Expelled Grey Matter

Warner Bros. seems to have no idea what to do with the DC brand.  It has been trying harder and harder to compete with Marvel and they fail almost every time.  It's not because they are hiring the wrong directors or actors, or even the wrong scriptwriters; in fact, if they actually made what was in the script more often, the DCCU would be right up there with Marvel.  It's just that they never seemed to have grasped what made the two Tim Burton Batman movies and the three Christopher Nolan ones stand out.  It wasn't grim settings and plodding drama, but in the former a great sense of dark humor (which replaced the campiness of the television show) and the latter, for the most part, good story telling.  Instead when Batman was brought back after Nolan's trilogy was completed he had issues.  Superman also has issues.  Lois Lane has issues.  Everyone has issues, and everything goes boom, in a washed-out color palette that looks like everything was fil...

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of many movies from the late 1960s which comes with the label "classic" but doesn't exactly work today.  I was disappointed when I first saw it, having heard so much about the film and excited at the time to see the movie everyone raved about.  I found it to be a boring, rambling mess where not much happened.  I think there were two factors going into that: I didn't know the first time through that it was supposed to be a comedy, and I saw it on an old VHS tape. The latter can have some effect on the viewing experience, since I am quite sure I was not seeing it in the correct aspect ratio, but the usual "full-screen" pan-and-scan aspect that most of the old tapes were in.  For a movie like this it can seriously affect many of the wide shots of the scenery as well as limit being able to see what the director had originally intended to be on the screen.  I am pretty sure the sound was not exactly up to par either.  I ...

Westerns have had occasional small revivals over the years, even if they have not stuck.  One of those came in the mid 1980s, while another popped up in the early 1990s.  The early 1980s, though, was not a time for these films, as Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate had practically brought down United Artists and the poor treatment of horses on the set brought to light realities of animal cruelty that were inherent to many of these films. Regardless William D. Witliff, along with Gary Busey as a silent producer, decided to do a western based on the legends he had heard about outlaws and bandits when he was a kit growing up in a remote part of Texas.  In order to do this he hired Australian director Fred Schepisi and headed off to Big Bend State Park, one of the most remote parts of Texas he could find, and made a movie about an honorable thief named Barbarosa, played by Witliff's friend, country singer Willie Nelson.  Barbarosa got great reviews from the critics and conti...

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw many movie genres getting reimagined.  This was do in large part to Hollywood itself being reimagined.  The 1970s are not considered a great era in cinema because of Hollywood's involvement, but largely because they were forced to pull back from controlling every aspect and allow writers and directors (often the same person) to have free range over what types of movies they made and how they made them.  For awhile it made sense to let others spend the money and then buy it from them and see if a profit was made. Thus even studio funded films in the first half of the '70s seemed to always be a bit different.  Westerns were no exception, although the genre had largely begun to fade by that time.  One of the notable entries in the genre that did not feature Clint Eastwood or an aging John Wayne was Robert Benton's Bad Company , which he directed and cowrote with David Newman.  It was one of the first westerns to try to avoid ...

If there is one thing David Cronenberg knew it's that the idea of things invading their bodies make humans quite uncomfortable.  His entire first movie, Shivers , dealt with just such a thing.  It's a sure-fire way to make audiences squirm in their seats while not breaking the budget, since all that's needed for the creature is something that looks fittingly disgusting.  Show the slug or whatever doing its thing once or twice and everyone gets the point.  I know there was at least one book written prior to The Hidden , and I also know there were Star Trek episodes that featured microbes controlling people.  Largely writer Jim Kouf took those existing ideas and mixed a bit of Shivers in with it, throwing in some of the weird humor of other '80s alien invasion films such as Critters .  The 1980s was also the height of the buddy cop movie phase, so that became a major part of the movie as well.  For director Jack Sholder The Hidden was also pretty much hi...

Though Clint Eastwood had already made his mark as a director by the time The Outlaw Josey Wales was released this director credit caused a bit of a controversy.  The movie was was originally to be directed by Philip Kaufman, who cowrote the script with Sonia Chernus as an adaptation of Forrest Carter's book Gone to Texas.  Supposedly Eastwood and Kaufman had some conflicts regarding the way the movie was being filmed, the casting and, most importantly, about who got to date actress Sondra Locke.  Eastwood won out in all cases, but Warner Bros. ended up paying a fine to the Directors' Guild since Kaufman had already put in much of the work to get the film going.  If anything the movie would have been known for resulting in the "Eastwood rule", which meant that an actor in the film cannot forcibly take over the director's chair.  It was also unfortunately discovered after the film became popular that the original novelist, rather than being part Cherokee as he in...

