Thursday 28 February 2013

Movie Review: Queen Christina (1933)


At the height of her world-wide popularity as the screen' most enigmatic star, Greta Garbo took on the role of Queen Christina, Sweden's mysterious and unconventional 17th century monarch. Garbo delivers a beguiling performance, elevating the movie to a dreamy, luxurious romance.

When her father the king dies in battle, Christina is elevated to the throne at age six. Demonstrating an independent, antithetic attitude from a young age, Christina grows up to become a popular leader. Still only in her twenties, she negotiates peace from a position of strength and favours reading and promoting the arts and culture rather than warmongering.

Christina resists pressure to marry the heroic warrior Karl Gustav (Reginald Owen), and fends off the attentions of Count Magnus (Ian Keith). Instead she prefers the company of Countess Ebba Sparre (Elizabeth Young) and manly pursuits, including aggressive horseback riding, wearing pants, and handling weapons. Out riding in the countryside to temporarily escape the burdens of the throne, Christina meets and falls in love with Spanish envoy Antonio (John Gilbert). They spend a heavenly night at a secluded inn, before Christina has to return to reality and balance the unexpected romance with the demands of her people to marry a Swede.

The Samuel Behrman script is only loosely based on the actual Christina. The central romance with Antonio is fiction, but here serves to emphasize Christina's strong non-conformist streak. Her refusal to pursue the traditional path of marrying a noble Swede to produce a suitable heir is accurate, but the movie adds the scandalous romance to a Spaniard as an exclamation point.

Greta Garbo's performance is commanding, effortlessly dominating all her scenes with a physical and mystical presence that demands obedience. Christina's only enemies are boredom, the trivialities of governance, and the shackles of tradition. Garbo conveys Christina's dismissiveness of convention with salient eyes, a confident and imperious tone of voice, and physical gestures that hint at both royal lethargy and endless patience with those of lesser intellect.

Garbo embraces the challenges of the character with adroit fluidity, adopting the Queen's male disguise with a glint in her eye and snuggling comfortably with hints of lesbian tendencies in the relationship with Ebba Sparre.

Director Rouben Mamoulian allows his cameras to worship Garbo, and confirms her regal status in two justifiably celebrated scenes. The first is a stunning three minutes of Garbo memorizing this room as she explores with her fingers, her skin and her soul every object in the room at the inn where her romance with Antonio blossomed. The second is the closing shot, a zoom in on Garbo's face as she stands at the bow of a ship, staring at absolutely nothing and thinking of every future imaginable.

The rest of the cast, including a John Gilbert desperately trying but failing to salvage a career in talkies, simply drown in Garbo's wake, the congregation of men trying in vain to control Christina's life melding into a mess of misplaced machismo.

Without being lavish, Queen Christina is a grand production. The set designs convey a winter-hardened Sweden, a bustling and functional royal palace, and interiors that combine required royal eminence with Swedish pragmatism. Ironically, amidst all the dignified nobility the most famous set is that humble inn where Christina and Antonio spend the night, a roadside stop designed to change the course of life.

Queen Christina delights with the story of a rogue royal, eons ahead of her time and portrayed by an all-time legend.






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Wednesday 27 February 2013

Movie Review: Night Of The Living Dead (1968)


A low-budget horror film, Night Of The Living Dead introduces the world to flesh-eating zombies and the commercial appeal of outright gore. Director George A. Romero, working with effectively no budget and a cast of novices, also pulls together a masterly exploration of ordinary people under sudden, extreme stress.

In rural Pennsylvania, brother and sister Johnny and Barbara (Russell Streiner and Judith O'Dea) visit a secluded cemetery to place flowers on their father's grave with dusk fast approaching. Before they can leave, they are inexplicably attacked by a wandering zombie and Johnny is killed. Barbara escapes and takes shelter in a nearby farmhouse, where she is joined by Ben (Duane Jones), a resourceful black man who fortifies the house in anticipation of a siege. After discovering a rotting corpse inside the house, Barbara goes into shock.

Harry and Helen Cooper (Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman) and another couple emerge from the cellar of the house, where they had barricaded themselves. Harry and Ben immediately clash, Harry believing that all of them should retreat to the cellar while Ben insisting that they should stay on the main level of the house where there are plenty of escape routes. With the house besieged by an increasing number of ravenous zombies, news filters through on the radio and television that the entire state is witnessing mass killings perpetrated by re-animated dead people. The human survivors at the farmhouse have to decide whether to stay and fight or try and flee.

Romero keeps the goriest scenes of flesh munching fairly brief, but that does not reduce their impact. The ghouls greedily biting into human flesh and bones latch on to the memory and stay entrenched, the rudimentary production values simply enhancing the documentary, surreptitious feel of horrific events being captured on film.

The stark black and white photography, capturing every detail with acute clarity despite the deep darkness of night, and the confinement of most of the film to a single set, add to the sense of sharing the horror of the barricaded survivors as they stumble onto the worst horror imaginable.

With a running time of less than 100 minutes and little time to dedicate to characters, Romero's script (co-written by John A. Russo) efficiently draws distinctions between the three leads. Ben is the natural leader, taking charge, giving orders, thinking ahead, and taking on the responsibility of planning an out. Barbara collapses under the weight of events, and after the death of her brother and the shock of seeing other mutilated bodies, she enters a state of heavy stupor, a burden to others and of no use in the survival battle. Harry is everything that Ben isn't, angry, self-centred, fearful rather than courageous, and blatantly placing his selfish interests ahead of all others.

The tension between the characters never settles down, and Night Of The Living Dead taps into the crackling energy of survivors who should be working together instead weakening their cause with continuous aggressive internal conflict.

Placing a black man as the natural leader within a cast of otherwise white characters is remarkable for the era. Romero claimed that Duane Jones was simply the best actor for the role of Ben, but the casting choice provides a progressive edge. All the cast is entertaining in a generally theatrical milieu, the cramped surroundings of the farmhouse providing the equivalent of a stage set and a suitable environment for slightly exaggerated performances.

Night Of The Living Dead pushes into bloodier, more extreme cinematic directions, armies of zombies now freed from their graves and ready to march into a gorier on-screen future.






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Saturday 23 February 2013

Movie Review: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)


A visionary classic, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is a graceful interpretation of the human desire for continuous exploration.

The opening Dawn Of Man sequence has no dialogue, and takes place among the man-ape predecessors of humans. Various tribes struggle for survival and compete for territory on a hostile ancient earth. A strange, smooth black monolith suddenly appears near one of the tribes, and a clan member discovers that bones of dead animals can be used as tools, and more importantly, weapons. After the first ever raid in which weapons are used, the victorious man-ape throws a bone into the air, and it is match-cut to a satellite orbiting Earth in 2001. Millions of years of evolution and innovation are spanned in one of the most famous split seconds in movie history.

The second part takes place in 2001. Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) journeys to Clavius Base, a US outpost on the moon. He is there to inspect a remarkable discovery being treated as top secret: a strange, smooth, black monolith has been excavated. Scientists estimate it was deliberately buried around four million years ago. As Floyd and his team are taking photographs in front of the monolith, it emits a piercingly loud signal.

The next chapter takes place eighteen months later. As a result of the monolith discovery, American spaceship Discovery One is on a mission to Jupiter, commanded by Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) while other scientists are kept in hibernation. HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain) is the on-board supercomputer, apparently infallible and controlling every aspect of the mission. Communications with Earth are difficult and suffer a long time lag.

When HAL raises the alarm about an imminent equipment failure, Bowman and Lockwood are forced to undertake a dangerous retrieval job outside the spaceship using the EVA pod. Diagnostic tests hint that HAL was maybe wrong. With Jupiter fast approaching, Bowman and Poole have to prepare for an unimaginable situation: the computer controlling the entire mission may be faulty. The final, surreal 20 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey unfold near Jupiter, and again have no dialogue. The monolith reappears and Bowman is drawn into a new, stunning evolutionary reality.

