21. Showboat (1951)

Once again, Howard Keel stars in a sometimes grim, sometimes funny take on the grand old days of the great Mississippi paddle wheel steamboats. Showboats once traveled “Ol’ Man River” picking up audiences, gamblers and travelers and presenting some of the best melodramas of the time. There was always plenty of dancing, singing, food and drink at, usually, a reasonable price. Having grown up on the Mississippi, just twenty miles from Hannibal, Missouri, I have a special love for the great waterway and it’s history.

Showboat captures much about that history and also the joy and pain of the time. Add in one of the greatest casts ever collected: Keel, Ava Gardner, Kathryn Grayson, Joe E. Brown, Agnes Moorehead and Robert Sterling, among many others; it’s no wonder that Showboat commands an important place in Americana, and American film. And, it’s a really good story too.

One note: if you’ve never seen (or heard) William Warfield singing Ol’ Man River you should immediately stop in your tracks…march right to your computer and get on Youtube. Type in William Warfield and Ol Man River and be thrilled. I get chills and can’t think of anything that lasts three minutes that’s any better! You will thank me. Or better yet, here it is!

22. Oliver! (1968)

Charles Dickens is one of the best known writers in the history of the world. His bleak depiction of the British Isles, and particularly London, combine with a transcendent ability to create brilliant characters to make his work uniquely suited to stage and film. A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and, of course, Oliver Twist, among many others, have reached countless millions of fans.

Oliver! Is one of the best of these: with great music, a wonderful cast and the best Fagin (Ron Moody) and Artful Dodger (Jack Wild) I’ve ever seen. Fagin’s Reviewing the Situation makes Oliver! a must pick in the top 25!

Verdict: ☆☆☆ – –

Out of the gate, this movie catapults itself into a high paced, action packed, slapstick-fest where every joke comes out of nowhere and smacks you in the face before running off laughing, and then the next one hits you!

I expected The Croods to run along the lines of Shrek but while the green ogre and donkey have a more linear storyline and character development to work from, The Croods seem more a chaotic plot befitting a family of cave people living just as Pangaea starts to break up. There are tiny emotional parts here and there that begin to tug at your heartstrings, but why cry when a good hearty chortle will do? The drama is trimmed tightly in this one, allowing more time to enjoy the brighter side of life.

This movie clocks in at 98 minutes, but feels more like 45. It zips along the plot of one cave family just trying to survive, when suddenly the land they’re living on starts breaking up and they have to leave. Enter a sudden boy interest that keeps dad on his toes more than the crumbling earth and you’ve got some crazy adventures! Especially when that boy has a bigger brain.

This is a fun, cute, quirky movie that never takes itself seriously at all and keeps the laughter coming. Inventive and cool, it has quickly earned a place on my DVD shelf!

23. Kiss Me Kate (1953)

Based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and one of the cleverer of the musical comedies, Kiss Me Kate is two running stories at once. One, the actual play, with Howard Keel as the indomitable Petruchio and Kathryn Grayson as shrewish Katharine and the other: the story of Fred Graham (also Keel) and Lilli Vanessi (also Grayson), the stars of the play. They are divorced but obviously still in love. Their battles, in the film, are legendary as were those in the original Shakespeare masterpiece and great fun.

Keel, as always, brilliant to a fault, is the musical equivalent of Clark Gable: loved by women and respected by men. His presence on the screen is riveting and his voice and bearing majestic. Taking nothing away from Grayson, she of the flashing eyes and beautiful face, has a grace and power on both screen and stage that’s almost incomparable. The play is brilliant and the understory great fun. It also has an incredible dance number with Bob Fosse and Tommy Rall (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), two of America’s greatest dancers. The only thing keeping it from a much higher place on my list is the gimmicky feel. (Pardon me if it seems I tend toward hyperbole, but I assure you I do not. These actors/dancers are that good!)

24. South Pacific (1958)

      Brilliantly made with a superlative cast and great direction by Joshua Logan, South Pacific is also of the one of the largest in scope. Set during WWII and against the backdrop of one of the most beautiful areas in the world, South Pacific is a deadly serious, brilliant and chilling look at love and loss in paradise. The music is unsurpassed, the plot excellent if a bit predictable and the performances superb. Only it’s, perhaps, too large plot make it less approachable than many other, musicals. It also seems a bit dated in today’s world, but I heartily recommend it to anyone.

Orig

Hey everyone! I’m going to try something new here at Movie Madness. I’m going to start with top 25 lists of some of my favorite categories. These are my picks so don’t blame Doug, Mr. Jeremy, Steph or Jason.

I’m going to start with one I saw as a little boy. It was a stage musical at the famous Muny Theater in St. Louis, as I recall, with the original cast. It began a love for live theater that has never waned. Imagine my surprise when, in 1959, the film version arrived in our local theater. I begged my aunt to take me and my number 25 musical became forever etched in stone.

25. Li’l Abner (1959)

Yea, okay, I got it. Li’l Abner, one of the best musicals ever? I would argue yes. The film is so true to the stage musical that I, at eight years old, was singing along during the film. With great music, a great cast and great watchability, Li’l Abner is such a wild eyed and wonderful recreation of a classic comic that it blows nearly every other attempt away. And guess what, Jerry Lewis has an uncredited appearance in the film as Itchy McRabbit! How could that be bad. The only knock on the film is that it seems to be hidden away in some vault and played seldom on TV.

Hey everybody! I have to tell ya, I’m startled, shocked, stunned, flummoxed and flabbergasted. I just watched The Duff and loved it. It’s not great writing, it’s just not. It’s not a great plot or story, they’re pretty much standard. It’s not even great characters or acting, they too are pretty average. What makes The Duff so much fun to watch is some kind of weird synergy: the whole of the movie is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

The main characters, Bianca (Mae Whitman) and Wesley (Robbie Amell) have been friends since childhood and find themselves working together. That is, until all the old fun stuff comes back. She has a great “monster voice” and he is genuinely likeable and caring. Friends again! It doesn’t seem likely they’ll get together, too much history, but it’s fun to see if they will.

The film is filled with cliche’s…like the scruffy girl that can’t get a date, and the jock that can’t pass science, but once again it doesn’t matter. I can list dozens of teen movies with the nearly the same plot. My personal favorites are: Better Off Dead, Can’t Buy Me Love and Just One of the Guys and each of these are better movies and have some “firsts,” but are still filled with teen cliches.

The Duff seems like just another one in the pack but it’s somehow more. I trust that, like me, you’ll start off the film wondering what the heck; this is just the same old story and not as good. But, once again, like me, you may wake up and realize there’s something special here.

I’m not going to rate the film, check out Rotten Tomatoes for that, but I heartily recommend you watch The Duff. You may be pleasantly surprised. As always, whether you want to throw stones (or money) go to: #260-573-0015, for voice mail (we’ll play it on the show), or you can email them to us at: moviemadnesspodcast@gmail.com. You can also post them to Twitter, Facebook or the Ultimate Movie Geeks community on Google+

Verdict: ☆ 1/2 _ _ _ _

Dracula rebooted! Why not? Everything else has been. Fear and horror surround history’s creepiest badass for centuries, spawning legends, stories and nightmares throughout all lands. But forget about all that! This is the Vlad you never knew, the Wallacian ruler we get to know from his wife and only son’s point of view. Who better than Luke Evans (Clash of the Titans, The Hobbit) to play that really good guy we know nothing about? Evans has that handsome face you can approach, the dashing next door neighbor with the Volvo and the Harley in the same garage. Here he looks like he just walked off the set of The Hobbit and was given the script for Dracula five minutes before the director yelled “…aaaand action!”

Wait. No makeup? What about hair? He looks like he just walked out of Lake Town and into Wallachia. That’s okay, no worries. One thing that sets Dracula apart from The Hobbit is the fact that there are no battle scenes. Oh, there are armies! The Turks attack Castle Dracula relentlessly. It’s just that Vlad has no army at all except for a few tough guys around him who stare solemnly at everything and hardly lift a sword.

Which is why Vlad decides to visit the creepy creature in a mountain nearby. Legend has it no one comes out of the creature’s cave alive. And that includes Turks, who have been seen entering the cave and not coming out. That’s good enough for Vlad! If it kills Turks, maybe he can figure out a way to use the creature. Unfortunately his plans go awry when the creature decides to use him! Bitten and becoming the Drac we all know and love to hate, Vlad then decimates the entire Turk army himself. It’s not even a contest.

Remember the scene in The Matrix Reloaded when Neo battled an army of Smiths? Yeah. Except it’s Vlad and an army of Turks. That scene alone almost made the price of a rental worth it. All in all though, the movie was pretty hum drum. This is the problem with having such cheap and readily available CGI. Instead of telling a story using CGI as a tool, CGI uses the story to advertise CGI. This movie is so chalk full of CGI from green screens to zillions of bats, it’s completely unrealistic. And no amount of CGI will help make a story deeper than it already is. The story in this CGI pool is desperately shallow, not much more than a wading pool. Sure, it’ll cool you off on a hot day, but you don’t get much exercise out of it.

