1972 - WAY OF THE DRAGON, Bruce Lee auteur

A film written and directed by Bruce Lee.  This is an unusual Bruce Lee movie in that he attempts to mix some comedy with the usual martial arts action stuff.

The plot involves Lee flying to Rome to save a Chinese restaurant that is being threatened by local gangsters.  The story is really just an excuse as usual for Bruce Lee to beat up a lot of guys which he does with his usual finesse. 

The film is rather poorly directed but once Lee gives up on the silly comedy at the beginning of the film and gets down to the fighting stuff the film finally comes to life.  Towards the end Bruce Lee takes on Chuck Norris who was in his prime as a martial artist.  Guess who wins.

As with most Bruce Lee films the martial arts fights are really something to watch.

100 minutes,  written by Bruce Lee.

2017 - BECOMING BOND, a film about a man who made a bad decision

The life story of one George Lazenby the one film James Bond who probably gets a footnote in film history as the man who turned down the James Bond film series after On Her Majesties Secret Service.  Probably one of the worst decisions made in the history of film production.

Lazenby narrates the film and comes off as an amusing fellow as he relates his life story to the camera which is inter cut with a series of recreations of his life.  Is it all true?  Who knows but it is pretty entertaining.   

Is this an important film?  Not really but it is kind of fun.  Did Lazenby make the worst career decision of his career?  Probably, but he comes off as a guy who learned to live with his life choice.

Worth a look.

92 minutes, written by  Josh Greenbaum.

1998: THE WARLORD BATTLE FOR THE GALAXY aka THE OSIRIS CHRONICLES

A bad science fiction film that Joe Dante directed.  This was a pilot for a science fiction series about a crew of rebels flying around space attempting to reestablish a galactic republic.  

With the exception of Rod Taylor the acting is extremely poor.  The cast doesn't seem to be able to put over the plot with a spec of enthusiasm.  The extremely poor and very derivative script doesn't help since it is a mismash of elements from Star Trek and in particular Star Wars.  The film was obviously trying for a wide appeal with the appearance of busty women and teenagers in primary parts.  Our so called hero is a very poor man's Han Solo.

The production is extremely cheesy looking the cardboard looking sets look like they are about to topple down around the actors throughout the film.  The special effects aren't particularly well done with the usual computer image assistance of spaceships flying around shooting laser beams at each other.  

Clearly Joe Dante brought no passion to this project the film doesn't even contain any of his typical movie references or in-jokes.  A very depressing film.

97 minutes, written by Caleb Carr (huh).

1983 - OCTOPUSSY, Bond movie number 13.

The last Roger Moore James Bond film that was any good.  Moore was entirely comfortable in the part.  The production was the usual classy job from the Bond producers.  The action and stunts scenes were well done.  The final action scene in an airplane was particularly outstanding.   

 

Roger Moore was always a particularly lightweight actor and the part of James Bond was tailored for him accordingly.  His films had a lighter touch to them than the Connery films.  Roger Moore's Bond did toughen up later in the series but he was always a pretty laid back kind of actor.

This Bond film actually has an espionage plot for a change and the typical Bond gadgets are a little more realistic than usual.  Even the sexist girl stuff is not too tiresome in this film.

131 minutes written by George MacDonald Fraser, Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson.

1973 - EMPEROR OF THE NORTH or EMPEROR OF THE NORTH POLE

 During the Depression of the 1930's hobos ride the railroad and have to contend with conductors trying to keep them off of their trains.  One conductor in particular called Shack is particularly sadistic in dealing with kicking hobos off of this train.  It's up to one hobo in particular called "A-No-1" to face him down.

The photography is great the locations were the same ones used by Buster Keaton in The General. The director is macho man Robert Aldrich so you  be sure the action will be tough and rugged.

The film stars two of Aldrich's favorite actors Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine (who is very scary), so you can be sure this film will be dripping with testosterone to put it mildly.   

A very entertaining manly adventure drama.

118 minutes.

1964 - DOGORA or Dogora the Space Monster

A typical Japanese monster movie from the old monster movie director himself Ishiro Honda.

Dogora as the monster is called for some reason eats diamonds and coal.  Into this mix is a subplot about a gang of diamond thieves who needlessly complicate the standard monster movie plot.\

This is a quick enjoyable monster movie that Ishiro Honda could knock out in his sleep and he probably did.

The dubbing as usual in these movies is half the fun.

83 minutes, written by Toho's go to monster screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa.

