Rob Kelly Writing

Movie Monday: Moneyball

2012-02-06T00:03:00.002-05:00

This week's movie is the Brad Pitt baseball drama Moneyball!

I had wanted to see Moneyball in the theater but never got around to it, so I leaped at the chance once it hit DVD. Batter up!

The film opens with a real-life footage of the Oakland A's losing baseball games in all manner of embarrassing ways: booting infield balls, crashing into one another, and watching other teams' home run balls sail out of the park. This is 2001, and the Oakland A's are a pretty bad team.

Their manager is former player Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt. Beane spends a lot of time driving in circles in a parking lot, frustrated at the situation he finds himself in (at one point he tosses a radio playing the game--which the A's are losing, of course--out the window, only to track it down and stomp it into bits).

After a frustrating meeting with the team's owner--who will not pony up a dime more, even though the A's are losing their three best players to the Yankees, whose operating budget is three times Oakland's--Beane decides things have to be done differently. He starts hatching an idea about drafting less big name players, cheaper players, undervalued players. He is met with nothing but resistance from his scouting and coaching staff, who are decidedly Old School:

While in Cleveland trying to strike a deal, Beane watches the whole thing fall apart, partly at least due to the whispered advice of a young assistant. As he is leaving, he finds that young man, who is more than a little intimidated:

The young man in question is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a bookish, shy low level employee, who nonetheless has bold--even radical--ideas about how baseball teams are managed and how players are assessed and valued. Beane essentially buys him from the Indians, and gives Brand an office in Oakland.

Brand shows Beane the nitty-gritty of statistics and what they reveal in terms of baseball (my gf, who works with statistics for a living, loved this part!). Beane hatches a plan and starts drafting players that are considered by others to be too old, too broken, or generally too hapless to ever get anywhere.

While Beane gets pressure from the media and his own staff, he's also dealing with his daughter, who he dearly loves. There's a painfully awkward scene where Beane goes to pick her up at his ex-wife's house, who has remarried to an excruciatingly even-tempered touchy-feely guy. This scene is all about footwear:

Beane's daughter wonders if her Dad is going to lose his job, after what she's been reading on the internet. Beane's solution? "Don't go on the web. Or watch TV. Or listen to the radio. Or talk to people..."

Spring Training starts, and the team is, in fact, a mess. It's not helped by the fact that the A's coach, Art Howe (played wonderfully by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in a terse, sour performance) thwarts Beane at every turn, refusing to put in the players in the positions Beane had in mind. The A's lose, lose, lose, and everyone thinks Beane's job is hanging by a thread.

There's a great scene where Beane overhears jovial clowning around in the players' locker room after they've lost another game. Beane--who has generally kept himself at arm's length from the players--steps in to teach them a lesson, which involves bat throwing, Gatorade-cooler-tossing, and a lesson about what losing sounds like:

Silence. Awkward silence.

As you might guess, things start to turn around, but not necessarily in the ways you'd expect. Beane's approach is recognized as having real merit, and near the end of the film Beane finds himself at Fenway Park, faced with a life-changing decision:

I found Moneyball to be a truly involving film, or ever level: the story, the pacing, the performances. Brad Pitt is terrific as Beane, and absolutely deserved the Oscar nomination he's received. We see a guy who has a hunch, and has basically put all the chips on the table on that hunch. He's at turns confident, angry, nervous, and often very, very funny. I laughed out loud more times during Moneyball than I have during many straightforward comedies.

Jonah Hill is a great foil to Pitt; both in terms of looks and energy. Pitt's Beane releases his energy in a hundred different ways, while Hill's Brand--who is just as revolutionary in this thinking--remains contained, almost painfully so. Yet this unassuming, schlubby guy is completely reinventing the National Pastime.

I'm a baseball fan and figured I would enjoy this movie, but I am happy to report Moneyball exceeded my expectations. It's a real winner.

Moneyball is available via Amazon in multiple formats. If you're a baseball fan, a statistics fan, or just someone who loves solid movie dramas, I suggest you give it a try:

Movie Monday: Island of Lost Souls

2012-01-30T00:03:00.003-05:00

This week's movie is the 1932 horror/adventure Island of Lost Souls!

I had not seen Island of Lost Souls in years, due to its generally unavailability on DVD or streaming. But now that the film is back (and by Criterion, no less), I took the chance to catch up with what I remembered as a grisly, creepy horror classic.

A shipwreck strands traveler Richard Parker (Richard Arlen), and he finds himself on a freighter delivering supplies to a remote South Seas island. After Parker sees the ship's captain abusing a brutally ugly, almost animal-like crew member, they fight, leaving Parker stranded again.

He ends up in the boat of two men, Montgomery (Arthur Hohl) and Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton). They take Parker to their island.

It's pretty clear from the beginning that Moreau is n-u-t-s, but Parker is slow to realize this, even though Moreau's island crew seems to be staffed by frightening-looking brutes:

He introduces Parker to a woman named Lota (Kathleen Burke, aka The Panther Woman), but not before delivering ominous threats to her out something called "The House of Pain." Lota takes an immediate liking to Parker, and tries to protect him when screams of pain draw Parker into a room where he shouldn't be:

It's here that Parker finally realizes the trouble he's in, and attempts to escape with Lota. They make their way into the jungle, where they are stopped by an army of animal men, led by a being known as The Sayer of The Law (Bela Lugosi):

Parker sees that Moreau rules these pitiful creatures with an iron fist (and a whip), who look up to Moreau as if a god. Back at the house, Moreau calmly explains how he experimented with plants back in society, but he felt his work was stymied, so he kept going, way past what any of us would consider sane, or humane, work: he has created an entire race of human/animal hybrids!

Charles Laughton's performance is simply outstanding. Sure, it's fairly hammy by today's standards, but there's a tone of relaxed geniality to Moreau that I find creepy. I love this little bit of inappropriately-casual body language as Parker confronts Moreau about his experiments:

Lota has fallen hard for Parker, which delights Moreau, who is watching all this. Deciding to keep Parker on the island, the boat that was going to take Parker back home is found mysteriously destroyed the next morning, stranding him. Eventually, Parker begins to reciprocate Lota's feelings, somewhat, but then he realizes that she, too, is one of Moreau's experiments:

Meanwhile, Parker's fiancee Ruth, tracking down Parker, makes her way to the island. When she arrives, Parker decides they have to get off the island immediately. The animal men, already an edgy, restless group ("Are we not men? What is The Law?"), revolt against Moreau's tight-fisted control and grab him. They drag him back to his lab and eviscerate him with his own surgical instruments:

During the melee, Lota is killed by one of the animal men, and eventually the whole place goes up in flames. This gives Parker and Ruth the time to escape with the help of Montgomery. As the boat makes it away across the water, further and further away from the island, the film ends.

Island of Lost Souls was directed by Erle C. Kenton, who also helmed a lot of Universal's "Monster Rallies" of the 1940s, like House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. The staging here is more reminiscent of the time, with long stretches of silence and a leisurely pace, similar to Dracula and Frankenstein. There are a number of spooky shots where characters address or lunge right at the camera, which gives the whole movie a weird, off-putting vibe.

Knowing what we know about Bela Lugosi's decision to turn down the role of Frankenstein's Monster, it's kind of amazing to think that he was willing to take this role, since it's much smaller and even more undignified, in terms of being buried under pounds of unflattering make-up (supposedly Lugosi's main reason for not taking the Frankenstein role).

Speaking of unflattering make-up, the make-ups/masks seen here are pretty basic, but it's that blunt roughness that gives Moreau's creatures an even creepier look; like they're all thrown together, hastily assembled. The final scene of them tearing into Moreau is, while not graphic, quite disturbing--the screams (from Laughton himself?) are the stuff of nightmares; you can just imagine what went on after the camera pulled away.

Considering how much of the horror market Universal had cornered in the 1930s, I have to force myself to remember this isn't from the studio; rather, it came from Paramount. In some ways, they did almost too good a job on Island of Lost Souls; it's so ghoulish and horrible that there was no way they could have kept up this level of intensity, with the Hays Code about to clamp down on the movie industry.

One last thing: I can't be sure, but one of the masks used for the animal men looks, to me, pretty familiar. Check out the guy below at left, and then again sixth from the left at the bottom:

That one guy's mask looks a bit like the ones seen in the classic Twilight Zone episode, "The Eye of the Beholder":

Could a mask from Island of Lost Souls have somehow made its way to a warehouse somewhere, only to be re-used for The Twilight Zone? Paramount sold the rights to a bunch of their films (including this one) to MCA/Universal in the 1950s, so I guess anything's possible!

For the longest time, Island of Lost Souls was not available on DVD, but now its out via Criterion, and I really can't wait to get my non-genetically-altered hands on it!

If you want to pick yourself up a copy and throw a little money this blog's way, just click the, er, handy link below:

Movie Monday: Red Tails

2012-01-23T00:03:00.004-05:00

This week's movie is the just-released WWII drama Red Tails!

I had another movie lined up for this week's Movie Monday installment, but over the weekend I saw the George Lucas-produced Red Tails, a "passion project" if there ever was one--supposedly Lucas had been developing it for over twenty years. Unable to convince any studio that a war film with an all-black cast would be marketable, Lucas financed it himself--as well as doing some second-unit directing and (supposedly) working on the screenplay as well.

Red Tails tells the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, a real-life all-black unit of fighter pilots, the first of its kind. Right from the first scene and the opening credits--which are done in an incredibly straightforward, almost plain (is that Helvetica?) style--the tone is set for an old school WWII adventure. I sat back in my seat, almost giddy with anticipation: I wanted nothing more than to be told a classic, rip-roarin' WWII adventure, but with an added dollop of real life social commentary.

Red Tails is old school all right--so old school at times that the film approaches Dada-esque proportions. The main characters are a handful of the airman, all with easy-to-remember code names: Easy, Junior, Joker, Deacon, and Lightning, who is the hot dog of the group:

We learn from the get-go that the brass has no faith the Red Tails; they keep assigning them boring, almost useless missions, using ancient planes. Col. A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) is fighting an uphill battle getting his superiors to give the Red Tails a real mission, to show what they can do. One of the brass is played by Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston, who in no uncertain terms lets Bullard know that African-Americans are not fit, mentally or emotionally, for important missions.

But Bullard keeps fighting and arguing, and eventually gets the Red Tails assigned to a minor mission, which they perform spectacularly. This gets them assigned another mission, then another, and by the end of the film they are sent to the big show--Berlin, Germany.

To say the characters in Red Tails are paper-thin would be an understatement. In many ways, its as if there have been no war films made in the last forty years--Red Tails feels like it was produced in the rah-rah, fight-the-good-fight era of the 1940s, its so unbelievably square. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays the Red Tails' immediate commander, Major Stance, whose main job is to chomp on his pipe.

The only moments where Red Tails feels "modern" is in the scenes where the pilots encounter brutal, direct racism: at one point, Lightning enters a G.I. bar, only to be called a racial slur and pushed out (which he responds to with a series of punches). In fact, there are so many scenes like this it feels as though the entire U.S. Army is a bunch of racists--a stark contrast to how the veterans of WWII are generally portrayed in modern war films.

There are minor conflicts: the flight commander, known as Easy, drinks too much. Lightning refuses to follow orders; we also follow him into a small Italian town where he falls in love with a white girl (Daniela Rush), which seems to cause not a whiff of strife.

The dialogue in Red Tails is so basic its bewildering. At one point, after Lightning has defied orders (again!) and bombed a Nazi air strip, he flies by, close enough for one of the German pilots (whose cheek has a giant scar) to see him. After Lightning's plane whizzes by, the German yells "Those pilots are African!"

The dogfight scenes are well-staged (to be expected, considering who produced the film), but they rarely contain any tension: the Red Tails seem so brilliant as a fighting squad that they don't seem really at risk; no one seems to ever be scared, and when one of them does die in the line of duty, it makes the rest of the squad sad for a few minutes, and then it's over.

The film's episodic nature also works against it: the Red Tails get a mission, then another, then another. It makes the two-hour film seem so much longer, and the final climactic mission doesn't feel any more important or tense than the ones that preceded it.

As sad as it is to say, I have to think the rumors that Lucas had a hand in the screenplay are true; and the evidence is the final film. As I mentioned above, the dialogue at times is so bizarrely simple and so unlike how people talk that parts of it reminded me of some of the groaners heard in the later Star Wars films.

Entire sequences go by with so little drama invested that its startling--one Red Tail is taken prisoner, sent to a POW camp, escapes, and makes his way back to his unit, all in about five minutes of screen time. The aforementioned Bryan Cranston is completely wasted in a cardboard role; he's a racist, that's it. Some of the actors fare better, but with a screenplay like this its hard to say how good or bad any of them are at their roles. David Oyelowo, as Lightning, comes off best, but that's probably because he gets the most to do. We see him fall in love with his Italian bride, but we don't know why (I mean, she's gorgeous, but surely there had to be more than that...)

All that said, I cannot completely dismiss Red Tails--the film is so earnest, so guileless in its desire to tell the true story of these brave men that I came away liking it, even though as I watched it I knew that it was failing as a film in almost every way (it was hard to judge the acting; since even the finest actors look weak when reciting bad dialogue).

Many reviews of the film have said this story, because it is so important, deserves a more realistic approach, and I can't argue with that (I haven't seen the 1995 HBO film about the same subject, The Tuskegee Airmen, which featured, among others...Cuba Gooding Jr.), but dammit, I still kinda liked Red Tails.

Maybe because I went into Red Tails wanting to like it so bad that I'm simply blinded to how weak the film is. I have to admit, when I saw this promo poster for it (by my former art teacher, the legendary Joe Kubert), I started to get my hopes up:

...sadly, nothing in Red Tails matches the grit and gut-level, you-are-there drama seen in the poster above. I hate to say this, but I have to wonder what kind of film we would have gotten if George Lucas had turned it over to someone else.

His heart was clearly in the right place, and Lucas deserves all the credit in the world for putting his money where his mouth is, getting the film produced (and, in my theater at least, he was right about how marketable Red Tails is--the screening I attended was packed). But the results are sadly reminiscent of what (to me) marred the Star Wars prequels--clunky pacing, leaden dialogue, and nearly transparent characters. The Red Tails--both the real men and the movie versions--deserved better.

Movie Monday: The Time Travelers

2012-01-16T00:03:00.001-05:00

This week's movie is the 1964 sci-fi extravaganza The Time Travelers!

Okay, "extravaganza" might be a bit much, but how can you not be excited over a movie with a poster like that?!? It was the poster (by the great Reynold Brown) that made me want to track this movie down...let's see what it's all about, eh?

After a very Irwin Allen-y credits sequence, we meet our main characters: a bunch of white-coated scientists hard at work at time travel experiments. Once glance at the equipment shows us this is high-tech stuff:

The scientists (which consist of two men and a woman, plus a male technician played by ubiquitous TV character actor Steve Franken) are working on a "time screen", which allows them to see into the future. Suddenly, the whole room seems to be filled with shadows, and soon they see the screen is showing them some bleak future Earth, which is just a desolate landscape.

The mechanic (named Danny), leaps into the screen and is somehow transported out of the room and into the future! Amazed, the scientists follow:

Our heroes wander around a bit, and there seems to be no civilization. But there is life: a horde of mutants who chase after them!

Sadly, director Ib Melchoir--who was multi-talented--simply plants the camera and lets the mutants slowly make their way forward, kinda robbing the scene of any real drama:

The scientists end up in a cave, where they meet another group of mutants--the only survivors of some horrible future war and their robot assistants, who also look vaguely, disturbingly close to human:

Okay--as is clear from these shots, the budget for The Time Travelers was obviously very, very low (it was made by AIP, after all). The scientists' lab looks like a TV set, and all the monsters are clearly just wearing masks. But there's a stark simplicity to these designs that keeps you from getting too bogged down with these details. I find the above make-up kinda creepy, actually.

Anyway, the scientists learn that they have traveled (a-ha!) to the year 2071, and the human race has been reduced to a small band of humans, including their leader, played by the great John Hoyt:

John looks like he's in space jammies here, like this is some weird sci-fi version of Playboy After Dark. But I don't care! Hoyt was in my all-time favorite Twilight Zone, "Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?" and I loved seeing him here, even though the proceedings are quite silly.

Turns out the remaining humans are frantically working on a spaceship that wiull take them to a more hospitable world, so the scientists agree to help. Its here that the movie really kinda bogs down, with lots of talky scenes and silly sit-com music played over lame jokes. At one point, Danny the mechanic looks directly into the screen and talks to the camera.

But there is some fun stuff to look at--the matte paintings are classics of the genre, making the film look more big budget than it really was:

Genre fans will enjoy the scene featuring a bunch of workers building various parts for the rocket, and one of them is played by none other than Forrest J. Ackerman, who even gets a a couple of lines:

There's some romantic sub-plots, all of it right out of other, non-genre films of the time. The women spend some time luxuriating in what was AIP's take on the future of the boudoir, complete with slightly smutty sax music:

But all this lounging around stops when the mutants break in to the cave, and try and kill the humans and their robot assistants before they can launch their rocket. For a film that was very cheap-looking and sit-com-y, the final battle scene is surprisingly bloody and violent:

The above scene, where the mutants rip apart one of the robots, is actually pretty well done. And while there's no blood, there's a brutality to it that reminded me of the better zombie movies where screaming humans get ripped apart before our very eyes. Don't get me wrong--this scene is no classic or anything, but for a movie with such a low budget, it was kind of impressive to see the robot flailing around even as its lower half is ripped to bits.

With the rocket destroyed, the scientists and some of the survivors return to the time lab to try and go back to the past. But due to some damage the lab suffers in the melee, they find themselves stuck in time, watching events go by at an accelerated rate, meaning they will all age nearly instantly. They immediately decide to go into the far, far future--100,000 years in the future!

And this is where the film gets really weird: we see everyone arrive at what looks like a leafy paradise. They all walk through the portal into the new world, and then the film loops back to the beginning, showing us clips of the movie we've just seen, but sped up, faster and faster and faster until the screen grows dark:

...The End!

I'm not sure what the ending means, exactly--it seems to be a happy ending, with our heroes safely in a more hospitable future. But you can't quite be sure.

As I said above, most of The Time Travelers is very silly, and it looks like an Irwin Allen sci-fi show of the time. There's nothing in it as captivating as the poster (nice job, Mr. Brown!), but there are little moments here and there that are unique enough that it made me glad I saw it.

Movie Monday: Wonder Woman

2012-01-09T00:03:00.001-05:00

This week's "movie" is the unaired 2011 TV pilot Wonder Woman!

News of the Wonder Woman TV pilot burned across the internet last year, and I had every intention of hunting the show down and checking it out, but somehow I just forgot about it. After watching Doc Savage last week I was reminded of it again, so here we are!

The show opens with a teenage boy, who just got a college acceptance letter. Its clear he and his family are fairly poor, so this is a cause to celebrate even more than it normally would be. But, seconds later, the boy starts convulsing and bleeding from his eyes and ears. The family starts to scream.

After this strange, kinda gruesome opening (am I watching the right show?), we cut to a guy running down a city street, clearly away from something. He's running faster than any normal person could, and then we see who is chasing him:

That's Adrianne Palicki (Friday Night Lights) as Wonder Woman. She catches up to her prey, and jabs him with a hypo, drawing blood(?). The cops catch up, and take the guy into custody...much to Wonder Woman's displeasure.

Later, at the high-rise offices of Themyscira Industries, a company run by Diana and her business partner Henry Johns (Cary Elwes) and executive assistant Etta Candy (Tracie Thoms). Themyscira makes a mint off of Wonder Woman's image, funneling the money into charitable works and Diana's crime-fighting efforts.

