Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

Blue Ridge (2020, directed by Brent Christy)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Former Green Beret Justin Wise (Johnathon Schaech) is the new sheriff of the small mountain town of Blue Ridge.  Sheriff Wise is so good at his job that he can just step inside of a gas station and figure out that it’s been robbed just by observing that the millennial behind the counter isn’t look at his phone.  The sheriff has a phone-obsessed millennial daughter (Taegen Burns) and a supportive ex-wife (Sarah Lancaster), who works as a waitress.

He also has a big mystery on his hands when the daughter of Cliff McGrath (Graham Greene) is found murdered.  The McGraths thinks that the Wade family is responsible.  The Wades have a long-standing grievance against the McGraths.  Sheriff Wise and Deputies Dobson (Lara Silva) and Thompson (Ben Esler) have to solve the mystery before a full-out war breaks out in town.

I was not surprised to discover that this was a pilot for television series.  The movie has the homey feel of the type of mystery show that your parents or grandparents would watch every Friday night.  Sherriff Wise may not be as old as my parents but he definitely shares their feelings about phones and trying to understand what’s wrong with the kids today.

It’s an old-fashioned movie but it’s mildly diverting and it does hold your attention.   Johnathon Schaech gives a strong performance as the sheriff who can beat up three people at once but who still gets nervous before asking a woman out on a date.  Graham Greene and Tom Proctor both give good performances as the rival family patriarchs and the mystery takes some interesting turns.  Blue Ridge did a good job of brining its small town setting to life.  Blue Ridge is good enough to be a pleasant afternoon diversion.

Avenging Angelo (2002, directed by Martyn Burke)

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When mob boss Angelo (Anthony Quinn) is assassinated on the orders of the son of a former rival, bodyguard Frankie Delano (Sylvester Stallone) takes it upon himself to protect Angelo’s daughter, Jennifer (Madeleine Stowe).  The problem is that Jennifer, who was adopted by a normal couple, doesn’t know that she is the daughter of a mobster.  Her life and her marriage are already falling apart even before Frankie reveals the truth to her.  All she wants to do is disappear into the pages of a romance novel written by her favorite writer, Marcello (Raoul Bova) but Marello is not quite what he seems.

Sylvester Stallone has had a long career, full of high points (Rocky, First Blood, The Expendables, Creed) and low points (too many to list).  Avenging Angelo, made at a time when it was assumed that the aging Stallone would never again play Rocky Balboa or John Rambo, is a moderate low point.  It’s no Rocky but it’s still better than Stop!  Or My Mom Will Shoot!  Overall, it’s not very good and a lot of the humor falls flat but Stallone and Madeleine Stowe are both likable and they have a few moments that display what seems like genuine chemistry.  It’s still a slow movie that awkwardly mixes comedy and action but it was not the disaster that I was expecting it to be when I first found it on Tubi.  It’s more forgettable than bad.  If there is anything to really regret when it comes to Avenging Angelo, it’s that Anthony Quinn did not get a more memorable swan song.

Avenging Angelo was Stallone’s second movie to go straight to video.  It’s easy to forget not but the conventional wisdom in 2002 really was that Stallone was washed up.  There were jokes about whether or not he would follow Schwarzenegger’s lead and go into politics.  Stallone, however, proved all the naysayers wrong, proving that he could still throw punches as Rocky Balboa and John Rambo while The Expendables revealed a Stallone who could finally laugh at himself.  Avenging Angelo turned out to be not the end of Stallone’s career but instead just a detour.  Say what you will about the man and his movies, Sylvester Stallone is an American institution.

Nothing In Common (1986, directed by Garry Marshall)

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Tom Hanks plays David Basner (Tom Hanks), an advertising executive whose immature lifestyle gives him insight into what sells but has also left him totally unprepared to deal with the fallout when his mother (Eva Marie Saint) leaves his father, Max (Jackie Gleason).  David, who is struggling to come up with the perfect commercial for a demanding client (Hector Elizondo), has to come to terms with both his father’s bad health and his history of infidelity.

This isn’t my favorite Tom Hanks movie.  It comes from that awkward period when Hanks was trying to make the transition from comedy to drama and its attempt to mix the two genres is not always successful.  The scenes of Hanks at the ad agency are often so cartoonish that they don’t seem like they belong in a movie where Jackie Gleason loses a foot to diabetes and realizes that he spent his entire marriage emotionally abusing his wife.  The movie, though, is worth watching for the teaming of Hanks and Gleason, two comedic actors who eventually proved themselves to equally as skilled at playing it serious.  Gleason, especially, gives a strong performance.  This was his final film and Garry Marshall convinced him to take it by asking, “Do you really want to go out on Smokey and the Bandit 3?”  Gleason would die a little over a year after the release of Nothing In Common and this film, even if it wasn’t perfect, gave the world a chance to see what a good actor he really was.

This film is often cited as the the movie that started Hanks on the way to becoming a dramatic actor.  Like Punchline, Nothing In Common played a role in Hanks becoming more than just a comedian but  I think Big was ultimately the better showcase for Hanks’s ability to mix pathos with laughs.  Nothing In Common was directed by Garry Marshall and, as was usually the case with Marshall, he often doesn’t trust the audience to figure things out for themselves.  He goes overboard trying to force an emotional response instead of just trusting the material.  Tom Hanks still does a good enough job in Nothing In Common.  Hanks is as likable as always and you can see the dramatic actor emerging in Hanks’s performance even if Hanks still wasn’t totally comfortable with it.

Nothing In Common is flawed but it was definitely a better swan song for Jackie Gleason than Smokey and the Bandit 3.

That Thing You Do! (1996, directed by Tom Hanks)

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That Thing You Do! is the story of a one-hit wonder.

In 1964, an aspiring Jazz drummer named Guy (Tom Everett Scott) is a last minute addition to the a local band called the Oneders.  (It’s meant to sound like Wonders but almost everyone mispronounces it as O-Needers.)  The band’s egotistical leader, James (Jonathon Schaech) has written a slow ballad called That Thing You Do! but when Guy’s drumming causes the band to perform the song at a faster tempo, they end up with a local hit on their hands.  That local hit becomes a national hit when The Oneders are signed by Play-Tone Records.  First, Mr. White (Tom Hanks), their new manager, officially changes the name to The Wonders.  Secondly, he makes sure that every teen in America is dancing to That Thing You Do!  Third, he tells Guy to always wear sunglasses.  Fourth, he tells James that he will record and perform what Play-Tone tells him to.  Guitarist Lenny (Steven Zahn) and the unnamed Bass Player (Ethan Embry) are happy to be along for the ride but James chafes at his lack of artistic freedom.  Guy, meanwhile, falls for James’s girlfriend (Liv Tyler, at her loveliest) and dreams of meeting his idol, jazzman Del Paxton (Bill Cobbs).

That Thing You Do! was Tom Hanks’s directorial debut and, with its careful recreation of a bygone era and its collection of authentic sounding early 60s rock on the soundtrack, it was obviously a labor of love.  Considering the number of times that the song is played in the movie, it helps that it is a very good song.  That Thing You Do! is a catchy tune, one that you can’t help but tap your feet to.  At the same time, it also sounds like a one hit wonder.  It’s good but not so great as to make you expect much else from The Wonders.

Not surprisingly, Tom Hanks gets great performances from the entire ensemble cast.  Johnathon Schaech and Tom Everett Scott have never been better.  Liv Tyler is lovely and vulnerable as James’s unappreciated girlfriend.  Familiar faces like Peter Scolari, Kevin Pollak, Chris Isaak, and Clint Howard make welcome appearances.  Hanks himself is surprisingly intimidating as Mr. White.  When he says that the band will cover something the Play-Tone catalogue, it’s obvious that he’s not making a request.

