Henry...encountered: The Phantom Tollbooth

You know you're near delirious with tiredness...


When you fall asleep to watching some weird stuff like The Phantom Tollbooth.


What a mishmash...what the heck-fire did I just watch? The movie, based on the children's "classic" written by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer is one strange bird.

I had read the book, many, many years ago, but had forgotten almost all of it save that it was filled with some semi-witty puns and was kind of a "nerd boy's" version of Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz. But to compare it to those two works is silly. The book has basically been forgotten in today's era and I doubt it will have a renaissance.

Anyway, the movie was produced by Chuck Jones (the genius behind a great deal of the Loony Toons classics, including the great "What's Opera, Doc?") in 1969 and does a fair job of adapting the book actually...but...I don't think this is one that needed to be made.

It's just so...boring. I mean there are clever parts...and the animation is actually kind of impressive given the time and apparent budget...but I just can't understand why a little kid would enjoy this.

The songs in this movie...good golly they're crap. Just no life to them. I give the film credit for getting on the "multiple songs in an animated film" wagon way before Disney really embraced it...but they're just so bad.

Also distracting is that the master of animated voice work, Mel Blanc, voices some characters in the film. So many characters have a... familiar voice...(coughBUGSBUNNYcough...ahemYOSEMITESAMahem). I mean, along those same lines, a lot of the animation is a little too reminiscent of those classic Loony Toons for my likings. You can't really blame Chuck Jones...but some of the character's facial ticks and eye movements are just a little too close to some of those from the great Warner Brother's cartoons.

Look, the movie is not without some clever bits. I really liked The Terrible Trivium, a faceless humanoid who seduces passers-by with mindlessly easy but pointless tasks on which they can waste all their time. That bit was quite well done. But the other "Demons of Ignorance" are more than a little tiresome.

To sum up, I'm gonna do the unthinkable and quote Family Guy. In one episode Lois Griffin, the "wife" on the show, admits to not liking The Godfather because, "it insists upon itself." Well the whole family derides her for her opinion and it is kinda funny. But I think that's a good way to describe this movie..."it insists upon itself."

Anyway, skip it, unless you were born in the 1970's and it's a childhood classic or something.

Grade: C-

Best Scene: The Terrible Trivium

Henry Saw: Hunger

Ugh..I feel so dumb...


So last Saturday night I dragged seven people to Gomorrah. You can read my review of that mess here but "long story short" I had heard great things and Gomorrah ended up being a big disappointment. At the very same theater, Hunger was playing. Hunger is a film I had only heard of thanks to my small obsession with the English movie magazine Empire (best movie magazine in existence. You can't like movies and not read Empire. Really. EW, Variety, they're all a joke in comparison. Now, back to the review). I knew Hunger was about Bobby Sands...I had to ask my parents who he was and if he was noteworthy...but I had a small sense of what I was in for.

I still was pretty damn impressed.

The director, an, artist of both canvas and screen, Steve McQueen (I guess it has to be said...no relation to the actor...he's an English black dude), does a hell of a job. The film is very much like a three act play. The first act is about a prison guard...this part plays the most like an art film with its use of sound and images...who is forced to check his car everyday for a possible bomb because he knows he is a target.

The next act, the best scene of the movie, and actually the best scene I've seen in quite a bit, is an 18 minute shot of Michael Fassbender (playing Bobby Sands) talking to Liam Cunningham (playing a priest) explaining why he is going on a hunger strike. His hope was to get all IRA detainees "prisoner of war" status. This would allow them certain treatment and attention that they certainly were not getting.

Just an unbelievably fantastic scene...witty, upsetting, spellbinding...it hits every note. You have to see this movie if just for this scene.

The last bit involves watching Sands wasting away. I've never been that impressed with actors who are willing to gain or lose an immense amount of weight for a movie...it just seems reckless and not all that noble...but the director McQueen more or less pulls it off.

Either way, a really solid, tough, cool movie. Check it out.

Grade: B

Best Scene: The 18 Minute Conversation...it's really cool

Henry Saw: Gomorrah

Over-rated.


This won't be the longest of reviews because I honestly don't have much to say about this film. The reason I don't have much to say is that this is one of the most confusing, challenging, uninviting, films I've ever seen. Just a total let-down.

So I'd read a lot of great things about this movie. It won Europe's version of the Best Picture award. The pretentious and stupefying New York Times critics (A.O. Scott and the other one) said it was better than The Godfather (basically). Joe Morgenstern from the Wall Street Journal, my second highest rated critic, loved it. Roger Ebert, who is the best critic alive, gave Gomorrah four stars (the highest rating he can give...of course he just gave "Watchmen" and "Knowing" four stars...he might be losing it a bit). Anyway, all these critics, be they good or bad, are dead ****ing wrong.

