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ROAD TO BALI / Hal Walker (1952)

December 27th, 2006 by Scott Marks

the-road-to-bali-lobby-card.jpg

Road to Bali (1952)
Directed by: Hal Walker
Written by: Frank Butler & Hal Kanter
Genres: Comedy, Musical
Cast: Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Murvyn Vye, Peter Coe, Ralph Moody, Leon Askin, Michael Ansara, Herman Cantor, Sue Casey, Larry Chance, Leslie Charles, Jack Claus, Jean Corbett, Harry Cording, Bob Crosby, Roy Gordon, Bernie Gozier, Carolyn Jones, Jan Kayne, Richard Keene, Al Kikume, Donald Lawton, Bunny Lewbel, Judith London, Charles Mauu, Patti McKay, Allan Nixon, Betty Onge, Satini Pualoa, Jane Russell, Kuka Tuima, Douglas Yorke
Aspect Ratio: 1.37 : 1

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

The sixth ‘Road’ picture was the last to be produced by Paramount and the only one budgeted for color (Technicolor, no less!). Not unlike later-period Elvis vehicles, the writers assumed that audiences knew exactly what to expect, and completely dispensed with any pretense of an opening. The musical passages, particularly Bing’s flaccid, rear-screen rendition of To See You, also have something in common with The King:they fail to reach the visual sophistication of any of the numbers in Follow that Dream.

The picture kick-starts in backlot Melbourne with the boys performing a buck-and-wing to the spirited Chicago Style, and it’s pretty much downhill from there. At one point during the opening, Hope, who is positioned stage left, is pulled into the wings by a soon-to-be-spurned fiancé and her father. The cut to Hope offstage is clearly taken from the perspective of stage right. Hey, how ’bout that violently insane screen direction, huh? Continue reading ROAD TO BALI / Hal Walker (1952)

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Number, Please?

December 26th, 2006 by Scott Marks

Number, Please? (1920)

Number, Please? (1920)

Directed by: Fred C. Newmeyer, Hal Roach

Written by: H.M. Walker

Genres: Comedy, Short

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Roy Brooks

Aspect Ratio: 1.33 : 1

Cowboys gaze out at the vast prairie, fisherman stare longingly into the briny deep and bored playboys squander their fortunes all in the name of ‘the girl.’ An austere (and fittingly absurd) prelude to a film set almost entirely at the Venice Beach Amusement Park.

Iris out on a forlorn Harold, alone on a roller-coaster, lost in concentration. Riding in the last car not only provides the most thrills, but a tremendous assortment of windblown headgear. Lovesick Harold could not care about either.

This is all the character backstory needed so let’s meet The Girl (Mr. Lloyd’s sausage-curled wife, Mildred Davis) and The Rival (the porcine Roy Brooks) and General Pershing (The Girl’s Dog). Back in the day, if the story called for an amusement park, studios did not build a backlot replica and could not even begin to dream of CGI -scouts found an existent one. Part of the fascination with these early thrill comedies is their authentic location work. When Buster played with trains, he played with trains! Continue reading Number, Please?

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The Best Films of 2006

December 25th, 2006 by Scott Marks

Marty broke my heart, Clint sided with Spielberg on the disappointing Sands of Private Ryan, and a grateful American public once again leaped head first into a steaming pile of Pirate shit.

The worst of times just kept getting worse at the movies this year.

Summer seemed to last forever. The only relief multiplexes offered came from the air conditioner, not the platter. It should have been the summer’s most enjoyable blockbuster, but V for Vendetta opened (and flopped) in mid-March. Even though the enormously entertaining French action flick District B13 miraculously found its way to the multiplexes, the challenge of subtitles kept the illiterate masses at bay, awaiting instead the pre-digested, idiot-friendly MI3.

There was even an attempt to revamp 007. No more gadgets or thudding throwaway lines. Instead, the series was plainly Bourne again.

If quality is your thing there were plenty of outstanding films that washed up from foreign shores. The Asian Film Festival was wise (and brave) enough to host the one night San Diego “premiere” of Hou-Hsiao hsien’s essential These Three.

At age 73, and with almost 70 features behind him, Claude Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid added more credence to the argument that the director is the most powerful force to emerge from the French New Wave this side of Godard.


Satire fared best. Not since the late 60s/early 70s, when Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and a pre-MPAA John Waters convulsed audiences has there been such cause for ground breaking and side-splitting laughter in movie theaters. Albert Brooks returned to form in the Muslim World. Laugh-for-laugh, the year’s funniest films, Borat and CSA: Confederate States of America proved to be two of the most dead on anti-racist satires period.