The next morning, Diana as Wonder Woman calls a press conference, and publicly accuses pharmaceutical manufacturer Veronica Cale (Elizabeth Hurley) of creating a killer steroid, responsible for several teenage deaths (like what we saw at the top of the show). This despite the fact that, as far as we've seen, Wonder Woman has no evidence. There's also a moment where someone refers to other supposed victims of Cale's being from "ghettos", a word still in use only to super-wealthy white people who only know of them from that one Elvis song.

Things also aren't perfect within Themyscira: Diana is uncomfortable with how she is portrayed in her own company's merchandise; specifically, the anatomical excesses of the new Wonder Woman doll:

Johns manages to argue her down, but Diana takes a stand.

After a scene where we learn WW has a third identity, a secret one as Diana Prince (who has a regular old apartment, a cat, and watches The Notebook while pining after lost love Steve Trevor), she goes back out as Wonder Woman to interrogate the guy she arrested earlier.

After openly flaunting her physique to get past the guard, Wonder Woman basically tortures the guy for information, breaking his hand, and looking positively gleeful over doing it:

We get some flashbacks to Diana's relationship with Steve Trevor, who is now working in federal law enforcement and has taken over the Cale investigation. Diana learns that Steve is now married, which clearly upsets her.

Later, Wonder Woman makes a full-on assault on Cale's headquarters, which is populated by your standard Hollywood goons. Surprising for a David E. Kelley show, its this action sequence that, to me, shines above the rest of the show--its a well-staged, tough, and exciting set-piece, showing Wonder Woman's powers off to dynamic effect, even working in the bullets-and-bracelets bit:

Wonder Woman confronts Cale, knocking her out. Later, back at Themyscira, Wonder Woman gets a round of applause from all her employees, including the prickly Johns.

But despite this this triumph, we see that Diana is still lonely. Back in her apartment, she logs onto Facebook, and chooses to list her only friend as her cat, Sylvester:

...with this downbeat scene, Wonder Woman ends.

When I first heard this pilot was rejected by the network, meaning A)it wouldn't be turned into a series, and B)wouldn't ever be aired, I was really frustrated and disappointed: I'm always up for a comic book-based superhero series, and I think Wonder Woman in particular deserves more attention in pop culture.

But now that I've seen the show, I can sort of see why NBC dropped it: the show, as evidenced by the pilot, is a mess. While Adrianne Palicki...er, fills out the role well, the script really lets her down: this Wonder Woman is constantly complaining, moping, frowning, and being kinda petulant...when she's not whining about being single (ye Gods, are we back to the 1967 Wonder Woman mini-pilot?).

Maybe this would be more palatable if they had cast someone intriguing as Steve Trevor. But as played by Justin Bruening, who seems straight from the CW, Trevor is a dull hunk who makes me doubt Diana's character that she's so hung up on him.

On top of that, watching Wonder Woman so blithely--happily, even--torture someone was quite troubling. Maybe that would be the kind of mature theme a well-written show could tackle, but nothing else in this show makes you think its capable of really engaging such a serious topic. It comes off more as macho preening, totally at odds with a show featuring Wonder Woman.

Diana having three identities is just confusing, and seems like the kind of thing that would have been jettisoned early into the series. Both Elwes and Hurley are mugging for the back rows; it seems like once they were told this was a comic book-based show, they figured it was okay to play every scene in the most cartoony manner possible. Elwes' character in particular talks down to Diana like she's an errant child, as opposed to a fearsome Amazonian warrior. Sure, this is early in her career, but in some ways we have to see that this is a god walking among us.

(One small but annoying detail: you don't "list" your friends on Facebook by just typing in a bunch of names. If you're going to bother using the brand name of Facebook, at least try and get how it works correctly)

But as I said above, Palicki is good at Wonder Woman, and the action sequence is just great--it was kinetic and fast but never confusing (do you hear that, Mr. Nolan?). Wonder Woman seems genuinely tough, a nice contrast to her general ineffective mopiness throughout the rest of the show. Since this pilot was not finished, you can still see some of stunt harnesses, and there are even a moment or two when a graphic comes up telling us that some FX shots are still to come.

That suggests that Wonder Woman will never surface officially, since someone would have to spend the money to clean it up and finish the effects, and that seems unlikely. Which means Diana still has to wait for a proper, 21st Century live-action worthy of the name Wonder Woman.

Movie Monday: Doc Savage

2012-01-02T00:03:00.001-05:00

This week's movie is the 1975 action adventure Doc Savage!

Doc Savage, of course, is a legendary pulp hero, a contemporary of The Green Hornet and The The Shadow, both of whom received film adaptations in the wake of the massive success of 1989's Batman. But poor ol' Doc Savage's timing was off--but more on that in a moment.

Doc Savage was released in 1975, a production of the legendary George Pal (in what would be his final completed film). Directed by Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days, Logan's Run), the film announces its tone right from the very beginning:

Under a John Philip Sousa score (whose last three letters are spelled out in red, white, and blue), we see Savage (Ron Ely) approach his Fortress of Solitude hidden in the Arctic. Ely takes off his hood, and turns toward the camera. He smiles, and an animated twinkle in his eye appears, complete with matching sound effect. Oy vey.

Luckily, this moment is the most in-your-face piece of "camp" humor. After this, Doc Savage maintains a slightly more serious feel than the 1960s Batman TV show, but not by a lot. Doc learns that his father has died under mysterious circumstances, and heads back to his HQ in New York, where he meets up with "The Fabulous Five", his specialized team of agents (Long Tom, Renny, Ham, Monk, and Johnny, as played by Paul Gleason, William Lucking, Darrell Zwerling, Michael Miller, and Eldon Quick, respectively). Doc is almost assassinated by some sort of loincloth-wearing jungle warrior, who dies in the attempt.

Doc's fathers papers have been destroyed by intruders, so Doc and his team travel to the Republic of Hildalgo, where Savage Sr. was killed. On the way they meet Captain Seas (Paul Wexler), who tries to kill them all on the voyage to Hidalgo, but fails.

Doc learns about a secret cache of gold hidden in a remote valley, and discovers the existence of The Green Death, an airborne plague that killed Doc's father and keeps the locals in line, who believe it is some sort of supernatural curse. Captain Seas kidnaps The Fabulous Five and Mona, a local woman who wants to help Savage. Doc and Seas have one last fight, leading to the latter's capture.

Some of Seas' men try and steal the gold, causing an explosion that melts the gold and covers them all in molten metal. Doc performs brain surgery(!) on Seas to cure him of his criminal ways. Shortly thereafter, we learn that this has worked, and Seas now does charity work. Lobotomies: not all bad!

At the end of the film, Doc Savage gets another message about a grave threat to the world, and takes off for another adventure. Doc Savage will be back in...Doc Savage: The Arch Enemy of Evil!

...okay, not really. Apparently Producer Pal was so sure this film would be a hit that they filmed a large chunk of the sequel simultaneously, only to see this film get ripped apart at the box office and become a massive flop. Plans for the sequel were scrapped, and Doc Savage has not been seen on movie screens again.

Doc Savage, the film, was the last gasp of the dreaded "camp" approach that was pioneered by Batman and engulfed every comic book project that followed it. In just two short years, director Richard Donner and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz would completely reject that approach with Superman, ushering a new era of superhero comic book movies, ones that (for the most part) respected the characters and didn't think of the thing as a big joke.

That said, Doc Savage isn't all that bad--the art direction is pretty nice and there are some fun sequences. Ely is pretty bland as Doc, but he's miles ahead of blocks of wood like Miles O'Keefe (Tarzan) and Reb Brown (the Captain America TV movies). One of the areas the film is surprisingly weak in is the effects--when The Green Death attacks, for instance, its just some animated snakes that look mighty lame:

...considering this came from George Pal, you're expecting something a lot more interesting.

The film, overall, looks fairly cheap, like it was shot in California on standing TV sets (which it mostly was). The actors playing The Fabulous Five acquit themselves well enough (Quick and Lucking both appeared in guests spots on M*A*S*H, so I kinda enjoyed seeing them together here), but they mostly run around like a goofy mob. With Doc supposedly being a genius-level expert at almost everything, its kinda hard to believe he feels the need to hang with these guys.

It's been almost forty years since Doc Savage, so its high time the character got dusted off and tried again. I've read that Sam Raimi has been working on an adaptation, but I haven't heard much other than that. Let's hope The Man of Bronze gets his chance to, er, shine once again!

Movie Monday: The Tales of Hoffmann

2011-12-26T00:03:00.001-05:00

This week's movie is the 1951 British adaptation of the opera The Tales of Hoffmann!

After wallowing in grade-Z movies (which are, I have to admit, my favorites) the last two weeks, I thought it'd be nice to end the year of Movie Mondays with a touch of class. So thanks to a suggestion from my friend Joseph Brian Scott on Facebook, I'm taking a look at The Tales of Hoffman, directed by none other than the classic team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger:

Now, up front I have to admit, I am not a fan of opera or the ballet. Its not that that I haven't been exposed to it; growing up I overheard a lot of opera thanks to my parents, who listened to it fairly regularly. I didn't get it then, and I really don't get it now. But the team of Powell and Pressburger are simply too good to pass up, so I was determined to pressburger on:

The Tales of Hoffmann is based on Jules Offenbach's opera Les contes d'Hoffmann, and is not merely a filmed recording of a live production. No, this film is an all-original recreation of the opera done before movie cameras, and taking advantage of all the benefits that cinema can bring.

Set during the interval of a ballet (starring a dancer named Stella, played by Moira Shearer), The Tales of Hoffman features a young man named Hoffman (Robert Rounseville) in a tavern telling three stories of lost love, each segment featuring the same actors playing different roles.

The film opens with a dance sequence from the ballet, and I have to say I was a startled by the sensuality on display, not to mention the sheer beauty of the dance:

Right off the bat, we see that the visual poetry that was Powell-Pressburger's stock-in-trade is in place here: this film is simply gorgeous to look at, even via the generally muddied, fuzzy copy I had available to me.

Hoffmann begins telling his tales of woe, and instead of trying to analyze what I was watching (I wouldn't begin to presume I could accurately explain what goes on during an opera, any opera), I'm simply going to present some stills from the film, to give you an idea how compelling this film on a purely visual level:

Each story is loosely color "coded"; the first segment is mostly in yellows, the second in reds, the third in blues, with the theme of an artist's struggle between love and dedication to his work prevalent throughout (Mea culpa: I learned most of this though reading about the movie online, not from the film itself. Like I said, I don't "get" opera).

The film ends by pulling out and showing us the conductor instructing his orchestra on the final theme. After completing it, he puts his baton down, and closes his book:

...with a hand coming in and stamping the film "Made in England", The Tales of Hoffmann comes to an end.

I may not have really "gotten" The Tales of Hoffmann, in that I only half understood what was going on at any given moment, but I guess that wasn't completely necessary--its more about how it makes you feel and react to what you're seeing. On that score, The Tales of Hoffmann is a masterpiece--its simply one of the most beautifully constructed movies I've ever seen, flawlessly executed on virtually every level. And that's saying something when you're talking about the work of Powell-Pressburger, who I don't think ever made a bad film.

While this film isn't all that well known nowadays, it certainly had an influence. George Romero--George Romero!--said this about The Tales of Hoffmann for a 2002 Sight & Sound poll: "This is one notch out of alphabetical order, but I decided to give it the status of last position because it's my favourite film of all time; the movie that made me want to make movies."

!

Commander Xmas

2011-12-25T00:03:00.000-05:00

Now it can be told!

This Commander Xmas Sunday strip (click to embiggen) was commissioned from Dan and me by Jay Piscopo, the writer/artist/creator of Commander X, Cap'n Eli, The Sea Ghost, and a plethora of other characters.

Every year Jay puts together a Commander Xmas book featuring different creators' holiday-themed interpretations of his character, and over the summer he asked us to come up with a Commander X "Color Supplement", in the same style we've ween doing every Sunday with Ace Kilroy.

Working with Dan on another set of characters was a fun of change of pace, and we're honored to be part of the 2011 Commander Xmas book, which you can find here. We strongly advise you check it out to see the rest!

Thanks Jay, and Merry Christmas!

Movie Monday: Ants!

2011-12-19T00:03:00.001-05:00

This week's movie is the 1977 horror TV movie Ants!

Also known as It Happened At Lakewood Manor and Panic at Lakewood Manor (and Laverne & Lakewood Manor, for all I know), Ants! was a TV movie that I remember seeing...maybe not when it first aired, but definitely on TV when I was a youngin', and it left quite an impression on me. Years later, when I toiled at Movies Unlimited (R.I.P.), I was ecstatic to see we had it on VHS. I put it on the store's closed circuit TV system more than once.

The plot is pretty basic: a real estate mogul named Tony Fleming (Gerald Gordon) is developing a large chunk of land next door to a placid resort hotel, and all the activity stirs up the local ant population. We can see that these are no ordinary ants, though--they swarm over a construction worker, and when another dives into a pit to help him, they are killed when a steam shovel accidentally covers them in tons of dirt.

We are then introduced to the cast of characters--along with the mogul is his cute assistant Gloria (Suzanne Somers, pictured on the VHS box), head of construction Mike Carr (Robert Foxworth, looking a lot like Jeff Lynne), his right hand man Vince (Bernie Casey), his girlfriend Valerie (Lynda Day George), and Valerie's wealthy mother Ethel (played by one of my favorites, the legendary Myrna Loy--who, frankly, should have known better):

After a quick trip through the manor where we get to meet everyone (including some other characters like a young boy and his mother, and some teens), the ants start making their way into the place. At first of course it seems harmless enough, if kinda icky, like when they pop up through the drain of Lakewood's kitchen:

Mike and Vince find the wounded construction workers, and take them to the hospital where one of them dies. The doctor is at a loss to explain what's wrong with the men, exactly, and tells Carr to investigate the site for clues (I guess there are no police in wherever this is, so investigating mysterious deaths are outsourced to local construction crews).

The young boy gets some ants on him playing around, which sends him into a panic. He runs into the swimming pool, even though he can't swim. Mike fishes him out, and the boy is carted off to the hospital.

The real estate mogul wants to buy Lakewood from Ethel, who owns it, but she's reluctant to sell. Fleming lays it on thick, and both Ethel and Valerie seem to fall for it. But we've already seen Fleming is a total jerk (he makes sleazy plays Gloria, abuses some of Lakewood's help), so of course we're all rooting for him to be covered in ants before long.

Mike and Vince dig around, and Vince is bit by some ants, which temporarily paralyze him! After that, word starts to get out about the strange goings-on--the cook is found dead, meaning the lunch buffet is going to be a little late. Mike tries to convince a local government agent that its ants--"Little damn ants, buddy!"

Unfortunately for Mike, when they go and check out the kitchen, the ants have antscrayed, and are nowhere to be found. The government official thinks a local water pipe has been ruptured, leading to the soil being poisoned. Mike doesn't buy it, so he goes looking for evidence.

A local scientist, investigating the soil, doesn't necessarily think that the ants being the culprits is such a ridiculous idea either, and we get to see some footage of real-life killer ants attacking other bugs. Kinda grisly, really.

Despite all this hubbub, Tony and Gloria spend the night together. Tony gets up and Gloria goes back to sleep, not knowing the ants are in her room!

At this point all hell breaks loose--Lakewood is surrounded by ants. The government stooge refuses to believe it (even though you can just look out the window see them), and runs outside, only to be killed by the ants within moments. Ah, where's the private sector when you need it?

They consult the scientist on what to do, and while they wait for him to arrive, Mike, Tony, and some of the others move everyone upstairs, including the wheelchair-bound Ethel. I love the giant bug prop in the scientist's office:

"Yes, I'm single. Why?"

Finally some cops arrive, led by the chief, played by Brian Dennehy! Using a fire truck, they extend a ladder over the ants, carrying a few of the people out and to safety.

The scientist arrives and explains that the ants have been soaking up all the poisons we damn humans have been putting into the ground for decades, and have now become, truly, killer ants. The poor actor playing the scientist (Bruce French) has to lay a lot of pipe about the ants, in between cutaway shots of Myrna Loy being carried up yet another floor of the hotel.

A rescue chopper comes by to rescue Ethel, but the wind kicked up by the blades send the ants into the air, all over the slack-jawed crowd!

Luckily(?), the threat of mass ant attack is erased when the crowd is hosed down. Sadly, this is endemic of most of the scenes of Ants!: just when something really exciting or even a little gruesome might be happen, the film puts a stop to it and cuts back to more people yakking.

A trench is dug, filled with gas and set on fire, keeping the ants from going any further. But of course they're still swarming Lakewood Manor, which means Mike, Valerie, and Tony are in real trouble.

The scientist tells them that if they stay perfectly still, then even if the ants crawl on them they might not get bit. Left with no other options, Mike grabs hunks of wallpaper to use as breathing tubes so they can try it:

However, Tony is not frosty in the clutch, and starts freaking out when the ants swarm all over him (understandable). He jumps up and runs around the room, comically flailing his arms while Mike and Valerie sit still, covered in ants. It sort of undercuts the drama.

Anyway, Tony runs onto the balcony, and tries to jump into the swimming pool below. Sadly Tony, in his ant-addled state, isn't going to make the Swimming Pool Jumping Semi-Finals:

Mike and Valerie are rescued by the local authorities, who come in wearing special suits and committing mass anticide:

The ants are all killed (?), Ethel's moving to Florida, Tony is dead, all is well! The End.

The end credits feature stills from the movie (a feature long since erased on TV, now that all credits run as plankton-sized type at high-speed, underneath the next show's opening credits), and this one was my favorite:

Gaaah, the ants! THE ANTS!!!

Of course, Ants! is pretty weak as a horror/thriller: since it was made for TV, there just couldn't be too much Good Stuff. The closest we get to anything remotely icky is the sight of (partly) nude Suzanne Somers being covered in ants (a scene of course highlighted on the VHS box), and even that scene is over way too quickly. In between its all talk talk talk, and the sad sight (to me) of the great Myrna Loy--Nora Charles herself!--wasting her time in piffle like this.

Ants! is one of those movies that exists better as a hazy childhood memory. As a kid, you tend to remember the movies and TV you saw as being really, really cool or scary or funny or whatever; then you see as an adult and you're like "Really? That's it?"

A Modest Proposal: The Star Wars Holiday Special

2011-12-13T00:03:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to set this down to paper (metaphorically) for a while, and since Christmas is right around the corner, it only seems fitting to do so now. As the above graphic indicates, this is an essay about the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.

For anyone not familiar with it, a brief history: The Star Wars Holiday Special was an all-new made-for-TV special starring the Star Wars characters and original cast. It featured a live-action segment as well as an animated one, which was the debut of a major new character to the Star Wars mythos, Boba Fett:

Unfortunately, the special was not produced by Lucasfilm or even 20th Century Fox; rather due to some arcane business deal it was farmed out to another production company, made by people who clearly didn't understand at all what made Star Wars so popular and trendsetting.

With appearances by Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur, and Jefferson Starship, The Star Wars Holiday Special feels like it was dumped in the lap of an old school TV variety show producer, someone who might have cut his teeth on The Dean Martin Show. Cheesy sets, shameless mugging, and funny names might be fine for Dean and his Golddiggers; but when mixed with Star Wars it made for an unfunny, excruciating viewing experience. I watched it over again a few years ago and even though the special is about ninety minutes, it feels like it goes on for approximately fifteen hours.

