Posts Tagged ‘Michael Douglas’
Monday, July 31st, 2023
August 5, 1983
THE STAR CHAMBER is the most grown up thriller I’ve come across in this 1983 retrospective so far. You can tell because it stars Michael Douglas. As a judge. It’s a crime/vigilante movie with a message about the flaws of the justice system and the temptation to take short cuts toward justice. Kinda like MAGNUM FORCE without the badass shit, but still good. Peter Hyams (between OUTLAND and 2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT) directs the shit out of it, and is credited as co-writer with Roderick Taylor (a recording artist turned rookie screenwriter who explored related themes many years later in THE BRAVE ONE).
It takes place in L.A., with a great L.A. atmosphere. It opens around 6 am one sunny morning when two undercover cops decide to follow a suspicious pedestrian, who notices them and takes off running. They see him ditch something in his garbage can as he runs into his house, and are aware they can’t search it without a warrant, but decide to wait until a garbage man dumps it in his truck, and then search the truck. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bo Welch, David Faustino, DeWayne Jessie, Don Calfa, Hal Holbrook, James B. Sikking, Joe Regalbuto, Michael Douglas, Peter Hyams, Roderick Taylor, Yaphet Kotto
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020
Wow, THE JEWEL OF THE NILE came out less than two years after ROMANCING THE STONE, which was expected to be a flop, so it’s not like they had a head start. Fast turnaround. Robert Zemeckis was off making BACK TO THE FUTURE and Diane Thomas was writing scripts for Spielberg (and wanted to be paid well) so producer/star Michael Douglas hired director Lewis Teague (ALLIGATOR) and writers Mark Rosenthal & Lawrence Konner (THE LEGEND OF BILLIE JEAN, later SUPERMAN IV, SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK, STAR TREK VI, MERCURY RISING and the bad PLANET OF THE APES).
The story starts six months later, with Joan and Jack sailing around the world on the boat he bought with the proceeds from part 1’s stolen jewel. (I thought he bought it for her as a gift, but I guess not.) This time she’s having trouble writing her books because her life is too much romance and adventure. She’s actually bored of all the exotic locales and beautiful sunsets and sits in the boat with her typewriter writing a garbage pirate adventure which she now imagines starring herself and Jack but also gets thrown off and accidentally turns the pirates into punks? I don’t know if that represents a typo or a failed artistic flourish or what. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Avner Eisenberg, Billy Ocean, Danny DeVito, Glenn Randall Jr., Jan de Bont, juggling, Kathleen Turner, Lawrence Konner, Lewis Teague, Mark Rosenthal, Michael Douglas, Paul David Magid, Spiros Focas
Posted in Action, Reviews, Romance | 19 Comments »
Monday, September 14th, 2020
I don’t think I’ve seen ROMANCING THE STONE since the ‘80s. I’ve been curious to rewatch it forever because it’s one of those things that was huge at the time that hasn’t survived as much in the cultural memory as other things. Like, maybe I didn’t study the crowd scenes enough, but I didn’t notice Kathleen Turner’s character Joan Wilder in READY PLAYER ONE. I suppose because this appealed a little more to the parents of the kids now in charge of the world’s nostalgia. But it’s directed by Robert Zemeckis, who I tend to like, so when I heard that my friends at the podcast The Suspense Is Killing Us were doing a Patreon bonus episode about the ROMANCING THE STONE/JEWEL OF THE NILE duology it prompted me to finally get to it.
Kathleen Turner (who’d only been in BODY HEAT and THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS previously) stars as Joan Wilder, Waldenbooks Romance Author of the Year winning author of Love’s Wicked Kiss, who we meet just as she’s completing her latest novel, as depicted through a re-enactment with her first person voiceover. She imagines her heroine Angelina as March 1981 Playboy Playmate of the Month Kymberly Herrin (GHOSTBUSTERS blowjob ghost, BEVERLY HILLS COP II, ROAD HOUSE, ZZ Top “Legs” video), but our glimpses of the rugged hero who rescues her look suspiciously like Michael Douglas. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: adventure, Alfonso Arau, Danny DeVito, Holland Taylor, Kathleen Turner, Kymberly Herrin, Lem Dobbs, Manuel Ojeda, Mary Ellen Trainor, Michael Douglas, Robert Zemeckis, Zack Norman
Posted in Reviews, Romance | 30 Comments »
Tuesday, June 19th, 2018
June 5, 1998
I thought I had reviewed A PERFECT MURDER before, but for some reason it didn’t come up when I searched for it, so I watched it again. Then when I searched for my DIAL M FOR MURDER review to refresh my memory I did find a review of A PERFECT MURDER from five years ago. But that review wasn’t that good so fuck that review. This is the first time I’ve reviewed it in my opinion.
A PERFECT MURDER is the first of two Viggo-Mortensen-co-starring Hitchcock remakes that came out in 1998. The other is Gus Van Sant’s PSYCHO, which is not a summer movie, but is worth bringing up as a comparison. While that was a complete anomaly – an audience-provoking experiment infused with bright colors and stylized costuming – this loose, updated remake of DIAL M FOR MURDER is an expensive, high gloss star vehicle. Remember? They used to make R-rated thrillers that were A-movies, sometimes by top directors. Michael Douglas’s movie before this was David Fincher’s THE GAME. For co-star Gwyneth Paltrow it was part of a prolific period – after being in SE7EN and then really blowing up with EMMA she starred in five 1998 movies: SLIDING DOORS, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, HUSH, this, and best picture winner SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, David Suchet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Douglas, Patrick Smith Kelly, Summer of '98, Viggo Mortensen
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 26 Comments »
Thursday, June 18th, 2015
Joel Schumacher’s FALLING DOWN (1993) is a movie I’ve always hated for what I thought it was saying. Watching it again a couple decades later I think I was partly wrong. Maybe even mostly wrong. But I still can’t get all the way on board. I’ll try to explain why.
Michael Douglas plays a defense industry office drone in L.A. who one morning gets stuck in traffic, loses his shit, decides to abandon his car and walk home. And along the way he decides to go nuclear on anyone he thinks is wronging him. This includes gang members who try to collect a toll for him sitting on their rock and a Neo-Nazi (Frederic Forrest, VALLEY GIRL) who shows him his weapons cache, but also a convenience store clerk, the staff and patrons of a fast food restaurant and random construction workers. As he travels he builds up an arsenal by taking people’s weapons, like a video game that didn’t exist yet at that time.
(He’s credited as “D-FENS” after his vanity license plate, but they find out his name is William Foster, so that’s what I’ll refer to him as.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Barbara Hershey, Ebbe Roe Smith, Frederic Forrest, Joel Schumacher, Los Angeles, Michael Douglas, Michael Paul Chan, Rachel Ticotin, Robert Duvall, Tuesday Weld, Vondie Curtis-Hall
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 95 Comments »
Monday, April 28th, 2014
BEHIND THE CANDELABRA is Steve Soderbergh’s one last big score before retirement. In some countries it played in theaters, but here in his home country it went straight to cable. Why? The Man obviously didn’t get how contemporary this story is even though it takes place in the ’70s through early ’80s.
It’s about this young working class guy, animal trainer, orphan (Matt Damon, THE BOURNE IDENTITY), one day he and his buddy (Scott Bakula, COLOR OF NIGHT) hit Vegas together, turns out his buddy knows this super famous musician guy (Michael Douglas, Streets of San Francisco), they get to hang out backstage, next thing you know he gets a job with the guy, gets to be in the crew, his posse, his entourage, like in the show Entourage (I don’t know, I haven’t seen it, but I figure I got a good guess what a show called Entourage would be about). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Marvin Hamlisch, Matt Damon, Michael Douglas, music biopic, Richard LaGravenese, Robe Lowe, Scott Bakula, Steven Soderbergh
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Thursday, March 14th, 2013
With DIAL M FOR MURDER fresh on my mind I was really curious how they updated it in the 1998 remake A PERFECT MURDER. In this one Michael Douglas plays the scheming husband, Gwyneth Paltrow is the wife and Viggo Mortensen (when he was still a rising character actor and not yet the guy from LORD OF THE RINGS) is her boyfriend.
The basics are all there. The husband knows the wife is cheating, he blackmails someone else into doing the deed, but she ends up killing the guy, and he has to desperately maneuver to cover his tracks, ultimately being undone by a mistake he made after giving the would-be killer a key to the apartment. But within that framework they do all kinds of things to update, expand, complicate and alter things. Some of it is kinda clever in the way it will surprise you if you’re expecting everything to go the same as in the Hitchcock version (I can’t say “the original,” because that would be the play by Frederick Knott, credited as the basis of this). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Davis, David Suchet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Douglas, Viggo Mortensen
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 17 Comments »
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
Steven Soderbergh’s take on an action/spy thriller – built around “The Face of Women’s MMA” Gina Carano after he saw her on Strikeforce while flipping channels around – lives up to my high expectations. It’s written by Lem Dobbs and it’s like the kid sister of THE LIMEY, mixing the style of that Soderbergh classic with kind of a more upbeat ex-Marine-badass-operative-betrayed-and-on-the-run type of story. It has THE LIMEY’s sense of quiet, deliberate pace and dread and also its dry you-just-fucked-with-the-wrong-person type of humor. Of course, professional fighter Carano has different strengths as a performer than Terence Stamp does, so her movie has less emotion and more punching, kicking, choking, armbars, heads broken through furniture, foot chases, etc. Gina’s not gonna mourn the loss of the daughter she never knew, and Terence isn’t gonna climb up onto a roof. In my opinion. And it’s great to have both of them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antonio Banderas, arthouse badass, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Gina Carano, J.J. Perry, Lemm Dobbs, Mathieu Kassovitz, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, MMA, Steven Soderbergh
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews, Thriller | 165 Comments »
