War Games (1983)

War Games (1983): written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes; directed by John Badham; starring Matthew Broderick (David), Dabney Coleman (McKittrick), John Wood (Falken), Ally Sheedy (Jennifer), and Barry Corbin (General Beringer): This Young Adult Cold War thriller holds up remarkably well. Not only did it make Matthew Broderick a star, it influenced American policy on hackers after President Reagan screened the film.

Broderick is certainly believable as a young hacker (dig that early 1980's computer tech!) who wants to steal some video games and instead talks the Pentagon's Artificial Intelligence into starting World War Three. What larks, Pip, what larks!

The movie succeeds in part on the charisma of all of its main actors, from the prissy, pissy Dabney Coleman as the Pentagon's chief computer scientist to Barry Corbin (later of Northern Exposure) as a grumpy, salt-of-the-earth General, John Wood as AI-designer Falken, and Broderick and Ally Sheedy as our high-school leads.

But the writing is sharp as well, though Broderick's ability to escape NORAD HQ in Cheyenne Mountain requires a certain suspension of disbelief. It's hard to imagine a big-budget summer movie today ending as this one does -- not with a half-hour action sequence, but with a bunch of people talking to a computer in a room. John Badham keeps things moving nicely, and his matter-of-fact cinematography keeps things rooted in at least the semblance of the real. Recommended.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Fitzcarraldo (1982): written and directed by Werner Herzog; starring Klaus Kinski ('Fitzcarraldo'), Claudia Cardinale (Molly), Miguel Angel Fuentes (Cholo), Paul Hittscher (Captain), and Huerequeque Enrique Bohorquez (The Cook): Werner Herzog's epic tale of obsession and opera sees big-dreamer Fitzcarraldo (really 'Fitzgerald,' a name the Peruvian natives pronounce per: the title) planning to build an opera house in early 20th-century Peru. His scheme to make enough money to do so involves getting a bunch of dangerous natives to help him move his steamship a mile over a small mountain to reach a river otherwise made unreachable by rapids. 

Of course, all this is filmed on location. And Werner Herzog actually does move a steamship overland without dismantling it. The movie is as much a testament to Herzog's obsession as it is to Fitzcarraldo's. The whole thing is surprisingly funny and light on its feet, shot through with sequences that play like fevered dreams and others that sparkle with wit and humanity. 

This may be Klaus Kinski's most sympathetic performance. He's as crazy as a loon, but boy, is he dedicated! The supporting players are uniformly excellent, as are the natives who play versions of themselves. The making of the movie is chronicled in Burden of Dreams (1989). Highly recommended.

Skating, Baseball, and JFK

The Price of Gold (ESPN 30 for 30) (2014): written and directed by Nanette Burstein: Excellent documentary about figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan and, you know, that whole thing. The documentary leaves it pretty much up to the viewer to decide how much Harding knew about the plot to injure Kerrigan, and when. Harding agreed to be interviewed; Kerrigan did not. Along the way, the documentary ends up being about class and appearance in the skating world and the world at large. Recommended.

The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee (2017): written and directed by John Maggio: Legendary newspaperman Ben Bradlee narrates some of this documentary from beyond the grave, thanks to tapes he made for a memoir back in the 1990's. 

Prior to becoming editor of the Washington Post, where his tenure would include the history-making Pentagon Papers and Watergate stories, Bradlee was basically the last Movie-Star Journalist. He was best pals with JFK (friend Jim Lehrer, among others, notes that this was incredibly compromising from a journalistic POV). He globe-trotted, left two families to marry someone new, and was memorably played by Jason Robards in All the President's Men. 

It's a solid documentary, though perhaps a bit too hagiographic and a little scattershot in its depiction of Bradlee's successes and failure after Watergate. Recommended.

Ken Burns' Baseball (Including The Tenth Inning) (1994/2010): written by Ken Burns, David McMahon, Lynn Novick, and Geoffrey C. Ward; directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick; narrated by John Chancellor (1994) and Keith David (2010): Ken Burns' great, flawed history of baseball could very well be titled Baseball in New York and Boston. It's that weighted towards the teams of those two cities, to the extent that Detroit's World Series wins in 1968 and 1984 are never mentioned. 

