Category: Directors De

Agent Carter (2013, Louis D’Esposito)

Agent Carter is a terrible execution of a nice idea. The short is supposed to follow-up on Hayley Atwell’s character after the Captain America movie. A post-script for a supporting character… love that idea.

Sadly, Carter wastes most of its runtime. The first minute is a recap from the movie, the end credits are three and a half minutes or so (of a fourteen minute short)… Atwell eventually plays second fiddle to stunt casted Bradley Whitford. Whitford plays her sexist boss (it’s the forties after all).

There are other returning Captain America cast members, but director D’Esposito and writer Eric Pearson save them for more stunt moments at the end.

The idea Carter ends on–what’s next for Atwell and her sidekicks–would make a fun movie. Except this short’s it. There’s just the promise next time it’d better.

It’s a shame too. Atwell does well with nothing.

Taxi! (1932, Roy Del Ruth)

Even when the story falls apart, Del Ruth’s direction still keeps Taxi! somewhat afloat. It only runs seventy minutes and the first half is pretty good stuff. When it starts, the film’s about one cab company trying to muscle out its competitors-Guy Kibbee and James Cagney being some of those competitors. But Taxi! soon becomes a romance between Cagney and Kibbee’s daughter, played by Loretta Young. In fact, after the opening confrontations and Cagney’s profession, the title has nothing to do with the rest of the film.

Instead, it’s an urban romance between Cagney and Young. He’s a hot-head, always getting into fistfights, and she’s trying to cool him off. During their courtship, Taxi! works its best. Leila Bennett plays Young’s friend and she’s excellent. While the film definitely seems listless, it’s well-made and well-acted.

But then the plot takes over around the forty minute mark and everything starts to fall apart. It doesn’t help Dorothy Burgess turns up and she’s awful. Kubec Glasmon and John Bright’s dialogue, at least for the first half, is quite good. They bring a personality to the New York setting and there’s some great banter between Cagney and Young. Burgress butchers the dialogue, but then it too gets worse so no one’s able to do anything with it.

Except Bennett. She, director Del Ruth and cinematographer James Van Trees are Taxi!‘s constants.

If it were just a dumb ending, Taxi! might overcome it, but the whole third act is lame.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Roy Del Ruth; screenplay by Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, based on the play by Kenyon Nicholson; director of photography, James Van Trees; edited by James Gibbon; produced by Robert Lord; released by Warner Bros.

Starring James Cagney (Matt Nolan), Loretta Young (Sue Riley Nolan), George E. Stone (Skeets), Guy Kibbee (Pop Riley), Leila Bennett (Ruby), Dorothy Burgess (Marie Costa), David Landau (Buck Gerard), Ray Cooke (Danny Nolan), George MacFarlane (Father Nulty), Nat Pendleton (Bull Martin) and Berton Churchill (Judge West).

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Carrie (1976, Brian De Palma)

In terms of De Palma’s direction, Carrie is a little bit of a mess. It’s a combination of Hitchcock as camp–which really cuts into the effectiveness of the finale–more religious imagery than, say, The Ten Commandments and, finally, some truly brilliant composition from De Palma. He, cinematography Mario Tosi and editor Paul Hirsch create a sometimes transcendent experience.

Sadly, the technical talent–including Pino Donaggio’s lovely score–and good performances don’t overpower the script problems. De Palma falls into the horror standard of using a big surprise ending to avoid having to include, you know, an actual ending. Someone seems to have misplaced Carrie‘s third act.

Some of the trouble probably stems from how much the filmmakers are hiding from the viewer. That aspect plays, unfortunately, into the Hitchcock camp factor I mentioned earlier. De Palma never figures out how seriously he wants to take the film–he’s often either slathering on the religion or making it a tad too goofy. The film’s at its best when he can’t do either, because the scenes need actual content. De Palma’s only goofy when he can fiddle with the pacing.

Sissy Spacek’s excellent in the lead, though she’s not really the protagonist or even the main character. The film forgets about her for long stretches. Nancy Allen’s also excellent as her evil antagonist. William Katt’s quite good too.

Piper Laurie’s okay, nothing more, as the psychotically religious mother.

The strong first half nearly makes up for the misfired finish.

2/4★★

CREDITS

Directed by Brian De Palma; screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen, based on the novel by Stephen King; director of photography, Mario Tosi; edited by Paul Hirsch; music by Pino Donaggio; produced by Paul Monash; released by United Artists.

Starring Sissy Spacek (Carrie White), Betty Buckley (Miss Collins), Piper Laurie (Margaret White), William Katt (Tommy Ross), Nancy Allen (Chris Hargensen), Amy Irving (Sue Snell), John Travolta (Billy Nolan), P.J. Soles (Norma Watson), Priscilla Pointer (Mrs. Snell), Sydney Lassick (Mr. Fromm) and Stefan Gierasch (Mr. Morton).

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Geometria (1987, Guillermo del Toro), the director’s cut

About the only thing good about Geometria is Juan Carlos Muñez’s photography. It’s very stylized, very red and blue, but it’s competent throughout and there are a couple great shots. It’s clear Muñez and del Toro shot it in an apartment or house, but Muñez gives it real scale.

Too bad the rest of Geometria is lame.

del Toro gets a lousy lead performance from Fernando Garcia Marin, who plays a kid making a deal with a demon so he won’t have to take a geometry quiz. It’s unclear if we’re supposed to laugh at the kid or feel sorry for him.

Best (or worst), the whole thing is weak homage to The Exorcist. Or del Toro just didn’t have enough money for two sets of demon effects.

And del Toro doesn’t even get how to tell a joke with the finish.

Except the photography and effects, Geometria‘s dreadfully lame.

1/3Not Recommended

CREDITS

Directed by Guillermo del Toro; screenplay by del Toro, based on a story by Fredric Brown; director of photography, Juan Carlos Muñez; edited by Sigfrido Barjau and Peter Devaney; music by Christopher Drake; produced by del Toro, Muñez, Antonio Hernandez and Javier Antonio Soto.

Starring Fernando Garcia Marin (Boy), Guadalupe Del Toro (Mother) and Rodrigo Mora (Demon).

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Item 47 (2012, Louis D’Esposito)

Item 47 is exceptionally lame. Though it is well-acted and Marvel did pay for a Cars song over the end credits….

47 is an “aside” Avengers sequel, but more to the events in it. SHIELD agent Maximiliano Hernández’s mission is to find a Bonnie and Clyde team using an alien gun. But they’re really nice people, played by Lizzy Caplan and Jesse Bradford. Director D’Esposito doesn’t get how to direct their scenes together so Caplan and Bradford are just stuck doing all the character work themselves.

Of course, if Eric Pearson’s script wasn’t so weak, 47 might be a lot better. He can’t write dialogue for the couple, but he can’t write it for the SHIELD agents either. The whole thing’s a setup for a weak punchline.

And 47‘s end credits are over two minutes long, which is way too long for a short. Cars song or not.

Mimic (1997, Guillermo del Toro), the director's cut

Based on one of the edits, I’m assuming Mimic isn’t exactly a director’s cut (i.e. del Toro finished his cut, the Weinsteins took it and reedited it) as an approximation. He went back and did what he could to make it fit his intent. Maybe there are more examples—I haven’t seen the original cut—but the one I noticed was jarring.

Mimic’s not a bad film, but no one was really trying except the actors. I make that statement assuming Jeremy Northam was trying to be a thinking American action hero… but he just couldn’t do the accent.

The script takes a lot of short cuts. You’re supposed to care about Northam and wife Mira Sorvino because they’re having trouble having a baby.

Sorvino makes Mimic work—her early scenes with sidekick Alix Koromzay do wonders to establish the character.

Having the protagonists be married and in this thriller does show some ingenuity on del Toro’s part. It would work if Northam were good. And if del Toro didn’t have a little autistic kid in danger. del Toro does kill off a couple kids, which is a shock.

The cast is all strong—Giancarlo Giannini as the autistic kid’s guardian, Charles S. Dutton as a transit cop who’s stuck with Northam, Josh Brolin as Northam’s partner.

Oh, I forgot that ludicrous bit. The script has Northam and Brolin acting like movie detectives… only they’re CDC employees.

Great special effects. Terrible Marco Beltrami music. It evens out.

Mimic’s fine.

2/4★★

CREDITS

Directed by Guillermo del Toro; screenplay by Matthew Robbins and del Toro, based on a screen story by Robbins and del Toro and the short story by Donald A. Wollheim; director of photography, Dan Laustsen; edited by Peter Devaney Flanagan and Patrick Lussier; music by Marco Beltrami; production designer, Carol Spier; produced by Ole Bornedal, B.J. Rack and Bob Weinstein; released by Dimension Films.

Starring Mira Sorvino (Dr. Susan Tyler), Jeremy Northam (Dr. Peter Mann), Alexander Goodwin (Chuy), Giancarlo Giannini (Manny), Charles S. Dutton (Leonard), Josh Brolin (Josh), Alix Koromzay (Remy), F. Murray Abraham (Dr. Gates), James Costa (Ricky), Javon Barnwell (Davis), Norman Reedus (Jeremy) and Ho Pak-kwong (Preacher).