Here’s a question: Why do the young sons of epic historical movie badasses all have that same, soft, compassionate, doe-eyed look as if they’d never seen a sword in their life and spend their off hours away from lessons caring for baby rabbits? Here’s side by side of the sons of Vlad from Dracula and the son of Maximus from Gladiator:

Verdict: * * * 1/2 – –

Yesterday I watched Gone Girl where everyday suburban people were dancing  because they did something very bad to someone they loved. Then I happened to see a Wayfarer.com commercial where everyday suburban people were dancing because they bought a really nice sofa for a great price and free shipping.

One of these scenarios I could wrap my head around and the other I just squirmed and grimaced the entire time. It’s not that GG was a bad story (I never read the book but everyone tells me it was so much better). It’s that the characters in GG were complete jerks to each other and practically everyone else… and I’m supposed to be drawn in?

I had heard the premise of the story before renting the movie, so I was already kind of prepared. I went into it as if I were watching a reality show. If you go into movies from a certain point of view, in this case, Nick (Affleck) and Amy (Pike) Dunn are two affluent writers who live in NYC and move to Missouri because Nick’s mom gets sick and needs care. Amy hates Missouri. Oh, and she also hates Nick after a while because he’s such a guy. There are other reasons, and I’ll admit, but the time I saw them unfold, I friggin’ hated Nick too.

But I also hated Amy because she’s essentially a pretentious hoity toity who speaks in a very mysterious, smoky, heady voice and uses big words and walks around hating herself and her life and everything she’s attracted into it. Suddenly <BAM!> Amy goes missing, and because she’s loved worldwide for her children’s books, her disappearance becomes nationwide CNN/Fox fodder and we begin to see what happened.

The entire story is three fold: We see things from 1) his POV, 2) her POV and 3) her diary’s POV. All blended seamlessly and it moves the story along well. Now, I won’t go further because there’s a lot to reveal and even one clue would be a spoiler so I’ll shut up about what happens. I will say that if you go into this movie as if it were a horror/thriller, you’ll be horrified/thrilled. I went into it as if it were a reality show because I identified with the characters about as much as I identify with Honey Boo Boo. This made it a popcorn flick for me and, while everyone else around me gasped, I laughed every time a new twist was revealed. This movie takes itself waaaay too seriously, in my humble. Like any marriage, the marriage in this movie could have used some laughs, but that’s just me!

No one was voted off the island, but the entire movie had me shaking my head thinking “God, these two deserve each other.” and “Thank God I’m not this eff’ed up. My life is lookin’ pretty good right about now!”

Kevin Costner‘s excellent performance, a great story and some absolutely wonderful characters make McFarland, USA one of the best movies so far this year. What’s more, it’s based on a true story that seems really likely. Too many of these films depend so much on created drama that it’s hard to see the real people. That’s not a problem in McFarland, the personalities shine through and make this film a joy to watch.

McFarland, California is a mostly Hispanic and very poor agricultural community. Many of the community’s workers are “pickers,” which simply means they spend hours every day harvesting produce by hand. It’s extremely hard work and the rewards are slim. When Coach Jim White (Costner) is forced to find a job, any job, he’s stuck with McFarland, one of the poorest towns in America.

White was consigned there because of his temper and an incident in Idaho. As football coach, according to the film, he threw a cleated shoe and accidentally hit his team captain. He was forced out and almost no school in the country wanted to touch him. Enter McFarland, where the choices were equally slim. Few coaches wanted to end up there.

Upon arriving White notices something startling; many of the local teens are forced to get up before dawn to pick produce until school and then do the same after. What’s even more startling is the speed they must run to be on time. An idea forms: what if he could take these kids and their blistering speed and create a cross country team? That is McFarland, USA. The story of an inspired coach and some very talented boys.

What makes the film so special is that it dives into the intense relationship the White family developed with this so different community. Director Niki Caro managed to skillfully break down the barriers between this very “white” family, even using the name White as a running pun, and a very Hispanic village. What was unexpected was that he was also doing that with the audience. I soon found myself relating more to the Hispanic youngsters and their  parents than the Whites (yes, pun intended). By the end of the film I too wanted to live in McFarland.

The easiest way to talk about McFarland, USA is a comparison to Hoosiers. Caro, in McFarland, managed to get nearly that same involvement in the lives of the players as David Anspaugh did in Hoosiers. I really wanted to know more about the players. I couldn’t wait till the end to find out where everyone ended up. Having said that…Hoosiers gets a 5 out of 5 stars (it’s just flawless), but alas, McFarland, USA gets a measly 4.5.

Both movies though are very, very re-watchable.