1966 - THE TIME TUNNEL, RENDEZVOUS WITH YESTERDAY, pilot episode for the series

 One of the greatest "12 year old boy" TV shows of the mid 1960's The Time Tunnel was a series created by producer Irwin Allen, which had a couple of scientists traveling through time meeting various historical personalities and having lots of improbable adventures.  The pilot for the series Rendezvous With Yesterday has all of the good and bad traits of an Irwin Allen production.

To begin with the actual set of The Time Tunnel, the tunnel itself is very cool.  The models and miniature work for the secret base called "Operation Tic Toc," in the pilot were up to a very high standard.  Irwin Allen also cast the show with lots of character actors such as Whit Bissell, Robert Colbert, James Darren and Lee Meriwether because there always has to be a woman in a TV series.  Allen also didn't skimp on the guest stars for the pilot episode, Gary Merrill, Michael Rennie and Susan Hampshire appear.  The pilot has the two scientists traveling back to the Titanic before it sank and trying to persuade the captain to avoid the infamous iceberg that the ship hit.  It's a decent enough story for the initial episode.

 

The conceit of this series was that Irwin Allen was able to use stock footage from the 20th Century studios vault as the scientists traveled through different times.  In this way he was able to give the series a rather epic look while not spending a whole lot of money.  In the case of Rendezvous With Yesterday, it's clear Allen was using stock footage from the 1953 film Titanic.

However the real star of this series was always the Time Tunnel set itself.  Sitting in front of their control panels the cast playing scientists rattles off lots of ridiculous science talk jargon involving the "image area, radiation baths," and other silly time travel mumble jumbo.  All of this is highly entertaining.

 

As the series went on Irwin Allen's propensity to start incorporating cheaper production values and lazy storytelling finally started to catch up with the series. Some of the later episodes are truely awful.  The series only lasted one season but amazingly filmed 30 episodes.

Harold Jack Bloom wrote the script for the pilot episode and the running time is about 53 minutes.

1933 - LA LLORONA, aka The Crying Woman

A very early horror film from Mexico based on the legend of a woman who murdered her child after being abandoned by his father.  She in turn kills herself and becomes a ghost who haunts a family and attempts to murder their child.

This is a fascinating film for the most part.  La Llorona does a good job of creating a genuinely eerie mood for the most part.  The acting isn't to bad for an early sound film and the plot while using a lot of the horror and mystery tropes that were to become standard stuff in the horror genre is interesting.

The film was completely a Mexican production and at the time was highly praised by the Mexican critics at the time of it's release.

 

The film was written by Carlos Noriega Hope and Fernando de Fuentes. The running time is 73 minutes.

1988 - SHAKEDOWN, a good urban action film

The old corrupt cops on the take plot is dusted off for this very entertaining film with some excellent action scenes and stunt work.  Peter Weller is a public defender who stumbles on to a plot by some NYC cops to extort money from drug dealers.  Sam Elliott is his buddy (a what else), rogue cop who helps him get to the bottom of things.

The film looks like a lot of it was shot on actual locations in NYC and it certainly has the grimy 1980's urban atmosphere with scenes photographed near porn theaters and in some very crappy neighborhoods.  The writer/director James Glickenhaus and his production team have staged some impressive large scale action scenes, one that involves a jet that is actually kind of unnerving to watch.

 

This is the kind of action film that knows what it wants to do and generally hits it's targets unlike a lot of the overblown action stuff that is released today.

 

The film runs a brisk 97 minutes.

1942 - HOLIDAY INN, a good musical.

 A fairly good 1940's musical from Paramount which features two big stars, Bing Crosby who was one of the kings of the Paramount lot in the 1940's and Fred Astaire.  The film's female leads are okay but really didn't have what you would call a breakout career.  Marjorie Reynolds and Virginia Dale are decent dancers but they don'ty measure up to Astaire's former partner Ginger Rogers.

Holiday Inn is such a light piece of fluff that the plot is practically nonexistent.  Bing wants to get out of the show business rat race, he proposes to Virginia Dale but she's in love with Fred and wants to continue with her career.  They break up and Bing buys an Inn which will only be open on holidays.  Bing meets Marjorie Reynolds who has one of those big Hollywood smiles and they sort of have a romance.  Re-enter Fred Astaire who has been dumped by Virginia Dale and is looking for a new dancing partner, he sets his sights on Marjorie Reynolds.  Will Bing win Marjorie back?

 

What this film really has going for it are the songs by Irving Berlin and the musical numbers under the direction of Mark Sandrich who had worked with Astaire during his famous RKO period with Ginger Rogers.  With the exception of a tasteless and cringe inducing black face number the film is for the most part an entertaining time.

 

 The film was written by Claude Binyon and Elmer Rice, the running time is 100 minutes.

