This Week in Rixflix #6: April 14-20, 2017

So, the big Mystery Science Theater 3000 reveal happened to the public, and by the time Easter weekend finished, I had watched the remaining episodes via Netflix. Using my iPad at night, I even watched a couple of them a second time (not counting the first episode that I saw again and again and yet again the previous Sunday).

I will write more about the show in a separate series I am planning to start soon, and despite MST3K basically stealing my brain and attention for the past fortnight, I will mention that I still managed to see a fair amount of feature films throughout the remainder of the week. Most notably of that bunch, I finally watched Kubo and the Two Strings. As a stop-motion aficionado (né nut), I have once again had to kick myself over and over mentally for not having seen Kubo on a big screen in a theatre in the first place. Likewise, for also not having seen it multiple times in such a setting. The film is genuinely one of the coolest, most engrossing films I have viewed in a very long time, and its arrival on Blu-ray at my household will be immediate following my next spurt of employment.

I will post a couple of articles on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc in the very near future that recap and review the two dozen or so National Film Board of Canada animated shorts that were aired by TCM the previous weekend, all of which I watched while juggling MST3K episodes on release weekend. Please keep your eyes peeled for that at http://cinema4celbloc.blogspot.com/, but just in case it takes a little longer to make those articles live than I am planning, also please keep those eyes on ice after you peel them.

This week's feature-length film count: 17; 14 first-time viewings and 3 repeats.
Animated shorts seen: 27
Highest rated feature-length film: Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature films: Crossroads (2002) and The Colony (2014) – 4/9
Average films per day in April thus far: 2.3
Average films per day in 2017 thus far: 3.02

Kismet (1955) Dir.: Vincente Minnelli – In the past couple of years, I have repeatedly confused the different filmed versions of Kismet. I have recorded the 1944 Marlene Dietrich version at least thrice when the one that I needed to check off my watchlist was the Howard Keel musical version from MGM in 1955. Finally, I trapped the little bugger and quickly dove into the proper Kismet at last. This film does fall into my "put off for too long" category, though I will say that having now seen it, I merely thought it was a good film but not nearly as engaging as I had hoped. The sets and costuming are, assuredly, quite wonderful to behold, and I truly did enjoy Keel's lead role as a poet known as the "King of the Beggars" who uses his wits and his skill with words to position his daughter for a better life as the wife of the Caliph. Keel is quite fun and able in the role, as is a pre-Family Affair and Jungle Book Sebastian Cabot as a grumbly wazir (who, fortunately, does not try to sing). There is a chance that if I manage to record this version of Kismet properly a couple more times in the future that I may grow to like it even more, possibly even to loving it. As it stands right now, my TC4P rating is a solid 6/9.

Bright Road (1953) Dir.: Gerald Mayer – I have recorded this film a couple of times before, but have deleted the recording each time either out of need for DVR space or disinterest at that particular moment. Well, I finally got interested enough to watch it, and now I regret not having visited Bright Road earlier. An early '50s attempt to engage a broader segment of the population beyond the white audience, with the lovely Dorothy Dandridge as a schoolteacher (at a segregated schoolhouse, of course) who has a sweet but troubled student in her class who doesn't quite connect with learning in the normal way. (Gee, I wonder why I connected to this material so quickly? Hmmm...) The always marvelous Harry Belafonte is the principal of the school who allows Dandridge some room (eventually) in trying to figure out the utter puzzle sitting at the little desk before her. It's a quietly paced, often sad tale, but the lead actors do wonders in working with their young cast to make the film a rewarding experience. Surprisingly for a film that is not a musical, Belafonte sings a haunting ballad during one scene that once more reminded me that he had some range beyond his more familiar calypso hits. TC4P rating: 7/9

Fort Dobbs (1958) Dir.: Gordon Douglas – The other tall, western-prone Clint. Someday, I will write more about actor Clint Walker's influence on my youth. He is somewhat of a forgotten man these days, but as a kid in my earliest years, he loomed like a 6-foot, 6-inch god before me on the TV screen. I saw old episodes of his series, Cheyenne, in syndication, and I also remember watching his extremely short-lived series, Kodiak (which lasted all of 4 episodes). I recall the show pretty clearly as we were very excited because the lead character was an Alaskan State Trooper. (For newbies to this site, I was born and partially raised in Anchorage, Alaska.) I also saw Walker in numerous films and TV movies in the '70s, the most memorable of which (for me) were Night of the Grizzly, The White Buffalo, Snowbeast, and the murderous construction equipment epic, Killdozer! (Yes, yes, more on that last one at a later date; I've been itching to talk about that absurd flick – though based on a sci-fi short story classic – for quite a while now.) 

