Category Archives: Movies

A Curious Editing Choice

Alien is one of the most influential science fiction horror films of all time. A credible argument can be made that Alien killed off the professional explorer style of sf movie, while military and semi-military people crewed spacecraft replacing with the ‘truckers in space.’ Scores of blatant rip-off movie followed in the Alien‘s staggering box office success with cheap direct to video production continuing to this day. Alien’s production design, direction, and cinematography are all presented with a ‘grounded’ realism. A more naturalistic ‘lived in look’ that Star Wars a few years earlier had pioneered in SF cinema.

Yet, in contrast to all this hard edged, grease covered realism Alien also boasts a singular edit that flies in the face of the rest of its choices.

For the most part editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherly employ a simple invisible approach to their craft, never drawing attention to their edits from shot to shot or scene to scene. A style that melds with the film’s ‘grounded’ approach drawing the audience into the screen’s reality. Except for one edit.

When Captain Dallas fatefully goes into the air shafts to hunt the alien in hopes of corralling it into the airlock the unintrusive editing style is maintained until the very end of the sequence. Dallas, fleeing from where he believed the alien to be instead heads directly into the creature, delivering a jump scare that would have made Val Lewton proud, as the creature suddenly reached out for him, and towards us. Then the scene cuts with a very brief shot of a badly tuned CRT screen, like a television switched to a dead channel with an accompanying burst of static.

There is nothing from any of the other characters points of view that supports a sudden cut to a CRT monitor. None could see Dallas as he fled, but instead listened to him and watched him as a phosphor dot on their crude trackers. The choice for that quick startling edit was made entirely for the audience’s point of view and it works.

I have never seen anyone watching this film react with anything other than emersion during this tense, horrific scene. Never has anyone suspension of disbelief ben damaged by that choice. It is a curious and genius bit of editing artistry that a lesser team would have never employed.

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Sunday Night Movie: Billion Dollar Brain

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Billion Dollar Brain is the third and final film with the protagonist Harry Palmer following The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, but the first that I have watched.

Harry (Michael Caine) now retired from the British Intelligence service is scrapping by as a private investigator when a mysterious package arrives along with a promised of a substantial payment for delivering it to a location in Finland. Simultaneously Harry is recruited back in the United Artistsservice as they are aware of the job and its vital national concerns. After using a fluoroscope at a shoe store (People really did use to utilize X-ray machines unsupervised to get better fitting shoes.) and determining the package contains eggs, the method by which viruses are transported, Harry travels to Finland, worming his way into the mysterious and sinister private organization. What he discovers has the potential to spark a nuclear exchange between the world’s superpowers, and Harry must work hard to prevent the coming disaster.

I had heard of this film from one of my many movie podcasts though they made the plot sound more fantastic as though it dealt with artificial intelligence. While the massive computer from which the novel and the film took their title is impressive there is no hint of intelligence in the machine. Rather, it is being used and programmed to analyze and execute insurgency operations behind the Iron Curtain. For me, this vastly improved the nature of the film and its plot. Many technical details, such as using eggs to transport viruses or the use of a mount when attempting a long-range sniper shot, are quite accurate. There’s even a sub-plot where a member of the organization is feeding bad data into the billion dollar brain for his own greedy goals and the bad data produces bad analysis well before the term garbage in garbage out became widely known.

Ken Russel, working with a decent budget, assembled a very good cast and production team giving Billion Dollar Brain the quality that many of the 60s spy genre lacked. Filmed on location in Finland the movie captures the unique charm of that nation and its precarious geo-political position as it remained a free nation bordering directly on the USSR.

In addition of Michael Caine the cast included Karl Malden as Harry’s former friend that brought him into the clandestine organization, Francoise Dorleac as another operative, the film was released the same year she tragically died in a single car auto accident, and Ed Begley as the deranged Texan behind the entire plot.

All in all, this was a surprisingly good espionage flick, more akin to LeCarre than to Bond and that was very much my preferred taste.

Billion Dollar Brain is currently streaming on Pluto TV.

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Let’s Get Back to Wolf Men

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Last week horror film Youtuber Ryan Hollinger released a video essay on 2010’s The Wolfman a remake of 1941’s The Wolf Man. The 2010 film was not particularly well received nor was it a hit at the box office and Hollinger put forth his own analysis of why the film performed so poorly. I

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watched the movie in the theaters on its release and found the adaptation tepid, dry, and wholly uninteresting and despite an amazing cast, Benicio del Toro, Emily Blunt, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugo Weaving, only Weaving managed to captivate and hold my attention. You can see my original review of the remake here.

