The Writer's Poke

A rather odd genre from this era called "the sex comedy."  Jan (Doris Day) is a single, professional woman. We don't know her exact age, but Day was 37, and it's likely Jan is supposed to be in her mid-30s. So it's a rather sexist question, but audience members would likely be asking it too themselves at the time: Why is she still single? The obvious answer is that she hasn't found the right man to fall in love with. Jonathan (Tony Randall) loves her, but she doesn't love him. She even lets him give her an "exploratory kiss," but the sparks don't run down her back. That's what she wants. She wants sparks.  Brad (Rock Hudson) is the man she shares a party phoneline with. She hates him, considering him a womanizing playboy. When Brad first sees her in the flesh, though, he knows that she's pretty special. He also knows that based on their past history, he doesn't have a chance with her. So her creates a whole new persona and pretend...

With a current IMDb score of 9.3/10, this film has to be in the conversation for the best film of all time.  What makes it so special? Well, if that was so easy to say, then every movie ever made should be equally as good, right? I guess we just like the main characters, Andy (Tom Robbins) and Red (Morgan Freeman). We want good things for them, and when they are somehow able to defy all odds and have their happy ending, that feels awesome. The film also does a masterful job of showing that the happy ending was plausible. In both men's cases, they had to survive decades in prison, but as Red puts it, Andy was too pretty a bird to be caged. Red, too. He served 40 years for a horrible crime, but he was no longer the person who committed that crime. This is one of those movies that I remember pretty much from beginning to end. In a way, I would never need to watch it again, because I know it. But somehow I do return to it every 5 or 10 years, and every time I watch it, I'm left com...

Prequel, sequel, stand-alone?  I recently re-watched Prometheus (2012), but even so, I wasn't completely sure about the timeline for this one. I had to look it up, and then I learned that this one is supposed to be 10 years after Prometheus.  And yet, the colony ship didn't have a clue about the planet they decided to detour to on a lark? That seemed a little unbelievable. I get that ship in space don't get a daily newspaper, but I'm guessing they would have known about the last ship to visit, especially if no one from that ship made it off the planet.  In terms of the special effects in this one, I liked it. One of the aliens jumped scared the crap out of my wife, and the continuation of the synthetic humans storyline is cool.  Is it a little obvious about "David" at the end? Yeah, maybe, but he's a bad dude. It's neat that he had a need to create, and he didn't give a darn about humans. Why should he?  Do I feel a little "tricked" with ...

A first-love sort of Romeo and Juliet story. Bud and Wilma (Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood) are high school sweethearts. His family has come into oil money, but hers is still more working class (although her father has potential money in the stock market). As it stands, however, Bud's dad doesn't consider Wilma a match for his son... at least he doesn't want his son to marry early and kill his chances at going to college.  Women are definitely cast into two categories. Nice girls and whores. Bud's own sister is a "whore" type, which is weird, because Bud's dad wants his son to sow his wild oats with all the whores he can. At the same time, his dad warns him not to let a "nice girl" catch him, or not to "go too far" with a nice girl and then end up being required to do the responsible thing.  Bud is conflicted. He can see what has become of his sister. What any of that has to do with Wilma, I'm not sure. She's the pure girl, 100%...

Daisy Clover is a 15-year-old girl being played by a 27-year-old Natalie Wood. That's a bit of a stretch, and I have to admit that I never really got past that. She's just too old for the part, and I'm not sure that it's absolutely necessary that Daisy is 15. Why can't she just as easily be 25? Does she need to be 15 so that she can be more vulnerable to the powerful forces trying to use her? She's a minor, so her estranged sister ends up being her adult guardian, signing off on all her official paperwork. That's a small detail, though, and I'm not sure it matters that much. Just let her be 25.  Because she's supposed to be 15, though, it is a lot creepier, although the film doesn't make it as Lolita creepy as it could be. Wade Lewis (Robert Redford) is never given an age, but I suppose he's supposed to be in his 20s. Redford was 29. Anyway, Lewis and Clover end up briefly married. This is sort of where the whole film goes south for me.  What...