Walker is now long retired from acting and a shocking 89 years old, so I will have to rely on his back catalogue. I have been able to see a couple of his earlier films recently, including Fort Dobbs, a small but gritty western from 1958, one of three in a row that he did with director Gordon Douglas. Walker is a man on the run from the law for shooting down a man (though it was in self-defense) but despite this, he comes to the aid of an entire town fleeing from renegade Comanches (as opposed to regular Comanches). He also has to forge a relationship with the wife (Virginia Mayo) and son (Richard Eyre, the annoying kid genie from 7th Voyage of Sinbad) of the man he shot. Walker is his usual, physically daunting heroic self, but speaking of A Family Affair earlier, that show's dad, Brian Keith, shows up in Fort Dobbs as a truly despicable and obnoxious cad who runs up against Walker when he plans to sell some newfangled repeating rifles to the very Indians that are attacking the town. While at first the film makes it seem they will be friends, their eventual rivalry is quite welcome as everything livens up each time Keith grits his teeth and says something mildly threatening. It's a darker turn from another favorite actor of my youth. The film overall is no great shakes, merely just more western product, but its cast makes it enjoyable enough. Sometimes, mere western product is what the town doc ordered. And if anything, Fort Dobbs once more reinforces my faith in my solo cult of Clint Walker. TC4P Rating: 6/9

The Mind Benders (1963) Dir.: Basil Dearden – When Ben Mankiewicz listed off similar films to The Mind Benders that dealt with brainwashing, he hit the usual suspects, such as The Manchurian Candidate (from the year before this one), A Clockwork Orange, and The Parallax View. And yes, The Mind Benders (especially owing to its name) does deal directly with influencing someone's actions using sophisticated scientific techniques. Lead actor Dirk Bogarde's character is indeed brainwashed to believe that he no longer loves his wife, in an effort (requested by Bogarde) to not only prove that one's mind can be turned completely away from his most strongly held beliefs. But he is also doing it to clear the name of his mentor, who committed suicide after using sensory deprivation therapy but whom the police believe did himself in to escape being caught as a Communist double agent. (Got all that?) 

It's a very twisty, absolute odd experience, but in going back to my opening sentence about the films that Mankiewicz reeled off, the one film he did not mention was Ken Russell's 1981 science fiction opus Altered States (which was penned by the great Paddy Chayefsky). While Altered States was not about brainwashing, but more about the de-evolution of man back to a primordial form – hence its not being cited by Ben M. – it is the film that bears the most resemblance to that which we encounter in The Mind Benders. The use of sensory deprivation equipment is completely the same, and the results of Bogarde's trip also reduces him to a proto-Jekyll and Hyde state, only without the elaborate makeup effects or the appearance of a recognizable monster as in Altered States. But the emotions that his torture bring about in his dealings with his wife are nearly as raw and almost unbearable to watch in moments as any I have seen onscreen, and they made this film truly shocking and memorable. A must-see again for me. TC4P Rating: 8/9

Sandy Wexler (2017) Dir.: Steven Brill – Man, I am reluctant to give this film a good rating, simply because it is Adam Sandler, and it is so hard to recognize when he is being completely shitty or when he is merely decent anymore. In a Netflix Original that premiered that weekend, Sandler plays the title role, a talent manager in the early 1990s who is completely inept at keeping his small stable of talent employed but whose utter sweetness and naiveté keeps them coming back to him. Sandler falls for a songstress played by Jennifer Hudson, and if you are thinking this is a romantic pair that could never, ever happen, well... yeah, I was thinking that too. And the romance part is downplayed through most of the film, but you can never doubt that something will probably bring them together by the end. Sandy Wexler features about a zillion cameos by celebs, and I guess their inclusion is what brings the film to a full two hours in length, where it really should have been a nice 1:35 or 1:40 instead. 

Surprisingly, as much as I wish Sandler would break away from his nebbishy sad sack with a goofy, stuttering voice character, he actually gives Sandy more depth than I was expecting, and there are enough good lines and jokes to just about balance out the film's faults (and it has plenty of those too). I kind of saw the film as existing somewhat in the same world as Judd Apatow's Funny People (which was also quite overlong, had Sandler in the lead, and was possibly the last thing I actually liked him in as well). I am certain there is a lot of Jerry Lewis in Sandler's conception of his main character, and since I was a Lewis nut as a kid, I am able sometimes to see past the whiny stuff that drives other people to distraction, and lie in wait for the hero to emerge from underneath the nerd outfit. I kind of did that here, as enough of the film's other characters give a serious bullying, both physically and verbally, to the poor guy that I couldn't help but root for Wexler to succeed. Surprisingly, I thought the film was good enough for me to actually give a Sandler joint (and not one done for a big league director like Apatow or P.T. Anderson) a positive rating. Miracles do happen. TC4P Rating: 6/9

Crossroads (2002) Dir.: Tamra Davis – Because I am looking out for you guys, I sometimes have to perform the impossible. This time around, I tackled a multiple Razzie-awarded flick that just happen to drift across my path early one morning. I saw Crossroads sitting before me on the channel guide screen, and after checking to see if it was actually the swell Walter Hill blues guitar flick featuring Ralph Macchio and Stevie Vai, I instead saw it was the flop Britney Spears flick from the early part of this century. A lesser man would have wimped out at the prospect of sitting through what must be a total "chick flick," but not this guy. I knew it was on my watchlist, as all films that have been nominated for Razzies are, and so I found myself adopting a "now or never" stance. Later that afternoon, I dug right into what must be the far lesser Crossroads and found out... that I was completely right.

Even with Zoe Saldana as one of the three leads, Crossroads is a dull, utterly predictable mess. It's a road picture where three former childhood besties who have fallen out long before high school graduation find themselves drawn back together by the absolutely most boring things ever placed in a time capsule and then buried for ten years. The one played by Taryn Manning wants to throw caution to the winds and drive from Georgia to California with a hunky guy (a much younger Anson Mount) that she has heard may have killed someone. The reason? To attend an open audition at a recording studio in L.A., though they never really show Manning having any real chops as a singer, despite the girls being involved in a couple of musical sequences (of which Britney is the centerpiece anyway, of course). Somehow, Manning convinces Spears (who wants to find her long-lost mom in Arizona) and Saldana (who is engaged to a guy who is supposedly doing some work in L.A. but is stupidly cheating on her – c'mon, douchebag, it's Zoe Saldana – instead) to travel together to renew their friendship. 

I never knew just how badly someone could fuck up I Love Rock 'n' Roll until you have heard Britney robotically mumble her way through the song in an absolutely unbelievable karaoke number. For a film that is really meant to push Britney product including more albums, the music is so shoddily produced as to make it hard to believe she was ever a major pop star. Most unfortunately, one has to hear the inane lyrics to her semi-hit, I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman, both spoken as poetry and then sung at least twice in the film and credits. This fluff came from the laptop of Shonda Rhimes, a few years before Grey's Anatomy started. I do not watch anything that Rhimes currently produces or writes, and so I am not going to criticize her writing beyond this film, which is pretty much generic pabulum and completely forgettable apart from its most ridiculous, jaw-dropping moments. Still, I have seen far, far worse films, and I will cut director Tamra Davis a little slack for helming CB4 way back in the day and Dirk Gently episodes most recently. Thus, this one gets a below average rating of 4/9.

This Week in Rixflix #4: March 31-April 6, 2017

A much smaller week in film watching than the previous week (10 less films), much of it directly responsible for the upswing in my hours spent writing now that the hip is doing even better than before. Having regular physical therapy also ate into the film watching time as well. Oh, yeah, and some old pal reunion time at Disney California Adventure Park on April Fools' Day with my pals Mattman and Leandro, where April Fools' was never even mentioned once. Hard for even me to think about film for long when hanging with my buddies at Disneyland Resort. (Unless we are talking about film, of course. But we only did a little bit...)

This week's feature film count: 15; 13 first-time viewings and 2 repeats.
Highest rated film: Little Fugitive (1953) – 8/9.
Lowest rated film: Frankenstein Island (1981) – 2/9.

