masonfisk

A pair of failures by master filmmakers were witnessed this week starting w/this misbegotten epic from Howard Hawks in 1955. A pharaoh has returned home from his crusades & vows to build the finest pyramid man has ever set his eyes on & be buried in it. Using a labor force comprised of Hebrew slaves (whose chief architect is of the Jewish persuasion), the construction begins in earnest but will take years for the project to see its final fruition & boy does this film feel as long as the construction. Not horribly bad but being a bit misguided as to the dynamic most epics involving the Egyptians & their slaves (especially given the mother of all tales, The Ten Commandments was released the following year) have presented is not the case here where the work force feels more like embittered contractors whose assignment gets worse as the years go on but there is nary a mention of the messiah or deliverance from bondage which feels a bit short shrift. Starring Jack Hawkins & Joan Collins (in charcoal face!) the drama for the most part is subdued & only gets interesting in the last 20 minutes or so when betrayals rear their ugly heads & a welcome comeuppance is met by Pharaoh & non-pharaoh alike.

Jackie Chan is front & center in this 1985 action romp (which he co-wrote, directed & even sang the title track, whew!). Chan is the titular law enforcement type who tries to do his job diligently but keeps butting heads w/his bosses due to his tendency to go overboard in his arrests (the first one we see involve him nearly wrecking himself & a bus in order to catch some bad guys) but when he sets his sights on a corrupt businessman, Chor Yuen, things start to go haywire as Yuen keeps escalating his efforts to demolish Chan (even framing him for a fellow cop's murder) while a witness, Brigitte Lin, willing to testify against Yuen & Chan's girlfriend, Maggie Cheung, all play into the mix of extreme stunts, histrionic outpourings & enough melodrama to drown the driest of audiences. I've always avoided the bulk of Chan's work since I never liked his blend of comedy & action (w/the comedy outweighing the chopsocky antics for my money) but I said why not & if you can check your kung fu purist brain at the door (which I did) then the stunts (which Chan always did himself as evidenced by the stunt outtakes shown during the end credits invariably show Chan destroying himself) are probably the best ever put to film, too bad those same stunts are surrounded by a pedestrian story & characters.

A familiar crime thriller from 2023. A diner & an adjoining gas station waiting for a fuel replenish is the setting for this tale as a gumbo of characters are visited upon by a pair of bank robbers. Our cast of characters, a helpful waitress, Jocelin Donahue, a knife salesman, Jim Cummings, our bank robbers, Nicholas Logan & Richard Brake, the gas station owner, Faizon Love & a few others must contend w/the armed desperate pair to get away w/a gas filled vehicle while the local cops, one, the deputy, Conor Paolo, has already popped over twice to the eatery due to some coffee snafus & the sheriff, Michael Abbott Jr., hubby to Donahue, is wondering why she's not picking up the phone at the diner. All of this leads to a Mexican standoff that wants to be a nailbiter of a scene but since it's been done before & better, your kind of meh on the whole thing even though the narrative does perk up a little when a certain survivor tries to abscond w/the ill-gotten gains until...anyhoo all of this is clearly from Quentin Tarantino's playbook (it's amazing every few years someone decides to throw their hat in the crime ring w/negligible results) which had my eyes glazing over hoping for better but getting just okay which is fine for lukewarm coffee but this.