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Reviews
Insomnia (2002)
well done thriller
This little suspense piece was pretty well done in two primary respects. First, Robin Williams again proves that he is better served playing dramatic roles than comedic ones. He's too busy trying to bring Mork from Ork to all his comedic roles. His dramatic performances are more disciplined and much more effective. The second was the tidy use of the metaphor of Detective Dormer's inability to sleep in the perpetual daylight of northern Alaska in the summertime. He becomes obsessed with keeping the light out of his room just as he was obsessed with keeping the light off of his improper behavior in LA. The parallelism between the quest to keep the light out of his room and to keep the dark chapter of his police career from being illuminated is at the same time subtle and obvious -- a very nice piece of film-making. Al Pacino is restrained and vulnerable as Detective Dormer, which is a nice departure from his more typical roles. This is not his best work, but he's still very, very good. Hilary Swank is convincing in her role as the eager and attentive Detective Burr. All that said, this story dragged along at times. I was never convinced that homicide detectives from LA would be dispatched to assist a small town Alaska police force in resolving a relatively run-of-the-mill homicide, especially when the detectives dispatched were deeply enough involved in an internal affairs investigation to be front page news. Three stellar performances (Pacino, Williams and Swank) and some beautiful scenery boost this film out of some slow-paced story telling.
Mary Poppins (1964)
Just one observation
I like Dick van Dyke, I really do. He was even pretty good at times in this movie. If only his character had been a mute. His horrible attempt at a Cockney accent still grates in my ears, and I haven't seen this film in more than 20 years! His role as the ancient old man at the bank was far better than his role as Bert. Van Dyke is a trooper and gave his all in the song and dance numbers but OY!, that wretched accent! As far as the film is concerned, it's okay as light entertainment and not much more. Watching this could not help but make one wistful that Julie Andrews was not cast as Eliza Doolittle in the film version of "My Fair Lady," a role of far more substance than the role in this piece of Disney fluff.
Written on the Wind (1956)
Melodrama ... blah
I saw this film for the first time not too long on TCM's "Essentials" series. The eye of the beholder cliché was never more apropos. This beholder saw little of value in this one. I was puzzled by the infinite attraction that Lucy (Lauren Bacall) possessed. Granted, Ms. Bacall was a beautiful woman, but in this film her character comes off more mousy than attractive. I would think men like Mitch Wayne and Kyle Hadley would more likely ignore Lucy than fall into an instant infatuation with her. In Bacall's defense, this film was made at the time of Humphrey Bogart's last illness and the weight of his deteriorating health may have affected her performance. Of course part of this mousiness on the part of Lucy was to contrast her to slutty Marylee, played to the hilt and beyond by Dorothy Malone. The scene where she engages in a wildly sensual dance while her father wearily climbs the stairs to a fatal heart attack is far and away the best scene in the film. Malone's performance outshines the rest, although Jasper Hadley's weariness at the disappointing behavior of his two children is brilliantly portrayed by Robert Keith. Generally, though, I would have to say that I'm just not much of a fan of melodrama. The cartoonish behavior of the characters just makes for a story too implausible for my tastes.
Fracture (2007)
Acting school
This film should be used as a training film for wannabe actors. Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling and Joe LaBruto all pull off stellar performances in this character-driven how-to-prove-who-done-it. The plot device is simple. Engineer Ted Crawford (Hopkins) shot his wife. We saw him do it. He made very little effort (apparently) to hide it. Surely an Assistant DA headed into big time private law firm will have no trouble proving it. What the ADA, Willy Beachum, does not realize is that one of the first responders to the apparent hostage taking and shooting at the Crawford home was detective Robert Nunnally, whose affair with the shooting victim is what drove Crawford to commit the crime in the first place. The cat and mouse between Beachum and Crawford game that ensues requires strong acting performances to carry the story along. Fortunately, Gosling was up to the challenge of appearing alongside Hopkins. The two men played off one another brilliantly and moved the story along to its foreseeable twist ending. The subplot concerning Beachum's contemplation of the lucrative offer from the gigantic law firm, complete with romantic interest, is not so well done, but generally this is an entertaining film carried by the spell-binding interactions of the two leads.
