Scott’s Movie Comments

Original post date: 31 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ In the sweepstakes for unconvincing romantic movie couples let us add the names of Diane Keaton—here a poster girl for the notion that older single women are totally hopeless with money—and Brendan Gleeson, playing a Dubliner living rough on London’s Hampstead Heath. Also unbelievable is the plot of this movie, which is kind of odd since it is actually inspired by a true story. In real life, Harry Hallowes was from Sligo, not Dublin, and before he died in 2016 he expressed the intention of willing his slice of the heath, which he won in a court battle, to the British royal family, calling them the “the last bastion of refinement and sophistication.” In this flick his fictional alter ego, Donald Horner, likes to lunch next to Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, which is kind of funny because Donald is basically an anti-government survivalist and loner who refuses to pay taxes or for any city services. By the end of his court battle t...

Original post date: 30 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ When people say if you can remember the 1960s then you weren’t there, they are talking about not remembering this movie. Definitely a candidate for best time capsule of 1968, a mere recitation of its plot points and cast members sounds like an incredibly unlikely evocation of the era. A sort of sex-and-drug-addled reinvention of Voltaire’s Candide, the film follows the travails, adventures and education of a nubile naïf from the American Midwest. Give the film credit for making a woman the central character in this spiritual odyssey and try to overlook the fact she is played by a stunningly beautiful Swedish actor (18 at the time of the movie’s release) who is required by the plot to strip down to her underwear at least once in every reel. As played by Ewa Aulin, high school student Candy is a total innocent but of the kind that was lasciviously photographed and airbrushed in the male fantasy pictorials of Playboy magazine at the time (...

Original post date: 21 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ This is the comedy that made the UK’s Ealing Studios an international success. Other classics like Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets would follow quickly the same year, 1949. The film’s fortunes, however, nearly foundered like the ill-fated ship transporting the titular spirits. It was the first film of Boston-born Scottish filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick, and his insistence on filming on location in the storm-lashed Outer Hebrides nearly proved disastrous. Because of a US ban on mentioning alcoholic drinks in titles, the film was initially dubbed stateside (as was the source novel by Compton MacKenzie) Tight Little Island. (James Thurber suggested an even better one: Scotch on the Rocks. ) Loosely based on an actual incident, the film recounts how the residents of the island of Todday, under war rationing, become ever more desperate for their customary dram of whiskey. Their prayers are answered when a cargo ship, bound ...

Original post date: 11 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ The very beginning of this flick promises a return to old-school entertainment. For one thing, they actually run a bunch of credits at the start of the movie. Also, the music is cool with a fair helping of classic French pop by the likes of Françoise Hardy, France Gall, Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. It has that widescreen Technicolor feel like those elegant spy or mystery movies from the 1960s. Quickly enough though, we are into 21st-century territory where irony is squeezed out of how dark and perverted American suburbs can be, how sunlight, modern architecture and children’s playdates are only a mask over the soul’s darkness. Think Desperate Housewives meets the late Stanley Donen’s Charade. Anna Kendrick’s Stephanie is a familiar type—the overachieving (single) mom who annoys all the other moms by being too perfect and who also has a video blog about cooking and crafts. Blake Lively’s Emily is her unlikely new best friend, a ...

Original post date: 5 March 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This movie is so much better than it has any right to be. It has been done so many times now (as What Price Hollywood? in 1932 and with this same title in 1937, 1954 and 1976) the story is not even well-worn anymore. It’s just worn. Still, there is something timeless about the tale of one star wobbling at his zenith just before his upcoming rapid descent while connecting with a young woman about to begin her upward trajectory. As played in this version, it almost seems as if Bradley Cooper’s self-destructive country rocker senses his impending doom (there a couple of unsubtle early shots of nooses on a billboard) and reaches out to pass his luck on to someone deserving while there is still time. In addition to being a familiar story, this always ran the risk of being a vanity project with Cooper not only starring but also directing and co-writing the screenplay (with Eric Roth and Will Fetters). For an actor, a talented, charming, downsp...

Original post date: 23 February 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ My, my, this is certainly an interesting movie. An old-school historical epic (running time well over two hours) released in 1970, this flick dramatizes the life and times of Oliver Cromwell, a dominant figure of mid-17th century England. There are lots of speechmaking scenes in Parliament, lots of battle scenes, and then lots more speechmaking scenes in Parliament. It was written and directed by Ken Hughes, who may be best known for two Ian Fleming adaptations. He was one of five credited directors on 1967’s Casino Royale and sole director of 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Somewhat surprisingly, Hughes tries here to turn Puritan political insurgent Cromwell into George Washington, i.e. a gentleman farmer reluctantly called on to lead his country’s rebellion against a despotic British monarch and then to become the first head of a new republic. I sought out this movie because, well, I had to. I have been steeped in all things Cromwe...

