Is there a place to talk about modern-ish movies? Right here, there is!

Let’s get right to the movies released since the day I was born, which is moving ever inexorably further into the past!

The Seven-Ups (1973). This is basically The French Connection redux, as Roy Scheider stars in it (as do some other actors who were in TFC), it’s directed by Philip D’Antoni, who produced that film (and Bullitt, which this also resembles a bit), and it’s set in the glorious shithole of 1970s New York. Scheider and his bunch (a secretive unit that only goes after bad guys who commit crimes for which they can get seven years or more) stretch the law a bit, too, just like Hackman and Scheider in The French Connection. It’s a slightly better movie than The French Connection, but then again, I hate The French Connection, so it’s still not a great movie, just better than that one. Scheider is using a childhood friend, Tony Lo Bianco, as an informer, but Lo Bianco is using the information he gets from Scheider to kidnap gangsters Scheider is investigating and blackmailing them. He uses two thugs, one of whom is the weirdly evil Richard Lynch, and eventually, one of Scheider’s team gets killed by Lynch and his buddy, and Scheider has to go all “outside the law” on the bad guys. Scheider is a decent actor, but when he emotes in this movie, he’s a bit too dramatic, and it’s a bit annoying. The car chase is wonderful, which is nice, but other than that, it’s just a generic cop movie. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it, either.

The Conversation (1974). I’d just like to point out two things: Coppola directed this and the two Godfather movies in the space of about 3 years, and you could make a case for these three movies showing up on a Best … 50? 100? Movies of All-Time list, plus he made Apocalypse Now right after these, and that’s a Murderer’s Row of masterpieces – I would put Apocalypse Now above all of those, honestly; and John Cazale acted in five full-length movies before his untimely death: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter. Dang. All of those were nominated for Best Picture. Sheesh! (I mean, he doesn’t have a ton to do in this movie, but he’s still pretty good in it!)

I’d never seen The Conversation, but I’d heard a lot about it, and it generally lives up to the hype. This is, apparently, Hackman’s favorite of his movies, and it’s easy to see why – he’s given a good role and he does very well with it. He’s a surveillance expert who’s hired by a mysterious company to record a conversation between two people – Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest – in a San Francisco park, which makes it hard to get it all and Hackman then spends a good amount of the movie piecing the speech together, which of course adds to the tension of it all, as they’re talking about something that could be dangerous to them. Hackman spends some time with other surveillance people, and we find out that one of his jobs got people killed, so he’s very sensitive to the fact that Williams and Forrest – who appear to be carrying on an affair – might be in danger. Coppola builds the tension nicely, and Hackman does an excellent job showing that his character – Harry Caul – is paranoid, so he’s a bit weird around people in general. He doesn’t trust his quasi-girlfriend, Teri Garr (in, sadly, a very small role), and when he does start to loosen up, it comes at the worst time. Cazale plays his partner, whom Harry keeps at arm’s length because he doesn’t trust him. Harrison Ford proves why he should have played at least a few more villains during his career, because he’s baby-faced (he was already 31/32 when the movie was filmed, but he looks younger) but he has that deadpan delivery that makes him sound a bit sinister, and it’s very effective. The 1970s were a perfect time for a movie like this, because after the assassinations of the 1960s and the Watergate break-in, it felt more plausible that conspiracies could work, and while the government isn’t involved in this plot, there’s a very conspiratorial tone about it, as Hackman doesn’t want to put his marks in danger but that means putting himself in danger, potentially. The only real misstep is the weird ending – not the resolution of the plot, which is clever but clear – as Hackman’s paranoia blooms a bit too strongly. I get it, but it seems like Coppola, who had been happy to be subtle about how Hackman’s life and career affect his personality, decided that audiences might not get it, so we need to make sure they do! Even in the 1970s, I guess, auteurs were worried that consumers couldn’t get subtext. Sigh. Anyway, this is an excellent movie. Check it out if you have the chance!

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979). This is a terrible movie, but unlike some other bad movies I’ve watched recently, it’s goofy and fun and has a killer soundtrack and stars P.J. Soles, who’s adorable, so I can’t hate it at all even though it’s terrible. Soles (28 years old at the time of filming) plays a high schooler who leads a rebellion against the ridiculously evil new principal, played by Mary Woronov, and she manages to get The Ramones in on the scheme, and they commit many acts of vandalism before becoming, essentially, terrorists at the end (yes, I know it’s a spoof, but still). Woronov, for her part, breaks several laws herself during the course of the movie, which takes place in a strange, alternate reality where parents don’t really exist and there don’t seem to be consequences for anything except what the kids themselves can mete out (they certainly don’t face any from the adults). Dey Young is also very cute as Soles’s best friend, who happens to be a scientific genius but also really wants to bang Vincent van Patten, who’s apparently the only high school quarterback in history who can’t get laid. The Ramones, of course, were the big draw in the movie, as they play a not insignificant part in the proceedings (enough to make it clear they can’t act their way out of a paper bag), and it’s all dumb fun (Clint Howard, for instance, has a very fancy office inside the bathroom, complete with secretary). For a high school movie made in the 1970s, it’s remarkably inoffensive (there’s a random “scalping” joke with an Indian, but that’s pretty much it), as van Patten’s desperation to get laid, for instance, comes off as more … endearing, I guess, than creepy. It’s dumb, but not the worst way to spend 90 minutes or so.

The Last Metro (1980). Truffaut’s gentle homage to theaters and actors during World War II doesn’t quite land, mainly because of its gentleness. Despite being set in Paris in 1942, there’s never a real sense of the danger involved in the actors’ daily lives, despite someone getting hauled off by the Gestapo and a main character living in a basement because he’s Jewish. It makes it an odd movie, because it’s certainly well done, but it’s just odd. Truffaut claimed it was “World War II as seen through the eyes of a child,” because it’s a recollection of his childhood, but that doesn’t mean a child couldn’t see the danger all around. One character loses all her papers at one point, for instance, which would seem like a very important thing in Occupied France, but it’s never mentioned again. Strange. Anyway, this is about a theater and the actors trying to stage plays while censors are watching their every move, and Catherine Deneuve is dazzling as always, and Gérard Depardieu is quite good, and it’s an interesting if flawed look at living under a repressive regime. Deneuve’s husband, a famous director (played by Heinz Bennent), is living in the basement even though everyone thinks he’s fled the country, and it’s interesting to see him try to retain some control over his life in an uncontrollable situation. Because it’s a French movie, Deneuve and Bennent fall out of love very imperceptibly, and Deneuve and Depardieu fall in love just as imperceptibly, but all three actors manage to sell it to a degree. Despite it being a frustrating experience, it’s still a beautiful movie with good actors, and it’s nice to see the ancillary players get some nice things to work on, as well. I don’t know if it’s worth checking out unless you’re a big fan of Deneuve (and who isn’t?!?!?), but it’s a decent enough flick. (Although the title doesn’t make sense – it alludes to people making sure they got the final subway ride to beat the curfew, but the characters in this movie never take the subway and seem to ignore curfews when they want to.)

The Manhattan Project (1986). The Manhattan Project is one of those movies that you’ve probably seen or at least know about – kid builds nuclear weapon in his garage, basically – but perhaps you’ve forgotten quite how ridiculous it is. Christopher Collet, lacking the sweaty, whiny charm of Matthew Broderick (if writer/producer/director Marshall Brickman claims WarGames had no influence on this movie, he’s a damned liar), instead plays the teenage genius as kind of a douchebag, and it doesn’t really work (on the plus side, it’s nice that he’s a super-duper science geek but he still plays soccer, because why not?). He figures out very quickly that John Lithgow, who’s a scientist sweet on his mom (Jill Eikenberry in a very thankless role), is up to something at his research facility, mainly because Lithgow, seeing that Collet has an interest in lasers, gives him a tour of the top-secret government lab in which they’re making extremely pure, highly volatile weapons-grade plutonium. Ah, the Eighties! Collet’s cute-as-a-button girlfriend, Cynthia Nixon, wants to write an article exposing the lab, but first Collet wants to steal some plutonium to prove that’s what they’re doing. Sure, why not? He proceeds with the easiest heist in history, switching out the plutonium for shampoo while Nixon bats her eyes at the two – ONLY TWO!!!! – useless security guards on the premises. TWO SECURITY GUARDS AND AN EASILY HACKABLE SECURITY SYSTEM TO PROTECT THE MOST SECRET SUBSTANCE IN AMERICAN HISTORY?!?!?!? Sigh. Anyway, Collet decides to actually make a bomb so that Nixon’s article will have some zing to it, and so he does. It takes a month before the theft is discovered, and by then, Collet has built a working bomb (he buys C-4 – a lot of it – for $60 from some random Army dude in perhaps the movie’s funniest scene because it’s so casual – yeah, we need to have this clever heist to get the plutonium, but C-4 you can just find lying around, practically) and entered it into a fancy science fair in New York (he says it’s something to do with hamsters so no one suspects). While he’s there, John Mahoney, playing a tough-guy Army dude, tracks him down, and somehow, Collet, Nixon, and a few other nerds manage to escape from the all the Army dudes who are hunting them. They go back to Ithaca, where they plan to kill Collet, but Lithgow finally grows a conscience and throws in with Collet, until the bomb starts counting down because of some glitch in the design and they have to disarm it. Meanwhile, Nixon and Robert Sean Leonard (in his film debut) get everyone in town out to the facility so Mahoney can’t just kill Collet and Lithgow. All’s well that ends well!

