Tag: movie review

The High and the Mighty (1954) – Not a Movie Review

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So, this can’t be a real movie review.  I really haven’t seen the whole movie so it would be false advertising to claim I was a fair reviewer.  But even viewing the part of the movie I watched I felt moved to talk about this “gem.”

There’s something about movies about airliners in danger that seems to liberate the cast and producers from trying to produce a good film.  Whether it’s Dean Martin in “Airport” in the 1970s or Bill Shatner in “Terror at 20,000 Feet” on the Twilight Zone, these airline flights always seem to degenerate into a race to the bottom between the awful plot and the staggeringly bad dialog and wooden acting.

Well, I’m proud to add “The High and Mighty” to this Olympus of aero-schlock.  And it has some amazing features.  Heading up the cast is John Wayne as Dan Roman the first officer on a commercial airliner flying from Honolulu to San Francisco.  The captain is John Sullivan played laconically by Robert Stack whom I only remember as Elliot Ness on tv’s “The Untouchables.”  The only other familiar names in the cast are Robert Newton and Claire Trevor as random passengers and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer in a very minor part as a Coast Guard junior officer.  But it really doesn’t matter whether the actors are well-known or unknowns because no actual acting is committed anywhere in the movie that I witnessed.

There is plot and it involves various passengers describing their mental problems or trying to shoot each other over a supposed marital affair but the main event is one of the engines exploding and the plane losing enough fuel to make a forced landing in the Pacific Ocean the aviation peril that every good disaster movie needs.  And so, for about three quarters of the movie the flight engineer, the first officer and the captain bicker about whether they should drop the plane in the ocean or try to make it to San Francisco.  Eventually after the flight engineer realizes that he has been mixing up knots with miles per hour, he delivers the bad news; they will run out of fuel, eleven minutes short of the airport and Robert Stack makes the executive decision that they will ditch.  But John Wayne keeps stalling him because he’s hoping that a tail wind will appear and save them the extra fuel.  But a half hour before the end of the 147-minute movie Stack shouts that he’s going to ditch the plane.  At which point John Wayne slaps him across the face and calls him a pansy (or something) and takes over the controls.  And a few minutes later Stack thanks Wayne for straightening him out and at long last the plane lands without any loss of life or cinematic interest.  When measured by the ground crew there is only thirty gallons of fuel left.

So, do I recommend this movie?  Absolutely.  It’s amazingly bad and without redeeming qualities.  Except one.  John Wayne gets to play John Wayne without any pretense to art.  It’s the Duke slapping around wimps and generating jet fuel out of thin air.  For any real fan of John Wayne that’s enough for an amusing visit.

Spidey Gets It Done, Mission Accomplished

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I went with my three youngest grandsons to see the new Spiderman movie; “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”  And shockingly, I actually enjoyed it.  We got there early enough to pick out good seats and let the kids buy mass quantities of popcorn and sugary drinks.  So reinforced by these provisions we took our seats and watched the half hour of advertisements and coming attractions for all kinds of useless products and awful movies.  Now it’s been a few years since we went to this theater and in the meantime, it went out of business and been refurbished by its new owners.  And they installed luxury pleather powered recliners instead of the usual crappy movie seats of yesteryear.  So far, so good!

So, I missed the previous Spiderman installment but I was told that in it another MCU character (Doctor Strange) performed some kind of magic-adjacent activity which eliminated knowledge of Peter Parker’s existence completely from the human race including all his friends and the girl (MJ) that he loves.  Now this seems particularly stupid but that is the situation.  So, one of the plots of this movie is Parker getting up the courage to tell MJ that she has forgotten that they were once in love.  Okay, that’s an even stupider plot element but let’s give the writers some slack to try and make that work.  Then there’s a plot element where Peter is having major problems with his spider powers.  His ability to shoot webs and other skills seems to come and go.  Okay, this is more of a standard superhero plot element so full speed ahead.

And finally, some telepath is able to take control of human minds and force them to attack a shadowy government agency called the Department of Damage Control (DODC) for some unknown reason.  I won’t give away any spoilers by saying that DODC isn’t a benign organization and the telepath controlling minds isn’t completely unjustified in these actions.

Well, before the end we have a whole sequence where Bruce Banner is telepathically controlled and forced to turn into the Hulk with predictable cataclysmic results and we find out that Spiderman has a quasi-working relationship with the comic book character “The Punisher” an Italian American New Yorker whose real name is Frank Castle.  Castle is a vigilante who doesn’t have as many scruples as Spiderman when it comes to using firearms to thwart criminals.  As an Italian American native New Yorker myself, I especially relished Castle’s extremely accurate Bensonhurst accent and vocabulary.  It felt like coming home.

Well, anyway, the plot moves along in a reasonably superhero-ish manner and naturally our hero comes out the other side with some progress in his personal problems but no permanent solutions so he can be just as conflicted in the next Spiderman movie sometime in 2028.  And that is all that can ever be said for a Spiderman movie.  Also, the special effects were especially deft and fun to watch.  So, the movie was quite entertaining and the boys enjoyed it thoroughly.  Or maybe it was the snacks.

Anyway, mission accomplished.  We returned home and Camera Girl loaded down a table with spaghetti and meatballs along with some biscuits that these grandsons especially love to dunk in a meat sauce.  What more could I ask for?

The Bank Job (2008) – A Movie Review

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“The Bank Job” is a 2008 British heist film that allegedly reveals the true circumstances behind an actual British bank robbery that happened in 1971 in London.  Whether it is mostly accurate about MI5’s involvement in the motive for the robbery is up for speculation.

It stars Jason Statham as Terry Leather the ringleader of the heist and he is likely to be the only actor whom an American viewer is at all likely to recognize.  Although I read somewhere that Mick Jagger had a tiny uncredited part.  But I never saw him on screen.

The plot has MI5 trying to figure out how to steal naked photos of royal family member Princess Margaret from the bank safety deposit box of a black nationalist revolutionary named Michael X who is using them as leverage to keep the British government from arresting and prosecuting him on various illegal activities.

The spies arrest a girl named Martine Love on drug charges and get her to agree to persuade her friend Terry Leather to use his contacts to rob the safe deposit boxes while the alarm system is conveniently down for repairs.  Terry agrees to run the job because his auto sales business is failing miserably and because the set-up seems simple and fool-proof.  He gathers his crew which include friends with various skills (most notably a fellow adept at using a “thermal lance” to cut through reinforced concrete.  The plan is to rent a store forty feet from the bank and over the weekend tunnel under the vault and cut their way through the floor.

But in many respects, the amateurish skills of the team cause the robbery to go off track.  A ham radio operator overhears their lookout man on the roof talking to the team on a walkie-talkie about the robbery in very explicit terms and he calls the police in.  A search across London is initiated to find which bank is being robbed and the gang has to bail before they can finish emptying all the boxes.  And worse, underworld figures who also used the safety deposit boxes to store records that can incriminate them, their powerful clients and crooked cops, begin the task of tracking down the robbers.  And they succeed.  One of the robbers is caught, tortured, forced to turn in his partners and then murdered.  Three others are found and two murdered.  One is held to blackmail Terry into handing over the records.

But when Terry finds out about the photos of Princess Margaret, he comes up with a plan to exchange the photos for immunity and new identities to allow them to escape the police and the underworld killers and keep the heist money.  Royal family member Lord Mountbatten acts as the intermediary between Terry and MI5 and trades the photos for the immunity.  And using the records that the underworld figures want back, Terry is able to use the police to rescue his associate and arrest the men who are hunting his crew.

Okay, so we really don’t know how much of all this is true.  But the important question is whether it makes a good movie.  I’ll say yes.  Jason Statham is a reliably entertaining actor and he provides the likeable character needed to give the audience someone to root for.  He’s got the working class persona with the wife and kids at home providing the pathos that the other characters don’t possess and he does get to beat up some bad guys which is his forte.  Regardless of whether the story is completely accurate the movie is entertaining and if you like heist movies I think you’ll enjoy it.

The Gentlemen (2019) – A Movie Review

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“The Gentlemen” is an English crime drama/comedy directed by Guy Ritchie with a cast of thousands that includes three actors that Americans would recognize; Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Pearson a drug kingpin, Colin Farrell as “The Coach” and Hugh Grant as Fletcher.

This movie has a plot that is as convoluted as one of those mazes they put on the back of kid’s menus at a fast-food restaurant.  I won’t even attempt to provide a complete summary of the story line.  Suffice it to say that the action revolves around Fletcher attempting to blackmail Mickey over a series of catastrophic setbacks in an upcoming sale of Mickey’s enormous drug operation to one of his rivals.  The deal sets in motion a Rube Goldbergian chain reaction of thefts, murders, accidental deaths and just plain criminal idiocy that easily fills out the movie’s 113-minute run time.

If I wanted to compare it to a more well-known American film in the same genre I’d point to Pulp Fiction.  I think the most entertaining aspect of the movie is Colin Farrell’s performance as “The Coach.”  He’s a working-class Brit who trains street kids to be boxers.  His dialect is close to impenetrable to American ears but he is genuinely a hoot during the relatively short amount of screen time he gets.

Alright, so is this movie any good?  Yeah, it’s pretty good.  It’s not great but it’s entertaining.  It has a little bit of trouble trying to decide if it’s a crime film or a comedy so it ends up somewhere in the middle.  And like Pulp Fiction, the whole thing is way over the top.  It’s probably a little overly complicated and the ending is somewhat bizarre but I would give it a solid B rating.  But I will say that British movies are a little bit of an acquired taste for some Americans.  So, your milage may vary.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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“It! The Terror from Beyond Space” (ITTFBS) is one of those marvelous science fiction movies that are so awful that they can be enjoyed entirely for the camp value.  It’s really hard to overstate how cheesy the movie is.  And unless you’re a connoisseur of B movie bit players you’ve never heard of the cast.  Now, you’ll probably recognize several of them from old tv shows of the time period like “Superman” and “The Twilight Zone” but none of them were movie stars.  But they do gamely soldier on with the plot and dialog, such as they are.  But when the set is a “space ship” that looks like one room in an industrial building and the “monster” is a guy in a rubber suit you can only do so much.

I won’t warn you about spoilers because you can’t spoil this movie.  The dopiness of the “science” defies any concern over spoiling the resolution of the dilemma.  It has something to do with the monster having very large lungs from living on Mars and therefore emptying the ship of air will kill the monster faster than if he had smaller lungs!  But none of that should be held against this movie.  If you watch this movie, you embrace the dopiness.

The plot is basically that the first manned mission to Mars is attacked by a monster that kills eight out of the nine astronauts.  A rescue mission is sent to bring back the survivor who is believed to have murdered his shipmates.  Of course, the monster stows away by walking into an unlocked entrance and then begins picking off the rescue crew.  Once the crew figures out that the survivor was telling the truth about the monster, he seems to become their leader and they combine forces to kill the really hokey looking monster.  They try guns, hand grenades, “gas bombs,” electricity and even radiation from their engine.  But no soap.  Finally, when the monster breaks through the last bulkhead protecting the handful of survivors, they empty the cabin air into space and the monster dies quite dramatically.

So, what makes this movie so special that I don’t pan it.  Maybe it’s the two women in the rescue crew.  They appear to be nurses who have been sent along to treat victims of the first Mars expedition.  They spend most of their scenes holding hands with various crew members and looking soulfully into their eyes while asking them whether the monster is going to eat them all or not.  And that’s another great thing about this movie.  The monster kills its victims by removing all oxygen and water from their bodies.  But since he likes to snack all day long, he drags them around while he’s feeding on them.  Then there’s the crew’s space suits.  They look like they’re made of wool.  And finally, there’s the view of space from the ship.  In addition to stars, there are what must be meteors flying by.  They look like a few Fourth of July sparklers tied together and pulled along on a string.

So, all in all this is a terrible sci-fi movie by any standard.  But for the connoisseur of this sub-genre, it’s a treat.  ITTFBS is highly recommended schlock.

Zodiac (2007) – A Movie Review

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Zodiac is a crime thriller released in 2007.  It was directed by David Fincher and based on the book of the same name by Robert Graysmith.  It is a fairly accurate portrayal of the actual Zodiac murders in the late 1960s to early 1970s in Northern California.  At least five people were attacked by the Zodiac killer in three separate events and several other crimes were also attributed to him.  And the taunting letters that the murderer sent to the newspapers had the residents of the city and suburbs of San Francisco in a panic about the safety of their school age children on account of his threats to target a school bus.

The bulk of the movie is the story of reporters and detectives working on the case following up on the evidence and sifting through the suspects.  The cast is headed up by such notables as Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.  But even the minor parts are ably performed with special notice for John Carroll Lynch as Arthur Leigh Allen who was the primary suspect and probably has the highlight scene during his police interrogation.

The murder scenes are brutal and creepy in the extreme and the whole film has a dismal sense of foreboding about it that reinforces the sense of dread that the populace felt during the Zodiac’s reign of terror.  The investigation into the killings never succeeded in an indictment even though the circumstantial evidence was pretty convincing.  And the protracted length of the search is portrayed as having destroyed the careers of the two reporters working on the story and also negatively impacted the SFPD team that was involved.  And eventually that is the focus of the movie.

And now my recommendation.  I thought this movie was highly entertaining.  The director succeeds in maintaining a claustrophobic atmosphere around the investigators while believably showing us where the blunders and problems hampered the search for the killer.  We can see how law enforcement back in the 1970s is hampered by a lack of coordination between jurisdictions and what we would consider primitive forensic methods.

Eventually one of newspaper investigators devoted years of his life (and the destruction of his marriage) to ferreting out the neglected details that all link back to the same suspect.  But all of it was in vain when that suspect died of natural causes before he could be indicted.  But it is a fascinating and creepy real life murder mystery that I can highly recommend to folks who like this fare.

McGuffin Magic

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I’ve been reading Andy Weir’s book “Project Hail Mary” and I’ll finish it soon and put out my review (which will be quite favorable).  But while working my way through it I was impressed by how the improbability of some of the “science” in a story doesn’t spoil the enjoyment garnered by its use.  After all, the premise of the story requires that Earth send an interstellar mission twelve light years away in order to move the story forward.  So, the “MacGuffin” has to be accepted to go forward with the story.  But what’s the formula for inventing an acceptable MacGuffin?

I suppose there are several methods.  The simplest is don’t explain anything.  Figure out a way for the main character to be unaware of any of the “technical” details for the MacGuffin.  Maybe he’s a completely non-technical individual; a grade school dropout or a literal caveman.  Or the technology is owned by an alien race that we can’t interrogate.

A more common way is to build up some technology based on a breakthrough in physics and other sciences.  And because it’s fictitious the main requirements and advantages of the explanation would be that it’s self-consistent and allows some very convenient short cuts in the plot.  This is the avenue Weir goes down.  His MacGuffin is both the problem and the solution to the problem.  He has built up a scenario that creates an existential catastrophe but also provides a mechanism for solving the problem and also turning the danger into a potential boon.

And that’s what’s extremely clever about this plot he’s invented.  It mimics the idea of the double-edged sword that some new discovery can be, for example, nuclear energy.  That was something that both threatened human extinction and promised the solution to the energy crisis.

As much as the mechanism Weir invents for his MacGuffin is intensely improbable, still, once accepted as fact, the rest of the story follows logically and satisfyingly from this premise.  He has this new “fact” introduced into the world and then spins that world around on it until he gets the wild ride that ensues.

So now he has interstellar travel at a respectable fraction of the speed of light, a reasonable excuse for an intelligent alien first encounter and throws that together with a likable protagonist who is swept along against his will by this cosmic catastrophe.  What’s not to like?

But what I realize is that I’m going to have to up my game when I write my sequel.  I’ve never fleshed out the rationale behind how Connors’ mining drone is able to do what it does.  I just sort of waved my hands around and said “abracadabra!”  Weir is careful to count up the zeros when he describes the amount of energy that his “astrophage” is able to store and discharge as the basis of his star drive.  Sure, attributing a neutrino-based energy storage system to a one-celled animal living in the hard vacuum of space in the vicinity of a star is pure nonsense.  But he does acknowledge the magnitude of the nonsense.  And that does make it fun.

Solo Mio (2026) – A Movie Review

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Kevin James is best known as the star of the long-running tv comedy series “King of Queens” where he is a modern-day Ralph Kramden working as a delivery driver for a UPS type company.  In that role he was a very funny everyman with a sassy wife and with Jerry Stiller as his deranged basement dwelling father-in-law.  Suffice it to say I’ve always found Kevin James a talented comedian.

So, Camera Girl came to me awhile ago telling me that Kevin James was in a movie called Solo Mio where he was a groom left at the altar by his runaway bride.  I must confess that this didn’t sound particularly hilarious but as a date movie for the two of us as fans of the star it seemed plausible.  But we somehow never got to the theater and I soon forgot all about it.

