2016 - THE GREAT WALL, is a not so great film

A good director kind of goes off the rails with this large scale fantasy/action/adventure film.  Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal play a couple of foreigners traveling around medieval China in search of gunpowder which was invented by the Chinese. They end up being taken prisoner by a mysterious Chinese army located on The Great Wall.

As is turns out the wall and the army are there to beat off a hoard of monsters who want to eat everyone up.  This leads to a large scale battle scene when the monsters attack.  The army in a series of really improbable maneuvers fights them off with some really outlandish weapons and tactics.  These monsters vs the army battle scenes are actually very well staged.  A lot of thought was put into finding crazy ways to eliminate these packs of snarly monsters.

Matt Damon was the star of what was essentially an Asian fantasy film.  He seems extremely out of place with his monster killing bow and arrow set.  He also looks mighty uncomfortable running around in this period piece film.  He had better luck in Odyssey which in many ways was a fantasy film. Clearly Damon and Pascal were hired to make this film palatable to a Western audience.  However even with the presence of a couple of Hollywood actors the film underperformed big time.

When you think about it The Great Wall is probably no better or worse than one of those later period and stupid Marvel/DC superhero movies.  I think a good director like Zhang Yimou should have really seen the weaknesses in the script. Yimou probably had his hands full just filming this large scale production.  The Great Wall was one of the most expensive films produced in China.  The film has it's good points.  It is visually stunning.  There is a lot of CGI in the film but Asian filmmakers always seem to be able to use it a lot more effectively than their Hollywood counterparts.

If you are looking for a time killer of a film with lots of action, visual effects, a very eclectic cast and monsters lots and lots of monsters this film is for you.  

The film has at least six credited writers never a good sign.  Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro, Tony Gilroy, Max Brooks, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz  and extremely eclectic group to put it mildly.  The running time is 103 minutes.  

1949 - MY DREAM IS YOURS, Doris Day's second film

This is Doris Day's second film. She is again under the direction of Michael Curtiz one of the best directors in the film business.  Curtiz had discovered her and cast her in her first film Romance On The High Seas.  Curtiz's instructions to her was just play herself and let your likable natural personality come out.  Day was also tutored by her co-star Jack Carson who showed her all the technical tricks of acting in front of a camera.  In essence know where your marks are and understand the function of cinema lighting and photography.

Day absorbed these lessons well and in this her second film she had a very natural screen presence.  Day played a widow with a young son looking to break into the entertainment business.  She teams up with Jack Carson who plays her manager and starts to fall in love with her.  However Doris is attracted to nightclub singer Lee Bowman a drunk and a lowlife.  It's obvious where the story is going to go.  I should also point out that this film looks quite beautiful in stunning 1940's technicolor.   

All of this drama along with the musical interludes was expertly handled by Curtiz a man who was practically an idiot savant when it came to making films.  Curtiz always knew where to place the camera to get the maximum effect out of almost ever scene.  Curtiz was a great director in almost any genre.  He was comfortable making westerns, dramas, musicals or comedies and had a very long career.

This film was a major influence on Martin Scorcese when he came to make his musical disaster New York, New York a bloated, unlikable and incoherent mess.  My Dream Is Yours had a completed screenplay to work with.  Scorcese and Robert DeNiro tried to improvise their way through their film with the predictable disastrous results.

My Dream Is Yours is a very entertaining film in a 1940's kind of way.  No one could knock out a song like Doris Day. The film also has a kind of weird animated sequence featuring Day, Carson and Bugs Bunny.  The cast besides Day and Carson is a who's who of 1940's Hollywood.  Eve Arden, Adolphe Menjou. S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall, Sheldon Leonard and Franklin Pangborn.  

This was the last appearance of character actor Edgar Kennedy who could trace his career back to silent films.  He worked with just about everybody, Charles Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, The Mark Brothers, John Barrymore, Rex Harrison and Harold Lloyd.  A remarkable career.

