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Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972, J. Lee Thompson)
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is about a bunch of ape slaves overpowering their human masters. Any film with a thirty second recap of the previous sequel by Ricardo Montalban has to be at least amusing, but Conquest is actually better than amusing (until the actual revolt begins). Since the film didn’t have… 📖
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Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005, Park Kwang-hyun)
Welcome to Dongmakgol is about an idyllic village in the midst of the Korean War. Two soldiers from the South, three from the North, and an American flyer end up there. Obviously, they learn people are just people and wars are a bad idea, but Dongmakgol revels in itself so much, it’s impossible to dismiss… 📖
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The Very Thought of You (1944, Delmer Daves)
Delmer Daves–for someone whose directing occasionally makes me cover my eyes in fright–does an all right job with The Very Thought of You. He has these tight close-ups and, while there are only a few of them, they work out quick well. Otherwise, technically speaking, he doesn’t have many tricks. He’s on the low end… 📖
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Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971, Don Taylor)
I occasionally–or often, depending on the films I’m going through–start a post saying how much I was dreading the film and how well it turned out. Usually, these are films I used to love and haven’t seen in ten years and was worried about them. I wasn’t dreading Escape from the Planet of the Apes,… 📖
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The Bride Wore Black (1968, François Truffaut)
I watched this film on a recommendation, since I’ve mostly sworn off Truffaut. I’d read it was one of his Hitchcock homages (and anything has to be better than Mississippi Mermaid) but I really wasn’t expecting so much “homage.” Besides the Bernard Herrmann score, which is identical to his more famous Hitchcock scores, mostly Vertigo,… 📖
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An Enemy of the People (1978, George Schaefer)
Growing up–early, before I’d really seen any movies–I knew Steve McQueen was in The Great Escape (though I hadn’t seen it, I’d seen the motorcycle clip) and I knew he’d gotten his start in The Blob. When I first did get into film, when AMC was still the station to watch, I discovered McQueen had… 📖
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Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970, Ted Post)
On rare occasion, I watch (and on even rarer occasion, finish watching) an utter dreg of a film. A film so bad I misuse the word dregs, which apparently–since it refers to a liquid form–must be used as a plural. Beneath the Planet of the Apes is just such a film. Immediately, with its use… 📖
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Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin J. Schaffner)
Planet of the Apes is, I’m fairly sure, the first film I’ve ever watched and known the director started in television. Franklin J. Schaffner has a lot of dynamic shots–helicopter shots, three dimensional motion and camera movement (which is rarer than one would think)–but none of them go together. It’s like watching a different movie… 📖
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Install (2004, Kataoka Kei)
I watched Install because I was curious to see Ueto Aya in a non-Azumi role. She’s good in Install, though it’s impossible to determine whether or not she could have been bad. The film’s constructed very carefully not to put her–or any of the actors–in difficult situations. Acting situations. Ueto narrates the film and the… 📖
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Pocket Money (1972, Stuart Rosenberg)
Pocket Money is, in addition to being an excellent film, an example of a couple interesting things. First, it’s a 1970s character study, which is a different genre than what currently passes for a character study (if there are character studies at all anymore, since Michael Mann and Wes Anderson stopped doing them). The 1970s… 📖
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The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972, Paul Newman)
Paul Newman must have had an interesting experience directing Man-in-the Moon Marigolds. His wife played the lead and their daughter played her daughter, the film’s protagonist. The mother’s awful (Joanne Woodward isn’t awful, the character is awful) and Newman sticks with her. Woodward manages to infuse her with some humanity, but only so much is… 📖
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Superman Returns (2006, Bryan Singer)
My expectations for Superman Returns were incredibly high (especially since everything Bryan Singer’s done since The Usual Suspects with the exception of the “House” pilot has been dreck). Three stars. I don’t bother putting star ratings on The Stop Button, since whenever I see them in reviews, I look at them and then at not… 📖
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The MacKintosh Man (1973, John Huston)
A miscast Paul Newman (he’s a British spy posing as an Australian for a bunch of the movie) tries to take down corrupt politician James Mason. Huston’s direction dilly-dallies and lolly-gags when it’s not dawdling. The script (credited solely to Walter Hill, who swears it’s not his fault) is bad. Newman having zero chemistry with… 📖
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Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986, Penny Marshall)
I was just reading–today or yesterday–Ken Levine talk about how there are no “balls-out R-rated” comedies with female leads. (His post is here). Jumpin’ Jack Flash is, obviously, a balls-out R-rated comedy starring a woman. Things have obviously changed in the last twenty years, both in film and television–female stand-ups don’t get TV shows and… 📖
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Toni (1935, Jean Renoir)
In its opening, Toni is established as an immigrant’s story. Foreign workers (Spanish and Italian) go to the south of France to work the quarries. The opening “prologue”–it’s never announced as a prologue, but there’s an “end of prologue” card–shows the workers’ arrival. The end also shows workers arriving, three years later, after the title… 📖
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Suzy (1936, George Fitzmaurice)
The war story love triangle: girl mets boy, girl marries boy, girl thinks boy dies, girl meets second boy, girl marries second boy, first boy returns, one of the boys dies. Suzy isn’t even an interesting spin on it. The film throws in a relationship between lower class Jean Harlow with her upper class father-in-law… 📖
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Fearless (1993, Peter Weir)
I try not to concern myself with the Academy Awards these days. I scoff at the thought of them actually awarding quality, but I’m still pleased when someone like Clint Eastwood wins and perplexed when something like Crash does too. So I’m a little surprised at my reaction to Rosie Perez in Fearless. I’m enraged… 📖
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Memories of Murder (2003, Bong Joon-ho)
So all Song Kang-ho needs is a good movie… Well, not quite. In my Foul King post, I accused Song of being the weak link in Korean cinema and maybe he’s not. Maybe he just makes some bad choices. Still, in Memories of Murder, he plays a well-intentioned buffoon of a detective facing a rural… 📖
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One Crowded Night (1940, Irving Reis)
One Crowded Night opens strong enough–a Mojave desert motel and lunch counter, run by a family with a past, with employees with romantic woes. It’s an RKO B-picture, as the most recognizable people in the cast are bit players from bigger films. It’s filmed on location (at the motel) and it starts centered around Anne… 📖
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Blondie (1938, Frank R. Strayer)
When I was in middle school, I read most of the comic strips in the newspaper, Blondie being one of them. I remember seeing, in the TV listings around the same time (probably a little later), some station running a bunch of Blondie movies at five o’clock in the morning. I missed taping them, but… 📖
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Shakedown (1988, James Glickenhaus)
Shakedown is such a terrible film, I’d have to go through it line by line to adequately catalog its deficiencies. The big action climax features Sam Elliot hanging onto landing gear of a jet flying over the World Trade Center, then dropping into a river. This climax–from take-off to dropping into the river to the… 📖
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Watch on the Rhine (1943, Herman Shumlin)
Wow, Watch on the Rhine’s got it all. Not only does it have a nice metaphor for the United States waking up to the horrors of the Nazis and determining to do something about it (which the United States never did), it’s also got a nice ending telling mothers their place is to send their… 📖
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Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959, Eugène Lourié)
I’m not sure the British are really suited for giant monster movies. No offense to the Brits, but watching a bunch of folks stand around and keep the stiff upper lip while radioactive monsters from the deep attack London isn’t too much fun. Behemoth might be unique in the giant monster genre in that respect–it’s… 📖
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Born on the Fourth of July (1989, Oliver Stone)
In the last ten years, Tom Cruise has turned in a number of excellent performances (well, four… four is a number) and a bunch of decent ones. He’s only been bad once (of the films I’ve seen). So, Born on the Fourth of July was a jarring reminder to the early period of Cruise’s acting… 📖
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Game 6 (2005, Michael Hoffman)
In many ways, Game 6 is the Michael Keaton movie I’ve been waiting ten years to see. He’s the lead, it isn’t a comedy, he’s got a grown kid, it ought to be a return to form. It’s a mildly high profile film, or at least it should have been, as Don DeLillo wrote it.… 📖
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Fighting for Love (2001, Joe Ma)
Watching Fighting for Love is frustrating. Rapid-fire dialogue–straight out of a Howard Hawks comedy–is difficult to get in subtitles, especially poorly translated ones. Still, the charm of the actors comes through and Fighting for Love is probably the best mediocre romantic comedy I’ve seen in a long time, at least of the recently-made (since 1998)… 📖
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The Punisher (1989, Mark Goldblatt)
Back in the late 1980s, The Punisher was part of that period’s comic book movie wave. Most of these films had little to do with Batman’s success and most of them failed, both commercially and artistically. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of course, succeeded financially. Watching this Punisher film (I have no interest in the new… 📖
