Have You Ever Seen

F.W. Murnau didn't live long enough to direct a huge slate of films, but the man bullhorning The Last Laugh also has Nosferatu, Faust and Sunrise on his resume. Like those, The Last Laugh is a silent picture And THIS one infamously uses very few intertitles to explain dialogue or motivations. So Emil Jannings went very big! The story is that he loses his job as the doorman of a swanky hotel, leading to depression and shame. The artistry by Murnau and his team are terrific. Their movie is slow-paced and extremely melodramatic, but there's poetry...until an irrational deus ex machina in the last 15 minutes. The story in episode #746 ends up leaving much to be desired. So enjoy the rare Friday show the next few months as I hand out towels and talk about The Last Laugh.
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The key word is charming in the 745th edition of Have You Ever Seen. Only The Lonely has John Candy playing a single Chicago cop who lives with his widowed mother (Maureen O'Hara). He's an extroverted sweetheart who falls for shy Ally Sheedy, but while his bigoted mom might love her son(s), that love is on HER terms. Candy didn't get to play the romantic lead very often (or ever?) before Chris Columbus gave him that chance in the Mama's Boy movie, but he showed he had the chops to evolve as more than just a laugh machine. Then he was dead only a few years later. Only The Lonely wasn't very popular 35 years ago, but it works really well as a dramedy...and it's nearly impossible not to like the 2 leads. In any case, it's good to be a cop in love in a sweet little movie.
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It's as if 007 went to prison for decades, was let out by government guys played by John Spencer & William Forsythe and then he had to help a nerdy Nicolas Cage save hostages on a deserted island. Well, hold up, that IS the plot of The Rock! Michael Bay's action movie is deeper than you might expect, with Ed Harris playing a superstar Marine general who becomes a terrorist…with sympathetic complexity. Cage is the out-of-his-element expert on chemical weapons who teams with Sean Connery's Bond-like ex-spy who once escaped from Alcatraz. The flick is a Bay/Bruckheimer/Simpson collab so it's gaudy, loud, tart-tongued and very exciting. Those 2 Mexican stand-offs are phenomenal scenes. There's death and destruction in The Rock, sure, yet it's just fun. So, yesh, cut Agent Goodspeed some slack as he battles the guy threatening to launch deadly gas while mourning his men (and "his wife") in this 744th episode.
Well, Actually: Mason uses SF Information to find his daughter...he doesn't just magically remember a phone number he never had. Also, the funny line about bailing on lemons is in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, not I Love You, Man. Also also, it DOES seem like Tony Todd's character knocks over a rock on purpose to start a massacre in the shower scene...and also at least SOME of Hummel's marines are killed when that "all enemies…foreign, sir, and domestic" melee is over.
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The first episode of a non-theme month here in June (and the 743rd overall) gets loud about Baz Luhrmann's bombastic Moulin Rouge. It's the kind of zany project where the director and star of this Paris-set movie are both Australians (Luhrmann and Nicole Kidman) while the co-lead is Scottish (Ewan McGregor) and a Colombian (John Leguizamo) plays the real-life French writer Toulouse Lautrec. Kidman and McGregor are well-matched as gaga lovers and, while she got most of the raves, he's just as good...if not even better. Baz's main hook is to use anachronistic pop hits on the soundtrack in his frantic, garish musical that's absolutely in love with love. Either you're all in...or you won't be able to put up with more than 10 minutes of it. But put up with me talking baout the sickly courtesan and her idealistic writer who l'amour things up in the spectacular (spectacular) Moulin Rouge.
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I put a jaunty bow on Heroes Month with another multi-movie episode. For #742, I'm mostly talking about John Ford's My Darling Clementine, but there's a bit at the end about John Sturges' Gunfight At The O.K. Corral and George Cosmatos' Tombstone. Clementine stars Henry Fonda as the stoic marshal Wyatt Earp and Victor Mature as the uber-talented but sickly Doc Holliday. Linda Darnell is in the mix too and they're all surrounded by a smorgasbord of character actors. Doc, Wyatt and his brothers team up to take on the Clantons in what's considered to be one of the greatest westerns. Then it's onto a much-shorter analyses of Gunfight and Tombstone, where I got to do what so many have done for 33 years: rave about Val Kilmer. So let's go, boys, to where they keep the horses and draw some guns as I give you my 3 takes on the world of Wyatt and Doc.
Well, Actually: Elia Kazan was the one who took over directing Pinky after Ford was fired. Also, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson is the name of the actress in Tombstone who plays Wyatt's wife Mattie.
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