Awful and unimportant, other than a milestone in the progress of pornography. I saw this, I believe, in Holland. [2094]
Linda Lovelace
Better than average for the series. [435]
Interesting example of how point-of-view can prejudice a film. Manson is played as demonic right from the start, leaving the viewer to wonder why anyone would follow him in the first place, let alone murder for him. [429]
Sometimes powerful anti-war film, documenting the misadventures of a German brigade on Russian front in 1943. [404]
Brilliant, powerful evocation of Hell. Scheider plays down and out man on the lam, hiding in some godforsaken South American village. Only chance out is to transport some old nitroglycerin to an oil well fire. Remake of "Wages of Fear". [349]
Richly sensuous exploration of split personality: Keaton as a Catholic do- gooder during the day, and adventurous junkie at night, finally done-in by her indulgence. Richard Gere is flamboyant, dangerous stud she meets at one bar; Tom Berenger is a conflicted gay hustler she meets at another. Tuesday Weld plays sister Catherine. [added 2016-07-23] Surprisingly powerful, authentic feeling dissection of a young woman's character. Teresa is the daughter of staunch Catholics, father very strict and demanding, and mother soft and conciliatory, who develops a taste for sex while conducting an affair with a married professor who employs her as secretary. He is abusive and she gradually learns to use men the way she was used. Unusual for the time, Goodbar shows her as raptly delighted by the physical experience: she craves it over and over again and chirps her pleasure when a man begins touching her. She does a few drugs, drinks a lot at seedy bars, and helps out her unstable sister, whom her father regards as perfect. Is this connected to her horrible experience of surgery to straighten her spine after a bout of sclerosis when she was a child? It is not made explicit. What is clear is the ambiguity of her personality-- which isn't really an ambiguity at all, in Goodbar-- she wants to teach deaf children during the day (and she's good at it, and those scenes are marvelously authentic feeling) while cruising bars for men at night. In the end, this leads to tragedy, and on second viewing, it feels more like the judgement of a society that just can't handle a woman in control of her own sensuality and pleasures, independent of the controlling men around her. [330]
Fascinating account of two unbalanced individuals who meet, become enflamed with passion, then discover that they can't live with each other or without each other. Brando is at his finest; Schneider is riveting and ravishing. At first, they are two lonely misfits, clinging to each other in desparate desire for love. But Paul (Brando) becomes possessive and violent and when Maria (Schneider) tries to escape the relationship, he destroys both of them. [326]
Sutherland is brilliant in this very stylish adaptation. Haunting, and visually stunning, though results, admittedly are somewhat ambiguous. Controversial! Outrageously staged, with plastic water and ridiculous, operatic supporting cast, but a rather savage indictment of Casanova's philandering, and his pretentious enlightenment intellectualism which Fellini seems to see as destined to end, inevitably, in isolation and despair. The sex, for which characters don't undress, is mechanical as a clock (which Casanova brings to every romantic event), and even Casanova's admirers are vulgar and frumpy. Does it work as a movie? It's never not lively or intriguing. [313]
Deeply flawed thriller, wastes Scheider, Hoffman, Olivier. Hoffman is "Babe", a runner and student, whose father committed suicide after being labelled by HUAC in the 1950's, presumably. We don't get details but Babe keeps insisting he was innocent, though the issue is really whether anyone should be persecuted for having previously held communist views. His brother Henry, "Doc", works for a nefarious government agency called "the division" which uses ex-Nazis, and pays them, to help them find other Nazis. It would have been far more likely that they were employed to undermine Communists-- as really happened. Olivier is brilliant as Szell, a Nazi war criminal who works for the Division. Szell absconded Nazi Germany with diamonds extorted from Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz which his father (brother, in the movie) stored in a safety deposit box in New York. When the brother dies, Szell is forced to come to New York himself to retrieve them, but he becomes convinced that Doc is going to rob him when he leaves the bank with them. He murders Doc but Doc manages to get to Babe's apartment before dying. Szell suspects that Babe is now in on the planned robbery-- something not very logical or convincing. Szell has a couple of goons with him-- why not have them accompany him from the bank? And why does he believe Babe would tell him the truth if tortured? How useful would any such information be? And would Szell really enter a thickly Jewish area of New York to get an estimate as to the value of the diamonds? The sighting by a survivor of Auschwitz is kind of banal-- more concerned with the physics of suspense than the psychological value of the scene. It does have it's moments of suspense-- some stolen (the bouncing ball from "Third Man", the baby carriage from "Potemkin") but you quickly realize that these allusions aren't really central to the action. And when a thug tries to murder Doc in Paris with a wire, I imagined a more exciting way to have Doc detect the attacker: have one of the onlookers across the street react, and him react to the reaction. But the ending is probably the most ridiculous. In the book, Babe simply takes direct action. In the movie, Szell more or less kills himself frantically trying to retrieve his diamonds from a being lost into a drain. Because American audiences don't like having their heroes expressed too directly as cold-hearted killers, even if their victim really is a very, very bad person. [282]
Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider, William Devane, Marthe Keller, Fritz Weaver, Marc Lawrence
I think I saw this with Mark Vandervennen, or at his recommendation. Maybe it was with Rick Vanderwoude. I thought it was relatively funny at the time: a parody of Watergate. Can't remember much more about it, though. [238]
I think it is De Palma's best film, which isn't saying much. He eventually wore out the motifs which he did rather well in this film, especially the stunning conclusion. Amy Irving and Sissy Spacek are good. Based on Stephen King story. Does it degenerate at the end, after building some legitimate suspense? [187]
SISSY SPACEK, AMY IRVING
Paul Schrader actually wrote the original script. When Spielberg started tinkering with it, Schrader had his name removed. Sine a film must have a screen-writer, Spielberg gave himself the credit. Glowingly optimistic take on alien invasions. Several diverse characters--all with personal problems--are mysteriously moved to act strangely-- it turns out they're being prompted by aliens about to introduce to the earth to astonishing new concepts. Good special effects and refreshingly mundane in many respects, but a deeply exciting film. Attempts to answer the question, what if the aliens like us? In this film, they appear to be the object of unfocused aspiration, a desire for a new start, an optimistic embrace of the unknown. The actual aliens are a bit of a disappointment but I'm sympathetic to the problem of how you would show them -- especially since it would be almost equally disappointing to never see what they look like. The shots of the aliens are deliberately over-exposed to hide the rubber heads and suits. John William's music, as usual, is mushy and bland and sucks the life out of the scenes where it rises in Spielberg's desperate attempts to tell the audience what to feel. But Richard Dreyfuss is the perfect Spielberg protagonist: great at surface gestures and excitement, but poor at actually creating a believable character. [178]
This is the film that becoming known as the best film ever made because it is known as the best film ever made. Kane is a brilliant work. Script, cinematography, acting-- everything is top-knotch, and, indeed, it should make most people's top ten lists. It is, of course, Welle's thinly disguised take on William Randolph Hearst, the scandal-mongering newspaper chain owner, who single-handedly ruined Welles after this film came out, by ensuring that Kane was a financial flop, by denying advertising and promotion in his newspapers. Welle's himself plays Kane with understated glee. He documents Kane's rise from poverty and obscurity to become the most powerful newspaper publisher in America. He also documents the vacuousness and emptiness of his life, his famous indulgences (the castle he left stored with millions of dollars worth of classic European art, which he neither understood nor valued), and his attempts to turn Marion Davis into a legitimate movie actress, which, if anything, hurt her career. The smart thing, of course, would have been to go see the movie and announce to the press that he loved it. Largely because of his response, he remains, in public memory, a snivelling, thin-skinned, nasty old man with bad taste. [175]
ORSON WELLES, JOSEPH COTTEN
Hollywoods version of the Russian classic is neither as good as you hope nor as bad as you expect. Actors are terribly miscast (Brynner? Shatner? Baseheart?). You get the sense that Brooks knows this is great literature and full of passion and life... so he has gypsy singers and a drunken Lee J. Cobb raging and bellowing his best. If you liked the book, you might at least enjoy the attempt. [146]
YUL BRYNNER, WILLIAM SHATNER, RICHARD BASEHEART, LEE J. COBB
William Goldman also writer. Thoughtful but sometimes staid drama about operation market garden-- and it's failure. Saw it again in 2013-07: really badly written and acted and directed, though it made a respectable attempt to be historically accurate. Notable that the dead general, Lieutenant General Frederick Arthur Browning, gets pinned with the bulk of the blame for the failure of Market Garden, and his widow, the writer Daphne Du Maurier insists the movie is unfair (while praising the book as (fair and balanced"). Hard to find much grounds to defend Browning: after all, he traveled with three teddy bears, design his own uniform-- I'm not making this up--and he clearly ignored intelligence from the Dutch and others suggesting the presence of the two Panther Divisions near Arnhem on the eve of the assault. He emerges, in real life, as something of a comic figure, one of those marvelous Monty Python creations, giving grand speeches about sacrifice and honor and the old spirit while holding his teddy bears. One writer defended Browning as "debonair in appearance, dapper in manner". This is a defense? Another website bemoans the smirch to his reputation, without offering any evidence that he was not an idiot who delivered thousands of soldiers into the maw of two experienced and able Panzer divisions without warning them. And it is hard to defend a movie so reliant on celebrity cameos, including Robert Redford in a rather ridiculously heroic role, and Elliot Gould, Liv Ullman (as a Dutch woman), Laurence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins, Arthur Hill. None of them can save the dialogue which sounds like it was written by two college students trying to imagine how generals and intelligence officers talk to each other. There is a noble effort to show the pain and suffering associated with war, but everything is so cagey and coy that it's hard to credit it-- they look like actors trying to look like suffering actors and we're invited to notice how dangerously wounded they are. Most fun in this movie is seeing real aircraft and armor instead of CGI, and real crowds, and Michael Caine, with a tip from the real-life general he played, keying up the action with "All right then, let's go". [143]
Sometimes aimless drama about auto-racer Bobby Deerfield and hot Swiss girl,-- Marthe Keller? [132]
Documentary style film about a poor man and his son and what happens when the man's only means of livelihood (he's a sign painter), his bicycle, is stolen. Humane and fresh (all the actors were amateurs). Part of the influential "neo-realist" movement in Italy after the way. [118]
Very funny, often moving account of love affair between Allen and Keaton. She is a klutzy WASP; Allen his usual neurotic Jewish intellectual. Funniest scenes revisit Allen's youth, his family arguing and making sarcastic, insulting comments to each other, Allen's visit to Keaton's family, her suicidal brother, and her smug parents. Allen's take on California is also amusing. Among Allen's best films. [101]
DIANE KEATON, Woody Allen
A nostalgiac movie with a bitter, perceptive edge to it. Set in 1961, on graduation night, in a small town, American Graffiti follows the adventures and misadventures of a group of grads as they try to sort out their futures. Curt Henderson (Dreyfus) is not sure about college. Steve Bolander (Howard) is being pressured by his girl-friend to stay home. "Toad" Terry Fields (Smith), receiving the gift of Bolander's car, just wants to score. He finds a likely girl, but she wants a drink, and he's underage. Carol (Mackenzie Phillips), a precocious 13-year-old, just wants a thrill ride, and John Milner (Le Mat) gets saddled with her for the night, while stalking an out-of-town racer, Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford!) who wants to challenge his hot rod. The stories of these four weave in and out in a superb pastiche of Americana-- drive-ins, radio, hot rods, drag racing, drinking, motorcycle gangs, and sex. Hanging over all the events is the viewer's consciousness of the disturbed 60's, the assassinations, race riots, war, drugs, and urban decay, that will follow this interlude of innocent pleasure-seeking. Somehow all the trivial concerns of Toad and John and Curt and Steve seem to matter. Maybe they even matter more, because we realize how poignant their unconcern for large issues is. These kids are not naive innocents, as the TV series "Happy Days" would have you believe. They are exploring uncharted territory: the freedom and mobility and prosperity of American suburbia in the late 50's. And they seem supremely unaware of the cost. [97]
CANDY CLARK, MAKENZIE PHILLIPS, BO HOPKINS, HARRISON FORD, WOLFMAN JACK
I liked Bujold in almost anything, but this was not an especially proud moment for her or Lemmon. [94]
Brilliant, stunning film. Severely under-rated by critics, I thought it packed a substantial wallop, particularly in Sutherland's gut-wrenching performance, his howls of despair near the end. Viewed again, years later, it is a mess. It does show signs of brilliance, but yes, there is a sense of chaotic indulgence here that makes you wonder if Fellini really knew what he intended to do. [88]
DONALD SUTHERLAND
Strange sci-fi film that always blended in my mind with "Logan's Run". [83]
Very moving picture, though flawed by David Lean's over-bearing sense of epic, in my view. Based on the book by Pasternak, about love and human spirit triumphing over history and destiny. Some astounding scenes of bleak winter desert. Some scenes of unforgivable pretention as well. The problem is that David Lean's sense of dramatic construction didn't survive his ear: the dramatic scenes seem contrived and melodramatic-- it feels like stage kisses. Beautiful music, and beautiful cinematography, but, at times, clunky. [21]
OMAR SHARIF, JULIE CHRISTIE, GERALDINE CHAPLIN, ROD STEIGER, TOM COURTNEY, ALEC GUINESS
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