Reviews

Saw this years ago, dead of night, when it should be watched. Mousy architect has recurring nightmare (an early version of Groundhog Day), of which most of the movie's comprised.

To help alleviate him of his anguish, characters in his nightmare each tell a tale of a nightmarish experience. Tales culminate with one of the greatest horror effects ever, so popular that it's been used on the silent screen (The Great Gabbo) & on TV (Hitchcock & Twilight Zone each had a version): the old ventriloquist's-dummy-assumes-the-ventriloquist's-persona trick. An ideal metaphor for the schizoid personality.

Spirited dialogue, Michael Redgrave, & enough smoking & drinking to acquire whatever 2d-hand ailments there are to be acquired. & Don't forget Hugo: "Good niiiiiight!"

Host Jonathan Miller's father was a psychiatrist, & Miller was headed for the same profession, until he decided that a more rewarding career would be to dress up in other people's clothes & pretend to be someone else: to be an actor.

Fortunately, Miller, a former comic anarchy mate of Peter Sellers & Spike Milligan, brings a healthy skepticism to his subject & so can be genuinely exasperated when NIH researchers are trying to explain schizophrenia by pointing to colorful CAT scans of the brain or the earnest doctor states that when a patient hallucinates in front of her, she's busy trying to figure out what's going on in his brain. Best parts are medical historian Andrew Scull describing psychiatry's distasteful history of carnival rides & enemas or E.C.T. pitchman Dr. Max Fink getting all dewy eyed over the "marked improvement" of his zapped patients. There's also some ancient footage of Ronald Laing talking about the "gulf in power" betw. doctor & patient.

"Madness" was shown over five weeks on PBS in 1991. Doesn't appear to be available on VHS or DVD: likely because it isn't hawking a pharmaceutical panacea. Ah, for the days of differences of opinion ...

About 20 minutes into the movie, I noticed the Rob Morrow character had a Boston accent. I hadn't caught his name, so I thought Bobby Kennedy? Dick Goodwin & wife Doris Kearns Goodwin are probably more familiar as professional PBS talking heads on those Ken Burns dynamos. But apparently around 1958 or so Goodwin was fresh out of Harvard Law, buried in a decidedly unfresh Capitol Hill library ("Must've been an oversight." "We're an oversight committee.") & working for a Senate committee.

Assigned to investigate wacky game show contestant Herbert Stempel's (John Tuturro, in bravura performance) complaints about network failures to deliver on promises (to put him on another show), Morrow's Goodwin is portrayed as a knight wanting to bring down networks & sponsors; he finds that his fellows merely want to bring down people: Stempel & his "Twenty One" successor Chas. van Doren. (The names are the same: only the degree of sincerity's been changed to protect the guilty.) Officials & their constituency thought TV was an entertainment medium & were determined to find it @all costs.

Turturro's desperate madness & Morrow's cool methodology make for some great exchanges: Quiz Show's best feature is its highly literate script (see memorable quotes @this site). With Martin Scorcese as the Geritol rep. & Barry Levinson as orig. Today Show host Dave "Peace" Garroway. Paul Scofield is riveting as literary brahman Mark van Doren.

Highly stylized account of lives of quiet desperation. Kevin Spacey & Annette Bening are husband & wife passing each other on the escalators of middle class mobility.

Foremost: Annette Bening is like super incredible. I always though she was just some babe that had something to do with Warren Beatty. Wow!: that scene where she convulses into tears after the open house. Is that what they call visceral acting? I've seen American Beauty 4 or 5 times, & each time that scene sends chills up my spine. Her whole quirky, esteem less, desperate-for-attention persona places her on par with Streep et al.

American Beauty is a fascinating example of the notion of imagination forcing a disconnection with consciousness. Spacey's fantasies about the teenager & the Marine neighbor: more elements of horror than titillation. If you like something beyond being passively entertained, see American Beauty. Post-pop priestess, pre-American Idol Paula Abdul choreographed the cheerleader sequences.

Key Largo's approximately may favorite movie, give or take an Apocalypse Now here or a Casablanca there. Bogart is a WWII vet paying a visit to the widow (Bacall) & father (Barrymore) of a dead soldier, late under Bogie's command.

Crooks have taken over the hotel for a week during this tourist off-season, evidently awaiting a fellow mug who'll relieve the gang of its stash, counterfeit money. Edw. G. Robinson is Johnny Rocco, gang executive, who's now back in the USA illegally, years after he was deported.

Movie is a great study in the breakdown of group relations: gang members @each other's throats; aimless Bogie's ambiguous relations with Bacall & Barrymore characters. All while anticipating the hurricane.

