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The Groomsmen (2006, Edward Burns)
The Groomsmen looks wrong. The film doesn’t have any grain and the lighting suggests it’s shot on some kind of DV (it isn’t). Everything is very controlled–a bright outdoor scene doesn’t seem bright in Groomsmen, it seems like the color has been toned down so as not to offend. It looks like a Mentos commercial… 📖
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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004, Wes Anderson)
The problem with The Life Aquatic reveals itself quite clearly in the final act, as the cast all gives Bill Murray shoulder squeezes of support. The scene is supposed to mean something profound. It’s Murray confronting not just his Moby Dick (a quest for vengeance lost in the film, maybe because they knew it was… 📖
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Mission: Impossible III (2006, J.J. Abrams)
After two asinine outings, Tom Cruise finally figured out how to get a Mission: Impossible to work. There’s an actual story–the viewer’s engagement with the plot doesn’t revolve around one’s appreciation of Tom Cruise and his frequent grin. The difference is in Cruise himself. He’s no longer charming the women aged twelve to fifty-two in… 📖
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Half Moon Street (1986, Bob Swaim)
Half Moon Street is supposed to be funny, right? No one’s supposed to believe it’s serious, they can’t. Certainly not with Sigourney Weaver’s performance–it’s got to be the worst thing she’s ever done, but it’s amazing because she certainly never gave the impression she’s capable of such an atrocious performance. The script’s full of these… 📖
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The Indian Runner (1991, Sean Penn)
Halfway through The Indian Runner–I’m guessing at the location, but halfway sounds about right–there’s a stunning montage. It might be the best way to talk about the film, or at least to start talking about the film, because The Indian Runner resists any standard–or glib–entry angles. It’s a five character montage, taking place in the… 📖
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Maze (2000, Rob Morrow)
A story, based on its text and then the reader’s reading of that text, evolves. The reading is required to make the story complete. A film has a similar relationship with the viewer, but has the added complication of conflicting influences–there’s a director, actors, a composer, a gaffer… and a screenwriter. A script is the… 📖
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The Man with the Golden Arm (1955, Otto Preminger)
There are a few problems with The Man with the Golden Arm. It’s hard to think of the film actually having any defects, since it’s such a brilliantly made motion picture. It was one of the first Preminger films I saw and was I ever surprised when they all weren’t so beautifully put together. The… 📖
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They Were Expendable (1945, John Ford)
They Were Expendable has a gradual pace. Not knowing the film’s subject matter–just genre–going in, it all unfolded quite deliberately in front of me. The opening is a PT boat exercise. The film’s special effects are spectacular; it’s impossible to tell what’s an effect and what’s an actual boat in the water. These scenes–there are… 📖
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Stigmata (1999, Rupert Wainwright)
From the director of MC Hammer’s greatest hits. Seriously. I wasn’t even going to open mocking Rupert Wainwright, but then I saw his filmography. Instead, I was going to open wondering how, with two people credited with the score (Billy Corgan and Elia Cmiral), it could be so terrible. Not really, I knew when the… 📖
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Badlands (1973, Terrence Malick)
I was in high school the first time I saw Badlands. I’d seen a lot of movies–I think by that time, I’d even made a top one hundred list. I know I’d seen True Romance, so I must have been at least fifteen. There’s nothing else like Badlands in cinema, which is a bit of… 📖
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Child’s Play 2 (1990, John Lafia)
When George Miller made the third Mad Max, he got someone else to direct the kids. John Lafia had directed one movie prior to Child’s Play 2—maybe someone should have made a similar suggestion. Under Lafia’s direction, ten-year old Alex Vincent’s performance is an abject disaster. The performance is so terrible, it isn’t even amusing.… 📖
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Double Wedding (1937, Richard Thorpe)
Much of Double Wedding–around two-thirds of it–is a supreme comedy. It might feature William Powell’s best comedic performance, just because of the limitless opportunity it offers him. It’s hard to top Powell in a fur coat and a fake wig… with a German accent (and a walking stick). Or Powell going through a big demonstration… 📖
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Maximum Overdrive (1986, Stephen King)
Maximum Overdrive confuses me a little. I thought–given the movie opens with the writer and director being insulted by a cash machine–Stephen King wasn’t going for anything… well, artistic is a stretch, so maybe genuine. Almost immediately following is a scene where a bunch of watermelons crash into car windshields to humorous effect. It certainly… 📖
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Blondie Meets the Boss (1939, Frank R. Strayer)
It’s hard to say who gives a better performance in Blondie Meets the Boss, Larry Simms as Baby Dumpling or Daisy the dog. Simms has a lot of funny lines–all the best lines are from kids talking about adults, it was hard not to think this entry should have been called “Kids Say the Darndest… 📖
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Rebel Without a Cause (1955, Nicholas Ray)
For a film with pioneering use of widescreen composition–the shot with the cars moving past Natalie Wood–and one of the better film performances (James Dean), Rebel Without a Cause is a curious failure. It’s loaded with content–there’s the stuff with Dean and his parents, the stuff with Wood and her father, the gang, Sal Mineo,… 📖
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Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Writing about Magnolia seems a daunting prospect (I don’t think I’ve ever read a review of the film). Following the prologue, which one could (or could not) see as a way to ease the viewer into the genre–the multi-character, all connected genre (Magnolia‘s got to be the best of the genre… I can’t think of… 📖
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Critical Care (1997, Sidney Lumet)
Critical Care opens on its main set–sets are important in Critical Care–with Helen Mirren (as a nurse) checking up on ICU patients. The ICU is a circle, Mirren rounding it by the end of the titles, returning to the station at the center, where James Spader (as a resident) naps during a thirty-six hour shift.… 📖
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R.I.P. VHS
It’s hard to imagine anyone fetishizing DVDs, though I’m sure some must. Someone out there knows each and every day he or she bought a different release of Army of Darkness. Someone out there sleeps with their Necronomicon case from The Evil Dead–didn’t it smell too? The initial Anchor Bay release (remember when Anchor Bay… 📖
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Child’s Play (1988, Tom Holland)
Child’s Play barely makes any sense. Or maybe some of it does, but there’s a big voodoo component and it gets used as a crutch for the more fantastical elements (with its own problems with rationality). But the film opens with a shootout in downtown Chicago–Child’s Play uses its Chicago locations very well, never excessive–between… 📖
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Calling Dr. Death (1943, Reginald Le Borg)
Reusing music in b movies isn’t uncommon, but to reuse music from a movie with the same star? It kind of gets distracting. Almost everything about Calling Dr. Death is distracting, actually. The movie opens with a head in a glass sphere ominously describing the film’s setting (Dr. Death is a filmic episode of Inner… 📖
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The Saint in London (1939, John Paddy Carstairs)
One of the unfortunate developments of television is the proliferation of hour-long mystery dramas. While these programs might be good, it means movies like The Saint in London don’t get made anymore. The film’s not episodic, with an abbreviated first act–George Sanders (playing the Saint for the first time) gets no introduction. But the first… 📖
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Fear and Desire (1953, Stanley Kubrick)
Fear and Desire‘s a mess to be sure, but it’s hard to understand why Kubrick later strove to have it willfully forgotten. The film’s greatest faults–the script and the acting–pale when compared to Kubrick’s success as a director and editor. He described the film as amateurish and that adjective certainly does describe the script well… 📖
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The Benson Murder Case (1930, Frank Tuttle)
I wonder how Eugene Pallette felt–more, how his co-stars felt–about having the closest thing to a close-up in The Benson Murder Case. I’ve never been more acutely aware of shot distance than I was during the film. Tuttle has a standard pattern. Long shot–usually a lengthy long shot, sometimes an entire scene is one shot–followed… 📖
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The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981, Joel Schumacher)
I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to properly discuss The Incredible Shrinking Woman. It’s an experience–Ned Beatty was in Network and he appeared in this one? Sorry. Anyway, according the IMDb, the movie might have made money–in fact, it might have even been a hit. I always assumed it was an enormous failure, but… 📖
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The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933, W.S. Van Dyke)
The Prizefighter and the Lady mixes a couple genres–the philandering husband whose wife can’t stop loving him standard and, additionally, stunt casting. Heavyweight contender Max Baer stars as a heavyweight contender, who fights the champ, played by champ Primo Carnera. Myrna Loy plays the suffering wife, while Walter Huston and Otto Kruger finish the supporting… 📖
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Milk (2008, Gus Van Sant)
As Milk‘s opening titles ran, it occurred to me Danny Elfman scored it. It doesn’t sound anything like Elfman’s norm–you know, the modified Batman music–but it sounded like the kind of score Danny Elfman should be doing (and should have been doing for years). Milk‘s a biopic–and always feels like one, thanks in great part… 📖
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The Wrestler (2008, Darren Aronofsky)
Maybe Darren Aronofsky actually gets it. As The Wrestler started, I marveled at what must have been Aronofsky’s longest shots to date until they kept getting longer and longer. His direction of the film is incredibly simple–put the camera on the actors, occasionally do an establishing shot. No medium shots. Long shot to close-up. The… 📖
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Boogie Nights (1997, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Boogie Nights is so well-made, so stunningly made–I’m not even thinking about Anderson’s wonderful, lengthy steadicam sequences, I’m thinking about Philip Seymour Hoffman alone in his freshly painted car–it’s hard to think about anything else while watching it. The omnipresent soundtrack–Nights is a combination of American Graffiti (the prolific use of songs), Goodfellas (the way… 📖
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Red (2008, Trygve Allister Diesen and Lucky McKee)
Red‘s a really safe movie. I’ve seen Noel Fisher play a young creep multiple times on television–just a few weeks ago even–and I’ve seen Kyle Gallner play the sensitive kid who hangs out with the creep. Twice for him. And casting Brian Cox as a loner who loses his dog and relentlessly pursues justice… well,… 📖
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In the Electric Mist (2008, Bertrand Tavernier)
Second attempt (Alec Baldwin tried in 1995’s HEAVEN’S PRISONERS) to turn James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels into a film franchise. Tommy Lee Jones is good in the lead and the supporting cast is all fine (Peter Sarsgaard is fantastic) but the script’s a mess. The “mystery” involves Jones, Hollywood actors (Sarsgaard and Kelly Macdonald),… 📖
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Missing (2008, Tsui Hark)
Tedious and self-indulgent mystical-ish ghost story about psychologist Angelica Lee taking a hypnosis drug and seeing, you know, ghosts. Lots of underwear stuff because her dude (Guo Xiaodong) is an underwater photographer. (Writer-director Hark can’t shut up about the water in the bad narration). Okay time killer until the third act, when it all falls… 📖
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Midnight Run (1988, Martin Brest)
Some time in the 1990s, Charles Grodin said in an interview no one wanted him to do a sequel with Robert De Niro, only ones with him and dogs. Midnight Run is one of the last great comedies (though the genre seems to be on the rise again). It’s an ideal motion picture comedy, with… 📖
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The Good, the Bad and the Weird (2008, Kim Ji-woon)
The Good, the Bad and the Weird, if the title is any hint, is an homage to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Kim Ji-woon borrows liberally from all three of the Clint Eastwood films, taking a scene from one then, a little later, one from another. He takes it further than just a cheap reference–at one… 📖
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In the Arms of a Killer (1992, Robert E. Collins)
Someone with a lot of time–and a low propensity for retching–could probably do a fine comparison between television cop movies of the late twentieth century and b-movies of the decades immediately prior. In the Arms of a Killer is absurdist in its portrayal of police investigation, between John Spencer’s disgruntled detective smoking cigars first thing… 📖
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Valkyrie (2008, Bryan Singer)
For Valkyrie to work, Bryan Singer needs to get–give or take–five minutes when the viewer isn’t entirely sure Adolf Hitler wasn’t assassinated. The entire premise of watching a film, a historically-based film, where the conclusion is well-known and suspending disbelief… he needs five minutes. Maybe the trick is casting Tom Cruise as a German. By… 📖
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Frost/Nixon (2008, Ron Howard)
Once upon a time (in Hollywood), there was a bald director (who always wore a cap) who first got famous on television as an actor, then as a director of comedies, who then started making excellent mainstream Hollywood pictures. Then he started making mainstream crap and then it got worse. The question of Frost/Nixon is… 📖
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King Kong (1976, John Guillermin)
In 2001, the Academy awarded Dino De Laurentiis the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial award. The clips ran from the beginning of his career to the present–I can’t remember if Body of Evidence got a clip–and I kept waiting to see how they’d deal with Kong. The De Laurentiis produced remake is either forgotten or derided,… 📖