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Motion Sickness:
A Guide for the Film Student
Collected Movie Reviews
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Sometimes comedians are remembered more for their routines and bits that for a lengthy conception. Like Laurel and Hardy, barely a handful of Abbott and Costello's feature films are consistently entertaining. This is one of their best, a spoof of horror movies.
The Abyss has an insecure story line. It's as if the filmmakers got so claustrophobic under the depths that they decided to throw in some friendly aliens. The aliens aren't needed though, because the audience is far more interested in watching the four or five suspenseful sequences--sequences that are among the most intense ever put on the screen. It seems as if the filmmakers had this good underwater action picture going, and just didn't know what to do with it. The Abyss is a little like 2001: A Space Odyssey in that it's a film that needs to be experienced. It's hard to explain it in words. The director, James Cameron, probably couldn't explain it, either. Starring Ed Harris (The Right Stuff).
This is basically a TV movie with two good performances by Jodie Foster and Kelly McGillis. Foster is at her very best when she is sitting at the witness stand, trying to explain what it felt like to be raped. This is one of those movies that saves the big flashback for the end of the film. But the rape scene itself is exploitive and basically puts the whole concept of why the film was made into question.
There are directors who want to do it all, and on their own terms. In the seventies, there was Coppola, Scorsese, Allen, and on the basis of M.A.S.H. and Nashville, Robert Altman. Sometimes these interesting men seem like magicians to us--they are so good at what they do. In the eighties, runaway directors aren't as easy to come by. But one man, Terry Gilliam, doesn't have to be a great director to be considered a magician. Fantasy and magic are themes of much of his work. I had problems with his 1985 Brazil. It had an astonishing visual sense, but I didn't emotionally respond to it. I just like looking at it. His new picture, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen doesn't look as good as Brazil, and isn't as smoothly edited, but it is a Gilliam film. Nobody else would do most of it quite this way. Again the theme is fantasy vs. reality, again the special effects are intriguing, and again I wasn't moved by it. There's so little writing, it seems, and the characters are so distant. I guess maybe fantasy films aren't my thing. But I do respect the director's wanting to thrill the audience and invent new clever sight gags. At least one can look forward to that in each new Gilliam film.
Martin Scorsese in an unusually contemplative mood. Stars Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Even when one of its many attempts at humor doesn't make one laugh out loud, there is a certain fascination in seeing how dumb this picture can get. And it does get dumb, what with Peter Graves in the cockpit, questioning a boy about Turkish Baths and Gladiators before he dies of food poisoning while piloting the plane. Much of the fun is derived by watching performers like Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges deadpanning their way through roles that they have played seriously in the past.
It was a big hit for unknown reasons. It inspired other airplane disaster movies, and showed that disaster movies in general could make money. Starring Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin.
A disastrous disaster movie. If only it didn't take itself so seriously. Scenes and ideas were used from it in Airplane!
Director Paul Mazursky's second film, about a director who doesn't know what to do for his second film. Alex In Wonderland is quite funny and interesting; unfortunately, it doesn't turn up on TV very often. Like many of Mazusky's films, parts are a bit slow-moving, as if it takes place in "real time." But there is no denying that Mazursky is a major director and one of our best screenwriters. He has many achievements, especially An Unmarried Woman and Moscow On The Hudson. Alex stars Donald Sutherland, who appeared in M.A.S.H. the same year.
Kind of a Martin Scorsese family picture. It's pleasant and sometimes funny and does not generate the anger of the director's most devastating films. Starring Ellen Burstyn, who won the Oscar as Best Actress. Also with Kris Kristoferson.
An inconsistent Disney film, with some of his most surreal sequences, and some of his most annoying.
The plot of this film is so simple that it hurts, but the production design is among the most elaborate ever captured in a science fiction film. You get a look at John Hurt, and you don't expect anything good to happen. Before long, the alien monster is busting out of his stomach. The film made a star of Sigourney Weaver.
All About Eve is biting in its own way. Although the filmmaking isn't exciting, the dialogue is sharp. The script is considered a model of a well-written screenplay. Starring Bette Davis in one of her best roles.
It is perhaps the greatest film ever made, emotionally powerful and searing in its ridicule of war. It contains many classic scenes, the most famous of which is the last one, in which the main character simply reaches out for a butterfly. Lew Ayres is very touching; he was only around twenty years old when he appeared in this film.
Bob Fosse's semi-autobiographical film is about a dedicated choreographer who is told that he must slow his life down or else he will die. Roy Scheider is made to have more than just a passing resemblance to Fosse himself, and he has his best and most substantial role. He was one of the nominees for best actor in 1979, after being best known for excellent supporting roles in The French Connection and Jaws. It feels awkward to see Scheider, more of a "tough-guy" actor, singing in this film, but he captures the spirit of an obsessed artist who wants to turn everything, even his own death, into a theatrical event.
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portray news reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the first film that tried to tackle the Watergate scandal. Director Alan J. Pakula creates a tense atmosphere throughout; you learn how hard it is be to be an investigative reporter. The film was nominated for several Academy Awards, with Jason Robards Jr. winning best supporting actor for playing Ben Bradlee, then the editor of the Washington Post.
Altered States at times seems downright silly, but it's really one of the few pictures that attempts to take on animal nature with some force. Raging Bull shows the animal part of ourselves, but Altered States shows people as animals and in addition turning into fiercer animals. This was made at a time when it was an in-thing for people to grow hair on themselves in the movies. Altered States shows some intelligence in its interesting characters, and it's an interesting, calm intelligence. Religion is more noticeably involved here than in Raging Bull. A nightmare image is that of the Sacred Shroud being burned. Starring William Hurt, who is at his best.
F. Murray Abraham's sly, colorful performance is the best reason to watch this picture. The idea is interesting--how is it that some people seem to have and be given natural gifts, while others who work harder at their art frequently can't find any inspiration? You can't figure out what Mozart has that Salieri doesn't. Mozart makes it look so easy, and there's a joy in seeing such talent flowing out so smoothly--it does seem as if he is blessed with "the Voice of God." Unfortunately, there is little intelligence in Tom Hulce's portrayal of Mozart. His laughing and mischief somehow backfires on him--you're almost always aware of his acting. One is frequently aware of Abraham's acting too, but also his love of acting--he radiates a true feel for theatrics.
This film features one of the greatest collections of songs put together on a soundtrack, and the look and feel of the movie itself seems to match all the songs. Sometimes the song lyrics comment on the action that is taking place. American Graffiti is basically a series of little stories thrown together. I don't really think it sums up the early sixties in any way; I don't think it says much of anything--but it's a lot of fun. It makes you want to be in 1962, cruising down the streets of the small California town it takes place in. With an incredible cast, many just starting out-- Richard Dreyfuss, Charles Martin Smith, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Paul Le Mat, and Candy Clark. Look for Harrison Ford, Kathleen Quinlan, and Suzanne Somers.
This is an entertaining film that has a wonderful "fifties" atmosphere. It is partly the story of the disc jockey Alan Freed, but it is most memorable when it portrays the coming of the rock 'n roll era. Watching the film, it sometimes seems that every teenager wanted a crack at writing and singing a song. There's a rousing concert at the end, with Chuck Berry showing up. Freed is generally presented as a decent, almost jolly man, who loved to play practically anyone's record on the air, especially if it had a fast beat.
Very nice animation, the story is tired. It's worth seeing because a lot of work into it. It doesn't push cuteness. A nice job. It was produced by Steven Spielberg.
Jill Clayburgh gives one of the sweetest and most natural performances captured by an actress during the 1970's. This is one of writer-director Paul Mazursky's most accessible films. The story is about a woman who is suddenly told by her husband that he is in love with another, younger woman. The scene in which Clayburgh's husband, played by Michael Murphy, tells her that he loves someone else is unforgettable. Alan Bates plays an artist who tries to offer Clayburgh a better life. There are many wonderful, sensitive moments to be found. It is a wonder that Jill Clayburgh, although very respected, never got the kind of roles that made Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Michelle Pfieffer such towering movie stars. Also starring Michael Murphy, Cliff Gorman, and Alan Bates.
Monty Python's Flying Circus in the first of their four outrageous movies. Not only are this bunch very funny, but little has been made of the fact that they are all damn fine actors. Many of these filmed skits were previously seen on their TV show, but some bits (like the famous "Barber/Lumberjack" skit) actually work better here--the scenery allows for less of the "sitcom" look and feel.
Woody Allen's best and most loved film. His screenplay, written with Marshall Brickman, is one of the finest and most inventive ever written. Starring Diane Keaton, Christopher Walken, and Tony Roberts.
The wonderful Oscar winner as Best Picture of 1960. Jack Lemmon plays office worker C. C. Baxter, a generous man who has fallen into the unfortunate habit of "loaning" his New York City apartment out to company executives so that they can fool around behind their wives' backs. Needless to say, the guy barely has any time to himself in his own place. Watching this film, one of director Billy Wilder's most entertaining works, you can't picture anyone but Lemmon in the main role. His acting is very natural and appealing here, as it was in Wilder's hysterical Some Like It Hot, which came out the previous year. Shirley Maclaine also has a memorable and quintessential part as the elevator operator who all the top men in the company seem to be after. Fred MacMurray plays Mr. Sheldrake--the big boss--and other TV favorites including Ray Walston can be seen as managers. The brilliant script also won an Oscar (there are throwaway lines like "That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise!")
Francis Ford Coppolla had already achieved greatness with The Godfather and The Godfather Part II; with Apocalypse Nowhe strived for greatness again and achieved it--but only intermittently. Starring Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, and Marlon Brando.
Robert Zemekis (Forrest Gump) directed this wonderfully inventive film about a teenager who travels back in time before he was born and sees the two people who are to become his parents. Michael J. Fox is extremely likable in the lead role and the rest of the cast is perfect.
The story of the Beatles before they became the Beatles.
Woody Allen's second movie; it's considered to be one of his best "early funny movies." Bananas is even funnier than his first movie Take The Money and Run (1969), and his even greater Sleeper (1973) would come next. With Louise Lasser. Sportscaster Howard Cosell appears in a cameo.
Star Trek V and Ghostbusters II are disappointing, but have some laughs and effects. The new Batman is a fiasco. It simply has to be one of the biggest and most overblown rip-offs ever made. I can't believe that anyone would want to see it again. What little script that there is deteriorates after around twenty minutes, and we're left with a movie that seems to have been made up as it went along. That's what I hated about the original Ghostbusters. But Batman is even worse.
I felt that I'd been taken. For months, there's been all this hype; there's even a big bat sign in Times Square. And the picture is a big nothing. It says nothing. (Neither does the new Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but at least you share in the passion and crazy search for the Holy Grail. It's a noble and symbolic quest.) Star Trek V has the crew on their way to find God and even Ghostbusters II uses slime as a metaphor of anger and urged people to try to do away with the reservoir of the stuff. Many people are praising Jack Nicholson's "performance" as The Joker, but I thought that he overacted like crazy. Starring Michael Keaton.
Peter Sellers has one of his best roles as Chance the Gardener, a dim-witted man whose simple words are mistaken as symbolism of the highest order. He quickly becomes involved with politicians and works his way into the White House. Also starring Shirley Maclaine and Jack Warden.
The second in the series of five "Ape" movies". I think it's second only to the original Planet of the Apes." Starring Charlton Heston.
One of the most beautiful and striking "childrens" films that has ever been made and one of the best movies of 1979. Mickey Rooney does a fine job playing a former jockey. He was justly nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. Also starring Kelly Reno and Teri Garr.
Not as funny as it is frequently made out to be, but any Mel Brooks film gives some pleasure and this one has its share of belly laughs. Starring Gene Wilder and Madeline Kahn.
One of Brian DePalma's best movies. It is clear that making this film meant a great deal more to him than many of his other films. John Travolta is as exciting and intense here as he was in Saturday Night Fever. DePalma is one of our greatest contemporary directors, and yet he is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Coppola, Scorsese, and Spielberg. Also stars Nancy Allen and John Lithgow.
Michelangelo Antonioni's famous suspense film is considered one of the quintessential "art" films of the sixties.
Paul Mazursky's first film as director. He is gifted with perception for realistic situations and natural dialogue. Starring Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, Elliot Gould, and Dyan Cannon.
To me, the best film of 1967 (above the other landmark film of that year, The Graduate), and one of the most startling films ever made. I think that the "modern era" of moviemaking begins with Bonnie and Clyde. It's really about a "family" of bankrobbers who owe much of their success to the press; the newspapers make it seem as if they intend to terrorize every small town that has a bank to begin with. And so the Barrow gang becomes legendary during the depression, and heroes to some because they are against the government that is taking so much away from the "little people." Although much praised, Bonnie and Clyde was controversial in its day, partly because of the considerable bloodshed and partly because audiences felt bad for the two criminals. As one character says, "they're just a bunch of kids!" This is one of the rare films in which the violence punctuates the story--it makes the viewing experience more powerful. Because of it, one watches much of the film in a state of apprehension. Starring Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, and Estelle Parsons.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson's chronicle of a seventeen year old who
enters the late '70's porn industry is full of the love of filmmaking,
and it is one of the best movies of the year. At times it feels like a
kind of "Nashville" of porn; its triumph is that it keeps
the viewer both entertained and uneasy throughout its two and a half hour
running length. Anderson, who is only 27, is without question inspired
by the work of Martin Scorsese --and in a more underhanded
way, Brian DePalma. He proudly moves his camera around and inward as if
to draw a person deeper and deeper into the framed image. Long takes seem
effortless to him, as demonstrated in the very first scene, in which many
of the main characters are introduced in a single tracking shot through
a disco. Anderson also understands the importance that rock songs can play
in a movie soundtrack--the songs, if not obtrusive, and when combined with
graceful camerawork and editing, can give the entire film an almost hypnotic
"pulse." Anderson will be someone to watch, and I enjoyed Boogie
Nights considerably more than Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction,
which is more slow-moving and has a much less interesting story (But there
is no denying that Tarantino's nonchalant use of violence has had some
influence in the bloody scenes here.)
Most of Boogie Nights is really wickedly funny and tense, like the
best work of DePalma. It is also explicit; part of the edginess in watching
the porn-filmmaking scenes is that you wonder: how far will the film go?
I haven't seen this much sexual playfulness in a major motion picture since
Henry & June in 1990. Still, no
one walked out of the theater in disgust. Everyone was too interested in
seeing what the young stud's fate would be, along with the rest of
the characters. Burt Reynolds deserves special mention in his role as the
porno film director who is yearning for legitimacy. He has his best part since
Semi-Tough, which came out twenty years ago, and he regains the
charm and looseness that made him famous in the first place. Mark Wahlberg
is perfect as the teenager who becomes Dirk Diggler, the hottest X-rated
star around. Many of the actors who portray his friends are memorable and
seem relaxed and natural in their parts. Director Anderson sees almost
all of these young and frustrated people as being like lost children; the
surprising warmth in a few of the scenes comes about from the sad realization
that no one in the film is genuinely emotionally attached to anyone.
Strongly recommended, but certainly not for all tastes. Also starring William
H. Macy and the wonderful Julianne Moore.
Oliver Stone has grown into too good of a director for his own good. The ads for his latest film, Born On The Fourth Of July, are nearly as pretentious as the movie is. There is some powerful acting, statements galore, and also a certain falseness to much of what is supposed to be at the heart of the story. The film starts out by being about Ron Kovic, a Vietnam veteran. However, it isn't long before it turns into yet another Oliver Stone freak show. The audience wants to care about Kovic but is never given the chance to. There is a wildly profane and violent streak in Stone's films, and it frequently catches up with him in a bad way.
Tom Cruise tries his best to create a realistic, driven character. He succeeds mainly during the first hour, when we see Kovic going through high school and looking for a direction to his life. He is portrayed as being held spellbound by a speech given to his class by a rugged recruiter. The man doesn't speak very long, but it's enough to convince the young Kovic that he should fight for his country. Soon enough, he enlists in the marines and is sent to Vietnam. Thanks to all the publicity about this film, most people will already know that Kovic will be wounded and paralyzed, that he will come back home and feel betrayed, and that he will end up cursing the war to no end.
The main problem with Born On The Fourth Of July is Stone's overly conscious desire to top all other films that even remotely concern war. He has a case of Apocalypse Now on the brain. The disease can be noticed right from the start, during the extremely dust-filled views of a parade. It is just the beginning of a variety of scenes that are geared to be "poetic." One of the most questionable scenes occurs when Kovic informs his parents that he loves his country and wants to fight for it. His mother shows no fear for his life whatsoever. She just says "It's God's will," and he's off to Vietnam.
For the war sequence, Stone goes for the documentary approach and gives the audience an aggravating, photographic rollercoaster ride. The hospital scenes that follow tend to pay more attention to the blood and decaying bodies than to anything else. It's hard to maintain an emotional concern for the main character when he is in the middle of so much plain grossness. The picture becomes somewhat more watchable when Kovic arrives back home in a wheelchair. He is greeted by his family and friends, and their feelings for each other are communicated--briefly. But they tire of his manic patriotism toward America, and the sequence leads to a family argument that starts off powerfully and full of anger, and then builds into a full scale blowout between Kovic and his mother. Her wanting him to move away comes out of nowhere; the audience becomes perplexed.
The second half of the picture falls apart altogether. The script turns into a barrage of curses. Those who haven't walked out by now will be intrigued by a gratuitous scene between Kovic and a prostitute. Stone must have a knack for making everything ugly--including sex. Soon enough, Kovic and another veteran in a wheelchair have a huge, unintelligible shouting match on a deserted road. The scene is so laughable that it negates anything that was even remotely good in the earlier parts of the film.
The problem is that all the screaming in the film doesn't pay off. Kovic is presented as being some kind of a spokesman but what he is shown as saying in the film doesn't distinguish him from many others. In the later scenes, which should have been the most important, one never gets a fix on Kovic's presence. The fault is not so much with Tom Cruise as with the script. Oliver Stone is assuming that the anti-war mood he presents is enough to outrage the audience. The film, like so many others, has no real emotional substance, and that is what ruins it. Unlike in Platoon, here it makes no difference how much death is shown. With Willem Dafoe.
The Breakfast Club is probably the most important high school
picture of the eighties so far. It's different from Fast Times At Ridgemont
High and Risky Business--both of which mainly concerned sex.
To watch Fast Times, you would think that high school kids have
sex every week. The kids are too sexually knowledgeable for their age-
so you're left rooting for Jeff Spicoli, the dazed surfer. He made the
most sense. Risky Business is an ingenious dream of a movie that
could have been filmed by the main character himself. I guess the point
of the picture is to "go for it." What separates John Hughes'
Breakfast Club from the other two is the fact that you feel as though
you can ultimately learn something useful from it.
The film is an attack on the general reputations that we invent for
each other. It starts off by saying "this is a jock, this is a brain,
this is a beauty queen, this is a criminal, this is a basket case. By the
end of he film, the five are much more than just that. The kids learn that
there are a little of each of them in each other. There's a lot of heart
in the film, and plenty of hate. The anger is mainly directed at parents,
parents who pressure their children into being obsessed with success. That
aspect of the film lingered on for too long, and drags the picture down
some. Hughes doesn't seem to accept that not all parents misunderstand
their kids, or treat them lousy. But The Breakfast Club proves that
a movie directed at teens doesn't have to be loaded with action. As long
as the story and dialogue are emotionally interesting, teenagers will watch
it. Starring Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Emilio Estevez.
Splintered and nerve-racking, Breaking The Waves is the kind of movie Ingmar Bergman might make if he was angry and drunk. It is not only the camerawork but the entire thematic structure of Lars von Trier’s work that remains shaky during the entire two hour and thirty-five minute running time. There will be those who will feel that there is something about the look and “feel” of this movie that make it super-special, that because there are numerous jump cuts and lightning-fast camera pans from character to character, and because there is little attempt to create a scene in a traditional manner, (meaning that little effort is given to genuinely establishing a memorable setting, or to giving the actors some interesting lines to say) that the director is in some way standing what we have come to know as the “art-film” on its head, or that he is actually re-creating film syntax itself.
In my opinion, none of these things are accomplished in Breaking The Waves. The techniques of jump-cutting and camera jerkiness are meant to create a sort of “this is happening as we speak” atmosphere, but ultimately these tricks work better in short, experimental bursts; in a film of this length, the novelty wears thin fast and continually annoys the viewer--contradicting its own tone, it rarely allows you to forget that you are watching a movie. Instead, you’re too busy trying to figure out what the meaning of all this camera movement is about, and like experiencing a wave of nausea, one winds up wishing that it would just stop.
Von Trier’s film might have been more deeply involving if he didn’t keep reminding you that a director is making the movie. The visual “chapter breaks” that chop up Breaking The Waves even more, although visually spectacular, also manage to break up any narrative rhythm and suspense that the film has been building; they’re like painted-on commercial breaks for a faraway place. The lyrics to the music played during these titles comment on the action, but somehow the seventies FM radio flavor doesn’t go along with the emotional desolation, religious strife, and out-and-out masochism that we are watching on the screen.
The film is about a woman who talks to God, and then answers herself back by using the words that she thinks he would use. No time is wasted in trying to convey that Bess (Emily Watson) has been brought up in a strict, ultra-religious way. She falls in love with a man named Jan; unfortunately, we never see how they meet or what really draws them to each other. Bess is portrayed as being childlike and obedient, utterly devoted to Jan and God. Jan comes across as being “one of the boys”--a working-class guy--and little more as a character. They have sex for the first time in a bathroom while their wedding reception is still going on, and so we are positioned to view their attraction on a mainly sexual level.
The early conflict revolves around Bess being so attached to Jan, that when he has to go back to work for some time on an oil rig, she is hysterical to see him leave. It is during these scenes that we first see her sickness; in the context of the film, it is that she is too dependent, too devoted, and too “good.” Bess uses God as a means of sorting out her desires; having exchanges with him are the means by which we will hear what she is really thinking. She prays for Jan’s return, and then chastises herself for being selfish.
Up to this point, (if one can get past the frustrating, scatter-shot filmmaking) Breaking The Waves is somewhat interesting and just a bit boring--the audience is in the unfortunate position of waiting for some kind of hook. It occurs when Jan does return, but through the wrong means--he gets badly hit on the head by a large metal instrument at work, which totally paralyzes him. Not unexpectedly, Bess blames herself for the accident and feels the need to pay for what she sees as a heinous sin.
