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

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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

1944 - HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN, Hollywood pats themselves on their collective backs

The Hollywood Canteen was an entertainment center started by Bette Davis and John Garfield to entertain servicemen either shipping out for combat or returning from combat.  Never an industry to pass up a chance to make themselves look good, Warner Brothers produced this butt kissing salute to how wonderful they were.

The film is loaded with lots and lots of 40's star mostly and unsurprisingly from the Warner Brothers studio.   There is actually a sort of plot to this film.  A soldier recovering from war wounds wants to meet his crush Joan Leslie.  This is an excuse for the soldier to run into a lot of stars.  Look it's Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Jane Wyatt, Eddie Cantor, Joe E Brown, you get the picture lots of actors that no one remembers today.

The film has a lot of musical numbers and little comedy bits from the stars.  It's harmless stuff, kind of boring and extremely dated.  In 1944, people watching this film could take comfort that "the stars" were ordinary people just like you and me.

Hollywood Canteen is over two hours but seems a lot longer.  Some of the musical numbers aren't too bad but the flag waving looks mighty corny these days.  Oh and the soldier "Slim" does get to go out on a date with Joan Leslie, God Bless America.

124 minutes, the director Delmar Daves also wrote the screenplay.

1962 - LE DOULOS, is another great Melville crime film

Another very good thriller from Jean Pierre Melville, a master in this genre. 

All the Melville stuff is here, a cool star, the heavy influence of American film noir, and some tight action scenes.  This time Melville has written a very tricky plot involving an informant played by very cool French star Jean-Paul Belmondo and thief Serge Reggiani a thief who suspects that Belmondo sold him out to the cops.

As usual, Melville was working on a tight budget but had complete control over his film.  If the film is a European idea of an American crime thriller, it's still completely Melville's film with lots of tough guy stuff from the crooks and cops.

Melville is a director who everyone has been stealing from for years.

108 minutes.

1965 - THUNDERBALL, looks good on high def

When you're hot your hot and Sean Connery's James Bond series was on fire after Goldfinger.  The producers needed a film for Christmas 1965 and rushed Thunderball into production.  Besides the main unit, there were three 2nd unit teams filming at the same time.

The director Terence Young apparently became fed up with this mess and quit the production leaving the editor Peter Hunt to patch the film together.  Re-watching the film this week was a minor ordeal over three nights.  For the most part nothing really happens in Thunderball until about 45 minutes into a film that is over two hours.

Still, this is Sean Connery in his prime, the photography looks great on location in the Bahamas and the special effects and underwater action sequences play pretty well.  Ken Adam, designed the incredible Disco Volante, Peter Hunt is still the man when it comes to editing the fight scenes, Maurice Binder starts to create his semi dirty title sequences and John Barry ties it together with one of his better scores for a Bond film.

Thunderball still has some basis in reality, the next film You Only Live Twice slides off the cliff into unreal science fiction as the series starts to enter it's own fantasy world.

130 minutes, written by Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins.

1964 - KWAIDAN, looking great on the big screen

Recently saw Kwaidan again at a revival theater in fairly decent shape on actual film.  It's a stunning film.

Amazingly enough one of the best stories, "The Woman of the Snow" was cut out of the film when it was first shown in the United States.

This was a very personal project for Masaki Kobayashi.  The director was so into this film he painted the sets himself.

The author of these very Japanese stories Lafcadio Hearn, was of Greek descent who lived in New Orleans but ended up in Japan as a newspaper correspondent.  He embraced Japanese culture big time.

183 minutes

1946 - ZIEGFELD FOLLIES gaudy and fascinating musical revue from MGM

Producer Arthur Freed wanted to recreate the kind of musical revue that Florenz Ziegfeld mounted in the 1900's.  He assembled some of MGM's musical and comedy talent for a series of sketches.  Vincente Minnelli directed about half of the film but apparently none of the comedy bits.

This is a technicolor extravaganza with big splashy tasteless sets and musical numbers that range from surreal dance sequences to a crazy opera performance completely out of context from source material.  It's all performed by top talent.  The end result is very strange.

Lucille Ball is the ringmaster in some strange cat/tiger number where she runs around with a whip trying to keep cat women under control, very kinky.  Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer, appear in a couple of numbers.  Astaire is in his prime.  His partner Lucille Bremer is an interesting story.  Bremer was a good dancer who never hit the big time.  Rumor had it that she was also Freed's mistress.  In any case she and Astaire dance together in a couple of very watchable numbers.

Some of the more fascinating parts of Ziegfeld Follies are the comedy sequences.  They are to put it plainly not funny.  Red Skelton does a bit with a hat as a prop which is interesting to watch because it's so bad.  Keenan Wynn does a telephone bit that's awful but it all shrinks in comparison when Fanny Brice shows up.

Ziegfeld Follies is an opportunity to see an actual Ziegfeld star Fanny Brice in a comedy skit with Hume Cronyn of all people as her husband.  It's hard to believe this obnoxious overbearing personality was even remotely popular with the public.  I guess she played better on Broadway because she sure is something to see up close on the fairly big TV screen.

The film wraps up with iron lung semi opera singer Kathryn Grayson bellowing something called "There's Beauty Everywhere" all the while a crazed bubble machine dumps soap suds all over a dancing Cyd Charisse.  It was the perfect way to end this amazing film.

110 minutes, Charles Walters takes writing credit apparently.

1976 - BOUND FOR GLORY, is boring

The completely fictitious and very long and boring life of singer and union organizer Woody Guthrie.  During the reign of the old studio system, the studios would spit out biographies of famous people that were to put it mildly loose with the facts.  But for every Life of Emile Zola, or Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet that might play loose with the facts at least they were sincere and not boring.

Bound for Glory is very sincere and very boring.  This plot free film has non singer David Carradine wander around the south western part of the United States becoming socially aware about the plight of the Okie's in the dust bowl and the exploitation of fruit pickers in California, all the while strumming that damn guitar.

Somehow kind of  creepy David Carradine portrays Woody Guthrie as a real lady killer which seems highly doubtful.  The film oddly casts an actor, Melinda Dillion in two roles.  One as Guthrie's wife Mary and another as a singer called Memphis Sue for no apparent reason.  The film also has spectacular photography from Haskell Wekler, which is great to look at but completely distracts from one should be a hard edged story about poor people suffering.

Bound for Glory is what you get when you let a bunch of rich Hollywood liberals make a movie about the "simple people." A film which means well but is as disconnected about real life as Star Wars was from science fiction.

For a good film about the Depression and the Dust Bowl check out John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath.  The photogrphy by Haskell Wexler is impressive, probably the best thing in the film

147 minutes, written by Robert Getchell but supposedly mostly improvised by the cast and director.