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Oscar Bait: Nuremberg and Rental Family

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  This is likely to wind up being a series. We’re entering the season where prestige movies and big tentpole flicks vie for your attention and the Academy’s. These are not predictions, by the way. However, I wouldn’t and won’t be surprised if a number of titles and names show up on Oscar Night. I should also add that “Oscar bait” doesn’t necessarily infer an unworthy or even bad film. It just serves to delineate some of the elements that AMPAS voters seem to reward movies for, often over and against other, better films or. performances. For example, by no metric that I can think of is Nuremberg a bad or unworthy film. It’s actually quite good, if somewhat too prestige-y for its own good. It’s a tight film dealing with an important historical event - Herman Göring’s surrender to Allied forces and subsequent trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials, and subsequent suicide. The story unfolds via Göring’s psychological assessment by Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly. Russell Crow as...
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The last of the Universal Monsters - The Creature from the Black Lagoon

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The Universal monsters began with   Frankenstein   in 1931. What became the first crossover cinematic universe expanded through the Depression, the Second World War, and into the fifties (though by then, the universe had run its course) and wrapped up with three films featuring the subject of the current film. They began with a bang and finished with a triumph of creature design, atmosphere, and even a couple of thought-provoking turns. I caught all three of the Creature trilogy a couple of times on TV in the seventies and saw the first entry in 3-D for the first time in the mid-80s. I saw it more recently a few days ago, and my goodness, it’s a good looking film and the 3-D worked.  What also worked is the atmosphere of the film and how it held all the other pieces together. The film runs at an efficient 79 minutes but hardly feels rushed. The pacing is deliberate and while we see the hand of the Creature twice, we don’t see him in full until a jump cut in an underwater ...
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Slumming/'tis the Season: Mesa of Lost Women!

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Every so often, you see a movie that is just, there’s no other way to put it, bad. It’s a wretched non-construct of script, acting, and direction. Every so often, you come across one, though, that calls you to question if that’s not the very point of the film.  I love - that's right: love -  Mesa of Lost Women . It is deliriously bad. And yet, and yet, if you venture into it with the right approach, it can prove to be a challenging work of avant-garde cinema, interrogating plot structure, characters, the passage of time, and interspecies/environmental relationships. Does that sound like a stretch? You bet it does! But look what happens when we take that approach. C’mon down! Let’s start with the opening of two people trudging across a desert with rambling narration that stops when the couple, a man and woman, find safe haven, and resumes when they are surrounded by other characters who may or may not have parts to play in their narrative. When the camera dollies in on one, Pe...
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Fantastic Four: First Steps for Marvel’s first family

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Fantastic Four: First Steps ,   Superman ,   Downton Abbey: the Grand Finale . One of these is not like the other two. It took a few decades, but the Fantastic Four have finally found a landing to stick. I don’t fault the Tim Story versions for not being quite what they could have been, but while they both had elements of fun, they were programmatic and often, sluggish affairs. Fortunately, Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans were on hand to relieve the tedium.  Going back further, the Roger Corman version is actually kind of okay for what it is. It was done on the cheap so that Bernd Eichinger could hold onto the film rights. His company eventually produced the Story movies, both of which did okay at the box office. Then came the Josh Trank fiasco in 2015, also released by 20th Century Fox. It did not do so well. It was a troubled production (and you can Google for the details) and four years later, The Walt Disney Company got the rights to the FF once it acquired 20th Centu...
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It’s just like starting over: James Gunn’s Superman

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  At this point, I think we best look at James Gunn’s DC Universe’s (DCU, as opposed to the DCEU under Zack  Snyder) fresh start. I was wondering how he was going to take on Kal-el/Clark/Supes and wondered how much of the traditional Gunn irreverence and weirdness would be preserved or would it be one of those properties where we’d see an independent filmmaker have to struggle with what the suits want (think Sam Raimi in   Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness ). I mean, hell, his Suicide Club is a thing of twisted beauty and to be sure, Warners seems less fretful over what a director is going to do than Marvel/Disney. That said, my eyebrow was highly arched when I found out Gunn himself would be directing   Superman . And when one eyebrow got tired, I just moved over to the other one. In a nutshell, I enjoyed the hell out of it. I really, really did and if I felt like Cavill got shortchanged (irrespective of how I feel about the Snyderverse, Cavill struck me as...
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