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davidandrews27
Reviews
Billions (2016)
They're really going to have to work it to go on without Damian Lewis
They're really going to have to work it to go on without Damian Lewis, or else shut down forever after S06E06. The first two episodes of S06 have been unpromising. Corey Stoll is always an interesting actor, and welcome in the Billions universe - but his character doesn't have the style that Lewis's did. The only redemption will be in having him go pure evil over the upcoming Olympics plot, evil to a degree not yet reached on the show. Will it happen? Otherwise, count me out for S07.
Force of Nature (2020)
Directing? What Directing?
Groaningly routine movie, fit for the likes of Steven Seagal. Director has three decent actors, plus Mel Gibson, and fails to make anything of their work. Dialogue is unbelievably rote, and the director doesn't know that, and failed to try and punch it up himself. Oh, God! What if it were worse, and he did punch it up? I'm tempted to blame the boring editing on Michael Polish as well. This guy belongs in network TV directing, the kind of stuff that works to not offend the sponsors.
The bad guys are uncharismatic and, beyond that, uninteresting. The blue color scheme of the apartment building is the only thing that holds one's attention. Mel Gibson was much better served by director S. Craig Zahler in Dragged Across Concrete, and it shows in his performance. Come to think of it, Blood Father was a better film, too. It's a shame the theater shutdowns will cause people to actually try to watch Force of Nature.
There's Always Tomorrow (1956)
Bob Fosse "cameo" in a great Sirk film?
Goes almost without saying that this is a great, underappreciated Sirk film. It's up there with Beau James (Melville Shavelson, 1956) on the list of 1950s titles that deserve a US digital release.
But...is that Bob Fosse as the male dancer at about 12 minutes in, onstage in the show MacMurray takes Stanwyck to?
Strangers When We Meet (1960, but filmed 1959), with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak, is also a great candidate for Blu-Ray.
The Last Thing He Wanted (2020)
Memory vs. Money
It's difficult to believe two things here: that so few people remember the Contra War in Central America during the Reagan administration; and that so many people can be influenced to lag a film about it because it indicts the Reagan-Bush party line of war profiteering and human oppression, the actions that have up till the present created an enormous and deadly narcostate from Tegucigalpa to Ciudad Juarez.
We live in a time when millions support a presidency which builds a wall at our southern borders to "protect" us from people fleeing Central American countries destroyed by the narcotics, police and military predation created by the Contra War. Persons who would demean the retelling of the horrors of 1980s El Salvador and Nicaragua, or would, for money, post messages condemning a film that reminds us of this outrage, should have to answer for their actions, either by researching and understanding history, or by ending up on its wrong side, as did too many of the people of Central America, then and now.
Stopover Tokyo (1957)
Why worry?
It's a 1950s Cinemascope film with Robert Wagner, and it's our first chance to see him in a modern-dress picture since the excellent A Kiss Before Dying. The decor and locations are similarly eye-worthy to Kiss, but the photography is toned down and some sets made to look shopworn to suggest a recovering Japan, at which the film succeeds. The clothes and automobiles more than compensate.
Stopover Tokyo is memorable for being the one that Joan Collins was contractually obligated to appear in after the studio's promise that she would work with Roberto Rossellini fell through. Was anyone expecting genius from a film adapted from a Mr. Moto novel to satisfy another contractual obligation? Just enjoy the ride, its a post-war film as aesthetically satisfying as The Crimson Kimono, without the burden of pretentious auteur direction. (They thought so little of it that they let the screenwriter direct.)
If you want a better Wagner film in Cinemascope, see A Kiss Before Dying. If you want a better Joan Collins role, see Turn the Key Softly. Otherwise, stop blaming everything on Edmond O'Brien.
The Night of the Generals (1967)
For haters of the movie...
It was based on a best-selling mystery novel that did Tom Clancy-style business, at a time when post-war Euro mystery writers (like Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo - remember them?) were bringing the war back in revisionist ways. The Nazi-art theft theme was also a revisionist topic of the day.