Along the way, Bacall realizes that Bogie character was the real hero of the battle, not her late husband. & They realize that Rocco was deported years ago. Review the scene where hoods tease Pop Temple ("Stand your ground!"): Barrymore had been disabled with arthritis for years when the scene calls for him to get up, take a swing @Rocco, & fall down. Also note simmering disdain betw. Ziggy & Rocco ("No more blasting away at each other!"). It's pretty intense cinema.

Anybody notice that the shootout on the boat is more or less a recreation of the battle on that hill in Italy?: Bogie alone, against the forces of evil. The last scene, with Bacall throwing open the curtains, is still a tearjerker for me.

Stellar cast includes Thomas Gomez as Curly ("Hotel Central. We're all together."), Harry Lewis as Toots ("It's guaranteed for life."), the incredible Claire Trevor as gang moll Gay Dawn ("How 'bout a drink? It'll help chase the blues away."), Monte "Ming the Merciless" Blue as Sheriff Wade, & Dan Seymour as Angel: he was also the doorkeeper @Rick's in Casablanca. Jay Silverheels (Tonto in the TV series The Lone Ranger) is Tom Osceola.

Robert Conrad was one of the standard bearers (along with Tom Selleck) of Hollywood's supposed right wing (until he got nailed for drunk driving here a coupla years back): Ba Ba Black Sheep & this Liddy movie. Not sure why, but I guess the summertime soldiers needed an epic flick: Cal Thomas directs The Ten Commandments.

The title Will: what Liddy had to withstand thousand shocks that he was heir to. Miltown County prosecutor, the FBI, committee to re-elect the President. He sure did have it tough: just shout "God, flag, country" & boom! you're in law enforcement.

So then, were we supposed to feel sorry that Liddy made enemies every time he broke the law? Suddenly, he could empathize with the poor & downtrodden?

Saw this movie on Lifetime about 7 or 8 years ago. By then, he'd taken the Liddy persona into commercials: "Knock it off my should; I dare ya."

Some woosies make careers outta being tough guys: Liddy & Conrad were two. If the shoe fits, shove your whole head in.

Dreary & finally pointless movie: if Clint Eastwood had made The Deer Hunter. Childhood pals, long estranged, are brought together when one of the pal's daughters is murdered.

Stars got the Boston accents down, although Tim Robbins's reticent character is a variation on his old Andy Dufresne persona, but in the end the murder has nothing to do with the three pals & none of the main characters changes (well, yeah, except for Robbins). The failure here: murder as plot device to delve into the past of the pals; pals, tho, peripheral to murder. I mean, it's not like Jimmy's daughter was killed to punish him!

Robbins et al. are enjoyable to watch, & I'm sure the effort here was sincere, but the movie went on way too long after the case was solved, & it looks as if creating a "work of art" took precedence over making a coherent movie, which along with a score by Eastwood was a 3d-rate film version of Albinoni's Adagio, sometimes called the most depressing piece of music ever.

Eminently watchable drama from 1989 with Woods as burned-out lawyer Eddie Dodd, formerly idealistic & successful civil liberties attorney who's now a callous defender of drug dealers ("No, pot possession cases are free. Coke dealers pay cash: that subsidizes the pot possession cases." Character reputably based on real-life S.F. lawyer J. Tony Serra; hence the long hair), & Rbt. Downey, Jr., as his idealistic law clerk, fresh out of school. (Downey, Jr.'s, @first incredulous: "You were my age when you defended that case," to which Dodd retorts, "I was never your age.")

There're a few continuity problems here, mainly which fingers the charcoal is on after Dodd's tussle with Chuckie, but they're pretty much overshadowed by some great sub-plots (Manhattan D.A.'s [Kurtwood "70s Show" Smith] curious interest in an 8-year-old murder case, Dodd's faded romance with P.I. Margaret Colin, the sadly schizoid Vietnam vet ["Cecil, are you what heroes are made of?"]) & the main story line, the case of a convicted murderer. Dodd @first dismisses Downey, Jr.'s, suggestion that they take the case but later becomes so emotionally immersed in it that when Roger (Downey, Jr.) spins the futility here with "We all think it's a good fight," Eddie pounces on him with some memorable oratory: "Don't give that liberal, yuppie b***s**t about a good fight; this isn't f*****g Yale! A good fight is one you win!"

Directed by Joseph Ruben, with a nice, incidental orig. score by Brad Fidel & some slick ambient tunes (Doors's Crystal Ship, Lou Reed's Busload of Faith).

