Category Archives: Movies that take place in the Big Apple

Rich and Famous (1981)

Posted on May 6, 2024 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: College friends become writers.

Liz (Jacqueline Bisset) and Merry (Candice Bergen) meet while attending college and become best friends. After graduation Liz achieves accolades for writing a novel and Merry, despite being married and living in posh Malibu, becomes jealous. She strives to write her own novel based on real-life experiences of her rich southern California acquaintances where only the names are changed. One night while Liz is visiting  Merry digs the first draft of her book out and reads it to her. Liz does not care for it, but promises the pleading Merry she’ll run it by her publisher (Steven Hill) convinced he won’t like it and nothing with come of it. To her surprise it does get published  and becomes a best seller. Now she’s the one seething in jealousy since her writing career has crested from writer’s block. While this is going on Merry’s husband Doug (David Selby) begins to come-on to Liz behind-the-scenes and openly wanting to have an affair with her, which Liz finds tempting since the two had a fling during college.

This is a remake of Old Acquaintances, which came out in 1942 and starred Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Bisset spent 2 years working on the script and getting it funded as she was determined to play a ‘real person’ for once and not just the proverbial beauty. However, the movie, which was the last to be directed by legendary filmmaker George Cukor, bombed badly at the box office and it’s easy to see why. The storyline is out of touch with the decade that it’s in. What gets used as fashionable status symbol like having Merry stay at the Waldorf Astoria hotel might’ve been considered glitzy back in the 40’s, but for the 80’s generation would be looked upon as passe. Nothing is hip or trendy. The characters and their conflicts are of a soap opera variety, which is where this tepid storyline should’ve stayed.

My biggest beef was the whole friendship thing, which didn’t make a lot of sense. The two characters are about as different as you could get with Merry coming-off, particularly with her annoying southern twang, as dim-witted particularly when compared with Liz who’s clearly more sophisticated and articulate. Why these two opposites would bond is a complete mystery. There’s no backstory given, only a brief scene during their college days is shown, but nothing displaying what lead to the friendship blossoming, or what they had in common that they’d enjoy each other’s company. For the relationship to work it needs to be believable and organic, and the viewer able to buy into it, but instead it’s quite shallow and forced. Merry is incredibly annoying painfully insecure, emotionally needy, and grossly self centered. She’s the type of person most people would want to quickly dump as a friend and you wonder why Liz, who could easily find new friends more her intellectual equal, doesn’t do just that.

Merry’s marriage to Doug has the same issue. Why would he marry someone that had such a contrasting personality to his? The film fleetingly intimates that it was Liz he was truly after, he went to their same college, and only married Merry as an attempt to stay close to Liz, though the film relies on the viewer reading into this and should’ve instead fully confirmed it.

Merry’s ascent into the writing world is equally ridiculous. From the opening three paragraphs that she reads out loud to Liz gave more than enough reason that it was poorly written and should never see the light-of-day and yet somehow it becomes an immediate best-seller. In a better movie this might get used as satire showing how bad the American Public’s taste in literature is, but the film here has the audacity to show her winning awards for her writing, which just makes it all the more absurd and laughable. It also makes it seem like writing a book is easy and simply requires someone to sit down and throw some words on a page and walah it gets published when it reality it takes many drafts and polishing before it’s even potentially considered publish ready, but the movie glosses over this part completely.

I enjoyed Bisset who’s clearly the stronger actress, but Bergen makes an utter fool of herself particularly her attempt at a southern accent. Normally she’s good at playing the snarky type, which best reflects her personality. Trying to portray a simpleton isn’t her best suit and the film digresses every time she’s in it to the point her sporadic appearances start to seem almost like unintentional comic relief.

Had the film ended with some bitter, knockout cat fight I might’ve forgiven it and even gave it a few points. Not everyone is meant to get along and in real life these two would be a bad match. It’s one of those friendships that ultimately fizzles because the two just don’t have enough in common to keep it going and in a lot of ways ingrate on each other’s nerves. A nasty bitch session would’ve been just what the doctor ordered, and they do have a little bit of one, but then immediately make-up, which just cements the film’s profound shallowness.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: September 23, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 57 Minutes

Rated R

Director: George Cukor

Studio: United Artists

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Drama, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Remakes

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Daniel (1983)

Posted on April 22, 2024 | Leave a comment

daniel

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Researching his parent’s execution.

Based on the 1971 novel ‘The Book of Daniel’ by E.L. Doctorow, who also wrote the screenplay, which was inspired by the true story of Ethel and Joseph Rosenberg, who were convicted and executed in 1953 for being spies to the Soviet Union. The story here centers on Daniel (Timothy Hutton), the now grown son of Paul (Mandy Patinkin) and Rochelle (Lindsay Crouse), who many decades after his parent’s execution now decides to research their case to see if his parents really were spies, or not.

