2015 - ALOHA, trying to be fair to this comedy/drama

With this cast, it seemed only fair to give this film a chance.  However critics just killed this film when it came out particularly heaping their ire on the writer/director Cameron Crowe.  Sadly this is a case where the bad reviews are well deserved.

It seems that Cameron Crowe can't seem to do anything right these days.  At one time he was the golden boy with films like Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous.  He's apparently in movie hell with junk like We Bought a Zoo, Elizabethtown and Vanilla Sky.  Although I would have to say I have never really cared for any of his films after Jerry Maguire.

I suppose a plot recap would be in order but suffice it to say the film isn't worth it.  The film shows signs of some serious editing and it's well know that Sony Pictures hated the film.  But honestly picking on this film is like stepping on ants, it's easy to snuff them out.

Cameron Crowe is know to be a devotee of Billy Wilder and even wrote a book about him.  Crowe sure didn't seem to learn the any lesson from Wilder, the chief one being "if you have trouble in your third act you better go back and see what's going wrong in your first act."

105 minutes.

1996 - DAYLIGHT, Stallone to the rescue

Jewel thieves have blown up some tunnel in New York City leaving people trapped as the water from the river or ocean or somewhere starts to rise.  Lucky for them taxi driver Sylvester Stallone who used to be a firefighter/rescue guy has been trained in saving people from underground tunnels.  Yes, it's The Poseidon Adventure in a tunnel.

This film has a good cast, Amy Brenneman, Claire Bloom, Barry Newman, Viggo Mortensen and Dan Hedaya.  The tunnel set is actually very impressive, I think I read somewhere that they actually built it full scale on some Italian soundstage at Cinecitta Studios, apparently the production team could flood it, that's pretty cool.

Otherwise, seen it all before.

114 minutes.

1987 - HE MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, yes I sat through this

Total no brainer, all they had to do was follow the crappy animated TV cartoon from the 1980's.  The film was so inept they couldn't even get that right. 

The story has the gang from the TV show, He-Man, Teela, Man-At-Arms, Skeletor and Evil-Lyn but that's about all they got right  Where are the sexy costumes for the women?  What is a time travel plot featuring Courtney Cox of all people doing in this? Finally, why is the action so inept, all they had to do was copy Star Wars laser battles to keep the kids happy.

The film was a flop, even prepubescent boys weren't taken in by the poor quality of this film.

 

106 minutes, written by David Odell.

1949 - UNDER CAPRICORN, a very odd Hitchcock failure

The dream of many of the major Hollywood film directors after World War II was to set up their own production company and film stories they were interested in.  John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens and Alfred Hitchcock took the plunge in the late 1940's.  For a number of reasons these companies failed.  Hitchcock is somewhat typical of what happened to these directors.

For his company "Transatlantic Pictures," Hitchcock chose two films.  Rope and Under Capricorn.
Rope was hardly going to be an "audience pleaser."  A play about homosexual murders filmed in very long takes, the film was a financial failure.  Hitchcock moved on to Under Capricorn.

  

Even with one of Hollywood's biggest stars this film is just a dull mess.  For a director who probably spent more time in the office working on his screenplays it's hard to believe Hitchcock even read this one.  There is just lots and lots of talk.  The story is secondary to this chatter.  Joseph Cotton and Ingrid Bergman live in 1800's Australia.  Cotton is an ex-convict who has built a fortune for himself.  Bergman is his wife who has a mysterious past.  Into this mix comes Michael Wilding as some sort of aristocratic fop who stirs things up.  However I'm not sure of the plot since my eyes glazed over about an hour into this thing with the constant gabbing of the main characters.

Probably the only noteworthy aspect of Under Capricorn is Hitchcock's continued use of the long take.  The camera rolls around flying past doors and walls to what seems little purpose other than to call attention to itself.  It may be an interesting experiment for movie nerds but it seems completely pointless for storytelling.  If fact most of the rolling camera shots were apparently cut from the film because they tended to slow the action down.

It can be appreciated that Hitchcock wanted to get out of the suspense genre occasionally and he did do that with Rebecca.  But in this case it would seem that Under Capricorn was just a completely failure to understand what he was getting into.  This film was just a real ordeal to sit through

117 minutes, written by Hume Cronyn and James Bridie.

2012 - THE EMPEROR, another piece of pretentious crap

Was Emperor Hirohito a part of the Japanese War planning efforts against the United States?  Is he a possible war criminal who should be tried?  General MacArthur sends one of his top aides General Bonner Fellers to investigate.

