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Nobody's Fool (1994)
An unusual take on a deadbeat dad
I have a problem with "Nobody's Fool," but let me start with the good stuff. The story about the redemption of Sully (Paul Newman) has a rough, homespun charm. North Bath feels like an updated Bedford Falls (minus George Bailey to save the day), a small town where citizens don't have a lot of choice in friends, so fences stay mended. They squabble and tease, but the talk is great fun, all quips and jabs and small-town blue-collar wit.
The actors supply the charm. Sully boards with Miss Beryl, whom Jessica Tandy imbues with equal parts elegance, grace, and steel. Bruce Willis is effortlessly funny as the shameless Carl Roebuck, Sully's boss and rival, and the serially unfaithful husband of Toby, played by Melanie Griffith stripped of sex-kitten mannerisms. She manages to be demure even when she flashes her perfect breasts at Sully. Pruitt Taylor Vince and Philip Seymour Hoffman bring plumb-dumb to sympathetic life, Vince with self-effacement, Hoffman with self-defense. And as Sully's family, Dylan Walsh and Alexander Goodwin are both utterly winning.
The problem is Sully. Not the performance; Newman is engaging. But Sully is one of those anti-heroes whom we are meant to like even though there's no good reason to. We're just supposed to go along with the crowd. Miss Beryl is protective of him (or tries to be). Toby enjoys flirting with him, and her husband Carl spars with him, but ultimately respects and hires him. He's given bad-boy stuff to do, like drugging a dog and driving on the sidewalk, but why? It isn't funny or entertaining, and it doesn't add to his character, it only diminishes him.
Sully reunites with his son, Peter, whom he totally abandoned in infancy: he hasn't seen the boy since. When Peter (now a father of two in his own troubled marriage) asks why he left, all Sully does is mumble about his own bad marriage and then lay it on thick about his own childhood: his big "never sober" father who slaps his little mother hard enough to literally launch her across the room, then almost kills him when he intervenes. Brutality is amped to the max to jerk our tears, which is manipulation, not persuasion. My sympathies were firmly with Peter.
Child support is not mentioned, but given Sully's complete absence, his hand-to-mouth life, and his wife's remarriage, it's safe to assume he was a deadbeat dad. All in all, the way Sully is written, he's a loser. We're not supposed to notice, I assume, partly because everybody forgives him, but mostly because he's Paul Newman, who is loveable, which is cheating.
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Beautiful boredom
It feels safe to say that Scorsese has never and will never make a more beautiful film, aided in no small way by his European team: the lavish costumes by Gabriella Pescucci (Oscar) and the exquisite art direction of Dante Ferretti and Robert Franco, all adoringly photographed by Michael Ballhaus (BAFTA award). His camera lingers no less dotingly on the features of sensuous Michelle Pfeiffer and sculpted Daniel Day-Lewis. They both deliver pitch-perfect performances, and in their stolen moments, when they kiss, Ballhaus delivers a consummation of light (her) and darkness (him).
The unhurried pace-- nothing is rushed here-- purposefully reflects the measured control maintained by New York society circa 1870, a society so severely straight-laced that no privacy (let alone a bed) can be found when a highborn lawyer, Newland Archer (Day-Lewis), falls in love with a bright young countess, Ellen Olenska (Pfeiffer), a cousin of his decorous wife (Winona Ryder). Ellen is also married, and gravely stigmatized for having left her "vile" Polish husband in France.
So why a mere 7 rating? Because it's Romeo and Juliet minus the poetry, updated to the Gilded Age, and I didn't care about either of them very much. The beauty was captivating, not the characters. The fine supporting cast (Miriam Margolyes, Richard E. Grant, Alec McCowen) only exists to interfere in the star-crossed romance. There are a few interesting conversations involving Ellen, but the rest of the dialog is society gossip-- as it must be, I suppose. Yawn. If it weren't for the pure pulchritude of the two leads, I would have enjoyed a good nap more.
Emma (1996)
Almost too good as bad Emma
It was during the ball at The Crown, about an hour in, when I knew that this adaptation of "Emma" was superior to every other version I've seen. The intricacy of the relationships in the story is charmingly reflected in the shifting dance partners during the minuet, complexly photographed and edited under the direction of the late Diarmuid Laurence (whose obituary in The Guardian on 1 November 2019 is worth reading).
I should have known from the credits: writer Andrew Davies is unsurpassed in adapting classic British novels to the screen, having successfully done so even with works as daunting as "Middlemarch" and "Bleak House."
Kate Beckinsale, age 23, rings true as Emma, the haughty and shallow little schemer whose comeuppance is so welcome. In fact, she's almost too good: it takes a leap to believe that Mr. Knightley (Mark Strong, irresistible as ever) could fancy her. The whole cast is superb in the hands of this director. I would single out Samantha Morton, so perfectly cast and coiffed as Emma's wispy acolyte Harriet Smith, and Olivia Williams, who shines with intelligence as Jane Fairfax. The only fallacious performance comes from pretty Raymond Coulthard as Frank Churchill.
The Deep End (2001)
Two-armed bandits in Tahoe
There is one profound difference between this film and the 1949 version, "The Reckless Moment" by Max Ophüls: instead of a 17-year-old daughter dallying with a predatory older man, it's a 17-year-old son.
In The Deep End, Tilda Swinton gives a finely nuanced performance as the young man's mother, Margaret Hall. With her husband away, she confronts the man, Darby (Josh Lucas) and demands he desist, but he wants payment. When her son, Beau (Jonathan Tucker, forgettable), learns this, he and Darby fight in the boathouse of the family home on Lake Tahoe. Beau retreats to the house, not seeing Darby fall from the pier to his death. Margaret finds the body in the morning, assumes Beau killed him, and-- bad move-- dumps the corpse in Lake Tahoe, where a fisherman promptly discovers it. Headlines follow.
