My Favorite Movies

This is the action adventure movie all others are compared against. The story is set in an exotic Greek island location during World War II. A small group of commandos on a desperate mission to destroy a set of German coastal guns that stand between the British Navy and thousands of outnumbered British soldiers trapped on a Greek Island near Turkey about to be captured by the Germans. The movie is set in the spring or early summer of 1941 after the British had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Germans in Greece and Crete. It is a true fact that the British barely were able to evacuate their defeated troops to Egypt before they were taken prisoners. The rest of the story is fiction. There is no Island of Navarone and the Germans never installed any big guns in Greece. Unlike many war movies, the Germans speak German to each other, not English. The violence is quick and brutal. There is no waste of ammunition for the sake of typical Hollywood action. The bullets don't explode, they just poke holes in people killing them. The special effects were good in 1960 but today it's obviously done with models. The story explores the morality of war and the duty of a soldier. When the mission commander breaks his leg his second in command must choose whether to sacrifice the life of his friend or the success of his mission. Later when a traitor is found in their mist they must decide whether she should live or die. I first saw this movie on TV when I was a kid. I have a Laserdisc version that was made with a faded copy of the film. I later bought the DVD which has a crisp cleaned up picture and is in wide screen format with much better sound. Best quote, "Are you sure it will work?" "No guarantee but the theory is perfectly feasible."

This movie is long and intense. It starts out good with an excellent battle sequence at the VC village. However, as they move upriver the historical accuracy gets lost. I don't think the American servicemen were as undisciplined as depicted in this movie. I also doubt that the Southeast Asian people were as primitive as shown in the movie. But this story was about 19th century Africa and not Vietnam. The ending on the DVD is not what I remember from the movie theater. I first saw this movie at the Cowboy Mall in Stillwater, OK. It was a strip mall north of the OSU campus that was new at the time and was the first multi-screen theater in Stillwater. This movie came out about the same time as Star Wars and is as dark and depressing as Star Wars was fun and uplifting. Redeux is Longer version of a good movie This version is longer and just as intense. Added a little sex left out of the original. The discussion about the history of Vietnam is interresting and reminds the viewer that this is a Vietnam War movie and not an African adventure film. This movie is worth watching more to remind people what was going on in the late 70's than during the real war. Oh Yea, the music is excellent.

Instant classic
The movie is the classic story of three hobbits, a dwarf, an elf, two men and a wizard on a quest to save the world from evil. The special effects alone make it worth watching. The story moves along at a quick pace unlike the book that has a tendency to drag along with side stories left out of the movie and a few long poems. When the party finally goes underground the pace picks up a little too much. In the book the orcs are hidden in the darkness just out of reach, a constant danger that never quite catches up with them. In the movie the walls are crawling with orcs. Fortunately the elf has a magic quiver that never runs out of arrows. If this were a game of D&D and I were the dungeon master, I'd be asking to see the character sheet for this elf.

This is a semi-humorous account of the early days of the space program. Based on a book that was much more serious and detailed and historical accurate. The movie plucked the funny parts out of the book to make the movie. The movie still shows the heroism of these test pilots who risked their lives to expand jet and rocket technology. However they left out that Gus Grissom was eventually exonerated in the capsule mishap that occured during his flight. Best quote, "No bucks, no Buck Rodgers." I didn't see this in the theater but rented the Laserdisc back when my Laserdisc player was new. I now have a copy on DVD.

Good movie if you like history. The movie spends too much time with the Earp family history. Once it gets to Dodge City it picks up. From there on its a good western. The violence is how it really happened. When people get shot they bleed and die. Unlike most modern westerns the characters in this movie are not 20th century people transplanted into the old west. These are real 19th century characters with 19th century attitudes and problems.

The original King Kong was the first big budget special effects movie. By today's standards it's crude, boring and unbelievable; however, in 1933 it was a huge hit. The technology used in making this film was a huge leap forward. Many of the techniques had never been used before. No film pushed the boundaries of movie making technology as much this film until Star Wars. King Kong is one of the classic monsters along with Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Creature From the Black Lagoon. It's a movie everyone should see. The movie has some great scenes but when put together in a full-length movie they get repetitive and with very little dialogue it gets a little boring. In 1933 no one had seen anything like this and the audiences were amazed at every scene. Like a good magic trick they didn't know how it was done and it came off as a great adventure/horror film. Today there have been too many cheap imitations and everyone knows how it was done and it loses its believability.

Part II of the Lord of the Rings. All the interesting parts of the 2nd book were left out in order to maximize the action. Hack hack, chop chop, send in more orcs. And were does that elf get all those arrows. I actually fell asleep in the theater the first time I saw this movie. It's much better on DVD where you can watch it at home and get up and move around during the battle scenes. The extended DVD is better than the version released to theaters. More of the story is explained. The depiction of Treebeard is excellent. This was the best part of the book; however, hasty hasty, much too slow for a movie. Tolken spent a lot of time describing his characters, their surroundings, and their dialog. He spent very little time describing action sequences, usually just a sentence or two. This movie does just the opposite. There are long and detailed battle scenes and the dialog is stiff and formal (except for the Hobbits).

The final film of the Lord of the Rings series is an epic. There are Large battle scenes with impressive special effects. It also gets back to the main story line of Frodo and his journey to destroy the ring. It makes for a long movie. Many complained about the many endings to the movie, but this is only about half the endings that were in the book. Although the movie won Best Movie, the award was more for all three movies combined. As a stand alone movie its not as good as the Fellowship of the Ring. As long as the party stayed together you had a concise story line to follow. When the party split up you had three or four stories to follow. In the end this is a movie about endings.

I first saw this movie when I was a kid on an old Black and White RCA Victor Television Set. At the time it scared the daylights out of me. At the time I thought it was a very realistic war movie. Looking at it again 40 years later I noticed that its style was very similar to a Twilight Zone episode except that it was movie length and had no science fiction. Unlike the 1998 version this movie focuses on only two characters. Sgt. Welsh and Pvt. Doll. Pvt. Doll was a minor character in the 1998 movie but was the central character in the 1964 movie. The 1964 movie was a low budget movie shot in Black and White and probably intended for television after a brief theater run since Black and White was still the standard for TV in 1964. The story takes place in 1942 on Guadalcanal. In history the Battle of Guadalcanal was the first American offensive drive to push back the Japanese after the Battle of Midway. By the time the U.S. Army arrived on Guadalcanal the Marines had been fighting there for several months and the Navy had isolated the Island from Japanese supply lines. The Army troops were brought in to relieve the Marines and to mop up the Japanese holdouts. This movie only makes brief mention of this and implies that the Marines had only taken the beach. The first part of the movie does a good job of showing the cramped conditions on the troopship but then bypasses the landing and picks up the story inland. You never see an ocean in the entire movie yet Guadalcanal is an island. In this movie Guadalcanal looks a lot like southern California (found out it's actually Spain). The soldiers are all wearing army fatigues but seem to be lacking any gear except for their M-1 rifles. The low production values can be seen in the weapons used in the movie. When Sgt. Welsh attacks a Japanese machine gun nest the Japanese are using an American machine gun and Sgt. Welsh uses a German MP-40. How did an MP-40 get on Guadalcanal in 1942? The American Army was using Thompson Sub-machine guns in 1942 yet not one Thompson is shown in the entire movie. Not a single authentic Japanese weapon is seen in the movie. In this movie the Japanese are armed with German MP-40's, British Bren machine guns, American Browning machine guns and some bolt action rifles that may or may not have been real Japanese rifles. The final battle in the movie everyone has an MP-40. In history the Japanese were armed with bolt-action rifles and their "woodpecker" machine guns that you can see in the 1998 version of The Thin Red Line. Even with all these shortcomings the movie is still good. The two main actors Keir Dullea and Jack Warden are good but the supporting actors are just saying their lines with no emotion. It's like watching a conversation between two Vulcans on Star Trek. When the Captain is relieved of his command you don't feel anything. You're left wondering about the motives of his commanding officer and the Captain showed no stress in the entire movie.

This new telling of the story of the Alamo is a very good movie. It sticks to historical accuracy as much as possible. Unfortunately no one knows what really happened inside of the Alamo since everyone was killed. What little is known is included in the movie and the rest is fictionalized. The weakness of the movie is that they didn't spend enough time setting up the story. If you don't know the history you don't know the importance of the story. They never explained why the Texans were rebelling against Mexico. They hinted at Sam Houston's goal to be the President of a Republic but they didn't show that he went to Texas on orders from Andrew Jackson and his true goal was to make Texas part of the United States. There is a good scene were Santa Anna explains to his officers that whoever controlled Texas controlled North America and that the losers would live in poverty for generations while the winners would become a world power. Billy Bob Thornton did an excellent job of portraying Davy Crockett. The battle scenes are well done with authentic replicas of the weapons of the era. After the battle they move on to Sam Houston and the Battle of San Jacinto. They leave out the fate of the 300 men captured and executed by Santa Anna at Goliad. The best quote is "We're going to need more men."

Don't mistake this for a history movie. This is a John Wayne movie. It's entertaining and uplifting and not one bit of it ever happened. Oh, there is a place called the Alamo and there once was a battle fought there but it didn't happen the way it's showed in this movie. The real battle of the Alamo is far more interesting and complex than is depicted in this movie. In this movie Davy Crockett found himself a girlfriend. The real David Crockett was a married man. In this movie Jim Bowie is the picture of perfect health. The real Jim Bowie was on his deathbed and probably had only a few days left to live when the battle took place. In this movie the Mexicans launch an attack in the middle of the afternoon and are mowed down by Texans shooting single shot rifles. In the real battle the Mexicans launched a pre-dawn surprise attack and took the Alamo after three hours of brutal hand-to-hand combat. In the movie the cannon shells explode flawlessly. In the real battle the cannons used solid shot that didn't explode. The movie never explains why the great Davy Crockett wound up at the Alamo. The movie implies that the holding of the Alamo was a clever strategy of Sam Houston. The truth was that Sam Houston ordered the Alamo destroyed and Travis was disobeying orders. Watch the movie and then go read a history book.

This movie is a retelling of the Trojan War as told in The Iliad and The Aeneid. For some reason the movie was given an R rating. I don't know why, the only nudity is a few shots of a woman's backside early in the movie. The violence isn't that graphic and is in fact sort of bloodless. In the fight scenes and battle sequences there is a lot of slashing and stabbing with swords and spears but no one seems to bleed that much, even when they get killed. In the Iliad the battles were described as men in chariots riding around throwing spears at each other. The Trojan War in the Iliad was a ten-year war and the Iliad only tells a small part of it. In this movie the War seems only last a short time. The fight scenes and Battle scenes are actually well done. We don't know how the ancient Greeks fought wars during the Bronze Age but we do know how they fought during the Iron Age. The movie chooses this type of combat and did a good job of making it look like it might have actually looked. Of course the real reason for this movie is to give Brad Pitt a reason to strut around in skimpy Greek tunics and occasionally shirtless. The girls should enjoy this part of the movie.

This is the first of Clint Eastwood's Spaghetti westerns. It's not bad for a western where the only one whose mouth is moving with the words is Clint. The story is kind of slim. Two rival clans battling over a ghost town and a beautiful woman. The only source of income seems to come from stealing from the Mexican and American armies. Clint comes in as a stranger who is able to kill anyone he shots at with one bullet, even when he's not aiming. The characters in the movie seem to be able to do things with their guns that are not only incredibly difficult but defy the laws of physics. Visually the movie is impressive when you watch it in the original wide screen format. If you watch the full screen TV mode you loose half the movie. Eastwood made better films latter in his career but this is the one that made him famous. Before this movie he was just the guy on Rawhide. This movie also reinvented the western. Hollywood had forgotten how to make a western when this movie came along. It took the Italians to show us that westerns weren?t for kids anymore. By 1960's standards this was an incredibly violent movie. It lacks the gore of modern movies but lacks nothing in the brutality of the violence. Best quote, "Sorry, make that four coffins."

I first saw this movie on HBO. This was back when HBO actually showed first run movies. There was nothing else worth watching at 7:00 that night so I thought, "I'll watch this for 30 minutes and then change to something else." Before I knew it I had sat there on my living room floor and watched the whole thing. It's one of those movies that pull you in and you can't stop watching until it's over. Today it's a little dated. The clothes are obviously from the 1980's although I never knew anyone who actually dressed like that. The make-up was good if you don't look to close. You can usually tell when it's Arnold's face and when it's make-up after you've seen the movie more than once. At the end of the movie they used stop-action special effects for the mechanical Terminator and it's about the quality of Ray Harryhausen's work. They smash up a lot of old cars (1970's era gas-hogs) and there are a lot of cool explosions. Of course the best quote is, "A'll bee baack."

This movie sucks. The background noise is too loud. You can barely hear the actors speak. It doesn't really matter since the dialog is all clichés. The football uniforms are ugly and they don't even follow the rules of football. Everyone knows that one team wears light jerseys and the other team wears dark ones. In this movie all the teams wear dark ones. In the final game of the movie one team doesn't even have numbers on the front of their jerseys. They talk about all the problems with modern professional sports but the characters in the movie are all caricatures so you don't really care about what they are saying. After all that the movie is too long and has a very simple plot. A professional sports team is on a four game losing streak when their veteran quarterback is injured and replaced by a third string quarterback who starts winning and gets the team into the playoffs. In the mean time every problem that has ever faced a real life football team is experienced by this fictional team and they still make it to the playoffs? I also didn't need to see a nude locker room scene. That's why it's rated R.

This movie was the last of the Cinerama movies made. The DVD tries to recreate the Cinerama version in a wide screen format. You can see the two lines where the three pieces of film came together. I first saw this movie in a small theater in a small town in Oklahoma when I was in the third grade. It wasn't the Cinerama version but it made such an impression on me that I wrote a one page history of the west based on the movie and showed it to my Mother. At the time I didn't know that this was Hollywood's version of history. In this version of history the west wasn't won by hard working farmers, ranchers and miners. It was won by dancers, gamblers, and corrupt railroad bosses. The story in the movie is really five different stories linked together by characters all belonging to the same family. Each one is so short that each one individually wouldn't even make a good hour long television show. Together they make an epic movie. The movie is packed with visual effects to take advantage of the Cinerama projection system. The actual history is glossed over quickly to get from one dramatic action sequence to the next. This movie made lots of money despite the fact that there was only a handful of Cinerama theaters built. Most people saw a standard size version in a widescreen theater or later on television. Two years after this movie came out they began filming movies in a format that matched Cinerama but only used one projector. This eliminated the distortion were the three strips of film came together on the screen and was cheaper to produce and could be shown in standard theaters. Even though the technology behind the movie didn't hold up it laid the groundwork for all of the modern widescreen movies produced today.

This is the Superman movie. Classic theme music. Captures the spirit to the Golden age Superman. Excellent special effects when compared to the 1950's TV show. If they try to make another Superman movie they will probably use computer graphics like some other superhero movies made recently. I predict that the effect will be like the 1940's Superman serials where they went from live action to animation in order to make Superman fly. In this movie when you see Superman fly, that's really Christopher Reeve dangling from wires in front of a blue screen not some computer animation. The only flaw is in the beginning they leave you thinking they are going to set the movie in the 1930's like the original comic books. I got to see this movie the first time in the old Leachman Theater in Stillwater, OK.

This is one of the best movies I've ever seen. To get the full impact you have to watch this movie many times in order to catch all the sub-plots. The best thing about this movie is the dialog. There are so many great lines you can't list them all. The great-unanswered question of the movie is "what's in that brief case?" One of the other things to watch for is the constant references to food. "That's a tasty burger." "That's one f***n good milk shake." Etc. etc. Every scene seems to have some reference to food. I also noticed that characters seem to live in a world with no Cops. They mention the police but even though there are many instances of extreme violence, the Cops never show up.

This is a straightforward old fashion Caper Movie. The characters are a collection of twisted individuals out trying to make off with a large sum of ill-gotten money. I liked the part were the key scene in the movie is repeated several times from the viewpoint of the different characters. Although it's a good entertaining movie, there is nothing that reaches out and grabs you and makes you say, "Wow, I've never seen anything like that before." That's because you have seen it before in old TV shows and old movies. The only difference is the uninhibited language and violence. Although the movie got an R rating there is no nudity. The DVD has lots of good extra features.

