By  Will, on January 6, 2013, 5:20 am  Starring Gene Barry, Angie Dickinson, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Paul Dubov, Lee Van Cleef, George Givot, Gerald Milton, Neyle Morrow, Marcel Dalio, Maurice Marsac, Warren Hsieh, Paul Busch, James Hong
Directed by Samuel Fuller
Expectations: High. Sam Fuller.
It’s been about seven months since I did a Sam Fuller movie, so once again I find myself slacking off immensely on my review journey through his filmography. And every time after I finish a film I think, “Why did it take me so long to watch this?” I love Sam Fuller’s films more than I know how to communicate, and for some reason when I get infatuated with a filmmaker I have an in-born desire to stretch out seeing all of their movies for fear that one day there won’t be any more new ones to see. This is exactly the reason I haven’t seen every Kurosawa film, for example. It’s an irrational fear because when you get through them all, then you have the fun of re-watching them! But I resolve that in 2013 I will do my best to finish the series! Anyway, my personal neuroses aside, China Gate is a fantastic, underseen gem in the Fuller catalog, exhibiting just about everything fans have come to expect from the director.
Set during the end of the First Indochina War in Vietnam, China Gate is an action/adventure tale about a group of men on a mission to destroy an ammo depot. That’s the yarn in the broad sense, but the real tale is the story of Angie Dickinson and the lengths to which she’ll go for her child. She agrees to lead the men through enemy territory as she has developed a good rapport and reputation with the enemy forces through smuggling and prostitution. As I said, she’s a single mom willing to do anything necessary to provide for her child. The lead male of the group is her ex-husband Brock, a racist who left her upon seeing their son’s Asian eyes after he was born. Herein lies the true journey of China Gate, and while modern viewers will probably find it too exaggerated and heavy-handed, for the time it is yet another bold picture confronting hypocrisy and racism from Fuller.
Continue reading China Gate (1957) →
By Will, on September 1, 2012, 5:20 am  Starring Active duty U.S. Navy SEALs and U.S. Navy Special Warfare Combatant Crewmen, Jason Cottle, Alex Veadov, Roselyn Sánchez, Nestor Serrano, Emilio Rivera, Drea Castro, Keo Woolford, Thomas Rosales Jr., Marco Morales, Ailsa Marshall
Directed by Mike McCoy & Scott Waugh
Expectations: Low, but the action will probably be OK.
While you could easily write off Act of Valor as simple recruiting propaganda, it’s actually a very accomplished action film that excites as well as it inspires. The action scenes play out like a live-action Call of Duty game but with a focus on realism, with neat overlays and instances when night vision or other cool tech is used. In some ways, I’d say it’s more akin to Rainbow Six (if we’re relating it to a video game), as that game’s measured, static pacing is mirrored beautifully in the way the Seals carry out their first mission on-screen.
In terms of story, you’ve already heard this one before. A terrorist hellbent on sending suicide bombers into crowed areas is on the loose and it’s up to our special forces to take him out. There’s nothing new or fresh here, but the way it is presented to us doesn’t try to sell it as such. In fact, a lot of the plot plays out visually as opposed to being dialogue-driven, so it’s as if the filmmakers knew they were treading deep into cliché territory and sought the quickest way possible to keep the film moving without bogging it down with needless dialogue. For this, I am incredibly thankful and it makes Act of Valor a breeze to watch.
Continue reading Act of Valor (2012) →
By  Stephen, on April 18, 2012, 5:20 am  Barefoot Gen [はだしのゲン, Hadashi no Gen]
Starring Issei Miyazaki, Masaki Kōda, Seiko Nakano, Takao Inoue, Yoshie Shimamura
Directed by Mori Masaki
It may be a cliché to say, “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” but any good storyteller knows that to tell a huge tragedy, you need to focus on the small stuff. And there aren’t many tragedies larger than the dropping of the atomic bomb. Barefoot Gen tells the story of Hiroshima and the hundreds of thousands of people killed by the first atomic bomb, and as with any good tragedy, the movie focuses on the small stuff. It deals with the statistics and the massive scale of destruction, but mostly it is the tale of a young boy named Gen and his family during the final days of World War II.
We expect to have the opening scenes showing the innocent lives soon to be lost, but this film does more than that. It shows great details of daily life in WWII era Japan, and really gets into the lives of Gen’s family. The strict rationing in effect during the war has left little food for them, and Gen’s mother is pregnant. She eats what little food they have, and even though it is for the unborn child, her guilt as she watches the rest of her family go hungry is a palpable object throughout the beginning of the film. Barefoot Gen is billed as a story about the atom bomb, and while this is true it doesn’t quite do the film justice. It grabs ahold of your guts long before it gets to the bomb.
Continue reading Stephen reviews: Barefoot Gen (1983) →
By Will, on February 20, 2012, 5:20 am  Starring Richard Widmark, Bella Darvi, Victor Francen, Cameron Mitchell, Gene Evans, David Wayne, Stephen Bekassy, Richard Loo
Directed by Samuel Fuller
Expectations: Low. This is Fuller’s least favorite film according to his book.
