This is the week I had off for vacation. As you can see, I saw (of course) a lot of movies in that week. Enjoy!

(April 10)

——Giant (1956)——

Like Texas, this movie is epic; a story about an Eastern girl who marries a Texas cattle millionaire who has to learn how to get with the times. The Eastern girl is Elizabeth Taylor who ditches her fiance to run off with the mysterious Texan (Rock Hudson) who has come to her home to buy her horse. Life isn’t easy at first for them. She has to get used to the stark Texas landscape and the jealous sister of her husband. Then there is James Dean, a trouble prone cowhand who inherits a worthless piece of land that just happens to sprout oil, making him the richest man in Texas. Hudson doesn’t like the direction oil is taking things and only reluctantly gets into the oil game when he has no other choice.

You probably wouldn’t guess it from the first two hours or so but the film is really about racism and intolerance, as Rock Hudson learns slowly through Elizabeth Taylor’s kind actions and their son’s marriage to a Mexican that being a bigot isn’t exactly the coolest thing to be. Giant is about an old-school Texan learning what it is like to grow up and what it really means to be a man. It isn’t a movie I’d ever write home about, but it is entertaining enough in its own way to merit a viewing.

(SEE)

——Dog Day Afternoon (1975)——

I hadn’t seen this movie in a few years (it was actually one of the first DVDs I bought) so it was fun to revisit the new Two-Disc Special Edition that Warner just put out as part of its second Controversial Classics collection. If you haven’t already seen this movie you should really check it out, because it really is a classic of the genre, even recently being referenced in this year’s Spike Lee film, Inside Man. Al Pacino and director Sidney Lumet have never been better and the movie still pops and seems as fresh today as it did back when it was originally released.

For those who don’t know, Dog Day Afternoon is about a real bank robbery that went wrong in Brooklyn, where the crooks had a standoff with the cops for hours as the media caught every minute of it. Instead of being about the actual robbery like most of these films seem to be, the majority of the film takes place afterwards while Pacino and his accomplice (played by the always impressive John Cazale) try to think their way out of their hopeless situation. Luckily for the most part the cops are just about as clueless as they are, which keeps the situation dragging on long into the night. The movie is funny and tense and deep with character. The acting is just great. If you haven’t seen this one yet, what are you waiting for?

(MUST SEE)

(April 11)

——Lucky Number Sleven (2006)——

A bit of fate led me towards seeing this instead of Thank You for Smoking, which I’m grateful for since I probably wouldn’t have seen Lucky Number Sleven otherwise while I definitely would have (and did) seen Smoking. This is one of those movies that just surprised me how good it was. Granted, the movie does lose a little bit of steam in its final act as it attempts to explain the first half of the story (most of which a careful viewer, like myself, has probably already guessed). But that didn’t stop me from really getting into this clever, fun modern noir.

Josh Hartnett is Sleven, a guy with a condition that allows him to feel no anxiety, who happens to get mistaken numerous times for someone he isn’t. In the meantime he gets caught in a gang war between two old mobsters who used to be friends but now want to kill each other. He’s supposed to kill the Rabbi’s son for the Boss, while getting a bunch of money for the Rabbi. Meanwhile, Bruce Willis plays a hitman lurking in the shadows who has something to do with all of this.

Now you better not get blogged down in the plot, because if you do you’ll probably be disappointed by it’s “so-clever-it’s-too-clever-by-half” as Owen Gleiberman put it, story line. Instead you should dig into the character work done by the main actors, all of whom chew the scenery like pros. Best is Hartnett’s relationship with the literal girl next door, Lucy Lu, something I was dreading going into seeing the film but actually delivers with some of the best on-screen chemistry I’ve seen between two actors in quite some time. Their lines really pop between each other and Lu is just fantastic. It’s not quite must see, but I really do think you all should see it. This is one of those looked over gems.

