Review – The Stepford Wives

The missus mouth off to you? Gripe when you stay out all night with the guys? Fail to attend to your needs? Bad cook? Lousy lay? Well, if you’re a guy living in Stepford in 1974, you can replace her with a robot simulacrum. Needless to say, this is some heavy-handed allegory from the golden age of the feminist movement. Still, turnabout is fair play. I mean, how many movies are there about how women are all united in a sinister conspiracy to do men in? This movie would make one heck of a point-counterpoint double feature with The Dark Secret of Harvest Home. Mildly amusing

Review – American Beauty

I guess I’ve seen worse mid-life-crisis movies. Still, I fear that if this movie is any indication, the boomers who rebelled against their parents in the 60s are now ripe to rebel against themselves for becoming their parents in the 90s. Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning turn in solid performances as a suburban couple who feel stifled by each other. The wife copes with her crumbling marriage and unsatisfying real estate job by sleeping with one of her competitors, while the husband overcomes his feelings of emasculation by quitting his job, pumping iron, buying a classic muscle car, and otherwise regressing to teenager-dom. There’s also a vaguely Nabokov-esque thing between the Spacey character and one of his daughter’s teammates on the high school cheerleading squad. Some of the comedy works fairly well, but in the end it just doesn’t come across as anywhere near as profound a statement about American life as it pretends to be (or as some critics apparently thought it was). Mildly amusing

Review – The Omega Code

The end times are upon us. The Whore of Babylon is a telejournalist. The False Prophet is a motivational speaker. Michael York is The Beast. Well, okay, I guess none of that is really all that unbelievable. Throw in a hearty dose of the nonsensical Bible Code, and you’ve got the makings for a Trinity Broadcasting Network version of Revelation tailor-made for the new millennium. Heck, some of the bad guys seem to have second thoughts about their evil ways. Even The Beast has his doubts. The False Prophet ends up so overwhelmed by conscience that he switches sides. How neo-Christian! With all due respect to the Bible Code, I have to say that I prefer the original St. John version of the Apocalypse to this odd, touchy-feely rendition. Finally, fans of The Atomic Cafe will probably find themselves with one of the odd nuclear ditties from the documentary’s soundtrack stuck in their heads at the end of this movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country

This is the final entry from the aging crew from the original Star Trek series. From here on out, it’s the next generation. At least for the last gasp from the past they chose something a little more engaging than the previous couple of outings. The dreaded Klingon empire has suffered some setbacks, and the time for peace is at hand (a situation roughly analogous to US/Soviet relations around the time the film was made). Naturally complications arise when the crew of the Enterprise is sent to escort the Klingon ambassador to the peace talks. The action proceeds from there, with plenty of standard series intrigue and starship battles in the offing. Mildly amusing

Review – The Longest Day

Not quite the longest movie ever made (I think Fassbinder’s still the title holder on that one), but still plenty lengthy. This is one of those war movies that tells the story of a famous battle (in this case D-Day) from many different perspectives. Thus it’s fun to watch just for the galaxy of major stars like John Wayne, minor stars like a host of early 60s heartthrobs, and then-minor-now-major stars like Sean Connery. Much of the dialogue is typical of the mucho-macho approach to combat flicks that was common when this movie was made (and really isn’t all that uncommon now), and the plot occasionally suffers from dulce et decorum est clichés. But for the most part the production manages to live up to its lofty ambition to paint a realistic and at least somewhat comprehensive portrait of the largest military operation in human history. Mildly amusing

Review – Leviathan

When word leaked in the industry that James Cameron was making an underwater action movie, rival studios must have assumed that it would be a waterlogged remake of his recent hit Aliens. Of course, history has shown that The Abyss turned out to be little like Cameron’s famous sequel to Ridley Scott’s original. But before anyone figured that out, at least two movies had hit theaters with the idea of stealing thunder from Cameron’s release. One of the two was Deepstar Six, and this dubious masterpiece was the other. The plot starts out with a mildly intriguing premise: that an old Soviet ship was deliberately torpedoed and sunk because the crew had been infected by some monstrous thing (as in The Thing). A crew from a deep-sea mining operation discovers the wreck and comes down with the turns-you-into-a-lobster-thing disease. Sadly, once the premise is established things rapidly devolve into a cheap rubber monster debacle. See if desperate

Review – Hard Eight

Hmmm, let’s see. This movie was generally hard to sit through, so that’s one. Two would be the characters, who were hard to care about. The plot – such that there was one at all – was hard to follow. There was a twist toward the end that was hard to believe. I know that’s only halfway, but I think everyone can see where this is going. After sitting through Magnolia and this dog, I’m really starting to think that the folks who made them both just happened to hit on a lucky fluke when they made Boogie Nights. If you like movies where every piece of action takes ten times longer than it needs to and the vast majority of the dialogue is repetitive or otherwise going nowhere, then this one’s a must-see. Otherwise ... See if desperate

Review – The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

Director Terry Gilliam lends his special brand of art-direction-intensive absurdism to this retelling of the Munchausen story and semi-remake of an end-of-the-war piece of German escapism. Toward the end it becomes a bit of a preachy paean to the merits of imagination over rationalism, but other than that it’s an enjoyable bit of fantasy. Mildly amusing

