Archive for the 'Movies' Category
(Chronologically Listed)
Video for the New Year
I ran across this some months back and just found a link to it again. Some how appropriate for New Year’s Day (though it might have been more appropriate for New Year’s Eve):
The time it took to put this together is a bit staggering. But impressive. ..bruce w..
The Star Wars Holiday Special! (1978)
Courtesy of Ace of Spades comes the most reviled, most wretched “holiday special” ever produced. First, here’s the Vanity Fair article to give you the entire ugly background:
In the summer of 1978, Bruce Vilanch had a bad feeling about the Star Wars television special he’d been hired to write. A veteran of the comedy wars who has since written material for 16 Oscar telecasts and starred as the extra-large Edna Turnblad in the Broadway musical adaptation of John Waters’s Hairspray, Vilanch had just finished working on Bette Midler’s 1977 TV special, Ol’ Red Hair Is Back, for producers Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion when they threw him what sounded like a plum assignment: a spot on the writing team that would help George Lucas adapt more of the Star Wars saga for television.
A year had passed since the theatrical release of Lucas’s gee-whiz space epic, and in that time Star Wars had become the highest-grossing movie in history as well as a cultural phenomenon with its very own lexicon and mythology. With a sequel still two years away from theaters, Lucas had been sold on the idea that a Star Wars holiday television special—to be broadcast on CBS the weekend before Thanksgiving, when Nielsen audiences were plentiful—would sustain interest in the franchise, move more toys off the shelves, and maybe even pick up some new fans who hadn’t seen the movie.
Though Lucas would not be involved in the actual shooting of the special—Smith and Hemion would oversee that—he knew the tales he wanted to tell and planned to work with the show’s team of seasoned TV writers to develop his ideas into a viable script. For those who had been summoned, the prospect of collaborating with the father of the Force initially sounded like a sure bet. “We were really excited, because, ‘My God, this is an annuity—Star Wars!’” says Lenny Ripps, another writer who worked on the special. “How could it lose?”
How indeed.
For those of you with the stamina, here a link to the complete Star Wars Holiday Special itself. I suspect most (if not all) of the actors involved wished that no record of this existed. Heh. ..bruce w..
Christmas recommendation: “Scrooge” (1970)
This remains my favorite Christmas movie (yes, even over “A Christmas Story”). It is a musical version of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol”, starring Albert Finney in the title role. I am not alone in my praise for this movie; note that of the 406(!) customer reviews for it at Amazon, 366 (90%) give it 5 stars and another 21 give it 4 stars.
“Scrooge” didn’t do all that well when it was released theatrically in 1970. Movie critics didn’t like it, feeling that it was somehow silly in the light of the earlier ‘classic’ versions of “A Christmas Carol” (in particular the 1951 Alastair Sim version). For years after that, if “Scrooge” showed up at all, it was in a chopped-up, pan-and-scan version on TV; I can remember my own profound disappointment when I first saw it on TV. The VHS release wasn’t much better — while not chopped up, it was still pan-and-scan, losing much of the outstanding cinematography and choreography.
But for five years now, it’s been out on DVD in an uncut widescreen version. The movie itself has held up very well. The score and libretto are outstanding; a few of the movie’s songs have crept into the mainstream over the years (I heard the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing one on their weekly broadcast earlier this year). As mentioned above, the choreography is outstanding as well, as are the cinematography and art direction.
The real key, though, is Albert Finney in the title role. The director cast a young man (Finney was only in his early 30s when this was filmed) as Scrooge, figuring that it was easier to make a young man look old than to make an old man look young. Furthermore, the old Scooge is not played as a stern if elegant patrician; he’s played quite literally as a dirty moneygrubber, with a permanent hunch to his back. His Scrooge is not someone you would want to cross or meet in a dark alley.
The movie shows a bit more of Scrooge’s young life (via the Ghost of Christmas Past), giving a better sense of Scrooge’s descent from a tall, handsome, modest young man to the bent-over miser he becomes. It also adds a scene of Scrooge in Hell (as part of the visit of the Ghost of Christmas Future) that is quite humorous and at the same time chilling (so to speak). And there are a few changes in the final sequence of events as well, but they represent a payoff from things set up early on.
