2024 - SATURDAY NIGHT, lame comedy/drama about the famous TV Show.

Exactly who was this film made for and more importantly who would be going to see it. "Saturday Night Live" the long running late night comedy show is now fifty years old which probably makes its original audience in the seventy to eighty year age range, hardly the hip group of moviegoers the filmmakers were probably hoping to attract to their film

This is a  comedy with small pieces of drama and it's clearly a tribute to Lorne Michaels who at 80 years old is still running the show and to think they complained about Trump and Biden"s ages during the election.  I don't think this film is an especially positive treatment of Michaels who I understand was a pretty cool character under pressure.  The young Michaels looks like he is about to crack up dealing with a nervous bunch of NBC executives who are ready to run an old episode of The Johnny Carson show should he fall on his face and  a staff of pothead comedians and writers who are basically a bunch of malcontents.   Did all this stuff really happen?  Well sort of.

The film has been carefully cast with actors impersonating the "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" and the  goofy writing staff.   A standout is the actor Tommy Dewey playing Michael O'Donoghue.   O'Donoghue was probably the biggest misanthrope writer Saturday Night Live had on staff and was responsible for some of it's sickest and funniest skits until he was fired.

Saturday Night wants to say how important the show was to the cultural zeitgeist of the mid 70's but at times it also wants to get serious about the show's treatment of the only black performer Garrett Morris which was almost board line racist in real life.  However that's all brushed away as the film races to the premier of the first show which is treated like it was the second coming of the Ten Commandments.  If the filmmakers really wanted to get serious maybe the could have discussed the misogyny of John Belusi and some of Chevy Chase's less than sterling interactions with the cast. 

The film was written by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, the running time is 109 minues.

1974 - THE TERRORISTS aka RANSOM

Mediocre movie watching continues with this film.  The batting average for good film watching has not been great lately.

In order to get Sean Connery back in the role of James Bond for Diamonds Are Forever, United Artists agreed to several of his demands,  Connery wanted one million dollars for his return and the right to produce three films of his choosing.  Connery didn't have much success with the films he chose, The Terrorists was one of these films.

 

In The Terrorists,  Connery with his Scottish accent and really stretching credibility plays Col. Nils Tahlvik, the head of security for a fictitious Scandinavian country called uncleverly "Scandinavia".  When the British ambassador is kidnapped by terrorists and a plane is hijacked at the same time, Connery has his hands full dealing with both terrorist acts and government ineptitude.  If this sounds like an interesting idea for a plot it sort of is.  Unfortunately the director Casper Wrede and the screenwriter Paul Wheeler can't seem to work up any tension or even interest in these conflicts for that matter.  The film plods along with lots of poor acting and an incredible mishmash of unbelievable English and sort of Swedish accents for a country called "Scandinavia."  

Even the photography by one of the greatest cinematographers in the history of film, Sven Nykvist looks like it was filmed as a TV show, clearly this was just a paycheck for him.  The film sort of has a twist ending and very little action.  The best you can say about this film is it looks like it's on the cold side since this was shot on location in "Scandinavia",  This film is just about a complete waste of time even for Sean Connery die hards.

The running time is 94 minutes.

1990 - UNDECLARED WAR, disappointing action film from Ringo Lam

 Undeclared War is a big disappointment from Hong Kong action director Ringo Lam.  The plot has something to do with a world terrorist organization trying to destroy an international conference of nations, seen that one before.  The film has the American and Hong Kong police joining forces to stop the terrorists.

The Hong Kong cop is played by Danny Lee his girlfriend is Rosamund Kwan who has shown up in some Jackie Chan and Tsui Hark films.  They deliver a lot of their dialog in English for the benefit of the American cop and  American audience and do fairly well with it although at times it's a little shaky.  I don't know how many times Danny Lee has played a Hong Kong cop but it seems like every time I see him in a film that's the character he seems to be stuck with.

 

The bad guys are played by Olivia Hussey one time star of Romeo and Juliet and Vernon Wells, the "Wez" from The Road Warrior and the chief bad guy in that Schwarzenegger classic Commando.  Olivia Hussey seems completely out of place in this film she should be playing a nun or something in a Zeffirelli film.  Vernon Wells could do these really evil bad guy parts in his sleep by this point in his career and he seems very sleepy in this film.

