Burl reviews The End of the Tour! (2015)

 

With a bookish hello it’s Burl, here to review a literary two-hander that came out a while back, and I’ve just now caught up with! It’s a tale of fellers who write books, and shows what can happen when two of them spend a few days in close company with one another! Yes, the movie is The End of the Tour, the tale of the meeting between a Rolling Stone reporter named David Lipsky and the bandanna-clad wordsmith David Foster Wallace!

Jason Segel from SLC Punk dons the doo-rag in order to play the celebrated author, and I’ll say right up front that I though his performance was terrific! I’m not familiar enough with the real DFW’s voice, look, and mannerisms to do a detailed comparison, but, ha ha, in any case impersonation is beside the point! Segel does an excellent job of creating the character of a shy, friendly, humble, prideful, whip-smart, uncertain, spiky, obliging, bewildered and ambitious man, no matter what his initials are!

Jesse Eisenberg from Adventureland and Zombieland enters Wallaceland in the character of Lipsky, assigned by Rolling Stone to accompany Wallace on the last stop of his Infinite Jest book tour! This last stop turns out to be Minneapolis, which is a city I’m pretty familiar with, so that was nice! The requisite Fargo-ness comes in the person of Joan Cusack from Grandville U.S.A., their perky tour guide and driver, but the city is otherwise portrayed as the bastion of NPR-level mainstream sophistication that it is, for the white, college-educated set anyway!

The bulk of the picture involves these two Davids getting to know one another, mostly in a mellow way but interrupted on occasion by neuroses and jealousies! It’s a pretty male movie, but there are ladies: Anna Chlumsky from Uncle Buck appears in a nothing, mostly phoned-in part as Lipsky’s girlfriend; while in Minneapolis Mickey Sumner from Frances Ha and Mamie Gummer from The Ward show up as Betsy and Julie, two DFW pals with whom the Davids hang out and, in a delightful sequence, go to Mall of America and catch a screening of John Woo’s Broken Arrow!

At several points in the picture, when Lipsky gets upset, Eisenberg pulls out one of his acting staples: a hurt, about-to-cry face that makes me want to jump up and run away whenever I see it! I didn’t care for that, nor for his amateur-hour smoking (it looks practiced, but fake), but on balance I think Eisenberg did a good job in his role! It’s a real pleasure sometimes to watch a movie about intelligent people having intelligent conversations, and this one hit me at just such a moment; and on top of that it’s solidly directed and features unexpected treats on the soundtrack! Ha ha, there are some 80s tunes and some Alanis to shore up Wallace’s contention that he has the musical tastes of a thirteen year-old girl, but R.E.M., Pavement, and Brian Eno all get a look in too, plus there are a couple of Tindersticks tunes, and most unexpectedly, a Tindersticks cover of a Pavement song! Ha ha, weird!

It’s necessarily limited in what it can do, but the movie is smart enough to know that, and so it just cruises along in its pleasant and competent way through appealingly familiar territory! I enjoyed it, though of course the ultimate fate of DFW made me sad! Still, this was a supposedly fun thing that I might very well do again, and I give The End of the Tour three pop tarts!

Burl reviews Heads! (1994)

 

By all the rolling melons, it’s Burl, here to tell of a tale of small town decapitations! Ha ha, it’s time to consider a forgotten film - although forgotten would imply that it was ever known at all, which it wasn’t! No sir, the picture is called Heads, and I’d be a mighty surprised mandanfield if anyone reading this missive has ever heard of it!

Our setting is the small town of Dry Falls, and our protagonist is Guy, the copy editor at the little local gazette, played by Jon Cryer from No Small Affair and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home! He hopes to become a reporter, and gets his chance when the fearsome editor of the Daily Document, played by none other than Ed Asner from The Wrestler, takes him along to a crime scene at which the paper’s crime beat man has been found lounging in a deck chair at poolside, and his head bobbing in the pool several feet away!

Further casaba-choppings ensue, and leather-jacketed Earl Pastko from The Sweet Hereafter is the chief suspect; but then again this town has plenty of suspicious denizens! Why, even Roddy McDowell from Doin’ Time on Planet Earth and Fright Night is lurking about as the local moneybags, a fey character in an ice-cream suit, totally beholden to his pet greyhounds! And the next thing you know Jennifer Tilly, whom we recall from Moving Violations and Remote Control, pops up and begins making strange overtures to our hero! Could she be the mad top-popper? Ha ha, maybe!

Severed heads show up on top of buildings, or else rolling down the street, or in farmer’s fields or what have you, but the movie somehow doesn’t make much of them! It might be fair to say, in fact, that the movie doesn’t really know exactly what it wants to be! Certainly it’s trying for dark comedy and murder mystery, and also it wants to be a kind of small town picaresque, but none of it gels very well! In any case, it’s hard to explain how a movie called Heads can make such small potatoes of what one assumes was meant as its chief attraction and major selling point! I suppose they didn’t want to be too lurid, ha ha, but it also smacks of timidity!

