Category: Movie Reviews

I think you’ll find some surprises in this list.

1. Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) stars William Powell as a Boston man in a mid-life crisis who falls in love with a real, live mermaid (Ann Blythe). This movie is just chock-full of witty lines and preposterous situations: like when Mr. Peabody enters “The Wee Shop of Intimate Things” and tries to buy “half a bathing suit.” Or when a nosy P.R. man spots him bending over a fish pond and whispering heart-felt words of love to… a fish, it seems. They just don’t make ’em like this anymore!

2. Jason and the Argonauts (1963), in which Ray Harryhausen created some of the greatest, most eye-popping special effects ever, using clay models and his trademark stop-motion techniques. To this day, in spite of all our technological advances, no one has ever surpassed Harryhausen’s rendition of the giant bronze statue of Talos coming to life, and his battle between the Argonauts and a platoon of homicidal skeletons: two of the greatest special effects scenes ever, in one movie.

3. The Princess Bride (1987), William Goldman’s “bent fairy tale,” featuring pro wrestling legend Andre the Giant in his one and only movie role. But it’s Mandy Patinkin who steals the show, with his immortal lines, “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” You’ll never see a movie with a sprightlier, more creative screenplay.

4. One Touch of Venus (1948) Ava Gardner is a statue of the goddess Venus who comes to life and falls in love with department store clerk Robert Walker, and turns his humdrum life upside-down. This film is another festival of wit: song lyrics by Ogden Nash, and Eve Arden in a supporting role, delivering a fusillade of droll one-liners. Compared to this, movies today are made by cavemen.

5. Ugetsu (1953), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Many of you probably have never heard of this one. It’s a grim little tale of two idiots, a potter and his clod of a brother-in-law, who get caught up first in a civil war and then in supernatural events. Watch what happens when the potter thinks he has become the lover of a princess of a noble house. Sweet dreams!

All five of these movies have one thing in common: they are fantasies that thoroughly succeed in carrying you away for an hour and a half or so–and I do mean far away. But don’t worry. You can always come back.

Here’s another movie you’ve got to catch on youtube, free of charge: Poirot’s Christmas, a feature-length murder mystery starring David Suchet. Patty and I watched it last night, and it blew me away.

Against a background of beautifully-sung Christmas hymns (no “Frosty the Snowman” or anything like that), Hercule Poirot navigates his way through a complicated mess of crime, cruelty, murder, vengeance, and injustice–one of the nastier cases he’s ever had to investigate. Watching it had a strange effect on me: I found myself tearing up when the Christmas music started, and even praying silently. (I won’t tell you what I prayed, except to say I asked the Father to give Christmas more power in this poor, fallen world.)

Why this odd juxtaposition of crime and Christmas?

I can’t read Agatha Christie’s mind, but I can read my own. To ponder the crimes against the Christmas background was to me a very powerful reminder of why Our Lord Jesus Christ had to come here in the first place–a reminder that yes, He did come, and yes, He has saved us who put our trust in Him.

Not a bad achievement for a murder mystery.

Well, folks, here’s another one for you to avoid: The Happening (2008), M. Night Shyamalan‘s first R-rated film. Rated R for ridiculous. (Yikes, they think my name is hard to spell…)

Amazon customer reviewers have hanged this turkey from a lamppost. They don’t like the story, the acting, the directing–they don’t even like the music.

But I say that if you could make this movie starring Laurence Olivier and Judith Anderson, directed by Otto Preminger, written by Ben Hecht, with music by Beethoven, it still wouldn’t save The Happening. In a spirit of humanitarianism, I’ll try to spoil this movie for you so you won’t have any reason to watch it.

OK–for no apparent reason, everybody in New York starts committing suicide. It spreads all over the Northeast. We are shown one guy feeding himself to the lions at the zoo, and another feeding himself to farm equipment. It’s all supposed to be scary, but before very long, it’s just slapstick.