In one’s mind, the film comes together right at this point. Bess and Jan can no longer express their sexuality as husband and wife, but can they still passionately love each other? Will Bess have a nervous breakdown and incapacitate both of them? Might she gradually lose her faith altogether? As a plot device, Jan’s accident finally gives von Trier a means of getting several thought-provoking themes going at the same time. One hopes that all the previous edgy energy will now slow down, that maybe the film’s major mistake has been made by simply cinematically rushing to get to the substance of what is now potentially a good story. There seems to be the possibility that Breaking The Waves will turn out to be a fascinating character study after all.
And then, it is all thrown away. Instead of truly exploring the main characters’ personalities, von Trier lays out a cheap-shot that is the cause of the controversy surrounding the film. The bedridden Jan convinces Bess that she should have sex with other men, as a means of giving them both the pleasure and “love” that they crave. Perhaps this lousy concept could have been used if it somehow tied in to the rest of the potential themes, but it ends up dominating the rest of the film and seems more like a desperate attempt to keep the story, but not much of anything else, moving recklessly ahead.
The last third of the film is plainly and simply morally ugly. The sudden conversion of Bess into being a whore for the sake of her husband will surely raise the blood pressure of many of even the most open-minded filmgoers, while others will no doubt be taken in by the bleak, claustrophobic close-ups of the characters’ suffering faces and think that something great must be going on. In fact, there is only one exceptional element to the whole charade--with her part-fervent, part-silly expressions, one could not ask of more from the lead actress, Emily Watson, who, at least during the first hour and a half or so, is the only good reason to see this ambiguous mess. It turns out that Breaking The Waves is not so much about personality disorders, or religious obsession, or sexual frustration, as it is about one director trying to please himself by thinking he has made the artiest art-film of them all.
Jean-Luc Godard's first feature film is one of the most famous and influential movies of the French "New Wave" of the late fifties and early sixties. Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Warren Beatty, with his frequently "laid-back" acting style, crafted this story of a U.S. Senator who cracks up a little and actually starts speaking the painful truth about politics and social issues to his constituents and observers. The idea sounds better on paper than it plays out on the screen, but it contains several scenes that are about as good as political humor gets. In one, Beatty addresses a black church audience and tells them that neither the Republicans or the Democrats have done anything for them. Instead of reprimanding him, the people respect him because they sense that he's really out to tell them the down and dirty truth--even if he is exaggerating on the surface. At one point, Beatty performs a rap song about the wide gaps between the rich and the poor. The main targets here are big conglomerates and insurance companies who want to buy the politicians off regardless of what the general public might feel. Beatty has his best role in years. Other humorous scenes involve seeing how the Senator's close advisors try to "spin" the criticism that he spews, so that they can save face for themselves and for their party. Also starring Paul Sorvino and Jack Warden.
One of Woody Allen's best recent films. The set-up is ingenious: John Cusack plays a young playwright who doesn't want to change a single word of his new play, and you just know that by the end of the movie, his play will be quite different than he ever imagined it would be. Terrific performances by Chazz Palmenteri and Diane Wiest, who won the supporting actress Oscar for this. She also won for Woody's Hannah and Her Sisters.
An exceptional cop movie, with Steve McQueen in one of his best roles. The film is most famous for containing one of the most lengthy and exciting car chase scenes ever filmed. Directed by Peter Yates (Breaking Away)
Burnt Offerings is the story of a family who rents a summer house from two seemingly nice people. The only catch is that the leasors' mother, Mrs. Allardyce, lives upstairs in a room that she never leaves. "If you just leave a tray in front of her room three times a day," they say, she'd take care of herself." After some cautious consideration, the family rents the house for the summer, and immediately after the leasors leave, strange things begin to happen.
To name a few, the father nearly drowns his son in a pool, the mother gets strange feelings over her whenever she goes by Mrs. Allardyce's room, and their boy almost dies again by a gas leak in his bedroom. And then there is the strangest scene of all--the house "shedding its skin." Who or what is making all this evil happen? Although Burnt Offerings is perplexing at the end, it is really a fun movie to watch. It starts off interesting and gets quite scary and suspenseful. There is good acting by Karen Black and Oliver Reed as couple who rent the house, and a super-good performance by Bette Davis as their Aunt Elizabeth. If you like the supernatural, this is a "must see" movie.
An entertaining crowd pleaser that stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the outlaws. Although very popular when first released, (and it was recently voted number 50 in the American FIlm Institute's 100 Greatest Films) I find the film to be overly cartoonish and the story uninvolving. William Goldman won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for this film.
One of the few great musicals of the seventies. (Fiddler On The Roof came out the year before.) The performances of the songs are so fantastic that one is tempted to fast-foward from musical number to musical number--"Wilkomen", "Mein Herr", "Two Ladies", "Money", "Maybe This Time" and of course, the title song--it's like eating candy non-stop without having to worry about getting sick. Starring Liza Minelli, Joel Grey, and Michael York.
A Brian DePalma shocker that contains one of Sissy Spacek's best performances. The centerpiece of the film actually comes at the end, when one of the bloodiest cruel jokes in horror movie history is played on Carrie. Shot in a combination of slow motion and split-screen, the sequence is one of the most cinematic pieces of work that appears in a DePalma film. It raises the film well above the typical "exploitation movie" fare and made the director someone to watch. As the years went on, Brian DePalma became one of our best directors. He did Blow-Out and Casualties of War among many others and is rather under-rated as a screenwriter. Also starring John Travolta and William Katt.
Martin Scorsese's new film, Casino, is overflowing with the love of filmmaking, everything in it moves smoothly at the hands of this master, and the story is involving, and in the first half, very interesting. Unfortunately, as is the case in all of his films since Raging Bull, there isn't a single empathetic emotion in it. It's a problem that's been haunting his films for over fifteen years--you don't feel anything for any of his characters. You can get giddy from watching his operatic camera style and might even count some of his films as among your favorites, but his lack of sensitivity in the ways that he portrays people on the screen somehow keeps his characters from ever seeming fully three dimensional. With Scorsese, people are animals, and that's it. Everything is spelled out in big letters--GREED, SEX, BLOOD.
Many of his most famous films, although always worth seeing (and sometimes again and again) never have the great stories and sub-plots that Copolla's Godfather films have, and although there is some humor found here and there, his films don't have the undercutting slyness that can be found in many of Brian DePalma's films. As a result of this, to me, in spite of two-thirds of his films being called great, in fact only one is--Taxi Driver, and that's because in spite of all the terrible things that are shown on screen, you cared for the two main characters, Travis Bickle and Iris. You just don't care about Jake LaMotta or Rupert Pupkin or most anybody in GoodFellas or Casino.
Mike Nichols (The Graduate) directed this version of Joseph Heller's famous war novel. Starring Alan Arkin and Jon Voight.
Marlee Matlin and William Hurt are wonderful in this story about a teacher who is trying to connect with a deaf-mute woman. Matlin won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance.
One of Roman Polanski's best films; it is widely considered to be the greatest detective film of the seventies. Robert Towne's screenplay, which won an Oscar, is as sharp and literate as one can hope for. When it came time to compare L.A. Confidential to another film, Chinatown was its closest match. Starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.
A Steven Spielberg classic. The screenplay, which Spielberg wrote, is more complex than that of E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial. The final forty five minutes of this film, in which the mother ship arrives, is absolutely unforgettable. Starring Richard Dreyfuss and Teri Garr.
Terrence Stamp plays a man who wants to collect a particular thing--a woman. He abducts a young woman and keeps her locked up in his basement, all the while hoping to start a relationship with her. This is certainly a strange and haunting film; it's one of the most surprising things that director William Wyler (Funny Girl) ever did. Also starring Samantha Eggar.
Jane Fonda and Jon Voight won Oscars for this movie, which came out during the same year as The Deerhunter. It is possibly director Hal Ashby's most powerful film. Voight and Bruce Dern give amazing performances, both playing devastated Vietnam war veterans. Dern has a "freak-out" scene toward the end that is very memorable, and Voight is great in a scene in which he talks about the horrors of war to high school students.
A little shown horror film that is about witch-hunting. If you can find this, you will see one of Vincent Price's best performances. There is none of the hamminess that turned several of his other films into part-comedies. (Although his winking at the audience is what makes those films so entertaining.)
Francis Ford Copolla's film came out between his first two Godfather films and it took home the Cannes grand prize. Gene Hackman is perfect as Harry Caul, an undercover man who bugs conversations for a living. Coming out as it did in the time of Watergate, the creepy atmosphere of this film made it all the more interesting. And it is equally as important today, when we see Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky all over the news.
Pauline Kael gave us hundreds of excellently written and thought provoking movie reviews, and yet since she retired from The New Yorker, there is still an intense yearning to hear what she has to say about recent movies. One never wants her to stop writing. This book is an entertaining collection of articles and interviews that were collected through the years, many of them taken from hard to find magazines. The wonderful thing that this book shows about Pauline Kael is that she talks almost exactly like she writes--an interviewer may ask her a relatively simple question, and she'll answer in her ever-playful way that will take up at least a half page of text. She has a terrific sense of verbal rhythm as well as her famous "conversational" writing style. Those who are new to her work should read her Deeper Into Movies and Reeling, the two books that cover what she feels is the most innovative period in film history--the early to mid-seventies.
An abomination.
Ingmar Bergman's very hypnotic and terribly slow-moving story of three sisters who are trying to care for each of their emotional needs. The cinematography, with its blood-red fade outs, is well worth studying. It's a very demanding film, but this is one of Bergman's quintessential films. Starring Liv Ullman.
Woody Allen is our most prolific, consistently good film writer and director. His new film, Crimes And Misdemeanors is in the "classic" Woody Allen mold. It has Woody searching for women and for the meaning of relationships and life itself. It has Woody as a creative person who is bothered by the falseness of other creative people and by one big shot in particular (here played by Alan Alda in the Tony Roberts role.) It has introspective family dinner scenes, movie theaters, the New York "feel," atmospheric music, mentioning of World War II and the Holocaust, even a young girl thrown in for Woody to hang out with.
It's hard to look at a Woody Allen movie without thinking about other Woody Allen movies. Is that bad? Many people don't mind, and I don't. Woody has such a nice catalogue of material that college classes are taught about his work. Watching Crimes And Misdemeanors, I found myself thinking "this is kind of like Annie Hall, this is like Manhattan--the idea of Woody's wanting to make meaningful documentaries brings back some of Stardust Memories. The careful style and look of the film brings back a little of Hannah And Her Sisters.
Some of the ideas and plot devices in Crimes date back to 1972's Play It Again, Sam--which was originally a late sixties play that was already leaning toward Annie Hall. I think that Annie Hall is Woody's best film overall. This year's When Harry Met Sally is a rip off of it.
In Crimes, the idea of the main character having his lover killed is right out in the open. But murder has not been new to Woody Allen. In his first film, Take The Money And Run, he played a criminal. In Bananas, rebels are after each other. In Sleeper, there is an attempted political murder. (Bananas opens with one.) In Love And Death, Woody is torn about trying to kill Napoleon, and he talks about moral choices, as he does in Crimes. In Stardust Memories, Woody himself is shot. In Interiors, the main character kills herself; in Hannah And Her Sisters, Woody nearly kills himself.
It is amazing how Woody Allen presents many of his obsessions in slightly different ways ech time. In general, I think that Crimes is more uneven than Hannah. It is more sketchy. Woody isn't filling in as many gaps because he's figuring that he's already filled them in during previous films. His "New York" films are like one big story, and Woody is the writer in the middle who is examining all of these lifestyles.
There is good and off-key in Crimes and Misdemeanors. The good is certainly Martin Landau, who gives a rarely seen today "gripping" performance. Good also is the man about whom Woody is making a documentary. The man is full of wisdom, but ends up killing himself anyway. There are good lines and good jokes throughout, and Alan Alda is perfect. Woody goes wrong, I think, with the family dinner scene--it is too preachy and somehow a bit corny. There is not enough of Woody's little girlfriend, and what little we see of her is too romanticized. She looks like a miniature Annie Hall. She isn't given anything really snappy to do. You see her and you think of Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan--Woody's other young girl character. At least Hemingway dressed realistically and had many sensitive scenes. Woody's mistake in Manhattan was in getting too involved with her--even into bed with her. And who is Mia Farrow playing? You don't feel much presence with her here, as in Hannah as well. She's mostly there for her beauty.
Problems aside, Crimes And Misdemeanors makes you think. There is far more of interest in it than there are flaws. Perhaps it is this year's real Sex, Lies, And Videotape.
It's a crime, all right. You can feel the acting through your skin. It's not realistic or sensible. Starring Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek, and Jessica Lange.
Every couple of weeks, I rent a movie or two. This week I rented Dances With Wolves, mainly because my father has been eager to see it since he saw coming attractions for it last December. He said that he knew it would win awards just from watching the trailer, and he was right. It won around seven Oscars, including Best Picture. The picture wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It isn't quite the festival of corn that Field Of Dreams was. And the subject doesn't make for a limp excuse for a movie like Home Alone, which is the current force-feed video release. At least Dances With Wolves has some narrative interest.
You know you're in for some head scratching right from the first scene, a very wounded Kevin Costner manages to pull boots over his bloody shins and walk away from the camp doctors. As if that isn't heroic enough, he gets on a horse and rides practically right up to an enemy line. He gallops past them like a carnival moving target, and never gets hit. Of course, this inspires his own side to fight. He has shown that the enemy is vulnerable, and regardless of who gets killed, he is made a hero. Costner's character wants a change from all this, though; he wants to see the prairies--deep down he wants to touch Indians. And for much of the picture he is in contact with them, and with a white woman who was taken in by a tribe, and also with a wolf. At first he tries to communicate to the Indians by using his body; a little more than half way into the film, he starts speaking their language astonishingly well. One senses that Costner will see the basic humanity of the Indians, that he will wind up with the white woman, and that the white soldiers will get theirs.
I must admit that Dances With Wolves was never boring. There is a story to it, and it is an interesting one. It's just that I felt I had seen it several times before. Maybe I have seen it several times before--the picture is like an anthology of many other Westerns. There's the wise chief with the peace-pipe, and lots of horses and buffalo, and the Indian who hates the white man, but who sees that our hero is a good one. There are the tee-pees and forts, the shooting arrows, a scalping or two. Costner and his crew saw to it that everything was in place. The scenes with Costner and the Indians trying to be friendly play out quite well. The scenes with the white woman aren't bad, although her trying to verbalize her forgotten English is a little lame. One strength of the picture is that it shows the Indians talking about their plans; it shows that they could be reasoned with, and that they frequently thought before they acted harshly. Costner gets intelligent performances with these scenes.
It's with the American soldiers that I think he goes very wrong. He treats them, quite simply, as the bad guys. In one of the early scenes, the officer who Costner talks to about getting transferred is portrayed as a fat-faced, vile, lump of a man. The cards are desperately stacked against him, although all he is required to do is let Costner do his own thing. When the thing kills himself a few minutes later, no one cares--he was just this corrupt high officer, one of the bad guys.
Near the end, one is made to scream for the white men's blood. Costner goes back to his deserted outpost to pick up his diary and finds a lot of soldiers have taken his area over. They mistake him for an Indian, immediately start shooting at him and end up killing his horse. They start beating on Costner (why didn't he try to talk to them a little before they smack him on the head with a rifle?) They take him inside, where he sticks up for the Indians, and he gets beat up some more. The soldiers shoot his wolf friend, who, as the title says, Costner had danced with somewhat earlier, and then they eventually use some of the pages from his diary as toilet paper.
Before long, you want these guys to get it. And instead of doing a dignified "let's rescue Kevin" thing, (which might have been possible) we get a massacre. It's the old Indians are good, the white man is scum story and the true, weak moral setup of the film gives itself away again. Was every white soldier who didn't really meet Indians hateful of all Indians? Weren't any soldiers in a terrible position of carrying out orders that they didn't really want to do?
The right way to film this kind of a story would be to show the good and bad in both sides. Perhaps it would be correct to show the Indians as being more taken advantage over, but one would have to see that not all were innocent wise angels. One would have to see that sometimes Indians started conflicts and sometimes with other Indian tribes.
A drive-in classic that is gory as all hell. George Romero's follow-up to his revered horror masterpiece Night of the Living Dead is not as frightening as the first film but is perhaps even more adept at social commentary. Much of the film takes place in a shopping mall, with zombies sheepishly peeking in store windows, riding escalators, and concentrating on getting food (in their case, flesh) to keep them alive. The insinuation is right out in the open: how much different are the zombies from us?
With Dazed and Confused, director Richard Linklater has created one of the most realistic movies about teenagers ever made. With a sure touch, he succeeds in bringing us back into a particular time and place. Much of the film feels as if he had done all his work when the story takes place, in 1976, and then put the finished product away in a time capsule and finally opened it up for us now, in 1993.
Much of this film can be understood and even be admired by today's teenagers because many of the basic rituals are still the same--the aimless driving around with the music of the times playing loud, the hanging out at the pool hall and arcade, and the anxiousness of trying to meet a member of the opposite sex who you can get along with. The whole "what do you want to do with your life" thing is present but is not lingered on for long.
Linklater seems not so interested in making statements within literate, formed scenes as he is in getting the atmosphere right. And he does--to sometimes startling effects. At first, Dazed and Confused seems like it might turn into all looks and mannerisms. Before long, one watches the screen in a kind of stunned disbelief, amazed at the exactness of the details and wondering how long the filmmakers will be able to sustain the natural tone of the whole piece. But the images never call too much attention to themselves, and one never spots a "character" or anyone really acting.
Far more than merely a "slice of life," Dazed and Confused somehow turns into the kind of film that speaks for a generation, and ironically, accomplishes that by using few words. The director has done his research. One of the chief accomplishments is that his movie doesn't fall into any of the traps that have lessened other fine teen films. The film never gets too zany or heavily romanticized. It doesn't make the mistake of turning into the kind of movie that blames everything on the parents, like The Breakfast Club. The people in it don't become rather cartoony, as some characters were in American Graffiti , or completely off-the wall, like some of those in River's Edge or Heathers. And they don't appear to have sex every other day, as the funny Fast Times At Ridgemont High would have one believe. On the teen film timeline, Dazed and Confused would clearly fall between American Graffiti and Fast Times. This subtle piece of work beautifully fills in a gap in the teen movie genre.
I was moved by this film and came close to crying during the scene in which Sean Penn is with his family members. By that time, it was inevitable that he was going to die, and I wondered why that should be the first time in the movie that I felt a lump in my throat. I certainly didn't feel bad for Penn's character, but it was at that point in the movie when the accumulation of mixed, but definite, feelings reached their first peak. My reaction was not so much out of feeling sorry for the criminal--it was just this overwhelming sadness that built up from watching the entire situation play itself out.
This is a film that is bound to be argued about because it positions itself between "an eye for an eye" and "thou shall not kill." It presents no clear answers and cannot get far into the subject of what makes Penn's character the way that he is. At the end it finally occurred to me that this film is perhaps as much about repentance as it is about capital punsihment. The criminal "dies with dignity" and some will interpret this as meaning that there was some good in him all along, and it was never really brought out--and others will say that the film glorifies him by making him more human in a sentimental way. I felt that this was a well-balanced film, a rare film that makes one think and feel. Susan Scarandon won the Oscar as Best Actress.
An infamous and weird cult film that involves a race car game in which people literally run over other people to get points. Sylvester Stallone is in this. It's sick, but the idea at minimum is hard to forget.
One of the most angering and heartless films that I have ever seen. This is the "landmark" piece of filth that most "vigalante films" are held up to. Charles Bronson's wife and daughter are raped (in an atrocious, but effective scene) and it is up to Bronson to take the law into his own hands because nothing much is being done about the criminals. This film is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Dirty Harry, the standard "cop taking the law into his own hands" film. These movies do say something about how many people felt then, and still feel today, but their execution is irresponsible. Their are many problems with our legal system, but these films are manipulative in the way that they urge the audience to cheer the victims, who end up becoming just as dangerous as those who perpetrated the crimes in the first place.
Perhaps Woody Allen's angriest film. Even his most loyal fans may be thrown off-guard by the reservoir of rage and casual vulgarity that is littered throughout his inventive, fractured script. The story line basically takes off from one of Ingmar Berman's most respected films, Wild Strawberries. In that memorable film, which is powerful enough to make even those who are not interested in film study recognize that they are watching a work of art, an elderly professor travels to his former university to receive an honorary award. He has few friends, and rides across country, meeting different people along the way (including three students), and contemplates the meaning of his life while gazing out at the scenery. It's one of the most moving and beautiful movies that has ever been made. In Allen's version, he plays a professor who is receiving an honorary award from a college that he was ejected from years ago. None of his relationships with women have worked out for long. He spends much of the time trying to find someone willing to go along with him, but a book that he has written about his friends and lovers' lives has them all furious with him. He brings along his little son, a depressed friend, and a hooker. He thinks back on his wrecked love life and visits his sister, who he rarely sees. Throughout Deconstructing Harry, we are treated to (some may say subjected to) Woody Allen's opinions on his usual topics. There's religion ("between the Pope and air-conditioning, I'll take air-conditioning"), his nationality ("my wife is Jewish with a vengeance") and the Holocaust ("records were made to be broken.") Much of the screenplay is funny, but it contains an undeniable fury; you feel that Allen is determined to give himself a beating, even in the few scenes when he isn't on screen. I believe this is his first film to contain nudity, and it occurs in Hell.
Among the most argued about films of the seventies, The Deerhunter won the Best Picture Oscar of 1978, sharing the big prizes with another "Vietnam film" - Coming Home. The controversy concerned whether the film's most devasting scenes, involving games of Russian Roulette, ever really occured with the enemy in Vietnam. The film's detractors felt that the film was not actually about the war at all and that it was ludicrous to even symbolically represent the war with the gun games. Many felt that the long set-up to the excruciating scenes--a big wedding sequence that takes more scene time that the one in The Godfather--was boring and unnecessary. I feel that this film is well worth seeing and talking about. The acting by Robert DeNiro, John Cazale, and the others is superb and highly realistic. The main thing is that the overall effect of the film is powerful and the results are filled with filmmaking craft. The director, Michael Cimino, didn't win the Oscar for nothing, although he never did anything else remotely as interesing as this. Christopher Walken won the Best Supporting Actor award for his incredible, nerve-racking performance.
