1979 - AN ALMOST PERFECT AFFAIR - pretty poor love story

A love story from a good but very erratic director, Michael Ritchie.  Ritchie has a very up and down list of films.  He would direct good films like Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Smile and The Bad News Bears and then there were the bad films.  Prime Cut, The Golden Child, Fletch Lives and The Island.  An Almost Perfect Affair is one of his bad films.

 

This is a love story set during the Cannes Film Festival.  A self involved independent film maker has a brief affair with the wife of an Italian film producer.  The independent film maker is at Cannes to peddle his dreary little 16mm film on the life of Gary Gilmore.  Through a  completely contrived circumstance he hooks up with an Italian producers wife.  The resulting romance is to put it mildly dull and very boring, Ritchie phoned this one.

The independent film maker is played by Keith Carradine who is essentially playing the same character he played in Altman's Nashville.  The wife is played by Monica Vitti as the usual larger than life Italian stereotype.  Vitti is definitely playing against type in this film.  Usually her best roles were as some angst ridden depressive woman in Antonioni's better films.  It's kind of dispiriting to watch her perform in this silly romantic comedy plus her English is not very good.

About the only fun to be had in this film are the background glimpses of film personalities such as entertainment reporter Rona Barrett, directors Sergio Leone and Paul Mazursky and actors George Peppard, Brooke Shields and Farrah Fawcett.  But these little cameos can't save this uninteresting film.

93 minutes, written by Walter Bernstein and Don Petersen.

1951 - THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, a little dated but still very good.

One of the better films in the science fiction film crazy of the 1950's. 20th Century Fox under the control of Daryl F. Zanuck paid attention to story and didn't go overboard with the special effects.  Studio director Robert Wise kept things moving along.  Wise had been a top editor at RKO and brought brisk pacing to a tightly constructed plot.  Bernard Herrmann was hired to compose the groundbreaking and unusual score which was a key component in the success of this film.

The film was well cast with character actor Michael Rennie as the spaceman Klaatu and a memorable robot called Gort.

The Day the Earth Stood Still with it's message of world peace and nuclear disarmament still holds up very well.  Probably the most dated aspect of the film is Klaatu's suggestion that earth adopt a Robot police force to monitor and stop the violent tendencies of human beings.  Somehow a robot police force consisting of lots of scary robots like Gort does not exactly sound like the best idea to promote world peace.

Still, this is one of the best science fiction films Hollywood ever produced.

92 minutes, written by Edmund H. North.

2015 - TOMORROWLAND - Disney's big summer movie bust

The critics hated it, the public stayed away from it and admittedly this film has some major story problems but it's hard to understand why this film was so disliked this is an entertaining summer film with a positive message. 

The film was directed by Brad Bird who was one of the leading animation directors for Pixar.  Bird moved into live action filming with one of those Tom Cruise Mission Impossible films which made a lot of money.  Bird actually does a very good job of keeping Tomorrowland moving along and sticks lots of inventive visual gags that make the film fun to watch.

The film stars George Clooney but the real lead is a young actor named Britt Robinson.  Robinson plays a female character who for a change isn't falling in love with vampires or is some sort of nymphomaniac.  It's hard enough to get major studios to make films with female characters as the main lead and since this film is considered a failure it will probably be a long time before it's attempted again.

Let's jump to the chase.  This is an entertaining film with story structure problems.  At least this film attempted a story.  When you compare this to something like Jurassic World which didn't even bother with a story the message for Hollywood is screw the attempt at intelligent summer films and bring on the people eating dinosaurs.

130 minutes

2015 - JURASSIC WORLD - DINOMITE!!!

A big stupid audience pleasing summer movie.  This rehash of Jurassic Park and mostly a lot of Toho Godzilla movies is making lots of money.  As producer George Pal proved many years ago, special effects can be the real stars of a movie.

The director is some guy named Colin Trevorrow but make no mistake the real directors of this film are the special effects computer guys who render all of these dinos in a computer. 

Nobody goes to these kinds of movies for the plot and characterizations but even for something like this the story telling seems might weak.  Contrived situations are created mostly for the purpose of watching the scary dinosaur eat lots of people but it's that PG-13 kind of violence so we don't actually see anyone really ripped apart.  This is after all a film for the entire family.

The actors are pretty much next to nothing as far as leaving an impression.  This won't be the career jump starter that Bryce Dallas Howard is looking for and the oddly unhumorous Chris Pratt is walking through this film mostly on the good will he got from The Guardians of the Galaxy.

