1939 - NINOTCHKA, Garbo laughs as they said

Hollywood's greatest director of sophisticated 1930's comedies directs one of Hollywood's most unusual and mysterious stars.  This is a comedy about Communism and Soviet Russia made with the usual high gloss MGM look. 

Greta Garbo the dour Swedish actor who probably would have been right at home in an Ingmar Bergman film, is carefully directed by Ernest Lubitsch.  The fact that this less than humorous woman is likable at all is a tribute to Lubitsch's talent with actors.  Fortunately Ninotchka has Melvyn Douglas as the male lead and he has a light comedy touch which saves the film and Garbo who seems very comfortable around him.

The screenplay is by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett among others so the audience gets the usual bunch of cynical jokes about politics and the human condition along with the famous Lubitsch touch, little visual jokes that move the plot forward.

Lubitsch directs Garbo

 

For a film that is 70 years old, Ninotchka looks very good, Lubitsch was a perfectionist when it came to film comedy this is filmmaking at a high technical and artistic standard.

Running time, 110 minutes.

2003 - UNDERWORLD, silly vampire vs werewolf film is kind of enjoyable

It's vampires vs werewolves for the love of Bella.  Wait, that's a different vampires vs werewolves series.  In Underworld it's vampires vs werewolves and Kate Beckinsale vs a PVC catsuit she constantly wears.  Kate's a vampire who is part of the vampire sub division called the Death Dealers.  The Death Dealers hunt down werewolves as part of an ongoing war that started 1000 years ago.  Of course the human race is so stupid it doesn't know this is all happening right under their very noses.

Underworld is sort of made in the Matrix style of film making, with people flipping around in slow motion and stuff like that.  Apparently the day of hunting vampires with wooden stakes has given away to using machine guns and computer technology.  Neither the vampires or the werewolves practice at the shooting range very often because they spray each other with machine gun fire and rarely hit anyone or anything. 

Underworld is enjoyable action garbage, filmed on a flamboyant scale.  Nobody just drives a car they race around in them.  It's constantly raining all the time and the rain is backlit to achieve that special Gothic movie look.  London appears to be nothing but a bunch of underground tunnels and chambers full of these immortal monsters running around shooting at each other.   

The filmmakers hired a lot of English actors probably because English actors saying all this ridiculous dialog make this film seem more sincere than it has any right to be.

121 minutes, there is an extended cut at 133 minutes, just what the world needs.  Written by Danny McBride.

2010 - SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD, aging hipster loses the light

Didn't laugh once and thank god for 2nd run theater prices.  Anyway you look at it, not so great.

A geek hipster 21st century love story with lots of overloaded visuals.  Looks like cool guy director Edgar Wright is getting a little to old to make this kind of film. 

After Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, a lot of people probably felt Edgar Wright had a pulse on comedic geek coolness.  Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World  proves that all of Wright's visual tricks mask an unpleasant and empty film really lacking in ideas.

This film is Wright's  tribute to  ideo games, but the film also borrows plenty from other TV shows and films.  Forbidden Planet, Seinfeld and in particular the old Adam West Batman TV show which also used graphics and weird camera angles to put a comic book on screen.

Wright completely blew it with the casting of his two main leads.  Michael Cera has been criticized for pretty much giving the same performance from film to film, have to agree with that.  Mary
Elizabeth Winstead as his girlfriend Ramona Flowers makes absolutely no impression as a meta chick.  Their lack of chemistry as a couple finally kills the film.  I could get behind all the razzle dazzle stuff if the characters were interesting but these two have nothing going on.

 
Edgar Wright seems like a smart guy, he knows a lot about film, but he has wasted 5 years of his life on this piece of crap.  Richard Lester the cool guy director of A Hard Day's Night, another hip and much better film retired because he felt he was no longer in touch with contemporary culture, looks like Wright might have the same problem.

112 very pointless minutes. Written by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright.

2010 - THE OTHER GUYS, typical Will Ferrell comedy?

A buddy cop film.

If this is a typical Will Ferrell comedy so be it.  The only other Will Ferrell comedy I've seen was Land Of The Lost, and that was crucified by the critics and the public.  I thought Land Of The Lost was a funny send up of those cheap looking Saturday morning science fiction kiddie shows.  However I was the only one who thought that. 

Yeah there's funny stuff in this film.   Samuel Jackson and The Rock are two stereotypical hot shot cops who run around creating havoc and destruction in New York City to the adulation of the public.  Mark Wahlberg is Ferrell's partner the classic short in height guy with something to prove.  Wahlberg plays him as a guy a little too pumped up on testosterone for his own good.  Michael Keaton who hasn't had a good part in a major film in a long time is also very funny, proving he's still got it.

