2019 - THE GENTLEMEN, Guy Ritchie goes to the well again.

If you like Guy Ritchie's films you will probably enjoy yet another variation on his patented crooks betraying crooks formula which can be traced all the way back to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.  The Gentlemen is just another reprise of that film. 

Matthew McConaughey is an American who runs a big marijuana growing empire in England.  He decides he wants out of the business and makes a deal with a rich American billionaire to sell his pot business and retire with his hot wife played by Michelle Dockery (wearing very high high heels).  Dockery for as good looking as she is plays a very tough cookie.  Let the double crosses commence particualy with the involvement of a shady private investigator played by the amusing Hugh Grant.

 

After lots of tough guy talk and the usual outrageous violence that Guy Ritchie specalizes in it all comes to a conclusion.  As is typical you almost have to keep a score card of who is doing what to whom in a Guy Ritchie film.

 

For a Guy Ritchie film there's really nothing new here but I suppose it's a decent enough times killer with emphasis on the killer part since lots of people get knocked off throughout this film.

Written by Guy Ritchie, the running time is 113 minutes.

2023 - ARE YOU THERE GOD IT'S ME MARGARET, does not star Jason Statham

This is a well made and well acted but really kind of boring film.  Are You There God It's Me Margaret is based on a popular young adult novel by the author Judy Blume.  The story is about the trials and tribulations of a 12 year old girl who just happens to live in a really nice suburban house, has two adoring parents a grandmother who is very attached to her and attends a lily white school in the suburbs which has the usual token minority kids sprinkled throughout the classrooms.

Our heroine Margaret is apparently conflicted about her religious identity since her mother is Christian and her father Jewish.  She has one way conversations with "god" and seems to develop an obsession with developing breasts and having her period.  Now this may be all good and fine as a device to hang on a story. Maybe lots of teenage girls do encounter these types of body and emotional issues while growing up.  However it makes for very low key drama to put it mildly.  It's hard to work up much sympathy for the privileged Margaret.

 

 

 This film is frustrating towards the end.  After about 90 minutes of Margaret's alienation she suddenly sees the light, befriends the outcast girl in school and finally gets her period.  This all comes out of nowhere.  The viewer is left wondering if that's all there is to this film.

 

 Probably the most interesting character is Margaret's mother played by Rachel McAdams.  She's a woman trying to find herself in a brain dead suburban neighborhood.  The mother must also deal with her hard core fundamentalist Christian parents and their anger with her in her marriage to a Jew.  In fact when we cut away from the mother's story to the anxiety riddled Margaret it seems like kind of a cheat of an interesting story line.

 

This film got very good reviews but had very poor box office.  As well made as it is it essentially comes off as a good TV movie.  The film just seems to have a very limited appeal to general audiences

Written by Kelly Fremon Craig, the running time is 106 minutes.

2002 - THE FOUR FEATHERS, another remake

This is a remake and an update of the 1939 film about honor, courage and duty in the British Army circa the late 1800's. 

Briefly, a British officer Harry Faversham along with his troop is ordered to the Sudan to put down a revolution by the Mahdi a religious zealot who is leading his "fanatical" followers against the occupying British forces.  Faversham decides he wants no part in this war and resigns his commission.   This prompts three of his army buddies and his fiance to send him four white feathers which in essence say he is a coward.  The rest of the story is about Faversham's attempts to redeem himself.

This is a well made film.  The photography and the settings are impressive.  The big battle scene is well staged.  The acting  when this film was released is that old stiff upper lip stuff the British like to convey in their war movies.  I think the problem with the film is that it is just a completely unnecessary remake.

 

The film definitely lacks a strong point of view.  Does it celebrate the tradition of British Empire building or is it a criticism?  Hard to tell since this point of view is all over the place.  When the original film was released in 1939 there was no question that it advocated the empire building fantasy the British embraced for a long time.  It least that film knew what it wanted to say.  This version just flip flops all over the Sudan as the viewer has to figure out it the British are the good guys or the bad guys.  In the end The Four Feathers is just a nothing film with nice desert photography.

The film was written by Michael Schiffer and Hossein Amini, the running time is 130 minutes.

