The Harder They Fall (1956)

the harder they fall

I friggin’ love Humphrey Bogart. In fact, he tops my Top 10 list of greatest actors. He played cold-blooded villains, cynical but good-hearted tough guys, down-on-his-luck schmucks, and romantic leads with the same grace and passion. It doesn’t hurt that he’s been in some of the greatest movies ever made. With a resume that includes Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, the Treasure of the Sierre Madre, and the African Queen it’s no wonder Bogart comes out as the actor starring in the most films on the AFI top 100 films list.

In fact, until now, I’ve loved all of the films I’ve ever seen starring Humphrey Bogart. I do my very best to catch any film in which he had a role. Being that he acted in some 74 movies during his career, I’ve still got a bit to go.

It was with great anticipation that I watch any Bogart film. You just can’t go wrong with a Bogie movie, I often say. Recently, I grabbed a worn-out VHS copy of his last film, The Harder They Fall. It pains me to say, but I can no longer claim that I’ve never seen a Humphrey Bogart picture that was less than wonderful.

It’s not that The Harder They Fall is a bad film. In fact, there were some rather good moments. It’s just that when compared to the other Bogart films I have seen this one falls well below the bar.

What pains me, even more, is that some of its failures lies in the hands of Bogart himself. Yet before we take the man off of his pedestal, I must remind the reader that at this point in his life, he was dying of cancer. It had not been diagnosed yet, but there is little doubt that Bogart’s insides were being eaten alive during filming. Legend has it that a sound-alike dubbed his lines during post-production.

His illness shows through the performance. He looks tired, and haggard throughout.

But you say “The character is tired and haggard, so shouldn’t the actor act that way?”

“Yes,” of course, I’ll answer, “but Bogart practically made a career of tired, haggard characters yet in films like Casablanca or Treasure of the Sierra Madre he embodied the characters and made them look tired.” Here, you see an actor who is a master craftsman performing at a much lower level than we’ve come to expect.

But, look, I spit on no man’s grave. Remember a fine actor’s better performances; let a dead man have his dignity.

There is a film in there, besides a Bogart performance. The plot concerns a down-and-out sportswriter, Eddie Willis (Bogart) hired as publicity man for an up-and-coming boxer (Mike Lane) who can’t actually box. The boxer, Toro Moreno, is a giant of a man who looks menacing but punches like a girl (and not a girl like Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby). You see Toro is mob-connected boxing promoter Nick Benko’s (Rod Steiger) fighter. Benko plans to buy every fight Toro boxes all the way up to a championship bout in which, betting on the other fighter, Benko will make a bundle.
The story is actually a good one, and with a little tweaking it could have been a great film. But the writing never really sparkles, and the direction never rises above the material.

Steiger’s performance is the films saving grace. He manages to come off completely ruthless, and immoral while still making the audience love the character. He out acts Bogart in every scene, and even with a tired, sick Bogart that is still quite an accomplishment.

Bogart may look tired on the screen, but his presence is still a formidable one. His lines don’t shine like they might in The Big Sleep, and his character isn’t quite as iconic as Rick in Casablanca, but he still manages to outperform most of the actors who’ve put their faces on a theatre screen.

I’ll take an average Bogart performance over Tom Cruise’s best roles any day.

The Ladykillers (1955)

the ladykillers poster

As part of the ongoing transition of the blog, I have decided to add a weekly feature: The Classic Movie Review of the Week. I’ve always reviewed classic movies, so I’ve decided to do a full-length review of one classic movie each Monday.

The Coen Brothers have a very unique sense of style. Their films are often visually arresting, filled with violence and a bizarre sense of humor that is both black and hyperkinetic. Nearly each of their films has tackled a different genre.

Their first film, Blood Simple, is filled with violence, double crossings, betrayals, and lots of shadows. You could call it an update of the traditional film noir. In fact, many of the Coen Brothers’ films are influenced by noir, both from the cinema and many of the detective novels that spawned them.

