1992 - FULL CONTACT, Ringo Lam's stylish action thriller

Ringo Lam's crime film is stylish, dirty, violent, soulless, and very entertaining for the action junkie crowd looking for lots of shooting and fighting without any of that morale compass stuff.

Chow Yun-fat plays Gou Fei a tough guy criminal along with his friend Sam Sei who get mixed up with an outrageous criminal gang looking to hijack a bunch of weapons.  Well one thing leads to another and there is betrayal, killing and lots more killing as a wounded Gou Fei nurses himself back to health all the while training and exercising himself into a one man killing machine and kill he does.

 

Ringo Lam was one of the best action directors working in Hong Kong, in Full Contact he's on location in Bangkok where he proceeds to blow and shoot up the town.  There's some dirty stuff as well one of the gang members is a woman who is shall we say a little oversexed another is a scary monster of a man called Deano as in not Dean Martin.  Gou Fei has a wife who seems like a nice bring her home to meet the parents kind of gal.  Her occupation appears to be exotic dancer so in between all the mayhem we get lots of dirty dancing.

 

It's always good to see Chow Yun-fat in his prime, he was a very charismatic actor.  Another Hong Kong mainstay is Anthony Wong who frequently showed up as a weaselly bad guy in a lot of these crime films.  The actor Ann Bridgewater who played Chow's wife actually got out of the film business and became an occupational therapist.

Full Contact is exactly what it is a well made film with absolutely no purpose to it other than to have Ringo Lam stage a bunch of impressive action scenes.  

The film was written by Nam Yin, the running time is 104 minutes. 

1992 - THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL, finally a version of A Christmas Carol I can get through

If you are looking for the definition of overexposed look no further then Dicken's A Christmas Carol.  I'm sure when Dickens wrote it he didn't expect it would probably be the story he would be remembered for.  A Christmas Carol is 182 years old and still going strong with many variations and that's putting it mildly.

 There is the stage version performed in my hometown at the Guthrie Theater which they role out every year a guaranteed fund raiser.  The actor Patrick Stewart does a one man version.  A musical version was performed on Broadway from 1994-2003. An LBGTQ version Scrooge and Marley apparently exists.  Mickey Mouse got into the act with Mickey's Christmas Carol.  Probably the best film adaptation is 1951's Scrooge with Alistair Sim which played up the horror elements of the story.  Believe me the list is endless.  I'm not even going to get into the other TV and film versions of this story although I will single out the Will Farrell version Spirited as particularly loathsome. 

 

Well let's get to The Muppet Christmas Carol which was filmed after the death of Jim Henson by his son Brian.  This is a surprisingly well thought out version which is mercifully under 90 minutes. Henson had the advantage of a supporting staff of technicians and performers who had been working together for quite a while.  The cast of these felt puppets assumed the various character roles.  Kermit the Frog is Bob Cratchit, Gonzo is Charles Dickens, the Marley's are played by Statler and Waldorf to name a few.  Paycheck actor Michael Caine takes on the role of Scrooge and if he's not exactly trying hard in the role at least he's British or in his case a Cockney to be precise.

The OK songs are by Paul Williams, the photography, sets and special effects are very well done and the idea of having these sock puppets play Dickens's characters really takes the sting out of a story that has been adapted more than it ever should have been.  

This version of A Christmas Carol was written by Jerry Juhl and old hand at writing material for the Muppets. The running time is 86 minutes. 

1992 - MALCOLM X, way too long biography

I had to sit through a lot of Malcolm X's childhood and formative years before I finally got to the meat of the drama, Malcolm X's conversion to the Muslim religion. This early stuff unfortunately takes up half the length of the film,  Terrorized by racists as a child who also killed his father, Malcolm X ends up in prison where he begins to focus on the racial injustice propagated  against African Americans.