Original post date: 22 February 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ Lily Tomlin is always such a delight to encounter in a movie or TV role (her latest gigs include being the voice of Aunt May in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the Netflix series Grace and Frankie ) that it is jarring to see her play a really unpleasant character as she does here. Although known mainly for comedy, we have always known that she has serious dramatic chops, and they get a good showcase here. Written and directed by Paul Weitz ( American Pie, About a Boy ), this flick more or less has the classic structure of the Heroic Quest. In the middle of a messy breakup with a younger lover, Tomlin’s feminist writer/poet Elle is approached by her teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner), who is going through her own crisis: she is pregnant and wants an abortion—today. The screenplay puts a somewhat arbitrary deadline on the procedure to heighten the dramatic tension as well as the somewhat arbitrary restriction of Elle being...

Original post date: 16 February 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ Like many really good documentaries, this one adopts the trappings of a genre feature film. It begins more or less as a comedy of coincidences with Bobby and David enthusiastically recounting how they and their fellow separated-at-birth brother Eddy met in the year 1980 at the age of 19. They had all grown up in the New York area and the multiple coincidences in their divergent lives went beyond simple genetics. In the second half, however, things take a dark turn as we learn about the three families’ efforts to understand how the brothers came to be separated and placed in the way that they were. A journalist, investigating independently the experiments carried out on twins and triplets in the latter 20th century, fills in some of the gaps, as does the UK-based filmmaker of this doc, Tim Wardle, with his own digging. As the brothers’ story gave them their proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, there is plenty of footage of them during ...

Original post date: 6 February 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ One review I read of this very funny and very evocative 2010 Welsh coming-of-tale used the shorthand “Max Fischer meets Billy Liar. ” (The former refers to Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, the latter is John Schlesinger’s 1963 Walter-Mitty-esque movie set in England’s gloomy north country.) This is indeed like an Anderson film, though I confess that did not occur to me as I watched it. I was reminded instead of the quirky spate of filmic Bildungsromans that sprouted on screens in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which no doubt inspired Rushmore and perhaps this. The blank stare on the face of our protagonist Oliver (Craig Roberts) is reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, but he is really more like Bud Cort, who appeared in movies like Brewster McCloud and, especially, Harold and Maude. Though he lets us down badly in moral terms (he is, after all, male and adolescent), Oliver is amusing company. A single child, he and his parents a...

Original post date: 29 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ Has the New York literary world ever before been as wonderfully de-glamorized as it is in this movie? Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Lee Israel’s confessional memoir could well put anyone off writing as a career. Fortunately, it did not put off Nicole Holofcener (director of movies like Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing and Friends with Money ) and Jeff Whitty from writing this screenplay. Some of its early points are a bit obvious, but as the story evolves, we are sucked in and happily along for the ride. Melissa McCarthy is something of a revelation in a role we would expect to see Kathy Bates in. Her dipsomaniac author has few redeeming qualities but we care about her anyway. Ditto the wonderful Richard E. Grant whose patented erudite-sounding waster character never gets old. These two are like wise-cracking denizens escaped from a Charles Bukowski story. We accept Lee’s fraud because we share her satisfaction at having a ...

Original post date: 27 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ Does this qualify as a jukebox musical? I ask because it seems to me the main reason for watching—and enjoying—this flick is the same as for watching movies like Mamma Mia! : to hear the songs. In this case, the songs are actually sung by Freddie Mercury, though at times skillfully blended through transitional bits with the Rami Malek’s voice and vocal support from Canadian singer Marc Martel. As with Mamma Mia!, everything else is kind of filler to get us from one song to another, except that Mamma Mia! had to actually come up with a story to work the lyrics into the narrative, while Bohemian Rhapsody simply has to show us the members of Queen coming up with ideas for songs. Strangely, for a work of a director of Bryan Singer’s caliber, this movie has little artistic viewpoint of its own. Rather, it has “Authorized Biography” stamped all over it. There is no classic Hollywood biopic shorthand that goes unused or unacted upon. In fact...

Original post date: 26 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ So here’s another one of those quickie movies that someone just threw together during a weekend or two. Ha! If you know anything about this film, then you are aware it is the poster child for filmmaking production hell. As documented no fewer than 16 years ago in the film Lost in La Mancha, this movie would wind up taking Terry Gilliam nearly three decades to complete. Think about that. This flick was conceived more or less around the same time as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In 2000 the great Jean Rochefort was to be Quixote and Johnny Depp the filmmaker he takes to be his Sancho Panza. In 2010 it was to be Robert Duvall and Ewan McGregor. In 2015, it was John Hurt and Jack O’Connell. In the end it is Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver. (The film is dedicated to the memories of Rochefort and Hurt.) And how fitting that it is Pryce, who had the lead role in Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil. For a film that deals with multiple levels of meta...

Original post date: 22 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ A year ago I belatedly declared Alfonso Cuarón the clear standout of the three contemporary Oscar-winning Mexican filmmakers (along with Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu) who rose to international prominence more or less simultaneously. With this multi-nominated gem, it is now clearly case closed. If there is a flaw to this masterwork, it may that it too consciously models itself on the European artists that Cuarón clearly admires. I mean, you do not make a heavily-nostalgic, sometimes-hallucinatory art film based on your own childhood and call it Roma without begging to be compared to Federico Fellini and his brethren. Still, coming from Mexico City’s Colonia Roma neighborhood, how could he have resisted? Normally in these auteur revisits to the past, the point of view is that of a child, thereby forcing us to fill in the gaps of what the child observes but does not understand. In this case, our perspective is that ...

