21 Kasım 2013 Perşembe
As today is the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, Film Babble Blog looks back at the cinematic legacy of the history changing event:
I’m 44 years old, so I wasn’t alive when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But since the events of that tragic day in November of 1963, 50 years ago today, have been so thoroughly covered from every conceivable angle in countless movies, TV shows, and documentaries, not only do I feel like I was alive then; I feel as if I had actually been there smack dab in the middle of Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, on that fateful date with a better view of the historic hit than Abraham Zapruder had.
Oliver Stone’s 1991 conspiracy theory epic, JFK is largely to blame for planting such vivid yet false memories in my psyche, but it was an obscure film that I saw on television when I was a kid that laid the foundation. It was David Miller’s 1973 political thriller EXECUTIVE ACTION, the first film * produced about the assassination.
Told from the point of view of the evil men in power, including Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan as shadowy co-conspirators who plot Kennedy’s killing right down to the last detail, the low budget docudrama postulates many of the same theories, mostly having to do with alleged murderer Lee Harvey Oswald being a patsy, that Stone would later do up with higher production values in JFK.
EXECUTIVE ACTION largely drew upon the work of New York Legislator Mark Lane, whose 1966 bestselling book “Rush To Judgement” heavily criticized the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Throughout the ‘70s, the consensus that something much more sinister was up than what the public record allowed, was evident all over pop culture.
Alan J. Pakula's THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974) defined the label “paranoid thriller” (see also Sydney Pollack's THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, 1975) by building upon assassination theories with a premise about an evil company (the Parallax Corporation) that's behind pivotal political plots. Warren Beatty plays a reporter that tries to unravel the conspiracy, but ends up being unwittingly trained to be an assassin himself. A scene in which Beatty is brainwashed by a recruiting film, satirized in Ben Stiller's ZOOLANDER, gives a good idea of the movie's sinister tone:
In Woody Allen’s Oscar winning 1977 comedy ANNIE HALL, comedian protagonist Alvy Singer obsesses over the possibility that there was a second assassin to the point that a girl he briefly dates (Carol Kane) states bluntly the he’s “using this conspiracy theory as an excuse to avoid having sex” with her. This surely received a lot of laughter from hip in-the-know audiences at the time, since post Watergate distrust of the government was at an all time high.
That same year, John Landis' KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, the first film to feature the comedy stylings of ZAZ (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker) of AIRPLANE! and NAKED GUN fame included a commercial parody for a fictitious Parker Brothers' board game called Scot Free. A four member family is seated around a kitchen table playing the game, made up of a miniature mock-up of Dealey Plaza, as a voice-over announcer sets up the premise: “Your team has just assassinated the President - can you get away scot free? Shake the dice and see...”
A few years later, a surreal and somewhat comical take on the cluster of conspiracy theories came along: William Richert’s WINTER KILLS (1979), starring Jeff Bridges as Nick Keegan, the brother of a slain President, of course, the victim of secret forces. The controversial film didn’t get much of a theatrical run, VHS copies of it were rare, and its out of print now on DVD (a 2003 edition of it can be found on eBay) so it’s a bit of obscure title that few people have heard of, but it’s well worth seeking out.
Bridges’ very “un-Dude” performance as the Robert Kennedy-ish hero neatly heads an impressive cast including John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Sterling Hayden, Elizabeth Taylor and Toshirô Mifune in an outlandish scenario yet again involving evil men pulling the strings from behind the scenes. The usual suspects of mobsters, the military, and power hungry oil barons are trotted out, as Bridges investigates the wide-ranging suspected cover-up.
Apart from the TV miniseries “Kennedy” starring Martin Sheen, and various PBS documentaries, the ‘80s were relatively free of movie treatments of the mysteries surrounding the Kennedy assassination, but it’s funny to note that in Ron Shelton's BULL DURHAM (1988), Kevin Costner’s character Crash Davis delivered a speech to Susan Sarandon listing his core beliefs, and one of them was “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”
A few years later, Costner would be speechifying the complete opposite at length as New Orleans investigator Jim Garrison in Stone’s before mentioned opus, which recently played at the Crossroads in Cary to mark the anniversary.
Stone’s movie is the biggest production to date dealing with the events of November 22nd, 1963, and definitely the most star studded. The film is largely accountable for the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon parlor game because Bacon appears alongside a cast that features seemingly everybody who was working in the early ‘90s including such A-listers as Tommy Lee Jones, John Candy, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Joe Pesci, Gary Oldman, Michael Rooker, Donald Sutherland, Ed Asner, Sissy Spacek, and so on.
