More capsule comments in an attempt to catch up with my movie watching.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)
- Since this film is now almost 30 years old, I guess it's time to acknowledge it as a classic teen/sex comedy. It's not that it's actually hilarious per se, but it's got a collection of mostly-believable characters, and many of them do and say hilarious things. On the other hand, the film is something of a painful coming-of-age for the Stacy character (Jennifer Jason Leigh), something which seems to be overlooked in-between the duels between Spicoli (Sean Penn) and Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) and Brad's (Judge Reinhold's) "desire" for Linda (Phoebe Cates) by the swimming pool.
36 Hours (George Seaton, 1965)
- WWII thriller with an awesome plot. Less than a week before D-Day, the Nazis kidnap an American major (James Garner) and try to convince him that he's been in amnesia for six years and that the war is over. The major has information on the Allied invasion and the Nazis want to get it from him before it occurs so they drug and artificially age him and set him up at a hospital with a wife (Eva Marie Saint), so that when he "comes to" 36 hours before D-Day, a German psychiatrist (Rod Taylor) can finagle the secret info out of the Major. This ingenious set-up plays out well for the first two-thirds, but it stumbles a bit later when it becomes a chase picture, although John Banner from "
Hogan's Heroes" is fun.
Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964)
- Frankenheimer follows up his masterpiece
The Manchurian Candidate with another political thriller, scripted by Rod Serling, about a potential military coup of the United States. The Adjutant Colonel (Kirk Douglas) of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Burt Lancaster) accidentally learns that there's a good possibility that his Boss is planning to overthrow the President (Fredric March) due to the fact that the President has signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets at a time when his approval rating is at an all-time low. Meanwhile, the General is very popular and has apparently approved of some secret base where suspicious operations seem to be taking place. The President and the Colonel try to get hard evidence that several strange "coincidences" may well be a planned military takeover. It's a thinking man's thriller in that there aren't really any action scenes, but the acting and story are so strong that it flies by and holds one's interest throughout.
The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975)
- Huston directs a grand Rudyard Kipling adventure (in fact, Kipling is an important character and he's played by Christopher Plummer) which soon enough turns into a cautionary fable a la his
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Two ex-soldiers (Sean Connery and Michael Caine) of the British Army in India decide to leave the country before they're jailed for their various crimes and travel to Kafiristan where they plan to become kings. Action, spectacle, and comedy are intermixed in a story filmed on incredible locations and leading up to several surprising revelations concerning another man who once may well have been King of the World 2200 years earlier. Caine and Connery are a terrific team in roles which were originally intended for Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable.
The Charge of the Light Brigade (Michael Curtiz, 1936)
- This one is based on Tennyson's poem and shows more Indian adventure with Errol Flynn. Most of the film takes place in India and tells of a Major (Flynn) who's friends with the local tribal leader Serat Khan (C. Henry Gordon) until one day, while most of the British soldiers are away, Khan decides to have his men attack the British fort and massacre a skeleton crew of soldiers, along with their women and children. In this historically-inaccurate film, it eventually leads to the battle of Balaclava. This is solid entertainment although the first half is staged somewhat awkwardly with some surprisingly slapdash editing and pacing. However, the second half of the film crams in enough action for two movies and definitely makes it one of Flynn's best.
Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989)
- One of Woody's best follows two stories, one about Judah (Martin Landau), an opthamologist whose mistress Dolores (Anjelica Huston) threatens to reveal herself to his wife, and the other about Cliff (Allen), a documentary filmmaker working on a project about a TV producer (Alan Alda) he loathes, although he's starting to fall for the exec's associate professor (Mia Farrow). The film is both hilarious and thought-provokng as it shows how the main characters have to try to deal with their lives while living in a world which seems to have laws and moral systems, but is justice ever really possible here on Earth? I won't reveal anymore except to say that Jerry Orbach is almost as good as Landau, playing his brother with strong mob ties, and I'll also add that you need to remember that "comedy is tragedy plus time".
Inside Moves (Richard Donner, 1980)
- This San Francisco-set film tells the story of a group of lovable losers who frequent a bar but are trying to make some big dreams come true, if they only knew what those dreams could be. Eventually, a young newcomer to the bar, Roary (John Savage), a failed suicide, decides that getting an operation for the bartender Jerry (David Morse) to fix his leg and foot may well let Jerry become a pro basketball player. If it sounds like a silly melodrama, rest assured that it's melodramatic but it's also quite funny and has a cross section of offbeat characters to cheer for and against. Sure, this is something akin to a modern-day Capra flick, but it's got its fair share of whores, druggies and other flawed characters who are living their life out any way they can.
Roadgames (Richard Franklin, 1981)
+ - Wonderful Hitchcockian suspense thriller with a sharp sense of humor and a smart lead character in Quid (Stacy Keach), the American truck-driving "non-truck driver" in the Australian outback with a vivid imagination, a pet dingo and eventually a load of pork he has to get to Perth during a meat worker's strike. It just happens that there's apparently a serial killer who's on the same route as Quid, so he seems to be a suspect, and eventually a hitchhiker (Jamie Lee Curtis) he picks up disappears too. The dialogue which Quid speaks on his lonely journey is humorous, and there are some Rube Goldbergish stunts on hand, but what makes the whole thing so enjoyable is the smartness of the Hitchcock tie-ins.
RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
- Futuristic sci-fi satire is a slam-bang action thriller as well as a cautionary tale on crossing the line at playing God. Peter Weller is solid as Murphy, a cop in the most dangerous place on Earth, Old Detroit, and he's matched by his partner Nancy Allen. One day, Kurtwood Smith, playing one of the scariest bad guys ever, puts a hole in Murphy's brain, basically killing him, but the folks at Omni Consumer Products have determined to bring him back "on-line" as a cyborg named RoboCop who can be a tougher kind of police officer. Verhoeven goes all-out with his patented violence, and the corporate backstabbing is rampant, especially between OCP execs Ronny Cox and Miguel Ferrer.
RoboCop still qualifies as sci-fi, but there may well come a time when it seems more like science and less like fiction.