2001: A Space Odyssey
The Matrix
LOTR: SE

Had to try out the bigger screen.

Two things since last time (this was actually last month, but I'll post them here at the risk of setting up an anti-matter universe up whose axehole we all disappear.)-

ADAPTATION (USA 2002)

Directed by Spike Jonze
Screenplay by Charlie and Donald Kaufman, from the novel by Susan Orlean
Photography by Lance Acord
Music by Carter Burwell

Main Cast: Nicolas Cage, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper

Mightily impressed. Because of the nature of the film, it is at once a movie in itself and its own "Making Of". I think there's a real fiendish intelligence at work here. Notice the duality of it all! Get to grips with ideas of duality through the representation of false happiness, reality, spontaneity, creativity and writer's block! I thought it was also good how the opposites were not noticeably opposites, but rather mirror images - the most blatant example being Cage's happy, uncomplicated twin. It would have been easy to have him portrayed as a Buddy Love kind of alter ego, but no, there he is cheerfully sharing the same Gene Wilder frizzy see-through orange hair as his tortured brother. I was constantly coming to false conclusions throughout ADAPTATION, but that's okay. Everyone comes away with their own ideas. And my conclusion is that it's difficult to come to a conclusion, but it's a great film (although it gets a bit ordinary near the end).

A shame, because some of the early scenes are well done. It's always fun to see places like Rome destroyed in true 50s SF style, and there's an extremely good BIRDSish scene of chaos and terror set in London's Trafalgar Square, but the rest of the film peters out in comparison.

Caught a documentary made for French TV with Jean-Pierre Melville made about 2 years before he died. He seemed in good health. Melville had some great stories to tell, no where near as in-depth as the ones he told in his published interview with Rui Nogeira, but the film was really more like hangin' with Melville than analyzing every aspect of every film. The result was surprisingly fun despite what a loner recluse JP was.

In the future, I would like to see the Mini-Series "Mussolini: The Untold Story" (1985) but I can not find it anywhere. George C Scott played as Mussolini. Yes, I was young when I saw this movie but I remember it a little better than "The Thornbirds." The movie "Nadia", which I have not seen in years, is also on my list.

Directed by Alfred Goulding
Screenplay by Charles Rogers, Harry Langdon and Felix Adler
Photography by Art Lloyd
Music by Marvin Hatley

Main Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson, Forrester Harvey, Wilfred Lucas, Peter Cushing

Stan and Ollie find jobs as butler and maid (!) in a posh house, but, unsurprisingly, make a fine mess of it. Their next job sees them as street sweepers. This is much more successful, because they unwittingly catch a bank robber (he slips on their banana skin), and the manager, in gratitude, finances an education for them at Oxford University, where they are the butt of student pranks. Stan gets knocked on the head and and thinks he's the incredibly twittish Lord Paddington for a while. Then he gets knocked on the head again and goes back to being Stan.

Laurel and Hardy were sometimes amazingly funny, but A CHUMP AT OXFORD looks quite weak, nowhere near as inventive as some of their earlier 20-minute shorts - and with the episodic structure it's like three of the (unfunnier) ones strung together. Certainly no classic, and very ramshackle, but it's impossible not to like. Endearing rather than great, although Stan's insults as Lord Paddington are amusing, and I did have fun spotting Peter Cushing, in his first screen appearance, as one of the students.

"Fun And Games" is a problematical episode which seems to accentuate the weaker aspects of the impressive old series. More than ever it looks and sounds like a moral in search of direction, where characters representing opposing ideas are shoe-horned into an extreme situation and forced to mouth unlikely profound dialogue. Not very convincing then, with the added burden of having the annoyingly Pinocchio/Tintin-headed wee nyaff Nick Adams in the lead role. He's irritating to look at, but Nancy Malone's performance is worse, reacting to Adams and monsters alike with the same fed-up countenance.

Helping the pace enormously is the excellent music, although it's quite clearly modelled on Goldsmith's L.A CONFIDENTIAL.

HEIST (USA 2001)

Directed by David Mamet
Screenplay by David Mamet
Photography by Robert Elswit
Music by Theodore Shapiro

Good too is the atmospheric scoring. I recognized Malcolm Arnold's style throughout, though it seems to have been a collaborative effort with Buxton Orr, an interesting composer who had previously done solid scores for some low budget Brit SF/horrors like FIEND WITHOUT A FACE and CORRIDORS OF BLOOD.

SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (GB 1959)

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Screenplay by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams, from the play by Tennessee Williams
Photography by Jack Hildyard
Music by Buxton Orr and Malcolm Arnold

DREAMCATCHER
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
Screenplay by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan

Those who got warned off by the critical pans of this are missing one of the best matinee films out this year. It's not quite at the level of LIFEFORCE, but it's as enjoyable, if not more so.

It's easily one of the better King adaptations put to film and the surprising thing is that both Goldman and Kasdan manage to be pretty faithful to what is one of King's wonkiest books... with the exception of one minor point at the climax (although the logic of it works so well in the context of the film).

Forget the Lawrence Kasdan who did THE BIG CHILL, GRAND CANYON & MUMFORD.... the guy who did this is the Larry Kasdan we all know and love from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and BODY HEAT.

this was horrible. a train wreck.
Shot on HD, too. Artificial looking, with no depth.

and the acting wasn't all that great, either. Nastassja kinska, Roseana Arquette, Ed Begley, Jr. -- moderately famous people, I guess.

Things have thankfully come a long way since the days of BBC's deadeningly dull video-taped "classic" series, so stultifyingly unatmospheric visually that you could almost smell the aroma of mothballs emanating from the costumes. And that horrible hollow video sound - a visit to Madame Tussaud's was more dramatic.

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by Melissa Mathison
Photography by Allen Daviau
Music by John Williams

Main Cast: Henry Thomas, E.T., Dee Wallace, Peter Coyote, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore

An extra-terrestrial gets stranded on planet Earth.

This was the first time I'd seen the retouched version, but I won't go into the changes because they've already been well documented and don't affect the overall tone of the film (unlike CE3K). Nor will I show my great intelligence by repeating what others have said about the themes of fatherless children and their premature exposure to death, resurrection and ascension.

No sir, I shan't mention any of that. I only want to say that I feel E.T. may just be the hardest to take of Spielberg's great films, especially if you're old and irritable. Best to just sit back and enjoy - even so, I found myself in disagreement with the "misuse" of E.T. in the film: we see him in drag, we see him drunk, and all with the intention of getting assured laughs from the 5-year olds in the audience. Or maybe it's a simple case of familiarity breeding contempt.

This reaction of mine extends to the score too. The climactic sequence is amongst the most perfect matches of music and image I can recall, but some scenes are perhaps too epically scored for such an intrinsically intimate film.

Whites built 1500 miles of a fence to keep out the rabbits. They had sex with native
Aborigines who lived near this fence and who bore half caste children. The government
took these children away from their Aborigine mothers and sent them to a camp where
they were trained as domestics for Whites. Also, they will be bred by whites, and over
generations, the theory was that their native blood with be bred out of them. Ugh. Three
girls are taken away to this camp, escape, and walk 1500 miles along the fence to find
their mothers.

Gorgeous photography. Lovely landscapes. Horrific story that really holds your attention
at first because it is hard to believe such practices occurred.

And yet this story, IMO, was strangely ineffective. It lacked dramatic impact. The girls
were never very believable and registered little emotion. Consequently, I didn’t connect to
them like I did to the characters in ROOTS. I heard nothing of merit in the music and
wondered why it garnered a Golden Globe nomination. Also, it didn’t tackle a very
touchy issue. It showed a white male land owner coming into the domestic’s bedroom
for breeding to a young woman. However, at the camp were many bi-racial boys who
were being trained as domestics, but they didn’t address how their native blood would be
erased through breeding with whites.

Overall, I felt the story should have been more compelling and heart-wrenching.

