MCN Columnists
Mike Wilmington

By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com

Wilmington on DVDs: The Rest. Water for Elephants, The Last Mountain, Rare Exports/Santa Claus Conquers the Martians; Haunted Summer; Sands of the Kalahari; The Man in the Net

Water for Elephants  (Three Stars)
U.S.: Francis Lawrence, 2011

Water for Elephants is an old-fashioned romantic picture done in new-fangled ways, and it‘s so good for such a long time, that it seems a shame, at the end, to feel so let down by it.

But that’s how it goes… Director Francis Lawrence’s show, co-starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz as an incendiary circus triangle — takes place in the Depression, in the ‘30s, in a flashback, in a circus, on a train or under the big top. And it’s a movie awash in memory, about the romance of the circus: about the circus as the canvas-tent palace of dreams. It‘s fitting, in a way, that this movie is set in 1931, when America’s illusions were being progressively stripped away.

The best of Water for Elephants – directed by Lawrence (maker of I Am Legend, that 2007 Richard Matheson science fiction horror shocker beloved of Ben Lyons), and scripted by writer Richard LaGravenese (of The Fisher King and The Bridges of Madison County) from a romantic bestseller by Sara Gruen — recalls the ways movies can transport us into visions of the past, and into the ways we want life to be: in this case, a portrayal of the circus world in Depression times as an empire of escape, a fatasyland of sawdust and tinsel. It’s a domain as poor and dangerous perhaps, as the economically shattered post-crash world around it, and as tawdry and fake. But it’s also somehow lovelier and dreamier.

The worst of it though, reminds us of how compromised and awash in clichés and phony glamour movies too often are.

Centering around those three movie star circus people above and an elephant named Rosie (played by the amazingly photogenic Tai) it’s a triangle drama — with Pattinson, the melancholy hunk of Twilight, as an idealistic veterinary student who runs away and (accidentally) joins the circus; Witherspoon as Marlena (Dietrich reference?) the lovely, sexy blonde bareback rider he goes crazy for; and Waltz as August, the circus’s brutal and egocentric Ubermensch boss, also its master of ceremonies and, unfortunately for Jacob, also Marlena’s husband, and the young vet’s bad, volatile nemesis.

The movie’s story is as simple as a fairytale, which, in many ways it is: a fairytale disguised as a period drama. Sometime somewhat near the present, an old man of 93 or so, Jacob Jankowski (Hal Holbrook), is found wandering in a nearly empty circus at nightfall. The young circus employee who finds him, Charlie (Paul Schneider) is about to return him to where he thinks Jacob came from — the old folks’ home — when his interest is piqued by Jacob’s mention of his onetime circus background and his witnessing of a famous circus catastrophe from many decades ago.

Most of the rest of the movie is Jacob’s story, narrated at first by Holbrook (who should have done it all) and then by Pattinson as the young Jacob — a young man in 1931 with a seemingly promising future (and a hot date), whose imminent graduation from Cornell veterinary college is interrupted by his parents’ sudden death by car accident, and the revelation that they’ve lost all their money, and their home (to the bank of course), because they sacrificed everything to finance Jacob’s education.

Abandoning college, heartsore, without a dime (probably), Jacob hits the road. But the first train he hops turns out to be not a freight car full of hobos, but the circus train of Benzini Brothers, a cheaper, sleazier rival of Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey. Thanks to an kidly old coot who likes him, named Camel (Jim Norton), Jacob gets a job, shoveling manure. And the revelation that he‘s been at Cornell and knows animal medicine, prompts his employment by the glib, seductive and very mean circus king August (another inglorious bastard played by Christoph Waltz).

The story of Water for Elephants plays out in the obvious way — which is what a lot of us may want it to do. Young Jacob meets the beautiful bareback rider Marlena (Witherspoon) , falls in love, and gradually drives August insane with jealousy. All the while, we’re aware of that famous catastrophe to come, and aware also that it probably involves the movie’s elephant, Rosie (Tai), the new circus star picked up after the previous big animal star, Marlena‘s horse, has to be put down by Jacob because of a leg injury. (August wanted to work the injured horse for even more shows and loot, despite the animal’s awful pain.)

What LaGravenese gives us is a triangle, and a typical Depression movie triangle at that, with prototypical roles. The young poor guy with lots of dreams and maybe a brilliant future, but an eye for the leading lady. (Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda.) The streetwise platinum blonde girl who looks like an angel, but stares like a slut. (Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard or Barbara Stanwyck, bleached). The evil bastard with the money and the woman, who gets insanely jealous (Wallace Beery, Edward G. Robinson or Lionel Atwill).

