2010 - THE EXTRAORDINRY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC-SEC or Adele: Rise of the Mummy

Finally an adventure film featuring a female lead that actually gets it right.  After sitting through the terrible Lara Croft films this piece of whimsy from Luc Besson a director not exactly known for his light touch i.e. The Transporter series.

This film is based on a comic book series and mixes two plots.  One involves a pterosaur on the loose in Paris during the early 1900's and a bunch of Egyptian mummies brought back to life.

The heroine Adle Blanc-Sec manages to interact with all this craziness without running around in extremely tight or cleavage enhancing outfits.  She also doesn't perform ridiculously over the top action stunts that would seriously injure or pretty much kill anyone else.  However she does have a brain in her which she actually uses. 

Probably one of the better adventure films I have seen in a long time.

107 minutes.

2013 - SAVING MR BANKS or portrait of an artist as a terrible person.

If you having a burning desire to watch a film about the creation of the Disney version of Mary Poppins, this film is for you.  Saving Mr. Banks is a long trudge back and forth between the author P.L. Travers tragic childhood in Australia and her bitchy behavior with Disney's creative team during the making of Mary Poppins.

It's pretty clear as the film goes on with it's crisscross story structure that the audience is going to understand why Travers ended up the way she did. In this film Travers finally sees the light when the Sherman Brothers the composers of Mary Poppins stick in the "Lets's Go Fly a Kite" song which brings Travers around.  After about 90 minutes of setting up what an emotionally damaged person Travers is this seems kind of like a cheat to wrap up the story.  Only in a Hollywood movie and particularly a Disney movie,  could the core issue of P. L. Travers tragic relationship with her alcoholic father be resolved with a song

Andrews, Disney, Travers

 

The film has a good cast.  Tom Hanks is a likable guy who plays the likable Walt Disney.  Emma Thompson is a pro and does what she can do to soften the character.  The rest of the cast is filled in with decent actors like Paul Giamatti and Colin Farrell.  The director John Hancock has done a decent job keeping a way to long movie perking along.

However, 20 minutes digging around on the internet reveals that Travers was a lot nastier person than she was as portrayed by Emma Thompson.  In particular she mostly ruined the life of her adopted son and apparently was shunned by her family towards the end of her life. 

125 minutes

2008 - NO SUBTITLES NECESSARY: LASZLO & VILMOS

Another documentary for me on cinematographers.  Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond a couple of Hungarian film students fled Hungry during the Soviet invasion of the 1950's.  They ended up in Hollywood eventually shooting about any low budget job they could get while working their way up.  They hooked up with Roger Corman and finally hit the big time working for directors like Spielberg, De Palma and Bogdanovich.  They come off as middle aged teddy bears at time this documentary was made but I suspect that they were a couple of pretty tough characters to survive in the film business.

This is the usual interview type format for these kind of documentaries.  The list of people they have worked with is pulled out, everyone sits for a few minutes and sings their praises, there are lots of film clips of their work, etc.

Probably the most interesting stuff is Zsigmond's time working with Steven Spielberg.  Zsigmond had shot Spielberg's first film The Sugarland Express and later Spielberg used him on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  There are references to Spielberg and studio firing him five times during the making of that film but the reason for their conflict is never explained.  Zsigmond makes a cryptic remark that he wanted Spielberg to film it like a movie but it is never explained what that meant.  Kovacs shot Peter Bogdanovich's better films and probably was a major influence on him.  He also has a cinematographer credit on Ghostbusters of all things.  This guy worked in about every genre in the film business. 

This is a film more for movie buffs than the general public but it is a lesson in "paying your dues."

104 Minutes.

1996 - HARD EIGHT, a good study of some low life characters

This a decent little drama about gamblers getting by in Reno.  The director/writer Paul Thomas Anderson has made a film that is essentially about four characters and their interactions with each other.

Philip Baker Hall is the old guy who's been around a while and knows all the tricks.  John C. Reilly is his pretty dense protegee.  Samuel L. Jackson is some sleeze ball who knows Reilly.  Finally, Gwyneth Paltrow is the cocktail waitress/hooker who Reilly falls for.  All of the cast is very good and it was kind of nice to see Paltrow play a character who wears too much makeup and isn't very smart. 

I have to give the director/writer Paul Thomas Anderson credit, he could have fallen for the colored light eye candy of the casino setting but he manages to control himself and focus on the actors.

It's nice to watch a film where the story moves along because of the characters instead of being held hostage by elaborate action pieces for a change.

102 minutes.

2013 - MAN OF STEEL, It's another Superman movie

An elaborate remake of the Christopher Reeve Superman II film and is it ever elaborate. Stuff gets smashed, a lot of stuff.  Superman fights his nemesis evil General Zod.  Lois Lane still can't stay out of trouble.  Perry White has a race change, he's now a black man instead of an old white guy.  Jimmy Olson has a sex change she's now called Jenny Olson.  The one thing that hasn't changed is a movie studio's need to get yet another super-hero franchise going.

