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mgconlan
Reviews
An Untold Triumph: America's Filipino Soldiers (2002)
Moving depiction of war and liberation
Though I've only seen the cut-down 57-minute version aired on PBS, I found this documentary quite moving and surprising especially when compared to the interesting but far more superficial "American Experience" show on the rescue of the Bata'an survivors which PBS coupled with it as a double bill. The film exposes some more of America's racist heritage from the 1934 Congressional bill (which FDR is shown signing) which stripped Filipino-Americans of the right to become U.S. citizens as part of offering the islands a sham "independence" to the assumption made in the Filipinos' training that they were too small to fall from the sky properly when parachuting down and therefore had to have weights tied to them but also shows a profound story of a people willing to ally themselves with the U.S., however shabbily we had treated them, to free themselves from an even worse oppressor. At the same time, in the film's blithe depiction of the double standard endemic to ALL soldiers in wartime atrocities committed by the enemy show how evil they are while atrocities committed by our side are just retribution it makes an anti-war statement without necessarily meaning to; whatever justifications may be offered for a particular war or a particular tactic within a war, the fact remains that war brutalizes everyone who fights and should therefore generally be avoided and certainly not glorified.
Terror in the Family (1996)
Better than average for Lifetime
I was curious about this as an early credit for Hillary Swank, and if I were she and someone mentioned this movie in my presence I'd probably be thinking, "I'm a big movie star now, I've won two Academy Awards, I should be allowed to forget credits like that." Truth be told, though, it's a better than average Lifetime movie and Swank acquits herself marvelously in it as the rebellious teenage girl whose violent relations with her family open a lot of old wounds going back three generations. This has some of the usual Lifetime weaknesses melodramatic plot construction, an overly reverential attitude towards psychotherapy, sappy piano-and-strings background music (they must have a library of millions of these records) and a limp excuse for punk rock allegedly performed by Garrett's band, as well as the obligatory soft-core porn scene but it's also solidly acted by a tight ensemble cast, it's all too believable despite the melodramatics, and Gregory Goodell has a visual sense far ahead of most of the Lifetime directors.
Americathon (1979)
Where's the DVD?
This is a move that has never got the respect it deserves. I loved it the first time I saw it its creators were previously involved in the Firesign Theatre comedy troupe and they brought the same envelope-pushing irreverent spirit to it that they had to their great records and ever since I've never forgiven the critics for savaging it on its initial release. It's the late John Ritter's finest big-screen performance, it contains the last truly great song recorded by the original Beach Boys, Elvis Costello's music video is an added bonus, and though some of the satire is a bit dated, much of it particularly the idea of how drastically life in this country will change when we inevitably run out of oil holds up beautifully. I haven't seen this in years but I wanted to post this to defend this marvelous film and demand a DVD release pronto. (Put me down as mgconlan from Tijuana Heights.)
Tadpole (2002)
Neat little film
I've just seen "Tadpole" for the second time and I'm astonished at some of the dismissive comments about it on this site. Maybe I'm a bit biased when I was the protagonist's age I was almost as impossibly pretentious a pseudo-intellectual as he is but though I don't consider this a great film, I was engaged by it all the way and loved everything about it: the story, the acting, the genuinely witty writing, director Gary Winick's knack for presenting some pretty outrageous situations as if they were perfectly normal and the upper-class New York ambiance in which the whole film was framed. The first time I saw it I called it "sort of a combination of Shaw's 'Candida,' the Phaedra legend and 'Lolita' with the genders reversed," and I stand by that. This time around it was nice to be reminded of how exciting and sensual an actress Bebe Neuwirth could be when all I'm seeing of her these days is the hard-as-nails prosecutor in "Law and Order: Trial by Jury," and John Ritter's performance is one of the ones he should be remembered by even though his presence makes one wonder why the movie wasn't called "Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Son." (Actually Ritter's best big-screen performance ever was as the President of the United States in the woefully underrated satire "Americathon," one movie I'd dearly love to see reissued on DVD.) Just two elements of "Tadpole" that bothered me: how did someone who looked so young get into that bar (I suspect the real Aaron Stanford gets carded all the time!); and why did a pretentious intellectual kid who prided himself on his fluency in French read Voltaire in translation instead of the original?
Thirst (2004)
Brilliant anti-capitalist documentary
There are some things so basic to human life that they don't belong in the free-market system, and water is definitely one of them. That's the message of this brilliant documentary, whose heroes are activists fighting to protect the rights of ordinary people to control their water supplies, either through government ownership or direct action (like the so-called "rainwater harvesters" of India, who dig their own ponds to collect rainwater in desert climates and fear that their work will be expropriated by multinational corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi). With human populations increasing and water resources staying about the same, there's a basic question for the future: will water continue to be a readily available human resource, or will it be privatized and become a luxury good controlled by multinational corporations, and will those who can't afford to pay for it be told just to do without and die? "Thirst" could have made an even stronger case against water privatization an examination of what happened when Atlanta privatized its water supply (water bills shot up, quality went down and Atlantans started turning on their taps and getting a brown fluid instead of clean water) would have bolstered the film but as it stands it's quite powerful and impassioned.
Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy (2005)
Typical "Going Hollywood" Movie
In the 1920's they called it "going Hollywood" talented but naïve kid from the sticks gets a big movie deal, becomes an overnight sensation, gets big-headed, blows his money on alcohol (an illegal substance in the U.S. back then) and sex, then either dies young or pulls himself together, gives up the booze and returns to the woman who loved him before he became famous. In 1933 Raoul Walsh directed a film with that title, starring Bing Crosby and Marion Davies, and "Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of 'Mork and Mindy'" could almost be considered a remake. It takes the known facts of Robin Williams' early success and presses them into the familiar cliché mold, with cocaine instead of alcohol and John Belushi as a sort of Mephistopheles to Williams' Faust. Best things here are Chris Diamantopoulos' eerily exact reproduction of the early Robin Williams and some bits of felicitous creativity in the writing (especially when Diamantopoulos as Williams encounters a busker doing him doing Williams and gives him $100).
Ladies Night (2005)
Neat little TV thriller, but I don't believe it
This "Ladies' Night" is a neat little TV thriller, with Paul Michael Glaser appropriately nasty as the villain and Colin Ferguson nicely hunky as the ex-cop turned insurance investigator who goes after him. Director Norma Bailey stages it well and the big action climax is both exciting and suspenseful. (I also liked the open ending in which at least one of the crooks gets away.) But I don't for one moment believe the opening credit that this is "based on a true story." As neatly as Bailey stages it, there's something fundamentally silly about the sequence in which the insurance investigators tail one of the suspects through a mall without noticing that he's also one of their co-workers. True, the Astaire-Rogers "Top Hat" used much the same mistaken-identity gimmick, but one can accept this in a light-hearted musical far more easily than one can in a suspense film.
The Phantom Broadcast (1933)
Great film, and Ralph Forbes is brilliant
I LOVED this film (I saw it on a VHS from Sinister Cinema) and was particularly moved by Ralph Forbes' performance in the lead role of the "hunchback," who (in an eerie foreshadowing of the Milli Vanilli scandal) provides the actual voice for a handsome but non-singing radio star. Forbes achieves the pathos of Lon Chaney, Sr.'s performances in similar roles (he actually worked with Chaney on the 1926 MGM film "Mr. Wu") and it's a real pity Forbes spent most of his career playing silly-ass Englishmen in supporting roles. "Phantom Broadcast" is also noteworthy for its daringly amoral ending (the sort of thing Hollywood only could get away with in the so-called "pre-Code" period of the early 1930's) and as proof that Philip Rosen, who made some of the God-awfullest movies ever made for the later Monogram in the 1940's, had at least two genuinely great films in him (this one and 1934's "Dangerous Corner"). Also, the actual singing voice heard on the soundtrack sounds so much like Russ Columbo's I suspect it IS Columbo on demo records recorded for a music publisher anyone out there know more about who the REAL phantom singer was?
Sensation Hunters (1933)
Great film and probably the first about Howard Hughes
This is an extraordinary movie, one of those quirky little gems that flourished in the days of the studio system and indicates that even an independent studio like Monogram could sometimes achieve high quality. The script is intelligent and at least until Kenneth MacKenna's character gets into his airplane when he's drunk and we KNOW what's going to happen to him it avoids the most obvious movie clichés. (BTW, MacKenna's character a rich man who builds and test-flies his own airplanes is clearly based on Howard Hughes and this is probably the first movie ever made in which a Hughes avatar appears.) Vidor's direction anticipates film noir in general and his own "Gilda," 13 years later, in particular and makes this story of degradation in the Panama cabaret scene live. The acting is appropriate and low-keyed and even the two songs are unusually good. Monogram is a little-regarded company and DID make a lot of lousy films mostly after it was reorganized in 1937 but in the first phase of its existence it produced some of the best indies in Hollywood: this one, "The Thirteenth Guest" (a thriller with Ginger Rogers based on a book by the author of "Scarface"), "The Phantom Broadcast" and the underrated first sound version of "Jane Eyre" with Virginia Bruce (who totally out-acts Joan Fontaine) and Colin Clive.
The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004)
Sam Bicke and 9/11
It's striking that almost no one who's written about this film has commented on the similarity between Sam Bicke's plot and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Ever since 9/11 the Bush administration and the intelligence community have said they shouldn't be faulted for not anticipating the attacks because no one imagined anyone would ever hijack an airliner and use it as a weapon to destroy a building and kill those inside. Yet 27 years earlier someone had planned just that sort of an attack on a sitting U.S. president! Maybe we ought to fire the entire CIA and hire the membership of the Screen Writers' Guild to replace them