Monday, October 7, 2024

Smug and Smugger.

Wolfs (2024)


Written&Directed by Jon Watts

with
George Clooney as Margaret's Man
Brad Pitt as Pam's Man
Amy Ryan as Margaret
Austin Abrams as Kid
Poorna Jagannathan as June
Zlatko Burić as Dimitri
Richard Kind as Kid's dad
Frances McDormand as the voice of Pamela Dowd-Henry

Here's the deal:  if there is a god, or supreme being or higher power as our friends in AA say, he enjoys a personal hatred for me. Why? I do not know, nor can I imagine. I am a nice guy. I give an honest opinion when reviewing a movie, based on my background, clarity of vision, and superior critical skills based on years of serious study.  However; I'm humble about it.  I believe cinema is an art-form, but I don't expect every movie to be a work of art! No, I expect at the very least some entertainment that makes some little story sense.

Which is how we arrive at the new Apple TV + offering titled Wolfs. No, not producers or agents or even our hairy four legged friends who keep sheep ranchers in Montana ever vigilant.  No one named Lupien as far as we the viewers know. 

Yeah, knowing my time in this veil of tears is finite, I'd expect the Great Magnet to shout a warning, a base-baritone voice bellowing from the the clouds,”John, I am the Lord your god of Cinema!  Be warned, do you sully your thoughts with movies like, ah like, Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1, and Wolfs. Somethings you just can not afford, even those included in the subscription price”.

Like in a Bergman film I get god's silence (at least Bergman can direct, something I can't say for Jon Watts.  Well, he can be said to direct if you have never seen anything other than Eastman Kodak commercials).  The pacing of his scenes almost approached the tedium of a movie like Barry Lyndon.  Snap it up, Howard Hawks, not Stanley Kubrick without the talent, art and craftsmanship.

Writer Jon Watts seems to have studied Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the way Brian De Palma studied Hitchcock. Trouble is, Watts is not William Goldman.  He is not even Pat Hobby.  He “snappy” dialogue relies on the personalities of his actors, Brad Pitt and George Clooney to provide the wit. Actors can only do so much. (even at a reported $35,000,000 each. Sputter, gag. Puke).

The story, such as it is, starts out implausible and slides down hill from  there.  A very slippery slope.

“No place for beginners or sensitive hearts
“When sentiment is left to chance
“No place to be ending but somewhere to start.”

(Sade singing Smooth Operator on the sound tract is the best thing about this movie.)

Clooney and Pitt are clean-up men of a kind you saw in Three Days of the Condor and John Wick. In and out, the job done quickly. These two are nothing like those guys, fixers more likely to be found in a Jerry Lewis movie than a Elmore Leonard type crime drama. They simply do not come across as tough underworld figures.  They are Smug and Smugger.  Pitt's smugger is OK, at least he doesn't do it with his southern accent. Clooney can't help but radiate that Cary Grant charm.  

Amy Ryan as the Manhattan DA, not an ADA, the DA checks into a $10,000 a night hotel suit with cute boy-toy who looks like a high school kid, who drops dead before the DA can even get undressed. Damn all the luck.  Amy calls her fixer, and the hotel's owner calls her fixer and they both arrive to help her out of a jam.  It seems the hospitality business at the upper end insures the privacy of guests with surveillance cameras in the rooms, just incase something like this happens.  Or, blackmail is called for.

Pitt and Clooney fall to arguing  like Don Ameche and Frances Langford on an Old Time radio rebroadcast of The Bickersons.

Guess what?  No? OK, I'll tell you.  The dead kid has four bricks of MacGuffin drugs in his backpack.  Another complication?

They finally exit the hotel only to discover the dead boy-toy is alive!  Another fine mess you have gotten me into, Stanley. Everyone wants to get into the act!  The seemingly before dead guy is transformed into a Olympic track star and our heroes must chase him all over the city.  You can run punk, but you can't hide.

