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Reviews
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966)
The poorest of the Man with No Name Trilogy.
A preposterous Italian rewrite of the Civil War starts my list of what is wrong with this movie, followed by plot grotesqueries, e.g. Van Cleef becoming the commandant of a prison camp with no explanation? I'm appalled that this film is ranked among the top ten movies, not just westerns, of all time by the voters on this site. Just goes to prove that the internet isn't going to raise the level of collective consciousness, as if anyone wondered.
Eli Wallach chews the scenery, like always, and Van Cleef plays the same character he has played in everything he's been in, so what's new? Eastwood was at least handsome in this flick, but just as wooden-faced as you would expect Dirty Harry to be if he were wearing a dusty serape.
At least A Fistful of Dollars was a remake of the classic Yojimbo, and A Few Dollars More didn't have gross historical inaccuracies, so I'd have to rate them a few points higher. These are, however, comic books on the screen, and as such don't reach quite the level of the Batman or Spiderman flicks. More like XMen.
Shallow, bad acting, pointless violence, and random cruelty to sate the Neanderthal appetite are the mainstay of all of Leone's spaghetti westerns, and this movie is the worst of the lot in that regard.
The Hallelujah Trail (1965)
Not a bad flick, but it does waste a superb cast.
I don't know why this movie isn't funnier. Jim Hutton, Donald Pleasance, Brian Keith, Dub Taylor, and Martin Landau all have great comic credentials, and Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, and John Anderson have also done serviceable comic bits in their long, illustrious careers.
I paid money to see this flick in the theaters forty years ago, and have watched it several times on TV, most recently on TCM this week, which was my first viewing in many years. My final conclusion is that the writing and the direction underestimated the viewing audience's collective sense of humor by an order of several magnitudes.
The narration is too pointed, the jokes are all telegraphed, and some of them are not as funny as they should be. The potential for the early scenes where Lancaster and Anderson think that the fort is being besieged based on the bugle calls and cannon fire just doesn't have the impact it should have at the denouement, when the troopers come charging into the fort, and the climactic scene with the popping champagne bottles was foreshadowed, also. Finally, the escape of the whiskey bottles from the quicksand bog should've occurred without any hints.
The movie is watchable, and even fun to watch, but not as good as it should have been. Sort of like watching Jim Thome hit a mile high fly ball which is pulled in by an outfielder who reaches over the fence.
Twin Peaks (1990)
The ultimate Cult TV show!
When this show started out it was intensely hyped in TV Guide and other media before it aired, and I was unsure how it would play out. I was, however, hooked from the initial scenes involving the discovery of Laura's body.
Kyle McLachlan is brilliantly cast as the stoic Agent Dale Cooper, and the other actors are also well-nigh perfect for their roles. In particular I was thrilled to see Piper Laurie, a fantasy icon from my youth, as the very, very sexy Catherine Packard Martell. and Peggy Lipton as diner owner, Norma Jennings. Lynch was also astute in casting basically unknown actresses as the teen-aged girls.
The Badalamenti music is haunting and dreamy, and deftly underscores the surreal quality of the script. Although Twin Peaks is not Sci-Fi strictly speaking, it does project a convincing sense of alternate reality, and sooner or later you begin to believe that the "owls are not what they seem."
Despite the plot summaries at the start of each episode, this is a serial, not a season of stand-alone vignettes, and I think the show was hurt because a person who didn't watch the first 5 or 6 episodes would have been lost if they tuned in without some substantial background on the narrative thread.
In my opinion this is as good as television gets, entertaining and thought provoking.
Years ago Bravo showed all the episodes back-to-back-to back, and I think I stayed up 48 hours consecutively to tape it all. Now I wish someone had the good sense to put the whole thing on DVD. I understand that video discs which are copied from VHS tapes are available on EBay, but I'm not sure if the quality would be any better than what I have.
My only complaint is with the network (and I think David Lynch did this intentionally, also) , which killed the series right after the bomb explosion in the bank vault. Were Audrey, Pete and Andrew Packard really killed off all at once, or was there some sort of escape clause?