The Arnelo Affair (1947) Dir.: Arch Oboler – A deadly dull affair without a single surprise in it, The Arnelo Affair is a waste of a pretty decent cast including Frances Gifford, George Murphy, John Hodiak, a very young Dean Stockwell, and a devastatingly underused Eve Arden, who brings the only life (and intentional comedy) to the picture. The lovely Gifford is a wife who is absolutely bored with her life with Murphy, who shows her no affection or attention at all. Her attention is turned momentarily by cad about town Hodiak (who might as well twirl his mustache if only it were longer) but when push comes to shove, she refuses to destroy her marriage with an affair. But Hodiak sets her up as the prime suspect when he decides to murder his previous flame. Since we know everything going on, and barring an incredible twist ending that never comes, all one can do for the last 40 minutes is wait for Hodiak to have a change of heart. Want to take bets that he does, but in such a way that Hodiak pays for his murdering ways violently so that the censors are appeased? Rating: 5/9

Rosalie (1937) Dir.: W.S. Van Dyke – A rather strange film that I would refer to as a "trifle" if it weren't overlong at 123 minutes, Rosalie boasts Nelson Eddy in his first role away from Jeanette McDonald, Cole Porter songs, John Philip Sousa marches, collegiate football, West Point antics, European court intrigue, and Eleanor Powell dancing her heart out at usual in the leading lady role (including the famous scene where she taps across the tops of a series of giant drums). It's an odd amalgam of ingredients, and though it has a cast filled with terrific character actors, some of them – such as Edna May Oliver, Jerry Colonna, and William Demarest – are absolutely trapped in nothing roles. I guess this was so they could give Eddy more time to bore us with molasses-slow ballads.

The best parts, and the main reasons this film slinks up to "good" territory for me, belong to sidekick Ray Bolger as Eddy's best pal who has to jump through hoops (not literally) to win his own fickle girlfriend's heart back, and his future co-star from The Wizard of Oz, Frank Morgan – the Wizard himself – as the king of Romanza, a fictitious country that doesn't seem to be all that happy to have a befuddled monarch who takes his orders from his own ventriloquist dummy. (That's right... you did not read that wrong. Ventriloquist dummy...) I did wonder for a while if perhaps this film was actually meant for Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, but it turns out that the film version of Rosalie (it was a Broadway show originally with a non-Porter score; Frank Morgan played the king on stage as well) was started in 1928 as a vehicle for Marion Davies until the production fell to pieces. A decade later in the sound era, the film was completed with only a few shots from the 1928 attempt incorporated into the final product. Regardless of its history, what made Rosalie work for me, apart from Powell's luminous dancing talent, were the scenes between Bolger (who never really gets to let loose with his incredible dance skills, though he teases them) and Morgan, who form an odd friendship amongst all the dull romantic stuff around them. They are great fun, but unless you have over two hours to spare, don't bother. Rating: 6/9

Honeysuckle Rose (1980) Dir.: Jerry Schatzberg –  One of a pair of films that I watched this week where I had seen portions of each previously but had never sat down to go through them in their entirety (Min and Bill being the other), Honeysuckle Rose was the first starring feature for Willie Nelson, and he came out of it with an Oscar nomination for One the Road Again, the monster crossover hit that was introduced in this picture. It had once astounded me that this film also received a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Supporting Actress (for Amy Irving, in the very first year of the Razzies), but when you actually look the truly shocking facts up, 70 films overall have received either nominations or awards at both the Oscars and Razzies (including Suicide Squad, which won an Oscar – sadly – this year). While Irving is pretty unpolished and young in this film, nothing about her performance reads "year's worst" to me, so obviously someone just had a beef with her in the nomination process (probably John Wilson, founder of the Razzies, whom I take exception with on a great many things he does with his awards). This movie is merely OK dramatically; in a film mostly about infidelity and the threat of divorce, everything gets tidied up far too neatly to be satisfying on that front. But the musical sequences onstage with Nelson and his band are wholly entertaining, and I also have to give a nod to a fine supporting role from the great cowboy actor Slim Pickens in a non-comedic performance. Rating: 6/9

The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened (2016) Dir.: Lonny Price – I love several Stephen Sondheim musicals, but Merrily We Roll Along is not one of them. This is mainly because I have barely heard of it, though I have heard a couple of songs from the show before (Good Thing Going, Not a Day Goes By). The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, directed by show alumnus Lonny Price, gets into exactly why most people don't know Merrily better, which opened and closed after 16 official performances (not counting previews) in 1981 (though it has been revived more successfully since). We see modern day interviews with many of the original cast, including Jason Alexander, long before his fame-making days on Seinfeld, and with Sondheim and producer Harold Prince. Luckily for this documentary, extensive filming of rehearsals had taken place at the time in conjunction with a planned television doc, which gives viewers more of a inside look at the development of the production than we might normally have gotten. But there was a little too much "inside baseball" going on here to keep my full interest through its running time. Nicely done, and essential for Sondheim and/or musical theatre fanatics only. Rating: 6/9