 

Usually Ringo Lam could rev it up with some great action stuff even in his so-so films but in this case he doesn't seem to have had the inventiveness or energy to rise to the occasion.  It's just one boring gun fight after another.  Even a speedboat chase towards the end of the film is boring.  Undeclared War is a big tiresome letdown  from a usually reliable director

The film was written by Nam Yin, Timothy Lung, Deborah Grant and Louis Roth.  Four writers for a standard action film never a good sign.  The running time is 109 minutes.

1959 - OPERATION AMSTERDAM, is half a decent war movie.

 In 1940 as the Germans began their invasion of Holland,  British Intelligence sends three agents to Amsterdam to obtain all of the industrial diamonds located in the city to keep them out of the hands of the German military.  What we have here is yet another "based on a true story" film for better or worse.

This is a frustrating film.  The first half of the film spends time with the British agents as they attempt to persuade the diamond merchants in Amsterdam to turn their diamonds over to them.  There is la lot of talk and I mean a lot of talk which really drags the film down. 

Finally we get to about the halfway point in the film where the British with the aid of the Dutch underground break into a bank holding the diamonds in a fairly decent heist scene.  The action kicks in with a great shoot out between the Germans and the Dutch.  But you will have had  to sit through a lot of jabbering to get there.

Operation Amsterdam has a lot of on location work in Amsterdam which  gives it a documentary like feel.  The film was an early role for Peter Finch who is really about the only noticeable actor in the cast.  Unfortunately Operation Amsterdam is a missed opportunity to tell an interesting war story but the poor pacing in the first part of the film really hurts the film.

The film was written and directed by Michael McCarthy, the running time is 104 minutes.

1970 - CHISUM, an average if entertaining western film.

Towards the end of John Wayne's film career the "Duke" was basically keeping the traditional western genre film alive by himself after it had died out.  Chisum will never go down as one of the great western films but it entertains in it's weird old fashioned way.  John Wayne was at the icon phase of his long film career and there's no arguing that he had his "John Wayne" character down.

Chisum is set during the Lincoln County War which was an actual range war that was fought over land in New Mexico.  The film does feature a number of iconic characters that were involved.  Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Henry Tunsell, Lawrence Murphy and Wayne playing prominent rancher and land owner John Chisum.  As with all these "based on a true story" films the details and actual facts tend to get a little fuzzy. But when did a movie let facts get in the way.  I doubt John Chisum was the straight shooting  patriotic tough guy that Wayne portrayed him as.

 

The film was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen a charter member of this blog.  As I've said before McLaglen had been an assistant director for John Ford, Budd Boetticher and William Wellman so he was definitely familiar with working in the western film genre.  When he moved over to directing,  McLaglen while competent never seemed to have that special touch that a Ford or a Wellman could bring to a  film.  Chisum is fairly typical of his non style. McLaglen gets the job done even if there isn't a whole lot of artistry that he brings to a film.

As with any late period John Wayne film .  It;s loaded up with a lot of his old cronies.  Bruce Cabot, Forrest Tucker, Ben Johnson, Glen Corbett, John Agar and Hank Worden to name a few. These actors would frequently turn up in his 60's and 70's films.  A lot of them were drinking buddies of his.  It's rather comforting to know that these over the hill actors were still getting work thanks to the Duke.

Chisum is what you could call comfort food in movie watching.  There is nothing special about this story or the way it's told but it goes through the motions with it's  familiar fist fights, gun fights and cattle stampedes all of which are strangely entertaining in an odd mellow way. 

The film was written by Andrew J. Fenady, the running time is 111 minutes.

1958 - THE MAGICIAN - another interesting Bergman film.

It's science versus spiritualism, man vs woman, and Ingmar Bergman vs his previous films with a couple of pot shots at the existence of god that are frequently found in a Bergman film.

A near mute Max Von Sydow is the leader of a performance troupe touring Sweden in what appears to be the mid 1800's.  The troupe ends up a village where they are detained and questioned by the authorities particularity a doctor named Vergerus played by another Bergman regular Gunnar Björnstrand.

