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Reviews
Sexy Beast (2000)
Fascinating movie. Genuinely frightening.
Sexy Beast asks the question, how do you deal with someone who is utterly evil? Answer: (and this is a spoiler) you shoot him.
Don Logan (played by Ben Kingsley) is a classic case of narcissistic personality disorder. In his mind, other people don't exist, except as agents of the ambitions and desires of Don Logan. Not only that but Logan may have a slight touch of schizophrenia, as becomes evident when he talks to his reflection in the mirror, and evidently hears replies that we can't hear out in the audience.
Sometimes, Logan's utter indifference to anybody else's rights is funny, as in the scene where he blithely refuses to extinguish his cigarette on an airplane. When told that the plane can't take off if he is smoking, he, reasonably to himself, replies that they'll just have to wait until he's finished smoking, won't they? I kind of wish that I myself had such an ironclad sense of my own right to run the world.
But mostly Logan is terrifying. He has absolutely nothing that resembles a conscience, and so people who actually are compelled by their natures to treat other people kindly and fairly, like the warm and friendly Gal, are at a loss with how to deal with him. Finally, with a little assist from his grossly insulted wife, Gal is forced to participate in killing Logan. It is clear that Gal, thief that he is, can hardly bear to hurt anybody, which is why he had been at Logan's mercy, despite Gal's superior size and strength.
Everybody has, at one time or another, run into someone like Logan. All you can do in the real world with people like that is get away from them. The big satisfaction of this movie is that Logan finally gets what is coming to him. Would that there was such justice in reality.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Perhaps the best movie ever made.
I have enjoyed and in fact loved many movies, but Dr. Strangelove is the only movie that I have seen over and over without eventually noticing flaws. George C. Scott delivers what I consider to be the finest comic performance in a movie (rivaled only by Lee Marvin, in Cat Ballou).
This movie is a satire, but even so the dialogue, ridiculous as it always is, is utterly, realistically human. When General Buck Turgidson (Scott) is explaining to the President what he considers to be the wisdom ofa first nuclear strike on the Soviets, for example, you can easily imagine a real general laying out the same arguments, using the same euphemisms. ("Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. I am saying, no more than ten or twenty Americans killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.") Or Major Kong (played by Slim Pickens) giving his bomber crew a brief pep talk. ("I reckon you wouldn't even by human bein's if you didn't have some pretty strong feelin's about nuclear combat.")
I have adopted some of Major Kong's expressions as my own. For example, "I'm going' to get them doors open if it harelips everybody on Bear Creek." Or, "I've been to a picnic, one world's fair and a rodeo, and that's the stupidest thing I've every heard come over a set of earphones."
Dr. Strangelove is the only movie I can name thatcontains no superfluous scenes. Every minute of this movie contributes to the story. You couldn't cut anything from it without lessening its effect, which is simultaneously horrifying and hilarious.
A great movie, and my choice for the best movie ever made.
Emmanuelle (1974)
This movie stinks. Sylvia Kristel is spectacularly beautiful, though.
The French love Emmanuelle. Apparently Emmanuelle is the most popular movie ever shown in France. Yet another reason to doubt the taste of the French, if you ask me.
I like me a good naked lady movie as much as the next guy, but even so Emmanuelle annoys me plenty. It's dreary, plot less, pretentious and more than a little sick.
What Emmanuelle does have is Sylvia Kristel, who was 21 when it was made. Kristel is a Dutchwoman who is said to have an I.Q. of 160. This actually could be true. I've seen her in television interviews, and she speaks perfectly grammatical English, with only a slight accent. Emmanuelle was shot in French, and apparently Kristel's French is virtually flawless too. She can't act any better than Daniel Day-Lewis's right foot, but she's certainly a gifted linguist.
And beautiful? Forget about it. Take the beauty quotients of Geena Davis and Demi Moore, add them together, and multiply by 5. Plus, she's sort of childlike, which is wierdly appealing in the star of a sex movie.
Cheyenne (1955)
Horrifying violent western with a heroic nonactor star.
I haven't seen an episode of Cheyenne since I was nine years old, and I'm well over fifty now. Mostly what I remember about it was its horrendous violence: shootings, beatings, hangings, Indian tortures, and any amount of deliberate mayhem. This was very strong stuff, and every bit as violent as modern TV shows.
What this show had going for it was Clint Walker, who may well have been the most astonishing looking human being ever to appear in front of a camera. I have seen very few professional athletes who were bigger and stronger, but none who were as handsome. Walker, whom I've seen in other movies, was also at least competent as an actor, even though he was hired on the basis of his striking good looks. He was at least as good as the young Clint Eastwood, and far superior to the truly appalling Arnold Schwarzenegger.
An interesting fact about Walker is that he once fell on an upturned ski pole, whose point pierced his heart. He pulled the pole from his chest and walked down the ski hill. He survived and is still alive in 2006. You couldn't invent somebody like this in a movie and have people believe it.
Bonanza (1959)
This show is just plain ridiculous.
Ah, Bonanza. I loved this show when I was a boy. Now I watch it in reruns just to marvel at how bad it was.
How come none of the Cartwrights look like each other? How come they all have those '50's brylcreem haircuts, and they all wear the same outfits all the time, and their clothes are always immaculately clean, even though they're supposed to be working cowboys? How come, if the Cartwrights own the largest ranch in Nevada, you never see a cow?
I especially love the episodes where one of the Cartwrights falls in love with a girl. She's a walking dead woman. As soon as they've set the date for the wedding, the unfortunate bride-to-be will immediately die of astrange disease, or get shot or run over by a wagon.
Okay, I love Hoss. Three hundred pounds of muscle, and no more brains than a man might need if his career were herding around imaginary cattle.
The Beverly Hillbillies (1962)
I worst, best-loved TV show ever made.
I first saw an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies in 1962, when I was ten years old. I loved it. I read somewhere that seven of the top ten audience totals for televised half-hours were attained by episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. These totals can never be surpassed, because when The Hillbillies were first broadcast there were only three channels available to viewers. Today the most popular shows cannot attract such large audiences because the total audience is fragmented by the larger number of TV channels.
But The Beverly Hillbillies is a genuinely bad show, because nobody in it ever behaves like a real human being. Even the stupidest of Ozark hillbillies would realize pretty soon that, if you're rich, you don't have to wear the same clothes every day. You can buy a new truck. You can hire somebody to do the laundry and cleaning and cooking. So the show fails as satire, because it has no roots in real human experience.
On the other hand, The Beverly Hillbillies does have Buddy Ebsen as Jed Clampett. It's worth watching as the calm, affable Ebsen plays straight man to everyone else, who is either severely retarded or insane.
Plus, the theme song is truly brilliant.
The Exorcist (1973)
Human and disgusting and frightening and fun all at once.
I saw The Exorcist in a crowded theater when it was first released (and I was 22), and that night was one of the most entertaining I've ever spent at a movie. The audience shrieked during the shock bits, and then broke into nervous laughter at the utter grossness of it. Grossness in movies was unheard of in 1973, and so we were all seeing something new and fun.
This movie scared me so badly that, on the way home from the theater, I ran in the dark from the bus stop to my house, looking back over my shoulder most of the way. I slept with the light on that night. So I got my money's worth.
I love this movie because the main hero, Damien Karras, is such a likable and human character. Father Karras is a priest who has lost his faith. Paradoxically, he regains his faith in God and goodness only when he is exposed to supernatural evil. Karras is presented all through the movie as a human being, instead of the Godlike father figure that Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy used to play. We see him smoking and drinking beer and trying to talk his elderly mother into moving into a nursing home. Father Karras is the most realistic, and therefore the most sympathetic, priest ever to appear in a movie. If it weren't for that, The Exorcist would just have been a silly gross-out horror movie, instead of the classic that it is.
The Godfather (1972)
A terrifically entertaining movie, but deeply phony and morally dishonest.
You get a lot to enjoy in The Godfather, although I suspect that anyone who has not read the book before seeing the movie might occasionally lose track of the plot.
But the movie is morally crooked, because the Corleone Family are never shown doing anything criminal, other than killing off rival criminals in justifiable self-defense. Don Vito Corleone is a wise, benevolent patriarch to the Italian American community of New York, and gets into trouble with rival gangsters only because he refuses to take part in selling heroin. Unless you have been told that he is a criminal, you'd never know. You certainly never see the Corleones cheating or hurting honest citizens. That's what I mean when I say that the movie is crooked.
Compare the Corleones to TV's Sopranos. Tony Soprano is overtly criminal-a brutal, thieving, murdering, adulterous extortionist who pretends to adhere to a Mafia code, which he breaks whenever it suits him to break it. This is why The Sopranos is artistically superior to The Godfather. The creators of the Sopranos have actually dared to make Tony Soprano and his fellow criminals hateful, which is just what you would expect real criminals to be. Don Corleone, on the other hand, resembles a real human being about as much as Tarzan of the Apes.
So, great as The Godfather is as an entertainment, it fails as art.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
I hate this movie and I want to tell you why.
This is one the most immoral movies ever made. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are professional thieves, and Sundance is a soulless killer, and we're supposed to like them because they're handsome guys who say funny things. Well not me, boys.
In the end, Butch and Sundance, crackin' funnies all the way, are under attack from a troop of Bolivian soldiers. Sundance shoots down five or six of these honest, nonbankrobbing men, and we're supposed to be impressed by how well he handles a gun. The men he has killed? Not good-looking, not funny, so who cares if they got shot, according to the general drift of the story. Then, when Butch and Sundance get killed, this is made to seem so tragic that we're not allowed to see it.
So I hate this movie. If you're not careful, it will seduce you out of your sense of right and wrong. It's not even as if Butch and Sundance are tragic victims who have been forced into a life of crime. They're just a couple of healthy, funny, handsome guys whom everyone seems to like, and they steal and kill because it's more fun than working. The first time I saw this show, I rooted for them myself. I was played for a sucker, and I don't like that I was.
Shane (1953)
The noblest hero and the wickedest villain in any movie ever made.
The character of Shane is so selflessly noble in this movie that only a truly gifted actor could play the role and still be believable. Shane is such a good man that, at one point, he pretends to be a coward in order to avoid fighting a man he could easily kill in a gunfight. In the end, after killing the irredeemably wicked Jack Wilson, Shane does not exult in triumph. His face takes on a look of deep sorrow. Then he praises the dead Wilson to the boy Joey, and tells the boy that, "there's no going back from a killing." Wonderful, and Alan Ladd does it all with a quiet, gentle dignity that is truly heroic.
Jack Palance plays evil gunfighter Jack Wilson. Wilson is the most hateful, frightening villain ever to appear in a movie. Wilson taunts the valiant fool Ernie Torrey into drawing his gun, and then gleefully shoots him down. Then he laughs about it.
I think that Shane is about the necessity for remorse. Shane, who bears a burden of remorse for a past life as a gunfighter, does his best to renounce violence, only to be forced against his best intentions to kill again. Because he is a good man, and wise enough now to know that killing is terrible, his heroism is extreme, because he must bear not only the danger of fighting but also the pain of remorse even if he survives the fight. Wilson, on the other hand, is perfectly evil because he feels no remorse for killing. He enjoys it and is proud of his capacity to do it. Wilson has no soul.
I am the only one I know who thinks this, but I think that Shane has been mortally wounded at the end of the movie, and is going off to die alone, rather than let the boy Joey witness his death. Nobody else gets this out of the movie, so maybe it's just me.
Rio Conchos (1964)
Good movie with a great score. Jim Brown is fun to watch.
Rio Conchos is a good, tough western in its own right, but it's main strength is its musical score, which was one of the earliest by Jerry Goldsmith. The main theme is a wonderfully vigorous piece that suggests the motion of a horse, and is used with great effect during a scene where the main characters are pushing a wagon up a steep incline, just before they are to confront a band of astonishingly ugly bandits.
This is football legend Jim Brown's first movie, and it was made just before his last season of professional football (during which he would be selected as Most Valuable Player in the NFL). Brown is just barely competent as an actor, but it's fun to watch him in the move, because you can see how the greatest running back of his era looked out of his uniform, while he was still an active player. He is noticeably heavier in the legs and hips than he was to appear in his subsequent movie career.