An oft-omitted passage from Plato

 

An Idol moment

Back in the lingering end of the hippie days in the late 70s and early 80s, consumer activist David Horowitz used to have a TV show. He’d come on and rail about how horrible it was that the “butter” on movie theater popcorn was actually some kind of oily goo that had never seen the insides of a cow. He also had a passionate hatred of over-packaging. Seemed like at least once a show he’d haul out a bag of cookies, open it up and show us all the evil travesty of excessively airy plastic trays.

The problem with acting offended by a foot-long cookie bag that turns out to be eight inches of polystyrene is that Americans love packaging, often more than we love the actual product.

Take Coke for example. All this product really offers us is corn syrup and caffeine, with carbonated water as an afterthought just to make it drinkable. Everything else, from the familiar brown color to the uniquely-styled bottle, is just, well, packaging. But take away the magical color and nobody buys it, as Crystal Pepsi proved back in the 80s.

Sadly, I think that spells doom for my latest, greatest show idea: American Asylum.

I’ve gotta start this one with a history lesson. Back in the days before television, people sought entertainment outside their homes. And one popular amusement destination was local insane asylums. England’s Bethlem asylum was particularly well known as a spot where the upper crust and even the newly-semi-idle middle class could pass a few carefree hours gawking at the mental patients. And if the inmates’ gibbering and cavorting wasn’t sufficiently entertaining, patrons were invited to poke them with sticks to get them riled up.

Attending trials was another popular pastime, one that has been a repeated success in syndication. So if it works for courtrooms, why not the loony bin? Let’s parade crazy people across TV screens and let the ad-watching-product-consuming public gawk at them. Should work, right?

On paper, maybe. But in reality, that might be a bit too much like offering consumers a bottle full of caffeinated corn syrup. They’ll drink it. They want to drink it. But they need some kind of packaging in order to make the experience palatable.

And that’s the real genius of American Idol, which recently started its seventh season. Like the carefully-camera-facing beverages on the judges’ table, it what we crave packaged up nicely so we don’t feel bad about consuming it. We want to feast on the auditions of deluded nutjobs who think they’re going to be famous for anything but their own freakishness. We want to watch Simon poke them with a stick to get them going real good. And as long as we can maintain the pretense that this is actually some kind of talent show, everything is nice and socially acceptable.

So poke on, Simon. America toasts your good health with an ice-cold bottle of Coke.

Review – No End in Sight

Though at this point all of us – well, okay, most of us – realize that the war in Iraq has gone badly, this documentary helps us understand exactly what went wrong. Not surprisingly, most of the problems can be traced to the Bush administration’s rampant bungling of post-war reconstruction. The movie is fairly well put together, with an even blend of interviews, on-scene footage and graphics. Mildly amusing

Review – Stardust Memories

I’ve said this before, and unless filmmakers finally manage to get over themselves I’ll probably have to say it again: if you hate being famous so much, find a different line of work. Invest wisely, retire and live out your life in peaceful anonymity. Go out and get a job and see what it’s like to work for a living for awhile. Just give it up. Eventually the fans you seem to hate so much will get tired of you and move on to someone else. In Woody Allen’s defense, he doesn’t seem to hate fame as much as he hates not being constantly famous for everything he does. After all, it isn’t his fault that his neuroses aren’t funny anymore, leaving his following longing for the good old days. Like Hannah and Her Sisters, this picture is partially redeemed by the excellent location work, but otherwise it’s more than a bit on the boring side. Mildly amusing

Review – Eastern Promises

Cronenberg has done worse. The basic structure is a boring mob movie, and the fact that the gangsters are Russian rather than Italian doesn’t make it any more interesting. But Cronenberg’s lingering skill with gore helped spice things up a bit. Viggo Mortensen stars as a low-key factotum in the London branch of the Russian mob who gets too close to a midwife (Naomi Watts) who knows too much about their underage prostitution ring. The real draw for me, however, was the tattoo stuff. I find Russian prison tattoos fascinating, so I enjoyed the parts of the movie that focused on the meanings of various designs and their importance in the criminal subculture. A little blood and ink aren’t quite enough to make this a must-see, but at least they supplied some entertainment value. Mildly amusing

