Yes, I’ve watched even more movies released since the day I was born!

And now I’m going to write about them!

The Hot Rock (1972). Donald Westlake, who wrote the Parker novels, wrote the novel that this is based on, and William Goldman cranked out the screenplay. That’s a lot of talent already, and then they got Robert Redford to play the lead, a jewel thief named Dortmunder (he’s from the German city, I guess?) who gets out of jail and immediately gets involved in another heist. His brother-in-law, played with smarmy charm by George Segal, has a can’t-miss job – a government official from an African country wants him to steal a jewel that is currently held by another African country (it’s gone back and forth for years, and the first dude wants it in his possession when the UN officially rules on who owns it), and is willing to pay a million dollars for it. Redford doesn’t want to get involved, but his sister manages to convince him. They recruit Ron Leibman (better known to youngsters like me as “Rachel Green’s father”) and Paul Sand for the job, and away we go! Apparently Westlake wanted to make this serious, but it kept getting funny on him, so he just went with it. The heist goes off, but Sand gets caught with the jewel, which he swallows. He refuses to tell anyone where it is (nobody knows he swallowed it) until they break him out of jail, so there’s a prison break. And then another heist. And another. Things keep coming up that they have to take care of, and while Redford wants to walk away, Segal keeps bringing him back. It’s a funny movie, if a bit ridiculous, as they seem to pull of these heists and prison breaks fairly easily, but it’s still a lot of fun. Zero Mostel shows up to add even more comic relief, and things just keep getting wackier. There’s nothing really surprising about the plot once we realize it’s going to be a sequence of errors, but the cast carries it along quite well. The only strange thing is when Redford gets to Segal’s apartment and he greets his sister after being in jail for a while. It seems like they’re a lot more interested in each other than brother and sister should be. The sister is played by Topo Swope, who’s not unattractive, but Redford was married at the time, so who knows what was going on. It’s just a bit weird. This is still a fun movie that shows how even professionals – and Redford, it’s clear, knows what he’s doing – can’t account for everything in a jewel heist!

Peeper (1975). This is supposed to be a “spoof” of detective noir, but it doesn’t feel like it. Maybe it’s been retroactively claimed as such because it’s not that great as straight noir? Either way, it’s really not a bad movie, just not as good as it seems like it could be. Michael Caine is an English P.I. – a “peeper” – living in post-war Los Angeles, when a shady dude comes to him with a case. He wants Caine to find the daughter he gave up decades before. He left L.A. and made his fortune and now he wants to share it with the girl. He doesn’t know much about her, and the way he made his money is a bit sketchy, so bad guys are after him and Caine doesn’t have much to go on. He finds her, though, or thinks he does – he finds Natalie Wood and her sister, Kitty Winn, and he’s not sure which of them is the adoptee (or if neither of them are). Caine and Wood have decent chemistry together (they dated a decade earlier than this movie, so maybe they just got along well), and the movie turns a bit comedic, but it still doesn’t feel like much of a spoof. The plot is convoluted, sure, but The Big Sleep‘s plot is nonsensical and nobody calls that a spoof. (Speaking of Bogart, the opening credits are spoken by Bogart-impersonator Guy Marks as he walks down an alley and into a crowded street. Weird.) I don’t really recommend this, as it’s a bit too slight, but Caine is fine, as is Wood, and even Winn is having some fun. It’s just that it feels like director Peter Hyams – who directed Outland, which I just re-watched recently, and is a pretty good director – isn’t taking it all that seriously. And Timothy Carey shows up as a thug, and of course got himself fired from the movie, presumably for being weird. Carey was a strange dude.

Carrie (1976). I had never seen Carrie, so I figured it was about time I did. There are people who think this is a classic, but I am not one of them. It’s fine, I guess, and the actors do their best – Spacek especially, but Piper Laurie (who thought it was a black comedy, hence her performance) is so insane you just have to love her. The others are fine, too, although none of them really have to stretch too much. But it’s just not that good a movie. We don’t get very much at all about the bullying Carrie endures, so even though the pig blood scene is well done, it doesn’t feel like the culmination of a long series of humiliations. Similarly, everyone knows Piper Laurie is nuts but they don’t really think anything of it, which, even in a laissez-faire era like the 1970s, seems weird. We never find out if William Katt and Amy Irving are actually being nice to Spacek or if they’re setting her up for something else, which seems odd. Spacek rebels against her mother awfully quickly, too, which is weird given that she’s been brainwashed for 17 years. And she doesn’t get her period until she’s 17? That doesn’t seem strange? We watched this with my daughter, who’s read the book and seen the 2013 remake, and she laughed at the opening scene in the locker room, as she told us that in high school locker rooms, nobody gets naked and takes showers, and nobody chats incessantly like the girls do. Now, she has experience only with one locker room, but it just makes Brian DePalma’s decision to get all the girls naked even creepier (all of them were in their mid-20s, but the characters were, of course, not necessarily 18 yet). And for some reason, 30-year-old Edie McClurg plays a high school student, even though she’s two years older than Betty Buckley, who played the PE teacher. The finale is fun, of course, as DePalma always does well with action scenes (although P.J. Soles – good to see her! – dies because the hose’s water pressure is so great and William Katt dies because the bucket fell on his head?), and it’s certainly not a bad movie, it’s just not a classic. I guess you had to be there. (In addition to debunking the shower scene, my daughter loved the 1970s fashions. She could not get over the bell bottoms and flares, and while she mocked the boys, she also wistfully remarked that the boys at her school care so little about how they look that it would be nice if they at least made an effort like the characters in this movie did. She was mesmerized by Travolta’s puffy vest, too, even though she does not think Travolta was pretty in any way. She doesn’t think Katt is attractive, either.)

The Silent Partner (1978). This is a weird movie that veers from seemingly light comedy to extreme violence and back, and while it’s not bad, it’s a bit jarring to watch. Elliott Gould is a bank teller who realizes that a mall Santa, played by Christopher Plummer, is about to rob the bank. He devises a scheme whereby he skims $50,000 right before the robbery and then takes it with him, while everyone thinks Plummer got it all. Plummer figures it out, unfortunately for Gould, and demands the money. Despite Gould’s efforts, Plummer becomes increasingly scarier until we get the extreme violence, which is surprisingly gory for a non-horror 1970s movie. It’s a pretty good cat-and-mouse game – Gould is smarter than he looks, while Plummer is far more violent than we first think, and so their confrontations are quite tense. Susannah York, probably best known as Superman’s mom, is Gould’s love interest, although he’s diverted a bit from her because she’s banging the bank manager and then Céline Lomez shows up and seduces him. John Candy has a small part as a fellow bank worker, so that’s nice for him. As it’s the ’70s, nudity is rampant – four different women bare their breasts at one point or another – and the morality is extremely flexible – York is banging the married bank manager, but she has no problem sleeping with Gould, who really likes her but doesn’t have any problem sleeping with Lomez, while Candy’s fiancé doesn’t have any problem banging other guys, either. Man, the Seventies were weird. Anyway, this is a fairly tense thriller with some nice twists, and Gould and Plummer are really good in it.

When a Stranger Calls (1979). I had never seen this, but of course I knew about the classic line about the calls coming from inside the house, so I was curious about it. It’s an odd movie – the first 20-25 minutes has Carol Kane, who hadn’t yet gotten cast in Taxi, as the babysitter getting menaced by the weird voice on the phone asking her if she’s checked the children (why didn’t she?). Then they catch the guy – Tony Beckley – and seven years pass. Charles Durning, who was the cop on the case but is now a private detective, hears that Beckley has escaped from the mental hospital where he’s been, and the father of the dead kids hires him to find him. Beckley ends up menacing Colleen Dewhurst for a while, and Durning’s hunt for him isn’t exactly bad, just not as gripping as the early section of the movie. Then, Beckley figures out that Kane is still around, so he decides to menace her and her children, and the movie ramps back up for the final 15 minutes or so, which are as intense as the first section. It’s a strange, disjointed movie, in other words. One thing director Fred Walton and writer Steve Feke do is make it clear that there’s something very wrong with Beckley, and he probably should be in a hospital, and they never make him just an evil figure, but a weirdly sympathetic one. His homeless journey through Los Angeles’s underbelly is handled fairly well, too (the 1970s are the Golden Age of showing cities in a really lousy light, mainly because so many cities in the 1970s were shitholes). Beckley was terminally ill during shooting, so that “helps” make his performance more disturbing, as he really doesn’t look well. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s clear that Walton – who made the first part as a short a few years before, which got him this gig – had to figure out “what happens next” and didn’t really do that great a job. I guess the remake simply expands the first 20-25 minutes of this movie, which is probably the right way to go. Still, not a bad movie, and Charles Durning – old, thinning hair, big gut – as the hero will never not be awesome.

Eyewitness (1981). This is a weird movie that should have been better than it was, even though it’s not bad. Peter Yates and Steve Tesich, coming off the Oscar-nominated Breaking Away (Tesich won for Best Screenplay while Yates was nominated for Best Director), decided to turn two of Tesich’s screenplays – neither of which he could sell – into one kind of messy movie, and this is the result. We get William Hurt (post-Altered States but pre-Body Heat) working as a janitor in an office building, and one night his recently-fired future brother-in-law James Woods shows up at work, ranting about the Vietnamese businessman who got him fired (justifiably, it sounds like). Later that night Hurt discovers the dead body of said businessman. Sigourney Weaver, in her first feature film since Alien, is a reporter whom Hurt is obsessed by, so when she shows up to cover the story, he hints that he knows a lot more than he does just so he can see her. He also doesn’t beat around the bush, telling her he digs her very quickly into their acquaintance. Weaver, meanwhile, is shacked up with Christopher Plummer, who uses his connections and Weaver’s parents’ money to smuggle Jews out of Russia and into Israel (usually via New York). The cops, played by Morgan Freeman eight years before his annus mirabilis (Glory and Driving Miss Daisy both came out in 1989) and Steven Hill before he became the cranky yet lovable DA on Law & Order, think Woods is the killer, not only because of his anger at being fired but because both he and Hurt knew of the victim during the Vietnam War, when the dead guy took money from all sides and worked for all sides. Hurt eventually gets Weaver into bed (as I noted above, I love movies from this era, when ethics mean nothing – Weaver doesn’t care at all that she’s cheating on Plummer, and Hurt doesn’t care at all that he’s cheating on Woods’s sister, played by relative newbie and wildly underrated actor Pamela Reed), Woods wanders around looking guilty (which means he’s not) and the two plots converge at the end fairly clunkily but not too terribly. Freeman and Hill seem to fixate way too much on Woods even though there’s not a ton of evidence against him, but that’s kind of expected in this kind of movie, where there’s a murder but the cops aren’t the main characters. The killer does some very stupid things toward the end, but again, that’s the way it is. The cast is strong, as you might expect, and New York looks like a shithole (see above), but it just doesn’t seem to cohere as well as it could. But it’s fun to see all these good actors doing their thing!

Evil Under the Sun (1982). Peter Ustinov played Hercule Poirot six times (this was the second), and he does a really nice job as the fussy Belgian, despite seeming a bit too non-fussy a person to embody Agatha Christie’s most famous detective. He does a good job in this movie, which is far different from the book, I guess (I don’t think I’ve read the book; I’ve read a lot of the Poirot books, but I don’t think I read this one). Poirot heads to the Mediterranean to find a woman who swindled a diamond from a rich dude who was infatuated with her, and he ends up on an island at a posh resort hotel run by Maggie Smith, looking like Lucille Ball with her gorgeous red hair permed up in tight curls. The woman Poirot is looking for is an actor, played with fierce and fabulous aplomb by Diana Rigg, and we know she’s getting killed almost from the moment she steps off the boat. Christie’s Poirot novels, as wonderful to read as they are, are very much similar, in that we get rich white people, all of whom probably deserve to get killed, getting all their secrets exposed by a snotty Belgian detective. It’s very fun, and this is no exception. The cast is very strong – James Mason is there, Roddy McDowall is terrific, Colin Blakely, Jane Birkin, Nicholas Clay, Sylvia Miles, Denis Quilley, and Emily Hone all do fine work – but of course Ustinov dominates (as does Rigg while her character’s alive), and the mystery is fun to follow along with. Another star is the scenery – the book is set in the north of England, but the movie (wisely) moves it to Mallorca, and the stark, gorgeous scenery is sumptuous and superb and allows the costumers to have some fun (Poirot’s bathing suit, which he designed himself, is a highlight, as is the outfit Rigg is wearing when we first see her). It’s just a solid murder mystery of the kind that we don’t get very often anymore – part of the reason Knives Out worked as well as it did is because, I believe, it prodded the nostalgia bone for productions like this one – and that’s pretty keen. (Guy Hamilton, who directed this, was almost at the end of his career. He had directed four Bond movies and his next movie, his penultimate one, is Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, which is a weird and wildly underrated quasi-Bond movie. If you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty fun.)

Midnight Run (1988). I love Midnight Run, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, so I figured I’d watch it again, and it’s still great! It’s definitely a manly movie, as DeNiro’s ex-wife and daughter and a random waitress are the only women with any significant screen time (and “significant” means more than about 30 seconds), but the cast is stacked with great actors doing their thing. DeNiro and Grodin are a terrific odd couple, Yaphet Kotto is tough as balls as the FBI agent chasing them, John Ashton is the tough-guy bounty hunter rival of DeNiro, Joe Pantoliano is sleazy as the bail bonds owner, while Jack Kehoe is unctuous as his employee, Dennis Farina is menacing but also hilarious as the mobster who wants Grodin dead, and it’s always nice to see Philip Baker Hall. It’s a very funny movie, and part of that is probably because several of the scenes were ad-libbed, including the one where Grodin and DeNiro scam some 20-dollar bills out of the diner. The other interesting thing about this is that it’s rated “R” solely for the use of the word “fuck,” because there’s no nudity and, weirdly enough, no one dies. If you haven’t seen it in a while, re-watch it, because it’s as fun as you remember.

Money Train (1995). I figured this was a brain-dead way to spend a couple of hours, and I was right. I really watched it because I actually think Jennifer Lopez is an underrated actor, so I wanted to see her in this (I had never seen it before). She’s kind of wasted, there for her nude scene and little else (this is her second movie as an adult, and third overall), so perhaps the director – Joseph Ruben – didn’t care much about her skills. It’s a dopey movie – Snipes and Harrelson are foster brothers who are transit cops, and they get on the bad side of Robert Blake, who’s in charge of the “money train” that gets all the loot from the subway stations, so they decide to rob the train to get revenge. Well, Harrelson does because he’s an inveterate gambler and he owes a bunch of money, and he keeps trying to convince Snipes to go along with it, but Snipes is too busy banging Lopez (who, of course, Harrelson also likes) to get involved. Of course they eventually end up on the train, but it takes a while and they have to stop crazy arsonist Chris Cooper in the meantime (this is right before Cooper’s career-making role in Lone Star, so he doesn’t have much to do, but he’s creepy enough). It’s a dumb movie, but Lopez looks good. That’s something!

Hot Fuzz (2007). Everyone talks of the “Cornetto trilogy,” but for some reason, they only talk about Shaun of the Dead, which I think is the weakest of the three movies (my disdain for zombies in general might have something to do with that). Hot Fuzz is the best one, and it’s much better than the zombie movie, according to me. Simon Pegg is a super-cop in London who gets “promoted” to a sleepy rural town because he makes the other cops look bad (the sequence where he gets “promoted” is hilarious, as Martin Freeman, then Steve Coogan, then Bill Nighy – all further up the ladder in the police – show up to tell him he has to take it), and when he gets to the town, he comes into the laissez-faire attitude of chief Jim Broadbent, his son Nick Frost, and the other cops, played wonderfully by Paddy Considine, Rafe Spall, and Olivia Colman, among others. The villagers, led by a charming Timothy Dalton, seem perfectly nice, and there doesn’t seem like much for Pegg to do until the bodies start dropping. This is a wildly gory movie, which is part of the fun, really, and Pegg and Frost slowly uncover the horrible stuff going on in town while bonding, as Pegg actually gets Frost to do some police work while Frost introduces Pegg to such classics as Point Break and Bad Boys II. The best part of the movie is that Frost has watched all these movies, so he keeps asking Pegg if he’s ever done some of the ridiculous stuff that cops in movies do, which of course Pegg has not done … but then, of course, he and Frost eventually do all of them. It’s very funny, exciting, and ridiculous but charming. Edgar Wright hadn’t made many movies at this point (he had mainly worked in television before this), but he has a very unique and clever visual signature, and it still makes me wonder what his Ant-Man would have looked like. Oh well. This is still better than Shaun of the Dead!

There you go! Let’s discuss these movies in the comments!