Phillip K. Dick came to the silvered screen in 1982 with Ridley Scott’s powerfully influential, but box-office miss,  science-fiction film, Blade Runner, but it wasn’t until 1990’s Total Recall that Dick found commercial success at the theaters.Hollywoodhas ever since sought to find the right action/adventure movie that can be mined from a Phillip K. Dick story.  Frankly, Dick is the wrong author to mine for action adventure, but they keep trying to force that very round peg in our Village’s square holes. Continue reading →

Last night movie-wise I was certainly in an odd mood. My potential selections, based on time constraints, ranged from the light hearted, (The Hudsucker Proxy) to the serious genre film, (Village of The Damned) thru the blockbuster (Jaws) to what I finally settled upon, 1975’s espionage thriller, The Eiger Sanction.

This was the fourth time that actor Clint Easton had stepped into the director’s chair on a film. In the decades that have followed Eastwood has been nominated several times and has won the Oscar for Best Director. While The Eiger Sanction is a good film, it’s not up to his recent standards.

Eastwood plays Dr Jonathan Hemlock – we never learn is that is an assumed name or not – a government assassin, now retired to teaching art as a college professor. When the Agency has need for an assassination or ‘sanction’ requiring Hemlocks unique skill set, they ruthlessly press him back into service. Continue reading →

The only Disney cell animated movie in my library is Aladdin. (I used to have The Lion King, but that was back in my pre-DVD laserdisc days and the laser-disc player has long since expired and the discs discarded.)
I saw this film on its theatrical release back in 1992and thoroughly enjoyed it. While it has all the usual hallmarks of a safe family film from Disney, it plays well for both adult and younger audiences. There was a controversy upon the film’s release. In the theatrical release the opening songs has the lyric “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face” and after the controversy the home video version altered the lyrics with a similar but somewhat distinctly different voice singing “Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense.” I have the first issue of the CD soundtrack with the original lyric, but later ones were altered to match the home video release.
The story, of course, is a bastardized version of the tale of Aladdin from 1001 Arabic Nights. In the movie Aladdin is a street orphan in a fictional Arabic city, surviving day-to-day by stealing bread and avoiding the city guard. His only companion is a mischievous monkey name Abu. Aladdin life is turned upside down by the appearance of Princess Jasmine in market place after running away from home to avoid the prospect of an arraigned marriage.
Events are further complicated by Jafar, the sultan trusted Vizier, who needs Aladdin to steal a magic lamp from a trapped cave. Jafar, sporting a traditional goatee of evil, with visions of a palace coup dancing in his head is, naturally, plotting against the Sultan. (In at least one of the tales from 1001 Arabic Nights I remember Jafar being the most reasonable character. As the Sultan kept drifting towards disaster and poorly thought-out plans, it was Jafar who tried to remind the sovereign of his word and commitments.) Jafar seeks the magic lamp that would release a wishing granting Genie, playing with manic vocal energy by Robin Williams.
Aladdin is a musical and its songs are a through joy. I thank this film for introducing me to the absolutely stunning voice of Lea Solonga, I have an album of hers and her voice is never unwelcome.
Certainly for anyone with children, or whose childhood has not died away within their soul, this is an enjoyable bit of movie making.

So here is the return of my Sunday NIght Movie  postings. Last night I booted up the PS3, logged into Netflix and started the next of my Bond Movie series, Diamonds Are Forever. This is a Bond film that I have never seen in its entirety. I can recall seeing bits and pieces of this movie on cable as I flipped through the channels, But I had never sat down and watched the film from front to finish. Now, it turns our that I had seen very little of this film and most of it was a total unknown to me, a very pleasant unknown I might add. Continue reading →

I was not in the mood for an untested product on Sunday night so I dove into my library of DVDs and pulled out a comedy that I knew I would enjoy and that I have not watched in some time, Bowfinger.

I missed this film in the theater and caught it went I rented it once from an internet company that is no longer with us. I honestly can’t remember the name of the company but there business was that they would bring DVDs and food to your home within an hour of your order. Netflix is a better deal, this was still daily charges and the whole shebang that most video stores did for their and to their customers.

Anywho, I really enjoy this film though it is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a simple story really, Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin) desperately wants to be a film maker, but he’s never been on the inside. His account has written a spec script and Bowfinger tries to get hollywoods biggest action star, Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy) to agree to be in the movie. Naturally that fails but Bowfinger, undaunted by such setback decides he will make the movie, with Kit in it, anyway. He’ll simply secretly film Kit, and a person who has an amazing resemblance to Kit (Eddie Murphy again) and edit these strangely filmed scenes together. Except for the camera man the rest of the actors and crew have no idea that Kit has never agreed to be in the movie. So Bowfinger is conning Kit, and his friends and associates.

There is a wonderful performance by most the cast, particularity Heather Graham who plays a wide-eyed innocent just off the bus and looking to be a star. A young lady who rapidly learns how to works the business if show business.

This movie is not perfect. I agree with a friend of mine who think it would have worked better had everyone been in on the con except Kit, but faults aside I still very much enjoy this film. In no small part due to the fact it is really about dreamers and how clinging to your dream can be a very painful thing in this cynical and dirty world, but losing them is worse.

 

So a few weeks ago for my Sunday Night Movie I watched Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. In my comments I mentioned that there had been three remakes of the classic SF film, one in 1979, one in the 90s and the most recent in 2007, this film The Invasion with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. I remember when this film was released in the theaters and having heard it was yet another remake I skipped seeing it. (While I liked the 1979 version,  1993s The Body Snatchers was so awful I had no desire to see this material abused once again.)

However, having watched the original I became curious about this remake and with Netflix to aid me, I had a blu-ray sent to my home. Now, I am sorry I missed this fin film in the theaters.

This is most certainly a remake, no doubt about that. It is not a whole cloth reinvention, nor it is not a cookie-cutter slap-dash copy of the original, and because of that it succeeds. Part of the nature of these alien invaders has been changed, no longer are there large seed-pods from which perfect copies emerge, but what has replaced that is a much more credible premise, infection. Alien spores that invade your body, and activated by R.E.M. sleep, transform you into the classical pod person. (Now you just let them have the whole alien life form infecting a species from an entirely different evolutionary path, but once you do the rest follows logically and credibly. There is a fungus I think that infects acts and changes their behavior into something beneficial for the fungus and fatal for the ants.)

The original film took place in a small California town, something easily containable, the 1979 remake was set in San Francisco, and this one the infection breaks out across a swath stretching from Dallas to Washington D.C. a vast infected area. This film also go further along and gives us a peek as what happens one the pod-people no longer need to maintain their masquerade. At this juncture it felt almost like a zombie film, but for me much more frightening.

The actors all turn in wonderful performance, including one child actor who goes far beyond creepy.

The only downside to this movie, was a critical mis-step in my opinion by the filmmakers in the opening. The film starts with a shuttle breaking up while reentering the atmosphere. That alone in 2007 would be enough to make some people uncomfortable, just 4 years after the Columbia tragedy. Including actual footage of Columbia breaking up for entertainment purposes is simply wrong, cheap, and tawdry.

That aside I really enjoyed the film and look forward to one day adding it to my collection.

It is kind of surprising, to me at least, that I have never seen this particular giant bug movie. I think I have seen nearly all the others, but somehow this one kept slipping past me. With this screening I can now call my science-fiction double feature viewing complete. That is I have seen ever film referenced in the song Science-Fiction Double Feature at least once. (Of course I have seen some of them many times.)

Tarantula naturally is about a giant spider ravaging the desert countryside killing cattle, ranchers, and hobos, before turning toward the small defenseless town full of ever so tasty civilians.

The film was directed by Jack Arnold who, just a  year earlier, had directed the classic film Creature From The Black Lagoon, (one of my favorite monster movies.) Tarantula is not up to Creature standards in budget, special effects, (Though these are credible) or scripting.  However the film does have some charm to it particularly in the fact that most of the film is not about the giant spider. Mostly the movies focuses on Dr Deemer and why the townspeople who had accept this stranger man now suspects he is up to no good. It doesn’t help that Deemer associate turns up dead in the desert of a deformity  that takes years to develop when he seemed quite healthy and normal just weeks earlier.

Dr. Deemer has been working with radio nucleotides in an attempt to make an artificial food to feed the coming billions in the world population. In other scripts he would have at this point become obsessed with his formula and injected his partner, forcibly, to prove it worked, but no in this movie. The partner and a lab assistance injected themselves without consulting Dr. Deemer certainly that they had liked the problem. Since they both end up dead and deformed clearly they had not, but the assistant, driven mad by his deformity over powers Dr. Deemer and injects him, but in the fight the lab is trashed and a Tarantula, already nearly the size of a man, escapes and continues to grow.

This was a fun little film, but not one I can heartily recommend. (Though if you watch and listen closely you can spot Clint Eastwood in an early role.)