Review – The Road Warrior

Despite animal violence aplenty, a graphic rape sequence, and a virtually endless parade of other random brutality, this is probably the best of the three Mad Max movies. This time around, our hero has turned outlaw and is cruising the outback in search of gas for his car and punk rockers to kill. Eventually he falls in with a group of good folks who are trying to safeguard their fuel supply from a gang of itinerant marauders. The cars-for-smashing fund is once again the lion’s share of the budget (though at this point Gibson’s salary might have been giving it a run for the money), and thus the under-cranked chase and battle sequences are the highlight of the movie. Mildly amusing

Review – A Star Is Born (1976)

Watch closely, children. Before the days of music videos, mega-stars in the recording industry apparently had to make movies like this to appease their monster egos. Fans of Barbra Streisand may enjoy the endless parade of her AM-format crooning, but most other folks will probably regard this stiff-plotted preachiness as little more than a relic from the pre-disco past. See if desperate

Review – Creepshow 2

I know sequels don’t typically compare favorably to originals, but this one is really, really not an exception. The basic format is the same as the first, though this time around it’s three bad vignettes rather than five good ones. The bracketing material is more extensive, featuring an animated, talking Creep and a mini-story all its own (so maybe that makes a grand total of three and a half). The first tale, a trite little number about a cigar store Indian that comes to life to seek revenge on some armed robbers, probably comes the closest to the look and feel of the first movie. The second one is a bad reheat of The Blob, with the part of the monster apparently played by a mass of duck weed and floating trash bags. As for the third outing, all I can say is “Thanks for the ride, lady.” If you actually sit through this stinker, you’ll think that’s funny. Or then again, maybe you won’t. See if desperate

Review – Revenge of the Dead

Revenge of the Bad Italian Filmmakers is more like it. I rented this barker because I thought it would be a zombie movie in the Romero tradition. As it turns out, the plot involves a mystifying and uninteresting scheme to re-animate the dead. Some young guy stumbles upon the conspiracy after he deciphers the remains of a letter left on the ribbon from a pawn-shop typewriter. Zombies do turn out to be the menace, but they don’t make a significant appearance until more than two-thirds of the way through. There is a slightly chilling moment right at the end, but it’s far too little and way too late to justify the whispered dialogue, eardrum-splitting music, and general ennui that makes up most of the rest of the movie. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Legionnaire

Jean Claude Van Damme drops the heavy-duty martial arts stuff in a bid to make a somewhat more serious action movie. The amazing thing about it is that the final product isn’t half bad. Of course it’s not exactly good, either. Naturally, any movie about the French Foreign Legion in the 1920s is going to invite comparisons to the whole Beau Geste thing, and certainly there are plenty of parallels that could be pointed out (the gallant young man fleeing personal crisis and ending up in the hands of a stern Legion commander, and so on). But somewhere amidst the “march or die” and the “blood and honor” nonsense there actually appears to be a worthwhile moral here. More than that I can’t divulge without giving away a chunk of the plot, so suffice it to say that this is a standard action flick with small shreds of conscience stirred in. Mildly amusing

Review – The Guardian

Director William Friedkin Allan Smithee’d this movie, and for good reason. The concept’s not too bad: a young couple hire a nanny who turns out to be a witch who tries to sacrifice their child to a tree god. Sure, it’s not too PC, but at least it had potential. However, the script is weak, the acting weaker, and the editing weakest of all. At times the action is so poorly assembled that it’s hard to tell what’s going on. And if you happen to be watching the butchered-for-television version, your predicament is even worse. The main attraction, at least according to the early buzz when this dog first hit theaters, was the supposedly hot scene in which our villain peels off and gets friendly with a tree. But even that turned out to be so tame that it scarcely justified the price of admission, even if you got to see it for free. See if desperate

Review – Courage Under Fire

Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan star in this Rashomon-style mystery. Washington plays an Army officer investigating the circumstances surrounding Ryan’s character’s death, though to determine whether or not she should receive the Medal of Honor rather than to figure out if she was murdered. The plot is complicated by a lot of sub-drama, including friendly-fire casualties, drinking problems, press leaks and the like. It might have been a more interesting film if the macho hadn’t been quite so thick. Further, like many action movies of late, it earns serious demerits for combining whispered dialogue and eardrum-rupturing combat sequences with little or no buffer in between. See if desperate

Review – The Revenge of Frankenstein

For a Hammer rehash of one of the most often redone plots in the history of horror cinema, this one’s actually not too bad. Christopher Lee was busy on another project at the time, but Peter Cushing had the time to play the creepy Dr. Stein (actually Frankenstein on the lam after having escaped his own execution). The good doctor has established a charity clinic where he has free reign to prescribe amputations for the choicest parts from the riff raff in his care. The ultimate goal is to transplant the brain from the de rigeur hunchbacked lab assistant into a physically-perfect body. I guess it probably goes without saying that things go awry. Despite the usual Hammer trappings, this movie makes a few points about medical exploitation of patients and other at least somewhat serious topics. Mildly amusing

