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Posts Tagged ‘Vittorio Storaro’

Little Buddha

Wednesday, May 29th, 2024

May 25, 1994

LITTLE BUDDHA is a film by Bernardo Bertolucci, so I always assumed it was highly respected. Maybe I confused it with THE LAST EMPEROR, his 1987 film that won best picture and eight other Oscars. This one only got decent reviews and one Razzie nomination.

It’s the very earnest story of some friendly Tibetan Buddhist monks who come to Seattle because they believe a 9-year-old blond kid named Jesse Conrad (Alex Wiesendanger, “Child,” THE NUTCRACKER) might be the reincarnation of their teacher, Lama Dorje. It’s also the story of Siddhartha (Keanu Reeves, last seen five days earlier in EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES) in gorgeously shot sequences interspersed throughout as Jesse hears about him.

(read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Drama | 6 Comments »

Exorcist: The Beginning

Tuesday, October 10th, 2023

At the turn of the century, as we discussed yesterday, Morgan Creek set out to make a prequel to THE EXORCIST, and wound up making two of them instead. We already took a look at Paul Schrader’s DOMINION: PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST, the first one made, but initially shelved by the studio. When they test screened it they were so unhappy they decided rather than trying to salvage it with reshoots and recuts they would build a church on top of it and bury the church, by which I mean hire Renny Harlin (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER) to start over.

The script was heavily rewritten by Alexi Hawley (a first timer who has since written for TV shows such as The Following, Castle and The Recruit), but it’s still about Father Merrin uncovering an early Christian church found mysteriously buried in the Turkana district of Kenya. Stellan Skarsgård continued, as he put it in an intro for the premiere of Schrader’s version, “carrying the cross for Merrin for another year.” And Julian Wadham and Ralph Brown will later show up as Major Granville and Sergeant Major. But Father Francis is now played by James D’Arcy (HITCHCOCK, OPPENHEIMER), and Clara Bellar’s Dr. Rachel Lesno has been replaced by Izabella Scorupco (GOLDENEYE) as Dr. Sarah Novak, so even when Skarsgård’s dialogue is the same he had to refilm. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Horror | 12 Comments »

Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist

Monday, October 9th, 2023

This is the first first-time-watch for me in this EXORCIST series viewing. There are so many horror franchises that I’m a completist about, but I never really thought of myself as an EXORCIST guy. But after revisiting I, II and III in quick succession, and knowing I’d be seeing the new one too, I figured… when in Rome (home of the Vatican), right? Look, if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize the entire THE EXORCIST series in one moment…

I actually always meant to see the EXORCIST prequel, but it was intimidating, because there were two of them. Morgan Creek founder James G. Robinson started trying to develop the prequel in the late ‘90s, probly without very lofty ambitions, since the first director attached was Tom McLoughlin (FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI: JASON LIVES). But after McLoughlin didn’t like the script by William Wisher Jr. (TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY) and left the project, they picked up the great John Frankenheimer, who had most recently done REINDEER GAMES and the made-for-cable PATH TO WAR. He brought in novelist Caleb Carr for a page 1 rewrite, and Liam Neeson signed on to star as the younger version of Max von Sydow’s archaeologist/exorcist character, Father Lankester Merrin. But Frankenheimer had to leave due to illness (and died a month later), and his friend Paul Schrader (fresh off of AUTO FOCUS) agreed to take over if he could rework the script. (Only Wisher and Carr received credit, but Carr said it didn’t resemble what he wrote.) Neeson had to drop out to do LOVE ACTUALLY, but miraculously the studio let Schrader hire Stellan Skarsgård (IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE) to star. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Horror | 19 Comments »

Dick Tracy

Tuesday, May 30th, 2017

Oh hey, look guys, it’s summertime! And you know what that means: 1) time to sit back and unwind 2) that hardcore dance has gotten a little bit out of control, and 3) there will be a bunch of big special effects type movies coming out. As soon as the sunny days start I get excited for all the greatness and/or crap that’s coming out every Friday, I get nostalgic for the joy I’ve had in movie theaters throughout my life, or even that certain feeling I get from sitting down and waiting for some big expensive heavily advertised movie that will turn out to not be artistically worthy of its Slurpee tie-in. I still cherish the experience.

And in between watching the new movies I usually do some kind of summer movie retrospective. I’m sort of running out of good anniversaries to do, though, so this year I decided to try a different approach. This will be a series of films that have come out in the past couple decades of summers but didn’t exactly catch on culturally. Some of them will be financial flops or disappointments, others made decent money but were undeniably rejected by audiences. We’ll look at some misunderstood gems, some horrible pieces of garbage, and various stages in between.

