FILM REVIEW OF ''LAWLESS" (2012)

“Lawless” (**** OUT OF ****) amounts to a first-rate, fiercely violent, but surprisingly entertaining crime thriller about Prohibition-era bootleggers in rural Virginia.  Not only does this exceptional 115-minute moonshine melodrama boast a gallery of memorable characters but also several unforgettable performances.   Although Shia LaBeouf takes top billing as the youngest of the three Bondurant brothers who brewed white lightning, Tom Hardy is the actor to watch in this rugged R-rated epic about turf wars in the woods.  Keep in mind, “Lawless” constitutes another of those movies “based on a true story.”  Interestingly, Australian director John Hillcoat of “The Proposition” and scenarist Nick Cave have adapted Matt Bondurant’s bestselling 2008 historical novel “The Wettest County in the World” and delivered a colorful, sometimes savage saga about the American free enterprise system.  What truth lies in the novel deserves scrutiny since Bondurant wrote about his own grandfather, Jack Bondurant, along with his two grand uncles and their high octane, Depression Era exploits as bootleggers who refused to bow to outside competition.   Most of “Lawless” chronicles the efforts of corrupt lawmen as they shake down rural moonshiners.  Anybody who doesn’t grovel pays a terrible price.  These sadistic dastards with badges tar and feather one unfortunate bootlegger and leave him for dead on his kin's front porch.  Despite the eruptions of sudden, noisy violence that will startle some and shock others, “Lawless” has more than its share of quiet, introspective moments to offset its abrupt Sergio Leone style violence. Indeed, Hillcoat and Cave slip in two love stories.  Cinematically, this atmospheric yarn resembles the Coen brothers' Depression-Era opus "O Brother, Where Art Thou," but it takes itself far more seriously.  Just as “O Brother” was inspired by Homer’s heroic poem "The Odyssey," the characters participating in the Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy emerge as titans-of-industry themselves.

Forrest (Tom Hardy of “The Dark Knight Rises”), Howard (Jason Clarke of “Public Enemies”), and Jack (Shia LaBeouf of “I, Robot”) are the brothers Bondurant.  Howard survived World War I as the one man in his regiment who didn’t die.  During the pandemic 1918 Spanish Flu influenza, neither Howard nor Jack contracted the fatal illness. Miraculously, Forrest recovered from it but their parents perished.  Forrest believes his brothers and he are invincible, and the events that unfold in “Lawless” make that description of their longevity appropriate.  The first time we see the Bondurant boys, Jack’s older brothers are egging him on to shoot a pig for them for vittles.  Staring down the barrel of a .22 rifle, Jack cannot muster the nerve to squeeze the trigger.  One of his brothers intervenes and shoots it; the gunshot reverberates like an artillery blast.  Afterward, “Lawless” picks up in 1931. The Bondurants operate a money-making moonshine business and use their country store and filling station as a front.  Forrest calls the shots.  Howard serves as the muscle.  Jack sweeps the floors. Surprisingly, the Bondurants even sell shine to the local constabulary.  This is one of many surprises that occur throughout “Lawless” and make it a lively, off-beat genre exercise.

“Lawless” presents its larger-than-life events from the perspective of Jack.  The runt of the litter, Jack struggles to measure up to his two imposing brothers.  They are always ridiculing his best efforts.  Jack’s closest friend is a nerdy backwoods boy, Cricket Pate (Dane DeHaan of “Chronicle”), who was crippled during his infancy by Rickets.  Cricket conjures up clever means to manufacture moonshine.  When Jack visits Cricket, he finds Cricket brewing whiskey in a huge still beneath his backwoods mansion in the basement. Cricket pipes the brew up through a spigot at the sink and dispenses it in a Mason jar.  At one point, young Jack observes that the fires illuminating hundreds of illegal stills in the woods of Franklin County appear like a constellation of stars.  

 

Things change for both good and bad for the Bondurants and their kind.  A dancer from Chicago, Maggie Beauford (Jessica Chastain of “The Help”), hits Forrest up for a job as a waitress.  Eventually, Forrest and she grow fond of each another.  Meantime, Virginia Commonwealth District Attorney Mason Wardell (newcomer Tim Tolin) prefers to skim the profits from the bootleggers rather than shut them down.  He deputizes some unsavory Chicago troublemakers with few sentiments about the sanctity of human life.  The most prominent is sadistic Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce of “L.A. Confidential”) who dresses like a stockbroker. Rakes behaves like a Nazi, wears gloves, dyes his hair black, and arms himself with only the best weapons.  He assaults defenseless Jack with a shotgun and sends the battered twentysomething home with a message that should Forrest anticipate rougher treatment.  Two thugs arrive at Forrest’s bar and inflict maximum pain on him. Later, after other depredations, Rakes kills somebody close to the Bondurants.

