Touching the Void is a documentary about a mountain climber who breaks his leg on a frozen mountainside and has to find his way back down to a base camp where he hopes his friends haven’t already left him for dead. It’s intense. Some may argue Touching the Void is not a documentary because it makes extensive use of recreations, but if the recreations are more affective in telling the story, then so what. James Berardinelli writes, “[It] doesn’t take long for suspension of disbelief to kick in with a vengeance. In fact, the recreations are done so well that we often forget we’re not watching a filmed chronicle of events…” We know the guy lived to tell the tale because the film incorporates present day interviews with everyone who was there, but that does nothing to ease the tension of watching it unfold. Touching the Void is immediate and perhaps even profound because I don’t know how anyone can watch it and not wonder what the hell they’d do in the same situation. I’m fairly confident most of us would be dead.
Kingdom of the Spiders starring William Shatner (just before the first Star Trek movie) is so incredibly bad it’s good — and then it’s bad again. Shatner is a cowboy / veterinarian who ends up fighting thousands of killer tarantulas that invade a dusty desert town where no one can run away fast enough to escape them. The first 20 minutes are hilarious. Then it’s just tedious. Words can’t describe it. Check out the opening scene from YouTube. Nuff said.
I won’t say anything about the story of Dracula because, like Frankenstein, everyone pretty much knows how it goes. And seeing how I had the same kind of reaction to Dracula as I did to Frankenstein, I’ll copy-and-paste almost word-for-word from my comments about Frankenstein. Here goes: The original Dracula from 1931 starring Bela Lagosi may be the kind of classic that gets better with each analysed viewing, but it didn’t do much for me. I wasn’t completely bored out of my skull, but I wasn’t too entertained or engaged either. It’s not a silent movie, but there’s no musical score and the acting style is exaggerated like in silent movies. Splash some intertitles on the screen, turn down the volume and have a pianist play along to the action and you’ve got yourself a fun silent movie. I’m trying to watch more movies from the ’30s, but they all seem kind of strange to me, an awkward hold-over from the silent movie era. I’m not sure what to think of them.
The original Frankenstein from 1931 starring Boris Karloff as the monster may be the kind of classic that gets better with each analysed viewing, but it didn’t do much for me. I wasn’t completely bored out of my skull, but I wasn’t too entertained or engaged either. It’s not a silent movie, but there’s no musical score and the acting style is exaggerated like in silent movies. Splash some intertitles on the screen, turn down the volume and have a pianist play along to the action and you’ve got yourself a fun silent movie. I’m trying to watch more movies from the ’30s, but they all seem kind of strange to me, an awkward hold-over from the silent movie era. I’m not sure what to think of them.
I watched the middle section of Mr. and Mrs. Smith on commercial TV at a friend’s house a few weeks ago and enjoyed the shoot-em-up action sequences. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have chemistry and Pitt isn’t a bad comic actor. I rented the DVD last night thinking I’d see more of the same, but I didn’t. I had to shut it off about 20 minutes before the end. The best part is when the two of them start shooting at each other and destroy their house. Otherwise, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is in the same class as Ocean’s 12.
Jean de Florette was originally 4 hours long. Instead of cutting essential scenes, the director, Claude Berri, split off the second half and called it Manon of the Spring (a.k.a. Jean de Florette - Part 2). But he didn’t have to. Anyone who watches the first part of the story will want to go on to the second part immediately. Fans of Cinema Paradiso or Antonia’s Line will love it. I can’t say much more without giving it away, but it is a gorgeous film, full of engaging characters and a story that builds in its intensity and doesn’t let up until the very last scene. I wanted to go back to the beginning and watch it all over again as soon as it was finished. (Read the reviews I’ve linked to if you want to know the story, but don’t read too much. It’s best to go in just knowing you’re going to see a wonderful film.)
Quantum of Solace is a sloppy action movie that uses fast-edits to compensate for poor direction — and it doesn’t work. The action scenes are disorienting and uninvolving. Even die-hard James Bond fans might have trouble caring about anything that happens this time around. After 30 minutes of car chases, explosions, knife fights, gun fights, fist fights, etc., I couldn’t tell who James Bond was after or why. I got near the end of the movie and still didn’t know what the bad guy was all about. Daniel Craig is fine as 007. The story could have been exciting in the hands of more skilled filmmakers. But it wasn’t. It isn’t. Quantum of Solace is boring and forgettable. Skip it.
The Incredible Shrinking Man is an okay B-movie, notable only because of the special effects. A guy is enveloped by an ominous cloud while out on a pleasure cruise. Six month later he slowly begins to shrink. That’s it. There’s your movie. Eventually the guy has to live in a doll house. His cat attacks him. He escapes to the basement where, even smaller, he lives in a match box, washes under a dripping hot water tank, tries to steal food from a mouse trap, runs away from a spider — that kind of thing. It’s worth a look for the cutting-edge 1957 special effects, but it’s lacking in every other regard (even for a B-movie).
The entire movie can be viewed online at guba.com (I’ve never heard of it either).
20 Million Miles to Earth comes off as an attempt recreate 1933’s King Kong but with a half-lizard man from Venus. The stop-motion animation scenes of Mr. Lizard are fun, and some of the acting is so bad it’s hilarious, but there are too many boring filler scenes. The story never takes off. Not enough attention is given to the most interesting character: the lizard man. Watching a movie like 20 Million Miles to Earth, which was made in 1957, makes me appreciate the original King Kong even more.
The Night Listener features Robin Williams as a radio storyteller who begins to receive calls from a 14-year-old boy whose depressing life story becomes material for a radio story. Williams speaks to the kid and his mother on the phone and notices they have similar voices. Is the mother pretending to be her 14-year-old son over the phone? Does her son actually exist? Does anybody care? More to the point, why should anybody care? What’s the big deal? There’s no reason for the audience to feel intrigued. Nobody with any sense would bother to hunt down the kid’s mother to see if he exists. Nobody with any sense would do half the things that go down in this movie. The filmmakers try to make it creepy and mysterious, and Williams does the best he can with the material, but the story goes nowhere. There is no story.
Cleaner is a low-grade, predictable thriller starring Samuel L. Jackson about a guy who cleans up the blood and guts left over at crime scenes and then one day gets tricked into cleaning up a murder scene before the police are called in. Stylistic touches such as inserting close-ups of inanimate objects, doorbells being pushed and coffee being poured are distracting to the narrative. What narrative does exist is conventional and ultimately melodramatic and stupid. It’s not a good movie.
James Berardineilli’s review of Hancock cuts to the case: “Hancock is a hodgepodge of intriguing ideas that, if developed further or presented as more than throw-ins to a confused production, might have made for a unique superhero film… Hancock is sometimes funny, sometimes clever, and occasionally involving, but it’s never brilliant and its edge is compromised by the neutering that accompanies the teen-friendly PG-13 rating.” Will Smith plays a homeless, alcoholic, belligerent super hero who grudgingly hires a PR man to improve his public image. So it’s a comedy, right? Or maybe an action movie? Maybe it’s a modern day Greek tragedy (I’m serious). Hancock had the potential to be a great movie in a class of its own, but it doesn’t know what it wants to be. So it’s a mess. It’s almost worth watching just to think about how good it could have been.
As a cheesy, “sci-fi” B-movie, This Island Earth doesn’t even approach the entertainment value of something like Forbidden Planet. (I have my doubts anything could beat Forbidden Planet. It’s impressive even outside the realm of B-movie appreciation.) There is a spaceship, an angry alien with a humongous brain and some humanoid people with big foreheads. All fine and good. The problem is boredom. The bad acting, the silly dialogue, the cardboard sets — you can only laugh your way through that for 10 or 15 minutes. Nothing cool happens until the last 20 minutes of the movie. That’s too much crap to sit through. Fast-forward to the 60-minute mark and you’ve got yourself a good time.
A disease breaks out that causes mass blindness in an unnamed city. The blind are quarantined, left to fend for themselves in a hospital that’s surrounded by guards who shoot anyone who tries to get away. I kept expecting more from the story than Lord of the Flies in a mental institution for the blind. Written by Don McKellar, Blindness is based on the novel of the same name by José Saramago. If you’ve read the novel, you might get more out of the movie than I did because you’ll know more about each character’s motivation than what’s presented in the movie. But from what I saw on the screen, I couldn’t get into it. It fell just a little too short for me.
The French Connection is one of a handful of classic crime thrillers that does nothing for me because the acting is dull or the story is either non-existent or just plain dumb. (I don’t like Chinatown either. You gotta problem with that?) The French Connection is supposed to have one of the best and most influential chase scenes ever. I heard the same thing about Bullitt. They both influenced me to go to sleep.
