Tag: John Wood

Richard III (1995, Richard Loncraine)

Richard III takes place in an alternate history where the British are five hundred years late with their royal wars, but still in the 1940s for technology and rising fascism. The film doesn’t update Shakespeare’s dialogue, so it’s the cast performing while dressed—increasingly—as Nazis. Except they’re British.

Well, not Annette Bening or Robert Downey Jr. Bening and Downey don’t do accents, implying there’s an accent-free United States out there. The people they’re playing in the play (who are people from history) were not American. There wasn’t a United States when the events took place. So I thought there might be some subtext to them being American. Nope. Richard III doesn’t do subtext, but it especially doesn’t do it with Bening and Downey.

Bening is not good, but she tries. Downey’s terrible. It’s unclear how hard he’s trying. He performatively fidgets in the backgrounds occasionally, presumably to keep himself in the movie, since it doesn’t do anything for his character development. Bening tries with the character development.

Doesn’t go anywhere, but again, she does try. And there are hints of better scenes. For example, in the second half of the film, when Ian McKellen is taking over, Bening gets together with the other women for an establishing shot and then a cutaway, but presumably, they’re very upset.

No one in the movie gets a good part except McKellen, but it’s not like Richard doesn’t fail him too. The first act’s dynamite, with McKellen plotting against brothers John Wood and Nigel Hawthorne and forcing the audience to conspire with him. They handle the plays asides with McKellen directly addressing the camera, tickled pink with his plotting. This device almost entirely disappears by the finish, apparently an appropriate adaptation of the source play.

But it’s not a good adaptation of it.

Similarly, no one really thought through the third act’s visual clashes—attempted usurper Dominic West (not good, not too bad) is dressed as a British commando from a WWII movie, complete with beret, off to fight… the British Nazis. Director Loncraine is initially bad at the war action but gets much worse for the finale. Richard III coasts through most of its run time on McKellen, trying to keep ahead of the film being entirely out of steam. It seems like it’ll make it; then comes the battle finish and Loncraine’s terrible work on it.

The film has big visual problems throughout, but Loncraine at least seemed to be trying to do something. Unfortunately, the finish is a smorgasbord of thoughtless bad.

Other than McKellen, who’s great when the film lets him be, the best performances are Kristin Scott Thomas (who should’ve had Bening’s part for sure) and Maggie Smith. Smith’s got about three scenes and seven lines. Scott Thomas has about double. Nowhere near enough for either.

Jim Broadbent plays McKellen’s chief sidekick and is relatively bland and obvious. It should be a better performance. There are excellent supporting players like Wood and Hawthorne, but also Jim Carter, Bill Paterson, Tim McInnerny, and Edward Hardwicke. All the actors are game (well, not Downey); it’s just Loncraine and company doesn’t put it together.

Peter Biziou’s photography is okay. Not the occasional composite shots. But Paul Green’s editing is jerky, and then Trevor Jones’s smooth jazz score is a (bad) choice.

Also, real quick—they reuse the same slamming door sound for about three minutes straight, regardless of door, and I’m wondering if it sounds so familiar because it’s from DOOM or something. DOORSLAM.WAV.

Anyway.

Richard III’s a slightly interesting but quickly pointless staging of the play. It’s never stagy, I suppose, but whatever they do instead doesn’t work either. McKellen’s first-act performance is singular, though. The rest is okay to good, but he has a unique first act.

The Last Days of Pompeii (1935, Ernest B. Schoedsack)

The Last Days of Pompeii opens with a disclaimer. Despite sharing a title, it is not based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel. That disclaimer should be read as a warning.

The film runs ninety-six minutes. The last days of Pompeii are the third act; the first two acts… wait, no. The timeline doesn’t even work internally. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, but when lead Preston Foster doesn’t give his life trying to free Jesus from the cross on the way to Golgotha, it’s 33 AD. Oh, sorry, spoiler. Last Days of Pompeii is not an exciting disaster movie; it’s a jejune Christian movie about how selfish dipshit jock Foster finds Jesus but not really.

Anyway.

In 33 AD, Foster’s got a nine-year-old adopted son—played by David Holt. It’s Foster’s second try at fatherhood; the first time, his selfishness and stupidity got his wife and baby son killed. After their deaths, he became a gladiator, eventually killing Holt’s dad in the ring. So Foster adopts him and strives to provide him with all the money in the world, including taking him to Jerusalem on a business trip. An old lady fortune teller tells Foster to take Holt to see the greatest man in Judea, so he takes Holt to meet Pontius Pilate (Basil Rathbone).

When the action gets to the Last Days, Holt’s character has grown into John Wood, who’s eighteen years older. Wood’s probably supposed to be playing a teenager, so screenwriter Ruth Rose’s taking the timeline even less seriously than she could.

Wood’s grown to resent his adoptive father’s greed and is trying to help escaped slaves get away from Pompeii. The slaves are headed to the gladiator games, dad Foster runs the games, but Wood knows he can’t tell his dad to stop being terrible. Even though they both met Jesus once, Foster has been trying to gaslight Wood into forgetting ever since.

The scary part of Foster’s performance is his angry old man, complete with makeup, is his best work in the movie. He’s lousy when he’s the greasy stud in the first act. He’s not the worst, but he’s bad. He slightly improves in the second act, when Pompeii introduces the real master of Judea, wink wink (not on screen, rather the Marsellus Wallace suitcase device), but only barely. Maybe the improvement is the lack of a greased-up chest.

Along the way, Foster buys a family slave, Wyrley Birch, who’s supposed to be a tutor but never tutors. Instead, Birch plays butler for Foster and sounding board for Wood. Birch seems like he’s always going to be better, but the movie never gives him anything to do.

Besides Rathbone alternating between sincere in his Christian movie performance and visibly restraining himself from chewing up the scenery, the most amusing thing about the film is spotting the character actors in the supporting cast. What other movie’s got Ward Bond as a gladiator (uncredited, which is weird because it’s a reasonably prominent role), Edward Van Sloan, Louis Calhern, Frank Conroy, and Jason Robards Sr. hacking it up in a costume drama. Plus a cameo from Jim Thorpe — All-American!

Unfortunately, the occasional appearance of a familiar character actor isn’t enough to keep the film going. Especially since none of them recur enough to matter. Alan Hale, but he’s second-billed and just not bad like Foster. Hale and some of the character actors can overcome the script, Foster cannot. Neither can Wood, unfortunately. Though he does better than his love interest, Dorothy Wilson. Pompeii’s got no time for ladies; they’re one kind of fodder or another, chariot or class.

Obviously, if the script were better, who knows. Director Schoedsack’s similarly unenthused, going from one rote setup to the next. He doesn’t even put any energy into the early gladiator fights, instead waiting for the finale when there’s much less time–though for a while, I wondered if they were going to skip the eruption altogether. The amphitheater in the finale’s much more elaborate than in the first act; maybe they weren’t done building it.

Most of Pompeii is just backlot street shots with questionable architecture. There’s not much special effects work outside some composite establishing shots. Unfortunately, the finale’s nowhere near enough to make up for it.

There’s more to say about Pompeii, especially the film’s presentation of slavery, but there’s not much reason to say it. It’s atrocious from the start, with some good but not good enough special effects at the very end.

Presumably, the Bulwer-Lytton novel has to have a better story, but I’ve got no inclination to find out.

This post is part of the Second “Disaster” Blog-A-Thon hosted by J-Dub of Dubsism and Gabriela of Pale Writer.

WarGames (1983, John Badham)

All WarGames really needs to be better is a good script rewrite, a better director (apparently there are some leftover shots from when Martin Brest tried directing it but got fired), and more John Wood. The Arthur B. Rubinstein music is a little iffy too but has its charms.

And WarGames has its charms. Matthew Broderick is often nearly charming in the lead; he’s a teenage computer hacker who tries to impress a girl (Ally Sheedy) by changing her grades only to get them involved in… well, not espionage. Basically Sheedy helps Broderick convince a lonely computer it wants to play a game; she gives him the big clue, which is regular people love their children. Based on Broderick’s parents in the film—an oblivious William Bogert and a nagging vitamin-obsessed eighties working movie mom Susan Davis—it makes sense he wouldn’t know to try the programmer’s dead son’s name.

They play a quick game of Global Thermonuclear War, then Broderick has to go clean up after his dog. The computer keeps playing—they hook it up to a voice box but Douglas Rain it ain’t, though—and I know John Badham had seen 2001, watching WarGames, you’d think he’d proudly declare he hadn’t—anyway. The Feds figure out Broderick hacked them, kidnap him off the street, and take him to NORAD. Where they do regular tours.

We’ve already been to NORAD because the movie opens with this hook—General Barry Corbin, who’s so proudly ignorant and backwards he’s probably an accurate depiction of an Air Force general (when they have him on the phone with the President and you realize it’s Reagan, WarGames becomes absurdist comedy), doesn’t have enough men willing to kill Russian babies. Now, eighty percent will do it, but twenty percent are wusses. So Dabney Coleman says they should let a computer do it. Said computer, housed in Colorado at NORAD, is hooked up to an outside phone line somewhere in California so Broderick can happen across it.

