The cast is familiar to many old movie buffs. Hillary Brooke was a femme
fatale in many early mysteries but may be best known for her work on the Abbot
and Costello TV show. She is the epitome of Mom here, supportive of her family,
loving and devote as wife and mother. There is enough normal mom shown so that
the audience appreciates the drastic change in personality that freaks out young
David. Erickson had a career that spanned almost five decades and just about
every genre of film. He is at his best in films like this where you have to
believe him as an ?every-man?, someone the audience can readily identify
with. Jimmy Hunt was perfect as David. As a kid I identified with his love of
science, his trust in family and wanting to see something special in the black
of the night sky. He was a good little actor, holding his own opposite much more
seasoned actors.

William Cameron Menzies directed this cult classic but is best known as a set
designer for films like Gone with the Wind. His main profession adds a lot to
the look of this film. There are sets that bend perception like a surrealistic
painting. Take a note of the hallway to the police station, the way the length
and height seem unreal and the shadows add so much to the mode. Menzies also
directed another favorite of mind, H.G. Well?s Things to Come (1936). If you
get a change check it out as well. Menzies knows how to work with the typically
short time allotted to these films. The action moves at a nice pace keeping the
expository material balanced by the albeit cheesy special effects. Sure you can
see the zippers on the backs of the Martian mutants but who cares, You have to
put yourself in the mind of a seven year old to enjoy this film. Menzies uses
the sets to show more than dialogue could have conveyed. The sand pit pulling
the fighting Rinaldi to his fate, fence that drops off to nothingness and the
stark room where the boy, stripped of everything familiar to him must learn to
trust the doctor.

This is the way a cult classic film should be presented. I have cherished my
VHS tape for years and it is starting to show the effects of wear. Now, with a
DVD I get not only the American version I have know for all these decades but I
get the British release version as well. This provides a somewhat different
ending to consider. There is also a booklet detailing the problems encountered
while restoring this film. Many may feel the video is too dark, just be thankful
we have a fairly clean copy of this film to own. While only in 4:3 color video
and digital mono sound this film should be purchased on the merit of how fun it
is to watch not the technical merits we hold films to today. Appreciate this
film either as a part of your childhood revisited or for the younger viewers
where the modern Sci-Fi films today came from. The style of the film is worth
the price. Add this one to your collection and remember it every time you awaken
from a bad dream.

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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

The 52-year-old filmmaker, at the time, Kenji Mizoguchi (”Ugetsu”/”Sansho
the Bailiff”/”Osaka Elegy”), is considered by most critics to be one of
Japan’s three greatest directors, who is right up there with Yasujiro Ozu
and Akira Kurosawa in quality films but because his films rarely played
in the States, in either theaters or video, he’s the lesser known of the
three. Life of Oharu signaled his recognition in the West; it’s based on
the classic 17th-century novel The Woman Who Loved Love by Sakaku Ihara
and is co-written by Mizoguchi and Yoshikata Yoda. It won top honors at
the Venice Film Festival. The woman-loving heart-breaking story chronicles
the decline of a woman in service of the imperial court who suffers in
different stages from exile, concubinage, and prostitution. 

Life of Oharu begins in flashback in 1686 in Kyoto, as a middle-aged
haggard looking prostitute tells her sad life story after it comes known
that she was once in the service of the imperial court. The scorned 17th-century
woman is Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka), the beautiful daughter of a respected samurai
for the ruling aristocratic clan head, who was a lady-in-waiting in the
imperial court but falls in love with the lower-class page Katsunosuke
(Toshiro Mifune). He’s beheaded and the disgraced Oharu is placed in exile
in her father’s country home. Her lover’s last words were that she should
marry for love, but she’s betrayed by her daddy (Ichiro Sugai) who forces
her into being a concubine for Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe). The lord’s
wife is barren and Oharu bears him a son, but is then betrayed by the lord’s
council who force him to get rid of her after she provides him with a heir.
Back in pop’s house, she’s not welcome and sold by him to a brothel to
be a geisha. At last finding a kind and honest man she can love, a poor
working-class fan maker named Yakichi (Jukichi Uno), she marries him but
he’s soon murdered. Out of desperation to support herself, she ends up
as a beggar and then a lowly street prostitute, while her son has grown
up to become a lord.

The bleak, uncompromising soap opera story of a long-suffering woman
seeking redemption through spiritual means is brilliantly realized without
moralizing or resorting to sentimentality. It shows how Oharu is repeatedly
betrayed by the males in the patriarchal society, which leads her to eventually
blurt out in defiance “I want nothing earthly.” The despair is also conveyed
through the masterful visuals and the superb heart-felt performance by
Tanaka. Mizoguchi’s rep is as a compassionate director, especially concerning
women, and that is clearly seen in his moving portrayal of Oharu. 

“Robin Hood: Prince of Thebes” isn’t supposed to be an outright comedy, but thanks to Alan Rickman’s over-the-top shape as the dastardly unscrupulous Sheriff of Nottingham, the film’s humor becomes its compensatory grace. I’m not sure it’s what big cheese Kevin Reynolds or major Kevin Costner had in capacity, but it’s what they got: plenty of spectacle and a cartload of diverting scenes.

Indeed, the 1991 film is so broadly characterized by melodramatics and overacting, it made sage pickings on account of Mel Brooks two years later with his parody, “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.” This is not to say that “Robin Hood: Prince of Whales” is a bad haziness, not by any means, not a Costner act of God of the enormousness of “Waterworld” or “The Postman.” But it’s not the flamboyant chef-d’oeuvre it could keep been, either, given the grand age-old phenomenon the writers had to work with and the stars involved.

In any if it happens, Warner Brothers had confidence ample in the film to issue it in a two-disc Special Number set, with an very twelve minutes of papers added to its already lengthy duration. At 155 minutes, the flick picture show at the present time seems positively interminable, but suited for its dedicated fans the additional information should prove worthwhile. Since I hadn’t seen the film in over a decade, I didn’t recognize the new content, except to note that the film appeared not in the least to end.

The story brand of “Robin Hood: Prince of Peeves” is knowledgeable about to most audiences thanks to countless variations on the theme. The year is 1194, and England’s King Richard the Lion Hearted is away from the take captive after fighting in the Third Jihad. In his absence George, the Sheriff of Nottingham (Rickman), has been taxing the people of his county to termination in the hope of reaping profits enough to bribe the country’s noblemen into plateful him usurp check of the government. What’s more, because the Sheriff is not of royal blood, he plans to force himself in wedlock upon the fair (and feisty) Maid Marian Dubois (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a cousin to the Royal, thereby enabling him legally to enhance monarch of the dukedom.

Meanwhile, in a nod to the sensibilities and civic correctness of the fresh twentieth century, the filmmakers have taken a handful liberties with the rest of the fish story. Robin of Locksley is no mere rich boy who has stayed in his castle during the Crusades but has gone off himself to quarrel, and when the film opens we find him escaping a Turkish remand centre cell and heading back to his family. With him is a newly made benefactor, Azeem (Morgan Freeman), a Moor whom Robin has saved from manner. Azeem swears to repay the straitened and returns with Robin to England.

Upon his newcomer house, the first thing Robin finds is that his author (Brian Blessed) has been murdered and his housing stolen, all at the hands of the evil Nottingham. From here, the plan follows its familiar course, with Robin joining and ultimately outstanding a orchestra of outlaws in Sherwood Forest, fighting against the Sheriff’s tyranny, and protecting the virtue of the fair Marian.

Homologous to so innumerable other films that aren’t quite undeviating of their on, “Robin Hood: Prince of Tides” is a mishmash of disparate elements: adventure, history, comedy, drama, romance, epic, and legend. Most of it works in short spurts but the unhurt doesn’t hang together as well as it should. Segment of the fitting can be attributed to its stars. Costner is not quite the animated Robin Hood of Errol Flynn memory. He’s more the sweet, Midwestern, “Ah, shucks” type of man whose demeanor works precisely in a fog like “Dances With Wolves” but who seems irrecoverable at lots as one of England’s most gallant heroes. If you’re an old-movie buff and have seen the 1938 “Adventures of Robin Hood,” think of Gary Cooper in the Flynn role. Doesn’t work, huh?

