Review – Caesar and Cleopatra

This may well be the most improbable epic ever made. For starters, it was shot with a huge budget during the hardships and shortages of World War Two England. They got Claude Rains to play the male lead, and apparently shooting for some kind of half-baked British answer to Gone with the Wind they borrowed Vivien Leigh from David O. Selznick to play Cleopatra. But strangest of all is the script, based on a play by George Bernard Shaw. Only such a great playwright would ever attempt to turn this grim historical debacle into a romantic comedy, and honestly even he can’t really make it work. But I was in the mood for a costume drama, and this worked as well as anything. Mildly amusing

Review – A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is as straight a version of Shakespeare’s play as one can expect from a Hollywood star-filled fantasy extravaganza. Frankly, it’s all too easy to get caught up in games of “hey, that’s what’s-his-name from that other movie” and lose track of the story. But that’s okay. Though I’m no Shakespeare connoisseur, in my opinion this isn’t one of the Bard’s finer moments. Instead, it’s a meandering, silly little farce about love gone wrong thanks to careless fairies intervening in mortal affairs. It’s pretty. It’s funny in spots. But it’s impossible to take as seriously as we appear to be intended to take it. Further, I’d forgotten about the play-within-a-play at the end of the production. With the main romances at their natural ends, I was all set to be done with it and move on to a new picture around 20 minutes before I could actually do so. Mildly amusing

Review – The Razor’s Edge

I suppose that after World War Two Hollywood figured audiences would be receptive to a tale set in the wake of the previous world war. Trouble is, this is faithful to the spirit – and pretty darn close to the letter – of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel. The experience of reading the book allowed for the appreciation of the craft of the language and the subtlety of the author’s purpose. Filming it, however, tended to sap the quiet dignity of Larry Darrel and leave a lot of the work’s melodramatic quality in its stead. The star power – particularly Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in the leads – just adds to the problem. Still, it was a sight better than the Bill Murray version. Mildly amusing

Great moments in theology #1

 

Review – Godzilla vs. Mothra

This isn’t anybody’s finest hour. A giant Mothra egg blows up during a hurricane, and the evil capitalist who buys it won’t turn it back over to the tiny women from the Mothra island. There, I just saved you from watching the first third of the movie. Half an hour in Godzilla finally puts in an appearance, but he seems to be destroying buildings by getting his tail caught and stumbling into them rather than deliberately trashing the place. Then he has to fight a giant moth. Then the giant moth dies and he has to fight two giant Silly-String-spitting caterpillars. This never tries to be scary. It tries to be funny but fails. The only thing it succeeds at being is dull. It’s always great to see Godzilla, but he’s largely wasted in this outing. Mildly amusing

Review – Seventh Sin

Without bothering to look it up, I’m going to guess that the number seven spot on the list of the “big ten” is adultery. Because heaven knows it’s enough of a theme in this picture. This is the second screen version I’ve seen of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. While normally I’d prefer a quiet little script-intensive production from the 1960s to a big budget 21st century star vehicle, this time it’s the other way around. There isn’t really all that much to the story, so it helps to have huge, colorful landscape shots to provide a little distraction. On the other hand, this does have a slightly more literary quality than the newer edition. Shorter too. Mildly amusing

Review – Barton Fink

Though not as good as some of their earlier and later work, this is still a respectable outing from the Coen brothers. A successful playwright from New York (John Turturro) gets lured to Hollywood to work on the script for a B movie about wrestlers. The studio sets him up in an odd hotel where he meets a travelling salesman (John Goodman). Things get stranger and stranger until finally the whole thing collapses in a climax that would have been genuinely chilling if it hadn’t been so contrived and bizarre. Turturro himself is a big part of the problem. He plays the protagonist as flat, aloof and neurotic, which makes him unsympathetic. It’s hard not to respond to his plight with, “Of course the world seems weird to you, weirdo.” Overall it’s a stylish little indie pic with at least some of the Coens’ usual charm. It just takes a back seat to their less forcefully artistic work. Mildly amusing

Review – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

I don’t know if it would have actually been possible to make an entire feature-length picture out of nothing but in jokes from cartoon history, but if it could have been done odds are it would have been a better movie than this. The film-makers have the character stables of both Disney and Warner Brothers at their disposal, and occasionally they put familiar characters to good – or at least unique – use. For example, one sequence features a piano duet between Daffy Duck and Donald Duck that’s actually fairly clever. Unfortunately, the majority of the screen time is occupied by a stupid parody of hard-boiled detective stories. The production blends live action and animation into a tale about a private eye (Bob Hoskins) on the case of a cartoon rabbit who’s been framed for murder. This is yet another kids’ movie with plenty of winking innuendo for the grown-ups. It also has a mean streak, a viciousness resulting from an awkward combination of the slapstick violence of cartoons and the pain, injury and death of real life. And though the animation was state-of-the-art at the time, it’s a bit rough in spots by 21st century standards. See if desperate