I like War movies, but I probably like War movies that spend more time and effort asking, "What are we fighting for?"  There's gotta be some sort of balance. I don't like War movies that go so far over the line the other way that everyone is just dying to end the war and get home. If there's a war, then let the people fighting it have a reason to fight it, and let them be into fighting it, sure. But don't give me 100% propaganda, either.  As I watched this film, I started thinking: Maybe the problem is that this is more propaganda film than war film. It was made right in the middle of World War II, and while the Allies were "winning" the war in 1942, maybe they didn't completely realize that yet.  After all, Hitler has entered Paris, and the British are being bombed and they've had to evacuate Dunkirk...  This film mentions details like that, but it's more interested in following the lives of a few men who have survived having their vesse...

I guess you call this a family bi-op. It's under 2 hours, so it doesn't quite qualify as an epic. And the actual period of time it covers is very strange. The World Wars are there as almost bookends, but the film doesn't use them as the bookends. Rather, it uses the period of time the family spent in their flat as the beginning and ending points.  So much happens in this family in roughly a 20-year period, because that's all there is, 20 years. It honestly feels like it should be a 30- or 40-year period. It feels that way because Frank and Ethel Gibbons (Robert Newton and Celia Johnson) age much more than 20 years, and Frank is on the brink of retirement, which should put him closer to 60 than 40.  Overall, I guess I like that focus on the family rather than on world events. Of course the family is impacted by what's going on in the world around them, but the drama of their day-to-day lives is what matters most. They are aware of Hitler and the prospect of a new war...

Why is Charles (Rex Harrison) so blithe? I guess that's the question I never get answered. He's married to a woman for about 5 years, and she dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. Seven years later, he's married to another woman, and things seem to be fine.  Then, I guess for fun, they and another couple invite over a weird older woman for a seance. You know she's weird because she rides a bike. Anyway, she doesn't really know what she's doing, and somehow Charles's dead wife crosses over.  This starts what I guess is supposed to be a bunch of funny shenanigans, a hilarious lovers' triangle. And maybe it's serious. Maybe the dead wife is trying to kill the husband so she can have him back on the other side?  I don't know. The humor is 1940s British, but even so, it just doesn't work for me. The female ghost is green, for reasons I never figure out. And while he can't touch her, she can touch and move physical objects. She can even drive a ...

Rose (Rosalind Russell) is a vaudeville mom. Her goal in life is to make her kids stars. Actually, she wanted to be the star. She wanted to fulfill her dream through her kids. Louise (Natalie Wood) eventually gets her mom to admit it, but that's way late in the film, after Louise has basically said, "I'm not you. I'm going to do burlesque, because that's what pays the bills." The movie is an odd musical. I didn't count the number of times characters broke out into songs, but it felt like just a few times, with it mainly being Rose doing the singing. I could 100% be off on this, because Russell didn't keep my interest as an actor, but I'm not sure even Marilyn Monroe in her part would have kept my interest in this film. I get the plot, but the movie felt overly long. It goes for almost 2 1/2 hours, and I'm thinking it deserved about 90 minutes. The musical numbers were not memorable at all, and they felt somewhat off the cuff -- no rhythm, no r...

Yeah, not a surprise, but the real problem with this franchise is that it's a one-hit wonder. Is the idea novel and somewhat interesting the first time? Sure, but when you go five sequels deep, you should have developed something more than what they ended up developing.  Now, what claims to be the "final" final destination is separated by 14 years from the last sequel. That's 14 years for them to try to figure out something a little bit better, and I have to admit, I was hopeful. The opening sequence and even the first half of the film did feel slightly above the average Final Destination fair.  Over the course of the film, we get to see that maybe all of the films were "related." My man Bludworth (Tony Todd) even gets a full name in this film, and we learn just a smidge more about him -- he was the little boy at the beginning of this film...  Brief note about Tony Todd: He looks horribly thin in this film. He's bald and gaunt. I didn't know until I ...

