Amadeus (1984) Hollywood Bowl

 

I had a special experience last week. I had a chance to see my favorite movie of the 1980s, which is also my seventh favorite movie of all time, on screen accompanied by a live Orchestra, and it just so happens that the movie is about classical composers and orchestral music. Isn't that perfect? The movie of course is “Amadeus”, the mystery / thriller / musical about the rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Austrian Court composer Antonio Salieri.

As an extra bonus , the presentation was at my favorite place in Southern California, the Hollywood Bowl. This outdoor venue was my destination for a recent trip to Southern California. I made it to two shows at the bowl, as well as getting to celebrate my daughter's 40th birthday.  The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra accompanied the film along with a choir which sang sections of choral music presented in the film. And of course they were all consummate professionals who did an outstanding job.

The film version of this play has significant advantages over the stage presentation. The way the music can be visualized is more elaborate and creative, and the music can be edited into the film in a way which allows it to add more life and make the story more vivid. When it plays out on the scale that it does in the movie this is incredibly rich and memorable.

The greatest strengths of the film however are the two central performances. Tom Hulce, as Mozart, is delightful and frustrating simultaneously. Headstrong and egocentric, and a bit of an infant, Mozart can't see his own best interests, and continuously trips himself up with the Austrian musical hierarchy. Regardless, it is clear that he is a superior musician and composer to any of his contemporaries, he's just not a better man.

Salieri could be the better man, but his professional jealousy prevents him from finding a place in the musical hierarchy that is satisfying. F. Murray Abraham, is one of the greatest performances of the last half century, as a conniving rival who seems to be the only person of his era who recognizes that Mozart is not only talented but on a completely different level musically than anybody else. Salieri’s frustration at being able to recognize genius but not replicate it is conveyed by Abraham throughout the film, and his performance in the end is ultimately heartbreaking in spite of his uncharitable behavior.

Let me happily recommend you to a post I wrote a dozen years ago when I was covering the year 1984 on a different project. You will find a much more complete description of my thoughts about this film there. Meanwhile you can appreciate a couple of moments from the bowl experience, cuz I celebrated with my daughter and connected with one of my friends from the Lambcast.

The Dog Stars (2026)

 

I'm not sure why a Ridley Scott film, featuring some terrific action sequences, isn't hitting with audiences or why it's being released in late August. Theatrical presentation is a little uncertain these days, which is too bad because I think this film hits on most of the points that it's trying to make and many people would find it entertaining if they took the time to seek it out instead of seeing Spider-Man for the fourth or fifth time.

Maybe the reason the film isn't working for audiences is that it is repeating a dystopian future that seems less likely now than it did a few years ago. The world is still a screwed up place, but it doesn't seem as likely that we're going to get wiped out by a plague or nuclear war or chemical accident, which for all kinds of reasons seemed possible a decade ago. 

Jacob Elordi is the star of this film and he's good at quiet and mournful,  he still manages to to convey a sense of decency in spite of his PTSD. I am going to warn you right now Jasper, his canine companion, does not make it out of the First Act. That's probably a spoiler but it's a spoiler that people who are sensitive to these things probably should be aware of. Although I'm never a fan of seeing an animal being sacrificed in a story like this, it is better that it comes early in the film, so that the dread does not hang over the entire Enterprise.

Anybody unfamiliar with the three act structure that is often found in films is not going to have any trouble picking it out in this particular movie. The location literally changes twice, giving us a series of events in three different locations with occasional flashbacks to our original launching point. Josh Brolin is the co-star in the first third, and he basically plays the grumpy Josh Brolin version of himself, which seemed completely acceptable to me. Guy Pearce is in the second act along with Margaret Qualley, as a father and daughter trying to survive on their own in a completely different environment.  Elordi's ability to move from place to place because he has a plane and is a pilot, is what makes this dystopian movie a little more unique. 