Enter Alek Spera (Goran Visnjic), demanding $50G for himself and his partner, Nagle (Raymond J. Barry), or they'll give the police a videotape of Beau and Darby having sex. It's a stunning scene, a mother watching footage of her son on his belly in bed with a man. The camera lingers on Swinton, whose stare will stay with you as the triple devastation dawns on her: she's already assumed that her son is capable of murder, now she's seeing images that further redefine him forever, images that are also inculpatory evidence of his involvement.
The movie drags in places because the crime is far more interesting than Margaret chauffeuring three her kids around as she tries to raise money. A big deal is made of the fact that Mom has to keep the home running (her father-in-law lives with them but is zero help), as if that had the same priority as a blackmail and a potential murder charge. Her speech about how hard it is to be a Mom didn't impress me much, but Alek the blackmailer went all soft on her. It strained credulity, in part Alek isn't fleshed out the way that character was in the Ophüls film (played by James Mason).
I had difficulty with Margaret instantly assuming her son killed a man, and dumping the body without even asking Beau about it. There are smaller problems, too, and one in particular stands out: late in the movie we suddenly learn that Beau has his own car. Seriously? So why has his mother been driving him and his sister around? And why wasn't her father-in-law pitching in with his grandchildren?
If you can overlook the muddled Mom stuff (I couldn't, not entirely), the film is absolutely worth a look for the emotional complexity of Swinton's performance. She was a well-established actress in England and Europe by 2001, but her career in America took off after this, and no wonder.
36 Hours (1964)
Hollywood has ways of making them talk
The plot is elaborately detailed in the movie, but the bare bones are:
In May 1944, Germans know that an Allied invasion is only days away, but when? On June 1, they drug and abduct an American intelligence officer, Major Pike (James Garner), and take him to a fake U. S. Army hospital in Germany where Dr. Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor) must convince him that he's had amnesia for six years: it's now 1950, Germany lost the war, and the treatment for amnesia is to recall details of the last thing he remembers: the plans for D-Day.
If Gerber doesn't get that intel within 36 hours, SS agent Otto Schach (Werner Peters) will take over interrogation, using sleep deprivation.
Time out for a reality check: about 180 hours are required for sleep deprivation to work. That's more than a week, and what good would any itel be after the invasion? Zero. Sleep deprivation was suggested because it sounds milder than the real Nazi methods, beatings and electric shock. But no such violence is even suggested in this movie. A nurse Anna (Eva Marie Saint in a fine performance) does recall her time at Ravensbruck concentration camp, but that is as close as "36 Hours" comes to the realities of war. Horrors are implied or euphemized, sparing the audience any genuine distress-- and, concomitantly, any genuine feeling.
Another real oddity, I thought, was the leisurely pace of the movie. Although categorized as a thriller, I can't recall ever seeing a movie with so much conversation. Threats loom, but Dr. Gerber, Anna, and Major Pike sit around, drinking and talking about psychotherapy.
To be fair, toward the end we do meet two other likeable Germans: a woman, Elsa (the wonderful Celia Lovsky), and a border guard (John Banner, anticipating his signature sitcom role as Sgt. Schulz), both of them Western sympathizers, and therefore not fools or flunkies. But it's too little, too late.
Ferrari (2023)
The wrong son died (twice)
Enzo Ferrari is quoted as saying "the only perfect love in this world is that of a father for his son." He's wrong, of course (any such sweeping statement would be wrong), but it's a good intro to this movie, which is about men, start to finish (to use racing lingo), which probably factored into poor box office numbers. Maybe it will find the audience it deserves on smaller screens, because director Michael Mann is in top form here. Shot in Italy, "Ferrari" is a convincing portrait of a man whose life is divided between a sustained passion for fast cars and (because divorce was illegal in Italy until 1970) a double life as a family man.
Adam Driver delivers a finely controlled performance as Enzo Ferrari, somber at age 59, in the months following the death of his beloved older 24-year-old son, Dino. It is almost an echo of the death of his own brother in 1916, referred to in a scene when his mother Adalgisa (Daniela Piperno) says, "The wrong son died."
The racing scenes are extremely well done, especially the depiction of the crash of a Ferrari in the 1957 "Mille Miglia" road race, a tragedy so horrific that, within a week, the Italian government banned racing on public roads. The driver, aristocratic playboy Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), and his navigator were both killed, which is a risk they knowingly took, as did Joseph Göttgens, a Dutch driver who was fatally injured in the same race in a Triumph TR-3. But the Ferrari crash also took the lives of nine spectators, five of them children, and injured twenty more. Mann's staging of that crash is like a gut punch. The speed of that airborne car hurtling through bystanders-- my breath left my body as I watched. Then I braced myself and watched it again, to see how it was done. Extraordinary.
As for the private Ferrari, the most engaging scenes involve Enzo and his 12-year-old son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), whose mother was Enzo's inamorata, Lina Lardi. Shailene Woodley plays her well, being loving and patient, but it is a passive supporting role.
Wife Laura Ferrari (Penélope Cruz) is another matter. We meet her wielding a gun, which she fires at Ferrari, purposely missing, and he doesn't even react. Nor did I. She was instantly dismissable as an unappeasable Italian hellcat. A cliché. She spends the movie in a fury, either sulking or screaming. I felt little sympathy for her, and none when she belligerently blamed her husband for their son's death, even though he was equally devastated, and had done everything he could to save Dino. It's a man's picture, fine, but if you get Penélope Cruz to play a major role, give her a character to play.
Road House (1948)
"One word to the judge and that's all, brother."
The incomparable Ida Lupino adds torch singing to her many talents as Lily, a woman with a gift for sizing people up. She books a six-week gig at Jefty's Road House, somewhere near the Canadian border, even though she can see that Jefty (Richard Widmark) is volatile. She keeps her distance, but it ain't easy because boss Jefty is smitten. The cashier Susie (Celeste Holm) earns Lily's trust slowly, both of them having eyes for the manager, Pete (Cornel Wilde), a man with dignity and morality, not to mention muscles. Lily cranks up the sex appeal (Lupino can make bowling sexy), and Pete's tempted but prudent, until one night when a drunken oaf begins groping her. Pete manages to subdue him, but their bar-wrecking brawl leaves both him and Lily wounded and shaken up. Sharing a drink later and talking, it's her honesty that finally seduces him. They end up in an embrace that amounts to foreplay, and she says, "What brought this on, was worth it."
