Jaws III (1983)

Jaws III seems to accelerate the aging of the Brody kids a little bit to make them the focus of this first Roy Scheider-less entry in the franchise. Well actually Mike Brody (here played by Dennis Quaid) is the principle focus here, he's in his twenties designing and installing various enclosures and underwater gates at Sea World (yeah, I don't know if I buy it either) while younger brother Sean (John Putch) just stops by for a visit, despite his understandable fear of water. Of course an aggressive great white shark makes it through the gate and Mike's marine biologist girlfriend Kay (Bess Armstrong) wants to save it, creole park manager Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett Jr.) wants to exploit it for profit, and the Brody boys know better from experience. It's kind of interesting that Sea World would agree to licensing their names use in this picture, given that its about a disaster at one of their parks, but I suppose the thinking was any publicity is good publicity, thinking that no doubt changed decades later after the release of another movie, Blackfish. A young, pre-star Lea Thompson appears as a bubbly love interest for Sean. If you see this movie you might notice that the film holds some subpar special effects shots for unusually long periods of time, that's because this movie was released in theaters as Jaws 3-D and wanted to give audiences time to appreciate its effects, which I doubt ever looked right. This film's not great, but honestly works better then it deserves to. **1/2

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Woody Allen's 2008 feature centers on two women, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and her best friend Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) who travel to Spain to spend two months staying with Vicky's aunt Judy (Patricia Clarkson) before Vicky's planed wedding to the reliable Doug (Chris Messina) in the fall. While in Spain the two friends encounter the roughish artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) whose seductive ways cause both women to question what they really want in a man. In fact Juan Antonio seems perhaps inadvertently skilled at unhinging women, as further demonstrated by his volatile ex wife Elena (Penélope Cruz, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this role).

This is not the kind of subject matter I'm usually inclined towards, and the decisions made by some characters in this film made me feel further inclined not to like it. However the quality of the piece, especially the acting and writing, won me over. There is some serious literary merit here, and the film does a very fine job of wrestling with some ambiguous and contradictory elements of human character, especially as they concern love and relationships. Like Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point a major theme in this movie is getting away with something you know your shouldn't, and the effect that has on a person. Given some of the things that director writer Woody Allen has been charged with over the years, its interesting that this is a subject he keeps revisiting, but even the reason for that is ambiguous. ***1/2

Dunkirk (2017)

When I was standing in line for tickets to this movie there was an older man in line near me wearing a Marine veterans baseball cap, I would guess he would have served probably in the 1950's. He was having a conversation with other people in line and stated that he remembered following events in Dunkirk on the radio when he was a boy. That was his introduction to the story of  Dunkirk, my introduction was about 15 years ago when I first saw the academy award winning movie Mrs. Miniver. In Mrs. Miniver there is a sequence where Mr. Miniver (Walter Pigeon) sets off in a small boat to take part in the civilian evacuation of British troops penned in by the Nazi's at Dunkirk, a French resort town just the opposite side of the channel. From the time I saw that sequence I wanted to see a feature length film about that inspiring true story. I got something of that in the 2007 film Atonement, based on the novel of the same name by Ian McEwan, a good portion of that story also takes place at Dunkirk, and includes a truly moving panoramic sequence of how solders dealt with the stress of their situation in a variety of ways.

So when I first saw previews for Dunkirk around a year ago I was pumped. The film is directed by the very talented Christopher Nolan (who turns 47 today) and is best known for his Dark Knight trilogy, and films that have elaborately constructed trick elements, like Memento, The Prestige, and Interstellar. That history made him seem a somewhat counterintuitive choice to helm a film on this subject matter, a World War II battle, but Nolan works some high concept structural elements into the film. The movie is primarily three narratives, all of course associated with Dunkirk, and all operating on a different time scale, though we cut between them as though they were occurring at approximately the same time.

The first story line concerns an unnamed British private (Fionn Whitehead) trying to escape from Dunkirk, and the various solders and sailors he meets along the way. This story takes place over the course of approximately a week. The second story occurs over the course of around a day, and centers on a father (Mark Rylance, the Soviet spy in Bridge of Spies) his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), his son's friend George (Barry Keoghan), and a stranded solder they pick up at sea (Nolan favorite Cillian Murphy). The final story takes place over the course of about an hour, and concerns some British spitfire pilots, principally one played by Tom Hardy. All of these stories intersect at the end.

The movie is of course reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan, both in part to similar subject matter, as well as the kinetic way in which they were filmed. Nolen also makes good use of the 70mm film stock he shot in, and this film is worth seeing on an IMAX screen for that reason. Like the steely nerve the British showed in this battle Dunkirk has a nicely underplayed intensity about it, there is a subtle effective evocation of sacrifice, fear and courage to it. It is an epic film, and at times a moving film, but not quite the emotionally stirring spectacle I was both expecting and hoping for. For that element turn to the previously mentioned Mrs. Miniver and Atonement, but for a realistic examination of events, whose true importance may not have been fully visible to the participants until some time later, see Dunkirk. ***1/2

Savages (2007)

From a cursory glance at Rotten Tomatoes the 2007 film Savages seems to have garnered pretty uniform critical approval. Not from me however, I thought the film encapsulated the clichéd, self indulgent, off-putting excess of the indie genera. It seems semi-autobiographical, but even if its not it felt navel gazing and self indulgent. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, usually very strong to great actors, are here grown siblings Wendy and Jon Savage. Their father Lenny (Philip Bosco) a difficult and often absent man is now suffering from the early stages of dementia, and the two must travel to Arizona to pick him up and move him back east into assisted living. Hoffman is a literate professor writing a book about Brecht, while Linny is a temp who writes semi-autobiographical plays on the side. Linney here is the kind of conflicted character which is the closest thing she has a cinematic type, she overplays the torture of putting the father she never had a good relationship with into a home, and is also conflicted about the affair she is having with a married man. What kind of person is she, she wonders, and the answer of course is a Savage. I felt like I've seen all of this before, save a few brief moments when this film wasn't a bore it was grating. It's a shame there aren't more movies about grown siblings, but this movie doesn't help that cause. Man this really rubbed me the wrong way. *

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

The second Resident Evil film picks up shortly after the first one left off. The Umbrella corporation foolishly tries to get into their underground research facility again, releasing the bio weapon plague and causing zombies and associated creatures to wreak havoc on Raccoon City. Umbrella quarantines the city with plans to blow it up in a fake nuclear accident and erase the evidence of their experimentation. However they also chose to take this opportunity to test some further weapons on the city, and scientist Jared Harris takes the opportunity to remotely recruit some survivors, including of course Mila Jovovich, to rescue his daughter who got trapped in the city, before the town can go boom. I found I didn't much care, but have already bought a cheap 4 DVD pack so I'm going to watch the other ones anyway. *1/2

Earthquake (1974)

In theory the movie Earthquake should have everything going for it. Produced during the heart of the disaster movie boom of the 1970's, the film has a screenplay coauthored by Godfather scribe Mario Puzo, and a modestly all star cast anchored by Chuck Heston. However imitation Irwin Allen is just that, imitation Irwin Allen. The film lacks that hard to define spark that made even Allen's lesser efforts strangely endearing. The disaster effects have dated pretty badly, even the earthquake sequence in 1936's San Francisco holds up better. At the end of the film several of the plot lines are left ambiguously unresolved and I'm not sure if this was intentional or if the film just rang long for the studios taste so they cut the thing and that's in the missing material. Walter Matthau's oddly uncredited cameo might be the best thing about this movie. **

9 to 5 (1980)

I've seen parts of this film many times over the years, particularly back in the 80's when it seemed to be on TV a lot, but it was not until a recent theatrical showing that I saw this movie all the way through. 9 to 5 is for lack of a better term a women's lib comedy, it's the story of three women, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton, who do to comically outrageous circumstances find themselves compelled to hold their "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" boss (played delightfully by Dabney Colman) hostage for around six weeks. The leads are all likable and play off each other well, and while born out of second wave feminism the tone of the film is unlikely to offend, I think most people familiar with this movie like this movie (it's number 74 on AFI's list of the 100 funniest movies). A big hit at the time of its release, making back over ten times its production cost, 9 to 5 is very much a piece of its time, but it still plays well. Also this film has Sterling Hayden in it, and no one Sterling Hayden's like Sterling Hayden. ***1/2

Cry of the Penguins (1971)

The basic thesis of Cry of the Penguins (also know as Mr. Forbush and the Penguins) seems to be that a nature documentary will be more interesting if we give a backstory to the guy doing the documenting. John Hurt is a devil-may-care grad student who takes a five month post documenting the mating habits of penguins in Antarctica, in an effort to impress that one girl he can't seem to make headway with; played by a 25 year old Hayley Mills, who at the time was married to the films producer Roy Boulting, 32 years her senior. The film had a difficult production, went through three directors, failed at the box office, and cost the three studios co-producing the thing considerable money. I actually enjoyed the film much more then I thought I would, it's an interesting experiment, odd, uneven, but on the whole I liked this failure.**1/2

The Beguiled (2017)

One of the things that I like about director Sofia Coppola is that she doesn't seem in any rush to get out movies just to get out movies, its like she only makes a movie when she has a movie she wants to make. Her most recent feature, and first in four years, is The Beguiled, the story of a girls finishing school in 1864 Virginia, whose few remaining students and faculty take in a injured Union solder (Colin Farrell) and try to nurse him back to health after he is partially crippled by shrapnel. The solder, Corporal John McBurney, quickly finds himself the lone object of desire for a half dozen frightened, isolated women, he attempts to play this to his advantage, but eventually makes a foolish mistake that sends his entire house of cards crashing down on him.

The film is based on a 1966 novel of the same name by Thomas P. Cullinan, and I didn't know until after I'd seen this most recent version that this had been made into a film before, in 1971 starting Clint Eastwood. Coppola's version has an impressive cast of women, featuring Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning, with the lesser known younger cast members also being fairly impressive. This is a mood piece, like the gothic southern mansion in which it is primarily set, it's a humid, slowly creaking piece, and in no rush. Also like the beautiful antebellum southern house the movies leaves us feeling morally torn, there is great esthetic beauty to it, but an underlining barbarism. ***

Goldfinger (1964)

The third James Bond movie seems to be the one that has most thoroughly imbedded itself in popular culture and is most frequently satirized. Goldfinger is the movie from which we get Odd Job, Pussy Galore, the movies memorable openings song, Bond strapped to a table and threatened with a laser, and the over the top super villain scheme of trying to break into Fort Knox. Not on the level of sophistication of From Russia With Love, but an enjoyable 110 minutes. ***

The Terminator (1984)

Another iconic 80's film you may be surprised I had never seen before. The Terminator is the film that basically started James Cameron's career, though he had written and directed a few minor things before it. The Terminator is also the film that gave Arnold Schwarzenegger what is still his most identifiable role, even more then governor of California. I do wonder if Michael Biehn resents the fact that he never really became that big of a star, he plays the human solder sent back in time to stop The Terminator from taking the life of Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton, also her best known role) the future mother of John Conner, the decisive human commander in our species war for survival against malevolent machines. I like how John Conner has a strong presence throughout the film even though we never see him, it makes him feel really legendary.

I must confess that while watching the film I didn't particularly enjoy it, and it was hard to put myself back into 1984 when this kind of sci-fi story would have really felt like something new. Looking back on it a few days later I appreciate it more, recognize it is a good movie, and both thematically and structurally its pretty impressive. Seeing the later movies in the series is on my to-do list, but I have a feeling that with Terminator, less is probably more. ***

The Aristocats (1970)

Other then The Song of the South, which has been seldom shown or distributed over the last thirty years, The Aristocats was the oldest, feature length, theatrically released, Disney animated film that I had not yet seen, and its also one of the weakest. That is not to say the movie is bad, its just not that memorable. At its core its basically a remake of 101 Dalmatians, only with about a half a dozen cats as the protagonists instead of five score dogs. The funniest scene in the film is when the butler is trying to get his stuff back from those two dogs, that made me laugh out loud.