Gomorrah is just unpenetrable. It just refuses to let the audience in. I'll allow the caveat that in it's original language, a dirty form of Italian, it might make more sense. But the subtitled version I saw was just totally unwelcoming and muddled.

Gomorrah is basically an Italian 'Traffic', just with the Naples' Mafia replacing drugs. It looks at how the Mob runs and controls everything in the area through five different plot lines. I was sort of able to follow 3 of them. The most interesting of which involves a 12ish year old boy who is sucked into the life style. He is probably the best actor in the film, and the camera work in these parts, that mostly follow his reactions to things around him, peaks.

The other two I was able to sorta/kinda able to make sense of involved two 20-somethings who are obsessed with Tony Montana and are trying to make a name for themselves. Most promo shots for the film show these two characters, shooting guns they find...somehow...near a lake or something. Their plotline is not that compelling and very easy to predict.

The last plotline I got involved a tailor who the mob is trying to rope in...or something...who is trying to resist their influence. His was perhaps the most interesting story to tell, and could have carried a whole movie had the filmmakers been smart enough to focus this film on something.

What we get instead is a maddening, boring wreck. YES, it offers an interesting look into the Italian Mafia. YES, it de-romanticizes the life of crime these people live; debunking the myth that Goodfellas and The Sopranos like to propagate. YES, it's cool to see movies in another language, from another culture, about an alien area. All these things are true...but good lord does this movie just not work for me.

If you trust those other critics...see the movie. Let me know what you think. Maybe I'm wrong (along with the other seven people I saw it with who also didn't care for it). Let me know. But my recommendation? Skip it.

Grade: C-

Best Scene: The opening scene in the tanning beds

Henry Watched: The Philadelphia Story

So before I name my favorite movie of all time by culminating my Top 100 list, my uncle Pierre demanded that I watch a triple feature of Rocky, the first Star Wars, and The Philadelphia Story as he feels those are the best films of all time. Well I've seen Rocky many times...it's not in my Top 100. Top sports movies yes, but not my Top 100. And Star Wars: A New Hope is on my Top 100...just not number one. So that left a movie I'd known about for a long time, but never seen, the 1940 classic: The Philadelphia Story.





So I thought this movie was going to be a madcap, slapstick, screwball comedy like Bringing Up Baby. After all, it features two of the stars of that movie (Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant) along with Jimmy Stewart(...pretty great cast).

I was wrong. There's very little of that kind of wacky humor in TPS. TPS is a much more "intelligent" kind of comedy; more of a "romantic comedy," in a sense, but not nearly as annoying or chick-flicky as those tend to be nowadays.

First, let me use IMDB to sum up the plot for you: "Haughty divorced socialite Tracy Lord (Hepburn) is preparing for her second marriage. Enter Dexter Haven (Grant), her first husband, and Macaulay Connor (Stewart), a tabloid reporter with a distrust of the wealthy. What follows is a rapid-fire war of words as the two men try to help Tracy discover the heart beneath her holier-than-thou exterior as she is forced to choose among her past love, her present love, and her new love."

TPS was a play before it was a movie (written especially for Hepburn by Phillip Berry) and co-starred Joseph Cotten and Van Heflin on the stage. Hepburn owned the movie rights and had, essentially, a producer's role for the making of the film. She wanted the studio to cast Clark Gable (in the Cary Grant role...easy to see why) and, her man, Spencer Tracy (in the Stewart role...ditto) but both were busy so we had to "suffer" through Grant and Stewart in the lead male roles.

Grant was given lead billing, and 100,000 dollars to "star", a sum he gave all of to the British War Relief Fund (This was 1940...). Stewart, coming off of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Shop Around The Corner, won his one and only Oscar for this role; an Oscar he always felt was a makeup for his performance in Mr. Smith (The Academy still does this today...see Al Pacino winning for Scent of a Woman and not Godfather 2...or, more like Stewart's point, Russel Crowe winning for Gladiator and not The Insider).

K, enough information thrown in this review just for my uncle Pierre's enjoyment...what did I actually think
of TPS? I thought it was pretty dang good. Not the "be-all-end-all" like Pierre does...but dang good.

Hepburn, who I'd never found attractive...is at least very, very alluring in this movie. And she has to be. She has to win Stewart's, and more difficultly, Cary Grant's love (again) for the story to work. She has an immense amount of innate vitality, intelligence, and real interest, to be the real center of this movie.

Stewart, an actor who has always really annoyed me (outside of Rear Window...where he still kinda annoys me), is admiringly strong. He plays the role of the audience: flabbergasted by these super-rich people, but really charmed by them. It's very easy to point to the scenes that won him the Oscar. One is a scene in which he's drunk, and goes to Cary Grant's house to basically confess his love for Hepburn...the other is a very charming scene between a drunk Hepburn and a drunk Stewart.

Grant is the least impressive, but he is still his undeniably winning self, as the puppeteer of sorts. Grant is an actor who always seems like he knows more than his character does, which adds a lot to his role here, and sells the only questionable part of the film...the ending.

To cut to the chase: the bulk of this movie is a delightful, witty, sharp, surprisingly honest and sometimes grim, masterclass is plotting, scripting, and acting. Then we get the last ten minutes...which just doesn't quite click for me. I won't spoil things but the way the last few scenes play out...well it feels very theatrical and fantastical...and it doesn't quite work on screen.

So, final verdict...Sorry Pierre...this doesn't bump my Number One film on my Top 100. In fact, I don't think it makes my Top 100...but I did enjoy it a whole lot. If not for the last few scenes...I think I would have loved it...but as is I just liked it, and respected the heck out of it.

Grade: B+

Best Scene: A Drunk Jimmy Stewart goes to Cary Grant's house.

Henry Saw: Watchmen

Hurm...


So...I really don't know where to begin. No clue.

I could talk about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's graphic novel Watchmen; the graphic novel. About how it is a very complex, tightly constructed, impeccably drawn, highly re-readable, disappointing masterpiece. But this isn't a comics blog.

And I could write about the long journey Watchmen had to make it to the big screen. 24 years in the making, Terry Gilliam, Paul Greengrass and Darren Aronofsky all threw their hat in the ring and came out thinking the comic was "unfilmable" as its author Alan Moore has said. But this isn't a rumors blog.

This is a movie review site.... So what did I think of Zach Snyder's Watchmen?

...Not so much.

Watchmen, to try and summarize the plot, is about a group of costumed adventurers who were forced into retirement into the late 70's. In 1985, with the threat of nuclear war with Russia as a backdrop, one of the heroes gets killed in his apartment. The most paranoid of the "heroes", Rorschach, becomes convinced that there is a "mask-killer" and tries to get the other former heroes to help him solve the mystery.

I think that basically sums it up. Of course both the film and the graphic novel are about so much more but that's the basic set-up.

Snyder took on a pretty impossible task when he agreed to make Watchmen. As I said, the graphic novel is very, very complex and is quite "un-cinematic" unlike Snyder's previous graphic novel film adaptation 300. A movie of Watchmen has an immediate uphill battle with the audience: It's long, it has a lot of high minded themes to discuss, it has very few action scenes, and it's conclusion is...well I'll get to that.

So, finally, how was the movie? Well it starts off great. Really, amazingly, great. The first 50 minutes or so (roughly the first 4 chapters of the comic book) are done perfectly. In fact, because of the incredible credit sequence, I'd say the movie almost improves upon the original material in terms of pure entertainment.

I honestly cannot say enough about the credit sequence. It's... phenomenal. Set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" it is so filled with information, in-jokes [check out what hero's parents the original Nite-Owl is saving in the first shot of the sequence for instance (ten points for whoever sends me the answer first), or the great re-imagining of the Enola Gay, or the Last Supper shot (can you spot the "happy" couple?) , or the Mick Jagger and David Bowie appearance, etc.] I could go on and on about the credits. Just fantastic.

Unfortunately, if you left after the credits ended (About 20 minutes in), you would have seen the best thing the movie has to offer. Anthony Lane from the New Yorker said the same thing, and I hate agreeing with a pretentious *** like him but he's right.

There is one more great scene after the credits, involving the only superhero with powers (Dr. Manhattan) reviewing his past on Mars. It's ripped straight out of the comic (Issue 4 - widely considered the best issue of the series - and perhaps the greatest single issue in comic book history) but after that... the movie just falls off a cliff.

The last 2 hours of the film are too muddled, too cheesy, too rushed, too confusing for anyone who hasn't read the book, too reverential of the original work, and really just a big mess. Which isn't too say I think it could be done better. Watchmen is fundamentally impossible to translate to film. Moore, the most respected author in comics, wrote Watchmen in an effort to show what Comic Books can do that novels and film cannot. So the original work actively rejects being translated into another medium. And it shows. Snyder does the best job he could do but ultimately the movie just never finds the right tone or pace.

How's the acting?

Well the standouts are Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan. Haley really impresses as the insane vigilante, especially given the fact that his face is covered by a mask 90% of the film, and also gets to deliver the most bad-ass line of the movie (it's while the character is in prison - you'll know it when you see it). Crudup, doing motion capture work for the blue, well endowed, superhuman Dr. Manhattan, brings a real humanity to a tough role. You might recognize Crudup's voice from the Mastercard commercials ("For everything else...there's Mastercard") and that voice is well used to give life to a detached, omnipotent, Superman.

Patrick Wilson and Jeffery Dean Morgan are solid as Niteowl II and The Comedian. The script lets them down in staying too close to the original work. A lot of their lines seem...unnatural. Better on the printed page (in a word balloon) then actually being spoken. Still, they do a solid job.

