“C”: Cool Hand Luke (1967)
I blame a shitty TCM recording, a loud thunderstorm, and a break half-way through to eat dinner for damaging my maximum enjoyment of Stuart Rosenberg’s Paul Newman classic Cool Hand Luke. Newman is an actor I’ve gained mad respect for because only in the past few months, I’ve seen The Hustler and The Verdict. Compared to the other two, Luke is the weakest, in both quality and Newman performance. But it’s certainly his most iconic. In the movie, Newman is Luke, a fighter against in the prison system that he has been introduced to. He’s a broken man, and all comes out in the final thirty minutes. But what about the hour and a half before? Roseneberg depicts Luke’s revolutionary “against-the-system” actions with a balance of fun and dead seriousness, and maybe forty-some years ago Luke’s behavior would have been considered rude, but today it feels mild. George Kennedy is terrific as Luke’s friend, deservedly winning Best Supporting Actor in 1968. (7.7/10)
“K”: Klute (1971)
Often I divide movies by pre-Godfather and post-Godfather, almost as if cinema is a religion and The Godfather is Jesus. The pre-Godfather era is a much tamer one than the post, so I was totally surprised by Klute‘s explicit nature. Think of Klute like Charade, sans playfulness plus seriousness. Donald Sutherland is dead serious like Jesus Christ dude can you stop being so serious sometimes, I’m like 100% sure there has been more evidence of Bigfoot over Donald Sutherland smiling John Klute, an investigator searching for a missing friend. His key? Jane Fonda’s NYC prostitute character. Do they fall in love? Yes. Is the missing friend revealed to have been killed by a friend? Yes. Klute, though mature and stylistically exciting, offers few things that haven’t already been seen before. I guess Jane Fonda was alright in the movie, though. (6.6/10)
“S”: Syriana (2005)
In this year’s Oscar season, Inherent Vice was ridiculed for being nonsensical and impossible. But did those guys even see Syriana, Stephen Gaghan’s exposé into shady oil going-ons? The movie has an all-star cast, with George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Peet, and William Hurt, to name a few. Though the plot is as tangled as Disney’s 2010 animated Rapunzel movie, maybe that was what Gaghan intended. There’s a lot of stuff happening in Syriana, and more often than not I was confused, but it still proves itself as bold adult filmmaking that the studio system needs a whole heck of a lot more of. (7.6/10)
By this time next month, I will have wrapped up my Alphabetical April challenge. Stay tuned for a final post in the coming weeks ranking all 27 films that I watched for the challenge.
Wu Chainz 