This movie is as hypnotic as any DePalma film, with the added advantage that it is straightforward and to the point. Maybe it is just good guys versus the bad guys, but when the Good Guys are lead by Kevin Costner and Sean Connery, I don't know how anyone can turn away. Throw in DeNiro as Al Capone and you have a heavyweight fight that would break pay per view records if it were a boxing match.
Even before the first scene, the movie is pulling you in with a haunting and propulsive theme played over artistically rendered Titles. Ennio Morricone was Oscar Nominated for the score of this film and it should have been his. The background themes are great at accentuating the heroes in their glory moments, and the action scenes are supplemented with exciting motifs that come up in various sections of the film. There are plenty of opportunities for the music to make an impact on you.
The botched opening raid is a nice way to set our expectations at a different place. Later, when the group of Untouchable Law Enforcement agents swoop down on smugglers at the Canadian border, we are amped up to see the results after the earlier futile effort. The key set piece is the train station shootout with the slow build and all the closeups. DePalma has studied the Serio Leone films meticulously and lets those beats play out at the same agonizing and tension filled pace as we got in the Spaghetti Westerns. Every complication adds to the suspense, every effort to get the accountant and keep him alive makes our anticipation of Andy Garcia as Stone worthwhile. Costner plays it so cool in this scene in comparison to some of the early moments of the film. You can see the character arc in his demeanor here.
Of course Sean Connery is the lynchpin for the film. His world weary folksiness and Chicago cantankerous nature were a perfect realization of the character. The combination of his story and that of Charles Martin Smith gives license to Eliot Ness to get a little dirty, in spite of his white knight image. Charlie Martin Smith and Billy Drago are the unsung heroes of the cast, one showing the exuberance of a puppy dog and the other reflecting the darkest elements of the Capone organization. Maybe Capone doesn't go flying to his death, but we know that his empire has crumbled because of the turning of his own tactics against him.
Filmed in the 80s, DePalma and Company make Chicago look like fifty years earlier, and the soundstage sets match up so well with the exteriors, you can believe it was all shot in the time and place depicted. This movie is just a lot of fun. Fidelity to the real story is lacking, and the conclusion in the court is a bit baffling, but you won't care because everything else is so rousing.
It's Easter, so it's time to revisit Jesus Christ Superstar. Much like "Jaws" seems to come out to theaters around July 4th each year, "Jesus Christ Superstar" surfaces on Easter Holiday and lets us take in the story of Christ's sacrifice and enjoy the hippie rock staging of the whole thing. I have written before about both Carl Anderson and Ted Neely in these roles and there was nothing in today's screening to dissuade me from my belief that they embody the whole spirit of the show.
As you can see above, director Norman Jewison did some creative things in making a film out of s stage musical, The camera angles, still frames, and zoom shots all jazz things up. Choreographer Robert Iscove, goes full tilt with the hippie chanting and arm waving that reflects some of the styles of the day. Although there was a stage musical done from the concept album, most of the staging in the film is original. You can see some of the things I'm talking about in the above clip.
Jewison used locations throughout Israel and the West Bank . The caves, ruins, and deserts are all integrated into the story with visual flare, from overhead shots, camera movement and the occasional insertion of contemporary military equipment as a backdrop. Those scenes sometimes make what is an eternal story feel fresh and relevant to the time.
The musical finale is staged with electricity. Judas dropping from the heavens in his white fringe shirt, and the dancers moving in synchronicity against a night sky in the ancient ruins, looks spectacular.
You can find previous posts on the film here, here, and here. Hope your Easter is one that inspires you the way this movie inspires me.
We have a winner for the stupidest movie of the year. It will take something colossally awful, like "Five Nights at Freddy's" to displace this from the list of dumb movies of 2024. This is a perfect example of making up stuff as you go along. It's as if we are listening to a story being told by a parent to a small child, and every time the kid's attention starts to wander, the parent throws in something else that they hope will keep the kid entranced. Well, I am not a little kid, and most five year olds I know will see that this is a bunch of nonsense.
There are at least five movies in this franchise, and it feels like they are racing one another to be the most forgettable. One reason that this is true is that there are no characters that you can care for past a superficial level. I literally had no memory of the main characters in this film, being in the previous movie. There is an attempt to make us care about Kong, by having him bond with a mini Kong, but that did not work the way it should. I did sort of enjoy Godzilla curling up in the Coliseum in Rome, like it was a cat bed, but it did not endear him to me.
Every location in the movie has to have a title card, because we would not otherwise recognize Egypt with the pyramids or Rome. The real reason that there are so many label cards is that there are so many hidden worlds that we keep traveling to. Not only is there a Hollow Earth, but there is a subterranean Hollow Earth, which has its own secret valley of giant apes. That section is different from the hidden world of the Iwi people and the Temple of Mothra. How are they all collected, well get ready for an exposition dump when the scientist starts translating the hieroglyphics they find. It reads like a pretty sophisticated and detailed narrative, in spite of the fact that they are barely pictographs.
It is so convenient that the Monarch Research group was working on an enhancement for Kong, that just happens to fit the one part of his body that is nearly destroyed by a Titan he encounters. Oh and it was very thoughtful to have it at the observation station that was destroyed, since no contact with the surface world is possible. This is just one incredulous moment followed by another. Unfortunately, none of them is very interesting.
Do you remember how impressive the dinosaurs were in that first "Jurassic Park"? Well now everything on the screen is supposed to impress you, and it looks cheesy. When I had students discover PowerPoint, they all wanted to use every feature, the the presentations lose focus as a result. Same effect here. There are too many creatures, in too many environments, doing too many things that it just becomes boring.
It sounds like I hated this movie, I don't. I would only hate it if I had high expectations and cared about any of it. That was not the case. Go stream "Godzilla Minus One", and save this movie to put your toddlers to sleep by.
I almost pulled the trigger on this with one of my streaming services, but on the podcast, one of my guests did say it was playing in theaters, which I had not realized. I immediately went in search and found a screening in one of our favorite venues, and boy am I glad I did. This is an early contender for top film of the year, and seeing it with a sold out audience was fantastic because when a horror film hits, you can feel it in the people around you, and I definitely felt it.
David Dastmalchian plays Jack Delroy, a late night talk show host in the 1970s, who has had great success but can't quite climb the mountain of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. The Halloween episode of his show in 1977, will feature some macabre guests and stunts, and as you can probably guess, it does not go quite the way it was anticipated. The film is presented as if it were the video record of that nights show. With the exception of an seven or eight minute prologue feature, which is made to look like a short documentary, the film plays out over the course of what would be a ninety minute late night show. Setting it in the seventies gives the staging a verisimilitude that a contemporary setting would lack. Nowadays, a huckster like the character Christou, would be doing YouTube or TikTok readings for his psychic demonstrations. There is a character, Carmichael Haig, that is based on James Randi, a magician and psychic skeptic, who made numerous appearances on talk shows of the era, debunking paranormal phenomena. His skills are used to help extend the mystery we are witnessing, but he becomes the subject of debunking as well.
