Category Archives: Adventure

Barbarella (1968, Roger Vadim)

Posted on 16 January 2013 | Leave a comment

In terms of badness, Barbarella is phenomenal. One could spend his or her time on the gender politics–someone must have in the last forty years. The film takes place in a post-gender future, where Jane Fonda’s titular character is the most relied upon person in the galaxy. However, the president (Claude Dauphin) spends the entire time he’s giving her a mission ogling her.

A few costume changes later–director Vadim’s approach to the film is to undress Fonda, put her in something scanty, tear off those scanty closes, get her undressed and then repeat–there’s some exposition explaining future sexuality. Fonda, and the boring people of Earth, are also post-sex. Luckily, Fonda comes across a real man, Ugo Tognazzi, who shows her the way.

Those sociological aspects aside, Barbarella‘s a complete bore. While the sets are enormous, they’re ineptly realized. Claude Renoir’s photography contracts them even more. Vadim’s direction is atrocious–he has dead space at the sides of his Panavision frame, can’t direct the sci-fi aspects, can’t direct the conversations, can’t even figure out head room. Barbarella would be funnier in its badness if the writing weren’t so terrible.

As the lead, Fonda’s bad, but she’s nothing compared to the rest. Tognazzi’s laughable, but John Phillip Law and Anita Pallenberg are much worse. Milo O’Shea is rather funny, presumably intentionally. One just feels bad for David Hemmings though, especially in those tights.

Barbarella‘s only surprise is its last line, a sublime (albeit obvious), profound observation.

CREDITS

Directed by Roger Vadim; screenplay by Terry Southern and Vadim, based on the comic book by Jean-Claude Forest; director of photography, Claude Renoir; edited by Victoria Mercanton; music by Bob Crewe and Charles Fox; production designer, Mario Garbuglia; produced by Dino De Laurentiis; released by Paramount Pictures.

Starring Jane Fonda (Barbarella), John Phillip Law (Pygar), Anita Pallenberg (The Great Tyrant), Milo O’Shea (Concierge), Marcel Marceau (Professor Ping), Claude Dauphin (President of Earth), Véronique Vendell (Captain Moon), Serge Marquand (Captain Sun), Catherine Chevallier (Stomoxys), Marie Therese Chevallier (Glossina), David Hemmings (Dildano) and Ugo Tognazzi (Mark Hand).

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Posted in 1968, Action, Adventure, Color, Comedy, English, Fantasy, France, Italy, Paramount Pictures, Sci-Fi

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Mad Max (1979, George Miller)

Posted on 2 January 2013 | Leave a comment

While the low budget undoubtedly plays a hand in it, Mad Max is the epitome of narrative efficiency. It should have a big concept–a slightly post-apocalyptic future (but people still vacation and get ice cream and the beaches are nice) where the big cities are (probably) gone and the rural highways are run by gangs, the cops just another one of them–but it doesn’t. The script from James McCausland and director Miller spends no time on exposition… ever.

Instead, Max opens with a pursuit, quickly introduces the good guys, and moves on. McCausland and Miller’s narrative structure is very plain. Good guys Mel Gibson and Steve Bisley go after bad guys, things happen, then more things happen. The beauty of Max, besides David Eggby’s photography and Cliff Hayes and Tony Paterson’s astounding editing, is in the scenes. Even when they’re poorly acted (the main villain, Hugh Keays-Byrne, is laughably bad), Miller’s basing them on Western scene templates and they’re extremely engaging.

But the film’s not entirely Western–Brian May’s score is half Bernard Herrmann Hitchcock homage (to fit Miller’s similar style of certain scenes) and half sublime.

Playing the titular character, Gibson doesn’t even become the protagonist until over halfway through (Bisley’s closer to it in the first half). For a fast and cheap action picture, Miller’s telling a distressing, human story.

Nice supporting work from Joanne Samuel and Geoff Parry helps.

Max is sometimes excessive–not to mention homophobic–but never slow; it’s masterful work.

CREDITS

Directed by George Miller; screenplay by James McCausland and Miller, based on a story by Byron Kennedy and Miller; director of photography, David Eggby; edited by Cliff Hayes and Tony Paterson; music by Brian May; produced by Kennedy; released by Roadshow Entertainment.

Starring Mel Gibson (Max Rockatansky), Joanne Samuel (Jessie Rockatansky), Hugh Keays-Byrne (Toecutter), Steve Bisley (Jim Goose), Tim Burns (Johnny the Boy), Geoff Parry (Bubba Zanetti), Roger Ward (Fifi Macaffee), David Bracks (Mudguts), Bertrand Cadart (Clunk), Sheila Florance (May Swaisey) and Vincent Gil (The Nightrider).

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Posted in 1979, Action, Adventure, Australia, Color, English, Roadshow Entertainment, Thriller

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Maverick (1994, Richard Donner)

Posted on 1 January 2013 | Leave a comment

Maverick is a lot of fun. In fact, it’s so much fun, when the film runs into problems in its second act, it’s impossible to be disappointed. It’s still so likable, one just feels bad it doesn’t maintain its quality.

There are two major problems. The first is the music. When the film starts–and for the majority of the run time–it’s a Western. It’s a very funny Western and has an affable Randy Newman score. Then it becomes a poker game movie… and the music inexplicably becomes modern country Western music. There’s one painful montage in particular where the music choice saps the energy of the film.

The second problem is the conclusion. William Goldman has a lot of fun with the twists at Maverick‘s finish and they’re nice to watch unravel… but it’s still a lot of padding. Alfred Molina’s character, for example, gets summarized in the conclusion instead of getting his due.

Molina gives the film’s most impressive performance. He’s creepy and dangerous; a very physical performance without much show of force. Just fantastic.

Mel Gibson’s great, so’s Jodie Foster, so’s James Garner. But the film’s made for them. I guess Foster, who doesn’t usually bring as much personality, is the standout of the three.

Graham Greene’s hilarious too.

Donner does fine. He and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond conceive an excellent Western. Donner primarily concentrates on the mood and the actors. Zsigmond and the scenery handle the rest.

Maverick is a joy, even with its bumps.

CREDITS

Directed by Richard Donner; screenplay by William Goldman, based on the television series created by Roy Huggins; director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond; edited by Stuart Baird and Michael Kelly; music by Randy Newman; production designer, Thomas E. Sanders; produced by Donner and Bruce Davey; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Mel Gibson (Bret Maverick), Jodie Foster (Annabelle Bransford), James Garner (Marshal Zane Cooper), Graham Greene (Joseph), Alfred Molina (Angel), James Coburn (Commodore Duvall), Dub Taylor (Room Clerk), Geoffrey Lewis (Matthew Wicker), Paul L. Smith (The Archduke), Dan Hedaya (Twitchy, Riverboat Poker Player), Dennis Fimple (Stuttering), Denver Pyle (Old Gambler on Riverboat), Clint Black (Sweet-Faced Gambler) and Max Perlich (Johnny Hardin).

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Posted in 1994, Action, Adventure, Color, Comedy, English, Thriller, USA, Warner Bros., Western

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A Pig’s Tail (2012, Sarah Cox)

Posted on 4 December 2012 | Leave a comment

A Pig’s Tail is a lovely little short, thanks to the hands-on Aardman stop motion, Cox’s straightforward but enthusiastic direction, and Catherine Taylor’s voice acting as the protagonist. The short tells the story of a determined piglet who doesn’t exactly like being in a factory farm. She decides to do something about it.

The U.S. Humane Society co-produced Tail, so it has an educational component and that component occasionally gets in the way of good narrative. For example, the farmer–who is more traditionally animated (in a deft move)–is almost more sympathetic than the pigs. Especially given how Tail shows the reality of the brutality a starving, abused animal will render.

It’s almost too short for its own good–running about five minutes. Cox and her cast could probably have held up for a lot longer. As is, Tail is still a finely produced, delicately made film.

CREDITS

Directed by Sarah Cox; written by Matthew Walker; director of photography, Nathan Sale; edited by Victoria Stevens; music by Steven Delopoulos; produced by Jason Fletcher-Bartholomew and Christine Gutleben; released by The Humane Society of the United States.

Starring Catherine Taylor (Ginger), Sophie Angelson (Mama Pig), Heidi Lynch (Mean Piglet), James Arnold Parker (The Farmer) and Kaia Rose (Nice Piglet).

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Posted in 2012, Adventure, Animation, Color, English, Family, Humane Society of the United States, Short, UK, USA

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Sector 7 (2011, Kim Ji-hun)

Posted on 16 November 2012 | Leave a comment

Sector 7 is about twenty-two years late. It’s another “Alien with sea monsters;” 1989 had two and a half major entries in that genre. It does, however, add one interesting element.

Wait, I guess it’s more Aliens with sea monsters. The female lead, Ha Ji-won, is more Ripley in tough mode. Anyway, the interesting element is her love interest, Oh Ji-ho. He’s a standard action movie leading man. So Sector 7 has a couple of romantically involved action heroes. Sadly, Nick and Nora they are not.

The big problem with Sector 7, besides its nine or ten false endings, is cinematographer Lee Doo-man. It was also released in 3D, which must have been hideous, because Lee can’t match any of the CG backdrops with his lighting. Most of the time, he shoots dark (presumably to be cost effective with rendering the sea monster), but the bright daytime scenes are horrific.

Kim’s a fairly ambitious director when it comes to his composition and action. He’s lousy with actors, but it only really matters with Ha; she’s terrible. The rest of the cast carries through pretty well.

Oh is good, as is Ahn Seong-gi. Park Cheol-min and Song Sae-byeok are great as the surprisingly touching comic relief team.

The film shifts from being a gender workplace inequalities picture to a pro-oil drilling picture to a monster movie and, finally, to a political picture.

Plot confusion, Ha’s acting and Lee’s photography aside, it’s not awful.

CREDITS

Directed by Kim Ji-hun; written and produced by Yun Je-gyun; director of photography, Lee Doo-man; released by CJ Entertainment.

Starring Ha Ji-won (Cha Hae-joon), Ahn Sung-kee (Lee Jeong-man), Oh Ji-ho (Kim Dong-soo), Park Cheol-min (Do Sang-goo), Song Sae-byeok (Go Jong-yoon), Park Jeong-hak (Hwang In-hyeok), Lee Han-wi (Jang Moon-hyeong), Park Yeong-soo (Jang Chi-soon), Cha Ye-ryeon (Park Hyeon-jeong) and Min Seok (Yoon Hyeon-woo).

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Posted in 2011, Action, Adventure, CJ Entertainment, Color, Horror, Korean, Sci-Fi, South Korea

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The Most Dangerous Game (1932, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel)

Posted on 12 November 2012 | Leave a comment

Running about an hour, The Most Dangerous Game shouldn’t be boring. But it somehow manages. Worse, the boring stuff comes at the end; directors Schoedsack and Pichel drag out the conclusion with a false ending or two.

The film doesn’t have much to recommend it. That laborious ending wipes short runtime off the board, leaving nothing but good sets, Henry W. Gerrard’s photography and Leslie Banks’s glorious scene-chewing performance as the bad guy. James Ashmore Creelman’s script occasionally has good dialogue, most of it goes to Banks. Unfortunately, Creelman’s script doesn’t have a good story.

Still, the script isn’t Game‘s problem. Simply, Directors Schoedsack and Pichel do a rather bad job. They rely heavily on second person close-ups–the actors are performing for the viewer, showing exaggerated emotion; it’s a terrible choice. Joel McCrea seems silly in the lead and Fay Wray is often just plain bad. She has a couple good moments, early on, but they’re amid some atrocious ones.

The hunt–if you don’t know what kind of animal is “the most dangerous game,” I won’t spoil it (though you should)–starts up over halfway into the film. Here Schoedsack and Pichel present a really boring chase sequence through the magnificent jungle sets. Their action is two dimensional. They also never establish their setting, which would have made the action play better… and give Game more weight.

Robert Armstrong is hilarious, but he isn’t not enough to save the picture.

And Max Steiner’s score is dreadful.

CREDITS

Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel; screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman, based on the story by Richard Connell; director of photography, Henry W. Gerrard; edited by Archie Marshek; music by Max Steiner; released by RKO Radio Pictures.

Starring Joel McCrea (Robert Rainsford), Fay Wray (Eve Trowbridge), Robert Armstrong (Martin Trowbridge), Leslie Banks (Count Zaroff), Noble Johnson (Ivan), Steve Clemente (Tartar) and William B. Davidson (Captain).

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Posted in 1932, Adventure, Black and White, English, Horror, Mystery, RKO Radio Pictures, Russian, Thriller, USA

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Extranjero (2011, Crinan Campbell and Daniel Lumb)

Posted on 8 November 2012 | Leave a comment

Extranjero is some exceptionally pointless, exceptionally pretentious swaddle concerning an illegal immigrant (Cristian Cardenas) who can fly. He actually just hovers and then maybe disappears. About the only good thing about the short is the special effects of him flying. Otherwise, it toggles between boring and confusing.

Directors Campbell and Lumb do a fine enough job when it comes to composition, but they have fast editing and jerky camera motion to hide their utter lack of ability when it comes to narrative structure. They have no story, so it can’t have any flow; they at least realize they need to hide it… I guess that self-awareness is a good thing.

Extranjero also gets some credit for having brief end credits. It’s a five minute short and it gets long in the tooth around minute one. Long credits would just make it worse.

But the special effects work is impressive.

CREDITS

Written, directed and edited by Crinan Campbell and Daniel Lumb; music by Shervin Shaeri; produced by Jo Coombes, Hannah Cooper and Mark Farrington.

Starring Cristian Cardenas (Extranjero) and Evan Regueira (Man on Train).

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Posted in 2011, Adventure, Color, Drama, Sci-Fi, Short, Spanish, UK

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North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)

Posted on 26 October 2012 | Leave a comment

North by Northwest seems a little like a Technicolor version of an early Hollywood Hitchcock–the regular man combating the bad guys against incredible odds (at an American monument no less), but it’s a lot more.

The film’s a tightly constructed proto-blockbuster; there’s not a bad frame in the film, not an imperfect scene. North moves steadily, its speed sometimes increasing and rarely decreasing. With that barreling pace, it always seemed to be just over ninety minutes. I was shocked to discover it runs over two hours.

It’s hard to imagine the film without Cary Grant, whose comic timing is essential to the picture. There’s one scene where Grant looks at the camera just for a moment and it feels like a throwback to Bringing Up Baby. Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman waste no time establishing Grant’s character (beyond a memorable name). The rest, done with Grant and his secretary talking, takes one short scene.

Speaking of Lehman’s script, he gets in a lot of great jokes. Hitchcock just works them into the narrative; its all so grandiose (even before the finish), there’s more than enough room for them.

The filmmakers get away with so much, for instance, one can’t even hold Jessie Royce Landis’s disappearance against them.

She, James Mason, Martin Landau and Eva Marie Saint, they’re all outstanding. It’s Cary Grant’s film, of course, but the supporting cast–can’t forget Leo G. Carroll (who’s dryly hilarious)–make it even better.

North by Northwest is a perfect film.

CREDITS

Produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock; written by Ernest Lehman; director of photography, Robert Burks; edited by George Tomasini; music by Bernard Herrmann; production designer, Robert F. Boyle; released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Starring Cary Grant (Roger O. Thornhill), Eva Marie Saint (Eve Kendall), James Mason (Phillip Vandamm), Jessie Royce Landis (Clara Thornhill), Leo G. Carroll (The Professor), Josephine Hutchinson (Mrs. Townsend), Philip Ober (Lester Townsend), Martin Landau (Leonard), Adam Williams (Valerian), Edward Platt (Victor Larrabee), Robert Ellenstein (Licht) and John Beradino (Sergeant Emile Klinger).