 

This films entertains because Bergman is such a good filmmaker.  He makes the encounters between the performers and the authorities interesting and at times thought provoking.  Bergman is also good at throwing in a little romance and sex courtesy of yet another one of his regular performers, Bibi Andersson who is always a very welcome addition in a Bergman film.

 

I don't think I would count The Magician as one of Bergman's greatest films like Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night or The Seventh Seal, but it is a very good film. 

Written by Ingmar Bergman, the running time is 107 minutes.

1965 - THE SOUND OF MUSIC, on the big screen

Revisited The Sound of Music at a revival theater on a fairly big screen, a few thoughts.

The film received bad reviews when it was released in 1965, apparently the combination of singing nuns and Nazis was just a little much for the critics to endure for a musical.  The film is incredibly saccharine and at times difficult to stomach.  Julie Andrew's character of Maria frequently grates on the nerves with her goody two shoes personality.  However I doubt any other actress could have played this part.  Christopher Plummer's sly performance as Captain Von Trapp does a lot to take the sting out of all the sentimentality and corniness of the film.

The film was produced and directed by Robert Wise and a production team that was basically the same group that had worked on West Side Story with him.  If anyone deserves credit for the success of this film, it's probably Wise who used just about cinematic trick in the book to put this film over.  Cinematography, editing and the on location filming all contributed to the success of the flm.

 

The screenplay was by a real pro Ernest Lehman,  Lehman had written North By Northwest for Hitchcock and the screenplay for the original version of West Side Story.  Lehman apparently performed some real surgery on the film's book taking out a lot of the real hackneyed stuff.

 

The Sound of Music saved 20th Century Fox Studios after the financial disaster of  Cleopatra.  However Daryl F. Zanuck got it in his head that family musicals were the future of the film business. He went on to greenlight, Hello Dolly, Dr. Doolittle and in particular Star the Julie Andrews musical disaster.  These musicals financially crashed and burned the studio yet again.

The running time is 174 minutes.

1933 - THE KEYHOLE, comedy/drama about marriage.

 1930's actress Kaye Johnson was pretty hot stuff for a few years before she became box office poison.  Johnson plays a married woman who falls in love with a private eye played by the rather stiff actor George Brent.  Brent’s been sent to spy on her to make sure she's not cheating on her husband.  Well that's about it for a plot for this film.

Really there isn't much to say about this film.  It has a comedic subplot involving actors Allen Jennings and everyone's favorite 1930's tough broad Glenda Farrell which isn't particularly funny. It does eat up the running time so we don't have to endure much of the Kaye Johnson/George Brent romance.

 

If there is anything that stands out about this film it's the involvement of Michael Curtiz one of the best Hollywood directors of the 1930's and 40's.  Curtiz keeps thing moving along at top speed and occasionally sticks in an interesting camera angle but that's about it.  Curtiz got a lot of the big film projects at Warner Brothers studio but he was a contract director and frequently get stuck directing stuff like this.  Sometimes Curtiz could make these kinds of films interesting but the screenplay was already old stuff even in 1933.

 

The film was written by Robert Presnell Sr,  the running time is a quick 69 minutes.

2012 - LOOPER, very entertaining time travel thriller.

 The writer/director Rian Johnson is a very clever fellow.  Lately he's been concentrating on mysteries involving his character Benoit Blanc a apparently gay upscale private detective.  Looper was Johnson's third film and it was a combination of a science fiction time travel story and a thriller. 

The plot involves a criminal organization with a time machine who use it to send people they want killed back in time.  After the victim arrives in the past a hit man is waiting to kill him which will in effect erase him from existing in the future.  One of the hit men  played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt awaits his next victim who when he arrives back in time turns out to be his older self played by Bruce Willis.  Willis manages to escape being killed by his younger self and as they say let the fun of this elaborate plot begin.

 

Joseph Gordon Lewis is very good as the younger assassin trying to sort out this time travel paradox mess.  Bruce Willis is Bruce Willis as usual apparently his motivation in this film was hie ten million dollar paycheck.  There is a subplot involving Emily Blunt playing a mother with a son who has powerful if undeveloped  telekinetic powers that eventually figures into the plot as well.

