2006 - X MEN THE LAST STAND is the future of movies

The future of movies will not be pretty because it's X Men The Last Stand.

 

Transformers Revenge of the Fallen is "the" summer family movie this year, more so than Pixar's Up. Concurrently all of the "adult" type films released in the last couple of month have flopped. In tough financial straits, Hollywood is looking for the golden goose. Hollywood thinks they have found it with Transformers Revenge of the Fallen. 

Transformers Revenge of the Fallen is just another version of X Men The Last Stand. 

 

 
Released in 2006 as part of the X Men trilogy. 20th Century Fox sold it as a wrap up of the story arc. The truth was that cheapskate studio Fox was no longer interested in paying the large salaries of the big cast. Bryan Singer had directed the first two films and had done a decent job but Singer left the franchise to direct Superman Returns,  which as it turned out didn't really work out all that well for him. Faced with a summer 2006 release date, the studio turned to legendary hack director Brett Ratner to take over the direction of the third film and get this sucker into the theaters in time. Fanboys, X Men comic book readers, and science fiction nerds whined that the untalented Ratner would ruin the conclusion of the series. They were right the finished movie was very lame but it also made a lot of money.
 

  

But Brett Ratner wasn't to blame for the movie. The truth was that Ratner never really directed the movie, the special effects department did. Every five minutes of the film had some sort of special effects sequence. As the movie went on, the effects just got more and more over the top. The actors were basically props for the ever increasing explosions, laser blasts and flying thru the air crap that ran throughout the film. In the end what the audience was left with was a movie full of pretty people stuck in some ridiculous action sequences. 

 

With an over engineered sound track and a lot of computer simulated explosions, the exhausted viewer probably returned home to medicate themselves with lots of alcohol to calm their nerves.  The success of this film and the horrible Spiderman 3 revealed the future of movies.   It would be lots of crappy cartoonish films coming at the audience in the years to come.

 

As if the movie wasn't annoying enough, X Men The Last Stand featured Ellen Page the grating star of Juno. Apparently the special effects department decided not to blow her up.  

 104 minutes, (BOOM).

1930 - CITY GIRL F.W. Murnau's American Period

Farm boy from Minnesota travels to Chicago. While in the Windy City he meets and falls in love with a waitress working at a diner. They impulsively get married, return to the farm where they are not well received by the farm boy's Christian Fundamentalist father. That's basically the story.

The director F.W. Murnau had filmed The Last Laugh in Germany. American film executive William Fox whose studio would later become 20th Century Fox, considered The Last Laugh the best film ever made. Fox brought Murnau over to Hollywood for two purposes, he let Murnau make any film of his choosing and he wanted him to teach his studio directors how to make better films.

 

City Girl contains scenes of strong lyrical beauty with beautiful shots of the farm fields and the couple running through them. It also has very emotional performances from a cast that actually look like people who would live on a farm. The composition and photography in each scene using light, shadow and set design is very impressive in the city and farm scenes.

Murnau's first American film Sunrise, is now considered one of the greatest films ever made, unfortunately it did not do very well with the audience which was overwhelmed with it's stunning technique. City Girl was Murnau's third American film and it got caught up in the transitional mess from silent to sound films. Fox screwed around with it, reedited it and released it in a version not approved by the director.

Still the film has a strong sense of atmosphere for the period and place and it's a very good film.

 

Written by  Marion Orth and Berthold Viertel, the running time is 89 minutes.

2009 - WATCHMAN, the extended Director's cut.

The world probably didn't need any version of the Watchmen when you get right down to it much less the extended director's cut but here it is.

 

I've read the graphic novel or comic book or whatever it's called, twice. I read it because it's been acclaimed as the best graphic novel or comic book or whatever written. Set in the 1980's, the graphic novel or comic book or whatever it's called, seems like a total period piece with it's criticism of Nixon and Vietnam. Does President Nixon still have that kind of resonance for the public anymore? After surviving eight years of Bush the younger as President, what's worse in a national leader ruthlessness
or stupidity?

