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CAPRICORN ONE 1978
Written and Directed by Peter Hyams.
Starring James Brolin, Elliot Gould, Sam Waterston, O.J. Simpson, Hal Holbrook, Brenda Vaccaro, Karen Black, Telly Savalas, David Huddleston, David Doyle, Lee Bryant, Denise Nicholas and Eilliot Whitter.
Writer/director Peter Hyams mixed together the cultural ambiance of paranoia and corruption of the 1970s with some basic but well performed characters and a biplane vs. helicopters chase sequence that’s still pretty impressive by modern standards to come up with one of the signature movies of its era. Capricorn One isn’t one of the great films of the 70s, but it is a good film and I can’t imagine it being made in any other decade. This is a piece of pop culture that reminds you of what pre-Ronald Reagan America was like and watching it would help a lot of liberals younger than 30 understand why the country’s been the way it has all their lives.
This movie is about the first manned mission to Mars. Well, it’s sort of about that. There is a trio of astronauts - the heroic leader (James Brolin), the smartass (Sam Waterston) and the black guy (O.J. Simpson) - and there is a rocket that supposed to take them to the red planet. What they don’t have is a working life support system to keep them alive all the way there and back. Rather than scrub the mission, the head of NASA (Hal Holbrook) decides to fake it all. The rocket is launched with no one on it. The astronauts are enlisted to make fake broadcasts to the world from a soundstage on an abandoned military base. There’s even a plan to have the space capsule “accidentally” return to Earth in the wrong spot, allowing time to sneak the astronauts into the capsule before the rescue teams arrive. It’s all going to be done in the name of giving the dispirited American people something to believe in…and preserving a space-industrial complex that’s grown too big to fail.
However, no plan is ever perfect and things about the Capricorn One mission that don’t make sense set a fly-by-night TV reporter (Elliot Gould) on the trail of something he doesn’t even understand at first. Then something goes wrong with the space capsule and instead of our trio of astronauts spending the rest of their lives as heroic liars, the world thinks they died in re-entry. Which means no one can ever see or hear from them again. So three, astronauts, one reporter and a vulgar crop duster (Telly Savalas) pit themselves against a government that wants them dead for all the best reasons in the world.
I liked Capricorn One but I’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty lackadaisically paced action-thriller by contemporary standards. It’s not really slow and there’s always some nice little things going on in the story, but this isn’t a roller coaster of a film that’s always dragging you hither and yon. There are also some special effects in this movie that didn’t look that great in 1978 and look a lot worse now. If you can forgive those things, there’s a lot here to enjoy.
The best elements of the film have to be the performances of Elliot Gould and Hal Holbrook. Gould is delightfully dry as a 1970s everyman whose surface cynicism masks a heart that still wants to believe in something. Holbrook is disarmingly sinister as a man who’s convinced himself that his supposedly noble ends justify the most awful of means. In a way, their characters are both heroes and villains struggling over the MacGuffin of the three astronauts. The jaded self-centeredness of Gould’s reporter is exactly what Holbrook’s character is trying to save America from and it is the deceitful control that Holbrook’s character tries to impose on the world that reminds Gould’s reporter that there are things in the world that matter more than he does.
Gould also has a couple of fun scenes with Karen Black as another reporter where they banter back and forth like they were in a newspaper movie from the 1930s. Brenda Vaccaro is quite appealing as well as the wife of one of the astronauts. Hyams is doing some interesting things with his direction here as well. There are very few close-ups in this movie and the camera stays at a distance as though the audience was watching something actually happen on the other side of the room.
Capricorn One isn’t a classic. It’s just a decent film that’s also useful as a window into the mindset of the 1970s. I believe a remake of this movie is coming out this year and I’m not sure what to expect. On the one hand, Hollywood has a fairly terrible track record when it comes to remakes of better films than Capricorn One. The Wicker Man with Nicholas Cage and The Day The Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves being prime examples of that. But maybe a movie like this, where the things to be changed and improved are a little more obvious, will turn out better. Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of Mike Myers’ butt.
