Night Flights: March 2010 Edition

Condensed reviews of movies we stayed up too late to watch.

The days are getting longer and we’re not going to bed any earlier. Movie networks like Turner Classic Movies and Fox Movie Channel continue to show stuff that catches our interest, even while the DVR makes watching them way, way too convenient. Movie channels run day and night, which means even the good ones – especially the good ones – sooner or later get down to the off-the-beaten-path works that, more often than not, feel like uncovered treasure. At least, they do for us.

The following are five movies we recorded, stayed up late checking out, and the next day felt both groggy, happy, and guilty all at the same time for indulging ourselves. Any of them rate a blog post of their own, and time willing we’ll get around to giving them the attention they deserve.

The Seal Wolf (1941): For pedigree, you really can’t do much better than this: Michael Curtiz directs John Garfield, Ida Lupino, and Edward G. Robinson in a big budget adaptation of Jack London’s underrated proto-existentialist novel. Curtiz takes a damp, gritty approach to the doomed voyage of the seal hunting vessel Ghost and its desperate crew, led by manically evil captain Wolf Larsen (Robinson). Garfield plays  a fugitive whose sense of dignity won’t let him kowtow to Larsen’s caprices, while Lupino plays an escaped convict rescued (if that’s the right word) after a shipwreck.

Curtiz nails the foggy menace that surrounds the ship and the souls of its passengers, and Robinson and Garfield both polish their screen intensities to a white-hot edge. You can almost see the acrimonious sparks jumping between them. Also giving memorable, even haunting performances are Gene Lockhart as the ship’s rummy doctor given one last glimmer of redemption and Barry Fitzgerald (The Naked City) as a vile ship’s cook and turncoat informer. Only Alexander Knox disappoints, blandly portraying an author mesmerized by Larsen’s feral intelligence. Ultimately, the film is hampered somewhat by odd transitions and a plot that could stand to linger on its ideas a little longer, but the total result is nonetheless completely satisfying. Curtiz would return to the foggy textures and doomed, redemptive romance in his next effort – Casablanca.

Out of the Fog (1941): Released just three months later, Out of the Fog reteamed Garfield and Lupino while covering much of the same philosophical ground in a vastly different situation. Jonah (Thomas Mitchell) and Olaf (John Qualen) are meek, working class Brooklyn drones who escape the drudgery of their day-to-day lives (one’s a tailor, the other a short-order cook) by fishing in Sheepshead Bay from their modest rowboat. Jonah’s daughter Stella (Lupino) dreams of a more exciting life than her impending marriage to a local working stiff (Eddie Albert) promises; those dreams seem briefly close to fruition when she’s romanced by a gangster (Garfield) who’s come to the neighborhood to graft protection money from the local boat owners. Except he’s also extorting money from Jonah and Olaf, forcing the timid men to contemplate killing him to protect Stella and themselves.

Based on a play by Irwin Shaw, the film’s pervasive New Deal flavor of populism – “Ordinary people can love like millionaires or poets,” Jonah tells Stella – today comes across kind of dated and vaguely patronizing. Still, Garfield and Lupino’s chemistry is as sharp here as in The Sea Wolf, and the acting is impeccable all around, especially in the achingly vivid performances by Mitchell and Qualen.

Rebel Without A Cause (1955): It’s a film we’ve heard about all our lives and one we suspect is considered a classic by millions, but we’ll just say we don’t join in that opinion. The narrative wanders, characters are never really fleshed out beyond their positions in the script, and the ending is anything but satisfying or even conclusive. Directed by the semi-notorious Nicholas Ray (In A Lonely Place), the film seems to have something to say but, like its trio of over-indulged protagonists, can’t quite figure out what that is or why it might be worth saying. Maybe that was the point, but we don’t think so.

Nevertheless, it’s almost impossible to watch Dean’s performance - cool, deliberate, odd – and not recognize the influence it played on dozens of leading men that followed him, both immediately after his death and in the next several decades to come. Conversely, Natalie Wood’s blank, spoiled stare and girlish energy don’t suit her emotionally conflicted character, and Sal Mineo’s performance fails to capture the menace that the script suggests lurks just beneath his character’s milquetoast veneer, even while grasping at its confused sexuality. Overall, the film represents an interesting period piece, as far as that goes, but not a work worthy of its lasting popular stature.

Cutter’s Way (1981): If Rebel Without A Cause arrived at the peak of its era, the ennui and dissolution of Cutter’s Way represents the one drink too many at the ”who’s kidding who” party that was 70s American cinema. The trio of outsiders at its center – a gigolo, his bitter Vietnam vet friend and conscience, and the dissolute woman they both love – understand that something’s passing them by, even if, like the angsty teens of Rebel, they’ll be damned if they know what to do about it. Bone (Jeff Bridges ) witnesses the dumping of a dead body after hustling the bored housewives of Santa Barbara high society. When he thinks he recognizes the murderer the next day – one of the community’s most powerful oil tycoons, no less – his buddy Cutter (John Heard) devises a scheme to both blackmail the culprit and turn him in to the cops. Unless you’ve never seen a movie before, you’ve already figured out nothing goes as intended.

In the years since its release the film has borne comparisons to Chinatown, and given the trio of broken people at its center and the suburban California setting, it’s hard not to imagine what Robert Towne would have done with such a premise. Instead, director Ivan Passer leaves too many of the ambiguities in Jeffrey Alan Fiskin’s script (adapted by a novel by Newton Thornburg) unaddressed and unfocused, so that the final result isn’t the masterpiece that its best moments imply it could become. Of the performances, Heard is brilliant as the maimed veteran that understands the fences around the distant mansions are meant to keep him out, while Lisa Eichhorn is positively haunting as his doomed but devoted wife. Bridges, fresh off Heaven’s Gate, here began a flirtation with neo-noir that would last for half the decade (Against All Odds, 8 Million Ways To Die) but has seldom caught his interest since.

Transformers (2007): Friends have suggested we watch Michael Bay’s paean to Turtle Wax more than once, not for the acting, story, or script but rather just to watch “shit blowing up real good.” (We live in the South.) Look, we just gushed about a seventy year old seafaring adventure, so alien robots folding themselves into monster trucks and fighter jets probably isn’t going to naturally pique our curiosity. (On the other hand, we do love comic book movies, so maybe our friends thought the film stood an even chance.)

We promised in our mission statement to judge these kind of movies fairly and without condescension but man, there’s a limit. The film can barely stand up to viewing, let alone serious consideration. It’s an aggressively stupid pile of red state pandering that feels interminable when you’re watching any part of it but the admittedly enthralling fight scenes. They are the movie’s lone strength, but there’s not enough of them strung out along the almost 2 1/2 hour runtime to sustain interest.

What it does have in abundance is limp, broad comedy starring Shia LaBeouf and some actually rather tepid vamping by former-It Girl Megan Fox. The worst part is that we’re told the sequel “isn’t as good.” We can only imagine what that kind of weapons grade anti-quality that must entail.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with – finally – some reviews of current movies and DVD’s, and then another edition of our always-popular Miscellaneous Debris right after that. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Night Flights, January 2010 Edition

Our new monthly feature offers bullet reviews of five films we watched while staying up too late.

Have you ever stayed up too late to finish watching a movie, or pulled an all-nighter because something good was coming on in the wee hours of the morning? We do that all the time, even now that we’ve got a DVR to record the films for playback whenever we want. Actually, now especially because we’ve got a DVR and can catch up on our film viewing when no one else is around.

Every month or so we’ll review a bunch of films we saw while avoiding sleep. Some of them deserve their own full-length post, and time willing they’ll get it.  Others can slip by with only a few words for summary. Not for nothing, but the name of this new feature is a homage to the great USA network series of the 1980s, which always made skipping bedtimes more fun.

Leave Her To Heaven (1945) Sometimes called “the Technicolor film noir,” this excellent suspenser directed by John M. Stahl (Imitation of Life) showcases Gene Tierney as a homicidally jealous wife who’ll kill anyone that gets between her and her author husband (Cornell Wilde). Among her many victims is the author’s polio-afflicted brother, in a scene that’s as chilling for its glacial calm as any half-dozen modern horror flicks combined (about 2:45 into the clip below.)

