The basis for the action thriller Die Hard, a movie that, however tongue in cheek, consistently makes media lists of the top Christmas films of all time. This, it's fair to say, because in spite of getting the core of the story right, it doesn't end quite the same way, and that makes all the difference in the world. The book, Thorp's sequel to his own 1966 novel The Detective (which was also made into a film, starring Frank Sinatra), is the story of Joe Leland, a retired New York cop, who flies to California on Christmas Eve to be with his daughter and ends up trapped inside her skyscraper office building during a terrorist attack. It, too, is an action thriller -- Leland, who begins with one gun and no shoes, must outmaneuver and kill his opponents, all while trying to keep the hostages, including his daughter, alive -- but it is also filled with Leland's ruminations on a life not always well lived, particularly in terms of his failed marriage and the mistakes he made raising his child. (Knowledge of the previous book or at least the Sinatra film is not required, but certainly doesn't hurt.) Late in the story, it also becomes vaguely political. No wonder the prose is occasionally a bit choppy. Still, it's the action and the suspense that carry the day, and that make this book an entertaining read. Until the end, anyway, which hits a note so jarringly off-key that, if it doesn't spoil the book, probably will leave you content to revisit it at the movies.
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The basis for the action thriller Die Hard, a movie that, however tongue in cheek, consistently makes media lists of the top Christmas films of all time. This, it's fair to say, because in spite of getting the core of the story right, it doesn't end quite the same way, and that makes all the difference in the world. The book, Thorp's sequel to his own 1966 novel The Detective (which was also made into a film, starring Frank Sinatra), is the story of Joe Leland, a retired New York cop, who flies to California on Christmas Eve to be with his daughter and ends up trapped inside her skyscraper office building during a terrorist attack. It, too, is an action thriller -- Leland, who begins with one gun and no shoes, must outmaneuver and kill his opponents, all while trying to keep the hostages, including his daughter, alive -- but it is also filled with Leland's ruminations on a life not always well lived, particularly in terms of his failed marriage and the mistakes he made raising his child. (Knowledge of the previous book or at least the Sinatra film is not required, but certainly doesn't hurt.) Late in the story, it also becomes vaguely political. No wonder the prose is occasionally a bit choppy. Still, it's the action and the suspense that carry the day, and that make this book an entertaining read. Until the end, anyway, which hits a note so jarringly off-key that, if it doesn't spoil the book, probably will leave you content to revisit it at the movies.
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+++ Official with the United States War Crimes Commission (Edward G. Robinson) tracks high-level Nazi to small Connecticut town and finds Charles Rankin (Orson Welles), a prep school teacher and clock aficionado about to be married to the daughter (Loretta Young) of a Supreme Court Justice. Dark, well-written drama made memorable by Welles' odd performance -- he plays Rankin as reserved and calculating to the point of abstraction -- and a spectacular climax on the top of a clock tower. ++ Nicolas Cage is Kyle Miller, a hard-driving, fast-talking businessman whose current project -- he's the middle-man for a number of diamond deals that may or may not be strictly on the level -- gets him targeted by murderous thieves. Or are they targeted because of his wife, Sarah (Nicole Kidman), who may have had an affair with one of them? Well, we know it isn't because of their sneaky teenage daughter, Avery (Liana Liberato), though through an amazing coincidence, she may hold the key to their freedom. It's only PC to get everyone in on the act, even if it makes the movie absurd and unbelievable. In something approaching a real home invasion, one with money as the bottom line, wife and daughter would be useful tools for coercing husband into giving up his wealth. But here, wife is protected by Jonah (Cam Gigandet), the psycho slug with whom she was previously acquainted. And since to hurt Avery is to hurt Sarah, that really only leaves Kyle -- and leaves us wondering why the women are there at all. They're there, of course, to sow dissension among the ranks of the criminals, a tired idea that looks positively exhausted here, when all the thugs had to do was take the women into another room, and all their internal differences would have been settled. What happens instead is a lot of yelling and gun-pointing and the making of empty threats and more gun-pointing as, through flashbacks, we learn the underlying dynamics of this little band of nimrods. None of them are sympathetic characters (which is fine), but combine that with Kyle's seeming disinterest in his family, Avery's rebelliousness, and Sarah's possible infidelity and the whole thing becomes incomprehensible. Who are we supposed to root for? You might not turn this movie off -- Cage and Kidman are all right, after all -- but it's the kind of movie you might think you did, once your brain dumps its short-term memory. ++ Set in 2025, when white men are still called "honkeys" and people still ask if you can "dig it," this story follows Ben Richards, an out of work revolutionary whose wife is a prostitute and whose 18-month-old baby is dying from pneumonia. Desperately needing money to buy medicine for the little tyke, Richards applies as a contestant for a popular game show called "The Running Man." The show is a way of ridding society of some of its more undesirable elements. Contestants are given a 12-hour head start, then pursued by merciless Hunters. Every hour they stay alive nets them a hundred bucks, which in this society is a lot of dough. It's unclear how or why "The Running Man" is a popular show. Though frowned upon, it isn't against the rules for the runner to take out innocent bystanders. Killing a cop is worth another hundred bucks. King, mired in the late sixties/early seventies, takes the hippie hatred of cops to a new level: everyone hates them, deriving entertainment from their deaths. Why anyone would want to be a cop in this society is another matter. The whole milieu is contradictory and self-serving. This is a race for Ben's life (and the life of his daughter); it should be exciting. However, like Rage, his first Bachman book, King substitutes an amorphous anger for anything truly stirring. That might work for teenagers, but adults can see through it all too easily. It all leads to a comic book ending, with lots of blood and wet, hanging entrails. If that's your thing, you may get a kick out of it. Made into a much more entertaining movie in 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Dawson. ++++ Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon), well-known big game hunter, trains his high-powered rifle on Adolf Hitler. But, as he tells Nazi Major Quive-Smith (George Sanders) after his capture, he didn't intend to shoot. It was, he says, a "sporting stalk." The thrill was in proving he could do it. The Major doesn't buy it, but Thorndike talks a good line -- a cultured English gentleman's version of General Zaroff's tune from "The Most Dangerous Game." When Thorndike refuses to sign a confession stating that he not only intended to kill Hitler but did so at the request of the British government, Quive-Smith has him tortured and thrown over the side of a cliff, to die an "accidental" death. He survives, and another hunt is on. All of this takes place "shortly before the war." During the course of the film, Germany invades Poland and World War II is begun. Joan Bennett plays Jerry, a London streetwalker who aids Thorndike and, of course, falls in love with him. It's easy to see why. Part of the charm of this movie is Thorndike himself, who is tough yet refined, rich but not snooty, serious yet carefree and optimistic. Too perfect? Absolutely. But he's still fun to watch. Made before Pearl Harbor, albeit by a man who hated the Nazis (Lang), when America was still isolationist. (According to Wikipedia, we don't see Thorndike's torture because the Hays Office wouldn't allow it, thinking it put the Germans in a bad light.) But this isn't a movie just for history buffs. It's exciting, funny, suspenseful, and refreshingly free of the naiveté of the country and the time that produced it. Based on the novel Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household. +++ Adaptation of Richard Matheson's horror novel Hell House, written by Matheson himself. The body of the story remains -- a scientist, his wife, and a couple of psychic investigators are hired to settle once and for all the question of survival after death by temporarily moving into an infamous haunted house -- but most of the connective tissue in Matheson's novel is missing, making the film seem more of a companion piece to the novel than a work in its own right. The individual parts aren't so much scenes as vignettes, each of which imparts another important plot point. Because each scene is, really, equally important, it doesn't build the way a narrative should. On the other hand, if the peaks are missing, so, too, are the troughs. It's a naive approach, but one that does give the film an unusual, if minor, fascination. This isn't a scary movie; it's ominous, from beginning to end. With good acting, though, by the likes of Clive Revill, Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, and Gayle Hunnicutt. The special effects are also quite good. ++ Proto-paranormal romance