A salon called Shortbus provided a liberating and explicit glimpse into the kind of sexual hang-ups that give us all a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Thanks also to Jason Reitman for Thank You for Smoking as well as the painstakingly insensitive gang from Comedy Central’s Strangers with Candy.

Clip what follows and post it somewhere near your computer to reference for future Netflix rentals.

Continue reading The Best Films of 2006

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THE DEAD GIRL / Karen Moncrieff (2006)

December 18th, 2006 by Scott Marks

Brittany Murphy stars as THE DEAD GIRL (2006)

The Dead Girl (2006)

Directed by: Karen Moncrieff

Written by: Karen Moncrieff

Genres: Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Cast: Toni Collette, Piper Laurie, Don Smith, Michael Raysses, Earl Carroll, Dorothy Beatty, Eva Loseth, Giovanni Ribisi, Rose Byrne, Joanie Tomsky, James Franco, Christopher Allen Nelson, Mary Steenburgen, Bruce Davison, Kate Mulligan

Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1

Told in five outwardly unrelated segments of equal length, The Dead Girl examines how the murder of an insignificant crack whore affects a handful of psychologically broken women. It’s not a pretty picture.

As in her first feature Blue Car, writer/director Karen Moncrieff paints a finely observed portrait of the impact violent behavior has on women. While the killer turns out to be a man, this is not a film that uses male-bashing as an easy out. Much of the emotional battery stems from mothers who are either verbally abusive or emotionally oblivious.

The film plays out in a semi-achronological order. The first image we see is of Arden (Toni Colette), “The Stranger” who comes across the decomposing body, sound asleep in the overpowering arms of her invalid mother (Piper Laurie). A tortured, painfully shy momma’s girl, her discovery briefly thrusts Arden into the spotlight. People in the grocery store stop and point her out. Serial killer obsessed bagboy Rudy (Giovani Ribisi) goes so far as asking her on a date.

The recognition stops at home where mom blasts her daughter for reporting the crime. This time, Piper Laurie makes Carrie’s mother Margaret White seem like Ma Joad. A bedridden walrus with an odious Jackie Gleason-sized cackle, she is a non-stop torture machine. On screen for no more than five minutes, Ma Laurie shows you every reason to understand why Arden turned out the way she did.

Arden and Rudy do go out and she practically begs to be tied up and raped. We believe Rudy when he assures Arden that he will not hurt her. After years of living with her maniacal, dominating mother Arden is beyond hurt.

Leah (Rose Byrne) is “The Sister,” a forensics student working the county morgue. She studies death, yet is still unable to come to grips with her sister’s abduction fifteen years earlier. Her mother Beverly (Mary Steenburgen) selects a bus stop bench photo of her late daughter with the same attention to detail she would chosing wallpaper.

A birthmark on the dead girl’s hand convinces Leah that it’s her sister. Even the slightest clue causes Leah to briefly reenter life. She even agrees to date a fellow student (James Franco) who’s been pursuing her for three years.

Who is “The Wife?” Is she the dead girl’s mother? Ruth (Mary Beth Hurt) lives in a trailer with her husband Carl (Nick Searcy). They argue in their easy chairs, eyes glued to the TV set, never once looking at their partner. He goes out for drives that frequently last for days. Ruth wants nothing more than to be a passenger.

Ruth is so concerned with not taking the Lord’s name in vain that she’s blinded to the fact that her husband is a serial killer. An unexpected visit to a storage locker uncovers a bureau filled with souvenirs of Carl’s murderous jaunts.

While there is no evidence that Ruth has any children, she is easily the film’s ultimate mother figure. After discovering Carl’s secret life she still prepares and serves her little man his TV dinner. The shot of Ruth naked and walking away from the flames she set to destroy the evidence remains the film’s most haunting image.

Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) is “The Mother” who learns of her estranged daughter’s past from Rosetta (Kerry Wahsinton), the prostitute who worked with Krista (Brittany Murphy) at the time of her murder. The rush of backstory nearly fells Melora particularly when she discovers that Krista’s first sexual contact was at her father’s hands.

This segment houses the film’s only titter, and I had to dig for it. Krista’s daughter is named “Ashley Kutcher.” Ms. Murphy briefly dated Punk’d hunk Ashton during the filming of Just Married. Shortly after the coosome twosome split, Ms. Murphy told a Late Night audience, “I suppose the crux of (Ashton and Demi’s) relationship basically means to him that age doesn’t matter and to her that size doesn’t matter.” First a small penis, now a crack baby for a daughter. Let’s hope the unending abuse doesn’t cause Ashton to loop one end of his Kabbalah bracelet around his neck, the other over the shower curtain rod.

