What I’ve Caught Up With, May 2026 Part 1
Film: Blue Beetle (2023)
Why did Blue Beetle fail as a movie in the DCEU? There are a number of issues that went into this. One is superhero fatigue. We’ve been inundated with superhero movies for going on two decades (Iron Man came out in 2008). The character is unknown to all but the biggest comic book fans. And, honestly, this is pretty standard fare. A kid (Xolo Maridueña) discovers a connection to an ancient artifact that gives him super powers and he needs to use them to defend his family and prevent that power from falling into the hands of corporate interests (mainly, Susan Sarandon). I’m just enough of a comic book nerd to remember when Blue Beetle was the unpowered tech genius Ted Kord—I’d have preferred that version here only because it’s the one I know.
Film: Amphibian Man (1962)
A surprisingly popular Russian film that clearly expresses Soviet ideals, Amphibian Man is an odd bit of science fiction and something that feels like an inspiration for The Shape of Water. A scientist (Nikolai Simonov) has a son named Ikthyander (Vladimir Korenev) with a lung infection, so the scientist gives him the ability to breathe underwater. When he saves a young woman named Gutiere (Anastasiya Vertinskaya), he immediately falls in love, causing complications with her arranged marriage to a rich local. That rich local (Mikhail Kozakov) wants to capture our titular character to take over the local pearl diving economy. It admittedly sounds kind of dumb, but it’s surprisingly good and surprisingly relevant. Worth noting that star Vladimir Korenev is oddly handsome in that 1960s Eurotrash way.
Film: Westward the Women (1951)
In California, rich employer Roy Whitman (John McIntire) promises his men wives to keep them working, and hires experienced trail boss Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor) to lead the party of 140 prospective brides across the prairie. That’s enough for nearly two hours of plot that, honestly, feels like Oregon Trail: The Movie. Don’t take that as a complaint on my part: Westward the Women, while sexist in its own way both for the Western setting and the 1950s in which it was made, makes heroes out of ordinary women looking for a better life on a trip filled with danger and hardship. That said, evidently one of the men waiting for the women was in the Donner Party, and Buck claims that the women had it worse, and he does use a whip on his love interest. I mean…yikes!
Film: Sleep Dealer (2008)
In a near-future dystopia, people are fitted with nodes, allowing them to plug into networks. While the nodes are frequently used for sex and for sharing memories, they are also used in third world countries to have workers plug into machines, essentially operating them remotely. Memo (Luis Fernando Peña) is a subsistence farmer, dealing with the fact that local waters have been dammed and must be paid for. Memo builds radios and attracts the attention of the company controlling the local dam, which sees him as a threat and calls in a drone strike, killing his father. Memo leaves, gets nodes implanted, and tries to live his life, but writer Luz (Leonor Varela) sells memories of him, attracting the notice of Rudy (Jacob Vargas), the drone pilot who killed Memo’s father. It’s low-budget and has eyes bigger than its stomach in terms of ideas, but I’m always going to give a lot of leeway to a movie that is this earnest in what it wants to do.
Film: Deadline at Dawn (1946)
A sailor (Bill Williams) wakes up sitting in a newsstand with a pocketful of cash and no memory of the previous two hours. He’s convinced by cynical dance hall girl June (Susan Hayward) to return the money to the woman he is convinced he took it from. When he returns to her apartment, he discovers the woman dead. Now, with just a few hours before his bus takes him back to his military base, the sailor needs to solve the case before he is accused of a murder he doesn’t think he’s committed but might have. Deadline at Dawn is a pretty solid film noir, although the ending comes as too pat and too Hollywood to really have it work.
Film: Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
Thus ends the Apes pentalogy, with a film that finally truly pits ape and man against each other. While apes and humans live together in a cobbled-together city (with the apes in charge and humans frequently penned), mutant humans still live beneath the city ruined by nuclear weaponry in the past. Looking for information, the apes head to the city, get discovered, and war ensues, pitting apes against humans and eventually apes against apes. The cast is surprising—in addition to the expected Roddy McDowell and Natalie Trundy, Lew Ayres, Claude Aikens, Paul Williams, and John Huston all put on the ape costumes. This honestly isn’t that great, but if you’ve come this far, you might as well finish.
Film: The Rocketeer (1991)
Somebody watched way too much Commando Cody as a kid, and thus we have The Rocketeer, based on an early-‘80s comic book of the same name. Flyboy Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) winds up in possession of a Howard Hughes-created jet pack. He’s forced on the run when the jet pack proves to be the ultimate MacGuffin, desired by the Feds, organized crime, and star actor Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) who is working for the Nazis in pre-War California. It’s a fun adventure, but the effects definitely look 35 years old. The cast is a fun one, including Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin, Paul Sorvino and more. There’s also a clear reference to Rondo Hatton in the form of Sinclair’s thug Lothar (Ron Taylor, aka Tiny Ron). The plot is obvious, but this is boys’ own adventure stuff, so knowing where we’re going doesn’t really matter.
Film: The Rainmaker (1997)
Sometimes I wonder if there’s political action committee that exists to make people root for lawyers. I freely admit that I love a good legal drama, and the best ones include an idealistic lawyer fighting for truth and justice. Enter The Rainmaker where a young lawyer named Rudy Baylor (a Dixie-fied Matt Damon) hooks up with a dishonest ambulance chaser, but breaks away working on a case regarding a young man with leukemia. He also gets involved with a battered wife (Claire Danes). Accompanied by an insurance expert (Danny DeVito), Rudy learns just how vicious the law can be. Honestly, it’s a solid movie, and the cast is a Who’s Who of A- and B-list Hollywood talent. I’m honestly a little surprised this didn’t get turned into a television show; it has all the makings of something that could’ve easily run 6-8 seasons.
