Creator (1985) [R] ***/****

In Creator, Peter O'Toole plays Dr. Harry Wolper, a university biology professor, physician and Nobel laureate obsessed with the idea of cloning his dead wife Lucy (Karen Kopins), who died 25 years earlier.

To further this obsession, Dr. Wolper, or Harry as he prefers to be called, steals equipment, funds and laboratory assistants from his university biology department to equip a secret laboratory in his garage where he hopes to clone Lucy, despite the suspicions of Dr. Sid Kullenbeck (David Ogden Stiers). In the film’s first act, Harry steals Kullenbeck’s new lab assistant, biology undergrad Boris Lafkin (Vincent Spano), by promising him the name of Boris’ newest infatuation, Barbara Spencer (Virginia Madsen) whom Boris had seen wearing a white lab coat and pushing a lab cart down the hall. Then Harry takes Boris home to show off his secret laboratory. Later, when Harry needs a healthy ovum to clone Lucy, he finds Meli (Mariel Hemingway) a teenage nymphomaniac whom he convinces to moves in with him and give him her ovum, and who promptly falls in love with him.

Boris really wants nothing to do with Harry, who chomps on unlit cigars and claims to be focusing on the big picture. He only wants to get his biology degree and win Barbara’s love. So, in the film’s second act, Harry pursues his goal of cloning Lucy, Boris pursues Barbara, Meli pursues Harry, and the ever-vigilant Kullenbeck pursues evidence that Harry is stealing from the university.

The romance between Boris and Barbara is really the honest, emotional core of the film. Boris convinces Barbara and her dog and cat to move into his one-bedroom apartment, with Barbara taking the bed and Boris sleeping on the living room sofa. Then Harry invites them to spend a weekend with him at his ocean beach cottage where he is able to enjoy the progress of their romance and reminisce about his own romance with Lucy decades earlier. It is during this weekend that Boris and Barbara consummate their relationship, Boris asks Barbara to marry him and she accepts.

Then tragedy strikes. Barbara goes into a coma and is pronounced brain-dead. Kullenbeck heads the committee that recommends to Barbara’s parents that they allow the university hospital to unplug her life-support systems. Boris and Harry are sure she is not brain-dead, however, and when Harry wins a 48-hour reprieve he encourages Boris to stay with Barbara and talk her out of her coma and back to consciousness. Will Boris reawaken Barbara? Will Harry succeed in cloning Lucy or will he fall in love with Meli?

The film was written by Jeremy Leven, based on his own novel. This was Leven’s first screenwriting credit and he has gone on to do some excellent screenwriting based on other material, notably Don Juan DeMarco (1994), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), The Notebook (2004) and Real Steel (2011). I imagine if Leven had a chance to do Creator over, he would make some major changes. The screenplay tries to do far too many things. It gives us a brilliant scientist’s obsession with his long-dead wife, two love affairs, a professional rivalry, an adjunct campus where retired scientists do research without funding, and a deathbed soap opera. There are so many plot lines the screenplay cannot do justice to any of them. The real problem, however, is the foundation. The story’s fundamental premise is that a brilliant, if eccentric, Nobel prize-winning biologist, a man possessed of a supremely rational, logical mind, nurtures a 25-year emotional obsession to clone his dead wife. As long as you accept this premise, the story makes sense, but once you begin to question it, the whole thing falls apart.

The film was directed by Ivan Passer with his typical attention to the personal quirks that allow his characters to avoid becoming trapped in the plot. The casting is decent with the exception of O’Toole. At 52 years of age, he is too old to play the romantic interest of 23-year-old Mariel Hemingway, especially since he has the gaunt appearance of someone well into his seventies, which makes him look and feel like Mariel’s grandfather. To his credit, O’Toole projects a great deal of warmth and charm in his scenes, displaying a grandfatherly gentleness that seems born of world-weariness and a desire to forgive and forget the past.

Vincent Spano and Virginia Madsen are two of the most interesting newcomers to Hollywood in the mid-1980s and the film gives them one of those simple, dewy-eyed, glowing romances that we always enjoy watching. Both of them have gone on to excellent film careers, especially Madsen who has 129 acting credits and an Oscar nomination for her performance in Sideways (2004) as of 2022.

The soundtrack by Sylvester Levay is lovely, however the production values (sets, costumes) are mediocre. The film has not aged well and feels dated, as any 1980s-era film focusing on genetic cloning technology would.

