I was sure I had a post on this film, but when I looked for it, it was not showing up in the search. Then I remembered by project from two years ago, "80s Nostalgia Central" and it came back to me that this is where my post was located.
It was only two years ago, and there is not a lot to add to my thoughts at the time. "National Lampoon's Vacation " continues to be a raucous, politically incorrect, entertaining experience. Once again. I'd forgotten how many f*#@ bombs are dropped during the film and the number of brief nude scenes is double what I remembered. What I did remember however is how funny the movie is and how easy it was for me to related to it.
Yesterday, the theater was about half full for a 4 pm screening. Leonard Maltin is doing the intros for the Fathom Classic Movie Series now, since TCM has pulled out of the co-sponsorship. He did a nice job talking about the film and it's legacy, three sequels and a reboot. The best indicator however, that the movie should be revisited on a regular basis (and not just on the occasional anniversary/this was the 40th), was the laughter heard during the film. Everyone was enjoying it. It's nice to have that communal experience on a summer afternoon.
To get more discussion of the film itself you can click on the above links or right HERE.
If you want to have nightmares, this is a movie to give them to you. Not because some CGI monster is going to show up, but because this is a depiction of real world monsters. They attack and take people everyday around the world, and they hide in shadows protected by digital anonymity and public indifference. This film is well made, compelling and will certainly stick to your brain, but it is not just an entertainment to be dismissed. This is a message film, more compelling than most documentaries because it uses a thriller narrative to pull you in and engage you. There are a couple of places where you will get some narrative exposition, but the film makers play this honestly, and then at the end of the film make their pitch, one that is very effective.
Let's start with a bareboned explanation of the plot. A Homeland Security Agent, investigating international child pornography, gets involved with trying to break up a trafficking ring and recover children who have been stolen. If you are a parent, the opening sequence will scare you out of ever letting your children out of your grasp. In addition to the dramatized narrative, there are several brief video clips of children being snatched up in places that seem relatively safe, as well as some streets that we have no idea about. All of this comes before we meet the agent who is the lead character in the film, played by Jim Caviezel. Tim Ballard is the real life person that the story is based on. There is an acknowledgment that in various parts of the film, a dramatic narrative was created that is fiction, but there are several moments that directly come from Ballard's experience.
It will not be hard to accept that the trauma of tracking down child pornography is soul crushing, and that the opportunity to help a child more directly would be tempting, even for someone without faith. The fact that the agent is a devout family man makes it all the more difficult to walk away when there is a problem that he can keep pulling threads on. The process by which Caviezel's Ballard pursues a group of traffickers is not far removed from a number of sting operations where suspected criminals are lured into revealing themselves in the hopes of completing a large scale financial windfall. There are several tense moments visualized in the "sting" as it is portrayed in the film. Some dramatic license may also give the audience the ability of get the retribution catharsis that most films of this type thrive on. There is not a violent explosion of retribution, but rather the figures we have seen participating in the plots get manipulated into turning on one another and revealing the depths of their involvement.
Critics of the film have focused on an imagined connection between the film makers and a certain conspiracy group that will go unnamed here. The main claims of that group are never made in this movie. This film is purely an advocacy piece for fighting not just child trafficking, but other forms of slavery as well. When that group's identification is connected to this movie, it undermines the real value of the film. Caviezel had a tenuous connection to the group by speaking to some of it's members, but he did not write the movie or live the story. His sincere desire to address the threat to kids is presented at the end of the movie, instead of some mid-title stinger. The conspiracy ideas are never raised, only facts that are widely accepted are presented in the movie and implications that this is some political screed are completely misplaced.
Most audience members will be moved by the mistreatment of children, and will be glad that it is handled without visual exploitation. I saw a couple of reviews that carried the implication that somehow this film glorified the process because of it's slow development approach. I think anyone who believes that is revealing more about themselves than they should. If this is such an obvious subject with a appeal that is a easy sell, why is it we have not seen those films? There are plenty that have focused on the more controversial issue of drug smuggling, child soldiers, and a variety of environmental issues. That this movie takes on a subject that everyone will agree is distasteful, is not really a criticism, it is a justification. The nonsense from an outlier group should be dismissed. It would also be wise to judge the movie on it's own merits, and not assume that because political opponents have embraced it, that you should oppose it. Sometimes cognitive complexity requires that we accept that people we don't like can sometimes be on the same side we are.