Albert Brooks has made his presence felt in every movie that he has been in. He started out by making short films for "Saturday Night Live" in the seventies, and by appearing in a few scenes of Taxi Driver (in which the character of Travis Bickle describes him as being "silly.") His humorous brief appearance in Twilight Zone-The Movie in 1983, in which he and Dan Ackroyd made a game out of guessing TV theme songs, made one wonder: where has he been?
The truth was that Brooks had made two films, but they had hardly been smash hits. Brooks just couldn't seem to reach a huge audience with his own films; he got overshadowed. In the late seventies, many of the original members of "Saturday Night Live" were leaving the show and getting into movies. Chevy Chase was coming off his hit with Foul Play. John Belushi soon had the biggest success from the group with Animal House. Not much later, Steve Martin was The Jerk. And although Mel Brooks was in a dormant period, Woody Allen had Manhattan, which further strengthened his reputation as the key comic writer-director in the country.
Like several other films released in 1979, Brooks' Real Life got lost somewhere between the more easily publicized comic films and Apocalypse Now. It took Lost In America in 1985 to take him from cult favorite to a potential comedic writer- director on the order of Woody Allen. But between his big hit and the new Defending Your Life, he it seemed that he did little apart from steal Broadcast News in 1987. It is not necessary to defend the latest Albert Brooks film, Defending Your Life. I can't see how anybody can dislike it.
A film that was highly respected in its day, and has since become a classic in the "Man against Nature" genre. It was directed by John Boorman, an erratic but sometimes brilliant and always versatile director. He also did Excalibur, about the knights of King Arthur; Hope and Glory, a film that looked at war throught the eyes of an English family, and the underrated Beyond Rangoon, about a U.S. Tourist trapped in the midst of a Burmese uprising. Starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight.
It is no secret that Dick Tracy is being publicized as if it were this year's Batman. That means it's the movie that everyone has to see. If you don't see it, and see it fast, you miss out on the "experience" that everyone else has already seen.
At first, the thought of turning to the "funnies" for movie projects must seem like a clever idea. It is a real challenge for filmmakers to transfer the frames of a comic strip into a motion picture. But most of the time, that is not the intent. Usually, the moviemakers are after the look of the characters--they are most concerned that the actors resemble the comic book people that they are playing. The mood and look of the original strips are most often overlooked, or not worked on nearly enough. That is not the case with Dick Tracy. Clearly, much thought has been put into the visuals--especially with the exteriors. All the characters look like they came right out of a comic strip, with the exception of Warren Beatty, who only has the title role. He is less an actor here than he is an easygoing phantom.
Nothing that he or anyone else does sticks with you; that's the main problem with this movie-- with most movies. Like Batman, it starts off with elaborate, moody photography and lush orchestral music. One does get somewhat taken in (some might say pushed in) and then before long, a sort of dullness sets in. Dick Tracy comes down with "scriptitis" within a half hour. One can soon get the impression that the whole concoction was made up as the filmmakers went along. Apart from the look of some of the film, no real ideas come across. Some of the visuals get a few chuckles, but there is virtually no inspired cleverness in the whole movie. Verbally and emotionally, it is dead on the screen.
Perhaps Beatty needed to take a better look at some of the more recent comic strip films, like Superman and especially Superman II. The 1978 Superman was like two films in one. The first part retold the legend of Superman--how he came to earth and got his powers. It all looked and felt right. Then the filmmakers needed something for Superman to really do, so they thought of the next logical thing--have him start small with fixing human accidents and then lead up to his trying to save the entire world from destruction.
Gene Hackman's portrayal of Lex Luthor was right out of the Batman TV show, and the second half got a bit goofy. But who can take the concept of one man saving the world seriously? In the end, there were enough good laughs and clever visual effects to carry the film. Best of all, the actors seemed to get a kick out of what they were doing. They were all given lines that they could pounce on. There was even room for a whole song during a flight with Lois Lane!
The initial concept of Superman II had no "origination story" to work with--it was already told in the first film. But the creators came up with a group of truly interesting villains. You believe their powers, and the writers were ingenious in having them head right for some kind of human power--the kind found in our White House. Long before they're blowing people and buses all over Times Square near the end, one is caught up in the comic book "feel" of the whole thing. The Superman films worked. Dick Tracy simply doesn't. Maybe "feel" is the key word here. The creators have the look, but not the "feel" down. Tracy is to 1990 what Robert Altman's Popeye was to 1980.
Clint Eastwood stars as a policeman who's had enough of the way the legal system works. He tracks down a killer on his own, although he has been forbidden to do so. This is the film that contains the scene in which Eastwood asks a wounded black man "How many bullets do I have, punk?" Dirty Harry is a decent thriller, although its moral base is questionable.
Perhaps the most argued about film of the eighties, Spike Lee's breakthrough film is still inspiring as a call for equality and an end to racism. The controversy around the film mostly involved whether the film was also a call to violence. There is no question that this film sent many young creative people off to study filmmaking. Also starring Danny Aiello.
Director Sidney Lumet has crafted a bank-heist film unlike any others. This is the film in which Al Pacino, in possibly his best performance outside of the Godfather movies, plays a man who robs a bank in order to pay his bills--and to pay for a sex-change operation for his male lover. The script won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 1975. Also starring John Cazale and Chris Scarandon.
A terrific documentary about Bob Dylan that captures him in his glory--but before he went electric (that was a different kind of glory for him in the sixties.) We see Dylan racing from music hall to music hall, chatting with admiring fans, and in an especially memorable scene, making life very difficult for a young interviewer. In another scene, a wealthy woman invites him over to her house for dinner with herself and her sons. Shot in black and white, this film is one of the best "rock documentaries" you will ever see.
There are some laughs in it, but it just didn't work. Also, I got sick of the dog. Starring Richard Dreyfuss.
Brian DePalma in an ascent to becoming one of our best directors. A bravura sequence takes place early on, with Angie Dickinson simply walking through a museum and trying to meet a man. Although there is no speaking in the scene, it is utterly hypnotic. Also starring Michael Caine.
The first of the famous James Bond series. It is usually regarded as being among the fourth or fifth best in the fifteen or so Bond films. This visually stunning and still modern-feeling movie made Sean Connery a star. Also stars Ursula Andress.
Stanley Kubrick is one of the most inspiring and talented film directors ever, regardless of his low output during the past twenty years. This is without question his funniest film, although the stench of nuclear disaster is its theme. Starring Peter Sellers in three very different roles, and Sterling Hayden.
Steven Spielberg's first feature film; it originally aired on television and was then re-edited for the theaters. Although the story sounds ridiculous--Dennis Weaver plays a man who is chased by a mysterious truck--Spielberg's filmmaking genius is very much present.
Although I don't think this film is the classic that it is usually thought of as being, there is no doubt that it is an important landmark in the world of independent filmmaking. A group of young men set off on motorcyle to "find America" and ultimately end up finding tragedy because they are "hippies" and are perceived as being rebels. Starring Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson.
In 1996, a terrific year for independent films, one of the best indie productions was also one of the least seen. Citizen Ruth directed by Alexander Payne, starts out by being about a paint and glue sniffing pregnant young woman (Laura Dern, in a brave performance) who is told by a judge that it would best if she got an abortion instead of bringing yet another child into the world. Through a series of cleverly written and unpredictable circumstances, she finds herself smack in the middle of a battle between groups of pro-lifers and pro-choicers. In the end, the film is partly about Ruth and mostly about the two sides and the incredible tactics that they use to win what they consider to be symbolic victories over the other army. Much of Citizen Ruth is incisive and wildly clever, but it never becomes bitter in spite of the devastating subject matter; like Payne's new second film, Election, it's really a comical suspense film that erupts into a full-scale emotional war.
In fact, both films revolve around the same theme-what is the difference between morality and ethics? It's a question that Matthew Broderick, playing a high school teacher, asks early on in Election. Several students try to answer him, saying that morality consists of ideas of what it means to be good, and ethics are the ways in which we use morality for our own benefit. There is little time wasted in showing what the sides will be in this story; it's basically one teacher against one student, here played by the smashing Reese Witherspoon, who is like a sister to the main character in Rushmore, the person who wants to join as many clubs as she can and do everything. In Election, her big goal is to become class president of the student council. The sick joke is that there is no one who plans to run against her-until Broderick steps in. He would love to see her flop just once, and he entices a good-natured, injured football player to channel his stunted energies into giving the go-getter a run for her money. The anticipation is not so much in seeing who will eventually win the student office position, but in whether it will be the teacher or the student will succeed in getting what they really want.
Election contains terrific, realistic performances by everyone involved. Matthew Broderick is utterly believable as the much-liked teacher and he is able to show an emotion that we have rarely, if ever, seen from him-genuine rage. Playing the obsessive Tracy Flick, Reese Witherspoon is perky and bright-eyed one moment, and snorting and grotesque the next, a sweet and growling Jeckyl and Hyde teenager. She is growing into one of our best young actresses, and here she has her most substantial role since the lovely 1991 The Man In The Moon. (And she was quite hysterical in parts of 1998's Pleasantville.)
Alexander Payne proves himself to be a master of creating subtle ironies and plot twists that build up through the course of his movies and turn his themes into profound statements about contemporary life. He is a director with a knock-about free-flowing style, and as in Citizen Ruth, he seamlessly throws in nifty cinematic tricks that don't interfere with the pacing of the film. Here he uses "stop-screens," split-screens, and in one slightly unnerving scene, Broderick has sex with his wife and imagines seeing the other female characters' faces cut and pasted over her own. The wrap-up of Election is extremely satisfying, in a bravura sequence that takes its time in showing what each of the main characters are doing a year after the election ordeal. One walks out of the theater both stunned and smiling.
Payne has the capability to make many more "small" classics. If he can be compared with any current young filmmaker, it's David O. Russell, the director of Spanking The Monkey about an incestuous summer, and Flirting With Disaster, about a guy who goes through hell to find his real parents. No subject seems beyond their loose, down and dirty style of satire. Todd Solondz's striking, exasperating work (Welcome To The Dollhouse, Happiness) is more rigidly structured and feels more thought out in filmmaking terms, and his use of humor is darker and more biting. There is no doubt that these three guys are among the best satirists of contemporary culture that we have. It's thrilling to think of what they've already expressed and accomplished.
Richard Brooks made this film about a fiery preacher, played by Burt Lancaster, who won an Oscar for his performance. Brooks was known for taking on controversial social topics, and he sometimes succeeded in making interesting and powerful films. Among his credits are Blackboard Jungle, the creepy Looking For Mr. Goodbar, and his most famous film, the adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.
What would The Empire Strikes Back have been without Yoda? It would still have been a great science fiction movie--but Yoda's scenes add to the film in a way that puts it up there with the best of them. I like a little philosophy in a subtle way, and Yoda was a most unlikely looking philosopher--which is what I loved about him. Funny looking or not, he was wise, and you knew it. The picture says you can do great things, and have fun and adventure, too. The Empire Strikes Back was more to me than the packaged entertainment of Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. These are good pictures, but I sense that in these early eighties, the post college age crowd is tiring of non-stop thrills with no mental bite. The kids can still have a ball with them, though, and they deserve it. Steven Spielberg is a master they are growing up with. The Empire Strikes Back is loads of fun. I think it is much better than Star Wars and parts of Close Encounters. The acting here is much more confident--the players look far from being amateur. The robots and aliens are keen to look at, and of course there is Yoda, a muppet who will no doubt make screen history. Yoda turns into a sort of religious character, like Obi Wan Kenobi, who does an Elijah bit in one scene. Overall, this is probably one of the most action packed and philosophical science fiction movies ever made. Starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford.
A very peculiar and occasionally funny movie directed by and starring Burt Reynolds. It's about a man who has been told that he has only months to live, and in his frustration, contemplates committing suicide. It's really not in good taste to watch someone fail at various attempts at taking his life, and so it is hard to give into the slapstick style of some of this. If anything, Reynolds gets a hysterical turn from Dom DeLouise. He outdoes his silly work in Silent Movie and creates a genuine character here.
A very literate and slow-moving film version of the famous stage play about a troubled teenager who blinds several horses in a stable one night out of sexual frustration and religious guilt. The central performances, especially the lead work by Richard Burton, are hypnotic. As directed by Sidney Lumet, this is a psychological film that feels like a detective mood piece.
The first film by David Lynch is one of the most bizarre, disturbing, and striking things you will ever see. There has never been a movie that has portrayed the suffocation of loneliness in the same way that this one does. The picture oozes a bleak, deadening atmosphere, and yet it is quite humorous. But just when you start to laugh at something, a sickening image is there to throw you off guard again. Eraserhead has little story to speak of; it is really more something to experience with your senses and subconscious. The film has inspired many independent filmmakers in showing that creative expression can be put on screen in unlimited ways.
A quite humorous Jerry Lewis movie, made before he did his famous Nutty Professor. In this one, he plays a guy does menial jobs for the big shots at a movie studio. Along the way, there are quite a few hysterical sight gags and some clever dialogue. A favorite scene comes when Lewis tries to eat his lunch while hopping from movie set to movie set--no matter where he goes, he keeps getting interrupted by whatever film is being shot at the time.
E. T. was very, very popular and very, very good. It is a modern fairy tale that is so obvious that after I had seen it, I kind of felt that I had seen it before--in my fantasies. The film has as much heart as a couple of years worth of movies. Once all its commercialism has left, it will stand as a gem.
Another of the films that is placed in the "early, funny Woody Allen" period. This one is an episodic exploration of sex, the only film of Allen's that is preoccupied entirely with that subject. The last two sequences are generally considered to be the best--in the first, a large female breast terrorizes a small comunity (you have to see it to believe it) and the second is one of the most creative and memorable comedy sequences ever filmed. It all takes place in a male's body, with Woody playing a sperm who is hesitant to be ejected. The film as a whole is a mixed bag, and is just a bit offensive (some may say daring), but it is mostly interesting because it is energetically filmed and Allen expertly spoofs the subject matter more often than not. Gene Wilder seduces a sheep in one sequence.
Excalibur is one of the most inspired films to come out in years. John Boorman directed with a lust for life, and I can't think of one image that's bad. The story is cyclical--about the King Arthur legend--and it grows on you. Particularly interesting is its showing of the kings and knights needing ladies around. I'm not sure if there's a major point to the movie, but it sends one out of the theater subconsciously more aware of the horror and wonder of life.
An ingenious, smashing movie directed by John Woo, who makes shoot-outs and explosions look like works of art. If you can accept the concept of a good guy and a bad guy having their faces surgically altered so they can look exactly like the other person, then you will be satisfied with this movie on many levels. Face/Off quickly sets up and maintains a combination of action, suspense, sly humor, and devilishly clever plot twists along with terrific acting from John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. And ACT they must: for most of the movie, Travolta has to communicate to the audience that his body is possessed by Cage's murderous personality, and Cage must show that he is inhabited by Travolta's obsessive and hurt nature. They both succeed brilliantly. Cage, an old pro at playing the kook, (see his outrageous performance in Vampire's Kiss) perfectly captures the warmth that Travolta's character has, as well as his dedication to his job--which basically is to capture Cage. Confusing? John Travolta has the task of making the wild eyes and outlandish leering grins that Nicolas Cage is known for. The whole effect has loosened up Travolta's acting style in a lively way--his slick performance in Pulp Fiction seems a little flat compared to his work here. Although the ending sequences seem to exasperate the audience a little--you begin to woder when the plot will really resolve itself--this is quite an astounding piece of work. Face/Off captures the genuine kinetic excitement that gets us interested in movies to begin with.
Probably the most accessible of Ingmar Bergman's many films. The film tells the story of two children who must adapt to their new lifestyles when their father dies and their mother marries an ultra-strict minister. It won the Academy Award as Best Foreign Film of 1983.
A team of scientists is minaturized and injected into the body of an important dying man in an effort to save his life. The special effects, which won an Oscar in 1966, have not all held up well (parts look as if the team is floating through some kind of car wash) but how can one resist watching a movie that has Rachel Welch swimming around inside a man's body?
The Coen brothers' best movie--at least the one that even non-fans of their kind of trickery find interesting. The two are excellent filmmakers, but that I find that the problem with most of their movies is that their scripts are quite unintelligable. Ironically, they won the Original Screenplay Oscar for this film. Starring Frances McDormand and William H. Macy.
The quintessential eighties teen movie. Sean Penn turns in a classic performance as Jeff Spicoli, the likeable surfer-pothead. He reaches his peak in a scene in which one of his teachers, Mr Hand, (Ray Walston) gets angry at him for being late to class and rips up his schedule. The dumbfounded anti-student turns to the teacher, hesitates a moment before breaking into a dumb, slack look and says "You.....dick!"
The director's day off, too. John Hughes must have reached into his bottom drawer to get this script. Parts of it are funny. Most of it is a throwaway.
A musical masterpiece. Amazingly, it lost the Oscar to The French Connection, one of the best cop films ever, but a film that is not nearly as timeless. Topol plays Tevye, a Jewish milkman at the turn of the century who is utterly devoted to his religion. The story shows how each of his daughters prefer to be married. The oldest has to beg to marry the man she wants, rather than have it arranged. The next does not choose to ask for permission to marry her lover, and the last wants to marry a man who is not of the same faith. It seems like a simple set-up, but it doesn't take long to see that this plot device is being used to show that time is moving on and many traditions are changing. There are so many great songs: "If I Were A Rich Man", "Matchmaker, Matchmaker", "To Life," are all here, and most beautiful of all is "Sunrise, Sunset." The wedding scene that contains that song must be one of the loveliest ever put on film. Few musicals are as emotional and spectacular as this, but another great one, Cabaret, came out the next year.
Five Easy Pieces took a long time to get onto videotape. I read a number of times that it is supposed to be one of the best of the seventies. I found the picture to be loose but interesting. It has that peculiar diner scene in which Jack Nicholson wants exactly what he wants. But the picture also has a "lost" atmosphere, and comments about the environment, and relationships and intellectuals. Also starring Karen Black.
This is a very good anthology of Pauline Kael’s writings, but capsule reviews are very unsatisfying to those who are familiar with the strengths of her reviews as they were originally written. Kael is known for her flowing, “conversational” writing style; by chopping many of her reviews into two or three paragraphs, the main reasons for reading her in the first place tend to evaporate. In a typical Kael review, she literally layered opinions on top of opinions. It was not enough for her to simply review a movie--she had to express exactly how the directors and actors had grown (or diminished themselves). One looked forward to reading her because she had such a superb way of relating the film she was writing about to other films, whether by the same director or not, and she could intelligently speculate on how the film tied in to current events or may have been a product of them. She would talk expertly about how many films seemed to evolve out of other less superior ones and then expand due to a director’s vision and desire to update a particular theme. Kael focused on what a movie is about--what it is really saying--and her dedication and playfulness was quite infectious (the many reviewers who used her style became known as Paulettes.) For a reference book, 5001 Nights At The Movies is fun to look through; it is full of reviews but it is Kael-lite. She didn’t call one of her best books Deeper Into Movies for nothing!
Regarded as director David Cronenberg's best film. It felt as if he had taken everything that he had learned as a filmmaker and finally run with it. It also helped that he had his most interesting script yet, and a great turn from Jeff Goldblum (his best role--and somewhat overlooked.) A man's body is molecularly molded with a fly, and we get to watch his gradual deterioration. It's an utterly fascinating movie. Also starring Geena Davis.
After John Carpenter's Halloween, there was no telling what to expect, but amazingly, The Fog, his third major feature, is a sustained, simple, and involving work. One almost immediately senses the presence of a young filmmaker who is doing his damnedest to achieve an effort through the use of his still developing skills. Carpenter really doesn't have to say much with the horror genre he works with; it's what he shows that is important, and The Fog, sure enough, is a visual triumph. There is much confidence to be seen here, and with nearly every frame wonderfully planned out, it is all carefully executed. The film has a dark, realistic look to it, and just as in Halloween, Carpenter leaves plenty of room for anything to pop out at any time. And that's exactly what happens. There are more quick, sharp gasps and shrieks heard from the audience in the film than from any other horror film in a long time.
The Fog attains its shock value honestly--it isn't as repulsive as The Exorcist or as intricate as The Omen. It's all fun--nineteen fiftyish horror tastefully brought up to date. Best of all, the audience seems to realize that it is dealing with a director who like to play games. Sure, he's on our side, but everyone knows Carpenter isn't going to let anyone leave the theater without receiving at least a few squirms in their seat first. What Carpenter has been exploring in his past two films is the underlying subject of death, of course. All they seem to say is that death is inevitable, so evil will lurk on, and people will be forced to be pessimistic on all counts of life. It isn't a bad thing to be saying because it's downright true. Carpenter doesn't seem to be a devious cynic, but he wants to keep reminding us that in the end, life has the last laugh on us.
Whereas Halloween dealt with only the terror of death, The Fog sacrifices a bit of suspense and horror in order to branch out and touch slightly on subjects related to death. Apparently, to Carpenter, it is religion that stands in the way of making death take its place as the admitted number one fear of all human beings. He must feel that because of the popularity of the concepts of heaven and hell, the idea of oblivion stays under the covers. And so, in order to compensate, Carpenter introduces a priest as one of the characters, and stages much of the horror in a church, complete with crucifixes glowing through the fog, and bloodstained arms smashing through stained glass windows. Surprisingly, the overall effect is not demonically profound, but it isn't the type of stuff one is likely to quickly forget.
Forbidden Games is a French gem about two children who live during World War Two. The boy steals crosses to impress the girl, and they have the decency and thought to bury small animals and even bugs. The look of the film, the feel of it, is unforgettable. It won the Oscar as Best Foreign Film.
One of the best cop films of the eighties. Paul Newman digs into his role in a way that reminds one of why he became such a great, charismatic actor. His work here and in Slapshot four years earlier ranks with the best performances that he has ever given.
Billy Wilder's last exceptional film. Walter Matthau is wonderful in the role of a shyster lawyer who tries to make money for himself and his brother-in law (Jack Lemmon), a cameraman who is injured on the sidelines of a football game. The film is highly entertaining, although Lemmon, so wildly funny in other Wilder films, is a little subdued here. Matthau won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his sly performance.
