Tag: movie review

My Thoughts on the New Movie, “Civil War”

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I have not gone to see the new movie “Civil War.”  And unless something comes out to convince me otherwise, I won’t be.  I watched a bunch of video reviews by people who went to the early IMAX screening.  And based on these reviews I understood that the director wanted the audiences to feel that the movie is drawing no comparison between the existing political sides in the United States and the fictional factions that are at war in the movie.

The director wants the audience to think that the movie is about the unstoppable desire of the four journalists to document the war and also about the horrors that would break out in the event of an American Civil War.  So that doesn’t sound like a partisan set-up waiting to mug unsuspecting conservatives after they plunk down their hard-earned movie money.  But the more I thought about the details of the movie the less convinced I was that this was an even-handed film.

I think the first “tell” I found was the fact that in the movie the dictatorial three term president had disbanded the FBI.  Now everyone knows that the FBI is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Obama/Clinton/Biden crime cartel.  And that Donald Trump has called for the FBI to be purged and possibly closed down.  To me this is the clearest sign that the rogue authoritarian president is meant to be Trump.

The second sign that the civil war is being presented as a battle between the Left and the Right is the scene where a “white” militiaman is pointedly asking the non-white journalist what kind of an American he is.  The implication is that at least one of the seceding entities is made up of white nationalists murdering non-whites.

But for me the thing that makes it most likely that I won’t enjoy this movie is the choice of protagonists.  The heroes of this drama are intrepid journalists.  These pillars of democracy are there to present the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them CNN.  After all, when might we have seen journalists reporting from a war zone with less than the complete truth?  Hmmm.  Oh, I remember, the fiery, but mostly peaceful George Floyd riots when half of America’s cities were looted and burned.  Yeah, that was it!  Why wouldn’t I buy into a movie where these paragons of objectivity were the heroes?

Based on the reviews and the statements made by the cast and director they are putting this forward as a completely neutral film.  Well, of course they are.  Alienating the half of the country that enjoys action movies is a recipe for box office failure for a movie like this.  But I’m extremely tired of paying for movies that portray me as what’s wrong with this country.  I’ll let someone else pay for that.

And it’s a shame I won’t be going.  From what I’ve read and seen, the war sequences are pretty exciting.  And they do blow up Washington DC pretty convincingly, which sounds like fun.  Maybe I’ll wait until it’s streaming for free or I can rent it from the public library.  Oh, and one last thing.  The guy who plays the evil president doesn’t look like him but he sounds exactly like Mike Pence.  I’m okay if the Western Alliance takes old Mike away for high crimes and misdemeanors.  That I’d be okay with.

What is This Quintessence of Dust

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Back when all I knew of Mel Gibson was Mad Max, the Road Warrior, if you had told me that he would play Hamlet I would have laughed and said, “Sure, and Sylvester Stallone will be playing King Lear and Macbeth too!”

But who knew?  Gibson is good.

I like this speech because it seems to cover the fact that depending on the events of the day each of us can view the world and all in it as either a lovely frame or a sterile promontory.  Humanity can be either like an angel or the quintessence of dust.

Gibson is a good actor and I don’t think he loses by comparison to Olivier or Branagh when performing Hamlet.

Helen of Troy (1956) – A Movie Review

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No spoiler alert needed.  It’s just that bad.

I’ve read chunks of the Iliad in Homeric Greek.  Unlike some of my professors who preferred it to the Odyssey I’m more partial to that more human scale sequel.  But I profess that there are scenes in the War Poem that are evocative and stirring.

I watched a 1950’s sword and sandal “epic” called “Helen of Troy.”  They somehow roped in Sir Cedric Hardwicke to play Priam in this spectacle.  I guess his salary ate up most of the salary budget because not another name of an actor or actress was recognizable to me except a very young Brigitte Bardot who played “the slave girl Andraste” mostly with her clothes on.

The movie had a budget of $6 million and in 1956 that was a lotta dough.  And you can see where they spent it.  There was a cast of extras that must have numbered in the thousands for the battle scenes and the elaborate props like siege towers and war engines not to mention the walls of Troy and the giant horse must have cost a bunch to make and then burn which of course they did in the last scene.