Original post date: 19 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This movie got quite a bit of attention merely for being a contemporary romcom set in Asia and aimed at the US (as well as international) market. It seems strange to me that this would be unusual, but there you are. And let us be clear. Though directed by an American (Jon M. Chu, who shares a surname with the female protagonist), this is a truly international project. Despite the Asian setting and the word Asian in the title, the cast and crew are from the US, the UK, Singapore, Malaysia, China and various other countries. As an entertainment, it is a rather delightful throwback to the glamorous, widescreen, Technicolor, location-hopping studio movies of the 1950s and early 1960s. It is also slightly reminiscent of the escapist films of the 1930s that regaled audiences with the exploits of the fabulously carefree and wealthy while most people were enduring the throes of the Great Depression. Adapted from Singaporean-American Kevin Kwa...

Original post date: 16 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ Is up-and-coming English actor Harris Dickinson in danger of being typecast? So far, at least in screen roles, he is specializing in beautiful young men at risk of becoming one of the world’s victims. He was on a sexually-confused, downward spiral in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats. Then his hedonistic teenage adventures in Rome were interrupted by a world-famous kidnapping in Danny Boyle’s series Trust. In this flick he is a naïve but game young lad from the north of England drawn to the capital city with little more than an open attitude and an optimistic nature. Within minutes of arriving, he is befriended by a wise homeless man and then recruited by an internationally diverse group of attractive young men into the glamorous world of rent boys cum artistic models. If Beach Rats was all bleak and neo-realist, then Postcards from London is all gaudy and bright with the make-believe artifice of wonderfully decorated sound stages. If you ar...

Original post date: 16 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ This movie should be a whole lot more depressing than it is. A little bit reminiscent of Larry Clark’s movies, it follows young Frankie as he wastes away a hot summer in Brooklyn with his equally aimless mates. Written and directed by Eliza Hittman, it is nicely understated with a minimum of dialog, especially from Frankie and his pals who, being young posturing males, tend to express themselves in knowing grunts and the usual proto-macho utterings. With no job—it is not clear whether he is on a break from school or out of school completely—Frankie clearly has little for doing. He battles his boredom—and escapes the bleakness borne of his father’s slow, miserable death at home from cancer—by exploring online sex sites and using drugs. Given the lad’s interest in gay sex, we are primed to expect a coming-out story, but that is not what Hittman has in mind. Instead, we watch as the conflicting strands in Frankie’s life slowly converge a...

Original post date: 8 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ I always know seeing a movie has been worthwhile when I find myself telling people that the less they know about it beforehand the better their experience will be. Of course, that also makes it a bit tricky to review. Sorry to Bother You is one of those gems that keeps you guessing from scene to scene where exactly it is going and what exactly its game is or even how to classify it genre-wise. Is it a satirical comedy? Is it a Capra-esque tale of a man against the system? Is it a political statement? Or is it all of the above? Or maybe rapper/activist Boots Riley, who wrote and directed, has something else in mind altogether? The set-up is that our everyman hero Cassius Green (character names have been chosen with a fair amount of knowing wit) is keen to find a job and maybe stop living in the garage of his uncle’s house in Oakland, California. He is welcomed with open arms by a telemarketing company but finds phone sales challenging u...

Original post date: 3 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ I was a bit surprised to hear Olivia Colman, in interviews about this film, say she knew nothing about Queen Anne before taking the title role and to hear her interviewers express similar ignorance. Really? Am I the only one who still remembers the 1969 BBC TV series (airing in 1971 in the US on PBS) The First Churchills? It was the consolation offered up to anglophile Yanks undergoing withdrawal from The Forsyte Saga. It starred John Neville and Susan Hampshire as the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and Margaret Tyzack as Princess (later Queen) Anne. Abigail Hill was played by Jill Balcon, who happened to be the mother of a youngster named Daniel Day-Lewis. Needless to say, the Beeb’s history-filled, 12-part treatment was nowhere near as frothy as this flick written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara and directed by the absurdity-loving Greek Yorgos Lanthimos, who previously gave us Dogtooth, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred De...

Original post date: 1 January 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ Sacha Gervasi is a London-born filmmaker who made an impression with his 2008 documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil, about a Canadian heavy-metal band dubbed the “real life Spinal Tap.” That led to him directing Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock. Before any of that, though, he happened to be the last journalist to interview French actor Hervé Villechaize before his suicide in 1993. This film is a fictionalized version of that encounter, substituting Jamie Dornan as an Irish journalist trying to get his life and career back together after an epic alcohol-fueled meltdown. In L.A. to interview Gore Vidal, Dornan’s writer is assigned to also do a short, humorous piece on Villechaize to mark the 20th anniversary of The Man with the Golden Gun (in which Villechaize played Christopher Lee’s henchman Nick Nack). The flamboyant, hard-partying Villechaize, on the other hand, has other ideas, and the night turns into a series of discussions, arguments...