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
Picnic at Hanging Rock
I was aware of Peter Weir's phantasmagoric film back in 1975, but I never had a chance to see it in a theater. Over the years I certainly could have caught up with it on home video or on my satellite service, but again, I never did. This last weekend on "The Lambcast", we had a Roll Your Own show and my colleague David Brook was choosing Cinema New Wave Films from different parts of the world. Director Peter Weir was the essential film maker of that period. "Gallipoli" and "The Year of Living Dangerously" were the films that first brought him to my attention. His subsequent American films have been among the best of the last forty years. Picnic at Hanging Rock was voted the best Australian film of all time by members of the Australian Film Institute, industry guilds and unions, film critics and reviewers, academics and media teachers, and Kookaburra Card members of the National Film and Sound Archive, in a 1996 poll.
The film is a languid mystery about the disappearance of school girls from a young woman's college while on an outing to nearby Hanging Rock, a geological formation that is quite unique. There is a soft horror story that goes along with the mystery because everybody at the school and surrounding community is effected negatively by the vanishing. Some of the consequences of the event are mild hysteria but other manifestations are more deeply complex, frightening and tragic. All of this takes place in a beautiful setting with historically elegant period design. The cinematography is gorgeous, which is of course strongly reflecting the surroundings.
Early on you get a feel for Weir's hand in the film, when the principle young woman, Miranda, is shown in her room, reflected on a mirror that is reflected off of another surface. This is a movie that is composed so that the images will be memorable and attractive, even if the consequences are ambiguous and somewhat creepy. The feel of the movie is almost always like an episode of "The Twilight Zone", where we know what we are seeing is going to be changed by the events that occur, and a pall of sadness lingers even if the images are beautiful.
In addition to the photography, the mood is heightened by the selections of classical music on the soundtrack and the frequent contributions of Greek pan-flautist Zamfir.
I have to admit that my familiarity with his work consisted only of the infomercial sales pitches on saw on independent TV stations in the 1980s, an example of which you can see above. The cheesy ad may undermine your confidence in the quality of his product, but in the film it sets a very strong emotional tone. The flute compositions are haunting and beautiful, which fits perfectly with the movie and the way it has been shot.
The film plays out as a series of events which lead to surprising outcomes. A young Englishman, who lives with his Uncle and Aunt, is mesmerized by the young women when he sees them walking up the rock formation very briefly. Their vanishing cannot simply be ignored and he obsesses over the missing girls. One unfortunate girl, Sara, who has a deep connection with Miranda, also suffers in her absence and the school becomes something more oppressive to her as time passes. The headmistress Mrs. Appleyard sees her school being crushed by the events and she feels the moral crisis of having to deal with an unjust financial situation. The other teachers are flummoxed as to how to respond to developments, and the one girl who does return from being missing, sheds no light on the subject.
All of this takes place in a world vaguely tinged by burgeoning sexuality. The girls are somewhat objectified as sexual beings by the two youths who observe them. Sara seems romantically drawn to Miranda, and one of the teachers seems to feel the influence of the young ladies who are coming into their womanhood. One of the maids at the school is having a sexual dalliance with one of the groundskeepers, and the police and local doctor seem to be particularly careful about the implication that the girls might have been sexually assaulted. Mrs. Appleyard seems to imply that some of the relationships between the guardians of the girls and their charges are suspiciously unclear. There is no actual sexual activity shown on screen but there is an undercurrent in some of the images.
Those of you who are narrative lovers and want a complete story, may be frustrated by the fact that the movie ends ambiguously. We don't discover what happened to the girls, we only learn what happened to everyone else. The landscapes and costumes are attractive, and the movie plays slowly, but it is magnetic to look at and will probably get you thinking about the ripple effect, in a way that is completely different than was talked about in Jurassic Park. I was very happy to catch up with this classic from 1975.
