Category Archives: Film Review

A Movie A Day #229: Amazing Grace and Chuck (1987, directed by Mike Newell)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Amazing Grace and Chuck has a heartfelt message but it ultimately trips over its own good intentions.

Chuck (Joshua Zuelkhe) is a 12 year-old boy who lives in Montana and who is the best little league pitcher in the state.  Because a field trip to a missile silo causes him to have nightmares, Chuck announces that he will not play baseball until the world agrees to nuclear disarmament.  Chuck’s team ends up having to forfeit a game because Chuck refuses to play.  In the real world, this would lead to Chuck enduring 6 years of ridicule and bullying until he was finally old enough to change his name and go to college in a different state.  In the world of the movies, it leads to Chuck becoming a hero.

A basketball player named Amazing Grace (Alex English) reads a news story about Chuck’s protest and he decides to protest as well.  He announces that he will not play basketball until there are no more nuclear missiles.  Before you can say “Colin Kaepernick,” hundreds of other sports stars are following Amazing Grace’s lead.  Of course, if any group of people is well known for their willingness to give up a huge payday for a quixotic and largely symbolic protest, it’s America’s professional athletes.  Amazing Grace and the athletes even move out to Montana, so that they can be closer to Chuck.

Because they do not appreciate his efforts to put all sporting events (and all betting on sporting events) on hold, the Mafia makes plans to assassinate Amazing Grace.  Chuck protests this by taking a vow of silence.  By now, it is hard to keep track of what Chuck is protesting and how.  Is he still trying for world disarmament or has he moved on to getting the Mob out of professional sports?  All the other children of the world follow Chuck’s example, refusing to speak.  In the real world, children taking a vow of silence would lead to parents celebrating in the street but, in the movie, it leads to panic and causes the Soviets to assume they have the upper hand over the west.  The President (Gregory Peck) ruins it all by inviting Chuck to the White House.  When President Peck explains that people are not allowed to shout fire in a crowded movie theater, Chuck breaks his vow of silence to ask, “But what if there’s a fire?”

There are many problems with Amazing Grace and Chuck, including the dumb Mafia subplot that seems like it should be in a different movie and Chuck coming across as being a smug little creep.  Joshua Zuehlke made his film debut as Chuck and, on the basis of his performance, it is not surprising that he has never appeared in another film since.  By the end of the movie, even Gregory Peck is sick of Chuck and his demands.   It’s obviously a heartfelt film, which is probably why actors like Peck, Jamie Lee Curtis, and William L. Petersen all appeared in it despite presumably having a hundred better things to do, but a nuanced look at détente and the arms race, Amazing Grace and Chuck is not.

A Movie A Day #228: Johnny Be Good (1988, directed by Bud Smith)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Johnny Walker (Anthony Michael Hall) may be the best high school quarterback in the country but he has a difficult choice to make.  He promised his girlfriend, Georgia (Uma Thurman), that he would go to the local state college with her but every other university in the country wants him.  (Even legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell calls Johnny and advises him to go to an Ivy League college.)  As Johnny tours universities across the country, he faces every temptation.  By the time he makes his decision, will Johnny still be good?

The main problem with Johnny Be Good can be found in the first sentence of the above synopsis.  Anthony Michael Hall plays the best high school quarterback in the country.  By taking on the role of Johnny Walker, Hall was obviously attempting to prove that he was capable of more than just playing nerds for John Hughes.  But Hall is never convincing as a quarterback, much less the best in the country.  Though he bulked up for the role, it is impossible to imagine Hall in a huddle, coming up with the big play that wins the game.  It’s easier to imagine Johnny getting shoved in a locker and left there until the school year ends.  Hall seems to be lost in the role and the movie never seems to be sure who Johnny Walker is supposed to be.  (Two years later, Hall would again play a jock and give a far better performance in Edward Scissorhands.)

As for the rest of the cast, Robert Downey, Jr., who plays Johnny’s teammate and best friend, is even less convincing as a football player than Hall.  In the 1980s, Downey could play a quirky sidekick in his sleep but not a wide receiver.  Paul Gleason also shows up in the movie, basically playing the same role that he played in The Breakfast Club.  Uma Thurman is sweet and pretty in her film debut but it’s a nothing role.  Fans of Cannon Picture will want to keep an eye out for Steve James, in a small role as a coach.

Poorly written and slackly directed with few laughs, Johnny Be Good fails to take its own advice.

A Movie A Day #227: Silk Degrees (1994, directed by Armand Garabidian)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Actress Alex Ramsey (Deborah Shelton) may have become a star as a result of playing the lead role in a cop show but she still worries that her show is not realistic enough.  When a fight with her director (Gilbert Gottfried) leads to her walking off the set for the hundredth time, Alex stumbles across a real-life murder.  Now being chased by terrorists and gun smugglers, Alex is forced to go into hiding.  FBI agent Baker (Marc Singer) is assigned to protect her but how can he hide one of the most famous women in America, especially one who does not appreciate being told what to do? Making things even worse, there is a traitor in the bureau.  Shelton is going to have to use all of her tv crime-fighting skills to survive.

Though it featured enough Deborah Shelton nudity to win it a place in the regular Skinemax rotation, Silk Degrees is basically a standard 90s direct-to-video action film but it has a cast that will be appreciated by any B-move fan.  Along with Body Double‘s Shelton, Beastmaster’s Marc Singer, and everything’s Gilbert Gottfried, Silk Degrees also features Charles Napier as Singer’s boss, Mark Hamill as Singer’s partner, and Katherine Armstong as a duplicitous femme fatale.  The main villain is played by singer Michael Des Barres.  Even Adrienne Barbeau shows up in a tiny role!  Silk Degrees is not a great movie but with a cast like this, it does not have to be.

Waterlogged: CATALINA CAPER (Crown International 1967)

Posted on by gary loggins

gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

Beach Party movies had run their course by 1967, as AIP released their final entry in the surf cycle, THE GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI, with Tommy Kirk  and Deborah Walley replacing Frankie and Annette , and nary a beach in sight. Crown International Pictures, AIP ‘s impoverished cousin (if one can imagine!), produced what is considered the last of the genre, CATALINA CAPER, also starring Kirk and a cast of dozens.

CATALINA CAPER is basically an lame excuse to get a bunch of young hardbodies on the beach and let ’em dance around to some dated rock music. Believe it or not, there’s a plot (though not a very good one) involving the theft of an ancient Chinese scroll masterminded by one of the teen’s con artist parents (Del Moore, Sue Casey) and a gangster trying to get ahold of it. There’s also a subplot (imagine that!) about Kirk torn between his bud’s sister (Venita Wolf) and a…

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A Movie A Day #226: Citizen X (1995, directed by Chris Gerolmo)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

How do you solve a crime in a society that refuses to admit that crime exists?

That is the dilemma faced by Viktor Burakov (Stephen Rea) in the fact-based film, Citizen X.  Burakov is a forensic expert in the Soviet Union.  In 1982, when a dead body is found on a collective farm, Burakov is assigned to investigate.  When seven more bodies are discovered, Burakov is convinced that he is dealing with a serial killer.  The problem is that the official Soviet position is that crime and, especially, serial murder are a product of western decadence.  With his superiors refusing to accept that a serial killer could be active in the USSR, Burakov is driven to the point of insanity as he both tries to stop the murders and keep his job.  Fortunately, he has the Machiavellian Col. Fetisov (Donald Sutherland) on his side but, even with Fetisov’s protection, Burakov is no closer to tracking down the murderer.

Citizen X is based on the crimes of Andrei Chikatilo.  From 1978 to 1990, Chikatilo committed at least 57 murders, with several of his victims being young children.  Though many were suspicious of him, Chikatilo was protected by both his membership in the Communist party and the government’s refusal to allow most of his crimes to be publicly reported.  It was only during the reforms of Perestroika that authorities were allowed to thoroughly investigate Chikatilo’s crimes.  Chikatilo was arrested in 1992 and executed, via a gunshot to the back of his head, in 1994.  In Citizen X, Chikatilo is played by Jeffrey DeMunn, who gives a very good and disturbingly plausible performance as the monstrous killer.

Made for HBO, Citizen X is a low-key but thought-provoking recreations of not just Chikatilo’s crimes but the atmosphere that allowed him to go undetected,  Along with DeMunn, both Rea and Sutherland give great performances.  (Sutherland won an Emmy.)  Max Von Sydow also appears, playing a psychologist who is given the unenviable task of trying to enter Chikatilo’s mind.

A Movie A Day #225: Behind The Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy (2005, directed by Neil Fearnley)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1978.  A television producer named Garry Marshall (Daniel Roebuck) teaches America how to laugh again by casting Pam Dawber (Erinn Hayes) and a hyperactive stand-up comedian named Robin Williams (Chris Diamantopoulos) in a sitcom about an alien struggling to understand humanity.  Despite constant network interference, the show makes Robin a star but, with stardom, comes all the usual temptations: lust, gluttony, greed, pride, envy, wrath, and John Belushi.

The Behind The Camera films, which all dramatized the behind the scenes drama of old television shows, were briefly a big thing in the mid-aughts.  Because they were lousy, they never got good reviews but they did get good ratings from nostalgia-starved baby boomers and gen xers.  I think The Unauthorized Mork & Mindy Story was the last one produced.  It probably would have been better if there had been any sort of drama going on behind-the-scenes of Mork & Mindy but, according to this movie, everyone got along swimmingly.  Williams may get hooked on cocaine but the film squarely puts the blame for that on John Belushi.  The script, which was obviously written with one eye on avoiding getting sued, is sanitized of anything that could have reflected badly on anyone who was still alive when the movie aired.

Stuck with unenviable task of having to play one of the most famous people in the world, Chris Diamantopoulos was not terrible as Robin Williams.  Considering how sanitized the script was, not terrible is probably the best that could be hoped for.  There was not much of a physical resemblance but Diamantopoulos nailed the voice and some of the mannerisms.  Erinn Hayes looks like Pam Dawber but, just as in the actual show, the movie gives her the short end of the stick and focuses on Williams.

For aficionados of bad television, this is mostly memorable for Daniel Roebuck’s absolutely terrible performance as Garry Marshall and a scene in which Williams is heckled in a comedy club but an overweight man who steps out of the shadows and announces that he’s John Belushi!  Roebuck’s performance as Garry Marshall begins and end with his attempt to impersonate Marshall’s familiar voice.  He was much better cast as Jay Leno in The Night Shift.  As for Belushi , since he was not around to sue or otherwise defend himself, the movie goes all out to portray Belushi (who was played by Tyler Labine) as being an almost demonic influence on Williams.   The film’s portrayal of Belushi is even worse and probably more inaccurate than Wired and that’s saying something!

To quote Mork himself: Shazbot!  This movie is full of it.

Roger of the Skies: VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN (United Artists 1971)

Posted on by gary loggins

gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

Producer/director Roger Corman finally cut ties with American-International Pictures after they butchered his apocalyptic satire GAS-S-S! Striking out on his own, Corman’s next movie was VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN, a World War I epic about famed German aerial ace The Red Baron and the Canadian pilot who shoots his down Roy Brown. There are grand themes, as Corman sought to make a statement on the futility of war, the end of chivalry, and the mechanized savagery of what was to be “the last war”. The film looks good, shot in Ireland, with exciting aerial footage, but despite all the outer trappings VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN is still a Corman drive-in movie.

John Philip Law also looks good as Baron Manfred von Richtofen, the aristocrat/warrior who became the feared Red Baron. Law was always great to watch, whether as the blind angel in BARBARELLA, the black-clad supervillain in DANGER: DIABOLIK, sexy Robin Stone in…

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Scene That I Love: The End of the World from Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Over the past few years, there’s been many movies about the end of the world.

A lot of them have been pretty bad.  I never did find the high heel that I threw at the screen while watching Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World.

And some of them have been pretty good.  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and its sequels come to mind.

And then there’s Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.  Von Trier is always going to be controversial filmmaker but no one has ever matched his brilliance when it came to capturing the end of existence.  In Melancholia, a depressed woman (played in a revelatory performance by Kristen Dunst) finds unexpected strength in the end of the world.  As can be seen in the scene below, it’s a beautifully sad film, one that ends on a note of triumphant apocalypse:

A Movie A Day #224: Armed and Dangerous (1986, directed by Mark L. Lester)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

John Candy and Eugene Levy make a great team in the underrated comedy, Armed and Dangerous.

John Candy plays Frank Dooley, a member of the LAPD.  One of the first scenes of the movie is Frank climbing up a tree to save a little boy’s kitten and then getting stuck in the tree himself.  When Frank discovers two corrupt detectives stealing televisions, Frank is framed for the theft and kicked off the force.

Eugene Levy plays Norman Kane, a lawyer whose latest client is a Charles Manson-style cult leader who has a swastika carved into his head.  After being repeatedly threatened with murder, Norman asks for a sidebar and requests that the judge sentence his client to life in prison.  The judge agrees on the condition that Norman, whom he describes as being “the worst attorney to ever appear before me,” find a new line of work.

Frank and Norman end up taking a one day training course to act as security guards and are assigned to work together by their tough by sympathetic supervisor (Meg Ryan!).  Assigned to guard a pharmaceutical warehouse, Frank and Norman stumble across a robbery.  The robbery leads them to corruption inside their own union and, before you can say 80s cop movie, Frank and Norman are ignoring the orders of their supervisors and investigating a crime that nobody wants solved.

Armed and Dangerous was one of the many comedy/cop hybrid films of the 1980s.  Like Beverly Hills Cop, it features Jonathan Banks as a bad guy.  Like the recruits in Police Academy, all of Frank and Norman’s fellow security guards are societal misfits who are distinguished by one or two eccentricities.  There is nothing ground-breaking about Armed and Dangerous but Mark Lester did a good job directing the movie and the team of Candy and Levy (who has previously worked together on SCTV) made me laugh more than a few times.

Armed and Dangerous was originally written to be a vehicle for John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.  It’s easy to imagine Belushi and Aykroyd in the lead roles but I think the movie actually works better with Candy and Levy, whose comedic style was similar to but far less aggressive than that of Belushi and Aykroyd.  One of the reasons that Armed and Dangerous works is because John Candy and Eugene Levy seem like the two last people to ever find themselves in a shootout or a car chase.  With Belushi and Aykroyd, it would have been expected.  After all, everyone’s seen The Blues Brothers.

 

A Movie A Day #223: The Texas Rangers (1936, directed by King Vidor)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Sam (Lloyd Nolan), Jim (Fred MacMurray), and Wahoo (Jack Oakie) are three outlaws in the old west.  Wahoo works as a stagecoach driver and always lets Sam and Jim know which coaches will be worth holding up.  It’s a pretty good scam until the authorities get wise to their scheme and set out after the three of them.  Sam abandons his two partners while Jim and Wahoo eventually end up in Texas.  At first, Jim and Wahoo are planning to keep on robbing stagecoaches but then they realize that they can make even more money as Texas Rangers.

At first, Jim and Wahoo are just planning on sticking around long enough to make some cash and then split.  However, both of them discover that they prefer to be on the right side of the law.  After they save a boy named David from Indians, Jim and Wahoo decide to stay in Texas and protect its settlers.

The only problem is that their old friend Sam has returned and his still on the wrong side of the law.

Made to commemorate the Texas centenary (though it was filmed in New Mexico), The Texas Rangers is a good example of what’s known as an oater, a low-budget but entertaining portrayal of life on the frontier.   King Vidor does a good job with the action scenes and Fred MacMuarry and Jack Oakie are a likable onscreen team.  The best performance comes from Lloyd Nolan, as the ruthless and calculating Sam.  Sam can be funny and even likable but when he’s bad, he’s really bad.

Jack Oakie was better known as a comedian and The Texas Rangers provides him with a rare dramatic role.  Four years after appearing in The Texas Rangers, Oakie would appear in his most famous role, playing a parody of Benito Mussolini in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.