Category: Rapid Response

Rapid Response: Airplane!

 

I watched “Airplane!” an embarrassing number of times as a teenager. I had seen it so many times that I convinced myself it was one of my favorite movies that I would never put on any “Best Of” list ever and that I would be sick of it were I to watch it again.

It’s been several years and I finally watched it again. I can say that it is notoriously stupid and goofy but oh so hilarious. If there was ever a movie you would feel sillier, more childish and immature for loving after watching it, it would be this one.

It is so completely goofy and random and gets a way with murder. There isn’t a moment of “Airplane!” that can be taken seriously. Sight gag after sight gag goes by unchallenged, the movie finds ways to be racist and sexist in more ways than one, it liberally parodies iconic films without any reason for doing so, it is crude, sexual, violent and offensive to an extreme, and its now famous dialogue is not so much clever as it is convenient set ups based on literal translations of common movie cliches and expressions.

In that way, the film shares less in common with the random, ridiculous comedies of its day like Monty Python or Mel Brooks films, but more in common with the movies that all use BIG RED TEXT in their titles today, “films” like “Scary Movie,” “Epic Movie,” “Superhero Movie” or “Meet the Spartans.” Continue reading “Rapid Response: Airplane!”

Rapid Response: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Robert Wise’s “The Day The Earth Stood Still” is one of the finest ’50s B-Movies of its time.

In terms of ’50s, campy, sci-fi B-movies that are actually pretty good, you don’t get much better than “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

This is your pinnacle Cold War B-movie. Dozens if not hundreds were released in the ’50s, some are remembered, some are exceptionally bad, and a select few, like “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” actually have some merit.

The films played on the fears surrounding a potential Soviet attack and the many forms they could find to strike. We see such methods as toxic shrinking gas in “The Incredible Shrinking Man” and aliens embodying exact replicas of people we know and love in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

“TDTESS” reverses the assumption that there will be an invading force aiming to destroy mankind. In this film, the enemy is blatantly mankind itself and our lust for violence amidst ignorant fear. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)”

Rapid Response: A Clockwork Orange

“A Clockwork Orange” is a devilish and entrancing cult film, but it challenges its audience more than others like it.

Arguably the most sinister opening shot in all of film is the extreme close up of Alex DeLarge in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” His intensely focused grimace sets the tone for the entire film, a devilishly and ironically sadistic film.

I watched it in a special midnight showing at the IU Cinema with a gaggle of other co-eds all anticipating a hyper violent cult film. They didn’t leave disappointed (nor did I), but they left surprised, uncertain of how to think or feel. They had never seen a film like it, one with so many gorgeous images, colors and cinematic flourishes.

This audience would likely have more “fun” at a Tarantino movie or a gritty graphic novel blockbuster, many of which are arguably nearing in “A Clockwork Orange’s” quality. But “A Clockwork Orange” tests its audience, challenges it to ponder questions that perhaps have no answers, like what symbolism sitting in an exotic milk bar has or why Alex listens to Beethoven. Continue reading “Rapid Response: A Clockwork Orange”

Rapid Response: National Velvet

 

Let’s call a spade a spade and acknowledge that for how much I’ve said these Old Hollywood movies from the late ’30s and ’40s up through the ’50s comprise just about the best time period for movies, there are quite a few that have aged terribly.

“National Velvet” is a fine example of a super corny, campy, hokey, dopey, feel good, family movie that would make a number of modern audiences wretch. Yet it’s survived based on its pedigree. Mickey Rooney was an insurmountably huge movie star when this movie came out in 1944, and at the age of 12, it was just about the first big role for the recently late Elizabeth Taylor, whose own movie stardom needs no further editorializing. It even has a small part for Angela Lansbury, who was nominated for an Oscar for a different film and lost to one of her “National Velvet” costars for Best Supporting Actress.

But the film could not be more cut and dry. A girl with dreams and ambitions to own a horse that she loves and cares for deeply ends up winning the horse of her dreams in a raffle, discovers the horse’s potential to race and jump and enters it to race in the Grand National race in 1920s England. She goes as far as racing the horse herself and winning, despite being disqualified for being an underage girl. Continue reading “Rapid Response: National Velvet”

Rapid Response: The Godfather

Of course I could’ve written a full Classics piece on “The Godfather.” I could write a book on “The Godfather.”

Except I can’t write a book on “The Godfather.” There’s too much I simply do not know, too many people who have seen the film more than I have and will serve as a better expert on one of the greatest films ever made. There are non-film critics who are more familiar with “The Godfather” than I am.

And yet it is impossible not to be familiar with Francis Ford Coppola’s film. No film this critically acclaimed (it sits at #2 on the AFI Top 100 and #4 on the Sight and Sound poll) is also this widely popular and beloved (it also sits at #2 on the IMDB Top 250). I had watched the film mere months ago, and there was not a moment of the sprawling three hour epic, not even just the iconic deaths and dramatic scenes that have been copied to death, that I could not visualize. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Godfather”

Rapid Response: The Lost Weekend

Billy Wilder explores alcoholism in this early Best Picture winner.

It is perhaps hard to imagine today how edgy and depressing a movie like “The Lost Weekend” was in 1945. Ray Milland portrayed Don Birnam in an Oscar winning role that gave us the movie’s first drunk. Milland and Director Billy Wilder not only led this tough, gritty and realistic film to box office success but also to a Best Picture award.

“The Lost Weekend” was the first film to tackle alcoholism head-on, and it was a bold move for an audience that until then had wanted little more than to be entertained. Birnam is set to go on a detox weekend with his brother until he convinces his brother and girlfriend to delay the trip by a few hours. In that time, he scours his apartment for hidden booze and money so that he can get sloppy wasted. And after leaving more than a dozen “vicious circles” on a bar, he misses his train and is abandoned by his brother, his bartender and soon his girl. I imagined this would become a movie in which we watched a man go from bad to worse to rock bottom, but that comes later. The screenplay by Wilder and Charles Brackett actually devotes about a third of the film to developing Birnam as a writer, as a lover and as an amateur barfly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Lost Weekend”

Rapid Response: Spellbound (1945)

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” is fairly overacted, but it’s remarkable to look at given Salvador Dali’s famous dream sequence.

Spellbound

I might have thought that an Alfred Hitchcock movie with a psychological twist, Ingrid Bergman, Salvador Dali set pieces and skiing would’ve blown me away, so when I notice how campy, absurd and overacted “Spellbound” is, I may be expected to be frustrated rather than admitting how much fun I had watching the damn thing.

It’s certainly far from a trash, B-movie. It was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and a handful of other Oscars, and Hitchcock is such a technical perfectionist that it’s impossible not to be entranced in a story even as bananas as this. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Spellbound (1945)”

Rapid Response: The Hudsucker Proxy

It’s always fun to see how far the Coen Brothers have come. There was a time after “Blood Simple,” before “Fargo” and surrounding the time of their Cannes victory for “Barton Fink” that the Coens had a peculiar reputation in the critical community, not like today when they are practically revered beside Scorsese, and some of the few American directors people actually eagerly anticipate movies from.

Rather, they were seen as remarkable stylists so in love with the movies that the Coens established a cult following and cult hatred long before “The Big Lebowski.” Some of their movies, as critics argued, were all style over substance, exotic plunges into cinema itself with plots that were intentionally contrived or outrageous, dialogue that was purposefully literary and fantastical and characters that were not just aiming for parody but were steeped in it.

The other three movies they made in this time period were “Raising Arizona,” which is a cult classic comedy that I couldn’t even get through, “Miller’s Crossing,” which I haven’t seen and is probably one of their lesser known dramas, and “The Hudsucker Proxy,” which I watched last evening.

“The Hudsucker Proxy” so perfectly sums up the moment in cinema history that were these infuriating and revolutionary characters the Coens before they were the Coens. It is a film that was generally panned when released but today has a solid following for the strongest of Coen fans. The reason for it is that it was thought they had made a film so in love with their own cinema dissertation that even fans would not get past it, a film so intentionally cliche it was maddening.

Roger Ebert’s two star review wonderfully analyzes each school of thought in either reviling the film or hailing it as a masterpiece. “The problem with the movie is it’s all surface and no substance,” one side of his brain says, while the other chimes in that, “That’s the tired old rap against the Coens… How many movies do have heart these days?… One good reason to go to the movies is feast the eyes, even if the brain is left unchallenged.”

Except the movie does have mental challenges, just not for the moral side of the brain. How and why the Coens choose to recreate so many historical cinema cues without actually making them a parody is part of the film’s mystique. At times it undoubtedly is too excessive even in its excess, but it falls back on its own sense of quirk and charm even if you’re not familiar with all the references they drum up.

It also continued to prove to me why Paul Newman is one of my all time favorite actors. He along with Tim Robbins and especially Jennifer Jason Leigh channeling Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday” are terrific. I will say though that if the Coens made this movie today, they would have cast J.K. Simmons in the part of the newspaper editor.

So yes, maybe the origin story of the Hula Hoop is not the most riveting or heartening tale of the rat race and romance in the 1950s, but “The Hudsucker Proxy” deserves to be seen as a relic of film history, both past and present.

Rapid Response: Shadow of a Doubt

To say “Shadow of a Doubt” is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films is like saying that “Please Please Me” is one of the Beatles best albums. It may not even crack the top 10. And who else can make a movie as good as this one and not have it be in their top 10?

However, this did represent a turning point in Hitch’s already legendary career. “Shadow of a Doubt” was his first wholly “American” film. He made “Rebecca” under the American studio system, but the cast was British and so was the setting. This film starred Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten in a thriller set in the quaint coastal town of Santa Rosa.

And it says on the special features of the DVD that “Shadow of a Doubt” was in fact Hitch’s favorite film. It seems strange considering how personal “Vertigo” is, or how around the ’40s and ’50s he was considered one of the greatest directors of all time, but not for the American films he was making at the time. His British films like “The 39 Steps” were the ones that resonated with critics so strongly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Shadow of a Doubt”

Rapid Response: Witness for the Prosecution

Billy Wilder’s “Witness for the Prosecution” is an outrageous, silly and over-the-top courtroom drama that likely would blow up in its own face were it not based on an Agatha Christie play. And boy does it work.

It stars Charles Laughton in one of his best roles, a blow hard of a barrister in the English courts just getting out of the hospital, but not without a singing sense of humor and dry bout of cynicism. His constant disdain towards his nurse insisting that he not work, drink or smoke is one of the film’s great charms.

His job is to defend the innocent inventor Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), who has been accused of murder of an elderly widow. She recently changed her will to leave everything to him, and although he constantly plays the naive fool as to how serious of trouble he is or how much his German wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich) will actually defend him, he’s a cool, confident and likeable character. He’s portrayed by one of Hollywood’s former boy toys, Tyrone Power. In this 1957 film, he was 43 and died a year later, but he had boyish good looks that landed him in numerous blockbuster A-pictures of the time. “Witness for the Prosecution” even gets cute with this when Power is seen watching “Jesse James,” the title character serving as one of his most notable roles.

And being a play, the film is almost entirely courtroom drama. There are only a few scene changes and all the extended courtroom sequences are handled with an enticing pace and levity.

But the ending surely makes the film famous. Just before and following the verdict, “Witness for the Prosecution” has more twists and turns than a pretzel, and all of them are deliciously absurd. The performances Laughton, Power and Dietrich especially are rightfully over the top and accommodate these more idiotic moments nicely.

The film was nominated for Best Picture that year, and it certainly isn’t as good as the winner “The Bridge on the River Kwai” or the fellow courtroom drama nominee “12 Angry Men.” It also arguably isn’t one of Billy Wilder’s best but it’s an enjoyable classic film with a great cast and fun story.