However Fellers has other things on his mind than the complicity of the Emperor of Japan during World War II.  Feller seems to spend most of his time looking for his old Japanese girlfriend, after all priorities are priorities. 

This film is just a piece of crap.  You get no insight into the Japanese character other than the Japanese can be real nice or real mean.  The film is a complete failure in what could have been an interesting story about the American Occupation of Japan.

Utterly worthless as a movie and as the old saying goes it's a couple of hours I won't be getting back.

106 minutes.

1958 - TOUCH OF EVIL, on Blu Ray

Touch of Evil  now exists in 3 different versions.  The original Universal release, the preview release, and the reedited version based on a memo Welles sent to Universal after the first preview resulted in Universal deciding to add additional scenes for plot clarification.  I'm most familiar with the original release version however I decided to watch the reedit.  I really didn't see much difference aside from dropping the credits and music during the famous long take at the beginning of the film.

This is Welles at his best.  He has complete control of the actors, atmosphere and some astonishing camera compositions.  It's hard to believe that Universal dumped this film without much marketing support.  You would think just having Charlton Heston in the cast would have been enough motivation to get behind it.

Welles put together a pretty amazing cast, starting with Charlton Heston in makeup as a Mexican police offier.  Janet Leigh is his wife.  Welles is of course the corrupt police Captain Hank Quinlan, Dennis Weaver is to put it mildly an eccentric hotel manager. An old Welles favorite Akim Tamiroff is "Uncle Joe Grandi the head of a criminal gang on a Mexican/American border town.

The cast also had an actor Joseph Calleia a Hollywood actor who Welles had seen perform on the Broadway stage before he went to Hollywood.  Welles never forgot him and was eager to cast him in Touch of Evil.  Calleia is very good as Hank Quinlan's devoted partner.  Finally Welles was able to get Marlene Dietrich to perform an extended cameo in the film and Welles old friend Joseph Cotten shows up in a small role.

This a great film noir, Welles always had a fondness for this genre.  The film is a lot of fun to watch. There is some great quotable dialog when you are not absorbed in the visual.  One of Welles best films.

95 minutes, screenplay by who else, Orson Welles.

1974 - THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GRIZZLY ADAMS, is cheap and inept

A cheaply made film about a smelly mountain man who's best friend is a smelly grizzly bear.  Fleeing into the woods for a "crime he didn't commit."  Grizzly Adams learns to survive in the woods with the help of a native American.  Adams also has a special bond with the animals which makes him a sort of frontier Dr Doolittle.

This is a film made on the cheap to put it mildly.  There are no scenes filmed at night.  The cast is made up of about three actors and none of them actually speak.  Instead the entire film is literally narration.  My guess is that the film's producers were to cheap to actually film with sound on location and found it a lot easier to just have someone blab over the footage.

The film features spectacular scenery shot probably on location in Utah.  The studio was Sunn Classic Pictures which specialized in this cheaply made outdoor film stuff which was aimed primarly at the Walt Disney don't offend anybody family market.  Sunn Classic would load the TV screen up with so many ads about their films they actually managed to create an event.  I have vivid memories of constantly seeing ads for this film over and over while watching TV during the 1970's.  As it turns out you can fool all of the people all of the time.

 

93 minutes, written by Lawrence Dobkin.

1939 - THE RAINS CAME - another impressive film from 20th Century Fox and Darryl F Zanuck

Another well made classic Hollywood film from 20th Century Fox and in particular Darryl F. Zanuck . When Zanuck found a story he felt was good he would bring all of the resources of 20th Century Fox to the production.

Zanuck hired MGM studio director Clarence Brown.  Brown was a film director who brought out the best in actors and knew how to produce quality work within the studio system.  Zanuck put together an excellent cast which included Tyrone Power, Nigel Bruce, Myrna Loy and George Brent.  Zanuck also spent lavishly on the sets and the special effects which still look very good.

The story involves a rather chaste romance between an Englishwoman and an Indian doctor played.  If everyone in the film is for the most part played by Caucasian actors, well that's Hollywood casting in the 1930's I guess.

The fact that a 77 year old film can still hold up and be involving is a tribute to Zanuck's skill as a producer.   Zanuck always knew that when it was all said and done a good story was the most important aspect in putting together an interesting and good drama. 

103 minutes.

2012 - THIS IS 40, a really long drawn out comedy

Since Judd Apatow wrote, directed and literally put his wife and daughters in this film the assumption would  be that this is an extremely autobiographical film.  It is also a long meandering film.

