MORNING GLORY: a good reason to sleep in

Harrison Ford plays it completely wrong as a legendary tv journalist forced to host the worst morning show on network television in this so-so comedy from so-so director Roger Michell ('The Mother', 'Changing Lanes', 'Notting Hill').

Ford's Mike Pomeroy is a grizzled veteran of frontline reporting from numerous wars and has won every award going, so he's more than offended when hotshot young producer Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams) uses an obscure clause in his contract to compel him to front 'Daybreak' alongside longtime co-host Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton).
Ford chooses to express Pomeroy's severe discontent by having him growl every line in a low gravelly voice, making him sound like no real life broadcaster, disgruntled or otherwise, who has ever graced the anchor desk of a morning show anywhere in the English speaking world.
Quite why Michell didn't assert himself to stop Ford on the first day of shooting is a mystery - perhaps he was overawed by Ford's back catalogue - but the result is a performance that sinks the film. Pomeroy is such an unconvincing character that no amount of running around, dropping stuff and general klutziness by McAdams as she battles to halt the show's plummeting ratings could persuade me to suspend my disbelief.In fact her character is barely more credible than Ford's, she just seems more believable by comparison.
MORNING GLORY is best enjoyed by film fans who are easily - very easily - entertained. For everyone else there's 'Good Morning America', 'The Today Show' and 'The Early Show.'

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER: and he will tell you this film is crap

2010's YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER nudges out 'Whatever Works' for the dubious title of Woody Allen's worst ever film. And I say this as a great admirer of much of his output in 70s and 80s.

There's not one redeeming feature in this worn-out retread of familiar Allen themes of fidelity, infidelity and the impossibility of finding a lasting and satisfying relationship. From the phoned-in performances by some big-name Hollywood stars (Antonio Banderas, Naomi Watts, Anthony Hopkins and Josh Brolin), and excruciatingly hackneyed dialogue unconvincingly delivered, to the predictable plot, and sloppy editing everything about this drama screams burn out. The muse has moved on leaving Allen a tired shell of his former self.
The release of a new Woody Allen movie used to be an event I looked forward to. Now I dread them. I keep watching, hoping that maybe this time he'll have rediscovered the spark that made his earlier films sparkle with wit and insight into the human condition, but - with the partial exception of 'Vicky Christina Barcelona' - each time I'm left disappointed and deflated.

PLATINUM BLONDE: a forgotten man steals the show from legends in the making

I've never understood the fuss over Jean Harlow.
Film historians trumpet her as one of the great stars of the Golden Age of Cinema, a sexy blonde bombshell cruelly taken from us in her prime. She was undoubtedly a star but as for being great and/or sexy, I'm just not convinced.
When I watch Jean Harlow I see a trampy, rat-faced woman with ridiculously dyed blonde hair who's about as sexy and seductive as a courgette. And, after watching her in PLATINUM BLONDE, I realise she's also impressively big-hipped. Director Frank Capra really should have taken more care to avoid shooting her full on from the back. She's almost wide enough to project the film onto.
She's also miscast as Ann Schuyler, the well-bred daughter of a wealthy New York family who scandalizes her relatives by marrying Stew Smith, a common newspaper reporter whom she first encounters when arrives at her palatial home to dig for dirt on her brother's broken engagement.
She'd have been better off swapping places with the equally miscast Loretta Young, who's too young, fresh faced and delicately beautiful to be convincing as Gallagher, Stew's fellow reporter who's secretly in love with him. Director Capra tacitly acknowledges the implausibility of her part with his failure to show her actually doing anything remotely journalistic. Sure she has her own desk in the newsroom and hangs out in the same speakeasies as Stew but we never see her doing any work

