I’d say this movie was a disappointment but I didn’t really have high expectations for it in the first place so it’s hard to reach that conclusion. Basically this is a rip off of the concept from “Weapons” , and not a very good one at that. The idea of creepy kids being used to take retribution is a cross between a “Nightmare on Elm Street” and the film from last year where Amy Madigan played the part of an ice cream man, sorry I mean witch.
This film is told from the perspective of the young protagonist, a lactose intolerant lad who has been bullied by classmates and even a little bit by his friends, but in the end, he stands up the firmest against the evil that is encroaching on his small town. The story doesn’t make much sense until we get a data dump in exposition from a local priest about 2/3 of the way through the movie. And if by any chance you’re suspicious of the priest and what he has to say, you will not be at all surprised at the twist that comes near the end.
This is an Eli Roth film, so no one’s expecting much subtlety. When the vicious killings occur, there’s not really a lot of cutting away, we’re going to see heads separated from bodies, faces smashed to smithereens, and dismemberment galore . Once in a while we get a sly joke inserted into the mayhem, unfortunately they don’t always land. I can say however, that there was one bit that landed for me. There is a very funny scene which is basically a takeoff on the playground scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s the birds. It builds in a form that mimics Hitchcock’s style of shooting in that scene, and the juxtaposition of antagonists is what makes it work.
The Ice Cream man depicted in the film never really talks. And in spite of the horrible things that occur, there is even a slight effort to make his character somewhat sympathetic. That doesn’t work, for the obvious reasons that innocent people are harmed in the process and that in the absence of any words of contrition from the victims, the Ice Cream man just continues to smile maliciously.
So the movie plays like the gore version of The Pied Piper of Hamlin, with indiscriminate victims, and innocent children turned into murderers. Ho hum. I guess I should have known when I saw that Osgood Perkins was a producer on the film. Let’s just say he’s gone zero for three with me, and I’m someone who appreciated that Eli Roth was directing this film,
Like a lot of film fans, if you ask me on any given day what my favorite movie is from a given director or actor, my opinion is likely to be influenced by the most recent film I’ve seen of theirs. For me I don’t think that’s the case with the Coen brothers. I really enjoy and love most of their films, but “Fargo” has always been my favorite. It features one of the greatest characters that they ever created in Marge Gunderson, the police chief of Brainerd, MN, who heroically pursues malfeasance in her community. Frances McDormand has been a fixture in the Academy Awards process ever since Mississippi Burning, but this is the film that cemented her as the leading actress of our era.
“Fargo” starts off with a lie, one that most people don’t even realize has been passed off on them. An opening card says that the movie is based on true events. No it is not. The mischief that is created by this line is continued in the ongoing Fargo TV series which uses the same conceit, and tagline about how only the names have been changed in respect to the dead and to protect the living. Joel and Ethan Cohen created a mythos with that line which works to make the film that follows more epic than it really is
Francis McDormand is not the only outstanding performance in the film. There are two other actors whose contributions to Fargo make it one of the great dark comedies of all time, while simultaneously being a grim crime story. William H Macy plays Jerry Lundergaard, the hapless car salesman who has taken out a loan against the inventory on his Father-In-Laws car lot, in order to invest in a piece of property he thinks is going to turn a tidy profit down the road. Of course the problem is he needs more money than he can get, and his solution is to kidnap his own wife and to ransom her using his father-in-law’s money. Macy presents a guileless persona in Jerry, he’s a character so conniving and reprehensible, while at the same time being a simpleton and a pushover. You get a good example of his feckless success in the scene where he passively aggressively bullies a customer into paying for an undercoat for the new car he is buying. We get a chance to see how capable Jerry is of lying while still trying to look like a powerless fool. The fact that he is a powerless fool doesn’t hurt.
The third Ace in this hand is Steve Buscemi’s Carl Shoalwalter, a professional criminal nearly as feckless as Jerry is. His frustration with his lot in life builds up to a crescendo of violence rather than a shrug of powerlessness. Buscemi is smarmy and belligerent, dangerously so when he confronts his own partner. No one in the story is reliable, but we can count on Buscemi to always make the worst choice possible and act as if he is the victim instead of the victimizer. Along with Mr Pink, his character and “Reservoir Dogs”, ShowWalter, establishes Buscemi as the weaseliest character actor of the 90s.
Just like Tarantino does, the Coen’s turned violence into grim humor, but unlike Tarantino, whose joke usually depends on the visual explosion of a handgun in someone’s face, the Coen’s make the situation the source of the humor. The violence is just the consequence of a particular situation. We don’t need to see Buscemi shoot the face off of an innocent ticket clerk in a parking structure, his frustration has already been set up, all we need is to see the consequence.
Chief Gunderson, has a couple of great scenes where her real sincerity is contrasted with the deceptiveness of the people she’s interacting with. Her kindness in regard to a former classmate, who clearly has emotional problems, and seems incapable of telling the truth, makes us see Marge as the decent woman she is in a tough job. In the two times she confronts the duplicitous Jerry Lundergaard, she is authoritative and polite up to the point, where Lundergaard’s rudeness demands that she step up. Her voiceless confrontation with Peter Stormare’s character, as he is disposing of his partner in the wood chipper, shows that she is also fearless, under that veneer of Minnesota nice.