Original post date: 14 April 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ “I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” This 1957 poison pen letter to the world of journalistic arrogance and backstabbing scriveners was based on stories by Ernest Lehman, drawn from his experiences as a gofer for Walter Winchell and other gossip columnists. Lehman wanted to direct, but the producers instead brought in a more experienced helmer, Scottish Ealing veteran Alexander Mackendrick. Lehman withdrew because of a stomach illness, and Clifford Odets was brought in for rewrites of Lehman’s screenplay. The result is a darkly cynical portrait of a society in which powerful egos must be stroked, principles are for losers, and working gals could sure use a #MeToo movement. Tony Curtis plays sleazy publicist Sidney Falco with just enough of a hint of conscience—mainly reflected through concerned looks from his secretary, Sally (Jeff Donnell)—to hope he’ll eventually do the right thing—or at least not do t...

Original post date: 11 April 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ When this movie came out in 1985, it was hip and trendsetting and firmly clutching the zeitgeist. Now it’s a time capsule. It’s a moment frozen in amber that we can study to try understanding something about ancient history. But you know what, ancient history doesn’t look all that different from today after all. The setting is the bohemian demi-monde of hipster New York in which the titular Susan makes references to the completely alien nature of the suburbs that could easily be coming from the mouth of Richard E. Grant in last year’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? Our current media, which think that gender fluidity and the urban/hick divide are new-fangled things, should take a gander at this. The sophomore feature film (after Smithereens ) of Susan Seidelman, this is a mixed-up-identities thriller/comedy that now seems strangely prescient about our society’s increasing identity crisis. Susan, as played by Madonna in her 20s (no, kids, not t...

Original post date: 8 April 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ To the long list of movies that have done location shooting in my native Kern County, California, we can add the latest installment from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In addition to filming at Edwards Air Force Base, at one point our intrepid Carol Danvers and Nick Fury land at Pancho’s Bar in the desert town of Rosamond. Pancho’s is really the Zebra Club, but it was clearly renamed in honor of legendary aviator Florence Lowe “Pancho” Barnes, who was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, the film adapation of which is also name-checked in a great blink-or-you’ll-miss-it scene in a Blockbuster Video. Yes, this movie is set in the 1990s, and it has great fun reminiscing over how slow and clunky computers were back then. The nods to heroic test-pilot history is one of the best things about this movie. Another is a more generous slice of time with Samuel L. Jackson than we usually get in the Marvel movies, even if he borders on uncan...

Original post date: 9 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ This was the big winner of the Golden Space Needle Awards for Outstanding Picture and Outstanding Direction (by Lasse Hallström) at the Twelfth Annual Seattle International Film Festival. Scott Bob gives this flick two thumbs up just for being Swedish and another thumb up because I liked it. It is currently playing in regular theaters, and I urge everyone to go see it. Was it really the best film? I don’t know. It’s not about a Big Issue like The Unknown Soldier or Where To and Back? or even Amazing Grace and Chuck (another film about a little kid). But on its own level, it is as good a film as any of them. You might compare it to Fanny and Alexander except that it’s not as long, it takes place in the 1950s, the kid doesn’t have a sister, and there’s no evil minister or big rescue. Actually, this film is more moving and affecting than any film I have seen by Ingmar Bergman. The protagonist, a little kid named Ingemar, is getting some hard...

Original post date: 7 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This U.S.-French-Italian co-production is a loving homage to films and filmmaking and to being brothers and to being Italian. Which is only natural since it is made by two filmmaking Italian brothers. Paolo and Vittorio Traviani have made Padre, Padrone, Night of the Shooting Stars, and Kaos. Their films always seem just a little bit magical, almost like a fairy tale, even when dealing with the most common of events. The story concerns two brothers who leave Italy for America in the early part of this century, hoping to make enough money to save their family’s business. The family, consisting of dad and seven sons, are all craftsmen. They restore beautiful Romanesque cathedrals. In America, the brothers don’t find any Romanesque cathedrals to restore, but they do wind up in Hollywood building sets for legendary filmmaker D.W. Griffith (played by Charles Dance, who was Meryl Streep’s husband in Plenty, but probably got seen by more people ...

Original post date: 7 June 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ Just when you thought that movies have pushed the bounds of good taste as far or farther than they could go, along comes Street Trash, which redefines what really bad taste means. I mean, really! A game of keep-away with a dismembered male member? Argh! Let me be clear here, I am giving one star because I think the people who made this movie would be crushed if they got more. The plot centers on a bunch of low-life street people in New York City who live for their next swig of booze. The main thing going on is that the local liquor store is selling a bunch of really old whiskey (called Viper) that someone found hidden away. But apparently this stuff is so old that it has changed chemically somehow. And it’s not good for you. It affects everybody a little differently, but the main thing it does is dissolve you from the inside. (Although one fat bum drinks it and expands and expands until he explodes in beautiful Technicolor and slow motion...

