First off, the 1927 Todd Browning/Lon Chaney feature London After Midnight is perhaps one of the more famous “lost” films of the silent era. Perhaps even THE most well known of them all, given the talents involved. (lists of famous Lost Films can be found here and here and here)
According to IMDB: (London After Midnight) is believed that this film existed until 1967. Inventory records indicated that the only remaining print was being stored in MGM’s vault #7 which was destroyed by fire in 1967. By that time, all other elements had been destroyed or were missing.
On TCM the other night, however, they aired a slightly under one hour “reconstruction” of the film. Since there is no actual footage remaining of the film, they used still and creative zooming/panning along with title cards to give viewers a sense of what this lost film was.
Visually, I have to say the film (or rather the still) sure deliver the goods. Lon Chaney’s vampire character is certainly memorable, as is Edna Tichenor as Luna the Bat Girl, the vampire’s assistant.
But the story…well…
Look, its silly. Perhaps even beyond silly. London After Midnight is, at its heart, a murder mystery. Five years before the patriarch of a family dies in what the detective in charge (Chaney) rules a suicide. But he clearly doesn’t believe this to be the case. Five years later, the house beside the deceased man’s estate is rented to what appear to be a pair of vampires (Chaney and Tichenor) who creep out the neighbors…one of whom may be a murderer.
Again, what follows is rather silly, storywise. If you must know, much of the vampire subplot is nothing more than a way for the detective to push the people next door into thinking that the suicide (actually murder) victim may be brought back to life…and therefore expose his murderer.
I am, however, pleased with the presentation, limited though it was to static stills. The people behind this “reconstruction” did a pretty good job of giving us what we needed to know so that we could at least visualize the lost film.
One remains hopeful, however, that sometime in the future a print of the actual movie will be found. Silly plot aside, I’d love to see the great Lon Chaney’s every scene as the vampire!
There are an awful lot (29!) of films mentioned, and some of the “headscratchers” may be more a function of lapses in logic with the screenplay.
For example, there is no way to understand or explain why the alien invaders from the movie Signs decided to target our planet when it has the one item (water) that can effectively destroy them. The sad thing is that, for the most part, I enjoyed the film, but that lapse in writing logic really sunk the movie.
The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, presented an ending that was also very ambiguous, at least in parts. As the article states, one realizes that there is story structure clearly evident before and after protagonist Dave Bowman’s “psychedelic” trip. The monoliths that take the Earth explorers out to Jupiter, and subsequently had Bowman enter a monolith floating out there and transform into a “cosmic” star child, indicated this was the next step in evolution. The scene also neatly replicated the first part of the movie, where we witnessed the evolution of apes to humans via touching the monolith and gaining an understanding of using tools. The question, of course, is then: What about the elegant room Bowman was in? His aging? His meal? Dropping the glass of wine? If you look closely at the scenes, Bowman is aging. He appears first as the astronaut he is in his full spacesuit. He subsequently (I believe, anyway), is allowed to live out what is left of his life in comfortable surroundings. Perhaps it is a gift of the alien race. Once he ages to the point of death, it is then that he is reborn as the star child.
At least that’s the way I saw it!
If you make it far enough into the list, at 29 they mention another headscratcher that, like the Signs example, I feel is a major writing flaw. The movie is the 2009 reboot of Star Trek and the issue cited is the convenient way the young Kirk meets the old (now alternate reality) Spock on Delta Vega following the destruction of Vulcan. When that scene played out in the theater I was watching it, I couldn’t believe it and for the reasons cited in the article. Far fectched doesn’t begin to do justice to the astronomical coincidence involved in Kirk and the elder Spock meeting in that barren planet. Yet the scene plays out straightforwardly and no one in the film questions Kirk’s incredible luck.
Anyway, the list is there for you to read, should you be interested.
When early word got out about the then upcoming film Looper, like many others I was intrigued. I’ve always been fascinated with the whole time travel genre, even though so much has been written about it since author H. G. Wells essentially created it with his 1895 novel The Time Machine.
What was most fascinating about the early reports on the film was that the film would feature Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis playing the same person, old and young versions of a hitman whose job in our near future is to kill people sent back in time and dispose of their bodies.