 

Then there are what I would call the questionable comedy bits in this film.  One on going gag involves Will Ferrell as a guy who is a "chick magnet" with the women, everywhere he goes women hit on him even though he doesn't know why.  Ferrell is married to Eva Mendes the joke being that he is completely clueless to her hotness.

This is actually not an original premise.   A Guide For The Married Man used the same premise with a clueless Walter Matthau being married to hot Inger Stevens, it wasn't funny then and it's not particularly funny this time.

Another so called comedy bit involves and extended flashback sequence where Will Ferrell plays a college student who becomes a pimp.  This bit also goes on and on until it gets beaten to death.

Ferrell works with his partner Adam McKay and they are  comedy veterans having worked on Saturday Night Live together.  In a way they are kind of like prostitutes themselves.  They know how to deliver the comedic goods in a tried and true fashion it may not be an original approach but they get the job done and the John customer leaves satisfied.

The Other Guys is an OK time waster of a movie, it has some funny stuff in it and gets the job done.  However it really doesn't hit the same levels of cop movie parody that Hot Fuzz does.

1933 - PASSING FANCY, Ozu's comedy drama

The Japanese were still cranking out silent films even into the mid 1930's.  Here's an interesting slice of life in Japan.  Passing Fancy is a comedy drama about a father and son in a working class neighborhood. 

The director is Yasujirō Ozu a filmmaker who really followed his own path.  Ozu's films were about family life in Japan and the small intimate events that occur in their lives.  Ozu's technique was developed over years of film making.  It's an austere approach emphasizing a lack of editing or fancy camera work almost imperceptible.   His films aren't boring but they are different, no Kurosawa razzle dazzle here.

The acting in this film is at a very high naturalistic level, especially for a silent film.

Passing Fancy is not one of the better Ozu films that I have seen.  The story kind of jerks along from one subplot to another.  Ozu doesn't seem to have worked out where he wanted the story to go.  He relies on the actors to keep the story from sliding into melodrama.  Still, this is a very good film with many fine scenes. 

Eight years later when the United States was at war with Japan, Hollywood was churning out propaganda films that portrayed the Japanese people as sub human monkeys.  Passing Fancy is an interesting view of Japan that the American public never saw.

2010 - INCEPTION, is a bloated mess of a film.

No wonder there are mostly old films on this blog.

A team of crack agents have a machine that will allow them to enter people's dreams and steal ideas floating around in their head.  This is just another spy thriller wrapped up in pseudo new age dream analysis junk with a lot of CGI effects thrown in.  Very ambitious and very shallow, the dream within a dream within a dream structure is just a gimmick.

 Christopher Nolan as the director/writer probably could have used a better director for his story,  he shows absolutely no ability to direct action scenes and while we are on the subject, his screenplay is very long and kind of sloppy.

When Stanley Kubrick did 2001: A Space Odyssey he jumped from the Stone Age to the 21st century in one cut.  Christopher Nolan has to draw things out explaining his world of the future for over an hour.  That's just bad writing. 

The cast is the best that money can buy but they really don't seem challenged by the material.  Nolan wants them to play it cool, but cool means boring in this case.   Leonardo  DiCaprio can't seem to work up any actual enthusiasm for his part of a cool spy guy, but he's no George Lazenby.  And what is the point of Ellen Page?  She continues to get cast in films but she brings absolutely nothing to them.  If you really think about it her role could have been easily eliminated, probably shortening the film by 1/2 hour. 

The biggest problem with Inception is a little TV show from the 1960's called The Twilight Zone.  That show could mix drama, science fiction, fantasy and suspense in under 30 minutes.  Inception waddles along trying to do this for 2  1/2 hours stinking hours.

If you want to see a film that screws with your brain then rent any Luis Bunuel film.  He's a filmmaker who knows how to mix the real world with the dream world and do it in under 2 hours.

148 poorly paced minutes, written by Christopher Nolan.

1946 -MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, a classic American film.

The gunfight at the OK Corral retold by John Ford.  One of the greatest American films of all time and a classic in the western film genre.  But how responsible is Ford for its greatness?

My Darling Clementine was the final film on Ford's contract for 20th Century Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck.  Zanuck choose the story, gave Ford a very generous production budget  and had a lot of input in the casting of the film.

