Writing about movies released since the day I was born? Why not?

Hey, I’ve been watching movies, and I’m going to briefly review them! Let’s go!

Murder by Death (1976). I’ve always dug this movie, and while some parts haven’t aged too well, it’s really not that bad. I mean, even the suggestions that Peter Falk is gay aren’t horrible, although it is played for laughs a bit. I’ve wondered over the years, since I became “woke,” if they cast Peter Sellers in the “Charlie Chan” role to make fun of the fact that the Charlie Chan movies only became popular when they cast a Swede as Chan, but maybe, in 1976, it was still the thing to do with Asian characters. I’m not sure – they cast Richard Narita, who’s Asian, as his son, so it’s not like they couldn’t do it (although they obviously wanted to cast big-name actors, and I’m not sure if there were any big-name Asian actors in Hollywood in the 1970s). Sellers’s depiction is the one that, sadly, comes under the most mockery – I mean, yes, Truman Capote yelling at him for not using pronouns and articles is funny, but it’s also extremely racist, and not in a “Blazing Saddles” kind of way (which is also racist, but it’s very much mocking the racists). I mean, James Coco is ridiculous, but he’s mocked because of who he, particularly, is, not because he’s a “Frenchie” (a “Belgie,” as he notes, although at other times it seems like the moviemakers forgot that and made him French). The cast is great, though – Falk and Eileen Brennan nail the hard-boiled detective and his girl Friday routine; Coco is ridiculously Frenchified; Sellers is … fine, I guess; David Niven and Maggie Smith are terrific as the Nick and Nora analogs; Elsa Lanchester (whom I’ve been in love with since I first saw this movie when I was ten or so) is superb, as is her nurse Estelle Winwood; Capote is fun; Alec Guinness and Nancy Walker as the blind butler and deaf/mute cook are hilarious; and hey, there’s James Cromwell in his first movie after some television roles! It’s a goofy, very funny movie, but if you’ve never seen it and you want to, just know that it was made in the 1970s, and some of it is a bit cringe-worthy.

Corvette Summer (1978). This is a silly but sweet romantic comedy, made at the height of the 1970s, so it’s a bit odd. Mark Hamill, in his first role post-Star Wars (filming started two months after that other movie dropped), stars as a kid who just graduated from high school (Hamill was 25 at the time) when the corvette he worked on in a class with a bunch of others is stolen. The others don’t care that much, but Hamill really, really liked the car, so he tries to find it. He hears it’s in Las Vegas, so he splits and hitches to Sin City, getting picked up by Annie Potts, also playing a recent graduate (at the age of 24) who’s heading to Vegas to … become a prostitute. Yep. They argue a lot, but they dig each other, naturally, although Hamill keeps getting distracted by news of the car. It’s not too much of a surprise that the culprit is his teacher, because he’s played by Eugene Roche, who just looks like a bad guy (Roche is more than that – he’s a quintessential Seventies bad guy), and he tries to get Hamill to let the car go and take a job with the car thieves, because Hamill is so good with cars. Eventually, of course, Hamill does the right thing and takes the car back and gets the girl, because of course he does. Hamill is his usual whiny self, and Potts is, honestly, terrific – I often wonder why she didn’t become a bigger star, because she’s often very good. Because it’s the 1970s, Hamill takes off and his mother doesn’t know or care where he is, Potts is an amateur hooker, there’s a bit of casual nudity, and Hamill can sleep in a U-Haul van on a lot without any repercussions. The car chase at the end is kind of lame, but such is life. And hey, Brion James (of Blade Runner fame!) and Wendie Jo Sperber are in this movie! Good for them!

Clash of the Titans (1981). I saw this when I was a kid (I’m not sure if I saw it in the theater, but I might have), and loved it, and it still holds up pretty well, honestly. Hamlin is nice and earnest, Burgess Meredith is fun, Neil McCarthy as Calibos is slimy, Harryhausen’s effects (on his final movie) are goofy but pretty cool (come on, Medusa is awesome), and the Kraken is nifty. Olivier lends some gravitas to it all, and Maggie Smith (her again!) is petty and spiteful as Thetis, Calibos’s mother, who doesn’t seem to think being a murdering thug warrants any kind of punishment from Zeus. I thought I recognized Tim Pigott-Smith, who plays Thallo, the most competent of Cassiopeia’s guards, and he’s been in a ton of things over the years, but I remember him as Creedy in V for Vendetta, because he was a huge dick in that movie. Anyway, this is very fun movie, and it’s far, far better than the remake (which, to be honest, I haven’t seen all of, but what I have seen is trash). Speaking of people not becoming bigger stars, I wonder why it didn’t happen for Judi Bowker. She worked for years, mostly in television, but she never was a star, and it’s too bad. She’s pretty good with not a great role, telling Perseus to stick it when he tries to leave her behind and only getting left behind because he leaves before she wakes up like a chump. Even when the Kraken is about to kill her, she doesn’t do the customary screaming, even though she does look a bit upset that she’s about to be, you know, eaten. And she doesn’t back down from Calibos, either, which is nice. I guess she didn’t have that “it” thing that a lot of actors have. Oh well.

48 Hrs. (1982). Speaking of not becoming bigger stars (I’m doing that a lot, it seems!), I wonder why Annette O’Toole also never became a bigger star. She’s worked consistently for over 50 years, but she never became a big star. She’s attractive, and she knows what she’s doing, so it’s strange to me. Oh well. Blah blah blah Eddie Murphy’s screen debut blah blah blah racism blah blah blah “There’s a new sheriff in town!” blah blah blah. It’s a good movie, you know it, I know it. I just felt like watching it again. I also always liked Margot Rose, who plays Billy’s girlfriend. She was perennial guest star in the 1980s, and it was always cool to see her show up. And hey, Brion James (of Blade Runner fame!) is in this movie! Good for him!

Another 48 Hrs. (1990). One reason I watched 48 Hrs. was because it and the sequel were on back-to-back, and I had never seen this one, so I watched them both in consecutive days. This one is not as good as the first one, of course, but it’s fine. It’s Walter Hill directing again, so there’s a lot of shooting and people falling through glass, but the anger between the two leads feels forced this time around, and that was a good part of the first one, so that’s a problem. The bad guys are fine – the bad guy from the first one had a brother, and he’s out for revenge, and there’s a mysterious drug kingpin running around – but nothing spectacular. The ending presents a whole host of unanswered questions, as it appears one person is the drug kingpin, then another, and then another, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Bernie Casey is fun, though. Apparently a good deal was cut from it, and it feels it, too. There is, for instance, no mention of Nolte having “48 hours” to do anything with Murphy, which makes the title weird. Frank McRae, so fun as Nolte’s captain (a role he would parody in The Last Action Hero brilliantly), was cut from the movie, and a lot of Brion James’s stuff was, too. That’s probably why there are weird plot holes. It’s not a great movie, but it’s not a terrible one, either. It just feels a bit unnecessary. One more time: And hey, Brion James (of Blade Runner fame!) is in this movie! Good for him!

The Two Jakes (1990). Unlike Jack Knight, I’m certainly not going to claim to prefer this movie to Chinatown, but it’s a decent enough movie. I haven’t seen it in years, so I thought I’d revisit it, and it’s fine. I appreciate that it’s about the growth of Los Angeles, much like Chinatown (apparently it was supposed to be a trilogy, with the third one being about the tram lines and the freeways, which Who Framed Roger Rabbit? got to before Nicholson, Evans, and Towne could), because that’s very interesting, and it’s related to the first movie, too, with Faye Dunaway’s daughter being somehow involved in the murder that Harvey Keitel (the second Jake) commits in the first few minutes of the movie (he kills the dude who’s banging his wife, but there’s a whole lot more going on than just that). The case is interesting, then, but the plot does get a bit convoluted, unfortunately, and that’s where it kind of falls apart as it goes along. But it’s still decent – Nicholson is Nicholson, Keitel is pretty good, Meg Tilly is always interesting, and Madeleine Stowe is pretty much wasted. Nicholson gives himself a fiancée for literally no discernible reason, as she’s barely in the movie (and then just to dump Nicholson), which is just one of those weird plot points that make the movie unwieldy. It’s not a bad movie, just not as good as its predecessor.

Alien Nation (1991). If Another 48 Hrs. feels a bit cut (see above), this one definitely does, as it feels far too short (a lot was cut, apparently). I know that action movies back in the day were generally shorter, which is fine (in, say, Commando, we need about five minutes to establish that Arnold loves his daughter, and then the butt-kicking can begin!), but this isn’t really an action movie, it’s a police procedural, and it zips along far too quickly, especially as we’re learning about a new culture along the way. Terence Stamp is obviously the villain from the get-go, but he’s in the movie so little that we don’t really get a sense of how menacing he can be, and his fate doesn’t carry the same impact because we don’t know enough about the drug he’s peddling. Caan, who tries to be a good bigot who learns that the Newcomers are just folks, isn’t much of a bigot to begin with, and he doesn’t really seem to change all that much. It’s very frustrating. The movie is just barely over 90 minutes, and it feels like it could easily be two hours without losing any momentum. Caan, Patinkin, and Stamp are all compelling actors, so let them act, damn it! I saw this in the movie theater when it came out, and I enjoyed it, but I hadn’t seen it since (nor did I ever watch the television show). It’s still a good movie, but there’s a more interesting one lurking inside it struggling to come out. Oh well.

Freejack (1992). Yep, still garbage after 30 years!!! You might recall from my monster receipts/ticket stubs post (those of you who managed to get through it) that I saw this in the theater when it came out while I was in Melbourne. It wasn’t good then, and time has not made it any better, not even making it a “so-bad-it’s-good” thing. It’s clunky, fairly dull, nonsensical, and dreary, with Emilio Estevez (not the greatest actor) trying really hard. Rene Russo is 1990s gorgeous, though, so there’s that. If you don’t know the story, Emilio plays a Formula One racer who has an accident on the course in 1991, and his car explodes with him in it. Unbeknownst to anyone, at the last second he’s “snatched” by a group in the future (2009) led by Mick Jagger. In the future, we can grab people from the past and put someone else’s consciousness into it, destroying the mind of the original. Rich old white dudes do this so they can live longer. Emilio manages to escape (becoming a “freejack” in the process) and of course he finds Russo, who hasn’t aged a day even though 18 years have passed. He has to go on the run, and everyone is after him. 2009 New York is a shithole, of course, because that’s the way it is. Jagger actually has quite a lot of fun with the role, and Anthony Hopkins chews the scenery nicely, and Jonathan Banks is at his sleaziest (given how sleazy he can be, that’s saying something), but it’s still stupid. Everything looks cheap, even the fancy parts, and the technology they use and the decay of society is just hand-waved away. It’s just a lousy movie.

Congo (1995). For me, it’s unclear when B-movies became passé – perhaps in 1993, when Spielberg showed you could use computer graphics to make things that don’t exist look cool? It’s sad, because Congo is B-movie trash, but it’s a fun as all heck movie, and I imagine its failure is because some movie exec decided it needed to have a big budget (its budget was 50 million, about). I mean, Laura Linney gets to shoot evil mutated apes with a laser, for crying out loud. I imagine she read the script, thought it kind of sucked, and then got to that moment and told her agent, “Sign me the fuck up!” Ernie Hudson proves that he would have ruled as a movie star in the 1940s (a far less racist, alternate universe 1940s, but still) as he has a grand old time as the guide into the jungle, Tim Curry totally commits to her part as the shady Slavic hustler, Joe Don Baker (Mitchell!) has a small part as Linney’s douchebag boss, B-movie icon Bruce Campbell has a small role, Delroy Lindo and Joe Pantoliano show up for fun cameos (and Jimmy Buffet?!?!?), and Dylan Walsh is there. Boy, Walsh is a good example of a white man failing upward, isn’t he? Anyway, this is a wacky movie, with killer apes and warring rebels and mysterious hidden cities. It just came out at the end of an era (or the beginning of a new one?) where it didn’t really fit. Too bad.

Welcome to the Punch (2013). James McAvoy is a cop who chases Mark Strong, a cool-ass thief, and gets shot in the leg as a result. Three years later, McAvoy is a shell of his former self, Strong is hiding out in Iceland, but he returns to London when he gets a call from his son, who has been shot in the gut and is captured by the cops. So McAvoy is back on Strong’s trail, and there’s a murder mystery as well, and it’s all very straightforward. It’s a decent cop movie, with good use of current (for 2013) politics, with a dude running for office on the strength of promising more guns and body armor for cops, because they’re being outgunned by the bad guys. McAvoy is a bit outclassed by Strong, which isn’t a surprise, and Andrea Riseborough gets to play McAvoy’s partner, which in a movie like this means she might as well have a “Kill Me” tattoo on her forehead (I like Riseborough, so that was disappointing). The plot isn’t too complicated, and there’s some good action, but it’s just a random action movie. That’s not the worst thing in the world, of course, but it’s just kind of decent and forgettable.

Death on the Nile (2022). Branagh’s second Agatha Christie adaptation is like his first – pretty good, with a good cast, gorgeous scenery, and some weird things about the plot that Branagh changed that seem a bit odd. The basic plot is the same – Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer are newlyweds, Emma Mackey is Hammer’s spurned ex-lover, Letita Wright, Tom Bateman, Annette Benning, Rose Leslie, Jennifer Saunders, and Russell Brand all show up and do their thing. Branagh changes the romance novelist in the book to a jazz/blues singer, which is fine (Wright plays her niece), but as usual with stories set in the past where they make the cast more diverse, there is no way Gadot, Mackey, and Wright went to school together in the 1910s or so without racism playing a huge part, but that’s just glossed over. Meanwhile, at one point Leslie has the perfect chance to clear things up, and she doesn’t take it, which is unexplained. Oh well. Branagh, meanwhile, adds a prologue of Poirot in World War I and a “secret origin” of his mustache (did Geoff Johns write this script?!?!?), which doesn’t really add much to the story. I guess Branagh wants to make Poirot more human, but part of what makes Poirot interesting is that his past is mysterious, and he doesn’t feel the need to talk about it. But it’s still a pretty good adaptation, and the scenery is amazing, and if Branagh wants to do more Poirot stories, I’m all for it. I do wish he had done them in chronological order, though. That would have been keen.

Well, that’s it for now. Will I watch more movies and write about them in the future? But of course!