In the opening moments of Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, voice-over narration provided by Michael Lerner (who also has a key role in the movie) plays over black and white photos of high school kids. Lerner informs us that, by 1975, America had approximately half a million preteen and teenage alcoholics.
But that’s just a number. What Sarah T. Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic does - and does very well - is bring the issue to the forefront, and in a manner that’s positively grueling.
Sarah Travis (Linda Blair) is not a happy kid. Her dad (Larry Hagman) is out of the picture, and Sarah’s mother (Verna Bloom) is remarried to a successful executive (William Daniels). What’s more, Sarah now lives with her mom and stepdad, which means she’s starting over in a new school.
One night, at a party thrown by her parents, Sarah steals a guest’s drink and quickly downs it in the kitchen. This kicks off what would prove to be a long and perilous addiction for Sarah, who even uses booze to help her fit in at school.
Her new boyfriend, Ken (Mark Hamill, two years before Star Wars made him a household name), is concerned about Sarah’s drinking, and worries she is taking it too far. But Sarah can’t stop. She sneaks liquor from her parents whenever she can, and, on occasion, steals it right off the shelves of liquor stores.
Concerned for her daughter but a little more worried about her social standing in their new neighborhood, Sarah’s mom reluctantly agrees to take Sarah to psychologist Dr. Marvin Kittredge (Michael Lerner). At that first session, Dr. Kittredge tells mother and daughter that the only way he can help Sarah is if she admits, then and there, that she is an alcoholic. But Sarah doesn’t believe she is, insisting she can stop drinking anytime she wants.
Sarah still has a little more to learn - and a lot further to fall - before she will realize just how serious her problem has become.
Always a strong director of children (The Omen, The Goonies), Richard Donner coaxes a brilliant performance from Linda Blair, who is just as good playing Sarah the insecure teen as she is portraying Sarah the teenage alcoholic. Her scenes with Mark Hamill have a sweetness to them, and watching their relationship grow brings something special to an otherwise hard-hitting story.
On the flipside are the scenes in which Sarah is drinking. And she drinks a lot! At parties… in her room… even standing in front of her locker at school.
We know what it is that drives Sarah to drink. Her mother is all about not embarrassing the family in their neighbor’s eyes, and dotes more on her older married daughter (Laurette Spang) than she does Sarah. As for Sarah’s dad, in the one scene in which they are together, we notice right away he is also addicted to alcohol (he downs several beers while the two are walking down the street).
But over the course of the movie, Sarah will make dear old dad look like a teetotaller.
Sarah hits lows that, frankly, for a TV movie in the ‘70s, surprised the hell out of me. There is a brilliant scene at an AA meeting (which Sarah walks out of after hearing an 11-year-old admit he is an alcoholic), but it’s the final 10-15 minutes of Sarah T. Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic that will shock you.
Written by husband / wife team Richard and Esther Shapiro, Sarah T. Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic is a movie with a message, and it delivers that message with a crippling right hook.
Rating: 9 out of 10
It was then that Cinerama was born.
Invented by film pioneer Fred Waller, Cinerama utilized images shot by three individual cameras, operating in unison by way of a single shutter, that, when projected, offered viewers a widescreen experience like no other, a complete “field of vision” presentation beamed onto a 146-degree screen that wrapped around the theater. Combined with another new innovation, stereophonic sound, the Cinerama process was unlike anything seen before, and the movie that introduced it to the world was the 1952 documentary This Is Cinerama.
Produced and co-directed by Merian C. Cooper, the mastermind behind another revolutionary motion picture, 1933’s King Kong, This is Cinerama opens with a black and white sequence, presented in the standard aspect ratio, during which narrator Lowell Thomas offers a rundown of the history of moving images, from the attempts by prehistoric man and ancient Egyptians to show pictures in motion to the days of early animation, Thomas Edison, and The Great Train Robbery.
Once this segment is over, Lowell, staring straight ahead, bellows “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Cinerama”, at which point the screen expands, the picture changes from black and white to color, and the viewer is treated, in full stereo sound, to a ride on a rollercoaster (the cameras were attached to the front of the Atom Smasher coaster in New York’s Rockaway Playland).
