Slack and severely underwritten story about several uninteresting sinners who, on the day of the Biblical Rapture, are left behind while millions of others from all around the world simply vanish. One man believes aliens are behind the disappearances, and for all the evidence in the film of God’s involvement (there is none), he might as well be right. Nicolas Cage is Rayford Steele, an airline pilot and adulterer, who may or may not make it back to New York after his plane is damaged during a flight to London. Meanwhile, Chloe (Cassi Thomson), his religion-hating college-age daughter, tries to cope with the loss of her mother and younger brother in a world rapidly descending into chaos. Based on the first book in the 16-volume series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and that’s about what this film feels like: 1/16th of a complete story. With a diffuse and inept script, forgettable acting, and an unimaginative effort behind the camera by Vic Armstrong.
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Slack and severely underwritten story about several uninteresting sinners who, on the day of the Biblical Rapture, are left behind while millions of others from all around the world simply vanish. One man believes aliens are behind the disappearances, and for all the evidence in the film of God’s involvement (there is none), he might as well be right. Nicolas Cage is Rayford Steele, an airline pilot and adulterer, who may or may not make it back to New York after his plane is damaged during a flight to London. Meanwhile, Chloe (Cassi Thomson), his religion-hating college-age daughter, tries to cope with the loss of her mother and younger brother in a world rapidly descending into chaos. Based on the first book in the 16-volume series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and that’s about what this film feels like: 1/16th of a complete story. With a diffuse and inept script, forgettable acting, and an unimaginative effort behind the camera by Vic Armstrong.
4 Comments
+++ 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. +++ 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.) ++1/2 Shirley Jackson's second novel is one of those literary compositions that begs the question, What's the point? It's too many things all at once: a coming-of-age story, a survivor story, a horror story, a psychological mystery, and a satire of college life. Reading it in several sittings, you never know what you'll encounter from one to the next. It is about seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite who, just before leaving for an all-girls college, is taken into the woods behind her parents' house by a man with evil intentions. What happens to her there is left to our imagination, but it isn't our imagination that really matters: Natalie is a lonely, imaginative child and her experience only exacerbates her mind's distortion of reality -- which gradually, under the additional pressures of college life, blooms into full-blown psychosis. Sounds straightforward enough, but that's just the magic of summarization. In between, Jackson writes thousands of words of over-contextualization to convey a few brief relevant ideas. On the other hand, some of her satire is funny, and there's one truly wicked scene in which a couple of girls who have eyes for the professor Natalie herself is infatuated with use her mercilessly -- but ever so politely. Then, too, Jackson has a marvelous talent for shifting from the everyday to the terrifying in the wink of an eye, as she demonstrates here in two scenes, one toward the beginning, the other at the end. This is a book not without its pleasures, but it isn't on the whole a pleasurable book. Ever so vaguely inspired by the real-life disappearance (not that Natalie disappears, except perhaps psychologically) of Paula Jean Weldon who, in 1946, vanished on a hiking trail in North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson was living at the time and where her husband was working in the same college Miss Weldon attended. ++++ Democratic populist from California is persuaded to run for the United States Senate on the idea that because he can't possibly win, he can say whatever he wants. Then he begins rising in the polls. Written by Jeremy Larner, a former speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy, this wry, realistic portrait of high-stakes political campaigning follows the inexperienced candidate (Robert Redford) and his savvy campaign manager (Peter Boyle) from announcement to election, and offers a behind-the-scenes (and decidedly adult) look at everything in between, things like campaign stops, television advertising, and a debate. Mentions without really examining a number of key issues, which keeps the film from ever becoming terribly partisan. Larner's script, by the way, won the Academy Award for 1972. +++ Based on the non-fiction book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, then of The Washington Post, whose investigative reporting was instrumental