Review – The Kingdom

The opening credits really got me interested in this movie. I thought maybe it would turn out to be like Syriana only less boring. And for the first hour or so, it actually filled the bill quite nicely. I don’t care for Jamie Foxx’s acting other than his work in Ray, and I don’t care much for Jennifer Garner at all. But I like Chris Cooper, and I definitely like movies that offer an even blend of international intrigue (especially when it’s at least semi-realistic) and a fast-moving plot with some good action and quality special effects. Trouble is, with 40 minutes or so to go the balance gets thrown way out of whack. Suddenly it’s a crappy video game excuse for a war movie, with the good guys going in with guns blazing and wasting the bad guys while taking only minimal damage. In other words, Foxx and Garner seemed a lot more at home in the back half. What a disappointment. Mildly amusing

Review – 3:10 to Yuma

As of this writing I haven’t seen the original. Nor do I have much of a taste for westerns. However, standing on its own as an action movie, this was reasonably entertaining. Christian Bale stars as a down-on-his-luck rancher who decides to pick up some badly-needed cash by escorting a dangerous criminal (Russell Crowe) to a train that will carry him to justice. Along the way we get several twists and turns and a lot of macho posturing as the balance of power shifts back and forth between the characters. Though this is unlikely to make my “eight best” list, it was an acceptable use of a couple of hours. Verdict: mildly amusing.

Review – The Simpsons Movie

I liked this better than I thought I was going to. Of course if the writers had five years to work on every episode of the show, it would be good like this rather than sucking the way it has for more than a decade. The animation was good, perhaps too much so. In particular, some of the computer-aided stuff was unnecessary and intrusive. The real draws here are the plot and characters. Bart isn’t really himself, which couldn’t possibly be a bad thing. And Homer’s perpetual mookishness seems to earn him a greater-than-usual amount of punishment (though still short of what he’s got coming). The story makes some clever moves, and some of the jokes actually seem well planned. I’m not sorry I waited for the DVD, but likewise I’m not sorry I saw it. Mildly amusing

Review – Hallowed Ground

I guess if they called this “Grown-Ups of the Corn” it wouldn’t sound as spooky. But that’s basically what this is: creepy small-towners satisfying their blood lust by tacking city folk to cornfield crosses. There’s some kind of bringing-back-the-evil-spirit-of-a-dead-cult-leader plot buzzing in the background, but the main point of the picture is the usual chasing-the-female-protagonist-around-with-a-deadly-weapon show. Mildly amusing

Review – Asteroid

Alas, poor Kansas City. This two-part sci-fi movie got me all set to see my home town trashed by a giant rock from outer space. And then the catastrophe peters out. Instead of a mega-hit, all we get is a medium-sized stone that takes out a (wholly nonexistent) dam, causing nothing worse than some flooding. Instead, a different asteroid comes along later and trashes Dallas. When this plot has to stretch out to fill four hours’ worth of screen time (minus ads, of course), you know going in that you’re going to get a lot of lost kid crap and similar time-killers. Mildly amusing

Starting a rumor

A few years back a rumor started going around that an attempted kidnapping was narrowly thwarted at one of our local shopping malls. The details varied depending on the storyteller. It was always one local mall or another, but exactly which one changed from teller to teller. The age of the victim hovered somewhere between eight and 15 or so. But the key elements were always the same.

At one of the large anchor stores – Dillard’s, Ward’s, it didn’t especially matter where – a young person was cornered in the bathroom and drugged by an evildoer. Once the kid was out cold, he or she was disguised – methods included changes into ragged clothes, impromptu haircuts, even dye jobs – by the kidnappers. Fortunately another store patron or employee happened onto the scene in mid-conversion and foiled the dastardly plot.

Never happened. If you’ve ever heard of an urban legend, you already know that this is a classic example of the genre. Somehow or another, parental nervousness about leaving offspring on their own in shopping malls – or even leaving them unattended for short periods of time – transforms itself into a horror story about an unfortunate tyke, an inattentive parent, a monster and a miraculous happy ending.