Working with author Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick creates the first grand space drama. In this vision, exploration of the vast and empty space beyond the borders of the Earth and its Moon is a continuation of an unstoppable process of discovery, and defines the next massive step in human advancement, a most astonishing challenge filled with wonder, danger, possibilities, and the pure unknown.

Filled with astonishing special effects, the visuals leave the deepest impression. From ape-men environments to space ships and satellites streaking through space, the details include elegant, complex docking manoeuvres and humans operating in zero gravity conditions. Personal headrest screens, wireless audio-video computer phones, and tablet computers are innovations on display. A brilliant classical music score provides a grandiose backdrop. The past and future are linked through the anticipatory opening of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra and then Johann Strauss' light-footed On the Beautiful Blue Danube, the waltz becoming a metaphor for sophisticated machinery performing an elegant coupling in space.

Dialogue is sparse, and when characters do talk in the middle segments, the interactions are stiff and almost robotic. In contrast, HAL has by far the most expressive and emotional role. Douglas Rain provides a tender, almost embracing tone, a jarring contradiction with the harsh lens and red pilot light representing HAL's omnipresence throughout Discovery One. When the battle erupts between human and artificial intelligence, Bowman operates with silent machine-like intensity while HAL continuously verbalizes his case.

The monolith is common to all the chapters, the large, foreboding, finely machined slab of blackness triggering fundamental changes in the human journey. Kubrick leaves the movie wide open to interpretation, and the monolith can represent external, extra-terrestrial intelligence or internal, intrinsic drive. Either way the irresistible force of change powers an ever broader expansion of abilities and horizons, with a startling ending where one phase of evolution merges into a rebirth to continue an expedition beyond known boundaries.

2001: A Space Odyssey is artistically and intellectually audacious, and a resounding, timeless triumph.






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Thursday 21 February 2013

Movie Review: Bowfinger (1999)


A boisterous comedy that surpasses a modest premise, Bowfinger brings out the best from two legendary comedians. Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy team up and deliver the quality chuckles in a story of Hollywood ingenuity on a shoestring.

Producer Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) lives off the scraps that bottom-feeders leave behind. Broke and desperate to manufacture a hit, he latches on to a ludicrous alien invasion script called Chubby Rain by accountant Afrim (Adam Alexi-Malle). Bowfinger uses about $2,000 that he collected as a child to finance the project, and hires illegal migrants as his crew and the straight-off-the-bus Daisy (Heather Graham) as his leading lady.  He also dreams up the idea of surreptitiously filming scenes with action superstar Kit Ramsey (Murphy) and inserting them into the film, thereby creating a star vehicle without having to secure or pay for a star.

Ramsey has an irrational fear of conspiracy theories and alien abduction scenarios, and uses the services of MindHead (a Scientology-like institution) and its head Terry (Terence Stamp) to barely keep his life together. Meanwhile, Bowfinger hires Kit's younger and slower brother Jefferson (also Murphy) to use as a stunt-double. When Bowfinger's actors start hovering around Kit and incomprehensibly interacting with him for the benefit of hidden cameras, Kit's paranoia spirals out of control, but Bowfinger is undeterred in his quest to secure his movie.

Bowfinger clearly defines its targets and squarely hits every one. Making a good movie about the making of a bad movie is not easy, and credit goes to Martin's barbed script, which combines sharp industry satire with broad humour. Director Frank Oz shoots over the shoulder of the fake production, exaggerating with a sharp outline everything in Bowfinger's film that makes cheap productions cheap, from poor acting to rudimentary special effects and unlicensed use of locations.

The character of Bowfinger is ridiculously resourceful, and Martin clearly had a grand time creating a producer who can get things done on next to no budget. From swiping a fashionable jacket to deploying his dog to create scary footstep noises, Bowfinger is never out of ideas on how to get the next scene into the can and Kit Ramsey into his movie without spending a dime. Martin keeps his acting relatively understated, allowing the ingenuity of the character to emerge unhindered by physical histrionics.

Murphy delivers astute comic timing in both his roles. Kit Ramsey is filled with loud bravado but also wracked by the insecurities of an undeservedly wealthy star, and Murphy switches between authoritative and submissive with delightful precision. His performance as Jefferson is even more arresting, the younger brother making up for the lack of intellect with an ever-present smile, even more heart, and wide-eyed enthusiasm for being anywhere near a Hollywood production.

Heather Graham adds to the fun by riffing on her Boogie Nights persona. Daisy treats sex like cold currency, and methodically sleeps her way to better information and better exposure. Even on lousy Bobby Bowfinger productions there are benefits for a starlet to sleep her way to the top, despite the top still being the bottom. Terence Stamp occupies the deep dark centre of MindHead, Martin's script taking the time to aim purposeful jabs at the manufactured nonsense of money-milking psychobabble duping conceited stars while masquerading as religion.

Christine Baranski as a has-been actress trying to reclaim old glories, and Robert Downey Jr. as a successful director occupying a diametrically opposite world to Bowfinger but sitting at the next table, complete the cast.

Bowfinger is bright and breezy, and in less than 100 minutes exposes the other side of movie-making glamour, where the mixture of misplaced ambition and deep-seated desperation creates rich territory for plenty of laughter.






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Tuesday 19 February 2013

Movie Review: The Moment To Kill (1968)


A largely forgettable Spaghetti Western, The Moment To Kill offers little that is new and comes up short in both style and substance.

Gunslingers Lord and Bull (George Hilton and Walter Barnes) are looking for $500,000 in lost Confederate gold. Judge Warren (Rudolf Schündler) is an old timer who provides clues to the whereabouts of the treasure before being killed by men working for the evil Jason Forester (Horst Frank). Jason is rich, temperamental, and also looking for the gold along with his father (Carlo Alighiero).

Jason's cousin Regina (Loni von Friedl) is wheelchair bound, but may unknowingly hold the critical piece of information needed to find the hidden fortune. Trent (Renato Romano) is Regina's trusted caregiver, and teams up with Lord and Bull to help Regina and fight-off Jason. But there are many personal agendas at work, and Lord and Bull will discover that all is not what it seems in the quest for riches against the Forester clan.

The Moment To Kill attempts, mostly unsuccessfully, to manufacture momentum out of a dynamic duo. Lord is smarter and faster, Bull is slower but deadlier, with an ever-present smile and a dedication to offing bad guys with his trusty shot-gun. But the expressively challenged Hilton and artistically limited Barnes barely register a synergistic spark.

The film offers several prolonged action scenes hampered by rudimentary execution. Bad lighting obscures the dark showdowns, and the borderline dull shoot-outs descend into an incomprehensible and uninteresting game of shadows with characters indistinguishable from each other taking cover and trading fire for what seems like an eternity.

But the action scenes are the best thing that director Giuliano Carnimeo can deliver, since the dialogue and plot advancement sequences are pedestrian in the extreme. Despite the involvement of Enzo G. Castellari in the script and concept development, Carnimeo simply has nothing to add to countless westerns that have come and gone before. The photography, camera angles, music, and plot of The Moment To Kill are strictly derivative, and quickly become tiresome.

Horst Frank delivers his usual intensely engaging performance as the scion suffering a severe case of impatience, while Loni von Friedl enjoys playing Regina as physically vulnerable but holding the power of essential information. Regina is subjected to disturbing abuse at the hands of Jason's unruly men, making their ultimate comeuppance at the hands of Lord and Bull all the more deserved.

The Moment To Kill is filled with moments of boredom, and not enough moments that deliver.






All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.