The one piece of casting that's spot on is Robert Williams as Stew. I'd never seen or heard of him before this film but I was immediately taken with his sleepy-eyed, laid back charm and relaxed delivery. His portrayal of Stew Smith is completely without artifice. Williams acting style is refreshingly natural and unaffected at a time when many films and actors came across as mannered and stagey as they attempted to adjust to the demands of talking pictures. Compared with Williams the rest of the cast PLATINUM BLONDE act as if they're appearing in a lethargically directed filmed stage play.
I looked up Williams on IMDb and discovered that the reason why I'd never heard of him was because he died from a burst appendix in November 1931,just 4 days after PLATINUM BLONDE opened. The early reviews reportedly hailed him as a star in the making and it's interesting to speculate on whether he really had what it took to become a star or would he have been elbowed aside by the young Bing Crosby with whom he shared a very similar acting style?
All we know for sure is that his two co-stars and the director went on to become legendary names while Williams is a forgotten footnote in Hollywood history. Dying young didn't work so well for him.

ARMADILLO: taking on the terrorists Danish style

ARMADILLO is a fascinating and extremely gritty portrait of a group of Danish soldiers on a six month tour of duty in Afghanistan. This 2010 documentary takes its title from the codename of their forward operating base. It's a fortified camp on a dusty plain in Helmand Province, surrounded by hostile, Taliban occupied territory.

The moments of action are interspersed with long spells of boredom as the men stare out into the vast spaces surrounding them and try to figure out if a dot moving in the distance is a villager or a terrorist.
The action, when it comes, is sudden and unexpected. Shots ring out as a patrol crosses an open field and everyone hits the deck. It's to cameraman Lars Skree's immense credit that he manages to keep shooting while he's diving for his life and captures usable footage rather than just blurry disoriented movements. His skill here makes up for his annoying habit earlier in the film of ceaselessly rocking the camera to and fro, which creates the unpleasant sensation of sitting in a rowboat on a choppy sea.
ARMADILLO is not a film that takes sides or even seeks to examine why Denmark and the other Allied forces are in Afghanistan. Director Janus Metz is there simply to observe without passing judgment. There are no talking head interviews or opinion pieces from the participants. When the men speak it is to each other, not the camera, and Metz never asks anyone to explain or describe their thoughts or actions. The camera records several interactions with Afghan elders complaining about the presence of foreign soldiers on their land and questioning their motives for being there, but their comments are given no more or less weight than the response of the soldiers.
What's also interesting about this film is the insight it offers into a modern non-American army under combat conditions. At times it's as if this unit is being run like a cooperative rather than a military hierarchy. There's none of the US military's obsession with saluting, shiny boots, "yes-sirring!" and "no-sirring", and rigid adherence to regulations, and it's often difficult to tell the commanders from the commanded,.yet these Danes are no less professional, brave or determined than their American counterparts.
ARMADILLO is not a film designed to change minds or reinforce existing beliefs. What is does do is inform. By the end of its 1 hour 40 minute running time I felt I had a better idea of what life is like for many of the troops stationed in Afghanistan than I had previously been able to glean from the countless 90 second to 3 minute tv and radio news reports from embedded journalists that we've been bombarded with since this war began.

NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY: no great flight of fantasy

The most interesting aspect of this now dated British drama from 1951 is its attitude to scientists. Considering that the UK and America had recently come through a war which had increasingly relied on advances in science to create the tools capable of defeating Germany and Japan, it is really weird to see scientists and their work so relentlessly disparaged.
James Stewart stars as the implausibly named Theodore Honey, the aeronautical engineer on whom most scorn is heaped for his untested theory that metal fatigue will cause the tail to break off a new model of passenger aircraft after 1440 hours flying time. Character after character, including many who should know better, deride Honey and his ilk as boffins walking a very thin line between brilliance and insanity. Stewart adds fuel to this perception by making Honey ridiculously absent minded and disinterested in anything outside his narrow field of focus.
This tension between the 'crackpot' scientist and almost everyone else in the film is necessary to keep the plot moving forward but it does beggar belief that not only Honey's superiors but also the pilots flying the planes at risk - all men who should have some appreciation of the value of science in the development of flying machines - should be so contemptuous of his warnings.
In true Hollywood style, Honey's only real support comes from the most unlikely sources - a stewardess, Marjorie Corder (Glynis Johns) and a film star, Monica Teasdale (Marlene Dietrich) who both board the potentially doomed flight with him. But, as women in a world dominated by middle-aged and elderly white men, they have no real power to influence a change in attitude by the establishment. Their role is to humanise Honey by making him realise there's more to life for him and his young (frighteningly well-spoken) daughter than scientific theories. They have slightly more respect for Honey's work than do the other characters, but they still don't believe it's a healthy environment in which to raise a child.

NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY reunited Stewart and Dietrich for this first time since the uproarious Western comedy 'Destry Rides Again' 12 years earlier, and there's none of the chemistry which made that 1939 film so memorable. Both actors and their characters are middle-aged and somewhat world weary. Honey has withdrawn from all relationships (except with his daughter) following the death of his wife in a V2 rocket attack during World War 2, while Monica has given up hope of finding a lasting relationship after 3 failed marriages. Dietrich's character is superfluous to the needs of the plot and it would be interesting to know what prompted her to take the part. In terms of the relationship to the protagonist, Johns' character is far more important.
NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY is unlikely to feature in a list of the top 10 best performances by any of the stars involved, but it is the kind of drama that's just right for curling up in front of on a cold and grey Sunday afternoon.

PUNCHING THE CLOWN: expectations amply exceeded

Discovering PUNCHING THE CLOWN is not exactly like discovering buried treasure. It's more like finding a $20 bill down the back of the couch. It won't change your life but it's infinitely more pleasurable than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Henry Phillips stars as a character called Henry Phillips, a singer of  subversive folk songs who looks like the bastard love child of Mark Knopfler and Level 42's Mark King,, and drifts across the American West playing one night stands in bars, restaurants and bowling alleys while living out of his car. His songs are sharp and very funny, but not in a way that can be easily categorized for commercial purposes. When the money runs out he heads to LA to crash at his brother's apartment, and through a series of bizarre and increasingly farcical misunderstandings finds himself a hot property and the subject of tabloid gossip.
This all plays out at a seductively languid pace. Henry's a man in no particular hurry to get anywhere or achieve anything. He has his pride and a good sense of his own worth but he's not particularly ambitious.He just wants to sing his songs to whatever audience is willing to listen. He's also a naturally funny guy with a great sense of timing on stage, and a very natural way with a one liner off-stage. Never having encountered Henry Phillips before I have no idea whether he's playing himself or a character but he's definitely someone I'd check out if I found he was performing anywhere near me.
Knowing nothing about him and only the bare bones of the story I came to PUNCHING THE CLOWN with low expectations and they were massively exceeded. The script is a little uneven - there's several scenes with decidedly clunky dialogue - and some of the cast are better at acting than others, but there's still plenty to keep you engrossed. Henry took me on a journey whose ending could not be predicted and I enjoyed every step along the way.

DR RENAULT'S SECRET: the last two letters are silent

The secret no one ever discovers is that the L and T in Dr Renault's name are silent. Not even Dr Renault knows it for he never corrects the villagers when they insist on calling him Dr Ren-alt instead of Dr Ren-O.

However, it's the other secret that everyone involved in this low budget horror is more concerned about - who or what is Noel, the doctor's strangely simian servant, and why does he have tissue paper stuffed under his upper lip?

There's nothing particularly original about this 1942 b-movie from 20th Century Fox.but it still succeeds in being reasonably entertaining. The Doctor (the wonderful George Zucco) lives in a stately chateau in a small French village, tended to by Noel (J.Carrol Naish), who dotes on the Doctor's attractive young niece Madelon.(Lynne Roberts). Madelon is engaged to Larry Forbes (Shepperd Strudwick), a young doctor with a disturbingly prominent overbite, who shares his future father-in-law's fascination with the workings of the human brain. 
Dr Forbes arrival in the village to visit Madelon is the trigger for a series of increasingly brutal murders - but who is to blame? Is it the socially awkward Noel or Dr Renault's burly gardener Ragell (played by Mike Mazurki as the least convincing Frenchman in history)?
The fun to be had here is not only in watching the cast taking this patent nonsense with deadly seriousness, but also in the low - very low - production values. These include not spending any money on a continuity girl (who would ensure shots matched up) or on re-taking shots where the action wasn't quite right. The most glaring example of this is the scene where a villager has been attacked and knocked out by the 'monster' who then picks him up to throw him through a window. The 'monster's' a little on the short side and  clearly struggling to lift his victim off the floor so the unconscious man very obviously puts his arm around the monster's neck to help.
All this in less than an hour!
DR RENAULT'S SECRET is creaky, cheap, cliched and corny. It's the kind of product one would have expected from Monogram rather than a studio of Fox's status. But it's also undeniably charming in a creaky, cheap, cliched and corny kind of way.