The film is a tribute to being young and to loving music bit it’s also a study in the disillusionment of discovering that everything is ultimately a business.  James is frequently an arrogant jerk and he treats his girlfriend terribly but it’s hard not to sympathize with him when he says that he wants to do more than just cover songs from the Play-Tone catalogue.  To James and Guy, the Wonders are about self-expression and their love of music.  To Mr. White, the Wonders are just another band that came up with one catchy tune and who probably aren’t ever going to be heard from again.   That Thing You Do! pays tribute to all of the one-hit wonders out there, the bands who you forget about until you just happen to hear that one song on the radio or in a movie and suddenly, all the memories come flooding back.

 

Lethal Tender (1997, directed by John Bradshaw)

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Montessi (Kim Coates) and his men have taken over a water filtration plant, are holding hostages, and keep threatening to poison the water supply.  Rogue cop David Chase (Jeff Fahey) and Melissa Wilkins (Carrie-Anne Moss) sneak around the plant and try to stop the terrorists.  David Chase is set up to be a John McClane type but instead, he only kills one terrorists and then lets everyone else do most of the work.  Of course, the whole water filtration hostage situation is just a distraction so Mr. Turner (Gary Busey) can steal a bunch of bonds.  Busey sits behind a computer for most of the movie, lending his name but not much else.

A good cast is wasted in what is definitely one of the worst of the many Die Hard rip-offs to come out in the 90s.  There’s not enough action, with Jeff Fahey as a passive hero and even the great Kim Coates reduced to standing around and doing a lot of yelling for most of his time on screen.  Gary Busey is the big star here but it’s obvious that he was only on the set for a few hours and his plan for stealing the bonds never makes sense.  Whenever anyone questions his plans, he says that it involves computers.  In the 90s, I guess that was enough.

Watching this last night, I realized that I had seen it on Cinemax back in the day.  It didn’t make much sense back then either.

The Killing of Billy The Kid (2023, directed by Brett Bentman)

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In the year 1881, a recently arrested prisoner named Thomas Riley (Andrea Zirio) attempts to gain his freedom by offering to inform Sheriff Pat Garrett (Thom Hallum) about the location of a man calling himself Henry McCarty.  At first Garrett asks why he should care about a man named McCarty but, when Riley reveals that McCarty is actually the infamous Billy the Kid, Garrett becomes much more interested.

The Killing of Billy The Kid is a straight-forward account of the events leading up to the death of Billy the Kid (played here by Paul Addison).  While there are flashbacks to the pasts of both Billy and Garrett, the majority of the film is Garrett heading out to the location where Billy is hiding.  With a few notable exceptions, it sticks to the general accepted facts about the death of Billy the Kid.  Paul Addison plays Billy as being a cocky punk and probably comes closer to capturing Billy’s actual personality than a lot of other actors have.

The budget was obviously low (the imdb says it was made for only $30,000) but the film still looks good and it’s version of the old west feels duty and isolated enough to be passable.  I have seen the film listed as having a 90-minute runtime on some sites.  Every streaming version that I’ve found clocks in at 77 minutes and, when I watched the film, it didn’t seem like there were any parts of the story missing.  Addison and Hallum are convincing in their roles, looking authentic whether riding a horse or shooting a gun.  For western fans, there’s much to appreciate about The Killing of Billy The Kid.

Demolition Man (1993, directed by Marco Brambilla)

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In the near future, law-breakers and other destructive types are not put in prison but are instead cryogenically frozen and left in suspended animation until they’ve served out their sentences.  The most fearsome criminal in the world, Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) has been frozen but so has his nemesis, Detective John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone).

In the far future, Los Angeles is a part of a megalopolis named San Angeles.  Envisioned and watched over by a seemingly benign dictator named Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne), San Angeles is a wannabe utopia where cursing leads to an automatic fine and all of the restaurants are Taco Bell.  When he’s thawed out for a parole hearing, the suddenly super-powered Phoenix makes his escape.  The police, no longer knowing how to deal with violence, make the reluctant decision to thaw out John Spartan.  Assigned to work with the enthusiastic Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock), Spartan must navigate this strange future to defeat Phoenix.

For some reason, Demolition Man never seems to get the respect that it deserves.  Made at a time when both the Rambo and the Rocky franchises appeared to be over, Demolition Man features one of Stallone’s most appealing performances as he deals with a society where just saying a bad word can cause a scandal.  Just as Spartan proves that his brand of destructive police work still has its place in the future, Stallone proved that he could still carry an action movie in 1993.  There’s a lot of knowing humor to Stallone’s performance.  After a series of failed comedies in the 80s, Demolition Man was the movie that proved that Stallone could be intentionally funny.  Stallone is also surrounded by one of his strongest supporting casts.  Wesley Snipes attacks his villainous role with gusto while Denis Leary breaks out his stand-up routine as Edgar Friendly, the leader of San Angeles’s rebels.  This is also the film that led to Sandra Bullock getting cast in Speed and she’s so incredibly adorable here that even Stallone breaks out into a smile while acting opposite her

(In 1993, you couldn’t turn on television without seeing Sandra Bullock saying, “All restaurants are Taco Bell.”)

Demolition Man is an action film and it lives up to its name, with all the demolition that a viewer could want.  Even more so, It’s also a satire, of both Stallone’s previous films and what was then known as “political correctness.”  Demolition Man’s portrayal of a sterile society where everyone had been programmed to be docile and inoffensive wasn’t that far off from what a lot of politicians were then promoting for America at large.  Luckily, John Spartan was around to put an end to that.  The end result is one of Sylvester Stallone’s most memorable films.

Scene That I Love: Waren Oates Is Sgt. Hulka

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I didn’t have time to write a film review today but there’s no way I could late July 5th pass without honoring my favorite actor, Warren Oates.  Oates played a lot of great roles over the course of his career but my favorite was his performance as Sgt. Hulka in 1981’s Stripes.

Here’s Warren Oates, as Sgt. Hulka, asking all the new recruits why they joined the Army.  To those who would say that this isn’t a realistic portrayal of basic training, all I can say is “Lighten up, Francis.”

Video Game Missions I Love: “Fireworks” From The Godfather

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I wish I had a 4th of July movie to review today but I don’t.  Instead, I’ll just share my favorite “mission” from the much maligned 2006 Godfather video game.

In this mission, Aldo (who is controlled by the player) takes care of a corrupt cop on the 4th of July.  The Godfather game is hardly perfect but I have always loved that cut-scene of the fireworks going off while Aldo and Rosa look down at the alley.

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

Flame of the West (1945, directed by Lambert Hillyer)

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Marshal Tom Nightlander (Douglass Dumbrille) shows up in a lawless frontier town, tasked with bringing peace.  He could sure use the help of Dr. John Poole (Johnny Mack Brown), a former gunslinger who has set his weapons aside and now works as the town doctor.  Dr. Poole has sworn off guns but with corrupt businessman Wilson (Harry Woods) and his gang determined to keep their town lawless, Poole is soon forced to reconsider.

This B-western from Monogram is better than many of the other low-budget, poverty row westerns of the era.  While the plot is another example of a corrupt businessman and his gang making life difficult for peaceful settlers, the characters in Flame of the West are a little more complex than usual.  Brown stands out playing a character who, for once, doesn’t want to fight and believes that it’s better to talk than to shoot.  Of course, this being a B-western, he soon sees the error of his ways.  Dumbrille was usually cast as a villain so this film is a chance to see him in a likable and heroic role and he’s very convincing as a Wyatt Earp-style marshal.

Of course, even a serious B-western is still a B-western so songs and entertainment are provided by the gorgeous Joan Woodbury and Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys.  (Don’t worry, I had never heard of them before, either.)  Joan Woodbury plays a saloon owner who wants to bring a higher class of entertainment to the frontier and she provides the film with enough sex appeal that 1945 audiences probably didn’t mind having to sit through the musical numbers before getting to the inevitable showdown between Johnny Mack Brown and Harry Woods.

Flame of the West is a good B-western that shows what dependable actors like Johnny Mack Brown and Douglass Dumbrille were capable of when given the opportunity.