A smarter than average bank robber (Walter Matthau) robs a small town New Mexico bank that, unbeknownst to him, is holding $750,000 in mob money. The job goes terribly bad. Matthau’s wife and wheel woman (Jacqueline Scott), an accomplice, and several deputies are shot dead. When Matthau and his surviving accomplice (Andrew Robinson, the memorable Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry) hear on TV that the robbers only got away with several thousand dollars, he susses out the massive shitstorm that is coming in the form of mob money man John Vernon and enforcer Joe Don Baker. Matthau has to figure out how to survive the ordeal.
This is a competent and serviceable Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz) crime flick. The picture is no great shakes but it has its moments, and the cat-and-mouse machinations of the characters are compelling.
The picture is also very very weird.
First, apparently, in the 70s, all you had to do to a woman to transform her to putty in your hands was rough them up a bit. Sure, 1960s James Bond could get away with it, but a majority of those women were play-acting for the post-coital kill, so, all’s fair. Not so the women of this flick. A slap or threat, and they positively melt. Times change.
Second, there are several actors who should not be kissing women in film. John Wayne is probably number one. Brad Pitt, with his blasé remove, is three. Matthau has got to be number two. In this flick, he kisses his dead wife on the lips – twice – and then he beds a live woman (Vernon’s executive secretary, Felicia Farr). It’s hard to tell which woman was less enthralled. Matthau looks ridiculous and uncomfortable.
Last, has there ever been a luckier actor than Joe Don Baker? “Oh, so, you want me to be a quirky Southern tough guy who can exude jovial sarcasm followed immediately by swift violence? I can do that.” And a career playing basically the same role – and playing it well – followed.
In these sensitive times, I’ll risk observing that Rachel Ward was exceedingly attractive. In various states of undress, even more so.
So, a steamy semi remake of Out of the Past featuring an on-the run Ward, coveted by her jealous and obsessive boyfriend, sleazy LA fixer and club owner James Woods, who enlists recently cut NFL player Jeff Bridges to find and recover her for him … it has promise.
Alas, the smoldering Ward is the only good thing about this Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, Ray) dog.
Bridges does indeed find Ward. They fall in love and press the flesh in the steamy environs of Mexico.
So far, so good.
But soon, they are back in LA, propelling a paper-thin plot that lazily meshes real estate and political corruption, game-fixing, and blackmail.
Bridges is badly miscast as a jock. He is too effete for the role. Woods is working way too hard to do something with nothing, and everyone else is stock.
The script also calls for characters to do bizarre things. Case in point – Swoozie Kurtz is a legal secretary who meets Bridges briefly early on, is smitten, and on that connection alone, risks her life to help him gets files from her offices when he shows up out of nowhere later in the picture. Similarly, Alex Karras is a football conditioning coach who, after Bridges betrays Woods with Ward, comes down to Mexico to … bring her back forcibly, at gunpoint. Which means, by my estimation, even taking Bridges out of the equation, a ferry, a small plane and then a jet back to LAX, gun in hand.
Worse, the score is cheezy tech crap that makes every scene feel like you’re watching 70s porn or at a sketchy massage studio.
Bad through and through, as the ending will attest, as if Hackford said, “Well, we need to wrap this turd up with more Rachel and the Phil Collins hit.”
I did read that after this film, Ward took a sabbatical to study acting. That tracks.
John Cazale did five films and then tragically passed away from lung cancer. When you lament the early loss of a Phillip Seymour Hoffman, you at least have the comfort of a significant body of work, 60 plus films even in his too short life.
This documentary, available on Youtube and Tubi, remembers Cazale through the interviews of directors and actors who worked with him (Coppola, Lumet, DeNiro, Pacino, Hackman, Dreyfus) as well as Meryl Streep, who was his lover and co-star on his last picture, The Deer Hunter. We also get insights from character actors like Hoffman, Sam Rockwell, and Steve Buscemi, guys who are used to doing a lot with a little in terms of screen time.
A tight 40 minutes, the documentary is a taut and moving remembrance with specificity. Hoffman, Buscemi, and Rockwell are particularly incisive in highlighting certain choices Cazale made in pivotal scenes, and the observations of Coppola and Lumet on the “I’m not dumb, like everybody says” scene in Godfather II is fantastic. A really great watch.
A solid mix of of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (though nowhere near as dense and complicated) and Deathtrap, Stephen Soderberg’s spy thriller, catch-the-mole flick is brisk, sexy, and very clever, and that is as about as much as I can say given the nature of the endeavor.
And Huzzah!!! Around 90 minutes, 96% on Rottentomatoes, and free on Amazon Prime.
This is not a film review, but some events require a detour from standard operating procedure.
A close friend and fellow film buff sent me the following:
Robert Duvall’s very first film is hard to find and may not exist: a made for TV Playhouse 90, John Brown’s Raid, directed by Sidney Lumet starring James Mason as John Brown, filmed on location at Harper’s Ferry. In addition to Mason and Duvall, the movie had James Broderick and Ossie Davis. His second film and first feature was, of course, To Kill a Mockingbird. He made about 7 feature films in the 60s–mostly episodic TV. But those 7 features arguably set up the next decade of his career: Countdown, a failed film by Robert Altman, The Rain People, a failed film by Francis Ford Coppola, and then The Chase (Arthur Penn), True Grit and Bullitt (Peter Yates). Oh, yeah, he plays a gay biker and Richard Jaeckel’s lover in Nightmare in the Sun. So the 70s opened and he plays a lot of assholes: MASH, Network, Killer Elite, Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. Also a lot of fairly colorless people: I’m sorry, but Tom Hagen is a thankless role, and while he’s an interesting Doctor Watson, it’s not very showy. And a Good Nazi, kind of, in The Eagle Has Landed. Also a lot of movies we’ve forgotten about. But almost all of his movies share two characteristics: he’s getting much bigger parts and most are directed by or written by big names. So even though at the end of the 70s, the average person hadn’t heard of him, he’s got a lot of respect in the industry and criticis love his ass. Setting up The Great Santini, Apocalypse Now, True Confessions and Tender Mercies–and that’s a sequence of films that’s got few rivals, particularly given he’s starring in three of them. Now he’s kind of found his groove as a movie star–of this group, only True Confessions wasn’t Oscar nominated. Ironically, his 80s after that is a bit tame–probably taking some time off. And then the epic Lonesome Dove, where he creates Augustus, leading to his strongest decade not in movies (that’s the 70s by far) but in Robert Duvall Roles. He made 24 movies in the 70s, 12 in the 80s, and 23 in the 90s. He still worked up into his own 90s, getting another nomination and directing up into his 80s. From CNN, “…the family encourages those who wish to honor his memory to do so in a way that reflects the life he lived by watching a great film, telling a good story around a table with friends, or taking a drive in the countryside to appreciate the world’s beauty.” He was apparently a Republican, too. Long time buddies with Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. I’m glad he had a better end than Hackman.
There is very little with which to disagree there, except for her misstep on Tom Hagen. Duvall’s turn as the “almost brother” is an understated, canny performance, pitch perfect to his co-stars, with quiet moments of real hurt. When Michael says, “You’re out, Tom,” Duvall shows piercing vulnerability, beseeching Vito with his eyes. When Michael attacks Tom for disloyalty, again, his bewilderment belies a greater fear (“Why do you hurt me, Michael? I’ve always been loyal to you”).
The scenes must be juxtaposed with Tom’s fights with Sonny, who also derided Tom, but with whom Tom was at ease, because for all his faults, Sonny was human, they were blood even if Sonny could cruelly suggests otherwise. And Sonny was dumber than Tom, a reality so patently obvious to Tom that his worth was never in doubt. They’d fight, Tom took it with a grain, and Sonny immediately apologized.
Michael, however, was inhuman and smarter.
The performance is masterful, like so much of what Duvall did.
