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The Mississippi Gambler (1953, Rudolph Maté)
Torpid isn’t an adjective I get to use often, but I can’t think of a better one to describe The Mississippi Gambler. It’s a boring melodrama, trading entirely on the charisma of its cast–Tyrone Power might have been able to handle the weight, but the film concentrates on the loveless marriage of Piper Laurie (as… 📖
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Lions for Lambs (2007, Robert Redford)
Hopefully, Lions for Lambs will be the most topical film ever made. Hopefully. In fifteen years, hopefully it won’t make any sense. It probably will. As a dramatic narrative, it’s pretty limp. Most of the scenes with the big three are dialogue scenes, written by someone not incompetent but without much gift for it. It’s… 📖
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My Blueberry Nights (2007, Wong Kar-wai)
I wonder what the reaction to My Blueberry Nights would have been if it were Wong Kar-wai’s first film instead of just his first English language film. Everything I’ve seen in way of critical reaction is polite, when it really ought to be anything but. My Blueberry Nights suggests a filmmaker for sale–nothing in Wong’s… 📖
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The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962, Tony Richardson)
Despite its title, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner doesn’t really concern itself with loneliness and the only long distance running is secondary in the narrative. The film’s really something of a social piece, made rather conspicuous in the third act, with the comparison between the public school and the reform school. That moment,… 📖
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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… 📖
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Dark City (1998, Alex Proyas), the director’s cut
I’m not sure if anything actually goes wrong with Dark City. There’s the significant music problem (Trevor Jones’s score seems more appropriate for a car commercial; it’s missing any subtext or delicacy), but there’s nothing else wrong. The acting is all fantastic–Richard O’Brien gives the best performance, making his evil alien human–and Alex Proyas composes… 📖
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Mission Sex Control (2006, Ahn Jin-woo)
Mission Sex Control opens as an almost farcical comedy. The Korean President (circa 1972) meets with his cabinet to discuss family planning and its effect on the GDP. The meeting devolves into a screaming match between two cabinet members, then the opening titles splash across the screen. It all seems very comic, even as the… 📖
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Ground Zero (1987, Michael Pattinson and Bruce Myles)
Ground Zero opens with a title card attesting to the film’s historical relevance. The intended effect is apparently to convince the viewer of the film’s authenticity and plausibility. So, for a film featuring a cameraman who can outfight spies, Ground Zero is completely plausible until the helicopter shows up. Not the first helicopter, but the… 📖
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My Sassy Girl (2008, Yann Samuell)
There is a star in My Sassy Girl–and it’s not Jesse Bradford, who handles the leading romantic comedy man role effortless–it’s cinematographer Eric Schmidt, who makes New York City vibrant. There’s a lot of good in Yann Samuell’s direction (his composition is fantastic, his fast-fowarded transitions are, no shock, atrocious), but Schmidt’s cinematography brings that… 📖
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Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984, Hugh Hudson), the extended version
Greystoke ought to work. From the opening, it really seems like it might. It survives a massive narrative hiccup–switching perspective from young Tarzan to explorer Ian Holm. It establishes people in ape costumes as believable, sympathetic, feeling characters. It’s got beautiful cinematography, Hugh Hudson’s a fine director, and John Scott’s got one great score for… 📖
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Mutant Chronicles (2008, Simon Hunter)
Mutant Chronicles should have been better. I’m not sure it should have been good, but it should have been better. The film’s all digital, which allows for some post-production touches. Ron Perlman’s red robe, for example, appears to be done in post. I think the movie uses miniatures in combination with practical (though not many)… 📖
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Birds of America (2008, Craig Lucas)
The sub-ninety minute indie film is practically becoming a genre (I’m assuming these short lengths have a lot to do with sales to commercial cable–ninety minutes fits perfectly into a two hour slot on TNT). Birds of America is both a part of this burgeoning genre and the post-Little Miss Sunshine indie dysfunctional family comedy… 📖
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Purple Rain (1984, Albert Magnoli)
I’m glad I’m not the only one who observed the pervasive misogyny in Purple Rain. Apparently, it’s a well-known feature of the movie. It’s constant from the start and frequently surprising in its intensity. At some point, that frequency wears down any reaction–the only intensifies over the running time. By the end, it’s worn the… 📖
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King Kong (2005, Peter Jackson)
I’ll be honest–I didn’t make it very far, considering its length, into King Kong. I sat through a lot. I sat through the opening Great Depression montage, which was shockingly bad. The people who assailed Michael Bay for his glitzy Pearl Harbor gave Jackson a free pass for Kong? It’s obscene. I sat through the… 📖
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Religulous (2008, Larry Charles)
As we waited for Religulous to start–my wife had confiscated my iPod touch for her own purposes–I read an article in The Onion about the coming election. The sixty million people voting for one candidate will not talk to any of the sixty million people who are voting for the other candidate. That–along with a… 📖
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Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
Every time I watch Casablanca–and I think it’s been a while since the last time, over ten years ago, when I saw it at Radio City–I marvel at the pacing. The film runs an hour and forty minutes and it doesn’t even seem like any time has passed until Bergman is in Bogart’s apartment. I… 📖
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The Ox-Bow Incident (1943, William A. Wellman)
The seventy-five minutes of The Ox-Bow Incident are some of the finest in cinema. The film is eventually a solemn examination of the human condition, quiet in its observations, with spare lines of dialogue of profound importance. But before this period in the film, which roughly lasts from twenty minutes in until the end, Ox-Bow… 📖
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I Love You Again (1940, W.S. Van Dyke)
I Love You Again is such a confident success–the whole thing rests on William Powell and everything he does in the entire picture is fantastic–it’s hard to think of anything wrong with it. It moves beautifully, its ninety-nine minutes sailing by, the supporting cast is all excellent and every one of its big comic scenes… 📖
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Choke (2008, Clark Gregg)
Choke working at all is kind of something special. The film’s got a major twist at the end, but it’s a silly one and isn’t, with any thought on the matter, particularly feasible. The film’s got a major plot point for Sam Rockwell–his mother’s diary reports he’s the half-clone of Jesus–and, eventually, he believes it… 📖
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Design for Living (1933, Ernst Lubitsch)
From the first third of Design for Living, it’s impossible to think it might not be absolutely fantastic throughout. Eventually it does hit a dry period and it’s impossible to think it’s going to pull out of it. Then it does and it’s impossible to think… well, you get the idea. I don’t know why… 📖
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Below the Sea (1933, Albert S. Rogell)
Below the Sea really should be good. It’s got a great–somewhat startling when viewed today–opening, it’s got excellent special effects and Albert S. Rogell has some fantastic composition. But it all goes wrong. The opening is set in 1917 on a German U-boat. It’s carrying gold through the Caribbean and gets sunk following a battle… 📖
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Frankenstein (1931, James Whale)
I’m trying to imagine how Frankenstein looks on the big screen–maybe on one the size of Radio City Music Hall; James Whale fills the screen upward. He directs the viewer’s attention always up, starting with the first scenes in the tower laboratory. The frames are obviously filled with extensive detail, which video certainly does not… 📖
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Navy Secrets (1939, Howard Bretherton)
Low budget filmmaking–both today and in the past–has always been the most successful when the narrative takes the budget into account. Navy Secrets takes place over one day, with most of the locations being in cars, apartments or restaurants. In other words, easy sets. There’s one slightly more complicated scene in a park. The scenes… 📖
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Canyon Passage (1946, Jacques Tourneur)
Canyon Passage starts out strange. Dana Andrews shows up in 1850s Portland (Oregon) and, after some character establishing, fends off someone breaking into his room. It got me thinking later if the unseen event leading up to the intruder is actually the film’s dramatic vehicle, the event setting off the action. Because Canyon Passage is… 📖
