1979 - MOONRAKER, Bond in space

As some critic exclaimed at the time when Star Wars made a bunch of money,  it was inevitable the Bond producers would do a James Bond in space film.  Moonraker is Outer Space Bond, it's also a remake of You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me and pieces of scenes lifted from about every other Bond film, a disjointed sloppy mess.  

Roger Moore is really walking through this film.  Even he can't seem to work up a lot of energy in this one.  The lead Bond girl isn't really much of a girl.  Lois Chiles is hopeless as an actor but I guess she fit the bill as an attractive age appropriate love interest for Moore.  The producer brought back the character "Jaws" for this film but they had to turn him into a good guy who helps Bond this time box office demands being what they were. 

Moonraker is a film that essentially just bumbles along from one action set piece to another, a boat chase, another boat chase, a fight, another fight, another fight, battle in space a la Star War the list is kind of endless.

However, Moonraker has a few things to keep a person watching.  The amazing skydiving fight scene done with real stunt men is very cool.  Ken Adam's sets particularly towards the end of the film with the space station and the Moonraker base.  The special effects by Derek Meddings are at a very high standard.  Music by John Barry.  Overall the production has that glossy expensive look that the producer Albert Broccoli brought to all of the Bond films there was never any cheapskate sets or locations while he was producing.

For all the work that went into the film, its too bad it wasn't just a little better.

126 minutes written by Christopher Wood.

1973 - MASSACRE IN ROME, interesting true World War II story.

Probably not a great film but a very interesting one.  In 1944 as the Allies were closing in on Rome, Italian resistance fighters killed 33 German soldiers.  In retaliation the Germans killed 330 Italians and buried them in a mine in Rome.  The film tells the story of the efforts of an Italian priest played by Marcello Mastroianni  to stop the German commander played by Richard Burton. 

The director George Pan Cosmatos was not known for making this kind of film.  He was usually associated with big budget action films like, Rambo, Cobra and The Cassandra Crossing.  On this film he actually has a screenwriting credit.

For a couple of past their prime acting hams, Burton and Mastroianni are pretty restrained.  I almost believed for a minute that they were real characters.  Burton has always been kind of a sad case as an actor, I guy who kind of threw away his talent during his career.  He is actually pretty good in this film. 

Massacre in Rome has some interesting criticisms of the Catholic Church, the Vatican and the Pope who if he didn't sanction it made no effort to stop it.  Probably the most depressing aspect of this film is the brutality of the killing the Germans committed.  A further example of the human race's ability to inflect pain and suffering on their own species.   

110 minutes, written by Robert Katz and George Pan Cosmatos.

2012 - JACK REACHER, a decent crime thriller

 A shot at reviving the movie crime thriller.  Tom Cruise is some sort of mysterious former army super cop investigator.  He's been called in to investigate a supposedly random mass shooting incident.  

In films like this the trick is in the storytelling and the director/writer Christopher McQuarrie does a decent job of keeping the plot straight and the action moving along so it all doesn't seem to improbable.

The acting is low key, even the female lead Rosamund Pike plays i so cool it's almost like she is in an episode of Dragnet.  Cruise is Cruise so if you like Tom Cruise playing a super cool tough guy you will like this film.  A very odd piece of casting is German director Werner Herzog as some sort of Russian bad guy who is behind the plot.

If you enjoy a decent old style car chase and lots of people getting their heads banged together you will probably greatly enjoy this throw back to and old style glossy crime thriller.

130 minutes.

2012 - THE AMAZING SPIDER MAN, or Spiderman redux

Emma Stone is Gwen Stacey and she's as cute as a kitten. That's about it for this redo of Spiderman. Sam Raimi the original director of the first three films walked away from the franchise, Sony pictures turned around hired the inexperienced Marc Webb to direct the film. 

The decision to reboot this series is about as cynical as you can get.  This is a watchable film but nothing special and it's all by the books.  What this film is about is a studio unable to walk away from a money making series.

Marc Webb may have been the director but the studio is calling the shots.  All the fights are computer  generated action images, the editing is frantic and all over the place and the plot is "been there done that."  This isn't an awful film just an unnecessary one.

Doesn't anyone who watches these superhero films find it a little odd that once one of these super hero guys shows up with their special powers a super villain just happens to pop up at the same time.

 Just didn't care about this one.

