Movie review - "Midnight Run" (1988) ***** (re-watching)

 Just perfect. Astonishingly great script full of strong characters, revearsals, logic, bits of business. Everyone is allowed to be smart. Also dumb. But dumbness is motiviated. Perfect score. Perfect casting - all the little roles (people in diners, etc). Heartbreaking moments like the stuff with the daughter and the ending.

Yaphet Kotto Top Ten

 A great actor

1) Midnight Run (1988)

2) Alien (1979)

3) Blue Collar (1978)

4) Truck Turner (1974)

5) Live and Let Die (1973)

6) Across 110th Street (1972)

7) The Running Man (1988)

8) Raid on Entebbe (1976)

9) Fighting Back (1982)

10) Bone (1971) 

Movie review - "Backrooms" (2026) ***1/2

 Solid horror. Creepy setting (rooms adjacent to furniture store), excellent actors, logically developed. Slow burn but big bang in the middle. Very confident. 

Movie review - "Big Trouble in Little China" (1986) ****1/2 (re-watching)

 Fun. So Howard Hawks. Wonderful teams. Engaging. Can't believe it wasn't a hit. Kim Catrall so funny. Ditto Kurt Russell. Everyone.

Movie review - "Let's Make Love" (1960) **

 The dud credit for Marilyn Monroe among her latter movies - this actually had some decent people on it, like Norman Krasna and George Cukor, not to mention marilyn, but it's a vehicle for Yves Montand, who struggles with English.

I don't like this movie. Don't believe Yves Montand as a millionaire, don't enjoy him, or his deception - a Frenchman in America is fish out of water enough. In Norman Krasna's defence he said he wrote the script for someone like Charlton Heston or Gregory Peck. There's no sense of Montand's world - Wilfrid Hyde White and Tony Randall don't feel like they come from it.

It's not a bad idea but there's not much development. No sense of why doing this deception will help make him a better person. Or why he likes Marilyn. Montand doesn't deserve his money.

I remember the awkwardness of scenes like a gag writer attacking Montand. 

It has studio production values, and Marilyn, who clearly doesn't want to be there but it the best thing about it. There's novelty of an off Broadway musical but too much Frankie Vaughan.  

The film is packed with people having an off day - Montand, Monroe, Krasna, Cukor. 

Maybe it would've worked had Montand be surrounded by French and it had been about the French falling in love with America. That would've worked. 

Movie review - "Letter from an Unknown Woman" (1948) ****1/2

 Beautifully made by Max Ophuls and producer John Houseman and writer Howard Koch. Joan Fontaine just gets in under the wire age-wise as a young girl infatuated with pianist Louis Jourdan (the quintessential Louis Jourdan role).

I'm not always wild about old Vienna tales but it's done very well. Heartbreaking in that the kid dies of typhus and she dies, having wasted a lot of potential. I like the husband character who avenges the woman.  

Gene Wilder Top Ten

 

1) Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

2) The Producers (1967)

3) Blazing Saddles (1974)

4) Young Frankenstein (1974)

5) Silver Streak (1976)

6) Stir Crazy (1976)

7) Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (1972)

8 ) Thursday's Game (1974) (TV movoe)

9) The Woman in Red (1984)

10) okay, alright... Willy Wonka (1971)