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The Son of Kong (1933, Ernest B. Schoedsack)
King Kong opened in April 1933, The Son of Kong opened for Christmas 1933. The rush shows. The special effects really suffer–for whatever reason, when Robert Armstrong and Helen Mack are added to the little Kong’s shots, it’s fine, but when little Kong is added to Armstrong and Mack’s… it’s not. It’s like the focus… 📖
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Tarzan the Ape Man (1932, W.S. Van Dyke)
It’s hard to believe a movie called Tarzan the Ape Man is going to be boring, but this one drags on and on. After a solid opening twenty minutes, the movie stumbles and never regains its footing. The problem is with Tarzan. Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan obviously doesn’t speak English but he also doesn’t communicate. He… 📖
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Righteous Kill (2008, Jon Avnet)
I don’t know when I first realized De Niro and Pacino had never been in a movie together (really together)–it was long before Heat; their pairing doesn’t exactly seem obvious (both were always leading men), but something about their acting pedigree just made it seem natural. For example, Pacino’s never made a film with Scorsese… 📖
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Beau Geste (1939, William A. Wellman)
Beau Geste is a colonial adventure, European soldiers under siege in the Arabian desert. There’s some imagination to the telling, but not at all enough. The strangest thing about the film is the title–Gary Cooper plays Beau Geste, who in some ways is the least of the film’s characters. I think Cooper must get the… 📖
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Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, Frank Capra)
Arsenic and Old Lace has to be one of the finest–if not the finest–film adaptations of a stage production. Nothing about the film, save the knowledge it’s from a play, suggests its theatrical origins… not the one night present action, not the one set. It’s an ideal motion picture comedy, down to what has to… 📖
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Silver Blaze (1937, Thomas Bentley)
Given Sherlock Holmes is an English creation, I thought Silver Blaze would be a solid, thoughtful portrayal of the Empire’s most famous son. He’s still the most famous, right? But it isn’t. Silver Blaze actually follows the Marx Brothers rule of giving the romantic leads more to do. Here it’s Judy Gunn and Arthur Macrae.… 📖
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The Da Vinci Code (2006, Ron Howard)
Hans Zimmer did the score for The Da Vinci Code? I hope he apologized to James Horner for all the plagiarisms (particularly from Horner’s two Star Trek scores and then Aliens). I don’t know where to start with The Da Vinci Code, except maybe to say it’s the finest film of its kind. It’s actually… 📖
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Transsiberian (2008, Brad Anderson)
The train thriller has been a film standard for seventy years, probably longer. I can’t remember the last one, as the genre’s sort of fallen off in the last ten years. The naive American tourist is trouble genre is younger, but not by much. Transsiberian combines the two–a natural combination–but it’s far more of a… 📖
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King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)
King Kong is a perfect film. I don’t think I’d realized before. It’s always hard to talk about films like Kong, influential standards of American cinema. I want to talk about how its structure still sets the tone for modern films–the gradual lead-in (it’s forty-some minutes before Kong shows up), the non-stop action of the… 📖
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Son of Dracula (1943, Robert Siodmak)
Son of Dracula doesn’t open well. The first scene’s all right, but once Louise Allbritton shows up–in the second scene–things start to go downhill. Allbritton’s one of the film’s constant problems. She’s a terrible actress and, in a film in desperate need of all the acting help it can get, it’s a significant defect. The… 📖
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One Sunday Afternoon (1933, Stephen Roberts)
One Sunday Afternoon suffers from some of the standard play-to-film problems. The scenes go on too long, especially in the first half, which only contains three real scenes. The opening, which is a lengthy, seemingly direct adaptation from the play, features Gary Cooper and Roscoe Karns talking to each other as way of establishing the… 📖
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M (1931, Fritz Lang)
I don’t think I’d ever realized M‘s technical importance. Lang creates quite a few filmmaking standards here, still in use today. Non-specific to genre, M features some brilliant off-screen dialogue work. It’s the earliest example (I’ve ever seen) of hearing a scene’s action while looking at something else. There’s also Lang’s approach to the sound.… 📖