Speak of the devil... XD
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainmaker_(TV_series)
Now we just have to see if it keeps getting renewed...
DeleteI've only seen 2 of these films. The Rocketeer I saw in the theaters when I was 10 and I really liked it but my school mates at the time thought it was lame. I guess they saw Terminator 2: Judgement Day which I never saw in the theaters as I wasn't old enough. Still, I think holds up.
ReplyDeleteThe Rainmaker I thought was a pretty good film that Francis Ford Coppola did although it's one of his lesser films while I have no interest in watching Megalopolis except out of a perverse curiosity.
Westward the Women is a solid Western and worth your time if you want to catch up on that genre. Sleep Dealer is interesting--it could stand a larger budget, but it's solid and the ideas are good.
Delete400 is an insane goal! I could never. I love The Rainmaker. I agree that it probably could make a decent TV show.
ReplyDeleteI admit that 400 sounds like a lot, but it's actually pretty manageable. One movie per day is 365 movies. Add three more per month, and that's 401 total.
DeleteIt really is just that--one movie per day plus three per month, a touch less than 8/week. And, to be fair, I fall short 75% of the time.
I’ll start with my favorite of these. I absolutely LOVE “Deadline at Dawn”!! I realize it is imperfect and some of its dialog is unrealistically flowery, something I totally enjoyed, and I still found it a treat. Aside from my obvious delight in Susan Hayward heading the cast the film is stacked with wonderful character actors, adding great bits. Among my faves were Roman Bohnen’s touching bit as a heartbroken janitor and Joseph Calleia’s sleazy Val who nonetheless threw out great quotes like "She was no lullaby, but she had the brains, like a man" but all the supporting performers make an impression. About Susan, this was a return for her after being offscreen for a year having given birth to twins just three months previous to filming this (she had passed up the tragic Sophie in “The Razor’s Edge” which won Anne Baxter her Oscar to spend more time with them) and the first feature where she received top billing. She could not be tougher at the beginning of the film but very skillfully reveals softer layers as she’s touched by Bill Williams naïve gob (she acts rings around him, but his aw-shucks callowness is ideal for his role) while always maintaining her street smarts. She and Paul Lukas also have a fine rapport, his steady calm helping her let down her guard. Again, I’ll concede that the plot is wrapped up with a bit too tidy of a bow, but it moves at a speedy clip and is drenched in that noir atmosphere.
ReplyDeleteWhat I liked best about Westward the Women was the fact that it made very few concessions for its female cast. It helps that there are no big stars among the women, it adds to the unsettled nature of the story. Once we hit the trail you could never be certain about the fate of any character (well except Taylor (in one of his better performances) and Denise Darcel) and when tough times come the reactions to them ring true. Frank Capra was originally slated to direct, but Wellman is a far superior choice considering the material. Hope Emerson is great fun as the plain spoken and practical Patience but never so much that she doesn’t seem like someone who would be in the wagon train.
The only problem I had with “The Rainmaker” was the Claire Danes subplot. It’s not her, she was quite good, but it was a plot thread that got in the way of the main story. I suppose it was to give more dimension to Matt Damon’s character, but it was unnecessary. Danny DeVito and Mary Kay Place were terrific and what a wonderful way for Teresa Wright to close out her career!
I remember when “The Rocketeer” came out and the studio beat the big drum for the film saying it heralded a return to flashy old-time adventures in the Errol Flynn vein…yada yada and then the movie did middling business despite good reviews. I enjoyed it (and the effects were more impressive back then) but the problem with it is Billy Campbell. That is not meant to be as harsh as it sounds, he’s quite a good actor who has had a long respectable career and he was certainly great looking but he’s not a MOVIE STAR and that is what the film needed to make it work. A Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt or someone else who radiated that sort of charisma. As much as I liked the picture, I left the theatre remembering Alan Arkin and not Billy.
I know I watched Battle for the Planet of the Apes and probably enjoyed it, but I’ll be darned if I recall a single thing about it all these years later.
If Amphibian Man is in anyway close to The Shape of Water (which I detested) I have zero interest in catching up with it.
I already have superhero burnout so Blue Beetle wouldn’t be on my list anyway but honestly, I’ve never heard of that particular character.
I may be way off in my understanding of your description of Sleep Dealer, but it called to mind Minority Report while I was reading it. I doubt that I’ll seek it out but if I were to run across it one day I might give it a shot.
Deadline at Dawn is good but probably not great. It definitely has moments. It works pretty well. That said, of this half of the movies I watched, I think Westwardbut the Women was probably the class movie. This is despite the whipping scene and the comparison to the Donner Party.
DeleteYou're not wrong about The Rainmaker. I'm always happy to see Claire Danes, who tends to be better than a lot of the movies she is in, but she is very much the least interesting part of this film.
The guy who I think could have pulled off The Rocketeer well is Billy Zane. He'd have been the right age and would have been exactly the right type of charisma, charm, and cheese for the role. Bruce Campbell would be too much on the cheese side. If he were a couple of years older in 1991, Brendan Fraser could have pulled off that role, too.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes is worth watching only if you have watched the previous four movies. Kind of the same thing for Blue Beetle; if you're not interested in the DCEU, there's no reason to spend your time here.
I liked The Shape of Water, but Amphibian Man isn't at all the same film. Sleep Dealer is earnest, though, and that's always a sale for me. It's smart, and that's rare, it seems.