boblipton Reviews

Borom sarret (1963)

"Protect me from infidels and the law"

[6/10 · 16 July 2020]

Ly Abdoulay has a horse -- played by Albourah, and a cart with a squeaky wheel .Every morning he gets up and goes downtown to look for work hauling around people and cinder blocks. Sometimes they pay him.

While he goes through his routines, he conducts an inner monologue of anger, fear and whining.. That's all of it in the course of this 18-minute short subject. You could argue that it's not a great movie -- and I do -- but it's an important movie because it is the first directed by Ousmane Sembene, and thus the first movie directed by a Black film maker in Africa.

Widows (2018)

I Enjoyed This One

[7/10 · 15 July 2020]

When Liam Neeson and his entire crew is killed while pulling a robbery, his widow, Viola Davis, is told by the criminal boss who's running for alderman, that she has to come up with the money. The only asset she has is Neeson's carefully worked out plans for his next job...only she doesn't know where it is. She contacts the widows of her husband's partners and proposes they carry out the robbery.

It's a beautifully acted, tough heist film with a lot of dirty politics in the foreground, as the family of old Irish politicians struggle to maintain their seats in a newly redrawn district. Director Steve McQueen is the hot director over the last few years, and he has turned out an exciting movie.

Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)

A Fine Sequel With Something New To Say

[7/10 · 15 July 2020]

When the steering wheel on the Candy Crush machine gets broken, it turns out that the only replacement available in on the Internet, and too expensive for the owner of the Arcade. With the machine about to be shut down, all the characters will be left home, so Ralph and Vanellope go onto the Internet to get the spare.

At first this animated cartoon appears to be more interested in Product Placement than in story or jokes, as the Internet is portrayed as a modern city with many real corporate logos revealed. As matters progress, however, story, character and jokes grow more important, as Ralph becomes a trending Internet star and Vanellope finds happiness in a rough, urban racing game. There's also a very nice section where Vanellope winds up on a Disney site, making friends with the Disney princesses, who are thrilled to spend their down time in tank tops and cut-offs.

I'm not happy with this current era in Disney, when all the movies are either sequels or live-action remakes of classic animation. However, this turns out to be an amusing movie with some good life lessons.

The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018)

Stuck On Accents

[5/10 · 15 July 2020]

A long-winded title. My first impression was puzzlement over the fact that all these Swedish characters speaking Swedish in Sweden speak with Swedish accents. I guess they're Swedish accents, even though no one speaks like Garbo or the Swedish Chef, but they don't sound like standard English speakers of any variety. Ah, you say, they're speaking English! Yes, I snap right back, but it's notionally Swedish, because who would expect two people in what is labeled right off the bat "Stockholm" who are Swedish to be talking to each other in but Swedish? I've never seen A Doll's House or Hedda Gabbler with anyone speaking in a Swedish accent, even though Ibsen set his works in Sweden and all the characters are Swedish. They never sound like they've just gotten off the boat, or even El Brendel. Usually they're speaking in British Stage accents. And don't blame Hollywood, because the producers and several key actors are Swedish. And the director is Uruguayan.

I saw the Swedish version of this about a decade ago. I recall nothing about it, except that it was terrific and, like all Scandinavian cinema, made me glad I wasn't Scandinavian, because I would have to kill myself. However, I'm pretty sure this is not the same story, because somehow Claire Foy as Lisbeth Salander, aka "the girl with the dragon tattoo" has become Batman, or perhaps Batwoman, complete with a Tragic Back Story and a sister who is her dark side, like a feminist Alan Dwan movie from the 1950s. She tootles around Sweden on her Batcycle -- I suppose we should call in her Dragoncycle -- or stolen Maserati, hunting down men who are abusive to their wives or assignations, hanging them upside down and draining their bank accounts; everyone knows who is doing this, but no one can find her because Computers.

Her paying job, however is calling. An American computer whiz has developed a program to control every nuclear missile in the world. He's decided it's not such a good idea, so he hires Miss Foy to find it and steal it. However, Sauron wants his Ring back.... I mean there's a three-way hunt for it, since the American NSA has sent Lakeith Stanfield to fetch the program -- he doesn't speak with a Swedish accent, but he does use his White voice -- the Swedish government is blaming her for everything, and her Evil Blonde Twin, Sylvia Hoeks, has been hired to fetch it for an unnamed employer, whose identity will surprise you (No, it won't).

