Behnke's Useless Thoughts

                            I don't hate Michael Bay. That's probably an unpopular thing to utter. To cineastes, he ruined the modern landscape of movies, relying on blunt spectacle rather than substance. But, you can't deny that he holds a unique place in movie history. I mean, sure, his name has become synonymous with shlock but it's shlock with flair . He's a dazzling pyrotechnic, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing. If Bay had picked a different career, he probably would have been one of those fellas who shoot off fireworks at the local county fair. Roland Emmerich is in the same camp though you never hear his name bandied about (probably because 'Michael Bay' is a snappier name). His movies are not quite as memorable as Bay's (except for Independence Day ) which I guess makes Bay a half.... step up, I guess (as I write this, I realize that Emmerich, as mediocre a filmmaker as he is, at least h...

                               1955's Summertime  marked a transition for director David Lean, whose previous efforts were smaller-scale British films. This film was his first internationally produced film and would ultimately lead to larger epics like Bridge on the River Kwai , Doctor Zhivago , and  Lawrence of Arabia .                               Summertime is based on Arthur Laurents' play "The Time of the Cuckoo" (which would later be adapted into the musical "Do I Hear a Waltz?"). It tells the story of Jane Hudson (played by Katharine Hepburn), a lonely American spinster taking a vacation in Venice where she meets and falls in love with an Italian merchant named Renato (played by Rossano Brazzi) who also happens to be married.                        ...

                                Dead Ringers , though not a particularly good film, is vintage Cronenberg, if a bit more restrained than his usual fare. David Cronenberg is cinema's native explorer of people's 'literal' insides; a pioneer of "body horror", a sub genre where the most frightening thing about life is not external, but internal.....organs, that is. He is, like the twins in Dead Ringers , both a serious filmmaker and strictly a man of genre, though more transgressive than most.                         It is (somewhat) based on the true story of identical twin brothers Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons), two respected gynecologists with distinct yet not so dissimilar personalities: Elliot is the confident womanizer and Beverly is the sensitive recluse, striking a balance.....until a woman comes along, an actress (p...

                                     In preparation for 1991's  The Silence of the Lambs, I read Thomas Harris' 1988 novel just to see how they match up. The novel tells the story of Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee who is recruited by Jack Crawford to help hunt for a serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill, whose modus operandi is to kidnap and kill oversized women to make clothing apparel out of their skin. To help out on the manhunt is an unlikely source, the charismatic cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter.                                     As far as adaptations go, the movie is a very faithful adaptation of the book (to the point where they built Buffalo Bill's house and the insane asylum set solely on Harris' descriptions in the book). I don't often read action thrillers, except for the occasional...

                                  Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss are two of the many Samuel Fuller features that have been released by Criterion (though they still haven't released The Big Red One , which is probably my favorite movie of his) and are often paired together because they were both distributed by Allied Artist Pictures, a company specializing in low-budget films that Fuller briefly worked for after his stint with the big studio companies. Fuller is considered one of the more under-appreciated filmmakers in the latter half of the 20th century, influencing a who's who of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. He worked under low budgets, tried his hand at different genres from Westerns to war flicks to film noirs, and tackled hard-hitting contemporary issues (told in a clear-eyed, blunt, tabloid-like style; Fuller was a newspaper reporter before he became a filmmaker)...

                                  I feel like I'm in a unimaginably tiny minority when it comes to This is Spinal Tap , the landmark 1984 mock- umentary about a mediocre 80's hair metal band. This is Spinal Tap  is grossly overrated, not so much as a movie (because its importance and ambition can't be denied) but as a comedy. I never found the movie funny.                                  My antipathy toward the film may have to do with a certain cynicism I have with the mockumentary genre itself. Us millennials have been fairly inundated with shows like The Office and Park and Recreations  to see through the stagey-ness of fake verisimilitude. The satire, though considered clever upon initial release, feels heavy-handed and obvious today. The joke gets old really fast. Not to mention that it relies on impr...