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Code Name: Emerald (1985)
Code Name: Underrated
Code Name: Emerald is an excellent espionage thriller involving a cool double-agent plot connected to the D-Day landing. It's expertly helmed by Jonathan Sanger and shot in beautiful Paris starring A-list actors.
It also offers proof that American movie-goers are mentally defective. Check out the domestic box office receipts for September 1985.
Code Name Emerald - starring arguably the greatest actor of all time, Max Von Sydow - and also starring international stud Horst Bucholz and American stud Ed Harris, placed 10th for the month, taking in $561,000.
Now look what placed No. 2: Invasion USA starring noted thespian Chuck Norris. It hauled in a cool $17.5M. Do I have have to include the plot synposis?: "A one-man army comes to the rescue when the United States are invaded by communists."
Jeezus that's depressing.
D-Day the Sixth of June (1956)
Chick flick
Opening scene shows some pretty cool ships on the water. After a pre-landing pep talk, Richard Todd and Robert Taylor meet on the p00p deck where it's revealed they loved the same woman back in the land of bad food and worse dental work.
Then we flash back to a romantic triangle movie.
BOH. RING.
Robert Taylor is one good-looking dude so he gets credit for at least one star. Richard Todd is a stiff. Dana Wynter is a corpse. The Technicolor is easy on the eyes. So a second star for that.
I feel sorry for the dudes who got dragged to the theatre in 1956 and had to sit through this nonsense...
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Wrong actor won the Oscar
I realize softheads and leftysts think FDR was some kind of god, a saviour to all the poorz of America. And that capitalists get their jollies kicking people off the land.
Gratefully, for the moviegoers of 1940, The Grapes of Wrath was directed by John Ford, who was about as far from being a c0mmie sympathizer as one could hope to get in Hollywood. So he softened the sharp corners of the politics and made a more universal movie about poor Americans trying to survive in desperate times.
There are many heartbreaking scenes. They'd be tough to watch even if the entire thing was fiction. Knowing this was reality for farmers displaced by the Dust Bowl (aka The Dirty Thirties) thanks in part to misguided government policies. It's even tougher when you realize America's poor in 2024 are losingtheir homes at record rates and ending up in homeless camps. Again thanks in part to ruinous goverment policies, including Resident Xiden's open-border.
Gregg Toland's cinematography is remarkable and the performances suitably downbeat and gritty. I'm not a huge fan of Jane Darwell's performance as Ma Joad. It's a bit too hokey for me. Henry Fonda's performance as Tom Joad is more subtle. But let's be honest here, his character is not actually sympathetic. He's an edgy, nasty ingrate, to my eyes.
The real hero is John Carradine's preacher. He's modest, honest and has the most dignity of any character. He even takes the assault wrap while Fonda escapes from the first camp. Carradine's performance is admirably without affectation, unlike Darwell, Pa and Sister Sharon (to say nothing of Grampa) who are all caricatures. As for moving performances, my money is on John Qualen as Muley. His flashback to being kicked off his land just crushed me.
The Honeymoon Killers (1970)
He killed the wrong wife
True-crime movie of a latin lover played by Tony LoBianco and a fat-sss nurse played by Shirley Stoler who team up to kill a bunch of lonely women.
Sh2t in black & white, it's another great entry in the annals of New American Cinema: gritty, no budget, and feeling like a documentary half the time. No real surprise it was helmed by Martin Scorcese for a week. At least until he was fired - according to another reviewer on this site - for spending too much time filming a soda can. I guess the Coke addiction started early. Ahem.
I totally bought LoBianco's act as a two-bit Lothario. I had no trouble believing he could charm the pants off the birds. But his victims aren't mere pushovers. Each has her own strengths and weaknesses as a character, and measure of cute appeal. The actresses who portray the wives do an excellent job, especially considering they probably rarely got to do more than a single take. Wife No 2 and 3 aren't on the screen for long but they're both memorable. And then Wife No. 4 comes along and blows them both away with a movie-stealing performance, as far as I'm concerned. And her death scene, my goodness, that is arguably one of the most disturbing I've ever seen.
