1999 - THE LIMEY, entertaining revenge thrilller from Soderbergh

The director Steven Soderbergh and the writer Lem Dobbs put together this entertaining crime thriller about a hardened criminal from England who travels to Los Angeles to get to the bottom of his daughter's death.  The plot has been done before but this film takes the basic premise and spins it with some clever story telling and a really great cast.

 

In almost a nod to Hollywood's past history Soderbergh put together an excellent group of performers starting with Terence Stamp (General Zod) is the transplant from England.  Character actor Luis Guzmán who is always fun to see, is the person who helps Stamp. Lesley Ann Warren usually associated with singing and dancing roles plays an acting teacher.  "Blues" himself from The Wild Ones, Peter Fonda is a mysterious record producer mixed up in Stamp's daughter's death. Barry Newman is Fonda's lawyer.  Newman was the star of the car chase cult film Vanishing Point.

 

Soderbergh brought an interesting visual and editing style with flash forwards and flash backs to tell the story it gives the film a nice contemporary feel.  Terence Stamp was a big deal in the new wave British cinema of the 1960's and he gives an excellent performance thirty years later.  In fact the whole cast is working at a high level throughout this film.

The Limey was produced on a modest budget but unfortunately didn't make money. To bad, this is a quality film which is also a very entertaining one.

The running time is 89 minutes.

1999 - FANTASIA 2000 - sort of a follow up to FANTASIA

Fantasia 2000 was made due to the involvement of Roy Disney, the nephew of Walt and a major shareholder in the company.  To say that the other Disney executives were not enthused about this project would apparently be an understatement.  Still Roy Disney was a big deal at the Disney company so this film which was basically an update of Fantasia went forward.

Once again the Disney company marshaled their creative and technical staff.  The format was to be the same, musical segments were based on compositions from classical composers such as Beethoven, Respighi, Gershwin, Shostakovich, Saint-Saëns, Dukas, Elgar and Stravinsky.

 

The plan this time was to hire a series of performers to introduce each segment to make the film seem more "hip."  Steve Martin opens the film with a rather tiresome comic bit.  Quincy Jones shows up in his introduction for Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  Magicians Penn & Tellar do an already dated magic trick.  "Darth Vader" himself James Earl Jones gets a bit and finally Bette Midler introduces some segment which I can't recall.  Sticking all these actors into this film smacked a little like desperation.

The animation was at a very high standard.  When the Disney Corporation put their minds to it, nobody could produce more stunning traditional animation and in his case aided by computer enhancement, than this talented group.

 

This film like the previous Fantasia also did not do especially well with the general public.  The film lost money.  The critical reviews were all over the place and it was clear this wasn't going to be the animation masterpiece Roy Disney had hoped for.  The problem with Fantasia 2000 was that it was for the most part a very boring film.   No amount of elaborate and stunning animation was going to help this film.  Nice try but no cigar as they say.

The film's running time is 76 minutes.

1999 - AN IDEAL HUSBAND, is Oscar Wilde updated for the modern audience

 If you are going to read or watch a play or movie written by Oscar Wilde you can't help but be impressed by all the witty one liners sprinkled throughout his writing.  You can drive yourself crazy trying to remember his best quotes

The writer /director Oliver Parker has streamlined the play a bit for modern audiences and added a love scene but the plot remains the same.  Sir Robert Chiltern would seem to be the perfect person.  An incorruptible politician and faithful husband particularity worshiped by his wife Lady Gertrude Chiltern.  Little does anyone know especially Lady Chiltern, Lord Chiltern has a dark secret in his past.  Enter Mrs. Laura Cheveley who knows about Lord Chiltern's past and wants some political favors in exchange for her silence.  Will Chiltern betray his principals to keep his good name or will he risk being exposed? That in a nutshell is the plot.

 

However in spite of this plot the real focus is on Chiltern's friend Lord Arthur Goring who is the consummate playboy. Lord Goring gets involved in helping Chiltern with the assistance of lots of amusing one liners that would make Woody Allen jealous.  Here is a sample:

"My dear father, when one pays a visit, it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time and not one's own."

"Well, there's nothing I like more than to be congratulated, though invariably I find the pleasure immeasurably increased when I know what for."

"Excuse me a moment. I'm in the middle of my performance of the attentive son."

"My dear father, if we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.” 

