Movie review - "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (1974) ****

 Really fun. Smart. Funny. New York-y. The four robbers have different personalities. Walter Matthau and Jerry Stiller are hugely entertaining. Shows how it's done.

Movie review - "The Truth About Charlie" (2002) ***1/2

 A delightful surprise - I'd dismissed this film without having seen it like many. I was offended, I guess, by the idea of remaking Charade and its junior grade stars. So I didn't bother. Maybe I wouldn't have liked it at the time but now I totally get it and really enjoyed the film. I understand why Demme wanted to make it, coming off Beloved, a heavy movie, and distracted by his production company and Good Works. He just wanted to have fun. So he look a terrific script, and an actress he wanted to work with and had fun in France. 

It's a love letter to the French new wave, with cameos from Agnes Varda, Anna Karina, and Charles Azanvour, and New Wave techniques and lots of French dialogue. He made the film for Thandie Newton who is fine - not perfect in the way Audrey Hepburn was but she's having a good time and Demme adores her. And Wahlberg is giving it a good try, and it's fun now to see him in a beret and talking French. Will Smith would've been much, much better but Demme is having a great time and so are the cast. Demme was ahead of the curve on diverse casting, and there's quirky touches like the girl from Emmanuele with the magazine (you'll know the one if you've seen the film) playing a cop, Ted Levine as a baddy but a flawed one. Tim Robbins is a little annoying with his dumb voice - this was around the time in his career when I began to dread him in films because he was always Saying Something about American Foreign Policy.

Loved the music. Enjoyed the movie. 

Movie review - "Father Goose" (1964) ***

 Cary Grant having fun as a boozy coastwatcher. It starts in Northern PNG, so I think Trevor Howard's naval captain is meant to be Australian but he's very British as are his offsiders.

Peter Stone worked on the script, which won an Oscar. Competently directed by Ralph Nelson. I always forget he directed it. 

I think Cary Grant wanted an Oscar, so channelled Humphrey Bogart in African Queen. He didn't get there. He's a little gruff, and boozy, but not that much - still tanned, and he gets pretty at the end. I didn't quite buy the romance with Leslie Caron other than they were film stars.

The girl characters could have been differentiated more. 

It's entertaining. Location filming in Jamaica but let down by crappy Universal studio scenes. 

Book review - "My Life as a Mankiewicz: An Insider's Journey Through Hollywood" by Tom Mankiewicz and Robert Crane (2010)

This is one of my favourite screenwriter memoirs ever - I'd rank it up with William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade and Joe Esterhaus' Hollywood Animal. I never knew that much about Tom Mankiewicz before reading this - I'd seen his name pop up of course, was a big fan of his father, and he always seemed to be available for a retrospective making of doco, especially about the Bonds. His credits are of variable quality - but his memoir is a definite classic.

The irony is Mankiewicz didn't even write this by himself - it was actually written by Robert Crane, who completed it after Mankiewicz's death at a relatively young age (68, due to pancreatic cancer - he liked to drink and smoke so maybe 68 wasn't too bad). Crane has done an excellent job knocking it all into shape; it's full of short, sharp chapters which get right to the point of the story and ensure you never get bored. 

I've read a lot about the period in time covered by the book but most of the stories were fresh and new to me. They were often very funny and moving. The ending does feel like it could have done a polish - it's a lot of rambling by Mankiewicz about Hollywood today and repeating things he's already said in the book.

Mankiewicz has a big advantage over most screenwriters in that he was Hollywood royalty - son of Joe, nephew of Herman. It was a privileged upbringing in many ways - Beverly Hills childhood, then to New York; visits to film schools; an expensive east coast education; contacts that got him involved in the film industry. However it came with a price: dad was emotionally distant, mum was schizophrenic and abusive and wound up a suicide. Mankiewicz found himself attracted to emotionally unstable actresses for the rest of his life - so, despite not exactly looking like an oil painting, had a highly successful strike rate with women in Hollywood, the Mecca for emotionally unstable actresses; his exes include Dorothy Provine, Tuesday Weld, Carol Lynley, Margot Kidder, Stefanie Powers, Jean Simmons and  Elizabeth Ashley (he's not very discrete), and he was good friends with Natalie Wood but didn't have an affair with her (they did make out in a sauna which isn't bad).

Mankiewicz must have been great company to have around - he talks about all these friends he had (Jerry Moss, Jack Haley) and he seems to have been a social animal. Maybe it was that combination of wit, some talent, famous father, social connections and just the right amount of tragedy in the background. Or maybe he was just a great guy.

How good a screenwriter was Mankiewicz? He brags every now and then about its quality and how "hot" he was once upon a time but it's hard to gauge He wrote some of the worst James Bond films of all time - Diamonds Are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun - and rewrote a bunch of movies were the screenplay doesn't exactly sing - The Cassandra Crossing, The Deep. But he wrote a decent enough Bond on his own - Live and Let Die - some okay entertainments - The Eagle Has Landed, Hart to Hart - and "script doctored" and bunch of classics: Superman, The Spy Who Loved Me. My guess is he wasn't a particularly strong on structure or original material, but he could do a decent rewrite and had a gift for dialogue, and he was clearly a great collaborator.

What makes this really special are not just the funny stories but the more heartfelt stuff... his suicidal mother, his loneliness, his tendency to be attracted to crazy women but his inability to sustain a long term relationship. I've read this three times already - it's wonderful.

Movie review – “The Taking of Pellham One Two Three” (2010) **1/2 (warning: spoilers)

Once I got over the fact this wasn’t as good as the original, this was enjoyable on its own terms – like a dance version of a classic rock song or something. The new script (deliberately I assume) turns famous bits from the original on its head: the traitorous railway man is killed early on, the transit hero is no longer an ordinary cop but a man who accepted bribes (presumably this was done to give Denzel Washington some acting to do), the villain is no longer a greedy mercenary but a brilliant Wall Street guy turned super villain (again, presumably this was done to attract John Travolta), the undercover cop who is a hostage is killed straight away, the baddies kill a few hostages, the mayor is less of an idiot, Travolta knows Washington is lying when he says the money has arrived and it hasn’t. I still enjoyed the original which was funnier and felt more believable. 

 

NB Why does everyone think Washington is telling the truth about him accepting bribes when Travolta tells him to confess or he'll kill someone? Don't they assume he'll tell Travolta what he wants to hear? Also they give all these close ups to a handsome coworker of Washington's - you keep expecting him to do something but he doesn't.

Movie review - "Skin Game" (1971) ***

A powerful idea for a serious comedy - James Garner and Lou Gosset Jnr (with hair!) travel through pre Civil War US making money by selling Gosset and him escaping. Garner has played a conman forever and is the star - which kind of throws off the balance of the film since the stakes are so agnoizingly high for Gossett. 

Gossett is a good actor and it's a wonderful part that he treats with respect - possibly too serious (though how could it not be?), I didn't really believe him as a conman, someone who loved the life - his pain is a bit too strong. I couldn't help wishing someone like Richard Pryor had been cast - the piece would have been funnier but not lost any power. 

The story is full of good ideas - Susan Clarke is a rival conner, John Brown appearing to rescue Gossett, Gossett winding up on a real plantation, finding real Africans. The handling is a bit TV - it feels a bit too much like a 70s TV Western (the blacks seem very contemporary like they did in Roots). They never seemed to quite get the tone right - drama vs comedy. Ripe for a possible remake if cast properly.