1980 - RAISE THE TITANIC, like the title says.

A big expensive film based on the Clive Cussler book.  Raise The Titanic was also a big failure with critics and the audience.  However this film is a "guilty pleasure" for me.  The logistics of actually raising a sinking ship like the Titanic are fascinating.  The extensive model and miniature work is at a very high level and at times it looks like they actually sailed the Titanic into New York harbor.

The cast is a mixture of excellent film actors like Jason Robards, Richard Jordan and Alec Guiness and lots of television actors such as J. D. Cannon, Bo Brudin and Dirk Blocker.  This is rather unsurprising since the film was directed by Jerry Jameson a filmmaker who usually worked in TV on just about every cop show that ran from the 1960's to the 2000's. Jameson was brought into the project as a replacement for the original director Stanley Kramer.

 

Also in the film is Anne Archer in the very thankless role as the romantic lead, you could have completely cut her scenes and it would not have affected the film in any way

The film has an outstanding score by John Barry and along with the special effects may be the best thing about the film.

The film was written by Adam Kennedy, the running time is 114 minutes.

2007 - CASSANDRA'S DREAM, disappointing Woody Allen drama

 Only the cast can keep this very disappointing Woody Allen drama going.  Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor play two brothers anxious to improve their social standing.  To do this they approach their gangster Uncle played by the as always excellent Tom Wilkinson.  Wilkinson will finance their dreams if they will just commit a murder for him. 

 Cassandra's Dream as one critic called it is basically a "morality play," the plot weaves along to it's inevitable and kind of pointless "crime doesn't pay "conclusion.  Woody Allen has already kind of covered this material before in his films Match Point and Crimes and Misdemeanors, and frankly a lot more successfully.

 

The film was shot in England and the character's dialog sounds like something an American would think that blue collar English people would sound like. What was the point of even filming in England ?  For the most part Allen hardly takes advantage of the London settings.  But this is a typical polished Woody Allen production, in this case the production is at the service of his poor script. 

The film was an original screenplay by Woody Allen,  the running time is 108 minutes.

1930 - MEN WITHOUT WOMEN, an early John Ford film.

This John Ford film exists as one of those hybrid sound/silent pictures that Hollywood was making as they made the transition to sound films.

Men Without Women is based on an original story from Ford and the writer James Kevin McGuinness.   The film is about a submarine trapped on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and efforts of the Navy to rescue the men inside. 

 

With the exception of a lengthy scene set in a bar, the film looks like it was photographed on one or two sets which probably made Fox studios happy.  The acting is typical of an early 30's movie with some of the actors emoting all over the place like they were in a stage play.

 

If the film is notable at all, its probably because it has a couple of people who were associated with John Ford as his career began to take off.  Joseph August was the cameraman and Dudley Nichols was the screenwriter.  Both of these men made significant contributions to Ford's films in the 1930's and 40's.

The running time is 77 minutes.

2001 - LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR, Neil Simon looks back at his early career

A film that probably won't make much sense for a modern audience.  During the 1950's,  a 90 minute comedy-variety television program called "Your Show of Shows," ruled the early days of television.  The star was comedian Sid Caesar who is practically forgotten today but was a big star on this show.  Incredibly the writing and production staff managed to crank out a 90 minute show once a week. The pressure must have been enormous.

One of the writers in the "writers room" was Neil Simon who along with a very talented group of comedic writers was tasked with feeding this show new material.   In 1993 Neil Simon dramatized the making of Your Show of Shows in his play Laughter on the 23rd Show which was eventually turned into a film.

 

Nathan Lane plays the part of the Sid Caesar character here called Max Prince.  Simon is a character called Lucas Brickman and the rest of the characters all famous comedy writers are names that would probably not mean much to a contemporary audience today with the exception of the Mel Brooks character called in this case Ira Stone who apparently drove everyone crazy with his antics.

Simon adds a lot more drama than comedy in his script, which is kind of unusual for a joke machine like him.  Nathan Lane does a good job playing the Sid Caesar like star of the show.  The conflict in this film is Lane's battle with the TV network to keep from censoring skits they don't find funny or appropriate.

Laughter on the 23 Floor is a fairly decent comedy/drama of a now nostalgic time in Neil Simon's life.  The film benefit's from the director Richard Benjamin's working with a talented cast of character actors and performers.

The running time is 102 minutes.

1968 - DANGER DIABOLIK, an early comic book film

 Probably the last person in the world to be directing a comic book film would be Mario Bava a filmmaker usually associated with the horror genre.  Surprisingly Danger Diabolik turned out pretty well.

Diabolik, a master criminal created by two sisters, is a comic book character that started in 1962 and ran for approximately 900 volumes.  The rights to the character were purchased by Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis.  De Laurentiis produced this film along with another comic book movie Barbarella at the same time. After an abortive start which saw De Laurentiis firing the original director Seth Holt and the recasting of the female role originally played by Catherine Denevue of all people, director Mario Bava took charge.

As was the case with Bava, he brought his considerable visual skills to the film.  He was also a master of trick photography and was known as a director who could class up a film production without spending a lot of money, something that probably must have appealed to De Laurentiis.

 

John Phillip Law played the master criminal Diabolik who pulls off one spectacular robbery after another with the help of his very sexy mistress/assistant Eva Kant played by Marisa Mell.  The rest of the cast had actors like Michel Piccoli who I usually think of as working with directors like Bunuel and Goddard.  Thunderball villain,  Adolfo Celli playing the real bad bad guy of this film and English comedian Terry Thomas who has a small role as the Minister of Finance, who has to persuade people to pay their taxes after Diabolik blows up all the tax offices.

 

Considering how overblown the comic book to film franchise has become since the domination of Marvel studios, it's kind of a relief to see a film that actually knows when to play up the camp with colorful visuals and entertaining but not go so over the top on the action scenes. 

The film was written by Dino Maiuri, Brian Degas, Tudor Gates and Mario Bava.  The running time is 105 minutes.

1967 - THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST, satire from the 1960's

Time has slightly worn the edge off of this still funny satire about American, life, paranoia, politics, you name it.  James Coburn plays Dr. Sidney Schaefer a psychatrist who is being screened by several government agencies as a possible therapist for the President of the United States.  As Dr. Schaefer becomes the confident of the President he suffers a breakdown from the burden of listening to the President's secrets. 

This puts him on the run from the FBI (known as the FBR) and the CIA (known as the CEA).  Schaefer's flight from these government agencies allows the writer/director Theodore J. Flicker to satirize various parts of the country from some gun toting quasi suburban liberals to the phone company to a bunch of goofy hippies. 

 

The film has a serious cast of comedians starting with Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, Pat Harrington, Will Greer, Artie Johnson and future director Joan Darling as a karate chopping suburban mom.

Although dated at times this is still a very funny film.  Since it is a satire as expected it was a box office flop.  Audiences just don't seem to like satirical films.

The running time is 103 minutes.

1978 - WARRIORS 2, Sammo Hung's slam bang action/comedy film

Another mix of that odd humor and martial arts action that came out of Asia for a while.  The actor/director and writer Sammo Hung has made a deceptively simple action film.

Warriors 2 starts out with a lot of goofy Sammo humor.  Sammo is attempting to sell pork balls or something.  After a lot of lame comedy the film settles down into a sort of revenge flick with Sammo and his friend Cashier Hua attempting to bring to justice a corrupt mayor who has killed Hua's mother. The film contains a long and interesting training sequence where Kung Fu master Mr. Tsan an expert on  the Wing Chun art of fighting, trains Cashier Hua for the big fight climax that the film has been building to.

 

But the reality is nobody watching this film is tuning in for the plot.  Bring on the fighting.  The last 30 to 40 minutes of Warriors 2 is a lengthy fight scene which is quite exciting to watch and extremely impressive as a piece of action cinema.

 

Running time on this film is 90 skull pounding minutes.

1992 SHADOWS AND FOG - Woody Allen makes a UFA film

Woody Allen's tribute, or spoof or whatever film that attempts to invoke the feeling of a German Expressionist film kind of like something Fritz Lang would have directed for the famous German film studio UFA GmbH, usually called UFA.  

The film has the rich atmosphere of a European 1930's film which Allen further emphasizes by shooting in black and white with lots of movie fog floating around on his sets.  The plot is about the hunt for a serial killer which a mob is on the trail of.  Allen is recruited by the mob and after one thing or another everyone thinks he is the killer.

 The film is full of Woody's usual one liners which kind of makes it a modern counterpoint to what is going on in the 30's setting.  However a lot of the dialog spoken by the actors seems rather stilted and forced.  Allen keeps a very tight grasp on the line readings of cast which comes off as very stagey.  Naturally Woody gets all the best lines after all he wrote it, and he delivers them  in his usual funny way.

 

At this point in his career just about every actor wanted to work with Woody Allen, so we have a string of grade A actors who show up in small bits.  Mia Farrow is also in the film she was still involved with Woody Allen when this film was made.

 

The film courted and achieved a status as one of his worse films.  The critics for the most part hated it and audiences stayed away, another major flop for Woody Allen.

The film has it's moments the production design and cinematography are excellent and nobody can put across a funny line like Woody Allen.

