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.
BILOXI BLUES (1988)
Sometimes my mind equates movies that others would probably never put in the same category. For example, while watching the comedy drama Biloxi Blues, I was reminded of the Chuck Norris action movie Lone Wolf McQuade. On the surface, these two movies have nothing in common aside from the fact that they were both released in the 1980s – but for me, they give the same feeling of nostalgia. They both feel like movies I would have watched on some lazy afternoon at my maternal grandmother’s house.
Back then, there weren’t many channels to choose from. Unless you wanted to pop in a VHS, you had to find something to watch from the handful of options that were currently airing. So you’d channel surf for a while, then pick the best movie or TV show that happened to be on at that particular moment. I don’t know if I ever watched Lone Wolf McQuade with my grandma, but it’s definitely the kind of movie we would have ended up putting on. Biloxi Blue has that same “randomly caught on TV in the ‘80s or early ‘90s” vibe. It’s not something I would have sought out to watch. In fact, I remember seeing the VHS on the shelf in a video store many times and I never watched it because that image of a smiling Matthew Broderick in a green tank top just wasn’t appealing to me. But if it aired at the right time, it could have been the best movie on TV in that moment, and then it would have been watched.
I sound dismissive of Biloxi Blues, but it was actually a prestigious project. It was directed by the highly respected Mike Nichols from a script by the highly respected Neil Simon, based on his play of the same name. Cast members Matthew Broderick, Penelope Ann Miller, Matt Mulhern, and Park Overall all reprise roles they originate on the stage. Critical reaction was largely positive, and the box office numbers weren’t too shabby. I just never watched the movie because it had an uninteresting poster and a bad tagline. (The Army made Eugene a man, but Daisy gave him basic training.)
Set in the 1940s, the story follows a group of American youths who have either enlisted in or been drafted into the Army and will now undergo basic training at Keesler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi. Our lead and narrator is Eugene Jerome (Broderick), and fellow recruits include loudmouth Selridge (Markus Flanagan), tough guy Wykowski (Matt Mulhern), Casey Siemaszko as Carney, Michael Dolan as Hennesey, and Corey Parker as the character who seems most out of his depth in this situation, Epstein. Not only does Epstein come off a lot like Woody Allen, and therefore not Army material at all, but there’s also some suspicion that he may be gay, which was an issue for the Army in those days. There’s so much focus on Epstein’s experience, he almost overshadows Jerome as the lead character, and Parker did great work in the role.
Really, everyone in the movie did great work. There’s Christopher Walken as the drill instructor with a plate in his head, Overall as the prostitute the guys visit on a day out, and Miller as the girl Jerome meets at a dance. Just don’t expect to see her giving him any sort of basic training, like the tagline said. Their interactions are actually rather sweet, but they don’t take up much of the film. He does get some training from Overall's Rowena, though.
This is an interesting “slice of life” movie that, despite the ‘40s setting, has the endearing ‘80s feel to it. They don’t make movies that look or feel like this anymore, and we’re worse off for it. The poster sucks, but Biloxi Blues is a good movie.
THE INTERPRETER (2005)
Director Sydney Pollack made one of the most popular political thrillers of all time with the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor, and thirty years later he circled back to the genre for what turned out to be his final movie before his death in 2008, The Interpreter. This one didn’t go over nearly as well and has largely been forgotten – but if you cross paths with it, it’s still worth watching more than twenty years down the line.
With a script assembled by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank, Steven Zaillian, Martin Stellman, and Brian Ward, The Interpreter centers on Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman), who works at the United Nations Interpretation Service in New York. Silvia was raised in the African country of Matobo and is one of the few people who can understand the language of the country, Ku. (Matobo is a fictional place and the Ku language was created for this film.) So it’s quite a coincidence that, while in the UN building late one night, she overhears two men discussing an assassination plot in Ku. The country’s President, Edmond Zuwanie (Earl Cameron), will soon be visiting the UN to defend himself against accusations of corruption and ethnic cleansing, and it seems someone plans to kill him while he’s in the building.
Agents from the Dignitary Protection Division of the Secret Service are assigned to investigate the situation, with Sean Penn playing Agent Tobin Keller, a man who’s grieving the recent accidental death of his estranged wife. Keller is initially highly suspicious of Silvia, but they start to bond as they spend more time together... and Keller and his former agents have to try to protect Silvia from potential assassins who want to take her out of the equation.
The movie probably wasn’t as exciting as most critics and moviegoers were hoping it would be, but it has an interesting set-up and tells its story in a reasonably intriguing way. There are some good twists and turns and a couple of thrilling sequences. It’s not an all-timer, but it’s pretty good, and Kidman and Penn did well in their roles. There are also notable appearances by Catherine Keener, Dexter regular David Zayas, Pollack himself, and James Bond villain Jesper Christensen, again playing a guy you’ll be suspicious of as soon as he steps into a scene.
THRASH (2026)
Director Tommy Wirkola tends to make movies that have a strong goofball element to them. He first caught attention with the zombie horror comedy Dead Snow, his most popular movie to date may be the “Die Hard with Santa Claus” action flick Violent Night, and he has even made an animated musical sex comedy called Spermageddon... so it has been surprising to see reviews for his shark thriller Thrash where the reviewers seem to have bumped up against the fact that the movie has some very goofy stuff in it. Add in the fact that it was produced by Adam McKay, who was a head writer for Saturday Night Live and worked on multiple Will Ferrell comedies, and it should be zero shock that Thrash has comedic elements, even if it’s not a full-on horror comedy.