CATACOMBS 2007
Written and Directed by Tomm Coker and David Elliot.
Starring Shanyn Sossamon, Pink, Emil Hostina, Sandi Dragoi, Mihai Stanescu, Cabral Ibacka, Radu Andrei Micu and Cain Manoli.
Catacombs is about as basic as scary movies get. It’s a pretty girl in the dark with a flashlight trying to get away from a guy in a goat mask. Occasionally, these filmmakers work way too hard to try and convince the audience (and probably themselves) that they’re doing something more sophisticated and they throw a nihilistic twist in at the end. None of that disguises the fact that this entire script could have been written on the back of a cocktail napkin.
Victoria (Shannyn Sossamon) is the quiet repressed sister who gets invited to Paris by her free spirited sibling Carolyn (Pink). Yeah, the pop singer Pink is in this thing. She’s listed in the credits under her real name, so I wasn’t expecting to see her. When she popped up on screen, I disgustedly said out loud “Oh, for God’s sake”. Not because I expected her to be terrible in the film, which she sort of is, but because I look more like Shannyn Sossamon’s sister than Pink does. David Spade would have looked more convincing in the role. Sossamon is a slim, dark, angular beauty. Pink looks like a very pretty bulldog that was dunked in peroxide. Imagine watching The Godfather and instead of Sonny Corleone looking like James Caan, he looked like Charles Nelson Reilly. That’s the effect Pink has in this movie.
Anyway, Carolyn introduces Victoria to her Eurotrash friends and then takes her to an illegal dance party in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. Victoria gets told the story of a killer in a goat mask who lives in the catacombs, winds up separated from everyone and unsurprisingly winds up getting chased through the catacombs by the goat mask killer. She gets away from him, literally wanders around in the dark for about a half hour where nothing happens and as she’s just about to escape from the catacombs, the big nihilistic twist kicks in. I’ve seen worse twist endings, but that doesn’t mean this one is any good.
There are parts of Catacombs that are really bad, where every visual cliché from every heavy metal music video or horror movie of the last 10 years gets thrown onto the screen. There are other parts, though, that are actually affecting. This film is a bit like those “ghost hunter” shows you find on basic cable. It’s silly and contrived and your first instinct is to snicker at it, but the rough simplicity of a frightened person alone in the dark, wondering what’s going to happen next, can still get to you.
The story begins and ends with bursts of high energy, but there’s a whole lot of nothing in between. None of the characters rise above the generic. You do get to see some random naked boobs, but not from the titular stars of this production. And what violence there is, is more suggested than graphic.
Catacombs is a horror movie for Amish teenagers. If you’ve never seen a horror movie before, you might find it exciting. If you’re at all familiar with the genre, you’ll recognize this as another sub-mediocre entry. I’d probably have harsher things to say about this movie, except I watched Rob Zombie’s Halloween II earlier this week. In contrast with that shambling monstrosity, I’m forced to recognize a certain level of competence in this film. So, if you ever watch a horror movie so awful it makes you feel like the director has propped open your mouth and urinated down your throat, you might get some enjoyment out of watching Catacombs. Unless your aesthetic standards have been pushed down that low, you’re probably better off avoiding it.
CHARLEY VARRICK 1973
Written by Howard Rodman and Dean Reisner.
Directed by Don Siegel.
Starring Walter Matthau, Joe Don Baker, Felicia Farr, Andrew Robinson, Jacqueline Scott, Sheree North, Norman Fell, William Scahllert, Woodrow Parfrey, Benson Fong and John Vernon.
It seems a little off to call such a cold blooded story “fun”, but that’s exactly what Charley Varrick is. It’s a neat little crime caper, a look at the cultural zeitgeist of the early 1970s and features Walter Matthau as one of the most ruthless bastards in cinematic history.
The simple but still interesting and effective plot starts with a bank robbery in a small New Mexico town. Charley Varrick (Walter Matthau) is a middle-aged pilot who’s gone from flying in air shows to being a crop duster. When bigger companies start to push him out of the business, he decides to start robbing banks. Yeah, that seems like an odd decision but the movie makes it subtly clear that Varrick has more than a bit of experience with the criminal world in his past. Though they get away with the bank’s money, two-thirds of Varrick’s gang ends up dead and Charley’s worried the same thing will happen to the rest of them after they discover the small town bank held over 750 thousand dollars. As Charley explains to Harman (Andrew Robinson), the young and reckless surviving member of the gang, the only way a tiny back in a backwater town could have that much money on hand is if it were mob money being hidden from the authorities.
Charley’s right about that. Bank president Maynard Boyle (John Vernon) and branch manager Harold Young (Woodrow Parfrey) have been laundering money for the Mafia. Boyle and Young aren’t just concerned about the robbery. They’re also worried that their mob friends will blame them for the theft, La Cosa Nostra being notorious for its suspicion of coincidence. The explanation that a crew of professional bank robbers just happened to hit a nothing little bank in a nothing little town on the exact day it was holding a stash of Mafia money isn’t likely to satisfy them. So Boyle dispatches a pipe-smoking cowboy of a hitman named Molly (Joe Don Baker) to track down the robbers, though Molly’s also instructed to find out if Boyle and Young were behind the theft.
Charley seems to know it’s just a matter of time before the cops or the mob run him down. The only question is…what will he have to do to get away?
Let me acknowledge that Charley Varrick shares two things with a lot of other films from the 1970s. Visually, it looks a lot like a TV movie by today’s standards and it has a more leisurely pace than most modern crime stories. While it’s actually more realistic for things to unfold the way they do in this movie, folks used to the rat-tat-tat-tat speed of current films may find Charley Varrick a bit slow. If those things don’t bother you, though, this is a very nice piece of work.
There’s a beguiling moral vacuousness to this film. The title character is a truly evil person, even worse in some ways than the mob guys out to kill him. Yet, the story treats his unflinching heartlessness as though it were merely a natural and proper reflection of the world in which Varrick lives. The slogan of Varrick’s crop dusting company is “The Last of the Independents” and the film uses that as something of a rallying cry for Varrick. It treats him as the symbol of the ordinary guy being squeezed by larger forces in society, whether it’s the law, the mob or big business. That Varrick has the brains and boldness to take those larger forces is portrayed as admirable, even though the actions he takes to do so are undeniably horrible.
The movie also reflects the 70s conceit that crime and the underworld are never more than an inch under the surface anywhere in America. That a bank president would be in bed with the Mafia is treated as the most unsurprising thing in the world. The existence of men like Molly, who cruise through the world like sharks, is considered a normal and expected aspect of life.
The acting in this film is quite good. Joe Don Baker plays Molly as a man who lives by very strict rules but relishes inflicting pain and death within those guidelines. Andrew Robinson plays Harman as a boy in a man’s world, incapable for seeing beyond his immediate wants and impulses. William Schallert as the sheriff investigating the bank robbery manages to make him a genuinely good man but not one who’s naïve to the bad world in which his lives. Walter Matthau also gives a great demonstration of “movie star charisma”. Charley Varrick is not a colorful or larger-than-life guy. He’s plain spoken and his only affectation is chewing gum. But Matthau manages to hold your attention every second he’s on the screen, to the point you can’t help but empathize with this vicious and unredeemed man.
Charley Varrick is from another cultural and filmmaking era. If you’ve had little experience with that era, this movie might be a bit of an acquired taste. Give it a chance, though, and you’ll find watching this film to be very rewarding.
CHLOE 2009
Written by Erin Cressida Wilson.
Directed by Atom Egoyan.
Starring Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried, Liam Neeson, Max Theriot, R.H. Thomson, Nina Dobrev and Misha Vellani.