Malin Akerman and Matthew Goode as Silk Spectre and Ozymandias...they disappoint. Akerman is just out-acted in most of her scenes, and Goode makes a few questionable decisions (a lame German accent for instance) and neither can really keep pace with Haley, Crudup, or even Wilson.

But in general the acting ranges from acceptable to great. They're just given crap roles (outside of Rorschach) to play.

There's not much more to say. I don't wanna spoil the movie...

One thing that's very important to know is that kids under 13 CANNOT SEE this movie. There's unnecessary violence (not in the book), a ridiculous sex scene (not in the book), and they just flat out won't like it. So don't make the mistake I saw a lot of parents making when I went to see the movie...this is an 'R' rated movie for a reason. Don't be sucked in by the fact that it's a "comic-book" movie... it's not for kids.

Also worth mentioning is the soundtrack. It's very...on the nose. The original comic makes a point of quoting a lot of songs in order to enhance it's themes ("You're My Thrill" by Bille Holiday, "The Comedians" by Elvis Costello, "Desolation Row" and "All Along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan) and the movie follows suit. "Unforgettable" by Nat King Cole, "The Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, "I'm Your Boogie Man" by KC & the Sunshine Band, and a muzak version of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears are all used. I was really 50/50 on the use of music. "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Unforgettable" are perfectly used. On the other hand, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is used during a sex scene and it's just... ridiculous. Completely laughable. By far the worst scene in the movie.

What's the final verdict?...It doesn't work. The first 70 minutes can't save the rest of the movie. I'm happy the movie exists. I'm happy it's gotten so many people to check out the graphic novel. And it's definitely a movie I'll revisit when it's released on DVD. But I can't recommend it. Cause honestly, I think you'll hate it, no matter who you are.

Grade: C+.

Best Scene: The Opening Credits

Watchmen comes out soon...some thoughts

I honestly don't know what to think.


This won't be the most formally written post on this website ever...

So Watchmen is a solid, complex graphic novel. Not the "greatest" as the marketing would have you believe...but it is the most respected [along with Maus and The Dark Knight Returns (all released in 1986 btw)]...so they're not that far off.

I agree with people saying that it is unfilmable. As a movie you will inevitably lose a lot of what makes the graphic novel worthy of note (the visual themes, the complexity) and as a mini-series on HBO...well it would just be boring.

But Snyder (the director) seems to have made an incredibly faithful adaptation of the comic in his film. I'm more interested in the movie than excited. I'm pretty sure I'll be more impressed with Watchmen than actually liking it.

My best guess is that Watchmen has a pretty big opening weeked (85 million being the max I can see it earning) and then drops off quickly. I don't think mainstream audience will get it..parents will bring their kids and be horrified by the rape scene, stupid teens will go and hate the dialogue heavy conclusion...lots of reasons to bet against this movie.

Still, I'm gonna see it. If nothing else it will be interesting. If it's a fascinating failure, or a miraculous success, it will be a great conversation starter.

I'm not excited...but I'm very, very interested.

More later.

Henry's Top 100: # 02 - Raiders of the Lost Ark

Yeah...this is only number two...


So for a solid 10 years, when asked what my favorite movie was I would have responded with one word: "Raiders". If the questioner wasn't retarded they would know I mean the 1981 great Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Nominated for best picture, part of the best trilogy in film history (I know Star Wars and LOTR exist...I'll take Indy), the best action/adventure movie ever...no one ever questioned this response. There must be an army of young men born in the 70's and 80's whose favorite film is Raiders. It's the perfect blend of elements: Harrison Ford at his very best, lots of killing of nazis, perfect chase scenes, exotic locales...Karen Allen, despite not being "Hot" by today's standards, is the girlfriend we all wish we had. It's both the perfect "little boy" movie and a masterclass is film-making.

I used a quote from Raiders as my High School Yearbook quote: "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go" ...the line is so well delivered, and so well followed up on (Indy, on a Horse, taking on a line of Nazi vehicles) that it remains my favorite line in movie history.

Raiders can't be topped. If I had actually finished this top 100 on schedule it might have been number one. But in the last few months I've come to understand that I appreciate another movie a bit more...just a little bit more...but Raiders will always be my standard for great movie making. Raiders is perfection. Sheer and utter perfection. It's a blend of Casablana (On the list) and The Empire Strikes Back (On the list) and it makes for the most fun, exciting, timeless, classic adventure movie ever made.

This should be considered more of a #1B than #2...but a top 100 is a top 100...and this isn't quite my favorite movie ever made. More on that soon.

Best Scene: Sorry to be repetitive but it has to be that "I'm making this up as I go" line and the subsequent chase (linked above). On a less showy note, I love the look Ford gives when they're about to open the tomb of the Ark. He's manic, possessed, and it adds weight to Belloq's line to Indy that "I am but a shadowy reflection of you".