Pretty soon Broderick’s not only got to convince the adults he’s not a Russian spy, he’s also got to find a way to stop World War III. Luckily he’s got his best gal Sheedy, though they have very little chemistry and their kisses on the cheek are the most natural parts of their relationship, and she’s got enough money and her own car to keep the plot going. Also Broderick is able to MacGyver his way out of any situation thanks to his hacker skills. Though he doesn’t know anything about anything except those things. We see his grades and he’s ever ignorant of things he’d know from watching any modern television drama.

Though it’s a little better than Sheedy, who seems to be around to decorate and be decorative.

Outside a flashing light sequence at the end, William A. Fraker’s (surprisingly Oscar-nominated but so was the script so whatever, she don’t lie, cocaine) cinematography is fairly tepid, which matches Badham’s direction. Tom Rolf’s editing is not an asset either. Again, WarGames just needed a better director and a good script rewrite.

Broderick and Sheedy are fine. They both have solid moments, Broderick more but because they stumble upon how to make Broderick a movie star and occasionally repeat.

Besides the surprisingly effective third act and trying to figure out what computer programmer Wood is thinking when he’s acting so goofy, the most amusing part of WarGames is spotting the character actors in the cast. I’m going to miss a few because I don’t recognize their names just their faces but this movie’s got… John Spencer, Michael Madsen, James Tolkan (didn’t that guy ever have hair, sadly he doesn’t call Broderick a slacker), Jason Bernard, Alan Blumenfeld, Maury Chaykin, Eddie Deezen, Stephen Lee, and Art LaFleur. I’m leaving out a bunch of the military guys but it’s like, Michael Ensign from Ghostbusters (but not Raiders, so I’m confused). But the listed folks, those I’m sure about.

Oh. And Broderick’s joke at teacher Blumenfeld’s expense is great, actually.

Ladyhawke (1985, Richard Donner)

Two things about Ladyhawke without getting to the script or some of the acting. First, Andrew Powell’s music. It’s godawful; it’s stunning to see a director as competent as Richard Donner put something so godawful in a film. Intentionally put it in a film. It’s silly. It sounds like a disco cover of the “Dallas” theme song at its best and it tends to get much, much worse from that low peak.

Second, Vittorio Storaro’s photography. Not all of it, but the day for night stuff is terrible. Again, it seems like Donner and Storaro should know better, especially since there’s actual fine nighttime photography in other parts. Just not when the film needs it to visually make sense.

Now for the script. The film’s about Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer. They were carefree young lovers in Northern Italy after the Crusades, even though lots of people have French names, which gets confusing. I don’t think the location really matters. The evil bishop of this castle and settlement–John Wood in a really lame performance–curses them because he’s a Catholic bishop in the Middle Ages so he’s perving after Pfeiffer. By day, she lives as hawk. By night, he lives as a wolf. Both animals mate for life, something it seems unlikely anyone would know about in the Middle Ages, but the occasionally lamer than it needs to be script feels the need to point out.

But, Hauer’s not the lead and neither is Pfeiffer. Instead, it’s Matthew Broderick. He plays a young thief who escapes Wood’s prison and finds himself basically squiring for Hauer’s knight. He meets Pfeiffer and soon learns their tragic fate. The script doesn’t give anyone enough to do–except Wood and he’s got too much to do given his performance–but there’s a lot of trying. Broderick tries, Hauer tries, Pfeiffer tries. Pfeiffer’s the most successful, not because the writing is better for her, but because the plotting isn’t as bad for her scenes. Just the day for night photography. Hauer has it the worst. Any time he starts to show personality, it’s nightfall and he disappears for a bit.

The music and photography mess up quite a bit of what otherwise seems like a good production. There’s some wonky editing from Stuart Baird, like Donner didn’t get enough coverage, which isn’t a surprise, but it’s mostly fine. It’s not great, but it’s fine.

Leo McKern is all right as the disgraced priest who has the plan to reunite the lovers. Ken Hutchison’s kind of okay as Wood’s henchman. Better than Wood anyway, even if his part’s lame.

Even without the terrible music and the problematic photography, Ladyhawke would still have that script. All it’s got going for it is likability, which Broderick, Hauer and Pfeiffer all have; Donner just doesn’t utilize it. Instead, he relies on the script, the music, the photography and Ladyhawke’s… well, it’s too lukewarm to be a disaster. It should be a disappointment, but there’s not enough wasted potential to be one.

CREDITS

Directed by Richard Donner; screenplay by Edward Khmara, Michael Thomas and Tom Mankiewicz, based on a story by Khmara; director of photography, Vittorio Storaro; edited by Stuart Baird; music by Andrew Powell; production designer, Wolf Kroeger; produced by Donner and Lauren Shuler Donner; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Matthew Broderick (Gaston), Rutger Hauer (Navarre), Michelle Pfeiffer (Isabeau), Leo McKern (Imperius), Ken Hutchison (Marquet), Alfred Molina (Cezar) and John Wood (The Bishop).

RELATED