Previews and Reviews that are Z's Views
ComingSoon posted Editors Guild Selects 75 Best Edited Films of All Time. Movie editors selected their choices for the best edited movies of all time [hence the title, right?].
The decade of the 70’s led the way with director Alfred Hitchcock coming in first spot with five films and editor George Tomasini coming in number one with four films.
Of the 75 films I’ve seen 56.
Twilight Zone: “One for the Angels?” [Season 1, Episode 2]
Original Air Date: October 9, 1959
Director: Robert Parrish
Writer: Rod Serling
Starring: Ed Wynn and Murray Hamilton.
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
Lou Bookman [Wynn] is a street vendor. Bookman makes enough to get by selling his cheap toys, ties and novelties, but he’s always wanted a chance to make a pitch to really show off his sales skills.
When Death [Hamilton] shows up in human form to give Bookman a chance to prepare for his death later that evening, Bookman requests an opportunity to make the pitch of his, er, life.
As with most deals with death [or the devil], you often get more [or less] than you bargained for.
Final Thoughts: Serling gives us a tale with a nice twist and just the right amount of humor. Hamilton does a fine job as Death. “One for the Angels” has grown on me over the years. Perhaps because as I get older, I may one day be in Bookman’s shoes?
Rating:
In Cold Blood (1967)
Director: Richard Brooks
Screenplay: Richard Brooks (based on Truman Capote’s book of the same name)
Stars: Robert Blake, Scott Wilson and John Forsythe
The Pitch: “Let’s make a movie based on the best-selling book In Cold Blood!”
The Tagline: “Written for the screen and directed by Richard Brooks.”
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
Dick Hickcock [Scott Wilsion] and Perry Smith [Robert Blake Perry] have a plan to steal $10,000 cash from a rich farmer’s safe and then high-tail it to Mexico where they will live out their days safe from extradition. The two ex-cons violate their parole and drive through the night to Holcomb, Kansas where according to one of Hickcock’s past cellmates, a fortune sits in the Cutter safe.
The only thing Hickcock and Smith find at the Cutter house are Mr. Cutter, Mrs. Cutter and their two teenage children. Hickcock and Smith place the family members in separate rooms, tie them up and search for the safe. There is no safe, no fortune and just a little over forty dollars in cash in the house. Hickcock and Smith brutally kill the Cutter family and then head back towards Kansas City.
The discovery that the Cutter family was brutally murdered makes national news and as the investigation grows, Hickcock and Smith decide to head to Mexico. They pass bad checks, pawn the items they buy and use the money to get across the border. It isn’t long before they’re low on cash and decide to go to Vegas to raise more. In Vegas Hickcock and Smith are picked up on a parole violation.
The cops interrogate them separately. Neither admits to knowing anything about the Cutter family murders. As the evidence begins to pile up, Hickcock suddenly tries to pin the murders on Smith. Smith then turns on Hickcock and the case is made. A trial, a death sentence and the gallows are all that Hickcock and Smith have left to look forward to. Sadly, one is left with the feeling that either man alone would not have committed the murders.
Wilson (probably best known to folks as Hershel from The Walking Dead) and Blake (probably best known as the crazy old celebrity acquitted of killing his second wife in 2005) are excellent as the leads. Robert Brooks deserves kudos for his screenplay and direction.
Watch for cameos by: Will Geer [Grandpa from The Waltons] and music by Quincy Jones!
Award Nominations:
Academy Awards –
Rating:
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Wendell Mayes, John D. Voelker (based on his novel written as Robert Traver)
Stars: James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazarra, Arthur O’Connell and George C. Scott
The Pitch: “Let’s make a movie based on the best-selling novel Anatomy of a Murder!”
The Tagline: “Last year’s No.1 best-seller … This year’s No.1 motion picture.”
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
Stewart plays small town attorney Paul Biegler who’d rather be fishing than practicing law. Biegler’s mentor is Parnell McCarthy (Arthur O’Connell) who’d rather be boozing it up than just about anything. When Biegler is offered the chance to defend Fredrick Manion (Ben Gazara), against a murder charge, he sees it as a way to get McCarthy off the booze. Manion is a soldier accused of murdering the man who raped his wife (Lee Remick).
We spend the first part of the movie learning about the case.
Biegler meets Manion, a quick-tempered, hard-to-like soldier who admits to killing the man who raped his wife about an hour after finding out about it. This wasn’t a heat of the moment murder. After meeting Manion’s wife who is sporting a beat-up face and a casual attitude, Biegler finds himself in a case where nothing is clear cut.
Manion is a jealous, thuggish man who likes his wife to dress provocatively and then gets jealous when men give her attention. Laura Manion likes men, booze and fun. Being married doesn’t stop her from having a good time where she can find it. She married Manion three days after divorcing her first husband and admits that Manion was the reason for the divorce.
Was Laura raped? She was beat-up, but did that happen during the rape or when he husband found out she had been with another man. The clinical evidence is inconclusive. Something happened but under what circumstances?
The second part of the movie takes us into the courtroom for one of the best courtroom dramas ever filmed.
The acting across the board is excellent. Stewart (Best Actor), O’Connell (Best Supporting Actor) and Scott (Best Supporting Actor) were all nominated for Academy Awards. I’m surprised Lee Remick wasn’t as well, because she is that good. The film went on to be nominated for seven Oscars as well as other honors.
To the movie’s credit, the jury comes back with a verdict, but knowing the evidence of the case and the things that we see that the jury doesn’t, the audience may come away with a different verdict. At the very least, there is room for discussion.
The last scene is a treat and adds another layer to the puzzle.
Watch for cameos by: Howard McNear [Floyd the Barber from The Andy Griffith Show] and Duke Ellington!
Awards Won:
New York Film Critics Circle Awards –
Venice International Film Festival –
Grammy Awards –
Producers Guild of America Awards –
Award Nominations:
Academy Awards –
British Academy Film Awards –
Directors Guild of America Awards –
Golden Globe Awards –
Rating:
Twilight Zone: “Where is Everybody?” [Season 1, Episode 1]
Original Air Date: October 2, 1959
Director: Robert Stevens
Writer: Rod Serling
Starring: Earl Holliman and James Gregory.
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
Mike Ferris [Holliman] suddenly finds himself in a deserted small town. He doesn’t know who he is or how he got there. As he moves through the town looking for others, he can’t shake the feeling that he’s being watched… and he is!
Final Thoughts: Nice twist ending provides a solid start to the series.
Rating:
S. Craig Zahler is an accomplished novelist, screenwriter. Zahler is also the writer and director of Bone Tomahawk starring Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson and Matthew Fox.
Robert Galluzzo interviewed S. Craig Zahler about the making of Bone Tomahawk and more at Blum House.
Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 10 Wild Facts About Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Here are three of my favorites…
2. PAUL NEWMAN WAS IN FROM THE BEGINNING, BUT FINDING HIS CO-STAR TOOK SOME WORK.
When he wrote it, Goldman had in mind Newman—then perhaps the biggest movie star in the world—and Jack Lemmon, who’d done a 1958 Western called Cowboy and seemed like a good fit. Lemmon turned out not to be interested, and numerous other candidates were approached, including Steve McQueen (see below), Warren Beatty, and Marlon Brando. Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, suggested Robert Redford, a stage actor who’d been in a few films but was considered something of a lightweight. Woodward, Newman, and director George Roy Hill all pestered the reluctant 20th Century Fox bosses until they conceded to casting Redford.
4. STEVE MCQUEEN DROPPED OUT OVER BILLING.
If Newman was the biggest movie star in the world at the time, Steve McQueen was right up there with him. The idea of casting not one but two mega-stars as Butch and Sundance made perfect sense, but there was a problem: whose name would go first in the credits? Fox president Darryl F. Zanuck later said that he proposed an unusual arrangement where half the prints of the film would list Newman first, the other half McQueen, but McQueen (or his representatives) wouldn’t accept anything other than top billing across the board. And that was that.
5. IT WAS “THE SUNDANCE KID AND BUTCH CASSIDY” UNTIL THE CASTING WAS SETTLED.
Once they’d settled on Redford as Newman’s costar, a new (minor) issue arose. Newman thought he was playing Sundance in what had heretofore been known as The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. It turned out Hill, the director, actually wanted him to play Butch, and Redford to play Sundance. No problem; Newman was fine with the switch. But now they had a situation where the character being played by the less-famous actor came first in the title. The obvious Hollywood solution: reverse the title. “The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy” sounds weird to us now (as does the notion of Redford being significantly less famous than Newman), but there you go.
Would you like to know The Secret of the Levitating Man?
If so, click on the video below.