I’m calling them SUMMER FLINGS – things the world flirted with briefly on the screen, then left in the past. Or movies that were flung out there and nobody caught them. Today’s movie is arguably remembered more than most of the others we’ll be looking at, but it definitely didn’t catch the world on fire the way Disney hoped it would, so I didn’t want to skip it.

P.S. I’m shy about bringing this up, but I’d have a hard time doing a series like this without my benefactors on Patreon, whose generous donations help offset some of the extra days I take off to really dig in and research and what not. So thank you to them and if you enjoy these reviews and can afford it please consider donating (or using any of the other methods of support mentioned on the right side of your monitor/bottom of your phone). Thanks!

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June 15, 1990

When the ’90s began, Tim Burton’s BATMAN seemed like the gold standard for summer movie excitement. In 1989 it had been a phenomenon at the box office, in record stores and at bootleg t-shirt stands, and every studio wanted to find their own Batman. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | 53 Comments »

Tucker: The Man and His Dream

Tuesday, January 19th, 2016

tn_tuckerlucasminusstarwarsTUCKER, directed by Francis Ford Coppola (CAPTAIN EO), glorifies two of executive producer George Lucas’s favorite things: cars and artistic independence. It’s a starry-eyed, big-band-jazz-scored paean to Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), an innovator who failed to conquer the post-WWII car business, but at least made a cool car.

The titleistical dream is the idea of the Tucker, “the car of the future today,” a sleek, futuristic sedan with the engine in the back and three headlights that he says will move with the front wheels for safety. He’s just a dude with a scrappy company working out of a barn who invented some turrets for the army and a tank that they rejected because it moved too fast. He still owns one and uses it to drive the family into town to get ice cream. Nobody will invest in his dream until he gets it into a magazine and just acts like it’s something that’s happening. Next thing you know Martin Landau is able to get him meetings and investors. The Secret!

In one sense Tucker is full of shit. He thinks he can make this car, but he lets people believe he already has. He pushes his sons and trusted collaborators into overdrive to figure out how to build a good-enough prototype in time for the big unveiling. Like a movie trying to make a summer release date. The dream runs into the reality of unforeseen problems and limited time and resources, but he’s happy to just build a thing that looks like the concept art. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Drama, Reviews | 10 Comments »

Captain EO

Tuesday, January 12th, 2016

tn_captaineolucasminusstarwarsI mentioned in my LABYRINTH review that I thought Michael Jackson would’ve been a cool Goblin King. Sorry about that. I take it back. Mr. Bowie was uniquely suited for the character and I’m glad he got to hang out with all those puppets and implant himself in the creepy childhood memories of millions around the world.

And besides, Michael got his chance to get a little muppety, because the next Lucasfilm release was this 17 minute 3D film starring Jackson as “the infamous Captain EO,” leader of “a rag-tag band” of aliens and robots and crap sent on a dangerous space mission to deliver a gift to the Supreme Leader (Angelica Huston). EO gives his crew a speech about how everybody thinks they’re a bunch of fucking losers and if they don’t pull this mission off they’re gonna be “drummed out of the corps.” Which really makes you wonder how they got into the corps in the first place. What kind of boot camp can these weirdos make it through?

They seem to be kind of the Bad News Bears of space troopers. They’re bickering, cartoon-voiced goofballs who screw everything up and get yelled at by the Captain (except when they throw an egg at the hologram of Commander Bog [Dick Shawn, The Year Without a Santa Claus]), which makes him laugh).

The crew consists of a robot named Major Domo (voice of Gary DePew, producer of ANGEL 4: UNDERCOVER), another one named Minor Domo that attaches into the Major’s back, a furry two-headed monster named Idey (Debbie Lee Carrington, RETURN OF THE JEDI, HOWARD THE DUCK) and Odey (Cindy Sorenson, THE DARK BACKWARD), a green elephant-man named Hooter (Tony Cox, RETURN OF THE JEDI, SPACEBALLS, BAD SANTA) and a small furry guy with butterfly wings named Fuzzball (effects by Rick Baker, makeup man for the cantina scene in STAR WARS as well as Jackson’s Thriller video). All are small in stature, most are inept and cowardly. But EO leads them through a space battle, a crash-landing and a dark tunnel to the Supreme Leader, who turns out to be a grey and black Giger-esque biomechanical witch hanging from a web of cables and corrugated tubes. She is not happy to see them. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Musical, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 20 Comments »

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