Review – All the President's Men

This was big stuff back in the day when the events upon this were part of recent memory, but now I’m guessing you have to be a journalism nerd to get much out of it. Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) work together to unravel the cable knit sweater of the Watergate scandal that eventually toppled the Nixon administration. The flow of the story is choppy, filled with aha! moments that seem like the newspaper writer’s equivalent of “Col. Mustard in the hotel suite with the screwdriver.” Despite its dated awkwardness, I got a kick out of it. But then I’m a member of the dying breed of people who relish good reporting and enjoy watching its creators (or at least the Hollywood versions thereof) at work. Mildly amusing

Review – Absolute Power

Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this tale of crime and high-level government intrigue. He plays an aging burglar who breaks into a mansion. While he’s looting the good stuff from an upstairs bedroom, the occupants return home. Long story short, our hero witnesses a murder committed by the Secret Service in order to protect the President. Once sinister forces in the government figure out who else was in the house, they pin the murder on him and try to hunt him down so he can’t testify to the contrary. Unfortunately for them, he’s a cagey old guy who’s constantly one step ahead of them. The production values are solid, and the script even borders on clever in spots. Though it’s unlikely to make a top ten list of any kind, it’s an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. Mildly amusing

Review – Red Sun

Samurai movies and westerns have a lot in common. Characters and plots from one can often be transferred directly to the other. But this is the first, last and only time I’ve ever seen the two directly combined. Toshiro Mifune plays one of the retainers of the Japanese ambassador to the United States on a long train trip through the Wild West. The train is robbed by a gang of criminals headed by Charles Bronson, and after the outlaw is double-crossed by a subordinate – who also steals a sword and kills a member of the Japanese contingent – our two heroes end up on the trail together. The story works well enough as long as the two men struggle to get past their mutual distrust long enough to accomplish their goals. But then suddenly we get Ursula Andress and a string of Comanche attacks that transform the picture into a garden variety western with a disappointing ending. Mildly amusing

Review – A Man for All Seasons

This is the biography of Thomas More from an era in film history when it was fashionable to be neither too silly nor too sleazy. Paul Scofield plays the title role, and the amazing thing is that his understated work doesn’t get lost behind the scenery chewing of legendary hams Robert Shaw (Henry VIII) and Orson Welles (Cardinal Woolsey). To be sure, this suffers from some of the problems endemic to such productions, particularly the tendency of the scenery and the costumes to take precedence over the script. However, overall it’s a touching portrait of a man struggling in vain to use his considerable wits to reconcile his faith in the Roman Catholic Church, his loyalty to his friend and king, and his desire not to end up a victim of the headsman’s axe. The trial sequence in particular was a fine piece of writing. Worth seeing

Review – Broadcast News

The parts of this movie that are actually about the title subject are quite good. In many ways it makes the transition between the days when Network was a ridiculous farce and the new era in which Network is a grim reality. Watching the characters wrestle with the complexities of their jobs and the ethical demands of their profession is tremendous fun for a journalism nerd like myself. Watching them wrestle with the complexities of their tangled personal lives, however, was less enjoyable. Though the Albert Brooks romantic comedy angle puts a serious damper on things, overall I’m still not sorry I saw it. Mildly amusing

Babies will never watch Toys again

 

Count on it

Recently Mental Floss ran an article dispelling (or in some cases confirming) popular rumors about the Muppets. Among other things, I learned that the South African version of Sesame Street features a muppet with AIDS and Bert and Ernie prefer to remain in the closet for the time being.

However, my one great curiosity about Sesame Street remains unresolved: does the Count ever get tired of counting things? I imagine the following off-camera rant (use the appropriate accent when you read this): “Vy is it zat every time somethink around here has to be counted zat I haff to do it? Can’t anyone else on zis schtupid street count anything? I mean, come on people! It’s a hereditary title, not a job description! Hey, vile you’re aht it, vy don’t you take zat guy Bob down to the beach unt zee if he floats?”

On the other hand, the job does have its perks. According to another Mental Floss piece, the Count has been romantically linked (in an innocent Children’s Television Workshop way) to no less than three other characters: Lady Two, Countess Dahling von Dahling and Countess von Backward. I think that last one is either a lady vampire muppet who loves to count backward or a stripper who can’t do her act in Utah.