I can only imagine how that first audience reacted to this initial sequence, but to paraphrase Al Jolson in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, they ain’t seen nothing yet!
This is Cinerama follows it up with a variety of amazing segments, shot in Venice (including a Gondola ride), Scotland (The Rally of the Clans at Edinburgh Castle), Vienna (featuring an outdoor performance by the Vienna Boys Choir), Spain (where we witness a bull fight in a packed arena), and Milan (one of the film’s most impressive sequences, the triumphal scene from the opera Aida, staged at the La Scala Opera House).
Then, after a brief intermission and a demonstration (audio only) of Stereophonic sound, This is Cinerama focuses on a more “American” experience, with a half-hour water show at Florida’s Cypress Gardens followed by aerial images (shot from a B-25 bomber) of some of the country’s more familiar landscapes, including Manhattan, Washington D.C., Chicago, the Mississippi River, and the Grand Canyon. Even today, in this age of high-tech entertainment, all of the film’s sequences are breathtaking.
The three-camera process as presented in This is Cinerama would be featured in a handful of movies over the next 10 years, mostly documentaries (Search for Paradise in 1957, South Seas Adventures in 1958), but also in two narrative films, both released in 1962: The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and the amazing How the West Was Won. It was during the making of How the West Was Won that the Cinerama corporation realized it could create a similar (though not quite as grand) widescreen 70mm experience using a single camera, as opposed to the more expensive three-camera set-up. This new technique, renamed Ultra Panavision 70, would become the standard for Cinerama in the years to come, and be utilized in such movies as It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Hallelujah Trail, and, most recently, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Still, even with its short life span, This is Cinerama proved there was something special about that three-camera set-up. Watching it on Blu-Ray, projected onto my high-definition television, gave me a taste of just how cutting-edge this process was at the time, yet I can’t help but envy those lucky patrons who saw the movie in 1952 on that 146-degree screen.
I was enthralled, impressed, and entertained, but they were witnesses to history in the making.
Rating: 9 out of 10
Using 8mm films shot by Proenneke himself, and with narration (by producer Bob Swerer Jr) lifted directly from the outdoorsman’s personal journal, 2004’s Alone in the Wilderness brings his entire first year in the Alaskan wilds to the screen, and it is a fascinating watch.
Like all nature documentaries, there are some stunning shots of the Twin Lakes area, from ice breaking up on the lake to scenes of caribou, brown bears, and rams on the surrounding mountainsides. But the bulk of Alone in the Wilderness’s 57 minutes is dedicated to Proenneke building his retirement cabin from the ground up. At first, I wasn’t sure if watching a guy build a cabin was going to hold my attention. Proenneke went into great detail in his journals, laying out the process of not only assembling a comfortable, waterproof dwelling, but also the amenities he would need. At one point he carves a wooden spoon out of a stump, making it just big enough so that one pour from it would equal one flapjack.
The more detail he went into, however, the more intriguing I found the movie. Who would have thought watching a guy make wooden hinges for a front door could have me on the edge of my seat?
We see it all, including the construction of his icebox (buried in the ground and covered with moss, it maintained a temperature of 40 degrees even when it was 80+ outside); the building of his fireplace (an especially tedious, though entirely necessary process); and even his outhouse!
As interesting as the footage and narration are, it’s the sheer magnitude of the project itself, and Proenneke’s tireless dedication to seeing it through to the end, that really impressed me. From his smokehouse to the storage containers he rolled himself out of sheet metal, this guy thought of absolutely everything, and I sat in awe of what he was able to accomplish.
Alone in the Wilderness does feature some additional footage shot by producer / narrator Bob Swerer Jr, which, because the quality of the image is so different from the rest of the movie, proves a distraction. The extra shots are mostly inserts of wildlife in their natural habitat, but one late segment, where Proenneke describes how he made ram stew, which is then brought to life by this “new footage”, felt particularly unnecessary. And while Proenneke was an amazing survivalist and outdoorsman, he was not the best photographer. The scenes of him building the cabin, when he set up the camera from a distance and left it running, are actually better than his shots of the landscape. Still, these are minor quibbles, and do not detract from the experience of watching this captivating film journal.
