wlgme Reviews

An American Romance (1944)

Beautifully photographed Americana with lots of heart - and no soul

[4 July 2017]

Although quite competently produced, directed and acted (and graced, by the way, with a delightfully humorous operatic performance at a school graduation ceremony), this film performed poorly at the box office, and it's easy to see why. Like "Wilson", an even abler American paean which was released at the same time and which met with the same tepid reception from moviegoers, it's an almost lifeless puppet show - from beginning to end, not a single character changes in any significant way. Only the lead, Czech immigrant Steve Dangos, undergoes an epiphany of sorts as he realizes that his rugged individualism must be tempered to meet the needs of modern industry - and by then, the movie is almost over!

What makes a story great? What draws readers and viewers, from generation to generation, to the Iliad, "War and Peace", "Strange Interlude", "Gone with the Wind", "A Face in the Crowd", "The Godfather" and other such classics? It's simply the fascination of seeing characters change over time as a result of the circumstances in their lives. It happens to everyone in real life, but not invariably in reel life, and when it doesn't, tickets don't sell no matter how much money, Technicolor and CGI are thrown into the mix.

The Connection (1961)

WAITING FOR GODOT on junk

[11 June 2017]

And, man, it's a drag. You dig?

No spoiler alerts needed here. No action takes place in this ham-handed movie (unless the popping of a boil passes for action), and even worse, there's no character development - not unless you count the back story of the abused farmer's son, which isn't worth counting.

It's cliché, too. Cowboy, the drug dealer, is a stereotypical one - glib, cynical and sinister. At least, he's supposed to be all of those things. But movie fans have seen them done far better by Ricardo Montalban in LET NO MAN WRITE MY EPITAPH and Darren McGavin in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, the latter being a movie infinitely superior to this untalented Beat waste of celluloid.

Speaking of WAITING FOR GODOT, let me pass along the true point of that bizarre exercise in futility. (These thoughts aren't my own - I take them from a brilliant article which I read years ago in the Encyclopedia Britannica.) Samuel Becket's inspiration goes back to what Aristotle said about tragedy, that its allure is in the relief, the catharsis, which one feels after viewing horrifying events on the stage. So Becket decided to give playgoers a relief from their own humdrum, pointless existence by depicting futility rather than tragedy. In other words, the play isn't merely a statement about the modern age - it's an anodyne for it.

A similar dynamic is at work in THE CONNECTION, and that's practically its only redeeming feature - escaping it is such a relief!

Admittedly, THE CONNECTION's single set, a rundown apartment, is convincing; however, the effect is spoiled by the lack of changing shadows outside the windows, and more so by the absence of sirens from police cruisers and fire engines, an omnipresent fact of life in Manhattan.

Finally, as a side note, light doesn't travel at "186,000 miles per second per second." Per-second-per-second is a unit of acceleration, not velocity. Hopefully, the playwright was aware of this fact when he put those words into Leach's mouth, but I suspect otherwise. The Beats were never much on science, however much they may have liked to riff about it while high.

Weiner (2016)

Towers above its competition

[13 May 2017]

You are there, a fly on the wall, as disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner reveals himself to be a politician bulging with ambition and narcissism. You are there as he stiffens his resolve after a sexting scandal and inserts himself into New York City's 2013 mayoral race. You are there as another sexting scandal erupts and sprays him and his wife Huma with its ejecta, and you are there as his courage wilts and droops and he descends into a spate of frenzied self-flagellation.

Seriously, WEINER is a brilliant documentary - it grabs you from the very first instant that it comes on the screen, and it never lets you go - and, yes, Huma is the real star of the show. The looks on her face are worth more than all of Weiner's self-stroking loquacity put together.

A big thumbs-up for WEINER!

The Roost (2005)

Tom Noonan in this fetid bat guano?

