Burl reviews The Sugarland Express! (1974)

Yee-ha-ha, it’s Burl, here to review the picture Steven Spielberg made just before he tackled Jaws! Yes, it’s The Sugarland Express, and it’s a movie I’d never seen before, ha ha!

I think the reason I’d always avoided it was that it promised a not inconsiderable number of Goldie Hawn moments on screen, and if you’ve ever read my review of Protocol, you know that ol’ Burl can surfeit of Goldie Hawn moments pretty easily! Not that I really dislike her or anything; it’s just that my Hawn reservoir, being perennially untapped, overflows at the slightest refill!

But when the picture came on the old-movie network, I thought it was finally time to have a look! Ha ha, it was apparently Goldie’s first dramatic role, and though there are many of her goofette traits on display, she also gets to cry and rage and play sly and other things Laugh-In just didn’t allow for! She’s not bad, overall, though the character comes off as being really not so very bright at all!

She plays a young lady who’s just come out of the hoosegow, and her husband, a fellow named Clovis, happens also to be in the pokey, though he’s got a few months left to go! (Clovis is played by William “Ghostbusters” Atherton, back in the day before he was known mainly as a guy who played jerks!) But the couple’s little baby has been handed off to a foster family, and to prevent the lad from being lost to them forever, Goldie’s plan is to break Clovis out of the pokey and for them to somehow then go get the wee lad! This leads to a police chase and the kidnapping of a young officer, and then an ever-escalating mega chase led by courtly Ben “Terror Train” Johnson!

The young officer is played by Michael Sacks, who was also the lead in the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five! It turns out he was only ever in a grand total of twelve movies and TV shows, the last of them in the mid-80s! But he was a good actor with a very appealing presence, so that makes me wonder just what happened to the poor guy!

In any case, the movie is very nicely done, though not the most thrilling and original thing ever made! It looks good, thanks to Vilmos “The Witches of Eastwick” Zsigmond, and it has some funny bits and plenty of nice performances! Ben Johnson is a particular delight – I’m always cheered up when he comes on screen, ha ha! I recall that, after seeing Jaws, some friend of Pauline Kael’s told her that Spielberg was the first director to come without a proscenium arch hovering over his head, and while that’s obviously not true, you can certainly see what he meant when you watch his early work!

It’s a nice little picture even if the John Williams score too often sounds like a Christmas carol (I forget exactly which one, ha ha), and so I’m going to give The Sugarland Express two and a half Louisiana lunkheads!

Burl reviews Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! (1989)

Ha ha, yi-yi-yi-yi, it’s Burl! I’m here to review the third and should’ve-been-final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! This is the one that features a delightful performance from Sean Connery as Indiana Jones’s father, one of the most perfect pieces of casting (Scots accent notwithstanding) since Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl in Popeye!

The Indiana Jones movies are one of those series in which each entry is just a little bit (or, by the time you get to the Crystal Skull, a lot) worse than their predecessor! But all of them, or the first three anyway, qualify as robustly entertaining, if hocus-pocus filled, slabs of primo Hollywood entertainment! Ha ha, ever since I sat in the theatre and stared wide-eyed at the spiders and snakes and melting faces of the original chapter (while idly wondering how Indy could ride a submarine out into the middle of the ocean), I’ve been an unabashed fan of the series!

This installment is as propulsive and spectacular as any of them, while leaning even more on the hocus and the pocus and the soggy scenes of myth-swallowing! It’s all about the search for the Holy Grail, which you’d think would be slightly dangerous territory given the spectacular Monty Python treatment of the same subject just fifteen years earlier! But the Indy picture negotiates that obstacle simply by being very exciting and frequently funny! For a movie which features Nazis, book-burning and a cameo by Hitl*r, it really is quite amusing!

There are lots of glances back toward the other Indy pictures, like a reference to the Ark of the Covenant and a scene involving not snakes or bugs but rats! There are even references to future Spielberg pictures – for example, he does an early version of that gag from Schindler’s List in which a single bullet is used to kill several people standing in a row!

There’s a whole opening sequence in which River Phoenix, star of Stand By Me and Explorers, plays a young Indy, and demonstrates how he collected his chin scar, his fear of snakes, his taste for the whip and his signature headgear all in the same eventful day! Then the movie gives us a few relatively quiet scenes showing Indy in teaching mode and hanging out with Denholm Elliot – I was fond of these scenes in Lost Ark and felt their absence in Temple of Doom – and after that it’s off to the races!

There’s something very 1989 about this picture, as opposed to the staunch 1982ness of the first one, and for that reason alone Last Crusade stands as a lesser entry! The villains, too, are a little weak, even though one’s a N*zi! But I still can’t help but enjoy it, particularly when we get a wonderful zeppelin scene, or Connery says, apropos of his diary, “I should have shent it to the Marxsh Brothersh!"

For these delights and others, I award Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade two and a half Xshs marking the shpot!

Burl reviews Jaws! (1975)

Doo-doo! Doo-doo! Dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum, dootle-dee! Ha ha, no, don’t worry, it’s not Jaws, just me, Burl, swimming up alongside of you here in the sea! Yes, I’m here to review Jaws for you, a very special movie and the best one Steven Spielberg ever made!

I saw Jaws at the neighbourhood theatre when I was just a tiny sprout! Ha ha, I was probably much, much too young to be taken to such a picture, but thank goodness I had liberal-minded, easy-going parents! It was a formative experience, one I still remember very well! I particularly recall being terrified when Ben Gardner’s worm-ridden head came rolling out of that boat hull, and shocked and amazed at the fountain of blood spouting up from poor Alex Kintner’s torso! On the way home from the movie we stopped at a neighbour’s house and my dad told him we’d just been to see Jaws! The neighbour, a real card, asked me if I wanted to come to his cabin and swim at his lake! I got excited and said sure! But he was only joking, I guess!

