Tuesday, June 29, 2010

1958 - GIDEONS DAY, John Ford's Scotland Yard police drama entertains with it professionalism

How John Ford an Irish American director got mixed up in this very British film is a mystery for a film scholar.  The actors, the writer and the cinematographer F.A Young, are all English.  The film was primarily shot on location in 1950's England and John Ford got involved exactly for what reason?



The film is a crime drama about the day in the life of a Scotland Yard police inspector.  Jack Hawkins who usually played generals for David Lean seems to be enjoying himself as the easy going detective.  Ford apparently enjoyed working with Hawkins and said he was the finest actor he ever directed.  John Wayne, Henry Fonda and James Stewart take note.


By this point in his career, John Ford had simplified his visual style to the point where it was almost invisible.  The moody photography and dramatic compositions on his previous films had now been replaced by a very clean visual style.  Ford takes this episodic and simple story and moves it along at an entertaining pace finding just the right pulse for the performances and the action when it suddenly comes. 

This is a smart and simple film by a master filmmaker who made over 200 films in his lifetime.

91 minutes, written by T.E.B. Clarke.

2010 - THE GREEN ZONE, Iraq war film is stunningly naive

Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon are shocked, shocked to realize that the United States government lied to the American public about the circumstances leading up to our involvement in Iraq.  It took them seven years and probably watching a lot of good documentaries that have already come out about Iraq, but they screwed up their courage and made a film stating the obvious.



Universal Studios couldn't say no to the director and star of the Bourne films but maybe they should have.  Damon's supposed to be playing a tough WMD soldier but he comes off more as a guy working towards his Eagle Scout badge. With the help of his trusty lap top and Google he goes to work.  He  uncovers the truth about the lack of WMD's in Iraq and our involvement in the war.   Finally towards the end of the film he becomes a gun blasting James Bond in search of the truth. 

The director Paul Greengrass uses his now very tiresome and cliche ridden hand held camera technique to make the action look like something in a bad You Tube video.  The staging is supposed to make the action look exciting but I can only imagine in a theater with all the bouncing around  the audience got a hell of a headache. Time to give Greengrass a tripod for his camera mount, the act is getting old. 


The only interesting character in the entire film is Greg Kinnear as the sneaky government employee manipulating everyone involved in the occupation of Iraq.  Kinnear has his own group of thugs to keep the truth from coming out but he meets his match in our true blue hero,  Damon.



Maybe someone will eventually make an Iraq war movie with widespread audience appeal, but for now audiences can enjoy seeing how cool Matt Damon looks in his military issue sunglasses

1991 - STAR TREK 6: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, as they say nostalgia ain't what it used to be


The final film with the original Star Trek cast is a letdown.  After five films Paramount probably saw the handwriting on the wall with diminished box office returns and a cast that was probably asking for more money with each successful film.  The studio decided to pull the plug on the series with this shoddy production.


The director of the best film in the original series (The Wrath of Kahn)  Nicholas Meyer was brought in to wrap things up.  Meyer was also co writer of the screenplay and conceived an outer space murder mystery for a plot, with Kirk and McCoy being put on trial for the death of a Klingon ambassador while Spock tries to figure who framed them.

The mystery element was new in the series which had increasingly loaded up the films with comedy.  Meyer had written a few Sherlock Holmes stories so he probably seemed like the right person to incorporate the mystery and science fiction plots.  But the mystery was really uninteresting with everyone pretty much walking around waiting for the next clue to show up.  


Unfortunately by this point the oldster cast had kind of descended into a quasi hammy acting style.  If the audiences wanted to see William Shatner in full overblown expressive mode that's what he gave them.  DeForrest Kelly was equally hammy as the put upon ship's doctor and the rest of the original crew followed suit with similar broad performances.  The acting at one point was so ridiculous that Christopher Plummer showed up as a Shakespeare quoting Klingon captain attempting to match Shatner with an equally over the top performance.  The constant quoting of Shakespeare that was meant to give the story some dramatic importance got pretty stupid.

