Review – Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan

Production-quailty-wise, this is a run-of-the-mill documentary. So if you don’t find the subject fascinating, this movie may not do much for you. But then again, if you don’t find Ray Harryhausen’s work fascinating, there’s something wrong with you. If you were born in an age when Hollywood served up nothing but flashy CGI, maybe you’re just used to it. But I miss the days when the effects had a style and personality of their own, often vastly overshadowing the actors, scripts and other elements of their productions. Worth seeing

Review – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Oh how I loved this movie when I was a kid. Of course I could have done without the musical numbers, which oddly still holds true even four decades later. But the story is entertaining enough. An inventor (Dick Van Dyke, here wisely eschewing an English accent) builds a fantastic, super-powered car and takes his moppets and rich girlfriend on an adventure. The whole thing is sort of a kiddie-lite version of Ian Fleming’s more widely-known creation. Mildly amusing

Review – Wyatt Earp

Of the two big-budget movie versions of this story that came out within six months of each other, this is by far the worse. The other one starred Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer. So yes, Kevin Costner really is able to suck that much joy out of a production. The meandering story and poor pacing didn’t help matters much, either. See if desperate

Review – Messenger of Death

How the hell did this thing make it almost all the way to the end before the protagonist kills anyone? It’s a revenge story. Charles Bronson plays the hero. It’s got “death” right there in the title. Seriously, this is a lot of infighting between Mormon splinter groups and not much else. See if desperate

Review – Twixt

Francis Ford Coppola moves ever closer to his ultimate goal: to be able to recut a movie over and over again even while the audience is in the middle of watching it. Digital video technology actually allowed him to try it with test audiences. Now if he can just program DVD discs to randomly mix things up, every home performance can become a unique experience. As if the final cut of this picture wasn’t random enough. The plot is so vague and the characters so annoying that this functions only as an experimental piece, the sort of thing most filmmakers do at the beginnings of their careers rather than closer to the end. See if desperate

Review – Jedi Junkies

At least one documentary about Star Wars fans made them look like a big pack of assholes, far from the more gentle obsessiveness of Star Trek fans. What a relief to find that some of the Star Wars crowd could be the subject of a more affectionate treatment, something a lot more along the lines of Trekkies. Mildly amusing