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Action/Disaster

Twisters – 1 star

September 1, 2024
1 star, 2024, Action/Disaster
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Goddawful, save for the winning Glen Powell and the fact I saw it in 4D, so the chairs moved and rumbled, wind blew on us, and lightning flashed in the theater.

Sensurround updated!

Otherwise, a complete dung heap.

Our story begins in Oklahoma, with one set of DEI/ChatGPT generated, wisecracking, riffing storm chasers, led by the charmless Daisy Edgar-Jones (Where the Crawdads Sing). Their endeavor feels like a Mentos commercial, until catastrophe strikes, and then it feels more like a darker Skittles commercial.

Five years later, after Daisy has run away from her fears to New York City, she is drawn back home, because, well … she’s a tornado whisperer. She can scan the topography, watch the wind disassemble a dandelion, take a deep breath, and she just knows where that pesky sky is gonna’ funnel.

Soon, she runs into Powell, a YouTube sensation who chases, or “wrangles,” tornados for fame and followers. Daisy must overcome her fears. Glen will help.

She also confronts the laziest form of corporate skullduggery one can imagine (so thin it is dropped immediately).

The script is banal and nonsensical. There really is nothing to say other than, “whoa!” given the impressive CGI and pyrotechnics (though someone does say, “be careful out there” – ugh), so you wait on some solid jokes and clever banter to get you to the next tornado, maybe some insight into other characters beyond “quirky” and “loud” and “ostentatiously, individualistically hip.”

Not gonna’ happen. Sure, there are a few spots for Powell to shine. But otherwise, he too has a coterie of kooky storm chasers, and they too look and speak like they’ve been assembled by a DEI/ChatGPT witch doctor, and while they all say “whoa!” differently, they don’t say it in a funny or interesting way (SPOILER – not a one of these wafer thin “characters” dies, which is a huge disappointment).

Powell pretty much has to steer this leaden ship with his impressive charm. God knows he tries, but he is thwarted by his co-star and a script written for dimwits.

Edgar-Jones has two faces – sad and sadder. So, for a rollicking, high octane joyride, one of your hosts is on thorazine, and Powell just can’t get past, into, or through her innate dullness.

And when they bond, there is nothing for them to chew on.  Case in point,  They are at a rodeo. Glen thinks Daisy is from New York City originally, so he is showing her the sights. There is great potential for some fun to be had here, the girl who knows the rodeo like the back of her hand letting the cowboy puff out his chest and wax poetically. But no. The kicker is she gets to say, mournfully, that this is not her first rodeo.

Then they talk about their first tornados. Again, this doesn’t have to be Oscar-worthy, but you can have a decent sexual double entendre or two here. God, anything to break up the verbal monotony. But Daisy demurs, Powell tells a story of how he saw one when he was 8 and realized he was supposed to be scared, she asks if he was scared, and he says . . . “yes.”

This is unintentionally moronic dialogue better suited to Idiocracy. Or Quest for Fire.   

As badly abused as the audience may have been, the people of Oklahoma are sitting on a winning class action suit for defamation. Here they are, living in a hellscape where tornados appear in an instant and ravage their communities. It’s all over the news! But damn if they don’t insist on proceeding with the town fair or the Little League playoffs or the Annual Pie-Eating Contest or running lightweight old-timey trolley cars down their streets.

Those plucky Okies won’t be dictated to by mere weather!

Yet, when the tornados arrive, you’d think these weathered veterans were from New Hampshire. They run around screaming and trying to gather belongings, hiding under metal containers, holding knives and bags of broken glass, doing all the other things people in tornados are advised not to do, until Daisy and Glen show up to remind them to seek shelter.

In a movie theater.

That is playing Frankenstein.

Because they don’t get first run movies in Oklahoma.

They do get a shitty country song about how you can’t spell Oklahoma without “home” and there’s a lot more of those ditties throughout this dog.

Gonna’ have to give a second look at Sharknado after this turd.

Rolling Thunder – 5 stars

May 21, 2024
70s, Action/Disaster, Crime/Mystery, Drama
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I recently devoured Quentin Tarantino‘s Cinema Speculations, wherein he recounts his childhood and the succession of films his mother’s boyfriends would take him to see when he was a kid. Most of the films he discusses are ones you probably shouldn’t take a kid to see.

When my mother and father got divorced, I was six years old and my father was supposed to take us every other weekend for two nights. That arrangement became a little less frequent over the years, and by later grade school, he was taking me and my brother on a Saturday day and an overnight. We would spend the weekend with him at his apartment and pretty much do the same thing every time: go shopping, do his errands, look for stereo equipment, maybe spend an hour or two at his law office, go Putt Putt golfing, and then to Shakey’s Pizza in Rockville or The Charcoal Grille in Bethesda. Dinner was from Swanson’s, so you got a entree’, two sides, and a dessert.

And movies. We went out to the movies a lot. Or, we stayed in Dad’s apartment, where he had a special key that was hooked up to some kind of internal cable system, and we could watch close to first-run movies there instead of going out. Or just catch what was on TV.

My father loved movies, he loved to talk about movies, he lived for movies. So much so that he would go through a certain kabuki with me where he would let me take a look at The Washington Post and ask what I wanted to see. I would pick a Herbie the Love Bug and he would say, “Nah. I heard about this good movie.” And then, like Quentin Tarantino with his mother’s boyfriends, you went to see a lot of dark, heavy, violent flicks, like The Laughing Policeman, The Silent Partner, Death Wish, or The Taking of of Pelham One Two Three. Or the remake of Farewell My Lovely, Night Moves, or The Eiger Sanction.

And Rolling Thunder. Which I noticed was available, and, as I couldn’t sleep anyway, I watched last night

Tarantino’s book has an entire chapter on the film, one of Paul Schrader’s first screenplays after Taxi Driver. Major Charlie Rane (William Devane) and Sergeant Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones) return to Texas after seven years of brutal captivity in a North Vietnamese prison camp. The adjustment is fraught, and even greater tortures are brought to bear on Devane, who is being treated by an Air Force psychiatrist (the just recently deceased Dabney Coleman) in his attempt to readjust. Tragedy ensues. Devane snaps. What follows is a classic 70s revenge flick.

The film travels wonderfully. There is a crisp foreboding to Devane’s return. While San Antonio welcomes him with marching bands and celebrations, and he is reunited with his long suffering and loving wife and the son who he last saw as a baby, Devane is damaged, and beneath the cheery gleam of a welcoming Texas, there is rot and danger. His son has anxiety issues. His wife has found another man (Devane says to her evenly, “you’re not wearing a brassiere” to which she replies, “oh, no one wears them anymore”). He cannot sleep in the house, preferring a cot in the garage.

So much is done well in the lead-up to the Death Wish-ian payoff, it goes unnoticed because, after all, this is a shoot ’em up, just desserts pic. Per Tarantino: ““This opening thirty minutes is a grippingly detailed character study, and by the time it’s over the audience doesn’t just sympathize with Charlie Rane, we really do understand him. Apparently better than anybody else in the film. It’s a much deeper depiction of the casualties of war than the [other movies of that era].”

I remember watching the film with my father. It is engrossing, both subtle and visceral, like a lot of pictures we saw together. It is also wildly inappropriate, also like a lot of pictures we saw together. I had trouble wrapping my head around something horrible that happens to Devane; not a spinning, vomiting Linda Blair kind of visual, but a brutality so smartly connected to a mundane part of the household, it just traveled with me, and probably not in a good way. Even last night, I fast-forwarded.

But on Sundays, when we were dropped off, I would not tell my mother about any of these movies, because I felt me and my Dad had this thing, this bond, and it was cemented in our little secret, Jujufruits and Junior Mints in hand.  And perhaps we did, although I’m probably mythologizing it. After all, my father needed to have something to talk to me about. Or at a minimum, just a two hour break from my babbling.

The picture is currently on Amazon Prime. Nostalgic for me but it really holds up.

The Killer – 4 stars

November 28, 2023
2023, 4 stars, Action/Disaster, Crime/Mystery
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David Fincher could grippingly film a Frosted Flakes commercial.

Fortunately, he has more to work with here, with Michael Fassbender as a lonely, meditative, assassin embarking on his own city-to-city retribution against his employers and their henchpeople.

We learn about the business, a grim primer without the dark humor of Grosse Pointe Blank, the panache of the John Wick franchise, or the earnestness of The Accountant. The work is drudgery and rote, until it isn’t, and things go tits up. Even then, though, there is no glamour. Just the racking up of air miles that cannot be utilized, the eating of fast food on stakeouts of dumps, and boring trips to any number of storage units.

Fincher’s picture is very easy and assured, occasionally inventive, never stalling, and yet, the endeavor feels beneath his gifts. The comedy is often too dark to resonate. Though the ending is refreshingly, thought-provokingly anticlimactic.

On Netflix.

Papillon – 4 stars

June 5, 2023
4 stars, 70s, Action/Disaster, Drama, Historical
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Franklin Schaffner’s (Patton) big-budget adventure/escape flick is competent, professional, well-acted (even if Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman have no interest in playing French people) and occasionally imaginative, particularly McQueen’s dream sequences as he fights solitary confinement and near-starvation. McQueen is the title character, sent to French Guiana for killing a pimp, where he meets the bespectacled Hoffman, a forger whose only protection is the ability to bribe officials. Their relationship deepens as McQueen, the Cooler King of The Great Escape, naturally attempts escape again and again here.

You may like the flick or not, but it is noteworthy for one scene, below. That crocodile has its snout wired shut and sure, it is drugged to the gills, but those are two massively bankable stars messing with a real crocodile. Nuts!


On MAX (formerly HBO Max).

Black Sunday – 4 stars

January 30, 2023
4 stars, 70s, Action/Disaster
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John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Ronin) handles this thriller with crisp professionalism. Proof? My wife, who loathes 70s films, came in for the last 25 minutes and was riveted. I even had to pause to get her up to speed on who was who and what was going on.

Granted, Frankenheimer has some pretty ingenious material to work with – Palestinian terrorists intend to fly the Goodyear blimp into the Super Bowl where they will detonate a massive bomb that will disperse shards of metal for maximum carnage (the film is adapted from Thomas Harris’ only non-Hannibal Lecter book).

The driven mastermind is Martha Keller (so driven because the Israelis have destroyed her entire family) and the psychologically impaired stooge is Bruce Dern (a former POW flyer in Vietnam, stripped of rank for “breaking”, now working for Goodyear flying the blimp). Robert Shaw is the relentless Mossad agent hot on their heels, guilt-ridden because he had a shot at Keller but let emotions engender mercy.

There is a little too much Dern and Keller relationship stuff, and in particular, Dern and his mental breakdowns/quirks, and the film could’ve been cut easily by 20 minutes.  But there is much to like here, and in particular, Frankenheimer does the madness of public violence great justice.  His insistence in showing just how many innocent people actually get killed if criminals and cops decide they’re gonna’ shoot it out in the streets is welcome, as evidenced by a thrilling Miami Beach sequence.

But the coolest facet is the fact that the NFL let them film the movie at the actual 1977 Super Bowl between the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, and the Goodyear people let them use the actual blimps, almost otherworldly in these days of image consciousness, risk-aversion, and fear of offense. Frankenheimer may have had Goodyear over a barrell. In one of his biographies, Frankenheimer recounted that he helped persuade Goodyear to let him use its blimps because if not, the production would rent a large blimp, paint it silver-and-black, and people would think it was the Goodyear blimp anyway.

The impact truly heightens the tension when we see Shaw and FBI Man Fritz Weaver running around the Orange Bowl past Tom Landry, Franco Harris and even this guy…

Okay, not the real Jimmy Carter, but this is the only shot of him in the film, and though it’s very quick, it is a testament to Frankenheimer’s desire for verisimilitude.

Solid. On a subset of Prime, MGM+.

The Northman – 2 stars

December 31, 2022
2022, Action/Disaster, Drama, Historical
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All the visual gifts in the world, and those of director Robert Eggars (The Witch) are prodigious, can’t make this Viking tale of filial vengeance any less stupid. There are a few joys - massive overacting (well played, Ethan Hawke, but Nicole Kidman wins by a nose), a few impressive scenes of sackings, the beautiful Northern Ireland topography standing in for Iceland - but boredom wins out, and by the end, it isn’t much of a fight. 

High and mindless, the picture could have used Game of Thrones’ intelligence or the John Boorman Excalibur’s fun. Instead, we get gory drug trips and silly moments when the film feels closer to RenFest than Valhalla. More hamburger than Hamlet. 

I do like how many of the actors try to do Norse and come off Transylvanian. 

Top Gun: Maverick – Defies Rating

June 6, 2022
2022, Action/Disaster, Drama
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The Mona Lisa of Stupid, a film so generic and irrepressibly cliche’ the never-fail motor of Tom Cruise almost fails to drive it.

Almost.

I liked it but I’m not proud of it. It is not the peak of genre nor does it defy it. It’s as insipid as elevator music, as banal as a modern country song, as predictable as pollen every spring.

I liked it because Tom Cruise willed it to be so.

I liked it in spite of the following

1) Bavaria appears to be the next potentially lethal nuclear power (again, homogenization and studied inoffensiveness to such a degree that the closest we get to “bad guys” live in Von Trapp territory)

2) The portrait at Val Kilmer at his funeral appears to have been made at Spencer Gifts


3) Every scene with Cruise and Jennifer Connelly is shot-for-shot a Kay Jeweler’s commercial.

4) The strafing run that serves as the centerpiece of the movie is the same strafing run in Star Wars and yes, a version of “the force” is used.

5) Cruise has many gifts. Chemistry with the opposite sex is not one of them. His post-coital moment with Connelly suggests they just engaged in a perfunctory bout of Wordle (K-I-S-S-Y).

Also, one might ask, if Val Kilmer, who cannot speak, was invited to reprise his role as Iceman, whither Kelly McGillis? She explains–

“I mean, I’m old and I’m fat, and I look age-appropriate for what my age is, and that is not what that whole scene is about.”

Hmmm. Connelly plays a bar owner.

I ask, who is more bar owner-ish?

 Alas.

The Batman – 2.5 stars

April 23, 2022
2 stars, 2022, Action/Disaster, Crime/Mystery
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Five things about The Batman

1. I get that Batman is supposed to be spare and mysterious. Here, however, Robert Pattinson plays him whispery, dreary and not only entirely humorless, but dull. Also, whenever Batman enters a room, is it necessary to have him looking down, and then, raising his head dramatically to face … the foyer? 

2. Except for Paul Dano, the villains are forgettable.  And what a waste of Colin Farrell. He might as well have been Michael Chiklis under all that padding and putty, and Chiklis would have been cheaper.

3. The end is laughably schmaltzy “I have met the enemy and he is me” blather. Batman is no longer vengeance. He is Moses, guiding his people through a parted Red Sea on the floor of the Garden. And he wants your vote!!

4. The film is no fun. Beautifully appointed, but zero fun. The Burton Batmans were super fun, the Nolan Batmans were heavy but also had some fun.  This is a mostly unsuccessful meld of Batman and SE7EN.  In fact, Pattinson would have been better served during his face-to-face with Dano by pleading, “What’s in the box!!!” rather than just pounding angrily on the glass. Not that all films have to be fun.  But certainly, films where an adult runs around dressed as a bat should be a little fun.

5.  I get the canon that Batman does not kill people, opting instead to maim, stun, paralyze or concuss them.  But now is the time to take a hard look at how many people have died because of his outmoded reticence.  In the climactic scene, he takes out a slew of snipers with punches and judo chops, kicks and roundhouses, all the while allowing the baddies to shoot significantly more quarry.  And without the intercession of Catwoman, he would have been toast, and Gotham would have suffered grievously.  Hubris, I say.

On HBO MAX.

Nobody – 3.5 stars

February 7, 2022
2021, 3 stars, Action/Disaster, Crime/Mystery
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Amazon.com: Nobody [DVD] : Various, Various: Movies & TV

“From the writer of John Wick . . .”

The film is John Wick, all the way down to its inexhaustible army of Russian pawns offered for slaughter. Instead of a laconic Keanu Reeves, we get a little less laconic and just a hair more put-upon Bob Odenkirk (the play against type is pretty cool). Still, while the film offers a massively high body count and is a little bloodier, it is pretty much the same as Wick minus the underworld mumbo-jumbo.

I’ve expended 2 hours in less fruitful pursuits. On HBO Max.

The Towering Inferno – 4 stars

February 13, 2021
4 stars, 70s, Action/Disaster
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Let us stipulate at the outset that pre-CGI disaster movies sit in the softest spot in my heart. When I was a kid, you couldn’t keep me away from them.  The first movie I saw without a parent was The Poseidon Adventure (’72), It was at The Avalon on Connecticut Avenue. My mom had a small gift shop appended to that theater, so they let me come in to see whatever we wanted. In that dark movie house, sitting with Jimmy Sullivan, jujifruits in hand, I was IN that dank, doomed ship and with that besieged group led by another cool priest (Gene Hackman, though he never rivaled Jason Miller in The Exorcist).  I was with poor Roddy McDowell and his shattered and bloody kneecap and Stella Stevens, Ernie Borgnine’s tough talking, busty wife, who had the moxie to tell the heavier Shelly Winters that, no, she was going into the tube first.

“I’m going next. So if ole’ fat ass gets stuck, I won’t get stuck behind her.”

I’m 9 years old.  That was something.

Throw in pre-Nancy Drew (Pamela Sue Martin).  

I was lost to it all and inhaled everything that came next.  Earthquake (’74) (in Sensurround!)  Oh my God, Charlton Heston, don’t you dare give up Genevieve Bujold to jump in the sewers and save a doomed Ava Gardner! 

All the Airports (’70, ’75, ’77, and ’79).  I loved George Kennedy and later, when I saw him in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, I was shocked such a gruff teddy bear could play such an awful villain. 

You can throw in The Hindenburg (’75) as well, though I kind of knew how that was going to end.       

I even went to the theater to see The Swarm (’78). Killer bees are, apparently, an ever-present threat to nuclear reactors. 

Then there were the disasters created by bad men (not just the poor salesman who blew up the airliner in Airport because he needed to leave his wife an insurance payoff).

Juggernaut (’74) – an ocean liner is rigged to blow (red wire or green wire!!!) and the bomb squad, led by Richard Harris, has to be dropped on the ship in rough seas to defuse the bomb. I’m still haunted by the scene of a member of the bomb squad missing the ship and just being . . . . left.  Liners cannot turn around.

Black Sunday (’77) – a blimp threatens The Super Bowl, helmed by the deadly serious Robert Shaw and an intriguing Marthe Keller (first and last German I ever had a crush on)

Rollercoaster (’77) – Tim Bottoms blowing up my favorite rides, including King’s Dominion’s The Rebel Yell (since re-christened The Rebel Scum)

Okay, that’s a long preamble.  The Towering Inferno has it all. Let me count the ways.

1)  Stars.  Yuge stars!  Bigly stars!  McQueen. Newman. Dunaway. Holden. Come on.

2)  OJ Simpson as a good guy.  He knows the security is for shit, and he lets McQueen know the place is a tinderbox. Then he saves a deaf woman.  And a cat. Boy did things go south for OJ.

3)  Shocking deaths.  They kill Robert Wagner and all he did was sleep with his secretary in the upper offices after foolishly having the phones cut off for privacy (by the way, I think his secretary is 10 years older than Wagner, which is pretty advanced).  Jennifer Jones seems as safe as any character can be, and then, boom, she just falls out of elevator and they bounce her off the structure.  My Lord, the genial bartender who was later a regular on Barney Miller, he gets crushed by a gaudy statue.

4) Moments of great bravery, by the innocent and even those a little bit responsible. Guess what? In 1974, it was still women and children first.  Even Richard Chamberlain, Holden’s shit-bird son-in-law who took kickbacks on the crappy wiring and dysfunctional sprinkler system, waited to try and jump the escape line after the women and children were evacuated. Holden ain’t clean, but he rises to the occasion announcing, much like a ship captain, that he will go down with the skyscraper.  Robert Vaughan is a United States senator and he buys it trying to keep Chamberlain from jumping the line. Wagner’s attempt to save his secretary is akin to a singular Charge of the Light Brigade.

6)  It works. At its’ silliest (you only learn about the million gallons of water on the top of the building in the last 20 minutes), it is always watchable.     

7) Professional camaraderie.  Steve McQueen’s number two in the San Francisco police department in Bullitt was his number two in the San Francisco fire department.  

On HBO Max.