I really wanted to see this film as a kid, and I was exposed to some merchandise and children's books about the story, but somehow I just never got around to seeing it until now. What struck me most about the movie is how it reinforces the way that Disney animation operated a sort of stock company when it came to voices in the post Walt years from the late 60's to maybe the early 80's. Eva Gabor, Phil Harris, Sterling Holloway, and Pat Buttram were are all go to voice talents for Disney at the time, even if you've never seen this film you will recognize their voices. Also present are the talents of the great Thrul Ravenscroft, who had been doing voice work, principally singing, for Disney since the early 1940's, but who is best known as Tony the Tiger and for singing You're A Mean One Mr. Grinch in the classic 1966 animated TV special about the Suessian grump. Anyway The Aristocats is likable enough, but nothing special, though highly recommended for Disney completest. **1/2

Casual Sex? (1988)

Light sex comedy, which I believe is based on a play, concerns two long time friends (Lea Thompson and Victoria Jackson) who go on vacation together to a California health resort, and learn important lessons about relationships with men. From what I've read on the internet it looks like this film was not well received critically, but I found it quite likable, even Andrew Dice Clay is likable in this film. The movie works because it doesn't try to hard, its light ruminations, not going for anything too deep, but the characters are sympathetic and you root for them. It also doesn't hurt that Lea Thompson was probably my first film crush when I was about five, and she looks great in this. ***

The Golden Child (1986)

It took me awhile to sync with this films changing tones, a young Dalai Lama type is kidnapped, and his kidnappers attempt to make him eat oatmeal mixed with the blood of a young girl they killed, yet its a comedy. Eddie Murphy is pretty subdued (for Eddie Murphy) as Chandler Jarrell, a social worker and child abduction expert (this works better then it has any right to, especially in the early part of the film) who turns out to be a prophesied "Chosen One" recruited by an ill defined group of Buddhists to rescue The Golden Child whose destiny is to save the human race if he survives. Jarrell's love interest and point of contact with the group is played the beautiful Charlotte Lewis, the rest of the supporting cast is forgettable, save Charles Dance as the bad guy.  

I think I would probably like this film better on second viewing, in many ways it seems like two films, maybe more, with Murphy rather gradually going into his comic mode. The winged stop motion demon at the end is actually pretty terrifying, and I just never felt that this film know what it was trying to be. **1/2

Weird Scince (1986)

I used to watch the USA Network TV series back in the 1990's but never saw the movie it was based off of until now. I had a perception that Weird Science was a dirty movie, but felt justified in watching the basic cable show version because no nudity (though what nudity there is in the film version is very fleeting). This is a very pubescent movie, a fantasy in which two 15 year old dorks (Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) who have no luck with the opposite sex create a sexy female genie (Kelly Le Brock) on their computer to guide them, help them grow, and get them laid. It's kind of shallow as redemption narratives go. This was made during director Jon Hughes most productive period, between 1984 and 1989 he directed 7 films, wrote or co wrote 9, and produced 12, and for the most part kept the quality pretty impressive, even Weird Science is better then it probably should be. A younger me would have given this a ***, but I'm going to give it a **1/2.

Baby Driver (2017)

Director Edger Wright's tribute to car chase and heist movies. Baby Driver centers on a young getaway driver known as Baby (Ansel Elgort), who at heart is a good kid and only reluctantly works as a get away driver for reasons reveled over the course of the movie. Baby falls for a young waitress named Debra, played by an adorable Lily James, this complicates things for Baby who tries to keep his relationship with her and his criminal dealings separate, this doesn't work out.

Part of Baby's backstory is that he was involved in a car accident as a young child that took the lives of his beloved mother and not so beloved father, and left him with severe tinnitus. To drown out the ringing in his ears Baby is constantly listing to music on his iPods, which gives the film makers a welcome excuse to license a whole lot of great music for the soundtrack, including the lesser known Simon and Garfunkel tune from which the movie draws its title. In addition to all the great music on the soundtrack various musicians are cast in small supporting roles such as Flea as a short order cook, and Paul Williams as an arms dealer, which might be the greatest thing I've seen on screen all year. The rest of the cast is strong, including Kevin Spacy, Jon Hamm, and Jamie Foxx as criminals with whom Baby has dealings.

Along with the great music the film boats great chase sequences, and a few plot twists and turns I didn't see coming. This is a great movie to see on a big screen with an audience, its pretty smart and one of the freshest action movies to come along in some time. ***1/2

Lust for Life (1956)

Lust for Life is a lavish MGM biopic of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, based on the 1934 novel of the same name by Irving Stone, who also wrote The Agony and the Ecstasy. Lust for Life is a great looking picture, full of beautiful location shots that are gorgeous in Metrocolor, makes excellent use of its subject artists actual paintings, and the costume and set designs are most impressive. While technically very competent my problem with the picture is that Vincent is just not very likable, he's the kind of person that you would put up with if your related to him, but would probably avoid if you weren't. Kirk Douglas does an admirable job in the title roll, and I certainly learned a lot about van Gough, such as the fact the he was a protestant missionary among Belgian coal workers in the 1870's. Still a tortured artiest story is always going to seem more then a little self indulgent, and is a tough sell, especially when done with a studio system gloss, this might have worked better as an independent film made decades later. While from a formalist perspective I could give this film ***,  as its about an expressionist and a bit of a slog I give it **.

The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? (2015)

Documentary on director Tim Burton's proposed Superman reboot movie of the 1990's, a film that came pretty close to being made but was scrapped 3 weeks before the start of production do to, among other things, the failure of the film Batman & Robin. The movie was to star Nicholas Cage of all people as The Man of Steel, Christopher Walken as the alien villain Brainiac, and Chris Rock as Jimmy Olsen, and I feel personally wronged that the latter did not happen. This modestly budgeted documentary has interviews with a  lot of the behind the scenes people associated with the project, story boards, costume testes etc., and while the subject matter would have been interesting enough at an hour in length, at an hour and 44 minutes its just long. **

The Mummy (2017)

From everything I had heard about this film I knew that it was going to be bad, I was just really curious how bad. The Mummy is nothing I could call a good movie, but I was disappointed, I was honestly hoping it would be worse. Now the film is a mess, a lazy jumble of clichés that feels stitched together. Tropes abound, and no acting, writing, or directing muscles were strained, even the special effects felt a little nah. The apparent lack of effort is a little surprising given that The Mummy is intended to be the launching vehicle for a new cinematic universe, modeled after those of Marvel and DC, and built on reimaginings of the classic Universal Studio's monster properties of the 1930's and 40's.

Tom Cruise is Nick Morton, your typical movie rouge, a military reconnaissance officer with a side venture in antiquities dealing. Jack Johnson is Nick's best friend and co-conspirator Corporal Chris Vail, a model of a second banana who lays on the 'that's another fine mess you've gotten us into' shtick pretty heavy. Annabelle Wallis is the impossibly attractive British scientist and forced love interest for Cruise, who gets our chief protagonist in touch with Russell Crowe's Dr. Henry Jekyll. Obviously intended as a bridge character for later films in an expanding universe, the good doctor Jekyll presides over a S.H.E.I.L.D. like monster policing agency called the Prodigium, which he runs out of the British Museum in London while periodically injecting himself with a drug to keep his Mr. Hyde persona at bay.

There is a gender reverse on the dynamic of the Mummy trying to bring back to life its former lover, with female mummy Sofia Boutella trying to incarnate an evil Egyptian god into Cruise, after he accidently resurrects her upon digging her up in the Iraqi desert. The Iraq connection is another deviation from norm in that Boutella's Princess Ahmanet was apparently so evil that the ancient Egyptians opted to entomb her far from home base. So while other Mummy movies may have featured Isis, this is undoubtedly the first such film to feature ISIS. The film runs around stringing its set pieces together with segments of exposition, and none of the characters feel more then surfacey. I honestly wish the film could have been more batshit insane, instead its pedestrian and predictable, not quite a full slog but still tedious to sit through. In addition to various 'Dark Universe' spinoffs the movie sets up for a more or less direct sequel, which at first I thought we'd probably not get given how mediocre at best this movie is, but it's already made nearly $350 million, so... money talks.

Now it's not often that ones gets to say this, but this was well beneath the standard of quality I've come to expect from Tom Cruise. Universal owes him big for this one because without his star power this movie would have been a tremendous box office bomb, but instead its just a critical one. * 1/2