Miller’s Crossing, though primarily a gangster picture, takes much of its plot from two Dashiell Hammett novels: The Glass Key and Red Harvest. Likewise, the plot twists that go nowhere in The Big Lebowski are reminiscent of many of Raymond Chandler’s works, and IMDB notes that the film was inspired by Robert Altman’s version of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Though, being a Coen film, they move the time frame up and make it a stoner flick. It’s The Big Sleep meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

The Coen’s have also created their own versions of such genres as the screwball comedy (Hudsucker Proxy with Jennifer Jason Lee doing her best His Girl Friday impression), the musical (O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?), cartoon shorts from Looney Tunes (Raising Arizona) and the true life crime drama (Fargo, though in true Coen Brother’s style they claimed it was based on real events, though they actually made it all up.)

In 2003 they hit on new territory with the romantic comedy, Intolerable Cruelty. Though filled with some classic Coen moments their take on this genre fell flat. Being the first film in which someone other than the brothers took partial screenplay credits (Sam Raimi takes co-writing credit on Hudsucker Proxy, but he is an old Coen collaborator.) The results of relinquishing some control of the story created what is easily the brother’s worst picture up to that point.

Their next picture likewise took over some unusual ground for the genre. They remade the 1955 British crime comedy, The Ladykillers. It stunk, and that badly.

Working with other writers = not very good.
Remaking somebody else’s film = crapola.

Here’s hoping their next picture is a complete original.

The Ladykillers was bad enough that it made me wonder what the Coens saw in the original that made them think updating it was a good idea. I checked out a copy from the excellent local library to see how it faired.

After watching it I can see how it appealed to the Coen Brothers. It is a bit absurd, quite funny, and rather violent, in a twisted kind of way.

This time Alec Guinness stars in the Tom Hanks role as a criminal mastermind who poses as a genteel professor renting a room in a feeble old ladies’ home. His gang of thieves (which includes a very young Peter Sellers in one of his earliest film roles) plot their crime while pretending to be a band rehearsing in the home. The house, it seems, is the perfect location for a hideout after they rob an armored car. The old lady will provide a perfect alibi.

The setup is really just a means to create some pretty humorous comedy involving the gang of criminals being befuddled by a harmless, clueless old lady. The comedy is rather British, which doesn’t always translate to an American state of mind. I found it to be rather smiling funny, rather than bowling over, spitting popcorn on my carpet funny.

The real fun for me was watching Alec Guinness act the role of a smarmy, conniving crook. He really chews on his role, creating such a vile villain, it becomes difficult to believe that the old lady (whose character is called Mrs. Wilberforce, and who I really must stop referring to as an old lady) would let him into her house, no matter how gentlemanly his manners make him seem. It is a part a long way from Obi-Wan Kenobi or Colonel Nicholson, and it is nice to see him play such a bad guy.

Katie Johnson (who plays Mrs. Wilberforce, who I really must stop referring to by her character name) does a lovely job playing an eccentric, out-of-touch, and really rather lovely lady. And it is a treat to see Peter Sellers before he was Inspector Clouseu or Dr. Strangelove.

In the end, I’m still unsure as to why the Coen Brothers chose this film to remake. Or why they chose to remake any picture at all, since their greatest skill lies within crafting interesting stories. The original was an enjoyable picture and covers similar territory as many of the Coen pictures. Yet there are so many other films that cover the same kind of ground, which could have been chosen. Perhaps it was just obscure enough that they figured that most audiences wouldn’t have anything to compare their remake too, unlike remaking say The Maltese Falcon or something. Although John Turturro could really do something with the Peter Lorre part.

Blackboard Jungle (1955)

blackboard jungle poster

Ten years ago Larry Clark released his controversial film, Kids (1995), about teens having sex, doing drugs, and generally acting like delinquents. The world was shocked (SHOCKED, I tell you) that a film would depict teenagers behaving so badly. Surely, it was an exaggeration. There were exposes on the national news shows, and lines formed outside the theatres picketing and boycotting the pictures.

