Kindle. And yet more mid-century pulp. This one is more hard boiled, more explicitly violent (with a fair bit of man-on-woman violence) but still coy on the sexy bits. The plot is chaotic, often tending to random as the leading man tears up a Texan oil town that has grown more quickly than the law can regulate. None of the characters are deeply drawn or make a lot of sense; at least four are interchangeable Country Club stereotypes of intemperate greed, and all the ladies need other men than the ones they have. Things get a bit screwy at times but too often I felt like Davis was just circling back to the same situations. He implied that there was an arrangement of wives that may've worked for everyone (at least the men) but let that dangle.
Goodreads. Apparently did the rounds of the blogosphere after it was reprinted in 2010.
My first time around with writer/director Ingmar Bergman. #241 in the IMDB top-250, at least until the next round of comic book movies. The IMDB grab for this movie has always sounded so intriguing:
A knight returning to Sweden after the Crusades seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague.
but the bulk of the runtime dances around these issues to the extent that I found this misleading. The film assumes a Christian ontology and disposition which seems at odds with a personified Death. Even allowing for that I did not understand why, if you're supreme-being curious and you are given sufficient reasons to suspect that your time is up, you wouldn't hurry to meet your maker. Moreover demanding sensory evidence of the transcendental reeks of category error. What is served up is a lot pontificating, mostly about women, sex and why the Creator is so elusive. It feels pre-modern in its exploration.
Structurally things start out media res and Bergman takes his time establishing most of the above quote. His knight was a very young Max von Sydow, Death Bengt Ekerot. Gunnar Björnstrand as the knight's squire opines at length. I kept waiting for it to kick into gear but all I got was distraction and evasion, an inarticulate fear of death. There is a fair bit of man looking at the world, woman looking at the man.
Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2000. His writeup is more about Bergman's career though. Bosley Crowther at the time.
Unrewarded curiosity about what Jean-Louis Trintignant did after Z (1969). Also an Angie Dickinson jag from Dressed to Kill (1980). She played the wife of L.A. mafioso Ted de Corsia who had more interest in his son Umberto Orsini. Outside hitman Trintignant executed his task just fine but was surprised when a mostly non-speaking and overly inert Roy Scheider tried to execute his. The former was fortunate that Ann-Margret (Carnal Knowledge (1971)) was at such a loose end that she offered to move to Paris with him.
IMDB trivia claims that the French crew — co-writer/director Jacques Deray, co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Ian McLellan Hunter — came to the city for another project that didn't happen, and so opportunistically dashed off a script in 12 days. It's essentially an exploitation piece, in love with yank tanks like Melville was but at least here the streets are made for them. The strong cast cannot make up for the disjointed script; there are several stretches of tedium, especially the car chases.
The daytime cinematography was fine but the street scenes at night were very poor. There was the odd inventive image, like the corpse at the funeral parlour. Talia Shire (Connie Corleone) got the Anjanette Comer role there. It does somewhat function as a time capsule for seedy L.A. at the time, much like Whore (1991) did.
Kindle. More mid-century pulp. Written in the style of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). A bloke from the wrong side of the tracks discovers that basketball is a path to small-time riches and dolls. Watch out for those small-time hoods! Well-executed as far as it goes but it didn't aim to go far: everything was entirely predictable, right down to his time in college where a working lady's time tracks his prospects. Or schedule, in their preferred locution. There's not a lot to recommend it.
A grab from this was included in Boorman and the Devil (2025) as evidence of how Hollywood took more risks during the new wave. I mostly wanted to see what Christopher Walken did early on in his career. Also for Sean Connery. It proved impossible to care about his romance with Dyan Cannon (Deathtrap (1982)) whose time ran out. Martin Balsam does some solidly fruity work. Directed by Sidney Lumet from a script Frank Pierson (Cool Hand Luke (1967), Dog Day Afternoon (1975)) derived from Lawrence Sanders's novel of the same name.
Connery apparently spent a decade in the can as a favour to the mafia (I think). He quickly gets bored with not having money and invests an excessive amount of time organising a heist: he aims to empty out an entire apartment block. The second half shows how that unwinds. But perhaps the point of it all was to observe all the surveillance (on film and audio tape) from a wide variety of interested parties, albeit to no particular end.
The mafia connection was entirely dispensable. The setting and its denizens reminded me of Rosemary's Baby (1968). In its favour was the casting of Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939)) alongside Judith Lowry as a sort of Statler and Waldorf pair who provide some very amusing commentary on proceedings. They should have built the movie around those two.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Roger Greenspun at the New York Times. Both enjoyed Alan King's mafioso.
John Boorman's output is a bit all-over-the-shop; from the accessibly mainstream (Deliverance (1972)) to the amusingly fruity (Zardoz (1974)). Some projects may've functioned if better assembled (Excalibur (1981)). This is a doco by David Kittredge about the making of Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).
