King Kong (2005)

 

The second (better but still unneeded) remake of King Kong lasts more than three hours, yet it tells what is, essentially, the same basic story as the original version from 1933, which clocked in at a comparatively terse 100 minutes. Director/cowriter Peter Jackson, fresh from his success with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, seems to have decided that what the first King Kong needed was more time on each element of the plot. We all know that Jackson does like to think of film as long-form entertainment. Thus, it takes almost twenty minutes for movie director Carl Denham (Jack Black, tamped down a bit from his usual boisterousness) and his potential star, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), to board the ship that takes them to Skull Island and their encounter with Kong. We spend another thirty minutes aboard the ship before we get to the island itself, and it’s almost an hour into the film before we first hear Kong’s roar and another ten minutes before he himself appears onscreen. That’s a long time for an audience to wait in order to see the star of the movie. Thankfully, about half of King Kong takes place on Skull Island as we intercut between two storylines. One has us watching as Ann initially tries to escape from Kong, who seems bewitched by her blonde hair when he first captures her, only to have her turn to him as her protector from three rather acrobatic dinosaurs intent of having her as a snack. The other plotline follows Denham, playwright/screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), and other men from the ship trying to find Ann to rescue her from Kong. Ann’s relationship with Kong is, of course, complicated by the weird idea that this is all some sort of metaphor regarding interracial relationships – although this is somewhat less emphasized here than in the original and the horrid 1976 version. Still, it’s fun to watch Watts performing some of Darrow’s familiar vaudeville tricks to entertain Kong, and it’s certainly breathtaking to watch the carefully choreographed extended sequence involving Kong protecting yet almost failing to protect Ann from what appear to be three Tyrannosaurus Rexes. Seeing two of the dinosaurs and Kong and Ann entangled in vines and swinging to catch or avoid each other is a highlight of the film, and I laugh aloud each time I watch as one of the dinosaurs chases after Ann, who is rather tiny by comparison, when he has a huge dead dinosaur in his mouth already. Does he want some sort of small appetizer or after-dinner treat? Finish your dinner before you go hunting for more food. As for the men trying to find Ann, well, they’ve picked a crazy island to visit. A stampede by a group of brontosauri and what appear to be velociraptors, a valley filled with nasty bugs, including giant spiders that are meant to be inspired by those in a sequence that was removed from the original for being too gruesome – it’s an astonishing series of encounters with more than a few sad deaths along the way. You should be familiar with the outline of the story already if you’ve seen either of the earlier versions. Kong get captured (this time with the help of chloroform) and taken to New York where he is put on display as the Eighth Wonder of the World. He escapes, finds Ann, and climbs to the top of the Empire State Building. The last line of the 2005 King Kong is the same as the one from 1933: “It was beauty killed the beast.” So why does it need to be twice as long if we’re going to hit the major plot points and end the same way? Perhaps it’s so you can have a lovely sequence in New York after Kong and Ann are reunited, involving him sliding around a frozen river with her in hand, and so you can perhaps spend more time on Skull Island, which is, as Ann says to Kong, quite beautiful when you aren’t about to be devoured by a dinosaur or attacked by enormous (hungry) crickets or being hoisted aloft by what appear to be giant bats. We also get to see more of the development of the relationship between Ann and Jack aboard the ship before they land on the island, so there is more of a sense of his desire to protect her. Sadly, having more time to tell the story doesn’t mean that this version of King Kong does a better job in its depiction of the natives of Skull Island. They’re just as dangerous and scary as they have been in previous versions, and even the performers who portray the “natives” in Kong’s New York show are stereotypically “savage” (and, it appears, in blackface, at least some of them). Watts and Brody are, of course, talented actors and do fine work here, and Black does allow us a few moments of levity, just as you would expect. Kyle Chandler shines as the vain Bruce Baxter, an actor who seems to believe he’s really the center of everyone’s attention. It’s all very entertaining, but it does beg the question as to whether or not we need more of a story (albeit expertly filmed) that we already know. Why not just watch the original again? By the way, the original did not receive any Oscar nominations. None, not even for its groundbreaking visual effects. Meanwhile, the 1976 version, as bad as it is, chalked up three nominations and one win, and this version received four nominations and three wins. Astonishing, really, when you consider it.

