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Kevin Killian's Profile
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Reviews Written by
Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States)
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Transsiberian
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| DVD ~ Woody Harrelson |
| Price: $15.99 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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Cold Fusion, November 6, 2009
The movie sounded interesting and Brad Anderson hasn't made a bad film yet, so we gave it a shot, and I'm here to tell you, it is better than we hoped!
Woody Harrelson in real life is only about ten years older than Emily Mortimer, but onscreen you'd think they came from entire different generations. That works in the movie, sort of, but really it would have been better with almost any other actor. Everyone seems skewed a little older: Kate Mara's supposed to be playing a teenager for goodness sake, and anyone could tell she's been around the block more than once or twice. And yet so strong are the movie's powers of horrors that you just sit there and accept all its improbabilites and oddities.
Be warned, there are some awful violent sights to be seen. Well, as soon I saw Thomas Kretschman's name in the credits my gorge rose, since I remembered him being so beastly to Asia Argento in those long, cruel torture scenes in her father's film THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. He may look like an angel but he's always evil inside. As for Ben Kingsley, he walks around with the offended pout he gets when in real life someone slips and forgets to address him as "Sir Ben."
Okay, so the moral of this movie, like every horror movie recently (like HOSTEL or THE RUINS), seems to be, don't go to any foreign countries, people will take advantage of you. Are these antiwar allegories perhaps? Woody Harrelson seems to think so.
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Suspense-Free Saga of a Winning Season, October 31, 2009
Maybe one day Mrs. Joe Drape will write her own book about what it was like to be uprooted from Manhattan to have to come to Smith Center and sit through a season of football. Joe acts as though she loved every minute of it (as did Jack, their cute little boy), but I sometimes wonder if she was playing "author wife" the way some politicians' wives have to stand there smiling and waving next to their husbands for the camera.
Anyhow, I came into the book expecting to read about a high school team where everyone in the town lives and dies by who's winning the ballgame each Friday night, but what I didn't expect was the sheer perfection of Midwestern life. Everyone is thoughtful and kind. The boys don't go on dates or see girls because, well, it would detract from their game. The town itself is small, but several millionaires hail from the town and come in periodically to spread around money. Meanwhile, Coach Barta is the town Socrates, inculcating good sportsmanship in his boys while giving them life lessons to grow on. The parts I liked best in the book were the ingenuity of the team boosters who are always wracking their brains thinking of new ways to celebrate and inspire their team. Compared to the pain in the neck boosters of the TV show Friday Night Lights, these boosters are always tasteful and appropriate. Yet they bring a sense of fun to the town.
I guess there isn't much drama in a book in which you know right from the start that the team is going to win every game. Boring? That's not the word for it. What's the name of that Warhol film where you just watch the Empire State Building all night long? Here and there, some hunts of drama: the boy quarterback who's too small for ordinary football but because he's the son of one of the staff, he's protected. Then there's the boy who's too big for his own good, Sumo size, who has to be trained to rein in his bulk for the good of the team. The most dramatic bit comes when the Redmen head out to a rival school and in the hours before the game one roving player finds a damning Xerox of the other coach slurring the Redmen and saying they are hated. I expect in those other towns, they probably ARE hated. But like the Stephen King novel, they are protected from negative ions by a glass dome and they are happy that way.
I did learn some life lessons from it, but Drape could have worked harder at making this book more, I don't know, interesting.
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Not Greenwood's shining hour, October 30, 2009
I'm a sucker for the Fox musicals but this one leaves something to be desired. However the pluses outweigh the minuses by miles. Among them, two extras playing body double in a hard-rocking powerboat race around the Everglades of Florida. From a distance they really do look like the stars! The costumes and the musical numbers, peachy. But the storyline seems unnecessarily convoluted. Okay, we've seen the story of three gold-diggers any number of times before, and it's always a narrative of redemption: the worst gold-digger of all always gets altered by true love and goes for the pauper. It must be a law in Hollywood that this should occur. But the basic storyline is a seamy one, no doubt about it. Few Hollywood movies really rub your noses in the dirt of capitalism to this extent, for we are encouraged to empathize with the plight of powerless women who lie their way into a bourgeois playground and attempt to deceive wealthy men into marriage by pretending to be wealthy themselves.
In MOON OVER MIAMI, however, we get a Continental twist, where Betty Grable as the heroine seems totally unconcerned for whatever it is that Carole Landis may be feeling for either beau. And like Shakespeare, the romantic dilemmas of the main couples are reflected in a surreal and gamy storyline involving the servant class. Well, Charlotte Greenwood is supposed to be the aunt of Landis and Grable, yet she is forced by the script to pose as their maid, and thus she attracts the attention of puritanical, creepy Jack Haley, whose mission in life seems to be to protect his wealthy male guests from gold-diggers. Why? It just doesn't make sense, and Haley seems all too convincing as a self-righteous Uriah Heep. What does Greenwood see in him? They have one catchy number together--and the rest of the time she's trying to physically restrain him from ruining the lives of her nieces. What's this all about?
Landis and Grable are charming, as are Cummings and Ameche as their boyfriends, but the storyline is endlessly padded and should have ended a good twenty minutes before it did.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The Party, October 30, 2009
No one in this book gets out alive, or so it seems, for Larry Harris and his co-writers have the scoop on everyone whether high or low, and most of them were quite high during the Casablanca years.
From a business point of view, the revelations here are mainly about hos the company never was successful, despite a milliondollar promo campaign and a lot of money juggling on Harris' part. he was ordered to cook the sales figures for PolyGram to show many more sales of Casablanca products than actually occurred; this despite the fact that the returns would be coming in constantly to contradict his lies. Harris seems to think this is a standard business practice, but for his sake I hope the statute of limitations on fraud will prevent them from carting his butt to hail like Bernie Madoff! Neil Bogart characterized the Casablanca years as a time of "profitless prosperity," and that seems apt.
I enjoyed hearing how a group of Brooklyn-born salesmen with great ears for what would sell turned the industry on its ear by making a commitment to disco, or all things. The discovery of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer is an amazing story, but even the flops of Casablanca have their charm. Take for example the signing of "Stallion." Ever heard of them? They were going to be Casablanca's answer to the Eagles, but when Harris asked their Svengali to make them sound more like the Eagles, he should have known right away it wasn't going to fly, since the producer genuinely puzzled, asked, "Who are the Eagles"?
The Village People and Kiss are the other big names here, but every page has a good story about someone, usually revolving around "blow." "Blow" allowed Larry Harris, one of the plainest men in show business, to live the Hugh Hefner lifestyle with a revolving cast of available and beautiful Hollywood starlets. Thus he was living every man's dream, and never had to look at a mirror throughout the entire 70s. Go, Larry, go!
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Great outfits and costumes, but Cass seems nervous, October 27, 2009
Cass' TV variety pilot is great fun to watch, but in some ways also painful.
When Cass and Buddy Hackett were together, the camera cuts in close on the hands in her lap, and she seems like she's pulling her fingers apart, out of nervousness I expect, though she keeps her eyes on Hackett's. She seems like she must have been a wonderful listener; when she listens to Mary Travers sing, or Joni Mitchell play the guitar, she looks as if she is in awe. (Well, she had displayed this lovely quality in the Monterey Pop movie, where the camera catches her mouthing the word "Wow" like a mantra.) I never liked Buddy Hackett, but he is excellent here, and don't fast forward through his scenes, he has that sort of broken down Chaplin appeal that people misguidedly ascribed to Jackie Gleason. Maybe it was a little gauche of him to boast to Cass about how much weight he's lost in recent years: does she look a little wounded, or fatigued, during this part of their interchange?
