The other day, I noticed a few billboards around town promoting an upcoming two-part miniseries on the History Channel for a production called Project Blue Book.  You may have seen them yourselves in your own towns, or seen ads for it.

Project Blue Book was a program created by the U.S. Air Force to study the phenomenon of Unidentified Flying Objects, and it was run by a civilian astrophysicist, Dr. J. Allen Hynek.  The mini-series focuses on Hynek and an Air Force officer who assists him. and is about what happens when Hynek begins to suspect that he is being used by the government.

I mention this all for a very specific reason.  It's not that I'm especially interested in UFO's.  Rather, that when I was at Northwestern, I took.an astronomy course, "Highlights of Astronomy" which was taught by an eminent professor there -- J. Allen Hynek!
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This is a sign I saw yesterday when I went to the Arclight movie theater in Santa Monica yesterday.  Apparently they have a Family Christmas film festival running through the month.  I looked at this sign and wanted to start singing the song from Sesame Street, "One of These Things is Not Like the Other."
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I'm always sort of amazed that somehow Die Hard has become seen as a "Christmas movie."  It takes place during Christmas, and I guess it's a Christmas party going on, and they a Christmas song at the end, but...well, it's a pretty violent (and very entertaining) action thriller that really has next to nothing about Christmas.

​That aside, it makes an whimsical addition to the list...

A week ago, I wrote here about a new documentary that has been getting overwhelmingly spectacular reviews, They Shall Not Grow Old.  It's from Peter Jackson, who directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and focuses on the British foot soldiers in World War I, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the armistice.

The film, which uses material from the BBC and Imperial War Museum archives, was made for the BBC and originally intended as a 30-minute piece, but grew from the wealth of material and ultimately had such a profound effect that Warner Bros. is releasing it in very-limited release theatrically,  And by "very limited" I mean there are two days scheduled.  

I say this because I saw it yesterday, and that means there's only one other day left to see it for certain, and you will do yourself a great disservice by missing it.  Yes, it's that tremendous.

(By the way, what I wrote in an an earlier version of this article is that I suspected that the studio was hoping for an Oscar nomination -- and win -- but it turns out that since this was never originally intended as a theatrical film, Warner Bros. missed the October 1 deadline for submissions and so the film is ineligible.  However, the box office, even for such a profoundly-limited presentation, has been massive and so discussions are underway for a possible, full theatrical release.)

I'll keep this description reasonably short because of a bonus that goes along with the documentary.  I'll dive in a bit more when getting around to that.  But as for the documentary itself, what makes it stand out so much is how Jackson physically crafted it.  Using the latest technology, he and his team restored the footage to a quality so remarkably pristine that it almost looks like modern-day footage.  Additionally, they manipulated the speed of the film so it doesn't look the way old silent movies generally do, sped-up and jerky, but instead is all fully natural.  They colorized it using the highest quality efforts so, although the process is often controversial, here is completely justified and all looks fresh and lifelike.  Perhaps most fascinatingly, they brought in expert lip-readers to determine what soldiers are saying in the footage, and then dubbed the voices to add a sense of realism to the material.  They also converted the old material to 3D in a way that doesn't get in the way with anything splashy, but brings subtle depth to the landscape so that at times you almost feel you are there on the battlefields.  And much more.  And making it all the more touching is that there are no historians or WWI experts narrating -- instead, all the narration is from archival interviews that soldiers did 40-50 years later.

It's really quite remarkable.  

Which brings us to the bonus.  Following the 90-minute documentary, there is another half-hour film that runs afterwards with Peter Jackson explaining and showing all the amazing work that they put into crafting the film and bringing everything to life.  In some ways, it's surprsingly almost as moving at times as the documentary itself.  And if They Shall Not Grow Old does get a wider theatrical release at some point, I wouldn't think it would be with this special half-hour featurette.  It seems like that was solely for this limited theatrical release. (Or the DVD, assuming one gets released.)

Here's an example of the level of detail and effort the filmmakers went to.  When they dubbed the soldiers, they team tracked down which divisions the men were in, and they found actors who spoke in that same dialect, to make it authentic.  Also, they often found footage that all other WWI documentaries most-certainly ignored because the footage had degraded, or was deeply underexposed or overexposed and therefore unusable -- but they were able to restore it, and much of what they ended up with was a treasure.  

Jackson also explains the decision to colorize the footage.  He said that the focus of the movie was on the foot soldiers and their experience, how they saw the war.  And they saw the war in color.  He notes, too, that had color been available at the time, there's little doubt that the original filmmakers would have used it.  He explains, too, that the quality of colorization depends in large part on the time spent on the process, and so they devoted a great deal of time getting it to look right and natural.

One of the more fascinating things of the featurette has nothing to do with the war, but the filmmaker himself.  It turns out that Peter Jackson wasn't approached merely because of his acclaim as a director, but rather both that and because he is a true, massive aficionado of World War I.  When talking about the impossibility of getting some footage for the movie of hand-to-hand combat, Jackson says he remembered that he had a few copies of old war magazines he'd collected as a kid that had original drawings from the time which might be useful -- and when he went to check, he found out that he didn't still have a few copies, but several hundred.  Also, when they did the colorizing of all the old uniforms of the many divisions, their efforts were made significantly easier because...Jackson had his own collection of old World War I uniforms, which got a growing chuckle from the audience.  But what got the biggest laugh is when Jackson (who clearly found it a bit bizarre himself) said that they wanted the sound of the artillery movement and explosions to be authentic and so -- yes -- in a bemused voice said, "I had my own collection of WWI artillery...as one does."  And so the featurette shows them rolling out Jackson's own canons and other artillery out to fields to be properly operated.

Both of these films are showing one more time, for certain.  That will be on December 27.  If this is even of remote interest to you, try to see it.  It's very special.  Here is the page where you can enter your zip cod and see where it's screening in your area.  Just click this link.

And here's a very brief trailer, which I posted before.  It doesn't begin to do the documentary anything close to justice -- but -- it absolutely gives you a touch of an idea of how unique this is.

No, that's not just a holiday greeting, but something else entirely.  Let me explain...

I remembered to mention this last year, but less than a week before Christmas.  So I wanted to be sure to bring it up well in advance this year.  And that's recommend one of my favorite, little-known holiday films, Joyeux Noel. It was nominated for a 2005 Best Foreign Language Oscar, based on a true story in WWI.   Since the holiday is still three weeks away, that should give folks time to perhaps get it from Netflix or whatever online service you subscribe to before the season is out.  Though it's great any time of the year.

I really thought Joyeux Noel should have won the Best Foreign Language Oscar they year it was nominated, but the award that year went to a South African movie, Tsotsi.  That was quite good, but for my own taste Joyeux Noel stood out as a substantially better film.  Tsotsi told an important story, in an important country at an important time in its history.  And it told its story well, though it wasn't special filmmaking.  I suspect its "importance" helped a lot.  But Joyeux Noel was just...joyous.  And wonderful.  And beautifully made.

As I wrote last year, it tells a fictionalized version of a famous story you may have heard -- how in World War I, four armies faced each other on Christmas Eve, ready for battle, but among themselves decided to call a truce for that one night.  The movie isn't just "feel good," there's a great deal of drama and intense tension, and it's all told superbly.

It was also the first movie I'd seen Diane Kruger in, though I didn't realize it at the time, since she wasn't a well-known star in the U.S. then.  She plays an opera singer, and interestingly he singing is dubbed by a soprano who was one of my folks very favorite, Natalie Dessay.

(I should note for those wary of foreign language films that one of the armies at a crossroads is British, so a good part of the movie is in English.)

Here's the trailer.  It doesn't remotely give a sense of the rich, especially-tense drama at stake and tends more to focus on the warmth, coming across like nothing more than a feel-good movie of the holiday season.  It's much more than that.  But you should at least get a idea of it all, most especially how exceedingly well-crafted the movie is.

By the way, here's a link to it on Netflix, by clicking here.  You'll note that it has four stars -- and a 7.8 rating on iMDB.  On Rotten Tomatoes, the critic rating is a high 74%...but the audience rating is 89%.  So I'm not alone on this...

Continuing our celebration of the 200th anniversary today of Illinois being admitted the Union, we have an appropriate video for the Land of Lincoln.  Here's a wonderful clip from the classic film, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play by Robert Sherwood (who co-adapted his play for the screen).  This is a six-minute monologue by Raymond Massey, who recreated his starring from from the Broadway production, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  (Historical note: those debates were not from when both men ran against one another for the presidency, but rather earlier when they competed for the U.S. Senate.)
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By the way, despite this clip appearing to be almost nine minutes, it's not.  There is a ponderous opening minute added on (you can jump past it), and another minute-and-a-half or more tacked on at the end.

The Huffington Post has a self-righteous article today titled, "Widows Isn't Making Much Money At The Box Office.  What's Wrong With You, America?"  It's a sort of joint-interview with two writers for HuffPo decrying the fact that the well-reviewed movie only finished fifth in its opening holiday weekend, with a mediocre per screen average of $4,400.  They trash Mark Wallberg personally, whose movie Immediate Family topped Widows, and express dismay that Fantastic Beasts and Bohemian Rhapsody made more money.  (In the case of Fantastic Beasts, much more money, finishing #1 at the box office.)

One of the comments in the article by the authors -- in fact, the editors even put it in the sub-headline -- is that the movie is "electrifying and crowd-pleasing."  This is one of the more bizarre contradictory phrases you'll likely find in a movie analysis -- bemoaning the lack of audience support for a movie that's crowd-pleasing.  I would suggest most crowd-pleasing movies get crowds. 

