reviews Archives - Page 6 of 16 - Ramblin' with Roger

MOVIE REVIEW: Lincoln

Will Lincoln become the definitive Lincoln biopic?

On Black Friday, my wife and I went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany to see the 1:50 showing of the new Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln. It was sold out! That hasn’t happened to me since the original Star Wars. We bought tickets for the 3:15 show and were advised to be back by 2:45.

We bought some hot chocolate, then went to a charming little toy store/food emporium. By the time we got back to the theater, there was this long line. I assumed it was to buy tickets; no, the 3:15 was SOLD OUT, and the line was for the ticket holders, which included us, fortunately. Also, the 6:25 showing that night also sold out, we noted as we left.

I was glad to have seen a recent interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals, the Lincoln book upon which the movie was based. I wasn’t as surprised by the relatively high-pitched voice that Lincoln (the extraordinary Daniel Day-Lewis) had. All that he had lived through, the secession, the war, and the death of a son all wore on him so that General Grant said that he had aged ten years in the past 12 months. Yet, despite all that, he could be very funny!

I wonder if the 10% of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes who DIDN’T like the movie thought it was boring, etc. I think they may have had different expectations. It is, above all, a political movie, based in the first four months of 1865. Lincoln has been re-elected President. A number of Democrats in the House of Representatives have been defeated, but are in a lame-duck session. Can Lincoln get the 13th Amendment, to abolish slavery, through the House? And how will that affect the chances for peace in that great civil war?

For the most part, it didn’t feel like a Spielberg movie. I can’t explain that exactly, except to note that the second scene in the movie, involving people quoting Lincoln, to Lincoln, did have a Spielberg “feel”.

Great appearance by Sally Field as a haunted Mary Todd Lincoln, a role she noted recently that she had to fight for; Lincoln was older than Mary, who he called Molly, but Day-Lewis is a bit younger than Field. Also, there were stellar roles by David Strathairn as William Seward, Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, and others. I must admit that the character James Spader played didn’t seem all that different from his role on Boston Legal.

Will this film become the definitive Lincoln biopic? It may very well do so. People cried, and applauded at the end of the film. I liked it a lot.

Book Review: 11/22/63, a novel by Stephen King

My great frustration with reading this book is that I had a great deal of difficulty putting it down!

I had never read a Stephen King novel, but due to boredom, I ended up taking out from the library 11/22/63, an 800+ page tome. OK, it wasn’t JUST boredom, but also a near-obsession I have long had with the tragic events of that day, crystallized in my mind; my own long-running curiosity about the various conspiracy theories surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination; and what would happen if, somehow, the President had survived the attack. (I’m sure I’ll write more about that next year.)

When I checked out the book – allowed for only 14 days, instead of the usual 28, because it’s a recent purchase – the library clerk, who had read it, assured me that it wasn’t one of those King horror books.

Well, no, and yes. This is a pretty straightforward narrative about a man and a portal to a very specific time and place in 1958. What I always disliked somewhat in some going-back-in-time stories is how very precisely timed the trips were. If one were trying to stop JFK from being killed (or make sure that he was, so that the “time-space continuum”, or whatever, wasn’t wrecked), one would show up in Dallas, Texas on November 19 or so.

What would happen, though, if you had to live in the past for five years before intersecting with history? Would that be a good thing? What would you do with your time? How would you survive financially? (Your 2011 credit card, or for that matter, your 21st-century cash, would not be useful.) Might you involve yourself in other wrongs that should be righted? And would you find the past more enticing than the present? The protagonist says, more than once, that the past is obdurate.

There were monsters, though, in this book, including assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and a couple of other folks. But the protagonist finds some redeeming characters as well.

My great frustration with reading this book is that I had a great deal of difficulty putting it down! Sleep? Work? Housework? These were getting in my way of finishing this fine, incredibly well-researched book. King addresses his sense of the conspiracy theories, both in the story proper, and the Afterword. Even though this is a fictional account, you will learn much about the forces that led to JFK’s death.

