2026 - THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE, on the big screen

I suppose you could classify The History of Concrete as a documentary but it's really an extended version of one of John Wilson's episodes from his HBO series How To With John Wilson.   It's well known that Wilson decided to end his HBO series after three seasons.  After that he opened a repertory theater in Queens, New York and somehow got it into his head to make this oddball film.

The premise of this alleged documentary has Wilson deciding to make a film about concrete.  We see him attempting to get financing from friends and partners who understandably have more than a few doubts.  In a particularly amusing scene, Wilson decides to use the plot structure of a Hallmark film to make his film.  This is just a jumping off point as Wilson travels around NYC and the country where he encounters one quirky person or situation after another. 

There are a couple of tattoo artists who frame skin tattoos from dead people to sell like they are posters from a museum gift shop. Then there is the only man in New York City who has a chewing gum removal business since apparently the streets of NYC are covered with people who just spit out their gum anywhere

Moving on, Wilson makes a strange visit to an Ohio town to look at the oldest concrete road which somehow finds him spending time at a driver's training school.  I also have to mention a foot race where the runners race around and around a city block endlessly. To give out any more of these vignettes would really ruin the film.  

Wilson was at the Sundance film festival with this film and got good reviews.  Unfortunately the 3000 pound monster in the room that he is competing with is the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything which is really sucking up all the air in the room.

This is a very entertaining film.  I'm not exactly sure what the point of all of this is but if you are looking for something different and frankly very funny it's well worth a look. 

The running time is 101 minutes.  

1954 - THE HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE, an apocalyptic tale for our times

You better keep your house clean and tidy and mow that lawn if you want to survive a nuclear bomb.  That's the message of this odd and interesting short film.  The film was sponsored (produced?) by The National Paint,Varnish, and Lacquer Association and The National Clean Up–Paint Up–Fix Up Bureau along with the Federal Civil Defense Administration. 

Three small houses are constructed near a nuclear bomb test site.  Two of them are what you would probably call today hoarder houses.  Their lawns are a mess with stuff laying around everywhere. But The House in the Middle is all clean and tidy and well taken care of.  Boom goes the nuclear device and the fire storm comes raging into the model homes.  The houses to the left and right are decimated but the house in the middle the one with the good paint job and the mowed lawn in the desert no less just has some minor peeling.  The lesson is a very clear one and the results speak for themselves.

This film has some self important narration by a guy sitting at a desk.  Is he a spokesman for The National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association or The National Clean Up–Paint Up–Fix Up Bureau?  Probably the truth will never be known.  He drones on and on while the viewer is waiting to get back to more good stuff with things "blowing up real good."  Instead the film ends with some kids running around picking up trash, a real letdown even for a short informational film like this.

This film exists in two versions, black and white and color.  If you want to watch it and get some insight into how the government and apparently The National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association along with The National Clean Up–Paint Up–Fix Up Bureau tried to down play a nuclear attack you can give it a look.

 The running time is 12 minutes.   

1961 - SCARLET SAILS, a Russian fairy tale

 From filmmaker Aleksandr Ptushko comes this romantic fairy tale filmed on an elaborate scale.   Ptushko loads the film up with epic photography, large scale sets and characters who are more symbolic than real people.  It kind of tends to overwhelm the story but that's the way Ptushko liked to make films.

This is a very uncomplicated love story/fairy tale.  A young girl living on a coastal town, is filled with stories from some old geezer sailor about how she will meet her true love when he sails into port on a ship with scarlet sails,  Parallel to this plot is the story of a young aristocrat who longs for a life at sea  away from the stifling environment of his rich parents and estate.  Since the film is called Scarlet Sails  he ends up becoming captain of a ship and there isn't much doubt that this twosome will meet and fall in love. 

I always enjoy Ptuhko's films.  He usually worked on a vast canvas in widescreen and with lots of special effects and amazing large scale scenes.  The word subtle was not in his vocabulary.  Putshko's early films were in the stop motion field and I believe some of them are floating around on YouTube and might be worth a look.  