Even though the film plays out as a tragedy, with several senseless deaths, which occur under uncomfortably amusing circumstances, there’s still some hope. As Marge and her adoring husband lay in bed contemplating the future and their soon to be born child, we get a sense that the normal people in the world still have a chance. That’s about as hopeful as it gets.
27 years ago a cult grew up around the films of the Wachowski Brothers / sisters, with the release of”The Matrix”. It was a groundbreaking film that utilized special effects, clever camera tools and frankly brilliant framing and staging, to make a science fiction film a classic. The two sequels never lived up to the promise of that first film, because they got bogged down in a series of philosophical and existential musings.
How could they redeem the promise that they showed with that first Matrix film? For my money the answer is apparently the gloriously overstuffed “Speed Racer”. When this film came out it didn’t do any business that is worth writing home about, which always amazed me because it looks spectacular. It may be that I am just one of those people who’s willing to go along with the conceit of a filmmaker if it strikes me as being appropriate in the moment. For example, I love films like “Snakes on a Plane”, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th dimension”, and “Swiss Army Man”. “Big Trouble in Little China” may be the most enjoyable film that John Carpenter ever made but I know there are people who just can’t get into it, well I can. And “Speed Racer” is a movie that I’m willing to do the same for.
This movie looks like a cartoon, moves like a cartoon, and is acted like a cartoon, and that’s one of the things that makes it so much fun. When Warren Beatty made “Dick Tracy” back in 1990, he used a very specific color palette and lighting strategy to evoke the comics of the era that the character came from. The Wachowskis are doing the same thing with this movie. The colors are dazzling, oversaturated Neon hued, and they whack you over the head.
If you’ve never seen the movie it’s hard to describe what the experience is like. It’s very immersive, and very loud, and I’m surprised that anybody who suffers from motion sickness can get through a screening of this film without passing out or vomiting. I guess I’m lucky because mostly what I get is an Adrenaline Rush and the kind of brain stimulation that occurs when I drive down the strip in Las Vegas. This particular screening was even more so, because it featured a new 4D presentation of the film on the largest IMAX screen in the state of Texas. It was an assault on your senses that you voluntarily take on, in the hopes that it will get you a kind of psychedelic High without actually having to drop acid.
In the nearly 20 years since the film came out, it has acquired a cult status, which overcomes its initial failings. When I see people criticize the film because they object to the little brother and the chimpanzee, I know they have completely missed the vibe that I experience when I see the movie. Sure the kid is corny, and some of the jokes are obvious, but if you take a look around you’ll see that that’s true everywhere in the movie. That’s one of the pleasures of this film, it is exactly what it wants to be. This movie wants you to give in to the sensory stimulation and the artificial nature of the visuals. If you can accept the little boy and his chimpanzee smuggling themselves in the back of a race car, or engaging in hijinks on a private plane, or simply just being a nuisance, then it’s easy for you to accept the ridiculous car chases, race sequences, and comic book villains.
As a kid I never really watched Speed Racer, so I don’t have that nostalgia to fall back on as a reason for my love of this movie. My embrace of it is clearly based on the audacity of the concept and its execution. I have not been enthusiastic about other films from this duo, but along with “The Matrix”, “Speed Racer” has my respect for them as filmmakers.
For almost 40 years I’ve been a fan of the Evil Dead series. The Original Trilogy featuring Bruce Campbell is the most entertaining horror mixed with comedy films that I have seen and that includes “Shaun of the Dead” . I was also a big fan of the reboot in 2012 that took the Grim story of demon possession to a straightforward horror film without the presence of our heroic character Ash.
This film and its predecessor however go a long way toward making me question whether or not I should be seeing any future Evil Dead films. In addition to lacking very much humor, “Evil Dead Rise” and this film, “Evil Dead Burn” lack characters that you care much about and the films go over the top in ways that suggest that there isn’t any good storytelling available to the filmmakers.
The technical aspects of this film are solid. The makeup effects and the various and sundry deaths and injuries are rendered in all too believable detail. So the incompetence of this movie has nothing to do with the technical abilities of the filmmakers but with their storytelling skills. This movie wants you to try and remember that there is a narrative structure but it mostly ignores that so that we just get from point to point to wallow in the most graphic and unpleasant visual images you’ll probably see on the screen this year. It’s bad enough to have a body whose face gets smashed in, but then to have another character forced to shove their face into the smashed in face of the Dead character, well it’s just unnecessary. This movie is full of the unnecessary gross flourishes that the filmmaker seems to believe would make a horror film fun. They are wrong, this was not fun, it did not horrify me so much as gross me out. You could probably accomplish the same effect by filming somebody taking a dump, looking up through a glass table that they’re pooping on.
The premise of the film is that somebody in a family vaguely connected to the original Professor who discovered the Book of the Dead has uncovered a weapon that can in fact destroy the deadites. So the Monstrous dead are attempting to find the weapon and destroy it so they can continue to take over the rest of the world and turn it into the hellscape that the deadites want.
