Delayed Reaction: Hair

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Marathon Man: Both star Richard Bright

 

Premise: The Broadway musical about hippies comes to the big screen.

 

I get why Hair was such a hit on Broadway. It came out in 1967-68 at the peak of the hippie movement. It was an incredibly timely show. And with all musicals, at the end of the day, what’s most important is that the music is great. As a movie coming out in 1979, it was going to lose some luster. It was a period piece at that point and the hippies were already seen as a bit of a joke by then. Or, if not a joke, they were a dated idea. Under those conditions, this feels like the best version of Hair I could’ve expected as a film.

 

The cast is good. Treat Williams feels like a star right away. I wasn’t totally ready for Beverly D’Angelo as a young person. She’s the mom in Vacation or older in my memories. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it was well made with Milos Forman at the helm. It’s his follow up to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This was definitely helped by the fact that I knew nothing about the show, so that ending really hit me. That shit was grim.

 

I must be honest about something though. I really wasn’t rooting for the main characters that much. Had I been alive in the 60s, even if I was young then, I suspect hippies would’ve annoyed me. In this, they sure felt like deadbeats who broke a lot of rules, disturbed a lot of peace, then acted like the victims when they faced any consequences. Thank god the music was so catchy, because it distracted me from how much I was actually annoyed by these characters.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Marathon Man

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Nicholas & Alexandra: Both star Laurence OIivier

 

Premise: A grad student gets caught up in a plot involving a Nazi war criminal and some stolen jewels.

 

The 70s was a golden era for the conspiracy-minded. People just got out of a turbulent decade full of assassinations. We’d been publicly lied to about Vietnam and Watergate. The post-hippie haze led to a lot of people hitting middle-age who just had their minds blown. The herculean accomplishment of the Moon landing begged for doubters. The Cold War was maturing from always thinking we were on the brink of war to assuming both sides were infiltrating the other. The run of conspiracy thrillers of the 70s is one of the easiest to understand trends in cinema history. And I’m here for them.

 

I haven’t disliked one of these thrillers that I’ve seen yet. Even when they are simply generic, they normally involve an actor I love being really intense for two hours and no immediate expectation of a happy ending. True to form, Marathon Man doesn’t feel unique to me. As the weeks pass, I’ll confuse all parts of it with Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, etc. It’s a lot of fun though. 70s leading men could believably come off as random guys. Sure, a Robert Redford has conspicuously chiseled features, but others like Dustin Hoffman and Roy Schieder in this have some grit to them. And New York City of the 70s wasn’t trying to sell anyone on it. They were OK letting it be dirty; big without inspiring awe.

 

I appreciate how dumb a lot of the motivation for this story is. It’s set off by a road rage accident. All the murders and espionage are for a guy trying to get some jewels. Despite the size of the conspiracy, it’s all so simple. So, I don’t have a lot to say about this one. Just that it was fun to watch.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Nicholas & Alexandra

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to You Only Live Twice: Cinematography by Freddie Young

 

Premise: The story of the last Czar of Russia and his family.

 

The purpose of this “Century in a Month” project is context. By moving in chronological order and with connected films I’m inherently tracking the evolution of the medium. Nicholas & Alexandra is a film that is really interesting in the larger context of the world at the time. It’s probably the last big 60s epic, despite the year it came out. Starting around 1956 with The Ten Commandments, the Hollywood studios flexed their might with a series of epics like Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and Cleopatra. By 1971, that type of movie wasn’t working as well as it used to. The New Hollywood movement shifted the focus from auteur producers to auteur directors. The look of epics was splitting. 1972 put that in sharper focus with The Godfather and The Poseidon Adventure representing both ends of the spectrum. Nicholas & Alexandra feels really outdated. Like a David Lean epic that he forgot to make earlier. It’s really not a surprise that producer Sam Spiegel made this because he couldn’t get to work with David Lean on Dr. Zhivago.

 

That isn’t to say this Nicholas & Alexandra is a failure. The cast is huge and impressive. The film looks expensive. It got 6 Oscar nominations in some of the biggest categories. It was a success, but it feels like a throwback success. Like when The Irishman pulls in a bunch of Oscar nominations now. There’s an “Oh, we’re still doing that?” feeling to it.