Also scripted by Wirkola, Thrash has a perfectly simple set-up: the U.S. coastal town of Annieville is flooded by a Category 5 hurricane called Henry, and with the floodwaters come a bunch of ravenously hungry bull sharks, lured in by blood from the local slaughterhouse, along with a pregnant great white shark.
There is a common theme to the characters the film focuses on: loss. Whitney Peak plays Dakota, an agoraphobic young woman who recently lost both of her parents. Alyla Browne, Stacy Clausen, and Dante Ubaldi play a trio of orphan kids who have been taken in by a lousy pair of foster parents. And Phoebe Dynevor is Lisa, a pregnant young woman who has been ditched by her baby daddy. It’s kind of odd that Wirkola chose to have three orphan siblings plus a solo orphan as his lead characters, especially since these people never cross paths or bond over their shared losses, but that’s how it is. The three kids are off having their own experience in the shark-infested waters, while Dakota and Lisa interact in a different part of town.
Dakota is also in contact with her uncle, marine researcher Dr. Dale Edwards (Djimon Hounsou), who’s in a different part of the country when he sees that Annieville has been flooded and decides to head into town on a boat to save his niece.
There is a lot of comedic dialogue in this movie, written in such a way that some reviewers have called in bad dialogue, but I think Wirkola did this on purpose. Things are supposed to be a bit off-kilter; quirky and amusing. And there’s also dialogue that was very obviously written to get a laugh, including a great line delivered by Edwards in response to an ignorant question where the African native has to remind someone that he grew up in modern society, not The Jungle Book.
Between the laughs, there are some great suspense sequences, like when one of the kids swims into a flooded basement and is joined by a shark, and when Lisa starts to give birth inside a crumbling house.
I had a really good time watching Thrash and felt that Wirkola really delivered on the promise of a fun shark thriller set in a flooded town.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)
I love director Sergio Leone’s “Dollars trilogy” of spaghetti Western movies (A Fistful of Dollar, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), but I’ve always had trouble getting into the spaghetti Western he made after those three: the epic Once Upon a Time in the West, which is slightly shorter than the epic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (the international version is 165 minutes, nine minutes shorter than the Dollars movie), but – as far as I’m concerned – not nearly as interesting.
Leone intended to walk away from the Western genre after the Dollars movies, but the studios were only interested in getting more Westerns out of him... and when Paramount offered him a $5 million budget and the chance to work with his favorite actor, Henry Fonda, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. Working with Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Sergio Donati, he crafted a story and screenplay “made up almost entirely of references to American Westerns.” But he decided to take a different approach to his latest Western, turning Once Upon a Time in the West into something different. Something much slower in pace. Achingly slow. There are multiple scenes throughout the film that are long and slow, with little to no dialogue being spoken and nothing much happening. The movie reaches its 165 minute running time by being full of dead air. That’s why I’ve always had trouble attempting to sit through it. The opening sequence focuses on three gunmen waiting for a train to arrive at a station – and we sit with these guys for ten minutes while one lets water drip on his hat and another is bothered by a fly that keeps crawling on his face. Those characters are played by Woody Strode and Jack Elam, but that wasn’t enough to keep Once Upon a Time in the West from losing me within the first ten minutes most of the times I tried to watch it. Leone wanted the three gunmen to be played by his The Good, the Bad and the Ugly stars Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach, but couldn’t make it happen. And I don’t think even those actors could make the first ten minutes bearable for me.
It has been said that Once Upon a Time in the West ran at a cinema in Paris for two years straight – and that when Leone met with the projectionist, the man threatened him. He said the projectionist told him, “I kill you! The same movie over and over again for two years! And it's so slow!” I get where the man was coming from. Watching this one multiple times over two days might break my mind, never mind two years of it.
There is some story set-up early on, but virtually nothing in the first fifty minutes of the movie needs to take up as much time as it does. If Leone picked up the pace, he probably could have gotten through the important stuff in at least half the time. There are more slow, quiet sequences to come, but thankfully the movie gets more interesting around the fifty minute mark and sustains that level of interesting for most of the remaining running time.
The story involves a railroad tycoon (Gabriele Ferzetti as Mr. Morton) hiring outlaw Frank (Fonda) to intimidate a man named McBain (Frank Wolff), who knows the rail line is going to cut through his property and is going to profit off of it by building a watering station there. Instead of intimidating the man, Frank kills McBain and his three children with the intention of claiming the property as his own. Problem is, McBain has just gotten married to a former prostitute, Claudia Cardinale as Jill, who arrives at the property soon after the McBains have been slaughtered. While Frank tries to scheme the property away from Jill, two men step up to support her and stand up against Frank and his lackeys: Jason Robards as the outlaw Cheyenne, who Frank tried to frame for the McBain murders, and Charles Bronson as the mysterious Harmonica, who’s on a mission of revenge with Frank in his sights.
There are some interesting developments and cool action scenes. Fonda does well playing against type as a slimy villain, Bronson is the stoic badass, and Robards livens up the proceedings and steals the show for me as Cheyenne, the outlaw with more depth than you might expect.
Once Upon a Time in the West is a good movie – in fact, it’s regarded as one of the greatest Westerns and one of the greatest films in history. But I find it to be a rough one to sit through. I couldn’t do it in one sitting, I have to break it up into chapters. It’s easy to see why Paramount cut it down to 140 minutes for its theatrical release in the United States; it could easily lose that much from its running time without affecting the story at all. American moviegoers still weren’t interested. The movie was a flop in the U.S., but it did quite well internationally. And it’s still very popular, almost sixty years after its initial release.
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