Unfortunately, Jefty's got it bad for Lily: "She makes me think about things I used to laugh about." Lily worries, and reminds Pete of an earlier confrontation about nothing more than bowling lessons: "I'll never forget the look on his face... he looked like he could kill you." But Jefty would prefer revenge: he frames Pete for larceny and then, when Pete is sentenced to ten years, urges the judge to parole him into Jefty's own custody, offering to give Pete his job back, to rehabilitate him. It works, and the community praises Jefty's generosity, but in private, Jefty is a constant threat to Pete: "Suppose you got mad and tried to slug me. One word to the judge and that's all, brother, ten years in the pen."
Richard Widmark plays the unhinged Jefty to the hilt, especially in one startling scene: When they're all at his lakeside cabin, he sets a can of tomato juice on a rock, walks 50 yards back, aims his rifle, and says, "Imagine that's a little duck up there, a tiny little duck waiting for its mother" BLAM! The can exploded and I flinched. (If only Hollywood could remember that suggesting violence can be more effective than laboriously staging it.)
Richard Widmark may never be surpassed as an actor whose big smile hides a menace that can erupt into psychosis at the pull of a trigger. There are no bad performances here, but Widmark is unforgettable. The movie drags a bit when they're all chasing each other through a forest after the tomato can got it. But in this tight little 95-minute noir, who cares?
The Reckless Moment (1949)
Cinematic royalty in Hollywood
Filmed on location in Southern California, "The Reckless Moment" is so beautifully made that it could be taught in film school. It is absolutely worth watching and re-watching for the gorgeous black-and-white photography and astoundingly fluid camerawork of Burnett Guffney (two Oscars) partnered with the great director, Max Ophüls (see the poem James Mason wrote about him in Ophüls' Wikipedia entry). The chiaroscuro lighting is extraordinary, even by film noir standards, with the heroine (Joan Bennett) moving in and out of light and darkness and shadow, visually reflecting the web of good and evil she is caught in. When she's in a boat on quiet water, the camera pauses long enough for us to note that everything is gray: she has just dumped the body of a man whom she believes her immature daughter killed.
The plot is immediately intriguing, even a bit licentious: 17-year-old Beatrice is seeing 40ish Ted Darby, a charmer whom her mother, Lucy Harper, confronts, demanding he desist. Darby will comply, but for a price, which is all she needs to know to expose him to Bea as a cad. Things don't quite work out that way. Darby ends up dead after visiting Bea, his body face down on the beach at their Balboa boathouse. Lucy suspects Bea did it, so she dumps his body in Newport Bay. It is promptly found by the police, who begin investigating-- after which the plot doesn't thicken so much as it curdles into a family drama.
It all centers on the mother (Joan Bennett), whose beloved husband is away on a job in Germany. Oh, and it's almost Christmas. To recap: this is a family drama with a lukewarm love story, not a murder mystery. Unfortunately.
Lucy is soon visited by Martin Donnelly (James Mason with his melting Irish brogue), one of a gang of crooks who possess incriminatory letters that Bea wrote to Darby. He wants $5,000 or he'll give them to the police, which will make Bea a prime suspect. The rest of the movie involves Lucy trying to raise money, which means driving around in her fur coat and jewels, trying to scrounge up cash. She's often chauffeured by Donnelly, who becomes protective of her, and blames his actions on his crime boss, Nagel (Roy Roberts). Yadda, yadda... I watched the movie for its cinematic qualities. The plot became secondary, especially with elements like Lucy's father, an old duffer who doesn't even need to be there since she's the man of the house (and suggestively dressed by Jean Louis in heavy coats and dresses with belts, cuffs, and shirt collars).
Aside from the pathos of the plot, there are problems with casting the female roles. As Darby, Shepperd Strudwick skilfully fuses smarm and charm, but Beatrice is played by Geraldine Brooks, who, in her early 20s, already has the look of a girl who's been around (she played Van Heflin's lover two years earlier in Possessed). James Mason balances criminality and conscience in almost every scene, and with no shortage of terse wit. The film comes to life when he's on screen. But Joan Bennett...
With apologies to her fans, she is not up to acting in an Ophüls movie. She delivers a few emotional scenes toward the end, but for most of the film her face looks like a woman who is concentrating hard on remembering her lines and her blocking for the mobile camera, never mind acting. Her delivery is so flat that she just seems perfunctory with everyone: her husband (on phone calls) and her family (cypher father, spirited son, Bea, and housemaid Sylvia), and Donnelly, though she makes it clear in the beginning that she doesn't like him. It's a two-note performance when an octave is required. The following year, she plays a mother again, in "Father of the Bride," and she fares much better with a Hollywood go-to like Vincent Minnelli at the helm.
In the Line of Fire (1993)
The trick was to aim high
John Malkovich is a crackerjack villain, and the cast boasts John Mahoney and Fred Dalton Thompson, but "In the Line of Fire" centers on Clint Eastwood as Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent haunted by his failure to react swiftly when JFK was assassinated. That could be interesting, but Frank isn't: he's a bull-headed old cuss. For starters, this is what he says about that day in Dallas: "I could tell he was hit. I don't know why I didn't react. I should have reacted.... I just couldn't believe it."
Excuse me?? His entire job, all his training and his sanctimonious talk, is geared to protecting the President, who gets volumes of death threats. But when an attack happens, Frank "couldn't believe it." Instead of Dallas being a wake-up call, telling him he's in the wrong line of work, he stubbornly stays on the job, ultimately becoming the insubordinate (read: antihero) sourpuss we meet 30 years later.