Anyway, the Special was a total bomb, and it was pulled from any sort of official Star Wars history, in perpetuity. Lucas never allowed it to surface again, and its never been mentioned in any of the numerous official histories of the Star Wars, except in some extremely rare instances. Lucas wants to pretend it simply doesn't exist, even once saying "If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it."

Lucas' attitude of course keeps the Special from ever being officially released on DVD, one of the rare instances where a buck is not being made from something with the Star Wars name on it. Obviously Lucas and Co. hate the thing so much that they feel like they can't actually release it, even though the legion of rabid Star Wars fans would eat it up.

But of course, The Star Wars Holiday Special is available, all over the place: do a Google search, and you'll find copies available for sale on VHS, DVD, even Blu-Ray! So Lucas' dream that he could wipe every copy of the Special off the face of the earth remains permanently out of reach, even for someone with resources as vast as his. So it remains available to any Star Wars fan who wants it; albeit in horrible-looking, fuzzy copies.

So my thought was this: why doesn't Lucasfilm just formally acknowledge that fans keep buying it, and release a deluxe edition of the Special, with crystal clear picture and sound, maybe even accompanied with some juicy extras? What Star Wars fan wouldn't want to see a great "Making of" doc explaining just what the hell happened?

But instead of making it a For Profit release, Lucasfilm states that they will donate all proceeds from the sale of The Star Wars Holiday Special: Deluxe Edition towards a cause--any cause Lucasfilm wants to support--cancer research, the environment, fighting animal abuse, whatever. That way Lucas doesn't feel like he's bilking his fans, selling them something he truly believes isn't any good, and in turn is using the Special to do something positive in the world.

This would also have the benefit of undercutting the sales from all the crappy-looking bootlegs out there, something that also must stick in Lucas' craw. After all, if you're a die-hard Star Wars and you want to own a copy of the Special, which would you rather have--a fifth-generation dub with horrible picture and fuzzy sound, or a Lucasfilm produced edition, with the best possible picture and sound and lots of extras, with all profits going towards charity? For Lucas and Star Wars fans, it's win-win-win!

I can appreciate George Lucas' feeling so proprietary about Star Wars--he is truly the master of this particular universe, and the Holiday Special must feel akin to that one relative who shows up every year for Thanksgiving dinner and gets drunk and says horribly embarrassing things. He'd rather just forget its existence.

But since the Bantha is out of the bag, and can never be put back in, why not just own up and do some good? After all, isn't that what Life Day is all about?

Movie Monday: Orgy of the Dead

2011-12-12T00:03:00.002-05:00

This week's movie is the Ed Wood horror/nudie film Orgy of the Dead !

Now, I call this an "Ed Wood Film" (the way one might say "A Martin Scorsese Film"), but I guess that's a misnomer; it was supposedly directed by someone named A.C. Stephen. But since Wood wrote the screenplay (based on his book!), worked on the film as Production Manager, casting agent, and cue-card guy, and it features longtime Wood favorite Criswell, I'm comfortable saying this is a pretty Woodian production, as it goes.

Okay--the film starts with two scantily-clad men (for a change) entering a tomb. Inside the tomb is Criswell--looking more than worse for wear--and he addresses the camera, telling us this is a story of people who live "in the twilight time", and are now monsters. Naturally, that leads us to a credit sequence featuring a nude woman in gold body paint:

After the credits, we see a young couple, Bob and Shirley (William Bates and the ravishing Pat Barrington), who end up in a car crash. Even if Criswell hadn't shown up in the first scene, the extended dialogue sequence (and the fact that the film changes from night to day and then back to night) lets you know this is, unmistakably, an Ed Wood film: the couple talk like no people in human history ever have, barely acknowledging punctuation, inflection, or meaning. Each actor basically just waits for the other to stop talking, then they say stuff. Then vice versa.

Okay, anyway, Criswell provides some narration, as Shirley wakes up post-crash. Criswell wanders around a cemetery, beckoning the undead--but still pretty hot--Black Ghoul (Fawn Silver, dressed a lot like Vampira). Criswell demands a show, and it better be pretty, um, titillating, or the Black Ghoul and the others will face eternal damnation! So there's no pressure.

(There's a great, classic Wood moment where the theme music for this scene ends a second or two before the scene does, leaving the actors staring at each other in silence).

Its at this moment that the "nudie" portion of our program kicks in, and we're treated(?) to a series of topless girls dancing for Criswell's pleasure. First up is an Indian Girl--you can tell she's Indian because she's wearing moccasins!

There's another scene with Bob and Shirley, now both awake. But enough of that junk, bring on the girls!!

And, you know, I have to admit, some of these girls are pretty cute. A lot of the women that found their way into Ed Wood films kinda have that sad, slightly Hepatitis-y look, but here they look more...wholesome is probably not the right word, but less demoralized. I'm guessing Ed found these girls dancing in various Los Angeles strip joints, and offered them a few bucks to do the same thing in a cheesy cemetery set.

Bob and Shirley watch all this ("Am I in heaven?", Bob wonders), and are kidnapped by a wolfman and a mummy (sure, why not?) and tied to stakes in front of Criswell and the Black Ghoul:

There's another dance number, by a Cat Girl, wearing the least erotic outfit seen in the movies since Margaret Dumont:

The Black Ghoul wants to F/Marry/Kill Shirley, and shows her displeasure by opening Shirley's blouse, as ghouls are wont to do:

(Note: this was my favorite scene)

There's more dancing, some mismatched stock footage, and the Wolfman and the Mummy clowning around, which pretty much tips the viewers off that this isn't remotely supposed to be serious...not that there was a lot of debate about that beforehand.

Bob and Shirley argue, there's more dancing (a nudie bride!), there's more talk between Criswell and the Ghoul, even more dancing, ending with The Black Ghoul once again opening Shirley's blouse while threatening her with a knife. Bob tries to intervene, but is knocked out by the wolfman with one slight tap to the head.

Just as The Black Ghoul is about to stab Shirley, the sun comes out, suddenly turning everyone--The Black Ghoul, Criswell, the wolfman, the mummy--into skeletons!

We then find Bob and Shirley, just waking up from the car crash. Shirley asks what happened to the monsters. But of course...it was all a dream!!

Or was it? Its hard to say, because Criswell is still talking:

...The End!

Woo, what to say? Of course, Orgy of the Dead is a complete and utter mess, and anyone expecting anything more, please contact me, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

While Orgy of the Dead, as a film, manages to make previous Wood efforts Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster and The Sinister Urge look like The Apu Trilogy, there's a cheerful goofiness to the proceedings that keeps the sadness at bay. Sure, this film marked a departure for Wood, where he stopped even pretending to be making real movies, which had to be heartbreaking for someone who saw himself as an Orson Welles-type, a real visionary of cinema.

Or...perhaps I'm confusing Johnny Depp's marvelous performance as Ed in Tim Burton's Ed Wood with the real guy: maybe the real-life version just saw making movies as a way to have some fun, make some money, and hang around with unusual people (you don't put people like Criswell and Tor Johnson in your repertory company unless you like spending time with them). And with content restrictions in movies being relaxed by the mid-1960s, Ed simply decided to take advantage of that and put boobies in his movie.

And on that score, Ed did a damn good job.

Movie Monday: The Band Wagon

2011-12-05T00:03:00.001-05:00

This week's movie is the MGM musical The Band Wagon!

I wanted to try something as different from last week's The Last Exorcism as possible, so a MGM Technicolor musical extravaganza starring Fred Astaire seemed to fit the bill!

The film opens with an auction of movie memorabilia belonging to former star Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire), whose popularity is clearly on the decline. We can see that when the first item offered garners no bids, despite the rock-bottom price.

Luckily for Tony, his two good friends Lester and Lily Morton (Oscar Levant and Nannette Fabrey) have written what they believe is the perfect comeback vehicle for him: a classic Broadway musical, filled with thrills, drama, and comedy. Tony heads to New York to see them (on the way, he runs into Ava Gardner--playing herself--whom attracts all the press attention, allowing Tony to get of the train unnoticed).

In New York, the Mortons tell Tony about their show:

They plan to meet with a big-time Broadway director/producer the next day, which lifts Tony's spirits. He breaks into a music number, where his joy is so infectious its like a burst of energy. Heck, at an amusement park, a pyramid of tin cans topple before he even has to throw a ball!

The Mortons and Tony got to a theater where they are to meet the legendary Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan), who knows a thing or two about promotion:

Cordova likes the idea he's pitched, except he decides to inflate it with all kinds of high-falutin' ideas, and thinks the show should be a musical version of Faust. The Mortons and Tony are a little taken aback, but decide to go along with Cordova. Tony meets his would-be co-star, the ballerina Gaby Gerard (Cyd Charisse), and he is intimidated by her youth, talent, and looks. Little does Tony know, but she is equally intimidated by him, because he's a legend.

(We get to see a glimpse of Cordova's Oedipus Rex, and its gorgeous in all its Technicolor glory)

Despite their initial awkward moments, Tony and Gaby start to fall in love. They walk through Central Park (or a Hollywood set version of), and they silently break into a number called "Dancing in the Dark", which is quite lovely:

Tony, despite his misgivings, goes along with Cordova's idea for the show, and they have their first try-out in New Haven. It doesn't go well, and the crowd leaving the theater is like the walking dead, except even quieter:

Tony convinces Cardova to let him take over the production, and turn it back into the kind of show his friends has envisioned. They take the show on the road to test it, financially backed by Tony himself, since the original backers have pulled out.

Even though big Broadway music is not really my cup of tea, I could appreciate the skill and grace with which the songs are performed (and of course Fred Astaire dancing is about as good as it gets). Nevertheless, the movie does feature one of those types of numbers that, with the benefit(?) of hindsight, looks so friggin' goofy that you can sorta see why these movies fell out of favor:

...yep, three grown people dressed as babies. They sing like babies, walk on their knees, the whole thing. Somebody get me an Avid.

Anyway, the show is tweaked and improved, and is ready for Broadway. The main set-piece is called "Girl Hunt", and is nothing less than a pulp detective novel come to life.

This sequence was shown (in part) in the documentary Martin Scorsese: A Personal Journey Through American Movies, and the sheer look of it made me want to see this movie. It is, simply, breathtaking:

Tony and Gaby dance a torrid number together, and it finishes the show. The crowd loves it, proving that show--as Tony and his friends saw it--is going to be a huge hit. After the show, the whole cast gets together to congratulate Tony and tell him they always believed in him.

Gaby lets Tony know how she feels, and everyone breaks into the now-classic "That's Entertainment" to wrap it all up:

Like I mentioned above, I mostly wanted to see The Band Wagon for that one number, and it is a doozy. Its funny to think how 1960s TV would appropriate the pop art look of numbers like this, with their bold colors, crazy angles, and deep shadows (Batman, I'm looking in your direction). In a similar vein, Saturday Night Live would parody the "Dancing in the Dark" number, with Gilda Radner and Steve Martin filling in for Charisse and Astaire (and it was this sketch that was re-run in 1989 when host Steve Martin payed tribute to Radner, who had died earlier that day).

Old school movie musicals are weird going for me--I don't find them particularly funny, and the music, for the most part, just doesn't appeal to me. But I simply love the Technicolor look, and enjoy the subtlety and grace with which the musical numbers are employed. I enjoyed the "Girl Hunt" piece so much I feel like I could have seen a whole movie of just that!

I don't need to tell you that The Band Wagon is a good movie--it starts Fred Astaire, for Pete's sake, was directed by the master of the musical movie Vincent Minnelli, and is personally vouched for by Martin Scorsese himself! But I will say that if you, like me, don't particularly go in for this type of movie, I'd say give it a shot--you'll enjoy it.

Movie Monday: The Last Exorcism

2011-11-28T00:03:00.001-05:00

This week's movie is the supernatural horror film The Last Exorcism!

I'm always up for a good horror movie--and see so few--that when I read some interesting things about this film, another in the "found footage" genre, I decided to give The Last Exorcism a shot:

The film opens sans any sort of credit sequence; rather we're immediately introduced to the faux-documentary's subject, Pastor Cotton Marcus:

Cotton is a family man, a religious man, but also someone who sees himself above most of the people he preaches to. We see clips of his sermons, which are combinations of religious ceremony, magic at, and stand-up routine. At one point he mouths a bunch of nonsense, and watches his parishioners eat it up.

He has performed a number of exorcisms, even specializes in it, because he has come to believe its science that can explain these incidents, and is on a secret crusade to debunk all the supernatural trappings behind these mysterious events.

He shows off the stack of letters he gets every day, from desperate people looking to him for help. He opens one from a farmer named Louis Sweetzer:

Cotton mocks the letter while reading it aloud, and decides to head to the small, backwoods town of Ivanwood to help Sweetzer's daughter Nell, who he claims is possessed.

The first sign of something amiss is when they stop a young man and ask for directions to the Sweetzer farm. The teen is polite, but then turns very serious when he instructs them, in no uncertain terms, to go back to where they came from. When they blow him off and drive on, he quietly walks away and then begins throwing rocks at their car:

Cotton and the camera crew (named Iris and Daniel) drive on, but the latter two are clearly unnerved at this. They are not reassured when they arrive at the Sweetzer farm, only to learn that the young boy is Nell's brother Caleb.

They meet with Nell (Ashley Bell) who, like her brother, is home-schooled. She seems simple and sweet, but also very fragile. She compliments Iris' boots, and almost squeals with delight when Iris gives them to her as a gift.

Using hidden sound equipment and props hidden beforehand, Cotton performs the "exorcism", which stuns Nell's father, believing every second of it. Cotton tells him that Nell is cured, and plans to leave town.

That night, Nell steals the camera, and goes on a rampage--she murders a cat (thankfully, the details of which are mostly obscured), and plans to kill Cotton before the crew wakes up and stop her. Marcus is convinced that Nell has a serious medical problem, and takes her to a nearby hospital, where she is found to be physically fine.

They meet with the family's former pastor, who says that the Sweetzer family left the church a while ago and have not been seen for months, much to their displeasure. Nell slashes her brother in the face, and while his father takes him to the hospital, Cotton and the crew do some investigating. They find some disturbing drawings that seem to represent Cotton and his crew:

The crew is pictured as being violently murdered, which further unnerves Iris and Daniel. They don't demand to pack up and leave, exactly, but whatever fears they have are dismissed by Cotton.

The hospital calls and states that Nell is pregnant. Cotton believes its the work of the father, in an act of incest. The father of course denies this, and insists that Nell is a virgin, and this is the work of the devil. He and Cotton argue when the father asks for another exorcism. It grows almost violent, with the father chasing the crew off his land with a shotgun. He only allows them to come back when they agree to perform another exorcism.

This takes place in the barn, where Nell contorts herself into unnatural positions (done without CGI, a nice touch). Nell starts speaking in another voice, which sounds unearthly, but Cotton catches something: Nell, trying to offend, refers to a "blowing job", which tips Cotton off into thinking this is all coming from Nell's diseased mind: after all, the Devil itself would know what the correct term was, but a home-schooled young girl might not:

Later, Nell tells them of Logan, a local boy who supposedly impregnated her. On their way out of town, Cotton and the crew visit Logan, who vehemently denies he had sex with Nell, having only seen her once, at a get together at their pastor's home--he also quietly admits he is gay, a claim they believe.

While leaving town, they discuss the case, and Cotton decides to turn around and head back to the Sweetzer farm. He realizes that the pastor's claim that he had not seen Nell in a long time is a lie, and that the story just doesn't add up.

Okay--at this point the film reveals its Big Ending, so if you don't want to learn any more about The Last Exorcism, don't read any further! You can safely skip down to the next set of asterisks.

******************************************************

When they get to the house, its dark and deserted.

A few yards away, Cotton and the crew spy what can only be some sort of cult ritual: Nell is on a table, and the pastor is what looks like delivering her baby. He pulls out something that looks like a baby, sort of, which he hurls into a pyre, which only seems to make the fire grow larger, and some sort of plume of smoke rises from it, along with demonic sounds. The cameraman also catches Louis Sweetzer, tied up and blindfolded, against a tree.

Iris and Daniel want to run away, but Cotton is transfixed--as if, in this moment, his faith in God has been restored. He grabs his crucifix, holding it aloft, and heads towards the fire--looking exactly like the drawing Nell did earlier.

Iris and Daniel take off, and Daniel--still filming--manages to capture a cult member grabbing Iris and hacking her to death with an axe. Daniel runs and runs, pausing to catch his breath. He finds himself face to face with Caleb, who swings some sort of blade, clearly decapitating Daniel. The camera falls to the ground, and stops moving. The End.

******************************************************

I enjoyed The Last Exorcism quite a bit--it spends a good amount of time establishing Cotton. And while I can't say I was all that wrapped up with the character, I am a sucker for any horror movie set in some remote backwoods--I find that idea inherently terrifying, so any movie with that setting already has me halfway.

Many people have criticized the ending, saying it violates the entire movie leading up to it, and I guess it does--the whole theme of the film is letting the audience decide whether Nell is actually possessed or if it is all in her head. The ending scene leaves no doubt.

The performances all around quite real and natural. The movie itself violates the "found footage" concept by dropping in background music occasionally and, if we were going to take this the whole way, how are we even seeing this footage, in this somewhat edited form? Wouldn't the film have been confiscated, or is that the subject of the inevitable sequel?

Overall, I thought The Last Exorcism was pretty scary--it generally refrains from cheap jump scares, preferring to put you in the shoes of the crew, who are in way over their heads (no pun intended). And, unlike Cotton Marcus, they know it.

Movie Monday: Captain America

2011-11-21T00:03:00.002-05:00

This week's movie is the blockbuster superhero adventure Captain America: The First Avenger!

Last Summer, I managed to see Thor, X:Men First Class, and Green Lantern in theaters, but never got around to see what was supposedly the best of the bunch, Captain America. So I was really excited when it hit DVD to have the chance to sit down and catch up:

The movie opens up in the present day, with two representatives from SHIELD (one played by Clark Gregg, who has essayed the same role in almost all of these Avengers tie-in films) as they are called to a scene in the arctic of an amazing discovery:

We then flash back to the 1940s, and find brave but hopelessly inadequate Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) as he tries yet again to be accepted into the nation's armed forces, hoping to sent overseas to fight:

Rogers, who has a host of physical ailments, is rejected again. He goes out on a double date with his best friend James "Bucky" Barnes, who is in uniform, having been accepted. Despite being set up with a beautiful woman, Steve is depressed, feeling left behind.

While trying again to get drafted (using yet another alias), he is spotted by a doctor named Erskine (Stanley Tucci), who takes him aside and asks him some questions about why Steve wants to fight. To kill Nazis? No. To serve his country the best way he knows how? Yes.

Erskine sees something in this young man, and signs him up. Shortly thereafter, Steve finds himself part of a unit run by Col. Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones), where he again shows grit and smarts, far beyond that of his fellow soldiers. Against Phillips' suggestion, Erkine picks Rogers to be the guinea pig of their new "Super Solider" experiment.

Before you can say Secret Origin, Steve is transformed from a skinny, asthmatic kid into a beefy, muscled man of action. Case in point: when a Nazi spy tries to blow up Erskine's lan--shooting Erskine in the process--Steve chases after him on foot, through the streets of New York:

Meanwhile, a Nazi known as The Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) is, with his partner Arnim Zola (Tony Jones), developing a super weapon that can annihilate anything that crosses its path. We learn that the Skull is also the result of Erskine's experiments, which he deemed as a failure before moving to the United States. Harnessing the power of what we'll come to know as The Cosmic Cube, the Skull plans to take over the world--and that even includes Hitler's Germany!