I know there’s no movie with quite that cast, but wouldn’t you like there to be? The movie is good, when it’s good, not just because of its snazzy direction, or its literate, knowing script by LaGravenese, or its memorably sick and stylish villain (Waltz), or its eye-pleasing pretty girl/pretty boy lovers (Witherspoon and Pattinson), but also in large part due to its sumptuously tawdry period production design by Jack Fisk (Days of Heaven) and the lush, moody color cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros). But by the end, the cliches have piled up, and the climax seems rushed, contrived, and unfelt. It will not be found here, even mercifully buried in a SPOILER ALERT.

Thanks to Fisk and Prieto though, and to Lawrence, “Water for Elephants” is often as visually stunning as the best films of the period it evokes. It’s a good movie that probably should have been more than good, that stumbles and loses its legs by the end. Maybe the logistics of the last big scene were too much, or Pattinson’s Jacob just not that interesting an ersatz James Dean, or maybe the push for a crowd-pleaser clouded judgment.

Still, the movie looks great, and it has a fine, loathsome villain, and it has a pretty terrific elephant too. Rosie/Tai has that leathery skin that makes an elephant seem old and wise, and he moves his great bulk with the slow majesty that makes you applaud him, even if he just kneels and gets up on his hind legs or forelegs, and bows. The movie finally lost me. But it’s not the elephant’s fault.

The Last Mountain (Three Stars)
U.S.: Bill Haney, 2011

Imagine a monster movie, a science fiction horror film called “The Last Mountain.” Except it’s not the usual alien invasion or creatures-run-amok tale, but something a little more…plausible?
 
Something like a Sundance Film Festival documentary, we’ll say, set it in the present day, in a typical working class America state like West Virginia (which, after all, is where they shot Super 8), in a area called Coal River Valley, where for years People have mined coal and pulled it from the earth. We’ll have as our heroes, a rag-tag but gutsy group of ex-mining families, retirees, citizens: ordinary people who love their homeland, love coal mining country, but who’ve been noticing mysterious and horrible things happening all around them.
 
Polluted streams and rivers, mountains torn up, dead animals and fish, a high incidence of cancers, tumors and brain damage in adults and children, rivers filled with toxic sludge. All around them, the Appalachian mountains that gave their state its name (West Virginia is “The Mountain State”) being dynamited, blown up, leveled — the country of their childhood and heritage being torn apart and vanishing before their eyes.
 
Who are the culprits behind all this?

 The bosses. The corporate elite. The heads of the state‘s most powerful and well-connected coal-mining company: revealed here as a cabal of seemingly unscrupulous, bottomlessly greed-crazed creeps who have been systematically tearing up the land, breaking laws and polluting the environment for decades, but are protected by their money and power and by the many politicians — up to and including the President and Vice President of the United States — whom they’ve bought and paid for.
 
Who will fight them? Who can fight them?
 
What I’m describing is a horror movie all right, and it‘s called The Last Mountain. It did premiere at Sundance; in many ways, in subject, style and theme, it‘s the quintessential Sundance documentary. The Last Mountain is about something happening right now, in Coal River Valley: the ravaging of the land and the brutalization of its people by unabashed, unchecked corporate and political greed.
 
Directed, co-produced and co-written by Bill Haney (The Price of Sugar), it’s an account of the battle between the residents of Coal River Valley (and their champions), and a company called Massey Energy — the biggest coal-mining operation in West Virginia, and the third biggest, revenue-wise, in the country.
 
Arrayed against Massey and its state-wrecking business as usual, are a  group of local citizens, with names like Bo Webb (a Vietnam vet and ex-miner), Maria Gunnoe (a waitress, mother and long-time Boone County resident), Chuck Nelson (an ex-miner turned activist), Ed Wiley (an ex-Massey contractor and now an activist/protestor) and Lorelei Scarbro (another activist from a long-time mining family), aided by some outside celebrities and experts like environmental lawyer/writer/activist Robert Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy becomes, in some ways, the de facto star of this movie, but he doesn’t seem to want to be. He constantly defers to the others, those Coal River Valley activists whom he calls “true American heroes.”
 
 In The Last Mountain, Haney wisely also focuses on the human drama and turmoil, and on a lot of people, the ones being affected by all this, the ones fighting against it, the people dying of cancer, the communities under assault, and all around them the landscape disappearing, blown right off the mountain top and dumped in the rivers.
 