A devastating documentary film by Spike Lee. Interviews and archival footage tell the story of four girls who were killed by a church bombing in the mid sixties.
The Best Picture Oscar Winner of 1971 is one of the most exciting cop thrillers ever made. Gene Hackman seemed born to play the part of Popeye Doyle, the hard-nosed undercover officer who is after drug smugglers. All those compilations of the great scenes in movies inevitably contain a part from this movie--the famous car chase in which Hackman is determined to beat out the subway car that contains a vicious criminal. William Friedkin won the Best Director Award and went on to make the appalling The Exorcist.
The second James Bond film is considered to be among the very best in the series. The highlight is a fight in a train between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw (The Sting, Jaws.)
Of special interest because it is one of the few motion pictures about the blacklisting period in the fifties. Many of the people who worked on this film had been blacklisted themselves. Woody Allen stars in his first "serious" role and does a very good job.
A Vietnam war film that clearly divides into two sequences. The first, set in a hellish and robotic boot camp is particularly effective. But Stanley Kubrick captures a meaningless and violent atmosphere throughout the film, much as he did in his earlier A CLockwork Orange.
Plainly and simply one of the greatest films ever made. There was little to suggest from his earlier films that Francis Ford Coppola would create a masterpiece of this magnitude. Everything about The Godfather is first-rate and memorable-- the acting, the cinematograpy, the editing, the haunting music, and above all, the story. The narrative is involving to the extent that most of the film impresses itself on one's memory in the same way that reading a great book does. There are numerous individual scenes in this film that are more powerful in themselves than other gangster films are in their entirety. Marlon Brando won an Academy Award for his performance, but it is clear that Al Pacino is equally as astounding in the role of Michael Corleone. You can't look at Robert Duvall and James Caan in another picture without thinking of them in this one.
The Godfather is a classic, and The Godfather Part II, although slower paced, is just as great. It's even more complex than the first film, and less driven by violent scenes. Francis Ford Coppola shows us the young Godfather, Vito Corleone, becoming established and juxtaposes it with the new head of the family, his son, Michael, trying to keep his power intact. The scenes of young Vito (sensitively played by Robert DeNiro) are lessons in how movies can make us feel as if we are living with characters in another time and place.
Watching The Godfather Part III is like watching a confusing tribute to The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, two of the greatest movies ever made. One of he most startling problems with the new film is that it is a homage that was made by the same director who filmed the original masterpieces. This time around, instead of presenting a powerful, vivid, (and understandable) story, what Francis Ford Coppola ends up with is a great looking, though emotionally stale and half-scripted piece of work. It salutes its predecessors instead of getting the real job done, which is to continue the engaging character studies. At its worst, The Godfather Part III feels like Coppola's cinematic tour of the locations where the original films were shot.
Coppola was once was an intelligent, daring and influential storyteller and moviemaker--a truly great director. His sensibility in getting ideas across on screen has been long gone. The Godfather Part III has a promising opening, a seeming return to the discipline that helped propel the original stories. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has made the family business legitimate and receives an honorary award from the Vatican, and his son, (Franc D'Ambrosio) daughter (Sophia Coppola) and nephew (Andy Garcia) are introduced. There is an interesting scene between Michael and his separated wife, Kay, (Diane Keaton) in which she tells him that she liked him better when he was "a common Mafia hood." Another good idea was to have Michael's own son be uninterested in having anything to do with the family's work.
Before long, the film's plot raises questions that require explanations, an expansiveness, and Coppola and his co-writer, Mario Puzo, provide little grasp of deeper meanings as to why characters are behaving as they do. One yearns to see more of how Michael Corleone legitimated himself, of how Michael's daughter, here portrayed as little more than a girl, was chosen to head the family business should anything happen to her father. Not enough is done with the part of the family lawyer; Robert Duvall's background intensity is desperately missed. None of the supporting characters are as vivid in the mind as, say, Hyman Roth from The Godfather Part II. The neglected Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna) is meant to be an arrogant criminal (like Don Fanucci in Godfather II) but one never feels any satisfaction in his demise because we never really know what he did wrong to the Corleone family in the first place. One man (Eli Wallach) is described as "a friend from the old days" (like Frank Pentangelli in Godfather II), another is a corrupt cardinal, another a German banker, and that's all they are. Even the character of Moe Green, the casino owner from the original film made a more memorable impression than an outright assassin does here.
Then there is the major problem with the Andy Garcia character, who comes on jittery and hot tempered like his father Sonny once was, and halfway through the film somehow takes on the delicate mannerisms of the young Vito Corleone, as portrayed by Robert DeNiro in the second installment. The audience doesn't have a clue as to what brought this startling change about. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that whereas in the first two films death carried a tragic force no matter who the person was, in The Godfather Part III, when somebody dies, it's just a matter of whether they're a good guy or a bad guy.
I suppose Ghostbusters II is moderately entertaining. I dislike the original--to me, it was a big commercial ego trip for everyone involved. It's a weird summer, all right. Mostly, we're watching remakes of earlier pictures. I don't know when I've seen so many remakes--and oddly enough, many of the originals are less than ten years old! Ideas must be needed.
Extremely moving and powerful. Matthew Broderick plays the leader of a group of black soldiers who fight in the civil war. It's a great subject for a movie, and the results are memorable.
Ian McKellen gives a great performance in this film about the last years of the man who directed Frankenstein and other horror films of the thirties. Nicely directed by Bill Condon, who also adapted the screenplay, for which he won an Oscar. Brendan Frasier has his best part to date.
Often voted the best of the entire James Bond series. It has a very good premise: a criminal mastermind wants to possess a fortune and power--so he schemes to take over Fort Knox itself. Gert Frobe plays Goldfinger, the most interesting of all the Bond villians.
A frequently great, large-scale western. It has become the best-liked of director Sergio Leone's "spaghetti" westerns (it was actually shot in Italy.) Clint Eastwood doesn't have much dialogue, but he has a terrific presence in this movie, surely one of his best.
Something of a Martin Scorsese "comeback" film; it contained his most vivid work since Raging Bull ten years earlier. Starring Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro, and in an Oscar winning performance, Joe Pesci.
It made Dustin Hoffman a star, and won Mike Nichols a best director Oscar. The film is considered a landmark in cinema history. Buck Henry wrote the clever screenplay about a confused young man who has an affair with an older woman (Anne Bancroft in a terrific performance.)
Corny and likeable comedy that contains at least a handful of catchy songs.
A lot of fun, probably the best animated feature since Watership Down in 1978. Very funny, hardly boring--Vincent Price's characterization is hysterical, the music is catchy. Walt Disney himself would be proud.
The movie year of 1994 is an altogether different story--it's like a demented mental wrestling match. In one corner is the outrageously popular Forrest Gump; in the other corner is the indescribably pulpy Pulp Fiction. I don't believe that either of these two films are terrible at all, but neither is the masterpiece that some people are making them out to be.
Originally, Forrest Gump received numerous favorable reviews, but in recent months a bizarre, frequently negative re-evaluation of the film has been taking place. Pulp Fiction, also highly praised at the start, and still going strong, is often thought to be the better film partly because Forrest Gump is supposedly a celebration of "dumbness." Strangely enough, there are some who hate Forrest Gump because they feel it is a movie that praises a moron--but who love Pulp Fiction even though it is a movie that makes a big deal over a bunch of morons.
Smiling spitefully in the shadow of the popularity of these two films is Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, called the most controversial film of 1994. Perhaps in order to understand the tone of "NBK", one would have to look at a moment from the 1983 version of Scarface that Oliver Stone scripted. In a dinner scene, a drunken Tony Montana (Al Pacino) staggers through a restaurant and tells other patrons "You need someone like me. You need someone you can point your fingers at and say, there--there's the bad guy! You think you're good--you're not good. You're all bad. You just know how to hide it. With me, I don't hide anything. I always tell the truth. I always tell the truth--even when I lie." Natural Born Killers takes these ideas and magnifies them in a way that fascinates and angers.
There are some artists who don't know when to stop. Hail Mary is the new picture by Jean- Luc Godard, and I was especially interested in seeing it because of the immediate controversy that surrounded it. The Pope quickly condemned the movie; church groups have been picketing it. While I was on line at the theater, a woman was walking around and saying things like "it is a mortal sin to watch this movie." That turned out to be the highlight of the evening.
The movie was garbage--a sheer waste of time. Some intelligent people make the absolute dumbest movies. The problem is that this movie isn't enjoyable on even a dumb level. Hail Mary is just plain dumb. There is virtually no cohesiveness throughout; images are slapped together, the dialogue has no intensity. I found hardly an understandable idea in the whole movie. It's a director's folly.
Some filmmakers reach a very fortunate point at which they can truly make the kinds of movies that they want to make. No doubt many terrific films have been made by men who aren't under much of studio pressure. They reach a stage where they don't have to be "commercial"; they can edit their picture any which way- they don't need known or even aspiring actors. Often, after a director has a hit picture, he is allowed to have somewhat more "personal freedom" on the next one that he films. It's interesting to see what happens when a filmmaker really tries to say something and shoot the works. Many of the best and worst movies ever made were done by the director being trusted to pull a particular vision together. However, it is awful when a talented person reaches his state of grace and then doesn't know what to do with it. Why make a movie just for the sake of seeing your name on the screen every couple of years?
Godard's Hail Mary is angering. For one thing, if it had never been publicized that the story involves some kind of retelling of the lives of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, many would have never figured even that much out. Godard is playing the part of the artist as spiritual converter. He likes to use implications, but most often the religious bullets that are used here don't penetrate the victims--the audience. Obsession with God and religion just doesn't work well on the screen. (Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen are among the few who can bring it off.) Hail Mary demonstrates that one person can indeed stir up much friction through one film. But a movie that only makes implications will never really reach anyone because the audience will not recognize the main theme, if there is one at all. The confusion of trying to figure everything out eventually gets annoying.
I found Hail Mary to be far less offensive than 1979's Monty Python's Life Of Brian, yet Godard's picture seems to be coming under more fire. No matter- it will soon be forgotten and word of mouth will soon create the next controversial film. Recently, Godard has been saying things like "a voice told me to make this film." You have to be intrigued by his sarcasm. It's apparent that he wants to make religious groups furious. He wants to make them look stupid. He's definitely making plenty of enemies. At one film festival, some guy walked over to Godard and threw a pie in his face.
John Waters, who made a series of gross-out independent films in Baltimore (Pink Flamingos), toned it down for this humorous movie about a girl (Ricki Lake) who yearns to appear on the local American Bandstand-style dance show. The results are very likable; a truthful statement about race relations suddenly works itself in about half way through. Sadly, cross-dressing actor Divine died shortly before this movie was released; it was his best work ever. Also with Jerry Stiller and Deborah Harry.
John Carpenter's horror movie became one of the most successful independent films made up to that time. A video rental favorite, Halloween is about a psychopath who murders teenagers. It remains frightening to this day because of realistic, unpretentious acting and the natural suburban settings that are beautiful at day and downright creepy at night. Jamie Lee Curtis (the daughter of Janet Leigh) is especially good.
An overrated movie. But it's mostly likeable and funny. Woody cruises through his familiar territory and themes. He is funny to watch here, and Dianne Wiest is very good. A nice piece of work.
Todd Solendz has made a disturbing film that establishes him as one of our best young directors. Only his second widely distributed film, he achieves a level of confidence and daring that few filmmakers ever display. Happiness is kind of a Nashville of loners and assorted troubled individuals; although a few of the characters look content, each and every person in the movie is in terrific misery. Dylan Baker is just one of the standout actors, portraying a pedophile in a "nice man next door" manner. The whole thing is tense and unpredictible--it's like a series of good short stories that all tie together.
The first Beatles film is their best live-action feature by far.
Wonderfully off-beat, this is one of the classic cult movies of the seventies. It's hard to think of another film in which an eighteen year old guy falls in love with an eighty year old woman. Directed by Hal Ashby, a somewhat under-rated and versatile director (The Last Detail, Being There.)
Moving Paul Mazursky film about an elderly man who travels to see his children at various places in the United States.
Heartbreaking film about a deaf-mute man who takes a liking to a young woman. Alan Arkin is excellent in the lead role.
I guess it's a good thing that I saw Heathers when I did, because it stayed around barely two weeks. Like River's Edge, I'm not sure of what to think about it. River's Edge had a strong, lost atmosphere, and an angry tone. Heathers has little atmosphere and doesn't seem especially angry. It doesn't seem especially concerned, either. It's more clever than anything. Heathers actually tries to make a joke out of teenage suicides. The characters don't penetrate--you don't feel for them. The two main characters murder some popular kids in their school, and make it look as if they had killed themselves. They write notes for them! I'm surprised that the film hasn't sparked more controversy. Maybe it has made many people angry, but the papers and big news magazines don't want to make anything of it. If Time in particular had put the picture as its cover story, Heathers would have stayed around longer and would have made millions more. I love satire--Network has always been one of my favorite movies--but this Heathers picture is truly offensive. Teen suicide is not a funny thing--suicide of any kind isn't funny. The suicidal lead character in Harold And Maude did funny things, but you felt for the guy. That movie was concerned with life--Heathers has no hope--just a casual "life sucks" attitude. The picture could give teens ideas. I read that the teen suicide rate has doubled in the past twenty years.
Near the beginning of Henry & June, Anais Nin and Henry Miller argue about D.H. Lawrence. According to Miller, Lawrence made too big a deal out of sex. That statement sets the tone of much of the entire film. In truth, Henry & June doesn't treat sex too seriously, but the sex scenes in the film are being treated very seriously--seriously enough to persuade the M.P.A.A. to create a new rating. In the previous rating system, Henry & June received a definite "X" rating. But there is too much talent and too many honest explorations to brand the picture pornographic.
In Henry & June, the sex is all right out in the open. During the film, the two main characters attend a film in which there is nudity, and a number of people in the audience become very offended, standing and shouting at the screen. Many people might feel the same way about this film. It all depends on one's personal tastes. Some will find the sex scenes shocking, and others will find nothing new in them that they haven't seen before, and will be a little bored. Still others will find the sex scenes to be a crucial part of a film that is very much about the lust for life, with sex being the ultimate representation of that life. In most films, the sex scenes can be separated from the rest of the picture. Frequently, they don't have to be filmed in the first place. In Henry & June, the sex scenes are used to express the characters' drives and desires. Only a few exist for the fun of it. After a while, the sex scenes flow into the narrative of the picture--into the look and feel of it.
Philip Kaufman has perhaps set up a landmark in recent cinema. Never before has a film used the expression of sexuality so consistently to propel the story forward. There has never been so much nudity and so many sexual situations in an American major studio release. In 1973, Last Tango In Paris used sex to kick open the door to greater personal expression, and Henry & June shoves the door open much wider. Last Tango had Marlon Brando in the middle of sexual episodes that tried to make eroticism seem artistic and shameless. Both of these films are similar--for one thing, both take place in Paris and both are after a certain kind of truth. Bertolucci's film was a spit in the face of romance and what moviegoers took for granted on the screen. (And some of it felt as if it was being made up as it went along.) By using Brando, he liberated movies from past conventions. Liberation is a key theme in Henry & June. It doesn't contain anyone who is nearly as famous or as great as Brando, but it manages to loosen traditions anyway, and its view is much more affectionate and funny than it is bitter. Why isn't the sexuality that is being expressed in Henry & June creating a bigger fuss? I think it's because for all the sex and nudity in it, the film is a little boring. Some people might find it to be very boring. Others will find it to be visually intoxicating, playful, and emotionally stimulating.
Hero At Large would have been a good television movie, but it's quite a bit of fun on the large screen anyway. This is due both to John Ritter's extremely likable performance as a simple young man who really wants to care about other people, and a generally entertaining script.
At times, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids comes down with an acute case of Disneyitis. But that was to be expected, as it is a Disney film. It had a terrific coming attraction that showed one of the bite sized kids swimming around in a cereal bowl, and then being picked up with a spoon and about to be shoved into Dad's mouth. "Dad, don't eat me!" screams the kid. When that scene finally arrives in the film, it somehow isn't nearly that funny.
The picture has made over $100 million dollars, but much of the film was missing something for me. The special effects are very good, but the picture has little real cleverness; it isn't nutty enough. Kids being shrunk down and getting lost in their own backyard sounded neat, but not enough is done with it. There's a terrific scene with a bee, but far too much time is spent with an ant and a scorpion. The dialogue isn't especially witty, and the indoor scenes don't have any distinctive look. Work certainly went into the picture, but it seems like a factory line product.
George C. Scott is powerful and yet quite hysterically funny in this satire about a city hospital staff that seems to screw everything up. Aides aren't always sure of who is a patient and who is a co-worker, medications are misgiven and so forth. A kook starts murdering people on the premises--in the middle of all this, a strike breaks out among certain hospital workers. Paddy Chayefsky won another writing Oscar for this one Marty and Network were also winners.) He is the only person to win three writing Oscars by himself.
The Howling has intelligent lines in the script, and is most open in exploring our animal nature. At the end, a newswoman turns into a wolflike creature after she explains that "we fight a battle each day in trying to overcome our animality." She means we civilize each other constantly.
The mood of Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives is the opposite of Singles, which was appropriately released on the same day. You can't picture anyone in Woody's film being able to sit down for ten minutes without having some kind of moral or conscious crisis. The camera is shaky, the editing intentionally sloppy; in short clips the film looks awful. But over the long haul, the technique works. One is made to feel as though you are intruding on the character's lives.
Husbands and Wives sacrifices some of the "New York feel" and the religious obsessions that have lingered over some of Allen's other films. He concentrates more on domestic issues here, and achieves an intensity that is rare in contemporary films. His friendship with the college student here is more believable than his one with Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan. There is also a type of mischief, a slyness in this film and in Allen's performance that has not made itself seen before in this director's more serious work.
Apparently it's not enough for Allen to try to be Bergman or Fellini or Fritz Lang--now he wants to mimic the style of John Cassavetes. I think that Husbands and Wives is about how we stay with partners who are really not deeply compatible with ourselves. Allen has stacked the deck and given himself the two best intellectual partners (Mia Farrow and Juliette Lewis.) He sticks his other male characters with one woman who is hard to get along with, and another who is simply written as being an air-headed health food and astrology buff.
As interesting as much of this film is, one can't help thinking that it is Woody Allen's way of saying "You think my secret sexual relationship with my ex-girlfriend's adopted college-aged daughter is screwed up--well, you should take a good look at yourselves." What comes across while watching the film is basically the same message from Annie Hall-- relationships are a crazy aspect of life.
Tense, memorable film about a young pool player, played with bravado by Paul Newman. George C. Scott and Jackie Gleason also star.
Kathleen Quinlan gives her finest performance in this film about a severely depressed teenager.
Touching film with Gene Hackman as a man trying to get on the good side of his elderly father.
Richard Brooks directed this frightening film about two men who murder a family in their home and walk away with a few bucks.
It's being called "sequel summer" and it's true--there are a lot of sequels to successful films coming out this summer. But during the 1980s, what summer hasn't had sequels? Last year's summer films included Crocodile Dundee II, Rambo III, Arthur 2, etc. This year we have Indiana Jones III, Ghostbusters II, Star Trek V, Karate Kid III, Lethal Weapon II, Nightmare On Elm Street V, Friday The Thirteenth VIII! It does seem like we're plastered with sequels this summer. But we'll go to the movies anyway--how much else is there to do?
The best sequel of the summer will no doubt be Spielberg's Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. It is basically a remake of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, but who cares? It has some good lines, plenty of action, a confident acting job by Harrison Ford and of course, Sean Connery. These kinds of pictures try to give off hope--it's like, if all this happens to this guy, how big can your problems be?
The summer movies are upon us, and there are still many more to come. It seems that each year (at least since 1983) I have trouble coming up with ten truly good movies to recommend. This year is already off to a familiar start--and the year is over half over! Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade is the runaway summer film of the year. I saw it a second time on Father's Day with my father. I took my father to see Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom on Father's Day of 1984--so I figured it would be ironic to take him to see the new flick on the same holiday five years later. He really liked the picture. The new Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade seems to have it all in terms of the action genre. It has already made around $150 million dollars.
Philip Kaufman is a versatile director who has made films about everything from Jesse James (The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid) to street gangs (The Wanderers) to the space race (The Right Stuff). This one, only his third film, is a loose remake of the famous science fiction film from the fifties. The basic story is the same--alien seeds fall to Earth and hatch duplicates of people. The horror is that the "new" people are little more that ineffectual robots. In turn, they expose all of the "real" people in order to take over the world. The first film is rightly regarded as a small classic, and this version is on the same par. It is also full of sly humor. The already zombie-ish Donald Sutherland is perfect in this, and Brooke Adams and Jeff Goldblum do well with their small parts.
A cult film that is talked about more for the many comedians who appear in it than for whether the final product is totally, genuinely funny. Stanley Kramer took a break from his big-themed productions and decided to make a movie with no theme, but yet in a way, he wanted nothing less than to make the funniest movie of all time. This overlong film doesn't come close to that, but it has its moments, and it is fun to watch the many different comics. With Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, Jonathan Winters, Jimmy Durante, and many others. (Jerry Lewis, The Three Stooges, and more show up in cameos.) The musical score is very catchy.
Outrageously entertaining and famous film by Steven Spielberg. He had already stunned people with his TV movie Duel (about a driverless truck chasing a man down) but it was this film that made him a household name. If this incredible director had never made another movie, he would still be written about and admired because of Jaws. In fact, Spielberg doesn't simply make movies; this is a man who more often than not makes cultural landmarks.
There have been numerous documentaries and television movies about John F. Kennedy, but there is still an intense fascination as to what exactly brought about his assassination. The events of November 22, 1963, created the greatest public-as-private-eye case in modern history. We still want to know how many people fired shots at Kennedy that day, and if Lee Harvey Oswald really was, as he claimed to be, "a patsy." We still want to know if the Warren Commission Report was correct, and if there was a conspiracy against the president.
The whole thing has meant very much to the world, has obsessed so many, maybe not so much because of the yearning for justice to be done, but because John F. Kennedy was generally seen as being a charismatic man, and an emotionally stirring speaker who was cut down in the prime of his life. Many of his speeches seemed compassionate; his words seemed to count. And suddenly, he was dead.