Touch of Evil (1958)
film noir a la Welles
Maybe I wanted more from this film, but I think it's a wee bit over-scored at #78 all time. Charlton Heston as Mexican police officer? Yikes. It does have many solid features, nonetheless. Welles' direction is sharp. The opening scene shown without credits (TCM and DVD versions of the film run the scene in that way), where the camera provides a bird's eye view of an impending murder by explosives, is marvelously done. Welles' acting as the amoral and imminently corruptible police captain, Hank Quinlan, is fantastic. He is repulsive on nearly every level imaginable. The supporting cast is strong, with particularly good performances by Mort Mills as the DA's assistant, Al Schwartz, and by Jospeh Calleia as police sergeant Pete Menzies. Sgt. Menzies in particular goes from being Quinlan's lackey to trying hard to be his conscience. Calleia carries off that transformation brilliantly. Heston, however, is never very convincing as the incorruptible "Mike" Vargas, whose scrupulous attention to detail ultimately brings Quinlan down. Blackening Heston's hair and giving him a pencil mustache and a few lines in Spanish did not transform him into a believable Mexican official. Janet Leigh's character, Susie Vargas, was intriguing. She is very easily duped by the drug ring and becomes fearful of remaining in Mexico, yet her apparently racist insistence on staying north of the border only threw her directly into the hands of the drug ring she so feared. Moreover, she was indirectly at the mercy of police "protection" in the form of the loathsome Captain Quinlan.
Aladdin (1992)
Perfect illustration
Many of you have probably read that one of the problems with Disney's animated films after about 1965 or so is the too-great reliance on well-known actors doing the voice work. "Aladdin" clearly illustrates the problem. Instead of using the script and skillful animation of facial expressions and other movements to give the characters personality, the current generation of Disney animators relies on identifiable actors to supply the personality for the characters in the process of the voice over. Thus, the Genie, voiced by Robin Williams, overwhelms and dominates the film as Williams tends to do in any film he's a part of. The Genie becomes a fast-talking hip comedian. Great, though it seems more than a little out of place in the context of the general story of Aladdin and his lamp. A similar observation can be made about the parrot, Iago, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried. Of course this is a children's film, but it seems to me that the presence of Williams and Gottfried dumbs this story down rather significantly, turning a story intended to be about the mysteries of the Middle East into a western pop culture fest geared toward short attention spans. I guess Disney studios has a rather low opinion of kids these days, or maybe a low opinion of what they need to inject into films to entertain the parents taking their kids to see these movies.
The Juror (1996)
Implausible
Annie Laird (Demi Moore) is chosen as a juror because she wants to be a juror. The trial she will hear involves a murder charge against a stereotypical mob boss named Lou Boffano (Tony LoBianco). In stereotypical mob fashion, Boffano sets one of his "soldiers," named Eddie (James Gandalfini)" and a contract hit man known as Teacher (Alec Baldwin) who evidently works for a Colombian drug gang that does business with Boffano's gang. Rather quickly, Eddie and Teacher make their presence known to Annie. Teacher in particular menaces Annie and threatens her son, Oliver (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Teacher bugs Annie's home, her phones and has an inordinate number of photos of Annie. It is interesting that he spent all that time and effort getting audio of Annie's home but did not plant any surveillance cameras. Eddie's role is less clear. He seems to have some minor supervisory role over Teacher, but Teacher is clearly in command. Turns out, in fact, that Teacher was the trigger man in the murder for which Boffano is on trial. Somehow Teacher (who seems to be planning the defense lawyers' strategy) wants Annie to convince the jury that Boffano is too stupid to be in charge of anything. He wants her to convince the jury that Teacher is the real mastermind -- without revealing his identity, of course. This hare-brained plot then morphs, briefly, into what comes off as a parody of the great movie, "12 Angry Men." Unlike that classic, where the jurors debate and discuss the evidence in great detail, in "The Juror," there only seems to be one piece of evidence: an audiotape that ambiguously implicates Boffano. Annie's job is to point out that ambiguity, which she does over and over again. One of the jurors reveals some kind of bias toward mobsters, or murderers or Italian-Americans (it's not quite clear what his bias is, just that he's biased), but the other jurors seem to have the depth of intellect of Cletus Spuckler and are persuaded by Annie to acquit Boffano. Of course that does not end the story. Boffano did not like the way Annie looked at him after the verdict was read and wants Teacher to take her out. Teacher has developed an obsession with Annie (of course) and wants to take care of it his own way, i.e., by continuing to pressure her and convince that he's the only person who can keep the Boffanos from killing her or Oliver. Annie tries to get help from law enforcement, but of course they are ineffectual (never mind that Annie has enough evidence to have Teacher given 10-15 lethal injections AND she knows that the Boffano family will not come to Teacher's aid). She tries to hide Oliver in Guatemala with his father (maybe -- at least with some guy with whom Annie once had "something"), although she uses no alias and flies a commercial airline. Thus, Teacher finds her and Oliver easily, leading to Teacher being executed by some Guatemalan somethings --- Soldiers? Police? Drug lords? -- with the coup de grace delivered by Annie herself. Hooray.