Review – The Green Mile

Normally I shy away from emotionally-manipulative, big budget Hollywood epics like this. And to be sure, this go-around includes many of the features that generally tend to drive me off: super-sentimentality, high-priced stars who feel that their delivery of every line has to justify their seven-digit paychecks, and a message so thick it probably has to be cleaned out of the projector after every screening. Further, I don’t like being able to practically hear the pitch meeting while I’m watching a movie (“hey, it’ll be just as big as The Shawshank Redemption” or words to that effect). On the other hand, I have to admit that I’m a sucker for Stephen King, even when he’s being as Ray-Bradbury-sticky-sweet as he is here. The filmmakers remain reasonably faithful to the original tale of a death row inmate with an unusual gift, and as a result the plot keeps moving throughout the movie’s three-plus hours’ worth of running time (except toward the very end, when the story begins to waver and wallow just a bit). So if you’re in the mood to have your emotions yanked around for a few hours, you could do a lot worse. Worth seeing

Review – Reindeer Games

If poor Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer had known that this was what he was missing out on, he probably wouldn’t have felt too bad about not being permitted to play. Our wrong-man protagonist (Ben Afleck) is a con fresh out of maximum security lock-up who assumes the identity of his dead cell-mate so he can go home with the guy’s correspondence girlfriend (Charlize Theron). After a tawdry sex scene, he ends up roped into helping a gang of would-be robbers (led by Gary Sinese) hit a casino. As usual with movies like this, he makes a string of bad and/or weak decisions that keep the plot going a lot longer than it really needs to. And to top it all off, the film-makers try to compensate for the predictability of most of the movie by introducing a plot twist at the end that can only accurately be described as completely absurd. Overall the sex and violence just aren’t quite enough to make up for the abysmal script and lackluster acting. See if desperate

Review – Great Expectations

Wow, is this ever a boring movie. It’s got too much art-house pretense to function well as a romance, and it has too much romance to function well as anything else. Gwenyth Paltrow does an acceptable job as the elusive love interest of our protagonist, a starving artist played by Ethan Hawke. Robert DeNiro and Anne Bancroft vaguely figure in here as well. If the script had been a little better, it might have overcome the overbearing art direction. Sadly, the pace was lethargic and much of the dialogue ham-handed at best. An E for effort, but not much more. See if desperate

Review – The Legend of Hell House

Normally I’m not all that big a fan of ghost stories, and the haunted house sub-genre generally amuses me even less than most. But for some reason lately I’ve been on a real spook-house kick, so this classic was a natural selection. Richard Matheson wrote both the source novel and the screenplay, so it should come as no surprise that the latter follows the former rather closely. Of course, the book had a lot more explicit sex and violence, but I suspect that’s mostly because in the early 1970s writers could get away with a lot of things that filmmakers couldn’t. Though I’m one of the world’s biggest fans of understated horror flicks that rely on script and atmosphere rather than flashy effects, I have to admit that I would have liked to have seen a little more of the stuff Matheson packed into the novel. The end is at least a little weak, and I didn’t think the graphic cat death served much of a purpose. That aside, this is a fine example of its era and milieu. Mildly amusing

Review – Stalag 17

When I was a kid, this was one of my favorite films. Bizarre childhood? Nah, not me. Perhaps I could blame this mean-spirited, sarcastic movie about a German prison camp during World War Two for the mean-spirited, sarcastic adult I grew up to be. Seriously, though, this film is a genuinely brilliant mix of comedy, tragedy and politics, daring to challenge the Audie Murphy-style myths about American servicemen during the war. The inmates in this prison camp are fallible individuals with senses of humor and other human qualities far beneath your average cinematic war hero. And on top of everything else, there’s a bit of an espionage mystery behind it all and a valuable lesson in the end about the difference between seeming guilty and actually being guilty. Billy Wilder was in top form when he cranked this one out. Worth seeing

Review – The Abyss

After James Cameron’s smash hit Aliens, I think everyone figured his next movie, a big-budget underwater epic, would be something along those same lines. Instead he serves up something a lot closer to Close Encounters. The story centers around a deep-sea drilling operation that gets caught up with an attempt by the Navy to check out a downed submarine. Michael Biehn plays the SEAL officer in charge of the mission, a pressure-sickness-psycho who’s the closest this production comes to a villain. Once he’s gone, the action is devoted almost entirely to the main plot, a touchy-feely bit of fluff about human contact with underwater extra-terrestrials. Also note that there’s a director’s cut out there with a fair amount of extra plot, footage and happy message. Mildly amusing

Review – The Great Escape

Though personally I like the dark sarcasm of Stalag 17 better, I have to admit that this star-studded epic sets the standard for escape-from-a-POW-camp movies. The endless tunnel-digging sequences are enough to drive a claustrophobia-sufferer completely nuts, of course. Further, if you’re looking for compelling roles for actresses, they’re pretty much non-existent in this outing. But if you can stand the camaraderie of men for the lengthy running time, the story (based on a real attempt to escape from a German POW camp during World War Two) should prove sufficiently compelling to reward the amount of attention you need to devote to it. Mildly amusing