FILMS I JUST COULDN'T FINISH ROUND FIVE

FILMS I JUST COULDN'T FINISH ROUND FIVE. 

As noted previously, these are not reviews, per se, but notes on films that I watched or suffered through until I just gave up on them for one reason or another. Sometimes I skipped to different sections just to get a sense of what was going on or to see if the film became more entertaining. Not all of these pictures are necessarily bad, they just didn't hold my attention. If you see one on the list that you think deserves another look, let me know.

The Spider's Web (1960) is based on a play by Agatha Christie but I could hardly finish a quarter of it when I turned it off. Glynis Johns is irritating and the whole flick comes off as a witless sitcom. I couldn't care less who murdered the man found in a closet.  

FX-18 (1964) is a poor Eurospy film with Ken Clark of Attack of the Giant Leeches playing a womanizing agent sent to Majorca to smash a spy ring that operates out of a yacht. Clark is okay in the part but the picture's pace is too slow and there is no style whatsoever. 

Secret Agent FX-18 /aka The Exterminators/1965)-- not to be confused with the just plain FX-18 -- stars Richard Wyler as another Eurospy who deals with sinister Egyptian agents, a French rocket, assorted thugs and the like, but the picture never amounts to much in spite of a lot of running around in different locales. 

Fireball 500  (1966) teams Frankie Avalon and Fabian Forte as rival race car drivers with songs, giggling gals, romance, and the like thrown into the mix but after awhile you realize there really isn't much to this picture. 

The Spy with Ten Faces (1966) stars Paul Hubschmid ("Paul Christian" in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) as "UpperSeven," a super-spy who wears so many masks that his enemies don't really know what he looks like. This device, borrowed from old pulp stories and serials, might be the only really interesting element of this mediocre eurospy flick, directed by super-hack Alberto De Martino. Although Hubschmid is fine in the lead and there are some good scenes, this is not a contender. 

I gave up on The Man from O.R.G.Y.  (1970) rather quickly, although I did try to stick it out for my customary quarter of the running time. This stars Robert Walker (Jr.) as a weird agent for a sex-based organization called O.R.G.Y. Walker is assigned to find three young heiresses who have a strange tattoo and gets involved in ludicrous, allegedly kinky scenarios. A complete waste of celluloid. 

I had wanted to see the strangely-titled Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things about Me?  (1971) for decades but was sorry when I did. With a poor and silly script by Herb Gardner, and an off-putting style from director Ulu Grosbard, this movie about a singer (Dustin Hoffman) who is supposedly bedeviled by a person saying bad things about him to his friends, never becomes remotely compelling. Leading Lady Barbara Harris shows up very late in the film but although she was inexplicably nominated for a supporting actress Oscar for this stinker, she's hardly enough to save this mess. 

The Sender (1982) is about a strange young man who tries to drown himself and winds up in a mental hospital where a woman tries to treat him despite his odd, almost supernatural, abilities. Despite the presence of Shirley Knight and the talented Zeljko Ivanek in his first starring role, this movie is so slowww and dull that I gave up on it halfway through. 

Fatal Instinct (1993) was meant to be a spoof of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, and I must say Armand Assante, Kate Nelligan, and Sean Young are right on-target in their performances, but this is basically a Carol Burnett Show spoof stretched out to over an hour and a half  -- after awhile this Carl Reiner-directed comedy begins to wear very thin. 

The Nurse (1997) stars Lisa Zane as a woman who comes to care for a paralyzed man she feels is responsible for the death of her father. No one in the movie seems to realize how awful the situation is for the patient, who can't move or speak but is able to think constantly about his horrible predicament. Eventually this whole situation becomes irritating, but in any case the movie doesn't grip.

The Woods (2006) has a young lady being sent to an exclusive girls' school where she has to contend with bitchy classmates, weird teachers, and the possibility of witches in the woods. This horror film may have been intended for a teen audience, but it just didn't hold the interest of this adult viewer. 

Triangle (2009) features a young woman with an autistic son who goes on a yachting party with a guy she's dating and his friends. They wind up on a deserted ocean liner where someone appears to be killing them off. Instead of a linear and tense suspense film, which this could easily have been, writer-director Christopher Smith gets metaphysical, silly, and unoriginal -- and creates a mess, The movie is professionally shot, acted, and directed -- quite well made, in fact -- but seeing the same scenes from multiple points of view quickly becomes tedious. The movie attempts to add some depth and poignancy relating to the little boy, but the screenplay is awkward, and all told, poor. After an hour I skipped to the end.