Further, I think we have to give proper credit to our OCD-afflicted vampire buddy. Counting things might seem like a fairly simple – even cushy – job. But a recent experience in a Micky D’s drive-thru has persuaded me otherwise.

“I’d like a number ten with a large Coke,” was my sad attempt at ordering my food.

The response: “You want ten large Cokes?”

Apparently somewhere at least one child got left behind.

Review – Rope

This is more of a gimmick than it is a movie. Alfred Hitchcock decided to shoot this as if it had been done in one long continuous take. Of course camera technology at the time didn’t allow him to actually film uninterrupted for an hour and a half, so every ten minutes or so he has to pull a trick such as zooming in on a table centerpiece in order to stop filming and change the film. And of course careful viewing will uncover a couple of cuts, which tend to take place just as Jimmy Stewart’s character has a flash of insight about the puzzle he’s trying to unravel. The tale is a murder mystery that was obviously a stage play before it became a movie. A pair of snotty rich youths pull a Leopold and Loeb on one of their acquaintances. They stuff his body in a trunk. Then they hold a dinner party with food served on the resting place of their victim. As the dinner party takes up the bulk of the screen time, the production naturally is far too “talky” and more than a little dull. That’s the price that even a director as good as Hitchcock pays when a technical trick becomes more important than plot and character. Mildly amusing

Review – The Haunting Within

A brother and sister inherit a house on an island. He’s a psychiatrist and she’s mentally ill, so the isolated estate seems like an ideal place for him to try to give her some help that she’s clearly not getting from institutional doctors. But when supernatural stuff starts happening, we’re faced with one of four possibilities: 1. he’s trying to gaslight her and claim the entire inheritance, 2. she’s crazy and the ghosts are all in her head, 3. the ghosts are real, and 4. it doesn’t really matter what’s going on because the production is so slow and devoid of interesting moments that it’s impossible to care about any of it. Guess which one turns out to be the case. The only surprise here is that William Baldwin decided he needed to be in it. See if desperate

Review – In Like Flint

If prior to today’s viewing you’d asked me if I’d seen this movie, I would have said yes. But as I started watching, I realized that other than the first 15 minutes or so I’d actually never seen it before. I think I must’ve seen the first Flint movie several times as a teen watching the late movies but fallen asleep before completing the second half of the obvious double feature. To be sure, there’s little here to keep a kid awake. Once again superspy Derek Flint (James Coburn) – freelance operative for a spy agency called ZOWIE – is up against evil geniuses trying to take over the world. At one point the picture appears to be taking a slightly feminist slant, as the menace is supplied by women who’ve cleverly exploited the presumption that they’re second class citizens. But then the macho zeitgeist of 1967 reasserts itself. Though slightly more clever than the first one, this is still a cheap Bond parody and not much else. Mildly amusing

Review – God Told Me To

Strange, cheap little horror movies like this are a dime a dozen in the 21st century world of digital production and straight-to-video releasing. But back in 1976 when making movies actually cost money, such pictures were a rarer breed. An NYC detective tries to figure out why several denizens of that fair city have gone mad, murdered their fellow citizens, and by way of explanation for their crimes offered only the title phrase. His search for answers leads him to an otherworldly entity and some of the strangest psycho-sexual horror ever committed to celluloid. Though the production suffers from several problems endemic to its age – particularly some unpleasant racism – it nonetheless supplies a few good chills. Mildly amusing

Review – Crowley

This movie’s as muddled and bizarre as the man for whom it’s named. Before the end credits roll, we get virtual reality, time travel, transmigration of souls, bloody murder, satanic sex orgies, college journalism and no end of other aberrant behavior. Unfortunately it never comes together into a cohesive whole. So if you like looking at bare nekkid English chicks, this supplies at least a taste. But if plot, character, logic, or anything else that might suggest an effort at craft are important to you, seek elsewhere. See if desperate

Review – Our Man Flint

So what exactly do you get when you make stupid parody of movies that were already at least somewhat stupid parodies themselves? Well, apparently you get this. The title character (played by James Coburn) is a cheap James Bond knock-off, a super-skilled, super-lucky lothario doing battle with the forces of darkness. Of course the “evil” enemy here is a trio of scientists who have seized control over the world’s weather and are using it to terrorize the superpowers into abandoning their vast arsenals (which is a bad thing for some reason that’s never clearly explained). The thing is so full of Bond sub-references and Bond-esque ridiculousness that it’s impossible to either take seriously or find funny. On the other hand, I remember liking it as a kid. I think it was because I was a Bond fan and this movie was a “close enough” that ran on TV more frequently than the real thing. Mildly amusing