Buck up, Detroit -- Kansas City, Toronto, St. Louis, and Cleveland also warrant barely a mention for World Series wins. Also San Francisco, Cincinnatti, Oakland.... OK, so it's biased to the extent that its historical merits are somewhat dubious. Still, it's enjoyable. Especially if you love New York or Boston. Everywhere else, not so much. Recommended.

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)

Mark Hamill wishing he were somewhere else.

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017): written and directed by Rian Johnson; starring Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Daisy Ridley (Rey), Carrie Fisher (Leia), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren/ Ben Solo), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Andy Serkis (Snoke), and Laura Dern (Vice-Admiral Holdo): 

So many moving parts. Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, and Adam Driver are genuinely terrific. Really, everyone is -- it's the most naturalistic acting in a Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back. And Rian Johnson also manages some lovely shots while also slowing down a light-saber battle so that one can actually follow it. Laura Dern supplies a certain amount of delight as a Rebel -- sorry, 'Resistance' -- Vice Admiral. 

Are there problems? Definitely. It's too long by one goofy sub-plot and one too many climactic battles. There are moments the movie seems to be trying to sell as many new toys as possible, including not one but two new flavours of Star Destroyer, a Death-Star-derived bunker buster cannon, and the Porgs, which look like the bastard offspring of puffins and Keane kids.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Dune's Frank Herbert filed suit against Star Wars and lost. 40 years later, a Dune parallel surfaces. Luke now resembles the disconsolate Paul Muad'dib of Dune Messiah for the first two-thirds of the movie. Oh well. Are we getting Lando Calrissian back for the third movie of this trilogy? Because that fecking Porg in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon really isn't a replacement for Han Solo. Recommended.

Table 19 (2017)

Table 19 (2017): written by Mark & Jay Duplass and Jeffrey Blitz; directed by Jeffrey Blitz; starring Anna Kendrick (Eloise McGarry), Rya Meyers (Francie), Lisa Kudrow (Bina Kepp), Craig Robinson (Jerry Kepp), Tony Revolori (Renzo Eckberg), Stephen Merchant (Walter), June Squibb (Nanny Jo), and Wyatt Russell (Teddy): Barely released romantic comedy basically follows the principles of The Breakfast Club and applies them to a wedding. Orson Scott Card loved it!

Table 19 is the last table at the wedding reception, there for all the losers. I guess. But this ragtag group will bond in their loserdom, realize they're not losers, and solve their life's problems. Mostly. The movie rises on the charm of its actors and falls on the script problems -- which is to say, the script needs to be funnier. And it could have been. It's floated around Hollywood for something like a decade! Still, a decent time-filler with a cute dog. Lightly recommended.

The League Of Regrettable Heroes (2015) by Jon Morris

The League Of Regrettable Superheroes (2015) by Jon Morris: Jon Morris of the Gone&Forgotten blog does a terrific balancing act here, mocking and celebrating in equal measure some of the goofiest super-heroes in the history of American comic books. 

While the Golden Age (1938-1954) supplies such non-luminaries as the Red Bee, The Black Dwarf, and Doctor Hormone, the book also presents some of the most ridiculous heroes from other eras. 

AKA X-Poochie

The mullet-ridden, EXTREME 1990's provides such unfortunate decisions as Marvel's Adam X-the-Extreme (probably not coming to a Marvel movie any time soon, though there's always Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.!) and Ravage 2099 (don't ask). 

Earlier decades gave us Marvel truck-driving hero U.S. 1 and DC's dadaistically ridiculous 'New Look' Blackhawks and the Metamorpho-wannabe Ultra the Multi-Alien.

CTE forced an early retirement

Those were the days.

Most of these heroes had fairly short runs, demonstrating that the marketplace sometimes knows what it's doing. Some are absurdly offensive (Mr. Muscles conquers polio by working out a lot). Some are awesome and recognized as such (Joe Simon's Prez got a terrific return appearance in Neil Gaiman's Sandman in the early 1990's). 