I'm not saying this isn't interesting or important information but the writer/director Spike Lee should have worked a little harder to telescope the events of Malcolm's early life.  A film that is pushing close to four hours is a lot for a viewer to sit through.  Probably the two dance numbers Lee staged could have been cut to start with since they add nothing to the narrative.

 

Denzel Washington is excellent as Malcolm X (you only have to watch some video clips of the real Malcolm X to see how good he is) especially when he begins preaching the teachings of The Nation of Islam. The film follows his pilgrimage to Mecca, his struggles with the leadership of the Nation of Islam, the perceived threat that white people have of him and his controversial comments about the JFK assassination this film finally become interesting. 

 

You can't fault the cinematography by Ernest Dickerson or the physical production of the film which really captures the look of the 1950's and 1960's.  Spike Lee had to deal with a really tight budget during the production of this film but he did give the film an epic quality.

The film was written by Spike Lee and Arnold Perl, the running time is 202 minutes.

1992 - YEAR OF THE COMET, attempt at a romantic action comedy

The Year of the Comet should have been a winner but for some reason the film just never came together.  The story is one of those couples on the run from bad guys in pursuit of something.  It's clearly trying to be an Alfred Hitchcock film.  While Hitchcock was working at Paramount Studios he developed a story formula called "beautiful people, beautiful places."  Put an attractive couple together, have them fall in love where the backgrounds are all beautiful locations in Europe or somewhere and you have an entertaining film.

The film was written by William Goldman who was considered one of the top screenwriters in the film business.  Peter Yates was the director.  The on location filming was in Scotland and France so all the ingredients were there for a entertaining rom-com but the film just doesn't work.

 

The leads were Timothy Daly who had been working on the comedy series TV series Wings so he knew how to put over a joke or humorous situation.  His romantic partner was a young woman named Penelope Ann Miller who had appeared in Kindergarten Cop, Biloxi Blues and The Freshman.  She also had a decent background in comedy.  But these two just didn't seem to have the chemistry to play a couple who fall in love.  If a film couldn't really work up any "juice" between the two leads it has a serious problem.

The director Peter Yates had made many fine films but  he just didn't seem to be able to make the story interesting.  Frankly a lot of the humor in the screenplay was kind of labored.  William Goldman may have been a great screenwriter but the comedic and chase scenes had a seen it all before feeling to it,

Probably the only interesting thing in the film is the actor Louis Jourdan who at the time was 71 years old and knew how to provide the light comedic touch the other actors were missing.   Although the critics really crucified it, The Year of the Comet isn't really a bad film, it's just kind of a mediocre film.

The running time is 91 minutes.

1993 - SUPERCOP 2, sequel to Supercop with focus on Michelle Yeoh

Sort of a sequel or followup or offshoot or something of Jackie Chan's Supercop which featured Michelle Yeoh as his action partner.  After taking an extended break, Yeoh was restarting her film career and was lucky enough to hook up with Jackie Chan who turned out to be her perfect action partner.  Supercop 2 was clearly an attempt to showcase Yeoh and her action and stunt skills.

Yeoh is a superb action hero in this film, unfortunately it's not much of a film.  Yeoh plays police inspector Jessica Yang whose ex boyfriend has become the leader of a gang of bank robbers in Hong Kong.  I suppose what could have been an interesting plot line about love vs duty is for the most part a fairly pedestrian and uninvolved story line.

 

The chief draw of Supercop 2 are the action sequences as only the Hong Kong stuntmen could do them back in the 1980's and 90's.  Lots of gunfights, car chases and especially martial arts action which in particular shows off Yeoh's skills who was a former dancer now turned stunt woman and Yeoh is a  rather petite woman which is all the more impressive.

Jackie Chan shows up at one point in the film in drag of all things. He's in another broad comedic scene that he likes to include in his films.  In this film it's kind of stupid.  The film is directed by Hong Kong action veteran Stanley Tong who was certainly an experienced hand at making these kind of films.  Again, not much of a film but the real show is watching Michelle Yeoh in her prime as an action hero.  Supercop 2 is on YouTube in a decent English dubbed version if you want to take a look.