Director John Hillcoat keeps things moving swiftly enough so the story never bogs down.  After the gunsmoke settles and the bodies are hauled off, Hillcoat wraps up the history neatly and gives us a glimpse of what the actual participants looked like in a 1917 black and white photograph.  Hillcoat stages several above-average shoot-outs, especially the bullet-blasting finale at a covered bridge.  Film editor Dylan Tichenor and Hillcoat have done a splendid job of editing the action scenes so the violence is more dramatic than gratuitous.  In other words, the violence may make you flinch, but you won’t be sickened by unnecessary gore.  The attention to period detail seems scrupulous, too.  Hillcoat substitutes Georgia for Virginia.  The rustic settings, the wooden barns, and the country stores as well as the clean-scrubbed urban cityscapes with period advertisements give “Lawless” an authentic feel.  Cinematographer Benoît Delhomme of “1408” captures those hundreds of fires blazing against the majestic backdrop of rural Virginia with his panoramic widescreen lens.  Memorable movies about moonshiners in the south are few and far between.  “Lawless” ranks as the best example about rural bootleggers since director Richard Quine's “The Moonshine War” (1970) with Alan Alda and Patrick McGoohan.

 

FILM REVIEW OF ''HIT AND RUN" (2012)

 Dax Shepard and his fiancée Kristen Bell co-star in the witless romantic comedy “Hit and Run”(* OUT OF ****) that Shepard wrote and co-directed with his pal George Palmer. Palmer and Shepard helmed the video short “Reunited” (2010) as well as the spoof documentary “Brother’s Justice.” The style of comedy that they espouse mingles dry humor with slapstick. The garrulous characters never cease making asses of themselves. This half-baked buffoonery about a goofy getaway driver in the Witness Relocation Program who shacks up with a brainiac, drop-dead gorgeous, community college professor delivers more run than hit. Nothing about this low-brow, tread-burning, crime melodrama will make you either smile or flinch. The grossest scene resembles something that Sasha Baron Cohen might have removed from one of his offensive comedies. Our hero and heroine are on the run when they check into a motel. They find a sex orgy in their room with participants who are old, fat, and ugly. This tasteless scene qualifies as so gratuitous that the MPAA probably had no choice but to slap “Hit and Run” with an R-rating for nudity. Shepard and Palmer aren’t content to show this unsightly scene once but twice for maximum impact. Meantime, you’ll lose count of the number of times that the F-word is uttered. The violence remains relatively mild by today’s standards. A felon takes a slug in the back with a splash of blood for realism. A man is shown mercilessly slugging another. An assailant smashes our hero’s nose with a golf club. Nevertheless, despite their lame-brained humor and lackluster car chases, Shepard and Palmer have assembled a first-class, straight-faced cast that contributes a modicum of hilarity to the antics. Bradley Cooper, Tom Arnold, Kristin Chenoweth, Michael Rosenbaum, and David Koechner run circles around our leads. “Hit and Run” amounts to one long, drawn-out, vehicular chase with no memorable stunts. The biggest stunt involves a dune buggy hurtling “Dukes of Hazard” style over several parked cars. Nothing about the driving will turn your knuckles white and make you gasp, but the automobiles look ultra-cool.

