1955 - THIS ISLAND EARTH, Universal's shot at a big time Science Fiction film

Universal spent money on a technicolor science fiction film called This Island Earth, and is it ever in technicolor the sets practically jump out with all the bright glossy colors.  The story involves aliens from the planet Metaluna capturing our nuclear scientists for their own nefarious purposes. In this case creating nuclear energy to help in their war with another planet called Zagon.

Understandably the special effects for 1955 don't seem so special any more and the big monster called a "mutant" lumbers around so slowly that it's hard to believe it could catch or scare anyone.  Still the film is entertaining and doesn't wear out it's welcome running only 86 minutes.  

 

The film is sort of a 1950's science fiction film classic and was written by Franklin Coen and Edward G. O'Callaghan.

 

Interestingly enough William Alland the producer had appeared in Citizen Kane as the reporter Thompson, trying to solve the mystery of "Rosebud."

2008 - BE KIND REWIND, a real quirky film

A real oddball of a film from an oddball of a film director Michel Gondry.  The film is really a time capsule of a different world.  Danny Gover owns a VHS tape rental store in Passaic, New Jersey.  He employs rapper Mos Def and Jack Black as employees.  One night Jack Black gets struck by lighting which causes his body to become magnetized.   He walks into the video store and erases all of the VHS tapes.  

 

Now he and Mos Def have to rerecord the tapes by re staging the erased films with somekind of a film process they call "sweded."  Essentially they reenact  the films Black erased using goofy costumes and sets and rent the films to the store's customers.  Unsurprisingly they become a big hit with Black becoming the star of the sweded films.  Throw in a tribute to jazz pianist "Fats" Waller for some reason and you have the the makings of a very strange film.

 

The director Michel Gondry has certainly not played it safe with his career and this is hardly the kind of film that gets you more offers to direct in Hollywood.  The very strangeness of the film kept me watching.  The recreations of films such as Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy and Rush Hour 2 are funny.

 

The cast seems to be having a good time.  Written by Michel Gondry.  The running time is 98 minutes.

1962 - HATARI, or the world of the Howard Hawk's boys club

When film critics and scholars talk about the auteur theory they frequently point to one film maker, Howard Hawks.

 

Hawks stayed fairly consistent during his working career as a director.  He liked the world of men, especially professional men out doing a dangerous job and not acting like a bunch of crybabies about it when it got tough.  The women in a Hawks film are usually very good looking and just about as tough as the men they are involved with.

Hawks and his writer Leigh Brackett developed these themes in many different pictures, such as Rio Bravo,  El Dorado, Rio Lobo and Red River to name a few.  At his best Hawks was good at working with actors and providing the audience with one entertaining scene after the other.  For a number of years Hawks was a very dependable director of very good commercial films.

 

Hatari is very much a Hawks film in that is has practically no story.  Hawks is basically interested in hanging out with a group of very cool people.  The film's action highlights involve the group catching animals in Africa to ship to zoos around the world.  John Wayne is the leader of the group and at this point is his career was older and didn't care to do love scenes with younger women.  Hawks being Hawks sets up a romance between Wayne and the gorgeous Elsa Martinelli which Hawks enjoys mainly becasuse it plays on Wayne's discomfort in his scenes with her.

Hatari is a fun film which is overlong and probably could have used a few less animal capture scenes as the film runs 157 minutes.  Still if you are in the right mood Hatari is very entertaining.

1992 - A FEW GOOD MEN, slick courtroom drama

Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson are in full movie star mode in Rob Reiner's film version of Aaron Sorkin's slick military courtroom drama.

The film plays to Reiner's strength as a director.  Working with an excellent script, Reiner gets very good performances out of his entire cast and knows when to step back and let Cruise and Nicholson do their movie star overacting thing.

 

A Few Good Men is essentially an updating of an old Perry Mason TV episode dressed up with Sorkin's at time overripe dialog.  Reiner does a good job keeping the dialog from sounding like a big preachy mess which is frequently an issue with Sorkin's writing.

