Category: Movies

Spenser Confidential review – Mark Wahlberg crash lands on Netflix:

caper called Spenser Confidential, is the kind of film that evaporates as it’s being watched, destined never to be thought of again. It’s regrettable given those involved, from director Peter Berg, who has worked with Wahlberg four times before, including on 2016’s criminally underseen Deepwater Horizon, to writer Brian Helgeland, who won an Oscar for his LA Confidential script before getting nominated for Mystic River. It’s also a story based around a much-loved private eye created by Robert B Parker, one who provided inspiration to crime authors such as Dennis Lehane and Harlan Coben. But it would take a master sleuth to detect any of that pedigree in the finished product.

Robert Urich is still my Spenser. I’ve seen the Joe Mantegna television movies and don’t remember hating them, but, as I mentioned, the Spenser: For Hire television series turned me onto the Spenser books in the first place.

Which means the progression for this IP was television series > books. And I liked both as their own things.

I don’t have Netflix, so I’ll have to wait for Friar to weigh in on it. It sounds like they’ve made some, erm, changes. But they’ve got a native Boston speaker to do it.

UPDATE: The wait is over.

In 2012, I posted a list of the top 100 movies of the year and made a quiz of it, identifying which I had seen.

Back then, the total was two.

Eight years on, the total is now five as I have seen The Dark Knight Rises, Ted, and John Carter.

Looking over the list, I might make out another dozen that I would be interested in seeing in the next decade, assuming that the DVDs are still available on the 2 for $1 shelf at the local video store. And that I end up going back to the video store regularly before it finally converts to a full-time CBD distributor and eventually closes.

It’s easy to get confused if you’re me. If you’re not, you probably won’t know either of these guys, so you won’t confuse them.

Rip Torn, star of Dodge Ball and Men in Black	Rip Taylor, star of Wayne’s World 2 and a bunch of things I haven’t seen

Only one of them is R.I.P. now, and strangely, it’s Rip Torn, who was the older of the two, although Rip Taylor seemed old in the 1980s.

Kim du Toit links to a story on SFGate with the provocative title Sex is disappearing from the big screen, and it’s making movies less pleasurable.

And it poses an interesting theory:

We know why. With the onset of internet porn, viewers looking for vicarious thrills had instant access to a cheap, private universe of polymorphous gratification. While Hollywood embraced a business model centered around wholesome baby-boomer nostalgia and PG-13 franchises, cable television and streaming services found their own niche, engaging in “Game of Thrones”-like one-up-manship in violence, profanity – and sex.

I’m pretty sure I’ve posited my theory before, but in case I haven’t: You know why Hollywood doesn’t put sex scenes in movies any more or even the formerly obligatory woman’s bare chest in comedies?

Overseas markets.

The cultures or gatekeepers of culture in other parts of the world don’t want that. So nobody gets it.

Like Kim, I’m not really mourning the loss.

I wonder if the gloss over the other cultures’ censors was intentional or thoughtless.

So last night, as I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep, my mind continued to whirl in strange directions instead of calming down.

So I started trying to recall films that I saw in the theater more than once.

I suspect it’s because of an exchange I had with a sixteen year old in martial arts class earlier in the evening. We’re working on a self-defense against choking that involves binding the arms and pushing down on the attacker’s neck, and I told him he needed to stretch me out when defending, to straighten his arms, and that I didn’t mind because it made me taller. “I’ll look like E.T. by the end of the night. Hey, have you guys seen this really old movie, E.T.?” Alluding to the latest incarnation of Spider-Man (Remember, gentle reader, the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man, gentle reader, debuted before my training partner was born). I think the young people enjoy it when I “get down” verbally, don’t you?

At any rate, I had E.T. on the brain, and I remembered I’d seen it twice in the theatres. Once with family friends, and once with a guy who dated my mother a couple of times and eventually opted for a woman on the next block in the housing projects–he and his kids and my sainted mother and her kids went to see it in the van that was eventually seen down Florist Avenue a lot.

So I started enumerating films I’ve seen twice in the theater.

• E.T.

  

  I guess I told this story above.

• Star Wars

  

  Although I did not see this in the theater in 1977, I saw it a couple of times on its re-release in the 1990s. In retrospect, I went to a lot of movies those days and could even see one a couple of times to make a statement.

• The Empire Strikes Back

  

  When my sainted mother was in rehab, my father took my brother and I to see this in the theaters on a Sunday evening after we visited her. But we got there late and missed the entire Hoth section of the film, so I would not see that until I saw it on video. I saw this movie the second time when it was re-released in the 1990s, which means it’s the longest time between viewings in the theater (so far).

• Return of the Jedi

  

  I would have to have seen this in the theater in its first run and also in the release. Wouldn’t I?

• The Bodyguard

  

  This film came out when I was at college and was establishing my identity as a stoic. So this film really fell into my wheelhouse.

• The Fugitive

  

  Ibid. I saw this film in the theater with my Milwaukee friends and with some of the college writing kids, including one of my college crushes, when the university showed in in the campus cinema. As we walked out, she whirled to me and said, “You like Gerard.” Well, yeah.

• The Truman Show

  

  The most recent entry on this list is from the late 1990s. The place where I worked, my first IT / office job, often left movie passes for employees by the coffee pot, and I grabbed a couple for this. I went with a friend, and then I took my fiancée. The movie really creeped me out as paranoid fiction often does, and although I have it on video, I haven’t watched it in a while. Not only do I go infrequently to movies, but I rarely get to watch videos, either. Although playoff hockey has made me comfortable watching the television for hours at a time in the evening, so perhaps I’ll get more in during the summer.

I came up with as many as I composed this post as I did last night before falling asleep, which should probably be a lesson to me when falling asleep: Just go to sleep, you’re not thinking very well anyway.

So what else might have made this list? I’ve seen Blade Runner in a revival one-night-only showing. Only once?

Films most likely to join these in the future are also things I might see in revivals such as The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep or something. I don’t really see myself in the position where I watch a film multiple times in the theater again.

Well, it should come full circle: I finished the book last month after having read the comic book adaptation last year sometime, and I was going to run through Villages at Monte Crist again this weekend, so I sat down to watch the 2002 film again (the first time I’ve seen it since seeing it in the theatre in 2002).

Of course, since I just read the book, I had a keen awareness of how the book was compressed. As I mentioned in my review, the long novel really was like a trilogy, with the first part being the unjust arrest and confinement of Edmond Dantès, the middle part is the things that go on during his confinement amongst the other players along with the beginnings of his plots, and the third is the culmination of his plots and his thoughts of whether his revenge is right or not.

The film covers the first part of the book, abbreviated, along with the third, really abbreviated. You can contrast the liberties the film takes with the original storyline, which are many. Alright, it’s about fitting it into a film, so I can see that.

However: As a film, the second half, where the Count of Monte Cristo emerges, saves young Albert from the thieves and is introduced into Paris to seek his abbreviated revenge against Danglars, Villefort, and Fernand Mondego. Which he does with a single plot involving the theft of a shipment of gold.

Which is not like the book at all.

Of course, one cannot judge a two hour film adapted from a one thousand page novel. One should test how the movie hangs on its own.

It’s paced fast enough, and, again, I like the first part, but the last half moves too quickly, really, to have depth (although it has action).

Alterations to the novel’s plot in service of the film treatment are forgiven for the most part, as they tighten the plot for a shorter treatment.

So it’s good enough to watch again, which I probably will with my boys this summer.

Well, I didn’t get to watch this film on the first try, but I did get to watch it after my triathlon class ended.

For those of you unfamiliar with the premise, it’s a film from 1959 where, after a nuclear war, an American submarine comes to Melbourne, Australia, where people are trying to carry on even though the scientists are pretty sure that the fallout will eventually reach Australia and kill them all.

The captain of the submarine, played by Gregory Peck, doesn’t like to think that his family in the states is dead. The Australian navy places a young officer, played by Anthony Perkins, as a liaison with the American forces, and he introduces Gregory Peck to a local drunk played by Ava Gardner. They start to have feelings for each other, but it’s complicated.

The Australian admirality receives a radio signal, so it sends the sub and its crew to the coast of California to investigate, which gives the sub crew a chance to view the empty coastlines and cities. Unfortunately, it’s not a remnant of civilization. So the sub returns to Australia, and everyone dies.

Well, the film ends with the sub heading back to America because the crew wants to die at home, but, man, it’s a heckuva downer of a film.

As you might know, gentle reader, Gregory Peck is not high on my list of favorite lead actors from the era, and Ava Gardner is not high on my list of actresses, either. However, the film does have Fred Astaire in it, so that’s a bonus.

A downer of a film, for sure, and anti-nuke agitprop. Not something to watch when you want to watch something entertaining, but if you fancy yourself a film buff, you might want to watch it for completeness.