I had just graduated from high school a few months before I saw the film, and while I found the picture to be a good one the only shock I felt was that of disbelief that parents were so unaware by their children’s behavior. Those kids seemed a lot like the ones I went to high school with. Of course, kids were, and are, having sex and doing drugs. The quarterback of our football team bragged about having sex on the 50-yard line. Another used to tell us about having sex underneath the soundboard in the light booth of the auditorium (sorry Mrs. Patton). The headbangers used to make bongs out of stolen beakers from the chemistry lab.

They say similar reactions came from screenings of the 1955 classic Blackboard Jungle, and its depictions of juvenile behavior in an inner-city high school. After watching the film all I can say is that parents seem to be as unaware of their children then as they are now.

It’s not that the film is a bad one, in fact, it is rather good, it just seems strange that anything appearing in the film was controversial at one time. It feels tame by today’s standard.

It’s like Rock Around the Clock, the Bill Haley song that opens and closes the film, apparently caused quite a stir amongst moviegoers and critics alike. With songs by shock rockers like Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor filling up the airwaves and movie soundtrack it’s hard to imagine how such a tame “oldie” could ever create the smallest wave of shock.

What we get from the actual film is a story about a high school teacher who takes his first job in an inner city school filled with all kinds of hoodlums. The teachers and staff that have been there for years are all content with simply maintaining some type of order. Of doing little more than surviving, and certainly not trying to do any actual teaching.

The new teacher, Richard Dadier (played superbly by Glenn Ford) actually cares about his students and wants them to succeed both academically and as fellow humans. Though he takes more than one beating (both philosophically and literally) he never gives up his task of being a teacher, of being a guide to those students.

The always impeccable Sidney Poitier, in one of his earlier roles, plays Greg Miller, an obviously intelligent student who acts as a leader for one of the school gangs. Dadier sees in Miller a chink in the student’s resistance and attempts to pull him into his side. Miller resists at first, but in a move that must be obvious to even the most half-hearted filmgoer, he eventually proves a powerful ally to the teacher.

It is here that my biggest complaint about the film lies. Much of the plot turns are telegraphed to the viewer way in advance. There is no doubt about how the film is going to end, nor even much of how it is going to get there. The film could use some real surprises, or at least bring to the table something deeper, or more original in terms of story.

That being said it is still an interesting ride to ride out, by the means in which the story is told. The acting is filled with fine, nuanced performances highlighted by Ford and Poitier’s scenes together. Director Richard Brooks adds some real tension to scenes in which we already know the outcome.

It is interesting to see films seeking to enlighten an audience by turning a blind eye to juvenile delinquency. It becomes preachy at times even beginning the film with a card noting the problem of the unruliness of the nation’s teenagers and that this must be stopped. That, along with some of the more trite plot points, it can sometimes feel like you’re attending a sermon, not watching a movie. It is to the director’s credit and the fine performances that the film mostly rises above the material and presents a solid piece of filmmaking.

Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist

dr katz

Editors Note: Dr. Katz is now available on DVD (But sadly not Blu-ray) so you may purchase your copy at the movie seller of your choice. The Midnight Cafe does not condone piracy.

My good friend Jamison recently sent me the entire series of Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist on DVD. This has brought much joy to my heart because none of the episodes from this series are yet available on DVD. My friend bought it off of Ebay from someone who essentially put his dubbed off the TV VHS tapes into the DVD format. The quality ranges from really quite excellent to something more akin to rather unwatchable garbage. Most of the episodes have that old VHS tape that’s been sitting in the attic for a bit too long look. But it’s Dr. Katz on DVD and I’ll take what I can get.

The other, quite humorous, but in this collection is that whoever mastered the DVDs didn’t manage to edit out most of the commercials. A few of the episodes are presented commercial-free and look quite professional. The rest retain the commercials, but the creator has done us the favor of fast-forwarding through them. This creates a nice nostalgic effect to the collection, reminding me of my days of recording favorite TV shows and fast-forwarding through the commercials myself. He even does the guesswork on when the commercials will end, and the show will begin. Many times he’ll hit play only to find another commercial coming on. Or he’s a little slow on hitting the play button, fast-forwarding through the first few moments of the show.