While I think Hollinger makes a number of good points about why the remakes failed, I do believe that he missed a critical element.

Curt Siodmak’s script for the 1941 film is a lean, spare affair quite suitable for a modest production with a brief running time of a scant 70 minutes but that is not to say it is without subtext and subtlety. In 1941 turmoil engulfed the world. Depending on how you counted the Second World War had been raging for 2 to 4 years and

Universal Studios

fascism seemed to be conquering the globe. A refugee fleeing Nazi antisemitism Siodmak and his brother landed in Hollywood marked by their experiences something Curt injected into The Wolf Man. The script’s subtext is about how even ‘good’ people become monsters under the wrong influence. A clear for what Siodmak witnessed in Germany with the rise to power of the Nazis. Repeated several times in the film is the famous poem Siodmak penned;

 

Even a man who is pure in heart,
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.

We all have the beast within us, and it only takes the wrong circumstance to awaken it, to release it, to the ruin of all including ourselves. This elemental truth is missing from the 2010 remake. It is a tragedy that Lawrence Talbot became cursed the potential lies within everyone. Any person can be filled with hate and perform terrible acts upon their fellow humans. This is the central theme that seems very much missing from modern werewolf tales. It isn’t about the bite but the darkness we hold inside. It’s about how easy it is to hate.

Given the cultural and political storms sweeping the globe we are ready for a return to TheWolf Man and a reexamination of the hatred at the center of a poisoned heart.

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Sometimes Plots Holes Don’t Matter

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Do not misunderstand me, the majority of the times if there is an element of your plot that given a few seconds of thought unravels the entire affair, it should be fixed well before the work is finished,

By the way by ‘plot hole’ I do not mean an inaccuracy that plays to genre convention even if it is factually in error. When Tony Star emerges from the cave where he had been held captive wearing his Mark I, built from scraps, every rifle and machinegun there would have had more than enough power to penetrate the metal. That’s not why we are at that movie, we’re there for superhero fun and that allows an amount of ignoring physics.

No, when I talk plot holes I am talking about illogic within the bounds of the accepted genre or conventions of the piece. However, if the characters and emotions of the piece grab your readers or audience by the throat then none of that would matter.

A wonderful example is the beloved classic film Casablanca.

Some of its plot holes and error are quite well know. Transit papers signed by Charles de Gaulle, who was in England and fighting the Nazis from there, would not only be worthless in Vichy France, but they’d also get you arrested. For refugees Ilsa and Victor are amazing dapper and well-fed enjoying their champagne cocktails, but this film is a romance and in romances we want beautiful people live beautiful lives.

The plot hole that really undermines the story if you think about it for two second and that no one cares about because the characters have seized our hearts so thoroughly centers on Ugarte the murder and thief that stole the transit papers and handed them to Rick to hide before Ugarte’s arrest. Prompting two problems in the plot.

1) Why in the world would Ugarte hand them to anyone? He expects to sell them very soon for a vast amount of money. How was this to work? Make the deal with victor, get the handshake, and then run back to Rick to get the papers? This non-sensical action only takes place so that Rick ends up with the MacGuffin.

2) More seriously, the police know it was Ugarte who killed the couriers and stole the papers, they arrest him at Rick’s and haul him off to jail. The next morning, we learn that he died while in custody with the corrupt police dithering between shot while trying to escape or suicide as the official report. A night of torture that killed him and we’re expected to accept that the murdering thief never gave up Rick’s name as the man holding the papers? Ugarte did not come off as the ‘die to protect your sources’ type at all. Again, this is only to keep the plot alive. Rick arrested kills the narrative dead.

And yet of all the times I have watched people experience this classic for the first time no one has ever questioned these actions.

With lesser characters and lesser actors, they would have. Our entanglement with this people blinds our critical eye.

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Streaming Review: War-Gods of the Deep

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1965 American International’s release War-Gods of the Deep (UK title City in the Sea)attempted to capitalize on the commercial and critical success of the Roger Corman Poe movies starring Vincent Price by hiring Price to star in this film very loosely inspired by a Poe poem.

Ben (Tab Hunter), an American working on the English coast, after discovering a corpse on the beach, becomes convince something is afoot, something unnatural. When the object of his

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affections, Jill (Susan Hart) vanishes in the night, Ben and an eccentric artist, Harold, (David Tomlinson), along with the artist’s pet chicken (My sweetie-wife’s favorite part of the movie), go searching for the woman. By happenstance and the force of a plot-driven story they end up in an underwater city ruled over by a tyrannical smuggler, (Vincent Price.)

