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Espionage (1937)
Die Hard stayed in the building; Espionage should've stayed on the train.
I give this a 7 or 8. 'Espionage' focuses on two opposing reporters on a train secretly trying to get a story and their suspicious/quirky fellow passengers who think they're a pair of newlyweds. It's 1937 and an informant leaks the European train schedule of a munitions mogul, Kronsky, to two rival newspapers. The first paper's star reporter is Patricia (Madge Evans) but her passport won't be valid because of a previous story angering many countries and to quote her editor they'd 'throw you in a concentration camp' (I found this an interesting line given the time and place of production). So she steals her boss' passport (which is a dual passport picturing him and his wife). The other paper's star reporter just began his vacation and only wants to spend it with his girl. However the editor finds at his house (in his bed, no less!) a violin-playing author named Ken (Edmund Lowe) whom he sends in his place. Patricia (who dislikes Ken's books) and Ken (who dislikes Patricia's column) meet on the train without revealing who they really are and why they're really there.
Ken has his passport stolen so he pretends to be Patricia's husband (via the passport photo of her boss). Soon the whole trains thinks they're newlyweds due in part to a friendly/busybody passenger from Missouri. When Kronsky's private carriage connects to the train and he visits the dining car everyone on the train becomes interested in him (except for the man from Missouri). Soon there's an assassination attempt..
This movie moves at a fast pace and has some minor mysteries to it in figuring out everyone's motivations but mostly it's a nice comedy with a few clever twists. It's not hilarious but I enjoyed myself while watching it. With about 20 minutes left they get off the train and all mysteries are gone and replaced with mild hijinks (alcohol, impersonations, and fake moustaches). The word 'mild' should mean I was bored and hitting the ffwd button but the script keeps things moving along (the movie's a little over an hour long). The ending is very upbeat and a little flat and the movie definitely loses some of its enjoyment once they get off the train. Performance-wise Ken hams it up a bit but Patricia was pretty good, if a little too straight in a scene or two. It made me wish it was Myrna Loy and William Powell together in this film. I'm surprised I'm rating it so high but I had a good time watching it.
Here are a couple examples of some of the humor. Ken goes to his original car and finds his roommate is a large Turk stifling the room with smoke from his hookah (helps his allergies) and Ken sniffs the air and says 'Oh, vanilla.' Or when Patricia and Ken are dining together and the Turk's sipping soup from his plate Patricia notes 'He's using the wrong spoon.' It's cute but not hilarious.
I soliti ignoti vent'anni dopo (1985)
I can see why no one had bothered to review this title yet.
'Big Deal After 20 Years' starts off with a brief clip of the final frame from the first film, 'Big Deal on Madonna Street'. Tiberio at the end of that one was heading to prison as a free man to pick up his kid who was visiting his inmate wife. I haven't seen the second one but this one, the third and last one, starts with Tiberio getting ready for his release. He's determined to go straight when Peppe, from the previous movies, tries to draw him into a scam involving sneaking contraband money across the border to Yugoslavia. In addition to Tiberio and Peppe, Ferribotte (who now lives with his overbearing daughter) and Tiberio's Wife are the only others from the previous films. Tiberio is also introduced to a doctor who is the son of Dante Crociani (the equipment supplier in the first movie) but instead pinches an elderly patient's cheeks saying 'I remember you when you were a little boy' before being corrected. That's the type of humor this film has when it has any.
The first 25 minutes involve Tiberio's release and discovery that his wife is now with a big furry guy paying the rent and she sold his photography equipment. So Tiberio sleeps in a Peugeot junk yard where his house used to be. To make money he steals flowers from a cemetery but they instantly wilt when he tries to sell them. And then he meets with his mopey son who tells him he's not into women but when asked if he's ever slept with a man he states 'Never!' Tiberio changes his mind and tries to get Peppe to take him into his currency trafficking plan, even dressing as a woman to try and fool him. Peppe's been running a low-level poker game out of a dive motel and sleeps on a cot in the bathroom. After Peppe gets sick, Tiberio spearheads the "plan" and the movie turns into a minor road trip flick. And I lost interest. Nothing much really happens and there aren't enough bits of good dialogue to carry it. They travel with a young single mother with a crazy ex and an old woman who watches soap operas all the time.
There wasn't much plot, humor, character development that made any sense, or general reason why this film was made. My attention wandered many times but all the same it's not terrible. There are some cute moments but sometimes it's too silly and others too dull. I tried to watch it removed from the fantastic first film but it didn't help much. The end is incredibly nonsensical with a pointless murder abruptly leading to the credits rolling and it summed up my feelings about the movie pretty well. What was the point?
The X Files: Alpha (1999)
Zeta.
The opening for Alpha finds two Chinese workers on a freight ship teasing an unseen (except for its eyes) large and angry creature in a crate. After provoking it and hearing it ramming against the crate door it falls silent. One of the workers immediately kicks the side of the crate twice to illicit a response and when he hears nothing says to the other man "I think we killed it"(?!). So they decide to open up the crate(?!!). You can probably guess how well that ends for them. This stupid intro was one of three warning signs for me that this wasn't going to be a very good episode. It was actually worse than I thought it'd be.
The other two warning signs were in re-watching the X-Files after their initial airings this was the only episode of season six I couldn't recall. And seeing that this episode would involved a dog/wolf I assumed it'd be a werewolf episode, which seem to be hard to do well in movies, much less in TV. They're too expensive to do convincingly or without a lot of non-werewolf scenes. But the X-Files is used to doing monsters on a budget so I gave it a go.
One good thing about this episode was Melinda Culea's performance as Karin Berquest. I thought she played the social recluse dog-lover well but the romantic angle they tried to squeeze in between her and Mulder felt forced. Also, she's accused of being full of lies by a nothing-better-to-do-this-episode Scully yet she only lied once to Mulder and it didn't have anything to do with him. And her plan to kill the Alpha dog/wolf made little sense unless she has Cirque Du Soleil level acrobatic skills that were never mentioned.
I thought the close-ups of the evil dog/wolf's face were pretty terrifying but by the sixth or seventh time they got pretty old and repetitive (reminded me of the repeated showings of the evil car headlights in the movie Christine). Also the dog/wolf changing into a St. Bernard is never explained. Can it shape-shift into any canine? How? Why? The Dr. Ian Detweiler character was terrible. "You kill that dog and I'll kill you!" He's said to have brought back the dog/wolf though what that means exactly is hard to say given the incredibly obvious reveal of his role in things. Which also lead me to wonder why he keeps showing up investigating. There's nothing for him to investigate and he certainly had no reason to pretend to be doing it. As another reviewer mentioned the werewolf man's clothes are sometimes on and sometimes off after a transformation. And rather importantly why the dog/wolf is uncharacteristically killing is never explained. Claiming his territory is briefly tossed up as a reason but since it's four killings span many miles and some of the victims are non-threats that theory doesn't make much sense.
Overall this was one of the worst X-Files episodes starring Mulder and Scully maybe slightly above the one where they spend the episode staring at TV screens in NASA and the one with those crazy cats in the sewer (though at least that last one made me laugh). It makes me wonder if this helped lead to the X-Files' ratings decline as the episode that preceded Alpha, Aqua Mala, is usually viewed unfavorably and the following two episodes weren't very good either (Trevor and Milagro).
Down on the Farm (1920)
Too many title cards, too few stampeding fowl..
Down on the Farm was a pleasant enough silent comedy that opens with a farmer and his daughter tending to their farm in the morning. A lot of the gags revolve around animals like a stampede of ducks or a dog filling up a bucket of water or drinking milk from the cow the farmer's milking. It's a different type of humor than I'm not used to in comedic silent shorts and I enjoyed it. But it quickly becomes more traditional with objects spilling and people falling and fighting.
The plot that develops involve a seedy landlord, who earlier tries to rape a married tenant, becoming interested in marrying the farmer's daughter. She's doesn't want to but her father is for it so she creates a non-existent previous marriage to successfully fend the landlord off. Unfortunately when she's about to marry the laborer she loves said fake marriage results in some angry complications. This only worsens when the seedy landlord finds out the farmer's daughter is about to come into some money. Along the way there's a scene with a cat chasing a mouse chasing the scared farmer's daughter onto some shelves, a dog saving a toddler from falling into a river, and some careless swinging of an ax in a general store.
I liked the pleasant humor of the opening but after that it became fairly standard with only a few highlights. It also slows down a bit when the guy whom the daughter claimed to have previously married shows up (though it's followed by a decent, if brief, chase scene with two cars and a motorcycle). Furthermore this short might have more title cards than any I've seen before. They're usually only a single line and sometimes explain things that don't need explaining or state what someone's said but mostly they're simply not too funny one-liners. It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't so many and they were placed better, but it really kills the movie's flow and humor when there are lame sayings inserted into the middle of chases. I was surprised when one of the fisticuffs results in a character getting a rather bloody mouth. I've seen it before in a few shorts but usually not so that most of the bottom half of the face is black. I should also add that the ending was really cute and gave me a little laugh.
Outlander (2008)
Thor would know what to do..
SOME SPOILERS! This movie about a spaceman/alien who crash lands with a ferocious monster in the time of the vikings kept my interest for the most part but it's nothing I'd want to see again. It didn't seem like a movie released in theaters. The cinematography lacked color so even though the sets were well done they still looked bland. And unfortunately the CGI effects were blurry probably due to too low a budget for the subject matter. The monster was alright and had a neat hunting mechanism but its overall design wasn't terribly inspired. The spaceman who lands in this ancient time seems to forget about all of his spaceman technology he had beforehand until the end. The love interest who is shown to be a tough princess and a great fighter spends the end of the movie screaming a lot and getting kidnapped. Ron Perlman shows up to be angry and then goes away. The king spends most of the movie talking, nearly dying, talking, nearly dying again. I don't know how he lived so long without the spaceman to save him. I did find you could make an intoxicating drinking game outta this flick if you took a drink every time somebody says 'Freya' (the princess' name). And I liked that the rival suitor for the princess actually had a lot of character and wasn't just a jealous cliché. This felt like a movie that could've been really cool but ended up somewhere in the middle.
Song of the Thin Man (1947)
A dried out Thin Man..
This is the last of the Thin Man movies but the first in the series I didn't like. I've found these movies work best when Nick and Nora are together as much as possible. The appeal for me is their banter and chemistry with each other and their paired interactions with others. But in Song they're rarely together in the first half of the movie and in the second half they're just sort of beside each other. Myrna Loy's delivery is still perfect but the writers forgot to give her anything funny or clever to say. She's in the background for most of the movie. And William Powell's delivery is a little tired. He's a little slower, less energetic than in the other entries. There's also a lot of musical interludes and a strange lack of alcohol consumption in this film. The lack of drinking in the previous movie was a funny on-going gag but here it's just noticeably absent. In fact this really could just be any movie starring Loy and Powell instead of a Thin Man flick. But at least Asta's still cute.
The Spanish Prisoner (1997)
Rebecca Pidgeon's casting is a twist I could do with out..
All the positive reviews on here had me looking forward to seeing the twists and turns of The Spanish Prisoner. But instead I watched a movie where the only one who doesn't know what going to happen is the unlikeable main character. The plot isn't predictable from the outset but you'll see the twists coming 5 to 10 minutes before they get there. At times its interesting to see the smaller details of the set-up being put into motion but for me, that's not enough. None of these characters are likable. The dialogue is stale and reads like a play straining to be overly clever. The acting of Rebecca Pidgeon, who plays more or less the love interest, is wretched. Like Ed Woods movie wretched. And there are some questions/plot gaps regarding the level of involvement of the FBI (a minor complaint). Oh and this film ends with one of the weakest final lines I've ever heard.
The Star Chamber (1983)
Could've been a good thriller..
I read a review on Netflix that mentioned there was a menacing mood that permeated throughout The Star Chamber. After 52 minutes, when the plot was finally underway, I was still waiting for something suspenseful. It's not a horrible movie, it's just dull and seemed to go out of its way to avoid action. All the vigilante scenes happen in 30 seconds with some unknown sunglass-wearing white guy. And when they uncover three suspects behind one of the movie's main criminal cases? We're TOLD about their arrest by a third party. There were a lot of little things that didn't quite work (for me, at least)-- The first loophole that Douglas rules on made no sense both logically and legally. All (yes ALL) of the criminals in this movie, no matter their crime, are ridiculously strung out on drugs. The top secret star chamber is located in somebody's house in a room lined with open windows. Yeah I'm being nitpicky, but I was really disappointed by this one, especially given the cast. And why couldn't the judges stop that last hit? They clearly had time and there was no explanation as to how it would compromise their identities. Anyway, hope this helps somebody. Thanks.
Moonlight (2002)
It's a distinct film with a lot missing.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS: I gave this movie 5 stars because it's equal parts good and bad. This is a road trip movie about first love between two teenagers from different worlds.. except one doesn't speak English. In fact, he doesn't seem to do much of anything except get shot, look confused, and then look angry. I found it difficult to feel much for him. It was a shame he was forced into such a terrible situation, but no real attempt was made to develop him beyond that. Fortunately, more is revealed about the girl's personality. The girl's parents are a little odd and don't seem to mind having a black leather jacket clad gangster wander around their property at night. Half the gangsters looking for the kids in this movie disappear as it goes on and we only learn the fate of a couple of them with the main gangster only bookending the film and completely disappearing in the middle. But there wasn't a lot to their characters anyway (though it would've been nice to at least know what became of them or see them get their comeuppance). The drug use by the boy and girl didn't bother me (it didn't look like they were enjoying themselves very much there at the end) but the nudity did surprise me. And the tragic scene immediately after the sex made me laugh aloud. I couldn't help it, it seemed too conveniently dramatic to be taken seriously. I did like the menstruation theme that ran through the whole film and thought it was cleverly used at times and I thought the very end was interesting. Overall, if there had been more dialogue and more happenings on the road trip I would've liked it better.