THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: so do my hackles

The first critic to post unflattering comments about director Christopher Nolan's magnum opus received death threats so I recognise I'm taking my life into my hands by stating that I did not enjoy this film and don't rate it.
A regular reader of my blog should not be too surprised by that. It's reasonably devoid of reviews of superhero blockbusters, and the reason for that is that I don't like them. They do nothing for me. I don't care about the characters, their epic battles or the endless philosophising/moralising about good, bad and the nature of man.

I found the second part of Nolan's Batman trilogy, 'The Dark Knight' to be an interminable bore which insisted on ramming its message down the throats of its audience over and over again. This third and (thankfully) final installment eases up a little on the preaching but is no less unrewarding.
It's all noise, darkness and characters speaking in ridiculously deep voices. It's like a world peopled by voice-over artists with sore throats.
But it's the nature of this world that I have the biggest issue with.
I appreciate that the viewer is required and expected to suspend their disbelief to enter the world that Nolan has created - this is after all a fantasy world not a National Geographic channel documentary - but I found it impossible to overlook the glaring omissions and inconsistencies.
The world of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is one of broad strokes - broad and constantly in motion in the hope that we won't notice that it doesn't all hang together. There's no attention to detail. Let me give you just one example.
At one point the chief villain, Bane (Tom Hardy), traps the city's entire police force in underground tunnels by dynamiting all of the entrances, leaving him free to run amok above ground. There the police all remain until Batman (Christian Bale) turns up some considerable time later (possibly months) to free them. The film asks us to accept that in the interim the thousands of officers just wait in their concrete tomb, not attempting to escape through any of the thousands of manhole covers, or dying of hunger or even growing a beard.
Sure, fantasy worlds don't have to operate by the same laws that govern the real world but when the story's set in what approximates a modern day New York City peopled by recognisable human beings there has to be something plausible to hold it all together.
The plot's studded with holes big enough to fly Batman's helicopter through and that, for me, more than canceled out any excitement the action might have generated.  If Nolan's intention was to bamboozle my brain by overloading my eyes and ears he failed.

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN: an unexpected catch

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN is one of those films that does exactly what it says on the tin.

There's absolutely no spoiler alert required before I reveal that this story concerns the efforts of a wealthy Yemeni sheikh (Amr Waked) to bring his favourite sport to his desert-like nation. To assist him in his fantastical vision he enlists the help of initially reluctant British fisheries expert Dr Alfred Jones.
As played by a surprisingly youthful looking Ewan McGregor, Jones is a strait-laced, socially awkward and emotionally repressed British government scientist, trapped in an unfulfilling marriage. He's extremely dismissive of the sheikh's ambitious plans to stock an artificially created lake and river with thousands of British salmon, believing there's no way the fish will survive in such foreign waters.
But he's under orders from the highest levels of the British government to make the scheme work and with some gentle encouragement from the sheikh's pr representative, Harriett (Emily Blunt) he slowly finds himself being won over to the project and the sheikh's vision of what it could do for his country.
I admit that selling a big screen film centred around fishing is an uphill proposition, and the producers certainly haven't helped themselves with the less than alluring title. It's going to act as an instant turn-off to 90% of the potential audience.
But, given the right frame of mind SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN is actually a very charming, pleasant and - dare I say it - enjoyable experience.

The story moves at the pace of the highland rivers the sheikh is so fond of fishing in. It unfolds in a leisurely manner with very little in the way of overt drama. The pleasure here is derived primarily from entering into the lives of Alfred and Harriett and getting to know them as real people rather than simply characters played by two well known actors. I've never been a huge fan of McGregor but he's definitely been on a roll recently with Alfred just the latest in a string of fine performances that have included 'Perfect Sense', 'Beginners' and 'The Ghost Writer'  in the past few years. Blunt's Harriett is immensely likeable, vulnerable and endearing and while it's inevitable that the two will become romantically entwined at some point director Lasse Hallstrom avoids the rom-com cliches in getting them to that point.
There are a couple of other pieces of business that are handled with considerably less subtlety and damage the overall tone of the film. Both involve politics and politicians, British and Yemeni, with Kristin Scott Thomas as a female Alistair Campbell supposedly adding humour to the UK end of the proceeding, and the Yemeni end offering a very half-hearted and perfunctory nod in the direction of the factionalism and violence which plagues that country.
Not to be mistaken for British cinema's take on 'A River Runs Through It' SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN is considerably less rose-tinted and sentimental yet succeeds in remaining soft at heart - but in a good and delightful way.

HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE: the only victim here is the viewer

In his prime few could best Bob Hope in the delivery of a joke. His timing was impeccable even if the material was often corny. By 1969, when HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE was released, he'd slowed to the speed of an arthritic snail on sedatives and the gags were even worse.
They're as creaky as the knee and hip joints of Hope and his co-star Jane Wyman.
This film really had no business being made.

It's an embarrassment to everyone involved and it's difficult to discern just who the intended audience was.
It's clearly not the nation's groovy swinging youth who are relentlessly mocked and demeaned as gullible, simple-minded and vacuous, and it hardly paints a positive picture of the older generation either, the parents who were apparently so disapproving of the lifestyle of their teenage offspring.
Hope and Wyman are an old married couple who run out of patience for each other's annoying habits and decide to divorce. But their plans are interrupted by the unexpected arrival home of their angelic daughter Nancy (JoAnna Cameron) with fiance David (a very young Tim Matheson) in tow.  She wants to get married right away and live a life as full of love as her parents. Not wanting to shatter her illusions they conceal their divorce from her, but she finds out at the altar and decides to live 'in sin' with David instead.
I know this is going on a bit but I'm trying to keep it as short as possible so please stick with me.
They join a band, The Comfortable Chairs, managed by David's huckster father Oliver (Jackie Gleason), and when Nancy becomes pregnant they decide to give the baby up for adoption. Her appalled - and divorced - parents reunite under a fake name to adopt the baby and raise it until their daughter comes to her senses.
Hilarity ensues.
Actually it doesn't.

Hope has abandoned the earlier egotistical coward persona which had proved so successful in the 1930s and 40s and replaced it with a bland, self satisfied, corporate-America complacency which offers nothing to laugh at or engage with. He's just another wealthy Beverly Hills suit who's traded in his 'old' wife for a blonde, busty younger model, and is now going through the motions of life at a severely reduced speed.

Gleason substitutes bluster and noise for actual humour, while Wyman displays a shocking lack of talent for comedy but an impressive ability to look even older than Hope despite being 14 years younger. The only real laughs come from a trained chimpanzee inserted into the story for no good reason other than director Norman Panama needed to pad out the running time by an extra 15 minutes.
Dated even when it was made, HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE is tired, tiresome and pointless. It drags on like an over-long, unnecessarily elaborate and spectacularly unfunny sitcom and effectively ended the big screen careers of both Hope and Wyman. On the evidence of this film they must have wished they'd firmed up their cinematic retirement plans a little earlier.

THE GONG SHOW MOVIE: America's most definitely not got talent

If this film were a contestant on the titular tv show it would be gonged off long before it got to the end of its act.
I'm not sure what I was expecting from this film but it certainly wasn't what I got.
I'll let you into a guilty secret. I love The Gong Show.

I got addicted in the late 1980s when it was finally screened on British tv as a late afternoon filler. Chuck Barris was a new kind of game show host - somewhere between bizarre (with his crazy outfits  and cornucopia of hats pulled low across his brow) and intensely annoying (that constant hand clapping/slapping when he was talking) - and the show itself was like nothing I'd seen before; a mix of chaos, truly atrocious amateur talent, and third tier celebrity judges (Jamie Farr, Rex Reed, Jaye P. Morgan, Rip Taylor et al) who gamely inserted themselves into the nonsense.
And then there was Gene Gene the Dancing Machine. He was my absolute favorite. A large African-American guy who wasn't a contestant but popped up regularly to stop the show with thirty seconds  of pretty bad disco dancing.
Every show worked to this same formula and it was immense fun to watch. I think it was the stupidity of it all that really appealed to me.
I'd heard that Barris had made a film version of the show in 1980 but had no luck in tracking down a copy until just recently. When I finally got my hands on it all I could think was "fantastic! a feature film length version of The Gong Show!! Let me at it!!!"
I didn't really think about the challenge of translating a 25 minute tv game show punctuated by commercials into an uninterrupted 90 minute feature. I didn't consider how the extra length would dilute the intensity of the original.
However Chuck Barris did, but his solution was less than ideal.

