2001 - TOWN AND COUNTRY, disappointing sex comedy

Somewhere in this rather disappointing and frequently silly sex comedy are some  decent ideas for a funny film.  Town and Country is the notorious film that cost $90 million dollars and only brought in $10.5 million dollars, obviously a financial disaster.  The film got terrible reviews although I suspect most of the reviews focused on the cost of the film and not the film itself.

Warren Beatty sort of plays a character modeled after himself, an aging Lothario still trying to bag every woman that he can.  In the film he's married to Diane Keaton.   Goldie Hawn and Gary Shandling are their best friends who are also having marital problems.  Shandling has decided he's gay after about 20 years of marriage. Andie MacDowell plays one of Beatty's attempted conquests who has a couple of bizarre parents played by "Moses" himself Charlton Heston as her father and a stage actor Marian Seldes as her mother.  These three are the funniest and most absurd characters in the film.

 

Had the screenplay maybe been thought through with a little more care,  it could have been an American version of Ophul's La Ronde but unfortunately it was not to be.  Beatty seems game to send up his image as the consummate Hollywood ladies man who is starting to age out of the role.  Gary Shandling, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton are all seasoned professionals when it comes to comedy, but that old chestnut, the disappointing script let them down. I was rather surprised by this as besides being an actor Warren Beatty is an experienced producer/director and must have known that this film had serious problems.

 

As it is, there are laughs to be had for the most part.  However I hate to jump on the bandwagon but they really shouldn't have spent so much money on what could have been a decent comedy.  It you want to read about the production history of this film, it's all over the internet.

Written by Michael Laughlin and Buck Henry, the running time is 104 minutes.

2001 - BLACK HAWK DOWN, spinning victory from the jaws of defeat

 If there is one thing they are good at in the movie business, it's taking a true story and twisting it around.  In this case it's the Clinton Administration's plan to send the Delta Force and the Rangers into the midst of the Somali Civil War to capture the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.  The mission was basically a disaster, 18 American soldiers died and several Black Hawk helicopters were lost.  

However leave it to Hollywood to somehow spin this into a quasi victory.  The director Ridley Scott stages a lot of for lack of a better term excellent and intense battle scenes.  It's amazing the Delta Force mission failed since in the film it looks like they wiped out most of Aidid's army.

 

What can you say about this film?  If you like war movies Black Hawk Down gets the job done I guess.  The film doesn't shy away from the blood and guts of a modern war but the whole film seems to just a little to "gung ho, rah rah"  for my taste.  It's the kind of movie John Wayne would have been proud to be a part of. 

 

The film was written by Ken Nolan and the running time on the Blu Ray disc is 144 minutes.

2001 - LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR, Neil Simon looks back at his early career

A film that probably won't make much sense for a modern audience.  During the 1950's,  a 90 minute comedy-variety television program called "Your Show of Shows," ruled the early days of television.  The star was comedian Sid Caesar who is practically forgotten today but was a big star on this show.  Incredibly the writing and production staff managed to crank out a 90 minute show once a week. The pressure must have been enormous.

One of the writers in the "writers room" was Neil Simon who along with a very talented group of comedic writers was tasked with feeding this show new material.   In 1993 Neil Simon dramatized the making of Your Show of Shows in his play Laughter on the 23rd Show which was eventually turned into a film.

 

Nathan Lane plays the part of the Sid Caesar character here called Max Prince.  Simon is a character called Lucas Brickman and the rest of the characters all famous comedy writers are names that would probably not mean much to a contemporary audience today with the exception of the Mel Brooks character called in this case Ira Stone who apparently drove everyone crazy with his antics.

Simon adds a lot more drama than comedy in his script, which is kind of unusual for a joke machine like him.  Nathan Lane does a good job playing the Sid Caesar like star of the show.  The conflict in this film is Lane's battle with the TV network to keep from censoring skits they don't find funny or appropriate.

Laughter on the 23 Floor is a fairly decent comedy/drama of a now nostalgic time in Neil Simon's life.  The film benefit's from the director Richard Benjamin's working with a talented cast of character actors and performers.

The running time is 102 minutes.

2001 - THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE

Well made, well acted and well photographed in black and white by Roger Deakins, this is another typically quirky Coen Brothers film.

