Sphere: adapted from the Michael Crichton novel by Kurt Wimmer, Stephen Hauser, and Paul Attanasio; directed by Barry Levinson; starring Dustin Hoffman (Dr. Norman Goodman), Sharon Stone (Dr. Beth Halperin), Samuel L. Jackson (Dr. Harry Adams), Peter Coyote (Captain Baines), Liev Schreiber (Dr. Fielding), and Queen Latifah (Fletcher) (1998): A fairly famous mess in 1998 and still something of a mess now. But separated from tales of budget over-runs and what Dustin Hoffman correctly noted was a movie that needed a lot more re-writing and editing before release, Sphere just seems like a dud now and not an indictment of studio interference.
The U.S. military discovers a mysterious spacecraft 1000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean near Guam. Inside that spaceship is a giant glowy sphere that seems to be made out of liquid mercury but really isn't. A team is sent to investigate. Dustin Hoffman, at the conclusion of his brief flirtation with the big paychecks of Event Movies, plays a psychologist who has been chosen to lead the civilian portion of the team because he wrote a paper on First Contact procedures for the first Bush administration. The two other big names in the cast, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson, play a biologist and a mathematician respectively. The lesser names in the cast play Cannon Fodder 1-4.
Barry Levinson's direction gets as much tension out of some of the exterior underwater scenes as it can, generating a real sense of panic in a couple of sequences as strange marine lifeforms menace our intrepid but whiny team. Sphere's fatal flaw is a scrambled, creaky script that results in scenes that are under-explained and long stretches of gratingly repetitive dialogue that even a solid cast can't make interesting. Even the threat, once revealed, doesn't make as much sense as the film-makers and the characters seem to think it does.
The movie is also rife with stupidities that exist solely to create plot tension (Hey, let's park the emergency escape sub a five-minute swim from the base, and while we're at it, let's not give the team any powered underwater craft to move between the base and the sub or the base and the spaceship!). There's also a truly incredible late howler involving the decoding of an alien message that I'm pretty sure a smart four-year old would catch. Not anyone involved with this movie, though!
There is one great twist early in the movie. Unfortunately, once we're past that twist, Sphere's fairly amazing similarity to a pair of Star Trek episodes* -- one from the original series and one from the Next Generation -- becomes more and more noticeable. Only much slower, stupider, and more boring and punctuated again and again with frustrating, repetitive scenes of people talking around and around in circles. Sphere could have been interesting, a fresh riff on movies like Alien and The Thing with a high-level cast and a major director. Instead it's a botch, though you may find yourself watching to the end just to see how big a botch it is. Not recommended.
* Spoiler alert: Sphere mashes together TOS's "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before." I kid you not.
The General: written by Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Al Boasberg, Charles Smith, Paul Smith, and William Pittenger; directed by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton; starring Buster Keaton (Johnnie Gray) and Marion Mack (Annabelle Lee) (1926): Buster Keaton's big-budget Civil War comedy astonishes in part because pretty much everything on-screen involving trains actually had to be filmed live. The timing of the various stunts and comic bits is impeccable, and the direction superb.
Keaton was the most gifted comic director of his time, a much more innovative figure than Chaplin in that regard. The sting of cheering for the Confederacy has been muted by Keaton in a number of ways, most notably by his complete omission of African-Americans from the screen. It's a comic triumph that will nonetheless infuriate some people for its glib view of the South. There are also some odd bits in which soldiers for both the Union and the Confederacy being shot to death get played for laughs. Highly recommended.
Tootsie: written by Larry Gelbart, Murray Schisgal, Don McGuire, Robert Garland, Barry Levinson, and Elaine May; directed by Sydney Pollack; starring Dustin Hoffman (Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels), Jessica Lange (Julie), Teri Garr (Sandy), Dabney Coleman (Ron), Bill Murray (Jeff), Charles Durning (Les), George Gaynes (John Van Horn), Geena Davis (April) and Sidney Pollack (George Fields) (1982): Ah, what a great comedy. The cast is terrific and in fine form in this fable of an actor (Hoffman) who learns to be a better man by pretending to be a woman in order to get a job on a soap opera.
It's really remarkable how zingy the dialogue is throughout, and how uniformly excellent is the cast (including director Pollack as Hoffman's long-suffering agent). The difficulty of working with Hoffman forms a subtext to the entire picture -- Pollack refused to direct him again despite Tootsie's massive critical and commercial success. Bill Murray drifts in and out to provide a loose, improvisational Greek Chorus as Hoffman's playwright-room-mate, Jessica Lange won an Oscar for her sweet, funny performance, and everyone else is also awesome. Highly recommended.
The Mummy: written by Jimmy Sangster; directed by Terence Fisher; starring Peter Cushing (John Banning), Christopher Lee (Kharis the Mummy), and Yvonne Furneaux (Isobel/Ananka) (1959): Enjoyable, atmospheric remake by British Hammer Studios of the original 1930's Universal horror movie The Mummy. This movie completed Christopher Lee's Hammer trifecta of playing three of the four classic horror-movie monsters originally made famous by those Universal movies of the 1930's -- Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Mummy, but alas, no Wolf Man.
Lee hated the heavy make-up and costuming for the Mummy, and would avoid heavy make-up ever afterwards. Like Karloff before him, he towers over the rest of the cast (there's a funny moment in which a drunk English poacher claims that the Mummy is 10-feet tall, and it doesn't seem like that much of an exaggeration). Lee is again teamed with his Dracula and Frankenstein co-star Peter Cushing, here playing the son of the archaeologist who released the vengeful mummy into the world.
The Egyptian sets and costumes are really quite impressive, as are the moody scenes set on the moor and in the swamp nearby, with some nice staging for scenes in which the Mummy emerges from, and later descends into, the swamp. Cushing makes for an interesting hero here as he did in the Dracula films as Van Helsing, and Yvonne Furneaux is lovely in the dual role of Cushing's wife and the long-dead Egyptian priestess Ananka, whom Lee's high priest loved and was ultimately mummified alive for loving.
Lee does what he can with his eyes, the only expressive part his made-up face shows, and by the end achieves a sort of lurching, Frankensteinian pathos as the Mummy. That pathos is also partially obtained by having a cultist give the Mummy his murderous orders. The Mummy really looks like he'd rather not stir from his 4000-years' sleep. Recommended.