I hope it’s obviously HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
***
Jaquandor’s take on the book.

New York Times review by Errol Morris.

Steve’s Stephen King memories

NYS Governor Martin H. Glynn- yup, new to me

Martin H. Glynn was a member of Congress, state comptroller, lieutenant governor, and became the first Roman Catholic governor in New York state history, even before Al Smith. At the same time, he rose from being a writer at the Albany Times Union, to becoming its editor, publisher and owner.

If I look at a list of New York State governors, many of them are familiar to me.

George Clinton – the mastermind behind the bands Parliament and Funkadelic
John Jay – first US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Daniel D. Tompkins – Vice-President under James Monroe
DeWitt Clinton – largely responsible for the construction of the Erie Canal
Martin Van Buren – 8th President of the US
William H. Seward – Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson; the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 was considered “Seward’s folly”
Samuel J. Tilden – should have been President instead of Rutherford B. Hayes after the 1876 election
Grover Cleveland – 22nd and 24th President of the US
Theodore Roosevelt – 26th President of the US
Charles Evans Hughes – Associate Justice, and later, the 11th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; Secretary of State; Republican candidate in the 1916 U.S. Presidential election, losing to Woodrow Wilson
Al Smith – The democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928, losing to Herbert Hoover
Franklin D. Roosevelt – 32nd President of the US
Thomas E. Dewey – Republican candidate for President, losing to FDR in 1944 and Harry Truman in 1948, despite newspaper headlines to the contrary in the latter case. (Berowne wrote about the 1948 election recently.)
W. Averell Harriman – U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and, later, to Britain

The ones after that, starting with Nelson A. Rockefeller, who I met twice, I remember directly. Mario Cuomo flirted with running for President in 1992, and his son Andrew, the incumbent, has been mentioned for 2016.

Wait: I’ve just been informed that George Clinton was NOT the funk master, but was rather the 4th Vice President of the US, serving under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

But I was totally unfamiliar with Martin H. Glynn, who was a member of Congress, state comptroller, lieutenant governor, and, when William Sulzer was impeached for dubious reasons, became the first Roman Catholic governor in state history, even before Al Smith. At the same time, he rose from being a writer at the Albany Times Union to becoming its editor, publisher, and owner.

I finished reading Governor Martin H. Glynn: Forgotten Hero by Dominick C. Lizzi (2007, Valatie Press). Glynn grew up in Valatie, a small mill town in Columbia County, NY. His near ancestors came to the US after the Irish potato famine of the late 1840s. Martin’s story was a Horatio Alger story of rags to riches. He graduated as valedictorian of his class at Fordham University in New York City in 1894.

Glynn worked at several small newspapers, before joining the Albany Times Union in 1896. He studied law on his own, passing the bar in 1897. Due in part to similar backgrounds and education levels, he was supported by the Farrells, their wealthy in-laws the Bradys – various Farrells and Bradys lived on fashionable Willett Street near Washington Park – and party boss Packy McCabe, in his shockingly successful 1898 run for Congress, though for but one term. Martin Glynn married Mary Magrane on January 2, 1901, and moved to 28 Willett Street in Albany.

Glynn would pass back and forth between journalism and politics in a way that would likely be scorned now. He tried to minimize the influence of New York City’s Tammany Hall while trying not to antagonize them. This got him elected as comptroller in 1906 and lieutenant governor in 1912; his achievement in these posts you can read about here.

Sulzer’s impeachment, due to the forces of Tammany Hall, elevated Glynn to the governorship. Glynn fought for direct primaries, and he persuaded the Legislature to enact such law, going into effect in 1914. He also got enacted a workmen’s compensation law. He worked for other reforms as well. But he was defeated when he ran for governor in his own right.

Throughout his adult life, he was always in great demand as a public speaker, in the tradition of William Jennings Byran, who was an early mentor.