Easy to Love (1934) Dir.: William Keighley – The first of two 1934 comedies with which I quite unexpectedly had great fun during the week. Easy to Love is a romantic farce that features the always elegant Adolphe Menjou as a philandering husband who has the tables turned on him by his wife, played by an angered but mischievous Genevieve Tobin. She finds out the location of the love nest he shares with his would-be next wife, Mary Astor, and then precedes to make him jealous in return by affecting an affair with his best friend, a millionaire played hilariously by Edward Everett Horton, a personal favorite since my youth. Door-slamming silliness abounds, all very lightly done and coated with some terrific lines by a game cast. ("Well, I've had a lot of shotgun weddings, but this is the first fire ax wedding I've ever officiated at," says the Justice of the Peace, essayed by the terrific character actor, Guy Kibbee, and yes... someone is indeed holding a fire ax in the chapel.) Hugh Herbert shows up as a very confused detective, and that was all I needed to sell this film to me for good. A nice surprise. Rating: 7/9

Sing and Like It (1934) Dir.: William A. Seiter – And here's that other 1934 comedy, that has gangster Nat Pendleton and his grouchy, cigar-chomping (as always) sidekick Ned Sparks wander into a community theatre and encounter ZaSu Pitts, where she awkwardly and awfully squawks her way though a terrible song about mothers. Unluckily for everyone, Pendleton is a full-on mama's boy who tears up at the song, and decides then and there (and especially after everyone says openly that it stinks) that he is going to make Pitts a big Broadway star. Soon, he and his thugs are not just taking over the upcoming show belonging to a big-time producer played (once again) by Edward Everett Horton, but he even has a couple of his guys rewrite the script by adding incredibly sophomoric jokes to it. If this sounds reminiscent at all of Bullets Over Broadway, then you win a cigar, because that is basically what it is, only the would-be star is just gawky ol' ZaSu Pitts and not the gangster's girlfriend, played here by a fiery Pert Kelton, who then plans to have Pitts kidnapped. Just so remarkably silly and goofy, in which Sparks gets the best showcase, throwing off remarks about everything going on around them, which mostly fall on the deaf ears of Pendleton, who just keeps crying every time he hears the "Mama" song. Sing and Like It gets a couple of big demerits though for having a repeated punchline being each time Kelton ends up with a black eye from her man. (Easy to Love doesn't go that far, but yes, the threat of a wife-beating lurks there as well, as it does in many a 1930s comedy.) Sure, it was the times, and one cannot judge ancient relics by the acceptable societal measures of today and ever hope to be entertained. But that doesn't mean one has to like them either, and such scenes come off completely cold today for anyone that is not a white male in the House or Congress. Still, my rating is a 7/9.

Recently Rated Movies: The Bridges of Tortured Accents

Seventh Son (2014)
Dir.: Sergei Bodrov
TC4P: 4/9

Up until a very few years ago, I was pretty much down for any fantasy film that came my way. The cast didn't matter, the special effects didn't matter, the fact that a film perhaps had a budget that was far too low for what it was trying to accomplish could only endear it to me more... and story? Who cares if it didn't make a lick of sense in the real world. All I needed was a dragon, assorted monsters, a wizard or a witch or two, some swashbuckling action, and some damsels in distress. And if the damsels in distress turned out to be the ones doing the swashbuckling, even better. (Sorry, guys... based on aesthetics alone, tough women are infinitely more interesting to watch than sweaty, nasty men.) 

Then digital happened. Then CGI happened. The ability to expand the size of battles and monster fights and all manner of wizardry happened. Films starting looking more and more gray-bluish and turd-brownish the more CGI was used. This didn't effect just fantasy films, but also science-fiction, historical epics, and war films. Every film, despite the disparate story elements and genres, all started looking the same to me, to the point where going to see a simple, two-person drama with bare bones camerawork (which once was anathema to me) seemed to be a reasonable antidote. And with the sameness, and of course, the success of giant franchises that ensured that knockoffs would hit us left and right, came the curse of too many films. We became inundated with movie after movie that all looked like the exact movie we saw the week before, in the same way that I right now can't tell the film version of The Giver from The Maze Runner from Divergent from The Hunger Games.