 

Rian Johnson's inspiration for this story probably was Brian DePalms's Carrie, the very clever Spanish thriller Timecrimes and Shane Carruth's Primer one of the most complicated time travel films I have ever seen.  If I have a criticism of this film it's mostly because it turns into another tiresome Bruce Willis Die Hard type shoot-em up.  Was this in the screenplay?  Did Bruce Willis insist on a large scale action scene as was usually the case with his films?  Anyway annoying as the Bruce Willis bloodbath is it is it doesn't ruin the film.

The film was a financial success and led to Rian Johnson's next film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the only one of the recent trilogy that was any good.  Looper is a very good commercial entertainment that doesn't insult the audience's intelligence for a change.

The running time for Looper is 118 minutes.

1996 - SPACE TRUCKERS, the return of the B-movie science fiction film

With his tongue and everything else firmly in cheek, the director Stuart Gordon films a B-movie space adventure film on a rather low but decent budget. However Gordon was a smart enough guy to add some humor to this funny and frequently dumb story.

Dennis Hopper is an independent space ship truck driver.  After dropping off a load of square pigs, (you read that right), he gets involved with a plot to take over the planet Earth with killer robots.  Along the way Hopper picks up some passengers, space station waitress Debbie Mazer and co-pilot Stephen Dorff.  A measure of the silliness of this film is that Hopper, Mazer and Dorff play a lot of scenes in their underwear for no real reason.  Hopper and his companions take on space pirates, killer robots and the evil C.E.O. of a company with plans to take over the world.

 

Well to put it mildly the critics did not get the jokes in this film or Gordon's clearly affectionate send up of old space movies like The Day The Sky Exploded,  Rocketship X-M, Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere, Lost Planet Airmen and Phantom from Space, to name a few.

 

Truth be told the film does kind of run out of gas towards the end but the good humor of the cast which is in on the joke does keep things amusing at the end.

The film was written by Ted Mann, the running time is 95 minutes.

1980 - THE MIROR CRACK'D, nice and boring Agatha Christie mystery

 The producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin go to the well once again with another Agatha Christie adaptation.  They had considerable financial success with Murder On The Orient Express starring Albert Finny as Hercule Poirot.  Their follow up was Death on the Nile another Hercule Poirot film made money but considerably less than Murder On The Orient Express.  Probably looking for a break from Poirot mysteries the producers hired director Guy Hanilton to film The Mirror Crack'd with Agatha Christie's other popular detective character Jane Marple.

 

At times the producers seemed like they were thumbing their noses up at the mystery. The cast was a real collection of Hollywood has beens. Elizabeth Taylor played an aging film star, Rock Hudson played her husband a hack film director. Kim Novak was cast as Taylor's movie star nemesis and Tony Curtis was the producer of a film that is being shot in Jane Marple's home town, this is an amazing cast of past their prime performers. 

 

Many scenes in the film featured Taylor and Novak trading quips about aging Hollywood movie stars. The film they are making appears to be about the life of Mary Queen of Scots a woman who died at the age of 44.  Taylor at the time was 48 but looked about 60 with years of partying finally starting to catch up with her.  The cameraman must have had his hands full photographing her.  I suspect Agatha Christie would have not been real thrilled by the changes made in her novel.  Angela Lansbury played Jane Marple a character she basically rehashed for her Jessica Fletcher character in her TV series Murder She Wrote.

 

Well anyway we see Miss Marple go through all the expected motions as she solves a couple of murders relating to the movie company.  Guy Hamilton's direction is competent enough. He was always a decent craftsman if not an "auteur" film maker.  The photography is nice and pretty and if you are in the mood to watch a bunch of has been actors hamming it up this film is as good a time killer as any.

The film was written by Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, the running time is 105 minutes.

2000 - BOILER ROOM, is Wall Street light

A fairly decent rehash of Oliver Stone's Wall Street with some plot points borrowed from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.  This is the usual "money corrupts" story line as a clever young stockbroker cheats and swindles his way to making a fortune.  Come to think of it this is also the plot of The Wolf of Wall Street although Boiler Room came first.

Giovanni Ribisi is the up and coming stock broker working for a firm which is in reality just a place to screw clients over by selling them worthless "penny stocks."  At first he is okay with this operation but gradually his conscience begins to get the better of him and he eventually becomes an informer for the FBI in order to bring the company down.