Nerve (2013) concerns a man who learns his wife is having an affair shortly before she is killed in a car crash. He becomes friends with a hooker and visits his psychiatrist regularly after having a nervous breakdown. I gave this alleged thriller more than twenty dull minutes waiting for something of interest to happen, but the placid style and slow pacing was so off-putting that I found myself longing to switch to anything, even an umpteenth rerun of Dr. Phil. I skipped ahead to see what the "alleged" twist was all about and am glad I didn't waste another full hour actually sitting through this.

The Last Days on Mars (2013) has astronauts planning to leave the "red planet" when they come across some kind of dangerous contagion. When the actors began foaming at the mouth and attacking everyone like something out of Night of the Living Dead I figured this was another trip to the well I didn't need and switched it off. 

78/52 Hitchcock's Shower Scene (2017) is a documentary about Psycho, especially the famous shower murder sequence. Well after about fifteen minutes I gave up on this. I mean, there was some pretentious film journalist babbling on about the movie along with minor celebrities like Elijah Wood and Bret Easton Ellis offering their opinions and whose observations were neither insightful nor interesting  -- who cares? 

Normally I love monster movies but I quit Rampage (2018), despite some good FX work, about a quarter of the way in because it came off like just another "Rock/Duane Johnson" action movie that I felt I had seen once too often. Just had no great desire to see it to the end. 

Although I did like Inglourious Basterds (with reservations), I still don't count myself among the fans of Quentin Tarantino. Nevertheless I checked out Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood  (2019) because people I know and whose opinions I generally trust recommended the film, so I gave this tedious and meandering movie a try. Everyone said that the ending was a knock out, and that may be the case, but I just couldn't stick around until it got there -- there were too many other films I really wanted to look it. I may return to this some day, but for now ... Besides, even if the ending is good that may not justify how long it takes to arrive there. 

Other pictures I stopped watching or skimmed through include: I'm From Arkansas with Bruce Bennett; Carnival Lady (1933); and the "eurospy" pictures Red Dragon with Stewart Granger; Secret Agent Fireball with Ray Danton; Agent OO3: Operation Atlantis with John Ericson; Dick Smart 2.007 with Richard Wyler;, The Big Blackout; Kommissar X: Death Trip; and Kommissar X: Operation Pakistan.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

Christoph Waltz, the real star of Basterds

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009). Writer/director: Quentin Tarantino. "Nation's Pride" segment directed by Eli Roth.

Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) is the sole survivor when her Jewish family -- hiding under the floorboards in a farm in Nazi-occupied France -- are wiped out under the orders of SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Years later she and Landa meet when she (under an assumed name) is the owner of a movie theater in Paris and the boyish German war hero Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl) takes a liking to her. Like a German Audie Murphy, Zoller has starred in a film about his exploits entitled "Nation's Pride" and wants it to be premiered at Shosanna's theater with top Nazi leaders, including Hitler, in attendance. Shosanna and her lover Marcel  (Jacky Ido) love the idea of wiping out all of the Germans in one fell swoop but have no idea that others have the same notion, such as a group of Nazi-scalpers known as the "Inglourious Basterds" headed by a good ole Southern boy named Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). I've never been a fan of Quentin Tarantino's -- and even this film hasn't quite convinced me of his alleged genius -- but at least he's come up with a genuinely intriguing storyline instead of childish drek like Kill Bill. The trouble is that some of Tarantino's "touches" get in the way and the film is at least thirty minutes too long. For instance the taut opening scene at the farmhouse is so lengthy that the tension almost dissipates. Robert Richardson's photography is top of the line, and there are a lot of fine actors in the movie -- and Brad Pitt. Pitt is given top billing but the real star, if it's anyone, is the superb Christoph Waltz as the slimiest Nazi to come down the pike in a long time. [The scene when he ingests and thoroughly enjoys a French pastry with whipped cream on it had my mouth-watering, but I digress.] When he and Pitt appear in the same scene it's like they're not in the same movie. Laurent is also excellent, as is Bruhl, Michael Fassbender as a British Lieutenant, Diane Kruger as a German actress who's secretly fighting against the Nazi's, Alexander Fehling as Sgt. Wilhelm who figures in an important scene in a cafe, and Denis Menochet as the farmer in the opening scene and others. Mike Myers has a cameo as a British general and an unrecognizable Rod Taylor plays Winston Churchill! With some audacious, unpredictable developments at the end, the movie sort of goes off into fantasy land but remains entertaining. You get the feeling it would have been a lot better had someone else written and helmed besides Tarantino, who seems more interested in effect than human emotion.