more than a horror novel, focused on the troubled (and troubling) relationship of Mina Harker and Dracula. Set 7 years after the events of Bram Stoker's book. When the Harkers, Van Helsing, John Seward, and Lord Godalming return to Castle Dracula to put their painful memories to rest once and for all, the lethargic yet still-existing spirit of Dracula is revived, now animated by a need for love and revenge, primarily the former. Seward and Godalming appear in little more than name only, while Van Helsing and Jonathan, though much more active, really only get in the way as Mina tries unsuccessfully to resist the charms of an undead psychopath. Warrington even uses Mina's son, Quincey, to stick another stake into the heart of all that is good and decent. Another contradictory post-religious take on Dracula: it is one thing for a woman of faith alone to question her beliefs, but quite another for a woman who knows damn well that both God and Satan are real. ("I could abide no clerical judgements upon my state of mind," Jonathan tells us at once point. "I would rather entrust myself to science." Interesting -- given that since vampires are subject to the scientific method -- killing them in a specific way produces identical and repeatable results -- not even a scientist would adopt this absurd position.) Told, like Stoker's book, in the form of journal entries and letters from the various characters, but much less skillfully as each dovetails with the next much too conveniently. And yet, for all this, Warrington's book is light-years ahead of Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt's own horrendous "sequel," Dracula: the Un-dead. ++ Quentin Tarantino co-executive produced this film which, given that Eli Roth substitutes quirkiness for narrative, isn’t difficult to understand. It’s about three young men who travel to Slovakia in search of easy, anything-goes sex and end up the victims of a much different flesh trade involving kidnapping and murder. Roth, however, does nothing with this intriguing premise, preferring to distract us from the superficiality of his ideas with sex, torture, and snarky lines. So bereft of imagination is this story that Roth can end it only by stacking one convenient coincidence on top of another. Responding to Slovak officials who complained the film in no way reflected the reality of their country, Roth blamed his own ignorant fantasies (which include kids who kill for bubblegum!) on Americans: “Americans do not even know that this country exists. My film is not a geographical work but aims to show Americans’ ignorance of the world around them.” Presumably by perpetuating it. Offensive and badly written — but flashy — torture porn. +++ Good, if somewhat superficial, adaptation of James Hilton's superior novel about a group of people fleeing a revolution who are kidnapped and flown to a mysterious lamasery (a Tibetan monastery) where, free from the cares of the outside world, some of them find paradise while others perceive only a prison. Begins with titles that ask the audience if they have ever imagined a perfect world, which is significant because here (not so in the book) the protagonist, Bob Conway, is an everyman type (albeit a middle-aged, somewhat world weary everyman), and as such his character needs little more than generalities to support it. And generalities are all we ever get. At the same time, it opens the door to the Hollywood sop, the love interest, played by Jane Wyatt. Still, a pleasant drama, worth watching for the evolution of the characters as they come to terms with their new situation in life, with suspense provided by those who don't: one member of Conway's party and one of the lamas. Edward Everett Horton adds humor as a new character, a timid palentologist who learns to assert himself. As Conway, Ronald Colman is both believable and likeable. With an ending that departs from the book not so much in terms of action as psychology, and which is, in its own way, very dramatic. Over the years, parts of this film were lost, and the current restoration includes the complete soundtrack, with stills substituted for seven minutes of still-missing footage. (Trust us, it isn't much of a distraction.) +++ Competent if uninspired thriller about a young mother whose two children are kidnapped -- on the seventh anniversary of the kidnapping and murder of her two previous children. Made the Mystery Writers of America's list of the top 100 mystery novels of all time, probably due to the remembered effect on its members of the book's then-novel theme of child molestation (though, to be fair, it should be noted that the bad guy, even today, remains a compelling character). Clark's first suspense novel. Based in part on the real life Alice Crimmins case, of a young wife and mother accused of killing her two children. Made into a movie in 1986, starring Jill Clayburgh. |
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