The commercials themselves are also quite interesting. Craig Killborn is still hosting the Daily Show, Comedy Central is overhyping their sure-to-be hit show “Bob and Margaret” and Dell computers with 8 megs of RAM and 10 gig hard drives sell for only $2600!

The show itself is classic. It’s one of my all-time favorite television comedies. The set-up for the show has Jonathan Katz playing Dr. Jonathan Katz, a professional therapist (high concept, I know). His patients consist of guest stars who are generally professional comics, whose “problems” are generally bits from their acts. Other characters are Dr. Katz’s perpetually lazy son, Ben (H Jon Benjamin), and his sarcastic secretary Laura (Laura Silverman – how did they come up with these character names?). There is also the bartender and regular customer at a local pub Dr. Katz frequents (Julianne Shapiro and Will LeBow respectively).

Ben: “I’m saying, Dad, that it’s lonely at the top. So if you wanna ride my gravy train, you better hop on, now.”
Dr. Katz: “Why do you think this is the top? I mean, you could be lonely for any number of reasons.”
Ben: “What are you trying to say?”
Dr. Katz: “I’m saying, you’re a lonely guy. … Don’t blame it on being at the top.”

The best part of the show is the interaction between Katz, Ben, and Laura. The three have great chemistry and often feel more like three hilarious friends sitting around trying to one-up each other. I doubt the show ever had much of a script, for it all seems rather improvised on the spot.

Ben: “I bought a, uh, one of those fake fountains. You plug it in, and the water runs constantly.”
Dr. Katz: “A urinal.”

The only problem with the show is when the guests aren’t all that funny. In the early days, the guests consisted solely of stand-up comics. Generally, these guys are spot-on hilarious, doing their best bits. But, sometimes the guest is more annoying than funny (Judy Tenuta anyone?) Since an individual guest’s bits can make up 1/4th of the show, a bad guest could really drag the show down. This is especially true when as the show got a popular, non-comedian to appear. I loved Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Seinfeld, but here she says nothing funny, and her only gag seems to be that she goes to the toilet a lot while she’s pregnant. Katz makes the most of poor guests, though, and milks the material for all its comedy potential.

Dr. Katz: “Hold on one second, Ben, let me play the Devil’s advocate here, just for one minute.”
Ben: “No Dad, don’t, okay please, I don’t like the Devil’s advocate thing; you’re too good at it.”
Dr. Katz: “What about ‘Duck Duck Goose’?”
Ben: “Okay, you got a deal.”

In the last season, the show did what too many television shows do when running out of steam: it tinkered with its own premise and added characters. While in the previous five seasons, the only people with speaking parts were the main characters and the guest patients. In season 6 suddenly there are miscellaneous extras popping up. Why suddenly is there an exchange between Ben and his dentist? Todd, the video store clerk has become running regularly into this season as well. The actor portraying Todd (Todd Barry) had previously been a patient on the show. While the bits between Todd, the clerk, and Ben are usually funny, it is an additional character to a show flooded already with too many characters, and not enough time.

These are minor complaints in what is one of the funniest series to have ever hit the airwaves.

The African Queen by CS Forester

the african queen book

See, I told you I would still write reviews. I’m just eliminating the stress that I had built into them.

The fact that it took me over 2 months to read the mere 136 pages that make up CS Forester’s The African Queen tells a great deal about the quality of the writing. Classic film buffs will note that this is no fault of the story, for it made a brilliant motion picture starring the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. The problem, then, lies in the telling.

In Creative Writing 101 writers learn the importance of showing and not telling. Forester must have been sick that day for he spends his entire novel telling the reader exactly how the characters feel, think, and are. He never allows his character’s actions or words to give the reader an emotional response, he spends his pages telling us how to feel.

There is no chance to gain insight into a character through what they do, for Forester is much too busy telling all the pertinent details. There is no subtlety in the text. If we don’t get something the first time, rest assured, he will repeat himself two or three times.

