1979 - CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO, Miyazaki's first feature.

Hayao Miyazaki, made the transition to features with this film based on an animated character named Arsene Lupin, a thief.  This was the second feature film featuring Lupin and it's an exciting action film.  

Miyazaki has taken stock action characters, the thief with a heart of gold, the evil Count, the bumbling police inspector and the innocent blonde girl in danger and somehow managed to make them work in a story about counterfeiters operating out of a castle with a dungeon no less.

The animation technique may look outdated and let's face it the characters are very cartoonish looking at times but Miyazaki turns these liabilities into  assets.  The pace of this film is so fast and the action scenes integrated into the plot are so well done,  a viewer will probably not be bothered by the rather primitive look that pervades the film at times.

Action movie directors could learn a thing or two about making these kinds of movies studying Castle of Cagliostro a few times

100 minutes, written by Haruya Yamazaki and Miyazaki.

1947 - UNCONQUERED, Another DeMille epic impressive and ridiculous.

Here he goes again.  DeMille films another historical epic where he uses American history to warp and shape it to his needs.  In this case it's the Pontiac Rebellion of 1763.  Or it's Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard vs white villain Howard De Silva who is selling what else, guns to the Indians.

All of the interesting DeMille stuff is here the methodical staging of scenes that are reminiscent of tableau's, the odd use of back project during the epic action scenes and most interestingly the manipulation of Paulette Goddard in some sort of sexual torture fetish scene.

As typical with DeMille, the actors are directed to play it very broad.  Since this is a larger than life story Gary Cooper can pull it off.  The underrated Paulette Goddard is the chief female that everyone slobbers over.  Goddard plays a slave so she is subject to all sorts of  the usual DeMille perversions.

Well how to rate this film?  The 40's technicolor is gorgeous, the mishmash of historical figures (oh look it's George Washington) is as wacky as usual.  The plot, overlong and convoluted as usual.  A typical late 40's DeMille film.

146 minutes, written by Charles Bennett, Fredric M. Frank, Jesse Louis Lasky Jr. and Jeanie MacPherson.

1978 - THE LAST WALTZ, the last time I watch this.

The third time on this film for me and it will be the last.  The Band, in their supposedly last appearance on stage performed  a concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.  Robbie Robertson a guitarist with the band got Martin Scorsese involved in filming  this bash.  Scorsese brought along a team of professional cinematographers and filmed in 35 mm instead of the usual grainy 16mm these kind of shows were shot in.  The result was a film with some pretty sharp images that looked unlike anything that had been seen in a concert film before.

Half the fun this time was reading up on the behind the scenes shenanigans that went on during the concert.  Levon Helm apparently was extremely pissed at Robertson and felt the film was mostly a Robbie Robertson ego trip.  Helm felt that Scorsese was entirely focused on Robertson and one thing for sure is that Scorsese seems to have a major man crush on Robertson with all of the closeups of him inserted throughout the film. 

Well how's the film?  I have the same issues that I had with it the first time I saw it.  The Last Waltz is too damn long.  It's fun to see a lot of the guest stars such as Dr. John, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.  But really, Neil Diamond come on.  Also Scorsese's interviews with The Band are kind of stupid and incoherent with their talk of the number of skirts they chased and just some general incoherence that pervades all of their supposedly deep thoughts about music.  Apparently the drugs flowed freely during the making of this film.  

Still, the film is kind of a must see concert film.  The Last Waltz is well made and the musical numbers filmed in a studio are extremely well done.

117 minutes.

2005 - A SOUND OF THUNDER, B movie time.

A mighty disappointing adaptation of the very good and maybe even classic Ray Bradbury short story about time traveling hunters who journey back to the Cretaceous Era to hunt dinosaurs.  The catch is that the hunters cannot interfere in the natural development of evolution as they might cause changes to their present day time period.  Bradbury cleverly works this out and shows the consequences of interfering with history. 

What could have been the basis for a good science fiction adventure story ended up as a cheap B movie looking mess.  Apparently the budget was cut during the production of the film and it sure shows with some very poor special effects.  This is the price of computer generated imagery done on the cheap.

That said, the film stuck in some kind of B movie hell hole is actually kind of watchable.  Ray Bradbury's basic plot is such a strong one even a film as poor as this can't entirely ruin it.

What to say about the cast, really not much.  Independent filmmaker Edward Burns is our sturdy scientist hero trying to fix history and because there has to be a girl some British actress named Catherine McCormack is his little scientist helper person.  Only Ben Kingsley as the head of "Time Safari" the time traveling company is any fun as the oily head of the company who wants to make a buck, time travel history interference be damned.

110 minutes.

1962 - HERO'S ISLAND - a very odd pirate film maybe?

Well the cast is certainly interesting and unusual.  James Mason, Rip Torn, Neville Brand, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton and some actor named Kate Manx who was the wife of the writer/director Leslie Stevens.  The plot of this film has something to do with a family trying to start a new life on an island off of the Carolina coast.  They become involved with some poachers, a pirate and Neville Brand as some kind of bad ass.

