic situations DeMille crammed into an hour and forty minutes.

The silent films of DeMille are generally considered his artistic peak.  This film isn't up to the silent version of The 10 Commandments that I saw but it is certainly a lot of fun with never a dull moment in any of it.

 

Just to give you the idea of the bizzaro nature of this film, DeMille, includes two ancient Roman orgy sequences which have absolutely nothing to do with anything in the film.  These scenes appear to have been included just as an indulgent whim.  One of the orgy scenes, has a couple of lesbians making out in plain view of the camera which is  pretty amazing stuff for 1922.

DeMille was frequently criticized for the poor handling of actors in his films but his star Leatrice Joy,  does a very good job going from playing a spoiled partying playgirl to a born again Christian.

Obviously Leatrice Joy is more fun to watch being naughty than nice.  She did a lot of her own  driving during the car chase scenes.   DeMillle was a big believer in actors doing their own stunts even if it meant risking their lives at times.  


Cecil B. DeMille, was criticized for being somewhat of a right wing moralizing hypocrite throughout his career but he certainly understood how to mix dirtiness with piety, something a lot of Christians are still very adept at.

In DeMille's case his moralizing is extremely entertaining in this film. 

1961 - THE STEAMROLLER AND THE VIOLIN, a Tarkovsky film I could stay awake through

Andrei Tarkovsky, was one of the Soviet Union's greatest filmmakers.  He made important films in his short lifetime.  Stalker and Solaris are science fiction films that examine man's place in the universe and attempt to look deeply into the soul. Andrei Rublev looks at the artist's place in society, in order to understand if an artist should be an active part of society or just a chronicler of it.

These films are very long, complex and thoughful meditations, with superb photography and are made with great care.  These films are also very boring.   I view them frequently when I am having trouble sleeping, they are a guaranteed cure for insomnia.

The Steamroller And The Violin was apparently Tarkovsky's graduate thesis film from film school.  The film appeared to have been made at Mosfilm studios, so it has a very professional look to it for a student film.  The Steamroller and The Violin shows the beginnings of Tarkovsky's complex visual style and is the story of a young violin player who is persecuted by his peers, but protected by a sensitive Russian worker.

 

Since The Steamroller and the Violin is a Tarkovsky film it is also very boring, but it is only 45 minutes long, although I still needed two breaks to get through it.

46  minutes.

1985 - INTO THE NIGHT, the very poor man's version of The 39 Steps.

Driving around  Los Angeles one night, an insomniac picks up a hot blond who is being chased by four Iranian gunmen.  This starts a series of Hitchcock like adventures around the cultural landmarks of the city.

The director John Landis, straddles his film between old Hollywood and new Hollywood.  His earlier film,  Kentucky Fried Movie was a send up of Hollywood genres.  He made a lot of money for Universal with National Lampoon's Animal House where he was able to combine college nostalgia with raunchy humor.

John Landis a greater admirer of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which mixed comedy with horror attempted to update that genre in films like An American Werewolf in London and Innocent Blood.

Into the Night was his shot at a Hitchcock type of chase thriller/comedy while mixing the then fashionable 1980's trends of violence and nudity.  He doesn't pull it off.  He documents a gag with a  curiously distant manner, afraid to bring the camera in close to show it.  The script isn't really very clever or funny, it mostly seems to be a collection of situations designed to move the "couple on the run" from one LA location to another.

Jeff Goldblum's performance as the insomniac is very tentative and laid back.  The idea's that Goldblum will come into his own as a hero like Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Goldblum seems more bored than tired throughout.  A young Michelle Pfeiffer the cute little bundle of trouble Goldblum hooks up with can't seem to work up any couples chemistry with him.  Since this was one of Pfeiffer's first major roles she was probably coerced into doing the nude scene that shows up in the picture.