I want to get this story going again, but I want to give it a new twist. Here’s the script you can use around the water cooler at work, at your next church social, or anywhere else you get the chance:

“The other day I heard a story from a neighbor that said a friend of his nearly lost one of her kids to a kidnapper. The kid was 14 years old, so she figured it would be okay to drop him and some of his friends off by themselves at (pick your favorite local movie theater). They were supposed to go see (pick a PG-rated movie in current release), but after they bought tickets they snuck into a different theater that was showing (pick an R-rated horror movie in current release).

“There were only two or three other people in the theater, and it turned out that one of them was a child molester. When he saw that the kids came in with no adult supervision, he decided to try to drug them and then kidnap my neighbor’s friend’s kid.”

Feel free to modify the story as needed. Borrow hair dye or barber’s scissors from the original legend. Throw in a heroic theater employee who saves the day. Invent your own details. Do whatever it takes to make the story convincing. Do whatever it takes to strike terror into the hearts of any and all parents within earshot.

Why would I ask you to help me spread such a malicious lie? Because I want parents everywhere to be afraid to drop kids off unsupervised at movie theaters. If we can nip this practice in the bud, maybe the rest of us will finally get the chance to enjoy a movie in peace without sharing the experience with a gaggle of squirming, nattering, seat-kicking, candy-wrapper-rattling brats.

I first hatched this plot several years back after going to an afternoon show of the third “Lord of the Rings” movie. Normally weekday matinees are safe from packs of feral crib lizards, but I guess school had already dismissed for the holiday break.

In all fairness to the kids, the movie did have its share of slow spots. Most three and a half hour long movies do. I probably would have gotten restless if hundreds of hours of Sponge Bob had left me with the attention span of a gnat.

In fairness to the movie theater staff, they’re entitled to make a buck. The fidgeting, yammering horde spent more to get in than I did, though if you combined the admission paid by all the adults turning around and giving them dirty looks I’d bet we had the kids outnumbered.

I’m not even blaming the parents. If I had kids that bad I’d treasure every opportunity to get rid of them, at least for a few hours. Of course, maybe the kids aren’t that bad when their parents are around. Certainly at the “Lord of the Rings” the curtain climbers behind me were a sharp contrast to the two well-behaved kids in front of me who came with their dad.

So let’s at least give this a try. If you’re squeamish about telling a tale so scary that your audience never drops kids at the movies ever again, that’s okay. But please try to at least make it frightening enough that folks will either go to the movies with their children or at least try to get the theater to keep unescorted kids out of grown-ups’ movies. Remember, if we’re going to prevent imaginary kidnappings everyone has to lend a hand.

Most of this entry was originally printed as a column in the Kansas City Kansan.

Review – Lost in the Bermuda Triangle

And yet somebody found it, brought it back and put in on the Sci Fi channel. In this tale the Triangle seizes the wife of a work-obsessed businessman, forcing him to realize his emotional need for her (and the need to convince the cops he didn’t push her overboard). This tangles him up with a surly charter boat owner and a flaky woman who has adapted a Tesla design into a Bermuda Triangle spooky phenomena finder. The vanishing island that took the wife turns up again, but from there the story seems to peter off. I kept hoping that the guy’s wife would turn out to be a human-eating space alien or something, but no such luck. Overall this is par for the course, though a bit on the dull side. Mildly amusing

Review – Unholy

Is there a word missing from the title? “Mess” or perhaps “Bore”? Film schools really need to start requiring scriptwriting classes that include some sort of training in character development. None of the characters in this production are even remotely sympathetic. Indeed, most of them (particularly Adrienne Barbeau in the lead role) come across as completely robotic, which of course negates any chance that the audience will care what happens to them. This approach makes the viewing experience a lot like watching someone play a video game full of long, dull passages where nothing happens. When the description promises Nazi occultism, mind control, invisibility and time travel, I expect less mumbled, meandering dialogue and more, well, anything more interesting than mumbled, meandering dialogue. The picture is also packed full of production errors. For example, the actors appear to spend days without changing their clothes. Indeed, only rarely do they even bother to remove their coats, even when they’re indoors. Just watching this made me cold, which was not a pleasant sensation on a chilly evening in mid-January. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Earth vs. The Flying Saucers