The main trouble with this Superman film is that it wants to top every other Superman film.  So you get lots and lots of spectacular destruction effects and they go on forever.  The film was criticized for using 911 imagery as entertainment and I would have to agree with that.  The other thing this film can be criticized for is it's real lack of humor.  I think there were probably 1 or 2 jokes in a film that runs over 2 hours.  This is just some real serious stuff even though it involves a guy running around in a cape and tights for most of running time.

I can't see where they thought they could go to make a series out of Superman after this elaborate film.  Superman has already taken out a super bad guy equal to him so who does he take on next God?  Apparently they are going to team him up with Batman since that series came to an end but who really cares about that except Warner Brothers studio which is hoping to make a lot of super cash with those two in the same movie.

143 minutes.

2013 - FAST AND FURIOUS 6, another film in the series

If you saw Fast Five...

130 minutes.

2013 - INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, another dour Coen Brothers character study

If the studio that put up the money for Inside Llewyn Davis was expecting another hit film and soundtrack like the Coen's previous semi musical film, "O Brother Where Out Thou?" weren't they in for a surprise.  Instead of a bunch of colorful southern characters and some zippy bluegrass musical numbers what they got was this depressing character study with a bunch of downer folk music tunes.  I also knew this film was in trouble when the lead was sharing scenes with a kitty cat.

The cast was the usually carefully considered group.  However Oscar Isaac is no George Clooney.  Justin Timberlake was cast as a more ambitious and successful folk singer than Llewyn Davis but he doesn't really make much of an impression.  Carey Mulligan plays Timberlake's sort of shrewish wife.  In fact the entire cast with the exception of John Goodman is just a downer.  I don't have a problem with a film having an unlikable leading character or characters but I still have to have a reason to be interested in them.

The New York and Chicago locations are well chosen, the film does have a feeling for the early 1960's.  The photography however while well done is as big a downer as the characters in this film.  The Coens decided on a muted color pallet with lots of smoke and shadows which only contributes to the overall impression of utter futility and pointlessness that hangs over this film.

The Coens usually make their films on the cheap so I would guess that although this film was not particularly popular with the general public, it probably broke even or made money.  Inside Llewyn Davis is one of those films that seems made for the intelligentsia.

105 minutes, screenplay by the Coens as usual.

2013 - GRAVITY , visually impressive with sort of OK story

Well this film looks great.  That computer stuff is getting better every year.  All they will have to do is get the price down on these computer special effects is to get rid of these pesky actors with their million dollar salaries.

Apparently almost all of this film was computer generated which might account for the weird sort of soulless look astronaut Sandra Bullock has throughout a lot of this film.  The film is also shot in 3D so a viewer viewing it in 3D has to watch a bunch of junk float around while trying to concentrate on the story.  Gravity also has some long shots with no editing as the computer camera whips around astronauts and spaceships.  It's impressive but to me seems kind of pointless coming off more like a "look what we can do with this technology" stunt.

Probably the chief issue I have with this film is the story.  As if it isn't dramatic enough that Russian space junk is going to destroy our heroine, you have to sit through some personal Sandra Bullock drama about a dead kid and her decision to give up fighting to survive.  The resolution to this is really lame since it involves ghostly hallucinations or something.  The survival of Sandra Bullock in space is actually cribbed from George Pal's Destination Moon which also used a fire extinguisher as a rescue device.  There are just no original ideas anymore.

It seems that one of the goals of Gravity is to take a shot at being on the king of the science fiction film mountain that 2001:  A Space Odyssey occupies.  But for all of the advanced technology that this film used it can't touch that film's greatness.

91 minutes, written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón.

2014 - 30 FOR 30 THE PRICE OF GOLD, remembering the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan skating drama

Relive the 1994 Winter Olympics with this jump back to the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan skating spectacle. 

I had almost forgotten about all the media craziness that went on while this epic drama played out on television.  The working class girl with no money vs the coiffed and anointed ice queen who was attacked about six weeks before the Olympics by a bunch of pretty dumb thugs trying to advance the skating career of Tonya Harding.

This is essentially a talking heads movie with the usual cast of "you are there" characters chirping in with their eyewitness accounts.  The documentary is also loaded up with lots of footage of the events that surrounded this epic drama.  This film is quite the nostalgia wallow when all is said and done.

The ultimate irony of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal was that Kerrigan went on to win only a silver metal at the Olympics that year but all the publicity that she got from the kneecapping made her famous and a millionaire.

90 minutes.

1967 - THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS, is not one of the better Chabrol films

Claude Chabrol filmed this thriller about murder in a family running a champagne vineyard.  This film was shot simultaneously in French and English.  The English version which I saw is a little shall we say stilted.

The story is also very slow moving with things finally picking up during the second half of the film.  Chabrol was usually compared to Hitchcock when he moved into the suspense genre but Chabrol himself felt that Fritz Lang was more of an influence on his films.

The cast of The Champagne Murders included Stephanie Audran, Chabrol's wife at the time and Anthony Perkins which probably had a lot to do with comparing this film to a Hitchcock thriller. 

Not the best Chabrol film that I have seen but it has it's moments particularly the stunning overhead shot towards the end of the film. 

105 minutes, written by four writers, never a good sign, William Benjamin, Claude Brule, Derek Prouse and Paul Gegauff.