War-Gods of the Deep was the final movie directed by the legendary Jacques Tourneur who gave us lasting classics such as the original Cat People, Night of the Demon, and the wonderful noir, Out of the Past. Sadly, this movie can’t match the quality of any single shot of any of those previous films. The script is a hodgepodge of ideas, scenes, and wildly incongruent elements. This story has, mystical caverns keeping people ageless for more than a century, reincarnated wives, gill-men living in the deep, and pseudo-ancient cults and practices. None of the actors, save Price, seem to have done anything more than memorize their lines and marks, giving lifeless, empty performances.

The editing of the film is terrible with long tedious underwater sequences that are supposed to contain tension and action but are, in reality, utterly confusing leaving the viewer unable to determine one character from another.

It’s 85-minute running time drags slower than nearly any other film I have watched including some Italian zombie flicks. There is little to nothing in this production that is worth recommending unless you are a Price completionist.

War-gods of the Deep is currently streaming on Amazon Prime in the US.

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Sunday Night Noir: Criss Cross

 

Universal Pictures

 

Criss Cross is a 1949 film noir directed by Robert Siodmak about a gang of crooks attempting to pull off an armored car heist of nearly half a million dollars.

Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) has returned home to Los Angeles after drifting about the nation for two years disillusioned after the disintegration of his marriage to Anna (Yvonne De Carlo). Anna has remarried to a local crime goon Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea) Soon Steve and Anna have rekindled their affair despite the lethal threat of Slim. Partly as a cover for their affair and partly to dissuade Slim’s suspicions, Steve concocts a plot with slim to rob the armored car company his works for with an intention to betray Slim and abscond with both the loot and the lady.

The film is a moderately decent noir marred by an intrusive and superfluous voice-over that, like Double Indemnity’s, seems to be the character recounting the events to a third party but without an actual third party to receive it.

Siodmak’s direction is sure and deft with creative and imaginative employment of rear screen projections the craft large spaces giving the impression of exteriors while maintaining strick studio control for cinematographer’s Franz Planer’s lighting and camera work.

Noted noir composer Miklos Rozsa fashioned the score but did not quite match his best work with the music sometimes as intrusive as the voice over.

The cast is uniformly good, portraying the conflicted and ultimately weak nature of the characters as they are consumed by their unrequited needs. While Criss Cross bears all the visual stamps of the noir style, more important to me the tone and theme of the story are true to the heart of noir, a dark cynical impression of humanity. Steve is trapped by his infatuation with Anna. While Anna and Slim are compelled by their respective flaws. The ending, dark, disturbing, and doomed is equally tragic and inevitable, paying honestly to the corruption in the human heart.

Playing as part of a Siodmak collection Criss Cross is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

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That Potential Harry Potter Series

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Deadline and other sources are reporting that Warner Brothers, a studio once known for its anti-fascist stances, is looking to move forward for a re-booting of the valuable Harry Potter IP as a series for its streaming service HBOMax. It is reported that WB CEO Zaslav has met with JKR in hopes of bringing this project to life and that JKR may even be producer on the series. JKR, in addition to the controversies surrounding her small-minded stance on trans issues, is notorious for demanding control over the property and would likely wield great influence over the series’ production.

It’s understandable that people became fans of the franchise either through the books or the films before JKR’s opinion became public poisoning, quite understandably, many against the author. With the proposed series all this is known ahead of time on this go around and raises ethical and moral concerns about financially supporting JKR as she continues with what many people feel are bigoted opinions.

I fully support those who protest and drag into the light the statements and attitudes of JKR, but I also think it would be wise and just to be prudent in who is targeted if this series continues to move forward.

For example, the young actors cast in the series I would not want to see hounded or harassed on social media. ‘We are not so smart when we are young,’ as one fictional character observed and it is already a very hard road to travel as a child actor there is little, very little, to be gained targeting them.

The writers of the ‘writers room’ are likely to be in the first stages of their careers, struggling with student debt, the high cost of living in LA, and the difficult task of landing any paying gig in Hollywood, refusing an assignment may not have been a viable option for them.

However, the show runner, as of yet unnamed, the person with creative control only checked by the studio and the dictatorial JKR is another matter. That person is likely to be an experience veteran of the business with the financial and career resources to walk away from the series. If they choose to get into bed with JKR, fully aware of the controversies she brings along, then they have made their decision and shouldn’t be surprised when it turns out to be far from popular.

I have read the books and seen the film adaptation and found them enjoyable but flawed. Others have done a fine job pointing out the antisemitic tropes and the ignorant racism in the text so I will not elaborate on that here just beware it is there. I have no need to purchase anything new from the franchise and I am quite happy leaving it behind, the proposed series holds no interest for me and hopefully not for you either.