 

Creator was filmed in January, 1984, in and around Santa Cruz, CA, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and Crystal Cove, CA. Hospital scenes were filmed in the Alexian Brothers Hospital, San Jose, CA. 

My suggestion is to forgive the rest of the film’s failures and focus on Spano and Madsen. Then you can enjoy Creator as a light romantic comedy-drama, at least until the deathbed scene.

Labels: comedy, drama, romance, sci-fi

Internet Movie Database 61/100 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=50, viewers=78) 

Wikipedia Creator (film)

music from the film on YouTube

Fever Pitch (2005) [PG-13] ****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net

I will be surprised if this film does well in New York City. Yankees fans, accustomed to success, are still smarting from last year's humiliating debacle, and a romantic comedy that capitalizes on the Red Sox's triumph is unlikely to pack theaters in the Five Boroughs.

Fever Pitch is a curious mix of smarts and schmaltz. The unusual combination derives from the group of creative collaborators involved in the film's development. The Farrelly Brothers (Bobby and Peter), operating outside of There's Something About Mary territory, prove that they are as capable of bringing a generic, formulaic romantic comedy to the screen as they are of producing something more edgy. (Only one scene – involving vomit and a dog – can be called a Farrelly moment.) The screenwriters are the team of Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, who have elevated fake sentimentality to a high art. Their tendency towards artificiality is mitigated somewhat by the fact that they're adapting from a book by Nick Hornby (who retains an Executive Producer credit).

As I have often said, the key to a romantic comedy working is often whether the filmmakers invest the audience in the plight of the main characters. Do we have a rooting interest in these two getting together? This is something the Farrellys accomplish. And, considering that the male lead is played by the insufferable Jimmy Fallon, that may be a more significant achievement that it appears to be at first glance. Drew Barrymore has proven herself in this genre but it takes a shift of perspective to pull for someone as inherently irritating as Fallon. To his credit, the ex-SNL player hides most of his rough edges and manages only to aggravate when he's trying too hard to get a laugh. His slapstick scenes aren't just unfunny, they are embarrassing. But the Farrellys keep these to a minimum. Fallon is otherwise palatable, and we believe in his relationship with Barrymore's character.

Fever Pitch is the meet cute/fall in love/break up/happily ever after story of Lindsey (Barrymore) and Ben (Fallon). (Did you expect the movie to take some other path?) Their first encounter occurs when Ben, a math teacher, brings a group of select students to meet Lindsey, a high-profile executive who does something with numbers (her exact job description is left vague). Ben is attracted to her, and timorously asks her out, only to be rebuffed. Afterwards, Lindsey realizes that she may have made a mistake. Ben isn't like her past boyfriends, but that could be a good thing. Maybe what she needs is a nice guy, not someone driven by corporate ambition. So she calls him back and tells him she has changed her mind. For most of the winter, the blossoming relationship moves along smoothly, but, come March, Lindsey discovers that she has a rival for Ben's affections - Spring Training. Ben isn't just a Boston Red Sox fan, he is a Rabid Red Sox Follower. Suddenly, Lindsey finds herself planning events and trips around Red Sox home games, and begins to wonder whether Ben values the team more than he values her.

The film provides each character with three or four friends as a support group, but none of these characters is sufficiently developed to warrant more than a passing mention. In fact, if one of Lindsey's gal pals looks familiar, that's because she's played by one-time it girl Ione Sky, the object of John Cusack's obsession in Say Anything... (1989). In Fever Pitch, the only ones who really matter are Lindsey and Ben - and, of course, the 25 players comprising the 2004 World Series Champions Red Sox, a few of whom make actual appearances rather than just showing up in game archive footage.

Sports widows will probably relate to Lindsey's plight, and long-suffering fans of many teams will see reflections of themselves in Ben. Of course, having won the 2004 World Series, the first one since 1918, Boston Red Sox fans really can no longer consider themselves long-suffering. The intelligent aspect of Fever Pitch's script comes from the way it balances its various elements. Ben is shown to be extreme, but the film never openly mocks sports addicts. Ben's love of the Red Sox is not belittled, and Lindsey tries her best to accommodate him. It's only when he turns nasty as a result of it that she has difficulty coping.