There is funny stuff but this film just goes on and on with really no plot to speak of.  Apatow also loaded up the supporting cast with a lot of actors that show up in films he has directed and produced.  This group is reminiscent of John Ford's famous stock company that constantly showed up in his films sometimes almost to an absurd level.  That's the same issue with this film.  Melissa McCarthy and Lena Dunham are friends of the director but when you stick them in your film their personalities rob the film of any verisimilitude.

The real family

Not a perfect film but not a failure either.  The film really needed more structure to it.  Apatow was probably too close to the subject matter to pull a really good film out of it.

133 minutes.

1963 - HERZOG BLAUBARTS BURG - a return to form for Michael Powell

After the disaster that was The Queen's Guards, a career low point for director Michael Powell.  Powell's production designer Hein Heckroth arranged for Powell to collaborate with the opera singer Norman Foster who was producing a Bartok opera called Herzog Blaubarts Burg.  Powell's film version of this opera shows that he still knew how to pull together a film that could have been an unwatchable experience especially when it comes to opera on film.

Powell and Heckroth combined color and almost abstract sets for a fascinating film mixing music and visual images.  This short film is well worth a look.

60 minutes.

1941 - CONFIRM OR DENY, a good 40's war drama

40's star Don Ameche is the editor of a news wire service sort of based on the Associated Press or United Press International.  Joan Bennett is the teletype operator in the office.  Ameche is the brash American looking for a scoop at any price, Bennett is the more reserved British citizen trying to keep Ameche from revealing to much about England's war efforts for the sake of a good story.

This 20th Century Fox film made during World War II was a surprise to me.  It's very entertaining and moves along at a fast pace.  Don Ameche was always sort of a lightweight leading man for Fox but here he's pretty good playing a variation on the Walter Burns character from The Front Page.

It's almost refreshing to see a film that doesn't have a torrid office romance going on between Ameche and Bennett.  The film stays focused on the story and the background of the London Blitz.  Frankly all this lovey dovey stuff always seems out of place in these war movies when people are supposedly fighting for their lives.

Confirm or Deny was actually started by Fritz Lang who directed it for a couple of weeks before he either got sick or quit the film.  Archie Mayo a decent studio director finished the film.  A very entertaining film.

74 minutes, written by Joseph Swerling.

1961 - THE HAPPY THIEVES, the unhappy audience.

This thing seemed like it was constantly showing up on the 10:30 late show when I was growing up.  I remember it was supposed to be some kind of heist thriller comedy story but all I really remember was it involved carrying paintings around a museum.  At the time I thought the film was pretty lame and guess what, the film is still pretty lame.

Rita Hayworth and Rex Harrison are the stars of this so called "caper" film.  But only Rex Harrison as one of those dashing thief types is actually any good.  In fact I think it's safe to say that Harrison drags this film along with a lot of charm and a very smooth performance.

The Happy Thieves is really not worth anyone's time.

88 minutes, written by John Gay.

1938 - TOO MUCH JOHNSON, the lost Orson Welles sort of silent film comedy.

Not a whole lot to say about this one.  Probably for Orson Welles fans only.  Welles was interested in doing a farce and had the idea to stage silent movie like scenes in between or during acts of the play Too Much Johnson.

Welles filmed for 10 days and edited the film.  Apparently the entire film part of the play was to run around 30 minutes.  Due to a number of reasons, most of which involved money,  the film sequences were never shown with the play.   Too Much Johnson was not a theatrical success.  However the idea of merging film and theater while not a new one was another typically audacious one from Welles.

Young Welles directs Too Much Johnson

Welles lifelong friend actor Joseph Cotton was certainly game during the film sequences.  Running around, climbing up on rooftops, zipping down fire escapes.  He certainly went beyond the call of duty when it came to performing for Welles.

Too Much Johnson is proof that Orson Welles was exposed to filming and editing 3 years before Citizen Kane came out.  Welles always portrayed himself has a self taught filmmaker who just magically stepped on a sound stage and produced a masterpiece like Kane.  Finally, it should be noted that this edited version of Too Much Johnson is quite delightful.  Welles was apparently a great admirer of silent films.

66 minutes (edited down around 30 minutes)

1947 - THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, very disappointing Orson Welles film.

The story goes that Orson Welles ran out of money during the production of some Broadway musical he was directing.  He persuaded Columbia Pictures President Harry Cohn to send him the money and in exchange he would write and direct a noir film with his wife, sexy Rita Hayworth.