Well you get the idea.  You can have all the great dialog in the world but it takes a great performance to put it over.  In this case the actor Rupert Everett as Lord Goring steals the film even from gifted performers like Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore and Minnie  Driver.   As good as they are, they not a match for this guy.

 

The film is very elegant to look at and Oliver Parker doesn't draw things, out the film comes in at 97 minutes.

1999 - 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU, a cult teenage rom-com

I'm a little to old for this film and I was definitely not the intended audience.   The film was marketed under the Touchstone production banner which was the Disney's studio's way of separating their so called wholesome family films from some films of what they felt were more adult in nature. As if this harmless film was  some kind of a version of Last Tango In Paris.

This film was  inspired by Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew.  But to put it carefully it is very loosely inspired  by that Shakespeare play.  Julia Stiles is the mean older sister to Larisa Oleynik.  Oleynik can't go on dates unless her older sister dates per their traditionalist father, a rather ridiculous premise for a film set in the 1990's.    Joseph Gordon Levitt in one of his early roles,  persuades bad boy Heath Ledger to romance Stiles and since this is a rom-com surprise surprise they fall in love.

What this film has going for it is the casting, we get a lot of young actors at the start of their careers and you can definitely see their talent shine though. Unfortunately the actors all speak like they have rom-com writers following them around because they sure don't talk like high school students.  Certainly not any high school students I hung around with.  It's a tribute to these actors that they make these constant smarmy one-liners seem sincere.

I can't say that this film isn't fun because it is.  What the film has going for it is the performance of Julia Stiles as the shrewish older sister.  At the beginning of the film she comes off as a major bitch but as the story progresses her character grows and the audience comes to understand why she behaves the way she does.  It seems that Stiles should have really been a bigger star on the basis of this film but that's the way it goes.  Stiles carved out an okay career for herself for the most part but doesn't appear to be obsessed with all the Hollywood star ego bullshit.

 

The film was written by Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, the running time is 97 minutes.

1999 - THE MUSE. Albert Brooks bites the Hollywood hand that feeds him.

Albert Brooks is a screenwriter trying to get a film project off the ground in that den of thieves called Hollywood.  Unable to get anywhere with the studio brass he learns of a woman who is a "Muse" for  people in the entertainment world suffering from creative blocks.  Brooks engages her to help him write a new screenplay and close a deal to get his film made.   It turns out that maybe the Muse might be a little bit crazy.

 As with many Albert Brooks comedies, The Muse is a very subtle and at times a very funny comedy.  Brooks has assembled a great cast which includes Sharon Stone as the muse, Jeff Bridges as his successful screenwriter friend, Andie MacDowell as his cookie baking wife and in two very amusing cameos from superstar directors James Cameron and Martin Scorcese.

 

I suppose this film will mostly appeal to fans of Albert Brooks, most people probably can't relate to  satirizing Hollywood or the problems a successful screenwriter is having getting a movie made.  For the most part I enjoyed it.

 

Written by Albert Brooks and Monica Johnson, the running time is 97 minutes.

1999 - ENTRAPMENT, the reason they have movie stars

Entrapment is meant to be a classy heist film with beautiful people and places.  The film got the beautiful people and locations part right, what it didn't great right was a decent script for the actors.

Sean Connery is master thief Robert MacDougal, but lets face it he's just playing an older version of James Bond.  The stunning Catherine Zeta-Jones is his partner. They are thieves about to pull off the biggest heist of the century.  The films wants to be a stylish remake of Rififi, the famous caper film that is the template for this kind of film.  Instead what we got was a remake of an old George Hamilton film, Jack of Diamonds (anyone remember that). Frankly the George Hamilton film was better.

This is an example of an entertaining film where the stars have to carry the whole film.   The director and writers can't seem to come up with any interesting situations or even decent character development.  The film is enjoyable in spite of itself.  Probably the high point of the film is watching Catherine Zeta-Jones slither around in a really tight leotard.

 

Written by Ron Bass and William Boyles Jr.

113 minutes but really too long for such a lightweight film.

1999 - NOTTING HILL, a romantic comedy from England

Glamorous movie star falls in love with the owner of a small bookstore in Notting Hill, London

Julia Roberts is the supposedly hot movie star.  Hugh Grant does his stuttering acting thing.

Compliations occur, but there is a happy ending.

124 Minutes

1999 - LIGHT KEEPS ME COMPANY, documentary on Sven Nykvist

A documentary on the life and career of Sven Nykvist made about seven years before his death.  Sven Nykvist was the cinematographer who was as responsible for the look of an Ingmar Bergman film as much as Bergman himself was.  As the film opens, Nykvist is retired and suffering from a rare form of dementia that has made it difficult for him to speak.

 

The documentary is short and zips through his life and career with the primary focus on his work with Bergman and even that part of the film only looks at a few of their films.  Nykvist was apparently a very private person so the usual collection of "talking heads" and film clips are featured. 

Nykvist apparently had a rather messy personal life.  He had an affair with Mia Farrow on the set of The Hurricane.  The writer Nora Ephron made a witty comment that she was "the only woman in Hollywood who hadn't slept with Sven Nykvist" is unfortunately not interviewed.  She probably had a story or two.

The film ends on a kind of moving note showing Nykvist spending time with his family and childhood friends, not a movie star in sight.  The final shot of the old and ill photographer still able to load a camera magazine is touching.  This is a film that will probably interest film buffs for the most part.

75 minutes.

1999 - THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, on BLU RAY

The third of the crummy Pierce Brosnan James Bond series.  Brosnan's Bond films made a lot of money however they were never very good and this is a series that had some dogs like Live and Let Die, and The Man With The Golden Gun.

The first 30 minutes of the film are the best part.  The boat chase down the Thames manages to recapture some of the fun of the Bond series.  Unfortunately after that it's all down hill from there with some incomprehensible plot involving oil pipelines, Russian nuclear missiles and stolen submarines.  The action scenes and special effects are up to the usual high standards but there is a lack of excitement in every scene.  The audience knows that Pierce Brosnan is going to come out unbloodied  Let's face it, in every Bond film James Bond is going to survive but in this film it just seems really obvious.

 

Pierce (Remington Steele) Brosnan was always a decent Bond even though he was really channeling Sean Connery but the scripts they gave him never gave him a chance to make a really memorable film.  Brosnan fought hard for better scripts and directors but he was just a hired hand and easily replaceable.  After Die Another Day the producers let him go and did a reboot with the incredibly humorless Daniel Craig.

What are you going to say about the cast?  It was always good to see the original "Q" in the Bond films even though this was Desmond Llewelyn's final shot.  Yea Denise Richards was kind of hopeless but that was par for the course.  Sophie Marcel and Robert Carlye showed up to cash a paycheck.  

The World Is Not Enough looks clean and pretty on Blu Ray.

128 minutes screenplay Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein.

1999 - eXistenZ, David Cronenberg's follow up to Videodrome.

Very weird science fiction from David Cronenberg it picks up where he left off with his theme of technology literally merging with a human body.  A video game developed by Allegra Geller is the latest in gaming technology, it completely immerses the player into the gaming experience.  A group called the "Realists" are attempting to stop this emerging technology and kill her.

Cronenberg gets to pursue his usual fascination of having icky living things infecting the body and transforming it.   Cronenberg went down this road one before with James Woods and creepy blond Deborah Harry in Videodrome.  This time he has Jud Law and creepy blond Jennifer Jason Leigh going through the same motions.  Both of these films are very well acted.

Videodrome was a ground breaking science fiction film, eXistenZ is a little less this time but it's still very interesting.  Besides the weird body merge technology thing and the slimy creatures that are featured throughout this film.   Cronenberg also has the multiple realities inside realities thing going on that Inception got all of the credit for last year.  Thinking it over now, this was a very engrossing film.

"I'm feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I'm kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here"

97 minutes.

1999 - SWEET AND LOWDOWN, is about a jazz musician but it's really about Woody Allen vs. Sean Penn

Woody Allen started to disconnect with his audience in the 1990's.  Allen is a funny guy but his humor had always been for a fairly specialized crowd.  As he drifted into drama he seemed to lose touch with the humorous side of his personality.  He can still put together technically funny scenes, but it now seems like he mostly goes through the motions.

Woody Allen's dialog has a certain cadence to it which he expects the actors to perform in a certain way.  This ends up with the actors in his films frequently sounding like Woody Allen, with his halting neurotic vocal delivery.  This was most evident in Celebrity where Kenneth Branagh completely parroted Woody Allen's acting style to a ridiculous degree.