When I first saw the trailer for Seventh Son in a theatre, I was understandably confused. I had been for many years a fan of Orson Scott Card (and people, it is OK to still enjoy a person's writing even if you don't agree with his personal/political stance on some things). Apart from the Ender's Game series, I really loved The Tales of Alvin Maker series (though admittedly, I have not read the most recent two books in the currently six-book line). But here was the trailer for a film named Seventh Son, which is the title of the very first book in the Alvin Maker series, and yes, here onscreen is, like that book, a young apprentice who is the seventh son of a seventh son. But then dragons and witches and monsters show up in the trailer, and in my head, I start thinking that Hollywood has really screwed up this time. That's not the book I remember. Isn't it supposed to be in an alternate timeline of America? Where are the Native Americans? I scanned the very quick credits card that flashed at the end of the trailer and saw no sign of Card's name, and realized it was a totally different property. And since the trailer didn't look that interesting, there would be no need for me to see it until video.

And see it on video, I have. Years ago, I would have loved Seventh Son. It has Julianne Moore as a truly evil witch with little remorse, and that is OK with me, because I will watch her in anything. The film has a multitude of dragons and monsters, and that too is still OK with me, because I am at heart purely a monster guy. The monster effects here run hot and cold with me; every time that I was wowed by a particular effect, the next one would be a letdown. But there is one huge lizard-monster that slathers and slobbers effectively, so that sat well with me. Seventh Son also has Olivia Williams, and she kind of falls into the same camp as Moore for me, but she is sorely underused (as she often is). The film tries to go far too big given how thin its story is, which I guess would be to allow for more action from its male lead, Jeff Bridges, as an aging knight -- actually a "spook" in the parlance of this film -- who battles witches for a living but who long ago was involved in a tragically romantic way with Moore's sorceress. And this is where I really ran into trouble with Seventh Son.

Since I first saw Bridges in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in the 1970s, ol' Jeff has been one of my consistently favorite actors. For a long time, I felt he was highly underrated and misused in Hollywood; suddenly, after over 30 years in the biz, the massive cult success of The Big Lebowski solidified him in the minds of the public forever, and then his Oscar win for Crazy Heart (after four previous nominations) just added to his legend. Since then, apart from True Grit (which was a smart choice and earned another Oscar nod), I feel he has gotten sloppy in the usual way of actors who have finally won an Oscar and then don't seem to try as hard. (R.I.P.D. anyone?) Then again, Jeff always did have a strange way of picking projects throughout his career.

And here in Seventh Son, taking on an action-heavy role, it seems that Bridges may have gotten too far out of his element. Thrust into a fairy-tale setting without a definite period -- I suppose we could define it mockingly as "medieval timeless" -- it is still noticeably European in look and feel, with most of the characters speaking with British accents. Not known for his Shakespeare, Bridges makes an odd attempt at his own style of accent, that doesn't seek to replicate the inflection of a certain people as much as he instead growl-shouts most of his lines in the hopes of landing somewhere near an accent that seems to fit in with the rest of the cast. And he is wildly inconsistent with it. 

Despite this, the more tender moments in the script (though there are few of them) are his better ones, where the growl-shout is turned down to a mere growl-mumble -- which could be Rooster Cogburn in armor for all we care -- and he is allowed to communicate more through close-ups with his considerable gift at charismatic expression. Overall though, it is a performance that I wouldn't be surprised gained a Razzie nomination this year (it came out theatrically in February 2015), and as much as it pains me, I would have to agree with the selection if they did. I can often admire actors who try things they never would normally try, but it seems that Ol' Jeff bit off more than he could chew here. (Strangely, he actually underplays in many instances, so the scenery is at least safe.)

There is considerable talent behind the camera: director Sergei Bodrov (Mongol), three-time Oscar winning production designer Dante Ferretti, composer Marco Beltrami, and co-writer Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), and apart from Ferretti's work, it is all for naught. Especially galling is Beltrami's score, which is just far too over-the-top at every second of the film, and you wished for a defter touch in every scene. Combined with that wash of overall mediocre special effects work, and Seventh Son makes you wonder if is actually the work of a bunch of fourth sons of third son-of-a-bitches.

RTJ