2023 - THE BOYS IN THE BOAT, another boring true life story

Another boring true life story.  This makes two in a row I've viewed.  I could probably just cut and paste my last post about Big Eyes into this post and save some time. But I march on.  The Boys in the Boat is about the 1936 University of Washington junior varsity rowing team who went from being considered underdogs in the sport of boat rowing to competing against the Germans in the Berlin Olympics.  Will these plucky lads beat out those nasty Nazi's?  The bigger question should be doesn't anyone remember the film Chariots of Fire anymore?

This film is based on a well regarded book but you would never know it. Apparently the incidents in the film are mostly true but the screenplay presents them in such a way that they come off as a bunch of uninspired cliches.  The film is photographed in that usual movie way where the color is kind of dull.  The intention is to give the film the feeling of watching an old movie.  However  I just kind of doubt people in  the Depression walked around looking like they were color de-saturated characters.  

 

This rowing team is presented like the "Great White Hope" of the Olympics against the Hitler bunch.  However the real star of the 1936 Berlin Olympics was runner Jesse Owens who is only mentioned in passing.  So where's a film about him?

 

I've listened to interviews with the director George Clooney on podcasts.  He seems like a thoughtful smart guy.  He's also a very fine actor in films like The Descendants, Michael Clayton and the funny O Brother, Where Art Thou?.  But for some reason he doesn't seem to be able to bring the intelligence he has shown as an actor to directing films.  When he was planning this film didn't he take a hard look at the story and ask what can I do to avoid the usual cliches in this type of sports story?  Once again this is another film where the production design and costumes are more interesting than the story.

The screenwriter is Mark L Smith, the running time is 124 minutes.

2015 - BIG EYES, a true story indifferently told

The apparently true story of an artist named Margaret Keane as played by the actor Amy Adams.  Margaret was a painter who specialized in creepy portraits of children with the dominant feature in the paintings being kids with really big eyes.  Margaret married a guy named Walter Keane who was something of a conman and self promoter. He persuaded her to allow him to take the credit for her paintings while he successfully sold her artwork.

Walter Keane is played by the actor Christoph Waltz in a larger than life performance although you could probably make the argument this is actually kind of hammy acting.  Amy Adams as Margaret has chosen or was directed to play her role as a  very mousey woman who allows a man to dominate her life and her work.  The film eventually focuses on Margaret's efforts to get control of her life and her art and dump her domineering husband.

 

Tim Burton is the director and I suppose considering the cultivated weirdness of some of his previous pictures this would be prime material for him.  But this is no Ed Wood.  For whatever reason Burton abandoned his usual gothic style for a  more conventional story telling approach.  The whole thing is presented like a retro TV film from the 1970's.  The result is an extremely  dull and uninteresting film.  Christoph Waltz does what he can to bring some life into the film but it doesn't help.  Only during the last fifteen or twenty minutes does the film finally take off with a "paint off" contest at a libel trial between Walter and Margaret, something that actually happened in real life.

The writers are Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski who specialize in these kind of true life odd ball stories but they don' seem to be able to work up much interest in this story.   About the only thing this film has going for it is in the production design and the costumes.  But let's get real people don't watch films to marvel at the sets and wardrobe. They come for an interesting and entertaining story.  An extremely disappointing film.

The running time is 106 minutes.

2023 - OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE - an entertaining action thriller

Kind of a mouth full for a film title.  This action comedy from Guy Ritchie seems like it could be a part of his Man From Uncle film universe.  Guy Ritchie likes to work with the same actors in this case Jason Statham, Hugh Grant and Josh Hartnett to name a couple.  In this film he's added the comedian Aubrey Plaza and "Westley" from The Princess Bride, Cary Elwes.

The plot is about a team of intelligence agents out to recover some gizmo called "The Handle" which is some kind of super weapon or something from Billionaire Hugh Grant (in a very funny performance).  Grant has a thing about Hollywood actors so secret agent Statham (in a real amusing deadpan performance) and his team recruit an action star played by John Hartnett (another funny performance), to get inside Grant's estate.  Along the way Statham and his team must do battle with a rival bunch of spies to get "The Handle."