Enter Oliver Stone. Having had the last word on the Vietnam War in Platoon, and yet another last word on it in Born On The Fourth Of July, he no doubt felt compelled to have the last word on the murder of John F. Kennedy, because he, as does many others, feels it ties in with Vietnam. Stone sees the assassination occurring mostly because of Kennedy's wanting to get of that war. The script for JFK probably caused so much controversy because it basically turned what we had all been taught about Lee Harvey Oswald upside-down. In the movie, it sometimes seems like practically everyone is guilty for shooting Kennedy except Oswald. Sometimes cameos are a bad idea because thoughts sway from the movie you are watching to the classic movies that you saw these reliable actors in (and liked them better in.) There's definitely something missing in JFK--namely, JFK.
At one point, JFK falls into the same trap that All The President's Men fell into back in 1976. It presents a character, here played very well by Donald Sutherland, that refuses to say who he is, but who has supposedly been close enough to what has happened so that he can basically tie everything that the investigator has been looking for together . All The President's Men had its Deep Throat, JFK has its General X. It's a cop-out movie device. These characters exist mainly to propel the story forward and they end up contradicting part of the theme of what we are watching. They're mysterious all-seeing figures in movies that are supposed to strip down mystery. Why is it that they never pop up closer to the time of the crime, when they were really needed?
The wonderful musical soundtrack redeems this otherwise average Disney film. The songs include the Oscar winning "The Bare Necessities" and "I Wanna Be Like You." The animation is very good, as it usually is from the Disney people.
A well done documentary about Robert Evans, the man who oversaw the production of some of the most popular films of the late sixties and early seventies. He was in involved with Love Story, and Chinatown, among many others. The film traces Evan's rise and fall--the production deals, his marriage to Ali MacGraw, the many celebrities who were in his circle, the unfortunate descent into drug use. One feels a bit sad watching it all: how does one top producing The Godfather? The film is always interesting, and there are some jarring revelations, one being that in spite of all the adulation and numerous women that Evans appeared in photos with, he still feels like a lonely man. Film buffs will love seeing the "making of" scenes in the film, especially those moments that show a young Mia Farrow playfully skipping around on the set of Rosemary's Baby.
Surely, when Paramount billed the remake of King Kong as "the most original motion picture event of all time," they were off by quite a bit, but King Kong is indeed, the best and most pleasing adventure film in a very long time. Although the story of Kong has been changed so as to differ form the original, its impact is the same. Jeff Bridges plays Jack, a representative of an oil company who attempts to stowaway aboard a vessel carrying officials of another oil company. The vessel is to carry the officials to a fog surrounded island that they believe contains millions upon millions of gallons of oil.
Jack already knows of this island, and he has intentions not of getting oil for his company, but of exploring the island to find out what "creature" might have killed a number of people on a yachting trip that was roaming close to the island. So, a little while after the vessel is on its way, Jack, being an honest guy, shows himself to the officials and proceeds to tell them why he must come along. Unfortunately, they do not believe what he says, and he is immediately escorted to a downstairs cabin of the vessel. Coincidentally, on the way there, he sights a raft that contains Dwan (Jessica Lange) who is a would be actress and a survivor of the fatal yacht trip. While Dwan is recovering in the vessel, Jack's reason for coming is believed by the officials and also, the island is sighted. However, about five nights later, not long after the island is looked at by Jack, Dwan and the officials, Dwan is kidnapped off the vessel by natives and strung up on a stairway platform as a sacrifice from that certain someone who we all have been waiting to see since the beginning of this picture. Kong now finally makes his entrance and takes Dwan back with him into the thick of the forest where he will study, play with, and yes, love her.
Next, after Kong kills a snake and some men, Jack rescues Dwan and Kong is captured and brought to New York City as an act to be shown to the people. Naturally, he escapes from the metal cage he is being held in, and he begins to roam through the streets, looking for Dwan. He finds her, and then climbs the twin towers, to his doom. Just as many people gaped at the original King Kong when it first was released, the remake offers us many scenes, both expected and unexpected, which we ourselves find interesting. Many of these scenes seem more like a parody of the original than a remake of it, but the main subplot of the first one is transferred to the new one excellently. That is, the highlights of both of the films always come when the beauty and the beast are together.
A Martin Scorsese peculiarity. A famous talk show host is kidnapped by a stand-up comedian who hopes to use the situation to become famous himself--and when all is said and done, he does. The film is monotonous and nerve-racking to some, hypnotic and original to others. Jerry Lewis is outstanding in the Johnny Carson-ish role. He expertly conveys the feeling of a very famous man who just wants some privacy from time to time. At times, his performance borders on being powerful, which is not at all what one expects from the great comic. Robert DeNiro gives one of his most bizarre perfomances as Rupert Pupkin, a man who refuses to be rejected anymore. You just can't picture DeNiro's character as a person in real life, but that somehow adds a further element of satire to the story.
A little seen film about a man (Alan Bates) who commits himself to an insane asylum during wartime. This is a cult film that is worth seeking out. With the pretty Genevieve Bujold.
A detective film, directed by Alan J. Pakula, that features Jane Fonda in one of her very best roles as Bree, a prostitute. Also with Donald Sutherland, one of the hottest character actors of the time.
Top Disney. The story is fun, the music is wonderful. Enjoyment all the way through. The characters are memorable and funny. This one has everything.
In the early to mid seventies, American motion pictures were at an innovative peak, and Jack Nicholson was the most exciting actor we had. This film is the first of three of his best films and best performances. Chinatown and Cuckoo's Nest would follow in rapid succession, and Nicholson was regarded with awe, as he still frequently is today. It is not unusual for him to be the best thing about a movie, but in this case, the movies themselves are also well worth seeing, due to their interesting stories and dynamic acting all around. In The Last Detail Nicholson plays a sailor who is required to transfer another younger sailor (Randy Quaid) to prison because he was caught stealing. The film quickly turns into a road movie about the need of the men to experience life to the fullest. Directed by Hal Ashby, who would create a number of interesting films of the period, including Bound For Glory and Coming Home. He died rather young.
A rather slow moving, but absolutely striking film about incredibly lonely people in a small Texas town in the fifties. It is widely considered to be among the greatest films of the seventies. Its power and significance has never diminished because the director, Peter Bogdanovich, crafted his characters with great care and portrayed all of them in a perceptive and humane way. It is to his credit that although the movie was shot in black and white, the settings and overall atmosphere seem real in ways that most color films of this kind never are. The film contains excellent, and never intrusive, cinematography and heartbreaking "natural" acting by Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn and many others.
Notorious, and I think, over-rated Bernardo Bertolucci film about a grieving man who shacks up with a much younger woman he has never met before. They mostly have sex and don't bother to tell each other their names. In the meantime, a friend is in the process of making a documentary about the woman. I think that the film is meant to be a spit in the face of "romance" and it does try to tell the story in a manner in which we are not used to. Marlon Brando, of all people is the draw here, and he is at his best--even improvising a long speech to his deceased mother. Before long, I grow bored with this piece and find it (and its lewd sex scenes) a chore to sit through. But there are many who consider Last Tango to be a masterpiece.
Every year, there are perhaps three or four controversial pictures. Most often the talk is started from the newspapers and from Time cover stories. During 1988, Mississippi Burning and especially The Last Temptation Of Christ made headlines. There have been other controversial movies in the eighties--among them Rambo II and III, Full Metal Jacket, numerous horror films, last year's The Accused. I suppose 1988 was a full year for controversial movies, but it seems a while since the last REAL controversial movie.
During the seventies, we had M.A.S.H., A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, Looking For Mr. Goodbar, The Deerhunter, Apocalypse Now. Those were movies worth arguing about. Whether or not you ultimately liked those pictures didn't matter--how could you ever forget them? With The Last Temptation Of Christ, Martin Scorsese has made his Hail Mary. As with Mississippi Burning, Last Temptation stirred controversy because it changed history into fiction. Mississippi Burning offended partially because it showed pointless killings of blacks and made it seem as if the FBI had put an end to prejudice and all the bad guys.
Last Temptation angers some people off because it shows Jesus as being "too human." He even sleeps with a woman. I was bored to death by Last Temptation. If only the picketers and papers and TV had kept things quiet, the picture would have died. But that's impossible. We feed on arguments. Scorsese granted interviews all over the place and continually lied through his teeth. His picture was clearly designed to offend believers in God and Jesus. He wanted to make the ultimate--a movie powerful enough to change one's most powerful religious beliefs. He didn't make that picture--(I don't think anybody ever has.) He did retell the gospels with the intention of raising curiosity about who Jesus really was. He got his Time cover story, and attempts were made to stop the picture from being released. All this made people more curious to see the movie.
The tremendous visual impact of this film has inspired many directors, including Steven Spielberg. David Lean directed this epic production that has many memorable images and sequences. It won the Oscar as Best Picture of 1962, and stars Peter O'Toole in the role that made him famous. Lean made several wonderful English productions from Dickens novels and turned to making huge pictures including The Bridge On The River Kwai and Dr. Zhivago.
A profane, daring film about comedian and social critic Lenny Bruce. Dustin Hoffman seems to capture the tortured soul of Bruce, and Valerie Perrine (later in Superman) is memorable in a supporting role as she recounts the way that she and her lover lived. There is a lot of nudity and explicit language here, and drug use. Although a slow-paced biography (this would make a good double feature with Raging Bull), there is a sadness that runs through the whole film that makes the overall results very compelling. Not for all tastes, but it was one of many of key seventies films that left past filmmaking and screenwriting rules in the dust. Directed by Bob Fosse, who had won tremendous acclaim for Cabaret only two years earlier. Although the reviews of Lenny were less enthusiastic, his work in this film is also well worth studying.
Sweet natured and yet at times appalling. Roberto Begnini's film exists in its own world; it doesn't feel realistic in the least. Much of it takes place during the Holocaust, which is made to seem like a warehouse with a lot of yelling going on. The audience responds to the relationship between the father and his young son, who he is trying to protect by saying that the whole thing is just a game. Begnini is very likeable, and he gets sensitive performances from his own wife and from the child actor.
A touching and under-rated film that has an independent spirit to it. Tom Selleck plays a lifeguard who is questioning the value of what he is doing with his life. He chooses to attend his high school reunion and meets an old girlfriend. Meanwhile, a young Kathleen Quinlan (I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, Apollo 13 develops a crush on him. The film plays nicely on the television screen; it has an intimacy and melancholy grace that many films don't capture.
Arthur Penn's epic scale film is one of the best westerns of its time. It frequently gets somewhat overlooked because of two other vivid films that came shortly before it: Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West, both from 1969. Dustin Hoffman began to prove himself a chamelion-like actor, as his perfomance is nothing like his work in The Graduate or Midnight Cowboy. He would turn in many other great performances in the years to come.
The Disney people have done it again. It's three in a row for them--1986's The Great Mouse Detective, 1988's Oliver And Company, and now, the new Little Mermaid. They've been doing state of the art animation. The Little Mermaid is their first fairy tale since Sleeping Beauty from thirty years ago. And it boasts the best music for them in over 15 years; the last exceptional music was from Robin Hood in 1973. The story of the mermaid has a "classic" feel to it, and like Cinderella, it has other characters who soon take over the show. The new star here is Sebastian, a crab who does two calypso style songs.
The film looks pretty and stays with you because of the logical, childish plot and the songs. One can recall images from this film much easier than from the two previous films, The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver and Company. Everyone in the theater seemed to love the film and there was even applause at the end. Is there anything to learn from this film? I think the moral is strive to be free and be what you want to be.
A Roger Corman trifle that became known mainly because it was filmed in a matter of days, and because of a certain plant that likes human blood. The film went through a kind of reassessment because it contains a then little-known actor named Jack Nicholson. It inspired a Broadway musical and the entertaining 1986 movie version.
Enjoyable remake of the 1960 film about a plant that craves human blood in order for it to grow. Steve Martin is very funny in this, playing a demented dentist that resembles Elvis Presley. The songs are by Menken and Ashman, who would work magic with their wonderful scores for Disney films.
Life in a large domed city where one gets killed as soon as he turns thirty. Two persons' attempts to break out of this dilemma and find "Sanctuary," a "place" on Earth where there is life in total freedom. Very good special effects.
Powerful film version of the emotionally shattering Eugene O'Neill play, directed by Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon, Network) Much of this feels alive and unpredictable and not static like many other filmed plays. Great performances all around and a carreer-crowning achievement by Katherine Hepburn, who is startling. Stars Ralph Richardson and Jason Robards. a filmed play
A crowd pleasing football film with the carefree Burt Reynolds, who is sometimes a wonderful, loose and funny actor much like George Segal, who was also in high demand in the early to mid seventies. The story concerns a man who is improperly jailed and gets a big game going against the warden's guys. The movie is sometimes crudely funny and mostly entertaining.
Albert Brooks' Lost In America is a funny road movie-- it takes off from the premise of Easy Rider. To me, it's a movie about two people who want to live life to the fullest, but eventually money gets in the way. The two really want good, high-paying jobs--and that's the joke. They want to have a lot of things. They're interested in finding themselves, but they don't really want to do away with any possessions to do it. And they find out that they didn't have to change their lives so drastically in order to find themselves. It's a movie that shows that things are generally the same throughout the country. Sometimes we need a change of scenery but we like to believe that we have actually changed our lives by moving someplace else.
Spike Lee has made a kinder, gentler version of the life of Malcolm X than was expected. As such, it is more suitable for everyone--it's a good class trip movie. For any real depth, one must read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, because it displays the power that is simply missing from much of the film. As interesting as most of the picture is, what happened? Lee has made the least Spike-ish of all his films; in the end, Malcolm X carries with it a certain reverence, as if the subject was Jesus Christ (who, according to the book and the film, was a black man.) Actually, Malcolm X has an alleged holy man in it--The Honorable Elijah Mohhamed--and at one point, he appears to the convict Malcolm in a ghost-like form. (One of the film's most laughable moments.) A fellow inmate introduces Malcolm to the religion of Islam, but it is this small man with a silly voice that has the biggest effect on him, as many of the Muslim teachings supposedly come from him and him alone.
The extremely popular Disney film about a magical nanny who comes to the aid of two children. The songs, although abhored by some, are extremely catchy--"A Spoonful of Sugar", "Chim Chim Cher-ee", "Let's Go Fly A Kite", and the kooky "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"
In 1970, there were two hugely successful war-oriented films--Patton, which told the story of the famous World War II battle general, and M.A.S.H., which told the story of a group of doctors who were trying to stay sane during the Korean War by cracking jokes and playing practical jokes on each other. Patton clearly followed the more traditional rules of film biography by effectively recounting the major episodes in the man's life, but there had never been anything quite like M.A.S.H., as directed by the brilliant and frequently infuriating Robert Altman. First of all, it wasn't exactly a war film--there are no battle scenes, although the audience sees loads of bloody bodies being taken off helicopters and in operating rooms. Where George C. Scott's agressive performance clearly dominated Patton, in M.A.S.H. it most often seems that the actors, which include Elliot Gould, Donald Sutherland, and Robert Duvall, aren't acting at all. The whole thing has a kind of "throwaway" feel to it, with grown men having no real respect for anything. The doctors make rude remarks about their superiors, and about religion and they curse quite a bit. In screenwriting terms, there is little discernable shape to M.A.S.H. The photography is nothing special and apart from the trick of recording various conversations taking place at the same time, the film does not seem like a technical marvel in filmmaking terms. And yet, it is a film that helped to usher in perhaps the most liberating period in American movies--the early to mid seventies. I never considered this film to be truly great, and it is not high on my list of favorite films, but there is no denying that everyone involved here created something that was verbally raw and rhythmically strange, and utterly different. In 1970, the war genre was turned on its head by Altman and company. Patton won the Oscar as Best Picture.
One of Roger Corman's best films, if not his very best; it stars Vincent Price in perhaps his most powerful role as Prince Prospero, who tries to shield certain people from a dreaded disease that his overtaking his domain. The film captures the horrible atmosphere of the Edgar Allan Poe short story on which it is partly based, but little of the plot from the story has been retained. Instead, the film borrows more from the religious symbolism of Ingmar Bergman--the character of Death is lifted right from The Seventh Seal but is used in an even more frightening way.
The film that brought Martin Scorsese to the attention of critics, who regarded him as potentially one of the best of the young directors of the seventies. He lived up to his expectations and continues to make interesting films that emanate the love of filmmaking.
A potentially great film about a young American man who get captured in Turkey with drugs and goes through hell on Earth. Unfortunately, the director Alan Parker (working from an Oliver Stone script) becomes too desperate to portray the terrible ways of the wardens and the prison system in that country. The bitter tone of the film seems more full of exploition in a nasty way than honest, and the picture sometimes makes one feel sleazy for watching it. There is a tremendous performance here by Brad Davis, who would die young, and all the technical aspects of the filmmaking are first rate. Stone won the Oscar for his screenplay, although apart from a few scenes with John Hurt as another prisoner, and one fiery speech, the script is not especially noteworthy.
Mississippi Burning is well photographed and well acted. Parts of it are intense, but somehow I wasn't impressed by it. I kept thinking of Alan Parker's picture Midnight Express of ten years ago. That's another picture that isn't as important as it is made out to be. This time Parker is after the Southern Black-haters. (In Midnight Express it was the Turks and their prisons.) A problem with the picture is that you feel you've seen much of it somewhere else, in other movies and documentaries. It's a difficult picture to pull off, and it works, but you're never sure of how much of it is legitimate. Again, there are similarities to Parker's earlier Midnight Express. They're both pepped up. The picture is intended to shock you, to make you squirm and react, but a good deal of it feels exploitive. You sense the filmmakers trying to figure out how to top themselves--what other agony can we concoct? You walk out of the theater feeling manipulated, and at least partially lied to.
Mississippi Burning has an important subject, and it got its Time cover story. (That serves to give controversial films that might otherwise have died at the box office still more publicity. Some pictures are designed to be events right from the start.) I suppose that the best thing the picture has going for it is its atmosphere. You feel that you really are in that Mississippi county in the early sixties. Gene Hackman is good, as he usually is, but I kept thinking of him being Popeye Doyle from The French Connection. His character here is more sensitive, but he's still a tough guy overall. I didn't think of Popeye Doyle when I saw Hackman in The Conversation, or Young Frankenstein, or Superman I and II. So Hackman's role seems familiar, but Willem Dafoe, who shoots for a kind of confident but quiet intelligence, comes out a complete dead-beat. This film has your typical black-hating sheriff and officers, hangings and beatings, and an obligatory "let's beat up the blacks when they come out of church" scene. It even has a battered wife (up for an Oscar) who gets caught between her lousy husband and Hackman's warm side. I guess the big problem is that the picture has little real depth. The producers were looking for a hot subject, and they found one, but this picture is in no ways a "summing up." It feels like an action picture.
The movies of the nineteen thirties were characterized by a number of innovative comedy stars, each with his own popular audience image. These comedians did anything possible to get reactions from people of all ages. It didn't matter if the film stories didn't make sense, or if any particular scene really didn't occur in everyday life. What was most important was that everyone laughed. The laughter in the theaters was what told the comedians they were reaching the audience in some way. It wasn't long before the depression showed its influence on the comedy films of the thirties. Generally, the comedy pictures were telling people to keep on trying, to do the best one could. There was much chaos but often much concern under the surface of the films.
Many of the techniques used in the comedy films of the thirties were handed down from a man named Mack Sennett. In Sennett's world, life revolved around gross exaggeration, destructive mayham, speed, and surprise. People whack each other over the heads with clubs, cars purposely crashed head-on, and people run into headfirst into just about anything. The truth was that he often depicted the senselessness of what can happen to people, and people in the twenties and thirties saw this clearly, and liked to see more of it expressed in a happy, ironic way. It was Mack Sennett who introduced audiences to "The Little Tramp," Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin quickly mastered what Sennett had been doing, and went on to master his own styles of comedy.
Chaplin's Modern Times is a good example of what comedy movies were like during the thirties. Chaplin starred in it, and produced, wrote, and directed, as well as composing the soundtrack music. In Modern Times, the main character is continually getting himself into trouble, and he can't help it. It was as though the whole world was against him, and audiences realted to the idea. Like many of the other films of the time, Modern Times parodied the lack of work, and the frustrations of work even when it was around. The whole picture is shrouded with the theme of human survival, and it's message is for all to "never say die."
The Python's forte are skits, and the idea of lampooning King Arthur and his knights allows the great troupe to connect a bunch of them together to create their funniest film. There are plenty of "classic bits" in this film, like the Knights who say "Nit", the monks who bash themselves on the face with slates, the "bring out your dead" scene, the killer rabbit, and who can forget that there are no horses used by Arthur's knights--just men galloping in place to the sound of coconuts being banged together? This is one of those films in which something funny seems to come along every few minutes; best of all, the script balances the sight gags with truly clever wordplay.
As the Monty Python team continued to make movies, their work became more and more pointed, with a blatant intention to offend. Their second film is about a simple man who is put in the position of being a savior because the people can't wait for something good to happen anymore. It is clear that the actual target is the Catholic Church, and there were some outbursts when this film was released. Graham Chapman, who played King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the lead actor here as well. There are funny moments, but it is worth seeing mostly as a daring curiosity.
The Pythons' most straightforwardly bitter and yet in ways most fascinating film. It is a connected series of skits that concern life and death. When I first saw this movie, I saw people walking out of the theater within about twenty minutes. There are many who are not going to want to see a couple talking about how Christians and Protestants differ in their sex lives, or see children singing a song called "Every Sperm Is Sacred", in a scene that borrows from Oliver. In another scene, a teacher shows his students how to have sex by performing it with a woman right in front of the class. This film is crass, but it is clear that the group was determined to top themselves in every way.
Moscow On The Hudson tries to bridge nationalities together, and tries to bring people together. It treats sex as being fun, and shows the need for people to get along with one another. Moscow is also one of the eighties best. Starring Robin Williams. A "comeback" film for director Paul Mazursky; it's his best film since 1978's An Unmarried Woman.
In which human beings are treated as animals in that they are packaged and sold as meat throughout the film. It's a sick joke, but also funny and interesting in its own way.
