My Darling Clementine (1946)

The most gorgeously photographed black and white western I have ever seen, this movie would be worth seeing even with the sound turned off. My Darling Clementine is John Ford's take on the legend of Wyatt Earp and the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Ford renders the story in the suitably iconic manner you would expect of him. While the film is based on the writings of Earp biographer Stuart N. Lake, I have no doubt that large portions of this film are highly mythologized, or even just made up. Not looking into the history I have a hard time believing much if anything concerning Linda Darnell's character is real, and while Ford had stated that the depiction of the final gunfight is taken exactly as it was told to him by the real Earp decades earlier, who knows how reliable it really is. However none of that matters much, because as a film its most excellent, and as Ford himself would make the point the better part of two decades later:"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Fonda is great as Earp, and the lesser known actress Cathy Downs absolutely the perfect choice for Clementine, while the rest of the cast is strong as well. A picture very much deserving of its prominent place in the canon of the film western. ****

Speed (1994)

Yep I'd never seen Speed, the bomb on the bus movie that made Sandra Bullock a star, and she really is adorable in this. I didn't know, or had forgotten, that Jeff Daniels is in this as well, he is the ultimately expendable partner for LA cop Keanu Reeves. Watching this early Reeve's role one is reminded how much he really could not act, now he's not a great actor even today, but he's improved since this, noticeably. Speed works, perhaps ironically, because of momentum, there is really not a lot to this film, but its brisk pace is makes it a successes. Dennis Hopper is of course an obvious choice for the villain, but effective, and has a memorable death. There are far better 90's cop movies, like Heat, The Negotiator, and the 2nd and 3rd Die Hard, but Speed is still enjoyable and makes the list of iconic films for its decade. ***

Resident Evil Extinction (2007)

I found this third Resident Evil film mildly more watchable then the previous two, I think maybe that's because the characters were on the road rather then stuck in a confined place. Picking up 5 years after the previous movie left off, the viral plague of the first two films has further mutated and is gradually turning the Earth into a desert, so it might have been a more interesting choice to set the action in places that aren't already a desert anyway, as this film takes place largely in Utah and Nevada. Millia Jovovich rejoins the group of survivors from the previous film, and as usual for these there is way too much going on, Milla continues to develop her psychic powers, there are mutants, and zombies, and clones, and killer crows, and the Umbrella Cooperation is still up to no good. There are a few more human moments in this then previously, but (spoiler) basically all the characters except Milla are killed off in the end. I'll still watch the next one though, because I bought the DVD 4 pack and am going to get my $10 worth. **

Death Wish (1974)

Before the low rent Cannon Group turned Death Wish into what I can only assume is a series of exploitive, increasing bad franchise movies for Charles Bronson, the original Death Wish was a somewhat exploitive Charles Bronson vehicle that had a little something to say. Born of the "Mad as Hell" urban frustration of the 1970's, Death Wish is also resonate with Trump era rage, and in fact a remake with Bruce Willis is due out later this year. Bronson is Manhattan architect Paul Kersey, whose wife is killed, and grown daughter severely traumatized after a home invasion attack by three hoodlum's, one of whom is a young Jeff Goldblum.

Subsequent to the immediate aftermath of the attack being dealt with, Kersey's bosses send him on assignment to work on a housing development in Arizona, hopping a change of pace will do him good. Inspired by a wild west show, the words of a cowboy zen developer played by Stuart Margolin, and a new found knack with a handgun, when Paul returns to the city he becomes a vigilante, taking out muggers on the streets of New York. Kersey's anonymous deeds inspire fellow New Yorkers to stand up for themselves, decreases street crime, and leaves the D.A. and Police Commissioner in an awkward position, needing to stop Kersey, yet also grateful to him. Vincent Gardenia is the police inspector originally assigned to unmask the vigilante, a task later amended to get him to quietly stand down.

Bronson's transformation from low key liberal to night time avenger is intriguing, you get why he is doing what he is doing, you root for him, but once you remove yourself from the film you see his actions are more then a little problematic, though at the same time not entirely unwarranted. This movie is about venting, the acting out of rage, but is also nuanced enough to be thought provoking. Certainly better then I'd expected it to be. ***

Thunderball (1965)

Now that I've seen the fourth James Bond film I understand why Robert Wagner is wearing an eye patch in Austin Powers. In this movie Bond actually blackmails a woman into having sex with him, and she likes it, pretty gross. The undersea fight goes on too long. ***

Vanilla Sky (2001)

Director Cameron Crowe's stealth science fiction film. I anticipated that it would provoke a strong reaction from me, most likely negative, but possibly positive. Instead I found it kind of uneven, or middling. I used to think that I hated Cameron Crowe, but I've reassessed. I think that if Cameron Crowe and I had gone to high school together we'd have run in completely different social circles and been close to indifferent to each other. Then at some point I'd have found out he liked Billy Wilder movies and been like, 'well he's okay then', but we'd still never interact. ***

Batman & Robin (1997)

As bad as they say. This is a movie whose reputation is earned, and one that prompted a public apology from its director twenty years later. It is one of the most arrogantly lazy movies I have ever seen, and a fine example of the worst excesses of late 1990's big tent filmmaking (another good example of this is the 1998 Godzilla with Matthew Broderick). Nobody gives a good performance in this thing, though Michael Gough probably comes the closest he is hamstrung by the material. Alicia Silverstone is shockingly bad, Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance consists entirely of clichés, and Uma Thurman can't decide if she's channeling Mae West or Bette Davis. I have too much respect for Georgia Clooney to say much, but I offer that there is a reason why Chris O'Donnell is doing procedural TV and not making movies. Shameful. *

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

War for the Planet of Apes, the third film in the 2010's Planet of the Apes reboot franchise, brings to a close (mild spoiler) what could be referred to as The Caesar Trilogy. This movie contains some cleaver re-appropriation of iconography from the original 1968 Planet of the Apes movie, but not that image your probably thinking of. It's a satisfying movie that, again mild spoiler, gives an explanation for why humans lose the ability to speak, something the original franchise never properly explained. Beyond these musings I have little else to add because while War for the Planet of the Apes is a rather good movie, most of what it has to say is 'on the page' so to speak and requires little unpacking. If you liked the other two films in the series I recommend that you see this one, I'd say its the best of the lot. Oh and Woody Harrelson's in this. ***1/2

Tetro (2009)

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 fantasy romance film A Matter of Life and Death (released in the United States as Stairway to Heaven) the sequences in Heaven are done in black and white, while the sequences set on Earth are presented in vibrant Technicolor, a deliberate inversion of how one might expect a bichromial film to render those two realms. In Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro the present is shown in black and white, while flash backs and fantasy sequences appear in color that looks like its from a 1940's film stock. This is one of two major tributes or homages in this movie to the work of the writing and directing team known collectively as The Archers. The other tribute is showing around a full minute clip from "the doll sequence" in P & P's 1951 film The Tales of Hoffman, and then later recreating that scene with contemporary actors.

The influence of mid century British art film combines with that of later motion pictures, largely indie, that used black and white film for artistic, and sometimes budgetary reasons, while the plot of Tetro barrows heavily from the dysfunctional family and angst of expectations motifs associated with the works of Tennessee Williams. Tetro (Vincent Gallo) the films title character is the son of a famed American orchestra conductor who flees to Argentina to escape from the oppressive presence of his imposing and difficult father. After years living mostly below the radar, shacked up with a lovely doctor (Maribel Verdu) and doing lighting work for a local theater troop, Tetro is visited by his much younger half brother Bennie (Coppola find Alden Ehrenreich in his film debut), who takes advantage of work being done on the cruse ship on which he is a waiter to see the sibling he idolized as a young child. Tetro isn't super happy to see him, and it turns out both brothers have a lot to work through vis-a-vis each other and their father.

There are a lot of really beautiful novelistic elements to this film, which is also rather routinely a work of character study as high opera. The film went in a number of directions I was not expecting but they mostly work. One of the most fascinating things about this film is comparing it to earlier works by its famous director, and how different it is from them, while at the same time still very much at peace in his criterion. Tetro would certainly seem dull going to many, and unexpectedly has a fair amount of nudity in it, something which historically Coppola hadn't gone that much in for. Still if you tend to enjoy filmmaking that is a little textually dense, you could be impressed, I was. ****

Ex Machina (2015)

Domhnall Gleeson (son of Brendan) plays Caleb Smith, both an every man and a tech genius, who is not so randomly selected at random as the winner of a weeks vacation with his world famous celebra-boss Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) at his isolated estate in what looks like maybe Canada or Alaska. It's not really a traditional vacation of course, Nathan has selected Caleb to test if the state of the art, top secret android he built passes the Turing test, a theoretical behavior standard meant to determine if propertied artificial intelligence is really genuinely capable of thought and consciousness, or is just imitating those quality's. Nathan's android is named Ava (Alicia Vikander with CGI trimmings), she's lovely and charming, but what is really going behind her human like face and in inside her cybernetic brain.