A horror film can only be said to be successful if it frightens the audience. The fact that Delroy's audience is subjected to some unpleasant surprises, offers us a couple of jump scares, but more importantly, an aura of dread hangs over the interview and demonstration of parapsychologist author June Ross-Mitchell, June's subject Lilly D'Abo. Lilly's back story is highlighted in the film with another documentary short that is presented as a film clip on the show. The two film segments do a lot of exposition in a way that makes perfect sense for the media that we are watching. The combination of behind the scenes video with what was purportedly broadcast, allows the story to play out in a more narrative form than it would otherwise be able to achieve.
Like most 70s films, this is a slow burn with the climax pulling out all the stops to make the show frightening. Although the effects and actions have been seen before in a dozen other horror films, they work really well here. The use of practical effects helps the movie as well, and when the events are shown as they might have appeared in the television camera, they seem even more creepy. There is a little bit of a twist in the wrap up, that feels a bit conventional but it ties everything together pretty well, and the seeds for it were planted early on.
Dastmalchian is convincing as a desperate TV Host but especially as a skeptic turned believer who is frightened by what he sees. Australian teen actress Ingrid Torelli is chilling as the subject of possession that drives most of the film's second half. All the other actors have been well cast and they get to play with the effects and the story to make their characters interesting. There is a hypnosis sequence that is pretty startling. Directors Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes, have made the found footage style film work by dropping it into the late night TV venue of the 1970s. Lots of clever touches here and there. The AI controversy that has popped up is a nothing burger that you can safely ignore without surrendering to Skynet. Find this film in a theater and treat yourself to some genuine scares and a really well made film.
One of the LAMBs has an interview with star David Dastmalchian, you might want to check out.
I'm a few days late on this one. I did see it a second time, and I did a Lambcast and edited a YouTube version of the podcast since then, so I feel a little like my thoughts are already out there for interested parties. Still, I am going to do a short post here, and I will include the link to the video for more detail.
This is the least of the "Ghostbusters" franchise, with the exception of the 2016 version featuring a completely different cast. That movie is not worth remembering, but this one will be eventually. I think in the race to include as much as possible, they overstuffed the meal and it takes it a while to digest. I liked the movie well enough the first time through, but my second viewing was more encouraging, and I think the film will grow on people as it ages.
Fan service is crammed into the film, and I am a fan so I don't really have a complaint, except that some of the things this fan likes get short shrift. As we discussed in the podcast, the series has moved from horror comedy to supernatural adventure films for kids. There are only a few of the snarky asides that made the first two films of the franchise so great, and most of those are provided by the newest cast member, Kumail Nanjiani.
There are not as many laughs in the film as you want, and it lacks the warmth of "Afterlife" which made that film work so well. The big bad is a big nothing in the film, and the "Frozen Empire" scenes come late in the movie and they don't really exploit the concept as well as they could. There are some inconsistencies in the characters and that will tick off the purists, but most of those are just rushing to get the plot to move forward. This is a mild recommendation, but still, a recommendation. Let the movie grow on you. Maybe in a few years it will acquire enough of a cult status that it will deserve some "Fright Rags" merchandise.
Color me amazed that I have not written on this film before. I was sure there was a Fathom Event where I had commented on the movie, but I can find no trace of it on my site. I feel a little like Deputy Gerard, I don't have any clues as to where to look, and my memory is escaping. The film on the other hand has not escaped my memory, this is a movie that I have seen dozens of times over the years and it has had an indelible impact on me for some personal reasons that I will mention at the end of this post. I have used the phrase "Black Hole Film" in the past, to describe a movie which has a gravitational pull on me that I cannot resist. "The Fugitive" is one of those films. If I happen across it, my eyes and ears lock on and I am captured for the time remaining in the movie.
There are so many things about this film that deserve attention, I can't really get to all of them and keep this post at a reasonable length. That said, let me pick out four or five elements that are worth drawing your attention to and highlighting. First of all are the two lead performances by Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Both men add credibility to the story, but they also engage us with small moments and line delivery. Ford has the most screen time but maybe the lesser amount of dialogue, at least until the exposition dump at the end. In the scene where he is being interviewed by the cops after the death of his wife, he conveys the frustration that a distraught man is likely to have. I may have written about it somewhere else, but Harrison Ford has his crutches as an actor and the two biggest are his hands. He gestures in small, self contained moments that draw our attention to him. The way he shakes his fingers or twists them around to underline a point are common. He also does a lot of pointing. In this film it is all fitting. Look at the way he holds his notes in the telephone booth as he is making calls to the one armed men on his list of subjects. It is distinctive, and a way to get us to focus on him rather than the background. When he gives up the gun on the reservoir waterfall, his hands don't simply shoot up in response to Gerard's command, they show hesitation and thought and desperation. Ford has always been a physical actor more than a vocal artist, and this film is a perfect display of those talents.
Meanwhile, his counterpart, Tommy Lee Jones as Marshall Gerard, is full of flummoxed emotional moments, controlled and calculating facial expressions, and a vocal range that reflects someone, unlike Dr. Kimble, who is trying to stay below the radar, is in fact trying to dominate every interaction he has. Jones won his Academy Award for this role and those who like to engage in revisionism have suggested that it was not maybe a correct choice, they are wrong. This character is a success because of the actor who embodied him. With a commanding voice and sardonic sense of humor, Jones steals every scene he is in. It helps that he has all the best lines in the film and he is surrounded by a cast of characters that feed his character's personality. He can get snarky with his underlings, and get away with it because they all respect him. When he and Joe Pantoliano are verbally jousting with Jeroen Krabbé as Dr. Nichols, they both smile and say they are smart guys too, and we can see how in tune the team is with the Big Dog. Jones has the punctuating speech where he instructs the searchers as to their task and finishes with..."Go get him". Later, Gerard has the famous comeback when Dr. Kimble confronts him and declares his innocence, Gerard spits back, "I don't care". The script and the supporting players all made Jones performance one for the ages.
Director Andrew Davis was a veteran action director who had worked with Tommy Lee Jones on his two previous pictures. His control over the pace of the film and the little bits that he was able to add to the script are of critical importance to the movie working the way it does. The improvised escape through the St. Patrick's day parade was his idea, and he meticulously worked with tech experts, engineers and production designers to get the train/bus crash sequence done in the one chance they had to get it right. Those are not miniatures or photographic effects, that's a real train. By the way, on the big screen, which is where this viewing took place, Alamo Drafthouse as a St. Patrick's Day event, it looked fantastic.