(In fairness, some movies take a while to build word-of-mouth, if they actually are crowd-pleasing, so the authors here fall into Hollywood Conventional Thinking trap by jumping the gun bemoaning the movie flopping, rather than waiting a few weeks to see for sure.  It may well flop, but c'mon, give it more than five days.  Maybe people want to see it, but with so many other films opening over the holidays, they only chose one or perhaps two, and will get around to it next week.  Or they want to hear from friends what they thought.  Express surprise that it didn't open better, but don't write off "America" as not wanting to see it when America has only had five days.)

I will note something else in that regard.  While the Rotten Tomatoes website shows that 91% of critics gave the film a positive review, only 60% of the audience liked it.  So...maybe it's not as "crowd-pleasing" at the audience thought.

I'll add something else.  I saw Widows at a Writers Guild screening a week ago, and stayed for the Q&A afterwards with the film's writers Gillian Flynn and Steve McQueen (who also directed it).  And I thought it was wonderfully produced, nicely edited, well-acted and had good dialogue -- and was empty and fairly uninteresting.  I was glad I saw it (though it was free), but left the Q&A early because they were expounding so enthusiastically about something I didn't think reached that level.  I left thinking, "Yeah, okay, fun, but whatever.)

You'll note that I didn't write a "Capsule Review" of the film, which is because I felt ambivalent enough about it that I decided to use my writing time elsewhere.  It's not a bad movie at all, but I personally didn't find it especially compelling and "electrifying," most-particularly enough to slam "America" for not supporting it more.

Side note: lest one think otherwise, I was actually predisposed to really like this film and was looking forward to it.  I love heist movies, it's one of my favorite genres.  (Just last week, in fact, you'll recall that I wrote about Topkapi, and it being one of the all-time great heist movies.)  And further, my novel and screenplay, The Wild Roses, is about a group of women bonding together in an action-adventure.  I not only was pulling for Widows to succeed...I still am.

The authors of the article talk about the film's "electrifying twists."  (As did the fawning interviewer at the Q&A.)  I found that there was one big twist, not plural.  And I pretty much guessed that one an hour earlier.  (In fairness, the audience reacted to it with a yelp, so they obviously didn't see it coming.)  The rest of the "electrifying twists" weren't really "twists" in that they didn't change the plot, but were more surprises in the action.  But then, it's an action-heist film, for goodness sake, and periodic surprises is almost the point of any film in the genre.  To give its due, maybe one of these surprises could also be called a "big twist" -- but not even remotely "electrifying."  After all, without giving anything away, the title of the movie is "Widows."  So, audiences should have a fairly good idea what they're in for, and it's pretty difficult to feel electrified when the title tells you what is to follow.

As I said, I'm glad I saw the movie, and enjoyed much of it, particularly when I wasn't thinking too closely.  But among the things that bothered me enough to find it empty is that -- I disliked pretty much everyone in it.  While I felt sympathy for the women being widowed I didn't find them all as innocent as the movie wanted to portray them, especially the main character who has garnered a fabulously wealthy lifestyle thanks to her husbands career in thievery.  To come up with the money demanded of them, their idea is to rob someone else.  There were piles of lucky-coincidences dropping throughout the film -- the best of the taut, action-thriller heist movies are so carefully constructed that most-every piece falls meticulously into place.  And then there's emptiness of the heist itself, which normally is the core of...a heist film.

"It’s a redefinition of what a heist film can be," the authors of the article rave.  Well, yeah, I guess, if by that you mean taking a heist film and not get around to the planning of the heist for 75 minutes, making the planning be the most banal of chores ("You're in charge of getting a gun.  You have to find someone who can drive.  And you have to figure out who this person is" -- which she does by a very lucky break) -- and then having the big heist take all of about five minutes, tops.  And the heist sequence is about as "electrifying" as some drugged-out kid breaking into a house to steal jewelry.

I could be a whole lot more clear and explicit about all of this -- as it stands, I know that my comments about the film's details are a bit amorphous -- but since the movie just opened and others here may likely see it, I don't want to give anything away.

Again, the movie is very-well produced, nicely acted and has sharp dialogue.  But to me, it's a whole lot more thin that these two adoring author take America to task over.  I know my opinion is just mine.  I also know that according to that one "exit poll," only 60% of the movie actually liked it.  Which I think is a fair number -- I liked it about 40-60%. 

So, the problem with "America" not seeing the movie may not be that they didn't want to for all the reasons the authors ruminate, but more that a lot of people who saw it just didn't find it "electrifying" and it hasn't gotten great word of mouth.