I came out rather grumpily from DREAMCATCHER, I must admit. LRob mentions earlier how he liked the film, on the level of a LIFEFORCE, for example. Well, I'm sorry, but I didn't like it, didn't like it at all. I was really hoping for so much more, because, although I've seen through Stephen King for donkey's years, I still held out for Kasdan. But no. I was very disappointed with DREAMCATCHER. I felt that the disparate elements didn't jell at all well - we have the small-town youth portrayal, the special powers aspect, the Cronenberg bodily functions horror (here mere scatological humour), the gung-ho INDEPENDENCE DAY attitude to the aliens, plus Carpenter's version of THE THING etc etc. No, apart from anything (too long, too unfocussed, too pretentious) DREAMCATCHER is just too derivative. And I think that half the problem just might be Stephen King. 600 pages going nowhere slowly. Jack Finney wrote this kind of stuff in 30.

"Juliette ou la Clef des Songes"
One of Marcel Carné’s last efforts (1950) to revive " poetic realism", a genre for which he laid the foundations in the thirties. Here, the atmosphere of fantasy and tragedy is too constrained, Georges Neveux substituting for Prevert, with much less success.

"The Ipcress File"
The triumph of style over substance, and a great supporting cast ; Guy Doleman, Nigel Green, Gordon Jackson. Whatever happened to Sydney J. Furie ?

"This Happy Feeling"
A somewhat frustrating comedy from Blake Edwards. Still there was enough to satisfy the Edwards fan within myself, but just. Bad casting in the main leads doesn’t help, nor does Frank Skinner’s unsubtle attemps at "funny" underscoring. Kudos must go to Estelle Winwood , Alexis Smith …and a lady seagull.

"Many Rivers to Cross
I was in the proper mood to enjoy this inocuous MGM " Frontier" comedy. Actors cheerfully hamming up all over the place, fast-paced direction from Roy Rowland, and an energetic and zestful score from Cyril J. Mockridge were good enough for me.

"Maciste in Hell"
Maciste in 17th century Scotland!! Riccardo Freda's inspiration at its best for the Inferno scenes, and an effective monolithic score from Carlo Franci.

I also just about remember Hammer's RASPUTIN. And to think that some people complained at the time that there was no historical context! Well, of course their wasn't! But I too enjoyed seeing Christopher Lee get the chance to really chew the scenery instead of merely standing around looking threatening or important. And, agreed, great Don Banks score. I covered him in one of my old "From The Vaults" threads.

Two and a half hours of this had me fidgety, but I was most impressed, and the restraint shown by all is admirable. The inner turmoil comes across clearly even without the presence of brusque, plain-speaking agnostic Peter Finch (although it was satisfying to see him as a mouthpiece for the ordinary non-nun viewer).

Suitably reverential score by Franz Waxman, a great work indeed, awesomely good music. The religious aspect is spine-tingling, but there are also interesting minor cues such as the plucked strings in the few scenes of violence, and the brooding music for the lepers (poor lepers - what with this and BEN-HUR, they were often treated like monsters by their composers).

THE NUN'S STORY (USA 1959)

Directed by Fred Zinnemann
Screenplay by Robert Anderson, from the book by Kathryn C. Hulme
Photography by Franz Planer
Music by Franz Waxman

Main Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Peter Finch, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Dean Jagger

At The Earth's Core
Any picture featuring a scantily-clad Caroline Munro can't be bad.

Also, I was very sad to see that the final chase sequence basically just rips off the great truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of course, the Raiders chase is vastly superior.

The music throughout is a pile of disjointed crap that does nothing but harm the movie, especially during the chase scenes. Why don't directors just let the sound of the engines roar through the sound mix instead of drowning everything out with horrid music?

Anyhow, it was a decent 87 minutes or so of mindless entertainment, but I have to wonder how films like this get funded.

1941
2010
Galaxy Quest
Gladiator
Maltese Falcon
Monsters, Inc.
Princess Bride
Tornado
Twister