“Hit and Run” starts out in a backwater California town named Milton with a community college. Basically, our heroine Annie Bean (Kristen Bell of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) learns that she is about to be fired from her job as a community college professor. Happily, Annie’s potty-mouthed boss, Debby (Kristin Chenoweth of “You, Again”), alerts her about an opening at UCLA where she can land her dream job as the head of a conflict-resolution department. The major drawback for our ambitious heroine is when her tattooed boyfriend, Charlie Bronson (Dax Sheppard of “When In Rome”), divulges his participation in Witness Relocation.  Charlie is pretty much condemned to live an eternity in the sleepy little town of Milton because his former partners-in-crime want to track him down and terminate him with extreme prejudice. Eventually, Charlie changes his mind about Witness Protection and pulls the tarp off his jacked-up 1967 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors to chauffeur Annie in style to Los Angeles. Annie’s green-eyed, ex-boyfriend, Gil (Michael Rosenbaum of TV’s “Smallville”), gets wind of Charlie’s real identity and sends a message via Facebook to Charlie’s number one nemesis. As it turns out, and Annie discovers later, Charlie is really Yul Perrkins. Charlie’s father Clint Perrkins (Beau Bridges of “Max Payne”) named him after legendary actor Yul Brynner of “The Magnificent Seven.” Charlie hated the name Yul so much that he changed it to Charles Bronson.  Mind you, Yul wasn’t thinking about  movie superstar Charles Bronson of “Death Wish” fame, but the notorious British inmate Charles Bronson who is known as the most violent man in British prisons. Naturally, Annie is appalled by these revelations. What she really isn’t prepared for the gun-toting trio that come calling on them as they are about to leave for L.A.  Alex Dmitri (Bradley Cooper of “The A-Team” in dreadlocks) hates Charlie because Charlie’s testimony put him behind bars long enough for a Phillipino prisoner to rape him. Now, Alex yearns to kill Charlie as much his accomplices Neve Tatum (Joy Bryant of “Spider-Man 2”) and Allen (Ryan Hansen of “Friday the 13th”). Predictably, our hero has a savior, bungling U.S. Marshal Randy Anderson (Tom Arnold of “Exit Wounds”) who doesn’t know where the brakes are on his car. The people who make FX's "Justified" have used this gag before. Worse, he has to dodge the bullets that his own gun bangs out at him as it bounces around in his car.  The scene with the bowling ball in his smashed up car will make you grin.

“Hit and Run” blends elements of both “True Romance” and “Smokey and the Bandit.” The romance between Annie and Charlie and their flight from the desperate villains recalls the predicament that Clarence and Alabama face in “True Romance.”  Bradley Cooper’s arch villain resembles the Gary Oldman bad guy that Christian Slater tangled with in “True Romance” when he went to fetch Alabama's luggage. Shepard has made it well known in the media how much he loved the Burt Reynolds' comedy "Smokey and the Bandit," and the plot follows it, especially the use of a series of careening car chases. U.S. Marshal Randy is the equivalent of "Smokey." Unfortunately, this sloppy, low-octane, pursuit potboiler conjures up little tension and delivers few thrills.  Meantime, Shepard struggles to capture the spontaneous, off-the-cuff Tarantino dialogue about controversial subject matter. Instead, they wind up sounding nothing less than loquacious. Shepard and Palmer look like they not only shot this 96-minute feature on the shoe-string but also improvised many scenes. They stage their dialogue scenes with the same lack of finesse that they do their automotive maneuvers. You should sit and shun “Hit and Run.”

FILM REVIEW OF ''THE BLOB" (1958)

 "The Blob" (*** OUT OF ****) qualifies as a cult science fiction film not only because it launched 27-year old Steve McQueen on a trajectory to superstardom, but also because it exploited the popular themes of alien invasion and teenage delinquency which were inseparable in 1950s   cinema. Interestingly, nobody in the Kay Linaker and Theodore Simonson screenplay ever refers to the amorphous, scarlet-red protoplasm that plummeted to Earth in a meteor and menaced everybody in the small town of Downingtown Pennsylvania on a Friday night as "The Blob." They refer to it vaguely as the monster. Steve McQueen won the role of Josh Randall, the old West bounty hunter in "Wanted: Dead or Alive," after producer Dick Powell saw this Paramount Pictures' release. Meanwhile, McQueen's attractive girlfriend Aneta Corsaut went on to star opposite Andy Griffith in the hit CBS-TV comedy "The Andy Griffith Show" as Sheriff Taylor's school teacher girlfriend Helen Crump. Of course, neither McQueen nor Corsaut were teenagers, but then rarely did actual teenagers play actual teenagers. Director Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., made his directorial debut with "The Blob." Linaker and Simonson's screenplay synthesized four genres: first, the alien invasion; second, teenage delinquency; third, a murder mystery, and fourth; a horror chiller. Moreover, while the gelatinous substance assumes various shapes, it remains largely anonymous. In other words, the eponymous Jell-O neither talks nor communicates through telepathy. Instead, it kills without a qualm and discriminates against nobody. The ill-fated Dr. Hallen summarizes the Blob: "There's a man here with some sort of a parasite on his arm, assimilating his flesh at a frightening speed. I may have to get ahead of it and amputate. No... I don't know what it is or where it came from."The tone of "The Blob" is fairly serious in spite of its somewhat campy nature.