It’s ridiculous because the tone is just weird. It was rated PG-13, and there are a few curse words, but I imagine it’s because the subject matter is, after all, nuclear annihilation, something that isn’t all that light-hearted. But Brickman directs it as if it’s a light-hearted heist movie with no stakes, and it’s just weird. When Collet is assembling the bomb, we get a musical montage, and the music is extremely cheery, which is just bizarre. Collet never takes the fact that he stole plutonium and built a bomb all that seriously, even when the Army guys and FBI guys are threatening to kill him, but because Brickman doesn’t seem to take it seriously either, it fits with the tone of the movie. In the 1970s, as I noted above, filmmakers believed the government was out to get their heroes and could easily do it. Did Reagan and his stupid smiling face have such an effect that by the 1980s, nobody was taking the government seriously about this stuff? Broderick could get away with it because he could play distressed while still being a punk teen, but Collet doesn’t, and while Lithgow is a better actor than Dabney Coleman (not by much!), Coleman has smarmy, slightly evil government functionary down cold, and he’s far more menacing in WarGames than Lithgow or Mahoney is in this movie. It’s just a strange movie, and it take plutonium a bit lightly (there is no way Collet could do almost anything he actually does, mainly because he never wears protective gear except for rubber gloves a few times), but it’s also not terrible. A nice way to waste some time in a simpler time. Oh, and Collet’s rival at the science fair seemingly invents the internet for his project. That was strange.

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). As good as the actors are in this movie (and they are), Pacino is sooooo good in it, and the fact that he only got nominated for Best Supporting Actor (and didn’t win – 1992 was a stacked year for Best Supporting Actor, with David Paymer the only weak link, as Hackman won for Unforgiven and Jaye Davidson and Nicholson were the other nominees) while he freakin’ won for Best Actor for Scent of a Woman is just weird, man. Pacino is everything in this movie – he’s just a weirdo when he’s first talking to Jonathan Pryce, and it’s unclear he’s even trying to sell him anything; he’s hilarious when he’s trying to get his Cadillac and ignoring the cops; he’s slimy when Pryce is trying to get out of the deal and Pacino is lying his ass of trying to keep it alive; and he’s vengeful when Spacey blows up the deal, and he does it all magnificently. Lemmon is terrific, Arkin is terrific, Harris is terrific, Spacey is terrific, Baldwin is amazing – how does Alec Baldwin, of all people, have two of the most iconic movies monologues – this and the one from Malice – in the past 30 years, if not all-time? – and I wonder if every male actor in Hollywood wanted to be in this movie, because all the roles are great. But Pacino, man – he’s on fire in this movie. (Some ridiculously offensive language in the clip below, if by chance you’ve never seen this movie.)

Stardust (2007). It’s been a while since I read Stardust, so I don’t know how closely the movie hews to the book (I guess Michelle Pfeiffer’s role was plumped up a bit once she signed on), but it’s a pretty good movie, full of typical Gaiman-esque humor and clever plotting and strong performances by good actors – De Niro is having a blast as the pirate captain with a Dark! Secret! (which isn’t really that dark), Pfeiffer is pretty good as the main villain, Mark Strong can be evil just by curling his lip a little bit, and I’ve always liked Jason Flemyng, so it was fun to see him here. Charlie Cox, who had had some small roles before this, is fine as the lead, although he doesn’t have a ton of charisma and he doesn’t have a ton of chemistry with Claire Danes, who has more chemistry with De Niro (I mean, so would I) but does a pretty good job as the fallen star that Cox wants to deliver to the snobbish girl (Sienna Miller) he thinks he’s in love with. It’s a rousing adventure, and the CGI isn’t superb but it gets the job done, and Gaiman is smart enough to zig when you think he’s going to zag even though we know where the path is going to end up. This is just a nice, exciting fairy tale, and it’s a fine way to spend some time.

Heist (2015). This movie didn’t make any noise when it came out (I don’t even know if it was released in theaters), but it’s got a good cast and it’s pretty good for what it is. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who feels like he ought to be a bigger star, plays a card dealer at a riverboat casino in Mobile whose daughter needs cancer treatments but who is going to lose her spot on “the list” because Morgan can’t pay for it. He asks his boss, Mr. Pope (played by Robert De Niro), for the money, but De Niro isn’t a nice dude and he resents Morgan because he was grooming Morgan to take over the casino – and all the illegal activity De Niro is into – and Morgan rejected him. When Dave Bautista, a security guard at the casino, figures out that De Niro is laundering money through the business, he asks Morgan to help him steal it, because De Niro can’t report it to the cops. Of course, we see early on that De Niro and his right-hand man, Morris Chestnut, do not deal kindly with thieves, and so there’s that. Morgan, of course, helps Bautista rob the place, but it goes tits up and they end up on a city bus with a bunch of hostages. Gina Carano is the cop who initially figures out what’s going on, and she and Mark-Paul Gosselaar – a detective – work together to figure out how to get the hostages off and if they can trust Morgan, who says he’ll make sure no hostages are hurt. It’s a very tight thriller – slightly less than 90 minutes – and the twist – of course there’s a twist! – is fairly easy to suss out if you’re paying attention and there are some plot holes, but it’s still pretty good. De Niro can do menace in his sleep, and he works hard to make Mr. Pope an actual person rather than just a stereotypical gangster. The movie rises and falls with Morgan, and if you like Morgan (and I do), this movie will probably work for you. It’s a clever heist movie because it’s not about the planning of the heist, but the aftermath, and we don’t always see that. If you have a little bit of time on a weekend afternoon, you could do a lot worse than check this out.

The Hurricane Heist (2018). I remember when this movie came out, because someone on-line – I’m pretty sure it was Danger Guerrero, but I could be wrong – was amped up about it, but I never got around to seeing it. It turns out it just a damned fine heist/action movie, directed by Rob Cohen, who’s made a living making these kinds of movies. A crew attempts to steal around $600 million in old money destined for the shredder in a federal facility in Alabama, and they just need a hurricane to provide some cover. Unfortunately, they get a really, really bad hurricane, and they don’t count on Maggie Grace as a slightly disgraced ATF agent, Toby Kebbell as a meteorologist who grew up in town, or Ryan Kwanten as Kebbell’s brother, who never left town and is a really good repairman who needs to fix the generator in the facility! It’s a fun, fast movie (around 100 minutes, and as we know, 90-105 minutes or so is the perfect length for action movies), with the hurricane used to very good effect – Kebbell obviously knows how to exist in one, so he has an advantage that the bad guys don’t, and he uses that. The bad guys are interesting, too – not completely evil, as they try very hard not to kill anyone, but obviously they become more menacing as their plans go awry, but early on, they actually come off as real people, so the problems they encounter are a bit more interesting. I also love that we learn very little about our heroes – the prologue shows us how the brothers’ father died during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but when they do talk about it later, Kwanten even tells Kebbell he let him have that little moment of reflection as long as it never happens again. Grace, meanwhile, did something to get her consigned to this gig of trucking in money to be destroyed (not the most glamorous job), but we learn very little about it. It’s awesome. There’s not any romance between anyone, and you know how movies used to end almost as soon as the action finished, with no denouement? Cohen does that here, and it’s very much appreciated. Nobody is going to accuse this of high art, but the actors are very game, the effects are neat, and it’s a very cool high concept. It’s a fun way to spend some time!

Free Guy (2021). I wanted to see Free Guy in the theater, because it seemed pretty neat, but for one reason or another, I never did, so now I watched it at home, and what do you know? It is pretty neat! It’s not earth-shattering, of course, but it’s just a very entertaining movie that actually does make some nice points about video game culture, what entertains us (and whether that’s a good thing), and living in the real world. Joe Keery, for instance, tells Jodie Comer he loves her by creating Guy, the NPC in the game, who loves her unconditionally (and, of course, is played by Ryan Reynolds, so he’s very easy on the eyes). Keery can’t figure out how to tell Comer he loves her to her face, and while their romance is sweet, it does speak to this idea of people for whom the real world has too much potential for pain, so they retreat into a fantasy world. Meanwhile, the evil plot of the movie, initiated by Taika Waititi (having a blast as the ultimate “bro” dude, who pretends to be super-cool but is really just pure evil), is about intellectual property and who owns what and how it can perverted, themes that are sadly all-too-relevant at any time, and especially today. It never gets too serious about these things, just has them in the movie, which gives it a bit more heft. Reynolds is underrated as an actor, mainly because he’s so attractive and because he often has that kind of smarmy charm that is both magnetic and a bit off-putting (on-screen, that is – he seems like a swell guy off-screen), but he often weaponizes his looks and he can shift to idealism pretty easily, which he does here. Comer and Keery are good, although because they’re the characters who have to hold the movie together, they don’t get to go off on tangents like Reynolds and Waititi and even Lil Rel Howery (as Reynolds’s best friend) get to do. This is just a very entertaining movie, and it’s the kind of flick that will be on basic cable until the sun goes nova, so I’m sure I’ll see it dozens of times in the next decade. And I won’t mind a bit.

Those are some of the movies I’ve watched recently. I’ve had some time, so my post about olde-tyme movies should be up soon, but for now, feel free to discuss these or other movies you’ve seen recently in the comments!