Unfortunately - because she's in almost every scene - Stoler is a significant weakness in the film. She's a caricature, not a character. More like - as some have pointed out - a beta version of Divine in a John Waters farce (which, in my mind, is decidedly NOT a good thing).
Frankly, as portrayed, I kept wondering why LoBianco's character hooked up with Stoler for their spree, instead of just wacking her for her money right up front. She was repulsive and was not an asset whatsoever in their scams (in the movie, at least). So in real life, what were the woman's charms? Stoler fails to infuse the character with any redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Nevertheless, a grimly watchable movie, but strictly for mature audiences. Even 54 years later it's disturbing.
The Naked and the Dead (1958)
Easily one of the worst-ever war movies
I haven't read the Norman Mailer novel and I'm not about to. This is a movie review, not a book review.
As a war movie it's a dull, disjointed mess. Filmed somewhere in Pasadena by the looks of it. About as much grit as your wife's shower loofah.
Aldo Ray plays a dark, unheroic version of John Wayne. It's a bold career move and he's about the only thing that kept me watching. I wanted to see just how much of a w3ckjob they'd let him be in a 50s movie.
Raymond Massey plays a bloviating Easter ham, as usual. Cliff Robertson does fine as a lieutenant. The rest of the cast ranges from irritating to forgettable.
Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951)
Starts strong but fades midway
Steve Cochran gets out of jail after serving 18 years for murdering his abusive father. Being out in the world for the first time since he was 13 has Cochran on edge, but he lets his guard long enough to spill his life story to some intrepid reporter. With his face plastered all over the local rag, Cochran gets paranoid. He seeks the comfort of the dames at the dance ahll. There he meets stunningly blonde, sharp-tonqued Ruth Roman. Va-voom!
Cochrane pesters Roman into a day of sightseeing, after which they return to her apartment to find some jealous fat-sss. A scuffle ensues and the fat-sss - turns out he's a cop - catches a slug.
After that, Cochran and Roman are on the run.
So far so good.
But then Act 2 has them meet up with some lettuce-pickers and the story turns into domestic melodrama. Blech.
There's a moral dilemma to deal with in Act 3 that adds some tension but the ending derails it.
The chemistry between Cochran and Roman was incredible. But they're let down by a weak script. Disappointing after such a promising Act 1.
The Hurt Locker (2008)
Mah Hurt Brain
I recall being a bit dumbfounded about all the hype the first time I saw this movie. Fast forward another 15 years and I really can't believe this unadulterated American war propaganda won the Oscar for Best Picture. Well, until I realized the competition was all cr2p except for one movie: Quentin Tarantino's glorious Inglorious Basterds.
At least Q's movie didn't take itself seriously. It was a fantasy romp through an alternative WWII universe where the good guys take out the top echelon of the Natsy regime, propelled by a memorable performance by Christoph Waltz.
The Hurt Locker is a low-budget, slow-moving slog about GI Joe's on a bomb squad. The Iraqis are mere props. The story thin. The character-development non-existent.
I have to assume this garbage was awarded the Oscar for Best Picture because it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and the Wokademy felt it was time to hand a trophy to a woman. If this had been directed by a man I can't even see how it would have been nominated.
The Revengers (1972)
Good ol' fashioned injun killin'
The scenery in The Revengers rivals anything put on the big screen.
The cast features William Holden and Ernest Borgnine at the top. Holden is solid, as always. But Borgnine steals the show as the comic relief. As the moral centre of the movie, this might be Woody Strode's finest 90 minutes.
Comanchees ride into Holden's idyllic wh1te ranch and pointlessly slaughter his entire family. His buddy also catches a couple of fatal bullets, but before he dies he conveniently describes one of two white men who were riding with the Comanchees, a dude with one pale eye.
Holden sets out for revenge. First stop, some prison camp. He recruits some reallky bad dudes. They go on a killing spree across Texas while pursuing the dude with the pale eye.
That's as complicated as it gets.
Susan Hayward shows up at the end of Act 2 with a terribly fake Irish accent to nurse Holden back to heatlh after he catches a bullet. Her scenes are pointless padding.
It all leads to an unsatisfying ending. Did they run out of budget?