The story is unbelievable at any level. Alec Baldin is somewhat menacing as Teacher, but comes off more like a stalker than a hit man. His beating Boffano to the punch and blowing up the car when Boffano thought his men were going to kill teacher is weak. Boffano left his limo unguarded, evidently, and the men about to kill Teacher simply let him pull an obvious detonator out of his pocket and use it. Right. They would have plugged him immediately when he went into his pocket. Demi Moore is supposed to be the strong woman as Annie, but she is really kind of dull-witted when you get right down to it (not using an alias to get to Guatemala; letting Oliver ride a bike home from school by himself, etc.). Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays his totally helpless role quite well. He's supposed to be an extraordinarily bright kid, but he seems a little slow, too. For a mob soldier, Eddie is far too affable -- that is primarily a problem with the script. James Gandolfini is okay in the role, I guess, but it's shame it was written with Mr. Rogers as the role model for a mob soldier.
All that aside, despite it's flaws, "The Juror" has a lot of moments where it is a fairly successful thriller. It needed a lot more of those moments and a lot less of "12 Angry Men," which it imitated poorly at best, and a tighter script to close up some of the plot holes.
The Interpreter (2005)
To foil a plot
UN interpreter Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman) overhears what sounds like a plot to murder a Third World, in this case African, despot named Zuwane (Earl Cameron). Zuwane is a formerly idealistic reformer who became a genocidal despot once he gained power. As it happens, Ms. Broome happens to hail from the country beset by Zuwane's reign of terror and following up on her lead, the US Secret Service is able to foil the plot, acting primarily through the efforts of Agent Tobin Keller (Sean Penn). Agent Keller and his staff have as their primary mission the protection of Zuwane, who is coming to address the UN General Assembly. In the course of investigating the assassination plot, Keller turns up evidence of political intrigue involving Silvia Broome, who it turns out has an ax to grind against Zuwane. Not only did Zuwane betray his ideals for the sake of power, land mines buried on his orders killed Silvia's father, mother and sister. If that wasn't cause enough for her to hate Zuwane, her brother was murdered by young gunmen working for Zuwane. Silvia and Keller, who has lost his adulterous spouse in a traffic accident some three weeks earlier, develop a loving relationship for each other in a subplot that in some ways is more interesting than the intrigue-thriller side of the story. The film ends weakly. Zuwane is giving his address. The assassin who thinks he is about to kill Zuwane from a sniper's perch in an interpreter's room is himself killed by none other than Zuwane's chief of security, Nils Lud (Jesper Christensen). The idea apparently was to have this poor dupe think he was going to kill Zuwane when in fact it was staged by Lud to discredit Zuwane's opposition. In any event, in the chaos that ensued on the floor of the General Assembly, Zuwane was hustled away to safety in a private room and left entirely unguarded by the Secret Service and UN security despite the fact that every one of those security specialists thought he was the target of an assassination attempt. That, my friends, was where the plot was foiled. The ending was so unbelievable as to scuttle the entire movie. What had been sailing along as a plausible thriller crashed on an iceberg of contrivance. Silvia invades the room where Zuwane was left unguarded, forces him to read his own early idealistic words and is eventually persuaded by Keller not to kill Zuwane. Please, Mr. Stellman, Mr. Ward, give us a reasonably believable denouement! Sydney Pollack's direction was good, capturing the lively and contentious nature of the UN, as well as the enormity of the place. Penn's performance was solid if not spectacular. Kidman seemed to have trouble staying with a consistent accent, but otherwise her performance was credible. The script was not bad, except for the utterly ridiculous ending. The DVD version includes an alternate ending that is even hokier than the ending that was actually in the movie. It's a shame they didn't come up with a third option.
