Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

Hang ‘Em High (1968) – A Movie Review

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Clint Eastwood stars as Jed Cooper, a former law man who is mistaken for a rustler and murderer by a posse and is hanged.  A U.S. Marshall comes upon him and cuts him down in time to save his life.  The Marshall brings Cooper in and his story is corroborated.  And the local judge Adam Fenton offers him a job as a Marshall with warrants for the arrest of the men who hanged him.

The rest of the movie revolves around Cooper’s attempts to bring the eleven men who hanged him to justice.  In the interim there is a love story between Cooper and Inger Stevens who plays a store owner named Rachel Warren who was also the victim of violence.  Ed Begley, Bruce Dern, Alan Hale, Jr and Dennis Hopper appear as members of the posse in supporting roles.  But this is Eastwood’s movie.

I found some parts of the story were overly drawn out and dragged.  The action scenes were good.  In addition to Eastwood, I would say Pat Hingle who played the judge was the most interesting character.  Overall, I enjoyed the movie.  But I am a western fan.

So, what’s the verdict?  As a specimen of the “new western” this is a good representative.  If you’re a western fan I think you’ll like this film.  If you’ve never seen a western it might seem stilted and slow.  I enjoyed it within the limitations I mentioned.

Dave Freer Over at Mad Genius Club Has a Good Essay on Writing

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Dave talks about what it’s like reviewing your own book for publication and feeling like the whole thing is poor.  I’m writing a book myself and I have to say I understand exactly what he’s saying.  The urge to re-write whole sections is almost overpowering.

Seeing other people pound out multiple books in a year is humbling.  I get side-tracked continuously between blogging and photography and just trying to keep my real life floating along.  Kudos to those who do all that and also create good fiction too.

A good read.

Codevilla Proposes a Plan for Avoiding a Civil War – Federalism

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Anthony Codevilla lays out how he sees restoring a way of life would have to take place in the United States.  And he clearly says that neither side is going to convince the other side to go along with it.  But he thinks the only way to avoid actual warfare is for the two sides to separate along regional or even local areas and ignore each other.  In this way the larger country can still cooperate on things like roads and armed forces without having to completely split the country in two.

It’s very long but worth reading if you enjoy an historian’s recapping of the historical precedence for re-establishing a conquered nation.  He goes into the way he thinks a national leader has to act to have this movement succeed.  And he does say that a strong leader will be necessary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time After Time (1979) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Malcolm McDowell is H.G. Wells.  He has invented a time machine and is about to use it to explore the past and future from his home in 1890, London.  But at a dinner party where he is announcing his project one of his friends John Leslie Stevenson steals it to escape from the police who have discovered that he is Jack the Ripper.  Stevenson is played by David Warner that I only know from his turn as Bob Cratchit in the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol.

After the time machine returns empty from the Ripper’s escape Wells follows him back to 1979 San Francisco.  No explanation is given as to how the time machine can also move through space but since this movie isn’t very good, we won’t quibble about unimportant gaps.

In San Francisco Wells meets up with a currency exchange bank clerk named Amy Robbins played abysmally by Mary Steenburgen and naturally they fall in love and we’re trapped into listening to their various thoughts on women’s liberation and casual sex.  It’s pretty awful.  Amy thinks her “career” at the bank is her whole life.  She left her husband because he wanted her to raise a family.  The monster.

Wells finds Stevenson and he tells Wells that 1979 is the greatest place in the world for Jack the Ripper with casual sex and easy access to women and sharp knives.  Then there is this ridiculous chase scene where the two Englishmen are running around on the streets of San Francisco.  It looks ludicrous and they’re not really running very fast.  Then supposedly Stevenson is killed in a minor car accident.  Wells takes this opportunity to see the Redwoods outside of San Francisco and talk to Amy about women’s lib again.

Then we find out that Jack the Ripper must not have been killed because women start turning up butchered.  Wells tells Amy that he’s from 1890.  She tells him he’s nuts and to prove to her that he is telling the truth he uses the time machine to bring her forward a week and she finds a newspaper that shows that Jack the Ripper has killed her the day before.