I will leave all of the other characters and the script to another time, I sure hope to see this again on a big screen, so there should be another opportunity. The personal note that I mentioned earlier is one of the reasons this film means so much to me. It was the last movie my best friend and I saw together. My friend from High School, Art Franz was dying of cancer in 1993. He lasted a while longer than doctors thought because he had a positive attitude, in spite of the ordained fate. In that last year, I took every opportunity I could to go with him to the movies. He and I were both huge James Bond Fans and he worked at a movie theater when we were back in High School. We saw this movie a little over a month before he finally succumbed, and we had both loved it. Exiting this world with this as the last theatrical experience of your life is pretty good. Miss you buddy.
I have been a little negligent as of late, keeping up with my posts as quickly as possible after seeing the movie. This post comes four days after I saw this great family film, and I am sorry I can't do more to promote the movie and save it from the discard pile that it appears to be headed for. Mark Wahlburg and a dog should be a sure thing for most family audiences, but I suspect that the sports based setting may not be as interesting to people on the big screen, since they see this weekly on their televisions.
Frankly, I am a sucker for a dog movie. It is probably a good idea for me to create an inventory of films I have covered on the site that feature a canine co-star. A couple of years ago, Channing Tatum made his directorial debut with a dog film, simply named "Dog". I liked that one quite well and it would make a good companion film for this movie. Both feature dogs that have some health and psychological issues, but one is a straight drama while this movie is an adventure film as well. There are some beautiful scenes of a race around the jungles of the Dominican Republic, but I did end up worrying about current events in Haiti, which shares the island with the setting of this movie.
Wahlburg plays a long time race figure, who while widely respected, has never come in first in the grueling endurance challenges that these races present. After a humiliating loss, and a two year break, he attempts to return to competition, but his resources are low and sponsors are wary. As we watch him struggle to put together a team for the race, we also see a street dog, struggling to survive in the third world nation, frequently abused and usually starving. The back and forth between these two stories is a nice parallel which pays off in the second half of the movie. When the race starts, the two characters come together in a surprising way, and it would be nearly impossible to buy it, if it had not really happened.
The race presents dramatic challenges, and the dog is included in these as the progress deepens. There are a lot of tense scenes and some lighter moments with the dog. The two both make sacrifices for each other, and at the end, the race results become less important than the survival story of a man's hope in a dog's lifeforce. Having recently lost a beloved pet, there were moments in the last act of the film, that I was not prepared for and which evoked some strong emotional responses from me. Even without this personal history, I think the turn that the film takes will be an emotional wallop for most audiences. In the long run, the less you know about the real story, the stronger the conclusion of this film will play.
Mark Wahlburg has become a very reliable actor, and his presence in a film like this makes the story work. Unfortunately, it looks like the audience is missing out on this, probably bad marketing decisions about the release date, and the fact that streaming is going to eat all of these kinds of movies alive in the next few years. Look, this will work on your television, but like most films, it will work better in a theater, and you should go see it now before it gets pushed off of the screens by whatever is coming next week.
You would think that a film from one of the Coen brothers would draw a lot more attention and interest from the film community than this slightly misbegotten exercise in excess has received. I didn't hate the movie but I was surprised at how over the top some of the things were in the film, and that the director's choices were also obviously designed to provoke and be distinctive, without being particularly creative. Ethan Cohen has created another crime drama about off-center characters, and crimes gone bad. From the makers of Fargo and No Country for Old Men, this is natural except that the comedic elements are created to accentuate the odd instead of using those odd elements to highlight small parts of the story. The result is an over full collection of vulgarities, violence, and elegant dialogue that would work a lot better if it was used more sparingly.
I had originally planned for this to be a film that we covered on the Lambcast. Unfortunately not a single one of the podcasters or bloggers of our 2,000 members signed up to talk about it. This should have been a signal to me that there was something not quite right about the project. I read after deciding to cancel the podcast, that the original title of the project was Drive-Away Dykes. The change in title was probably designed to avoid putting off people who didn't care to have that element of sexuality front and center in their crime story. However, a title change doesn't change the script, and we still get lots of lesbian love, phallic foreplay, and some of the most vulgar and descriptive language that you can imagine. While there are moments of nudity in the film the vast majority of those things that sexualize the film are in the dialogue. And they are not sexy but rather obnoxiously provocative.
I'm not sure that this is a film that will be embraced by the LGBTQ+ community, because the stereotypes in the film seem to be at odds with what would be a more inclusive approach. There is a caricature of a lesbian relationship that seems particularly offensive, and there are sexually based sequences that seem to cater to offensive stereotypes about lesbians. I am also dubious about the desirability of flexible phalluses as the love toys preferred by committed gay women. For a movie about the empowerment of lesbians, the perspective it takes seems to be one of amusement rather than real agency.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Vishwanathan, are the two leads and each of them has some pretty effective moments in the film. Qualley was familiar to me from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, where she played Pussycat, the hippie girl that gets Brad Pitt's character up to the Spahn Ranch where the Manson family is living. Vishwanathan, was very appealing 3 years ago and a fill my liked quite well, “The Broken Hearts Gallery”. In this film she plays a more innocent character to her partner’s Wild Child. The story involves a mis-matched pair of women who take a road trip and inadvertently have in their possession what at first seems like a McGuffin. Later the secret does in fact get revealed. You might think it was drugs, because of the violence involved and obtaining the suitcase with the soon to be revealed contents, but unlike the mystery of the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, we finally see what the contents are, and it's another one of the crude jokes that the film is based on.
The girls are pursued by a team of inept criminals, similar to the pair in Fargo, or Pulp Fiction. Their dialogue is also frequently over the top, with just enough wit to make it interesting but not enough to allow it to be compared to some of those sparkling sequences in those other films. When we discover what the whole Enterprise is about, it makes even less sense, because most of this could be dismissed without anybody having to be murdered or any money exchanged. A simple denial would be more than sufficient to eliminate the risk that the ultimate antagonist seems to feel exists. We have no providence for the relics, except some perv collectors. The movie has a couple of prominent actors in secondary roles that might almost count as a cameo. Pedro Pascal shows up at the start of the movie, and then a part of him continues to be a present in the film. He was perfectly fine but I'm not sure why director Cohen thought that it was necessary to have such a well-known actor in the part. Conversely when Matt Damon shows up near the end of the film, we understand his casting because the film needs someone with some charisma, to become the antagonist that the movie needs at this point. Once again though, his motivation seems to be highly exaggerated. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, it is a legitimate strategy for public relations. It just doesn't seem to have been considered.
I probably already given away more than I should have about the film. There are three or four transition sequences that feature psychedelic visuals and remind me of a Saul Bass James Bond title sequence. They don't make much sense, until the end, and even then they don't really do much to make the film interesting, they mostly just make it weird.
