Reviews

The late F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre says the title of the show was Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, which is certainly true. The NBC show, however, was called NBC's Saturday Night for its first few months because of the potential title conflict. (I used to vet title conflicts at ABC, although not this one.) Cosell's show was cancelled after a month or two, and NBC "reclaimed" the title not long afterward.

The David Frost Revue was a half-hour show comprised of short sketches. Mr. Frost (who'd earlier helmed That Was the Week That Was in both the U.S. and the U.K., flying transatlantic every week so he could do both series) served as host, would appear in some of the sketches, and would solo in the final one. The show was simply not very funny.

It ran in fringe time (10:30 on Sunday nights in New York, for example) for a season and never caught on. I once went to the studio and saw them make an episode. The half-hour show took them more than three hours to shoot, and the audience was left to itself during the long delays between sketches. About two hours in, after yet another unfunny piece, people started to leave. I remember Mr. Frost, still on stage, watching as perhaps a third of the audience drifted out. He looked - well, not beaten, but something close to that.

I can't help feeling that this movie is not only about a chef finding himself, but it's also about lead actor/director Jon Favreau trying to get back in touch with the kind of films he used to make -- small ones without guys wearing super-suits or cowboys drawing down on aliens. Here, Favreau's Carl Casper quits his big Iron Restaurant job and rediscovers himself, and his passion for food and family, by running a Chef-sized food truck. Results: excellent.

Films like this can be lost if the wrong kid is cast. Emjay Anthony is the right kid. He's great as Percy. I particularly enjoyed the way the film handled Percy's internet-savviness, and how he used it. John Leguizamo is a great fit as Carl's friend and sous-chef. Sofia Vergara as Carl's ex- wife is, as usual, capable and stunning.

See Chef, and bear witness as a good filmmaker continues his journey to becoming a great one.

I just don't see what the point of this mess was. It was much the same as any family-under-attack flick I've ever seen, with the usual surprises and turnabouts and so on. The lack of police and other protection simply codifies what's in all those other movies. Really, what's the difference between ineffective cops and absent cops?

The family acts stupidly at every opportunity, simply to drive the plot along. The attackers are the usual maniacs. There's nothing new here.

And, really, how does this Purge nonsense work? How can The Purge even exist? Are the victimized classes really going to put up with being victimized every year? And who's still running the electric company while everyone's out shooting and hacking away at each other? Aren't people mad at the electric company?

This film makes no sense at all. Bleagh.

I found this film late at night on Starz, about ten minutes in, and was instantly drawn in by the absolutely out-there performances of the meth addicts in the first segment. I'd never heard of this film before, and I have rarely been so taken by surprise. Pawn Shop Chronicles is exactly why people should take the time to bounce around the movie channels at four in the morning.

Pawn Shop Chronicles is clearly a homage to the EC horror comics of the 1950s. There are three tightly interwoven stories here, each of which could have stood on its own as a Quentin Tarantino "Grindhouse" film. There's a large amount of violence here, as well as a pleasing platoon of naked ladies. Of the many good performances in this film, Brendan Fraser's Elvis impersonator and Matt Dillon's crazed husband are standouts. Vincent D'Onofrio and Chi McBride skillfully hold the center as the denizens of the pawn shop in the title. I also liked Ashlee Simpson as the Elvis impersonator's girlfriend and Lukas Hass as the brain-dead buddy of the meth heads.

Don't miss this one. And I say that as a Cook man!

The "National Clean-Up Paint-Up Fix-Up Bureau" was an arm of the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association. I don't know who was the intended audience for this film (homeowners? hardware store jobbers?), but the unintended hilarity is of a piece with other Cold War atomic-survival films.

The film does take pains to point out that this advice is meant for suburban homeowners who live on the "outer fringes" of a target area. There is enough truth in the advice here -- paint your house white to reflect heat, keep your grounds free of trash and clutter to prevent the spread of fire -- that the casual viewer of the 1950s might begin to think seriously about doing a little maintenance work. It was not enough to urge people to keep things neat and tidy because, well, they really should; the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association clearly felt that homeowners had to be scared into doing so. I wonder if it worked?

You'll be happy to know that the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association is still around. After a merger in 2010 with a like-minded organization, it's now called the American Coatings Association. I'll bet there's a p.r. guy in the ACA keeping a close eye on the movements of the Chinese Navy.

It's been almost twenty years now since I first saw "The Inner Light," and I still think it's the best episode of any Star Trek series. The writing, acting and direction are nothing short of brilliant. I was sitting there on 8 Sep 1966 for the premiere of what we now call Trek Classic, and I have never seen them do better than "The Inner Light." Hence, it gets a perfect 10 from me. Whoever called it TNG's "City on the Edge of Forever" was not mistaken, although I think the edge for "best ever episode" goes to "The Inner Light."

It seems odd, really, that the best episodes of Classic and TNG are more or less Star Trek in name only. The Trekkish trappings are all there at the top and bottom of both episodes, but in the middle we get a wonderful story about these characters, who in each case are far removed from their normal time, place and circumstance.

What an achievement this episode was. Writing about this has made me miss the series all over again.

I watched this on Starz in two shots because I found the first 45 minutes or so to be not very good. It was acceptable, but I just wasn't anxious to endure another slog through the origin of Spider- Man. After the film gets through that bit, though, it gets much better. Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker absolutely nails this character, bringing to the role a kind of vulnerability Tobey Maguire never quite pulled off. Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy is awfully cute and does well here, but she appears to be at least five years too old to be in high school, and I'm afraid I found that distracting.

