Review – The Vanishing

I wonder if the French original was this terrible. A woman (Sandra Bullock in one of her earlier appearances) vanishes from a highway rest stop, leaving her boyfriend (Kiefer Sutherland) stuck on an endless quest to discover what happened to her. Even years later he can’t rebuild his life with a new woman because he remains obsessed with the mysterious fate of the old one. Eventually his search leads to an odd chemistry teacher (Jeff Bridges, sporting one of the worst accents in movie history) who has apparently spent a little too much time reading Crime and Punishment. The result is one of those productions that seem to serve no purpose other than to be as annoying as possible. See if desperate

Review – The Good Shepherd

What a disappointment. Perhaps if I hadn’t recently re-watched Our Man in Havana (a movie that does just about everything right that this effort does wrong) I might have been able to muster a bit more charity. Or then again, maybe not. The subject here is the birth of the CIA, from its origins at the beginning of the Cold War to its great failure at the Bay of Pigs. Or at least that should have been the subject. Instead we get Matt Damon as a nerdy little poetry student at Yale who – via Skull and Bones – gets caught up in the high-stakes world of international espionage. Rather than focusing on what The Company was up to in these crucial years, most of this movie is devoted to the hero’s ever-deepening paranoia and its impact on his family life. So what on the surface looks like a top-notch spy thriller turns out to be a mediocre soap opera. Actor / director Robert DeNiro should have known better than this. Mildly amusing

Review – Children of Men

Several critics compared this grim bit of science fiction to Blade Runner. That’s apt to the extent that both movies had better visuals than scripts. However, this round of dystopia is both more and less sophisticated than the Ridley Scott classic. This isn’t a startling departure from the real world; none of the technology would seem terribly out of place in 2006. But the subtle shifts in cars, televisions, and many of the other trappings of everyday life underscore the dramatic change in the world’s politics. Something has rendered the entire human race infertile. The resulting social chaos and fascist backlash serves at the backdrop for the story of an average guy who gets dragged into a desperate attempt to rescue a miraculously-pregnant woman from the government and various rebel / criminal elements. The story is plenty depressing, so this made a vaguely inappropriate choice for Sunday evening viewing. But if you can stand a bit of a bummer, the art direction and cinematography alone are worth the rental price. Mildly amusing

Review – The 300 Spartans

Doctors should prescribe this movie to patients who suffer from low testosterone levels. The macho here flows like Niagara Falls, as of course one would expect from a telling of the tale of Thermopylae. Overall this isn’t a bad movie. It’s very much a creature of its time, a typical example of the 60’s-era, medium-budget, Hollywood historical epic. It didn’t exactly fill me with a desire to go fight the Red Menace in Southeast Asia, but it kept me entertained for a couple of hours. Mildly amusing

Review – Our Man in Havana

Carol Reed and Alec Guinness team up to produce one of the great dark comedies of the Cold War. Guinness stars as a British vacuum cleaner salesman who runs a small shop in Havana. One of England’s Caribbean-based spymasters recruits our reluctant hero into the intelligence service, a job he takes on because he needs the money. However, he has no luck at all recruiting agents for the spy network he’s expected to create. On the advice of a friend, he begins making up contacts and intelligence, including drawings of a military project hidden in the Cuban hills and a device that bears a suspicious resemblance to a vacuum cleaner. When things inevitably go horribly wrong, the movie appears to be playing out as a stylish but simple comedy of errors. Then people start dying, and the production takes a turn for the grim. Overall the blend of comedy and drama is brilliant, emphasizing the simultaneous dead seriousness and inherent absurdity of international espionage. Worth seeing

Review – Murder, My Sweet

Rare indeed is the movie that’s so completely murdered by one actor. It took some guts for RKO to give in to Dick Powell’s pleas for a role in something besides a stage-door musical. Sometimes a wild gamble like this pays off. Not this time. Powell is just as stiff and goofy here as he ever was in the candy corn roles that made him famous, and in a hard-boiled detective story the guy works about as well as ice cream and liverwurst. Some of the dialogue is pretty wretched stuff as well, though it’s hard to say if it would have been better if Humphrey Bogart or some other film noir veteran had played the role. Otherwise this is a good movie. The supporting cast is solid and the technical quality is good, sometimes even innovative by 1944 standards. If not for the bad casting decision, this might well have been worth seeing. Mildly amusing

Review – The Funhouse

Imagine Halloween with everything done exactly wrong and you’ve got some idea what’s in store for you here. The plot is a meandering mish-mash about a quartet of teens who – eventually – get trapped in a carnival funhouse with a psychotic, physically-differently-abled carny. The production is cheap and poorly-paced; indeed, in spots it’s downright boring. The cast is bad; in particular, Elizabeth Berridge’s witless mugging is a poor substitute for Jamie Lee Curtis. Even the sets fail to work. The main setting is one of those trailer-style funhouses, but for some reason it has a second floor and a basement. See if desperate