Back in America, Steve is put into a gaudy costume and used as a symbol of propaganda. As Captain America, Steve shills for war bonds, entertains the troops, stars in movie serials, and punches out Hitler every single night, live on stage:

America falls in love with the good Captain, and he becomes a national symbol, even getting his own comic book:

(The book seen above is the actual Captain America #1 from 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, a nice touch)

While the U.S. Government loves Cap, Steve feels like a clown, like he's not really contributing anything of substance. After getting jeered by some troops, he sneaks off to rescue Bucky's unit, who has disappeared somewhere behind enemy lines.

He finds Bucky, as well as a bunch of brave fighting men who we recognize as the future Howling Commandos (save Nick Fury, of course):

With his new vibranium shield (developed by genius Howard Stark, father of you know who), Cap and the guys take on the Red Skull's army, known as HYDRA. Its here that Cap and the Red Skull meet for the first time, and Cap is shocked to see that the Skull seems as powerful as he is.

Cap does get a good shot in on the Skull, and immediately he--and we--see something's more than a little off with the guy: his whole face seems to sag, like its going to fall off, and there's a shock of red underneath:

Arnim Zola is captured during a daring mission aboard a moving train, and Bucky is killed. Using info from Zola (during a nice, tense scene between the two Jonses, Tommy Lee and Tony), Cap goes after the Skull at his secret HQ. The Skull tries to escape via his souped-up war plane. but Cap climbs aboard.

During their fight, the Cosmic Cube gets loose of its container, and when the Skull touches the Cube, it seemingly immolates him. Cap, left aboard a damaged plane headed straight for America with WMDs aboard, sees no other option than to purposely aim the plane to crash in the Arctic. Over the radio, he says goodbye to Sharon Carter (Hayley Atwell), the British agent who has been his guide--and sometimes more than that--throughout this whole adventure:

The plane crashes, and later Howard Stark finds the Cosmic Cube, but can find no trace of Steve or the plane. Where did they go?

Cut to: a short time later, and Steve awakens in a small hospital room. There's a radio playing a baseball game from 1941, and when a young woman enters he knows she's lying: he was at that baseball game!

Steve bursts through the door, and learns that the room he was in was merely a set, all fake. He runs onto the streets of New York, and sees a whole new world. He's stopped by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, of course), and is told he's been asleep for almost seventy years. Steve is bewildered, but mostly sad: if he survived the plane crash, he had a date with Sharon:

...The End!

I went into Captain America with pretty high expectations: I had seen a lot of reviews calling it the best superhero movie ever, as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc. Now, I knew neither of those things could really be true, but after being generally disappointed with last summer's superhero movie crop (I liked Thor, thought X-Men: First Class was okay, despised Green Lantern) I really hoped Captain America would be the best of the bunch. And, overall, I would say it is.

Chris Evans does a solid job of evolving from plucky kid to plausible man of action (although I found CGIing his face onto a shrunken version of himself a bit off-putting), and of course he looks the part. The inclusion of the Howling Commandos I thought was great--to me, the best scene in the movie is Cap's rescue and subsequent escape with them, and I wish I could see a whole movie of just them kicking Nazi butt.

The romance with Hayley Atwell as Sharon Carter was kind of eh, it I didn't feel a whole lot of chemistry between Evans and Atwell so when they made a tearful date that they both knew would never be kept, it doesn't have the emotional resonance it would supposed to. That said, I thought ending the film on a melancholy moment--Steve realizing that Sharon is long dead--was gutsy and a welcome change to the usual bom-bom-BOM! crash-bang finale most superheroes have, to set everyone up for the inevitable sequel.

The film looks great (I'm a sucker for 30s and 40s Americana), but the film does make the mistake of making all period detail--the rooms, the cars, etc.--all gleaming and clean, like they were just built, which of course they were.

By far the weakest part of the movie is The Red Skull. Hugo Weaving is decent in the role, but he never gets one line of dialogue that isn't of the "...and I vill rule the vorld!" variety, and he never for once seems like a real person (compare that to, say, Raiders' Paul Freeman as Belloq). Tony Jones does better, in the very Peter Lorre-esque role of Arnim Zola; there's a shot of him running for his life, hunched over, that reminded me a bit of Lorre in M.

I guess my main complaint about the overall approach the film took is, ironically enough, also one the big problems that the ultra-lame 1990 Captain America movie had (among its many): its in such a hurry to put Cap on ice (literally) that he barely gets to become this towering, legendary heroic figure before being yanked off the scene and wakes up in modern day. I guess movie studios just don't believe an all-period action movie is commercial enough (that doesn't bode well for my hopes of there ever being an Ace Kilroy movie), so they just rush him through the WWII stuff so he can wake up in modern times.

But I still liked Captain America quite a bit: the performances are pretty good, the action well staged, and it moves quite well: it gets the central conceit of Steve Rogers pretty well, and manages to not make him look hopelessly square. Post credits, there's an additional scene with Cap and Nick Fury, leading to a preview of The Avengers, out next Summer.

Growing up reading comics in the 70s and 80s, I didn't think I would ever be able to say such a thing!

Movie Monday: Memoirs of an Invisible Man

2011-11-14T00:03:00.001-05:00

This week's movie is the action/comedy Memoirs of an Invisible Man!

For whatever reason, most of John Carpenter's body of work is available on Netflix WI, which is great for me: I'm such a fan of his that I've been programming entire days of nothing but John Carpenter movies.

One of his most underrated films, IMO, is 1992's Memoirs of an Invisible Man, starring Chevy Chase.

The film opens with narration by Chase, playing Nick Halloway who, indeed, is invisible! As we watch him chew gum and twirl a pencil for the benefit of a video camera, he records his story, starting from the beginning:

Halloway is a stock analyst, but seems to not care too much about his job. In a flurry of activities, Halloway takes off for some drinks at a nearby club, where he meets up with his friend George (Michael McKean), who introduces him to a mutual friend, named Alice (Darryl Hannah):

Its love--or at least lust--at first sight for both of them, and after some passionate groping, they make plans to have lunch later in the week. Alice proves herself to be just as strong a character as Nick, which seems to interest him all the more.

The next day, Nick attends a stockholder's meeting at Magnascopic Labs. Bored to tears, we wanders off to a small room to take a nap. While asleep, a mishap occurs in another part of the lab, causing something unexpected: parts of the building becomes invisible:

Nick wakes up, and of course completely freaks out: he's invisible! It takes him a few minutes before he realizes what's happened to him.

A group of government agents, led by the eerily-calm David Jenkins (Sam Neill), descend on the building, and when they spy Nick, they cart him off on a stretcher after he knocks himself out banging into an invisible wall.

Nick wakes up overhearing what Jenkins has planned for him, which is basically a never-ending stream of medical experiments. Not believing Jenkins' smooth talk, Nick escapes onto the streets of San Francisco.

To this point, MOAIM is a decent, if unremarkable, sci-fi thriller comedy. Chase is doing something a tad different here, and while that's fun to watch, its nothing exceptional. But its at this moment that the film could have taken several different turns, and thankfully Carpenter and his screenwriters take the road less traveled:

Instead of just going for cheap gags, Memoirs explores what it would really be like to be invisible: sounds great, right? Well, maybe for a short while, but while on the run Nick discovers how lonely he is: afraid of being caught by Jenkins and his goons (especially after he realizes they know where he lives), he has to wander the streets, always moving. Since no one can see him, he's always at risk of being knocked into, or shoved aside. Plus, he's so, so hungry!

Chevy Chase brings a palpable pathos to the role of Nick, and while there are some gags (he off-handedly foils a purse snatching, much to the bewilderment of the crook and victim), for the most part the film is played straight.

Finally, Nick gets the idea to find the scientist he saw that morning, assuming he might be able to help cure him. He confronts the man at a nearby park, dressed like a bum to avoid being noticed. When the scientist, horrified at what has happened, tells Nick it might take years to undo what has happened, Nick loses his temper and yells: "I want my molecules back!"

This is another scene that could have gone the way movies typically do: instead, the scientist is bewildered at what has happened (the experiments were never about invisibility, this was a random side effect), and actually wants to help Nick. When he spies two of Jenkins' goons aiming a gun at Nick, he jumps into the line of fine, giving Nick a chance to escape.

Nick then decides to try and learn more about Jenkins, and maybe reporting himself to the government. He sneaks into Jenkins' office and sits in a corner, listening to everything. In another great scene, Nick, who has been sitting in the same position all day, stretches his legs. There's a quiet little "snap" as he does, which he fears reveals his presence to Jenkins:

Jenkins, knowing Nick is in the room, tries to bargain with him, while also advising him not to go to the higher-ups: because once he does, he will never be free.

Nick escapes, and hides out at the summer beach home of his friend George. He dreams of living a regular life, while still being invisible. Pretending to be his friend, he orders food deliveries ("My doctors say I need clear food") and contemplates contacting Alice, who wondered what happened to Nick after their first meeting.

Unfortunately, George, his wife, Alice, and a mutual friend arrive at the house to stay the weekend, and can't figure out why the house has been stocked with food. They surmise its Nick's work, and Alice grows concerned. She rebuffs the clumsy advances of the mutual friend, and Nick helps by tossing the guy across the room when he lunges for Alice in her bedroom.

Nick moves into another house down the beach and calls Alice, begging her to come see him (ah, if only). He explains what's happened, and they plan to go into hiding together, Alice showing a grit and devotion that helps Nick fall in love with her.

But all that falls apart when Jenkins and his men kidnap Alice (after overhearing a phone call that tips them off to his location), and demand Nick turn himself in. He agrees in exchange for Alice going free, calling from a nearby phone booth. This is the film's only moment where it uses classic Invisible Man iconography via Nick's disguise:

Jenkins and his men surround Nick, shoving Alice into a nearby cab. Nick tries to escape, but is stopped in his tracks. Jenkins punches Nick in the stomach, but then senses something is wrong: he grabs the bandages, and underneath them is...George! Where's Nick Halloway?

Turns out Nick pulled a fast one on Jenkins, and, in disguise, is driving the cab that picked up Alice. But Jenkins catches up with him, chasing Nick into a construction site. Nick, finally getting a hang of his invisibility, tricks Jenkins once again, leading to his death. Everyone assumes Nick is dead as well, including Alice, but she is startled when she hears Nick's voice in her ear. She--and he--quietly walks away from the whole sordid scene.

Over the end credits, we that Nick and Alice have built a life together, albeit an unusual one:

...the film ends with Nick and Alice's romantic bliss, but there's some melancholy there, too: after all, Nick is still invisible, and, presumably, will always be. The End.

Visually, Memoirs of an Invisible Man is nothing special: shot in a fairly bland way, both in terms of composition and colors, the film still stands out to me because, at virtually every turn, it takes the road less traveled. After all, if all you know about this movie is that Chevy Chase plays an invisible man, you can guess what you're gonna get: lots of prat falls, dumb jokes, Chevy being silly.

And while there is some of that (Chevy dresses up in disguise a lot, reminding one of Fletch), it always winds its way back to taking this story seriously. Since this film was produced by Chase's production company, we can only assume this was his intention, and I thought he pulled it off.

Sadly, MOAIM was not a box office hit, and Chase went right back to the silly crap he's been mostly known for--he followed up this movie with Cops and Robbersons, Man of the House, and Vegas Vacation. Ugh. I guess, on some level, that makes me like this movie more, because its so unappreciated. Again, its no classic, but its a film that tries to break the mold, and succeeds a lot of the time. Originally this film was going to be directed by Ivan Reitman, who wanted it to be more traditionally silly; I guess we have Chase and Carpenter to thank for the making the more serious, and more interesting, film that they did.

Before I sign off, I just want to mention one more thing about how the deck was stacked against this movie. Check out the poster:

I guess Warner Bros. figured "Chevy Chase" in giant letters was not enough to let people know he was in the movie, they had to airbrush his face onto the invisible form, which really makes no sense! How eye-catching would have this poster been if they had just let the invisible man be invisible?!? To me, this ham-handed attempt to make the poster more traditional is a perfect example of the kind of thing this movie, in its own small way, was working against. No wonder it failed.

Movie Monday: Jackie Brown

2011-11-07T00:03:00.002-05:00

This week's movie is Quentin's Tarantino's Jackie Brown!

Part of the point of these Movie Mondays has been to talk about an obscure movie and give it a look, or talk about something brand new that people maybe haven't had a chance to see. Of course, Jackie Brown doesn't fit either category, since its a film by one of the most famous movie directors of the last couple of decades, stars big name actors, and has been around long enough that anyone who wants to see it has seen it. So why cover it?

Well, Jackie Brown came out on Blu-Ray a few weeks ago (paired up with Pulp Fiction, I believe) and at first I rolled my eyes at some critics insistence that it is Tarantino's best film, even better than PF. I had seen Jackie Brown when it came out in 1997, and very much enjoyed it, but saying it was better than Pulp Fiction--one of the most influential movies of the last quarter century--seemed like revisionist history, the kind of thing critics say when they want to sound just a little hipper than everyone else (I feel the same way when its said that one of Orson Welles' later films is better than Citizen Kane. As good/great as many of Welles' films were, they're not better than Kane. Citizen Kane is Welles', and anyone else's for that matter, best film. Period.).

But while I was skeptical of all this effusive praise, I thought why not give Jackie Brown another spin, especially since its available on Netflix WI?

Jackie Brown opens like film right out of the 1970s, with a long tracking shot of Jackie (Pam Grier of course, still looking gorgeous) as she makes her way down an airport walkway, as Bobby Womack's "Across 110th Street" plays on the soundtrack.

Jackie is working for a rinky-dink airline, after a flight back from Mexico she's stopped by two DEA agents, Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen) and Ray Nicolette (the awesome, why-isn't-he-in-more-movies Michael Keaton). They check her bags, and find a ton of cash, as well as a small bag of drugs, the latter Jackie seems surprised over. They lean on her, trying to get her to give up the name of the person she's working for.

That person is Ordell Robbie (Samuel Jackson), who is involved in several illegal enterprises, along with his dim-witted pal Louis (Robert DeNiro):

We're introduced to them both via a long scene (many scenes in Jackie Brown are long) and Ordell is charming, funny, but also very scary. Jackson excels at conveying a river of violence running just beneath a gregarious exterior, and we see some glimmers of that in how he treats his sort-of girlfriend, the perpetually-stoned Mel (Bridget Fonda, looking ridiculously sexy):

Before the problem with Jackie, Ordell has to bail out another one of his messengers, a kid named Beaumont. He turns to a local bailbondsman named Max Cherry, played by Robert Forster (another actor whose career Tarantino was resuscitating with this film). Max takes Ordell's money, but in their first scene together (in Max's office), you can tell that Max doesn't really buy most of what Ordell is saying, and keeps him at somewhat arm's length. He also looks hesitant over how Louis just sort of wanders around the office, doing nothing in particular.

Beaumont gets bailed out, and gets a visit from Ordell. Since Beaumont is played by the motor-mouthed Chris Tucker, the scene between him and Jackson is a flurry of curses and the N-word being tossed back and forth. That river of violence of Ordell's comes to the surface when, after talking Beaumont into taking a short drive with him, he shoots Beaumont to death, execution-style.

After Jackie gets busted, Ordell asks Max to flip the money used to bail out Beaumont to Jackie. Max goes to pick up Jackie at the local lock-up, and in a bravura scene, we see Max is instantly smitten:

Max watches Jackie come towards him, and Tarantino stretches out the scene to improbable lengths (Jackie seems to take ten minutes to walk a few feet). As he cuts back to Max, he pulls in closer and closer, and we can read Max's lined face and see something stirring that maybe hasn't stirred in a long, long time.

Max is pretty clear he likes Jackie, but in a very plainspoken, charming way. Jackie likes Max too, and they get a drink together and talk. Max doesn't trust Jackie exactly, but he's clearly smitten (there's a hilarious scene where hear an answering machine message Max leaves for Jackie, where he rattles off so many different numbers he can be reached at it becomes either desperately sad or desperately funny. I've been there, pal). He's simultaneously protective and wary of her.

There's a lot of plot in this movie--a lot--but its not really about that. Tarantino is more interested watching how these characters interact, how they respond to events. Jackie sees a way out of the dead-end she's been on, Max falls hard for Jackie, the DEA tries to nab Ordell, and Ordell does whatever he has to to get his money from Mexico into his hands.

All the performances are outstanding; none mores so than Robert Forster, whose Max Cherry is so compelling I would have loved to see spin-off into his own Rockford Files-esque spin-off. In the middle of all this sex, drugs, and murder, Cherry is so soft-spoken that first he seems like a chump; but we get to see his inner resolve and you can't help but root for him.

Fonda is great as a girl so sure of her sexiness that she takes risks, big risks, and her final scene ends with an act of violence so arbitrary that its shocking. DeNiro manages to come across as a dim bulb, Keaton is electric as the hyper DEA agent (a role he reprised in Out of Sight), and Jackson is tremendous as a very charming guy, but one you know you probably don't want anything to do with. Tying it all together of course is Pam Grier as Jackie, who, along with Forster, gets the role of a lifetime here.

The movie's pace is leisurely; there's a dry run of the sting Jackie and the DEA run against Ordell, and then the sting itself, yet both sequences are taut and involving, and despite the two and a half hour running time I was never, ever bored.

I won't get into the details of the rest of the plot, but I don't think I'm giving anything way to mention that the film ends with a long close-up of Grier. You can almost feel the love and affection Tarantino has for her just as the credits roll:

As I said, at the time of its release I remember liking Jackie Brown, and thought it was a fine successor to the triumph of Pulp Fiction, but I concluded it didn't match its predecessor.

Well, now I'm not so sure--unlike his other films (before and aft), Tarantino seemed to want to downplay the genre pastiches and make a more character-centric piece with Jackie Brown, and now having seen the film again I see he succeeded, wildly. Roger Ebert said in his review that he could have watched these characters go on for hours more, and I agree: right after watching Jackie Brown all the way through, I put it back on and watched it all over again.

So while I may have rolled my eyes at it a few weeks ago, I think now I agree: Jackie Brown is Quentin Tarantino's best film.

Welcome to the World of Ace Kilroy!

2011-10-31T00:03:00.001-04:00

In lieu of a Movie Monday segment this week, I'm highlighting a long-gestating project that goes live today: Ace Kilroy!

Ace Kilroy is the creation of artist Dan O'Connor and me; its a brand-new online daily comic strip launching today over on AceKilroy.com!

Ace Kilroy is a project Dan and I have been working on for over a year. He and I attended the Joe Kubert School together, and from the beginning I was impressed by the quality of his work: Dan had a crisp, simple style, dynamic but not flashy--perfect for comic books, and I resented the hell out of him for it!

Anyway, over the intervening decades(!), Dan and I lost touch, and then we ran into one another again virtually on Facebook and then in something called Real Life at the 2009 New York Comic Con. Dan was telling me some horror stories (stories I was all too familiar with in my own life as an artist) about doing comic book work, and I was simultaneously angry and bewildered that a guy this talented has had to deal with some at times shady comic book publishers. Little did I realize, but Ace Kilroy was born on the ride home from the con.

Within a couple of months, I had formulated a basic concept of the strip, what it would be, what kind of tone I was aiming for, and I knew Dan would be the perfect artist to bring it to life: he and I are both aficionados of 30s and 40s culture (Americana specifically), and since Ace Kilroy starts off in 1937 and would steeped in that world, I knew Dan could really sink his artistic teeth into it.

Luckily, he agreed, and within a few weeks we were already working on the strips, having a blast, but with no clear date set when it would officially launch. Since the strip has a prevalent horror theme, I thought October 31--Halloween--would be perfect.

The short of Ace Kilroy is: In 1937, the United States has learned two disturbing facts. One, that supernatural monsters--i.e., vampires, werewolves--are real. Two, the Third Reich, in preparing to start World War II, are trying to take control of these monsters and turn them to the side of the Nazis, making them unstoppable.

President Franklin Roosevelt commissions soldier of fortune, WW I veteran and all-around adventurer Ace Kilroy to head to Transylvania, where there are rumors of some sort of real-life Dracula, and stop whatever nefarious plot is being hatched!

Ace Kilroy will feature adventure, horror, thrills, comedy, political intrigue, and even romance, in (hopefully) the most fun and engaging way possible!

I normally never use my other blogs to pimp my outside projects, but Ace Kilroy is special: I am enormously proud of what we've created so far, and we're going to give it ol' college try in terms of making it a financially viable, ongoing creative project: its nothing less than a daily comic strip, just like the classic adventure strips of old, except Ace Kilroy will appear on the web, not on the back page of a newspaper sandwiched between Ziggy and Mark Trail.

Ace Kilroy will run a black and white strip six days a week, with an extra-sized Color Supplement on Sundays, again like the classic strips of old. Dan and I want to bring back that sense of pure adventuresome fun with the strip, and transport the reader back to a time when the daily adventures of Steve Canyon, Secret Agent X-9, or Dick Tracy were can't-miss, waiting-with-bated-breath-for-the-next-installment affairs for comics fans.

But since the daily newspapers of old are, essentially, gone (the comics pages especially), we're doing it in a very modern way: on the web, with all past strips available with the click of a mouse, with Ace appearing across a wide variety of social media platforms, which will occasionally feature bonus or special side material. Dan and I essentially want to hire ourselves as the artist and writer (respectively) of an daily comic strip...which of course means you!

Not to sound like I'm taking my other blogs hostage or anything, but if we can get enough people to support Ace Kilroy financially, then I can spend more time at home, leaving me the time and ability to subsidize my other, non-profit-generating efforts, like this one. And isn't that what we all want?

So if you're interested in taking a look at Ace Kilroy, and maybe even supporting it, you can do so at the following places, starting off with the official site, where you can learn more about the characters, the creators, and see the first strip:

...and finally, if you like what you see enough to financially support Ace Kilroy, you can visit the Ace Kilroy Fundraising Page on Kickstarter, where you can learn more about the strip, find out what kind of donations you can make, and even watch a short video all about Ace Kilroy. We hope to raise enough money to give Ace (and us!) and a good running start!

Movie Monday: The Thing/The Ward

2011-10-24T00:03:00.003-04:00

I happened to see two movies related to one of my favorite directors, John Carpenter, in the same day, so I thought I'd do another Movie Monday double feature and talk about the new remake of The Thing, then check in what Carpenter himself came up with in his newest, The Ward.

First is The Thing, and I have to say I went into this movie with very low expectations. I'm such a fan of Carpenter's 1982 remake (although that film is not really a remake of the 1951 original), that I figured this was maybe little more than one of those modern-day cash-ins, where they take the name of a beloved horror film from the 70s or 80s and then make some lame-ass PG-13 version of it. Apparently I was misinformed, because for a long time I thought this new movie was a remake, when in fact its a prequel. Even still, I didn't expect much when the lights went down.

But it only took a couple of minutes before I really got hooked into the story--a bunch of Norwegian scientists and researchers find a giant spaceship hidden under the ice in Antarctica, and call in a specialist, Kate Lloyd (the easy-on-the-eyes Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to investigate the life-form they also found, frozen in a block of ice a few miles away.

Admittedly, most of the story of The Thing is the same as the 1982 film, but I think my love of that film simultaneously allowed me to just give myself over to the remake; I just love the whole idea of a bunch of people cut off from the rest of the world, as an alien starts taking them over, one by one.

Of course, I completely loved the Star Wars movies too, and that didn't make The Phantom Menace a good film, and maybe in a year or so I'll sit down and watch The Thing again and have a different opinion. But all I know is I found this prequel compelling, filled with tension, solid acting, and (mostly) decent f/x.

The film is, of course, not even close to being perfect, or even anywhere near as good as Carpenter's: most of the characters are cyphers, so when they get assimilated into the alien it doesn't have much of an impact (other than "Ugh, gross!" of course). And while I did find the film suitably tense, that feeling doesn't build: basically once The Thing gets out of the ice, the film is at "11" and stays there, which is a little wearying.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead does a good job as the main character, but since we don't get a single scene of her alone, it was hard (for me at least) to get as invested as I was with Kurt Russell's MacReady. And the film does come dangerously close to being one of those tedious exercises where way too much is explained during a sequence on the aliens' ship.

But overall I enjoyed The Thing quite a bit--it has a nice vague ending, and I loved how it tied itself into the 1982 film during the credits, making it a nice companion piece. Is this film really necessary? Probably not, but I've seen many, many worse horror movies than this. Case in point:

I was so excited when I heard that John Carpenter, having not made a film in a decade, was back with a new movie! Then I read some of the reviews, which were middling at best, but generally negative. Most critics said it was a very generic movie, not the kind of thing you'd expect from John Carpenter, whose films are so distinctive. But I was determined to judge for myself.

The Ward opens with a young woman, looking bruised and battered, burning down a house. After setting it aflame, she staggers out, falls to her knees, and watches it burn. In the distance, a police car approaches:

But instead of comforting the girl, the cops violently grab her, and drag her off, kicking and screaming, into their squad car:

I felt like we were in safe hands here, cinematically, since the cops are being unnecessarily rough and, as far as we know, completely unfair--they didn't know she set the fire, so why are they roughing her up? The world we know being turned upside down is a Carpenter specialty, so this seemed like a great start.

Unfortunately, once the young woman (named Kristen, played by Amber Heard) is taken to a nearby mental institution, The Ward settles into a very predictable, if not tedious, rut. We meet a quiet, studios psychiatrist (Dr. Stringer, played by Jared Harris), and a group of other patients that, to me, didn't for a moment feel like real people: there's the Really Crazy Girl, the Mousy Girl, and the Obviously-Hot-But-Wears-Glasses-So-That-Means-She's-Ugly Girl.

Pretty quickly we see the place is stalked by some sort of ghost, who attacks the girls at different points:

Kristen keeps insisting this ghost is real, and Dr. Stringer keeps insisting she's coo-coo for cocoa-puffs. None of this is particularly scary, and at one point when it seemed like the film was wrapping up, I noticed I had only been watching it for 45 minutes, which means we were only halfway through. I couldn't believe it! I can't think of a single John Carpenter movie--even when the film itself wasn't very good--that I considered boring. But the whole middle section of The Ward could barely hold my attention.

Near the end, we learn the truth about Kristen (which I won't reveal here) and why she ended up torching the house that we saw at the beginning.

The Ward has a "shock" ending, which really wasn't that much of a shock at all; nevertheless, I appreciated the downer, "everything is f*cked" feel to it, which seemed very John Carpenter to me.

So, like most people, I was very disappointed with The Ward. Its not a horrible movie by any means; its just dull, and a dull movie is the last thing you'd expect from John Carpenter.

If you're looking for some scares, I'd say go see The Thing, and let's hope that The Ward is merely John Carpenter's first step back into filmmaking. The man has more great films in him, I just know it!

Movie Monday: She

2011-10-17T00:03:00.002-04:00

This week's movie is...yep, one more time with She!

After watching the 1935 version, and then the 1982 version, it only seemed fitting to try what's arguably the most famous movie adaptation of H. Rider Haggard's novel, the 1965 version made by none other than the legendary Hammer!

She opens with a title card that says "Palestine, 1918", but before you worry this is going to be some dry, historical film, the film makes its intentions known from the first shot:

...woo, belly-dancers!

As a bunch of comely girls dance around, we are introduced to our main characters: Leo Vincey (John Richardson), manservant Job (Bernard Cribbins), and Professor Holly, played by the always-delightful Peter Cushing:

Amid talk of an adventure expedition, Vincey spies a gorgeous young girl in the bar named Ustane (Rosenda Monteros) and within a few minutes he's already gotten pretty chummy with her:

Later when they are alone, Vincey and Ustane start mashing, but its interrupted when someone conks him on the head--turns out the whole thing was a trap! And the guy doing the conking is none other than Hammer's go-to bad guy, Christopher Lee as She's priest and right-hand man Bilali:

When Vincey wakes up, he is entranced to meet "She" (Ursula Andress), who promises Vincey riches and, even more enticingly, love, courtesy She herself:

Our three heroes set out into the desert, and the film at this point becomes veddy veddy British--despite all the dangers and death they encounter, there's a whole "stiff upper lip" Gunga Din-feel to it, interspersed with Vincey's visions of She, drawing him deeper and deeper into the desert.

Eventually they make their way to the hidden city of Kuma (with Ustane having genuinely fallen for Vincey), where She talks of the flame of eternal life. She is a despotic ruler, tossing slaves into a pit of flame when they disobey her, much to the disgust of Holly and the rest.

Andress looks great as She, but the closest we get to anything really titillating is when She and Vincey have parallel dreams, and the former writhes around in her bed. Unfortunately her sheets seemed permanently affixed:

Unfortunately for She and Vincey, Bilali wants the secret of immortality for himself, as reward for his faithful service. He doesn't want this interloper stealing his thunder, but when he tries to jump into the flame and become immortal, She stabs him with a spear:

She and Leo enter the flame, with the latter becoming immortal! Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have the same effect on She (hasn't she seen the other movies?), and the centuries of life catch up with her all at once:

She dies, and the flame flickers out, leaving Leo immortal. He promises that even though he doesn't know when the blue flame will be seen again, he will be there, so he can undo his immortality. The End!

This version of She has a great credit, right at the end:

...it's not Maria Quasimodo, but "Oo-Bla-Da Dancers" is still pretty good!

Thankfully, this version of She is much more akin to the 1935 one, in that its a fairly-rousing, well-produced adventure film. There's lots of location shooting here, indicating Hammer had some money to spend, and the sets (especially those in Kuma) are quite striking.

Ursula Andress looks great, but of course that's why she's in the movie. She doesn't have much to do beyond that (and occasionally throwing some poor bastard into a flaming pit), but having the always-dependable Cushing and Lee in the movie helps fill the space.

Having the movie end with Leo being immortal--and sort of promising he's going to go on more adventures--is a nice hook for a sequel, and Hammer apparently intended to make one, producing The Vengeance of She in 1968. But apparently at the last minute all references to She were removed, making that film more of a remake than a sequel.

There are even more film versions of She--Wiki lists productions from 1908, 1911, 1916, 1917, 1919, and 1925! The last one is available on DVD, and maybe some day I'll pick that up just for curiosity's sake. But for now I think Movie Monday needs to walk out of the ol' blue flame and try something else next week!

Movie Monday: She

2011-10-10T00:03:00.002-04:00

This week's movie is the 1980s adventure fantasy She!

Yes, for those of you paying attention, I did pretty much take last week's opening sentence and replace a "3" with an "8"--that's because right after posting last week's review of the 1932 movie She, my pal Dan O'Connor stated, "I'm not ashamed to say I was really hoping you'd be reviewing the 1982 version." My first response was, "What 1982 version?"

Yes, somehow, despite the ten thousand hours I spent watching cable TV and toiling at a video store, I somehow missed this 1982 version of H. Rider Haggard's She, and was overjoyed to find that it, too, was on Netflix WI! So I queued this baby up immediately.

Over some kinda nifty animated scenes of skulls and grim reapers (the kind of thing you'd see drawn on the notebook of your typical teenaged Iron Maiden fan), this 1982 version opens with a quote from the original novel:

...unfortunately(?), this is the only bit from the original novel that this film gets anywhere near. No, this She charts her own course. You've come a long way, baby!

The film proper starts with a title card that says "23 Years after the Cancellation" (I hear ya, I felt that way about Sports Night), and then we meet two men, Tom and Dick, and Tom's sister Hari (no, really). The three visit some sort of trading post, full of crap left over from the apocalypse. A roving bad of football uniform-wearing Nazis arrive, beat everybody up, and drag Hari off.

Tom and Dick end up in this big castle where all the people inside worship "She", played by Sandahl Bergman:

...as an introduction to a woman warrior, this is pretty weak stuff. She seems more like a hostage than a demi-god. Oh well.

I could get into the plot details, but it would be like describing a dream. She, as written and directed by Avi Nesher, is incomprehensible. There's a scene where She (who gets kidnapped by Tom and Harry fairly easily, again undercutting the whole "She is a God" thing) ends up in this cave full of old crates, which contain bad guys who, presumably, just wait around for days, weeks on end for some poor slob to come wandering by just so they can jump out and grab them.

She is then grabbed by a guy in a Frankenstein mask, wearing a suit and mismatched socks:

For most of the scene, they try and hide the fact that the attacker is just wearing a cheap Frankenstein mask, then they ruin it by showing us a big close-up of the thing, just after She bites off a hunk of his neck:

...if I may pause for a moment, I want to make this point: look at this still. I think this is what George Lucas sees when he looks at the original Star Wars movies. In his mind, the f/x in those movies are so out-dated that they look like this, and he just can't stand it. Hence, the endless fidgeting with movies that were perfect as is. The rest of us can discern the difference between the Holy Trilogy and this cheapjack POS, but to Lucas, A New Hope might as well be She. Okay, back to the review!

The closest She gets to replicating anything from the original book is when, after She is attacked by Frankenstein (whose head bursts as if filled with air...huh?), she/She retreats to a rejuvenating pool (not flame) and is healed. Also unlike the 1932 version, this one has boobies!

This scene is intercut with footage of an old woman who babbles on about She's destiny, or something. The old woman is played by someone named Maria Quasimodo, which is the greatest name in the history of anything.

There's more, so much more. We meet more new characters than you'd see in any five movies: guys dressed as mummies, a big hairy guy in a pink tutu, a gang of sort-of yuppies, who turn for some reason into werewolves:

...a guy with laser eyes...

...and this guy, who clearly had every episode of Mork and Mindy taped on his Betamax:

Director Nesher gives his guy several minutes of scenes to vamp, and he is painfully, excrutiatingly unfunny. Maybe if you were coked up.

There's another scene set in a garbage compactor, but without that cool one-eyed creature that came with Kenner's Death Star playset (remember those pieces of foam that were supposed to stand in for the garbage? They tasted awful!), that's set to horribly inappropriate 80s hair-metal.

She and her best pal Shandra go with Tom and Dick to rescue Hari, and they do. When Tom and Hari leave, She gets upset, because she loves the big lug:

...this guy went straight from here to either Beastmaster or The Blue Lagoon.

As I said, She is a total mess. In the beginning, I thought that it was just a really bad movie; incompetently shot, acted, and scored. But about halfway through, I realized that the filmmakers clearly didn't care, and were going for that kind of "what the hell" kitchen-sink approach that maybe, somehow, congeal Spam-like into something, anything, resembling an actual capital-M Movie. Hell, at one point even She herself says, "This isn't about sense." And how!

I guess this means I have to talk about the 1965 She next week, doesn't it?

The Moon is a Dead World: Dementia 13

2011-10-06T11:54:00.002-04:00

Hey folks! For those of who you can't get enough of my movie reviews (and who can?) head over to the Moon is a Dead World blog, where my take on Francis Coppola's Dementia 13 is now up!

Thanks to blog host Ryne Barber for asking me to be part of his Halloween movie extravaganza!

Movie Monday: She

2011-10-03T00:03:00.003-04:00

This week's movie is the 1930s adventure fantasy She!

I am sucker for any movie produced by King Kong's Merian C. Cooper (a guy who deserves a bio-pic of his own. Seriously; this is a guy who was falsely declared dead...twice, before he even got to Kong!), so when I saw She was available on Netflix WI I couldn't wait to check it out.

Based on the 1886 novel by H. Rider Haggard, She opens with a scientist, dying of radiation poisoning, who summons his nephew Leo (Randolph Scott) and, supported by his scientific partner Horace Holly (Nigel Bruce, most famous as Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes), reveals he has been searching for a radioactive element that he believes can preserve life, making people nearly immortal.

The scientist's experiments derive from a letter, passed down through his family for generations, about an uncle and his wife who discovered a remote, closed off society living in Siberia. Supposedly in this tiny, hidden spot is something called "The Flame of Life", a sort of reverse Fountain of Youth.

The only piece of evidence of this whole story is a small statue supposedly taken from the village. The scientist implores Leo and Horace to take up the mission and find The Flame of Life. As Leo and Horace agree, the scientist succumbs, and dies.

Leo and Horace head to Siberia, and find a small outpost run by a old man named Dugmore and his daughter Tanya (Helen Mack). At first, Dugmore is less than friendly to strangers:

Dugmore and his daughter join the expedition, and we're treated to some of the really cool, in-camera combos of sets and matte paintings that Cooper's productions were so good at. Sure, they really don't look real, exactly, but they have a classic feel, like they're ripped from illustrations of old adventure novels:

Eventually our little band of explorers (minus Dugmore, who is killed in an avalanche when he lets his greed get the best of him) find the mythical land they've been searching for, hidden inside the crack of a glacier, a place called Kor.

Kor is run by She, aka Hash-A-Mo-Tep (Helen Gahagan), who takes one look at Leo and believes he is actually his older relative, the one who visited Kor with his wife. She, who claims to be immortal, falls for Leo, believing he is the reincarnation of his uncle, a man she loved but had killed when he would not leave his wife.

After promising to share the secret of immortality, Leo falls for She and decides to stay in Kor, even though Holly and and Tanya are told to leave. Tanya, who has fallen for Leo, tries to talk Leo out of it, and is used as a human sacrifice for her trouble.

When Leo sees this, it wakes him from his stupor, and he decides to try and escape with his friends.

A lot of these scenes are very talky, but they're made more lively by the astounding art direction. There's a great scene where the camera pans across a row of toweting statues:

Seeing these, it reminded me of the Seven Deadly Sins statues from the origin of Captain Marvel, and makes me think what an amazing movie could have been made, if somehow The Big Red Cheese and Merian Cooper had ever been paired up for a feature film. But I digress...

Our trio escapes various pursuers and ends up in She's sacred temple, where The Flame of Life resides. She tells Leo to enter, but he refuses, so she does. Unfortunately, this time the effects are less than rejuvenating:

She collapses and dies, and Leo, Tanya, and Holly escape Kor, while the Flame of Life rages out of control. These final scenes in Kor again feature stunning art direction, heavily influenced by German Expressionism:

Leo, Tanya, and Holly make it home, where Holly tries to explain why The Flame of Life did what it did to She. Tanya refuses to believe it, saying she thinks True Love saved them from the villainous She. The End.

Of course, She is complete and utter nonsense; a mish-mash of ideas and tones and influences, but I didn't care. Like Cooper's other movies (most famously Kong, of course), She feels like its a portal into another world, one more grand and fanciful than most films of the time (heck, more than most films now!), and it has just enough verisimilitude that it all feels real, even when you're dealing with immortality, secret societies living inside glaciers, or a giant rampaging ape.

She isn't nearly as fun as Kong, of course--Gahagan as the titular character is fun to look at but fairly one-note--but its well worth your time if you enjoy these kind of crazy fantasy adventure films of the time. They never made them quite like this again.

Fun Fact: She was considered a "lost" film until Buster Keaton (of all people) had a print of it (in his garage!), which he gave to a film historian.

Fun Fact 2: She was originally shot for color, but when Cooper's budget was cut he went to black and white. Supposedly Ray Harryhausen was involved in a colorized version as a tribute to Cooper; man I have to track that down!

Movie Monday: Coach

2011-09-26T00:03:00.001-04:00

This week's movie is the 1970s comedy/drama/soft-core sex-flick Coach!

Okay...I have to admit, right off the bat, Coach is not really a soft-core sex flick. Sure, the poster kind of suggests that, and the film was retitled Swinging Coach(!) when it was re-issued in the U.S. (wait, this film was re-issued...?), but there are very few sex scenes, and even less nudity. What kind of sex flick is this?

I guess the producers who made this movie knew that the set-up alone--an older female coach takes over a high school basketball team--would be enough to get lots of horny teenagers interested in going to their local drive-in to see this. Personally, I remember seeing this film for rent at the video store I worked at, Movies Unlimited, and I seem to recall it was categorized in our soft-core section, which of course made me think it was hot, hot, hot!

Now having seen the film, I agree with this reviewer who suggested Coach is what a soft-core flick would seem like if produced by the Lifetime Channel. The main plot is about how a high school basketball team ("The Stallions", heh) loses its coach after a really humiliating series of losses. Desperate, the school principal (played by Keenan Wynn) hires the coach whose resume--that of an Olympic medal winner--lands on his desk. He's less than happy when that coach turns out to be...gasp! A woman!

At first, Coach Rawlings (Cathy Lee Crosby, who was Wonder Woman--okay, briefly, but she was!) has a hard time keeping her players in line, because they're all teenage boys and most teenage boys are sexist pigs. But she's tough and doesn't take any crap, and eventually as the players start to play better, they respect Coach Rawlings and get to like her.

One player, Jack Ripley (Michael Biehn--Michael Biehn!), likes Coach Rawlings a lot, and they start spending time together outside of school. So much so that they start having an affair, which of course puts this movie in the unique category of feminist empowerment film and horny teenage boy fantasy, like if you asked Carrie Fisher to do a script polish on Porky's.

There's some sub-plots in the movie, like one about another player who is such a bad student he has to be hypnotized into remembering his math, with the help of a trigger word ("Jabberwocky"). They then go even further, using the same technique to make him think he's a superstar basketball player, which actually works!

There's another plot about a rich kid on the team that defends Coach Rawlings to his snooty parents (who happen to be the principal and his wife), and he angrily rebuffs their sexism, in what turns out to be a fairly dramatic, well-played scene.

There's a surprisingly small (read: none) amount of nudity in this movie. Crosby and Biehn have one sex scene in a shower that gets pretty, er, steamy (sorry), but that gets interrupted by an unwelcome school janitor. You keep expecting more, but the film never delivers, despite a decent amount of chemistry between Crosby and Biehn.

Right before the Big Game, Jack is nowhere to be seen. He shows up at the last minute, clearly mad at Coach Rawlings. He doesn't play well, and they ultimately fall way behind. During halftime, the Coach reads her depressed players the riot act, proverbially kicking them when they're down. In classic Knute Rockne style, she inspires them to play to their best--and Jack finally mentions why he's mad: he thought he saw her with another man, but it turns out to be a big-time basketball scout, there to see the team play!

When the team falls behind, Coach Rawlings herself uses the "Jabberwocky!" bit, leading to a come-from-behind win! I'd say this calls for some hot teacher-on-student loving to celebrate, no?

Turns out, no--the film ends with the team holding Coach Rawlings aloft, chanting "We're #1!" Did Jack and the Coach stay together, or did she move away when rumors inevitably started to spread? Or did she hang enough and find another student she could get involved with after Jack graduated and joined the Space Marines (wait, I may be confusing my Michael Biehn movies)?

Overall, this film will appeal to you if you like films steeped in the decade they were made in, in this case the 1970s. To be fair, Coach does have more on its mind than most films of this type, but to keep promising some hot-and-heavy content only to cut away from it is frustrating, to say the least!

Movie Monday: Red Planet Mars

2011-09-19T00:03:00.002-04:00

This week's movie is the 1952 sci-fi/propaganda film Red Planet Mars!

Of all the films I've watched for Movie Monday, I'd say Red Planet Mars has the biggest chasm between Coolness of Poster and Actual Movie. I mean, come on--look at that poster, it's gorgeous, clever, and unusual! If only the movie was half as good...

Anyway, Red Planet Mars opens with astronomer Chris Cronyn (Peter Graves...sure, why wouldn't it be?), who has discovered evidence of large ecological movements on Mars, which indicates intelligent life!

Right around this same time, a colleague of Cronyn's says he has been talking to Mars(!)--at first using mathematical concepts, then with actual questions, leading him to believe Mars is a near-Utopia!

At first the U.S. Government tries to cover up the existence of these transmissions (oh that Eisenhower!), but world finally gets out. This news, as you might guess, wreaks havoc on the world--dogs and cats living together, etc.:

One of the more disturbing themes of the messages (depending on your point of view, I guess) is that the people of Earth can turn their own planet back into a utopia if only they return to following the word of God.

Revolution follows (except for Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins), but doubt about the veracity of these messages creeps in when an ex-Nazi named Calder (Herbert Berghof) claims he has been sending the messages, duping the world, in an attempt to destroy Capitalism!

Calder gets a visit from some Soviet goons, in a set that looks like a re-dressed Castle Frankenstein:

The Soviet Union is overthrown(!) and turned into a Theocracy. More messages arrive, with Mars suggesting they/it communicated with Earth 2000 years ago in the form of Jesus Christ.

Calder sneaks into the lab of Cronyn and his wife Linda (Andrea King) and says he's going to reveal that the messages are a fraud. The Cronyns believe that Calder was only responsible for some of the messages, but he won't budge.

Linda realizes the only way to stop Calder is to blow up their lab with all their transmitting equipment (really?), so she floods the room with Hydrogen--just as another message from Mars starts to arrive!

Calder panics, pulls a gun, and fires at the machinery, aiming right at the camera:

The whole place blows up, killing Calder and The Cronyns--not the ending I was expecting!

The film ends with the President of the United States eulogizing the Cronyns and reading what arrived of the message: "Ye have done well my............"

Red Planet Mars certainly is unusual, and for that it deserves credit. There's nary a spaceship or alien in this movie, and instead it tackles huge, titanic issues like politics and religion, all in the space of a low-budget sci-fi movie running less than 90 minutes!

And on that score, Red Planet Mars falls flat on its face: the movie is so absurdly pro-religion that this movie is almost pure propaganda. Sure, its also vehemently anti-communist, as so many movies were at the time, but to a lot of critics (this one included) the movie is basically trying to swap out one top-down mode of total control for another. Same as the old boss, and all that.

Movie Monday: Rise of the Planet of the Apes/Planet of the Apes

2011-09-12T00:03:00.001-04:00

This week's movie is a double-bill: Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes!

I've been an Apes movie fan ever since I was a kid, and I was really happy I finally got to see Rise--which everyone had said was unexpectedly good--and I thought it'd be fun to not only talk about that movie this week, but go back and re-watch the generally reviled 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes, making this Movie Monday's first double feature! Let's start with Rise of the Planet of the Apes!

I hadn't heard much good about Rise before it came out, and that kinda made me sad. As I said before, I love the Apes movies, and after the debacle of the remake, I figured if this reboot didn't work, that would ruin the Apes franchise for the foreseeable future. And while I might be a little late to the party (Rise came out August 4th), I'm happy to report that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a fine film, worthy of the Apes legacy.

The film opens in our present, with Dr. Will Rodman (James Franco) working at a pharmaceutical company, working on what could be a potential "miracle drug": a cure for Alzheimer's Disease!

Unfortunately, one of the apes they've been experimenting on goes, well, ape, escaping from his cage and rampaging through the lab. The ape is shot dead, but afterward we learn that the ape not only was pregnant, but gave birth.

The baby ape in question comes to live with Rodman, and over the years grows to be a formidable presence, named, ominously enough, Caesar:

Caesar is played by go-to-MoCap actor Andy Serkis, and I can say with confidence this is the first time that I felt an entirely CG character "worked" for me as an actual character. Even though I enjoyed films like King Kong and The Incredible Hulk, I never really bought in to the idea that the titular characters really existed in the same world as the live actors. But once Serkis takes over at Caesar, I began to forget I was watching an effect and just went with it. Its in the eyes, I think!

After a violent run-in with a neighbor, Caesar is dropped off an ape sanctuary, run by the odious John Landon (Brian Cox):

It doesn't take long for us to see this sanctuary is no such thing; its a cruel prison for apes, partly run by the owner's sadistic son Dodge (Tom Felton), whose violence pushes Caesar (whose intellect was boosted by the drugs he got in utero from his mother) to plot, and plan, and conspire, as a great actor once said.

It's Felton who gets stuck with all the "classic" lines from the original Apes movie, and its these brief moments that don't work: they feel shoehorned in as little in-jokes that take you out of the movie. But! The upside is, the response to the most shoehorned of lines ("Get your paws off me...") was, for me, the biggest and best surprise of the movie. I won't say what it is, but its a moment where the plot hinges and starts to take us spiraling into its gangbusters final third.

The apes escape, and begin to extract their revenge. They climb the Golden Gate Bridge (hopefully with plans to head to Marin County and kill George Lucas before he messes with Star Wars any more) and prove they are too much for the humans:

This whole bridge sequence is well-executed, in form and content: the CGI apes look good, pretty damn real, not the rubbery cartoons that you saw in, say, the original Spider-Man movie: they seem to have real weight and presence.

The top-notch CGI is important, because halfway through the film, it effectively stops being Rodman's story and lets Caesar become the main character. That's a ballsy move dramatically, and one that the movie pulls off, through the combo of Serkis' performance and the CGI. After all, this is a Planet of the Apes movie; at some point you gotta have apes!

There's a great scene where the apes have the chance to show mercy towards one of their human tormentors; they refuse. The shot--held for several seconds, a record nowadays--I found terrifying, as a character has just enough time to comprehend they are about to die, violently. *Shudder*

Caesar and his army make it to a redwood forest, and he has one last moment with his "father":

The film ends on a curiously upbeat note; considering all the violence and pain the movie has put us through (I found the first half, which deals heavily with animal experimentation and what we humans see fit to do with them, unpleasant to watch, despite it being well done and involving). Then there's a post-credits sequence--which I will not reveal--that tips the movie's hand in showing us where this franchise might go next.

Its a huge reveal for a post-credits sequence, and its that impish quality that I thought helped keep the film from getting too dire, even though its dealing with such heavy issues.

I walked out of Rise very satisfied; its probably the best made film since the original (having just seen the original five films, all in a row, I was reminded that no matter how fun the four follow-up Apes films are, some of them are pretty dodgy as coherent movies), and I'd totally be up for seeing another chapter in this new Apes saga!

Okay, next up: The 2001 remake (oh, I'm sorry, "re-imagining") of Planet of the Apes:

I remember seeing this film in the theater and walking out massively disappointed: that partly had to do with the ending, which made no damn sense; and since that was the last thing the movie leaves you with, its the freshest memory.

Now, I didn't think POTA 2001 was, like, the worst film ever made; it just seemed a lot of time and money went into an entirely unnecessary one; why waste all this talent remaking a movie that still holds up?

That said, I thought Apes was worth revisiting:

The film opens on the space station Oberon, which counts among its crew Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg), who is working with chimps to go on routine space missions. When the station is hit by a massive electromagnetic storm, they send one of the chimps, Pericles, into a space pod to investigate and gather information.

But Pericles' ship disappears into the storm, leading Davidson to grab another pod and follow. He, too, disappears, ending up crashing on a planet named Ashlar in the year 5021.

In short order, Davidson meets the cavemen-like human inhabitants of this world, as well as the ruling class, which are not what he expected:

Right here is a good indication of what's wrong with this movie: Wahlberg looks mildly shocked, but that's it; there's no big "ta-daa!" moment when the apes are revealed. Sure, I guess you could argue that by this point (2001), there's no way to get a shock out of the reveal because everyone already knows the premise; but there's something about Wahlberg's more internal style of acting that just doesn't seem like the right tone for a movie like this.

Anyway, we are introduced to the various ape characters: the brutal General Thade (Tim Roth), the wily Limbo (Paul Giamatti, who's very funny), and the kind Ari (Helena Bonham Carter). Each of them have wildly different opinions on how the savage humans should be treated.

Thade is desperately trying to gain control of the government, turning to his ill father, Zaius, for advice, played by none other than an uncredited Charlton Heston:

Zaius reveals to Thade that, thousands of years ago, humans were the more evolved species. He passes a powerful weapon to his son: a gun, which Thade will learn to use.

Davidson helps form an organized rebellion against the apes (with the help of the Nova-esque Daena, played by Estella Warren), leading to an assault at the holy ape city of Calima. Its here that Davidson realizes that Calima is the remains of the Oberon, which crashed on the planet thousands of years ago. The Oberon's survivors--apes and humans--ended up forming the civilization of Ashlar.

Suddenly, another visitor from space arrives:

Inside the ship is Pericles, who made a similar leap in time as Leo. All the apes think Pericles is the incarnation of their god Semos (got all this?), and this transcendent moment leads the apes to declare peace with the humans.

But General Thade is not interested in peace, and inside a nearby cave he fights with Leo and Pericles. Leo ends up trapping Thade in the wrecked hull of his original pod, and takes Pericles' pod to go back to Earth.

In short order, Leo crash lands on Earth, in Washington D.C. specifically. But once again he's in for a surprise when he takes a gander at the Lincoln Memorial:

Leo's arrival is quickly discovered by the police, reporters, and ordinary citizens, all of whom are apes! As Leo stands there, mouth agape, he is surrounded by apes, and the film ends.

Watching Planet of the Apes again after a decade, I came to the conclusion its not that bad a movie: the performances are mostly pretty good (though like I said, I think Wahlberg, a decent actor, was the wrong choice for a movie like this), the film looks great, and it takes as its source material the original book by Pierre Boulle, an idea that has worked for other sci-fi remakes (John Carpenter's The Thing, to name one superb example).

Its just this film has no real shocks or surprises; and when it does have one--the final scene--it feels tacked on and nonsensical, as if they realized they needed a Statue of Liberty-sized twist. Its not that it doesn't make sense, per se (Thade clearly went back in time and twisted Earth in his own violent image), but it just sort of comes out of nowhere.

Another thing that works against the finale is that it was planned as a cliffhanger for a sequel; and maybe if they had continued the story and enhanced it, it wouldn't in retrospect seem so ridiculous. But since that sequel never came (despite the film being a financial success), the Aperaham Lincoln ending just feels a little desperate.

One last thing that I think works against this version of the Apes world: there's very little sense of wonder. We see a whole lot of the apes, and everything becomes quite routine fairly quickly. Maybe that's because of Tim Burton, who seemed like an odd choice to take on this potential franchise; the movie simultaneously feels too locked in to his vision yet also lifeless and generic.

So while the Planet of the Apes remake isn't the disaster I remember it being, its really not worth searching out, especially now that Rise of the Planet of the Apes has delivered a much more effective installment to the Apes franchise.

Go ape!

Movie Monday: The Final Countdown

2011-09-05T00:03:00.002-04:00

This week's movie is the sci-fi/action/drama/hunk of cheese The Final Countdown!

The Final Countdown is one of those movies I had heard of for a long time, but never seen. The premise sounded cool and weird: a modern-day battleship finds itself back in time, the day before Pearl Harbor--so once I saw it was available on Netflix WI, I queued it up!

The film opens up aboard the USS Nimitz, under the command of Capt. Matthew Yelland (Kirk Douglas). Its being visited by a civilian observer, Martin Lasky (future President Martin Sheen), who is there to oversee the ship during a routine training mission.

During the trip, the ship finds itself in the middle of a huge lightning storm--but this is no ordinary lightning storm. No, its some sort of vortex, and when the ship gets sucked into it and comes out the other side, it finds itself back in time--on December 6, 1941!

Of course, it takes a while--a long while, actually--before the crew of the Nimitz (which includes Wing Commander Owens (James Farentino) and Commander Dan Thurman (played by SuperFly himself, Ron O'Neal) really believes this has happened. At first they hear old radio broadcasts, and figure its some sort of weird trick. Then they take recon photos of nearby Pearl Harbor and see that it looks just like it did before that fateful day.

Nearby is a small boat, and on board is Senator Samuel Chapman (Charles Durning), and his assistant Laurel Scott (Katharine Ross). They see a fighter jet overheard, which of course doesn't look like any plane they're familiar with. They end up aboard the Nimitz, and Lasky realizes that this Senator is the same guy that disappeared on December 7, 1941, and was in line to become FDR's fourth Vice President--which of course ended up being Harry Truman.

Lasky and Yelland have a lot of discussion over what to do--the Nimitz has the power to repel the sneak attack by Japanese, thereby changing all of history. Can they do it? Should they do it?

This is primo material for a compelling, classic sci-fi "What if?" kind of story, and while we kind of get that, generally The Final Countdown fumbles the ball.

Directed by Don Taylor (Escape From Planet of the Apes, The Omen II), the film has a sort of bland, TV-movie vibe: despite this great premise, not all that much exciting happens: there's a lot of arguing, some nice period detail, and some decent acting, but none of it really catches fire: the romance between Ross and Farentino is cookie-cutter (I mean, who cares, really, when friggin' Pearl Harbor is about to happen?!?), and everyone adjusts to being back in time fairly smoothly (you'd think there'd be at least one crewman who'd go bug-f*ck crazy over the idea).

There's a brief action scene, featuring a recovered Japanese pilot (played by M*A*S*H's go-to Korean, Soon Teck-Oh), which is fairly well done and tense, but its over very quickly and basically doesn't affect the plot, one way or the other.

That said, the film is still enjoyable to watch--everyone here is the utmost professional, from the lead actors to the SFX guys--so it goes down smoothly. This would be, for instance, the perfect movie to watch with your Dad on a Sunday afternoon. There's no truly bad scenes, but nothing that you'll remember for too long afterwards, either.

I won't spoil the ending, and say what Yelland and his crew decide to do in regards to Pearl Harbor. The final scene is a sort of Twilight Zone-ish twist ending, which is kinda cheesy but fun. Which is probably the best way to describe all of The Final Countdown.

One final thought: a cool element of this movie is that they don't explain the whole time-portal thing; it just happens. So, Note to Hollywood: we don't need a "re-imagining" of The Final Countdown, where you explain in exhaustive detail where the time portal came from, how it works, and basically ruin all the mystery in an attempt to make sure everything is explained to everyone. As mediocre as The Final Countdown might be, its fine the way it is!

Movie Monday: The Bat

2011-08-29T00:03:00.001-04:00

This week's movie is the mystery/horror The Bat!

Being a fan of Vincent Price, I assumed I was acquainted with all of the man's films--I haven't seen them all, but I thought I had at least heard of any I hadn't. That is, until I saw The Bat listed on Netflix WI--what the heck is The Bat?

Well, The Bat is mystery/horror film that, this time, was on its third pass through the Hollywood meat grinder. It was originally a play, then turned into a silent film in 1926, only to be remade as a talkie called The Bat Whispers, which (rumor has it) was an inspiration to Bob Kane when he (co-)created Batman. For some reason, this third version is generally less well known; let's see if we can figure out why...

The film is almost entirely set in one location (it was a play, remember), a country mansion called The Oaks. Its being rented by mystery author Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead, awesome) and was the location of several grisly murders a little while ago. Did she not read the brochure?

(I'm pretty sure I had this playset for my Batman and Robin dolls in the 70s)

The murders were committed by a sort of monster/serial killer named The Bat, who rips out women's throats with steel claws(!). The Bat also lets a bat loose, which attacks people, like Van Gorder's maid. When its thought the maid has contracted rabies, they call their doctor, Dr. Malcolm Wells (Vincent Price), who is a bit of an expert on bats.

