Category: Movies

This film comes from the early middle 1980s, and it’s definitely a product of its time.

Eddie Murphy was beginning his ascent to being a box office superstar–he’d done 48 Hours the year before, and Beverly Hills Cop was a year in the future. Wait, then it was Coming to America in 1987, but The Golden Child in between, and maybe that was it–Boomerang and The Distinguished Gentleman and Vampire in Brooklyn were kinda flops, so aside from a couple of sequels which did okay, it was onto the silly family movies and remakes in the middle 1990s. Maybe Eddie Murphy’s heydey coincided with my youth and watching Raw and The Golden Child over and over on Showtime whilst in the trailer.

Still, one detects a certain theme in Murphy’s works: The fish out of water. The con out of jail. The Detroit cop in California. The PI in Tibet.

And, in this film, a con man swept up into a life of luxury. Dan Ackroyd, who is also in this film (I say that a bit facetiously–both he and Murphy star in the film and have equal billing), plays a commodities trader named Louis Winthrope who aspires to be respected by the old money men, played by Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy. They, on the other hand, don’t think much of him. And when one of them reads an article about Nature vs. Nurture, he thinks that any man in the commodity trader’s environment would thrive, and that if Winthrop were out of his environment, he would not thrive. So they make a wager on it and they turn Winthrope out and replace him with Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy), a con man arrested after bumping into Winthrop outside the club. When Winthrop and Valentine learn of the scheme, they set about to reverse their fortunes and to bankrupt the Duke boys. That is, the old money brothers, not the Dukes of Hazzard.

Maybe I just haven’t watched enough period pieces set in the 18th or 19th century or much of recent times, but something about the club and the snooty people there and the social circles and the locations smack of the 1980s. One could almost imagine Judge Smalls from Caddyshack in the film. But unlike perhaps some recent things, it does not depict commodities trading or making fortunes as evil in and of themselves. Thematically, that will change, and by 1983, probably already is.

An amusing film which stands the test of time if you’re of a certain age. Undoubtedly, younger people might find it an anachronism. But maybe not–I caught my oldest re-watching The Secret of My Success. Maybe kids these days can appreciate aspirational comedies.

Oh, and the film also had Jamie Lee Curtis as a financially savvy prostitute. But, to be honest, I’ve never found Jamie Lee Curtis all that. Maybe it’s the short haircuts. But Kristin Holby, on the other hand, plays Winthrope’s fiance who abandons him in his time of need. She, I like, although she’s made up in this film to be a caricature of a shallow society girl.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Trading Places (1983)” →

“Didn’t you just watch this movie?” my beautiful wife asked as she passed through the den the evening which I watched this film. No, gentle reader; we know I watched Indiscreet a couple weeks ago. I am internally aghast that my wife might think that all Technicolor Cary Grant movies from the late 1950s look the same.

C’mon, man, you know the plot, ainna? Grant plays a suave playboy engaged to an New York heiress meets a woman engaged to a wealthy man on a ship crossing the Atlantic. They strike up a friendship, which everyone else on board thinks is an affair. They visit his grandmother in her home in a beautiful Mediterranean setting, and the engaged woman (played by Deborah Kerr) starts to fall for him–and he for her. As they reach New York, they make a pact to meet at the top of the Empire State Building in six months if they’ve broken away. On the day of their reunion, she is struck by a car and cannot make it, and he feels jilted. But he eventually meets her again and discovers her secret. Sorry if I spoiled it for you, but the film has been a part of our culture from its debut up until the end of the time when we had a culture. Sleepless in Seattle relies on it heavily, for crying out loud.

I have seen this film before some time ago, and although I enjoy it, I did not get into it so much as apparently, at least fictional, Baby Boomer women might have. I still want to be Cary Grant when I grow up (and, as he said, “So do I.”).

I don’t think I have many other Cary Grant films hidden amongst the stacks, so I will have to hunt for them in the wild. But Cary Grant movies for the home video market seem to be more videocassette than DVD, and the VHS tapes are getting thin out there all ready.

Gentle reader, I will ask you to indulge me here a bit. I saw Ghost Rider recently, but I cannot tell you how recently that would have been since I’ve only been doing movie reports since 2020 here (recently). I mean, I am pretty sure I watched it at Nogglestead, but it could have been on a DVD I rented in my most recent movie store membership days (within the last decade) or on a DVR version I recorded before the last time I cut the cord (also within the last decade, but more last decader than when I had the video store card). Or, gentle reader, it could have been somewhere in the middle where I bought the movie on physical medium, watched it, and put it on the “watched” shelves which are not as deep, extensive, or inscrutible as the Nogglestead bookshelves, but are quite deep never the less.

At any rate, suffice to say, I have watched Ghost Rider recently. But not in the cinema, so my time between viewings is less than 300.

Most notable about watching the two on successive nights is the great chasm between 2007 and 2012. No, not the political chasm. Not the personal chasm (Old Trees >mother dead > Nogglestead). The whole aesthetic approach to comic movies. Maybe the studios’ understanding, or not, of them.

At any rate, in Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze works with his father in the circus as a stunt rider. Johnny hopes to leave the circus to be with Roxy, who doesn’t think much of circus folk. When Johnny learns his father is dying of cancer, he signs a deal with the devil to heal his father–and the devil does, but the father dies immediately in a stunt gone bad. Because, you know, the devil. But he says he will call on Johnny when he needs him.

Years later, Johnny is still a stunt rider although a la Evil Knievel, packing stadia with people who want to see his outlandish stunts. Johnny can’t die, so no matter how badly the jumps go, he is all right. But then the devil needs him to help find and prevent another demon loose on the planet from getting his hands on an unfulfilled contract. Sorry for the late notice, but the film starts with Sam Elliot narrating the legend of the Ghost Rider, the devil’s bounty hunter, who was supposed to execute on a contract for 1000 souls but who did not. Blaze gets the powers of the Ghost Rider (on a motorcycle, not a horse).

The film is mostly a series of set pieces where Ghost Rider has to take out the minions of the demon and finally kill the main boss. The subplot revolves around Blaze reuiniting with Roxy–he left her after signing the contract, but she returns as a reporter who scores an interview with him before a big jump.

This film comes from the Before period, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe (as did The Punisher). Mark that.

Ghost Rider: The Spirit of Vengeance (2012) comes five years later and does not extend the story of the first so much as reboots it, albeit with the Nicholas Cage again as the Ghost Rider. The film tells his origin story again, albeit differently, which is much more jarring when you have just seen the original film just the night before. Maybe it worked better after five years, and perhaps people watching this film did not see the first one. At any rate, Idris Elba portrays a holy man of some motorcycle-riding order who comes to an armed monestary of some sort just an armed force attacks it, looking for a boy who is part of some prophecy. The boy’s mother escapes with him, and Idris Elba finds Johnny Blaze hiding out in Europre, trying not to be the Ghost Rider or let the Ghost Rider out. He reluctantly agrees to find the mother and to protect the boy, who is the spawn of the devil and into which the devil eventually wants to put himself in exchange for Elba lifting the curse on Johnny. So that’s what happens with a twist at the climax.

As I mentioned, the two films have a completely different feel to them. The first has a touch of CGI to it–well, okay, a bunch–but it at the core has a certain heart to it that the second does not. The second feels like a series of CGI spectacles stitched together loosely with a plot. Both have Nicholas Cage doing the gonzo Nic Cage thing, but the second is gritter, pared down to the bone and a touch pessimistic or brutal. The second ignores some of the constraints put on the Ghost Rider in the first film–only coming out at night, for example–which might only matter if you watch the two films in close succession, which perhaps only I and Nic Cage do in 2023.

So I liked the first more than the second.

Violante Placido played Nadya, the mother, in the second film.
Continue reading “Movie Report: The Ghost Rider Collection: Ghost Rider (2007), Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012)” →

Like 300, I saw this film in the theater, but this time it has no controversy because I know I saw it with my beautiful new bride. My goodness, we went to a lot of movies in those early years BC (before children). Now that we’re getting to the AC years, I’m less interested in the offerings at the cinema and like a sad old man like to watch the films I have already seen at home because I think they’re better than what’s getting made now adays. And I’m probably correct, but I’ll leave it to Christian Toto, John Nolte, or the Critical Drinker to argue why.

At any rate, the movie starts with college sweethears Nicolas Cage and Téa Leoni at the airport. He’s going to London for a one-year-long internship with Barclays which should set him on his career path, and he vows to return to her. The story picks up thirteen years later–he did not, in fact, return to her, and has instead become a wealthy finance guy on Wall Street, and he’s keeping his team in the office over Christmas to work on a big multi-billion dollar merger. He decides to walk home on Christmas Eve and stops by a convenience store for some egg nog when he has to step in and defuse a tense situation. The street thug, played by Don Cheadle, is actually some sort of angel who, in speaking with Cage (the character’s name is Jack Campbell, but the character is the understated Cage), does not believe the businessman when Campbell (I will try to get better about using the character name instead of the actor in these movie reports) says he is not lacking anything in his life.

So Campbell wakes up on Christmas morning in a strange place: A house in New Jersey where he is married to Kate (Leoni) and they have two kids. He tries to return home, but the doorman and resident at his apartment do not know him, nor does the security man at the firm where he worked. So he tries to navigate his new environment, and he learns that in this reality, he returned from London the next day and ended up working for–and saving–his father-in-law’s tire store when the father-in-law had a heart attack. And Campbell learns the value and love in this life that he was missing.

It ends a bit abruptly and unsatisfyingly when he’s returned to his old life and contacts Kate, only to find that she is moving to Paris. But he meets her at her airport gate in a scene clearly designed to mirror the opening scene, and the ending is but perhaps an opening.

Still, it occurred to me as I watched this that this would have been the last new movie I saw in theaters with the World Trade Center in the New York skyline and where you could go to an airports gates without standing in line and presenting a ticket. World events made the movie an anachronism in less than a year.

Also, I wondered what my perspective would have been watching the film then. I was a newlywed, and I did not sacrifice anything when I married–if anything, it was during my courtship of my wife that I moved from being a printer to being a professional in IT. The film takes place thirteen years after the initial parting of the protagonists. I’ve been at Nogglestead longer than that, and in rewatching the film after having children (not in the plans in 2000) who are almost grown up now. And I look back to see if I made sacrifices. Did I? Would I have been so different had I not married my wife now? I know a couple of people who have not married and climbed various ladders. Would I want to trade places with them? No.

So I guess that’s a nice reminder.

With re-watching this film, I have rather covered a lot of Téa Leoni’s oeuvre in the last year or two (see also Bad Boys, Spanglish, Fun with Dick and Jane). Combined with Deep Impact and A League of Their Own which I saw in the theaters, that’s her major movies.

I’ve also seen most of Lisa Thornhill’s major movies as well. Which is a tacit admission that I have not yet seen Time Cop. Continue reading “Movie Report: The Family Man (2000)” →

You know, I saw this film in the theater. I want to say it was at Crestwood Plaza, and my initial assessment was that it was with El Guapo, but given the timing of the film–it was four years past working with El Guapo, and but we were working across the street from each other downtown at the time. Perhaps I saw it with Gimlet, as I would have just finished working with his wife at the time. It’s only sixteen years ago, and already the memory is fuzzy.

At any rate, this is a retelling of the story of the Spartans fighting the Persians at Thermopylae. Jeez, do I have to explain what that was? The Persians were looking to invade Greece, and a small contingent of soldiers from Sparta hold off the invasion at a narrow pass. The Spartans are all killed, though, but the Persian victory cost them–it was a Pyrrhic victory before Pyrrhic victories were named after Pyrrhus. Gerard Butler plays the Spartan king Leonidas, and he plays it with an Australian accent.

I mean, it’s based on a comic book, and they managed to capture a comic book feel to the film with its colors, some stylized slow-motion and different shots. It has a subplot about Leonidas’ wife trying to raise a Spartan army to bolster the 300–who are not an army per se as paid-off oracles prohibited gathering an army for battle–which kind of serves to pad the story a bit, but I’m sure the film cut a bunch from the comic books. They’re different media, of course, and the film is pretty good for what it is.

A strange bit–I found I had two copies of the DVD from various film-buying frenzies, which came in handy. I had some trouble with two DVDs I tried to watch one night–The Return of the One-Armed Swordsman didn’t play, and then I put in a copy of 300 which was balky before the title menu and then froze about half way through. So I paused my viewing for the evening, and I popped in the second copy of 300 the next night. Not only did it play flawlessly–alleviating my fear that the DVD player was getting wonky and I would have to deploy one of my several backups already, but the second copy played immediately from the same spot. Because, for the DVD player, it was the same disc.

The film also fits in with my reading, as I am into the second volume of The Story of Civilization, The Life of Greece. And like Reservoir Dogs, this book makes me want to rewatch another film. Or, rather, this film and what I’m reading. That film: The Warriors, a retelling of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand. Coming soon to a movie report near you? Time will tell! (But probably not as I have so many other films to watch, so rewatching DVDs and videocassettes is unlikely–unlike rewatching things I’ve seen in the past before buying them, sometimes again, on media.)

I got this film in February, and I popped it in because my oldest, who now has a job, income, and–from his perspective–everything one needs to be an adult so he can’t wait to move out and not have to clean his room–has gotten himself a Netflix subscription and is catching up on all the R-rated movies I’ve missed. Like this one.

I have to admit that I’m not much of a Tarentino fan. I mean, I’ve seen Pulp Fiction, and I’ve seen From Dusk til Dawn. The only movie that I’ve enjoyed enough to rewatch is Jackie Brown. Come to think of it, this means I’ve seen his first four films (this was his first) and nothing after. I rented Kill Bill Volume 1 back when I had a video store membership, but I didn’t make it past the opening titles, or maybe the pre-title narration in the dark. I thought, “I don’t have to watch this brutality,” and I ejected the DVD and returned it unwatched (at $.50 a rental, I did that a couple of times with other films). But some years later, and having watched this film, I wonder how inured I have become to brutality in film–I remember thinking the most recent Conan revival wasn’t that bad. So maybe I will take a flyer on Kill Bill some other time.

But that’s a long digression.

The critic hearken this film back to noir thrillers from the olden days, and I can see it, albeit it’s in color and the actual cinematography doesn’t capture that. Instead, it reminds me a little more of the old black-and-white films which were quite clearly adopted from a play. After all, the film takes place in a single location, a “warehouse” that looks more like it would have been a garage, with only some other locations appearing through flashback.

At any rate, for those of you not familiar with the plot, a local crime figure has gathered a number of crime specialists to do a diamond heist. The first bit of the film takes place in a diner before the job. But then we switch to the warehouse after the job has gone bad–the police were apparently waiting for them. One of the bad guys has been gutshot and is brought in by a strongarm man who has befriended or befathered him in spite of the rules. Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink arrives and says that someone was a fink. That’s the basics. We get flashbacks from some of the main characters telling both how the robbery went wrong and how they prepared for it, and we find out fairly early who the undercover policeman is but have to wonder what will become of him.

There’s a brief torture scene–my beautiful wife said I’d never hear Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” the same way, but watching this film must have been her first and formative experience with the song and not mine, so it won’t affect my appreciation of Gerry Rafferty–and there’s a Mexican standoff and some amibuity in the end.

So it was not as brutal as I thought (although that might be me watching the film 30 years later–maybe it was indeed brutal for its time). An okay movie, but not necessarily something I’ll rewatch a bunch. It does make me want to rewatch Jackie Brown, though. For the Pam Grier, certainly, but also because it introduced me to Bobby Womack, whose CDs and records I’ve since acquired when I can.

I bought this film in June in Arkansas, and as it had been almost two months since I’d seen a Cary Grant film (three, actually), it was time.

Ingrid Bergman plays a London actress who comes back from a holiday early after yet another suitor cannot hold her attention. Her sister and brother-in-law stop to use her flat to change before a formal dinner and are surprised to find her back. They invite her along, but she demurs because she finds those dinners and their speakers boring. But Cary Grant shows up as the American economist scheduled to speak, invited to also change at the flat from his trip into his evening clothes, and Bergman is smitten. Pardon me if I don’t bother to include the character names–I’ve already forgotten them.

So Grant and Bergman spend a wonderful evening together, but at the end of the night, Grant says that he’s married, separated, but cannot get a divorce–right after Bergman says she hears that from all the men.

But they take up an affair anyway. Wait, what? Blatant immorality in the 1950s? Get out of town!

So the film is them flirting, bantering, and pitching woo until it is revealed that Grant’s character is not actually married–that he just says that because he does not want to get married, and when he has said that in the past, women always thought they would be the one to make him change his mind. Bergman is just such a woman, and she hopes to change his mind. When she finds out, though, that he is not, in fact, married, she is scandalized and plans a surprise when he is to surprise her for her birthday–she plans to be caught in flagrante delicto with an old flame who falls ill, so she has her elderly chauffeur play the role briefly. But it ends happily, though.

You’re watching it to see Grant and Bergman flirt and caper about (well, not as caper as in some other Grant films).

I’ve seen Bergman in a number of films, but something about the color in this film really emphasized the lines between her teeth, and it was distracting.

Weird. Probably not on a real woman–now watch me as I stare at women’s teeth in the real world until I’m tased–but not something we generally see nowadays on actresses and influencers due to orthodontia and veneers.

So I got to thinking about the leading men/heroes that played opposite of Ingrid Bergman who I most closely resemble in my own mind. Gentle reader, those include Cary Grant (this film and Notorious which I have yet to see), Humphrey Bogart (from Casablance), and Bing Crosby (The Bells of St. Mary’s which I’ve seen a couple of times and include it in my Christmas film rotation). Of all them, of course, I would prefer to be Cary Grantish, but I am pretty sure I am mostly Humphrey Bogartish (I have had a picture of him on my office wall for…. well, probably not decades, plural, yet, but for a long time). Of course, in this accounting, I have forgotten For Whom The Bell Tolls with Gary Cooper, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen that. I would hunt it down for a re-watch but I have other films I’ve not yet seen to get to first.

At any rate, best viewed by a Grant or Bergman completist, but kind of pedestrian and of questionable moral worldview otherwise.

Well, I have often–well, I have once or twice–talked about the Sandlerverse and the Ferrellverse and even the Apatowverse. I’d say this is a crossover event, but really it’s an Apatow movie with Adam Sandler in the lead role, and it relies on actors from the Apatowverse (Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill), so this has nothing to do with the Sandlerverse at all. And it’s not even a comedy–it is a drama about comedians, so it has some jokes, but the situations themselves are not comic.

Sandler plays an older, established comic who went from stand-up to movie success who learns he is dying of a blood cancer, so he sort of adopts a younger comic to be his protégé and assistant and…. friend. Sandler’s character also tries to reconcile with his ex-fiancé who is now married to an Australian businessman and has two children. When he learns that his cancer is cured by the experimental treatment he received, he almost convinces her to leave her husband, but ultimately everyone learns that Sandler’s character has not really grown from his experience and is still very self-involved.

Unlike, say, Step Brothers, this lack of growth is not celebrated–it’s recognized as tragic. But, eventually, in the dénouement as the credits roll, we see a bit of a reconciliation.

Like Spanglish, this is an early dramatic turn for Sandler, but the character is not sympathetic enough to draw us in, and the Rogen-based assistant is, well, played by Rogen. He just doesn’t draw me in.

As I have mentioned, I’m probably going to miss a lot of Sandler’s later œuvre as it’s on streaming platforms and not in wide release, although perhaps if the streaming market implodes, they’ll be available elsewhere. Also, you are correct in guessing that I was disappointed that œuvre did not give me the opportunity to pretentiously use another word with accents, although I did get a chance to use one of those smashed-together letters.

Well, this is another film in the Ferrelverse, and a 21st century film at that. I watched it without my boys even though they tend to favor Will Ferrell movies.

At any rate, the film deals with two forty-year-old manchildren, played by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, whose single parents meet and marry, making the, what, protagonists (Are you kidding me? We have to use that word for their characters?) as step-brothers. And they have childish spats until they discover their similar interests, when they team up for something childish, and then they have another falling out. There’s a subplot about Ferrell’s character’s younger, more successful, brother who acts as a foil for his childishness, and the younger brother’s wife who is crazy hot for the Reilly character for some reason. At the end, they all reconcile.

But they do not grow up.

I guess that’s why I prefer Adam Sandler films rather to Will Ferrell films. The Adam Sandler characters tend to start out boyish–okay, immature and grating–but they’re called to some cause outside themselves, and they grow up over the course of the film. Whereas Ferrell characters do not. The denouement is that the father of the family puts the boat that the boys wrecked into a tree as a treehouse for them to play in, and their love interests accept their, erm, foibles. So, yeah, not much inspiration to be found in this film.

A product of its time, right down to the George W. Bush quote that appears on the screen at the beginning of the film. C’mon, man, kids today don’t identify George W. Bush as the boogeyman anymore.

I cannot say that I will never again watch a Will Ferrell film–I mean, some of them which were a bit more topical had their moments–but overall, probably more of a marker of our decline than funny.

As I thought Grosse Pointe Blank was a very 1990s movie–or at least one that captured if not the feeling of being in your twenties in the 90s, at least an archetypcial representation of the same, this film captures a 1980s New York upper class zeitgeist–if not a representation of the actual experience, at least a representation of how this particular situation was presented in the 1980s. Followed in the 1990s by Sex in the City and other stylized representation of glamorous life in the big city packaged for those who are not there.

Tom Hanks plays Sherman McCoy, a bond trader, son of a bond trader, who is on top of the world. He’s making millions, he’s married to a socialite played by Kim Cattrall…. But it’s not enough, or something. His wife is more into being a socialite than in being a wife. So he has taken up with a married woman played by Melanie Griffith. He picks her up from the airport and is taking her to their love nest when they miss their exit to Manhattan and end up in the South Bronx. When Sherman leaves the car to move a tire in their way, a couple of black kids approach, probably with bad intent. Maria (Melanie) slides into the driver’s seat, and in the process of their getaway, hits one of the youths. Sherman wants to go to the police, but Maria talks him out of it.

When police don’t seem to be doing much to seek justice for the incident, an Al Sharpton-style self-aggrandizing preacher grabs onto the incident, as does a Jewish district attorney who is running for mayor–and a new assistant D.A. wants to make his mark (and maybe Maria). Bruce Willis plays Peter Fallow, a talented but often drunk journalist who gets hold of the story and helps to drum up the pursuit of the driver (but his paper just wanted the press of the injustice of it all, as the preacher and the struck boy’s mother just wanted a lawsuit payday). When they catch Sherman and look to hang it on him, Fallow looks deeper into it, and even though Sherman’s life falls apart, he is exonerated.

The film cuts between the different players and their individual storylines in the overarching story pretty well–I was kept interested through the film. I know it comes from a thick Tom Wolfe novel (which I have here somewhere), and I could see where the characters might have been better developed in a novel. I was kind of looking forward to trying the novel or another Tom Wolfe novel (I have several, of course), but my beautiful wife said she started the book but put it down. And, you know, I could see how none of the characters would be likeable. A film can move this along–and this one does–but if a writer feels contempt for his characters and doesn’t give the readers anyone to like…. Well, I don’t know that I’m going to go looking for the book, anyway.

But as a film, it’s not bad. It bombed at the box office, though, so perhaps it fell into a crevice between the 80s zeitgeist and the upcoming 90s zeitgeist. Or maybe I just am on a kick of using the word “Zeitgeist.”

You might be expecting a Kim Cattrall vs. Melanie Griffith battle tucked under the fold here, but to be honest, I am kind of a Kim Cattrall partisan even though I’ve learned her biography is a bit, erm, varied.

Instead, I’m thinking if, overall, I’m more of a Tom Hanks character or a Bruce Willis character guy. Even aside from the types of films they’re in (comedy then drama, comedy then action), I think I’m more of a Bruce Willis character guy. His characters have a working man vibe to them that Tom Hanks’ characters do not.

I guess it cannot be said that I’m on a John Cusack kick since the last film I watched of his was High Fidelity three months ago. Or maybe two movies in three months is a kick. Regardless, we mentioned Grosse Pointe, or something, at Nogglestead which prompted me to watch this film last weekend. Not this last weekend. The weekend before. Maybe a lost weekend, or maybe that’s all the weekends in the past.

Regardless, my oldest had a friend over for the night, and when they came downstairs at one point, my oldest said, “Is that Elvis?”

“No, get out of here,” I tenderly responded. Although maybe in his defense Cusack had a curl in the middle of his forehead in the scene, and also in his defense the variety of the qualities of transfers his father watches might have made Technicolor look like modern DVDs (or more likely, modernish movies on VHS looked worse than Technicolor).

At any rate, in this film, Cusack plays a hitman who might be losing his edge who is working with a therapist who feels threatened into keeping Cusack’s Martin Blank who has revealed that he knows where the doctor lives after he, Blank, has shared his profession. He’s trying to work something out, find some meaning to his life, and so he decides to return to his home town of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, for his 10th class reunion since he has a job in the area. Meanwhile, Dan Ackroyd is another hitman trying to put together a guild–and when Blank won’t join, he launches a plot to eliminate him. While in Grosse Pointe, Blank reconnects with an old flame played by Minnie Driver and an old friend, now a real estate agent, played by Jeremy Piven. As Blank tries to work things out, a variety of unsavory types including a hit man whom Blank humiliated show up seeking revenge, justice, or whatnot.

So it’s a bit of a black comedy/actionish film targeted right at the heart of Generation X as they were getting old in their mid-to-late twenties. Blank’s home has been replaced by a convenience store. His father died and his mother is in an asylum. He has been away for ten years when he’s been in the military, the CIA, and then a contract killer. So detached from home. I understand as I never really had anything I considered a home and not much of a family. So, yeah, when I first saw it when I was almost ten year reunion age, it rang bells. It still does, but more of a that’s what it felt like to be almost thirty twenty-five years ago thing.

Remember, gentle reader, I watched High Fidelity earlier this year. As Cusack is but a couple years older than I am, I’ve found his films from the middle 1990s to the early 2000s to track better with my personal zeitgeist (a concept for which the Germans have an adequate word without having to make a compound phrase out of an English and a German word) than things like Reality Bites or, certainly, the Brat Pack movies of the 1980s.

So it was good for a rewatch, but I’m not sure how younger audiences would like it as they did not live through that time, and I’m note sure how timeless the themes really and their presentation really are.

Also, this was the second film short succession that I saw which had Alan Arkin in it shortly after his passing (Glengarry Glen Ross being the other).

Enough about Alan Arkin. More about Minnie Driver, the local radio personality love interest.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)” →

Ah, gentle reader, it was but four years ago when I discovered the Bob Hope two-pack that included The Road to Bali was mislabeled at the factory and instead contained ten episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. As it and The Road to Rio fell out of copyright protection, so they’re pretty easily available in transfers of sometimes dubious quality from “nostalgia” houses which specialize in copyright-free fare. Somewhere along the line, I picked up this two DVD set. I watched The Road to Bali with my boys some time ago (back when they would watch movies with their old man–now the oldest prefers to watch Netflix alone in his room and the younger prefers an endless river of YouTube videos on a handheld device).

They’re part of the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour series of “The Road to….” movies which are not really a series, per se, as they play different characters in each but all have a certain type: Hope and Crosby are vaudevillians/con men/performers on the run from (usually) woman trouble who end up going to an exotic location and encountering and trying to woo the Lamour character. They’re also very self-conscious and meta-movies, where they spoof film conventions and sometimes break down the fourth wall.

The Road to Bali from 1952 finds the two performers in Australia from which they must flee to avoid a couple of shotgun weddings. They go to Darwin where they sign up as deep sea divers on an expedition looking for lost treasure. Their employer is a prince whose sister, the princess (Lamour), the boys try to woo. They find treasure and try to escape and then end up shipwrecked on another island where the natives take them in, and instead of having to choose, the princess learns she can marry multiple husbands–so she wants to marry them both. But she ends up married to the chief, and Hope and Crosby end up married to each other. A volcanic eruption seems to indicate displeasure with this turn of events, and as often happens, Crosby ends up with Lamour. This film is the only one of the series in technicolor–and represents the penultimate entry in the series, which is a weird place to start, but they’re all stand alone films.

The Road to Rio finds the boys down on their luck when they sign up at a circus. After doing their vaudeville number, Crosby tells Hope he also has to perform a high wire act–which goes awry and burns down the circus. On the run from the circus owner, the boys stow away on a ship bound for Rio. There, they encounter an heiress (Lamour) scheduled to marry her “aunt”/caretaker’s cousin unseen. The caretaker is controlling the heiress and facilitating the marriage using hypnosis. They expose Hope and Crosby as stowaways, hijinks ensue, and when they reach Rio, the boys have to break the caretaker’s hold on the girl and get the “Papers,” a MacGuffin they later expose as nothing but a MacGuffin (remember the meta nature of the films).

I suppose if you’re of a certain age and probably a bit of an old soul even then to really appreciate the films, but then again, I am both, so I’d be happy to discover more in this series out in the wild, but given how 1995 or 1996 is the Year Zero of modern culture, I won’t hold my breath.

I got this DVD for a buck in Arkansas last month, and it was the first film I watched when I got back.

As you might remember, gentle reader, I reported on the printed play in 2007 (or as I like to say, a couple months ago–my goodness, that would be right after I left my job as the Director of Quality for the interactive marketing agency and was getting ready for what would be a couple of years of part-time contracts as I took care of my child and then children). I said then that I wondered how the play would get stretched into a 100 minute movie. And the answer, apparently, is not well.

The plot: Four men (played by Alan Arkin, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, and Jack Lemmon) work selling dubious real estate lots in Arizona and Florida. Their manager (played by Kevin Spacey) parcels out two leads to each every day, leads that come from people who filled out cards, perhaps in the supermarket to enter a contest (as was the fashion at the time). Each will apparently do or say anything to get someone to buy a lot. One day, they arrive at work in the afternoon or evening to find Alec Baldwin–well, the downtown sales manager guy–come to give them the famous speech (“Coffee is for closers.”) and to tell them they’re all fired except for the man who sells the most that month (current leader: the guy played by Pacino). Baldwin then taunts them with a set of premium leads for the Glengarry Glen Ross project, but gives them to the sales manager (Spacey) who locks them in his office.

One of the men (Harris) tries to get another of the salesmen (Arkin) to help him break into the office to steal those leads, and the majority of the film is Harris trying to convince Arkin, Lemmon working the leads he’s given, and Pacino taking the long way to sell to the guy who played Seamus in Ronin (what was in the case? I don’t remember.).

That’s it. The movie has a handful of sets: The office, the Chinese restaurant across the street, the street, a phone booth, a car interior, and a sales prospect’s house. So it’s kind of a throwback of a film like one you get from the 30s or 40s where it’s clearly directly translated from the play.

A bit of an anachronism, although perhaps just a touch when it came out, as the land sales thing was not as big in the 1990s as it was in decades past. I did, however, buy it when I was on vacation using “points” that we bought as part of the modern timeshare that we’ve had for, what, almost a decade? It’s been worth it to us, but your mileage may vary. It was not lost on me, though, that I bought this DVD while on a vacation made possible by a sales pitch much like the ones depicted in the film. Many years later, I still have most of the balance on one of the gift cards given as a lure. Because it’s for Bass Pro Shops, and I am not muvh of an outdoorsman. The only thing I’ve used it for was a camouflage hat for my father’s grave.

At Rob K.’s recommendation, I watched this film. I am easily led, you see, so be careful with your comments, gentle reader, as they may spur me to action.

So, the plot: In an alternative reality, in 1939, an intrepid woman reporter, Polly (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) investigates the disappearance of several scientists. As she’s doing so, a number of giant robots attack the city to extract resources. The authorities call upon Sky Captain, played by Jude Law, who is the leader of a band of mercenary pilots. Sky Captain manages to save Polly and disable one of the robots, which he takes to his base in the mountains for his science-and-engineering genius, played by Giovanni Ribisi, to study. Sky Captain and Polly follow the trail of the missing scientists to a base in the Himalayas and then to an island lair where Dr. Totenkopf’s minions have been building a rocket to take select animals and people and robots to another planet to begin anew as man on earth is bad. Unfortunately, the rocket’s acceleration at about 100km above the earth’s surface will kill all life on the planet.

As mentioned in the previous post, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow features a lot of CGI animation–the film was one of the first to feature a completely green-screen backlot, where scenery behind the actors is completely penciled pixeled in. As Rob said, it has aged well, but that’s because the animation was supposed to look a bit like a comic book and not as real as they could make at the time. So it’s not a jarring anachronism.

An interesting film, an especial treat if you’re familiar with the comic books of the 1930s (such as Doc Savage) with their tropes.

Angelina Jolie appears in the film wearing an eyepatch which in the comic books of the 1930s would not disqualify one from being a pilot. Bai Ling also appears in this movie–it is the first film I’ve seen her in since posting her picture in 2017. I thought it might be the first film I’d seen with her, but I’ve seen The Crow and Red Corner, so this is not the case. I just didn’t know then to associate the name with the actress at the time.

I don’t know where I bought this collection, but it looks to be fifteen films from the Blaxploitation era of the 1970s. And, to be honest, they’re not the best of them–one bets you could sell Shaft, Across 110th Street, Foxy Brown, Superfly, and a handful of other films singly–heck, I bought Get Christie Love! on a dollar DVD close to twenty years ago. But, you know, as I got into them, I discovered that they’re not so much Blaxploitation films as films with black casts.

As I’m going to drop a couple lines on each of them, I will tuck them below the fold.

Continue reading “Movie Reports: Urban Action Cinema collection” →

This is the Adam Sandler remake of the Burt Reynolds film from 1974. Sandler plays a former professional quarterback, in disrepute due to allegations of point-shaving, who breaks up with his girlfriend by stealing her car and leading the police on a chase. Sentenced to prison for his transgressions, the warden encourages–nay, encourages in italics which means demands that Crewe (Sandler) lead a prisoner team against the guards’ amateur league team.

Well, that tracks with the original (which I have not seen). The bulk of the film deals with Crewe gathering up a team out of the prisoners, including having to earn the respect of the other racial groups, and then playing the big football game.

It was an amusing film, not the top of Sandler’s work, obviously. It includes Chris Rock, Nelly, and Burt Reynolds as a long-time inmate who agrees to coach. And, of course, we’ve got Rob Schneider saying, “You can do it!” Which is what Sandleristas like to see.

Amusing, not world-shattering or world-changing, but maybe world-encouraging.

The cover indicates many markdowns in price: Presumably full-ish price somewhere, $7.99 at Vintage Stock, marked down at Vintage Stock to $3.99, and a buck at an antique mall. Which says something about how people have felt about keeping it in their film libraries. Rest assured, little DVD, that you have a forever home. At least until my estate sale. Which is not this year, I hope.

I picked this film up earlier this month after having watched Knocked Up late last month to see what I thought about other Jud Apatow movies.

This film stars Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as high school friends (well, mostly Cera and Hill’s characters are–they keep the geeky other guy around because he has a fake ID and can score alcohol). They’re coming to the end of their senior year in high school and will have to go to different colleges–the first time they’ll have been separated since they were really young. They get invited to a party thrown by their attractive classmate (Emma Stone), so they plot to get alcohol, lower their inhibitions, and have sex with their crushes. Their plan goes awry when Fogell, the one with the fake ID, witnesses a liquor store robbery and is befriended by two fun-loving cops played by Bill Hader and Seth Rogen. Meanwhile, the other pair infiltrates a biker party to make off with some booze. Hijinks ensue, they make it to the party….

And although they could, they do not have drunken sex with their crushes.

So the film does have a bit of a mature, maybe even conservative cast as the kids learn that alcohol and sex are not really the ultimate ends of life. Which is nice.

However, the film is a little more crass and overt with a lot of the swearing and drinking that differentiate it from the youth party-centric movies of my youth (such as Weird Science which I saw over and over back in the day as it was on Showtime). And I got to thinking about how much of the youth party culture is fictional. I mean, I did not go to a lot of parties in high school (and only a handful in college). My boys haven’t seen it so far. I don’t think my wife was into it. But I do recollect that my West County girlfriend of the middle 1990s talked about her experience in high school, how on a Saturday night they would pile into cars and start following cars they recognized, eventually having a long train of cars because someone was going to a party, and all the rest would follow. Perhaps, then, the party-culture depicted in the films are more of an upper class thing, or perhaps I and my progeny are just oddballs who have been left out of it, probably to the better.

Oh, and shortly after watching this, I saw a headline in a British tab “‘I drew todgers as young Jonah Hill on Superbad – it earned me a fortune’. An interesting story about how small roles can lead to income years down the line. But hardly a fortune.

Gentle reader, over Memorial Day weekend (that long ago, sadly–I am far behind on my movie reports and not so much my book reports), I watched this single videocassette with three Cary Grant films which I bought in April. I’d had memories of the three-VHS set that I bought in 2008–and when I tried to watch it shortly thereafter, I encountered a problem with one of the videocassettes not tracking well at all, so I left it in my unwatched video cabinet for the last fifteen years.

So I was a little surprised that I had already seen the two first two movies. I bought Charade on a separate videocassette and watched it in 2015 (almost closer to 2008 than now). I’m not sure when I would have seen Penny Serenade unless either that videocassette of the 3-pack worked or I also bought and watched it independently in the interim. But I had never heard of the third film, Amazing Adventure also known as The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss.

They go in reverse chronological order: Charade is from 1963, the height of Grant’s older charmer era. The Penny Serenade comes from 1941, and Amazing Adventure is a British film from 1936 in a trimmed American release in 1937.

Charade finds an ex-pat American (Audrey Hepburn) planning to divorce her husband. But returning from holiday, she finds her Paris apartment bare and her husband has been murdered leaving the country. A helpful American, played by Cary Grant, lends support. Several old squad mates (including James Coburn and George Kennedy) of her husband’s show up looking for stolen war loot that they presume she has. A helpful American agent, played by Walter Matthau, tells her to look for the money and turn it over to him. And she learns that Mister Joshua (Grant’s character, not Gary Busey’s) is working with the squad mates. Maybe.

It has twists and turns, set pieces and a lot of early 60s Paris, including some scenes on the Seine filmed in the same locations as scenes from Frantic two decades later. And a happy ending between the older Grant and the younger Hepburn–whose age difference is a bit of a running joke through the film, as Grant is 59 and Hepburn is 33 in the film. To be honest, although she was the original manic pixie girlfriend archetype (well, original to those of us of a certain age who did not get into silent films until later), Hepburn really doesn’t do that much for me.

I have the soundtrack by Henry Mancini on LP, and although I have seen the film once before as I mentioned, I am more familiar with the music as I play the record more often than I’ve watched the movie.

Penny Serenade tells the story of a couple, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who marry when Grant’s journalist gets posted to Japan. They enjoy life in pre-World War II Japan (the film came out in April 1941, months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor), living a bit beyond their means, when the wife becomes pregnant. During the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, though, she loses the baby and through cinemagic cannot have another. When they return to the states, he buys a newspaper in California and with the help of Applejack, a friend from New York, they try to make a go of it. The core of the movie is their adoption of a little infant girl with the comic movements of their first time with a baby, challenges in bathing the baby, and so on. Applejack comes from a large family, and in addition to being able to diagnose and correct printing presses with a whack, he can show them how to handle a baby. As she grows, they enjoy moments with her, including her participation in a Christmas program.

The story is told in flashback as the wife spins various records triggering these memories–it turns out that after the Christmas program sometime, the child took sick and died suddenly–this is revealed in a handwritten letter to the woman at the adoption organization, and important points should not be rendered in handwriting, Hollywood, as when viewed eighty years later a cheap, copyright-free transfer to a videocassette watched 35 years later, viewers will not be able to read the letter blurring upward on the screen. At any rate, the wife is leaving the husband who has become depressed and detached, but as Applejack readies to take her to the station, the woman at the adoption agency calls with another child for adoption, and the couple reconciles as the credits roll.