At its core, though, “Scrooge” fully delivers on Dickens’ original message of regret, repentance, and redemption, and it does so in a powerful fashion. I recommend it without reservation. ..bruce w..
“An American Carol”: a brief review w/spoilers
[UPDATED 2134 MDT: Uh, corrected David Zucker's last name. Thanks, Kevin!]
[UPDATED 1604 MDT: Got an Ace-o-lanche going on, with other links coming in -- welcome all! Also made a few minor edits.]
The Devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.
– Sir Thomas More
I went into “An American Carol” with guarded expectations. While David Zucker immortalized himself with “Airplane!” (”Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?”, “I know how to talk jive.”), “Scary Movie 3″ and “Scary Movie 4″ were his last two outings. I expected some chuckles, some misses, maybe a few laugh-out-loud moments.
I didn’t expect to be howling with laughter — and often simultaneously wincing — through most of the movie. But I was. As was my wife. As were, as far as I could tell, the rest of the people in the theater.
Hollywood likes to think itself brave and groundbreaking as it makes the 3,932nd consecutive film of the past 40 years portraying (conservative) government, war, the military, intelligence agencies, and/or corporations (often all indistinguishable from one another) as evil. Hollywood is not brave; Hollywood is terribly conservative (in its own sense) and very much in lockstep with itself.
David Zucker is brave. Not just because he gleefully mocks the Left (including Hollywood), but because he gleefully mocks radical Islamic terrorists as well. And he is very politically incorrect in how both the Left and radical Islamists are portrayed. When in the first few minutes of the movie you have suicide bomber jokes — not wry or ironic asides, but Airplane!-style, pushing-the-boundaries-of-taste jokes and pratfalls — you know you’re not in West LA anymore.
The actors who appear in this movie — Kevin Farley (as “Michael Morton”), Kelsey Grammer, Jon Voight, Leslie Nielsen and the rest — are likewise brave, especially in light of actual voiced blacklisting threats towards outspoken conservative actors.
Not all jokes in the film were drop-dead funny, but enough were — and the movie moves fast enough to get by the occasional miss or slow moment — to have kept us entertained throughout. And there was at least one moment (”A lot of dust in here…”) that unexpectedly made me tear up.
The Left, the mainstream media, and Hollywood (but I repeat myself) will absolutely hate this movie. They cheerfully promulgate and perpetuate grossly-distorted depictions and unfair stereotypes of those on the Right (e.g., see the trashing of Sarah Palin), but they cannot endure to be mocked themselves. It is their fatal weakness, the one thing that keeps most clear-thinking people from taking themselves seriously.
And as an old American proverb says: screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke. The rest of us should go see the film, repeatedly. I plan to.
Spoilers (such as they are) after the jump.
Scenes from a marriage
Not many marriages last 50 years, particulary not in Hollywood, and especially not when both parties are well-known actors. But Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward managed that on a very public stage, and the montage of clips below gives you an idea of the fire in the dance:
Hat tip to American Digest. ..bruce w..
A good man is gone
I’m sure Paul Newman had his flaws — we all do — but for someone to be successful in at least three different endeavors — acting, racing, and raising $175 million for charity — and to always keep a normal-sized head (Newman refused to sign autographs, not out of ego but because signing autographs seemed arrogant) makes for a pretty remarkable life.
Condolences to his family, including his wife, the ever-lovely Joanne Woodward (to whom he was married for 50 years). Hat tip to Ace of Spades.
[UPDATED 1001 MDT] Here’s a better and more thoughtful obituary than the wire service one linked above:
A loving father, faithful husband, World War II veteran and philanthropist who gave away a vast fortune, being one of the all-time great screen legends was only part of who Paul Newman was, and it‘s the rare circumstance where after their passing we mourn the loss of the man more than the star.
..bruce w..