 

The graphic novel was kicking around Hollywood for many years before Warner Brothers decided to sink a whole lot of money into it. Hoping for a repeat of that The Dark Knight kind of success, the studio was asking for and got a disaster. The problem was that the Watchmen stories are pretty outdated in the 21st century. A film that requires a knowledge of Richard Nixon and the culture of the 1980's and wants to mix it up with a critical look at the role of the superhero in our society seems like a lot to ask of a viewer looking for a couple of hours of entertainment. It's a very long film and a fairly violent film, the R rating made sure that the film would have a limited audience. The whole project probably should have been written off years ago.

Honestly the acting was not seem so hot. The character of the super heroine Silk Spectre was played by an actress named Malin Akerman. You can zip her up in a latex outfit but that doesn't make her a particularly sexy super heroine, you actually have to know how to act sexy. She's supposed to be the voice of humanity presenting the case to godlike superhero Dr Manhattan that the world is worth saving from nuclear war. She came off more like a shrill harpy.

 

Mixing the story lines of a murder mystery and the potential destruction of earth by nuclear war seemed pretty shaky. It was weak in the graphic novel or comic book or whatever it's called, and the film just makes it look even weaker. The old Space Ghost cartoons did a better job telling stories and they were at least short.

The whole idea of people dressing up as super heroes to rid the world of evil is really kind of stupid when you really think about it.

 The screenplay was by David Hayter and Alex Tse, the running time is 186 minutes.

1959 - OUR MAN IN HAVANA has a great Alec Guinness performance but movie is a little to smart for it's own good

A comedy thriller from Graham Greene and Carol Reed who had made The Third Man. This is a very clever spy film but probably a little subtle for a mass audience entertainment.

 

British Intelligence needs an agent in Cuba. They recruit a vacuum cleaner salesman named Wormold to spy for them. Wormold is given a code name that ends in 005 amusingly enough.  He realizes rather quickly he doesn't have a clue what to do as a spy. He pulls out the Havana phone book, randomly picks some names out of the book and starts making up reports to send to British Intelligence in London. Soon "the other side" realizes the British have a new agent in Cuba and send an assassination team out to kill him and his list of agents. Remember this is a comedy.

Graham Greene and Carol Reed are top professionals. The dialog is good, the acting is also very good and the on location filming in Cuba literally while the revolution was going on is pretty cool. However the film is so clever and subtle in it's tone and humor, it works against the enjoyment of the film. The understated nature of the story is kind of interesting to watch unfold and when the story gets serious and the violence comes it is kind of surprising.

Carol Reed always got great performances out of actors, apparently he was a director who actually liked his actors, unlike Hitchcock or David Lean. All the acting is good but this film has an amazing performance by Alec Guinness. Playing the vacuum cleaner salesman who goes from being a wimp to a cold blooded killer while perfectly staying in character.

 Love the name on that sign by the way.

111 minutes.

1972 - CABARET requires a high tolerance for Liza

Cabaret was loved by the critics when it was released in 1972. It starred Liza Minnelli as the likable gold digger Sally Bowles and Michael York who was portraying the original author of the stories, Christopher Isherwood. With a makeup job that makes her looks like one of the droogs from A Clockwork Orange, Cabaret featured the Academy Award winning performance of the very grating Liza.

The viewer better have a high tolerance for her over the top constantly on personality because it's the entire movie. She starts out at the peak of the emotional range and doesn't really scale it down for the rest of the film.  It's hard to top Joel Grey as the flamboyant Master of Ceremonies at the Cabaret but Minnelli succeeds brilliantly.

The movie's other major character, the bi-sexual writer who sleeps with Minnelli is supposed to be the original author Christopher Isherwood. He's in total shame when he reveals his homosexual encounter to Minnelli. Although it was 1972, the idea that his one sexual encounter with another male was the most horrible thing to ever happen to him now seems pretty silly. 

The filmmakers were so sure that Isherwood would like their adaptation of his stories and their portrayal of him they screened the film for him. Isherwood's only comment was "I never slept with a woman in my life."

