Stephen Frears has directed quite a few terrific movies (High Fidelity, one of my ATFs, The Grifters, The Van, and more) but one of his abiding interests has been the immigrant culture in London and he pursues that interest again in Dirty Pretty Things, a story about three people who come to London from very different homelands but face much the same pressures.

Audrey Tautou, who made a huge impact in Amelie, features here as a Turkish immigrant waiting for her status to be determined by the authorities; in the meantime, she’s not permitted to work or take in a tenant to share the cost of an apartment but to have the money for food and rent she of course must do both. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a Nigerian in the country illegally, a trained surgeon running away from political trouble at home, unable to sleep and working two jobs, subletting the couch from Tautou’s Senay. They both work for Senor Juan, the third immigrant, at a hotel where unpleasant things take place.

Frears and writer Steve Knight create a mileau where essentially no ethnically English people exist even though the whole film takes place in London and every person struggles to find and keep their place. I’ve little doubt that they’ve reflected a true picture of life in these neighborhoods but perhaps the dramatic exaggeration is the overwhelming pace of the drudgery and pressure. The acting, the often claustrophobic settings, the bland and dark imagery all combine to give Dirty Pretty Things a strikingly creeping effect, quite suited to the material.

Recommended

Back in 1969, people where groovy. I mean, they were cool cats and chicks and didn’t let conventional moralities stand in the way of a good time. No sire, not them people back then. So how is it that a movie studio picked four of the least groovy people I’ve ever seen to make a movie called Where It’s At? A couple of clues: the movie was backed by the prototypical ’60s conglomerate ITT (Harold Geneen’s less than synergystic attempt to prove that management is management) and was written and directed by someone whose best work was 15 or more years in the past, Garson Kanin.

David Janssen stars as the fictitious owner/operator of Ceaser’s Palace in Las Vegas, Robert Drivas is his semi-estranged, just-graduated from Princeton son, Rosemary Forsyth is Janssen’s new wife, and Brenda Vaccaro made her movie debut as Janssen’s under-appreciated secretary. Forsyth, at least, comes within a smidgen of groovy but the other three miss by a mile. Don Rickles even makes a cameo playing a dealer who tries to sneak a scam past the sky in the eye; Janssen busts him down to dishwasher, literally, to repay his debt.

Drivas should have had an easy time of it but Kanin seems to have been unable to buy a clue about the younger generation. Janssen’s acting can best be described as early screaming; almost every line he utters right until his comeuppance is delivered with a gruff, barking tone, even when his character is trying to make nice with the wife or son. Vaccaro is sweet but her part just makes no sense at all–for most of the movie her Miss Hirsch is just a typical harried executive assistant until, out of the blue, she appears in nightclothes in Drivas’ suite and asks him for a night of passion before she leaves Las Vegas.

Kanin, who wrote and directed Where It’s At, was retired for most of the ’60s and I’m thinking he should have stayed that way even if he was only in his late 50s when making this. His reputation was built on some terrific films–Tracey and Hepburn in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, the Jayne Mansfield trash classic The Girl Can’t Help It, and a few films with Judy Holliday. This clunker seems like an attempt to update that vibe for the Swinging ’60s but turns out as just another father-son melodrama with plot points winked at instead of built solid.

Not recommended

Coming from David Levien and Brian Koppelman, the same pair that wrote Rounders, no one was surprised that Knockaround Guys is another movie about young guys caught up in the underworld. But Guys does not have anyone like Matt Damon or Edward Norton to play the young men struggling with The Life and no femme like Famke Jansen to add spice. In the end, the pair’s script and direction is pulled under by overly pretenscious speeches and a simplistic plot.

It’s all about putting words in the mouths of stereotypical characters. Barry Pepper is a mob boss’s son, whose father doesn’t give him the respect he craves, Seth Green and Andrew Davoli are also second generation hoods not living up to dad, and Vin Diesel is the muscleman who ‘understands’ the truth of their path better than any of the others. John Malkovitch is Pepper’s evil, slick uncle, chafing under the thumb of Dennis Hopper. A bunch of no-name actors play the hicks who get in the way of Malkovitch’s plan to flip the pecking order and none stand out. Might have expected Levien and Koppleman to use the wide open spaces of the Montana location a little more attractively but that didn’t happen either.