Still when you get down to it, this movie is making a lot of money.

124 minutes.

1973 - BREEZY, boring pointless love story

This love story was directed by Clint Eastwood in his typical straightforward (i.e. boring, unimaginative) style.  This is your standard May/December romance between a middle aged real estate agent and a 70's hippie.

 

Eastwood hired old Hollywood pro William Holden who basically has to carry the entire film.  The young hippie girl is played by an actor named Kay Lenz who makes almost no impression.  In fact it's impossible to see what the weary Holden would see in this tiresome ditz.

It's amazing to think that after about 40 years directing films Eastwood's film technique has barely evolved past the level of a silent film.  You could have hired a competent 70's TV director and gotten the same results that Eastwood achieves in this film. 

A waste of time that can take it's place with many of Eastwood's other mediocre films such as The Eiger Sanction. The Gauntlet, Pink Cadillac and Blood Work to name a few of the many.

108 minutes, written by Jo Heims.

1979 - CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO, Miyazaki's first feature.

Hayao Miyazaki, made the transition to features with this film based on an animated character named Arsene Lupin, a thief.  This was the second feature film featuring Lupin and it's an exciting action film.  

Miyazaki has taken stock action characters, the thief with a heart of gold, the evil Count, the bumbling police inspector and the innocent blonde girl in danger and somehow managed to make them work in a story about counterfeiters operating out of a castle with a dungeon no less.

The animation technique may look outdated and let's face it the characters are very cartoonish looking at times but Miyazaki turns these liabilities into  assets.  The pace of this film is so fast and the action scenes integrated into the plot are so well done,  a viewer will probably not be bothered by the rather primitive look that pervades the film at times.

Action movie directors could learn a thing or two about making these kinds of movies studying Castle of Cagliostro a few times

100 minutes, written by Haruya Yamazaki and Miyazaki.

1947 - UNCONQUERED, Another DeMille epic impressive and ridiculous.

Here he goes again.  DeMille films another historical epic where he uses American history to warp and shape it to his needs.  In this case it's the Pontiac Rebellion of 1763.  Or it's Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard vs white villain Howard De Silva who is selling what else, guns to the Indians.

All of the interesting DeMille stuff is here the methodical staging of scenes that are reminiscent of tableau's, the odd use of back project during the epic action scenes and most interestingly the manipulation of Paulette Goddard in some sort of sexual torture fetish scene.

As typical with DeMille, the actors are directed to play it very broad.  Since this is a larger than life story Gary Cooper can pull it off.  The underrated Paulette Goddard is the chief female that everyone slobbers over.  Goddard plays a slave so she is subject to all sorts of  the usual DeMille perversions.

Well how to rate this film?  The 40's technicolor is gorgeous, the mishmash of historical figures (oh look it's George Washington) is as wacky as usual.  The plot, overlong and convoluted as usual.  A typical late 40's DeMille film.

146 minutes, written by Charles Bennett, Fredric M. Frank, Jesse Louis Lasky Jr. and Jeanie MacPherson.

1978 - THE LAST WALTZ, the last time I watch this.

The third time on this film for me and it will be the last.  The Band, in their supposedly last appearance on stage performed  a concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.  Robbie Robertson a guitarist with the band got Martin Scorsese involved in filming  this bash.  Scorsese brought along a team of professional cinematographers and filmed in 35 mm instead of the usual grainy 16mm these kind of shows were shot in.  The result was a film with some pretty sharp images that looked unlike anything that had been seen in a concert film before.

Half the fun this time was reading up on the behind the scenes shenanigans that went on during the concert.  Levon Helm apparently was extremely pissed at Robertson and felt the film was mostly a Robbie Robertson ego trip.  Helm felt that Scorsese was entirely focused on Robertson and one thing  for sure is that Scorsese seems to have a major man crush on Robertson with all of the closeups of him inserted throughout the film. 

Well how's the film?  I have the same issues that I had with it the first time I saw it.  The Last Waltz is too damn long.  It's fun to see a lot of the guest stars such as Dr. John, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.  But really, Neil Diamond come on.  Also Scorsese's interviews with The Band are kind of stupid and incoherent with their talk of the number of skirts they chased and just some general incoherence that pervades all of their supposedly deep thoughts about music.  Apparently the drugs flowed freely during the making of this film.  

Still, the film is kind of a must see concert film.  The Last Waltz is well made and the musical numbers filmed in a studio are extremely well done.

117 minutes.