Ford shot extensively on location and when completed turned in a 2 hour cut to Zanuck.  Apparently Zanuck was quite appalled with Ford's version of the film, which had Ford disregarding much of the script and inserting lots of his patented cornball comedy bits.  Zanuck took the film away from Ford, completely reedited it and cut about 30 minutes out of it.  Zanuck also brought in another director to reshoot some key scenes including the ending of the film.  

Obviously Ford was responsible for the individual scenes and the visual look of the film.  My Darling Clementine is a sterling example of Ford's strong sense of visual composition.  Every scene has beautiful black and white photography and composition.  Ford also got very good performances out of the cast, particularly Victor Mature and Walter Brennan.  Ford's technique for directing actors was to basically verbally harass and abuse them during filming.  Victor Mature, never a great actor to begin with gave a very good performace.  Walter Brennan is also good as the head of the Clanton family, Ford kept Brennan's tendency to ham it up under control for this film.  Ford also harassed Brennan so badly that he never worked for Ford again. 

Today the film is one of John Ford's greatest films. However the considerable influence of Darryl F Zanuck must be considered when applying the auteur label to this film. 

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1949 - LE SILENCE DE LA MER, aka The Silence of the Sea

Jean Pierre Melville filmed this World War II drama set during the occupation of France.  A German officer is billeted at the home of a Frenchmen living with his niece.  The film is essentially about the German trying to ingratiate himself into their lives. 

This is an interesting film.  The Frenchman and the niece decide to give the German the silent treatment, they literally do not speak throughout the entire film.   And, for a film set in occupied France the portrait of the German officer is unusually sympathetic.  The German completely believes that the two nations will mutually benefit from the occupation, culturally and socially.  The film is about his slow realization what  the actual effects of the occupation are doing to France.

Le Silence De La Mer is an impressive film from a great filmmaker at the beginning of his career.   The film was essentially shot on location in one room for very little money.    This is a great filmmaker demonstrating how to create a thoughtful and complex film with very limited resources.  Considering the extreme restraints, Melville made it visually and emotionally interesting.

Jean Pierre Melville was a filmmaker who always valued his independence throughout his career.  Melville's style was in the classic Hollywood tradition,  creating well constructed films on very small budgets.

1962 - ROME ADVENTURE, on location love story has the scenic wonders of Troy Donahue's hair

Troy Donahue has awesome hair in Rome Adventure.

Troy's hair, with the assist of a lot of styling gel, whips around on his head in about 3 different ways, It  goes over his head at the top and in the back he's got it perfectly  coiffed coming down behind his head.  Then he's got this side hair thing going which kind of intersects with the other 2 waves of his hair head.  He is also very blonde. 

Angie Dickinson unfortunately made poor hair choices for this film. Angie's hair is really odd looking, it's pulled way back in a beehive thing throughout the film so it looks like she has a really large forehead kind of like that creature from This Island Earth. 

Suzanne Pleshette can't really compete with these 2 hair hogs but she gives it a decent try.  She sticks a ribbon in her hair and some curly thing a ma gigs that she twists around.  Unfortunately she's just not in the ballgame.

It's just hard for the ladies in this film to compete with Troy

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2010 - JONAH HEX, another failed attempt at a film series

At the end of Jonah Hex, the President of the United States offers Jonah the job as sheriff to the entire country.  Jonah turns him down but tells him "if you need my help just call me."  Jonah is going to be waiting for that call for a while.

The director Jimmy Hayward stepped in after the creative team (?) of Neveldine and Taylor left the project over "creative differences."  Neveldine and Taylor still have screenplay credit, and god only knows what the director/writers of the Crank films and Gamer would have done to this film, we can be grateful we will never know. 

The film has lots of shootings and stabbings and things blowing up.  About the only thing to be said about the cast is that Megan Fox has a very tiny waist.  Probably the tight corset she has to wear contributed to it.

It's hard to understand exactly why all this critical scorn was heaped upon this film.  I've read the Jonah Hex comic books while hanging around a comic book store killing time.  On sworn testimony, I will state these comics can be read standing up in about 5 minutes and certainly not over 10 minutes.  Jonah Hex the comic is exactly like Jonah Hex the film.

Isn't this what fans of the comic wanted?

1963 - THE SILENCE, Ingmar Bergman's film is unbelievably grim.

Ingmar Bergman's film is the story of two sisters stuck in a strange European town in the middle of what appears to be a civil war.  The sisters are a study in alienation.  One of them is dying, the other has a son and resents her dying sister.  The film has intense black and white photography, lots of scenes of isolation, a creepy setting in a strange hotel, (which reminds me of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining)  and a bunch of dwarfs.  In other words this is a typical Ingmar Bergman film. 

There is a lot of sex and eroticism in this film but trust me absolutely no one is having a good time.   This is another example of the kind of film that screams "artistic foreign film" with some dirty stuff in it.  From the opening austere credits at the beginning of the film to the almost complete lack of a background score, this film was never going to be anyone's idea of a popcorn movie. 

I'll go with the prevailing interpretation that the two sisters represent the intellectual and sensual sides of the personality.  I also believe that these two women actually are different parts of Bergman's persona.  Ingmar Bergman the chilly intellectual attempting to understand his place in the universe and what the role of God or a divine presence is in his rationalism. Or Ingmar Bergman the sensual Scandinavian who wants to let his his Freudian ego run amok.

Bergman was married 5 times and had major relationships with 3 of his primary actresses.  The film Trolosa is pretty much an autobiographical account of the mess he made out of one married woman's life.  Bergman is a fascinating guy.

The Silence is one of the reasons I stopped watching Ingmar Bergman's films over twenty years ago.
 
The film is unquestionably well made and acted but after a while watching Bergman work out his emotional obsessions on screen finally got to be a major chore.  Ingmar Bergman's unrelentingly dour view of people and himself finally exhausted me.

96 depressing minutes

1973 - THE NORLISS TAPES, ok horror film pilot

If you are looking for someone to blame for all of this Twilight, romantic vampire nonsense then producer/director Dan Curtis is your man.  Starting in 1966 with the Gothic daytime soap opera Dark Shadows which introduced the heart throb vampire Barnabas Collins.  Dan Curtis became a specialist in mixing old B movie horror film conventions with a more modern sensibility. 

The Norliss Tapes is a TV pilot for what was clearly going to be a horror anthology type of show the idea being that the writer David Norliss has left a series of tape recordings behind (cassette tapes no less) that would document his encounters with the supernatural.  The plan for the series was to begin each episode with his publisher listening to one of these tapes.

The Norliss Tapes is a perfectly entertaining time killer of a film.  It never really gets to the level of Curtis' previous modern horror films The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.  Those films were written by Richard Matheson who was very good at achieving the right mood for a modern horror thriller. 

There is also nothing wrong with the actor Roy Thinnes as the writer David Norliss, but he could have really used a little bit of a sense of humor which was something Darren McGavin achieved as Carl Kolchak in the Stalker series. 

While blaming Dan Curtis for the Twilight series, he might as well also take the blame, for The X Files,  Lost, and just about an other quasi supernatural piece of modern day supernatural or horror garbage an audience has to sit through.

72 made for TV minutes.

1936 - THE SECRET AGENT, Hitchcock's flawed but entertaining spy thriller

Alfred Hitchcock's follow up to his masterpiece The 39 Steps, is another story about espionage but he doesn't get the balance right in the script like he did in The 39 Steps.  Hitchcock also unfortunately miscasts one of the main leads in his film.  The Secret Agent does have many good ideas and scenes such as the murder on the mountain top, the chase in the Swiss chocolate factory and the final spectacular train wreck sequence.

Hitchcock's lifelong fascination with blonds commences in this film with his closeups of the actor Madeline Carroll.  Carroll is very attractive but she isn't really very good in a typical female role with lots of whimpering and whining, a very tiresome character.  However Hitchcock cleverly casts Robert Young, who usually played nice guys in films against type as the enemy agent and Young nails it.

Where the ball really got dropped was casting John Gielgud as the writer turned spy who has been assigned to eliminate an enemy agent, sort of with a license to kind of kill.  Gielgud is very stiff in the role and as the romantic lead he can't seem to work up much interest in Madeline Carroll which is hard to believe just looking at her.

Hitchcock directs The Secret Agent

The real star of The Secret Agent is Peter Lorre.  Here is an actor totally in sync with what Hitchcock is trying to achieve in this film.  Lorre's character at first comes off as comedy relief, but it quickly becomes clear he is a very dangerous assassin and not to be screwed with.  Lorre's balancing act of a performance was clearly what Hitchcock was aiming for in this film. 

The Secret Agent is not the best of Alfred Hitchcock's British films, but it is  extremely important in the development of the film thriller, particular the James Bond films.

Along with Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock is responsible for creating the thriller genre.

86 minutes.

1975 - DEEP RED, is stylish, disgusting horror thriller from Dario Argento

If you have a yen to watch a very well made Italian horror thriller with lots of disgusting murders, this film is for you.  If you don't have a yen for this type of film,  then cast blame where blame is due Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.  Argento's film and his directing style is very clearly influenced by the Hitchcock touch.  Argento's vision is to really ramp it up with the subjective camera, blood and grisly murders. 

