Canadian Bacon.

Review #2171: Canadian Bacon.

Cast: 

Alan Alda (The President of the United States), John Candy (Bud B. Boomer), Bill Nunn (Kabral Jabar), Kevin J. O'Connor (Roy Boy), Rhea Perlman (Honey), Kevin Pollak (Stuart Smiley), G. D. Spradlin (R.J. Hacker), Rip Torn (General Dick Panzer), and Steven Wright (Niagara Mountie) Written and Directed by Michael Moore.

Review: 

"I made a film for people like me. People who live in Flint, Michigan or Hamilton, Ontario or Sarnia ... another critic said this is the first left-wing film for the mall crowd ... I consider that a compliment. I wanted to present this hybrid of satire and farce with a mix of politics to get people thinking about a particular issue, in this case, why are Americans led like lemmings to war?"

Michael Moore probably doesn't need much introduction, but maybe my reasoning to select this film does. Simply put, this is a film that became an oddity in his career of over thirty years: a feature film with a narrative. Moore was born in Davison, Michigan, a suburb of Flint in 1954. Not many people can say they went from being elected to the school board as an 18-year-old to becoming a director. Granted, the road to being a director had stops along the way, as he had run his own alternative newspaper for several years before a stint at the magazine Mother Jones, which saw him fired as editor. That loss of his job saw him move back to Flint, where seeing the decline of the city because of layoffs from General Motors (as run by Roger Smith at the time) made him want to film a documentary. After years of funding and production, Roger & Me was release in 1989 that was quite the sensation. A choice vote (i.e. no vote) at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991 in regard to the beginning of Operation Desert Storm gave Moore an idea to fester on. The next film Moore did was a short, called Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint in 1992, which, well, raising pets as snake food. He also did television around this time with TV Nation, a satirical news magazine show that was broadcast for two seasons. Anyway, back to the feature film. As mentioned, the idea of a President gaining public support for war against an enemy such as, well Canada, got Moore onto production with Propaganda Films (irony?) in 1993, which was shot on both sides of the USA-Canada border (such as Buffalo, Hamilton, and Toronto). Right before reshoots were to be done, John Candy, who supported Moore every step of the way, died on March 4, 1994. Moore and Propaganda did not get along well for the reshoots (where because of Candy's death meant a handful of scenes were then shot to focus on others), and perhaps his personality does not rub well with certain folks. Haskell Wexler, who shot the film, described Moore as one with "the aw-shucks homespun character that Moore portrays is a complete falsification." The resulting film, released in 1995 on a budget of $11 million, was seen by very few audiences. Moore moved on, doing a book tour and further documentaries (nine as of 2024) across the social, political, and economic topics that interest him, to varying levels of interest.

Honestly, all of that curiosity kind of goes out the window with the result played here. By god, it is so close to being good. It was probably never going to escape that inevitable comparison of Dr. Strangelove, although it at least predates certain films that touch some of the ideas presented here, such as Wag the Dog, another film about a President using the idea of invasion to attract public attention (of course, that was loosely based on a 1993 satirical conspiracy novel). But all that comes through in a sparse 90-minute movie is the thought that this just doesn't click for great laughs. My god! You have Torn and Spradlin (the former is one of Movie Night's favorite people to see on screen) as supporting players for a mediocre lead in Alda and a middling diversion in the quartet of Candy, Perlman, O'Connor and Nunn. You want to like them, and you want to have something to laugh at in those broad jokes (get it? saying beer sucks makes Canadians fight? eh?), but you just get sitcom stuff. Like, heh, sometimes it is funny, but never to a big level for that first hour. The irony of having a handful of recognizable faces is that this is the first film I've seen with Alda (known mostly for M*A*S*H, but I recognize him from The Blacklist [!]) as a lead. He may be playing a "Clintonite". but man is it really not that funny. It begs for something broad, I almost wish Torn was playing the role, because he sweeps the rug right from both Alda and Pollak (mildly funny) in craven fun. Most of the people just don't seem to have that much fun here, where even cameos by Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi just make me wonder what brought them on to do listless cameos (eh? get it? public apologies and having people write Canadian slander in English and French?). One really does wonder just what would have been if Candy had been there for the whole production cycle (he died during production of Wagons East (1994), which apparently was worse). The film just can't strike hard for those looking for broad laughs and it can't really gel well as any grand satire because it just doesn't have the chops to really stick a definitive landing, particularly with its third act. It just feels like a collection of sketches run amok. The jokes are just mild and not very entertaining for a whole film, particularly since the ending doesn't even find anything riotous to say about warmongering or in amusement that hadn't been done in better things. Political firebrand or not, Moore just made a movie that wasn't even worth tearing to shreds or defending to death. A six-star rating out of 10 is sadly appropriate here.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

Next up: Byron Haskin and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1953).