Despite being well produced the film failed at both the box office and with the critics, which is a shame as I felt director Sidney Lumet does some marvelous work here and creates a few powerful scenes. One is when the the FBI agents raid Daniel’s house, who is played at this stage by Ilan Mitchell-Smith, and the look of horror in his eyes as the home gets torn up from top to bottom and his father violently removed in handcuffs. Another great moment are the execution scenes filmed in the actual death chamber at the Sing Sing Prison. These moments are quite chilling as Lumet’s focuses in on the close-up shots of the two being strapped in and the leather flaps of their hoods pulled down over their frightened eyes and then seeing their bodies shake violently while a group of men sit quietly observing it is effectively disturbing and one of the more impactful execution segments put on film.

There are though some things that could’ve been done better. The jumping back and forth between time periods proves distracting and takes the viewer out of the story instead of wrapping them in. The book of which it’s based had a very fluid structure as well, but here the scenes involving Daniel and his sister as children prove far more impactful while segments involving Hutton all grown-up are weak by comparison. The film would’ve been more effective had it taken a linear structure.

Watching Hutton walk along the sidewalk while voice overs are heard from his sister, played by Amanda Plummer, chastising him for not caring more about what happened his parents, was unnecessary and heavy-handed as we had heard her saying all this earlier to him at the dinner table and could see by the shocked reaction on his face that it really got to him, so we didn’t need the same lines getting repeated again. The music particularly the singing, is way too intrusive and having almost no music and just relying on the action and visuals would’ve been far better.

I was also confused who Linda was, played by Tovah Feldshuh, whom Daniel comes upon at a dental office years later and acts like he knows her from childhood. I didn’t remember seeing a young Linda, though one is listed in the closing credits, and then it dawned on me that there was a quick moment when a snotty girl tells Daniel and his sister, when they’re kids, that they ‘smell’ while they’re riding in a car, but because this character does end up returning and playing a pivotal role to the plot I felt the confrontations between them as kids should’ve been more pronounced and extended instead of so fleeting that you completely forget about it.

Hutton, who turned down the starring role in Risky Business to be in this at the protest of his agent, gets wasted. He gives a strong performance, but is over shadowed by Ilan Mitchell-Smith. His character also had too wide of an arch as he seems to have a complete personality change after the argument with his sister even though I thought he should’ve been shown harboring the same feelings and questions about his parent’s death for a long time and decided to explore the case out of his own curiosity and anger. I also felt that both he and his sister should’ve done the investigation together instead of discarding her off to a mental institution and barely seen. I know the book had her going to a mental hospital as well, but we see them go through the trauma together as children and therefore it seemed only right that they should work as a team as adults to find the answers.

The film offers no conclusions. The parents are portrayed in a highly sympathetic way like they didn’t really do anything and it does play with the idea that there might’ve been another phantom couple ‘who were the real culprits’ though it doesn’t pinpoint to anyone specifically. I felt it would’ve been a stronger movie had it based itself on the real children of the Rosenbergs, Michael and Robert, and detailed things from their true-life experiences. Maybe they didn’t want the limelight, which is okay, but fictionalizing a real historical event with a lot of made-up people and situations doesn’t have the same profound effect.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: August 26, 1983

Runtime: 2 Hours 10 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Sidney Lumet

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, Paramount +

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Movies Based on Conspiracy Theories, Movies Based on Novels, Movies that take place in the Big Apple

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Believe in Me (1971)

Posted on April 12, 2024 | Leave a comment

believe

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Couple addicted to drugs.

Remy (Michael Sarrazin) is a medical student at a New York hospital, who finds himself increasingly addicted to speed and other drugs available to him through his job. Pamela (Jacqueline Bisset) is the beautiful new girlfriend he meets through his friend and fellow intern Alan (Jon Cypher) who’s also Pamela’s brother. The two hit-it-off and soon move into together, but the romance doesn’t last when Pamela becomes aware of Remy’s addiction. He convinces her that he can handle it and even gets her to try some of it despite her reluctance. This then leads to her becoming hooked as well and their lives quickly spiral out-of-control as they both lose their jobs, their money, and ultimately their dignity.

The early 70’s was  a peak era for drug culture movies with most getting a bad rap from the critics, which included this one. Certainly it does start out cringey with a sappy love song sung by Low Rawls that not only gets played over the opening credits, but also about 30-minutes in, which practically kills the whole thing with its heavy-handed melody and lyrics. The title is not so great either as it seems to imply a totally different type of movie like have someone sticking with another person through thick-and-thin, which really doesn’t happen here and in fact its the complete opposite.  ‘Speed is of the Essence’, which was the working title as well as the title of the New York Magazine article by Gail Sheehy of which the film was based was far more apt and should’ve been kept.

However, what I did like are that the characters aren’t teen agers, or a part of the counter-culture movement, which is where all the other drug movies from that period had. The blame in those films was always the same too: peer pressure and bad influences, but here that all gets reversed. Remy and Pamela are well educated and with Remy’s background is well aware of the dangers of drugs and essentially ‘knows better’ and yet becomes a victim to them anyway. Because he’s at such a high standing initially and not just played-off as being some naive kid, makes his downfall and that of his equally smart girlfriend all the more stark and gripping.

The performances are good too. Sarrazin and Bisset met while filming The Sweet Ride, that started a 6 year relationship and this was the one project that they did together. Sarrazin has been blamed as being too transparent an actor who’s instantly forgettable and melts into the backdrop. While I’ve usually found his acting credible he does have a tendency to be passive and lacking an imposing presence, but here he’s genuinely cranky and snarly. Even has some moments of anger, which is why the movie mostly works because the character is believable. There’s good support by Alan Garfield as his dealer who gets the final brutal revenge on Remy when he can’t pay up as well a Cypher whose advice to his sister when she’s down-and-out and asking for money is shockingly harsh.

Spoiler Alert!

The film has a few strong moments particularly when it focuses on the couple’s teenage friend Matthew (Kurt Dodenhoff) who also becomes hooked and goes through a scary mental and physical decline, but the ending lacks punch. It has Remy sitting outside his apartment saying he’s ‘lost his key’ (not sure if this was meant as a code word for them being evicted, but probably should’ve been). Pamela then leaves him there while she walks to a clinic in order to get sober, which for me was too wide-open. For one thing there’s no guarantee that Pamela would’ve been able to cleanly kick-the-habit as many people enter into drug recovery suffer many relapses. Leaving Remy alone doesn’t offer any finality. Either he dies from his addiction, or finds a way out, but we needed an answer one way, or another like seeing his lifeless body lying in the gutter, which would’ve given the film the brutal final image that it needed. The movie does give an honest assessment of the situation most of the way, so why cop-out at the end and become vague? The viewer had invested enough time with this that they should’ve been given a more complete and concrete character arch.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: December 8, 1971

Runtime: 1 Hour 26 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Stuart Hagmann

Studio: MGM

DVD-R (dvdlady.com)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Movies Based on Short Stories, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies with a Hospital setting, Obscure Movies

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Without a Trace (1983)

Posted on March 4, 2024 | 1 comment

without

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Her child goes missing.

Susan (Kate Nelligan) works as a college professor while also raising her 6-year-old son Alex (Danny Corkill) as a single parent. Alex normally walks 2-blocks to his school every morning in their Brooklyn neighborhood, so Susan thinks nothing of it when she waves goodbye to him as he turns the corner towards his school while she goes the other way to her job. However, when she returns home and finds that he’s not there she begins to worry. She calls her friend Jocelyn (Stockard Channing), who has a daughter the same age as Alex, only to learn that Alex never showed up to school that day. She then immediately calls the police and Detective Al Manetti (Judd Hirsh) becomes the lead investigator in the case to find the child.

The story is loosely based on the real-life case of Etan Patz who disappeared one day while walking to school on May 25, 1979. Not only did he become the first child to appear on a milk cartoon for missing children, but it also inspired Beth Gutcheon to write a novel, which was a fictionalized account of the his case that was later purchased by producer Stanley R. Jaffe in the amount of $350,000 to turn it into a film, of which Gutcheon was hired to write the screenplay.

While the film has a riveting quality that keeps you watching it does also have a certain ‘genteel atmosphere’ that critic Leonard Maltin complained about in his review, that keeps it a bit sterile for its own good. The film acts like child abduction is almost a novelty that’s rare to happen and shocking when it does though kids can go missing each and every day in this country. The detective states that children can be sexually molested by adults though if children came forward about it they’d ‘never be believed’ or ‘taken seriously’, which is something that I think has certainly flipped the other way in this day and age. He also brings up the subject of child porn, which gets called ‘chicken porn’ here, and parents respond in a naive way to this concept, which again is something I think most adults in this era would’ve been familiar with its existence and not act like they’re being told about something completely new they had never heard about.  The police also ‘set-up-shop’ in the women’s apartment turning it into a virtual police station and remain there day-and-night for 6-weeks, which I couldn’t see happening now.

The sequence with a psychic, played by Kathleen Widdeos, I found unintentionally laughable. Her ‘visions’ are quite vague and when she gets pressed to give something specific, like the license plate number of the car, or identity of the kidnapper, she can’t. Yet the mother acts relieved when the psychic says the child is still alive, but since her ‘information’ is so nebulous she could be a con artist making it all up and no one would know the difference.

David Dukes, who plays the ex-husband and father of the child, who at this time was best known for playing the man who tried to rape Edith Bunker, in a memorable episode of the classic TV-show ‘All in the Family’ of which he received several death threats, plays the only character that shows any emotion and thus the only one who stands-out. The movie also examines the detective’s home-life, which I didn’t feel was needed. Normally I say it’s good when we learn more about a cop’s private side, but since he wasn’t the film’s protagonist I didn’t find it necessary and only helps to lengthen the film’s runtime, which was too long anyways and could’ve neatly been told in only a 90-minute time frame instead of 110 minutes.

I did come away liking Nelligan’s performance, some critics at the time labeled her as coming-off as ‘cold’, but I felt she did alright, but was kind of disappointed that Stockard Channing didn’t get the lead instead. At the time Nelligan was considered the up-and-coming star while Channing had been mostly relegated to comedy including two failed sitcoms, but in retrospect Channing has become the better known actress and proven to be highly versatile, so seeing her in the part of mother would’ve been quite interesting and she might’ve even been able to do it better.