Scarlet Sails running time is short which is probably a good thing especially for such a simple fable.  This film is available on YouTube in a good copy

The screenwriters were  Alexandr Yurovsky and Semyon Nagorny, the running time is 88 minutes. 

2019 - THE MASTER OF DARK SHADOWS, a look at the gothic/horror soap opera

Well you would be hard pressed to say the world really needed a documentary on the cult soap opera  Dark Shadows and it's creator and producer Dan Curtis but here it is.  Dark Shadows was a soap opera where the gimmick was that it was a gothic romantic novel in the soap opera format.  The show was created by Dan Curtis who to put it nicely was a "type A" Hollywood personality in the best tradition.

The show was cheaply done and had that soap opera touch of dragging out story lines episode after episode where essentially nothing really ever happened.  Initially filmed in black and white it had a not that bad cast which featured Joan Bennett who had been a star in Hollywood during the 1940's working for director Fritz Lang.  This show really revolved around a performer named Alexandra Moltke who played the damsel in distress.  Moltke may not have been much of an actress but she certainly had a very interesting personal life.  She was the mistress of a German millionaire named Claus von Bulow who was accused of murdering his wife by administering an overdose of insulin.  Von Bulow was put on trial not one but twice where he was eventually acquitted.

Dark Shadows struggled along for a while and was on the verge of cancellation when producer Dan Curtis hit on the idea of actually adding a horror element to the show.  Enter the character of Barnabas Collins who turned out to be a vampire and also a very popular character.  Dark Shadows was off and running while reworking just about every horror movie plot Curtis and his writers could think of.

Producer Dan Curtis

This documentary does a fairly good job of recounting the Dark Shadows phenomenon.  It was a very hot show for a while.  Dark Shadows aired in the late afternoon and was extremely popular with kids getting home from school.  This film has the usual archival film clips and interviews with the remaining cast members.  It's certainly a lot more entertaining than the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie version that showed up in 2012.  The Master of Dark Shadows  turns out to be a real nostalgia wallow for people who remember the show.

The running time is 92 minutes.

1973 - WAVES & 1970 - ERRIGAL, two films by Patrick Carey

While bouncing around the internet the other day I happened to stumble onto the Irish Film Institute and in particular a filmmaker named Patrick Carey.  Carey was a cameraman who worked In Ireland and Canada. He has credits on some major motion pictures.  Barry Lyndon, Julia and A Man For All Seasons on his resume.  Carey returned to Ireland and with his wife formed his own film company where he created short films about and around the Irish countryside. 

Waves, was photographed off the Irish coast. Carey had worked as a cameraman on David Lean's epic Ryan's Daughter and after watching this film you can see that he definitely had a big influence on Lean's picture in the seascape scenes.

Errigal  is apparently the highest point in an area of Ireland called the Derryveagh Mountains.   It's the perfect place for lots of impressive nature photography.

Waves feature no narration and Errigal has some introductory remarks at the beginning of the film after that it's narration free for the remainder of it's running time.  Both these films clock in under a half an hour.  These films are art films. The films are what you would call mood pieces or visual essays.

These films can be viewed at the Irish Film Institute website https://ifiarchiveplayer.ie/patrick-carey/  but they would probably look more impressive on a large screen format.  These films are not paced for today's ADD film viewer who are conditioned to overblown action scenes with rapid editing.

The running time for Waves is 26 minutes.  The running time for Errigal is 14 minutes.

1971 - TWO LANE BLACKTOP, an excellent cult classic

This film has a very simple premise.  Two gear heads in a Chevy sedan drive around the southwest challenging car nuts to drag races.  Eventually they end up in a coast to coast race with the owner of a GTO.  It's mano a mano with souped up cars.

