moonspinner55

Joaquin Phoenix as an unwashed, pot-smoking private investigator in a Southern California beach community circa 1970 whose ex-girlfriend needs his help in preventing her real estate developer boyfriend from being railroaded by his own wife and her lover who hope to commit him to "the loony bin". The case ties into the Black Guerrillas, the Aryan Brotherhood, as well as a Los Angeles police detective who arrests the private eye after finding him lying unconscious next to the dead body of one of the missing man's bodyguards. Half-cocked, perpetually enervated noir adapted from Thomas Pynchon's novel by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has a terrific and eclectic cast but doesn't utilize anyone to their best advantage (particularly Phoenix, who seems to be channeling Jeff Bridges). A complete and total self-indulgent folly by the filmmaker...every great director should be allowed one, anyway. Two Oscar nominations: for Anderson's script and Mark Bridges' costumes. Anderson won the National Board of Review Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the film was named one of the Top 10 best of the year. * from ****

Workers in a newly-constructed high-rise office building have to use the passenger elevator to move a 700lb safe, which jostles the elevator car's moorings, shortening out the power. A TV-version of the "disaster movie"; no threat to Irwin Allen, but more plot-complicated and character-oriented than it probably needed to be. In the elevator we have: claustrophobic James Farentino, who was part of a three-person heist of thousands of dollars from a business inside the building (we never learn whose money this is, who stole it first, but moving on...); Myrna Loy as a likably chatty doctor's mother checking out rental space; Roddy McDowall as the building manager; Craig Stevens and Teresa Wright as a doctor and his wife; Arlene Golonka as the doctor's secretary and mistress; and teenager Barry Livingston and his hysterical mother Jean Allison. Director Jerry Jameson works hard to give us a little suspense, and Don Stroud is a heartless baddie who shoots two people and takes a blowtorch to the elevator's cables. Not much, but Loy's resolve is sweet, and she takes the movie to its reassuring finale. ** from ****

Hysterical, overheated hothouse melodrama from Tom T. Chamales' novel might rate as a guilty pleasure were it not for all the shouting and foolish-acting characters. San Francisco prostitute Gina Lollobrigida reluctantly falls in love with former Army soldier Anthony Franciosa, who is apparently too naïve to grasp what she does for a living (she doesn't charge him for sex--maybe that's what throws him off!). Once Franciosa is made aware of his lady-love's vocation--and the fact she's had most of the men in the city, including Tony's father, Greek engineering tycoon Ernest Borgnine--he's ready to leave her, but Pop's interfering (including hiring a private detective) may instead send the battling couple down the aisle. Randal MacDougall wrote the adaptation and directed (with uncredited behind-the-scenes help from Charles Walters), but he can't seem to stay on track: one minute, hot-headed Borgnine is luring his son out on a construction beam 20 stories high after the kid asks for a loan, but soon after is consoling the heartbroken boy in a motel room and throwing a wad of cash at him. After the film's first-half, which plays like a faux-Greek family soap opera filmed on a hideously over-decorated set, MacDougall changes course, sending our lovers to Mexico for a vacation! Glossy, ridiculous picture is so lame-brained, you can't even get mad at the people who made it. They were probably hoping for Oscars, but instead delivered a gift for camp-addicts. *1/2 from ****