The ending of it was rather tacked-on, but I guess that was the whole reason for the frame story and perhaps the promotion of the records featured. But it ultimately was unsatisfying. Grant got one of his Academy Award nominations for the role, but I am not so sold on it.

Amazing Adventure finds Cary Grant playing a well-to-do bachelor who is challenged to live life as a commoner for a year without touching his money. He meets a young commoner, played by Mary Brian, and falls in love, holds a number of jobs, and learns some life lessons. It was not a particularly compelling film, but I’ve seen it now.

Now that I am getting into the older Cary Grant stage of my life, I should perhaps re-channel my inner Cary Grant. I have been dressing in jeans and t-shirts a pile lately (but collared shirts when leaving the house) because I’ve not been going many places these days. Perhaps I should spring for a couple more dress slacks and get back to dressing dapper even in my own home. Because that’s how men, at least men in the cinema in the first half of the last century, did it.

I bought this film at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in April, but the real trigger to watching it comes from having later bought Lanie Kazan’s record. And she plays Nia Vardalos’s mother in the film–third billed after Nia Vardalos and John Corbett, that guy from Northern Exposure who was briefly the It-Guy for (over-)educated hunks at the turn of the century, so of course I picked it up right away. Not because of John Corbett, although I would have felt more like him seven or eight years earlier when I was the over-educated one with the mullet.

I did not see this film in the theatre, but I saw this film with…. Originally, I thought it might be before my beautiful wife, but the timing is not right. Unlike Get Shorty, this film clearly came out (and by clearly, I mean by checking its date) after we were together married. Apparently, she had seen it with the ladies at work (back in the day when we went to work and not to our separate home offices–oh, so long ago), and she then wanted to watch it with me. And we did.

So this was Nia Vardalos’s big shot. She wrote it, and she stars as Toula, an ugly duckling daughter of a Greek restaurant owner in Chicago who wants more than to be the dutiful daughter all her life. So she–with the help of her mother, played by Lanie Kazan as I mentioned, gets her father to allow her (Toula) to attend college to learn computers. She does and gets some work with a cousin’s travel agency. Along the way, she meets Ian (John Corbett), an English professor who is the only child of WASPy white-bread parents. They fall in love, and the cultures clash as she has a big, boisterous family compared with his mother and father as sole representatives of his family.

The humor comes from that culture clash as they prepare to wed with their (mostly hers) family’s help. She pokes fun at Greek heritage, and Ian’s parents, well, they’re stereotypes (archetypes?) of the sort who name their child Ian.

But, you know what? As a pretty white-bread whitey who grew up in the ghetto and in the trailer park instead of any side that could be called “upper,” I’m not offended because:

• I can laugh at myself and those who look like me.
• There’s no money for me in faking outrage.

At any rate, a pleasant and amusing way to spend a couple of hours.

Apparently, it proved lucrative for Nia Vardalos. She had a hit film that spawned a franchise (a couple of sequels over the decades including one that’s forthcoming) and a television show based on the movie. She’s also had a career with television appearances and small movie roles over the years, but she did not replicate the success of this film into leading role success in the cinema.

I would draw a parallel to my own creative career, gentle reader, but you’re here on this blog, and this blog is pretty much it.

I kind of remember the Pink Panther movies from my younger years. I’d like to say that I saw one of them at the drive-in with my parents. We went a couple of times when I was younger, sometimes my parents, my brother, and I, and at least once with my mother and her friend the country singer and her two boys. Enough to think we went all the time, kind of like how a handful of Christmases and holidays from my very younger years set the pattern. But going to the drive-in in the late 1970s was already trending toward an anachronism. I’ve thought about taking my boys down to Aurora for the drive-in there (and mentioned it to my beautiful wife while talking about this film, triggering Facebook ads for that very drive-in). But I am sure my boys would find the experience underwhelming. I also think that I saw parts of a Pink Panther film when we later at the home of the country singer, her husband the wedding singer, and their two boys, either on a sleepover or in the interim month between exiting the projects and decamping for Missouri at the end of the school year–I remember the bit about Inspector Clouseau’s butler attacking him. I also remember that Inspector Clouseau was a bit of a, what, trope? when I was younger. You’d say someone was a Clouseau who was stating the obvious or was making a bad deduction. And look at his attire on the cover: He was the inspiration for Inspector Gadget, ainna?

At any rate, with the title The Return of the Pink Panther, I thought it would be the sequel to the first film. But, no: This is the fourth in the original series of 11 films (with two 21st century rebooted movies starring Steve Martin instead of Peter Sellers). It came out in 1975, eleven years after the first. So I have no idea of whether I’ve seen bits of this film before–probably what was showing in the drive-in or on HBO at the time would have been later entries in the series.

So: Someone has stolen The Pink Panther, a large diamond with a flaw in it that looks like a leaping pink panther (not like the Owen Corning pitch cartoon character–the cartoon character originated in the titles for the film series) is stolen (again), and Clouseau is tasked with investigating (over the wishes of his commander, who has finally succeeded in getting Clouseau off of the force). His old nemesis The Phantom (Christopher Plummer) is suspected of the crime, but he did not do it–so he sets out also to find out who did. A number of humorous set pieces later (my oldest passed through while I was watching it and guffawed at a bit), and Clouseau is there when the culprit is revealed: the Phantom’s lover, who did it to spice up the retired Phantom’s life.

Uh, retroactive spoiler alert, but it is a 48-year-old movie that isn’t about the whodunit it but the cartoonish comic pieces, like when Clouseau enters the suspect’s hotel room and destroys it with a vacuum cleaner.

I don’t know that I have seen any of the other films or reboots in the wild, but I might pick them up in the future if they’re a buck or so (as this was when I bought it in April).