There are plenty of films that go over the top as a stylistic choice to try and make the movie interesting to a specific audience. I enjoyed the movie “Shoot ‘em Up”, from more than a decade ago, but by the time it was finished I was bored by the excess. This film provides excess on a different subject, and I was bored by it in the first 20 minutes. There is some clever stuff here, and I think you will laugh a few times, but I also think you'll shake your head and say " I've seen this before”. There's nothing new to see here, it's recycled and overdone. You'll forget about it almost immediately, which is not something I've said about many Cohen Brothers films before. Perhaps Ethan needs his brother Joel, to rein in the more preposterous elements of the movie, and make it feel less like a cartoon and more like a satire of crime dramas. That is really what it wants to be. You can safely skip this, but if you watch it at home later, maybe you should send your parents to bed before it starts, trust me it's a little awkward.
Completing one of the great film projects of my lifetime, Director Denis Villeneuve delivers a terrific part two to the "Dune" stories he began three years ago. Actually it was four years ago, we got delayed a year by Covid, and this film was delayed by six months due to the actor's strike. Maybe those were not bad omens but rather good luck charms. My original review of the first film was positive, but muted by some less than favorable comparison to the David Lynch version. As a film, "Dune Part One" is more successful, but less vibrant than I had hoped.
The biggest reservation I had about the first film, was the surface level storytelling of the Harkonnen adversaries. That flaw has been redeemed substantially by the story choices made with this film. To begin, Baron Harkonnen, played by Stellan Skarsgård, is more than a floating figure in the background. We finally begin to see the long game he is playing. The murderous political life of Geidi Prime is revealed, and when he indulgences in his vices, we get a significantly greater reason to have distaste for this fearsome antagonist. The complexity of the Harkonnen plot is extended when Feyd-Rautha's character appears on screen. Feyd is the figure actually being groomed to take over Arrakis and maybe a lot more. That he is the Baron's nephew does not eliminate the subterfuge that takes place in the family, and is an additional plot that the Baron ids cooking. I might be a little critical of how vociferously he is cheered by the crowd, especially when we see his murderous behavior towards his servants, but the culture seems to be a martial one , so maybe the actions are viewed in the same way the Spartans of ancient Greece might view their own behavior toward the weak.
Back on Dune, Paul and Jessica are finding their way into the Freman culture, which is frankly also brutal, but without being cruel. The Fremen are more fatalistic and many of them are fervent believers in the narrative that has been set out over thousands of years by the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. Fanaticism is very dangerous when mixed with messianic expectations. The fact that Paul's genetic background is leading to fulfillment of both Freman Prophecies and Bene Gesserit genetic manipulation, is probably an unexpected consequence of Jessica's disobedience in providing a son to the late Duke Leto. I liked the slow way that the prophetic arrival of a messiah is being introduced to the native population of Dune. It is much clearer in this version of the story that the Bene Gesserit have nurtured this mythology with the intention of using it. One of the differences in the film version and the original text, is the way that Chani is depicted in the context of this prophesy. She is something of a heretic by rejecting the story, and she turns the religious drive behind it, into a suspect of political proportions. It is her contention that adhering to the religious fundamentalism is what has held the Fremen down. The awkwardness of that attitude however is revealed as it is the prophecy that finally liberates the forces of the Freman as an army capable of being lead by the outsider Muad'Dib. It is also a little strange that she can accept Paul's prescience, but reject the description of that very thing in the stories of her people.
The slow take on the prophesy is not limited to Jessica and the Freman. Paul does his best to resist the call of becoming the Kwisatz Haderach. He has visions of the devastation his ascension to power will result in. Having followed his story, we want to see justice for House Atreides and revenge on the Emperor and especially the Harkonnen. It is clear that the Harkonnen are evil, and that at the very least the Emperor is a Machiavellian ruler with no moral compass except power. The problem is that it looks like Paul will fall into the same patterns, and do so for the sake of Fremen Paradise. In the end, Paul is not the hero of the story, he is an instrument of chaos, the likes of which will change the universe, the question is, will it be for the better? The sequence where Paul takes the Water of Life, is dramatically well played, but it is the moment when he confronts the Fremen Cavalcade that his threat becomes realized. It is both awe inspiring and frightening, a fact that he recognizes with his own words in the script. Screenwriters Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts have adapted Frank Herbert's novel in a more expansive way than was done with the David Lynch version. Having twice as much time, they still trimmed elements that are not essential for this story. The timeline in this film is different, and the easiest illustration of that is Jessica's pregnancy and the fact that Alia only appears in a flash forward for a brief few seconds.
When it comes to the technical aspects of the film, I found nothing deficient. The sequence when Paul conquers the Sandworm is one of the most impressive scenes in a science fiction movie. The sense of realism is overwhelming, with the sound design of the moment a big part of that. The scope of the visual, combined with the enveloping sound, lets the audience experience the ride, almost as a participant rather than just an observer. The power of the worms also comes up in the conclusive battle as they crash though the shield walls and mountains of Arrakeen. The story, for those of you unfamiliar, will not be spoiled here, but suffice it to say, we get a clear sense of what desert power is.
There are still many production touches that I prefer in David Lynch's vision of the story, but the choices that Director Villeneuve makes are completely appropriate for his. I think the desert environments, the tents and Sietches of the Fremen, are vastly superior to what we have had before. The black and white palate of Giedi Prime is startling, but when we enter the halls of the palace, the slight color pops make it all much more intriguing, and there is a sense that the culture reflects the supposed black sun of their system.
It is easy for me to predict that this will be one of the top films of the year, since it is unlikely that anything comparable is likely to be released any time soon.
I'm not sure if this movie will be getting a regular theatrical release. It is from Amazon and they are streaming it next wee, so it seems dubious. That's too bad, because one of the joys of a good comedy is bathing in the laughter of the audience surrounding you, and believe me, this film will have lots of laughter to go around.
If you watch the trailer, you will get the premise, but I know some of my on-line friends have gone trailer free, so for them, here is a brief synopsis. Three friends have invented another friend, that they have used as an excuse for thirty plus years. "Ricky Stanicki" is the kid who brought the fireworks to the wedding, threw the cat in the pool, or conveniently, as they got older, scheduled something opposite a family event they would really like to avoid. They have kept an elaborate "bible" of Ricky's illnesses, rehabs and assorted other excuses, and their families believe Ricky is a real person.. Of course with a comedy, there are exigencies that require over the top solutions, and the guys back themselves into a situation where they have to produce the famous friend.
For years John Cena has been known as a wrester who has taken up acting, but I think it is fair to say now that he is an actor who has taken to comedy. His boisterous persona and physical characteristics have been exploited for laughs in films like, "Blockers", "Suicide Squad" and "Argylle". This may be his masterpiece. As Rock Hard Rod, an off color singing impersonator, Cena is hysterical as the desperate and sad entertainer in a dive bar/casino in Atlantic City. He encounters the three friends and they decide to hire him to be their unseen friend. Cena was just getting started at being funny, for the rest of the movie, he sells it all.