All of this might have made for an enjoyable final film but Nicholas Meyer directed the film with almost no visual style or pace.  Almost every scene is shot in medium closeups with all the interest of an episode of Dragnet. The film looks very clautrophobic for a story with spaceships flying through space.


The constant jokes about retirement and being "put out to pasture" get tiresome, and even Shatner's overblown acting style can't prop this thing up.  The reassurance of seeing the familiar characters that dates back to their first appearances in the the 1960's show is about the only thing interesting in The Undiscovered County.

A disappointing way to end the first Star Trek film series.

113 minutes.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

1966 - DJANGO, Italian western where they must have shot about a couple thousand guys

The violence in Leone's Italian westerns looks positively restrained compared to Django.  The lead Franco Nero plays Django, a gunfighter who shoots a hell of a lot of people.  Nero has very blue eyes which with all the shooting leads to the thought "one blew here, and one blew there."


If this is a typical spaghetti western then I'm not sure exactly what "typical" means in this genre.  Everything is exaggerated, the western town is really dirty, the colors are really vibrant and the character development is really next to nothing.  What this film has going for it is lots of action and by that I means lots of people getting shot. 


This is an entertaining film if you are looking for a western with lots of violence and action.  The gunfights are well staged and edited.  The director Sergio Corbucci certainly knows what he is doing behind the camera.  I have to believe all the killing and shooting in this film was meant as some kind of a very sick joke.  As with any of these Italian films, the dubbing  just adds another level of bizarreness to it.  One scene in Django was clearly copied by Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs.


Django is very entertaining but again an extremely violent film.  You gotta love the imagery of the gunfighter dragging a coffin around the west.  Again, like Django the film, it looks cool but just makes no sense.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

1919 - BLIND HUSBANDS, Erich Von Stroheim's impressive first film

In his first film Erich Von Stroheim is the auteur in every sense, he wrote the story, directed and starred as the slimy Teutonic military officer who attempts to seduce the wife of an American doctor on a mountain climbing holiday in Switzerland.


This is an extremely well made and acted silent film.  Von Stroheim already shows his fascination with the less then sterling side of human nature.  His fascination with Prussian military attitudes is a part of this film and will continue on through many of his films. He clearly enjoys himself as the Prussian  officer trying to get the American doctor's wife into bed.  

For a first time director Von Stroheim showed a pretty strong command of the film medium.  He moves the story along with a strong visual sense and keeps the silent acting of the cast under control having them give naturalistic performances. 


The film's climax during a mountain climbing expedition shows Von Stroheim  setting  the dramatic climax against an impressive background. Arnold Fanck clearly learned a thing or two from Von Stroheim. 


This is a sharply observed character study made by a tough uncompromising filmmaker.  As has been noted, Erich Von Stroheim went on to create a series of impressive films only compromised by his exacting methods and his increasingly extravagant spending on each succeeding film

1997 - INSOMNIA, interesting crime drama out of Norway

One of my early Criterion discs I finally got around to watching.  This is one of their bare bones editions with no special features of any kind.  Insomnia is a good film, but it strikes me as hardly worthy of the masterpiece treatment that they are known  for and they probably knew it at the time of the disc's release


The Swedish cop investigating the death of a girl in Norway has to cope with a few problems, like accidentally shooting his partner and then trying to cover it up after the murderer of the girl figures out what is going on.

Stellan Skarsgård plays the cop who is first introduced as being a real professional a cop's cop as they say. 

Further into the film it's clear his really bad case of insomnia isn't exactly a matter of living up in the land of the midnight sun but a guy who has more than a few sexual repression issues to deal with.

This is a well made crime drama and Skaarsgård is a lot more believable in this role then he was in that Meryl Streep contemporary classic, Mama Mia.  That film will hopefully not show up on the Criterion label in the near future.

