2003 - INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, a comedy from the Coen brothers.

A goofy comedy from the Coen Brothers about marriage and divorce.  Their oddball humor is very much present. With the assistance of their leading man George Clooney they continue to make Clooney act like an absolute fool.

Briefly, Clooney is a shark of a divorce attorney known for never losing a case.  He takes on a divorce where the husband played by Edward Herrmann picks up prostitutes and pretends he is the conductor on a train, (don't ask).  Herrmann's wife is played by Catherine Zeta Jones photographed to look her most glamorous.  After Jones loses the case thanks to shyster attorney Clooney, she swears revenge.  This kicks in lots of scenes with goofy characters and nutty situations involving scary rottweilers, asthmatic hit men and soap opera actors.

 

The Coens are known for their eccentric dialog and the scenes during the divorce court proceedings are funny.  However it does seem like the comedic invention and situations seems to sag about midway into the film.  Still this is a Coen Brothers film and they are always worth a look. 

 

Among the other actors involved in this film are Geoffrey Rush, Cedric the Entertainer, Richard Jenkins, Billy Bob Thornton, Julia Duffy and Jonathan Hadyley as a character named Heinz, the Baron Krauss von Espy, aka "Puffy." 

The film was written by Robert Ramsey, Matthew Stone and Joel and Ethan Coen, the running time is 100 minutes.

2024 - THE PENGUIN LESSONS, a charming film

Expecting the worst, comedian Steve Coogan adopting a penguin as a pet, I was surprised to see that this film had a lot more going for it than I thought.  This film has the ominous credit scrawl, "based on a true story."  But I will say Steve Coogan who is a funny guy also makes films that have a lot more to them then just comedic situations.   Coogan was the producer on Philomena a true story film a woman abused by the Catholic Church.  Coogan also played comedian Oliver Hardy in a decent film biography about Laurel and Hardy.

In The Penguin Lessons Coogan plays a teacher working at a boarding school in Argentina while the millitary was in power after overthrowing the elected government.  During a short vacation to the ocean he comes across a penguin covered in oil.  After cleaning the penguin up, Coogan tries to return it to the ocean but the penguin has bonded to him.  Coogan ends up taking the penguin back to his boarding school where the penguin bonds with the students and staff.

 

 Up to this point the plot seems simple and feel good enough but the film takes a turn when the daughter of one of the employees is arrested by the country's secret police for being a political activist.  Coogan has to decide if he will intervene to get the daughter released which could be at the expense of his own personal safety.  

 

I'll give this film credit, it could have easily taken the low road with lots of penguin being cute scenes but the filmmakers did try to put a little bit of a spine into one of these "adorable" animal films.  The film also doesn't have some gratuitous love interest to distract from the story for a change.  Overall an agreeable story well told.   

The film was written by Jeff Pope, the running time is 112 minutes. 

2025 - ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, on the big screen

One Battle After Another is an excellent film, it is also a very quirky and at times odd film as is to be expected from it's writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson.  This film was kind of a crap shoot for Warner Brother's Studios.  Give a talented filmmaker a large budget and let him follow his own muse.  The end result is film that says a lot about the current social and political situation in the United States but also adds some oddball humor to it's story.

This film has an amazing cast, Leonardo DiCaprio is a burned out revolutionary.  Sean Penn is a very right wing military officer.  Benicio Del Toro is a karate instructor who is also moving illegal migrant workers around to keep them from being detained by the government.  Penn in particular hasn't had a good part like this in a long time.

 

Anderson has also taken a different approach to the action scenes instead of the usual over the top hyper and frankly unrealistic approach most of these action movies have. The chase scenes have been carefully staged and edited.

 

 One Battle After Another will unfortunately not be a financial success.   The film just did not catch on with the public. This admittedly unconventional but very entertaining film will apparently lose a lot of money.  The studio spent a lot marketing this film but something clearly didn't click with getting the word out to the movie going audience.  Frankly what the public now wants in film entertainment is apparently a mystery to Hollywood especially when a film like this fails

Still a great film anyway you cut it.  One Battle After Another deserves to be seen in a movie theater to appreciate it's widescreen compositions.  In fact all of the technical credits in this film are at an extremely high level along with the performances of the cast.

The running time is 162 minutes. 

2019 - VFW, a nostalgic horror film

A nostalgic horror film filled with a cast of character actor old timers.  VFW is also one gory and violent film.  The director Joe Begos is a relatively young guy who seems attracted to this kind of extremely nasty stuff in his other films and VFW has plenty of intense over the top violence.

The plot such that it is has a gang of drug dealers looking for a member who has run away from the gang with a load of their very nasty drugs.  She ends up hiding in a rundown VFW bar full of over the hill army veterans. The veterans decide to take a stand and protect her from the gang.  VFW is kind of a really savage version of Rio Bravo or Assault On Precinct 13.  Let the siege commence and make sure everyone is swimming in blood with all the killing going on by the end of the film.

 

Besides the incredible killing stuff what this film has going for it is an amazing cast of actor old guys.  Stephen Lang, William Sadler, Fred Williamson, David Patrick Kelly and George Wendt are the oldsters who turn out to be just as scary and tough as the drug dealers.  These performers should know a thing or two about how to be tough guys since they mostly spent their careers in action movies.

 

This film is well made and I have to say the spilled blood and the violent action scenes are also very well photographed.  The old guy actors actually bring a kind of a poignancy to this story which is hard to believe. but it's there.  If this kind of stuff is your cup of carnage, VFW can be a very enjoyable story.

The film was written by Max Brallier and Matthew McArdle, the running time is 92 minutes.

1963 - LOVE IS A BALL, undemanding romcom

An innocuous time killer for the most part.  Love Is A Ball is the kind of film that the slowly dying movie studios were still pumping out in their foolhardy attempt to compete with television.  The film was filmed on location on the French Riviera so it looks pretty.  It has a good cast and some of the situations are rather humorous at times.

The semi complicated rom com plot goes like this.  Charles Boyer is a person who arranges very rich people to get married to impoverished royalty. He takes a penniless aristocrat in this case Ricardo Montalban and does a Pygmalion thing to him.  The makeover will make him acceptable to a rich American heiress played by Hope Lange.  Lange is playing a sexy party girl, she was an okay actress but the sexy party girl role may have been a little beyond her acting range.  Glenn Ford figures in this story as a championship auto racer who has to teach Ricardo how to be a race driver.  Glenn ends up going undercover as Hope's chauffeur so the director and writers can create a contrived romance between the two of them.

 

The film has an interesting cast besides the above mention actors.  Telly Savalas is Hope's guardian.  Savalas played a lot of "he-man" roles but in this film he's kind of a foppish character. Character actor Ruth McDevitt is Hope's Grandmother or Aunt or something.  I've seen McDevitt in a lot a lot of movies and TV shows, she was always a reliable presence in a movie.  Also showing up is Swedish actress Ulla Jacobsson in her first American film and clearly trying to break into the international film scene.  She's barely in the movie and really doesn't make much of an impression.

 

The director David Swift was kind of an old hand at this fluffy stuff.  He worked for Walt Disney and make a couple of good films, The Parent Trap and a very good version of Pollyanna.  He went on to make Good Neighbor Sam and an excellent film version of the musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  

 

For such a light piece of film junk the production was apparently not a happy one.  Glenn Ford clashed with the director frequently, he was apparently in his 'I'm a movie star" mode.  Ford and Hope Lange were a couple in real life which didn't help matters.  Swift was an unhappy camper during the shoot.

The was written by David Swift, Tom Waldman and Frank Waldman, the running time is 111 minutes.

1979 - STALKER, on the big screen

Showing at a revival theater near near me was Tarkovsky's science fiction epic Stalker.  The film is long and very intense visually and story wise.  To recap, Stalker involves the travels of three individuals into an area called The Zone.  The Zone apparently contains a room that will grant the wishes of people that can find it and enter it.  The three men traveling to this mysterious room are the stalker who is the guide through the zone, a writer apparently suffering from writer's block and a professor on a mysterious mission.

The movie is long and probably what would today be called slow moving.  Andrei Tarkovsky the director was a very serious fellow when it came to his art and he approached each of his films with a deliberate approach when it came to making films.  The visual elements in a Tarkovsky film were always carefully planned out.

 

This was a difficult film for Tarkovsky to complete, he apparently had lots of technical issues with film stock and after a year of work the first version of the film was scrapped and was restarted with a revised screenplay.

What's the film about? Well part of it is definitely about having faith in your life although this is a very simple explanation.  The best thing that can be said about Stalker is that it is considered one of the greatest films ever made.  It's certainly a very fascinating and interesting film and was made by a master filmmaker.

The film was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.  The running time is a daunting 161 minutes. 

2011 - WE BOUGHT A ZOO, entertaining thanks to one really good performance

A very slight film from one time wonder boy Cameron Crowe.  No need to rehash this story since it's in the title.  It's generally known that Crowe was a big admirer of Billy Wilder a director who really knew how to blend comedy and drama into his films.  However We Bought A Zoo seems more like a Frank Capra film than a Wilder film and we're talking a Frank Capra film from the 1950's when Capra was in his big time artistic and creative decline.

This film is kind of a mix of comedy, family drama and romance.  It has some good scenes and some good actors but it you are allergic to cute little kids beware because this one has a real scene stealer.  The underrated Scarlett Johnansson is a zoo keeper and potential love interest and Thomas Hayden Church plays the brother of the main protagonist.  He isn't in the film enough but he's very funny

 

What makes this film very watchable is Matt Damon as the widower father looking to restart his life with his family by buying a decrepit zoo.  Damon pulls off the comedy and family drama stuff expertly and manages to sell even the silliest scenes in the film with his sincere performance.  He makes this film worth seeing.

 

An uneven film at best, this is another example of actors coming to the rescue of a less than perfect screenplay.  

The film was written by Cameron Crowe and Aline Brosh McKenna.  The running time is an overlong 124 minutes. 

2025 - FANTASTIC FOUR FIRST STEPS, try try again

Marvel still trying to reclaim their box office glory comes up with another underachiever.  Fantastic Four First Steps isn't the film that is going to bring them back from the precipice.  As the critics and box office analysts have been saying for a while the superhero genre has just plain exhausted the viewer.

Still holding on to that meta universe verse stuff, we're on Earth 828 mostly because Marvel still insists on dragging all of their films together under one umbrella.  We are introduced to the Fantastic Four the prime members of the Marvel comic books.  Right away we are plunged into a confusing mess of storytelling with mentions of mole men and super apes which the team has apparently defeated. We are also dragged into a bewildering recap of their origin story.  After what seems like an eternity the Silver Surfer (who apparently had a sex change) shows up to announce the that the big and I mean literally big supervillain Galactus is coming to eat up Earth 828.  Will the Fantastic Four be able to defeat Galactus?  

 

For a film that was supposed to reinvent or restart the Marvel Universe Fantastic Four First Steps seems mighty derivative.  There are call outs to scenes from Star Wars ( a cute little robot, space ships flying around), that huggy feely stuff that we had to put up with in Marvel's Thunderbolts and oddly a North Korean monster movie called Pulgasari which featured another stiff stone faced giant stomping around.  Frankly the film seemed a little slow moving until the big battle at the end with the inevitable ending triumph.

 

What's good about this movie?  Well it looks cool with its blend of a mid 1960's look combined with some futuristic buildings.  The cast seems kind of game although in the back of my mind I couldn't help thinking that all of these rather mature adults dressed up as superheroes looked kind of silly.  I believe this film broke even financially but it's not the blockbuster success Disney and Marvel were apparently looking for. 

The film has four writers, Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer, a lot of writers is always a very bad sign.  The running time is 114 minutes

1937 - ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL aka 100 MEN AND A GIRL

Deanna Durbin one of the big three child stars of the 30's and 40's the other two being Shirley Temple and Judy Garland, was a popular star of family friendly films.  She frequently played a little miss fix it up as she went about righting wrongs and solving problems for clueless adults.  One Hundred Men And A Girl was one of her most popular features. 

Durbin plays the daughter of out of work trombone player father Adolph Menjou.  Durbin also befriends famous conductor Leopold Stokowski playing himself.  She schemes to get her father and his out of work musician friends work.  After the musicians form an ad hoc symphony orchestra Durbin tricks Stokowki into conducting them.  Not much plot in this movie.  Stokowski was a fairly well known symphony conductor and is best remembered for appearing in Disney's Fantasia.  For a musician who wasn't a trained actor he actually gives a decent performance. 

 

Anyway Durbin races around town good deed doing and more importantly singing, singing singing.  Durbin was a lyrical soprano and her films have her warbling lots of audience friendly musical selections.  In this film she sings Mozart's "Alleluia", "A Heart That's Free", "It's Raining Sunbeams", and for good measure,  "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow." 

 

This film was made during the Depression and if it has one theme to it, it's don't give up hope.  When things are the darkest hope is personified by the perennially chipper Deanna.  This is the kind of take the family to a movie that won't remotely offend anyone.

This fluff of a film was written amazingly by three writers Charles Kenyon, Bruce Manning, and James Mulhauser.  The running time is a painless 85 minutes.    

2025 - THE LOST BUS - based on a true story apparently

Showing up on streaming this month The Lost Bus is one of those based on a true story deals.  The plot concerns the heroic efforts of a school bus driver trying to rescue 22 children trapped in an out of control fire called the "2018 Camp Fire." This was one of the most devastating fires in the history of California.  The driver Kevin McKay is played by a very scruffy looking Matthew McConaughey and the school teacher Mary Ludwig is played by America Ferrera.  Ferrera of course got to deliver that famous feminist speech in the Barbie film.  

 

The film was directed by Paul Greengrass who brings his usual documentary technique film style to tell the story.  Greengrass likes to use handheld cameras which gives the film a sort of immediacy to the storytelling.  The handheld camera has a lot of shaky photography and at times can probably induce motion sickness in a viewer watching all that photographic bouncing around.

The film is good at capturing the terror of the massive fire. The story is apparently true for the most part, so what's the problem?  Well it seems that Greengrass and his screenwriter had decided to add lots of stuff about the personal lives of the bus driver and the teacher.  The bus driver is having problems in his relationship with his son and ex wife.  The school teacher has led a sheltered life and has not really lived an adventurous fulfilling life, blah blah blah.  Why the makers of this film needed to add all of this junk is beyond my understanding.  The circumstance of the school children stuck in a bus which might get consumed by a fire should really have been enough drama.  All this personal lives stuff of the teacher and bus driver just dilutes and drags out the film.

 

The film is well made, Greengrass knows how to stage intense dramatic scenes in this case a forest fire chasing a school bus full of frightened elementary school children.  The Lost Bus is sort of a real life version of The Towering Inferno.

The film was written by Paul Greengrass and Brad Ingelsby, the running time is an overlong 130 minutes.