Oscar Wins: Best Achievement in Sound Mixing, Best Achievement in Sound Editing, and Best Achievement in Visual Effects

Other Nomination: Best Achievement in Art Direction

Foul Play (1978)

 

Foul Play is a bit of a cross between a romantic comedy and a thriller/suspense movie featuring repeated references to (much better) Hitchcock movies. It’s also a bit of a mess, frankly. Goldie Hawn plays Gloria Mundy (the pun on “worldly glory” doesn’t get used to full advantage here), a librarian who is recently divorced. Thanks to encouragement from a friend who tells her to take more chances in life, the normally shy Gloria picks up a guy whose car has broken down. Scottie, the guy she picks up, hides a roll of film in a pack of Marlboro cigarettes that he leaves with Gloria, promising to meet her for a date later that night. A group of criminals wants the film, and after killing Scottie, they make Gloria the object of repeated kidnapping attempts and apartment break-ins to retrieve the film. Chevy Chase plays a police lieutenant who helps her (and who falls in love with her, of course – this is a Hollywood film, after all). However, he is initially unable to be much help because the bodies keep disappearing. It takes a while before he and the other police and even Gloria’s friends begin to believe her. The film is set in San Francisco, much like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the climax occurs at the San Francisco Opera House, circumstances similar to the climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Foul Play never reaches the artistic heights achieved by any of the Hitchcock films it references, though. In fact, Mel Brooks does a better and funnier homage in his High Anxiety from 1977, just one year earlier. Foul Play doesn’t even restrict its allusions to Hitchcock. In another twist, Chase and Hawn have a rough fast drive through the streets of San Francisco that is reminiscent of the centerpiece chase in What’s Up, Doc? from six years earlier (although that film does it better). The plot unfolds a few clues at a time, and aside from the romantic relationship between Hawn’s and Chase’s characters, it winds up being about some weird, convoluted plot by a group called the Tax the Churches League to kill the Pope during a performance of The Mikado. However, the plot is rather beside the point. It’s the performances here that are key to whatever success the film has. In addition to Hawn and Chase (was he really this cute back then?), the cast includes top-notch actors such as Burgess Meredith at Gloria’s landlord with a rather unbelievable past and some amazing martial arts skills for an old guy, Rachel Roberts as one of the leaders of the Tax the Church League who matches Meredith’s martial arts skills pretty well, Brian Dennehy in an early role as Chase’s police partner “Fergie,” the great Billy Barty as a Bible salesman in a very funny sequence, and character actress Marilyn Sokol as Stella, Gloria’s coworker who’s prepared for any male-initiated crisis (mace, brass knuckles, etc.). However, it’s Dudley Moore who almost steals the movie as Stanley Tibbetts. Hawn’s Gloria picks up Stanley in a singles bar, hoping to escape from her potential kidnappers by hiding out at his place. Stanley, though, thinks he’s about to get lucky and starts revealing some ridiculous “modifications” to his apartment, including a Murphy bed with lights and sound effects and a cabinet with a couple of fully inflated sex dolls. He’s almost down to just his heart festooned boxer shorts before Gloria catches on to what’s been happening while she’s been looking for her potential kidnappers through Stanley’s window. Moore gets two more scenes, one of them in a massage parlor, the other at the opera, and he’s hilarious in each one. He would star in 10 the following year and in Arthur three years later, achieving superstar status. It’s hard to forgive the use in Foul Play of language like “dwarf” or “albino” to describe people, and the portrayal of a couple of Japanese tourists is both unnecessary and teeth-grindingly offensive. I know that these terms and depictions were not as heavily criticized in 1978, but they should have been. And I can’t quite forgive the film’s pretending that the famed Nuart Theatre is in San Francisco since any resident of Los Angeles knows better. Foul Play marked Chase’s first leading role after he left Saturday Night Live for movie stardom and Hawn’s first movie in two years. They do have a fun chemistry, but all I could recall from having seen it in the theaters during its initial release was Barry Manilow’s “Ready to Take a Chance Again” playing over the opening credits as Gloria drives her yellow convertible Volkswagen Beetle along the coastal highway. That was fun to revisit. The rest of the film? Aside from Moore’s standout performance, not as much.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song (“Ready to Take a Chance Again”)

Varsity Show (1937)

 

Varsity Show is an Oscar nominee thanks to just one musical number that lasts about ten minutes. Its finale was nominated for Best Dance Direction, a category honoring choreographers that lasted for just three years (1935-1937). Of course, the finale is spectacular given that it was choreographed by the legendary Busby Berkeley. To get to the film’s end, though, you have to go through a very tepid narrative that keeps throwing somewhat ridiculous obstacles in the path of a group of students who just want to have a great annual show for the Quadrangle Club at Winfield College. The show they’ve been working on is very old-fashioned and dull, thanks to their faculty director, Professor Biddle (Walter Catlett, hamming it up to the film’s detriment). He doesn’t want any contemporary (i.e., swing) music in the show, so the students turn to a famous alumnus, Chuck Daly (Dick Powell, much the same as he was in almost every other film). Daly, now a theatrical producer, has just had one of his shows flop miserably in New York, and his friend/manager (Ted Healy, providing a few strong comic moments) convinces him to return to campus for a promised thousand dollar payday. Let the complications begin. First, naturally, they need to get rid of Biddle so that Chuck can take over direction of the show. Healy’s William Williams contracts mumps from a night with a coed, and he agrees to spread the mumps to Biddle. He shows up at the professor’s home, asking, “Can’t we kiss and make up?” Biddle’s reply is “I’ll make up. That’s as far as I’ll go.” They enter the home for a cup of tea, and we next see them in side-by-side beds. It seems like Biddle (and Williams) will go farther after all. The college then schedules a bunch of exams with the condition that any students who don’t pass cannot participate in the show. So everyone has to study hard in order to stay in the show. And so it goes… Even when the students get the bright idea to take over a theater in New York in order to make a hit for Chuck—perhaps the silliest plot turn of them all—the obstacles keep coming. The theater owner keeps going up the city’s and state’s hierarchy to get the students thrown out, but two waves of police officers and even the National Guard wind up being more interested in watching the rehearsal than in stopping the show. There are a couple of romances, just as you would expect in a musical from this time period, but they truly aren’t essential to the plot or even depicted organically. Chuck falls in love with Babs (Priscilla Lane), a college senior with a lovely singing voice, and even Williams gets a romance with a glasses-wearing female nerd, Cuddles (Mabel Todd, matching the hamminess of Healy as much as she can). Varsity Show features Sterling Holloway, later to be famous as the voice of Winnie the Pooh, in a supporting role, but he and the other players really don't add very much to the film. Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians provide lovely musical accompaniment to the various numbers throughout the movie, particularly shining in the finale. And about that finale? It’s ten minutes of marching band music, baton twirlers, synchronized dancing, and performers spelling out the insignia of various famous colleges, among them Yale and the University of Southern California (one of my alma maters). The finale also includes one of two performances by the singing-and-dancing duo of Buck and Bubbles. They are great, but then you realize that their numbers are shot so that they could be excised for showings in Southern theaters, which often did not permit scenes with talented African American performers except in servile roles. How sad that some moviegoers were not able to see these numbers, truly some of the best parts of the film overall. You can just watch the finale below, and you’ll truly see the highlight of Varsity Show.

Oscar Nomination: Best Dance Direction

RoboCop (1987)

 

RoboCop has a lot of villains. Set in a future dystopian Detroit, the film reveals a city filled with criminals and crime, a dangerous and deadly place to be a police officer. On his first day in a new precinct, Murphy (Peter Weller) gets brutally killed by a gang of criminals led by Kurtwood Smith’s Clarence Boddicker. (Yes, the guy who played the father on That 70s Show is a criminal mastermind/crime boss.) Murphy’s body is modified by OCP, a corporation that has taken control of the police department, and he becomes the cyborg RoboCop. He proves to be remarkably effective at police work, stopping a liquor store robbery, an attempted rape, and a tense hostage situation involving a political loser. Given that he’s a cyborg whose body is mostly metal and machine, he also can’t be easily hurt or killed either; he just needs to recharge now and then. During one of those recharging sessions, he has a series of flashbacks; his makers apparently didn’t erase everything. He remembers his wife and son, and more importantly, he remembers his murder. That sends him off on a quest to capture Boddicker and his accomplices, one of whom is played by Ray Wise before the TV shows Twin Peaks and Fresh Off the Boat, another of whom is played by Paul McCrane after the movie Fame but before the TV show E.R. The film actually includes quite a few reliable actors, including Nancy Allen as Murphy’s partner who witnesses his murder and tries to connect to him personally after he becomes RoboCop and Ronny Cox as the OCP executive whose failure to create a mechanical cop leads to the RoboCop program’s success, a move that makes him incredibly bitter and prone to a desire for revenge. In other words, he’s another villain. With all of its emphasis on crime, RoboCop is a very, very violent movie at times, and we aren’t spared from watching the grisly demise of several characters. Murphy’s death, for instance, is quite gruesome. It’s little wonder that the movie initially received an X rating due to its violent content; what we have now is the “softer” version, and it’s still quite shocking. The film is also much campier than I remembered from the last time I saw it decades ago. Weller’s deadpan reading of the line “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me!” alone is laugh-inducing each time he states it. The director, Paul Verhoeven, isn’t known for his subtle touch; his later films include Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers, none of them exactly masterpieces of keeping their moments from being laughable. On a side note, RoboCop shares with Starship Troopers the use of commercials that are sometimes funnier or more interesting than the rest of the movie. The one for a vehicle called the 6000 SUX is especially hilarious. I will admit that it’s a bit surprising that the film wasn’t nominated for Best Visual Effects, especially in a year with only two nominees in the category: Innerspace and Predator. (You might still be surprised to learn that Predator was NOT the winner.) If there’s a “deeper” message to RoboCop, it might be the warning against corporations taking control over police departments, the military, hospitals, etc. Of course, we haven’t heeded that warning at all, given how much those functions have become increasingly privatized since 1987. You’d think after watching OCP’s first attempt at a fully mechanized robot cop (Cox’s invention), we’d know better. Watching the ED-209 malfunction and kill a OCP executive is what actually provides the opportunity for Miguel Ferrer’s Morton at OCP to create RoboCop (and become a higher-ranking executive and turn into yet another villain and be targeted by his former boss and…). Maybe it’s also trying to suggest that no matter how mechanized or mechanical we might become, it’s our humanity or whatever is left of it that might save us. I doubt many viewers gave the film’s narrative a great deal of deep thought; they just enjoyed the fun of watching Weller as the former cop who can’t be stopped now that he’s a cyborg. It is a shame that the actor’s face and those hypnotic eyes are covered up for most of the film.