Back during the Cold War, people actually bought into the bleak misery that was brinkmanship & actors actually took chances, & their agents let them.

Richard Burton is Alec Laemmas, John Le Carre's reluctant spy, whose disillusionment is turned against him to save one last informant: hard to believe that Mr. Burton was then still in the throes of his public romance with Liz Taylor. Grim's the word here: from the opening Checkpoint Charlie Berlin scene to the Dutch shores to the East German countryside--the Cold War's done nobody any favors. Moreover, this harsh treatment of spies & their back-stabbing, double-dealing ways was made just after Ian Fleming's suave James Bond had become a pop movie icon (Bond's "M," Bernard Lee, as a grocer here ["T'get a proper credit, y'need a banker's reference."], gets the crap pummeled outta him by Burton).

Anyway, "Spy" is movie stripped of glamor: everyone gets usurped by people with power. Burton's Laemmas is sent to salvage the good guys' chief informant, a senior GDR official; Claire Bloom's Commie idealist Nancy is called to East Germany under the ruse of cultural exchange, to aid in the hoax. Oscar Werner is mesmerizing ("Were you present for ziss...Sanksgiving?") as the no. 2 man in the Abteilung, on the trail of no. 1, Peter van Eyck, until Laemmas shows up to thwart his plans.

If old cold warriors were only half as conniving as they appear here, whither did they go after the fall of the Soviet Union? Something to which nobody with nanogram of sense has paid much attention.

I have the p'back ed. of the book (Capote's famous invention, the "nonfiction" novel, which basically meant it wasn't chronological), & those movie ad eyes can spook you: this was the orig. movie ad.

That score! Those characters: Bobby Blake limping & drinking down aspirin tablets with root beer; the chilling, skin-curling, totally asexual way in which Scott Wilson's Hickock calls Blake's Smith "honey." Blake's flashbacks watching his whore mother are genuinely erotic: has there been anything comparable since?

Then, panic in the Clutter house, while Smith, so outraged @crawling around under a bed for a silver dollar, takes it out on the family. & The "living witness."

Director Richard Brooks was supposedly the original choice to direct The Godfather. He turned it down: he wouldn't make heroes of gangsters.

But he made this, & later he made Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which had alot of the Cold Blood people-in-panic mode to it. (Although there's violence in The Godfather, is there any real suspense?)

This is great acting, folks. & Great dialog: name of the executioner? We the people!

Local Hero is one of the true gems: a wicked little movie that sneaks up on you with its little truths that seems frightfully large when you ponder them. The plot summary is available anywhere: boy goes to buy foreign land and falls in love with foreign land.

Peter Riegert, better known these days as corrupt Assemblyman Zellman in `The Sopranos,' is Mac, an anxious, highly wired (`I need electricity.') oil company bargainer sent to northern Scotland to purchase an entire town & environs for his company's North Sea oil project. He is initially put off by the town's unorthodox habits: his bargaining opponent (caddish Denis Lawson) is the local CPA, runs the bed & breakfast where Mac is staying, & `doubles as a cab driver;' & Mac discovers that an ageing beachcomber actually owns his beach.

Mac just wants to close the sale & go home; the townsfolk want to close the sale too (`…face the fact that you're gonna be filthy rich.'), but their excessive charm & good nature gradually draw Mac into their collective bosom.

Whereas too many movies want to be novels (preferably the agonizing `War and Peace'), Local Hero is a kind of short story; whereas too many directors place their loud symbols out there for characters to rally ‘round, director Bill Forsyth's characters produce the symbols. Mac's inability to maintain a long-distance phone connection with his office is symbolic of his gradual cutting of ties with his life in Texas (of course, he isn't even a native Texan). When Cal (`You've only been gone a day.') hangs up the phone after losing a connection with Mac, you know Mac is gone. But if you miss that, there's always the singing watch (`Meeting time in Texas.') drowning in the tide: incredible!

Mark Knopfler's soundtrack winds tightly thru the movie: the final phone booth (a symbol of both connection & distance) image as the closing theme thunders in always makes me shudder. There's also the cadre of wonderfully quirky characters: Happer (Burt Lancaster), the dreamy, stargazing V.P. of Knox Oil & Gas; Moritz, his incompetent therapist (`Look at me, Mr. Happer: I'm not married!'); Ben Knox (`Did you say Knox?'), the beachcombing ersatz astronomer; Rev. Macpherson, the African missionary (`I'm not Scottish either.'); and Oldsen, Mac's counterpart in Scotland. If you'd like some quiet enlightenment with solid entertainment, pick up this early 80s classic.

Angry Marines've taken tour group hostage on Alcatraz, to protest unfair treatment. Also hold some lethal weapons. Biochem. meister Nicolas Cage & mystery con Sean Connery end up charged with freeing hostages, defusing weapons.

Cage & Connery characters have nothing in common but must work well if grudgingly together, in the bowels of the island prison. Cage is high strung & scared; Connery is mean & methodical. The product is some very entertaining exchanges. The exchanges betw. two great actors, Ed Harris & Connery, are riveting, although way too brief. Excellent supporting cast. Movie has an outstanding music score too, which really adds some high drama to the massacre of the SEAL team.

Before Cage & co. descend on Alcatraz, there's a bit too much time frittering, & tension is deflated if not eliminated by Cage's barfing scene, & the obligatory chase scene with the ageist little old lady crossing the street (she's on screen less than seven seconds, & you just know it's some stuntman made up!) & the frightened cable car conductor might leave you cringing rather than on the edge of your seat.

Fair-to-middling action picture with some fine dialog, if one-too-many sight gags.

Simon Baker is Nick Fallin, bull-headed & over-the-top corporate lawyer, who finds a drug conviction sentence of community service to be just another annoying obstacle in his charge toward the top. He violates the terms of probation in almost every episode. Dabney Coleman is his icy, loveless father.

At the risk of TV heresy, The Guardian & The Sopranos share one primary element: endless tension among the regulars. Nick turns his eyes & back whenever pop gets serious.

He's even more contemptuous of his boss @legal services (a "12-step control freak") & an attractive colleague there (Wendy Moniz), with whom he insists he "wanted to spend time": "I thought I made that clear." "You did." Maybe because of his own dreary & aseptic upbringing & because he's so impersonal elsewhere, Nick has become an outstanding children's advocate, encouraging children & their however-abusive or -oblivious parents to stay together, rather than allowing them to get lost in the equally impersonal & govt.-funded maze that is social services.

The Guardian began its 2d season 9/24/02: Nick's left dad's old firm after dad left for judgeship & has got in a hurricane of trouble with drugs, a dead stripper, & his late probation officer. Incredibly, he bores thru these obstacles like a termite thru balsa wood.

This movie rockets beyond the hype. We are watching mythical creatures come to life. Every exchange here, every character has 2dary & 3diary meanings: Dennis Hopper is not just a photojournalist or just a sleazy sycophant: he's the insane harlequin ("The man's enlarged my mind!") in Heart of Darkness & he's Sean Flynn, the son of another mythical movie giant, of Dispatches.

Willard's narrative insists that the more he saw of them, the more he hated lies. Marlowe in "Heart" can't bring himself to tell the truth, so he lies about Kurtz's last words, telling his "intended" they were her name, instead of what we know they were, thus nailing himself to the heart of darkness. The movie is a journey up river & to the center of the earth.

Maybe "Now" is even the retelling of the Odyssey: Willard in search of Kurtz is Telemachus in search of Odysseus. But Brando's Odysseus is as mad at the end here as Odysseus tried to be in the Iliad. Then the Oedipal twist: kill the father & marry the memory ("It's no mistake that I got to be the caretaker of Walter E. Kurtz's memory.").

Everybody here is mesmerizing: coldly professional assassin Capt. Willard is as dumbfounded as a 10 year old when confronted with the TV news team ("Make like you're fighting!"). The war may run by four-star clowns, but it's OK, because "Charlie don't surf!"

Just like Conrad threw up walls of words to bury his story, Coppola erects walls of symbolism to hide "the horror." There are endless diversions from the inevitable: "I couldn't believe they wanted this man dead."

Maybe one day there'll be a Redux redux: the post-Cold War "Now." Could there be dozens of Kurtzes, forcibly sequestered in caves or deserted monasteries by the war profiteers? With Willard the real Telemachus? What happened when Kurtz died? Did the tribes disband? Or are his minions waiting for the 2d Coming?

Saw Man in the Glass Booth eons ago, on Hershey, PA, public TV. I'd heard of it, knew Robert (Quint in Jaws) Shaw had something to do with it.

But according to imdb, Shaw gets no credit here. Booth is a metaphorical rendering of the Trial of Adolf Eichmann, most-wanted Nazi war criminal. Point of play I think was to dramatize Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil." Schell is the wacked-out war crimes defendant who seems more than eager to resume his ghastly activity from the dock; he is utterly at a loss to understand why you shouldn't be able to wipe out entire races of people. Lois Nettleton's his appointed attorney, who may be seduced by Schell's grotesque charms.