Four Friends (1981)
I missed it
I saw this movie many years ago. Maybe I need to rent it and see it again. The gushing, ecstatic reviews I'm reading here either mean I missed something very special or that only people who thought this to be the equal of the greatest films ever made bothered to write on it. My recollections of this movie are that it was a disappointingly disjointed story given that Arthur Penn was the director (he had previously directed two of my personal favorites, "Bonnie & Clyde" and "Little Big Man") and Steve Tesich the screenwriter. "Coming of age" films portraying "slices of life" can still have coherent, plausible story lines even as they try to weave the mundane into a larger story. This movie was lacking in both coherence and plausibility. Tesich's writing, so crisp and natural in "Breaking Away," seemed self-conscious and even pretentious here, trying to weave the stories of these four into the broader revolutionary changes sweeping the country in the time frame of the film. I thought Craig Wasson as "Danilo" was unfortunate casting -- he was wooden and unable to portray Danilo as a sympathetic character. Then again, maybe that's another problem with the writing. In any event, Danilo did not strike me as sympathetic, just pathetic -- a loser who couldn't move on from the vacuously ethereal Georgia (Jodi Thelen). Good lord, boy, get out some -- she's no prize. I'll try to find time to see this again soon and see what I missed and I will watch with an open mind, but I sure don't recall anything in this movie worth gushing about -- unless it's getting into a brawl with a full stomach.
****POST SCRIPT *****
I finally go around to taking a look at this again. I have to say my original comments stand. The dialogue was wooden and unnatural. THe broader cultural and social references seemed in large measure extraneous to the story. Not a movie I would recommend.
Kelly's Heroes (1970)
Anti-war war movie
This is a fine little film, well worth a rental from your local merchant. The plot is fairly simple: World War II era American GI's learn of a large supply of gold in a bank behind enemy lines and make the decision to heist the stash regardless of the danger from the enemy and from their own superiors. The film, however, is only loosely set in World War II. Donald Sutherland's "Oddball" might as well be wearing tie-dyed t-shirts and grooving to the Grateful Dead. The underlying message is anti-war in the sense that, at the end of the day, looking out for number one is more important and more worth the risk than any military objective invented by so-called superior officers. The only fight really worth fighting is the fight one defines for oneself. Though not nearly as sharp in its criticisms of the military establishment as "M*A*S*H," that same spirit of criticism is present in "Kelly's Heroes," particularly in Carroll O'Connor's loopy Gen. Colt. This is one of Clint Eastwood's better early performances in the title role, and Telly Savalas is quite convincing as the NCO career military man who makes the momentous decision to buck his superiors for the first time in his career.
Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)
WIlliams overkill
There is bound to be an over-the-top element in any film where cross-dressing is a featured element. Therein lies a problem with casting Robin Williams in the lead role in a film where a man impersonating a woman is a key element. Williams already plays every role in an over-the-top, "Im cool and you're not but you wish you were as cool as me" manner. Williams's presence detracts from the story rather than adding to it. His insistence on making the characters he plays larger than life totally undermines the credibility of what might have been a cute little story. Williams's inability to portray subtlety is the undoing of this film and turns what might have been an entertaining farce into a monotonous, predictable bore. Sally Field, Pierce Brosnan and Joseph Prosky turn in credible performances in their roles, though there is really nothing extraordinary about any of them. An actor less pre-occupied with his own "mark" on the character might have made this the entertaining light comedy it was meant to be. This is not a bad movie for younger kids, though, if you don't mind explaining what Mrs. Doubtfire means by "cunning linguistics."
The Green Berets (1968)
Bad stuff
This attempt to create a propaganda film in support of the war in Vietnam was ill-advised at best. We can hope that what John Wayne had in mind was reminding the folks back home that the draftees who lived that horror were not responsible for creating it and that the soldiers still deserved our support. IF that was the intention, the intent was laudable. Clearly, however, that was not the intention. The intent appears to have been to portray any media person who dared speak against the war as a traitor. The sub-text, of course, was that if the soft pinkos in the media would go see the war up close, they would all become supporters of the war. The "other guys" don't fight fair, don't value human life, and, worst of all, don't understand what they're fighting against. If only the doves could see all that, they would understand the wisdom of being a hawk. The timing for the release of this film could hardly have been worse. The year 1968 was, of course, the year of the Tet offensive, which demonstrated just how much American commanders in Vietnam had been lying about the cracking resolve of the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong. The movie falls into the credibility gap and never quite gets out of it. At some level, the attempt may have been based on the good intention to remind people to support the troops, but in the execution all this film does is suggest that opposition to the war was necessarily treasonous.