 

It’s strange to me that for as huge as the cast is, I know so few of the names. Jumping out, I know Laurence Olivier, Brian Cox, and Ian Holm. Just about everyone else I don’t know by name alone. I’m not sure how much of that was felt at the time. Did this feel like a huge cast of generational stars? A kind of movie you’d watch in a decade and notice a bunch of A-listers and Oscar winners looming (Think 2012 Anna Karenina or 2005 Pride and Prejudice). Or at the time was it clear they weren’t getting first choices in any roles?

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: You Only Live Twice

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Dr. No: In the James Bond series.

 

Premise: James Bond does stuff in Japan.

 

Perhaps it’s cheap to use two James Bond movies as connectors in this “Century in a Month” project, but I don’t care. I’ve got a lot of James Bond movies to catch up on. You could argue that I’m doing the series no favors by watching them all in such a scattered order over several years. I largely agree, but I sure do like to watch these like one off adventures with no greater context. If step on Blofeld’s grand reveal that’s a fair tradeoff.

 

James Bond has never been a series concerned with aging well. Counterintuitively, that’s why they’ve remained popular. This movie’s understanding of how spacecrafts work is charmingly naïve in a very 1967 way. The embrace of Japanese culture is simplistic but kind of endearing. I do laugh at the idea that they could take a man like Sean Connery and expect to be able to make him blend in there. This is pretty mid-tier of the James Bond I’ve seen. Arguably though, one of the better balances of zany and serious.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Blackhat

Premise: A devastatingly handsome hacker tries to stop another hacker from hacking.

I’m not in the cult of Michael Mann, but I do agree that he’s good at making a certain kind of watchable movie. He’s a filmmaker whose films I saw before I really considered who directed them. Heat, Collateral, Ali, and Public Enemies I saw because they looked good. Mann wasn’t a brand to me. He is that now, thanks in large part to the Blank Check podcast forcing me to consider his filmography as a whole. My take on him now is that he makes big movies that should work but don’t always. You’d think for how much people like Heat, Collateral, and The Last of the Mohicans now that he’d have even one movie that broke $100 million at the box office, but he doesn’t*.

 

*Barely. His highest grosser is Public Enemies at $97 million and you could make some arguments with inflation adjustment. The greater point is that he has no blockbusters.

 

Blackhat is a rather impressive extreme of the Michael Mann experience. It’s a massive box office bomb. The kind that’s hard to ever predict. I mean, Heat fans alone should’ve gotten that movie above $10 million, right? Seven years later, Blackhat doesn’t look that different than his other films. It’s a nice reminder of how much timing and ad campaigns can really matter sometimes.

 

Anyway, the movie is a little ridiculous but ultimately entertaining. I love Hollywood’s obsession with making hackers cool. I’m not saying that a hacker has to be a nerd at a computer. They tend to dress the Chris Hemsworth role up a little more though. Typically he’s a spy who just happens to be the world’s best hacker. In this, he’s just a hacker who happens to also be an action movie star. And whatever that accent was, I’m asking that he never bring it back.

 

The movie does what it can to dress up a fairly dry topic. I mean, any time “soy futures” are mentioned as part of a masterplan, it’s going to be an uphill battle. Solid cast though. Viola Davis as stern authority figure and Holt McCallany as exhausted law enforcement officer play to their strengths. The rest of the cast is nicely international. Michael Man knows how to make this kind of action movie, even if the details of the hacking and technology escape him.

 

Look, I didn’t follow a lot of the movie. It was entertaining enough though.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Dr. No

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Man of the West: Both star Jack Lord

 

Premise: James Bond is sent to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of an MI6 station chief.

 

Nothing hits quite like a proper series starter. I've seen it many times in my life, although many of the best were before I was born. It must've been so cool to see Star Wars or Raiders and realize that the language of pop culture was about to change. Dr. No is one of those moments as well. Right away it's got that iconic theme music, the visuals, and Sean Connery looking like a million bucks. I doubt many in 1962 predicted they'd be making these movies 50+ years later, but it must've been cool to see Dr. No as a kid and have it carry you through to retirement.