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Dr. Strange (1978, Philip DeGuere)

Dr. Strange aired in September, Superman came out in December… and they both have the same flying techniques, at least for couples, though Superman does have a longer flying sequences… Dr. Strange just kind of hints at it.

A number of things put Dr. Strange above the standard seventies television movie. First, it rarely has noticeable commercial breaks. It’s been edited, sure, but the story doesn’t have awkward pauses. Second, Jessica Walter’s the villain. Yes, she has some incredibly goofy moments (and goofier makeup) but she’s great. Third, DeGuere worries about composition with his shots. Dr. Strange is a good-looking movie, with DeGuere coming as close to making me believe a Hollywood backlot is New York City as anyone is going to be able to in a seventies TV movie.

The problems, actually, are minor. Except the flying, special effects are bad–the lasers coming out of people’s hands and so on. I wish they’d come up with something more imaginative, since the cheap effects route doesn’t work.

Then there’s the regular plotting problems with a pilot. There’s an almost hour-long setup here and a relatively hurried resolution. DeGuere even gets too subtle on plot points because he just doesn’t have time.

Peter Hooten’s a good lead (it would have been a fine television show), because he’s basically an altruistic alpha male who becomes a superhero (lame costume though).

And Anne-Marie Martin’s a decent romantic interest. She plays young college student well and their romance is compelling.

Twister (1996, Jan de Bont)

At some point during Twister, I remembered Jack N. Green shot it–he shot a bunch of Clint Eastwood’s nineties pictures. So, Twister looks great. Jan de Bont’s a fine director, he knows how to shoot Panavision.

It’s really a lousy movie, a lousy summer action movie. It’s a perfect roller coaster movie in terms of plotting–there’s no reason to see it twice. The “ride” is the only important thing about the movie. Since it’s all special effects, the characters are anemic. It’s very boring when they try to make them likable. Philip Seymour Hoffman is crappy in it, which is surprise, given what he’s gone on to do. The entire supporting cast is awful, even people I like–Alan Ruck, for example. I suppose Todd Field is all right.

Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are both fine. Cary Elwes is terrible, Jami Gertz is terrible.

One of the more interesting things about the film would be the sunglasses. Gertz wears dark sunglasses while Hunt wears see-through ones, it’s obviously so you can see Helen Hunt emote but not Jami Gertz–to get the audience ready to dislike Gertz.

Considering other action movies, Twister‘s not too terrible. It’s competently made; it’s got a terrible screenplay, but whatever.

It offers nothing. If it were on in the middle of the night, it’d take a lot for it to be the most compelling thing to watch. It’s so unspectacularly bad, there’s just no reason for a person to watch it.

Robocop 3 (1993, Fred Dekker)

It’s actually not hard to find nice things to say about Robocop 3. There’re about fifteen nice seconds of Phil Tippett stop-motion, Dekker’s got a neat way of shooting cars to give a sense of realism (his cinematographer, Gary B. Kibbe, did a lot of Carpenter’s films)… umm… wait, I’m sure I can find a third. It was cool seeing Jeff Garlin in a movie? Does that one count?

Robocop 3 is an unmitigated disaster, made on the cheap–made a few years later, if Orion Pictures had maintained solvency, it would have just been a direct-to-video entry–the only amusing way to pass a viewing experience is to rate the actors’ sense of embarrassment. Worst has to be Nancy Allen, who had so much vested interest in the sequel’s artistic import, she demanded to be killed off. There are a few “reasons” Peter Weller didn’t return–the costume, filming conflicts–but maybe he just read the script. As a PG-13 movie, Robocop 3 is silly. It turns RoboCop into a Saturday morning cartoon superhero, complete with bad one-liners.

What’s peculiar about the film is the cast. It’s a veritable who’s who of television personalities–famous ones. There’s Stephen Root from “NewsRadio,” he’s really bad. CCH Pounder, I’ll use “ER” as an example to keep up the strange NBC connection, is also bad. She’s usually quite good, so I suppose by not being more visibly embarrassed while delivering her lines–well, there’s a compliment somewhere in there. Jill Hennessy from “Law & Order.” She’s absolutely atrocious. Robocop 3 was delayed a couple years while Orion worked its way out of bankruptcy and I wonder if, had it come out as scheduled, she’d ever have gotten another role again.

But my favorite has to be Bradley Whitford, if only because he’s actually all right in Robocop 3. His character’s a generic corporate slime, but Whitford’s got a couple good deliveries. It doesn’t make the movie any better, but they’re funny deliveries. I wonder if he kept the glasses he got to wear in the movie.

I haven’t seen Robocop 3 in ten years and it appears to have corked rather significantly. I haven’t even gotten to some of the worst performances, which is mind-boggling since I have mentioned Hennessy already. I’m just worried I’ll forget the stunt performers, who jump long before they have any reason to, creating an almost surreal effect. But I don’t think Dekker was trying to bring Fellini to Robocop.

There’s an annoying little kid in this one–Remy Ryan Hernandez–she’s real bad. She’s got a great scene where–after doing calculus at a Doogie Howser age–doesn’t seem to understand her parents have been bussed away (the script’s got some real logic problems). Every scene with Hernandez is painful. It’s like the filmmakers were trying to appeal to a Disney girl audience or something.

Rip Torn is also terrible here, mugging for the camera (I’d believe it if they told him he was just doing a voice for a cartoon, which might explain his exaggerated expressions and so on). John Castle, terrible. Mako, terrible. Daniel von Bargen, okay.

As the new RoboCop, Robert John Burke is the pits. Why they didn’t just leave the helmet on all the time and hire Peter Weller to dub in the lines….

Well, that suggestion makes sense and nothing in Robocop 3 makes any sense.

Beautiful Girls (1996, Ted Demme)

Of the principals, only Michael Rapaport is under thirty (Beautiful Girls hinges on a ten-year high school reunion) and much of the running time can be spent wondering how the viewer is supposed to believe Timothy Hutton isn’t thirty-five years old (he’s actually thirty-six). Hutton gives one of the film’s best performances, frequently transcending the script and its severe deficiencies (almost every event is a sitcom trope). His best scenes are with Noah Emmerich (whose performance is shockingly broad, even in this cast) and Natalie Portman. In their scenes together, both Hutton and Portman stumble through the awkward dialogue and create the film’s only (comparatively) honest relationship.

That relationship doesn’t have to be too real, since every other one in the picture is a hackneyed mess. Screen-“writer” Scott Rosenberg seems to fancy himself a more WASPy Kevin Smith with all the pop culture references. Only Ted Demme’s incredible direction–and it really is fantastic in every area except the film’s writing–saves the film. Besides Demme’s fantastic choice of look and sound for the picture (Adam Kimmel’s photography and David A. Stewart’s score), he also gets a lot of solid little moments in. Max Perlich has almost no function in the script, but under Demme’s direction, his occasional asides are some of the best moments in the film. Rosie O’Donnell basically gets a couple big monologues (I believe these were ghost-written for her; Rosenberg’s unabashedly sexist script doesn’t indicate he’s a feminist), but has some good little moments as well.

Beautiful Girls‘s greatest failings are all script-related, but having some terrible performances doesn’t hurt much either. The three worst performances are from Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman and Lauren Holly. Holly’s got what’s probably the film’s most difficult role and instead she plays it like a poorly articulated mannequin. I know I just got done complementing Demme with actors… but Holly doesn’t have any room for asides. Her character’s all epical, as is Dillon’s. Dillon’s so goofy in the film, it’s like he’s lampooning a former teen actor who can’t catch a break. His character is terribly written (none of the main characters make any sense being in their late twenties… it’s clear they’ve only existed since the end of the opening logo), but even so… Dillon still does a real bad job. Both he and Hutton lower their voices to make them gruff for whatever reason. Hutton it doesn’t work with, but there’s a still a performance backing it up. Dillon doesn’t have that luxury.

Thurman actually should be all fluff material, but the script places so much weight on her character, it’s hilarious to watch her. She’s absolutely incapable of creating even the semblance of a human being. Every one of her scenes is painful to watch.

The best performance is probably Mira Sorvino. She doesn’t have much of a character, but Sorvino essays the role brilliantly.

Otherwise… I guess Martha Plimpton and Pruitt Taylor Vince are both okay. They aren’t bad and they don’t embarrass themselves (why Miramax put Rapaport in this one, I can’t even imagine–he doesn’t have an honest second here).

The only real draw is Demme and his superior talent.

1/4★

CREDITS

Directed by Ted Demme; written by Scott Rosenberg; director of photography, Adam Kimmel; edited by Jeffrey Wolf; music by David A. Stewart; production designer, Dan Davis; produced by Cary Woods; released by Miramax Films.

Starring Matt Dillon (Tommy), Michael Rapaport (Paul), Martha Plimpton (Jan), Mira Sorvino (Sharon), Lauren Holly (Darian), Timothy Hutton (Willie), Annabeth Gish (Tracy), Natalie Portman (Marty), Uma Thurman (Andera), Pruitt Taylor Vince (Stanley), Anne Bobby (Sarah), Rosie O’Donnell (Gina), Noah Emmerich (Mo) and Max Perlich (Kev).

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