Les Miserables (2012)

Last weekend I watched the blue rays of Les Miserables (2012) and The Great Gatsby (2013).  This was the first time I had seen either film.

Although I panned Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby, I can't find enough good things to say about Tom Hoopers Les Mis.

The cast is stellar.  Everyone can sing as well as act.  (Russell Crowe can sing!  Who knew?).  A large group of singers who had been in the stage version in London's West End were brought in to fill minor roles in the film.  Even though it's an opera, everyone is believable in his or her role.

I criticized Gatsby a lot for its over the top CGI that made the movie look like a cartoon.  Les Mis has a lot of CGI shots which look like CGI shots but it doesn't detract from the film's realistic impact. There is such emotion which comes through the actors' performances and the music that the staging becomes secondary.  They probably could have performed this in costume on a blank stage and it still would have been good.

Definitely FIVE OUT OF FIVE.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

This should have been a great movie.  It's got a lot of very good actors, it's mostly faithful to the novel it's based on, and it's visually stunning.  But it's not a good movie.  It's just an OK movie.

First thing is the music.  No matter how much you want to attract young audiences, hip-hop has no place in a movie about the 1920s.  Some authentic jazz age sounds would have probably made this movie hop.

The eye-popping CGI (this thing was released in 3-D; a movie based on a literary classsic in 3-D?) makes The Great Gatsby look like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

I also found the acting to be a bit flat.  Lionardo DiCaprio is trying, but his fake blue blood accent with "Old Sport" every other word makes Gatsby comical rather than the mysterious tragic figure presented in Fitzgerald's novel.

The Bad Catholic gives it 2 out of 5.

WAGNER (1983)

Watching all 7 hours and 46 minutes of Richard Burton's magnificent portrayal of the composer Richard Wagner is about like watching a Wagner opera itself.  It's very good, but it's also exhausting.

This was Richard Burton's last role.  Although the veteran actor was only in his mid fifties, most likely because of his hard drinking, he looks much older.  This creates the only problem I have with this film.  The movie opens with Wagner as Kappelmeister in Dresden when Wagner was about age 34.  Playing the 34 year old Wagner, the 55 year old Burton looks like he's about 70.  

The real Cosima and Richard Wagner with son Siegfried

Burton's portrayal of the older Wagner, however, is truly magnificent.  There are great performances here.  This is the only film in which Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, and Sir Ralph Richardson appear in a scene together.

Vanessa Redgrave as Cosima Wagner

The movie is true to Wagner's life, worts and all.  All the eccentricities, anti-semitism, and genius are on full display.  Vanessa Redgrave is also very good as Wagner's mistress and then second wife, Cosima.  As a matter of fact, Redgrave and Burton are probably a lot better looking in the roles than the real people.

Richardson, Olivier and Gielgud

The perfomances of Laszlo Galffi as King Ludwig of Bavaria with Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson as his ministers is great.  The score of Wagner's "greatest hits" was conducted by the renowned Wagner conducter Sir Georg Solti and was specially recorded for the film.

This movie is a must for all "Wagnerites" and opera fans.  The Bad Catholic gives it five out of five violins.

Nazisploitation: The Nazi Image In Low-Brow Cinema And Culture

In the introduction to the book Nazisploitation: The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture (Continuum Books, 2012),  University of Tennessee Professor Daniel H. Magilow quotes New York Times movie reviewer Vincent Canby as writing in 1974 "If it's possible to reconstruct the interests, attitudes and values of a lost society from its garbage, then perhaps we should take a closer look at some of the junk that's passing through our movie theaters these days.  Would you want a future historian speculating about your life on the basis of a mossy old print of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS?"

Well, that's exactly what this book of scholarly essays seeks to do: examine what the genre of "Nazisploitation" movies says about society.   They run the gamut from pure exploitation movies like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and Eurotrash like Last Orgy of the SS to so called "art films" like The Night Porter, The Damned and Salon Kitty.

Although some of the essays were merely pretentious academic posturing, the majority of the book was fascinating.  Why do we find Nazis sexy?  What is the attraction people have to watching kinky BDSM set in a concentration camp?

The book is really interesting when it examines whether "art house" films like The Night Porter are art or merely jumped up exploitation movies.  Why is that picture of Charlotte Rampling topless wearing a Nazi uniform hat and pants seemingly everywhere in popular culture? Is Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds  a Nazisploitation film? The essay on Nazi Zombies is also very enlightening.