The third section of the film reminded me a lot of the second half of “A Boy and his Dog” from 1975. As usual the point of the movie here is to show the different ways that people try to cope with disaster. Some become predators, some become isolates, and others try to remain as normal as possible. I thought there was enough creativity in the story to justify one more of these dystopian nightmares. It looks however from the reviews and box office returns that I am one of the isolates.

There are two or three very exciting sequences in the movie, and a couple of very satisfying outcomes to conflicts. There is however some sacrifice that comes along with this, which is only natural in a movie of this type. I did think there was a little bit of a cheat at one point, but in the long run I felt better about that and if it had played out the way I expected it to. This movie is not going to win any awards, and it won't take a place on the top shelf of all these kinds of films, but it's at least as good a movie as the Will Smith version of “I Am Legend”. If you wait to see it at home it won't destroy the experience for you, but I kind of like the idea of extending summer with a movie like this.

Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

 

As usual, I'm late to this because I've been so busy.  I have however done a podcast on it so I will include that at the end so that my comments here don't feel too brief.

“Coyote vs. Acme” is a completely delightful mixture of live action and animation, it's not as elaborate as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit "and I frankly can't compare it to the Looney Tunes Space Jam movies because I've never seen them. Not being a basketball fan I didn't care much about Michael Jordan against Daffy and Bugs.  I am however interested in a good argument and the idea of litigation by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme company was very intriguing.

We talked a bit on the show about why this film almost got canned for tax purposes, the people in charge of Warner Brothers don't seem to know what the hell they're doing. Maybe that's why they are ripe for acquisition by Paramount. Anyway this film was extremely well made and I frankly tell you, it was funny. I mean I really laughed quite a bit during the movie. Being an old school Looney Tunes guy, it fit my expectations perfectly.

There's a nice twist about halfway through the story, which helps maintain the consistency of our Title Character, and I appreciated that. I also appreciated the way they used all the other Looney Tunes characters by not treating them as if they are movie stars but rather they are just characters in the story. Even Bugs and Daffy, who do appear in the movie, are just secondary characters and not celebrities at all. For the most part the film avoids being too politically correct, all though Speedy Gonzales never gets an on-screen credit and Pepe Le Pew does get labeled as if he was being judged by 2020 standards . It doesn't matter because there was a good joke there.

Being a bit behind gives this film an opportunity for me to look at its box office returns. I think it is doing extremely well given the expectations and it demonstrates why sometimes the bean counters in the tax department should not be making the decisions about what films ultimately get distribution. I suspect the Batgirl film would have done perfectly fine, so it's disappointing that it didn't get a chance to escape the way this movie did. 

If you want to know more of my thoughts and what I appreciated in the film, take a listen to or watch the podcast. By the way, I was not alone in my appreciation. We had pretty much a unanimous opinion that this movie rocks.

The End of Oak Street (2026)

 

It's great when we get to the end of summer and there are still movies coming out that treat the summer as if it is an endless opportunity for fun. “The End of Oak Street” is one of those movies that makes August bearable in spite of the heat ( which by the way in Texas has been 103°) , and the pending gloom of fall, and for those who care, a return to school.

I am a big fan of a previous film from David Robert Mitchell ( although I'm not sure you should trust somebody who has three first names), "It Follows ".  That film would truly classify as a horror movie, I'm not so sure however if “The End of Oak Street” fits that category. In many ways it is a horror film because it is a Creature Feature and humans are being hunted by monsters in the story. However because the monsters in this story are dinosaurs, I may be inclined to call this an adventure story rather than a horror movie. This is a distinction I plan on talking about with my friends on the LAMBcast later this week.

There have probably been other people who have said it, but from my perspective this is the best sequel in the Jurassic Park series, since Jurassic World.  Technically of course it's not a Jurassic Park story at all, but its roots are clearly grounded in the same kind of Summer adventure and thrills that those movies have mined successfully for the last 30 years. This one sort of reverses the scenario, and instead of visiting a park with Dinosaurs, the Dinosaurs show up in your backyard.

