chuckster-1 Reviews

I Escaped from Devil's Island (1973)

Bizarro-world "Papillon" clone is too much fun to miss.

[7/10 · 27 July 2023]

Saw this last night as part of a Jim Brown triple feature at QT's New Beverly Cinema in L. A., and all I can say is: Viva Roger Corman. "I Escaped from Devil's Island" isn't the best Corman movie, but it's fun and worth a look.

In 1973 Allied Artists was set to release "Papillon," so Corman rushed "I Escaped from Devil's Island" into production and apparently beat it into theaters by a couple of weeks.

Same basic story and locations as "Papillon" but Cormanized, with more exploitation elements. (Same prison yard, same guillotine bit at the beginning, same leper and leper colony, same pink-and-white striped uniforms, and one character even has the same little round eyeglasses Hoffman wears in the Franklin Schaffner film.)

The best part is that it has the two biggest-weirdest gaffe-mistakes I've ever encountered in any movie: I hope this isn't spoiling it too much, but a credit at the beginning tells us it's set in "French Guyana, 1918." But sixty-two minutes into the movie, when Jim Brown, Christopher George, and Richard Ely have escaped, and they arrive on the mainland, the movie inexplicably seems to jump fifty-five years into the future, because suddenly the actors and background actors are wearing contemporary 1973 clothing, and they're running through a 1973 carnival, complete with metal rides and lots of '70s buildings, décor, fireworks, guns, furnishings, etc. Maybe Corman thought nobody would notice? I guess nobody did, since I can't find anything about it on the 'net.

Just as great: The "mainland" Brown and his fellow inmates escape to is clearly Mexico - the film is a U. S./Mexico production - which begs the question: How did they float 3,500 miles from French Guyana to Mexico on a tiny raft (in the hot sun)?

Roger Corman hired William Witney to direct this. I wasn't familiar with Witney, but he directed dozens of B-westerns in the 1930s and '40s, so clearly he was retired and Corman probably secured his services cheaply. (Good production values in spite of the gaffes and the plethora of too-dark-to-see day-for-night shots; good enough, in fact, so that the film was released by United Artists.)

I'd give it a 7 out of 10. Worth a look if you want to see a fun bizarro-world/alternate "Papillon."

Crisis in Six Scenes (2016)

Overlong, but it has a lot of great stuff in it.

[6/10 · 6 June 2022]

"Crisis in Six Scenes" is a lot of fun.

Woody is just as sharp and hilarious as he's ever been (today, in our embattled world, we need his genius and wit more than ever), and he's ably abetted by another legend, Elaine May, who is also in top form. Miley Cyrus, also turns in a wonderful performance: Allen's trademark dialogue is great when he's saying it himself, but it can sometimes sound a little stilted when it comes from other actors, but Cyrus totally sells it and makes her proto-Patty Hearst-esque character believable and real.

If there's a problem with "Crisis," is that it's a hilarious ninety-minute Woody Allen movie that's been stretched out to two-and-a-half hours, to equal the running time of a six-episode streaming series, and it kind of peters out somewhere around episode four. The fault, I think, isn't with Woody Allen, but with the Amazon streaming service that required him to add unnecessary length, and to wit, the show is padded out with a few dialogue scenes that seem long and/or repetitive.

(The script also has some anachronisms in it, and in that regard, maybe Allen should have given it one more pass through the typewriter: Elaine May invites her friends over to participate in her "book club," but the series takes place in the late '60s before book clubs became popular, and these women would have probably been more inclined to play bridge or mah-jongg; Woody and Elaine's house is alarmed, but this wouldn't happen in those days, because people back then used to routinely keep their doors unlocked; there's also a scene in which Woody pitches an idea to a network, but I'm not sure if this kind of pitch meeting was commonplace back then; and in another scene, Woody and his agent dine at a deli, and the agent has ordered a taco, which I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see in NYC in the late sixties.)

On the trite "1 to 10 scale," I give "Crisis in Six Scenes" a six, because it's got a lot of filler in it, but if Allen ever decides to whittle it down to ninety minutes, there is definitely a solid "9" or "10" hiding inside of it.

Being the Ricardos (2021)

Never boring, but obstreperous and unnecessary.

[5/10 · 30 December 2021]

I went into "Being the Ricardos" with a lot of goodwill, but it made me feel like somebody was holding me over a dumpster and dipping me up and down for two hours. While it's set in the 1950s it's filtered through Hollywood's usual too-earnest 2021 sensibilities, which means that much of it is super dour.

While I know, from having read biographies about Lucy and Desi, that they, and Vivian Vance and William Frawley, could often be mercurial, however the whole movie is awash in the mercurial, not to mention in the unpleasant, and everybody spends the entire movie dressing everybody else down. Each character has a mean streak, continually sniping at each other and putting each other down, and even though this happens in the entertainment business, where a lot of people are famously testy (and they are often complete bullies), the film rarely lets up from this level of disagreeableness.