1986--what a year for movies! There is still talk of postponing the Academy Awards ceremony becuase of rain, or at least until some pictures come out that can be nominated! Well, it wasn't quite that bad. But it did come close. Did we really need to see Sylvester Stallone battling snakes? (Cobra) Could we stomach another film about breakfast cereals? (Critters) Wow about a film about a duck? (Howard the Duck) A house? (House) There was even pornography! (The Fly) Actually, I didn't go to see any of those pictures. I hope you didn't, either. I didn't see many of this year's popular movies. (Among them--Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, and The Golden Child.) Many of them, I didn't want to see--(Poltergeist III, Haunted Honeymoon, Neon Maniacs, etc.) Many of them, I never even heard of--(Band Of The Hand, Out Of Bounds, Quiet Kool, etc.) In truth, there were many, many decent movies. It was the year of the two and a half star movie. The video rental industry nearly doubled the box office intake this year, if I'm not mistaken. We need better written films, as always. Hopefully, next year will bring us more memorable movies.
As for the Academy Awards (if they are not postponed or blown up for political reasons) there are good words for The Mission, Room With A View, and Mosquitoe Coast. I think that Platoon and Hannah And Her Sisters will be the two top contenders. Platoon should wipe up the technical awards. When we get to the big ones, it's tough to say. They could go all the way with Platoon, but the problem is that it's not a film for everyone. Then again, neither was Chariots Of Fire. Patton won the award for best picture in 1970, and remember, the main difference between Platoon and Patton is only a few letters. That means they could go for Platoon. Then again, they might give Platoon the technical awards and go with Hannah And Her Sisters for the writing, direction, and picture. One other possibility is to give Oliver Stone the directing award for Platoon (which he deserves) and go with the typical lighter fare (Hannah) for the picture. We'll see what happens.
Some other early selections: Best Supporting Duck: Howard The Duck Best Cinematography of Bugs: The Mosquitoe Coast Worst Title For A Movie: Under The Cherry Moon Worst Film For An Editor's Fingers: Jagged Edge Best Performance By A Zipper: The Fly
A break-out independent film that became a big hit based on good word of mouth and theater chains that were willing to run it for extended weeks as a change of pace from the big summer movies. The movie is little more than a long TV pilot, but its lightness works in its favor; the audience has no trouble following what little story there is and takes pleasure in figuring out which members of the huge Greek family are most like their own. Many of the characters seem so familiar, that they cut across nationality lines. Everyone who watches it is bound to say to themselves "I know someone just like that." My Big Fat Greek Wedding is painless to sit through, and has several funny scenes, but the ending seems like a cheat--it works its way though the wedding of the title and then abruptly cuts from the reception to a cute wrap-up that leaves one wondering about what happened to the main event itself.
My Bodyguard is a nice, sure-shot kind of picture. It shows very convincingly how we love to have others around to help us fight our battles, and to even have them fight for us. My Bodyguard has entirely fine performances--especially from the two featured boys. I found the film to be too violent, but the message will hopefully find its way to even the youngest of kids.
In a way, My Dinner With Andre is a time capsule kind of movie. It's full of different ideas and recollections, and they go by quite fast. It's easy to imagine people in the audience being fascinated by something one of the two characters says and then tuning out on everything else they say. My Dinner With Andre can get you thinking, and often before you can contemplate one point being stated, another one comes at you.
It's the kind of movie that one would like to save; it is priceless and confusing because it expresses many philosophical thoughts of our time. Through the filming of a single hour and a half conversation, so many ideas have been captured--and nowadays so few films capture anything. There is much excitement and despair to be found in the language of this film. The characters seem to want to talk about what they're saying, and there are hardly any pauses between their talk. Of course, the conversation begins even before Andre and his friend, Wallace, are served.
Andre starts by talking about his travels to weird places, while Wallace listens attentively. He goes on to describe some unusual rituals that he saw, and how interesting they were. Wallace tosses a few words in, and takes Andre's stories in for about a half hour. It seems that Andre's long speeches are there to show how "detached" he can be. Actually, he isn't that detached at all. His perceptions of the other places prove that he had his eyes open there all along. It's just that to we here, his travels and visions are hard to understand.
Eventually, the subject gets to our own society. Wallace finally gets more of a chance to speak. Many interesting moments are formed as both he and Andre relate past experiences to the world around them. Mainly, they talk about how many people are slowing down, losing interest in life. They talk about how we all block things we prefer not to know out of our minds. They talk about the need for comfort, how they feel too much of it can keep a person from seeing the hardness of the world. In short, they continually bring hidden thoughts that are not often spoken out into the open.
Not everyone is going to want to watch two people talking for so long. However, for those who, like Wallace, don't mind listening for a little while, this picture is a little treat. At times, there is the temptation to get in on the conversation, to state how one feels. I suppose that is what is so charming about My Dinner With Andre. The two characters have confusing, interesting points of view, and most of the film is written so cleverly, and with such concern, that others will want to keep their own points of view finely tuned as well.
One of Robert Altman's best known films, second in popularity only to M.A.S.H. Here he has crafted an interesting and peculiar view of America that takes place in 1976, the bicentennial year. Over twenty characters are seen going about their lives, with the world of country music used as a framing device. All the small scale stories that are followed throughout the movie begin to expand in one's mind, coming together in a sly and masterful way. To many Nashville feels likes an epic, and in terms of how Altman effortlessly deals out the many characters and keeps them real and memorable, this is an important and influential piece of work.
For many, just asking a theater cashier for a ticket to see a movie called Natural Born Killers will feel awkward. Sitting down minutes later, one might wish that there will be no coming attractions of other films; when a movie is rumored to be so blantantly controversial, there is frequently an immediate need to see what one is getting oneself into. It doesn't take long to see that Oliver Stone's latest film is a kaliedescopic journey through sicknesses of contemporary culture, "TV-land," controversial movies of the past, and the art of filmmaking in general. Whether one likes this particular journey will be an object of debate for years to come.
In 1976, Network examined many of the same themes as Natural Born Killers does. Sidney Lumet's film screamed that television is desensitising people--it turns us into robots. When a veteran newscaster named Howard Beale (played by Oscar winning Peter Finch) is told he is going to be taken off the air due to poor ratings, he goes on TV and says he is going to blow his brains out the next time he is on. He makes a point of giving out a date: ("Tune in next Tuesday. That should give the public relations people a week to promote the show.") Soon after, he apologizes to the programming directors and is allowed on for a final farewell telecast. But the exectives of the network quickly find out that in anticipation of Beale's threat coming true and what he might do on live TV, his ratings have skyrocketed dramatically. They decide to keep him on, and he becomes "the mad prophet of the airways, spontaneously letting out his anger--a latter-day prophet denouncing the hypocrasies of our time."
All goes well for the network for some time, but after a while both the programmers and the public get sick of Beale's tirades against inflation, the Russians, crime, and on and on. It ends with the best attention grabber of all--Beale's final show features him being murdered on live TV. The executives, who have set the whole thing up, are pleased, and plan to create other shows that present actual crimes as they are happening. One self- conscious newsperson (played by Oscar nominated William Holden) had earlier suggested the media would eventually have shows that consisted of "suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, mafia hit men, automobile smash-ups--"The Death Hour"-- a great Sunday night show for the whole family." A programmer named Diana Christensen (played by Oscar-winning Faye Dunaway) is something of a protype of the Wayne Gale character. At one point she calmly says to her writers "I want a show developed based on the activities of a terrorist group. "Joseph Stalin and His Merry Band of Bolshevics"--I want ideas!"
Looking back, Network predicted the shows like "A Current Affair", "Cops" and in a strange way, movies like Natural Born Killers. The author of Network, (Paddy Chayefsky, who also won an Oscar for it, as well as for Marty and The Hospital) was like the screenwriting Oliver Stone of his time. He used words to criticize "the media," "corporations" "society," -- anything he could get his pen on. His characters spouted ridicule against so many things, that after a while one could lose track of what the point of all his rage was. After a while, it was only the fact that the rage existed that proved you were alive--("I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!") Chayesky used words to create his effects; in Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone primarally uses images. The overall intent is the same: to mentally stimulate and outrage.
Oliver Stone is an especially angering filmmaker because he always has moviemaking fever, but at the same time, his hard-hitting style doesn't always go along with the way we believe a story should be told. Criticisms of his work often consist of speculation about his bombarding the audience with unnecessary hyper-editing and profanity--overdoing it. With his latest film, it seems that Stone's aggressive style has worked in his favor--you might not be able to know exactly what he is getting at, but the form works. The look and chainsaw editing aspects of the film will excite some and give others a terrible headache. In one way, Natural Born Killers is like the ultimate experimental film; it's so flamboyant in its pursuit to re-write film syntax that it's going to inspire some people to take film classes, and perhaps others to drop them, wondering why they ever bothered in the first place.
Throughout the past thirty years, there have been numerous films that have stirred up controversy in peculiar ways, and Natural Born Killers fits into this mold. Whether one likes it or not, it might become a "landmark" film that is continually being used as a kind of reference point for the way we think or behave at a particular time. The violent lovers on the run theme suggests relations to Bonnie and Clyde, but whenever there's a picture about criminals on the run, it gets compared to Bonnie and Clyde. (It is a great "landmark" film.) When Mickey tells fans "you ain't seen nothin' yet," he carries the same kind of pride that Bonnie and Clyde had in telling strangers "We rob banks."
But visually, and in tone, it is A Clockwork Orange that seems to be the nearest relative to Natural Born Killers. Structurally, both films follow a similar pattern: the evil acts toward strangers, the capture of the villians, the difficulty of rehabilitation. In A Clockwork Orange, the evil that remains in the main character is suggested at the end, but in this film the violence is allowed to play itself out. Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.), with his relentess badgering and Robin Leach vocal inflections, becomes a kind of pest to Mickey and Mallory, like what Rupert Pupkin was to the Jerry Langley talk-show character played by Jerry Lewis in Scorsese's The King Of Comedy. They all want to be famous, but in this story, it's the host that's being annoying to the up-and-coming "stars." At times, it seems that Natural Born Killers is Lynch-like, at other times it's like Orwell's 1984. Big Brother is watching and says it's OK to watch O.J. on every station being chased by police. In fact, Big Brother himself is pleased to broadcast it to you. Can Natural Born Killers be nominated for an Oscar? Possibly. If a well-acted horror film like The Silence Of the Lambs could win best picture, there's no telling what can happen.
"I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" These are the magic words of Network, the movie about intercorporate happenings in a quickly dying New York television station called UBS, the United Broadcasting System. The fact that the station's ratings are going down may seem bad enough for the executives of UBS, but a UBS newscaster, Howard Beale, (played by the late Peter Finch) is not helping matters by announcing that he is going to kill himself on the air. Later, Howard admittedly regards his abrupt statement as an act of madness, and in a scene in which the audience believes that Howard will go back to reading the news, the opening irony of the film occurs. Instead of presenting the news, Howard speaks rather strongly about the "nonsense" that people believe in and talk about in their everyday lives.
The vice president in charge of programming at UBS, Diana Christensen, (Faye Dunaway) finds that Howard's controversial language and feelings are actually raising the station's ratings. She eventually bills Howard as "the mad prophet of the airways," and within a month, the UBS daily seven 'o clock news program becomes "The Howard Beale Show." Diana Christensen's continuous actions of this kind show that the top brass of UBS are basically just as mad as Howard Beale is. Almost all of the executives at UBS realize that they are destroying the standards of modern day television stations, but they really don't care. What they do care about is the almighty dollar.
The only person in the station who "comes to his senses" and wants no part of what is going on is Max Schumacher, (William Holden) the president of the UBS news division and Howard Beale's best friend. Max Schumacher represents the majority of today's society, which also opposes corporate greed. Another major character in the film is Frank Hackett, (Robert Duvall) who is a calm, but commanding individual. As the vice president of UBS, Hackett can make many clever decisions and can laugh in spite of himself.
Network is a sophisticated satire on what makes television and corporations tick. Network's technical aspects are the most brilliant in recent movies. The best edited and most electrifying scene is at the climax of the film, during which Howard Beale tells his audience of millions to open the windows of their homes and exclaim how mad they are about everything, including the world that they live in, as they shout: "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Under the direction of Sidney Lumet, (Murder On The Orient Express) the cameras are placed in areas that make the movie screen look as if the actors are talking directly to the audience. Shots of Peter Finch's preachings are shown from the sides of cameras, through monitors, and on color television sets that lie about in the UBS studio.
Network's excellent acting makes up for its complete absence of atmosphere and soundtrack music. Peter Finch is amazing in the role of Howard Beale, the seemingly quiet newscaster who turns into a raving madman. Mr. Finch had the most phenomenal role in the movie, and in my opinion, should win this year's best actor award. William Holden is also nominated for best actor, and his performance as Max Schumacher is among his finest. Mr. Holden plays a character who is able to accept life as it happens, and he turns out to be the smartest of the executives. Mr. Holden was at his peak in his final scene, in which he leaves Faye Dunaway, proclaiming himself as her only "contact with human reality." His words are true; for in fact, the character that Faye Dunaway plays, Diana Christensen, is more excited about television than men. Faye Dunaway is still another person who acts at her best in Network, and she also has been nominated for an award. In addition to those nominations mentioned above are best director (Sidney Lumet) and best screenplay, which was written by Paddy Chayefsky (The Hospital).
Ned Beatty has been nominated for best supporting actor for his portrayal of an owner of a corporation similar to the FCC. Beatrice Straight has been nominated for best supporting actress for her portrayal as Max Schumacher's wife. Both Ned Beatty and Beatrice Straight are in Network for no more than ten minutes each, but their performances are strong enough to earn them their awards; more so in the case of Ned Beatty, who seems the perfect satirical character. Network takes the mystery out of exactly what goes on behind the scenes of a news show. Its script is straightforward and language strong at times, but nevertheless, it gets its point across and gives the audience a chance to laugh at itself. It is my belief that Network will win the Academy Award for best picture of the year.
Some directors want to do it all, and some actually do it. In the seventies, there was Francis Ford Coppola with The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Martin Scorsese with the horrifying Taxi Driver, and Woody Allen with the lopsided Annie Hall. My excitement level rose last year when I heard that the three directors were going to make a movie called New York Stories, which would consist of a film by each. I made a note to myself to see that film no matter what. I don't know what I expected. I guess whatever it was, I expected too much. You take three of the greatest directors of the seventies and you expect them to turn in a great picture. I must have thought that they'd deliver some sort of summing up of the eighties.
Now New York Stories is playing, and it doesn't sum up much of anything. At first I thought that perhaps the three were shooting for something modest, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the picture is on the sidelines of modest. It's not an utter embarrassment, but I found it to be thoroughly disappointing. I got the impression that the directors had reached into their bottom drawers and taken out and filmed whatever they had found. The picture isn't pretentious, though. But why did they choose three of the greatest cinematographers in the world? The results don't stick with you. There are few memorable images.
Of the three, Scorsese's first is the best. Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette played off each other well, but that damned rock music got very annoying. There's a nice scene in which a young guy in everyday clothes is doing a stand up routine in a subway terminal--right on the tracks. And people are gathered around, listening to him. That showed the sadness and craziness of the city, and it was my favorite part of the picture. If only the whole movie had captured that tone!
Coppola's piece has an appealing girl in the lead, but it seems incomplete. After about ten minutes of it, I was bored and was anxious for Woody Allen's piece. Most reviews seemed to think it was the best of the three stories.
Allen's "Oedipus Wrecks" is easiest to follow, but I didn't find it to be that funny. I felt that I had seen parts of it before in some of Woody's previous pictures. I was more intrigued in how much of it actually applied to Allen's life. When I saw him driving his dead mother to her funeral, I laughed, but later I thought about how hostile that was. I'm sure that there's plenty of hate in Woody Allen--but it was disturbing to see it so blatantly on the screen. Part of his segment is a poison-pen letter to mother. In one scene, his mother winds up in a magic show. As she's in a box, and the magician is putting the swords into it, you're shown Woody Allen happy about it. He's hoping they penetrate--and it isn't funny. At the end, the mother approves most of the girl who cooks like her, and who wants to fatten her son up. It's tired and dumb.
This movie is not only long--it feels long, although that is not necessarily a bad thing. Watching Nixon is like reading a really intense non-fiction book that is packed with information. You can take in only so much information and then you need to put the book down and give your mind a rest for a little while. The showing that I saw had no intermission, and so all the images and dialogue came at us non-stop. One problem for many will be that this film does not spend much time explaining the positions of many of the political characters and how they fit into Richard Nixon's life. You have to be really up on many details of the Watergate scandal and on events that happened in Vietnam in general. Oliver Stone is putting his faith in the audience this time around; he's not out to make a "class trip" kind of movie. You'd better be familiar with the names Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean before you go to see this picture, because if you're not, then many of the men around Nixon are going to seem one and the same--just a big bunch of advisers. You won't know who certain characters are in particular.
That said, I thought that Nixon was a very interesting movie. Oliver Stone is continuing the same style of filmmaking that he incorporated in last year's Natural Born Killers. This time the editing isn't as jarring; his style of using different film stocks in the same scene seems more and more natural. Before long, I didn't think about all of the film trickery because it seemed appropriate for some scenes to seem like newsreels, others like video, and still others like grainy home movies. Remarkably, he achieves his grand effects without using split-screens (although he uses a few back projections.) Natural Born Killers looked like it might have been edited by a chainsaw, and although many of the same techniques are used here, the overall look and tone of Nixon is less nervous and even more confident. Regardless of his tendency to assault the audience with barrages of quick images and controversial ideas, Oliver Stone is on of the most interesting directors working today.
Unlike JFK, which really didn't have very much of JFK in it, Nixon has plenty of Nixon in it. I thought that Anothony Hopkin's performance was note-perfect. He doesn't look like Richard Nixon, but it doesn't matter, because he gets so deep into the core of this man (as he did with Hitler in The Bunker) that before long you become more immersed in the driving force of the character than you do in remeinding yourself about who is playing the main part. What is wonderful about Anthony Hopkins is that he acts so unself-consciously. You never catch him bucking for an Oscar; he does his job and does it with care and intelligence. It's a damn admirable performance--one of the best on film in this decade.
Norman--Is That You? is yet another comedy that has been adapted from a Broadway play and brought to the movie screens. It can be compared with The Odd Couple in that it gives us laughs at a more modern level: not in a vaudeville style as in The Sunshine Boys. Redd Foxx plays Ben Chambers, a seemingly lonely middle-aged man who often talks to himself. Upon hearing that his wife, Beatrice, (Pearl Bailey) is having an affair with his own brother, Ben moves to California where their son Norman (Mike Warren) lives in a luxurious apartment. He tells Norman about his mother and soon finds out that Norman is a homosexual, and is living in the apartment with his friend Garson (Dennis Dugan).
The film then shows us how these problems affect Ben and eventually drive him out of the apartment for a while, and into the streets, where he goes to a bookstore and buys eight books on the subject of homosexuality, until finally, he actually finds himself going out on the town with Garson. Two of the scenes in Norman--Is That You? are presented in way that we seldom see in movies anymore. First, a dream sequence in which we see Ben's thoughts on the whole matter, and second, the final scene in which Ben turns around and talks to the audience itself. These scenes are meant to show us that the movie screen is really a stage, and that we, the audience, are watching a play and not a movie. Many will feel that these two scenes ruin the film, but I find them only a part of a totally entertaining and unique film.
The Omen is a very suspenseful and action packed movie. It is cleverly done and is a film that is not easily forgotten. The story is set about twenty years from now, and revolves around the coming of the "Son Of Evil," or Anti-Christ, to Earth as was foretold in the Bible. No one realizes that the boy is the Anti-Christ until he becomes older. However, if the boy grows up, he will force death and destruction to all the Earth, signaling the end of the world. The film shows us that even as a very young child, he is powerful and responsible for many violent deaths. The boy is played effectively by Harvey Stephens, but the truly outstanding performance is given by Gregory Peck, who plays the man who adopts the boy after his own son is killed. The Omen contains a surprise-twist ending that is a shocker.
Billy Wilder directed this film after his smashing success with Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. It wasn't nearly as popular, but it definitely should be seen. James Cagney stars as an executive for Coca-Cola in a Berlin office. The Soviets come knocking because they want the formula for the soft drink so that they can sell it in their own country. The film is clearly a satire about Cold War relations and is consistantly entertaining. There is a hysterical exchange early on, when the Soviets explain that they are in a trade deal with the Cubans. "We sell them rockets and they sell us cigars." Cagney lights one up and gags on it. "This is a pretty crummy cigar," he says. "That's OK," answers one of the Soviets. "We sell them pretty crummy rockets."
Kathleen Turner is very good in it. It looks nice but seems familiar. Hardly a bad film, just rather a tired subject.
A sadly under-rated film from director Herbert Ross. Steve Martin plays a man trying to make it in the depression as a sheet music salesman.
One of Ingmar Bergman's best films from the sixties. The cinematography is hypnotic and inspiring.
Jane Campion's peculiar film about a deaf-mute woman who travels to New Zealand to marry a man that she has never met. The look of the film is haunting, and Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin give memorable performances. Also starring Harvey Keitel (Taxi Driver and Sam O'Neil (Jurassic Park).
Made by the same creators of the brilliant Watership Down, this animated film is even darker and more troubling. The story involves two dogs who break away from a laboratory in which brutal animal experiments are taking place. Featuring the voice of John Hurt (Midnight Express).
An instant classic of the science fiction genre. Charlton Heston plays an astronaut who lands on a planet that is ruled by various members of the primate family, although not men.
Image for image, the film of 1986. Haunting and tense, parts get you in the stomach. The most realistic film about fighting in Vietnam ever. Young people who have not seen many films about war will be shocked by it. A whole new generation of filmmakers will be intrigued and inspired by the power of it. A triumph.
Mostly humorous film based on Woody Allen's play. It was the first time the wonderful chemistry between Allen and Diane Keaton came into view. Directed by the versatile Herbert Ross (The Turning Point, Pennies From Heaven).