Peter Farrelly, along with his brother Bobby, made some of the greatest comedies of the 1990s. In the last few years he has made some more serious films, like the Academy Ward winning "Green Book", and the under appreciated "The Greatest Beer Run Ever". This time he is back in his sweet spot, gross out comedy, and we should be glad to welcome him back to that arena. He is working here with Zac Efron, who was the star of "Beer Run" and recently played a wrestler himself in "The Iron Claw". To top off the top knot cast, William H. Macy has a supporting role as a clueless executive who has some awkward hand gestures.
If you enjoyed films like "There's Something about Mary" and "The Hangover", you will certainly relate to this project. It is irreverent and heartfelt at the end. Exactly the kind of stuff that those who remember will appreciate.
GG (Feb) chosen by Richard of Kirkham A Movie A Day! GG (Genre Grandeur) is a series Rob started a few years back where each month a different blogger chooses a genre for everyone to write a review of their favorite film (s) of the particular genre. (There is no limit or restrictions on the number of reviews)
A 1971 picture that contains a nomination for best actor, by one of the big stars of the sixties and seventies, that has largely been forgotten, despite the fact that is the lone directorial effort of another oscar-winning actor. Kotch features a sentimental story about an aged man, coping with the complications of being a burden to his family, while he is still relatively active, cogent, and financially independent. It also contains a sweet story about an unwed mother who's only 15 and is trying to navigate her pregnancy.
I saw this movie when it came out in 1971, and I remembered it slightly. The details of the story are hard to hold on to because nothing too dramatic happens in the course of events. This is really a character piece and that's the thing that's easy to remember here because Walter Matthau is a character in every role he plays but in particular in this one, where he is cast 30 years senior to his actual age. In fact he was only 5 years older than the actor who was portraying his son. Mathau had been in three successful sex comedies in the preceding 3 years, and was probably thought of as a comedian with the leading man's charisma if not looks. 20 years down the road he would be playing this same part at his own age and making a big success of that as well. If you want to you can kind of think of this as a prequel to “Grumpy Old Men”.
Joe Kotcher is a 73 year old man currently living with his son Gerald, daughter-in-law Wilma, and their toddler child Duncan,in a nice suburban house in Southern California. Kotch does not have dementia, there is no disease on the horizon, and he does not pose a threat to anyone except those who jump to the worst kinds of conclusions about what an old man is doing at a park. However, anyone who has lived with a person, who has personality quirks that may be bothersome, knows that it can be stressful. His daughter-in-law, is maybe wound a little too tight, but of course Joe Kotcher is an avuncular guy who is free with information, opinions, and advice. Those things may not always be welcome and sometimes seem like a bombardment of information that's unnecessary. Imagine a child who is telling you about their day, and tells you the name of every child that they sat with at lunch, and what they had to eat. It's not a bad thing but it's an unnecessary thing for the listener, it seems to be a needed function for the old man, he has to talk,and Kotch is a talker. He keeps a running commentary on all sorts of things, he has a vast knowledge of arcane information he's happy to drop into every conversation. That's the kind of thing that is driving a wedge into this family. Walter Matthau plays Kotch as a genial old man not as a curmudgeon, but sometimes you can just be too genial.
The son Gerald, is played by veteran television actor Charles Aidman, who anybody who has seen 70s television, will recognize from some program that they have watched. Aidman is great casting because he has the same hangdog face as his costar. Gerald is a sympathetic son and he is a little bit dominated by his wife who is struggling under the pressure of having her father-in-law live with them. At one point they have the delicate moment when the father and the son have to confront the possibility that Joe is going to relocate to a retirement community. The daughter-in-law is not a monster, she sees how tough this is for her husband and his father. She is the one in fact who sheds tears at the thought that this has become necessary by the way, she is played by the director’s wife). But like “Harry and Tonto”, which will arrive in a couple of years, old people can be a lot more resilient than their children want to think. Kotch has no intention of giving up living the life that he wants just to make his children feel secure.
At one point the old man feels a little bit like an informer because he has to share with his son the fact that the babysitter, while not being negligent, was distracted by having sex on the living room couch during an evening supposedly taking care of the grandson. When he shares this information we think he might simply be acting out of the feeling that he is being nudged out of his child care responsibilities by this young interloper. There's a nice moment done in a flashback, which reveals that Joe and his late wife Vera, faced some of the same issues that the babysitter did. The location for their assignations was An old Hudson, instead of his parents' living room couch. Erica, the babysitter, subsequently becomes an important character in the story. After Kotch has spent a little time away from his family traveling, he returns home to discover that the babysitter has been pushed out of school, sent to San Bernardino, because she became pregnant. We learned that her much older brother is her guardian, and there is a brief moment of sadness when we discover the story behind her orphan status. Koch is not going to take this lying down, he feels that he might have betrayed the girl and pushed her on this path because he told his son that the babysitter had misbehaved. He decides that he's going to help her as best he can.
The film meanders along, giving us a few incidents about how these two, the pregnant teen and the slightly distracted older man, form a dependent relationship and care for each other over the course of her pregnancy. Nothing too dramatic happens, they go out to eat, or they fix meals at home, where they spend time sitting in the living room working on some hobbies that are a little strange but charming. As the end of her term comes, she is faced with some important decisions about her future. And without telling her what to do, Kotch has a huge impact on the decisions that she makes.
This is the only film that Academy award-winning actor Jack Lemmon directed. He got an Oscar nominated performance out of his close friend and frequent co-star Walter Matthau, and efficiently tells the story without an excessive amount of sentimentality, but with just the right amount of humor to keep us going. This time period looks grand in the film, and you might think that Palm Springs would be a reasonable place to move to. Maybe the one big flaw in the story is the location, because even in 1971, Palm Springs was overpriced and maybe not a wise choice for a retiree and an unemployed pregnant girl.
The film received three other Academy Award nominations, so it was widely respected and even though it didn't win any of those Awards it seems to have gathered enough Goodwill to make it a multiple nominee. I bet if you ask anybody who the nominees for best actor were in 1971 people would only be able to name the winner, Gene Hackman, and maybe one other nominee and not this one. This for the most part is a forgotten film. Kotch is largely done in a style that is not typical anymore. It's not fast paced, it doesn't have surprise plot twists, and the characters are all generally good people without there being a villain in the scene. It's a nice story, about the struggles of a couple of nice people, who find a way to make the world work for them. That seems enough to recommend it.
I'm getting to this almost a week after I saw the film, sorry. I've been under the weather for a few days and just not in the mood to think much about blogging. There's nothing particularly special about this film, it's also getting such a limited release that it will probably be out of theaters after the first week, which was when I saw it. That's too bad, because this is a pretty successful action film for those who are looking for some combat activity to get them through an afternoon.
The setup for the film is pretty simple: a Commando team is being sent to a remote island in the Philippines, in order to retrieve a human asset for the CIA. The thing that makes this an intriguing film is the detail that is added by the use of high altitude drones that contain not only sophisticated Communications equipment, but also a substantial amount of weaponry. Most of the time the Drone in this particular scenario was being used to assist the team on the ground with surveillance of the site that they are about to engage in. There are however some dramatic uses of the weapon at appropriate times to create diversions or potentially rescue members of the team. The way the Drone communication is integrated into the mission is the thing that was new to me. An operator flying the Drone at a location in the States, is communicating information to the team on the ground about enemy activity and potential locations for the asset. It looks like it's a pretty sophisticated set up and I don't doubt that the film is reasonably accurate in presenting how the basics work. Of course for drama purposes, they're always going to be complications and distractions and anybody who is dependent upon this technology would be frustrated with the behavior of some of the team at the Drone base.
Liam Hemsworth is the odd man out on the team, he is basically the Communications tech and not the warrior that the other people on the team are. He is of course a trained soldier so he has the basic ability to handle himself, but obviously the Special Operations group is used to having their own people there and that throws in a few wrinkles. Hemsworth is perfectly fine in the action hero mode, he performs admirably, makes some basic mistakes, and redeems himself a number of times on the mission. So it's easy for us to have him as a rooting interest.
I'll probably get in trouble with some people for the way I'm about to describe the next actor in this film, he's the biggest movie star in the world, …by weight. Russell Crowe at one time was a lean mean fighting machine, but in the last several years his waist has expanded much like my own, so that now when he appears on screen, it's much like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, a little bit lumbering. The guy can still act his ass off, and he's great as the Drone operator, although even sitting in a chair behind a console I would assume the Air Force has some physical fitness requirements that they are going to be imposing on their officers. Russell Crowe still has great screen charisma, and He commands the screen even if it doesn't require him to do any tumbling, running, or hand to hand combat.
There are really no big themes or messages in the film. At one point the villain wants to suggest that hiding behind a drone is a cowardly way of engaging in combat, but when that comes from a guy who decapitates a helpless woman and wants to do the same for a child, he pretty much loses all credibility. Alan Rickman made a film not too long before his death, that featured a more nuanced View of drone Warfare called “Eye in the Sky”, if you're looking for a message, that would be the film to seek out. If you're looking for shootouts, dramatic firefights, explosions, tense torture scenes, and a few people surviving a lot longer than you might expect, then this is a film that you should probably look for. Good guys taking out the bad guys in modern combat situations is what this whole thing is about. Of course it's going to be a lot harder to find unless you have your own Drone to assist you.
The amount of hate this movie is receiving is hard to understate. I have seen reviews that suggest this movie will be able to be the measure of bad films for the next 15 years. People have even suggested that a root canal is more entertaining. I haven't seen this level of disdain for a movie since Morbius opened a couple of years ago.
It will certainly not be my position that this is a good movie, but the notion that this is going to be the worst film in the last 20 years and for the next 10 seems to be hyperbole of the worst sort. Madame Web certainly has flaws, and will not be well thought of over time, but I found it perfectly watchable, and kind of interesting in how long it took to set up the character at the heart of the story.
This is a superhero movie about a hero that you've never heard of, with a villain who basically is evil Spider-Man. The idea of this Hero's superpower is kind of a strange one, it's a psychic ability to see a short distance into the future. And when I say a short distance it seems like it's probably less than just a couple of minutes. It’s a little bit like the Omega 13 device from “Galaxy Quest”. Does it allow you to change the future? Maybe. The other problem with the film, in addition to the fact that you have an obscure hero, is that it seems to be setting up another Trio of Heroes, that is going to be another girl Power Team, and that just seems a little trite.
Dakota Johnson is the star of the film, and if you are not a fan of hers then you probably are not going to care much for this movie because she is in 90% of the scenes. I think she's been fine in a number of films, and there is a certain quality that she has on screen that makes her appealing. That does not mean however that she is ready to carry a whole movie on her own. That is pretty much what's required in order to get this movie off the ground, and an interesting screen presence is not necessarily sufficient to keep us intrigued.
There are two or three lapses in logic that make plot holes large enough to drive an 18-wheeler through. Maybe that is the cause of so much of the dissension about this film. It's hard for me to know though because most of the reviews that I've seen, from fans online and from professional critics, all spend their time looking for the greatest put-downs they can come up with, rather than explaining what the faults of the film are. An evaluation without any context or explanation just seems like an exercise in stringing together adjectives and adverbs. I much prefer an analysis that tells me why a person thinks the things that they do.
So the reservations I have, concern the cliche tropes of this movie, and some of the logical lapses that occur because of the superpowers involved. Just to give you an example near the climax of the film, the villain is smacked down by an ambulance, essentially falling from a building, and that's not enough to kill him. A few minutes later however, a much less significant object is more effective, for no reason that we can discern.
The three girls who are being set up to be a superpower team in the future, are as annoying as all heck. They do exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing, and most of the time they simply end up screaming and running. They need to be a little bit more interesting, and they need to have a little more agency in the film. The villain doesn't seem to have very much motivation either, except for nightmares, and of course we're getting a Time Loop story where the nightmares might very well be created by his reaction to the nightmares. There is such a thing as a circle of life, but circular reasoning never convinced anybody except those who are exceptionally undemanding. His acquisition of the powers that make him a supervillain seems to be pretty artificial, and apparently there's a curse, but all that gets explained in exposition that wasn't written very well. The time setting of the film is largely done for the purpose of limiting the influence of Technology. That way it is just the one tool, stolen by the villain, that's going to be important in the story. Everything else can just happen the way it did before people had easy internet connection and access to mobile phones.
Again I'm not saying it's a great film, in fact I'm saying it's a poor film, it's just not the wretched pile of crap that so many other people are saying it is. You shouldn't be embarrassed by going to see it, but you won't remember it for long, and you'll have a better time with the popcorn then with the story.
Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy.
The Fortune
As usual, I tried locating a trailer to accompany my film selection, but this does not seem possible with "The Fortune". I was unable to locate a trailer on YouTube, which is the most likely site that it would be available on. I looked at Google to search for the same thing and also got no results. Maybe this is the reason that this film was a Blind Spot for me, I never remembered seeing anything promoting it, except newspaper ads. The fact that the movie flopped on release probably accounts for it never being available for me to see in 1975. To catch up with it today, I purchased a copy from Umbrella, an Australian Media company, this actually had to clear customs before being delivered to me. Anyway, the above video is a clip from TCM when they showed the film a few years ago.
"The Fortune" stars Jack Nicolson (This is his fourth film in the Throwback Thursday Series) and Warren Beatty (Only his second). They were both big stars at the time and the movie was directed by Mike Nichols. With that pedigree, you would think this was a surefire smash. Unfortunately, like "Lucky Lady", also in 75, casting cannot make up for all the elements of a movie. Somehow this light comedy farce, just lacks the delicate touch that it takes to pull off this kind of material, and part ofd the problem is the two stars.