I'd reckon this play's a bit dated now, & even the 2002 war crimes tribunal in the Hague provides no real I.D. After all, getting there, as they say, is half the fun, & well before Eichmann went on trial, Israel had apologized to the world community & promised never to sneak into another country & kidnap one of its citizens.

Vet cop (Nicholson) makes solemn promise to the mother of a murdered little girl to find killer. Even after retirement, Jerry's haunted by the hunt. He's determined to show that police arrested wrong man (del Toro) for the crime. But determination begets obsession begets--insanity?

The merits of this fine movie, I think the most intense drama I've seen in 10 years, could rest on story alone or on the cadre of excellent actors. Sean Penn has achieved something really remarkable here: so many actors playing against type; so many nonstereotypical scenes.

Nicholson's character reads bedtime stories to little girl, even as he suspects she's being stalked by killer. Mickey Rourke as grieving father? Yes, & also driven mad. Vanessa Redgrave as grandma.

Everybody's perverse here: mother who forces Nicholson to "pledge" on cross that dead daughter made. Aaron Eckart & del Toro turn your standard interrogation room scene into one of sexual seduction: Eckart stops short of sticking his tongue in del Toro's ear.

Mesmerizing & unnerving. This is what "adult drama" should be.

This solid drama was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. Burt Lancaster as legendary lawman Wyatt Earp; Kirk Douglas as gunfighting & hard-drinking dentist Doc Holliday. Great color amplifies the desert heat of Tombstone. Shootout finale has Wyatt chasing a really young Dennis Hopper into the general store. Progressive, for the time, romance betw. Lancaster & cardsharp with the heart of gold, Rhonda Fleming. Frankie Laine's theme song was a staple of AM radio for years afterward.

Everything works well in The Time Machine: solid acting, fair rendering of the story (Wells was one of the natural supernaturalists: the supernatural came from nature, usually a nature subverted by man), good effects, & very good music. In fact, the music here really fixes the film, right down to a riff from DeBussy's The Girl with the Flaxen Hair (an allusion to Weena), near the end, as Filby departs the house. Sebastian Cabot appears as the resident skeptic, at least the most vocal--it's a caricature but a better one than his later Mr. French.

Can you believe it?: a two-cassette, 3-hour celebrity interview? And we jerk ourselves silly if His Wealthiness Bill Gates deigns to talk to TV reporters!!

In 1972, Sartre sat in his apartment in the Montparnasse section of Paris for a film documentary: archive footage (including clips from the 1967 Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, convened in London by Bertrand Russell; that's U.S. antiwar activist Dave Dellinger to Sartre's right) and Sartre being interviewed by old friends, including Simone de Beauvoir. A real historical find, particularly with the endless talking-head revisionism conducted nightly on CNN & its broadcast progeny.

Originally made for French TV, Sartre By Himself was released theatrically in 1976. There is a post-Sartre coda on the video. In French with English dubbing & French subtitles for the archive footage. The only real drawback is that everyone but Sartre seems uncomfortable on camera: the energy produced by the fidgeting here could replace nuclear power.

I saw Day of the Jackal in Germany back in 1974, with German subtitles. I watched it again recently & realized that it had to've been a great film, since I recalled nothing specific, except that it was exciting. Movie is a fictional account of an assassination attempt on French Pres. DeGaulle in 1963, just 3 mos. before JFK was killed. DeGaulle had been a hero of the French resistance but incurred the wrath of senior military people by ceding Algeria its independence in 1962. We follow a pro hit man (Edw. Fox) hired by a group of the disgruntled Army officers as he prepares to kill DeGaulle. We're mesmerized as The Jackal (in French, chacal, presumably an anagram of the killer's real name) jumps from one meticulous procedure to another, including altering the exhaust system on his Alfa Romeo to accommodate his custom-made rifle. The detective assigned to track down the unknown would-be assassin is just as meticulous, if less enthusiatic. Fast-paced & engaging, with no dross.

Film recounts resistance to Hitler from 1933 until the July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life, when all unraveled. Interviews with widows of some of the conspirators & with people the conspirators helped out of Germany.

Is there a greater understatement than when Frau von Moltke says, "I really think they [the Nazis] did Germany a great disservice when they killed him [her husband]." It's so amazing that so many Germans in govt. & military absolutely hated Hitler but so few did anything. [Generals hated Hitler because of a) the Hitler oath & b) the Roehm putsch, in which several generals died.] Until he was executed, Adm. Canaris's office spent most of the war fouling up German intel. reports & producing false passports. Ask yourself whether you could keep a high-level job for 5 years & not only never once do what you were supposed to do but do everything you could to sabotage the outfit you worked for.