12 mini-reviews for the short attention span, taken from dark corners of stevenl's video vault:

Harrison Bergeron / directed by Bruce Pittman (1995, VHS). Sean Astin, Miranda de Pencier, Christopher Plummer, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Howie Mandel, Nigel Bennett, Buck Henry, John Astin (uncredited). Vonnegut stories, as wonderful as they are, never seem to translate well to the screen. This one, originally made for the small screen via Showtime, is about as good an effort to bring one of Kurt's stories out to the light of day as I've seen. Set in the year 2053 after the Second American Revolution, the world has taken the appearance of the 1950s, except that citizens wear brain altering bands around their craniums in order to keep them from having creative or original thoughts. It maintains citizens as "equal." Mentally-gifted people are selected and recruited into a small corps of elite who keep the Machine running. This a libertarian/authoritarian morality tale, with characters who are not emotionally complex. This last point is not due to poor writing or bad acting, it is merely illustrating the natural consequence of a system where all thoughts are under government control. Eugene Levy in his role as the simplistic President sort of anticipates George W. Bush. Like a lot of Vonnegut stories, the humor is dark, the world is not fair, yet there is a faint ray of hope as the human spirit refuses to be crushed. Loyalists to the Left or Right can use this film to bash the other side.

Key Largo / directed by John Huston (1948, VHS). Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor, Dan Seymour, Jay Silverheels (uncredited). A great film by a great director with a great cast. Also the last of the movies with that Bogart-Bacall chemistry. But, there are still some flaws. A criminal invades an innocent setting and takes hostages while the outside world is temporarily oblivious. In Petrified Forest and in the Desperate Hours, Bogart is the invader. But in this one he is one of the captives. He is more suited to play the invader. Maybe it is the script and the fact Hollywood didn't faithfully follow the original, but Bogart's mood swings and introspection don't seem all that convincing. Although this is pretty much known as a Bogart film, he is not one of the strongest actors in the story. Everything revolves around Edward G. Robinson, who is disturbingly convincing as an Al Capone type of gangster. It is his character who gets the buildup, his character who shapes the destiny of the others. He's an updated version of Little Caesar, deported and returned, and meaner than ever. Bogart is a returning WWII vet, giving the audience an opportunity to hear that the fight against evil didn't stop when the war ended. Normally in that era, that meant fighting "subversive" elements, and even Robinson's character at one point says, "After living in the USA for more than thirty-five years they called me an undesirable alien. Me. Johnny Rocco. Like I was a dirty Red or something!" Al Capone had some great quotes along the same lines: “Don't you get the idea I'm one of those goddam radicals. Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system,” and, “This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it,” and, “Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.” Like Capone, Robinson's gangster brags about how many politicians he has bought and paid for. The knot that the three main players find themselves in throughout most of the story can be summarized in a brief but powerful scene where Robinson whispers something obscene in Bacall's ear. She spits on him. And Bogart defuses the situation with fancy talk, maintaining the status quo. But it all comes to a head, John Huston style. Claire Trevor plays the usual quintessential drunk bad girl, but this time they gave her an Oscar for it.

The Best of the Benny Hill Show. Vol. 2, 4 (1981, VHS). Benny Hill. British comedy is so extreme. When it is good, it is really good, and when it is bad, it is Benny Hill, may he rest in peace. You can't even apologize for him by saying, "Well, it was funny at the time. You have to take that into account." I was a TV viewer when he broke into the American entertainment market, and the only thing funny about his humor was how cluelessly tasteless and offensive he was, which, I admit, was sort of fascinating for the first few minutes. That was a few decades ago and he hasn't gotten any funnier. Benny was alleged to have been born on the very same day Lenin died, which raises some interesting reincarnation scenarios. Now that's funny!

Fantastic Voyage / directed by Richard Fleischer (1966, VHS). Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmond O'Brien, Donald Pleasence, Arthur O'Connell, Arthur Kennedy, James Brolin. Sometimes I wonder how Richard Fleischer, the son of madcap genius animator Max Fleischer, could direct movies that have a tedious and slow pace. In this SF story, a medical team is miniaturized and in a specially constructed submarine enter the body of a scientist (who has crossed the Iron Curtain to help our side) in order to remove a blood clot from his brain. The color is in garish and groovy 1960s style and the music sounds like it was composed for TV, which, in fact, is where composer Leonard Rosenman made his bread and butter. Fleischer spends much too much time showing us all the technology making this Fantastic Voyage possible. At first it is interesting how the entire operation mimics the Mission Control of space flight, but after a while it gets tiresome, then outright boring, then humorous. Perhaps at the time the tension came from the audience wondering whether or not we were going to score a big Cold War win by really landing on the Moon or not. That was still three years away. When I was a kid, astronauts were national heroes and throughout the 1960s every detail of every manned rocket launch was aired live. In 1966 the opening sequence of this movie might have been tapping into a national anxiety that does not exist today. Stephen Boyd has the pretty boy role. Raquel Welch doesn't get a chance to act. Donald Pleasence is as hammy as ever. I particularly enjoyed Edmond O'Brien as the cigar chomping, coffee guzzling military man at Mission Control (CMDF = "Combined Miniature Defense Force," I'm not kidding)-- one of the few real characters in the whole story. The great Arthur Kennedy plays the egotistical yet philosphical surgeon, "The medieval philosophers were right. Man is the center of the universe. We stand in the middle of infinity between outer and inner space, and there's no limit to either."