1959 - COMPULSION, based on a true story

This thinly disguised story of Leopold and Loeb is turned into a reasonably compelling film shot in widescreen black and white.  Leopold and Loeb were clearly a gay couple,  homosexuality in this film is made to seem like about as big a crime as the murder they commit.  

Leopold and Loeb got it into their heads that they were intellectually superior individuals.  To prove their superiority they decided to commit the perfect murder.  Of course in real life their perfect crime unraveled and they went on trial for murder.  They were defended by the famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow.

Orson Welles plays Darrow, he was apparently a big pain in the ass on the set.  The director Richard Fleischer had to use every trick in the photography book to match the continuity during the trial scenes with Welles.  Welles apparently was extremely uncooperative while filming his scenes.

An interesting film is not really a great one.

103 minutes.

1963 - I COULD GO ON SINGING, Judy Garland's last film

Judy Garland's final film is an OK drama with some musical sequences. 

The film is kind of a soap opera story of Judy trying to start a relationship with the son she abandoned years ago for a career in entertainment.  The father is played by Dirk Bogarde. 

Apparently Judy was a real handful on the set.  The director Ronald Neame and the star Dirk Bogarde had to deal with a moody high strung prima donna who couldn't be counted on to show up to film her scenes. Some critics have said that her angst ridden performance reveals the true Judy Garland.   

99 minutes.

1984 - RED DAWN on Blu Ray

I saw this film when it was first released in 1984.  At the time I thought it was the stupidest film I had seen in a while.  Re watching the film yesterday I thought it played a little better.  It's still kind of a stupid film.

The invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union is told from the perspective of a group of high school students who become a resistance movement in their town.  There's lots of shooting and blowing up of stuff and lots and lots of macho posturing.

The director and co-writer was right wing nut job John Milius.  This film was definitely has cup of tea.  He gets to fill the fantasy the every right winger has about the government capitulating to the Commies.  His approach was to focus on a select group of people probably saved the film having giant budget overruns since he didn't have to stage major battle scenes with hundreds of extras.

The blu ray presentation is kind of poor with lots of grain in certain scenes particularly the scenes filmed at night.

114 minutes.

1948 - FOUR FACES WEST, a good little western

A good little western with nice guy actor Joel McCrea as a bank robber who is chased by the legendary lawman Pat Garrett.  The story involves McCrea on the run from the law who for robbing a bank.  As McCrea attempts to escape he ends up at the ranch of a sick family.  McCrea has to decide if he will help the family or continue to make his way to Mexico to escape the law.

This film is a simple morality tale with a good cast that helps put the story over.  There is a love interest in the person of Francis Dee who was married to McCrea in real life.  Theirs was one of the more successful Hollywood marriages as they were together for over 57 years.

This film has nice scenery and a pleasant manner to it.  The film only runs about and hour and a half and tells its story efficiently.

90 minutes.

2013 - NOW YOU SEE ME, seen it.

 The first in the Now You See Me series followed by the sequel Now You See Me 2.

 

It's got a good cast, Michael Caine, Mark Ruffalo, Ilsa Fischer,Woody Harrelson to name just a few

Since I saw Now You See Me 2 ,  before I saw this film I can report these two films are the exact same picture.

115 minutes, written by Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin, and Edward Ricourt.

1996 - MOTHER, another Albert Brooks observational comedy.

This quiet laid back comedy from satirist Albert Brooks is probably a little too laid back for its own good.  The story involves a writer who is attempting to come to grips with his relationship with his mother.  His decision is to move back home and live with his mother while he gets his head on straight.

Brooks and Debbie Reynolds are good as the son and the mother and the rest of what cast there is does their best to wring some laughs out of the situation.

The film is somewhat of a change of pace for Albert Brooks who usually has the knives out with his usual con artist character.  Here he tries for something a little more normal with his character.

A not bad picture it has some quiet laughs.

123 minutes. Written by Albert Brooks and Monica Johnson.

1982 -THE THING - on Blu Ray

For once a remake of a film classic that doesn't disgrace the original film.   John Carpenter an admitted fan of Howard Hawks takes the old Hawks film and rethinks it completely. 

Carpenter and his writer Bill Lancaster go back to the original short story and update it with 80's state of the art special effects.

The monsters in this thing are really something to see, the special effects wizard Rob Bottin and his team really outdid themselves in the practical effects department.  When I saw this film on first release this was when I realized that they could now put anything into a motion picture when it came to special effects.

The film probably suffered from being a little too graphic for the general public.  It wasn't the box office success it should have been.  Going against E.T at the time probably didn't help it's commercial possibilities.

109 minutes.

1971 - VANISHING POINT, on Blu Ray

Put a guy in a car and have him chased by the police for about and hour and a half for no particular reason and you have the film Vanishing Point.

This film is a real 70's counter culture antique.  The driver Kowalski, played by Barry Newman for some reason decides to piss off the police and the race is on.  We never learn what ultimately pops Kowalski's cork.  However one thing seems to be for sure, Kowalski is rebelling against any type of authority.

The film is loaded with hippies, naked girls on motorcycles and a barely talkative leading man.  It all means something but what?

The film is a major influence on many filmmakers.  Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino are big fans of Vanishing Point.  Nice photography of the western United States by the way.

98 minutes, screenplay by Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

1975 - THE HINDENBURG - on bluray format.

The director Robert Wise attempts to class up the 1970's disaster movie cycle with this meticulous film on the airship Hindenburg disaster.  If good direction, special effects and production design could make a good film this would have been a very fine film.  However the script leaves quite a lot to be desired and this ultimately lets the film down. 

As always with films like this where the primary characters are all supposed to be German the choice was made to let the American actors speak without accents.  This has always been an issue where a film is set in a foreign country and the cast is primarily made up of actors not native to that country. It frequently affects the film's verisimilitude.

The special effects are old school with model work and matte paintings extremely well done.  At times it seems like they actually built an airship and flew the damn thing to New York.  The photography and production design are well executed.  Robert Wise was always a director who put a lot of care into his films.

The film is somewhat of a disappointment but nowhere near the failure that the critics labeled it when it was released.

 The film runs 125 minutes, written by Nelson Gidding based on a story by Levinson and Link.

1934 - CRIME WITHOUT PASSION, a real weirdo of a film.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur are chiefly remembered as the authors of The Front Page. However they were top writers in Hollywood and on Broadway.  For a while they co-directed and wrote a series of offbeat films.  Crime Without Passion was their first film and apparently they weren't that well versed in film making technique.  To the rescue came their cinematographer Lee Garmes who not only photographed the film but is listed as "associate director" in the credits

The film is full of wild editing and montage effects as well as some pretty over the top dialog. The story has velvet voiced Claude Rains as a sleezy attorney involved with two women.  Rains wants to get rid of one of his mistresses so he can take off to Europe with the other one.  This snowballs into a whole lot of craziness.

I guess as a mainstream commerical film, this film doesn't really come off but it is so off beat and original it's a lot of fun to watch.  Hecht and MacArthur apparently had enough sense not to push their story too much the film is a brisk 70 minutes.

70 minutes.

2016 - SULLY, a hero for our times so they tell us

Good thing we have men like Sully Sullenberger or is it Tom Hanks on the job?  Sully effortlessly lands a plane on the Hudson River saving the lives of the passengers this all occured in about four minutes in real life.  In the movie Sully somehow this is stretched out to about and hour and a half of screen time.

The film was directed by Clint Eastwood in his typical straightforward approach to making movies.  Frankly the movie looks like a TV show most of the time.

Not only does Sully save the passengers he also takes on the mean Federal Government in the persona of the NTSB.  It seems the NTSB wants to hang Sully out to dry by proving he had enough power left in his engines to return to the airport and land the plane properly instead of crashing it into the drink.  But the government is no match for Sully who proves them wrong.  The implication almost comes off that we should take Sully's word for what happens and not investigate plane crashes as thoroughly as possible.  

Still a fairly entertaining film mostly because nice guy actor Tom Hanks holds the film together with another expert performance.  As seems to be the way with these true stories that get turned into movies the post credits scene shows the real life Sully and the passengers getting together for a reunion.  Somehow this just makes me want to see a good documentary on this incident instead of this usual jacked up Hollywood hokum.

96 minutes, written by Todd Komarnicki.

1968 - BULLITT, vintage circa 60's cop movie

Wearing cool 60s turtle neck shirts, Steve McQueen is tough cop Frank Bullitt.  Bullitt is assigned to guard a Mafia witness but things don't go as well as they should.  The witness ends up dead and Bullitt is left hanging by his own department and an ambitious politician played by Robert Vaughn as one slimy dude.

This film actually has a decent plot for a cop thriller which had as the big selling point an extended car chase through the nearly deserted streets of San Francisco.

Bullitt well made by a good director, Peter Yates.  McQueen was playing a bad ass strong but silent cop character butting heads with "the system."  However for all his bad assedness he still gets to sleep with Jacqueline Bissett who has the usual cliched part of the girlfriend.  

This film still holds up pretty well and looked good on Blu ray.

113 minutes written by Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner.