1995 - A MONTH BY THE LAKE, entertaining romantic comedy

At 58 years old when this film was released Vanessa Redgrave is the whole show in this romantic comedy.  Set in 1937 at Lake Como in northern Italy. It’s now a place that only the very rich can afford to vacation at.  Redgrave plays a single woman who would probably be called a "free spirit."  She meets an Englishman played by "The Jackal"  himself, Edward Fox and finds herself attracted to him.  Unfortunately he is being led on by a younger woman played by Uma Thurman.  Will Vanessa win the heart of this stuffy British guy?

The film was shot on location and the production design does a good job capturing the mood of pre-World War II Italy.  John Irvin was the director.  Irvin worked in a lot of different genres whether it was the war film, the thriller or the drama he was for the most part an excellent craftsman.  The cinematography was by Pasqualino de Santis who had been associated with Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Robert Bresson and Ettore Scola.  De Santis was a real heavy hitter in the Italian film industry.

 

If there is one objection that I have to this film, it's that the very magnificent Vanessa Redgrave would never fall for Edward Fox's English twit character.   The guy just acts like a complete jackass most of the time. Still this is an entertaining romantic comedy. Vanessa Redgrave even late in her career is a pleasure to watch and this film shows again what a unique talent she always is.

 

This film was written by Trevor Bentham, the running time is 92 minutes.

1995 - LOVE IN THE TIME OF TWILIGHT, a love story among other things

A big favorite of this blog, Tsui Hark films a love story/fantasy/comedy/ghost story/time travel film.  Hark mashes together about every film genre he can think of.  The main plot seems to be a love story about a young couple who can't stand each other but will eventually fall in love in the future.

 How do we know this?  Nicky Wu plays a bank teller named Kong who meets a woman who is a member of the Peking Opera.  The woman is Charlie Yan playing a character named Yan-Yan.  Early in the film Kong is killed during a bank robbery but comes back as a ghost who needs Yan-Yan to help him relive the last two weeks of his life so he can prevent getting killed. Since this is a Tsui Hark film, this is just the jumping off point for him and this story.

The film has a crazy time travel plot which probablaly puts any of that Back to the Future time travel stuff to shame.  Hark also indulges in some weird low brow humor involving toilets and vomiting.  The sets are colorful and the actors appear to enter into the spirit of this nutty story.

 

Needless to say Hark brings that dynamic and sometimes overly dynamic style of his to this film.  This is yet another entertaining film from the master director who appears to be having fun orchestrating all this chaos

The running time is 103 minutes the writers were Sharon Hui and Tsui Hark

1995 - DIE HARD WITH A VENGANCE, aka Die Hard 3

The third installment in the Die Hard series, In this film we follow Detective John McClane who is now on suspension.  He's being pursued by the brother of Hans Gruber the villain from the first Die Hard movie.  But all is not as it seems as McClane starts to piece together the real reason that chief bad guy Simon Peter Gruber is messing around with him.

I'll give them credit they approached this sequel with some new ideas.  This time McClane has a partner played by Samuel L. Jackson.  The main bad guy is played by Jeremy Irons in kind of a paycheck performance but a very witty paycheck performance.  The other main character is New York City.  A lot of Die Hard 3 was shot there and they did a pretty good job of capturing the vibe of the city.

Die Hard 3 also has a decent sense of humor with Willis tossing off the one liners while taking on the usual small army of terrorists.  The director John McTiernan is back at the helm of this film and he keeps things perking along from one action scene to the next.

 

The chief problem with Die Hard 3 is as usual it's length.  Once the action moves out of New York City the tension kind of dissipates and it's mostly a matter of the story going through it's paces so we can wrap it up with the now Willis signature line "Yippee- Ki-Ya..." etc as he takes down another elaborate bad guy plot.  This is the last Die Hard film that was any good.  The subsequent sequels had a major drop in the quality department.

The film was written by Jonathan Hensleigh with a little more wit this time.  The film runs an overlong 128 minutes.

1995 - RENDEVOUS IN PARIS, aka Les Rendez-vous de Paris

 The brief description for this film was, " the film consists of three loosely connected episodes revolving around chance meetings in Paris," this was not a selling point for me.  As a film critic whose name escapes me once wrote.  "Love stories are easy to make, it's just two people saying a lot of dumb things to each other.

However in this case I shouldn't have been worried.  The writer/director is Eric Rohmer and if there is anyone who knows how to write love stories about young French people it's Rohmer.

 

The film consists of three separate stories. In the first story a student figures out that her boyfriend is cheating on her.  In the second story, a couple meet and talk about their relationship while wandering around a lot of beautiful parks.  Sort of a mini tour of Paris.  The third story is about an artist trying to pick up a woman at a museum who apparently was just recently married.

 

As with many of Rohmer's films the women are young, beautiful and smart.  Their boyfriends are all for the most part kind of clueless and stupid.

A very enjoyable and civilized film from a master filmmaker.

The running time is 94 minutes.

1995 - UNDER SIEGE 2 DARK TERRITORY, a sequel to Under Siege (what else)?

 The film Under Siege with the rather unlikable  Steven Segal made a lot of money.  So the ineveitable sequel was green lighted.

As with most sequels this is essentially the same film as the first one except this time the film was set on a train rather than a ship.  Most of the cast is even back from the first film to give you the sense of "been there done that."

The film was directed by Geoff Murphy a good New Zealand director and it has some decent action scenes but apparently Segal had a lot of influence on the script which is readily apparent.

Well I've see worse.

 

Written by Matt Reeves and Richard Halem.  This OK time killer runs 10o minutes.

1995 - THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, Sam Raimi's eccentric western

Sam Raimi's hyped up visual style is applied to this western about a contest to see who is the fastest gun in town.  Sharon Stone stars and gets a producer credit on the film.  Stone isn't really playing her usual sexy self for some reason, she's rather sullen throughout the film.

I will say this about the film is has an amazing cast.  Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Pat Hingle, Lance Henrickson, Keith David and in his last appearance on film Woody Strode.

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The film is essentially a series of gunfights staged by Raimi with about every bit of visual craziness he can muster.  Gene Hackman basically recreates his Uncle Billy character from Clint Eastwood's The Unforgiven.  Russel Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio were still fairly new in their film career.  

 

The film is a lot of fun to watch mostly for the crazy gunfights and Hackman's scenery chewing performance.  The Quick and the Dead was written by Simon Moore and runs 108 minutes.

1995 - RUMBLE IN THE BRONX, Jackie Chan breaks into the American market

This film should probably be called Rumble in Vancouver instead of Rumble in the Bronx since the film was primarily filmed there.  You can see mountains in the background and cars with Canadian license plates.

 This film was a big deal for Jackie Chan.  He had been trying to break into the American film market for a while and this film finally did it for him. However this is not one of his better films.  It can't begin to hit the peaks of Police Story, Wheels on Meals or Project A to name a few.

 

Still the film is very entertaining. Jackie Chan is a superb athlete and the fights and stunts are staged with his usual dynamic action beats.  The film is loaded with nubile women and lots of cheap sentimentality.  The scenes of the little kid in a wheelchair are particularly grating to watch. However all is forgiven when Jackie Chan starts beating the crap out of a particularly nasty bike gang.

 

The film was written by Edward Tang and Fibe Ma who probably spent most of their time figuring out how to incorporate the stunts and fighting into some sort of coherent story. 90 minutes (the US cut).

1995 - GET SHORTY, gangsters vs Hollywood

 Lone Shark "Chilli" Palmer is in Hollywood to collect some debts owed to some Miami gangsters.  While there he gets the movie bug and decides he wants to produce films.  Little does he know the movie business is just about as cutthroat as the gangster business.

Get Shorty is probably John Travolta's last decent role as "Chilli" Palmer.  He's mister cool dressed in black with his hair slicked back. Gene Hackman is the B movie producer he gets involved with who has aspirations of being a big shot.  Rene Russo is the small time actress and current girlfriend of Hackman. She's someone who has been "rode hard and put up wet"  as they say.  The film is stylishly directed by Barry Sonnenfeld who has a knack with comedy.

Thriller writer Elmore Leonard wrote the book on which the movie is based.  Leonard had spent plenty of time in Hollywood writing westerns so he probably knew a thing or two dealing with sleazy movie industry people.  The film is very funny.

Scott Frank wrote the screenplay. Running time 115 minutes

1995 - MIAMI RHAPSODY, poor copy of a Woody Allen film

A very poor excuse of a film.  The writer/director David Frankel copies a Woody Allen movie without any of the wit of Woody's view of relationships.  

 

The film stars Sarah Jessica Parker in the Woody Allen role, the neurotic Jew trying to sort out her various relationships.  Instead of being set in Manhattan this film uses Miami for it's location and I suppose Frankel thought it was clever to do a sex change with a female playing the neurotic character. Parker apes Woody's character so closely that about the only thing she doesn't do is stammer.

It doesn't help the film that Mia Farrow, Woody's muse in a number of his films is cast as Parker's mother.  It just makes the cribbing from Woody even more obvious.  

Woody Allen is a hit or miss filmmaker these days but films like Miami Rhapsody make you appreciate how hard it is to do this type of bittersweet comedy.

105 minutes. 

1995 - JADE, a sleezy sex thriller

William Friedkin, a director who is challenged to control his over the top impulses takes on a script by sleazy writer Joe Eszterhas.  Friedkin apparently did an uncredited rewrite which apparently didn't make Eszterhas very happy.  I'm not sure Friedkin improved on it much but I will assume the sex titillation stuff was in both versions of the script.

This was a big expensive Paramount studio production.  The on location photography and the sets could not have been cheap.  The film also has one of Friedkin's famous car chases and I'm sure crashing cars around San Francisco wasn't cheap either.

Say what you want, but the film is well made.  Friedkin knows how to assemble a film.  He just seems to have some issues with his tendency for excess which seems to be a running theme in a lot of his films.

I guess if you are feeling in a " I want to watch something kind of slimy" mood.  Jade will probably deliver the goods.  The film is under 2 hours which is a selling point.  A little of this stuff goes a very long way.

95 minutes.

1995 - GOLDENEYE, on Blu Ray

This Bond film actually played pretty well for me after sitting through SPECTRE.  The miniatures and special effects are very well done.  This was the last production that featured Derek Medding's special effects.  Meddings had started his career working for Gary Anderson's Thunderbirds and Fireball XL5.  The miniatures are blended very well with the live action of the film.

Pierce Brosnan always kind of suffered at the hands of his series of Bond films.  The stories were kind of silly but at least they were a little more in keeping with the light weight style of the previous films before they became so heavy handed.  Brosnan always uncomfortably walked the line between copying Sean Connery and Roger Moore, but I would have to say he wasn't too bad in this film.

The film is as usual with Bond films is just a little longer than it needs to be but considering the direction the series took Goldeneye almost seems like a fast paced ninety minute movie,

This was the Bond that introduced Brosnan as Bond and everyone seemed to try a little bit harder on this one with a different director and more contemporary story instead of the usual madman out to destroy the world plot.  I actually enjoyed watching this Bond film for a change.

130 minutes, written by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein.

1995 - BEFORE SUNRISE, you will need to wake up from your movie nap before sunrise.

Out came the reviews, there is another one of these "Before" movies being released.   The latest in the series Before Midnight.  Before Midnight is getting good reviews, particularly by romantic liberal critics looking for a literate, smart love story about two sophisticated people.  

I headed to my collection and dusted off my old DVD's of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, eager to see the first two films before I headed out to the theater to see what everyone was raving about. 
"Gee I wonder why I never got around to watching these films before" I thought.  Over 90 minutes later I knew.  Before Sunrise is really boring.

The meandering talk of the two leads Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy is not in the least bit interesting.  It reminds me of the old definition of writing a lazy love story, get two people together and have them say dumb things to each other for a couple of hours.  

After forcing myself to finish this turkey I now realize that I am not giving Woody Allen enough credit for doing this kind of picture even is his stuff isn't always up to par.  The one positive of this film,  Julie Delpy speaks very good English.

101 minutes, written by Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan.

1995 - A WALK IN THE CLOUDS, pretty and pretty sappy romantic drama

 A deliberately old fashioned romantic drama starring inexpressive actor Keanu Reeves, thrown in with a bunch of emoting Hispanic actors.   The resulting film is kind of a crappy mess of a romance.

 Keanu is a soldier returning home from World War II who is suffering from PTS syndrome although it's kind of hard to tell with him.  He meets up with with Spanish actress Aitana Sánchez-Gijón who is an unmarried, pregnant and is returning to her "colorful" Hispanic family who have a vineyard in the Napa Valley.  Keanu pretends to be her husband so she doesn't suffer the wrath of her explosive father played by Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini since there were clearly no Hispanic actors who could play this role.  Well anyway Keanu and Sánchez-Gijón fall in love and etc.

A Walk In The Clouds is very pretty to watch, every scene is filmed with a golden tint which only goes to prove that the sepia filter can be overused as a sloppy cliche in a romantic drama.  Maurice Jarre also lards it on with his "expressive" film score because when you can't generate real emotions from the actors you supplement it in every other way that you can.

102 minutes.

1995 - JUDGE DREDD, is dreadful (what else)

Mix Blade Runner with some comic book called Judge Dredd and you get another attempt at a summer action film circa 1995.  Throw in some comic relief and a bunch of loud action scenes with a past his prime action star. The result another mediocre summer film for the teenage boy crowd.

Sylvester Stallone is the humorless star, of an eccentric cast that features Diane Lane, Armand Assante, Joan Chen, Jurgen Prochnow and the hopefully one time screen appearances in the same film of Rob Schneider and Max Von Sydow who actually have a scene together, god help us.

Obviously this crummy film wasn't supposed to be taken very seriously but like Stallone's other terrible science fiction action film Demolition Man the stupid story( Judge Dredd is framed for a crime he didn't commit etc) ruins any fun that was to be had in this film.  Stallone's also pretty hopeless in the film.

96 minutes, written by William Wisher Jr. and Steven E. de Souza.

1995 - DRACULA DEAD AND LOVING IT, another so called comedy from Mel Brooks

With his camera pointed at the cleavage of almost every woman in the cast, Mel Brooks films another genre parody this time of vampire movies. 

An incredibly unfunny comedy.  Almost every joke and gag seems really forced and tired and also 20 years out of date.  Leslie Nielsen was hired to lure the suckers in thinking they were going to see another Airplane or Naked Gun type of comedy.  What they got was a bunch actors hamming and milking supposedly comic situations so broadly they made Abbott and Costello look subtle.
 

It's always amazed me that Mel Brooks got away with his tired genre rehash comedies as long as he did.  He's seen a lot of old movies and knows all the cliches so he knows what to make fun of.  Mel Brooks was also smart enough to put enough schoolboy smut into his films to make them seem a little contemporary even though his interest was clearly in recreating and spoofing old films.

Dracula Dead and Loving It is so out of funny ideas that even with all the breasts on display,  Brooks has to stick in two musical numbers just to pad out the running time.  In the old days of The Producers or Young Frankenstein he played these musical moments for laughs, now it seems like he is actually taking them seriously.

This film was a complete bust and appeared to be the end of his film making career.  In 2001, Brooks turned The Producers into a Broadway musical and he was proclaimed a comic genesis all over again.  However the film musical version of The Producers turned out to be a big flop supposedly due to Brook's constant interference with the director Susan Stroman.

88 minutes

1995 - GAMERA GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE, is not Godzilla

Giant ancient birds are flying around Japan eating people.   Fortunately,  the ancient Atlantians, created a flying turtle with rockets for feet called Gamara.  Gamara does battle with these things called the Galos and saves the day.

 

This is the first in a trilogy of Gamara films from the late 1990's, and it's a reboot as they like to say these days, of the older silly children's series from the 1960's.  

Probably no stupider that the first three Star Wars movies and at times a whole lot more entertaining,  the movie combines models and miniatures with some OK digital computer effects.  The Japanese like to call these films "kaiju's" which means strange beasts AKA  "monsters."

The prepared English language dub of the movie has some funny lines.  "Someday I'd like to show you around a monster-free Tokyo,"  says the boy to the girl while the Galos is ripping Tokyo apart.

Written by  Kazunori Itō ,  the running time is 95 minutes.