Frankly this film is weird and kind of a mess.  Leslie Stevens was the creator of The Outer Limits and the auteur behind the very strange horror film Incubus a film with the dialog spoken entirely in "Esperanto" an odd ball auxiliary language.  So the viewer should know what they are getting into.

I guess this is a pirate movie since James Mason plays a pirate.  The acting is kind of stiff, the film looks like it was filmed on location the action is spotty and not particularly well staged.   Frankly Hero's Island is a real muddle.  What keeps the film going is the interesting cast at the beginning of their careers.

I can remember seeing this film at a Saturday matinee for kids of all places.  I didn't understand it at the time and 40 plus years later the film still doesn't make any sense.

94 minutes.

1994 - THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE, yes another film about the British royals

Yes, it's another film about British royalty which means powdered wigs, women's gowns with lots of major bosom uplift and lots of uniforms and starched pants.  The film is adapted from the play of almost the same name.  The play is actually called The Madness of King George III.  For some reason they dropped the roman numerals in the screen version.

 

 

The film is a character study of England's King George The III the monarch who saw the American colonies gain their independence from England.  Apparently George The III had a few mental problems which is the story line of the play.  The drama comes from seeing if George will get his marbles back before the British Parliament strips him of his powers and gives them to his indolent son.

The cast is one of those only in England can we find this bunch.  Ian Holm, Rupert Everett, Rupert Graves, Amanda Donohoe, Geoffrey Palmer, Helen Mirren (with her clothes on for a change) and Nigel Hawthorne recreating his stage role as the nutty King.

The film is a good character study and very well acted although George the III is so extremely dislikable when he's sane that it's a little hard to work up much sympathy for him when he is trying to recover from his mental illness.  In any case the film is probably best enjoyed by that certain bunch of people known as Anglophiles.  Frankly, you can see this kind of stuff on public television Sunday nights often.

107 minutes, written by the playwright Alan Bennett.

2005 - THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO - an OK middle class drama.

"Based on a true story" says the title card at the beginning of the film and who will ever know how true this is.  In order to support her large family because her alcoholic husband is blowing every paycheck on booze.  Evelyn Ryan enters lots and lots of contests and wins enough stuff to keep the family afloat financially.

Julianne Moore plays Evelyn Ryan and she has the look down and gives a very good performance.  The film has a few clever bits with characters breaking the 4th wall and talking directly to the viewer.  The production is modest but decent and the film has an upbeat ending with a message of sort of 50's female empowerment.

The film underperformed at the box office and it's easy to understand why.  The problem was with the casting of Julianne Moore.  Moore is a fine actress but she is not really what I would call a star.  Nobody lines up to see the latest Julianne Moore film.  She may play to the art house crowd but she is nobody's idea of a commercial star.

This film popped up on Netflix and that's probably the perfect place for it.  The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.  Plays perfectly well while sitting at home in front of the TV.

99 minutes.

2015 - MAX MAX: FURY ROAD, violent rehash of the previous Max Max films.

After a long pause Mad Max is back in a film that has a lot of kinetic energy and lots of cars and people getting smashed and flattened.  The director George Miller uses his old visual references and tricks from his previous films and if the viewer has seen these shots before in Miller's other car chase films, he sure knows how to use them.

Tom Hardy takes over for Mel Gibson whose presence is frankly kind of missed.  Charlize Theron wa very stunning woman is actually the star of the film and it's not a glamour babe part for her.  Miller has even perversely used computer trickery to remove one of her arms and put a prostethic gripper in it's place.  Next to Theron, Hardy is more of a reactor than driver in this film as she basically beats the crap out of him and any other man that gets in her way.

Fury Road has a lot of scenes and situations from the other films.  The chief villain, Immortan Joe is definitely a call back to The Humungous from The Road Warrior.  Immortan Joe's fortress, The Citadel is clearly Bartertown from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.  The car chases in this film are extremely well done, but they do remind me an awful lot of the final chase in The Road Warrior.  In fact the weirdo's in this film could be related to the other weirdo's that populated the first three films.

Probably the most interesting thing about this film is the strong feminist slant the runs throughout the film.  This is one of the few ''balls to the wall" action films where the women call all the shots fighting a testosterone dripping bunch of violent crazies.

120 minutes

1940 - FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE, third in the trilogy.

Watched the 90 minute edited version of this over 3 hour serial and I doubt I could have lasted much past 92 minutes if this was any longer.  It seems that the evil Emperor Ming is spraying earth with a purple mist that causes people to drop dead in the middle of the street.  To the rescue are Flash Gordon, Dale Arden and Professor Zarkov flying off to the planet Mongo in their phallic spaceship. At the planet Mongo the ruler,  Emperor Ming, an oriental looking villain with a very western accent is behind this evil scheme.  I think it goes without saying that this Ming character is one of the most offensively racist characters in 1940's films.