He is also predatory, not only with his partner (Dylan McDermott), a junior agent whom he begs and bullies to get what he wants, but with his colleague, Lily (Rene Russo), whose attraction to him can only be explained by the need for a love interest for Eastwood, who is even given jazz chops in this movie, lest we forget who we're watching and start thinking it's a real character. The movie could have been cut by twenty minutes, and been more amusing, if Lily had sparred rather than slept with him.
John Malkovich is memorable as Leary, the villain aiming to assassinate the current President, and Wolfgang Peterson and his able D. P. John Bailey capture him from every angle and plenty of close-ups. Leary's phone chats with Horrigan are riveting because of Leary's dialog-- which, to my surprise, actually generates anti-government sympathy: he was well-trained as a killer by the feds (at School of the Americas?) and apparently well paid, too (he self-funds his assassination plot, once dropping $50,ooo without batting an eye). Meanwhile, all Frank does during these chats is growl, threaten, and swear.
It's an intricately structured movie, cleverly manipulating the plot to deliver some very close encounters, including a rooftop death scene that is meaningfully filmed. The showdown scene in the glass elevator where Frank says "Aim high" works nicely. It's also slickly written, e.g., when Frank warns that Leary is targeting the President at an upcoming fundraiser in California, the Secret Service disregards him, because why would Leary leak his plan? It's just another hurdle for peerless Frank, who has to go it alone now (that's the point), never mind that it's idiotic: their job is not to second-guess threats, it's to protect the President wherever he is.
The ending is pure Hollywood, a nick-of-time climax, triggered when Frank has a sudden insight into the when-and-where of Leary's plot. When all is said and done, it's a well-made two hours of patriotic hooey, ending with Frank and Lily sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, gazing at the erect white Washington Monument. Never mind making Frank admirable or credible, let alone alluring. Just never let us forget that he's Clint Eastwood.
Charley Varrick (1973)
I swear it's a comedy
The plot is immediately involving: a deadly but astoundingly successful bank heist. Four robbers led by Charley Varrick (Walter Matthau) accidentally score a fortune from a small bank that happens to launder money for the Mafia. We don't meet any mob bosses, only their mid- and low-level flunkies, including the banker who lost their >$750,000 and is now panic-stricken.
Except for the law, a couple of kids, and one horny old lady, every major character we meet has criminal tendencies and, thanks to Charley, most become targets of a mob vendetta.
But as directed by Don Siegel, "Charley Varrick" is so swift and fun and entertaining that-- in spite of some startling violence and a substantial body count (at least six)-- I reflect on it as a comedy. Siegel telescopes future actions, mostly with visual clues, in a way that makes the story more satisfying than if the payoffs were surprises. It's solid in every way-- propulsive pace, intricate structure, performances, dialog, settings in Nevada (standing in for New Mexico).
Matthau is the implacable center of the film, a man smart enough to let his actions do most of the talking. (Eastwood turned the role down, and there's a line of dialog when a man introduces himself to a woman who says, "I didn't think you were Clint Eastwood.") At no point was I bored. There was only one moment when I thought Siegel was pushing his trust-nobody theme too far: a hit man (Joe Don Baker) hauls off and slaps a counterfeiter (Sheree North), who then smiles and takes him to bed. It felt false for her no-nonsense character, and wasn't necessary for his psychopathic one.
The final scene in the wrecking yard goes on a bit too long, but that's Hollywood for you-- villains survive more fatal encounters than Rasputin. And since the ending is satisfying, I can't complain. This is an extremely accomplished film.
China Moon (1994)
Not the man you should frame for murder
If only! The cast in this movie could not be improved upon. Every one of them commands the screen with their good looks and even better talents: Ed Harris, Madeleine Stowe, Benicio del Toro, and Charles Dance. If only Dance's character had some depth, some redeeming quality, or irresistible charm-- some reason for Rachel to have married him, let alone stay married. But no. Even the name he's given, Rupert Munro, is ugly.
This is one of very few features directed by John Bailey (he was primarily a cinematographer, and an interesting one if you look at IMDb trivia), and he keeps interest high with swift pacing and wise use of close-ups of his principal actors. The plot involves a murder and a cover-up, the details of which are credible and intricate without being convoluted. You see what you need to, to follow the evidence along with detective Kyle Bodine, whom Harris embodies as a thoughtful, compassionate detective, always proceeding with due deliberation-- until love strikes. Then he's as fallible as the rest of us, and Stowe is utterly convincing as Rachel, a woman who could inspire that kind of overpowering passion, as well as a woman who might just be a duplicitous and manipulative sociopath. Between those two extremes, Bodine gets trapped-- framed for murder, but by whom if not Rachel? Harris delivers a masterful performance of a man whose personal and professional lives are at war: he must temper his fiery love with cold proficiency.
Then there's Benicio del Toro, and wow. Even with those co-stars (and Roger Aaron Brown, who always delivers), he almost steals every scene he's in, wringing every ounce of versatility out of the role of Bodine's rookie partner. At age 24, he was already a force.
Sea of Love (1989)
Poetically licensed police
The best idea in "Sea of Love" is the trap set by the NYPD for a serial killer, presumed to be a woman because all three deaths are linked to poetic personal ads: detectives post one, then endure dates with responding women to get fingerprints on wine glasses. Unfortunately, the set-ups are few (Patricia Barry as the "Older Woman" is notable), and embedded in a screenplay that boils down to clichés. A couple of hard-as-nails New Yorkers nail each other as they fall in love: 20-year veteran detective Frank (Al Pacino, looking every day of his 49 years) and shoe merchant Helen (Ellen Barkin, her distinctive face peering out under whorls of porn hair). I longed for the days when copulation was off-screen unless it was required to advance plot or character. (Has that ever happened? Maybe "Bonnie and Clyde," ignoring the fact that the real Clyde Barrow wasn't impotent.)