A marvelously entertaining film about two teenagers who are transported into a squeaky clean and perfect black and white sitcom world. Things begin to change as the bland characters of the town discover opinions, art and sex. The film is really an allegory about liberalism versus conservatism, and it arrived during the months in which President Clinton was in the process of being impeached. Pleantville is one of the best pictures of 1998 and although it was not nominated for many awards, I believe that time will be very good to it.
One of the best haunted house movies ever. It taps into childhood fears in an extremely tense and yet clever way. Tope Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) directed, but there is a strong possiblity that Steven Spielberg, who produced this, also had a hand behind the camera.
Titanic it ain't, but this film is actually one of the best examples of the "disaster movie" genre. It's well acted (some will say over-acted) by an all-star cast that includes Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, and Shelly Winters.
The Postman Always Rings Twice gives us Jack Nicholson better than he's been in years, and Jessica Lange better than she's ever been. There is something unusual about this picture--it must be its absolute willingness to combine love, sex, and corruption in general at the same time. It's hard to think of anything major in this picture that doesn't want to corrupt itself. And just about everything in the picture looks ugly.
Although his Young Frankenstein was more stylishly filmed and directed, this is the quintessential Mel Brooks film, the one that is most typical of his style of humor. He won an Oscar for his screenplay.
The movies have contained many shower scenes, but when you talk about THE shower scene, you are talking about Alfred Hitchcock's most famous film, Psycho. It is hard to say how many horror film directors have been inspired by one shot from this film, a camera pan in which blood is seen flowing lightly from a woman's body down into a bathtub drain. There is then a startling dissolve as the drain becomes one of the woman's lifeless eyes.
Unnecessary. Best exchange--woman to Norman Bates: "Your bathroom isn't very clean." Bates: "I've seen it worse."
There is a certain amount of excitement and apprehension in going to see a new "teen" movie. The excitement is in seeing whether the filmmakers and actors will discover something interesting in how the teenagers talk and view the world. The drawback comes when fingers are pointed in desperation as a matter of saving the plot. Pump Up The Volume tries to express the loneliness and anger of teens--all teens--through the voice of one teen who is shy at school and outspoken in his basement, where he operates a pirate radio station. The film comes on like some kind of teen Talk Radio, and is powerfully written during the first scenes. Unfortunately, it runs out of emotional steam fairly early on.
One wants to get more into the main character, and his parents and female schoolfriend. But unlike the radio broadcasting scenes, the family and girlfriend scenes seem labored. One has to take it that the parents aren't so much fun to be around. Before long, the film stoops to portray the high school principal as an unattractive manipulator who expels certain students because she feels that their SAT scores aren't good enough. The deck here is rather stacked, and it gets uncomfortable trying to watch how blame for the state of the teens' world must be put on something. Pump Up The Volume takes the standard route of cursing those in power, parents in general, and "the system."
The film is best in the early scenes in which the lead character addresses how empty life is. That is when there is an inspired energy to the writing and the plot problems are not as pronounced. At least teen suicide is treated as the serious subject that it is. One gets the point of the film even then. It says that you don't have to "get anywhere" if you don't want to. The film's idea of rebellion is for teens to turn music up loud and jump around. Pump Up The Volume is not as sex-crazed as Fast Times At Ridgemont High, not as "lost" as River's Edge, not as off-the-wall as Heathers, not as sweet as Say Anything. It doesn't succeed in creating a tone of its own, but it does display concern for teens in general.
Woody Allen is great. Although he doesn't appear in this film, it is definitely Allen dialogue coupled to Allen situations. Like last year's Broadway Danny Rose, Purple Rose is something of a parable. It's about fantasy vs. reality, and the message is that we have to deal with reality first and foremost. It has an exceptionally sad ending for comedy. The main character is left in a near hopeless situation. Either she leaves her home altogether, or goes back to living with a man who doesn't treat her good. I consider the film to be a bit of a return to the tone of the earlier Woody Allen films. It has the potential to inspire young people in the same ingenious way that his films like Sleeper inspired me. This one isn't quite as crazy, though. Still, it has it's message, and that message should stay with everyone for a long time after the movie is over.
Animal nature in human beings is reaching the screen in more detail in the eighties. There is Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, an examination of the life of boxer Jake LaMotta. Robert DeNiro gives a fine performance, and so does everyone else in the picture. But it's hard to walk out of the theater without realizing that all of the characters have been depicted as being little more than just animals.
Every summer, a new slew of movies comes out--usually the most movies of any given time all year. (Christmastime is second.) I've read that this summer, the summer of 1981, has been a record breaking one in terms of box office receipts. I know how but I don't know why. The biggest hit seems to be Steven Spielberg's Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It's an action packed, well plotted film that I really don't find all that memorable. Harrison Ford stars and pulls through, and Nancy Allen (Animal House) gives her best performance. What bothers me is that there isn't much to learn from it. There isn't much to learn from any of the movies coming out this summer, and it hurts. What Raiders has going for it is its pace.
I think that Dustin Hoffman is the best contemporary actor in movies today. He has given many interesting performances. He was around thirty when he was in The Graduate, but he easily passed for being in his early twenties. He was so confident; he has such audience empathy. He is wonderfully deadpan and likable.
He became Ratso Rizzo in 1969's Midnight Cowboy. It was an unforgettable film and an unforgettable performance. And he didn't have as much screen time as in The Graduate. He was very good in Lenny, Papillon, All The President's Men, and in Kramer Vs. Kramer. He was even good in Marathon Man, although the picture has diminished with time and people remember Laurence Olivier's evil character more than anything. In the eighties, Hoffman has taken considerable care in choosing his roles, as usual. But the good roles have come farther apart. 1982's Tootsie will be remembered as being one of the funniest films of the decade. Hoffman actually played three roles in the picture-- Michael (the actor), Dorothy, (an actress), and the character who Dorothy plays in the soap opera. He transformed himself again in Death Of A Salesman. You felt him trying to act more, but he has never appeared to be especially pretentious on film.
The new Rain Man verifies Dustin Hoffman's status as a terrific actor. He plays an autistic man--a sad character which in ways reminds one of Ratso Rizzo. He talks on-- babbles--eventually he walks around with his Watchman TV set, glued to it. He doesn't seem interested in feeling anything. As in Midnight Cowboy, it is the interplay of the two main characters--the "buddy" aspect--which makes this picture so compelling. The director of Rain Man, Barry Levinson, has dutifully filmed the story without announcing his style. The camera is kept where it seems to belong. The film is not sloppy; Hoffman's fits in the movie are disturbing and realistically edited. You feel his helplessness. Best of all, Rain Man doesn't come across as being contrived, as did Terms Of Endearment at the end. And it doesn't grab you to force you to cry--you're drawn to the picture--you come to it.
As sad as the story is, you don't feel lousy when the picture is over. It's one of those pictures that shows you the power of movies. I sensed interest and attentiveness from the entire audience at Rain Man. The picture makes you want to tell other people to experience it. It makes you want to talk to other people. That's the sign of a precious film.
Reds is about three hours and fifteen minutes long. It deals with the politics and romance of one man named Jack Reed. I suppose the length helps save the film, because although there is much talking, action-wise nothing much happens. I walked out of the picture a bit bewildered --somehow feeling cheated--wondering if it was really all worth it. I am forced to conclude that one almost has to have some respect for the film, mainly because much of it tries to be violently intelligent, and that's a quality that so few films seem to have these days.
There is some dissatisfaction about Warren Beatty in the lead role. In Shampoo, which dealt with sexual frustrations, Beatty looked great and really did seem to have a lot on his mind. (Mainly because of the problems in figuring out which girl he wanted most, and the trouble he encountered in trying to get a shop of his own.) In Reds, he looks great too, but somehow too cute. Here he's dealing with women and politics, and he seems to breeze through much of the film. Perhaps he didn't give himself as many heartfelt lines as he thinks.
Diane Keaton shines, however, but most of the time that she's on screen, Beatty is with her. In short, I think a good number of the scenes are ruined. Jack Nicholson is his ever macho self as Eugene 'O Neill, and he and Keaton click together better in their scenes. I don't think there are many actresses who could pull off what Keaton does here--but I don't think there are many actresses who would want to. The role required much emotion, but to have to get it with Beatty in the same frame negates some of the feeling overall.
Technically, the film is very good, and that is where Beatty takes a good leap up from directing the too safe Heaven Can Wait. Reds is a somewhat boring, somewhat interesting, mostly disappointing "major" film.
Extremely creepy film by Roman Polanski, shot in black and white. Although not as well known as his Rosemary's Baby, it is equally as disturbing.
This is the continuing saga of Sir John Morgan, an Englishman who was captured by "Yellow Hand" Sioux Indians during the 1700s and then released after proving his manhood. Living back in England a few years later, Sir Morgan realizes his love for the "Yellow Hands" and their way of life and he decides to return to their land. He gets there only to find their village burned down, the site of a brutal massacre. The film is good up to this point and then it takes a quick steady downfall right to the end. Included in its downfall are some ridiculous torture scenes, and a painful evil spirit ritual in which the "Yellow Hand" men and Sir Morgan (played by Richard Harris) actually tear the upper part of their chests apart. People go to the movies to be entertained, not upset. Let's hope that no more sequels are made as degrading as this one.
The third of the Star Wars series. This is the one with those annoying Ewoks, but the film as a whole is still quite entertaining in spite of them.
One of the best American films of the eighties, directed by an important filmmaker - Philip Kaufman. This is an exciting, intelligent, and crowd pleasing film that is framed around the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The story is beautifully textured and has an epic scope.
Sly and sleazy film that made Tom Cruise a star. He plays a teenager who falls in love with a young call-girl and later has a blow-out party with her fellow hookers and his school friends.
Tim Hunter's dark film about a teenager who kills his girlfriend and goes into school the next day bragging about what he has done. His friends must decide whether they should tell authorities about the murder or make believe that nothing has happened. Keanu Reeves is very good in this.
Rocky is the motion picture that has introduced Hollywood's newest superstar to filmgoers throughout the nation in an extravagant, record breaking manner. The superstar is Sylvester Stallone, who wrote Rocky in three and a half days. Rocky has been nominated for ten Academy Awards including best picture and best actor (Stallone.) Rocky is the story of a loser in life who tries to make his way up in the world through boxing and the rough ways of loansharking. Though seemingly stereotyped at first, Rocky is no ordinary movie. The difference is that Sylvester Stallone's character, Rocky Balboa, has feelings and the decency to give advice, unlike most of the other characters of his type. By the end of the film, he actually lives up to the clich‚: "He's not as dumb as he looks." Rocky Balboa is well developed during the course of the film, and is the perfect role for Sylvester Stallone, who acts with such force that he obtains almost immediate sympathy from the audience. The impact of the film's ending evokes still more sympathy, but even more love for Rocky Balboa and what he is. Rocky radiates many moods, and there are several scenes in the film in which too many of these moods are introduced too fast, and thus, the atmosphere of the film is slightly degraded at times. However, the reality of this film is far from lost, and holds its deepest meaning at the brutal finish. Rocky is a rare movie experience that should turn out to be the most touching film of the year.
The quintessential midnight cult movie, although the end product is far from being a classic. The songs are wonderful and catchy, but the story leaves much to be desired. The music and Tim Curry's outrageous perfomance is what makes this worth seeing.
Motion pictures are like a jigsaw puzzle--the more you watch, the more pieces come together. It's fun tracking down some movies and discovering others. Before the 1980s, it was hard to watch a movie whenever you wanted to. You would have to wait for the picture to get on TV or appear in a revival house in New York. So you'd see a movie in a theater and have to wait a few years to see it chopped up on TV. TV is more permissive now. A few weeks ago, Aliens was on, and I was surprised at what was left in. Nowadays, you walk into a video store and see practically whatever you want. Many movies are available to buy. Still more show up on the cable movie channels. That's where I saw Rosemary's Baby--a picture that I hadn't seen in around ten years. Looking at it now, I couldn't believe how diabolical that picture is. It's all a big plot, and Roman Polanski makes the fear of the body and of decay really get to you. I think it's a kind of AIDS picture. Ahead of its time--eighteen years before David Cronenberg's The Fly. Both pictures really get to you. They annoy you on purpose.
An entertaining movie that plays on the Russian-American relations and fears that were so powerful during the Cold War. Alan Arkin has one of his best roles, and there is a memorable final sequence in which the two sides show sympathy to each other. Directed by Norman Jewison, who also did the great film version of Fiddler On The Roof
It seems that this winter a person is not only supposed to catch the flu but also Saturday Night Fever. The first symptoms of this new affliction are dilated pupils at the sight of John Travolta on all of those movie posters. Naturally, the best way to describe the main character of the film is cool, but what exactly is "cool?" Is it a person who dresses fancy, or swears a lot, or constantly has a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth or through his fingers? That's what Travolta does throughout the film, but anyone could do the same.
The truth is that Travolta is playing the character that he can relate to best so far in his motion picture career. Actually, in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta's character, Tony Manero, does something that the Fonz never does. He eats pizza like a sandwich--two slices at a time. He's an all-American kid: he chases girls, loves his family, has posters of celebrities plastered over his bedroom walls, and wears platform shoes. However, all this could still stop him from being the hero of the film. The vulgar immodesty toward life in general that he and his friends exploit could really cause audiences to dislike the film.
The best way to describe the SaturdayNight Fever might be to say that it is an observation of a nineteen year old who is finally realizing the stupidity of the vandalism and prejudice that his friends advertise. However, by the end of the film, Tony Manero still does not seem like the type of guy who wants or needs to change. One flaw in the film is the lack of related events building up to the climax. Some might find the only event the audience has to look forward to is whether of not a group of Spanish kids are going to get beat up! There's very little mini-drama to make up for Saturday Night Fever's lack of logical plot, and much of the dialogue sounds very casual; not getting anywhere. The disco scenes are flashy, but the camera basically stays still and just observes Travolta and the others dancing; it doesn't really glide with them closely enough to make the audience feel the same way that the dancers do. However, the opening segments of the film seem to radiate a unique sensation as Travolta walks down the streets of New York City in beat to the Bee Gee's "Stayin' Alive." Another scene that helped the film was one in which Tony Manero explains that sometimes people can ruin each other through prejudice, and he finally takes a big step toward maturity. In conclusion, Saturday Night Fever will be successful, but if John Travolta wasn't the star, there's no telling what might have happened.
Yet another towering film from Steven Spielberg. The theme is similar to that of Schindler's List, only instead of focusing on the attempt to wipe out an entire race of human beings, the emphasis is on the possiblity that the last of four brothers will be killed in war. Saving Private Ryan is a scream against the extermination of even one human being and the elimination of his family name. In Schindler's List, a person's name came to represent his very existence; the Nazis needed lists of names of people they wanted to kill, and Schindler needed lists of names of people he wanted to save. It is of major importance to the subject matter that "name" is the first word spoken in Schindler's List. Before that astonishing film, Spielberg's work had never been referred to as being powerful. Now he is in the same position that Francis Ford Coppola was after he directed The Godfather and The Godfather Part II; Steven Spielberg is, plainly and simply, the most important American film director working today.
It must be said that no movie can cover everything and Saving Private Ryan doesn't try to. We don't get a clear perception of the many countries who sent men to fight in World War II, and the numerous supporting characters remain in the mind as a group; no single individual, apart from Tom Hanks in the lead role, registers with tremendous depth. There has been criticism that many of the characters are stereotypes but the screenplay contains several quiet, contemplative moments and a few anecdotes and monologues that bring us closer to the young men who are questioning their purpose in the war. The film shows that man is an animal who doesn't want all of the cruelty that is imbedded in his nature.
An extremely violent and yet cartoonish piece of work that has little to do with the original gangster classic that was made in the early thirties. But what is on screen is both exploitive and somehow highly involving, in a spaghetti western kind of way. I think that Al Pacino is terrific as Tony Montana, the brute gorilla-like thug who works his way up the ranks of the drug world. In terms of the filmmaking, Brian DePalma is at the top of his game--the camerawork has a fluid feel to it that is quite hypnotic. Oliver Stone wrote the extremely profane screenplay. Watch for the great restaurant scene, in which a drunken Pacino curses at the mannered patrons.
Sex, Lies And Videotape is something of a curiosity. It's curious how a picture that is basically an exceptional college film went on to win the Cannes major award. I'm hesitant to call it a movie, because there's no real love of filmmaking in it. It's mostly talk, and the overall effect of the talking is ultimately rather boring. My basic complaint is that there is really nothing to look at in the picture. The director, 26 year old Steven Soderburgh, displays little visual sense. He does have some interesting ideas--and some of them come through, but because of the continual interior home setting, one has trouble getting a fix on other aspects of the characters. You never see them with other friends or with their families. Somehow the picture is too claustrophobic for its own good. It needs to breathe.
I like how other characters are shown while somebody else was talking. (This was mostly at the beginning.) You hear someone talking to a psychiatrist, but you're seeing another person's actions on the screen. The picture is about the need for honesty, and it shows how easy it is not to be honest. A personal picture like Shoot The Moon was so full of emotions, but the personal Sex, Lies And Videotape is somehow quite dead on the screen. Another director, Tim Burton clearly has a visual flair; he was only twenty five when he did 1985's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Soderburgh shows promise with dialogue. Burton is interested in strange pop weirdness--Beetlejuice is now a cartoon show.) Soderburgh, on the basis of Sex, Lies And Videotape, is into truth (different from Truth.)
Warren Beatty is one of his very best perfomances, plays a hairdresser who wants to open up his own shop, all the while juggling his confused life around three different women. This is a very peculiar film, directed by Hal Ashby Coming Home. The film takes place during the eve of the 1972 presidential election. Written by Robert Towne, who penned Chinatown.
Shoot The Moon seems to me to be a powerful, studious film that explores unhappiness, love, and divorce. I was taken in by Albert Finney in particular, but Diane Keaton has many beautiful moments. It could be the best film that shows children and their world. I like Shoot The Moon's attitude very much. It takes it for granted that all families have their troubles.
The Oscar winner as Best Picture of 1991 has tremendous acting by Jodie Foster and a classic performance by Anthony Hopkins, who then came into demand far more than he ever had been before. However, the film itself is basically a well-written horror film that contains none of the grace and cleverness of director Jonathan Demme's earlier films like Citizens Band and Melvin and Howard.
A cheesy and sometimes funny film that stars Dean Martin as secret agent Matt Helm. Martin was a bit old to be playing this kind of part, but his laid-back quality works for him here, in what is by far the best of the four movies in the Helm series. The best thing about The Silencers is that it is a spoof of James Bond films that was made while Sean Connery was at his peak in that role. Most of the ideas come off quite well, and I find this to be funnier than the more recent spy spoof Austin Powers, which is at least partly modeled after this film.
A once great director (Mel Brooks) and his associates (Marty Feldman and Dom DeLouise) set out to save a dying movie studio by filming the first silent movie made in over forty years. Probably Mel Brooks' funniest yet.
A clever and sharply written film directed by the writer of The Truman Show; this film also deals with artificiality, although with a different twist. Al Pacino portrays a down on his luck indie film director who gets the idea of incorporating a computer generated woman into his latest movie, because his real actess has quit on him. It is intriguing to watch how Pacino starts out slowly and soon manages to have his fake actress turn in better perfomances than actual ones. Simone herself eventually wins an Oscar! Pacino is wonderful here, as is the uncredited actress who plays Simone herself.
Singles is Cameron Crowe's snapshot-like view of a group of people who are in their early to mid-twenties. I liked the film; it cries out to be liked. Crowe tries to be romantic--sometimes he is, and frequently he overdoes it. His first film as a director, Say Anything, was better. It truly was sweet and all of it rang true in its own way. But each of the characters had problems, and one felt for them.
In Singles, any real conflict gets softened or siphoned out altogether. One is left with a film that goes down too easy. It has a "let's hang out and try to have some fun" feel to it that is pleasant, but which runs thin as the picture goes on. There's no anger, or desperation, or even a fight with a parent. In fact, all of the main characters are out on their own. The whole subject of how they manage to keep up with their bills and not move back home is left out. There are some interesting subjects floating around, though--game playing between the two sexes, whether or not to have a breast implant because your boyfriend would be happier, how to present yourself on a video-dating tape. Crowe could have gone so much further, but here he hates to degrade any of his characters--he likes them all too much. In the end, Singles is an entertaining but incomplete look at the singles scene.
A fairly humorous John Hughes film that shows he once had a talent for creating interesting teenage characters.
Wickedly funny and profane, this is generally uncharacteristic for a George Roy Hill film. But the director does a good job in telling the story of a minor-league hockey team. This is more than just the best hockey spoof ever made; it casually raises questions about the sports field in general. Practically every player is portrayed as being a big kid, and that allows for some of the film's charm. It throws you off guard right from the beginning, when profanity is used while the national anthem is being sung. Slapshot also provides a terrific role for Paul Newman, whose love of acting comes across maybe more than ever. He throws himself into his part with an admirable delight that is infectious. But he doesn't go soft, and one never asks why such a huge star would want the part of the team manager. Newman doesn't buck for an Oscar here; instead, he acts with a looseness that makes him fit in with the other actors.
Good Disney, some classic scenes. the music is pretty, scenery beautiful. But it's nothing close to the early Disney classics.
Meryl Streep gives an outstanding performance in this film, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar of 1982. She plays a woman who is telling a young man about her life experiences. Kevin Kline plays her schizophrenic lover. Some will find his acting to be energetic and original, while others will become annoyed by it. The scenes that take place in a Nazi concentration camp are powerful and well-staged by director Alan J. Pakula (All The President's Men.)
The animated segments are what make this film, along with "Zippety Doo Da." The live action parts are dated and boring for the most part. You keep saying: "Get to the cartoon parts!"
The Oscar winner as best picture of 1965 is frequently a love-it or hate-it affair among critics and viewers. Say what one will about the feeble plot, squeaky clean Julie Andrews, and the truckload of kids running all over the place, but how can anybody resist those great sugar-coated and blatantly memorable songs? This is the movie that has "Do-Re-Mi", "Sixteen Going On Seventeen", "Maria", "Climb Ev'ry Mountain", the title song, and the lucious "My Favorite Things." Show some mercy!
One of the few "biblical epics" that has stood the test of time. Kirk Douglas had worked with director Stanley Kubrick three years before on the great anti-war film Paths of Glory. Supposedly Kubrick himself was not ecstatic about the final results of Spartacus, but there is no telling what could have disappointed him. It is a powerful story about a slave who creates an uprising in order to get freedom for all slaves. The photography is stunning; this is a film that loses most of its impact on television. There is an excellent wide-screen version available on laserdisc.
