You just hate to see a perfectly good Rolls Royce destroyed. Crushed to nothingness by a dozen other cars. And then explode in a huge fireball when the gas tanks from all of them are lit up. But that’s just one of the many thrills in this totally silly, totally fun little movie that’s basically a chance for Ron Howard to learn his directing chops.

1977’s Grand Theft Auto was Howard’s first feature film directing assignment, made while on a break from Happy Days and a companion piece to his acting stint in Eat My Dust from the year before. They were more or less a package deal Howard made with all-time B movie producing champ Roger Corman. Howard knew he wanted to direct, not act, and Corman was always happy to give nearly anyone a chance to write, direct, or act in one his films–they were made for relative pennies, so why not?

Howard followed GTA (and you have to wonder if this wasn’t some part of the inspiration for the vastly annoying videogame series of the same name) with a trio of TV movies, while he was still stuck in the TV show, but then he got the chance to direct Nightshift and he essentially never acted again. If you’ve seen him on an awards show or interview, you can understand why. He just does not make a good looking bald man!

The film. Essentially a sequence of car chases, car crashes, explosions, and bad puns set off when Howard’s character, Sam Freeman, elopes to Las Vegas with Paula (Nancy Morgan, John Ritter’s ex-wife), daughter of millionaire and gubenatorial candidate Bigby Powers. Daddy is not happy, and neither is snobby rich boy Collins Hedgeworth, who thinks he’s engaged to Paula. They set out after the lovebirds and each starts offering big cash rewards for assistance in stopping them from reaching the wedding chapel. Every idiot and his brother get involved and the chase gets deeper and deeper. Of course Ron finds parts for his brothers Clint and Rance (Rance and Ron even wrote the script).

Not exactly sophisticated humor but a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Recommended

From 2001, Kill Me Later stars Selma Blair as a morose, suicidal banker. Finally fed up with the total absence of love or pleasure, she heads to the roof of her office building to jump off. Instead, Max Beesley races up to the roof ahead of the cop whose chasing him after he and a couple of pals robbed Blair’s bank. She still wants to jump but he holds her hostage to fend off the cop; he promises to kill her later. They escape (where would the movie be otherwise?), keep running from the cops, but never really find a way to get clear. Amazing, again, but the two fall in love.

Not recommended

From 2001, Kill Me Later stars Selma Blair as a morose, suicidal banker. Finally fed up with the total absence of love or pleasure, she heads to the roof of her office building to jump off. Instead, Max Beesley races up to the roof ahead of the cop whose chasing him after he and a couple of pals robbed Blair’s bank. She still wants to jump but he holds her hostage to fend off the cop; he promises to kill her later. They escape (where would the movie be otherwise?), keep running from the cops, but never really find a way to get clear. Amazing, again, but the two fall in love.

Not recommended

Same year: Original Sin is Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas in 19th century Cuba, a triffling film about passion and, I suppose, truth. The biggest surprise to me was that Jolie did her own nude and topless scenes. There should be more surprises but writer/director Michael Cristofer seems incapable of keeping his powder in his pants. Not even much of the beautiful ‘Cuban’ countryside.

Not recommended

The original version of Bedazzled, starring Dudley Moore as a poor slob and Peter Cook as the Devil came out in 1967 and was absolutely a product of its era. The recent sequel, with Brendan Fraser and Liz Hurley in 2000, was also a reflection of the current milieu. The difference is that the first version was original and funny while the later was derivative and mean-spirited. Then again, when are remakes ever better than the original?

Stanley Moon (Moore) is a short order cook and desperately in love with the greasy spoons’ waitress Margaret (Eleanor Bron) but completely unable to get past his shyness to speak to her. Deciding that enough’s enough, he throws a rope over a water pipe in his flat and attempts to end his life but even that he cannot do properly. Or perhaps this failure is the work of George Spiggot, aka Lucifer, who happens to appear in the apartment at just that moment. Spiggot offers Moon seven wishes, an seven wishes he chooses, in exchange for his soul. A useless leftover, much like the appendix, according to Spiggot. Moon of course signs the contract for he sees it as the way to get next to Margaret. Indeed, each of the wishes is a different attempt to connect with her but since this is a deal with the Devil not one works as expected.

Comparing the two versions points to several reasons why the original is superior. Most importantly, Cook’s Lucifer is much more human and sympathetic compared to Hurley’s slick and uncaring portrayal. Cook’s fallen angel simply wanted a little adoration of his own after spending so much time as God’s favorite angel. He has no choice about inducing evil, big or little, as God’s compelled him to such behavior. And over the course of the film he actually grows to like poor Stanley and at the end voluntarily returns his soul; Hurley’s is forced to return Fraser’s due to a contract technicality which neither Fraser nor the audience is aware of before the crucial act. And in terms of sex appeal, well, Liz Hurley is a hottie but cannot compare to Raquel Welch in her prime.

Cook also wrote the original, which probably accounts for him getting so many of the good lines, and the comedy duo were able to attract Stanley Donnen to direct. Donnen was one of the top directors of the middle century (Singin’ in the Rain, Damn Yankees, Charade) and a terrific choice. The new version has some quality names involved (Harold Ramis as director, Peter Tolan and Larry Gelbart as writers) but they seem to have taken the easy paycheck on this effort.

Definitely Recommended

2001’s Gosford Park is a Robert Altman film, which means that it will be long (137 minutes), filled with quality acting, and that there will be much dialog and little action. Altman can be hit or miss: Dr. T and the Women, his previous film, sucked while ’92’s The Player was great; M*A*S*H and Nashville, from the early ’70s were terrific, all time favorites, but sandwiched in between was Elliot Gould as Phillip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye and you can’t tell me that any film with Gould as Marlowe could be worth seeing.