 

The film was written by Stanley Tong and Sandy Shaw, the running time is 104 minutes. 

1992 - SINGLES, surprisingly dated 90's romantic comedy

One time wonder boy Cameron Crowe wrote and directed this surprisingly dated comedy about the love lives of some young adults in Seattle.  Set during the period where the "grunge" trend was developing. If the film has any interest at all it's as a look into a time when bands like "Pearl Jam" and "Alice in Chains" were beginning to take off.  The rest of the film, not so great I'm afraid.

 

The story is really conventional boy meets girl stuff.  Campbell Scott is a city planner who meets environmentalist Kyra Sedgwick.  They begin a relationship which results in her getting pregnant, him proposing marriage, her losing the fetus and both ultimately breaking up.  Will two such attractive people rediscover their love for each other?  In the meantime perky coffee shop waitress Bridget Fonda has the hots for grunge band leader Matt Dillon who is fronting a group called "Citizen Dick."  Will Dillon finally realize that cute Fonda is the girl for him?

 

This is an extremely light weight story to hang a film around and it really depends on the actors, the dialog and the situations the writer creates.  In this case the actors are fine, the dialog at best is predictable and rather banal and the comedic and romantic situations are not very interesting.  It's all been done before and done better in other films.  I've seen films from the 40's and 50's which seem more contemporary then this antique.  Singles actually got fairly good reviews at the time of it's release for what that's worth.

Cameron Crowe is a big admirer of Billy Wilder and even published a series of interviews with Wilder.  But as it turned out, Crowe was no Billy Wilder.  After some initial success with films like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Jerry McGuire and Almost Famous his career his descended into movie mediocrity.  Singles was in some ways almost a preview of where his career ended up with films like We Bought A Zoo, Elizabethtown and Aloha.  

The running time is 99 minutes.

1992 - BITTER MOON, Polanski's relationship film

This is a film about relationships.  It's co-written and directed by Roman Polanski.  The story involves an English couple played by a young Hugh Grant and Kristen Scott Thomas.  They meet another couple while on an ocean cruise.  The other couple played by Peter Coyote and Emmanuelle Seigner are shall we say in a rather complex relationship.  Coyote is a paraplegic in a wheel chair who narrates the story of his meeting and subsequent relationship with Seigner to Hugh Grant all the while Grant attempts to seduce Seigner.

Bitter Moon as some critics pointed out has many parallels to Cul-de-sac, a film Polanski made early in his career which featured another "out there," couple.  Polanski really pours on the sensuality and sexual desire that was prominent in the early stages of Coyote's and Seigner's connection which eventually turned into a kind of codependent hate of each other. It's one sick scene after another throughout the film as only Roman Polanski could do.

 

As is typical with a Roman Polanski film, Bitter Moon is extremely well made and is full of Polanski's very black humor.  If you are looking for a film to share with your significant other for Valentine's day it would probably be best to pass on this.  Emmanuelle Seigner in particular is really something to watch in a "go for it" performance.

 

Unsurprisingly the film was a failure at the box office and to put it mildly was not particularly liked by the critics.  As sick as the film gets by the end it's kind of weirdly reaffirming about achieveing a stability in marriage. 

Written by Roaman Polanski, Gerald Bach and John Brownjohn.  The running time is 139 minutes.

1992 - PASSION FISH.very good character study but overlong

A soap opera actress who has become a paraplegic after a car accident returns to her childhood home in Louisiana for therapy.  Angry about her situation she slowly bonds with her caregiver who is confronting some personal issues of her own.  Passion Fish is a good drama that avoids a lot of feel good sentimentality.  This situation is interesting enough thanks to Sayles skilled writing and doesn't need any Hollywood type "goosing up" with it's story.

The actors Mary McDonnell and Alfre Woodard  give excellent performances and the supporting cast that Sayles has assembled also have their very strong moments.  Sayles strength as a filmmaker was always in creating believable characters that populate his films.