Original post date: 6 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ The title of this movie is never really explained in the movie, but I have been given to understand that, if you think about it in such a way as to come up with something nasty, you will get the idea. That’s the sort of guy Joe Orton was. He also was constantly making things up that weren’t true just to mess up people’s minds. The facts here are well known. Orton wrote a few plays, dark comedies, and was very successful. In 1967 his lover and roommate Kenneth Halliwell killed him with a hammer and then committed suicide. This sounds like it could be a real downer of a movie, but it is actually quite funny and entertaining. Even the occasion of the murder provides a blackly funny line as does the cremation afterwards. The movie portrays the two main characters’ relationship as a marriage and suggests the jealousies that doomed the couple afflict all marriages to some extent. Halliwell’s envy at his former protégé surpassing him is echoed b...

Original post date: 6 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ This is a French epic of the first order. Beautifully photographed in Provence, the setting is rural France of the 1920s. Jean de Florette (played by Gerard Depardieu, who is in virtually every French movie ever made) is a tax collector by trade. But when his uncle dies, he inherits a house and farm in the country. Jean, who happens to be a hunchback and has a lovely wife and daughter, decides to move to the farm and get away from city life. What he doesn’t know is that the neighbors covet the farm for a natural spring (which they have conveniently hidden from him). So, while they pretend to be his good friends, they are sabotaging his farming efforts every chance they get. It is heartbreaking to watch the innocent, ever optimistic Jean try and try again to make a go of his farm only to be wiped out for the lack of water, which he doesn’t suspect is under his very nose. Even ugly Ugolin, who is after the farm, is torn between greed and pi...

Original post date: 6 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This was another last-minute substitution at the Seattle film festival. (There were so many last-minute schedule changes during the last week that the waggish deputy director was calling it the Seattle International Film Fiasco.) So what could a movie called The Beat be about? Disco music? Police? Punk rock? Try Jack Kerouac. This movie isn’t about Jack Kerouac, but that seems to be the kind of Beat they’re talking about. This is based on a play, and you can tell, although they’ve opened it up quite a bit. It plays sort of like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in an inner city high school. The lives of some street gang kids are changed when a new kid (Rex) moves into the neighborhood. It’s hard to tell whether Rex is crazy or a genius or both. Sometimes he sounds like a Kerouac for the Eighties. Sometimes he sounds like he’s read too many Marvel comic books. And sometimes he’s just really weird. But he becomes almost a mystical prophet for...

Original post date: 6 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ I’ve got to be honest here. I was half-asleep through much of this movie, which was screened at midnight. This isn’t really the movie’s fault, although lack of sleep didn’t seem to be a problem for Evil Dead II or Street Trash. Anyway, this Australian flick takes us back into Mad Max/Road Warrior territory. It is sometime a few years from now and civilization is breaking down pretty badly. The latest big movie is Rambo Takes Russia. A teenager named Crabs (“I thought I had them once, but I didn’t”) takes his girlfriend to the drive-in. But while he is having his way with her, someone rips off the tires from his car. Turns out it was the police. In fact, everybody’s getting their tires ripped off. And the drive-in has a barbed-wire, electrified fence. In other words, the powers that be have turned the drive-in into a concentration camp to better manage the unruly teen population. But Crabs (love that name!) is a rebel. He thinks of nothing...

Original post date: 5 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ You might think of this film as Repo Man goes West. It is directed by Alex Cox, who did the wonderful Repo Man, not to mention Sid and Nancy. This time he is lampooning Sergio Leone’s westerns and is using the same set in southern Spain that Leone used in his spaghetti westerns. You can probably identify some kind of plot to all this, but there really isn’t much point. It all seems kind of improvised and appears to be full of “in” jokes. There are some wonderfully funny bits and parodies as well as weird images that stay with you. Everyone in this town is hooked on coffee and is after money. Many of the parts are taken by members of the Irish band The Pogues, and apparently the film is based on some of their songs. Previous familiarity with this music seems to help one appreciate the movie. The main thing missing here is some central character, preferably a real film icon, to do the same thing for this movie as Harry Dean Stanton did for ...

Original post date: 5 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ Have you ever wondered how it came to be that people stopped dancing the fox trot and started dancing the way people do now (without touching each other)? Well, it all happened one night in 1963 at a resort in the Catskills (run by Jack Weston, who is really starting to look old). Of course, this was before we lost our innocence, which means before JFK was assassinated and (according to this movie) before the Beatles became popular. As a disclaimer, 1et me say I was not disposed to like this movie because it was a last-minute substitution for a movie I really wanted to see by one of my favorite directors, Ettore Scola. Anyway, Dirty Dancing suffers from Flashdance -itis. The music and dancing are fun, but it’s too bad they tried to weave some kind of story in between. They also have trouble keeping the music and dancing in 1963; the 1980s keep creeping in. The young lady coming of age here (everyone calls her Baby) is played by Jennifer G...

Original post date: 5 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ The title is Norwegian for “hard asphalt” which suggests to me that Norwegian may not be that difficult a language after all. The film is basically a fun-filled travelogue of Oslo as seen through the eyes of two of its most upstanding citizens. Knut and Ida are your basic Norwegian fun couple. He’s an alcoholic, who goes crazy every once in a while and beats up Ida. She’s a junkie, who walks the street part-time to make ends meet. They’re young, they’re in love, and they’re depressing. They get by through scams, petty thievery, and whoring. They try to make a go of it by getting real jobs and going to school and all that stuff that never works in movies like this. In the end, you think that Ida has finally got her act together because she walks out on Knut. But at the final fadeout we see her listing her services and prices to some john in a car. This movie is even more depressing because it is based on someone’s actual autobiography. But...