So, they go back to the week before and try to catch the Ripper and save Amy’s life.  Cars get flat tires; Wells is arrested by the police as the Ripper and it appears that Amy is murdered and hacked to pieces by the Ripper.  The police let Wells go because he couldn’t have killed Amy while he was in custody.  But, big mistake, it was Amy’s friend who was butchered and now Stevenson has her hostage and wants to trade her life for the key to the time machine.

Stevenson tricks Wells and after getting the key takes Amy with him as he heads to the time machine.  Wells takes a car and somehow figures out how to drive at night in a crowded city and follows them to the machine.  There he begs for Amy’s life but Stevenson decides to take her with him but somehow in a way that doesn’t make any sense she escapes him.  As Stevenson enters into the machine and begins setting it for the future Wells removes another key from the outside of the machine and this sends Stevenson to “infinity,” whatever that means.  Hoorah for Wells and Amy.  Now Amy decides that her bank job isn’t as important as marrying Wells back in 1890.  And they live happily ever after.

This movie is so bad that it both sucks and blows.  The special effects are laughably bad and cheap looking.  They remind me of some effects that they used on Gilligan’s Island.  The dialog is awful and the 1970s disco hedonism is embarrassing.  Mary Steenburgen is an awful actress but this part is even below her talents.  The quality of this film is at the level of a made for television movie.  McDowell and Warner are decent actors but they aren’t given anything to work with here.  It’s all too silly and badly done.

Not recommended.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) – A Movie Review

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This is a caper movie.  Four men armed with machine guns hijack a New York City subway train and hold the passengers for a million-dollar ransom.  Walter Matthau plays Lt. Garber of the NYC Transit Authority Police who negotiates with the kidnappers.  Robert Shaw is “Mr. Blue,” the criminal mastermind of the gang.  With supporting cast members Jerry Stiller as Lt. Rico Patrone, a cop working for Garber, Martin Balsam as “Mr. Green,” the man in the gang who knows how to run a subway train and Lee Wallace as the despised and cowardly Mayor of New York the movie is a taut drama with humor and suspense mixing perfectly to suspend disbelief.  And with gobs of local color from a supporting cast that acts and talks remarkably like actual New Yorkers of the period (as I can personally attest) the movie bumps along from the initial capture of the train to the first dead body to the mad dash to get the ransom money to the stone-cold killers who enforce a deadline with the lives of the hostages at gunpoint.

Matthau and Stiller provide the comic relief and Shaw provides the menace with bloodless calm.  The hostages are a tapestry of the ethnicities and callings of that time and the other parts, cops, the mayor’s cronies and the transit workers all add texture to the story.  And the swearing!  Except for Robert Shaw almost every character including the women curse a blue streak.  Some of it is actually quite amusing but it should be mentioned in case there are any folks who would take offense.  And the most important character of the whole drama is the New York City subway system of that era.  The movie was made in and on the subway trains and tunnels and it is unmistakably authentic.  It brings back the thousands of hours of my life I spent travelling around Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and The Bronx on subway cars.

Here we are almost fifty years since this movie was made and it stands up very well although only the old remember the New York City being represented.  I must confess it did my heart good to see the people of that era being represented.  The city back then probably had a higher crime rate than even now in these post George Floyd riots times.  And racial tensions were high and neighborhoods treated outsiders with suspicion.  But at least back then people still considered the police as part of the solution.  Nowadays the police are so disrespected that they probably wouldn’t even bother to save the hostages’ lives.  They’d wait until the hostages were shot and then write up the reports and look for some surveillance footage for the six o’clock news report.

I highly recommend this movie with just a warning about the swearing for the genteel.

Someone at the American Thinker is Speculating on the Arizona Audit

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Someone named Andrew Coy is wondering exactly what would happen if it turns out Donald Trump won Arizona.  He further speculates what would happen if the other swing states also do audits and it turns out Trump won those too.

He looks at the likely reaction by the Military and the Supreme Court.  Interesting speculation.  I haven’t thought about it enough myself yet.  But I put it out there in case anyone was interested.  I’ll reserve judgement for a few more weeks when the Arizona count is due to conclude.  If it does come out in favor of President Trump that will be a big deal and then things could start getting very interesting.

Max Morton’s Latest – Federalism is Key to Surviving a Divided Nation

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This guy Max Morton has so far always had something interesting to say.  He starts this essay out by saying that endlessly kvetching about the latest atrocity out of Washington is not only useless but self-defeating because instead of doing anything to stop the atrocity we just stand there pointing at it.

“It is fruitless to continue arguing the same tired Left/Right arguments. “Owning the libs” on Twitter, relentlessly calling out the hypocrisy of our political opponents, and focusing our time and attention on outrageous content may be entertaining, but it won’t save us from the oppression and serfdom of the authoritarian oligarchy that is presently transforming America.”

He gives as an example the Biden administration’s attempt to ban AR pistols.

“The conservative commentariat’s response has been loudly to point out that this will have little or no effect on the effort to quell gun violence. Really? Does anyone honestly believe the regime’s interest in banning tens of millions of legally owned firearms and potentially making millions of law-abiding Americans felons overnight is for the purpose of reducing gun violence? This has nothing to do with preventing gun violence and everything to do with disarming American citizens—a longtime, major plank of the Democratic Party and an essential step towards authoritarian rule for every dictator in modern history.”

Morton is saying that the effective action is to have the state you live in protect your rights as specified in the Constitution.  In other words let the state nullify any federal overreach into our rights but use the federal government for the functions such as defense, highways and trade that it’s supposed to be in charge of.

Now of course the devil is in the details.  Basically he’s saying the state government is going to have to step up and arbitrate the way in which it will tame the federal government.  and that needs to be specified.  So there aren’t any concrete examples beyond what we are seeing from DeSantis in Florida and to a lesser extent Abbott in Texas.  So I would say this is only a partial answer to the question Morton is asking.  But the fact that he is telling the outrage mongers to shut up and do something useful is very useful.  Basically he is saying you can stop sounding the alarm we can all see the fire burning from where we’re standing.  Now someone get a bucket brigade going and maybe we can put it out.

An interesting read.

 

 

Color Out of Space (2019) – A Science Fiction and Fantasy Movie Review

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Tyler Cook of the Portly Politico and I have decided to cross link on our reviews for this movie.  We both thought this movie was awful but we thought that readers should see nuanced differences.  Actually what you’ll see is our two styles.  Tyler is a witty and intelligent writer and I like to rant.  So here’s the link to his review and below is mine.

This is a cinematic version of Lovecraft’s story about a meteor that lands in a rural Massachusetts farmyard and infects the soil and the water with an entity that subtly alters the plants and animals and then sucks the vitality and finally the life out of every living thing around it before shooting back into space leaving a dead landscape behind.  But let us say the movie takes liberties with this plot.

How do I hate this movie?  Let me count the ways.

First off, I despised all the characters in this story.  I even despised the seven-year-old who was the youngest kid in the family.  They are stereotypical yuppie transplants to the countryside and all of them have extremely annoying personalities.  The father is Nicholas Cage and he spends his time milking alpacas and raising heirloom tomatoes.  The mother is a financial advisor who has neglected her kids to the point that older son is a useless pothead, the daughter is a bitter Wiccan wannabe and the younger son appears to be a doofus.  Tommy Chong is the forest dwelling pot grower who supplies the son with his weed and also seems to be acquainted with alien invasions.  Then there is the hydrologist who is taking water samples for a new reservoir that will be covering the property that Nick Cage’s family currently inhabits.  He walks around warning everyone about the dangers of meteorites and contaminated water but achieves nothing other than somehow surviving the apocalypse.

Next is the plot.  In the original Lovecraft story, the baleful influence of the entity slightly modifies the appearance of plants and animals but its most powerful effect is the sapping of the life force and eventually even the structural integrity of organic materials.  By the end of the book the whole farm where the meteor lands, the house, the trees, the animals and people, the wagons and the fences crumble to dust.  Only stone and metal remain.

