Sherwood Week: He's not the Marian kind

ROBIN AND MARIAN

1976

Directed by Richard Lester

Written by James Goldman

Spoilers: moderate shifting pretty immediately into severe, and I guess you could feel deceived that I said it was ever "moderate"

What a disaster: Get on the bus

THE BIG BUS

1976

Directed by James Frawley

Written by Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman

Spoilers: moderate

What a disaster: The devil with that report

FLOOD

1976

Directed by Earl Bellamy

Written by Dan Ingalls

Spoiler alert: moderate

What a disaster: I don't like Sundays

TWO-MINUTE WARNING

1976

Directed by Larry Peerce

Written by Edward Hume (based on the novel by George LaFountaine)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Joe Dante, part I: If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle

HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD

Most directors' first films aren't great ones.  Maybe most directors' first films aren't even particularly good ones.  But somehow, when that filmmaker is Joe Dante, you'd expect more than this.  Hell, you'd expect more if the filmmaker were Roger Corman—but even by that standard, Hollywood Boulevard remains a piece of questionably moral trash.

1976

Directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante

Written by Danny Opatoshu

With Candice Rialson (Candy Wednesday), Rita George (Bobbi), Tara Strohmeier (Jill), Dick Miller (Walter Paisley), Pat Hobby (Jeffrey Cramer), Paul Bartel (Eric von Leppe), Roger Doran (P.G.), and Mary Woronov (Mary McQueen)

Spoiler alert: moderate

John Carpenter, part II: SUPPOR YOUR LOC POLIC

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13

Abstract art, a vague politicizing impulse, and lo-fi action all converge in John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, and I mean that in a highly complimentary way.

1976

Written and directed by John Carpenter

With Austin Stoker (Lt. Ethan Bishop), Darwin Joston (Napoleon Wilson), Laurie Zimmer (Leigh), Tony Burton (Wells), Charles Cyphers (Officer Starker), Gilbert De Le Pena (the Chicano Warlord), Frank Doubleday (the White Warlord), James Johnson (the Black Warlord), and Al Nakuichi (the Oriental Warlord)

Spoiler alert: high

Reviews from gulag: First, the news in brief

While I was away, I had the opportunity to watch what I suppose one might as well call a "few" movies.  Here's some of them, in bite-sized form.  Or maybe two or three bites, because if there's one thing even moving to Pittsburgh can't beat out of me, it's my awful long-windedness.  Today's subjects: Citizen Kane, His Girl Friday, Network, and Good Night, and Good Luck.

CITIZEN KANE (1941)
Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) dies, and a newshound (William Alland) seeks the story of his final words.  He never solves the mystery of Kane for himself—although we are privy to more than he—but he learns through conversations with the great man's friends that he was human like the rest of us, even if he didn't know it.

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane is very likely the single most overrated film made in the sound era.  But that says more about the overreaching critical reevaluation of it—the reevaluation that eventually snowballed into its acclamation as the long-running Best Film Ever on just about any critics' poll you'd care to look at—than it could ever possibly say about the quality of the actual film itself... which is, of course, simply deliriously high.  Yes, fewer pictures have been more talked-about than this one, and Kane has been just about talked to death: its spectacularly well-appointed deep focus compositions; its beautiful lighting schemes; its monumental art direction; its bitterly humorous satire, so viciously on point it might have been slanderous were everything bad not based at least in part on something true; and, of course, its extraordinary lead performance by Welles, taking William Randolf Hearst only as the starting point for his creation of the saddest man in the world—the man who thought he could buy happiness.  So, no, maybe it wasn't particularly close to the best movie ever made, not even back in 1941.  But Goddamned if it isn't still absolutely Great—even after all those decades it spent, condemned to be The Greatest.  Maybe now that Vertigo is the Best Film Ever (an even worse choice, but never mind), we can enjoy Kane for what it is and always was: entertaining, moving, human, and expertly-crafted, too.

Score:  9/10