in bringing the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon's administration into public view. Significantly, Jason Robards, playing the Post's executive editor, won an Academy Award (for Best Supporting Actor), while neither Robert Redford (Woodward) nor Dustin Hoffman (Bernstein) was even nominated. This is because this film is strictly a reportorial yarn -- a very well made one, to be sure -- in which the two stars might as well be playing Reporter #1 and Reporter #2. It is so laser focused on uncovering the conspiracy that the conspiracy itself fails to thrill. It's a wonderful advertisement for journalism, but much less successful as a human drama. Yet on its own terms -- that is, as fodder for political and journalism junkies -- it works. +++ Set in 1917, this threadbare story of prostitutes in the famous Storyville district of New Orleans is nevertheless compelling thanks to its unusual -- and unusually frank -- focus on 12-year-old Violet Marr (Brooke Shields), who becomes the mild obsession of a dandified photographer (Keith Carradine). Even so, it's only a couple rungs up the ladder from pure prurience, and that because, technically, it's a fine film: everything from the costumes, sets, and props to the fine acting from Shields, only 12 herself, and Susan Sarandon as her working girl mom to Malle's direction looks authentic. But Malle is really directing another, better film, one in which his long takes are filled with the feeling this over-romanticized film lacks. Never has being a 12-year-old prostitute looked so non-threatening and homey. Controversial, of course, due to Shields' nude scenes. It isn't porn, but it's worth noting that no porn director could do what Malle does here and get away with it. +1/2 What do you do when God speaks to you, but says He is a figment of your imagination? That's the question this film -- the revisionist story of Joan of Arc -- poses, even though the real Joan, so far as we know, never questioned her sanity and certainly not her faith. Here, the poor farm girl is clearly nuts. We know that because Milla Jovovich plays her as a twitchy shake-voice schizophrenic of whom it is hard to imagine anyone following her to the milking barn, let alone to war. (Critics complained of Jean Seberg's performance in Saint Joan; Jovovich's is infinitely worse.) Having dispensed with theology, Besson and co-writer Andrew Birkin go about the task of motivating Joan with imaginary events from her life, like the one that starts it all: the murder followed by the rape of her sister by an invading Englishman, to which little Joan is a witness. Common vengeance is the best they could come up with for an uncommon woman who claimed to be directed by saints from Heaven. The real Joan, of course, heard voices; here, she has visions -- not of saints but of a single male, suggesting she believed she had a direct line to Christ himself. When does historical accuracy matter? When the alternative is the construction of one straw man after another so that you can fob off a lie as modern understanding. With, unlike the earlier Saint Joan, long battle sequences replete with beheadings and dismemberment, some misplaced and misguided humor, and Dustin Hoffman as Joan's vision of the god of self-help psychiatry. ++1/2 The story of Joan of Arc, minus battle scenes, from being put in charge of Charles VII's army to her trial for heresy and subsequent execution. It's all wrapped up in a dream of Charles', 25 years later, allowing him to tell her that her conviction was overturned in a posthumous retrial. Jean Seberg, still a teenager at the time, turns in a solid performance as Joan, capturing her innocence and her piety, if not the eloquence the real Joan must have possessed to lead so many others into battle: she cries a few times, but it's doubtful that the viewer ever will. Gets its history substantially correct, however. Based on the play by George Bernard Shaw and written by Graham Greene. ++++ Powerful, intelligent, and darkly funny adaptation, by Tennessee Williams himself, of two of Williams' one-act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and The Long Stay Cut Short. Carroll Baker is 19-year-old Baby Doll Meighan, coerced into marriage to the much older Archie Lee (Karl Malden), owner of a cotton gin that is put out of business by Sicilian Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach) and his modernized cotton company. Nothing, Archie Lee decides, that a touch of arson can't fix -- but he doesn't count on Silva figuring he did it and making a play for Baby Doll in revenge. With superb acting and substantive dialogue, and at best a moving target for our sympathies. Controversial when first released (it was "condemned" by the Catholic Legion of Decency and banned as obscene in Aurora, Illinois, for instance), the film is still today racy enough to make its "sex" scenes suspenseful and somewhat nerve-wracking, particularly one set on an outdoor swing. |
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