The Stunt Man

Dir. Richard Rush

Starring
Peter O'Toole
Steve Railsback
Barbara Hershey

Rated R - 1980 - 131 mins

If this movie was a sport, I'd call it NASCAR. If this movie was on Wall Street, it would be the stock market. And, if this movie was a drug, it would most definitely be cocaine. Sometimes a movie will creep up on you, like that up hill part at the beginning of a roller coaster; "The Stunt Man" is that kind of a movie.

"The Stunt Man" is one of those "movies about making movies"...movie. Which, when done correctly, can be a lot of fun. Well, the twist in this film is that Cameron (Steve Railsback), a Vietnam vet on the run from the law, quite literally stumbles into a big budget film being shot by Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole). A recent death of the lead stunt man on the film set gives Cross the unique position to compromise Cameron into becoming his new stunt man in exchange for hiding him from the law.

Cross is intrigued by the mysterious background of the war veteran/drifter, and seems to love psychologically toying with him, and other crew members, in order to get the reactions for the film being shot. You get the impression that Cross, a sweet talking megalomaniac, only cares about one thing: getting the right shot on film.

The story is constantly going back and forth between the World War One movie being filmed and the real world of cameramen, make up artists, stunt men and all. The film has a strong theme of "what is reality?" There are also a bunch of allusions in the film to things like "Alice and Wonderland", and biblical stories, so if you enjoy that extra meat in a story you'll get a kick out of this one. You REALLY feel the up and down ride of the story. Is Cross willing to kill this stunt man for the perfect take? Is the lead actress in love with Cameron, or is it a front for the movie? By the end of the film your head is (rightfully so) spinning. But somehow I didn't find myself angry or frustrated at the story, I just enjoyed the ride.

I would strongly recommend this to those who enjoyed films such as "Day for Night", "8 1/2" or "Living in Oblivion".

ACTING - 7 (O'Toole is GREAT, every one else...eh. Cameron reminded of Mark Hamil)
STORY - 9
LOOK - 7

Transsiberian - not your ordinary choo-choo ride

Released - 2008! I'm actually reviewing a NEW movie currently in theatres.
Directed by Brad Anderson
Starring Emily Mortimer as Jessie and Woody Harrelson as her husband Roy with an appearance by Ben Kinglsey speaking Russian.

SYNOPSIS: Do-gooders Roy and Jessie are on their way home from doing charity work in China and decide to take the Trans-Siberian Railroad all the way from Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean to Moscow - a 6 day journey by train. On the way, the couple encounters some untrustworthy characters and becomes unwittingly drawn into danger.

REVIEW by CINEMAGIRL:

If you've ever spent a decent amount of time on a train, anywhere in the world, you know how foreign a feeling it is to be rocking across backwoods countryside and the gritty sides of towns with the only familiar surroundings being your traveling companions and the other passengers. It's kind of like traveling through space. Everything is a new frontier.

Traveling on the Trans-Siberian through thousands of miles of tundra, small towns and emptiness would certainly have a time capsule effect on the passengers. They only exist at this time, together, on this train, drinking vodka and smoking incessantly. In this environment Roy and Jessie meet their bunkmates Carlos and Abby, a mysterious young couple traveling the world together. Abby is quiet and moody but the Spaniard, Carlos, is friendly and outgoing and interested in learning more about the American travelers.

When Roy and Jessie become separated at a railroad station, Jessie is left alone on the train with Carlos and Abby. She learns more about them, to the point where she uncovers details it would be safer not to know. Eventually Roy is reunited with the distraught Jessie, who annoyingly will not open up to her husband and tell him the truth about what occurred in the 24 hours they were separated.

The couple continue on their journey and have some thrilling, terrifying misadventures in the corrupt "wild west" that is former-Soviet Russia before their train ride comes to an end. I would elaborate more but it would spoil the plot.

The description I read of this film before going to see it at 19th St. Theatre this weekend did not give me the impression that this story would be so action-packed, but it is. A good chunk of this film is suspenseful, parts of it delve into paranoia and fear like "Crime and Punishment" and the last hurrah feels like an action movie.

The cinematography is well done, showing us the open, frosty-white landscape of Siberia and the raucous drunken nights (and days) spent on a train with a host of travelers from Russia and beyond. However, there are no spectacular shots or techniques tested out in this film. It is simply good filming.

The actors do a good job portraying their characters, though Jessie's (Mortimer) lack of honesty at times was annoying. I think if most people were threatened with a deadly weapon they would consider spilling their guts.

Roy (Harrelson) was well acted, but the character seemed a little typical - nice Christian guy, likes trains like a little kid, talks a lot, is overly-friendly. It felt overboard at moments.

Overall, I would recommend renting this film. There's no need to rush out and see it in the theatre unless you're planning a Trans-Siberian journey yourself, comrades. The action was fun, the story had a nice twist and the scenery was great.

STORY: 7
ACTING: 7.5
LOOK: 8
Overall: 7.5 - Worth a rental.

The Invasion (2007) --- A Review with Stray Thoughts

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

Based on Body Snatchers (novel) by Jack Finney
Starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam and Jeffrey Wright.

Reviewed by Junior

I love the Body Snatchers premise. There have been four movies based on Jack Finney's book, and I've enjoyed them all. I'm sure Hollywood would have just made sequels if they could, but the structure of the story would make that very difficult.

• Jack Finney also wrote a wonderful time travel book called Time and Again. Fanciful and romantic and above all else well researched, this book is, among other things, a fascinating travelogue of New York City during the early 1900's, replete with lots of photos. Uses the no-tech time travel method borrowed for the sappily romantic Somewhere in Time.

The first adaptation, of course, was the black-and-white Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) directed by Don Siegel. The second, and best, version was Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), directed by the fabulous Phillip Kaufman and starring Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum, and Brooke Adams. After that they started changing up the name. There was Body Snatchers (1993), directed by Abel Ferrarra with Meg Tilly and Forest Whitaker, set mostly on an army base. Now we have the other half of the title, The Invasion, starring the always lovely and talented Nicole Kidman.

• The star of the 1956 original, Kevin McCarthy, has a cameo in the 1978 version as the crazy man warning of doom on the street.
  

• Veronica Cartwright, who has raised stressed-out panic to an art form in itself, is in both the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and this new one.
  

Kidman plays Dr. Carol Bennell, a psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., a single mom who dispenses pills to make people feel better. This "feel better" aspect is important in the film because---unlike previous incarnations of Body Snatchers---this movie is not an allegory about creeping Communism, or some other group or movement; it is a heavyhanded rumination on the violence and discord of mankind and what price we might be willing to pay to all live in peace, as one. This drum is beaten repeatedly and loudly throughout the movie. Couldn't they have made this alien threat a metaphor for Scientologists?

• Kidman looks hot in a thin tee shirt and diaphanous white pajama bottoms 5 minutes into the movie, getting her son's breakfast ready. I've always found her surprsingly sexy, despite her being thin and pale, not my usual type, as well as a terrific actress. I first noticed her in Dead Calm, before she had hooked up with the dwarfish Cruise.
• I am one of only 7 people in the world who liked Eyes Wide Shut.
  

Dr. Bennell's child, I guess, is intended to add an original twist to the Body Snatchers dynamic. Her need to save him is her motivating force, therefore the boy is placed in jeopardy constantly throughout the film, which never works for me. I can suspend my disbelief when the star of the movie is in peril, even though I know in the vast majority of Hollywood movies he/she will be fine, but when a child's put in jeopardy---I can count on one finger the number of times in a major movie where a child actually dies or has something irreversibly terrible happen to them. Didn't work for me in Aliens either, despite loving everything else about it.

Hunky Daniel Craig plays Kidman's love interest, Dr. Ben Driscoll. Amazingly, she wants to "just be friends," obviously not having seen him yet as James Bond, which makes him completely irresistible to just about every woman on the planet, who will immediately flop onto their backs in his presence. One of Driscoll's scientist co-workers is the incomparable Jeffrey Wright, completely wasted here.

• Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright also appear together in the Craig's first two bond films, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. Wright has assumed the role of CIA agent Felix Lighter, who, in previous incarnations of Bond films was sometimes white, sometimes black, and got his legs eaten off by sharks.
  

The seed pods seen in the previous three incarnations of Body Snatchers are here replaced by microscopic spores which are disseminated when an infected person hocks up a big green loogie. This is effective because the viscous snot can be put into drinks to infect people, or, when the snatched feels particularly aggressive, just projectile vomited in someone's face. This serves the dual purpose of dispensing with the need to cart around huge seed pods and put them in beds with people while they sleep and making the movie more actiony.

Unfortunately, action is not what I want from a Body Snatchers flick. The slow, creeping menace of these pod people who walk and talk and look human, but are strangely deadpan and lifeless, has always been the threatenting thing in these films. That, paired with the wonderful conceit that if you don't want to be assimilated you have to stay awake has always been the most effective aspect of these films. Sleep---which you can only put off so long. It's a very compelling device because we've all been there at some point, whether it was when you were driving, strung out from taking care of a new baby or cramming for an exam, we all know what that feels like and that, ultimately, sleep will win.

• Avoiding sleep, of course, is also one of the important aspects of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and equally effective in that movie. In the first one, before the series decided Freddy was a great comedian, the nightmare was truly terrifying.

The creepy tension you usually expect in a Body Snatchers adaptation gives way to power walking and molotov cocktails and helicopters in the end, unfortunately. I know modern screewriting dictates that the last third of the movie needs to ramp up the action, but it doesn't work for some films and leaves me cold here. Add to that the fact that this movie uses a deus ex machina (literally) when the proper ending for a Body Snatchers movie is one of defeat for our protagonists, and you've got a heavyhanded film with very little real tension and three good actors wasted.

Look---5
Acting---6
Story---3

Cat People (1982)

Directed by Paul Schrader
Music by Giorgio Moroder
Starring Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O'Toole

"An erotic fantasy about the animal within us all."

Review by Junior

Whenever the subject of "guilty pleasures" comes up, Paul Schrader's 1982 remake of Val Lewton's 1942 classic Cat People pounces to mind. Guilty because of the loopy concept, the copious amounts of non-gratuitous sex and the bloody panther attacks. Yet the movie's hotness, style, music and actors make it a pleasure.

The movie opens to drums and synth strains. Orange sand blows away revealing human skulls. A young girl is tied to a lone tree in the rocky, alien landscape and left there for a stalking panther, who approaches her and then---embraces her?

After the dreamlike opening we are introduced to Irena (Nastassja Kinski), immediately after her arrival in America from the unnamed, mysterious realm of the prologue. She has come to New Orleans to see her brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell.) We see their reunion and learn some backstory. It seems Irena has come to America to be with her brother to sort out the problem of their unique family history.

Irena and Paul come from a clan of werepanthers, but unlike their lupine cousins who change when the moon is full, Irena and her ilk change after having sex and can only revert back to human form by killing. This is a problem because they are perpetually horny, apparently. There is one solution, however, which Paul favors---if brother and sister do it, they don't turn, proving the old adage "Incest is best! Put your sister to the test!" But while Irena is not happy about her feline side, she is reticent to make the beast with two backs with her loving brother. McDowell effectively establishes a mysterious and slightly threatening persona so that we, as an audience, are not quite sure whether he means his sister good or ill. Add to that the fact that, after their initial reunion night, Paul disappears. It seems seeing his comely sister was too much for him and he had to go out into the night and get him a little action.

Irena explores New Orleans and meets Oliver (John Heard), the curator of the New Orleans zoo. He takes the shivering and soaking wet Irena under his wing, naturally, and feeds her oysters, as any red-blooded American man would to a sexy, puffy lipped European babe like Kinski, despite the fact that he already has a sexy, big-bosomed American girlfriend named Alice (Annette O'Toole.)

I won't go through the whole plot. Suffice to say there are two love triangles established. Oliver---Irena---Alice and Paul---Oliver---Irena. Will Oliver sleep with Irena and get disemboweled by the cat while he lies is post-coital bliss? Will Paul kill Oliver and have his way with his sister? Will Alice claw Irena's eyes out herself? The triangle comes to a head (or a point, I guess) in the famous scene from Val Lewton's original, recreated here almost shot-for-shot, where Alice is stalked while walking through a park at night, moving from pools of light from the street lamps through the darkness in between as she becomes more and more sure that Irena, in cat form, is about the pounce.

The music by Giorgio Moroder is terrific, moody and atmospheric, establishing a smooth and sexy undercurrent throughout the film. The closing song by David Bowie is great, with lyrics appropriate to the film. The acting is first rate, despite the silly material. The actors take it all seriously enough. McDowell is in fine form, horny, threatening and mysterious, not yet having fallen completely into the mad villain role he now phones in constantly. Kinski is coquettish and beautiful, and naked more often than not. As always, John Heard plays a great everyman. Around the time of this movie he went from being a big actor in small films (see Chilly Scenes of Winter, Cutter's Way, Between the Lines, no really---see them) to being a small actor in big films (such as Big and the Pelican Brief). Sympathetic and yet surprisingly callous, he makes no bones or apologies to Alice about the fact that he is clearly chasing some Irena tail. Annette O'Toole shows her amazing ability to float without treading water, and you gotta give a hand to Ed Begley, Jr. as one of the zoo workers.

The movie establishes a dreamlike mood, effectively maintaining a feeling that this insane idea is plausible. Sensual, mysterious, and spooky New Orleans is the perfect backdrop for this sexy, violent, entertaining fantasy where everybody gets laid, some people get hurt and/or die, some people turn into cats and nobody wears underwear. I changed my mind. I'm not guilty about this. I love this movie. So there!

Look---8
Acting---8
Story---6

We're Baaaack! (and with a New Review)

Sorry for the delay. This blog seemed to go on hiatus this summer. Between vacation, the Olympics, the DNC and the RNC, there was just too much good television going on to catch any movies. However, CINEMAGIRL happened to watch a good rental last night and here's her view......



AWAY FROM HER
Released 2007, Directed by actress Sarah Polley
Starring: Julie Christie as Fiona Anderson and Gordon Pinsent, as her husband Grant.
Based on the short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain"

REVIEW by CINEMAGIRL:

This film was beautiful in scenery and in story. Away From Her takes place in the snow-covered north of Canada where Fiona and Grant live out their days at a lovely (frozen) lakeside cottage.

It is apparent early on that Fiona is struggling with memory loss. Not just "Oh, damn! Where did I put my keys?" She has forgotten how to pronounce some words and she has gotten lost on her daily cross-country ski. She and Grant quickly realize that she must have an evaluation to figure out what's going on.

As it turns out, Fiona is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. She makes the bold decision to move out of her cottage and away from her husband to a personal care facility. This is the foundation for all drama in the film.

The devoted Grant continually visits his wife only to find her changed each time. At first she flippantly dismisses him like a casual acquaintance, then her character changes and she goes through some personal struggles. Her tireless husband keeps trying to reach out to her and understand what she's going through.

Julie Christie's transformation throughout the film is so subtle, yet it makes an impact. Slight changes in her speech, or appearance, or the lack of focus in her eyes tell us fully how this character has descended into the painful and confusing world of memory loss. It is easy to see why Christie was nominated Best Actress for this role at the 2007 Academy Awards.

Up and coming director Sarah Polley, who adapted the story for the screen, carefully wove scenes between the recent past and present to continually give the audience new tidbits of information along Fiona's progression. She also used grainy, old Super-8mm looking sequences to show young Fiona, her young husband Grant and brief snippets of scenes from their life and his career as a professor.

The film also contains beautiful scenery of the snow-covered Canadian landscape. It's open barreness seems fitting for a story about the stark reality of Alzheimer's.

STORY: 8.5
LOOK: 8.5
ACTING: 10