Eventually we do get a discussion of how this whole thing happened, but that's the least interesting part of the film. What works best is the family dynamic, of two parents and two teen children struggling to survive in a clearly hostile environment, one in which many of their neighbors do not survive. The dinosaurs in this movie represent a wide variety of species, and many of them seem to have very aggressive tendencies, which I suppose is exactly what you want if you're creating a summer thriller.

Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway star as the parents, who are of course struggling with adult issues in the 1980s setting in which the film takes place. Hathaway is fully invested in the film and she is the focal point for the dramatic arc of the story. There are all sorts of moments that add a bit of humor to dire circumstances, but expect some gruesome deaths and PG-13 violence.  Some people will have an issue with the resolution, but don’t think too hard about it all. Just sit back and enjoy a fun family thriller with enough bite to keep it real. 

Lady Snowblood (1973) Paramount Summer Classic Film Series

 

How I missed "Lady Snowblood" when it originally played back in the seventies is beyond me. It is the kind of exploitation film from the Far East that I would have loved. It's a Revenge story with a female protagonist and it involves martial arts and sword play, the nature of which inspired Quentin Tarantino when he made “Kill Bill”. I did finally catch up with the film on home video through a Criterion Edition that I bought at one of their annual sales. So I didn't go into this last evening screening completely blind.

The idea that makes this film work,  is that the woman in question was born into revenge.  She is supposedly a demi-demon incarnation of her mother's desire for Vengeance.  It takes a series of flashbacks to see how she got prepared during the  twenty years after being born and her mom dying.  Meanwhile we get to see her in action a bit before we go through the exposition. 

Copious amounts of stage blood are used in the film as katana swords are the weapon of choice for most people in the film.  Heads and hands get separated from the body on a regular basis,  and gushers occur as they do in these sorts of movies.  There seems to have been a whole subculture of criminal organizations in Japan at the time. Rival gangs rat each other out, fight for power, and generally get to the center of the Revenge plot in a variety of ways. 

Sometimes the storytelling in films like this is a little incomplete. It's not quite clear what the motivation of the first gang leader is, when helping Lady Snowblood track down her victims. It's also not quite clear how the sensationalist writer who starts publishing stories about this quest for vengeance, ends up being in an alliance with our heroine.  And maybe there's even a romance there, but again that remains relatively abstract.

The truth is that we don't really care about much of that stuff. What we want to see is Lady Snowblood go off on criminals who stand in her way, but we especially want to see the ones who destroyed her family be punished. We do get all of those things, along with a mournful song starting and ending the film. So you can sit back rest assured, that there will be bloodletting and revenge. There might even be a moment or two of contemplation but don't take it too seriously because there's a geyser of blood coming.

Hero (2002) Paramount Summer Classic Film Series

 I had owned this movie on Blu-ray for a dozen years before I finally watched it for an episode of the Lamb cast just a couple of years ago.  It is filled with the names of martial artists who have been acting in Asian films for 20 plus years, and with whom I only had passing familiarity. Many of my friends in the LAMB community would know all of these names in the films they've been in without thinking hard about it. So I'm coming in on this film underprepared. I will cautiously refrain from trying to be too familiar with their previous work, because after all, I'm not.

There are a few martial arts movies that I've seen over the years, three or four Bruce Lee films, Jackie Chan has been a regular, and the gloriously beautiful “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon”. In no way would I diminish the work in these previous movies, but for scale and the frequency of combat, "Hero" seems to be the “Gone with the Wind” of martial arts films. It is epic and has a cast of thousands, and the leads are the biggest stars in martial arts movies in their generation. Looking at the film from a purely cinematic perspective , it can be a little overwhelming. The scale and grandeur of some of the sequences, comes pretty close to those things that we appreciate in films like the “Lord of the Rings”, or “The Odyssey”.. 

If I have any reservation about recommending this movie, it comes from the fact that it is clearly also a piece of propaganda about China's place in the world. The philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party that there is one China. Not too subtle a threat to Taiwan, and to the rest of the Pacific area, that China is an expansionist bully, that sees its mission as being righteous. Although the film appears to have the central character called Nameless, as its hero, the real heroes from the story's point of view are those who enabled the king to achieve his goal.

