Review – Mission to Moscow

This is one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen. Actually, the movie itself isn’t all that odd. It’s a fairly standard World War Two era propaganda picture. The astounding thing is that it’s about how great Stalin’s Soviet Union was. Of course they’re working an agenda here, as the U.S. government needed public support for the anti-Hitler alliance with a country that everyone had been told – not without justification – was a totalitarian regime. The picture tells the story of Ambassador Joseph E. Davies (Walter Huston) and his efforts to drum up support for American-Soviet alliances. In retrospect a lot of the story is stupid, such as the scene in which Davies tells Stalin directly, “I believe, sir, that history will record you as a great builder for the benefit of mankind.” Still, given the political climate of the time, perhaps some of the lies and other foolishness can be understood if not excused. Mildly amusing

Review – The Hottie and the Nottie

Though this is plenty terrible, it wasn’t quite the travesty of the cinema arts that some critics made it out to be. The perpetually talentless Paris Hilton stars as a beautiful, unobtainable woman who won’t date the homely, talentless protagonist unless and until he can find true love for her homely, talentless best friend. Overall the picture was a witless parade of date movie clichés that failed to leave much of an impression one way or another. See if desperate

Review – Race to Witch Mountain

Though I expect 21st century kids will prefer this version to the original, unfortunately that’s an apt demonstration of what’s wrong with the way the 21st century is raising kids. The script in this one is more sophisticated, and the special effects are a million times better. The alien kids’ adult helper is The Rock rather than the Green Acres guy. On the other hand, the story has been robbed of any sense of nuance. The kids know that they’re aliens from the start, so there’s no sense of mystery to the tale. And the simple charm of Disney in the 70s has been replaced by what in comparison seems to be a great deal of violence, maybe a bit much for a kids’ movie even by current standards. Overall the trade-offs aren’t worth it. See if desperate

Review – Legion

Mark 5:1-20 – the story of Christ exorcising a demon(s) named Legion – is fascinating, potentially even scary. And yet the actual story has been largely ignored both by religious folk making movies out of the Gospels and by horror picture producers exploiting the name for some cheap thrills. This movie is no exception. Though the scary scenes and the action sequences are reasonably effective, they represent only a small percentage of the overall running time. The rest is devoted mostly to comic book pseudo-theology as the last scraps of humanity struggle to figure out why they’re suddenly surrounded by demons and – with the aid of an archangel – try to find a way out of their predicament. Locating most of the action in a diner in the middle of nowhere gives the production the distinct odor of Maximum Overdrive only with more demoniacs and fewer trucks. Mildly amusing

Review – Phantasm 2

Needed way more balls. The deadly flying spheres are the high point of every movie in this set, and here they’re used extremely sparingly until the end. The rest of the story is the usual mish-mash about the Tall Man and his miniature Black Sabbath sidekicks stealing corpses from graveyards, trashing small towns and moving on, our heroes on his trail the whole time. Some of the eeriness is actually eerie, but the rest of it is only entertaining in a “that dude has a shotgun with four barrels” sort of way. See if desperate

Review – Escape from Alcatraz

The last time I was in San Francisco I took an evening tour of the title location. So for me a lot of the amusement value of this filmed-on-the-spot production was of the hey-I-remember-that variety. Tourism aside, this is a reasonably well made story of the last and most famous escape from The Rock. Of course the general assumption about this trio (led in the picture by Clint Eastwood) is that they drowned in the bay, but at least they made it off the island. The story of desperate men figuring out how to get out of their cells and over the wall is entertaining stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – Cutthroat Island

I have to admit that I’d seen this before – many years ago – and thus knew what I was getting before I started. My intent was to deliberately change the TV channel to a program bad enough to drive me from the room and supply a little annoying, motivational background noise while I washed some dishes. For that purpose it was particularly well suited. Actually watching it, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. This picture exists primarily to allow Geena Davis and then-husband-and-alleged-director Renny Harlin to work together. Thus it struck me as particularly odd that Harlin manages to film his wife from all her worst angles and consistently use the takes in which she does the flattest job of delivering her lines (though in his defense, for all I know that could have been all the takes). And for some reason Matthew Modine squanders his I-worked-with-Stanley-Kubrick cred on this crud, the actor’s equivalent of training as a cordon bleu chef and then getting a job at Burger King. Even Frank Langella is worse than usual. Overall this is the biggest catastrophe of a pirate movie I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. Wish I’d skipped it