The two stars who carry the picture hated producer Sam Speigel for past injustices, and hated the picture he had roped them into. O'Toole, in particular, thought it was a comedown to be directed by aging old-schooler Anatole Litvak, though Litvak does keep the Euro flavor consistent in this. O'Toole and Speigel biographies talk of the actor deliberately overplaying the Tanz role so as to sabotage the mystery element of the picture, though it's hard to see how restraint would have improved the role. (And while this pic isn't The Lion in Winter, it's also hard to see how it's worse than Beckett.)
Even as a kid, I admired the 'big concept' of the film: Murder is wholesale in Nazi Europe, yet one freak is buying it retail, and another has only as much morality (or perversity) as is necessary to obsessively hunt the small murderer, but not the larger ones. If the state-vs.-individual angle had been played up a little more, if a younger director had made it in an artier style, if it didn't disregard history in so many ways - people would be falling over themselves comparing this to Blow-up as a portrait of modern times. They'd also be talking stuff about low material redeemed.
Being closer in time to the war than pictures like The Good German (Ehhh!) gives the apparent offhandedness of the moral treatment of the material a contemporary edge, though. The war slips away into the past without notice, just as, to American eyes, it seemed to have happened in Europe. Only the singular prostitute murders survive as prosecutable crimes - not even as war crimes. O'Toole's Jack-the-Ripperish performance seems to tie the two eras together, and the ending, in which celebration of his public excesses is spoiled by discovery of his private ones, nails the theme in the same deadpan style the picture has quietly established all along. It's hard to fault Litvak in this, though another director might have emphasized the passage of time as a dramatic-psychological element.
Like the script of Gangs of New York, Night of the Generals crams in a lot of historical background (yes, with anachronisms like the Warsaw Ghetto action placed in 1942), but it never seems like butt-covering for an inaccurate foreground fiction as in Gangs. Hannah Arendt's 'Banality of Evil' trope is put to work, as all facts - even those of the Holocaust - become statistical fodder for the war machine that remade Europe, while only the personal murders that the Tanz character is hunted for disturb the placid hum of the post-war apparatus. So both Litvak and novelist Hans Helmut Kirst are creditable for a contemporary and distanced view of the war. Some transitions and plot points are not suavely or accurately handled, or humanely considered. But don't let bad screenwriter shorthand fool you into thinking this is a comic-book treatment of the war or the post-war era.
Compare the themes of individual and state action in Night of the Generals to those in Blade Runner, The Sixth Sense - even The Fugitive. Those pics have a Noir-ish 'victim mentality' akin to Camus' The Stranger, while Generals has an activist mentality like The Plague, presented in a similar deadpan-existentialist style, in the face of futility. However it came about collaboratively, it did come about.
All the King's Men (2006)
One of the most unfairly maligned films
Yes, the cast accents are wildly variable. Yes, the release print might have been too long (see DVD deleted scenes). But this pic was unfairly stigmatized by critics with an imperfect grasp of the book, the Broderick Crawford film version, and the art of screen adaptation. Forget the hype: It satisfies.
Much of the bad press can be traced to a certain august TV film critic and his fawning junior partner. As in old politicians, infirmity and illness are distilling some of this guy's worst tendencies, tolerable when he was young and balanced by a superlative partner, whose amateur critic status ran intellectual rings around this former writer of godawful screenplays. Time for this dinosaur to roll over into extinction; but what rougher beast will be born on TV in his place?
Heat (1995)
Inevitable Joy
I hated this picture when I first saw it in a theater, hated it again on video when I was trying to like it, then saw it on cable one night when there was nothing good on (!) and fell in love - all the family background that I once hated finally clicked for me. That, and the length it adds, may be what turns some people off, including several of my friends. (That and feeling that Pacino is over the top here, which I have also learned to love - he's the last romantic left in acting.) In the end, there is no denying that Heat is a 10 out of 10 in these times in film, maybe better than The Departed, if not as culturally relevant as Goodfellas. Miami Vice fails because Mann did common themes of that film and Heat already in Collateral, and with more detachment than in Heat - so by the time he washed out in Miami Vice, passion (or "heat") had drained, and Farrell and Foxx had nothing to replace it with. I hope Mann makes one as good as Heat again, and collects an Oscar like Marty. Where he'll get the talent, I don't know.