This time instead of an apartment building or a cabin in the woods we have a decrepit old mansion that the living are occupying as the dead try to take over. Frankly the biggest problem that I have with this film is that I forgot so much of what happened. I’ve been guilty of posting the last few entries about a movie days or even weeks after seeing that film. What happened here in this movie did not benefit from that pause but rather clarified for me how dull and boring the story really was.
I didn’t hate this movie, but I didn’t love it either and from the point of view of the Evil Dead series, that seems to be a pretty important failure. Sam Rami and Bruce Campbell were both executive producers on this movie. , but they seem to have had very little creative input and somebody should have told the writers and the director that action needs to move a little quicker to have more zip to it
If you are ever boarding a plane and you see Aaron Eckhart in the cockpit you should probably take another flight. Between this movie and Clint Eastwood’s “Sully”, Eckhart manages to be the co-pilot on two disastrous flights. Of course one of them turns out well and he ends up a hero, This one, not so much. “Deep Water” Is an Amalgam Of Disaster Film And Shark Exploitation. Like the movie “Bait” from a few years ago, we have a disaster followed up by shark attacks, but instead of a tsunami, “Deep Water” has a plane crash in the ocean.
To be honest with you I wasn’t expecting much, this looks like it might even be a straight to video Shark film. It’s actually much better than it has any right to be and in fact Renny Harlin, the director of this film, seems to be back in form when it comes to creating a suspenseful action movie. After early successes like “Die Hard 2” and “Cliffhanger” , Harlan has been inconsistent, with several films relegated to direct video in the last 10 years. He had a film out last year that just got a token release in theaters and I’ll bet you didn’t even know that. Unfortunately this film also got a very limited release, and because it didn’t take over the box office in the first weekend it disappeared from most theaters, which is too bad. “Deep Water” is an exciting disaster picture, with a truly horrifying crash sequence and plenty of suspense in the shark sections.
Ben Kingsley is the co-star, and he’s just fine as the older pilot, who makes the initial tough decisions Ultimately he gives way to Eckhart’s First officer. Not to give too much away, that’s not by choice. There is just enough character development of some of the passengers to make us interested in what’s going on, but not so much just to turn it into a soap opera. When the time comes for us to root for certain characters to survive or to be consumed, we know exactly where our feelings are going to rest.
Slow burn is not the way I would describe the picture but it does take its time to get started. Once the crash sequence starts however, it is phenomenally frightening and I think it will make you more afraid of flying than the Sharks will make you fear being in the water. The combination of practical effects and CGI are very convincing. The interior shots of the plane are very effective and practical, and even the exterior CGI is pretty solid. There are a number of hazards that show up in the crash sequence that you probably haven’t thought about , but will make you nervous the next time you get on an airplane. Fires and falling luggage are bad enough, but you better keep your seatbelt on if you know what’s good for you.
In the long run this film doesn’t do anything new, it just does what it’s supposed to do very well and that is to entertain us. You should be gripping your arm rest pushing yourself back into the seat and occasionally closing your eyes during several moments in the film. The Shark sequences are solid, and I think the sharks look better than the CGI sharks that Harlan had in “Deep Blue Sea”, but I’ll probably get yelled at for saying so.
Aaron Eckhart’s character has a personal backstory that doesn’t seem to make much sense, and it is clearly manipulative at the end of the film. That’s okay though, his character has managed to secure the safety of as many passengers as possible, including the adorable children that you knew were going to be part of the plot.
So you probably won’t get a chance to see this in theaters but when it shows up on your streaming service, take the plunge and fork over a couple of bucks. One of The Producers on the film, of which there are at least a hundred it seems like, is Gene Simmons of Kiss, who of course wants your money. So go ahead and give it to him and have a good time and enjoy the surprise of a competently made film that does what it sets out to do without embarrassing anyone.
I said it five years ago when I reviewed the original film, this ain’t Shakespeare. I’ll stand by that comment in regard to this second film in the rebooted series. “Mortal Kombat 2” should not be confused with any serious filmmaking but belongs in that category of films that is exclusively designed to delight people in a theater while consuming sugary snacks, large quantities of popcorn, and soda cups the size of small vehicles. It is stupid, loud, and incredibly violent, which is exactly what you expected from it and so it doesn’t disappoint.
If there were a comparison to be made between the two films it’s the script which it would be easy for me to point to. Mortal Kombat 2021 has a clearer story and a little bit more character development. However do we really go to these films for character and script? Probably not, so the fact that this movie gets to all of the combat sequences very quickly and is relentless in presenting them, that fills the goal of most theater goers who are lining up for this. The only questions remaining is whether the fan service is satisfactory, the action sequences are laudatory, and the actors are having fun making the movie. I can certainly say that that last part sure seems to be true. For all the solemnity that is supposed to occur in the Realms who are battling for control, there is still plenty of levity in the ridiculousness of the fights and especially in the special effects.
I remembered almost nothing about the film from 5 years ago. In fact I wasn’t even sure if I’d seen it until I went back and looked and saw that I had posted a review. One of the reasons I had my doubts is that I did not participate in the Lamcast discussion for that movie, instead my friend Howard Casner hosted the episode. I must have been out of town. I waited to rewatch that film until after I’d seen “Mortal Kombat 2”, and frankly it didn’t make any difference in my appreciation of the film. Both films are plenty ridiculous and made up of tropes that gamers probably love and the rest of us miss. That’s it. I had a good time and enjoyed my time in the theater.
The biggest addition to the film is the inclusion of a character named Johnny Cage, apparently a key figure in the original video game. The character did not appear in the previous film. The last shot of the original film suggested that Johnny Cage was going to be the key figure in the sequel and that is in fact what happened. Because I don’t know anything about the characters, casting was not something that I was thinking about, but when the trailers came out and Karl Urban was starring as the Cage character, it was all right with me.
Urban’s character is presented as a slightly washed up action star from the 90s, probably a meta comment about the audience for these films. Cheesy action films starring martial artists were a dime a dozen before the new millennia, and Karl Urban looks like he could have been in any of those movies. His delivery of the lines in this film seem to have his tongue firmly placed in his cheek, and a twinkle in his eye and the slight bending down of his head indicates that he’s in on the joke. Which all seems great given the tone that the movie is trying to provoke. Although the blood and body count is greater in this film, it feels a lot less solemn than the first entry, and that’s largely because of Johnny Cage’s character. Fans of the series and the video game will probably be greatly satisfied with Karl Urban and the way he treats the material.
The violence quotient is high, although I don’t think there is quite as much blood being splattered on the combatants as there was in the first film. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of gruesomeness and bloody pulp to go around, it just seems to be placed a little bit more discreetly. We still get bodies Buzz sawed in half by frisbee hats, and heads crushed and splattered by giant hammers, and plenty of spikes, swords, Fists and other objects penetrating the bodies of the combatants. I’m still waiting for the one visual that I remember seeing in the arcade game where the victor grabs the neck of the defeated competitor and pulls their spine out of their body. Maybe they’re saving that for part three.
This movie is too violent for the 14-year-old boys that it’s targeted at, which means it’ll probably be a big success with that demographic. Everybody wants to be a little bit older when they’re going to a movie as a kid. I know “3D” gets a negative rap, but I think this was a movie that I would have enjoyed in that format, given all the body parts flying off and weapons being flung back and forth. As far as I know the movie was not shot in 3D, and I don’t think that there were any screenings in which it was offered in that format, but if you find one, put on those glasses and get ready to duck because blood, knives, Spears and body parts will be coming your way.
Thursday April 30th was the opening night of the TCM Film Festival, and as become our custom, we had the Essential pass which allowed us to go to the opening night Premiere and walk the red carpet. The feature was Barefoot in the Park from 1967 starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. It was chosen as a tribute to Robert Redford who passed last year and Jane Fonda herself showed up as the guest to talk about her experience making the movie. While I am not a huge fan of Jane Fonda, I did think that her presentation was sweet and heartfelt about her co-star.
She mentioned how she had had a crush on him and would try to convince him that they should have an affair. I’m not sure she was really joking. She also told the story of how all the secretaries at the studio looked out the door and down the hallway when Redford was walking down the pathways of the studio.
The movie is a light fluffy romantic comedy from playwright Neil Simon, and it had its share of crazy characters and oddball situations, and there were plenty of laughs. I know I saw the movie back in the 1970s at some point probably on television, but I had very little memory of it except that their apartment was sort of dismal and small. Redford had a very nice touch with the comedy elements and he even does kind of a silly dance as part of the story. I think there’s a restored 4K Blu-ray coming, and I will probably pick that up just to make sure I have it in my collection.
We were originally going to stay for a second movie but we got hungry and decided to make a late evening visit to Canter’s Delicatessen for a sandwich and some cheesecake to take home to Allison.
Day Two
The El Capitan theater usually hosts an animated film from the Disney Vault on the first full day of the TCM Film Festival, this year it was ”Alice in Wonderland” which was pretty surreal anytime you see it. Mario Cantone was the host and he was delightfully silly and fun and talking about the film. His expert guest was Andreas Deja , a legendary animator from Disney Studios who has worked on dozens of Disney films since the 1980s. They talked about the things that inspired the movie and the fact that it had been one of the things Walt Disney had wanted to do from the very start. Of course there was also a discussion of how the movie finally started making money when we got to the Psychedelic era of the 60s and hippies under the influence made the film a hit.
We got locked out of “Letty Linton”, because Alice in Wonderland got out just 15 minutes before this long lost Joan Crawford film was to screen at the Egyptian. We did get in line and get a queue card but there was no way we were going to get into the film. The Theater was completely packed. So we went and had lunch in the car in the parking garage at Hollywood and Highland, and then went up for the second film of the day, which was “Dangerous Liaisons”.
The star of the film, Glenn Close, had just gotten her feet and handprints done in the courtyard at the Chinese Theater, and she stayed over to talk about this movie. She did have some interesting information about the process, including the fact that all of her scenes were shot well after everybody else had completed their work. She had given birth just 7 weeks before and was still on maternity leave before she came to Europe to film her part of the movie. She talked about how she was unsure that John Malkovich was going to cut it as a romantic lead , but she ultimately decided that he was definitely going to work in the film.
It’s easy to forget that both Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves are also in the movie, they play secondary characters and they were both quite good despite the usual criticism that Keanu gets for playing a character in a period piece. There was a little bit of a discussion about the ending of the film, and Glenn Close revealed that they did shoot a guillotine execution, but that that was ultimately abandoned for the disturbing silent treatment ending that finishes off the film now.
The movie is a tour de force for both Close and John Malkovich, and it was certainly deserving of the awards that it received and the ones it was considered for.
Next on the agenda is just one of the most delightful moments of the festival. The presentation of the 1996 film “That Thing You Do”. This has always been a personal favorite, and it tells a great story behind one of those one hit wonders that made up pop music in the ’60s and ’70s, in this case though one that was entirely invented for the movie. The two guests were Johnathon Schaech and Kevin Pollock, who both explained how they had been cast and some of the contributions that they made to the way the story was told. The writer-director of the film is Tom Hanks, who also plays the part of record company executive Mr. White.
Schaech explained that when he went in for his audition he improvised the snapping fingers, hand on the ear and delivery to an invisible microphone when his character says “I quit”. It was his idea to present it as if it was a song that he’s walking away from. He also literally walked away when he finished his line and Tom Hanks had to chase him down in the hallway to get him back. He said that that is the point at which he knew he was going to get the part. Pollock on the other hand had worked with Tom Hanks on his Apollo Mission miniseries, so they had a previous relationship. Again, the actor was given quite a bit of leeway into how his character was going to be played. People sometimes mistake him for a DJ but he’s actually a local businessman who does his own commercials on the radio and that’s why the audience is familiar with him. Pollock said that Hank’s told him to do whatever he wanted with the character, and Kevin played it very broadly with some cartoonish dancing and movements and oddball vocal delivery. He thought for sure Hanks was going to call him on it and ask him to tone it down, but he said Tom was just fine with it and it ended up in the film. This presentation and the conversation that followed the movie were highlights of the festival for us.
We then went out and got in line again to go back into the Chinese Theater for the presentation of Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Boyer had also been in “Barefoot in the Park” the night before so we were seeing him in two different movies that were made 30 years apart. It was sort of an interesting comparison. Incidentally actress Mildred Natwick had been in both “Barefoot in the Park” and “Dangerous Liasions” so we saw two stars in their own double feature at the festival, an unplanned but very pleasant coincidence.
Amanda had not seen Gaslight before and she enjoyed it quite well, the fact that the term gaslighting has become so prolific in the last couple of years is easy to understand once you see the movie. We know that we are being deliberately lied to and are expected to accept the lie in spite of the evidence of our own eyes and ears. That’s exactly what is happening as Boyer’s character is attempting to drive his wife mad as he seeks jewels that belonged to her aunt. The movie was also the debut of Angela Lansbury and she is quite a character as a fairly slutty servant who is providing comic relief and some plot details in the film.
As much as we would have liked to stay for the midnight screening of “Vanishing Point”, it wasn’t going to work. We were not staying in a hotel downtown and so we had a 45 minute commute back to the house in Glendora, and that meant that we would not have gotten home until after 3 am.. Not something that we could do and then on Saturday morning get up for the other films that we planned on seeing.
Day Three
We had to make a tough choice on Saturday morning, and the way it played out for the afternoon meant that our best option was to see “The Day the Earth Stood Still” in the Chinese Theater Multiplex. I think whenever they have an older science fiction film they basically get Joe Dante out of storage and bring him to the festival. Let’s face it, this is a guy who knows what Saturday sci-fi and the 50s and 60s was all about.
He told a couple of quick stories about the making of the film, got us hyped up for the movie, and then got out of the way. This may be the 4th or 5th time I’ve seen him introduce a movie at the festival, and he always seems to work it just right, so the focus is on the movie.
Immediately after The Day the Earth Stood Still we got back in line at the multiplex to see Captain Blood, one of my favorite Errol Flynn films. The guest was Allen Rode who has written extensively about the era of films that this was made in and in particular about director Michael Curtis, whose long association with Errol Flynn was contentious for a variety of reasons including things that happened in the making of this film.
Mr Rode talked about the final time that Flynn and Curtis met near the end of Flynn’s life when he was broke and desperate for work, and although they had had their differences they seem to have a Reconciliation at that final meeting, and after Flynn left Curtis told his host that if it wasn’t for Errol Flynn he would not have had a career.
Because of the timing of events at the festival, we had to step out of Captain Blood for a few minutes to get queue cards for the next film that we wanted to see. We were able to do that and then go back in to finish off the movie, but the sequence that we missed while we were gone was the great duel between Flynn and Basil Rathbone on the beach. Fortunately I’ve seen the movie a dozen times, still it would have been nice to be able to see that moment again on the big screen.
