2013 - INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, another dour Coen Brothers character study

If the studio that put up the money for Inside Llewyn Davis was expecting another hit film and soundtrack like the Coen's previous semi musical film, "O Brother Where Out Thou?" weren't they in for a surprise.  Instead of a bunch of colorful southern characters and some zippy bluegrass musical numbers what they got was this depressing character study with a bunch of downer folk music tunes.  I also knew this film was in trouble when the lead was sharing scenes with a kitty cat.

The cast was the usually carefully considered group.  However Oscar Isaac is no George Clooney.  Justin Timberlake was cast as a more ambitious and successful folk singer than Llewyn Davis but he doesn't really make much of an impression.  Carey Mulligan plays Timberlake's sort of shrewish wife.  In fact the entire cast with the exception of John Goodman is just a downer.  I don't have a problem with a film having an unlikable leading character or characters but I still have to have a reason to be interested in them.

The New York and Chicago locations are well chosen, the film does have a feeling for the early 1960's.  The photography however while well done is as big a downer as the characters in this film.  The Coens decided on a muted color pallet with lots of smoke and shadows which only contributes to the overall impression of utter futility and pointlessness that hangs over this film.

The Coens usually make their films on the cheap so I would guess that although this film was not particularly popular with the general public, it probably broke even or made money.  Inside Llewyn Davis is one of those films that seems made for the intelligentsia.

105 minutes, screenplay by the Coens as usual.

2013 - GRAVITY, visually impressive with sort of OK story

Well this film looks great.  That computer stuff is getting better every year.  All they will have to do is get the price down on these computer special effects is to get rid of these pesky actors with their million dollar salaries.

Apparently almost all of this film was computer generated which might account for the weird sort of soulless look astronaut Sandra Bullock has throughout a lot of this film.  The film is also shot in 3D so a viewer viewing it in 3D has to watch a bunch of junk float around while trying to concentrate on the story.  Gravity also has some long shots with no editing as the computer camera whips around astronauts and spaceships.  It's impressive but to me seems kind of pointless coming off more like a "look what we can do with this technology" stunt.

Probably the chief issue I have with this film is the story.  As if it isn't dramatic enough that Russian space junk is going to destroy our heroine, you have to sit through some personal Sandra Bullock drama about a dead kid and her decision to give up fighting to survive.  The resolution to this is really lame since it involves ghostly hallucinations or something.  The survival of Sandra Bullock in space is actually cribbed from George Pal's Destination Moon which also used a fire extinguisher as a rescue device.  There are just no original ideas anymore.

It seems that one of the goals of Gravity is to take a shot at being on the king of the science fiction film mountain that 2001:  A Space Odyssey occupies.  But for all of the advanced technology that this film used it can't touch that film's greatness.

91 minutes, written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón.

2014 - 30 FOR 30 THE PRICE OF GOLD, remembering the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan skating drama

Relive the 1994 Winter Olympics with this jump back to the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan skating spectacle. 

I had almost forgotten about all the media craziness that went on while this epic drama played out on television.  The working class girl with no money vs the coiffed and anointed ice queen who was attacked about six weeks before the Olympics by a bunch of pretty dumb thugs trying to advance the skating career of Tonya Harding.

This is essentially a talking heads movie with the usual cast of "you are there" characters chirping in with their eyewitness accounts.  The documentary is also loaded up with lots of footage of the events that surrounded this epic drama.  This film is quite the nostalgia wallow when all is said and done.

The ultimate irony of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal was that Kerrigan went on to win only a silver metal at the Olympics that year but all the publicity that she got from the kneecapping made her famous and a millionaire.

90 minutes.

1967 - THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS, is not one of the better Chabrol films

Claude Chabrol filmed this thriller about murder in a family running a champagne vineyard.  This film was shot simultaneously in French and English.  The English version which I saw is a little shall we say stilted.

The story is also very slow moving with things finally picking up during the second half of the film.  Chabrol was usually compared to Hitchcock when he moved into the suspense genre but Chabrol himself felt that Fritz Lang was more of an influence on his films.

The cast of The Champagne Murders included Stephanie Audran, Chabrol's wife at the time and Anthony Perkins which probably had a lot to do with comparing this film to a Hitchcock thriller. 