Probably the best parts of the movie are the technical aspects of the film. The director Bob Fosse showed that he was beginning to understand how to put a movie together after the mess he made out of Sweet Charity. Having the legendary cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth who had filmed 2001: A Space Odyssey, shooting the film didn't hurt him one bit.

Cabaret is a film that takes the musical format and makes a strong statement on the evils of Nazi Germany 22 years after the end of World War II. Had Fosse lived longer perhaps he could have followed Cabaret with a musical on the evils of slavery, now that would have been a courageous movie.
 

 124 minutes, screenplay by Jay Presson Allen.

1925 -SEVEN CHANCES yet another Buster Keaton classic

Buster Keaton's comedy epic about weddings. Buster has until 7:00 pm to find someone who will marry him or he will lose an inheritance of seven million dollars. His friend advertises for a bride in the local newspaper for him.

 

 

 

The film is a little over an hour. The last 20 minutes is an extended epic chase involving Keaton and hundreds of would be brides that has to be seen to be believed. The film does have a happy ending, but Keaton does not dish up the sentimentality like Chaplin does and the movie ends with a funny string of gags.

It's fun to see a film that actually succeeds at what it wants to do. 

 

 

 

Written by  Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph A. Mitchell, the running time is 56 minutes.

1940, SEVEN SINNERS stars real life couple John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich?

John Wayne was personally chosen by bisexual actress Marlene Dietrich to be in her latest piece of fluff Seven Sinners, I doubt at the time  Duke was even remotely aware he was about to begin a 3 year love affair with Dietrich.

 

This movie is the type of goofy entertainment that Hollywood has completely forgotten how to make anymore. Mix lots of comedy, a love story, some songs and a big saloon fight at the end and you have 90 minutes of painless entertainment. The director was Tay Garnett, nobody has written lengthy film books about Garnett, but he was an extremely competent filmmaker in his day.

Probably one of the most interesting things about this movie is the involvement of Rudolph Mate, the Director of Photography on this picture. This was a guy who had come over from Europe and had worked with people like Fritz Lang on Metropolis and Carl Theodor Dreyer on The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr. He had also shot Hitchcock's film Foreign Correspondent. How Mate got mixed up in this is anyone's guess but a guy's got to eat. The movie looks great with lots of atmospheric black and white photography.

 

But really the movie is about Dietrich the legendary actress and screen personality. An interesting piece of 1940's fluff.

 87 minutes.

1959 - VERBOTEN, Sam Fuller's love story features teenage Nazi punks

The Director is Mr. Unsubtle, Sam Fuller. The film is about the American Army's challenges with the occupation of Germany after World War II. The film was shot on a very low budget, it is creepy and contemporary. Verboten starts with three American soldiers on patrol in a small German town, the soundtrack blasts Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as one by one each soldier is shot. The third soldier survives hidden by a German woman who he will eventually fall in love with and marry. He takes a job helping to feed hungry Germans, then all hell breaks loose.

 

Fuller touches on a lot of different issues, homegrown terrorism, the role of a civilian population governed by a totalitarian government, Nazi concentration camps, attacks on American troops by underground Nazi political groups. He doesn't do it with intelligent discussions of these issues, he bangs the viewer over the head with a shovel to get their attention first.

It's well known that Fuller was an infantry man during World War II serving with the 1st Infantry, also known as The Big Red One. Fuller was not a guy to put up with a lot of bullshit in his movies so he doesn't mess around.  He shows former Nazi's organizing terrorist cells called "Werwolfs." Fuller makes it very clear, he has some sympathy for the German people, but this was also a guy who liberated Jewish concentration camps and he's not about to let the Germans off the hook for that. These Werwolf groups actually existed and apparently the Allied Army didn't mess around when it came to dealing with them. General Eisenhower ordered them shot or thrown into forced labor camps without a trial. The French made them clear mine fields, the Canadians burned down the houses they were living in and the Russians just destroyed entire towns where they were suspected to be living.