  

Two Lane Blacktop has one of the most interesting casts I have seen in films.  Musicians Dennis Wilson and James Taylor are the gear heads.  Apparently the director Monte Hellman liked how they looked.  Hellman knew he did not have a couple of actors on his hands and kept their dialog to a minimum.  There is a strange girl groupie played by an actor named Laurie Bird who shuffles between these two guys.  Finally there is character actor Warren Oates as the driver of the GTO.  Oates gives an amazing performance as a braggart racing around the southwest telling one outrageous story after another.

The backgrounds and locations in the small towns and gas stations and road side dinners really help set the mood for the film, and add to a unique feel for the film.   This is one of the most impressive films of the 1970's dealing with the male persona in the American culture.

Universal Studios financed this low budget film in an attempt to get in on the action of the low cost but money making Easy Rider. However when the film was finished they hated it.  Perceptive critics at the time understood that Two Lane Blacktop was an existential masterpiece disguised as an AIP car race movie. 

The film's screenplay was by the amazing writer Rudy Wurlitzer who was also responsible for the unique nature of this story.  The running time is 102 minutes.  

2017 - AN HOUR BEHIND - another rom-com with yet another gimmick

When is a rom-com Chrismas movie not a rom-com Christmas movie?  Well in this case An Hour Behind is that movie.  The gimmick in this film is that our heroine the owner of a cupcake cafe is set up on a blind date by her sister with a rich attorney.  The problem is that she screws up the time of the blind date and instead of hanging with the rich attorney she has one of those mistaken identity things where she accidentally ends up with a working class, but good looking fire fighter.

 Yes, it's mistaken identity time as the couple hits it off and engages in the usual romantic montage (going for walks, rowing a boat on the river etc.)  However the firefighter has a secret which will cause the couple to split up but only for a while of course.  Then there is the big town cupcake contest to contend with.  There's a big cash price involved.  If our heroine wins the prize she can open a second cupcake store and begin building her empire or franchise of cup cafes across the United States.

The gimmick of the couple"meeting cute" with the screwed up time change works about as well as any of those contrived Hallmark Christmas movies although this is just as contrived.   The fireman's secret which initially splits up the couple is not much of a secret but you need a reason to put some kind of conflict in this movie.  People sitting around eating and obsessing about cup cakes has a limited dramatic appeal.   

Our female protagonist played by the actor Emily Rose is about the only person in the cast I recognized.  I had seen her in the TV show Haven where she played an FBI agent stuck in some small New England town which had lots of weird supernatural stuff going on and where she lived a bunch of past lives.  Haven was based on a Stephen King mystery which they managed to squeeze five seasons out of.  It was probably a relief for Emily Rose to to play a semi-normal person for a change instead some weirdo Stephen King character.  However I'm not exactly sure a woman with a cupcake baking fixation is all that normal.  

The film was written by Brittany Wisecombe, the running time is 90 minutes. 

2026 - DISCLOSURE DAY, Steven Spielberg at 79

I guess you can add Spielberg's Disclosure Day to the list of films made by old guy directors. Hitchcock's Family Plot, John Ford's 7 Women and Fritz Lang's 10000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse come to mind.  What all of these films have in common are that these oldesters make not exactly uninteresting films but clearly are not at the peak of their film making abilities.

 

Disclosure Day is frankly an ungodly mess of plot points and muddled ideas.  Mixed up in this film are UFO's, space aliens, ESP, mind control, magic crystals, World War III, invisible man type magic tricks, nuns and stuff about god.  To say this film doesn't have a clear narrative is an understatement.  Spielberg fires it up for a couple of decent action scenes and at one point he breaks out the old razzle dazzle light show stuff towards the end.  It kind of reminded me of his similar and frankly a lot better alien encounter film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  However it all seems a lot less this time.

With a Spielberg film the production values are top notch.  The cinematography is once again by his go to guy Janusz Kamiński.  Kamiński and Spielberg like to favor photography where the color is sort of de-saturated giving this film a documentary look.  There is also a lot of camera movement in Disclosure Day, the camera zooms in, pans left, pans right and zips around with that hand held effect that's become a cliche in every action film today.  It's annoying and after a while distracts from the narrative. 

