We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Lemmon, Matthau, strangers, and sharks.
THE FORTUNE COOKIE (1966)
Legendary filmmaker Billy Wilder cast actor Jack Lemmon in seven different movies over the course of their careers, with the 1966 comedy The Fortune Cookie being their fourth collaboration. Lemmon was locked in early on to play Cleveland-based CBS cameraman Harry Hinkle, who gets knocked unconscious when Cleveland Browns football player Luther "Boom Boom" Jackson (played by Ron Rich) goes out of bounds and collides with him during a game. Wilder needed to find someone to play Harry’s brother-in-law, lawyer William H. "Whiplash Willie" Gingrich, who causes a whole lot of trouble when he convinces Harry to play up his injuries so they can file a lawsuit and hopefully get a lot of money from an insurance company – and Wilder’s choice was an actor he had never worked with before, Walter Matthau.
The company behind the film, United Artists, hoped to pair Lemmon with a bigger star, with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason being on the wish list... but Wilder insisted on Matthau. And when Matthau was stricken with a heart attack during filming, it probably looked to be a disastrous choice for a moment. But Matthau recovered and got back to work weeks later. The finished film was a well-received box office success that earned multiple Academy Award nominations, with Matthau taking home an Oscar for his performance. Lemmon and Matthau would go on to work with Wilder more times, Lemmon a couple more times than Matthau – and they also established their own collaboration on the side. Lemmon and Matthau were in a total of ten movies together.
The script Wilder wrote for The Fortune Cookie with I.A.L. Diamond gave Lemmon and Matthau both fun characters to play, with Harry being a nice guy who feels bad about faking his injuries, especially since "Boom Boom" is a really good person, but sticks with the act at Willie’s insistence – and even keeps up the act after the insurance company puts him under surveillance and his ex-wife Sandy (Judi West) comes back into his life. Matthau absolutely deserved his Oscar win for bringing Whiplash Willie to life, and he makes this slob shyster a lot of fun to watch.
At 125 minutes, The Fortune Cookie goes on longer than necessary, but it’s still a fun, amusing movie to watch – and the fact that filming took place in Cleveland makes it all the more appealing to this Ohio native, who grew up watching Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau movies.
THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 2 (2025)
The Strangers franchise launched in 2008 with a very well-received home invasion horror film – and even though the writer/director quickly started working on a sequel, that sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night, didn’t come along until 2018, with a different director and a rewritten script. Now, the franchise is being expanded in a major way with a relaunch trilogy that was shot back-to-back-to-back by director Renny Harlin. It got started with The Strangers: Chapter 1, which was basically a rewrite of the original The Strangers, just with slightly different characters and circumstances. With The Strangers: Chapter 2, which picks up exactly where the first chapter ended, we’re entering some new territory.
The original The Strangers ended with the lead female, Liv Tyler as Kristen, injured but clinging to life. We’ve never found out what happened to Kristen after that, although early drafts of the Prey at Night showed her getting killed as soon as she returned home from the hospital. Prey at Night ended with the lead female, Bailee Madison as Kinsey, being hospitalized after her encounter with the strangers – and it looked like the stranger known as the Man in the Mask was going to be visiting her in her hospital room.
Scripted by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, The Strangers: Chapter 2 picks up on the idea that the home-invading, masked, homicidal strangers will not just let their victims get away and go on with their lives. Chapter 1 heroine Maya, played by Madelaine Petsch, got out of that film injured but alive, and Chapter 2 finds her at the hospital – where the strangers, Pin-Up Girl, Dollface, and Scarecrow (formerly known as the Man in the Mask) quickly come after her. Maya runs for her life – and this chapter is basically just one long chase, with Maya either dodging attacks from the strangers or being suspicious of the people she crosses paths with, thinking they might be the strangers unmasked.
This chase takes her through the hospital, out into the woods (where she has a much-talked-about encounter with a wild boar), into the home of a nurse and her roommates, and into multiple vehicles that get wrecked. It’s fun, but it’s kind of an empty experience because there’s no beginning (that was the previous movie) and there’s no end (that’s the next one), it’s basically just the franchise running in place for 90+ minutes. But it’s fun to see the strangers increase their body count when they get the chance.
Maya is right to be suspicious of everyone she meets. For one thing, they all act strange – including the sheriff, who is played by genre regular Richard Brake and is named Rotter. For another, the strangers are revealed to be locals. Now that we’re four movies into the franchise, it’s no surprise that the filmmakers have decided to start revealing information about the strangers’ identities – or at least, the identities of this iteration of the strangers, since most of these characters were already killed off in Prey at Night. This one quickly reveals that one of the strangers is a local waitress, and we get flashback to her childhood days, building up to the first murder she committed. It’s completely unnecessary, but not unexpected. The longer a series goes on, the more the mystery goes away.
