Change Your Image
rmelmeyer
Reviews
We Made This Movie (2012)
Very good movie, but I have a conflict of interest
I found this an entertaining way to spend 90 min with my wife, and that is genuine. On the other hand, one of the actors is my son. Nonetheless, you can count on my honesty and sincerity.
This movie was well written, well casted, well shot. I have poor hearing but was able to make out all the dialog, so that means the sound was mixed very well. This was a good story with engaging, energetic young actors who were very involved in their work. It was great to see what a determined and resourceful director and producer can do with a low budget.
I recently finished the book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" about the exciting decade of movie making that started in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde. The movies were made on low budgets; young people were given a chance to give free rein to their ideas and creativity. The decade came to an end after investors saw the huge profits to be made from blockbusters such as Lucas' Starwars and Spielberg's Jaws. Gradually, the business insisted on cranking out copycat movies in order to "assure" large profits by following a "proven" formula. The result is that so many American movies to this day lack soul and don't involve us, the audience.
I hope that this low cost model works out for Rob and for the investors, and that it encourages others to experiment with affordable production and distribution. If many people can make "their" movies, many of them will turn out to be good.
Finally, my son had a great time making this movie, and from watching it, many others did as well.
Give this movie a try, for $5 you'll have an enjoyable 90 min.
The Big Lift (1950)
Setting stars in though-provoking inquiry into civilization
***May Contain Spoilers***
I have been hunting down this movie for 35 years. I could not get out of my mind the image of Paul Douglas' confrontation with a German from his past. It and the followup remain uniquely powerful and among several surprises that reward the patient viewer of what may for its first half-hour seem a mediocre effort by the writer/director of Miracle On 34th Street (1947, -73, and -94).
As I began watching Big Lift in 2002, it was no more than a whitewash of the Germans who had become the enemy of our Cold War enemy. Paul Douglas' character did seem like a clumsily portrayed boor. By the end of the movie, I recognized a complexly structured, though-provoking screenplay, and favored Douglas' performance far over Clift's.
I often mentally program double features. The mate for The Big Lift is The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), the former filmed among ruined Berlin, the latter in postwar Vienna. Both use the settings effectively to start the viewer thinking about the artifices associated with civilization and the depths to which we ourselves would probably sink to meet our material desires. Each movie has an engaging American (Monty Clift, Jos. Cotten) whose naivete gets him in over his head in the Old World. Both movies bear repeated watching for the subtlety of the thematic content and their shifting perceptions of good and evil.