This is one I thought I’d get to for years and never did, until now. I had access to it for a long time, and then I moved away from it. But now I can see it again, so I am.
I have the impression this is a screwball comedy, but I may be reading too much into it from its superficial similarity to His Girl Friday via the married couple and ex-husband dynamic and the fact that it shares one third of the same stars. Certainly it has more to do with that movie than with Philadelphia. Continue reading →
Escape From New York. Goldcrest Films International 1981.
Before watching the movie:
I’ve been meaning to see this for a while now, but I kept finding the sequel and not this one. So New York is a prison/wasteland, and Kurt Russell has to get in and get out. That’s pretty much it. About fifteenish years in the future, basically the present but with slightly better tech and more ridiculous premises. Continue reading →
World War I doesn’t get nearly as much attention as any other major war of the 20th century (that registers in American history education). It’s sometimes treated like a forgotten prequel to everyone’s favorite war with Nazis and atomic detonations. While it’s a mentality I’m not at all immune to, it’s worth remembering as the horrific tragedy of old-fashioned warfare at an industrialized pace. There are few symbols more powerful to me than the Douaumont Ossuary, a memorial built to house the remains of over 130,000 young men killed in a single (massive) battle, and that number is just the ones that couldn’t be identified. Small wonder it was thought at the time that this war would make any future wars unthinkable. As centennial anniversaries of milestones in the war are remembered currently, it might be gaining back some respect.
I went into all of that because this movie is positioned as a drama concerning the toll aerial warfare took on RAF pilots, and so hopefully the above paragraph is relevant, even if it was more concerned with terrestrial battles than planes. The big names by today’s standards are Malcolm McDowell and Christopher Plummer, though Peter Firth (whom I don’t think I’ve heard of) gets top billing on this poster. I know McDowell is a major character, but I’m not sure about Plummer.
Why is it that Hollywood seems to like Phillip K. Dick more than any other SF writer? Off the top of my head, there’s Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Looking it up, I was surprised to learn that the recent The Adjustment Bureau is another adaptation of his, as well as almost as many more I hadn’t even heard of, including two television series.
I recall the short story this is based on “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” as a cerebral thriller, while this movie seems to be positioned as an action-packed blockbuster. To be fair, I can certainly see the room to open up the plot with action sequences.
I feel like this is one of those movies that if it wasn’t rated R I would have seen it ages ago. It came out only two years after I was born and its staying power has only been diminished by having a recent remake. If I’d been 17 in the 90s, I probably would have been invited to watch it with someone before the decade ended, or been invested enough to make the effort myself. However, in the last ten years it’s just been on a shelf or digital shelf somewhere, with no particular reason to make “I’ll watch it someday” into “I’ll watch it now”, until well, now.
The stars are the headline for this movie. Peter O’Toole is no doubt a scoundrel with class and Audrey Hepburn brings glamour with… playfulness? I’m not as familiar with her type as I should be.
This appears to be a story of an unlikely pairing of people who never expected to be art thieves. Something to do with an art forger who gives his master forgery to an art museum, presumably meaning these two decide to steal it back. I’m predicting a clumsy, snarky heist, but I recognize I’ve built a lot of preconceptions on top of what little I actually know.
I think I first heard this existed in some kind of Eddie Murphy retrospective. I just remember an interview clip of Murphy talking about being awed at getting the chance to work with Nick Nolte. This looks like a slight revision of the “buddy cop” formula, where in this case, one of the chalk and cheese pairing isn’t a cop but a convict, presumably with the connections the one who is a cop needs.
Buddy cop wasn’t played out in the early 80s, but I think it was still well established at the time. What comes to mind right now is that the two-year later Beverly Hills Cop seems like a streamlined version of this premise without the buddy cop dynamic, merging the streetwise fast-talker character with the unshakeable detective character. It’s highly likely from the similarity and proximity that Murphy got Beverly Hills because of this movie.
I’m not sure I’ve seen Nolte in anything other than Lorenzo’s Oil, which I saw in a science class in high school. I don’t remember much of it, but I do know it’s clearly a very different film from this. Continue reading →
Here’s another that I found rattling around my automated recommendations, having never heard of it before The log line for this movie goes something like “a scientist discovers the fountain of youth, and a screwball comedy ensues”. It looks like there’s a love triangle, and there’s probably some dispute over who gets control over the youth serum, but I’m fairly clueless about it otherwise. Maybe it’s a bit like The Man in the White Suit?
I often think about how I’d like to watch a movie without knowing anything other than the genre, the cast, and the title, if that. But while it’s nice to watch a movie without preconceptions, it’s not as enjoyable to write about a lack of them.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Cary Grant handle witty screwball dialogue well before, but I don’t think I know Ginger Rogers as anything but Fred Astaire’s dancing partner, which now occurs to me as almost certainly unfair to her.
Chris Farley and David Spade. That’s all I need to know.
Okay, apparently there’s a man running for office and Chris Farley is Rob Ford his misbehaving brother who keeps getting into headlines for all the wrong reasons, dragging the family name though the mud. What comes to mind is Spin City or The Thick of It, but with familial ties instead of political ones.
I guess I should say that from what I have in front of me, I’ve been assuming that Farley and Spade play brothers (which I would buy in the context of such a comedy), but on second thought, Spade is probably the head of the PR team or at least the member personally responsible for keeping Farley’s character in line, because that’s the combination that gives them the most opportunity to play off each other. Spade’s type of character is much more of an image manager than an office-seeker, anyway.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. United Artists 1978.
Before watching the movie:
I don’t normally like to see remakes before the original. When I do see the 1956 version, hopefully this won’t color it too much. However, the reason this is line-jumping is because I wanted to respect the death of Leonard Nimoy and this has turned out to be pretty much the only work he was involved in available to me that I haven’t seen and is a movie.
At any rate, this is billed as a “reimagining”, and appears to do a decent job at making the story relevant to the late 70s, which is always a problem when remaking science fiction decades later. I take it from the recommendation that brought this to my attention that Nimoy’s role is fairly significant, though I don’t know much about his star capital between Star Trek leaving television and entering theaters to judge whether he was a big enough name to get on the poster for minor roles.
I don’t want to make this post all about Nimoy, but it occurs to me that I may never have seen him play an onscreen role besides Spock.
I always had the impression that this movie was a horror/monster film, but actually looking at the promotional material, it seems more like a disaster drama in the style of Outbreak, where the disease is more of a force than a monster. In this movie, it appears people are dying of bites from a rare spider, and the experts have to contain the spider. It doesn’t even seem to be an uncanny spider (which would make it more monsterish), just an exotic one.
Jeff Daniels headlines this movie, and I continue to realize how broad his filmography is. At one time, I knew him exclusively as a comedy actor (though I was young enough to confuse him with Dave Coulier), and I think he’s still best known for Dumb and Dumber, but at this point I think I’ve seen him in more serious roles. But maybe I’m assuming too much with this movie.
Yesterday's Movies 