Supergirl (1984) 6.5 of 10

-I got the Warner Archive Blu-Ray and gave it a look. I'd note first off that a lot of Anchor Bay's bonus material wasn't ported over. It has the commentary track, the feature special and the trailer but it doesn't have the TV spots and earlier trailers (which used Williams theme) or the production stills, storyboards etc. So hang onto it just for that reason. The longer "Directors cut" is just presented on standard DVD so it isn't different from the old version there. Picture quality on the Blu-Ray "international cut" does look good though.

-I still stand by my contention that this film, flaws and all is more fun to sit through than III or IV (and don't get me started on "Returns" which will be a film I'll never finish after shutting it off after 20 minutes). The key is Slater. If she didn't succeed with me, then all the film's other flaws would have overwhelmed it. It's because she does such a valiant effort while the script and the direction is letting her down that I still find the film rewatchable.

-Key flaws. First, Reeve backing out totally disrupted not just a coherent way for Kara/Supergirl to be introduced to the planet (not to mention giving us a stronger jeopardy element since the idea was supposed to be Dunaway has him imprisoned) it also made it impossible for audiences to accept the film as a natural extension of the Reeve series universe. The film can never overcome that flaw. A brief appearance by Reeve, complete with one burst of the traditional Williams theme at that moment (rather than the listen carefully or you'll miss it quotation when we see the poster) would have gone a long ways.

-Second. The film dives in much too fast to the jeopardy and wastes a chance to give us some better backstory/exposition in Argo City that would make it believable for Kara to be wearing the costume when she arrives. Instead of having her rush and jump into the machine that carries her to Earth, a scene of preparing herself and insisting she has to go and being told she'll be "briefed" about Earth and her cousin on her journey so she'll be prepared would have given some compensation for the lack of a Reeve cameo.

-Third. Dunaway's character has no coherent through-line. They make a big mistake by establishing her as an inept witch who has been falling on her face instead of an intelligent evil menace who just lacks a McGuffin device that will make her invincible (Hackman's Lex Luthor, despite being a comic character was still a villain who knew what he was doing!). Once she got the device we should have seen her doing "semi-big" things as a threat but instead we get 50 minutes of silliness over "you stole my boytoy!" (and boy does Hart Bochner define stiff as a board 80s nothingness!) and the end result is that when they try to make her a global threat in the last half hour it comes across forced and all the more silly. And I don't get why Peter Cook ultimately is let off the hook while Brenda Vaccaro gets banished because he was by far the more evil character!

-The novelty of the climax showing super heroine squaring off against super villainess though, was something new for the time and that's what also makes it stand out from III and IV.

JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO
8/10



A movie they don't make these days -- and a score nobody writes, either.

Goofy, very uneven, but beautifully shot and endearing -- and my favorite Georges Delerue score on top of it.

-Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018): 8.5/10

Smashing entry in the series, all-but-tied with my favorite one, Ghost Protocol. Aside from a sometimes-leaden Lorne Balfe score (there are a couple of decent passages -- and it's always nice to hear those kind of stuttering, low-end piano runs you'd hear in 70's Schifrin and Goldsmith scores -- but too often it's full of those blocky Zimmer "Power Chords" ), it's fast-paced (the 2-1/2 hour running time flies by), slick, exciting, wryly funny and the ageless Tom Cruise continues to prove he's our last great Movie Star.

And Vanessa Kirby...

-L.A. Confidential (1997): 11/10



They really DON'T make 'em like this anymore. Classy, gorgeous, and engrossing, as well as Curtis Hanson's finest moment as a filmmaker. What a screenplay, what a cast, what a soundtrack (both Jerry Goldsmith's terse, agitated score and a brilliantly-chosen selection of ironically cheery 50's tunes). What I wouldn't give to see a big, studio-driven adult entertainment like this nowadays.

LA Confidential is a fantastic movie.

Ready Player One (6 1/2 out of 10)

This was a sufficiently likeable movie, with likeable characters you can root for. It held my interest and had moments which were both suspenseful and touching. But it really isn't anything special either. The story also felt like a pastiche of different things -- basically it was Willy Wonka, with some Brainstorm, Tron (and Tron Legacy) thrown in.

It was also confusing and ambiguous about how powerful the villainous IOI company is. Throughout the film one is given the sense IOI is so powerful it is itself "the state" -- the way they deploy armed "shocktroops", spy drones, blow-up peoples' homes, etc. Samantha even says to Wade "Welcome to the resistance" like she belongs to some "rebel alliance" trying to overthrow a corrupt government. Then, in the final scene, the "corporate heavy" and his chief henchwoman are arrested by a handful of cops. Where were the police when IOI was shooting up the resistance's hideout? Or when Sorrento was chasing the mail truck in an armored car and shooting at it on a crowded street?

The pop culture references -- Krull's glave, Mad Max's car, the Battlestar Galactica pistol, etc. -- are a bit fun, but ultimately just throwaway window dressing. Some I found annoyingly contrived and self-indulgent, like the references to movies Spielberg himself produced (Back to the Future, Gremlins, etc.)

I'm sure a lot of geeks born in the 1960s and 70s ate these references up, but I found it distractingly odd that all the pop culture references were limited to the 70s and 80s (with the Iron Giant thrown in). A lot of popular genre movies have been made since those days -- and Ready Player One takes place in the future -- so why are there no references to anything (other than the Iron Giant) that came along later? My nephew and nieces (and most of my friend's kids) did not grow-up watching Gremlins, Back to the Future or John Hughes movies. They grew-up on Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, X-Men and Napoleon Dynamite. But Ready Player One seems to be aimed solely at nostalgic Gen-X nerds.

Visually the movie doesn't offer anything new, and is often derivative of previous films. The big "force field" at the climax of movie looks exactly like the one guarding Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and the landscape where the climax takes place looks like a cross between Mordor and the volcanic planet in Revenge of the Sith.

Alan Silvestri's score works well, but isn't anything special. I think the film would have been better served by a John Williams score (and fewer songs).

It's not a terrible movie, but it certainly isn't iconic either, the way Close Encounters, Raiders, and E.T. (and in its way, even Jurassic Park) were. If this was a studio-controled project with a journeyman director at the helm, I might have been a little more impressed, but I expected more Steven Spielberg. Still, it was a lot better than The BFG!

Still befuddling to me (and apparently a lot of people) that Spielberg thought it was a cool idea to use THE SHINING as a major setpiece in the film. Its not what most would consider an "80s movie" nor does it mean anything to the decade's specific pop culture. Nor does it have a thing to do with video games and gaming culture.

In the book apparently they used WARGAMES for that bit instead, which is most definitely a beloved "80s movie" and is also clued into video gaming.

I guess because its MGM, Warner decided to use one of their own properties, but I found the whole sequence odd and disconnected.

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Thu Aug 02, 2018 7:45 am Still befuddling to me (and apparently a lot of people) that Spielberg thought it was a cool idea to use THE SHINING as a major setpiece in the film. Its not what most would consider an "80s movie" nor does it mean anything to the decade's specific pop culture. Nor does it have a thing to do with video games and gaming culture.

Yes, that was a bizarre sequence, and very "out of left field". And The Shining was really not on the radar of 80s kids, whereas WarGames was a big hit -- and fits right into the milieu of Ready Player One.

I think Spielberg chose it just because he had a friendship with Kubrick...that, and WB has the rights.

It did seem odd to have a spot-on recreation of scenes from an R-rated horror movie in a film that's otherwise a fairly benign PG-13. And, if you were going to choose a horror movie that screams "80's" and appealed to kids and teens back in the day, something like Friday The 13th would have been a more obvious choice.

What annoyed me most was how the characters kept spreading the overstated myth that The Shining is one of the scariest movies ever made. It's a good movie that's as ridiculously over-adored as Brian De Palma's Scarface is for the hip-hop crowd.

It just thematically made little sense. Especially to see these video game avatars walking around in a Stanley Kubrick movie that has no relationship with that world at all.

Its kind of like Spielberg didnt really "get it".

I mean, from a technical standpoint, it was VERY impressive how closely Spielberg aped the camera moves and lighting from The Shining...it honestly looked like he just plunked his animated characters directly into the movie, even if that was not possible. From the perspective of a Movie Nerd, the idea of actually ENTERING one of your favorite movies certainly has a genuine appeal. If I could just enter a movie with Mary Elizabeth Winstead...

Monterey Jack wrote: ↑Thu Aug 02, 2018 10:57 pm I mean, from a technical standpoint, it was VERY impressive how closely Spielberg aped the camera moves and lighting from The Shining...it honestly looked like he just plunked his animated characters directly into the movie, even if that was not possible.

Considering how sophisticated cgi effects have gotten, I’m sure all he did drop the characters into Kubrick’s original footage.

Strangers On A Train (1951) 7.5 of 10

-Doing some overdue Blu-Ray upgrading of some non-Universal controlled Hitchcock films. For some reason, whenever I pop this one in I always watch the "preview" cut even though it's only different from the one added train sequence where Bruno and Guy give their lunch order and the lack of the final tag on the train. At any rate, this serves as the beginning of the "classic" Hitchcock period most people associate him with and Hitchcock shows off brilliant decoy moments to fool the audience like using the shadows in the Tunnel of Love and a scream to suggest the murder has just taken place when it hasn't yet.

-Two future "Bewitched" cast members in vital roles. Marion Lorne is in the same ditzy mode she would be as "Aunt Clara" but to chilling effect here as you realize that her behavior was inherited by Bruno. Laura Elliott, the murder victim, later returned to her own name, Kasey Rogers and was the second actress to play Louise Tate.

-Because this was the first movie I ever saw Robert Walker in, it has the unfortunate effect of always making me think of his as a psycho first so that all of his nice-guy parts before that are harder to connect with. And I don't think I've ever seen a case where a son who went on to act looked exactly like his father the way Robert Walker, Jr. ("Charlie X") did.

Eric Paddon wrote: ↑Tue Aug 07, 2018 9:42 am Strangers On A Train (1951) 7.5 of 10

-Doing some overdue Blu-Ray upgrading of some non-Universal controlled Hitchcock films. For some reason, whenever I pop this one in I always watch the "preview" cut even though it's only different from the one added train sequence where Bruno and Guy give their lunch order and the lack of the final tag on the train.

Personally, I hate the preview cut. Ending the movie with Ruth Roman on the phone kind of leaves you hanging, whereas the ending of the theatrical version -- where Farley Granger is recognized on a train -- is both funny and gives the film an effective coda on which to end.

Also, the preview cut is only presented in standard definition on the Blu-ray, whereas the theatrical cut is HD.

I agree, it's definitely a stronger ending. When I listen to the commentary track, that will let me see the HD improvement on the regular cut.

A film like this also has a way of showing so many aspects of a vanished America. When traveling by train even from NY to Washington was in a luxurious setting.