The plot is right out of a James M Cain novel with the very heavy hand of fate coming down hard on a barber and his wife trying to pull together money to open a dry cleaning business.

 

I hate to criticize such a well made film, but this story seems even colder than usual for the Coen Brothers. It's just very hard to work up any sympathy for any of these extremely unlikable characters.

 Probably can't recommend this one although I usually enjoy their films.

Written by Joel and Ethan Coen as usual the film runs 116 minutes.

2001 - THE TICK, very funny superhero spoof

Ben Edlund's goofball superhero series is very funny and very weird.  Unfortunately it was just to weird for the television viewing audience.

This version of The Tick lasted only nine episodes but they are nine very funny episodes.  Edlund has such a warped vision of comic book superheros that once you watch the big blue avenger's clueless fight against evil and mostly past their prime super villains, it's hard to take another Marvel movie seriously.

The Tick and his crime fighting partner Arthur (dressed as either a bunny or a moth or something) are ably assisted by the Wonder Woman like Captain Liberty and the hilarious send up of the Batman character,  Batmanuel.

Edlund doesn't seem to have much luck finding a way for The Tick to get mainstream acceptance on TV.  However.  the character continues to bounce back so far in an animated series and another 2016 live action series that also failed with the public. I'm sure The Tick will turn up again.

The running time for this series is 198 minutes, Ben Edlund, primary writer for the series.

2001 - FULLTIME KILLER, lots of shooting the Hong Kong way

Star and producer Andy Lau plays an up and coming hit man deciding to take on the challenge of unseating the current top hit man.  The results are gun battles, lots and lots of gun battles all directed with a certain amount of skill by Johnnie To.

In spite of all the shootings there really isn't a whole lot to this film but if you are feeling the need to watch a lot of people getting shot, well nobody does action better than the film making gang in Hong Kong.

The film runs 102 minutes.

2001 - AMERICA'S SWEETHEARTS - sort of a hollywood satire and a romantic comedy.

Pretty poor film considering the cast who for some reason didn't read this script.  But the fact that the director Joe Roth managed to rope in this cast is a not inconsiderable accomplishment.  Julia Roberts, Billy Crystal, John Cusack and Catherine Zeta Jones are the leading players in this so called romantic comedy.  Only Catherine Zeta Jones is any fun as a self absorbed movie star and the supporting players Christopher Walken and Stanley Tucci get whatever laughs they can find.

Billy Crystal co wrote the script but the jabs at Hollywood are pretty lame for a guy had been around the acting block a few times.  The various spoofs of the movie genres are too broad and the idea that the public would be so enamored of a movie star couple that they would make their lame movies a success just isn't how the entertainment business works anymore.

Probably the only real fun in the film Christopher Walken doing his weirdo film director bit otherwise the film is just pretty lame.

102 minutes.

2001 - LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER - crap to watch on the treadmill

Lara Croft:  Tomb Raider is a little over 90 minutes long so that's about 3 / 30 minute workouts on the treadmill to make the time go faster during the morning workout.  The additional 10 minutes of running time is the fooling around part where you set up the speed of the treadmill and set the timer for the morning run.

The film stars Angelina Jolie as the video game character.  Jolie is kind of young in this film, she has big pouty lips and a padded bra.  Her face is hard looking because she is supposed to be a hard ass.  She has a very bad British accent.

This is basically Indiana Jones if Indiana Jones was a chick instead of Harrison Ford.  The big action pieces are rehashes of the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade scenes involving a mix of science and fantasy.  One scene is lifted from Ray Harryhausen's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad which the director just ramped up with more frenzied action and special effects.  The bottom line, this film is very derivative but then what do you expect from a video game turned into a movie.

100 minutes

2001 - THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING is really long.

Pity the poor fools like me who bought the extended versions of these incredibly long films.  However rest assured that this post will be a lot shorter than watching this film. 

The first film in this trilogy introduces the middle earth characters containing hobbits, dwarfs, elves, orcs, a balrog, nazgûl, uruk-hai, and humans.  To complicate matters even further many of the characters have multiple names or names that sound the same such as, Sauron, Saurman, Strider, Argon, Gandolf the Grey, Merri, Pippin, Bilbo and Frodo.  The film is a feast of fantasy foolishness for the nerdiest of nerds playing fantasy card games at their local comic book store.

Liv Tyler, because I don't want to look at any more pictures of Hobbits, Dwarfs and Orcs.

No argument that this first film looks great.  It was filmed entirely in New Zealand with some magnificent scenery in the background to look at.  This is probably a good thing because most of this film is watching characters walking, walking, walking.  The special effects are at a very high caliber and the actors seem very sincere in their roles.

Since this is  J.R.R. Tolkein's elaborate fantasy creation it is probably not unexpected that the first film would spend most of it's running time setting things up for the next two films.  Still, this is a mighty long haul through the first third of this trilogy.

219 minutes.

2001 - DONNIE DARKO, having your cake and eating it as well.

Donnie Darko is a film about an alienated teenager being visited by a giant rabbit with a metal head.  The rabbit tells him the world will end in about a month, this is the sort of sci-fi fantasy element to the film.  However Donnie Darko may actually be a psychotic teenager who is imagining all of this.

The writer/director is Richard Kelly and he appears to have some talent.  The film is very well made and edited.  However the problem that Kelly gets into is that he seems intent on making a cult film with all the weird stuff he sticks into it.  If you remove all the giant rabbit scenes and and the time travel crap, the film is just another alienated teenager story.

The film is pretty well cast with some old 70's and 80's actors like Patrick Swayze and Katherine Ross showing up in small but important parts.  Drew Barrymore also isn't too bad as a teacher out of step with the school administration.  However the title character of the film played by Jake Gyllenhaal is the usual repressed teenager full of anger and angst which is probably a cliche best abandoned.

Apparently Richard Kelly has a website that further expands the characters and the plot of the film.  But if you have to work this hard to explain your film, maybe your approach to telling this story had a few problems in it to begin with.


113 minutes.

2001 - THE LEGEND OF ZU aka ZU WARRIORS, Tsai Hark's elaborate Chinese fantasy

Tsui Hark directed and produced one of the most elaborate digital effects fantasy films I have ever seen.  It's visually stunning and stunningly incoherent as a film. 

The story:

In the floating Zu Mountains good and evil have been at war for thousands of years.  Now the Blood Demon is releasing his blood clouds has he prepares his final assault on Zu.  Meanwhile "White Brows" has summoned "King Sky" and "Red" to keep the Blood Demon inside the blood cave.  Unfortunately Red has become possessed by "Amnesia" a flower demon and now wants to destroy Zu.  "Enigma" and "Hollow" will unite in Ying and Yang with their divine swords to stop the blood demon's blood clouds.

 That's just half of the plot I actually figured out and that took some work.

What the Legend of Zu is really about is Tsai Hark letting his imagination run completely out of control with digital computer effects.  Watching what Hark has created is one of the most visually overwhelming experiences I have ever sat through.

 I believe Tsai Hark was attempting to translate traditional visual storytelling into some kind of new kinetic graphic expression.  For all the CGI that is used in Hollywood films, no one has had the guts to push it to this extreme and this film came out 10 years ago.

This was an expensive Hong Kong film production that failed to find and audience.  I can imagine watching this film in a theater was probably an overwhelming and exhausting experience for the average film goer.

 The Legend of Zu is an important film and also a fascinating failure at the same time.

104 minutes, written by Tsai Hark and Lee Man-choi.

1979 - 2001 - APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX, the extended version shows how good the original version is

This review should be more about my foolish purchase of the extended version of Apocalypse Now.  Francis Ford Coppola who hadn't had a hit film in a while and possessing a large ego added back in almost an hour of footage into his original cut of his film.  The additional scenes mostly consisted of the crew's visit to a French Plantation in Vietnam and more of the Playboy bunnies.  Coppola re-released it calling it a reworking of the original film.

Where the original Apocalypse Now ran into trouble was towards the end where Coppola went all surreal on the audience with a weird Dennis Hopper spouting gibberish and Marlon Brando appearing to improvise his entire performance.  This extended version didn't even attempt to clarify those scenes. 

Still, you can see the original film among the new mediocre scenes that were reinserted after probably being deemed disappointing in the first cut.  The big helicopter attack with the Wagner music is extremely well done and the cinematography by Vittorio Storato is very impressive.  Coppola had plenty of brilliant scenes in the first part of his film to make you forget the complete mess that the last  part of the film turned into.

Apocalypse Now was a big production with big problems.  Advised by Roger Corman not to film in the Philippines during the monsoon season.  Coppola went ahead anyway only to see a hurricane destroy his sets.  Martin Sheen had a heart attack and Marlon Brando showed up extremely overweight forcing Coppola to shut down production while he rewrote the last part of the film to incorporate Marlon Brando's appearance and somewhat irrational behavior. 

There is an even longer version of Apocalypse Now called the bootleg version which runs 289 (almost 5 hours).

202 minutes, written by John Milius and Coppola.

2001 - ATLANTIS THE LOST EMPIRE, Disney's animated adventure epic was probably a poor choice for a film

For reasons probably only known to the executives of the Walt Disney company, the animation department produced this beautifully made animated epic adventure.  That's the main problem, it's an animated adventure epic. 

No singing princesses, no singing birds, no singing teacups and no large overblown Broadway style production numbers.  What the film did have was a neat submarine, a monster, a volcano blowing up and a Star Wars type air battle at the end which was actually pretty cool. 

Atlantis The Lost Empire has a princess but she didn't sing one note, it also has a lot of comedy relief.  The basic appeal for Disney's audience of young girls was going to be nothing,  and an audience of young boys probably wasn't going to be caught dead at an animated adventure film, from the unhip Disney Studios. 

2001 was the year of Harry Potter, the first Lord of the Rings film and yet another Jurassic Park film.  These were more in line with where kid's heads were at.

Atlantis the Lost Empire is a well made, very well designed and good looking film with lots of action.  It just shouldn't have been made. 

This is the first, second,  third film I've watched this year about the lost continent of Atlantis and surprisingly I've enjoyed them all.

The running time, 96 minutes.  Written by Tab Murphy.

2001 - AVALON, interesting live action Japanese anime film

What came first Avalon or The Matrix?  The Matrix was released in 1999,  2 years before Avalon.  The filmmakers of the Matrix films always said they were influenced by the Japanese anime film Ghost in the Shell.  Ghost in the Shell and Avalon were made by the same filmmaker Manoru Oshii.

Avalon is a virtual reality (VR) environment in which people enter and play to different game levels where they receive money or some kind of reward.  One of the players has begun to believe there is more to this virtual reality world then they are being told.

An odd if interesting film shot in Poland by Japanese filmmakers.  There isn't a lot of action and the film mostly focuses on the mystery of the higher game levels in the VR world of Avalon. 

The film looks good and has an intriguing story.  I suppose you could say in some ways it's a souped up episode of the old Twilight Zone TV series.  It's also a science fiction dork dream come true with a good looking woman blowing up tanks and aircraft in a virtual reality game world. 

Considering it kind of treads on the same themes of the Matrix trilogy I was more engaged with the film that I should have been.  Worth a look.

2001, 2002 - THE HIRE, glorified, car commercials.

The marketing department at BMW got the brilliant idea to hire 8 top directors and have them shoot short films with the actor Clive Owen racing around in different model BMWs.

AMBUSH, by John Frankenheimer, a good car chase film.  Frankenheimer had directed Grand Prix and Ronin so he knew how to film exciting chases.

CHOSEN, by Ang Lee.  Also a fairly decent car chase film.  Probably the only interesting thing in it, Lee's little inside joke about The Hulk his big budget flop was the next film he directed.

THE FOLLOW, directed by the artsy fartsy Wong Kar-Wai, aims to be a mood piece but is just boring.

STAR, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring his then wife Madonna.  Madonna looks pretty bad and the film is about the driver embarrassing and humiliating her.  Almost prescient considering how Madonna and Ritchie's marriage ended.

POWDER KEG, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu wallows in it's stylization and pretentiousness, no fun.

HOSTAGE, directed by John Woo, only goes to prove that Woo should stick to filming scenes with Chow Yun-fat shooting thousands of bullets into guys instead of staging car chases.

TICKER, directed by Joe Carnahan, probably the best short film of the 2nd season, to bad Carnahan couldn't have brought this kind of interest to The A Team.

BEAT THE DEVIL, directed by Tony Scott.  The most annoying of all these short films, an attempt at a supernatural/ comedy/ action short film.  Filmed as usual by Scott like he had irritable bowel syndrome.