Bizarre also to see Cass, Mary Travers and John Sebastian all in the same show. Each had been a significant part of a great pop group, but going solo is always fraught with peril, and you might say that none of them were ever as good alone as they were when they were in their groups. But you can see they each had style! Joni seems too smart and eccentric for TV, doesn't she, though she still thought of herself at least in part as an entertainer. She and Cass share a sequined, hippie designer sense of style, while Mary Tarvers, with her long blonde processed hair and her minidress of blue zirconium, looks like Nico in the days of the Silver Factory. Mary Travers' bangs were also copied from Nico. Goodness knows Joni had bangs, but Mary's continue right past her eyelashes! When it's her turn to sing she rises up from her chair as though "I just gotta dance while I sing." Well, it's not reallty dancding but it is really sixties and you got to love it.
Another unfortunate note, Mama Cass' backing band is brilliant and soul-inflected and all that, but it's weird that they were called "Hamfat." You know why.
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The Fair Trade
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| DVD ~ Tamara Joy Johnston |
| Price: $17.99 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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Life for Death, October 20, 2009
Tamara made a fair trade of life for death. I suppose it wouldn't really be a spoiler to tell you that the movie concerns a young woman who works with Robert Zemeckis in Hollywood until her life turns upside down when an elderly woman kills her bearded boyfriend, Matt. In an instant Tamara goes from being full of life and full of fun to a state of catatonic depression. She sees no point in living any longer now that her precious Matt has left this world, the victim of an elderly driver who slammed into him as he was parking. This tragedy haunts the movie, though for some reason we the audience never get to know Matt well. I wonder why there was so little film coverage of him, though a lot of different photos show him experimenting with different hair and beard stylings.
We do get to hear one song Matt wrote though, part of an eclectic soundtrack that deserves its own release. The song--well, it's ok, and it must have meant a lot to Tamara. She tries to go back to work, but instead just sits there and when the pain gets too much, she resorts to deadening her feelings with alcohol, cigarettes, and cutting herself. Co-workers notice and before long she is living alone in the apartment she once shared with Matt, death tempting her.
Luckily the Fair Trade movement was underway and her twin sister, sensible Shelby, and the sister's husband, brainiac Steven, talk her into helping them import shea butter from Togo, and eventually she goes to Togo and talks to native women. I was reminded of the documentary CRAZY SEXY CANCER, another one my wife made me watch. If you have seen both films than you will be astonished at the amazing similarity the two docs share, especially at the ending of each, for they have the exact same romantic denouement.
Some aspects of the doc confused me. Apparently Tamara and Shelby are super close, but what about the rest of their family? Never seen! Film-maker Lauralee Farrer, who narrates the show, makes some cryptic comments about meeting the twins when they moved in next door to her, a pair of troubled thirteen year olds. One feels like there are vast areas of Tamara's life that are left in shadowm perhaps for good reason?
A side benefit of watching this movie is that we started our own fair trade company.
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Moth to a Flame, October 17, 2009
Spoto is being thrown to the lions for daring to write a third book about Alfred Hitchcock. But also the implication is that he (or Tippi Hedren) is lying about Hitchcock's obsession with her.
Nick Anez, for example, tells us to read the Tony Moral book about the making of Marnie to correct Spoto's lies. But he is not being completely forthright either, for certainly the Moral book shows us a Hitchcock riddled with flaws, doubts and neuroses, it is not a book in which Hitch comes off a saint.
As a few reviewers have pointed out, SPELLBOUND BY BEAUTY is worth reading if only for the interviews with the lesser known stars. Spoto's picture of Alida Valli is particularly compelling, and its interest does not depend on shock value; Valli made few criticisms of Hitchcock; on the contrary, she reports him to have been the most helpful and caring of directors, lavishing hours and hours on helping her through her first American production. I don't think that Spoto is obsessed with destroying Hitchcock as some have said. If he had been, why include the testimony of Alida Valli--testimony none of the approved critics and biographers of Hitchcock bothered to obtain?
