SALT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Ace Aussie Director Delivers YUMMY Action Babe Goods

Salt (2010)
dir. Phillip Noyce
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Daniel Olbrychski, Liev Schreiber

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Kurt Wimmer's screenplay for Salt is riddled with the sort of Swiss Cheese plot-holes that normally drive me up a wall, but happily, they only rear their ugly head AFTER the movie is over, and by then, it's too late. As it unspools, the movie is one hell of an amusement park ride and on that level, it delivers the goods and then some.

Wimmer, of course, is no stranger to penning screenplays that border on (or even cross over into) the insanely improbable, but deliver the sort of imaginative, kick-ass set pieces that directors endowed with considerable style and/or proficiency just love. This certainly includes Wimmer himself who directed the studio-butchered, but still wildly entertaining Ultraviolet with Milla Jovovich wreaking havoc in mouth-watering painted-on clothing amidst a dystopian sci-fi setting.

Salt director Phillip Noyce clearly had a ball with Wimmer's script. Whilst dopey as all get-out, the screenplay provides enough forward thrust to keep the audience guessing (though one major climactic plot twist can be predicted right from the beginning) and to provide Noyce with the kind of set-pieces he excels at (being, of course, one of the aforementioned filmmakers who can handle this sort of thing with considerable aplomb). It's a superbly crafted, pulse-pounding summer picture - maybe one of the best action pictures in the new millennium. If it weren't so humourless it might well have garnered an even higher star rating from me, but not every genre director can be Brian DePalma.

Noyce, in tandem with ace editor Stuart Baird, has rendered a straight-up, kick-ass action thriller that begins full throttle and escalates from there. In this respect, Salt is near-flawless in what it sets out to do.

Noyce, an Aussie helmer who began with smaller art films in his home country Down Under, has made several first-rate and diverse works in a career spanning over thirty years. The chilling 1989 three-hander scare-fest Dead Calm maintains, 20 years after it was first made, a nail biting creepy crawly quality. Starring a lithe, young Nicole Kidman as the fetching trophy wife of Sam Neill (and how they're terrorized by super-psycho Billy Zane on a luxury yacht in the middle oif the ocean), the picture was not unlike a Polanski-inspired version of Knife in the Water or Cul-De-Sac - but with the sort of crank and testosterone that precious Euro-types can only dream of making.

Add to the Noyce mix three bonafide classics of Australian cinema (Newsfront, Heatwave and Rabbit-Proof Fence), the excellent film adaptation of Graham Greene's The Quiet American and his two tremendous Tom Clancy adaptations of the Jack Ryan entries starring Harrison Ford: A Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games, and you've got a director perfectly poised to deliver the goods with Salt, a contemporary Cold-War-styled thriller starring Our Lady of the Lips, Angelina Jolie.

Jolie plays the title character, a CIA operative fingered by Russian defector Vassily Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) as being a Russian spy who will orchestrate an assassination that is going to plunge the planet into an all-out Third World War. Her partner Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) refuses to believe it's true and locks horns with Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) one of his colleagues who believes unequivocally that it is. Lip Lady busts out of the CIA's clutches to clear her name and the movie never lets up with some gorgeously executed gun battles, hand-to-hand ass-whupping, nail biting suspense and chase scenes of the most hair raising variety.

Is any of this vaguely original?

No.

That said, the picture is such a thrill ride that it hardly matters. In fact, Wimmer's script - while all set-piece and little else - does manage enough of a genuine surprise treat in providing a somewhat ambiguous ending which, while it also keeps things open for a sequel - it does indeed leave us dangling in its final moments (but in a thoroughly satisfying manner).

The action set pieces are remarkably well-directed - each shot and each cut delivering blows and the kind of drive that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Noyce is. thankfully, of the old guard when it comes to orchestrating such carnage. There's relatively little in the way of the de rigeur herky-jerky shooting and cutting so prevalent in modern action pictures (notably in the hands of such hacks pretending to be artists like Christopher Nolan). Most of the coverage is solidly framed with a nice mix of shots that not only deliver the goods, but do so in a way that give you a clear sense of geography. Geography is essential in action sequences. It keeps you with the protagonist rather than being bombarded by noise and sloppy cutting.

The performances are all uniformly fine for a picture like this - especially from Jolie. She's an extremely likeable and stylish heroine who must don many visages to make it through the proceedings intact. The only disappointment in Jolie comes early in the picture when she is in the clutches of some nasty Korean interrogators. She's obviously been physically tortured and is about to receive even more punishment.

What doesn't ring true is that Jolie is trussed up, bleeding, bruised and ludicrously attired in her designer bra and panties. Now, I don't want you to think I'm disappointed because she's not buck naked (well, if truth be told, I am), but that all one can think about during this sequence (especially since it's intimated she's been sexually assaulted) is this: Why would her captors strip her down ONLY to bra and panties. It genuinely makes no sense given the context of the scene and you're pulled out of the action thinking only about the fact that (a) Jolie refused to strip down and (b) that the studio didn't want an R-rating.

But, I digress - lack of Jolie-nudity is a mere quibble, especially since Salt entertains on the highest possible level and offers just what action aficionados demand.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half-Stars

Salt is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Sony Pictures.

GETTING STRAIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Important 70s examination of academia, civil unrest from Richard Rush, director of The Stunt Man, featuring a truly GREAT performance by Elliot Gould. This movie demands a proper Criterion or Kino Lorber edition featuring my dream commentary w/ Gould & Rush moderated by critic Kim Morgan!

Every kid growing up in the 70s wanted to be Elliot Gould because he was (and still is) so FUCKING COOL!

ELLIOT GOULD
with preppie/druggie
HARRISON FORD

Getting Straight (1970)
dir. Richard Rush
Starring: Elliot Gould, Candice Bergen, Harrison Ford, Brenda Sykes

Review By Greg Klymkiw

During the general 60s/70s American mayhem of the civil rights movement, Vietnam, protests, the draft and the JFK/RFK/King assassinations, one event still stands apart from the rest.

The Kent State University Massacre in Ohio of 1970 continues to send shudders through us all - that horrific moment when American National Guardsmen fired off live rounds of ammunition into throngs of innocent student protesters. As horrific as anything imaginable, this was a case where a government turned its fascist guns against its own people - its hope for the future, its youth.

Dissent would NOT be tolerated and Big Daddy Establishment was steadfastly unable to spare the rod against its seemingly spoiled, stubbornly non-compliant progeny.

During this period, the unrest was mirrored and examined in the popular culture – especially the movies, where filmmakers like Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah and many others sought to expose the violence and hypocrisy of American life. Many of these films were not only boxoffice hits in their day, but continue to be revered and recognized to this day. And then, there’s all the rest.

While there are several worthy forgotten pictures from this era, one in particular stands out – Richard Rush’s fascinating and entertaining Getting Straight, a counter culture drama based on Ken Kolb’s novel (with Robert Kaufman's screenplay adaptation) about post-secondary academic hypocrisy. Rush is a great, but hardly prolific filmmaker. His biggest claim to fame is The Stunt Man, a wonky, obsessive and utterly anarchic look at the blurry lines between fantasy and reality in the movie business starring a completely and deliciously over-the-top Peter O’Toole whose thespian excess in the picture is rivaled only by Rush’s controlled manic directorial style.

Looking at Getting Straight 45 years years since its release (during the very year of the aforementioned Kent State Massacre) and in the context of The Stunt Man, one is immediately taken with Rush’s fascination with the blurring of borders. In Getting Straight, the divides are simply and clearly between old and new.

Harry Bailey (Elliot Gould) is the mustachioed, side-burned and amiably rumpled protagonist of Getting Straight – a Vietnam veteran returned from the war and in the last year of his English Literature Masters degree and a sessional lecturer. Harry is a man without (so to speak) a country. He wants to teach – desperately, but is, alas, faced with the dilemma of being too world wise to be a true part of the youth movement he so desperately craves to reach and too hip to embrace the staid complacency of the established order of academia.

He wanders through the picture, not so much torn between both worlds, but observing them and wondering how he can be a part of both. This noble effort, on the part of the character makes for fascinating viewing as we take on his perspective, but it’s also probably the main reason why Getting Straight has disappeared into the ether.

Rush bravely chooses to maintain the perspective of a man divided to lead us through the narrative – a worthwhile goal and certainly not flawed, but over the decades, audiences have become so bludgeoned into needing a character with firm coattails to grab onto in order to - ugh! - root for him/her, that part of the picture's relative obscurity has probably been affected by this the most. Like Gould’s Harry Bailey, we, the audience, wander through a world where students protest the outmoded academic ideals of the institution and Gould himself tries to utilize new methods to reach his students, but he also craves to play the game of an establishment he wants to change. This, of course, is what makes the film so fascinating.

Two Harry Baileys.
Both went to war.
One Harry won
the Congressional
Medal of Honor,
The Other Harry
got screwed
by The Man.

Harry Bailey’s namesake is, of course, a character from Frank Capra’s stunning post-WWII classic It’s A Wonderful Life. The difference between the two characters is especially intriguing since Capra’s Harry is anything but indecisive. As Harry Bailey's big brother George (in the form of James Stewart) declares, “Harry Bailey went to war, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor, he saved the lives of every man” under his command. And when Capra’s Harry returns from the war, he knows EXACTLY what he wants.

Rush’s Harry is probably closer to Capra’s big brother figure, George. He wants to join the establishment in order to change it. In Capra’s post-war fantasy, George Bailey gets to do exactly that, but in Rush’s world, with roles clearly reversed, Harry learns that straddling the fencepost can never yield true change – it instead equals stasis.

Getting Straight falls a bit short of greatness, but in many ways, it's one of the few pictures that comes closest to capturing the complexity of the period in which it’s set. In this sense, it has NOT dated. It is genuinely a project of its time – perfectly reflective of the complexities of the blurred lines on both sides of the old and new world orders. The two main things that work against the picture’s bid for the kind of immortality it probably craved are as follows: the aforementioned passivity of Gould’s character – it’s right for the movie and right for the world of the movie, but at the same time, fights against what mainstream movie drama is MOSTLY made of – a clear goal, clear stakes and a satisfyingly wrought conclusion.

Rush does not achieve this, though in all fairness, it’s clearly not his intent to do so. The second roadblock facing the picture's grab for greatness, and it is (and must have been) insurmountable, is the utterly dreadful performance of its leading lady Candice Bergen as the Ice Goddess grad student who is in love with Harry. Bergen is horrendous. Her lines are delivered with the kind of soullessness, which goes well beyond that of the character’s cold shiksa-like station. Bergen’s deliveries are flat and so is her face. Though this movie was made well before the Botox revolution, Bergen wanders through the picture like a poster-child for the toxic protein of choice to render the flesh immovable and wrinkle-free.

That said, there’s just so goddamn much to admire in the film. Elliot Gould works boundlessly with his character's passivity, indecision, confusion, complexity and manages to always maintain a fun, funny, sexy and amiable screen presence. When Harry Bailey is called upon to be active, especially during a brilliant thesis-defense sequence, one can see precisely how and why Gould was such a big star during this period and why he hit such a responsive chord with audiences. He's a laconic wiseacre who saves his best explosions of force for when he needs them. HE IS SO FUCKING COOL you just WANT to BE Elliot Gould. (At least I did as a kid and probably still do.)

The film's supporting cast is marvelous, especially a very young Harrison Ford as a wide-eyed preppie-druggie. It's also great seeing sexy Brenda (Mandingo) Sykes and counter-culture star of Zachariah, John Rubinstein.

Rush’s direction is suitably obsessive and detailed. There is a protest scene that is as breathtaking and chilling as anything you’re likely to see and the numerous party scenes are all infused with the kind of immediacy that allows you to observe AND participate.

At the end of the day, Getting Straight accomplishes much of what it set out to achieve and is, finally, an evocative window into a time and place that seems so distant, and at the same time, so current.

Look around. Innocent people are being killed indiscriminately by The Man everyday.

In that sense, things never really change that much, do they?

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Getting Straight is available on Sony Pictures’ inexplicably titled and oddly programmed DVD label “Martini Movies”. This movie is begging for a proper Blu-Ray release, transfer and special edition via Criterion or Kino Lorber. I also dream of a commentary track featuring Gould and Rush and, most importantly, moderated by Kim Morgan (whose piece on California Split for the L.A. Review of Books is a poster-child for WHY SHE'D BE PERFECT).

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ABOUT LAST NIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - With Steve Pink's re-imagining of the Mamet play taking box-office and critics by surprise, it might be worth taking a look at Edward Zwick's re-imagining of the Mamet play from the 80s. Or, maybe not.

About Last Night (1986) *
dir. Edward Zwick
Starring: Demi Moore, Robe Lowe, James Belushi, Elizabeth Perkins

Review By Greg Klymkiw

About Last Night is atrocious. In spite of this, it provides a few delights. First and foremost, the film offers ample exposure to Demi Moore’s naked body, which is quite splendid to gaze upon with its lithe, youthful, and pre-boob-job-pre-child-bearing-milk-sack-udder-creation-perfection.

One also gets to eyeball a nude Rob Lowe and marvel at his perfect bum that is, not surprisingly, much nicer than Miss Moore’s and designed to both worship and penetrate. Finally, we are occasionally treated to shots, unexceptional though they are in both composition and lighting, of the great city of Chicago, which, even when poorly photographed, makes us long to make a pilgrimage to the Windy City and stay forever.

Aside from the aforementioned, about the only reason to see About Last Night is to study exactly HOW it could have been a good movie, to longingly contemplate the original source material that is David Mamet’s play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and imagine a world where something resembling a good movie director, as opposed to the no-talent hack that is Edward Zwick, took Mamet’s words and displayed them cinematically, yet reverentially upon the screen.

Zwick reduces Mamet’s glorious, strangely universal and viciously funny play to a simple boy-meets-girl-gets-girl-loses-girl-and-gets-girl-back scenario aimed squarely at that empty generation that embraced the Brat Pack of St. Elmo’s Fire as romanticized cinematic reflections of themselves. The only thing worse would be to do the same thing with the even more repulsive generation of today. Wait a minute. Didn't Steve Pink do that? Yeah, but at least he did it a whole lot better.

Mamet’s play yielded a dramatic examination of relationships between young and women in a pre-Generation-X world that somehow predicted the Gen-X experience and furthermore proposed the notion that we can apply as many labels as we’d like to various eras, but that ultimately, the differences between men and women do not really change with time. Mamet’s play is universal. Zwick’s film is dated. One is alive. The other is dead.

This is no surprise with Zwick at the helm. In spite of the fact that he was able to pinch out a loaf of decent celluloid with Glory, one could argue that only a complete bonehead would have failed with such stirring subject matter as a Civil War picture focusing on Black soldiers.

Alas, Zwick’s other “accomplishments” are not as stellar as the aforementioned war epic. His big screen efforts are mostly humourless, clunky, turgid costume dramas like Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai and his entry in the Holocaust sweepstakes, Defiance or worse, his dumb socially conscious action pictures like Courage Under Fire, The Siege and the execrable Blood Diamond which prove that even a no-talent can get pictures repeatedly green-lit based solely on subject matter that must appeal to left-leaning studio heads.

Zwick’s primary small-screen accomplishment was the creation of the popular, but annoyingly dated “dramedy” that stills sends shivers down my spine when I think about it, the reprehensibly twee “thirtysomething”.

What this all adds up to is a severe watering-down of Mamet’s delicious savagery. Not only that, it’s incompetent to boot. Zwick takes the opening of the play, a magnificently nasty bit of dialogue between the brutish Bernie (James Belushi) and the slightly more sensitive Danny (Rob Lowe) wherein the former recounts a Penthouse-Forum-styled tale of his sexual exploits. Even now, the language has the power to provoke and entertain. The way Zwick presents the scene is jumpy, confused and frankly, a just plain crude barrage of “guy talk”. Zwick idiotically presents the continuous conversation over a series of different locations. His intent was to obviously “open up” the dialogue – to render it “cinematic” as opposed to leaving it visually intact and (oooohhhhh, dirty word…) “theatrical”. What this does, however, is confuse the focus and detract from the story and conversation’s natural rhythm. Instead of moving the action forward through dialogue which, in and of itself is already action-oriented, Zwick sledgehammers us with unnecessary location changes and, of course, completely unnecessary cuts. All this contributes to destroying Mamet’s great dialogue and curiously, make the characters seem one-dimensional instead of extremely layered.

Uselessly “opening up” theatrical scenes in a movie are the hallmark, knee-jerk touch of true hacks. Rather than trusting the original author’s intent, a buckshot approach to visually presenting the material is used. “Opening up” is extremely unimaginative. In the flawed, but eminently watchable adaptation of Peter Schaffer’s Equus, Sidney Lumet allowed Richard Burton to sit at a desk uttering purple verbal ruminations directly into the lens. This was nothing if not “cinematic”. When Mike Nichol’s adapted Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? he wisely kept most of the action centered on George and Martha’s den of verbal savagery and the only opening up that falls on its face are the few scenes outside of their physical domain – most notably the action in the car and the roadside bar. And of course, one cannot forget James Foley’s simple, effective and extremely subtle opening up of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

Nothing so subtle exists in the world of Mr. Zwick. From the abovementioned opening sequence and onwards, the picture simply gets worse. In addition to spotty performances (especially and surprisingly from a forced, bombastic Belushi and the always sickening Elizabeth Perkins), we’re hogtied to a soundtrack score bearing some of the more grotesque 80s pop tunes.

Interestingly, the play’s original title, “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” was dropped when it was discovered that many venues refused to carry advertising with a title like that. So from that point on, it became known as About Last Night.

This must continue to be a blessing for Mamet.

“About Last Night” is available on Blu-Ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

THESE ARE THE DAMNED - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Teddy Boys, Incest, Oliver Reed, Sci-Fi, Joseph Losey - YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA! YOWZA!

These are THE DAMNED (1961) ***1/2
dir. Joseph Losey
Starring: MacDonald Carey, Shirley Anne Field, Oliver Reed, Viveca Lindfors and Alexander Knox

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Blacklisted American filmmaker Joseph Losey’s compelling science fiction thriller These are THE DAMNED, made for Britain’s Hammer Studios in 1961 and released in the U.S. during 1963 in a severely truncated form, is much closer in spirit to the company’s more subdued 50s efforts such as X – The Unknown (which Losey was fired from when the right-wing star Dean Jagger threatened to walk rather than submit to the direction of a “communist”), as well as the marvellous Quatermass pictures with Brian Donlevy.

In spite of this, These are THE DAMNED is still as unlikely a Hammer picture and certainly an even farther cry from the company’s deliciously overwrought 60s and 70s colour horror films starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. In fact, Losey’s near-masterwork goes further than most Hammer pictures, and frankly, most science fiction pictures of the 50s and 60s as it seems even more in tune with the early beginnings of the British New Wave than any of its fantastical genre counterparts.

Imagine, if you will, a kitchen-sink angry-young-man story (an incest-obsessed Teddy Boy) merged with a fantastical fairy tale (involving a strange, sad race of "super" children) and fraught with 50s/60s apocalyptic paranoia (on behalf of everyone in the film). It’s a mad vision, which inhabits a time gone by, yet possesses a timelessness that makes it as relevant today, if not more so. These qualities are inherent in the work, due very considerably, to Joseph Losey.

His staggering and original mise-en-scéne is a patchwork quilt of movement and composition that ultimately becomes surprisingly linear in creating a world that seems at home, ONLY on the silver screen, yet also possessing mirror-like qualities of our own world. It's a universe where one can recognize a planet - our planet - that’s as fraught with the same kind of orderly disorder we continue to face in these times of economic uncertainty and war – a world fraught with crime, poverty and boneheaded, exploitative government policy and all seemingly on the verge of collapse.

The film’s opening credits run over a bird’s eye view of the sea, waves crashing on a remote shore below, panning ever so smoothly to reveal that we’re on a rocky cliff. The camera dollies gently to reveal a series of grotesque sculptures along the edge of the barren outlook until it settles on a tortured figure – a semi-mermaid with a hawk-like visage and a vaguely human torso. The figure is frozen and faces away from the majestic sea and sky, yet it seems desperate to face the beauty of the horizon. Losey’s “directed by” credit appears in a patch of sky on the upper left of the contorted beauty of the sculpture, then recedes into the clouds.

What a credit sequence! The bronze outdoor sculptures seen here and throughout the film are credited to the iconoclastic British artist Dame Elisabeth Frink and they are very much stars of the film - in addition to the warm-blooded ones.

As if this weren’t enough, we move from these images of nature and art, all presented with stalwart Hammer composer James Bernard’s suitably malevolent score to a smash cut revealing a gorgeous wide shot of the seaside resort of Weymouth perched from a gently lolling camera on the water. Thus begins the movie’s opening dramatic sequence – a brilliantly shot and edited montage which may well be the ultimate British predecessor to Lester’s “rock videos” in A Hard Day’s Night and clearly an influence on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. With music written by Bernard and lyrics by both screenwriter Evan Jones and Losey himself, an unnamed band (worthy of some of the amazing tracks on the “Las Vegas Grind” series) sings:

Black leather, black leather, rock-rock-rock...
Black leather, black leather, smash-smash-smash
Black leather, black leather, crash-crash-crash
Black leather, black leather, kill-kill-kill
I got that feeling – black leather rock!