What followed is an mindless odyssey over the city in an effort to return the dope to its rightful owner without getting killed. Plot hole's abound. An Ellery Queen or a  quantum computer could not sort it out because it makes no sense. Oh, and some afterthought gunplay.

The end offers a Pitt/Clooney high speed denouement hoping to explain the now convoluted story to the confused viewer.

Watts plays out his incompetence straight out to the end, giving the suffering viewer a Butch/Sundance ending.  But wait!  Brad and George have signed for a sequel, so the boys survive to return for another version of the same story.

If this is the best a reportedly $15,000,000 writer/director can do, I say give AI a chance. At least AI comes from a background of artificial experience honestly. 

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

 As you all know this is Nobel Week.  Thursday is the Literature award. A few years ago it was warded to a jingle writer.  The character Charlie Sheen played on 2 ½ Men must have have been based on Bob Dylan.

Yes, Bob Dylan is now placed in the same category as Yeats and TS Elliot. Never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor, as Gore Vidal observed. 

Mark Twain and Tolstoy never won but by god Dylan won.  No, not Dylan Thomas.

If them Dutchman (see The Blue Hotel) in Stockholm wanted a song writer to win, why not Stephen Sondheim?  Oscar Hammerstein II?  Joni Mitchell?  Cole Porter?  Why not Sheb Wooley? after-all, he wrote The Purple People Eater, and played a bad guy out to kill Marshall Will Kane in High Noon.

Philip Roth was robbed.

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Dune In

 The theme for many modern films these days is taken from the Bob Fosse musical, Chicago. Lyrics from that great American poet, Fred Ebb.


Give 'em the old razzle dazzle

Razzle Dazzle 'em

Give 'em an act with lots of flash in it

And the reaction will be passionate

Give 'em the old hocus pocus

Bead and feather 'em

How can they see with sequins in their eyes?


Current practitioners of the Old Razzle Dazzle are Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and several others, including the director of Dune Pt. 1.


Frank Herbert’s massive novel has been rendered by the director of Blade Runner 2049 into a solemn, self-important religious narrative about a Mahdi played by an actor who possesses the screen presence of a potato.  (Where is Chinese Gordon when we need him?). Timothée Chalamet has just enough charisma to be a singer in a boy band.  Lost in the shuffle. 


The young savior of the planet Dune is aided by a band of desert dwelling lunatics, more Klingon than Arabs, who could be tamed by monthly supplies from the Arrowhead water delivery man. As it stands they would kill a hapless intruder for the piss in his urinary bladder.


Before directing Citizen Kane, Orson Welles screened John Ford’s Stagecoach dozens of times.  Director  Denis Villeneuve  would do well to follow Welles’ example and take a look at David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.  The narratives of Dune and Lawrence have much in common.


Final note:  Sam Colt’s 1836 patent of his  Patterson revolver rendered sword fighting pretty much obsolete.  The folks in Dune had interstellar travel, anti gravity devices and all manner of groovy science fiction stuff. Couldn’t they do better than bladed weapons?



Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Heaven's Gate

I had just emerged from the hills on highway 93 at the north end Flathead Lake on the way to Kalispell when I saw the first bumper sticker that read, To Hell With Heaven's Gate. I was soon to see many more. This was August of 1981. Over a year after the film wrapped, the ugly feeling persisted.

Kalispell Montana was the base of operations for that film shoot. I had worked on two film shoot in Kalispell just a few years before.  Winterhawk, and Winds of Autumn, both low budget Westerns. Heaven's Gate had cost over 40 million dollars, over 150 million in today's dollars. For a Western with no bankable stars and no expensive optical effects. The problems began when the director, Michael Cimino, thought he was the bankable star. Like many foolish men, he believed he was the auteur, the author of the film. 

Upon arrival in town I spoke to a guy who I had worked with on the two films I mentioned. He had been hired to drive Cimino. At an appointed time, he was told to arrive with Mr Cimino's car at the front door of the Outlaw Inn, the motel where cast and crew were housed.

