Blue Steel (1990).

Review #2361: Blue Steel.

Cast: 

Jamie Lee Curtis (Officer Megan Turner), Ron Silver (Eugene Hunt), Clancy Brown (Detective Nick Mann), Elizabeth Peña (Tracy Perez), Louise Fletcher (Shirley Turner), Philip Bosco (Frank Turner), Richard Jenkins (Dawson), Kevin Dunn (Assistant Chief Stanley Hoyt), and Tom Sizemore (Robber) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (#1258 - K-19: The Widowmaker, #1548 - The Hurt Locker, #1820 - The Loveless, #2188 - Near Dark)

Review: 

"What was interesting to me was kind of a heretical, irreverent look at a particular moment in time. You have this woman who's a police officer. And believe it or not, that was very difficult to get made because the police officer was a woman. I was asked to make her a man, and then we could get financing. I said no, the whole point of making this was that she was a woman. It seems so strange today to think of that as being an obstacle, but it was a big obstacle."

The road for what became Bigelow's third feature film is a tricky one. According to Bigelow, Universal Pictures had tried to develop a movie that would be about gangs in East Harlem that had her interested in writing and directing that had come after Walter Hill had been in the process of setting up a producing deal there around the time of Streets of Fire. Years later, Oliver Stone apparently was interested in doing a project but about South LA gangs...and then he got involved in Salvador and Platoon while she did Near Dark. Long story short, Stone liked that film and was interested in doing whatever she wanted to do next, complete with being producer, and Bigelow sent him, well, the script for Blue Steel, which eventually came around with Stone and Edward Pressman producing. I wonder who exactly came up with what in the script for the film, since Bigelow shares the writing credit with Eric Red; they had previously written Near Dark (1987) together, although Red has apparently labeled the script as basically a "female version of The Hitcher". Apparently, the climax of the film (you know, the gun fight) would've had Curtis nude, but she said no to that, being quoted as saying "Everyone would be watching my breasts flopping around instead of watching the scene." Bigelow in the past was quoted as having an interest in "treading on familiar territory", describing Blue Steel as a "mutation that maybe implies a different genre". The movie was released by MGM in the wake of Vestron Pictures' impending doom as a company, and the movie made a small amount of money while Bigelow next directed with Point Break (1991).

Some reviews of the time compared the movie to Halloween (1978) because of the whole boogeyman thing and having Curtis, I guess, but I don't seem to remember the part in the earlier film where the lead became a cop. But what we do have is a weird movie, one that is entertaining but stupefying in its execution to varying levels of effectiveness that tries to play two different angles: the plight of a (woman) cop that has to come to terms with who they really are when faced with rough surroundings...and also a nut that has an obsession with her and, well, things that lead him to want to shoot again and again. Technically speaking, the movie is kinetically interesting in general action while dragging along at 102 minutes to a conclusion that will befuddle the viewer in its certain positioning (ambiguity or overwrought, you might wonder) while seeming digging new ways to throw itself in melodrama. But how many films do we let certain things fall by the wayside because of our relative enjoyment, anyway? Is it nitpicking to wonder where the line should be drawn with a movie where a robbery takes place but somehow the guy in the front of it thought he saw a knife rather than, well a gun*. But Curtis does hold the film together with a generally tense performance that shows the struggle that arises with her position that only is solid when she essentially plays nice in the box she is constrained to, and that's without even mentioning her interactions with the other side of the coin of someone trapped in the strange world of struggling with their position and place. We the audience know what we know, so if someone can badger her about her method the way they do in one particular scene, imagine how is in an actual active scenario. If you're not with her and her charm that comes through even in the plight around her, then, well, the rest of the film goes down with her, for better or worse. Silver is mostly effective in evoking tension, albeit with a few obvious beats (bad enough he carves names into bullets, does he need to have voices in his head and also spout lines about death?) to go with the newfound power of a gun, which I'm sure could be interpreted in different ways**. The scenes the two share with each other are curious enough to make a worthy enough cat-and-mouse game to a certain point, being more interesting in the start and close rather than the holding down that comes with stretching things out. Brown moseys about with a casual charm, albeit with late usefulness in the long run, since it is more a movie of doubts and moods that might as well be a dreary dream. You don't exactly get much time to spend with Bosco and Fletcher[*] besides the bare minimum that comes with semi-resolved (?) family tension either. By the time the movie moves to its endgame around Wall Street, you have a movie that is frantic enough to possibly override the inevitable quibbles because it has a committed director and star that want to make an entertaining thriller. In a sea of varying effectiveness when it comes to women-leading action movies, Blue Steel is at least a solid enough recommendation to seek out for the ride it goes on in the curiosity about the nature of power and, well, the thrills.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

*I don't want to pick all the way to hell, but probably the most ridiculous idea is that our lead comes to her parents, sees a fresh bruise on her mom, arrests her dad but decides in the middle of a conversation with him in the back of the car to just...let him off with a warning to not be who he is anymore. Or something. 

**Something something Freud something something penis. Actually, I wish my memory was a bit better, because I swear it isn't too particularly hard to find a movie about someone finding a gun and deciding to mosey around the city with it. Instead, I keep wondering why I haven't watched Gun Crazy.

[*] Bosco was a Tony Award winning actor for 1989, while Fletcher, well, you know her Academy Award-winning role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but for me, her performances as Kai Winn on the massively underrated Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was probably just as cool.

Godzilla (1998).

Review #2161: Godzilla. 

Cast: 

Matthew Broderick (Dr. Niko "Nick" Tatopoulos), Jean Reno (Philippe Roaché), Maria Pitillo (Audrey Timmonds), Hank Azaria (Victor "Animal" Palotti), Kevin Dunn (Colonel Hicks), Michael Lerner (Mayor Ebert), Harry Shearer (Charles Caiman), Arabella Field (Lucy Palotti), Vicki Lewis (Dr. Elsie Chapman), Lorry Goldman (Gene), Doug Savant (Sergeant O'Neal), Malcolm Danare (Dr. Mendel Craven), Ralph Manza (Fisherman Joe), and Glenn Morshower (Kyle Terrington) Directed by Roland Emmerich (#193 - Independence Day and #413 - The Patriot)

Review: 

"I’m totally proud of Godzilla. I’m always saying this, I mean I know there’s a lot of naysayers, but I’m proud of it. I’m not really a fanboy, so I was changing Godzilla. It was also, probably, a situation that I was a little bit talked into it.”

Why should I be surprised? Actually, this is one time where I'm glad I was born in 1996, because I really don't want to know how the hype would have been if I was at least ten years old for the release of this film, which is now 25 years old. This is the kind of movie that had a whole promo campaign all about "Size Does Matter". The idea for an American Godzilla wasn't too farfetched. There had been dubs released in theaters, if you recall: the original 1954 film got turned into Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), the 1955 sequel got turned into Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959), oh, Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) was co-produced by Toho and UPA, and The Return of Godzilla (1984) got turned into Godzilla 1985. Plans to make a feature film started bubbling in 1992, when TriStar announced they acquired the rights to the character from Toho to make a trilogy of films. Jan de Bont was considered to direct by 1994 for a 1996 release, and he apparently had something in mind involving Atlanteans, a "Gryphon", and a creature designed by Stan Winston. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio were approached to do the screenplay, although Don Macpherson was later hired to do re-writes. Budget concerns by TriStar eventually led de Bont off the project in favor of doing Twister. Despite all of this, in 1996 (the year after Toho tried to end their series with Godzilla vs. Destoroyah), Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin (right before the release of Independence Day, and I would like to point out that Emmerich apparently was big on doing his next film involving a meteor hitting Earth inspired by The Right Stuff) were hired to craft a Godzilla film, complete with Patrick Tatopoulos being hired to design an animal (not a monster) that would move fast. Emmerich and Devlin were credited with the screenplay and also the story (with Elliott and Rossio) while Devlin served as a producer. Around-the-clock work in trying to get the effects (a good deal done in CG) done meant that a final cut was only assembled just days before the premiere, with a lack of studio screenings being done before its release in May (three months later, an animated series came out as a follow-up that ended up lasting until 2000). The film, made for over $100 million, was one that made money, but a general lack of enthusiasm all the way around led to TriStar letting the sequel rights expire in 2003. Emmerich was apparently never a big Godzilla fan, describing them as just "weekend matinees you saw as a kid...you'd go with all your friends and just laugh" (he liked the first but apparently wasn't big on the follow-ups with monsters fighting each other). Devlin later stated his belief that there were two mistakes that were made with the film and its script: a lack of commitment in what Godzilla was as a character (i.e, hero or villain, since they went with "just simply an animal trying to survive") and lending its exposition of the character backgrounds in the middle of the film rather than in the start. Rossio wrote a whole essay with the title "The One Hundred Million Dollar Mistake". Some have mockingly renamed the film to such titles as "G.I.N.O." (Godzilla In Name Only) or "Zilla", and years later, Toho even went with a "Zilla" trademark. TriStar handled the distribution for a dubbed version Godzilla 2000 (which started production shortly after the release of this film) in 2000, funny enough.

At least Devlin could be given credit for trying. But Emmerich? No, he screwed up a layup of making a disaster movie where a monster goes around breathing fire and wreaking havoc that could play like an Irwin Allen epic. I haven't watched an Emmerich film in a decade, but this is shovelware for tbe birds. You might say, hey, he tries to make popcorn entertainment movies, why not give him a break if you weren't too hard on Independence Day and The Patriot...? Nah, I can't give credit here, because this being the first all-around American rendition of a Godzilla film makes for the easiest target to call a piece of crap in all of history. This is a movie that names two characters after prominent critics of Emmerich's work and doesn't even take the chance to squish them. This is a movie where the creature can just disappear for chunks of the film and... reproduce asexually while having an origin of nuclear testing...by the French. I think being hard on this stupid film is not only a wise idea but a righteous one. 2024 will see a fourth Godzilla film from the States (oddly enough, Rossio co-wrote the story to Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire [2024]), and it likely will dwarf the one presented here by the simple act that it will be made by someone who cares about what they are making. It makes Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, that movie with dubbing and Raymond Burr playing a stand-in explaining stuff, look like a godsend in comparison. Fiery breath and an underwhelming human cast is the equivalent of being served a hamburger filled with plastic while the soda cup is filled with stuff from 1978. 

At least Broderick seems to be engaging with his role rather than looking like he wants to shrink away in humiliation. That doesn't make it any easier to bear the idea that a film about a monster (sorry, animal, but that just sounds stupid) with the most boring human characters to support it. Lame gags about his character name and a horribly misplaced timing of trying to get us to be on these characters for the middle have him fare nearly the worst of everyone. According to one source, a lead executive was so displeased at what he saw from Pitillo's performance that he wanted to find someone to re-voice the role. I would like to point out that she was one of three folks that had three-film contracts for Godzilla (alongside Broderick and Reno). How mean could I possibly be? Well, I will simply just say that she would probably be better fit for the third lead in a Gamera film. Most perplexing is Reno, if only because again, when I think of guilt and trying to deal with what they create, a bunch of bumbling French operatives is not high on the list. What exactly is the purpose of having accomplishes all being named Jean? With the various little attempts at humor involving bad coffee, I'm almost surprised they didn't give the team a skunk mascot. Lerner and Dunn are probably the only highlights of the film, and all they are doing is just stuff you would expect from people playing to the check that we like. It isn't even worth making a reference with talking about Azaria and Shearer. It meanders for over two hours and fails to even reach half of the level of something like say, The Towering Inferno ever did. The "asexual reproduction" makes the whole thing preposterous, the sequences of baby Godzillas elevates it further, the end sequence of Godzilla being taken down by military missiles closes the entire thing out to the stupidest possible level, because if there is anything to learn from a series about a radioactive monster and consequences, the best way for it to go down is a credibly interesting presence to counteract it...i.e., not the military. Emmerich can say whatever he wants about what he thought about getting into the project or the result, the bottom line is that this is a hacky movie that isn't particularly thrilling or particularly noteworthy for spectacle that hadn't been done in Jurassic Park (or its mediocre sequel) or other Godzilla films before it. I can't claim to have seen all of those feature films, but even the ones that are just okay at best knew that they were trying to make something worthwhile for an audience to watch. This just exudes misery.

Overall, I give it 3 out of 10 stars.

In some ways, every year gets better and better for Movie Night. Happy 13th anniversary, folks. Two record-setting months of interesting reviews made a useful 2023 and hopefully sets the stage for some re-invention in 2024.

Dave.

Review #1503: Dave.

Cast:
Kevin Kline (Dave Kovic/President Bill Mitchell), Sigourney Weaver (Ellen Mitchell), Frank Langella (Bob Alexander), Kevin Dunn (Alan Reed), Ving Rhames (Duane Stevensen), Ben Kingsley (Vice President Gary Nance), Charles Grodin (Murray Blum), Faith Prince (Alice), and Laura Linney (Randi) Directed by Ivan Reitman (#026 - Ghostbusters, #031 - Ghostbusters II, #243 - Stripes, #487 - Twins, and #1278 - Legal Eagles)

Review: 

"Your job is not to make things funny. Your job is to tell the truth on a daily basis."

When the right director and stars are at hand, one could do something really interesting. Ivan Reitman had already cultivated a career for himself in directing/producing since the 1970s (after attending McMaster University for music while making short films and being hired and fired from CITY-TV in Toronto). He started directing features with Foxy Lady (1971) while also serving as producer for film such as Shivers (1975), but his first true successes came through the hands of soon-to-be comedian stars: Animal House (1978), featuring a variety of stars (which Reitman co-produced with Matty Simmons) was a major hit, while Meatballs (1979), featuring Bill Murray in the first of four collaborations with Reitman, proved to be one of the most successful films ever done in Canada. Reitman has directed seventeen films while continuing to serve as producer for a variety of films (such as serving as co-producer for this film with Lauren Shuler Donner who liked the concept provided by campaign worker-turned-screenwriter Gary Ross), and he became interested in doing this film through Warren Beatty, who was first thought for the lead role before eventually bowing out. The choice for stage and film star Kevin Kline as the star nearly fell through as well because Kline thought that Reitman wanted a performance similar to his acclaimed performance from A Fish Called Wanda (1988), although he soon grew to like the idea of the film as a "very delicate sort of romantic comedy."

The film certainly has a feeling of familiarity, such as Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) in its tone, or perhaps The Magnificent Fraud (1939) and Moon over Parador (1988), which both dealt with a look-alike becoming president of a country. It certainly helps in a film that is fairly light on its feet in trying to make a charming little film work piece by piece in clever amusement for a serious subject, a guy pretending to be President of the United States, the most prominent person in this great country. With different hands or a different set of actors not as talented as these prove to be, one could have had just a silly film and nothing else, but with Retiman, Kline, Weaver, and Langella at their places on and behind the camera, one can't go wrong here. Kline proves a wise leading man in balance, capable of stepping into any moment required of him without any kind of hesitation in timing or composition, sifting through scenes as an impersonator-in-chief with honesty that resonates in all the right ways needed, and his brief double act is fairly amusing to view. Weaver follows along with respective timing and grace that makes for a fine pairing with Kline (such as an improvised song on the street, for example). Langella proves a worthy foil to Kline, one that nibbles on the scenery with careful amusement in polished arrogance that fits within the confines needed in cynicism. Dunn and Rhames prove efficient support, while Kingsley and Grodin are neat in small moments (the sequence with the latter involving looking over the budget is a good indicator of that), and the cameos involving a mix of television and politicians lend a small hand to helping the film breeze through 110 minutes well. On the whole, there is a good sense of everyman warmth through its direction and script that hits most of its marks in a careful subtle way that make it a reliable comedy for its time that still works out now more than ever.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: Unstoppable.

Review #253: Unstoppable.

Cast
Denzel Washington (Frank Barnes), Chris Pine (Will Colson), Rosario Dawson (Connie Hooper), Lew Temple (Ned Oldham), Ethan Suplee (Dewey), Kevin Dunn (Oscar Galvin), and Kevin Corrigan (Scott Werner) Directed by Tony Scott (Top Gun - #029)

Review
Personally, a runaway train is moderately frightening for me. Trains aren't used as much as they were back then when people had to use the train. What does this statement have to do with this review? I'll tell you later. It's been a long while since I've reviewed something of Tony Scott (Brother of Ridley Scott), who directed films from his first in 1983 to his last in 2010. Scott manages to keep the story interesting enough to keep watching, and...the runaway train is actually a bit frightening, with a decent climax. The acting is alright, Washington (last Review of him: Glory - #101) and Pine (last: Star Trek - #009) do a respectable job together, as does the rest of the cast. It should be a note that this was Scott's last film that he directed (I would've mentioned this earlier, but I wanted to make sure that part would be padded to the end), and it is a good way to go out.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: Small Soldiers.

Review #097: Small Soldiers.

Cast
Gregory Smith (Alan Abernathy), Frank Langella (Archer), Kirsten Dunst (Christy Fimple), Tommy Lee Jones (Chip Hazard), Phil Hartman (Phil Fimple), George Kennedy (Brick Bazooka), Jim Brown (Butch Meathook), Ernest Borgnine (Kip Killigan), Clint Walker (Nick Nitro), Bruce Dern (Link Static), Kevin Dunn (Stuart Abernathy), Ann Magnuson (Irene Abernathy), Jay Mohr (Larry Benson), David Cross (Irwin Wayfair), and Denis Leary (Gil Mars) Directed by Joe Dante.

Review
This is a bit similar to Gremlins (#096), with our lead hero releasing the villans to the world, destroying things, and ultimately losing to another toy/gremlin. But the film does try to distance itself a little, with action and slight laughs all over the film. It may be a little dark, but compare it to Gremlins, which had microwaved heads and more. This is just a cherry to that cake, really. It has excellent effects with good voice acting and standard acting that entertains you for two hours (Make that 1:50). It's not a great film, but it at least is enjoyable. Countdown: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3...

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: Hot Shots!

Review #028: Hot Shots!

Cast
Charlie Sheen (LT Sean "Topper" Harley), Cary Elwes (LT Kent Gregory), Valeria Golino (Ramada Thompson), Lloyd Bridges (RADM Thomas "Tug" Benson), Kevin Dunn (LCDR James Block), Jon Cryer (LT Jim "Wash Out" Pfaffenbach), William O'Leary (LT Pete "Dead Meat" Thompson), Kristy Swanson (Kowalski), Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (Wilson), Bill Irwin (Leland "Buzz" Harley), and Ryan Stiles (Dominic "Mailman" Farnum) Directed by Jim Abrahams.

Review
This spoof of Top Gun might actually be better then Top Gun, with some good gags that might remind you of another spoof, Airplane! (That also had Lloyd Bridges) Anyway, the film is decent with performances, especially Sheen and Elwes. The film is decent enough to become good, making this a film to watch. While it may not be great-great, it at least is useful.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.