Richard Proenneke would spend the majority of the next 30 years living off the land, finally returning to the Continental U.S. in 1999 at age 83 to live the remainder of his days with his brother in California. Alone in the Wilderness chronicles that first year, which saw harsh winter conditions and threats from bears, wolves, and other creatures. I doubt I would’ve survived that first year. I doubt most people would. To have done so for another 29 years on top of it is beyond amazing.
Rating: 8 out of 10
While relocating his young family to Chicago, Patrick O’Leary (J. Anthomy Hughes) is killed in a freak accident. Left on her own, his widow Molly (Alice Brady) brings up their three boys, two of whom would make a name for themselves in the city.
Oldest son Dion O’Leary (Tyrone Power) is a schemer with big dreams. After convincing lounge singer Belle Fawcett (Alice Faye) to join him in a new business venture, Dion alienates Gil Warren (Brian Donlevy), Belle’s previous employer and the most powerful crime boss in the section of Old Chicago known as “The Patch”. Establishing himself as the new driving force of “The Patch”, Dion manages to get his younger brother Jack (Don Ameche) elected as Chicago’s new Mayor, using deception and backdoor dealings to steal the election from Warren himself, who ran against him.
A trained lawyer, Jack takes his new position seriously, and intends to clean up Chicago by wiping out the political corruption running rampant in “The Patch”. In so doing, he finds himself squaring off time and again against Dion. But when a fire started in the O’Leary’s barn threatens to wipe out the city, the two brothers put their differences aside and do what they can to save their beloved Chicago.
Tyrone Power has charisma to spare in the role of Dion, a swindler and crook who is always looking for the advantage in any situation. Whether it’s stealing a shirt from his mother’s laundry business to wear for the evening or making unwanted passes at Belle (the initial scenes between the two, where Dion comes on strong and refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer, don’t play so well today), this is a guy who usually gets what he wants, and won’t back down until he does.
With a smile on his face, Dion lies and steals his way to the top of Chicago’s underworld, to the point that he’s powerful enough to rig an election in his brother’s favor. By the time the final act rolls around, Dion is firmly established as the film’s true villain, and yet Power is so damn likable in the role that we can’t help but admire the guy!
Don Ameche is also solid as the straightlaced, well-meaning brother; as are both Alice Faye (who gets to sing a few songs) and Alice Brady (winner of that year’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn as the cantankerous Mrs. O’Leary), but from the moment he first strolls on-screen, In Old Chicago belongs to Tyrone Power.
As it was with San Francisco, all the drama, the family spats, and the political machinations are merely a set-up for the disaster yet to come: a reenactment of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Director Henry King and his crew spent $150,000 on this final segment, and the fire is a sight to behold. Walls topple, buildings explode, and houses burn to the ground, all at a fever pitch. There’s drama here as well; Gil Warren manages to convince many residents of “The Patch” that Mayor Jack O’Leary, who had been looking to have that section of Old Chicago condemned, started the fire intentionally. Warren even assembles a posse to confront Jack as Chicago burns around them. Still, it’s the awesome spectacle of a city on fire, presented so realistically, that makes this final act as hard-hitting as it is.
Yet much like San Francisco before it, In Old Chicago ultimately proves to be more than the sum of its disaster sequences. In fact, I found myself so wrapped up in the story of the O’Leary boys and their squabbles that I had forgotten about the tragedy to come! In Old Chicago works as an early disaster film, but it works just as well as an example of a big Hollywood production done right.
Rating: 9 out of 10
Tourist Carlo Cofield (Tony Curtis) stops along a stretch of road in Southern California to admire the ocean view. Also nearby is temperamental artist Laura Califatti (Claudia Cardinale), who, after abandoning her effort to paint a picture of the landscape, angrily hops into her car and speeds off. Unfortunately, she clipped the bumper of poor Carlo’s vehicle on the way out, sending it careening down a hill and off the side of a cliff!
Stranded and with no money (his car exploded on impact, burning all of his worldly possessions), Carlo spends the night in Laura’s beach house, with the promise that she will give him her insurance information, to pay for the damages, the next morning.