THE ROMANTICS: eminently unlovable

If it weren't for the execrable script this misconceived drama would have no redeeming features at all.
Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin and Josh Duhamel star in this tale of seven close friends from university who reunite for the wedding of two of them. As the alcohol flows on the night before the big event old passions are reignited causing the various characters to spew dialogue like even more fictional characters in a bad novel one would have assumed they didn't read in college while studying for their Romantic Literature degree.
The story concept is sound but the execution is atrocious, and I recommend you avoid this like the plague. Check out the 1992 Kenneth Branagh - Emma Thompson drama 'Peter's Friends' instead. It covers much the same territory and is a hundred times more satisfying.

HEARTS OF THE WEST: a Hollywood history lesson gone wrong

A young Jeff Bridges is appealing as the would-be writer of cowboy stories who stumbles into a film career in this rather labored tale of the early days of Hollywood.
I'm a sucker for films set in bygone Hollywood because they give me a window into a world I would love to have lived in. But my passion for the golden age of Hollywood and the stars who made it so also means that I'm frequently left feeling let down by such films because they rarely succeed in capturing the essence of the time and place.

Don't ask me to describe exactly what the essence should look like because beyond insisting that it be in black and white I can't. But rather like Supreme Court Justice Potter's famous definition of hard core pornography, I know it when I see it.
And I don't see it in HEARTS OF THE WEST.
It's not just the atmosphere-sapping use of colour, it's the film's own confusion over exactly which part of the golden age of Hollywood it's supposed to be depicting.In his head, scriptwriter Bob Thompson has set his story in the silent era Hollywood of the late teens and early 20s, but on paper he's placed events in the early 1930s, after the advent of sound.
So Bridges' Lewis Tater hooks up with a poverty-row studio churning out low budget westerns where everyone acts as if it's 1921 rather than 1931. You may say that's a small point and don't be so nitpicky, but I find it very difficult to suspend my disbelief when in every scene set on a movie set everyone's pantomiming to convey emotion and making loads of noise because they don't have to worry about every sound being picked up by the microphone. AND on top of that Alan Arkin as egotistical director Bert Kessler directs scenes by shouting at the actors while running to and fro in front of the camera. I realise that this is not a film about film making but please! make a token effort toward authenticity.
Beyond these irritations the story is slight and not particularly engaging. Bridges is likable enough but I didn't feel emotionally invested enough in his character to care what happened to him. Surprisingly  (to me anyway) it's Andy Griffiths who impressed me most. He looked just right as Howard Pike, the silent movie star reduced to bit parts in an endless series of interchangeable Westerns.
HEARTS OF THE WEST was one of a number of movies made by Hollywood in the mid 70s about its own past (among the others were 'Gable and Lombard', 'Day of the Locust' and 'Nickelodeon') and none of them came anywhere close to earlier bona fide classics on the subject 'Sunset Boulevard' and 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?'

WHISTLE STOP: she just put her lips together and blew town

George Raft stars as the oldest juvenile delinquent in town in this overheated melodrama with aspirations to film noir.