There are a dozen different fight sequences in the movie that could be the highlight in any other film. The battle between Nameless and Sky, at the Temple of chess, is choreographed furiously, with thrusts, strikes, and close escapes chilling in wide Master shots and  an occasional close up. It is filmed the way these kinds of movies should be done, giving us time to see the actors performing the martial arts in the context of the complete battle rather than just isolated close-ups with their hands or feet. The rain effects and the water dripping into containers around the temple add beautiful elements to the conflict, although I don't know that they signify anything of critical importance. Many of the same things can be said about the fight between Flying Snow and Moon. Their fight takes place in the daytime in a forest filled with Golden Leaves that swirl around them as the long sleeves of their clothes spin in the Wind and accentuate the fluid movements of their swords. 

Those are only two of the fight sequences that occur in the film and they may not even be the best ones. They are however the most visually stunning ones and therefore the easiest for me to remember. At first it appears that Nameless, in telling his tale To The King, is presenting the story in flashback, but in reality he is sharing a narrative that is designed with an ulterior purpose. And we are going to see the same story told more accurately from a different perspective. What looked originally like it was going to be a straightforward tale of martial arts combat,  becomes an entangled conspiracy between the combatants, and the surrounding environments, including surprisingly enough, a strong influence from calligraphy.

This was a double feature in the Paramount classic film series for this summer. I'm going to include a link to the podcast episode for you, if you'd like to hear us talk about this in more detail.

Whiplash (2014) Re-Visit Paramount Summer Classic Film Series

 

Back in 2014 I declared this the best film of that year. There hasn't been anything to change my mind since, and after watching it again on the big screen, I might easily think it's the best film not only of that year but of the last 10 years. At its core is the most confounding character you were likely to see on screen. Terence Fletcher is simultaneously a monster and an icon that we might admire. His demand for excellence is truly admirable but his means of achieving it are horrific.

Those of you not familiar with the story, let me briefly explain that it involves a student at the most prestigious musical Institution in the country, pursuing excellence in his instrument. Miles Teller plays the striving young man, and he encounters a teacher that pushes him to reach the excellence that he aspires to. All is not well however, because the path to excellence according to both of these people involves sacrificing the human decency that the rest of us take for granted.

JK Simmons won the Academy Award for supporting actor for this year, in what is probably the most deserved bestowing of the award in the last 20 years. His portrayal of Fletcher, as a precision driven taskmaster, is incredibly absorbing. At times he wears the mask of civility, and seems to genuinely be invested in the music culture. Yet when he stands up to his lectern to take over directing his musical ensemble, he's the personification of the most controlling, ill-tempered, unpleasant boss that anyone has ever had. The drill sergeant in “Full Metal Jacket" could take a few lessons from Terrance Fletcher in breaking down a young protege.

Writer/director Damien Chazelle, creates a story that crackles like a thriller, in spite of the fact that it has all of the accoutrements of a classroom drama. There is tension in 80% of the film that Fletcher appears on screen, and in about 50% of the time that he is not there. Aspiring Jazz drummer Andrew Neiman, is incredibly talented, but don't tell him that, because that would lead him to be satisfied with mediocrity. The recurring story about Charlie Parker having a cymbal thrown at his head, becomes the blueprint for how Fletcher is trying to teach his students. “Good job”, is a filthy phrase in his vocabulary. “Not my tempo”, is the cattle prod that he uses on Teller's Niemann. 

Both these personalities have something wrong with them. They both are addicted to the concept that suffering beyond human capacity both by yourself and by others , is the only way to achieve greatness. Neither of them has the kind of humility that will allow for a satisfying social life. And in the end, the film actually seems to be endorsing the terrorist method of instruction that Fletcher inflicts and Neiman endures. I'm sure there are plenty of successful artists, who have struggled to overcome adversity and achieve great things, without becoming insufferable a-holes. The problem is, their stories are never going to be as compelling as this one is.