In this version of the story the entity is able to fuse groups of animals together into hideous many-headed monsters.  It can disable all communication devices and even alter time, making days and nights shorter as needed.  So, they’ve revved up the monster’s power quite a bit.  But the use they put this to is horrendous.  In one scene the mother and the seven-year-old kid are walking in the dark near the barn when the creature zaps the both of them with its potent “light.”  Next, we see that the mother and the little boy have been fused together.  His head is attached to her shoulder, their torsos are fused and both of them are writhing in agony.  And the older son characterizes what’s happening to them as the younger son being re-absorbed into the mother’s body.  Even the thought is horrifying to consider.  And later on, the fused creature starts taking on a preying mantis like shape and Nick Cage’s character shoots both of them in the head to end this nightmare.  Okay sure, this is a horror movie and it’s no more disgusting than the scenes in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” but he didn’t use a mother and a little boy as the victims of this abomination.  To my mind this is awful.

Finally, the acting.  The only cast members I’ve heard of are Nick Cage and Tommy Chong.  I’m guessing the rest of the cast is unknown and they should stay that way.  They were awful and so were the two better known actors.  The script was awful.  The plot was tedious and the resolution seemed pointless and annoying.  I will say some of the special effects were interesting looking and well done.  But not the fused animals and people.  Those were hideous and depressing.

I would avoid this movie.  Nick Cage has descended indeed from the time when he was a pretty good actor.  He should be ashamed that he was in this crap.   Seeing this movie has ruined a perfectly good day out of my life.  Not recommended.

10JUN2021 – OCF Update

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Today is a disrupted day due to errands and visits.  But also I have to watch the Nick Cage movie of the H.P. Lovecraft story “The Color Out of Space.”  Tyler Cook of the Portly Politico and I have agreed to each watch this stinkeroo and then review it to the best of our abilities.  He has watched it and assures me it’s awful.  So today I will bite the bullet and watch it before Camera Girl gets back from weekly shopping.  I am dreading the experience already.  The things I do for my art.

Dersu Uzala (1975) – A Movie Review

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Akira Kurosawa is probably best known in the West for his films that are set in Japan’s Sengoku period like “Seven Samurai” (1954), Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985).  But one picture of his that I recently watched is set in turn of the century (19th to 20th century) tsarist Russia and is based on the memoir of a Russian explorer, Vladimir Arsenyev, concerning his travels in the Ussuri basin in the Russian Far East. Dersu Uzala was a Nanai hunter.  The Nanai are a tribal people who live in the area.  Dersu guided Arsenyev’s surveying crew from 1902 to 1907.  His knowledge of the climatic and topographic dangers of this wild area several times saved Arsenyev and his men from death.

The story very simply and directly demonstrates the friendship and respect that Arsenyev and Dersu develop and when the elderly Dersu is no longer able to survive as a hunter Arsenyev takes the old Nanai home with him to Khabarovsk.  But although Arsenyev’s wife and son adopt the strange tribesman as family, we see the stifling restrictions of the town wither the old man’s spirit and he declares that he must go back to the forest.  His death and the cause of it completes this story about simplicity and modernity colliding and the humanity that exists on both sides of that intersection.

One of the interesting things about Dersu’s world view is his animism.  He sees “people” in almost everything; the sun, the moon, water, fire, the wind, the forest.  And he feels that the forest spirit watches him and punishes actions that are forbidden such as his killing of a Siberian tiger that threatened the expedition at one point.  And we see his empathy for his fellow man in the practices that he follows.  For instance, Dersu leaves salt, matches and firewood at the shelters that he leaves in the woods for the next stranger who will come along.

The movie was filmed in the Russian Far East.  The Arctic ice flows and limitless taiga forest is an impressive if forbidding back drop for the story.  Mainly it is a story of men on an adventure in the wild.  Although the film is in Russian with subtitles, it’s a pretty good story.  I recommend it.