1964 - THE T.A.M.I. SHOW, is an amazing concert film.

Finally a concert film that isn't an ordeal to sit through (sorry The Last Waltz).  The T.A.M.I. Show has it all, great performances by great performers, screaming teenage girls and go-go dancers. 

An eclectic group of musicians was assembled for what was a free concert in Santa Monica that included:

• The Barbarians
• The Beach Boys
• Chuck Berry
• James Brown and The Famous Flames
• Marvin Gaye
• Gerry & The Pacemakers
• Lesley Gore
• Jan and Dean
• Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas
• Smokey Robinson and The Miracles
• The Rolling Stones
• The Supremes

Obviously the highlight is James Brown performing "Please Please Please," but really almost all of the acts are in top form.  The Rolling Stones weren't very happy about following the incredible James Brown, but they are a very fun and exciting group to watch.  Jan and Dean are the emcees and when was the last time you saw pop singers coming into a concert on skateboards.  Jan and Dean also perform the fairly ridiculous "Hear They Come," the opening song over the credits.  This is probably the worst thing about this concert film, after that little ditty things jump up to a very high performing level starting with Chuck Berry. 

As far as these concert films go everything depends on the musicians and the musical numbers otherwise they can be a total drag to sit through.  The T.A.M.I. Show's straight presentation of these performers allows them to really show their stuff.

Directed by Steve Binder who did the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.

123 minutes

2003 - THE DREAMERS, those French the are a naughty naughty bunch.

A French brother and sister and some American kid they pick up,  share their passion for film and lots of dirty stuff in their parent's apartment (the parents are on vacation), while all hell breaks out in Paris during the 1968 student riots.  Lots of kinky and dirty stuff results.

Where were these chicks in film school?

It's nice that some production company gave Bertolucci a bunch of money to indulge himself in this little romp, however you still have to sit through it. The film seems to be some sort of nostalgia wallow for Bernardo Bertolucci about the good old days in Paris attending the Cinémathèque Française, watching old movies "avec Nicholas Ray," and banging hot French girls (that seems questionable).  

The brother and sister live in some sort of semi incestuous relationship, and you have to sit through a lot of film trivia as they play little games where they quote movie lines and scenes to each other (would this even happen in real life?).  Throw in a little anti establishment stuff and you have... really not much.

Another picture of Eva Green.

What the film has to recommend it is well Eva Green, she looks pretty good.  Bernardo Bertolucci is known as a director who examines sensuality and carnal relationships which is code for he knows how to get young women to take their clothes off for his films.

Yet another picture of Eva Gree

A completely pointless film.

Hard to know if academy award winning director (which is plastered all over the DVD cover),  Bernardo Bertolucci was kidding with this film, the bigger concern should be that he wasn't.

112 minutes the screenplay is by Gilbert Adair.

1955 - LOLA MONTES, Criterion's classy treatment of Max Ophul's final film.

Lola Montes, is the story of a  dancer and courtesan who was involved with Liszt, the King of Bavaria and a whole bunch of lovers.  It  was filmed in Technicolor and CinemaScope on a very large budget.  It is quite something to see.  The film was also a box office disaster when it was originally released.

Lola Montes is a great film and it's made with a lot of style and flair.  Unfortunately these aren't always things that are appreciated by film audiences. The idea of using a circus performance as a way of illustrating scenes in her life is very clever and extremely well done.  However it's a concept that an  average audience used to more linear story content might find somewhat difficult to follow.

The film is very well cast.  The central role was played by the actor Martine Carol, a blond who was a French Marilyn Monroe who usually played sexpots.  Ophuls colored her hair and ramped down the sexuality, unfortunately audiences that went to a Martine Carol film were expecting to see their French sexpot in action not performing in a film that was a meditation on the nature of love and romance.

In spite of all the baggage the film carries, it is a brilliant technical and artistic achievement on almost every level.  Ophuls was famous for his tracking shots and moving that big CinemaScope camera to get those shots must have been an immense challenge.  The color photography looks good and the lavish sets are very impressive.