The opening theme of The Big Country told me this was a movie I should have known about long ago. I am a fan of Yes and, on their second album Time and a Word, they cover Ritchie Havens's "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed".  They had decided to go with an orchestra to accompany them (and to drown out guitarist Peter Banks, who was being pushed out of the band at the time), and one of the big pieces was for this opening song.  Surprisingly I have never seen it mentioned that the orchestral piece was the opening title theme from The Big Country  and, even without the Hammond organ thundering along at the beginning, I recognized it right off.  I kept expecting Chris Squire's bass part to follow. Jerome Moross's theme music almost didn't make it into the movie since director William Wyler didn't like it.  Test audiences did, so it stayed, and won an Oscar.  It is hard to imagine this film with anything else, as Maross's music not only plays o...

Sam Raimi was one of my favorite directors, and I guess he still is in many ways.  His early films showed a lot of innovation, often working on a shoestring budget but, at the same time, inventing techniques to make it look like there was much more behind it.  There are a lot of camera tricks done today that he invented, from the famous steady-cam shots from the demons' point of view in the Evil Dead films to following objects as they fly through the air.  There was a time one knew what to expect from a Sam Raimi film, and even then he would come up with something completely new.  The Quick and the Dead came out two years after Army of Darkness , one of Raimi's best films, and I was excited at the time to see what he would do with westerns.  I did have some concerns going into it, however.  I noticed right off that he and his brother Ivan did not have writing credits on this.  Part of the charm of Raimi's films is he writes as frenetically as he direct...

f Unlike the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation came to a bit of an unnatural end in 1994 as Paramount decided that, since the original cast would no longer be making any new films, it was time for the new cast to do so.  The result was Star Trek: Generations   which, though it suffered a bit from still being in the shadow of the original series as well as being difficult to understand if not already familiar with TNG , was a good beginning. Star Trek: First Contact shows the movies with the TNG cast coming into their own, with Jonathan Frakes directing (as he frequently did on the television show) and a story a bit more friendly for those that are not deep into Star Trek lore.  To put this movie in perspective it deals directly with the aftermath of the two-part episode "The Best of Both Worlds", which served as the Season 3 cliffhanger with its resolution as the beginning episode of Season 4.  This dealt with the Borg, a collective cybernetic race, eng...

One would think westerns and horror would go well together.  The Native Americans themselves have plenty of stories about what may lurk in the deserts and forests of North America, of untold spirits of beasts and men.  Writers such as Zane Grey have come up with some pretty good western ghost stories.  One of the best western songs, "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky", has phantom cowboys driving hell's herd of cattle, and it is not too hard to imagine tales of ghostly horses and lost riders and such.  Unfortunately, though the terrain and the sheer isolation of parts of the American West lend themselves to tales of the supernatural, Hollywood has never got it right.  Instead of the restless spirits of gunfighters still roaming their old haunts or pale riders heralding doom, we instead get zombies and vampires and such - and at budgets that seem below those of the studios that used to churn cheap westerns out by the dozen nearly a century ago.  Unfortunately, The P...

John Wayne had been attempting to become a movie star for some time and, just his luck, he was friends with director John Ford.  Ford had been making short films since 1917 and feature films since the 1920s of all different types.  It just happened that he would eventually become best known of his westerns, both due to his love of filming around Monument Valley and other parts of Arizona, but also due to John Wayne.  For many, Stagecoach was their introduction to Wayne. In truth Wayne had already had a starring role 9 years prior in The Big Trail , a movie directed by Raoul Walsh about a group of pioneers and their perilous trip out west.  Although well-regarded in hindsight, The Big Trail was an expensive flop, costing two million dollars (nearly 33 million in today's money) to make on location in Zion National Park in Utah.  On-location filming was difficult in 1930 and using Wayne was a risk.  When it didn't pay off he got much of the blame and, even by ...

Westerns in the 1990s were largely dead as a genre.  Clint Eastwood was doing what he could to bring them back and his 1992 Unforgiven helped put a new spin on some of the old tropes, but while it was an excellent Clint Eastwood movie it had people wondering what he would do next rather than clamoring for more westerns.  1990 saw the other big western - not Quigley Down Under , unfortunately, even though that one has aged better, but Kevin Costner's Dancing with Wolves .  Both Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven  got Oscar wins, so the main takeaway was that if one was going to indulge in the genre it helped to already have industry cred and to do them as epic vanity productions.  Although neither movie managed to bring the genre back something strange happened in 1993 and 1994.  Two movies based on Wyatt Earp popped up, with the one originally most anticipated being Lawrence Kasdan's three-hour plus epic biopic with Kevin Costner in the title roll.  Ano...