1960 - JIGOKU or The Sinners From Hell

Absurd melodramatics and ridiculous plotting finally lead up to the big part of Jigoku that the viewer has been waiting for the literal descent into hell. 

The so called hero, Shirō Shimizu has so messed up his life to the extent of being involved in the deaths of at least 3 or 4 people.  His family isn't much better.  Dad is cheating on Shimizu's dying mother, dad's mistress is hitting on Shimizu, the girl next door has an uncanny resemblance to Shimizu's dead girlfriend who was pregnant with his child.  Well you get the picture about the outrageous plotting.

It all ends up at a party where everyone is poisoning or committing suicide or shooting someone else and then the fun starts everyone goes to Hell.

From here we have bizarre graphic depictions of suffering in Hell with rivers of feces, people being flayed alive, or walking through a room of needles you have to see it all to believe it.

An amazing over the top film.

100 minutes

2006 - THE SINKING OF JAPAN or Japan Sinks or Nihon Chinbotus or Doomsday: The Sinking of Japan

Toho Studios produced this science fiction epic about what else the sinking of Japan.  It's almost like they decided to make one of their kaiju films and got rid of all the monsters.

This is an extremely serious film.  How do you evacuate an entire nation?  Where do you put them?  What about your culture?  There are meetings with high level politicians, scientists and disaster relief workers.  It's all treated very solemnly.  But it's also time for a lot of special effects, cities get pulverised, earthquakes shake things up and all with out the assistance of Godzilla this time.

Films like this are unsurprisingly lacking in characterization and The Sinking of Japan is no exception however no other studio can destroy the world like the pros at Toho.

135 minutes, written by Masato Kato.

1976 - THE DROWNING POOL, sequel to Harper.

Paul Newman is private eye Lew Harper, in this sequel to Harper.  This time Harper is in New Orleans investigating a blackmail scheme for an old fling played by Newman's wife Joanne Woodward.

This is the usual private eye stuff.  Girls, guns and wisecracks.  The plot is one of those too complicated to understand exactly what is going on stories.  The finale involves a hydrotherapy chamber which Newman and the chief bad guy's wife flood in order to break out of.  That seems a little improbable but it is kind of a cool scene.

This film has a pretty good cast, of 1970's actors.  Murray Hamilton, Richard Jaeckel, Gail Strickland, Tony Franciosa and a very young Melanie Griffith as a piece of jail bait.  However, this is a Paul Newman film, and he is in about every scene and has to carry this rather lightweight mystery film to the end.

Behind the camera is some fairly decent talent.  Gordon Willis was the director of photography.  Willis was known for filming scenes in very low light levels.  He photographed Woody Allen's best films along with The Godfather films.  But one of the problems with The Drowning Pool is that every scene in this film is mighty dark.  Its hard to see exactly what is going on.

The director was Stuart Rosenberg who had a couple of good films and was probably hired because he could handle Newman who he had worked with before.  Lorenzo Semple Jr, Walter Hill and Tracy Keenan Wynn all have screen credit as the writers.  This is never a good sign in a film.

109 minutes.

1963 - SOLDIER IN THE RAIN, odd but very well made comedy drama

Ralph Nelson was the director but Blake Edwards was the writer/producer of Soldier in the Rain and it's loaded with his sensibility.  The film is a mixture of comedy and drama about the friendship between two soldiers on an army base. 

This film is extremely well acted.  Jackie Gleason is the overweight Army staff sergeant who is friends with the goofy Steve McQueen a supply sergeant who seems to not have all of his oars in the water.  Tuesday Weld is a little piece of jail bait they get involved with who is more than just an empty headed blonde.  All three of these actors really brought their "A" game to this film.

Gleason is remembered as a comedian but he was capable of giving very sensitive performances when he needed to.  Steve McQueen's career evolved into an anti-hero action star but he was a trained New York actor.  Tuesday Weld had talent but never really got past her sexpot image.  

It's difficult to know what to make of this film, it jumps from comedy to drama to tragedy and it's all well done it just doesn't seem to have a point to it other than as a character study about two different kinds of men who just happen to be friends.

96 minutes, written by Blake Edwards and Maurice Richlin.

1960 - LAST WOMAN ON EARTH, Corman science fiction cheapness

Roger Corman's end of the world science fiction epic is an early Corman film all the way.  In essence, the cast has 3 people in it.

Shot on location in Puerto Rico along with 2 other films back to back and apparently in about 3 days this film looks pretty cheap.  However it is shot almost entirely on location and you have to give Corman his due not a lot of directors could film this fast and have a fairly decent end product

Corman's film also wants to tantalize the viewer from the opening credits with the slow pan of a nude female to the promise of some type of menage a trois developing between the woman and the 2 men.  Unfortunately this is the early 1960's and even for a cheap exploitation film it's more tease than action.

 The film is very short it doesn't require a lot of investment in your time or emotional energy.

71 minutes,  written by Robert Towne.

1981 - THE HOWLING, Joe Dante updates another old film genre

There just isn't much to say about this one.  The Howling is a typical Joe Dante film.  Some of the characters are named after old Universal studios horror directors.  The film has scenes from The Wolf Man scattered throughout the story and there are lots of references to wolves with jokes about dog food and eating rare hamburgers

Being that this is a 1980's film, no studio was going to finance a werewolf film unless it had lots of blood and sex which The Howling does.    Dante knows that if he wants to make his genre influenced films he has to play the Hollywood game.

The big thing in The Howling at the time was the actual on screen transformation of a man into a werewolf.  This prosthetic effect probably looked reasonably cool back in the 80's but now it's just a bunch of inflatable balloons attached to an actor's face.  This kind of thing is now done with computer effects these days.

This is an OK time killer and nothing more.  The Howling is a lot like The Wolfman it sounds better than it actually plays.

91 minutes

1935 - STEAMBOAT ROUND THE BEND, entertaining John Ford comedy

Ford directs the "Garrison Keller" of his day Will Rogers in this comedy about life in the rural south.  Rogers was not a trained actor but had been a performer on Broadway for years with the Ziegfeld Follies where he developed his cracker barrel philosopher shtick.

Rogers eventually ended up in Hollywood working with John Ford who apparently got along well with Rogers allowing him to actually improvise a lot of his dialog.

Steamboat Round the Bend is not The Searchers this is strictly a commercial entertainment but a very good one.  There is still the expected sloppy sentimentality and corn ball humor Ford liked to stick into his films but it plays pretty well in this film.  Rogers plays a con man selling a line of snake oil up and down the river on an old steamboat.

The film reaches it's climax with a steamboat race which is still pretty exciting and fun to watch.

82 minutes written by Ben Lucien Burman, Lamar Trotti and Dudley Nichols.

1971 - THE FRENCH CONNECTION, classic cop thriller still holds up.

I didn't particularly care for The French Connection when it came out in 1971.  But  I will have to admit watching this film on Blu-Ray impressed my quite a bit.

The documentary like photography of early 1970's New York and the standout performance of Gene Hackman are probably the best things in the film.

The French Connection was the breakout film that William Friedkin had been looking for.  His decision to shoot it like a documentary really paid off.  The other important decision in the film was the insistence of the producer Philp D'Antoni that Friedkin add a car chase to the film.

 Friedkin has always had the reputation of a "bad boy" film director.  Apparently Hackman had more then a few run in's with the director.  The antagonism between Hackman and Friedkin probably helped Hackman stay in character, as asshole detective "Popeye" Doyle.

104 minutes.

2006 - BUG, horror film from Friedkin,

You get what you get from a film directed by bad boy William Friedkin.  Bug has something to do with everyone's favorite character the "deranged war veteran" hooking up with a white trash waitress working at a southwestern lesbian bar.  The film evolves into a horror/black comedy as the crazed veteran projects his nutty vision that aphids planted by the United States government are crawling around inside him.  Eventually the waitress ends up acting as crazy as he is. 

Friedkin has seemed to find his soul mate in the playwright and screenwriter Tracy Letts who takes an already crazed situation and ramps it up with lots of loony theories about the government, lesbian girlfriends, cocaine and a crappy southwest motel setting that wouldn't have been out of place in Hitchcock's Psycho.

The picture above gives you an idea of what you're getting in for when you watch this film.  I suppose if you are in the mood for one of these extreme films where the director lards on the violence, crazy dialog and over the top performances you can get a kick out of this film.  I wasn't in the mood this time.  

Since the commercial success of the Exorcist, Friedkin has seemed to think that these over the top stories have a potential for commercial success.  On the other hand maybe Friedkin is just attracted to this type of material.  Who knows, who cares.

102 minutes, written by Tracy Letts.

1951 - THREE GUYS NAMED MIKE, the enjoyable blandness of nothing films

This is a nothing of a romantic comedy.  Jane Wyman is the aspiring stewardess working for American Airlines.  She is very perky and a regular little chatterbox.  Jane is always in trouble with management because of her mild but wacky airplane shenanigans.  She meets up with three nice guys who want to marry her.  They are all named Mike, hence the title. 

Charles Walters was the director and it looks like he phoned this one in.  Walters may not have been the greatest stylist in the world but he did direct some successful films for MGM like, Good News, Lili, Easter Parade and High Society.  However you would be hard pressed to find anything that resembles a cinematic flourish in Three Guys Named Mike.  This is strictly a point the camera in the direction of the actors and shoot movie.

The real auteur of this film is the writer Sidney Sheldon.  Sheldon had a long career as a provider of light weight comedies.  Sheldon is probably best know as the writer and creator of the I Dream of Jeannie television series.  Towards the end of his career he pumped out semi racy novels like The Other Side of Midnight and Bloodline.

 Three Guys Named Mike is a Sidney Sheldon story all they way.  You know where it's going from the moment it starts till it's final scene but you still sit there watching to see how the damn thing is going to get to where it's going because it's so comforting in it's predictability kind of like every episode of I Dream of Jeannie.

90 minutes.

1943 - AIR FORCE, Howard Hawk's World War II propaganda epic

Howard Hawks set out to make the propaganda film to end all propaganda films during World War II. He hired Dudley Nichols who was frequently associated with John Ford's films and had William Faulkner to do some unedited rewrites.  The result is a very good propaganda film that in a lot of ways still holds up considering the source and period.

 

 Hawks primarily used Warner's character actors with only John Garfield as the most notable star and even he is billed 9th in the cast.  The plot concerns the crew of the bomber Mary-Ann flying to Pearl Harbor just as the Japanese attack.  This is an actual incident that occurred during the start of the war. From there the film focuses on how the crew works together to take the fight to the Japanese.

For what this film is, it's a very good Hawks film.  Air Force has all of his trademarks, overlapping dialog, good performances especially from John Garfield and John Ridgely and Harry Carey.  Actors like George Tobias and Edward Brophy were always "Johnnie One Notes"  in any film they were in and there was probably nothing Hawks could do about them, but overall the rest of the cast is first rate.

 

 The film also has some pretty good action scenes.  However, the final attack on the Japanese fleet about to invade Australia is ludicrous since it features the Mary-Ann almost single handily blowing up the entire fleet.

This is basically a World War II propaganda film, you have to endure the usual cringing anti Japanese stuff these films are loaded up with.  Still this is a very good Howard Hawks film.

124 minutes

2003 - LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING day 3 watching this series

Coming in at a whopping 4 and 1/2 hours, The Return of the King was the shortest book in the Tolkein trilogy this film is something else.  A long padded out story line completely enthralled with it's own myth making self importance.  Nobody talks like a normal human being in this film almost every line of dialog is loaded with self important platitudes about duty, honor and legend. 

At this point in the trilogy, if you haven't read the books or seen the two previous films the plot is now incomprehensible.  However I have to give Peter Jackson credit he has stayed very faithful to the Tolkein books while orchestrating this extremely complicated production.  

Liv Tyler modeling what the well dressed elf woman wears around the home

.

Probably watching this trilogy over three nights was not the best way to view it.  However I am convinced that these extended edition DVD's really added nothing to the story.

  263 minutes, written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson.

2002 - THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS, another butt buster in the series

The second film in the extended version trilogy.  This film contains god help me 45 minutes of new scenes, i.e. stuff that wasn't deemed worthy of release in the theatrical version and 11 extra minutes of ending credits.

The Two Towers picks up the pace with Peter Jackson cutting between three different stories in this film.  This film also prominently features the CGI character Gollum.  One has to give credit where credit is due this is a very impressive achievement from a technical and artistic standpoint

Liv Tyler looks good but really has nothing to do in this film.

As I popped in disc two of this version and faced down another two hours of running time I couldn't help thinking that perhaps some trimming of Aragon's hanging around the country of Rohan and maybe less of the talking trees would have maybe moved things along a little bit faster.

Everything in this film builds up to the big battle at Helm's Deep and it is spectacular to watch. Whatever reservations I have about the length and confusing plot are placed on the back burner for this display of CGI and practical effects mayhem.

223 minutes, written by Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens and Stephen Sinclair.

2001 - THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING is really long.

Pity the poor fools like me who bought the extended versions of these incredibly long films.  However rest assured that this post will be a lot shorter than watching this film. 

The first film in this trilogy introduces the middle earth characters containing hobbits, dwarfs, elves, orcs, a balrog, nazgûl, uruk-hai, and humans.  To complicate matters even further many of the characters have multiple names or names that sound the same such as, Sauron, Saurman, Strider, Argon, Gandolf the Grey, Merri, Pippin, Bilbo and Frodo.  The film is a feast of fantasy foolishness for the nerdiest of nerds playing fantasy card games at their local comic book store.

Liv Tyler, because I don't want to look at any more pictures of Hobbits, Dwarfs and Orcs.

No argument that this first film looks great.  It was filmed entirely in New Zealand with some magnificent scenery in the background to look at.  This is probably a good thing because most of this film is watching characters walking, walking, walking.  The special effects are at a very high caliber and the actors seem very sincere in their roles.

Since this is  J.R.R. Tolkein's elaborate fantasy creation it is probably not unexpected that the first film would spend most of it's running time setting things up for the next two films.  Still, this is a mighty long haul through the first third of this trilogy.

219 minutes.

1990 - GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH, is more of the same but less

 Warner Brothers wanted a sequel to Gremlins and finally lured Joe Dante back with the promise of complete control over the picture.  This was a bad idea.  Dante ran amok indulging himself with his cartoon sense of humor and let the picture get completely out of control to the point of incoherence.

 Dante crammed a lot of stuff into the picture.  It was a spoof of Die Hard, and a satire of cable TV.  He indulged himself with cartoon sequences from past his prime animator Chuck Jones and a musical sequence.  The first Gremlins was barely credible but at least it had a story.  Gremlins 2:  The New Batch doesn't even bother with a story so it is virtually impossible to get involved with the film.

 Dante brought back some of the original cast which included a rather haggard looking Phoebe Cates who was only 26 years old.  Rick Baker made the gremlin puppets for this film but even the fuzzy cuddly "Gismo" seems to have lost a lot of it's cuteness along with Phoebe Cates between the first and second film. 

Gremlins 2: The New Batch is what you get when you let an interesting cult director go nuts on a large budget.

106 minutes.

1984 - GREMLINS, Joe Dante's horror comedy

Gremlins is one of the few films that Joe Dante has directed where audiences responded to his comic book style of film making.  Dante, also a major film buff (nerd)  has packed the film with lots of in jokes and old actors he grew up watching.

This is a nostalgia wallow of old character actors with Kenneth Tobey, Edward Andrews, Scott Brady, Harry Carey Jr, William Schallert, Dick Miller, Jackie Joseph and Keye Luke.  The film gets even more inside with appearances from Jerry Goldsmith, Robbie the Robot (reciting dialog from Forbidden Planet), Steven Spielberg sitting in George Pal's time machine, Chuck Jones and pictures of character actor Edward Arnold prominently displayed.  Amazingly, all this stuff doesn't get in the way of the film.

The film sends up small town middle class American life with the gremlin assault on a housewife in her kitchen the highlight of the film.  Americans can wallow in sloppy holiday sentimentality but they are also capable of developing a real vicious and violent streak when push comes to shove. 

 

106 minutes, written by Chris Columbus.

2012 - SKYFALL - the James Bond series keeps rolling along

 As the bad guy's helicopter with the high powered machine gun flew around James Bond's childhood home blasting it into a million pieces, I couldn't help thinking the perhaps the fun has finally drained out of the series.

I fully understand that the Sean Connery and Roger Moore, films in the series are a thing of the past.  Still it  seems that this serious streak the series is going through with the humorless Daniel Craig isn't much fun to watch anymore and maybe Craig could really start to lighten up a bit.  This is very apparent when the film rolled out the Aston Martin from Goldfinger for the last half of the film.  This was the only time in the theater the audience cheered.

The Bond series really seems out of ideas in this film.  The "put James Bond out to pasture" thing was already done in Goldeneye.  Also this cyber crime plot and focusing on the M character seems like pretty tired and unimaginative stuff.  Javier Bardern as the gay criminal mastermind is good but this character lacks the larger than life villainy that Joseph Wiseman, Lotte Lenya, Gert Frobe, Adolfo Celi and even Charles Gray brought to this stereotypical role.

Finally, this film is incredibly long,  coming in at over two hours with a very plot heavy story about James Bond's search for personal redemption blah blah blah.

But what do I know, this is one of the most successful films in the series.  Critics are critics fawning all over it and the the general public loves it.

143 minutes.

1939 - UNION PACIFIC, is DeMille's very entertaining western.

This is a large scale Western film, from Cecil B. DeMille. The film is long but completely entertaining.  DeMille has loaded Union Pacific up with lots of fights, a soap opera love triangle, and two spectacular train wreck sequences. 

The plot is about the building of the transcontinental railroad, Barbara Stanwyck and actor from Brooklyn is stuck playing and Irish engineer's daughter complete with stereotypical accent.  Joel McCrea who was a capable light comedian plays the railroad troubleshooter who is such a tough guy he wears his guns backwards.  Brian Donlevy frequently played bad guys and he again gets the honors in this film.  Finally, Robert Preston, an actor who struggled in films is the 2nd lead bad guy.  Preston didn't his the big time until he starred in The Music Man on Broadway.

Frequently criticized for his lack of sophistication, Cecil B. DeMille was an extremely good at producing and directing films that were very successful with the public.  DeMille also had a much more impressive visual sense when it came to staging films than he was usually given credit for.  Union Pacific is a well staged and photographed film.

Union Pacific is a very good piece of commercial enterainment, from a master commercial filmmaker.

135 minutes

1995 - A WALK IN THE CLOUDS, pretty and pretty sappy romantic drama

 A deliberately old fashioned romantic drama starring inexpressive actor Keanu Reeves, thrown in with a bunch of emoting Hispanic actors.   The resulting film is kind of a crappy mess of a romance.

 Keanu is a soldier returning home from World War II who is suffering from PTS syndrome although it's kind of hard to tell with him.  He meets up with with Spanish actress Aitana Sánchez-Gijón who is an unmarried, pregnant and is returning to her "colorful" Hispanic family who have a vineyard in the Napa Valley.  Keanu pretends to be her husband so she doesn't suffer the wrath of her explosive father played by Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini since there were clearly no Hispanic actors who could play this role.  Well anyway Keanu and Sánchez-Gijón fall in love and etc.

A Walk In The Clouds is very pretty to watch, every scene is filmed with a golden tint which only goes to prove that the sepia filter can be overused as a sloppy cliche in a romantic drama.  Maurice Jarre also lards it on with his "expressive" film score because when you can't generate real emotions from the actors you supplement it in every other way that you can.

102 minutes.

1964 - GOLDFINGER on Blu Ray

Goldfinger looks good on Blu Ray but not as spectacular as Thunderball on Blu Ray does, but it doesn't need to, it's still the best film in the entire series.

The Bond producers have been essentially remaking this film for the entire series, you can find elements of Goldfinger in every film going forward.  But who could blame them.  Everything in this films works for a change.  The actors are all iconic screen characters, the plot is still reasonably plausible and the production team assembled for this film is really on top of their game.

Connery goofs it up on the set of Goldfinger.

Finally, lets get real, none of the other Bond actors could top Connery.  Also a shout out to the iconic score by John Barry

110 minutes, screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn.

1946 - TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY, is yet another musical revue from MGM

 Producer Arthur Freed's musical on the life of composer Jerome Kern is just another excuse to feature MGM stars in musical sequences without bothering about a pesky plot.
 
 The actor Robert Walker is the chief victim of this mess.  He walks around knocking out songs like he was picking lint off of his well tailored suits.  The audience never sees Kern actually sit down and write a song it's just taken for granted that he has a portfolio full of them where ever he goes.  Jerome Kern may have been a great American songwriter but he was a very boring guy.

 For a composer who wrote a lot of great songs, this film presents them in a fairly mediocre middle class style.  The director was Richard Thorpe a studio contract guy who is barely remembered and gets no respect from film scholars although he made a lot of films.  Thorpe's chiefly remembered as the guy who got fired off of The Wizard of Oz.

Till the Clouds Roll By is also extremely long coming in at over 2 hours, a real killer of a film.

 132 minutes

1942 - BAMBI, Disney classic from his best period

Rewatched Bambi after a lot of years.  This is a visually stunning film.  Almost every shot is a treat to look at.  The Walt Disney studio had been filming cartoons in color for a while before they made Bambi.  They had a very good understanding of how to use technicolor for dramatic effect.

There are a lot of cute animals in this film which became a Disney trademark and eventually a cliche, but they are all in the service of the story.  If anything really dates Bambi it's the film's music which sounds like the 1940's score it is.

David Hand gets credit as the director, but this is a film which makes the auteur theory look like a big joke.  The film has animation sequence directors, character directors and a story director, many individuals were involved to create this film.

Bambi is also nice and short the Disney studio knew what they were doing when they filmed this.

70 minutes

THE KEY - World War II drama from Carol Reed

Working with Hollywood liberal Carl Foreman,  director Carol Reed moved into bigger budgeted dramas.  The Key is the first of these films.  A World War II drama about British navy tugboats rescuing damaged ships before the Nazi's ship them,  the central conflict in The Key revolves around the Sophia Loren character.

Loren plays the finance of one the deceased tugboat captains.  Before he died he passed the key to their apartment to another captain in order to take care of her if something happened to him.  The end result is that Loren has essentially become a prostitute for a series of men as each one is killed by the German navy.

I doubt when the original author Jan de Hartog wrote this story he pictured the tragic female character being played by Italian sex bomb Sophia Loren which sort of throws off most of the credibility of the character.  Having American actor William Holden playing a Canadian serving with the British just makes a bigger mess of things.  However the whole thing comes down to, who wouldn't pass up the chance to get some action out of Sophia Loren.

In the end, the chief problem with this film is Carl Foreman's script.  Carol Reed has put together the film with his usual skill and taste.  Even if the actors are miscast Reed gets very good performances out of them However the film is disappointing and too long.

134 minutes.

1976 - DRIVE-IN, comedy of small town life

A night at the drive-in theater in a small Texas town where nobody, especially the teenagers has anything to do.

This is what critics would call a "modest comedy."  Nobody aimed real high but this isn't some crappy film.  Obviously American Graffiti was the inspiration but this film can stand on its own.  The cast is a bunch of unknown actors from the Texas area.  The film making is pretty basic but the script is fairly funny.

Everyone is piling into the drive-in to watch a crappy 70's film called "Disaster 76" which looks like a Universal 70's genre film like Airport 75 of Earthquake both of which came out in 1974.  This spoof which runs throughout the film isn't even that funny but it doesn't have to be because it perfectly nails how stupid those films were.

Drive-In is almost a documentary.   Watching a movie in your car or aimlessly wandering around the blocks of cars pointed at a large screen with crummy speakers has almost completely disappeared from the Midwestern way of life.  I should know because I was a part of this experience.  Highly recommended and love the country western songs on the soundtrack.

96 minutes.

1980 - POPEYE, the unmusical

 UNFLIPPING BELIEVABLE.  Robert Altman directs, Robert Evans produces and apparently the coke, pot and booze flowed freely during the making of this film.  The result unsurprisingly is a horrible film watching experience.

Anyone who says this film is some sort of undiscovered or unappreciated classic has clearly not watched it lately.  Between the muttering and terrible Robert Williams and the horrible musical numbers this viewer can only wonder what the heads of the Paramount and Disney studios who financed this thing must have thought watching this nightmare during the dailies.

Complete garbage, not even worthy of a review.

114 minutes