And it made about $3 million at the box office so it lost a lotta dough.  And I can see why.  The acting is shockingly wooden.  The script is laughably bad and the fight scenes look as if the combatants had never seen a sword or a spear used, even in movies.  My favorite fight is the duel between Achilles and Hector.  Instead of hurling their spears at each other they use the butt ends as cudgels and only after pounding away at each other for a while does Achilles skewer Hector as if he were a pork roast.

Mercifully the gods are completely omitted from this remarkable cinematic monument.  That surely would have been too much.  But humans suffered enough here.  Some of the Trojans are portrayed sympathetically.  Unfortunately, none of the Greeks were.  Achilles, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax and Patroclus are all presented as swine of one variety or another.

The action of the war is compressed from ten years to something like a weekend.  Hector and Achilles are finished off within five minutes of each other and before you know it the wooden horse is unloading its deadly cargo of Hellenic hoplites.  As the final credits are rolling Helen is on the trireme headed back to Sparta and she muses how even though Paris was just brutally murdered by her once and future husband Menelaus and his henchmen in the preceding scene and died the beautiful death, in a sense he would always be there with her.  Or something.

You know I like bad old genre movies.  If I’m in the mood I can watch Demetrius and the Gladiators or Quo Vadis.  They’re full of bad acting and historical inaccuracies but somehow, they manage to allow me not to suspend disbelief but rather, to revel in the conceit that I and the moviemaker both get to wink at each other and still enjoy a fake Age of Caesar or Bronze Age Greece that he’s conjured up.  But this thing is not that.  It’s too completely pointless and the characters are too unlikeable.  Pass!

24 GOP Governors Message Solidarity With Abbott in Texas

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24 GOP Governors Message Solidarity with Abbott in Texas

So, I was watching the Big Lebowski tonight.  That movie has an odd effect on me.  It’s a comic tour de force.  It piles absurdity on absurdity with nothing but bizarre characters as far as the eye can see.  And I find most of the humor highly entertaining.  But it always sort of depresses me too.  I guess it’s because even in their comedies the Coen Brothers are always laughing at us.  And it’s not a friendly laugh.  They’re dramatizing the meaninglessness of human existence.  Well, at least that’s how it affects me.

Then I read this.

The full list is:

Governor Kay Ivey (AL), Governor Mike Dunleavy (AK), Governor Sarah Sanders (AR), Governor Ron DeSantis (FL), Governor Brian Kemp (GA), Gov. Kim Reynolds (IA), Governor Brad Little (ID), Governor Eric Holcomb (IN), Governor Jeff Landry (LA), Governor Tate Reeves (MS), Governor Mike Parson (MO), Governor Greg Gianforte (MT), Governor Jim Pillen (NE), Governor Joe Lombardo (NV), Governor Chris Sununu (NH), Governor Doug Burgum (ND), Governor Mike DeWine (OH), Governor Kevin Stitt (OK), Governor Henry McMaster (SC), Governor Kristi Noem (SD), Governor Bill Lee (TN), Governor Spencer Cox (UT), Governor Glenn Youngkin (VA), Governor Jim Justice (WV), and Governor Mark Gordon (WY).  The only abstainers were Republican governors in Vermont and Nevada.  But those aren’t conservative states so there’s no surprise here.

So, this is a mildly encouraging sign.  Maybe the Republicans are starting to realize they have an enormous amount of leverage because of the panic about getting money for Ukraine.  They should demand that Biden deport ten million illegal aliens before he gets a penny.  But what are the odds of the House holding out for that?  Probably pretty slim.

But I do see some good coming of the Republican governors finding common ground.  And of course, I fantasize that they’ll go beyond a letter of support.  What they should do is coordinate a plan to not only close the border but to eject the illegals whenever they show up in the red states.  This is another case of federal law that is being ignored by the federal government.  They could announce to the country that they are going to arrest all illegals and give them a chance to hand themselves over and instead get free airfare back to their homes.