His film (he wrote, directed, starred in it and composed most of the songs) takes us behind the scenes of the tv show to give us a week in the life of Mr Barris. And what an eventful week it is!
Chuck is burning out on the pressure of auditioning dozens of acts every day, and fulfilling the network's demand for new shows each week, while getting constant harassment from people wanting to get on the show, and from network executives who insist the show is getting out of hand - too wild and too dirty.
It's affecting his sleep, his lovelife and his will to continue. He hates his life and the all-consuming monster that the hit show has become.
THE GONG SHOW MOVIE aspires to a surreal semi-documentary style but it's punctuated by too many flabby moments of nothing interesting happening to really engage. Barris is likeable enough but there's too much of him off-set interacting with dull characters and not enough about the show itself.
Most of my favourite moments from the tv show are included (including Gene Gene the Dancing Machine) but they're very brief and served only to remind me how much like the tv show this film isn't.
It was unrealistic to expect the film would simply be an extended version of the tv show, and perhaps Barris's approach is the right one. It's an interesting curio and one that I'm glad I invested the time in watching, but it's left me desperate for a Gong Show tv marathon and I can't find a channel to satisfy my craving!

THE MAN WITH TWO FACES: both of them red with embarrassment

It's oh-so tempting to describe this 1934 drama as creaky but that would be oh-so wrong.
Why?
Because creaky suggests noise caused by movement, such as a foot stepping on an old floorboard, and THE MAN WITH TWO FACES is so stiff there's absolutely no discernible movement for the majority of it's (mercifully) short running time.
And no movement equals no creaking noise.

I didn't need the opening credits to tell me this is a film based on a stage play. That is obvious from the story's first moments when we are introduced to the characters all artfully arranged on an oversize country mansion set, and enunciating dialogue at one another with the sole purpose of being heard by those sitting in the back row.
It's not just the volume of the dialogue which shrieks stage play, it's the quality too. From the pacing to the word choice it's completely unreal. The only people in the world who speak this way are actors in a play.
But maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe director Archie Mayo is making an incredibly clever, magnificently subtle point by having his cast perform as if on a Broadway stage instead of the confines of a film studio with it's camera close-ups and ease of access to microphones.

Because THE MAN WITH TWO FACES is a story about a pair of Broadway actors (Mary Astor and Edward G Robinson) and their thwarted efforts to bring a surefire hit play to the Great White Way. And the off-stage action is - if anything - more melodramatic than the fictional play, so perhaps Mayo's making the point that art is simply imitating life.
But this is Great Depression-era Warner Brothers; the home of James Cagney, Edward G Robinson, Joan Blondell, gangster movies, and uplifting tales of ordinary folk struggling to survive and, heck, no one spoke like they were on stage in all those Busby Berkeley backstage musicals so chances are I've not missed anything here, and the reality is that THE MAN WITH TWO FACES is just a dud.
It's not just the dialogue and its delivery that's bad - the stars are miscast too.
Edward G Robinson is one of the finest actors ever to grace the cinema screen but he is not convincing playing a slightly foppish actor so in love with his craft that he doesn't know when to stop acting. As the brother of Mary Astor, playing a super-talented but emotionally fragile actress whose long awaited comeback is threatened by the re-appearance of her good-for-nothing and presumed dead husband Louis Calhern, he puts his acting abilities to deadly use to ensure Calhern can't ruin her career a second time.
Which is where the titular man comes into play. What's weird about this is that it's obvious from the get-go that both faces, despite the disguise, belong to Robinson. Maybe in the theatre, where the audience were further from the stage, the deception might have worked, but there's no hiding from the eye of the camera.
So that's the story's big surprise blown immediately.
Which just leaves us with a far more ho-hum storyline that takes forever to get moving and then resorts to a patently ridiculous and convoluted finale to ensure compliance with the newly introduced Hays Code.

As an amoral cad with an impressive Svengali-like power of control over his wife, Calhern is no more convincing than Robinson, but he is considerably more hammy. Meanwhile Astor must have been so grateful she was playing her part in the era before actors looked for motivation in creating their characters, because it's impossible to ascribe any plausible explanation for her wild mood swings.
Mae Clark, as Robinson's borderline trampy girlfriend, and Emily Fitzroy as a sharp-tongued housekeeper are really the only two cast members to emerge unscathed.
Warner Brothers were turning out movies at such a rapid pace in the early 1930s that they couldn't expect to strike gold every time and THE MAN WITH TWO FACES is a particularly fine example of what hitting tin instead looks and sounds like.