 Ambush and Ticker are probably the only two worth checking out.  This series is kicking around on YouTube.

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2001 - OCEAN'S 11, the remake

A film with a stylish, clever director in Steven Soderberg and a reasonably clever and witty script.

Ocean's 11 has an interesting cast.  George Clooney and Brad Pitt are very charismatic.  Matt Damon and Julia Roberts are sort of charismatic.

But Ocean's 11 is kind of time waster for talented director and cast. I have no issue with light film entertainment but just seems remaking the Sinatra Ocean's 11 is just setting the bar very for these people.

Written by Ted Griffith, the running time is 116 minutes.

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2001 - STANLEY KUBRICK: A LIFE IN PICTURES, documentary on Kubrick

 Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is a documentary supplement that came with a Kubrick DVD box set of his films. The picture was directed by Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother in law and apparently had the approval of the Kubrick family. So I wasn't expecting much. The documentary spends a lot of time pushing the idea that Kubrick was just a big lovable teddy bear/family man who directed classic films way ahead of their time.

 

Kubrick probably had an obsessive compulsive personality with possibly a streak of paranoia. He was a recluse towards the end of his life. He spent many years living on a private estate in England with his wife and daughters chasing people off of his property with a shotgun.  A compulsive memo writer.  At one point in the film Kubrick's daughter reads from a lengthy 17 page memo he wrote on how to care for his cats. It's supposed to come off as funny and eccentric but it seems weird. 

The film spends some time discussing the negative reviews to A Clockwork Orange, and Kubrick's surprising reaction to the backlash he received from the film. This part of this seems extremely suspect.  Kubrick had stated in many interviews (when he was giving interviews) that he had always wanted to make a mainstream pornographic movie his entire life.   Did Kubrick actually think the strong sexual violence he put into A Clockwork Orange would be well received by the critics in 1971?

However I think you could make a good argument that after 2001: A Space Odyssey he really didn't make a "classic" film. He made interesting films but considering the 2 years he spent actually filming his final film, Eyes Wide Shut even his most rabid fans would have to admit it was not really the masterpiece that was expected.

The impression left by Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures, is of a very strange guy allowed to do whatever he wanted by a movie studio that gave him enough money to indulge his screwy whims.

 The clips and scenes from the films do look very good.

Running time 142 minutes.

2001 - PEARL HARBOR another big budget mess

Pearl Harbor was yet another big  Michael Bay film. He was shooting for an epic love story against the background of the Japanese attack on December 7th. Making a movie like this is a tricky business, a filmmaker has to have a pretty strong story to hang against a big event like the Pearl Harbor attack. This movie doesn't really have that going for it.


Pearl Harbor is the typical love triangle between "two friends and the woman they love". The one friend is presumed lost in combat, so his buddy moves in on his girlfriend to comfort her, and well one thing leads to another, the girlfriend gets pregnant, the dead friend returns from the dead and we end up with a big mess on our hands. This is the kind of junk that television soap operas could do in their sleep, but for some reason the screenwriter couldn't seem to work up the energy to make this interesting.

The love story is resolved by having the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, destroy the United States pacific fleet, kill thousands of sailors and blow up most of Hawaii which seems like overkill to resolve everyone's personal and romantic problems.

There are a few positives to this movie.   Nobody stages big action scenes like Michael Bay, he is the master. You actually get a feeling for what the attack might have been like that day, with the planes flying in low, the men trapped in the sinking ships, and the panic of the US military during the attack.

As usual the Japanese military plans the attack moving little toy ships around a big map, and a lot of the dialog is pretty lame. The actors actually are pretty decent. Ben Affleck does a good job as the guy who returns from the dead. The woman playing the nurse and girlfriend of Ben Affleck, isn't bad.   Jon Voight is good as FDR, as is Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle.  What's his name, Josh Hartnett makes no impression at all, but he is a nice pretty boy.   Dan Ackroyd is extremely miscast as a naval intelligence officer, and shatters the believably of the film whenever he's on screen.

Pearl Harbor is a failure but it's not the worst epic ever put on screen. However it doesn't appear to be what was intended when they filmed it.

Written by Randall Wallace, the running time is an epic 183 minutes