Things take an uncomfortable turn when Laura’s “benefactor”, Rod Prescott (Robert Webber), president of a company that installs luxury swimming pools, turns up in the middle of the night and demands that Carlo leave immediately.
Forced to spend the rest of the evening on the beach, Carlo nearly drowns during high tide the next morning, but is rescued by the gorgeous Mailbu (Sharon Tate), a sexy skydiver who is dating body builder Harry (played by David Draper, at the time the reigning Mr. Universe).
Realizing the true nature of Laura’s and Rod’s romance (Rod is already married, and Laura is his mistress), Carlo weasels his way into a job with Rod’s pool company, promising, in exchange for his employment, he’ll keep his mouth shut and not reveal anything about Laura or the affair to Mrs. Prescott (Joanna Barnes).
Now gamefully employed, and having recently purchased both a beautiful house and a classic car for practically nothing, Carlo sets his sights on winning the heart of Malibu by forcing a wedge between she and Harry, going so far as to convince the bodybuilder, with the help of a writer / astrologer whose pen name is “Madame Lavinia” (Edgar Bergen), that sex wears the body down, and could keep him from winning the upcoming championship.
Everything comes to a head during a torrential rainstorm, at which point Carlo and the others discover why his house was so inexpensive.
A later entry in the Southern California beach movie craze, Don’t Make Waves is a breezy, lighthearted romantic comedy, with Tony Curtis giving a strong performance as the lead who, though likable, has a sinister streak a mile wide. Not only does he blackmail his way into getting a job (after first proving his talents as a salesman by talking none other than Jim Backus, who appears briefly as himself, into buying a pool), but he’s also slick and dishonest in the way he breaks up Harry and Malibu. In fact, by the time the final act rolls around, we feel a little guilty that we like Carlo as much as we do!
Claudia Cardinale is beautiful as always, but also demonstrates here that she is an able comedienne (her opening scenes are a riot), while Webber, Barnes, Tate, and Bergen hold their own in supporting roles.
Featuring a handful of crazy moments (including a skydiving fiasco and a pretty costly mudslide); a catchy title song (performed by The Byrds); and more than its share of bikinis, Don’t Make Waves flows along at a brisk pace, and manages to keep us smiling the entire time!
Rating: 9 out of 10
In short, the guy knows his stuff, especially when it comes to physics and outer space. So, when Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in October of 2023 and said Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall violated more laws of physics per minute than any other science fiction movie he’d ever seen, you can bet it’s the truth.
But then, Roland Emmerich also made The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, neither of which are known for their scientific accuracy. And let’s face it: a movie about the moon breaking orbit and hurtling towards earth is gonna require more than the usual “suspension of disbelief”.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a man of science. Roland Emmerich is a showman, and Moonfall, as insane and unscientific as it may be, is, first and foremost, entertainment. On that level, it is at least somewhat successful.
That said, there are characters and scenes scattered throughout Moonfall that had me longing for the subtlety of The Day After Tomorrow!
Eleven years after an accident in space was blamed on his “human error”, former astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) has been struggling to make ends meet. Divorced from his wife Brenda (Carolina Bartczak) and estranged from his son (Charlie Plummer), Harper continues to insist he did nothing wrong that fateful day aboard the Space Shuttle. Unfortunately, nobody believes him. Not even his former friend and colleague, Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry), who is now the Deputy Director of NASA.
Then something incredible happens: conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman (John Bradley), leader of a small group that’s convinced the moon is not a planetary body but an alien-built megastructure, determines that the moon has changed its orbit, and is moving closer to earth.
Initially dismissing Houseman as a crackpot, Harper is stunned to discover NASA has also noticed the orbital discrepancies. What’s more, there’s a strong possibility the trouble is being caused by alien technology, which has altered the moon’s trajectory and put it on a collision course with earth!
As with most of his movies, Emmerich generates some genuine excitement and impressive destruction throughout Moonfall, with tidal shifts flooding out coastal towns and loose fragments from the approaching moon crashing to earth, leveling entire cities. There is also a plot twist in the last half hour or so that leaves little doubt what we’re watching (and what Emmerich intended) is straight-up science fiction, with no footing in reality whatsoever.
