Movie Review: Annie (1982)

An adaptation of the hit stage musical, Annie is bloated and off-target.

The setting is New York City during the Great Depression. Annie (Aileen Quinn) is a mischievous 10 year old orphan whose dreams of reuniting with her parents help her survive squalid conditions in the orphanage run by the obnoxious Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett). Daddy Warbucks (Albert Finney) is a Republican billionaire in search of good publicity, and his secretary Grace Farrell (Anne Reinking) selects Annie as the lucky orphan to spend a week at Warbucks' massive mansion.

Annie brightens up the house, enchants the servants and melts Warbucks' heart. He offers a reward for her real parents to come forward, sparking a frenzy as desperate scammers make false claims.  But Miss Hannigan's con-artist brother Rooster (Tim Curry) and his girlfriend Lily (Bernadette Peters) devise an elaborate ruse to falsely claim Annie as their daughter and make off with the money.

Somehow, producer Ray Stark tapped 76 year old veteran John Huston to direct Annie. Working from a Carol Sobieski script, this was Huston's first and ultimately only musical. Totally bamboozled by the child-oriented material and the genre, Huston delivers a bumbling and plodding adaptation. The production values are decent, but otherwise the song and dance numbers are listless, the dialogue scenes stiff, and the performances grating. A joyous, upbeat and inspiring stage show is turned into a laborious chore clocking in at an interminable 128 minutes.

Some of the decisions by Huston and Sobieski are simply baffling. A large chunk of Greta Garbo's Camille, a film about courtesans, is inserted into Annie, but only after a glitzy show by the dancing girls of Radio City Music Hall. And not one but two bodyguards are created for Warbucks to help set up a garish chase ending complete with a helicopter rescue. Meanwhile, the song Tomorrow, which is the highlight of the entire show, is given away entirely during the opening credits and then half-baked into an inert scene with President Roosevelt (Edward Herrmann).

Aileen Quinn gives her all but gets no help from Huston, while Burnett, Curry and Peters overact as though there is no difference between stage and screen. Worse of all is Albert Finney, a British actor plonked into the role of the prototypical American tycoon, and understandably bemused into irrelevance.

Shouty and tone deaf, Annie hits all the wrong notes.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Clue (1985)

A madcap whodunit comedy, Clue has a large cast breathlessly running around a spooky mansion for 90 minutes. The film runs out of steam and ideas long before the convoluted plot ties itself into an unfathomable knot.

On a stormy night at an isolated mansion, the butler Wadsworth (Tim Curry), the maid Yvette (Colleen Camp) and the Cook (Kellye Nakahara) prepare dinner. Six strangers are invited, and they have been instructed to use colourful pseudonyms: Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan), Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn), Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd), Mr. Green (Michael McKean), Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull) and Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren). The apparent dinner host also shows up: Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving) claims to be blackmailing all the guests. He is soon mysteriously killed, as is the Cook.

Wadsworth leads the guests on an investigative quest to search the mansion and unmask the killer, but a stream of apparently uninvited strangers keep on ringing the door bell and also getting themselves killed, including a lost Motorist, an off-duty Cop, and a Singing Telegram Girl. All the dinner party guests have motives, and it's up to Wadsworth to untangle everyone's movements and reveal the truth.

Based on the popular board game, Clue stumbles on a most cluttered plot, and disintegrates as the bodies pile up and the invited guests dart aimlessly from room to room. Director Jonathan Lynn, who co-wrote the script with the usually sharper John Landis, never finds neither the humour nor the focus necessary to build an engaging narrative. By the time Wadsworth runs through (literally) what happened (and there are three variations to the ending), the only thing that matters is that he gets it over with as quickly as possible to end the tedium.

Tim Curry does enliven the proceedings somewhat with his sheer energy and willingness to ham it up, but the rest of the decidedly theatrical cast members are quickly lost among the furniture and interrupted by the continuously ringing doorbell introducing yet another nondescript victim.

Sad to say, but Clue does not have a clue.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Charlie's Angels (2000)

The television series was a showcase for models trying to pretend that they were actresses representing women's emerging empowerment. The movie does away with any pretenses. Essentially a 98 minute music video that finds every excuse to fill the frame with the cleavage, rear-ends, and blowing hair of its leading ladies, Charlie's Angels is almost tolerable mainly because this film is honest about its intentions. Director McG also earns some points for stylish action sequences that effectively use slow-motion to highlight the depth of the stunts in the many one-on-one hand combat scenes.

The plot matters about as much as it would in a slickly produced rock video. Natalie (Cameron Diaz), Dylan (Drew Barrymore), and Alex (Lucy Liu) are detectives working for an agency run by the mysterious and rich Charlie. Their handler and only contact with Charlie is the hapless Bosley (Bill Murray). The Angels are retained by Vivian Wood (Kelly Lynch) to rescue her business partner and software wizard Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell), who has apparently been kidnapped by rival computer magnate Roger Corwin (Tim Curry). But the Angels soon realize that neither Vivian nor Eric are what they seem, and the hunters become the hunted as Charlie himself is threatened with violent and permanent retirement.

Diaz, Barrymore (who also helped to produce the movie) and Liu go through the film with a knowing smile and glint in their eye, confirming that they are not at all taking any of the silliness seriously, and they have fun flirting shamelessly with the cameras. Charlie's Angels hustles along from one contrived set-piece to the next, never losing sight of the prime objective, which is to place the Angels in as many figure-hugging outfits as possible before the bad guys are finally terminated.

Charlie's Angels is the equivalent of browsing a fashion magazine with a model staring out of every page: an icky mixture of the glossy and the vacuous.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.