He was instructed to open the rear door and stand silently until the great man emerged and walked the short distance to the car. Close the door after he enters. Under no circumstances was he to speak to Cimino.

The employment did not last long. Cimino, impatient with the long drive from Kalispell to the locations in Glacier Park, opted to take a helicopter each way. Cast and crew had to endure the two to three hour drive each way. The union crew frequently on triple overtime.

After Cimino won the Oscar for the gimmick ladened pseudo drama, The Deer Hunter, he actually came to believe his press: he was a great artist of the cinema.

Somehow, this former director of Kodak commercials learned of a little known conflict between big cattle outfits (largely owned by absentee owners in Great Britain) and small ranchers, over grazing rights on open Federally owned lands in Wyoming, back in 1890. It had served as the basis for George Steven's western, Shane, and Owen Wister's novel, The Virginian (“When you call me that, smile.”). In his fevered mind, it would serve for an absurd Marxist sleigh-ride of victimization of Eastern European non English speaking immigrants (who had no part in the actual events) and and cattle barons, Harvard Grads to a man, who had followed Theodore Roosevelt's example and headed west to the cattle trade. (TR went bust).

The Winter of 1989/90 was severe and ranches in Montana and Wyoming, the story set in Johnson County, lost most of their stock, frozen where they had stood, starving. The employee/mangers for the British owners had little patients for the plague of cattle rustlers taking what was left. Vigilante justice was common in lawless territory.

So, in director Michael Cimino's “vision” , the story was about Eastern European immigrant farmers, and Harvard educated cattle barons, and legal death warrants issued by the governor, with the approval of the president of the United States!

The Heaven's Gate of the title is a roller rink in the little town of Sweetwater. The town's residents are a quarrelsome bunch. Men who are so poor they own a good old John Deere sodbuster plow, but no mule, horse or oxen to pull it, so must resort to a dozen or so women to act as draft animals, as seen in an unintended comic scene.

The men can not feed their staving families, but can afford to drink at the local saloon, bet on cockfights, and dally at the whorehouse ran by Ellas Watson, played by Isabelle Huppert (the real Ella Watson was not a madam and had nothing to do with the Johnson County war. She was the common law wife of store keeper, Jim Averill, played by Kris Kristofferson as a Federal Marshall with his usual one-note performance. Good looks count for a lot in the star system, as evidenced by the career of Brad Pitt).

These desperately poor people can afford to buy or rent roller skates at a rink in the unlikely location of 50 miles from who-gives-a-damn. Apparently, no one at United Artists, the studio footing the bill for this nonsense, at anytime questioned the appearance of a roller rink in the film. It's main function seems to be as a town hall for the unpleasant citizens. Plenty of citizens of Kalispell wondered about it.

I saw the new, improved version, approved by the director, cut down from five and a half hours (One critic called it like a, “A five and half walk around one's own living room”), to a still glacial two and half hours. Thirty minutes of story and two hours of pretty pictures. After a disastrous screening, the stunned UA executives asked Cimino nicely to edit down a version that would not kill the viewer by boredom. He succeeded, just barely.

The pictures opens, after a dull and pointless Harvard graduation sequence of the class of 1870, featuring a bewildered looking Kristofferson and a drunken buffoon who will play a drunk in the narrative to come, played by John Hurt, twenty years later with a period train chug chug chugging into Casper Wyo. On top an EMPTY stock car are a cargo of the afore mentioned impoverished immigrants. (It should be noted that at the time, the railroad advertised in Germany and Bohemia for the prosperous farmers there to come to American for the free land, so they would have crops to ship from farm to markets in the East. They arrived with plenty of money to buy the equipment they needed to work the land.) I expected the show was in trouble after seeing that. They could have traveled in the railroad car. It was a lowbrow way of making a statement.

It seems Hester Street area of Manhattan had emptied out.

Also aboard is Marshall Averill, bringing a brand new Studebaker buggy for his sweetie, Ella the sexworker. She is also the sweetie of Nate Champion, the determined Christopher Walken , the Cattle Ass. enforcer. (Walken later has a wonderfully unlikely line, written by Cimino, “Shut your mouth, shit poke.” You won't find that one in the the Dictionary of Western Words. Shit poke describes the script, however. There is another unlikely line spoken by Richarl Masur with an absurd Irish tilt, “Lord of shit”. Load of shit more likely).

Averill shows Ella the new buggy after having left his horse hitched up overnight (called abuse even back then), she drives it through downtown Sweetwater, causing the folks to gleefully prance behind it as if it is Juggernaut rolling down the main drag in Bangalore. Yippee!

Finally after many pretty, well composed shots, the stock detectives hired by the cattleman invade Johnson county with murder in the eye, armed with legally issued death warrants! 

The immigrant community, after a lengthy and repetitious reading of the death list in Heaven's Gate, march out like the mob they are to confront the villains, led by cattle baron Frank Canton (in reality, the former sheriff of Johnson County) played with intense menace by Sam Waterson, in one of the few convincing performances. Too late to save poor Nate, who perished in a hail of gunfire after turning on his masters.

The people who did not have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, the whinny immigrants, who are so poor they own no working stock, or food to fed the family, are all well mounted and owners of buggies and wagons pulled by cart horses,; and here is the best part: they all own expensive Colt and Smith&Wesson revolvers, Winchester, Sharps and Springfield rifles, and have a store of dynamite to toss at the bad guys. Let me assure you, Dupont don't give it away. Then or now.

After the US cavalry arrives to save the besieged stock detectives, and poor hapless Ella is murdered by Canton in a revenge killing, Averill, who we were told in dialogue is a rich man, returns to his Jay Gatsby life, wondering the deck of his yacht with his well preserved Harvard girlfriend. (We witnessed them waltzing for what seemed like hours) The final scene with Kristofferson looking his most bewildered.

Executive production managers can breakdown a script and calculate the cost of production almost to the penny. The Heaven's Gate script had many costly elements. Location shooting, period costumes and props, set construction (Cimino had an entire town built and then torn down and rebuilt because buildings were too close by a couple of feet. Not at all noticeable on screen), a $150,000 prop in the form of the locomotive, and horses, lots and lots of horses. A huge crew.

The executive production manager at United Artists presented Cimino a budget of $11,000,000. He agreed he could shoot it for that price, but never signed the budget. It was a con, a grift, he had no intention of keeping his word. He was, after-all, an artist, an auteur of cinema. He was after “perfection”. His was the arrogance of the mediocre.

Perfection is a laudable goal, but it helps to know when you achieve it. Cimino, like Kubrick, demanded take after take hoping to see something drift through his vision. He found the fiftieth take was no better than the first. He shot one million, two hundred thousand feet of largely repetitious takes, much of it unusable. All of them pretty. However, pretty can not overcome a lack of story or character development. Pretty can be pretty boring after a while.

In order to maintain his vision, Cimino avoided the UA executives responsible for the vast expenditure of time and funds. He was so secure in his arrogance as an “artist” he never took responsibility for the debacle that ended in the destruction of United Artists, the company founded in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, 
D.W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin.

And he made a boring movie.

Had a man like Irving Thalberg been in charge of UA at the time, Cimino would have never been allowed his excesses. He would not have allowed a screenplay with overt depictions of class warfare. He would have insisted on a story. Accountability of the director.


The executives at Disney apparently did not learn the lesson of Heaven's Gate when they allowed the cost of John Carter to balloon to three hundred million dollars. Another lousy movie.

The two westerns I mentioned, Winterhawk and Winds of Autumn both enjoy pretty photography. Neither in my view are very good movies, however, both are more entertaining than Heaven's Gate. They were never boring.

Heaven's Gate is a cautionary tale of the excesses by directors who believe an Oscar is an indicator of artistic merit, men who believe no cost is too high to realize the vision they think they have.

I am indebted to Steven Bach's, Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists.








James B. Harris


The New York Times has a review of a new bio of Kubrick.   The reviewer takes the opportunity to take shots at Pauline Kael (as if, how dare she say anything negative about 2001!), and poor Tom Cruise for his performance in the dreadful Eyes Wide Shut (people have apparently forgot Kubrick's late night phone call to Lee Ermey. "He told me it was a piece of shit". Kubrick blamed it on Cruise and Kidman.  What a guy).

The reviewer reveals when the Great Stanley first conceived of EWS, he considered Bill Murray for the lead.  I can well understand that, considering Murray's stunning dramatic performance in 
The Razor's Edge.

But Kubrick's new legend does not include his partner in the early films, James Harris, despite the fact he produced, and was a writer on The Killing, Paths of Glory, and Lolita (the Nabokov screenplay was unfilmable.  I read part of it, as much as I could take.).  He also worked on the
Dr. Strangelove screenplay, before he departed to direct The Bedford Incident, which was pretty good.

When Kubrick died, entertainment “journalists” fell all over themselves to get comments from Steven Spielberg, who by all accounts knew him only over the telephone.  Harris's phone never rang.

Monday, May 4, 2020

Close Encounter of the 3rd Kind

Ruthless Reviews presents: I Love a Mystery! Follow our tireless critics of the A-1 Detective Agency as Jack, Doc and Reggie ferret out the best, and worst in movies. Sponsored by Pee Clean, “never fear the pee police again, use, Pee Clean and have clean pee!”

Your host:
So fellas, tonight we have a blast from the past. Steven Spielberg's second and much anticipated film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Well, Doc, Reggie, Jack, is it cinema?

Doc and Reggie burst out laughing: Cinema? Cinema! What the hell.

Pardon me Mater, but I am going to the
 cin...e...ma... "

Knock it off and talk about the damn movie.

Ah, well, this is a ...movie... about some outer space UfO flyers who want to make friends, but like want to get to know us better as people. Longer than a minute date, but shorter than a long walk in the rain.

Jack: I think you are missing the most reverent aspect of the show. The theme is timely. The government knows all about the visitors from out there, beyond, but the Deep State, in the form of the, Air Force, FBI and very likely; and I say this with all the Fear and Loathing it deserves, the C.I.A. Cover it up going to any and all lengths to conceal the truthiness. Maybe even the D.E.A. Those guys have their fingers in everyone's pie.

The cover-up by Deep State begins the movie when an airline pilot, perhaps even carrying Mulder and Scully, is harassed by a UFO, playing skytrain chicken. Cluck, cluck.

So, traffic control asks if the pilot wants to report the near mid-air crash by the overly friendly ETs, he's like, Hell no, like I need that Deep State grief! (What a pussy.)

Then we go the Mexican desert that the UFOer use as a dumping- ground/chop-shop for all the stuff they stole.

A bunch of Deep State operatives emerge from SVUs and find an old wino sleeping one off, who tells the head guy, a Frenchman who runs around the world collecting UFO stuff for the Deep State, the sun came out the night before and sang to him. The Frenchie looks like, yeah, someone spiked the old fart's Night Train with mescaline.

But, the Big Surprise is the appearance of the a bunch of Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, lost in the Bermuda Triangle , oh so many years ago. Lost? Ha! Stolen by the UFO flyers more like it. Now they have finished their joyride with US government property, they dumped 'em in Mexico, looking better than they looked on the showroom floor. Anybody see the pilots? Huh? Did you even look?

The insurance company is going to come down hard on this one.

Then, the action moves to:

Muncie, Indiana!

What a wonderful name,
Named for Muncietown, of Delaware County fame.
Muncie, Indiana, as a Shakespeare would say,
Trips along softly on the tongue this way--
Muncie, Indiana, Muncie Indiana, Muncie, Indiana,
Let me say it once again.
Muncie, Indiana, Muncie, Indiana, Muncie, Indiana,
That's the town that "knew me when."
(With apologies to Meredith Wilson)

Where three year old Barry Guiler lives with his single mom in a big scary old farm house. The UFO people decide to put the snatch on the kid right under his mom's nose, so they magically animate, the Hoover, and TV and (especially the just adorable little monkey playing the cymbals!) all the kid's toys that causes him to dive through the doggie door attempting to escape the racket. The child is torn from his mother's arms.

The mom is left screaming and crying of despair while the UFOer escape in some cloud cover. They intend to study the hapless three year old like a prize pig at the county fair.

"The Invaders! A Steven Spielberg Production. Starring Richard Dreyfuss as electrical maintenance worker, Roy Neary.

"The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. Roy Neary has seen them. For him, it began one night looking for a downed power line on a lonely country road. They mess with the electrical system in his truck. rattle county mailboxes and shake a railroad crossing signal. Monstrous! A least they did not follow him home and steal his kids.
(With apologies to Quinn Martin Productions)

This is nuts!” declares Roy.

Yep, the whole wacky adventure begins with RoyBoy chasing after three midsized UFOs followed by a really cute little forth one tagging along. They jump the toll both at the Ohio line.

The purpose of all this madness is to put a huge phallic symbol in the minds the witnesses to the UFOer shenanigans.

Meanwhile, the Deep State crowd travels around the world retrieving stuff like cargo ships the UFOer stole for some happy-horseshit excuse of studying us. The witnesses have actually been invited to a meeting at Devils Tower (the phallus) in the state of Wyoming (first state to give women the franchise!). The Deep State, using geometric logic and a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, discover the location of the big, Witness v UFOer meet.

The Deep State goes to any lengths, stopping at nothing, to prevent the witnesses from attending the meet, but the plucky few elude the Deep State minions and arrive just in time to see the legendary Mother Ship, which looks like a flying top hat the size of the state of Maine, disgorge little Barry and the hundreds of people the UFOer kidnapped and kept from their friends and families for decades in order to, “get to know them better”.

The head UFOer, who looks like the Pillsbury Dough Boy as spokesmen for a new commercial diet product as a former fatty, is followed by what appears to be little kids dressed for a UFOer themed Halloween party.

They make nice with a stupefied Roy, smiling a toothless grin at him like Uncle Hector who lives up on the Ridge.

Roy is chosen as Deep State ambassador to the UFOers and marched into the huge flying top hat which we see is largely empty (which begs the question: what is all at cargo space going to be used for???). It flies off to the planet Who Gives A Damn in the Black Eye Galaxy.

OK boys, what did you think of it? Somebody wake-up Jack.

Doc: this is a movie about a bunch of ETs that harasses airliners, steals ships and aircraft, kidnaps and holds for decades hundreds of people, including children, and we are supposed to think they are good guys?

Reggie: It's called, The Spielberg Touch.

That solves that mystery of that ET Cargo Cult.

Good Night!

Monday, May 27, 2019

John Wick 3

For reasons I can not explain, I actually went to a theater and paid good money to see John Wick 3. What critics are calling a great action film, I call a confused, repetitious mess with a laughably absurd premise. Basically the same fight scene over and over for what seemed like three hours. One hundred and thirty one minutes, holy christ.

It was preceded by a series of alike trailers of violent action scenes of a single theme. The only creativity, none on the stories or dialogue surely, was in new wildly creative stunts.

Keanu Reeves is a bit long of tooth to be playing an assassin/superbeing, all but immortal. With his
long stringy hair and puffy face, he looked more like a hippy gone to seed than a famous uber/killer.