Gosford Park is the story of a shooting weekend in 1932 at the country estate (castle, that is) of Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon). He’s invited an assortment of relatives and friends and they bring along a servant or two each who only add to the castle’s huge staff. The film explicitly parallels the servants and the nobility, cutting between the two, showing the nearly unconscious interactions, and the striking similarities of hierarchy and snobbery. Altman even uses one character, played by Ryan Phillippe, as a sort of joke: He arrives as the valet of a visiting American film producer, seduces one of the noble women and one of the servants, then is revealed to be an actor playing a part and crosses back to his ‘proper’ place. None of the English characters approves of this, of course.

This is one of those films where nothing much really happens to create real emotional peaks–even the murder that creates the only significant plot twist isn’t really shown–but instead tries to create an atmosphere (England just before the Empire crumbled, when one simply knew his proper place) and an interesting assortment of characters to bring out the difference between there and then and here and now. A movie length, movie budgeted version of Upstairs, Downstairs. In the end, the viewing experience was enjoyable but never created the type of excitement the best films, or evenly moderatley good ones like Bedazzled, do. Julian Fellowes, a veteran British actor, did win the 2002 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay although the competition wasn’t that strong.

Mildly recommended

After a few years as a young wizard directing episodes of TV shows and one acclaimed TV movie (Duel), Steven Spielberg made his break for the big time in 1974 with this based on a true story movie, The Sugarland Express. Goldie Hawn has the featured role; her participation was key to getting the picture greenlighted by the studio (who wanted a big name) but she wanted in to show that her acting chops were not limited to romantic and other comedies. Because one thing’s for sure: this ain’t no comedy.

No, this is a serious film about two young people who get caught up in a chain of events from which there is no turning back. Hawn plays Lou-Jean and William Atherton her husband Clovis. Lou-Jean is just released from a few months in prison and Clovis, who she’s come to visit, has four months of his year left to serve. Their baby Langston, though, has been taken away by Child Welfare, permanently, and this Lou-Jean cannot accept. So she’s come not to visit Clovis, but to bust him out. Escape successful, they hitch a ride with another inmate’s parents, steal the car when their elderly driver is stopped by a highway patrolman (Michael Sacks), and then take the patrolman hostage and drive off in his patrol car to get their son.

Clovis and Lou-Jean’s journey is the stuff of tragic legend, doomed from the start. Only two small town 25 year olds who’d never been to the big city could even begin to believe that the authorities (as embodied by Texas Department of Public Safety Captain Harlin Tanner, played by the old cowboy Ben Johnson himself) would allow them to end up taking a little baby to Mexico. (Sugarland is a little town south of Houston not far from the Mexican border.) So they drive on and on to where they think the boy is, followed by an endless caravan of police cars and news reporters, holding Patrolman Maxwell Slide at gun point. The ending sort of foreshadows, say, Thelma and Louise, with its dirt and water and mass of chasers.

Like any good drama, there are light moments that cut through the tension, bringing temporary release. Momentarily disengaged from the chase, hiding for the night in an RV, the two lovers watch a Roadrunner cartoon at the drive-in next door through the window; a TV crew pulling up next to the truants for an on the move interview has its tires shot out by frustrated cops; denizens of the next to last town on the route hold a parade down Main Street with them as the central float, passing in toys and good wishes.

Spielberg shows the natural touch with relationships, image framing, and pacing here that everyone finds out about in his next movies: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Arc. He doesn’t need explosions (well, one small one when some wanna-be cops try to shoot up our protagonists) or drag racing-type challenges (okay, again, just one at the beginning of everything), just simple movement used as a framework for drilling deeper and deeper into the psyche of our two lost souls. The relationship of the three youngsters (the patrolman is only nine months on the job, more or less the same age) evolves as the time and intensity of emotions moves on; several times Slide says things that show he too is young and naive, willing to give his life if necessary to stop anything worse from happening, but wise enough to try time and again to talk his captors into surrendering.

Recommended

I saw a couple of films the last few days and am just writing briefs for completeness. Never did that for Sweet Home Alabama, which I saw at dollar night, but that was just so bad it would be wrong to even bother.

From 1965, The Ipcress File was a quite good example of a small sort of Cold War spy story, though it seems quite dated to me now. Not just because the Cold War ended so long ago but because the film itself, while probably quite out in front of things when made, has been done to death in the 38 years since. Michael Caine stars in the first of five movies as Harry Palmer, based on novels written by Len Deighton. Palmer is an agent for a branch of British Military Intelligence, a trickster working there to avoid jail for swindling German soldiers, and his mission here is to ransom a top scientist whose been kidnapped.

Harry Saltzman produced the movie(s), he also co-produced the then new James Bonds, and I believe he saw this character as a potential franchise as well though the Palmer films never came close to the financial success of 007. In many ways Palmer is the anti-Bond: cheap old car, no special equipment, dingy office shared with a half dozen other agents, always rumpled. Very cool where the Bond films are filled with heat. Though one can’t fault Caine, he was quite good but handicapped by working with a so-so script (the novel was much better) by two guys who never wrote any other films and a mediocre director in Sidney Furie.

Moderately interesting

From 1999, All the Rage is a strange little artsy movie about people who’s lives are ultimately ruined by handguns. Some of the stories are a little more interesting than the others but writer Keith Reddin and director James Stern dilute the effect by having so many subplots and then needing artificial means to connect them together. The actors are all pretty good but they don’t have enough to work with. The IMDB page linked to the title has a good audience summary, so I’ll skip it here. Let’s just say I had a difficult time buying David Schwimmer and Andre Braugher as a gay couple but that may be due to the fact that I cannot unerstand how Schwimmer ever got work as an actor in the first place. Gary Sinise, on the other hand, is terrific playing a Bill Gates gone Howard Hughes weirdo.

Not recommended