Category: 1979
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Gerber writes the script from a Mark Evanier plot. It starts with Howard in Cleveland again, though it doesn’t look like Howard. Will Meugniot and Ricardo Villamonte’s art is strange; Howard’s reality is gone. It’s a comic strip. Meugniot’s got fine enough composition, but zero detail. The story doesn’t have much Cleveland–Howard almost immediately ends…
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Star Trek: The Motion Picture is one of those imperfect films. No matter how many versions, there’s no way to fix one thing without breaking another–or it might just be broken all together. For example, I don’t know if I’d ever realized how focused director Wise is–during the first hour–on William Shatner’s slightly dangerous desire…
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The Black Hole is a weird–and bad–movie. American science fiction usually avoids religion, at least literalizing religion, but Black Hole embraces it. Maybe I shouldn’t spoil it. But it’s from Disney too. It’s a Disney movie with Heaven and Hell. When the film cuts to Maximilian Schell during these sequences, the film feels like a…
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Snapshot is one half middling coming of age melodrama and one half not scary thriller. The picture opens with a burnt-out building and a corpse, then goes back to explain. Director Wincer isn’t playful with the flashback–the opening is only there so the viewer is suspicious throughout the entire film. The coming of age aspect…
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For a “traditional” underdog story, Breaking Away is exceeding complex. It opens with Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern and Jackie Earle Haley; neither Steve Tesich’s script nor Yates’s direction emphasizes any over another. Actually, Quaid’s loudmouth gets the most emphasis. Then the film introduces Barbara Barrie and Paul Dooley as Christopher’s parents and it…
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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,…
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Every shot in Manhattan, whether of the cityscape, the interiors or the actors, is so carefully and beautifully composed, it’s not surprising Allen lets the cast go a little loose. Gordon Willis’s black and white photography is luminous, giving the city an otherworldly, dreamlike feel. That feeling, thanks to Allen’s composition, carries over to some…
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The Muppet Movie takes it upon itself to be all things… well, two things. It has to be appealing to kids and adults. The film is split roughly in half between the audiences, with the adults having more to appreciate in the star cameos–some cute, some hilarious (Steve Martin in short shorts)–and terrible puns and…
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Can you even watch Alien if you have epilepsy? After about a hundred minutes of elegant direction, Scott relies on this strobe effect for the remainder of the film’s running time. Yes, it makes a disquieting effect, but it gets old in a few minutes and he uses it for at least fifteen. And, strobe…
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It takes three minutes for something to “happen” in New York Portrait. The first three minutes are just static scenes, unless one want to count the smoke coming out of a stack. Portrait might be better titled, New York Establishing Shots. With the exception of a lengthy–for the short, which is a long fifteen minutes–sequence…
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During Salem’s Lot’s finale, Hooper gets this amazing physical performance out of Bonnie Bedelia as she is exploring the vampire’s lair. At that moment, I realized Hooper was intentionally making Lot palatable for a television audience—he could have made the entire three hours terrifying, but he was handicapped by the format. The miniseries issues are…
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The Frisco Kid is a Western, but it doesn’t open like one. It opens more like a seventies Gene Wilder theme comedy (composer Frank De Vol starts out like it’s Young Frankenstein, but quickly gets bad… especially at the end). The film takes a little while to ground itself. Before Harrison Ford shows up, much…
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Over the Edge is explosive. Sorry, maybe that statement is a little glib–but it is literally explosive. More cars blow up in Over the Edge than a season of “The A-Team.” I think Kaplan was going for dramatic effect, but it’s hard to say. Kaplan’s actually the least interesting technical component of the film. Whenever…
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Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm is not any kind of cinematic wonder. Coscarelli is a decent director in terms of composition and his screenplay has some inventive moments. Mostly, the writing credit is due because of his enthusiasm for the content. There’s nothing like seeing adults defer to the wisdom of a teenage boy–and A. Michael Baldwin…
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Even with rats doing cute tricks–and maybe because of it–Invincible Enforcer is an unwatchable piece of… of something. I’m not even sure the correct noun. It’s my first or second attempt at a Shaw Brothers production and what’s really amazing about it is the editing. It’s got all the fast edits of a modern Hollywood…
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In addition to being one of the more intentionally boring films ever made, Star Trek: The Motion Picture features some of the more amazing science fiction special effects. The work Douglas Trumbull does in this film is without equal–he makes the unimaginable visual. It’s astounding (and I was watching the pan-and-scan only “Special Longer Version”…
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Last Embrace goes a long way in showing what’s wrong with Hitchcock homages. Most of Last Embrace isn’t even a real Hitchcock homage–it’s a Niagara homage and Niagara was Henry Hathaway–but Embrace is supposed to be Hitchcock, down to Miklos Rozsa’s score (but he never did any Hitchcock). So it’s kind of a second-hand Hitchcock…
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Chilly Scenes of Winter (the title of the 1981 director’s cut of Head Over Heels) painfully chronicles the year in a man’s life after he loses his girlfriend. Painfully is my chosen word for a couple reasons. First, because Joan Micklin Silver doesn’t disguise how messed up John Heard’s character is over the break-up and…
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Seemingly endless adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES with an atrocious lead performance from Nastassja Kinski and an almost as bad one from her beau, Peter Firth. The third act, partially based on the source material, is an absolute disaster. But the screenplay’s still endless problems of its own. Absolutely gorgeous looking; cinematography…
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Occasionally funny but rather draggy for a ninety minute comedy about imbecile Steve Martin (the titular JERK) ending up rich and shacked up with Bernadette Peters. The first half at least makes sense, the second half is rushed and in summary or half-scene. And Peters becomes a background extra without any lines for the third…
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Should be good (or at least better) disaster thriller about news reporter Jane Fonda and her rugged cameraman (Michael Douglas, who also produced, in a risible performance) happening upon an nuclear power plant “event” coverup involving plant supervisor Jack Lemmon. Great supporting performance from Wilford Brimley, waste of both Lemmon and Fonda’s time. Director Bridges…
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