Not the best Chabrol film that I have seen but it has it's moments particularly the stunning overhead shot towards the end of the film. 

105 minutes, written by four writers, never a good sign, William Benjamin, Claude Brule, Derek Prouse and Paul Gegauff.

1977 - GRAND THEFT AUTO, Ron Howard's feature film directorial debut

The Orson Welles of lame stogy Hollywood films made his directorial debut with this redneck car chase comedy that is fun to watch because they wreck a lot of cars.

The film was produced by Roger Corman, the great exploiter of young talent.  Howard and his father Rance Howard wrote the story which pretty much consists of cars chasing each other.  Ron Howard found a part for his brother Clint Howard and loaded up some of the smaller parts with some of his Happy Days co-workers.

This film is not really anything special.  Howard directs everything in a two shot which is kind of understandable since he is stuck in a car for almost the entire film.  But considering that Howard had been a working actor his entire life he sure doesn't seem to know how to direct the rest of the cast.  Everyone is completely over the top except for Howard and his costar Nancy Morgan who are very bland.

Probably the best thing in the film are the car chase scenes which I doubt Howard directed since that is usually 2nd unit stuff.  However Grand Theft Auto made a lot of money for Roger Corman and helped Howard get better films since in Hollywood making money rules all.


1977

84 minutes.

1999 - LIGHT KEEPS ME COMPANY, documentary on Sven Nykvist

A documentary on the life and career of Sven Nykvist made about seven years before his death.  Sven Nykvist was the cinematographer who was as responsible for the look of an Ingmar Bergman film as much as Bergman himself was.  As the film opens, Nykvist is retired and suffering from a rare form of dementia that has made it difficult for him to speak.

 

The documentary is short and zips through his life and career with the primary focus on his work with Bergman and even that part of the film only looks at a few of their films.  Nykvist was apparently a very private person so the usual collection of "talking heads" and film clips are featured. 

Nykvist apparently had a rather messy personal life.  He had an affair with Mia Farrow on the set of The Hurricane.  The writer Nora Ephron made a witty comment that she was "the only woman in Hollywood who hadn't slept with Sven Nykvist" is unfortunately not interviewed.  She probably had a story or two.

The film ends on a kind of moving note showing Nykvist spending time with his family and childhood friends, not a movie star in sight.  The final shot of the old and ill photographer still able to load a camera magazine is touching.  This is a film that will probably interest film buffs for the most part.

75 minutes.

2003 - LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE, another sequel

It's all about the franchise in the movie business.  Paramount was hoping to get a female Indiana Jones type of series going with the Lara Croft character so they tried again after Lara Croft Tomb Raider.

What they got was essentially the same film as the first one with Angelina Jolie again playing Lara Croft.  Jolie is supposed to be tough and sexy but still comes off as more scary than sexy.  This time they gave her a boyfriend who's a real hard ass.  When we are introduced to him, he's doing push ups upside down on the ceiling of his prison cell.

Instead of chasing after some silly time control gadget in the first film.  Lara Croft is now after Pandora's Box.  Yet another blatant steal from the Indiana Jones films.  Along with cribbing from Spielberg films, the film was edited by Spielberg's long time editor Michael Kahn but he can't spin much gold out of this mess of a movie.

At almost two hours long this film was even a chore to get through on the treadmill since it took a week to watch.

117 minutes, written by Dean Georgaris.

2009 - THE MILLENNIUM SERIES, is 9 hours long by the way

The three book series is turned into a three film series.  The films focus on the character of Lizabeth Salander, the rather strange goth/bisexual/computer hacker. The Millennium Series is essentially the three theatrical films based on the books with additional scenes added to each film to pad out the running time.

The first film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo introduces the character of Lisbeth Salander probably one of the most put upon characters in the history of Swedish drama.  Raped and molested by her guardian, neglected by the state, Salander is really damaged goods.  However Salander is also a brilliant computer hacker who in one of those lazy plot devices can break into anyone's computer.  In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Salander teams up with a Bob Woodward like investigative reporter called Mikael Blomvkist to investigate the death of a woman over 40 years ago.  The rather contrived plot features fascists and serial killers. 