136 minutes

1976 - KING KONG, first remake.

Long and kind of lame remake of the original film.  The writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. the guy who created the Batman TV series with Adam West wrote a semi spoofy version of the original film.  John Guillermin a director the studio could push around was hired.  The producer was the eccentric Italian Dino De Laurentis who had worked with Fellini on La Strada and Nights of the Cabiria along with Orca, The White Buffalo, Lipstick and Death Wish.

The cast had competent actors like Jeff Bridges, Rene Auberjonois, John Randolph, Ed Lauter and Charles Grodin.  But the film also had the De Laurentis discovery, model turned actress Jessica Lange who De Laurentis hired because she had "big boobs."  Lange is pretty hopeless in this film, she plays her character like she is channeling another "big boob" actress Marilyn Monroe. 

This is a very 70's film, the bad guy is the evil oil company and there is an overall campy tone that pervades the entire film.  The special effects are the old Toho studios trick of sticking a guy in a monster suit (in this case a monkey suit) and having him stomp around miniature jungle and New City sets.  De Laurentis played fast and lose with the production facts claiming that a 40 foot robotic gorilla would play Kong.  In fact an actual full scale replica was built but barely worked and never looked like the guy in the monkey suit.

What entertainment there is in this film pretty much comes from Charles Grodin as the snarky oil executive trying to exploit Kong.  The film has some good photography from the cinematographer Richard Kline.

134 minutes.

1982 - STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, paired up with 1967 - SPACE SEED

Double feature night at the local neighborhood theater which can't make up it's mind whether it wants to show independent films or old classic films.  Anyway we zipped over to watch Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan and much too my surprise they showed the original episode Space Seed which the film was based on. 

Well, Space Seed is from Season One of the original cast when the series was very fresh.  It looks like a television show, a lot of light on the sets everywhere to put it mildly.  Forgot how sexist the show was when it came to women, those Star Fleet uniforms sure are short and tight.  Ricardo Montalban is as over the top and hammy as he was in The Wrath of Kahn, he is a good villain for Kirk to go up against. Actually a pretty fun episode of the series which had had a lot of crappy shows particularly in the third season.

However all hail Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, the first real Star Trek film.  The troublesome Gene Roddenberry was pushed out of the film after making a mess out of Star Trek The Motion Picture.  His replacement Harv Bennett television producer of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman was brought in to put together another Star Trek film.  It was Bennett who realized Space Seed could be a jumping off point for another Star Trek film.  When you get right down to it Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn is really just another episode of the old television series. 

After cutting the necessary deals with the cast, Bennett hired Nicholas Meyer and inexperienced director to shoot the film.  Meyer did an uncredited rewrite of the script and actually managed to get the old feeling of the show in the film something Roddenberry completely failed to do.

 A very enjoyable big screen version of the television series.

Space Seed 50 minutes.

Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Kahn  113 minutes.

1964 - FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, a Ray Harryhausen film with plot and characters for a change.

Ray Harryhausen's producer Charles H. Schneer purchased H. G. Welles novel of a trip to the moon and I will assume was probably responsible for hiring the excellent screenwriter Nigel Kneale to adapt the book.  Kneale added a very clever modern prologue and epilogue to the the film and even fleshed out the characters which included the completely unnecessary love interest.  The end result was a very good science fiction film with a lot of British humor and charm.

The cast was an unusually good one with Edward Judd and a very eccentric Lionel Jefferies as the lead characters along with American actor Martha Hyer who is not too bad in the typical heroine role.  Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves without letting the special effects get in the way

There actually aren't a lot of the famous Harryhausen animated special effects in this film.  There was no way he could have animated the dozens and dozens of Selenites that live inside the moon.  Still, the models and miniatures are extremely well done and the set design primarily done by Harryhausen is quite impressive.  The music by Laurie Johnson is effective and captures the proper Victorian mood of this film.

First Men IN the Moon is kind of a forgotten film classic in the science fiction/fantasy genre.

103 minutes.

1981 - CLASH OF THE TITANS, Ray Harryhausen's last film.

Ray Harryhausen's last film and in a lot of ways this is one of the last films to be made with "old fashioned"  Hollywood style special effects.  Star Wars essentially killed this type of film.

A very good print of this film shows the separation of Harryhausen's special effects and the live action footage shot usually on location.  Frankly at times the blending of the two films looks mighty bad.  Harryhausen's black and white films always seemed to match the two separate pieces of film together a lot smoother. 