I could see this being entertaining as the ABC Wednesday Night Movie of the Week in 1974. Grampa always enjoyed seeing the white guys killing Ind1ans.
Quadrophenia: Can You See the Real Me? (2012)
The Making of The Who's OTHER rock opera
Everybody in the western world knows about Tommy, The Who's rock opera featuring the deaf, dumb and blind boy who sure plays a mean pinball.
The Who made another rock opera a few years later, the story of Jimmy the Mod (a movement in Britain in the 60s). Many fans of The Who consider Quadrophenia to be the band's greatest album. Full disclosure: I say their best is Who's Next. But why should friends quibble.
This documentary pieces together studio footage from the time of the album's recording, along with 21st-century interviews with Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Richard Barnes, Bill Curbishly and a host of others who help put the album's story, music and recording in historical perspective.
I still say that if they'd dumped the pretense of the story and issued a single album it not only would be the greatest album by The Who, but maybe by any artist of the rock n roll era. Here's the tracklist I propose would make it unbeatable:
The Real Me
Cut My Hair (re-work it into a proper rock song instead of a story-telling bridge)
The Punk and The Godfather
I'm One
I've Had Enough
That's a 21-minute, give or take, Side 1
5:15
Drowned
Doctor Jimmy
Love Reign O'er Me
Edit Doctor Jimmy down to just over 5 minutes and you'd have a 22-minute, give or take, Side 2
With a stronger outside producer (Kit Lambert was so wacked out on heroin by this time the band fired him) to turn Townshend's songs into a proper rock album there's no telling how many units they would have shifted.
Professionisti per un massacro (1967)
Shoulda hired some Professionals from the Movies
Three Confederates sell their own regiment's guns to some union soldiers. Just before they're shot at dawn as traitors, General Sibley steps in and commissions them to recover a wagon of gold stolen from the Confederates. At least, I think that's the plot.
Edd Byrnes, with this super-cool hair. George Hilton as a dynamite-happy priest. And some random fake Mexican are the hired guns. Lots of mayhem ensues. Lots of fights and gunplay. And they up things real good.
I couldn't follow the half of it, since the one thing that marks spaghetti westerns is the total lack of continuity. I swear most of these movies - from the lowest dregs right up to Sergio Leone - were filmed, cut up by a blind butcher, and randomly taped back together by studio janitors.
The most memorable thing about this movie is that some of the random characters are extraordinarly ugly, even by spaghetti western standards. I mean, they're repulsive.
The Big Trail (1930)
How The Oregon Trail Was Won
Bunch of Missouri dirt farmers are headed for the lush Willamette Valley in Oregon. John Wayne, in his first starring role, agrees to lead their wagon train. Tyrone Power Sr features as Yosemite Sam, the rootin'est, tootin'est, meanest hombre west o' the Pecos.
About 6 different versions of this film were apparently shot simultaneously, including a 70mm version that is quite incredible to see in its digitally restored state (thank, to the Museum of Modern Art for the restoration and TCM for showing it). The widescreen shot of the wagon train leaving the station, all spread out, kicking up dust, is right up there with the all-time great shots in cinema history.
The pacing can seem slow to modern audiences. But I think that's a deliberate choice by director Raoul Walsh. I mean, it's a long ride from Missouri to Oregon. It took a while. There were phsyical and psychological challenges. There was LOTS of smoke and dust. We really get immersed in it.
I'm not sure what it was about John Wayne's performance that critics objected to. He looks like a star right from the first time he appears in the frame. Sure, he's stuck with plenty of cornball dialogue but that's not his fault, he's the lead actor, not the head writer.
Marguerite Churchill was a good-looking dame. Refreshingly a brunette in an era that came to be dominated by blondes with helium-filled brains.
Considering how stagebound sound films were for much of their first 20 yearsw, The Big Trail is nothing short of a miracle. I'm not saying it's a great film. But it's undeniably an epic one.
The Liquidator (1965)
Get better as it goes along
As WWII draws to a close, British spy Trevor Howard is walking the streets of Paris when he's set upon by a couple of baddies. Tank Commander Rod Taylor happens along and, somewhat inadvertendly, saved Howard's life. Years later, when Howard is tasked with plugging leaks at MI5, he hires Taylor to be The Liquidator.
Taylor's bumbling in the opening scene gives viewers the impression that we're about to see some broad comedy spoof of the Bond films. What follows after the credits is neither spy spoof nor remotely funny. In fact, it's a straight-up spy film. And a pretty good one.
Trevor Howard as the Liquidator's handler plays it no-nonsense, just like all the M's do in the Bond films. Jill St. John as the female lead isn't there for comedy. And neither are any of the supporting cast, including Wilfrid Hyde-White, David Tomlinson, Eric Sykes and. John Le Mesurier.
The plot has considerable grit to it and it deals with a mature subject matter, esp once the action switches to Nice.
OK, Akim Tamiroff is way over the top. But that's comic relief. John Ford movies had Victor McLaglen or whomever as comic relief. That didn't make those John Wayne movies comedies or spoofs.
I think what happened is that the producers watched the daily rushes and recognized that Taylor couldn't pull it off. Sure, he was handsome. But when he's objecting to something he's more peevish than p1ssed off. Instead of a tightly wound coil like Sean Connery's Bond, Taylor is more like a limp creme brule.
So they decided to salvage the production by (this is my guess based on the fact it wasn't released in the U. S. for a year) by re-shooting parts of Act 1 to emphasize Taylor's eye for the ladies and - most importantly - tacking on that goofy opening scene.
Taken as a legit spy film, it's very entertaining after the dubious start. If you fall for the "it's a comedy/spoof" gaslighting you'll probably be disappointed.
My Fair Lady (1964)
The penny finally dropped
I've always hated My Fair Lady. It's stiff, pompous and dull. It features songs that were hopelessly dated by 1964. And It stars charmless Rex Harrison and human stick insect Audrey Hepburn. As an added discredit, Hepburn was cast as Eliza Doolittle over the obvious choice: Julie Andrews.
Today, watching it in fully restored Technicolorama on TCM, with the sound barely on because I loathe the songs, the light bulb finally went off.
It's not a romantic musical that shows how a semi-literate girl from the gutter can - with the help of her "betters" - overcome class distinctions and enter society as a "proper" woman. A movie for lovestruck cat ladies and dudes of dubious s3xual orientation.
In fact, it's a satire of empty-headed upper-class twits who think that if they simply apply some polish to the working stiffs all will be well in England. With proper posture and unimpeachable diction we can lick the Hun and probably beat back the Bolsheviks while we're at it. Pip pip and jolly ho!
But, of course, the source material is George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Be hard to find a more strident class warrior than the ol' marxist gasbag himself.
So what we really have is the Eliza fighting to retain her working class dignity in the face of heavy-handed polishing by the preening Prof Henry Higgins. Not to mention the society twits he hangs out with. Watching it on mute, I get it now. As an added bonus, Id din't have to listen to Hepburn's screeching (her spoken dialogue) or whoever dubbed her singing.
So we end up with a stage play with a marxist theme turned into an unlistenable musical. Talk about a bad combo.
La notte (1961)
La Nap
Italian New Wage director Michelangelo Antonioni cranks out the second of what I call his Navel Gazing Trilogy.
Headliners Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni are a married couple just barely hanging on. They don't do anything as crassly American as yelling or throwing pots and pans at each other. These are Euros. Sophisticated, high-class Euros. Moreau wanders the streets feeling ennui. Mastroianni stares ahead, longing to be elsewhere.
There are three key scenes that make the film worth watching at least once.
Firstly, the opening scene where they visit their friend in hospital. He's afraid of dying alone. His mom takes a 7-hour train ride to sit quietly by his bedside. He's desperate to be forgiven, the most regrettable thing being the time he's wasted. If you're old enough to have helped a loved one through the end of their journey, this is a very moving scene.
Secondly, amidst a night-time garden party, Moreau walks into the house to call the hospital to inquire about this friend. The entire phone call is just her dialogue. One shot. No cutaways. Heartbreaking.