The Strangers: Chapter 2 is a fine time-killer and I’m looking forward to seeing the wrap-up in Chapter 3.
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING (1995)
Coming along right when Sandra Bullock was breaking through in a major way, the romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping was a big hit when it was released in April of 1995, earning over $182 million at the box office on a budget of $17 million. I was a fan of Bullock’s from movies like Demolition Man, The Thing Called Love, and Speed and watch pretty much everything that was notable, so I watched While You Were Sleeping once it reached VHS... but I never watched it again, and over the last thirty years had completely forgotten that it was a holiday movie, taking place over Christmas and New Years Eve and going into January. Once it was brought to my attention that it could be considered a Christmas movie, I decided to added to this December’s watch list – and thoroughly enjoyed revisiting the movie decades after my previous viewing.
Directed by Jon Turteltaub from a script credited to Daniel G. Sullivan and Fredric Lebow, the movie starts off by making the lead character come off as a total nut. Bullock plays Lucy, a token collector for the Chicago Transit Authority who has become secretly infatuated with regular commuter Peter Callaghan (Peter Gallagher) and, even though they have never had a conversation, she thinks she’s going to marry this man one day. When muggers knock him onto the train tracks, causing a head injury that leaves him in a coma, Lucy saves Peter’s life and gets him to a hospital. Only close loved ones are allowed to visit him, but since a nurse overhears Lucy muttering about marrying Peter someday, she gets added to the guest list. Problem is, Lucy is still in the room with the comatose Peter when his actual family comes in and the nurse mentions that she’s Peter’s fiancée. So she gets accepted into the Callaghan family. She wants to find a way to tell them the truth, but some people who know her secret advise her not to, especially since Peter’s grandmother is of fragile health.
So we get a lead character who’s acting like a creep when we first meet her, drooling over a stranger and planning to marry him, and who continues acting like a creep by lying to his family while he’s in a coma. And yet, because this creep is played by Sandra Bullock, we still like her and go along with the story.
Another reason why Lucy enjoys hanging out with the Callaghans is the fact that she has no family of her own. Both of her parents have passed away. So it’s understandable that she would want to be around these people, who were impeccably cast. Peter Boyle and Micole Mercurio play Peter’s parents, with Glynis Johns as his grandmother, Jack Warden as his godfather, and Monica Keena as his much younger sister. Another family member is Peter’s brother Jack, played by Bill Pullman... and while spending time with the Callaghans, Lucy starts to fall for Jack (finally, a guy she actually interacts with before falling in love with). And Jack starts to fall for her as well.
It has been said that the script for this movie was a cut-and-paste mess that had gone through a lot of revisions from a lot of writers, and the cast table read was such a disaster that Bill Pullman wanted to drop out of the project – but somehow, through the direction (and script polishing) of Jon Turteltaub, the charm of Sandra Bullock, and the quality of the cast around Bullock, it ended up working. Thirty years later, it holds up as a pleasant rom-com. And yeah, even though it was released in April, it’s a nice one to watch at the end of the year.
DANGEROUS ANIMALS (2025)
I was really impressed with director Sean Byrne's feature directorial debut, the captivating and disturbing 2009 film The Loved Ones, and with his second movie, the intense 2015 film The Devil's Candy. The only problem with his filmmaking career is the gap between his movies: six years between the first two, and now ten years between his second film and his long-awaited third: the survival thriller Dangerous Animals. While Byrne wrote his first two movies himself, for this one he was working from a screenplay by Nick Lepard – and thankfully, Lepard gave him a really good script to bring to the screen.
Jai Courtney stars as (and does an excellent job playing) an Australian maniac named Tucker, a boat captain who offers tourists the chance to swim with sharks (in the safety of a cage). He’s currently taking what he describes as a well-deserved holiday... and he has a very twisted idea of what serves as an entertaining way to spend your downtime. He likes to murder people, and his greatest thrills come from abducting young women, keeping them captive in a room on his boat, then hooking them up to winch system that he uses to lower them into the water and feed them, kicking and screaming, to sharks while he films them with an old VHS camera. He has a whole collection of death-by-shark tapes hidden away on his boat.
At the heart of the story is American surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), who has a casual (or could it be more?) hook-up with local Moses (Josh Heuston) before heading out to catch some waves – but before she can get into the water, Tucker grabs her.
Zephyr is a hell of a fighter, though, and to a degree that Tucker has never dealt with before. Byrne and Lepard do a great job of keeping the suspense cranked up as Zephyr spends the majority of the film trying and failing to find a way out of Tucker’s clutches before he can feed her to sharks. Byrne has always been a filmmaker who excels at making you worry for the safety of his lead characters, and that carries on in Dangerous Animals.
This is a great thriller and one of the best “shark movies” I have seen in a while. Byrne is three-for-three as far as I’m concerned, and I really hope he’ll make another movie very soon.
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