Old rivalries are exhumed and tempers boil when the beautiful and seductive Mary (Ava Gardner) returns to her small town after 6 years away in the big city during which time she's 'earned' a mink coat and an inscribed silver cigarette case.
Before she left she'd been stepping out with Kenny (Raft) and flirting on the side with local nightclub owner and all-round sadistic smoothie Lew Lentz (Tom Conway), and her reappearance rekindles smoldering passions, driving both men to thoughts of murder. 
I describe WHISTLE STOP as having aspirations to film noir because while almost all the elements are there they don't coalesce into the dark, fate driven brew generally recognised as noir. Lew and Kenny and his halfwitted sidekick Gitlo (a miscast Victor McLaglen) are driven not by forces beyond their control but by boneheaded stupidity and minuscule horizons.  They're like a pack of hungry dogs fighting over a juicy pork chop being dangled in front of them but - tantalizingly - just out of reach.
As the implausibly named Kenny Raft exudes his usual aura of wooden immobility and is simply way too dull and old to be convincing as the sweetheart Mary left behind when she lit out for the bright lights of Chicago. I've never been a big admirer of Miss Gardner's looks - there's an off-putting porcelain quality about them - but she's absolutely ravishing here. This low budget 1946 production was one of her first starring roles and there's a freshness and innocence to her appearance which was lost once MGM decided to make her into a sultry sex goddess.
Unless, like me, you get a perverse pleasure out of watching George Raft films to wallow in his patent inadequacy as a leading man, Ava's really the only reason for investing time in WHISTLE STOP. It's no great shakes as a drama, melodrama or film noir and most likely played the bottom half of a double bill on it's original release, but it is exciting to see an actress on the cusp of becoming a great star, still learning her craft and giving a very naturalistic performance.

JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK: a piece of promotional work

I read a piece in The New York Times last week previewing the Oscar nominations for Best Documentary and musing on why some other high profile titles hadn't been selected. Among them was JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK and, if I remember rightly, Joan was none too happy that she'd been passed over by the Academy.

I watched the film last night and I can understand why it hasn't got an Oscar nod.
Ostensibly a year in the life of Ms Rivers - and her 75th year in particular - this documentary comes over like an 85 minute pitch to potential employers. Rivers spends most of the film complaining that she doesn't get the breaks she deserves or the bookings she needs to sustain her opulent lifestyle, and admits without a trace of embarrassment that she will appear anywhere and sell anything if someone's willing to pay her for it.
Rivers is - much like Don Rickles who also appears here - one of those American comedy phenomena you either love or hate. Perhaps hate is too strong a word so let me change it for a phrase - you either love or don't find funny. Portions of her stand-up routine at a New York nightclub are sprinkled throughout the film and they would seem to suggest that a large part of her live act consists of the f word; not as part of the joke to add emphasis to the gag but actually as the gag. itself. And I thought Eddie Murphy had done that particular routine to death in the 1980s.
Directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sunberg never really manage to drill through the inch thick layer of make-up to discover the private Joan Rivers beneath. She talks about her marriage, her husband's suicide, her relationship with her daughter, and her (grotesque) plastic surgery but that's all stuff she made public long ago.
Maybe the reality is that there's nothing private left to reveal, except perhaps what she really looks like and that may be just too much. After all, this film only has an R rating.

LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS: disease of the week plus nakedness

Imagine LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS as a long dance to a familiar tune. The dancers start out attempting to impose different steps but find themselves inexorably drawn back to the more traditional moves.and by the final bars they're dancing the steps the tune was written to be danced to.

Which is a roundabout way of saying LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS tries to put a different spin on the age old boy-meets-girl story but winds up right back where it had struggled to avoid going. Jake Gyllenhaal - looking like a ridiculously sculpted model in a fashion ad in Vanity Fair - is the boy. Anne Hathaway - all eyes and teeth - is the girl.
Boy meets girl, boy and girl bang like a stable door, boy falls in love with girl, girl rejects boy, boy tries to win girl back etc etc. All this is further complicated by girl being in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease and using her illness as a reason to avoid emotional entanglements, and the boy being a shallow, smooth, screw'em and leave 'em, career obsessed type.
Other than the excessive nudity on the part of the two stars LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS really isn't that different from the countless young-love-meets-disease-of-the-week movies churned out by US tv since the early 1970s. There's tears, laughter, broken hearts and gut-wrenching decisions in profusion (plus the invention of Viagra) as the story works its way to it's disappointingly predictable conclusion, so sit back, lower your expectations, and prepare to be entertained in an 'it was okay' kind of way..