(SEE)

——2001 Maniacs (2005)——

The premise of this horror flick sounded full of promise. A small Southern town puts up a false detour sign in the middle of the road to lure unsuspecting Northerner coeds on their way to spring break to their annual festival. At that festival they kill the Northerners in various gruesome ways so that they can eat them. Plenty of nudity, comedy and violence to go around. Sounds great, right? Well, not in this case. This movie is plagued with bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, bad everything. One question for all of you crap horror film directors out there: Why the need to make your protagonists as annoying as possible? Seriously, when none of your main characters are redeemable in the slightest what’s to make us care whether they live or die? Better yet, what’s to make us care about how they die? Every line in this movie is either lame, cliché, or ripped off from another (famous) film. The acting is criminal. And the two remaining factors that can save any horror movie, the gore and the nudity? Well, the gore is nothing you haven’t ever seen before and not even handled very well, and ditto for the nudity of which there is more than your usual amount, but there just happens to be nothing erotic about it. Stay the hell away from this one.

(AVOID)

——Masters of Horror: Dreams in the Witch House (2005)——

Masters of Horror is a television series that ran on Showtime in which 13 of the best horror directors each made a short film about an hour long. This is one of the first released on DVD, by Stuart Gordon, most famous for doing the comic Re-Animator (like Dreams in the Witch House, based on a H.P. Lovecraft story). I wasn’t really all that impressed with this one. It feels a lot like your typical TV horror episode, abet with a lot more blood and nudity, thanks to Showtime’s looser standards.

The story concerns a physics grad student who rents the cheapest room he can find in an old rundown house, only to discover that it houses a wormhole to a parallel dimension in its walls from which a witch tells young men to kidnap babies so that they may sacrifice them to her. That’s really it. No big surprises. It’s well acted and the nudity was a bit of a surprise, but other than that there really isn’t anything special about this episode. I also don’t like that this feels like an episode of television instead of a stand alone movie. This one is only for the hardcore horror fans.

(MISS)

(April 12)

——Murmur of the Heart (1971)——

I’ll just steal a line from the back cover of this Criterion release: “Both shocking and deeply poignant, this is one of the finest coming-of-age films ever made.” And I agree with that. I was really shocked with just how good this film was, how fully realized the characters were written and acted, and how funny and yet real it was. The story is about the youngest of three brothers in an upper-middle class French family. Laurent is different from his two older brothers in that he isn’t quite the troublemaker they are, although he has his moments, and is quite smart and well read. He also happens to be the apple of his mother’s eye. The older brothers introduce him to sex, in their own cruel way, but the movie doesn’t really kick in until he gets the heart murmur of the film’s title. He then starts spending quite a bit of time with his mother, including going of to a health clinic/retreat where he meets some other like aged members of the opposite sex but manages to develop and extremely deep and mature relationship with his free spirited mother.

It’s hard to really summarize the plot any more than that because the film consists mostly of isolated episodes that add up to a greater whole. The ending will surprise you though, but beyond that the film is consistently great throughout. It’s very light and funny. I suggest to anyone that they should pick this up. This was my first Louis Malle film and I can’t wait to explore the rest of the recent Criterion boxset releases.

(MUST SEE)

——The Firemen’s Ball (1967)——

You can watch this movie as a comment on the inept Soviet Communist system of government in Czechoslovakia in the 60’s, or you could just watch it as a hilarious comedy about people and the silly things they do. The great thing about this Milos Forman film is that either way you want to see it, it works both ways.

The Fireman’s Ball is about a, well, fireman’s ball, in which the members of the firehouse want to present their elder chairman with a honorary fire-ax to reward his many years on the job. Of course it would have been better if they gave it to him last year on his 85th birthday instead of now, as they know he has fatal cancer, but at least good for him, he doesn’t know it. The ball itself is a delightful comedy of errors. To the embarrassment and horror of the firemen a table filled with prizes for the lottery they have organized is pilfered over the course of the night. A beauty contest is organized for the winner to present the fire-ax. None of the truly beautiful girls actually show up for it though, and once the actual event starts the girls scatter only for an overweight middle-aged woman to take the stage during the confusion and crown herself. And in the middle of the ball a fire breaks out. The firemen rush to the rescue but are unable to get their new fire truck out of the snow, so they ineffectively throw snow on the fire as the owner watches helplessly as his house burns down.

Milos Forman directs the film flawlessly and uses a cast of non-actors to bring a realism to the comedy that it definitely benefits from. A very interesting film, and extremely funny.

(MUST SEE)

——Clockers (1995)——

This is a Spike Lee Joint about “Clockers”, or to you, 24-hour drug dealers in Brooklyn. Mekhi Phifer is the title drug dealer who isn’t quite cut out for his line of work. Although he acts tough he isn’t really able to shoot anyone, and the anxiety of work has given him a bleeding ulcer that puts him in the hospital. Oh, and he also likes trains. When’s the last time you saw a gangbanger in the hood playing with trains?

This is one of Spike Lee’s more political movies about stopping the violence and how drugs beget violence and yadda, yadda, yadda. The film is extremely well shot and well acted, but the screenplay never really rises up with the rest of it. It’s pretty standard fair, and if you’ve seen one movie about stopping the drug violence in a black neighborhood you’ve seen this movie. It’s a nice effort from Spike but not really worth seeing.

(MISS)

(April 13)

——Three Colors: Blue (1993)——

While there have been numerous directors that have known how to expertly use black and white in cinema, much fewer directors have been able to do the same thing with color. Very few people actually effectively use different colors to tell a story. Luckily, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue, the first of his Three Colors trilogy, has no such problem. The story is about a woman (played by Juliette Binoche) who loses her husband and child in a car accident and struggles to move on with her life afterwards. In her grief she decides to pull herself inward and remove all traces of her family by selling their house and possessions and moving into a small flat in Paris. As you can already probably guess the color in the film is used extremely well to signify to the viewer her inner feelings, the color most often used, unsurprisingly, is blue. It’s hard really to get into more detail of the plot other than by mentioning that her husband was a composer hired to write a piece for Europe that is left unfinished. What the world doesn’t know is that she was the one to polish (and perhaps create) all of his great music, and if the piece is finished by her the world will know. Pieces of that are played throughout the film and do such a great job of filling out what the color can’t. Great use of music and color. Check it out.

(SEE)

——The Big Clock (1948)——

Of the three major companies that have put out noir titles so far, Warner Brothers has put out the most classics, Fox tends to be very hit and miss, twisting the very definition of noir, and Universal has put out some of the most interesting noir films. The Big Clock is one of those Universal noirs and plays just like one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest suspense thrillers. Ray Milland is George Stroud, a hotshot crime reporter who prides himself on being able to find any man, but who is also extremely overworked by his time obsessed boss. George has yet to take his honeymoon with his wife because he has been so overworked and this time he is bound and determined to take that vacation even if it means he’ll be blacklisted forever. Unfortunately right before he is scheduled to leave he meets the boss’ mistress who wants to get back at her poor lover using George. The boss, thinking there is an affair going on, accidentally kills her though, and George gets sucked into finding out who was the last person to see her even though he knows it was himself. Thus there follows a race against the clock as George struggles to keep his team from finding out he was there before he can find the evidence to prove that it was in fact the boss who killed her.

Thrillers don’t come much tenser than this one, which benefits from great acting, writing and wonderfully expressionistic cinematography and art direction. I can highly recommend this one to you.

(MUST SEE)

(April 14)

——The Long Good Friday (1979)——

Any fan of gangster movies who think they’ve seen it all should check this one out, as it takes the familiar troupes of the genre and twists them just enough to make it interesting. Harold Shand (played brilliantly by Bob Hoskins) is the king of the London underground in control of everything. He’s about to make a big deal for casinos on the London waterfront when it all starts to go wrong. Top members of his organization start dying in car bombs and his best friend is stabbed in a pool locker room. Worse yet, no one knows what is happening or why it is all going on. Harold spends the majority of the film trying to figure out who has it out for him, torturing the usual suspects and bringing in all the rival gang leaders, but after all of this he still can’t figure out who is doing it.

The real driving force of the film is Harold’s growing frustration. Here is a man who is used to being in control and used to finding out what he needs to know, and yet neither of these things are true on this day. He can only watch in frustration as his men die and his merger falls apart. Finally it is revealed that while he was away someone upset the IRA and they think that he is responsible. The IRA is different than another rival gang. He can’t just take them out the usual way. Ideologies tend to live on long after their leaders die. The final scene is one of perfection, of Bob Hoskins’ slow burning rage and frustration. This is a different kind of gangster movie.

(SEE)

——Heaven Can Wait (1943)——

Great premise for a movie: A man on his way to heaven instead makes the trip to hell to convince a bemused Satan that he should be there instead of up above with all of his friends and family. Satan doesn’t have time at first, but when a real sinner comes down and greets Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche) Satan takes an interest and agrees to hear his life story. Henry’s issue is that he hasn’t exactly been the model of “good” behavior in his life, living as a pamper rich playboy used to having a good time womanizing and getting away with it. That is until he meets Martha and marries her, even though she is supposed to be marrying his cousin.

Ernst Lubitsch takes that general premise and designs an extremely fun movie around it. What is wonderful about the movie is how even though Henry thinks that he has technically done wrong things, his intentions are so good and his love for Martha so pure that by the films end there isn’t any doubt in anyone’s mind (including Satan’s) that he should be up in heaven. Henry just doesn’t think he deserves to be happy because he doesn’t fit in with what society deems appropriate. The film is doubly interesting in that it covers Henry’s entire life over some of the greatest events in world history and yet never deals with a single issue outside of Henry’s closed circle, meaning Lubitsch has no interest in making any larger point about life other than that one should live life to be happy and make others happy.

(SEE)

(April 15)

——Mission: Impossible (1996)/Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)——

(Question to all of you: Which movie do you think is coming out soon in theaters that I was getting prepared to go see?)

I saw Mission: Impossible when it first came out and I have to admit that I didn’t like it much. At the time I found it way too confusing to follow what exactly happened on the mission that went bad and left Ethan Hunt alone, trying to find a way to clear his name. I was also a little upset that they killed off all of his team, since I was really looking forward to see the whole team thing in action (without it, Mission: Impossible I thought was just another Bond movie with Tom Cruise as James Bond). Looking back on that initial assessment from years ago I find the whole thing kind of silly. First off, while I still think that Brian De Palma does go a little out of his way to confuse the hell out of you I now also think that he did that because Jon Voight gives one of the worst “I’m not guilty” performances in film history. I mean, watching it again he looks SO guilty from the very first frame he’s in up until it is revealed that he is the traitor. Fake it just a little, won’t ya? Also, I don’t know why I was so upset about the team thing, since he is working with a team throughout the entire film (the only one who survives though, is Ving Rhames, the tech expert who, other than Cruise, is the only one to make it through all three films).

Maybe I was so upset because I then was not familiar enough with Brian De Palma’s style over plot filmmaking style. But even that’s not it, because watching it again I was impressed at how the plot moved along so economically and with great pinnace. Wrong place, wrong time, I guess. It’s a pretty fun film, looking back on it now. Not like the inferior sequel, directed by John Woo. If I thought the original steered a little too close to Bond territory I should have gone nuts with M:I II, which easily steals much of its content from other Bond movies, most notably my favorite Goldeneye, from its fast driving on cliffside roads flirting metaphor to its agent gone evil premise. The story is quite laughable, and isn’t really that different from the first film except for the fact that it tries to do too much with too little and succeeds at almost nothing. The idea that Hunt could fall in love with a thief in one night and then get so emotional over what he has to do to her as part of the mission is just ridiculous. The only part of the film that is really any good is the action sequences at the end where Woo gets to do what he does best. The motorcycle stuff is pretty damn cool. And yet for anyone who is familiar with Woo’s body of work you can tell that the guy has really lost steam and sold out after reaching Hollywood. I remember that when I first saw M:I II when it first came out was when I first realized that the whole dove thing when from cool effect to trite parody of what Woo’s action movies used to mean.

(M:I SEE, M:I II MISS)

——Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)——

On lists of the greatest sequels ever made you never see Lethal Weapon 2 included with such others as the Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, and my personal favorite sequel, Aliens. Somebody tell me, why not? I was completely surprised at how great this movie was. It takes off right from where the last movie left off, carrying the same buddy dynamic made so wonderfully by the first film, and while it might sacrifice some of the dramatic character study from the original it makes up for it with a relentless pace filled with non-stop laughs and action. Seriously, the movie just starts and never stops until the closing credits. There are no opening credits. We go straight from the Warner Brothers logo to the middle of a car chase. We don’t know what the perps have done and it doesn’t matter. The action and the wise cracks just start flowing. The credits never come on because the movie never stops moving. The plot almost doesn’t matter. Richard Donner asks you, “Do you want more of what you got in the first movie? Well, here you go!”

Some people might argue that the absurd doesn’t belong in film. I beg to differ. The plot of this movie couldn’t be any more absurd if they tried. South African drug dealing Ambassadors to the United States (frequently called Nazis) don’t like that Riggs and Murtaugh have been sniffing around their drug business and try to scare them off. It doesn’t work. The two of them get saddled with protecting a witness (played by the so annoying he’s actually funny, Joe Pesci) but even that doesn’t stop them. In some of the most irresponsible cop behavior ever, they take him along with them to find the evidence they need to take down the South African drug czar. Coincidence #1: Pesci used to work for the South Africans. Coincidence #2: The drug czars killed Mel Gibson’s wife, mistakenly trying to kill him for getting too close. The coincidences just keep piling up, but you don’t care because you are having so much fun. Action. Comedy. Action/comedy. That’s all there is. And damned if it isn’t great stuff.

(MUST SEE)

(April 16)

——F for Fake (1972)——

Orson Welles with one of his final films, F for Fake, managed to create a new genre of documentary filmmaking, much like how he reinvented conventional narrative cinema with Citizen Kane. In F for Fake he brings the conventions of a personal essay into the documentary form, allowing him to document the stories of his two main focuses–art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, who also happened to be a big faker as the author of a fake biography of Howard Hughes–and at the same time impose his own personal views on fakery for the viewer. With devilish glee Welles informs us in voice-over that everything in the first hour is true, and sure enough after that hour is over he proceeds to tell another story that is just another elaborate hoax. There is a purpose behind the hoax though, one that helps give credence to the argument of his video essay. Welles wonders if we don’t mind being tricked if the fakery is good enough to be passed off as the real thing. With our art forger Welles has quite a bit of fun with the so-called “experts” who consistently pass the fakes off as the real deal. De Hory wonders if there should be any difference, since he believes his fakes are just as good as the real things. And the question posed to us is: Do we accept the fake because we wish it to be real? The story Welles tells at the end is fake, a fact he manipulates by how he tells the story. And yet the story is so good we wish it to be true. Welles asks us, why not believe it is true?

Always a showman, Welles makes up for his low, almost non-existent budget by careful trickery in the editing room. The editing moves the story along adding dramatic flare to seemingly less interesting subjects, almost giving us something to look at and always making us wonder, how much of this is fake?

(SEE)

——Torn Curtain (1966)——

This is minor Hitchcock, just one of those few films where nothing really works and a great idea never really gets off of the ground because of general apathy from everyone involved in making it. Paul Newman and Julie Andrews could not look more bored and/or confused as to why they are in this movie. Their chemistry together beyond the opening scene of the two of them naked and in bed together is nil. The plot is bland (which matches the cinematography, in which Hitchcock wanted everything beyond the Iron Curtain to be in various shades of gray) and never really builds up any of Hitch’s trademark suspense. The characters/actors have no motivation beyond the plot driving the film, which isn’t much of anything if you’ve ever seen a spy movie before.

And what about that plot? Newman and Andrews are rocket scientists in Europe to attend a seminar when Andrews starts to notice that Newman is acting a little weird. He skips the seminar saying he has a meeting to attend, but when Andrews follows him she discovers that he’s in fact gone to East Germany to defect to the Communists to continue work on an anti-missile missile program. Andrews is crushed, but for some reason decides to stand by her man. Big mistake, because Newman is actually a spy trying to figure out what the Communists already know about that missile program. After getting the information he needs they make a (somewhat) tense journey back to the West. There are quite a few parallels here between one of his other films, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Unfortunately for this film, The Man Who Knew Too Much is a whole hell of a lot better than this lifeless mess. For Hitchcock completists only.

(MISS)