Reviews

All right, so Al Capp's satire is dated half a century later. It's still one of the most thoroughly enjoyable musicals ever adapted from Broadway.

Dogpatch, USA has been determined by the government to be the most useless place in the country and therefore a suitable place to conduct nuclear testing. So the bizarre inhabitants have to move unless they can find a reason to stop the bombing.

I admit to being old enough to remember the original comic strip, so I'm probably biased. But lively musical numbers like "Jubilation T. Cornpone" and "Put 'em back the Way They Wuz" elevate this above standard Broadway translations.

If you like musicals and great choreography, check this one out!

This is a terrific movie, as far as it goes. It's got action, violence, suspense, humor, everything a great movie strives for. But then it stops. It doesn't end, just stops. Enough loose ends are flailing around to tie a kitten to the railroad tracks, but the train never arrives. Instead, the credits roll.

The bile of unanswered questions overcomes the sweetness of everything that came before. Instead of plot closure, we're only given homespun philosophy from a country sheriff who barely appeared in the first half of the movie.

Bad, filmmakers! Bad! Bad!

I watched this on Netflix's online service, initially as a time-killer. I had expected to turn it off after 10 minutes. Thankfully, I didn't.

It turned out to be a fast-paced comedy of errors even more complex than What's Up Doc?. Let's see... There's two gossipy girls who keep getting everything wrong, mis-delivered love letters, a hooker mistaken for an exchange student (and vice-versa), two identical handbags, one of which contains a big wad of cash and a planned armored car robbery.

With all that happening, yeah, it's hard to follow all the plot convolutions, but that's what makes it funny initially and eventually hilarious.

The young cast performs energetically, which is all this kind of movie really requires.

Not highly recommended, but a pleasant way to kill an hour and a half.

For starters, this would have been a complete disaster with anybody but Bruce Campbell in the lead. He manages to salvage something out of a show with horrific scripts.

The premise: Jack (Campbell) is a US spy in 1801, sent by president Thomas Jefferson to an obscure island to subvert Napoleon's expansionism in that part of the world. There he teams up with a gorgeous British spy to accomplish his mission. To do this, he assumes the identity of Dragoon, a Zorro-like folk hero.

It's a comedy, but the action sequences tend to be the highlights of the show. Much of the "comedy" seems to be junior high double entendres. (A parrot is warned that his girlfriend would leave him for a cockatoo.) I suspect that Campbell cringed over many of the lines he had to deliver but in Hollywood, a successful actor is a working actor. So if his character, in 1801, has to reference Little Orphan Annie, then so be it.

Nutshell: it's fun to watch, with a truly rousing theme song, but sophomoric writing brings it down.

I'd never heard of Jim Butcher's series before watching the TV show, so I went in without preconceptions.

I liked the show and have since started reading the books. It's a nice concept, a wizard working as a private eye and police consultant on otherworldly cases. Harry Potter as written by Raymond Chandler.

It's an enjoyable series on its own, suffering only from comparisons with the books. But that's understandable. You could no more translate the books to TV than you could make Lord of the Rings into a weekly series. You can't do the nevernever (a fantasy dimension dominated by faeries--Spencerian rather than Disneyesque) on a TV budget.

The result is sort of a film noir detective show with a fantasy twist. Definitely worth checking out if you like that sort of thing.

Either this isn't really a teen show or this certified geezer is going into his second childhood. On a whim, I picked up the first few episodes at the local library's DVD section. I've since taken out all of the DVDs and eagerly await each new broadcast episodes.

My primary criterion for any entertainment is the quality of the writing and that of Veronica Mars is very good indeed. The combination of serious story lines and witty dialog make this one of the few bright spots in a TV season bogged down with so-called reality programming.

I've long held the theory that audiences from shows with a cult following would migrate en masse to similar shows. I first noticed this when fans of the original Star Trek moved on to Kung Fu. (Told you I was old!) In this case, Veronica seems to have picked up the fans from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

There are even crossovers from the earlier show, with both Allison Hannigan and Charisma Carpenter appearing occasionally. Even Buffy creator Joss Whedon did a cameo.

Viewers of all ages need to give this show a look. It just might bring out the kid in you.

Whenever a producer decides to "reinvent" a classic film character, the result is generally horrific. That rule holds true for James Bond in Casino Royale.

Reinvention is a scary process. Roger Moore supposedly wanted Cuba Gooding, Jr. to be the first black James Bond. Maybe then we could have the first Eskimo James Bond, followed by the first Pygmy James Bond. Given the success of March of the Penguins and in deference to the animal rights crowd, we could even have a penguin James Bond. (Hey, they both look good in a tux.)

According to the song, Mr. Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang, "He's tall and he's dark, and like the shark he looks for trouble...." Daniel Craig's Bond is short (or at least average) and blond. When asked if he wants his vodka martini shaken or stirred, he angrily replies, "Do I look as though I care?" Definitely anti-Bond.

Facially, Mr. Craig looks like a dissipate Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen was cool, right? James Bond is cool,too. So could McQueen ever have played James Bond? Not bloody likely.

I read most of the Bond books some forty years ago, and my views of the character are mostly shaped by subsequent movies. Bond is suave, cool under pressure, resourceful, witty and constantly horny. Craig's version is blunt, angry, lucky, bland and (Lord save us!) ultimately SENSITIVE.

The movie manages to redeem itself somewhat through the well done action sequences, but that doesn't make it a good Bond movie.

Daniel Craig is definitely not the new James Bond, unless you're willing to abandon the character entirely. Maybe he can be the new Lemmy Caution.

Full disclosure: I didn't watch all of this movie. After forty minutes of experiences ranging from tedium to offensiveness, I turned off the DVD. It's so much easier than walking out of a theater.

Whatever happened to families in movies? From Andy Hardy to Beaver Cleaver, the family was once the cornerstone of society as reflected in the media. Nowadays, one is hard pressed to find a movie family that isn't preceded by the word "dysfunctional." I suspect this is a reflection of the new Hollywood system, where serial polygamy is the norm. Why would such people make movies about folks for whom "'Till death do us part" actually meant something? Instead, Miss Sunshine gives us the standard shtick of homosexual pseudo-intellectuals and nihilistic teens, along with a foul-mouthed, heroin-snorting (and Oscar-winning) grampa who lived through the era when values meant something but apparently chose to reject them.

Sorry, but what many have called an "hilarious" comedy should have made me laugh during the first 40 minutes. Little Miss Sunshine gave me only a drab, unrelenting cloud.

The genre, originally established by Airplane, decrees that there be a nonstop flow of gags based on popular culture in the hope that enough of them be funny to make a comedy.

Date Movie follows the rule, primarily parodying the Meet the... (Parents, Fockers) movies, but also everything from Shallow Hal to Kill Bill.

The problem is that none of this is funny. There are no gags found in any of the other film references that worked. I may have smiled at the idea of Frodo trying to pawn the Ring in order to hire hookers, but that's about it.

Amazingly, the DVD offers the chance to see the flick with an accompanying laugh track, so you can hear what's supposed to be funny. Is that pathetic, or what? Overall, not even worth a video rental.

I'm with the Grinches on this one.

I'd never heard of the book (after my time, I'd guess), so I watched the DVD without preconceptions. Okay, maybe a positive one, since Zemekis has directed some of my favorite movies.

First, the technical problem: I have high hopes for CGI characters to reach truly lifelike status on screen. Unfortunately, as Polar Express shows, the technology isn't there yet. Instead, we see characters that sometimes seem lifelike, but aren't quite. It's like Pinocchio, where we think there's a real boy there, but the face is still just wood.

Then there's the story, or lack of same. A boy, at the age when one teeters on the edge between belief and disbelief, takes a magical train ride to reaffirm his belief in Santa. Good for a short picture book, but far too thin for a feature film.

So what we get is mostly filler. Long, boring sequences which might have been good in themselves, but here merely seem necessary to expand the length. So we watch a ticket float through several adventures in the hope that it will land somewhere and the plot will progress.

I'm not sure who this film was intended to satisfy. Old timers like me will be bored. Younger children will be terrified. (You wanna see Santa? You've gotta go through pure hell first!) Somewhere in the middle, enough people liked it to bring in the big bucks.