Spoiler Alert!

My biggest beef though is with the ending, which is much different than in the actual incident. In the Patz case his body was never found and it turned into a cold case for many years before a man named Pedro Hernandez came forward in 2012 and confessed to the crime. Here though the boy gets found alive having been kidnapped to help take care of a man’s disabled adult sister, but it’s very hard to fathom how much help a 6-year-old could be expected to give an adult woman nor has there ever been in the annals of crime where a kidnapping has been done for this reason. Having the kid immediately answer the door of the home he is supposedly being ‘confined in’ hurts the tension and would’ve been more suspenseful had the police had to search the place before finally finding him hidden somewhere. Also, if the kid is able to open the front door then what’s stopping him from running out at some point and finding help?

The fact that a neighbor woman named Malvina Robbins (Louise Stubbs), who lives next door to the kidnappers and keeps calling the police about it, but they ignore her, really hurts the credibility of the Manetti character who we’re supposed to like and he’s portrayed as being ‘super dedicated’. If that’s the case then he should’ve followed-up on every single lead he could’ve even if he thought some of them might be ‘cranks’ it shouldn’t matter because you just never know. The fact that he doesn’t do this even after she calls the police hundreds of times makes it seem like a dereliction of duty who should be investigated for not  following up and certainly not some ‘hero’.

I realize most audiences want some sort of resolution and making a movie like this that doesn’t have one might prove frustrating, but in real-life a lot of cases like these don’t get resolved, or if they do the findings are a grim one. To have a movie stay realistic the whole way only to tack-on a feel-good ending does a disservice to the many parents whose missing children never come home and thus hurts it from being as insightful and compelling as it could’ve been.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: February 4, 1983

Runtime: 1 Hour 50 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Stanley R. Jaffe

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD-R, VHS

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Kidnapping Movies, Movies Based on Actual Events, Movies Based on Novels, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Obscure Movies

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The Gambler (1974)

Posted on February 29, 2024 | Leave a comment

gambler

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Can’t control his addiction.

Axel (James Caan) is a college professor with a serious gambling addiction. He enjoys making bets on anything and everything whether it’s in a casino, over the phone betting on sports games, or out on the street playing one-on-one hoops with the neighborhood kids. No matter how much he loses he can’t stop from continuing the same pattern. When he owes $44,000 to the mob and they come looking for him and threatening his life he’s forced to ask his mother (Jacqueline Brookes) for the money and despite her disapproval she gives it to him out of her life savings, but then instead of paying off his debt he just uses it to gamble some more.

The screenplay was inspired by writer James Toback’s own life experiences and was initially written as a semi-autobiographical book before he decided to turn it into a script. The film is intriguing to a degree as gambling addiction is not anything that I’ve ever fully understood, so trying to fathom why some people would put up such huge sums of money to make a bet that they know they have a very good chance of losing, and even if they do lose will still continue to go on making bets anyways is baffling to me. Toback makes good efforts to try to explain the psych of a gambler’s mindset, which mainly gets revealed through Axel’s lectures to his class and at one point during a conversation with his bookie (Paul Sorvino) where he admits he could beat him with safe bets in competitions he was sure to win, but that this wouldn’t give him the same adrenaline rush, or ‘juice’, that placing a more riskier bet would.

Even with these explanations it still becomes gut wrenching watching him spiral out-on-control and dig himself deeper and deeper in a hole until you feel almost like turning away as it becomes genuinely painful, and frustrating, at seeing someone self-destruct the way this guy does. There are some very powerful moments including the scenes where the mother begrudgingly takes her money out of the bank to help him for fear he may lose his life if she doesn’t and her pained expression on her face as she does it really gets etched in your mind. Axel sitting in a bathtub listening to the final moments of a basketball game that he’s also bet big money on where the final score doesn’t go the way he wanted is also quite compelling.

The acting is strong with Caan giving a great performance that Toback originally wanted to go to DeNiro, who campaigned heavily for it, but director Karel Reisz choose Caan instead, only for Caan to state in later interviews that he hated working with him. Comedian London Lee, wearing an incredibly garish bowl haircut, is good in a very sleazy sort of way and Burt Young has a dynamic bit as an enforcer who tears up a lady’s apartment when her boyfriend is unable to repay what he owes. James Woods can be seen in a small role as a flippant bank teller though overall I still felt it was Brookes who steals it as the concerned mother and I was surprised she was not in it more nor that she didn’t get an Academy Award nomination as she really should’ve.

Despite a few powerful moments the pace is slow and there’s a lot of periods where it gets boring and nothing much happens. A lot of the blame goes to the fact that the main character has very little of an arch. He starts out already with the addiction gripping him and we can see what a problem it’s causing and the rest of the movie just continues to hit home this same point until it becomes redundant. It would’ve been better to have seen him before he had gotten into the whole gambling fix took over his life and personality, which would’ve created a far more interesting and insightful transition.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: October 2, 1974

Runtime: 1 Hour 51 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Karel Reisz

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Amazon Video

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Posted in 70's Movies, College Life, Drama, Movies that take place in the Big Apple

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Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

Posted on December 27, 2023 | Leave a comment

crimes1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Threatening to tell wife.

Judah (Martin Landau) is an eye doctor whose mistress of several years, Dolores (Anjelica Huston), is threatening to tell his wife (Claire Bloom) about their affair. Judah tries to persuade her not to, but she insists on going through with it unless he gets a divorce, which he refuses to do. Feeling he has no other option he hires his brother (Jerry Orbach) to do a hit on her in order to get her off of his hands. Once the job is done Judah then becomes wracked with guilt and though he had been a non-believer for many years begins to rekindle the fear of the wrath of God for what he’s done. Meanwhile Cliff (Woody Allen) is a struggling documentary filmmaker who gets a job filming a movie of a obnoxious comedian (Alan Alda) who’s highly narcissistic and difficult to deal with.

The film is unusual in that it has two correlating stories that go on at the same time with very little that links them. The only connecting thread is a Rabbi, played by Sam Waterston, who is friends with both Alda and Landau, as well as Cliff and Judah getting together briefly at a party to have a discussion near the end. Otherwise it’s like two separate movies with one being semi-funny while the other is made to be more like a searing drama and character study. While it’s engaging most of the way I felt the segment dealing with the egotistical celebrity wasn’t interesting or comical enough to be worth having especially since Alda didn’t seem able to convey an obnoxious jerk in a way that was amusing. The film also goes off on several tangents including Cliff counseling his sister about a date she had where a man tied her up and defecated on her that didn’t have anything to do with the main story and just taking up runtime for no reason. There’s also segments that I did find intriguing like the mysterious phone calls Judah gets late at night where the caller immediately hangs up when Judah answers that I felt should’ve been explored more.

A good way to have solved this and would also have tied-in Allen’s character better would’ve had him filming a documentary on Judah who could’ve been portrayed as this heroic eye doctor who saved the vision of underprivileged kids, or even gone to Africa for awhile to help heal the vision of the kids there and thus his efforts were considered a suitable material for a film. Alda’s character could’ve been cut out totally and not missed. Judah could’ve still be conniving behind-the-scenes about how to get rid of the other woman and thus the irony of him being lionized in front of the camera, but a complete jerk behind it would’ve been even more accentuated and interesting.

As it is the moments with Landau are still quite strong. His career during the 80’s had nearly tanked with him having to accept co-starring roles in low budget horrors just to keep busy only to finally get his name revitalized with his role in Tucker: A Man and His Dreams in 1987 that lead to an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor and helped him get better quality work including this one. Here his expressive blue eyes come into play particularly after the dirty deed gets done and he begins having reoccurring visions of himself as a boy going to synagogue and quarreling with his moral depravity, which is effective.

This is also the rare movie where Allen plays someone who is actually likable. Normally his incessant whining and misguided belief that he’s more sexually attractive than he is and can bed any hot women I’ve found annoying, but here he’s more of a ignored chump who’s still struggling to make a name for himself and this makes him endearing. Instead of aggressively coming onto women in tacky ways he instead shyly courts Mia Farrow who plays a sort-of nerdette here and their scenes together are cute.

Spoiler Alert!

The ending in which Allen and Landau meet briefly and he tells Allen about this ‘great’ movie idea in which a husband finds away to kill off his mistress, which is essentially what he’s really done, and feels no guilt afterwards doesn’t really work. For one thing it’s hard to believe that he’d wake-up one day, as he describes, and no longer feel any remorse and could just go on normally as he had felt so guilty about it earlier that you’d think it would’ve left some sort of lasting affect. The viewer should’ve also seen this realization play-out visually through the story versus having him just describe it.

I realize Allen’s whole point was to show that the universe doesn’t dispense justice and sometimes people really can get away with murder and can go on living happy lives unlike in the movies where it’s expected that the bad guy should suffer some consequence. Yet realistically I actually think Landau would’ve been caught, or at least been more of a suspect than he is. He was already questioned by the police earlier due to all the phone calls he had with the victim and I don’t think his flimsy excuse would’ve sufficed. Since he had been to her apartment many times including even on the night of the murder that most likely one of the other tenants would’ve spotted him coming and going and all the police would’ve had to do was show his picture around for him to be easily fingered by someone else living in the building. Thus watching Landau confidently leave his discussion with Allen thinking he could go on happily with his life only to have a detective there with handcuffs would’ve been funnier and in a lot ways ultimately more believable.

The film’s promotional poster, as seen above, doesn’t get the mood of the scene right. If you look at the poster it seems like Landau is the despondent one who’s suffering from inner turmoil while Woody is nonchalant, but if you watch the movie it’s Landau that is at complete ease while Woody is in turmoil over Mia getting married to Alda, so the poster is essentially misleading.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: October 12, 1989

Runtime: 1 Hour 44 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Woody Allen

Studio: Orion Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy/Drama, Movies that take place in the Big Apple

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Made for Each Other (1971)

Posted on December 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

made

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Couple argues a lot.