While all that is happening, its revealed a thief has stolen a million bucks worth of bank securities ans hidden them in The Oaks. In a great, tense scene, the thief confides in Dr. Wells, who turns on a dime and murders the thief in cold blood!

The Bat returns and commits a couple of murders, including a young woman named Judy (played by former Little Rascal Darla Hood, in her last film appearance). A police chief investigates, and he suspects Wells (since that's Vincent Price, that's only logical). But later on, Wells is killed by The Bat, so I guess that rules him out!

Visually, The Bat is no great shakes: this film was obviously designed as the back-half of a double bill (it runs just barely 80 minutes), so they didn't have a lot of money to spend on make-up. Still, with his dark suit and feature-less face, The Bat has a simplicity I like; he reminds of a Dick Tracy or Batman villain from the 1940s (indeed, his "razor-sharp claws" look like they were re-used for Catwoman on the Batman TV show).

Police Chief Anderson (Gavin Gordon) also suspects Van Gorden's new butler Warner. When Van Gorden manages to trap The Bat in a room in her house, The Bat is killed by Warner, and revealed to be...Police Chief Anderson!

The film ends with Moorehead talking directly to the camera (as she dictates her newest book to her secretary), none the worse for wear. She then declares, "Well, that's the end!"...and so it is!

The Bat is a humble little effort, but its always fun to watch Vincent Price, and Agnes Moorehead chews the scenery with aplomb. Maybe had it been directed with a little more flair, The Bat could have really been a minor classic, or at the very least a visual treat. Who knows, maybe The Bat could have come back! The Bat Returns? Bat Forever? The Bat Begins?

Movie Monday: Black Swan

2011-08-22T00:03:00.001-04:00

This week's movie is the horror/drama Black Swan!

I generally stay away from reviewing newer films for Movie Monday, because I figure there are so many great/weird/interestingly bad older films that deserve a spotlight.

But the film I had planned on talking about for this week (an Italian horror/thriller) turned out to be so boring that right after watching it, I could barely recall anything that happened. I happened to have received Black Swan via Netflix the next day, so I figured why not?

Just FYI, I won't be revealing any crucial plot details or the ending, in case anyone out there still wants to see it:

Black Swan opens with a beautiful, wordess sequence of ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) dancing with her partner:

It's a gorgeous way to open the film, but it also hints at what's to come: via camera movements, we feel a slight sense of disorientation, like something's not quite right.

And of course, something isn't quite right: while Nina is a young, beautiful woman, director Darren Aronofsky shoots Portman in unflattering light, and she looks tired and gaunt. She looks stricken when she sees another young woman on the subway who looks a lot like her, but we can't quite tell. Its one of many indications that Nina is not well.

Nina is currently in the running for the lead in Swan Lake, directed by the slimy, arrogant director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel). She seems mousy, almost broken; and that is not helped when another dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis) arrives and joins the company, who always seems to be around every corner:

Nina's home life is no bed of roses, either: her mother (Barbara Hershey) is passive-aggressive in her tight-fisted control of her daughter, treating this young woman like she's a tiny child.

Leroy tells Nina she's technically good enough for the lead, but lacks the confidence to "let herself go" the way the part demands. When Nina forces herself to loosen up, she gets the part (taking over from the company's aging and bitter star, played by Winona Ryder). But the good news doesn't last long: someone seems to be chasing after Nina, trying to drive her insane, like when she emerges from a bathroom stall in an empty ladies room to see this:

Aranofsky spends a lot of time dealing with the physical abuse the body takes: the extreme diet, compulsive washing of hands, a rash that never seems to go away. During one sequence when Nina puts on her shoes, her feet have turned into something straight out of a David Cronenberg movie:

Nina and Lily become unlikely friends, but Nina's unbalanced nature turns the friendship into something more (a lot more; there's a fairly explicit lesbian scene between the two that felt more than a little gratuitous).

She fights with her mother, and it gets so bad it turns physical. The mother seems to want to arrest Nina's sexual development, and there's a disturbing scene where Nina is in bed and her mother asks from outside her bedroom door: "Are you ready for me?" before entering. The scene ends, and you never get to see what the point of the sequence is. I've read theories that suggest the mother is sexually abusing her daughter, and its become such a part of their dynamic that its simply routine.

Nina prepares for opening night, and her confidence is undermined further when she learns Lily has been named Nina's understudy. This leads to a scene in Nina's dressing room that goes so far in the direction of horror that, via the use of some silly-looking CGI, it pops the bubble the film was sitting on for the previous 100 or so minutes.

Nina goes on, and delivers a powerhouse performance as the Black Swan:

...at this point, I will say no more about the film's plot. Not that the ending is some huge twist, but it is worth watching fresh if you're planning on seeing the film.

Overall, I liked Black Swan; the performances are compelling and you get wrapped up in the story, thanks to Aranofsky's skill as a filmmaker. Unfortunately, the film establishes Nina's mental health (or lack thereof) fairly early on, and once you realize that she's coo-coo for cocoa-puffs, the film is another ninety minutes of piling on, showing us example after example of Nina's loose grip on reality. To that end, there isn't much of an arc for Portman; and while I think she's a fine actress I'm not really sure she deserved the Oscar for this performance: she basically goes from twitchy and crazy to more twitchy and really crazy.

Mila Kunis is great in the movie; her matter-of-fact, sorta-Bad Girl character cuts through a lot of the melodrama and self-seriousness of the rest of the movie, and I enjoyed every scene she was in.

Having finally seen Black Swan, I have to admit I'm a little shocked at how many critical raves it racked up; basically this movie could have been something Hammer put out in the 1970s, just with a lower budget and less of a high-falutin' air. Anyone who thinks this is some "amazing original vision" is someone who probably considers B-horror movies beneath them; so when an A-list director and star borrows those elements, it seems so daring!

Movie Monday: Shout At The Devil

2011-08-15T00:03:00.002-04:00

This week's movie is the action/adventure drama/comedy Shout At The Devil!

I had barely heard of this movie until it was recommended to me, so when I looked it up I was pleasantly surprised: Lee Marvin and Roger Moore ("my" James Bond) in one movie together? Netflix WI don't fail me now!

Truth be told: I had originally planned to talk about Dario Agento's Inferno, a film I had never seen before, for this week's Movie Monday post. I tried getting through it, but I was a little bored and wondering whether I should keep going. Then I got to a sequence involving some nutjob and a bag of cats, and even though some of it was clearly faked, there was enough real footage of cats not being treated very kindly that I got disgusted and turned it off.

That left me a new movie to find, so I jumped at Shout at the Devil when it was suggested. So what's the first thing they show you in the movie? This title card:

...man, what is it with movies and animals this week?!? Let's just hope this title card is telling the truth.

Shout at the Devil opens in Zanzibar, with American expatriate Flynn O'Flynn (Lee Marvin) trying to make a deal with a local bigwig El Kelb (played by George Coulouris, who played Walter Thatcher in Citizen Kane!). Flynn is desperate and sweaty, and when its suggested he needs some sort of patsy to bring off his plan to smuggle ivory, he spots a suitable rube getting right off the boat: an English gentleman named Sebastian Oldsmith, played by Roger Moore:

Sebastian's money and passport are stolen from his hotel room, which ruins his planned trip to Australia. "Luckily" for him, Flynn is there to overhear Sebastian's distress, and offers to help him out:

Sebastian goes on the ivory-poaching trip with Flynn, which partly takes place on German-occupied land, which gets them in dutch with a German military commander named Fleisher. These initial action scenes are well-staged and full of old time movie brio, with the tone swinging between broad comedy and tense action, like when Flynn ends up in a river and is chased by an alligator:

They get into several more scrapes, with Marvin and Moore making a good pair: two movie stars evenly matched. Marvin in particular is swinging for the fences, with a broad comedic performance, while Moore is his typical British stiff-upper-lip guy, polite and debonair even while shooting and killing animals and people.

They end up on an island where Flynn has an estate, run by his daughter Rosa (Barbara Perkins). She is none-too-pleased to see the old man:

Rosa and Sebastian fall in love after Rosa helps bring him back to health. At first this is kept from Flynn, and when he discovers it Marvin practically makes the film 3D with an over-the-top angry speech, veins popping and eyes bulging:

Things take a grim turn in the movie when WWI breaks out, and Fleisher sets his sighs on Flynn's estate, burning it to the ground, attacking Rosa, and killing her and Sebastian's infant child. This sequence is quite difficult to watch, and plays with racial stereotypes so loosely that it's more than a little troubling: a bunch of Portuguese soldiers grab Rosa, and there's a series of quick close-ups of their grinning, evil faces shrouded in darkness as Rosa screams for help.

The next day, Flynn, Rosa, and Sebastian set out to get revenge:

Our trio is eventually recruited by the British to sabotage Fleisher's ship, The Blücher, which is undergoing repairs up river. You'd think this would be leading to the film's final sequence, but there's a lot more: a scene with Moore climbing into a plane and getting horribly wounded when it crashes:

...not to mention a long action scene involving some cannons that tear loose from their straps and go barreling down a hill, dragging one German soldier to his death and decapitating some locals when pieces of metal get loose and go flying. Overall, a pretty brutal sequence, even if the gore isn't explicit:

Finally, Flynn and Sebastian sneak aboard The Blücher (with Moore in black face, no less!) and set explosives. In the meantime, Rosa is captured by the Germans and brought on board, which means they have to sneak back on to rescue her! Whew!

I won't get into the details of the final scene; suffice it to say it doesn't disappoint. Moore as Sebastian gets to be more nasty and violent than he was James Bond:

BLAM!

All in all, I enjoyed Shout at the Devil quite a bit. Tonally its all over the place, from Marvin's Groucho Marx-esque name and pop-eyed performance, to the scene with Rosa and Fleisher, which is terrifying. And I didn't even mention Ian Holm is in the movie, playing Flynn's mute manservant Mohammad, who gets all sorts of physical comedy bits to do.

At two and a half hours long, Shout at the Devil is overstuffed with characters, settings, plot turns, and more. At the same time, that's one of the reasons I liked it: its a big, sprawling mess of a movie, with multiple ambitions, the kind Hollywood really doesn't make anymore. It reminded me a lot of John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King, released the previous year. That film is much classier and high-brow than this one, but in some ways that makes Shout at the Devil more fun!

This week's film was suggested by my pal Dan O'Connor. Thanks Dan!

Movie Monday: Union Station

2011-08-08T00:03:00.002-04:00

Danger rides along on your way to Union Station!

Union Station is a relatively little-known thriller that came between Born Yesterday and Sunset Boulevard in William Holden's career, released the same year and also starring Nancy Olsen, who also appeared in the latter. But despite its modest reputation and ambitions (it runs barely 80 minutes), Union Station definitely has its charms!

The movie opens aboard a train, where secretary Joyce Willecombe (Olsen) sees something a little unusual: a car racing its way through traffic, speeding alongside the train.

In a neat little scene combining well-timed live and back-projected footage, Joyce sees two men get out of the car at the next station and get aboard the train:

This isn't necessarily all that odd, except when the two men get on, they sit apart and pretend they don't know one another. Also, one of them is carrying a gun!

Joyce tells the conductor of her suspicions, but he ignores her. Finally she badgers him enough to place a call to the cops. The one who gets the call is our hero, William "Tough Willy" Calhoun (great name!), played by the one-and-only William Holden, who gets a great intro shot:

Calhoun, too, thinks Joyce's suspicions are unfounded, but when the train stops at Union Station, she sees one of the men hide a suitcase in a locker, which contains the belongings of Lorna Murchison, the blind daughter of Joyce's businessman boss!

Turns out Joyce's boss knows about kidnapping, but doesn't want to get the cops involved for fear of his daughter's life. Calhoun and another cop, Inspector Donnelly (Barry Fitzgerald) get involved to try and stop the kidnappers.

Most of the movie's scenes take place in or around Union Station, like a good chase scene between Holden and one of the crooks. With his pitch-black coat and hat, Holden cuts a dashing figure against the bright Los Angeles (subbing for Chicago) sky:

There are a lot of characters in Union Station, so many that unless you're really paying attention its easy to get a little confused. There are a couple of good set-pieces; there's one scene where some of the cops and the kidnapped girl's father watch some silent home movies of her; leaving the film completely quiet for a minute or two.

There's another scene that's almost startling in its noir-ish cynicism: Calhoun and some of the other cops, demanding information from a suspect, drag him down to a train platform and threaten to throw him in front of a moving train to get what they want, pulling him back at the last second. This scene also cleverly splices live action and projected footage:

The case is resolved, of course; though I won't say how in case you check out Union Station for yourself. The movie ends on a jaunty note, with Inspector Donnelly nodding in approval of Calhoun and Joyce's realization they kinda like each other--of course they do, this is a Hollywood movie, after all!

Union Station was directed by Rudolph Maté, who also made the classic D.O.A. (released the same year), and the sci-fi extravaganza When Worlds Collide. He keeps the story moving a brisk clip, and while there aren't that many scenes that really stand out, the movie holds up a good little thriller, with some nice performances, a good early star turn by Holden, and some compelling visuals.

Movie Monday: The House on Skull Mountain

2011-08-01T00:03:00.002-04:00

Every room is a living tomb in The House on Skull Mountain!

The House on Skull Mountain was one of those movies I remember seeing at the video store I worked at, probably a thousand times as I put boxes back in the horror section. In the days before DVDs, lots of obscure movies got put onto VHS, and The House on Skull Mountain, without any stars to show off on the box, always looked like one those.

I had forgotten all about it until I saw it surface on Netflix WI, so I thought why not give it a spin?

The movie opens promisingly, with this evocative, slightly old-school matte painting of the house in question. Remember: location, location, location!

After some shots of voodoo drums, we find an old woman on her death bed inside the house on...well, you know. The woman hands four letters to a priest, then pulls out a box filled with voodoo dolls. She dies, and we go to the opening credits:

Unfortunately, after this, there's scarcely little horror content to follow---sure, this movie's about voodoo and all that scary-type stuff, but visually it looks like a TV movie. Maybe part of the reason for that is this:

Yep, that's Lionel Jefferson himself, Mike Evans, playing one of the people who receives a letter from old lady Pauline Christophe. Evans plays Phillippe, one of her great-grandchildren, summoned to skull mountain along with another great-grandchild, a cousin, and a doctor, played by another TV stalwart, Victor French.

Another relative, an older woman, boards a plane to come to Skull Mountain. This is the one scene where the relative cheapness of the production pays off: she sees a weird hooded figure sitting a few rows up, and is terrified when it turns around and stares at her:

Utini!!

Now, don't get me wrong: this scene is not all that scary, and anyone who watches this film just for this scene will come away very disappointed. But the complete lack of atmosphere helps give this moment a feeling of weirdness that you hope for in a horror movie. Unfortunately, its still pretty tame, and over way too fast.

The first night, the great-granddaughter, named Lorena, prepares to go to sleep, and director Ron Honthaner drops in a little bit of visual trickery just to help set the mood:

...again, nothing to write home about, but it is a little something. Sadly, the movie put in between these moments is just talk, talk, talk, and more talk. French's character keeps being asked how he's related to the Christophe family when he's white.

French, playing generally against type as a doctor, does reasonably well in the role, but he's not quite the leading man/action hero this movie requires:

One of the Christophe family is practicing voodoo, and uses it to try and control the others. French's Dr. Cunningham steps in, and there's a battle with machetes that looks like it was shot on standing TV sets (I'm pretty sure I've seen a number of bad guys end up on the business end of a Vulcan Nerve Pinch in front of that wall).

There's some spells, some snakes, some undead; typical voodoo stuff--all of it perfectly fine, but its all presented so boringly that it was really hard for me to stay interested. This is one of those instances where the poster promises a lot more than the movie can deliver.

Director Honthaner never directed another film, I guess Return to the House on Skull Mountain never made it past the idea stage...

Movie Monday: Gog

2011-07-25T00:03:00.002-04:00

This week's Movie Monday is the sci-fi film Gog!

Gog was one of those 50s sci-fi movies I had heard of years ago, but never got around to seeing, even though the title really intrigued me. In an age where you had to have a real grabber of a title like "Invasion of the Brain Eaters" or some such, just calling your movie "Gog" seemed positively artsy.

Anyway, Gog was produced by Ivan Tors, who considered this film the third of his informal "OSI" trilogy, following The Magnetic Monster and Rider To The Stars: each film featured an entity known as the Office of Scientific Investigation. Shot in color and 3D (though released in 2D, more about that shortly), Gog looks great right from the get-go.

In some super secret lab, two scientists are performing an experiment on a monkey where they attempt to freeze it, put it into suspended animation, and then revive it (hey, Captain America totally ripped Gog off!).

It appears to work, sort of, but then something goes wrong: the main scientist finds himself trapped in the chamber, and suddenly the room starts to fill with the freezing gas! With the other scientist having stepped out for a moment, our brainiac is left to pound the glass as he succumbs to the gas:

When the other scientist returns, she discovers her partner on the floor, presumably dead (we don't see what she sees). Then the chamber door closes behind her, and locks! The gas fills the room again, killer her as well.

These two deaths are part of a string of mysterious mishaps, so the man in charge of the installation, Dr. Van Ness (the great Herbert Marshall, who I'm familiar with from The Razor's Edge and The Fly) calls in the OSI to get to the bottom of this!

An agent named David Sheppard (Richard Egan) arrives, teaming with another OSI agent named Joanna Merritt (Constance Dowling) who is already at the base. After a lot of talky scenes, Sheppard determines its due to sabotage committed on NOVAC, the giant computer that runs the base.

The computer also runs two robots, Gog and Magog:

More and more of the scientists are put at risk thanks to the computer. One female scientist is almost crispy-friend thanks to a high-powered solar lens, and she is chased around her lab and the computer tries to set her on fire:

The computer instructs Magog to go into the center's nuclear reactor and pull the safety rod, causing a chain reaction that will blow the whole place up. Sheppard and some of the scientists try to stop it, the robots are pretty strong:

As I mentioned above, this film was originally shot in 3D, but wasn't released until the 3D "fad" was ending, so Gog was mostly shown in 2D. But there's still a lot of shots meant to capitalize on 3D, like when Sheppard tries to blast Gog with a flamethrower:

Just as it looks as though Gog is about to kill Shepard, it suddenly stops and becomes inert. Our heroes wonder why, and we learn that a US fighter jet patrolling above shot down a secret enemy jet had sneaked into American airspace and was controlling NOVAC remotely.

Merritt faints, and when she wakes up its in a hospital bed with Sheppard at her side. They reveal their feelings for one another, and embrace.

This is where we'd normally see "The End" scrawled across the screen, but Gog still has one scene to go: a talky exchange between Van Ness and the Secretary of Defense, where Van Ness explains that a working space station is about to be blasted into orbit (you'd think the Secretary of Defense would, you know, know about this already!):

This station will be equipped with cameras that will see all, preventing any future sabotage, ever. The SecDef is thrilled, announcing "We will never be taken by surprise again!" And with that, we have our ending, complete with cool sci-fi background:

...everything's gonna be great, from now on! The End!

After last week's review of Brideshead Revisited, I promised I would do something "trasy" this week. But of course, Gog is not trashy at all--if anything, its a very high-minded, if at times silly, sci-fi movie that is so in love with science (Science!) that it was probably too brainy for the average drive-in moviegoer. This movie believes science can accomplish pretty much anything, even after it just spent eighty-plus minutes showing us how wrong it could all go.

The final scene reminds me of the one from Psycho, where a bunch of characters explain what just happened. Its generally unnecessary, but I enjoyed it because of its sheer oddness: I totally expected the film to end with Egan and Dowling's clinch, and to see it keep going made me chuckle. Clearly, producer Tors' fascination was more on science than the gushy romance stuff, which feels pretty pro-forma.

As I mentioned, Gog is a bit talky, and the two robots--who are supposed to be imposing--are pretty rickety looking. When it approaches one of the scientists, we see the actor actually grab one of Magog's claws and sort of place it around his neck, Bela Lugosi-and-the-rubber-octopus style. But all that can be forgiven; Gog is still a lot of fun and it does have a slightly different, more brainy feel than a lot of other 50s sci-fi.

Movie Monday: Brideshead Revisited

2011-07-18T00:03:00.002-04:00

This week's Movie Monday is a bit of a change of pace; we'll be looking at the 2008 feature film version of Brideshead Revisited!

I didn't plan on picking this film for a Movie Monday, but Darlin' Tracy and I watched it last week and I liked it quite a bit--enough to want to, um, revisit here.

Plus, after doing some research online (as opposed to what, microfiche?) I saw that the film was generally dismissed, if not outright loathed, by a great many critics, which kind of shocked me--this is usually the kind of movie critics drool over: a period piece! Literary source material! English accents! So what's so bad about this version of Brideshead Revisited?

The film opens with a pre-credits sequence: sometime during WWII, a man walks through a vast mansion, a castle really, as all manner of uniformed soldiers mill about. He heads outside:

The two men walk, and we see the man's face: actor Matthew Goode (probably best known to most of you reading this as Ozymandias in Watchmen) as Charles Ryder, our main character.

We flash forward a bit, and Ryder is now a successful painter. He and his wife are being fêted by a large group of wealthy aristocrats aboard a cruise ship, who are apparently buying up his work.

But Ryder looks bored being there: as his wife acts as his PR person/agent, he avoids talking to anyone, and has to fake his way through conversations:

Out of the corner of his eye, he seems to spot someone he knows. All we can see is that's a woman, quickly leaving the room. Ryder follows her all the through the ship, ignoring everyone else. The woman keeps walking, almost as if she knows she's being followed. Ryder strains to keep up, until she enters a state room:

The woman turns--she's beautiful, and its clear she knows Charles and knew she was being followed. She smiles and says a satisfied hello. We then flashback ten years earlier.

Charles is a young man going off to college. He comes from a decidedly middle-class home, with a father who is almost comically cold to his son: he seems barely interested in even saying a proper goodbye to the boy.

At college, Charles gets a tour of the place, learning that its mostly filled with rich kids, kids who don't seem too interested in much of anything but partying. Indeed, one of them leans into Charles' window and vomits right onto the carpet!

The young drunkard in question is named Sebastian, and is a member of the wealthy Marchmain family. Sebastian takes an immediate like to Charles, and they quickly become best friends. But you get the sense that Sebastian sees their friendship as something more.

While staying at the Marchmain's vast grounds--Brideshead--Sebastian lets his feelings be known to Charles, with a gentle yet passionate kiss. Charles response is so subtle it took me a few minutes to figure out what it was exactly: at first it seems like he is completely ignoring it, but then it became to clear to me that he neither accepts or rejects his friend. By not freaking out, but also not reciprocating, he lets Sebastian know that this is not the kind of friendship they have; but doesn't judge him for feeling differently or being who he is.

Sebastian drinks too much--way too much--and after Charles goes back to school he gets a telegram from Sebastian saying he was in a horrible accident. Charles hops on a train to go back to Brideshead. Sebastian sends his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) to pick him up:

We see that this the woman Charles reunites with on the ship ten years hence.

Indeed, it doesn't take Charles long to fall for Julia, hard. Sebastian (who lied about the accident, just using it a ruse to get Charles to come visit) is overwhelmingly jealous, and tries to end his friendship with Charles, but you can tell this is mostly just him lashing out. He continues drinking, and when he is invited to Venice by his estranged father, Sebastian's mother Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson, cast against type as a cold fish) asks Charles to go along to try and keep her son out of trouble.

Lady Marchmain has her doubts about Charles: they are devoutly Catholic while he is an avowed atheist; but she is so desperate over Sebastian she feels she has no one else to turn to.

Unfortunately for Sebastian, its in Venice that Charles and Julia admit their feelings for one another, even if Julia admits they cannot be together: Charles' lack of wealth--not to mention his atheism--is too wide a chasm for her family to accept. They share a passionate kiss, which Sebastian spies, but after that Julia keeps her distance.

One of the things that impressed me about this film was the visuals: there are scenes here I found breathtaking in their beauty; the color and composition are simply gorgeous:

I wonder why more big-budget films don't bother with visuals like this for the most part; I can only imagine what a superhero movie might feel like if matched with beautiful shot compositions like these.

Anyway, Sebastian is utterly crushed over Charles falling for Julia. He drinks so much that Lady Marchmain withdraws his regular allowance. Sebastian begs Charles for some money, which he gives him. When Sebastian shows up drunk at Julia's birthday/engagement party, Lady Marchmain tells Charles he is no longer welcome at Brideshead. This, combined with Julia's engagement (to a rich Canadian Catholic), is devastating to Charles.

Years pass, and Charles is shocked to find Lady Marchmain in his home. She looks much older, and she sadly reports that Sebastian flew off to Morocco, and is gravely ill. She begs Charles to go there and bring him home, so she can see him before either of them die.

Charles goes, and finds his friend in sad shape, practically an invalid:

Sebastian is happy to see his friend, and is obviously in no condition to go anywhere. They say a sad goodbye, and Lady Marchmain is crushed that she will never see her son again.

Charles starts his career as a painter, and meets the young woman who will become his wife. They seem to like one another, though she seems as much in love with what Charles will become as who he is actually is. When he meets Julia again on the ship, they waste no time, throwing caution to the wind and making love, right there on the floor of the state room.

Charles and Julia go back to Brideshead, having decided to be together and leave their respective spouses. Charles tries to talk to Rex, Julia's husband, about being willing to give her up. Rex is a complete pig; willing to sell his wife for a couple of Charles' paintings. He even admits to faking his Catholicism just to get in good with the Marchmains. Julia overhears all this.

Just as Charles and Julia are about to leave to live in Italy, Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) arrives, with not long to live. Gathering with this children (Julia has an older brother and younger sister), he prepares to die. His family wants him to receive last rites, which he initially refuses. But in his dying moments, he accepts them, even crossing himself as his dying act. Charles doesn't know what to make of this--a lifelong atheist, like himself, undergoing the proverbial deathbed conversion.

Later, Charles and Julia's relationship cracks under her devotion to Catholicism; bothered by the transaction between her ex- and future husbands, she realizes she cannot in good conscience run away with another man. Choosing to stay at Brideshead, Julia breaks it off with Charles.

The film then circles back to the very beginning: more years have passed, and World War II is underway. The British Army has taken over Brideshead to use as a military base. Charles is told what happened to the Marchmains; the junior officer of course not knowing the connection:

Lady Marchmain died years ago, and so has the eldest son Bridey. Julia is now serving as part of the war effort. Brideshead is all covered up, quite literally a shell of its former self.

Alone, Charles visits Brideshead's chapel, which is big and elaborate enough to be its own church. He finds a single lit candle still glowing:

He contemplates extinguishing it, but then stops himself. He walks out, leaving it still burning. The End.

As I mentioned above, the critical response to this movie version of Brideshead Revisited was pretty negative. A.O. Scott of The New York Times said it was "tedious, confused and banal", and other critics were almost as harsh.

Most of the criticism seemed to have a common element: that it can't hold a, er, candle to the PBS mini-series that ran in 1981 which was something like seven hours long. While that might be true, I've never seen that version of Brideshead Revisited; I'm meeting this characters for the first time, so I don't have any superior version to compare this to and find wanting.

While there are elements to this film that I found a little less than fleshed out--the whole religious divide angle, which drives the movie, doesn't get mentioned as much as it should have been. In a rush to fit all the events and themes of the original 1945 novel into a two-hour movie, the machinations of the plot are given more weight, making it more of a soap opera: and while that seemed to be unforgivable to those more familiar with the source material, it made the film compelling viewing for me (and Darlin' Tracy).

I thought Matthew Goode was terrific as Charles; and was pleasantly surprised when I realized I had seen him previously in Watchmen. I thought he just wasn't up to the task of playing Ozymandias, but clearly that wasn't because he can't act: here he fills the space, and draws you in, quite admirably.

As I mentioned before, the film is beautiful to look at, and while I'm usually bored to tears by big CGI-aramas when all they offer is pretty pictures, this film's use of the natural world (sets, colors, etc.) made the film a visual treat.

Having enjoyed Brideshead Revisited, the film makes me want to go back to the PBS mini series, and possibly even the book. Maybe either of those will be so superior to this film that it will color my view of it in retrospect; for now, all I can say is I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Next week: something trashy again, I promise!

Movie Monday: Tarzan The Ape Man

2011-07-11T00:03:00.002-04:00

This week's Movie Monday is the 1981 soft-core cheesefest Tarzan The Ape Man!

*Warning! Many of the images in this post are NSFW*

This was a film I was shocked to see on Netflix Watch Instantly (I am easily shocked). Mostly because its such an obscure title, a notorious bad movie that hasn't gained any sort of reputation with age, so its kind of amazing to think whoever owns the rights to it thought to offer it up on the newest of movie platforms. Yet there it is, and I am grateful!

Tarzan The Ape Man was one of those movies that played incessantly on the then-brand-new cable channel we had called Prism (basically a Philadelphia-centric version of HBO, but with sports, too). It was famous for its "hard R" reputation, and it was something I was totally not allowed to see. But because it played on Prism so much (mostly on Friday and Saturday nights), I ended up catching little bits of it, here and there.

If memory serves, I never caught any of the Good Stuff; my direct exposure to Bo Derek's pulchritude would have to wait a few years when I could catch another Derek/Derek epic, Bolero. So here was my chance to see what all the fuss was about!

First up, before any credits, is this gorgeous production company card by none other than Frank Frazetta. Sending up the presumed relationship between writer/director/producer/husband John Derek and his nubile wife, Frazetta flips the dynamic, having John Derek as the helpless plaything of his larger-than-life, impossibly sexy wife. Sadly, it's mostly downhill from here.

Anyway, the first sight we see of Bo Derek (playing Jane Parker, not Porter, as in the novel) is of her carefully, expensively dressed feet, as she is carried through a small town in Africa by some locals:

While staying in a makeshift hotel, Jane is threatened by two would-be crooks, who she sees trying to break into her room. She grabs a pistol out of her bag, and waits for them. They make their way in, and she fires!

Next is the credit sequence, featuring this butt-ugly logo:

The film then introduces us to James Parker, Jane's father, who is out in the bush searching for the mythical "white ape." Our first shot of James, played by the late, great Richard Harris features him waking up his bride in an unorthodox way:

This shot is sadly symbolic of the film itself: as we'll come to discover, we're going to end up seeing way, way too much of Richard Harris.

Jane joins her father on his expedition, after the death of her mother. James and Jane are estranged, and they have endless scenes where they discuss their relationship, or lack thereof. In fact, we get as far as 40 minutes into the movie before Tarzan has even shown up!

At some point John Derek must have realized he needed to get to the Good Stuff, the stuff that puts asses in the seats, as it were. So about halfway through the film, we get an extended scene of Jane swimming nude in the ocean:

...I can't say it was worth waiting almost thirty years to see Bo nude in this film, but I have to admit, she looked damn good.

While Jane is frolicking, a lion shows up on the beach (do they do that?) and approaches. Luckily, for her and for us, the attack is interrupted by a familiar cry:

...a little something for the ladies! This is "actor" Miles O'Keefe, who was the stunt double for the original actor cast as Tarzan. When that actor quit/was fired, they got O'Keefe to fill in the last minute. While he certainly looks the part (sort of), we still have to see whether he can act.

Tarzan rescues Jane, but it scared off when James Parker fires a shotgun nearby. They all realize the "white ape" is this man, Tarzan!

After some more talky scenes between Harris and Derek, Tarzan meets up with Jane while she's off filling her canteen. He carries her away from the expedition, but she runs away. She is attacked by a giant snake, which Tarzan kills, in an action sequence shot in painful extra-slow motion, for some reason.

Tarzan collapses from exhaustion, so Jane takes this opportunity to examine this amazing specimen of hunkitude. She runs her hand across his chest, up his thigh. Meanwhile, Derek keeps cutting back to Harris, lost in the jungle, cursing Tarzan and yelling out for his daughter.

The next morning, Jane and Tarzan get to know each other. Even though the Ape Man is a savage, doesn't speak a lick of English and probably stinks to high heaven, we see he's got Game:

...man, are the boys back in the jungle gonna love hearing about this!

Tarzan and Jane's heavy petting session is cut short by Parker, who has finally found Jane. But before too much celebrating, the whole party is captured by a band of evil tribesmen, who take them back to their king, a giant brute painted all white named The Ivory King.

This where John Derek ramps up the Good Stuff, or at the very least the Weirdly Titillating stuff: as Parker watches helplessly, his daughter is stripped naked and scrubbed by some native women. And they don't miss an inch:

This scene gets even goofier, as the women then paint Bo white:

During this whole sequence, Harris basically tries to tell his daughter to let her mind escape her body, and not think about it. So, basically, lay back and think of England. Gee, thanks Dad!

The Ivory King shuts Parker up by stabbing him. Tarzan shows up (a bit late, ape man!) and attacks the Ivory King, fighting again in slow motion:

Tarzan breaks the Ivory King's neck, pounding his chest in classic Tarzan style. Parker dies in his daughter's arms, allowing Jane to take off with her hunky rescuer and go live in the jungle together.

Tarzan takes her to a nearby river, giving us the opportunity to watch Bo get scrubbed clean. One of Tarzan's pals, a chimp, shows he has Game too:

...bold move, Cheetah!

The film ends with Tarzan and Jane in silhouette, having sex (or about to). You'd think that was the end, but Derek saves the weirdest for last. During the end credits, we see Bo, Miles, and an orangutan playing around. Bo is topless, and the orangutan gets just rough enough with her that you can only hope this is as far as it got:

It takes a special kind of director to add a "♥" next to the name of orangutan who you just filmed molesting your wife. And they say Roman Polanski is skeevy!

What to say about Tarzan The Ape Man? Well, of course its a total mess; its not a good Tarzan film by any metric, the action is poorly shot, the acting is horrible, and the nudity so absurdly jammed in that its just laughable. The film keeps cutting back to Richard Harris, looking for Jane, cursing Tarzan to high heaven, so much so it becomes completely comical.

That said, the film is relatively handsome to look at. Bo Derek--the whole reason this film exists--looks drop-dead gorgeous, nubile, sexy as hell. If I had seen this whole movie at age twelve or whatever, I would have totally fallen for her, the way I did for other gorgeous movie gals from that time, like Valerie Perrine and Jane Seymour.

Apparently the spoilsport Edgar Rice Burroughs' estate tried to sue to have the film halted or shelved. It didn't work; the film was released and went on to make over thirty million bucks, a fortune in 1981 money.

We live in an age of almost instantaneous franchise reboots. So its fun to notice that "rebooting" kinda went on in the 80s too: Tarzan was given the serious movie treatment just three years later, with Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, about as far away from this film as possible. So if you think of Greystoke as a sort of Batman Begins, that makes Tarzan The Ape Man the equivalent to Batman and Robin. Which is about right.

Movie Monday: River of No Return

2011-07-04T00:03:00.001-04:00

For this week's Movie Monday its the Technicolor Big-Time Hollywood Western River of No Return!

I thought it was time to give the Giant-and-Usually-Killer-Animals bit a rest, so I went scouring around Netflix to look for something I hadn't seen and would be a change of pace.

So when I came across River of No Return, I was intrigued--I'd certainly heard of the movie, but had only known it was a Marilyn Monroe picture. Not being a particular fan of hers, I never gave the film much thought, but then I looked a little closer: it was in Technicolor--a plus. It co-starred Robert Mitchum--another plus. It was directed by...Otto Preminger?!? Okay, I had my movie!

The film opens with cowboy Matt Calder (Mitchum) atop a horse, headed to a tent city. Recently widowed and having been in jail for murder, he now wants to reclaim his son Mark (Tommy Rettig), left in the care of dance hall singer Kay (Monroe).

Right from the beginning, we see this film was clearly an "A" production: of course the stars, but Preminger fills some shots with dozens of extras, all scrambling around as the camera pans by:

Mark and his father are virtual strangers, but Matt promises him a good life back at their homestead.

Meanwhile, we see Kay's relationship with her fiance, a scraggly gambler named Harry (Rory Calhoun), is none-too-good: he's clearly a liar, and he hits up Kay for her hard-earned money to file the deed on a gold mine.

So far, this film doesn't feel much like an Otto Preminger movie; and my research told me that this was a picture forced upon him by a studio contract. Its not that its a bad film, by any means; its just a tad generic, especially coming from someone as idiosyncratic as Preminger.

But there are some scenes early on that have a weird, almost nasty feel: like when some creeps at the tent city pick on poor Mark by shooting at the buckets of water he's carrying, then laughing when he begins to get upset:

...of course, Mitchum shows up to paste the jerk one. Several, actually.

Matt takes his son on his way home, and they run into Kay and Harry who are on a flimsy raft, headed down river. Matt and Mark rescue them, only to have Harry steal Matt's gun and horse so he can get to Council City (where the deed has to be filed) by land!

When Indians show up to threaten the three of them, they hop on the raft to escape. During their trip, they start to learn more about one another, with Matt wondering why Kay would agree to marry such a creep like Harry. Kay points out that at least Harry never killed anyone.

There are some absolutely beautiful shots in this movie--with the mountains and sky, they look like classic Americana paintings:

...sure, this was filmed in Canada, but you get my point.

The back-projection effects of our trio heading down river are, well, pretty fake-looking, but they don't last all the long and they do the job:

Kay and Matt get to admire one another (including a sort-of attempted rape of Kay by Harry, which is really weird and off-putting), and Kay sees how brave Matt is when he rescues her from a mountain lion, some prospectors (who say Harry stole their claim), and some more Indians. At the same time, Mark learns to look up to his old man, learning that Matt did a kill a man, but it was in the defense of someone else.

They make their way to Council City, and Harry doesn't like being confronted by the allegation he stole the gold claim, and decides to shoot an un-armed Matt:

...but just as he's about to fire, a shot rings out: it's Mark, who was inspecting a rifle in a nearby store. Harry falls over, dead, in a well-executed (no pun intended), tense scene with a just a touch of bloody violence.

Later, just as Matt and Mark are planning to return home, Matt stops by the saloon where Kay is singing (with distinctly less enthusiasm then she had before), grabs her, and takes her with them. The End.

I couldn't help but feel a little underwhelmed by River of No Return; its certainly not a bad film by any means (and it really didn't deserve Monroe later calling it her worst film), its just a bit pro-forma considering the stars and the director. After this, Preminger went on to make edgy (for the time) films such as Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, and Exodus. He bought out his studio contract, and pretty much never made a "for hire" movie again.

But Mitchum is his laid-back best here (indeed, he was busted for pot possession while making it; so I guess he was pretty relaxed), Monroe is very sexy, and the Technicolor vistas are beautiful. So while I wouldn't say rush out to see it, if you're experiencing a lazy Sunday and want to watch an exercise in old school Hollywood professionalism, you could do worse than River of No Return.