And lastly, the final scene, Moreau and Mastroianni sitting together in the edge of a golf course the morning after leaving the party. She confesses she no longer loves him. Then reads a letter out loud. This time there are cuts, capturing Moreau from different angles. And Mastroianni's reactions. Wow. Such beautiful and subtle film-making.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie didn't grab me. I just don't care about disaffected artists and rich Euros. Maybe their detachment, isolation and self-involvement was Antonioni's point, given that he was a marxist.
There's just too much flab. Beautifully photographed flab, I'll grant you. But clocking in at 2+ hours it tried my patience.
Démanty noci (1964)
A harrowing one-act movie
Two boys jump train en route from one concentration camp to another. Or so we're lead to believe.
I offer that proviso because we get a harrowing escape through the woods that appears to be as linear as it is harrowing. The lengthy tracking shot goes on for so long the actors need to bend over and use their arms and hands to continue to propel themselves forward, like a lower primate would. BTW, this was for decades my recurring nightmare.
At this point if you're not hooked you better check your pulse.
However, once the boys have put enough distance between themselves and the gunfire that is whizzing past their heads, they slow their pace and one of the main characters starts to hallucinate, likely from intense hunger.
From that point on, we don't know what's real and what's Memorex. But it's so exhilirating that I was 57 minutes into it before I realized the plot, such as it is, wasn't going anywhere. Then I noticed that the film was only 67 minutes long.
We get an unlikely resolution to the chase that appears to be a return to linearity. But then Directir Nemec subverts even that before we're done.
By the end, I wasn't sure whether any of it was real. It's ultimately a one-act escape film with hallucinations, plus a prologue. Memorable for its artistry, but not what I'd call ground-breaking storytelling. The synopsis of the novel upon which this film is based sounds a lot more interesting, to be honest.
1917 (2019)
Self indulgent
You know how Act 1 of most movies introduces us to the main characters and their situation? Yah, well, there's no Act 1 to 1917. Instead, the movie begins with Act 2, where our protagonists are told during some random break in the action that they've gotta make some perilous sprint across No Man's Land to deliver a message.
About 60 seconds later we're off and running.
Yes, they are in a sprint for their lives, but since we never got to know these two, it's like watching a video game. I was no more invested in them than I was any random character in a video game jumping over barrels thrown at him by a cartoon monkey.
The conceit is that the entire film is one long tracking shot from beginning to end. Even though - of course - it's not. However, because of the conceit, we also have to accept all sorts of chicanery, like entire divisions coming out of nowhere to appear at a farmhouse to surprise our heroes.
Frankly, even accepting the "single long shot" premise I didn't find their journey all the harrowing, to be honest. It's noisy spectacle and little else.
Ultimately, it's an empty spectacle.
Bataan (1943)
They died bravely defending the Paramount lot
Pretty decent cast with Robert Taylor, Thomas Mitchell, Loyd Nolan George Murphy, and several well-known others. But man is this an el-cheapo. It's shot on the studio backlot with mostly straightforward tight shots and rear-screen projection. And although the actors have a lot of filth smeared on their faces and uniforms, I just never got a sense of genuine grit. It seems more like LARPing. Mitchell is 50+, too old and too fat to be in this movie.
The prologue says these men were putting up a defence that allowed America to build up its forces to take it to the Japanese. It looked like they were killing time until the canteen was ready with the roast beef sandwiches.
There's a lot of gung-ho talk about shooting "J3ps," which probably played well in P0dunk, Kansas in 1943. But these days it's obvious war propaganda meant to whip up the farm boys so they don't mind getting pointlessly slaughtered on some faraway island that no American could find on an unmarked map. Audiences only had to wait a couple years for They Were Expendable, which had actual outdoor locations, had a legitimate sense of dread, a heartbreaking love interest and an ambiguous ending that ripped your heart out for everyone who had been over there. For my money, John Ford's best movie.
There's nothing at all fresh in this movie. Unless you count Desi shouting like a Latin lunatic at a short wave radio as Tommy Dorsey's Orchestra plays.a song that may or may not feature Gene Krupa during his brift stint in Dorsey's band.
Easily bottom-of-the-barrel genre fare.
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958)
Escalator to a nap
Starts strong, with two lovers on the phone, nervously planning their meetup after what turns out to be a murder. So those first 5-10 minutes are pretty entertaining.