Matthew Jackson and Mental_Floss present 10 Fascinating Facts About Thunderball. Here are three of my favorites…
1. IT STARTED AS A FILM, THEN BECAME A BOOK, THEN BECAME A FILM AGAIN.
In 1959, Bond creator Ian Fleming began considering a film version of his character, andcollaborated with producer Kevin McClory and writer Jack Whittingham on a screenplay treatment. Fleming eventually tired of the movie business, and went back home to Jamaica to write his next Bond novel, Thunderball. McClory later sued, claiming the novel used elements from the film they’d worked on together. The suit settled out of court, but McClory was granted certain rights to Thunderball in the process, and ultimately served as a producer on the movie. Nearly two decades after Thunderball was released, he served as an executive producer on Never Say Never Again, a Bond film that saw the return of Sean Connery in the title role for the first time in more than a decade (produced by Warner Bros. and not Bond’s home studio of MGM). The plot is in many ways identical to Thunderball.
4. THE JETPACK REALLY WORKED, BUT THE PILOT WOULDN’T FLY WITHOUT A HELMET.
The Bell Rocket Belt used in the film’s opening sequence was a real working jetpack, and two qualified pilots were flown to France to operate it for the moment when Bond lifts off. Bill Suitor, who flew the jetpack on camera, was initially asked if he would mind flying without a helmet so that Bond could look cooler. Suitor refused for safety reasons, which is why Connery wore a helmet in the final film.
6. THE BRITISH MILITARY THOUGHT BOND’S MINIATURE OXYGEN TANK WAS REAL.
Early in the film, Q gives Bond a tiny breathing apparatus that allows him to survive underwater for several minutes, and Bond puts it to good use when trapped in a closed pool with a bunch of sharks. The scene was so convincing that a member of the Royal Engineers called chief draftsman Peter Lamont and asked him how long the apparatus actually worked. Lamont replied “as long as you can hold your breath.” When the engineer countered that Bond was underwater for several minutes onscreen, Lamont replied it was “the skill of the editor.” The engineer eventually hung up.
Bike Parkour, anyone?
All of the stunts are pretty impressive, but riding over the bridge and also along the thin guard rail hundreds of feet above the ocean are life-threatening… and I’m just talking about the fear of those who dare to watch.
Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 21 Things We Learned from the Reindeer Games Commentary. Here are three of my favorites…
1. Test screenings resulted in audience feedback that was “not bad, but not what the producers had expected,” and it led to immediate pressure on Frankenheimer to cut the film. The distributors believed the issue was entirely due to length. “In retrospect, I should not have cut the movie.” He believes the theatrical release lost a lot of its edge.
2. Re-shoots inspired by audience reactions at test screenings took more time than planned and left them unable to open during the holiday season. Frankenheimer regrets that decision and would have rather skipped the re-shoots so they could have opened in December. “We missed our optimum time to play the movie.”
17. The scene where Rudy and Ashley fall through the ice was filmed in a field. They dug a hole, filled it with warm water, and added plastic “ice” over it. The underwater scenes were filmed in a tank. Frankenheimer says it’s preferable to the way he did it on 1990’s The Fourth War in which he actually dropped Roy Scheider and Jurgen Prochnow into icy water.
Gamesradar posted their choices for The 30 Best Sci-Fi Movies Ever. It’s a pretty good list.
I’ve seen 21 out of the 30. My guess is that most of you have seen even more. And that almost everyone recognized the sweet Steranko Bladerunner art.
This is a really clever video using only movie titles for dialogue, it presents a clear story with a nice twist at the end.
More, please.
The Syfy Channel runs a Twilight Zone Marathon every year for New Year’s Eve / New Year’s Day.
This year is no exception. Except it is.
This year Syfy is pulling out all the stops and will run each of the 156 Twilight Zone episodes in order! My DVR is locked and loaded. Although I’ve seen nearly every episode, this is my chance to (Z-)view them in order.
The fun starts on December 30th at 7pm.
Paleofuture has a list of the TwilightZone episodes and times that they’ll appear. I’ll be live tweeting along with The Twilight Zone @The Night Gallery and others. Hopefully, you’ll be able to join in too.
Meadow George Lemon III better known as “Meadowlark” Lemon of Harlem Globetrotters fame passed away today at the age of 83.
Meadowlark played “before Kings, Queens, Presidents, Popes,” and millions of fans in over 100 countries of the world during his career with the Globetrotters which ran from 1954 – 1979 and over 16,000 games. Dubbed the “Clown Prince of Basketball” Lemon became the face of the Globetrotters and one of the most recognized athletes in the world.
Lemon’s popularity led to commercials, tv and movie roles and two Harlem Globetrotter animated series. In 1993, fourteen years after retiring, Lemon returned to the Globetrotters for a 50 game come-back tour. In 2003, Lemon was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame which was just one of the many honor and awards Lemon earned throughout his life.
Lemon was a born-again Christian and in 1986 became an ordained minister.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to Meadow George Lemon III’s family, friends and fans.