This is not Fuller's best movie, the limitations of the budget and the large amount of stock footage work against it. But this is a very tough emotional film made by a guy who was actually a witness to this part of history.

 93 minutes, written by Samuel Fuller. 

1975 - remake of FAREWELL MY LOVELY is OK if nothing special

Legendary Hollywood movie star, pothead and alcoholic, Robert Mitchum plays Phillip Marlowe in this remake of Murder My Sweet, which was based on legendary alcoholic mystery writer Raymond Chandler's book Farewell My Lovely.  It's a classy production with top photography, production design and a musical score that copies the tradition film noir whaling trumpet sound on the soundtrack.

 

The movie also stars legendary kinky actress Charlotte Rampling in the femme fatale Lauren Bacall part.  Rampling was known for her performance in The Night Porter, as part of a couple engaged in a sado-masochistic relationship. That approach would probably have been a little more out there than the producers wanted to go with her role.

The screenplay, which dumbs down the plot of the book is still pretty complicated and rather hard to follow. But nobody ever read Chandler's books for their story structure. The books are a rambling mess of characters and situations made interesting by Chandler's strong ability to create good dialog and quotable lines.
 

      

Probably the best approach to a movie like this, is the Howard Hawk's version of Chandler's The Big Sleep.   As Hawks worked on the movie he realized he had an extra murder victim in the story and had no idea who was killing who. Hawks said "the hell with it" and focused on Bogart and Bacall's love scenes instead, today that film is a classic.

 95 minutes.

1928 - John Ford's HANGMAN'S HOUSE is surprisingly a very well done silent film

John Ford's 1928 silent film Hangman's House was a big surprise. Clocking in at 76 minutes it was not a major ordeal to sit through unlike a lot of silent movies are. It was a sophisticated piece of film making showing off many of Ford's strong points. Thematically somewhat reminiscent of The Searchers and The Quiet Man it didn't have any of the pretentiousness and ponderous story telling that affect those films.

A love story and a revenge story set in Ireland, Ford seemed to be inspired by the material and setting. Visual composition had always been Ford's strong point. Here he had a lot of impressive scenes photographed and staged for maximum visual impact. Using studio sets, Ford was able to create a very special look and mood with light and shadows throughout the film.

Ford and his production team staged an exciting and very impressive fire sequence at the end of the film, I would bet that Alfred Hitchcock and David Selznick remembered it when they were filming Rebecca. The film is known today for having the first appearance of John Wayne in a John Ford film. Wayne's an extra in the crowd cheering on the racers in the steeple chase scene. He's on the far left in this blurry picture below. Hangman's House really deserves to be known as a very good picture rather than for that piece of film trivia.

 

 

1968 - HELLFIGHTERS, Crappy John Wayne Production

Looking over the list of late career movies with John Wayne, this is probably one of the worst. As Wayne got older and westerns were declining, he would occasionally look for more contemporary subjects to appear in. This worthless movie about firefighters putting out spectacular oil rig fires probably seemed like a good one at first, but the screenplay was just terrible. The story is a mix of fire sequences followed by some lame soap opera stuff about Wayne's domestic life. The audience endures  lots and lots of "honey don't go and put out that oil well fire tonight, I'm worried you might get hurt" scenes. This stuff is just murder to sit through. It looks like Wayne was trying to make a Howard Hawk's type of film with action and drama mixed together.

 

  

 

Frankly, even the fire fighting highlights are boring after a while, if you've seen one oil rig go up in flames you've seen them all. The settings don't help, the film is supposed to be about Wayne's team flying all over the world putting out fires, but every scene was clearly shot at Universal Studios.

By this point in his career Wayne should have been able to tell a good script from a bad script, but he has only himself to blame, the film was made by his production company. This film is the one that Katherine Ross made after The Graduate and it's certainly a contrast between the old Hollywood and New Hollywood film making styles.

  

Probably the only interesting thing about the film is the appearance of Bruce Cabot, Wayne's boozing buddy. Apparently a hard living kind of guy, Cabot was the star of the original King Kong with Fay Wray. His final film appearance was in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever.