95 minutes.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

1945 - BACK TO BATAAN, John Wayne a patriotic kind of guy

During the propaganda rich period of World War II,  Hollywood cranked out a lot of these fight the "Japs" or the "Krauts" pictures for the public.  Sometimes good directors and writers could kind of redeem this genre with a decent film or two.  John Ford filmed the excellent They Were Expendable and Howard Hawks had pretty good luck with Air Force. Then there are the series of propaganda war films John Wayne made, The Fighting Seabees, Flying Tigers and Back to Bataan.  These movies are tagged to appeal to audiences at their most sophomoric level.


Back to Bataan is pretty god awful with the exception of an exciting battle scene towards the end of the picture.  The constant speechifying and the portraits of Japanese soldiers as little killer monsters finally even managed to offend my small town middle class values.

From cute little kids being sadistically tortured by rotten Japanese soldiers, to a good god fearing Christian teacher joining the guerrillas after her school principal is hung by the Japanese for not taking down the American flag, this film has it all.  I know the general public had to be whipped up into a frenzy for the war effort but by 1945, it's hard not to believe that even the most patriotic movie goer must have been getting a little tired of these shows. 


Super patriotic actor John Wayne is good as usual.  Wayne was a guy who actually believed all of this stuff and he does bring an honest conviction to his role.  Wayne does not have any kind of manufactured love interest in the film, he wants to keep the message loud and pure, the American way is the best way and by the way kill lots of "Japs."


Clearly filmed on location at someones ranch in southern California, the movie does have a few good unintentional laughs.  A truck full of very stiff Japanese soldier dummies is sent over a mountain in one scene, and the school teacher walks around the guerrilla camp trying to get injured soldiers to eat her homemade chicken soup.

The beginning of the film features actual soldiers from the Bataan Death March.  Phony Hollywood makeup is used on them to make them look like they are suffering from the effects of Japanese internment.  One can only wonder what must have been going through their minds while they were filming this sequence.  Probably it was something like,  "I get to meet John Wayne."

95 hit me over the head with propaganda minutes.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

2010 - PRINCE OF PERSIA THE SANDS OF TIME, fails in almost everyway possible

A movie that so called Hollywood professionals managed to screw up in almost every possible way is worth considering for a moment.


The decision to make a movie out of this video game was probably not thought through carefully.  Movies based on video games have not succeeded with audiences, i.e.  Doom, Super Mario Brothers etc. The lack of a coherent story really shows throughout the film with the confusing path of twists and turns the movie has to take because of it's episodic nature and need to jam in yet another sword fighting scene in a movie already overloaded with sword fighting scene.

The filmmakers must have realized they had script problems since they steal or borrow ideas from the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, both of those lame National Treasure films, Disney's Aladdin and about every Arabian Nights story they had a passing acquaintance with.  In particular the idea of the magic knife that turns back time is a direct steal from the "one ring" in the Lord of the Rings.  


The casting choices are equally perplexing, the lead character of the adventurous prince should have been played by a more interesting actor.   Jake Gyllenhall has no particular charm or sense of humor.   The attempt to make him sort of foreigner by having him spout a British accent was an equally bad idea.

This is two mediocre fantasy films in a role for the British actor Gemma Atherton.  She is playing a spirited princess, but she comes off more like a total bitch.  Atherton is well on her way to starring in a remake of Beastmaster hopefully for her in the Tanya Roberts and not the Rip Torn part.

Then there are the other assorted British and American actors stuck into the film.  Once you cast Ben Kingsley as the villain, you pretty much give up your chance for any subtlety.  This guy has just played to many bad guys in films.  I'm not even going to get into the thought that for a movie set in the Middle East, it seems pretty lacking in Middle Eastern characters. 


Even visually this expensive production is pretty bad.  The decision to photograph a lot of the movie with a tinted color scheme to give it that glowing old fashioned look, washes all of the color out of the exotic locations.  David Lean was able to film the Middle East with out resorting to smearing sepia lens filters all over his cameras, no such luck here.

The Walt Disney company clearly had in mind the idea to create another Pirates of the Caribbean series with this movie.  Audiences are not responding this summer to a movie that deserves to be the flop that it is.

 Running time 116 minutes, written by Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard.