This is a minor classic of the alien invasion trend in the sci fi movies of the 1950s. It’s noteworthy mostly as an early example of the talents of Ray Harryhausen. The scenes of the saucers crashing into Washington landmarks are rough around the edges but nonetheless as entertaining as his later, more sophisticated work. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is a stiff piece of B-movie junk. Mildly amusing

Review – The Werewolf (1956)

Here’s a creative twist: the werewolf in this picture is the victim of a mad scientist. One minute he’s a motorist minding his own business, and the next he’s been injected with werewolf serum. The best part is the excuse: the scientist wants to turn everyone into werewolves so humanity will destroy itself and he can rule a planet covered in werewolf corpses. Beyond that, however, this is a big pile of movie-making at its B-est. Bad dialogue, bad acting, the whole nine yards. At least the wolf guy is cute. See if desperate

Review – Village of the Damned (1960)

As if British moppets aren’t creepy enough when they don’t have spooky eyes, identical haircuts and psychic powers. I expected this to be worse than it was, particularly considering my luke-warm feelings about the John Carpenter remake. But the original actually is somewhat creepy. The more sedate pacing, the shadowy black-and-white cinematography, and even the low-budget nature of the production is exactly what some horror movies need, as this production proves. Worth seeing

Review – Xanadu

After all these years, I finally got so desperate for an “X” that I sat through this stinker. This is a genuinely embarrassing experience for all involved, even Olivia Newton-John. Particularly sad is that Gene Kelly – for reasons known only to himself – decided to appear in this. They’re going for some kind of early-80s goofiness, creating an awful blend of disco (some time after that ship had already sailed) and 7-Up ad graphics. On the other hand, I can see pretty clearly how this would end up on the Broadway stage and the Logo network. See if desperate

Review – Young Sherlock Holmes

I’m glad I didn’t see this movie when it first came out. More than 20 years after the fact, I’ve got the opportunity for some interesting compare-and-contrast between this Spielberg/Levinson production and the Harry Potter series. Both feature gifted English kids doing battle with the forces of darkness. To be sure, back in 1985 the story-telling wasn’t quite as sophisticated. Parts of this play like a kid-oriented remake of the Indiana Jones movie that came out a year earlier. And role-model-seeking girls accustomed to the wit and assertiveness of Hermione Granger aren’t likely to think much of the silent dishrag love interest in this show. On the other hand, I found it refreshing to see the protagonists prevail through intelligent and inventive problem solving rather than silly magic mumbo-jumbo. And if memory serves, this is the first big studio production to use computer-generated effects for something that wasn’t supposed to look like a computer-generated effect. It’s brief and rough, but in the stained-glass-knight sequence you can see the shape of things to come. Mildly amusing

The empty theater

One last quick end-of-last-year-start-of-this thing, and then I promise I’ll let it go and write about something more interesting.

At the end of every year I do some introspective calculating. For example, I figure out how many reviews I’ve written, how many pages I’ve read, and so on. Real anal-retentive stuff. One of the things I look at is where and when I saw the movies I reviewed. I keep track of whether I saw the movie on TV, rented/borrowed video, Netflix or the theater. And when I ran the 2007 totals, I noticed something interesting.

In the whole year, I only saw three movies in a theater. That’s only slightly over 1% of the total. And that’s quite a deviation for me, because back in my “glory days” as an undergrad I practically lived in movie theaters. But that was many, many years ago.

It got me to thinking: why don’t I go to movies in theaters anymore? Part of it is the wide variety of stuff that’s available on DVD (especially via the aforementioned subscription service). Combine that with the pain in the ass involved in driving all the way to the mall, paying the huge price to get in, and sitting with one’s cretinous, cell-phone-yakking fellow patrons of the arts, and it’s just not all that attractive an option.

