2007 - VAL LEWTON: THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS, modest documentary about famous Hollywood horror film producer

Martin Scorcese takes a producer credit and also narrates this documentary a brief overview of the film career of Val Lewton the B-movie horror producer who worked at RKO in the 1940's.  Val Lewton had been employed at MGM and hooked up with independent producer David O. Selznick for a while.  After the disaster that was The Magnificent Ambersons and Orson Welles getting kicked off the lot of RKO. Val Lewton was put in charge of their horror film division in order to make a quick profit on some of Welles existing sets.

Much to the surprise of the studio executives Lewton made some very good which in this case equals profitable, low budget horror movies using the existing talent at RKO .  Jacques Tourneur, did good work with Lewton.  Robert Wise and Mark Robson started their directing careers with Lewton and horror stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi appeared in his films.

 

What sets Lewton apart from other horror film producers is that he actually made very good films.  Stuck with titles like Cat People, Curse of The Cat People, The Leopard Man ,  I Walked With a Zombie and The Body Snatcher amongst others.  Lewton's production team turned out what at times very poetic films in the horror genre.  Many critics think that Lewton was a big influence on Alfred Hitchcock.  

 

How's this documentary?  Well it's all right I guess nothing special.  It made me want to revisit some of Lewton's films.  Scorcese narrates in a very soft almost inaudible voice.  To bad Scorcese didn't take away some of the lessons from Lewton's film making style.  Lewton rarely made a film over 90 minutes.  Considering the bloated running times of his last couple of films , Scorcese could have learned a lesson or two.

The film was written by the director Kent Jones, the running time is 77 minutes.

2007 - GONE BABY GONE, a good adaptation of a book for a change

In Boston, a four year old girl has vanished .  Along with the police, two private investigators are on the case attempting to trace the whereabouts of the child.  As the investigators get more involved in the search, it appears that the situation is a lot more complicated than they imagined.

The director and co-writer of this film is the actor Ben Affleck.  Affleck is a smart talented guy and in this film his storytelling skills are excellent.  Affleck has done a good job keeping the story straight while balancing all the subplots.

  

Affleck has a very talented group of actors to work with, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, John Ashton, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver and Michelle Monaghan.  The surprise in this film was Ben Affleck casting his brother Casey Affleck.  He gives a very good performance as one of the private investigators who has to make some difficult decisions during this investigation.

Ben Affleck does a good job capturing a side of Boston that tourists probably never see, the blue collar neighborhoods of the city.  Frankly it's good to see a well made film like Gone Baby Gone that has some substance to it instead of the usual big budget drivel that comes out of Hollywood.

Written by Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard, the running time is 114 minutes.

2007 - CASSANDRA'S DREAM, disappointing Woody Allen drama

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

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

 

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

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

2007 - DAN IN REAL LIFE, likable rom com

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

  

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

 

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

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

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

2007 - THE KINGDOM, watchout Middle East terrorists here come the good guys.

A nice schizo action film.  The Kingdom starts out with a short history lesson about the United States government's screw ups over the many years in dealing with the Middle East all in the name of oil.  It puts the viewer in the mood for perhaps a fairly honest appraisal of yet another US foreign policy disaster.

However after that lecture,  we jump into the action. At an American housing compound built by an oil company,  terrorists set off a bomb.  This brings in the FBI's crack bomb investigation team.  They have to put together what happened and who did it.  Since this is a film directed by Peter Berg a man who apparently has to much iron in his diet, the violence commences.

The action scenes are well staged with the usual shaky camera style that is so popular these days.  The cast beginning with Jamie Foxx, Jason Batemen, Chris Cooper and Jennifer Garner (in the role of the girl, because there always has to be a girl) is OK.

The film is ultimately a rather pointless mess.  It can't decide if it should be sympathetic to the situation in the Middle East or just another shoot em up.  Guess what prevails.

The film was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan  and runs 109 minutes.

2007 - ELITE SQUAD, tough as hell crime film

Rio De Janeiro looks like a total hellhole in this crime drama about a squad of cops called BOPE a military squad attempting to contain the city's drug lords.  The drug dealers are tough and the regular street cops are corrupt.  Making their job very tough.

If the BOPE cops come off as tough and brutal dealing with the criminal element in the slums the criminals are even more violent it that's possible. After a while it's hard to know who the good guys are or in fact were there ever any good guys.

 

A violent but extremely well made film.

 

The screenplay was by Braulio Mantovani, Jose Padilha and Rodrigo Pimentel, the film runs 115 minutes and was a big hit in Brazil.

2007 - HOT FUZZ, a comedy spoofing the 80's and 90's action films

Movie nut Edgar Wright made this film a spoof of the 90's cop movies he grew up on.  Films like, Heat, Thief, Bad Boys, To Live and Die in LA and of course Point Break. 

Wright uses a lot of whip pans, zooms and rapid editing tricks, to reproduce the style of those films.  It almost reaches a point where you want to scream "ENOUGH." It really distracts from the comedy aspects of the film.  However about 20 minutes into Hot Fuzz the funny stuff really starts to kick in and I have to admit this film is very funny.

Edgar Wright has a couple of his old buddies as the leads, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.  In addition he has filled the remaining cast with lots of British character actors and comedians. Say one thing about Edgar Wright he really knows his actors and that they will deliver the comedic goods for him.  This is an extremely enjoyable film.

 

Written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg

 Running time, 121 minutes.

2007 - HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER SEASON 3

I enjoyed the 3rd season of How I Met Your Mother.

The writers, producers and actors definetly have the drill down by this season.  The show still manages to get a lot of humor out of the flash forward and flash back story telling structure.

This show is like getting a hamburger at a restaurant.  Always a safe bet when you are unsure what to order.  

429 minutes or 20 episodes.

2007 - A GRANDPA FOR CHRISTMAS, #3 in the Christmas film countdown.

A slight improvement in quality from the previous Christmas epic A Mom for Christmas.  This film is better only because the cast of professional actors is so much better than the non-acting bunch of that film with one exception.  That exception is yet another dreadful little child actor named Juliette Goglia.  This kid not only over emotes but sings and dances like some kind of Las Vegas showgirl.  Goglia just can't sing a song at a school Christmas pageant she has to murder it.  She dances and struts all over the stage like Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls.

Probably the main attraction is the adult cast of the film.  It's a list of professional TV actors headed by that old trooper Ernest Borgnine who must have been pushing about 90 years old when they finished this.  Borgnine worked into his mid 90's in the entertainment business.

Honestly, this film isn't so hot.  The story is another one of those family dramas where nobody likes or understands each other mostly because of some misunderstanding that occurred years ago.  These kinds of stories could be easily resolved if everyone sat down and talked to each other but then there would be no movie.

This is the kind of film that would be considered safe viewing for the entire family.  Everyone can relate to a sentimental story of a family coming together during the Christmas season and Ernest Borgnine is basically a big loveable teddy bear.

120 minutes

2007 - TIMECRIMES or Los Cronocrímenes

No spoiling or even a discussion of the plot for this clever time travel film.

Working with a cast of 4 people the director Nacho Vigalondo has cooked up a very entertaining film that really moves along and comes in under 90 minutes without belaboring it's tricky concept.

An excellent science fiction film.

88 minutes

2007 - BLINK, good later Dr. Who episode.

Gave up on Dr. Who years ago after Tom Baker left the series.  However I have been told this is one of the best of the later episodes.   Blink appears to be a stand alone episode on the series and does not really have much of the Dr. Who character in it.

Blink starts future flavor of the month actor Carey Mulligan as Sally Sparrow investigating the disappearance of her friend and some strange messages written on a wall of an abandoned house left by the Doctor, 20 years earlier.  In a very clever plot twist, Sally Sparrow can only communicate with the Doctor through DVD special features. 

The most impressive thing about Blink is the writing by Steven Moffat.  The time traveling paradoxes and the creepy alien angel statues are all very cleverly worked out in the story.  Dr. Who was always a TV series that the BBC produced on the cheap side, Moffat's writing really makes the story work even though there are almost no special effects in the show.

Carey Mulligan is a very charming and likable hero in Blink.  Whatever happened to this aspect of her personality?

Still, the clever plot is the selling point for this show.  Here's a link to the original short story the episode is based on.

45 minutes

2007 - SHOOT EM UP, an excessive action/comedy

If you can get behind the incredible amount of gunfire and mayhem inflicted on the cast and ultimately the viewer you can kind of enjoy the sick sense of humor that runs throughout this film.

Clive Owen is Mr. Smith some sort of former special opps agent.  Monica Belluci struggling throughout the film with the English language, is a constantly lactating prostitute.  They are attempting to protect a baby from Paul Giamatti a hit man in charge of a small army of killers trying to murder the baby.

Giamatti really seems to be enjoying himself playing a character completely different from his usual film roles in drama like John Adams, Sideways and Cinderella Man and he gets to shoot a lot of guns.

Besides the constant gunfire and bodies piling up everywhere, Shoot Em Up features a number of Rube Goldberg type of gizmo's (that involve guns naturally) that wouldn't be out of place in a Road Runner cartoon if the cartoon involved a high body count.

The shooting scenes are staged like one of those domino chain reaction courses where one guy is shot which starts a chain reaction of an entire bunch of guys being shot and falling down in a row behind him.

It's hard to know exactly who this film was made for.  You wouldn't dare show this to your wife or kids. and the underlying jokey content probably wouldn't appeal to the Rambo crowd.

86 minutes, written by Michael Davis.

2007 - DEATH PROOF, Tarantino's tribute to Drive In movies.

Tarantino carefully recreates the drive in genre films he grew up on complete with crappy photography and scratches on the film.  He probably creates it maybe a little too carefully as he kind of sucks the life out of the film. 

Kurt Russell is stuntman Mike whose idea of kicks is to crash into cars full of beautiful women.  His character is rather undeveloped although in Tarantino's world he gabs away about old TV shows.  In fact everyone chatters away in this film.  Tarantino likes to load up his films with a lot of talk.  Death Proof has lots of his patented dialog and in this film lots of comely women to oogle. 

Everything leads up to a big improbable car chase done without digital computer tricks which was a major selling point for the film.

The critical consensus was that Tarantino who was good at mixing his B movie sensibilities along with love of film trivia didn't pull it off this time.  He has seen every film in the world but he wasn't able to channel it all into something interesting.

This was the film that Tarantino tried to make a star out of a stuntwoman named Zoe Bell.  She might have been a great stand in for Zena the Warrior Princess but as an actor she sucked.

Over indulgence does Death Proof in but his devoted fans would probably crawl across glass to defend it anyway.

114 minutes

2007 - THE KEY TO RESERVA, 2010 - A LETTER TO ELIA, two short films about filmmakers from Martin Scorsese.

A couple of short films from Martin Scorsese about filmmakers and filmmaking.  These two minor films say a lot about his attitudes towards a couple of major filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock and Elia Kazan.

The Key to Reserva is an extended sparkling wine commercial about Scorsese discovering some lost script pages from an unfilmed Hitchcock script.  Scorsese's really the whole show at his motormouth best.  He blathers on at 100 miles an hour talking about preserving a film that was never made in the first place and carries on about recreating the lost scenes to Greed.  His short film The Key to Reserva does a pretty good job of mimicking Hitchock's style and contains enough in jokes to amuse just about any film nut. 

10 minutes.

A Letter to Elia is something very different from The Key to Reserva.  Scorsese is again the star in this film. This time he's much more serious as he discusses the career of director Elia Kazan a filmmaker he clearly feels a lot of kinship for.  Scorsese does a brief overview of Kazan's life and career focusing on some of the highs and lows of his personal life.  Towards the end of the film Scorsese speaks movingly about his friendship with Kazan, his appearance at the Academy Awards to give Kazan his honorary Oscar and in particular, Kazan's late 50's and early 60's films which had a personal resonance for him.

60 minutes.

Scorsese clearly enjoys Hitchcock's films but seems to have a more emotional connection to individuals like Kazan or Cassevetes.

These films are an interesting insight into what makes Scorsese tick film wise.  The Key to Reserva is floating around the Internet, but don't bother with You tube which for some reason has suppressed the audio track on this film.

2007 - WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY, funny one joke film.

A spoof of musical film biographies, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is funny up to a point.

The idea of having the songwriter Dewey Cox run through every major musical genre and style is funny. Also having Dewey Cox interact with about every famous performer from Buddy Holly to the Beatles is also amusing.  It's clever and well acted, the song spoofs are funny although not in the same league as Paul Williams's songs in Ishtar.

What finally kind of wears down the film is all the padding out of the story in the form of a bunch of sex jokes that finally makes the film seem pretty tiresome.  The other problem with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, is that it has a sense of irony about it along with all the parody and as someone once said, irony is not always understood or appreciated by an audience. 

 John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox is pretty funny.

96 minutes