Bubbly to the point of being uncorked, there has always been something a tad bit unnerving about Brittany Murphy’s portrayal of brittle, yet overly-outgoing characters. Even in multiplex-filler like Uptown Girls there is that unending ebb of neurotic desperation; lightning in a bottle about to be devastated by an earthquake.

Her early characterizations can be easily summed up by the titles of two of her most successful film: Clueless and Drop Dead Gorgeous. A prolonged dark patch (Girl, Interrupted, Cherry Falls, Spun) brought about more complex roles. She miraculously survived an unhealthy string of studio comedies between 8 Mile and Sin City. God or bad, every second of prior screen time led to this explosive performance.

We never learn why Krista’s daughter lives apart from her. All that is important is that she turns three tomorrow and Krista needs a ride to Norwalk to deliver her present. Her boyfriend Tarlow (Josh Brolin) has a Poison poster hanging on his wall, an “Eat s*it and Die” tattoo on his upper arm, and only agrees to give her a ride in exchange for a free blowjob.

Even though she keeps her part of the bargain, the ride never materializes. Rosetta lies bloody in bed after catching a beating off her pimp. All else fails and Krista is forced to thumb a fatal ride.

Thankfully, Ms. Moncrieff spares us Chapter 6,”The Killer.” She found the impetus for this film while sitting on a month-long trial involving the death of a prostitute. “The tremendous waste of her life haunted me,” she wrote in a press statement.

Endless hours of MSNBC documentaries have transformed Krista’s type into a pathetic stock figure. Ms. Moncrieff recalled her time as a juror and fought not to go in the opposite direction by presenting “a sainted victim.” As she observed, “Both of these mental characterizations seemed to answer some need to avoid seeing this woman as a real person.”

If ever there wasn’t a Christmas release, it’s The Dead Girl. By her own admission, Karen Moncrieff makes dark movies because, “We live in a dark world, mostly with our heads down.” Her film’s hideous surfaces gradually reveal a brilliant depth of compassion and understanding. This is an amazingly powerful film, impossible to shake. Weeks later and a part of me is still inside this movie. If you really want to give yourself the gift of cinema this holiday season, buy a ticket for The Dead Girl.

[rating: 4)


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The Worst Movies of 2006

December 5th, 2006 by Scott Marks

Ten reasons to wait for the DVD and not rent it:

  1. Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Everything that’s hateful about cinema today. It’s manipulative, overblown, joyless and mechanical; like being trapped in a two hour roller coaster ride that has you vomiting two minutes in. If you’re that desperate for a dose of Depp, rent Ed Wood.
  2. Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy: Torture. A training film for monks, this private rental was erroneously screened for critics. Hey, fellas, I’m all for incense and spirituality, but how about a little cinematic enlightenment?
  3. Date Movie: One of this year’s few satiric misfires. An unfunny and inept attempt to lampoon a genre (teen comedies) that by its very nature is riddled with self-parody.
  4. The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Greene: Unfabulous and interminable. It just goes to show that people of all sexual predilections are entitled to have bad films made about them.
  5. Just My Luck: Teen mess Lindsay Lohan stars in a Petrie-fied role reversal comedy. What the fuck was I thinking when I signed on for this? For Lohan laughs, nothing this year rivals her rambling condolence letter to Robert Altman’s widow.
  6. Firewall: It wouldn’t be a Ten Worst list without a contribution from Harrison “Knotty Pine” Ford and this high-tech reworking of The Desperate Hours is a particularly putrid qualifier. The “actor” has two modes of expression: pained and more pained. He’ll be pushing 70 is they ever get around to filming another Indiana Jones sequel. If Rocky XXVII does well, I’m banking on a three picture Alien vs. Predator-style series pitting Sly against Harry.
  7. Beerfest; Guzzling drinking as sport. What else is new? This premise could only have worked had the filmmakers been sportsaphobics. While Artie Lange’s Beer League didn’t seem to screen anywhere outside of Jersey, this flat keg of suds earned a wide release. The stein-toting Fräuleins with the pretzel pasties in Mel Brooks’ Springtime for Hitler number summed up everything Beerfest had to offer in 10 seconds.
  8. Nacho Libre: I don’t know what horrified me more: this bungling mess or the fact that I actually got a few laughs out of Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny.
  9. Marie Antoinette: Sofia Coppola’s tale of a beautiful young woman born into royalty who spends her spoiled teen years listening to rock music, buying shoes, gorging on sweets and indulging in all sorts of pretentious behavior. Not many people remember, but Marie Antoinette made her acting debut in The Godfather Part III.
  10. Trust the Man: Writer/director Bart Freundlich crafted this bogus romantic comedy for his wife Julianne Moore. I call it grounds for divorce.



The 2nd Annual Dana Award, named after dependable (to show up drunk) leading man Dana Andrews, is bestowed on a film that’s so bad it’s educational. This year’s dishonor goes to the gaseous comedy The Benchwarmers. Deuce Bigalow, Joe Dirt and Napoleon Dynamite play a trio of rejects who form a three man baseball team that takes on the little league. High concept, low brow. Mormon boychild Jon Heder’s refusal to appear in anything R rated may account in part for the film’s oppressively juvenile tone. The rest of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of director, and I use the term loosely, Dennis Dugan. I thought he’d never recover after playing the lead in Norman…Is that You?, a sort of Guess Who’s Gay, Interracial and Coming to Dinner offspring, opposite Redd Foxx and Pearl Bailey. Dugan puts a fresh spin on incompetence. I swear that peripheral characters flinch when the camera dollies in. If you must see it, turn on HBO, wait three hours and it will turn up.

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Blood Diamond

December 5th, 2006 by Scott Marks

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Blood Diamond (2006)

Directed by: Edward Zwick

Written by: Charles Leavitt

Genres: Adventure, Drama, Thriller

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connelly, Kagiso Kuypers, Arnold Vosloo, Antony Coleman, Benu Mabhena, Anointing Lukola, David Harewood, Basil Wallace, Jimi Mistry, Michael Sheen, Marius Weyers, Stephen Collins, Ntare Mwine

Aspect Ratio: 2.35 : 1

“Blood Diamond” is a big, loud, patronizing Hollywood blockbuster masquerading as a well-intentioned message movie.

In the late 1990s, diamond smuggling was the name of the game in Sierra Leone. The chaotic opening chase sequence, in which a fisherman and his young son dodge bullets and race past explosions, would be equally at home in Diamonds are Forever. Solomon (Djimon Hounsou), screaming in close-up, looks on as his family is taken from him. What? No slow motion? If you’re going to film clichés, at least do so with a scrap of conviction.

Solomon is put to work in the Sierra Leone diamond fields where, surprise of surprises, he uncovers the title bauble, an extraordinary one of a kind treasure. While on a faux bathroom break, Solomon buries the pink jewel much to the suspicion of M’ed (Ntare Mwine), his brutal guard.

In lock up, M’ed grills Solomon about the diamond’s existence. All of this is overheard by Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ex-mercenary from Zimbabwe who makes his living exchanging diamonds for arms. Both prisoners see this one shot rock as their ticket to freedom.

The woman in the picture is Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a sexy American journalist bent on blowing the lid off of corrupt diamond merchants “who have chosen profit over principles.” At first Leo resists temptation, but before long he realizes that he needs her a lot more than she needs him.

Charles Leavitt over-stuffs his screenplay with equal parts hackneyed dialogue (“I like to get kissed before I get f*cked”) and divine intervention. I counted at least a half-dozen times throughout the film where fate sticks its foot out, generally in the form of rebel attackers, at just the precise moment when a character is forced to make a decision.

Solomon is about to be shot for pilfering the diamond when the rebel forces attack. Later on, Solomon’s decision to team with Danny is influenced by the sudden appearance of the bad guys. These rebel savages might be real-life terrors, but dramatically speaking they make the best plot advancers.

Isn’t it about time that critics left Leo alone? Those unable to look beyond his boyish good looks slammed his performance in Gangs of New York. He didn’t fit their idea of a violent street thug. Others were quick to disparage his Howard Hughes claiming that his baby face drained believability.

Simply put, Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the finest actors of his generation. Five minutes of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? are enough to put many of his contemporaries to shame. As Archer, he’s all guts and bravado with an accent that never falters. The film is almost worth seeing just for his performance.

Djimon Hounsou has a towering presence and he summons up the right amount of suffering that the part demands. Jennifer Connelly, miscast and lacking chemistry with her lead, appears to have signed on to help support a good cause.

A closing crawl asks us all to remember the film next time we shop for diamonds. Instead, I’ll be keeping Forrest Gump’s Dan Taylor in mind when I buy socks later this week.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆


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