True Grit (1969)
Lifetime achievement award
John Wayne won the Academy Award for his portrayal of US Marshall "Rooster" Cogburn. This is not Wayne's best work (see "The Searchers" for that), nor is this the most compelling film he was ever in, but it is a step up from most of the rest of what Wayne was involved in during the 60's (with "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" as a notable exception). It therefore gave the Academy an opportunity to reward Wayne for his body of work. The story here is quite simple -- a teenage girl named Mattie Ross (Kim Darby) sees her father murdered by a hired hand. She sets off to find the man who can bring the murderer to justice, not knowing that the man she seeks, "Rooster" Cogburn, is a sot. It develops that a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (Glen Campbell) is seeking the same man for the murder of a Texas politician. The trio sets off into the "Indian Territory" of Oklahoma in pursuit of the killer, who Cogburn believes has probably cast his lot with an outlaw he has been chasing for some time named "Lucky" Ned Pepper (Robert Duval). Through twists and turns, the outlaws are killed, justice is served and the loner Cogburn finds a true admirer in Mattie Ross. Wayne's performance is vintage Wayne, though the character is not nearly so complex, and therefore not as compelling, as Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers" or J.B. Books in "The Shootist". This movie is not Wayne's best, but it is entertaining for the composite character he plays and for the subtle recognitions that age is catching up with him. This film leads nicely into "The Cowboys" and "The Shootist" in which Wayne plays characters coming to grips with a changing way of life, and mortality. For that reason alone, "True Grit," "The Cowboys" and "The Shootist" are much better Wayne films than anything else he was in after "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and together make a fitting closing bow from the ultimate screen cowboy.
The Undefeated (1969)
Formula
Take the usual roster of John Wayne-western character actors, mix in another big box office name (Rock Hudson) and a couple of pro football players (Roman Gabriel and Merlin Olsen pre-"Little House on the Prairie"), add a rather thin plot treating the end of the Civil War (a favorite John Wayne theme -- what do the soldiers do when the war is over?), then ladle on the guns, horses, fist-fights and mayhem, and you have "The Undefeated." There were some real possibilities with the story here. There were some recently defeated Confederate officers who saw a link up with Emperor Maximillian in Mexico as a way to perhaps extend their way of life and revive "the lost cause" of the Confederacy (Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton suggests as much to Ashley Wilkes in "Gone With the Wind"). On the contrary, US government policy, to the extent there was one, opposed Maximillian, who was not trusted because of his connections to France and suspicions about the designs of the French government. You also have a former Union Army officer who doesn't trust his government to give him top dollar for a herd of horses. So there was a set up for some actual dramatic tension. But why get bogged down in dramatic tension when you can have a drunken brawl? Clearly there was no intention of letting a complicated story get in the way of the action, which was the reason most John Wayne movies were made in the 1960s. If you like western shoot-'em-ups, this movie is all right. Suspend your disbelief, sit back and enjoy (and marvel at how differently people looked at world less than 40 years ago).
The War Wagon (1967)
Action!
This is a fairly typical John Wayne action film of the 60's. The characters are all stock, except for an outstanding performance by Kirk Douglas as the outlaw, Lomax. Another difference is that there isn't a lot that's really heroic about Wayne's character here. He's not quite an anti-hero because he's convinced he was wrongly imprisoned, but here the alleged culprit (Bruce Cabot's Frank Pierce) does not seem to have the community cowed, and the townspeople don't seem to have a lot sympathy for Taw Jackson (Wayne). Taw Jackson is nowhere near as complex, nor are his motivations as clearly explained, as Wayne's greatest character, Ethan Edwards of "The Searchers" (1956), but he is clearly a man for whom there seems to be little sympathy. Complex character analysis is not the point of the film, though. The point is the Gatling gun firing and the War Wagon running amok. On that level, this is not a bad little escapist movie with a nice little twist at the end. It airs pretty regularly on TV, so I wouldn't make a special trip to the video store to rent it -- if I was going for a John Wayne film I'd be after the aforementioned "The Searchers" or "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" either of which is far superior fare to the War Wagon. But for some light entertainment that doesn't take itself too seriously (mostly thanks to Douglas), it's not a bad way to go.
