All-timer freezing cold take of a movie review . . .

[torbee]

From The New Yorker in 1939:

The Wizard of Hollywood​

M-G-M’s Technicolor production “The Wizard of Oz” displays no trace of good taste, imagination, or ingenuity.
By Russell Maloney
August 12, 1939

Fantasy is still Walt Disney’s undisputed domain. Nobody else can tell a fairy tale with his clarity of imagination, his simple good taste, or his technical ingenuity. This was forcibly borne in on me as I sat cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of “The Wizard of Oz,” which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity. I will rest my case against “The Wizard of Oz” on one line of dialogue. It occurs in a scene in which the wicked witch is trying to persuade Dorothy, the little girl from Kansas, to part with a pair of magic slippers. The good witch interrupts them, warning Dorothy not to give up the slippers, whereupon the wicked witch snarls, “You keep out of this!” Well, there it is. Either you believe witches talk like that, or you don’t. I don’t. Since “The Wizard of Oz” is full of stuff as bad as that, or worse, I say it’s a stinkeroo.

The vulgarity of which I was conscious all through the film is difficult to analyze. Part of it was the raw, eye-straining Technicolor, applied with a complete lack of restraint. And the gags! Let me give you just one. Dorothy is telling the Wizard about the fate of the wicked witch. “She just melted away,” Dorothy says. “Liquidated, eh?” the Wizard comes back, quick as a flash. He’s a card, that Wizard; you ought to hear him ribbing the boys in Dave’s Blue Room some morning. Bert Lahr, as the Cowardly Lion, is funny but out of place. If Bert Lahr belongs in the Land of Oz, so does Mae West. This is nothing against Lahr or Miss West, both of whom I dearly love. I don’t like the Singer Midgets under any circumstances, but I found them especially bothersome in Technicolor.

“The Old Maid” has many virtues. It is a faithful transcription of a well-written, though far from brilliant, play. It is a costume piece in which the feeling of the period goes deeper than the clothes worn by the actors; it is impossible to imagine the action taking place in a different time or locality. The characters are well conceived, they react credibly, and they actually develop as the action progresses. The story is adult, insofar as it is concerned with something beyond getting a certain girl into the arms of a certain man. But how dull it is! Written and directed with no variety or change of pace, “The Old Maid” just trudges sensibly along to its inevitable conclusion, and then stops. This is not to say, however, that Bette Davis’s performance in “The Old Maid” will not win her the Academy Award for 1939. All that renunciation, all those tight-lipped, understated, half-lighted scenes with the jealous sister and the illegitimate daughter—it’s in the bag, folks.

The charge of dullness cannot be laid against “When Tomorrow Comes.” James M. Cain, who concocted the story, has tossed into the Irene Dunne-Charles Boyer-Barbara O’Neil triangle quite a few surprises. Miss Dunne is a waitress in a chain restaurant who successfully engineers a strike—the first time, to my knowledge, that the labor question has been so taken for granted in a full-length commercial production. Even after this warning, I bet you won’t believe your ears when Mr. Boyer says, “I have a union card,” and Miss Dunne shrewdly asks, “C.I.O. or A.F. of L.?” Then there is a lovely, demented wife—beautifully played by Miss O’Neil—and a hurricane which forces the lovers to spend the night in the organ loft of a flooded church. Then there is a scene in which Mr. Boyer, who plays a famous concert pianist, pounds out great, crashing chords during a thunderstorm, and there’s—oh, what isn’t there? See it, by all means. ♦




Published in the print edition of the August 19, 1939, issue, with the headline “The Wizard of Hollywood.”

 

[binsfeldcyhawk2]

Mr Maloney seems like a sour puss.

 

[torbee]

Mr Maloney seems like a sour puss.

How he can say it had no inventive ideas is just ludicrous.

 

[jamesvanderwulf]

Tommy Boy​

Comedy
93 minutes ‧ PG-13 ‧ 1995
Roger Ebert
March 31, 1995
3 min read


"Tommy Boy" is one of those movies that plays like an explosion down at the screenplay factory. You can almost picture a bewildered office boy, his face smudged with soot, wandering through the ruins and rescuing pages at random. Too bad they didn't mail them to the insurance company instead of filming them.

The movie is an assembly of clichés and obligatory scenes from dozens of other movies, all are better. It has only one original idea, and that's a bad one: The inspiration of making the hero's sidekick into, simultaneously, his buddy, his critic and his rival.

It's like the part was written by three writers locked in separate rooms.
"Tommy Boy" stars Chris Farley of "Saturday Night Live," the guy with the size 23 neck, as Tommy Callahan, the dopey son of a Sandusky brake shoe manufacturer. His father, Big Tom (Brian Dennehy), is proud of him even though he squeaked through college in seven years, and supplies him with an office and big responsibilities when he comes back to Ohio. Meanwhile, there are startling developments on the domestic front, where Big Tom, a widower, is engaged to marry the bodacious Beverly (Bo Derek).

Young Tommy is overjoyed, because Beverly has a son, Paul (Rob Lowe), which means Tommy at last will have the brother he always dreamed of. Paul doubts there's much to do in Sandusky, but Tommy proves him wrong, introducing him to the favorite local pastime, "cow tipping," which means sneaking up on sleeping cows and tipping them over. In other hands this could have been the movie's only funny scene, but director Peter Segal doesn't have a clue about comic payoffs and bungles it before ending with the desperate director's ancient standby, as the lads fall in the mud.
The plot thickens. Or does it congeal? I began ticking off the story clichés: We'd already had (1) dumb son returns to family business and (2) unexpected stepmother. Soon we get (3) company gets in trouble and all workers will lose jobs, (4) it's up to the kid to save the day, (5) evil stepmother, (6) road movie and (7) buddy picture. The last two come as Tommy hits the road in a desperate last-minute bid to sell brake shoes, accompanied by his friend Richard (David Spade, also from "Saturday Night Live"). Richard has been introduced as a resentful employee who doesn't think Tommy should get such a quick promotion. Now he becomes a sidekick, critic, rival and buddy, all wrapped in one ungainly package.
The movie tries for laughs during the road trip, I'm afraid, by having Richard's car fall to pieces. First a deer destroys the convertible roof. Then a door comes loose. Then the hood flies off.

They drive down the highway in what's left. Those whose memories stretch all the way back . . . back . . . back to the dim past of 1987 will remember a similar demolished car in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," one of the many better movies this one rips off.
No one is funny in "Tommy Boy." There are no memorable lines. None of the characters is interesting except for the enigmatic figure played by Rob Lowe, who seems to have wandered over from "Hamlet." Judging by the evidence on the screen, the movie got a green light before a usable screenplay had been prepared, with everybody reassuring each other that since they were such funny people, inspiration would overcome them. It was Forrest Gump, I believe, who said, "Funny is as funny does."

 

[TJ8869]

Mr Maloney seems like a sour puss.