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Because Costner is performing opposite the incomparable Morgan Freeman, who is never at a ruin someone is concerned forceful, natural expressiveness, Costner is upstaged at every turn. Then, with Rickman playing the heavy in so comically exaggerated a style (”Cancel Christmas!”) that he would not be out of situation in Brooks’s take-off, the three principals seem occupied in entirely different movies. Figure in an impudent young Englishman, Last wishes as Scarlett, played by that noted young Englishman-via-Remodelled York Christian Slater, and you get in unison bizarre set of characters.

Furthermore, there are the script’s embroideries, some of which are hardly less than corny. Nottingham, for instance, keeps an old soothsayer witch, Mortianna (Geraldine McEwan), in the basement of his mansion, a hag who guides his every move with her fortune-telling charms and spells. Or select the string when Robin returns to England after his great absence and goes to see Marian. She is wearing, repayment for reasons unknown, wholly armor and attacks him viciously, apparently not recognizing him and thinking him an intruder. Doubtlessly, she didn’t have dilly-dally to change on a complete suit of armor in the minutes it took Robin to knock on her door and enter. Besides those oddities, there are certain contrived, soap-opera turns of events in reference to Will Scarlett and Mortianna to contend with, in addition to Michael Kamen’s bold but in the main overblown lyrical score underpinning every scene in a grandiose method, no matter how unimportant the goings on. It’s all a tad much.

A hip young cast is made to look desperately unhip in “200 Cigarettes,” a dismally unfunny farce in the air a bracket of aggressively self-absorbed characters looking championing a salubrious time in New York City on New Year’s Vigil, 1981. Catchy title, campaign and soundtrack could ignite some initial teen B.O., but account-of-gate will insure that a surgeon general’s report won’t be needed to admonish people unpropitious of this one.

Presence of 11 — count ‘em, 11 — producers on this featherweight project will provide ammo for those who like to point out the involvement of too many cooks on film projects, as well as for those who like to ask, “Didn’t any of them read the script?” It’s clear from the first few minutes that the performers are fighting an uphill battle against lame material, and the situation never improves as pic labors on.

First-time screenwriter Shana Larsen approaches her ensemble piece with two ploys: to send unattached, on-the-prowl scenesters out into the East Village streets anxious to party, and to so woefully mismatch those who are paired up as evening begins that they’re motivated to make changes by night’s end. In both cases, desperate and predatory personality traits come immediately to the fore rather than anything that might make one take an interest in any of these unamusingly maladroit characters.

Flimsy framework is provided by a party that Monica (Martha Plimpton) hopes will be happening in her loft; however, she becomes increasingly depressed and paranoid as the hour presses ever closer to midnight and the only guest to have shown up is her pushy ex-boyfriend Eric (Brian McCardie), who comes to rue his demanding to know the real reason Monica stopped seeing him.

Only marginally more engaging are Lucy (Courtney Love) and Kevin (Paul Rudd), platonic roommates with very different agendas for the evening; the one-track-minded Lucy wants to score with the first attractive guy she spots, who turns out to be a bartender (Ben Affleck), while the morose Kevin basically wants to kill himself over his breakup with tart-tongued performance artist Ellie (Janeane Garofalo).

Out looking for kicks are two pairs of girls, dim-bulb suburbanites Val (Christina Ricci) and Stephie (Gaby Hoffmann), who are pursued by a couple of freaky looking punks (Casey Affleck, Guillermo Diaz), and the coarse Bridget (Nicole Parker) and Caitlyn (Angela Featherstone), who also set their sights on the bartender.

Last and almost certainly least is a pathetic little story strand devoted to a naive and prim young lady, Cindy (Kate Hudson), who has just lost her virginity the night before to Jack (Jay Mohr), a polite but callow fellow whose big complaint in life is that women immediately fall in love with him the first time he takes them to bed. Dave Chappelle eagerly plays a cabbie who picks up a number of the night prowlers along the way.

Most of the relentless chatter here centers on the characters’ speculation about their sex lives: whom they might hook up with, why so-and-so decided to break up, if someone’s attractive or not, and so on. No irony or point-of-view is applied to their heated quests for self-gratification, nor is any used in the portrait of the colorful period, a moment immediately pre-AIDS awareness when the sexual freedom and cultural anarchy of the late ’70s was about to change. Pic becomes as frenetically absorbed in the characters’ immediate dilemmas as they are, to extremely tiresome results.

It’s questionable if any director could have surmounted the script’s limitations, but vet casting director Risa Bramon Garcia, in her helming debut, indulges far too much in farcical pratfalls that don’t feel right in context. Of the performers, only Garofalo and Ben Affleck manage to project any wit that cracks through the prevailing humorlessness.

Befitting a picture co-produced by MTV, the proceedings are wallpapered with vintage tunes — 49 of them, to be precise — with an emphasis on Blondie and Elvis Costello, the latter of whom pops up briefly as himself. Tech considerations are just so-so, with several badly matched cuts jumping out in distracting fashion.

Ed Jager and I have a a mountain in collective. We’re both demanding to be satisfactory fathers, both of us work hard each day to select ends meet, and we both deceive a moonlighting “hobby” that we secretly wish were our main occupation—one which takes up approximately as much all together as our time job. The distinction is that my wife, thankfully, is also a generous silent picture lover, though she may not appreciate some of the films I have to watch as a reviewer. But Ed’s wife didn’t division his passion in spite of demolition derby, or the points that he spent every tenebrousness from 7-11pm after work tinkering with his wrecks, and every weekend tooling far the street. His love fling with cars rate him, and for ten years he had to sleep on the siamoise, secretly hoping to work his sense up to modified cars and bigger racing circuits. I be informed I’ll not in any way score a sweet job like Roger Ebert or pull down the $500,000 the grand song gets just to comment on films, and Ed “Speedo” Jager knows he’ll not in any way drive in the Grand Prix or equal the NASCAR course. But we’re both compelled to be preserved going because we sweetie what we do. That’s what makes Jesse Moss’s film, “Speedo: A Demolition Girlfriend Story,” so compelling.

Sure, it last will and testament speak to lovers of cars and crashes and demolition derbies, but it also holds appeal for people whose only idea of car maintenance is to recognize to ask the gas train station usherette to check the aqueous levels. And would-be distinct filmmakers will especially concern this film for the insights it gives into the process. Aired as part of the POV (Point of View) series on PBS and partially funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment conducive to the Arts, “Speedo: A Demolition Derby Love Story” follows resistance fighter driver Jager as he seeks to win state derbies at the Riverhead Raceway in Long Island, where myth has it that demolition derbies originated. Jesse Moss, a affiliated newcomer to the business of independent film, went to the racetrack one broad daylight just to pay attention to the action and was blown away by this gyrate with the capital-rev personality, a guy that seemed to deadlock the animosity of other drivers unprejudiced as he developed a fan base representing his Kamikaze style.

Moss, who, like his subject, was basically a one-restrain wrecking crew—writer, commander, producer, and photographer—used a inadequate DV camera, a Sony VX 1000, and a wireless microphone to shadow Speedo as he rescued wrecks from the junkyard, worked at the Exon station in Garden New Zealand urban area, Hanker Isle, drained moment with his children (and tense moments with his none-too-happy wife), kibitzing with other drivers in the “pits” before and after races, and during races themselves. For an individual race, Moss mounted one camera on the rear-window well to capture the mayhem, with another camera mounted in the fare seat. The wireless microphone proved to be the most valuable, because after one derby which

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Speedo had won but which was challenged because of a welded pane he had used to repair the car, a demo official pulls him away from the cameras to talk in off the record. But of course we hear anyway, because Speedo is wired. That having been said with one powerful scene where he sells the house without his wife’s knowledge and we watch the disinvolved of the sporting house and see their two sons’ reactions in the car as we hear the f_ this and f_ that shouting marriage.

The legend to independent filmmaking is clearly to spend so much time shadowing your vassal exposed to that he/she starts to feel as if its natural having a flick crew around, but you fix the drift that Moss did the same thing with others who interact with Speedo on a regular basis. There’s very little self-consciousness among those on film, the one extraordinary find fault with being Linda, Speedo’s estranged wife. She’s not right advantageous that the source of her pain is on occasion the motive of a documentary, and that’s made clear when he goes preferred one-liner time to tell her that the filmmaker wants to talk with her on camera and she precisely broken refuses. “Okay,” Speedo says. “But we’re gonna roll in in and watch movies,” he tells her, and then shows dated demo derby films to Moss, including bromide where after a race he’s jumped by three guys. With his connivingly-held camera, Moss manages to combine artsy angles and gripping cuts and crops with a home-movie cosmopolitanism that creates an intimacy that appeals to the voyeurism in viewers. And he paints an honest dossier of his subject, ordinarily having others comment on him. In one instance, Speedo, instinct persecuted again at the lose sight of and growing increasingly angrier at the world as his marriage disintegrates, walks away from his competitors after the race, shouting, “This place f_ing blows!” while one of his demo friends comments how sad it is, that he’s usually centre of the best sports.

Jennifer Aniston has just the right face for a title like this, don’t you think? Everybody’s favorite fictional TV character since 1994, Rachel Unsophisticated, from “Friends” has that euphonious, innocent, angelic look that has worked so skilfully for her in lightweight comedy and here works equally well in a darker, more ironic way. “The Good Girl” is a salutation change of pace in the direction of the actress and shows us once again that she’s more than a pretty semblance.

That said, I’m not sure every viewer is flourishing to appreciate Ms. Aniston in so downbeat a role. As for myself, I cognizant of I liked the film and Aniston’s atypical for the story’s outset thirty minutes or so, but after that I began to grow ready to drop subservient to the Dialect heft of it all.

Aniston plays a thirty-year-unused little woman named Justine, living in Texas, working a uninteresting-end berth at a Retail Rodeo bank on department store, and stuck in a childless, dead-halt wedding to a deadhead husband (John C. Reilly). If that isn’t the unemployed of the sphere, I don’t know what is. Then she meets a one cashier at the store, a young fetter (Jake Gyllenhaal), ancient twenty-two, whose name is Tom but who calls himself Holden, after the main character in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.”

You can’t much find fault with Justine for not being advantageous. Her peace, Phil, is a undertaking painter with no ambition beyond getting sharp every night in front of the television with his good-ol’-boy buddy, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). But why does Justine ruin for a kid groove on Tom? He claims to be an unpublished writer and a college dropout; what we know for sure is he’s serene and a loner. Both he and Justine hate their jobs and hate life and hate the unbelievable in general.

Justine and Tom are associated spirits who find hearten in one another’s arms. She’s lonely, he’s immature, and they’re both idiotic. It’s a measure of their romantic creativity that they meet for their first romantic tryst in face of a Chuck E. Cheese’s.

The characters are essentially caricatures, to be sure, but there’s a talented deal of truth behind the candour of their facades. Their galumph labour–including Justine’s, the pathetic husband’s, Bubba’s, and Justine’s boyfriend store workers (Deborah Rush, Mike Ivory, John Carroll Lynch)–is ubiquitous; we all know people like them, heaven help us. Indeed, to some amplitude we may be like a given or more of them ourselves.