In terms of genre, "Sea of Love" is soft-core noir, and what would be a B picture except for the budget and the return of Pacino (this was his comeback after "Revolution" bombed four years earlier). Unfortunately, the McGuffin search for the serial killer is foreplay to their all-consuming affair: after three men are found shot dead and naked in their beds, there are no more murders because the plot doesn't need them. We're left wondering if Barkin is the perp, although as the critic Kevin Thomas noted in the L. A. Times, why would a dish like Barkin need personal ads unless she really is a psychopath? It's a thought that could and should have been mentioned by Detective Sherman (John Goodman having fun) or one of the other officers played by a fine cast of under-used actors: Richard Jenkins, John Spencer, Larry Joshua, Paul Calderon, and, in one memorable scene, the great William Hickey as Pacino's father, who provides the poetry in more ways than one.
Midnight Run (1988)
You lied first
It's easy to enjoy "Midnight Run" purely for its spirited script and deNiro's star turn without appreciating its other qualities: an A-list of character actors disrupting the cross-country road trip of two men with opposing goals.
The story has no moral, but it's all about morality: there is no honor among thieves and precious little anywhere else from sea to shining sea-- the movie covers a lot of American territory, ethical and regional.
Bounty hunter Jack Walsh (de Niro) left the Chicago police for refusing to join his colleagues in accepting bribes from crime boss Jimmy Serrano (Dennis Farina), whom the FBI is after (Yaphet Kotto seriously in charge). Their star witness is Serrano's accountant, Jonathon "the Duke" Mardukas (Charles Grodin), who is in hiding after embezzling $15 million and skipping bail ($450G). His bail bondsman Eddie (Joe Pantoliano) hires Jack to find him and bring him to Los Angeles in five days for arraignment, unaware that his doofus flunky (Jack Kehoe) is feeding information to Serrano's thugs. Like I said, no honor.
From plane to train to bus to cars, Jack and Jon fight their way west against a cascading onslaught of G-men, mobsters, and another bounty hunter (excellent John Ashton). Adventures ensue, interrupting the duo's civilized conversations with stretches of well-placed and -directed action. Running jokes about sunglasses, badges, cigarettes, and doughnuts add to the fun.
Typical of anti-buddy movies, the budding friendship is the essence, and deNiro and Grodin make it work. DeNiro is extraordinary, making a complex character out of incorruptible Jack. Grodin is not his equal as an actor, but his dialogue does most of the work. Jon is a frump of a man, yet he's no chump, not after embezzling $15 million. A question mark sticks to him: can a self-proclaimed altruistic thief really be trusted? And Jon "the Duke" feeds that question by parsing his relationship with Jack. They lie to each other to achieve their opposing goals, but Jon insists on claiming the moral high ground in his talkative way: "But you didn't know I was lying to you when you lied to me down by the river. So as far as you knew, you lied to me first!" Why does he care? Either he wants respect as the man who donated $15m to charity, or he needs Jack to trust him. Honor will out.
Desk Set (1957)
Comedy as prophesy
"Except for sex, what's left?" is amused, exasperated reply of the network research chief, Bunny (Katharine Hepburn), when their office first uses the giant Emerac computer. It was a prophetic quip then, with that giant blinking, beeping know-it-all machine, and even more now, with its immortal ghost, AI.
Desk Set is a lighthearted but smart and prophetic look at human vs artificial intelligence, explored most wonderfully in the lunch scene on the wintry midtown Manhattan roof where efficiency expert Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy) profiles Bunny. Her answers are not simply correct, they are clever, probing, and perceptive. Like a computer, she evaluates input objectively. But unlike a computer, her responses exhibit a freewheeling intelligence: a good memory in a mind not limited by the parameters of the question as worded: she answers dutifully only after evaluating the validity of the question itself, which algorithms do not do (imagine the infinity of nested loops). She has another advantage over algorithms: senses, and the screenplay is smart enough to notice. When asked about her personal life, we get this exchange:
Bunny: I don't smoke, I only drink champagne when I'm lucky enough to get it, my hair is naturally natural, I live alone - and so do you.
Sumner: How do you know that?
Bunny: Because you're wearing one brown sock and one black sock.
If you find that evaluation of AI contestable, or boring, feel free, but don't let it stop you from enjoying the movie. Hepburn and Tracy clearly had fun making it, as obvious at the goofball end of the dinner scene that Gig Young crashes. Large emotional questions are smartly underplayed, but remain poignant: Hepburn's struggle with wanting love but not at the expense of respect. Joan Blondell's dialog, and her delivery. Even the formulaic joke about the old lady (Ida Moore) who has free run of the offices because she was the original model for the network's hotsy-totsy symbol. The girls in the research department, smart as whips but undervalued (that new dress Ruthie wants), and now facing competition from machines as well as men. The key is remembering that computers are tools for us, not replacements of us. At least until, "Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye."
Adam's Rib (1949)
If this is how women defend women, I object
I write this review at the risk of sounding humorless. I'm not. The first time I watched it, I found it very cleverly structured, and amusing, starting with the absolutely perfect title: Adam's Rib. Married lawyers, Tracy and Hepburn, as Adam and Amanda. They're wonderful together, especially at home, in the lively, witty "That Evening" scenes with an impish David Wayne.
Then I watched it closely, and yeesh! It's a feminist screwball romcom, but feminist and screwball tend to be oil and water. The problem is the bullet-hole-ridden plot, and the screenplay, based around the trial of a housewife for attempted murder. Let's just say that If I were on trial, I'd ask for pro se privileges before allowing Amanda to represent me, unless the prosecutor was as inept as Adam.
Judy Holiday does a true star turn as gun-toting Dolores, the wife, and Jean Hagen is almost as good a Beryl, the home-wrecker. Unfortunately, Tom Ewell as the husband only prompts the question, what's wrong with these women? The movie begins with the crime: Dolores shoots open the door where her husband is canoodling with Beryl, then closes her eyes and begins firing wildly into the room. Her husband ends up in critical condition.
No forensic evidence on those stray bullets is collected, or if it is, Adam never uses any. He sticks to countering Amanda's feminist defense strategy: that women should be judged the way men are, not only if they sleep around, but when their home is invaded: justifiable use of force.
If Amanda's strategy was just silly, okay. But it's worse. It's irrelevant, and it stoops to insult. In her summation, she invents a "civilization far older than ours in South America... the Lorcañanos, descended from the Amazons," where women rule. No such culture exists (anyway Amazons were a Greek myth, not a New World one), nor has any credible evidence ever been found of a matriarchal society anywhere in history or prehistory.
Did writers Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon really have so little real dedication to equality that they had to fabricate a false myth to argue that women are equal?
Their desperation for humor in this comedy sinks to a cringe-worthy low when Amanda humiliates Adam in the courtroom (a female circus performer lifts him off the floor), and subsequently refuses to understand his outrage.
Tracy and Hepburn bring their extraordinary talents, both serious and comic, to the roles of married couple, but when, after the trial is over, Adam and Amanda both compliment each other on their respective strategies and summations, all I could say was, "I object."
The Story of Us (1999)
Certain unromantic facts
With all due respect to the IMDb reviewer wes-connors, who gave this movie a 4, I have a complaint about your complaint: "Their marriage unravels in a series of clichés, which many couples should recognize." How is that a criticism? Isn't it a strength to recognize on screen what you've been through?
The Story of Us is about love surviving heavy odds: aging, disappointment, drudgery, jealousy, meddlers (and money, which isn't an issue here). Casting was crucial, and director Rob Reiner got it right. Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer, each with considerable individual appeal as well as seasoned talents, have a screen chemistry that makes us not only buy into their marriage, but want it to survive.
Their union is convincing not only where it is expected, in their early years, but where it is unexpected, during the prospect of separation and divorce. The marriage is in trouble when we meet them, but it is obvious that both spouses are far more miserable at the thought of parting than they are over the clichéd miseries of their daily routines. After fifteen years, love is no longer "lust in disguise," it is the essential and durable core of who they are, anchored in the unromantic fact that their two teen-aged children are an integral part of the "us" of the title. This movie is the story of accepting that hard truth about marriage.
The comedy is formulaic (mostly shtick about once-hot sex) and structurally confined to four fishbowls: his friends, her friends, their marriage counselors (briefly), and their parents (ditto). Unfortunately, his friends are played by Rob Reiner who can't play anybody but Rob Reiner; and Paul Reiser, who seems to be there to lower the bar for male behavior, which he does in a robotic (and uncredited) performance. Her friends are Rita Wilson, doing her patented toothy, mouthy busybody; and Julie Hagerty, reduced to asking questions at a ladies' lunch. As for the parents, pure shtick: the six of them in bed, Freuding it out.
One recurring motif, being smartly conceived and utterly charming, is worth mentioning: the family plays a high/low game at dinner, wherein each one tells the other three about the high and low points of their day. It's a clever way to develop the character of the two teen-aged children, and a quietly convincing way to present a cohesive and mostly happy family. If the marriage ends, that game ends, and everyone will share the same low for months, possibly years, maybe forever.
Babylon (2022)
The meaning of the elephant
The opening sequence reminded me of the old joke: When a custodian who shovels elephant dung at the circus is asked why he doesn't quit, he says, "What? And leave show business?"
In Babylon, a truck carrying an elephant stalls and the driver endures a deluge of elephant dung attempting to restart it because he'll do anything to go to the Hollywood party that the elephant is invited to. And he's not the only one. Dignity and self-respect replaced by fawning and yearning.
Damien Chazelle is clearly trying to shock us with nudity and depravity and drugs (oh my!), but it all feels forced and phony. Unfortunately for him, that schtick has played out. According to the MPAA, of the 11,000+ movies released since 1995, only 406 were rated G. By now, our brains have such rugged shock absorbers that we barely bat an eye at climate change, let alone an orgy.
There is something shocking, however, about the Babylon screenplay: it's unconvincing, even implausible. Start with the dialog so rife with profanity that it sounds like the 2020s, not the 1920s. Then consider this line, delivered by Brad Pitt, which is problematic for another, and worse, reason: "Then he said, 'Frankly, Scarlett, you're a c*** '." Gone With the Wind was published years later, in 1936, and Clark Gable immortalized the line in 1939. So, is Chazelle being careless, disdainful, ignorant, or (desperate guess:) trying to go meta and be funny?
Babylon lacks not talent, but discipline and dignity. It is three self-indulgent hours trying to satirize self-indulgence. Chazelle doesn't have the chops.
Want to see a credible movie about the silent era in Hollywood? Try the modest little comedy Hearts of the West (1975).
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)
Ed's aunt has a point.
Good old Ed Couch. All he wants to do when he gets home is have dinner and watch a game on television. Normal stuff. But his bouncy wife, Evelyn (Kathy Bates in top form) lives in a world of "should": what marriage should be, how her husband should act, what she herself should be like. Ed (Gailard Sartain) pretty much lets all that wash over him. He doesn't even complain when she tears down a wall in their house only to rebuild it later.
Ed has an aunt in a nursing home, a woman we never see but who throws things at Evelyn to keep her out of the room when they visit. This happens twice, so it's not a sudden tizzy. It's animosity, probably because she's had enough of Evelyn's incessant smile, which hides a stubborn streak that, in the worst instance, explodes in a parking lot where she heedlessly, cheerfully, and repeatedly rear-ended a car that took a parking space she wanted.
At the nursing home, Evelyn befriends Ninny (Jessica Tandy, still glorious at 81), who recalls the Great Depression in Alabama. The Southern Gothic tale of Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker) involves murder, racism, homelessness, wife-beating, and cannibalism, which is presented tongue-in-cheek (so to speak), yet we are repeatedly shown the boiling pot. Like I said, Southern Gothic.
Most of this bifurcated movie is about that era, but the tone is firmly set by Evelyn who, at one point, joins a female support group, a bizarre scene that brings a whole different problem to this misbegotten movie (Jon Avnet began his career and will end it directing for TV). The group meeting involves the women dropping their drawers and grabbing hand mirrors to look at their groins (the v-word is used, but nobody in the room has a speculum). To her credit, Evelyn doesn't join the lunatic gynecological tour, and I was left wondering why a movie that seems to celebrate women would choose to mock a support group. It could only be another desperate-for-laughs thing, like Evelyn cheerfully weaponizing her car.
Meanwhile, good old Ed finally reaches his limit when Evelyn unilaterally invites Ninny to live with them. He objects, reasonably enough, and when persuasion fails, he draws the line, "It's not going to happen." Her cheerful, stubborn, insulting reply, "I'll do all the work," dismisses her husband as if he was her boarder.
The movie expects us to like Evelyn in spite of her behavior, presumably just because she's female (or because she's Kathy Bates, who is marvelous, which is cheating), as if there's something superior about one gender or the other. But you're only as good as your actions, whatever your gender, and Evelyn needs an intervention, preferably before she rams the auto-insurance office that will reject her claim.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
The limits of charm
There is undeniable charm in Wes Anderson's established style: sets like dollhouses, candy-colored design, formalized symmetry, and painterly camera work with occasional tracking shots. But here's where I jump ship: deadpan delivery from the actors. All the actors. Every single face is frozen as if posing for a painter rather than performing in a motion picture. Perhaps Anderson believes, as some directors are rumored to (von Sternberg, Mamoulian, Clarence Brown), that when actors are expressionless the audience supplies the emotion. That's a big risk, especially inside Anderson's already rigid aesthetic.
Consider Dr. Seuss, another artist with an unvarying style. His drawings are backed by wisdom and poetic genius, while Anderson's style, once established, became a necessary cosmetic for minor storytelling gifts. Ironically, Dr. Seuss's printed images are actually more dynamic than Anderson's movies.
Moonrise Kingdom is a case in point. The plot centers on two humorless twelve-year-old runaways with troubled lives. There are a few amusing lines ("Our daughter's been abducted by one of these beige lunatics!") and a few thoughtful ones, e.g., when the girl says she wished she was an orphan, the boy replies, "I love you but you don't know what you're talking about." The deadpan delivery is perfect for that line; unfortunately, all the dialog is delivered that way, minus any of the messy emotions that make us human.
Sometimes, happily, really talented actors manage to ply their craft in spite of a director's limitations. Tilda Swinton brings a crisp and believable authority to her role as Social Services, in spite of Anderson encasing her in a code-blue uniform. Equally irrepressible, Bruce Willis comes across as the most human character in the bunch, with nothing more than the practiced use of pauses and inflections, evidently the maximum display of human nature that Anderson will allow.
Dateline (1992)
Three little observations
Dateline is predictable in the best way: I know it's going to be well produced and interesting, if necessarily uneven. That said:
1) First, high praise: What I like most about Dateline (and other crime shows) is that vast majority of people we meet in any given episode are good people. There's always a murderer or two, but they're the exception. The rest-- survivors, witnesses, prosecutors and most cops-- are truth-seekers in search of justice. (I forgive the defense lawyers because they're doing a necessary job). Ultimately, far from being a condemnation of humanity, Dateline proves that most of us are honorable.
2) This bugs me. Common to many, if not most, episodes is a phrase like "Stuff like that never happens here." Give it up, guys. Obviously homicides can happen anywhere-- especially the murders that Dateline specializes in, which involve family dysfunction and/or sociopaths.
3) Could someone please ask Andrea Canning to tone down her sing-song delivery; it undermines the gravity of the subject matter. I'd also appreciate it if the women being interviewed weren't coiffed and slathered in make-up. A significant number have also had significant plastic surgery without significant success. So while the men are allowed to age gracefully, the women are often one whorl of hair away from looking grotesque.
Le Cinquième Élément (1997)
Willis and Oldman, what could go wrong?
Chris Tucker, that's what. But not enough to bury the movie, and some people even seemed to find him more amusing than annoying.
I agree with pretty much every reviewer who agreed with me: an 8 rating. The Fifth Element is unapologetic fun. If you can't follow it (because it doesn't make sense), so what? It doesn't matter. Just enjoy the ride, scene by scene.
Just three things to add:
1) It takes place in the 23rd century, and though nothing is made of this in the screenplay, evidently evolution has gotten rid of every female who isn't a babe. A young babe. Either women don't age, or they die off, or end up staying home on the phone, haranguing their sons. Meanwhile, men of every age and stage, mostly middle-aged and ugly, occupy every position of responsibility or power. Not plausible, but this movie wasn't meant to attract women viewers.
2) Yet another Gary Oldman triumph, which is saying a lot for an actor who has played both Sid Vicious and Winston Churchill. Has anybody got a wider range than that? And in this movie, he is a pleasure to behold in every scene. Even Jean-Paul Gaultier's fantasy/punk rainbow leather costume can't upstage him.
3) with a bullet: this is optimal Bruce Willis. He plays Korben Dallas like a guy who has seen it all and bounced back so many times that his survival isn't even a question any more. Milla Jovovich is spectacular eye candy as well as being a gifted actress, but I just wanted more of Willis. I've watched him since Moonlighting and loved him since Die Hard, and seriously consider him the most under-rated above-the-title actor in the history of Hollywood.
Working Man (2019)
Plastics on the job and at home
I tuned in for Peter Gerety, an extraordinarily gifted actor, and was pleased to find that Billy Brown absolutely held his own, and then some, as his co-star. The movie also has its heart in the right place-- with the working class-- and it has a fairly fresh idea, with an unpredictable plot, and characters who are not one-dimensional, including not just laborers at the plastics plant (stay tuned for more on plastic), but management and corporate, too.
My frustrations may seem minor, but I think the movie was undermined by two bad decisions.
First, the imbalance of dialog between Brown as Walter Brewer and Gerety as Allery Parkes. Brewer is charismatic and talkative which is a stark difference from Parkes, who is given less than the bare minimum of lines to make him seem real. Gerety's character shut down after his son's suicide, but to a degree that doesn't help the film: it's unnecessarily severe. When a character is that withdrawn, I always wonder why anybody bothers to stick around-- including me.
Second, and this may seem petty, but I'm serious: Talia Shire had no business playing Mrs. Parkes. I'm not talking about her acting ability. I'm talking about her plastic face: the amount of cosmetic surgery she has obviously had undermines every scene she's in, especially when she's counting coupons at the grocery store. Once a performer gets that much work done, they forfeit the right to play a working stiff, or his wife.
The Big Knife (1955)
He called me a child and then he--
Jack Palance as Charlie Castle is the prominent lead, but the key character in this movie is really Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters, in her early 30s and in full command of her talents). Dixie is a slightly blowsy dumb blonde and a #MeToo victim of the studio system that The Big Knife attacks from both inside and out: it was originally a Broadway play (with John Garfield) by Clifford Odets, after he left Hollywood in disgust. The screenplay oozes with the knowledge that Hollywood hangers-on sacrifice their dignity just to be close to the movies.
Dixie got wise to the system the hard way, and she defiantly holds on to what little power she has (the scandalous truth about a crime) against men who dangle roles en route to the casting couch. The dialog is neutered, but it isn't hard to read between lines like, "Don't tell me about Mr. Hoff. He called me a child one minute and the next he--." Hot-headed Rod Steiger and his cold-hearted henchman Wendell Corey bring the corruption to life: the only thing that matters is power, and the measure is money. Blackmail is light work; murder, a bit more complicated.
Charlie's lament is that he's trapped (being blackmailed by Hoff about the crime) into signing a contract with Hoff studio, which forces him into roles that he plainly considers beneath him. We hear no details about his movies, but if he is as big a star as the screenplay suggests, they're not lousy little B pictures. I found myself wondering how objectionable the Hoff movies really were, Hollywood standards being what they are. Charlie ("Anything for my art") seems to think he's Olivier or Welles, but he's probably more like Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. At worst, Johnny Weissmuller, athletic and bankable.
So, okay, he's sick of it and wants to be cast against type. Well, excuse me, but if being trapped with fame and wealth is his punishment for getting away with driving drunk and killing someone (the crime), is that really worse than prison for vehicular homicide? Charlie evidently didn't prevent his despicable bosses from giving the cops and courts a studio flunky as the fall guy, and when he says "Anything for my art," he means aiding and abetting the murder of Dixie to further protect them all. Charlie is a victim of big-box-office corruption, but he is also a selfish player in that game.
Even if Charlie Castle is throwing the snit of all artistic snits, it's an engaging movie, partly because of the set, which is echt mid-century modern L. A., complete with sunken bar. Ernest Laszlo's camera examines the room from every angle, making it a kind of palace/prison, and we are never bored. The room also includes a huge kitschy painting of a clown (like a bad Raoul Dufy), which says a lot about just uncultured Charlie really is.
Shelley Winters really delivers, as I said, as does Wendell Corey, who is vastly under-appreciated. The incomparable Ida Lupino is irresistible as Castle's virtuous wife, providing a strong contrast to Jean Hagen as Connie Bliss, a role that is an insult to both women and writing: an insufferable aging sex kitten, wife of a studio toady. The movie would lose nothing if they'd both been left on the cutting room floor.
Finally, but worth noting, the bombastic dialog is needlessly underscored by Frank DeVol's bombastic music, which includes use of the drumroll from the Nazi rally at Nuremberg as the theme for the studio boss Hoff. More than a bit over the top.
Sasquatch Sunset (2024)
There's a sort of trick to watching this movie
It's possible to see "Sasquatch Sunset" at an almost anthropological level, with four humanoid creatures in a series of scenes with them eating, fornicating, walking, defecating, sleeping, etc. That could be boring.
But start with the early scene of two of them chewing on grasses in an alpine meadow-- and think of it as breakfast. This is the start of their day. After that you're watching what their daily life is like, and it is familiar. Soon an interstitial title appears, "Spring," and the time scale has opened to a year. Eventually, you stop thinking about the timeline and start thinking about the fragility of existence.
There is no backstory, but the quartet is taken to be the last of their species-- and they know it. They have a signal to call for help: banging a fallen branch against a tree trunk in a series of four distinct sounds that echo through the forest. It tells us that they were once part of a clan, and a tribe, members of whom have died in the recent past. Perhaps there were five Sasquatch a year ago, or ten. Every death brings them closer to extinction, and every time their SOS isn't answered, it's a reminder that they are alone.
The movie is brilliantly structured, with credible costuming, able performances, and a score that pretty successfully mixes folk and New Age-y forms.
But my favorite parts have to do with the glimmers of intelligence and progress. We see nascent engineering skills when a log traps one of them. One member has the urge to count things, but without numbers he has trouble keeping track past two or three. At one point he holds a fossil or rock that petrified into rows of ripples, interrupted in the middle by a dark horizontal flaw. He begins counting down from the flaw, struggling to find a way to keep track, and you realize that someday he may notice there are ripples both above and below the flaw, which will require negative numbers.
But the best scene, by far, is when they happen upon a road in their forest. Do your brain a favor; see the movie.
Born to Be Bad (1950)
Soap-opera noir
This movie got under my skin. I don't know why. It's no masterpiece, but I've watched it three times, returning to it every few years because it I find it so satisfying. I think of it as soap-opera noir, and without the noir I wouldn't enjoy it. But it's well written, constructed, and paced, like most of Nicholas Ray's movies, including his neglected gem, "Bigger than Life."
The big attraction is Joan Fontaine, so silken smooth as the bad girl who never met a man she didn't want. But there's also Joan Leslie, who was only in her twenties but plays such an intelligent, mature, talented woman that she seems oddly ageless. She's one of several actresses from 1940s Hollywood who never quite reached the starry heights of Stanwyck, Bergman, Hepburn, Crawford, and Davis, but never disappoints.