But the real heart of the matter is that the movies in 2007 were a big load of crap. To be sure, there were exceptions (Pan’s Labyrinth comes to mind). Nonetheless, I recall several occasions during the course of the year when I had the time, the energy and the inclination to go see a movie but couldn’t find a single thing I was willing to sit through.

Perhaps 2008 will be better (though it certainly isn’t starting out that way, and if the writers’ strike continues things aren’t likely to improve anytime soon).

And a quick aside to my good friends at Esquire: thank you ever so much for deciding to kill the Dubious Achievement Awards. Now that the Dubies are no more, I haven’t the slightest incentive to ever pick up another issue of your magazine. As one of your contributors already observed, now you can devote even more pages to topless supermodels covering their boobs with their hands. I’ll bet that buys you a much bigger audience than good writing ever could.

Review – The Point

It came from the hippie days! The allegory is as ham-handed as the animation is choppy, and goodness knows just about every possible interpretation of the word “point” is explored by the end of the production. Further, I found myself musing about who would lend their voices to a 21st-century remake. I see Jim Carrey as the obnoxious guy with three heads, Ian McKellen as the King, and maybe Ewan McGreggor as the narrator. As things stand, however, the biggest name in the show is Ringo Starr. Still, its heart is in the right place. And it’s got a certain 1971 kind of charm to it. Mildly amusing

Review – The Bat

This must be part of the National Film Museum’s Project to Restore Crappy Old Movies Starring Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead (or NFMPRCOMSVPAM, which as acronyms go isn’t all that good). The killer in this stagey murder mystery dresses up like The Shadow minus the cape and plus a glove with sharp metal talons, making me wonder if Wes Craven didn’t see this as a kid and later echo it with Freddy Krueger’s infamous blades. Beyond that, however, this is a clunky bit of skullduggery and not much more. Mildly amusing

Review – 13 Rue Madeleine

Though put together after the war ended, this 1946 production is pure wartime propaganda. James Cagney is the valiant OSS (oops, make that 077) operative who goes after a Nazi double-agent in order to protect D-Day secrets and locate V2 launch sites. The picture is fun in a pre-Cold-War espionage story sort of way, though the drama and the dialogue are a bit too broad (in keeping with the era). Mildly amusing

Review – The Iron Curtain

It came from the early days of the Cold War, when the Red Menace haunted the earth. Dana Andrews stars as Soviet traitor Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Russian Embassy in Canada who gave up an atomic secrets spy ring in the name of freedom and justice. The production is packed with the typical clichés: the sneaky spies, the foolish Commie dupes, the sinister Soviet officials, and so on. At this point in history the drama is stiff and corny, though I suppose it must have been scary at the time. Mildly amusing

Review – Abominable

Pity poor Preston (whose name I recall because it’s shrieked dozens of times throughout the course of the production). A climbing accident kills his wife and lands him in a wheelchair, which is an inconvenient seat when a whole houseful of fly-ass girlies moves in next door to his mountain cabin. But things get even worse when Bigfoot shows up and starts chewing his way through the nubile neighbors. The horror of this might have been slightly enhanced if any of the women had been given even minimal personalities, or maybe even if the monster hadn’t looked like Hank Williams Jr. A smattering of B-list actors likewise doesn’t transform this into a masterpiece of the cinema arts. My favorite part of the movie was the end, and not just because it meant the movie was over. It was a nice, unexpected twist, even if it was a blatant set-up for an (with luck entirely hypothetical) Abominable 2. Mildly amusing

Genre: Horror

Subgenre: Monster
Date reviewed: 

Review – The Horror Show (1979)

This is an extended clip show for American horror movies from the 1920s to the 1970s. However, it appears to have been produced as cheaply as possible. They must have spent a buck or two hiring Anthony Perkins to narrate, but otherwise corners are frequently cut. For example, many sequences are nothing but two movies reasonably representative of their sub-genre (such as The Fly and The Incredible Shrinking Man demonstrating trends from the 50s) intercut to make them look like more footage than they really are. It’s also spoiler city, including some of the key moments from some real classics that will be more than a little ruined if you haven’t seen them yet. And though I didn’t keep close track, it seemed like almost all the clips were from movies produced by Universal. Mildly amusing

