The Departed: 2006 Crime Drama directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Leo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Marky Mark, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and Anthony Anderson.
Marc Horton Plot Synopsis: Leo goes undercover for the cops. Damon goes undercover for the Irish mob. A bunch of guys in horrible Boston accents yell insults at each other for being from various sides of the track. Nicholson runs the mob; he smells a rat. Mayhem ensues, with plenty of double-crosses along the way.
Like No Country for Old Men, it's slick, pointlessly violent and empty. But Hollywood ate it up, awarding Scorsese the Best Picture Oscar more or less as a lifetime Achievement Award in case he drops dead before he makes another worthy film and as an apology for stiffing him for genuine works of genius such as The King of Comedy.
By the time you get to the "surprise" ending you're exhausted and don't care.
Politically Incorrect Movie Review: The Departed should have stayed away.
The Way We Were: 1973 Romantic Drama starring Robert Redford, Barbara Streisand. Directed by Sidney Pollack.
Marc Horton Plot Synopsis: A good-looking, popular, athletic Yalie falls in love with an ugly, humorless, Commie sympathizer who tries to rally her fellow students to the Kremlin's efforts in Civil War Spain.
He's a pragmatic WASP with friends named "Muffy" and "Charles Emerson Winchester III." She's an idealistic Jewish political agitator whose only friend is fellow Trotskyite James Woods. Implausibly, Redford's drawn to her. Even more implausibly, his friends don't organize an intervention.
Years go by. Redford's in the Navy. Streisand irons her hair straight (honest, they make a big deal out of it). They run into each other at a pish-posh party and make an accidental hook-up. She becomes desperately clingy. He fails to get a restraining order.
Another chance encounter on the street months later leads to romance. This time he stays around despite the fact that she is incapable of getting along with other humans. They move to Hollywood so Redford can pursue his writing career. He wants to make movies; Streisand wants him to write novels. He compromises to get his movie made; she marches off to Washington to defend her First Amendment rights at the HUAC hearings. Still, he stands by her.
The only thing the characters even superficially address is their cultural differences. She says her mother insists that the baby be named after her grandmother, "Shlemackel" or something. He laughs and they both fall to the sandy beach. Aaaah.
After all that, he bolts because - I dunno - because Hollywood producers in the 70s wanted a tear-jerker ending.
Money Quote:
Streisand: "Is it because I'm not attractive?"
Redford: (blank stare)
Re-write: "In a word: 'Yes.' " Political Incorrect Movie Review: Streisand strains to prove her Marxist bona fides, but brings Redford along for box-office ballast.
Gone With the Wind: 1939 Drama starring Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard and a cast of thousands.
Marc Horton plot synopsis: Scarlett (Leigh) loves, coincidentally, The Scarlett Pimpernel (Howard) but Ashley (as his character is actually named) marries Melanie (de Havilland). Scarlett then gets swept off her feet by Rhett Butler (Gable), who later goes on to hit .300 for the hometown Braves and co-star in the ensemble drama ER.
Scarlett cries. A lot. She cries when the war starts. She cries when Ashley goes off to war. She cries when Melanie has a baby. She cries when the Union Army burns down Atlanta. She cries when she goes back to the plantation, which has been reduced to ashes.
After the house slave informs Scarlett the only thing left to eat are last year's radishes, Scarlett goes into the garden and eats an un-ripe root vegetable and cries some more. She vows to rebuild.
Intermission.
Scarlett cries on Ashley's shoulder. She cries on Rhett's shoulder. She cries and cries some more. All beautifully filmed in glorious colour and all so bloody pointless. After a while it's just a long blur of tears, mercifully concluding after nearly four painful hours with Butler telling Scarlett, "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
The hype: Based on a monumentally successful door-stopper that centres on, if Her Indoors is to be believed, a no-nonsense heroine who doesn't take no shit from no body. The producers spent a widely publicized year casting for Scarlett. It was like "American Idol: In Search of the Next Luke Skywalker."
The film made enough money to float the entire 1939 issue of War Bonds. Adjusted for inflation, it works out to $4.3 trillion.
Won a truckload of Oscars: Picture, Director, Screenplay, Editing, Cinematography (I'll go along with that one), Actress (Leigh), Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel). Ranks 4th on the AFI Top 100 (1988).
Politically Incorrect Movie Review: Scarlett cries so much you'll hope she dies in the fire.
From Here to Eternity: 1953 Drama, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift. Directed by Fred Zinnerman.
Marc Horton Plot Synopsis: Army misfits in Hawaii just before Pearl Harbour. One's a trouble-making pisani (Sinatra), another's a reluctant boxer (Clift); both have a habit of leaving the base without a pass. They get drunk and fight a lot. Then you've got your career sergeant (Lancaster) and the repressed wife (Kerr) of the unit's captain; they have an affair. The Japanese attack. Another guy meets with a bad end. The end.
The hype: Won a bagful of Oscars in '53, including Picture, Director and Supporting Actor (Sinatra). The scene on the beach where Lancaster and Kerr make out is one of the most famous scenes in Hollywood history. If you believe The Godfather, a washed-up Sinatra got the role because the mob made the Bigshot Hollywood Producer "an offer he couldn't refuse."
The reality: Turgid army soap opera. That beach scene goes by faster than a dog chasing a frisbee. Sinatra gives a Neil Diamond-level performance and Clift is at his Method peak. Kerr is frostier than an Alaskan weather station and Lancaster is stuck interpreting the sorriest character in his illustrious film career.
Politically Incorrect Movie Review: It only feels like an Eternity.
Citizen Kane: 1941 drama, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, among others.
Marc Horton Plot Synopsis: Here's a real silver-screen heavyweight — and I'm not just talking about Orson Welles. He plays media heavyweight Charles Foster Kane, who treats everyone in his family and his newspaper as a servant and exiles anyone who doesn't play the toady. In that way, it's very much a 21st-century tale. Anyway, he croaks in the beginning, gasps Rosebud, and the hapless reporters are sent about the country to find the missing piece of the puzzle. Early in the film, he's a happy-go-lucky billionaire happy to blow his fortune on a crappy rag. He turns it into an empire, natch, marries a socialite, dances, sings and runs for governor. But politics isn't any good without some action on the side, just ask theseguys, strikes up an affair with some half-assed singer and loses the election. Kane ditches the old lady, marries the singer, and moves into Xanadu — where the film loses its vitality and becomes a bore — kinda like Kane himself. The singer's bored, the servants are bored, his old toadies at the paper are long gone, probably bored to tears, so is his ex-wife and eventually the second wife decides to pack it in and get the hell out. At the end, Kane croaks and the reporters, sans Wikipedia, are still no closer to the Rosebud mystery than they were at the beginning. Only in the final sequence does the viewer find out the missing Rosebud link, kicking off decades of joyful symbolizing merriment and hours of inside-of-eyelids-gazing pleasure at Film Studies courses around the land. Politically Incorrect Movie Review: It has its moments, the first half of the movie is fast-paced, but then it drags. The greatest film of all time? You can toss those opinions in the same furnace as Rosebud.
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: 1963 comedy, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters, Buddy Hackett, Phil Silvers, et al.
Marc Horton Plot Synopsis: A bunch of borscht-belt comedians and faded movie stars go in search of buried treasure. Mad-cap hijinks ensue. Ethel Merman shrieks a lot. Celebrities make cameos. Spencer Tracy loses his last shred of dignity after a distinguished career in the picture shows. Buster Keaton rolls over in his grave - and he wasn't even dead yet.
Politically Incorrect Movie Review: It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie.
Manhattan: 1979 Dramedy? Starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Mariel Hemingway. Written and directed by Woody Allen.
Marc Horton plot synopsis: Following his divorce from Streep, Woody the writer has a bunch of affairs - all irritatingly boring - including one with a "woman" who is still in high school (Hemingway). I mean, in the final scene, Hemingway's character actually says she just turned 18: "I'm finally legal."
The hype: Hailed for its gorgeous B&W cinematography of land the Indians sold to the Dutch for a few guilders worth of crap, Manhattan is also hailed for its use of Gershwin music as its musical bed. Putting the two together in this film made me wonder whether the better way to go would be to carve my eyes out with broken bottles or fill my ears with muriatic acid, because one day I'd like to listen to Gershwin again without having to think about this cinematrocity.
Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever 2001 calls the movie a "scathingly serious and comic view of modern relationships in urban America and of the modern intellectual neuroses." I'd bet $10 that "review" was ripped directly from the movie's VCR tape box that doubtlessly sat, unwatched, on the shelf of the local Crazy Mike's Video from 1979 through 1984, until Beta was officially declared dead and all the tapes were landfilled.
The Fat Man's review includes the understatement: "This is a variation on a familiar theme."
Politically Incorrect Movie Review: At what point do we start classifying Woody Allen's oeuvre as kiddy porn?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Western Comedy Buddy Pic directed by George Roy Hill, starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katherine Ross, 1969.
Marc Horton plot synopsis: Outlaws team up to rob a train, things go sour, they end up in Bolivia. But not before riding "the girl" around on the handlebars of a bicycle. Spend a lot of time getting chased by Pinkerton men. They get shot at a lot. They famously jump off a cliff. And they go out in a blaze of glory.
The hype: Teaming up with superstar Newman made a star out of Redford. Nominated for a bagful of Oscars, including Director and Picture. Won for Cinematrography and Song (Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head). The reality: Starting from the time Ross gets paraded around on the handlebars and that stupid song played, I was so bored I kept looking at the clock, hoping it would end.
Politically Incorrect Movie Review: Acid Rain Keeps Falling In My Eyes.
Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939): Historical Romance, Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara.
The Marc Horton plot synopsis: Asswipe falls in love with red-haired, green-eyed Irish-American "gypsy." Kills rival suitor. Inexplicably blames murder on gypsy. Inquisition-type court delivers "witch" verdict. Deformed bell-ringer hides gypsy in Notre Dame Cathedral. State over-rides Church's Sanctuary and vows to burn her, or hang her, or give her a stern scolding or something.
The Hype: Hugo wrote Notre-Dame de Paris as a clarion call to restore the cathedral, which had fallen into a state of disrepair after several centuries. There's a silent movie version, but this Hollywood talkie of Victor Hugo's door-stopper won Laughton praise for his portrayal of Quasimodo, the bell-ringer who tries to save O'Hara the gypsy.
The Reality: Aside from Laughton, everybody in this movie sounds like they dropped in from 20th-century Stockton rather than 15th-century Paris. Maureen O'Hara as a gypsy? I half-expected Keanu Reeves (or maybe his father) to pop up as a street urchin. The biggest travesty, however, is the happy ending. Mon dieu.
The Politically Incorrect Movie Review: The only people needing Sanctuary! are the movie-viewers who get sucked into watching Hollywood take a 20th-century hatchet to a 19th-century classic.
Amityville Horror (1979): Horror, starring James Brolin, Margot Kidder.
The Marc Horton plot synopsis: Young couple buys drafty old house that had been the scene of a mass murder. Husband starts acting a little kooky. Priest and nun make visits, suffer convulsions. Couple and their friends make a late-night visit to the library to get to the bottom of things. etc. The hype: Hyped as a true story but pretty much all of it has been debunked or refuted over the years, except for the fact that the house was the site where some discontented kid shot his parents and siblings. Took in $86 million at the box office.
The reality: Brolin and Kidder aren't going to win any Academy Awards for their acting at the best of time, but Rod Steiger did, for "In the Heat of the Night". Maybe it was the director's fault.
Roger Ebert called it, "dreary and terminally depressing." That sounds more like an Ingmar Bergman film. This is just derivative (mostly of The Exorcist) and dull.
The Political Incorrect Movie Review: If you thought this was scary in 1979, you were probably watching too much Carol Burnett Show.
Ever see a movie and wonder, "What's all the fuss about?"
Could be a big-budget fiasco. Could be a stumble by a name director. Could have been an inexplicable box office hit or critic's darling. Could be a movie that broke new ground in its time but doesn't hold up for contemporary audiences. Or it could just be an all-out, all-time dog.
Politically Incorrect Movie Reviews is launched as a tribute to Marc Horton, The Edmonton Journal's movie reviewer in the 1980s, who was never afraid to call out a movie's flaws (and give away vast stretches of plot), regardless of pedigree, pretension or hype.