Oscar Win: Special Achievement Award for Sound Effects Editing

Other Nominations: Best Film Editing and Best Sound

U-571 (2000)

 

The first ten minutes of U-571 are gripping and claustrophobic as we watch German sailors aboard a submarine enduring an attack of depth charges from a British destroyer. Their submarine gets disabled, and they are unable to defend themselves. It’s quite tense watching this opening sequence; it’s vaguely reminiscent of the great German film Das Boot from 1981. Unfortunately, after those initial moments, the plot starts to become rather preposterous. The Americans intercept the German sub’s distress signal and plan to get to the disabled sub before the Germans do. The goal is to capture an enigma code machine so that they can translate the messages being sent by the Germans. The plan involves using a submarine that’s been disguised to look more like a German one, including a Nazi emblem, and the sailors will also disguise themselves as Germans, putting on black leather jackets and carrying German guns. However, just as they capture the sub (far too easily, by the way) and get the German prisoners transferred to the American submarine and find the enigma machine (which looks very much like a plain typewriter, frankly), a German torpedo destroys the American sub. So the remaining American survivors (and one German prisoner, who you just know is going to try to sabotage their escape attempts) plan to use the disabled German sub to escape. They get into a torpedo fight with the resupply submarine that destroyed their American sub, and of course, in traditional Hollywood fashion, the German torpedoes miss (one of them just scrapes the hull), but the Americans destroy the German sub even though the firing mechanisms for torpedos on the disable sub were… well, disabled. The villains always are such bad shots in the movies made in America. As the Americans try to get the submarine to England, a German destroyer shows up and they have to dive to unsafe levels in order to avoid the potential danger from multiple depth charges. You should know how this ends, given that it’s an American movie about American sailors facing the Germans in World War II, and it’s already proven itself to be unrealistic. Both of the Oscar nominations for U-571 were for its sound achievements, and it really is a movie indebted to quality sound. The moments of fearful silence punctuated by the explosions of depth charges (punctuated by the visuals of those explosions) only enhance the power of those moments. Overall, the film is engrossing even though it stretches one’s disbelief. The plot also doesn’t help the actors much, though, putting them into situations whose resolutions are easy to anticipate. Matthew McConaghy plays Lt. Tyler, who at the film’s start is still upset over being denied command of his own submarine by his superior, played by Bill Paxton, because Lt. Commander Dahlgren doesn’t think Tyler is ready to risk the lives of the sailors he commands even if he has to do so for the greater good of the American effort during the war. You know what that means? Yes, he’ll have to take command of the submarine and he’ll have to quiet the resistance to his command and he’ll be awesome at commanding the submarine because he’s willing to risk the lives of the men under his command. If the rest of the movie were as compelling as the first ten minutes, which manage to avoid typical cliches of movies about submarines and war, U-571 would be a better film.

Oscar Win: Best Sound Editing

Other Nomination: Best Sound

Ad Astra (2019)

 

Visually, Ad Astra is quite a stunning film. It has been beautifully shot; the cinematography is superb. The film has been art directed to hell and back again, so the production design is also topnotch. However, watching Ad Astra is an exercise in tedium. I fell asleep while watching it in a theater, and I’ve fallen asleep both times I’ve watched it at home. It’s just a slow, boring movie. Maybe it’s time to stop making space films for a while, especially after this and First Man. Perhaps we just need a break until someone comes up with something more interesting to say about space travel? The plot of Ad Astra (Latin for “to the stars”) is rather straightforward. Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) has been asked to contact his father, the legendary astronaut H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) about whether his Lima Project near Neptune has been causing some sort of bizarre power surges. This is, naturally, a mission with a lot of emotional resonance for Pitt’s younger McBride because his dad always was more excited about journeying into space rather than staying with his family. Yes, he’s got “daddy issues” because, of course, his father abandoned the family when Roy was a kid, and a lot of the film features Pitt’s voice-over discussing his feelings about his father and about his own fears over repeating his father’s patterns of behavior. Roy has to go to Mars to send a message to his father since that’s the closest communications system to Neptune—and why wouldn’t it be? The film does have a few moments of intense action that interrupt the boredom. When Roy lands on the moon to catch a transport to Mars, he and Col. Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), an old friend of his father’s, get attacked by some sort of weird space pirates who kill their military escorts. The trip to Mars gets interrupted by a distress signal from a Norwegian ship, where Roy and the captain face attacks from some murderous baboons. No, you read that right: murderous baboons. However, these kinds of moments are too rare and too brief. McBride spends an extended period of time on Mars trying to make contact with this father and learning that his father killed everyone on board his ship when they wanted to return to Earth rather than follow the elder McBride’s deranged ideas about his mission. The director of the facility on Mars, Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga), helps him to get onto the ship that’s going to try to stop his father. Sadly, the three other astronauts die within minutes of his arrival on board—not through him killing them, no. They die from a series of rather stupid mishaps. People disappear in this movie very quickly. Part of the problem with Ad Astra is that it takes remarkably talented performers like Sutherland and Negga and even Jones and relegates them to minor roles (almost cameos at times) with only a limited amount of screen time. Instead, we get a lot of time listening to Roy’s inner thoughts. While Pitt is always a welcome presence to gaze upon, his character is well known for his ability to control his emotions and never get upset. That’s tough to watch for almost two hours, no matter how high the quality of the cinematography or art direction or visual effects.

Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Sound Mixing

Romancing the Stone (1984)

 

Romancing the Stone is a great hybrid of romantic comedy and action-adventure film. It’s a sexy film with lots of gunfire, some physical comedy, and even a few crocodiles. It also marked the first movie pairing of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas (with Danny DeVito along for the ride, as usual). They would later appear together in The Jewel of the Nile and The War of the Roses, but Romancing the Stone set a template for their future film interactions. They don’t like or even trust each other at first, but they begin to fall in love, and the film is as much about their relationship as it is the outline of the major plot. Turner plays Joan Wilder, a romance novelist living a pretty dull life with her cat. She’s not having any actual adventures; she just writes about them. Douglas is an actual adventurer, the perfectly named Jack Dalton, who smuggles exotic birds; he’s making his way through the jungle, one small town or village at a time. When Joan’s sister is kidnapped and taken to Colombia by the hapless brothers Ira (Zack Norman) and Ralph (DeVito), she crosses paths with Jack and attempts to enlist his help in rescuing her sister. She has to promise to pay him what she has left in traveler’s cheques once they’re both stranded in the jungle. Throughout the film, there’s a clear example of a McGuffin (one of Hitchcock’s favorite devices) in this treasure map to the location of a large emerald called El Corazon (“The Heart”), but really what matters here is the interaction between Turner and Douglas. It’s somewhat incidental that the map came from her murdered brother-in-law, and now everyone, including another drug lord named Col. Zolo, keeps looking for Turner because she’s in possession of it. Turner is very sexy here, and she becomes looser as the movie progresses and her inhibitions around Douglas’s Jack lower. She’s so delightful when she finds one of her fans in a small village, a local drug lord named Juan who helps them escape capture. Douglas, by comparison, was always a bit of a lech in his movies during this period. A look at his facial expressions seems to tell you his intentions with Joan. And that raises one of the central concerns of the film’s narrative: Does he love her, or is he just an opportunist? Has he started to have feelings for her, or does he just want to find the treasure of El Corazon himself? Romancing the Stone likes to tease viewers with the nature of their relationship, and it’s a delight to watch them bicker ruthlessly and then enjoy each other’s company.

Oscar Nomination: Best Film Editing