The movie that we were trying to ensure that we got queue cards for was next and that was 1979’s”The Muppet Movie”. The guest was composer Paul Williams, who did the music for the film and wrote the great classic song “Rainbow Connection”. Williams was in fine form telling great stories, and because he was going to be doing a conversation later in the festival, there was a small tribute film to him that screened before the Muppet Movie. Frankly if I had to pick a moment from the festival that was my favorite this would probably be it. I love “The Muppet Movie” and I’ve admired Paul Williams for 50 plus years. This made me anticipate the conversation that would be coming up later even more.
Afterwards we all sang along with the “Dream Factory”at the end of The Muppet Movie and then we made our way over to the Egyptian Theater for a screening of a Fellini film. We were also going to meet up with one of the Lambs who is also going to be seeing “Nights of Cabiria”. Aaron Neuwirth saw me first, and yes I turned around to the call “hey old man”. Ouch, but it is accurate. Aaron went in first. He had already gotten a queue card and he held a couple of seats for us at the back of the theater because all three of us were going to leave as soon as the movie was done to get queue cards for the next film.
“Nights of Cabiria”, won the Academy Award for Best foreign language film back in the 1950s, and I suppose from the perspective of the time it would be deserving. Frankly, it was not my cup of tea. The lead actress was quite good but her character is frustratingly irritating and dense to the point that she makes the same mistakes over and over again. And it may very well be that The stereotype of Italians shouting everything comes from this movie where the actors all seem to be about 20 decibels louder than they need to be. I have to admit that the three of us dozed off occasionally, and we left a little bit early to be sure we got in line for the movie that we were all anticipating.
Our final film on Saturday was “Robocop”, which I have seen on the big screen almost as many times as I’ve seen “Jaws” on the big screen. The bonus here though, was the guests, Paul McCrane who plays Emil, the melting man in the movie, Kurtwood Smith who is Clarence Boddicker, the villain who gets the most amount of time and the juiciest lines in the movie, and RoboCop himself Dr Peter Weller.
They had a lively time sharing stories about the making of the film and commenting on the work of director Paul Verhofen in turning this film into something that was not cartoon movie junk but rather a satire of the social mores of the time. I think all of the conversations that took place during the festival are available on the TCM YouTube channel, but I will try to link this one here because it was so memorable.
Amanda and I had actually seen Peter Weller talk about Robocop in the Egyptian Theater several years before when the American Cinematheque was doing a tribute to Miguel Ferrer who passed away just days earlier. We said goodbye to Aaron after this film and once again headed home for a short night’s sleep before coming back for the last day of the festival.
Day 4
Going to a movie at 9: 00 in the morning on a Sunday is my idea of Heaven but I’m sure a lot of people felt it was a little early. One of the most fun conversations about a film at the festival however took place here as nine of the 12 kids who made up the “Bad News Bears” showed up to talk about the movie. You would think having that large a crowd of storytellers would be overwhelming but they paced themselves very well and everybody got a turn to say something about the movie and their experience in it.
All of them had very nice things to say about Walter Matthau but also the director Michael Ritchie. Some of them had been actors and some of them had been kids who played baseball and just wanted an opportunity to do so on screen. As anybody who has seen the movie knows, there is dialogue in this film that comes from not only the adults but the kids, that would certainly not be politically correct. There is language that would not pass muster with the woke police of today. With that warning the audience watching the movie laughed at all of the appropriate places and held their breath once or twice because of the language use but everyone seemed to recognize that this was a comedy not a commentary and they responded appropriately.
I actually saw the Bad News Bears in the Chinese Theater in 1976 so it was kind of fun on the 50th anniversary to be back for another screening. I was asked about it by the cameras that were roving the courtyard before the film so I hope that that footage shows up somewhere so that people can appreciate the moment.
Our next stop at the TCM Film Festival was at Club TCM in the Roosevelt Hotel, to listen to the conversation with Paul Williams. Ben Mankiewicz introduced Williams and we also got to see the film tribute again which was nice. Paul went into more detail about the start of his career and he talked about how being an actor in a film where he picked up a guitar and started teaching himself how to play and making up a song on the spot led him to a career as a songwriter.
He could not be laudatory enough about Karen Carpenter, referring to her as an angel whose voice gave life to his lyrics and set his career path. I was hoping there would be a little bit more talk about the “Phantom of the Paradise” and I think Mankiewicz was planning on that, but Paul Williams is a raconteur and he had things that he wanted to say, so they just let him go. If there was one screening that I missed at this year’s Film Festival that I would really like to have made it would have been “Ishtar” a movie that I have championed in the face of derisive criticism since the day it opened. Williams talked about how he was trying to create songs for that film that work musically but were cringe-worthy, and frankly he succeeded. He was pretty proud however of some of the lyrical rhyming that he did and who can blame him.
