wannall Reviews

We Forgot About the Zombies (2022)

At Houston Horror Film Festival 2023, got the biggest audience response and applause

[8/10 · 12 August 2023]

Of the dozen or so shorts shown at the festival last night (8/11/2023) this is the one I came home talking about. It got the biggest audience response and the hardiest applause. Let's get one thing clear: I'm rating this out of the small universe of short films with which I'm familiar. At festivals like this one, many of them are more like finger exercises at the piano - directors/writers/crew proving that they can establish a moment, light it, shoot it, edit it, add sound to it, and put something on the screen that looks like it should be in a feature film. We Forgot could certainly be a sequence in a feature film, but it stands on its own entirely, and in my opinion shows what you can pull off if you have an idea - even a goofy idea - and believe in it enough to go at it with conviction. That's what we saw in We Forgot.

I have to accept that there is a bit of a spoiler out already in Coventry's review, spelling out cure, cute, cake, curse and so on as the labels on the syringes. The gag is that only the C and E are visible, and we are shown very quickly (that's a key element) that the labels are all different, and unpredictable. We get invested pretty fast in figuring out what the label was from the result of the injection.

Think about close-up magic. Someone does something right in front of you, and you know it's a trick, and you get caught up in trying to see it, since it's right there, a foot or two away from your eyes. And if the magician is good, skillful, and best of all clever, then you are left surprised, amused and completely entertained, knowing that you were looking right at the action and missed the trick. That's very much what happens in We Forgot.

It's "only" a short, so it's not realy worth going any further into this, and it would be difficult to do without more spoilers. There's only a few minutes of action to deal with after all.

The two guys are somewhat dimwits. That's a fair characterization. The accusation that the premise is not presented well is way, way off. This short was one of the few that, although it could be in a longer film, stood solidly on its own, with a beginning, a middle and an end. It's the first one we all talked about when we convened outside the screening room.

I stepped in to review this because I thought the rating of 3 stars was a gross injustice. I'm on the record with my 8 now, and if you get a chance to see this, go see it. By the way, the success of the trick depends on some very successful editing and pacing in the middle section, so don't overlook that there is considerable skill on display here.

Enjoy.

Pay the Ghost (2015)

Wait. Nicolas Cage used like a real actor in good old ghost story? Go figure!

[6/10 · 11 September 2020]

Here are some things this movie is not: It's not gory. It's not a constant assault on your ears. It's not a world-level apocalypse. It's not nonstop ghouls or ghosts or bonecrushing action. In short, it's not any of the things that put so many of our current movies so far over the top.

It occurred to me at the end that I was grateful to everyone involved. They made a very straightforward ghost story with some unexpectedly effective human scale movements and some very credible takes on parents who lose a child. It's not about losing the child. That's more complex and not supernatural. This is a ghost story built on top of the loss of a child, and that loss is well enough handled to provide some unexpected opportunities for the performers, especially Sarah Wayne Callies as Kristen, the mom.

I'm also grateful on another score: Someone apparently believed that Nicolas Cage could still be a competent actor in human scale role and took on the job of reining him in or whatever it took to get him to show and do the job.

It's just a good little ghost story. It's not brilliant, but it's clever enough. I was pleasantly surprised as things kept developing without great leaps or Earth-shattering revelations of staggering proportions. They found a good little premise. They built on it well enough to craft an entertaining hour and a half. And they just got on with it.

I'll side with everyone who said that it is not something you can call excellent. That's true. Sometimes, though, good enough is good enough. This is good enough to give it a watch and enjoy a movie which could have been a bit better, but of a kind and scale I wish they made more of these days.

In short: If a good old-fashioned ghost story will entertain you, you'll enjoy this. Everyone in cast and crew does a credible job, and no character does anything stupid. Thank you!

7500 (2019)

I hate what they were trying to do. I like an awful lot about how they did it.

[7/10 · 21 July 2020]

I almost hate to slam 7500, because there are some very commendable aspects. It may surprise you to find that in a review carrying a 7.0 rating, I plan to slam the movie, but that's where I'm headed. I hate what it seems to advocate. I like many things about how it was put together.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is very convincing throughout. I have nothing but good to say about his work here. Also, if you enjoyed Locke, with the technical challenge of staging an entire movie in a vehicle moving down the highway, you're likely to enjoy the accomplishment here, of staging almost an entire movie in the cockpit of an airliner. It's very convincing and well done. (I do recall one odd exception. They continually refer to a runway at 2-7-R. In every conversation I ever had from a cockpit, runways were rendered using international alphabet, which would make this one 2-7-Romeo. Have things change?)