What will keep the reader reading is the power of the story itself. For many years Rose has been assisting her missionary brother in the heart of the African Jungle. When he dies suddenly she enlists Charlie, a gin-swigging rough and tumble riverboat captain, to ship her back to civilization. Along the way they must traverse deadly rapids, disease-infected hoards of mosquitoes, German soldiers, and a river that is not meant for the sturdiest of boats, never mind the old, rickety African Queen.

Forester fills his tale with plenty of chills and spills. There is enough action to keep the pages turning, and an old-fashioned romance to keep the lovers interested. Truth be told, there is almost too much action. In nearly every paragraph, some new obstacle presents itself that must be overcome. Each obstacle is overcome, of course, and that a bit too quickly. Though the obstacles are fretted over and stressed about, Charlie and Rose seem to overcome them within a few sentences; only to find another one waiting around the corner. It would have served the novel better to have had fewer problems, and more struggle to overcome them.

Forester has a keen eye for mechanical detail. He gives good exposition over the mechanics of making an old steamer like the African Queen keep going. He paints a detailed picture of the African landscape, as seen from a riverboat. The physical details of the boat and its surroundings are all apt, and true. It is the abilities of humans that bring an air of falseness.

Rose, though having never piloted a boat before, in a very short time somehow manages to master the intricacies of sailing a difficult steamer through dangerous rapids. Likewise, she sheds her moral inhibitions like a heavy coat in the sultry African climate. We are led to believe that an innocent, sheltered missionary can suddenly give up all of her beliefs and morals to a dirty, foul-mouthed, drunk all in a matter of days.

Ultimately I would have been better off having just watched the movie again and left the novel on the bookshelf. The movie retains all of the excitement and grandeur of the story and elevates the storytelling to the level of a classic. The book seems flat in comparison.

American Tabloid by James Ellroy

american tabloid cover

Like the supermarket rags in the title, this James Elroy novel is loaded with grandiose stories, half-truths, and more conspiracy theories than an Oliver Stone wet dream. It rewrites history in a manner akin to the Lone Gunmen in the X-Files and is a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

It is filled with wall-to-wall celebrities. There are politicians (John F.and Robert Kenney, J Edgar Hoover), flashy millionaires (Howard Hughes), and mobsters galore (Santo Traficante, Jack Ruby, etc). It retells the rise to power of JFK through a myriad of conspiracies, ending with the ultimate conspiracy, the assassination of JFK.

It is filled with bits of history and fact, but also unproven conspiracies and outright fabrications. I am not a historian, so my knowledge of the time period, while pretty good, is by no means complete. I suspect this is true for the majority of Americans. None of us know exactly what happened the day JFK was assassinated. There are a lot of theories floating around, and they all sort of blend together after a while. Elroy uses this to his advantage.

For example, it is generally accepted that John F Kennedy had affairs. During the Clinton scandals, numerous journalists touted this as absolute truth, though I’ve never once seen any hard data confirming the information. Before anyone sends in the hard data, understand that whether or not JFK did have affairs is beyond the point. As a culture we believe it, it is accepted as fact. There are many more rumors and flat-out lies, that as a culture we know, that we have heard for the umpteenth time, that it feels like the truth. Elroy writes all of these things as hard truths and then kicks them up several notches. Here, JFK not only has a few casual affairs but is an oversexed hound dog. He employs multiple persons to set him up with one-night stands at every campaign stop, for every night of the week.

Likewise, such fascinating conspiracies of the American group mind such as the CIA/Mob collaboration to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the CIA sanctioning of heroin sales to support this collaboration,. Or Joe Kennedy’s mob ties, and Jack Ruby’s collaboration with the JFK conspiracy, are all made concrete facts and punctuated with exclamation marks, ad infinitum.