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The Freshman (1925, Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor)
The Freshman has one of the most peculiar approaches to storytelling I’ve seen. It has very little establishing exposition–a few lines on a title card about maybe four of those exposition title cards throughout–and its scenes are gag-centered and the film is these gags strung together. Maybe the approach isn’t so peculiar (arguably, it’s the… 📖
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Sorum (2001, Yun Jong-chan)
Sorum’s approach makes the film singular. While the DVD cover certainly suggests a ghost story, the first half of the film does not. Instead, it’s a film about urban apathy, just one with an uncanny style. Director Yun really does know how to make a film–one scene in the film had me ready to proclaim… 📖
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Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969, Burt Kennedy)
From the first scene of Support Your Local Sheriff!, I thought of one thing: Blazing Saddles. Mel Brooks lifted the tone of the frontier townspeople scenes, just giving them ribald dialogue. In Sheriff, the humor poked at the Western stereotypes is smarter and funnier. The characters themselves are–in character–aware of the absurdities of the genre… 📖
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Shenandoah (1965, Andrew V. McLaglen)
In addition to being the first film of Andrew V. McLaglen’s I’ve seen (which is quite an achievement, considering how much he directed), Shenendoah is the first film I’ve seen where James Stewart plays the patriarch. Unless Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation counts and I don’t think it does, not like Shenendoah. The film sets… 📖
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The Foul King (2000, Kim Ji-woon)
The Foul King is supposed to be a comedy, but I only laughed once, about an hour in. It’s not about South Korea’s leading stand-up comedian (which I thought it was). It’s about a wrestler who cheats (and gets fouls for that cheating). The film’s structured not around a traditional sports movie, instead it’s about… 📖
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I Capture the Castle (2003, Tim Fywell)
Do the British have an unending supply of novels about wise-beyond-their-years young women (unjustly poor or ordinary, of course) who have slightly dim older sisters who can’t see love in front of their eyes while all the time these younger women suffer for their sisters’ happiness? It certainly seems so. I Capture the Castle, the… 📖
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Westward the Women (1951, William A. Wellman)
Despite the description–Robert Taylor guiding a hundred mail-order brides from the Middle West to California in 1851–having the potential for a lot of cute comedy, the film is anything but. It’s a rough, indifferent narrative (outside the romance subplot), where no one is safe from the harsh realities of the trip. Great Taylor performance, strong… 📖
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Libeled Lady (1936, Jack Conway)
Good but not great comedy about socialite Myrna Loy suing a newspaper for libel and editor Spencer Tracy enlisting fiancée Jean Harlow and pal William Powell to try and foil Loy. Harlow and, eventually, Tracy become third wheels in a Loy and Powell picture, with Harlow getting the least out of the film. Tracy has… 📖
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Dark Star (1974, John Carpenter)
Dark Star is probably John Carpenter’s second finest film (after The Thing). It’s the John Carpenter film I’ve always been saying he should make–a funny one. I have seen Dark Star before, probably nine years ago, back when it was somewhat rare (it got picked up, a year after I saw it, by a video… 📖
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Mallrats (1995, Kevin Smith), the extended version
Extended version of Kevin Smith’s pseudo-New Jersey, pseudo-mall culture comedy but really just pop culture references and bad dirty jokes movie tacks about a half hour onto the front before the movie even gets to the mall. Most of that added time is about Jeremy London, who’s terrible, his on-the-rocks girlfriend, Claire Forlani, who’s terrible,… 📖
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Return to Peyton Place (1961, José Ferrer)
Stupefyingly bad sequel to PEYTON PLACE without any of the original cast returning. Unfortunately, none of the replacements are up-to-par–though, to be fair to Tuesday Weld and Eleanor Parker (in for Hope Lange and Lana Turner, respectively) the parts are the problem not the performances. Really bad lead performance from Carol Lynley, who’s back in… 📖
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Monkey Grip (1982, Ken Cameron)
Poorly written drama about single mom (Noni Hazlehurst) working in the Melbourne music scene. She falls for heroin-addicted actor Colin Friels, which causes all sorts of problems because Hazlehurst is a mom after all. Alice Garner (daughter of source novel author Helen Garner) is the kid; she probably gives the best performance in the film.… 📖
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Warlords of Atlantis (1978, Kevin Connor)
Fairly awful sci-fi adventure picture about a scientist and his sidekicks discovering Atlantis; along the way there are sea monsters and other such things–if you’ve ever wanted to see John Ratzenberger fight a giant octopus, here’s you go. The Atlantians are fascists so the explorers aren’t just trying to save themselves, they’re trying to save… 📖