There are wonderful moments in Kevin Spacey's tribute to Bobby Darin, but they never seem to add up to a cohesive whole.

It should rightly be categorized as a musical, since those are the best parts. It begins with Darin (Spacey, who also wrote and directed) doing Mack the Knife as part of a movie of his life. This is interrupted by Darin as a child reminding him of the parts he left out.

Somehow, the biopic within a biopic is forgotten thereafter, instead following his life. From his days as a sickly kid not expected to live beyond 15 to his death after a successful Vegas revival.

In-between, musical numbers are the highlights. A B&W recreation of Darin doing "Splish, Splash" on American Bandstand starts it off. But he doesn't want to be a teen idol; he wants to be Sinatra (who, ironically, began as a teen idol).

In-between the musical numbers, the plot slows to standard stardom self-pity regarding his confused parentage, but audience identification with somebody who has a fireplace in his hotel suite is questionable. Fame and Fortune don't bring happiness. This is new? Still, filmmakers's passion is a powerful reason to watch a movie. Kevin Spacey apparently REALLY wanted to make this movie, which he wrote and directed besides starring. But then, somebody passionately wanted to make Howard the Duck, so it's a mixed bag.

The musical numbers make it worth watching; the dramatic interludes make it just another "Stars are super-rich regular people to be pitied" biopic.

Watch the good parts and sit through the rest.

Dead End is something the late Rod Serling may well have written: A family lost on a seemingly endless road. Strange occurrences. All clocks and watches stopped at 7:30. These are the sort of plot points that compelled people to watch the "Zone" in the early 60s.

Aside from the fact that Serling never used the now-seemingly-required F-word and would have fitted the story into an hour-long episode at most (it's 84 minutes), the character-based formula of eeriness is the same.

Remember, Twilight Zone was one of the all-time great TV series. Not a bad thing for a low budget horror flick to be compared to.

For one who considers Used Cars and Blazing saddles among the funniest movies he's ever seen, the threat of "tastelessness" that appeared in some reviews was no deterrent. The buzz was that Bad Santa was funny, and that's all that I was looking for.

It wasn't. Watching on DVD, it's possible to consult the time code. I smiled 45 minutes into the movie and laughed once a little over a minute into it. That's it. One laugh in 98 minutes (unrated version). Did they edit the laughs out of the theatrical release?

I'm reminded of a film historian (Halliwell, I believe) who watched a series of Mack Sennett shorts and wondered how anyone, ever, had found them funny. I'm with him.

The fact that so many critics called the film hilarious says more about the wretched state of film criticism than about the movie. What amused erudite critics that we poor mortals in the hinterlands fail to grasp? Was it the anti-religious element that's so trendy in today's Hollywood?

"Smash the heads off Mary and Joseph in a manger scene and get a laugh!" That's it? That's what humor has been reduced to nowadays, at least according to the ordained elite? If so, the critics must be rejected, shunned, and, if necessary, restricted to leper-like colonies where they can mingle with their own kind without risk of infecting the rest of society.

From the era of "epic" comedies like The Great Race and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Hallelujah Trail was the entry in the western category. Lots of funny stuff, but just too long to sustain the hilarity.

A favorite bit concerns temperance leader Lee Remick unsuccessfully trying to convince cavalry officer Burt Lancaster of the rightness of her cause:

LEE: Three of the women in my movement have lost their husbands to alcohol. The men literally drank themselves to death!

BURT: One can only wonder why.

There are enough gems like this to make it worth watching, but not up to the standards of Blazing Saddles or Support Your Local Sheriff.

In 1935, somebody came up with a brilliant idea: make a talking short that would epitomize the slapstick comedies of the silent era. Silent comics, pushed into obscurity by the advent of talkies, were readily available.

Never mind about the plot; it only exists as a framework on which to hang new renditions of classic silent gags. The finale, of course, is a massive pie fight in the hotel ballroom while the Keystone Kops rush to quell the riot. Segments of the pie fight are frequently used as stock footage; it's likely that everyone has seen portions of it at one time or another.

Altogether, a nostalgic short that captures the flavor of the silent era. Good fun.

It's the early days of television and much of the programming consists of old western movies. Suddenly, the films of Smoky Callaway (Howard Keel) are discovered by a new generation and he becomes a star once again.

One problem: the real Smoky Callaway is a hopeless drunk who has disappeared somewhere in Mexico. Enter Hollywood agents Frye and Patterson (Fred MacMurray and Dorothy McGuire), who need to find a replacement to make a new series of westerns and cash in on the merchandising possibilities. They discover an actual cowboy, Stretch Barnes (also Keel) who agrees to impersonate Smoky.

There's a Frank Capra feel as simple Stretch turns out in real life to be the white-hatted western hero that Smoky pretended to be onscreen. Things get complicated when the real Smoky returns.

The writing team of Panama and Frank (A Southern Yankee, The Court Jester, White Christmas) delivers another warm, funny movie that pokes fun at Hollywood superficialities and contrasts them with the genuine values of hometown America.

Classic stories are always worth retelling, but certain rules must be observed. If you want to make your spaceships look like 17th century sailing vessels, there should be a reason why they look like that.

You should also explain why they ignore rules like the absence of oxygen in space. (Simple enough; when they activate "artificial gravity," an "atmosphere bubble" could also be created.) Then there's the problem of propulsion. Solar winds and the sails to capture them are fine within the limited confines of star systems, but useless in the vast interstellar voids.

That said, the basic story is a classic and the animation is outstanding. Too bad the above problems weren't addressed or it might not have been such a disaster at the box office.

The Broadway musical has pretty much retained the same format since it first appeared: characters go through the play and, at critical moments, BURST INTO SONG! Chicago is the first I've seen to take a different tack.

Here, the somewhat drab dramatic plotline goes along telling the story with the spectacular musical numbers serving the function of a Greek Chorus, accentuating elements of the plot. So a press conference turns into a puppet show, with attorney Billy Flynn manipulating reporters. A scene in which Velma describes her nightclub sister act becomes a full-fledged routine with Catherine Zeta-Jones performing both parts.

Beneath the glitz of the musical numbers, the film presents a cynical message. The three major roles, two murderous women and their sleazy lawyer, all come out smelling like roses. The only objectively admirable character is John C. Reilly's Amos, who hocks everything he owns to defend his unfaithful wife. He is used, then cast aside. If this is the movie's message, that morality is for chumps, then it manages to slide it in smoothly.

I'm not sure this is a good thing in an otherwise highly entertaining film.

There are two types of scary movies: The creepies and the jumpies. The former slowly creates an atmosphere of terror that builds to a crescendo which sticks with the viewer for days. The latter merely has its characters moving around so that things can jump out at them.

Darkness Falls is a classic jumpie. The ghost-witch can be counted on to make a sudden appearance (accompanied by a loud musical spike) whenever anybody is on a screen that's half in shadow. The characters aren't likeable, or even interesting, their entire personalities being based on the fact that they're SCARED.

Once you get used to the fact that something will jump out, there's not a lot of interest here.

This has to rank alongside Roger Corman's best as one of the great cult favorites.

The acting is atrocious and the direction is primitive at best. But there's plenty of action and bare bosoms, which is what such movies are all about.

Terlesky seems to be getting by in Hollywood nowadays as a writer, director and actor in mostly B-movies, but D-2 represents the best of his early days.

"Is Deathstalker your first name or your last?" You gotta love lines like that.

A classic of sorts.

Overheard at a Hollywood party (punctuated by snorts of coke):

Y'know, Mad Max was awesome, man. But how about if, instead of a nuclear holocaust we got invaded by, like, dragons!

Wow! That'd be cool!

You got a script? No? Not a problem. Here's $20 million. Make that movie!

What an utter piece of brain-dead trash! I'm generally willing to suspend disbelief for a fantastic premise, but this was just too preposterous to swallow.

The movie supposes that tens of thousands of fighter jets were unable to take out a batch of slow-flying reptiles. Sorry, but I can't buy that, either.

Suspension of disbelief can only go so far.