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5/30/06 - Stars and Bars: (Elmer Bernstein) --Expanded Review-- "Veteran
composer Elmer Bernstein had plenty of scores rejected from films in the last two decades of
his career, and it could be argued that worst of all these films was Pat O'Connor's Stars
and Bars in 1988. Based on a best-selling 1985 novel by William Boyd, the story involves a
depressed, proper Englishman who dreams of becoming a wild American brute. Daniel Day Lewis is
terribly miscast as the English art expert living in New York City, dispatched to Georgia to
acquire a newly surfaced Renoir painting. Being completely unlearned in American culture, he
runs into a series of eccentric people and bizarre misfortunes, and while he may end up losing
the painting, his career, and his fiancee, he does gain a new, tougher personality with the
help of a scrappy Joan Cusack. The film only grossed $100,000 and suffered a horrible death
before it even premiered. Released only on videotape many years ago and gone from the market
in any form..." *** Read the entire review.
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5/27/06 - Cape Fear: (Bernard Herrmann/Elmer Bernstein) --Expanded
Review-- "With his first film after signing a major contract with Universal Studios and
Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, director Martin Scorsese decided to remake the
classic 1962 horror story of Cape Fear. In the original, Gregory Peck was the lawyer
and heroic father figure and Robert Mitchum was the criminal who had served time because of
what he believed to be a bad defense by Peck. The ensuing battle of nerves and wit between the
Hollywood icons made for a classic film of good versus evil. But in Scorsese's darker outlook
on life, there can't be any true hero, and in his 1991 remake, everyone from the lawyer to his
16-year-old daughter has demons with which to work. It's more difficult to root for Nick Nolte
in the Peck role, and Robert De Niro is far more psychotic than Mitchum ever was as the
criminal. What Scorsese had going in his favor was a $35 million budget, cameo roles by both
Mitchum and Peck (ironically on opposite sides of their original allegiances)..." *** Read the
entire review.
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5/24/06 - Frankie Starlight: (Elmer Bernstein) --Expanded Review-- "Not
even all the mysticism in the stars could save Frankie Starlight from total anonymity.
Based on "The Dork of Cork" by Chet Raymo, the adaptation for the big screen by Raymo and
Ronan O'Leary was an anticipated arthouse film released during the awards season in late 1995.
Michael Linday-Hogg's film meanders through decades in the lives of a dwarf and his mother,
with the modern-day dwarf, a successful but reclusive author, serving out the tale in
flashback format. A voice-over narrative tells of the mother's journey from France during
World War II to Ireland, where she gives birth to the illegitimate dwarf, and the two
eventually settle in Texas, where the dwarf becomes the author and narrator. Woven throughout
the film is the dwarf's interest in amateur astronomy, and the constellations are used to draw
connections between the seemingly random circumstances of life. The messages work to some
degree in Frankie Starlight..." **** Read the entire review.
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5/21/06 - Last Man Standing: (Ry Cooder/Elmer Bernstein) --Expanded
Review-- "Sergio Leone's 1964 A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood was an
adequate American interpretation of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo from three years prior,
though for some reason, director Walter Hill decided to make the same adaptation once again in
the 1990's. Hill moves the setting up by another few decades into the prohibition era and, of
course, inserts his usual excessive glorification of violence. The "no name man" who walks
into 1920's Jericho this time is Bruce Willis, who may very have been perfect for the part,
but in the process of destabilizing the truce between two Chicago bootlegging crime
organizations in the small town (which leaves a whole lot of logical questions by itself),
Willis takes advantage of his independent gunslinger skills to maim and kill people who
obviously deserve such an end. And unless you're a fan of Hill's notion that it takes 40
bullets from tommy guns (shown very explicitly) to kill a man..." **/*** Read the entire review.
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5/17/06 - Demolition Man: (Elliot Goldenthal) --Expanded Review-- "Aside
from the fact that it introduced an innocent Sandra Bullock to many movie-goers, Demolition
Man hits nearly every guilty-pleasure button known to mankind. Among the "violations of
the verbal morality code," the verbiage of "murder death kill," and a villain named "Cocteau,"
viewers of Demolition Man are still trying to figure out exactly how to use the three
seashells in place of traditional paper ass-wipes. The stupidity of the film is oddly
compensated for by its purely tongue-in-cheek zaniness, proving that ridiculously dumb movies
can indeed catch you watching them whenever they come on late night cable television (though,
of course, violations of the verbal morality code lose all their punch on family-friendly
channels). Given how utterly juvenile a film Demolition Man really is, another amusing
irony is the assignment of composer Elliot Goldenthal to the task of composing the underscore
for the film. Goldenthal is, more than any other contemporary composer..." ** Read
the entire review.
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5/13/06 - Fried Green Tomatoes: (Thomas Newman) --Expanded Review-- "One
of the ultimate tearjerkers ever to be put to screen, Fried Green Tomatoes is a story
told in flashback, set in both the 1990's and 1930's and addressing common issues in both
periods. The 1930's setting is the attractive one, and the reason Fannie Flag's book ("Fried
Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe") was put to screen by Universal and director Jon
Avnet. Two young women operate a cafe in a small Alabama town in the '30's, where things are
pretty progressive. Whites and blacks have civil relations, and the rednecks that roll down
the main street waving guns in the air are shunned as being the village idiots. But complexity
exists in the cafe, for there are lesbian undertones to the relationship between its two
operators. There's a murder mystery in the past and the salvaging of another troubled woman in
the future setting, and one of the film's weaknesses is its inability to switch between times
with ease...." **** Read the entire review.
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5/10/06 - Emma: (Rachel Portman) --Expanded Review-- "The early 1990's
saw a rebirth of adaptations of famous British authors of centuries ago, and none was perhaps
as influential on screen as Jane Austen. Following Persuasion, Sense and
Sensibility, and the massive A&E production of Pride and Prejudice, the success of
Emma should come as no surprise. Even Alicia Silverstone's Clueless the previous
year was a modern adaptation of Austen's "Emma" story, though it doesn't take a genius to know
the intended audience of the true adaptations. Austen stories all have the same general idea:
several marriages have to be arranged by the end, the leading lady is stubborn and dislikes
social conventions, there's ballroom dancing to be done, and the main couple of interest takes
the entire story to finally admit their love to one another. For non-Austen fans, these
scenarios are just one alien invasion short of a successful story, and unfortunately for those
non-romantic folks, the scores for these films aren't much better...." *** Read the
entire review.
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5/7/06 - Last of the Dogmen: (David Arnold) --Expanded Review-- "There
was a law in Montana that was just recently repealed: "Seven or more Indians are considered a
raiding or war party and it is legal to shoot them." Perhaps the people who still believed in
the validity of that law in the 1990's had seen the movie Last of the Dogmen, though
even they should have figured out just how far-fetched the plot of the film really is.
Writer/director Tab Murphy's 1995 film presents the idea that it's possible that a handful of
Cheyenne dogmen survived the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and were still miraculously living
hidden from modern-day 1995 life in the treacherous mountain regions of Montana. Anyone who's
lived in Montana (as of 1995) knows that hippies have hiked into every last square mile of the
Rocky Mountains and hugged their trees, not to mention geologists and forest rangers that
survey all that territory every day. In short, in an age when there exist little airports and
portable toilet cabins..." **** Read the entire review.
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5/4/06 - Chaplin: (John Barry) --Expanded Review-- "So much
had been known about Charlie Chaplin's movies and the public persona he attempted
to enhance in his own autobiography, and yet the significant (and, to some extent,
self-imposed) troubles in his personal life went largely undocumented until Sir
Richard Attenborough attempted a revealing bio-epic of the early film star in 1992.
As to be expected from this sort of Attenborough venture, the film's scope was
grand and the acting credits contained a dozen well-known names. In the title role,
Robert Downey Jr. (like
Chaplin himself, mired in legal trouble) is convincing both aesthetically and in
mannerism, and the film is littered with other high quality performances. But the
major faults of the film are the pace at which it steams through Chaplin's life,
the emphasis on the sex and other turmoil (an encounter with J. Edgar Hoover is
invented to explain that a snub of Hoover by Chaplin at a party is a reason why the
FBI pursued Chaplin as a Communist during his later days)..." **** Read the entire
review.
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5/1/06 - The Specialist: (John Barry) --Expanded Review-- "You have to
give the filmmakers at least a little credit for figuring out what parts of The
Specialist were going to sell with audiences. After all, a film that was originally
intended to be a noir thriller ended up relying on Sharon Stone's breasts, Sylvester
Stallone's bulging muscles, and a myriad of exploding buildings to retain audience interest.
It ended up being an odd collection of different film genres rolled into one dismal package.
The cinematography and music had all the dark, seedy atmosphere of a high class thriller from
yesteryear, and yet the convoluted plot and unenthusiastic acting (apart from James Woods, of
course, who foamed at the mouth in the roll) had B-rated action film nonsense written in every
line. The plot involves Stallone as the ex-CIA bombmaker, Woods as his former partner gone
bad, Stone as a vengeful foe and friend of both, and Rod Steiger as an unintelligible crime
boss. Throw the Miami locale into the equation, and the humid environment steams up the
picture..." **** Read the entire review.
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