Change Your Image
M. David
Reviews
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
Midnight in the Garden of Lame and Misguided
First of all, this was an unfilmable book. There is no narrative plot to speak of; the book is part travelogue and part character profile. I'm sure the author John Berendt was flattered that Clint Eastwood wanted to buy the rights, but the resulting disaster was no one's fault BUT the author's for not being more discerning. Remember "A Chorus Line"? "Chorus" was also unfilmable. THEN, Sir Richard Attenborough got the directing job based on the fact that his last picture ("Ghandi") was a hit. Attenborough had no talent whatsoever with this kind of material, and several directors who at least had a HISTORY had already passed on the project. Can anybody take a hint? At about the same time that "Midnight" was being filmed in Savannah, Georgia, "The Gingerbread Man" was also being filmed there. "Gingerbread Man" was being directed by Robert Altman. What if the two directors had just switched projects? We can only imagine that the resulting movies would probably have been a lot better. ("The Gingerbread Man" was a flop.) The point is, material has to be matched with temperament and sensibility. As to some of the performances in the picture, the actor who played Sonny Seiler (Jim Williams' attorney) is an embarrassment, but the role was embarrassingly written. (The real Sonny Seiler, who plays a judge in the picture, is a quadruple embarrassment.) John Cusack LOOKS embarrassed throughout the picture. Aside from that, if you want to recreate the rest of Cusack's performance, look in the mirror and let your jaw go slack and let your eyes go vacant, like someone just smacked you on the head. There, you've got it.
Bloodline (1979)
One wishes every single copy of it would magically disappear
When "Bloodline" was released in 1979, a major magazine review pointed out that in the course of the story, ostensibly for failure to pay a gambling debt, a character's knees are nailed to the floor. The critic then went on to say, `This is what Paramount Pictures is going to have to do to get audiences to sit through this picture.' There aren't enough negative things to say about this abomination of a movie. The meandering, incoherent story is hampered at every turn by ludicrously bad production values. The direction, the inept blocking of the scenes, the lighting, the sets in every case conspires to make the results look cheap and hollow. The movie is really a miracle of dreadfulness. The following is one of thousand small crimes against cinema throughout the picture: There is an explosion in the street. This is conveyed by a flash of light on the actors in the scene and a sound effect. The next shot, meant to be the view of the street from the window, is a still photograph beneath which someone is apparently waving a lit piece of paper. Just before the cut from this scene, the photograph actually starts to buckle from the heat of the flame. And the filmmakers left this in the film! The real crime against cinema is the fact that the name of Audrey Hepburn is associated with this repugnant film, a monstrosity so putrid, one wishes every single copy of it would magically disappear.
Children on Their Birthdays (2002)
Truman Capote is spinning in his grave
It is difficult to tell if any member of the production company responsible for this appalling movie, ever read Truman Capote's original short story. The short story had at its center a delightfully willful heroine whose good deeds were only incidental to her self-centeredness. In more skillful hands, this wicked piece of literature could have reached the screen as a spare little piece of Southern Gothic. What the filmmakers chose instead to do was to turn Miss Lily Jane Bobbit into Pollyanna, the classic little do-gooder. It is not as if I am unaware of the eternal conflict between people's images and recollections of the printed word and what Hollywood ends up putting on the screen. Truman Capote himself called "Breakfast at Tiffany's", his most popular screen adaptation, a "mawkish valentine to Audrey Hepburn". (He later recanted that opinion, by the way.) Probably the best example of the expression "the movie captured the spirit of the book" occurred with "To Kill a Mockingbird", a production which recognized that source material needs to be treated with honesty and respect. Disappointments are inevitable, but a good adaptation requires just that -- honesty and respect. This production of "Children on Their Birthdays" not only lacks those qualities, but it also lacks good taste, while at every turn is busy making everything politically correct. My only solace in all this is that this picture will never receive a wide theatrical release, and will only be seen on video. It is too much to hope that this thing would just be shelved.
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Mind-bogglingly Bad
In 1977, this picture was given a "saturation release", which generally happens when a studio is handed a high-profile turkey, and tries to beat the word-of-mouth by opening the movie everywhere at once. People were lined up around the block to see it: after all, this was the sequel to "The Exorcist"! I myself saw the first showing in town, and when I came out of the theater a friend of mine in line said eagerly, "Well?" I replied, "This is the worst movie I have ever seen; you've GOT to see it!" I stick to that statement. Any self-respecting movie-buff owes it to him/herself to experience Hollywood at its most misguided. I love John Boorman, whose intentions I'm sure were the best, but this is a stinker of Cecil B. DeMille proportions.
Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)
Grand Guignol with a heart
"Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte" is after all is said and done really a rather sweetly sad movie. The lurid opening with it's bloody murder sequence is only a set-up and a tease: nothing remotely like it occurs for the remainder of the film. (By today's "Scream" standards, of course, this sequence is tepid.) The value of watching this movie, as many (maybe most) people will comment, is the dialog and the performances. Two of the supporting character performances are remarkable, for two entirely different reasons. Agnes Morehead was roundly praised in 1964 for her performance in this movie, and even got an Academy Award nomination. It was, however, a completely misguided conceptualization that comes across as a racist "Amos and Andy" burlesque sketch. The other performance is by Mary Astor as Jewel Mayhew. This was Mary Astor's last performance in a movie, and in her big scene with the actor Cecil Kellaway she is Oscar-worthy. With over-the-top performances in no short supply in this picture, it is understandable that Astor's marvel of delicacy and restraint hardly ever gets a mention.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Has Kubrick always been the caretaker at the Overlook Hotel?
Very simplistically stated, "Eyes Wide Shut" resembles "The Shining" and "2001", Kubrick's two most popular and profitable movies. (There's even a visual reference in "Eyes Wide Shut" to the neo-Classical bedroom where Dave Bowman ends up in "2001".) But whereas Kubrick got away with making what has been described as "the most expensive experimental film ever made" with "2001", I'm not sure what this final film is going to do to his reputation. The picture works as a protracted nightmare (poor Nichole Kidman has to ponderously, slurringly, deliver most of her lines since in her two big scenes her character is either drunk on champagne or stoned on pot), but being promoted as a mainstream entertainment, I expect most audiences to get up and walk out. (These aren't the times of Stravinsky's "The Rites of Spring", so they won't riot, they'll just leave.) In the final analysis, I see in "Eyes Wide Shut" the same complete contempt for his audience which Kubrick exhibited in "The Shining". This is where he has been heading his entire career. Or maybe this is where he's always been, and I just woke up to that fact.
At Long Last Love (1975)
Terrible in a way that is nearly impossible to grasp
Remember the scene in the remake of "The Fly" when Gena Davis and Jeff Goldblum are tasting a steak and then tasting a steak that has been sent through the molecular transporter? The reaction is that the transported steak tastes "synthetic", like a computer's "interpretation" of what a steak is. That's the same sensation you get with "At Long Last Love". Bogdanovich, heady with success and power, decided that he could make a "live" musical, the way they had to make them in the Thirties. "Hey, I know what Musicals are made of!" you can imagine him saying. What he didn't understand was casting and historical context. His musical is plastic, inept, and grotesquely embarrassing. It is a "must-see" for your All-Time Worst Movies list, along with John Boorman's "The Heretic: Exorcist II". It's that bad.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Excruciating
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is the very definition of a small (and extremely questionable) idea overwhelmed by huge production, and very bad production at that. Horrendous performances abound, none worse than Jack Albertson. The dialog makes one's skin crawl. The production design, sets and costumes are ghastly. When I see time and again how many people dote on this film, it reinforces the realization that good taste is a very rare commodity.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Kubrick is God (end of discussion)
This movie needed to be seen the first showing of the first day it played: two weeks later, with scratches and dust on the print, the effect was not quite the same. The perfection of the style of the cinematography, compositions that were a series of tableaux of period paintings, set the environment of the story like no movie had before (or has since). The same critics who found this picture over-long and the performances wooden were some of the same people who waxed rhapsodic over 2001. Though "wooden" is a calculated part of Kubrick's palette, 2001 is definitely the longer of the two pictures, in my opinion. Critics of the day also found the narration to be "anti-dramatic", as in several cases throughout, the narrator announced what was about to be played out on the screen. I found this device, as with Kubrick's other intentional effects in this picture, to be absolute perfection. Viewers who were not brought up on Kubrick become very impatient with the worshipful tones some of us adopt when discussing his films. What can I say? He is the only director whose decisions I would never have the effrontery to question.
L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961)
Influence on Boorman's First Feature
John Boorman was once accused of having ripped-off the mood and structure of "Last Year at Marienbad" for of all things his hallucinatory gangster film "Point Blank" with Lee Marvin. I believe one of the descriptions used was "a lot of cross-cutting a la Resnais". "Last Year at Marienbad" influenced quite a few "trip flix" during the Sixties, but none to better effect than "Point Blank".