This is the basis of what I was calling the Red State Council.  The red states coordinating to circumvent the sabotage of the federal government and protect each other by enforcing the Constitution within their own borders.  So there’s the tie-in to the Big Lebowski.  It’s filled with nihilism, both explicit and implied.  And that is what the federal government stands for and enforces.  But luckily for us we don’t have to have a Coen Brothers moral to our story.  It is possible to end up with a happily ever afterward story line.  All we need is a bunch of red state governors who decide that twenty five states is enough to stand their ground and refuse to be stampeded on by Biden and his minions.  Well, I guess I should get around to doing a review of the movie.  After all, the dude abides.

British Perspective on the Movie “The Holly and the Ivy”

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The Holly and the Ivy is one of my favorite Christmas movies.  But it is an intensely English movie and so I thought it would be interesting to hear what a British movie critic would have to say about it.

Whether it is interesting or not I’ll leave to the individual viewer but I enjoyed it.  However I was already a fan of the movie and didn’t require any convincing.

The Fountainhead (1949) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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The Fountainhead is a novel by Ayn Rand about an architect named Howard Roark who embodies Rand’s ideal of the individualist.  It was made into a movie with Rand providing the screen play.

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

Gary Cooper is Howard Roark, a young man who wants to build buildings where the form corresponds to the function of the building and the materials it is made from.  But the architectural profession demands that only the established patterns, like classical columns and facades be used.  Unwilling to compromise on these points he is scorned by his profession and denied any commissions by the corporate establishment and is forced to get work wherever he can find; a gas station here, a factory there.  But slowly he gains a reputation as an innovator who can build modern buildings that are structurally sound and gracefully beautiful.

During these years he meets friends and enemies that help or hinder his career and he meets his soul mate; Dominique Francon (played by Patricia Neal) who is the daughter of a prominent architect and is the first to recognize Roark’s great talent and integrity.  But because she sees that the world will try to destroy him, she leaves him to spare herself the agony of watching it happen.  He meets Gail Wynand (played by Raymond Massey) the owner of the New York Banner, a tabloid newspaper that profits from yellow journalism.  He is also Dominique Francon’s new husband.  Wynand recognizes Roark’s talent and hires him to build a mansion for him in the country where he will live with his wife.  Neither Dominique nor Roark keep their former relationship from Wynand and in fact Roark and Wynand become close friends.

Working for Wynand at the Banner is Ellsworth M. Toohey, the newspaper’s architectural critic (if you can imagine such a thing).  He is also Ayn Rand’s mouthpiece for the collectivist ideology.  He believes that individualists like Roark are criminals for defying the will of the majority and should be treated as such.

Eventually we reach a crisis when Roark agrees to design a low-income housing project on the condition that his design would be adhered to completely.  When the powers that be betray him and change his designs, he dynamites the buildings before they are completed and is put on trial.  Wynand attempts to defend Roark in the Banner but Toohey organizes a boycott of the paper and Wynand is defeated and must recant his defense of Roark.

In the climax of the picture Roark gives a summation speech to the jury defending every man’s right to the fruits of his labor, in his case the design of his buildings and the agreement that they would not be altered.  And of course, he is found not guilty.  Wynand sells the Banner and uses the funds to commission Roark to build the tallest building in the world and then shoots himself.  The movie ends with Dominique Roark taking a construction elevator to the top of the million story Wynand Building tower with Howard Roark standing there with his hands on his hips while the wind whips his shirt.

O good grief.  Where to start?  Ayn Rand was a novelist and social critic who proposed a theory of human values that she called “objectivism.”  It seems to be a justification for a libertarian view of human interaction.  It espouses individualism and the right of everyone to live life according to the individual’s free will without constraint as long as no one else’s existence is constrained by this behavior.  For Rand, the antithesis of objectivism and the epitome of evil is communism.  Since Rand had grown up under the Soviet regime, she knew something about how communism worked.  She was also a novelist and her books reflected her philosophy.  And Howard Roark was one of the exemplars of her philosophy.  And the book is a very interesting read in some respects.  But subtlety was not one of her attributes.  There are no shades of gray.  Howard Roark and Dominque Francon are demigods of individualist virtue and Ellsworth M. Toohey is a communist slug dripping slime wherever he goes.  But even this would be a starting point for a movie.  What is missing though is anything like actual human behavior.  The characters are there more or less only to mouth talking points and diatribes for their particular points of view.  Even the romantic entanglements are presented as examples of how these mythical objectivist supermen and women would behave.  At no point can you find yourself suspending disbelief and becoming immersed in the characters.  It’s more like one of those public service film documentaries from the fifties where you are told about how the air raid shelter will allow us to survive World War III and get on with our lives in the glorious future that awaits us.  I enjoy watching the movie as a lark.  But except as a philosophical treatise on Ayn Rand and objectivism I don’t think it can be recommended for entertainment value.