The biggest problem with Passion Fish is it's length.   The film runs over two hours and could have used a little pruning.  Sayles is clearly in love with his cast and the scenes that help flesh out his characters but  an awful lot of the film does have a tendency to meander at times.

Still a film that features two strong believable actresses working through their personal problems in a realistic way is certainly worth  a look at the very least.  The film has nice on location photography and as usual with John Sayles he takes an editing credit as well.

The screenplay is by John Sayles, the running time is 135 minutes.

1992 SHADOWS AND FOG - Woody Allen makes a UFA film

Woody Allen's tribute, or spoof or whatever film attempts to invoke the feeling of a German Expressionist film kind of like something Fritz Lang would have directed for the famous German film studio UFA GmbH, usually called UFA.  

The film has the rich atmosphere of a European 1930's film which Allen further emphasizes by shooting in black and white with lots of movie fog floating around on his sets.  The plot is about the hunt for a serial killer which a mob is on the trail of.  Allen is recruited by the mob and after one thing or another everyone thinks he is the killer.

The film is full of Woody's usual one liners which kind of makes it a modern counterpoint to what is going on in the 30's setting.  However a lot of the dialog spoken by the actors seems rather stilted and forced.  Allen keeps a very tight grasp on the line readings of the cast which comes off as very stagey.  Naturally Woody gets all the best lines because after all he wrote it, and he delivers them in his usual funny style.

 

At this point in his career just about every actor wanted to work with Woody Allen, so we have a string of grade A actors who show up in small bits.  Mia Farrow is also in the film she was still involved with Woody Allen when this film was made.

 

The film courted and achieved a status as one of his worse films.  The critics for the most part hated it and audiences stayed away, another major flop for Woody Allen.

The film has it's moments the production design and cinematography are excellent and really nobody can put across a funny line like Woody Allen.

The running time is a brief 85 minutes

1992 - A FEW GOOD MEN, slick courtroom drama

Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson are in full movie star mode in Rob Reiner's film version of Aaron Sorkin's slick military courtroom drama.

The film plays to Reiner's strength as a director.  Working with an excellent script, Reiner gets very good performances out of his entire cast and knows when to step back and let Cruise and Nicholson do their movie star overacting thing.

 

A Few Good Men is essentially an updating of an old Perry Mason TV episode dressed up with Sorkin's at time overripe dialog.  Reiner does a good job keeping the dialog from sounding like a big preachy mess which is frequently an issue with Sorkin's writing.

 

The film runs 138 minutes

1992 - THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS - 11th remake of this story

Michael Mann known for his crime thrillers dusts off James Fenimore Cooper's story for another shot.  This time with more "open minded" attitudes about Native Americans the film seems to have a little more depth to it.  Anyway we meet Daniel Day Lewis who is constantly on the run thoroughout the film.  For a while this got to be a big joke with stand-up comedians.  Lewis is Cooper's famous character Natty Bumpo a man with a lot of alias's (Hawkeye, Pathfinder, and the Deerslayer).  The setting is the French/Indian war in American which ran about eight years I believe.  Bumpo is off to save the lives of two daughters of a British Colonel, of course he falls in love with one of them.

Daniel Day Lewis is the epitome of the movie star with his handsome looks and his clearly pumped up body.  His love interest is Madeline Stowe playing Cora Munro and their love scenes are bathed in either amber light of soft misty water from a waterfall. No question they are a very good looking couple.  There is also a sort of secondary love story between Natty Bumpo's adopted Native American brother Uncas who clearly is attracted to Cora Munro's sister Alice.  But nobody paid their money to watch a couple of supporting players fall in love, so their scenes are given pretty short shrift.

 

The battle scenes are quite exciting as is to be expected from Michael Mann.  The film was shot in North Carolina on some spectacular forest locations.  The soundtrack is epic and the photography from Dante Spinotti is excellent.