I don't want to know what it says about me that I'm interested in this subject.  However,  I would recommend this book highly to anyone with more than a passing interest in this sick subject.

Fred "The Hammer" Williamson's BOSS

Last night I watched the DVD of the 1975 Blaxploitation classic Boss.  Originally released under the infamous title Boss Nigger, the film was written and produced by Fred “The Hammer” Williamson who stars in the title role.

This movie is basically Shaft meets the Wild West.  Two bounty hunters, Boss (Fred Williamson) and Amos (D’Urville Martin) are looking for the notorious outlaw Jed Clayton (William Smith).   The town of San Miquel is run by a crooked mayor (veteran western actor R.G. Armstrong) who is in league with the outlaws. Boss manipulates the Mayor and the Town Council into making him Sheriff and makes plans to go after Jed leading to the inevitable climactic gunfight.

Clara Mae (Carmen Hayworth) comforts Boss after being beat up by Jed

Boss has two love interests, Clara Mae (Carmen Hayworth) who is eventually killed by Jed and the town school teacher Miss Pruitt (Barbara Leigh), who of course, has the hots for Boss. 

 

Without the “Blaxsploitation” elements, this would be just another B-Grade Western.  With all the “Blaxsploitation” elements, a lot of peppy dialogue and a “soul” music soundtrack, it’s a fun movie to watch.    If you’re offended by very liberal use of the “N” word, this isn’t the movie to watch.    Although the film has comedic elements, this is not a “comedy western” or a spoof of the genre as it’s sometimes called.  Boss gets beat up bad and almost tortured to death by Jed, a Mexican child is murdered by Jed out of sheer sadism, and Clara Mae is almost raped twice and then killed by the outlaws.

At the end of the movie, Ms. Pruitt (Barbara Leigh) begs for Boss to take her with him, to which he replies, “A black man’s got enough trouble as it is without a white woman following him around.”   This movie is just plain cool.  Four out of Five Six Guns.

Comic Book Movies

Last weekend I caught up on comic book movies.  Thanks to Netflix and Instant Amazon, I binge watched The Rocketeer (1991), Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013), The Avengers (2012), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). 

THE ROCKETEER

When this came out in 1991, I was too busy graduating from law school, getting a job and getting married to go see it or to pay any attention to it.  Not being a big comic book aficionado, I was unaware of the immensely popular graphic novel which the film is based on.   

This movie by Disney studios changes a number of the plot points of the original graphic novel by Dave Stevens.  In the comic, the rocket pack which pilot Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) finds has been built by an un-named character inspired by Doc Savage.  In the movie, the rocket pack has been built by Howard Hughes.  The biggest change from the comic book is with regard to Cliff’s girlfriend.  In the comic book, Cliff’s girlfriend, Bettie, was inspired by 1950s pin up queen Bettie Page.  In fact, Stephens’ drawings of Bettie inspired a Bettie page frenzy by comics fans which directly led up to Page being “re-discovered” in retirement after having dropped out of sight for decades.  The entire Bettie Page motif is dropped and Cliff’s girlfriend is played by Jennifer Connelly who, in the film, is an aspiring actress instead of a pin-up model.

 

The faux 1930s setting is played to the hilt.  The art deco sets and costumes are gorgeous.  The actor Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton), who turns out to be a German spy, is inspired by Errol Flynn.  Of course, the bad guys in the movie are the Nazis who are the coolest villians around for a film set in the Depression era.  Comic creator Dan Stephens said he was 70% satisfied with the movie.  The Bad Catholic is too.  Three out of five rocket ships.

THOR & THOR: THE DARK WORLD

Ever since I was first exposed to Wagner’s operas, I’ve thought that the Norse gods were cool.  They wear cool armor, they carry swords and hammer and stuff and they kick some serious ass.  What could be better than a comic book about Norse gods?  A movie based on a comic book about Norse gods.  Of course, in this movie they’re not really gods, they’re extraterrestrials who came to earth and were mistaken for gods by the locals.  But in the comic books they really are gods and some Joe Shmo finds a magical staff which becomes Thor’s hammer and then becomes Thor.  All of that got jettisoned for this movie, but it’s still a great ride.  Thor still has the hots for a motal chick but his daddy, Odin, the King of the Gods, sorry they ain’t really gods, don’t want Thor to marry a mortal.   Thor’s brother turns out to not really be his brother but a frost giant (you know them guys that in Wagner’s mythology built Valhalla for Wodin, but that’s a whole other story).  So, Thor’s adopted brother, Loki, is really pretty pissed when he finds out that he’s really a frost giant and wants to get revenge on Odin and Asgard.

Thor is banished to earth and loses all his powers, except that Odin allows him to possess his hammer and get all his powers back.  Finally, Thor kicks ass and returns to Asgard after defeating Loki.  Unfortunately, he has to sever the rainbow bridge and can’t get back to his earthling girlfriend.  The movie was directed by veteran Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh.

In Thor: The Dark World, the Dark Elves attack Asgard to get their dark crap back so they can plunge the world into darkness.  Thor’s earthling girlfriend, Jane Foster, is made the carrier for the dark materials which the Dark Elves are after.  Thor’s mother, Frigga, dies fighting the Dark Elves to protect Jane.  At the end, it appears that everything is brought right.  Odin (played in high Shakespearean form by Anthony Hopkins) offers Thor the throne and he refuses it, it is revealed that Odin has been replaced by Loki who is not dead after all. 

After starting to watch Thor: The Dark World, I realized that there must be another movie in between which I didn’t see yet, because they kept talking about Loki tearing up New York City.  So then I discovered, that the adventures of Thor and Loki part 2 was in The Avengers.

THE AVENGERS

The Avengers are all of Marvel’s superheroes together as a team.  All of Marvel’s superheros that Marvel still owns the movie rights too, that is.  Conspicuously absent is Spiderman, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, who with the world in such great danger, you would think would show up.  You would certainly expect Spiderman to show up when his beloved New York City is getting torn to shreds by Loki and a bunch of aliens who aren’t Frost Giants or Dark Elves but look kinda and act kinda like em.   I guess Spidy was on vacation that week.  Probably touring the Sony headquarters in Tokyo.  But I digress.

Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), head of a super secret government spy service, summons the Avengers to save the earth.  We get some great CGI of an aircraft carrier taking off and flying and Samuel L. Jackson could look and sound cool reading the telephone book, which really helps his nothing part.  Anyway, the B-Team Marvel superheros, I mean the Avengers, kick alien ass and save the earth setting up the imprisonment of Loki in Thor: The Dark World.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

This must be the longest advertisement for another movie in history.  This movie gives us the backstory for Captain America and explains how he got frozen in at the North Pole so he could be thawed out and fight with the modern day Avengers.

Steve Rogers was a proverbial 90 pound weakling who couldn’t get into the army but is chosen for an experiment to use some kind of scientific rig-a-ma-roll to enhance soldiers and make them super-soldiers.  Unfortunately, the machinery breaks down after the one use, but Steve is transformed into a muscled, lean, mean American fighting machine.

Originally only allowed to sell war bonds, Steve puts on his war bond show outfit and goes out and kicks Nazi ass.  Of course, they’re not exactly the Nazis their the guys that Red Skull is leading in a war against the entire world.    Red Skull, who literally has a red head, is a failed early experiment by the same scientist that enhanced Rogers.  Tying this into the whole Thor thing, Red Skull has captured Tesseract, powerful stuff which fell from the gods. 

Captian America has to crash land Red Skull’s plane, which is about to use weapons of mass destruction on the United States, in the Arctic where he is frozen until he is revived so he can fight with The Avengers.

These were all kick ass movies and I enjoyed watching them a whole lot.  Nuff said.

Pan Am

A couple of weekends ago, I binge watched all 14 episodes of Pan Am.  It's a real shame that this got cancelled or didn't get picked up by somebody else.  Reportedly, there were talks with Amazon.com to pick it up and make it an original to web show like Orange is the New Black or House of Cards but the talks fell through, so we are apparently left with only one season of Pan Am.  I am still going through withdrawal.

Pan Am is a soap opera about the life and loves of a group of stewardesses and pilots for Pan American Airlines in the early 1960s.  Like the hugely popular Mad Men, Pan Am is full of pop culture references.  A stylized and sanitized Disneyland version of the early sixties, the sets, costumes and props are visually stunning.  The real sixties never looked this great.  With Sinatra crooning "Come Fly With Me" in the background Pan Am soars.