This film was a big summer tent pole release for Universal Pictures.  Their marketing department did a good job with creating anticipation primarily using Spielberg's reputation to sell it.  However this was not a joy ride summer film the audience probably expected.  In short it's not an Indiana Jones film because it never was intended to be.  Unfortunately nobody bothered to tell this to the audience.  For Spielberg those days are past. The film probably would have played better if it had been released in the fall or winter where expectations for films are kind of low.  Disclosure Day also would have benefited from a more streamlined story.  This film is an unending two and a half hours.  There are a few good things in the film but overall it's a disappointment.

The screenplay was written by Spielberg's frequent collaborator David Koepp, the running time is 145 minutes.   

1966 - FAME IS THE NAME OF THE GAME - TV pilot for a series

More film junk from my wasted youth watching televison when I should have been playing softball.  Fame Is The Name of the Game was a TV pilot for a series called The Name Of The Game.  Briefly The Name of the Game revolved around Glenn Howard played by Gene Barry who published two weekly magaiznes, "People" (no relation) and  "Crime."  Robert Stack was the editor of "Crime" and Tony Franciosa who was their top reporter.  Franciosa played reporter Jeff Dillon in the great tradition of Hildy Johnson from The Front Page a smart ass wise guy.

The TV series was unusual in that instead of being the typical 60 minute drama it ran 90 minutes.  Each week a story with feature Gene Barry, the next week it was Robert Stack and then the following week the show would feature Tony Franciosca.  I suppose it should be mentioned that actor Susan Saint James played a "girl Friday" character who showed up in most of the episodes to bring a little consistency to this rather unwieldy format.

 

Well it all started as it usually does with this Universal TV series pilot.  Universal was big on these pilots it helped them decide if the show should be turned into a series.  Fame Is The Name of the Game was essentially a murder mystery with Franciosca wise cracking his way through the plot as his assistant Saint James playing straight man (woman?) to his silly jokes.

For a show produced by Universal Studios in the 1960's this TV movie had a decent cast. Jack Klugman was a bad guy mobster.  Jill Saint John played her usual femme fatale sex kitten and love interest for Franciosca.  Character actor George Macready was originally the publisher Glenn Howard but when the show went to series he was recast in favor of the more sexy Gene Barry.   

This film actually had a fairly good director in Stuart Rosenberg and the producer/writer was old Hollywood pro Ranald MacDougall.  With a decent cast and some good talent behind the camera you would have thought this film would have turned out a little better than usual for Universal Studios.  However Fame Is The Name of the Game is the typical mediocre Universal production.  The camerawork is that boring flat look that every Universal film had.  The sets look like sets and the whole thing just looks cheap in general.  Tony Franciosa was always a likable if intense actor and he carries the show about the best that he can.

The running time is 100 minutes. 

1919 - WAGON TRACKS, a Willam S. Hart silent western, it's short but not uninteresting

One of the early stars of silent westerns William S. Hart was the very idea of the good guy western hero riding tall in the saddle doing the honorable thing.  Having not seen a lot of William S. Hart silent westerns or a lot of silent westerns in general I assumed Wagon Tracks was typical of his type of film.

In this film Hart is one of those frontier scouts who lead wagon trains across the prairie in search of the promised land as they like to say.  The complication in this rather simple plot comes from a couple of men and a woman who are involved in the death of Hart's younger brother.  Hart determines to get to the truth of his brother's death so to get a confession he ties up the two men and marches them out to the desert where he denies them water and starves them until they admit their guilt.

Since this is a western there is a a tribe of Native Americans involved and I will have to admit how they are weaved into the denouement of the film makes for kind of an interesting ending.  Justice is served and Hart does not get the girl.  Incidentally the female lead Jane Novak worked into the early 1950's and was the author of all things a book called The Treasury of Chicken Cookery.

The legendary silent film producer Thomas Ince was involved in the production.  Ince was a major character in Bogdanovich's film The Cat's Meow.  He died under very mysterious circumstances.  The film was shot in Sacramento, California by cameraman Joseph August.  August was one of Hollywood's top visual stylists and had worked with John Ford and George Stevens. August was a major influence on Ford's technique.  Wagon Tracks is available on YouTube if you poke around a bit in a decent copy.

Wagon Tracks was written by C. Gardner Sullivan, the running time is 69 minutes. 

2005 - ANGEL - A, odd ball film from Luc Besson

From filmmaker Luc Besson a French guy who specializes in over the top action films comes this very strange film.  Naturally being a Besson film this change of pace story features yet another stunning blonde model turned actress.

In a what the hell is this story about set in Paris?  A crook and con-man Andre is starting to run out of luck.  He's in big trouble with a lot of people he owes money to and will be killed by a gangster before midnight.  Sensing his only solution is to commit suicide by jumping into the Seine.  As he stands on the edge of a bridge he happens to see a beautiful woman named Angela about to do the same thing.  They both end up in the water where he saves her and she tells him she will now help him get out of his money troubles.  Thus begins their series of adventures throughout Paris.  Things lead to a denouement where Angela reveals her true nature which forces Andre to make some decisions about his life.

This is a weird film even for Besson who had previously made a film about a guy holding his breath under water for a long time (The Big Blue).  Normally Besson favors his action films with a very flashy visual style.  The flashy video style is still here but Besson apparently was looking to film more of a character piece.   Or as much of a character piece as you are going to find in his type of film.  Besson elected to shoot the film in black and white with his frequent cinematographer Thierry Arbogast and it is a gorgeous film to look at.  Probably the best thing about this film is the photography. 

Well lets jump to the female lead thing that seems to be in all these Besson films.  The list of women in his films is fascinating and almost endless.  Mila Jovovich, Isabelle Adjani, Anne Parillaud, a jail bait 11 year old Natalie Portman, Scarlet Johansson and from The Family the tag team of Michelle Pfeiffer and Dianna Agron.  It's like an action movie modeling agency.   The woman in this film Rie Rasmussen is one tall drink of water with her mini skirts and very high heels.  Yes it is quite a contrast between the tall Rasmussen and the actor playing Andre which was obviously deliberate.

How's the film? Well it's okay for the most part it's only and hour and a half.

The film was written by Luc Besson.

2002 - THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE, is a disasterous remake of Charade.

When it was released this remake of Stanley Donen's Charade was considered a complete disaster.  In many ways it depressingly ended director Jonathan Demme's ability to combine off beat film making with commercial viability.  Demme had been having some decent critical and commercial success in his career.  Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia had performed very well for him.

However he stumbled badly with the Oprah Winfrey project Beloved which was a big commercial disaster.  Probably looking for a box office hit he decided to remake Stanley Donen's Charade as The Truth About Charlie.  Demme's approach was to film in Paris as a tribute to the French New Wave movement that had started in the 1950's.  He got financial backing from Universal Studios and was off and running. "Big Mistake" as Arnold says in The Last Action Hero.

About the only thing Demme got right was casting Thandie Newton in the role that Audrey Hepburn had created in the original film.  However things started to go off the rails with his Cary Grant replacement Mark Wahlberg.  In short Wahlberg was to put it very mildly no Cary Grant.  He looks completely ridiculous running around wearing a beret.  Someone should have told him that only tourists wear berets.  More importantly he had absolutely no chemistry with Thandi Newton which for a romantic thriller is kind of a problem.

Demme's idea to film this as a tribute to the New Wave was to shoot the film with hand held cameras.  The Truth About Charlie is a head ache inducing shaky mess and  the camera work a complete distraction to the story.  I suppose I could comment on the frenzied editing but what's the point.  

Demme also stuck some of the old French New Wave gang into this film.  Director Agnes Varda shows up in a couple of scenes and recreates the ending from Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black.  Anna Karina,  Jean Luc Goddard's one time wife and muse appears.  Charles Aznavour the star of Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player makes a couple of appearances crooning some songs.  Finally there is a shot of Francois Truffaut's grave in Montmartre Cemetery.  All these New Wave jokes and tributes get really tiresome when the rest of the film is an unwatchable mess.