Some have even moved into the mainstream (Steve Ditko's hilarious Squirrel Girl). Some are truly screwed-up product advertisements (Marvel's NFL Superpro, who really deserved a crossover with Marvel's Kickers, Inc., a team of crime-fighting professional football players). 

There's now a second volume of this focusing on goofy super-villains. I'll have to pick that up. In any case, hours of fun and education make this Highly Recommended.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Mmm... big yellow cocktail.

The Long Goodbye [Philip Marlowe #6] (1953) by Raymond Chandler: It's difficult to assess a Raymond Chandler novel when you've read a lot of the novels influenced by Chandler's hard-boiled detective style, much less seen great movie adaptations and great movies influenced by Chandler's transformative work.

The voice of the Chandlerian narrator -- in this case and many others, Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe -- is that of a cynical, world-weary detective who will nonetheless try to do the right thing. As first-person narration, it's almost infinitely adaptable. 

The narration of the original theatrical release of Blade Runner echoes it. The bleak world of Chinatown subverts it. The triumph of The Big Sleep lies partially in almost perfectly adapting it to the big screen, with help from Chandler himself (and Leigh Brackett, who 30 years later would help write The Empire Strikes Back, the most world-weary Star Wars movie of them all.

Chandler famously railed against the artificiality of most mystery novels in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder." The Long Goodbye seems like the fictional expansion of that essay. Marlowe doesn't so much solve a couple of mysteries as get caught in their undertow before being vomited upon the shore. 

It's a triumph of style and characterization. As a plot, The Long Goodbye makes Murder on the Orient Express look like a true-life case study -- and as the climax recedes once and once again, things get stranger and more complex.

Chandler's depiction of grimy, gaudy Los Angeles rings about as true today as it did then -- or at least as truthy. Philip Marlowe exists not as a possible character, but as the more poetic extrapolation of Dashiell Hammett's earlier Sam Spade. Humphrey Bogart played them both, which somehow makes all the sense in the world. Highly recommended.

The War of the Worlds (2005)

The War of the Worlds (2005): adapted by David Koepp and Josh Friedman from the novel by H.G. Wells; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Tom Cruise (Ray Ferrier), Dakota Fanning (Rachel Ferrier), Justin Chatwin (Robbie Ferrier), Tim Robbins (Harlan Ogilvy), and Miranda Otto (Mary Ann): 

Spielberg and company's so-so, 9/11-inflected update of H.G. Wells' seminal tale of alien invasion has some nice moments between about the 20- and 80-minute mark. Unfortunately, the movie features two of the most annoying offspring in film history for Tom Cruise to bond with during an alien invasion because alien invasions just aren't interesting unless they involve Steven Spielberg's go-to trope, The Absent Father.

It's important for Spielberg, as Old Hollywood's last air-bending Avatar, to remind us that even when billions of humans are literally getting dusted, as in 'turned to dust,' FAMILY IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS. 

And what a family! They're so great that the kids' grandparents live on the only street in Boston that doesn't get destroyed by marauding alien tripods who thirst for human blood to... fertilize their plants? I think Wells really nailed the concept of 'Keep it simple, stupid'  by having the Martians suck human blood out of people for their own dining pleasure, and not to feed their high-fructose corn crop. 

The tripods look nice. The redesign of the tentacled creatures of Wells' novel sucks, though. They look like teddy-bear versions of the aliens from Independence Day. Tim Robbins is wasted playing a guy who's somehow found safe haven in the basement of a house located about three feet from a major battle between aliens and the U.S. military. 

Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise. He's supposed to be an unlikeable cad who LEARNS BETTER, but he mainly seems justified in his animosity towards his annoying children. He also turns out to be the most competent man in the world, single-handedly taking down an invulnerable tripod with a hand grenade, among other things. Yet he doesn't know his ten-year-old daughter is allergic to peanuts! Ha ha! Absent Dad, you are such a card.

With about 30 minutes to go, the film-makers seem to lose interest in their story, sticking us in that basement with Tim Robbins for an eternity before rushing through the last 15 minutes of the film like holiday travelers with a plane to catch. Oh, well. The ferry scene is pretty swell, as are the early city scenes with the tripods rising out of the ground. Lightly recommended.