Verdict: No Judgment at Nuremberg [if you're talking about films dealing with the evils of Nazi Germany] but absorbing, beautifully acted by most of the cast, and with several striking and tense sequences. ***.

FOXY: MY LIFE IN THREE ACTS -- PAM GRIER

FOXY: MY LIFE IN THREE ACTS A Memoir. Pam Grier with Andrea Cagan. Springboard; 2010.

Actress Pam Grier came to prominence in the seventies when she appeared in a number of popular "blaxpoitation" pictures such as Coffy and Foxy Brown. The only flaw in this otherwise excellent memoir is that she doesn't discuss those films very much [perhaps because they were not exactly cinematic masterpieces] nor her attitude toward the movies that gave black actors jobs but were often considered inherently racist with their stereotypes and negative depictions. Grier prefers to see the movies as depicting empowered [i.e. tough] female characters, but one wishes she had included a few on-set anecdotes and the like. [She does write about working on her early "women in prison" films that were made in the Philippines.] However, Grier does write very compellingly of her childhood and youth [when she was raped by cousins], her work on Jackie Brown [which Quentin Tarantino wrote with her in mind] and on the cable TV show The L Word, about lesbians, in which she played a straight character. She also describes her several unfortunate relationships with men: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who expected her to adhere to the outrageously sexist tenets of his Islamic religion; Freddie Prinze, who had a serious drug problem that led to his early death; a black man who virtually abandoned her when she developed cancer; and a white man who claimed his attraction to women of color wasn't a fetish but who ultimately couldn't see her as his wife because she didn't belong to the "country club" set. There are horrifying passages about her sister's painful death; her husband insisted she stick to their religious principals and she wasn't even allowed painkillers -- her 15-year-old son was so upset the poor boy committed suicide. Grier intelligently writes of the need for women to be themselves and make it on their own so they are not hung up by bad choices made by the men who supposedly want to "take care of them." Many books written by "B" or "C" list celebrities aren't worth the paper they're printed on, but Foxy is an exception and is a very worthwhile read.

Verdict: Absorbing and entertaining. ***1/2.

KILL BILL VOLUME ONE

KILL BILL VOL. ONE (2004). Director: Quentin Tarantino.

When her entire wedding party is slaughtered for unknown reasons by members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, the bride (Uma Thurman) vows revenge and starts to take the killers out one by one. At first this film is fun, but eventually it becomes rather boring – despite all the mayhem on-screen – because there are no real plot or characters. Even fans of the over-rated Tarantino's equally over-rated Pulp Fiction may be disappointed in this, although gore-geeks and frat boys of all ages will probably have fun with all the dismemberments and bloodletting during the sword fights. The movie opens with a zesty, well-executed cat fight between Thurman and Viveca A. Fox, and there are other lively sequences and some decent acting, but it all becomes pointless, junky, and – worst of all – a bit dull. The animation sequence depicting the early years of Japanese crime boss Lucy Lui is boring despite all the over-the-top gore, as is the climactic scene when Thurman takes on and defeats dozens of swordsmen trying to protect the boss. Although this is based on the character of “The Bride,” it seems just as influenced in a way by episodes of Alias (which Tarantino guest-starred on) and certain comic books such as Daredevil (which introduced Elektra, who is mighty handy with a sword) and The X-Men, which features a lot of “strong” and neurotic female characters. Michael Parks of The Idol turns up as a small-town sheriff. Thurman should ask for a foot double in her next contract – when she tries to wiggle her feet after coming out of a coma she reveals perhaps the ugliest pair of feet in all of Hollywood! All the “Hollywood” references and occasional cleverness can't disguise an utterly mediocre movie. The film got surprisingly decent reviews, but nobody really raved about it and you can see why. Will not whet your appetite for "volume" two.

Verdict: Not exactly Citizen Kane -- but what is? *1/2.