Review – The Pink Panther Strikes Again

Despite myself, I like this one. I know it’s juvenile stuff, even compared with most of the other entries in the series. But I enjoy the stupid slapstick, which at least is well choreographed and edited. Even the opening credits (animated parodies of famous movies) are entertaining. To be sure, some of the humor is dated. For example, gay men must have been a lot more inherently funny in 1976 than they are now. But overall this is a good show as long as you don’t require anything that activates your brain. Worth seeing

Review – The Sentinel

Wow, what a parade of B-listers from the 70s. Look this thing up on IMDB; the cast list is the most entertaining part of this production. The story is a low-rent rip of The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. A fashion model with an attorney boyfriend moves into a too-cheap-to-be-real apartment in New York only to find a devilish catch to the deal. The production starts off interesting, ends up interesting, but somewhere in the middle it gets bogged down and dull. Mildly amusing

Review – Princess Mononoke

After My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, I was a little disappointed in this production. It isn’t a bad movie. Far from it. It’s just less like the Miyazaki movies I really loved and more like standard anime, full of flying blades of kung fu death (and perhaps just a touch of Kurosawa on top). It’s also full of lots and lots of animal death. It’s integral to the plot, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to take. There’s only so much that even excellent quality animation can do to make up for such an unrelenting bummer of a story. Overall this is a good movie, but not on par with some of the director’s other work. Mildly amusing

Review – Eye of the Beast

It’s a giant squid, not a shark. It’s a lake, not the Atlantic. Otherwise I’ve got the sneaking suspicion I’ve seen this somewhere before. Mildly amusing

I do hereby resolve

To hell with New Years resolutions. Like greeting cards, at one point they might have served a useful purpose but now are mostly just another obnoxious collar for our necks. Wanna lose weight in the new year? Go on a diet. We’ve got a product for that. Exercise more. Here’s a gym you can join, complete with a contract that will last a lot longer than your resolution.

That notwithstanding, I’d like to see some changes made. No better place to start than with myself, and no better time to start than 2008.

Indeed, this election year seems like an especially appropriate time to change some bad habits. The brutal truth is that technology has rendered news coverage of the election almost completely worthless. On the one hand, the pressure to go on the air or to press with election news even when there’s nothing newsworthy to report has produced a vast plague of polls and punditry. So each time the latest poll numbers come out, the page gets turned. Each time words like “electability” or “demographic” or even “I think” pop out of someone’s mouth, the channel gets changed. Democracy dies a little every time we choose a leader based solely – or even primarily – on what other people think of him. Or potentially in this case, her.

On the other hand, primary sources are now much more accessible than they used to be. With fairly minimal research, one can find exactly what candidates say in speeches and propose in position papers. The only thing that keeps sound-bite politics from becoming completely moot is our unwillingness to give up on it. And that’s what makes it such a good resolution.

And the diet. And joining a gym. And giving up ending articles with “whatever.”

Review – Manticore

The Sci Fi Channel strikes again. This time it’s an Army unit in Iraq that runs up against an ancient beast awakened by the local populace. The monster is cute in a computer-animated videogame kind of way. But whatever points the monster wins for the production are immediately squandered by the stereotypical treatment of journalists. Overall this is just another run-of-the-mill horror movie, which is a shame because the archaeological elements and use of a “real” mythological creature could have been done to much better effect. Mildly amusing

Review – Tower of Evil

What a wildly uneven picture. Some of it is a murky English horror movie. But then it goes all nudie slasher flick. Then it goes right back to dreary British. This was a particularly odd thing to find on Turner Classic, which generally doesn’t go for things this risqué. However cheap, this does have a few spooky moments. Mildly amusing

Review – Spirited Away

I’m beginning to like Miyazaki. This is much more elaborate than My Neighbor Totoro, but it has the same childlike charm. In this tale, a cranky pre-teen girl ends up spirited away from her boring little world and into a strange fantasy realm. Bereft of parents (they’ve been turned into pigs), she’s forced to work as an attendant in a bath house that caters to odd gods of all shapes and sizes. There’s constantly something magical and mysterious going on, and only by carefully sticking to her conscience can our heroine navigate the complicated goings-on around her. The animation is just as good as the plot, which makes this a wonderful experience. Buy the disc