Dude makes an amateur mistake and has to return to the scene of the crime. Gets stuck in an elevator. Meanwhile, GF thinks she's been stood up so starts to get nervous.
And that's when the movie gets packed into a Citreon and heads straight off the white cliffs at Calais.
For one thing, the movie almost entirely abandons the male lead, Maurice Ronet, who is super cool. It devotes barely any more time to the female lead, the super s3xy Jeanne Moreau.
Instead, we get a plot about a shopgirl and her degenerate boyfriend who steal a car and then keep making very bad decisions, let's just say.
My patience ran out well before the first hour had expired. But I kept grinding in the hope that the young couple would get kidnapped by Algerian rebels or something. I had long lost interest in Ronet and Moreau.
If they'd written a full movie around the lead couple and their initial crime, this could have been great. The cinematography and music are amazing. But I just don't care about teen rebels. In French movies. In Hollywood Movies. Nowhere. Never.
Mauvaise graine (1934)
First-rate crime caper
Henri Pasquier is the prodigal and profligate son. Daddy Warbucks takes away his car so the kid goes rogue. Steals a car and before long we're treated to an excellent car chase through the streets of Paris. Remember, this is 35 years before Bullitt and French Connection. Hollywood movies at the time barely left the studio.
Henri soon finds out the car-theft business is an organized racket. Luckily for him, they're hiring.
The plot then really gets going, with beautiful women distracting wealthy car owners from daring daylight car thefts on the streets of Paris. The head of the international car-theft ring is devious and charming in his own way. We get a plethora of interesting side characters. And a gorgeous love interest for Henri.
Complications arise when Henri goes to bat for better wages for the crew, so the boss cooks up a scheme to get rid of him.
Now I'm supposed to note that Bad Seed is Billy Wilder's directorial debut. He was temporarily in France after fleeing Natsy Germany. While the exterior scenes are very well done, the interior scenes are, at times, pretty stiff. Maybe that was the work of co-director Alex Esway.
Luckily, Wilder co-wrote the screenplay. The plot works on every level. The characters are believable, gritty, and lively. The setting is second-to-none.
The Tunnel of Love (1958)
Movie full of cretins
Richard Widmark and Doris Day are unable to have a baby. Neighbours Gig Young and Elisabeth Fraser can't stop having kids.
Instead of trading in those twin beds for a queen and - you know - having s3x, the childless couple decide to adopt. Unfortunately their plans get sandbagged when the investigator from the adoption agency - played by gorgeous Gia Scala - drops in unannounced and catches Widmark with no pants on, and drinking in the middle of the day. Even worse, Gig walks in and makes a pass at the investigator, who storms out.
It's already bad enough at this point, but the beginning of Act 2 sees Scala return to Widmark's house to say she finds him to be "a very attractive man." At which point I moaned, "oh come on now."
Now, that's not a knock on Widmark. He's a favorite of mine. And unlike other reviewers, I don't think he's miscast here. In fact, I think he's perfectly charming.
I'm complaining about the entire premise. I'm no feminist, but the notion that the Scala character would return under any circumstances, much less to announce her attraction to Widmark, wearing a designer gown, and then sit down at his home bar to bang back scotch while talking about s3xual theory, bleecccchchh.
By gawd it gets worse. They decide to go for a night on the town, and while driving (remember they've already been drinking at home) Widmark is so nervous he bangs back not only one but TWO "tranquilizers" (sedatives) which results in his waking up the next day in a strange motel, wondering just what happened the night before with Scala.
Hi. Larry. Us.
Was this supposed to be sophisticated comedy in the Eisenhower era? I've seen kinescopes of 50s television shows that had more edge.
On a side note, did notorious drunkard and wife-murd3rer Gig Young have it written into his contract that he could drink in every scene? And that the booze be real? A couple of times I thought he was gonna tip over. It's not quite as bad as in A Touch of Mink, where Gig can't even keep his eyes focused, but it's still not hard to spot.
The Gold Rush (1925)
A grind full of unlikeable characters
Chaplin had a formula for The Tramp: outcast scuffles his way through life yet somehow finds love and prevails against the odds.