This is a typical liberal political documentary, which means that most of the witnesses agree with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., as do I. There are few defenders of Massey and the rest of the coal-mining industry — and frankly, I would have liked to see more of these clowns try to defend themselves. Examples: The President of the West Virginia Coal Association, Bill Raney (not to be confused with Last Mountain director Bill Haney), chats with Kennedy and calls the coal mining industry “practicing environmentalists.” And then there’s the very rich Mr. Blankenship, who pops up on TV to pooh-pooh the idea of greenhouse gasses and global warming and to claim that the Arctic is actually getting colder — but not as cold as his heart.
 
Meanwhile, the community activists here keep fighting. Sometimes they get arrested. I remember the Vietnam years. Seems like old times — but much less violent. (Except for those exploding mountaintops.)
 
 
The Last Mountain is a good documentary, both engrossing and illuminating. (If you want those press notes and some soberig statistics, , the official movie site is http://thelastmountainmovie.com

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Two Discs) (Three Stars)

Finland: Jalmari Helander, 2010 (Oscilloscope)

This dark little horror-fantasy-comedy, in the Trollhunter mode, is about an arctic mountain Finnish village/outpost where a horde of wild deadly Santa Clauses invades the town and endangers any humans who’s been naughty or nice. It’s somewhat like a Yuletifde version of Hawks’s The Thing or like Sands of the Kalahari (see below) with Saint Nicks instead of baboons, and the isolated snowy locale, moodily photographed,  makes it scary and at time, funny. With Onni Tommila as the boy protagonist, Johma Tommila and Per Christian Ellefsen. In Finnish and English, with English subtitles.

 

The package also includes a scruffy-looking print of the legendary bomb Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (U.S.: Nicholas Webster, 1964) (Zero  Stars).  In this flabbergasting  stinker, probably one of the worst movies you’ll ever see, a space ship full of squabbling Martians flies to Planet Earth to kidnap Santa Claus and put him to work back on Mars making and delivering cheesy-looking assembly-line presents.  Two cute tots stow away on the return flight to Mars, which proves to be a weird domain of cheap sets, bad lighting and papier mache’-looking caves inhabited by what seems to be a race of idiots. The music is by TV composer Milton Delugg, who contributes the now forgotten (with good reason) song “Hooray for Santa Claus!” irritatingly sung “Hooray for Santy  Claus!” by what seems to be a chorus of demented chipmunks. (Sample lyrics: “When we hear sleigh bells ring/Our hearts go ting-a-ling!”)

 Incredibly awful. I would say that this movie makes Plan Nine from Outer Space look like Citizen Kane, but you probably wouldn’t believe me, unless you’ve seen it. With John Call as Santa and the very young Pia Zadora as a Martian child.           

Extras: Writer-director Helander made two wry deadpan shorts about his Rare Exports theme (wild, evil  Santa Clauses) and they’re both in the Oscilloscope package: the festival hit 2003 Rare Exports Inc. (Three Stars) and the 2005 Rare Exports Inc — The Official Safety Instructions (Two and a Half Stars). Also Documentary, Featurettes, Photo Gallery, Concept art.

 Haunted Summer (Two and a Half Stars)

 U.S.: Ivan Passer, 1988 (MGM Limited Edition Collection)

As in Ken Russell’s far more baroque 1986 Gothic, this is the story of the summer spent in heavenly Swiss landscapes, dreaming up hellish tales, by some of England’s greatest, most famous, most reckless writers. The dreamers: hedonistic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (Philip Anglim) and rbel poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Eric Stoltz) and his wife Mary (Alice Krige) and her stepsister Claire (Laura Dern) and Lord Byron’s foil and object of ridicule, Dr. John Polidori (Alex Winter).

 This was the summer when Mary wrote “Frankenstein”  and Polidori wrote “The Vampyre,” thus anticipating ’30s Universal Studio’s horror classics agenda over a century early. 

Despite an excellent director (the Czech expatriate Ivan Passer, of Cutter and Bone and Intimate Lighting) and an intelligent script by that sometimes excellent playwright/scenarist Lewis John Carlino (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea) yield variable results, perhaps due to budgetary problems. It’s one of those oddball semi-prestigious Cannon ’80s productions from producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus; you get the impression throughout of something quite good and ambitious going wrong. Worth seeing, but neither haunted nor summery enough. No Extras. Made to order. Browse www.mgm.com or order from major online venders. 

  Sands of the Kalahari (Three Stars)

U.K.: Cy Endfield, 1965 (Olive Films)

In 1965, a year before Robert Aldrich directed  that underrated plane-crash-in-the-desert movie classic The Flight of the Phoenix (remade  badly in 2004) — with an extraordinary  cast that included James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Kruger, Ian Bannen (a great weirdo scene-stealing role), Dan Duryea, George Kennedy and Ernest Borgnine — writer-director Cy Endfield made a similar but far more cynical adventure/survival movie called Sands of the Kalahari, based on a novel by William Mulvihill.

It’s no Phoenix, but Endfield can be a first-rate action director and it’s worth a look. Endfield’s cast, less stellar and brilliant but still pretty interesting and offbeat, includes Stanley Baker (also Endfield’s producing partner and the star of their big 1964 hit Zulu) as a hard-drinking hero, Susannah York, Theodore Bikel, Harry Andrews, and Nigel Davenport as other survivors, and, as  a seeming hero who truns into a horrific villain, that sometimes shifty-looking ’60s leading man Stuart Whitman.

This colorful group’s plane hits a locust storm and  goes down in an African desert, somewhere near diamond country, and they find themselves faced with murderous heat, low water, bad communications, a colony of wild baboons and worst of all, human flaws and social disintegration — something about which  Endfield, an ex-blacklist victim who left the U.S. for England in the ’50s, may have often ruminated.

 The presence of the gorgeous York, crash-landed and stranded with the others, seems a bit phony-big-movieish, but she’s a good actress (remember Robert Altman’s Images) and she makes it work, as do the others.  The sandy location cinematography, by Erwin Hillier, of the Powell-Pressburger I Know Where I’m Going,  is excellent, and the ending is a sardonic shocker. By the way, if you’ve missed the first Jimmy Stewart Flight of the Phoenix, you’ve missed one of the great Aldriches.  No extras.

 undefined

The Man in the Net (Two and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Michael Curtiz, 1959  (MGM Limited Edition Collection)

Alan Ladd is a painter who’s fled the urban rat race for the suburbs and art; he’s also unhappily married to vixenish Carolyn Jones — who looks here like Bette Davis, with a Louise Brooks hairdo.  When Carolyn vanishes after a big public tiff, and he decides to vanish too, Ladd is branded a probable killer by the community’s adults but harbored by its children.

This odd little late film noir, which often suggests one of the better “Alfred Hithcock Presents” TV shows, but longer and with less irony, was made by two film noir masters — director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, The Breaking Point) and cinematographer John Seitz (Double Indemnity, This Gun for Hire, Sunset Blvd.).  It’s  a little sunny and even bland-ish for a thriller, but it’s a good example of the late, effortless Curtiz style.  It’s also well-written: adapted by sharp message guy Reginald Rose  (12 Angry Men)  from a story by mystery writer “Patrick Quentin,”  (“A Puzzle for Fools”) the pseudonym used by Hugh Wheeler, who later wrote the books for A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd.

 With all those names (including producer Walter Mirisch) Man in the Net should probably be better than it is. But it’s good enough: a decent time passer, in a late Hollywood Golden Age programmer way. With Charles McGraw (of The Narrow Margin), Tom Helmore (of Vertigo) and Diane Brewster (of  TV’s original “Maverick”). No extras. Made to order by on-line vendors. Browse www.mgm.com

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments are closed.

Wilmington

awesome stuff. OK I would like to contribute as well by sharing this awesome link, that personally helped me get some amazing and easy to modify. check it out at scarab13.com. All custom premade files, many of them totally free to get. Also, check out Dow on: Wilmington on DVDs: How to Train Your Dragon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Darjeeling Limited, The Films of Nikita Mikhalkov, The Hangover, The Human Centipede and more ...

cool post. OK I would like to contribute too by sharing this awesome link, that personally helped me get some amazing and easy to customize. check it out at scarab13.com. All custom templates, many of them dirt cheap or free to get. Also, check out Downlo on: Wilmington on Movies: I'm Still Here, Soul Kitchen and Bran Nue Dae

awesome post. Now I would like to contribute too by sharing this awesome link, that personally helped me get some beautiful and easy to modify. take a look at scarab13.com. All custom premade files, many of them free to get. Also, check out DownloadSoho.c on: MW on Movies: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Paranormal Activity 2, and CIFF Wrap-Up

Carrie Mulligan on: Wilmington on DVDs: The Great Gatsby

isa50 on: Wilmington on DVDs: Gladiator; Hell's Half Acre; The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Rory on: Wilmington on Movies: Snow White and the Huntsman

Andrew Coyle on: Wilmington On Movies: Paterson

tamzap on: Wilmington on DVDs: The Magnificent Seven, Date Night, Little Women, Chicago and more …

rdecker5 on: Wilmington on DVDs: Ivan's Childhood

Ray Pride on: Wilmington on Movies: The Purge: Election Year

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon