House in Reno

5 Against the House (1955) is an odd little noir - it starts out as a sort of college comedy, then becomes a heist film, but not a funny one.

It starts with four older college kids in Reno. Guy Madison, the responsible one is reminding everyone that they need to by back in the car by midnight. Alvy Moore, the goofy one, scoffs, and Kerwin Matthews, the rich kid, just wants to try his roulette system. Brian Keith, the dark brooding one, tells them all to listen to Madison. They spend a little time in Harold's Casino and almost get swept up when someone tries to rob the place. They are standing behind him at the cashier's counter and the police think maybe they are part of the gang. They clear everything up, and someone from the casino mentions that no one can rob Harold's - too much security. That sets the plot in motion.

They arrive at college and immediately shanghai a freshman to be their gofer, as was the custom in those days. It seems that these guys are Korean War vets, which explains their age. Keith also saved Madison's life, and got injured badly, which explains his PTSD. Madison has a townie girlfriend, Kim Novak, who sings in a nightclub. There is romance and college hi-jinks. Then Matthews has his bright idea.

He comes from a rich family, but has never done anything himself. He has a plan to rob Harold's, then give back the money - no harm no foul. He talks Moore and Keith into it, but they don't want to ask Madison. But he has already decided to go to Reno to marry Novak, so they take him along and figure they'll talk him into when they get there. 

This doesn't work out too well. Mainly because Keith finally snaps and decides that he is going to keep the money, and everyone better do as he says or Novak gets it. Of course, the last act is the heist, which I'll skip, except to mention that William Conrad is the casino employee they hijack.

Most of this is just fair. Novak is OK - I didn't think she was better than the picture. Keith wasn't better than the picture, but definitely brought something extra to it. He was fun as a nihilistic college philosopher, and scary as an unstable guy with a gun. Madison, who seemed to play a lot of cowboys, is good looking, but that's about it. The other two were mostly comic relief - and not bad if you like that kind of stuff. 

There's some good location shooting in Reno at the end, if you want to see the biggest little city in the world in the 1950s.

Rolling Stock

I resisted watching Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013) for quite a while, because I assumed that the harsh secret was cannibalism. I'm happy to tell you that I was wrong. Also happy I watched this, mostly for the atmosphere.

It takes place 17 years after an attempt to solve global warming leads to global freezing. The only life left on Earth is a group of people on a luxury train that travels endlessly around the globe. Why this prevents them from freezing is never explained. The train has a special inexhaustible  fuel, but I don't think it requires motion. Anyway, just roll with it. 

In the tail of the train are refugees and their kids. They live crowded together, and fed on bricks of grey protein jelly - not soylent green, but not much better. Their spiritual leader, John Hurt, is working towards their eventual overthrow of the oppressive regime, symbolized by Helen Mirren as the Thatcher-like minister who comes to the tail section to steal children - in this case, Octavia Spenser's. 

Chris Evans plays another sort of leader - a good, capable man who is reluctant to lead. His side-kick is Jamie Bell. He discovers that the guards guns don't have any ammunition - it all ran out and there's no way to get more. So the revolution is on.

First, they get a famous thief out of cold storage, Song Kang-ho. He also breaks out a young woman, Go Ah-sung. They are both addicted to a volatile substance derived from industrial waste, but have skills they need.

So the team heads up to the front of the train. They make many discoveries, have lots of fights, and so on. When Evans gets to the head of the train, he meets the train's inventor, Ed Harris - and makes more discoveries.

I have to acknowledge that the plot is full of holes - in fact the whole premise is. So never mind that. The story is great. The influence of Terry Gilliam (Hurt's character's name is Gilliam) and Edgar Wright (Jamie Bell is Edgar) are clear. The train has a great post-steampunk feel, not as over the top as Brazil, but you won't be surprised by the Art Deco cockpit in the front of the train. Bong gets some fine performances by some great actors for this. 

So that, along with Parasite, completes our little Bong Joon-ho film festival. We loved this but don't expect to watch the TV series that is just starting up. 

Deep Welles

A funny thing about Orson Welles, the greatest director in the history of movies - he didn't actually make many. And not all of them are that great. But his tribute to Franz Kafka, The Trial (1962). was pretty entertaining.

Anthony Perkins is Josef K., an ordinary man who works in an office of some sort. One morning, he wakes up to find strange men in his bedroom. They ask questions and give no answers. They have been in the room of Jeanne Moreau, the nightclub performer who has the room next to his in the boarding house. Is it her they are investigating? Are they even from the police? It seems they are, since they tell him he is under arrest. They won't tell him the charge, and tell him he doesn't need to go to prison or leave his job - yet.

He goes to work, then to the theater, but he is taken away by the strange men. He is taken to what seems to be a tribunal, and makes a fine speech, but nothing changes. He still doesn't know what he is charged with. He goes to the best advocate around - Orson Welles. Welles holds court in bed in a delapidated mansion, with a beautiful nurse or secretary, Romy Schneider. I haven't read the original Kafka: Does Josef K. get it on with her in the book? 

So Perkins goes from one frustrating situation to another. He meets with William Chappell, an artist with influence in government, and pleads with him while children peek through chinks in the walls, maybe hoping to see him pose nude? He even goes to a priest. Where does it end?

It ends as it began, with Orson Welles narrating a sort of fable on justice, accompanying animation on pin boards. This is an esoteric technique that, unfortunately, looks just like an ink sketch to me. 

Great use of atmosphere, some nice acting, and a real oddball story. It made me want to watch Kafka again, which takes the surrealism to the next level. 

Send in the Clones

For some reason, we had two clone movies for this weekend: Replicas (2019) and Gemini Man (2019). Neither was very good, so I figured I'd review them together.

Replicas stars Keanu Reeves, pretty much the only reason we watched it. He plays a scientist working to transfer the mind of a dead man into a robot. He succeeds, only to see the robot go mad and try to tear its own face off. He is assisted by a dubious and sarcastic Thomas Middleditch.

Reeves, his wife Alice Eve, and their three children go on a vacation, and because Reeves is a terrible driver, they all get killed. Except him, of course. So he gets Middleditch to come out with the mind mapper - with the great catch-phrase: "Commence the mind-mapping process!" Actually, I might have that quote wrong, but who is going to watch Replicas and correct me?

Step two, Middleditch digs up some cloning pods - but he can only come up with 3, so one of the kids has to go. It's ok, though - he edits everyone's memory so they don't remember the little darling.

So it all goes according to plan - they clones wake up and do not try to tear their own faces off. In fact, they go about their business as if nothing happened. They remember going on vacation, but don't remember anything special happening. This was infuriating to me. So there aren't going to be any questions about the missing time, the extra bedrooms? No questions from friends and neighbors about the missing kid? No, Reeves is just going to go about his business as if nothing happened - he's just glad to have most of his family back.

The only trouble is that his company is beginning to look into his activities a little too closely.

This is not Keanu's best role. It isn't even Johnny Mnemonic level. Thomas Middleditch is much better as the buddy who constantly tells Keanu that what he's doing is not OK. But he goes along out of friendship and because it's cool science.

Speaking of something that's not someone best work, Gemini Man has director Ang Lee working with Will Smith. Smith is a crack assassin, wants to retire. Agent Mary Elizabeth Winstead is sent to track him, but he befriends her and heads to Caracas to see his pal Benedict Wong. He's attacked by the most advanced assassin he has ever met, who bears a strong resemblance to his younger self.

You see, Clive Owen has cloned him and raised the clone to be even deadlier than he is. And there you have it.

The parts seem to be there, but this movie just doesn't quite make it. However, I think that Ang Lee did a fine job of directing, particularly the fight scenes. There was a lot of CGI required, and not just to replicate and de-age Will Smith. He handles it as well as any, I'd say.

In conclusion, Upgrade was better than Replicas.

Late One Night I Was Trimmin' the Glim

This one doesn't count, because we didn't watch it on Netflix: The Lighthouse. We watched it on Amazon Prime because Netflix DVD wasn't letting us watch it. In fact, right now we have 14 "Short Wait" movies at the top of our queue, and I expect 2-3 of the available movies at the top to switch over to Wait status on Monday, before they send us any. While Lighthouse was in that limbo, we decided to just stream it.

It stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two lighthouse keepers on a solitary rock, just starting a two week stint. Pattinson is a taciturn young man with past as a lumberjack he doesn't like to talk about. Dafoe is an old salt who doesn't mind taking a drop of rum at dinner. That leads to their first cconflict: Pattinson won't drink to the complicated maritime toast Dafoe offers. He compromises by drinking water - which unfortunately tastes like shit, because something got into the cistern.

The other conflict is that Dafoe won't let Pattinson go up to the light, and Pattinson suspects that he is somehow communing with it, getting some form of illumination from the intense beam.

They survive the two weeks, but there's a storm on the day their relief is supposed to come, and they do not get picked up. At this point, Pattinson decides a little drink won't do any harm. And things go right off the rails.

This was made by David Eggers (The Witch), and it takes a similar historical approach. It was based on a real event, and filmed on black-and-white stock, giving it an eerie look. While being quite scary, it also has a lot of silly humor, which both Pattinson and Dafoe are quite good at. 

Also, it had me singing "The Eddystone Light" song most of the way through.

Forsythe Forsooth

Can you believe we haven't seen Local Hero (1983) until now? We saw Gregory's Girl long, long ago, and That Sinking Feeling in theater when it was released in the US (anyone else? No?). So we were low-key Bill Forsyth fans. But Forsyth is pretty low-key, so that fits.

It stars Peter Riegert (of recent film quiz fame) as a young go-getter in a Texas oil firm. He is sent to Scotland to buy out a small town so that they can put replace the bay with a refinery. The president of the company, Burt Lancaster, asks him to watch the sky for comets or anything else unusual.  He’s an amateur astronomer, and a bit of a nut. Riegert doesn’t really like meeting in person - he’s more of a telex man. But it’s a good opportunity and from the glimpse we get of his empty life, there’s nothing to keep him from going.

In Scotland, he meets his local partner, Peter Capaldi (just a kid here) and a gorgeous marine biologist Jenny Seagrove, who is studying a scale model of the bay. Good name for the actor, because we rarely see her out of the water.

In the village, he meets inn owner and unofficial village headman Denis Lawson (kind of a Scottish Stephen Rae) and his lusty wife Jennifer Black. He doesn't quite realize it, but the villagers are very willing to sell up, as long as they get rich off of it. It's a beautiful village, but as they say, you can't eat scenery.

So we have Capaldi falling in love with Seagrove while Riegert is falling in love with the village he is set on destroying. He starts noticing the sky, including meteors and northern lights. When Lancaster finally shows up to see the situation for himself, what will happen to everyone?

It's a sweet story with interesting characters who aren't all they seem. Lawson and the villagers in particular aren't rubes or canny primitives. They love their village but would like to be rich enough to live somewhere warm. There's a Russian trawler captain who comes through with some semi-smuggled goods who has Lawson manage some financial investments for him, and so forth. And it ends with everyone happy, except maybe Riegert, who has to go back to his life.

Note: The soundtrack is Mark Knoepfler on guitar. It's lovely and unobtrusive.

Room Service? Send Up a Room!

I'm getting a little desperate for horror movies that Ms. Spenser will like. No slasher, preferably supernatural, etc. 1408 (2004) looked likely. For years I've confused it with that Shining documentary - Room 237. The only thing they have in common is source material by Stephen King.

It stars John Cusack as a sad-sack writer of travel guides with a specialty in haunted hotels. He doesn't seem too popular, possibly because he doesn't believe in the hauntings, but isn't a debunker - kind of falling between two stools there. We slowly learn that he is estranged from his wife (it seems he "went out for cigarettes") because they lost a daughter to cancer and he couldn't cope.

He gets an unsigned postcard telling him not to visit the Dolphin Hotel in New York, and not to stay in room 1408. The manager, Samuel L. Jackson, doesn't want him to stay there, either. Too many people have died there. Cusack's editor, Tony Shalhoub, has to get lawyers involved.

So he sets out to spend the night in this creepy room. Things are OK for a bit - he has a few drinks, settles in. Then things start going haywire: everything from a creepy clock radio to shadows in the mirror to blood pouring out of the wall.

At one point, he figures that Jackson dosed him with acid in the booze. That doesn't go anywhere. The door won't open. He even tries the window ledge and discovers that all the other rooms have disappeared. There are ghosts in the room and in the air vents. And so on.

He finally wakes up and finds it was all a dream - he's back home, he's ok, he reconciles with his wife, and you can guess where this is going...

I thought this was kind of fun. I liked how crazy it all got, and the twists as he tries to come to grips with the phenomenon or to escape. Ms. Spenser, on the other hand, thought it was silly, lacked all subtlety, and went from zero to psycho in under 60 seconds. She says she recognized the heavy hand of Stephen King. Oh well. Back to the DVD queue.

If anyone out there has seen this, let me know: Better or worse with Nicholas Cage in place of John Cusack?