Maybe it still will, they only gave it five days.  And if people did love the movie, I myself wouldn't argue with them, I completely understand the film's strong points, and if those are to a person's taste, I get it.  But to ask "America" what is wrong with you for not supporting in its first five days this very well-made, empty film, methinks they doth protest too much...

As I say every year, this song isn't officially about Thanksgiving, but given that its title is "Thank You Very Much," we always go with it here.

This is the Oscar-nominated Best Song from the movie Scrooge, the musical adaption of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with a score by Leslie Bricusse.  The number features Albert Finney and, in the lead, the wonderful Anton Rodgers.  (He first came to my attention when my folks came back from a trip to London and had seen the musical, Pickwick, based on Dickens' novel, with Harry Secombe, and raved about the show, about Secombe, and in a supporting role as Alfred Jingle, about Anton Rodgers.  I think you can tell by his performance here in Scrooge what so impressed them.  By the way, Pickwick had music by Cyril Ornadel and lyrics by...Leslie Bricusse!  So, we're just piling on all the various connections we can.  By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if the Pickwick and Bricusse connection, which came six before the movie, had something to do with Leslie Bricusse  -- who also wrote the screenplay and was the executive producer of the film -- wanting Rodgers for the role.)

Note: if you haven't seen the movie, this comes from The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come sequence.  The people can't see Scrooge, though he thinks they're cheering him -- when what they're overjoyed about is that he has died and all their debts to him are wiped out.​

Three months ago, I posted the trailer of a movie I hadn't heard of and knew nothing about, called Green Book, simply because I was so taken by the trailer.  At the time, I ended the piece by writing, "I have no idea, of course, how the full movie will be, but I can't wait to see it."

Last night, I saw it.  Yes, I know this is election day, and other things are on most people's minds.  But I bring up the movie now because...well, it's better than I was hoping.  Actually, in fairness, that's not really correct -- more proper is to say that it's significantly better than I was hoping.  And that's coming from a starting point of having said three months ago, "I can't wait to see it."

The film is inspired by a true story about a New York City bouncer at the Copacabana night club who is hired to drive brilliant black jazz pianist Don Shirley on his tour through the deep South in 1962.  The title comes from the guidebook that would let black people know where they could eat and sleep, or get gas when traveling through the South in the days before Civil Rights. It stars Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali (who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Moonlight), and they're both absolutely terrific, in complete opposite ways -- the former throwing caution to the wind (gaining 45 pounds for the role), the other profoundly restrained, yet both full of deep emotion, showing how they each impacted one another's lives.  It's surprising directed (and superbly so) by Peter Farrelly. -- the surprise being that he is one of the two Farrelly Brothers, who made such "stupid comedies" as Dumb and Dumber; There's Something About Mary; Me, Myself and Irene, Kingpin, Shallow Hal and more.  And exquisitely written by Farrelly, Brian Currie, and Nick Vallelonga...who is the real-life son of the character played by Viggo Mortensen.  Three months ago I wrote that I'm sure many reviews will refer to it as "Driving Mr. Daisy," which is somewhat apt, but the story takes its own left turn down a little-used road. It's a serious, thoughtful drama, but often very funny, with the humor coming from the characters, not jokes.  It takes a while to set up the film, both in New York and the early part of their trip on the road -- though to be very clear, it's not slow at all during that period, but terrific -- however then there are some plot turns, and it kicks into high gear, richer, more serious, more thoughtful and more joyful.

There's much more than I'd like to say, but this is a Capsule Review, so I'll leave it at that.

What I'll add is about the screening at the Writers Guild, which had a Q&A afterwards by the three writers.  It not only got sustained applause throughout the credits, but also is one of the two or three films I've ever seen at the Guild where the writers got a standing ovation when they showed up for the questions afterwards.  Nick Vallelonga said that he'd wanted to make the film since he was 15, and got the approval and support to do so years later from his father and Don Shirley, who stayed friends for 50 years -- though the musician had the one condition that it not be made until after he died, which he did in 2013, just months from when Tony Vallelonga himself passed away.  His son has no idea why Shirley set that condition, for his own reasons.  The film is based on hours of interviews that son had with father, and then later confirmed all the tales with Don Shirley, which overlapped closely, though from different perspectives.  In fact, it's that relationship which shaped the movie -- the filmmakers said they chose not to put the racism upfront, but (though it's very much there and often viscerally) instead deal with the two characters as its core.  One funny moment -- when talking about the title of the movie, Nick Vallelonga said his original title was Love Letters to Dolores.  At that moment, Peter Farrelly turned to the audience and said, "But I wanted guys to see it."

The trailer does the movie justice.  With one caveat -- the film is even better.

On this episode of 3rd & Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America, ​Moon Zappa interviews  Drew Goddard about his new film Bad Times at the El Royale, which he wrote and directed.  His other work including writing the screenplays for The Martian and World War Z, as well as writing and directing, The Cabin in the Woods.
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