As the filmmakers point out on the Criterion DVD release of "The Blob," the movie opens uncharacteristically for a sci-fi horror thriller with our hero and heroine in a remote rural locale making out and kissing. Jane (Anita Corsaut) and Steve (Steve McQueen) see a large meteor fall to the earth and drive in search of it. Meanwhile, an elderly man with a lantern finds the meteor and pokes it with a stick. The meteor cracks open, and a slimy bunch of goop clings to the stick. When the old timer (Olin Howland of "The Paleface") gets a closer look at it, the goop attaches itself to his hand. The old guy runs screaming from the crater, and Steve nearly hits him with his jalopy. Steve and Jane pick the guy up and take him to see Dr. Hallen in town.

Hallen is poised to leave town for a medical conference when Steve and Jane bring the old guy to his office. Hallen phones his nurse to return since he may need to perform an amputation. Of course, Hallen has never seen anything like the substance on the man's forearm. Hallen sends Steve and Jane to find out what happened. Our heroes run into another group of teenagers that ridicule Steve's fast driving. Steve fools him into a reverse drive race, but the local police chief Dave (Earl Rowe) lets him off the hook. Steve and the teenagers visit the site of the meteor crater and find the warm remains of the meteor. After they visit the old man's house and rescue a dog, the teenagers split for a spooky late night movie while Steve and Jane return to Dr. Hallen's office. During the interim, the blob has entirely absorbed the old geezer, killed Hallen's nurse and attacked the doctor. Neither acid thrown on the protoplasm nor Hallen's shotgun have any effect on the blob. Steve catches a glimpse of the blob absorbing Hallen. When Steve and Jane go to the police department to report the incident, Dave is frankly incredulous, while Sergeant Bert (John Benson) believes that it is a prank. Bert has an axe to grind with teenagers because his wife died when one struck her car.

Steve and Jane take them to Hallen's office, but they can find neither hide nor hair of anybody, but Dave admits that the office has been vandalized. Against Sgt. Bert's advice, Dave turns the teens over to their respective parents. We learn that Jane's father is the High School principal. No sooner have Steve and Jane fooled their folks into believing that they are snugly asleep in bed than they venture out again. Jane's little brother in his pajamas with his stuffed Teddy Bear pleads to join her. Jane emphasizes the he needs to watch over their unsuspecting parents. They drive into town and spot the old man's dog that got away from them in front of a supermarket. When they go to retrieve the mutt, Steve steps in front of the electric eye door of the grocery store and it opens. They find nobody inside, but they encounter the blob. Steve and Jane take refuge in a freezer and the blob doesn't attack them. Later, after they escape, Steve persuades the teenagers that challenged him in a street race to alert the authorities because he is supposed to be home in bed. Police Chief Dave and the fire department arrive at the supermarket. Steve tries to convince Dave that the blob is in the store. About that time, the blob kills the theater projectionist and attacks the moviegoers. Suddenly, a horde of people exit the theater and Dave believes Steve. Steve and Jane wind up at a lunch counter that the blob attacks. The proprietor and our heroes hole up in the cellar and Steve discovers that a fire extinguisher with its freezing contents forces the blob to back off.

The authorities collect every fire extinguisher in town and manage to freeze the blob. The Pentagon sends down a team to transport the blob to the North Pole. As the remains of the blob drift down to the polar ice pack, the end credit appears with a ghostly giant question mark. Producer James B. Harris obtained stock military footage of a Globe master military transport plane depositing the parachute and its cargo.

"The Blob" proved to be a drive-in hit and Steve McQueen's surge to stardom gave the film added momentum. Unless you are a juvenile, this little horror movie isn't scary at all, but Yeaworth and his scenarists create a sufficient amount of paranoia and sympathy for our heroes. They never show the blob actually assimilating its victims and leave this to your imagination, so "The Blob" isn't without a modicum of subtlety.

ONLY THE VALIANT (1951) ***1/2 OUT OF ****

 "Only the Valiant" qualifies as a pretty gritty western. This straightforward U.S. Cavalry versus Apaches saga is a solemn suicide mission with minimal humor. “Them” director Gordon Douglas stages this grim, harrowing, outdoors epic with gusto, and a brawny cast of hard-bitten hellions sweating bullets when they aren’t shooting them surrounds leading man Gregory Peck. Lon Chaney, Jr., Neville Brand, Ward Bond, Jeff Corey, and Steve Brodie constitute some of the cast. Ostensibly, "Colorado Territory" scenarist Edmund H. North and "A Place in the Sun" scribe Harry Brown adapted western filmmaker Charles Marquis Warren's taut novel. Basically, a squad of die-hard cavalrymen receive orders to prevent bloodthirsty Apaches from massacring defenseless white settlers. The chief dramatic complication is these cavalrymen don’t stand a chance in Hades. North and Brown adhere to Warren's novel for the most part. The last-minute revelation--when it seems our heroes are doom—is a corker! This frontier tale drums up a palatable aura of claustrophobia in the latter half of its 105-minute runtime. The stark black & white cinematography of "Going My Way" lenser Lionel Linden endows this adventure with a grim look that enhances its tension. Actor Michael Ansara, who later played the antagonist in "Guns of the Magnificent Seven," is extremely effective in a small role as the hated Apache leader Tucsos.

"Only the Valiant" opens with Army Scout Joe Harmony (Jeff Corey of “True Grit”) providing expository voice-over narration. "This is my stamping ground. I'm a scout for the Army. Had my work cut out for me for a long time. Behind that pass there is the whole 'Pache nation. (There is a map of the territory with the Flinthead Mountains stretching across the screen with a bottleneck pass.) They used to come swarming out of the pass killing everything in sight. Then we built a fort—Fort Invincible. It plugged up the pass, just like a cork in a bottle. Things was fine for a while. But them 'Paches is pretty smart. One day the bottle blew the cork plum apart." We are shown the burning remains of Fort Invincible with a dead man pinned to a stockade wall and a lance sticking out of his belly. Hidebound Captain Richard Lance (Gregory Peck of "12 O’Clock High") and his troopers charge in on horseback and capture Tucsos, and Joe Harmony (Jeff Corey of "True Grit") wants to shoot him on the spot. Harmony points out Tucsos is "the fella that started this whole business." Lance intervenes, "The Army doesn't shoot prisoners, Joe." Predictably, Harmony is aghast. "He's no common injun. He's just as near to a god as a fella can get. If you shoot him now, things will quiet down. Without Tucsos stirring them up, the rest of those Indians will get reasonable, just as fast as they can. You take him in alive, you'll have every 'Pache in the territory coming after him. We have had three years of this, you can stop it now." Just as predictably, Captain Lance refuses to kill Tucsos, and his decision to take the Apache back sets things into action.

Colonel Drum (Herbert Heyes of "Union Station") surprises Lance when he tells him Tucsos should have killed. As it is, they need to get Tucsos to another post. Everybody from the troopers to Joe Harmony know taking Tucsos to Fort Grant is asking him to die. The Apaches are poised like predators in the mountains, and the fort is blatantly under strength. Meantime, Douglas introduces us to Captain Eversham's daughter, Cathy (Barbara Payton of "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye") and young Lieutenant William Holloway (Gig Young of "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"). They play a peripheral part in the conflict. Lance and Holloway both want to wed Cathy. Clearly, Cathy prefers Lance. Meantime, Colonel Drum refuses to let Lance escort Tucsos to Fort Grant. Instead, Drum orders Lance to send Holloway in his place, shocking everybody. Lance has never changed an order. Furthermore, Lance saw Cathy and Holloway kissing in public. Everybody thinks Lance has reassigned Holloway out of sheer jealousy. Indeed, one officer observes that rewriting orders is about as sacrilegious as rewriting the Bible. Predictably, Tucsos escapes, and the surviving troopers accompanied by Harmony bring back  Holloway’s mutilated body.

Although Drum anticipates the arrival of a relief column of 400 troopers in ten days, Harmony explains Tucsos will launch an attack before they arrive. Since Tucsos was held captive in the fort, the wily Apache knows about the shortage of manpower. Lance wants to take six or seven men of his choosing to maintain Fort Invincible and thwart Tucsos from assembling a war party. A defile in the mountain pass keeps the Indians from riding through in full strength. Instead, they must pass through one-at-a-time. Lance believes his men can hold Invincible until the relief column shows up. Drum gives him permission, and Lance recruits the worst men. All of them hate him with a passion and crave the chance to kill him.

"Only the Valiant" exemplifies the new breed of military western emerging after World War II. This is not a gung-ho John Ford cavalry western with troopers serenading their commanders. Again, Lance's own men want to kill him. This foreshadows the attitude of troops during the Vietnam War when they fragged their officers. Lance bears the onus of Holloway’s death—except those few privy to the circumstances that prompted the change of orders sending Holloway in charge of the escort. The black & white photography enhances the grim nature of this western. "Only the Valiant" amounts to a last stand western until the last-minute reprieve. Reportedly, Peck hated this movie, but then it is not “The Gunfighter” with its anti-violence message. If anything, "Only the Valiant" lives up to its Warner Brothers origins. Small but significant, it bristles with melodramatic twists and turns and features lots of unsavory characters, virtually a "Dirty Dozen" western.