Reality, it seems, forced a re-write of the film's ending. Handled better, the have your cake and eat it too resolution might have been more satisfying, but the finale seems rushed. Having had the actors and a few cameras at the Red Sox's first World Series victory since 1918 might have seemed like manna from heaven, but whatever footage the Farrellys captured is underused. Everyone except Yankees fans will feel shortchanged. And, with George Steinbrenner paying ever-steeper payrolls, they'll probably have their own feel-good story to tell in the near-future. [Berardinelli’s rating: *** out of 4 stars]

Blogger’s comment: The Boston Red Sox won World Series titles in 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916 and 1918, and then sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees and began what was to be an 86 year drought, called the Curse of the Bambino. Then, in 2002, the Oakland Athletics’ manager Billy Beane began to use methods of statistical analysis to evaluate players and build a team, as described in Michael Lewis’ book and film Moneyball. The 2002 Athletics set a record of 20 consecutive wins, but failed to make the World Series. Red Sox principal owner John Henry offered Billy Beane $12.5 million to manage the 2003 Red Sox, but Beane declined. Regardless, the Red Sox began to use the statistical analysis principles described in Moneyball and two years later, in 2004, won the World Series. Since then they have won the World Series three more times, in 2007, 2013 and 2018, and now, virtually every franchise in professional sports – Major League Baseball, NFL Football, NBA Basketball – use the principles set forth in Moneyball.

Labels: baseball, comedy, drama, history, romance

Internet Movie Database 6.2/10 

Metacritic 56/100 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=63, viewers=70) 

Blu-ray 

Wikipedia Boston Red Sox 

Wikipedia Moneyball 

Murder on the Orient Express (1974) [PG] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert for rogerebert.com on January 1, 1974.

There is a cry of alarm, some muffled French, a coming and going in the corridor. Hercule Poirot, Adjusting the devices that keep his hair slicked down and his mustache curled up, pauses for a moment in his train compartment. He lifts an eyebrow. He looks out into the hallway. He shrugs. The next morning, it’s revealed that Ratchett, the hateful American millionaire, has been stabbed to death in his sleep. This is the quite obviously a case for Hercule Poirot, the most famous detective in the world, and, over breakfast, he agrees to accept it. The list of suspects is long, but limited: It includes everybody on board the crack Orient Express, enroute from Istanbul to Calais, and currently brought to a standstill by an avalanche of snow that has fallen across the track. Poirot arranges to begin a series of interviews and plunges himself (and the rest of us) into a net of intrigue so deep, so deceptive, and so labyrinthine that only Agatha Christie would have woven it.

Murder on the Orient Express is a splendidly entertaining movie of the sort that isn’t made anymore: It’s a classical whodunit, with all the clues planted and all of them visible, and it’s peopled with a large and expensive collection of stars. Albert Finney, who plays Poirot, is the most impressive, largely because we can never for a moment believe that he is Finney. His hair is slicked down to a patent-leather shine, his eyes have somehow become beady and suspicious, his French mustache is constantly quivering with alarm (real and pretend), and he scurries up and down the train like a paranoid crab. The performance is brilliant, and it’s high comedy.

So is the movie, although it’s careful never to make its essentially comic intentions get in the way of Miss Christie’s well-oiled mystery. This isn’t a thriller, because we’re not thrilled, or scared-only amused. The murder itself has a certain antiseptic, ritualistic quality, and the investigation is an exercise in sophisticated cross-examination and sputters of indignation. What I liked best about this movie is its style, both the deliberately old-fashioned visual strategies used by director Sidney Lumet, and the cheerful overacting of the dozen or more suspects.

They form a suitably bizarre menagerie and at first glance have nothing in common with one another. Bear with me please, and I’ll work my way through the all-stars: Lauren Bacall is a particularly obnoxious American, Ingrid Bergman is an African missionary, Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset are Hungarian royalty, Jean-Pierre Cassel is the conductor, Sean Connery is an English officer returning from India, Vanessa Redgrave is his constant companion, Sir John Gielgud is a very, very proper manservant to millionaire Richard Widmark, Wendy Hiller is an aloof Russian aristocrat, Anthony Perkins is Widmark’s secretary, Rachel Roberts is a neo-Nazi ladies’ maid, Martin Balsam is a director of the railroad line, and there are, believe it or not, others also under suspicion.

There are obviously big technical problems here: More than a dozen characters have to be introduced and kept alive, a very complicated plot has to be unraveled, and everything must take place within the claustrophobic confines of the railway car. Lumet overcomes his difficulties in great style, and we’re never for a moment confused (except when we’re supposed to be, which is most of the time).