Cure (1997) – A Movie Review

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“Cure” is a Japanese psychological horror film written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, starring Kōji Yakusho as a Tokyo Metropolitan Police detective named Kenichi Takabe investigating a string of murders by different killers that are only linked by the throats of all the victims being slashed with an X shaped incision.

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

Takabe and his partner the forensic psychologist Sakuma suspect that a powerful hypnotist is implanting the idea of the murders into each of the killers.  They track down a strange man named Mamiya that was present at several of the murder scenes.  He behaves as if he has no memory of his own identity or his history.  Sakuma has Mamiya committed to a hospital for observation.  Mamiya uses his hypnotic powers to learn the details of Takabe’s family problem from a hospital employee.  Takabe’s wife is seriously mentally ill and the stress of living with her is undermining his own mental balance.  Mamiya uses this information to torment Takabe during an interrogation.  Takabe begins imagining his wife committing suicide.  He has her placed in a psychiatric institution to safeguard her.

Next, we see Mamiya implant a murder suggestion in a young female doctor and shortly afterward she murders a man.  Afterward Mamiya even causes Sakuma to commit suicide.  Finally, Mamiya escapes from the hospital and Takabe who is now enraged against his tormentor tracks him down to an abandoned hospital and after being taunted by Mamiya shoots him.  When Mamiya’s last motion is to attempt to implant the murder suggestion in Takabe the policeman empties his pistol into the madman.

After killing Mamiya Takabe finds an old phonograph player in the hospital and listens to a recording that seems to be the source of Mamiya’s knowledge of the deadly hypnotic technique.  In the next scene we see the corpse of Takabe’s wife at the mental hospital with an X cut into her throat.  In the last scene we see Takabe in a restaurant finishing a meal.  As the waitress leaves his table, we see her walk over to a counter and grab a butcher’s knife.

This is a very strange movie.  And of course, since it’s spoken in Japanese that adds another layer of distance for the non-Japanese speaking viewer.  But the movie is quite compelling.  The Mamiya character is extremely unnerving.  Whenever someone attempts to interrogate him about his actions or even his history it always ends up with him turning the interrogation around.  The movie viewer develops a strong revulsion for the character.  He manipulates the interrogators and eventually implants his suggestion.  Because of this antipathy I felt a great sense of satisfaction when Takabe emptied his pistol into the homicidal hypnotist.

I’m not sure how to provide the recommendation for this movie.  My impression of this movie was definitely positive.  I did enjoy it.  But it’s such a strange movie that I’m having a hard time selecting what audience this movie is made for.  I guess we’ll have to start with audiences that enjoy crime dramas.  A somewhat similar type of movie might be “Silence of the Lambs.”  But added to that is the foreign language aspect which might be problematic for many viewers.  I guess I can only qualify this film’s audience with these two factors.  That will have to be my recommendation, as vague as it is.

Gilda – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Currently the cable channels available to me contain two kinds of movies I might watch.  There are Halloween movies (horror and slasher movies) and classics (mostly movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s with a smattering of later movies that supposedly have “timeless” qualities).

So tonight, my choice was between John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982) and the 1946 film noir “Gilda.”  In deference to Camera Girl’s presence (she wanted something quiet in the background) I put on the older movie.