 The film was written by, Harry Kurnitz, Dane Lussier, Allen Rivkin, and Laura Kerr.  The running time is 101 minutes. 

2001 - ENIGMA, a romantic thriller

There's nothing all that bad about Enigma a World War II espionage thriller set in Bletchley Park England's famous code breaking headquarters during the war.  However the film doesn't really work as a spy/romantic thriller considering the talent behind the camera.  What this film really needed was a director like an Alfred Hitchcock or a Roman Polanski in their prime to really pull this story together while mixing the spy stuff with the love story.

Briefly the story involves a British mathematician who is returning to Bletchley Park after cracking up and spending some time in a mental institution.  It seems he managed to have a nervous breakdown over his involvement with one of the women working there who just happens to be a really hot blond.  She ended their relationship and vanished under mysterious circumstances .  Now he is attempting to find out what occured with her.  A parallel plot has him under pressure to break a German code that will give out the location of a German U-boat pack that is about to blow up an Allied convoy. There is just a lot of stuff going on in this film.

To solve the mystery of the vanishing hot blonde he ropes in another employee to help him played by Kate Winslet.  He improbably also gets involved with her and I guess she is sort of a consolation prize in the girlfriend department.  Although it's hard to think of Kate Winslet as anyone's second runner up as a girlfriend.  To give the filmmakers credit they loaded up the story with a lot of clues.  Enigma wants to be one of those plot twisty espionage stories.  Unfortunately all of this clue stuff gets tiresome to sort out after a while. With all the red herrings in the story you have to keep straight,  it's exhausting to get to a reasonably coherent ending.

A few more things to mention.  The film was criticized for not mentioning code breaker Alan Turling who helped crack the enigma machine code during World War II.  That criticism was kind of ridiculous since the film was a fictional story not a biography of Alan Turling.  Enigma was produced by Mick Jagger and Saturday Night Live impresario Lorne Michaels go figure that out.  Finally this was composer John Barry's last film score.  Barry wrote another of his melancholy low key scores which he had been composing towards the end of career.  Frankly a lot of Barry's score is just a reworking of his main theme. 

The film was written by noted English playwright Tom Stoppard, the running time is 119 minutes. 

1972 - THE HOT ROCK, entertaining crime caper spoof

This is a very entertaining spoof of one of those Mission Impossible films or TV shows.  To steal a diamond a team of criminals decide to rob the Brooklyn museum of a precious diamond.  The twist in this film is that everything goes wrong and they stumble along from one improbable and ridiculous situation after another.  They succeed in stealing the diamond which they then manage to misplace.  They spend the rest of the film wondering where they lost it and how to steal it yet again.

The film has a very good cast starting with Robert Redford.  He was an extremely good looking guy in the classic Hollywood tradition.  One of Redford's strengths as an actor was comedy and in his low key deadpan way he was very funny in this film.  Redford's big break was in the Broadway play Barefoot in the Park as Paul Bratter.  Paramount was smart enough to cast him in the film version of this Neil Simon play and he pretty much stole the movie away from a very manic Jane Fonda playing his wife Corrie Bratter. 

The rest of the cast were no slouches in the comedy category.  George Segal played Redford's brother in law and he was good in dramatic performances but he also excelled in comedy.  Ron Liebelman and Paul Sand were also well cast as the remaining members of the gang.  Finally there was Zero Mostel playing Sand's father who is also a shyster lawyer.  Mostel was always a very larger than life presence on film but given a good part and a director who knew how to keep him under reasonable control he could deliver the goods.

This film was directed by Peter Yates an Englishman who kicked off his film career with two good crime thrillers Bullitt and Robbery.  Yates was a versatile director who didn't get stuck in the crime movie category.  He made a lot of different types of films and was fairly successful.  Yates keeps the plot moving along from one scene to another while not neglecting the comedy or character moments.

The film was written by ace screenwriter William Goldman from a book by Donald Westlake who specialized in serious and not so serious crime novels.

The running time is 105 minutes.  

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.