Guy is virtually the same character Don Knotts played in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken: a cringing ninnypants newshound whose only accomplishments come by accident! Ha ha, I’m sure they would have hired Knotts for the role if he was a little younger; though it ought to be said that Cryer is perfectly good in the part, even if his character is frequently annoying! Ed Asner is plenty of fun here though - ha ha, he jumps into his character and goes at it full-bore, not minding whose toes he steps on in the process! McDowell makes a tasty little snack of his brief role - ha ha, there’s a pro for you! - and Tilly does her baby-doll thing, but seasons it with sadness and regret!

It’s pulpy, but not to the degree and in the manner the makers intended! There are a few attractive shots thanks to cinematographer Alar Kivilo, who on this picture was forced to work, at least part of the time, with a broken light meter! It could have used a little more pep and dynamism I think too, and might have given us a more active and less enervating protagonist! Maybe the best thing you can say about it is that it’s something mostly all its own! Mercifully it doesn’t try to be Lynchian or Tarantinoesque, or Finchereuw avant la lettre, at least not in any recognizable way; it seems to believe it’s a parody of something, but of what? The small-town serial-killer newspaper picture comedy genre? Ha ha! I give Heads one and a half battered Airstreams!

Burl reviews House! (1986)

 

Ding dong, it’s Burl at the door! Ha ha, today I’m going to maintain my occasional habit of telling little stories about my personal experience with whatever movie I happen to be reviewing! The funny thing about today’s movie is that my personal experience involves not seeing it! Ha ha, the movie I’m talking about is House, and not the crazy Japanese one either but the one Steve Miner made to escape the curse of making movies like Friday the 13^th part 2 and Friday the 13^th part 3-D!

You see, it was around this time of year in 1986 when House was released into theatres! For whatever reason, the powers that be rated it R in my bailiwick, and that meant no one under 18 could see the movie under any circumstances! Ha ha, this rating still mystifies me! Anyway, it was playing at the theatre around the corner from me, and I and two of my friends decided to try our luck! One friend, Rob, would have no trouble getting past the crabby old lady at the ticket booth: at age fifteen, he looked more like he was twenty! My pal Dave, on the other hand, had just turned sixteen, but looked ten! (I myself was fifteen and looked fifteen, ha ha!)

So before the movie I snipped off a bunch of hair from Dave’s head and used spirit gum to construct a fulsome moustache on his upper lip! I worked hard at it and it looked fantastic, but when I was done there was no time left to make one for myself! When we got there, Rob sailed through with no problem, and then Dave, with his big fake blonde moustache, made it in as well! Of course it was me who was refused entrance to the movie, and I had to go home and wait as Rob and Dave enjoyed the film! When they arrived back at my house they said the picture was only okay, and I assumed they were just being nice so I wouldn’t feel bad for missing it!

When I finally saw it, I realized they were right: it was only okay, if even that! And now that I’ve watched it again, my opinion on the movie must be revised still further downward! Here’s the story: a grocery boy arrives at a big Victorian house to find that the old lady who lives there has hanged herself! Her nephew, a big-time horror novelist struggling to write something uncharacteristic (a popular sort of a character, thanks to Stephen King), inherits the house! His name is Roger Cobb, he’s played by William Katt from Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, and his crowded backstory involves the mysterious disappearance of his son, and, separately, a touch of guilt from his Vietnam days, which is what he’s trying to write a book about!

Never mind that William Katt seems much too young to have fought in Vietnam, ha ha, especially seeing as how he doesn’t look any younger in the flashbacks! And it is a flashback-heavy movie, and also a movie of extremely terrible scoopneck sweaters! Luckily Roger’s next-door neighbor is a goofy but kind-hearted guy played by George Wendt from Fletch and Dreamscape, and the scenes involving him have some appeal! Kay Lenz from White Line Fever is Roger’s ex-wife, and Richard Moll from The Sword and the Sorcerer is the old Army buddy who reappears as an angry zombie-man!

The picture occasionally dips a toe into the rubber reality you find in Nightmare on Elm Street pictures, but it seems much more interested in simply having monsters pop out of closets to startle Roger! There are some odd tonal shifts, but neither Miner nor anyone else possessed the deftness of touch to weave these together with any style or elegance! It’s never the least bit scary, and the reason for the R rating that kept me out all those years ago is completely baffling! Ha ha, around here pictures like The Thing and Ghost Story were rated PG, and I and my friends went to see them with impunity and without adults! I can only assume a lozenge became stuck in the throat of somebody on the ratings committee while they were adjudging House, and so the picture got that R!

The upshot: it’s a mediocre mid-level horror picture, professionally made and slick enough, with a few bright spots here and there and some cartoonish monsters! It’s badly edited and relies very heavily on some low dolly shots of the house, which it only needed one or two of instead of the dozen or so that we get! And what’s with that Swedish neighbor cadging child care from Roger? I could discern no point to the sequence, other than to show us that Roger’s fatherhood instincts are still intact! Ha ha, it’s a pretty bad movie, and I award House one wet sweater!

Burl reviews Amityville 3-D! (1983)

 

Ha ha and picture windows, it’s Burl, here to talk haunted house sequels! Yes, it’s one of the Amityville pictures today, one I have a very specific memory attached to! Ha ha, I have specific memories attached to several of these movies, as it happens: when I was very young, a kid in my class had a birthday party to which everyone but me, it seemed, was invited! They all went to see The Amityville Horror, and the next day at the lunch table were all talking about how scary it was! Then, a few years later, my friend Dave and I went to see Amityville II: The Possession in the theatre, and that one, with its mixture of incest and demon possession and matri-parri-fratricide would surely have been a heady brew for a pair of 11 year-olds!

The devil’s fondness for the Dutch colonial building style is well documented, ha ha, and so today’s picture is Amityville 3-D, which I saw once again with my friend Dave! We biked to the video store one humid July day, rented this movie, and then got caught in a massive, pounding summer storm while biking back to Dave’s place! We later learned that some poor soccer player had been struck by lightning during that storm, yikes!

Well, the other day I revisited this picture, which of course builds on the malarkey presented by that Lutz family who made up that whole haunted house thing in the first place! This tale, in contrast to the first two movies, is entirely fictional instead of only 99% fictional, ha ha, and involves Baxter, a professional magazine skeptic played by Tony Roberts from Annie Hall, who, after debunking a pair of fake spiritualists who’ve been using the place as their base, decides to purchase the rambling Long Island spookhouse for himself! How Baxter does this on a magazine writer’s salary is left to our imaginations, ha ha - this picture abandons the household finance fixation that was the most frightening aspect of the first picture!

Candy Clark from The Blob plays Baxter’s partner at the magazine, who, after having a spooky encounter at the house and taking strange pictures of the realtor (played by John Harkins from Six Weeks) which make him look even more yoplait-faced than he really is, renounces her skepticism of the supernatural, does some investigating, and eventually comes to a remarkably sticky end while sitting in her car! Lori Laughlin of Secret Admirer and of recent news stories, is Baxter’s teenage daughter, who, along with a feisty friend played by Meg Ryan from Innerspace, D.O.A., and Armed and Dangerous, continually hangs out at the house against the wishes of Tess Harper from Flashpoint, essaying the role of Baxter’s angry ex-wife!

Robert Joy from The Dark Half and Land of the Dead is Baxter’s scientist friend, and he too comes to a bad end when a goochy demon monster reaches out of a bubbling water pit and grabs his face! Ha ha, there’s quite a body count in this picture, in fact - characters you don’t expect to become victims of the baneful dwelling are cut down as wheat before the harvester! Then one of Joy’s research assistants is blasted halfway out a widow by a door - ha ha, yes, you read that right! And all of this was filmed in 3-D, so of course there are many, many instances of items being thrust toward the lens, which will tend to confuse the viewer unaware of the movie’s tri-dimensional provenance!

Any affrights the movie has to offer come from the inherently spooky shots of the house, and even these are not as spooky as they are in the earlier pictures! (It’s still scarier than Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, though, ha ha!) It was directed by an old pro, Richard Fleischer, but he doesn’t seem to have had much interest in the goings-on! There’s an elevator scene, for example, that any truly engaged filmmaker would have excised at the script stage! Oh well - maybe Dino De Laurentiis made him keep it in, saying something like “Everybody heart stop when elevator drop! Everyone surprise when elevator rise!” I give Amityville 3-D one and a half smiling swordfishes, and that extra half a swordfish is really for the rainstorm that drenched me those many years ago! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Silver Streak! (1976)

Choo choo! Hello gumchewers, it’s Burl, here with a mile-long review of a 1970s train picture! I’m not talking about The Cassandra Crossing - ha ha, I have yet to see that one, but one day perhaps I will - nor The Great Train Robbery, nor Murder on the Orient Express! This one does feature murder, and there is also some robbery involved, and the picture in question is of course Silver Streak!

This is the kind of movie they did well in the 70s, and by that I mean movies with some sort of hook to attract the Evel Knevel-and-Superdome-besotted young people of the day! Here we have the train itself, called the Silver Streak though there’s nothing special about its speed or appearance, and the climax in which the engine crashes spectacularly through its Chicago terminus! Leading up to this great moment is a plot I won’t get into, because when bad guy Patrick McGoohan explains his nefarious scheme near the end of the picture, I didn’t understand a word of it! Ha ha!

Our main character is George, a mild-mannered editor of gardening books played by Gene Wilder, who’s taking the train to get some rest and relaxation! He first meets an obnoxious vitamin salesman (or so we think!) played by the excellent Ned Beatty from Rolling Vengeance, and then hooks up with prettylady Jill Clayburgh, known from It’s My Turn and several similar movies, here essaying the role of - well, to be honest, I was never sure exactly what her character was meant to be! Soon George witnesses an apparent murder, then is repeatedly thrown off the train by a pair of goons, Ray Walston from Galaxy of Terror and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Richard Kiel, playing the same spangle-toothed killer giant he does in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker!

Eventually, more than an hour in to the picture, none other than Richard Pryor shows up! Ha ha, we certainly recall him from his adventures in Brewster’s Millions! He gives the proceedings a shot of energy they badly need and, by this point, barely deserve! Don’t get me wrong: the movie is generally entertaining even without Pryor, but Pauline Kael’s observation that Pryor briefly makes the movie into the comedy its makers had hoped it would be is well taken! However a scene in which Pryor tries to help his little white frizzy-haired buddy evade capture by smearing him with shoe polish and teaching him how to “act Black” nearly destroys the whole endeavor: only the movie’s profound, essential, guileless unhipness helps it survive this ill-considered passage! Ha ha!