Other than JGL and the handling of the cockpit setting, I don't have much good to say about it. It's certainly not about doing the smart things once you have attackers get busy on your airplane. It might be a very effective presentation on why no one in the cockpit should ever have been disarmed on any aircraft.

I saw a lot of grumbling and 1-star reviews, and I think that a lot of it came from folks not realizing why they felt so cheated at the end. Some acknowledge the technical correctness of a lot of the cabin business. Some found it good for roughly the first hour, but then found it annoying or silly or depressing or several other things, but I think they missed the most important reason for all of that. I'll get to that.

I rated the movie based on how well it's made, not on my opinion of what it tries to do. If you like its message, you'll experience it as a good movie. If you think the message is naive and risky at best, and perhaps downright irresponsible and deadly, as I do, then you will not agree with the rest of what I have to say.

To start with, you can't fault a movie because it's characters don't make what you think are the right choices in rough circumstances on the fly. So, I groan at some of the actions taken, but they are believable and even likely. Sometimes you make a movie about bad choices to make people think hard about what the good choices would be. That's legitimate. That's not this movie, although it certainly can serve that purpose, even if unintentionally.

My strongest complaint is that they are trying to get me to be sympathetic towards a young man who, in my scheme of things, has thrown himself far past any possibility of deserving more than proforma sympathy. I'm sorry, a bit, that he got himself into the situation, as I would be sorry for any young person who didn't have the judgment to do smarter things. He chose to do deadly, awful things, so my sympathy is limited to that formal regret, and not one drop more. Let's review briefly what we see him do.

He's not really much more than a kid, but we would call him a young man, I think. We see him acquire the materials for deadly weapons. (It's quite clever, and one of the best points of the film, and it should serve as a warning to airlines.) We see him participate in rushing the cabin. He stands by while his accomplices in the main cabin brutally murder more than one person on the plane. He later enters the cabin with his own deadly weapons.

We do see him a bit distressed by the murders. After he sees the plan falling apart, after being upset by watching murdered persons die, he finally seems to regret that he took part in the whole thing, especially that part about him having to die as part of the plan. He calls mom - no joke - and cries that he just wants it all to end and he wants to come home. Mind you, he calls while holding the surviving pilot hostage in the cabin of the airliner he helped to hijack and for which he helped supply the weapons used to commit the murders. Somehow, even with all that, we are supposed to have some sort of sympathy for the guy and hope that maybe he lives to surrender.

I make no apology for preferring a very different outcome.

When the attacker who first made it into the cabin was subdued - only after fatally stabbing the captain multiple times - he should not have been simply restrained and left to regain consciousness. He should have been dealt a final and fatal blow to ensure that he could not possibly be any further threat. As I said, that's a different movie, and they weren't "wrong" in any sense to write that their character did something else.

This is, however, my review, and I will use the point - not killing the lead attacker, even after he brutally stabs the pilot - to underline that sparing him leaves the remaining pilot at risk again, and leaves him at the mercy of the young man when he eventually gains entry into the cockpit. What should have happened was that the surviving pilot (JGL), after killing the lead attacker (my version of the story), as he allowed the young man to enter, he should have positioned himself at the ready to use the same fire extinguisher to bash that skull and eliminate that threat.

It is movie illogic to leave that primary attacker alive, period, and then worse to leave the young one alive as well. However, both had to be done, since this story needs the primary attacker to stick around and terrify the young one by working hard to carry out the plan to crash. It also had to be done in order to have the young one stick around and show us, after everything he had done or helped to do, that he was, I guess, "not really a bad person".

Apparently, we are supposed to accept that he is very agitated and afraid now, and so we should care about his life now. (JGL, by the way, does a genuinely nice job of being the character who would try to warn the young man as the police gather outside the plane and the young man holds a blade to JGL's throat. I hate that they want us to care in that way, but I have only respect for JGL and his approach through the film. Here, his attempt to calm his attacker, to keep from provoking him, but also to prevent him from making a threatening gesture sure to be seen by the police - JGL's attempt to juggle all that is a lovely piece of work.)

I think it's a terrible message ("oh, he feels so bad now, we should hope he survives") and very likely to be far more deadly in the real world what we saw in the movie, where several folks die.

If you think the message is just fine, you'll surely enjoy the movie. If you think it's dangerous at the very least, then, like me, you may cheer when finally, at long last, someone outside the aircraft, trained and ready, does what I think was the right and necessary thing and eliminates the young man's ability to harm anyone ever again. I was so frustrated by the time we got there, that I really did, I admit, cheer that the right thing finally got done.

The Creepy Line (2018)

If it does nothing but sensitize you to the issues, it is a good use of your time.

[9/10 · 12 April 2020]

It may also inform you quite a bit. Some reviewers want to dismiss some of the info as "right wing conspiracy theory". I disagree.

More importantly, even if you do not believe that the tools have been used exactly as claimed, there is nothing that they claim is happening that CANNOT be done, and, as they point out, we have absolutely no method whatsoever, as users, to have any clue whether any of it is being done or not, and THAT is the problem.

You can dismiss the few points where you decide that they are "too conservative", and take the underlying possibilities as the real point.

And I suspect that they have barely scratched the surface.

Cry 'Havoc' (1943)

Rewarding and viewing on several fronts, and genuinelly moving

[8/10 · 19 March 2020]

I knew nothing about the film when I happened to land on it about ten minutes in. It was immediately apparent that it was at the very least an unusual item: a WW II film, made in 1943, as the war waged, with an all-female cast. It didn't take long to see that it was a serious and well-made story giving us all of our information through the eyes of a collection of nurses who may have been inexperienced volunteers when they started in the hospital in Bataan, but were rapidly figuring out just what was under way and how to deal with it all. It's Bataan, just prior to April 1942, apparently, so don't expect a happy ending.

It also didn't take long to guess that it might have come from a stage production, and if you're an observant film fan you'll see it, and just about a moment later you'll be done thinking about that.

It also occurred to me that the damned thing, like so many others, was made in the middle of it all. Yep, there is certainly some attempt at spirit-lifting here and there, more than understandable given the circumstances of the world at the time, but even that frankly is given in a reasonable fashion, mostly, and has to be the sort of thing that, in less literary fashion, people all over that war had to come to terms with and use to buoy themselves up. I can't even pretend to put myself in such a situation, so I won't attempt to comment on how well this reflects what it took to get through.

Others have said plenty about this rare collection of fine actresses being given an even rarer chance to tackle a project full of women becoming tougher and tougher and dealing with what comes at you in the middle of a war.

It pulled me in. It engaged me. It delivered. It moved me. Watch it for completeness, if nothing else. That's how I started watching, and I'm still quietly sad thinking of the cost of getting through that war. I hope I am helping to make a world that honors the sacrifice of so many.

The Gathering Storm (2002 TV Movie)

In addition to everything else wonderful that it is, it's a love story!

[10/10 · 28 May 2019]

In addition to the many observations and offerings of high praise, all completely deserved, I will only add that it is as well a love story. I have no way of knowing how accurate is the presentation of the relationship between Winston and Clemmie, but it is certainly convincing to me. It does not overshadow the historical elements. It simply puts the relationship into the picture in balanced, credible, and ultimately very touching fashion.

I plan at the first opportunity, to quote Churchill to my wife, as he thanked his: For being rash enough to marry me, foolish enough to stay with me, and... for loving me in a way... I though I'd never be loved.

I don't mean to suggest that the love story takes over. Everything about the political developments is fully and well shown. All the praise for the script, the casting, the performances, the production - all richly deserved. Take notes. There are lessons for us today in what Churchill had to fight against. "The people are lost in a pacifistic dream. If people are dreaming, they are asleep."

One last detail: The story does show Winston, as many comment, "warts and all". Wonderfully, it neither softens nor magnifies them, as far as I can tell. Shown without gloss, and without exaggeration, they contribute, along with all the other elements of his character, to a fully human portrayal.

As others also said, roses all around.

Absolutely Anything (2015)

A lackluster revisit to "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"

[5/10 · 8 December 2018]

I was surprised that across a dozen reviews I did not find a single mention of the 1936 film of the H. G. Wells story starring Roland Young. Absolutely Anything is amusing. There are some good laughs. However, it has all the flaws outlined in detailed by other reviewers (no chemistry between leads, mostly set in an apartment, lots of overlooked potential, etc).

I was immediately struck by the similarity in premise to the far better The Man Who Could Work Miracles. It's dated, of course, and the effects are of the period, but the story is both more ambitious and funnier where it attempts comedy.

If you just love Simon Pegg, which I do, by all means see this, for completeness I suppose. (What's really, truly shocking is how completely unfunny the segments with the Python alumnae are, with the possible exception of the wonderful resolution that comes from Dennis, the dog, and that's not funny because of the Python people, but because of the just desserts served up. Nod's as good as a wink. I can say no more.)

After you see Anything, go directly to watch The Man Who Could Work Miracles and enjoy Roland Young's mousey character as he gives in to temptation, as a human being really might.

Roughshod (1949)

The western formula is in plain sight, but dialed back and skillfully opened up.

[8/10 · 28 November 2018]

I stumbled into this by not changing channels after watching another movie. I was engaged within 5 minutes by the not-quite-formula everything - dialog, setup, even acting. I don't want oversell it. It's competent and interesting, partly for surprisingly good dialog occasionally, for a "western". I would call it a skillful addition to the short list of actually adult westerns. It could reasonably be called a skillful addition to the short list of actually adult westerns.

There's an exchange that serves as a good example of how the movie succeeds. At one point Mary Wells (Grahame) and Clay Phillips (Sterling) get to the moment that any film buff knows must come, where she confronts him about his attitude towards her past, we get this exchange:

MARY: Well, why don't you just say it.

CLAY: Okay, it's said.

There's a lot of that, economy of dialog and action where lesser writers would drag in familiar stuff from the standard inventory.

Other reviewers have analyzed plenty that's good. I mainly wanted to toss in another high rating for it.

How It Ends (2018)

Here's how I decided, very early, that this was not worth it

[4/10 · 23 July 2018]

(Spoiler alert, concerning minor point in early scene)

Boy and girl want to get married, but there's tension with dad. Okay. Boyfriend goes to visit parents to ask "permission". Okay. World falls apart due to some event that happens off-screen. Fine. Dad and boyfriend leave to drive across county to go find daughter. Fine. Dad and boyfriend stop for gas, amid confusion that is not quite yet chaos. Naturally. Some punks attempt to hijack them for cash or whatever, and Dad goes to trunk, pulls gun out of luggage. Hmmmm. I didn't quite buy that a 27-year Marine veteran would be carrying his pistol in the back in his luggage, but - uh - okay, let's carry on.

They keep driving, passing sign for "Maximum Security Prison" in dead of night. Obviously, something has to happen. Cop car flashes lights behind them to pull them over. We're not naive moviegoers, we're already working through the moment to come. As they spin wheels to get away from the phony cop, Dad tells boyfriend to "get the ammo from the trunk. Load the pistol". Or something along that line. It's not worth going back for more exact quote. Boyfriend asks, alto voce, "It wasn't loaded before!?" (at the gas stationi) Dad answers, "I didn't need it loaded then."

Hold on! A 27-year Marine veteran not only had his pistol in the luggage in the trunk, headed out on a car trip across what he is pretty sure is likely to be chaos, and he even leaves it unloaded in the luggage in the trunk?????? Why not just leave it home.

How about, uh, carrying it, probably concealed, inside the waist band, definitely loaded, probably cocked and safety on. If it's not available and ready for use on demand, it's an ornament. If I am supposed to believe that this experienced Marine keeps a pistol around as a decoration even as he heads into unknown and very likely dangerous conditions, what else am I about to be asked to swallow?

Well, I wasn't interested to find out, because there are just too many films and too little time. Next.

A Matter of WHO (1961)

Delightful blend of humor and mystery-solving.

[8/10 · 6 November 2015]

I have little to add to the other reviews that have pointed out the lamentable fact of this film's undeserved obscurity. It's a bit hard to describe or categorize because it is such a relaxed combination of light to oddball comedy plus a first rate mystery being pursued by an uncommon sleuth (Terry-Thomas in top form) and his American "sidekick" (Alex Nicol doing a competent job with an unconventional assignment as an actor).

It is common to say that they don't make 'em like this any more. In this film's case it's also true that they never made so very many like this at all. I won't pretend that it's brilliant, though Terry-Thomas's performance probably qualifies, but it is the obvious product of a clear vision, a strong hand at the helm, and a very able crew. Once it started it kept me amused and engaged constantly.

What fun! If you have any affection for British comedy or light mystery, do not miss it

The Family (I) (2013)

Zany? Comedy? Ugh. Just ugh.

[2/10 · 8 September 2015]

I saw favorable reviews and unfavorable, decided that maybe it was just a good dark comedy that wasn't for a large audience. I made it an hour into it before deciding that maybe the last ten minutes, as some had claimed, were where it became funnier. Well, given my view of it at 60 minutes in, that wasn't a very high bar to get over, so I moved on over there. Ugh. Just ugh.

Technically, there were decent performances. The actors showed up and did what they were asked to do, and well in some cases. It hardly matters which ones. The story is so relentlessly, mindlessly violent and pointless that I can't even find it in me to go back and watch the part I skipped over, minutes 61 through 95. I don't care.

What exactly is supposed to be funny in this? Oddly, at the end, with bodies all over the yard, in the house, in the street, some part of the house in pieces, smoke and flames scattered about, I did have one thought about the movie as a statement of one sort: Look at the mayhem Americans visit on the world when we deal with the psychopaths and sociopaths we think we have to protect for some reason. I'm not sure that was intended, but it was embarrassing, in that way that it is embarrassing to sit at a French sidewalk café, having a perfectly wonderful afternoon, and hear yet another loud, obnoxious American two tables over. We shouldn't even be behaving this way at home. Never mind taking it around the world.

Ugh. Just ugh.

Knife Fight (2012)

West Wing on a shoestring, minus the wit

[5/10 · 8 May 2015]

As a big fan of West Wing (in spite of its heavy doses of Democratic propaganda), I recognized very soon where we were in this movie, and was happy to see West Wing alums Rob Lowe and Richard Schiff together. I thought a couple other faces might have been familiar from there, too, but nothing happened to make me care enough to go check. This is more like a fan-made "next episode" of something similar to the West Wing than like a well-developed movie project, though that's slightly more on the writing and directing end than on the acting and technical end. It isn't actually awful, but it certainly isn't that good. There's no heavy lifting to do, and perhaps as a result all of the performances seem fine but nothing rises above "fine". Nothing here challenges the performers or the director, or us, and so they, and we, just settle in for a pleasant ride.

There's no particular reason to see Knife Fight, but if you like the type of story (look at the awful things we do in election politics!) you may want to see it just for completeness. There's also no particular reason to avoid Knife Fight. Nothing in it is truly bad. However, now I wish I had just watched the far superior Ides of March (2011) again instead. Ides is an excellent modern look at the same topic also well treated in Robert Redford's The Candidate (1972). Knife Fight is not in the same league as either of those, but it is playing the same game.

If Candidate and Ides are the bookends, then Knife Fight is one of the books they hold up. I suppose that just as we have murder and romance stories written for beach reading, there could be political movies for beach watching, and this would be a fine entry there.

There's more that could be said, but honestly, how much time do you spend analyzing your beach novels?

Drive Hard (2014)

Almost a near miss

[5/10 · 2 April 2015]

I'm not exactly sure why I finished watching it. It's not quite as terrible as some of the reviews insist, but it's never much above slightly amusing. I found Thomas Jane sort of fun, with his Chris-Lambert-but-not-quite-as-strange look. He actually did a little work here and there and was pleasant. Grumblings about John Cusack's job are somewhat on the money. It occurs to me that there were really only two actual laugh-out-loud moments for me, and I' not giving them away, just in case you watch it. Too bad. It was loosely assembled from a collection of sort of funny possibilities. If you have some spare time to watch it for completeness, you won't regret it really, but that's about as much of a recommendation as I can drum up. Too bad.

Sabotage (2014)

Good dumb mindless boring gory stupid fun

[4/10 · 2 April 2014]

I knew very early we were in trouble when the first takedown involved stopping in broad daylight outside the lavish home of the criminal, whose party was in full swing inside, while waiting to set the charge to breach the front doors. It was confirmed when the charge took out . . . ready for this . . . the lock. Why not drive through the doors? Why not kick them in, with all that beef on the hoof? Must have carried a standard "door knocker" in that vehicle, surely. Or just shoot the doors off the hinges with those giant shells that seem to blow everything else in sight to smithereens. Or at least make the charge big enough to splinter the door so we get something for sitting there wondering why no one was cutting everyone in half with those ubiquitous machine guns that figure in the rest of the movie when villains are shooting back!!

So, the signal was clear, "NO THOUGHT ALLOWED".

But then, it got even worse. The actors are mostly not to blame. They did what they were asked to do, and mostly pretty well. It's just that what they were asked to do was to dreadful and tedious.

Sam Worthington by himself actually added one star to my rating, for a moment that I feel certain he must have invented for himself, in the exchange near the end, after another takedown, when he is confirming identities of the slain. In case you might feel compelled to see this in spite of my urging to pass it, I will say no more. It was the one moment that actually made me laugh at the humor in the moment, on purpose, as opposed to practically all my other laughter, which was maybe more groaning.

Dialog is just ridiculously full of obscenities, especially opening, I guess character-establishing, minutes. The idea that their dear leader could call them family is pretty odd, which you will discover if you see the thing. To say more would be too much of a spoiler.

The character of the female homicide detective was pretty nearly interesting a few times. Not the actress's fault that those moments were cut short, sabotaged (that's appropriate), or wasted. Anyway, honorable mention to Olivia Williams, and maybe to the director for casting her.

Oddly, if I were willing to see it again, which I am absolutely not, I think I could identify the remains of what could have been a pretty good yarn scattered throughout. Was this originally some better script that was sold to a chop shop that reassembled it as whatever it wound up being? They should have stuck with original parts, I guess.

I shudder to think what state we're in if the men and women doing the DEA's work are actually remotely like these folks, and I don't mean tattoos and loud and cocky. Those are surely survival tools. I mean soulless and somehow lost.

Please, David Ayer, no sequel. I beg you.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Go watch Boiler Room instead, or at least also

[4/10 · 4 February 2014]

Wolf is entertaining enough, and Leonardo does another bang-up job, but the movie is also a good example of Hollywood turning out a movie that technically shows the hazards of excess but in the process revels in the excess to such a degree that you have to push aside the 95% of the film that revels in sex, drugs and greed to notice that, oh, yeah, lives are wrecked in the process. If you didn't come out of this thinking that some drugs and some gang sex are the next thing to try, then you are a thinking person and a conscious, active viewer. Congratulations.

I would say instead of seeing this, see Boiler Room and watch Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, Nia Long, Nicky Katt, Scott Caan, Ben Affleck, and Jim Young perform Writer/Director Ben Younger's far better movie. To be fair, Wolf contains several admirable performances, but that doesn't make up for the self-indulgent movie they wound up in.

Boiler Room actually contains a few characters you might care for. (I didn't really care much what happened to anyone in Wolf, except the victims, who are entirely off-screen.) It is a tighter film by far, indicating excesses without offering them up as the main dish. Tightly written, well acted, simple and honest.

If you will only see one of these two, see Boiler Room. If you must see both, see Boiler Room first so that you can see how Wolf pales by comparison as you watch it.

Unknown (I) (2011)

A botched retread of "Total Recall" ** spoiler **

[24 June 2011]

** Warning: Conatins spoiler ** As if it matters.

Total Recall was a way more entertaining treatment of the "I have a fake identity as a good guy but I'm actually a bad guy, and I lost my memory and after I figure it all out I like the good guy I was pretending to be and don't want to be the bad guy I was, so that's my new identity" approach.

Don't waste your money. The script piles on one unbelievable thing after another for so long that by the time you ever get to the moment where he makes the first reconnection with his life, you no longer care. It just looks silly for so long that it destroys any interest you might have had at all, which wasn't much. I like the reviewer's remark elsewhere about the plot depending on stupid things one after the other: both Martin and the cab driver leave his (passport containing!!) briefcase on the luggage cart at the airport (they try to make it work by having the wife interrupt Martin during loading, but it's lame anyway); Martin is briefly unable to get a cellphone signal on the way to the Berlin airport. Right.

Oh yes, and the ending is a sore-thumb obvious setup for the two characters to spend another movie going after the bastards who killed her family in Bosnia. You see, her family was murdered, Liam used to be a bad-ass, but now he's a good guy, but with all that know-how. I think I'll plan well ahead to miss that one, absent a miracle in the choice of the next screenwriter.

This Is It (2009)

Wonderful. The human being comes back to the foreground

[9/10 · 2 November 2009]

I danced a million miles to his music. I drifted away from keeping up with him sometime right after Thriller. I still enjoyed the occasional hit from time to time. I felt for him and lamented the loss of the man, hidden behind layer after layer of fame, of surgery, of inexplicable behaviors.

I was happy to tutor my 10-year-old son along in separating the gifted performer from the very (in my opinion) tortured man.

All of which I say by way of setting up this: The film was a delightful and touching complete surprise. Like some of the other reviewers, I cried almost immediately. I don't know if it was gratitude over seeing the artist as a human being up close after so long, or thinking what a lovely final memory to present to the public, after years of on screen or front-page weirdness.

Watching this gifted performer, this gentle man, I mourned the loss all over again.

My boy could not contain himself during Billie Jean, and went down front, to one side, to dance along with him. Even so, I think that maybe at 62 I enjoyed the film at least 6.2 times as much as he did.

If you ever enjoyed MJ's performances, but, like many of us, you had moved away from him for completely obvious and understandable reasons, I say : See this documentary. Watch a gifted performer doing the hard work with people at the top of their field all around him.

Now even more than before, come to think of it, after seeing this, I ask, "With everyone tossing out 'We love you too Michael' so often, was there no one who would stand up to him and say 'Michael you cannot live like this'. Sad, very sad. It turned out to be literally true.

Nonetheless, I cannot think of a kinder, more humanizing, more enjoyable (the music of course is great as is the dancing) last view of the man.

Rest in peace, Michael. It is our family's prayer for you.

Paradise Alley (1978)

Definitely worth seeing. An excellent film.

[9/10 · 21 July 2003]

Its advocates have spoken pretty well here, so I won't add much except to say that I was happy to vote it 10 to counterbalance the grossly undeserved low ratings. In fact, it's more like 8.5 or 9, so stretching to 10 didn't hurt at all, for fairness.