If you, for some ungodly reason, crossed Masterpiece Theater and late night Skinemax, or maybe Merchant/Ivory and Zalman King, you’d probably end up with something a lot like Chloe…and it would probably be just as tepid and aggravating as Atom Egoyan’s film. This is the type of “arty” movie where you put up with a lot of long, boring, mannered storytelling because you think it will lead to something emotionally powerful. In this case, all that Egoyan’s dull posturing leads to is an melodramatic clusterbleep that could pass for the ending to any one of about a hundred woman-in-peril flicks on cable TV. Replace Julianne Moore with Lori Laughlin, Amanda Seyfried with Tori Spelling and Liam Neeson with John Stamos and the only place you’d find this production is some random Saturday night on the Lifetime Channel.
The plot here is maddeningly simple. Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore) is a woman of a certain age who feels alienated from her flirtatious husband David (Liam Neeson) and her plot-device son Michael (Max Theriot). And yes, plot-device is the best description of both Michael’s character and role in the story. Catherine decides to hire a local prostitute named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to tempt David and fine out if he really is cheating. Chloe regales Catherine with tales of David’s seduction, which gets Catherine so excited she has to jump into bed with Chloe herself. And no, that doesn’t make any more sense if you watch the movie. Just trust me on that.
Anyway, after all that unfolds at a snail’s pace with enough atmospheric mood music to choke the Syrens of ancient lore, the film spins about on a twist so annoying and aggravating you’ll wish you could stick your foot through your television screen and right up the ass of director Egoyan, with a couple toes left over to poke writer Erin Cressida Wilson in the eyes.
Now, it’s hard to say that any film where Moore and Seyfried get naked together is completely without merit. What I can say about Chloe is that it is grindingly slow and sparsely populated with undefined and uninteresting characters whose behavior seems more like it’s determined by the random throw of an eight-sided die than by any recognizable human impulse or desire. I can also say there’s not a single line of interesting dialog spoken in the entire movie and that Catherine and David’s home in the film looks like a bunch of red shoeboxes stuck together.
This film doesn’t have anything to say about marriage or family or fidelity or sexuality or trust or insecurity or, quite frankly, anything about anything. It provides the world with a look at Moore’s and Seyfried’s breasts and that’s about it. If this pretentious waste of time and energy is what it takes to get legitimate actresses to remove their clothes, I can honestly say we’d all be better off if Egoyan had use Rohypnol instead.
Chloe isn’t the worst thing ever made and, I suppose, if you’re some kind of stupid and degenerate upper-middle class urbanite, perhaps you could find something here that echoes your own empty existence. The rest of us would be better off not letting our Merchant/Ivory get in our Zalman King, and vice versa.
THE CITY OF VIOLENCE 2006
Written by Jeong-min Kim, Won-jae Lee, Seung-wan Ryoo.
Directed by Seung-wan Ryoo.
Starring Doo-hong Jung, Kil-Kang Ahn, Beom-su Lee, Seung-wan Ryoo and Seok-yong Jeong.
Perhaps more than any other genre in cinema, Asian martial arts movies are an acquired taste. It’s not just that they have so many conventions and tropes you have to accept. It’s that the better they are, the more their stories reflect the unique social and cultural aspects of their countries of origin, the less appealing they are to someone who just wants to watch people getting karate chopped. The City of Violence is a pretty good Asian martial arts movie. Whether you enjoy it depends on how much of a taste you’ve acquired for that sort of thing.
Set in Korea, Taetsoo (Doo-hong Jung) is a police officer in Seoul who gets word that one of his boyhood friends is dead and returns to his hometown to look into it. Wangjae (Kil-Kang Ahn) was the toughest and boldest of the boys and grew into a leader of the gangs that have always run Taetsoo’s hometown. Then he left the gang life behind when he married and settled down as a private citizen. He turned the control of his gangs over to another of the childhood chums, Pilho (Beom-su Lee), who’s used his illicit power to bring a casino development to town. After Wangjae ends up dead in an alley, Taetsoo and another old friend, the hot-headed Seokhwan (Seung-wan Ryoo), investigate what happened. The true story leads to Seokhwan’s worthless brother Donghwan (Seokt-yong Jeong) and two of those martial arts fight scenes where two guys have to battle dozens of enemies at the same time.
The fight scenes are always the most important element of this type of film and The City of Violence delivers. There’s very little one-on-one action where it looks more like ballet than combat and there’s none of that wire-fu stuff with superhuman leaps and feats of strength, but there’s plenty of rough and bloody battle. It’s very much in the style of Jackie Chan where there’s lot of running and spinning and using whatever’s handy for defense and attack. The guys playing Taetsoo and Seokhwan help the puncture the melodrama and keep things from getting too overwrought. As the challenges before them grow, they both evince a “you’ve got to be kidding me” weariness that gives some emotional realism to the physically fantastic action going on. The fight scenes also look really good, unlike many American action flicks where you literally can’t tell what the heck is going on during a fight.
The story of 4 old friends brought together by death and vengeance is fairly compelling and the acting seems good, though it’s always hard to tell. Asian performances can have such different emotional pacing and inflection that it can be a little hard to follow. Beom-su Lee as Pilho, however, pulls off a seamless mixture of weakness and strength as a street kid grown up and out of his depth.
Like most Asian martial arts films, there are plenty of things you have to go along with in The City of Violence…such as the kid gangs all having costume themes like something from the old Batman TV show and that this story apparently occurs in a reality where guns where never invented. But if you can accept all that, and you’re not just looking for mindless violence, I think you’ll like this movie.
CLASH OF THE TITANS 2010
Written by Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi.
Directed by Louis Leterrier.
Starring Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Flemyng, Gemma Arterton, Alexa Davalos, Mads Mikkelsen, Luke Evans, Liam Cunningham, Hans Matheson, Ashraf Barhom, Mouloud Achour and Pete Postlethwaite.
The new Clash of the Titans does show off all the advances in special effects made since the original back in 1981. But while the first one wasn’t exactly a masterpiece of storytelling, this remake might be even dumber and a bit more obviously slapped together. I don’t think these filmmakers tried to make a good movie. I think they tried to make a big, loud, flashy distraction…and they succeeded at that.
At a time when humanity is rebelling against the dominion of the Olympian gods, young Perseus (Sam Worthington) sees his family killed by Hades (Ralph Fiennes), the lord of the underworld. Perseus finds himself in the city of Argos just as it threatened with divine destruction. For its defiance of the gods, Argos must either sacrifice the beautiful Princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos) or be destroyed in 10 days by the monstrous Kraken. Perseus sets out on a quest to find a way to defeat the giant beast, but not before learning that he is the son of Zeus (Liam Neeson). Joined by a small band of warriors and an immortal girl named Io (Gemma Arterton), Perseus battles a series of CGI creatures and one dude in traditional monster make up.
This film looks good, though it doesn’t come close to the visual magic of Avatar. It moves relatively quickly, has a few honestly funny lines and its action scenes are both reasonably exciting and comprehensible. Very little of it makes sense if you think too hard, but who goes to see a movie like this to think?
None of the performers embarrass themselves here, though none of them are asked to do more than the acting equivalent of walking and chewing gun at the same time. Only actresses Gemma Arterton and Alexa Davalos are noteworthy, each making a real effort to give depth to roles that don’t ask them to do more than look pretty (which they also do quite well). Sam Worthington continues the trend toward more straightforward and unflamboyant action heroes. He’s little more than a crash test dummy in this film as what little characterization there is in this script gets sprinkled among the supporting roles/cannon fodder.
The new Clash of the Titans isn’t “good” in any meaningful sense of the word. For a big budget blockbuster, though, it isn’t noticeably bad. The bar for these sorts of movies has sadly been set rather low and this film barely manages to get over it. If you like this sort of cinema, you’ll have a decent time. If you loathe this sort of brain-optional spectacle, there’s nothing here to change your mind.
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