 

The film runs 138 minutes

1952 - THE NARROW MARGIN, excellent film noir

 Coming in at the beginning of the 1950's, this film is an extremely well made noir made on a low budget with a minimum of sets, and a cast of "B" actors which actually give a lot of verisimilitude to the film's plot.

Charles McGraw plays the tough cop transporting a mobster's spouse on a train so she can testify at an important criminal trial.  The wife played by Marie Windsor is one tough cookie who McGraw basically can't stand.  The action in the film comes from McGraw having to keep Windsor alive while a couple of mob hit men try to knock her off.  The enclosed space on the train which is imaginatively photographed and staged, creates a lot of tension.

The director is Richard Fleischer at the start of his career before he moved on to bigger budgets and more prestigious assignments. The screenplay is by Earl Felton who would go on to write Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and a good comedy called The Happy Time.

The running time is a tight 71 minutes.

1963 - SUNDAY IN NEW YORK, dated but very likable sex comedy.

 Jane Fonda said this was the film where she finally learned to enjoy the film making experience and it shows.  Fonda is extremely likeable as the sophisticated virgin holding off the advances of a boyfriend while falling in love with a stranger she meets on the bus in New York City.

The film is rather dated in it's attitudes about relationships, but the cast and the screenplay by Hollywood veteran Norman Krasna know how to find the right touch in what could have been a rather stupid romantic comedy.

 

In addition to Fonda the film has a fun cast.  Manly Rod Taylor, Cliff Robertson as Fonda's brother and Robert Culp as the boyfriend all seem to be having a good time. The film has lots of footage of early 1960's New York City which is also fun to watch.

 

Sunday in New York has lots of amusing and old fashioned talk about the relationships between men and women.  Norman Krasna was an old hand at this kind of film which was soon to go the way of the dinosaur.

The running time is 105 minuutes

1979 - 1941, attempt at a large scale comedy.

 Obviously the plan was to make a large scale comedy like It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.  The film's critical failure probably had more to do with the screenplay then Spielberg's direction which in many scenes was quite inventive.

Spielberg by this point in his career could do no wrong, so two studios ponied up money for this very expensive film.  The large cast included John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Robert Stack, Ned Beatty, Tim Matheson and Toshiro Mifune to name a few.  Belushi and Matheson had been in Animal House so I suspect audiences were looking for that kind of irreverent humor.  But if anything Belushi's tiresome slob shtick had gotten very old by this point in his career. The same holds true with Dan Ackroyd.  

1941 was not the huge moneymaker that Spielberg and the studios intended but I believe it did make it's costs back.  The film is an old school production in many ways, with models and miniatures used in the special effects and action scenes.

 

The film appears to have had a profound change on Spielberg's career.  He entered into a period of good but somewhat safe crowd pleasers like Raiders of the Lost Ark.  1941 is an interesting film probably worth taking a look at but it's biggest problem is that it's just not funny.

The screenplay was by Robert Zemeckis, Robert Gale and John Milius, the running time in the extended version is 146 minutes which plays a little better than the theatrical cut of 118 minutes.

1972 - GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT, De Palma's first Hollywood film

This is the usual story of a Hollywood studio luring a hip, hot filmmaker from New York in this case Brian De Palma, to make a film that would appeal to a younger audience.  Not liking the approach De Palma took,  the studio and the producer Tommy Smothers, proceeded to interfere with De Palma so much that the end result was a poor comedy with a couple of inventive visual touches.

The story has something to do with a businessman who drops out of the corporate culture and decides to be a dancing magician with the help of his teacher played by Orson Welles of all people.

 

Along the way Smother gets involve with Katherine Ross playing a character called "the beautiful girl," and realizes that he has just traded one corporate straight jacket for another type of straight jacket.  There's probably a decent idea or two rolling around in this film but it's all for nothing, the film just doesn't work.

 

Written by Jordan Crittenden the running time is 92 minutes.

