The Writer's Poke

Writer and Executive Producer: John Hughes (but not Director for this one). It's funny that Hughes uses his real name for his "top-tier" stuff, but uses the pen name, Edmond Dantes, for stuff he wrote that he doesn't want to be connected with. Why didn't he use Dantes for this screenplay? Seems like a good simple premise. Put John Candy and his family and the uninvited guests, Dan Akroyd and his family, in the Great Northern Forests, and see what happens. Chet (Candy) plays a kind of E.B. White "father." He remembers going up North as a kid, and he wants to give his kid the same fond memories he had. Roman (Akroyd) doesn't have a love of nature. He looks out at the great expanse of undeveloped land, and he sees dollars signs -- tree mills, mining, and places to dump toxic waste. As you would expect, there's comedic conflict between the two families, and then they come together and discover the real meaning of family. Buck (Chris Young) also gets ...

In my search for films with Charles Grodin with good ratings, I stumbled upon this one. For whatever reason, I have a difficult time finding 1970s films that I want to watch. Why is that? I mean, I have no problems finding films from any other decade, but beyond the "best well known" films of the 1970s, I tend to draw a blank.  And this one, I would have thought, would be better known. It was nominated for 14 Oscars and won 9. But nope. I went in to watching it without having a clue what the plot was about. Nor did I know that this is a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), which features another one of my favorite actors, Claude Rains. (There's also a 1943 movie called Heaven Can Wait, but it has nothing to do with the 1978 version.) Although I'm okay with fantasy, the premise of the film is a little absurd. I could forgive that, but I don't like how the ending is handled. In brief, Joe (Warren Beatty) is a back-up quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams. He's...

Another 80s movie I've somehow never watched until now. As far as John Candy's body of work goes, this is one of the films he's still better remembered for. This is also a John Hughes film. Since I'm a fan of both men, I had to go ahead and finally watch it, hoping I would be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps the "breakout star" of the film is Macaulay Culkin as 6-year-old Miles. Of the three kids, 15-year-old Tia (Jean Louisa Kelly) receives most of the story's focus, but I love the "Dragnet" sequence when Miles is asking Buck (Candy) questions about his life (with Miles record for number of consecutive questions asked being 38). In a way, this movie is "Home Alone"-lite, as the parents need to leave home quickly for the wife's dad's death. Tell me why, though, in all these various movies about parents going away (this one, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter Is Dead, etc.), once they leave the house to do whatever, they never contac...

At the end of the movie, we see the words The End crossed out with the words The Beginning. Since I know three additional Bridget Jones movies have now been made, I take that to mean that they had at least planned for one additional Bridget Jones film, if not a full franchise. (I have no current plan to watch the sequels, but I have read the IMDb summaries, and so I know, in summary, how the following years of Jones's life have gone. Usually, I wouldn't count that against the original movie, but I feel like it's difficult with this one, as this movie is a Romance with a Romantic ending, and yet, I know "the rest of the story.") A simple love triangle. There's Daniel (Hugh Grant), a womanizing prick she knows better than to get involved with... but once he shows the least bit of interest in her, she immediately gets involved with him. Then there's Mark (Colin Firth). He's like a real man, the one she was "destined" to be with, but she can'...

For the curious, this one is available for free on YouTube (fair quality). I watched it because I wanted to see how badly it copied Double Indemnity (1944), and because I've been watching Ann Savage films. Savage plays Toni, the Barbara Stanwyck role. Hugh Beaumont plays Kenny in the Fred MacMurray role. Technically, there's an Edward G. Robinson role, but the actor doesn't stand out in his part whatsoever. Honestly, that's one of the major problems. No chemistry between characters, and no fun banter between the young male and his older boss. If Beaumont was in Double Indemnity, I think he pulls off MacMurray's part just fine. He's just as good an actor, but he just happens to be in a worse film. Although I'm watching Savage films, it's only because of her role in My Winnipeg (2007). That's what interests me about her. She's definitely a B-movie actor -- no Barbara Stanwyck. The murder in this film takes place before the halfway point. The entir...

Cool cover art. Reminds me of Sin City. I just watched Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007), and in it is 86-year-old Ann Savage, an actor who had been retired from the movies for over 50 years. That made really curious to see what the 24-year-old Savage was like. In My Winnipeg, I couldn't tell if she could act, or if the weirdness of the film just called for Savage to be weird. To be honest, after watching Detour, I still don't know for sure if she can act, because her performance is weird in a film noir sort of way. The basic premise is that Al (Tom Neal) needs to hitch across country. His girlfriend is in L.A. She wanted to see if she could make it there, but she quickly discovers she can't. Al wants to get out there and marry her quick. Unfortunately, "fate" isn't kind to Al. He ends up getting a ride from a guy who either died while Al was driving or who died falling out of the passenger's side door, hitting his head on a rock. Al's bad luck ...

As the ending credits begin, we're told that A Simple Twist of Fate was "suggested by the George Eliot's Silas Marner," a Victorian novel written in 1861. The movie was written by Steve Martin, and he also served as the Executive Producer. As far as I can tell, it was a box-office flop. It grossed just $3 million during its limited engagement run, and production cost certainly ran somewhere around $10 million.  No one, in other words, was clamoring for modernized retelling of Silas Marner.  Well, it's been 30 years, but I have actually read that novel, and when I decided to watch this film, it was just because I'm watching Steve Martin movies this year, and I had no idea that the movie had a Silas Marner connection.  Martin studied philosophy in college, and he does seem to have a passion for the classics, including Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac and William Shakespeare's Hamlet, etc.  All that's well and good, but how does this one work as a ...