An interesting thing happened last night at the Mission Impossible Fan Event we attended. After the two short promo reels that were part of the event, the wrong movie started running. "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is a joint Paramount/Disney production but when we saw the Disney Studio credit logo, we knew this was not Mission Impossible and that the wrong IMAX film was running. Two dozen people got up immediately to inform the management, but it still took nearly fifteen minutes of running the wrong movie before it was corrected. That accident allowed us to see the difference between a completely CGI train fight, which would later compare unfavorably to the practical train fight in the movie we came to see. This was an inadvertent reveal of how meticulous director/writer Christopher McQuarrie and star/producer Tom Cruise are about making their movies. They sure put in the extra effort to make it work for the audience.
"Dead Reckoning" has the kind of plot that could easily befuddle you the first time through. I know a lot of people had difficulty with the first of the Mission Impossible movie plots, and those folks may be happy to learn they are not the only ones who can get confused by the events in these movies. I've got a pretty good grasp on some of the elements but I will probably need a re-watch to clarify some other points of the story. I don't think audiences will be put off however. We know that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is the good guy, and that his team can be trusted, although uncertainty about Ilsa Faust is understandable. This is the third film in the series in which Rebecca Ferguson's disavowed MI-6 agent has been a part. After "Fallout" we are pretty confident she is on our side, and that's a good thing because she is incredibly competent and formidable.
The other members of the team return and they continue to provide both humor and some grounding for the series. Simon Pegg is as always, a gas who can lighten up a situation with an ironic acknowledgement of the difficulty in front of the team at any time. Ving Rhames brings calm and gravitas to his scenes and makes the tech crew a lot more humanly relatable. The newest member of the team is Haley Atwell, who gets involved with the team and is completely unreliable from the start. Atwell has experience playing a spy so she will be a good fit, although it was jarring to see he character so quickly develop the combat level qualifications that make her equal to some others in the group. She is fit enough and fine, and when her character has to improvise, especially in the climax, she is terrific, but her character is supposed to have a different background and that difference gets ignored as the film moves on.
All the Mission Impossible Films are anchored by great stunts and clever visual sequences. The opening of the film riffs on "The Hunt for Red October", with the same outcome for a Russian sub that was seen in that movie. This is where the confusion starts as well. Although we get an exposition scene from an under utilized Cary Elwes, that comes almost two hours after we have witnessed the opening and we are still trying to figure it out. Of course that is part of the intrigue, but the audience may be wary of everything after this. Elwes and the returning Henry Czerny as former IMF director Kittridge, are set up to be the partial villains of the bureaucracy, the real bad guy appears to be Esai Morales as Gabriel, working on behalf the the real big bad, "The Entity, a self aware A.I. that has taken control of the digital world and is using it to achieve an end that we are not yet sure of. Gabriel has a team, the Intelligence Community has a team, multiple local jurisdictions are involved, and there is a band of bounty hunters, and all of them are after Ethan and Atwell's Grace. At times this feels like one long continuous chase movie. The moments of tension are less about achieving an objective than giving us a bit of a break from the chase. But damn, those are some good chases.
Tom gets to do his patented running man routine at least three times during the film. There are two excellent motorcycle sequences and two equally great car chases. There is certainly a lot of action to go around. The shooting that takes place exhibits the usual poor marksmanship of the bad guys, and the hero team never seems to miss. That is boiler plate stuff. The real highlights come in the train sequence at the end of the film. There is a solid fight on the top of the train, and the Spielberg/Hitchcock inspired action after the train begins going off the edge is going to make your butt clench, even though we know it is just a movie. Once again, the stunt team and the practical effects, make this movie feel completely different from so many action films nowadays. The film ends on a cliff hanging moment, but since it it Part One of Two, no one should be too surprised by that. There is no teaser sequence during or after the titles, these film makers are keeping it real.
This was my most highly anticipated movie of the year with the possible exception of "Dune Part II". It lived up to my expectations and the audience I saw it with was quite responsive. Once more Lalo Schifrin should be getting a huge residual check, his theme is used in the right places and it provides the audience energy needed to propel us through the story. The release of this movie is one of the twisted tales that resulted from the Covis-19 shutdowns. This movie got held up in production by the Pandemic, and the studios juggled how to release this and last years Tom Cruise vehicle "Top Gun Maverick". And just like last year, there is a good chance that Tom Cruise will break the movie going doldrums and get folks out to the theater. Like last year, Cruise may save the summer and the cinema experience. Who says there are no movie stars left?