 

The film is very entertaining if a little to violent at times.  Christopher Crowe and Michael Mann wrote the screenplay the film runs either 112 minutes or 117 minutes or 114 minutes due to Michael Mann's tendency to constantly reedit his films after they are finished.

1992 - SUPERCOP aka POLICE STORY 3: SUPERCOP

 Jackie Chan finds his perfect action partner in Michelle Yeoh in the third installment of the Police Story series.  Along for the ride are Chan actors Bill Tung  and in her final appearance in the Police Story series Maggie Cheung as Chan's very stupid girlfriend May.

The plot has something to do with stopping a drug cartel in China and Hong Kong.  But the picture is really about Jackie Chan and his amazing stunt team taking on crazier and crazier stunts as the picture goes along.

The film's climax has Chan dangling from a helicopter and Yeoh on a motorcycle jumping onto the top of a train.  

 

A great action film from Jackie Chan at his peak

Written by Edward Tang, Ma Fibe and Yee Lee Wai.  The running time is 95 minutes.

1992 - TRESPASS, a tough acion movie.

A hard nosed action thriller about the search for gold in East St. Louis.  Two firemen from Arkansas have a map of gold icons from a church that were stolen and hidden in a warehouse.  The firemen decide to find it but run into a very tough street gang led by a guy names King James.  The film becomes an extended siege as the gang takes on the firemen now locked inside a warehouse with the gold.

 The film has very good direction from Walter Hill who knows how to stage an action scenes for maximum  impact.  The script was written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale before their Back To The Future series.

 

Trespass is probably not a date night film, but if you're looking for a hard nosed tough guy film this is the one for you.

The film has lots of clever plot twists and runs a tight 101 minutes without any padding in the story.

1992 - DON QUIJOTE DE ORSON WELLES, pretty much a travesty

What a mess.  Welles "companion" Oja Kodar, the keeper of Welles unfinished film footage somehow decided schlock/porn Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco was the man to assemble this footage from
his Don Quixote project.  It appears that Welles was never able to get a handle on what type of film he wanted to make.  So Don Quixote along with other films of his remained unfinished.

Franco's assembly of this footage is to put it mildly, atrocious.  Shots don't match, the english dubbing on the soundtrack is horrible and scenes are inserted that were not even parts of Welles footage.  Instead the viewer is stuck with watching endless shots of parades marching down the streets of some Spanish town and a general incoherence that pervades the entire project.

What a viewer comes away with in the end is some very brief glimpses of what might have been.  The lead actor Francisco Reiguera looks like he would have been ideally cast as Don Quixote and as Sancho Panza who else but one of Orson Welles favorite actors Akim Tamiroff.

Still, this film is basically a complete waste of time even if it has footage shot by Orson Welles.

116 minutes.

1992 - HARD BOILED, probably John Woo's best film

John Woo's last interesting film before he sold out and moved to Hollywood so he could make a series of mediocre action films.  Hard Boiled takes the police thriller and mixes it up with lots of Woo's famous over the top violence.

Chow Yun-fat is Inspector Tequila the hard boiled cop who is out to bust a triad gang smuggling guns, Tequila gets mixed up with an undercover cop, and the bullets and explosions begin to fly for almost two hours.  Everything builds to the final big shootout in the hospital.  For reasons to silly to be properly explained or understood the Triad is shipping arms out of the hospital.

No question Woo is a master of staging tremendous action scenes and shootouts.  But credit should also be given to those amazing Hong Kong stuntmen who bring all these over the top scenes to life. 

The other thing Hard Boiled has going for it is Chow Yun-Fat who really holds this film together.  Without him this would simply be a collection of gun battles, as it is it's still one shoot out too many.

For all it excesses, this is still a dazzling action film.

126 minutes.

1992 - RAISING CAIN, De Palma makes fun of De Palma films

Frequently criticized for not having much of a sense of humor the director Brian De Palma actually does have a sense of humor although kind of a sick one.

Its hard to know what De Palma had in mind with Raising Cain the convoluted and pretty ridiculous plot has something to to with stealing toddlers for weird mind experiments, a theme that Michael Powell examined in Peeping Tom.

The acting is to put it mildly stilted and also over the top.  John Lithgow gets to play multiple roles as twin brothers and their father.  Lithgow had worked with De Palma in a couple of films and I'm sure it's fun for an  actor to take on a challenge like this, but he seems pretty hammy even resorting to a lame European accent at times.  The rest of the cast isn't much better, the woman playing Lithgow's wife is sickeningly sweet and she seems unreal.  The two cops assigned to the case are so stiff they wouldn't pass muster in an episode of Dragnet. Was all of this intentional?

Then there are the usual quotes from Hitchcock films, particularly Psycho.  De Palma literally recreates the sinking of the car into the quicksand scene but adds his own sick twist on it.  De Palma has always been accused of stealing from Hitchock and in this instant it almost seems like he is giving the finger to his critics with this bit.  De Palma even steals from himself quoting from the train station sequence of The Untouchables complete with the baby carriage rolling around. 

Brian De Palma is famous for his wandering camera, particularly effective in the museum scene in Dressed To Kill.  In Raising Cain he recreates that scene and spoofs it at the same time.  The climax of the film involves one of those famous set pieces he likes so much incorporating elaborate camera movements and slow motion but somehow not his famous split screen technique.  Even this seems played for laughs with ridiculous coincidences happening throughout. 

De Palma appears to have enjoyed himself orchestrating this nonsense.  However I'm not sure a viewer watching this film would know that the film is primarily a joke.

 91 minutes.

1992 - DIRK BOGARDE: BY MYSELF interesting documentary on screen acting

There are plenty of lame documentaries about film directors kicking around these days, here's an interesting one about an actor who actually sounds like he has a brain in him.

The English actor Dirk Bogarde, sat down for the BBC and talked about his career as a screen actor and it's actually pretty good talk.  He looks back at his early days as an actor when he was basically a pretty boy screen personality.  His comments on what it took to maintain this screen personality are very interesting as he talks about how he needed to wear his hair and dress to maintain his public persona.

Bogarde recognized early on that he needed to understand the fundamentals of filmmaking, so he spent time with the crews on his films, learning about camera lens, lighting and editing.  Bogarde apparently got along with most of the directors he worked with and his thoughts on, Visconti, Losey, and the very crazy Fassbinder are fascinating.

Bogarde didn't seem to  have much time for the method school of acting.  To be a professional film actor meant knowing his lines, showing up on time and not pissing anyone off.

Probably one of the better documentaries I've seen on film making.

1992 - BILLY WILDER SPEAKS and speaks and speaks and speaks

Filmed by Volker Schlöndorff in 1992 and edited down from a 3 hour documentary. Wilder rehashes the same stories he has told about his films and himself many times before. Since Wilder lived to be 96 years old, he had a lot of time to get his version right.

   

Even at the age of 88 when this was film was shot, Wilder still carries on at great length about the problems he had working with Marilyn Monroe while filming Some Like It Hot. Humphrey Bogart doesn't come off much better when Wilder discusses Sabrina. For Wilder, time did not heal old wounds.  

 

 

Wilder was a prickly verbally abusive kind of guy. He always worked with a co-writer when preparing his films and usually these writers couldn't stand to work with him again. His longest partnership with writer I.A.L. Diamond supposedly survived because Diamond was pretty much a human doormat.

 

Billy Wilder also kept an experienced editor on set with him while filming. This was to ensure that he didn't miss getting all of the required shots he needed during a scene. He stopped doing this in the mid 1960's which interestingly enough is when his hot streak finally ended. None of this comes up in the interview, no idol criticizing allowed in this film.

A disappointing film, you're probably better off reading the biography On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Time of Billy Wilder.

71 minutes.