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Posted in 1959, Adventure, Color, English, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, USA

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High Road to China (1983, Brian G. Hutton)

Posted on 25 October 2012 | Leave a comment

Upon hearing John Barry’s beautiful opening titles music, I realized it was unlikely High Road to China would live up to its score. It does not. It does, however, at times, come rather close.

The film takes place in the twenties, with Bess Armstrong as a flapper who hires WWI veteran Tom Selleck to fly her to Afghanistan to find her father. Selleck’s rough and tumble, Armstrong’s perky and assured; they don’t get along. But unfortunately, Road isn’t a travel picture. The 1,200 mile part of their journey is done completely between scenes. It cuts down on the bantering between the two–but also cuts down on their expected romance.

About thirty minutes in, after they reach Afghanistan, the plotting becomes more predictable. They encounter a warlord–Brian Blessed camping it up in brown-face–and have to escape. Then they get another passenger (Cassandra Gava, in the film’s worst performance) and discover they have to keep going. It should be a quest picture… but it’s not.

Jack Weston is excellent as Selleck’s sidekick. For most of the runtime, the film’s salient character relationship is between the two men; both are broken down and marking time. None of the other actors make an impression–except Robert Morley. He’s awful.

Armstrong and Selleck are both fantastic; Armstrong gets a little more to do.

Besides the bad plotting, the film’s real drawback is director Hutton. Even when he’s competent, his work is never good enough for the actors.

Still, it’s not bad.

CREDITS

Directed by Brian G. Hutton; screenplay by Sandra Weintraub and S. Lee Pogostin, based on the novel by Jon Cleary; director of photography, Ronnie Taylor; edited by John Jympson; music by John Barry; production designer, Robert W. Laing; produced by Fred Weintraub; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Bess Armstrong (Eve), Tom Selleck (O’Malley), Jack Weston (Struts), Wilford Brimley (Bradley Tozer), Robert Morley (Bentik), Brian Blessed (Suleman Khan), Cassandra Gava (Alessa), Michael Sheard (Charlie), Lynda La Plante (Lina), Timothy Carlton (Officer), Shayur Mehta (Ahmed), Terry Richards (Ginger), Robert Lee (Zura), Anthony Chinn (General Wong), Ric Young (Kim Su Lee), Timothy Bateson (Alec Wedgeworth) and Wolf Kahler (Von Hess).

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Posted in 1983, Adventure, Color, Drama, English, German, Hong Kong, Romance, USA, War, Warner Bros., Yugoslavia

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The Hobbit (1966, Gene Deitch)

Posted on 4 October 2012 | Leave a comment

Director Deitch does a couple brilliant things with The Hobbit. First, he condenses a novel of some three hundred pages to eleven minutes. I’m fairly sure it’s not a faithful adaptation, but there’s a wizard, a hobbit and a ring so it’s fine by me. Second, he turns The Hobbit into a folk tale. Or at least a fable. It feels classical and traditional, not an adaptation of something written in the twentieth century.

The film’s barely animated–I think the most “animation” is the moving of the wizard’s arm when he’s showing Bilbo Baggins directions on a map. Instead, Deitch uses thoughtful editing and camera movement to imply motion. For this approach to succeed, however, Deitch needs an outstanding narrator….

And Herb Lass is perfect. His narration conveys humor and excitement, along with the suggestion he doesn’t know how the story’s going to go.

It’s a fabulous little short.

CREDITS

Directed by Gene Deitch; screenplay by Deitch, based on a novel by J.R.R. Tolkien; music by Václav Lidl; production designer, Adolf Born; produced by William L. Snyder.

Narrated by Herb Lass.

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Posted in 1966, Adventure, Animation, Color, Czech Republic, English, Fantasy, Short, USA

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