Archive for the ‘Drama’ Category
Wednesday, September 27th, 2023
In the early ‘80s, the English ad director Tony Scott, fresh off of his movie debut THE HUNGER, wanted to adapt the A.J. Quinnell book Man on Fire. According to some of the vague reports I found, producer Arnon Milchan got some other guy for the MAN ON FIRE ultimately released in 1987 because he didn’t have faith in a director who was only on his second movie. 17 years later, when Milchan decided to try again, he was like “okay, yeah, I guess you can make it as your 12th movie.”
Times were different, so Scott had screenwriter Brian Helgeland (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4, HIGHWAY TO HELL, THE POSTMAN, PAYBACK, BLOOD WORK, MYSTIC RIVER, LEGEND) change the setting from Italy to Mexico, where the sorts of kidnappings in the story had become more common. Nevertheless, Quinnell found it a much better and more faithful adaptation of his book. I haven’t read it, but as a movie Scott’s version obliterates the other one in every category I can think of. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A.J. Quinnell, Arnon Milchan, Brian Helgeland, Christopher Walken, Dakota Fanning, Denzel Washington, Giancarlo Giannini, Jesus Ochoa, Marc Anthony, Mickey Rourke, Rachel Ticotin, revenge, Roberto Sosa, Tony Scott
Posted in Reviews, Action, Drama | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, September 26th, 2023
“A kid. I didn’t know it’d be a kid.”
I think we’re all familiar with MAN ON FIRE, the 2004 Denzel Washington/Tony Scott movie. I didn’t like it much at the time, but seeing Washington’s reunion with Dakota Fanning in THE EQUALIZER 3 got me wanting to give it another shot. Before that I thought I should finally watch the earlier version I’d never seen, the 1987 adaptation of the same 1980 A.J. Quinnell book. Scott actually tried to adapt the book in the early ’80s. Producer Arnon Milchan said “nah dude, I produced ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, I’m getting Sergio Leone to do it” (paraphrase) but that didn’t work out – it went to French director and comic book writer Élie Chouraqui, his followup to LOVE SONGS starring Catherine Deneuve and Christopher Lambert. Chouraqui did share adaptation credit with Sergio Donati, one of the writers of FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and DUCK, YOU SUCKER! (plus ORCA and RAW DEAL), so that’s something. But he’s no Leone, no Scorsese (Milchan produced THE KING OF COMEDY) or Terry Gilliam (he also produced BRAZIL) or Tony Scott’s brother (he produced LEGEND). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A.J. Quinnell, Arnon Milchan, Brooke Adams, Danny Aiello, Elie Chouraqui, Franco Trevisi, Gerry Fisher, Jade Malle, Joe Pesci, Joe Scott, Scott Glenn, Sergio Donati
Posted in Reviews, Action, Drama | 13 Comments »
Thursday, August 31st, 2023
August 25, 1983
After all the bullshit I happily dissected for this Summer of Nub series, I knew I shouldn’t skip the revered international classic that dropped in the final week of August ’83. The one that’s in the Criterion Collection, that was brought up so lovingly when co-star David Bowie died in 2016, and when composer/co-star Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March. I’ve been giving you the lowdown on every cheapjack part 3, off brand space opera and fantasy sword guy you ever heard of, then right when I’m about to wrap up I swing in with this highly acclaimed drama that happens to have been released in four American theaters between JARED-SYN and HERCULES. Film criticism won’t know what hit it.
One problem, though: what if it turns out I don’t really understand MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE very well? What then? Well, I guess I’ll just confess that up front. We must be able to admit that we don’t know everything. But come along and help me parse it, if you want.
I really went in blind, so this was news to me yesterday: it’s the story of mostly British prisoners in a Japanese P.O.W. camp in Java, 1942. The titular Lieutenant Colonel is played by Tom Conti, who’s immediately unmistakable as the guy who played Albert Einstein in OPPENHEIMER. It’s impressive because yeah, he looks so much like Einstein, but the resemblance never would’ve occurred to me. Casting directors know what they’re doing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alistair Browning, David Bowie, international co-productions, Johnny Ohkura, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takeshi Kitano, Tom Conti
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, August 16th, 2023
First thing I want to say is that I’ve been calling this movie “Oppy” while having no idea that it’s what everyone calls him in the movie. I guess it’s just the natural, instinctive nickname that comes to mind for J. Robert Oppenheimer, even before “J.R.”
Second thing I want to say is that I was so wrong about the phenomenon of OPPENHEIMER! I had been confused as to why people were talking about it as a sure-thing blockbuster smash, but here I am finally having seen it after 3 weeks of sold out shows at the Imax. I had to give in and buy the tickets a week in advance, and the show did sell out in the same theater that never filled up for DEAD RECKONING, JOHN WICK 4, CREED III, DIAL OF DESTINY, etc. There’s lots of hype about it being shot for Imax format, and this is is the only full Imax format screen in the state, so that’s important context. But still – a 3-hour R-rated drama about a scientist selling out every show every day for weeks? Just because Christopher Nolan directed it? Hooray for the auteur theory! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alden Ehrenreich, Alex Wolff, biopic, Christopher Nolan, Cillian Murphy, Dane DeHaan, David Dastmalchain, David Krumholtz, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Imax, Jack Quaid, James Remar, Josh Hartnett, Macon Blair, Matt Damon, Matthias Schweighofer, Rami Malek, Robert Downey Jr., Scott Grimes, Tom Conti
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 30 Comments »
Thursday, July 13th, 2023
July 15, 1983
Earlier in this series we talked about how PSYCHO II was a risky, unlikely sequel of ’83 that was so good it actually went over pretty well. There’s another one that did not go over well at all (though it made about $30 million more than PSYCHO II at the box office). Like RETURN OF THE JEDI, this one is a sequel to a huge hit and pop culture phenomenon from 1977.
How is it that there’s a sequel to SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, and it’s directed by Sylvester Stallone, but I didn’t see it until now? I was always curious, but I knew it wasn’t about disco, it looks like he’s doing aerobics on the cover, and I’d only ever heard it mentioned as a punchline, so it stayed low on my watch list until I decided to study the summer of ’83. Only after watching it did I read up on it and realize it was pretty much a universally hated movie. Wikipedia says it’s “the earliest film to hold a score of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.” It has an average of 23 on Metacritic. World’s biggest SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER fan Gene Siskel called it “a typically weak sequel that has no legitimate artistic reason for being.” A 2006 Entertainment Weekly list called it the worst sequel of all time. I actually couldn’t find a positive review, and few that weren’t scathing, seething, disgusted.
But I’m not crazy, the world is crazy, when I tell you I genuinely enjoyed STAYING ALIVE. I’m not trying to be a show off here, I’m just coming to it with vastly different artistic values, I think. I’m not a circa-1983 critic determined to assassinate the exploiters of a sacred text of the ‘70s, or a Razzie voter avenging popular actors for being hunky, or a snarkster eager to snicker at The Worst Sequels of All Time!!! can you believe it!? How did this get made!? I come to it as a fan of Sylvester Stallone who discovered that holy shit, this is the missing link of his directorial work, not just the movie he did between ROCKY III and IV, but the stylistic bridge between them. It’s also very ROCKY-like in its content, with its ham and egger underdog chasing his dreams – a huge plus to me, but used as a criticism in every review I looked at – so it’s clearly very personal to the director. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, Cynthia Rhodes, dance movies, Finola Hughes, Frank Stallone, John Travolta, Norma Donaldson, Norman Wexler, Steve Inwood, Sylvester Stallone, Vince DiCola
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 32 Comments »
Wednesday, July 12th, 2023
1983: SUMMER OF NUB supplement: SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)
I was born in the ‘70s. Between you and me, it was a week after JAWS came out. So I don’t remember the release of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, or Disco Demolition Night, I was busy with other shit. Mister Rogers, STAR WARS, Popeye cartoons, learning to tie my shoes, etc.
So growing up there was this idea of “the seventies” that was really funny. Ha ha, they had bellbottoms, they listened to disco, the movies had wah wah guitars. A big joke. The high-pitched Bee Gee vocals, white polyester suits, light up floors and dance moves of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, as parodied in AIRPLANE!, on Sesame Street and elsewhere, were part of that impression.
But when I was a teenager, hip hop samples opened a path to P-Funk, and 99 cent records at Goodwill introduced me to Innervisions and Headhunters. Film appreciation led me to SHAFT, SUPER FLY, DOLEMITE and THE MACK (with a side order of TAXI DRIVER and all that). Suddenly “the seventies” weren’t as much of a joke in my mind, they were becoming a legendary period. But disco still seemed like some bullshit. As smooth jazz was to jazz, disco was to funk, I thought. Still kind of do, to some extent. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Barry Miller, based on a magazine article, dance movies, David Shire, disco, Donna Pescow, Fran Drescher, John Badham, John Travolta, Julie Bovasso, Karen Lynn Gorney, Martin Shakar, Norman Wexler, Robert Costanzo, Sam Coppola, Val Bisoglio
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 30 Comments »
Wednesday, June 28th, 2023
DEAD PIGS is a little movie that premiered at Sundance in 2018, and didn’t come to home video in the U.S. until a few years later, but I knew about it because it’s the feature debut of director Cathy Yan, and got her the job of directing BIRDS OF PREY (AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN).
Yan is American, born in China, raised in Virginia, went to high school in Hong Kong, then went to Princeton and a couple other American schools. Before she started making short films she was a reporter for the L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal working out of New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing. With a background like that it makes sense that her debut would be a truly international movie: American producers, Chinese financiers, presented by Chinese director Jia Zhangke (ASH IS THE PUREST WHITE), filmed in Shanghai with a bilingual crew, with mostly Mandarin dialogue but also some English, post production done in New York. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cathy Yan, David Rysdahl, Haoyu Yang, international co-productions, Jia Zhangke, Mason Lee, Meng Li, Shanghai, Vivian Wu, Zazie Beetz
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 4 Comments »
Monday, June 26th, 2023
MASTER GARDENER is the latest from Paul Schrader, who I consider to be on a late career roll between FIRST REFORMED and THE CARD COUNTER. This one is thematically related to those, and Schrader has called the three of them his unintentional “Lonely Man Trilogy,” but the template goes all the way back to TAXI DRIVER and has been loosely repeated over and over again throughout his filmography. Which is one of the things I love about him.
This time the journal-writing weirdo narrator is Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton, JANE GOT A GUN), the fastidious horticulturalist in charge of Gracewood Gardens, an estate in Louisiana (filmed at a former plantation). He’s very loyal to his aging heiress boss, Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver, ABDUCTION) – including having sex with her on demand – so he does as she says when she instructs him to take on her troubled grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell, BLACK ADAM) as an apprentice. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Devonte Hynes, Esai Morales, Jared Bankens, Joel Edgerton, Matt Mercurio, Paul Schrader, Quintessa Swindell, Sigourney Weaver
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Drama, Thriller | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, March 8th, 2023
You know I love the CREED movies and the ROCKY movies. ROCKY V is easily the weakest of all of them, and I even like that one. I don’t expect there ever to be another one as impressive as CREED, a miraculous rebirth by a brilliant director who deeply loved Stallone’s movies and evolved them into something new, so I enjoyed CREED II for what it was. I was thrilled that it brought back Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago and let us care about him the way I always wanted to. As I wrote in my review at the time, “He was a human specimen in ROCKY IV, and now he’s a human.”
CREED II is a solid sequel, but CREED III is a truly great one. It’s the directorial debut of Michael B. Jordan, and being populated only by characters from the CREED part of the series it stands more on its own, less on our nostalgia and good will. It follows the ROCKY sequel template in that it checks in with Adonis Creed (Jordan) at a new stage of his career and life, catches up with his family, introduces a new rival, and builds up a conflict that will result in a big match wrapped up in personal meaning. To his credit, Jordan also introduces a bit of stylization in the fight scenes that stands out from the others in the series. But most importantly he tells a story that genuinely has things to say about life and relationships that to me is as exciting as any of the boxing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron D. Alexander, boxing, Florian Munteanu, Jonathan Majors, Joseph Shirley, Keenan Coogler, Michael B. Jordan, Phylicia Rashad, Ryan Coogler, Tessa Thompson, Thaddeus J. Mixson, Wood Harris, Zach Baylin
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Sport | 48 Comments »
Tuesday, February 14th, 2023
“My dad died fighting Nazis in Germany, but he died fightin the wrong ones, huh?”
THE FINAL COMEDOWN is a 1972 drama starring Billy Dee Williams as an angry young militant who leads some sort of small uprising. It has been categorized as blaxploitation, and that makes sense – it’s a low budget movie with a funky soundtrack, and a sex scene (maybe to please producer Roger Corman), and it co-stars that bad D’Urville Martin (director of DOLEMITE, played by Wesley Snipes in DOLEMITE IS MY NAME) and Raymond St. Jacques right after COOL BREEZE. But despite having many bullets fired and quite a few falling-off-a-building stunts, it’s not exactly an action movie or empowerment fantasy. It’s a very earnest issue movie, with the unvarnished rage and radicalism of THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR, plus an editing style and non-linear storytelling that seems more in the arty vein of stuff like SWEET SWEETBACK and TOP OF THE HEAP than all the ones that were trying to cash in on the success of SHAFT and SUPER FLY. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Allan Arkush, Billy Dee Williams, Celia Kaye, D'Urville Martin, Ed Cambridge, Grant Green, Maide Norman, Oscar Williams, Pamela Jones, Raymond St. Jacques, Roger Corman
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime, Drama | 2 Comments »