[8 May 2017]

Noonan is talented - check out his triple duty as the writer, director and star of 1994's WHAT HAPPENED WAS..., which features one of the most believable first kisses in movie history - so what in the world is he doing here? Either lending his star power to a needy friend, I suppose, or simply taking the money and running.

THE ROOST has absolutely nothing to recommend it. The writing, directing, acting, photography, effects, makeup and scares - they're all garbage. Even Noonan's own bit as the retro TV horror host is painfully lame, and the "shock" scenes are just a handful of uninspired shaky-cam attacks by some escapees from a WALKING DEAD convention.

You can - as I did - fast-forward through 90% of this sad excuse for a movie without missing anything, and the other 10% is equally worthy of oblivion.

And, please, can people stop hating on bats? The bat is a docile and remarkable creature without which we'd be up to our eyeballs in mosquitoes, and the vandalism of its habitats is an ignorant crime against nature.

Traffic with the Devil (1946)

"Fast-moving" cautionary short about reckless driving...

[30 April 2017]

...with a curiously ambiguous parting shot.

For better or worse, the other IMDb reviewers of this short have covered most of its salient points, so I'll content myself firstly with praising its epigrammatic narration, and secondly (and much more importantly) with expressing my surprise at its closing line, which is spoken by real-life LAPD traffic cop Charles Reineke to an outraged motorist complaining of a close encounter with a reckless driver:

"Anyway," says Reineke, "stopping cars won't stop reckless driving. That's up to the driver."

By "stopping cars," Reineke means "giving tickets to drivers," and it could be argued in his defense that he's alluding to the fact that his outraged motorist was himself a reckless driver only a little while earlier, and ticketed by Reineke to no effect, before that recklessness led to a crash which left the motorist with his neck in a brace, and a harsh lesson to ponder from the school of hard knocks.

But Reineke's remark is nonetheless troubling. It seems to point to a time when reckless driving was considered an offense worthy only of ticketing and not loss of license and, in egregious cases, imprisonment. Until the 1980s, a similar laissez faire attitude was prevalent toward the carnage caused by drunk driving - many of us are old enough to remember "lovable" drunk driver Foster Brooks on THE DEAN MARTIN SHOW.

Thank goodness for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)! We need them as much as ever, and as much as we need something along the same lines to combat the latest scourge of America's bloody highways - thoughtless texting.

Love Is Colder Than Death (1969)

European art house film types pretend to be gangsters...

[28 April 2017]

...and the artsy-fartsy results are just as ridiculous as one would expect.

With his soft, fat behind squeezed everlastingly into tight white pants, the main character, Franz, is played by the film's director, and while Rainer Werner Fassbinder is certainly ugly enough to convince as a thug pimp, this is no RISE OF THE FOOTSOLDIER. Not for a single instant does the film persuade the viewer that he or she is peeking into the lives and world of real criminals. Instead, the impression is that of a particularly amateurish Andy Warhol abomination, or of what might have been Ed Wood's nouvelle vague magnum opus.

Pretty boy Bruno (Ulli Lommel) is supposed to be a psychopathic killer but exudes not the slightest air of threat, and for most of the movie, he sports a fedora which makes him look almost as laughable as CONTEMPT's Michel Piccoli in his fedora and bath towel (almost, I say, because it's hard to beat the king). Like Franz, Bruno is frequently seen with a cigarette dangling from in his mouth - "Bogarting" (along with a laconic affect) is a sign of toughness in European cinematic culture, a tradition which Woody Allen parodied so amusingly in EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX.

As for Johanna (Hanna Schygulla), Franz's prostitute girlfriend - she has a nude scene or two, but don't get your hopes up.

LOVE's silly scenes are legion. The perfunctory shootouts are more over-the-top than William Shatner getting hit by a phaser blast, and the police's idea of stakeout is to put a crowd of plainclothes officers at the entrance of a bank. A Turkish pimp isn't alerted to the fact that his life is in danger when Bruno, complete with fedora and sunglasses, enters a café in broad daylight (the perfect time and place, of course, to stage a hit), with his hand concealed under the lapel of his overcoat, and takes a seat directly facing his intended victim; and Bruno himself, again in broad daylight - and again in his fedora - doesn't think it unwise to piggyback a dying man through the streets looking for a place to finish him off.

LOVE reminded me of a designer jeans ad which I once saw in the New York City subway system. Under a row of male models striking fashionista "tough guy" poses, a joker had used a magic marker to scrawl the words, THIS ADVERTISEMENT EXPLOITS A**HOLES.

A**holes! That's one more star than I give to LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH, firstly because of IMDb's guidelines, and secondly because the film's subtitled version allowed me to fast forward through its lengthy silences, which are even more worthless than the dialogue, without feeling that I'd missed anything.

Thirst (III) (2015)

Not too shabby

[18 February 2017]

It moves quickly; has good writing in the form of a tight plot and some believable characters; and features interesting Utah landscapes and respectable special effects - pound for dollar (and it's free on SyFy), it's a worthy effort.

The weakness is the inability of the director to control the mood in a perfectly competent manner. This inability is often seen in movies of this genre, and while THIRST doesn't make as many mistakes as other, lesser entries, the mistakes are certainly there.

Here we have a group of people being terrorized and slaughtered by an alien creature, and yet they still have the wherewithal to make bad jokes at random moments and to seem oblivious to the epoch-making mystery of it all.

To see what a grade A production can do with this kind of material, watch the 2011 version of THE THING. After her first horrific encounter with the creature, the young paleontologist gazes up at the stars and says, "I'll never look at them in the same way again..."

An even better example of tight control is the Tom Cruise masterpiece EDGE OF TOMORROW. The humor is always there, but it's always apropos.

The World Changes (1933)

A poor man's "Strange Interlude" which manages to end with a bang

[21 October 2016]

This sweeping soap opera always moves rapidly, but most of it is told in a linear fashion and is populated by only a few characters at a time. This mode of storytelling ends abruptly with the appearance of many characters and a highly involved climax. It's not Eugene O'Neill, but it's certainly entertaining and may have you rewinding your DVR or DVD more than once. Also, Paul Muni is brilliant, as usual ("They're just selling papers," he says of newspaper boys hawking Wall Street editions on the eve of the 1929 crash); the rest of the performers are strong, too; and it was made, as at least one line of its dialogue betrays, in the pre-Code days. Worth a look.

Prophets of Science Fiction: H.G. Wells (2011) Season 1, Episode 2

For those familiar with H.G. Wells, more interesting for its glimpses of current science

[18 December 2011]

For those unfamiliar with H.G. Wells' life and works, this documentary will be an interesting and generally competent overview, and even for the initiated, it contains some worthwhile tidbits. This reviewer, for example, was unaware that Wells was no fan of Fritz Lang's overrated METROPOLIS and that Wells' own unforgettable masterpiece, THINGS TO COME, was in part an answer to that movie. But in general, the documentary is most interesting for its look at the ways in which modern science is realizing Wells' dreams and nightmares of the future. Some of the latest advances in laser beams, cloaking technology and genetic manipulation are covered in the field, often with surprising insights.

That being said, it must be pointed out that the documentary contains a significant error which seriously calls into question the competency of its researchers. They claim that THINGS TO COME depicts the use of biological weaponry during a world war. In fact, the Wandering Sickness of Wells' imagination was merely a natural outcome of the war - much like the influenza which decimated Europe after WWI - and the gas dropped on Everytown was a tranquillizing "peace gas" which subdued its retrograde population without killing anyone but (ironically enough) the Chief, its quintessentially belligerent warlord.

This lapse of factual accuracy is especially surprising considering that Ridley Scott was an executive producer of the documentary. Surely a science fiction film maker of his stature is more familiar with one of the genre's most seminal works.