The second film, The Girl Who Played with Fire focuses on the background of Lizabeth Salander who is starting to come off as some sort of super hero who would probably fit in with the gang in The Avengers.  In addition to her computer hacking skills, Salander now has fighting skills and can survive being shot several times.  The story in this film has something to do with women being sold into some sort of sexual slavery while Blomvkist unravels Salander's previous life which leads into some sort of vast government conspiracy.

The final film The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest has a plot that would rival a John Le Carre  novel with spies spying on other spies who are spying on other spies.  The film features an evil genius and a deadly and unstoppable henchman.  These guys would easily fit into a James Bond film.

 Was watching this series worth the time?  Well the acting is pretty good, the films are well made. The biggest liability seems to be that the story gets more convoluted and unbelievable as the series progresses.  I will admit that the films kept me watching but at times all the physical and sexual abuse heaped on the Lizabeth Salander character got to be a little too much.

540 minutes.

1979 - THE BLACK HOLE, good looking science fiction film

Disney's attempt to grab some of the Star Wars money came up short.  The Black Hole has impressive special effects and production design like Star Wars.  It also had some of the worst aspects of that series, comical robots and lots of laser blasts. 

Disney also kind of blew it with their cast.  There was nothing particularly wrong with hiring Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, Yvette Mimieux, Robert Forrester, Timothy Bottoms and Maximilian Schell as a retread Captain Nemo character. However casting a bunch of middle aged actors wasn't going to seem very hip and cool to the targeted teenage audience.

The story was also very derivative as well.  The original Star Wars film may have borrowed from about every film that George Lucas could think of (Triumph of the Will, The Searchers etc) but at least he was able to steal and reuse ideas from those films in sort of clever ways.  The Black Hole's problem was that it was stealing ideas from Star Wars, so you had a situation where a film was stealing ideas from a film that had stolen ideas from other films.

Still the film looks good and has enough action and special effects to pass the time.  The robot battles are pretty lame with some very stiff robots shooting it out with our space heroes.  The comical robot V.I.N.C.E.N.T. gets all the good lines in the film and was voiced by Roddy McDowell who for some reason didn't receive any screen credit.  The voice of the robot B.O.B. was Slim Pickens in probably the only real clever joke in the film.

Written by  Gerry Day and Jeb Rosebrook the running time is 98 minutes.

1959 - THE GIANT BEHEMOTH, more of the same

Another monster is on the loose full of radioactivity in this very derivative science fiction film that steals from about every plot and situation from every other previous giant monster on the loose film up to this time.

The main films that this lack of monster inspiration seemed to borrow from are Godzilla and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.  The director/writer Eugene Lourie was also the director of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms so he was essentially stealing from himself in this film.

Some of the special effects particularly the monster rampage in London were done by Willis O'Brien the special effects guy behind King Kong.  However the very cheapness of the film particularly the monster who never moves his mouth really kill any effective moments the stop motion animation might contribute to the film.

The film has as it's lead Gene Evans one of Sam Fuller's regulars.  Evans usually played dog face soldiers but here he's a clean shaven marine biologist it's all very odd.  Well I've seen worse films.

80 minutes

1970 - FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON, more Mario Bava Eurotrash

 Mario Bava's film is a direct ripoff from Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.  Stick a bunch of people on a remote island than have one of them bump them off the rest one at a time.   

This is not one of the better Bava films but it does have it's moments.  The hanging of the dead bodies in the walk in meat locker, the usual graphic and kind of sick killings and the general Eurotrash vibe throughout the film are worth a one time look

As with some of these later films Bava, the inspiration and lack of creativity seems extremely apparent.  Perhaps the lack of originality in the story just couldn't get Bava to work up much enthusiasm.   He had been making these mad killer movies for about 15 years.

On the positive side, the film is nice and short.

78 minutes, written by Mario di Nardo.

1963 - COME FLY WITH ME - the old single girls on the make for a husband film.

