Vanishing Point, She (1935), and Sleep, My Love

Vanishing Point, by Richard C. Sarafian, 1971


Vanishing Point took me by surprise. I expected a badass 70's car chase movie, and on one level that's exactly what it is. But it's also the story of one man's existential race into oblivion.

It begins with the hero, Kowalski (Barry Newman), a car delivery man who is taking an awesome car (I guess, anyway, I'm not a car guy) from Denver to San Francisco. He bets a guy that he'll be able to get it there by 3PM the next day, only 16 hours from his time of departure. I just did the math, and that means he would have to go a minimum of 80 miles for hour the whole way in order to make that goal, and that's not counting stops. So Kowalski takes a bunch of speed and sets out on his mission.

It doesn't take long before Kowalski gets the attention of the police, and it's no wonder. Nothing is going to stop him. If he sees a road block, he just jumps the median and goes around it on the other side of the road. He's getting help in avoiding the law over the radio from his friend Super Soul, a DJ (played by Cleavon Little of Blazing Saddles) who talks in a secret code of jive poetry.
All the while, the police are bearing down on Kowalski, as he edges closer and closer to the end of his race.

Vanishing Point is a really cool oddity among car chase movies because of its dark, psychedelic, and philosophical overtones. Things get more and more surreal for Kowalski as he goes deeper into the desert, meeting snake handlers, desert hippies and naked motorcycle riding hippie girls on the way. We get an idea of what is driving Kowalski through some sketchy flashbacks of his past, but he never states explicitly why he's doing it.

One last thing: If this review is selling you on Vanishing Point, and you decide to watch it, try to find the UK cut. It was available on the flipside of the DVD I had, so it shouldn't be too hard. It has an extended sequence cut from the American version, a surreal scene where Kowalski picks up a hitchhiker. It's one of the most important scenes in the movie, and we Americans didn't see it upon release because someone decided we were too stupid to get metaphors. That happens to us a lot, doesn't it?

She, by Irving Pichel and Lansing C. Holden, 1935


Based on a popular series of novels by H. Rider Haggard, She is an epic adventure produced by the man who brought King Kong into the world, Merian C. Cooper. It was intended to replicate the success of Kong, and despite its wonderful production design and special effects, it failed to do so, and I can tell you exactly why: NO MONSTERS.

She is the story of a man's quest to a lost land to find the Fountain of Youth deep in the arctic. Family lore has it that his ancestor found the fountain centuries ago. There they find an ancient race of cannibals and their ruler, She Who Must Be Obeyed. She believes the guy is his own ancestor that she had taken as a lover 500 years ago, and She wants him back.

The film is decent, but never achieves the blend of wonder and high adventure that King Kong did. There's never the feeling that you're seeing something you've never seen before. They are, after all, just shooting on a big soundstage, right? Couldn't they have thrown a giant spider or something in somewhere?

Still, She is full of rich movie history. One cool little fact is that She Who Must Be Obeyed was the visual inspiration for the evil queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Another is that it was thought lost until a print was found in Buster Keaton's personal collection. It's a fun, pulpy little movie, and it's totally worth watching, but it's not going to change your world.

Sleep, My Love, by Douglas Sirk, 1948


I've been meaning for some time to watch something by Douglas Sirk. Sleep, My Love happened to be the only one of his films on Netflix Instant, and though it's not one of his more well known titles, I decided to give it a look.

Sleep, My Love stars Claudette Colbert as a New York woman who wakes up on a train to Boston, with no idea how she got there. When she returns to her husband (Don Ameche), we begin to see things take a much more sinister turn. He's cheating on her with a younger woman, and wants her money, and is manipulating her through hypnotic suggestion to drive her mad and commit suicide. It's pretty ridiculous, I know, but it's a fun little movie.

I can see now why women at the time responded so well to Sirk's films. He seems pretty sympathetic toward them. Like, if a 40's or 50's housewife believed her husband was cheating (chances were fair that she was right), most people would just roll their eyes and talk down to her. But she could go and see Sleep, My Love and have all her suspicions validated. See? Husbands CAN be evil. And that younger girl he's seeing is nothing but a money grubbing floozy. And that shrink he's sending me too IS a fraud. And look, she met a nicer man on the plane back from Boston. There's hope!

As I said above, this isn't one of Sirk's better known films, but it's a fun little diversion. I would very much like to see the 1950's films he would later become so well known for.

Fantastic Voyage

I was really looking forward to seeing Fantastic Voyage. It's directed by Richard Fleischer, who had a respectable career, directed some real classics, and also Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja. It has a really cool premise, with a crew shrinking themselves to go inside a man's body. I loved Joe Dante's Innerspace growing up. It also has groundbreaking for its time special effects and production design. Unfortunately, the movie itself just didn't hold my interest.

When the scientist developing the shrinking technology is nearly assassinated and rendered comatose from a blood clot in his brain, a small crew is put together to shrink down and go inside his brain to perform laser surgery on the clot. Unfortunately, I can't tell you that much about the crew, because I just wasn't very engaged by them. Raquel Welch was basically just "the girl" (though she looked amazing) and there was one scientist who constantly spouted out profound philosophical musings on what they were doing. The only performance that was fun to watch for me was Donald Pleasance as the claustrophobic scientist guy. Pleasance built a career on playing fun-to-watch supporting characters. When you're telling a high concept, fairly simple story like this, character is important. They need to be more colorful and memorable than they were in this case.

I did appreciate the attempt to ground Fantastic Voyage in real science. Obviously, the shrinking part is all made up, a necessary conceit of the premise, but Isaac Asimov worked on the story, straightening out some kinks, and giving it some scientific credibility, in terms of being inside a body and everything. It's really hard to do a science fiction movie right when you're actually paying attention to the science part of it, and I wish it happened more often.

I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority on this one. I know Fantastic Voyage was and still is a well regarded sci-fi adventure. I can appreciate it on a technical level, for sure. Unfortunately, the movie just didn't reach me on a human level. This is one of those rare movies I'd actually be interested in seeing a remake of.

The Three Musketeers (1973) / The Four Musketeers (1974)

Swashbuckling and slapstick comedy go together like chocolate and peanut butter. The massive global success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies is proof enough of this. Director Richard Lester and the producers, the Salkinds, the guys who later brought us Superman, had this formula figured out 30 years before with their two-movie adaptation of The Three Musketeers.

The Three Musketeers and the sequel, The Four Musketeers, may have been the first instance where a series of movies were shot back to back in order to cut costs and keep the cast intact. Or maybe they just split a really long movie into two, a la Kill Bill. And the cast is of the All-Star variety, featuring such names as Oliver Reed, Christopher Lee, Raquel Welch, Richard Chamberlain, Faye Dunaway, and Charlton Heston.

A young Michael York takes the lead as D'Artagnan, an ambitious young country bumpkin who sets out to the city with the goal of becoming one of the Queen's Musketeers. He meets the Three Musketeers, and together, they are sent on a mission: retrieve the queen's jewels, so she won't get caught sleeping around with someone other than the king, thus shaming France. Over the course of the first movie, he grows from a clumsy kid to a full-fledged Musketeer. The sequel follows Dunaway's character Milady de Winter, as she plots revenge against D'Artagnan and friends for the events of the first movie.

I watched both movies back to back in one sitting, so I'm honestly having a hard time remembering which scenes came from what movie. But they both do work great together as one huge film. I liked Michael York a lot as D'Artagnan. He's always charming and likeable in the few films I've seen him take the lead. I also thought Faye Dunaway and Christopher Lee were great in their villainous roles. The titular Musketeers were a ton of fun, but I felt like they didn't get enough screentime. In fact, I think Raquel Welch's cleavage had a bigger role than they do.

The action scenes and setpieces alternate between elaborate physical comedy routines and impeccably choreographed sword fights. Lester does nice work of balancing the two, for the most part, but sometimes the comedy gets a little too low-brow and/or broad for my tastes, especially in the first movie, which is lighter. The second one, while still funny, pulls back a little bit, and has a much darker tone, even with some turns in the plot towards the end that are unusual for a big movie such as this. I haven't read the books yet, but I assume they stay pretty faithful.

The Three and Four Musketeers are both really fun adventure movies, that are almost great for the whole family, if it wasn't for all that bawdy humor. Of the two, I think the second one is the better. It just balanced the humor with the drama with the action really well, while the first is a little bit tilted towards the comedy side. I honestly believe that Gore Verbinski was inspired by these when he made the Pirates movies. They have a similar sense of quirkiness, big characters, and high adventure.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games is the story of Ms. Pacman, a perfectly spherical woman taken by her government and forced to navigate a maze, hounded relentlessly by colorful ghosts and forced to subsist on tasteless white pellets, only occasionally given the nutritious reprieve of a cherry or, if she's lucky, a banana.

What? That's not The Hunger Games? Let's start over.

Seriously though, I'm weeks late on this, so what can be said about The Hunger Games that hasn't been said already by everyone else on the internet? I liked it. I didn't love it, but I thought it felt immediate and mostly effective.

The Hunger Games is the story of Katniss Everdeen, a resourceful sixteen year old girl who must fight for her life against 23 other teens in a sort of gladiator battle for the entertainment of the foppish, ruling class in the Capital. Along the way, she plants the seeds for dissent in the increasingly dissatisfied poor of America's dystopian future, divided into twelve districts.

I need say no more because you've probably seen it already, read the bestselling book, or have no interest in it whatsoever.

The Hunger Games is directed by Gary Ross, best known by me for writing and directing Pleasantville, a really great movie by my estimation. The performances of the cast are all around impressive, especially Jennifer Lawrence in her role as Katniss. Josh Hutcherson surprised me as, Peeta, her partner/opponent in the games, who professes his love for her on national television. Elizabeth Banks is hilarious as Effie Trinkett, Katniss and Peeta's clueless liaison with the capital, and Woody Harrelson is underused as their drunken mentor Haymitch. I assume he'll get some great stuff in the sequels.

The movie manages to be intense and entertaining for the most part, despite being bound to and neutered by the bloodless, largely off camera violence of a PG-13 rating. Gary Ross does a decent job of working around these limitations. I honestly felt he could have pushed it even further without risking the rating, but I'm guessing the MPAA had particular issues with the fact that it was kids doing all the killing.

My main problem with The Hunger Games was with the way it was put together. The book, which, yes, I have read, is told entirely from Katniss' point of view, and once she's in the games, she has no idea what's going on in the outside world. All that matters is her own survival. It's what made the book such a page turner. In the case of the film adaptation, they frequently cut away from Katniss' struggle to Stanley Tucci and Toby Jones as the television announcers, providing all the exposition necessary to keep the story going. We also get a lot of cutaways to the Wes Bentley as the designer of the games, calling the shots in the control room. I understand that some exposition is necessary since not all moviegoers have read the book, but each time they cut outside of the games, the movie lost a little bit more of its punch.

And if I'm going to compare it to the books, I should probably point out that there were some plot points from the book that were actually improved in the adaptation into film. Katniss' badge of a Mockingjay, for example, which becomes a nationwide symbol of dissent, is now given to her by her sister, instead of some girl she went to school with but didn't really know.

Overall, I was happy with The Hunger Games. I'm looking forward to the next one. By the way, whoever owns the Ms. Pacman movie rights, call me. I have a pitch that could make you millions.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Sherlock Holmes is possibly my favorite literary character. I've read all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes stories. I'm sure a lot of the most devoted Holmes fans probably hate Guy Ritchie's hip, revisionist take on the classic characters and stories, but I think the characters are quite elastic and open for reinterpretation many times over. I also think these movies are quite fun, though both of them slouch for a good stretch in the middle.

Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law return as Holmes and Watson, this time on the trail of Prof. James Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime. Joining them this time around are Noomi Rapace as a gypsy fortune teller, and Stephen Fry as Holmes' equally brilliant older brother, Mycroft.

Unlike many other Holmes films, Guy Ritchie presents them as action adventure mysteries, utilizing his hyperactive, slick visual sense to its best advantage. I like this angle, because the original stories were very much the forerunner to pulp adventure books. Holmes was an expert pugilist and swordsman, and Watson was a former military man, who did much of Holmes' legwork for him. I get so sick of Watson being portrayed as a fat sidekick who is just there to go, "Amazing! However did you figure it out?"

Downey's Sherlock is an interpretation only he could bring to the table. He's eccentric and foppish and weird, and from what I can tell, he's obsessive-compulsive, and possibly bipolar. Without a case to occupy him, he gets depressed and turns to drugs, but when he's in a manic state, he becomes obsessed with certain ideas. In addition to his infatuation with Moriarty, this time around, Holmes is hung up on disguises.

Mad Men's Jared Harris is pretty much the perfect James Moriarty. I mean, seriously, you can't get any better than him for this role. He's manipulating events on a grand scale, diabolically twisting the fates of entire nations to his will. Sherlock Holmes is truly the underdog in the face of this Moriarty.

Like the first Sherlock Holmes movie, this one isn't perfect. The two leads are great together. The Victorian England it is set in is vivid and fully realized. But man, that second act starts to drag. There's a point where they're being chased through the woods and being shot at and it changes to super slow motion as trees explode around them as they run. It looks really neat, but it grinds the movie to a halt. My mind started to wander for a few minutes there.

The droopy middle is made up for in A Game of Shadows by a wonderful showdown at the end, where Holmes and Moriarty have a chess match, both figurative and literal, deciding the fate of the world.

Like the first one, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is worth a watch, though not as good as it could be. I'm glad that Guy Ritchie has found a Hollywood-type movie that is a good fit for his style. I like his first couple movies a great deal, but he floundered for quite a while after those. For those clamoring for a more faithful yet still refreshing take on the character, might I suggest the currently airing BBC show, Sherlock? If you haven't seen it yet, you're missing out on the definitive Holmes of our generation.

The Adventures of Tintin

I've already said much of what I had to say about how much I like the character of Tintin a couple of days ago in my review of Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece, an old French adaptation of the character. In short: I'm a big fan. But even if I wasn't already a fan, I would have been pretty psyched for this new movie.

You see, The Adventures of Tintin's geek credibility is through the roof. It's directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Peter Jackson. The screenplay is credited to current Doctor Who/Sherlock showrunner Steven Moffat, Shaun of the Dead/Scott Pilgrim writer/director Edgar Wright, and Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish. It features Daniel Craig, AKA James Bond as the villain, Andy Serkis, AKA Gollum as the sidekick, and Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the comic relief.

Holy crap!

The Adventures of Tintin is the story of boy reporter Tintin, who purchases a model ship at a market. Within the ship is a clue to hidden pirates' gold that leads him and his dog Snowy on a globetrotting adventure filled with peril and intrigue. Along the way, he gets help from dunderhead inspectors Thompson and Thomson and everybody's second favorite drunk seaman with an anger management problem (the first being Donald Duck, who must have been hitting the sauce, right?), Captain Haddock.

The movie was filmed using the performance capture method, where the actors' performances are fed into computers and then animated to look like the characters they're playing. These movies never seem to perform very well, mostly because of the often zombie-like rendered appearances of the characters. The technology has come a long way since Polar Express, though, and I have to say, it didn't really bother me this time around. There's no attempt in Tintin to make the characters look photo-real; rather, they're made to look like the human equivalent of creator Herge's art style.

Spielberg seems to be having a field day, letting his camera and imagination run wild. Positioning the camera in places that would otherwise be physically impossible in a live action film. The action centerpiece of the film is a huge, complex chase sequence done in a single shot. I'm not sure he captures Herge's spirit, exactly, but I think he manages to emphasize the stylistic and tonal qualities that the two of them have in common.

The cast all seem to be having fun as well, and are all perfect fits for their characters, particularly Jamie Bell in the title role. Pegg and Frost are quite impressive at making themselves indistinguishable from each other as the Thom(p)sons, especially considering how different they look in person. The dog, Snowy, is a purely CGI creation, but interacts perfectly with the actors, and perfectly captures the dog's personality from the comics. John Williams delivers a fun, upbeat score, that actually surprised me. In my mind, I expected it to be more along the lines of Indiana Jones, given the similar nature of the stories.

I'm honestly not sure if everyone will enjoy The Adventures of Tintin like I did. I have to admit, I was pretty inclined to like it from the get-go. I'm still not sure if America at large has any real reason to care about the character. Luckily for me, the rest of the world loves him, so a sequel is already on the way. Yay, Tintin!