What the film's known for are the number of in-joke cameo appearances of Hollywood film directors.  Alfred Hitchcock put himself in his films but I don't think a major mainstream film ever saw anything like this.  Listed below are just some of the filmmakers and personalities appearing in this film:

• Jack Arnold, director of  Gilligan's Island,  as the man with the dog in the elevator.
• Rick Baker, make-up artist on An American Werewolf in London, as the drug dealer.
• David Cronenberg, director of Videodrome, as Goldblum's supervisor in the boardroom.
• Jonathan Demme, director of  The Silence of the Lambs , as the federal agent with glasses.
• Richard Franklin, director of Roadgames, as the aerospace engineer sitting next to Goldblum in the cafeteria.
• Carl Gottlieb, who co-wrote Jaws , as the large federal agent with mustache.
• Amy Heckerling, director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, as the clumsy waitress.
• Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, as the man on the phone talking to Burt.
• Colin Higgins, who wrote Harold and Maude,  as the actor in the hostage film.
• Lawrence Kasdan, writer and director of Body Heat, as the police detective who interrogates Goldblum.
• Jonathan Lynn, writer of Yes, Minister, as the tailor who fits the Iranian killers.
• Paul Mazursky, director of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and An Unmarried Woman as, the beachhouse owner and accused drug dealer.
• Carl Perkins, performer and composer of 'Blue Suede Shoes', as Mr. Williams.
• Daniel Petrie, director of A Raisin in the Sun, as the director of the hostage film.
• Dedee Pfeiffer, actress and sister of Michelle Pfeiffer, as the hooker.
• Waldo Salt, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, as the derelict who tells Goldblum his car having been towed.
• Don Siegel, director of Dirty Harry, as the man caught with a girl in the hotel bathroom.
• Roger Vadim, director of And God Created Woman and Barbarella , as Monsieur Melville, the French kidnapper.
• Clu Gulager, a veteran character actor as a federal agent.
• Vera Miles, one time protege of Alfred Hitchcock.
• David Bowie, as a professional killer who gets in a fight with Carl Perkins (probably the only real clever scene).  

John Landis even sticks himself in the film as one of the Iranian killers  (he's second from the right .  Landis appears to have put all of his energy into thinking up funny little bits for his director buddies.

 

This seems to be the real reason Into The Night was made, an excuse for Landis to party with his director buddies on Universal's dime.

 115 minutes, written by Ron Koslow.

2006 - PAN'S LABYRINTH, updating Hans Christian Anderson's, The Little Match Girl, with lots of blood and violence

The director Guillermo del Toro, is an interesting guy.  He's very talented when it comes to making movies.  He knows how to stage and photograph a scene.  He  is up on the latest technological tricks to integrate special effects with live action.

Del Toro spends a lot of time working on his films to get them perfect.  But story wise he hasn't been exactly aiming for a Citizen Kane or a Schindler's List.

Here is a partial list of his films:

Cronos - a vampire story about a guy trying to destroy mankind.
Blade 2 -  vampires trying to destroy mankind.
Mimic -  giant icky insects living in the sewers trying to destroy mankind.
Hellboy - comic book about a demon from hell fighting off monsters trying to destroy mankind.
Hellboy II - see above, more of the same still trying to destory mankind.

Then there's the film Pan's Labyrinth,  his attempt at sort of respectability by filming a very dark fairy tale.

In Franco's Spain during World War II, a young girl lives in the woods with her mother and evil soldier stepfather.  She meets a fawn who tells her she is the queen of the fairies ( or something like that).  If she fulfills three magical challenges she will live in the fairy world ( or something like that).

 

The idea appears to be to contrast the fairy world with the cold cruel world of man.  This is really hammered on with the character of the evil step father.  His job is to put down any resistance to the fascist Spanish government.  He goes about this by smashing people in the face with hammers, sawing their limbs off and just generally being an unpleasant guy.

 

Obviously the fairy world would be a happier place to be, except that world apparently has monsters who like to bite the heads off of cute little fairies and chase cute little girls around as well, that doesn't exactly seem like a fun place to hang out.

As much time and attention as del Toro spends on creating his fantasy world, he probably spends even more time on figuring out ways to show people being shot, stabbed and tortured.  The film was rated "R" when it was released, so going into it I was aware that the film was going to be kind of dark.  However I was unprepared for the level of nastiness that I was about to watch.

I get that the real world can be a harsh and cruel place, I don't need del Toro to tell me that I have cable news.  However in this incredibly pointless film, fairyland isn't much better.

119 minutes.

1999 THE MATRIX, 2003, THE MATRIX RELOADED, THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS

Rewatched the Matrix films, haven't seen them since they first came out in the theater.

THE MATRIX

This film still looked pretty good, the action scenes were still impressive to watch and very entertaining.  The plot is fun even if it's a bunch of foolish techno babble.  Keanu Reeves plays the Christ figure Neo,  who has been chosen to save humanity from the psychic brain control of the machines.  Keanu's actually not bad,  he'll never be known as a strong actor but he certainly didn't disgrace himself.  Probably the real star is Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus  he's a very good actor and has enough gravitas to him that he can put over the ponderous dialog. Don't know where this film would have been without him.

Four years later  it's the summer of 2003, the inevitable sequels:

THE MATRIX RELOADED

Problems almost from the beginning.  The intention was to have a Star Wars type of trilogy film series, but they boxed themselves into a corner almost immediately.  The Matrix ended with Neo discovering he had  super powers, much like Superman.  He flies around and even has some kind of X-ray vision.  Agent Smith who was obviously the Darth Vader character from the first film had been destroyed, but now he's back as a rogue computer program who can clone himself to give Neo an unstoppable enemy.

Nothing of any interest really happens for about the first 40 minutes of the film, there is some soap opera stuff between the characters that we have to sit through, and this time the self important dialog is spoken very slowly as if it were some self important epic text from a Shakespeare play or a Dr. Strange comic.

Even the two big action scenes are boring.  Neo's fight with the Agent Smith clones goes on forever and has no resolution, because it's clear he would have to confront Smith again in The Matrix Revolutions.  Instead Neo just flies away leaving the audience to wonder what the point of the fight was even about.

The other big scene, the car chase features Fishburne's Morphius character battling it out with the evil computer program agents on top of a speeding semi.  Again, this scene ends with Neo flying to the rescue and saving Morphius another pointless showoff special effects scene.  None of the action scenes can have Neo actually participate in them since he is now undefeatable.

The Matrix Reloaded ends with Neo confronting the Architect of the Matrix who informs him that he is just part of a repeating cycle of man and machine control.  Neo cannot change the preordained destiny of the Matrix.  This long dialog scene really brings the movie to a stop.  


THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS

Part three came out Christmas 2003.  The idea was to wrap up the story with a big finale.  Again, the problems from part two hang over this film as well.   The first hour of this film has literally nothing going on it's basically a preparation for the big machine/human battle in the city of Zion.   Neo learns from his adviser the Oracle that the Architect didn't know what he was talking about in the last movie.  This I had to sit around six months to find out back in 2003.

The two big action set pieces in this film are the battle with the sentinels in Zion, and the final battle between Neo and Agent Smith.  The sentinel battle with the mech battle units is kind of fun to watch if a little confusing, but a least it's something different from the endless and now very boring slow motion Kung Fu fights.

Time for the third Agent Smith/Neo battle, and now it's really hard to work up any interest in their fighting it out yet again.  They fly around and throw each other into buildings which is clearly a direct steal from Superman II.  As usual the outcome is never in question.

The Matrix Revolutions wraps it up with Oracle and the Architect discussing the end of the war between man and machine.  The Architect states that humans will now have their right to choose what will happen to them from now on.  Well whatever, it seems odd that the filmmakers choose to end with these two and no one from the main cast.

The Matrix Revolutions ended with the possibility of yet another followup but considering the amount of money and time spent on these film sequels and their less than stellar finance payback, it was pretty obvious that this wasn't going to happen anytime soon.  You don't see a lot of people collecting Matrix action figures these days.

Probably no one needed a sequel to the original Matrix but the film made a lot of money and was a fun sci/fi action film so it's understandable Warner Brothers would want a franchise.  Unfortunately for the filmmakers, they had exhausted all of their clever ideas in the first film, so their sequels were uninspired rehashes of their earlier and much better sequences from The Matrix.

It's also very apparent watching The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions that both films could have been easily edited down into one film.

Still all three films were well made, and obviously expensive productions.  The sequels are now only OK time wasters and not the film epics that were hoped for.