“The Dark Knight”: a brief review (w/spoilers)
Actually, it’s hard to write much of a review without giving away key plot points, so this first part will be brief (and spoilers listed below).
Truly an outstanding film. Not perfect (see the spoilers section), but every bit as tense, intelligent, and morally complex as the crime dramas that regularly get Oscar nominations. Put another way: if you took Batman out of the film (but left Bruce Wayne), removed the Joker’s makeup, and toned down the injuries to a certain character — it would be considered one of those Oscar-worth crime dramas, “ripped from tomorrow’s headlines”.
Adding to that verisimilitude is that Gotham City for the first time looks just like a normal city. There’s clearly a lot of effects to make it look both bigger than and different from Chicago — but there are none of the gothic city designs that have dominated the previous five Batman films, including Christopher Nolan’s first one, “Batman Begins”. Ditto for Batman — with Wayne Manor still under reconstruction, there’s no Batcave, just a large, low-ceiling, well-lit expansive workspace buried somewhere in Wayne Enterprises-owned property, while Wayne himself lives in a large, sparse city-center penthouse. If anything, the city and the sets look normal to the point of banality — which serves to intensify the darkness within the people themselves.
That darkness is indeed the theme of this movie, and it’s pretty unrelenting — except for one grace note (or rather two) towards the end. The acting is all solid, with excellent performances by Aaron Eckert (Harvey Dent) and Heath Ledger (the Joker) — and, yes, Ledger’s performance really is Oscar-worthy. (Quick: who so far this year would you rate over him?) The score is likewise outstanding: it doesn’t call attention to itself but it does build the mood of the movie.
Like Harvey Dent’s coin, “The Dark Knight” is the flip side of “Iron Man”. In the few spots where “Iron Man” turns dark, it’s never more than a quip away from lightening up. In the few spots where “The Dark Knight” turns light-hearted, there’s still a weariness in the humor, and it never lasts long.
Highly recommended; spoilers after the jump
Know what impresses me about “The Dark Knight”?
No, not the movie itself — I haven’t seen it yet, though I do have tickets for Friday night.
It’s the movie’s title: “The Dark Knight”. It’s not “Batman: The Dark Knight” or worse yet “Batman II: The Dark Knight” (though I guess technically you’d have to call it “Batman VI: The Dark Knight”). It’s not even “Batman and the Joker”. Yet I daresay that the movie-going public is pretty clear that this is a film about Batman.
Lucas had an excuse for the Star Wars series — he was really trying to do episodes (though read Michael Kaminski’s utterly fascinating The Secret History of Star Wars — a free downloadable electronic book), and he had the cojones to label “The Empire Strikes Back” — the second Star Wars film made — as “Episode VI”. Beyond that, the “Star Wars Episode XX” part wasn’t part of the titles for posters and promotions for “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi”. Everyone who had a pulse and an above-room-temperature IQ knew that these were all Star Wars films and needed to reminding.
Spielberg, on the other hand, had no excuse for sticking “Indiana Jones and” in front of the successive “Indiana Jones” movies or, worse yet, retroactively in front of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (yep, that’s what the DVD cover says, though the title within the film itself remains untouched). Somewhere in here there is a whiff of Hollywood’s fear that we’re all secretly idiots and that no one would realize that “The Temple of Doom”, “The Last Crusade” and “The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (which should have been “The City of Gods“, and I don’t just mean the title) were Indiana Jones films.
The nadir is probably “Spider-Man”, “Spider-Man 2″, and “Spider-Man 3″. Given how many different “Spider-Man” titles that Marvel has had over the years, surely Sony could have used some of those instead (as Marvel did for the Hulk reboot, using “The Incredible Hulk”).
A useless rant, I know. But if “The Dark Knight” turns out to be the top-grossing film of the year, maybe other studios will sit up and take notice. ..bruce w..
“WALL-E”: a brief review (w/spoilers)
You could probably devise an interesting psychological profiling test around a person’s favorite Pixar film; mine happens to be “The Incredibles”, so make of that what you will. What is telling is that Pixar has yet to make either a bad or an unsuccessful movie, a pretty stunning achievement given the river of diluted sludge that generally flows out of Hollywood, and especially in light of Sturgeon’s Law (”90% of everything is crap”). Pixar continues its impossible string of hits with “WALL-E”.