The role earned Tierney an Academy Award nomination and became 20th Century Fox’s biggest hit of the decade.  Its influence on later films including Play Misty For Me, Fatal Attraction, and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle is unmistakable and immediately apparent.

The Harder They Fall (1956) – Probably best known as Humphrey Bogart’s last screen appearance, director Mark Robson’s (Peyton Place) boxing drama was based on a novel by Bud Schulberg (On The Waterfront) as well as the scandals surrounding the career of real-life heavyweight Primo Carnera. A visibly ailing Bogart plays Eddie Willis, a down and out sportswriter hired by mobster Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) to promote an argentine contender. The towering Argentine Toro Moreno (Mike Lang) can’t hit, can’t take a punch, and possesses an almost childlike intelligence, yet since all his fights are fixed by Benko’s cronies his fame and public adoration grow.

Bogart spent much of his last decade in film making “socially conscious” films like this, Knock On Any Door, and Sabrina, and while his performance and the boxing scenes are all accomplished, the ending almost ruins everything by trailing off into a vague, unsatisfying resolution. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining to see real-life boxers like Max Baer (Russell Crowe’s nemesis in Cinderella Man) and Jersey Joe Walcott ably fill important roles.

A Face In The Crowd (1957) – Schulberg also wrote the script to this excoriation of the advertising and television industries, reteaming with On The Waterfront director Elia Kazan to tell the story of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), an Arkansas vagabond who rises to national ideologue status after getting discovered in jail by a well-meaning reporter (Patricia Neal.) Rhodes, like so many modern-day pundits, mixes “down home” folksy sincerity with his politics, syrup-coating the agendas of the advertisers and politicians standing behind him.

Until his hubris catches up with him, precipitating a downfall that Kazan stages as an almost Shakespearean descent from power. Kazan and Schulberg’s understanding of marketing and television’s use of imagery to appeal to audiences – simultaneously stimulating and soothing, sexy and doting - remain to this day acidly barbed in their accuracy.

The Last Detail (1973) – Two Navy career men (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) escort a convicted thief (Randy Quaid) from Virginia to the Naval prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Given a week and a full per diem budget to carry the errand out, the two resolve instead to show the naïve, kleptomaniac convict a good time before his eight year sentence begins. Director Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude) and screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown) frame the black comedy as a parable about living within authoritative systems and the toll that it takes on the individual, with the knowledge of their duties and obligations always hanging over the trio’s heads.

Some fans consider Nicholson’s turn as Billy “Badass” Buddusky his finest performance, a claim that’s not completely without merit. Quaid is excellent as the young, doomed thief, giving the character equal parts naïvety and resignation. Also appearing, very early in their careers, are Michael Moriarty, Gildna Radner, Nancy Allen, and Carol Kane (as “Young Whore”) in various minor roles.

Amazing Grace And Chuck (1987) – Montana little league pitcher Chuck Murdock (Joshua Zuehlke) refuses to play baseball as a protest against the United States’ and Soviet Unions’ nuclear arsenals. When Boston Celtics star Amazing Grace Smith (basketball hall of famer Alex English) reads about his protest, he quits the NBA to join him. In time, other athletes join their cause, despite the warnings of Chuck’s fighter pilot father (William L. Petersen), the U.S. president (Gregory Peck), and Smith’s business manager (Jamie Lee Curtis). After Smith is killed, Chuck leads the world’s children in a silent protest for disarmament.

British director Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco) made his American début with this sweet, well-meaning feature, and the film manages by and large to contain its hokier elements. One of its major strengths lies in its characterizations, which are all surprising but no less believable: each one is complex and multi-faceted, and no character is there just to occupy a stock designated place in the plot. Of the two stars, imdb.com lists no other roles for Zuehlke, and English is now an assistant coach with the Toronto Raptors.

- Michael Kabel

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Five Good Books That Should Be Great Movies

Great novels that are due and overdue for a leap to the big screen.