 

Overall, Dr. No is a pretty traditional Bond movie. It gets some bonus points for establishing the template, and I like the relative simplicity of this compared to the more peculiar Roger Moore movies and other more elaborate installments. And it's fun to think about this as a 1962 movie. I tend to think of the hippies and the British Invasion as some overnight event, like one day people were dressing in suits and listening to Sinatra then the next it was Beatles and flower children. However, the shift was happening slowly before that. This is an unmistakably 1960s movie despite coming out before most of the big 60s benchmarks. Pretty much since the beginning, Bond was a debonair presence in an evolving world.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Man of the West

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Return to Paradise: Both star Gary Cooper

 

Premise: After the train he's on gets robbed and man gets thrown back into his criminal past.

 

Just because I'm doing this as part of my "Century in a Month" project, doesn't mean I'll have much to say about it. This movie’s got Gary Cooper as the linking point with my last movie, and he is a pro at Westerns. Looking this film up, it's apparently regarded as one of Copper's finest later performances and the film has been re-embraced over the years. Personally, I don't see it. It blends in with a lot of Westerns I see.

 

Part of that is that the sanitized 50s Western doesn't sit as well with me. I like more of the Westerns that follow because they embrace the dirtiness of the Wild West. And I don't just mean physical cleanliness. Like, I don't buy Cooper as a former criminal. He's too well reformed. I sooner believe him as a lawman than a man on the run. In general though, I do like the story of a criminal who can't escape his past, trying to be better. I'm just not a fan of the Hays Code approved 50s studio version of it. It has all the gunfights and Western trappings though, so it's a baseline successful movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Return to Paradise

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to Edge of Doom: Both directed by Mark Robson

 

Premise: A man washes up on a remote, strictly religious Pacific Island and helps them break away from those ways.

 

This is a weird movie. It's not all that good, but I have an unexpected number of things to talk about from it. I suppose I'll start with the "Century in a Month" of it. I didn't expect to find much of a connection between this and Edge of Doom. I look at Mark Robson as a successful but ultimately journeyman director. So I was surprised to see the religious angle pop up in both movies. Edge of Doom is about a man who struggles with his faith and the church, going so far as to kill a priest before ultimately seeking absolution. Return to Paradise starts off with a puritanical society that the people rebel against. I wonder if that's a coincidence or if Robson really had some struggles with his faith. It's certainly a connection I never would've noticed without doing this project, so that's pretty cool.

 

I don't know what to do with the discussion of race with this movie. It's not doing anything that other movies in 1953 weren’t doing, but it's still a little uncomfortable from a modern context. I mean, this island is under the puritanical rule of the one white guy who's on the island, then the second white guy who shows up is the one who overthrows the first guy and becomes a folk hero for it. And when the puritans are deposed, it’s the preacher's enforcers who are banished from the island, not the preacher himself, who gets to continue to live a happy life there. Again, this is very typical of the time in film, but it's nice to point out as a reminder that that doesn't mean it was a good thing.

 

I love the production design and location of this movie. These small and/or remote island nations are so intriguing. They have the trappings of modern society but haven't or can't embrace all parts of it. Even watching this movie, I can't figure out if filming this was amazing or awful. I mean, it's a beautiful island, but also, what was the plumbing or electricity situation there?

 

I'm sorry to harp on this again, especially again with Gary Cooper, but how old did Gary Cooper look to people in 1953? I know movie stars from an older generation all look older to modern eyes. Gary Cooper is in his 50s in this and at best he can pass for mid-40s. Yet, for the first hour of this, he shows up like he’s a young drifter. If you just describe his character to me, I'll image someone early 30s. So, here's this old man who starts a revolt then has a kid with a woman over 20 years his junior. In the film's defense, there's a time jump later where Cooper seems about the right age. That's less than half the movie though. So, was this something where, to 1953 audiences, Cooper in the early scenes passed for much younger, or is it like Robert Redford in The Natural where audiences collectively agreed to just ignore it?

 

In the end though, as I've already said, this isn't a very good movie. I would've rather just watched 90 minutes of people hanging out on this beautiful island. The plot is scattered. I don't think the movie realizes how much Cooper's character sucks in it. Like, I think the calculus was that people love Gary Cooper, so they could get away with a lot with him. But, for an audience (me) that doesn't care that much about Cooper, he's just a jerk. Mixing WWII and a time jump in is a nice touch but not enough to make it time well spent.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend