1940 - THE POWER AND THE LAND, 1933 - INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN, a couple of short "classic" documentaries.

I doubt The Power and the Land would even be produced today by the United States Government since it glorifies rural electric cooperatives and the government's involvement in bringing power to the rural areas of the country in the late 1930's, this stuff is way to socialist for the present mood of the country.

The real life farm family in The Power and the Land.

The Power and the Land has some nice photography but not unexpectedly looks hopelessly dated, with the narration glorifying the "simple people" working the land.  Television has completely killed this kind of informational film.

38 minutes.

Industrial Britain is just hopeless.  The film was started by Robert Flaherty for the Grierson film unit and then taken out of his hands and reedited.  The stereotypical British narrator intones about the merits of industrialization across the British empire.  The word "stogy" comes to mind.  This is the kind of short film that played before before the main feature in theaters during the 1930's and 40's.  It's primary function was to torture the audience by boring them to death.

22 minutes

1959 - NO NAME ON THE BULLET - an impressive Western drama.

Probably the best film I've seen in the past few weeks.  Audie Murphy is a professional killer who rides into a small western town with the intention of killing someone, the question is who will it be.

This existentialist western reminds me of something that Clouzet could have filmed in his prime.  What is kind of amazing about this film is that it was directed by Jack Arnold the future director of Gilligan's Island, and written by Gene Coon, who was associated with the original Star Trek series and wrote the infamous "Spock's Brain" episode.  Which only goes to show that a good story can always survive a "gifted" auteur. 

The hired killer is played by medal of honor winner Audie Murphy.  Murphy was a baby faced solider who supposedly killed over 240 Germans during World War II.  If you were looking for someone to play a hired killer who better than Murphy who was a real killer.  Murphy gives a very fine low key performance throughout the film supported by a bunch of Universal's contract actors.

This is a compact tightly plotted film, that makes some interesting points about the human condition.  Somehow High Noon gets all the credit as a serious adult western drama, but this film is vastly superior to that one. 

77 muinutes.

2011 - THE ARTIST, the overrated

Only the charm of the actors Jean Dujardin, the star of those silly "OSS 117" films and Berenice Bujo, keep this thing from sinking like a rock. 

The Artist is a comedic take on the romance between Greta Garbo and silent screen star John Gilbert.  Gilbert's career was destroyed by the coming of sound and his alcoholism so naturally that would make a funny movie.  This isn't really a silent comedy, it's just someone's idea of what a silent comedy was like back in the good old days.  It takes more than just  shooting the film in the old film ratio with black and white to make this a silent film.  The Artist lacks the special technique that a Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd could bring to a pantomime performance.

For a French film, the supporting cast is weirdly loaded with American supporting characters like John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller and character actor Ed Lauter, none of them really make much of an impression, and I'm not even sure exactly why they are in this film other than to evoke some kind of memory of old Hollywood.

This film is just incredibly slight, yet it's getting good reviews by many critics and winning many awards.  Apparently none of them have seen any Ernest Lubitsch or King Vidor silent films

100 minutes,  written by Michel Hazanavicius.

1994 - BOTTLE ROCKET, Wes Anderson short film

Bottle Rocket is Wes Anderson's really low key comedy about a couple of small time thieves.  It's also the first film for Anderson and like Spielberg's Amblin' it defines his style for all of his subsequent films.

It's either interesting or depressing to see a director continue to make films in the same style as his first short film.  Everyone knows what a Bergman, Hitchcock, Fellini or Welles film looks like, but these were guys who had years to develop their craft, Anderson has been  rigidly locked into a very formalized style since this first film.

Anderson's made some good films, but he reached his peak of artistic indulgence with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film so inside and indulgent nobody knew what to make of it.  It also flopped at the box office.

This short film has it good points and bad points, some funny if very quirky humor and an overall utter pointlessness.

13 minutes, written by Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson.

1924 - GREED, made it through this one.

When they said this was the extended version of Greed they weren't kidding.  Four hours of looking at still photos to fill in the missing scenes from this heavily edited film. The photos are given the Ken Burns treatment with lots of panning up and down and left and right and sideways and anyway that can be thought of.  This process of making the stills look like they are moving does not work.

What's left of the film is downbeat to say the least.  This is an unbelievably depressing and relentless film about the worst aspects of human nature.  MGM financed Von Stroheim's "labor of love" and I can't believe they didn't read the script before shooting.  The added still photo scenes flesh out subplots that are really depressing as if the fate of McTeague and Trina isn't enough of a downer. 

 Since it's a Von Stroheim film, there are impressive scenes throughout the film, especially the final confrontation in Death Valley.  But from what I can figure out from all the extra baggage of the still photos the world didn't lose much of a masterpiece.  All the extra subplots don't really add anything to the overall narrative of the film.

Faced with an unwatchable film at a length of 10 hours, you can hardly blame the studio for cutting it down to a more manageable length as if two and half hours is much shorter.

239 minutes

2011 - BRIDESMAIDS - chick flick

There's joy and sorrow, comedy and drama, laughter and perhaps a tear or two in Bridesmaids.

For all the raunch and potty mouth women, this is just another warmed over chick flick.  Kristin Wiig is the pathetic best friend of Maya Rudolph the bride to be.  Wiig has already played this loser character in Paul.  In  her last two films she's now managed to typecast herself as a variation of Charlie Chaplin's put upon tramp character complete with slapstick.

Bridesmaids clocks in at over 2 hours which is way too long for any comedy.  The film loads up with secondary characters like Jon Hamm as the selfish boyfriend and the extremely overbearing colorful character of the obnoxious friend played by Melissa McCarthy who is funny for a whole 10 minutes.

It all ends with the ladies singing their little hearts out at the wedding, best buddies forever.

125 minutes.

2011 - GREEN LANTERN, really boring comic book movie

Green Lantern takes an hour to get going.  It has lots of plot exposition to endure. How the Green Lantern guy got his ring, how he travels to the planet Oa to learn how to use his super ring powers, how he defeats one of the greatest threats to the Universe, etc.

The film stars Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan and Blake Lively as the girl.  Reynolds has been OK in a few lightweight comedies  and films like The Proposal and The Nines.  Then again Reynolds has also been the star of  National Lampoon's Van Wilder and Blade: Trinity.  Regardless, he doesn't have the charisma to pull off a larger then life super hero.  Blake Lively is another one of those flavor of the month actor chicks who manage to make absolutely no impression, in fairness the script never gave her a chance.

Frankly, the Green Lantern power to think of things and make them materialize with his magic ring is kind of lame and the kind of things he thinks of are lame as well, Giant drills for drilling through monsters, race cars and tracks that travel around in the air and green swords clearly modeled on light sabers, not much imagination here.

Green Lantern with it's overblown computer effects cost Warner Brothers a small fortune.  It needed to make 500 million bucks to be considered successful, instead it came in at 200 million on a 300 million  dollar budget.  Anyway, not worth anyone's time

No franchise with this film.

114 minutes.

1968 - GREETINGS De Palma's draft dodger comedy

You can get a nice nostalgic feeling for the 1960's in Greetings.  Return to the good old days when a young man's preoccupation was staying out of the Vietnam War by avoiding the draft at all costs.  This is essentially the plot of Brian De Palma's film.

Since this was a film shot on a limited budget,  De Palma has the scenes run a long time which allows the actors to do their thing.  A young Robert De Niro sticks out in the cast and he's actually kind of likable.  Another De Palma regular Gerrit Graham is De Niro's friend an avid Kennedy assassination conspiracy researcher.

Even if this is an early De Palma film, you still get to see  his fascinations with voyeurism, sex and film with jokes about Blow Up and Hitchcock in particular. 

De Palma has a sense of humor it's just not one that's always been appreciated or understood by the critics.

Nice peppy theme song and nice to see LBJ book ending the film.

88 minutes.  Written by Charles Hirsch and Brian De Palma.

1972 - TROUBLE MAN "He skip on me, I feed him to the dogs. "

Trouble Man is called "Mr. T"  throughout the film and he has his "cool" going for him at all times.  This is a 70's Blaxploitation film that is a lot more polished than usual for this genre. 

Ivan Dixon who was the token black guy in the Hogan's Heroes series directed and for what this film is he directed it very well.  Michael Kahn, Steven Spielberg's go to editor for almost all of his films cut the film, and it moves along at a very good pace. 

Trouble Man also has a good cast of actors.  Robert Hooks is credible as the tough guy considering all the "honky ass" he has to take down.  Academy Award nominated actor Paul Winfield and Ralph Waite who was the dad in The Waltons are the bad guys he takes down.  This was a film clearly made early in the careers of these two gentlemen.

Decent action, 1970's fashions in clothes and apartments all add up to a quick fun action film.

99 minutes.

1953 - THE BIG HEAT, not so hot.

Time has worn down the classic status of The Big Heat.  The film now looks like just another cop show.

Glenn Ford's the cop on a mission of revenge for the death of his wife at the hands of a nameless crime syndicate.  Gloria Grahame is a gangster's "girl friend."  Lee Marvin is slimy in the bad guy period of his career and the rest of the cast is pretty good if a little too clean cut.

However the plot of The Big Sleep has been copied in so many films, any originality the film once had has been drilled out of it.  It also doesn't help the film that it looks like it was filmed completely on studio sets.  Everyone looks very clean, the sleazy night clubs, the police station and even the junk yards.

The Big Heat was an important film for Fritz Lang.  It helped revitalize his reputation as one of the cinema's most important directors.  But for the most part Lang seems fairly uninvolved with the film, which is surprising.  The film has the kind of things he was attracted to, a Mabuse like leader of a mysterious crime syndicate with lots of colorful characters but it seems that Lang couldn't muster up any interest in one of his favorite themes for this film. 

Fritz Lang directs Ford and Gloria Grahame

What Fritz Lang does get right are a couple of sadistic scenes inflicted on Gloria Grahame and a little emotion out of the poor man's Spencer Tracy, Glenn Ford.  Grahame is the best thing in the film.

The Big Heat is film noir but no classic

89 minutes.

1985 - PULGASARI, North Korea's Godzilla film is funny and pathetic

The making of Pulgasari is more interesting then this half baked kaigu film from North Korea. 

 

  Hoping to upgrade the North Korean film industry, dictator Kim Jon-Il had the director Shin Sang-ok kidnapped of all things.  Stuck in North Korea, Sang-ok was able to induce special effects artist Teruyoshi Nakano the poor man's Eiji Tsuburaya to come over to North Korea and film someone stomping around in a rubber suit while destroying models of buildings.

Pulgasari, has alternately big and cheap production values. "A cast of thousands," running around in the big battle scenes, poor acting from the leading players and Pulgasari itself the metal eating demon, a guy wearing a cheap monster suit where you can clearly see where the head attaches to the body. 

Of course is goes without saying this is a Communist vs Capitalist allegory since this is a propaganda film, Pulgasari isn't even up to the standards of Godzilla vs the Smog Monster. 

 However, I did enjoy the trap the King's soldiers set for Pulgasari which was essentially, dig a really big hole and have him stumble into it.

95 minutes.

2009 - KNOWING, interesting but flawed drama/science fiction film.

Knowing is kind of a cross between the Left Behind series and the book Childhood's End .  You have to give the filmmakers some credit for going there with a story that I can't believe would have had much popular appeal to the general public.  In fact it's surprising the film even got made.

Nicholas Cage is an astronomy professor of something who has unlocked a coded message that predicts when disasters are about to happen.  Cage is an actor who is pretty much ridiculed these days for his rather larger than life performances and there is some of that in this film.  Still, he doesn't really disgrace or do harm to the story.

The director Alex Proyas is good at staging the disaster sequences and he has definitely gotten the creepy vibe down for the film.  However with this film you have to overlook a lot of plot holes and some serious issues with plausibility that run throughout. 

I am kind of surprised this film wasn't embraced more by the fundamentalist Christian core.  The film feeds into their beliefs about the Book of Revelations, and there are references to the Bible that run throughout the film.

121 minutes.

1962 - THE PIRATES OF BLOOD RIVER, shiver me timbers, avast, etc.

The infamous Hammer studios pirate movie without any pirate ships in it.  This is not entirely true, there is one matte painting of a pirate ship in the middle of the film.  However The Pirates of Blood River is set entirely on land for the most part except for the appropriately named blood river scenes since the river is full of piranha.

This pirate film was written by Hammer's legendary screenwriter Jimmy Sangster who reinvented Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy for Hammer.  Told to put together a film about pirates on the cheap,  Sangster took an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to this film.  The film's got Huguenots, French pirates, hidden treasure and busty babes.

The film also has a kitchen sink cast as well.  Kerwin Matthews from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Glenn Corbett costar of John Wayne films like Chisum and Big Jake and Hammer's go to guy Christopher Lee as the French pirate Captain LaRouche.  Buried in the cast is Oliver Reed future star of that Hammer classic, The Curse of the Werewolf.

Really not much of a film, it's still a pirate film so it's got lots of sword fights and fist fights and gun fights running throughout the film.  There's not a dull moment.

87 minutes.

1975 - WHITE LINE FEVER, truck driver trash classic

Jan Michael Vincent is Carrol Jo Hummer a Vietnam vet trying to make it as an independent trucker in southern Arizona.  He runs afoul of some crooked freight handlers and decides to take matters into his own hands.

White Line Fever is B movie stuff expertly directed by Jonathan Kaplan who also co-wrote the screenplay.  The film has a real feel for this trailer park white trash without being condescending towards them. 

Besides Jan Michael in his signature role driving his truck the "Blue Mule." 1974 Ford WT9000 cabover rig with a Cummins turbo diesel engine.   The film has an outstanding cast of character actors.  Slim Pickens as Duane Haller, L.Q Jones as the villainous Buck, Sam Laws as Pops and Don Porter as Cutler, head of the Glass House the evil transportation company trying to muscle out the independent truckers.

Half the fun of watching this film are the great stunts and fights that run throughout the film.  Kaplan even works in a John Ford shot with a sequence of the Blue Mule driving through Monument Valley.

90 minutes

1963 - A GATHERING OF EAGLES, bombers, missles and Rock Hudson

A war movie without a war.  Rock's the asshole Colonel in charge of whipping a SAC Air Force base into shape after they fail an ORI that's "Operational Readiness Inspection" for you civilians.

Rock uses a lot of tough love to whip these boys into shape.  As is typical for these kinds of films he has a wife who stays at home and whines about what a tough guy he's turned into and how she doesn't know who he is anymore da dum da dum da dum.

Truth be told, this is actually a pretty good film about what is essentially a film about guys training all of the time.  The director Delbert Mann was always a good craftsman and he excelled at getting good performances out of actors.  Rock was never mistaken for a method actor but he does a pretty decent job in this film.

The worst thing you could say about A Gathering of Eagles is that it's hard to work up a lot of tension over whether an Air Force base will pass a training test.

The oddest thing you can say about A Gathering of Eagles is that it has a song written specifically for it by satirist Tom Lehrer and exactly how that got into this film is anyone's guess.

This film has an awesome cast of testosterone fueled actors, Rod Taylor, Kevin McCarthy, Leif Erickson, Richard Anderson, Barry Sullivan, Robert Lansing and Henry Silvia.

116 minutesm screenplay by Robert Pirosh.

1976 - TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, decent occult horror film

At the end of their run, Hammer took another shot at adapting a Dennis Wheatley novel.  Their previous Wheatley story The Devil Rides Out had Terence Fisher as the director and Richard Matheson adapting the book, this film didn't have that level of talent.  However To The Devil a Daughter isn't bad.

Christopher Lee is the defrocked priest who has established a cult that worships the demon Astaroth.  He plans to use one of his "nuns," Nastassia Kinski to summon Astaroth into the world.  To the rescue is occult writer Richard Widmark.  Lee and Widmark are quite good in their parts, Kinski does what she does best, take off her clothes.  Overall the film actually has a fairly decent cast.

Since To The Devil A Daughter was made towards the end of film production for Hammer the sex, nudity and violence were ramped up to compete with films like Rosemary's Baby.  None of that stuff really brings anything to the film and I doubt that the original author Dennis Wheatly would have been very happy about these little additions to his story.

Apparently Widmark was a huge pain in the butt during filming the script went through numerous revisions and the budget was cut.  Considering all the issues this film turned out fairly well.

95 minutes.

1982 - UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE or A ROOM IN TOWN

Jacques Demy's film about a 1955 workers strike in a French town called  Nantes is a musical.  Like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg every single word of it is sung by every single member of the cast.

It looks like Demy's concept of dramatizing the strike and the love affair by one of the strikers and a married woman somewhat exceeded his ability to actually put what is essentially an intimate opera on film.  Still you have to give Demy credit for attempting something so audacious.  You just don't see films like this every day if at all. 

Demy must have worked very carefully to get the cast to seem as natural and unaffected as they are considering they are constantly singing, it's very tough to build a character in a film that has such an unusual approach to story.

Worth a look and doesn't overstay it's welcome.

90 minutes.