Ignatius Reilly, the poster child for Development Hell

Books, as we’ve said before, are like movies that play in your head. Good books are movies you don’t mind watching over and over again on the screen in your mind. The film industry has appropriated all kinds of books virtually since its inception, taking material from the best fiction and nonfiction as well as from the lowest genre potboilers. There’s just no way of predicting how a book will translate: Hollywood has made masterpieces out of humble paperbacks but also made garbage of bona fide classics. Films and movies aren’t exactly alike, but they’re close enough in structure and pacing that it’s sometimes hard to believe filmmakers could screw up excellent source material. But they manage.

We were excited by recent news announcing that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels are headed for filming soon, at last bringing two classics of science fiction into cinema. The following is five additional examples of worthy books we’d like to see on the screen, if only so that cinema’s much wider audience can take notice of their superb stories. Just for the sake of variety, we’ve tried to include samples of literature of many different styles and periods.

Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard (1987) Shepard’s Cold War thriller is part horror tale, part allegory and part military war epic, forming a mosaic of genres typical of his strange genius. Set amid a U.S.-led guerrilla war in Central America, the story follows infantryman David Mingolla as he joins an elite cadre of psychic tacticians but finds his fledgling abilities much much vaster than he realized, allowing him to bend reality to his will and challenge the other psychics manipulating world events. Suggested cast: We imagine Jeremy Renner (The Unusuals) playing Mingolla, with Vinessa Shaw (Two Lovers) as his adversary and kindred spirit Deborah. Imagine the film as: A cross between Scanners, Apocalypse Now, and The Matrix. Ideal director: David Cronenberg.

The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy (1988) A homophobic sheriff’s deputy, a mafia thug and an anguished investigator desperately pursue a brutal serial killer through McCarthy-era Los Angeles while communists, gangsters and politicians jockey for power. The second and arguably the darkest of Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet” cycle of novels, it’s similar in tone and structure to L.A. Confidential but even bleaker and more cynical. And its ending, for better or worse, is anything but “Hollywood.” Suggested cast: Ryan Gosling (Fracture) stars as the self-loathing Deputy Danny Upshaw, alongside Michael Hogan (Battlestar Galactica) as repentant enforcer Buzz Meeks and Dean Winters (Oz) as weary crusader Mal Considine. No one on Earth should be allowed to play the monumentally evil Dudley Smith except James Cromwell, who nailed the same role in L.A. Confidential. Imagine the film as: Chinatown, Body Double and Manhunter combined. Ideal director: James Gray.

Five Skies, by Ron Carlson (2007) Three men – a petty criminal, a recent widower, and a Hollywood construction foreman – work at building a stunt ramp beside a gorge in the Idaho wilderness, all so that a female stunt driver (think Danica Patrick) can jump the ravine on Pay Per View. The three men confront their past as the ramp slowly takes shape and form. Suggested cast: Damian Lewis (Life) stars as the guilt-ridden foreman Arthur Key, alongside Chris Pine (Star Trek) as thief Ronnie Panelli and Sam Elliott as the heartbroken Darwin Gallegos. Imagine the film as: The Wages of Fear and Tender Mercies merged with Days of Heaven. Ideal director: Terrence Malick.

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford  (1927) Easy to visualize as a costume drama with an edgy anger to it - an antidote to the huffing and puffing Oscarbait of recent years – Ford’s Victorian Era novel swirls around two married couples spending weeks together over twenty years at a German spa. The titular good soldier, Edward Ashburnham, is a perfect English gentleman except for his almost compulsive need to seduce women – including his friend’s wife. Long praised as an influential work both for its structure and style, the book was previously a 1981 telepic, so its time has easily come round again. Suggested cast: Liev Shreiber (Defiance) and Cate Blanchett (Bandits) play Ashburnham and his lover Florence Dowell; Robert Downey, Jr. costars as the cuckolded John Dowell alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight) as Leonora Ashurnham. Imagine the film as: A mix of Last Year At Marienbad, The Ice Storm, and The English Patient. Ideal director: Michael Winterbottom.