Fast forward to today and Camera Girl was at the local library and by a coincidence they had just gotten a DVD of Solo Mio, so home it came and we made some good coffee and cut into a pie and watched it.  Well, what do you know?  We enjoyed it.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The plot is goofy.  James is an American 4th grade art teacher named Matt Taylor.  In the opening scene we see him propose to a fellow teacher named Heather in the classroom and next we find Matt at the altar of a church in Rome where he will marry Heather and celebrate a deluxe honeymoon in Italy.  But she leaves him at the altar leaving only her engagement ring and a Dear John letter.

The rest of the film is Matt trying to contact Heather by phone to beg her to reconsider.  But because he couldn’t cancel the honeymoon he is travelling around Rome and Tuscany with a group of honeymoon couples visiting romantic Italian locales as a tourist.  And it is with this group that he meets Julian and Neil, two new husbands whose brides are very much present but who are neglected while their husbands rally round Matt trying to force him to accept the loss of Heather and move forward with his life.

Their distinctly dysfunctional advice and help manage to make Matt even more miserable but with the help of some locals (including a sympathetic Italian woman named Gia who owns a small restaurant) Matt begins to make sense of his capsized life.  Eventually Matt finds a new love (of course) and all is well.

Other than James none of the main actors are well-known (at least to me) but the opera singer Andrea Bocelli has a small part as a fictional version of himself.  But this is not a star-driven film.  It is a small romantic comedy that manages to bring a smile to your face and even a few small laughs.  It isn’t too sappy so as to embarrass a man in the audience but it doesn’t hurt to have your wife or girlfriend there to justify your presence as a man at such a non-conventional film.  But I will openly admit that I definitely enjoyed the movie.  Recommended for couples and fans of Kevin James.

More Movie Talk

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So, I had some fun re-imagining “THEM!” as a 2026 sci-fi reboot.  Alright what’s next?  Well, John Carpenter beat me to the punch with “The Thing.”  That was a reboot that in many people’s minds outdid the original (“The Thing from Another World”).  But a whole bunch of classic sci-fi movies have already been redone (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders from Mars, War of the Worlds).  So maybe we don’t need another reboot.

As I said in my discussion of Weir’s “Project Hail Mary,” what we really need are new movies.  Sure, they’re mostly just variations on the million science fiction stories that are already written but even small differences can freshen up old ideas.  Instead of any more trash from the Star Wars industry why not give us some pulp?  Burroughs or Doc Smith or Howard.  Those stories were made to be put on the big screen (or the smaller one in my living room).  And I read where they’re working on bringing back Schwarzenegger as an older Conan.  That would be perfect.  A beat-up old Arnold playing a beat-up old Conan with the right writer and the right director could be the perfect swan song for him and a wonderful treat for us if they abandon all the woke crap and let Conan be the barbarian he’s meant to be.

And if we digress into fantasy, I wish they’d try again to make a movie or a series out of the Dresden Files.  Jim Butcher’s series of books are some of the most entertaining and filmable stories in urban fantasy.  Of course, I wish they’d start by doing justice to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series first.  With the combination of interesting characters, vivid monsters and high caliber weaponry they would make a very exciting series of movies.  But I suppose instead we’ll get more nonsense like “The Rings of Power.”

But of course, what’s really needed by both the larger movie audience and the film-makers’ bottom line is a cable series based on Jake Barter’s “The Sniper.”  The combination of economically but vividly drawn characters and remarkable plotting make this story the most cinematically perfect vehicle for a studio to reap the harvest of multi-billion-dollar profits.  Joseph Boghadair is an iconic figure and the many fascinating sub-plots and characters will spawn a whole series of sequels and spin-offs that will explore the multi-faceted world that the author is creating.  New technologies and industries are waiting for Paul Connors’ empire to recover from the ravages of war and reap the benefits of the new political situation that Bogey’s “war” has created.  And the political changes that will sweep across North America will change life on the whole planet as better ways for humans to cooperate and socialize and organize themselves politically emerge.

I am toying with the idea of including some short stories in this “world” I’ve built and putting those out next as a short-term addition to the saga.  That will allow me to push off in several directions at once before I commit to any one story for the next novel.  Well, that’s enough for now.

Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.