For a fantasy film, the producer Charles H. Schneer was able to rope quite a few "distinguished" British actors like, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom and Susan Fleetwood.  The film also contains some odd shots of female nudity which was extremely atypical for these films.

Harryhausen retired after this film mostly due to "repetitive strain injury" and Hollywood's lack of interest in 3-D animation.  Clash of the Titans is fun to watch and it does have a couple of outstanding sequences.  Could have really done without the mechanical owl Bubo.

118 minutes.

2013 - THE LAST STAND - older Arnold, same old stuff

Arnold's back in the movie biz after his time in politics and dealing with a rather messy personal life.  Older and attempting to do the same kind of film he did in the 1980's The Last Stand is essentially one of his 80's films with some nods to Arnold's age.

Seen it all before, Arnold is a small time sheriff who has to fight off a gang of international (what else) drug dealers.  He has a motley band of helpers who between them and the bad guys have enough firepower to take out a middle eastern country.

Anyway the rest of the story could probably have been phoned in by cultish South Korean director Kim Ji-Woon who is apparently trying to make a straightforward Hollywood action film after coming off a series of very strange South Korean films.

I get that Arnold understands what his core action audience wants to see, over the top violence.   However it seems to me it was probably time for a little more tinkering with the formula instead of just presenting the usual action stuff.

A time passer or waster whatever you prefer to all it.

107 minutes.

1984 - JANE AUSTIN'S MAFIA - not funny

Jane Austin's Mafia is a comedy which spoofs gangster movies. Among the films being sent up are, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Casino, Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump for some reason.  This movie is not very funny.

The director Jim Abrahams was part of the Zuker Abrahams Zuker team (ZAZ) that stopped being funny almost immediately after Airplane.

The formula for ZAZ films was the same as the Mel Brooks films, the movie parody.  ZAZ just took Brook's shtick and ramped it up by increasing the number of jokes in their films.  The theory being if you get a few bad ones,  you will get a lot of good ones and the audience won't really care about the bad ones.

In Jane Austin's Mafia it looks like Abrahams got the formula backwards.

84 minutes.

1970 - ZABRISKIE POINT, flawed but impressive study of American culture circa 1970.

Antonioni's look at America should have been a masterpiece of film making.  However his decision to cast two non actors, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin created deep flaws in Zabriskie Point which affected the overall film.  Antonioni's gamble that the audience would identify with his two main characters simply did not work.  Professionals like Rod Taylor. G. D. Spradlin and Paul Fix really demonstrate the ineptitude of the performances of "Mark and Daria."

Yet, this film has some strong points to make about American consumerism and the culture that created it.  If Antonioni at times stumbles into pretentiousness at least he's trying to say something.  Obviously scenes such as the group orgy at Death Valley's Zabriskie Point and the final scenes of destruction in Arizona are over the top, but they are extremely well done.

At the time this film was released, American critics clobbered it with some of the worst reviews a major director had ever received.  The 70's counterculture audience that MGM hoped would make the film a success failed to show up and the film was a fairly big budget disaster for 1970.  The film's criticism of the American way of life probably hit a little to close to home for the public.

A major asset to Zabriskie Point is the cinematography by an Italian photographer Alfio Contini,  The film is very impressive to look at,

110 minutes.

1995 - BEFORE SUNRISE, you will need to wake up from your movie nap before sunrise.

Out came the reviews, there is another one of these "Before" movies being released.   The latest in the series Before Midnight.  Before Midnight is getting good reviews, particularly by romantic liberal critics looking for a literate, smart love story about two sophisticated people.  

I headed to my collection and dusted off my old DVD's of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, eager to see the first two films before I headed out to the theater to see what everyone was raving about. 
"Gee I wonder why I never got around to watching these films before" I thought.  Over 90 minutes later I knew.  Before Sunrise is really boring.

The meandering talk of the two leads Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy is not in the least bit interesting.  It reminds me of the old definition of writing a lazy love story, get two people together and have them say dumb things to each other for a couple of hours.  

After forcing myself to finish this turkey I now realize that I am not giving Woody Allen enough credit for doing this kind of picture even is his stuff isn't always up to par.  The one positive of this film,  Julie Delpy speaks very good English.

101 minutes, written by Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan.