billys

I don't know how to explain what it is about Jaws 3 that I really, really don't like. The bad special effects, acting, direction, writing, etc. have all been mentioned to death. And yes, it was a really big dumb mistake to go all 3-D gimmicky. That's probably why they picked Joe Alves, the production designer from the first Jaws movie as well as others (Escape From New York, for example, another very grimy-dark and somewhat shoddy looking movie) to direct--the guy was obviously better with everything other than the human portions of the scenery. Or maybe not. The whole movie looks very flat and colorless...lifeless. It's strange.

No, I think what really kills this movie for me is that seems very...I don't know...UNPLEASANT. There are ways to take even the most misanthropic horror, the silliest and most glaringly fake special effects, and make it compelling, interesting, and somehow cool to watch. It's a very subtle thing which I can't put my finger on. Jaws 3 doesn't come close. As ridiculous as the movie is, it tries to be relentlessly dark, and there are hints of a kind of nastiness or something which doesn't scare me, or even horrify me, but just make me feel very uncomfortable instead, like I need to take a shower afterwards. Perhaps it tries to be too literal when it begs to be stylized. Perhaps it's too dead serious when it's obviously claptrap. There some kind of jarring collision going on, something isn't working right. Basically the thing is the visual equivalent of indigestion.

I will admit that certain things like sound effects work almost too well--the crunching as another vapid Floridian becomes fish food, the muffled underwater groans and shouts. But it's not horrifying in a good, entertaining way, you know? There is one very inventive shot, I also have to admit--the one prick cameraman diver gets eaten, and you watch the poor bastard getting chewed from INSIDE the shark's gullet.

I think I may have an answer. It seems like unlike many horror movies, which simply like to show off gore effects and photogenic ways to kill people, Jaws 3 seems to revel specifically in helpless suffering, prolonging people's pain while they die. Even that poor fish at the beginning doesn't just get eaten...the severed head floats there half-alive for half a minute, uselessly working its mouth, just to drive the point home. It's a distinctly sadistic movie. Perhaps we need to coin a new movie genre for films like this: loathing movies. As such Jaws 3 would probably rank up there with The Passion Of The Christ or something as one of the all-time greats. It's a crappie (pun intended), extremely unpleasant movie to watch overall, but it does achieve its dubious goal unnervingly well. I will give it that.

Knight Rider was one of the staples of my TV diet as a preteen back in the wonderful (?) '80s. The main attraction to this young car fanatic was that...CAR. I swear, back then, that jet black Trans Am was awe-inspiring. It wasn't an '80s car in the sense that we know now, but an *'80s car*...new, ultra-high-tech, computerized! All those flashing buttons and lights and monitors were, like, so sophisticated. It even had a steering wheel that was a cross between an airplane's and a dragster's. Never mind that this Knight Industries 2000 talked with a voice like a somewhat more streetwise version of HAL 9000. Wow!

It still has an air of futurism in my memories--it seems like it should still seem fresh now in the year 2004--but then of course I haven't seen it since its original run ended. Maybe better that I shouldn't, or risk ruining my memories.

What I do remember, outside of having a minor crush on Bonnie and the chemistry between all the leads, is that as much as I enjoyed this show it had a distinct thread of creepiness running through the whole show. Technology had part of it--remember KARR, KITT's evil doppelganger? Or the episode where someone's voice had been cut apart and "reassembled" to say something different? But what I remember the most was the explosions. Funny how many shows I liked back then had lots of things blowing up (like The A-Team, another Universal TV favorite).

Knight Rider's creeped me out for some reason...the one non-KITT image I remember over any other from this show, for some reason, is a large stack of fuel drums set ablaze by bad guys in a factory or airplane hangar, and a long, long scene of these drums exploding and shooting into the air like rockets, accompanied by a repetitive stock explosion sound effect right into the commercial break. I dunno, I still get the willies thinking about that one. Then again, there's that Lear Jet getting blown up in the opening credits...that one WAS kinda cool.

Very strange what twenty years can do to one's memories of a show...some things are cystal clear, others (like the stories) I'm not sure I ever really paid attention to. Such is TV. KR was one of my faves once upon a time.

I first saw this movie as a somewhat hacked up, scratchy, blotchy, variably-colored, crapophonic late movie on a then-independent station (now a FOX affiliate) when I was a teenager in the '80s, and that is still how I remember it. Even the gorgeous print available on home video doesn't dull "Jessica"'s ability to make you feel really uneasy.

Make no mistake, horror fans brought up on Freddy and Jason are going to think this is supremely lame. There are no wisecracking psychos, unless you count Mariclare Costello's mildly swaggery hippie-vampire Emily, and there is very little in the way of gore, no nudity to speak of, hardly any profanity, and no ass-kicking. It's SLOW. So what gives?

I'll tell you what gives. This movie is SCARY. Not gross, but scary. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but there is a thread that runs under everything that put you slightly off balance and makes you feel icky inside, something that makes even broad daylight seem deathly black and menacing. Credit Bob Baldwin with some nicely atmospheric photography. I'll say this much: a lot of it is in the sound. From the constant wind to the creaks in the farmhouse, from the plaintive minor-key acoustic guitar plucking to the WONDERFUL, unsettling electronic noises by synthesizer pioneer Walter Sear-one of my absolute favorite aspects of this movie-what you hear is almost as important as what you see (or don't see, in this case). The rough edges caused by a miniscule budget make for plenty of continuity errors for the movie buffs to catch, but also somehow make it all seem that much more real.

You keep waiting to be impressed with the slick Tom Savini or Rob Bottin special effects and there are none, you could be watching a documentary road-movie-gone-amuck the way "Jessica" is shot.

And what about Jessica herself? As played by Zohra Lampert, who I believe was primarily known as a comedic actress and did Broadway a lot, she is the portrait of a pointedly average lady who is coming apart at the seams after a breakdown and can't seem to escape from whatever it is that drove her off the cliff. Lampert projects frailty, indecision, optimism and despair, and above all paranoid terror, but managing to keep herself from falling into cliché hysterics and making her character absolutely believable, even if her inner-voice monologues sound pretty hokey. Someone else mentioned that her performance was Oscar material...well, if they had a separate Oscar for B-movies she'd have won hands-down for 1971.

Surrounding Lampert are a bunch of equally talented character actors you've seen many other places, not given as much to do. Barton Heyman (the doctor in The Exorcist) comes across well as the somewhat asshole husband who's had it up to here; Kevin O'Connor appropriately spacey as a laid-back quasi-hippie friend of the family, Alan Manson aggressively square as the local antique dealer, and Gretchen Corbett (yup, from "The Rockford Files") ethereal but pitiable as a mysterious mute girl wandering through the countryside like a warning ghost. Most interesting is Jessica's friend/nemesis, red-haired hippie chick Emily. She's charismatic, hip, funny, far-out, and very pretty...except that she's maybe a shade too pale of skin...and she scares the bejesus out of poor Jess. And those awful things she does, well, does she really? Mariclare Costello plays Emily perfectly; I really wish she had done more major movie work as she is a very appealing actress, although I understand she was a regular on "The Waltons."

The problem with all these characters is that, compared to Jessica, they seem artificial. In particular, they are all almost, but not quite, sorta-hippies--they're too old, and they seem to square for the hip dialogue. Either miscasting, or bad writing. The clumsy insertion of every horror cliché in the book (seance...check; empty rocking chair rocking...check; jump out of the silent shadows...check) doesn't help, nor does some pretty hokey dialogue. It's too bad, because there's a lot of good, cerebral stuff in here, subtext, but it seems like a sloppy first draft script rather than a polished, tight, finished one. Given more work, the script could have been A-list.

Finally, credit must be given to director John Hancock for pulling these uneven ingredients together and making a masterful job of it. The guy hasn't made many films ("Prancer" is probably his best-known), but he certainly is a talented fellow and he pulled off a major hat trick with this bleak little chiller.

One more thing, people: lay off the '70s accoutrements. Yes, you can make fun of Heyman's sideburns and O'Connor's greasy mop-I'd join you-but does it really make a difference?

Fans of Matsumoto probably know him best from either his original mangas, or the mostly made-for-TV adaptations like "Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers" and "Captain Harlock." The man definitely had his own little enterprise there, with his own vision and style; for a while in the '70s he was arguable THE star creator of anime & manga (like Osama Tezuka before him, and Hayao Miyazaki after). I've never seen his stories in their original episodic TV form, just the impressive and emotional but maddeningly fragmented movie version of "Yamato" (edited down from an entire TV series into roughly two-odd hours). There is no such problem with "Galaxy Express 999," a feature film from 1979.

Besides a cohesive storyline--involving scrappy young Tetsuro Hoshino taking a trip on the eponymous spacegoing locomotive along with enigmatic lady-in black Maetel, and kicking some major mechanical butt along the way for his dead mother--the movie has all the trademarks of Matsumoto at his best: wonderfully slinky old-school character designs, fanciful details and settings, a stylized, distinctly "vintage-futuristic" flavor (rather than the grungy postmodern cyberpunk variety made popular by "Blade Runner" and, in anime, "Bubblegum Crisis"); Matsumoto's obsession with vintage terrestrial vehicles streaking through space (the 999 is an old-fashioned steam locomotive-turned-spaceship, the Yamato is a resurrected WWII Japanese battleship-turned spaceship...one wonders if Leiji ever considered a "Galactic Land-Yacht Edsel"); even Leijiverse regulars Captain Harlock, one of the coolest anime characters ever, and Queen Emeralda figure into the story. A scene where the good Captain forces a belligerent android to down a bottle of rust-inducing milk is a classic--I can hear Japanese movie audiences cheering.

Above everything else, "Galaxy Express 999" offers a kind of poetry in the imagery and the story, and an enormous reserve of humanity and unadulterated drama, that touches on very deeply embedded emotional buttons. Like the Yamato movies, I find myself feeling close to tears in several places. This is no empty thrill-ride anime where the mecha are the stars, but a bona-fide sci-fi drama featuring effectively "real people" with real concerns and intense feelings that radiate directly out to you--what the best anime are all about. See this one, definitely. The style (including that endearing '70s-rock end theme) may strike some younger otaku as quaint or even hard to deal with, but those who stay on the Galaxy Express 999 to the end of the line will be glad they did, experiencing a true anime classic, from a master of the genre, that has survived the test of time.

It's a shame that John Schlesinger arguably never again made a movie as thrillingly good as this dramedy starring John Voight and Dustin Hoffman; he demonstrates a complete mastery of the film-making craft through then-cutting-edge techniques like quick cutting, playing with color, montage, and (my favorite) some very unnerving electronic sound effects and music (courtesy of legendary composer and studio engineer Walter Sear). Parts of this movie look like something you would as easily find in an MTV video as in an avant-garde cinema.

His main on screen talent here are the very young future father of Angelina Jolie as Joe Buck, a good looking but pathetically naive Texan who hops a Greyhound bus to New York City in hopes of making a fortune servicing the sexual needs of rich "society type" women. Once he arrives, decked out in his cowboy costume, cowhide suitcase, and transistor radio, he immediately finds the city to be...inhospitable. Frustrated and broke, he finally makes a friend--Enrico Salvatore "Ratso" Rizzo (Hoffman), a put-upon gimp who offers to hook Joe up with a friend. For a nominal service fee, of course. Turns out, after Ratso's run off with his money, that Joe's been screwed once again--cue frightening revenge/unpleasant flashback montage--and now, frustrated, broke, AND homeless, he turns to hustling very un-society-type guys, who can't or won't pay either. Somehow, Joe runs into Ratso again. First overjoyed, then apoplectic, he demands his $20 back, but then gets more than he bargained for: Ratso invites Joe to come stay with him. The rest of the movie documents the misadventures of these two lost souls as they try to survive the cruel and grungy cesspool that is (was) New York City, or at least long enough to get the ailing Ratso down to his personal paradise, Florida.

Midnight Cowboy paints a sharp portrait of the grime and degradation that characterized NYC at the time; with tons of neat little details to fill in the blanks (the payphone that doesn't work, the psychedelic party, the snippets of radio broadcasts). If you remember nothing else of this movie, you'll remember the smoky, grungy atmosphere. But there is so much more, not the least of which are the actors and their memorably colorful characters: Hoffman's cagey, streetwise con artist, Voight's time-bomb bumpkin, Sylvia Miles famous middle-aged "gorgeous chick," an unrecognizable Bob Balaban as a young gay john, Barnard Hughes as Joe's unfortunate final john, Brenda Vaccaro as his REALLY gorgeous next-to-final client, John McGiver as Ratso's "friend O'Daniel," and last but not least the one dude who played Ratso's sneery, effeminate gay tormenter in his opening scene.

These odd people all demonstrate that vivid color is often hidden in all the gray squalor and the overall effect is often disturbing but always intriguing. Not to mention that friendship and bonding often happen between the unlikeliest parties under the most challenging circumstances. Ultimately it's a story of hope and redemption, although at a price that's considerably more than a nominal service fee. Very poignant and disturbing all at once.

This is going to be short, as I've just seen one and only one episode, "Carded & Discarded," less than an hour ago in fact. My brother and sister-in-law wanted me to see the hilarious renditions of "Eighteen" by the guidance counselor dude, but something else was going on while I was watching. They were afraid I wouldn't get it like they did, seeing as how they were high schoolers in 1980. Instead, I got it all too well. The cultural references might have been different, but the basic culture of high school remains the same, and the late '80s were not much different from the early '80s as depicted in Freaks & Geeks.

For anyone who's been through the meat grinder that is high school (except maybe for rich boarding school brats), I can't imagine anyone not seeing themselves or someone they knew in this cast, and the recognition of those emotions come flooding back. And it isn't exactly fun. But it is POWERFUL. Neal, Bill (another Bill! Ha!) and Sam--the Geeks--could easily have been three of the guys in my circle of friends back at Linden; I was surprised to find myself silently cheering on this bunch of fictional young TV characters as they befriended the blazing-hot (but exceedingly nice) new girl in school, and feeling my heart sink as they did when she decided to sit at the cheerleaders' lunch table--even if, as she pointed out, it wasn't like she was moving back to Florida...I knew how vast that three-table gulf was. I felt with them. I NEVER do that with characters in TV shows. EVER. Wow.

No so with the other half of the cast. The Freaks still strike me as too standard-issue TV beautiful for my taste (Linda Cardellini herself definitely is, but I'm not complaining, yowza...or is that Zoinks! hehe). In my school the freaks would have been the mullet-wearing metalheads with black t-shirts and high top Reeboks (some of whom I was friendly with on account of my being a rock fanatic and aspiring guitarist), not these pouting faux-rebellious suburbanites. I may just be reading it wrong. But this is network TV, people. Obviously I'm supposed to be identifying with Lindsay since she's the prettiest, the smartest, the most normal, and the prettiest (did I mention that she's pretty? or top-billed?). I don't. She wouldn't have given me the time of day, I think. The only reason she and her pals qualify and Freaks is the presence of the cheerleaders and others even more glaringly white-bread than them. Sorry, Linda; I would have preferred you as Velma, hanging out with the Geeks.

And let's not forget that in Freaks And Geeks there is not (at least in the little I saw) a single black kid, and the whole cultural tension that creates. My school was 1) poor, 2) inner city, and 3) predominantly black. There's a kettle full of *real* dramatic possibilities...one that network TV will never touch, especially if they were frightened off by something as white middle-class as this stuff.

Okay, so I can't relate 100% to a show about a bunch of white suburban kids at a nice high school. Call me an unrepentant prole giving the finger to Average America. As I said, the basic culture of high school doesn't change as much as the details. And unlike other execrable crap that is supposed to be about "real teens" and their problems (90210, anyone? Dawson's f***ing Creek?) Freaks And Geeks doesn' t make me want to go kick somebody's ass. It does bring back painful memories, yes. But in its honest, heartwarming way it also helps me to remember 1) that it's okay to be an outcast, and sometimes we are the most human kids of all;

2) that I not only made it through that hellhole, but ended up okay in the end anyway. It's also done what few other shows have managed in a long time: I want to go back and watch more.

For those who are curious: I went to Linden McKinley HS in Columbus OH between 1987 and 1991.

Why is it that environmentalist (or any issues-based) entertainment has to be so heavy-handedly didactic? I have no problems with the message of SIlent Running per se, although in retrospect it is a little naive, simplistic (they didn't know about things like global warming, obviously). It has its heart in the righ place, but like most propaganda it's more concerned with beating the viewer over his complacent, hypocritical head with THE MESSAGE. Propagandists are rarely also good dramatists. They don't realize that for a message to be effective, touching, etc., you have to care about the characters and what's happening to them. Here, the real main character is the forest; it's what you end up caring for, crying over when it's being nuked or shot out into deep space for eternity. In a movie that's not a good thing, because it means that the humans who do all the acting are all detestable, as they're all ciphers, pawns in service of THE MESSAGE.

Dramatically the movie is on about the level of a high-school writing class project: the main human character is essentially a thinly disguised mouth for the author (or authors as it were, including the same Steven Bochco who later created LA Law), the others simplified objects of self-righteous hate or cute sidekicks who serve little function outside of giving said main character something to do for an hour after said objects of hate have been killed off. Bruce Dern as our demented hippie astronaut has absolutely all the personality and charm in this movie, as well as all the carefully written speeches and dialogue, but his shtick gets tiring after a while. He suffers from the Omega Man syndrome: one guy talking to himself is rarely interesting outside of the theatre, and his "costars" barely qualify as people (they're more like cardboard figures that offer repugnantly ignorant wisecracks). Of course the little robots are charming and almost have semblances of personalities, but all they do is waddle around, and if pressed, play cards and stitch up leg wounds.

I'm not sure that the movie's logic is all sound. Evil capitalists in enviromental movies tend to do things like push a button to destroy all the forests in one shot, or dump toxic waste into the ocean in plain view of everyone. And so they do here. No reasons given, no rationalizations, no subtlety. One can imagine evil laughter after the radio clicks off (to the radio op's credit, he does lament with a brief "God help us all"). As someone else suggested, why not just leave the forest bubbles in orbit? No, dispassionately nuking the forests is just so much more...evil.

Pigs! (What if the dumb fatheads had to confront the ecological consequences of defoliation back on Earth? There would have been some dramatic possibilites.) Besides, the movie's full of bad science. Gravity in space? Every place on Earth being 75 degrees?

I will say that where the movie does shine is in the production design department. Silent Running definitely does not scream "early '70s" visually, or any particular time period. It has the kind of austeure fuctional look you find in industry and the military. Doug Trumbull has always had a wonderful eye for timeless visual design and applies it well here, so a movie from 1971 looks as if it could just as easily have been made in 2001 (hehe). Speaking of which, it is too bad he didn't think to include any of his famous simulated "computer graphics".

Finally music: Peter Schickele (the PDQ Bach guy) supplied most of the incidental music, which is not bad, if a little unusual for a movie. At the other end of the spectrum is Joan Baez's cooing the theme song over and over. The insrumental version under the opening credits actually tug at my heart strings; every time Joan sings along with it I start wishing that Trumbull had hired Grand Funk Railroad instead (Mark Farner, after all, was in his messaianic save-the-world phase at the time).

All that said, when it all boils down, the movie has a payoff that makes the preceding 90-odd minutes worth it. The shot of the bubble floating off into deep space with the little robot critter watering whats left of Earth's plant life is enormously moving, even with Joan Baez singing under it. One wishes that the whole movie was as quietly and simply dramatic as that final scene.

Final assessment: a curio from a curious era in both filmmaking and environmentalism. Not a great movie, but an admirable try done in by putting message over meaning.

This is a personal recollection.

I only have vague memories of watching reruns of the $6M Man as a teeny tiny tot, but the overall impression I have is of being seriously creeped out (something that also happened with another '70s Universal sci-fi/action/adventure show, The Incredible Hulk).

However, I remember with relative crystal clarity, filtered through the prismatic eyes of an overimaginative five-year-old and the ensuing twenty-five years of psychological fermentation, the episiode "Day of the Robot," an early first season episode guest starring John Saxon as a "bad" android with a removable face and that infamous "Fembot" makeup appliance underneath...I dunno, that was pretty intense IMO. The cheapness of the special effects somehow made it even scarier. Add to those a good unhealthy dose of endless slow-motion photography and weird electroni sound effects, and you have an episode with a climax literally just like a bad nightmare.

Such is my only vivid memory of what is considered one of the best, most innovative sci-fi shows of the '70s.

I'll leave it for others to provide detailed and expert comments about The $6M Man. I'm *still* hesitant to watch the show after all these years, based solely on infantile bad memories of one episode that would probably make me bust my gut laughing nowadays.. Even though I dig sci-fi I must not have been the kind of kid the folks at Universal TV had in mind.

This was one of the shows that made up my afternoon routine as a grade-schooler in the early to mid '80s. "CHiPs Patrol" as the syndicated reruns were tagged, played every day at 4 pm, in their scratchy 16mm glory, on our local NBC affiliate, and for a little car-fixated youngster like me, it was like...well, like a car crash played in slow-motion. Literally. Set to bad disco music. The whole thing was so outrageously bad that I couldn't turn away. All the impossiblly stupid motorists doing impossibly stupid things on the sunny LA freeways, invariably ending up in a bloodless, perfectly timed explosion of the said automobile's fuel tank, held me rapt. Ah, the explosions. Large, chrome laden '70s cars flipped through air, jumping *through* telephone poles, turned into piles of twisted sheetmetal, or even just sitting there on the asphalt broken down...somehow they'd ALWAYS end up exploding spectacularly (except when they'd land in someone's swimming pool...damn physics!) with disco-horror music on the TV speaker. Even if it's a diesel powered school bus (which by definition can't explode) it's gonna explode as soon as Ponch and John courageously escort the last bowl-haircitted '70s child to safety.

Did I mention Ponch and John? Or rather Ponchenjohn? I almost forgot about them. These two suntanned, good-looking-in-a-70s-kind-of-way motorcycle cops were the viewers' guides through this wacky world of nonstop car crashes. They seemed reasonably okay, as did all their identically dressed CHP colleagues, rescuing vapid motorists when they weren't comically discussing Ponch's impending hot date or the practical birthday joke they were planning to spring on John. But the two storylines rarely mingled. Nothing of real emotional or dramatic depth ever happened. At the end of the closing credits, as the afterimage of Ponch's Pearl Drop smile begins to fade from your retina, all you can think of is: "Man, that was a beautiful '71 Trans Am they blew up."

In other words:

Mindless eye candy with a wonderfully plastic '70s sheen. Don't miss it!

I can't quite fathom the hostility this movie is attracting from '90s-'00s viewers; they of all people, nurtured on a steady diet of MTV and pop-culture-recycling media hits, should see The Groove Tube for what it is: not just the prototype for Saturday Night Live, but also the spiritual predecessor to modern items like That '70s Show to Boogie Nights. They all seem to miss the point, concentrating on the badly dated early '70s comedy (which is still valuable from a historical point of view) and shoddy production values. Get real...this stuff is about as accurate a reflection of its time and place (the New York/New Jersey underground, circa 1973) as anything the hip young tyros with their digital camcorders are doing these days. The gritty, low budget feel of this thing is more visceral than about any movie I can think of outside of Last House On The Left (and of course, if you want to see a REALLY bad movie with REALLY lousy attempts at humor, see that one, from the director of Scream, of course). The TV/movie/commercial parodies are spot-on brilliant IMO; on the small screen, you can forget that you're watching a movie and easily imagine that you have a long-lost tape from an early '70s VCR that was tuned to a network in an alternate universe. The comedy, such as it is, is secondary to me; The Groove Tube's real attractions are its acute observations of the details of TV and its capturing of its zeitgeist to perfection.

BEST BITS: the opening 2001: A Space Odyssey parody/frolic in the meadow sequence (not only brilliantly funny, but one of the most exhuberant openers in film, right up there with Hi, Mom! and Mean Streets); Kramp TV Kitchen; Roy & Babs; The Dealers (too long, but cool in how it snakes its way to its punch line); Butz Beer; The Fingers; Safety Sam the talking prick; Lionel Elgin and his ho, aka Richard Belzer in blackface drag; the various Uranus Corporation ads.

SO-SO: Ko-Ko The Clown, most of the Channel 1 Evening News, Sex Olympics (a porn loop by any other name); "Mumbles" (too topical and kinda pointless); "Just You, Just Me" (totally out of place).

IMHO.

The Weekend Specials were sometimes good, sometimes crap, and I rarely watched regularly. Generally I'd stick around long enough to see what this week's story would be, and then, washed out and headachey from four or more straight hours of watching jumpy animation on a black and white TV, I'd go off to have breakfast. So the distinctive theme music and animation were my signal that Saturday morning was over...but oh, what great music and animation it was! Like a flourishing coda to a Bach concerto, in fact. Even though it wasn't one of the shows that I stayed around to watch, it was nevertheless probably more ingrained in my memories of Saturday mornings than anything else, except for maybe the Bugs/Roadrunner Show, In The News, and ABC's various between-show thingies (Schoolhouse Rock, the "Bod Squad" segments...)

Ahh, so THIS is what everyone was talking about, this Harry Potter chap and his movie. I'll keep it short and sweet since I went to the 9:45 showing and came out at 12:30, thus am sleepy and still recovering.

Daniel Radcliffe may be the nominal star of the movie, and a very appealing and talented kid he is, but make no mistake, the real stars of Harry Potter are the production design and the special effects. Therein lies the problem: the effects and design are so magnificently, elaborately overwhelming and omnipresent that they almost shove the story and characters off the screen (which I haven't read in original novel form, although I probably should). They pop and slither all over the screen, saying "look at me!" Now, the sets and design are fabulous--someone deserves an Academy award for creating such an awesomely detailed (to quote Kael) fantasy world. But the CGI effects, which took a dozen or more studios and probably 80% of the end credits, are the standard Hollywood-type eye candy IMO. Often clever, but too damn much of it, and usually pretty fake looking. In fantasy, I prefer *not* seeing all the snazzy and expensive effects stuck right in my face, one after the other, as if they don't trust me to get the hint on my own. But this IS a big budget movie we're talking about here...gotta spend that money somehow. Thank Goodness they didn't add dumb sound effects a'la Disney.

There IS a story in here, though, and people. Everyone does as well as they can with their roles...Dan Radcliffe is definitely a spot-on lookalike of the illustrated Harry Potter on millions of book covers worldwide, and the kid can act pretty well too, although we get way too many reaction shots of him looking awestruck and flashing that Mary Lou Retton grin of his :-D. Rupert Grint is probably the bigger discovery, though; he's got a ton of appeal and great comic timing, looking and acting like a very young John Lennon. Emma Watson is an incredibly adorable, pretty girl who will no doubt have a bright future in movies ahead of her if she can learn to stop bobbing her head with each word. Tom Felton puts in a delightfully sneery turn as a preadolescent cross between Alex Winter and Rutger Hauer. As for the adult actors, they're great thespians in the British stage tradition, but I mistook a lot of them for other actors: Alan Rickman fooled me into thinking he was a magically de-aged David Warner, and I thought I saw Madge Ryan as the broom-riding coach. As for Johns Hurt and Cleese and Richard Harris, I missed them totally! Wow. The big bearded fellow and those absurdly nasty Potter relatives are also memorable.

Ah, but the story...intriguing. Entertaining. Occasionally exciting. But took SO long to get going. I realize that you have to establish this whole other world and all, but could we condense it a bit? Too many sidetracks into things (read the Quiggleball-or-whatever-it-was-called match) that looked cool but didn't advance the story at all. A bit sluggish in spots.

Final word: a very entertaining 2 1/2 hours, and a good advertisement for the Harry Potter books and for the effects studios. Not deep, not thought provoking, certainly not a masterpiece, but fun, pretty to look at, and a hell of a lot better overall than Disney's junk. And no product placements either!

I remember seeing this on a local-TV Sunday matinee as a kid and bawling my eyes out at the end, when Chuck Heston gets impaled on a sharp stick. Yup, it was that traumatic.

Years later I saw it again (on a local-TV late movie show) it was the beginning twenty minutes or so (and the first ten) that transfixed me. The scenes of an eerily deserted Los Angeles circa 1971 (and those cool brand new 1971 Fords) were some of the most effective I'd seen up to that point, and are still incredible.

It is only when the other players are introduced that The Omega Man starts it's descent into cheese. First comes perennial Mission: Impossible bad guy Anthony Zerbe and his black-robed, white-faced Family, who are such a bunch of hams that it's impossible to take them really seriously. They speak in a convoluted pseudo-liturgical lingo that reminds one of too many bad movies about witchcraft, and they gleefully chant "More! More books! Burn them all!" while pillaging a library. Then we realize that Heston is NOT in fact the last untainted human on the planet. Why, right nearby is a bunch of VERY HIP looking and sounding hippies, with enough heavy ordinance to wage their own jihad against The Man. Leader of this counter-Family is tough chick Rosalind Cash, who if one squints at could pass for Pam Grier. That means several things in terms of the movie: Chuck now has a love interest (a then-racy interracial one at that!), there are more people to fight/be killed, Chuck now has someone to chat with besides himself and his bust of Caesar, and the movie as a whole loses almost all its steam. The lonely fight for survival promised in the opening minutes becomes diluted when Chuck has all this help, you know?

I've never read Matheson's original story, so I can't comment on how true the screenplay is to it. I can say that it seems to go out of its way to make all the good guys sound hip, and the baddies sound like monks gone amuck. Occasionally clever, occasionally dumb, but not very realistic in any case. Chuck's sneering one-liners aimed at no one in particular eventually gets on your nerves, although he does deliver yet another in a long line of Classic Heston Shouts: "There is no phone ringing, dammit!!!" I really do wish they had explored Heston's and Zerbe's characters more, their contradictary natures and their not-so-hidden madness, and the moral questions represented by "good guy" Heston, a former Army doctor who carries a machine gun, and "bad guy" Zerbe, driven by self-righteous rage against "the tools that destroyed the world." And dumped the hippie family. But then how would they have sold the movie to the public?

Ron Grainer's score isn't half bad on its own merits, and even fits in certain places. But most of the time it reminds me of a contemporary made-for-TV movie, is often just plain inappropriate, and works against the basic concept of the movie, that the world is dead except for one man and these hooded hobgoblins. I'd have done away with the score completely. Russell Metty's cinematography, however, is high quality in that old-school workmanlike way.

Okay, so The Omega Man is cheezball early '70s post-apocalypse. That isn't to say it's a bad story, or is morally invalid, or whatever. As we are seeing now, it is all too relevant, even if the bad guys aren't Russians or Red Chinese. It was a good story told poorly, or at least carelessly. Worth a look, as long as you aren't expecting more than a local-TV Sunday matinee.

possibly contains SPOILERS

Later known for his stylish, violent thrillers, Brian De Palma's third feature displays his instinct for subversive comedy and flashy film technique, as gawky Robert De Niro (looking an awful lot like his Travis Bickle character in Taxi Driver) makes "peeping tom" movies of the tenants across the street, strikes up a romance with pretty Jennifer Salt, falls in with a performance art/black radical group including Gerrit Graham (who paints his full-frontal-naked body black for a camera), and blows up his apartment building. Even at this early stage De Palma is a master at making you uncomfortable, even in the context of comedy--the "Be Black Baby" performance art sequence is utterly frightening while it lasts, and is the highlight of this movie about voyeurism. But he also works you like a violin when he wants you to laugh and thrill with delight; the opening sequence with low-rent superintendent Charles Durning is a hoot, so is De Niro's trip to the pharmacist's for prophylactics and his subsequent crazy love scene with Salt, all packaged with energetic camerawork and editing.

Hi, Mom! Would make a good double bill with Taxi Driver, because in many ways it feels like a comic trial run for that movie. Many elements of this movie--De Niro's appearance; the fact that he's an arguably unbalanced Vietnam vet; his spying on the pretty blonde he eventually, awkwardly asks out; his transformation from soft-spoken eccentric to urban terrorist--show up in the later movie. You might also want to add Ken Shapiro's The Groove Tube for another taste of groovy 60s-era New York performance art/media satire/semismut (as well as another early look at a soon-to-be big star--Chevy Chase).

Containing a fantastic musical score, great performances from all the leads, and a great distillation of the seedy late '60s New York atmosphere, Hi, Mom! is a meandering, semi-improvisatory, and brilliant black comedy that will leave you with an admiring grin plastered on your face.

I just watched this tonight, on video, at my brother's house. Here are my comments, starting with some personal observations:

1) Did anyone else want to reach through the screen into the sound mixer's control room and TURN OFF THE DAMN MUSIC? Not only did it never stop for one minute, but half the time it was totally inappropriate to the onscreen action (ie stuck in heroic/uplifting epic mode while we're watching people dying). Did James Horner even watch the footage while he was composing or did he just write two hours of nonstop music and set the tape on auto?

2) You know a movie is in trouble when, 15-20 min into it, you correctly guess the next thing a character says (Mark Wahlberg: "I've *gotta* go.")

3) The Karen Allen/obstinate skipper/Coast Guard subplot. Was that flown in from another (unfinished?) movie? Maybe it was intended to provide some breadth of scope to this killer storm. Maybe it was just to pad out the length of the movie to put it into epic territory. Peterson didn't give me any clues as to how this was relevant to the story of the Andrea Gail...

4) Too damn many scenes of Marky Mark's character kissing his gal. I mean, I get the idea, already...perhaps he still hasn't quite gotten Dirk Diggler out of his system.

5) Okay, I know this is a movie about fishermen, but they really go to town in the animal cruelty department. Swordfish are eviscerated. A (presumably animatronic) shark gets its brains blown out. I don't care if the Humane Society gave their stamp of approval, you'll never open a can of Sun Kist the same way again.

Overall I think Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio put in the best performance in her bit part as another swordfisher boat. Most everyone else is middling, which is about all I can expect from them given the script. You get sketchy outlines for the characters, those are as close as you get to knowing them. You have the automatic reflex (I hope, if you are a human person) of concern when one of them is in danger, but not the deep concern of someone you really care about. These folks are basically props for the effects to toss around, engulf, and throw animatronic sharks at. I feel sorry for that, because this could have been a much better movie if only for better characterization and writing.

I doubt any amount of acting would be able to upstage those flashy ILM special effects, which, like most other CGI effects these days, don't even try to look really naturalistic. The digital waves and rain bowl over everything and everyone in sight. I'm no fan of this brand of larger than life effects, and like one of those poor guys caught overboard, there really isn't much I could do but let them wash over me and hope I live. If you go to movies to be thrilled by special effects, you're gonna love this, it delivers.

I came out of watching The Perfect Storm feeling totally exhausted and somewhat disappointed. I remember the Wolfgang Petersen of Das Boot, the director who was able to take something similar to this--a bunch of bickering, smelly, bearded guys aboard a sea vessel in trouble--and make it deeply affecting without going overboard on extraneous crap. He is a talented fella, and he can make excellent movies if he wants to. He misstepped with this surefire blockbuster.