 

This is all fairly entertaining stuff and it lets Ritchie stage his usual over the top action scenes.  But for nonsence like this, all of the fighting and running around is very entertaining.  As I indicated earlier this film reminds me of Ritchie's underrated action film The Man From Uncle a film that also featured Hugh Grant although he's a lot funnier here.

 

This film unfortunately was released while the COVID pandemic was going on so it didn't do particularly well at the box office, it's still entertaining.

The screenplay is by Guy Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson and Bill Block.  The running time is 114 minutes.

1993 - THE SECRET GARDEN, a good children's film.

The Secret Garden is a good children's film or family film or whatever.  This type of genre film isn't really made or appreciated today. This production had a number or very good filmmakers involved, particularly the director Agnieszka Holland.  

The Secret Garden has been made a couple of times and the story is a rather simple one.  A young girl orphaned by her parent's deaths in an earthquake in India ends up living in a creepy castle back in England with her uncle.  The castle is right out of Jane Eyre with mysterious voices at night and a mean housekeeper played by Maggie Smith who could probably be a relative of Mrs Danvers from Hitchcock's Rebecca.

The young girl played by an actor named Kate Maberly is a mean selfish girl who gradually begins to become a better person after she discovers a "secret garden" which she nurses back to health after years of neglect.  That's basically the story.

 

However the director Agnieszka Holland is a very skilled filmmaker and her story telling skill makes the film really pop.  The interesting Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner wrote the score.  The cinematographer was Roger Deakins.  Francis Ford Coppola was the executive producer .  This is a very top level group of filmmakers.

 

The film is highly recommended as a useful corrective to the ADD school of Marvel and Star Wars movies and TV shows.

Caroline Thompson wrote the screenplay, the running time is 101 minutes.

1952 - HIGH NOON , classic 1950's western

This famous western about a sheriff facing down a gang of outlaws without any help from the cowardly townspeople plays a tad slow today.  However this is an extremely well made film on a modest budget.  The director Fred Zinnemann, was one of Hollywood's best filmmakers when it came to making important films that were also entertaining.  The editor Elmo Williams went on to bigger and better things but  was responsible for the careful structure of the story.  The film plays in real time something that was rarely done in the movies.  The film was well photographed by Floyd Crosby who had been associated with the documentary movement. The composer was Dimitri Tiomkin who along with the lyricist Ned Washington wrote the famous ballad that played throughout the film.

The cast of the film was interesting.  Gary Cooper who had spent a large part of a career playing western characters was the sheriff.  His performance is a study in the less is more style of acting. Grace Kelly practically starting out her career is his wife,  with a 28 year age difference between her and Cooper.  Kelly really didn't take off until she worked with John Ford in Mogambo.  The fascinating Mexican performer Katy Jurado played Cooper's former mistress.  The rest of the cast is filled with character actors, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, Lon Chaney Jr., Harry Morgan and Lee Van Cleef.

 

High Noon had a very high critical reputation at the time of it's release, maybe a little too high.  For a relatively simple story it was burdened by a lot of "deep" insights from film critics.  It was seen as a metaphor for the current state of politics in the United States at the time and was reviled by John Wayne as an "un-American" film.  The gutless behavior of the citizens of the the town Cooper is trying to protect do seem to be a metaphor for the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950's.  

 

The film has a complicated production history between the writer Carl Foreman and the producer Stanley Kramer.  It did very well financially and for all the baggage the film carries it's a good film  thanks to Fred Zinnemann's skill as a director.

The running time is 85 minutes.

1922 - ROBIN HOOD, a spectacular film from Douglas Fairbanks.

An action adventure film from the man who invented the action hero, Douglas Fairbanks.  The film is in many ways an attempt to out do his previous action films, The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. 

The story of Robin Hood is told on an amazingly larger than life level.  Gigantic sets were built and then augmented with special effects to make them completely dwarf the actors.  It looks like hundreds it not thousands of extras were employed for the crowd scenes.

Douglas Fairbanks was known for doing a lot of his own stunts and this film is not an exception.  Fairbanks was a superb athlete and many of the action scenes were clearly thought out and executed by Fairbanks himself.