Billy Madison (1995)
if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all
Oh boy, an Adam Sandler movie. If I could turn the clock back to being 13 years old, this might be funny. I can't, and it's not. Sandler is a louder and somewhat more caustic version of Jerry Lewis in the movies he made after the split with Dean Martin. Those movies weren't very good either, but they had a big following and helped make Lewis a ton of cash. Sandler has ripped off the Lewis comedic style; if he has similar investment smarts, he should be set for life and primed to take over the Labor Day Telethon when Lewis finally hangs it up. The only thing I found remotely funny in this film was when Sandler and "bus driver" John Candy were discussing "Veronica Vaughn" outside the bus when they were loading up after the field trip. The thing that made the scene funny is that, suddenly, "Billy" becomes a mature and thoughtful adult who rejects outright the claims of the bus driver concerning "Ms. Vaughn's" sex life. The scene is laughably clumsy. Like every other Sandler movie, this is mindless nonsense, and if you consider that entertaining, go for it.
Airplane! (1980)
sterling spoof
I don't want to add just another cheerleader comment about how well done this movie is. Following on the heels of all the high-budget, star-studded disaster epics of the 1970's ("Airport" and its sequels, "Earthquake," "The Towering Inferno," etc.), the time was ripe for a spoof. The cast of "Airplane!" is itself star-studded, but in an off-beat kind of way. Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack were at the time the film was made, character actors best known for TV roles, as was Leslie Nielsen (who seemed to be an almost weekly TV villain in "Hawaii 5-0," "Cannon" and the other detective shows of the 70's). Bridges, Stack and Nielsen all played the stereotypical heroic roles in disaster movies with a great flair for the melodramatic and with a perfect deadpan solemnity that made the ridiculous things they said and did all the more funny. None of the jokes here have to be explained; that helps make the movie a comedic masterpiece. Of course "Airplane!" spawned a sequel and other films attempting similar humor. Of those imitators, the "Naked Gun" films, starring Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebbin, come close to matching the layers of humor that permeate "Airplane!", but "Airplane!" is the original, still funny after all these years, all the imitations and all the attempts to quote it around the water cooler notwithstanding.
No Time for Sergeants (1958)
A good time
This movie is a lot of fun, so suspend your disbelief and enjoy a Three Stooges style comedy with a Southern accent. Andy Griffith (Will Stockdale) displays his talent playing a character that is, remarkably, even dumber than Gomer Pyle. His ignorance is, of course, a product of an extreme rural Southern upbringing. This movie struck a chord with audiences in the 50's but might be a little harder for current audiences to relate to beyond the slapstick. Young men were conscripted into military service in the 50's and many of those who made up the audience for the film lived through the experiences of suddenly mixing with young men from different backgrounds, much to the torment of the long-suffering drill instructors like the one played brilliantly in this film by Myron McCormick (Sgt. King). Private Stockdale's encounters with military life and the world beyond the family farm where he had spent his life prior to being drafted make for one genuinely funny situation after another. For Griffith, the steep learning curve of Private Stockdale is not intended as a statement that "all Southerners are stupid;" rather, it's Griffith engaging in self-deprecating humor, seeing the comedic possibilities in what amounted to cross-cultural encounters. His own background from a small town in North Carolina and his own experiences no doubt fed into his portrayal of Will Stockdale. Myron McCormick is superb in the role of Sgt. King, who cannot believe what he is seeing from Stockdale. Yet, every time he tries to use Stockdale's ignorance to his advantage, it is Sgt. King who suffers humiliation (as with the Permanent Latrine Orderly, PLO assignment, for example). As many have noted, this film also marked the first collaboration between Griffith and Don Knotts. Knotts is only involved in the film briefly, as an officious and efficient Corporal administering dexterity tests to the recruits. The role is clearly the prototype for Deputy Barney Fife; if you enjoyed Knotts as the nervous, officious Deputy Fife, you'll enjoy his attempts to get Stockdale to perform the dexterity tests properly. This movie is escapism and very enjoyable on that basis.
