Reviews

Been reading the late Oliver Reed's authorized (by family, natch) bio, What Fresh Lunacy Is This? Ollie was England's pure film actor from the '60s and '70s, a star in his time. He got his start in Hammer horrors and was only a year away from international fame thanks to the Oscar® winning Oliver! (one of my all-time faves) when he made this comedic heist film with future schlockmeister Michael Winner. Almost impossible to see today, The Jokers is an interesting slice of swinging '60s Cool Britannia that's definitely worth a look (if you can find it). Michael Crawford and Reed play a pair of upper-class blokes in search of kicks. They decide to pull the biggest heist ever -- stealing the Crown Jewels of course -- and thanks to a loophole in English law, hope to get away with it by showing that they did not intend to "permanently deprive" the crown of its treasure. Of course this is precisely the type of movie that they could never get away with making these days. Crawford and Reed are really little more than "terrorists" blowing things up around London and generally make a nuisance of themselves. Amid the snappy music and freewheeling dialog, there's a twist ending. Everything moves at a hare's pace and although there aren't really any bellylaughs, the proceedings are light enough to entertain. Still awaiting a proper video release, bootleg videos exist taken from television airings. A pivotal step in Ollie Reed's rise to silver screen fame deserves better.

Passable time filler...back in 1988. Otherwise a somewhat unnecessary redo of a '50s era Noir classic, lensed for the most part in Austin, Texas.

Quaid's portrayal of a haunted and hunted college lit prof is passionate if nothing else. Supporting roles are mostly filled with what can generously be termed, "over-actors". Charlotte Rampling must have wandered in from another set, ironically giving the proceedings a bit more art house street cred than deserved.

I enjoyed this when it was released. Upon re-watching in 2016, the film now seems slight and dated. Not really clever enough to be a satire, it instead aspires to homage with somewhat uneven results.

I was looking forward to seeing Hugo. It started, as most movies do, promisingly enough but by the time the end credits rolled, I was left with an empty, unsatisfied feeling. I couldn't put it exactly into words at first but I stumbled across another review that pretty much summed it up: the entire "mystery" of Hugo isn't really that big of a deal. I didn't read the book, but it seems that Hugo is really two movies awkwardly stitched together - one of a mechanically-inclined orphan searching for a final message from his late father and another of a forgotten cinema pioneer whose life has descended into bitterness. Frustratingly, the boy's storyline is conveniently dropped somewhere along the line. The Scorsese touch is absent here. Let's face it, this film could've been made by any Hollywood vet with an army of CGI effects people behind him (or her). At certain moments I thought I was watching a Spielberg picture despite the overacting from the film's youthful protagonists (speaking in ridiculous British accents in lieu of French) -- clearly not the work of the director of E.T. A sorry script that telegraphs it's resolutions from a million miles away (again, this could be the fault of the original source material), poor casting and an almost mechanical - pun intended - devotion to cinematic clichés left me cold. Technically polished and full of a generous amount of eye-candy, Hugo will most certainly have it's fans. But when we're dealing with a filmmaker of Scorsese's caliber, I think it's easy to understand that Hugo just doesn't measure up to a Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore or Taxi Driver.

Bill Maher and Larry Charles' RELIGULOUS is a funny and somewhat insightful look into the absurdity of modern day faith. Most "believers" will steer clear of this film even if they might actually embrace a lot of the ideas that Maher espouses ("They say that their guy found the Golden Tablets...Ha! OUR guy found the Golden Tablets!") I quite enjoyed the movie and watched it twice. Yes, the film is unfairly edited in order to maximize the awkward reactions of Bill's soft targets but the thing that brought the film to a screeching halt for me was Mr. Maher's insane, unreasonable reaction to the Anti-Zionist Jewish man. Maher never allowed the guy to get a word in edgewise before terminating the interview early...simply because the man did not support the state of Israel. It was an incredible display of hypocrisy on Maher's part since one could easily argue that the modern state of Israel is founded on as much of a "fairy tale" as any of the Christian and Islamic ideas that are attacked throughout the film. Most of the montages of news footage of various religious "extremists" also fail to include any footage of Judaism -- focusing instead on Protestant Christians and violent Muslims.

The film never quite recovered its authority after this point although I did enjoy the end and I do actually appreciate Maher's point of view. But until he reconciles his hawkish and -- let's not beat around the bush here -- right wing views on Israel with his otherwise apparent religious skepticism, then I'm going to have say that Bill Maher is a humbug.