1970 - WATERLOO, large scale recreation of the famous battle

This is a large scale film with literally a cast of around 15,000 people, (in this case the Russian Army) in a re staging of Napoleon's defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo a town located in Belgium.  Probably only one person, Sergei Bondarchuk the director of the large scale Russian version of War and Peace and his team could have pulled off the impressive battle scenes in the last half of the film.

The film for all of it's impressive physical production had some huge problems.  Chiefly, the very poor story and screenplay by H.A.L. Craig which does not do a good job of explaining the importance of the battle or the strategies of Napoleon and his counterpart the Duke of Wellington.  The characterization of the two commanders is also not really developed very well and you don't get a sense of who these men were and what their motivations were before and during the battle.

 

The film also has a big problem in the casting of Rod Steiger as Napoleon.  Steiger and actor from New York gave a real over the top performance and certainly doesn't seem to know the meaning of the word subtle with his portrayal of the "Little Corporal."  On the other hand we have Christopher Plummer who doesn't give much of a performance as Wellington.  If Steiger is loud and obnoxious, Plummer is so stiff and uncomfortable it's hard to get a handle on his character.

 

What the film has to recommend it are the spectacular battle scenes and they are something to see.  The money on the production was certainly well spent on the staging of these scenes.  Of course with current film making techniques these battle scenes would all be created digitally.  Still there is something to be said for seeing actual people reenacting this famous battle.

Screenplay and story by H.A.L. Craig, Sergei Bondarchuk, Vittorio Bonicelli, and Mario Soldati.

2013 - JOURNEY TO THE WEST: CONQUERING THE DEMONS, has everything but the kitchen sink thrown in.

 This film by one of Hong Kong's best filmmakers is a large scale epic which combines horror, comedy, drama and fantasy.  In other words this is an extremely ambitious film from Stephen Chow.

The crazed story line has a Buddhist monk in training, Tang Sanzang battling all sorts of monsters(demons), while attempting to reach spiritual enlightenment.  Along the way he meets another demon hunter Duan who competes with him in the monster hunting business and after a while decides she is in love with him.

 

Only someone like Stephen Chow could mix all of these genres and come up with a very entertaining film which in some ways is almost one of it's kind.  The high voltage action scenes blend fairly well with the computer effects.  The comedy may get a little silly at times but it certainly doesn't affect the entertainment value of the film.

 

Stephen Chow, Derek Kwok, Xin Huo, Yun Wang, Fung Chih Chiang, Lu Zheng Yu, Lee Sheung Shing and Y.Y. Kong worked on the story and screenplay, the running time is 110 minutes.

2021 - NO TIME TO DIE, hopefully the final Daniel Craig Bond film

This James Bond film, supposedly the last one with Daniel Craig had a lot of production problems.  The film lost it's original director Danny Boyle who left the project over the usual "creative differences." The replacement director Cary Joji Fukunaga who was brought in faced the task of trying to get a decent screenplay out of the 7 different writers that took a pass at the script.

Daniel Craig hurt his ankle during filming which required surgery.  The film's original composer was replaced with Hans Zimmer who contributed an unmemorable score with the highlights basically reused bits from old John Barry/Bond films.  The film was further hampered by the COVID  pandemic which had it's release date pushed out 3 or 4 times.

This is another James Bond film that runs over two hours and in this case almost topped 3 hours, that's a lot of time for any film much less a James Bond film.  The film tried to tie together plot threads from the previous Craig/Bond films but this just seemed to muddy an already confused mess of a story line which has Bond mad at his current girlfriend for some reason.  Throw in final and gratuitous appearances from Bond characters Blofeld and Felix Leiter and the film ends up with an overstuffed approach to this Bond adventure.

 

As far as the cast goes, frankly Daniel Craig always seemed to play the character as a street thug instead of Ian Fleming' gentleman secret agent.  Attempts to update the Craig series always had a kind of desperation about them.  Q is now gay and Moneypenny is black.  The only character that received any kind of positive comments was Ana de Aramis as the CIA agent Paloma, she's the one person who seems to be having fun because Craig isn't a lot of laughs.

 

The film has a couple of plot twists that don't really work and frankly the action has a kind of been there done that feel to it. 

The mess of a screenplay was credited to Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukinaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge but there were clearly others involved.  The running time is a deadly 163 minutes.

2004 - THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK - the second in a science fiction series

The second in a science fiction series staring Vin Diesel who was probably hoping to set up another franchise similar to his The Fast and Furious series.  The first film Pitch Black was a decent little science fiction action film with Diesel as a tough guy names Richard Riddick who can see in the dark but needs cool sunglass/googles to keep from destroying his eyes with too much light during the day.

 

Pitch Black was a surprise hit and the go ahead was given to make another film with the Riddick character called The Chronicles of Riddick.  Everything about this film was big, the special effects, the action, the sets.  They just forgot one thing, a coherent script. The film's plot jumps between Riddick trapped on some sort of prison planet and some scary bad guys called Necromongers who take over the peace loving planet of New Mecca.  Somehow Vin Diesel playing Riddick jumps back and forth between these two story lines.

The very few compensations the film has to offer are the set design and strange costumes the Necromongers wear.  I guess sticking the actor Thandie Newton in really tight outfits has to compensate for any kind of love interest in this film.  Judi Dench is also in this film playing some kind of spirit who hovers around but doesn't seem to add anything to the plot,  I'm guessing the film was easy money for her.

 

If you take away the science fiction setting, the film is just Vin Diesel playing the same character he plays from film to film.  Nothing special here.

 

Written by David Twohy the running time is 135 minutes (directors cut).

2006 - SOMETHING NEW, an interracial romantic comedy

This is a modest but enjoyable romantic comedy about the love life of a high achieving career driven African American woman.  Urged by her friends to do more with her life than just work, Kenya McQueen accepts a blind date with a handsome landscape architect, Brian Kelly who just happens to be white much to her surprise.

The film charts the course of their romance as they negotiate their different social standings and navigate the challenges of their romance.  For a story set in a fairly worn out genre the film does make some good points about the place of African American women in this country's workplace.  Of course it's going to have a happy ending since that is the nature of the beast in these kind of films.

 

The film has a very attractive couple playing the leads.  Sanaa Lathan is the driven accountant and Simon Baker is the laid back landscaper she becomes involved with.  They manage to work up a decent amount of couple's chemistry between them.  

 

Something New was notable for having three African American women behind the camera, Sanaa Hamri the director, Kriss Turner the writer and producer Stephanie Allen, the running time is 99 minutes.

1986 - PIRATES, Roman Polanski's idea of a fun pirate movie

 After a well regarded literary adaption called Tess.  Roman Polanski wanted his next film to be a fun pirate romp for younger audiences.  Taking inspiration from his favorite Disneyland ride, The Pirates of the Caribbean, Polanski decided on making a swashbuckler.

But Polanski being Polanski this fun film is very strange.  It has scenes of attempted cannibalism, people vomiting, stepping on dog poop and a very odd rat eating scene.  Just the kind of stuff to induce an audience to see it.

The film also has a beautiful damsel in distress who at the end of the film doesn't get rescued and looks to end up marrying the chief villain of the film.

Walter Matthau is the lead playing a character called Captain Red and in spite of the strange casting he's actually pretty good as a pirate.  Polanski had intended to play Captain Red's sidekick a Frenchman called "The Frog,"  but instead the part actually went to a French actor.  

The film has lots of action and it's an impressive production, the film does have some weird funny stuff in it and if you are a fan of this director's sense of humor,  you might laugh out loud at some of the scenes Polanski has staged.

The film was unsurprisingly a big flop.  Roman Polanski and his frequent collaborators Gerard Bach and John Brownjohn wrote the screenplay.  The running time is 112 very weird minutes.