The Charlie Maudlin approach works if we fall in love with the female lead as quickly as The Tramp does. They must suffer their travails and enjoy their ''triumphs" together. Then we can overlook when Chaplin lays it on a bit thick.
What are we supposed to do with Georgia Hale's character, then? She doesn't even appear until Act 2. And when she does, she's a narcissistic glorified call girl in Bumbfk, Alaska, hitching a ride with some bully gold miner. She and her entirely unattractive (and one fat) friends treat The Tramp abominably.
Sadly, The Tramp has been stuck in a cabin with two fat guys for so long he's starved for female company. His efforts to woo Georgia aren't romantic, they reek of sick desperation.
When one of his cabin buddies hits the motherlode, fortune favors The Tramp. So we get a resolution that no way, no how, no matter one's romantic inclinations, strikes the right notes. The Tramp might not realize it, but we know he's still a first-class sap.
Acts 1 and 3 are basically set pieces in a snowbound cabin. It feels like the same gag gets recycled to pad the running time. It wore out my patience at times.
If you take out the famous dancing potatoes scene, this movie is a frozen turdsicle.
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
Perfect Novel, Perfect Movie
There are library shelves full of books analyzing Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility down to the finest detail. Let me be crass and just say that a family consisting of the widow (second wife) and three daughters is set adrift, close to but not quite penniless, and this is their effort to survive in an England still very much bound by propriety. There is so much here about the class system, manners, urban vs rural, duty and honour, gender roles, and maybe most importantly, money.
But that sounds too sombre and stiff. Austen was anything but. Heck, the clue is in the title. Emma Thompson adapts Jane Austen's magnificent novel of manners, capturing and - as I understand it - augmenting Austen's words. It is, of course, romantic above all. It is, at times, heartbreaking. But crucially, the screenplay also loses nothing of Austen's humor.
Director Ang Lee is entirely up to the task. He paints the scenery around the words with such generosity that we're spoiled with a movie that hits all the right notes textually and visually. He draws remarkable performances from every single actor who appears here.
Emma Thompson as the eldest Dashwood daughter is the Sense of the title. Logical and reserved. Kate Winslet as the middle daughter is the Sensibility. Passionate and expressive. Watching it tonight for the first time in more than 20 years, I realized that, at the end, those roles are reversed.
For my money, Alan Rickman steals the show among the male actors. To that point, most people in North America would have known him as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, surely among the most memorable "can't help but like the bad guy" roles in cinema history. Here he gets to play the reliable, manly yet sensitive Colonel Brandon. Hugh Grant as Edward Ferras works because, at the time, audiences didn't realize "bumbler" was Grant's one-note shtick so here it seemed sincere. Greg Wise as shallow pretty-boy John Willoughby would reliably send any woman's heart fluttering. But let's not forget Hugh Laurie of "Black Adder" and "House" fame. His role as Mr. Palmer expands as the plot moves along; his character grounds the emotions at times when they threaten to spin out of control.
It would be easy to say the performances of Winslet and Thompson should have been rewarded with golden statuettes on Oscar night but 1995 (the late 90s, really) was a time when they were still making quality pictures. Let us be satisfied that those fine actresses (and many others I haven't mentioned) turned in such great work here. I dare say, note perfect work. OK, I'll say it, Ang Lee should have won for Best Director. Nothing against Mel Gibson, who is a lot smarter and talented than his more recent blacklisting would suggest, but Braveheart is a revenge picture. Anybody can play dressup and make a revenge picture.
I don't like giving away 10s on imdb. This might actually be my first. But to dock Sense and Sensibility I'd have to find a fault. Until then, I'm giving it a 10.
Violence (1947)
Fight Club of 1947
The movie has veterans of WWII being recruited to be part of a group that will use violence to accomplish the goals of bigger men. A young go-getter female reporter infiltrates it. Very early plot twist: on the way back to Chicago to file her stories, she gets in a motor vehicle accident, her typed-out stories are burned up in the car fire, and she gets amnesia. Dun-dun-duhhh....
Nancy Coleman is convincing as the reporter who is distressed about her loss of memory, although she rubs her temple too many times. Steve Fuller, who surely must have got his start as Kirk Douglas's stand-in, is a convincing male lead here, but he's clearly in support of Coleman.
It's gritty, adult fare for 1947. It might not be splattered-blood Bonnie & Clyde violence but sometimes implied violence is actually more dramatic.
At one of the rallies - these are all recently released WWII vets, remember - one guy stands up and gives a highly unlikely w0kified speech right out of 2024 about how "hate and violence alone won't solve any of our problems." He is quickly ushered out.
There are some unlikely plot twists that rely on characters making very bad decisions or things that happen a bit too conveniently to keep the running time tight and the sh00ting schedule on budget.
But it's an entertaining way to spend 90 minutes just the same.
There's enough meat to this plot that good writers with a respectable budget could churn out an excellent first season of a short-run prestige-cable show. Of course, the reporter would be a bl3ck tr2ns-g3nd3r and the underground club would all wear red baseball caps.
Which brings me to Eddie Muller's presentation of this movie on April 7, 2024. He suggested that movies such as Violence might have "inspired the House Un-American Activities Committee to launch investigations into 'purported' (here he gives an ironic hand wave) communist influences in Hollywood." It's well established by now that Hollywood (and Washington) were completely infiltrated by commies, as they are today. One's credibility takes a big hit to pretend otherwise. I expect better from Muller.
Don't go w0ke, TCM. Cause you know what rhymes with w0ke.
Rumble Fish (1983)
The Horror! The Horror!
In Rumble Fish, Francis Ford Coppola doesn't have his main character travel up river to find a charismatic leader as he did in Apocalypse Now, along the way encountering all sorts of wackjobs in surreal situations.
Instead, he has his main character (Matt Dillon) travel up his own sss to find himself, along the way encountering various wackjobs (his brother, played by Mickey Rourke; and dad, played by Dennis Hopper) in surreal situations.
Rumble Fish, let me just say, is a lot less entertaining than Apocalypse Now. Instead of being glued to the screen, I wanted to throw a brick through it.
Now let's talk about the actors: instead of veteran pros Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne and Martin Sheen turning in memorable performances, we get a quartet of lightweight doofuses, Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Chris Penn and Nicolas Cage. Dillon faded away because he can't act - and I mean, AT ALL. Mickey Rourke fell off the face of the earth until his remarkable revival as the bloated t1tular character in The Wrestler. Penn had a memorable role in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs before, um, binging his way to an early demise. Only Nicolas Cage went on to have a highly successful career despite having even less acting ability than the other three. In Hollywood, it pays to be Francis Ford Coppola's nephew.
Hopper couldn't act, either, to be honest. But here, as in Apocalypse Now, his name helped sell tickets, probably.
Considering how wealthy Coppola is from the Godfather films and his winemaking, I would have thought that by now he'd have bought up all known prints of this dreck and burned them.
Week end (1967)
Another dud from the French Commie Pervert
Breathless was such a...well...breath of fresh air. JL Godard's subsequent films - the half-dozen I've seen anyway - are unmitigated cr3pola. Weekend is one of them.
Movie opens with a couple discussing how they hope her dad and brother will die in a car accident so she'll get all the inheritance. Below their apartment a fight breaks out between two motorists that leaves one nearly dead. And then the wife tells a very boring 10-minute story about a threesome. Whoooooo. Edgy.....
Very soon thereafter the couple is one the road, inching past a traffic jam on a country road that features the celebrated 8-minute tracking shot. Big deal. None of the motorists they pass is doing anything remotely interesting. Turns out it was a traffic fatality. Whoooooo. Edgy....
Then they pull into town and there's another accident between a convertible and a tractor. Male passenger dies. Wife freaks out at farmer. Townspeople gawk. Whoooooo. Edgy.....
Now we are a half-hour into this dull, noisy (did I mentions somebody is always blowing their car horn?) and I've had about enough. I'm not waiting for the scenes of animal cruelty.
Kinda reminded me of David Cronenberg's Crash in its depravity. Or A Clockwork Orange.
If this is what passes for intellectual movie-making among the Frenchie marxists, we definitely fought the wrong team in WWII.