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Reviews
Overboard (1987)
Makes You Think About How People Perceive You Every Time You See It
Overboard and Groundhog Day are two movies that I have seen countless times.
Each time you see them, it makes you go over in your mind how you treat people in general and how they perceive you.
Usually, I review how I've treated people recently and I always try to treat them better without letting them use me as a doormat.
I don't know about the average viewer, but I think this type of movie is good every so often in order to keep a person on track.
This one teaches that commitment and humility are important values and gives us the incentive to grade ourselves on how we behave toward those we don't get along with very well and those we love.
Dark Streets (2008)
If You Like Blues and Jazz....
If you like blues and jazz and movies with the 30's ambiance, you may like this.
It seems like it is suited to a movie you would watch in th middle of the night when you couldn't sleep.
I had never heard of any of the actors, so there was little I could identify with there.
However, the music is fairly good, the sets and props are impressive.
The storyline is hard to follow, but looks fairly derivative.
The costuming is reasonably good.
Part of the plot involves power failures so maybe that was a ruse for the following.
Unfortunately, I think the producers were trying to save money on lighting.
Either that, or, like many movies lately, to evoke mood, the sets are dimly lit.
Don't expect to see many street scenes with vintage automobiles, the number of sets is limited mostly to the nightclub.
What I think the producers were trying to do was get the flavor of "Chicago" However, it seemed like they tried to do it without any storyline to speak of, as a non-musical.
The King of Queens (1998)
Awful
I never watched this show when it was running and I'm glad I didn't.
It started showing up on MeTV or TVLand (I'm not sure which).
I watched an episode and had a preliminary opinion of it at that time.
However,I figured one episode as insufficient to form an opinion, so I watched several more episodes.
From this I deduced the characters portrayed in the series were some of the most unscrupulous, selfish, loathsome, childish people I had every seen.
Nothing about this series made you want to like or identify with these characters nor recommend it to anyone.
Somewhere in Time (1980)
A Good Watch
Amazing love theme, costuming very good, starts off a little slow, and then moves along at a brisker pace, but I would not have ended the movie version the way it ends.
I have not seen it recently, but Jane Seymour's performance was very good, Christopher Reeve's performance, although adequate, was a little tentative.
Mackinaw Island's hotel provides a beautiful backdrop for the story.
Interestingly enough, there was another movie made the year before - (1979),titled "The Two Worlds of Jenny Logan" which had a similar theme and flavor, but a more satisfying ending.
That movie is now public domain and if you do a search for it it can be watched in its entirety on one of the free movie sites. If you search "ABC Movie Of The Week" you will find it among a number of those movies.
Elementary (2012)
Not Too Bad
To begin with I have read most of the original Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories.
For this show, it appears they took the scruffy look of Robert Downey in the movie Sherlock Holmes, the disdain for authority and theatrics exhibited by Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) in the Mentalist,and the situation of a discredited surgeon - Megan Hunt (Dana Delaney) in Body of Proof, and combined them.
While what I have seen so far has not been bad, and the main characters played by Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu do a fine job in the parts they play, I have feeling that this will be a one season show.
May 20, 2013
I think they have modified the format a little. It looks like they have added some additional lighting and/or are shooting it through a different colored filter, so that it is not as depressing. Also, I think they are using a little more makeup on Lucy Liu, and have given her a little less somber wardrobe.
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Gave a Taste of What They Could Do In Star Trek
Saw this picture when I was in about the 8th grade.
Star trek didn't show up until 1966.
I had read about every SF novel in the local library and was getting tired of the cheesy special effects in the "B" SF films of the period.
Gee, a saucer shaped interstellar craft that wasn't rocket powered, crewed by humans - now that was novel!
I had seen the archived footage of that Redstone rocket take off umpteen times. And when it got into space it was always very streamlined with fins all over it. So the saucer shaped craft was a great change of pace!
The method used to convey when the entity which was the focus of the movie was lurking around the ship was much more chilling, because earlier in the movie, you didn't know anything about its nature. I think they borrowed that particular effect from the Claude Raines version of the Invisible Man.
Except for a few snippets of dialog and mores that definitely identified it a 50s flick, it was great.
For the time period that the movie was filmed the special effects far outstripped anything currently out there, with music that evoked an alien feel of the planet where the action took place.
Plots are better now in the 2000s, but most of them are still generally geared for the masses instead of the thinking individual. A really unique thinking plot doesn't make it to the screen nearly often enough.
I would love to see what someone with vision could do with Arthur C. Clarke's "Songs of Distant Earth". That story has drama, interstellar travel, an encounter with an alien species, humor, and romance. However,the studios would probably fail badly in conveying its nuances, because it would not be of the non-stop action variety, if they followed the book sufficiently well. With CGI, that movie could probably be filmed in the Hawaiian Islands!
The Black Scorpion (1957)
Another So Bad It's Good
This is another one of those "creature features" that had a little more cash on hand for some of the special effects than some of the really bad '50s SF or horror flicks. (But not much). I always enjoy watching these to see what kind of shortcuts they have taken with the budgets they have to work with. (I have supplied props and effects for amateur productions, and know what that is like.)
Also, I always liked Mara Corday, because she could take dialog that a lot of actresses couldn't pull off without it sounding really dumb and make it seem reasonable. Another reason she was appealing,was that on a scale of 10 for attractiveness, she was close to the top of the scale, whereas many of the heroines for these "B" movies were further down the scale.
There is one line a policeman says after another policeman has been done in by the scorpion off camera that always cracks me up. The line was "Every chamber in his gun has been fired!" (The gun he was examining was an automatic!) It's possible their technical consultant and script consultant may have just missed that, or they may not have specified a revolver to their prop-master.
Flash Gordon (1954)
Quaint, But With a Big Hole in One of Their Story lines
I found movie this on one of those internet sites where you can watch old movies and thought this was one of the old Buster Crabbe movies.
What the movie appears to be is 3 episodes of a 1954 German produced TV series stuck together into movie length.
I only watched the episode where the villain informs the good guys that he went back in time 1000 years and planted a bomb that will go off in one hour in Flash's time. Flash goes back in time to find and disarm the bomb. However,he is trying to do it in that 1 hour time-frame. He actually could take all the time he needed to locate and disarm it! He had 1000 years available!
Other than that, the special effects and dialogue were not too cheesy compared to some of the stuff put out in the '50s.
Up (2009)
Grows on You
This is one of those movies you have to see several times to get all the nuances and gags.
This movie spoofs a lot of movies and salutes a lot of traditional values.
The score is perfectly suited to the action.
It is amazing that the animation and the score can telegraph emotion as well as it does.
While a number of the things that happen in this movie would not stand up to scientific scrutiny, the plot is so engaging that it is easy to suspend belief after the original liftoff.
When many other animated movies offer up dialog that borders on the smutty just for a laugh, this is a breath of fresh air by comparison.
All in all, a good way to spend an hour and a half or so.
Anybody notice that Charles Muntz looks like a caricature of Kirk Douglas?
Squirrel!
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
Very Very Disappointing
I caught about 2/3 of this movie on TV because I tuned in late.
Realizing that times have changed since 1951, I wanted to see what slant they would take on the plot in 2008.
While there are flaws in the 1951 version, it was still thought provoking.
In the 1951 version, Klaatu had some feelings and concern about the situation he was sent to deal with, whereas in the 2008 version he didn't have any feelings to speak of until the eleventh hour.
My questions were "What was the studio thinking?" and at the end, "That's all there is?"
My advice: "Don't waste your money on the DVD."
Even on films others think are bad, I can usually find some redeeming qualities.
Not this time.
White Palace (1990)
Interesting - Because I Saw a Part of It Filmed
The film was not very impressive to me, but Susan Sarandon's characterization was interesting. The actual dialog was a little embarrassing, not the language, but the situations that sometimes take place between other people, that make you want to blend into the scenery and just get out of there.
I saw them film some of the outside scenes in St. Louis,including the "White Palace" which was leased from some small burger joint similar in format to the White Castle chain. I worked on the 4th floor of an office building (which apparently no longer exists) overlooking the "Palace".
About 3:00 in the afternoon when the sun and weather was just right,the film crew would shoot some footage in the vicinity of the "Palace". For several days all the staff would take a short break and watch.
At the director's signal all the period cars, buses, and taxis would start down the street. It was like stepping out of a time machine!
However, we never did see the two stars. I think this is what they call an establishing shot.
Some Came Running (1958)
Quaint - Now
This movie was made in Madison, Indiana when I was a teenager.
I lived about 20 miles north of Madison.
The production company was looking for a crowd for the street carnival scene in the movie. Some of my family thought it might be interesting to go down and mingle in the crowd and we might end up in the movie. However, something came up and we couldn't go.
I saw the movie shortly after it was released and have seen it a couple of times since and was not overly impressed with the storyline or the dialog(very derivative). I was not impressed with Frank Sinatra, at all. However, Shirley Maclaine and Dean Martin were very good in the supporting roles.
The cinematography, however, is excellent.
Madison is located in a very green, rolling, area of Indiana on the Ohio River and is very lush, and the background of the Ohio River shot over the characters shoulders in the cemetery, in Kentucky, captures the beauty of the area.
The photography at the Lanier Mansion (1844) definitely captured the affluence of the character that lives there in the movie.
Murder by Death (1976)
An eccentric invites 5 of the world's greatest detectives for dinner and a murder.
Excellent spoof of several genres of fictional detectives - the hard-boiled San Francisco detective, the thorough thinker from Belgium, the inscrutable Oriental detective, the amateur lady detective, and the rich,debonair, dilettante detective invited to a weekend adventure by a wealthy eccentric to solve a murder that hasn't happened yet.
As the film progresses, the clues, are, shall we say, interesting, and don't fit together quite as well as they should.
A word of warning, if you are not a nominal mystery buff, you may not catch some of the things that are being spoofed.
Nevertheless,if the viewer doesn't watch and listen carefully, he will miss some priceless gags.
The first time my wife and I saw this on TV, she dozed off after a long day at work, because she was exhausted.
When she woke up, she asked me, "How did it end?"
I told her "You wouldn't believe me if I told you" and I didn't.
She was slightly miffed for a few days.
A couple of years later, Murder by Death was on again and she watched it clear through.
Her comment - "You were right, I wouldn't have believed it, if you had told me how it ended!"
And if you haven't seen it, neither will you.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
One of the Best 50 Flicks
I didn't see this first run in a theater, but caught on TV in the 60's.
I had read the Finney book in the fifties and felt the movie captured the flavor of the storyline very well, although what is saleable in a book may not fly in a movie. Also, character development is very hard to achieve in a movie when you can take several pages in a novel
This is, by far, the best version.
Unlike many movies made in the fifties, the dialog in this movie is relatively natural, even by 21st century standards.
Dana Wynter is absolutely stunning in this movie!
The plotting is tight, and the pace of the movie is quite relaxed initially, gradually increases in intensity as it goes along, and growing very frantic at the end.
The book had a very different, and a little more satisfying ending.(I found my copy in the basement recently - a paperback which had cost 35 cents!)
If you don't see it in black and white, you are missing some very memorable atmospheric effects, especially the scene around the pool table. A chilling scene without any special effects except the lighting. No grays - just the stark contrast between white and black.