Matchstick Men / directed by Ridley Scott (2003, VHS). Nicholas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Alison Lohman. A coming of age movie. The principal character is actually a con artist approaching middle age, but it isn't a midlife crisis in the sense that we know it. He never really grew up. He became isolated and emotionally retarded. He developed a catalog of obsessive-compulsive habits. And out of nowwhere a daughter he never knew he had walks into his life. Parenthood does have a way of waking you up and bringing you to a sort of reality that requires being grounded, even if they show up 14 years too late. So it is a coming of age movie. Nicholas Cage is fun to watch in this story. Much of his world revolves around carpets, a theme in this film from start to finish. Ridley Scott knows how to tell a tale and he employs some great cinematic tricks showing us how the world looks through the eyes of Cage's character. This movie must be viewed twice to really appreciate it, and it is more fun to see on the second go-around-- almost like watching a sleight of hand artist at work in slow motion. Cage is paired with a fellow matchstick man who plays Oscar to his Felix. My favorite quote is when Cage visits a psychiatrist: "Look, Doc, I spent last Tuesday watching fibers on my carpet. And the whole time I was watching my carpet, I was worrying that I, I might vomit. And the whole time, I was thinking, 'I'm a grown man. I should know what goes on my head.' And the more I thought about it... the more I realized that I should just blow my brains out and end it all. But then I thought, well, if I thought more about blowing my brains out... I start worrying about what that was going to do to my goddamn carpet. Okay, so, ah-he, that was a GOOD day, Doc. And, and I just want you to give me some pills and let me get on with my life." This movie deserves a sequel. I'd like to know what happened down the road.

"The Cycling Tour" (Monty Python's Flying Circus ; v. 16, episode 34) / directed by Ian MacNaughton (1972, VHS). Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin. Chiefly Palin and Jones in a rare half-hour tale. Leon Trotsky makes an appearance, which is kind of strange since the Benny Hill review mentioned Lenin. Nice emergency room scene.

Peter the Great / directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, Lawrence Schiller (1986, VHS). Maximilian Schell, Vanessa Redgrave, Omar Sharif, Trevor Howard, Lawrence Olivier, Jan Niklas, Elke Sommer, Ursula Andress, Helmut Griem, Jeremy Kemp, Graham McGrath, Denis DeMarne. This was originally broadcast on NBC as a six-hour miniseries and apparently is difficult to locate in DVD format. Filmed in Russia, with beautiful production values, this biopic covers the life of Peter the Great, the Russian Tsar who Westernized his country. Even though this was made for the small screen it visually has a feature film feel through much of the story. The cast is uneven. This was among the last of the screen appearances of Olivier and Howard (who had a nice bit as Isaac Newton), both of them basically had cameo roles. Jeremy Kemp is always fun to watch. Vanessa Redgrave makes a great schemer. There are a couple distracting things about watching this on VHS if you are expecting the timing and pace of a theater-released piece. First, all the action takes place in measured chunks, and it is easy to see where the commercial breaks were inserted. Secondly, as my partner in viewing pointed out, the music was too overpowering in attempting to direct us on how we should feel about a scene. But this was primetime NBC. PBS could've released the exact same production without any music and it would've fit right into that particular network market for the most part, they allow their viewers to think for themselves. The character of Peter was played by four actors. Peter the child (McGrath), Peter the young man (Niklas), Peter in his prime (Schell) and Peter the ancient narrator (DeMarne). Niklas appears to have the lion's share of the screen among these four, and he brings energy to the role. There was another unidentified actor playing Peter, perhaps DeMarne again. Here's how it worked. Schell supposedly left production to meet another commitment, so they filmed about 8 major scenes with a stand-in, employing tricks like back of the head shots, lots of shadows, out of focus distant angles, etc. But it fails to work. It gets in the way of the story. It was like when Ed Wood used the chiropractor Tom Mason as a stand-in for Lugosi in Plan 9 From Outer Space, or like when Jules White employed Joe Palma to stand-in as the Fake Shemp so he could complete a few more Three Stooges shorts after the Nov. 22, 1955 death of Shemp Howard. There is only one Bela, one Shemp, and one Maximilian. The latter became more interesting to watch as his soul eroded, as the ravages of being Tsar ate away at him. And Schell played it well. My favorite line came from the cruel, despotic yet paradoxical Peter himself, who said to his friend as he watched the exiled Sophia give a last kiss to her equally exiled lover, "Don't mock them, Alexander. Love in any form is rare enough."