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

The plot of Gilda is slightly goofy.  The motives of the three main characters are hard to reconcile with their actions.  Glenn Ford plays Johnny Farrell, an American down on his luck in Buenos Aires for some unknown reason.  We meet him he has just won a sum of money in a craps game from some American soldiers.  As he walks away, he is accosted by a robber armed with a pistol.  He is rescued by Ballin Mundson who happens by with a walking stick that has a retractable 18-inch blade hidden inside.  We find out that Ballin owns an illegal gambling casino.  And after a very short time Johnny inexplicably becomes Ballen’s indispensable operations manager.

When Ballen returns from a business trip he introduces Johnny to his new American bride Gilda played by the absurdly beautiful Rita Hayworth.  But of course, Ballen doesn’t know that Johnny and Gilda were married and divorced sometime before the start of the movie timeline.  And they vehemently hate each other.  But neither of them reveals to Ballen this common history.  And because Gilda resents Ballen’s trust in and friendship with Johnny she attempts to torture Johnny by forcing him to cover up for a string of flirtations that she initiates with every man who catches her eye at the casino.  The logic of this isn’t really well explained.  But Johnny apparently feels its his responsibility to keep Gilda from upsetting Ballen.

During this part of the movie, we learn that Ballen has other business interests in addition to the casino.  Somehow through patents he has a monopoly on the world-wide production of tungsten (of all things).  And eventually we find out that his position was provided to him by Nazis(!).  Eventually the Nazis return and want their monopoly back.  A crisis arises when Ballen refuses their demands and he murders one of the Nazis at the casino.  Ballen must flee the country to escape the law.  He tells Johnny to find Gilda and bring her back to his house from which he will be fleeing with Johnny and Gilda that night.

When Johnny extracts Gilda from a romantic rendezvous that she was on and brings her to Ballen’s house they have a bitter fight which of course ends with them in a passionate kiss.  And, of course Ballen enters the room at that exact moment.  He rushes out and drives away.  Johnny jumps in his own car and follows him to the airport where Ballen runs to a waiting plane and flies out over the ocean.  The police have followed both of them and they tell Johnny that they have been waiting for the Nazis because they want to bust up the tungsten cartel.  They watch Ballen’s plane heading off into the night when it suddenly explodes.  We are then shown Ballen parachuting into the ocean where he is picked up by a boat.  He tells his rescuers that he will be hiding out for a while but he will return to deal with a situation, which we assume is Johnny and Gilda.

Thinking Ballen dead, his will is read and Gilda is his sole heir but Johnny is the sole executor of his estate.  So, Johnny marries Gilda to get control of the casino and the tungsten empire.  Afterward he treats her like dirt as revenge for what Johnny thinks of as her disloyalty with other men.  Gilda rebels by acting even more disloyal.  Finally, there is a rapprochement when Johnny finds out that Gilda has only been pretending to have affairs with various men.  Now the police tell Johnny that he must give up the casino and tungsten business because Argentina is about to seize them.  Johnny and Gilda decide to return home to America.  But at that juncture Ballen returns and announces that he is going to kill the couple.  And because he has to kill them both he won’t use his sword cane but his gun instead.  But just as he bears down on them, the friendly philosopher/bathroom attendant (I didn’t mention him before?) Uncle Pio stabs Ballen in the back with his own sword cane.  The understanding police inspector declines to press charges against the amiable killer saying, “you can’t murder someone who has already been declared dead plus haven’t you ever heard of justifiable homicide?”  And Johnny and Gilda live happily ever after.  Well, anyway we hope so.

Good lord.  This movie is a hopeless mess.  As I said earlier the plot and the motivations of the main characters are hopelessly absurd.  Gilda’s marriage to Ballen can’t be reconciled with her actions.  And Gilda’s and Johnny’s feelings for each other are hopelessly confusing and annoying to the audience.  The whole plot of the Nazi tungsten business makes no sense and seems ridiculous on its face.  Sure, uranium would have made sense for crypto-Nazis to be dabbling in but tungsten?  What were they planning to do, deprive the world of light bulbs?  And then there is the laid-back police inspector who wouldn’t let a little thing like homicide stand in the way of a happy ending.  Add to this Gilda’s almost incessant habit of saying Johnny’s name in every sentence she utters at him and you have a movie in which it is impossible to suspend disbelief.  The only possible motive for this movie was to showcase Rita Hayworth’s face and figure.  And without a doubt that is a worthwhile endeavor.  Hayworth is featured in several song and dance routines where she parades and shakes her very charming assets for the audience.  She was a very lovely woman in the prime of her life.  Now is this a movie worth recommending?  I would say only if all that I’ve said is taken into account.  You have to be going in just to watch Rita Hayworth dance to “Put the Blame on Mame.”  If not then don’t.

 

Search for Intelligent Life on Cable TV

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Tonight, I watched for the first time Charlton Heston’s 1988, made for television version of “A Man for All Seasons.”  So, of course, when I watch it, I’m comparing it to the 1966 film starring Paul Scofield.  And that was a great movie.  Great acting, all around.  If I’m being honest the Scofield picture is better.  But the later film is still a pleasure to watch.  And that is because it is essentially the same story.  Both movies are based on the same stage play and for that reason both provide the same story and characters.  Even large chunks of the dialog are the same.

Both plays include an argument between Thomas More and his future son-in-law about the value of man’s law in God’s world.  It’s one of my favorite parts of the play.  He tried to make his daughter’s very idealistic and self-righteous fiancé understand that man’s law was made to deal with imperfect humans not angels.  And without it we would all be at the mercy of the powerful.

‘William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!’

The image of the law as a windbreak that protects us from the winds of merciless powers that rule the Earth.  Wonderful image.  The author is a poet, I’d say and a good one.

So even though the later film is not as great as the earlier one it is true to the play and this trueness to the story, even if in the hands of less able actors still manages to provide the same general experience.  There’s a satisfaction in watching a play that provides that successful theatrical effect.  It draws the audience in and immerses them in the scene, in the words, in the interaction of characters that you care about and believe in for the short time that you sit there and watch and listen.

And that’s a theatrical experience.  Most movies do not possess this.  Because the rule of movies is, “Don’t tell them, show them.”  And even a play is showing us something.  But to pull together a scene where the characters are in a space together and they collide and we get to see who they are by what they say is still a very powerful experience.  No special effects needed.  No need for fancy camera angles.  Think of how many great courtroom scenes you can think of.  Or a death scene between lovers.  The dramatic scene is charged with meaning and all that is needed is a poet’s soul to breathe life into it.  Even mediocre actors can take a wonderful scene and give the audience the catharsis that the writer created.

But the truth is this is a relatively rare event.  Out of the thousands or tens of thousands of movies that have been made in the last century or so what percentage have this quality?  I’d guess it’s much less than one percent.  I don’t have any figures to back this up but I doubt it’s a tenth of a percent.  Most of the “entertainment” produced is awful.  It has no soul.  And I’m not even talking about its morality.  I can imagine that art can be made that’s immoral or even amoral.  But what it can’t lack is an honesty about what it’s trying to say.  You can claim that the world is a meaningless maelstrom of death and destruction and out of that you can make art that could touch the human heart.  Or you can show us sublime love and the selfless sacrifice of a mother for her child.  And that could be art too.  But mostly what we get is dreck.  We might as well be watching a surveillance camera of traffic moving on a street.

I have three good movie versions of “A Christmas Carol.”  And I like to watch all three of them.  All three provide a close approximation of the story and therefore a similar feeling of catharsis.  And likewise, there are some other classic movies that tell a story that was so good that they’ve been redone.  One of Shakespeare’s plays or some other talented author’s work.  So, I’ll own several versions of the same work.  And seeing how different actors and directors bring the classic scenes to life is interesting to compare.  But the underlying experience is based on the skill with which the story was crafted and given human meaning.

All that was a lot of words.  Maybe it made sense to you.  I guess it can be boiled down to the fact that there are such things as timeless classics and they exist because they resonate with something inside our brains or minds or souls.  Look for these and own them so that when the crap that you can “stream” on some particular night is just too soul-deadening for you to stand you can reach for this DVD or Blu-ray or whatever technological incarnation exists and feed your soul with something that has meaning and maybe joy.  Or at worst find the book.