Of course it’s all a big tribute to Hitch, and especially to North By Northwest; but the Wrong Man scenario is not played up as much as I was expecting it to be, which was something of a relief! The director, Arthur Hiller, who would use the success of this and his subsequent picture, The In-Laws, to launch a brave stab at eco-horror with Nightwing, keeps it all moving with the stolid momentum of a freight train, though if he’d pushed the throttle up to bullet train speeds, who knows what we might have had!

As you can see, the cast is generally great, with a properly cold-eyed performance from McGoohan, whom we recall from Scanners and Escape From Alcatraz! Ha ha, his demise is certainly a tent-capper! Clifton James from Juggernaut shows up, playing an only slightly less cartoony cracker sheriff than the one he essays in Bond pictures like Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun! We also get Stefan Gierasch from Blood Beach, Fred Willard from Moving Violations, and the great Scatman Crothers from The King of Marvin Gardens and The Shining, playing a porter of course! And there is a trio of obnoxious conventioneers played by Canadian acting staples Henry Beckman from The Brood, Steve Weston from Sudden Fury, and Harvey Atkin from Funeral Home! (Obnoxious conventioneers are themselves a convention in movies like this - ha ha, just look at Airport ’75, where the analogous triumvirate is played by Norman Fell, Conrad Janis and Jerry Stiller!)

There are some laffs here and there, for example in George’s repeated cries of “Son of a bitch!” whenever he’s thrown off the train, which is frequently! But there are tone-deaf scenes too, like the aforementioned blackface debacle; and another in which Wilder, in an effort either on his part or on the part of Colin Higgins’ script to make him seem unexpectedly virile and manly and domineering and bristling with alpha confidence, instructs Clayburgh on every pre-coital step as though he’s a director blocking her in a scene! Maybe it was a gay man’s imagining of straight foreplay, or maybe it was meant to show a hint of steel in George’s spine, or maybe Wilder demanded extra toughness in his character, but whatever the case it didn’t work for me!

But the big climax did! Tons of gunfire, helicopters buzzing around, a racing train smashing through the station, ha ha, it’s all pretty good! George personally kills two people dead in the picture, one of them with a harpoon, and this is not behavior we expect from Gene Wilder! So it gets points for that too, ha ha! As middlebrow comedy-suspense-action pictures go, it’s one of them and no mistake! I give Silver Streak two Rembrandt Letters!

Burl reviews Volcano! (1976)

Ha ha: Burl here with a dash of reality for you! Yes, it’s a documentary, one I saw years ago and recently revisited! It’s called Volcano, but the full title is, I think, Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry! Ha ha, that’s a mouthful! But as I recall the title card on the movie itself is simply Volcano, so that’s what I’ll go with, even though some may confuse it with Volcano from 1997! That would require a good deal of confusion, and cause even more!

Because this Volcano is an almost experimental Canadian documentary about Malcolm Lowry and his great creation, and possibly my all-time favourite novel, Under the Volcano! Boy oh boy, I read the Penguin edition of that thing when I was twenty years old, and I was by golly hooked! I return to it regularly, in fact, that same battered copy! Ha ha!

The documentary, which came along seven or eight years before the John Huston adaptation of the book, with a great drunkard act from Albert Finney as the Consul, uses interviews and location footage, and one curious courtroom re-creation scene, to give a full biography of Lowry from cradle to grave, packed with every detail you might want to know and several you might not! The portrait is of a tormented genius; a desperate, devoted inebriate; a disordered emotional state and crippling lack of self-confidence! It’s not a pretty picture, but if you’ve read Under the Volcano, it’s precisely what you’d expect!

Lowry, born into comfort in England, leaves this behind to become a cabin boy on the high seas, and then, after some schooling, writes his first book, Ultramarine! Ha ha, the movie doesn’t mention this, but my understanding is that, en route to a publisher, the young author left his only manuscript in a cab, which then drove away, and he had to rewrite the entire book from scratch! Soon after that Lowry was married, and spent some harrowing time in New York where his copious mental health problems erupted into full bloom, and he ended up in Bellevue! Next he went to Mexico, where he began work on the manuscript that would become Under the Volcano, and where his wife called it quits on their troubled marriage! He married again and moved to a small shack outside Vancouver, where the book was finished, rejected by every publisher there is, and then rewritten and, after eight years, finished again!

The rest of the tale contains both triumph and tragedy, and many atmospheric shots of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl! On the soundtrack we have plentiful narration from director Donald Brittain (who also gave us Sweetheart: The Hal C. Banks Story), a lot of Lowry readings from Under the Volcano or from letters, voiced perfectly by Richard Burton from Exorcist II: The Heretic, and an eerie avant-garde music score by Alain Clavier! Many of the interviews, and the interviewees themselves, are horribly fascinating, and are just the type of eccentric old Brits that I’ve met quite a few of myself!

On the debit side, the picture is quite definitively just a bit too long: removing just a few volcano shots and other Mexican material might have helped! And it seems to revel a bit too much in the harshest aspects of Lowry’s life! But these are very minor complaints: I find Lowry fascinating, his book spellbinding, and Volcano an exceedingly worthwhile account of both! Ha ha, I give it three and a half unnecessary photos of syphilis victims!

Burl reviews Crime Wave! (1985)

The top! Few reviewers ever reach it, but here am I, Burl, with a review of the movie Crime Wave for you! Ha ha! Now, mind you, this is not Sam Raimi’s sophomore picture, which I believe in any case is called Crimewave, but rather an earlier, cheaper, and even more eccentric picture made in Winnipeg, Canada, over several years in the mid-1980s by a fellow called John Paizs!

Even though the movie got its widest release on a VHS tape for which it was retitled The Big Crimewave, and indeed that was the tape that I watched, be assured that the movie is indeed simply called Crime Wave! The picture tells the tale of a struggling screenwriter who specializes in “color crime” movies; or, rather, he specializes in the beginnings and the endings of “color crime” movies, and the boring stuff in the middle is what he’s unable to write! So much of the picture depicts the different beginnings and endings he comes up with, and the rest is about his struggle to fill in the gap between!

So if you like struggling-screenwriter pictures, Crime Wave has got that covered! Our struggling screenwriter is called Steven Penney, and he’s played by none other than Paizs himself! He gets called “a quiet man” by his tweenage chum, and this is because he doesn’t utter a single word throughout the picture! No, not even when he meets the psychotic script doctor, Dr. Jolly, who’s played in a show-stoppingly demented performance by Neil Lawrie from Mob Story!

It’s a little like an Edgar Ulmer picture, specifically one of the weirder ones, Strange Illusion for instance, but with a dash of gore, nudity, weirdness and swearing thrown in! Ha ha, it was clearly done on a penny-poor budget, and is the more impressive for that! Plenty of imagination is ladled atop the story, and the occasional bum performance or sour mash on the screenplay is a small bird to pay for the many pleasures the picture offers! It’s got laffs: that you can bank upon, and real laffs in a motion picture are nothing to ka-choo at these days!

I’m very fond of this odd little movie, which sits awkwardly at on the bench at the side of the gym during the grade seven dance along with fellow weirdos Big Meat Eater, Lobster Man from Mars, and, sure, Sam Raimi's Crimewave! (Ha ha, The Human Mule wasn’t even allowed into the dance: the principal said she smelled whiskey on his breath!) I give Crime Wave three Greatest American Hero costumes!

Burl reviews Misery! (1990)

Good day you dirty birdies, it’s Burl, here to review a movie about a demented fan! No, though it does feature Lauren Bacall from The Big Sleep, it’s not The Fan! In fact it’s Misery, a movie that, like Stand By Me, involves Rob Reiner taking a Stephen King story and doing some of his very best work with it!

James Caan from Submarine X-1 and Elf plays a writer called Paul, whose most famous works are a series of antebellum soap operas featuring a Scarlett O’Hara character called Misery! But he’s the usual Stephen King type of writer, the kind with literary ambitions buried beneath his commercial success, which he has now exercised with a new, as yet untitled, book about street waifs! He types the last lines of his book in his Colorado winter resort cabin, enjoys a smoke and a glass of champagne, and sets off in his Mustang for New York City!

But this foolish writer has not checked the weather, and he evidently is not accustomed to winter driving, so his ‘stang flies off the road! He’s rescued by Kathy Bates, well known for playing Gertrude Stein in Midnight in Paris, a demented farm lady who loves the Misery books above all else, and who sets Paul’s shattered legs and feeds him soup, and who has a head full of cracklin' bran! When she discovers first that Paul has written a profanity-laced, non-Misery book about street waifs, and then that his latest Misery book kills her favourite character off, she’s not too pleased, yo! Ha ha!

It’s not quite the two-hander it sounds as though it might be from that synopsis: Richard Farnsworth from Into the Night plays the local lawman Buster, who slowly pieces together the clues, and… well, ha ha, have you seen The Shining? Yes, I’m sad to report he’s the Dick Hallorann of the piece! Frances Sternhagen from Outland plays his salty wife, and there’s even a little cameo from J.T. Walsh, known for his appearance in Eddie Macon’s Run, as a hilariously insensitive state trooper! But it’s the Caan and Bates show for the most part, and both of them are excellent!

It’s a marvelously crafted picture, which gets pretty grisly in parts, but doesn’t go overboard the way it probably would if someone made it now! It’s a little hokey the way Paul uses his tools as a writer - stories, writing paper, a typewriter - as his weapons against his buggy warder, but this aspect comes directly from the King book! The supporting cast, particularly Farnsworth, Sternhagen and Bacall, is made up of the sort of faces you just plain feel glad to see when they come on screen, and Reiner’s direction is restrained and strong, and William Goldman’s screenplay simplifies and externalizes only what needs to be simplified or externalized! It’s a solid picture, which I remember enjoying in the theater and which holds up well now! I give Misery three beloved pet pigs!

Burl reviews Hush! (2016)

Ha ha, quiet everybody, it’s Burl, here to review a new-style slasher picture called Hush! It’s a bit more refined than your typical 80s-era hack-‘em-up, but shares some real similarities! Ha ha, for example, both this picture and Friday the 13^th part 4 feature corkscrew deaths, ha ha; but in contrast to the Jason movie, this picture really skimps on the spaz-dancing!

The situation here is that a lady novelist with hearing issues is living alone in a house out in the woods, with only her fluffy white cat (who seems marked for death from the outset) and a pair of neighbours, with whom she is friends, and her indecision as to how she should end her latest thriller!

All of this is interrupted by brutal murder and mayhem! First to go is the neighbor lady, and her demise demonstrates the mean-spiritedness of this particular slasher-murderer! He wears a mask at first, the usual creepy featureless mask that we’ve seen in pictures like this since Halloween, but he removes it soon enough to reveal a face in need of a shave, ha ha! And with his crossbow and set a’ steak knives he clearly means business! Still, of course, our deaf lady Maddie is not going to take all this lying down, and, as in Misery, she will use everything in her writer’s toolkit to defeat the bearded menace! (But unlike in Misery, that will not include actual items in the toolkit, such as a typewriter, ha ha!)

The movie is not badly done, and there are some solid suspense scenes! Of course her hearing impairment is a factor, but not as much so as I’d thought it would be, and the incorporation of new technologies is not as clumsily done as in most modern horror pictures! There’s nothing really stellar here; no new ground broken; and while clearly that wasn’t the intention it might have been nice of the movie to give us a little something to remember it by! It’s the kind of movie that invites the application of the word “exercise,” like something that would be pulled off by the more talented students in the film school if their end-of-semester assignment was to demonstrate rote suspense! As such I will award Hush two unexpectedly hale and hardy pussycats! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Best of Enemies! (2015)

Ha ha and bon mots, it’s Burl, with a review of a documentary that presents us with the full story of the non-friendship between Gore "Shadow Conspiracy" Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.! The picture is called Best of Enemies, and like any decent doc it manages to give us a nice, polished version of not only that story, but of the situations and events that surrounded it!

Ha ha, and that’s a pretty appealing prospect for ol’ Burl, since the times in question – it’s the late 1960s, we’re talking about here – and the political and social events occurring within them are of special interest to me! I also once met a fellow whose job was to cat-sit Vidal’s felines! Yes, this poor soul had to go live in Gore Vidal’s spectacular Italian cliffside villa, of which we get glimpses in this movie, and live there for four or five months at a stretch, his most onerous duty to feed the great man’s cats while Vidal was off living in New York or somewhere! Ha ha, pretty sweet deal!

I can’t say I have any such tenuous connection to Buckley, which suits me fine because frankly I never much liked the guy, ha ha, and probably wouldn’t have cared for his catsitter neither! So I’ll happily admit my sympathies were overwhelmingly with Vidal in the great tête-à-tête featured in this picture! And of course the contretemps in question happened over a series of debates during the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1968, during which the ABC network, unable to cover the conventions the way the other more monied networks did, hired these two high-toned palaverers to debate the issues of the day!

Their debates mainly ended up as exchanges of erudite trash-talk, ha ha! Vidal was better at this, though Buckley, despite merely being smart and not the towering intellectual giant he believed himself to be, manages many full-throated runabouts that demonstrate a quick wit, but never, unless I blinked and missed it, a great deal of depth! Ha ha! I guess that’s the pitfall when you’re trying to mount an intellectual defense of an ideology that by its nature resists such defense!

Of course this all leads up to the famous blowup which took place in the ninth of the ten scheduled debates, held in Chicago while police and protestors engaged in a full on, if rather one-sided, war on the streets outside! Buckley found himself pushed just that much too far when Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi,” and instead of responding with a passionate rebuttal explaining just exactly why he wasn’t a crypto-Nazi – and I for one would have been curious to hear such a rebuttal – growled “Ha ha, listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered!”

Well, this insulting, threatening utterance was the climax of the debates, and framed the relationship between the two men for the rest of their lives, and not incidentally helped father a terrible era of insult journalism which we still suffer today! Ha ha, it’s really too bad! But this is an entertaining picture, and does a nice job setting the context , and remains even-handed in its treatment of the protagonists! The set-up is a bit laborious if you already know anything about these guys, but that’s to be expected I guess! And it maybe goes a bit hard on milking the drama of the Buckley’s meltdown, but that’s equally to be expected! The only other major problem is that we have to look at and listen to that patrician reptile Buckley a lot more than I’d have cared to, but that’s part of the price of the ticket, ha ha! I give Best of Enemies three collapsed ceilings!

Burl reviews Best Seller! (1987)

Ha ha and chickenpox, it’s Burl, here to review a face-off between two pretty interesting actors, James “Night Moves” Woods and Brian Dennehy, fresh off of The Belly of an Architect and F/X! It’s kind of a wonder that I’ve never seen this before recently, considering that I like both those guys, as well as screenwriter Larry “half of Deadly Illusion” Cohen and director John “Rolling Thunder” Flynn!

The movie’s called Best Seller, and it has a very Cohenian premise: an ex-cop bookwriter, probably based on Joseph Wambaugh, is looking for his next big book subject, and along comes a weasel-faced killer who wants to spill the beans about his life as a trigger man and, more specifically about the work he does for a certain shady businessman! Naturally the businessman is not happy about this!

The picture suffers from taking the lack of trust that should be strictly a first-act conflict and making it the driver of the entire second act as well! Sure, Dennehy might reasonably demand a little proof of Woods’s intentions and truthfulness, but after a while, you know, move on! Ha ha, at least from a narrative point of view, that’s the way to go! Having Dennehy continually refuse to take Woods at his word leads to an extended feeling of stasis and repetition!

We are treated to staging and mise en scène that frequently make it seem as though the two leads are on a romantic date, ha ha! If this was a directorial decision, I applaud it! Seeing two tough guy actors lying across a frilly bed having an earnest discussion is a real spectacle, and distinctly novel – I’m trying to imagine, say, Robert Ryan and Bob Mitchum doing the same thing, but, ha ha, cannot!

It’s just as much a squib movie as Fatal Beauty, which is nice and very 1980s! The supporting cast, featuring Paul Shenar from Scarface and Victoria Tennant from All Of Me, is disappointingly unmemorable, but this picture is all about its principals, and of course Woods and Dennehy are top-flight as always!

This picture got plenty of acclaim when it came out, as I recall, but doesn’t quite live up to it in retrospect! Ha ha, perhaps at the time it seemed a lot fresher! At any rate, it’s still a very decent B picture, tough and amusing (though undercut by one of the worst musical scores ever heard), and I’m going to give Best Seller two Richard Nixon masks!

Burl reviews The Grand Budapest Hotel! (2014)

Ho ho, it’s Burl here, reviewing a new Wes “Moonrise Kingdom” Anderson picture, The Grand Budapest Hotel! I was really looking forward to this one, because its particular milieu, which is to say Central Europe between the wars, is a time and place which fascinates me and always has! Ha ha, such rich and marbled tales have come out of this twenty-year period: curdled fairy tales arising from a new era of fatalism!

Evidently Anderson feels the same way, because he’s plunged into this storied environment with the enthusiasm of Steve Zissou exploring a sea cavern! Ha ha, like some other stories I know and love, specifically Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” The Grand Budapest Hotel contains stories within stories, each of them reaching farther back in time! (Ha ha, I suspect this movie to have been influenced as much by Dahl as it was by Stefan Zweig and Bruno Schultz!)

The core story, told by F. Murray “Inside Llewyn Davis” Abraham to Jude “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” Law, concerns the legendary, perfumed concierge of the titular hotel, M. Gustave H,. played by Ralph “Skyfall” Fiennes! He takes on a protégé, young lobby boy Zero, and is promptly accused of the murder of an old lady, one of the many old ladies with whom he dallies! Soon he’s on the run, and a veritable galaxy of characters are either chasing him (the old lady’s savage, greedy son, Adrien “Midnight in Paris” Brody, his murderous factotum Willem “Streets of Fire” Dafoe, and a policeman played by Edward “Fight Club” Norton) or helping him (young Saoirese “How To Catch A Monster” Ronan, a baker’s assistant; Jeff “Into the Night” Goldblum, a lawyer; Mathieu “Cosmopolis” Amalric, a butler; Harvey “Mean Streets” Keitel, a prisoner; and Bill “Meatballs” Murray, another concierge and a member of The Society of the Crossed Keys)!

A curious thing about many of these actors is that almost all of them have worked for David Cronenberg at one time or another! Ha ha, I found that curious and amusing! At any rate, the picture is fast-paced and madcap and as overstuffed as a goochie-cake! It may lack the immediate engagement invited by some other Wes Anderson pictures, but there sure is a lot to look at! Ha ha, I liked the (ostensibly) old-style trick effects, straight out of Guy Maddin’s great picture Careful or even Ernst Lubitsch’s Eternal Love, both mountain movie like this one; the funicular train (which didn’t get enough screen time if you ask me!); the sudden moments of violence or gore; the performances; and the great scene with all the concierges calling one another!

Altogether a fine and entertaining night out at the movies, and I’m certainly going to see this one again, just to catch all the details and gags I must have missed the first time around! I’m going to give The Grand Budapest Hotel three and a half severed fingers!

Burl reviews Funny Farm! (1988)

Buck-buck-buck, it’s Burl, here to review a movie about a farmer! Ha ha, well, sort of! And it’s just as sort of a movie about a farm! Actually the farming is all in the title and in the characters’ names – otherwise farming is an utter non issue in this picture! The movie is called Funny Farm, and it’s yet another one of the 80s comedies I’ve decided I should finally get around to watching! Ha ha, most of them are pretty bad, so this very loose project is as much a mystery to me as to anyone!

All I can do when I pop one of these items in is pray it’s not as bad as Protocol! But I’ve always been curious about Funny Farm, because although it has every appearance of being a particularly lame Chevy “Fletch” Chase picture, it was directed by George Roy Hill, which I always assumed had to count for something! Hill made at least a couple of pictures I really like, and here you’ll assume I’m going to say Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting! Ha ha, those are fine pictures, but for my money his classics are Slaughterhouse-Five and Slap Shot!

Okay then, what about Funny Farm? Well, heart-sinkingly enough it started out just like another 80s comedy, The Money Pit! Sportswriter Andy Farmer and his wife Elizabeth, played by Chase and Madolyn “All Of Me” Smith, remove themselves from New York to a pastoral area near the town of Redbud, somewhere in Vermont! Thankfully the house doesn’t start falling down around them, but indeed strange and worrisome things do begin to occur! Some of them involve Chaseian slapstick, but many others do not – they have more to do with the weirdnesses and venality exhibited by the townsfolk, and the emotional, physical and ethical toll this takes on poor Andy!

Some of it is kind of funny and some of it is dire! Andy’s book gets written, but it turns out to be terrible! (I thought it would be a movie about how he can’t write his book, but along comes a helpful montage near the end that enables him to create a literary masterpiece! Glad I was to find this was not the case!) Meanwhile Elizabeth writes a book of her own and manages to sell it in short order! Ha ha! This leads to a second-act turn which leads to the final bit of the picture, wherein the Farmers instigate divorce proceedings and pay off the townsfolk to help them sell their house!

Now this sounds like an interesting development, doesn’t it, ha ha! But it seems to come out of almost nowhere, as the townsfolk haven’t actually been that weird, or at least haven’t been so weird as to put off prospective buyers! (The Farmers bought the place, after all, didn’t they!) It feels as though a lot was cut out, like there’s an Our Town’s worth of material showing the Redbuddians acting weird and the feud between them and the Farmers reaching crisis proportions! But this has to be imagined, as we don’t see it in the picture!

But what we do see is better than I’d thought it would be, probably because there was a real director to keep Chevy in line, and to stand up to whatever wackiness or sentimentality the studio might have demanded! And the last act turned out to have a Yuletide setting, so it was unexpectedly appropriate for the season, ha ha! So in the end it’s among neither the best of the 80s comedies I’ve been drawing from my VHS collection, nor the worst! It’s pleasant, forgettable 80s entertainment! I give Funny Farm two skeleton arms in the trash!

Burl review's 'Salem's Lot! (1979)

Bluh bluh, it’s Burl, here to tell you all about the vampires! Yes, I’m reviewing ‘Salem’s Lot today – the full length 1979 mini series, which I came across on VHS recently, and of course which was sequelized by none other than Larry Cohen in A Return to 'Salem's Lot! Ha ha, I got a whole box of VHS tapes through the kindness of a family member, all of them like new, and this double cassette was among them! (There was also a double cassette special edition of Hellraiser, and naturally Children of the Corn was in there too!)

Anyway, I was one of the millions of youngsters terrified by ‘Salem’s Lot on its original airing! At least I think that’s when I saw it, though I would have been pretty young! I remember some of the key scenes, like the kid whose younger brother appeared floating at the window (extra scary for me because I had – well, still have! – a younger brother of the same type!) and Mike the gravedigger jumping down into the grave and opening up the coffin! But the scariest scene for me was when the two guys (Mike and somebody else, I think) are transporting the big crate which we know contains the Nosferatu-esque hemogobbler Mr. Barlow!

Ha ha, it was all pretty scary at the time, and while it’s not so much any more, it remains a creepy and well-done television movie, which feels a lot quicker than its three hour running time would indicate! The story, for those who require it, has a writer returning to the small Maine town he was born in (ha ha, yes, as a matter of fact this is a Stephen King story!) and investigating the creepy house he once got spooked by as a child! Coincidentally, a vampire and his friend have just moved into that very house, and soon the townspeople are looking a mite pastier than before! Ha ha!

The picture was directed by Tobe Hooper, the man who later brought us such gems as The Funhouse and Lifeforce, and who at that time had just been fired from directing The Dark! He does an okay job on what must have been a tight schedule and low budget! The real draw, at least nowadays, is the cast, specifically the great James “Bigger Than Life” Mason as the vampire’s friend! Ha ha, he’s a lot like the handyman in Fright Night, in that he isn’t himself a vampire, but appears to have some superstrength and possibly other powers as well! And both of those fellows go down hard as they’re descending a staircase in a menacing fashion! Very similar scenes, ha ha!

Also in the cast we find Bonnie Bedelia, the lady from the Die Hard pictures, as the writer’s ill-fated ladyfriend; Geoffrey “The Fat Black Pussycat” Lewis as the ill-fated gravedigger; George “Massage Parlor Hookers” Dzundza as the ill-fated cuckold; Fred “Moving Violations” Willard as the ill-fated realtor; Ed “Exorcist III” Flanders as an ill-fated doctor; Kenneth “Dune” McMillan as the surprisingly not ill-fated town constable; and a bunch of fine old-timers like Lew Ayres, Marie Windsor and Elisha Cook Jr., who also battled Blacula and is of course well known from his role as Grandpa in The Trouble With Grandpa! Phew, that’s a lot of actors! And I haven’t even mentioned scary-faced Reggie Nalder, who plays the ghoulish head vampire, or Hutch himself, who plays the rather bland hero!

Ha ha, that was one of the big changes from the King book that improved things, I thought – making the vampire more of a hideous bloodsucking animal than the urbane, sarcastic man-‘bout-town he is in the novel! It’s sort of the opposite of Christine, where they got rid of the backseat corpse of Roland D. LeBay! But ‘Salem’s Lot goes for the gusto with this great vampire; and it also pushes the violence about as far as it could go in a 1979 TV movie!

It’s an entertaining and engaging watch, a little chintzy and flat here and there, and too willing to let loose threads flap around everywhere; but overall it’s not too bad! I’m going to give ‘Salem’s Lot two and a half glowing bottles of holy water!