Here’s something lighter after the last couple of weeks. Jeff Daniels plays an office drone who gets kidnapped into an adventure by a woman with his polar opposite personality.
This was an automatic suggestion I’d never heard of before. Sometime I ought to just rifle through Jeff Daniels’ filmography, since I keep finding interesting stuff I never knew he was in.
The poster style makes me think it’s from earlier in the 80s than it is, but everything I can point to as to why could also apply to the early 90s.
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. Revolution Erie Productions, 2005.
Before watching the movie: When I ask someone new for a movie recommendation, there’s a high likelihood they’ll suggest something I’ve already seen. There’s a very slim chance they’ll recommend something I’ve never even heard of. Not every movie I’ve ever reviewed is obviously to my taste, but the ones that aren’t are pretty much the cinematic canon. And now there’s this. Possibly the first small drama I’ve seen outside of a film festival. I might have passed it by without the strong recommendation of a new friend. The closest reference point I have is something like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? for reasons that become less clear as I explore what they might be (for one thing, I remembered that one as a period story and it’s actually contemporary). This seems to essentially be a story about a housewife supporting her children by writing for prizes. So it’s more like October Sky (intellectual skills lifting people out of bad situations), only probably not at all. Continue reading →
I first heard of this movie at least five years ago, and pretty much every time it comes up, it’s being mocked for confusing the Internet with Magic. However, that’s hardly unique in Hollywood, and the main examples I’m thinking of seem less implausible now that the Internet of Things is a trendy consumer electronics buzzword on the horizon.
Basically, Sandra Bullock gets on the wrong side of some Hackers for Reasons, and they use the power of the Internet to destroy her life. The drama comes from the fact that since the assault is Online, her antagonists are basically everywhere yet nowhere. At the time, this was clearly New Things Are Scary But We Don’t Really Understand Them, but I want to see if it’s any better now that technology has gotten its hooks into more things.
The problem with Sylvester Stallone’s franchises is that they were really never meant to be franchises. But then I say that having never seen any of the Rocky or Rambo sequels. However, I get the sense that the Rocky movies did better at retaining its emotional center than Rambo.
As I understand this, the original Rambo film is a fairly faithful telling of a story contemplating what happens to Vietnam veterans with difficulty adjusting to civilian life (in this case, get triggered and start shooting people), while the later movies recast the character as a warrior put in contexts that need a warrior for the sake of letting him shoot more people. So I expect this one to be thoughtful on a level somewhat beyond a typical gritty action movie.
Stallone gets typed as an action star, but it’s clear from Rocky that he can portray human vulnerability, and I hope to see that on display here in the pacing scenes.
I guess before just now I didn’t know anything but the title. So apparently a ship that was lost in a black hole has mysteriously come back, and the people who go investigate discover that it brought Something back with it. It seems to basically be a horror story with sci-fi trappings, so I wonder how much it’s indebted to Alien, when I was picturing something more like The Fifth Element or The Black Hole (three films I have yet to see as well). I suspect the main reason I have it connected to The Fifth Element in my head is because of similar looming heads posters and proximity of release dates, but also possibly they were stored close to each other in a friend’s collection. As a tense horror film, I don’t know how much to expect as far as visual and practical effects, and the only name I recognize among the top billing is Laurence Fishburne. So I don’t have much of any foundation for expectations here. Continue reading →
From what I can tell from summaries, this movie covers several years of John Candy sneaking a relationship/engagement behind his mother’s back. The length of time that seems to be involved is throwing me off so I have no idea what to expect from the plot.
It’s not even readily apparent why his character has to hide his lover from his mother, but from some minor things on IMDB I glean that there’s a strong Irish-American element, so my guess is that O’Hara’s character is a very traditional Irish mother and Sheedy’s is not Irish enough or Catholic enough or something for her.
I expect good things from a movie written and directed by Chris Columbus and produced by John Hughes.They both have a strong track record on earnest portrayals of life and family.
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.
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 