Apparently what Harry Cohn got for his money was a talky and confusing mess of a film.  Welles even dared to change Hayworth's look, cutting her her and coloring it blonde. much to Cohn's displeasure.  Cohn demanded lots of cuts and reshooting of scenes but the film never came together.

The Fun House and Hall of Mirrors sequences are brilliant pieces of film making but they occur towards the end of the film and both sequences together are about 10 minutes long hardly worth sitting through this turkey.  You can probably find them on YouTube and save yourself some time.

Considering the mess this film is it would appear that Welles just had no interest in this film.  The Lady From Shanghai is not recommended viewing.

87 minutes

1958 - THE TROLLENBERG TERROR aka THE CRAWLING EYE

This low budget "Aliens invade the Earth" film has the advantage of being scripted by Hammer pictures ace screenwriter Jimmy Sangster although it it not a Hammer Production.  Sangster was a writer who could write in the low budget horror/science fiction genre and still if maybe not gold at least make some silver out of a script full of hay. 

In the Swiss town of Trollenberg the mountain near the town has a mysterious cloud which never moves.  As climbers approach the cloud they either vanish or come back acting strangely different.  In an attempt to figure this out Forrest Tucker of all people is the UN investigator trying to sort out this weirdness.  For an all British production which features all British actors, Tucker a rather larger than life personality is surprisingly restrained.  The cast also included future Walt Disney star Janet Munro who died at a very young age.

Jimmy Sangster's story certainly crammed a lot of stuff into it.  There's mind control, zombies, one eyed aliens and a decent amount of creepy atmosphere which runs throughout the film.  Make no mistake, this is still a "B" science fiction film but it's fairly well done for what it is.

84 minutes.

1984 - TOP SECRET, the follow up to the comedy Airplane

The followup to the Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker (ZAZ) hit Airplane is essentially the same formula as that film.  Load the story up with lots of scenes from different films and parody the crap out of them with lots and lots of jokes because it doesn't matter if some of the jokes are bad or poor you can be guaranteed that some jokes will hit their targets.

For Top Secret the ZAZ team decided to mix an Elvis movie with a World War II spy movie and set  it in contemporary East Berlin (still divided at the time this was filmed).  For the first hour or so everything seems to be working fairly well.  The jokes are mostly funny and the cast appears to be enjoying itself.  However at the halfway point, it's clear that the comedy starts to get less and less as the cleverness of the jokes descends into even more juvenile humor and lots of very tiresome and politically incorrect gay jokes which even managed to offend me.  By the end of the film Top Secret is so out of ideas the best it can come up with is a lame western saloon fight parody and a stupid Wizard of Oz joke.

The ZAZ team had everything going for it with this.  Christopher Challis was the director of photography, Maurice Jarre scored the music and a good supporting cast which featured Omar Scharif, Peter Cushing, Jeremy Kemp and Michael Gough.  Val Kilmer played the Elvis Presley like star Nick Rivers and he seemed to understand the material better than the writers.

Top Secret probably proved that the Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker formula of parodying old movies like they were on steroids may have been a one hit wonder.  Their subsequent films like Scary Movie 3, Scary Movie 4, and Scary Movie 5 only drive home the point of a comedy team out of ideas for the most part.

90 minutes

1935 - THE CALL OF THE WILD, a story about a dog is a movie about Clark Gable

William Wellman's film of Jack London's story of adventure and survival in the Alaskan wilderness told from the point of view of a dog named Buck got a major redo and was turned into a story about Clark Gable and Loretta Young falling in love in the wilderness while searching for gold.

Gable teams up with Jackie Oakie an actor usually playing comedy relief.  For a third credited actor Oakie isn't too obnoxious and actually plays off of Gable pretty well.   Clark Gable had the manly man act down pretty well by 1935.  In this film he has an affair with Loretta Young whose husband supposedly died on the trail looking for gold.

 

 In real life Young and Gable actually did have an affair (she claimed date rape) which resulted in a child.  Young then went through a series of maneuvers which had her putting her birth child up for adoption and then adopting the kid herself.

Back to the film.  The Call of the Wild is another well produced Daryl F. Zanuck production.  A lot of it was filmed on location in the Mount Baker National Forest near Seattle Washington.   Zanuck never had a problem shooting on location if it benefited the film.  Macho director William Wellman directed the film and it zips along for a quick 90 minutes.

Bottom line, charismatic Hollywood stars, classy production and on location photography add up to an entertaining film.

89 minutes, written by Gene Fowler and Leonard Praskins.