HOLLYWOOD HOTEL: Busby's distinctive trademark checks out

Question: When is a Busby Berkeley film not a Busby Berkeley film?
Answer: When he directs the entire picture.
Berkeley made his reputation in the early 1930s as the innovative choreographer and director of spectacular and complex dance routines in a number of now classic Warner Brothers musicals, including '42nd Street', 'Gold Diggers of 1933' and 'Footlight Parade.' Having proved himself more than adept at directing the dance sequences the obvious next career move was directing the entire picture.

I don't claim to be an expert on the Berkeley directing oeuvre but it does appear from consulting IMDB that the bulk of the movies he directed were of a musical persuasion, so it's not as if he decided that having conquered the art film choreography he wanted to move on and explore other genres of storytelling. Given that,  and the fact that his name was so closely associated with this particular style of movie-making, why on earth did he abandon his cinematic trademark in HOLLYWOOD HOTEL?!
Without a sequence featuring dozens of scantily clad dancers moving in unison and shot from above, below and other imaginative angles, all we're left with is a very average piece of entertainment which could have been helmed by any number of directors on the Warners payroll. It's competent but anonymous.
The story opens promisingly enough with a rousing rendition of 'Hooray for Hollywood!' by Johnnie Davis and Frances Langford, accompanied by Benny Goodman and his Orchestra all performing while standing in a convoy of open top cars being driven to St Louis airport to see off saxophone player Ronnie Bowers (Dick Powell) who's signed a 10 week contract with a Hollywood studio. The song is now so closely identified with Hollywood it's kind of weird to realise that for audiences watching this film in 1937 this was a brand new tune.
In retrospect it was both a great and a really bad idea to open the film with such a fantastically infectious and instantly hummable tune. On the plus side it makes the audience feel upbeat and optimistic about the entertainment value of the story about to unfold, but the big risk is that it sets up expectations that are going to be very difficult to fulfill. Sad to report that those expectations do remain mostly unfulfilled as Powell and Rosemary Lane warble their way through a succession of unmemorable and ever more treacly songs while falling in love and struggling for cinematic success in the City of Angels.
In a part Powell had played a dozen times already for Warner Brothers, he manages to keep it fresh despite the material he's given to sing, but the two female leads are a definite drag on the proceedings. Real life (and almost identical) sisters Lola and Rosemary Lane are neither talented nor attractive enough (imagine a less appealing Norma Shearer) to be completely convincing, while Hugh Herbert as the comic relief is saddled with routines that look like rejects from the scripts of every other Warner Brothers musical he made with Powell earlier in the 1930s.
HOLLYWOOD HOTEL is very much in keeping with  the 1930s era Warner Brothers' philosophy of telling stories 'ripped from today's headlines.' While these most often focused on social and economic problems afflicting the USA (the rise of the gangster was a particular favorite) HOLLYWOOD HOTEL taps into the dream shared by millions of ordinary cinema going Americans of being plucked from obscurity to find fame and fortune as one of the god-like stars they worshiped at the altar of the silver screen each week.

But at the same time as it indulges their fantasy the film also hints at the considerably more grim reality of a film industry which chewed up and spat out the vast majority of starry eyed youngsters from the sticks who arrived in Los Angeles by the busload every week. As Ronnie's experience makes clear, this is a fickle business run by smooth talking hucksters whose only interest is in making a fast buck. It's a message given extra credibility by the presence of legendary gossip columnist Louella Parsons (playing herself with all the woodeness of a California Redwood) who takes a brief moment out from a life of hobnobbing with the stars to caution against acting on the dream and heading west on a Greyhound bus.
The idea is sound it's just the execution that's lacking.HOLLYWOOD HOTEL could have been so much more had Warners only insisted on a trademark Busby Berkeley routine in this Busby Berkeley directed movie. Perhaps then we'd all be humming 'Hooray for Hollywood Hotel' today instead.