Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

Criminal Law (1988, directed by Matin Campbell)

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Gary Oldman is Ben Chase, a hotshot defense attorney who graduated from Harvard and now practices law in Boston.  That means that he gets to have a Boston accent and you know how much Gary Oldman loves playing a role with an accent.  Ben also has a pompadour because Gary Oldman always has something weird going on with his hair in almost every film he appears in.

Ben’s latest client is Martin Thiel (Kevin Bacon), a sociopathic rich kid who has been accused of murder.  Even though Ben thinks that Martin is probably guilty, he still gets Martin off the hook.  As soon as Martin get his acquittal, he starts murdering again.  Ben feels responsible so he decides that what he needs to do is trick Martin into implicating himself.  However, Martin knows what Ben is planning so, instead, he decides to frame Ben for the murders.  Somehow, it all links back to Martin’s feelings about abortion.  I guess Martin is against abortion or maybe he’s for it.  It was hard to keep track.  I watched the movie and I’m still not sure I followed everything that I saw.  It’s not that the plot is diabolically clever.  It’s just that it’s so incoherent that not a single plot point logically follows from another.

The film experiments with suggesting that there’s some sort of deeper connection between Martin and Ben.  Martin is obsessed with Ben and when Ben is in bed with his girlfriend, he briefly imagines that she’s turned into Martin and has a good old-fashioned freak out as a result.  It doesn’t make any sense.  First off, you have to believe that Ben can’t tell the difference between Kevin Bacon and his girlfriend.  Secondly, you have to then accept that Ben — a HARVARD GRADUATE — is so stupid that he would actually believe that his girlfriend had suddenly transformed into Kevin Bacon and must now be strangled.

Criminal Law is a film that you may be tempted to watch because of the pairing of Kevin Bacon and Gary Oldman but you’d be better off just watching JFK again.  They’re both great actors and and it’s always interesting to see them cast against type but neither one of them is particularly good in Criminal Law.  They’re let down by a script that doesn’t allow either one to create a consistent character.  Sometimes, Martin is a soulless attorney and other times, he’s a panicky social justice crusader.  Sometimes, Kevin Bacon is a clever sociopath and, other times, he’s just your typical mindless movie slasher.

On the plus side, Joe Don Baker is in this mess, playing a cop.  Joe Don Baker has played so many cops in so many bad movies that I wonder if he’s ever been tempted to try to arrest someone in real life.  In Criminal Law, he’s not given much to do but it doesn’t matter.  He’s Joe Don Baker!

Music Video Of The Day: Ponder The Mystery by William Shatner (2013, directed by William Shatner and Kevin Layne)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today, we wish a happy 89th birthday to the one and only William Shatner!

This music video is for the title song from Shatner’s 2013 album, Ponder the Mystery.  Nowadays, it’s usually agreed that Shatner was laughing at himself when he famously covered songs like Tambourine Man and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.  But Ponder the Mystery features Shatner in a reflective mood.  This song, like every other song on the album, finds Shatner pondering not just the mysteries of life but the reality of death, as well.

After that happy introduction, what else can I do but invite you to…

Enjoy!

Time Chasers (1994, directed by David Giancola)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

People, I know what you’ve heard but Time Chasers is not that bad.

I know that Time Chasers has got a reputation.  It was featured on one of the most brutal (and funniest) episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  That, in fact, is probably how most people know about this film.  (Some members of the MST 3K crew subsequently revisited Time Chasers for Rifftrax.)  It’s true that MST 3K was known for taking apart bad films and it probably hasn’t helped the film’s reputation that it’s been reported that some members of the production were not amused about being mocked by Mike Nelson and the bots.

But that’s all in the past and I think that today, we can finally admit that Time Chasers is not that bad.

It’s certainly one of the few films to suggest that time travel can be achieved by an airplane, five oversized floppy disks, and a Commodore 64.  Nick Miller (Matthew Bruch) is a scientist and amateur airplane pilot who has discovered how to travel through time.  He hopes that we can use time travel so that we can figure out a way to “stop killing ourselves.”  Lisa (Bonnie Pritchard), the local journalist who went to high school with Nick, is impressed, especially when Nick takes her on a trip to the future (which does indeed look much like a mall food court).  Lisa is less impressed when Nick decides to sell the idea to J.K. Robertson (George Woodard).  J.K.’s a rich businessman and that automatically makes him evil.  Lisa understands this.  Nick does not.

J.K. promises that he won’t use time travel to develop weaponry but, when Lisa and Nick take another romantic trip to the future, they discover that the world is in ruins and it no longer looks like a food court.  Instead, people are shooting at each other.  J.K. lied!  Nick and Lisa go back to the present to confront J.K. but J.K.’s not willing to give up time travel that easily.  Soon, as a result of all the time travel, there are multiple Nicks and Lisas and J.K. Robertsons all over the place.  It all ends with a trip back to the American Revolution, where many of the colonists wear wrist watches and modern-style eyeglasses.

It is easy to poke fun at something like Time Chasers but I’m going to defend it.  The plot is actually more ambitious than you would expect from a low-budget sci-fi film and there are some clever touches that indicate that the director actually did give some serious thought to what would happen if you had multiple people jumping from one time to another.  (I like the fact that, when Nick meets his past self, Past Nick can’t understand why Present Nick won’t stop talking about Lisa.)  For all the ribbing that they took on MST 3K, both Matthew Bruch and Bonnie Pritchard are likable as Nick and Lisa.  Bruch may not look like a conventional hero and, in this film, he’s got a mullet that’s goofy as hell but there’s a lot of sincerity to his performance.

I love MST 3K.  When I first saw the Time Chasers episode, I laughed so much that it hurt and it’s still a favorite of mine.  (I cannot see an empty field without saying, “Hey, Children of the Corn.”  Lisa — our Lisa, not the film’s Lisa — is usually kind enough to reply, “Hey,” so my joke isn’t just left hanging in the air.)  But taken on its own, without Mike and the bots riffing on it, Time Chasers is not that bad.  It’s goofy take on time travel and, dammit, I like it.

4 Shots From 4 Film: Special Gary Oldman Edition

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4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!

Today is the 62nd birthday of one of the best actors currently working, Gary Oldman!  In honor of both this day and also Gary Oldman’s amazing versatility as a performer, here are…

4 Shots From 4 Films

Sid & Nancy (1986, directed by Alex Cox)

The Firm (1989, directed by Alan Clarke)

The Fifth Element (1997, directed by Luc Besson)

The Dark Knight (2008, directed by Christopher Nolan)

Music Video of the Day: Heartbreaker (At The End Of Lonely Street) by Dread Zeppelin (1990, directed by ????)

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Yesterday’s music video of the day was Dread Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song.

Today’s music video of the day is another video from everyone’s favorite cover band.  This one is for Heartbreaker (At The End of Lonely Street).  I have no idea who directed it.  I don’t know if the song was a hit when it was released.  I don’t know if anyone but me cares.  But sometimes, you just need to see a Led Zeppelin song covered by a 300-pound Elvis impersonator.

Am I alone in this?

Enjoy!

Cinemax Friday: Sworn to Justice (1997, directed by Paul Maslak)

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Janna (Cynthia Rothrock) is a psychologist who is also a martial arts expert.  One night, she comes home to discover that her sister and her nephew have been murdered and that the killers are still in the house!  Though Janna manages to fight off the attackers, she also gets a nasty bump to the head.  Weeks later, after she’s gotten out of the hospital and she’s ready to get back to work, she discovers that she now has ESP!

All Janna has to do is touch someone or hold something in her hand and she has visions of the past and sometimes the present.  (She has those special ESP powers that do whatever needs to be done at the moment.)  When she finds her sister’s brooch, she flashes back to the night of the attack and sees the faces of the men who attacked her sister.  Using her newfound power, Janna sets out to get revenge.

But even as she tracks down the thugs who killed her sister, Janna still does not know the identity of the person who ordered the hit.  She just knows that he’s known as “The Man.”  Could he have something to do with the arrogant cop killer (Brad Dourif!) for whom Janna is serving as an expert defense witness?  Or could The Man by the publisher (Kurt McKinny) with whom Janna is having a steamy affair?  (This was a late night Cinemax film, after all.)  Or could it be the detective (Tony Lo Bianco) who is supposed to be investigating her sister’s death?

As far as Cynthia Rothrock martial arts films are concerned, Sworn to Justice is pretty good.  Rothrock was not only a force to be reckoned with in fight scenes but, as this film shows, she was a likable actress, too.  For the most part, she’s able to hold her own even when acting opposite seasoned scene stealers like Brad Dourif, Tony Lo Bianco, Mako, and even Walter Koenig, who plays Janna’s mentor with an outrageous German accent.  While the film’s fight scenes are just as good as you would expect from a Cynthia Rothrock fick, the ESP twist adds just the right amount of weirdness to keep Sworn to Justice from coming across as just another low-budget martial arts film.  The film doesn’t take itself too seriously.  Even while she’s getting revenge for their deaths, Janna never seems to be that broken up over the deaths of her sister and her nephew.  At worse, she’s seems to be annoyed by the inconvenience of it all.  It’s just something else that she has to find the time to deal with.

There are a few scenes that are so darkly lit that it’s almost impossible to see what’s happening but then there are other scenes, like the one where Janna shows off her favorite martial arts moves to her new boyfriend, that work surprisingly well.  This is a 90s production all the way, which means a saxophone-scored sex scenes and synthesizer-scored action scenes.  Sworn to Justice is a good Cynthia Rothrock film, even if most audiences will end up figuring out the identity of The Man long before she does.

 

Music Video Of The Day: Immigrant Song by Dread Zeppelin (1989, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

I don’t know about you but I’m in the mood for a reggae-flavored cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, hopefully one that’s performed by a 300-pound Elvis impersonator.

Fortunately, when you get those type of cravings, you can turn to Dread Zeppelin.  Dread Zeppelin is certainly not the only band to cover Led Zeppelin but they are probably the best known.  Actually, it’s somewhat unfair to describe Dread Zeppelin as being only a Led Zeppelin cover band.  They’ve actually covered a wide variety of artists and I believe they’ve released some original material as well.  They even did a disco record at one point.

Dread Zeppelin is one of those bands where members come and go.  As of this writing, the band is still recording and touring but bassist Gary Putnam is the only member who has appeared on every recording and taking part in every tour.

Enjoy!

Citizen Cohn (1992, directed by Frank Pierson)

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The year is 1986 and the powerful attorney Roy Cohn (James Woods) is dying.  The official story is that Cohn has liver cancer but the truth is that he’s dying of AIDS.  As he lies in his hospital bed, he thinks about his past and the events the led to him becoming one of the most feared and powerful men in America.  He is haunted by the ghosts of his many enemies, people like communist spy Ethel Rosenberg (Karen Ludwig) and his former colleague, Bobby Kennedy (David Marshall Grant).

Not surprisingly, a good deal of Cohn’s memories center around his association with Sen. Joseph McCarthy (Joe Don Baker), a charismatic alcoholic who, in the 50s, charged that he had a list with the names of communist spies deep within the government.  Cohn and Kennedy served as the counsels on McCarthy’s committees.  Cohn is with McCarthy from the beginning and he’s with him until the end of the senator’s career.  In fact, it’s Cohn’s own shadowy relationship with an army private that ultimately leads to McCarthy’s downfall.

Except for one aspect of the film, Citizen Cohn is one of the best films to ever be produced by HBO.  The film covers a lot of history in a little less than 2 hours and it does so in a way that is always interesting and easy to follow.  By including incidents from every phase of Cohn’s life, as opposed to just focusing on his time as McCarthy’, the film also shows how someone like Roy Cohn can become a behind-the-scenes power player despite the majority of the country having no idea who he is.  James Woods gives one of his best performances as the hyperactive and unapologetically corrupt Cohn while Joe Don Baker is perfect as the self-pitying Joseph McCarthy.

The problem with the film, and your mileage may vary on how big an issue this is, is that it almost presents Cohn’s final days — dying of AIDS in a lonely New York hospital room — as being some sort of deserved fate for everything that he did wrong in life.  For me, even in the case of someone like Roy Cohn, that’s a step too far and it comes very close to presenting AIDS as some sort of divine punishment (which, itself, comes dangerously close to mirroring the homophobic statements that were made — and still are being made — by anti-gay activists).  That may not have been the film’s intention but, with the flashback structure and all of his dead enemies materializing to taunt Cohn as he lies dying, it’s still a very valid interpretation.

Some of that is perhaps unavoidable.  Cohn, in both real life and the film, died largely unrepentant for anything he did during his life.  As the central character of a biopic, Cohn never has the type of big moment that you would hope for, where he would realize that it was wrong for him to destroy so many lives and show at least a hint of contrition for his past behaviors.  That Roy Cohn is even a compelling character is a testament to the talent of James Woods because it’s certainly not due to any sort of hidden goodness lurking underneath the surface of Cohn’s snarling personality.  The lack of apologies and regrets that made Cohn a powerhouse in real life also makes him an ultimately unsatisfying subject for a movie.

Music Video Of The Day: Under The Boardwalk, performed by Bruce Willis and The Temptations (1987, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today is Bruce Willis’s birthday!

Everyone knows that Bruce Willis is the film star who, late in his career, turned out to be an unexpectedly good character actor.  Quentin Tarantino once said that Willis as one of the only modern stars who seemed as if he could easily step into an old gangster movie or film noir and not seem like he was out of place.  Tarantino was right.

What is often forgotten is that, early on his career, Willis also pursued musical stardom.  He released two albums of R&B covers, the best known of which was the first, The Return of Bruno.  Released by Motown, The Return of Bruno was critically dismissed as being a vanity project but Bruce got the last laugh when the album exceeded expectations commercially and Willis went on to appear in movies like Pulp Fiction and 12 Monkeys.  Meanwhile, his critics had to settle for appearing in Rolling Stone.

When the album was released in 1987, HBO aired a concert film of Willis performing.  The video above is taking from that concert film and it features Bruce singing Under The Boardwalk with The Temptations.  Willis’s cover of Under The Boardwalk did not chart in the U.S. but it was hugely popular in the UK, where it reached the second spot on the charts.

Enjoy!

Fever (1991, directed by Larry Elikann)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Ray (Armand Assante) is a formerly viscous ex-con who has just gotten out of prison and is now determined to go straight and live on the right side of the law.  After spending nearly a decade behind bars, all he wants to do is to reunite with his girlfriend, Lacy (Marcia Gay Harden), and make her his wife.  However, there’s a problem.  While Ray was locked up, Lacy moved on.  She’s now engaged to Elliott (Sam Neill), a liberal attorney who, unlike Ray, is a pacifist.  Even though Lacy is still attracted to Ray, she does not want to get back together with him.

Unfortunately, there’s a second problem.  Ray may have gone straight but his former criminal associates don’t believe him.  They want Ray to help them pull off a major crime and when Ray says that is no longer his thing, they react by kidnapping Lacy.  If Ray ever wants to see Lacy again, he’s now got to return to his life of crime.

There’s also a third problem.  Ray may be an experienced criminal but Elliott insists on tagging along with him while he’s following the kidnappers’s orders.  So now, Ray not only has to commit several crimes but he has to do it with an inexperienced partner who doesn’t even believe in firing guns!

Fever is one of those HBO films that used to show up all the time on cable in the 90s.  I watched it a few times back in the day, just because I was a teenage boy and the movie featured a good deal of nudity.  Even at that time, though, I thought it was a slow and frequently boring movie.  Rewatching it for this review, I was shocked to discover that it was even slower than I remembered.  It seems like it takes forever for Ray and Elliott to finally team up and for the movie to get going.  Though the plot description may make it sound like a buddy comedy, it’s actually a very tough and grim picture.  Armand Assante and Sam Neill are not actors known for their light touch and they both give very serious and gritty performances.  Unfortunately, the film’s pace never really matched the intensity of its stars and the film’s storyline isn’t strong enough to hold up under scrutiny.  Once you start to wonder if Ray would really let Elliott tag along with him, the movie itself falls apart.

Armand Assante is a good actor who rarely seems to appear in good films.  Fever is a good example of that.  Assante gives an excellent and complex performance (and both Sam Neill and Marcia Gay Harden are pretty good too) but Fever itself never really clicks.