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.
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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. ++++ 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. ++ 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.) ++ Two-part miniseries starring Zoe Saldana as young mother-to-be Rosemary Woodhouse, who unwittingly finds herself in the midst of a coven of baby-killing witches. Transplants the action of Ira Levin's novel from New York to Paris, seemingly for no reason other than to differentiate itself from Roman Polanski's original adaptation, next to which this version pales into insignificance. Good enough on its own to maintain mild interest -- provided, of course, the unnecessarily explicit and violent scenes with which the story is regularly punctuated serve their purpose in keeping you awake. (Neither Levin nor Polanski needed to resort to such tactics.) Despite its 240-minute length, the film adds very little to the story; its few embellishments -- a meaningless lesbian kiss, for instance, or the idiotic trope of a character who hallucinates then acts as if nothing unusual happened -- distract from the suspense rather than adding to it. No standouts among the performances, either, and Carole Bouquet is certainly no Ruth Gordon as Rosemary's overly-solicitous neighbor. The credits oddly state that the film is based not only on Levin's novel, but his sequel, Son of Rosemary, as well, though one would be hard-pressed to find any material drawn from the latter work, which, after all, takes place more than 30 years after the events of this story. +1/2 The tagline: "Fear for her." She is Susan Harris (Julie Christie), estranged wife of the creator (Fritz Weaver) of Proteus IV, a thinking machine so far advanced of human capabilities that it devises a cure for leukemia in only four days. The difficulty: the movie has no suspense. Soon after being activated Proteus is questioning its human masters and seeking a way to escape its "box." It infiltrates an open terminal in Harris' house, usurps the environmod that controls its every function, and imprisons Susan so that it can use her body to produce a child. It is so powerful and so superior that Susan never has a chance. A better tagline would have been, "Listen to Proteus." For that is about all we can do, listen as it embellishes its egomaniacal fantasy of taking over the world. (We are, however, rewarded with one nice line, something about Proteus not wanting to make humans obsolete but to so improve on humanity as to make computers obsolete.) Based on the book by Dean Koontz -- the original version, of course, not his 1997 rewrite. Improves on the book in the sense that Proteus itself is slightly more adult (Koontz imagined it as an adolescent with dreams of becoming flesh so as to ravish women), but falls far short in that the book's best feature was the suspense of its first half. Adding nothing to the film are its special effects, which serve clunky machinery on the one hand, and are used, on the other, to produce meaningless light shows that are possibly intended to be profound. ++ Not a remake of Michael Mann's Manhunter, but a determindly fresh adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel as a prequel to the films The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, with Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Hannibal Lecter. Will Graham, the man who at great personal cost originally captured Lecter (according to the films, not the books), is lured out of retirement to help catch another serial killer, one targeting entire families, and is compelled to seek advice from his old nemesis. With too-young-looking Edward Norton as Graham and too-handome Ralph Fiennes as the killer, and a great deal more hero worship of Lecter and his supercalifragilistic intellect. Employs elements of the book not found in Manhunter -- that is, all the worst ones, including the silly ending, to which screenwriter Ted Tally adds a ridiculous Friday the 13th-type twist. |
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