Pandora (Renee Taylor) is an out-of-work actress still clinging to her dreams that she’ll one day become famous something she has hoped for since she was a child. Gig (Joseph Bologna) suffers from not being able to find a stable relationship and guilt-ridden over sending the last one into attempted suicide. Both Pandora and Gig attend a group therapy session and this is where they meet. Initially though things are rocky. Gig does not like Pandora’s stand-up act, something she’s been working on for years, and openly tells her it’s awful. They then break-up, but Pandora eventually returns telling him that he was right and she’s worked out the ‘kinks’ from her act, so it’s now improved. To celebrate Gig takes her to his parents (Paul Sorvino, Olympia Dukakis) for Thanksgiving. The parents though don’t approve of Pandora since she’s Jewish and they’re Catholic and they eventually drive her out of their apartment. Gig and Pandora continue to argue once they’re back in the car, but find, strangely, that no matter how the other one annoys them they still like each other’s company.

After the runaway success of Lovers and Other Strangers, which Bologna and Taylor wrote initially as a play, but then turned it into a movie, Hollywood studios were interested in them trying another script and gave them upfront money to do so. The first film had been based on their real-life experiences of dealing with all of their in-laws during their wedding, which occurred in 1965, and so they decided to base this one on their lives as well, namely what brought them together. Like with their first project the script is quite broad and focuses in on many different people including the parents of each character who have quite a bit of screentime, particularly Sorvino and Dukakis, and who are quite funny. The film also shows the leads when they were infants and many of their childhood experiences, which gets shot in black-and-white, that is also both insightful and amusing.

Unlike with most movies the scenes are quite extended and seemed better primed for a stageplay. The elusive Robert B. Bean gets credited as director, but he never did anything else, which seems a bit curious and there’s been rumors that he was just a pseudonym for Bologna who took over as the actual director. The long takes though are effective and enhance the comedy. The scene inside Gig’s parents house where the tension builds when they slowly realize that Pandora is ‘not their kind’ is quite good and not unlike what could happen in many families homes of that era who closely identified with their particularly religions and not privy to having their kids marry outside of it. Gig’s inability to appreciate Pandora’s stage act and his blunt assessment of it while at a late night cafe is comically on-targe too as any fledgling artist will tell you sometimes family members, friends, and even those really close to them won’t always connect with their artistic endeavors and regrettably become their biggest critics.

Sorvino scores as the abrasive no-nonsense father though ironically he was actually 5-years younger than Bologna who plays his son and for that reason his hair should’ve been made more gray. Dukakis is equally on-target as the super religious mother whose strong faith amounts to a lot of rituals and ends up inadvertently harming her child psychologically like when she catches him masturbating and informs him that if he continues his ‘little thing will fall off’. Helen Verbit as Pandora’s mother is equally amusing playing the over-protective type who wants so hard to shield her daughter from harsh reality that she tells her that her stage act is ‘brilliant’ when it really isn’t and that because she’s her mother that somehow makes her opinion ‘objective’.

The film’s one drawback is the yelling, which there is a lot of. Sometimes confrontational comedy can be quite amusing and this one works most of the way, but how much the viewer will enjoy is up to each individual. Bologna’s shouting is particularly loud and abrasive. It’s meant to funny and done only out of aggravation, but it does tend to get extended especially by the end. Had Taylor shouted back then it would’ve seemed like a ‘fair fight’, but having her run away and cry takes humor out of it and may ultimately ingrate on the audience. The intent is for there to be an offbeat charm, but not everyone may see it that way and thus this thing won’t be for all tastes.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: December 12, 1971

Runtime: 1 Hour 41 Minutes

Rated GP

Director: Robert B. Bean

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD-R (Fox Cinema Archives)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Obscure Movies, Offbeat, Romance

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Tribute (1980)

Posted on December 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

tribute

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Father reconciling with son.

Scottie (Jack Lemmon) has been working in show business for decades and has built up many friends and fans, but finds it all come crashing down when, at the mere of age of 55, he gets diagnosed with leukemia. His greatest regret is not having a close relationship with his now grown son Jud (Robby Benson). He wants to reconcile, but not make it obvious that’s it’s because he’s about to die. When Jud comes over for a surprise visit with his mother (Lee Remick), whom Scottie has long since divorced, he tries to mend things and become the father he never had, but the hurt runs deep and Jud proves to be resistant to everything Scottie tries making him feel even more hopeless and forcing him to come to terms with his personal faults and inadequacies.

The film is based on the stageplay of the same name, which also starred Lemmon, and got sold into a $1 million movie deal before the stage version ever hit Broadway. On the surface it’s deemed a drama, but the script by Bernard Slade, who also penned the play, comes off more like a desperate comedy akin in tone to Same Time Next Year, which is Slade’s most famous work that had a strong dramedy vibe to it. This works on that same level as it attempts to lighten the poignant moments with comical bits, but it fails miserable.

Had some of it managed to actually been funny I might not have complained, but it amounts to cringe instead. The most eye-popping moment is watching Lemmon in a chicken costume run around his place going ‘balk-balk’ and even lay a giant egg on the sofa, which I felt was a career low point. What’s even dumber is his wooing of a young woman, played by Kim Cattrall, who’s also a patient at the hospital. He gets into her room by pretending to be a doctor and then gropes her breasts in a feeble attempt to check her heart rate. A normal woman of today, and even one back then, should respond with outrage for him copping-a-feel by disguising himself into being someone he isn’t, but in this stupid movie she’s instead ‘charmed’ by his antics and it’s enough to get her to go to bed with him later.

What’s worse and even more outlandish is that Scottie then sets her up with his son to have them conveniently ‘bump into each other’ in public and then begin going out. Yet how many sons are going to be cool with Dad sleeping with their girl first? Of course Scottie never tells him that he’s already ‘tested her out’, but it does end up showing inadvertently what a conniving jerk the old guy is and what the film considers to be nothing more than an amusing comic side-story really hurts the likability of the character if you think about it.

The acting is good. Lemmon is expectedly strong and so is Remick as his wife though her part is limited. I liked seeing Benson, who usually got stuck with immature parts due to his young, geeky features, play the mature and sensible, level-headed adult of which he does perfectly. Colleen Dewhurst has some strong moments as the caring nurse and Cattrall, despite the annoying nature of her dippy character, is pleasing enough. Yet the ultimate scene-stealer goes to Gale Garnett famous for the mid-60’s folk song ‘We’ll Sing in the Sunshine’, who plays a hooker and in one segment goes topless (looks great), but it’s a bit jarring when you realize it’s the same person who sang such a sweet-natured tune, tough in some ways you could say it’s also a testament that her creative talents are quite broad.

The third act, where they have this major tribute for Scotty has a touching potential, but gets overdone by filling-up an entire auditorium with all of his ‘close friends’, which even for a social butterfly seemed a bit exaggerated. The scene where the hooker gets a restaurant packed with all of her male clients who have ever slept with her has an amusing quality though again equally hard to believe that all of these men would be cool with everybody knowing that they’ve bedded a prostitute. I’ll give props though to the segment showing Scotty getting treatment in the hospital, which gets shown exclusively through still photos, which I found visually innovative.

Unfortunately everything else falls into second-rate melodramatics. It doesn’t even have the decency to tells us whether Scotty dies or not. When an entire movie deals with a character’s ultimate demise I think it should eventually get answered instead of leaving it open. It makes the whole terminal illness thing seem like a tease done to emotionally manipulate the viewer than an actual reality that it supposedly is.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: December 19, 1980

Runtime: 2 Hours 1 Minute

Rated PG

Director: Bob Clark

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD-R

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy/Drama, Foreign Films, Movies Based on Stageplays, Movies from Canada, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies with a Hospital setting, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies

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Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

Posted on November 27, 2023 | Leave a comment

broadway2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Talent agent becomes beard.

Danny Rose (Woody Allen) is a hapless talent agent who represents clients who are down-and-out, but seeking a comeback. Lou (Nick Apollo Forte) is a singer who uses Danny as his agent. Since he has some potential and might even get hired by a big star, in this case Milton Berle who plans on tabbing him as his opening act, Danny will do anything to keep Lou happy especially since Danny’s other clients tend to drop him once they become famous, which Danny doesn’t want to happen again. In order to appease him Lou has Danny acting as a ‘beard’, or a person who pretends to being a boyfriend to someone he really isn’t. In this case it’s to Tina (Mia Farrow) a woman whose been dating a gangster. Danny acts as her boyfriend to draw attention away from Lou, but her ex-gangster lover becomes jealous and thinking Danny to be the real boyfriend sends out a hit on him forcing both he and Tina to go on-the-run.

While this film did well with the critics I felt it was pretty much a letdown. What annoyed me most was the washed-up, aging comedians sitting around a cafe table and essentially telling the story, which gets done in flashback. I felt these comedians, who say nothing that is funny, or even slightly amusing, served no real purpose except for maybe padding the runtime, which was short already, and the scenario could’ve easily played-out without constantly cutting-back to these guys to add in their useless side commentary. This also cements Allen’s transition from being hip and edgy. which he was considered as during the 70’s, to out-of-touch with day’s youth and young adults by the 80’s as no one in this movie appears to be under 40.

It’s confusing too what time period this is all supposed to be taking place in. Supposedly the cutaways to the comedians is present day though with it being shot in black-and-white it hardly seems like it, and then the scenes with Danny are apparently things that happened in the 60’s. This though gets completely botched not only because of the cars they drive, which are of an 80’s variety, but there’s also a scene where Lou and Danny are walking on a sidewalk and go past a theater marque advertising Halloween III, which was  a film that was released in 1982.

On the plus side I enjoyed Mia’s performance of a hot-headed, highly oppionated Italian especially with the dark glasses and bouffant hair-do, which could’ve been done up even more. She’s known as being such a serious actress, who’s marvelous in drama, but to see her able to handle the comedy and even become the centerpiece is a real treat. Woody and her make for a quirky couple, she’s actually taller than him when they stand side-by-side, and she really gets in some good digs on him. Though with that said I actually wished that Nick had played the role of Danny as his amateurish acting made his doopy character funnier and the scenes between him and yappy Mia could’ve been a real riot.

There are a few laugh-out-loud moments, though it certainly takes it sweet time getting there. Watching Woody and Mia attempt to escape the killer by running through a field of tall grass I liked as too the scene where they are chased into a warehouse filled with parade floats and the hydrogen that escapes from them, due to the shooting bullets, causing their voices to become extremely high-pitched. The rest of the humor though relied heavily on Italian-American stereotypes that have been done hundreds of times before and isn’t original. I was also surprised that it has walk-on cameos by Howard Cossell and Milton Berle, who even appears in drag during the Thanksgiving Day parade, but are given no lines of dialogue.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: January 27, 1984

Runtime: 1 Hour 25 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Woody Allen

Studio: Orion Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Freevee, Tubi, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black & White, Farce, Gangster Movies, Movies that take place in the Big Apple

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Cat’s Eye (1985)

Posted on October 30, 2023 | 1 comment

cats

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Three stories involving feline.

With a screenplay written by Stephen King the film is made up of three of his short stories with two of them taken from his 1978 novel ‘Night Shift’ while the third one was penned directly for the screen. The only connecting thread is a stray cat and actress Drew Barrymore who appear in all three tales though only have major parts in the third one.

The first segment is called ‘Quitters, Inc.’ and involves James Wood playing the part of a man named Dick Morrison who is trying to quit smoking and enters an agency that boasts a high success rate of getting their clients to stop. It’s run by Vinny (Alan King) who tells Dick that if he doesn’t stop smoking instantly that they’ll kidnap his wife (Mary D’Arcy) and put her into a room where she’ll receive electrical shocks. To prove his point he puts the cat in the cage and then through a glass partition Dick witnesses the feline getting shocked, which is enough to scare him into quitting on the spot. Yet as the days progress Dick finds himself constantly getting the urge to light-up, but Vinny warns him that he has people who’ll be watching him and if he does dare to backtrack they’ll immediately grab his wife and bring her into the cage. Eventually though the compulsion to have a cigarette gets to be too much and he sneaks a puff only to then face the dire consequences.

This segment tries for black comedy, but doesn’t go far enough with it. While Woods, who usually excels as the twisted types, is quite good as the straight man, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t go the police when his wife gets taken, or why any of the other clients didn’t either, which should’ve gotten the business quickly shut down and the owners prosecuted for running an unethical operation. Famously brash comedian Alan King isn’t given enough leeway to allow his cantankerous persona to go full throttle though watching him wearing a white leisure suit and lip synch the words to the song ‘Every Breath You Take’ makes it almost worth it. It’s interesting seeing James Rebhorn in a bit part as a drunken business man at a party as he later had a prominent role in the movie The Game, which had a very similar storyline to this one involving a business that overtakes their client’s lives and is constantly watching them.

The second segment called ‘The Ledge’ involves a man named Johnny (Robert Hays) who must walk across a thin, outdoor ledge along a penthouse wall many feet above a busy street. If he succeeds then the penthouse owner, Cressner (Kenneth McMillan), will grant his wife a divorce and allow her to marry Johnny whom she’s been dating.

This story is the best one mainly because it has McMillan who is one of the finest character actors of all time and supplies his role with an amazing amount of energy and dark campiness. The scenes of watching Hays trying to maneuver his way on the ledge while being simultaneously attacked by a pigeon and at times McMillan who throws things at him out his window, is really terrifying. You feel like you’re on the ledge with him and I cringed all the way through this one, but in a good way as I really got swept up in it though the twist ending is a letdown.

The third and final segment called ‘The General’ involves a young girl living in North Carolina, named Amanda (Drew Barrymore) who takes in a stray cat much to her nagging mother’s (Candy  Clark) chagrin as she feels the animal may attack Amanda’s pet bird named Polly whom she keeps in a cage in her room. Amanda though likes the cat, whom she’s named General, because he scares away the evil troll, who’s the size of a rat and sneaks into her bedroom at night through a small opening in the wall to steal away her breath while also attacking Polly.

This segment has some interesting special effects, but it’s hard to tell if this is intended to be scary, or comical. It’s probably supposed to be a mixture of both, but I wished it went more for the scares since the movie, which gets billed as being a ‘horror’ doesn’t really have much of them otherwise. This segment also doesn’t really have any twist to it other than the parents finally believing that a troll really does exist in their daughter’s bedroom, but then telling her not to tell anyone about it, but why? It seems like if there’s one of them there could be others and the whole home should be inspected and fumigated and if I were the homeowner I wouldn’t want to spend another minute in there until it was, so having this family just forget about it and go back to normal didn’t seem like a normal response. The troll is also too reminiscent of the devil doll in Trilogy of Terror, which was far more frightening.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: April 12, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 34 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Lewis Teague

Studio: MGM/UA

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Horror, Movies Based on Short Stories, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies that take place in the South

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