Why is this happening? Because Mother Gaea is really cheesed off at us, dude! Like, this disaster is only a warning of what’s gonna happen if we don’t learn how to be good little Greenies… Barf bag, please. You see, all these different plants have suddenly “evolved” this neurotoxin that makes human beings kill themselves. The plants release it into the air and it spreads on the wind. There is no defense. This is all laid out for us by a talking head at the end of the movie, in case we didn’t catch on earlier. You know your screenplay stinks when you have to plug in a talking head to tell your audience what happened. Then again, maybe Mr. Shyamalan doesn’t know that.

“Gee, mister–if this movie is so bad, why did you watch it?” I plead temporary insanity. I had no idea it’d be that awful. Leave me alone.

So once again the art of film is used to preach a load of pagan poppycock. I guess we’re supposed to worship The Planet, or else The Goddess will sic her plants on us. Better watch out for those plants, because they can magically evolve, at very short notice, one mean hombre of a neurotoxin. And then they’ll stop for a while to see if we’ve learned our lesson. Better trade in your SUV for one of those Government Motors electric doohickeys. And don’t use so much toilet paper! A dandelion might be spying on you.

 

As my wife was marveling at the latest “People of Walmart” on the ol’ computer, I couldn’t help asking, “Can I go back to Narnia now?”

The BBC treatment of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader came out in 1989. All right, some of the costumes are kind of hokey. But there is poetry here. It gets under your skin. It stirs the blood. When the voyagers come to Ramandu‘s island and meet the ancient, retired star–I mean a star brought down from heaven… This is among the most beautiful and emotionally moving scenes you will ever find on film. We have seen it many times, two tough old birds, and it never fails to bring up tears. Nor is it the only beauty in this movie. Best of all, it is all in the service of Jesus Christ Our Lord.

The new movie threw out all the poetry and underplayed the Christian theme. Fooey! Fools! Do you think beauty created by a human mind is cheap? Oh, we can create many things that seem to be beautiful… but they aren’t. The real thing is a gem of great rarity. And you threw it away. For all your gawdy special effects, for all the money that you spent, there was nothing–nothing!–in your Voyage that came within long miles of the poetry and beauty brought forth by C.S. Lewis and happily captured in this humble old BBC effort.

But then Christ is the fount of beauty. No one who is embarrassed to praise Him will ever create real beauty.

 

Everything outside wears a shining white mantle of snow, and icicles glitter from the eaves of all the houses. God has painted another beautiful picture.

Sometimes I am not able to follow the example of the Macabees, who laid off fighting on the Sabbath (unless they were attacked). If you’d like to see this morning’s set-to, go to the Chessgames.com website ( http://www.chessgames.com ), scroll down to “Chessforums,” click it, and then scroll until you find the “Playground Player Chessforum,” with the little green dinosaur for an avatar. That’s my forum. Click it and follow the discussion, in which I attempt to defend the right of a Christian baker in Oregon not to be forced to create a cake for a lesbian “wedding.” The state is flexing its muscles, trying to compel this man to do something abhorrent to his conscience. Sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it?

But that’s done for the time being, and we’re going to spend the afternoon watching the wonderful old BBC rendition of C.S. Lewis‘ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Part III of The Chronicles of Narnia. It’s vastly better than the fancy new 3-D movie version that came out a little while ago.

I love these stories because they never fail to remind me that, no matter how aggressive our statist bullies are today, Christ is King–and He shall reign forever and ever.

A dear and esteemed friend has privately objected to the strong language I used yesterday in reviewing The Grey. Well, what can I say? That movie really cheesed me off. In fact, I’m still angry.

Let us not forget that a movie is a story that is told, and nothing happens in the movie that the screenplay writers didn’t want to happen. In this case, I think it’s obvious that the purpose of this screenplay was to create a two-hour infomercial for atheism. The writers manipulated events so that, at the end of the movie, they could say to their audience, “See? There is no God! There’s only do0m, defeat, and despair!” And they took a great deal of trouble to set us up for this.

As a storyteller myself, I resent this abuse of the storyteller’s art. What kind of message is that–“It doesn’t matter what we do, there is no God, and we’re stuck”?