Talk about a personal nostalgia wallow, Come Fly With Me, was a film that seemed to be in constant circulation on the CBS Thursday Night Movie when I was growing up.  I have seen pieces of this film many times.  The film was produced by Anatole de Grunwald who seemed to specialize in these multiple cast, multiple story films like The V.I.P.s and The Yellow Rolls Royce.  This cast isn't as star studded as those films, it's sort of the B squad of starlets and TV actors.

Dolores Hart is the cynical stewardess looking for a rich husband, she thinks she has scored with a European Baron played by Karl Bohm.  Bohn is actually an impoverished diamond smuggler.  If Dolores had watched more movies she would have known that Bohm played the crazed killer in Peeping Tom who stabbed women with his camera tripod.  Lois Nettleton is the stewardess who has been used and abused by married men and is staying away from nice guy Karl Malden in a very rare romantic lead part.  Nettleton was on about every TV show I every watched in the 60's and 70's.  Finally there is Pamela Tiffin who always seemed to get cast as the beautiful but wacky all American girl.  Tiffin spends most of the film trying to get Hugh O'Brian to abandon his loose moral playboy ways.

Well anyway the girls have lots of boyfriend problems as they are photographed on location in widescreen in Paris and Vienna.  Karl Malden probably comes off the best in this film.  Malden had been associated with Elia Kazan and I suppose Come Fly With Me is sort of a career comedown but hey he gets to romance a woman about 20 to 30 years younger than him.  Probably the best thing in the film is the Jimmy Van Heusen /Sammy Cahn title song but apparently they couldn't get the Frank Sinatra version so they settled for Frankie Avalon crooning away on the title track. 

Come Fly With Me was fun to watch because it is such an early 1960's film.  The weird attitudes about that sex stuff have to be heard and seen to be believed.  If a woman sleeps with a man before she is married no good will come of it.  In  Dolores Hart's case she may end up as a nun after sleeping with Karl Bohm. 

109 minutes, written by William Roberts.

2003 - THE HUNTED - a pretty good thriller from William Friedkin

A pretty decent "crazy psycho war vet on the run" film from William Friedkin who actually manages to restrain himself from his own excesses. 

Tommy Lee Jones is the guy who trains special ops soldiers for secret missions, Benico del Toro is one of his soldiers who turns out to be a nutcase who runs around killing deer hunters in northwest Oregon because he can.  It's mano a mano with some pretty tough fight scenes between the two of them.

For a director who never met an excess that he wouldn't put on film this is a fairly restrained film considering how violent it is.  The action is tough but realistic, and there are no apparent over done special effects with computer imagery.  Connie Nielsen is the hot looking FBI agent assigned to the case but Friedkin is having none of that lovely dovey stuff in his film.

The film is a fast moving hour and a half.

94 minutes.

2013 - DRINKING BUDDIES, will this be the future of movies?

Drinking Buddies is an independent feature made on a very low budget probably with a digital camera.  For a low budgeted film it has a high degree of polish mostly because digital technology has come such a long way now that a film can be shot and edited quite proficiently. 

 

 The cast is a group of actors that probably had a couple of weeks of free time and worked for minimum wage.  Their hope was that the film would find an audience,  give them a little serious actor cred in Hollywood and a piece of the profits if there were any to be made.

The film is about a couple of work buddies.  The woman played by Olivia Wilde is the secretary at a brewery.  She is best buds with a very hairy factory worker.  They eat lunch together, hit the bar together and generally do the work hangout thing.  Both of them have significant others.  She is involved with a nice intellectual boyfriend, the hairy guy is involved with a petite teacher with a nice butt.  I'm not sure what factory the writer/director Joe Swanberg every spent time in but I can guarantee you I was never in a place where there was a super hot administrative assistant with model looks who guzzles beer like a lumberjack.

What's kind of depressing about Drinking Buddies if you ignore the nonexistent and frankly uninteresting story, is the whole general vibe of this film.  As the film industry continues to fragment and digital delivery systems find their place in everyone's home we will probably get even more of this kind of stuff.  Films made to fill the increasing need to feed these on demand delivery systems to keep the general public loaded up with some sort of entertainment no matter how poor or mediocre it might be.  The film business is already drowning in lots of these sort of crummy movies with sort of low rent Hollywood actors

Written by Joe Swanberg, the running time is 90 minutes.

90 minutes.