Still, the book is far from perfect and maybe there is something to the adage about going to the well one too many timss.
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Four Stabs at the Theater, October 17, 2009
This was one of the books which figured in the trial of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell for vandalizing volumes from the public library. Kenneth was upset because the library lacked Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and yet it had vast collections of schlock by popular writers like Barbara Cartland and Howard Spring. The two spent a year sneaking books back on to the shelves that they had altered in some way--sometimes subtle, but more often loud, vulgar and funny in the Carry On tradition. The Collected Plays of Emlyn Williams had its title page altered beyond recognition. NIGHT MUST FALL turned into KNICKERS MUST FALL.
The book itself is sort of sad, for it was released as Volume I, and there was no outcry for a Volume II so none was released--absurd in a way because, love him or hate him, Emlyn Williams was an original writer and had several other plays that would have been worthy of collection. In the present book The Corn Is Green stands out, it is the classic story of Williams' own youth as an impoverished Welsh boy who meets a teacher who really helps him at a crucial age. Night Must Fall is the other "famous" play here; into the home of an elderly dowager comes a young man who flatters her continually and gradually takes a more and more important place in her life: what the household doesn't know is that Dan is what we would today call a serial killer and keeps women's heads in hatboxes! "He was Born Gay" was a famous flop in its day, and Williams explains why in his honest, winning forward. It is the story of the "son of Marie Antoinette" and was written as a vehicle for John Gielgud. "The Light at Heart" is a study in theatrical personalities somewhat down on their luck and living in tatty surroundings, but basically, are you ready, light at heart. A father-daughter play, it is always worth reviving.
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Penetrating study of red hair and madness, October 16, 2009
Irene Gammel is rather over-dramatic here, and every little ad in the popular women's magazines of Montgomery's days is scrutinized and classified as the key to the eternal mystery of Anne of Green Gables. After a few hundred pages of this, I threw up my hands, moaning, "WHAT mystery?" I do appreciate being given so much of the context behind the creation of Anne Shirley, just as I appreciated Irene Gammel's previous book and her loving delineation of Elsa, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, but enough is enough and how many times can we find out that red hair was popular in 1905?
Come to think of it, the Baroness Elsa book was a lot about her hair too! Elsa was an early member of the Dada movement, "unhampered by sanity," who dyed her hair vermilion or blue depending on the season and appeared in a film by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp with more hair in it! Maybe Dr. Gammel just likes these hair women. On the surface Maud Montgomery lived a life much more uneventful than Elsa did, but Dr Gammel shows us that there were strains of eccentricity, narcissism, and evasion in Maud same as there was in Elsa. Maud preferred to look the other way while Evan went a little mad--the truth is, he was always mad, even when she first knew him. She was the princess of Denial.
Dr Gammel is just a little overblown in some of her metaphors (perhaps trying to match her style to LMM's)? Spring came in to Avonlea like a late lover, etc. No more, please, Doctor!
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Frustrating, October 10, 2009
Like other reviewers, I was taken in by the claim on the front of the book that it draws on 5,000 letters, and then disappointed to see that, if this is the case, so few of these letters could have been of any substance. Hack excels at explaining the business side of Agatha Christie and the industry that accreted around her. I did not know for example, that Rosalind Hicks left behind a fortune of six hundred million dollars--how is that even possible? I expect that many of the bruited 5,000 letters might have come from the papers of her agent or publishers? Otherwise the lack of footnotes is frustrating indeed.
For example, on page 212 there is a brief discussion of Christie's one venture into screenwriting, a treatment for MGM of Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House. Hack tells us that Bleak House, completed in April 1962, came in at 270 pages long, absurdly overlong for a feature film. But we never find out how he knows this. Did he read the screenplay? How does he know it was 270 pages? How does he know the month of completion? No references are given. It is one of my dreams someday to read Christie's "Bleak House" screenplay, and I would have appreciated more information here.
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(San Francisco, CA United States)