Wayne's next film was True Grit.

Written by Clair Huffaker, the running time is 121 minutes.

1951 - FIVE-nuclear war end of the world story

 The Writer/Producer/Director of Five was a radio writer named Arch Oboler. He was frequently thought of as Orson Welles light. There is nothing light weight about his 1951 film, Five. It's an interesting little film about the after effects of nuclear war on five survivors. This film was made entirely on location for about $75,000 with a crew of college students. 

 

The actors are not well known Hollywood personalities and the whole look of the film almost has a European feel to it with it's stark filming style, and some creative use of sound particularly towards the end, when two of the survivors explore the empty city.

 

 

Today's film people run around from city to city attending independent film festivals where young filmmakers force their low budget junk on audiences in a shot for artistic relevance. A film like Five shows that creative people had been working in this medium long before fancy digital film making software was available working with very low budgets.

 

 

 

 Arch Oboler sounds like an interesting character, he was a pioneer in 3D movie making with films like Bwana Devil and The Twonky. Today Hollywood is convinced that 3D will save their accelerating extinct business. If it's new it's old.

The screenplay was by Arch Obler, the running time is 91 minutes.

 

2009 - TRANSFORMERS REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, or watching hard core porn this weekend

Transformers Revenge of the Fallen is a long but very busy summer movie. It's not about giant robots from outer space. It's not about a new dimension in science fiction story telling. It's not about trailer trash Barbie doll Megan Fox who struggles to act. It's not about Shia LeBouf as a college bound boy who takes a detour to "Transformer Heaven" on the way to his Bachelor of Arts degree. It's a hard core military porno movie.

 

  

 

The whole reason for this film is for men to get their rocks off watching scenes of tough talking Patton like generals deploying their troops while sitting in front of giant TV monitors at the Pentagon. The generals say things like, "get me Central Command, clear that airspace for an immediate drop, and drop smoke for the air strike." It's got lots of scenes of soldiers staging up for attacks with their cool weapons. 

 

I will skip the obvious metaphor of the big gun as a penis substitute because anyone can make that connection, but who couldn't help but notice that the civilian put in charge of the elite military unit was clearly an impotent homosexual bent on ruining everything the military had been training for. This was a cunning commentary on the need for a continued persecution of gays in the United States military. There is even a mention of President Obama being sent to an underground hideout because just for the record he is clearly a wimp as well. George Bush didn't run and hide after 911, I think.

 In the end the United States military and I want to make this clear, the UNITED STATES military saves the world from the evil robots. We got no help from NATO or any of those worthless Third World countries. We...the UNITED STATES military won the battle, the nice giant robots helped a little bit but we dropped all the bombs on the Iranians or Decepticons or what ever they were called, it doesn't really matter. The final scene is of the cast sailing away on an aircraft carrier into the sunset, because in the end that's the way it had to be. It was a perfect ending to help celebrate our nation's birthday. After the movie ended I went outside and fondled my son's green army men for a long time, it was very satisfying. 

Running time 149 minutes, written by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. 

1962 - Bunuel's THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL and don't ask me to explain it

Don't ask me to explain it. Luis Bunuel surrealist filmmaker filmed this little "love letter" to the upper classes in 1961. I would bet that Rod Serling watched it a couple of hundred times since it has a real Twilight Zone buzz to it.

 

A group of dinner companions find themselves for some reason trapped in a room in an upper class house. Unable to leave, they slowly turn on each other as their less then best behaviors start to creep out.

 

 Bunuel was such a talented filmmaker that he was able to keep this potentially "johnny one note" idea constantly interesting and more importantly entertaining. He was also smart enough to know when to add his famous surrealist touches and when to keep the story moving.

 

Luis Bunuel had lots of highs and lows in his career. He had to walk the fine line between commercial responsibility and artistic integrity. He was also smart enough not to bore his audience.

Wish I could understand it all but I sure loved that bear wandering around the house.

 95 minutes.