 

The film has a few interesting characters of note, Vin Diesel is a sort of crooked stock broker with a sort of guilty conscience. Ben Affleck shows up occasionally channeling the Alec Baldwin character from Glengarry Glen Ross.  Ron Rifkin is Ribisi's Federal Judge father who gets dragged into his son's schemes. Of course because there has to be a woman in a story like this, Nia Long is the office secretary who becomes involved with Ribisi and adds absolutely nothing to this story.

For all the plagiarizing from other films Boiler Room is fairly entertaining mainly due to the performances of Giovanni Ribisi and Ron Rifkin.  I'm not sure why Ben Affleck is in this film?  His over the top performance contributes nothing to the story, it's just a silly show off role which is in the film for no particular reason but gives Affleck a chance to mug his way through his few scenes.

The film was written by Ben Younger.  The running time is 120 minutes.

1973 - SCORPIO, more mediocrity from Michael Winner

For a guy who didn't make very good movies, Michael Winner was an amazingly prolific filmmaker.  Scorpio is typical of Winner's skill behind a camera.  The film is loaded up with a couple of good leading men, Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon.  There is also a decent supporting cast with old stalwarts like Paul Scofield (what's he doing in this?), Gaye Hunnitcutt, Vladek Sheybal, John Colicos and J.D. Cannon.  The film however is nothing you haven't seen on television a million times.

Delon is Scorpio a hired killer for the CIA who has been ordered by them to kill his mentor played by Burt Lancaster.  Lancaster is suspected of being a double agent, so he's got to go apparently.  So begins a game of "cat and mouse" as Lancaster the old pro takes on Delon the cold blooded killer.  The film's plot is basically a rehash of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, one of those who's doing what to whom spy stories.

 

About the only reason to watch this is Burt Lancaster who was 60 years old at the time they made this and still running around doing his own stunts during an elaborate shoot out.  Try as much as he could a big French star like Delon could never get a Hollywood career going, for some reason,  Scorpio is just another failed attempt.

 

Scorpio has the usual Michael Winner touches.   On location filming to the point of viewer distraction. The sound in almost every scene has a weird hollowness  to it. The staging and photographing of the action scenes are conceived from about every uninteresting camera angle he can think of.  The whole film has that "let's just get this thing done" feel to it which isn't the greatest way to approach film making.

Scorptio was written by David W. Rintels and Gerald Wilson, the running time is 114 tedious minutes.

1983 - AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD, a sidebar in British history

You have to know something about Great Britain in the 1930's, Cambridge and the Soviet Union's espionage efforts in Britain to appreciate this fascinating little film.  It seems during the 1930's the Soviets were able to recruit a group of disaffected upper class Cambridge students into spying on their own country.  As the years went by these students managed to make their way into the British intelligence service and in one case Buckingham palace.  None of them were exposed until the CIA broke a code naming them as Soviet agents.  Instead of being arrested by the authorities three of them managed to defect to Moscow.   It was a major scandal for British Intelligence who had managed to keep the exact circumstances of their spying secret from the public for years.

Jumping ahead a few years later. A touring company of actors went to Moscow to perform Hamlet as part of a cultural exchange program.  While there one of the defectors Guy Burgess approached Coral Browne one of the performers in Hamlet.  Burgess was looking for a favor.  It seemed he wanted Browne to get in contact with his old tailor in London and have the tailor make and send him a new and proper English three piece suit.  From this story, the director John Schlesinger and the writer Alan Bennett have dramatized Browne's encounter with the now ex-spy and ex-Englishman, Burgess.

 

The cast is a relatively small one with Alan Bates as the traitor Guy Burgess and Coral Browne playing herself.  Although supposedly a committed socialist and communist, Burgess is still a very proper Englishman.  The film is a clever and amusing look at a man now exiled from the country he grew up and lived in and the reality of his drab life in Moscow.  

 

This is one of the director John Schlesinger's better latter day efforts in his career after a series of less than interesting films.  When Schlesinger was on his game nobody was better at getting good performances out of his cast and filming interesting stories.  An Englishman Abroad turned out to be an excellent film about the English character and mentality.  Definitely worth a look.

The running time is 60 minutes.