There are some fine shots in this movie, all of which have been used in the trailer and TV commercials.

Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

Actually Writing A Script

[7/10 · 15 July 2020]

A man enters a motel room, moves all the furniture, rolls up the rug, pries open the floor, drops a satchel into the hole, puts everything back in place, hangs around, answers the door and is blown to smithereens.

Ten years later, a priest, a traveling salesman, a girl singer and an angry hippie chick are checked into the El Royale motel by a deaf hotel clerk. Only one of them is what he or she claims to be.

It's an elaborately, almost flamboyantly written neo-noir. Clearly writer-director Drew Goddard has seen Quentin Tarrantino's pictures and has learned his stye of writing a movie: take a bunch of great shots, and write a script that gets from one to the next. Add in some shock value and a great setting -- the Arte Moderne El Royale is clearly modeled on the Cal-Neva Lodge, the glitzy hotel half in California and half in Nevada, that was bought by Sinatra and Dean Martin fronting for the Mafia. A great music track is necessary -- 1960s girl-band hits. Where he has bettered Tarrantino -- with whom I have reached my limit -- is that it's not necessary to go all potty-mouth all the time, and if you can't remember a great shot to steal, why, you can write your own.

Gasp! What an insane idea! Thanks to cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, composer Michael Giacchino and the other talent behind the camera, as well as a solid cast led by Jeff Bridges, it works very well... although about ten minutes from the end something bumped my concentration to make it clear all this was scripted.In sum, there's nothing absolutely original about this movie, but it's pretty well put together and will keep you guessing until the end.

Assassination Nation (2018)

Surprising Thriller

[8/10 · 15 July 2020]

In the suburban town of East Salem, Massachusetts, four girls are dealing with high school, complaining that no one gets them, etc. etc. Then someone hacks every phone in town, downloads them to the Internet, and everyone goes crazy.. Every secret in town is out, people kill themselves or form mobs to lynch a high school principal who has photos of his daughte when she was five or so, running naked around the back yard. People have never dealth with anything like this before, so they start acting according to the only model they know: grindhouse movies that play on latte-night television.

The first half is largely shot with shaky cel phone video, interspersed with the occasional art shot (the four teenage protagonists, lying with their heads together, like the spokes of a huge wheel, while a crane shot rotates above them), to be supplanted by sharp movie photography in the final third. Add in some sharp dialogue and the most chilling final line I've heard in soe time, and you have a great movie.

White Boy Rick (2018)

Annoying

[5/10 · 15 July 2020]

IIf you've heard mention of this mention, , you'd think it's about how a fifteen-year-old Richie Merritt played police, FBI and the Black drug king pins of of Detroit.

What goes up on the screen is a movie about stupid, uncaring people in a stupid, uncaring environment who get played by stupid, uncaring FBI agents, think they're smarter than everyone else and discover that no one cares what happens to them, just like it says at the beginning.

At the end, we're supposed to care about this guy, because he never pulled a trigger, just sold them drugs and guns, and those who did are dead or paroled. Isn't that unfair? It makes me want to echo abbot Arnaud Amalric: "Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."

Peppermint (2018)

And Puff It In Your Face

[5/10 · 15 July 2020]

Because I am very fond of Jennifer Garner, I easily agreed when my cousin suggested we see this movie It was directed by Pierre Morel, who also directed The Transporter and Taken, so I went in expecting to see a lot of mindless ass-whupping done in a cinematically interesting although barely believable style, and that's what I got.

The story, for those of you who think that still matters, is that back when, Miss Garner was married to Chris Noth with a cute daughter. Money was tight, and he phoned his friend saying No,I'm not going to help you steal from the drug kingpin" to his answering machine. Apparently, even thinking about such things can get you killed, which happens to Noth and the little girl.

Miss Garner identifies the killers, but the judge dismisses, so she goes away and come back, looking for vengeance or, as she puts it, "justice." This, of course, involves much blood and many things that go boom.

Miss Garner actually limps after being shot, and in the alternate universe in which she lives, Internet comments use the word "alleged" when talking about gang bangers.

It's certainly not a great movie, but Miss Garner, despite her talent, has placed herself on the movie actress' equivalent of "midlist author." I expect she will continue to star in this sort of movie, support in others, and have a very satisfactory career.

The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)

Disappointing

[5/10 · 15 July 2020]

I was looking forward to this movie. Milas Kunis is a cute, dependable leading lady in comedies and Kate McKinnon has never failed to be very funny, even in blah movies like Rough Night. The premise, in which Miss Kunis is the girlfriend of a Bond-like superspy who... well, you get the idea, and Miss McKinnon is her best friend, and somehow they wind up in Europe in the middle of spy capers, seemed like a pat but promising situation.

However, something went, if not wrong, then not particularly right, and director Susanna Fogel seems more interested in the actual workings of the plot and the beauty shots of European cities than in efforts at comedy, although Jane Curtain and Paul Reiser as Miss McKinnon's parents have good bits.

Regiments Returned from Boer War to Victoria Barracks, Cork (1902)

Trooping By

[6/10 · 15 July 2020]

It's poretty much as described. Soldiers in various military kit march by whilea crowd of onlookers watch.

It's another production by Mitchell and Kenyon, the Electrical Edwardians. Although they mostly stuck to taking shots of local events in north England, occasionally they wandered into Ireland; Manchester and Liverpool had large Irish populations, and a lot of their appeal at the time was showing people themselves and their neighbors on the screen of the local cinematograph.

As always, I'm shocked by the fact that everyone wears a hat of some description. Apparently being seen outdoors bareheaded was a major social gaffe. Strangely enough, no one looks at the camera, although there's one seedy-looking fellow in the lower left corner whose attention seems distracted from the event.

Enigma (1982)

Fine Actors, Blank Story Keep Up Interest

[6/10 · 15 July 2020]

Former spy Martin Sheen is now broadcasting for the Voice of America. His erstwhile boss offers him a major payday to switch some electronic gizmo that will give the CIA an ear into OGPU headquarters; all he has to do is head to Berlin, meet up with former lover Brigitte Fossey, evade every Stassi agent in the country and Russian spy Sam Neill.

It's one of those movies with an old-time serial feel: how's Sheen going to get out of this cliff-hanger? And why are people doing whatever it is they're doing? French locations in mid-winter and drab signs stand in for a depressing East Germany, and Jeannot Szwarc's explication-free direction doesn't pander to the audience, but keeps the movie interesting throughout.

Hiroshima (1953)

A Little Didactic, But Effective

[8/10 · 14 July 2020]

It seems that CHILDREN OF HIROSHIMA was paid for by the Teacher's Union in Japan; they apparently felt it did not get the message across they wanted, so they commissioned this film. Instead of being seen from the viewpoint of an ex-teacher, the central character is a teacher. Eiji Okada's student suffer from leukemia, general malaise, and other symptoms, some real, some imagined, of having been around when the Bomb went off. There's some discussion talking about how the US looked for any excuse to use the A-Bomb; some concern about a fear that nationalism and a longing for the Old Days would retrigger millitarism and start the whole thing over again; and a harrowing re-enactment of the survivors struggling out out of the wreckage left by the blast.

I'm not sure the Teacher's Union got what they wanted out of this movie; the trouble with directors is they go off and make the movie they want instead of the one you want. In any case, some of the sequences looked like modern 'slow zombie' movies, except they seemed much more real and terrifying. The union did not make a third movie. Perhaps they ran out of money.

Floral Japan (1937)

When It's Tulip Time In Japan

[5/10 · 14 July 2020]

James A. Fitzpatrick sends the Technicolor cameras to Japan, so WiIlfrid Cline can take pictures of flowers, women in traditional clothing, and stones, which seem to be essential to gardening. Then Maria Grever offers a lush, sentimental score, and Fitzpatrick offers his usual multisyllabic peroration.

There's a long segment on ladies' hairdressing, with details that make it clear that the Japanese, while different from us, are in many ways the same. It's just a matter of expression. There's a long-running impression of the similarity of people across the world, just different ways of expressing it.

The colors in the print that plays on Turner Classic Movies is in pretty good shape; you might not believe the colors, true though they are.

Prison Nurse (1938)

I Feel A Jailbreak Coming On

[5/10 · 14 July 2020]

Henry Wilcoxon is in prison for murder, and girlfriend Marian Marsh, a nurse at the prison, thinks he's been framed like he says wants him out. But will a flood, a plague, a prison break and probably locusts and the slaying of the first born be enough to do the trick?

Director James Cruze was on his last legs as a director, and looks to have been taking just about any script that came along, and the budget that went with it. He then proceeded to do his best with what he had which, considering the script and the budget that Republic was able to give him at this stage, wasn't very much. This leads to some very awkward shots, some odd set decoration, and a level of enthusiasm about the final, convenient clue that wraps up everything neatly that I just don't find particularly worthwhile.

The Plastics Inventor (1944)

Do It Yourself

[6/10 · 14 July 2020]

Donald Duck listens to a radio professor who instructs his listeners on how to build a working airplane out of plastic ..... which they've manufactured themselves. Then shake and bake and mark it with 'T' and you''re ready to take off into the wild blue yonder. But beware! It dissolves on exposure to water!

It's a silly Donald Duck cartoon appropos of nothing in particular, just an opportunity to watch Donald grow increasingly agitated in fantastic situations, with a few visual puns thrown in. Except that the editor of a plastics industry magazine saw the cartoon in a movie theater and was incensed! He wrote editorials denouncing the cartoon for its inaccuracies. Which just goes to show that people haven't changed at all, even if their airplanes seldom melt on getting wet.

Scenes in an Infant Orphan Asylum (1904)

The Audience As Observer

[5/10 · 14 July 2020]

Small children are marched into a room. They sit at a table and begin to eat; everyone sneaks looks at the camera. Nurses wheel infants in baby cameras, making a sharp turn to avoid hitting the camera. Three children are washed in a row for the audience's observation. A boy has his hair clipped to the skin, crying.

Edwin Porter's movie involves the audience in the dull, harsh routines of the orphanage by making the camera a known observer of the action.

The Squeeze (1987)

The Thing

[5/10 · 14 July 2020]

Michael Keaton is an installation artist in the glamorous world of Staten Island's disco scene. When Rae Dawn Chong serves a summons on him, a corpse turns up in his apartment, and everyone wants a mysterious black box he finds, it turns into the sort of laugh-free, frantic action comedy that seemed to be all too common in the era. It concentrates on destruction as funny.

It's clear that a lot of money was spent on the production, and the set piece is early on when a battle breaks out in the middle of the disco, but the vague characters aren't appealing, and there isn't any chemistry between the leads.

10th & Wolf (2006)

Good Performers, But In The End, Violence

[6/10 · 14 July 2020]

James Marsden returns to Philly after a tour in the the tougher spots of the world, but nothing as bloody as Brian Dennehy playing the Stenfa faction of what a friend of mine used to call the Mothers & Father's Italia Association.

It's a beautifully cast movie, with performers like Giovanni Ribisi, Lesley Ann Warren, Dennis Hopper and Val Kilmer stretching to play a crazy man. Despite some fine acting, in the end its message is that criminals are bad, and guns are a lot of fun to watch.

Genbaku no ko (1952)

Downfall

[7/10 · 13 July 2020]

Nobuko Otowa lives on a small, beautiful island in the house of her uncle, but she grew up in Hiroshima and taught kindergarten there. She returns to her home town to lay flowers on the graves of her parents in the blasted cemetery and see the children she taught. She encounters Osamu Takizawa. Once he was her father's employee. Now, scarred and blinded by the A-Bomb, he ekes out a living, caring only about his parentless grandson.

Confronted with a movie about the consequences of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, my urge is to write about Operation Downfall, its US armed forces casualties estimated at between half a million and a million dead, and two to four million wounded; Japan's Operation Ketsugo, its propaganda campaign of "One Hundred Million Deaths For The Emperor!"; and other factors that made dropping the Bomb not just a political necessity, but An issue of saving saving lives.

However, Kaneto Shindô's film isn't about the big picture. It's about the tragedy of a small boy who refuses to leave his grandfather. The A-bomb isn't a racist plot by Americans to kill Japanese. It, like war, are monsters that kill people for no reason whatsoever. Blinded old men, fatherless children, women rendered sterile are the lucky ones.

Only a Farmer's Daughter (1915)

THe Joke About The Farmer's Daughter

[6/10 · 12 July 2020]

Charley Chase is the slick urban dude whose car breaks down out in the sticks. While Fritz Schade is rescuing the auto -- picking it up out of the mud puddle, inflating its tires with his own breath -- Charley is wooing pretty Vivian Edwards, persuading her to come with him to the city. This, even though she's Fritz's betrothed.

It's the standard city slicker versus the noble rube plot, a standard of the melodrama, and already decayed enough in the popular view to be familiar enough and ripe enough to burlesque. The gags are fairly limited in this second ranked Keystone, but it's well edited and performed.

A Bathtub Bandit (1917)

It's A Ham & Bud Short, So No One Knows What To Do With A Bath Tub

[3/10 · 12 July 2020]

Robert Bradbury has a mania for stealing bath tubs, so he hires Ham & Bud to move it. They all wind up at a waterfront bar, where Bradbury is more interested in the bath tub than in Ethel Teare.

In this period, Lloyd Hamilton and Bud Duncan made up a scuzzy Mutt & Jeff team, two psychopaths who wandered into dirty circumstances, engaged in random violence, and left. Apparently they hated each other almost as much as I hate them together. After they parted, Hamilton developed into one of the most accomplished short-form comics of the 1920s and drank himself to death in the 1930s. Duncan continued working for another thirty years for no clear reason.

Apparently Bradbury was so disheartened by appearing in this short that he became a director, boosting his son, Bob Steele into a major B western star in the 1930%.

Oranges and Lemons (1923)

Before He Was Mr. Laurel

[6/10 · 12 July 2020]

Stanley wears a hat like a straw orange juicer in this rough slapstick comedy set in the orange fields of sunny Southern California, and everyone throws oranges at each other. This was standard for his Hal Roach short subjects in this go-around at the studio, when he wasn't doing lampoons of popular movies for Billy Anderson. Sometimes they'd be set in a brick yard, so the cast could hence bricks at each other. It's moderately funny, because f the supporting cast, which includes Katherine Grant and James Finlayson, as well as other Roach regulars.

The problem is that it's standard hard-knock slapstick, indistinguishable from other raw slapstick comics of the era. We look at it because it stars Stan Laurel, but he's not the Mr. Laurel we know and love.

General Election (1946)

Good Explanation Of The Process Plus

[6/10 · 12 July 2020]

This short subject Covers a local race for Parliament in 1945. Historically, that's the election that ended the government of Winston Churchill and replaced it with a Labour Government. To ground the events of the election in reality, the seat for Kettering is chosen as representative, if not average.

If this particular district has any meaning to people three quarters of a century later, it is because one of the candidates - and the winner - was John Profumo. For movie fans this is interesting because he would marry Valerie Hobson in 1954; their marriage would last until her death in 1998. For history wonks, Profumo's name is more familiar because an affair he had with 19-year-old model Christine Keeler led to his resignation, and the defeat of the Conservative government in 1964.

On Location with Westworld (1973)

Coming Attractions

[5/10 · 12 July 2020]

Long after the major production companies abandoned the short subjects in the middle of the 1950s, MGM would occasionally turn out an extended "coming attractions" short, masquerading it as a "behind the scenes" short feature. Here's one for WESTWORLD.

There are clips in which a bizarrely young Michael Crichton talks about the script, shots of the cast relaxing between takes, and clips from the actual movie, and co-stars Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin about their characters.

It's impossible to say how much an effect this short subject had on ticket sales, but WESTWORLD did well enough that the title is revived for new properties more than half a century later.

So You Want to Be a Gladiator (1955)

The Fix Is Out

[5/10 · 12 July 2020]

When Joe MacDoakes is sentenced by Nero to be thrown to the lions for bad lyre-playing, he thinks it's his pal in a lion costume. It's not. Worse Than A Lion, However, is Joe's Wife when she gets her dander up.

Usually the series stuck to the MacDoakes' middle-class existence, but here's a case where series writer/producer/director Richard Bare decided to roam far afield. As a result, it's far more slapstick a production that unusual, While undoubtedly amusing, its absurd set-up makes the usual silliness of the series less amusing.