Nicolson and Beatty are both laconic actors, who need some pushing to feel like active participants in a movie. Here they seem to be cruising rather than working, and the script and direction are not enough to compensate for a lack of wattage from the stars. There is a scroll at the start of the movie, to explain the complication that the story is trying to deal with. This immediately suggests trouble. When you have to have a history lesson before the story starts, it is never very promising. Basically, the two are small time scam artists, who are trying to get a hold of the wealth of an heiress by marrying her. Unfortunately, the man who wooed her is unable to complete a divorce, so if he takes her with him across the country, he could be violating the Mann Act.
During the 1920s, in the United States, the law known as the Mann Act was much feared. It prohibited transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Because of the Mann Act, a man who wanted to run off with a woman and was willing, or unable, to marry her, would sometimes go to unusual lengths.
So Beatty wants to marry Stockad Channing, but can't, so he has her marry his pal Nicholson, as a way of getting around the law. Of course that presents some awkward moments in the story, and those are the only places where the film comes to life. The movie is less than an hour and a half long, but it seems to take forever to get to the real complications. A car ride, train trip and Airplane flight, all use up a lot of screen time, without really building the story or the characters. Once the trio arrives in Los Angeles, and settles into the same courtyard apartment that was used in "The Day of the Locust", the comedy feels more connected to the goings on. There just isn't that much of it.
Channing is in her first credited role here, and for the most part she is great, but there are a couple of scenes where bickering is featured and she was given the direction "louder". It annoys rather than amuses. The final section of the film, is where the slapstick humor comes in, and the hapless con men, having decided to murder the woman they both claim to love, can't quite pull off the act. There is a scene of a traffic jam on a bridge that showcases what the film could have been, if only that spirit was infused in the rest of the story.
Anyway, it's not as big a misfire as "Lucky Lady", it still isn't something you need to add to your list of essential viewing.
I didn't hate this movie but I didn't love it the way I wished I had. Diablo Cody has written a couple of films that I do admire quite a bit, both “Juno” and "Jennifer's Body" are regular visitors on our TV screen. So it was with some enthusiasm that I looked forward to this newest film penned by this talented screenwriter. I can't say the fault for this film's failures is entirely with the director, because the screenplay is a mess. Instead of being funny or cute or sexy, it's just gross and it relies on obnoxious stereotypes to sell some of its jokes.
The premise is a cross between “Heathers” and “Warm Bodies”, two films with horror at their heart that also try to slip in some romance. Maybe “Heathers” can successfully pull that off because its black heart is clear from the very beginning. “Warm Bodies” just didn't work when it was released a few years ago, and this film has the same problem, dead bodies are just not sexy or romantic. Dress them up in period clothing and try to style them as if they were poets of the era, they are still decaying, oozing, cold bodies that would not be attractive to anyone.
This film takes the idea of a wicked stepmother, and tries to update it into Dawn of the Dead. There's not enough humor to make it work when the film's tone changes dramatically after the first murder. At first the film seems to want to be a wacky romance between a girl who's an outsider and a little odd, and the idea of a Lost Boy from the old days, you know, when men were cravats and vests. The idea that a short circuiting tanning bed will substitute for the elaborate Laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein, is funny at first, but the joke gets repeated several times and it never really makes sense in the story why this would work. I know this is supposed to be a fantasy, so I shouldn't take most of these things seriously, and I don't, but come on. There needs to be a little bit more of an explanation about why a body that's been in the ground for almost 200 years suddenly rises from the grave because of the lightning strike. Lisa, the teen girl who is the protagonist in the story, is suffering from PTSD after the loss of her mother by an Ax Murderer, and the acquisition of a sister and mother when her father remarries. So okay, she's not stable, but her reaction to the character that shows up in her bedroom makes no sense at all.
Speaking of teen comedies that this film borrows from, we also get a little bit of “Pretty in Pink”, where there is a romantic interest, but not the one that we should be rooting for given the setup. It just doesn't make much sense that Lisa continues to want the editor of the school literary journal, after practically engaging in voodoo to get the corpse of Victor Frankenstein animated. Expecting the corpse to go along with this, without any jealousy also makes no sense. This is just a series of scenes that are supposed to be funny but don't work. We get ax murders that aren't funny, and characters who act as if there's no consequence to their actions, when in fact anybody can see the consequences coming from a mile away.
Oh, and another team comedy that we can throw in, “She's All That", where the dowdy little girl turns into a teen Queen that all the boys at school want to be with. Not sure that this is the right way to go from a screenwriter who came up with the clever premise of “Jennifer's Body”, and the terrific contrarian “Juno”. This movie feels like it was manufactured by somebody who is trying to make a successful Teen Movie by doing the same thing that Dr. Frankenstein did, sewing together the parts of dead films and hoping to revive them as something new. It's been tried before and rarely is it successful.
Comedy in horror, it's hard to pull off well. When it happens, like in the film “American Werewolf in London”, we are lucky that we can laugh and be scared at the same time. Lisa Frankenstein doesn't pull this Balancing Act off, it's not as disappointing as Five Nights at Freddy's, but the number of laughs is almost as low, and despite the cute actors, and three or four clever lines, there's just not much here to recommend.
In anticipation of the second chapter of Denis Villeneuve's Dune films, the first part from 2021, has been released in theaters for a week so that we can all catch up. When I say we, I was hoping that there would be other Dune fans in the theater, sadly I was by myself without another soul in sight. That didn't change the movie much for me, I still liked it very much, and was happy to see it on the big screen.
There was an interesting phenomenon in the film and my experience in the past 3 years which showed up at yesterday's screening. I had read the original book again for a book club 3 years ago, and we had talked about some of the scenes that were missing in the film. Apparently my memory of the book intruded on my memory of the film, and I kept waiting for a scene that I saw vividly in my head, but was never in the film to begin with. That's just my imagination working overtime and filling in some blanks. I may have done the same thing 40 years ago when I saw David Lynch's Dune, and I thought the film was great even though others saw it as occasionally incoherent. My brain apparently wants me to embrace the concept of Dune as a film in a more complete form than either Lynch or Villeneuve was able to complete.
Next week I am seeing the David Lynch version of Dune on the big screen, and I'll make more comparisons between the films then, but for now I'm happy to have the new version of Dune. This version has a magnificent score, some terrific visual effects, and casting that is quite effective. Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, and Oscar Isaacs are all excellent in their respective roles. It's taking me a little while to get used to Zendaya as Chani, and I'm still not sure why we had to gender swap Dr. Keynes. Timothée Chalamet has turned out to be a much better choice for Paul Atreides than I had hoped.
I know several film fans who are irritated that the film stopped where it does in the story, but given the impracticality of having a 7-hour movie, I think it was the correct cut off point. The story finishes at a spot that completes what is essentially the First Act of the story and sets up what is to come pretty effectively. At the conclusion of the film screening, we got an 8 minute preview style trailer, which featured a long segment that will certainly be coming near the beginning of part two. Paul, riding a giant sand worm for the first time, is the important plot point, and it's a little surprising that they give away this sequence in a trailer. I guess they don't think any real Dune fans are unaware of what's going to happen, and those fans who are casual fans, need a little inducement to push the button.
Of course I have already purchased my tickets, I'm excited for the movie, and I would be happy to go to a double feature and see both part one and part two playing together. I'm sure that will happen sometime down the road, until then the spice must flow.
I've been watching reaction videos on YouTube this week. When I see Gen Z kids reacting to bands that I listened to back in the seventies, and they are emotional in the way they hear the music and the voices, it reminds me quite a bit of the way I feel every time I see a movie like “My Fair Lady”.
It would be completely inappropriate for me to simply video myself in a theater while watching a movie, but that's sort of the way I think this review should go because my reaction to this movie is completely emotional and spontaneous. If you watched my face while I'm watching the movie, you would see smiles and tears and a hundred other emotions because this movie evokes some of the nicest feelings you can have about a film. I'm not a huge fan of musicals on stage. I have seen my share, and I usually enjoy them, but I'm not a completionist and I don't insist on seeing every musical that comes along in a stage production. I've never seen the stage version of “My Fair Lady”, but I have seen this film a dozen times and it gets to me with each viewing.
The presentation of this movie on Sunday, included an overture, which is one of the things that is frequently missing from modern films. The musical score is given sort of a greatest hits montage of themes from the film in a brief preliminary before the start of the movie. In the background are screenshots of dozens of different kinds of flowers, which of course evokes the reminder that Eliza Doolittle is a flower girl. Just hearing the themes gets my emotional Mojo going. When the title comes up I'm ready for just about anything. The movie could easily have won the Academy Award for costuming after the first 3 minutes of the film, during which none of the principles actually appears. A crowd leaving the Opera is filled with elegant gowns and elaborate headpieces that make you wish you were going to the same Opera just to see what everybody is wearing. When the story finally starts, the costumes of Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn are not particularly interesting, but they do sell the characters and their social position. But don't worry, there is greatness to come,
First though, we have to meet our main players and set up the plot. Rex Harrison created the role of Henry Higgins on Broadway. The rumor is that Jack Warner offered the part in the film to Cary Grant, who said that if the part didn't go to Harrison, not only would he not do the movie he would not even see the movie. Whether this apocryphal story is true, it does reflect the accuracy with which Rex Harrison is appropriately cast in the role. Henry Higgins is a self-righteous, accomplished, over privileged, snob. Yet his snobbery is not based on wealth or social status, but rather on the enunciation and dialect of the people that he interacts with.
My background is in rhetoric rather than in linguistics, but sometimes those two fields cross paths, so I have a natural interest in many of the things that Henry Higgins points out. I would have very little patience for practicing an elongated “e” or an abbreviated “i” or any of the other tools that are used to make Eliza's speaking voice more effective. As an American it's probably true that I'm much less influenced by the manner of speech than I would be if I were a subject of the British Empire. We are a little more egalitarian, but not without our prejudices. Those biases that we usually do have, reflect cultures that are expressed more in clothing and manners than in pronunciation. While not completely outside of the realm of enunciation prejudice, it is the British who are notorious for their obsessions with dialects and vowels.
Audrey Hepburn was cast in the role of Eliza Doolittle, despite the fact that Julie Andrews originated the part on the stage. Jack Warner was unwilling to allow a first-time screen performer to try and carry his movie. As we all know, the irony is that Julie Andrews won the Academy Award for best actress this same year, for “Mary Poppins”, after being passed over for the role in “My Fair Lady”. Still, Hepburn does a magnificent job in portraying Eliza, regardless of the fact that her singing voice is usually dubbed. She gets great comic power out of her speaking voice and facial expressions in the first act. She also looks glorious on screen. She has the magnetic quality that real film stars possess. Paired with Rex Harrison, the sparks really do fly. Harrison has a highbrow attitude and vocal disdain for Eliza, and can manipulate her with his snarky comments and indifference. The fact that the supporting cast of household servants all see Professor Higgins as the oppressed person in the relationship is particularly amusing. There are glorious moments of laughter when he mocks Eliza's pronunciation, and when Eliza herself reacts to something that Professor Higgins said.
The production design on this film is extraordinary. The house the professor Higgins occupies and moves Eliza into, is a multi-storied puzzle, which gives the characters the chance to move up and down a set of stairs while singing both in frustration and in happiness. The drawing room/library and the workroom where Eliza practices her vowels, are rich with little details that make it clear that Professor Higgins is a meticulous academic and certainly qualified in his field to undertake the transformation he is attempting. The production design doesn't let down even in moments of obvious backlot work, for example the race at Ascot. Even though it is clearly not an actual race track, the emphasis is appropriately on the characters rather than the horses. The black and white gowns worn by all the ladies at the track are simply stunning. Each one seems more elaborate and stylish than the one that came before it, capped off by the Beautiful form-fitting gown that Eliza wears, putting everyone else to shame. In regard to her speech however, she has mastered her pronunciation, but her pace and rhythm are not yet representative of someone from the upper crust. Her vocabulary also contributes several moments of hilarity in the situation. The fact that she is dressed to kill, makes all of those moments even more preciously funny.
The first half of the film is just about perfect. The presentation we saw on Sunday, through another Fathom event, included an intermission. The third Act that plays after the intermission has some of the best songs, but some of the weaker parts of the book that the play is based on. Eliza's dilemma and Higgins' resolution does not make a lot of sense, but it does have an emotional component to it that makes it work. There are songs throughout the film that you could probably sing on a continuous loop like an earworm that simply won't go away. Not only could you have danced all night, you could have hummed all night.
I have no hesitation applauding the changes that took place in the film industry in the years following this movie. Storytelling has gotten better, and actors are all more naturalistic. I am however still very nostalgic for the kinds of quality and craftsmanship that showed up in this film, a quintessential studio movie of the era. Director George Cuckor does a masterful job. The film glides along effortlessly, making use of a massive street set, detailed Interiors and Professor Higgins house, as well as the ballroom in the Transylvania Embassy. This is the kind of stuff that was done to perfection in the old Studio factories. The artifice works because the details look wonderful. The Craftsman who created these settings are incredibly talented. Today most of this work would be done by computer technicians creating a CGI environment, with the actors performing in front of green screens and being inserted into the context. Somehow we've lost something despite adding to our toolbox.
I don't drink or use hallucinogenic drugs because I understand how damaging an addiction can be. The euphoria that comes from seeing a movie like this is probably as close as I will ever come to the rush that the heroin user first feels when they shoot up. I am perfectly happy living within the boundaries of that kind of high. As long as I get my fix every once in a while, sitting in a theater, watching a film and listening to the music and being overcome with emotions as a result, I don't really feel I've denied myself anything by refusing illicit drugs.
