Frank's Movie Log

Will Rogers plays a struggling razor blade manufacturer sailing with his family to the Mediterranean to close a deal to acquire Damascus steel. His boisterous manner offends an upper-crust playwright played by Joel McCrea. Onboard ship, Rogers becomes entangled with a vamp played by Jetta Goudal, while McCrea romances Rogers’s daughter.

Rogers delivers every line as though it was a time-honored folksy saying. He’s got charm, but I liked how the opening paints him as loud and self-absorbed. Your enjoyment will hinge on how much of his shtick you can take. Boris Karloff has an uncredited part as an Arab sheik.

Though shot with actual carnival performers, Freaks features no carnival performances. Instead, the film focuses on the self-contained world behind the scenes. We see performers celebrate a new baby, struggle through a bitter breakup, and find new romance. Director Todd Browning paints these characters as relatable, not idealized saints or sullen outcasts, just folks living their lives. We relate. Then Browning strikes. Continue reading...

Peter Fonda and Warren Oates play two buddies setting out from San Antonio with their wives in an RV. They’re headed for a much-needed ski vacation in Aspen. They pull off the highway to a secluded riverbed to camp. The bucolic central Texas landscape features as the guys ride their dirt bikes while the wives chat. Fonda and Oates display the familiarity, banter, and semi-sibling rivalry that speaks silent volumes to their character’s long-standing friendship. Then later that night, they chance upon a gathering across the ravine they shouldn’t have seen. Continue reading...

In an alternate 2008, a mysterious company performs contract killings by having their agents possess the bodies of unwilling third parties. Continue reading...

George Arliss plays a renowned concert pianist who loses his hearing, learns to read lips, and discovers renewed purpose by playing anonymous benefactor to strangers he sights in Central Park. The sixty-four-year-old Arliss doesn’t convince as a fifty-year-old. The thick foundation and dark lipstick combined with his long features conjured visions of the Joker. Bette Davis has a supporting role as an admirer of Arliss. She charms, and I appreciated the script’s giving her character relatable dignity, but the material didn’t engage. When one of Arliss’s beneficiaries started hacking the melodramatic cough of cancer, I laughed.

A fascinating entry from writer/director Michael Haneke. Like his prior film, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, it follows several disparate characters united by a single incident. But while that film built toward its climax, Code Unknown opens with its converging incident then follows the rippling impacts through its character’s lives. Continue reading...

Shelley Long plays a flakey Beverly Hills housewife who volunteers to lead a Girl Scout-like troop. Predictable hijinks ensue. The child actors don’t grate and I liked the Los Angeles locations and the Ted McGinley cameo. But the deleted throat-choke scene proved funnier than anything left in the film.

Blood Rage director John Grissmer’s directorial debut. Robert Lansing plays a plastic surgeon who reconstructs a stripper’s face to pose as his runaway daughter. Continue reading...

Bela Lugosi plays a mad scientist injecting blood from his sideshow ape into abducted women. I appreciated the stylish cinematography and cooky mid-nineteenth-century Paris production design. But the talky script (with dialog punch-ups by John Huston!) and lame ape-suit effects proved too much. The scariest thing about this movie was Lugosi’s unibrow.

In a dystopian near-future where the last child was born over eighteen years ago, society crumbles. Global refugees flock to London, one of the few functioning cities. Hoping for sanctuary, they find interment camps. Militant groups demanding better refugee treatment execute bombings and clash with government forces. Clive Owen plays a bureaucrat swept into the conflict via his estranged ex wife. Continue reading...