1956 - WAR AND PEACE, King Vidor's film of Tolstoy's novel on a very epic scale.

One of those big 1950's epic films.  Photographed in Italy for the most part and featuring a cast made up of Italian and American actors.  The producer Dino De Laurentiis as they liked to say in the film's advertising "spared no expense."

Apparently six credited screen writers were involved with the director King Vidor also doing rewrites during production.  England's top color cameraman Jack Cardiff was responsible for the photography of the film. For the time supposedly 18,000 Italian troops were hired to re-stage the battle scenes, primarily the famous Battle of Bordino.  Director King Vidor had handled complex productions in the past, The Big Parade, Hallelujah and Duel in the Sun with out losing sight of the personal stories of the characters but this film might have gotten away from him in this instance.

If the film had problems it was in the mixed cast.  Henry Fonda was all wrong as the pivotal character, Pierre Bezukhov, his American Midwestern affectations seem completely out of place for a film set in Russia.  Audrey Hepburn who was cast as Natasha Rostova at least looks the part of a Russian Countess.  However Hepburn insisted at the time that her husband Mel Ferrer play Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and he's kind of hopeless.

How's the film?  Well it's long, the color photography is good.  The sets are on a massive scale.  The battle scenes are well staged as is the burning of Moscow.  Frankly the mixed cast of Italian, British and American actors is kind of jarring at times. There is a lot of dubbing that had to occur to get everyone speaking in the same language, in this case English.  The sound has kind of a hollow reverb quality to it which can get fairly distracting.

 

This version of War and Peace is usually compared to the 1967 Russian version. But I think that this is a little unfair.  The two films were made at different time periods and are really two different interpretations of the same story.

 

Here we go, the film was written by Bridget Boland, Mario Camerini, Ennio De  Concini, Gian Gaspare Napolitano, Ivo Perilli, Mario Soldati, King Vidor and Robert Westerby.  The uncredited writers were, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Sergio Amidei and supposedly Irwin Shaw and King Vidor's wife Florence Vidor.  The film is 208 minutes.

1995 - FRENCH KISS, a very lame romantic comedy

I suppose it's kind of a tribute to Meg Ryan that she was asked to repeat her annoying Sally character from When Harry Meet Sally.  Ryan is so full of weird personality ticks in this movie it's unsurprising that her boyfriend dumps her by phone while he is on a trip to Paris.  After many scenes of Ryan being afraid to fly, she takes a plane to Paris to win her boyfriend back from a French woman he has fallen in love with.

 

 

While on the plane, Ryan meets French guy Kevin Kline who just happens to be a jewel thief and a would be wine maker.  Naturally they will get together, Meg Ryan the spunky goofy American and Kline the smooth talking French master thief who must have chemistry  together per the screenwriter.  After what seems like hours of "cute" adventures,  true love wins out and the two of them get together.

 

The director is Lawrence Kasdan for a while could do not wrong in Hollywood.  He wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi, The Big Chill and The Bodyguard.  His hot streak finally ended with films like Silverado, Wyatt Earp, Mumford, Dreamcatcher and Darling Companion, a film about a dog and his best friend Diane Keaton.  The mighty had indeed fallen.

 

Anyway, this dreary film completely fails as a romantic comedy.  The usually good Kevin Kline can't save this show.  I've seem better romances on the Hallmark Channel and that's not exactly a high bar for this genre.  However French Kiss did make money although the reviews weren't the greatest.

The film was written by Adam Brooks, the running time is 111 unending minutes.

1983 - FIRE AND ICE, an animated fantasy epic.

Probably looking for a commercial hit after the success of Arnold's Conan the Barbarian. The director Ralph Bakshi along with the comic book artist Frank Frazetta dreamed up this story of muscle bound heroes, nearly naked buxom babes, evil magicians, scary monsters and did I mention nearly naked buxom babes.

To save money on animation Bakshi and his crew rotoscoped the main characters. This is a technique which involves tracing over live actors to make them look like comic book people.  The now animated characters are then placed in exotic backgrounds  The result is interesting if a little jarring at times when viewed.  Bakshi had used this technique on several R rated cartoons notably Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic.  He had uneven success in Hollywood as R rated animated cartoons didn't exactly make for a family night at the moves.

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Fire and Ice is loaded with lots of fighting and entertains as an action film although the story is really nothing special.  The good vs evil fantasy stuff had been done before and in better films.  Fire and Ice is at best an okay time killer.  The weird looking animation does give it an interesting look.

The film was written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, a couple of comic book writers.  The running time is 81 minutes.

1982 - KOYAANISQATSI - life out of balance = pretentious

Astutely described by legendary film critic Roger Ebert as a "glorified music video."  Koyaanisqatsi is a silent film with music and at times stunning photography.  The film according to its creator, Godfrey Reggio is about "how we live technology," whatever that gobbly gook means.