Clearly I don’t feel any great need to review this particular movie in the accepted sense, as everyone has seen it and there have been many thousands of words written about it! I’ll summarize it for the one guy who maybe hasn’t seen it, though: a Great White shark puts a biting on people off the shores of a small island community, and it’s up to the local police chief,  a crusty sea captain, and a young ichthyologist to go out and hunt up this terrifying predator before he can munch down on anyone else!

Those are the broad details, but by now I’ve seen this picture so many times that it’s more a collection of small pleasures for me now! I love the beachtown atmosphere of the first half, even including the cheeseb*ll mayor and his anchor-patterned sportsjacket! I really like Chief Brody’s reading area, his little desk in the windowed corner of his house with the great view of the sea and the evening sky! I like the visual motif of the snow fencing that seems to be everywhere on the island! I greatly appreciate the pants on the young lady who is painting and spots Jaws going into the estuary for a quick meal!

Ha ha, I like the excellent prosthetic limbs they use for Jaws's victims! I like the shot of Pippet’s stick floating in the water, though of course I was sad about Pippet himself! I like the way doomed Ben Gardner helps Richard Dreyfuss from the boat and says “Hello! young feller.” I like Captain Quint’s silent little old buddy who follows him around!

Of course I like the Indianapolis scene, but then so does everyone! I like the way Chief Brody doesn’t participate in the scar-off, but glances down at his own torso, perhaps recalling a bullet or knife wound he’d suffered in the course of police duty! I like the animated barrel lights and meteors seen periodically through the second half! I like the call of the whale!

I like most of the performances, even that of Bad Hat Harry! (I wasn’t so hot on Brody’s wife’s performance though, but it’s not terrible I guess!) I do wish Spielberg had found a part for Dick Miller, perhaps as the sea captain (though Robert Shaw is excellent) or the mayor (ditto Murray Hamilton), but we’ll always have Miller’s performance in Piranha, so that’s okay!

And there’s a lot more pleasure where that came from! I could watch this movie many more times, and I probably will! And I’ll very likely show it to my own son at some vastly inappropriate age! I give Jaws four panics on our hands on the Fourth of July!

Burl reviews The Adventures of Tintin! (2011)

Hi, Burl here to review a cartoon movie from none other than Steven Spielberg! This is apparently his first cartoon, and it was done using a new technique quite different from the pen-and-ink styles employed by the late Walt Disney! The drawings here have a strangely lifelike look to them – but their close approximation of human appearance and movement almost comes to work against these drawings, as we are constantly reminded that they are not real precisely by the fact that they are so nearly!

The movie is The Adventures of Tintin, and I was very excited to see it as I have been a longtime fan of that world-famous young journalist-adventurer, who never writes or files a story, has no editor that we ever see, and yet seems to live very comfortably with his little dog Snowy, and enjoys endless leisure and worldwide travel! He’s really got it figured out, ha ha! I’d long thought how nice it would be to see a good live-action version of one of his adventures, so I was a little disappointed when I heard it was going to be a cartoon, but I guess it’s no big deal! A live action version would have had so many trick effects that it would have been something of a cartoon anyway like so many Hollywood action pictures these days!

The movie is a mash-up of three of the Tintin books, The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Crab With the Golden Claws! Those aren’t bad choices, but I’d have liked The Black Island mixed with Tintin in Tibet, I think! Ha ha, one has an ape in a tam o’ shanter and the other has a big coconut-headed yeti! I think this Tintin movie has been a fairly sizable hit, so who knows, maybe we’ll get that down the line!

This story has the intrepid boy reporter getting mixed up in a mystery involving a model ship and, ultimately, a sunken treasure, ha ha, naturally! He meets a man destined to be his lifelong chum, the dipsomaniacal sea captain Haddock, and together, along with help from the inept Scotland Yarders Thomson and Thompson and the little white terrier Snowy, they battle a perfidious first mate and a piratical, devil-bearded malefactor along with all their attendant henchmen!

It’s been a while since Spielberg made one of these lighthearted action pictures, or at lease a while since I saw a new one of them, and now and again as I watched this picture I got a little ghost of the frissons I recall having back when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time! But only occasionally, and that’s in part because I’m now an adult, of course, and in part because there’s a kind of mechanical and rote aspect to the goings-on this time around! Some of the action scenes appear to have strange ellipses in them which the top-of-his-game Spielberg would never have allowed! During a big chase in an Arab town, for example, we see a tank driving along with a building stuck on top of it; but we never see the moment when the tank actually tried to drive through the building and became wedged, and then just pushed the building along with the Thom(p)sons inside! Ha ha, it’s a solid comedy action beat, or would have been, and SS is usually on those like a dog on chocolate!

That’s not the only example! There’s a bit of a “Yeah, yeah, here’s your Tintin movie” aspect to it, from the script on up! And Tintin has always been a fairly one-note fellow, but in a movie you might hope for a few little crenellations that expand upon but don’t undercut or alter the character too much! A difficult balance, I’m sure, but they might have at least given it a shot! Also, they steal at least one gag from Commando, and, ha ha, where’s Calculus anyway?

But it’s not a horrible movie or anything, just a sort of time-waster sprinkled with moments of excitement and adventure, but generally just sort of there! We get a couple of references to past Spielberg triumphs – Tintin’s ginger quiff poking above the water like a shark fin as he stealth-swims toward some villains, for example – but these somehow feel as though they were put in by different people, maybe while Spielberg was in the bathroom or something! I think it’s possible that Spielberg simply realized halfway through the process that he didn’t enjoy making cartoons after all, and that’s fine! Anyway, I give The Adventures of Tintin two blistering barnacles and am keeping my fingers crossed for a live-action Black Island adaptation!