The real Lucille Ball may have been tough, but audiences loved her because she also radiated warmth and humor. Nicole Kidman, an excellent performer whom I like in a lot of movies (She's wonderful in "The Human Stain" and a lot of other movies), plays Lucy as hollow-eyed, cold, and pissed off, plus whoever did her makeup made this usually-expressive actress look like a wax statue.

Aaron Sorkin has tried to shoehorn in every "I Love Lucy" fact he could think of, and I felt like somebody was making me play a sour-spirited trivia game. I enjoy Sorkin's other movies and series', but the Sorkin/Ball combo, and the writer-director's now-clichéd dialogue wherein his characters are always having to one-up each other with tired verbal badinage, as if they're in a boxing match that lasts a lifetime, feels weird. (What will he write next? An angry Santa Claus movie? An angsty Easter Bunny play? A Mother Teresa miniseries full of anomie?)

"Being the Ricardos" is entertaining, but nobody in the film is likeable or recognizable as human, and even though the film ends with a sequence in which Ball apologizes to a few people for being mean, it's too little, too late.

This is a legendary sitcom re-imagined as "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," and it needed warmth and humor to counter-balance the characters' near-constant meanness.

It's never boring, but I wish they could start over from scratch and make something a little less cynical that might appeal to people who live outside of the 310 area code.

Rifkin's Festival (2020)

Love Woody, but not this movie.

[2/10 · 7 September 2021]

I'm a lifetime Woody fan, and I went into "Rifkin's Festival" with a lot of goodwill, but it felt really stodgy and dated. The actors do a uniformly great job, and it looks great courtesy of the legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, but I felt like this was the kind of thing Woody could write in his sleep, because it was the same dialogue (especially tinny-sounding this time) and themes we already know from fifty of his other movies, and in a kind of uninspired way. I also cringed a little when Wallace Shawn kept hitting on the pretty doctor, Elena Anaya, even after she initially turned him down. We're definitely lucky that we still have this masterful filmmaker delivering a film once a year, but I wish this one had been much better.

Magnet of Doom (1963)

Awesome Movie! Unfairly Maligned!

[9/10 · 28 March 2019]

Even though I have always enjoyed Melville's films, I had never heard of "L'Aine des Ferchaux" until it was on TCM this past week. I'm bowled over. It was amazing!

The American title is "Magnet of Doom." Before I saw the film, I thought, "This is the best movie title ever. There's no way the film can live up to it. And not only does it live up to it, but it exceeds it in every way!

Down and out boxer Jean-Paul Belmondo is hired to drive a disgraced, on-the-run, banker Charles Vanel across the backroads of the US, from NYC to New Orleans, in Kennedy-era 1962, kind of like a proto-"Green Book"... except "The Green Book" sucks and "L'Aine des Ferchaux" is amazing!

I loved seeing the cold/stoic characters of French Film Noir thrown into the over-the-top world that's also occupied by American films like "Cool Hand Luke," "Midnight Cowboy," "Easy Rider," Tennessee Williams, and even "Hurry, Sundown." It's film noir, it's a road trip, and it's also a fantastic widescreen/color travelogue of JFK-era US in 1962. Belmondo even visits Sinatra's home in Hoboken, and he brawls with toughs in a diner, like Rock Hudson does in "Giant." Much of the dialogue is in English, too.

European directors sometimes pick up on little nuances of Americana that American filmmakers miss. Here, I'm thinking of this film, but also of Wim Wenders' "Paris, Texas." This film is full of small details that only a European outsider would notice (Melville is definitely fetishizing Chevrolets, roadside motels, lady hitchhikers, and American rock and roll), plus a few comedic set-pieces that seem to be right out of David Lynch or John Waters.

The score by Georges Delerue is excellent, and it stays in your head, long after the film is over.

This film is sometimes left out of Melville retrospectives, because it's less somber than some of his other films, and I guess Melville purists don't like it. I enjoy the director's other movies, but I also really liked this one a lot. Entertaining and fun, from beginning to end.

The Cobbler (2014)

Unjustly maligned by critics, but truly wonderful.

[9/10 · 23 March 2015]

"The Cobbler" is a really wonderful movie that's been unjustly maligned by critics who probably didn't understand what it is: it's a really creative, imaginative, moving new story in the vein of Sholom Alechem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. I truly enjoyed it much more than the last fifty movies I saw in a theater; it's a real movie -- a rarity these days. The filmmakers did a great job. It's one of those rare films that will build by word of mouth and become a great classic over time. Adam Sandler, Method Man, and Dustin Hoffman turn in uniformly great performances. Reminds me of another movie I liked just as much, 1970's criminally underrated "The Angel Levine."