Friday, June 11, 2010

1983 - I PREDATORI DI ATLANTIDE, or Atlantis or Atlantis Inferno or The Atlantis Interceptors or The Raiders of Atlantis

A movie every cult film buff makes fun of and enjoys for it's ridiculous plot.

The lost continent of Atlantis has risen from the Atlantic Ocean, apparently near Miami, and is now being protected by a bike gang dedicated to killing everyone while they wait for the descendants of Atlantis to reappear and take over the world.  Meanwhile a group of survivors of an oil rig platform explosion are saved by two criminals on the lam for a kidnapping they took part in.  This group battles the bike gang and attempts to stop Atlantis from taking over the world.


The recap of this ridiculous plot and the low budget special effects are the appeal for cult film buffs but if you can get past the clearly intentional silliness, this is a very entertaining action film with lots of non stop and very enjoyable action.  


The movie stars TV actor Christopher Connelly, who I remember as a guest star from almost every TV show I watched in the 1960's and 70's.  How he ended up in Italy filming B movies would probably be an interesting little story, but I imagine a working actor heading into his mid 40's takes anything he can get. 

The director Ruggero Deodato, appears to have somewhat of a sense of humor even if it is a rather lame one, he has two ongoing jokes one about eating spinach dinners and the other featuring one of the characters converting to the Muslim religion. 

This B movie is just as entertaining as anything I have seen in a 100 million dollar film.  The movie is a quick 92 minutes long.  What ever it's shortcomings in plot and characterization, it more than makes up for with it's outlandishness and entertaining action scenes.

Written by Vincenzo Mannino and Dardeno Sacchetti.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

1975 - THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, a great action film


A very entertaining R rated action movie from Hong Kong and Australia.  This is the standard story about a police detective doing the "fish out of water" thing hunting down a crime lord in Australia.  But what this film is really about is watching a good action flick without any of the over done computer assisted special effects that have pretty much knocked the reality out of the action film genre.


Actual fights and car chases were the real thing back in the 1970's with stuntmen risking their lives in the service of entertaining an ever jaded movie audience.  This is an excellent example of some high risk stunts performed by stuntmen and in some case actors.  Apparently the filmmakers actually set the actor George Lazenby on fire at one point.



The star, Jimmy Wang-Yu has been described as an actor with a "colorful" personal life.  This is usually code for "he was a big prick." If his Kung Fu style isn't as slick as Jackie Chan or Jet Li, it's still exciting to watch and probably a little less staged and balletic making it look a lot realistic.



A very impressive film.

111 action packed minutes

2004 - THE BRIDESMAID, a thriller that would have made Hitchcock jealous

At the age of 76, Claude Chabrol directed this very good thriller about a middle class French family and in particular the son, who get involved with a very strange woman.  Philippe becomes infatuated with one of the bridesmaids at his sister's wedding.  After sleeping with Philippe the bridesmaid, Senta informs him that they have been joined by fate to be together forever.  That should have have been a big warning sign to the horny and smitten Philippe.


Claude Chabrol makes smooth thrillers, after 53 films his technique is so good it's a pleasure to watch the story unfold with his emphasis on character instead of set pieces.  Chabrol has always been labeled the French Hitchcock, but Hitchcock in his 70's was turning out mediocre junk like Topaz, and Family Plot certainly nothing like this.

The focus may be on this creepy relationship, but Chabrol also  looks at this equally screwed up French family.  In some of his previous films, the family unit has been shown as extremely less than ideal role models and in The Bridesmaid this family doesn't seem like a particularly emotionally healthy group.


 The Bridesmaid is another fine film from a master director about the darker side of middle class society and human nature. Whatever Chabrol's feelings about class, values and society, he is a skillful enough storyteller to keep this film very interesting.


 Hitchcock stopped making interesting films after Psycho and pretty much slipped into rehashing and reworking ideas and set pieces from his previous films during his Universal period.  It's unfortunate he wasn't able to grow and further develop as an artist the way Claude Chabrol has in 70's.

The Bridesmaid is a very fine and impressive character driven thriller from a master of the genre.

111 minutes.