"D.N.A." (Red Dwarf ; IV, byte 1) / directed by Ed Bye (1991, VHS). Chris Barrie, Craig Charles, Danny John-Jules, Robert Llewellen. While in the course of salvaging a drifting space vessel, the crew encounters a device called a transmogrifier. This technology can alter the DNA of any living thing. Kryten the android, who has a bit of organic matter in his brain, briefly turns into a human being. The scene where Kryten asks Lister questions about his human body is one of my all-time favorite moments in the entire series. We also get to see Robert Llewellen without all that makeup and the guy is a very expressive comedian. There is another great bit where the entire ship shuts down due to the vain Cat insisting on using his hair dryer. Oh, and this one includes a very unique monster defeated by lager in there as well.

The Journey of Sacagawea / directed by Alan Austin (2004, VHS off-air). Rita Coolidge, narrator. This is an hour long documentary originally broadcast on PBS about the teenage girl who opened a continent. Her story is nothing short of incredible. This Shoshone girl was kidnapped from her Idaho tribal grounds and taken to the Dakotas by the Hidatsa. She was either purchased or won in a game of chance at the age of 13 by the French fur trader Charbonneau. When he was hired by the Lewis and Clark Expedition as a guide and translator, she was part of the deal. During the journey she gave birth to a son, saved the Expedition's journals from vanishing downstream, and her presence seemed to bring calm to encounters that otherwise could've turned hostile. There is no doubt she was one of the most valuable members of the Corps of Discovery. One could even make the case that the whole enterprise would have collapsed without her. She was a participant, along with the African American slave York (who is strangely missing from this documentary) in the symbolic and historic Nov. 1805 vote among the Corps about where to set up a winter camp. There are some maddening mysteries concerning her life. No one really knows how her name was pronounced, or what she looked like, or when and where she died. Sacagawea was an amazing woman, a legend in the history of the United States. Then I have to ask myself: Why is this documentary so boring? On the face of it, the method of giving us the information should work. We have Native and Anglo talking heads, actors reading the journals of Lewis, Clark, and Gass, dramatization that is subtle and effective, filmed on location with beautiful landscapes. But it all has a much too laid back tone. The music, although very nice by itself, for the most part seems more suited for a documentary about some New Age concept than for Sacagawea. There is a feeling of sedation about the whole documentary, almost as if the folks who put this together considered themselves too cool to be visceral. This was a compelling bit of history that was squandered.

Hate Jennifer Show (1978, VHS off-air). Gilda Radner. A show within a show. In her Saturday Night Live character of Judy Miller, Gilda presents a Brownie-uniformed girl putting on an imaginery TV show, "Hate Jennifer Show," illustrating all the shortcomings of her sister. When I first saw this when it originally aired, I thought it was clever, but not much more. Of course, it was buried in among all the other skits and I was probably not really paying attention anyway. 1978 was the tail end of my undergraduate years. If you've been there in Almost-Graduatedland you know what I mean. Besides, at Evergroove, 1978 was the Year from Hell, and we were all distracted. So years, nay, decades later I find this little snippet of the "Hate Jennifer Show" buried in a homemade video about something else and was able to appreciate it for itself. Gilda was wonderful. She really captured the essence of little girls when they are feeling bratty. Since I originally viewed this broadcast, I have raised a daughter to adulthood and possess a much different appreciation for Gilda's genius today than when I saw it almost 30 years ago. If you've been there in Father of Daughterland you know what I mean.

The Blue Carbuncle (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) / directed by David Carson (1984, VHS). Jeremy Brett, David Burke, Ken Campbell. Set in the background of a Victorian Christmas, this tale of greed stars Jeremy Brett as the one and only actor who can claim Holmes. Brett set the bar on his interpretation of the great detective. And this is an early one of the series, before he got sick, and when he had the spark-- back when Holmes zeroed in on his prey like some kind of predatory animal with a crazy primal energy. Conan Doyle's language and the way it is delivered is worth the audience time alone. The attention to period piece detail in here is amazing, considering this was made for television and was a series. The role of James Ryder, played by Ken Campbell, is incredibly sleeeeeazy and pathetic. According to IMDB, Campbell "Auditioned in 1987 for the role of the Seventh Doctor in Doctor Who, but was turned down, apparently due to his audition performance being considered too disturbing for television." And you can see why, after watching this Holmes episode. Human greed and unpleasantness is exposed in this tale in gradations in a very subtle way. Even the most likable characters have to dirty their hands in little ways in order to survive. In the end, Holmes turns existential and becomes a law unto himself. It helps that the victim of the crime is a Queen of Mean type. One important detail about this video, my big black cat, Spooky, was furiously chewing on the clipboard as I attempted to make notes during viewing. So I was distracted and will cling to this cat-chewing explanation in response to any subsequent complaining about my treatment of this work.

Butterfly Dance / directed by William K.L. Dickson (1894 VHS off-air). Annabelle Whitford. One of the very first motion pictures, lasting less than two minutes, it was filmed in Thomas Edison's Black Maria studio in New Jersey. Young Annabelle dances around with a long gown and butterfly wings. Filmed over a century and a decade ago. Probably more electrifying to audiences in 1894 than a zillion dollar piece of cultural flotsam distributed and advertised by the Big Boys today. Ms. Whitford died when I was in elementary school. It astounds me how new we are as a nation and technological powerhouse.