I don't remember how I wound up seeing the film (in a theater, no less!), but I distinctly remember how I felt coming out: "Stallone wrote THIS! And he DIRECTED!?!?!?!? Boy, this guy's GOOD!"

I liked Arthur Rose's comments in another comment, probably above mine, that Stallone had probably been persuaded that this was a bad film. I suspect he's right, and it may be why he never took on another project as worthwhile as this one. It's a fine story of very believable people in tough circumstances, and not all the resolutions are Hollywood-approved. There are people in here with actual moral problems. And they have consequences.

I think it's hard for some people to watch exactly because it is about very believable people. It's one thing to see the cartoonish figures in our modern action films betray each other left and right. It's quite different to see a brother manipulate and betray his own brother in a way that is not slick, or glamorous, or anything but slimy.

I'm surprised at how much, all of a sudden, I want to find the film and see it again. See it without the preconceptions that prevent otherwise sensible persons from giving Stallone his due. If you can enjoy an intelligent story about real human beings, you will respect this film.

Vampire's Kiss (1988)

It's better every time I watch it (spoilers...as if that werepossible by now)

[9 May 2003]

When I first saw this film years ago, I loved it. I just watched it again, for perhaps the fourth time. I still love it. It's a film lover's film.

Usually, when a film appears to be one thing and turns out to be another, it's disappointing. The opening motif is usually the more interesting one, and you typically see scenes from that part of the movie, to get you in.

This movie is an exception. It looks like a vampire movie for a while, and then it makes a very satisfying turn into a dark comedy about something else much more real. And everything about the film helps to pull it off. The direction is finely tuned to presenting us with a very normal, fully populated background of people such as you would find at any job, or on the street, or in a real family, against which we watch Cage move from almost-contained desperation to way past coming apart at the seams.

If nothing else in the film were even good, his performance would be worth the price all by itself. I suppose that much of the direction to him was simply to play it out as big as possible and remember that to madmen nothing they do seems mad.

Luckily, much else in the film is very good. Maria Conchita Alonso, as someone else pointed out, is cast against type, and very effectively. Demure, forgiving, conscientious - she is any female worker prior to the era of telling men to go f*** themselves at the drop of a hat. She has a job. She needs her job. She is scared of the boss, but she accepts his apologies for clearly bizarre behavior, repeatedly. Part of the setup that makes it obvious early on that Cage is way out of line (he's much more, but you don't know that for a bit) is his heavy-handed, dishonest treatment of this simple, pleasant young woman. Part of why he is so effective is that she is very effective.

I have even come to believe that Elizabeth Ashley's character, the psychiatrist, is a better accomplishment than I thought originally. I thought it was just too much of a parody of the profession to add anything. After seeing over the years how little psychiatry has to do with any notion of getting better, I think the film's take on the therapy is not only funny but absolutely on the mark for showing the patient stranded in his insanity while making futile cries for help to the shrink. And Elizabeth Ashley's completely aloof formula responses are delivered with a perfect mixture of words that seem to convey interest. They are no more authentic than her patient's adopted gestures. If she has a genuine interest in the patient's actual state, it's certainly well concealed.

And one more - Some reviewers faulted Jennifer Beals's performance (or lack of) as the vampire who comes to Cage's character. They have missed the point that she was not there to develop a vampire character. She was there to play Cage's character's idea of a vampire, which she did absolutely perfectly - all breathless sexuality, hungry vampire, and then comforting lover. If she shows us Cage's character's creation convincingly, then she did her job, and she did just that.

By the way, there is no confusion in this film about what's real and what's not. The movie seems to be about vampires for a while. Then it becomes a descent-into-madness tale that is much more satisfying than any fantasy could be. But, unless you are merely staring at the screen, rather than watching the movie, you will not be confused about what is going on.

Cage incorporates a good deal of classic vampire movie images into his performance, the same way that he has the character already incorporating parts of other types of people in his own actions from the beginning - notice that he has at least three different accents - one as he does business on the phone, another as he tries to be an engaging drunk while walking one of his conquests up the stairs, and yet another as he hounds Maria's character. I take it that this is a portrait of a man with almost nothing left in his life that is authentically him, so it stands to reason that as he "becomes a vampire", he would take the same approach to that as well. Cage pulls this off with absolutely brilliantly controlled apparent abandon. You can't play a character that's out of control unless you are fully in control.

There was no question in my mind after seeing this that Cage had all the talent any actor could ever ask to have. I'm glad for his later successes, but he has had very little chance to show his range and strengths since the days of Raising Arizona, Wild at Heart, and this film. See it more than once.

(Come to think of it, I did also like those parts of Face/Off where we get to see John Travolta acting like Nicolas Cage acting like John Travolta and Nicolas cage acting like John Travolta acting like Nicolas Cage. The rest of the film is neither here nor there, but this isn't a review of that. It's an all-out plug for Vampire's Kiss and Nicolas Cage's brilliant performance in it.)

The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960)

A Gulliver for Kids and Adults

[7/10 · 9 July 2000]

The special effects that let Gulliver be a giant in Lilliput and a mite in Brobdingnag are by the reigning genius of the day, Ray Harryhausen, but writer/director Jack Sher's 1960 film wisely uses them only in the service of the story. They have held up quite well, in part because they were used with restraint to begin with and they do nothing to interrupt or distract from the story and its points. (A minor exception could be the fight with a giant animated crocodile that must have been damn fun for the effects team, but even it is kept within reason.)

Is this a film for children or a film for adults? The too-easy answer is that it is obviously a children's version: There is none of the trumped-up insanity element that the dreary-but-great-looking 1996 TV movie shoe-horned in for cheap drama. Neither is there the despair or genuine misanthropy of the book.

Only Lilliput and Brobdingnag are visited. (No Laputa, Balnibari, Luggnag, Glubbdubdrib, Japan, or Houyhnhnms. The third world is Gulliver's own normal-sized world.) Gulliver puts out the fire in Lilliput by spitting wine. (In the book, the wine has been processed by Gulliver's bladder before he douses the fire with it.) Many characters, though not all, are all done in a cartoonish way clearly aimed at children. The travels are framed within the added-on love story of Gulliver and his fiancée Elizabeth.

These are good choices. Children are inherently interested in the size contrasts. (It must add something to the experience that first they identify with the Lilliputians but later identify with Gulliver.) Spitting the wine is good enough. The cartoonish-ness makes the characters less threatening than they could have been. The love story is light and easy to follow, and promotes marriage.

There are even a couple of musical numbers, one a love song that Gulliver sings. The Bernard Herrmann score is a fine complement to the film, as you would expect from the composer of music for the original Psycho, Citizen Kane, Magnificent Ambersons, Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Day the Earth Stood Still, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (tv), Have Gun Will Travel (tv), Perry Mason (tv), Twilight Zone, Cape Fear (1962), Taxi Driver, and on and on and on.

But Sher's script and direction have preserved some important points and spirit from the book: The gratitude of princes is short-lived. The causes of war can be shockingly petty. Vanity and unreason among the powerful make truth an early casualty in the pursuit of power. The various unpleasant characters (and the few nice ones) actually reflect things inside all of us. If it's okay for an adult to be reminded of these things in a playful way (certainly more playful than the original), then this film will amuse and inform that adult.

And what are Gulliver and Elizabeth doing when their ball-field sized marriage license falls over them like a tent, and King Brob, peeking under it, is moved to say, "You're right dear. I'd better marry them at once."

Ultimately, it has to go down in the books as a children's film, but surely an uncommon one: an intelligent adaptation, if abridged and lighthearted, of a great classic, that stands on its own for entertainment and, if you like, can whet your child's appetite for the book when that time arrives.

Like the tacked-on love story, there is a tacked-on ending that suggests that the whole thing might have been a dream. I originally found this annoying.

These days, watching with my little girl, I find that I'm glad for the admittedly sore-thumb reminder that the value of the story is not in whether those characters do or don't exist, but in what the story says about what is within us. As with all such points in the film, you'll have to talk with your child a bit to be sure that it comes across, but what a pleasure - to find a film that sparks such a discussion with your child.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------

Other works by Jack Sher:

-------------------------------------------------------- Writer - filmography -------------------------------------------------------- Female Artillery (1972) (TV) (story) Goodbye, Raggedy Ann (1971) (TV) Move Over, Darling (1963) Critic's Choice (1963) Love in a Goldfish Bowl (1961) Paris Blues (1961) 3 Worlds of Gulliver, The (1960) ... aka Worlds of Gulliver, The (1960) Wild and the Innocent, The (1959) Kathy O' (1958) (also story) Joe Butterfly (1957) Four Girls in Town (1956) Walk the Proud Land (1956) ... aka Apache Agent (1956) World in My Corner (1956) (also story) Kid from Left Field, The (1953) Off Limits (1953) ... aka Military Policemen (1953) (UK) Shane (1953) (additional dialogue) My Favorite Spy (1951)

-------------------------------------------------------- Director - filmography -------------------------------------------------------- Love in a Goldfish Bowl (1961) 3 Worlds of Gulliver, The (1960) ... aka Worlds of Gulliver, The (1960) Wild and the Innocent, The (1959) Kathy O' (1958) Four Girls in Town (1956)

(with thanks to The Internet Movie Database http://www.imdb.com)