There aren’t any good guys in this novel. Anybody who starts out with anything close to a normal set of morals has completely lost them by the story’s end. Though filled with real people, it centers around three completely fictional characters. Kemper Boyd carries out a tangled web of undercover work for the FBI, CIA, the Kennedy clan, and the mob. Pete Bondurant is an ex-cop who plays bodyguard for Howard Hughes and then Jimmy Hoffa and has a penchant for bloody violence. Ward Little is an FBI agent hungry for anti-mob activity, who through a series of mistakes eventually begins working directly for them.

Each character is destroyed, destroyed again, and sometimes built up a little before they are yet again destroyed. Nobody walks away clean, or undamaged. The plot gets a little thick and there were moments where I wish it had been supplied with a map and a compass. The subplots are so plentiful and intertwined it’s sometimes difficult to tell where you are at within the myriad of webs. Elroy’s style doesn’t help in this matter, for it is about as hard-boiled as a writer can be. I don’t think there is a paragraph longer than five sentences, and there are a great many consisting of only one line. Many critics have found this immensely annoying and find the novel difficult to read because of it. I had no problem with it. It made the novel faster to read, and made it seem much lighter than it actually is. Although I must say that at the halfway point through the sequel, it has grown quite tiresome.

To supply some of the details left out in the brevity of his prose, Elroy supplies any number of fake documents including tabloid cutouts, top secret documents, and verbatim transcripts of phone conversations.

It is a fast-paced, exciting, often violent book. It is pulp fiction with literary sensibilities. It doesn’t work particularly well as revisionist history, but for fans of hard-boiled crime stories, or those who can’t get enough conspiracy it is a thoroughly enjoyable read.

The Apartment (1960)

the apartment poster

I came to this film expecting a light-hearted romantic comedy. Watching the trailer did nothing to eliminate this idea. The actual film is hardly light-hearted and is really rather sad, and dramatic.

The setup is fairly antiquated and somewhat sexist. Jack Lemmon plays CC Baxter, a quiet gentleman working as a small cog in a very big insurance company. He also happens to have a very spacious apartment to himself. Word gets around the office about the apartment and Baxter’s agreement to not be home on certain nights. Soon enough every male executive in the office is hitting him for use of the apartment for evening trysts.

Though modern audiences probably grimace at such a concept, it is pulled off quite well. For the most part, the comedy remains intact. When I said that it isn’t a comedy, I don’t mean that there isn’t lots of humor to be found. It’s just that the drama is more involved than what we typically consider to be a comedy. There are some truly funny scenes one of which has Baxter getting out his apartment planner, and rescheduling several visits from the office men. In my favorite scene, he cooks pasta with a tennis racket.

The conflict of the film involves one of the top executives of the office, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), and a fun-loving elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLain). When Sheldrake begins using the apartment to rekindle his affair with Kubelik, he promotes Baxter at the office. Not knowing that Kubelik is Sheldrake’s love interest, Baxter begins courting her himself.

Tension builds up within the love triangle. Kubelik is not the fun-loving gal she at first seemed. As Baxter gets to know her better we find that she harbors some deep secrets and her actions take a downward spiral. The film becomes rather dark, rather grim. It turns even bleaker when the principal joke wears thin. It seems the only thing holding back every married man from having an extra-marital affair is a nice place in which to have it. There isn’t a man in the cast, except Baxter, who has the slightest moral aptitude.

Billy Wilder is one of the great directors of American cinema, and it certainly shows here. Instead of going for a more slapstick approach, and the material certainly could have been handled that way, he turns it into a more touching drama.

The three characters involved in the love triangle are all superbly acted. Lemmon and MacMurray are both at the top of their game. And MacLain reminds us that she was not always the kooky old lady waxing nutty about past lives. Here she is a beautiful screen presence and holds her own against the two male leads.

What I thought was going to be a light-hearted, fast-paced romp in the vein of Some Like It Hot, turned out to be a rather poignant, sad tale of the complexities of life. This was a little disappointing while watching the film, but after letting it sit inside the recesses of my mind, it has become one of the great films I have seen. This is not to say there isn’t a comedy, but instead of jokes, the comedy comes from within the characters themselves. As in life.