The POV shots of Spider-Man web-slinging his way through Manhattan are astonishing. Visually, this film is a triumph. I'm glad I finally caught up to it and will look forward to the next one.

I saw this ... thing ... last night on TCM under the title The Devil Within Her and am still wondering why they scheduled it. It's a slapdash mess, a Rosemary's Baby ripoff by way of The Exorcist. The only good thing about it is Joan Collins, who's still in her '70s career decline and taking whatever work she could get. Joan's a pro who gives this film her best, and as a result the best thing about the film -- the only good thing, really -- is her name on the poster. That's it. It's a daft story about a dwarf and strippers and bizarre murders. Donald Pleasance shows up to lend a bit of weight to the proceedings but, really, just skip this one. It's not bad enough to be any fun at all. It's just bad.

When I was in fourth grade in Catholic school, the nuns trooped us over to the local theater one sunny afternoon in the fall of 1961 to see this film. I remembered nothing about it, except for a vague notion that it had bored my sandals off. When I saw that Fox Movie Channel had it On Demand, I gave it another try, just to see. (I don't think I've ever had such an enormous gap between viewings of a film.)

And it's not bad at all. The first half-hour or so, unfortunately, is not good. It looks tacky and cheap, like a '60s TV-movie. There's a ludicrous battle scene early on, but this marks the point after which the film starts to get better. The Italian locations are beautiful. The film is overly reverential and was made for a general audience fifty years ago, so we don't really get to see how much of a party animal Francis was before his conversion. Bradford Dillman pulls off the near-impossible job of making this plaster saint interesting. The incredibly lovely Dolores Hart plays Clare, the noblewoman who becomes the first Franciscan nun (and Dolores actually did enter the convent the year after this film, and is still there today, and remains as lovely as ever). There is a subtlety in the relationship between Francis and Clare that often works, but occasionally you get the feeling that the two are behaving in such a restrained way that they might actually be 13th-century Vulcans. Of course, the director here, Michael Curtiz, is responsible for the most romantic movie of all time, Casablanca. Whatever is there between Francis and Clare is left subtle enough for us to appreciate while not peeving the more conservative members of the audience. Stuart Whitman, the nobleman who loves Clare and serves as the third member of this non-triangle, seems miscast here. Stu was never really the nobleman type.

Interestingly, the film takes a dim view of the Crusades, as it shows Christian forces raping and pillaging their way to the Holy Land. There's a scene with Francis meeting the leader of the enemy Saracens that shows their Sultan in a much more civilized light. The film also states that Francis felt his mission from God was to save the Church from its own materialism and heresy, pretty much along the lines of what Martin Luther would try to do two and a half centuries later. I'm not sure the nuns of 1961 really understood what was going on here.

My non-Catholic wife says that Francis has always been well thought of outside the Catholic religion, mainly because he loved animals and is generally felt to have been kind and modest. Not too many reputations have survived eight centuries of questioning and doubt intact. I really didn't expect to like this film, or to get all the way through it, but I was happily surprised to find that I rather enjoyed it.

The Neighbors' pilot was a little weak, but there was something good going on inside there — enough for me to have come back the following week, and then the week after that, and so on. Now, as it closes out its first season, The Neighbors — a sitcom, for crying out loud! — has become my favorite show on television. The most recent episode, as I write this, was a musical with songs co-written by the great Alan Menken. Who else does this kind of stuff? Who else would even try?

Lenny Venito, who has spent most of his career playing cops both good and bad, is a standout as the father of the human family at the center of the series. Jami Gertz makes a welcome return to series TV as his wife and the mother of their three children. Simon Templeman and Toks Olagundoye are just amazing as their alien neighbors. The younger cast members, especially Ian Patrick as Dick Butkus, are just as good.

I have no idea how this show got on the air. It's that good. I didn't think broadcast TV had the stones to do a show this bent, this wonderful, this near-perfect. If the network can restrain itself from "fixing" it, I look forward to several more seasons of the same.

Real People was an enormous hit, sometimes coming in #1 in that week's Nielsens. It was a feel-good show about America that found its footing during the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81, which started a few months after the show debuted. It's hard to describe to someone who doesn't remember it just how miserable and distracting the hostage thing was to us. Some segments on Real People were just plain silly, but others showed folks rebuilding their homes after tornado strikes, doing charitable works for the poor, and so on. I think Real People made many of us feel a little better about the world around us. However, I think the show was also a creature of its troubled times; it spun down quickly during the early '80s, and a reunion special in 1991 did not lead to a hoped-for revival of the series.

I liked this one quite a bit. The two leads, Beverly Archer and Oliver Clark, clicked as a couple. I remember being a little annoyed at the other characters because they seemed to have been plugged in from other series: the smart-mouthed secretary, the wacky photographer, the bimbo model, etc. But this one gets a 9 from me anyway because of Archer and Clark. Perhaps they were too "real" for a '70s audience seeking escape, or maybe it's just that this element of the show was well ahead of its time. As a series on present-day USA or TNT, I think it would have been successful.

BTW, I thought Beverly Archer was rather cute. She was cast as "plain," but she had that smile. I recall her being interviewed in TV Guide when this show premiered, and she mentioned that she'd gotten married not long before, and there was a time when she thought she'd never meet her soulmate because of her looks. Wikipedia says they're still married after 36 years. It's nice to know they've still got each other, and I've always been a sucker for a happy ending.