“WALL-E” is something quite different from previous Pixar films: it is not a film so much as a feature-length cartoon. Specifically — as I said to my sweet wife Sandra as the credits ended — this is the longest, best, most exquisitely drawn “Looney Tunes” cartoon ever made.
Think about it. “WALL-E” contains all the classic “Looney Tunes”/Warner Bros. elements: a sympathetic underdog hero, not a lot of dialog, physical slapstick, manic and goofy secondary characters, unrequited (for a while, at least) romance, a melodramatic villian (with sidekick), “classical” music (”Barber of Seville” : my generation :: “Hello, Dolly” : my grandkids’ generation), social satire both broad and subtle — but always sharp and a bit painful, lots of puns (visual and verbal), various subtle homages and cultural references (my wife chuckled every time she heard the Mac OS X boot sound), the triumph of individualism and common sense over mandates from above, and an upbeat ending. While most reviewers have seen the “Buy n Large” corporation as a slam on Wal-Mart, I think it also doubles as a call-out to the ubiquitous “Acme Corporation” from the Warners Brothers cartoons.
I know some folks have complained about the apparently heavy-handed message — anti-consumer, pro-environment — but that falls under the broad-yet-sharp satire. “WALL-E” didn’t have Bugs or Daffy or Elmer to make asides to the audience, so the storyboards had to do it.
Because it is a “Looney Tunes” cartoon rather than an animated film, “WALL-E” doesn’t have quite the personal emotional resonance (read: “tugging at parents’ heartstrings”) of some of the previous Pixar films, such as “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles”. But it is, I think, Pixar’s finest work to date. I find myself humming “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and smiling two days after seeing WALL-E; I’m not sure when was the last time that a film had me doing that.
Spoilers (such as they are) after the jump.
“Indiana Jones and the City of Gods”: a brief review (w/spoilers)
Oh, for things that might have been.
I saw “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” on opening day, and — for all the grumblings that I’ve seen in other reviews — I actually liked it. Shia LaBeouf wasn’t as bad as I feared, and it was a joy seeing Karen Allen — the only real heroine of any of the Indiana Jones movies — appear again. The film was a bit goofy here and there, but it was fun.
And then in just this past week, I began to see rumblings about Frank Darabont’s original screenplay for Indy IV having been leaked to the ‘net in PDF form. I did some poking around, found it, downloaded it, and began read.
I didn’t stop until I had finished it, despite my wife’s best efforts to drag me away from my laptop.
The screenplay isn’t perfect, but scene-for-scene, line-for-line, it’s a far better script that what Lucas and Spielberg eventually filmed. I don’t know why Lucas and Spielberg (and it may well have just been Lucas) rejected this script; on the other hand, given what Lucas did to the Star Wars prequels, I’m not sure any explanation is necessary.
This film does not have the Cate Blanchett or the Shia LaBeouf characters. The Ray Winstone character is actually Russian (and turns out to be a Russian spy). Marion is married (!) when Indy runs into her in Peru, and — contrary to what Wikipedia says — she does not have a 13-year-old daughter from her liaison with Indy in “Raiders”. There are giant ants — even bigger than the ones in “Crystal Skull” — but there’s actually a rational for them — and I regret not seeing the hummingbirds. Oh, and Sallah and Dr. Henry Jones are both still alive.
Yes, there is one (only one) former Nazi — hiding out in Peru — in the movie, but he’s a relatively minor character and could have been easily written out or changed to something else, so it makes no sense to say (as Wikipedia does) that Spielberg rejected the whole Darabont screenplay because of that one character.
It’s a great read, even in screenplay form, and a great insight into the craft of screenwriting. If Spielberg had filmed this screenplay, I think that “City of Gods” would have blown past “Iron Man”.
But, hey — that’s Lucas and Spielberg for you. A few “spoilers” after the jump.