Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

Set around nine months after the conclusion of events in Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: Far From Home deals some what with the after effects of happenings in that movie, though I think still underplays them. Peter Parker and friends go on a summer school trip to Europe, they encounter a mysterious threat at several location set pieces, Jake Gyllenhaal shows up, Jon Favreau's beard is discussed, and if Marvel can't get the rights back to Spider-Man they have just written themselves into a tremendous plot hole. A pleasant enough breather of a film it's success is in stepping back a little and doing something meant to be more fun the harrowing. ***

Critters 4 (1991)

Critters 4 is the weakest of the Critters film's, the first one I did not like (I only recently learned there is 5th Critters film, this one with a 2019 release date, so I'll have to keep an eye out for it). Sadly Critters 4 just isn't very interesting. This is Critters in space, Charlie gets himself frozen in an alien sample pod, and thawed out in 2045 by a group of space scavengers. These space scavengers are human and one of them has never been to Earth, so there has been a lot of change since 1992. The majority of the film is spent on a recently abandoned space station, and again its just not very interesting. This movie is mostly of note for the presence of Angela Bassett, then just on the verge of stardom. *

Critters 3 (1991)

Critters 3 is chiefly of note as the film debut of a then 16 year old Leonardo DiCaprio, though he looks even younger. In this film some Critters get into a run down apartment building in what by implication appears to be Kansas City. Though it has a 0% Rotten Tomato's score and is cliché and mostly lazy, I honestly kind of liked it in a guilty pleasure sort of way. I'm a sucker for a 'small group fighting to survive in a confided place' film, and this fits the bill in a surprisingly family friendly sort of way. I oddly admire that effort was taken to give Aimee Brooks and DiCaprio actual story arcs, with Brooks's being mildly sophisticated, this lift's the film from *1/2 to **. Surprisingly watchable.  

The Woman in Red (1984)

Adapted from the French farce Pardon Mon Affaire, The Woman in Red was written, directed, and stared the late Gene Wilder. The story of a San Francisco city employee's single minded pursuit of an affair with a model (a pre Weird Science Kelly LeBrock) who is working on an advertising campaign for the city, this is the kind of cynical adultery comedy which I most associate with another Wilder, Billy. While it operates under this basic framework Gene Wilders comic persona is his own, he has a very unique, ideocentric humor, he is that rare performer whose comedy is somehow both dry and manic at the same time. A comedy inherently kind of sleazy in its subject matter, it's also witty and sophisticated enough to be quasi- high brow. Good supporting part for Charles Grodin, his sub plot is strangely progressive for a movie it's time. This is also the film from which the Oscar winning Stevie Wonder song "I Just Called to Say I Love You" comes from. ***

Critters 2 (1988)

Fairly organic sequel off the original Critters, takes place again in Grover's Bend now about 2 years after the events of the first film. Scott Grimes comes back to town to visit his grandmother for the Easter holiday. Now Critters left some eggs as a teaser at the end of the first film, there was about three such eggs but somehow in the intervening years and through the magic of lazy writing they multiplied to a couple of dozen, many of which end up painted and planted around the garden for the church Easter egg hunt, you can see where this is going. Charlie comes back with the bounty hunters, turns out he's been helping them in space for the last few years. Barry Corbin replaces M. Emmet Walsh as Sheriff Harv, and Liane Curtis is introduced as a love interest for Grimes, she has a nice reassuring presence, too bad she didn't have more of a career. **

Echo in the Canyon (2019)

Documentary on the "Laurel Canyon Sound" that came out of California in the mid-60's. Artists from Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, The Mamas and The Papas, The Association, they all lived within a short distance of each other in L.A.'s Laurel Canyon, often knew each other, and developed an iconic style and what is still some of the best music out there. The story is framed by a tribute album and concert by contemporary recording artists in 2015 lead by Jakob Dylan. Great music, great interviews, great stories, I really enjoyed it. ***

Mike Wallace is Here (2019)

Mike Wallace is Here, the new documentary film about legendary newsman Mike Wallace begins with its star interviewing Fox New personality Bill O'Reilly for a 60 Minutes profile piece during the George W. Bush years. At one point O'Reilly, a prickly interview subject tells Wallace that he can blame himself for O'Reilly's success, claiming that he modeled himself after the news icon. The look on Mike Wallace's face is kind of fantastic, there is a mixture of things going on their, surprise, some incredulity, he is not liking what he's just heard, and a little bit of critical self reflection. Wallace himself was a complicated man with a long and varied, and sometimes counterintuitive career.

A Jew from Massachusetts Wallace describes himself as a very self conscious child who didn't think much of his own appearance. He gravitated to radio but by virtue of right place right time ended up in television where he did all sorts of things, game show host, company pitch man, even star of a short lived early television series called Stand by for Crime, which lasted about seven and a half months. He got into journalism by way of interviewing, in the mid 50's he was given a late night interview program broadcast only in the New York area called Night Beat. In order to mix things up from the standard soft ball interview programs of the time Wallace decided to have all his guests thoroughly researched and ask them tough questions. Despite, or perhaps because of the confrontational style, guests came, the program was a success and eventually went national on ABC as The Mike Wallace Interview. That program was canceled do to suites from unhappy guests and Wallace eventually ended up on CBS, first on their morning show and later as a correspondent.

As a correspondent Wallace followed the Nixon Campaign in 67 and 68, he got to know Nixon and various members of the inner circle pretty well and there was enough mutual like there that Nixon invited Wallace to join the campaign as official spokesman. The offer was tempting, but then Wallace's long time producer Don Hewitt came to him with an offer to do the kind of hard hitting interviews he missed doing, he was putting together a new concept, a television "news magazine" he was going to call 60 Minutes.

Of course from there the rest is history. 60 Minutes was a surprise success and today after more then 50 years on the air it is still, remarkably, one of televisions highest rated network programs. Wallace had a long, career defining stint with the program, not retiring until he hit the 40 year mark in 2008. Wallace would die 4 years later.

The film focuses of course on Wallace's journalistic career, the interviews and the investigative reporting for which he became best known. Some of the stories are remarkable. Of particular note is a 1979 interview with Iran's new leader the Ayatollah Khomeini, in which the theocratic leader calls for the overthrow of the more secular Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by religious radicals two years later. There was the libel suit by General William Westmorland, who had once been commander of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War, Westmorland would eventually drop the suite. There was the interview with tobacco company whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand in the mid 90's, an interview that CBS first sought to suppress, but which Wallace fought for and was eventually aired, it is the basis for the theatrical film The Insider staring Russell Crowe and in which Wallace is played by Christopher Plummer, casting which he took as a great compliment.

Less explored, though not entirely neglected is Wallace's personal life, he was a very private man, a self confessed bad husband (he was married 4 times) and absentee father. Plumed in most detail is Wallace's reaction to the death of his eldest son in Greece in 1962, Wallace had gone searching for the young man and was the one who ultimately found the body. Wither this death was accident or suicide is hard to say from what little information is provided in the film, but it would haunt Wallace. So too would depression, which onset a couple of decades into his 60 Minutes career and which he generally sought to hide, at least at first, finally facing up to a failed suicide attempt in an interview with his colleague Morley Safer.

This film is composed entirely of period footage, no present day talking head putting things into perspective, though the film is still in fact composed principally of talking heads because its mainly old interviews. It is a collage, and a supremely effective one, a portrait of a news man through the news, it's Mike Wallace presented the way he was meant to be seen. ***1/2

My Life in Ruins (2009)

While the independently produced film My Big Fat Greek Wedding unexpectedly became the highest grossing romantic comedy of all time in 2002, that success did not translate into main stream stardom for its star and writer Nia Vardalos. So periodically Ms. Vardalos has attempted, and largely failed, to catch lighting in a bottle again, most obviously with 2016's My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, but also with this film My Life in Ruins. My Life in Ruins stars Vardalos as a professor of Greek antiquities reduced to being the tour guide on the B bus of a low rent tour company in Greece. She is depressed, how did my life come to this, I'm going to quite my job, then one tour changes everything when a widower played Richard Drefuss teaches her to be more positive, and she ultimately finds love with a bus driver named Poupie (Alexis Georgoluis). This movie has a 9% score on Rotten Tomato's, it's bad, and trite, and lazy and cheesy and seldom funny, but I really kind of liked it. Yes I enjoyed watching this I am a little ashamed to say. It's like a McDonald's hamburger of a movie, you know its not "good" but sometimes it still tastes "good" and you enjoy it. I think two of the reasons this movie worked for me is because 1) I have been on a tour group a time or two and can relate to that, and 2) I saw this movie with a group of co-workers and listening to some of them laugh as hard as they did really upsold the movie to me. The perfect kind of movie to play on a tour bus My Life in Ruins was a guilty pleasure viewing experience, but I doubt it would play as well on a second sit through. **

Critters (1986)

For some time now I have been wanting to make my way through a classic 80's horror franchise like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street. I have seen none of those movies and at some point would like to see at least a few, principally for reasons of film literacy, in this case low brow film literacy. Anyway as a possible appetizer, and because I saw an intriguing video about the franchise on Red Letter Media, I decided to view the four films in the Critters series. I have seen none of these films before, and until recently I knew next to nothing about the series other then finding the poster kind of scary as a child.

The first film Critters is very much an 80's movie in the Stranger Things sense of an 80's movie. If I didn't know it was an actual period product I could almost believe it was an homage there too. The Critters are, basically Gremlins, arguably more mean spirited, there's some Invaders from Mars here, maybe a little Last Starfighter. The opening sequence in space reminded me some of Night of the Creeps, and Dee Wallace is the mom in this so that's multiple 80's references, there is even a scene where a Critter interacts with a stuffed E.T. toy, which is kind of meta. Critters also known as Crites are a sort of galactic pest, little porcupine things with veracious appetites. Eight of them escape from an alien prison asteroid and are pursued by a pair of shape shifting bounty hunters, an invitation to various visual gages.

The Critters land in rural Grover's Bend Kansas, they attack a farm house while the space bounty hunters end up attacking the town. This is the film debut of Scott Grimes, then around 14 as Brad Brown. Don Keith Opper is Charlie McFadden, he's kind of a little slow, believes in aliens even before the Critters arrival and is apparently the only human character to be in all four films. M. Emmett Walsh is the sheriff, Billy Zane and Ethan Phillips have bit parts. It's a movie full of those requite 80's movie beats, it's formula but in a good way. A quite likeable film and not nearly as intense as I would have thought it would be as child, its rated PG-13 but I suspect most kids says 9 or over would be fine with it. I am going to give it a **1/2 in quality because it is more or less assembled from used parts and conventions, and not super cleverly either,  but it plays closer to a *** a fun watch.

You, Me & Dupree (2006)

I had no particular desire to see You, Me & Dupree, the only reason I watched the movie is because I got it in a mystery movie DVD pack. It was honestly not as bad as I had expected it to be, though I could hardly call it good. Dupree is the loser friend, played by Owen Wilson doing his usual shtick, who moves in with a newly wed couple, Kate Hudson (who looks beautiful) and Matt Dillon, who I assume is only in this because he was in the Oscar wining movie Crash the previous year which had briefly inflated the potential sale-ability of his name on a marque. Seth Rogan and Bill Hader are in this too though they are not yet stars, as is Michael Douglas but he is just cashing in a paycheck. It's not a particularly gross out comedy, which surprised me a little, nor is it quite as dumb as a lot of the so-called comedy out there, but it's not really funny (I laughed maybe once or twice), and plays everything really safe and conventional. If you haven't seen this movie, you've still kind of seen this movie if you've read my one sentence plot description above. *1/2

The Gay Divorcee (1934)

The Gay Divorcee is probably best remembered for featuring the first Oscar winning best song, 'The Continental', which is catchy but perhaps overplayed in the movie, that production number near the end is 15-20 minutes long. An adaptation of the Broadway musical The Gay Divorce, the title was changed to The Gay Divorcee under the studio logic (in this case RKO) that while a divorce should not be depicted as happy a divorcee might be, today of course any connotation of the word 'gay' can potentially be applied to a divorce.

This is an Astaire/ Rodgers vehicle with a somewhat complicated plot, Fred is Guy Holden a famous America dancer traveling Europe with his good friend a lawyer named Egbert (Edward Everett Horton). At disembarkation in England he meets, falls head over heals in love with, but makes a bad impression on Mimi (Ginger) who is there to meet her aunt Hortense (Alice Brady). Unbeknownst to Guy, Mimi is actually married, but seeking a divorce from her older geologist husband with whom she does not live, but who is refusing divorce because Mimi comes from money and he uses her as a kind of personal credit card (those high living geologists). In course of the story Egbert becomes Mimi's lawyer and hits on the idea of faking an affair in an effort to force Mimi's husband to seek a divorce as a face saving measure. But who to play the other man in this scenario.... ultimately not who you think.

Seeming inconsequential in many ways The Gay Divorce is still a lite, enjoyable story, a likable movie with a fun cast, some nice musical numbers and occasionally wry humor. Edward Everett Horton who principally played a lot of small film roles is here the secondary male lead, he's pretty amusing in this and even gets to have a musical  number with a pre-star  Betty Grable  called ' Let's K-nock K-nees'.  This is a movie where the casting elevates fairly mediocre martial into something that is memorable and a film which I would happily see again. ***1/2

Norma Rae (1979)

The film Norma Rae is inspired by the true story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a North Carolina textile worker who fought at much personal risk and sacrifice to unionize the plant at which she was employed. A controversial figure, a poor, female, union organizer from the south her story wouldn't seem to have the makings of box office gold. However the fictionalized screen play treatment of her story by the husband and wife screen writing team of Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch was incredibly good (also incredibly impressive is that as of this writing Harriet is still alive at the age of 102).

The screenplay attracted the attention of Martin Ritt, best known at the time as the director of the multiple Oscar winning 1963 film HUD. Ritt got 20th Century Fox to agree to make the film on the condition that he cast a big star in the lead role, the thinking being that the movie was a prestige flick that probably wouldn't make money but they wanted to minimizes it's losses. After being repeatedly turned down by the big stars he tried to recruit Ritt was turned on to the former sitcom star Sally Field after seeing her Emmy winning performance in min-series Sybil. Ritt told Field he believed she could do justice to the role of Norma Rae and would fight for he with the studio if she really wanted it, she did. Eventually Ritt prevailed, the movie was made and in addition to being a critical darling, winning Ms. Field her first Oscar, it was a box office smash making $22 million off of a $4.5 million budget.

Norma Rae is very strong film making, its certainly rooted in its time but it still feels fresh. Characters aren't as stereotypical as they might at first appear, and the platonic relationship between unsophisticated southern country girl  Norma and the Jewish union man sent from New York to organize the factory (Ron Liebman) is just a treasure. Good supporting parts for Beau Bridges and Pat Hingle. I was mighty impressed, it exceeded my not low expectations for the film, a marvel and a very fulfilling watch. ****

Over the Top (1987)

Over the Top is the semi-famed competitive arm wrestling film that Sylvester Stallone made for The Cannon Group in the late 1980's. While it's not good its 80's cheese makes it watchable, as does trying to solve the mystery of  just what Stallone was trying to accomplish with this film, are we meant to take it straight, is it a self parody? Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk a truck driver and competitive arm wrester who is trying to win the affections of his estranged son Michael (David Mendenhall), a boy who could be anywhere from 10 to 16 it was never clear to me. It starts out as a road movie, then it becomes about a custody dispute with Robert Loggia, and in the end we are at the International Competitive Arm Wresting Championship's in Vegas and their are strong echo's of Rocky. This ridicules film was somehow co-written by two Oscar winning screen writers, Stallone himself (Rocky, 1976) and Striling Sillipahnt (In the Heat of the Night, 1967). That this movie exists just continues to puzzle me. **

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood grafts a fictional story about a has been television actor and his long time stunt double onto events leading up to the real life murder of actress Sharon Tate and her houseguests by acolytes of cult figure Charlie Manson. The very idea of making a movie like this is extremely tricky and poses some obvious risks of taste and ethics, which is why I am kind of surprised just how much I enjoyed it and that it is in fact, despite the apparent subject matter, one of Quentin Tarantino's more upbeat films.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, former star of a late 50's early 60's NBC western called "Bounty Law". Dalton left the popular show to try and jump start a movie career that didn't work out, now it's 1969 and Rick is a struggling working actor who pays the bill's by doing guest shots on episodic TV, and a producer named Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino) is trying to convince him to go Italy and make spaghetti westerns, something Rick is loath to do. Rick's former stunt man turned gopher Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is himself semi-black balled in the industry, owing to a wide spread suspicion that he.... well I won't spoil it. Dalton lives in the house next to the one occupied by the actress Sharon Tate and her husband the director Roman Polanski on Cielo Drive near Beverly Hills, this provides the obvious link between our fictional story and real events. While the film keeps its principal focus on Rick and Cliff time is spent following Sharon Tate, played with wide eyed delight by Margot Robbie.

Unlike the bulk of director/writer Quentin Tarantino's film work, and especially notable given the real world basis of the film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not a particularly tense film until the last hour our so. Running 2 hours and 45 minutes this film is in no rush to get to its destination, and much of the time is breezily paced. Good portions of the film are devoted to characters driving around the Los Angeles of 1969, a city so meticulously recreated it's the closest you'll get to being there outside of a time machine (unless of course you actually visited or lived in Los Angeles in 1969 like the director did). The detail and feeling of verisimilitude is so strong that I found it kind of moving. Tarantino plays tribute to a time, a place, and a mid century American pop culture that he loves unironically, and it comes through as a very affection portrait.

Tarantino films are very uniquely structured, the movie is simultaneously rambling, and extremely well, even tightly put together. The film abounds with satisfying little nuggets, pieces of business, obscure references and homages, several rather notable ones to earlier films in the directors canon. It is loaded with supporting characters, many of them based directly on real people. It is a film not to be spoiled so I won't say much concerning the story, but to me this movie worked on pretty much all levels. I had to see it again on the big screen, full price, about a week after my first viewing, something I very rarely do and have never done for a Tarantino film before. Arguably not one of his greatest movies, those career defining pieces came earlier in the career, but perhaps this is his most personal film. I highly recommend it if you have an appreciation for Hollywood history and aren't too squeamish. ****

Dark Phoenix (2019)

Dark Phoenix is notably not titled  X-Men: Dark Phoenix, it is sans the titular prefix of its franchise brethren. This is the 4th film in X-Men prequel franchise and something like 10th overall for big screen X-Man and/or Wolverine films and also the 2nd cinematic telling of the Jane Grey "Dark Phoenix" storyline from the comics. This film went through a lot of changes in making its way to the big screen, the series signature director Bryan Singer is out, felled by continued sexual assault charges, he is replaced Simon Kinberg who feels downright low key compared to Singer, who was all about throwing everything at the screen, culminating the previous film X-Men: Apocalypse which was a mess of too much. That film ended with a tease of Mr. Sinster (who I remembered from the 1990's Fox animated series) as this films villain but nowhere does he make an appearance in the story, nor does Olivia Munn's Psylocke who I seem to recall actually seeing in early posters for this film. Instead we has Jessica Chastain as a shape shifting alien, their is nothing special about this part almost anyone would have done so it did not call out for an actress of her caliber, it's simply an exercise in cast padding and easy paycheck for Ms. Chastain.

I liked this film more then I ever expected to, I did not go in with high hopes so the bar was low, low enough that the overall competence of the film making careered the proceedings a little above the watchable mark. It's not that it did anything super well but that it failed to do things too badly. The early 1990's setting was not overplayed like the period settings of the previous 3 films, it barley registered beyond period cars, TV graphics, and the space shuttle. The plot is silly but not overmuch, the actions sequences refreshingly restrained, It didn't feel like the film was trying to outdo everything before it which was nice, I'm suffering spectacle fatigue and its best not to inflame it. This is to be the last film the current X-Men film series, future films are set to be part of the shared Marvel Cinematic Universe and I was happy that Dark Phoenix provided an actual and reasonably satisfying ending to a movie franchise that began back in the year 2000. Congratulations to Jennifer Lawrence, you don't have to wear that blue makeup anymore. Really a ** but felt like a **1/2 do to directorial inflation.