Last thought. A Civil Action is an underrated legal thriller about a class action case brought against local polluters. John Travolta is the engine, a plaintiff’s lawyer fighting a massive, all-enveloping case and his own sense of inadequacy, and he is quite good. Duvall represents one of two corporate defendants, a wily, eccentric old line senior partner with a white shoe Boston firm. I’ve been around lawyers of all stripes my whole life. He is spot-on, brilliant, and inhabits the quirky-but-wise character entirely:
A serviceable John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven) Cold War action/espionage thriller from 1968, currently on Tubi. The Soviets take photographs of our missile installations from space, but in attempting to retrieve the film, things go awry. The canister lands near a British scientific weather station in the Arctic, and the race is on for retrieval before the Soviets get there. The mission is led by nuclear submarine skipper Rock Hudson, who has MI6 spook Patrick McGoohan, friendly Soviet Ernest Borgnine, and Marine squad leader Jim Brown along for the ride.
I watched the flick when I was a little kid on TV. It was thrilling.
50 years later, it still holds up somewhat. It’s really worth catching for three particularities.
First, clearly of its time, a significant portion of this rather long picture (it has both an overture and an intermission) is devoted to the inner workings of a nuclear submarine, sometimes, pedantically so. But you have to remind yourself that in 1968, film audiences would have been thrilled with a long dissertation on the inner workings of a nuclear submarine.
Second, I never understood why McGoohan was not a massive star. He is a great villain, but he also has a charming smile and twinkle in the eye that communicates humor and a little menace.
I read up on him. He was swallowed up by television, which probably suppressed a budding film career. He was also extremely Catholic, and would not take any role in which he was required to kiss a woman other than his wife, thereby taking him off the James Bond list (and apparently, he was on it). Modern audiences would know McGoohan as the villainous king who steals and chews scenes in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.
Lastly, Jim Brown is still cool, even in a winter parka.
At the outset, we meet Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) as a little boy, hearing his father (Stephen Graham) coming up the stairs, drunk, to spar with him. Bruce catches a slap, and we know it’s gonna’ be these two guys the whole picture, as the shy, depressed superstar makes his most personal, least commercial opus, Nebraska, while grappling with his troubled upbringing.
I read Bruce’s autobiography and was impressed with its honesty, charity, and equanimity. There was little, however, about his abusive father. Maybe Bruce wasn’t ready to share. But the point is relevant because in the film, while his father seems to be a handful, he is not portrayed as such a monster so as to justify the depths of Bruce’s torment. In fact, when Bruce is writing Nebraska, he seems more influenced by Terence Malick’s Badlands than Daddy issues.
In the midst of his struggle, Bruce has a relationship with a single mother (Odessa Young). Their union is supposed to be simple, earthy, a local rocker and a “heart of gold” fan who sees through The Boss’ facade. Mind you, this is post The River. Bruce is massive. He’s been on the cover of Newsweek and Time.
No matter. The picture persists in the massive conceit of Bruce the regular guy. When Bruce drops his waitress gal off, because of course she’s a waitress (in a diner, no less), it is in a blue collar row house, oil storage tanks in the background. Her father comes out and says, in a hackneyed, suspicious New Jersey small townie way, “is that the … uh … guitar player fella’?” Dad then sneeringly brings up Uncle Dave, who also “played guitar” and presumably, was not much of a success.
Oof.
Worse, the relationship doesn’t add much if anything to the story. Given the woman didn’t exist, one would expect writer/director Scott Cooper (Hostiles) to do more with the character. But she is there solely to be dumped by the angsty Bruce and to utter pap like, “if you can’t be honest with yourself, I don’t know how I can expect you to be honest with me.”
Holy Moses.
The second half of the film goes straight into the ditch. Bruce is struggling to present Nebraska in his stripped down vision while fending off the mildest of pressure to release Born in the USA. In the doing, he engages some more with his father while struggling with depression. It’s a long slog, with Bruce upset his cassette tape sound cannot be replicated in the studio, a struggle treated as if we were watching Oppenheimer and his team of scientists making Fat Man. In these moments, the film has absolutely no sense of proportion and lapses into the ridiculous.
The Boss’ head is in his hands. A lot.
Another negative is the Jon Landau character (Jeremy Strong). As Springsteen’s manager, Landau is supposed to provide some obvious tension between the Boss’ failure to follow up The River with something more commercial than his sparse, acoustic passion project. But there really is no tension at all because Landau is first and foremost an acolyte, and an uber reverential one at that. If Bruce said he wanted to follow up The River with hand puppetry, from this Landau, we’d get: “Hey [deep soulful look into Bruce’s eyes, hand on shoulder]. I Iove you. You do you.” When Landau and his wife discuss the Nebraska demo, their conversation is the most elemental exchange you’ll hear in film, as if Cooper fears the audience is so stupid it must be painstakingly explained just what a departure this record is and just how “dark” it seems. When Bruce plays the hit Born in the USA, Landau says, “I think a Muse came down and kissed you on the mouth.”
Sweet Mother of Jesus.
Ultimately, Cooper cannot land on any one thing for very long, and it is just not very cinematically interesting to watch a film about a guy writing a personal solo record.
The resolutions at the end are brutally maudlin, shield your eyes syrupy.
“You need therapy man.”
“You did the best you could. You had your own battles to fight.”
This while Bruce, an adult who just finished a concert, is sitting on his father’s lap.
There is a positive. Jeremy Allen White is really quite good as Springsteen. One has to be really careful with such a mythic figure, and White does a very understated job while still capturing the persona. The script calls for him to be perpetually tortured but he pushes back with a refreshing natural humanity. This is no small thing given how humorless and dour the script portrays him.
It’s not grotesquely terrible. But it’s pretty bad, hopelessly muddled and much duller and pedestrian than it had to be.
No doubt, Danny Boyle movies are easy on the eyes. This one is no different. But as good-looking as the film may be, tonally, it’s a mess.
Boyle updates us on the world 28 years after the release of the rage virus, and we find ourselves in the Scottish Highlands, where an isolated community is celebrating a 12 year old boy, Spike (Alfie Williams), and his passage into manhood. No, they don’t put Spike outside the gates of the town to fend for himself, like the Spartans. But he does accompany his father (Aaron Taylor Johnson) to the mainland, which has been quarantined for 28 years, to get Spike his first kill. There are a few fraught moments, and Spike does … okay. But he shows very natural terror during the terrifying chore, and when they return to their small burg to tell tales of his bravery, he is a bit ashamed.
He shouldn’t be. During his trip, we see that the infected have either regressed, stayed the same, or progressed. So, they are either crawling sloth-like behemoths who move at a glacial pace and eat worms (unless they can get near a human) and standard rage lunatics who speed attack in packs and have learned to eat. There is also an Alpha, a rage survivor so big and powerful that when he grabs your head, he can pull it off your body and your entire spinal column will follow. Spike also sees a fire, suggesting the presence of an un-infected.
Things go awry shortly after Spike’s return. He learns of a mysterious doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who may or may not be a lunatic, but is still on the mainland and may be the keeper of the fire. Spike’s mother (Jodie Comer) is bedridden, afflicted by crippling headaches and memory issues. After Spike sees his father with another woman, the revelation pushes him into a decision so monumentally stupid, all allowances you might give other failures in the film are immediately expended.
Looking to find the doctor who can help his mother, Spike enters the dangerous world of the mainland, but this time, not with his adroit and capable father, who got them out of several close calls the first trip, but with his infirm mother. On their first night, Spike almost buys it from one of the sloths, who was moving 30 yards over at least an hour, such is his capability.
Regardless, after some time on the mainland, which is beautifully rendered by Boyle, they find a pregnant infected. Spike’s mom and the woman hold hands to get her through delivery, a laughable conceit. Then, Mom and Spike tote the baby around (unlike the baby in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, this baby “appears” healthy, though the immediate acceptance of that reality is in keeping with Spike’s guileless approach to the dangerous mainland) and find the doctor. They also defeat the Alpha, who, lo’ and behold, is the baby’s father.
Before and after that victory, a bunch of pseudo philosophical mumbo-jumbo about love and death is bandied about.
And then Spike meets up with some locals who have been roving and fighting the infected.
They all look like members of A-ha. Or a grubbier Duran Duran.
I was hoping this touching film would be properly rewarded at Oscar time, but it was ignored. The omission is even more galling given the Academy’s decision to nominate 10 films this year, including the dreck of F1 and Frankenstein. Getting an Oscar nomination is never a confirmation of merit. But with 10 nominees? Please. Noah Baumbach’s story of mega Hollywood star Jay Kelly (George Clooney) in midlife crisis is clever, entertaining, and tender, and Clooney gives his best performance since The Descendants. The picture deserved better.
After the death of a mentor, the man who “discovered” him, Clooney is approached by an old friend from acting school (Billy Crudup). In the hope of establishing more of a real connection with both his past and normality, Kelly invites Crudup for drinks to reminisce about the old times. Unfortunately, Clooney is a massive, unknowing target, and he becomes the repository for Crudup’s bitter regret, as well as a TikTok sensation when the two get into a fist fight in the parking lot. Clooney, however, is not deterred, and takes his retinue, led by longtime manager Adam Sandler and publicist Laura Dern, to chase his younger daughter through France on his way to a tribute ceremony in Italy. To be unencumbered is a freeing experience for Clooney, albeit one that is laughably abnormal. He is recognized, fawned over, and catered to by a staff of five, and soon, even he sees the absurdity in his efforts.
The trek is infused with real heart and pathos, and throughout, Clooney flashes back to his ascent to stardom. While he seeks to reconcile himself to failures with family and friends, including his father (an irascible Stacy Keach) and an older adult daughter, who is estranged and embittered and attributes all of her mental torments to her wanting father, ultimately, they are not there for his moment. Clooney is left to the expected support from his longtime manager and assistants, but Sandler himself is going through his own crisis, realizing the limits of friendship in his uneven relationship as the fixer of all things for megastars. Dern has had it, and bolts with a “save yourself, this man does not love us” warning for Sandler. Eventually, Clooney is alone.
There are wonderful exchanges, poignant moments but, thankfully, no real resolution. Baumbach studiously avoids the pat. This type of film would normally result in some kind of oath, or commitment, or suggest a rapprochement, a teachable moment. Here, it ends with Clooney at the festival given in his honor to credit him for his life‘s work on the screen, and his lesson is not quite clear. Yes, like all men and women, Clooney has made mistakes, but when you get to see the joy in the faces of the people who love his work, work that has accompanied and maybe even inspired many of the moments in their own lives, there is at least a rebuttal to the regret.
For some, this, I suspect, may be too much sentimental log rolling for Hollywood. I ate it up with a spoon and wanted more.
A lovely film, one of the best of the year, replete with fantastic, unheralded performances. Sandler is particularly good, vulnerable and piercing. Though he has impressed enough, however sporadically (Punch Drunk Love, The Meyerowitz Stories, Uncut Gems, Hustle) that I can no longer register surprise.
I signed up for Tubi because it has a lot of older movies that don’t get run on some of the other streaming services. This very competent Peter Yates (Bullitt) flick from 1977 beguiled me as a young teen for a couple of reasons. First, it was a Peter Benchley, post Jaws vehicle, with Robert Shaw as yet another boat captain, though this time his quarry is treasure, not a shark.
Second, well … I was 13 years old, Jacqueline Bisset, enough said.
My prurient childhood fascination aside, this is a pretty solid picture. Two tourists (Nick Nolte and Bisset) happen upon two collided shipwrecks while snorkeling. They cross a local drug lord (Louis Gossett) who also has an interest in what they’ve found (tens of thousands of vials of morphine from an old WWII medical ship) and must enlist a wily old diver and antiquity collector (Robert Shaw) to help them find treasure from the other vessel, deliver the drugs, and otherwise negotiate their way out of the mess.
Nolte exudes charisma as the thrill seeker captivated by the jewels of the sea. Shaw is Shaw, commanding and interesting even when he is probably phoning it in. Gossett is oozily charming as a lethal Haitian trafficker interested not in treasure, but in the drugs, until he learns of the treasure and gets greedy.
Bisset is every bit as alluring as she was when I was 13, and it turns out, now that I can focus, she can act. She is menaced throughout the picture and her terror is palpable.
The film gets balky when Gossett inexplicably harasses the trio even though they are working on his behalf, and the ending is the cheesiest finale in movie history. But otherwise, sexy and solid.
filmvetter 