These folks help distill the information Stone displays down to further his theory, informed by decades of other’s research and speculation, that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy that stretched through the military industrial complex, involving the CIA, and anti-Castro Cuban nationals. Newsweek welcomed Stone’s movie with a cover story that had the headline: “The Twisted Truth of ‘JFK’: Why Oliver Stone’s New Movie Can’t Be Trusted,” yet in the same issue had a very favorable review of the film by David Ansen. That sums it up neatly: JFK is an entertaining and thought provoking movie, but it’s just a movie, it shouldn’t be taken as historical record.
In the years after JFK, Danny Aiello played Jack Ruby, the Texas nightclub owner who shot and killed Oswald in RUBY, Clint Eastwood played a Secret Service agent who was in Kennedy’s detail that day in Dallas in IN THE LINE OF FIRE (1993), and the long running Fox television program The X-Files revealed that its chief antagonist, the Smoking Man played by William B. Davis, was the real gunman who shot the President from inside a sewer drain along the route of the motorcade.
Yep, JFK’s tagline, “The story that won’t go away,” really is truth in advertising.
More recently, Peter Landesman’s drama PARKLAND, concerning the aftermath of the assassination with another cast of big names (Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton, Zac Effron) partly set at Parkland Hospital where Kennedy’s body was taken after the shooting, played briefly last September at the Raleigh Grande. The film effectively captures the chaos and confusion in the air on Nov. 22, 1963 and the days after, but it’s not concerned at all with conspiracy, and it doesn’t really add anything to the cinematic history of the world-changing events of that date.
Neither does the National Geographic Channel’s telefilm adaptation of Bill O’ Reilly’s best seller “Killing Kennedy,” which premiered earlier this month, though there’s some fun to be had watching Rob Lowe take on the President’s Boston accent. O’Reilly isn’t a fan of conspiracy theories so it’s a pretty dry run through the facts.
We may never get the answers to the questions about what really went down that day, but one thing’s for sure: whether it’s another feature film, a new documentary (there are tons of them on cable these days), or an episode of a ‘60s-set TV show (Mad Men did their Nov. 22, 1963 episode in their third season), we are destined to relive the JFK assassination again and again until we shuffle off this mortal coil.
* Mel Stuart's 1964 documentary FOUR DAYS IN NOVEMBER was technically the first film produced about the assassination, but this essay concerns the dramatizations of the event.
More later...
18 Kasım 2013 Pazartesi
Regular visitors to this blog (there must be a few, right?) may be aware that I have a bit of a thing for movie theater marquees. I regularly post pictures of local theaters like the Colony Theater and the Rialto Theater’s marquees here in Raleigh on the sidebar (in the old days it would be the Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill when I lived there), and I have them collected on Facebook in the “Movie Theater Fun File!” section of my profile.
So since it’s been a while since I've put together a good ole Film Babble Blog list I thought I’d get back in the game with this top 10 of memorable marquees that have appeared in the movies throughout the years:
1. THE SORROW AND THE PITY in ANNIE HALL
It was a running gag throughout Woody Allen's 1977 Oscar winner ANNIE HALL that protagonist Alvy Singer (Allen) would drag his girlfriend (Diane Keaton in the title role) to see Marcel Ophüls' THE SORROW AND THE PITY (1969). The marquee shot above comes from the end of the film, after the couple has broken up, when Allen runs into Keaton coming out of a screening of the four hour documentary about Nazis at the Thalia Theater, which used to exist on 95th Street off Broadway (it's an apartment building now). It's a long shot so it's easy to miss that Allen's date is Sigourney Weaver, in her first film appearance. A bonus Woody Allen marquee appears at the top of this post.
2. FAMILY PLOT in DAZED AND CONFUSED
This is one of hundreds of well chosen details that helped Richard Linklater's 1993 cult comedy drama classic DAZED AND CONFUSED so convincingly recreate a day from May of 1976. Hitchcock's final film, released a month earlier, appears in a few early shots on a standing marquee for a drive-in in the background of the film mostly set in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. It works as both a piece of a time capsule capture, and a shout-out to the master of suspense.
3. PLAY MISTY FOR ME in DIRTY HARRY
This, and #4, are inside-jokes. In Don Siegel's 1971 cop classic DIRTY HARRY, Clint Eastwood's iconic Harry Callahan character enters a San Francisco burger joint in one shot in which a marquee advertising Eastwood's previous film, PLAY MISTY FOR ME (also '71) can be seen around the corner. Nice plug, Clint!
The same type of thing happens in David O. Russell's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK from last year. While leads Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are arguing in front of a theater midway through the film, a marquee advertising Ryûhei Kitamura's little seen 2008 thriller THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, which starred Cooper, is fairly visible - partially obscured but still obvious.
5. PLATOON in THE NAKED GUN
During a very funny falling-in-love montage set to Herman Hermit's “I’m into Something Good” in David Zucker's 1988 comedy classic THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD, Leslie Neilsen and Priscilla Presley exit a Los Angeles movie theater laughing their asses off. The camera pans up to the marquee:
It's a cheap laugh, but still always gets me.
6. A double feature of A BOY'S LIFE and WATCH THE SKIES in GREMLINS
The fictitious film titles on this marquee seen in Joe Dante's 1984 classic GREMLINS are Spielbergian in-jokes. A BOY'S LIFE was the original title of E.T. and WATCH THE SKIES was the early working title of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, so the fake double bill presents a double nod to the film's executive producer. This marquee has been mentioned before on this blog as has:
7. SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY in KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE
This marquee for the phony film SEE YOU NEXT WEDNESDAY (previously covered in “Film Within Film Follow-up Fun” 7/13/07), seen in the 1977 ZAZ sketch comedy movie THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE is part of a running gag through many of the films of John Landis. It comes from a line from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that the director liked enough to feature in the form of billboards, posters, and more than one marquee.
8. A double bill of DEEP THROAT and MEATBALL in SLAP SHOT
This marquee glimpsed in the background of a parade shot on the streets of Jonestown, Pennsylvania in George Roy Hill's classic 1977 hockey comedy SLAP SHOT proudly displays a double feature of Gerard Damiano's 1972 pornos DEEP THROAT (possibly the most famous porn film ever) and his lesser known, but presumably just as filthy MEATBALL.
9. JAWS 19 in BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II
I also featured this one before (“10 Self Referential Or Crossover Moments In The Films Of Lucas And Spielberg” 5/20/08), but couldn't resist including the marquee of JAWS 19 that Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) encountered in the future in Robert Zemeckis' BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (executive produced by Spielberg) here because, you know, hologram shark! Also the fact that the director of the 19th film in the JAWS franchise is credited to Spielberg's son Max Spielberg (born in 1985) is a nice touch.
I'm including this one because I used to climb up a ladder and change the marquee a lot at the Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill when I worked there from 2004-2009. So I appreciated that Quentin Tarantino's and Eli Roth's revisionist World War II romp, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, included a scene in which Mélanie Laurent's character Shoshanna is taking down the lengthy line of letters that spell out “German Night Leni Riefernstahl in Pabst's THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU.” Thankfully, I rarely had to put up that many letters.
Post note: I should definitely note the cool blog Marquees in Movies, which houses a collection of screenshots from movies showing movie theater marquees. I, ahem, borrowed that great screenshot of SLAP SHOT from them.
More later...
31 Ekim 2013 Perşembe
Opening today at a multiplex near you:
LAST VEGAS (Dir. Jon Turteltaub, 2013)
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Four Oscar winners - Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, and Kevin Kline - join together for a film that will win no Oscars.
The famous foursome play friends since childhood (forget that their ages range from 66 to 76) who hit Vegas for some bachelor party shenanigans in this crappy comedy that critics everywhere are calling THE HANGOVER for the geriatric set.
I’m not a fan of THE HANGOVER movies, but they at least have more of an attempt at a narrative; LAST VEGAS just piles on a bunch of city of sin set-piece ideas (the guys judge a bikini competition, get in a bar fight, pretend to be mob bosses, etc.) that seem right off the top of the head of the film’s screenwriter Dan Fogleman (CARS, CRAZY STUPID LOVE, THE GUILT TRIP).
The bare as bones back story is that in their youth, Douglas and De Niro’s characters had been in a love triangle of sorts with a girl who chose De Niro. The gruff as ever De Niro is now a widower who’s angry at Douglas, now engaged to woman half his age, for not coming to his wife’s funeral.
Other loose story threads are that Kline has been given a “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” card from his wife (Johanna Gleason) so he’s got a HALL PASS thing going on, and that Freeman is sneaking out on his overprotective son (Michael Ealy), who thinks his old man is going on a church retreat.
Another Oscar winner, Mary Steenburgen, pops up as a torch singer in a rundown lounge, all smiling and amused at the guy’s antics. Predictably Douglas and De Niro both fall for her in scenes devised to give the proceedings some emotional weight, but end up feeling shoehorned into this glib series of geezer sex gags.
There’s also the cringe-worthy scenario of the fellows bossing around Jerry Farrera (Turtle from Entourage). Their Parks Hotel concierge (Weeds’ Romany Malco) told Farrera that the guys are the heads of four crime syndicate families so he’d be scared into serving them. That obviously means that there’s terrible tough-guy jokes in the miserable mix to contend with too.
I have to say though, that castling Turtle does nail the air-headed Entourage guys-bonding-through-partying ethos the film is going for. The energy the leads put into their performances does elevate the flimsy material at times I also feel I should add.
But while it’s far from lifeless, LAST VEGAS is a lame, almost laugh-free, piece of PG-13 fluff that will please only incredibly undemanding crowds.
It’s funny (funnier than anything in the movie, anyway) how Kline comes off like William H. Macy in WILD HOGS. That is, the one guy that you’d thought wouldn’t get caught slumming it up in such commercial dreck like this. However, more power to him because he looks like he’s having a better time than anybody else onscreen. I can't help thinking that his character and performance so deserve to be part of a much better movie.
More later...
21 Ekim 2013 Pazartesi
Now playing at a multiplex near you:
ESCAPE PLAN (Dir. Mikael Håfström, 2013)
There’s just no way Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger can make a movie together that isn’t a throwback to their ‘80s action heyday. It's simply impossible.
Of course, THE EXPENDABLES movies have been there and done that (and will again), but this shiny formulaic prison break movie, a buddy-convict flick if you will, proves that maxim all over again.
The graying former rivals (they never would’ve appeared in each others’ movies during the Reagan era) here play fellow inmates in a secret state of the art maximum security facility that highly resembles the futuristic prison in John Woo’s FACE/OFF – you know, the ‘90s over-the-top action film in which John Travolta and Nicholas Cage traded faces? Yeah, I thought you’d remember.
Anyway, Stallone plays a “secure structure expert,” who is employed by various contractors to break out of prisons to test the strength of their security. The CIA hires him to go undercover to their new high-tech super prison to find the flaws in their system, but his methods are immediately compromised by a truck full of thugs who abduct him and remove the G.P.S. tracker embedded in his arm.
This leaves his staff including Amy Ryan (The Wire, The Office), and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson scrambling to find his location, while his boss (Vincent D’Onofrio) seems less concerned, obviously because he was involved in the set-up.
Jim Caviezel (PASSION OF THE CHRIST, Person Of Interest), as the sinister as can be Warden, knows Stallone’s real identity (he even uses Stallone’s book on building an escape-proof prison as a reference guide), and has evil plans to use Stallone and Schwarzenegger to find the whereabouts of a never seen terrorist mastermind named Manheim.
If that last paragraph seemed a bit hard to follow, it really doesn’t matter as its just mysterious background fodder to the main action dealing with escaping from the prison which turns out to be located inside an oil tanker somewhere in the middle of the ocean. See what I mean about the prison’s similarity to FACE/OFF?
In the midst of these convolutions, Schwarzenegger has the best lines, like “You hit like a vegetarian,” while Stallone does his stoical man in deep thought thing, and there is juicy turn by Vinne Jones as a sadistic guard. A not so juicy turn is put in by the odd casting of Sam Neill as a prison doctor who so seems like he’d rather be anywhere else.
ESCAPE PLAN is smarter than THE EXPENDABLES movies, but it's still really stupid. However, hardcore fans who’ve been waiting for the duo of the Italian Stallion and Ahnold to break away from the EXPENDABLES ensemble of aging action stars and do a true buddy film where they kick a lot of ass together will surely find it to be explosively entertaining.
As someone who’s not particularly a big fan of either heavy weight, but has come to appreciate their brands over the years, I found it to be a B-movie blast. It has the look, feel, and gusto of Stallone and Schwazenegger’s greatest guilty pleasures – consider it LOCK UP meets COMMANDO. No self-deprecating jokes about being aging relics this time around, just good ole '80s-style action 101.
More later...
2 Ekim 2013 Çarşamba
Now playing at an indie art house theater near you:
ENOUGH SAID (Dir. Nicole Holofcener, 2013)
It’s a testament to the talents of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late great James Gandolfini that I forgot about Elaine Bendis and Tony Soprano, i.e. their iconic characters from Seinfeld and The Sopranos, while watching Nicole Holofcener’s newest indie rom com ENOUGH SAID.
Sure, Louis-Dreyfus has some of Elaine’s neurotic neediness, and Gandolfini shares some of Tony’s unhealthy appetites, but the people they portray here are grounded in a more stable sensibility. A sensibility that will be recognizable to those who’ve seen Holofcener’s previous movies that have largely dealt with modern women coming to terms with, well, being modern women, and always have Catherine Keener in them (see: WALKING AND TALKING, LOVELY & AMAZING, FRIENDS WITH WOMEN, PLEASE GIVE).
Here Keener plays Gandolfini’s ex-wife, a successful poet (successful enough to know Joni Mitchell) who hires Louis-Dreyfus to be her masseuse after befriending her at a party. Unknown to Keener, Louis-Dreyfus has begun dating Gandolfini, who she met at the same party.
So when Keener complains at length about her ex-husband during their sessions, Louis-Dreyfus is making all kinds of mental notes about her new beau’s faults. Louis-Dreyfus wants a playbook to guide her through the emotional minefield of when dating somebody gets serious, and for a time Keener unknowingly serves that purpose.
This hilariously comes to a head when Louis-Dreyfus can’t help picking on him about such things as the calories in guacamole at a dinner party with Toni Collette and Ben Falcone (Melissa McCarthy’s husband that you may remember as the Air Marshall in BRIDESMAIDS). On the uneasy drive home, Gandolfini remarks: “Why do I feel like I just spent the evening with my ex-wife?”
Despite its rom com-style plotting – i.e. one half of a couple is keeping something from the other until they get way in over their head – ENOUGH SAID doesn’t strain for laughs, or go for cheap one-liners. Holofcener, who wrote the screenplay, simply wants to spend some time with some flawed folks who are making their way through a transitional period.
There’s somewhat of a misshapen subplot concerning Louis-Dreyfus’s daughter (Tracey Fairaway) leaving home for college, with the mother over compensating by becoming way too close to her daughter’s best friend (Tracey Fairaway), but it doesn’t clutter up the main storyline.
Although Holofcener definitely has her own thing going on, in tone and relationship perspective, I was reminded of Jay and Mark Duplass’s 2010 comedy CYRUS, which also dealt with a couple who met at a party and have an obstacle or two to overcome, and also had Catherine Keener as the ex-wife. In that and in ENOUGH SAID, both very likable low key indies, I rooted strongly for the leads to stick it out.
The chemistry Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus have together is pleasing yet fleeting as we can’t help but be aware that the man is no longer with us. We can at least take a little comfort in the fact that Gandolfini has two more films in the can (small parts in NICKY DUECE and ANIMAL RESCUE set for next year), but that this is his last lead performance is very sad indeed.
ENOUGH SAID will perhaps be remembered more for that than its content, but however people come to it, most will find that it’s a thoughtful and witty take on the insecurities involved with taking a second chance at love. It really shows how good Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus were together working with Holofcener's moody material that that’s the real takeaway.
More later...
ENOUGH SAID (Dir. Nicole Holofcener, 2013)
It’s a testament to the talents of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late great James Gandolfini that I forgot about Elaine Bendis and Tony Soprano, i.e. their iconic characters from Seinfeld and The Sopranos, while watching Nicole Holofcener’s newest indie rom com ENOUGH SAID.
Sure, Louis-Dreyfus has some of Elaine’s neurotic neediness, and Gandolfini shares some of Tony’s unhealthy appetites, but the people they portray here are grounded in a more stable sensibility. A sensibility that will be recognizable to those who’ve seen Holofcener’s previous movies that have largely dealt with modern women coming to terms with, well, being modern women, and always have Catherine Keener in them (see: WALKING AND TALKING, LOVELY & AMAZING, FRIENDS WITH WOMEN, PLEASE GIVE).
Here Keener plays Gandolfini’s ex-wife, a successful poet (successful enough to know Joni Mitchell) who hires Louis-Dreyfus to be her masseuse after befriending her at a party. Unknown to Keener, Louis-Dreyfus has begun dating Gandolfini, who she met at the same party.
So when Keener complains at length about her ex-husband during their sessions, Louis-Dreyfus is making all kinds of mental notes about her new beau’s faults. Louis-Dreyfus wants a playbook to guide her through the emotional minefield of when dating somebody gets serious, and for a time Keener unknowingly serves that purpose.
This hilariously comes to a head when Louis-Dreyfus can’t help picking on him about such things as the calories in guacamole at a dinner party with Toni Collette and Ben Falcone (Melissa McCarthy’s husband that you may remember as the Air Marshall in BRIDESMAIDS). On the uneasy drive home, Gandolfini remarks: “Why do I feel like I just spent the evening with my ex-wife?”
Despite its rom com-style plotting – i.e. one half of a couple is keeping something from the other until they get way in over their head – ENOUGH SAID doesn’t strain for laughs, or go for cheap one-liners. Holofcener, who wrote the screenplay, simply wants to spend some time with some flawed folks who are making their way through a transitional period.
There’s somewhat of a misshapen subplot concerning Louis-Dreyfus’s daughter (Tracey Fairaway) leaving home for college, with the mother over compensating by becoming way too close to her daughter’s best friend (Tracey Fairaway), but it doesn’t clutter up the main storyline.
Although Holofcener definitely has her own thing going on, in tone and relationship perspective, I was reminded of Jay and Mark Duplass’s 2010 comedy CYRUS, which also dealt with a couple who met at a party and have an obstacle or two to overcome, and also had Catherine Keener as the ex-wife. In that and in ENOUGH SAID, both very likable low key indies, I rooted strongly for the leads to stick it out.
The chemistry Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus have together is pleasing yet fleeting as we can’t help but be aware that the man is no longer with us. We can at least take a little comfort in the fact that Gandolfini has two more films in the can (small parts in NICKY DUECE and ANIMAL RESCUE set for next year), but that this is his last lead performance is very sad indeed.
ENOUGH SAID will perhaps be remembered more for that than its content, but however people come to it, most will find that it’s a thoughtful and witty take on the insecurities involved with taking a second chance at love. It really shows how good Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus were together working with Holofcener's moody material that that’s the real takeaway.
More later...
18 Eylül 2013 Çarşamba
Occasionally, I’m going to shine a spotlight on a could be classic scene from cinema history. This time around, let’s take a look at the final casino scene from Martin Campbell's 2006 James Bond film CASINO ROYALE.
The film, the 21st in the series, was the first outing as 007 for Daniel Craig, and it served as a reboot for Bond after the increasing silliness of the Pierce Brosnan entries.
A film I wrote about earlier this year, John Dahl’s 1998 poker-driven crime drama ROUNDERS is widely respected within the casino games community, on the grounds that the gambling is more realistically depicted than usual in Hollywood movies, but the gambling scenes in CASINO ROYALE put cinema over realism in a way that only Bond movies can.
No one should ever expect gritty realism in a Bond film so when our secret agent hero faces off against arch villain Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) over a game of Texas Hold’em the stakes are absurdly high. Bond knows he has to win, because le Chiffre plans to use the winnings to aid terrorists, which gives the game an edge even the most gripping of cinematic poker games could never match.
In the scene, the game is down to four players - Bond, Chiffre, Fukutu (Tom So), and Infante (Ade) – with four million in the pot. Bond has the biggest stack of chips, and the coolest demeanor, of course. After studying his main opponent with his icy eyes, Bond puts his entire 40 million, 5 hundred thousand in on the next hand to the gasping of the roomful of patrons surrounding them. Chiffre follows suit, and puts his money, all $115 million of it, in the pot.
Watch the scene and feel the tension:
With so many glitzy gambling scenes throughout the series, it would be hard to say that this one is the best, but it's definitely in the top 5 I'd say. It also recalls that the first time we met 007 on the silver screen, portrayed by Sean Connery in 1962’s DR. NO, he was sitting in a tux at a gambling table. Some things never change.
More later...
5 Nisan 2013 Cuma
Opening today at a multiplex near you:
JURASSIC PARK 3D
(Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993)
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, and to create franchise awareness for the big ass IMAX 3D event spectacular JURASSIC PARK IV set for Summer 2014, Steven Spielberg’s action adventure epic has now been outfitted in 3D for a theatrical re-release opening today.
That’s all well and good, but at the advance screening I attended, the image looked faded. The colors were much more vibrant in a revival screening I saw the same week of THE MUPPET MOVIE (part of the Cool Classics series at the Colony Theater in Raleigh), and that was an original 35 mm print 15 years older than JURASSIC PARK!
I know, I know, it's digital and I can only speak for how it looked at the one screening I saw, so I’ll be curious to know if any other movie-goers experienced such a dim image. When I see TV spots for the film, the color looks over-saturated, as if to make up for the faded picture. But anyway, on to the actual movie.
I could tell from the feel of the packed auditorium (and overhearing some random chatting) that many there had not seen the original JURASSIC PARK before. It has been a long time since I’ve seen it in full, but it has been on television so often that I’m very familiar with large chunks of it.
The Spielberg sense of otherworldly awe, that shined blindingly in such classics as CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND , RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and E.T., takes its last glorious gasp here.
The scene where Richard Attenborough introduces Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and the less famous kids (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello) to the wide landscape of cloned dinosaurs still has jaw-dropping impact, but the 3D-ness present this time is only intermittently effective throughout the film (the shot with the T-rex roaring into the jeep mirror with the disclaimer “Objects may seem closer than they appear” is one effective in-your-face instance). But most of the time, I didn’t even notice it.
The storyline (based on the 1990 novel by Michael Cricton, who co-wrote the screenplay with Spielberg cronie David Koepp) hasn’t really aged well - i.e. billionaire Attenborough brings a team of paleontologists and scientists (Neill, Dern, Goldblum), and a blood-sucking lawyer (Martin Ferrero) to inspect his new cloned dinosaur island theme park, but things go wrong (thanks to the conniving ways of Newman from Seinfeld) and they spend the rest of the movie being chased by CGI dinosaurs - but does it matter with so many genuine thrills on display? No it doesn’t.
It also has a number of entertaining elements such as a pre-PULP FICTION Samuel L. Jackson (“hold on to your butts!”) as the park’s chief engineer, the before mentioned Newman (actually Wayne Knight) providing snotty comic relief (Goldblum provides the more egg-headed kind), and a great suspenseful sequence with the kids trying to escape from a few raptors in the lavish kitchen in the visitor’s center, so the film still largely holds up.
It’s not even that dated - I only noticed Knight drinking a Jolt Cola, and Richards identifying herself as a “hacker” reminded me how new a term that was 20 years ago.
However, over and over I could tell that in this new 3D presentation, the things that got rises from the audience (many of whom were kids) came from Spielberg’s film making drive being in fifth gear, not the 3D enhancement, which, as I said before, didn’t look very good.
If your kids haven’t seen it, or only seen it on TV, a matinee may be in order of Spielberg’s crowd-pleaser, but contrary to Attenborough’s repeated boasts throughout the film, it looks to me like they did spare some expense with this re-tinkering, so brace yourself for a picture that doesn’t quite pop.
Sigh. If only a 2D 20th anniversary re-release was an option at the multiplexes.
More later...
JURASSIC PARK 3D
(Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993)
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, and to create franchise awareness for the big ass IMAX 3D event spectacular JURASSIC PARK IV set for Summer 2014, Steven Spielberg’s action adventure epic has now been outfitted in 3D for a theatrical re-release opening today.
That’s all well and good, but at the advance screening I attended, the image looked faded. The colors were much more vibrant in a revival screening I saw the same week of THE MUPPET MOVIE (part of the Cool Classics series at the Colony Theater in Raleigh), and that was an original 35 mm print 15 years older than JURASSIC PARK!
I know, I know, it's digital and I can only speak for how it looked at the one screening I saw, so I’ll be curious to know if any other movie-goers experienced such a dim image. When I see TV spots for the film, the color looks over-saturated, as if to make up for the faded picture. But anyway, on to the actual movie.
I could tell from the feel of the packed auditorium (and overhearing some random chatting) that many there had not seen the original JURASSIC PARK before. It has been a long time since I’ve seen it in full, but it has been on television so often that I’m very familiar with large chunks of it.
The Spielberg sense of otherworldly awe, that shined blindingly in such classics as CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND , RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and E.T., takes its last glorious gasp here.
The scene where Richard Attenborough introduces Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and the less famous kids (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello) to the wide landscape of cloned dinosaurs still has jaw-dropping impact, but the 3D-ness present this time is only intermittently effective throughout the film (the shot with the T-rex roaring into the jeep mirror with the disclaimer “Objects may seem closer than they appear” is one effective in-your-face instance). But most of the time, I didn’t even notice it.
The storyline (based on the 1990 novel by Michael Cricton, who co-wrote the screenplay with Spielberg cronie David Koepp) hasn’t really aged well - i.e. billionaire Attenborough brings a team of paleontologists and scientists (Neill, Dern, Goldblum), and a blood-sucking lawyer (Martin Ferrero) to inspect his new cloned dinosaur island theme park, but things go wrong (thanks to the conniving ways of Newman from Seinfeld) and they spend the rest of the movie being chased by CGI dinosaurs - but does it matter with so many genuine thrills on display? No it doesn’t.
It also has a number of entertaining elements such as a pre-PULP FICTION Samuel L. Jackson (“hold on to your butts!”) as the park’s chief engineer, the before mentioned Newman (actually Wayne Knight) providing snotty comic relief (Goldblum provides the more egg-headed kind), and a great suspenseful sequence with the kids trying to escape from a few raptors in the lavish kitchen in the visitor’s center, so the film still largely holds up.
It’s not even that dated - I only noticed Knight drinking a Jolt Cola, and Richards identifying herself as a “hacker” reminded me how new a term that was 20 years ago.
However, over and over I could tell that in this new 3D presentation, the things that got rises from the audience (many of whom were kids) came from Spielberg’s film making drive being in fifth gear, not the 3D enhancement, which, as I said before, didn’t look very good.
If your kids haven’t seen it, or only seen it on TV, a matinee may be in order of Spielberg’s crowd-pleaser, but contrary to Attenborough’s repeated boasts throughout the film, it looks to me like they did spare some expense with this re-tinkering, so brace yourself for a picture that doesn’t quite pop.
Sigh. If only a 2D 20th anniversary re-release was an option at the multiplexes.
More later...
15 Mart 2013 Cuma
This new documentary, rockumentary if you will, as Marty DiBergi would say, is now playing in selected cities across the country:
DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’: EVERYMAN’S JOURNEY
(Dir. Ramona S. Diaz, 2012)
Dammit! I can never escape Journey.
Over three decades since they first tortured me via AOR radio, the San Francisco band's particular brand of schlocky power balladry is still unavoidable. The use of the song “Don’t Stop Believin’” in the controversial last episode of The Sopranos has had a lot to do with the current resurgence of the band’s popularity that came to an ugly head in last summer’s awful ‘80s hair rock homage ROCK OF AGES (happily that movie flopped).
I should’ve accepted by now that Journey is a corporate rock machine, one that will keep going even if it has to replace a vital part. This documentary, the debut full length feature by director Ramona S. Diaz, is about the most recent replacement of the band’s lead singer in 2008, for an album and tour that was already in the works.
What’s interesting, or at least amusing, is how they went about finding their man. Guitarist and founding member Neil Schon trolled YouTube watching clips of Journey cover bands and tribute artists in a desperate last minute search to find a Steve Perry sound-alike for what he calls that “legacy sound.”
Schon happened upon videos of Arnel Pineda, a Filipino singer/songwriter who could imitate Perry’s vocal chops impeccably. Schon sent Pineda an email offering him the job that stressed “this is not a joke,” and before you know it, the skinny energetic 40-year old was fronting the band he idolized.
And then suddenly, Journey has more of an international appeal.
This is all established in the first 15 minutes so after that the documentary goes in circles through Journey’s history, stuff that was better covered in their episode of VH1’s Behind The Music, and through footage of the band onstage and backstage on their Revelation Tour ‘08.
Despite the name of the tour depicted, there are no real revelations in the backstage stuff, which is the kind of fluff that fills up special features on concert Blu ray or DVD releases, and the lengthy chunks of the band performing to thousands of appreciative fans will only be appreciated by those same fans.
Diaz’s documentary is most compelling when it touches on the fans that weren’t on board with Pineda joining Journey. We see Pineda reacting to cruel racist posts on internet message boards like one that yells with all caps: “ONLY FILIPINOS WILL SUPPORT TIS CRAPPY SINGER!!!!!!” (misspelling kept intact).
“I think he should be from here,” says one young female concertgoer, who stresses she’s not being racist. Another girl in the same concert venue parking lot counters with “He sounds just like him, and it’s still music.” Well, at least she’s half right. No, that’s a cheap shot, but I wish they spent more time with the white trash fans getting drunk and spouting out inanities before the show, but that’s probably because it reminded me of HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT (Jeff Krulik’s 1986 short shot in the parking lot of a Judas Priest that lives up to its cult reputation).
It’s all well and good, that Pineda was able to overcome the poverty of the streets of Manila and the rough living of his youth to hit the big-time, and it’s great he could buy his family a nice house and all, but the way that this is packaged, like an inspirational polemic is laughable. It seems to be saying that you too could be plucked from YouTube obscurity to front your favorite band, so don’t stop believin’ in your dreams, kids!
Pineda’s storyline weaving through the history of Journey’s branding does have uplifting elements, and he seems like a nice guy humbled by the spotlight, but, hey, it’s a one in a million tale of luck. No amount of belief will change that, even if it goes on and on and on and on and on…
More later...
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