There is hardly anything more I can tell you, or even hint, about the plot, except that nothing is as it seems (and you knew that already about a movie based on an Agatha Christie book). The movie provides a good time, high style, a loving salute to an earlier period of filmmaking, and an unexpected bonus: It ends with a very long scene in which Poirot asks everyone to be silent, please, while he explains his various theories of the case. He does so in great detail, and it’s fun of a rather malicious sort watching a dozen high-priced stars keep their mouths shut and just listen while Finney masterfully dominates the scene. [Ebert’s rating: *** out of 4 stars]

Labels: crime, drama, Ingrid Bergman, mystery, period

Internet Movie Database 7.3/10 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=74, viewers=72) 

Blu-ray

Come See the Paradise (1990) [R] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert on January 18, 1991.

Here is a film about people who insist they are Americans, even when small and evil-minded people in power would treat them as if they were not. Most of the characters in Come See the Paradise are Japanese-Americans who were thrown into prison camps at the outset of World War II, even though there was no evidence that they were less patriotic, less American, than members of other ethnic groups such as the Germans or the Italians. Their imprisonment was essentially racist, translating into laws that said they were not entitled to the same constitutional rights as their fellow citizens.

Another character in the film is an Irish-American who is a left-wing labor organizer. He gets involved in a stupid and illegal action against a movie theater chain, flees from the East Coast to the West Coast, and changes his name. But he cannot change his ideas, and after he gets a job in a fish cannery he is soon supporting the right of his fellow workers to strike. That means he, too, is not an American - at least not in the eyes of the company goons.

Although we make much of our tradition of freedom in this country, we are not so clever at understanding what freedom really means. Even our president, for example, cannot understand that among the rights symbolized by the American flag is the right to burn it - or honor it, if that is our choice. I have always wondered why the people who call themselves American most loudly are often the ones with the least understanding of the freedoms that word should represent.

When the country is threatened, our civil liberties are among the first casualties - as if we can fight the enemy by taking away our own freedoms before the enemy has a chance to. That is what happened in the early days of World War II, when a wave of racism swept the Japanese-Americans out of their homes and businesses, confiscated their savings and investments, and shipped them away in prison trains to concentration camps that were sometimes no more than barns and stables. Later on some of these same Japanese-Americans fought with valor in the same war, perhaps because they understood better than their captors what they were fighting for.

Come See the Paradise tells a story of this period in terms of a romance between the labor organizer and a young Japanese-American woman. Her name is Lily Yuriko Kawamura (Tamlyn Tomita), and she is the daughter of a businessman who runs a little chain of Japanese-language movie theaters. When the Irishman, Jack McGurn (Dennis Quaid), flees to San Francisco after getting in trouble in New York, he finds a job as a projectionist in one of the theaters, and then he meets the daughter and they fall in love with each other almost immediately. (On their first date, he leans across the table and asks to kiss her, and she gives permission. It's a sweet scene, reminiscent of some of the Hollywood movies being made at about the same time.) Lily's father, of course, opposes the marriage. Jack goes to confront him, in one of the movie's strongest scenes, and when the old man remains inflexible the two young people run away to get married out of state (marriages between members of different races were illegal in California at the time). In a scene that is gloriously romantic and highly improbable, they find themselves at someone else's wedding party, where they dance the night away.

Then Pearl Harbor is attacked and war is declared. By executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt, Lily, her family and everyone they know find themselves herded away to prison camps. One of her brothers later volunteers for the U.S. Army and another becomes militantly pro-Japanese, but the saddest figure is the father, who is accused by his own people of being a spy, and literally fades away into death, sitting sadly in a chair and gazing at nothing.

Lily and Jack have had a daughter, who goes into the camp with her mother, while Jack goes into the Army, but not before one of the most lacerating scenes in the film, when Jack takes his little daughter to meet Santa Claus, and Santa refuses to let the child sit on his lap. She's an American, Jack informs Santa, grabbing him, and you will sit here and listen to what she wants for Christmas or I will kill you. Come See the Paradise has been criticized in a few places because it uses a technique that is common in movies about minority groups: A convenient Caucasian provides the point of view, so that the audience will have someone to identify with. I didn't appreciate that approach in Glory - why couldn't the story of these black Civil War soldiers be seen through their own eyes, rather than through the eyes of their white commanding officer? But with Come See the Paradise, the introduction of the Quaid character seemed somewhat less contrived, because the film's director, Alan Parker, is making a statement not limited to the story of his Japanese-American characters. The theme of the whole film is that all of its characters are Americans, too. That people of various colors and political beliefs are all equally Americans, and if there is not room for them here then there is no purpose for this society. By adding the Quaid character, he is able to show in one story how eager we sometimes are to deprive people of their rights for both racial and political reasons.

The story itself is rather sweet, when it is not angry. It's told in a flashback from shortly after the war, when Lily is describing the events of those days to her daughter, now just barely old enough to ask questions. The love affair between Jack and Lily is tender and romantic, and if Lily's father dies after he loses all pride and self-esteem, at least her mother lives long enough to finally accept and embrace her little half-Japanese granddaughter.

Come See the Paradise is a fable to remind us of how easily we can surrender our liberties, and how much we need them. [Ebert’s rating: 3 stars out of 4 = 75%]

Blogger’s comment: This is a heartfelt, passionate romance with an uplifting ending, but the process of getting there is not an easy one. Nevertheless it is worth watching. Filmed in Aug. – Nov. 1989 it was released the following year. Thirteen years later (Nov. 2002 – Oct. 2003) Dennis Quaid and Tamlyn Tomita would be together in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) as Jack Hall and Janet Tokada.

I can just imagine this conversation:

DENNIS: Damn, Tamlyn, you're as beautiful as you were thirteen years ago. How is that possible?
TAMLYN: Just good genes, Dennis. It's too bad you didn't notice me then. You know I really wanted you to.
DENNIS: What was I doing in 1989?
TAMLYN: I think you were chasing Meg Ryan.

Labels: drama, romance, WWII
IMDb 67/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=55, viewers=74)
Roger Ebert’s review 

 

Cactus Flower (1969) [M] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert for rogerebert.com on December 29, 1969.

The movie press agents have a theory that critics shouldn't be allowed to see a comedy in a screening room. Unless they can hear the people laughing, the theory goes, they won't know the movie's funny.

I don't know if there's anything to this or not (usually not, I guess), but it was a pleasure to catch the Saturday matinee of Cactus Flower at the State Lake. The audience didn't merely like it; it reveled in it. Here's one kind of comedy that inspires raucous laughter, such as The Producers (1968), and another, like this one, where the audience laughs under its breath because it doesn't want to miss the lines.

It's not exactly that the lines mean anything; it's more that the three central performances (by Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and - wow! - Goldie Hawn) are so engaging that we find ourselves, despite ourselves, involved in their story.

They work together. The chemistry works. When Pauline Kael observes that The Scalphunters, not a very good movie, becomes enjoyable because of the sparks that Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis strike in their scenes together, I know what she means. Goldie Hawn and Walter Matthau have that happening in Cactus Flower, and Ingrid Bergman moves between them with absolute serenity.

The story should be familiar by now; the play ran forever at the Blackstone. It's about a middle-aged dentist, his nurse, and his 21-year-old mistress. He tells the girl he's married, because he doesn't want to get involved. But then he does get involved, and can't figure out how to confess his deception. So he gets the nurse to pretend to be his wife. But then the girl becomes sympathetic to the poor, abandoned wife - and then there's the problem of the hairy young playwright who lives next door.

All of this is the basic stuff of stage comedy. In Cactus Flower, just as in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895, or in She Stoops to Conquer in 1773, the plot depends upon a romance developed through mistaken identity. So Abe Burrows wasn't inventing anything new when he wrote the play.

What usually happens is that hit Broadway comedies have a long run in New York, and then they tour the provinces forever, and then a couple of big-name movie stars are substituted in the key roles, and then an expensive production is launched to support the comedy (which is the most fragile of art forms), and by the time the movie finally turns up, four years later, nobody could care less. That's exactly what happened with Cactus Flower, of course - except, paradoxically, that the movie is better than the play.

I wonder whether a lot of the credit doesn't belong to I.A.L. Diamond, who wrote the screenplay. Diamond is a master of light comedy, who has mostly collaborated lately with Billy Wilder (on The Apartment, The Fortune Cookie, etc.). Diamond's screenplay successfully opens up the play, breaking it loose from the confines of the stage without seeming to.

This has previously been a weak spot in the films of director Gene Saks, whose Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple were both terribly tied to one set. By widening the background, Diamond (or somebody) has managed to really convince us that Cactus Flower does take place now (or about now) in a real city - New York. That contributes a lot to the performances they seem more real because they're not stuck in phony sets. But in the last analysis, it really is Matthau, Miss Bergman and (with a marvelously expressive face) Miss Hawn who make Cactus Flower a success. [Ebert’s rating: *** ½ out of 4 stars]

Labels: comedy, Ingrid Bergman, romance, Sixties

Internet Movie Database 7.2/10 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=71, viewers=74)