The Truth About Charlie is the price movie studios and ultimately the audience pays when a quirky filmmaker is allowed to run amuck with his so called personal vision.   Demme had only himself to blame. He wrote, produced and directed this film. 

The screenplay is by Jonathan Demme, Steve Schmidt, Peter Joshua (the alias for Peter Stone when he knew he was working on a turkey like this), and  Jessica Bendinger.  The running time is 104 minutes.

2004 - THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB, I was expecting the worst.

Five women and a guy form a book club where they decide to read all of Jane Austin's novels.  The gimmick in this film is that each of the club members is living out one of Austen's plot lines.  What this film has going for it is a really good cast of women and honestly a not uninteresting story line interweaving their fascination for Jane Austen's books with their actual lives. 

Kathy Baker is Bernadette sort of the ring leader of the group who kind of orchestrates the whole shebang with the group which includes get mixed up in their personal lives.  Amy Brennerman is Sylvia a woman whose husband has walked out on her for a younger woman.  Sylvia still hopes for a reconciliation with her cad of a husband.  Brennerman who by the way looks way to young, has a daughter in her twenties who is a lesbian having relationship problems.

Emily Blunt with a really bad haircut, is Prudie a woman with an inattentive husband.  She finds herself falling for a high school student in the film's ickiest subplot.  Finally there is Maria Bello as Jocelyn a dog trainer who is ignoring the male member of the group who has a crush on her.  It's easy to see why that is.  He attempts to woo her by giving her science fiction novels to read for some odd reason.   

 The Jane Austen Book Club is one of the better films in this genre. This good cast and a fairly decent screenplay help make this a better than average romantic comedy.  These types of genre films have a preset list of scenes and "meet cute" situations that must always be followed. These boy meets girl stories do have the inevitable march to their happy ending.  In these types of films the entertainment value comes from how the director and writer can pull this bunch of cliches off.  In this case the makers of this film pulled it off fairly well. 

The film was written by the director Robin Swicord, the running time is 105 minutes. 

2026 - MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, a very strange film

This is not a good film, in fact it's a very stupid film.  Mattel owns the rights to the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe characters. They were looking for a studio to make a live action version of their cheesy syndicated cartoon series. Mattel managed to get MGM/Amazon to sign on to create a feature film.  And what brought this on?  Well one word Barbie.  Barbie another Mattel character made so much money that all these corporate interests thought they had a potential money source converting plastic toy doll characters into actual films. 

Unfortunately nobody seemed to understand the success of Barbie.  The film had an excellent screenplay, good direction and casting.  Barbie also pitched a message of female empowerment and you can rest assured Masters of the Universe really had no such message just a cowardly tiger called Cringer and a floating magic guy called Orko.

As poorly as this film turned out there was the gem of a decent idea in it.  Add the usual action and fantasy stuff but also stick in lots of self deprecating humor with a wink to the audience that all this sword and sorcery stuff is actually mighty silly.

Half the time the actors look like they can barely contain the smirk on their faces while playing these silly characters.  The action scenes are the usual bunch of overblown computer graphic animations. After a while it just looks so outrageous it ceases to be remotely believable even for a fantasy world.  But maybe that was the point. 

The director Travis Knight had primarily been associated with animated cartoons. I suppose he was considered to be a safe choice for what is essentially a live action animated cartoon.  But in the end the whole thing just came off as another  flop that ended up on streaming almost immediately after it was released.  If you are for some reason interested in the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe world I would recommend watching the Dolph Lundgren version.  Released in 1987 by the Cannon Group who at least recognized this was B-Movie junk instead of the wasted $170 million dollar budget that this film spent.

 The film went through a lot of screenwriters but only four got credit.  Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee and David Callaham.  The running time is 140 minutes for a film that is an updated toy commercial,