Possibly Glynn’s most important achievement was as the “Father of the Irish Free State,” which you can read about here.

Martin Glynn was almost constantly in pain as a result of a spinal injury sustained in his youth. He suffered great emotion pain as well, when his only child died in infancy. Returning from Boston after an unsuccessful attempt to relieve his intractable suffering, Glynn took his own life on December 14, 1924, a fact that was covered up until Lizzi’s book came out. Glynn was given a proper Catholic burial, with many notables lining the streets.

It’s a short, but interesting book, though it uses exclamation points about Glynn’s accomplishments far too often!

Video reviews: Iron Man 2 and The Parent Trap

Maureen O’Hara is gorgeous in The Parent Trap.

The Parent Trap (1961), if I saw it – and surely I MUST have seen it at some point – mustn’t I? – I watched SO long ago that the details are surely erased from my memory. It was a Disney film starring Hayley Mills… and Hayley Mills! I DO recall that ad campaign. The script was based on Das Doppelte Lottchen, a novel by Erich Kastner, that had been made into British and German films, using twin girls.

Two girls, one from tony Boston, the other from freewheeling California, meet at a summer camp and take an instant dislike to each other. Each just doesn’t like that other girl with her face. Antics ensue, including a social event with the boys from a neighboring camp, ruined by the duo.

Forced to spend time together in isolation, Sharon and Susan discover they have the exact same birthday… and the same mother! They figure out that their parents separated when they were infants, with Sharon staying with their mother, and Susan off with their dad. They decide to switch places, which involves Susan cutting Sharon’s hair, in order to get their parents back together.

Susan gets to spend time with her mother (Maureen O’Hara), grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt), and grandfather (Charlie Ruggles), who is the first to uncover the scheme. Meanwhile, Sharon finally sees dad (Brian Keith) on his ranch. His housekeeper (Una Merkel) notices a “change” in the girl. But trouble is brewing: Dad is engaged to some gold digger named Vicki (Joanna Barnes).

Eventually, Susan and mom head west, and the plot goes from there.

The not-so-good:
It’s too long! At 129 minutes, we watched it in two sittings. I would have cut some parts of the 30-minute set-up.
A couple of the songs, by Richard and Robert Sherman, were period pieces, and not very impressive.
For both of these, I blame Uncle Walt. I discovered, from the extras disc, that the movie lacked a title song for a good while. One working title was Let’s Get Together; the Sherman Brothers wrote a song by that name, and then Walt insisted that director David Swift insert the song into the movie, not once, but twice. As sung by Annette Funicello, it’s on a record at the dance; as sung by Susan and Sharon, (unconvincingly) playing guitar and piano, it’s a serenade to mom and dad.
The ultimate title song, performed by Tommy Sands and Annette, isn’t great either.

The quite good:
The winning cast. In spite of the implausibility that parents would keep the sisters’ existence from each other, and the unlikely coincidence of the meeting, good chemistry between the siblings, and with their family.
Hayley playing opposite Hayley, much more difficult in the day than it would be now, was quite effective. The filmmakers, I discovered, looked for some physical background, such as a wall design so that if the matting weren’t perfect, it wouldn’t be as obvious.
From the extra disc: highly entertaining six minutes with Susan Henning, who played Hayley’s double, who only appeared on-screen when one girl was at an angle to the other, or when you saw one girl’s back. She is uncredited in the film, but Walt Disney himself gave her a special trophy at the end of the shoot.
The other Sherman Brothers song, For Now for Always, sung by Maureen O’Hara, as mom recalls the first date with dad, is lovely. This too was a title song contender. Speaking of lovely, O’Hara is gorgeous in this film, more beautiful at 40 than the 26-year-old Barnes.

I think this review is largely accurate, especially with regards to the extras, although the disc I rented paired Parent Trap with its 1986 TV sequel.
***
Which brings me to:
The Parent Trap II (1986). A quarter century after Susan and Sharon’s successful maneuver, a now divorced Sharon (Hayley Mills) wants to move to NYC for her job. Her daughter Nicki fears losing her best friend Mary, unless Sharon marries Mary’s dad Bill (Tom Skerritt); then they would be sisters. They get aunt Susan (Hayley Mills), who is married, to pretend to be Sharon to get him interest in Sharon. Wha?

The motivation for Susan is so non-existent. It’s one thing to get her parents, who were once married, BACK together again. This matchmaking, though, is bizarre. The film had the feel of a clunky 1980s TV movie because it is. There is one rather funny scene near the end, but both the Daughter and I were either bored or confused through much of this.
***
Iron Man 2 (2010) was OK. I LOVED the first film but was concerned about the big reveal at the end that Tony Stark was Iron Man. In this iteration, Tony tangles with a self-important Senator (Gary Shandling) and a military weapons expert (Sam Rockwell). Can the secrets of the powerful Iron Man suits fall into the wrong hands? Apparently so, as Ivan (Mickey Rourke), son of Tony’s father’s colleague, poses a serious threat.

Meanwhile, Lt. Rhodes (now played by Don Cheadle) gets all conflicted about his obligations to the military and to his friend Tony. Does Tony just give Stark Industries to his secretary, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow)?! And what’s the story with Stark Industries legal consultant Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson)? It all made sense at the end but felt convoluted along the way.

Oh, and obviously, I was supposed to have seen this BEFORE the Thor movie. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) continues to be involved in the mix. In any case, I think I’m now finally ready to see the Avengers movie.

Movie Review: Argo

The hostage crisis is an event I remember all too well, watching the ABC News crisis news segment each night with Ted Koppel; that Koppel show eventually became Nightline.

It shouldn’t have worked: six Americans avoid being taken in the Iran hostage crisis, which started November 4, 1979. They hang out at the residence of the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber) for several weeks. The CIA, trying to get them out, rejects the idea of pretending the six are Canadian farm aid workers. Instead, CIA operative Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) came up with this ridiculous idea of wanting to scout Tehran as a potential backdrop for a science fiction movie called Argo, with the six becoming part of the crew, a plan approved by his boss (Bryan Cranston) as the “best bad idea” available.

It shouldn’t have worked: the movie was based on real, known events. You might know how it turns out. And yet my wife and I are on the edge of our seats for the last third of the film when we saw it Sunday at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

This is a wonderful movie, directed by Affleck. It is also, at times, rather funny, with most of the laughs generated by John Goodman, as John Chambers, a Hollywood make-up artist who’s done work for the agency before, and Alan Arkin, as film producer Lester Siegel; they set up a phoney film studio to put out a non-film, even getting a story in the entertainment periodical Variety. Yet the tension is never far away, as the Iranians are developing their own intelligence about the missing Americans.

At the beginning of the film credits, a picture of the actual passport of each “fake film crew” member is shown alongside of the performer in the film, which reflected the sometimes astonishing similarities between them. Also, Kyle Chandler is almost a dead ringer of President Carter’s chief of staff Hamilton Jordan. Then we hear from the President, giving thanks to the CIA, while expressing only passing regret that the US government had to give all the credit for the rescue to the Canadians, lest the 52 hostages, who weren’t freed until January 20, 1981, the date of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, suffer the repercussions.

Interesting fact from the IMDB: “In order to make the movie feel like the 1970s, Ben Affleck shot it n regular film, cut the frames in half, and blew those images up 200% to increase their graininess.” This is done to great effect.

The hostage crisis is an event I remember all too well, watching the ABC News crisis news segment each night with Ted Koppel (shown in the footage, along with ABC’s Frank Reynolds and NBC’s Tom Brokaw); that Koppel show eventually became Nightline. If you’re younger, an important history lesson, even as the film takes a couple of liberties, especially near the end.

The Oscar buzz is warranted.
***
There’s a Kickstarter project about the story behind this story, involving Jack Kirby, Ray Bradbury, and Buckminster Fuller, among others.