The wrinkle to the story is that these hitmen, known as “Loopers”, eventually wind up killing their thirty year later future selves. This winds up being their “last” job and is paid for in bricks of gold. The Looper then has thirty years to live out their life as they please, owing no one anything, only with the knowledge that after those thirty years are up, they will be sent back in time and killed by themselves.
Got that?
Personally, I find it an intriguing concept but one that, on the outset, is somewhat flawed…though ironically enough that central flaw plays a big role in the film’s ultimate resolution. Without getting into too many details (or spoilers), what young Joe realizes at the end of the film applies not just to him, but to everyone who has been sent back.
Anyway, the film was released in, frankly, a very dead time for movies, which made me curious. Early word was that the film was very good, yet the release date is usually a movie dead zone, a time when the studios release films they don’t think/expect to be quite worthy of summer or major holiday blockbuster release. Still, the film has done well, though after three weeks it does appear to be on the verge of dropping out of the top ten list.
Which is kind of a shame, for Looper is a very solid piece of entertainment.
Granted, there are elements of other films here, most notably the essential structure of The Terminator (or, if one wants to really get into it, a pair of Harlan Ellison stories, particularly Demon With a Glass Hand and Soldier, both of which appeared on the original Outer Limits tv show).
The big twist here, and what separates Looper from these works, is that in this case the old and young versions of Joe, the protagonist, are both operating with a different perspective. Old Joe (Willis) has seen an unpleasant future and, upon being sent back for his execution at his own hands, manages to escape from his younger self. His goal is to save the future in this past. The Young Joe (Gordon-Levitt), meanwhile, knows his older self is just one possible future, and that if he gets rid of him like he’s supposed to (and get the mobsters that are now coming after him for this botched assassination of his future self) he can effect change from the present on.
Frankly, I love the fact that one can look at both perspectives and realize both Joes are right in wanting to fix things their way. And as the film progresses, one of the central questions becomes just what is the right way to go about fixing the future.
But, but…but…
SPOILERS FOLLOW!
YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!
One of the little wrinkles this film presents is that in this future world of Looper assassins, a group of people have developed telekinetic powers. The powers are nothing terribly big, those able to can lift small objects (usually coins) six or less inches off the palms of their hands.
However, in the future of “Old” Joe, one person, the mysterious “Rainmaker”, has taken over all the mobs and is intent on ridding the world of all Loopers and assuming all power for himself. No one knows who this “Rainmaker” is, but he is effectively terrorizing the entire power structure of the future world. When “Old” Joe returns to the past, thus, he is intent on finding and killing this future “Rainmaker”.
Like the Terminator searching for Sarah Connor, “Old” Joe has three possibilities, children born at the same time and at a particular Hospital his future self determined was where the “Rainmaker” was born. His grim task is to assassinate these three children, one after the other, in the hopes that one of them will turn out to be this “Rainmaker”.
As it would turn out, young Joe gets to the future “Rainmaker” and his mother first. The young child has telekinetic abilities far beyond those of everyone else, and it is through these abilities that his future self is able to rule the criminal world. However, in the present, young Joe who comes to realize that this boy can turn out to be good rather than evil, provided his mother is there to raise him as she has been. Old Joe, on the other hand, is set on killing the boy and, in so doing, risks killing the mother and setting off the very thing he is, ironically enough, trying to avoid: Making the “Rainmaker” evil.
Thus, young Joe comes to realize that he’s effectively witnessing a time loop that’s bound to go on again and again and again, where the “Old” Joe and the “Young” Joe will inevitably butt heads and the “Old” Joe will inevitably kill the young child’s mother and the young child will escape and become an evil figure.
So, the young Joe realizes there is only one solution: Suicide. By killing himself, the “Old” Joe will cease to be and mother and child will live to a (we presume) better world.
The problem? The time loop, as I said before, applies to everyone sent back in time, not just to this situation.
Person “A” kills his older self “B”. He then lives thirty years and becomes “B” only to then go back in time and be killed by “A” who then lives thirty years and becomes “B” only to then go back in time and so on and so on and so on.