For many, the best of the James Bond films that starred Roger Moore.
I was fourteen in the summer of 1975. That was when Jaws came out. I can remember seeing it several times, and once with my father. It wasn't long before it seemed like everyone had seen it. You couldn't go to a beach that summer without worrying about being attacked by a shark. Jaws seemed to make everyone more cautious in the water. The movie was a gem, with a witty script (which sometimes seemed improvised) and fine acting, cinematography and editing. Best of all, it was packed with the love of filmmaking.
It was clear that Steven Spielberg had the potential to make more great movies. Jaws was masterful. Back in 1975, Spielberg had a lot less material. I thought, how can he follow up Jaws? What could he create next? He had made an earlier TV movie called Duel that was mostly a chase between a man and a driver-less truck. I hadn't seen The Sugarland Express, but knew that it, too, involved chases. Did Spielberg really have a mind? Would he continue to make slick action pictures with mechanical gimmicks? He was good at what he did--that was for sure. Most realized that the main thing was that he entertained. Spielberg went on to Close Encounters, and he truly lived up to his talent. The last forty minutes or so is as spellbinding as filmmaking gets. There is a togetherness in watching Close Encounters. Five years later, with E. T. Steven Spielberg thrilled the world. I don't believe that any of his other pictures displays the beautiful balance of family tensions and outright action that those three pictures did. He tried to make stirring "adult" pictures with The Color Purple and Empire Of The Sun, but somehow those films were disappointing and less coherent than his big three.
His gift for presenting images makes all of his pictures worth seeing. His pictures make tons of money. His track record as a producer is impressive--he helped with the 1978 I Wanna Hold Your Hand, 1980's Used Cars, 1982's Poltergeist, 1983's Twilight Zone-The Movie and 1985's Back To The Future. Gremlins in 1984 and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) had their moments, but not too many. All of this is incredible considering that one Jaws could make a director a remembered figure for the rest of his life (and longer.) And I haven't even mentioned the three Indiana Jones films.
Steven Spielberg began his career with a filmmaking majesty that few directors ever reach. It is hard to think of him as ever being a film student because he seemed more like a master right from the start. Spielberg seems to have more "film sense" than ten directors put together, and has been the victim of jealousy because of this.
Somewhere along the way, he became a kind of symbol-- the technically assured filmmaker who continually dealt with childish subjects. At various times, even his classic films were downgraded to generalizations--Jaws was a film about a fish, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a fantasy about weirdos who turned out to be right about the existence of UFOs, and E.T. was a sickeningly sweet "tale" of an ugly duckling alien who befriends a few children.
Many of Spielberg's films are basically about the human need for adventure and wonder. Like Disney, Spielberg has been accused of being too "soft" even though his films contain many frightening scenes. Somewhere around the time of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it seemed that a kind of strange backlash started against Spielberg. In spite of yet another highly popular film, for some it seemed that there had to be something to fault. It was too violent, it was only a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and besides, it didn't make as much money as E.T. did. These things were used against Spielberg in an effort to depict the idea that his best work was now behind him. It was as if there was a demand on Spielberg to do something more "adult," and as the years went on, he answered with The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, both of which were exceptional in comparison to many other films that were being acclaimed. Whereas Temple of Doom had been considered repetitious and too violent, these were too "sentimental" and were untrue to the tones of the books on which they were based. There was some truth to these assertions, but there was no disguising the envy toward Spielberg as he was denied an Oscar nomination for directing either film. It was as if many wanted to portray the most popular director on the planet as being washed up, and that even his best films weren't what they were cracked up to be. Spielberg had "lost his touch," was too much enclosed in his own fantasies of how life should be, and was not "contemporary" enough. But he will have the last laugh. Schindler's List is the work of an already great movie director who has now become even greater.
Ron Howard's most entertaining film as director. Splash is sweet and often laugh- out-loud funny, and it also contains John Candy's best and most substantial role. Tom Hanks became a star with this film, and he would go on to scale the greatest heights of Mount Oscar. Unfortunately, Ron Howard got more serious with disappointments such as Backdraft and The Paper, (although to be honest, he developed greatly as a film craftsman). Although Howard's recent Apollo 13 was much liked, one wishes that he would do another project that contains even half the playfulness that he expresses in Splash..
There are nice touches in it. However, a lot of it is too cute, too "look how cute the kids are acting." Mostly likeable, some nice photography.
Alternately interesting and dull, this is the film in which Woody Allen is upset about people wanting to see more of his "early, funny" movies as opposed to his more serious Bergman-like attempts. Strangely, he had made only one truly serious film up to that time--Interiors.
Say what one will about the results, but director Paul Verhoeven promised bugs, and
he has delivered them with a vengeance. The astouding special effects are really the
only reason to see this movie. Robocop, Total Recall, Basic
Instinct, Showgirls, and now this--the man is a master of visual and moral
grossness. Starship Troopers has loads of shootings and insect guts flying,
screaming soldiers, futuristic sets, spectacular spaceships, and some nudity thrown
into the mix. Watching this movie is like watching someone else expertly play a violent
video game that you aren’t any good at. If anything, the film has been inspired more by
the popular computer game “Doom” than by any sincere desire to expand on the science
fiction genre. Box office wise, there’s no question that the producers were willing
to pump a hundred million dollars into this because their eyes were looking for the
topper to Independence Day. Like that film, Starship Troopers has a
practically invisible screenplay and a fever-pitched, though at the same time
unsatisfying, “time to wrap this up now” ending.
The whole first hour is a blatant
set-up for the carnage to come, and even the two ten year olds sitting next to me
recognized that. Because the whole thing is all humans versus bugs, Verhoeven can get
away with extreme amounts of blood; there are stabbings, decapitations, mutiliations,
even a guy getting his brain sucked out. It’s all done with a wink, but with none of
the genuine slyness and good storytelling that saved Verhoeven’s best American film,
Robocop. The bugs are the whole show here, for better or worse. Even the most
sensitive souls will find much of Starship Troopers to be exciting, but the film
shamelessly puts a person in the state of mind in which you root for more and more
violence and horror.
Sorry, fans of the show. Trekkies will like it, but it's really an overblown TV episode. That's where it belongs. In the movies, the second one, The Wrath of Khan, was the best of them.
The famous landmark science fiction film of the seventies. It is incredibly loved and stolen from to this day, but there are some critics who blame all that is wrong the film industry on this film in particular. The film was so outrageously commercial that many studios became more obsessed with creating "blockbuster" productions that could be marketed in many other forms that had nothing to do with the film itself.
Sam Pechinpah film about a man (Dustin Hoffman) who tries to protect his wife from a group of men who have raped her.
Among the best horror-suspense films of the eighties. Terry O' Quinn plays a man who kills his wife and children when they disappoint him. He disguises himself and soon wants to settle down again with a different woman and her children.
The Best Picture Oscar winner of 1973. Robert Redford and Paul Newman are con-men who create an elaborate scheme to swindle money from a man who had murdered a friend of theirs. Also starring Robert Shaw.
A sweet film by Robert Mulligan that concerns a group of teenagers fumbling to find out about sex. Starring the lovely Jennifer O'Neill.
One of the best comic strip films ever made. The first, lengthy sequence tells the story of Superman's origin, and then the film becomes increasingly silly as Superman tries to stop his enemy Lex Luthor from creating devastation aroung the world. Christopher Reeve is wonderful in the lead role, and although he tried very hard to broaden his future roles, he has always been loved primarily for this film.
The second Superman film is just about as good as the first. This time three villians challange the leadership of the Earth. They fly right into the White House and demand that the President bow before them. Most of the time it is more effective that the more recent Independence Day.
Rob Reiner's second film, after This Is Spinal Tap is a lovely story about two college students who travel across country together. Reiner's early films had a sharp, very clever edge to them; they felt like independent films that were taking satire and the teen movie genre to new heights. Starring John Cusack.
The entertaining Disney film about a standed family and the crude inventions they create to stay alive.
Robert DeNiro is unforgettable in the role of Travis Bickle, a lonely New York City taxi driver who is a walking time bomb. He always feels like an outsider, and as his rage builds, he vows to clean up the city. "Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets," he says. Martin Scorsese's film creates an atmosphere of despair and hopelessness that few films featuring New York ever do. Watching Taxi Driver you feel that all is lost; you get so drawn into its nightmarish world that you even forget suburban neighborhoods actually exist. The look of the film (photographed by Michael Chapman) is intentionally dark and misty; toward the end, different film stocks were used to get a "grainy" visual style--the effect is that of looking at a faded magazine photo. The horror of the film is that it is not only Travis, but everyone else in the city who has the potential to explode into violence. Also starring Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle and a young and terrific Jodie Foster.
The Oscar winner as Best Picture of 1983 is entertaining and features sly performances by Shirley Maclaine and Jack Nicholson, who also won top awards. It was directed by James L. Brooks, one of the creators of the Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Simpsons. He also did Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets. There is no question that Brooks has a gift for recognizing the kind of family material that people like to see, and he carries it all out in a catchy, although sometimes predictable way. His talent as a writer is his greatest asset. Also starring Debra Winger and John Lithgow.
Despite that atrociously exploitive title, this is one of the most horrifying movies ever made. Directed by Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist), this is far more than just a kook running after people with a now infamous hardware tool. The film's high standing among horror films is due to it's realistic acting, and even more, its eerie but non-imposing film editing and photography. It is one of the few movies that truly captures the texture of an actual nightmare.
A film with a very interesting framing device--a dance til' you drop contest during the depression years. Jane Fonda had her most substantial and demanding role yet in this film. Her even more memorable work in Klute would come two years later. This sad and angry film was directed by the versatile director Sydney Pollock, who directed Absence of Malice and Out of Africa, among many others. At his best, Pollock's work is extremely perceptive and in the case of Tootsie, hilariously clever as well. And he's a good actor too--he is well worth seeing in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives.
Often hysterically funny and unarguably creative right down to its satirical heavy metal songs, Rob Reiner's first film has become a cult classic and is now seen as being one of the funniest films of the eighties.
A comical and yet rather haunting film about a man who desperately tries to disengage himself from the rat race, and therefore from much of life itself. Jason Robards has one of his best roles as Murray Burns, a middle-aged man who is sick of the meaningless and lovelessness of his existence. He wants nothing more than to be as non-phony as possible and finds comfort in hanging out with his ten-year old nephew and naming his own days after whatever he feels like. The boy takes after him--he changes his own first and last name at whim and when he chooses one that he's most comfortable with, it's the exact same one as his uncle's. A Thousand Clowns is filled with many lovely moments and wonderful perfomances from Barbara Harris, Martin Balsam, Gene Saks (who directed) and Barry Gordon as the child. It is sadly underplayed on television, although it was a potential Best Picture winner, had it not been for The Sound Of Music.
The third James Bond film, again with Sean Connery, who is the best of all possible Bonds. Although not as consistently clever as the previous Goldfinger, it is well acted and contains some tense underwater battle scenes.
Thoughtfully filmed version of the famous book by Harper Lee about a southern lawyer who defends a black man in a trial in which bigotry is rampant. Gregory Peck stars in one of his best roles and there is a fine child performace by Mary Badham. Peck won the Oscar as Best Actor.
I thought Tootsie was a wonderful, popular movie--every performer in it doing his best. Especially good was the script, one of the few that noticeably allow for some improvisation. It is an extremely likable movie, and you really get to care about the characters. You walk out of the movie and feel like they're out there--like in Shoot The Moon. Starring Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange and Teri Garr, all at the top of their game.
Not for everyone; this movie is about a totally uncensored television network. The people want it; the government does not. Set in 1985, 55 percent of the people in the United States quit their jobs just to stay home and watch TV. With Chevy Chase.
Anne Bancroft and Shirley Maclaine give excellent performances in this beautifully structured film that centers on an emotional build-up of past disappointments between two dancers that have been best friends for twenty years. Heroines have rarely emerged in the films of the seventies, and The Turning Point shows that more themes that concern the feelings of women might be just what moviegoers are looking for.
The performers and the director, Herbert Ross, have put much love and attention into the ways that the various characters are portrayed. Cinematographer Robert Surtees (The Sting, A Star Is Born) manages to make many of the films ballet sequences look like paintings come to life, and the film is just as interesting to listen to as it is to watch due to a fine script by Arthur Laurents.
Throughout the film, feelings of curiosity, jealousy, and love are presented by the two main characters as their life-long desires continue to conflict with their friendship. The story is built up to the point where a glass of wine that is thrown into the face of Shirley Maclaine by Anne Bancroft turns into the most shocking dramatic highlight of the film. The scene that follows contains a fight between the two women, each trying to pound out her past regrets on the other. The film ends on a touching and yet humorous note that is painful and definitive for both. The way in which The Turning Point emanates human qualities will enable it to endure many years to come.
People have been arguing about the meaning of this film since the day it was released. However, no one will deny that this is one of the most visually stunning science fiction films ever made. It made director Stanley Kubrick a god to many young filmmakers.
Many of foreign films have become easier to see. We have two big video stores--RKO in Edison, and Blockbuster Video in North Brunswick. From time to time, I've been trying to catch up on some foreign films that I've never seen on TV or in film classes. Umberto D. was a very touching movie, full of warmth and loneliness. It's got to be one of the saddest movies ever made. Directed by Vitorrio De Sico.
Philip Kaufman's excellent adaptation of Milan Kundera's book about a doctor who is obsessed with the two main women in his life. Starring Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche.
One of Brian DePalma's most crowd-pleasing films. Sean Connery won an Oscar for his role as a cop. Also starring Kevin Costner.
An early, wickedly funny film by Robert Zemekis, who would give us Forrest Gump for better or worse nearly fifteen years later. Used Cars is about two brothers, one mostly good and one mostly evil, both played by Jack Warden, who each own used car dealerships across the street from each other. Needless to say, they don't get along very well. When the conniving brother tries to have his brother killed in an assaultive test-drive, a young car salesman (Kurt Russell in top form) steps in to deflect his intentions, but the brutal one-upsmanship gets even worse. In one memorable scene (among many) the "good guys" shoot a commercial outside of the bad brother's dealership while shooting up his cars with a shotgun, and soon enough blow one up altogether. This may well be one of the most outrageously funny films of the seventies.
For better or for worse, Oliver Stone finds a subject to make a movie about and then goes about filming it as if it will be the last movie ever made. People who hate his work tend to view him as being more of a general than a film director. I also have mixed feelings about Oliver Stone. He is always a great filmmaker, but true, not always a great film director. One has to catch him when he is both at the same time, as I think he was with Nixon, much of Natural Born Killers, and JFK, and the one which even Stone-haters usually admit was powerful and deserving of awards, Platoon. With U-Turn, he has decided to make a film without a "big" subject (it's even called an Oliver Stone movie and not film) and it is a somewhat interesting and mostly unpleasant experience. What makes it more disappointing is that Sean Penn, who occupies a lot of sceen time, doesn't have a well-written character to sink his teeth into. You rarely catch him acting as if he doesn't know what he is supposed to be doing in this picture--by no means is he terrible--but one wants the very best in material for him, especially after seeing his stunning portrayals in Carlito's Way and Dead Man Walking. Although Stone gets ridiculed for playing with historical facts in his film biographies, at least those films are ambitious. One can feel the director's passion to get his story and ideas across. The problem with U-Turn is that there is little story and few ideas that will stick with one after you leave the theater.
I first saw this haunting film in a high school class, and it was the first time that I watched a movie and thought that the person who had made it was truly an individual artist. I had seen films by Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, and others--but no film had prepared me for the work of the great Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman. He had already made quite a few films before The Virgin Spring, including his other masterworks The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. (He is a man of many masterpieces.) The Virgin Spring concerns the subjects of rape and revenge, forgiveness and the philosophical issue of whether or not a God is watching us. The rape scene that is at the center of this movie is one of the most realistic that has ever been filmed.
WarGames is an enjoyable and suspenseful pop parable about the horror of nuclear war. Like The World According To Garp, it is a cartoon picture, but it carries a heavy message in a good way--full of heart. Children can relate and understand this picture. I believe it will mean more than The China Syndrome (a good picture) but WarGames is broader. Deservedly, its screenplay was nominated for an Oscar. Matthew Broderick is excellent, too.
One of the most interesting animated feature films that has ever been made. The artwork can hold its own with Disney's marvelous work, and the Disney people have never touched the subject matter that is dealt with here. The film is about a group of rabbits who yearn to find a better life for themselves; the underlying theme is that of democracy versus dictatorship. Directed by Martin Rosen.
A remake of Romeo and Juliet--only the Montagues and Capulets are "whites" and "Puerto Ricans." Parts of this movie, which won the Oscar as Best Picture of 1961, have not held up well. In fact, it's questionable as to whether those same parts held up when West Side Story was first released. If you can get past watching the supposedly tough street gangs dancing through the streets of their poor neighborhood, then you will probably like this entire film. (I do.) Natalie Wood is the young girl who comes between the two gangs who call themselves The Jets and The Sharks. George Chakaris and Rita Moreno are especially good in their respective roles as the leader of the Sharks and his girlfriend. The music, by Leonard Bernstein is absolutely great: songs include "Tonight", "Gee, Officer Krupke", "Something's Coming", "I Feel Pretty", and the famous "Maria." The film was directed by Robert Wise, who would also make The Sound of Music. Wise was the editor of Citizen Kane early in his career.
A precursor to Jurassic Park, which was also written by Michael Crighton. He directed this film, his first, with the same kind of ingenuity that makes his books so interesting to read. In Westworld, robots in a theme park go berserk and start going after the humans. Starring Richard Benjamin. Yul Brynner makes a cool robot.
Snappy comedy directed by Peter Bogdanovich. This was from the period when Barbra Streisand was likeable and extremely funny on screen. Also starring Ryan O'Neal.
Cult film with George Segal, one of the most natural actors in the early seventies. Also with the hysterically funny Ruth Gordon (Harold and Maude).
Every year there are a few films that are advertised to death. And over-rated to death. A few years ago, Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop were getting loads of attention. Judging by their box office success, one would think that these films are great, memorable, and utterly entertaining. The truth is that they are minor, forgettable, uninteresting, and unfunny. I still can't figure out what makes these pictures so very popular. I suppose it's the liking of a particular star--like Eddie Murphy or Dan Ackroyd or Bill Murray. Sometimes one or two funny scenes draws crowds in like crazy. Word of mouth gets everyone curious.Then there is another phenomenon-- advertising. Some films like Rambo III and the new Who Framed Roger Rabbit? have massive promotions. Roger Rabbitis the latest in a long line of commercial candies being shoved down our throats. Roger is everywhere. There are some ten different commercials for the film. Then there are stuffed animals, pictures on glasses and cups and shirts. They'll probably come up with a board game for it. And you thought there was a lot of junk when Gremlins came out in 1984!
To listen to the reviews of Roger, one would think that it is an "instant classic." I don't know what that means. Almost every great film that I have ever seen has required several viewings--often over the course of several years. Everyone is being programmed to like Roger Rabbit. You're led to believe that you're a fool if you don't like it. You would think that maybe it's meant to be another Wizard Of Oz. The picture has no real charm. Neither did most of the Warner Brothers and Tom and Jerry cartoons--but somehow they were zippy and clever. You never get tired of those cartoons. The great thing about them is that they retain their flavor and humor when they come at you in little spurts. Two or three of those eight minute shorts could keep you giddy for hours. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? runs well over an hour and a half. It's a big spurt, and it wears you out. I didn't sense anybody really enjoying it.
The first five minutes are terrific, but the rest of the movie never tops them. The whole real life-animation bit very quickly becomes gimmicky, and you soon yearn for some real substance to the story. The film and script have no emotional center; that's what a cartoon of this length needs. Maybe twenty minutes into the movie, you realize that the gimmicks and tricks that you're watching are all that you're going to get. It probably seemed like a good idea to put all those famous cartoon characters in the picture as cameos. I must admit that much of the movie really tries to be clever and big. I think that the filmmakers really intended Roger Rabbit to be the ultimate salute to the art of animation. But seeing all this "innovation" somehow annoyed me, and seeing all those cartoon characters just made me wish I was watching their own original cartoons.
The acting, directing, and technical aspects of the film are exceptional, and yet I become very frustrated with this film after the first forty minutes or so. Richard Burton is hypnotic and cold, in what is surely one of his best performances, and Elizabeth Taylor is clearly burning to give an all-out performance. Perhaps it is the presentation of the endless marital bickering and bitterness between the main couple that eventually makes some viewers feel as if they're listening to a sound loop of a blackboard being endlessly scratched. Still, many people feel that this is a marvelous filmed version of the award winning Edward Albee play, and that it was deserving of still more awards. Taylor took home her second Best Actress Oscar for this.
Sam Pechinpah's most famous film. It is notorious for its slow motion, bloody action scenes. Starring William Holden and Ernest Borgnine.
A peculiar version of John Irving's popular book about a man thrown around by bizarre circumstances in his life. Starring Robin Williams in one of his best performances, and Mary Beth Hurt. Jon Lithgow was nominated for Supporting Actor.
A classic of pop art. The Beatles are in animated form, and don't supply their own voices, but this film captures the essence of what made them so popular and likeable.
Epic sized James Bond film, with Sean Connery after the evil Blofeld. Sean Connery plays Bond.
An early Francis Ford Coppola film that contains much inventiveness and love of filmmaking. It is definitely worth checking out, although there is not a clue that this is the man who will be capable of making a startling and powerful film like The Godfather five years later.
If I'm not mistaken, this film may have inspired the popular Brady Bunch television show. Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball fall in love, but they have what seems like have a truckload of children from previous marriages. Fonda nicely plays a military man who uses his knowlege to keep all the kids orderly and respectful. Lucille Ball has a very funny drunk scene toward the middle--you can't help but love her.
Woody Allen slipped Zelig by in the summer of 1983, and it has a great, broad theme, a theme that isn't treated that openly. It's about a man who wants to be loved, and he has the gift of being able to change nationalities and professions at whim. It is a film performed by a master, with a documentary style. It is weird, kind, interesting. Also stars Mia Farrow in one of her best roles.
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