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Movie Review: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

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This past Saturday the 25th I had the good fortune to see an advance screening of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a big budget cinematic adaptation of the tabletop role playing game. As a gamer for more than 40 years I had a keen interest in the film and when a fellow writer popped up with invites to the screening I had to attend.

There have been other attempts to leverage the game into popular media. From 1983 through 1985 saw the production and airing of an animated series Dungeons & Dragons with the three season clearly target for a younger audience. 2000 saw the release of a live-action film Dungeons & Dragons that was poorly received by both critics and audiences. (Though successful enough for two direct to Home Video sequels.) This production, Honor Among Thieves is boasts the most resources and well-known names to adapt the property.

The film, like most sessions of the game, is an ensemble piece, though more focus is given to Edgin (Chris Pine) a man who through tragedy has turned to thievery and Holga, (Michelle Rodriguez) his dangerous barbarian partner in crime. They assemble a team, Simon (Justice

Paramount Studios

Smith) a Sorcerer with self-esteem issues, Doric (Sophie Lillis) a tiefling druid desperate to save her people and wilderness from encroaching ecological devastation, Xenk (Rege-Jean Page) a paladin with ties to Edgin past before Edgin fall from grace. What starts as a heist, with a few side adventures to gather the materials required, transforms into a battle against a vast and evil conspiracy with thousands of live and the future in the hands of the thieves.

Each character has an arc of character development and with the story compressed to a single film none are particularly deep or complex. Honor Among Thieves is not a contemplative examination of the human condition but romp, an exercise in fun with just enough character to allow the actors to invest, engage, and embrace their roles. No third act twist is truly shocking or surprising, but the film isn’t relying on that approach. It expects, with reasonableness, that characters and the actors portrayals with keep the audience emotionally invested and not some amazing reveal to recontextualize the story.

The filmmaking is solid, competent, but not groundbreaking or visually stunning. For the most part, with the except of one shoot, the directors, Jonathan Goldstein a & John Francis Daley, avoid drawing attention to the VFX with ‘impossible’ camera moves and Barry Peterson’s cinematography is perfectly serviceable with decent compositions but never remarkable.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a ‘popcorn movie,’ one meant to provide a short diversion from the grind of reality and give some thrills, laughs, and a touch of real emotion. In the matter the film succeeds. It is fun and worth the hair over two hours spent watching it.

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Movie Review: 65

 

Movie Review: 65

Adam Driver plays a pilot from an alien civilization that crashes on Earth 65 million years ago at the end of cretaceous period and must save himself and his sole surviving passenger while fighting off dinosaurs.

That single sentence description far more action and entertainment than the delivers. I went into the auditorium expecting a fun, mindless, ‘popcorn movie’ but discovered that 65 failed to deliver anything approaching even the barest minimums of engagement. It would be difficult for me to remember a screening that had left me as bored as this one.

Driver’s character, Mills, is given a perfunctory and cliche backstory, presumably to create emotional engagement and to misdirect the audience as to the exact nature of his emotional distress. After encountering another tired, worn, and idiotic cinematic cliche from bad 50’s Sci-Fi films, the ‘uncharted meteor storm,’ his ship is disabled and crashes on cretaceous Earth, an equally ‘uncharted’ planet. The passengers, all in some sort of hibernating sleep capsules, are killed save for the one that will have emotional resonance with Mills. However, this star-faring race with faster than light travel apparently never invented a manifest and so he has no idea who she is, where she’s from, or even which languages she might possibly be familiar with. Now this ersatz father-daughter duo must transverse on foot less than 10 miles to escape this deadly planet.

What should have been a sequence of set pieces with thrills, tension, and scares quickly becomes a tedious pattern of nothing exciting. Oh, Mills and the girl do face danger at every turn but nothing that was supposed to be tense ever possessed the least amount of actual tension. Mills has advanced technology to assist, except for when the scrip requires it to fail, which it does just long enough to cause trouble and then the tech resumes proper function. There is a piece with a waterfall that I honestly thought. “Oh, they ripped this off from the Universal Studio’s ride, and the ride did it better.”

The third act bring in the Chicxulub impactor, the asteroid hypnotized to have cause the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, as an additional ‘ticking clock’ and a futile attempt to inject tension into the flaccid fairytale.

Nothing that happens in 65 is in the least bit surprising, original, or even entertaining. It is a movie constructed of bit and bobs from better films and wasted 90 minutes of my limited time on the planet.

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