As for the characters, I did enjoy John Bradley’s turn as Houseman, a guy who hasn’t achieved much in life and is struggling to care for his mother (Kathleen Fee), who suffers from Alzheimer’s. As for Wilson and Berry, Moonfall is far from their finest hour. Wilson isn’t particularly likable through much of the film, with his Harper coming off as moody and kind of arrogant; while Berry doesn’t seem to be putting her heart into it at all. A few supporting players, including Michael Pena as Brenda’s new husband and Kelly Yu as Michelle, an exchange student acting as nanny for Fowler’s son Jimmy (Zayn Maloney), fare better than the main stars.
Yet the real stinker in Moonfall is its script, written by Emmerich, Harald Kloser, and Spenser Cohen. Along with its plethora of far-fetched situations, the dialogue is obvious and trite, and somne of the secondary characters are as one-dimensional as they come (worst of all being NASA Director Albert Hutchings, played by Stephen Bogaert, who is the typical “movie” official, i.e. – unreasonable, deceitful, and cowardly).
Bottom line: I didn’t go into Moonfall expecting to learn anything about space or science. I wanted a fun disaster movie, with decent special effects and a whole lot of destruction.
And it’s a good thing that’s all I wanted, because that’s all I got! If it was intriguing dialogue or believable characters I was after, I would have been as disappointed as Neil deGrasse Tyson!
Rating: 5 out of 10
An unpublished writer, the cynical Oscar invites Nigel back to his room on several occasions, regaling the young man with the entire story of his romantic past with Mimi, from the moment their eyes first met aboard a Paris bus through to their more recent history, when the two have come to despise one another.
Realizing that Nigel is smitten with his estranged wife, Oscar, who is paralyzed from the waist down, uses these meetings as a way to enflame Nigel’s passion, promising him that, once his tale is over, he is free to do as he wishes with Mimi.
But is that really why Oscar is revealing his deepest, most personal secrets to Nigel, or does he have another motive altogether?
The bulk of Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon is told in flashback, with scenes of Oscar’s and Mimi’s tumultuous affair as related by Oscar himself, thus making him the narrator of these sequences. There are plenty of steamy moments during said flashbacks, everything from implied oral sex to roleplay and even bondage. “Have you ever truly idolized a woman?”, Oscar asks Nigel at one point. “Nothing can be obscene in such love. Everything that occurs between it becomes a sacrament”.
Polanski does not shy away from the early passion that drives Oscar and Mimi, nor does he hold back when the relationship sours, with first Oscar humiliating Mimi on a regular basis (and he is cruel as hell, criticizing her hair and make-up at a party while romancing two other women at once), then forcing her to have an abortion when she announces she is with child. Oscar even agrees to take Mimi on vacation to the Caribbean, then hops off the plane just before it takes off, convinced he has finally rid himself of her.
Even with him acting as narrator, we despise Oscar in these moments. So, when Mimi returns a few years later, as Oscar is recovering in hospital from being struck by a car, she begins to treat her now-crippled former lover in much the same way he treated her. These scenes are just as difficult to sit through, yet we can’t help but feel that Oscar deserves it.
Tying the flashbacks together are the scenes involving Nigel and Fiona. Nigel can barely conceal his attraction to Mimi, and a wounded Fiona, in response, flirts openly with a young man (Luca Vellani) she meets in the bar. Having witnessed the collapse of the relationship between Oscar and Mimi, we now watch as another is on the brink of destruction, and Polanski ensures that we the audience side with the ladies in both instances, even if their behavior does also, occasionally, cross the line.
The performances are spot-on, with Coyote standing out as the oft-loathsome Oscar; and Polanski (who also co-wrote the screenplay) shines a light throughout Bitter Moon on some very difficult subject matter as it pertains to relationships, presenting it all in such a way that even the most perverse sequences (whether described by Oscar or shown in detail) come across as honest.
A sweltering erotic drama that crosses into thriller territory (especially in the final act), Bitter Moon is a fascinating study of the destructive side of romance, and how it can not only wound, but destroy lovers.
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