Sean Penn is too strong an actor to play Allen's game and he takes the character of a jazz guitarist who happens to be a real jerk and makes it his own.  Penn does the best job possible with the disappointing dialog and situations in this film and he is the best reason to watch Sweet and Lowdown.

Incredibly, the actor Samantha Morton won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the Chaplin like mute girlfriend who sticks with him through his ups and down.  An "oh come on" acting job.

Sweet and Lowdown is as close as anyone will get to Woody Allen's explanation of his less than sterling personal behavior.  The jazz guitarist Emmet Ray is portrayed throughout the film as a brilliant musician and artist and this seems to be the justification and excuse for his mistreatment of the devoted mute girl and the people he works for.

Sweet and Lowdown never really has much of a story and just completely peters out towards the end. The film does have excellent photography and production design, Woody Allen films always look great.

The film's very unsatisfying conclusion has Emmet Ray recording a series of "brilliant pieces of music" and then vanishing from the public.  Another Woody Allen wish fullfillment? 

The running time is 95 minutes.

1999 THE MATRIX, 2003, THE MATRIX RELOADED, THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS

Rewatched the Matrix films, haven't seen them since they first came out in the theater.

THE MATRIX

This film still looked pretty good, the action scenes were still impressive to watch and very entertaining.  The plot is fun even if it's a bunch of foolish techno babble.  Keanu Reeves plays the Christ figure Neo,  who has been chosen to save humanity from the psychic brain control of the machines.  Keanu's actually not bad,  he'll never be known as a strong actor but he certainly didn't disgrace himself.  Probably the real star is Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus  he's a very good actor and has enough gravitas to him that he can put over the ponderous dialog. Don't know where this film would have been without him.

Four years later  it's the summer of 2003, the inevitable sequels:

THE MATRIX RELOADED

Problems almost from the beginning.  The intention was to have a Star Wars type of trilogy film series, but they boxed themselves into a corner almost immediately.  The Matrix ended with Neo discovering he had  super powers, much like Superman.  He flies around and even has some kind of X-ray vision.  Agent Smith who was obviously the Darth Vader character from the first film had been destroyed, but now he's back as a rogue computer program who can clone himself to give Neo an unstoppable enemy.

Nothing of any interest really happens for about the first 40 minutes of the film, there is some soap opera stuff between the characters that we have to sit through, and this time the self important dialog is spoken very slowly as if it were some self important epic text from a Shakespeare play or a Dr. Strange comic.

Even the two big action scenes are boring.  Neo's fight with the Agent Smith clones goes on forever and has no resolution, because it's clear he would have to confront Smith again in The Matrix Revolutions.  Instead Neo just flies away leaving the audience to wonder what the point of the fight was even about.

The other big scene, the car chase features Fishburne's Morphius character battling it out with the evil computer program agents on top of a speeding semi.  Again, this scene ends with Neo flying to the rescue and saving Morphius another pointless showoff special effects scene.  None of the action scenes can have Neo actually participate in them since he is now undefeatable.

The Matrix Reloaded ends with Neo confronting the Architect of the Matrix who informs him that he is just part of a repeating cycle of man and machine control.  Neo cannot change the preordained destiny of the Matrix.  This long dialog scene really brings the movie to a stop.  


THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS

Part three came out Christmas 2003.  The idea was to wrap up the story with a big finale.  Again, the problems from part two hang over this film as well.   The first hour of this film has literally nothing going on it's basically a preparation for the big machine/human battle in the city of Zion.   Neo learns from his adviser the Oracle that the Architect didn't know what he was talking about in the last movie.  This I had to sit around six months to find out back in 2003.

The two big action set pieces in this film are the battle with the sentinels in Zion, and the final battle between Neo and Agent Smith.  The sentinel battle with the mech battle units is kind of fun to watch if a little confusing, but a least it's something different from the endless and now very boring slow motion Kung Fu fights.

Time for the third Agent Smith/Neo battle, and now it's really hard to work up any interest in their fighting it out yet again.  They fly around and throw each other into buildings which is clearly a direct steal from Superman II.  As usual the outcome is never in question.

The Matrix Revolutions wraps it up with Oracle and the Architect discussing the end of the war between man and machine.  The Architect states that humans will now have their right to choose what will happen to them from now on.  Well whatever, it seems odd that the filmmakers choose to end with these two and no one from the main cast.

The Matrix Revolutions ended with the possibility of yet another followup but considering the amount of money and time spent on these film sequels and their less than stellar finance payback, it was pretty obvious that this wasn't going to happen anytime soon.  You don't see a lot of people collecting Matrix action figures these days.

Probably no one needed a sequel to the original Matrix but the film made a lot of money and was a fun sci/fi action film so it's understandable Warner Brothers would want a franchise.  Unfortunately for the filmmakers, they had exhausted all of their clever ideas in the first film, so their sequels were uninspired rehashes of their earlier and much better sequences from The Matrix.

It's also very apparent watching The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions that both films could have been easily edited down into one film.

Still all three films were well made, and obviously expensive productions.  The sequels are now only OK time wasters and not the film epics that were hoped for.

2006 - PETER AND THE WOLF, 1999 - THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, 2 short animated films

Viewed a couple of short films last week:

PETER AND THE WOLF: A short film that won the Academy award in 2006, but don't hold that against it. Filmed in the stop motion animation process that is usually associated with Ray Harryhausen and is basically considered a dead technique these days. The film uses Prokofiev's score and generally follows the story. This is a very well made film. The stop motion actually brings the characters to life, unlike WALL-E where the human character design seemed to be the weakest part of the film. This film was written and directed by Suzie Templeton.

 32 minutes.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA: Hemingway's most overrated story won him the Nobel prize for literature. This was also an Academy Award winner in 1999. Apparently it was animated using glass panels painted with pastels. It has a unique look to it. The filmmaker was Aleksandr Petrov.

 20 minutes.

1999 - EYES WIDE SHUT, Kubrick;'s final film.

Rummaged through my collection and pulled out Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's last film. I viewed the film in 30 minute pieces while on the treadmill, so it allowed me to think about it each day. I doubt this was the viewing experience Kubrick had in mind when he made it, but hey you go with what works.

 

This film is about SEX. It has major stars in it, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Since it was directed by a male director, guess which star gets to take her clothes off, a lot. But this is in an odd way a very anti sex film. Apparently all of the critics are in agreement that the movie kicks into gear with the confession by the wife to her husband of a sexual fantasy. This freaks the husband out and sets him off on a night of supposed sexual debauchery which he never fulfills. 

The night reaches a climax in a high class orgy where men and women run abound in cloaks and masks. Correction, the women run around with no clothes on while the men run get to wear their clothes. After this scene we still have another half an hour of red herrings.  It seems that Kubrick was trying to build some suspense but it just seemed to add length to an unfocused story. The movie ends with the husband confessing his wild night to his wife (or lack of it) and the implication is that they will have a stronger marriage. There's no place like home I guess

 

 Kubrick was in his 70's when he made this, but it's no masterpiece. As an older filmmaker was this his attitude towards relationships at the end of his life?  Is he just a voyeur sending the Tom Cruise character through a series of weird sexual situations staring at lots of naked young women, only to have him running to his wife at the end of the film? So what, what's the point? Maybe the point is Kubrick gets to film "neeked" women.

Kubrick kind of lost his way after 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It seems to me that his later films lacked a clear structure. I like Barry Lyndon, but Barry Lyndon is pretty slow moving. His films were always very well made, but somehow they always seem to be lacking something. I can't put my finger on it yet. He has been described as a cold filmmaker. The films are fun to watch for their technique but it's really only on a movie nerd level that a film like this can be appreciated.

159 minutes, screenplay Frederick Raphael and Stanley Kubrick.

2008 - GHOST TOWN / 1999 - GO

Ghost Town-a sort of rehash/remake of that Demi Moore movie (whose name escapes me) except it's not as corny and sappy this time. Ricky Gervais plays a dentist who has the personality of an asshole. He is chased around by Greg Kinner the dead husband of Tea Leoni, because the spirit of the dead husband is not at rest etc etc. It's a decent movie, made by professionals. Tea Leoni is typecast as the wife of a guy who likes to screw around on her. Ricky Gervais obviously added a lot of jokes to the final screenplay. I enjoyed it.

Go-I'm not the first to mention this, but Quentin Tarentino is the influence all over this one as we follow multiple stories around the sale of some ecstasy tablets. Everything gets very screwy. The actors are all pretty good, the stories are fairly interesting. The movie sort of runs out of steam towards the end, but I enjoyed it.