The stories Tom writes are remarkably depressing, and we are reminded at the kick-off by Tom that Salinger’s rebellious suitable wound up in a mental hospital. Why Justine is tired to him is both obvious and mystifying. Part of the movie’s ungovernable is that Justine herself is an puzzle. She appears at times to be extremely shining and touchy while at other times extremely clouded and cloddish. Her affair with the younger, mentally disturbed Tom is conducted practically in the unbosom, in motel rooms around metropolis and in unified of the store’s back rooms with pledge cameras everywhere.

The darker comedic elements of the film are the best parts: the incidental death of a coworker, for exemplification; the unlikely routine that develops between Justine and Bubba; or Phil’s attempts to comprise his semen analyzed at a hospital. But the movie abandons the dark comedy and the ridicule with halfway owing to, and the bittersweet ending leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth. Worse, the ending hasn’t the shock value it was intended to have because most of it can easily be foretold well in advance. Composed as a satire of halfway-domain vacuousness, the big may not be funny adequately, vicious enough, or novel plenty to fully satisfy numberless viewers. “American Beauty” and Gyllenhaal’s own “Donnie Darko” covered the in spite of ground superiority before.

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Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) is a thin, sexy girl who goes to join her husband in Bangkok where he is attached to the French Embassy. Though looking innocent, but enamored of love making, she had managed to be seduced by two men on the plane.

In Bangkok she meets a sultry teenager given to masturbation who intros her to an older man (Alain Cuny) who is to finally reveal the secrets of her true sexual and femme liberation. At the same time, Emmanuelle falls for a lesbian anthropologist, masturbates with the young girl, and is raped in an opium den.

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Direction is a bit pompous, but lensing is good. Acting is a bit self-conscious, except for Cuny as the older man who initiates Emmanuelle into the rites of love. Kristel is acceptably ingenuous as the part-innocent, part-sex-obsessed heroine.

Richard Doyle's

FLICK PICTURE SHOW MADNESS

Waking Life


(Richard Linklater,
2001).

Harkening
back to


Slacker


, Linklater's groundbreaking
animated meditation on life and dreaming follows Wiley Wiggins as he encounters
discussions about dreams and the meaning of life through what may be his
own dreamscape. The animation is the real star here. The film was shot
on digital video and animated from the final cut using a new computer
driven rotoscoping process. Intellectuals (Robert C. Solomon, Eamonn Healey),
actors (Ethan Hawke, July Delpy, Adam Goldberg, Nicky Katt), cult figures
(Steven Prince) and Linklater himself all appear as basically themselves,
expounding upon the profound, the banal, and life's mysteries. A bit hard
on the eyes at first, but dazzling when you get used to the shifting,
stuttering style of much of the animation.

Spielberg's
admittedly fun updating of Saturday afternoon serials does not stand up
that well 20 years later. Rife with plot holes and outright ludicrous
plot developments (Nazis in Egypt in 1936???), it's best enjoyed with
one's brain in neutral. The once stunning action set-pieces now seem predictable
and dependent on implausible chains of events. Still, it's a very well-made
B movie that succeeds in not taking itself too seriously most of the time.
Harrison Ford is wonderful in his star-making performance, and Karen Allen
is the only woman to ever play an appealing part in the whole series.
Vastly overrated in my books.

The only interesting film in the series. Despite Donner's
signature lack of style, this one entertains with its middle-of-the-road
mix of humour, action and violence. Mel Gibson's character here is still
quite edgy, and Gary Busey plays an effective villain. The plot is ridiculous
(the villains attempt to conceal their criminal behaviour by blowing up
an entire house just to knock off a hooker), but it still can be enjoyed
if one turns off one's better judgement. Most importantly, Joe Pesci is
nowhere to be seen.

Hugo Weaving stars as a man snatched from his apartment
by the police and interrogated about a stolen car. Eventually, the topic
of the interrogation turns to a missing person and a case of serial murder.
Meanwhile, others are monitoring the cop conducting the interview in an
effort to catch him breaking the law. This twisty, original thriller features
great performances from Weaving and Tony Martin as the cop. Some of the
twists are predictable, but the dialogue and performances make it well
worth your while. Unfortunately, the ending is a bit abrupt, leading me
to think that Monahan was unsure how to end the story.

