Category Archives: Film Review

Montana Incident (1952, directed by Lewis D. Collins)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Whip Wilson (played, in a fortunate coincidence, by Whip Wilson) and his partner, Dave Conners (Rand Brooks) work for the railroad company as surveyors in the old west.  They’ve come to the town of Martinville to convince the citizens that the town would benefit from having a train station.  Mostly, they just want to go to the saloon, have a beer, and flirt with the local gals.

Albert Hawkins (WIlliam Fawcett) is the leader of the local homesteaders and he’s all for bringing the railroad to town.  Land baron Max Martin (Hugh Prosser) disagrees.  Martin is not really a bad person but his daughter, Clara (Peggy Stewart), is a greedy fanatic who doesn’t want to lose the water rights to the land.  With her boyfriend, outlaw Arnold Benson (Bruce Edwards), Clara rules the town with an iron fist.  Whip and Dave must defeat Arnold and Clara so that progress can come to the frontier.

Montana Incident is a standard western programmer but it is distinguished by having an evil female land baron instead of the usual male land baron.  Stewart tears into the world, proving that she can be just as dangerous as any man.  Fans of the old Adventures of Superman TV show will immediately recognize Noel Neill, playing the role of Clara’s much nicer sister.

If you’re a fan of B-westerns, Montana Incident is watchable enough.  Wilson and Brooks are bland heroes but Peggy Stewart is so good at being evil that she makes the movie worth watching.

The Last Castle (2001, directed by Rod Lurie)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It’s Redford vs. Gandolfini in The Last Castle!

The last castle of the title is a United States Military Prison, one that was originally constructed during the Civil War and which resembles a castle, but with one big difference. Castles were originally designed to keep people from entering. The purpose of this castle is to keep people from leaving.

Colonel Ed Winter (James Gandolfini) is the prison’s commandant, a martinet who has never served in war but who keeps a collection of bullets and weapons in his office. Eugene Irwin (Robert Redford) is the newest inmate. Irwin was a highly respected general until he disobeyed a presidential order and eight of his men died as a result. Irwin has been stripped of his rank and sentenced to ten years. He tells Winter that he just wants to do his time and then go home. That’s fine with Winter, until he overhears Irwin disparaging his collection of battlefield memorabilia.

At first, Irwin tries to lay low.  Even when he sees firsthand that Winter is a sadist who manipulates the inmates and who isn’t above ordering his guards to kill an inmate in order to make a point, Irwin tries to stay uninvolved.  But eventually, Irwin’s natural military instincts kick in and he leads the prisoners in a revolt against Col. Winter.

The Last Castle requires a healthy suspension of disbelief.  Irwin brings the inmates together by reminding them that they were once soldiers and that, even when serving time in a military prison, they’re apart of a grand tradition of soldiers who have been court-martialed.  He soon has them saluting and standing at attention and walking in formation.  The movie overlooks the fact that most of the prisoners were sentenced to the prison by men much like General Irwin.  The idea that all of them are just waiting for someone to once again start barking orders at them just doesn’t seem plausible.  Instead, it seems more likely the Irwin, as a former general, would be the least popular inmate in a prison that’s full of enlisted men who feel that they were screwed over the army.  In the end, Irwin asks the prisoners to sacrifice a lot but, in the end, it doesn’t matter how heroically he’s framed in each scene or how much the music swells on the soundtrack, Iwin’s rebellion seems like its more about ego than anything else.  Even if it means getting rid of Col. Winter, would any of the inmates realistically be willing to die for Eugene Irwin?

At the same time, The Last Castle is worth watching just to see James Gandolfini face off against Robert Redford.  Gandolfini plays his role with the type of neurotic energy that only a method actor is capable of capturing while Redford is his typical move star self.  The contrast between their two styles of acting translates well into the contrast between Winter and Irwin’s philosophy of leadership.  Among the inmates, Mark Ruffalo and Clifton Collins, Jr. both have early roles.  Of the two, Ruffalo gets to play the only character in the film with a hint of moral ambiguity and he runs with it.  Clifton Collins, Jr., meanwhile, plays a character whose fate will be obvious to anyone who has ever seen a film before.  The Last Castle has its moment but it’s never a surprising movie.

The Last Castle ends with a spontaneous display of patriotism, one that is effective but also feels implausible and out-of-place.  It’s the perfect way to sum up this frustrating but occasionally diverting film. 

 

Film Review: Icahn: The Restless Billionaire (dir by Bruce David Klein)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Before I actually talk about Icahn: The Restless Billionaire, I should probably confess something.  Well, actually, this is a reconfession because I explain this every time that I review any movie or documentary the deals with stocks and investments and big shorts and corporate takeovers and all the rest.  The Stock Market confuses the heck out of me.

Seriously, I have no idea how it works.  Everything that I hear about it just confuses me.  How can you invest money that you don’t have in order to make or lose money that might not actually exist?  How can people keep buying stock in the same company?  It just seems like a company should eventually run out of stock.  And what is stock anyways?  And don’t even get me started on this whole thing where people can apparently secretly buy everyone’s stock and then force a company’s founder to resign or sell the company itself.  That’s just weird to me.

I will also admit that I actually do own stock.  I didn’t buy any of it.  Some of it, I inherited.  Some of it was gifted to me.  Some of it, I got through work.  Off the top of my head, I really couldn’t tell you much about any of the stock that I own.  I’ve been told that my stock’s doing well, which is fine with me.  Nobody ever tells me if my stocks aren’t doing well, which is also fine with me.  I don’t really need that pressure.

Some people, however, love the pressure.  Carl Icahn, for instance, has made billions by playing with the stock market and by taking over struggling companies and then selling them for a profit.  Icahn’s detractors call him a pirate or a raider.  Icahn claims that he’s an activist, taking over poorly managed companies and then selling them for a profit so that people, like me, who have no idea how any of this works can also make a profit.  (And, of course, Icahn makes a huge amount of money off of it as well.)  Carl Icahn is thought to have been one of the role models for Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko.  Consider that Wall Street was released in 1987 and you can see just how long Carl Icahn has been doing this.

Icahn: The Restless Billionaire is a documentary about both the man and his controversial career.  It delves a little into his childhood and features plenty of scenes of Icahn at his mansions and in his ornate office.  For the most part, though, it’s a collection of scenes of Icahn and some of his associates discussing the various takeovers and battles that Icahn has been involved with over the years.  The documentary is unapologetically pro-Icahn.  If you’re expecting to see AOC or Bernie pop up and start going on about taxing the rich or condemning billionaires, you’re out of luck.  In fact, the documentary is so pro-Icahn that it almost feels like a relic from a different era.  For that matter, so does Carl Icahn.  Icahn is happily pro-capitalism and he makes no apologies for that.  A lot of viewers aren’t going to be used to seeing that in a contemporary documentary, especially not one produced by HBO.  Myself, I’m a fan of capitalism and free enterprise so it didn’t bother me and the documentary, at the very least, worked as a change of pace.  Still, I can’t help but imagine that a lot of my friends would have ended up throwing something at the TV.

Carl Icahn is obviously a smart guy and he’s made a lot of money.  I enjoyed looking at the house.  At the same time, he’s not exactly the most charismatic billionaire in the world and the scenes that attempt humanize him come across as being stiff and staged.  The documentary is probably at its best when its just Icahn and his associates talking about the battles that he’s fought.  I honestly couldn’t follow what they were talking about but I also couldn’t deny that they all seemed to be having fun.

Scene That I Love: The Opening of Mulholland Drive (Happy Birthday, Angelo Badalamenti)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Happy birthday, Angelo Badalamenti!

This great composer is probably best known for his dream-like and haunting work for the films of David Lynch.  Among the many songs and musical pieces that he’s done for Lynch, he composed the jitterbug music that opened David Lynch’s 2001 film, Mulholland Drive.  The scene below features the perfect mix of Lynch’s visual vision and Badalamenti’s musical ear.  What I especially like about this scene is that the music starts out as a very cheerful and vaguely generic but then it grows steadily more ominous as the scene plays out.

Here it is.  The haunting opening of one of the best films of the current century:

Film Review: Lucy and Desi (dir by Amy Poehler)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

If you were as disappointed with Being the Ricardos as I was but you still want to learn something about the lives and the marriage of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, might I suggest checking out Lucy and Desi?

Directed by Amy Poehler, Lucy and Desi covers much of the same material as Being the Ricardos but it does so in a far more authentic way.  This is because Lucy and Desi is a documentary, one featuring actual interviews and recordings from Lucy, Desi, and the people who worked with them through the years.  As a result, we get to hear the story in their own words as opposed to Aaron Sorkin’s words.  I’m hardly the first person to point out that Aaron Sorkin is incapable of writing dialogue that doesn’t sound like something that Aaron Sorkin himself would say.  In Being the Ricardos, Lucy and her writers all spoke in Sorkinese and it all felt rather false.  Watching Lucy and Desi, you quickly realize that both Lucy and Desi were intelligent and articulate people.  Their own words are strong enough, without needing a polish from a screenwriter who, by his own admission, never found I Love Lucy to be all that funny.

Lucy and Desi covers the early lives of both Lucy and Desi as well as detailing how they first met, how they married, and how they went on to revolutionize television with I Love Lucy.  More than just being portrayed as being a talented but somewhat volatile couple, both Lucy and Desi emerges as fascinating individuals in their own right.  Both of them survived childhood difficulties, both of them remade themselves in Hollywood, and, most importantly, both of them had an instinctive understanding of what audiences wanted to see.

They were also very much in love, even after their divorce.  That love was missing from Being the Ricardos but it’s very much present in Lucy and Desi.  It was that love that led to the marriage that led to the partnership that made them a success but it was that same success that eventually led to the end of their marriage.  And yet, even after divorcing, Lucy and Desi remained close.  Their daughter, Lucie Arnaz, talks about the last few times that Lucy saw Desi before Desi’s succumbed to lung cancer.  They watched old episodes of I Love Lucy and they laughed together.  It’s an incredibly touching moment.

And if sentimentality isn’t your thing, Lucy and Desi also explores just how important their partnership was to the development of modern television.  I Love Lucy was the first “modern” sitcom but their company, Desilu Productions, had a hand in producing several other classic shows as well.  Star Trek was a Desilu production.  So were Mission Impossible and The Untouchables.  So much of what we take for granted about pop culture started with Lucy and Desi.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation in the Lucy and Desi documentary is that the J. Edgar Hoover story was true!  You may remember that, when I reviewed Being the Ricardos, I scoffed at the scene where Hoover called the studio and personally cleared Lucy of being a communist.  But apparently, this actually did happen!  I’m as stunned as anyone.

Lucy and Desi is a good and heartfelt tribute to Lucy and Desi, their talent and their love and their lasting influence.  It can be viewed on Prime.

Sliver (1993, directed by Phillip Noyce)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Who here remembers Sliver?

It may be hard to believe it but Sliver was a big deal back in the day.  It was one of Robert Evans’s first producing gigs after getting out of rehab.  It was Sharon Stone’s first film after Basic Instinct.  The script was written by Basic Instinct‘s Joe Eszterhas, back when that was still something that people bragged about.  It featured Tom Berenger, back before he found himself relegated to character roles, and William Baldwin.  Remember William Baldwin?  He was Alec Baldwin’s younger brother.  He looked just like Alec but he never managed to project much of a personality whenever he was onscreen.  Even Stephen Baldwin was a more interesting actor than William.  Still, back in the day, William Baldwin was close to being a star.

William Baldwin’s lack of personality actually works for the role he plays in Sliver.  He’s Zeke, who owns an exclusive high-rise apartment building.  Zeke makes his money designing video games and he’s filled the building with secret video cameras so he can spend all day sitting in front of a wall of monitors and watching his tenants and experiencing their lives without having to get close to them.  Zeke’s a voyeur.  Back in the 90s, the surveillance thing was a big twist.  Today, we take it for granted.  We even applauded Batman for doing the same thing to all of the citizens of Gotham.

Sharon Stone plays Carly, the newest resident of the Sliver.  Carly is a recently divorced book editor snd is lonely and repressed despite being played by Sharon Stone.  She draws the attention of both Zeke and her neighbor, Jack (Tom Berenger).  Both are interested when they discover that Carly has a telescope on her balcony.  “She’s a voyeur!” Jack says.  When Carly gets involved with Zeke, Jack is obsessively jealous.  He insinuates that Zeke had something to do with the death of the previous tenant of Carly’s apartment.

After Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone made a series of films that were designed to show that she actually could act by casting her as characters who were meant to be sexually repressed.  The films never seemed to work because, at the height of Sharon Stone’s 90s stardom, there was nothing about her that suggested that she was repressed in any way.  What made her a star in the first place was that she was so uninhibited and not afraid to be as blunt about sex as any of her male co-stars.  In Sliver, she gives a performance that is somewhere between her vampish work in Basic Instinct and her terrible ice queen performance in Intersection.  At the start of the film, she feels miscast as a straight-laced book editor but her performance gets better once she starts hooking up with Zeke.  Sharon Stone tries, even if she doesn’t succeed.  That’s more than can be said for most of her co-stars.

“Get a life,” Sharon Stone says at the end of the movie and, as far as final lines go, it’s a bad one because it comes out of nowhere and her actions in the final scene don’t fit in with anything that she’s previously said or done in the film.  That’s because the ending was hastily reshot after test audiences disliked the original ending.  Test audiences often have the worst instincts.

Like many things, Sliver was big in the 90s but forgotten today.  It was a popular Blockbuster rental for a while.  VCRs were set for whenever it appeared on Cinemax.  When it first came out, it was all about Sharon Stone.  Today, it’s all about nostalgia.

Film Review: Deep Water (dir by Adrian Lyne)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Just released on Hulu, Deep Water is the funniest film of the year so far.

Ben Affleck stars as Vic Van Allen.  (Even his name is funny!)  Vic made a fortune by inventing a computer chip that is used to help drones track people down and blow them up.  Now, Vic is retired, living in a nice and small town, and publishing a photography/poetry magazine.  He enjoys going to parties with his friends, joking about committing murder, and riding the heck out of his bike.  Seriously, the shots of Affleck riding that bike are comparable to Will Ferrell playing the flute in Anchorman.

Ana de Armas plays Vic’s wife, Melinda.  Everyone, including Vic, knows that Melinda cheats on Vic with almost every man that she meets.  Vic accepts Melina’s infidelities on the condition that she not leave him and their daughter, Trixie (Grace Jenkins).  Of course, Vic does still get upset.  When Melinda’s former lover vanishes, Vic jokes to Melinda’s current lover that he killed the previous lover.  Everyone in town gets a good laugh out of that one.  Everyone, that is, but for Melinda and local busybody Don Wilson (Tracy Letts).

Both Melinda and Don think that Vic is capable of murder.  As far as Don is concerned, Vic is responsible for the death of every single person who has ever been blown by a drone.  Meanwhile, Melinda knows that there’s something strange about the way that Vic spends all of his time taking care of the hundreds of snails that he keeps in the basement.  Vic, of course, insists that he was just making a joke when he said that he was a murderer.  But then Vic actually does murder someone and things get complicated….

From what I understand, Deep Water is supposed to be a serious thriller but I absolutely refuse to believe that it’s not actually meant to be a parody of the genre.  It’s director Adrian Lyne’s first film in 20 years.  Lyne is best know for directing movies like 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction. Indecent Proposal, and Unfaithful and so many of the scenes in Deep Water feel as if they’ve been specifically designed as a way to poke fun at Lyne’s previous films that one can’t help but suspect that at least a few of the film’s laughs are meant to be intentional.  This is a film that features Ben Affleck, on a bicycle, chasing a car while the driver rants about how autocorrect is always ruining his text messages.  I absolutely refuse to accept that this was truly meant to be taken seriously.

That said, Affleck wanders through the film with a glum expression on his face, one that suggests that he wasn’t let in on the joke ahead of time.  Ana de Armas is ultimately defeated by a script that refuses to allow her character to behave with any consistency but she’s still smart enough to play Melinda as being a character who is at least partially aware that she’s in a movie.  As for Tracy Letts, I have never seen any reputable actor overact quite as much as Tracy Letts does towards the end of Deep Water.  It’s a sight to behold.

Adrian Lyne makes sure that the film looks good but he never manages to strike a consistent tone and the film’s plot is full of holes.  Affleck spends a lot of time gazing at snails while Ana de Armas throws a fit when her daughter keeps insisting that Alexa play Old MacDonald.  Tracy Letts, at one point, sees Affleck riding his bicycle and starts cursing like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.  Deep Water doesn’t really work as a thriller but, as a comedy, it’s a lot of fun.

The Domino Principle (1977, directed by Stanley Kramer)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Roy Tucker (Gene Hackman) loyally served his country as a part of a “search and destroy” team in Vietnam but when he returned home, he discovered that America didn’t appreciate his sacrifice.  When he was convicted of murdering his wife’s abusive first husband, he was tossed in prison.  But now, two mysterious men (Richard Widmark and Edward Albert) have offered Tucker a chance to escape from prison and reunite with his wife (Candice Bergen) in Costa Rica.  The only catch is that they also expect Tucker to do a job for “the Organization” and assassinate an unidentified target.  As Tucker discovers, The Organization has been watching and manipulating him entire life, setting him up for this very moment.  Every small event in Tucker’s life led to another event that eventually sent him to both the war and to prison.  It’s almost like a game of dominos.  And we have a title!

The Domino Principle gets off to a good start, with a black-and-white montage of actual assassinations and then an opening credit sequence that features someone placing dominos over pictures of Roy Tucker at different ages.  (I am guessing that actual childhood photos of Gene Hackman were used because even the baby pictures feature the Hackman squint.)  However, the scene immediately following the credits features Gene Hackman and Mickey Rooney as cellmates and the film never really recovers.  Though they were both talented actors, Gene Hackman and Mickey Rooney don’t seem as if they belong on the same planet together, let alone sharing a prison cell in a grim and downbeat political thriller.  Hackman is his usual surly self, while Mickey seems like he’s going to try to get the entire prison to put on a show.  The film tries to do some unexpected things with Mickey’s character but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s Mickey Rooney and he just doesn’t belong here.

As for the rest of The Domino Principle, it’s slow and ponderous.  Best known for earnest social issue films like The Defiant Ones and Guess Whos’ Coming To Dinner, Stanley Kramer is the wrong director for a film that aspires to duplicate the conspiracy-themed atmosphere of other 70s thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.  For all the time that film takes to build to its obvious conclusion, Kramer doesn’t even bother to identify who Tucker is supposed to kill or why the Organization wants him dead.  Though he seems like he should be a good choice for the lead role, Gene Hackman goes through the movie on autopilot.  Perhaps he was overwhelmed to be sharing a prison cell with Mickey Rooney or to be playing the husband of Candice Bergen, who the film unsuccessfully attempts to deglamorize.

Sadly, this would be one of Kramer’s last films.  He followed it up with The Runner Stumbles, which starred Dick Van Dyke (!) as a conflicted priest, and then went into semi-retirement.  (A few attempts to return to directing failed.)  Kramer spent his twilight years writing about movies for The Seattle Times.  Before his death in 2001, he also published a very entertaining autobiography, A Mad Mad Mad Mad World: A Life in Hollywood, which I recommend to anyone interested in the history of Hollywood.

Cliffhanger (1993, directed by Renny Harlin)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Sylvester Stallone is Gabe, a mountain climber who also works as a rescue ranger.  Michael Rooker is Hal, Gabe’s colleague and former best friend.  Hal blames Gabe for the death of his girlfriend, Sarah.  Gabe also blames himself and is planning on getting out of the rescue game.  But before Gabe can quit, he’s got one last mission to perform.  Qualen (John Lithgow) is a psychotic former spy who has masterminded a multi-million dollar robbery.  A plane crash leads to the loot getting scattered in the mountains.  Qualen takes Hal and Gabe prisoner and tries to force them to help him track down the money.

Cliffhanger was made during one of the slower periods of Stallone’s career.  He had temporarily retired the roles of both Rocky Balboa and John Rambo and, as an action star, he was being overshadowed by Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Stallone had tried to reinvent himself as a comedic actor, with the result being Stop!  Or My Mom Will Shoot!  The former Oscar nominee was now only winning Razzies and he was running the risk of becoming better known for his messy divorce from Brigitte Nielsen than for his recent films.  Things weren’t looking good for Stallone but, fortunately, the box office success of Cliffhanger revived his career.

Seen today, Cliffhanger holds up well as an undemanding but enjoyable action film.  It’s a very much a film of its time, complete with John Lithgow hamming it up as a British villain and Northern Exposure’s Janine Turner playing Stallone’s loyal, helicopter-owning girlfriend.  Stallone’s best films are the ones where he is willing to surrender his ego and he does that in Cliffhanger.  It may be a Stallone film but the best lines go to Michael Rooker and the true stars of the film are the mountains and the scenes of Stallone and Rooker trying to climb them.  With Cliffhanger, Stallone was smart enough to stay out of the way and just trust that the image of him dangling above the Rockies would bring in the audience.  It was a smart decision.  Though Cliffhanger is often overshadowed by Stallone’s other 1993 hit, Demolition Man, it’s still an entertaining film in its own right.

Cliffhanger was directed by Renny Harlin, the Finnish action specialist whose promising career would subsequently take a hit and never really recover from directing Cutthroat Island.  Mountain climbing and Renny Harlin just seem to go together and Cliffhanger is one of his better films.  Here’s hope that, just as Stallone has done many times in the past, Renny Harlin will eventually his comeback as a director.

Scenes that I Love: Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Beware the Ides of March!

The scene below is from the 1953 film, Julius Caesar.  This Oscar-nominated Shakespearean adaptation had a cast that was full of distinguished actors.  James Mason played Brutus.  The great John Gielgud played Cassius.  Louis Calhern was Caesar while other roles were filled by Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson, Edmond O’Brien, George Macready, John Hoyt, Edmund Purdom. and a host of other distinguished thespians.  And yet, the best performance in the film came from an actor who, at the time, no one considered to be a Shakespearean.  Marlon Brando brought his method intensity to the role of Mark Antony and the result was a performance that is still electrifying today.

On YouTube, someone referred to this as being “the world’s greatest speech delivered by the world’s greatest actor.”  Sounds good to me!

Here is Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar: