AndyDursin wrote: Exactly Eric, and the speechifying dates the movie very badly, which is unfortunate because while not a groundbreaking technical show, the effects and the film otherwise holds up well. I have to think it was a case of Hyams grandstanding his leftist agenda, inserting it where it did not entirely belong (I did read Clarke's book, but I don't recall it being nearly as politically preachy).

That's the irony, because in the original novel there was zero in the way of Superpower tension happening back on Earth or at least nothing beyond the routine run-of-the-mill stuff. There was a subplot involving a Chinese expedition crashing on the moon of Europa and the last survivor reporting via radio message that there is life on that moon of Jupiter's. All the political stuff of the two superpowers on the verge of war was entirely Hyams' doing and was no different than Nicholas Meyer in "The Day After" making a grandstanding statement about the Reagan defense build-up. What I find even more amazing is how ultimately, "Capricorn One" is a movie that has comparatively *less* political preachiness despite the fact that it deals with a direct government conspiracy and as a consequence "Capricorn One" is a movie much more entertaining to watch over the long-haul.

Yeah I'm a fan of Capricorn One also. You should up the UK Bu Ray which is region free as is Escape to Athena. Both can be found at Amazon Usa pretty cheap too.

Baby: Secret Of The Lost Legend (1985): 7/10

Here's a movie I loved when I watched it as a kid on television back in the mid-late 80's, and while its faults are more glaring in the eyes of a jaded adult some 25 years later (an odd mix of cutesy anthropomorphism and graphic violence...an extra gets knifed in the gut by Patrick McGoohan in the first few minutes of the film! ), it's still overall a nice piece of family-ish entertainment, with likable performances from William Katt and Sean Young (in short-shorts, yow), superb John Alcott cinematography and a rousing, lyrical Jerry Goldsmith only slightly tainted by his mid-80's "synth fart" fetish. Sadly, Goldsmith's powerhouse bronto fanfare gets slightly "clipped" at the conclusuion of the end credits...did they remove the Touchstone Pictures logo or something? But for six bucks on Amazon, I can't complain. Hard to believe Jurassic Park was only eight years after this, considering what a quantum leap in technology there was between the mediocre animatronics here and Stan Winston's marvellously expressive full-scale dinos in Spielberg's film.

Two films: THE LETTER (1929) from Warner Archive-see my posting under "General Chit-Chat." 8/10

THE TREE OF LIFE 4/10

I am a huge fan of Terrence Malick, but aside from astounding photography and a terrific performance by Brad Pitt, after it was over all I could think of was George Carlin: "I'm going to make a movie and remove every other scene. It may not make much sense but think of the sequel!"

This felt like sections of the film had been removed with no connecting material. Example: there is a scene at a public pool that turns tragic when a child drowns. The problem is, there is an insinuation that the child that has died is one of the three brothers of the family that is at the center of the film. It isn't until some time later that you realize that all three brothers are still alive and the child that died was a friend.

And I'm still not sure if the end of the film is one of the characters going into the afterlife but returning or just dreaming it or what. I really wanted to like this film (I think DAYS OF HEAVEN and THE THIN RED LINE are masterpieces) but it was even worse than THE NEW WORLD. Too bad.

Jedbu wrote:This felt like sections of the film had been removed with no connecting material.

EVERY Terrence Malick movie is like this, like he shot fifty hours' worth of footage and the released film consists of nothing more than three hours' worth of incoherent excerpts with "poetic" voiceovers and classical music filling in the cracks.

THE NEW WORLD and this film especially felt like that. DAYS OF HEAVEN at least had a bit of a plot and Sam Shepard and THIN RED LINE had an astounding ensemble (Travolta is horrible, sadly) and Jones' book as a guide. TREE OF LIFE felt like a dream but one in which the dreamer kept being awakened every few minutes then back to sleep. This film was such a disappointment.

I've read from a number of people who saw THE THIN RED LINE early on and claim it was a masterwork -- when it had an actual, coherent narrative. He ended up throwing it all away in post, opting instead to make this "non traditional" film where he throws disembodied narration and poetry on top of beautiful scenery with fragmented scenes and a disconnected story line. Even the editors said as much in the Criterion supplements.

I think, on the whole, Malick's rep has sunk a great deal since his re-emergence over a decade ago. THIN RED LINE, THE NEW WORLD and now TREE OF LIFE all follow a very similar pattern -- it's like we've now seen his bag of tricks and know what to expect from his style. Ruminations on life, love, loss, nature -- yeah, we get it already!

For all the talk about TREE OF LIFE, the film has been an absolute disaster. Even on the art-house circuit it tanked -- a feeble $12 million domestic gross given the publicity is an out and out embarrassment. They'll make a small profit/recoup the budget because of foreign (and because the budget was $30 million), but it's no wonder why studios don't want to sink lots of money into his films because they aren't successful.

Not to mention the fact that half (or more) of the cast involved with THIN RED LINE hated what he did with the movie and won't work with him again...I remember Adrien Brody talking about how excited he was that he was one of the major characters (if not the lead) in the film, and then Malick cut him completely down in the editing room when he "re-transitioned" it into a "Malick film."

One of the more amusingly pretentious critical descriptions of Malick I've read recently was something to the effect of "most directors make movies. Malick creates catherdrals."

Or as someone once said, "when a director dies, he comes back as a photographer."

Andy, in response to the actors who hated what happened on THIN RED LINE, you can't tell me that when they signed up to be in the film they didn't know that the actors are second to the scenery and the mood of the film. Anyone who saw either BADLANDS or DAYS OF HEAVEN would notice that Malick does not have the actors as the "stars" of his film-it is what surrounds them that is given preference, and this is the only thing that I fault him for on his first three films-on NEW WORLD and this latest film it appears that he surrendered to the mise-en-scene and felt that performances were not important. Say what you will about Kubrick or Renais, I don't think they ever forgot about the characters, even when they were at their most pretentious. I admired but did not like EYES WIDE SHUT, and I have never liked LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, but at least there were some characters-even if they were not the main protagonists-that kept your interest. Malick, I fear, has lost sight of this.

Actually Jeff I don't believe the actors had any idea when they signed onto THIN RED LINE that they knew he was going to pay zero attention to the script. Most all of them felt betrayed....why do you think thy signed on on the first place? So guys like George Clooney would fly and show up for a 30 second pop up? Malick at that point had only directed a couple of films and none in many years....so it was not that obvious to them or anyone else....including the editors of the movie...that the film would turn out like that. Now that its been established firmly what a "Malick movie" is..nobody should be surprised...but at that time, I don't think you can just blame the actors for him essentially lying to them...making a film and writing a screenplay...and then discarding most of it in the editing room.

Clooney said in an interview when the film came out that "I would carry the camera box if Terry asked me to," so I gather that many of them signed on because of Malick's rep and the material. Also, DAYS OF HEAVEN spent over a year in post, and supposedly a lot of the way the film turned out was shaped in the cutting room and in Linda Manz' improvised voice-overs, so again, I don't think any actor-even after a twenty-year break-could sign on to a Malick film without having some realization that the script would be so plastic and anything could happen to the material he shot.

Considering the choices Brody has made since he won his Oscar (THE VILLAGE, SPLICE), maybe he should bitch about those instead.

Jedbu wrote:Clooney said in an interview when the film came out that "I would carry the camera box if Terry asked me to," so I gather that many of them signed on because of Malick's rep and the material. Also, DAYS OF HEAVEN spent over a year in post, and supposedly a lot of the way the film turned out was shaped in the cutting room and in Linda Manz' improvised voice-overs, so again, I don't think any actor-even after a twenty-year break-could sign on to a Malick film without having some realization that the script would be so plastic and anything could happen to the material he shot..

But you are talking about one movie he shot. It wasn't at that time a large body of work you could point to (like you can now since he's made a bunch of other films) and say, "they knew what they were getting themselves into." How did they all know every film he would ever make would end up just like DAYS OF HEAVEN? They signed on because of his rep, yes, and because he had been away for so long, that it was like J.D. Salinger or something coming back. Maybe they thought he was making something very different than DAYS OF HEAVEN. Either way, he'd have a hard time assembling a cast like that ever again after what happened on THIN RED LINE.

My other point is what he originally shot WORKED and apparently was a terrific war film before he decided to chuck most of it all away in favor of his typical, now-established formula of poetry, visuals, half-assed ruminations on life and existence, etc.

For the record I like -- don't love -- the movie for its cinematography and some of its performances, but I find it very disconnected and jumbled, and not entirely coherent. It is, however, superior to THE NEW WORLD in every facet.

Considering the choices Brody has made since he won his Oscar (THE VILLAGE, SPLICE), maybe he should bitch about those instead.

I think if you asked most any actors in that position they'd have felt the same. If I took a script, spent months shooting on another part of the globe, thinking that I was the lead, and ended up having my role reduced to a handful of lines, I'd be ticked off too. IMO most of those actors never would've signed up if they knew what he was going to do with the final cut -- how about the dozens of big actors he cast and never put them on-screen at all??

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark: 8/10

Here's a real late-summer surprise, a tingly, atmospheric, and very scary genre exercise from producer/co-screenwriter Guillermo Del Toro in perfect creative snych with the films he personally directs. There are fine performances, gorgeous cinematography by Oliver Stapleton (with a full color pallet for a change), perfectly-pitched chills and a marvellous score by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders that stands as one of the best I've heard this year...eerie and melodic in the best Christopher Young tradition. A shame they're tossing it away at the ass-end of August...this would have made for perfect October viewing.

Hollow Man (2000): 6.5/10

What should have been a home run (considering the marriage of director and subject matter) turns out to be a disappointing near-miss, lacking the lip-smacking naughtiness one would expect from Paul Verhoeven tackling an "invisible man" thriller. The first two-thirds are reasonably compelling, and the visual effects still hold up as some of the best in the modern era, but once the last, set-bound third kicks in, the film becomes a redundant sci-fi knockoff of the Friday The 13th formula, with dumbass characters constantly wandering off by themselves so they can get offed by Kevin Bacon's see-through slasher. Like Leviathan, Deep Blue Sea, and countless other bad horror films with scientists stalked through their lab/underwater base by their own genetically-cultivated monstrosities, Hollow Man is rife with cliches (the "seemingly dead killer lunging up for one final scare" bit outlined by Scream pops up no less than three times in a row, which is absolutely unforgivable), and the generic supporting cast doesn't help (when the best-known actor aside from the three leads is played by Greg Grunberg from Heroes, it's not too hard to figure out who's going to survive to see the end credits). It's nice to see Elisabeth Shue earn top billing (maybe for the last time in her career, which basically sputtered to a halt after this), and Jerry Goldsmith's terrific score is probably the last time he wrote in his terse, agitated 70's style, but the film should have grown bigger as it went along, with Bacon's mad scientist allowed out into the world to wreak sinister havok, instead of collapsing back into itself for a series of chase scenes down a bunch of boringly identical industrial corridors. Still, it's not nearly as terrible as some critics said, and the Blu-Ray at least gives the film's brilliant visual effects all the "pop" they deserve (even if it omits the commentary and isolated score from the DVD ).

FOXY BROWN (1974) - 0.5/10. I know this is considered to be a "classic" in the blaxploitation genre, but I found it to be really bad (meaning 'not good'). The acting is terrible, the script is bad, the dialogue is atrocious, and the characters are laughably bad. The film does try to deal with some of the typical issues that the genre as a whole addressed (poverty, blacks being held back by The Man, etc.), but unfortunately I think the filmmakers were more concerned with how many pairs of breasts they could film. It's very nearly a soft-core porn film and could possibly be considered some kind of rape-revenge film. The film has Foxy burning hill-jacks to death, approving the castration of an enemy, and showing her breasts at any given time. This film could have been so much more, but it ends up being an exploitation film in my mind.

I'm not quite sure how to say this, but I don't find female characters at all empowering who are filmed in the nude by men (or women for that matter). How is it empowering when you basically objectify yourself? Whether you control the decision to objectify yourself is beside the point to me - in the end, walking around topless or exposing yourself is not "empowering" (something Madonna has made an entire career out of). I did not see Foxy Brown as a symbol of female empowerment; I would have seen her as such if she kept her clothes on and just exhibited her strength of character to overcome her obstacles. I gave this a 0.5/10 for the music, but honestly I was expecting more. Maybe I don't get it, but this is one you want to avoid.