Review – The Last Wave

I liked this Peter Weir outing better than Picnic at Hanging Rock. It had many of the same subtle horror qualities without being quite so 19th century. Indeed, the quiet nature of the menace is made all the more disturbing by juxtaposition with the noisy modern world. An up-and-coming corporate tax lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) gets stuck representing some Aborigines accused of murdering their cellmate in jail. He soon learns that his client’s strange mysticism is in some way connected with the apocalyptic dreams he’s been having and the sudden excess of water even in the arid parts of Australia. If you’re looking for chainsaw massacres or similar “big horror” elements, seek elsewhere. But if you’ve got the attention span to sit still for a little while and let Weir do his work, you’ll find your patience well rewarded. Worth seeing

Review – The Seventh Sign

The theological (and pseudo-theological) end of the world stuff here is sort of fun. The Demi Moore stuff is not. Guess which one occupies the most screen time. Particularly toward the beginning, the drama is composed of Jurgen Prochnow as a combination Angel of Death and Second Coming of Christ bringing about the terrible miracles of the Book of Revelation. It’s spooky stuff. But then the picture gets bogged down in a mire about Moore’s fear that her baby will be born without a soul, thus cementing the inevitability of the end times. Mildly amusing

Review – Jason and the Argonauts (2000)

The Harryhausen version was both considerably better and considerably shorter. This is yet another one of these cheap miniseries reworks of classical mythology packing a bunch of B-list celebrities in with unknowns, bad writers and video-game-worthy effects. I can maintain a measure of amusement with such pictures, but generally not four hours’ worth. Typical of the experience is the scene in which Jason must vanquish a robot bull in order to win the legendary Golden Fleece from Frank Langella. He defeats the thing by hopping on top of it and riding it until it runs out of juice. See if desperate

Review – Nightmare (2007)

Maybe it’s just that I recorded this off the Lifetime Movie Network, but it struck me as Freddy Krueger for Girls, a watered-down version of the done-to-death dream demon thing. Haylie Duff plays a college student with a long history of battling nightmares. She gets a job in a sleep clinic, but it rapidly becomes apparent that she should be a patient rather than an employee. By learning to suck her friends into her dreams, she arms up for a final conflict with an evil woman who’s been killing the female members of her family for several generations. Mildly amusing

Review – Incubus (2006)

What is it about the terms “incubus” and “succubus” that are so damn hard to keep straight? At least this time they aren’t using one term when they mean the other. Instead, the incubus here isn’t a demon of any kind. It’s some kind of experiment gone wrong, allowing a psychic psychopath trapped in a chair to astrally project himself into anyone who makes the mistake of falling asleep in his vicinity. So at least it’s a little incubus-like. Tara Reid stars at the nominal head of a group of slack-jawed 20-somethings who stumble upon the evil entity’s secret lab home. See if desperate

Review – Route 666

A team of federal agents headed by Lou Diamond Phillips and Lori Petty are transporting a guy in the witness protection program through the desert when suddenly they end up waylaid by ghost zombies of prisoners who were on a chain gang when blah blah blah. For the most part this is run-of-the-mill horror crap, distinguished only by the decision to shoot all the zombie attacks using hearty doses of jump cuts and a shaky camera trick that gets old in short order. Mildly amusing

Review – Lightning Strikes

As if lightning wasn’t dangerous enough by itself, imagine how much worse it would be if these random electrical discharges contained a sentient, malevolent creature. Fortunately for most of the world, the thing has chosen to attack a town in Kansas so small that it can barely raise a crowd for its own Pumpkin Festival. The effects are Syfy cheap and the script is Syfy stupid. Mildly amusing

Review – I Aim at the Stars

Gather ‘round while I sing you of Wernher Von Braun, the subject of this biopic from 1960. Given the date, I guess I can see why the main character’s Nazi past gets a whitewash. Besides, they couldn’t exactly release a movie called I Aim at the English. Curt Jurgens plays Von Braun, who comes across as a man obsessed with rockets, “apolitical” to quote Tom Lehrer’s ironic assessment. In the first half of the movie, he battles against the SS and his own conscience while working on the V2. Once the war ends and he ends up in American hands, Von Braun finds himself dogged by an officer/journalist who lost his family in a rocket raid on London. Though this was somewhat more morally ambiguous than I would have guessed before I actually saw it, the message – particularly at the conclusion – is clearly that the end justifies the means. Mildly amusing

Review – The Phantom Tollbooth

Imagine The Point done over by Chuck Jones (though I believe this movie came out first) and you’ve got some idea of what’s in store for you here. The animation is okay, though it suffers from that late 60s cheap feel that takes it down more than a couple of pegs from Jones’s classic shorts from a decade or two earlier. Other than a few “hey, I recognize that from a Bugs Bunny cartoon” moments, however, this picture doesn’t have a lot to offer. It’s one of those animated – well, animated plus a live action bracket featuring Butch “Eddie Munster” Patrick – productions that seems like it would be for kids but contains a ton of “clever” references clearly aimed at the grownups. It isn’t stealthily smutty like such productions tend to be in the 21st century, but it is overtly boring and cram-packed with ham-handed allegory and dreadful musical numbers. The animated art has a moment or two – I was fond of the demon of useless tasks – but otherwise this is mostly just the sad death of whatever chance Jones might have had to break into feature-length work (this is the only one he ever did). Mildly amusing

Review – Blue Velvet

David Lynch’s mainstream work – particularly The Elephant Man and Dune – tends to sport little “Lynchy” moments in which the director’s art school background shows through a bit too strongly. This is a whole movie made of such moments. Even simple, everyday dialogue takes on an odd, hallucinatory quality. Lynch-look-vaguely-alike Kyle McLachlan finds a severed ear in a field. Subsequent events tie him to an innocent girl next door (Laura Dern) and an exotic lounge singer (Isabella Rosselini). And his seamy affair with the singer in turn brings him into unfortunate contact with her nitrous-inhaling psycho boyfriend (Dennis Hopper, in what must be the role he was born to play). Frankly, the plot is an irrelevant detail, consistently taking a back seat to strange visuals, quirky characters and arty editing. See if desperate

Review – Blood of the Vampire

Isn’t there some kind of FTC regulation that says if a movie has “vampire” in the title that there has to be a vampire in the movie? If not, there should be. To be completely fair, the villain in this dreary little English picture is prolonging his life by consuming human blood. But beyond that he’s really more of a mad scientist than a traditional bloodsucker. He performs experiments on the “patients” at the mental hospital where he presides, drafting a wrongfully-imprisoned inmate with medical training to become his unwilling assistant. A mistake, as it turns out, because the assistant’s desire to escape proves to be the undoing of the whole operation. Mildly amusing

Review – Devil's Diary

Two “outsider” teens find an old, blank diary in a graveyard. One of them starts writing her hate fantasies in it, only to discover that they start coming true. The more she uses it, the more goth she becomes. The only difference between this and every other supernatural-teen-revenge movie is that midway through the cheerleaders figure out what’s going on, and one of them steals the diary and starts using it against the outsiders. The new twist was not an improvement. See if desperate

Review – Dead Mary

So what happens if you look into a mirror and repeat “boring crap” three times? Does this movie appear? If so, don’t try it. Honestly, pictures from Candyman to Urban Legends: Bloody Mary have already thoroughly used up this storyline. They try to spice it up by adding a dash of Evil Dead. But nothing can overcome the bitter taste of 20-somethings squabbling with each other first about their petty, stupid problems and then about the evil spirit that’s killing them. See if desperate

Review – Wind Chill

Wow, does this one ever take its sweet time getting underway. Nearly all of the first half of the picture is nothing but set-up: two college students – an attractive woman and a vaguely creepy guy – get stranded in the snow after taking a wrong turn off the highway (when oh when will city folk learn not to leave the main roads?). For a few minutes it gets interesting when they’re menaced by frozen zombies. But then it sank back down under the weight of too many useless, how-will-they-fail-to-escape twists. Though I was glad it never turned into a halfwit-with-a-chainsaw debacle, I would have preferred that it at least turn into something rather than meandering randomly along until the film stock ran out. Mildly amusing

Review – The Greatest Story Ever Told

Or at least one of the longest. The Gospels naturally make for an entertaining, thought-provoking story. But here the telling undoes a lot of the point. Christ’s teachings get screen time here and there, but at the same time we get a lot of extraneous politicking among government and religious officials. I was particularly surprised that a lot of the miracles took place off-screen, described in gossip between the characters rather than actually shown. Further, Good Friday takes up nearly a third of the screen time. With the galaxy of stars they packed into the production, a much more inspirational picture could have been made. Mildly amusing

Review – The House Next Door

The movie is the evil twin of the novel upon which it’s based. Sure, it preserves the core of subtle menace inherent in a house possessed by an amorphous, sourceless evil. But it adds so many Lifetime-Movie-Network-compatible elements that it turns too soapy for my taste. See if desperate