The story is really fairly conventional for sci-fi, we've seen it before in everything from The Bicentennial Man to West World, but its expertly and quite moodily handled here. I feel like I should have seem more of what was coming before I did, I too was distracted by the lovely magicians assistant, to borrow a metaphor from the film, and so interested in what was happing on screen that I never got around to projecting it forward to its likely ending. Special notice must go to Oscar Isaac's performance as Bateman, he is one of those phenomenal genius, business guru types, who is so well respected, rich, and all around successful that he has come to relate to lesser intellects with a detachment that echoes that of the artificial intellects he seeks to create. ***1/2

The Last of Robin Hood (2013)

Movie about the final romance in the life of notorious ladies man Errol Flynn, its was not so much May/December as March/December given that Flynn (Kevin Kline) was 48 when it started and his paramour Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning) only 15. We can give Flynn a little slack given that he probably didn't know Beverly's real age when the affair started, she had apparently been lying about it to get chorus line work at the studios, but he no doubt found out the truth rather quickly. Errol persisted in the affair anyway, enabled by Beverly's star struck mother Florence (Susan Sarandon) the couple carried on for two years, Flynn even making what looks like a truly awful pro-Castro movie with her called Cuban Rebel Girls, and then basically died in her arms on a trip to Canada. Flynn took such bad care of himself that his cause of death is literally two lines long on Wikipedia.

The story here is really pretty interesting and spilled into a big public scandle after Flynn's death. All three lead performances here are strong, especially Kline's which is deceptively good, he so naturally seems to inhabit Flynn that he hardly appears to be acting. The problem is the story doesn't seem to lend itself particularly well to a theatrical feature film, the substance is rather lite for the caliber of  the performers in it, the whole thing would have been best suited as a 1970's movie of the week.

The most interesting things about this story happen after the movie ends its narrative, Beverly had a rough decade or so including two failed marriages and a boyfriend killed in struggle over a gun in her apartment, but then she seemed to pull herself together and had a four decade plus long marriage before dying of diabetes and heart failure in 2010. Now a movie about that would probably have been time better spent. **

Trapped by the Mormons (1922)

Shown at the recent Sunstone Symposia in Salt Lake, Trapped by the Mormons is a 1922 British made silent film based on the 1911 novel of the same name by Winifred Graham. The movie is derivative of the 'Mormons as stock villains' trope of Victorian era dime novels. Isoldi Keene is the most successful Mormon missionary in England, this is do in large part to his hypnotic powers, powers which he uses principally on young women, with the intent of shipping them off to Utah to be plural wives.

Isoldi is particularly taken with the lovely young Nora Prescott (Evelyn Brent, the only performer in this movie whose IMDb page contains photographs) who lives with her mother and partially paralyzed father in Manchester. Isoldi strikes up a 'nodding acquaintance' with Nora on her daily walk to work, he eventually introduces her to Mormon pamphlets, fakes a miracle healing to impress her, gets her to invite her female co-works to listen to the missionaries, and hypnotically convinces her to break her engagement to good guy navy man Jim Foster. Suspicious of Nora's sudden and unexplained breaking of their engagement, Jim hires a private eye to help him get the bottom of it. The two quickly discover that Nora, only now realizing the trouble she's in, has become Trapped by the Mormons.

The nefarious Mormons hope to secret Nora out of the country and off to Utah, convincing her parents that she will be taking a trip to The Netherlands as the traveling companion of a lady novelist (actually a Mormon woman in disguise). Nora's father accepts this, thinking it will get his daughter away for the influence of the Mormons he knows she has been seeing, because as he says in title card dialogue "They don't allow Mormons in Holland."

Nora is actually taken to a hotel, which seems to be run by the Mormons, as they prepare for their journey. Jim and the PI track her there, Jim want's to go right in and bust her out, but the seasoned detective cautions they can't do that yet because, and they actually use this term in the title card, it's too much "red tape".  The good guys eventually find just cause to break into the hotel, there is a fight with the Mormons, but eventually the police arrive and all is set right.

This movie is actually pretty entertaining, and though it feels a little unnecessarily stretched out at the end, at 72 minutes in length it's quite watchable. The fact that the LDS Church had officially given up the practice of polygamy more then three decades before this film was released is casually glossed over in the plot with a line or two about how the Mormons are lying about that. The writer of the story obviously had enough exposer to Mormonism to work in a few distinctly Mormon phrases such as "pure and delightsome" and "time and all eternity", but in still more ways is widely inaccurate, including a depiction of a Mormon baptism consisting of a vaguely Catholic hand gesture of blessing and standing about knee deep in water.

The copy of the film I saw was mostly fair, but there were times when the actors facial features became indistinct, almost bleached, this 95 year old movie could do with a good restoration. For its historical novelty and strangely endearing oddness I give Trapped by the Mormons ***.