This is a film that deserves to be seen several times although it will probably be appreciated more by film buffs.

115 minutes.

1977 - CURSE OF THE BLACK WIDOW, made for TV horror and Anthony Franciosa

The father of the modern horror film, Dan Curtis directed Curse of the Black Widow with a fairly interesting 1970's cast which included, Patty Duke, Donna Mills, Vic Morrow, June Allyson, Sid Caesar, June Lockhart, Roz (Pinky Tuscadaro) Kelly and TV stalwart Anthony Franciosa.

Franciosa's private detective Mark Higbie is on the trail of some mysterious murders that appear to be the work of a giant black widow spider.  This is the kind of stuff Dan Curtis could pump out in his sleep, but the script is pretty lacking even for one of his productions.  Franciosa is basically playing Carl Kolchak from The Night Stalker.  I guess Darrin McGavin wasn't available when they filmed this. 

It appears that Curtis was trying to do a horror film and cross it with a psychological study of a person suffering from multiple personality disorder, but the whole thing comes off as a poor man's version of Val Lewton's Cat People.

Curtis does know how to do the creepy mood thing pretty well.  He had lots of time on his TV serial Dark Shadows to practice.  Curse of the Black Widow is entertaining but a little disappointing. 

100 minutes. 

1978 - THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY, should be the boring holly story

Could they possibly made a more boring musical biography of an important American pop singer? 

Holly's life which is actually fairly interesting including his dramatic death would have seemed like great source material. However by the time these filmmakers got through with it, his story was just another highly fictionalized narrative of performer who happens to be named Buddy Holly.

A lot has been about the fact that the actors, Gary Busey, Don Stroud and Charlie Martin Smith played their own instruments and actually sang on the soundtrack,  but lets face it Buddy Holly's music isn't exactly Alban Berg when it comes to being performed.  It is fun to see these three actors completely cast against type but again the film doesn't even begin to explore Buddy Holly's split from his group  the Crickets.

They cast a former playboy bunny Maria Richwine to play Holly's wife and they even managed to make her boring.

A complete waste of time.

113 minutes.

1963 - BLACK SABBATH, Italian horror trilogy from Mario Bava.

Apparently American International Pictures (AIP)  kind of made a mess of Bava's horror anthology.  They rearranged the order of these short films, cut some of the blood and trimmed a lesbian subplot.  AIP's grand old horror man Boris Karloff provided introductions for each of the stories which wasn't in the original version of the film and naturally they dubbed it for American audiences. 

The Drop of Water, the first film is a ghost story about a nurse who steals a ring off of a corpse she is preparing for burial.  The film is photographed with Bava's usual fascination with the colors green and blue.  Bava also adds an interesting soundtrack to the film.

The Telephone, is almost a short version of a giallo film.  A prostitute is harassed on the phone by her supposedly dead ex pimp.  This was apparently the film that AIP altered the most.  When film buffs talk about Bava being the father of the modern horror film, they are kind of referring to the "beautiful woman stalked by an unseen killer" genre.

The Wurdalak, is based on a story by Tolstoy of all people.  This was probably the best film of the three.  Boris Karloff plays the head of a Russian family.  He may or may not have been infected by vampirism and turned into a wurdalak, a vampire that only drinks the blood of family members.  Bava really goes for all the gothic atmosphere in this film and it's a very effective horror story. 

92 minutes.

1972 - SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, giving it the old college try.

Since George Roy Hill's previous film had been Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and had made a lot of money, it probably gave him the clout to take a shot at a Vonnegut novel,  Slaughterhouse Five.

The story follows the protagonist Billy Pilgrim as he relives his life which includes the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, his infatuation with a porn star, and his life on a planet named Trafalmadore, in a non sequential timeline.

I have to give the filmmakers credit considering all the jumping back in forth in time from scene to scene,.  They did a very good job of keeping the focus of the film on the personal journey of Billy Pilgrim.

Editing is everything in a film like this since it is extremely important to keep all the various film threads clear so the audience  can  follow the overall Vonngeut theme of how fate affects mankind.

The cast is mostly character actors for a change, no major star to take the focus off of the story.  Parts of the film were shot in my home state of Minnesota (the winter parts naturally).

Slaughterhouse Five is probably not a film that would appeal to everyone and I doubt a major studio, much less Universal Studios when even consider making a film from a book by a writer as cultish as Kurt Vonnegut in the present Hollywood environment.

Slaughterhouse Five is a more than decent attempt to make a though provoking film out of a novel that probably had a specialized following at best.  Apparently Vonnegut was pleased with the adaptation of his book.

104 minutes.

1967 - LE SAMOURAI, Melville's supercool crime thriller is well, cool.

Jean-Pierre Melville's crime thriller Le Samourai,  is a very interesting piece of film making and he was lucky to get the perfect actor to play the hit man Jef Costello, Alain Delon. 

A lot has been written and discussed about the stylized structure of the film with Melville keeping the dialog to a minimum and the action tight and fast. Melville's direction is very meticulous with much attention to detail focusing on Costello's actions.  He steals a car with a set of master keys which he meticulously tries one at a time to find the right key.  He evades and elaborate trap by the police on the Paris subway and he creates a perfect alibi for a hit on a nightclub owner that is probably a little to perfect since it brings him to the attention of the Paris police who are about as ruthless as he is.

Melville has acknowledged his debt to American films, and he has Delon wear hats and trench coats like a 1940's film noir protagonist.  It looks a little anachronistic but it also looks very cool.

Speaking of cool what Le Samourai also has going for it is Alain Delon.  He moves through the film quiet and emotionless.  It's a performance that would have worked well in a silent film.

A film with style to spare, Jean Pierre Melville was a master of the crime film genre with a control of the medium that most filmmakers could only hope to achieve. 

105 minutes.

1967 - HOUR OF THE GUN, excellent but forgotten film.

This is John Sturges and the writer Edward Anhalt's followup to Gunfight at the OK Corral the film Sturges made 10 years earlier.  Hour of the Gun  focuses on Wyatt Earp and what happened to him after the shootout at the OK Corral.

The film has very good performances from James Garner and Jason Robards Jr, along with typically excellent Sturges direction particularly in the action scenes.  Along with Anthony Mann, Sturges knew how to stage and photograph action scenes while incorporating strong scenic values within those scenes.

 

 

In Hour of the Gun, Sturges is interested in exploring the line between vengeance and justice, particularly how the law is used and manipulated by Wyatt Earp to achieve his goal, of bringing down the Clantons.

For a change this film is fairly faithful to the actual facts.  This is an underrated western film that never got the credit it deserved.

100 minutes.

1958 - BONJOUR TRISTESSE, those wicked rich French people are kind of tiresome.

A young girl living in a mildly incestuous relationship with her father on the French Riviera, plots to get rid of her father's fiancee who she feels will come between them.

Otto Preminger and the writer Arthur Laurents are responsible for this very turgid drama.  But the chief bad guy is Preminger a director not known for his light touch. Today, Preminger has a fairly serious following as an auteur among certain film intellectuals.  Preminger was one of the early adapters of widescreen and on location photography.  Preminger preferred to have his actors perform in actual locales which he felt added to the authenticity of the film.  Bonjour Tristesse features lots of  photography in France using that old Wizard of Oz trick of switching between black and white and color. 

Preminger was also a noted stage director and much of the acting in his films always seems very stagy and forced at times.  The rare exceptions were people like James Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder and in Bonjour Tristesse Deborah Kerr, who probably gives the best performance in the film. Overall though, the level of acting is really awful.  It was almost as if the actors couldn't perform naturally in actual natural locations.

The chief acting offender in Bonjour Tristesse is Jean Seberg, a Preminger discovery with an extremely limited if almost nonexistent range.  She has to carry the entire film since she is in about every scene.  As the old joke goes, she runs the range of emotions from A to B.  Seberg was never much of an actor and never really had much of a career, including Breathless which was really a Godard film not a Belmondo/Seberg film.

Alfred Hitchcock had a saying that he never made films about really rich people because he couldn't figure out when or where they went to the bathroom.  It is nearly impossible for an audience to relate to the superficial problems of the very rich in this film.  In the case of Bonjour Tristesse, Hitchcock probably nailed it on the head.

94 minutes.

1967 - SPIRITS OF THE DEAD or Histoires Extraordinaires, Edgar Allen Poe stories by European directors

Another European anthology film, three sort of based on Edgar Allen Poe stories sexed up for film audiences and filmed by three major European directors.

Metzengerstein directed by Roger Vadim, features his then wife Jane Fonda in her 60's Barbie doll persona. Vadim dresses her up in a lot of questionable medieval costumes for the apparently  sole purpose of showing film audiences what a hot piece she is.  In other words, this is a typical Vadim film.

The story has something to do with Fonda falling in love with a horse who is the reincarnated spirit of her cousin ( played by her brother Peter Fonda).  She gallops around like a mad woman bare back, (on the horse, not the cousin).  Pretty unsubtle eroticism and pretty stupid.

William Wilson, directed by Louis Malle, stars Alain Delon as a soldier named William Wilson who is being followed by a doppelganger also named William Wilson.  This segment features a phallic cigar smoking Bridget Bardot.  Nothing very special here that hasn't been seen on an old Twilight Zone episode. 

Toby Dammit  directed by Federico Fellini,  is probably the best segment although it appears to be barely based on Edgar Allen Poe.  Toby Damnit is an alcoholic British actor who has traveled to Rome to film a biblical story in a western setting, sort of a spaghetti western religious epic.  The producer tells Toby Damnit that the film's style will be a cross between Zinnemann and Pasolini with a touch or John Ford.  

Fellini is sometimes a director who should be watched in short doses and not taken too seriously, Toby Dammit is one of his best films since it's short and actually funny.

121 minutes.

1990 - DAYS OF THUNDER, more stupid NASCAR racing junk.

Tom Cruise is Cole Trickle(?) a hotshot Yankee trying to win it all on the redneck NASCAR racing circuit in this very obvious attempt to dip into the well of money that Cruise and the same production team made with Top Gun four years earlier.

The future and then later ex Mrs. Tom Cruise plays his girlfriend neurosurgeon who helps him recuperate after a horrible accident.  Nicole has a very cute Australian accent and is kind of pretty with her pre plastic surgery looks. Robert Duvall is the old timer crew chief who will teach Tom how do be a better air force pilot,  NASCAR driver.

The ridiculous bull crap in this film has to be seen to be believed, the constant macho posturing, the obvious references to Top Gun, the height challenged Cruise attempting to look like he's at least 5'7", and the unending look a like racing sequences that blend together into one long boring spin around and around and around the different NASCAR race tracks that all look the same after a while.

My personal favorite piece of stupidity is the sex scene where Cruise pretends to drive little racing cars up and down Kidman's legs, while she tells him "you're not going to do anything weird are you?"

There seems to be something about these NASCAR movies that do not bring out the best in Hollywood, witness Red Line 7000, that came out 25 years ago.  It's essentially the same plot, the cocky young driver, the old veteran in the crew, the girlfriend watching and hoping the driver won't die in a car crash.  The cliches have barely changed.

108 minutes.

2007 - WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY, funny one joke film.

A spoof of musical film biographies, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is funny up to a point.

The idea of having the songwriter Dewey Cox run through every major musical genre and style is funny. Also having Dewey Cox interact with about every famous performer from Buddy Holly to the Beatles is also amusing.  It's clever and well acted, the song spoofs are funny although not in the same league as Paul Williams's songs in Ishtar.

What finally kind of wears down the film is all the padding out of the story in the form of a bunch of sex jokes that finally makes the film seem pretty tiresome.  The other problem with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, is that it has a sense of irony about it along with all the parody and as someone once said, irony is not always understood or appreciated by an audience. 

 John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox is pretty funny.

96 minutes

1927 - UNDERWORLD, impressive early gangster film from Von Sternberg.

I doubt when Josef Von Sternberg filmed Underworld he knew he was creating an entirely new genre in films.  What I don't doubt is that Von Sternberg had a complete understanding of how to integrate the visual elements to the story.  The is an extremely well made film.

Everything about this film is first rate, the photography, the set design, the acting and the story.  It's amazing to see a film that actually succeeds in every area for a change.  It's hard to believe this was Von Sternberg's first major film. 

Underworld was written by  Ben Hecht and Jules Furthman, parts of it turn up in Howard Hawk's films Scarface and Rio Bravo.  Also, the female lead  character "Feathers" shows up in Rio Bravo as well.

A very impressive silent film from Criterion's Von Sternberg trilogy.

80 minutes.

2003 - PAYCHECK, pretty poor John Woo action film.

Ben Affleck has invented a machine that can read the future, he uses it to find out that Paycheck will be another film that destroys his career until he starts to reinvent himself as a director.  Uma Thurman uses the machine to find out that the producers will make her wear a really bad haircut throughout the film.  The director John Woo  also uses the machine to find out that this film will finally finish off his reputation as a once stylish action director.

The whole idea of a scientist getting his memory erased but leaving clues to find out what happened to him is I hate to say it again something that Alfred Hitchcock could have really developed.  John Woo doesn't seem to have a clue what to do with this concept except stage a lot of indifferent action scenes.

I suppose it was impossible for Woo, Affleck, and Thurman to turn down Steven Spieldberg's company Dreamworks.  In Hollywood you don't say no to Steven Spielberg even if it won't do anything for your career.

Paycheck is just another empty action film. 

119 minutes.

2006 - VOLVER or "To Come Back" is a very satisfiying chick flick for a change.

The difference between chick flicks coming out of Hollywood and chick flicks coming out of Spain is really apparent in Volver.  It helps to have a good director like Pedro Almodovar calling the shots, instead of some Hollywood hack.  It also helps to have a very interesting story and good actors.

Penelope Cruz is the lead and she actually gives a performance for a change instead of walking around  sticking her chest out.  Carmen Maura who I haven't seen since Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown shows up as Cruz's mother or ghost of her mother. But the entire female cast is quite good. 

Considering what could have been some seriously out of control melodrama in this story, Volver is a pretty impressive piece of film making from a very good director.

A quality film.

121 minutes.

1941 - MANHUNT, Fritz Lang's pre World War II spy thriller.

An English hunter on a "sporting stalk," decides to make Hitler his target.

After two indifferent but fun westerns of all things, Fritz Lang was lucky enough to direct this espionage thriller with a pretty good screenplay from Dudley Nichols.

Probably the World War II propaganda aspects and some of the portrayals of the British as shall we say stereotypical Englishmen date the film, but this spy stuff is a film genre that Fritz Lang practically invented on his own.
 

All of Fritz Lang's trademarks are here, shadows, fog, a secretive spy network, a larger than life hero and the beginning of Lang's infatuation with the actor Joan Bennett who he used in several films.  If the film was kind of a bunch of cinematic cliches even in 1941, Lang really knew how to use those cliches. 

Since the United States was officially a neutral country for most of 1941, Lang was forced to make a number of changes in the finished film, playing down the Nazi torture scenes and the bad Nazis. In spite of those compromises this seventy year old film has a number of pretty good scenes.

The ending of Manhunt is still pretty effective.

105 minutes.