Terminator 2, bigger, louder, better. Maybe. The special effects in this movie are far better than in the original Terminator. The many computer graphics effects were cutting edge at the time and had never been seen outside of a music video. The story is basically the same as the first installment except that Arnold gets to play the good guy this time. The movie plays out as one long fight/chase scene. The twist at the end is when the heroes decide to prevent the creation of the super computer that takes over the world and creates the terminator. I enjoyed the gun battle in the computer facility with all that old obsolete Hewlett-Packard computer hardware. Most of their computer props were older than the first Terminator movie. They must have got them cheap at a used computer junkyard. Although I doubt that those hollow metal boxes would stop a bullet. As a science fiction story, this movie had hole big enough for the T2 to drive that big truck through. At the end of the movie they successfully destroy the super-chip from the first terminator and then Arnold destroys himself in order that the super-chip inside himself never falls into the hands of the people who want to build the supercomputer. The problem is if the evil all-powerful supercomputer is never built, then were did the Terminators come from? It's the classic time-travel paradox. There was nothing in this movie to resolve the paradox. I guess that's why they made a third movie to tie up this loose end. There is an alternate version on the DVD but it's not that much different from the original.

This is a movie that you need to read the book before you watch the movie. If you don't you won't have a clue as to what's going on. The special effects were light years ahead of their times and set up the effects used in both the early 'Star Wars' and 'Star Trek' motion pictures. It is interesting to see what we thought 2001 was going to be like back in 1968. If you can't find the book, I'll try to summarize the story. About 100,000 years ago an alien space probe lands on earth next to a troop of ape/men. It manipulates their primitive brains and instills the first intelligence on earth. It leaves and buries itself on the moon and waits to be found by the descendents of the ape/men. In 1999 an American moon base discovers the alien probe. When the sun light hits the probe is sends a signal to its mother probe on one of the moons of Jupiter. Somehow the scientists on Earth track the signal to Jupiter and plan a manned mission to Jupiter in 2001. In order to keep the Soviet Union from finding out about the true nature of the mission the astronauts are not to be told until they get to Jupiter. The only one on the space ship who knows the true nature of the mission is the ship's computer HAL 9000 the first artificially intelligent computer. The computer is told to lie to the Astronauts about the nature of the mission; however, the computer considers a lie to be an error that propagates though the system. First the computer begins to make mistakes detecting damaged components on the ship. When told of its error the computer begins to think of the humans as threats to the mission and begins to kill them off. The lone surviving astronaut dismantles the computer and proceeds to Jupiter alone. On the largest of the moons of Jupiter a larger version of the alien probe is found. The astronaut flies into it and is transported to a room where he spends the rest of his life. After he dies of old age the aliens turn him into a space baby and send him back to earth were he arrives in time to see the earth destroyed by nuclear bombs. The end. Best quote: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Comedy is hard. Tear Jerkers are easy.
Steven Spielberg tried to do a comedy and found out it wasn't easy. It should have been funny. The cast is good. The stunts are good. The jokes are good. The special effects are good. But when it was all put together it just didn't click. The re-cut extended version on DVD is better than the original cut released to the theaters. I think the set ups to the jokes were too quick in the original. In the DVD they take more time to set-up each joke so that it seems funnier. Spielberg's style of fast paced action works well in action-adventure movies but falls flat in a comedy. In comedy you have to set up the joke then deliver the punch line. In a drama or action-adventure you can throw in a joke as comic relief and get a good laugh. I think he thought that if you just threw one punch line after another at the audience it would be funny. Instead the audience didn't get half the jokes because they were trying to figure out the last one. Slim Pickens is great and has some very funny lines. Warren Oates and John Belushi also were funny. The problem is that they were side characters to the plot of the movie. The movie is based on an actual event that took place in December 1941 when the Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA) in Los Angeles began firing at imaginary Japanese aircraft. The official version reported that they were firing at Unidentified Flying Objects. This was the first official use of the acronym UFO. He also threw in the many reports of Japanese submarines that occurred during the first months of the war and the Zoot Suit riots that actually took place later in the war. When watching this movie at home it is actually a pretty funny movie. For some reason when shown to an audience in a theater it couldn't draw the crowd in and maintain the comedy.

This movie gives a highly accurate account of Battle of Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately the movie making technology in 1970 was not advanced enough to show the visual impact the Battle had on the actual eye witnesses. It's as if they made a movie about the September 11 attack on New York City and never showed the World Trade Towers collapsing. The central event in the actual Battle was the explosion of the USS Arizona. Since the actual footage of the explosion was recorded on black and white film and this movie was in color they couldn't use it. Colorization was still over ten years off. With today's computer graphics technology it could be done but it was not available 35 years ago. They did an excellent job telling the human drama leading up to the battle by showing both the Japanese and American points of view. However they glossed over the Japanese atrocities in Asia that caused the split in U.S.-Japanese relations and they only had one scene showing the signing of the German-Japanese treaty. They did show the many warnings that were ignored by the American government and how the Japanese failed to issue a declaration of war before the attack. The best part of the movie was the attack on Hickam Field and the destruction of all the American airplanes. The aerial photography showing the Japanese planes flying over Hawaii was also good. Some parts of the attacks on the Navy ships was good since they used actual U.S. Navy ships, but you could tell that the explosions were off-camera and that they weren't really blowing anything up. If they could have shown the battleships actually being destroyed this would have been an excellent movie but due to budget and technology they were limited as to what they could do. Overall the story was well told and well acted.

Guy's Film
This is my favorite Clint Eastwood movie. It's a World War II comedy/adventure movie. It's set in the weeks after the liberation of Paris in 1944. A squad of soldiers in a fictional National Guard unit has been deployed in a rural section of northern France. Every time they are about to enter a large city, regular Army troops are allowed to bypass them and enjoy the soft beds and clean showers. They are unhappy and loosing moral. Their unofficial leader is Clint Eastwood who plays a former lieutenant who has been demoted after leading a suicide attack against a hill in the weeks after D-Day. He was blamed for the excessive casualties even though he was just following orders. Telly Savalas plays the squad's sergeant. During a German attack Clint Eastwood's character "Kelly" captures a German officer carrying two bars of gold. From the German he learns that there is a large stash of Nazi gold in a bank behind enemy lines. Kelly convinces the squad to go with him to steal the gold before the Germans can move it. He then recruits a greedy supply sergeant played by Don Rickles. This is one of the funniest roles Don Rickles ever played. Donald Sutherland plays a hippie tank commander who has been separated from his unit. I doubt there were any hippie tank commanders in WW2 but I've been told that there were a lot of tank commanders just like the Donald Sutherland character in Vietnam. Remember that this movie was made during the Vietnam War. Donald Sutherland's character is called "Oddball" and asks to go along with his three tanks. Oddball has some of the funniest lines in the movie. Example, "I don't know what makes them work, I just ride in them." Or, "Don't make with the negative waves." At the end of the movie is a face off with the German tank commander that's done just like one Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns. In addition to the good story, funny lines, and exiting action the theme song is a catchy tune that actually made the pop charts in the early 1970's. This is basically a guy's movie. There are no women characters. Rent this movie to watch with your buddies.

This is the movie that pulled Star Trek from the world of TV re-runs and made it into the most popular Sci-Fi movie series of all time. The plot is basically a re-write of "The Changeling" episode from the original TV series. It also has elements of "Run Silent Run Deep", the submarine movie with Clark Gable but then so did "Balance of Terror". Unfortunately they over did it with the special effects in an attempt to keep up with "Star Wars". The special effects took too long and they almost ran out of time making the movie. The new director's cut DVD is the way it was intended but even then the original effects were sometimes crude. That's what made the original TV show so cool. The effects were so cheesy they were entertaining. The effects in the movie were cool at first and then began to get repetitive and boring. The LaserDisc version with the version shown on TV with added scenes is bad. Some of the added scenes were filmed later just to add to the TV version and the props don't match and there is one scene were they didn't finish the special effects and you see Captan Kirk hanging is space below a section of the Enterprise surrounded by the rafters of the sound stage where it was filmed. Although the original theatrical version is good the special Director's Cut on DVD is better.

Unless you've been living in a cave you know that Star Wars Episode I is the fourth Star Wars movie. Once again George Lucas pushed the boundaries of movie making technology; however, unlike the original Star Wars this was not as big a jump and was more of an evolutionary step forward. The technology used in this movie began as far back as "The Last Starfighter" and continued on in "Terminator 2" and the new improved releases of the original Star Wars trilogy and the later Star Trek movies. The story is a convoluted mix of "American Graffiti", 1960's era Saturday morning cartoons, old Errol Flynn movies, "Spartacus", "Our Gang", and old Laurel and Hardy movies. There is a thread of the background story Lucas wrote for the original Star Wars back in the 1970's but has been fleshed out with a side story about pod racing and the political intrigue undermining the Galactic Republic. Like "Return of the Jedi", this movie was written for 10 and 11 year olds and not adults. There are way too many creatures that can be turned into kid's toys. At least with the computer graphics they don't look like they are made of rubber this time. Everyone who saw the movie was annoyed at the Jar Jar Binks character. This constant attempt at slapstick humor throughout the movie was a distraction. The verbal interaction between R2D2 and C3PO was much more subtle and funnier but was missing in this movie. The kid who played young Darth Vader was too cute. He needed to be edger, someone you could believe would turn bad and become Darth Vader. The pod races reminded me of the ending to "Viva Las Vegas" with Elvis Presley. How many other movies had a race where the hero wins against all odds by being the only surviving car/plane/horse/chariot/etc. to finish the race? Even though there was an epic battle against the droid army it lacked any suspense. The only thing that caught your attention was the final light-saber battle between the Jedi knights and the Dark Lord.

So Good They Did It Twice.

This is one of John Wayne's best movies. In fact it was so good they filmed it again as El Dorado. John Wayne only played one character, "John Wayne". He played this character from "The Big Trail" to "The Shootist". By the time he made "Rio Bravo" he had the character down pat. The story is simple. There is a murder committed by the brother of a rich and powerful cattle baron. The murderer is thrown in jail and while the heroes wait for the U.S. Marshal, the town fills with hired gunmen who try to break the killer out of jail. The real story is the back-story of the character played by Dean Martin. He plays an alcoholic deputy sheriff who is an old friend of the town sheriff. The implication in the movie is that alcoholism can be overcome by willpower and determination. This was probably wishful thinking on the part of the moviemakers who were 1950's era hard drinking men who didn't want to admit to the drinking problems they had in real life. Angie Dickinson is the love interest and looks hot. This was when she was young and very good-looking. You also get to hear Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin sing. The movie begins almost as a silent movie. Dean Martin goes into a saloon to get a drink. He is humiliated and beat up by the bad guy. When someone tries to stop the beating the bad guy shoots him dead and leaves the saloon. He goes to another saloon where John Wayne tracks him down, knocks him in the head and takes him to jail. All this happens with just a few lines of dialog. In the end there is a final shoot-out and the bad guys lose. In the mean time there is a lot of banter between the main characters with a few gunfights in between.

This movie starts out as a funny spoof of James Bond movies. Then it gets bogged down in this silly story of spy who has a wife and child in the suburbs who think he?s a salesman. Tom Arnold keeps this part going with some funny jokes. Bill Paxton plays a used car salesman trying to seduce Arnold's wife, Jamie Lee Curtis by pretending to be a spy. Jamie Lee Curtis is hot when she gets to show off her body when Arnold tricks her into meeting him at a hotel while she doesn't know it's him. The end of the movie is just a wild shoot-up with crazy special effects that couldn't happen in real life. Over all it's a fun movie to watch but its terrorists theme is outdate since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.

This movie was based on the drug wars of the 1980's and the Iran Contra affair during the Reagan Administration. The plot is about a fictional President who secretly sends a squad of rangers down to Columbia to destroy the cocaine production facilities and to kill the drug lords in retaliation for the murder of one of his personal friends who had been laundering money for the drug lords. The plot is complex and sounds plausible based on the real events of the 1980's. There is plenty of action to go with the intrigue. It's very well done and the acting is excellent. I've never read the book the movie was based on so I don't know how close they stayed with the original story. I've heard they changed the ending to make it more politically correct. There are lots of high tech gadgets in the movie but unlike a James Bond movie, these gadgets are real, not movie props. The computer technology in the movie is pre-Windows. Lots of good old DOS programs. The gunfights are a little more realistic than most movies. The explosions are a little fierier than real explosions, but for some reason Hollywood always likes to add a little gasoline to the movie-land explosions. It's a good movie and worth seeing. I have it on Laser Disk. My sister got it for my birthday at a clearance sale. She probably got it real cheap since it was when everyone was switching to DVD's. It's one of the few I have with Digital sound. The Digital sound is a big improvement on the analog sound of the older Laser Disks.

This is a retelling of the King Arthur legend. It's set in the Dark Ages and the mood and atmosphere of the movie is good but the dialogue is pompous and everyone yells at each other. People must have been hard of hearing in the Dark Ages. The first half of the movie has some good battle scenes but the second half is all mood and atmosphere and pompous dialogue. All the knights seem to wear plate armor all the time even though in the real dark ages knights wore chain mail and only in battle. Merlin tries to say something funny every once in a while but it's like listening to a Shakespeare play, the language gets in the way. Maybe they took the dialogue from the literature. I guess you would have to take a trip to the library to find out. There are tons of books written based on the King Arthur legend and this movie tries to cram too much of it into one movie.

Star Wars Episode II is much better than Episode I. All the kid stuff has been toned down. The first half of the movie is full of the political intrigue leading up to the creation of the Galactic Empire. There are some chase scenes in flying cars. And it is reveled that the Storm Troopers are clones. Other than that it is kind of boring. About half way through the movie C3PO is reintroduced to the movie and suddenly it's the old Star Wars again. Without C3PO and R2D2 bickering it just isn't Star Wars. The first half of the movie was supposed to have a love story but it somehow fell flat. It's amazing that the same guy who wrote American Graffiti has forgotten how to write a love story. Natalie Portman does look hot in a white cat suit though. When she puts on that cat suit the movie gets good. The movie is all action once the Jedi arrive with the new and improved Storm Troopers. And Yoda really can use a light saber.

This movie was the Japanese attempt to tell the story of World War II without admitting their own guilt in starting the war or the atrocities committed by the Japanese army. They could show the suffering of the Japanese civilians by having the cities of Japan destroyed by a giant fire breathing radioactive dinosaur that rises mysteriously from the sea. Godzilla is in fact the good old US of A. No sea going dinosaur ever burned Japanese cities and spread radioactive fallout across the landscape. It was the U.S. Army Air Force. But the Japanese didn't want to offend us since we were protecting them from communist invasion from Korea. Therefore they had a giant lizard do it in the movie. The version released in America was dubbed into English and extra scenes with Raymond Burr added and scenes that might offend U.S. audiences deleted. The added scenes are obviously out of place and don't fit the Japanese story. The Japanese actors seem to be acting their hearts out but the English dialog seems flat and unemotional. Godzilla is actually seen in less than 30 percent of the movie. Sometimes all you see is his head. In the U.S. version there is actually only about 17 minutes of Godzilla smashing cardboard miniatures of a Tokyo. By using black and white film and keeping everything slightly out of focus it's not as obvious as in later Japanese monster movies made in color and filmed in sharp focus. I guess the only reason this film was popular in America was because it was shown at drive-in movie theaters and the American people of 1954 still enjoyed the sight of Japanese getting smashed even if it was by a giant lizard. Although Godzilla was supposed to be the bad guy, Americans probably saw him as the hero. Americans who lived through World War II know exactly what this country did to Japan and why we did it. If you were to ask someone of that generation they will tell you the Japanese deserved every bit of all the damage we did to them. That was the generation that in the 1950's was having fun driving their new cars to the drive-in movies on Friday nights and watching a guy in a rubber lizard suit smash models of Japanese cities.

Although the movie is titled "The Doors", it's really a bio-picture about Jim Morrison. It's a good movie that captures the 1960's and early 1970's and shows the influence the Doors music had on the times. The music is excellent since a lot of it is actual Doors' recordings. It concentrates on the reckless and self-destructive behavior of Jim Morrison and show how it resulted in his premature death. If the real Jim Morrison behaved the way he did in the movie all the time I doubt he would have had any friends. Since it shows in the movie that he had lots of friends there must have been a side to him not shown in the movie. Also if anyone was as stoned and drunk as much as they showed in the movie he couldn't have been as creative and successful as the real Jim Morrison. I'm sure in the last years of his life his destructive behavior did strain his relationships with others but in the beginning he couldn't have been as stoned as they showed and still been as creative as he was. As a morality play showing the destructiveness of the sex, drugs, and rock-in-roll culture of the 1960's and 1970's it's an excellent movie, although on a certain level it glamorizes the drugs and alcohol abuse.