Original post date: 4 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ This Japanese movie does for food what Last Tango in Paris did for sex and what Rocky did for boxing and what Apocalypse Now did for war and what The Magnificent Seven did for Mexican villages. You would have to consider this an extremely funny comedy, unless you happen to be a turtle in which case you would have to consider it a snuff movie. It is really just a string of black-outs and skits strung together, all dealing with food and the Japanese obsession with it. Much of the film deals with the adventures of Tampopo (which is Japanese for Dandelion), a young widow who is trying to be the best noodle cooker in Japan. If you are like me (and God help you if you are), you will have a great time picking out all of the many references to other movies, including westerns, Rocky, gangster movies, etc. Very, very funny. And I guarantee that, if you see this movie, you will never think about egg yolk in the same way again. If you get the chance...

Original post date: 23 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ There is a story behind this 1950 movie. It was directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the legendary British team which did a slew of highly regarded movies like The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. It was produced by Hollywood’s David Selznick and stars Jennifer Jones, who was to become Mrs. Selznick. Mr. Selznick had artistic differences with the directors, however, and ended up re-shooting a lot of the movie and releasing it in the U.S. as The Wild Heart. So the film festival presented a rare opportunity to see the English version. Technically, the film cannot be faulted. The story, however, was met with some derision by the audience. Somewhat reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, it concerns a wild gypsy girl named Hazel who, in a fit of anger against her father, vows to marry the first man who proposes. The lucky guy turns out to be the parson, who is not exactly exciting. Meanwhile, the squire (a dastardly cad who all but twir...

Original post date: 3 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ What the heck is this? A contemporary comedy about single people in the 1980s trying to have a relationship… with no sex in it? Yes, it’s true! Tim and Nancy are two single people in L.A. who are at that scary age of 29. Tim (Mark McClure, Jimmy Olsen in the Superman movies) works in a large corporation and isn’t sure what he’s supposed to be doing there. His active life mainly includes watching basketball games on TV. Nancy (Jennifer Edwards, Blake’s daughter) is a bookworm and perpetual student (she has 503 units out of the 180 required for graduation) with a nothing job in a video store. The plot is familiar. They each have the requisite best friend giving them lots of bad advice. Through an improbable series of events, Tim places a personal ad that describes the perfect single male, and Nancy answers it. They both pretend to be what they are not: rich, interesting, cultured, athletic. They go on a hilarious weekend trip into the mount...

Original post date: 3 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ This is the final part of The Austrian Trilogy, and these three films are truly a monumental film achievement, even though they are filmed in black and white (better to blend in with documentary footage) and obviously didn’t cost a fortune to make. I hope these films will get more exposure in this country. In this installment, our friend Freddy is now a U.S. citizen and soldier, whose knowledge of German is exploited by the Allies, as they push through Germany. He winds up with the occupation army back in his hometown of Vienna. But things are drastically different, and I’m not just talking about half the buildings being blown up. Now Freddy is one of the conquerors. His U.S. Army uniform makes him privileged in this defeated country, a status he has never known before in his life as a “professional emigrant.” But Freddy’s expectations of what post-war Austria would be like are dashed one by one. His former persecutors are de-nazified bec...

Original post date: 2 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ What if you were Catholic and you died and it turned out all those things the Church had told you were true? This is sort of the premise of this U.S. film. Four men at different stages of their lives find themselves dead and in purgatory. The group includes a marine killed in Vietnam, a gay writer who took too many painkillers, an unscrupulous businessman who chokes on a fishbone at a banquet in his honor, and a dogmatic sort who has a heart attack while playing football with his friends. Turns out they all were friends at St. Jude’s Catholic High School in the 1960s. There are lots of flashbacks as they try to figure out why they all wound up together in purgatory. Refreshingly, the actors who play them as teenagers are all really teenagers (as opposed to being in their 20s, as is usually the case in movies). There are plenty of good jabs at the church and at nuns and many other funny moments. At a school dance a stern nun walks around t...

Original post date: 2 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ Part two of The Austrian Trilogy which, incidentally, is titled Where To and Back? Anyway, this flick has about as much to do with Sante Fe as Brazil had to do with Brazil and Paris, Texas had to do with Paris, Texas. First, I have good news and bad news about our friend Ferry. The good news is, he finally manages to get on a boat out of Marseille to Casablanca and then New York. The bad news is, he doesn’t have a visa to enter the U.S. and he and others in the same predicament can’t get off the boat. One woman is so desperate that she jumps off the boat, and Ferry goes in after her to save her and he drowns. Meanwhile, the story follows a friend of Ferry’s, Alfred Wolff (aka Freddy), who is able to disembark and whose dream is to head for Santa Fe, New Mexico, and become a Jewish cowboy. The film observes various Jewish emigrants in New York who are having varying degrees of luck in dealing with the trauma of what they have been through,...

Original post date: 1 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ In another one of those hooks to draw in Americans, this film has been described as Hungary’s The Big Chill. It is, and it isn’t. It’s been a strange day for Makai, a Budapest disc jockey. One of his oldest friends Nikita (who is married) has borrowed Makai’s apartment for a tryst with a woman. Turns out the woman is Makai’s young wife. After throwing his wife out, Makai is then surprised by the arrival of a very old friend. Rèb left Hungary for the United States 18 years ago. Unfortunately, Rèb hadn’t been able to get a passport because of his wild ways, so he ripped off Makai’s passport and took off with his girlfriend Mari for fame and fortune in the New World, while Makai had to stay behind. Now Rèb is back with his totally Americanized teenage daughter Marylou (named for the Ricky Nelson song). Mari, meanwhile, left him long ago and returned to Hungary where she is married to Nikita (the one having the affair with Makai’s wife). Got ...

Original post date: 1 June 1987 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ The title may sound kind of strange, but if you were a Jew living in Europe in the 1930s, it might have been a thought that crossed your mind. This film is the first installment of The Austrian Trilogy, which is a pretentious way of saying that it is the first episode of a three-part mini-series that was on Austrian TV. The film follows a Jewish youth in 1938 in Vienna whose father is beaten to death, leaving the young man with no family. He finds it impossible to get out of Austria legally, so he crosses the border illegally into Czechoslovakia and becomes a refugee in Prague with lots of other Jews who are trying to stay one step ahead of the Nazi army. Ferdinand (Ferry, for short) takes up with a gentile who has escaped from Dachau, where he was imprisoned for helping Jews escape. The gentile, who goes by the nickname Ghandi, falls in love with a Jewish woman. When the Germans arrive in Prague, Ferry and the couple have made their esca...

Original post date: 2 May 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✰ My first question upon seeing this documentary about producer/director Dan Curtis and the phenomenon he spawned with his idea of a Gothic soap opera was: is this really directed by the guy who used to host Meet the Press on NBC? No, that’s not right. My first question was: why has no one made this movie before and what took so long? For the record, the filmmaker behind it, David Gregory, is not the well-known television journalist but rather the auteur behind 2008’s filmed-in-Connecticut Plague Town in which, according to IMDb, an “American family visiting their Irish roots accidentally stumbles on a horde of bloodthirsty mutant children.” In the past couple of decades, Gregory has made a slew of documentaries, long and short, about all kinds of topics relating to film and filmmaking with a particular emphasis on the outré. Now he has taken on a subject for which many of us have been waiting literally for decades: the career of the late gr...

Original post date: 4 May 2019 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ Being that this is a biopic about a famous fantasy writer, it comes as no surprise that it quickly puts us in mind of at least two other movies. Like 2017’s Goodbye Christopher Robin (about A.A. Milne), it shows us how a British writer may have used the penning of fanciful tales as a sort of therapy to recover from horrific experiences in World War I. Like 1996’s The Whole Wide World (about Robert E. Howard), we get regular visual hints and teases about the fantasy world brewing in the protagonist writer’s subconscious. Unfortunately, authors’ lives can be notoriously tricky to dramatize on screen. The most dramatic period in young Tolkien’s life was his participation in World War I and the Battle of the Somme, so it is not a surprise that the movie puts that front and center as a point from which we keep traveling backward to see his story in flashbacks. One only has to utter the words “World War I British trench warfare” to summon up a w...

Original post date: 10 May 2019 Rating: ✭✭✭✭ It is strange to be giving my coveted (and relatively rare) top rating to a movie with such a generic title and premise as this one, but this achievement by the Russo brothers is extraordinary. This is not only an endgame between earth’s (and the universe’s) heroes and Thanos, but it is a literary endgame for one of the most complex and enduring entertainment undertakings ever. At three hours plus a minute, it is a bit long for a popcorn movie, but the extra running time is not merely for additional extended CGI battle scenes. There is actual deliberately-paced drama here. Comic book and franchise devotees might well have expected this sequel to kick off from where its predecessor ended with immediate action, but instead we get an unhurried meditation on life and loss. Surviving Avengers deal with the consequences of defeat. Those who did not participate confront the fallout from inaction. As one would expect, the solution to the universe...

Original post date: 22 February 2007 Rating: ✭✭✭✭ Things have finally come full circle. The last time I saw this classic by Wim Wenders was 10 years after its release at the 1987 Seattle International Film Festival, as part of a tribute to Dennis Hopper. Now, 20 years later, I’ve seen it again at another film festival, this time in Dublin, the same day that Wenders was a festival guest. What a long strange trip it’s been. In between Wenders has made Lightning Over Water, Hammett, The State of Things, Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire (his masterpiece), Until the End of the World, Faraway, So Close!, The End of Violence and a few music documentaries (notably Buena Vista Social Club ). The American Friend is fascinating to see again now for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, the title character (Tom Ripley, played by Hopper) has become a very familiar movie fixture—played previously by Alain Delon ( Purple Noon ) and subsequently by Matt Damon ( The Talented Mr. Ripley ) and John Malkov...

Original post date: 31 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ This almost was the last movie for Dennis Hopper. It is a very Sixties movie and looks like Hopper was probably doing a lot of substances while making it. Hopper made it right after Easy Rider, but Universal Studios killed it, so no one ever saw it. Now Hopper owns the rights to it, so he made us watch it before his tribute. It is about a Hollywood crew shooting a cowboy movie in Peru (sort of an empanada western) and the effect it has on the locals. They begin imitating the Americans, except when they do it, the cameras and mikes are fake and the violence is real. Lots of cameos by Hopper’s friends, like Peter Fonda and Kris Kristofferson. Director Hopper did his best to blur the line between reality and film. I can see why it didn’t get a real release, but I’m glad I saw it.

Original post date: 31 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This low-budget science fiction thriller is probably mainly of historical interest. To see it now, one would dismiss it as a cheap rip-off of Blade Runner and The Terminator, so it’s important to know that it was made before either of those movies. Jack Deth is a hard-boiled cop (trooper, as they will say in the future) in a time when old Los Angeles is somewhere under water. An evil villain has gone back in time to kill the ancestors of world leaders. So Jack is sent back to stop him. I couldn’t help thinking what they could have done with a bigger budget, but it still is a pretty clever film. Helen Hunt ( Project A ) plays the girl who falls in love with him and learns how to singe trancers and that “dry hair is for squids.”

Original post date: 30 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This is a very British comedy by Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame. But this is definitely not a Monty Python movie. There are Python-esque bits of humor in it all right. Julie Waters ( Educating Rita ) is a feisty waitress, who winds up becoming the madame of very successful brothel (despite some amazing sexual naïveté). This is not a slapstick farce. There are serious moments. But the last part is devoted to a lot of kinkily funny moments. Sex in this movie is mostly portrayed by having elderly men dress up like little girls or schoolboys. The point seems to be: these people aren’t hurting anybody, so why hassle them? The tag line is one old geezer’s proclamation: “The future is kinky people.”

Original post date: 30 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ I will skip past the high-minded artsy-fartsy analysis of this movie and tell you right up front what you really want to know. In this movie, there is an extremely graphic oral sex scene. I’m talking X-rated. Okay, now that that’s out of the way: This movie (by Italian director Marco Bellochlo whose films usually have body parts in the title: Fists in the Pocket and The Eyes, The Mouth ) is about a young woman, who is going crazy, and the male high school student, who comes along for the ride. She is engaged to a man on trial for terrorism. Her teenage lover is mostly just horny which, when you’re a teenager, is called Love. There are some funny moments, some intentionally.

Original post date: 30 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰✰ This movie is an out-and-out comedy. Mikey and Georgy are two airheads who dig up the brain of their long dead Uncle Anwar so they can fulfill his dream of reincarnating the ancient goddess Sheetar (who has a large toothy mouth where her appendix should be). The catch is, they have to build Sheetar a new body out of female body parts (no two of which can be from the same woman). That’s the easy part. The hard part is they have to find a virgin (in L.A.) to feed her for her first meal. Pretty mindless stuff. The second best scene is a send-up of the ubiquitous female in peril situation. A girl has just seen her best friend hacked to bits before her eyes, and she runs for the door. Just as she reaches safety, she stops and says, “Damn, I forgot my purse,” and she runs back inside. If you want to bear about the first best scene, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

Original post date: 29 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This movie stars Zelda Rubenstein, who was the diminutive exorcist in Poltergeist. Here she plays a weird mother in a weird house, and she has a weird son, John, who is a pleasingly plump orderly for an eye doctor (although mom and John like to think of John more as a… surgeon). To be brutally candid, John isn’t cooking on all four burners, if you know what I mean. When a rich bitch patient complains about him, he gets fired, and mom convinces him that he should go show that lady just what a good surgeon he really is. Mom controls John through hypnosis, and they show lots of lights moving back and forth and spirals turning around and if you’re not careful, you could be hypnotized. In fact, they warn you at the beginning that you might get hypnotized. Come to think of it, isn’t this exactly like a movie called The Mommy and didn’t somebody in Culver City see it so many times that they actually did get hypnotized and start killing people in...

Original post date: 29 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This is a bittersweet, nostalgic story from Yugoslavia. Four teenage boys and the girl they are all in love with (and who happens to be their coxswain) are in a rowing race on the Adriatic Sea. But the rowers don’t stop at the finish line. They keep right on going to Italy, so that their friend can be reunited with her exiled father. But it turns out that the young lady is pregnant. Whodunnit? Switch to the present day. The four boys are middle-aged men and spread out all over Europe. On the occasion of their girl friend’s funeral, they come back to Yugoslavia for a reunion. After reminiscing and briefly meeting the daughter of their departed friend, we go back to the 1950s to see How It All Began. The picture painted is one of a Yugoslavia casting off the ugly overcoat of Stalinism. The young protagonists have a continual love affair with American culture. The girl is nicknamed Esther, after Esther Williams. The musician is called Glenn ...