 The film starts out with stately images of the American Southwest desert where all is calm and mellow.  As the camera moves past these images the viewer gets a lot of time lapse photography of human beings racing all over a Metropolitian city like a colony of ants on speed.  

 

It all comes to a crashing end with stock footage of a rocket blowing up as the camera follows pieces of it falling back to the earth.   What does it all mean?  In the end should we abandon our fast paced and out of control lives for a more simpler existence in the southwest desert trying not to get bit by scorpions? Or is the film just a bunch of interesting locations tied together by at times stunning photography and editing that achieves a visual impact on the viewer?

One thing is for sure the minimalist film score by composer Phillip Glass is an important contribution to the film and kind of saves the day.

The film was written such that it is by Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Godfrey Reggio and Alton Walpole.  The running time is thankfully under 90 minutes.  A little of this stuff goes a very long way.

1987 - THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS, a good James Bond film

In my opinion and for what it's worth this James Bond film is one of the better ones.  Roger Moore had finally committed the sin of getting to old and it was decided by the production team to go in a new direction with a serious and tougher Bond than the lightweight comedic character that Moore had turned James Bond into.

Timothy Dalton was cast as the new Bond and he certainly went for a more realistic approach.  Dalton may have been a little too much for the audience which had been used to the quip uttering Moore.  The public and more importantly United Artists didn't really seem to embrace him. It was only after the Pierce Brosnan Bond years that the sullen Daniel Craig got all the credit for being the tough guy James Bond for some reason.

The film has excellent action scenes courtesy of the director John Glen who had been with the series since On Her Majesties Secret Service, Glen had been the 2nd unit director and editor on that film and certainly knew his way around staging exciting scenes.

The Living Daylights played down the sexism that had finally become uncomfortable to watch.  The model Maryam d'Abo actually has a fairly chaste relationship with Bond in this film.  In a lot of ways The Living Daylights is a throwback to the classic Sean Connery Bond years.

 

The film was written by Richard Maibaum and Michael Wilson, the running time is 130 minutes.

1988 - MR NORTH, sort of comedy of manners way to refined for it's own good.

Mr. North is the last film that John Huston has a credit on.  Huston worked on the screenplay and was supposed to play one of the characters in the film but his poor health finally caught up with him and Robert Mitchum stepped in as a substitute.  

Mr. North is based on a book by Thornton Wilder who is mostly remembered for his play Our Town.  The film tells the story of a young man named Theophilus North and his interactions with the elite of Newport, Rhode Island in 1926.  Robert Mitchum is a dying millionaire with a bladder problem, Mary Stuart Masterson is a young woman with severe migraine head aches who North cures. Virginia Madsen is an Irish maid in love with an upper class man etc.  North moves from one subplot to another as a little mister fixer upper.

For a film with three talented writers, the dialog is very stiff and unnatural.  The actors aren't able to breathe much life into their characters. Faced with streams of prose the characters all sound like something out of a poor man's version of Masterpiece Theater. 

 

Frankly I don't think anyone with a straight face could say this is one of Thornton Wilder's better story efforts.  The plot what there is of it seems more like the uncollected fantasies of an old man than an actual novel with a beginning, middle and end.

This was kind of a Huston family reunion film. Danny Huston, Angelica Huston and Allegra Huston were all John Huston's children.  Virginia Madsen was Danny Huston's wife.  Lauren Bacall and Robert Mitchum were close friends of John Huston.  But all this buddy buddy actor stuff unfortunately didn't really make Mr. North much of a film.

Written by John Huston, Janet Roach and James Costigan.  The running time is 93 minutes.

1943 - SO PROUDLY WE HAIL, a World War II war film made during World War II

A war film made for the boys and the girls at the home front during World War II.  So Proudly We Hail is based on the actual experiences of some Navy Nurses serving in the Philippines at the start of the war.  The Japanese attack on the US military finally ended in the surrender of the Philippines after General MacArthur was evacuated.

This film while fiction is not above sticking in some love stories for the nurses (as if this situation isn't dramatic enough) to appeal to the female audience.  During the second half of the film the action finally kicks in with some very well done war scenes for the boys which is certainly a break from the lovey dovey stuff you have to endure.

Paramount cast their top female performers, Claudette Colbert as the Lieutenant in charge of the nurses.  Paulette Goddard is the all American gal juggling two Navy captain boyfriends but hooking up with a good old regular marine/former football player.  Finally the smoldering Veronica Lake plays a nurse with a score to settle with the Japanese.

Frankly the romance between Colbert and her fella, George Reeves (TV's first Superman) gets mighty tiresome.  Paulette Goddard has a little better chemistry with the regular marine played by a goofball of an actor named Sonny Tuffs.  As for Veronica Lake, well she has a memorable scene confronting a squadron of Japanese soldiers.

 

This film was a big hit and the idea of telling a war story from the point of view of the nurses was at the very least original.  So Proudly We Hail for all the usual jingoistic wartime stuff, particularity directed towards the Japanese, does give the viewer a little bit of a sense of the attitude of Americans during the war.

The film was written by Allan Scott who wrote a lot of those Astaire/Rogers musicals at RKO.  The running time is 126 minutes.

2025 - FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH - another day another action film from a streaming site

In the golden age of Hollywood this kind of film would have been produced by a movie studio's B-unit.  It would have been made on a tight budget, shot completely on the studio lot and feature second string actors.  But as they say times have changed.

Streaming services now produce variations of the B movie formula they now have money to burn. They can buy expensive behind the camera talent, in this case the director Guy Ritchie (who I am sure didn't come cheap).  They actually film on location and they cast what are or were considered A list stars (usually middle aged performers).  What they don't seem to have figured out is how to put together an interesting story and characters to balance the constant bombardment of action scenes for the ADD television crowd.

 

The Fountain of Youth is what I would call an internet movie.  You can sit with your computer and play solitare while simultaneously having this movie on in the background.  The actors in this case, John Krasinski and Natalie Portmann play a feuding brother and sister in search of the Fountain of Youth. 

You have to wonder who's decision it was to have Krasinski and Portmann as brother and sister it seems to me they would have been a more interesting couple as boyfriend and girlfriend but then again nobody asked me.

Guy Ritchie doesn't seem very interested in this film, with the exception of a couple of decent action scenes he's just walking through the plot to get to the finish line.  This film is clearly influenced by the Indiana Jones series, particularly that search for the Holy Grail one.  I also detect some borrowing from Howard Hawk's Land of the Pharaohs towards the end with all the running around inside an Egyptian tomb.

 

The Fountain of Youth is ultimately just another time killer of a streaming action film which it seems like I've seen a million times already.  

The film was written by James Vanderbilt who clearly watched those Indiana Jones films a lot, the running time is a very overlong 125 minutes.

1959 - THE BLACK PIT OF DR. M, another oddballish Mexican horror film.

Another odd ball of a horror film from Mexico with a plot that can only be described as schizophrenic.  Two doctors make a vow that it one of them dies before the other he will somehow contact the living doctor and tell them what it's like on the other side which of course will turn out to be a bad idea.  

Sounds simple enough plot wise, but this is a Mexican horror film and it just can't stick to a straight narrative, it has to throw in a crazy woman at an insane asylum, some sort of weird body possession, a long lost daughter who does a sexy dance at a nightclub and finally a ghost who shows up from time to time.

 

The result of all this stuff, well it beats me, but the film is kind of fun to watch.  The film has excellent black and white photography and you can hardly go wrong watching people dig up coffins in a creepy cemetery, a scared killer on the loose and enough fake fog flowing all over the sets clearly the result of an over worked fog machine.  

 

As I indicated before The Black Pit of Dr. M like the last Mexican horror film I watched, The Witch's Mirror has moments of genuine horror and creepiness mixed in with many ridiculous situations.

The film was written by Ramón Obón, the running time is 71 minutes.

1999 - THE LIMEY, entertaining revenge thrilller from Soderbergh

The director Steven Soderbergh and the writer Lem Dobbs put together this entertaining crime thriller about a hardened criminal from England who travels to Los Angeles to get to the bottom of his daughter's death.  The plot has been done before but this film takes the basic premise and spins it with some clever story telling and a really great cast.

 

In almost a nod to Hollywood's past history Soderbergh put together an excellent group of performers starting with Terence Stamp (General Zod) is the transplant from England.  Character actor Luis Guzmán who is always fun to see, is the person who helps Stamp. Lesley Ann Warren usually associated with singing and dancing roles plays an acting teacher.  "Blues" himself from The Wild Ones, Peter Fonda is a mysterious record producer mixed up in Stamp's daughter's death. Barry Newman is Fonda's lawyer.  Newman was the star of the car chase cult film Vanishing Point.

 

Soderbergh brought an interesting visual and editing style with flash forwards and flash backs to tell the story it gives the film a nice contemporary feel.  Terence Stamp was a big deal in the new wave British cinema of the 1960's and he gives an excellent performance thirty years later.  In fact the whole cast is working at a high level throughout this film.

The Limey was produced on a modest budget but unfortunately didn't make money. To bad, this is a quality film which is also a very entertaining one.

The running time is 89 minutes.

1965 - THE WAR LORD, attempt at an intimate epic

In the good old medieval days, a Norman Knight is sent to Normandy to rule over a Druid village.  While there he avails himself of a local custom by taking part in the right as Warlord to sleep with a newlywed wife before her honeymoon. Needless to say all hell breaks out as the locals storm the knight's castle to get her back.

This is a Universal studios film all the way.  Charlton Heston plays the knight but the rest of the cast is made up of contract players from their casting department.  Richard Boone is Heston’s second in command playing Richard Boone as usual.  Guy Stockwell was in about every Universal TV movie you could watch around this time.  Probably the biggest casting problem with this film is the female lead played by yet another Universal contract player, model/actress Rosemary Forsyth.  She is so bland and uninteresting it's hard to believe she could be a woman who fills men's hearts with "lust" much less "like" as they say.

The director was Franklin J. Schaffner who is five years from his big critical and commercial hit Patton.   Russell Metty was the cinematographer who had previously worked for Orson Welles on Touch of Evil.  The War Lord was filmed on the back lot which probably gave the studio executives a lot of say on the picture.  All said, it's an interesting if overlong film. 

 

The running time is 123, the writers were John Collier and Millard Kaufman.

1974 - BIG BAD MAMA, drive in trash from Roger Corman

This piece of exploitation junk came from the one and only producer, Roger Corman.  Big Bad Mama carefully follows the typical Corman film formula, a little sex, a little social commentary, and a little violence.

The film is a mashup of a lot of other films particularly Bonnie and Clyde and Corman's own Bloody Mama.  Angie Dickinson is the criminal mother on the run during the Depression with her two jail bait daughters.  They hook up with crooked Tom Skeritt way before MASH and Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner. 

 

Well there's lots of shooting and a whole lot of nudity particularly during an extended striptease for a group of Shriner's or an American Legion men’s group or something. This strip scene just goes on and on.  Corman clearly was going to get his money out of the stripper if it killed her.  The striptease is so long it finally becomes boring.  

After years of playing cover up Angie Dickinson at the age of 43 apparently decided that it was time to do nude scenes in a Roger Corman film for some reason.  Well it can be reported that she looks to be in fine shape.

 

This isn't a movie to be reviewed by any film reviewer much less this amateur reviewer.  The film is what it is, ripoff genre crap made to make a buck.  Roger Corman made a lot of money with these kinds of films throughout his career.

The film was written by William Norton and Frances Doel, the running time is 83 minutes.

2025 - BLACK BAG a spy film or a domestic drama?

From Steven Soderbergh a filmmaker who's always game to film something different comes this story of two married spies one of who is suspected of being a traitor.

Michael Fassbender is the agent tasked with figuring out who the traitor is.  Cate Blanchett is his wife who he is deeply in love with but might be supplying a malware to the Russians that would cause a meltdown at a nuclear power plant.  To get to the truth Fassbinder invites all of the chief suspects for a gourmet dinner and drugs their food with truth serum as he interrogates them in a highly amusing scene.

I always enjoy Soderbergh's films he has a total command of the tools of film making and knows how to use them, he's not a showoff of a director.  However this film would seem like one of his more minor efforts.  It's kind of an interesting film but even with the threat of nuclear meltdown this crisis seems like a minor problem at best. The focus is mostly on the uninteresting marriage of Blanchett and Fassbender.

 

You can't argue with the casting, Blanchett and Fassbender are good.  One time Jame Bond, Pierce Brosnan  amusingly shows up as their spy boss.  The rest of the cast, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris and Regé-Jean Page are all very talented if somewhat unknown British actors.

If you are a fan of Soderbergh's films you should enjoy this, but it's an extremely lightweight thriller/drama.

Written by the talented David Koepp, the running time is 94 minutes.

1932 - THE MUSIC BOX - the classic Laurel and Hardy short film

Laurel and Hardy were big stuff back in the early days of movies.  Their elaborate slapstick comedies aren't really something that you hear much about anymore.  Stan Laurel was the creative genius behind the team who along with producer Hal Roach developed the team's slow boil comedic approach.

The Music Box is a short film with Stan Laurel and his partner Oliver Hardy as two delivery men who are hired to transport a player piano to a home on a very high hill.  The comedic situations arise from these two having to carry the piano up some very steep stairs only to see it repeatedly come tumbling down to the bottom of the stairs and on to the street.  

 

Is it funny?  Well I guess so.  It's clearly based on the legend of Sisyphus who was doomed by the Greek gods to push a rock up a mountain for eternity only to see it constantly tumble down the same mountain.  Laurel and Hardy updated this old Greek legend with a player piano in a wooden crate which continually makes noise as if it is a Greek chorus commenting on their progress or lack or progress.

 

Obviously the humor is dated, this film was released 93 years ago.  However watching this piano constantly rolling down the steep stairs does produce a kind of anxiety in the viewer.  The Music Box is an interesting film almost like it was filmed by a dadaist,

The film was written by H. M. Walker, the running time is 30 minutes