by Dean | Aug 23, 2015 | General
There are a great many problems with the script by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, thus making The Godfather Part II (1974) a near-flop. Yet it is watchable, I think, because it is powerful. In this it resembles Hitchcock’s films, and like Hitchcock, Coppola directed cannily. And numerous people did some very fine acting, from Lee Strasberg to Talia Shire.
Undeniably Part II is an imaginative movie. TOO imaginative, but . . . strong in its way.
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Aug 18, 2015 | General
Don Siegel got a bit fancy in his directing of the 1971 film, The Beguiled, and that the look is occasionally unpolished is not so bad. All the same, the film is built on a premise which I must regard as poor: during the Civil War, the female proprietor of a Southern boardingschool for girls (Geraldine Page) is disinclined to turn a badly wounded Union soldier (Clint Eastwood) over to Southern troops even after he is nursed back to health. Thus she is so foolish she fails to see what a dangerous situation she is creating, and yet this woman is not supposed to be dumb.
Even beyond the premise, though, there is feeble material. Not everything comes across convincingly (e.g., the Page character’s belief, if it exists, that the Union soldier must have his leg amputated in order to avoid gangrene). The final years of Siegel’s career saw a decline in his movies’ quality. But there are a couple of hard-hitting scenes here, and the performances of Eastwood, Page, Elizabeth Hartman and Pamelyn Ferdin (a youngster) are pleasurably true.
The Beguiled (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Aug 17, 2015 | General
Kudos to Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond for an engaging if imperfect screenplay for The Apartment (1960), which was also, by Wilder, exquisitely directed. Consider that nothing is under- or overemphasized. . . The film shows us a tug-of-war between the overturning of traditional values such as marriage and respect for women, and the attempt to be decent. (This while the traditional institution of big business keeps humming along.)
Sure, I don’t like the sentimental romanticism in The Apartment but, all things considered, it’s a worthy film.
Cover of The Apartment (Collector’s Edition)
by Dean | Aug 14, 2015 | General
I was very hard last year on Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) but, believing it just might be a well-made guilty pleasure (if not something better), I decided to give it another chance.
I was naive—except that the first ten minutes of the film are indeed artistically interesting and should be commented on. It opens with agreeable shots of a pregnant girl dressed in white pensively sitting on the bank of a pond which a number of ducks have found inviting. Minutes later, a Mexican land baron sincerely calls for the head of the girl’s seducer to be delivered to him, after which shots of cars and planes taking men to Mexican cities appear. This engenders the idea that the violent ways of a Central American rural locale stuck in the past are also the violent ways of the present-day city.
Following this inspired moviemaking, however, is trash. Footage proving that the main actress has beautiful zoomers does not exactly conduce to either art or artistry. Too, it is not irrelevant to Alfredo‘s sexism. . . The only Peckinpah picture I’VE seen that can be called a guilty pleasure is Straw Dogs.
Cover of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
by Dean | Aug 12, 2015 | General
Not bad but not all that good either, I’ll See You In My Dreams (2015) focuses on a widow and retired teacher, Carol Petersen (Blythe Danner). A new film by Brett Haley, it presents the Unexpected, in various forms, intruding into the life of an aging person, but without being particularly memorable.
I have a problem with the gifted Danner in that she seems to be acting like a very old, nearly decrepit woman instead of the barely old senior that Carol in fact is (Danner must have been a mere 70 or 71 when the film began to be made). There are a few scenes of grief which are nicely done by both Danner and director Haley, and the dialogue can be intelligent. Other people, though, have liked this movie better than I have—it could use more character exploration—and yet, as I said, it’s not bad.
by Dean | Aug 10, 2015 | General
Cover of Man on the Train (L’Homme du Train)
In 2004’s Man on the Train, Jean Rochefort plays Manesquier, a bachelor who offers lodging to, and befriends, a middle-aged bank robber named Milan (Johnny Hallyday). Friendless and lonely, Manesquier finds himself secretly longing for the kind of gutsiness and abandon he sees in Milan, who, for his part, warms to the quiet conventionality that the old bachelor is beginning to hate. Each man nigh unconsciously slips into behaving a bit as the other man does. A kind of desperate role-playing, this, while the routine danger of death abides (Manesquier has health problems). However, both men go to their individual fates—in screenwriter Claude Klotz’s almost nihilistic vision of the world.
Ingenious for its characterization, dialogue, direction (by Patrice Leconte) and cinematography, Man on the Train is nonetheless, sadly, a failure. James Bowman has rightly commented on the film’s “willingness to romanticize criminals,” i.e. Milan. Watch the film from beginning to end and you’ll see what Bowman means. That’s bad enough, but another thought provoked is that of whether an aging intellectual would ever really envy an outlaw’s life. Yet whether he would or wouldn’t, the matter ought to be examined with a more acceptable climax and denouement than Klotz has purveyed in this movie. That denouement is all that keeps Train from out-and-out nihilism, and it’s lousy. Over and above, the film is thin and rather talky, not unlike Ingmar Bergman at his worse.
Leconte’s direction is tasteful and painstaking. Klotz’s screenplay leaves much to be desired, but at any rate his dialogue is terrific. No admirer of the music of Schumann, Manesquier nevertheless says he likes Schumann because he “appeals to my love of failure.” In another sequence Milan, substituting for Manesquier in the tutelage of a boy, praises a fictional character, Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, because she waits and waits for her fiance’s return. Says the bank robber, “I think she’s magnificent. People nowadays don’t have that kind of patience.”
(In French with English subtitles)
by Dean | Aug 7, 2015 | General
For the first hour and 15 minutes, Forbidden Planet (1956) holds up well as science fiction, then falls apart with its Id-as-monster plot device. Oh well. It is still a curious entertainment proffering a familiar-looking robot and those electronic tonalities on the soundtrack. Sets are still often impressive when they are not, like the idyllic backyard woods, strikingly quaint. Plus FP has Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis. Oddly, it respects religion and it respects leggy females (that is, Miss Francis). More ambitious than Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it is nonetheless a lesser film, although . . . I wish I had seen it when in opened in Cinemascope.
Screenshot of Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis from the trailer for the film Forbidden Planet. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Aug 5, 2015 | General
Again there is an absurd plot, but at least it’s fairly interesting. However, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015) succeeds on the strength of its utterly captivating adventure set pieces. A terrorist mastermind’s silly overkill in an opera-house assassination scheme creates some mesmerizing human doings. A motorcycle chase is long-and-winding exhilaration.
Participating here, and elsewhere, is of course Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, but also newcomer Rebecca Ferguson, a Swedish actress using an imperfect British accent, who is practically the star of the movie. (But not quite, Tom.) A real action heroine she is, and she somehow looks like a secret agent. She has a noirish look. The acting in Rogue Nation, such as that of Simon Pegg,is winningly successful.
Christopher McQuarrie’s film knows how to cast a spell.
Have fun.
by Dean | Aug 3, 2015 | General
Directed by Robert Mulligan, The Stalking Moon (1968) is a rough-hewn Western wherein a white woman (Eva Marie Saint) kidnapped long ago by the Apaches, and now rescued, struggles to keep the Indian father of her half-Indian son from taking the boy away. Helping her in this effort is a retiring army man (Gregory Peck) voluntarily serving as her escort. The likable action scenes hardly redeem this picture once it starts failing to make sense—perhaps the novel from which it is adapted is more illuminating—and since it too quickly and casually ends. As it happens, Moon is one of the weakest Westerns of the past few decades.
Cover of The Stalking Moon
by Dean | Jul 31, 2015 | General
To have one’s mind taken away is to lose one’s personhood. This is what happens to the people of Santa Mira as the outer space body snatchers do their demonic possessing in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955). Once the bodies are snatched, the people feel no love or any other emotion, caring only about self-preservation. In the interest of this, in fact, they know how to mimic people who still have their humanity. Miles (Kevin McCarthy) and Becky (Dana Wynter) still have theirs, and they themselves rush about for the sake of self-preservation. There is a fascinating panic in the film. Siegel never makes a misstep, and the tale, based on a Collier’s magazine serial, is unerringly crafted.
Cover of Invasion of the Body Snatchers