Not really worth the time

There are only seven basic stories for writers to use and Hollywood ranks the Hero’s Tale right at the top; my favorite genre or at least far ahead of Boy Meets Girl. So I was quite interested when TV Guide mentioned that one such film I’d never seen but which has all kinds of great press, 1960’sThe Magnificent Seven, was going to be shown on commercial-free Turner Classic Movies. This is a film that spawned three or four sequels, a couple of variations, and a TV series. One of the last of the classic Hollywood westerns, Magnificent Seven is itself based on a another film, a Japanese classic called Shichinin No Samurai from Akira Kurosawa.

A Mexican village, a few miles on the other side of the Texas border, is hounded year after year by a bandit and his gang until the farmers decide enough’s enough. Riding up to some no name Texas town seeking guns and ammunition, they find instead two brave gunmen (Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen) and hire them instead. The gunfighters recruit four more and a wannabe insists on joining them to make the seven. Once the crew reaches the village, there is only enough time for a little training before the bandidos attack. The story itself is hardly surprising to anyone who’s seen more than three Westerns or really any three decent Hollywood action films.

What makes it stand out so much is that so many elements come together so well. The actors really inhabit the characters, while the script treats the characters with respect rather than as objects to move the plot. The director lets the script breathe and gives the actors space. About the only artificial feeling I got was from the sets, especially the Mexican village, which were a little too obviously built on a tight budget. The villagers are a good example of what I mean; in most movies their characters would have been the objects of condescension but Brynner as the leader of the hired guns talks with them and makes them a part of the plan.

I’m not surprised since the director is John Sturges, who went on to make one of my all time favorites three years later, The Great Escape. And Steve McQueen, when his A game is on, is always a treat. The ending might seem like a bit of a letdown but I saw it as realistic.

Recommended

A movie that could easily have gone over the edge in sentimentality, obviousness or obnoxiousness didn’t. As a result, the audience with which we saw Freaky Friday applauded when the final credits ran. I didn’t go that far but I did laugh through most of the movie, except for some touching scenes towards the end when I cried. Seriously, this Disney-made flick is just terrific and worth seeing even at the outrageous prices charged here in Silicon Valley.

This remake is the exception, I suppose that proves the rule. You know, the rule which says that remakes are crap. Seriously, how many good remakes can you point to? Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait was great but Chris Rock’s re-remake (Down to Earth) was just sad. As great an actor as Robert Deniro is, was his Cape Fear better than Gregory Peck’s? Unlike theatrical productions, movies are best left in their original state. Still, try an idea often enough and there are bound to be some successes, as is the case here.

Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan play the mother and daughter who are the focus of the film (Barbara Harris and a very young Jodie Foster in the original). Curtis has no need to prove her acting skills, anyone who saw her in Trading Places and True Lies will agree, but Lohan was a surprise (some fans might take issue with me for saying that!), a very nice surprise, who makes a terrific mark in her first feature starring role. You will recall that mother and daughter switch bodies, meaning, of course, that Lohan spends a considerable portion of her screen time playing the mother trapped in a 15 year old body. I’m not surprised to read that Disney already has her in production on a movie for next year (Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen).

Harold Gould makes a rare appearance, providing quality as my footie friends would say, as the nutty grandfather, Mark Harmon has a quiet time as Curtis’s fiance, Rosalind Chao looks ageless as the Chinese restauranteur whose mother causes the switch, and Chad Michael Murray is sensitive and hunky as the guy Lohan must have.

The soundtrack is pretty good too. Lohan’s character plays in a band, which is featured on a couple of tracks, but really good are The Donna’s Backstage, Joey Ramone’s cover of What a Wonderful World and a hard rocking take on Britney Spear’s …Baby One More Time by Bowling For Soup; they could have left off the hurried, emotionless remake of Happy Together from Simple Plan.

Definitely recommended

Since this little essay seems to be the 200th movie review (to use the term loosely) published here on BillSaysThis, I thought I’d pair these two films about the mid-60s concert scene by what are arguably the two most important popular music acts of the era, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. I watched the former a few weeks back (thanks Pam for the present!) and the latter am still enjoying some of the DVD extras as I write this but was struck by the similarities and differences.

First off, both are Definitely Recommended as long as you think you’ll enjoy the music and not worth watching otherwise. Fortunately for me, I do very much. Second, don’t expect anything close to a normal movie in either instance: one was thrown together just to capitalize on the band’s popularity without time to plan or think things through and the other is an avant-garde documentary that makes no attempt to provide context or comfortable familiarity.

In A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles take an overnight train trip to London for a performance, joined by their road manager and Paul McCartney’s grandfather (actually a wiley old actor named Wilfred Brambell). Director Richard Lester in many scenes simply worked from a setup and suggested bit of action; even though Alun Owen wrote what many said was an excellent script, very little of his dialogue and staging was used.

The DVD has lots of extras and one that was particularly interesting to me was a series of interviews with people involved in organizing and making the movie (though none of the Beatles themselves participated). We find that the studio executives in America who provided the financing were mainly interested in getting a soundtrack record and its publishing rights; the go ahead was given before the group had made much of an impact in the States though their instant godhood via that first Ed Sullivan show performance came before filming began. Little did they realize…

From our perspective in 2003, Hard Day’s Night may seem amateurish and even a poor outing by the Fab Four (except, of course, for the actual music) given our familiarity with more modern efforts, especially the million dollar major label videos seen over the last decade or more but remember that in 1964 there was no such thing. Rock and roll in the movies was pretty much Elvis in whatever dreck Colonel Parker put in front of him and Frankie and Annette beach movies and music television was American Bandstand plus the occasional crumb of an appearance on Sullivan, who was more interested in his Broadway pals and circus acts. In fact, Lester lampoons the latter by having a dance troup and ‘plate spinner’ appear with the Beatles on a TV broadcast.

Mainly, the film has the boys (in their early 20s at the time) have fun with a bunch of situations: on board the train, getting from the station to the hotel, in the hotel room with each other and with room service, finding Grandpa when gets loose, backstage at the show, and even at a police station where they go to retrieve the old man. Absurdity, nonsense, and the occasional tip of the cap to Spike Jones and old school Peter Sellers.

Did I say mainly? Okay, that’s true in terms of minutes but the primary source of entertainment is the music, perhaps the peak of their early period, with Lennon and McCartney confident in their own writing abilities but still working within the existing forms. The title song, amusingly enough, wasn’t even written until after the filming when everyone was trying to figure out a name for the movie; when one was arrived at, Lennon came back the next morning with the complete song.

On the train, in fact, we’re also introduced to Patti Boyd as one of two girls that Paul tries to talk up but who end up flirting with Grandpa instead. Boyd took up with and then married George, later becoming the object of Eric Clapton’s unrequited affections when he wrote Layla for and about her, though she eventually gave in and left Harrison for him. Clapton, in his happiness, then wrote Wonderful Tonight for her.

Don’t Look Back is much more difficult to pin down; documentary maker DA Pennebaker completely ignores convention and simply edits together bits of film that he expects will, in sum, present a meaningful portrait of Bob Dylan. Shot in 1965, almost exactly a year after the Beatles’ movie, and also in black and white, Dylan is captured before he retreated into his shell, before he decided to essentially stop saying anything in public other than his lyrics (or even less connected to reality).

There is absolutely no inclusion of, say, captions to let the viewer know where some scene is taking place, except for the odd mention by a hotel staff or glimpse of signage such as on the approach to Royal Albert Hall. Pennebaker seems to have laid down on the back floor of limousines and simply wandered where he would with a small camera to get his shots, giving the film a radical perspective, an awesome feeling of simply being inside the space. Where Hard Day’s Night laid the foundation for two generations of rock films, Don’t Look Back had a more immediate impact as the rock festival films like Woodstock and Monterey Pop came out and took the Pennebaker style as their own.

I think that there must be hundreds or thousands of feet of unused footage filmed early on, before Dylan and his pals–mainly Joan Baez, Bob Neuwirth, Albert Grossman, and Marianne Faithfull–got used to the camera’s intrusiveness. Still, on screen Dylan is comfortable and has, for example, an outstanding exchange with a small-time British reporter sent to interview him. The singer turns the tables on the out of his depth young man, questioning him on life and his worth rather than simply responding to standard questions posed a thousand times before; one really gets a glimpse of his intelligence and twistedness.

Donovan (Leitch), just making a name for himself in England at the time of filming, comes up in conversation early in the film and then later on shows up in a hotel room where he and Dylan trade performances. Baez sings a few times as well, and Alan Price, who’d just left The Animals after playing keyboards on their hit House of the Rising Sun.