I’ll tell you what kind of message it is. It’s a lie. And it’s lies like this that are turning our Western civilization into a ruin. Shame on those who told it. Shame on Liam Neeson for prostituting his talent to it. Shame on all who are so in love with their own cleverness that they’re not clever enough to understand they’re serving Satan.

 

Hey, what is it with these movies in which everybody dies? My wife and I just watched The Grey, starring Liam Neeson, a 2011 survival story in which nobody survives. And along the way, the screenwriters give you an atheist message to go along with it–like finding half of a dead waterbug in your tainted potato salad.

A plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness and Liam Neeson, a professional wolf hunter, tries to lead the crash survivors to safety. He needn’t have bothered. Nobody makes it. The ones the wolves don’t kill, the weather polishes off.

Well, you bunch of sophomoric movie-makers, I say “Piss on you!” And on your pathetic and defeatist message, too. Is this how you get critics to say you’re smart? Fooey! Boo! Hiss! I defy you. My cat empties her glands in your direction.

I think it says something about our civilization, that it produces movies in which all the characters die.

I think our civilization had better get its act together before it becomes more of interest to archeologists than to bloggers.

Suppose, by some outlandish quirk of life, you found yourself sitting in a movie theater, watching the new remake of The Great Gatsby, with a rap soundtrack. You don’t know how you got there: it’s like waking up in Dracula’s castle.

To save your sanity, you slide hurriedly into a trance. And now you’re in another theater, with another movie playing. One of these, in fact–great movies that were never made, but should have been.

1. Ulysses starring Toshiro Mifune, directed by Akira Kurosawa. It just doesn’t get any better than this. Homer’s epic would translate beautifully to an old Japanese setting, especially if the screenwriters concentrated on what happens when Ulysses finally gets home and finds his house occupied by “suitors” planning to rape his wife and murder his son. The Kirk Douglas Ulysses is one of my favorite films, but this would be even better. Much better.

2. Only in New England starring Joseph Cotten, directed by Otto Preminger. This is from a 1959 book by Theodore Roscoe, subtitled “The Story of a Gaslight Crime.” A writer vacationing in a New England shore town delves into a murder that happened some sixty years before, in the very house he’s staying in. As he uncovers the strange secrets of an extinct family, we get a strong impression that murder is sneaking up on him, too. In glorious and creepy black and white!

3. The Hollow starring Virginia Christine as an evil movie star, Michael Rennie as an egotistical doctor suddenly freed from his obsession with her, and Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot, called in to solve a murder. This is, as you’ve guessed, an Agatha Christie novel. (By the way, if you don’t think Virginia Christine would be up to the challenge of this role, see my Oct. 20 post, “Blessing the Mummy’s Curse.”) In this haunting tale, Christie created such complex characters, and peered so deeply into their troubled, complicated souls, we almost (but not quite) don’t care about the murder.

OK, that’s it for non-movie time today.

If you know of some other terrific movies that were never made, I’d love to hear about them.

Sometimes I just can’t stand it anymore, this debauched and benighted period of history. And that’s a good time to turn to The Last of the Summer Wine.

This BBC sitcom was one of the longest-running TV series ever, from 1973 through 2010, and only had to stop, finally, because almost everyone involved in it died of old age. Because the main characters were post-middle-aged to begin with, cast members did die out. They kept replacing them as needed, but finally had to call it a day.

Summer Wine is about a few eccentric retired men in a small town in Yorkshire, and their talent for getting themselves into ridiculous situations. And believe me, some of those situations are monumentally ridiculous. The way this show worked, they amble along sedately, creating a tone of mild amusement, and then suddenly spring something on you that’ll cause you to explode with laughter. We were watching an episode the other day in which the comedic climax caught my wife with a mouthful of tea. And I laughed so hard, I couldn’t see for all the tears in my eyes.

Man, I needed that!

Along with the comedy, you get soothing and often witty background music and even more soothing, absolutely beautiful, Yorkshire scenery.

A lot of PBS affiliates carry The Last of the Summer Wine, some episodes are available on youtube video, and you can buy DVDs of whole seasons. I recommend the latter: you’re going to want to see these again and again.