The Birds (1963)
Just okay
This is probably my least favorite Hitchcock film. Many of the reviewers seemed unnecessarily troubled by the lack of explanations in the plot. That ambiguity, of course, was part of the plot. Why did the birds suddenly organize and attack? We don't know. Not knowing why the threat exists is part of the terror. We take for granted that birds are just a non-threatening part of the scenery in our lives. What, says Hitchcock, would happen if birds, especially birds not particularly known as hunters like gulls and crows and ordinary starlings, suddenly and inexplicably appeared to start to prey on human beings. The birds are eco-terrorists, if you will. Clearly humanity has done something to ruffle the birds' tail-feathers. Caging them, as with the lovebirds, is perhaps the cause. Perhaps the cause is pesticide use or pollution. Whatever the cause, the birds are mad as hell and not going to take it any more. What that idea amounts to is a pretty good story line for for an installment of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, but not quite enough meat for a feature film. Add to that some mediocre acting by Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren in the lead roles (there was no chemistry between them whatsoever) and you have the recipe for a disappointing effort from Hitchcock. While I will admit that this movie scared the bejesus out of me when I first saw it on TV at age 8, it's really not all that frightening. It is ironic that in a film where birds are portrayed as apparently up in arms over their mistreatment by humans, in at least some scenes, Hitchcok had stage hands physically throwing live birds at Tippi Hedren to enhance the bird attack sequences. Overall, though, the bird attacks come off as pretty hokey. The general chaos scenes are pretty good, but the close ups are so obviously mechanical birds as to be laughable. I absolutely hate the sequence of shots where Hedren tracks the flow of the gas from the gas station to the man lighting his cigar -- the facial reactions are just a little too much, especially since all she's doing is watching the flow. This film is okay as a light diversion, but if you seek out the Hitchcock Hour on DVD, you will find many episodes that are more worthwhile than this mediocre movie.
12 Angry Men (1957)
Riveting
This is a fine film with a terrific cast. Its Spartan set serves to draw the viewer into the intensity that churns throughout the deliberations of the twelve men constitute the jury in a criminal case. It is hard to imagine a simpler story line: the twelve person jury has retired to deliberate the fate of a young man charged with murdering his father. One of the number (Henry Fonda) votes "not guilty" in the first vote. The other 11 jurors, more or less convinced that they are discussing an "open and shut" case, immediately set out to prove him wrong. Instead, one expresses doubts about the evidence and proceeds to convince the other jurors, one by one, of the flaws in the evidence and the existence of a reasonable doubt as to the guilt. Nearly all of the action takes place in the jury room, or in the restroom adjacent to it. There is no recreation of the crime other than those portions of the evidence "acted out" by the jurors in the course of their deliberations. This film does not emphasize the police work, or the work of the lawyers in the trial, or of investigators, or forensic evidence. Instead, the viewer is drawn into the drama of twelve jurors trying to decide what is the right thing to do in the case. Each in turn reveals a bias or flaw in his logic that has caused him to view the evidence in a particular way. In the end, each is confronted to identify his blind spot and acknowledge that it is that blind spot that caused him to think the defendant guilty rather than a careful examination of the evidence. One just wants to get to the Yankees game, one believes if an immigrant is charged with a crime he has to be guilty, and so forth. There are two dramatic moments that stand out above the rest. The first is the speech by Ed Begley in which he reveals that his determination of guilt is based on nothing other than blind prejudice. During his speech, the jurors leave the table and turn their backs on Begley, who in the end acknowledges his bias. The second is when the final holdout juror, Lee J. Cobb, comes to grips with the fact that he hopes to punish the defendant as a means of vicariously punishing his own son, who has apparently rejected Cobb. Of course each of those instances are high melodrama -- would that racial or ethnic prejudice was as easily identified and eliminated as it was in the film -- but each is played out with sufficient intensity as not to seem hokey or contrived. The film does show its age in a couple of respects -- there are no women on this jury, and no people of color -- an all white male jury in late 1950's New York is pretty unlikely. Nonetheless, this is a superb film with tremendous performances by the ensemble cast. On another level, "Twelve Angry Men" betrays a kind of pre-Vietnam, pre-JFK assassination innocence about the ability of American ideals to triumph over all sorts of biases if only people are made to confront those biases. That idea is of course harder to sustain post-Vietnam, post-JFK murder, post-Watergate, but it is worthy of noting that not too long ago, it was still believed that such a triumph of ideals was possible. In the polarized nation we live in now, where the more obvious people's biases become, the more tenaciously they cling to them, the underlying message of "Twelve Angry Men" just might be one we need to hear.
Happy Gilmore (1996)
Yawn
Another predictable piece of fluff from Adam Sandler. As long as there are 15 year-old boys, Sandler will have an audience for his movies. Yell a lot, make jokes about bodily functions, toss in a bit of mindless class envy and a "girl" (never a strong woman) for Sandler's character to sweep off her feet, and you have the basic formula for everything the guy has been in since he left Saturday Night Live. I'm not blaming him or the people that line up to pay good money to watch this stuff -- he makes lots of cash and the people lining up get mindless entertainment. For the most part his attempts at humor are as harmless as they are limited, and a little mindless fun never hurt anybody.Sandler is a one-trick pony, though, and if he doesn't learn some new tricks pretty soon, he'll become the Jerry Lewis of his generation -- a guy who exhausted his one-trick repertoire early on and spent the rest of his career as a caricature of himself. Jim Carrey seems to understand that phenomenon and while he's no Henry Fonda, he has at least expanded from the ham-handed humor that marked his early films into a few roles of some depth. Maybe Sandler doesn't care to expand --he certainly has no obligation to do anything differently and he's making money hand over fist, so it's a fair question to ask why he would want to change. Makes no difference to me, but it might to him when the notion of what's funny changes (as it will) and he hasn't adapted. Then we can all look forward to the Adam Sandler Labor Day Telethon.
JFK (1991)
Astonishing
No, not the film. What is astonishing is the number of people who have the garbled notion that this film somehow presented a "true" account of the Kennedy Assassination. Stone takes a little from many of the hodge-podge of conspiracy theories out there and smashes them together into a tedious glop of nothing that an unbelievable number of people who have reviewed this movie to date take to be accurate. Stone's work does a disservice to those people who have spent years earnestly trying to piece together the events of Dallas. Diligent investigators of alternatives to the explanation embodied in the Warren Report have long ago discarded much of the Garrison "evidence." Like Garrison, Stone casts a pall over all of the "conspiracy theories" with his plodding melange of discredited evidence and bogus witnesses. Like Garrison, Stone wants the glory of being THE GUY who solved the mystery. The problem is, his haphazard lashing together of the plausible alternative explanations of the killing with pieces of discredited nonsense only makes it easier for the Gerald Posner's of the world to discredit any and all alternative explanations. Stone (and Garrison) made links that careful alternative researchers have never made. In real life, Jim Garrison knew that his primary witness was perjuring himself regarding the "sinister" aspects of Clay Shaw's movements and alleged connections to Oswald, but Garrison went ahead with the evidence anyway. Stone only compounds the error. But from reading the reviews, it's obvious that as long as Stone plays into the mythology that JFK was a "liberal hero" who would never have made the errors LBJ did with regard to Viet Nam, Stone just has to be telling the truth -- regardless of what the historical records and JFK's own White House tapes reveal. It's equally obvious that for people who find ANY conspiracy theory easier to swallow than the "lone nut" theory, Stone is preaching to the choir. Trouble is, for serious researchers, he set the cause of alternative explanations of the assassination back to about 1968, because now those sincere researchers have to undo all the false connections to discredited theories that Stone made in this film. Posner and his ilk leaped at the chance to reconnect all the looniness of Garrison that careful alternative researchers had put to bed years ago. Even now, serious researchers still struggle with the misconceptions and misrepresentations that Garrison and Stone cobbled together in each man's quest for personal glory.
As a film, JFK does have a few worthwhile elements. Some of the performances are quite good, as to be expected from the stellar cast that Stone assembled. And on many levels, the film excited historical inquiry, which is an inquiry that is seldom a bad thing for any culture. It is ironic, though, that so many who would fault the Warren Commission (only a small fraction of whom have ever attempted to read even the summary sections for themselves) will grasp at straws every bit as ludicrous as the "single bullet" theory simply because those theories fit a preconceived notion that everything done in government is conspiratorial. Even so, portraying Garrison as some heroic crusader would be laughable if he hadn't spent so much of his life ruining the lives of people -- not just in the Clay Shaw matter, but throughout his career as a DA in New Orleans. Stone did not set out to make a documentary, of course, he set out to entertain and to provoke. Unfortunately, it becomes clear in reading the reviews here that there are many, many people incapable of making that distinction.