Based on the ending death montage, I'm guessing that the writers really did think this one was the final movie in the series. And compared to the previous film, this movie did seem to have something going for it. The formula is the same as always: A major accident, with a few younger people surviving, only to realize that you cannot outlive death.  Each time, one person has the vision, and then they start to figure out there's a "pattern," and deaths start to occur in the order in which they "should have occurred." This time, we also get the wrinkle that if it's your turn to die, someone else can "take your place" which returns death's balance. The problem is: you only end up with as much time as that other person was slated to live. If you kill the wrong person and they had an extra day to live, then that's all you get.  Maybe I was most happy to see Bludworth (Tony Todd) return to the series, after being absent in the 4th film, He act...

Man. The team that did the 2nd Final Destination is back with another chance. They have a $40 million budget. How do they use it? They don't hire any high-end acting talent. They don't use it to write a script. And quite honestly, I can't say they use it for special effects, because I've seen equivalent CGI used in C-level films. Nick (Bobby Campo) is the one with the visions. Is there a reason he would need to have visions in CGI? Going into this film, I cheated and looked ahead. What I saw scared me. First, they dropped the number from the film. Second, for an already gimmicky franchise, they filmed this one, apparently, in 3D. Third, whereas in the first film, when they took the time to be clever with character names, in this one, they don't even bother to name most of the characters -- Cowboy, Racist, Racist's Wife, MILF, Girl on Top.  And, a personal note: No Bludworth? Seriously? As minor a character as Bludworth has been, you could find a way to include h...

The premise of these movies is always that people are fated to die, and yet, for some unexplained reason, someone always has the vision that they are about to die. These deaths are not just about the person with the premonition. They are about a group of people -- generally young people. First it was the airplane crash, then it was the multiple-car pile up, and for this movie, it's the roller coaster. All of these events are out of the ordinary, as are the ways that Death "recovers" the lives of the people fated to die. I guess that's all necessary for the purposes of movie magic, but I'd prefer deaths that are a little bit more boring and mundane. When the death scenes get too crazy, I lose all sense of verisimilitude. I want to watch a movie that feels like real life, or in this case, real death. Even something like this: Why not have the character survive death and then have the character go to the doctor and find out that they have incurable cancer? Now that w...

“What did you think?” I asked my daughter. "It was okay," she said. "About equal to the first one." I thought so, too, but if the second one is no better, no worse than the first one, why make it? Money, I know. Money. But definitely not for "art." There's nothing really artistic about these movies, and no one is pretending that they are going to be changing cinema forever by making the Final Destination movies.  Bludworth. What a wasted character. I've looked ahead, and I know he's the character recurring the most in the series. I still hold out hope that his character will eventually be developed and mean something. In the first film, it felt like they didn't know who he was or what to do with him. Same feeling in this sequel. He basically plays the same one scene role here. In fact, I'd say less effectively, as he comes off a little too hammy, not as creepy or as eerie as in the original.  Alex (Devon Sawa) does off camera -- never m...

I'm not sure what I expect when I watch movies like this. It doesn't seem right to say, "I expect to see people killed in graphic and cool ways," but I suppose that's part of it. If a woman steps one inch out into the road and gets slammed by a bus going 75 miles an hour, that's one thing. But if another character gets their head sawed off right below the eyeballs, that's something else... The movie is somewhat intriguing because the "Jason/Freddy" villain isn't human... it's just Death (not even Death personified... not even the Grim Reaper).  This is a movie I've seen before, but the first time, I wasn't paying attention to the "classic horror names" some of the characters had -- there's the obvious, like Billy Hickcock (Seann William Scott), but then there's also the "deeper cuts," like Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke), aka "Val Lewton."  Even the minor throwaway characters sometimes had cool...

Is it or isn't it part of the Alien franchise? Of course it is, but for whatever reason, they make it difficult to place in the series. And so people debate whether it's a prequel, a reboot, a completely different thing, or whatever.  In many ways, it doesn't matter. Is it any good as a movie? I think it has a nice look. The acting is okay. The story. Eh. Somewhat predictable. We've seen this story before, and so no matter how nice it looks and how well the actors play their parts, something still feels like it's missing. That aside, what do we think of human curiosity? Are we worse than cats? Does our curiosity drive us, even when we might rationally know that being so curious is ultimately not in our best interest? I like Captain Janek (Idris Elba). He's a curious guy to a certain extent, but he knows where to draw the line. He's curious enough to wonder what it would be like to have sex with Meredith (Charlize Theron), but he's not curious enough to s...

When I originally watched Interiors (1978) and Stardust Memories (1980), I had watched Bergman and Fellini, but I don't remember thinking about or even making the connection that Woody Allen was simply copying (or paying tribute) to their work. I'm sure a lot of his more knowledge fans knew what he was doing, but it does make a difference to have Bergman and Fellini in mind when watching these two films. In Stardust Memories, we have a director, Sandy (Allen) trapped in his own fame. He's known for his comedies, and everyone expects comedies from him. They don't want him to be serious. They don't want him to change, but Sandy doesn't want to be trapped. -- in the types of films he makes, or in life, for that matter. If he feels serious, then he wants the artist freedom to be serious. This isn't a film about anything more than a director going about his business, professionally and personally. It really is Woody Allen's 8 1/2. The reason I don't like ...

Roger Ebert liked Woody Allen a lot, and he ended up giving 4-star ratings to nine of his films by my count. Including this one.  This was Allen's first serious film, and not coincidentally, perhaps, the first film he wrote and directed that he didn't appear in.  It's the story of three sisters. You see them on the DVD cover, in that famous, staged scene. They're carefully arranged, looking out the window at the stillness of the ocean. That's the film's last scene, much different from the roaring waters that ended up swallowing their mother.  Their mother wasn't well, and their father decided, at the age of 63, that he no longer needed to be responsible for her wellbeing. He finds another woman who makes him feel more youthful and alive, and after a month, he marries her.  It's a lot for his daughters to accept. These daughters have their own "life issues." Like a lot of Allen characters, they all want to be creative, and they all want to have ...

Early Woody Allen movies are fun to watch, and a much different brand of humor from his later works -- even most of his films after, say, Manhattan.  I watch a film like Love and Death, for example, and although I'm not an expert in Groucho Marx, that's exactly what it puts me in the mind of. In other words, the plot of the film is secondary. It's all about the gags, the one-liners, and the facial expressions. If you watch it for that, then you probably have a good time.  The setting for this one is Napoleonic Europe. Boris (Allen) doesn't want to be a fighter, but he's not built to be much of a lover. He loves his cousin, Sonja (Diane Keaton), but she loves just about everyone but him. Eventually, they do marry, and she might even admit that he turned out to be the love of her life. By that time, however, Boris is frolicking through the trees with Death.  From time-to-time, Boris breaks the fourth wall and speaks right to the camera. That's even how the film en...

The first Woody Allen movie to feature Howard Cosell. (He also appeared in archival footage in Sleeper and had a small cameo role in Broadway Danny Rose). It makes me laugh that Cosell would play his Wide World of Sports ABC self, because basically, he's acting like the opening scene assassination and the closing scene consummation of a marriage are both nothing more and nothing less than boxing contests. That's funny. Maybe the funniest bits of the film, to be honest. Fielding (Allen) is a product demonstrator. That's his job. He meets Nancy (Louise Lasser), a young activist who goes door-to-door to get people to sign petitions. And through this chance meeting, he eventually ends up trapped in a fictious Latin American country, becomes part of the rebels seeking to overthrow the new dictator, and even briefly becomes dictator himself. I think it's fair to say that a lot of Woody Allen movies feel like live-action cartoons. I see this one in the same light as maybe Grou...