widsith-58602 Reviews

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

Fabulous performances from a stellar cast - a gem

[8/10 · 20 February 2017]

Two brothers get together to re-evaluate their lives and dreams, but it soon become apparent that they have more differences than similarities, and perhaps would have been better off not hooking up at all.

This is a movie that makes you work. There are no easy clichés to grab hold of. Nicholson shows that he can act the pants off most others, playing a sundied, self-examining radio host, a million miles from the 'Nicholsom' we're used to.

Dern gives an astounding performance as perhaps one of the most obnoxious characters to ever grace the screen - a self-obsessed businessman and would-be millionaire, if he wasn't to busy taking drugs and abusing women.

Ellen Bursten is utterly convincing and heartbreaking performance as one of his neglected hangers one, and just as one is thinking the film is burning itself out, steals the show with an memorable explosion of emotion.

Julie Anne Robinson, the young of the two women hanging around Dern, is equally impressive. A promising actress with three films to her credit, she sadly died of smoke-inhalation during apartment fir at her home on Eugene, Oregon, 13 April 1975.

It's Nicholson one ultimately remembers most from this film, even though he is really an observer thorough whose eyes we witness the self-destructive habits of the others.

Really glad I saw this, happening upon it when browsing through a batch of 70's movies that cane into my possession. No car chases, gun fights or sex scenes (well, one brief one), but a rare ensemble performance, a real gem.

USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage (2016)

A puzzling, muddled, film - starts OK then sinks without trace.

[2/10 · 14 October 2016]

I've titled this puzzling and muddled, because it's always 'puzzling' to me how, given the resources they have at hand, some directors manage to produce something of such poor quality. 'Muddled' because the screenplay jumps from theme to theme and scene to scene with no obvious logic.

The film starts creditably enough with some basic character building - suitably gung-ho or sensitive crewmen, the respective American and Japanese captains with their professional concerns and personal issues, and there's a generic love story thrown in. It is difficult to go much further without plot-giveaways, but from then on the film descends into something resembling a collection of out-takes from Titanic, Pearl Harbour, Moby Dick: 2010 and The Hunt for Red October.

The recreation of the Indianapolis is impressive, 'photo-relistic' initially, but the money or enthusiasm for quality CGI seems to have rapidly run out, because thereafter the ships and sharks move about obviously too fast, too slow or with peculiar quirky motion. The Indianapolis's angles as it is sinking change repeatedly, one moment it has tutned almost upright in the water, the next it is at barely 30 degrees from the horizontal.

The actors, including Cage, give reasonably competent performances, but as another reviewer has already said, the whole caboodle would have fared better as a TV movie without big-screen pretensions. So, sorry everyone, while it has a promising opening, the quality of the production then drops rapidly.

Independents' Day (2016 Video)

I enjoyed this, but I suggest waiting until it's in the $1 bin.

[4/10 · 14 June 2016]

First, do not mistake this for the 2016 sequel to the original Independence Day. "Independents' Day" (the cheeky title alone deserves an extra point) is made by The Asylum, a company which specializes in grabbing as many sales as it can from people mistaking their productions for upcoming blockbusters, or from people such as myself who don't mind watching these things occasionally as a change from all the over-hyped, big-budget productions about. Production values are very much in dollars rather than billions of dollars. However, that doesn't mean the result is necessarily bad.

The actors take their roles seriously, albeit they're not exactly A-list, being either complete unknowns or daytime soap extras. Occasionally The Asylum do pull in a recognizable face, but there's none in this film.

The special effects are actually not bad - better than many TV productions I've seen, and the story-line is quite imaginative, although the screenplay lets things down a bit. That's a shame, as with a bit more attention to the latter the whole production could be raised a notch or two.

In this film, some large(ish) spaceships arrive on earth and instead of immediately destroying everything offer to relocate earth's population to avoid a costly battle, even offering rewards in the form of cures for various diseases if humankind cooperates. The female vice-president of America finds it's up to her to work out what's really going on and find a way to prevent the aliens' from taking possession the planet.

I definitely wouldn't recommend wasting $10 on this - wait a couple of months until it appears in the $1 bin. It's good to pass a bored 1½ hours when there's nothing else to do, or save it for a day when your in bed with chickenpox. Also, as another reviewer has pointed out, The Asylum productions are blissfully free from the expletives and sexism that appear in almost everything these days, for which I'm truly grateful.

Star Trek: Spock's Brain (1968) Season 3, Episode 1

Forget the smug derision this episode gets. It's Trek at it's goofy best.

[8/10 · 6 April 2016]

Trek at it's best is sublime, at it's worst embarrassing to watch, but why is this episode so panned? It is great fun. Admittedly one is left feeling one has watched some sort of pantomime special, or a Trek equivalent of Police Squad. However, there are far worse episodes in series three - The Way to Eden is at the bottom of the barrel in my opinion - and I'm personally grateful that the studio pulled the plug as the scriptwriters were rapidly running out of new ideas.

The plot is simple. A matriarchal underground society steals Spock's brain because their old one - which controls all their underground machinery - has broke. See? Perfectly understandable. Kirk, Scotty and McCoy beam down to rescue him/it, in the process discovering there's a bit more to this act of theft than first appears.

Would it be a spoiler to reveal that Spock is reunited with his brain ready for the next episode? DeForest Kelley is a delight to watch as the stressed brain surgeon, and his banter with Nemoy immediately after is equally entertaining.

Forget the smug derision this episode gets. It's Trek at it's goofy best, up there with The Trouble with Tribbles and various other "don't worry too much about the plot" episodes.

The Abyss (1989)

OMG awful

[1/10 · 29 January 2016]

I saw the extended version with the 'real' ending. It is just as rubbish as the shorter version. This is an astonishingly poor movie.

It is sort of Close Encounters underwater, but with awful dialogue, one-dimensional characters and zero imagination. It's the kind of film that one keeps watching, presuming that some development or impressive finale will make up for all the dross that one has to sit through. It doesn't. I watched the longer version, thinking the 'directors' cut might have some qualities that the theatrical release did not. Big mistake.

Unless you're a student of bad film-making, avoid this.

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)

Wow!

[9/10 · 19 December 2015]

Wow! Just seen Star Wars! There's a princess and spaceships and flying around. There's a robot and another robot, three or four robots - a lot of robots, and there's a bad guy in black who has a red sword and they fight, and then they're flying around in spaceships again, and one of them is a stormtrooper who doesn't like being a stormtrooper, 'tho I'm not sure why, and things keep blowing up, and they're walking around in a desert saying "It's the Force", and there's an old guy with a beard helping them and a big, round star destroyer thing that all the spaceships have to go and fight. Wow! Another robot! Not too sure what he plot was about, actually. Was there a plot? WOW!

Village of the Damned (1960)

A minor masterpiece despite having a cast and crew of relative unknowns.

[7/10 · 23 September 2015]

Having watched (and admittedly skipping through bits of) the awful 1995 Village of the Damned, I decided to re-watch the 1960 version. I recall seeing it when I was in my teens and recall it as something both classy and compulsively eerie at the same time. Does it still hold up three decades later?

It does. It is in some ways a typical B-movie, and I suspect that was the producers' and director's intention, but somehow the cast, story and screenplay work magic with each other and lift the production to another level. This is very much the zenith of the director's career. Wolf Rilla was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who started off working with the BBC before having a go a film-making. While never producing anything terrible, he could not be accused of being in the upper echelons of film director circles. After spawning a number of more forgettable productions and a spell back in television, he retired to manage a hotel in France.

There are some curiously familiar faces, although no A-list actors, such as George Sanders, more famous as the voice of Shere Khan in Disney's The Jungle Book. His wife is played by Barbara Shelley who went on to become a pillar of the British Hammer House of Horror scene. This is the kind of film that you can happily watch again for the pleasure of seeing how many 1950s character actors you can spot.

So, a quality film, but perhaps more by accident than intention. Incidentally, the lead girl amongst the strange children is June Cowell, sister of Simon Cowell. After a very short career, she purposefully ditched film work for family life, stating she's never had a single regret and wishes her illustrious brother could find the same happiness she has.

M*A*S*H: The Life You Save (1981) Season 9, Episode 20

Not sure where they were going with this one

[6/10 · 17 September 2015]

After bringing a young soldier back to life, Charles developed a unhealthy obsession with the near death experience. Meanwhile, Colonel Potter assigns various menial tasks - laundry, kitchen duties, trash management - to his senior officers.

This is a average quality episode, where two ideas - that the regular cast couldn't cope with menial tasks delegated to them, and Charles's preoccupation with the moment of death - were used, but neither developed convincingly. Charles's actions in particular are increasingly out of character and credibility. It's always enjoyable to watch the ensemble cast going through their paces, but this is one of the more forgettable episodes.

127 Hours (2010)

A mixture of true-life horror, endeavor and salvation, and just excellent.

[8/10 · 14 September 2015]

IF YOU KNOW THE BASIC STORY, THEN THE SPOILER IS OBVIOUS AND THIS REVIEW WON'T AFFECT YOUR VIEWING.

This is the story of how Aron Ralston survived five days trapped in a remote Utah canyon, one arm pinned under a tumbled boulder. Great craft is shown here, both in engaging the audience's interest and holding onto it for two hours. It succeeds, not least because of James Franco's performance as the happy-go-lucky adventurer whose world view is profoundly changed by his experience – facing, he believed, certain death but without loosing his cool, then being 'reborn' when he managed to cut through his own right arm and survived.

I'm not a particular fan of Danny Boyle, but this is a case of the director, story and casting being perfectly matched (including the real Aron Ralston being on set throughout filming, advising Boyle and Franco on how things should be portrayed). The severing of the arm is show very graphically – one knows it is a studio prop he's cutting through, but it is still gut-wrenching to watch, yet one can't imagine the tale being as effectively any other way.

The only major departure from true events is when Ralston goes swimming in a hidden canyon lake with two girls whom he happens to meet on the trail. In reality they simply passed by, but Boyle extrapolated from this occurrence to illustrate the self-centered and hedonistic existence Ralston lived before his accident. Ralston approved of the final cut, saying that it was as close to the truth as anything made for commercial release could be.

The lessons from the film are simple ones – the value of human relationships, and that if you're off somewhere remote, tell someone where you're going! Ralston now earns a living as a motivational speaker, but still spend all the time he can climbing mountains and going on other adventures. I walk in the hills occasionally, always alone, so this film touched a chord. Plus it involves rocks! As a geology buff, this always gives something a bit of extra cudos. Well done Danny.

Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)

Good entertainment

[7/10 · 13 September 2015]

IMDb averaging 4/10? No way! This is great fun. Sly is a tough but fair cop living a bachelor lifestyle whose minuscule mother comes to stay with him. In no time she's trying to 'improve' him with motherly advice, improve his diet and get him back together with his lady love. It never dips into sentimentality or become too serious, and is a quality, well-paced production in general.

Happening to catch this on TV recently, I'd long forgotten that Sly can not only act when he wants to, but has excellent comic timing. (He really should have not spent so much time trying to be an action hero, but explored his dramatic and comic abilities). There are some really good moments, such as when his mom squares up to a sly villain threatening her son and comes out with a catchphrase of Sly's real-life rival Arnie Schwartzenegger.

The only criticism I'd give is that toward the end a slightly laborious car chase is thrown in, but thankfully the comedy returns as his interfering mom steps in again. Good entertainment, and it really, really deserves at least a couple of stars more on the IMDb rating.

WKRP in Cincinnati (1978–1982)

I loved this, and still do.

[9/10 · 13 September 2015]

In an era before cellphones, the internet or i-things, this was a little slice of heaven. The small, ensemble cast mesh wonderfully together. It takes a while for the angles and humour to work themselves out in the first few episodes, but like M*A*S*H or Friends, the cast stealthily grow on you until you catch yourself aping their mannerisms and quotes in daily life.

The basic premise is a family-run classical music radio station that has to reinvent itself as a rock station to survive, for which they hire Gary Sandy as a new station director. He inherits a dysfunctional but enthusiastic set of individuals, including utterly self-possessed advertising salesman Frank Bonner, much loved but totally ineffectual office manager Gordon Jump, gorgeous secretary Loni Anderson and utterly gullible and forever earnest news presenter Richard Sanders.

As a comedy it never makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously, but does have quiet fun having a crack at racism, sexism and gay issues occasionally. It's really a character driven affair, and one watches episode again and again for the pleasure of seeing how the crew of the station either wind each other up or manage to pull together when crises hit.

In spite of finishing a third of a century ago, it still comes over as fresh, and a league above many far more plush and 'daring' comedies of recent times. It doesn't have the answer to life, the universe and everything in it, it is just plain, heart-warming fun.