Talk To Her (2002)

talk to her poster

A friend of mine recently lent me her Chinese bootlegged copy of Talk to Her. I have seen a few other Pedro Almodóvar films and expected another tale filled with bizarre violence and kinky sex. What I wasn’t expecting was a rather moving tale of unrequited love.

Talk to Her reminded me quite a bit of the films of Todd Solondz. Like his movies, this film manages to make characters who commit rather heinous acts quite sympathetic. Equally alike, Talk to Her deals with the immense loneliness of its characters.

The story begins with a chance meeting between Marco (Dario Grandinetti) and Benigno (Javier Cámara) at a dance recital. Neither man knows the other, but they happen to have seats that are side by side. They later meet again at a private hospital, where Benigno is the caregiver to a beautiful dancer, Alicia, who has been comatose for several months. Marco is there visiting his girlfriend, a bullfighter who was recently gorged by a bull and is likewise comatose. A friendship builds between the two men, as they care for the women they love, though they cannot be loved back.

The film’s title comes from Benigno’s insistence that Marco speaks to the women as though they could hear him. He urges Marco to open up and tell his lady the intimate details of his life. Benigno is deeply in love with Alicia and treats her as if she was his lifelong lover, though she cannot respond in any way.

The film is very subtle and nuanced in meaning. Both men, though apparently quite heterosexual, spend most of the film in more standard feminine roles. They are the caregivers: washing, cleansing, and taking care of the women. Benigno is a male nurse. They become very good friends, and indeed seem to love each other deeply, yet they are hopelessly devoted to women who are deemed hopeless, doomed to never awaken from their coma.

Neither Benigno or Marco really knew these women in their waking lives. Benigno watched Alicia in her dance classes, from across the street, through his window. Marco had just recently met Lydia, interviewing her for a magazine, and finding the beginnings of romance. It is really only through their caring for these women while they are asleep that they begin to feel love for them.

Almodovar is careful to portray the characters as sympathetic while still tainting their devotions with something sinister, something perverse. As the stories conclude, one character’s actions become slightly horrific, and yet we still feel sympathy for him. Almodovar understands life’s complications and that it is too easy to broadly label people as one thing when reality goes much deeper.

In keeping with the kinkiness of his prior films, Almodovar throws in a sequence with Benigno retelling a silent film he watched recently. It rivals the bathtub scene in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, and inside the cheerleader’s pants scene in the USA Up All Night classic, Getting Lucky. Let’s just say for lovers of perverse, whacked-out cinema, it is a must-see.

Ultimately, Talk to Her is a bizarre, but moving portrait of unrequited love, friendship, and the complexity of human life. It is undoubtedly a difficult film emotionally, but one definitely worth sitting through and contemplating.

Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard

maximum bob

Reading an Elmore Leonard novel is a lot like watching a good, not great movie. There is a lot of style, dialogue that demands to be spoken out loud, and interesting and twisting plots, with great ease in being read. Maybe that’s why so many of his books are made into movies. They read like screenplays.

Maximum Bob was actually made into a television show starring Beau Bridges, but it didn’t last past a season.

What we get here is a breezy, fun novel about Bob Gibbs, a conservative, hard-nosed judge nick-named “Maximum Bob” for his tendency to deal out the full force of the law. Bob begins to fancy a no-nonsense probation officer, Nancy Baker, who is busy tangling with a couple of low-life losers. Things get complicated when a giant alligator shows up on Bob’s front porch scaring his former mermaid-turned-new-age-psychic wife into leaving him for good. Add into the mix Dale Crowe Junior, one of the aforementioned losers, who is plotting to flee from an oncoming prison sentence, and Owen, Dale’s uncle, and recently released ex-convict. The outcome is a wild ride, which is enjoyable to read, but without a lot of depth or staying power.

Leonard is a good craftsman. He has a real knack for creating interesting plots. He is often praised for his dialogue, but I can’t say that I was too impressed with it here. It has that screenplay feel to it, and would probably sound a lot better coming out of an actor’s mouth, than lying flat on the written page. Actually, that’s a good idea. Next time I read a Leonard novel I’ll act out all the parts.

I read the novel in a couple of days while basking in the sun at the local park. It was a good novel for that purpose. It was easy to pick back up after being distracted by the Frisbee players, and the ball-chasing dog, without having to think about what I had just read. It was entertaining enough to get me occupied while loafing for several hours as well. It is also forgettable enough that once I’ve written this review I’ll pretty much never think about it again. Well, at least until I browse the L-N shelf at the library.

28 Days Later (2002)

28 days later poster

The zombies are fast.

It’s true that in Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later the crazed, flesh-eating villains aren’t technically zombies. In fact, Boyle has gone to great lengths to qualify them as humans infected with a virus known as RAGE. Yet, to this reviewer at least, the differences seem moot. In traditional zombie pictures, and in this film the creatures are mindless, they carry a real zeal for human flesh, they have a predilection for turning everyone else into their like, and they are fairly easy to kill. Whether the creatures are the living dead so to speak, or infected by an incurable virus doesn’t make much of a difference. Though the zombies here, seem updated from their cinematic ancestors.

These zombies are fast.

Traditional zombies are a slow-moving lot. Having been rotting in their own graves for untold years, their reanimated flesh is a little atrophied, causing them to move at a slow, sluggish pace. This has always been a helpful plot point for the heroes in zombie films, for they are easy to run away from. In fact, zombies are generally able to kill their victims through sheer numbers. Individually they are easy to destroy, but as an oncoming onslaught, the sheer numbers win every time. Boyle circumvented this convenience by allowing his monsters to run at normal human speeds. It is an excellent update to the genre, giving the ability for more scares.

Man, I dug the first half of this movie. Well, except for the very, very beginning. The opening scene gives us the origin of RAGE, with a bunch of Clockwork Orange-inspired monkeys. I’ve never really dug origin scenes in zombie flicks. I think it’s much scarier to just have the zombies running around eating brains, without any reason for their existence. Origins, generally, just seem dumb. And here, with the infected monkeys being freed by some Green Peace types doesn’t really inspire any other feelings. Though, I suspect it was another move to plant this film outside the zombie track.

But after the scene of the dumb origin, things get really good. We’ve got a naked guy named Jim (Cillian Murphy) hooked up to various tubes in a hospital bed. I always like it when there is a bit of male nudity in a flick since there is always so much of the female variety. Anyways, Jim gets out of bed and wanders the streets of London. There are plenty of shots of Jim (fully clothed now) walking by big famous London monuments without another soul around. It seems London has been vacated. It is creepy and effective.

In a bit, Jim clamors into a church figuring to find some sanctuary, or at least have a few questions answered. What he finds is a bunch of dead folks piled up. In a good holy crap moment, Jim says, “Hello” to find a couple of the dead guys not so dead and jumping up. From there until the second half of the film, it is a constant run from the zombies.

The zombies really work in this film. They are fast, furious, and vicious. Jim eventually teams up with some other survivors and they set about trying to figure out what to do. Boyle really does a great job of adding tension to the film and keeping the scares up.

Then the film changes.

The group is rescued by a gang of all-male military types, living in a compound. Turns out the military types are a bunch of psychos and the film turns from being a zombie flick into being a stranded-in-a-compound-with-a-bunch-of-psycho-military-types kind of film. To make sure we know this is no longer a zombie flick, a big group of zombies launches an attack on the compound only to be massacred with machine guns and land mines.

In this half of the film, I don’t dig nearly as much. Zombie flicks always have trouble filling out their whole hour-and-a-half time slot. Even with a good introduction of characters, and a slow build to zombie free-for-all, there is still plenty of filler time. Here, the filmmakers seem to have decided that they might as well dump the zombies and give us some other tension-filled concoction. But, there isn’t really enough time to develop the military end of the story and it feels wrong.

It’s too bad too because that first half was really promising.