This is a bizarre movie directed by Terry Gilliam, the guy who did the animation on Monty Python's Flying Circus. The background of the story is New York City in the early 1990's. Robin Williams plays a crazy homeless man as only Robin Williams can. Jeff Bridges plays a late night radio DJ based on the DJ's who did the rude call in shows popular in the 1980's. The movie is about the friendship of these two characters. The movie is full of grit and grim like Monty Python And The Holy Grail or Time Bandits. In fact, all of Terry Gilliam's movies have unique grit to them. The humor is dark. The acting is good. If you are a fan of bizarre humor you must see this movie.

A Sleazy Dragnet Police Story

This is an excellent police story set in Los Angeles in the early 1950?s. The movie is only slightly based on the book. The book covered a time period from the late 1940?s to the late 1950?s. The movie compressed the time to 1952 through 1953. They also deleted characters and simplified the story and changed the ending. In the book the bad guys get away, in the movie they get shot. The story mixes real historical persons with fictional characters to create a fictional story intermixed with actual historical events. The story is set in the era when Los Angeles was trying to clean-up and modernize their police department but at the same time using strong-arm techniques to keep eastern gangsters out of L.A. The plot is complex and makes a good story but is not as complex or as sleazy as the plot in the book. The plot in the book would be too much for a movie. The character that caught my attention was Wendell ?Bud? White. Were did he come up with that name? If anyone knows I?d like to find out.

Here Monster Monster Monster
The Alien is now one of the classic Movie Monsters right along with King Kong, Godzilla, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man and the Creature From The Black Lagoon. The movie blends an old fashion monster horror movie with science fiction. The basic story was stolen from "IT! The Terror From Beyond Space". An alien monster stows away aboard an earth ship and kills the crew one by one. In Alien the crew brings the monster aboard on secret orders from the "company". Along with Star Wars, these movies of the 1970's were the first movies to show a science fiction world that wasn't clean and pristine. The characters wear real cloths not some futuristic color coordinated jump suits. The ship has grease and steam. It's dark and spooky. But, why didn't she leave that cat behind? And how did the Alien get so big? What did it eat to get that big? Overall though it is a good movie that all fans of science fiction and horror movies should watch. The special effects are good except for the one scene were they use the mechanical Alien. The end of the movie we get to see Sigourney Weaver in a pair of bikini panties that barely cover her ass, just enough to push the movie from PG to R. I first saw this movie at the Cowboy Mall in Stillwater OK just north of the OSU campus. I went with a group of my D&D friends. When the Harry Dean Stanton character went looking for the cat and said "Here kitty kitty kitty", the guy next to me leaned over and said "Here Monster Monster Monster".

This is the first of the James Bond 007 movies. It's not the best but it is far better than some of the latter sequels. The movie follows the book closely and sets the pattern for all the James Bond movies to follow. In the book Dr. No was just a Chinese gangster who had fled to the Caribbean with a large amount of money stolen from the Chinese Tong organized crime families. He had set up his own little kingdom on a remote island filled with seagull droppings and had set up a fertilizer plant to finance his operation. When he encroaches into a bird sanctuary in British Territory the British Government sends one of its agents to find out what's going on. When Dr. No has the agent murdered James Bond gets involved. This wasn't exciting enough for the movie so they changed this plot element to have Dr. No interfering with Cape Canaveral rocket launches. Although this is technically not possible and the likelihood of Dr. No having a nuclear reactor is a little far fetched that's what they put in the movie. The original story that was going to be the first James Bond movie was a script that wasn't based on any of the books but latter became the book and movie "Thunderball". In that script the bad guys belonged to a terrorist organization called SPECTRE. To set up latter sequels Dr. No in the movie was also made a member of SPECTRE. In the book James Bond's sidekick is Quarrel who is described as a young good-looking half white half black Cayman Islander. In the movie they changed Quarrel to a middle aged black man and portrayed him in the standard stereotypical black character of the pre-1960's era. To Americanize the story they brought in Felix Leiter from the CIA. Although Felix Leiter was in several of the James Bond books he wasn't in Dr. No. The rest of the movie matches the book and is a classic James Bond story. James Bond goes to an exotic location. James Bond meets beautiful woman. James Bond confronts bad guy. James Bond gets tortured. James Bond blows up bad guy's hideout. The end.

Watching this movie again 37 years after I saw it the first time in the theaters is kind of bizarre. I saw it the first time at the movie theater in downtown Guthrie, Oklahoma. When I saw it as a kid, I had never flown. It seemed plausible and was a good disaster movie. In fact it was the first of several disaster movies made in the 1970's. Today when air travel is commonplace you wonder what kind of world they were living in 1970. Airports with no security or computers to prevent someone from just sneaking onto the plane or carrying on a bomb without being searched are so far in the past most people don't remember those days. And what about those huge 707 airplanes, they made it seem like two people could walk down the aisle side by side. They made it seem like the inside of the plane had plenty of headroom and when was the last time anyone flew on a plane that was 25% empty. Boeing must have paid for part of this movie since they seemed to brag a lot about the 707. Most of the "emergencies" seem contrived. Why couldn't they have just diverted the damaged plane to another airport? There is an urban legend that when they first showed this movie on TV that several cities' sewer systems flooded when the movie was over because everyone watching went to the restroom at the same time. Shortly after this movie came out people began hijacking planes to Cuba. So the next time you are in the airport having all your belongings searched you can blame this movie.

This is a most bizarre movie. It's a mix of several styles including animation, Italian westerns, and Japanese and Chinese movies. The heroine is shot in the head at the beginning of the movie yet has no scars. After she recovers after being in a coma for four years she becomes a super killing machine set on revenge. There a some great fight scenes climaxing with a sword fight with a group of Japanese gangsters. When she lops off an arm or leg the wound sprays large amounts of blood as if they were suffering from high blood pressure. If a person lost that much blood they would pass out and die. The movie ends before she kills Bill. You have to wait for Vol. 2 to find out how this ends. Although its a comic book fantasy it's well done and is fun to watch.

This is one of the best westerns of the 1970's. By the beginning of the 1970's Hollywood had forgotten how to make a good western. The Italians made better westerns in the 1960's. Only a few directors and actors new how to make a good western in the late 1970's. Clint Eastwood was one of them. In the opening scene Clint is trying to plow a field with a mule and plow. Somehow he's not doing it right. He is a much better gunfighter than a farmer. This is the first movie I can remember that used replicas of the actual firearms used during the Civil War. Most westerns used modified modern weapons and hoped no one noticed. The locations were good representations of Missouri, Oklahoma and west Texas. The story is set during the closing days of the Civil War in the west. Unlike the Civil War in the east there were no large scale battles, just hundreds of small fire fights and a few small battles. It was the first of the modern low intensity conflicts. Per capita there were more deaths in the west than in the east but were spread out over time. This lead to a more personal conflict were the combatants knew each other and were fighting over personal grudges not related to the issues of the overall war. This was the story of Josey Wales.

The Return of Darth Vader

Episode III is a very busy movie. It's got constant action but doesn't move the story along except in brief jumps. I would have liked to have seen more of the wokies. There are no surprises in the story. It's basically a 140 min setup for episode IV. The action scenes are excellent but have more than you can take in. There is a lot of sensory overload. There is no cool dialogue. Even R2D2 and C3P0 weren't that funny. It's too somber. They needed the comic relief that wasn't there. It's better than Episodes I and II but not as good as IV through VI. For fun see if you can find the Millennium Falcon.

This is a well made movie about the true story of John Nash, a semi-famous mathematician. In the first part of the movie he seems like just an eccentric genius. In the second half of the movie you learn that much of what seemed to him as real were just his hallucinations. Russell Crowe plays John Nash and does an excellent job of portraying a man with mental illness. Jennifer Connelly plays his wife and is hot. The real Mrs. Nash was cute when she was young, but there was no way a crazy dude was going to hook-up with someone as hot as Jennifer Connelly. Especially since the real John Nash didn't look like Russell Crowe. But then who goes to a movie to see ugly people. They did a pretty good job of explaining John Nash's complicated mathematical theorems in a simplified way that the average person could understand. It's a serious movie about a serious subject and it did win an Oscar. I bought the VHS tape at Hollywood Video as a Christmas present for my Mother and Father. My Dad was a math teacher and I thought they might like it.

This was the movie that made Dudley Moore a star in the U.S. He was already a star in England but not well known in the U.S.A. The movie also made Bo Derek a sex symbol. With one movie she bumped Farrah Fawcett from the number one sex symbol. I first saw this movie in Stillwater, OK while i was in college. At the time I thought it was funny. The movie is about an 42 year old song writer who is having a mid-life crisis after a surprise birthday party. The next day is sees a beautiful young bride on her way to her wedding. He becomes obsessed with her and follows her to a Mexican resort and finally meets her and finds out she's not all that he imagined her to be. Now that I'm over 40 the movie is kind of sad. The comedy is provided by Dudley Moore's physical comedy. There is lots of nudity which gives the movie an R rating. Lately they've been showing an edited version of TV. Without a nude Bo Derek there is not much point to the movie. That's really the only reason I went to see it in the first place.

Don't call me surely.

The third sequel to the movie Alien picks up with the ship from the second movie on its way back to Earth. Somehow some Alien eggs have been smuggled aboard the ship. They really don't explain how that happens, they just show it during the opening credits. When one of the eggs hatches it causes malfunctions in the ship and the crew compartment is jettisoned into space and crashes on a nearby planet. This planet was a former penal colony with a lead mining operation and is now populated by former prisoners who have formed their own religion and who volunteered to stay behind. They were all sex offenders and didn't trust themselves to return to earth. The society of the ex-cons is more interesting than the Alien. One of the Aliens latches onto a dog and incubates in the dog. The new Alien takes on characteristics of the dog so it can run fast. It starts to kill the ex-convicts and they have to figure out how to kill it. There's an interesting twist at the end but some of the middle part of the movie is slow. The action picks up when they are hunting down the Alien. I also saw this movie in Midwest City, OK. It's a good movie but not as scary as the first movie and has less action than the second.

This sequel to the movie Alien is set 57 years after the first movie. It's got more characters and more action. The story of this movie has Ripley being asked to return to the planet where the first Alien was found with a group of space Marines to find out what happened to a group of colonist that had been sent there while Ripley had been drifting in space. They find that the entire colony has been infected with the Alien parasites and there are now hundreds of Aliens on the planet. They find one lone survivor. A young girl who Ripley takes in as her own daughter. They have to fight their way off the planet and the young girl is taken by the Aliens so Ripley has to rescue her and in the process kills dozens of Aliens. The space Marines are based on the troopers in the book "Star Ship Troopers". They even asks it they are going on a "bug hunt" which is a term used in the book "Star Ship Troopers". These characters are much more interesting than the characters in the movie "Star Ship Troopers". This is a must see movie for Science Fiction fans. I first saw this movie at the Heritage Plaza in Midwest City, OK.

classic

I liked this movie the first time I saw it when it was called Casablanca. Actually the first half of this movie is not to bad. The second half is just a lot of gunfights that don't have any point to the plot. Since the plot is a rip-off of Casablanca they spend 10 minutes of gunfights and flaming explosions to cover the same plot element that Casablanca covered in ten seconds. The first half of the movie was based closer to the Dark Horse comic books and you get to see a lot of a naked Pam Anderson. That's the only reason to see this movie is to see Pam Anderson naked so get the unrated version. I'd seen pieces of this movie on cable TV but the story was so implausible I turned off after 5 min. Later I got the unrated DVD. The story must have been written by a Canadian. Pam Anderson's a Canadian, maybe they wrote the story to please her. In the movie's back story the USA is in the middle of a second civil war. Most of the country has been taken over by Neo-Nazis and the fictional city of Steel Harbor is in neutral territory on the Canadian border. Canadian money is worth more than American money and the UN are good guys. Maybe if they set the story 100 years in the future but they set it in the year 2017. Not likely.

The only Batman movie I had seen before this one was the silly one based on the silly TV show that was popular when I was a kid. This movie brought back the dark and mysterious Batman from the comic books. Michael Keaton played an interesting Bruce Wayne. Jack Nicholson was an excellent Joker. The important thing about a movie based on comic books is does it have the visual look to match the comic book. This movie does. It has lots of good scenes! The story is silly but it is based on a comic book. The Batman stories always depended on a flamboyant bad guy to make it interesting. The last Batman movie may have been closer to the latest comic books but this movie is closer to the old comic books and is more entertaining. In the end, any actor can play the Batman because it's all about the costume. The mask in this movie is a classic and is closer to the comics than any film version of Batman done before. Cool Batmobile too. The bad guys had to drive old GM X-cars which were made at the GM plant in Oklahoma City. I first saw this film in Midwest City, OK and I bought the Laser Disc as soon as it came out.

This is a Science Fiction classic. They didn't set the date for the movie far enough into the future. 2019 is just around the corner and the technology is too far advanced and Los Angeles is changed too much for the events to be in the not to distant future. Maybe another 100 years. I have a Laserdisc of the original version with Harrison Ford's voice over narration. I like this version. The narration is not over done and it helps explain the background of the story. It also gives it the feel of an old fashion detective novel. I also have a DVD of the first "director's cut" with the narration removed and the ending cutout. They added some extra scenes showing how Deckard and Rachel fell for each other. Because of the claustrophobic atmosphere of the movie the wide screen DVD is not that much of an improvement over the full screen of the Laserdisc until the final confrontation between Deckard and the leader of the replicants. I just recently bought the four disk DVD of the "'Final Cut". The special effects are great. This is real Science Fiction and not a Western set in space or a Space Fantasy.

A couple of friends of mine and I went to see this movie on New Years Eve 1989 at the original movie theaters outside of Crossroads Mall in Oklahoma City. They were new then but are dollar theaters now that they built the new stadium seating theaters. It's a good movie. They played fast and loose with the historical facts such as they left out Earl Long's wife. The character wouldn't have been very sympathetic if we saw that he was cheating on his wife. The story is less about Blaze Starr than it is about the last two years of Earl Long's life. Although Lolita Davidovich is hot and she does have some topless scenes, you see very little of Blaze Starr's stage act. She's probably not as well endowed as the real Blaze Starr. This is really the story of the last days of old style American politics in the early years of television politics. There was a time when politicians were colorful and mudslinging was acceptable. Before television there was little entertainment in rural America. Going to listen to a political speech or debate was entertaining. Politicians brought plenty of free food and drinks to a political rally along with bands and other entertainment to draw in the crowds. Today politicians have to have a good TV presence and be politically correct in their speech. Gailard Sartain from Tulsa is in this movie as one of Earl Longs advisors. The best line in the movie is "It may not fly but it will surely flap its wings."

This is a really good movie. It won the Oscar for best picture. It's got a good story with a surprise ending. The story is about a pair of con men in the 1930's. They did a good job of recreating the look of Chicago in 1936. I saw it twice in 1974. Once in Stillwater OK and the second time on my Senior trip in Denver CO. There is some confusion by some who would like to see this movie in wide screen format. There is no wide screen format for this movie because it was filmed in the same format used in movies in the 1930's. Since this was the same format used for television the movie fits the screen of your television set with out modification. For some reason when they made both the VHS and the DVD they put a disclaimer that the movie had been modified to fit your screen. It really wasn't. I have a DVD and a VHS tape of this movie. The DVD has a better picture.

Snow capped Mountains in Oklahoma?
This is the best John Wayne movie. John Wayne plays a character totally different from the usual upstanding John Wayne character. Rooster Cogburn is a true old west character. He is part lawman, part bounty hunter, and part outlaw. He's a drunk and a killer who wouldn't hesitate to shoot an outlaw instead of bringing him in alive. The characters speak in the formal manner of the nineteenth century, not the casual manner of the twentieth century. The only problem is that the movie takes place in southeast Oklahoma but nothing in the movie looks like southeast Oklahoma. Instead of the rolling hills covered in blackjack oaks we see jagged snow capped peaks and groves of pine and aspen trees. The scenery is beautiful but it's not Oklahoma. The story is good but the book is better. A few of the cultural details from the book make it into the movie but the book has more. The gunfights are relatively bloodless in the nature of an old fashion Western. In 1969 the movie was rated 'M' for the bad language but only rates a 'G' today. I guess "son of a bitch" is no longer considered bad language.

This movie is the best of all the James Bond movies. It stars Sean Connery, the best actor to ever play James Bond. The story was written by Ian Fleming and two screen writers. They had intended it to be the first James Bond movie but couldn't raise enough money. Later it was decided to use Dr. No for the first movie since it could be done with a smaller budget. Thunderball was a big budget movie with lots of classic James Bond gadgets. It had four gorgeous Bond girls with big breasts. It came out at the height of the James Bond popularity and made more money than any Bond film before or since. They staged the biggest underwater fight scene ever filmed. The theme song was sung by Tom Jones when Tom Jones was at the height of his popularity. The opening credits had the classic graphics of nude women swimming underwater. The story is about a band of terrorist calling themselves S.P.E.C.T.R.E. stealing two atomic bombs. It's a totally absurd story since the security around real atomic bombs would be too tight for someone to steal. However at the time the story was written there was a basis in fact. The U.S and probably Great Briton were keeping bombers in the sky armed with atomic bombs twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. The year after Thunderball came out there was a mid-air collision with a B-52 and a KC-135 off the coast of Spain that resulted in several atomic bombs being dropped into the Mediterranean and a farmer's field. The next James Bond movie wasn't an Ian Fleming Story. Only one more movie based on an Ian Fleming Story was made but it didn't star Sean Connery. I've got this movie on Laserdisc. I originally saw it on TV but that version was edited. Some of the more graphic violence in the underwater fight scene was cut out. One of the writers who collaborated on the story with Ian Fleming won a court fight and got to make a remake called "Never Say Never Again". But that's another story.

The book "The Godfather" is a study in the use and abuse of power. For the movie Francis Ford Coppola used the part of the book dealing with the transition of power between the the Godfather and his son. The events in the book are based on historical events that took place during the history of organized crime. The real events were not connected but Mario Puzo linked them together into a fictional story. After World War II the mafia needed a new source of income since the prohibition of alcohol was over. In real life this was done by Charles "Lucky" Luciano. He set up the smuggling of heroin from Turkey through France that became known as the French Connection. In the movie a character named Philip Tattaglia is based on Luciano. There is also a character named "Moe Green" that is based on Bugsy Siegel. The most obvious is the Johnny Fontane character that is based on Frank Sinatra. The story in the movie only uses the Johnny Fontane story as a back story to begin the movie. The heart of the movie is when a drug dealer asks the Godfather for financing and protection for his drug smuggling. He is turned down because the Godfather is afraid he would lose the support of the politicians who are more comfortable with gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging. When the drug dealer thinks there is a split in the Godfather's family he tries to kill the Godfather. The rest of the movie deals with how they transfer control of the family to the Godfather's son and how he gets revenge for the attempt on his father's life.

The original Pink Panther movie introduced both the Inspector Clouseau character and the Pink Panther cartoon character. The opening credits are cool. The movie was supposed to be a David Niven movie but Peter Sellers stole the show. The later movies staring Peter Sellers were much more funny but this was a good start. The first movie lacked the verbal humor used in the later movies. The really funny parts are the parts with Peter Sellers. The movie was also supposed to be a spoof of the 1960's Jet Set crowd. That's kind of out of date now. Peter Sellers physical humor still is funny after 45 years. I first saw this movie in 1978 at a Pink Panther film festival at Oklahoma State University Student Union Theater. They showed the four existing Peter Seller's Pink Panther Movies on two separate days. I laughed my ass off. When I got my first Laser Disc player one of the first movies I bought was the Pink Panther.

This was Marilyn Monroe's and Clark Gable's last movie. it was filmed in black and white. Back in 1960 when this movie was filmed directors who wanted a film to last many years filmed in black and white because the color film of that era would fade over time. The movie is about a woman played by Marilyn Monroe who is in Reno Nevada to divorce her husband and hooks up with three guys who have an aversion to working for a living. Their motto seems to be "better than wages". Clark Gable plays an old cowboy who longs for the old days when he could make money rounding up wild horses. Eli Wallach plays an ex-Air Force pilot who's wife has died and has lost his motivation to do anything except fly an old plane. Montgomery Clift plays a rodeo cowboy who drifts from rodeo to rodeo. The movie centers on Marilyn Monroe who gets to wear a lot of bra-less outfits thirteen years before such styles became common. There is one brief scene where she wears a bikini coming out of a lake. She would be considered fat today but back in 1960 it was considered sexy for a woman to have a little fat on her backside. She still looks good in a dress or blue jeans and white shirt. Her character is an animal lover and gets squeamish when she sees people hurt. Most of the movie is about her relationship with these men whose whole life is been about brutality against both animals and other people. Which of the three will she wind up with? Watch the movie and find out. It's a good movie. Clark Gable died of a heart attack a few weeks after the movie was finished. Some blamed Marilyn Monroe for constantly being late to the sets and stressing Clark Gable. Others blamed the director John Houston who has Clark Gable out roping horses. The truth was that Clark Gable was 65 years old and was part of a generation of men who smoked their whole life and ate fatty food since they were kids. Many men in the 1960's dropped dead in their 50's and 60's. It was an epidemic that generated a lot of scientific study that resulted in better diets and advances in open heart surgery.

This is one of the important Western made and has one of the greatest theme songs in Western Movie history. It was based on the Japanese movie "The Seven Samurai". The Japanese movie was over 3 hours long. This movie is only 2 hours long, almost 80 minutes shorter than the Japanese film. This became the prototype of the later Italian Westerns that were also based on Japanese Samurai movies. This movie is far superior to the Italian movies because this movie was actually filmed in Mexico while the Italians filmed their movies is Spain. In America following this film the Western took a down turn until the 1970's except for a few John Wayne movies. The Japanese researched their film and based it on a story of a Japanese village that hired a group of Samurai warriors to protect their village from bandits. It was set during the Japanese feudal era when the country was divided among several warlords who hired Samurai mercenaries to fight their wars. The Japanese story may have been based on an actual event. The American film was set in the 1870's along the Mexican-American border. The Samurai warriors were replaced by American gunfighters and the villagers became Mexican peons. But who were these bandits? From the time of the Mexican-American War in the 1840's until the end of the Mexican Revolution in the 1920's the border between the U.S and Mexico was a lawless place populated by Comancheros, Bandits, and Revolutionaries. The film makers made the bandits in the movie look like the rebel fighters of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. The peons were Pima Indians that the Spanish had used as slaves on their plantations in northern Mexico. In the movie when the gunfighters arrive in the Mexican village they witness a festival were the villagers dress in their Native American costumes and preform their native dances. But these villagers weren't afraid to fight. The Japanese villagers lived in a culture with a ridged class system. Only the Samurai were allowed to carry weapons. The Pima had fought the Apache for centuries and had rebelled against the Spanish in the 1700's. When the film was made the Mexican government took offense at the idea that these Mexican peasants would have to hire American gunmen to protect themselves; therefore, the script was changed to have them go north to buy guns. In the 1860's France had invaded Mexico and the Mexican government fled to northern Mexico. When the American Civil War ended President Lincoln ordered Phil Sheridan to Texas with 50,000 troops and ordered him to supply arms to the Mexican Rebels and to prepare for an invasion of Mexico. By the 1870's the French were gone and a weak Mexican government had little control of northern Mexico. Were the bandits in the movie supposed to be the losers in the war against France or the following power struggles, or are they Comancheros who had been trading with the Comanche Indians? In the 1870's Mexico was transitioning between the democratic government that had expelled the French and a dictator that would rule Mexico until the Revolution of 1910 so it is conceivable that there would be bands of bandits preying on peons in northern Mexico. As for the gunfighters, New Mexico in the 1970's experienced the Lincoln County War where many notorious gunmen were hired by wealthy landowners battling for control of New Mexico. The original script had the gunfighters as Civil War veterans but this was dropped in later re-writes. If the movie had been set in the 1880's then it would have been believable that there would have been out of work gunmen in New Mexico but then there would have been no bandits in northern Mexico until 1910. By the 1880's the New Mexico gunmen had moved onto Tombstone, Arizona. The weapons used were Colt revolvers that came out in 1875 and Winchester rifles. The ones in the movie looked to be model 1898's which put them out of the time period of the movie. This was typical of Westerns made before the 1970's. I first saw this movie on TV. The version you usually see on TV today is grainy and old. You also don't get to see it in wide screen format. This movie was an early wide screen movie that was coming into vogue in the early 1960's. The DVD is much cleaner and you get to see the original wide screen format. The music in the movie is great except that it was later used to sell cigarettes. The best quote in the movie is, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." Also since this is an American movie all the characters speak English including the Mexicans but if you get the DVD you can watch it in English, French or Spanish with any subtitles you want.

Great Soundtrack

This movie should be seen by everyone in Oklahoma. I saw it while I was a freshman at OSU. We had to watch it for our English class. When the book Grapes of Wrath came out people in Oklahoma didn't like it because it made everyone in Oklahoma look like ignorant hicks. Most Oklahomans are also very conservative and didn't like being associated with the left wing politics in the book. They prefer Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee image. The movie didn't have the politics of the book and Henry Fonda and the rest of the actors portrayed the Okies as ordinary people down on their luck. What still bothers native Oklahomans was that the book and the movie placed the character's farm outside of Sallisaw Oklahoma. Sallisaw is west of Fort Smith Arkansas in eastern Oklahoma and is not on Route 66 as shown in the movie. This made it look like the entire state of Oklahoma was over taken by the dust bowl. The dust bowl was only in far western Oklahoma. John Ford over simplified the cause of the western migration of the Okies. The movie implied that these people had been on the land 50 to 70 years. The truth was that these people had been homesteaders that had come to Oklahoma 25 to 30 years before and bought cheap land that U.S. government had taken from the Indian tribes in the 1890's. In the years before World War I there was lots of rain and western Oklahoma became over populated. During the first World War the wheat fields in France became no-man's land between the Allies and the Germans. Wheat prices went up and the Oklahoma farmers made lots of money. After the war wheat prices fell and farmers started falling deeper and deeper into debt. Unfortunately they were bad farmers using techniques from the east that destroyed the western prairie. When the 22 year drought cycle returned the the 1930's the top soil blew away creating the dust bowl. When banks began failing during the depression the banks began foreclosing on the loans. Ford used the collapse of the sharecropping system as the explanation for the farmers being forced off the land. The movie has some good road side scenes of Route 66 and uses downtown McAlester Oklahoma to double for Oklahoma City. There is a shot of the Court House in Sayre Oklahoma that is on Route 66. The movie shows how a small number of handbills advertising jobs in California started the mass migration of unemployed from Oklahoma to California. Once the story gets to California the story gets into the subject that Steinbeck knew about. The intolerance the Californians had toward the Okies. They didn't realize that these were the last settlers of the last western migration that had begun at the end of the Revolutionary War. The original settlers in California had been from the north and had been Pro-Union Republicans, these new settlers were Southern Democrats. The movie shows how the Californians thought they were some kind of Communist sympathizers and Union agitators. The Californians treated them like second class citizens. In the end the movie uses a U.S. Government camp to leave the impression that the solution to the problems of human suffering can be solved by the Government. This was the typical attitude at the hight of the New Deal in 1940. By the time the movie came out the Okies were being absorbed into the expanding military-industrial complex in support of World War II.

This is the best of the Star Wars Series. There is a complex story, lots of action, adult dialog, and no annoying rubber toy like creatures. Yoda is a muppet and looks like it but is done well enough that you believe he is a real character. I first saw this movie when it first came out at the old Leachman Theater in Stillwater OK about a month before I moved to Midwest City. At the time the revelation that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father was a surprise. Also the cliff hanger ending with Hans Solo being taken away by the bounty hunter left you wanting more. The original trio of movies had the best actors. You could believe the relationships between the characters. In the three prequels everything seemed melodramatic and unbelievable. All the story elements were explored or hinted at in Episode V. The only thing that wasn't revealed was who were the clones that fought in the Clone Wars. At the time some suggested that Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader were clones of each other and Obi Wan was a clone of the Emperor. After all in the cave on Dagoba it was Luke's face behind Darth Vader's mask and Alec Guinness played the Emperor behind a lot of makeup. As we now know the Storm Troopers were clones of each other. When the new and improved version came out they replaced Alec Guinness with Ian McDiarmid as the Emperor. Other than that there is very little change between the original version and the updated version. I have an old Laserdisc version of the original and a DVD box set of the improved versions. There is only nine minutes extra and a lot of that is in the added credits at the end. You did get to see more of the ice monster at the beginning of the movie and all the blue lines around the special effects are gone but other than that and the fact that the DVD is letter-boxed and the Laserdisc isn't, there is not much difference. But that just shows how good the original was that they couldn't make many improvements.

I first saw Star Wars in the old Leachman Theatre in Stillwater, Oklahoma. This was like nothing I had ever seen before. The special effects used in this movie had never been done before. The story was a simple adventure story with elements of western, sci-fi and swash-buckler movies of the past. It left you with an emotional high that was rare for a movie in the 1970's. I have an old LaserDisc version of this movie and the new DVD expanded version. The sound on the LaserDisc isn't that good compared to the DVD and the picture on the DVD is clearer and sharper with more vivid colors; however, the added effects sometimes helps the movie and sometimes just proves the saying that less is more. For instance, the digital version of Joba the Hut made him look too small. The widescreen version on the DVD didn't really add anything to the same scenes in the fullscreen LaserDisc version except for the scenes with the added special effects. Of the three original trio of Star Wars movies, this one has the most added effects. This was due to the limited budget and technology in the first movie. Like the 1933 King Kong movie, most of the special effects had to be invented as they made the movie. The later movies had the advantage of using proven technology and a bigger budget. The real secret to this movie is the relationship between the main characters. In the latest episodes the actors just don't seem to have the same chemistry. There was also no kid stuff in this movie. By the third Star Wars movie they had added a bunch of creatures that were designed to be turned into kid's toys. Although the movie was rated PG, it would have gotten a G rating except for the chopped off arm in the bar scene with the first light saber fight and the skeletons of Luke's dead aunt and uncle. it was as if they added these scenes intentionally to get the PG rating.

When I first saw Star Trek II in the Lewis and Clark Theater in Seattle Washington and heard the opening music come through the sound system, I said to myself, "They got it right this time." I wasn't disappointed. This is the best of all the Star Trek movies that featured the original cast. It has a direct connection to an original series episode with Khan played by Ricardo Montalban. The main disconnect is that when Chekov encounters Khan they recognize each other. The original episode with Khan was in the first season. In fact NBC wasn't going to OK the Star Trek series without a big star like Ricardo Montalban signing on as a guest star. Chekov didn't enter the scene until season two when NBC wanted a "young" character similar to the characters in their other TV show "The Monkees". The theme of the movie is the middle age crisis that Captain Kirk is going through and the revenge for being marooned that Khan is seeking. At one point Khan says that there is an old Klingon proverb that says that revenge is a dish that is best served cold. Ironically Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II says that it is an old Sicilian proverb that revenge is a dish best served cold. Oh well, it's actually French. Thanks to Industrial Light and Magic the special effects are excellent. The new uniforms are cool but the communicators were clunky looking. They should have dug out the ones they used on the TV show, they were better. The story is simple and fits right in with the tone of the original TV series. There is just the right amount of action and no long special effects scenes that add nothing to the story. I have this movie on Laserdisc. It is a full screen version made from a bad copy of the film and not cleaned up. There are a couple of spots where the film was scratched. The stereo sound is good but no surround sound. I haven't watched it on DVD but it's probably better.

Guys In Drag

This is supposed to be the funniest movie made. I don't know about that. I've seen funnier, but anytime you put two guys in drag you get an automatic laugh. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were very funny dressed as women. There are a lot of inside jokes about historical events, Hollywood, other movies and actors. The two main characters supposedly witness the St. Valentines Day massacre. The real massacre didn't happen the way they showed in this movie and the gangsters were all fictional, but they were in a garage and the victims were lined up against the wall. One of the subtle jokes here was that they were going to drive 100 miles on 40 cents worth of gas. Marilyn Monroe looked good except when she was on the beach. Supposedly she was pregnant while making this movie which made her look fat. They also put her and all the other women in the film in 1920's style bathing suits. Most of the women in the all female band are good looking. I first saw this movie on TV in 1969 at my Grandmother's house on a black and white TV. She could only get two stations in southeast Oklahoma so it was either on Channel 10 Ada or Channel 12 out of Sherman Texas. This movie has been a standard on late night movie channels or independent stations.

When this movie came out everyone thought it was the greatest movie they had ever seen. I just thought it was a good movie and that it had been so long since anyone had seen a good movie they had forgotten what a good movie was like. I saw this movie the first time at the Heritage Park Mall in Midwest City. Later that year in November I took my first trip to Seattle and while I was there I went to see it again in a big theater in the parking lot of a mall in Kent, WA. It had a stereo sound system unlike the theater in Midwest City. I was amazed that the gun shots during the gun battles were coming from different corners of the room. Sometimes while we were in Seattle we would make Christmas shopping trips to some of the local malls. I saw my first Laserdisc player in a mall south of Seattle. A few months after I got home I bought my first Laserdisc player. As soon as Raiders came out on Laserdisc I bought it. When I watched at home with the sound piped through my stereo the gun shots also came from different corners of the room. The Laserdisc is in full screen. I haven\'t seen the DVD but it probably comes in widescreen and even better sound. As for the movie, the plot is improbable, Karen Allen is young and good looking, and Harrison Ford runs and jumps snaps his whip like he knows what he is doing. Before you go see the latest movie you need to see this one first.

Red River is a classic western. It is the movie were John Wayne transitioned from playing a young handsome lending man to playing the crusty middle age John Wayne character he played in most of the rest of his movies. It's the story (however fictional) of the first cattle drive on the Chisholm Trial. Although they used short horn cattle and a few long horns (the real cattle drives were all longhorns) they captured the look and feel of a real cattle drive. The black and white helps convey the grittiness of a cattle drive. The story starts out in 1851 when John Wayne leaves a wagon train in Oklahoma that is on it's way to California. The problem is that the real wagon trains to the California gold fields in 1851 went through Nebraska on the Oregon Trail. After he leaves his girl friend with the wagon trail John Wayne and Walter Brennan go to Texas with a long horn bull. The wagon train is ambushed by Indians and only a young boy survives with a long horn cow. He joins up with John Wayne after John Wayne fights off the Indians. Of course the the guns he used were the type used in the Civil War ten years later, but that is typical of westerns in the 1940's through 1960's to use historically inaccurate props. Later in the movie when it's supposed to be 1865 the cowboys all have guns that were invented in the 1870's. In order to get his land John Wayne has to shoot a Mexican who says he works for a landlord that lives south of the Rio Grande. I suppose this is suppose to represent the Mexican War and John Wayne represents the U.S.A. Then the story jumps to 1865 and the young boy has grown into Montgomery Clift and the bull and cow to a herd of thousands of cattle. But then the Texas longhorns really were brought to Texas by the Spanish 200 years earlier and ran wild throughout Texas in the 1860's. All the men in Texas have just returned from the Civil War and are broke and in desperate need of money. John Wayne decides to organize a cattle drive to Missouri up the old Texas Road that runs from present day Dallas to present day Joplin. The movie tries to make it sound dangerous with outlaw bands waiting in Missouri to steal all the cattle and kill the cowboys. The truth was that the Texas Road went through the mountains and forests of eastern Oklahoma. The first cattle drives that took that route lost 20 to 30 percent of their herds in the thick blackjack forests. The Chisholm Trail went through the open plains of western Oklahoma with no trees. The cowboys could see their cattle for miles and lost very few and if they went at the right pace the cattle actually gained weight in the lush grasslands. When John Wayne hears about the new Chisholm Trail he doesn't believe there is a railroad in Kansas and wants to push ahead to Missouri. After a stampede some of his men desert and when they are caught he wants to hang them. Montgomery Clift stops him and takes his herd away from him and goes up the Chisholm Trail. In the movie they have already crossed the Red River into Oklahoma; however, the real Chisholm Trial starts in central Texas somewhere south of Dallas. Anyway they make their way to Abilene, meets a wagon train with dance hall girls on the way. Montgomery Clift falls in love with one of the women in the wagon train. John Wayne collects a posse and follows them to Abilene were there is the final confrontation. The End.

Somewhere the last series of Batman movies took a wrong turn and the public lost interest. This movie was back to square one to present Batman as he was intended in the Comic Books. However this movie waited until half the film was over before Batman showed up. It's a good movie but it waisted too much time with Bruce Wayne off learning Chinese martial arts. Then when Batman did show up they hid him in the shadows and had him moving so fast you could barely see him. The Batman is all about the Batman image, over the top villains, and high tech gadgets. This movie only had a few good images of Batman and the Scarecrow wasn't that menacing. The new Batmobile was cool. Much more practical for an urban environment than the traditional Batmobile. It was a good set up for this summer's Dark Knight movie.

This is a slick well made cops and robbers movie. It's set in the 1980's and is the story of a master counterfeiter and a Secret Service agent who is trying to catch him. He becomes obsessed when his partner is killed and steals the money he needs to set up the counterfeiter. I first saw this movie at someone's house who had rented it from Blockbuster. I had the VHS at one time but sold it to a pawn shop. Now I have the DVD. There are some interesting special features on the DVD including missing scenes and alternate endings. Watching it brings back memories of the 1980's. At the beginning of the movie an Arab suicide bomber tries to kill President Reagan but blows himself up falling off a hotel roof. Although the story is all fiction it shows how little things have changed since then. But is also shows how easy it was to counterfeit money back then and why they had to change our money to the more colorful version we have today.

Anyone else want to negotiate

This is a bizarre sci-fi comedy. It's like a story from the magazine "Heavy Metal". It's very cartoonish but with lots of action. Bruce Willis plays a cab driver in a New York set 300 years in the future. He was a former special operations military guy. An alien is sent to earth to save the planet from an evil ball of fire and the alien just happens to be a beautiful young girl. While fleeing from the military scientist who put her back together she falls into a flying cab driven by Bruce Willis. They join up and go to another planet where they fight some alien pirates and retrieve four stones needed to save the world. There is lot's of action, lots of jokes and lots of strange characters. The best line is after he shoots the leader of the pirates Bruce Willis says, "Anyone else want to negotiate?" I saw it first on a VHS tape I rented. The DVD is better, the sound is better on the DVD. It's a fun movie and worth watching.

This is another classic western. The single scene where Jack Palance's character "Wilson" shoots Elisha Cook's character "Stonewall" changed not only westerns but all action movies to follow. It was the first time a movie showed someone knocked off his feet buy a gunshot. It's true that a .45 has a lot of "knockdown" power but not enough to fling someone a foot through the air. If it did the recoil would have knocked Jack Palance's character back too. The movie was filmed in the Grand Teton National Park so you see the Grand Teton's in the background of almost every scene. The story is based on the historical Johnson County War between ranchers and homesteaders in Wyoming in the 1890's. The movie points out both sides of the argument but makes out the ranchers to be evil. Truth was both sides were wrong. Although the open range was an inefficient way to raise cattle, the high plains were too dry to raise crops. The plowing up of the prairie grass in the southern plains resulted in the dust bowls of the 1930's. The story is told through the eyes of a kid. The best part of the movie is the final gunfight. One of the best gunfights in western movie history. Old Ben Johnson from Shidler, Oklahoma is in the movie. He was a young man then. That's near Bartlesville. I had a friend in college from Bartlesville. He told me old Ben Johnson used to hang out at the stores in Bartlesville dressed in overalls with the other farmers and ranchers and no one knew who he was. Every once in a while he'd get bored and come in on a Saturday all dressed up and driving his Cadillac and would sign autographs. I first saw this movie on TV. When I was a kid my family drove through the Grand Teton National Park on our way to Yellowstone one summer. I didn't make the connection to this movie till years later. The novel was in my high school library. I read the first chapter. In the novel Shane was a urban character wearing city clothes. In the movie Shane wore a buckskin shirt.

This is a good movie. It's about four adrenaline junkie surfers who rob banks to finance their fun. When they rob banks they wear rubber President's masks. Patrick Swayze plays their leader. Keanu Reeves and Gary Bussy play FBI agents trying to track them down. Lori Petty plays the love interest for the movie. There is lots of action, lots of good surfing shots, lots of good skydiving shots. Although the movie is set in 1990 the feel and mood is more like the 1960's. The theme of the movie is male bonding. Keanu Reeves gets beat-up by a naked biker/suffer chick; therefore, the movie is rated R. I didn't see this movie in the theaters but rented the video tape when it came out on VHS. I was watching a lot of VHS movies back then. I now have the DVD. It has some good special features. This is one of Patrick Swayze's better movies. Much better than Road House. John C. McGinley plays the FBI boss much the same way he plays the head doctor on the TV show Scrubs. Gary Bussy is crazy as only Gary Bussy can play crazy. Although the surfing shots were good the skydiving shots were not physically possible. On the DVD special features you can see how they did those scenes. Looks real on film though.

This was one of the last of the good western movies made before the demise of the western movies in the 1970's. It came out in 1969 and broke the pattern of ultra-violent Italian Westerns. This was a light hearted but serious story about two true life old west outlaws that robbed many banks and trains but never killed anyone. The exploits Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were first put on film in the first silent movie to tell a story in 1903 called The Great Train Robbery. In 1903 this was considered a current event. In 1969 it became the story of two anti-establishment characters. The movie became the basis for the 1970's TV show Alias Smith and Jones. I didn't see the movie when it first came out, I saw it when it was re-released in 1975 at the Leachman Theater in Stillwater Oklahoma. When I got my LaserDisc player in 1982 I bought this movie on a Magnetic Video LaserDisc. It was in stereo with a pan and scan format. I just got the DVD. You do get a little more of the picture in the wide screen format. The DVD does have some good special features on the second disk. This movie made Robert Redford a star. The real Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid lived at the end of the post Civil War Wild West era. Jesse James was dead, Frank James and the Younger brothers were in prison. Bill Dolan and the Dalton Gang were also all dead when the Hole In The Wall gang started their train robbery exploits. In the early 20th century the old steam engines in the west were being replaced by larger faster engines that could outrun a horse making train robbing impractical. Also new communication technologies such as the telephone and improved cheaper photography made law enforcement easier. The movie tells a fictionalized version of how the advances in technology and a super posse forced Butch and Sundance to flee to South America. There are lots of good one liners in this movie.

classic

This is a good movie because Sean Connery is in it. The story about a man who can't be killed is kind of silly but the sword fights are good. The other thing that makes the movie good is the bad guy. A black knight called a Kurgan. A good bad guy can really make a movie. The bad guy is heavily punk rock influenced. The movie was made in the 1984 when there still was a punk rock element in New York. Most of the movie is just explaining who these immortals are and setting up the final battle a the end of the movie. I saw part of this movie on HBO at an old girl friend's apartment. Latter I watched the entire movie on HBO at home. I now have the DVD. It's a little different than the original movie. They added a few extra scenes. The origins of the immortals is left a mystery in this movie. I went to the theater to see the sequel and was disappointed that they tried to explain the origins of the immortal as aliens from another planet. I didn't like this explanation. They should have left is a mystery. They could have found another way to bring Sean Connery back. I was in Fort Lauderdale back in 1998 and went to the Hard Rock Cafe in a new convention center. They had the Japanese sword used in the movie on display.

This is the best anti-war movie of the 1970's. It's ironic because the Richard Hooker the author of the book was a right wing Korean War vet who was proud of his service and wanted to tell some of the humorous stories that happened to people he knew or had heard about. But the screen writer, Ring Lardner Jr. was a communist who had been thrown in jail during the Korean War. Robert Altman's style of directing mangled both the book and the script developed from the book. But he made a great movie. Some of the lines in the movie are in the book. The movie was made during the Vietnam War so they tried to fool the audience by putting several Vietnamese props. They even used 1960's football helmets instead of 1950's helmets and the hair cuts were from 1970. For Americans who lived through the Korean and Vietnam war it didn't matter. It was just one long 25 year war that just changed locations. There were lots of characters in the book but the movie compressed these characters into just a few in the movie. It made the MASH units seem small. The TV show made it seem even smaller. These mobile hospitals were based on the field hospitals of World War II. I once saw a book that was the official history of the field hospitals in Italy during World War II. These hospitals were very large with hundreds of doctors and nurses. The MASH units in Korea were smaller but still each one had about ten doctors and a dozen nurses. When I was in college before VCR's were common our dorm got money from the student fund and rented the film MASH to show at a MASH themed party we were having. Films have a 5 second count down on the leader before the film starts. On the film MASH at the 1 second mark instead of the number 1 there was a picture of a reclining girl in a bikini. When I spent some time in Seattle Washington I saw MASH on a Canadian channel shown on the cable system in the motel I was staying at. It was interesting that the censors in Canada cut out different words than the American TV censors. Humphrey Bogart made a MASH movie in 1953 called "Battle Circus". I have a laserdisc of the movie MASH and the new DVD. It's better in wide screen version.

This was supposed to be the end of the Star Wars series but twenty years later they did a prequel series. I first saw this at a theater in Midwest City, OK and was very disappointed. I had been waiting for three years for the conclusion of "The Empire Strikes Back" expecting a movie just as good. They start off going to Jobba the Hutt's lair to rescue Han Solo. The place is full of rubber looking creatures ideal for reduction into kid's toys. After they rescue Han Solo, Luke Skywalker rushes off to finish his training with Yodda. When he gets there we find out he needs no more training after all the concern in the previous movie. All we find out is that Darth Vader is in fact Luke's father. Then everyone rushes over to destroy the new Death Star and Luke confronts Darth Vader and the Emperor. The only interesting plot development is that Princess Leia is Luke's sister. The battle on the forest planet goes too easily for the good guys. Are we expected to believe that little stone age creatures can defeat Imperial Storm Troopers in full battle armor? Everything works out just right and the good guys win and everyone has a party. No real suspense. Of course the Anti-hero of the series betrays the dark side kills the Emperor and dies. They got over ambitious with the special effects and there were some flaws that are barely noticeable unless you watch in slow motion and know what to look for. In the 1997 special edition they corrected all these errors and added a lot of computer graphics characters to Jobba's lair. They also revised the ending to show young Darth Vader instead of the old one and showed all the planets in the expanded Star Wars universe celebrating the death of the Emperor. The whole movie is just one long conclusion to the series. A guy I was working with when it first came out took his two young sons to see the movie. They were too young to read and he started reading the opening scroll to them and the whole theater went quiet and he found himself reading it out loud to every kid there.

The third Star Trek Movie only served to bring Mr. Spock back from the dead after they killed him in Star Trek II. It's also where the reputation that odd number Star Trek movies aren't any good. The story doesn't amount to much but then they shouldn't have killed off Spock in the second movie. He's too good of a character. I'd put this story along the lines of the episode in the original series were the alien women steal Spock's brain. Leonard Nimoy directed the movie. It was the only way they could get him to come back. The actress who replaced Kirstie Alley wasn't as good. That's why the character never came back in later movies. I'd heard that the reason Kirstie Alley didn't come back was because she went "Hollywood". I guess that means she wanted more money. You get to see the new Klingons for the first time since the first movie. It's the form the Klingons take for the Next Generation TV show and all the future movies. Not only did they change the look of the Klingons they established that the Klingon society was a chaotic warrior society where the most ruthless get ahead. The original Klingons had been a military dictatorship were everyone obeyed orders. They had been patterned after the Soviet Union and the Nazi's. It's interesting how they kept changing the Klingon world from one movie to the next and from one TV show to the next. The Klingons are still the best Star Trek bad guys. This movie is were they make the first deviation to more of a pirate/criminal society where the individual commanders make their own decisions without direction from the home world. Without the Klingons this wouldn't be much of a movie.

it really is the worst ever made

The American remake of Godzilla is loud. The special effects are good but are about the same as Jurasic Park. Taco Bell promoted this movie. I still have one of the plastic cups they sold their pop in that summer. They kept the general premise of the original story, a monster created by a nuclear blast. Except being a dinosaur he's a giant Iguana. They also blamed the French. The U.S.A. set of A-Bombs in the South Pacific too. But we get an interesting French character that way. And Iguanas are from South America and the Caribbean. There are a few species of Iguana in a few Pacific Islands but not where the nuclear testing took place. But it's Science Fiction that nuclear radiation would cause an Iguana to grow to the size of a sky scraper or bring a dinosaur back to life anyway. Basically the story is that Godzilla sinks a Japanese factory ship then crosses Central America and Jamaica and goes to New York City. In New York he hides in the sky scrapers and fights the army and trashes the city. They made the movie with a little tongue in check humor. In a way the movie turns out to be prophetic. This was before 2001 so the World Trade Center is in the center of all the skylines shown in the movie. On September 11, 2001 the world saw the sky scrapers of New York trashed for real. It kind of takes the humor out of watching this movie.

This is the first of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies. Johnny Weissmuller was the best of all actors to play Tarzan. The main reason is because he perfected the Tarzan Yell. In this movie he is still young and trim and looks the part of Tarzan perfectly. The movie has nothing to do with the original book Tarzan of The Apes. In this movie they never explain where Tarzan came from. Since this movie was made just after the transition to sound movies from the silent era, there are long stretches without any dialog or background music. The story is basically that Jane and her Father are looking for a mythical elephant's graveyard. They think it is on top of an escarpment that doesn't exist in the real world. Tarzan finds them and snatches Jane. The movie is a love story between Jane and Tarzan with a lot of action thrown in. Tarzan wrestles lions and crocodiles and at the end a giant ape. Of course the apes in both the Tarzan books and the Tarzan movies don't exist in real life. Edgar Rice Burroughs made them up. In Africa there are chimpanzees and gorillas but no large vicious man-like apes. A lot of stock footage of actual African Natives is used in the beginning of the movie. Other than that this Africa looks a lot like Southern California. Although they used baby chimpanzees for the baby apes, the adult apes are obviously people in ape suits. The crocodiles are mechanical and the elephants have fake canvas ears. For people living in the early 1930's this was a sexy exiting movie. It was good on Saturday afternoons on black and white television when I was a kid. Today the lack of dialog and the primitive sound effects in the long action scenes can get kind of boring. But the movie is a classic.

The sequel to 'Tarzan The Ape Man' is considered the best of Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan movies. It's a rehash of the first movie but with a larger budget and more skin than all the other Tarzan movies put together (not counting Bo Derek's remake). Instead of lots of stock footage they have lots of black extras in the background of the opening scenes. Some of them are women casually wondering around topless. Jane wears a leather outfit totally open on the sides. The DVD includes an infamous nude swimming scene that was cut out in 1934. The movie is too slow at the beginning. They take too long to get to Tarzan and Jane. Every time Jane wanders off alone some animal attacks her and Tarzan comes to the rescue and wrestles the animal and stabs it to death. Then Tarzan who kills animals with his knife is offended when the great white hunters want to carry off a bunch of elephant tusks from long dead elephants. Tarzan is the first animal rights activist. Tarzan is almost superhuman in this movie. He wrestles a crocodile that's bigger than any living crocodile. Some of the best lion wrestling scenes are in this movie. After this movie the series got more juvenile which I liked when I was a kid and they showed these movies on Saturday afternoon TV.

boring

I first saw this movie on TV when I was a kid. However, it was a school night and my folks made me go to bed at 8:00 so I didn't get to see the Martian. All my friends at school whose folks let them stay up late got to see the Martian. When I got my first LaserDisc Player this was one of the first LaserDiscs I bought so I could see the ending to this movie. The story is the original alien invasion story. Every alien invasion story since then is just a rewrite of this movie's story. The original story was written in the 1890's and was set in England. This movie is set in post World War II California. In the 19th Century the European powers had expanded their colonial empires by using their industrial revolution weaponry to overwhelm older less advanced societies. The story in this movie explores how we would react if aliens from outer space with advanced weapons tried to conquer Earth. The special effects were outstanding in 1953 but crude by today's standards. The depiction of an atomic bomb explosion was as close to real as they could make it. The Martian looked like a headless E.T. The main flaw in the story is that by 1950 everyone knew that Mars was a lifeless planet. In the 1890's when the story was first written there was a Martian craze going on because it had been reported that there were cannals on Mars. People thought that it meant intelligent life had built them. Turns out the cannals were optical illustions and when they finally photographed Mars through a telescope the cannals disappeared. There is a pro-religion theme to the movie that you wouldn't filnd in today's Hollywood movies. The original story also was prediction of the World Wars that took place in the 20th century. The movie is looking back after World War II to the past World Wars and is warning that the next World War would wipe out mankind.

This movie is John Ford's attempt to tell the story of the Northern Cheyenne Indian's escape from Indian Territory and their return to their homeland in Montana. The basis of the movie is a true story that occurred in the summer and fall of 1878. The movie however skims over the historical details in order to fit the mold of a typical John Ford western. If you want the full story read Chapter Fourteen of the book "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." As usual John Ford uses Monument Valley Arizona to fill in for Oklahoma. He tries to show that the Indians were on a reservation in the middle of a desert. The truth was that Northern Cheyenne arrived in Oklahoma in August of 1877 the hottest time of the year in Oklahoma and they were not acclimated to the hot weather. These Northern Cheyenne had been at the Battle of the Little Big Horn and as punishment had been shipped south to live with the Southern Cheyenne and to separate them from their Sioux allies. When they arrived no one had made arraignments to feed them and there was not enough food to feed both the Northern and Southern Cheyenne. In addition they were forced to live along the mosquito invested rivers that resulted in a malaria outbreak that began killing them. Richard Widmark plays an army officer who is a composite of many cavalrymen who served in Indian Territory in those days; however, his views were of a more modern politically correct nature than the attitudes of the true soldiers in those days, although there were some who filled reports with the officials at Fort Sill in order to get more food and medicine for the suffering Cheyenne. Ricardo Montalban plays Little Wolf and Gilbert Roland plays Dull Knife the actual leaders of the Northern Cheyenne. When the Cheyenne made their break in September 1878 they were chased to the Cimarron River were the cavalry soldiers caught up to them. This was shown in the movie but the movie implies that a reckless officer played by Patrick Wayne attacked the Indians after an Indian played by Sal Mineo fired the first shot. To show how every cowboy, farmer and townsmen from Kansas to Nebraska came out to chase the Cheyenne; John Ford inserts Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday into the story when they weren't even involved. This was done to add some comic relief to the movie. Jimmy Stewart played Wyatt Earp but really was just playing himself. Carroll Baker plays a Quaker missionary lady who accompanies the Cheyenne on their trek even though at this time in Oklahoma history a white woman in Indian Territory had a life expectancy of about six months. The last half of the movie shows how the band of Cheyenne split in two. Half went with Dull Knife to Fort Robinson Nebraska. Karl Malden plays Captain Oskar Wessels who was an actual historical figure at Fort Robinson who took the Cheyenne prisoners. The movie then shows the events at Fort Robinson fairly accurately when it shows how the Indians rebelled when told they were to be shipped south and how they were shot down in a gunfight with the soldiers there. The end of the movie has Edward G. Robinson playing the Secretary of Interior who intervenes on behalf of the Cheyenne and lets them stay in the north. The truth was that the Secretary of the Interior was named Carl Schurz and was more interested in cutting the budget in the Indian Office and was actually the cause of the lack of food and medicine in Indian Territory. John Ford tries to paint a happy ending to the story but the truth was that of 927 Cheyenne Indians who arrived in Oklahoma in 1877 less than 100 made it back to their homeland in the north where their descendants live to this day.

This movie is based on a very good book. The movie is fairly true to the book but lacks the detail of the book. The movie has some of the best comic actors of the early 1970's. The book and movie are not linear in flow. They jump all over the place but eventually everything fits together. The book does this better than the movie. You need to read the book before you see the movie. The story is set in 1945 in the last month of the war in Europe on a small island in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Italy. It is about a B-25 bombarder named Yossarian that wants to go home after flying 50 missions. The war is almost over but the war in Italy is still going on and all the new flight crews are being shipped to the Pacific. In order to keep flight crews the commanding officer keeps raising the number of missions before a person can go home. Yossarian tries to convince the base doctor that he's crazy. The doctor tells him that only a crazy man would fly combat missions but if he asks not to fly then he must not be crazy; therefore, he has to fly. That's the catch-22. The book was written in 1955 and is a satire of 1950's America and was using World War II as a backdrop. The movie was made in 1970 during the Vietnam War and is more of an anti-war comedy and only uses a small part of the satire of the book. The actors played the character's a little more over the top than they are portrayed in the book. The book is funnier because the characters seem so real. In the movie only Alan Arkin, who plays Yossarian plays his character as written in the book. The rest of the actors exaggerate their characters for laughs. Strangely though, the movie was filmed in North Africa and except for the B-25 bombers and the 1940's uniforms it looks like it could be set in modern day Iraq or Afghanistan. There are a few nude scenes which got the movie an R rating. I'd seen parts of the movie on TV when I was in college but of course it had been edited. I didn't see the uncut version until I bought the DVD. I do remember seeing a Life Magazine when I was in high school with pictures of all the B-25 bombers used to make the movie. I think it was the last time that many B-25's were every flown together.

Better than the second one.

This movie was based on the 1960's TV show "The Fugitive". It's a good movie with good special effects and good acting. It is probably one of Tommy Lee Jones best roles as the U.S. Marshal searching for Dr. Richard Kimble. Much of the Movie was filmed in Chicago and the surrounding area in Illinois. The special effects in the first part of the movie are good, especially the train wreck. The climax to the Movie takes place in the Chicago Hilton Hotel that I enjoyed watching since I once stayed there when I was in High School when it was still the Conrad Hilton Hotel. They used to hold the National 4-H Congress there and I went as part of the Oklahoma delegation. I recognized some of the banquet halls in the movie that I had been in. I have this movie on Laser Disc. My sister gave it to me as a birthday present. She got it at a place that was having a close out sale of all its Laser Discs. The movie and the original TV show was inspired by Dr. Sam Sheppard from Cleveland, Ohio who was falsely accused of murdering his wife in 1954. Dr. Sheppard never escaped the way Dr. Kimble did but was acquitted in a re-trial that took place while the TV show "The Fugitive" was on the air. The movie has a complex conspiracy theme to the story that was not in the TV show. Except for the opening credits that began each episode showing the one armed man in the headlights of a car and Dr. Kimble coloring his blond hair black, the TV show never showed how Dr. Kimble escaped or how the murder took place. In the last two episodes of the TV show Dr. Kimble finds the one armed man and finds out he was just a witness who knew the identity of the real killer. In the movie the one arm man was the killer and was working for a corrupt group of doctors trying to get a drug company to sell a drug that didn't work. The movie staged the murder similar to the Shepard case except that Dr. Shepard claims to have fought with a "bushy haired man" not a "one armed man". The real Shepard case was never solved and had a lot of sexual motives that were theorized as being the motive for the murder. This was left out of the movie and the TV show. In the TV show, the running from the law was just a plot device that allowed the writers to use the same formula used on many 1950's and 1960's TV westerns beginning with the Lone Ranger. The lone hero travels from one town to the next doing good deeds and helping people. This overall plot was used again in the TV version of "The Incredible Hulk" in the 1970's and 1980's.

Pioneering Science Fiction movie. This is one of the first Science Fiction films. I have the 1998 DVD. It was made from a poor copy and you can't see a lot of the pictures. It has poor contrast and a lot of the pictures are so faded you can't make out what's happening. I also got the restored authorized version. It's 100% better. The pictures are clear with good contrast compared to the 1998 unrestored version. It is a silent picture that makes it hard to follow since it's too long. Since the new version has restored some lost scenes that makes it even longer. There are lots of classic scenes that are used in TV and modern movies since the film was in the public domain for many years. There is also a scene not shown on TV, a topless scene where the android does a exotic dance in a night club. The new version has been digitally restored and missing scenes added. What looks like a topless scene in the unrestored version turns out to be large pasties that can't be made out in the faded out version but can be seen in the restored version. The restored version added text descriptions of the scenes they couldn't find. There is supposed to be new footage found in South America but wasn't added in this 2001 version. Maybe another revised version will come out in the future. They copied the robot for C3PO in Star Wars. The German director was inspired by a trip to New York. However his wife wrote the script and she was a socialist who later became a Nazi. Her vision of the 21st century looked a lot like the world Hitler tried to create. This was supposed to be Hitler's favorite movie. This shows what the Germans were thinking in the 1920's. They believed they lived in a world where the people were cogs in a machine and the planners lived in luxury. All that was needed for a perfect world was a savior to set things right. This was the theme of the movie. When Hitler came along the German people latched onto him as that savior. The director Fritz Lang later realized how stupid the story was years later. When Hitler came to power he split Germany and moved to the United States to make movies in Hollywood while his ex-wife stayed behind and became a loyal Nazi.

The special Effects are excelent.

OK better than 1976, 1933 was best.

This movie isn't so much bad as it is stupid. The heroine is an angry young woman who seems to hate everyone, steps on everyone to get to the top and still people help her. In real life someone would have kicked the tar out of her. Never mind that an unknown girl with no money could never work her way from a Las Vegas nude stripper bar to become a lead dancer in a major casino show. Never mind how gross it was when she licked the brass pole. Did the writers know what's on those poles. As the heroine movies up to the top and back down everyone who helps her has bad things happen to them. The only reason to watch this movie is the naked women. This movie is loaded with naked women. Every scene seemed to have a naked woman in it. There is also not a single positive character in the whole movie. It would be impossible to put on a big show like that if everyone is arguing with each other all the time. Supposedly this movie has become a cult classic because it's so bad.

Best Sword and Sorcery Movie.
This is the movie that moved Arnold Schwarzenegger from champion body builder to a movie star. Arnold was a perfect fit to play Conan. It's one of the best sword and sorcery movies ever made. It's based on the Conan stories written by Robert E. Howard. Howard died young and others continued writing their own Conan stories. This movie is not based on any of Howard's stories but was written independently based on his character. The story in the movie seems to be inspired by the religious cults that were plaguing the country starting in the 1960's and were reaching their peak in the late 1970's. In the movie a cult leader leads an attack against the village were Conan is born in order to steal the steel swords and to kidnap the children. As a slave Conan is forced to push the spokes of a grist mill until he is strong enough to push it by himself. He is then used as a pit fighter like a Roman gladiator. He is trained to fight with swords and then is released. As a free man he becomes a thief and starts a search for the killers of his family. When he finds the snake cult he goes to free the daughter of a king and kills the cult leader but looses his lover. The sword fighting in the movie is well done. Sword fights in movies are difficult. Some movies use rubber swords or collapsable swords. This move used real swords. The movie was criticized for using trip lines on the horses; therefore, you'll see stunts that aren't performed anymore due to animal cruelty laws. I first saw this movie in Midwest City at the theater in Heritage Park Mall. I bought the Laserdisc of this movie at a mall in Fort Lauderdale while I was on a training trip. I brought it home in my suitcase. The Laserdisc is in full screen format. This movie needs to be seen in wide screen format. I also saw this movie on ABC. It was a censored version that had all the nudity, cannibalism, and excessive violence edited out. They even changed the ending. Instead of throwing the cult leaders head down the stairs Conan throws his headless body. They had to have filmed different versions of each R rated scene. One for TV and one for the theaters. The best line in the movie is, "Do you want to live forever?"

This is the version of part two of Superman The Movie as Richard Donner intended. It's interesting and very different from the 1980 version. The owners of the rights to make a Superman movie took 5 years to get it done. In the process they hired many writers and directors. It shows at the beginning of the first movie when they started out with the comic book image of the Daily Planet building and a child narrator talking about the Great Depression. By the time they hired Richard Donner the movie was moved from the 1930's to the 1970's. This version is almost as good as Part I. It's not cheesy and cartoonish the way the 1980 version was. The movie begins with the trial of the three Krypton criminals with Marlon Brando playing Jor-el. Then it highlights the main points of the first movie before the credits. The plot covers the escape of the Krypton criminals and the romance between Superman and Lois Lane. In this version they did away with the terrorists in Paris and had the Krypton criminals escape when Superman pushes a missile with an atomic warhead into space which ties this version more closely with the first movie. This makes the movie shorter. The 1980 version actually had a better story with the romance of Clark Kent/Superman and Lois Lane. The best part is the fight between Superman and the three Krypton criminals in the streets of Metropolis (New York). The silly jokes with the bystanders was retained because that's all they had to work with but it detracts from the seriousness of this version. The part of all these movies that I didn't like was that Metropolis was obviously New York. I guess it was cheaper to use an existing city than to create a fictional one. In the end Superman turns back time to fix all the damage done but that was also done in the first movie. This DVD is worth watching to see how Superman II should have been.

This movie was made in 1975 but is set sometime in the early 21st century. I first saw it on TV in my dorm room in college with a bunch of other guys. It was supposed to be this great movie but it was so laid back that it kind of got boring during the parts between the rollerball matches. When I got the CD and watched it again it still puts you asleep. The rollerball matches are exiting but are mostly filmed close up so you can't see what's going on except for a bunch of guys fighting each other. The background of the story is a world were corporations have replaced governments and are running the world. The corporate leaders don't want a sports superstar to become too popular. The James Caan character Jonathan E. is becoming that popular so someone has decided he should retire. He refuses and so the game is changed to make it more dangerous in hopes that he will be killed. In the end he defies the odds and is the sole surviving player in the championship game. It's an interesting film to see how close we have come to the future predicted in the film. In the movie the corporations have ended all wars and use rollerball to provide violent entertainment for the common people. Today corporations own most of the professional sports teams and are going to local governments to finance new sports arenas. Local governments are using eminent domain to clear land for corporate strip malls that put small local businesses out business. Professional athletes were allowed to abuse their bodies with steroids for years in order to increase the number of fans. So in a way the movie is still relevant today.

When this movie came out there was so much hype I almost didn't go see it. I waited until late summer when it came to the little Perry, Oklahoma theater. I went to see it on a Friday night and all the Junior High and Middle School kids in Perry showed up and filled up the theater. The Perry theater was in pretty bad shape (the kind of place where your feet stuck to the floor) and was torn down a year latter. Every time the shark came out of the water the kids would scream so loud you couldn't hear the dialog. The first time they screamed for a two minutes. I even yelled for everyone to be quiet so I could hear the dialog. The movie turned out to be better than I expected. The mechanical shark looked OK until the end when they had it come completely out of the water and it didn't bend. Most of the underwater shots of the shark were of a real shark. You could tell the difference because the real shark was flexible and thrashes around. The fake shark was stiff and had a hinge in it's jaw. When I got my first Laser Disk player one of the first movies I bought was a DiscoVision version of Jaws. That's the first time I got to watch it without a roomful of screaming kids. It's in full screen and not wide screen. It's grainy and the sound is not that great but you can see the movie without any glitches. The parts of movie were the shark was killing people on the beach was the part that made people afraid to go the beach for years after this movie came out. The best part of the movie is the three men on the boat chasing the shark. I really liked the the part where Quint and Hooper are comparing scars and then when the Chief asks Quint about a scar on his arm we find out that Quint was on the USS Indianapolis. His description of the Indianapolis sinking is the most chilling part of the movie. Best quote: "We're going to need a bigger boat." The movie was rated PG but it almost got an R or an X because of the nude shot of the first victim. In the original version they could see the girls pubic hair. They darkened the film so that in the released version you can just barely see it. We now know that this was the first of the summer blockbuster movies followed by Star Wars, Superman and all the other summer movies that followed in the 1980's and 1990's.

This first episode of the original TV show Battlestar Galactica was a classic example of bad 1970's TV. I first saw it on the Sunday night when it was first shown in the TV room of Stout Hall at Oklahoma State University. I got there late and missed the first 15 minutes and then in the middle of the show Jimmy Carter interrupted the show for an hour to show the signing of the Camp David Accords. I have an MCA Laser Disc of the version shown in movie theaters outside the U.S. When you watch it you see how bad the acting was for most of the supporting cast. The whole thing was a big rip-off of previous movies. Obviously was the rip-off of Star Wars. George Lucas even sued them over it. John Dykstra produced the show and did the special effects and had also done the special effects for Star Wars. They ripped off the book Chariot of the Gods. They ripped off The Ten Commandments. They ripped off Bonanza and Wagon Train. They ripped off Star Trek. Those are the just the ones I saw. There was an obvious theme in the story that was critical of Jimmy Carter's policies of negotiating with the Soviet Union. That's probably why he interrupted it. That and the fact that he knew there were going to be high ratings for the show. There are some good parts to the movie. Dirk Benedict's Starbuck character was fun and Laurette Spang was hot. But I like to call the character's after their Bonanza inspiration. Pa Adama, Hossbuck, Little Apollo and Sheriff Teigh. There was actually only about 15 minutes of special effects and they kept using them over and over again. They used Tektronix Vector Scopes for the displays used on the space craft. The Cylon voices were cool but they were clumsy copies of the Star Wars Storm Troopers. They were a rip-off of the robot in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. They Laser Disc version I have the Cylons lop Baltar's head off. On the TV show they let him live so they can have a human bad guy. Since there was a lot of political pressure to clean up TV they use a lot of stupid fake curse words. The new reinvention of show shown on the Sci-Fi network is 1000 times better than the 1978 version. So if you see the old version on TV or rent a DVD prepare to laugh your ass off. It's really so bad it's good.

I first saw this old movie on late night TV back in the 1970's. It was a staple of late night TV in the 1970's. It's a funny movie without being too over the top. It's loosely based on some real events in World War II but stretches the truth a bit. The basic joke is what happens when you put five large breasted Army nurses on a crowded submarine with with men a long way from home. For a movie made in 1959 it was as risque as they could make it but is very tame by today's standards. Compared to the TV shows in 1959 it was very risque. The movie starts in 1959 then flash backs to December 1941. The fictional submarine is sunk by the Japanese while tied to the dock in the Philippines. This happened to a real submarine in World War II but it had to be destroyed before the Japanese could capture it. In the movie they raise it and repair it in four days. Not very likely. The Subs they used in the movie were all made after 1942 but where of the type being used in the Pacific in 1941. They had jeeps too but the jeeps weren't delivered until after the attack on Pearl Harbor and wouldn't have been in the Philippines. Tony Curtis plays a playboy officer who steals parts for the submarine. Cary Grant plays the sub Captain. He was the right age for the 1959 beginning and ending but he was too old for the 1941 Captain. Most of the World War II Sub Captains were in their 30's not grey haired old men. Tony Curtis had just made the movie "Some Like it Hot" were he did a Cary Grant imitation. Also apparently using pink primer paint is common when there is a shortage of red and white primer. The women in the film were good looking but not overly hot like in the 1977 TV remake. Many of the supporting cast became latter TV stars on shows like McHale's Navy, Bewitched, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Love Boat.

This was the movie that defined the Burt Reynolds character. Although his character's name is Paul Crewe, Burt is really just playing himself. Burt Reynolds had played football at Florida State and had wanted to play pro-football but a knee injury prevented him from playing in the pros. This movie was his chance to play football for money. Originally they had intended this movie to be filmed at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester Oklahoma but the summer they were going to film it the inmates at Big Mac decided to burn the prison down in the 1973 prison riot. So the film crew headed of to Georgia to film at the Georgia State Penitentiary at the invitation of Governor Jimmy Carter. Just think if they hadn't burned the prison at McAlester, Jimmy Carter would have never made any Hollywood contacts to fund his run for the President and the whole history of the U.S would have been different. The only reference to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary left in the movie was when they asked the Indian were he played football at and he said "Oklahoma State". Burt says, "Oklahoma State U?" and the Indian replies "Oklahoma State Prison." There are a lot of retired NFL players in the movie which help make the football scenes but it's still a sloppy looking game but then maybe it should look sloppy since this was supposed to represent semi-pro football. In the remake they moved the location to California but that looses the southern feel of the story. The basis of the movie is the southern passion for football at every level of the sport.

This is Quentin Tarantino's first movie. He was the writer. Christian Slater plays a character based on Tarantino. This was made when Patricia Arquette was hot. It's very violent, but a lot of good characters. Brad Pitt plays a cool stoner. Very good movie.

In the late 1970's New York City had reached the lowest point in its history. But then so had most major American cities in the late 1970's. The movie is based on the experiences of two New York City policemen who worked the streets of the Bronx in the late 1970's. It's set in 1980 but many of the events in the movie would have been more likely to have happened in the late 1960's than the late 1970's. Most of the movie is shot on location in New York so it has a more authentic look than a film shot in Hollywood. Pam Grier plays a killer prostitute who starts a killing spree by shooting two cops. This is the best acting in the movie. Most of the movie is routine cop stories with back stories of the social life the the two main characters. Paul Newman and Ed Asner are the stars of the movie. They both try to talk with New York accents but they can only hold it for a couple of words before their natural accents come through. The actors from New York do a better job with the accents. The events of the movie were before the AIDS epidemic and the crack cocaine epidemic. The drug of choice in the movie was heroin. Heroin had been a big problem in New York in the 1960's but starting in 1970 the Federal Government began to crack down on the heroin smugglers. By 1980 heroin was hard to find on the streets but cocaine had replaced it. There was no cocaine users shown in the movie. The characters in the movie implied that the Pam Grier character has started using "angel dust"(PCP) that caused her to flake out. I think I first saw this movie in the old Penn Square mall in Oklahoma City. Penn Square mall has been totally remodeled since then and I'm sure the south Bronx in New York has been rebuilt since 1980 too. The crime rate in New York is dramatically lower today than it was in the 1970's. In the movie you can see the wrecking crews tearing down the old buildings. America is becoming a trailer park nation. It's cheaper to tear down old buildings and build new than to maintain old buildings. The movie shows the social effects of housing people in old run down buildings in crowded over populated cities when the economic base of the city is gone. New York was a city built as a sea port and was America's front door to the world. In the age of air travel New York has been trying to reinvent itself and find a new economic base. New York in the 21st century won't have the population level it had in the 20th century. This movie is a good record of the shrinking of New York.

This John Ford directed movie is one of the transitional westerns filmed in the 1950's. It's a serious movie with adult themes, but still has humorous characters found in older kid oriented westerns. It has an underling theme of rape and interracial sex but never comes out and says it. The characters talk around the subject since these were taboo subject matters in the 1950's. The movie begins in 1868 Texas, but most of the movie is filmed in Monument Valley Utah and doesn't look like west Texas. The story is loosely based on the capture of Cynthia Ann Parker, the mother of Quanah Parker the last of the Comanche Chiefs. Cynthia Ann Parker was captured in east Texas the same year as the Texas Revolution; however, there were other similar cases throughout the 19th century of Indians capturing white children. Although the movie is set between 1868 and 1873 the weapons used are Colt Single Action .45's that came out in 1873 and 1890's era Winchester rifles. Almost all westerns of this era used these stock weapons probably because they were easy to get. An actual group of Texas frontiersmen of that era would have been armed with surplus Civil War weapons such as cap and ball Colt revolvers and Henry rifles or Sharps Carbines. The Indians would have been armed with bows and arrows and maybe a few mussel loading plains rifles. The battle scenes are good except that the Comanche had horse hair ropes braided into their horses manes that allowed them to sling themselves behind their horses body to protect them from enemy fire. From there they could shoot at their enemy from under the horses neck or over its back. In that way they preferred a running fight as seen at the first of the movie. When the Texans found cover along the river the Indians in real life would not have charged them but simply rode off. These old westerns always showed the Indians as not being too smart. In reality they were very smart. They wouldn't charge a volley of gunfire knowing that they would be killed. I guess it makes for a more action packed movie to have the Indians attacking the cowboys. The obvious theme of the movie is the racial hatred of white Americans of the 19th century toward American Indians; however, there are some strange 20th century twists in the story. One example is the Swedish homesteader. The reality in history is that during the Texas Republic days a large number of German Immigrants came to Texas so the homesteader would have been German not Swedish but in 1956 there was still a lot of anti-German feelings in the U.S. due to the two World Wars so they made the character Swedish. Then there is the attitudes of the characters that are more 20th century than 19th century. This movie was made right after the end of the Korean War. That's why I think the movie is really a commentary on the way the U.S.A. makes war in the 20th and 21st centuries than about 19th century Indian Wars. When we are attacked we ride off together to go fight the enemy but when the trail gets long we go home and leave the fight to most dedicated or sometimes to the ones with the most anger and hatred. We then sit by the home fires and read letters from the war zone wishing it would end. When the fight is finally over we leave the cold hearted warrior outside by himself. And John Wayne turns and walks away as only John Wayne can do it. I've got this movie on LaserDisc. It looks good and sounds good. There are a few white spots in on the old film and it jumps a couple of times. It's in full frame and it doesn't look like it loses much. I'm sure the newer DVD's are better.

This movie was based on a 1960's British comic strip. The original script was written by the author of the comic strip but then they rewrote it till it didn't have any resemblance to the strip. They even used a blonde haired Italian actress to play a dark haired English woman. It came out in 1966 the same year as the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, the Batman TV show and the height of the James Bond popularity. At the end of the movie the heroine and her side kick are rescued by an army robe wearing, towel headed, oil rich Arabs. I guess they thought this was funny. Forty-two years latter after all the Arab terrorist attacks it's not so funny. The comic strip was a semi-serious adventure strip but with the success of the campy Batman TV show, movie writers couldn't take anything from the comics seriously. So they made this a campy spy-spoof; however, the humor is very, very English. To American ears its unintelligible and not funny at all. They had a lot of trendy psychedelic paint schemes on the walls and multiple costume changes to show off the latest London Mod fashions. What was the point of the instantaneous hair style and costume changes? Was she supposed to have magic powers to change her look with the blink of an eye like Bewitched? The only reason I have this DVD is because my In Like Flint DVD came with a coupon for a free copy of this movie. Don't watch this movie when your tired or you'll fall asleep. There wasn't even a good memorable quote in this movie. Most of the time I couldn't make out what they were saying with their thick English or Italian accents.

This was Jane Russell's first movie. The whole purpose of the movie was to show off her cleavage. The story is boring and totally bogus. It's supposed to be about Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid. The real Doc Holliday and the real Billy the Kid never met each other. In fact by the time Billy the Kid was famous he was already dead. Pat Garrett wrote a book about Billy the Kid after he had killed him in order to make himself famous. Pat Garrett was also a character in this movie. All three were supposed to be good friends but for some reason they keep threatening to kill each other throughout the movie. The whole plot seems to be about two grown men arguing about a horse. Most of the movie is just these three guys talking at each other. The acting is terrible and the sound track is even worse. Jane Russell enters the movie with a high neck top. She tries to kill Billy the Kid and instead he rapes her in a shadow so you can't see what's happening but you hear the dialog and the sound of ripping clothes. As the movie goes on Jane Russell's neckline gets lower and lower until she's showing quite a bit of cleavage by the end of the movie. At one point they are being chased by Indians and they show her riding a horse with her breasts bouncing. Another point in the movie Billy the Kid ties her up with her arms stretched out in the air like one of Bettie Page's bondage movies. I guess this was all very scandalous in 1941. Today you see more cleavage at the grocery store than they showed in this movie. Howard Hughes publicized his fight with the movie censors over this movie for three years before it was finally released. It was a clever ploy that made money but the movie is still bad.

The movie Logan's Run was based on a story written in the 1960's during the heyday of the generation gap between the Baby Boomer's and the Great Depression generation. The book told of a future society where everyone was killed when they turned 21. The movie changed it to age 30 so they could use older actors. It makes more since. I doubt world of teenagers could keep a high tech future civilization working. In the movie all of mankind was living in a single domed city. Most of the exteriors for this movie was filmed in Dallas/Fort Worth or Houston Texas. One scene was shot at a mall in Dallas that was new in 1975. I think I've been to that mall back in the 1980's when my sister lived in Dallas. It had a lot of Christmas decorations then. For special effects they used a lot of miniatures that looked a lot like the stuff they used in Godzilla movies or science fiction movies from the 1930's or 1940's. Most of the rest were camera tricks or techniques used in the Star Trek TV show or crude props liked they used on Dr. Who. The most advanced effect was a holograph that was an actual holograph machine that had just been invented. In 1975 they thought they were using cutting edge special effects but they really didn't have anything new. Star Wars which came out in 1977 was light years more advanced. Part of the story was a commentary on the hedonistic atmosphere of the 1970's. It's kind of slow at points but there are a lot of good looking women including Farrah Fawcett in a pre Charlie's Angel movie role. Her acting wasn't that good but she looked just like she did as an Angel. The movie got a PG rating even though there are scenes with exposed women's breasts. They cut out some racier scenes that almost got it an R rating but they wanted a PG so they cut those scenes out. I first saw this movie on TV and it didn't have any of the nude scenes. Some of the music had a Star Trek sound to it since the composer also did the Star Trek movies' music.

This alternative James Bond movie is a scrambled mess. It had a big budget and too many directors. Only the middle section near the end has the slightest link to the original book. The rest is just 60's pop art, gorgeous women and poorly delivered jokes. The ending is the worst part of the movie. A big bar fight with cowboys and Indians in a French Casino? How stupid! They weren't even real Indians anyway. Looked like Italian actors playing stereotype Indians. They had the greatest comedy minds of the 1960's with Peter Sellers and Woody Allen and barely used them. They even fired Peter Sellers before the movie was finished leaving holes in what little story they had. However the music for this movie is great. Most of the songs became top 40 hits and some were later redone by other musicians and became hits again. All the women are gorgeous and wear the latest in 1960's fashion. David Niven probably played James Bond the way Ian Fleming had originally written him, just older and in retirement. Peter Sellers was good until they cut him out. He was better in the Pink Panther series. As for James Bond spoofs, Our Man Flint and In Like Flint are better.

The DVD also has a copy of the old Climax TV show version of Casino Royale. It's in black and white and was filmed off a TV screen. This was before they invented video tape and this was the only way they had of recording live TV. The props are cheap and if the actors made a mistake they couldn't redo it because it was live TV. The story sort of matches the book but they made James Bond an American and changed the torture from the beating of Bond's privates with a rug beater to breaking his fingers with a pair of pliers. Also the villain survives and is arrested instead of being shot by a Russian hit-man.

This is a classic Monty Python inspired movie. It's directed by directed by Terry Gilliam, the guy who did the animation on Monty Python's Flying Circus. The movie is cute and is good for kids and adults. There are good special effects. Fans of Monty Python, George Harrison, and Sean Connery need to see this movie. The movie is a commentary on middle class life and attitudes especially in England. Lots of funny lines and characters. All of Terry Gilliam's movies have unique grit to them. I first saw this movie in a small neighborhood theater behind a strip mall south of Seattle WA. It was my first trip to Seattle on a 7 week training trip to Boeing. The guys I went with were staying in a cheap motel called the Birchwood Air Motel. The rooms were two bedroom apartments. We shared apartments to save money. The guy staying with me found the ad in the paper and we found the address in the phone book. It was a dark November night and we barely found the place but we managed to get there in time. There was a picketer outside from the Projectionist Union. Apparently it was a non-union theater. I didn't know they had a Projectionist Union.

Excellent War Movie. R. Lee Ermey's best role. The first half of the movie has the best depiction of Marine Corp. basic training since Jack Webb's movie about the Marines in the early 1950's. Jack Webb wanted to show the Marines in a positive light. This movie wanted to show the raw brutality of the military. Military training has lightened up since the 1960's due to the all volunteer military. R. Lee Ermey was a real drill instructor during the Vietnam War and wrote most of his lines from his memory of those days. Marines are our modern Spartans. The second half of the movie is set in Vietnam and has some good parts and some clichés. The biggest is the confrontation with the sniper. A point man is shot by a sniper and then shoots the guys who go to save him. The same plot was used in Saving Private Ryan. The Marines in this battle seemed to have a lot a ammo. But is was a good shoot out and climax to the movie. The ending has a little bit of humor with the Marines the theme from the Mickey Mouse show.

When this movie came out everyone thought it was the greatest movie they had ever seen. I just thought it was a good movie and that it had been so long since anyone had seen a good movie they had forgotten what a good movie was like. I saw this movie the first time at the Heritage Park Mall in Midwest City. Later that year in November I took my first trip to Seattle and while I was there I went to see it again in a big theater in the parking lot of a mall in Kent, WA. It had a stereo sound system unlike the theater in Midwest City. I was amazed that the gun shots during the gun battles were coming from different corners of the room. Sometimes while we were in Seattle we would make Christmas shopping trips to some of the local malls. I saw my first Laserdisc player in a mall south of Seattle. A few months after I got home I bought my first Laserdisc player. As soon as Raiders came out on Laserdisc I bought it. When I watched at home with the sound piped through my stereo the gun shots also came from different corners of the room. The Laserdisc is in full screen. I haven't seen the DVD but it probably comes in widescreen and even better sound. As for the movie, the plot is improbable, Karen Allen is young and good looking, and Harrison Ford runs and jumps snaps his whip like he knows what he is doing. Before you go see the latest movie you need to see this one first.

This is another of Steven Spielberg's sappy tear-jerking movies. It came out when my niece was 2 years old and she loved it. She wanted to watch ET all the time. I got her an ET stuffed animal for Christmas that year. I first saw the movie ET at the Heritage Park Mall theater in Midwest City, OK. It's a good movie but it's more of a kid's movie. They threw in one bad word to get a PG rating otherwise it would have been rated G. I bought my first Laserdisc player that year too. The booklets that they put out once a month at the Laserdisc store said that ET would be released to Laserdisc within a month or two. Finally six years later they released it to Laserdisc and I bought a copy.

This is a sci-fi chick flick. Jeff Bridges plays a good fish out water character. He lands in Wisconsin in a spaceship that looks a lot like the spaceship used on the TV show "Smallville". He clones himself into a human with the genes of the Karen Allen's character's dead husband. The story is basically a chase film across America. He has to meet his mother ship in Arizona and the Government in trying to capture him. I like the feel of the movie. Some of the early scenes remind me of southeast Oklahoma. It shows what road side America is like. Karen Allen is young and good looking. I first saw this movie on TV on a chilly Saturday morning. The weather outside matched the weather in the movie. It helped to get into the movie.

John Wayne made this movie right after he made "True Grit". This movie is nowhere near the quality of "True Grit". It's like they decided to make a movie and just re-used ideas from past John Wayne movies. John Wayne was way too old to be playing the character in this movie. Of course he just played himself. They threw in a bunch of young good looking actresses to add a little sex appeal. But none of them could act. Jack Elam was the only interesting character, but that was just your typical Jack Elam character. The story was set at the end of the Civil War and a few years after. They never really said how long but the guns used in the second half of the movie were not from the era. The first part with the Confederate guerillas robbing the Union train was good. Although Union payrolls in the Civil War wouldn't have been gold but would have been paper Greenbacks. After that the story made no sense. The Union and Confederate soldiers become friends when the war is over. The hard feelings between north and south lasted for years after the war. Most of your good western stories deal with this lingering hatred between northerners and southerners as the western United States was settled in the last half the 19th century. This movie glossed over these facts and made the bad guy an ex-Union soldier who sold information to the Confederates and then went to Texas to buy up land from the poor southern landowners. The story has so many holes in it I can't list them all here. George Plimpton had a bit part in the movie and gets shot. I remember watching the TV special he did about being in this movie. He showed how they staged the shootout and used wires to jerk him back when he got shot. It was some sort of Thanksgiving special because I remember watching it at my Aunt and Uncle's house in McAlester, OK. I never saw the movie until I bought the DVD. It was supposed to be the third movie where he gets barricaded in a jailhouse. In this movie it's only the last 15 minutes of the story.

The world is threatened by Global Warming, who do you call? Derek Flint, James Coburn's James Bond spoof. The structure of the movie is exactly like a James Bond movie. The first half of the movie is cool with a lot jokes poking fun at James Bond. The panic of the world leaders in this movie reminds me of some of our current politicians when dealing with Global Warming. The second half of the movie slows down with little dialog. The movie has lots of good looking women. James Coburn does a lot of karate chops and kicks. This movie was made about the time he was taking martial arts training from Bruce Lee. The second Flint movie "In Like Flint" is better.

This movie was made back in the days when cars had muscle! There are no special effects in this movie. Everything was filmed on location with real equipment, cars and buildings. There is lots of old office equipment that was considered hight tech at the time but now is obsolete. The car chase that is the central part of the movie is done with real cars. They beefed up the suspension systems on the cars so they could handle the San Francisco hills without damaging the cars. Most movies with car chases they use many duplicate cars and you can see them being irreparably damaged in one scene and in perfect condition the next. The chase between a Dodge Charger and a Ford Fastback Mustang is a classic chase. They used a real hospital and doctors and nurses for the hospital scenes. it's hard to believe that in 1968 San Francisco hospitals were so cramped and claustrophobic. If you've ever been in a modern hospital you can see the great advances in medical technology when you watch this movie. it's a movie with few words. It was like a Jack Webb Dragnet story with better acting. For the next 10 years after this movie Cop movies and TV shows tried to be accurate and realistic. The story has a cynical few of politics and politicians. The bad guys included not just the mob hit men but a corrupt politician played by the Man from UNCLE.

This was the first movie Hollywood made about the Viet Nam War after John Wayne's "The Green Berets". It's set just before Johnson's reelection in 1964. It shows the problems the U.S. had in fighting the war. It's low budget and they tried to use the weapons, equipment and uniforms that were used in 1964. It's about the quality of a made for TV movie. Some of the extras didn't look very Vietnamese and their hair was too long and some had mustaches. I don't think there were very many soldiers with mustaches in 1964. It got an R rating due to the language and violence, no nudity. It is a war movie though. It's a pretty good movie. I first saw this movie in Stillwater, OK in what had been the old Aggie Theater but had been converted into a twin theater. When I got to the theater I ran into a couple of guys from my dorm floor. Turns out the one I thought was just some hippy dude about my age had actually been to Viet Nam and was an ex-Marine and was three years older than me. We all enjoyed the movie and then we went to a beer joint and talked for a while. The best line in the movie was "Nobody drives slow in this country."

This is an attempt to tell the Biblical story of King David. They do a good job of showing the culture of the ancient Israelites but Hollywood seems to think they can be as fast a lose with Bible stories as they are with any other book. This movie isn't as bad as some of the movies made in the 1950's based on Bible stories but they did make a few changes. In the Bible it is told that David committed fornication with Bathsheba but in the movie it's covered up. Then they throw in a couple of nude scenes and should have had an R rating. It got a PG-13. The battle scenes are OK. I'm not sure they got the bronze age weapons correct. King David brought the secret of iron from the Philistines to the Israelites. This isn't shown in the movie but it is in the Bible. I've got this movie on Laserdisc. After watching this movie read the Old Testament. David is one of the major characters of the Bible. Everyone should read and know the story of David.

John Wayne's first movie is actually two movies. There is the 70 mm wide screen and the 35 mm square screen. Since 70 mm and sound movies were both new technologies in 1929 they literally filmed this movie with two separate cameras. The complex scenes they filmed simultaneously from two separate angles. Some of the scenes had the actors perform twice for two different camera crews. This required the actors to duplicate their performance exactly the same twice. Watching the two versions is like watching a stage play twice on different days. One scene had one of the characters wearing a coat in the 70 mm version but was coatless in the 35 mm film. Other scenes the sound synched up perfectly but the camera angle was different. Towards the end of the movie John Wayne had to make a speech urging the pioneers not to turn back. Both were good and both started out the same but he started to ad-lib a little and the two versions aren't exactly the same. Due to mechanical problems with the new cameras there were some scenes in the 35 mm film that weren't in the 70 mm version and there were many scenes that were in the 70 mm version that weren't in the 35 mm version. There was a section of the 35 mm film were the travelers have to cross a desert (even though there is no desert on the Oregon Trail) but is totally left out of the 70 mm version. In the 70 mm version John Wayne's love interest is left behind and John Wayne has to go back to rescue them. This is left out of the 35 mm version. Over all the 70 mm is better but was only shown in two theaters and the rest of the country was shown the 35 mm version. In some sections the 35 mm is better. Sometimes the 70 mm is cleaner, sharper with better contrast and other times it's the 35 mm with the better photography. Overall the 70 mm version is 14 minutes longer than the 35 mm version. John Wayne played a young version of himself. You can see the John Wayne character begin his development into the character so familiar in his later movies. The story of the movie is the first wagon train to follow the Oregon Trail. They tried to make it look as accurate as possible by having oxen pull some of the wagons. They still have too many being pulled by horses and mules. In 1850 all the wagons were drawn by oxen. Also in 1850 nobody rode in the wagons. Wagons carried the food and supplies. The people walked. They wore out so many shoes the Indians would sell them moccasins along the way. They filmed the movie in 5 states but nowhere along the real Oregon Trail. In the movie there were too many trees and too many hills. For most of the movie everyone carried single shot guns, then all of the sudden in the middle of a buffalo hunt John Wayne pulls out a revolver and starts shooting. Before that all he had was a rifle. By todays standards this is a boring movie and in 1930 the places were they had to watch the 35 mm version they thought is was boring too.

stupid but funny

stupid
and no race.

very very funny

Not very good

I saw this movie on TV when I was a kid. At the time the robot scared me but I was puzzled when world was threatened by not being able to do the laundry. The scariest part was when the robot started zapping people and not just their weapons. It was already outdated when I first saw it with outdated cars and clothes but I also watched the old Superman TV shows with the same outdated clothes. The movie is intended to be an anti-war film. The creators of the movie naively thought that the United Nations could stop wars if given enough authority. This movie was made in 1950 the same year the Korean War started. The Korean War quickly proved the fallacy of this theory. The robot in the movie had overwhelming power to stop any weapons. No such power exists in the real world. The UN has since proved to be too undemocratic and too impotent to wield the power represented by the robot. The style of the movie is slow and quiet. Robert Wise directed this movie and also directed the first Star Trek movie. The complaint about that movie was that it was too slow. Fortunately this movie is only 92 minutes long. This is still the best flying saucer movie of the 1950's.

This was the first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula. It\'s a silent film with crude special effects, but there are a few classic scenes that defined the vampire character. The movie ends abruptly by having the vampire destroyed by sunlight. This was the first time this weakness of the vampire was used. Not a very good ending. The best part of the movie is the way it linked deadly epidemics to the vampire myth. There is a strange scene with an African hyena. I guess this was supposed to be some kind of supernatural wolf. The German company that made it tried to get around the copyright laws of that time by changing the location of the story and changing all the character's names. Bram Stoker's widow sued anyway and won. She tried to have all copies of this film destroyed but a few copies survived. The movie is now public domain, therefore; there are many DVD versions available. I've got a cheap version with no special features but a good copy of the film. You might want to get one of the newer versions with special features and a cleaned up copy of the film.

This movie was the Japanese attempt to tell the story of World War II without admitting their own guilt in starting the war or the atrocities committed by the Japanese army. They could show the suffering of the Japanese civilians by having the cities of Japan destroyed by a giant fire breathing radioactive dinosaur that rises mysteriously from the sea. Gojira is in fact the good old US of A. No sea going dinosaur ever burned Japanese cities and spread radioactive fallout across the landscape. It was the U.S. Army Air Force. But the Japanese didn't want to offend us since we were protecting them from communist invasion from Korea. Therefore they had a giant lizard do it in the movie. Although the monster was supposed to have been created by an H-Bomb blast, the United States is never mentioned in the movie. They never even show an atomic blast. The Japanese version is hard to follow even with the English sub-titles. The Japanese actors seem so serious and occasionally angry. I guess it lost something in translation. The version released in America was totally recut and dubbed into English and extra scenes with Raymond Burr added and scenes that might offend U.S. audiences deleted. The added scenes are obviously out of place and don't fit the Japanese story. The Japanese actors seem to be acting their hearts out but the English dialog seems flat and unemotional. Godzilla is actually seen in about 30 percent of the American version. Since the Japanese version is longer Gojira is in 25 percent of the original version. In the Japanese version you get to see more of Gojira destroying Tokyo. Sometimes all you see is his head. In the U.S. version there is about 13 minutes of Godzilla smashing cardboard miniatures of a Japanese city. The Japanese version has 14 minutes of Gojira destroying Tokyo landmarks. By using black and white film and keeping everything slightly out of focus it's not as obvious as in later Japanese monster movies made in color and filmed in sharp focus.

I remember when I was a kid and every summer a Godzilla vs. Somebody movie came out. This was the first one. They showed them at the little theater in Perry, Oklahoma but I never went to see any of them. After seeing this movie I see why. I was a smarter kid than I thought. This is the ugliest King Kong I ever saw. The story was silly. The Japanese actors were silly and the American narrators were pointless. Most of the movie was spent getting King Kong and Godzilla in the same place. They fight for a few minutes then fall into the ocean. King Kong swims away and Godzilla vanishes. The whole thing was more of a live action cartoon. It was guys in rubber monster suits wrestling and trashing miniatures for no reason. Maybe I would have enjoyed it when I was six or seven. My friends at school seemed to have, it just didn't occur to me back then to ask my parents to take me. By the time I was aware of Godzilla they were promoting "Godzilla vs. The Thing" and "Godzilla vs. It".