Cassandra’s Dream is Woody Allen trying to get back in form as a writer-director, but not quite making it. It’s the story of two brothers, Ewan McGregor and a mis-cast Colin Farrell (he sunk Terrence Malick’s The New World for me) who get tangled up in a criminal situation where people end up getting hurt. One brother struggles with his conscience; the other brother doesn’t. Certain scenes are well directed and affective, but there are too many elements of the movie that don’t work. Still, I admire Woody Allen for the attempt to present a story with both style and substance. I might like this one more if I get around to watching it again, but I’d rather just watch Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is pretty damn close to a masterpiece; same deal with Match Point. All three films deal with a similar subject manner, only the last two do it brilliantly.
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is a B-movie that’s no more sophisticated or frightening than The Blob. Birds start acting funny and attack people. The movie has a few good shots, but it’s boring and over-rated. If you bother to watch it (I don’t plan to see it again), let me know if you think the guy who plays Mitch, Rod Taylor, looks and sounds like Robin Williams’s father. I was convinced the two must be related. They’re not.
I’ve seen most of Hitchcock’s movies. I’ll eventually post about them as I re-watch them.
Searching for Bobby Fischer became one of my favourites when I first saw it in a theatre in 1993. I was hooked after the opening narration by 8-year-old Max Pomeranc that recounts Bobby Fischer’s rise to fame as one of the best chess players in the world and ends with the whispered words: “He disappeared.” Then we discover the narrator is a child prodigy, a genius chess player who some call a young Bobby Fischer. But where Bobby Fischer was a nut, this kid stays on a path that keeps him sane. He plays baseball and goes fishing and doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. It’s a good story.
Whenever I put on just about any Krzysztof Kieslowski DVD, it becomes apparent, usually within the first 60 seconds, that I’m watching an exceptional film. The way it looks, the rhythm of the shots, the way it sounds, the natural look in the actors eyes — the attention to the details of every facet of the filmmaking process creates a feeling like a symphony of 50 different instruments playing a melody in perfect pitch and perfect time. It moves you. And you know that wherever the journey takes you, you’re in good hands. It doesn’t happen often because Sturgeon’s Law holds true in movies too. But when it does happen, you sit up and take notice because you don’t want to miss anything. You’re no longer a passive viewer. You’re engaged. You’re paying attention. Vera Drake is that kind of film. It tells the story of a woman in England after World War II who performs illegal abortions for poor people who can’t afford the medical procedure themselves. It’s not a pro-choice or anti-abortion film. It presents the situation, draws you into the thoughts and feelings of all the people involved (Vera’s close-knit family) and allows you to make your own judgements. None of it is black and white, though. When the end credits start rolling, you’re left with a lot of feelings to sort through and plenty to think about. It’s not an overly-serious downer film, though. Yes, there is drama, but it’s a pleasure to be with these characters because they’re so genuine and kind. It’s just solid filmmaking all around. At any rate, I’ll keep an eye out for anything directed by Mike Leigh for now on. He definitely got my attention with Vera Drake.
I’ve watched all three incarnations of King Kong in the past two weeks: The 1933 original, the best of the bunch for my money; Peter Jackson’s 2005 CGI-heavy remake which — although bloated with nearly 90 minutes of subplots about characters no one cares about — kicks ass when Kong is on screen; and now the 1976 version that presents us with a guy running around in an ape suit. If you’re going for camp value, then okay, maybe it works. But let’s be honest: The Kong scenes are boring. There’s no drama or intensity to any of the action. If you were 9 years old watching it on TV sometime in the ’70s and loved it then, the nostalgia factor could cloud your judgement enough that you might have fun watching it again as an adult. That’s the case for me with The Poseidon Adventure, but not here.
Touching the Void is a documentary about a mountain climber who breaks his leg on a frozen mountainside and has to find his way back down to a base camp where he hopes his friends haven’t already left him for dead. It’s intense. Some may argue Touching the Void is not a documentary because it makes extensive use of recreations, but if the recreations are more affective in telling the story, then so what. James Berardinelli writes, “[It] doesn’t take long for suspension of disbelief to kick in with a vengeance. In fact, the recreations are done so well that we often forget we’re not watching a filmed chronicle of events…” We know the guy lived to tell the tale because the film incorporates present day interviews with everyone who was there, but that does nothing to ease the tension of watching it unfold. Touching the Void is immediate and perhaps even profound because I don’t know how anyone can watch it and not wonder what the hell they’d do in the same situation. I’m fairly confident most of us would be dead.