Night Train, by Martin Amis (1997) Amis’ critically-lauded 1997 fling with the hardboiled detective genre features an alcoholic, emotionally crippled police detective trying to solve the apparent suicide of a beautiful scientist with every reason to live. The investigation takes a turn for the darkly existential, and Amis twists conventions further by making the troubled detective a woman, too. The novel’s abrupt ending is like two fingers joliting out of the page, poking you in the eyes. Suggested cast: Laura Linney (Breach) plays the self-destructive Detective Mike Hoolihan, Amy Adams (Enchanted) plays the deceased Jennifer Rockwell, and Paul Schneider (Away We Go) co-stars as Rockwell’s lover and suspected killer Trader Faulkner. Imagine the film as: The Pledge, Prime Suspect and Laura compressed into a brainy whodunnit. Ideal director: John Dahl.

- Michael Kabel
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Preview: The Day The Earth Stood Still

Long-awaited, promising remake of 50s sci-fi classic opens in just four days.

Intelligent science fiction, actors who are good at their jobs, and social relevance are three of our favorite movie things here at SBR, and this Friday we get the rare chance to see all three happen in the same film. The Day The Earth Stood Still, a remake of the classic 1951 Cold War cautionary thriller, arrives in theatres after months of speculation and a relentless and painstakingly teasing advertising campaign. If you haven’t seen an ad for this film yet… I don’t know, you probably don’t own a TV.

The original version, just last week voted one of the five best science fiction films of all time (after Blade Runner, Star Wars Episodes IV and V, and Aliens),  combined a mature look at alien visitors, Cold War era politics, and an emotional story about grief and humankind’s chance at growth, all while making pointed but not didactic comments about post-World War II American paranoia and hubris. Beloved by film and sci-fischolars with equal affection, it remains a watershed moment for mid-20th Century cinema and an important milestone in the science fiction genre. The movie’s setup is ingeniously simple: an alien from another world, Klaatu(Michael Rennie), parks his UFO in the middle of Washington, D.C.’s President’s Park  and makes a simple announcement. It seems other civilizations have noticed that Earth’s nations have gained nuclear weapons, and they’ve sent him here to warn us to embrace peace instead of war. Knock it off with the killing, Klaatu warns world leaders, or face your destruction.

After befriending a war widow (Patricia Neal) and her son, as a sign of his ability Klaatu causes all electrical power in the world to malfunction, stopping all machinery and making the world “stand still” for the entire day.  Later, he’s shot dead by soldiers while attempting to re-board his craft but, with the help of his robot bodyguard Gort, quickly recovers. As he boards the craft to leave he warns the Earth again to abandon war or face an army of indestructible killing machines like Gort.

This time around, Klaatu has come to apprise Earthlings’ fitness to continue occupying the planet, after his own people’s world was drastically altered by environmental abuse. After getting denied permission to address the United Nations, he decides the human race must be destroyed so the world can survive. This, presumably, leads to the huge spheres and disintegrating dust storms shown so prominently in the trailer.

Keanu, barada, nikto: Reeves

We admit we were sort of hoping Keanu Reeves would play the role not of extraterrestrial bitchslapper Klaatu but of the fearsome-despite-being-barely-ambulatory Gort. Still, from what we can tell his part in this re-envisioning is only a piece of a much larger cast.  Jon Hamm (Mad Men) plays the leader of the NASA team studying Klaatu, while Jennifer Connelly (House of Sand and Fog) plays an astrobiologist brought to the team to study Klaatu up close. (Her job is an upgrade from the original, in which Neal played a lowly government secretary.) Kathy Bates (Misery) appears as the Secretary of Defense, while  John Cleese, of all people, is cast against type as the physicist who tries to teach Klaatu the human race’s positive qualities. Jaden Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness), James Hong (Chinatown), and Kyle Richmond (Friday Night Lights) also appear.

The film is directed by Scott Derrickson (The Haunting of Emily Rose) while David Scarpa (The Last Castle) updates the script. The film opens nationwide in theatres and IMAX, if you like your wholesale destruction to fill up your peripheral vision.

-Michael Kabel

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