A
wonderful and innovative western. The story unfolds in approximately real
time (the time elapsed in the story is the length of the film, but Zinnemann
manipulates time inside the story to heighten suspense), and repeated
shots of train tracks and ticking clocks skilfully create tension by anticipating
the arrival of the outlaw Frank Miller. The look of the film is gritty
and spare and the script remains focused on the action that drives the
plot, anticipating the westerns of the 60s that would revolutionize the
genre. Gary Cooper's performance is extremely subdued, and the supporting
work by Grace Kelly, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, Otto
Kruger, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Harry Morgan is uniformly excellent. Lee Van
Cleef appears in his first role, but has no dialogue.

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The
fifth film in Smith's New Jersey series is more like the


Clerks


animated series than any of the other films in the series. Extremely profane
and low-brow, but dense with clever reference to films, television and
comic books, the film doesn't work all the time, but when it does work,
it is extremely funny. Surprisingly, Jason Mewes has improved as an actor
and successfully carries the film in the lead role. Smith is quite funny
despite his lack of any real lines in the film. There are dozens of celebrity
cameos, which are clever and funny. Major characters from the earlier
films appear (Jason Lee appears as two different characters, and Ben Affleck
appears as his character from


Chasing Amy


and
as himself), and fans of the whole series will find dozens of cross-references.

Ford's
atypical western stars Henry Fonda as the new commanding officer of a
remote outpost bordering Apache land. Fonda is unhappy with the assignment,
which he considers a demotion, and his firm, unyielding style clashes
with the informal atmosphere of the post. John Wayne plays Captain Kirby
York, an experienced frontier officer who clashes with Fonda over the
treatment of the Apaches. Fonda's rigidity, snobbery, and desire for glory
leads to a foolhardy confrontation with the Apaches. Fonda's performance
in a role that is unusual for him is outstanding. Wayne, on the other
hand, has very little to do. The picture really belongs to the members
of Ford's support company - Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Anna Lee, and
others. Most of the film focuses on the details of life at this remote
outpost, and does a good job of painting a picture of a life devoted to
military service. A romantic subplot involving Shirley Temple, as Fonda's
daughter, and John Agar (who she would later marry in real life), the
son of Irish NCO Ward Bond, is unworthy of the rest of the movie, but
does lead to an interesting scene between Fonda and Bond that deals with
issues of military protocol, domestic duties, and class conflict. Ford's
view of the climactic battle with the Apaches is interestingly complex,
offsetting Fonda's foolish decision with considerations of duty and tradition.

The
film that made Bruce Willis a film star and inaugurated the "terrorists
take over a ____ and one man must defeat them" action genre. Actually,
a smashing good action film, despite its plot holes and many one-dimensional
characters. The success is due mostly to Willis' portrayal of a more down-to-earth
action hero who actually gets hurt, and Alan Rickman's urbane performance
as terrorist leader Hans Gruber. McTiernan's pacing is excellent. The
film never really bogs down despite numerous sub-plots and the introduction
of too many "idiot" side characters. The cheap slasher film
"surprise" at the end is inexcusable.

Richardson's screen adaptation of John Osborne's play helped
initiate the British screen's "kitchen sink" movement, with
its working-class characters and gritty, realistic style. Richard Burton
may seem a tad old, but his performance as Jimmy Porter is quite stunning.
Jimmy is a college graduate who operates a candy stall by day, plays jazz
trumpet at night, and takes out his simmering rage and misanthropy on
his middle-class wife and all who cross his path. Burton's performance
combines anger, humour and vulnerability, effortlessly bringing Porter
to life.

The Mummy


(Stephen Sommers, 1999)

While I wasn't expecting a film like the classic Universal
film, or even the Hammer remake, I was expecting decent entertainment.
I was wrong. This is a ridiculous excuse to fill the screen with digital
effects at the expense of a coherent plot and developed characters. A
total waste of time.

©2002 Richard Doyle

CineScene