As the song be-bops along, the camera begins atop a clock tower, makes its way down and reveals a load of leather-clad Teddy Boys led by the suave King (played by an ultra-cool and very young Oliver Reed), adorned smartly in a crisp white shirt, thin black tie and a plaid sport coat to end all plaid sport coats. Perched against a perfectly symmetrical sculpture of a white unicorn (juxtaposed beautifully with the architecture of Weymouth and Frink's sculptures from the previous sequence), King surveys the square as Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey, who starred – for thirty years!!! – on the soap opera “Days of Our Lives”), an American tourist, admires a historical plaque and is quickly seduced into following a fetching, nubile Joan (British ingénue Shirley Anne Field). At first, Joan appears to be King’s squeeze, leading the American along with promises of carnal delight, but it's clearly a trap. King and his Teddy-Boys beat the American to a pulp and steal his watch and wallet.

Joan feels some guilt over her part in this act of savagery and soon tracks Simon down to apologize and, with a strange Daddy-fixation, throw herself at him. This enrages King – not because she’s REALLY his main squeeze, but is in fact, his sister!!! King has rather obsessive and overtly incestuous feelings towards Joan and refuses to let her touch or be touched by any man. Add to this mix, a mysterious military bureaucrat Bernard (Oscar-nominated Alexander Knox for his role in “Wilson”) who seems to be overseeing a secret research operation just on the outskirts of property owned by the sultry, cynical sculptress Freya (the vivacious Viveca Lindfors).

The movie eventually brings all of these seemingly disparate characters together – first at Freya’s studio on the cliffs and finally, behind the barbed wire of the military research facility where a strange group of children are incarcerated within a seawall fortress – subject to observation, experimentation and indoctrination.

This is one crazy movie! And what a movie it is! Dealing with such heavy themes as haves and have-nots, incest, art versus science, science as creation, secrecy yielding paranoia, childhood innocence being exploited for a greater “good” and ultimately, the horrors of nuclear radiation – These are THE DAMNED is some kind of lost and decidedly insane masterpiece (albeit with some of the flaws associated with its bare-bones budget).

Based upon a novel by Evan Jones, neither the British nor American titles seem to adequately encompass what this film is about. The novel’s original title was “The Children of Light” which seems to be a far more evocative summation of the picture itself – a film devoted to the ironic loss of innocence of an entire post-war generation to the mad powers that gripped everyone and created a platform that forced subsequent generations to live in a world of fear, paranoia and exploitation with each successive government blunder and lust for power - or, in the parlance worthy of a Teddy Boy: same shit, different pail.

Joseph Losey made a B-movie, all right. He who would go on to direct many more fine pictures, including a rich collaboration with Harold Pinter, but These are THE DAMNED is one hell of a great B-movie!

“These are THE DAMNED” is included in the recent Sony Pictures DVD release entitled “Hammer Films: The Icons of Suspense Collection” which also features the very good child molestation thriller "Never Take Candy From a Stanger" in addition to four other pictures from the same period.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND - Review By Greg Klymkiw - It's been 36 Years Since I First Saw.....IT?

Aside from being a great science fiction picture, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is one of the most evocative tales of obsession ever to be etched on celluloid and as such, this is as much a review of the film as it is a reflection on my personal obsession with the picture that has not abated since I first saw it 36 years ago.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) *****
dir. Steven Spielberg
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Roberts Blossom

Review By Greg Klymkiw

On a crisp Winnipeg winter night in December of 1977, I floated in a daze from within the warm confines of an old 2000-seat downtown picture palace and my eyes looked immediately to the Heavens.

IMMEDIATELY.

A typically clear mid-western prairie sky presented a dazzling display of the cosmos – stars danced and twinkled above me and it was near impossible to shift my gaze from the limitless expanse of the universe and beyond. I kept watching the sky for some time in total bliss and ignorance of the sub-zero temperature that, as per usual, threatened to freeze exposed skin in less than a minute or two.

I had, of course, just seen an advance preview screening of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a motion picture of such staggering power that it seemed perfectly fitting that my first helping of its magnificence be within the cavernous expanse of this classic theatre built in 1907, its screen enveloped by a mighty proscenium, sitting in plush seats surrounded by an interior rich in ornate white Italian marble (it not only had a huge balcony, it had fucking LOGES) and bathed in a flickering light of utter magic that was, at this early stage of my life, a picture unlike anything I had ever seen before.

This one screening proved to be so epiphanous that once the picture officially opened two weeks later, I saw it on a big screen – in this same cinema – well over forty times.

I could not get enough of the picture. I needed to see it as one needs nourishment. A week could not go by that I did not feel the mysterious pull of this extraordinary movie. I was a man possessed - barely one, at that, being a mere 18-years-old.

By now, everyone knows that this classic motion picture charts the journey of everyman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who experiences the unexplained appearance of something other-worldly and abandons his life, his job, his family – everything he holds dear – to obsessively track down the meaning behind this occurrence. In a tale steeped in Judeo-Christian resonance – from Moses to Christ – Roy makes a perilous journey, climbs Devil’s Tower and comes face-to-face with the answer to his visions until he, along with twelve apostolic “pilgrims” ascends to the Heavens, arms outstretched in what is surely the most benign crucifixion-image imaginable.

It’s quite perfect, really. Aside from the obsessive quality of the central character, the picture itself is relentless in its adherence to the basic principles of UFO-ology and a system of extraterrestrial classification as posited by the late astronomer Dr. Josef Allen Hynek – the close encounter. According to Hynek, a close encounter of the first kind is seeing unexplained phenomena, while the second kind involves hard proof of some sort of physical manifestation from what was originally witnessed and, finally, the close encounter of the third kind, contact.

Using this classification system as the basis for his screenplay, Spielberg fills in his story with a sound and compelling three-act structure – one that is so exquisitely classical and presented with such flair, that the experience of seeing the film is not only entertaining, but frankly, borders on the spiritual. This sense of spirituality is almost divine in nature and makes perfect sense considering Hynek’s own belief in the notion that a technology must exist which blends both the physical and psychic. Furthermore, it's important to note that Paul Schrader wrote the first pass of the film and though he didn't take a story credit (something he regretted almost as quickly as he agreed to it and more so in the years to follow), it feels, deep-down like a Schrader narrative - especially the combination of obsession and spirituality.

Spielberg clearly believed in both Hynek and Schrader's concerns, but his approach was, as it always is and always must be, that of a master showman imbued with the innocence and wonder of a child. This, finally, is what makes Close Encounters such a supreme entertainment – we’re engaged and dazzled, finally, by the sheer physical beauty of what Neary sees, but also, we feel and perhaps even understand what this character feels (and by extension, Spielberg).

I really don't think Richard Dreyfuss has ever been better. He's the ultimate man-child here - a kind of hulking working class version of what Kubrick's "Star Child" in 2001 might have become. Teri Garr and Melinda Dillon acquit themselves nicely, but if any performances match Dreyfuss' here, it's legendary French filmmaker Francois Truffaut as the UFO expert who seems as much an obsessive man-child as Dreyfuss and, of course, lest we forget the late, great character actor Roberts Blossom as the crazed old man who opines on the aliens' prowess at manning their spaceships:

"They can fly rings around the moon, but we're years ahead of them on the highway."

The movie contains several great set-pieces of wonder, but nothing in the film, and frankly nothing in MOST films can compare to the pure joy of the final third of the picture - the close encounter of the third kind. For me, perhaps the most moving element is how the universal language that binds mankind with the aliens is light and music. Can their ever be a more universal duo? Thank God for John Williams' score, the simple, melodious, almost-Satie-like dissonance that brilliantly riffs on "When You Wish Upon A Star" from Disney's Pinocchio.

It's pathetic. Just THINKING about moments from the final third of the film in tandem with Williams' score STILL makes me tear up like, in the words of Brando in Apocalypse Now, "some old grandmother".

As for the special effects - they are GORGEOUS OPTICALS courtesy of Douglas Trumbull, an astounding hand-built set in an airplane hangar and animatronics courtesy of Carlo Rambaldi. There isn't a single digital effect that can hold a candle to any of these.

Over the years, Spielberg has tinkered with various cuts of the film. After the initial theatrical release, he issued a “special edition” in 1980, which trimmed a few bits he felt needed trimming, but moronically dumped several key moments that contributed to Neary’s humanity and his relationship with his family - as well as the physical manifestation of Neary's obsession in the form of the most insane act of tossing mud, plants and trees into his family's suburban dream home in order to sculpt the image lodged in his brain, the message that he and a few other special people receive from the aliens.

This was, frankly, a mistake, but an even more egregious error in this decidedly UN-special Edition, was taking us beyond Neary’s walk onto the Mother Ship, but inside as well. This version comes close to destroying what was almost perfect. Years later, Spielberg rectified the situation by restoring the film closer to the original release, dumping most of the new footage (and thankfully, ALL of the interior Mother Ship footage). All three versions are presented on Sony’s exquisite Blu-Ray and watching them back-to-back provides an extremely rewarding look at a great artist’s process at trying to “get it” right.

Whatever you do, though, watch the 1977 version on the disc first. It offers the purest state of grace.

You see, on one level, the third version from 1998, is probably the best version of the film, but for me, it’s hard to separate myself from the slight raggedness of the 1977 version. It’s the version that first obsessed me and I feel that ultimately, even its minor flaws weirdly contribute to the picture’s enduring, obsessive quality.

Steven Spielberg is unquestionably a born filmmaker. He’s delivered some of the finest entertainments we’ll ever see in this bigger-than-life medium, but ultimately, it’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind that will probably resonate with the greatest power and longevity in the decades to follow.

After all, it comes from a special place.

It comes from the heart – that mysterious, delicate muscle that pumps lifeblood and seems, more so than the mind itself, to harbor the soul. It’s what makes great pictures and Close Encounters of the Third Kind is nothing if not great.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is currently available on Blu-Ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. If you are seeing it for the first time in years and/or if you are showing to kids who've never seen it properly on FILM, on a BIG screen before - do this: Turn all phones off, make sure all the curtains are drawn so nothing from the outside seeps in, make sure ALL the lights are off, make sure nobody has anything to eat or drink before or during the film, make sure your kids have unloaded every drop of urine and every ounce of heavier materials, make it clear that there will be no breaks and that nobody will be allowed to leave the room for ANY reason and then, CRANK THE SOUND. It's the only way to fly.

NIGHT OF THE CREEPS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The 80s was a miserable Dead Zone of John Hughes, The Goonies and Overblown Action Pictures with a few exceptions like this movie. Hilarious Dialogue, Genuine Scares, Delicious gross-outs, Perfectly Pitched Performances, Stylish direction from the unsung Fred Dekker and Gratuitous Nudity. What's NOT to like?

"Girls, I have good news and I have bad news.

The good news is, your dates are here.

The bad news is, they're dead."

Night of the Creeps (1986) ***
dir. Fred Dekker
Starring: Tom Atkins, Jason Lively, Steve Marshall, Jill Whitlow

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Fred Dekker is a genre director who, with his first two features, The Monster Squad and Night of the Creeps, displayed so much promise, that even the toilet-bowl-plunge of his third feature, the lamentable abomination that is/was Robocop 3, should have led to a continuing canon of first-rate genre pictures. It didn’t.

Instead, he has, for almost 20 years, slogged about the wasteland that is television drama – working occasionally as a writer, director and consulting producer on material that ranged from mind-numbingly mediocre (Star Trek: Enterprise) to tolerably mediocre (HBO’s Tales From The Crypt).

One cannot believe this was his chosen path. That would be very depressing. Instead I prefer to think that Dekker’s idiot box purgatory had more to do with the fact that his third feature, Robocop 3, was such a total washout, that nobody in their right mind wanted to take a chance on him anymore. A man needs to fill his belly and there is no more consistent trough than that of television. Well, that’s MY fantasy, anyway.

And let’s make no mistake about it, no apologies – Robocop 3 stinks! Why Dekker and those who green-lit the picture thought a kid-friendly Robocop was a good idea is beyond me. Not only was it dull, toothless and stupid in all the wrong ways, but it had the dubious distinction of being one of the last releases of the once-mighty mini-studio Orion – and this after sitting on the proverbial shelf a couple of years and suffering the indignity of starring a no-name in the title role when Peter Weller didn’t bother to reprise the role that made him a star.

Dekker’s sophomore feature, The Monster Squad was a deliciously entertaining homage to the Forrest J. Ackerman-inspired fan boy appreciation of monster movies. The picture was an absolute joy – especially to anyone who loved the sensibilities of the Universal Horror programmers of the 30s and 40s. This, alas, might have been exactly why it didn’t click at the box-office. Late boomers and early Gen-X-ers would have keyed into Dekker’s headspace perfectly, but sadly, too many kids during the 80s were either into the kinder, gentler Loserville of John Hughes, or if they were into genre at all, they were brought up on the likes of Michael Myers, Freddie Krueger, Jason Voorhees and any number of anonymous slasher epics or worse – much worse – The Goonies.

At the end of the day, the monsters in Dekker’s film must have been so “uncool” and/or beyond anyone growing up in that cultural dead zone of the 80s.

And of course, let us now turn to the reason we're all here - Dekker’s fine first feature, Night of the Creeps. This funny, clever and terrifying horror picture should have been a hit. It wasn’t. The picture had a miserable theatrical run and found its way quickly onto home video, but with little fanfare.

It’s too bad. In fact, with both of these features, Dekker was probably, depending on how you look at it, just behind or just ahead of his time.

Night of the Creeps is a horror geek’s wet dream. It begins in a small college town during the 50s where an alien parasite infects a studly college-aged jock. After committing a grisly murder, he is subdued and – get this – is cryogenically frozen. Uh, like…why? Well, because it makes it more convenient to flash forward to the 80s when a horny young geek is assisted by his wisecracking, handicapped and even geekier pal to perform a fraternity house pledge initiation.

The goal is to steal a body from the campus med-school anatomy morgue. Of course, they happen upon the conveniently and cryogenically frozen stud and idiotically nab his body and dump it in front of a sorority house. A night of horror begins when Mr. Cryogenic Stud wakes up and begins vomiting parasites into the mouths of his victims, turning them into psychopathic zombies hell bent on vomiting their own parasites into unsuspecting open mouths.

Okay, did I say, at any juncture, that this was Bresson?

Phew! For a minute, you had me worried.

Nope! Night of the Creeps is pure, unbridled trash. And it is exquisite – which, I suppose, IS a word one might use to ALSO describe Bresson. Full of in-jokes, references to other great horror movies, but still working on its own steam and merit, this is an extremely well-crafted, good-humoured and effective fright fest.

One of the delightful aspects of the picture is the central performance from stalwart genre tough guy Tom Atkins as the local police chief who delivers one hilarious line of dialogue after another. The most famous line Dekker wrote for Atkins was also used as the picture’s tagline. How this movie could have bombed with a line like this is beyond me, but here goes. Barricaded in a sorority house with a bevy of vixens, Atkins looks out the window at one point and says, “Well, girls. I have good news and bad news. The good news is your dates are here.” One of the bubbleheads asks what the bad news is and Atkins retorts with a straight face, “The bad news is, they’re dead.”

Mayhem ensues.

This is a fun, stylish and scary picture. Fred Dekker is a terrific genre director. He needs to make more pictures. It’s not too late. His time might actually be NOW!

Oh, yeah – in addition to all the hilarious dialogue, genuine scares, delicious gross-outs, perfectly pitched performances and stylish direction; did I mention that Night of the Creeps also features gratuitous nudity?

So, uh, what's not to like?

"Night of the Creeps" is available on DVD and BluRay from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

ZOMBIELAND - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Zombies, babes and Bill Murray. What's not to like? Sadly, a lot.

Zombieland (2009) *1/2
dir. Ruben Fleischer
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Bill Murray

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Zombies.

Babes.

Bill Murray.

What’s not to like, right?

Well, lots, but the big one is mighty simple – the movie’s just no good.

And it’s too bad, because all the elements – in addition to those mentioned above – are in plain view. A great title. Two nicely matched actors. Two terrific actresses. Lots of carnage. A road trip across a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland. An amusement park with cool rides and filled with zombies (a nice – on paper – substitute for Romero’s mall in Dawn of the Dead). A blend of humour and horror.

And most importantly:

Muscle cars.

With all these elements popping up throughout the picture, my constant inner refrain was, “Please, oh please – say it ain’t so! Please let this get better.”

Unfortunately, these sure-fire elements are not presented with the kind of intelligence, control and style they needed. The picture is a flaccid mess. The super-talented Jesse Eisenberg of The Squid and the Whale fame plays a young Woody Allen-like schlemiel who delivers deadpan narration on how he’s managed to survive a worldwide onslaught of flesh eating living dead. The casting, content and delivery is reasonably inspired; the rules of the world are set-up nicely, there’s some terrific zombie killing and a few lines actually manage to elicit some smiles and a couple of chuckles.

Enter Woody Harrelson as a zombie killing cowpoke extraordinaire who takes an instant dislike to Eisenberg, but grows to like him. The two characters have their differences, but they bond by their mutual love and prowess at killing zombies. Not a bad thing to bond over in a zombie movie, but it seldom goes beyond a by-the-numbers nod to a depth that doesn’t really exist.

The opening minutes are not too bad, but the style and presentation of the film’s inaugural un-spooling is pretty much dropped and tedium starts to set in until the fellows meet up with two babes; the sinfully sexy Emma Stone and the younger and thoroughly delightful Abigail Breslin. The two chicks are in peril, but in reality they’re cleverly using the cliché of weak women who need their men to con our two zombie killers into giving up their wheels and guns. Eventually all four team up and the fun should really begin. It doesn’t.

The story turns into a series of comedy and action set pieces that are not funny or suspenseful enough. Add to this an annoying A.D.D.-challenged approach to shooting and cutting (director Ruben Fleischer, not surprisingly, comes from music videos and commercials). He has no feel for suspense and his timing on the comedy front is always just off the mark.

While the leads are attractive to look at, they go through the obligatory ropes of most multiplex fodder, adding little spin to the proceedings save, perhaps, for Eisenberg’s performance which is delightful in its incongruity with the genre. This would all be fine if the writing had been better, but the screenplay by Fleischer and co-scenarists Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick delivers mostly frat boy humour gussied up with some wiseacre-speak from the wonderful Eisenberg. Woody Harrelson is not without amusement value, but again, he’s pure good ole’ boy without the kind of heart that might have lifted the picture beyond the perfunctorily machine-tooled variety. The ladies are perky and cute; especially since they’re allowed to kick some ass, but they too are cardboard cutouts without the shading that could have made them more interesting and engaging.

I also love the IDEA of the Texas backdrop to much of the proceedings, but there’s really no sense of place beyond the fact that we’re told the setting is Texas. The movie feels like it could be pretty much anywhere.

The overall pace of the picture is also problematic. Given the fact that the running time is a perfect 80 minutes, the annoying style of Fleischer’s approach, still manages to bung up the works and the picture feels far longer than it actually is. Zombieland wants to be Shaun of the Dead, but the writing is not good enough. It craves to be “Dawn of the Dead”, but the direction is lifeless and bereft of any weight.

All this said, I do suggest eventually renting the movie since there is one truly great element to find pleasure in. Bill Murray’s supporting role is an absolute delight. His performance and the material he’s working with rises above the pedestrian level of everything else in the picture. If the movie had been up to Murray’s greatness, I’d have been singing a much different tune. I’m not, though. Instead of belting out “Yellow Rose of Texas”, I’m just a-humming “Old Black Joe”.

"Zombieland" is available on DVD and Blue from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

LOVE AND PAIN AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING - Maggie Smith, Alan Pakula and Alvin Sargent a Holy Trinity!

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973) ***1/2
Dir. Alan J. Pakula
Starring: Maggie Smith, Timothy Bottoms

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing is a terrific title and, because of its length, a challenge for most marquee displays, video box covers and TV listings. It’s also, save for those who saw the picture in 1973 and loved it, a relatively forgotten picture from one of the best American directors of the 70s. During the last 17 years of his life, however, one might have concluded, based on his delivering overwrought Holocaust-themed Oscar-bait like Sophie's Choice amidst a whack of John Grisham adaptations and the like, that Alan J. Pakula was little more than a hack.

In fact, the most interesting thing about Pakula during this period was how his life ended, a freak auto accident in which a steel pipe sailed through his vehicle's dashboard window, lodging itself deep into the filmmaker's skull.

However, if one could erase the abovementioned years of 1980 to 1997 and focus solely on his output during the 60s and 70s, one would be faced with the work of a good, if not great filmmaker. In the early 60s, Pakula established himself as one of the best creative producers in Hollywood. Allied as a producer with director Robert Mulligan, the pair generated seven fine feature films during the 60s. Of these seven pictures, two were bonafide masterpieces – the powerful film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and the brilliantly acted (Anthony Perkins and Karl Malden) biopic of baseball player Jimmy Piersall and his domineering father, Fear Strikes Out. This was surely one of the great producer-director relationships in American cinema. Pakula and Mulligan tackled a wide variety of important social issues with taste, intelligence and most, importantly, a fabulous sense of showmanship. The pictures they made together were as supremely entertaining as they were thought provoking.

Pakula’s talent as a filmmaker became even more apparent when the team split up. Mulligan’s work got worse - a pale shade of his past successes, while Pakula went on to direct some of the most important films of the 70s. Ironically, it’s Pakula’s last years as a director that resemble the mediocrity of Mulligan’s career WITHOUT Pakula as a producer. But from his directorial debut in 1969 with the quirky Liza Minnelli vehicle The Sterile Cuckoo and through to the elegiac post-war western Comes a Horseman and the tremendous romantic comedy Starting Over, Pakula delivered the goods - and then some.

Pakula is, perhaps, always going to be best known for his unofficial trilogy of 70s paranoia-infused thrillers Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men – and rightly so, since all three pictures clearly display a strong voice, an impeccable command of film craft and solid delivery of some of the most intelligent thrills committed to film.

Nestled between the paranoid world of a call girl being stalked and a corporation devoted to political assassination is Pakula’s imperfect, but still lovely and mostly forgotten bittersweet romantic comedy Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing. Working from a terrific script by Alvin (Paper Moon, Ordinary People, Spiderman 2) Sargent, the picture tells the tale of a May-December romance between two lonely, seemingly mismatched people. Lila Fisher (Maggie Smith) is a forty-something spinster dying of an incurable disease who takes a trip to Spain to experience the beauty and adventure that has eluded her. Walter Elbertson (Timothy Bottoms) is a twenty-something slacker packed off by his over-achieving father to the same sunny Spanish climes for a bike tour. When Walter abandons the rigorous journey for the relative comfort of a bus tour, he finds himself sitting next to Lila in the only empty seat. At first, the unlikely pair keep their distance, but after a couple of meet-cute-ish moments – one involving Walter’s underwear, the other involving a locked outhouse door – the loners are drawn to each other: first as friends and eventually as lovers.

Sargent’s scenario is a largely familiar romance, but he peppers his tale with a series of genuinely funny set pieces and some terrific dialogue for the two attractive stars. Most importantly, he creates two lovely, diverse characters for two equally diverse actors.

Timothy Bottoms, no stranger to the May-December romance by virtue of his turn as Sonny Crawford in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic The Last Picture Show where the sensitively studly Bottoms beds down the sex-and-love-starved housewife played by Cloris Leachman. Made the same year as Love and Pain…, the Bogdanovich picture went through the roof while Pakula's effort saw its release delayed until 1973. Bottoms is great in both. In Love and Pain…, he's initially and alternately aloof and whiny, but his performance is truly a marvel as he slowly becomes charming and likeable as his relationship with Lila deepens.

Maggie Smith is especially wonderful in her role. Often portrayed as pinched and matronly in films like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the seriously neglected The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, she is full of life, vim, vigour and romance in Love and Pain… and happily, Pakula lavishes the kind of pictorial attention to her that was so rare for Smith. She is a downright sexy in this movie – a mature, but enticing middle-aged babe. With her gorgeous red hair, long legs, delectably prim manner and beautiful smile flashing a nice set of pearly whites, Smith is – without question a MILF-extraordinaire! Most amazingly, the script allows her to engage in some really funny physical humour. Smith is not above taking more than one pratfall and a scene wherein she has an entire roll of toilet paper wrapped around her legs and unfurling an ever longer trail of bum-wipe as she scrambles towards her tour bus is the stuff of comic genius.

With a lush, romantic score from Michael Small, stunning location photography from Geoffrey (A Night To Remember, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tess) Unsworth and a fine director at the peak of his powers, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing is a truly sparkling and moving romance.

“Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing” is available on Sony’s “Martini Movies” DVD brand. How and what a “Martini Movie” is supposed to be is still beyond me. How this bittersweet romantic comedy can be considered a “Martini Movie” is especially beyond me.

THE BUTTERCUP CHAIN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Gorgeous Douglas Slocombe Cinematography (Almost) Saves This Moronic, Dull, Soft-core 70s Euro Sleaze Replete With Incest and Swingin' Swingers

The Buttercup Chain (1970) *1/2
Dir. Robert Ellis Miller
Starring: Hywel Bennett, Leigh Taylor-Young, Jane Asher, Sven-Bertil Taube

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This dull, idiotic, pretentious bit of soft-core is not especially sexy and lacks even the tiniest shred of entertainment value, in spite of its more ludicrous elements of prurient excess. It is, however, one of the most sumptuously photographed bad movies I have ever seen.

Shot by the brilliant Douglas Slocombe, one is treated to impeccable compositions, delicate interior lighting and sun-drenched location photography of the highest order. And of course, whenever the supple flesh of the attractive leads is bared, Slocombe captures the puff pastry of the ladies and the buff brawn of the gentlemen with the eye of a pornographer extraordinaire.

Not that this should come as a surprise. Slocombe, a multi-award-winning-and-nominated cinematographer had, by the time he worked on this film, been making dazzling images for twenty-five years. His early career in Britain included lensing some of the great Ealing Pictures including the classic chiller Dead of Night, the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alexander Mackendrick’s wry satire The Man in the White Suit, the quiet, delicate and almost elegiac The Smallest Show On Earth and the all-out hilarity of The Titfield Thunderbolt.

Throughout the 60s, Slocombe created indelible images on a variety of classic films from all genres. He gave us the lurid glory of the sickening, terrifying Circus of Horrors, the hip, groovily-dappled colours and endless heart-stopping shots of Raquel Welch in Fathom, the glory of the intimate historical epic The Lion in Winter, Roman Polanski’s gorgeously, insanely, expressionistic The Fearless Vampire Killers, Peter Collinson’s Euro-trashy heist thriller The Italian Job and among many others, the subtly darkening black and white palette of Harold Pinter-Joseph Losey’s The Servant. In the same year The Buttercup Chain was made and released, Slocombe also shot Ken Russell’s phantasmagorical biopic of Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers a cinematographer-director match made in heaven.

Of course, any of the above-named titles, should probably not even be mentioned on the same page as The Buttercup Chain, but alas, Slocombe was also enough of a pragmatic artist that he also took jobs that were just that – jobs. Not that money was the only aim in shooting this, but I suspect he was attracted to the stunning and wide variety of gorgeous European locations and the prospect of photographing a bevy of babes and hunks against said backdrops.

And just what, pray tell, is a “Buttercup Chain”?

Well, aside from being one of the least entertaining bad movies ever made, it appears to have something to do with the two lead characters and their childhood obsession with buttercups and how this, by extension, transmogrifies into a summer of carnal delight with everyone but each other in order to avoid the hint of incest that lingers over their desire for each other.

“Say, what?” you say!!!

France (the broodingly beautiful and ever-so-slightly mincing Hywel Bennett) and Margaret (jaw-droppingly ravishing model Jane Asher) are cousins. Their respective mothers are twin sisters. From childhood, they are deeply in love – the cousins, that is: not the twin sisters. As adults, they give each other lots of hugs and pecks, but never consummate their fleshly desires for each other. Instead, France desires to “pimp” (the word – I kid you not! – that he actually uses) Margaret out to as many lovers as possible so he can experience, from afar, the joy she will receive from every other man, but himself. For her part, Margaret also wants France to get some lovin’, so she encourages him to bed down the luscious Manny (that scrumptious morsel of big-screen 70s desire Leigh Taylor-Young). France chooses the swarthy Swede Fred (stiff-jawed and bulgingly endowed salami-meister Sven Bertil-Taube) to lay pipe within his beloved.

We, the audience, get to sit back, take our shoes off, apply the palm lubricant of choice and voyeuristically participate in this oh-so-sexy romp through the most exquisite European vacation spots imaginable as our two attractive couples… couple.

Alas, I feel I have made this cinematic equivalent to dog-shit-splattered-sidewalks sound far too watchable, if not downright compelling. It’s not. The dialogue is moronic, the performances wooden and Robert Ellis Miller’s direction is utterly pallid.

Miller’s poor work is not surprising. Essentially a camera-jockey (television director), he lucked out with one big screen picture, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – thanks mainly to a fine cast and lovely source material. Here, he has a quartet of incompetent actors and high-mindedly boneheaded source material.

There is, however, Slocombe’s gorgeous cinematography, but as mentioned above, a myriad of good and sometimes great movies already existed prior to this film and benefited from his magnificent eye. In fact, AFTER shooting The Buttercup Chain, Slocombe continued to dazzle as the Director of Photography on such diverse and solid work as the two terrific Norman Jewison pictures (Jesus Christ Superstar and Rollerball), the flawed, but compelling Jack Clayton version of The Great Gatsby and especially, the first three instalments of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones pictures.

This deservedly obscure picture has recently and shockingly been bestowed with a DVD release on Sony’s weird “Martini Movies” label. Like many pictures in this series, one wonders why The Buttercup Chain is considered a “Martini Movie”. One thing I can assure, however, is a few dry, stiff, shaken-not-stirred carafes of the old olive-garnished belt-back will numb you rather pleasantly – should you choose, that is, to divest yourself of 95 precious minutes of your life.

NICKELODEON - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Bogdanovich love song to early movie biz a delight in spite of itself.

Nickelodeon (1976) ***
dir. Peter Bogdanovich
Starring: Ryan O’Neal, Burt Reynolds, John Ritter, Stella Stevens, Jane Hitchcock, Tatum O’Neal, Brian Keith, Don Calfa.

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Nickelodeon is a mess, but WHAT a mess!

This notorious Peter Bogdanovich boxoffice and critical failure from the 70s is a big budget, star-studded love song to the pre-D.W. Griffith pioneers of the motion picture industry. Reviled in its day as a clumsy attempt to cram early movie history into a pastiche of early film techniques, it’s a picture that not only managed to keep audiences away in droves, but (at least for me) inexplicably alienated Bogdanovich’s biggest supporters – the critical elite of both the popular mainstream and alternative press. To dump truckloads of manure onto a picture for excess is one thing, but when the excess seems somewhat justified and not without entertainment value, it’s incumbent upon some of us to refute the elitism of the predatory gaggle of scribes who were clearly looking for any excuse to take Bogdanovich, the critic-turned-filmmaker, down a few notches.

Set at a time when Thomas Edison and his cronies maintained the position that they held exclusive patents to the motion picture camera, we follow the adventures of a ragtag band of moviemakers who refuse to shell out royalties to the inventor-thug who stopped at nothing to shut down all the independent businessmen who sought to grab their fare share of the profits from the new magic called movies. Edison hired gun-toting strong men to seek out these upstarts and rough them up and destroy their labs and equipment.

In Nickelodeon, one such upstart is the blustery showman H.H. Cobb, insanely portrayed by a crazed Brian Keith. Failed lawyer and Harold Lloyd look-alike, the bespectacled Leo Harrigan (Ryan O’Neal) literally pratfalls into this independent company and is quickly nominated to the position of screenwriter.

Dispatched to a sleepy, one-horse California waterhole to take over the filmmaking operations, Harrigan discovers that a teenage girl, Alice Forsyte (O’Neal’s daughter Tatum) is an even better screenwriter than he is and when he furthermore discovers that the director has gone on a drunken bender, absconding the unit’s working capital, he is further nominated to the position of director.

The group includes a sexy leading lady (Stella Stevens), a near-sighted ingénue (Jane Hitchcock), an amiable sad sack cameraman (John Ritter) and best of all, a two-fisted galumphing galoot from Texas played with good humour and cheer by a thoroughly delightful Burt Reynolds.

All of this probably sounds terrific. It’s not, but it should have been. Where Bogdanovich errs is when he spends far too much time on meticulously recreating slapstick farce from the period. While technically proficient, it’s seldom funny – not so much out of familiarity with the style of humour, but that many of the set-ups are so meticulous that instead of seeming freewheeling and fresh, the laughs – what few we actually get – are utterly predictable. They’re also at odds with what should/could have been a thoroughly compelling story – taking us out of the action to grind everything to a standstill in order to watch one set piece after another.

When the humour works, it works not because it is mannered, meticulous and stylized, but when it’s rooted in the story, characters and backdrop. These moments work so beautifully that they come close to canceling out all the moments that don’t. Many of these well-wrought sequences happen when Bogdanovich doesn’t play over-the-top moments… well, over-the-top. When he plays them straight or relatively straight, they’re as fresh and funny and downright exhilarating as any great comic moments should be.

It's no surprise the best stuff involves Burt Reynolds. In one great scene, Burt's recruited to mount a house for the first time in his life. In full KKK garb he holds a burning cross aloft as the steed stumbles. Another great moment involves Reynolds, who is terrified of heights, and gets bamboozled by Ryan O’Neal to get into an air balloon which, instead of rising only to the height of a horse, is released and set on a wild course into the Heavens. As well, Tatum O’Neal unleashes her trademark Paper Moon precociousness and gives us one fine display of cutthroat negotiation after another.

This IS the stuff great comic set pieces are made of.

When the movie sticks to moviemaking and does so in an understated fashion, it IS terrific. One only wishes Bogdanovich hadn’t indulged his slapstick muse so often. The best thing about the movie, though, is a truly exciting and moving recreation of the world premiere of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. This astounding sequence is so elegiac, that one is inclined to forgive the movie any and all of its flaws.

One of the main reasons to give this picture a whirl on DVD is the fact that Bogdanovich has been given an opportunity to present the film in black and white. When it was first made, the studio balked at such an expensive picture being unleashed in shades of grey rather than all-out colour. Bogdanovich and his cinematographer, the late great Lazlo (Easy Rider) Kovacs acquiesced, but with new digital technologies, the film has been transformed into gorgeous black and white with a lovely range of tones and a mouth-watering grain that looks especially stunning when one plays the regular DVD on a Blu-Ray machine with an HD television monitor. In spite of its flaws, Nickelodeon was always a picture I liked, but I have to admit that in black and white, I do believe I like it a whole lot more.

“Nickelodeon” is available on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment in a two-disc set with Bogdanovich’s masterpiece “The Last Picture Show”