For an action serial primarily aimed at the 1940's Saturday kiddie crowd these Flash Gordon stories have always had a very strange lack of action.  The spaceships fly around in circles held up by wires while the backdrop whizzes by.  The fights are more like two guys duking it out in a poor man's professional wrestling contest.  Finally the acting to put it mildly is poor.  I get that this is a low budget production and that the intended audience of kids probably aren't interested in subtle acting but come on.

I suppose in some way you can argue that Flash Gordon is the very poor relation to the Star Wars films.  Certainly all of the troupes of the genre are present, the evil empire, the evil emperor and the colorful worlds just ripe for the marketing of a line of toys for the kiddies.

Still, even for a serial this is mighty weak storytelling.

87 minutes.

2013 - 47 RONIN, is a weird mix of samurai and oriental fantasy film

Obviously looking to rehash some of Keanu Reeves Matrix moments and make some money at the same time.  Somebody dreamed up the idea of mixing the legend of the 47 Ronin with lots of monsters and mysticism.  As if the original idea of samurai warriors avenging their dead master wasn't dramatic enough this film adds lots of substandard CG monsters and witches to the mix. 

 Casting Reeves was an attempt to add some international box office insurance to what is a national legend in Japan.  However I would argue people don't line up to see Keanu Reeves films (if they line up at all for any film these days).  Studios who spend lots of money on elaborate fantasy films better know what they are doing.  There are any only so many Lord of the Rings epic type stories floating around out there.

The only somewhat redeeming feature of this film is the action stuff and after a while even that gets tiresome.  Obviously Keanau is going to defeat all of the phony looking monsters since a plot point is that Keanu can sense magic or in this case computer magic.

The film is trying for a sense of epic tragedy but it's only a tragedy of wasted time in front of the TV.

118 minutes written by Chris Morgan and Hossein Amini.

1988 - APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH, lazy Agatha Christie mystery make that very lazy

 Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of a mean matriarch who is vacationing with her family in the middle east in this strictly by the numbers murder mystery.  This is a Cannon film production the studio responsible for such classics as Lifeforce and Ninja III:  The Domination.

Hack director Michael Winner put together an interesting cast, Lauren Bacall, Peter Ustinov, Haley Mills, Carrie Fisher and an interesting actor named Jenny Seagrove who wasn't able to really get a career going in films. 

However even a decent cast has to deal with the artistic ambitions of Michael Winner and there isn't a whole lot any of them can do about that.  Winner stages ever scene with his usual direct (coarse) approach to filming a movie. 

The chief liability in this film is the Agatha Christie murder plot.  Once again Christie withholds information from the viewer and spends an unending amount of time focusing on the time of the murder.  Was it a 4:00 pm or 4:30 pm or 4:45 pm etc.  Christie wrote a lot of murder mysteries and they weren't all winners but come to think of it mysteries kind of annoy me anyway.

102 minutes

1964 - ONIBABA, or Demon Hag

This is an exceptional drama with elements of horror from Japanese director Kaneto Shindo.  Two women living in a marsh during the medieval Japanese war period make their living by killing samurai soldiers and robbing them of their weapons and armour.  Into their lives comes a former soldier to upset their existence.

As atmospheric as you could ask for in an eastern Gothic film like this.  The marsh setting with the tall reeds is claustrophobic the photography is suitably creepy especially at night and there is a highly charged erotic atmosphere to the whole film.

This is a unique horror film.  Well worth a look.

103 minutes.

1952 - RETREAT HELL, schizo Korean War film.

This is a rah rah get those commies war film with lots of stock footage of planes dropping bombs.  The characters are right out of the book of soldier war movie cliches. The cowardly soldier who sucks it up, the old hardened vet who has seen it all and the civilian called up from the reserves etc.

However as you watch this film it becomes clear that the director Joseph Lewis is more interested in showing how grim war really is in particular the Korean War fought at times during the freezing winter months.  Hard to sell a lot of "of go get em" propganda when soldiers are freezing to death.

The  cast is a bunch of "B" movie actors with the headliners being Frank Lovejoy, Richard Carlson and Russ Tamblyn.  Tamblyn was usually seen in MGM musicals dancing around or as a dancing street hood in West Side Story.

The film was made with the cooperation of the Marines and was filmed at Camp Pendleton in sunny California with Camp Pendleton standing in for freezing North Korea.  Well that's Hollywood realism for yea.

94 minutes

2011 - A DANGEROUS METHOD - literate treatment about a crazy person and situation

Michael Fassbinder is analyst Carl Jung, Keira Knightley is his crazy patient who he treats with some unusual psychiatric methods which include sleeping with her and spanking her.  Into this mix is Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud.

For all the implied kink in this film, this is a very talky story.  There are lots of discussions about psychoanalysis.  This film is a real blab fest although the actors make the dialog sound pretty interesting

Keira Knighley gives either a brave larger than life performance as the crazy patient or she is so over top it's hard to know where the top exactly is.  Either way it's certainly interesting.

Christopher Hampton adapted the film from his play.  Hampton is known for his classy adaptions of his plays like Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement.  The director is extreme film maker David Cronenberg so it's easy to guess where the emphasis on sadomasochism came from.

99 minutes.