Review – Three Days of the Condor

The first 45 minutes or so of this production are pretty good. Robert Redford stars as a guy who reads books for the CIA. The office where he works is shot up by hit men one day while he’s out getting lunch. The subsequent guy-on-the-run routine stays entertaining for at least as long as it takes to reveal who’s behind the murders. But then we have to have a love interest (Faye Dunaway), and suddenly the whole thing turns into a Stockholm Syndrome soap opera. Max von Sydow does his best to keep things going as the creepy-killer-in-chief, but to little avail. By all means come in for the start, but don’t feel like you have to stay until the end. Mildly amusing

Review – The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

Ick. This is one of those movies that insists on being unpleasant from beginning to end, deftly avoiding every opportunity to redeem itself in any way. Jodie Foster (back when she was age-appropriate to the role) stars as a 13-year-old girl trying to hide the fact that she lives by herself. That alone wouldn’t have been so bad, nor would the stiff, theatrical dialogue and plot structure (almost the entire movie takes place in her living room). But then Martin Sheen shows up as a pervert intent on playing his little molestation games with her. One of these stunts involves the torturing and killing of her pet hamster, which cost the production an entire rating point. And don’t even get me started on the nude scene that has to be a child molester’s wet dream (and Foster being body doubled by her of-legal-age older sister didn’t make it dramatically less creepy). Overall the piece is poorly constructed and generally hard to look at. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Quiller Memorandum

Any movie – especially a spy movie – with the word “memorandum” in the title is a safe bet to be dull. And on that count this one sadly fails to disappoint. On the other hand, I kinda like dull spy movies, because they make espionage look more like the workaday (albeit dangerous) job it is rather than the realm of glamorous super heroes. In this tale George Segal stars as a contract agent brought in by what appears to be MI-6 to break a ring of neo-Nazis in 1960s Berlin. Spy movie vet Alec Guiness does a solid – if all too brief – job as the chief of the operation, and Max von Sydow plays the head of the bad guy cabal. If you’re looking for cars with ejector seats, seek elsewhere. But if you want a good production that takes ample advantage of the paranoid world of spies and counter-spies, this one does the trick. Just about my only major objection were the un-subtitled exchanges between our hero and some of the German characters. Mildly amusing

Review – Journey to the Center of the Earth

It’s hard to say exactly where this one starts to go wrong. Perhaps it’s when Pat Boone takes off his shirt and cuts his plaid pants down to shorts. Perhaps it’s when they start croaking off the cute animals (at least one of which – a lizard – looks like the film-makers genuinely killed it). Perhaps it’s in thinking that this badly non-prescient Jules Verne tale would make a good movie to begin with. Some of the stuff shot in Carlsbad Cavern is kinda pretty. Most of the rest of it is too stupid to amuse anyone over the age of ten or so, and too long to entertain any remaining audience members. See if desperate

Review – Frankenstein: The True Story

I remember this as being less boring than it turned out to be, which is odd because I don’t think I’d seen it since it was first on television back in 1973 (and at the ripe old age of seven I had even less tolerance for boring crap than I do now). However, crammed into the Masterpiece Theater costume drama is a reasonably entertaining telling of the classic tale, and one that’s supposed to be a bit more faithful to Mary Shelly’s book than most other screen versions. Mildly amusing

Review – De-Lovely

Add Cole Porter to the list of famous people I wish I knew less about. Once again a movie biography dwells on the sex life of its subject. Plus we get the added insult of some really great music performed by some talented folks – particularly Elvis Costello doing “Let’s Misbehave” – overlaid and undercut by some spectacularly dull dialogue. Even the producers of classic musicals from the less sophisticated days of the 1930s knew enough to have the actors shut up during the songs. However, the actors have their hearts in it, especially Kevin Kline in the lead and Ashley Judd as his wife. The art direction is also impressive for what appears to be a fairly low-budget movie. Mildly amusing