Having seen none of the franchise and with no interest in it whatsoever was no liability in enjoying the ruefulness on show here. The shoot looked suitably crazy and the claims of supernatural interference are as overheated as everything else. Most of the talking heads (including Louise Fletcher, Linda Blair, Stephanie Zacharek and Boorman himself) say interesting things. (The other, younger directors are mostly filler.) They assert the obvious about the deceased: Richard Burton was a limited actor ("dead from the neck down") with a great voice. The budget limitations caused them to draw inspiration from Black Narcissus (1947) and shoot on sound stages, but it seems the really exciting stuff was shot on location, including the roof of the Warner Bros skyscraper in NYC. Someone claimed that some of Ennio Morricone's score wasn't even music.
Kittredge pumps up Boorman's tyres a bit too much; he is indeed visually creative, wildly so, but his movies tend to philosophical incoherence. This is observed here implicitly by everyone piling on Rospo Pallenberg for not improving the situation. The concept of audience-independent filmmaking doesn't strike me as of much concern now given the huge reduction in the costs of production. Kobek's take on Kenneth Anger is a superior work on that front.
Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: justice for the heretic. Peter Sobczynksi: "the Boorman film is a stone-cold classic and this is a hill that I am willing to fall upon." He claims that Boorman's crazypants cinema had a revival in 2026. More dished dirt at the film's IMDB trivia page. There is a grab of Friedkin mouthing off in this doco but I can only imagine how much better it would've been if they'd been able to interview him too.
A pointer from Peter Sobczynksi's review of Verity (2026) and some Brian De Palma completism. Notionally a psychosexual/erotic thriller and it is indeed prurient and lurid, ploughing the track for not only Basic Instinct (1992) (amongst many others) but also The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
The movie is split into halves with a thick seam in the middle, bridged somewhat by Michael Caine's shrink in one of his blander performances. The first is languid, focussing on clotheshorse/socialite/housewife Angie Dickinson (Rio Bravo (1959)) who is all hot and bothered in NYC. The scenes of her looking for some attention in an art gallery mostly work before it degenerates into a slasher. Last/call girl Nancy Allen (the Mrs De Palma of the day, The Last Detail (1973), Robocop (1987)) takes over and proceeds to run around trying to crack the case while avoiding the same fate. The late exposition dump was very unwelcome, as was the concluding "it was only a dream" bookend scene. Somehow she (and De Palma) didn't go all Mrs Robinson (1967) over gifted geek/mama's boy Keith Gordon.
Dickinson got the harder task and the better end of the movie, but her efforts to draw attention to the fine details of her activities (the frustrated discarding of a lonesome glove, a missing wedding ring, a letter diagnosing VD) seem misplaced in this very unsubtle production. Getting bored with what I was shown (so many scenes linger, trying to amp the tension) I started to wonder if De Palma wasn't also trying to play identity games ala David Lynch's far superior Mulholland Drive (2001). But the ladies are all blondes.
Roger Ebert: three stars. De Palma was trying to mime the Hitchcock style. Vincent Canby. IMDB trivia. Enough body doubles to confuse everything.
Inevitable as it's Looney Tunes. Essentially a joke-conceit — Wile E. Coyote gets fed up with the failure of Acme's devices and sues them — overstretched to feature length. The cartoon parts are generally funny but the human elements are poor: Will Forte as a loser, ambulance-chasing lawyer, John Cena as a high-level Acme functionary, Lana Condor as something relatable for Gen Y or Z or alpha. Eric Bauza's voice work is nowhere as good as Mel Blanc's; Bugs Bunny just didn't sound right at all, so much so that I'd've preferred something generated by AI. And surely the Road Runner does not say "beep beep".
Even the source material by Ian Frazier stretched the joke too thin. James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Samy Burch did the overstretching in the writers' room.
Jason Di Rosso interviewed director Dave Green, focussing on how the movie was sprung from the Warner Bros purgatory. Peter Sobczynksi: it's not Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). A movie about the release of this movie may've been more fun. And so on, way beyond my attention span.
A jag from Falling Down (1993) via Ebbe Roe Smith who acts here. Written by Daniel Petrie Jr. Directed by Jim McBride.
Lead Dennis Quaid is a slightly bent police lieutenant in New Orleans. The only available woman in town, Ellen Barkin (Tender Mercies (1983), Down by Law (1986), Sea of Love (1989)), works for the D.A. and has reason to suspect that the cops are in on a mafia/wiseguy murder or two and a heroin stash. Ned Beatty got the John Goodman role, an amiable police chief, leaving John Goodman with little to work with. Things generally go as they must in a winsome, comedic mode. It's a bit Howard Hawks with Lisa Jane Persky doing the Hildy role well enough that I wish she'd been the focus. There's so much mumbling that I missed boatloads of dialogue and most of the character's names. Barkin is game but not my idea of a good time. She's at her best when she's chewing some man out. There are some funny bits but I felt I was more laughing at than with.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Clearly I missed the depths, the eroticism and the characterisation. Vincent Canby was far less convinced.