The running time is a brief 85 minutes

1976 - MOTHER, JUGS & SPEED - a comedy/drama about ambulance chasers

The director is Peter Yates a man who flipped between interesting pictures like, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and junk like For Pete's Sake.  The writer is Tom Mankiewicz the son of director Joseph Mankiewicz who specialized in standard light Hollywood entertainments like the James Bond movies and garbage like the movie version of Dragnet.  Mankiewicz was a go to guy when you needed your script doctored.  His hands are all over a lot of 70's and 80's movies and TV shows which he was not credited for.

 Mother, Jugs and Speed is a black comedy about an independent ambulance service in Los Angeles.  They are in competition with another another ambulance service to secure the rights to providing the city of Los Angeles with transportation to their hospital.  The film has lots of  bits of black comedy as they drive around dealing with sick people in need of their services.  The film is interlaced with dramatic scenes as a counterpoint to all of the comedy.  The film clearly wants to be the MASH of the contemporary 1970's Los Angele scene I guess.

  

Harvey Keitel is "Speed" a disgraced cop working for the service.  Where someone got the idea Keitel a rather intense actor from the Martin Scorcese school would be a leading man is kind of a head scratcher.  Raquel Welch is tastelessly nicknamed "Jugs." Her main duty is to apparently provide the sex in the movie.  Bill Cosby is "Mother,"  who does most of the heavy comedy lifting in the film.

 

Is the film funny? I guess so, but even for a black comedy it's awfully cynical.  This is a slick piece of product from the Hollywood studio system. No auteur stuff here thank you.

The running time is 98 minutes, apparently it made money.

1951 - TALES OF HOFFMANN, Powell and Pressburger at their most esoteric

 Alexander Korda who was running British Lion Studios was anxious to have Moira Shearer the star of The Red Shoes appear in another film.  This gave the opening that Powell and Pressburger were looking for to stage a version of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann as an exotic dance extravaganza. Be careful what you ask for.

The Tales of Hoffmann is an amazing infuriating film.  The film's production design and cinematography are outstanding.  The cast is extremely well chosen along with Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann a dancer and choreographer, Léonide Massine a dancer and also a choreograher as well and Ludmilla Tchérina a prima ballerina appear in the film.  Sir Thomas Beecham, conducted the score which was prerecorded prior to filming.

 

So what's the problem.  Well watching the film is an exhausting experience.  The film is so drenched in overwhelming color design and movement after a while it begins to get to be a bit to much for this viewer anyway.

 

It's amazing that Powell and Pressburger got away with making this film as the commercial potential for this film was not good.  Alexander Korda must have known he did not have another film of The Red Shoes on his hands.

 

For an exercise in extreme style this film is certainly something to look at.

 

Written byE.T.A Hoffman, Jules Barbier, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and Dennis Arundell.  The running time is 133 minutes.

1984 - STOP MAKING SENSE, the Talking Heads concert show

 David Byrne the lead singer of the Talking Heads jumps, struts, shakes and runs around like a mad man possessed in this film version of one of their concerts that features most of their hit songs up to this point in the band's lifetime

It's all here the songs, Psycho Killer, Burning Down The House, Once In A Lifetime, Take Me To The River and Byrne running around in his famous big suit.

 

The concert film was directed by Jonathan Demme a big rock and roll fan who's major contribution was probably just turnin on the cameras and letting the Talking Heads do their thing.  Stop Making Sense is certainly a lot less pretentious than Martin Scorcese's The Last Waltz which practically patted itself on the back with all the big name talent they had for that film.

 

A very enjoyable film, however six years later Byrne walked away from the band.  Byrne didn't even bother to tell the band they were breaking up, they had to read about it in a newspaper article.

The film was written by the Talking Heads and Jonathan Demme, the running time is 88 minutes.

2007 - DAN IN REAL LIFE, likable rom com

 A very well chosen cast and a few attempts at making the film's characters a little more three dimensional,  make this rom-com an entertaining viewing experience.  Steve Carell is Dan Burns a widower (what else) raising three daughters with various degrees of success.  On a long family reunion weekend he meets a French woman named Marie in a bookstore.  They hit it off almost immediately but as it turns out she is currently dating Dan's brother Mitch.  As in all rom-coms complications occur.

  

I'll give credit to the co-writer and director Peter Hedges, he does a pretty good job juggling the usual rom-com tropes.  The romantic comedy genre is extremely difficult to pull off as the very nature of the story line is usually a forgone conclusion as it marches towards it's traditional ending.

 

Besides Carell, Juliette Binoche not an actor known for her likable funny side does a very credible job as the woman who is torn between Dan and his brother Mitch. Steve Carell who usually played wacky comedy roles at this point in his career tones it down and is actually a realistic character for a change.

This isn't the type of film to win awards or make critics top ten lists, but it is a perfectly enjoyable entertainment.

The film was written by Peter Hedges and Pierce Gardner, the running time is 98 minutes.