TAKING WOODSTOCK: a real groovy trip

It's July 1969. In the Middle East Israel and Egypt are fighting the War of Attrition. In Vietnam more than 800 US troops would die before the month was out. On the moon Neil Armstrong was taking one giant leap for mankind, and in a small rural town in upstate New York Jake and Sonia Teichberg's dilapidated motel is being taken over by a bunch of hippies.
They're there at the invitation of the Teichberg's son Eliot (Demetri Martin). In a last gasp effort to save his parents' business from foreclosure, Eliot has offered the rundown El Monaco as the HQ for the promoters of music festival which has just had its permit pulled by a neighbouring town. He also finds them a new venue in the fields of a nearby dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur (a pleasantly subdued Eugene Levy).
This act borne of desperation would make Bethel the centre of the universe the following month as more than half a million people descended on Max's 600 acres for 3 days of peace and music known as Woodstock.
TAKING WOODSTOCK is Eliot's story told in a spellbinding blend of drama, comedy and documentary. Director Ang Lee doesn't simply recreate those two months in the summer 69, he transports us back there and lets us live them as if we were actually there.
Where Michael Wadleigh's epic 1970 "Woodstock" documentary focused on the heart of the festival, capturing the musical acts on the main stage, Lee's interest is in the periphery of the event. This is not a story about the music or the performers. Most of the action takes place at the Teichberg's motel, where Eliot finds himself engulfed by the events he has unwittingly unleashed and battling with an overbearing and ungrateful mother who can see only disaster and financial ruin ahead.
Eliot's also struggling to come to terms with his sexuality and the fear that his parents will disown him. But with a little help from a muscular ex-Marine turned drag queen (an interesting turn from Liev Schrieber) the uptight Jewish interior designer finds himself as hundreds of thousands of young people flood past his front door to lose themselves in the music, drugs and free love.
Despite that, Eliot's actually the straightest character in the story and that makes it easier for us to experience events through his eyes. Forty years removed from the height of the hippie movement, many of us will share his bewilderment and surprise at the good natured "turn on, tune in, drop out" behaviour he witnesses. Eliot puts a human face on what is now a legendary event.
Lee has a solid track record as a creative and original director (Brokeback Mountain", "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon") but he doesn't entirely avoid the drug and hippie cliches of the era although I'm not sure what else he could have done. They may now be cliches but they're also pretty accurate representations of the time which have unfortunately since become overused.
What's more irritating is Imelda Staunton's unrestrained portrayal of a very New York Jewish mother. Where 10 would be more than adequate Staunton cranks her performance up to 12. It's too much especially when there's not a hint of humour in her behaviour.
But Mrs Teichberg aside TAKING WOODSTOCK is a real trip. I'm never going to be able to say I was there but, thanks to Ang Lee's gentle sweet-natured storytelling I can now feel as if I were there.

THE VEGAS CASINO WAR: Hudson's last hurrah more of a faint croak

Rock Hudson had been one of the biggest stars of the 50s and early 60s but by 1984 he was reduced to made for tv dreck like THE VEGAS CASINO WAR. Also known as "Las Vegas Strip War" the film's most likely to be referred to as Hudson's final film.
He plays Neil Chaine, a charming, old school, casino owner who takes revenge on his former business partners in the most satisfying way possible by beating them at their own game. Along the way he finds time to have sex with Sharon Stone in a cell on Alcatraz, and get the better of a blatant Don King rip-off boxing promoter called Jack Madrid (a truly unusual performance by the normally dependable James Earl Jones) in a business deal.
                            The story's not actually as exciting and/or bizarre as this brief synopsis suggests. Burdened down by a threadbare script, shoddy production values, uninspired direction and some dreadful overacting THE VEGAS CASINO WAR is a thoroughly undistinguished production. The sole justification for investing 96 minutes of your time is Hudson's presence.
At the time of it's release, less than a year before his death from AIDS, the secretly homosexual star was already a sick man, and it shows. He's clearly lost a good deal of weight and his face wears the haggard look of illness. Apart from a few camera angles which capture - fleetingly - the familiar Hudson features of earlier decades, he is mostly unrecognisable. His character is written as a man of action and charisma but Hudson looks tired and uninspired. Of course that may in part be due to the third rate script sapping his energy but whatever the reason he does little more than go through the motions.
With hindsight it's easy to read more into the film than may have been intended. There's a couple of scenes where Hudson strips off his shirt for no good reason other than - perhaps - to try and persuade us he's healthier than he looks, while one line which "This body's the one thing in my life I have any certainty about" - is loaded with retroactive meaning.
As cinematic swansongs go THE VEGAS CASINO WAR is not the way any star would want to go. It's certainly nowhere near as sad and pathetic as Bela Lugosi's final bow in "Plan 9 from Outer Space" but it's closer to that end of the scale than it is John Wayne's splendidly valedictorial farewell in "The Shootist."

THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D: the stars deserved better

THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D. is a tail-end entry to the golden era of screwball comedies and pretty weak one at that.
Bette Davis is miscast as flighty oil heiress Joan Winfield. Given to impulsive marriages to unsuitable men, she finds herself shanghaied by James Cagney when she attempts to elope to Las Vegas to tie the knot with vacuous, egotistical bandleader Jack Carson.
Not only is she unconvincing in this madcap role but at 33 years old she is clearly a decade too old to play a 23 year old child of the nightclub scene.
Had she essayed the part in 1937 or 38 she might have got away with it but by the time of the film's release in 1941 Davis had built a solid reputation for herself as a strong, often wilful, screen presence, given to dominating her men and suffering for her rebelliousness. To cast her as a flibbertigibbert who lived in fear of telling her overbearing father about her latest nuptials, and allowed herself to be repeatedly humiliated by Cagney's character, made very little sense.
THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D. is an ill-advised effort by Warner Brothers to extend her range, ignoring the received wisdom of the studio system that stars became stars by playing a type which clicked with the public. Once they found that type, if they wanted to maintain their grip on the top of the slippery pole of success, they played variations on it over and over again.
Cagney, by contrast, plays Cagney. He's cocky, impulsive, pugilistic and brimming with confidence but really not very interesting. Both he and Davis are poorly served by a script that simply fails to sparkle. That's particularly disappointing considering it's written by Philip and Julius Epstein who, just one year later, would be responsible for the screenplays for "The Man Who Came to Dinner" and "Casablanca."

THE INFORMANT! Bloody good fun!

THE INFORMANT! is based on a true story but refuses to be bound by the facts. That's the general gist of the disclaimer which appears right at the start of the film. It's such a crazy story that it's hard to believe it actually happened. Stylistically it's a companion-piece to 2008's "Burn After Reading" but content-wise it's closer to Russell Crowe's 1999 true-story epic "The Insider."
Matt Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, an Ivy League PhD scientist and rising star at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the early 1990s. ADM is an agri-industry giant manufacturing many of the additives, preservatives and sundry chemicals listed in small print on the ingredients section of food packaging. Motivated, he says, by a sense of moral outrage, Whitacre contacts the FBI to blow the whistle on ADM's efforts to fix the world price of the food supplement, lysine, and for the next 3 years he leads a double-life as an undercover informant gathering evidence on his colleagues. It became the biggest anti-trust case the FBI had ever handled and resulted in the downfall not only of ADM's senior management but also - for very unexpected reasons - Mark Whitacre himself.
What starts out as a comedy-tinged caper, punctuated by a wonderfully jaunty score from Marvin Hamlisch, turns out to be something very different indeed. Director Steven Soderbergh oversees a story that peels like an onion revealing layer after layer of twists and turns which keep us constantly wrongfooted. Are we watching a comedy, a drama, a tragedy or something that's a combination of the three but isn't a dragemedy? Can this real life guy Whitacre be for real? Can we take him seriously when he comes across like a close cousin of Damon's dorky character Linus Caldwell in the "Ocean's 11/12/13" movies?
The ride is wild, the story's fascinating, and the performances are spot on - Joel McHale - from E!'s The Soup - and Scott Bakula are stand-out as Whitacre's FBI handlers. The result is total entertainment. THE INFORMANT! really is a whole lot of fun!

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY: sadly lacking in the Yuletide cheer department

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY is a real Hollywood oddity and not in a good way. Despite the title there's nothing festive or heartwarming about this tale of a nightclub singer who's swept off her feet by a dashing and wealthy young man who turns out to be a wastrel of the worst kind.
What makes this such an odd drama is the casting. A young and decidedly lightweight Gene Kelly plays the dashing cad, while teen singing sensation Deanna Durbin makes her dramatic debut as the young woman he wrongs. Although CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY was her first serious acting part, the 22 year old Durbin was a Hollywood veteran, having starred in a series of musical vehicles dating back to 1936.
On the evidence of CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY she should have stuck to the warbling which made her famous. She gives a one-note performance which lacks depth and believability. Her movements look awkward and rehearsed, and her.limited emotional range is further stunted by a surfeit of facial puppy fat which severely restricts her ability to register any expression other than sullenness, topped off by an overly red pair of "trout-pout" lips.
Her unconvincing portrayal of a woman to whom horrible things are happening is matched by Robert Siodmak's lacklustre direction. Too often he pads the running time with long, pointless scene-setting shots which do nothing to advance the story.
An all-round disappointment CHRISTMAS STORY is really only worth watching as an example of how even the Hollywood studio system occasionally got it completely wrong.

KISS THEM FOR ME: Cary Grant's worst ever?

This 1957 turkey has to be a strong contender for the title of Cary Grant's worst ever movie. He's clearly too old for the part, his character is not only unsympathetic but also totally unlikeable from beginning to end; Jayne Mansfield's feeble Marilyn Monroe impression is unwatchable; the characters are constantly shouting at each other, and the story stinks of its theatrical origins. Truly terrible.
What on earth were Grant and director Stanley Donen thinking?

MINISTRY OF FEAR: the benefit of being a blank actor

It's rather difficult today to understand the appeal of Ray Milland as a star actor. He's undeniably charming and handsome in a bland kind of way but hardly memorable, yet for 20 years he was a bona fide Hollywood film star. Between 1935 and 1955 he made more than 60 movies working with some of the biggest names on both sides of the camera.
He started out in the 30s as a suave and slightly stiff leading man in romantic comedies and expanded his range in the 40s to include an assortment of morally unscrupulous and mentally fragile characters.
Perhaps it was his lack of a discernible screen persona which allowed him to enjoy such a long career. It allowed him to maintain credibility as he switched between roles because he never became associated in the mind of the cinema-going public with one particular type.
These were the thoughts swirling through my mind as I watched - and thoroughly enjoyed - Milland in action in the 1944 thriller MINISTRY OF FEAR. Set mostly in a rubble-strewn London under devastating nightly attack by Hitler's Luftwaffe, he plays Stephen Neale, a man who's grasp on reality is in doubt following his release after two years in a mental asylum. Making his way back to the bomb-damaged capital he finds himself caught up in a Nazi spy ring and forced to go on the run after being framed for murder.
The seeds of doubt over Neale's mental state are sown in the story's opening moments then copiously watered and encouraged to sprout by the events that follow. Milland's relatively anonymous screen persona is a great advantage here because it's difficult for us to predict whether he will ultimately succeed or fail. He has no predetermined type to inform with confidence our guesswork about his fate. Whatever travails Milland's contemporaries Cary Grant or Ronald Colman (for example) endured during the course of a movie one could be pretty sure they'd wind up on top at the conclusion with the girl at their side. There's far less certainty with Milland and that keeps the tension going almost until the finale.
However, the film's effectiveness is not due to Milland alone. MINISTRY OF FEAR is based on the novel by Graham Greene and directed by the great Fritz Lang who creates a wonderfully atmospheric studio-bound version of London peopled by all manner of strange characters who may or may not be what they seem.
Milland went on to pick up the best actor Oscar in 1946 for his performance in "The Lost Weekend." and it's interesting to speculate whether his portrayal of an alcoholic writer on a bender would have been as effective without his having first accumulated a little emotional baggage as the tormented Stephen Neale in MINISTRY OF FEAR.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS: World War Two Tarantino style