 

The director of Robin Hood was Allan Dwan but the real driving force and creative person in this film is Fairbanks himself.  Not only was Douglas Fairbanks the producer who had complete control of the film, he also wrote the screenplay.

 

Robin Hood is an entertaining and important film in the Hollywood film cannon.  It made Fairbanks a lot of money.

Written by Douglas Fairbanks, the running time is 127 minuets.

1992 - BITTER MOON, Polanski's relationship film

This is a film about relationships.  It's co-written and directed by Roman Polanski.  The story involves an English couple played by a young Hugh Grant and Kristen Scott Thomas.  They meet another couple while on an ocean cruise.  The other couple played by Peter Coyote and Emmanuelle Seigner are shall we say in a rather complex relationship.  Coyote is a paraplegic in a wheel chair who narrates the story of his meeting and subsequent relationship with Seigner to Hugh Grant all the while Grant attempts to seduce Seigner.

Bitter Moon as some critics pointed out has many parallels to Cul-de-sac, a film Polanski made early in his career which featured another "out there," couple.  Polanski really pours on the sensuality and sexual desire that was prominent in the early stages of Coyote's and Seigner's connection which eventually turned into a kind of codependent hate of each other. It's one sick scene after another throughout the film as only Roman Polanski could do.

 

As is typical with a Roman Polanski film, Bitter Moon is extremely well made and is full of Polanski's very black humor.  If you are looking for a film to share with your significant other for Valentine's day it would probably be best to pass on this.  Emmanuelle Seigner in particular is really something to watch in a "go for it" performance.

 

Unsurprisingly the film was a failure at the box office and to put it mildly was not particularly liked by the critics.  As sick as the film gets by the end it's kind of weirdly reaffirming about achieveing a stability in marriage. 

Written by Roaman Polanski, Gerald Bach and John Brownjohn.  The running time is 139 minutes.

1985 - PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, well I thought it was funny

Re-watched this at a revival theater the other night, the temperature outside the theater was  -4 below with a wind chill of -14.  The theater was packed.  An almost 40 year old comedy is still bringing people in although I think it would be safe to say it's kind of an older crowd.  They probably grew up on Paul Reuben's man/child character.  Such is the staying power of this film.

To say that critics were divided about the film would kind of be an understatement.  Some embraced it as a supremly funny dadaist experience. Other critics thought it was one of the biggest pieces of crap that was released that year. I guess you go with this kind of humor or you don't.  The film certainly exists in a world clearly created from Paul Reuben's imagination.  Apparently Reubens had been developing this comic character with Phil Hartman for a number of years at a comedy club in Los Angeles called "The Groundlings."  The character proved to be popular and Warner Brothers hired first time director Tim Burton  who had a comic book sensibility himself to direct.

 

Pee Wee's Big Adventure actually turned out to be a financial success.  In many ways it was a high point for both of them and it was kind of downhill after that.  Reubens was stuck with the Pee Wee character for most of career.  Burton while financially successful with his earlier films has definitely hit an artistic slump in his career with crap like the live action remake of Dumbo, the remake of Dark Shadows and most depressingly the remake of Planet of the Apes.

 

Anyway Paul Reuben's loaded the film up with lots of his comedian friends in strange character parts, once seen who can ever forget "Large Marge."  The production design is amusing and the score by Danny Elfman really got into the spirit of the film.

The film was written by Paul Reubens, Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol.  The running time is a lean and funny 91 minutes.

1983 - STRANGE INVADERS. possible spoof of 50's science fiction films

First let's get the plot out of the way.  In the late 1950's, space aliens show up and take over a small Midwestern town.  They possess the bodies of the people living there for some nefarious purpose.  Jump ahead about 20 years later and a college professor played by Paul Le Mat in an incredible piece of miscasting, shows up in the town,  He is almost incinerated by these space aliens.  The film involves Le Mat and Nancy Allen, playing a reporter for a National Inquirer type of newspaper, returning to the town to save Le Mat's daughter.  She has been kidnapped by the space aliens because she is half human/half alien.  I'm not even going to get into how this contrived subplot developed.

Strange Invaders slavishly follows the formula for 1950's science fiction films particularly Invasion of the Body Snatchers and It Came From Outer Space two films that are a lot better than this mess. This film can't decide if it wants to be a parody or a straightforward recreation of those films.  In either case it fails.  I can't understand what the intentions of the writers and director were and I doubt they had a clear idea themselves.  I'm all for a parody of those old films but again what is the point if you don't have something to say besides "look how clever we are duplicating those old films."

The director Michael Laughlin stages every scene so flatly that it's almost like watching middle school kids make a movie with a video camera which in a way is an insult to middle school filmmakers. The film appears to be deliberately photographed with a piece of gaze or something over the camera lens to give it a 1950's look but all it gave me was a headache.  The composer John Addison was clearly told to write an over the top film score but his loud screechy music just make my headache worse.

 

Probably the best thing about the film are the supporting players, Kenneth Tobey, Charles Lane, June Lockhart, Wallace Shawn (?) and Michael Lerner.  It's a great group of actors but the director doesn't seem to know what to do with them which is unfortunate.  Strange Invaders is a complete failure.

Written by Michael Laughlin, Bill Condon and Walter Halsey Davis.  The running time is 94 minutes.

1949 - STRAY DOG, very good crime thriller from Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa is a year away from releasing Rashomon which will put him on the map as one of Japan's most important directors.  A year before Rashomon, Stray Dog was released and it's a superior crime thriller.  The film is set in post World War II Japan and has lots of on location filming around Tokyo. The film stars Toshiro Mifune who was becoming one of Kurosawa's most important collaborators and Takashi Shimura who was the leader of The Seven Samurai in Kurosawa's film. In the West he is probably best remembered as Dr. Yamane from the first Godzilla film.

The plot of the film has Mifune as a rookie detective whose gun is stolen.  He spends the film attempting to locate the thief while the gun is being used to commit armed robberies. Shimura is the veteran police detective who helps the young detective solve the crime.  The film is set in Tokyo during a hot summer and  it does an excellent job of creating an oppressive atmosphere of heat and humidity.

 

Kurosawa tells an exciting story within the confines of the urban police procedural. Watching this film there is no question that he was entering an important part of his career.  According to the supplemental features on the Criterion disc Kurosawa was a big fan of detective novels which had a major influence on Stray Dog.  This film is also a good look at post war Tokyo as it recovered from World War II. 

The film was written by Akira Kurosawa and Ryūzō Kikushima who worked on some of Kurosawa's best films.  The running time is 122 minutes.

1922 - THE LOVES OF PHARAOH aka The Wife of the Pharaoh

One of the most important directors in early film history.  Ernest Lubitsch started out in silent films in Germany and made the transition to sound films in the United States until his death from a heart attack.  Lubitisch is chiefly remembered as a director who was good with intimate stories of love and romance.  But for whatever reason, probably just to show he could do it, he made a few epic films.  The Loves of Pharaoh is one of these.

The film stars one of the biggest stars in silent cinema Emil Jannings.  He was big stuff for a while until World War II when he starred in a lot of propaganda films for the Nazis during the war.  This didn't really work out very well for him.  After the war he was finished in the film business due to his association with the Nazi party.

 

Well anyway Jannings plays the Pharaoh of Egypt who happens to fall in love with a slave girl and all hell breaks lose as only it can in one of these larger than life stories.  This story was shot on a massive production level with huge sets and large scale battle scenes.  The film is well staged by Lubitsch who for a man who preferred to make more intimate stories did a very good job on this larger than life story.  The Loves of Pharaoh is certainly worth a look for the production values and battle scenes alone.

The film was written by Norbert Falk and Hanns Kräly.  The film exists on YouTube in a very good copy.  The running time is 100 minutes.

2016 - SKIPTRACE, action comedy from Jackie Chan

Skiptrace is the kind of film that Jackie Chan has been making since his big breakout successes which kind of started in the 1980's.  Chan once again plays his standard character of the Hong Kong cop taking on a major Hong Kong triad.  The film is loaded with a lot of action and Chan's typical physical comedy.  However time had started to take it's toll on this formula and on Chan himself.  Chan was 62 years old when this film was released and the years of stunts and tumbles had also taken it's toll on him.