Hell and High Water begins in classic Sam Fuller style, hitting hard with a stunning image designed to immediately excite the viewer and grab hold of their attention. The particular image that opens this Fuller film is a giant nuclear explosion on a remote island (which is actual footage of a test blast by the military), and we’re quickly told via narration that it’s this explosion that the film is about. Sort of. The explosion is more like the catalyst to the film and its climax, but I guess you could say that the explosion informs the entire film and gives tension to the events presented within. That’s kind of a stretch though. This conflicted feeling I have is representative of how I feel about the entire film.
Going into Hell and High Water I had virtually no idea what the film was about. All I knew was that it was a Sam Fuller film, that it was something of a military film, that it was a bigger budget studio picture made as a favor, and that it was Fuller’s least favorite of his pictures. Like the opening explosion, the knowledge that Fuller didn’t like this one informed my viewing of the film. To my surprise though (and realistically I shouldn’t be surprised), Hell and High Water is pretty damn fun, and exceedingly well produced. It is Fuller’s first film in color, as well as his first CinemaScope film and he wastes no time in utilizing both to great effect.
Continue reading Hell and High Water (1954) →
By Will, on November 18, 2011, 5:20 am  Starring Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Dominic Cooper, Richard Armitage, Stanley Tucci, Toby Jones, Neal McDonough, Derek Luke, Kenneth Choi, JJ Feild, Bruno Ricci
Directed by Joe Johnston
Expectations: High. Thor was great, and I hope this can lead me into The Avengers in a spectacular way.
Ever since I heard Marvel was producing an Avengers film with a Captain America film leading into it, I knew exactly how it should end. The Captain America origin storyline has a built-in cliffhanger that could naturally segue the character into the team structure of what the Avengers film must be. So imagine my surprise when the first scene in Captain America: The First Avenger uses this cliffhanger, effectively letting the air out of the balloon before it even gets the chance to fill up, or even introduce the balloon at all. Oh man, this can’t be a good sign.
Captain America wasn’t always the super soldier he’s now known as. He started as Steve Rogers, a 4F frail weakling who possesses such a desire to fight for his country that he tries anything he can to get another shot at the recruitment process. One of these times he catches the eye of a defected German scientist (played somewhat poorly by Stanley Tucci) who has developed a super serum that can turn Rogers into a beefed-up, Nazi-smashing version of himself. Thus is born Captain America.
Continue reading Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) →
By Will, on July 7, 2011, 6:36 am  Starring Rod Taylor, Jim Brown, Yvette Mimieux, Peter Carsten, Kenneth More, André Morell, Olivier Despax, Guy Deghy, Bloke Modisane, Calvin Lockhart, Alan Gifford, David Bauer
Directed by Jack Cardiff
Expectations: High, I’ve heard great things. This is a favorite of Scorsese and Tarantino as well.
The second movie this week that features a crazy ex-Nazi! I swear I didn’t plan it this way. Unlike Crawlspace though, Dark of the Sun is a lot more than just a crazy ex-Nazi film. It oozes style, machismo and gritty violence. Tarantino is a big fan of this one and after watching it, it’s no secret why. It’s remarkable that a film like this could even be made by a major studio in 1968, and as such feels a lot more like a big budget B-picture than a traditional studio film.
Rod Taylor and Jim Brown play a pair of mercenaries hired to take a steam train deep into the volatile Congo in order to rescue a town full of trapped European settlers… and $50 million in diamonds! They assemble a small force for the mission, a simple three-day job that requires with crackerjack timing if they are to avoid massive casualties. That’s ain’t the way it’s goin’ down for our steel-willed heroes though, is it?
Continue reading Dark of the Sun (1968) →
By Will, on June 24, 2011, 11:59 am  Fixed Bayonets! (1951)
Starring Richard Basehart, Gene Evans, Michael O’Shea, Richard Hylton, Skip Homeier, David Wolfson, Henry Kulky, Craig Hill
Directed by Samuel Fuller
Expectations: Another Sam Fuller, I’m fairly positive I’ll enjoy this, but as it’s his first studio picture I’m worried it may be watered down.
It’s no secret to frequent visitors that Samuel Fuller is one of my most favorite filmmakers. The man was years ahead of his time and his films continue to resonate just as well, if not better, than they did upon release. I approached my viewing of Fixed Bayonets! with slight apprehension though, as I feared that Fuller’s transition to the studio system (his previous three films were all independently produced) would cramp his style a bit. While Fixed Bayonets! does not have the hard-hitting social commentary and racial tension of Fuller’s other 1951 film, The Steel Helmet, it makes up for that with hard-hitting war action and survival drama. This is essentially a smaller, more localized version of Fuller’s epic The Big Red One.
Continue reading Fixed Bayonets! (1951) →
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