No Escape (1994).

Review #2043: No Escape.

Cast: 

Ray Liotta (John Robbins), Lance Henriksen (The Father), Stuart Wilson (Walter Marek), Kevin Dillon (Casey), Kevin J. O'Connor (Stephano), Don Henderson (Killian), Ian McNeice (Tom King), Jack Shepherd (Dysart), Michael Lerner (Warden), Ernie Hudson (Hawkins), Russell Kiefel (Iceman), and Brian M. Logan (Scab) Directed by Martin Campbell (#173 - GoldenEye, #220 - Green Lantern, and #285 - Casino Royale)

Review: 

Honestly, the only reason I picked this movie is because of the confounding elements that come from its director and stars. How does a movie that features Ray Liotta as star and Martin Campbell as director one year before GoldenEye (1995) slip by under the radar? The most noted film that Campbell made as a director came considerably late in his career, you know. Born in New Zealand, he moved to London to become a director for softcore sex comedies and action TV in the 1970s, as represented by The Sex Thief (1973) and The Professionals, respectively. His most notable television project, however, came with the six-part serial he directed for BBC Television in 1985 in Edge of Darkness (incidentally, he would direct the feature film remake in 2010). Campbell's first film away from his initial start was Criminal Law (1988), which was as successful as his next in Defenseless (1991), which is to say not very much. At any rate, No Escape may have been a ineffective hit with audiences, but GoldenEye, the first James Bond film in the 1990s, was a major hit that he followed with The Mask of Zorro (1998). The film is based on the novel The Penal Colony by Richard Herley, with the screenplay written by Michael Gaylin and Joel Gross.

Technically, the movie does look like the cost to make it was $20 million, because it is a decent-looking "sci-fi action film", but the plot has the rumblings of something unearthed from decades ago in the B-movie realm. Think about it: a man is dropped into a totally inescapable situation and finds either savages or a slipshod attempt at community that has his own reasons to escape. Set in the then-future year of 2022 involving a lead character that suffers PTSD from his experience in Benghazi, the result is something you can see coming right from the very get-go. I really wished I liked the film better, but the only thing that may stick out for you beyond the name actors is the odd distinction that it has no women in the cast (what zero interactions with women does to a person, heh). It just seems too ordinary as a dystopian film (even with a for-profit prison depiction), so stop if you've heard this before: a loner rogue ends up leading people off to safety, an elder that is secretly dying ends up sacrificing oneself, a greedy authority (and/or traitor) figure gets what they deserve, and so on and so on. Liotta is at the very least a solid presence to give the movie some sort of attempt at a redemption story, one where he simply cannot escape being with people despite his traumas and desire to run. Henriksen certainly has a knack for playing authority figures for a handful of his roles, but it is merely too little for him to really lean into for anything meaningful (perhaps it is dwarfed by having Hard Target (1993) on my mind). Wilson seems to be having a nice time playing the heavy, even with the makeup done to portray "the law of the jungle", but yea, we both know that the conflict between him and Liotta isn't exactly the stuff that compelling duels are made of. Dillon is in the most obvious of sacrificial lamb roles and it has very little to trot in meaningful interest, which slips by more than Hudson, who comes and goes with little to no distinctions. Hell, the "rat" character and the "eccentrics" aren't exactly ones to write home about, the movie just seems a bit too plaid to do anything that would stick out that could threaten the serious time the film aims for that ends up for not much when you realize it is a B-movie with nowhere to go but the middle because you don't really know these folks that much or feel like you want to know about them for 111 minutes. As a whole, it is a movie that comes and goes without anything really meaningful to say about people beyond the mildest of conflicts of "decent" and "very bad" that can only go one way when you already know where the cards are stacked to escape. It is a decent-looking movie with decent-seeming people that just can't find that extra ingredient to carry it over the finish line, but maybe you might find something to notice for yourself.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

The Mummy (1999)

Review #1748: The Mummy.

Cast:

Brendan Fraser (Rick O'Connell), Rachel Weisz (Evelyn Carnahan), John Hannah (Jonathan Carnahan), Arnold Vosloo (Imhotep), Kevin J. O'Connor (Beni Gabor), Jonathan Hyde (Dr. Allen Chamberlain), Oded Fehr (Ardeth Bay), Erick Avari (Dr. Terence Bey), Stephen Dunham (Isaac Henderson), Corey Johnson (David Daniels), Tuc Watkins (Bernard Burns), and Omid Djalili (Warden Gad Hassan) Directed by Stephen Sommers (#201 - G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra)

Review: 

Yes, I know, technically this isn't an "all the way horror movie". But it is a remake of the classic 1932 film of the same name as some sort of epic romantic adventure with help by Industrial Light and Magic. If you remember, the original movie involved Boris Karloff playing the title character, one that involved a mummy (Imhotep) raised from the dead that proceeded to live among folks for a decade before wanting to bring back his long-dead princess with a person that happens to be half-Egyptian and looks like said princess. Well, aside from the Book of the Dead helping in a resurrection, the movie isn't quite a straight-laced remake. Of course, this wasn't the first time this had happened, since Hammer Film Productions had done their own version that began in 1959 (although it was based on the sequels more so than the original, and this was followed by a number of sequels). It should be noted that the film that came from Universal Studios in 1999 was a culmination of a decade of attempts from producers James Jacks and Sean Daniel to make a modern Mummy movie that went through several directors and writers in consideration that revolved from George A. Romero to Clive Barker to Joe Dante; it should be noted that until 1996, Universal was aiming for a cheaply budgeted movie, and they were really aiming for an unstoppable villain at the level of The Terminator (incidentally, the movie was made for $62 million. So yes, one is probably wondering a bit about Sommers. Born in Indiana but raised in Minnesota, he was a graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts before he went to direct his first film in Catch Me If You Can (1989), which attracted a little notice despite minimal release; he directed two features for Walt Disney Pictures involving literary figures (Huckleberry Finn, Jungle Book), and it was during the end of shooting Deep Rising (1998) that he found interest in the ongoing attempts to bring The Mummy onto the screen. So, yes, I suppose one can be glad that Sommers (a fan of the original film that had aimed to do a remake for years) wanted to make a fair adventure with tinges of horror, at least for a title character that goes around wanting flesh to regenerate before creating sand storms. Sommers would be credited for the screenplay while also doing work on the story with Lloyd Fonvielle and Kevin Jarre. 

So, now we have a mummy that was buried alive due to attempts with the Book of the Dead to bring back a lost love that has been watched over from the bodyguards of the pharaoh and its descendants for 3,000 years while a lost city holding wealth and the tomb is waiting to be found. Look, it all depends on how much one buys into its attempts at sweeping adventure that doesn't take itself too seriously while having a few CGI effects here and there. Honestly, I'm fine with it, albeit in the mindset that it is basically comfort food; it may be fluff, but it is decent fluff, one that has interest in making charm count more so than sitting back and looking at effects sequences for two hours. It may not be great scary fun, but being alright fun that is aware of its surroundings is decent enough for most folks, a blockbuster in the era that fits it, and at least one can recognize some fair effects and some ideas of spooky scenery; the scarabs are pretty chilling, and the title creature in its growing form is pretty creepy. Technically speaking, it compares favorably to the original 1932 film, and it likely stands up fair for the era it was made for; while I undoubtedly have more curiosity over the film that could have been with a different director, being a loose effective remake of the original 1932 film is still an effective film in the long run (two sequels would follow in 2001 and 2008 before Universal did a "reboot" in 2017). Of course, the highlight among the cast is Fraser. He manages to roll along with the quick pace and wavering attempts at humor with just enough timing and stature to make things count, playing with the material with a casual appreciative nature. Weisz fares fine, straddling the line in curiosity that at least has more to do than her counterpart in the original feature (which, incidentally, means Weisz and Fraser have a bit of chemistry together). Hannah (first known for his work in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) among television work) fits exactly to what is needed in mild comic relief without dragging the film down (or being easy bait in line for being taken down), while O'Connor does okay in sniveling middleman material. Vosloo is curious as the adversary, one that has to try and seem interesting in creeping terror despite being surrounded by a bunch of makeup that doesn't give him that much to really do. Part of me wishes this would have done more when it comes to actual horror, because the potential is there is you think about it. As a whole, it manages to push most of the right buttons in doing stirring entertainment in the guise of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), but then again most blockbusters probably honed a trick or two from that film, so being a step or two below something like that isn't a bad thing. It is a romp, and a romp is fine if one is in the mood for it. I wavered between just how "good" it was, but I guess calling it a good kind of average film (in either genre) is appropriate. 

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

Next Time: Final Destination (2000).

There Will Be Blood.

Review #1546: There Will Be Blood.

Cast: 
Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Eli and Paul Sunday), Kevin J. O'Connor (Henry), Ciarán Hinds (Fletcher Hamilton), Dillon Freasier (H. W. Plainview), Russell Harvard (adult H. W. Plainview), Sydney McCallister (young Mary Sunday), Colleen Foy (adult Mary Sunday), David Willis (Abel Sunday), and Hans Howes (William Bandy) Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

Review: 
"I really subscribe to that old adage that you should never let the audience get ahead of you for a second. So if the film's abrasive and wrongfoots people then, y'know, that's great. But I hope it involves an audience. If not, that's my fuck-up."
"I begin with a sense of mystery. In other words, I am intrigued by a life that seems very far removed from my own. And I have a sense of curiosity to discover that life and maybe change places with it for a while."

Anyone with a particular vision and the right sense of timing can be a director, just ask Paul Thomas Anderson. The son of actor and horror host Ernie "Ghoulardi" Anderson, he found himself interested in making movies from a young age, doing them on video and 8mm camera while also doing writing. He made his first attempt at a true production in high school with The Dirk Diggler Story (1988), which took a mockumentary approach (Boogie Nights, released nine years later based on that material, proved his breakthrough). He did brief study at Santa Monica and Emerson College along with two days at New York University before deciding to set out on his own with work (a production assistant, mainly for television. It was during one of those experiences that he met Philip Baker Hall and told him about a short script that he believed would suit him and after his liking of the script Anderson set out to raise the funds to do what would become Cigarettes & Coffee (1993) - it received notice from festivals and got Anderson on his way to venturing into theatrical works, which resulted in movies such as Hard Eight (1996), Magnolia (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002), although this has turned out to be his biggest success in terms of notice or with audiences. Similarly, anyone with a particular vision and the right sense of timing can also be an actor, and Daniel Day-Lewis would certainly come to mind fairly early as one of those actors with reputation to spare. Born in London, Day-Lewis found interest in a variety of fields that included acting and woodworking (with one inspiration for the former being the films of Ken Loach), and he studied like other famed alumni before him at the British Old Vic Theatre School. He soon honed himself a method actor with theatre before growing to shine in film with a dedication to maintaining character that resulted in highlights such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), My Left Foot (1989), and The Last of the Mohicans (1992) in a career that spanned 35 years and 20 films before retirement in 2017.

The film is based in part on the 1927 novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair (Anderson stated they drew upon material from the first 150 pages), which had inspiration from the exploits of oil man Edward L. Doheny that included success in Southern California and Mexico alongside a key part in the Teapot Dome Scandal in the 1920s. Anderson found it a "great stepping-stone" in terms of helping to lend cohesive material to draw upon, which included research to cities and museums displaying pieces of oil equipment from the days of the boom while citing further inspiration in part from The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948, which he apparently watched every night during production). What we have here is a film of great physicality and loneliness, one involving a man that seems to have oil in his veins rather than blood in the way that he moves along in wheeling-and-dealing through a rise to fame, fortune, and eventually madness. Day-Lewis based his voice and characterization on recordings of famed director John Huston while also looking over letters and artifacts of the time period involving the oil boom that included reading up on Dohney. He captures something profound in predatory greatness, one more entity than man in his ultra-competitive nature and ever-growing hatred of the people that encompass him (one with no friends, lovers, or even a true son) - he dominates most of the scenes present in terms of dialogue and stature that generally works out in a performance for the ages. Dano has the interesting task of two roles, as the original actor cast for Eli (Kel O'Neill) was replaced by Anderson a few days into shooting. What could have been a gimmick used to stand out for having the same actor play different roles is instead done quite well by Dano in drawing out differences in the response to opportunity - whether that means clear-edge honesty in one brother or something devout in ambition in another. O'Connor does fine what is needed as a shadow of hope in his time spent with Day-Lewis in revealing the differences in one's humanity and what one needs from those close in some relation to them, whether that means affection or something else. This applies just as well to Freasier, who accompanies Day-Lewis as a sort of token of machinations and later a token of something else - anguish, which Harvard utilizes for his one key scene near the end to display the contrast between blood and partner as a man of the basket and his own path.

Of course no film comes without at least one caveat. It may very well prove a bit much for some audiences, in regards to its length or in its uncompromising approach to its subject matter that maintains a dour atmosphere that might seem overdone or pretentious to those who don't see with what it aims to do involving its sprawling scope as an epic with its own kind of scenery of oil. This is basically a fable involving the nature of two people aiming for success by any means necessary, even if it involves sacrifice of one's soul to get there (since we are dealing with a man of oil and a man of faith) that either will satisfy those in its reach or slip some from its sermon on the derrick. One other thing to note is its ending involving a bowling alley and a "milkshake" analogy. While I can certainly feel a chuckle out of that particular line, I do find it to be a satisfying way to close out its method of madness with proper finish in displaying the blood, sweat, and tears that could come from trying to cultivate liquid gold from the ground and beat out the competition and problems on all sides - whether that involves humiliation at needing to atone for oneself or finding oneself to be utterly removed from humanity in the basic form. It is a brutal and uncompromising look upon the nature of man with regard to power that can consume one's family or even themselves in the end, which ultimately makes a devastating winner that works for those in the mindset with patience for 158 minutes of a grand tale of oil and blood. It's an unsettling film, but it is exactly what it wants to be without consequence.

Overall, I give it 10 out of 10 stars.