After the conversation we rushed over to the Egyptian Theater for another one of those things that we look forward to every year, the Craig Barron Ben Burtt presentation of “The Towering Inferno”. These two Academy award-winning film technicians deconstruct the visual effects and the sound effects of the movie that they talk about each year. We briefly met our friend Michael in line, who had shown up hoping to be able to crash the presentation and was in the standby line. We told him we would try to hold a seat for him when we got inside, but he texted us that he never really got close to being able to have a ticket to the screening. Maybe next year Michael, sorry.
Burtt and Baron both have a lot of fun putting these presentations together and they showed up in their firefighters turnouts and helmets to explain how the movie was made. They had some great behind the scenes pictures and clips to show, and the story of working with fire is always fascinating.
“The Towering Inferno” is 2 hours and 45 minutes, which sounds like a long time but it actually moves very effectively. Some people may think of it as a Cheesy disaster film, but let me tell you it works really well and plays like gangbusters on the screen. Maybe the character development is a little thin, but the plot plays out with a lot of suspense and there are some great set pieces. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen both get to play action hero in a couple of scenes and those look terrific on the big screen. Everyone was surprised at how well the film holds up, and this was the right way to see it on the big screen with great sound.
It also turns out that Director John Landis was a stuntman on the film who took a dive out a window on fire, and he was in the audience for the screening. How cool was this bit of trivia?
For our last film at the festival we decided to skip the closing night screening in the Chinese IMAX theater and instead opted for screening of the Gene Kelly Musical “On the Town”. The hosts for the show were Mario Cantone and Kate Flannery and I think both of them had a few shots before the screening because they were feeling good.
They didn’t have any special insight into the film but they enjoyed talking about the three main characters and they engaged in a variation of the “F***”, Marry, or Kill? game, and let’s just say the poor Jules Munchen came up on the short end of the stick with everyone.
“On the Town” is an ebullient celebration of New York City and the Golden Age of Hollywood dancing. Anne Miller and Vera Ellen are terrific dancers and Betty Garrett is no slouch either. There are great sequences and memorable moments in the film and it feels really nice to close out a classic film festival with a movie that came from the Dream Factory at its height.
So that was our Festival experience and I can’t wait till next year.
There is literally no need for a sequel to the 2019 horror comedy , “Ready or Not” . That film was a nifty little thriller that accomplished its goal in a less than 2 hour time slot and left.you completely satisfied with the outcome. The only reason to follow up is to have some more fun or to make more money. I am not an investor in a movie studio,.so for me, the only thing that matters, is the movie fun?
My answer is yes. “Ready or Not 2” is a lot of fun, although it does suffer as most sequels do from not being as fresh as the original. The film basically reboots the same scenario as the original film, but throws in additional characters and motives and provides the kind of World building that would allow such an expansion. In fact , the film picks up exactly where the first one left off , with Grace, played by Samara Weaving, sitting on the steps of the La Domas mansion , smoking a cigarette and trying to recover from her ordeal. Almost immediately, she becomes a suspect in the burning down of the house, and the vanishing of all of her in-laws, and her husband.
The LA Domas Family Dominion turns out to be part of a cabal of satanists who basically run the world as oligarchs, controlling huge swaths of wealth and power. Director David Cronenberg appears as the head of the entire syndicate of evil doers .and Grace’s victory in the game leads to a new set of circumstances. This reset the rules for the organization and required a follow up game. Elijah Woods appears as the enigmatic attorney who represents Mr. Le Bail, the devil-like figurehead that all of the families are subservient to.
With a little retconning and a lot of exposition provided by various members of the families and by the Woods character, we see how a new game is going to play out and the added wrinkle of multiple families competing to kill Grace is also layered with a family dynamic that we weren’t expecting. Grace has an estranged younger sister, who accidentally becomes involved in the game herself. So now we have the 2 women racing against 5 other families in an attempt to survive a more elaborate game of Hide and Seek, with the stakes being control of the world.
If the set up sounds convoluted , well , frankly , it is. I didn’t mind that. In fact, it makes some of the fun that follows more interesting and feels like it’s got bigger stakes. The intensity of the violence is turned up, as is some of the character humor of the twisted oligarchs.as they jockey for position and control. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Sean Hatosy play the children of Cronenberg’s character who become the main antagonists. Hatosy , in particular, is shown as a dangerously venal monster, with only a desire to satisfy his own interests.
Grace’s sister Faith is played by actress Kathryn Newton, and the two sisters’ estrangement and reconciliation becomes an important part of the secondary plot. In the long run, it is a lot of foolishness, designed merely to give us a reason for a group of people to try desperately to kill another group of people, and in the end, for us to clearly root for one side. The film is funny and the sick way that the original was. There are several twists along the way , some of which you see coming , some of which are a surprise. If you are a fan of the first film , you will most likely enjoy this one, Just probably not as much.
I saw this movie in a Thursday Early screening, and I knew there was trouble by the sparsity of the crowd. In spite of coming from an accomplished actress as director with an award nominated film in her directing resume, there was plenty to doubt. This was obviously going to be a punk rock version of the Bride of Frankenstein, but it is hard to tell who would be the audience. We were there as fans of actress Jessie Buckley, who should be grateful this movie opened after the Academy Award voting this year had closed. She was terrific in “Hamnet” but over the top and more anonymous than expected in this.
From the start of the film, when the ghost of Mary Shelly, reaches out for an insane story follow up to her famous novel, you get chaos. Somehow her spirit possesses a mob good time girl, and then that woman is murdered and her body rejuvenated by a mad doctor, prompted to do so by the creature that Mary Shelly invented. Yeah, it’s that kind of batshit crazy and it gets more convoluted as well. There is a side story that involves the mobster who is responsible for the crime in Chicago in the 1930s, and he is not named Al Capone , but rather has the last name of Lupino, who is pursued by the dead woman reborn who it turns out was named Ida. Film fans will recognize this combination of names as the identity of actress and proto-feminist director Ida Lupino, the most well known woman director of films in the 40s and 50s in Hollywood. That barely scratches the surface of the movie references that the film piles on.
“Frank”, the so named creature (maybe a lazy choice, maybe deliberately stupid), is a fan of Ronnie Reed, a singing and dancing movie star clearly inspired by Fred Astaire. Somehow, the Frankenstein Monster and his Bride, end up in a road picture, like a less romantic Gable and Colbert, more like Bonnie and Clyde or Mickey and Mallory. Death and Michael Jackson dance moves follow. Then we throw in a pursuing detective and his secretary, the real brains of the pair, and you have a chase movie. Scene to scene we watch the pursuers and the pursued, hop skip and jump through towns connected by the movies of Ronnie reed, for no particular reason. At one point a cult of women decide to emulate the Bride as if she were a modern YouTube influencer, advocating death and weird makeup tips. Pay close attention to when this happens because although it gets a whole 30 seconds of screen time, it will be a big part of the resolution of the film.
OK, so this is all supposed to be absurdist art we are absorbing for two plus hours, but only the occasional image suggests anything artistic, the rest of it is gibberish. Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley, overact the vast majority of the time, diminishing the moments in the film when you might have had some interest in their characters. Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as the pursuers are moistly wasted with motives that are fuzzy and story arcs that make no sense. When the credits at the end of the movie start with The Monster Mash as the closing song, it is clear that this was one long cartoon. Randomly sticking incomplete feminist ideas into a Pepe LePew short, makes no sense an swallows up any purpose the movie might have.
I can say that I enjoyed watching the film in several sequences, but that this is clearly not a good movie and it’s existence is a puzzle. Who thought the script was worth the effort, much less the money that it took. Maggie Gyllenhaal got too far out over her skis and the result is a mildly interesting mess that will be lucky to get midnight screenings at art house theaters but not ant acclaim. This is “The Room” for horror film fans, and that may sound inviting, I suspect most of you will not feel so if you spent the night with it.
Director Sam Rami has been a favorite of mine since the Evil Dead movies of the late ’80s. In fact I recently wrote about two of his films that I saw in theaters this year, “Darkman” and “The Quick and the Dead”. It’s been a while since he’s had a film out that was clearly something that he was built for. He did the best he could to mold “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” into a Sam Rami film, but it still had to be a Marvel product.
With “Send Help”, he returns to the horror genre at least peripherally. While not a straight horror film, “Send Help” does have several horror elements to it, and a couple of good jump scares, one of which is clearly horror motivated. It is the scenario set up by the story that makes this more of an adventure drama, but the way Rami directs it, you will feel tension and revulsion as if you were watching a horror film.
One of the things that is unique about this movie, is that it will make us feel sympathetic to someone who commits some atrocious acts. Rachel McAdams stars as the put-upon data analyst and accounting specialist, Linda Liddle, who is passed over for a promotion by someone who is younger, less experienced and of a different gender. This is done largely because the new head of the firm, the son of the firm’s founder, is buddies with the guy and it’s an old school approach to business.
After having been demeaned and ridiculed by her coworkers and boss, Linda gains the upper hand when their private jet crashes and she and her boss are stranded on an island, with a little chance of rescue. What follows is a series of events where the two characters fight, bond, fight some more, and deal with ambiguous relational issues. You never however get the feeling that all is going to be right. The boss, Bradley, played by Dylan O’Brien, continues to be a person whose lack of power drives him to do things to gain the upper hand. McAdams on the other hand, relishes her situation so much that she ignores some potential opportunities to escape the situation. It may be a trope in these revenge horror type films, that we sympathize with a dangerous character. I remember seeing Willard back in 1971, and knowing that even though he was a little deranged and murderous, I wanted him to get the best of his tormentors.
Surprisingly there are times when we can sympathize with the boss as well. Every time however, that he seems to be more human and someone who can work with his employee, he slips back into the habit of trying to one up his partner in the situation. Sam Rami lights us up with dangerous situations, sudden animal attacks, and a variety of injuries and poisons that make life on this island feel very tentative and risky.
As usual there are a couple of twists in the story, and when the final ones are revealed I think you will discover that the film is a very satisfying two hours of entertainment. That is if you enjoy Sam Rami’s camera style and dark sense of humor. In case you haven’t guessed I do.
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Kirkham A Movie A Day 