During the film itself, most of the stage performances are cut short, just excerpts, but the DVD has recordings of all five songs in the extra material; my favorite of them is It’s all Over Now, Baby Blue. Also added is an alternate version of the Subterranean Homesick Blues video which opens the movie–the one where Dylan stands there nonplussed and drops cards with a word or two from each line to the ground.

Since this little essay seems to be the 200th movie review (to use the term loosely) published here on BillSaysThis, I thought I’d pair these two films about the mid-60s concert scene by what are arguably the two most important popular music acts of the era, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. I watched the former a few weeks back (thanks Pam for the present!) and the latter am still enjoying some of the DVD extras as I write this but was struck by the similarities and differences.

First off, both are Definitely Recommended as long as you think you’ll enjoy the music and not worth watching otherwise. Fortunately for me, I do very much. Second, don’t expect anything close to a normal movie in either instance: one was thrown together just to capitalize on the band’s popularity without time to plan or think things through and the other is an avant-garde documentary that makes no attempt to provide context or comfortable familiarity.

In A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles take an overnight train trip to London for a performance, joined by their road manager and Paul McCartney’s grandfather (actually a wiley old actor named Wilfred Brambell). Director Richard Lester in many scenes simply worked from a setup and suggested bit of action; even though Alun Owen wrote what many said was an excellent script, very little of his dialogue and staging was used.

The DVD has lots of extras and one that was particularly interesting to me was a series of interviews with people involved in organizing and making the movie (though none of the Beatles themselves participated). We find that the studio executives in America who provided the financing were mainly interested in getting a soundtrack record and its publishing rights; the go ahead was given before the group had made much of an impact in the States though their instant godhood via that first Ed Sullivan show performance came before filming began. Little did they realize…

From our perspective in 2003, Hard Day’s Night may seem amateurish and even a poor outing by the Fab Four (except, of course, for the actual music) given our familiarity with more modern efforts, especially the million dollar major label videos seen over the last decade or more but remember that in 1964 there was no such thing. Rock and roll in the movies was pretty much Elvis in whatever dreck Colonel Parker put in front of him and Frankie and Annette beach movies and music television was American Bandstand plus the occasional crumb of an appearance on Sullivan, who was more interested in his Broadway pals and circus acts. In fact, Lester lampoons the latter by having a dance troup and ‘plate spinner’ appear with the Beatles on a TV broadcast.

Mainly, the film has the boys (in their early 20s at the time) have fun with a bunch of situations: on board the train, getting from the station to the hotel, in the hotel room with each other and with room service, finding Grandpa when gets loose, backstage at the show, and even at a police station where they go to retrieve the old man. Absurdity, nonsense, and the occasional tip of the cap to Spike Jones and old school Peter Sellers.

Did I say mainly? Okay, that’s true in terms of minutes but the primary source of entertainment is the music, perhaps the peak of their early period, with Lennon and McCartney confident in their own writing abilities but still working within the existing forms. The title song, amusingly enough, wasn’t even written until after the filming when everyone was trying to figure out a name for the movie; when one was arrived at, Lennon came back the next morning with the complete song.

On the train, in fact, we’re also introduced to Patti Boyd as one of two girls that Paul tries to talk up but who end up flirting with Grandpa instead. Boyd took up with and then married George, later becoming the object of Eric Clapton’s unrequited affections when he wrote Layla for and about her, though she eventually gave in and left Harrison for him. Clapton, in his happiness, then wrote Wonderful Tonight for her.

Don’t Look Back is much more difficult to pin down; documentary maker DA Pennebaker completely ignores convention and simply edits together bits of film that he expects will, in sum, present a meaningful portrait of Bob Dylan. Shot in 1965, almost exactly a year after the Beatles’ movie, and also in black and white, Dylan is captured before he retreated into his shell, before he decided to essentially stop saying anything in public other than his lyrics (or even less connected to reality).

There is absolutely no inclusion of, say, captions to let the viewer know where some scene is taking place, except for the odd mention by a hotel staff or glimpse of signage such as on the approach to Royal Albert Hall. Pennebaker seems to have laid down on the back floor of limousines and simply wandered where he would with a small camera to get his shots, giving the film a radical perspective, an awesome feeling of simply being inside the space. Where Hard Day’s Night laid the foundation for two generations of rock films, Don’t Look Back had a more immediate impact as the rock festival films like Woodstock and Monterey Pop came out and took the Pennebaker style as their own.

I think that there must be hundreds or thousands of feet of unused footage filmed early on, before Dylan and his pals–mainly Joan Baez, Bob Neuwirth, Albert Grossman, and Marianne Faithfull–got used to the camera’s intrusiveness. Still, on screen Dylan is comfortable and has, for example, an outstanding exchange with a small-time British reporter sent to interview him. The singer turns the tables on the out of his depth young man, questioning him on life and his worth rather than simply responding to standard questions posed a thousand times before; one really gets a glimpse of his intelligence and twistedness.

Donovan (Leitch), just making a name for himself in England at the time of filming, comes up in conversation early in the film and then later on shows up in a hotel room where he and Dylan trade performances. Baez sings a few times as well, and Alan Price, who’d just left The Animals after playing keyboards on their hit House of the Rising Sun.

During the film itself, most of the stage performances are cut short, just excerpts, but the DVD has recordings of all five songs in the extra material; my favorite of them is It’s all Over Now, Baby Blue. Also added is an alternate version of the Subterranean Homesick Blues video which opens the movie–the one where Dylan stands there nonplussed and drops cards with a word or two from each line to the ground.

Back in the mid-90s, a lot of writers and directors in Hollywood wanted to make the next Pulp Fiction. And every studio wanted to release it, which probably explains how a guy like Klaus Hoch, who’d been hanging around Hollywood looking for a break, was able to get the green light to make Flypaper.

This is a very strange movie which just can’t bring off the combination of hardcore and comedy the way Tarantino did. Hell, even Tarantino had trouble with the formula in his followup. Hoch sets in motion a bunch of characters who slowly are drawn into each others’ orbits. Mostly, since he leaves a few loose ends hanging. There’s a sense of absurdity that kept me watching (well, that and the sexual nudity of Lucy Liu and Sadie Frost).

Mildly recommended

Bang! Ka-pow! I kept expecting to see balloon captions appear above Colin Farrell’s head each time he got into a fistfight, the sound effects of his punches landing were so loud. I’m still unsold on Farrell as (one of) the next big Hollywood stars, even if he does insist on acting like that’s already a done deal, but he does show up as well as anyone else here except perhaps LL Cool J.

S.W.A.T. the movie claims to be inspired by S.W.A.T. the ’70s TV series but honestly I don’t remember the series well enough to compare–though the character names were retained. And the cool theme music got some very headbanging updates, including a version with lyrics that played over the closing credits.

Olivier Martinez and Jeremy Renner play the primary bad guys, both very cool cucumbers. I especially liked their stonecold reactions as they waited for a small jet to land on the 6th Street Bridge during their getaway. Martinez, of course, came to notice last fall by seducing Diane Lane in Unfaithful and more recently in Showtime’s production of Tennessee William’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Samuel Jackson plays the one name only Sgt. Hondo but I missed his usual energy here.

Clark Johnson, who I first noticed when he was Meldrick Lewis on the classic TV series Homicide: Life on the Streets, makes the directing leap from small screen to big screen with S.W.A.T.. He did some excellent work on TV, directing the pilots/first episodes of both The Shield and The Wire. I think he has a great future if he sticks to strong scripts.

Recommended

For years I’d heard about this cool Robert Mitchum movie, Springsteen even mentions it as inspiration. Or maybe just stealing a cool title for what has to be one of my top three songs. Since Turner Movie Classics was unreeling it commercial-free last night, I figured the time was right.

Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the 45 years that have passed since Thunder Road was made. Either way I just didn’t get the appeal of the film or of Mitchum. The linked write up says that he fills the screen with his brooding presence but I just saw him as unable to express the emotions of his character.

The other featured actors, save Gene Barry as a Treasury agent out to bust up the moonshine rackets, look like friends or relatives of Mitchum’s and others in charge rather than actual, oh, actors. Mitchum’s son James, for instance, plays his younger brother but is barely capable of remembering his lines, much less acting them. The actresses who play his love interests, Keely Smith and Sandra Knight, are on about the same level, especially Smith–her eyes look like they’re about to explode off her face in every scene. At least she has an excuse, being a singer (married to Louis Prima) and not an actress; Knight is more famous for having Jack Nicholson’s daughter Jennifer.

Still, the film does show life that doesn’t exist any more in the USA, but a life that I think many people (*cough* Southern Republicans *cough*) look back on with far more fondness than is justified.

Barely recommended