In the case of old and young Joe, however, another wrinkle is set up:
Person “A” fails to kill his older self “B”. “B” heads after child but never gets him and the “Rainmaker” grows to become a powerful mob figure. “A” grows up into person “C” (person “B” might, after all, still be around in this new reality, though a very old man by that point) and is sent back in time where he either merges with “B” (two people appearing in the same space at the same time=splat?!) and “A” wonders just what the hell that was all about. Then person “A” grows up to be “B”, is sent back in time, escapes (because he knows the evils of the “Rainmaker”), fails to get the boy, “A” grows up and becomes “C” again and splat! once again.
Or…there is no splat and each subsequent “Old” Joe appears before “Young” Joe until there is literally a field of “Old” Joes sitting before “Young” Joe, all intent on killing this one boy.
As I said before, and it bears repeating: The first time loop applies to ALL the Looper killings, not just to “Old/Young” Joe. They’re all in a time loop, young and old versions, all killing their older self and growing up to be older people who are then sent back in time, are killed, and grow to be older and are killed again and again and again.
Time travel stories can really make your head hurt.
Still, if you aren’t like me and don’t get so damn anal (like me) about these things, I nonetheless recommend you go out and see Looper. While it may not leave you cheering at the end, it is nonetheless a great diversion and an intelligent take on the whole time travel concept.
Despite some great sequences and some interesting ideas, last summer’s Prometheus, legendary director Ridley Scott’s (somewhat oblique) return to the Alien universe, remains one of the bigger cinematic disappointments I’ve experienced in many a year (read the original review here).
When I walked out of the theater a few months back after seeing the film, I nonetheless wondered if I would purchase the eventual BluRay release, which I figured would have some cut scenes included. Surely there was some trimmed cinematic seconds/minutes of material out there that would more fully flesh this sometimes very perplexing film.
Right?
Yet I was on the fence. Would/could anything “improve” this deeply flawed (to my eyes) work, or would the cut scenes reinforce my feelings that the film was flawed almost from the very beginning and would never become an improved or better work?
Well, the BluRay/DVD was released yesterday and the sale price proved low enough for me to give the BluRay a try. I immediately put the disc into my machine and moved to the alternate/deleted scenes segment and…
…well…
Sadly, the cut scenes reinforced the later opinion. The film was always going to be a flawed work, and the sequences that were cut didn’t really add all that much more clarity to the overall product. I suppose the best of the cut scenes was a sequence that humanized Charlize Theron’s Meredith Vickers a little. There was also a longer climactic fight between Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw and the engraged/revived Engineer, but in the end it was wise to trim this down. It was simply too difficult to believe the injured Shaw would offer that much of a fight against such a bigger menace…a menace that a few scenes before disabled the stronger David in a matter of seconds.
Otherwise, all the movie’s original flaws -again, to my eyes- remain firmly in place. I still don’t understand why David spiked the drink. I can’t understand why Weyland “hid” in the ship…it proved a completely pointless storyline. The male medical machine, similarly, was an alternately silly and too obvious (look here! A medical machine…I wonder if it will be used later in the film!?) idea in the end. If such a machine existed, why would it be designed for men alone?
Then there were the various characters. Why was Charlie Holloway, Elizabeth Shaw’s lover, so disappointed by what they found? Sure, they didn’t find living engineers, but they found iron-clad evidence of intelligent life! Why was he so sour about this?
Jeeze, I could go on and on and on here.
I suppose the bottom line remains as it was before. Despite some interesting concepts, Prometheus remains a deeply flawed work. I don’t think there will be a future “director’s cut” that will clarify and improve on what we saw in theaters, at least based on the cut scenes included in this release. I could be wrong, of course, and perhaps there are a few sequences out there that weren’t included in this release.
With a few exceptions. Like interesting characters. A scenario that, clever as Mr. Whedon and company made it, also expected the audience to accept our villains were also incredibly, mind-numbingly stupid.
But let’s back up for a moment. The film starts with two seemingly divergent sets of characters. On the one hand we have a bunch of office drones in some strange, undefined worker setting complaining about your typical office drone problems with management or the job itself. Then, you have a group of five rather old looking “teens” (I suppose the satire element has begun!) who are about to embark on a vacation. Their destination? A…cabin in the woods…
Strange stuff subsequently happens and our two seemingly divergent sets of characters are slowly brought together into a single gory (but not too gory) story.
As a fan of horror films and the horror genre, Cabin In the Woods sounded like something in my wheelhouse. Early word was that this was a clever deconstruction of the modern “slasher” genre, and I was certainly game for a clever horror film.
As the film played out, it was hard to miss the references to other famous (and infamous!) horror films like Evil Dead, Friday The 13th, Hellraiser, Psycho, etc. And that’s not even mentioning the very obvious shout out to Scooby Doo via the group of teens themselves.
But, but, but…
As clever as all these little tips of the hat were, as the movie went on, I found myself less and less engaged in what was going on. Yes, there were moments I chuckled. But there were very few moments I actually felt any horror. After a while, I realized that part of the problem was that as clever as the script was in riffing off other films, the characters we were suppose to sympathize with were simply…flat.
In many ways, Cabin in the Woods seems to be trying, more than anything else, to be this generation’s version of the 1981 film An American Werewolf In London. Both films featured clever (and plentiful) riffs on other films, but An American Werewolf In London worked better, to my mind, because the characters were far more genuine and interesting. Thus, the shocks, the gore, and the laughs were that much bigger when they came at you versus Cabin In The Woods.
In the end, Cabin In The Woods winds up being a disappointment. It’s not a bad film, mind you. It is perfectly watchable to any horror fan out there. But by the same token it never quite reaches the heights of what I felt it was trying for.
Of the many, many beautiful women who have appeared in film, one of the most beautiful, to my mind, is Bridget Bardot.
In the following link, photographs are presented of Mrs. Bardot’s “Style Evolution.” What was most depressing to see was that in her most recent photographs, on what I’m assuming is her 78th birthday, she is using crutches to get around:
The last time I saw Hard Rain (which could well be called the wettest movie ever) it was during its 1998 original theatrical run. Though overall I felt the film was a disappointment, unlike many films I see and promptly forget about, the movie’s setting stuck with me over all these years and, when the film played on cable the other day, I couldn’t help but revisit it.
So, did my opinion of the film change in the fourteen or so years since its initial release?
Alas, not all that much.
Hard Rain, as already mentioned, could well be the wettest film ever made. It involves a town that is facing a flood, a security truck filled with loot, thieves (and other unsavory types) using this disaster to enrich themselves on said loot, and the honest security truck driver who tries his mightiest to thwart the crooks from getting the loot.
The honest security truck driver, Tom, is played by Christian Slater in a role very reminiscent of his straight arrow (ouch) role in the John Woo directed Broken Arrow, released only two years before this film. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me to much to find, while investigating this film, that John Woo was in fact originally slated to direct Hard Rain but ultimately, obviously, didn’t.
The director of this film, Mikael Salomon, does a good job presenting the incredible flooding sequences and semi-submerged buildings. His action scenes, on the other hand, don’t have the zip of a John Woo, and one can’t help but wonder if this movie might have worked better had a more established action director taken the helm.
For you see, the movie’s main problem, the one that had me leaving the theater disappointed when I first saw the film all those years ago, remains: The script is simply lackluster. Yes, there are attempts to create interesting drama by shifting character’s loyalties. However, the fact remains that the characters in this film are all…characters. Not for a second did I feel we were watching anything but a film. Thus, there was never any sense of dread or danger, something we should obviously have felt. Or, to put it another way, the movie’s many sequences (action or otherwise) play out one after the other and while there is some suspense, there just isn’t enough.
So what remains is what stayed in my mind all these years: Those incredible water filled sets. I can’t even begin to imagine the misery involved in making this film. I can’t imagine the number of hours the cast and crew had to spend soaked to the bone while wading through all that water and being drenched in all that rain.
Hard Rain is a truly unique film to see. I can honestly say you will never see the likes of it on almost anything else out there. Unfortunately, as an “action” film it fares less, raising just a little above mediocre but not all that much more. Given the unique setting, I would recommend this film to anyone curious to see a truly staggering water logged set. It is impressive as hell. But realize that the film itself isn’t the action and suspense classic it could have been.
I’ve presented the movie’s trailer below. However, be forewarned: One of the film’s bigger plot twists is revealed within it!
If there seems to be one thing you can expect to find every few months in the theaters is a Jason Statham action/adventure film. You have to admire the man’s ability to find steady work. In 2011, for example, IMDB lists four films he appeared in…though at least one, Gnomeo & Juliet, only featured his voice work.
2012 was a little “slower” a year for him as he appeared in only two features, Expendables 2 and the film that’s the focus of this review: Safe.
Like too many of Mr. Statham’s latest films, this one seemed to come and go rather abruptly from theaters, yet I recalled reading several positive reviews and decided to give it a try.
Did I waste my time?
As it turned out, I didn’t, though as good as I ultimately felt the movie was, it had the potential to be a truly great film…and just fell short.
Safe treads plenty of familiar ground. We have Mr. Statham playing the role of Luke Wright, a moody fellow who somehow got involved in an MMA fight that went horribly wrong and put him on the bad side of some Russian mobsters. They killed his wife and effectively (so it seemed!) shut his life down. The Russian mob warned him they would constantly watch his movements and anyone he got to close to would be killed. Likewise, he was told he could not put down any roots, as any home or apartment he tried to live in would be destroyed and anyone living near him would be killed.
Meanwhile, the mob in China has sniffed out a gifted young student named Mei (Catherine Chan) and transferred her to New York, where her incredible gift for mathematics allows them to use her to keep track of all their numbers. As the leader of the Chinese mob notes, he favors using this gifted girl as that way there is no “paper or electronic trail” to point incriminating fingers toward his organization.
Ultimately, Mei is tasked to see and recall a series of mysterious numbers for some mysterious purpose. She does as asked, but before she can use the numbers the Russian mob (the same individuals that crossed Luke Wright) kidnap the girl. The police get involved, but it turns out they’re just as corrupt as both the Chinese and Russian mobs, and a three way power play results when Mei escapes her captors and is loose on the streets of New York.
While loose, who do you suppose she happens to run into?
What follows are some good stunts and bone-crushing (yet not overwhelmingly bloody) violence as the damaged Wright takes Mei under his wing and tries to skirt the minefield erected by the various corrupt officials…including, as we soon find, the mayor of New York himself.
It is at that point, I felt, that the movie was at its best. When the revelations were made about who exactly Luke Wright was and what his place in this chain of corruption was, I found myself quite excited. Though the movie isn’t exactly the most original thing I’ve seen (the 1998 Bruce Willis/Alec Baldwin film Mercury Rising had a very similar plot), the revelations regarding Wright were intriguing and produced an almost Yojimbo-like sequence where our anti-hero began playing the players against each other.
Add to that a very intriguing (and surprising!) main villain showdown in the later stages of the film and there were certainly the potential for this film to really knock it out of the park.
But what was the potentially strongest part of this film, the surprise main villain, unfortunately played out a little too quickly for my taste. I wish more time could have been devoted to explaining who this person was and why he and Wright were destined to collide.
Having said that, Safe is one of the better of the more recent Jason Statham vehicles. Despite some flaws, I would certainly recommend it as a good action time-killer.
I’ve mentioned before my love for what is arguably the first -and equally arguably the best– “modern” superhero film, 1978’s Superman. This is a film that offered viewers an incredible array of material. You had drama, you had tragedy. You also had slapstick, romance, and (of course) high adventure. Heck, there was even a quasi-musical/dance number thrown in, to boot!
What is most amazing is that with all those different elements, tones, and styles, the movie worked. Through clever writing, directing, acting, and editing, all that stuff came together into a wonderful whole and the film never felt excessive or overwhelming (In the theatrical print…I’m not quite as enamored of the “extended” cut released to DVD).
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the 2011 film Green Lantern. As I finally watched the film a couple of days ago, I couldn’t help but feel that the people behind the cameras were hoping to match Superman‘s mojo. They offered a big story that featured a big cast and took you to quite literally the ends of the universe. The movie also features a hero that would prove his worth before an awesome foe, all while re-connecting with the love of his life.
Unfortunately, all those ideas are thrown at the viewers without the skill of a Superman. Instead of a fascinating whole, the film works only in spurts and seems content to throw out comic books characters after characters and hope that that alone makes the film interesting.
It doesn’t.
Now, I’m a fan of Green Lantern, particularly the silver age iteration as illustrated by the incomparable Gil Kane and, just a little later, Neal Adams. I think the character’s back story and supporting cast are interesting and naturals for film. However, did the film really need to have Dr. Amanda Waller in it? Worse, given all the things thrown out (including Waller’s character herself!), did we also need to spend precious screen time showing her “origin”? And while the character Tomas Kalmaku, unlike Dr. Waller, was a big part of the early Green Lantern comic books stories, he was mostly irrelevant in the film and did nothing more than take up screen time that could have gone to Blake Lively’sCarol Ferris.
The movie offers us two big villains, but given what ultimately happens with Hector Hammond, the Earth-bound villain, I can’t help but wondering if it might have been better not to have Hammond appear at all and instead focus the main conflict entirely on Parallax.
Or, even better yet, why present Green Lantern arch villain Sinestro in his “pre-evil” form at all? He would have made a far better villain instead of being shown as a noble member of the Green Lantern Corps that (inexplicably) succumbs to evil after the credits roll. That’s like giving us a new Batman film with the Joker featured prominently within it as a good guy and then teasing us only at the very end that he’ll be the bad guy next time around.
Sometimes, the next time doesn’t come around.
As for the acting, the two leads, Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern and Blake Lively as Carol Ferris, are…ok. While they didn’t display the charisma Christopher Reeves and Margot Kidder had in Superman, I thought a better, clearer, and more focused story might have helped show them off much better.
In sum, count me among those that cannot recommend this film.
I first heard of the movie Wrecked back when it was nearing release in 2010. Then, nothing.
In fact, the film seemed to so effectively disappear that I couldn’t help but wonder if it was released at all. I guess it was. IMDB lists the film as having made a paltry $4821 in a two week run on a single screen. Considering the film starred Academy Award winning actor Adrien Brody, that alone is stunning if not unusual in this day of modest or direct to video releases.
Nonetheless, when I spotted the film airing on IFC, I set the DVR to record it, sat back, and gave it a whirl.
So, did the film deserve a better fate? Was it unjustly dumped?
The answer, frustratingly, is yes and no. Wrecked concerns a man (Brody) who awakens to find himself sitting in the front passenger seat of a very bad car crash. The car is at the bottom of a forest ravine. In the back seat is the corpse of one of the other passengers of the car. Several feet before the remains of the vehicle lies the body of the presumed driver.
The lone survivor has no memory of how he came to be in this predicament nor who the corpses of those around him are. He too is injured, and his leg is pinned down hard under the car’s dashboard. For the first half of the film he drifts in and out of consciousness and tries to recall who he is and what he was doing before the crash while trying to simply get out of the wreckage.
Soon, ominous hints as to who he might be appear. He finds a handgun under the driver’s seat and has flashes of memory of a possible robbery.
Is he a bad guy? Did he kill someone?
The questions haunt him even as he tries to escape the wreckage of his vehicle.
I won’t go into too many more details, but suffice to say the film does hold your attention for most of its run time despite the fact that what we have here is for the most part a one person/one setting story with very little actual dialogue and plenty of symbolism. Some of the symbolism, I felt, worked well while others left me more confused than illuminated. Unfortunately, the movie also runs out of steam after a while and, particularly in the later part of the second half, becomes something of a chore to sit through.
However, where the movie fails the most is when it finally does offer a resolution and explanation as to who our protagonist is and why he was in the car. The explanation, unfortunately, is quite banal…almost too simple. It makes you think that this film could have made a good one hour episode of a mystery TV show rather than a 91 minute full theatrical feature.
There is one other thing that I found very bothersome, but to get into that requires SPOILERS. They follow the movie’s trailer…
SPOILERS FOLLOW!!!
As the movie progresses, it is clear our protagonist is having hallucinations. While the dog he encounters may or may not actually be with him (I believe it to be a hallucination, too), he also sees a woman in and around his immediate area…a woman he slowly begins to think might have been a victim of his (possible) crime. Considering the film’s eventual resolution and the woman’s actual identity, the way our protagonist deals with this hallucination is very bizarre, to say the least.
Regardless, Wrecked is an intriguing film that, unfortunately, ends with a whimper rather than a bang. Too bad.