The so called story has for lack of a better term "more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese."  The reasons given for not going to the police don't really make much sense and if you stop to think about it  Deep Red is really a collection of extremely well done murder and "sneaking around" scenes. 

Dario Argento isn't really interested in creating believable characters, he puts just enough time into character development so he can set them up to be killed.  Almost everyone in the cast is subjected to some kind of disgusting violence, although it is very stylized disgusting violence.  For what is basically an exploitation film there is no eroticism in the film, the eroticism is pretty much in watching the intricate murders. 

I can't say I was exactly entertained by Deep Red, but I probably won't forget it for a while.  This is supposedly Dario Argento's masterpiece and is usually placed in the category of Italian films called "giallo."

Enjoy

1982 - ONE FROM THE HEART, Coppola's big budget musical mess.

When Francis Ford Coppola flopped with One From The Heart, he flopped very big.  The goal was to tell a simple love story with musical background numbers in a highly stylized manner.  Somewhere along the line Coppola embraced the somewhat revolutionary technology of word processing and video pre-visualization to blow this film completely out of the water. 

Coppola spent three months rehearsing with the actors, but during filming he directed in a trailer with a video monitor and a loud speaker giving direction to Terri Garr that consisted of him yelling over a loud speaker "show more boob," very classy directing stuff.

Gene Kelly was hired as a creative consultant for the musical numbers but quit the production.   Kelly felt that Coppola appeared to have no feeling for this type of genre, he was probably right.  The overblown sets and the over stylized photography completely overwhelmed the simple and frankly uninteresting love story.  Coppola not a director with a light touch saw the critics and audiences reject his film. 

28 years later the film still looks very pretty but is still pretty bad.  The love story that Coppola envisioned is just not that interesting.   Coppola was past the point in his life where he could relate to a working class couple trying to live together.  Terri Garr, Frederick Forrest and the then hot Nastassji Kinski are not interesting actors. Garr a dancer before she was an actor had to carry the musical numbers, but she is really not that good a dancer.

Tom Waits background songs have to do all the work to put some emotional meaning in the film, but  after a while if you've heard Tom Waits croak one song you've heard him croak them all.  

Probably the most revealing aspect about this film are the special features on the DVD.  Here is where you can see a production and a director completely out of control.  It appears that almost every day on the set was a big carnival with lots of catering and partying go on.  All of this energy was not directed at making a good film.  

An amazing failure like Hello Dolly another musical behemoth, One From The Heart is not even fun to watch.

One From The Heart is an example of a director with grandiose artistic pretensions being allowed to run out of control without any kind of studio supervision.

107 minutes and nobody wished it a minute longer. Written by Armyan Bernstein and Coppola

2003 - LOONEY TUNES BACK IN ACTION, very disappointing

An attempt by the director Joe Dante and the writer Larry Doyle to reintroduce the famous Warner Bros. cartoon characters fails.  These two men would have seemed like the right individuals to make this film.  Dante had a love of old genre films and clearly knew the characters.  Doyle is a writer who had worked on The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. 

The biggest problem with the film beside the lack of story and actual funny situations, the failure to realize that these hyper animated cartoon characters probably played best in their cartoon short six minute format.  A ninety minute film with all this frantic action is more exhausting than entertaining. The film also lacked actual funny situations and an identifiable story to hang the whole mess on.   

The cast is another issue.  Brandon Fraser as the thick headed security guard was sort of funny, but inconsequential actor Jenna Elfman was completely miscast as the female lead.  Elfman actually has a rather hard looking face and isn't very funny which is odd considering she got her big break playing in TV sitcoms.  Steve Martin as the president of the ACME corporation falls back on the "wild and crazy"  stuff he did on Saturday Night Live years ago.  In this film he's more stupid than funny.

As for the Looney Tunes characters,  their integration into the live action seems way off,  they don't mix into this film at all. The old Disney films had been adding animated characters to their films for some time and they were a lot more skillful at blending live action and animation that this film. 

Its a Joe Dante film so its fun for a film buff to watch all of his little jokes.  The Robot Monster, the Daleks from Dr. Who, and Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet.  Some of the live action characters include, Vernon Welles, the "Wez" from The Road Warrior as one of Steve Martin's henchmen.  Roger Corman shows up directing a Batman film and a character actor named Marc Lawrence who is about as inside as you can get is one of the board members of the ACME corporation.  All these little inside jokes don't really mean anything if the film isn't any good.

Another disappointing film from Joe Dante.

91 frantic frenzied minutes.