The series ended with a bunch of open story threads for a second season which we will, alas, never be able to see.  We'll never find out if Maggie (Christina Ricci) is ever going to be caught in her life of crime or will be fired for lying about her background.  We'll never find out if Laura (Margot Robbie) is going to get in trouble with the airline for those nude pictures of her which have been published or if she and Ted are going to be able to get together after he's found out that his former fiancee, who is really a lesbian, is pregnant with his baby.  We'll never find out if Kate (Kelli Garner) becomes a full fledged CIA agent or if her cover as a Pan Am stewardess will be blown.  We'll never find out if Colette (Karine Vanasse) can find her brother who was lost during the Holocaust.  We'll never find out if Dean (Mike Vogel) and Bridget (Annabelle Wallis) can patch things up.  And we'll never find out if Ted (Michael Mosley) can shake himself loose from his pregnant frigid lesbian fiancee, Amanda (Ashley Greene), and get together with the love of his life, Laura.

Guess I'll just have to go take a cold shower and try to get over it.

The Mothman Prophecies

I picked up a copy of the DVD of The Mothman Prophecies (2002) on the bargain bin at a local video store.  The only thing I knew about the Mothman was what I had seen on a documentary on The Travel Channel about how some kids in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the late sixties kept seeing a man with moth like wings right before a bridge over the Ohio River collapsed and killed a bunch of people.

Richard Geer and Laura Linney ponder reports of Mothman

Unfortunately, the only sighting of Mothman in this movie is the shadowy images which come to people’s minds.  Richard Geer’s wife (Debra Messing), who is dying of a brain tumor, saw the shadowy image of Mothman just before having a car crash.  While lying in the hospital dying, she keeps drawing pictures of the demon looking Mothman.

This movie is mostly a psychological drama.  The stuff that you don’t see is a lot scarier than what you do see.  Richard Geer plays John Klein, a Washington Post reporter who’s beloved wife has just died.  Strangely drawn to the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, Klein is drawn into the mysterious goings on.  People in Point Pleasant hear and see weird stuff just before something bad happens.  Klein talks to people who have seen and heard the entity and talks to the entity himself.  In fact the entity calls him on the phone and keeps calling after the phone has been unplugged.  A local eccentric (Will Patton) hears the entity talking to him and telling him what will happen in the future.  It eventually drives him crazy and he goes out in the cold and dies from exposure. Klein seeks out a para-normal expert (Alan Bates) who tells him that he is dealing with beings who live on another plane of existence who can see the future.  The expert tells Klein that he can’t change the future and the entities will drive him to his death and to quit talking to them. 

Klein becomes involved with a police woman Connie Mills (Laura Linney) who sees and talks to Klein’s dead wife and has a recurring dream in which she is drowning and told “don’t worry number 67.”  Later, it becomes apparent that this was a reference to the fact 66 people died in the bridge collapse and she was supposed to be number 67 but is saved when Klein decides to stop talking to the entities, who are taking the form of his dead wife, and return to Point Pleasant to be with Connie.

The Mothman Prophecies is a creepy movie.  The thing that makes it the most creepy is the eerie musical score.  Geer and Linney put in good performances and are convincing in their roles as people who are caught up by the weird and supernatural and don’t know what to do. 

All in all, The Mothman Prophecies was worth the dollar that I paid for it.  Three out of Five Vampire Bats.            

TRUFFAUT'S DAY FOR NIGHT (1973)

Day for Night (La Nuit Americaine) released in 1973, is famed French director Francois Truffant’s homage to movie making.

This is a movie about making movies.  Truffaut plays Ferrand, the director of a melodrama called Meet Pamela (Je Vous Presente Pamela) about a young man whose father abandons his mother and runs off with his hot young wife.

The action in “real life” among the cast and crew mirrors what’s going on in the film.  The actor who plays the jilted husband in the movie, Alphonse (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud), is sleeping with the script girl who he wants to marry.  But Alphonse’s girlfriend runs off with the stunt man leaving Alphonse devastated.

The sexy leading lady, Julie (played by Jacqueline Bisset), had a nervous breakdown and an affair with her doctor who left his wife and children to marry her.  When Alphonse freaks out over his girlfriend abandoning him Julie sleeps with him out of sympathy.  Mistaking this for true love, Alphonse calls Julie’s husband back in the United States and tells him that their marriage is over.   Needless to say, Julie almost has another nervous breakdown.

Severine (Valentina Cortese)

Alphonse’s on-screen father is played by Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) an aging leading man and sex symbol who is, a la Rock Hudson, secretly gay.  The jilted mother played by Severine (Valentina Cortese)  is an aging Italian bombshell who has turned into a sad alcoholic with a son who is dying of cancer. 

   

We see all aspects of movie making: sets, trick camera shot, stunts, fake snow and on location shooting.  There is a cat who fails to like the milk out of the saucer on cue. We also see aspects of the behavior of movie crews like recreational sex.  The title “Day for Night” refers to the process where a scene is shot in daylight using a filter to make it look like night.  Called “day for night” in the U.S. and Britain, in France the technique is known as La Nuit Americaine or “American Night.”

Ferrand (Francois Truffaut) and crew on the set of "Meet Pamela"

According to Roger Ebert, “Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) was one of the most beloved of filmmakers, a man whose own love of film was in such details as the old-fashioned iris shots he borrowed from silent films (That’s a shot where the screen seems to screw down to circle one detail, before going to black). . . Truffaut was a founder of the New Wave generation – French film critics who celebrated Hollywood’s veterans in the 1950s and then made their own films. . . . In 25 years he directed 23 films. Why did he make so may? I think because he loved to be on the set.  The young actor in “Day for Night” is heartbroken after his girl runs off with the stuntman.  Truffaut’s character consoles him: “People like us are only happy in our work.”

I enjoyed Day for Night a lot and would definitely recommend it.  It’s currently available on DVD and on Amazon Instant Video.  I watched the movie in the original French with subtitles.  The film was released in the United States in a dubbed English version.

100 Rifles (1969)

A movie that opens with Burt Reynolds in a hotel room with a very nude Soledad Miranda, has Raquel Welch running around half naked for most of the movie, has a thumping original score by Jerry Goldsmith and has interracial sex and lots of guns and violence should not be boring.  But 1969’s 100 Rifles is boring.  I half to confess, halfway through I gave up and started playing games on the Ipad. 

I don’t know exactly what it is, but 100 Rifles wound up being just another formulaic B grade Western.  Set in the early 20^th century during the Mexican Revolution, 100 Rifles involves an outlaw named Joe Herrera (Burt Reynolds).  The son of an Alabama father and Yaqui Indian mother, Joe has robbed a bank in Arizona and used the money to buy one hundred rifles to arm the Yaqui Indians who are being systematically murdered and wiped out by the Mexican General Verdugo (Fernando Lamas). 

Joe is pursued into Mexico by American lawman Lyedecker (former NFL star Jim Brown).    Lyedecker’s plans to bring Joe back to Arizona and collect the reward money and get a permanent lawman job is thwarted by General Verdugo and his German Army advisor (Hans Gudegast).   Lyedecker and Joe wind up hooking up with the beautiful Indian revolutionary Sarita (Raquel Welch). 

Controversial and shocking for 1969 is the scene in which Lydecker is seduced by Serita.  A movie showing a black man and white woman making love was hot stuff in the late sixties, but watching it today, my primary emotion was, “that’s nice,” and it only made me take a momentary break from playing Ace Patrol on the Ipad.

The climax of the film comes when, Lydecker, convinced now to fight for the Yaqui’s, stages an ambush of the train carrying General Verdugo’s soldiers by distracting them by having Sarita get half naked and take a very suggestive shower in front of them.    Lydecker uses the train as the centerpiece of the big gun battle during which Sarita is killed but the Yaqui’s win their freedom.

The best summing up of 100 Rifles is from a review on the blog friar’s fires: “Of the lead cast, Reynolds and Lamas offer much.  Reynolds seems to recognize the ridiculous story he’s in so he goes into full smart-aleck Bandit mode, mugging and grinning as much as this movie lets him.  Lamas throws a big slab of ham on the grill and proceeds to chew whatever scenery he can sink his teeth into.  Brown and Welch aren’t exactly bad, but neither of them had developed yet into actors that can transcend the material, and this is material that desperately needs transcending.”