There was apparently an attempt to bring some new blood to this film.  Renny Hardin an action director  from America was hired and for the second lead in the film American actor Johnny Knoxville was cast as Chan's humorous sidekick.  There is a lot of extensive on location filming in Hong Kong and more interestingly mainland China which is probably the best thing about this film. 

 

The film is loaded with Chan's usual stunts and he still goes through the fighting motions but he has definitely slowed down. This is hardly the same Jackie Chan of his classic film Police Story.  Nobody stays young forever and I sense a lot of stunt doubles were used during the action scenes in Skiptrace.  Chan being Chan he has also loaded the film up with lots of beautiful Asian and American women but never fear in Jackie Chan films all these relationships are very chaste.

 

Skiptrace clearly had a big budget and the director Renny Hardin probably staged the action scenes about as well as anyone could.  However Chan (who was one of the producers) has gone to the well one to many times with this setup and the whole film is kind of boring in spite of all the fighting and stunt work.

Written by Jay Longino and BenDavid Grabinski but it's essentially the same film Jackie Chan has been making almost his entire career.  The running time is 108 minutes.

2023 - THE EQUALIZER 3, probably the final film in the series

Denzel Washington is back as Robert McCall, The Equalizer in the third and hopefully final film in the series.  It's hard to believe anyone had any interest in this film. The first Equalizer was competently made and a decent action film but I never thought this series was setting the film world on fire.

This time McCall is in Italy righting the wrongs of the innocent.  For McCall this involves killing a lot of people.  He lets his guard down after one mission and ends up with a bullet in his back.  He's nursed back to health by a doctor and gets involved in the lives of a seaside town in Italy called Altamonte.  Anyway the town is loaded with lots of Mafia guys who are using it as a gateway to run illegal drugs etc.

 

As usual the audience can expect the typical Equalizer bloodbath as McCall runs around shooting lots of Mafia guys to save the day.  Denzel Washington is a very charismatic actor but at age sixty nine he looks tired and worn out and really appears to be dragging himself through the hit man motions.  I suppose the chief if only interest in this film is the appearance of twenty nine year old Dakota Fanning who last appeared with Denzel in Man on Fire back in 2004 when she was ten years old.  She plays the clueless CIA agent in this film who Denzel has to save yet again twenty years later.

 

The Equalizer 3 is nothing new, I've seen this plot line probably over 100 times.  Clearly Denzel and the the director Antoine Fuqua like working with each other.  This is probably the fifth film they have made together.  I just wish they would aim a little higher than spewing out another film version of Death Wish.

The film was written by Richard Wenk who seems to specialize in these old guy action films.  The running time is 109 minutes.

1985 - TAMPOPO, the ramen noodle comedy

 I'll have to admit when I saw this film back in the 1980's I didn't really get the jokes about food and the correct way to serve ramen noodles. Ramen wasn't really that popular in the United States at that time. After seeing it at a revival theater this week I can say this film is hilarious.

Nobuko Miyamoto plays a widow struggling to run a successful ramen noodle bar in Tokyo I believe.  Just when all is lost, in walks Tsutomu Yamazaki as a truck driver wearing a cowboy hat and driving a semi with the horns of a steer on top of it.  Yamazaki commits himself to helping her.

To do this, Yamazaki recruits a team to help Miyamoto become a success.  Right away the parallels to Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven become obvious and amusing.  The performances  throughout the film catch the comedic spirit of the story.  Nobuko Miyamoto as the put upon ramen chef may be down but she is not about to give up on her dream of running the best noodle bar in Tokyo.  Tsutomo Yamazaki is also hilarious as the brooding truck driver acting like an Asian John Wayne.

 

 Throughout the film the director Juzo Itami cuts to some brief vignettes showing other characters and their relationship to food.  Some of these vignettes walk the line between tragedy and comedy but all of them are very amusing.

Tampopo was a complete delight in this viewing and is highly recommended. 

The film was written by the director Juzo Itami and the running time is 115 minutes.