I wrote about "Enter the Dragon" on my original project and you can read that post here. I can pretty much stick with what I said then, although I may have been a little harsh on the story structure and the acting. It is true that the evil fighters working for the villain Han, seem to get more menacing as we go along. The level of loathsome is ramped up to make us feel the catharsis that comes when an injustice is addressed, and that happens several times in the movie. I probably should not have been so harsh on those aspects of the film. One of the things that has led me to this conclusion, is the reaction of the audience in last night's screening at the Paramount Theater.
Paramount Theater's Summer Film Classic Series is drawing a lot of movie fans like me. People who have seen a film before and are looking to recreate their first experience by seeing it on the big screen again. I last watched this movie just a couple of years ago for an Episode of The Lambcast. We had a terrific time talking about the movie and you can listen here:
I had watched the film on my Special Edition Laserdisc, which was pretty darn good, but it is nothing compared to seeing the movie in a real theater with an audience, amped up to see the Mater kick some butt. I was barely prepared for the grunts and ahhs and cheers that I heard from my fellow movie goers last night. When an amazing moment from Bruce Lee happened, you could hear a collective WOW from the audience. There were enough people with pain empathy in the audience to insure that there was a groan whenever Bruce executed a groin kick, head slap, or leg break. It was all enhanced by the sound system last night. I never realized how much the foley in this picture makes the fight scenes so intense. The volume of the punches to the solar plexus, the slap echo from a hand across an opponents face, all of it may seem like a cartoon out of context, but it works when we are in our seats together. Oh, and you should have heard the audience howls of anger and fear when it looked like Blofeld's cat was going to get guillotined.
Listen, I know we have to suspend disbelief occasionally in a movie and I willingly do so on a regular basis, but someone needed to cast the guys in the black gees in the scenes in the prison cells. Those are two completely different sets of prisoners and it undermines the final battle royale for a minute. None of it undermines the main attraction however, Bruce Lee is as amazing as you remember. The speed of his strikes against O'Hara was incredible. It looked like a magic trick. The nun chuck display that Lee puts on is also flawless and speedy. This is part of why his legend continues. The cool factor of Bruce Lee comes out repeatedly. The corner of his mouth moves up only slightly when he has mentally bested his enemy before there is even a hit. When he tastes his own blood in his fight with Han at the end, we know that Han has just sealed his own fate. Maybe there is a little too much Eastern Philosophy in some of the early sequences, but there is nothing inscrutable when the three leads are in fighting form.
Jim Kelly gets a pretty good fight scene before he is required to get his ass kicked by a guy he easily outmatches, it's just the way the script goes and Director Robert Clouse can only do so much to sell it. Although you might think John Saxon is an actor who had to be carried through the fight scenes, nothing could be further from the truth. He is great in the action, getting off kicks and punches that don't look like movie fighting but seem like real martial arts. He did have training and you can see it in the movie.
Bruce Lee moves like a silent cat when he is in those scenes where his character is spying on the inner workings of Han's island. He dances nimbly around the furniture, machinery and guards, as if he were a ballet dancer, on point and filled with helium. The loss of Bruce Lee was a tragedy, but his legacy is secure as long as people can see this movie. Lucky for me, I also got to see it in a theater.
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 Black Bird
This week is a little different. This is a sequel of sorts to one of the greatest films ever made, but don't take that description seriously, because it is more spoof than follow up. Another thing that is different is that the video above is not the trailer for the film, I could not find that. Instead, you have a YouTube link to the whole movie, uploaded by a random person on the site. I'm OK with sharing this link because the movie is not available in any other way. It did have a VHS release, but as far as I can tell, there was never an official DVD/Laserdisc/Blu-ray edition of the movie. It is currently not streaming although it is listed as being on TUBI, it is not available there at this time. Before I found this link, I purchased a burned copy from a boutique site, and it was not very good. It looks like they had the captions on and I could never turn them off, and the captioning was terrible. This is probably the best way you can experience the film, should you wish to do so in spite of the comments I am about to make.
The premise of the film is simple, Sam Spade's Son Junior, has inherited the family business, and suddenly, there are people looking for the Maltese Falcon again. George Segal is Spade Jr., and he has always had an easy time delivering smug comic lines in movies. He made a lot of comedies over the years, in fact, it was one of his comedies that introduced the world to Denzel Washington ("Carbon Copy", a movie that may have almost as much blowback on racial politics as this one). Spade Jr. is not particularly successful. His Dad's old offices, which he now occupies, are located in a rundown section of San Francisco, and his clientele are inclined to pay him with Food Stamps. This caustic approach to humor will continue throughout the movie. Characters are mocked because of their ethnicity, size, social standing and a variety of other casually cruel things. This is quintessentially a 70s film. It would never be made in today's environment. Like "Blazing Saddles ", it often steps on the third rail of culture. Unfortunately, it is not as clever as "Blazing Saddles" and it is not a satire which would justify those moments, it is a farce, that simply uses them as punchlines not as commentary.
I will start with a couple of positive things. To begin with, two of the actors from the original film make appearances in this movie. Lee Patrick, who was Bogart's secretary Effie, in the original, is back as the same character, doing the same job for Junior. Her character has undergone an unfortunate transformation in an attempt to create some humor, but it was more off putting than funny and she was ill served by the script. Elisha Cook Jr. fares a little better, getting a chance to remain trapped in time, spouting lingo from 1940 in the 1975 of the film. The anachronistic patter is one of the jokes that actually works in the film. Segal also has the same sort of insolence that Bogart had but the tone is not "tough guy talk" but "smart ass banter". He looks pretty good in the hat as well.
There are fight scenes that are staged as slapstick, and others that are just not that interesting. As a former Angeleno, I enjoyed the joke about parking on the streets of San Francisco. Any jab at the supposed more sophisticated town to the North was always appreciated. There are cops in this movie, somewhat like the two in the original, but don't hope for anything interesting in that regard, it all goes nowhere. This is a movie that makes a racial joke out of the lead character's last name, not once but multiple times. That reflects the times but also the lack of creativity in the script.
I remembered the movie as being more amusing than it turns out to be. I did only see it the one time in 1975, It was a Christmas time release, so I can't say for sure if I saw it at the end of the year or the start of the new year, but it was a film I saw on a date with my future wife, so at least I have that good memory about the movie. Oh, they did do an excellent job on the titles for the film, so you can watch that for ninety seconds and then skip the rest of the film.
Regular visitors to this site will not be surprised at the fact that we had a return visit to "Jaws" on the big screen, just a month after our recent screening. Yes the 47 year old film is widely available for home viewing, yes there is an expense and inconvenience of traveling to a theater thirty miles from home, but those things don't matter. Seeing "Jaws" in a theater is a chance to share the experience with an audience, it is an opportunity to treat the moment as special, and it is one more instance where we can sit in awe of the accomplishment of the film.
The screening was promoted as a "Movie Party" and the audience was provided with some tools to participate, including a shark fin hat that I tried on but took off while watching the movie. The bloody inflatable drink cozy was not needed in the theater but might come in useful in a hot tub. We were encouraged to respond to lines in the movie but the audience was relatively subdued. I did sing along with Quint about those fair Spanish Ladies and with all three of our hunters when they were tired and wanted to go to bed, but I did not hear others doing so. There was one audience member enamoured of the response line when Hooper Identifies the kind of shark the skiff load of fisherman hauled in, he repeated the line "A What? " with a great deal of impressionistic accuracy.
Another example of the advantages of seeing a film with an audience is being able to see the reactions of others to the moments you are reacting to as well. The man sitting next to me jerked involuntarily when Ben Gardner's head appeared in the hole in the hull of his own boat. The audience laughed together at several points and you could also feel the pall that fell over everyone, on -screen and in the audience, when Mrs. Kitner confronts the Chief. At that moment it doesn't just feel like a story, it feels like a tragedy.
I think we also felt a collective sense of community joy when Mayor Vaughn tells Brody and Hooper, "For Christ' sake tomorrow is the 4th of July and we will be open for business". Since we were all sitting in a theater together, the day before the Fourth of July, it just seemed especially relevant to us. Whenever someone asks what a great movie to watch for the Independence Day holiday, this is always the first answer.
