I watched THE DEEP a few weeks back. I like it on balance better than you did Eric. It's not JAWS but it's sturdy and well made, very well shot, with good underwater photography and a terrific Barry score also.
I keep waiting for it to show up in 4K on one of those Columbia Classics box-sets. Seems odd to have one of their big hits from the mid/late 70s not be in UHD.
I know I mentioned this before also, but I emailed Grover Crisp at Sony a few years ago, and he even wrote back when I asked if we could get the 3-hour DEEP TV cut out in HD at long last (said he'd look into it, etc.). I've been hoping for it ever since that Pioneer Special Editions laserdisc from the mid '90s got canceled! I can't imagine they don't have it available as a good 20 minutes of those scenes are on the Blu-Ray in full widescreen also.
They should include both cuts of the film (though when they do the long version don't give us the fuzzying up of Bisset to please TV censors!). The prologue should have been left in the film, though I don't think the sidestory about Gossett being responsible for killing Shaw's wife in the past added much to the story and was a wise deletion. I do agree the photography is excellent and it makes "Into The Blue" look totally amateurish by comparison.
My rating of 7 out of 10 is something of a compromise. I found this picture far-more impressive than Part I -- the character development is better, plus the film has a lot more emotional resonance.
Still, I wish both films had more visual variety. The different "houses" (and the worlds they occupy) have almost-uniform architecture, which makes it hard to tell where you are a times. It wasn't until after I finished the film that I realized that Feyd Rutha's "birthday fight" took place on the Harkonen home world, not Arrakis (as both look similarly arid and sterile).
But for the most part I found the movie engaging, and at times even compelling. In general I prefer the cast of this version to that of David Lynch's film. Timothy Chamalet far-better suits the role of Paul Atreides than Kyle MacLachlan ever did; Chamalet looks closer in age to the character as described, yet is able to project a growing maturity as the film progresses. Likewise I much prefer Zendaya in the part of Chani, and her character is better-developed in this new version (whereas in Lynch's film Chani wasn't much more than "the girl").
Dave Bautista's Beast Rabban has ten times the sinister menace of Paul Smith. Xaviar Bardem certainly offers a more dynamic and visceral portrayal of Stillgar than Evert McGill did. But as much as I like Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, he'll never be Patrick Stewart. And Christopher Walken is positively limp compared to the elegant Jose Ferrer in the role of the emperor. Walken's costume also makes him look like a 1950s dentist.
But I have real misgivings about the way the book is adapted here. Denis Villeneuve is clearly adamant about conforming Frank Herbert's story to a 2024 mindset. Most of the actors cast as Fremen are "people of color", resulting in heavy-handed messaging about "race". I found this preachy and pretentious (plus this story takes place tens of thousands of years in the future -- on other planets -- when race relations as we know them would be long-irrelevant).
Villeneuve aslo invents different factions of Fremen not found in the book, specifically "Southern Freman" who are "fundamentalists" (i.e. religious fanatics) who who believe Paul to be their "messiah". The "Northern Fremen" who have adopted Paul into their tribe -- including his lover Chani -- are divided on his messianic status.
In the book, Paul's younger sister Alia is born while he and his mother are still sheltering with the Fremen, but in this film she remains a fetus. Alia also acquires adult intelligence -- as well as prescience -- while still in the womb, though how and why is never really explained (perhaps due to her mother imbibing the "water of life"?).
Still, I could excuse all these alterations and kowtows to our transitory zeitgeist -- but for the lousy the ending, or rather non-ending. Although Lynch's film deviated from the book by having it rain in the final scene, it at least gave the story closure. Things were satisfactorily wrapped-up. This version leaves a lot of elements unresolved -- the the political future of this culture, Paul and Chani's relationship, etc. and concludes with a more of a cliffhanger than a resolution. Apparently we're expected to "tune in a couple of years from now" to find out what happens. Sorry, I'm not committing to a ten year "miniseries".
Hans Zimmer's score is terrible, a cacophony of wails and his trademark "BRAAAAAMs" and usual bag of tricks. It only serves to accentuate the sublime artistry of Toto's score for Lynch's film (which is much-missed this time around).
Paul MacLean wrote: ↑Sun Jun 23, 2024 7:34 pmDune Part II (7/10)
In the book, Paul's younger sister Alia is born while he and his mother are still sheltering with the Fremen, but in this film she remains a fetus. Alia also acquires adult intelligence -- as well as prescience -- while still in the womb, though how and why is never really explained (perhaps due to her mother imbibing the "water of life"?).
I enjoyed your review Paul. Yes, it was because Jessica drank the water of life that Alia acquired adult intelligence and prescience - hence why she is called Abomination in the book and the films.
Where DV missed the mark, IMO, is in the characterization of Chani (and by extension her's and Paul's relationship). It seems to me one of the big overarching theme of the Dune series from the original novel moving through to the end of the story (not counting all the prequels) is the love relationship between Paul and Chani. It is their descendants who would have such a profound effect on the history of humanity moving forward. Their story is central to the arc of the metanarrative; their relationship significantly echoes the relationship between Leto and Jessica (ruler and concubine), and IMO the previous love relationships in the prequels all point forward to Paul's and Chani's relationship (for example, Xavier Harkonnen and Serena Butler, or Vorian Atreides and Leronica Tergiet followed by his marriage to Mariella). In a story this epic and deep, having that light of love is not a bad thing - but DV jettisoned it in favor of a more cynical and modernized Chani...granted, Paul says in the movie he foresees that Chani will "come around", but that still stifles the beauty of their relationship. I didn't like it and continue not to like it (although a friend of mine didn't mind because, to her, it made Chani more relatable and fleshed out).
I always thought the girl was supposed to have that level of consciousness because she was in the womb when Jessica consumes the water.
As I wrote in my review, it's no fault of Zendaya, but the character is also too combative in this movie. She's constantly sparring with Paul, I didn't feel this chemistry between them, and it's clearly supposed to be there.
On the whole though I liked the film a LOT more than the first one, and agree with Paul overall. And that score is as BAD as anything Zimmer has written, ever.
mkaroly wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2024 8:48 am
Anyway, again, great review!
Thanks! And thanks also for your observations. I'd agree Chani is more combative, I just felt her character had more dimension than she did in Lynch's film.
1979 Russian film, which is sort of half European "intimate drama" and half Irwin Allen disaster film -- which may sound contrived, but the film is actually excellent. Air Crew follows three pilots -- a former airline employee who has taken lesser work to appease his shrewish wife, a senior pilot who is threatened with forced retirement, and a younger Lothario who finds himself falling in love with a flight attendant.
The first half of the film looks at the various lives and personal struggles of the pilots, and is a kind of low-key (but effective) "human drama". The second half of a the film follows the three as they are assigned to rescue people trapped in a remote, mountainous region, threatened by an erupting volcano, and the accompanying earthquake which causes landslides and damage to the runway. This second half is a real nail-biter too -- and vastly more impressive than any Airport sequel.
Apart from the fact this movie is superb, I also found it interesting to watch a more "mainstream" picture produced during the late Soviet era. All I'd ever seen from Russia are "art films" (like those of Eisenstein or Tarkovsky) so it was something of a revelation to view a movie made for "regular audiences". The production value is impressive, and despite a few obvious model shots, the miniature effects in the disaster sequence are very good (I'd say they're on the same level as Derek Meddings' effects for UFO). The score by Alfred Schnittke (a well-respected classical composer) is also terrific.
I would never have watched this film, but for Mosfilm's Youtube page, where they have uploaded many of their films, which can be seen for free. Here is the link...
My first two viewings of the dozen Criterion titles I bought yesterday.
Written On The Wind (1956) 5.5 of 10
-Soapy technicolor melodrama that was loosely based on the mysterious death/suicide of an heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company. To avoid legal trouble, changes were made to the script (which is based on a novel from the late 40s) so that the heir is from an oil family rather than a tobacco family. Irresponsible drunk scion Robert Stack somehow manages to charm solid upstanding Lauren Bacall to marry him, much to the chagrin of his best friend and solid company man Rock Hudson, who is in love with Bacall, while meanwhile Stack's nympho-dipso sister Dorothy Malone has always been in love with Hudson who won't love her back......
-About the only thing I can say is that the film shows where 1980s TV soaps like Dallas and Dynasty got their inspiration from. The film hardly strikes me as the kind of movie that comes across as particularly deep despite what the pretentious liner notes say. I don't see anything particularly stellar of Malone's performance which made her more of an A-list performer in the period afterwards (and among other things led to her being paired with Stack again this time as husband-wife in the 1960 disaster movie "The Last Voyage" before both of them got their TV fame in "The Untouchables" and "Peyton Place" respectively). But it's amusing how the motion picture Academy had this strange obsession with wanting to give Oscars to actresses who were shedding "good girl" images from their previous roles and playing hookers or nymphos since in a seven years span they did that with Donna Reed, Malone and then Shirley Jones.
-Interesting potboiler but I wouldn't call it an important film by any stretch of the imagination.
Ace In The Hole (1951) 5 of 10
-Another case of a film that was a total flop that has become a critics darling decades later and for reasons that totally overlook the question of whether this is a good film or not. This was Billy Wilder's film in between "Sunset Boulevard" and "Stalag 17" and he was given a level of carte blanche control that resulted in a sledgehammer movie of in-your-face pretentiousness that totally overshadowed whatever point it had to make on the legitimate issue of press responsibility. Kirk Douglas is a drunken washed-up New York newspaperman who having been fired in New York and other big cities now finds himself in dreary Albuquerque pining for a shot at a big story that will get him back to the big time, and away from assignments like covering rattlesnake contests that his noble, upright editor Porter Hall gives him. (In this early part of the film, I swear I thought I was looking at a non-sci-fi version of Carl Kolchak!) Then Douglas stumbles into a story of a man trapped in the ruins of an old Indian cave and thinks he's found a story to latch onto. This is actually drawn from what at the time was recent history, where the public became fascinated with the story of a little girl trapped in a well in California, Kathy Fiscus and it ended up tragically. Wilder was clearly drawing from the subsequent media obsession with covering that story and the circus-like crowd it brought out at the time. The problem though is how Douglas is so ruthless and wants the story to be milked out to maximize his chance for success that he literally, in order to make the story last multiple days, gets the timid engineering crew to take the long way in to rescue the trapped man instead of following the simpler procedure to get him out within 12 hours. This is where the story lost me completely. The idea that Douglas can exercise this kind of influence even with him getting to make a deal with the crooked county sheriff who loves the publicity this story is giving him for his re-election campaign is just ridiculous on its face. Naturally this is all prelude to how everything gets out of control and we see nothing but non-stop cynicism and a dreary depressing ending for all parties involved. There is of course a sidebar matter of Jan Sterling as the golddigging wife of the trapped man who wants to take advantage of his being trapped to slip out but who Douglas needs to stay behind to make the story something the people will eat up. She is the worst kind of stereotype I've seen in too many other movies.
-Now I grant that there is a sound case to be made about press sensationalism and exploitation and the corruption of certain journalists. The problem is that Hollywood because of its politics, will never address the subject in a manner in which that corruption has revealed itself time and time again when collective *bias* in their ranks will trump any regard for simply "telling the truth" (the philosophy that noble editor Porter Hall lives by; ironic to see him as a paragon of virtue when his best-known role is that of the slimy, duplicitous Mr. Sawyer in "Miracle On 34th Street"). We are seeing that happen now where political bias is why the press didn't tell the truth about our current President and why they chose instead to manufacture Fake News narratives about Russia collusion and "very fine people" etc. The media without any sense of self-awareness has become *exactly* just like Kirk Douglas's character in this movie but they still think they're just like Porter Hall's noble editor.
-So while the film has a sort of relevant lesson on one level, the problem is it doesn't make its point effectively and the reason it draws praise from critics who would give it the Criterion treatment today are for all the wrong reasons.
=This film has never had a Blu-Ray release in the US and likely never will (Disney) so I got a German Blu-Ray release that is region free with proper English track. I remember seeing this once as a rental from Blockbuster back in 2002-03 I think and being underwhelmed but I'd forgotten everything about it so in the tradition of revisiting all the brain dead movies of 1996-2001 I can remember, I figured it was time for a new look.
-First, its amazing how bad CGI of this era really looks now. The F/X work of the 70s IMO holds up a lot better than this stuff does for the most part. The only exception are the spacewalk scenes which look fine.
-The story though is just awful as we get a long build-up for a stale cliched payoff that rips-off 2001, Close Encounters, Abyss (right down to the silly looking aliens), Hanger 18 and another one of those hoary cliches that we can smell from a mile off on what's going to happen to Gary Sinise because we know he's a widower with no other family. The scenes of spacecraft malfunction look to have been arbitrarily placed there just to avoid spending time exploring the mystery in a more compelling fashion. And I REALLY have a complaint with the set-up in which the ENTIRE four person crew at the beginning is going out together to explore this strange thing that results in death for all but Don Cheadle. Come on, wouldn't sanity let alone prudence dictate having one of them stay behind for safety purposes???
-Just not an imaginative story. I'd forgotten DePalma directed this since for years I've been saying the only films of his I ever saw were "Obsession" and "Bonfire Of The Vanities". Morricone's score is serviceable but not memorable since we've reached the era where movies no longer seemed to have a truly distinctive signature theme to them any longer even when an old-school composer was doing the project.
Eric Paddon wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2024 8:27 pmMission To Mars (2000) 4 of 10
=This film has never had a Blu-Ray release in the US and likely never will (Disney) so I got a German Blu-Ray release that is region free with proper English track. I remember seeing this once as a rental from Blockbuster back in 2002-03 I think and being underwhelmed but I'd forgotten everything about it so in the tradition of revisiting all the brain dead movies of 1996-2001 I can remember, I figured it was time for a new look.
-First, its amazing how bad CGI of this era really looks now. The F/X work of the 70s IMO holds up a lot better than this stuff does for the most part. The only exception are the spacewalk scenes which look fine.
-The story though is just awful as we get a long build-up for a stale cliched payoff that rips-off 2001, Close Encounters, Abyss (right down to the silly looking aliens), Hanger 18 and another one of those hoary cliches that we can smell from a mile off on what's going to happen to Gary Sinise because we know he's a widower with no other family. The scenes of spacecraft malfunction look to have been arbitrarily placed there just to avoid spending time exploring the mystery in a more compelling fashion. And I REALLY have a complaint with the set-up in which the ENTIRE four person crew at the beginning is going out together to explore this strange thing that results in death for all but Don Cheadle. Come on, wouldn't sanity let alone prudence dictate having one of them stay behind for safety purposes???
-Just not an imaginative story. I'd forgotten DePalma directed this since for years I've been saying the only films of his I ever saw were "Obsession" and "Bonfire Of The Vanities". Morricone's score is serviceable but not memorable since we've reached the era where movies no longer seemed to have a truly distinctive signature theme to them any longer even when an old-school composer was doing the project.
I saw a test screening of this in 1999 at the Sony Theaters in Wayne. The SFX had not been completed and there were rudimentary stick figures in spots. Also, Horner's music was tracked all over the place. The scene where Tim Robbins let's go and "floats off" is tracked with the melancholy APOLLO 13 trumpet music and I think the audience groaned at that point. It was so awful that I never saw the finished movie after that.
I always liked Morricone's score for that film, its one of my favorite scores of his. Has some really lovely moments and outclasses the picture as a whole. Very atypical for him also, it's sort of like his version of Close Encounters with a rousing ending.
The movie doesn't work but there were parts of it I did like especially the ending. It's unfortunate the rest of it was so clumsy and awkward. One of those DePalma misfires where things don't gel but the idea was noble at least.
In the documentary De Palma, BDP vents about his frustrations working with special effects, and cites M2M as the biggest reason he stopped making films in the U.S.
I haven't watched the movie since it first came out in theaters, and thought it was risible at the time. De Palma making a wide-eyed, PG-rated Spielbergian sci-fi epic never made any sense to me, and it's easy to see that it was an inherited project (Gore Verbinski bailed on it right before production was to start, meaning De Palma inherited a project he obviously viewed as a work-for-hire gig). Morricone's score is beautiful, but it only makes the rest of the movie's emotional and narrative deficiencies more glaring. I'm sort of curious to revisit it, especially as I had seen very few of De Palma's films at the time, but the lack of a U.S. Blu release means it's unlikely I ever will.
If you want to go through it, the German Blu-Ray which is region-free is easily available on e-bay where I got my copy and it's not too expensive. You just have to make sure to change the audio track to get English and not German (you don't have to fiddle to eliminate German subtitles thankfully, they're not defaulted).
Peter Hyams’ 1990 remake of the 1952 RKO thriller “The Narrow Margin” looks the part, offering a terrific cast and crisp action sequences, but ultimately succumbs to Hyams’ own script, which regrettably is one of his weakest.
In the midst of his prolific run of ‘80s/early ‘90s features, Gene Hackman plays an L.A. Deputy District Attorney attempting to put a mob boss behind bars. He finds the perfect solution to do so after Anne Archer’s blind date (J.T. Walsh) turns out to be a mob attorney who’s rubbed out while Archer is watching. Alas, the mafia soon wants Archer dead, forcing Hackman – questioning even the motives of his own superiors – to take Archer on a speeding train through the Canadian Rockies.
A Carolco production that died at the box-office in September 1990, “Narrow Margin” boasts Hyams’ trademark use of widescreen and features a litany of superb character actors in support, from James B. Sikking (as a mob assassin) to M. Emmet Walsh and Harris Yulin. The director’s lensing of the train sequences is effective but the character element of the picture severely lags; Hyams’ dialogue could occasionally come off as heavy-handed and much of the interplay between Hackman and Archer is strained. The quips between all the characters, in fact, mostly come off as contrived, and as a result there’s not much chemistry developed between the two leads, which the movie desperately needs for the audience to make an emotional investment in its outcome.
Kino Lorber’s 4K UHD includes a SDR 4K transfer (2.35, 5.1/2.0) that offers fine detail and warm colors. Extras include an older Hyams commentary, a new commentary with Pete Tonguette, a few vintage EPK materials (brief cast interviews, featurette) and trailers. The Blu-Ray is also on-hand.