Quentin Tarantino's latest is a maddening mix of comic book action, high camp, and gratuitous self indulgence. He's created a spectacle which kept me hooked from start to finish while also irritating the heck out of me with it's director's masturbatory obsession with cinematic pop culture.
But let's start with the comic book action. There's plenty of it (though not as much as the publicity and some reviews might suggest) and it's gory. Numerous bodies explode into a multitude of bright red chunks of flesh and spurting blood as they are machine gunned at close quarters. Throats are slit and the recently dead scalped in equally graphic and luridly technicolored detail. It's like watching a considerably more explicit version of one of the World War Two comic strips from my childhood brought to life.
For those who didn't share my youthful passion for comic book stories about an American sergeant under sentence of death from a bullet lodged milimetres from his heart fighting his way across France after D-Day, imagine one of those gung-ho starstudded 60s WW2 epics like "The Dirty Dozen", "Kelly's Heroes" or "Battle of the Bulge" with Telly Savalas chewing on a cigar and spitting contemptuously in the face of death.
Brad Pitt plays the Savalas part, as jut-jawed Lt Aldo Raine, grappling manfully with a backwoods Tennessee accent as he leads his band of Jewish-American "Inglorious basterds" on a bloody killing spree across Nazi occupied France.
The high camp is provided by SS Colonel Hans Landa, known as "the Jewhunter" for his tenacity and success in tracking down Jews who've gone into hiding. In the film's stand-out performance German actor Christoph Waltz plays Landa as cultured and totally ruthless, revelling in his reputation and his ornate uniforms, and delighting in turning every interrogation into a full-blown theatrical performance. It is to Landa that Tarantino assigns the bulk of his trademark longwinded monologues incorporating the kind of trivia, irrelevant digressions and self satisfied wordplay which start to really - really - irritate after a while.
Prevented by the period setting from loading the dialogue with his usual mishmash of pop culture references to music, and films and actors of the 1960s and 70s, Tarantino instead makes Landa's dialogue a loose amalgam of the smug, pontificating, self aggrandizing lines spoken by every actor ever to have played a German officer in a World War Two film.
Determined to show-off that he knows as much about cinema in the 20s and 30s as he does about the 60s and 70s he also gratuitously throws names like Brigitte Helm, Pola Negri and Emil Jannings into the mix. For me this kind of unnecessary (and to many cinemagoers, completely meaningless) namedropping says more about Tarantino's ego than an interest in creating period atmosphere.
From the totally implausible (even by the standards of the 60s movies he's pastiching) appearances by Hitler, Goring and Martin Bormann to everything else included in the film's sprawling 153 minute running time, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is exactly the kind of war film I'd expect Tarantino to make. It's not a masterpiece but it holds the attention and, after the tedious navel-gazing of 2007's "Deathproof," it's a welcome return to something approaching form.

ALL ABOUT STEVE: suffering for my ardour

Until this afternoon I've been so hot for Sandra Bullock I'd drive fifty miles to watch a silent movie of her ironing bedsheets. But having just sat through her latest movie ALL ABOUT STEVE I've downsized that maximum distance to ten feet (and she'd have to be ironing underwear).
ALL ABOUT STEVE seriously challenges "Miss Congeniality 2" for the title of worst Sandra Bullock film ever. This alleged rom-com is a witless, lame ragbag of slapdash cliches devoid of originality, humour or entertainment value.
Ms Bullock has built her career playing lovable klutzy outsiders who overcome all manner of (usually) self-induced adversities to triumph personally and professionally. In the best of these ("Two Weeks Notice", "Miss Congeniality") her social ineptness has been endearing and often adorable but here it's just plain disturbing. Her character, Mary Horowitz, is unintentionally borderline autistic. She's very intelligent but totally clueless when it comes to developing personal relationships or appreciating how her obsession with her job (she creates crosswords for a small Sacramento newspaper) appears to others. At one point she actually jots down her editor's advice to "be normal" as if that's the only way she's going to remember it.
When she develops a fixation with tv news channel cameraman Steve (Bradley Cooper) after a disastrous blind date and starts following him across country from one assignment to the next the effect is scary. Mary (who constantly refers to herself in the third person) is more stalker than smitten, and completely unconvincing to boot. Bullock fails to imbue Mary with even an ounce of credibility as a character, settling instead for a weird mix of childlike innocence, demented schoolgirl and overage virgin. Imagine watching someone with no concept of the meaning of the phrase "to act" being instructed to act. To be fair to Ms Bullock her performance is no worse than the script or Phil Traill's direction, both of which tarnish the description pedestrian with their lazy and total lack of effort and imagination.
Rom-coms don't make any claim to be realistic nor do audiences expect the story that unfolds to be completely plausible or even likely. But it would be nice to be offered the possibility that it might happen. A token gesture in the direction of believability rarely harms an audience's ability to enjoy. For example, showing or perhaps simply suggesting that the CNN-style cable news channel Steve works for employs more than one cameraman and reporter rather than having him and egotistical journo Hartman Hughes (Thomas Haden Church) as the sole team dashing from one breaking story to the next across vast distances apparently at the speed of light.
As star and producer of ALL ABOUT STEVE my beloved Sandy has only herself to blame for this execrable mess. What was she thinking?! Was she thinking? If even there was an argument for installing a fast forward button in the arm of each cinema seat this film is it. It's ninety six minutes of my life that I'll never recover. Do her and yourself a huge favour and remember her as she was, and not what she's become.