Two Geeks and a GIT Classic Movie Reviews

The other film in our pairing which features an actor in their first outing as director takes place in Dorchester, Boston in 2007. Directed by Boston-native Ben Affleck, the film stars his brother Casey as Patrick Kenzie, a local private investigator who is brought into a child abduction case by the abducted girl's Aunt and Uncle, Bea (Amy Madigen) and Lionel (Titus Welliver) McCready. Working with his partner, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), they learn that the girl's mother, Helene (Amy Ryan) reportedly left the girl with a neighbor for only a few minutes, but when she returned, the child was gone. Police detectives Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Pool (John Ashton) are assigned to the case, which is overseen by decorated Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman). Patrick and Angie pursue the child through a network of neighborhood contacts, and believe they've found her and negotiated her safe return when everything goes horribly wrong, and they believe the child has died. But this is only the beginning of a story with some incredible twists and turns before all is said and done. And the gents turn their attention to one of the greatest female actors of all time with their next pairing!

We begin our look at the first outing by actors-turned-directors with a gentleman who's turned out to be one of the best directors in Hollywood! It all started back in 1971 for Clint Eastwood, with a little thriller called "Play Misty For Me." Dave Garver (Eastwood) is a DJ at KRML in Carmel-by-the-Sea, spinning tunes for the locals. He has a regular caller who always asks him to "Play Misty for me..." One night, at the local watering hole, he hooks up with Evelyn (Jessica Walter), who confesses to being his "Misty" caller. After an enjoyable night together, Dave is ready to return to life as usual, Evelyn, however, has other ideas, interpreting their night together as an indication of commitment and love. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game of passion, obsession, and threat that ends up sweeping over Dave, his intended girlfriend Tobie Williams (Donna Mills), and Detective Sergeant McCallum (John Larch). The film that taught people everywhere to be careful who you let into your home! Also starring James McEachin, Clarice Taylor, Donald Siegel, and Duke Everts.

After the success of "The Graduate," the counter-culture exploded onto screens across the United States. But it was a surprise hit from the Cannes Film Festival in France that really cemented the movement's place on the silver screen, a film about two drug-dealing and drug-consuming drifters, on motorcycles, headed from Los Angeles to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. First-time director Dennis Hopper, who also starred in the film with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, made 1969's "Easy Rider" into a spiritual monument to the culture of the youth of the day, as well as becoming an indictment of the intolerance and bigotry those who participated in such communities faced, especially in the U.S. south, during the late 60s. The film also continued the trend of using modern music in lieu of an instrumental score to provide an emotional floor for the story, creating one of the first great rock and folk soundtracks in film history. And the trio unveil which two films, featuring first-time actors-turned-directors, make up their next pairing.

As cinema developed, as a medium and as an art, it went through periods of significant change, both in form and content. The late 60s was one of the most drastic turning points, as the free love movement, the hippie movement, and the anti-war movement all dovetailed together, creating what film scholars refer to as the "counter-culture movement" in film. The style, stories, and structure of the stories being told on the big screen started rejecting traditional Hollywood in order to craft new narratives, tales of the youth of the day and what their lives were like, that reflected their experiences living in the America they'd inherited from their parents, whose culture they soundly rejected. And the poster-child of counter-culture films arrived in 1967, an examination of the ennui experienced by those coming out of college and looking ahead at their futures with bleak and detached hearts and minds as they realized that they wanted something different than their parents had, but not knowing what that might be or how to find it. Directed by Mike Nichols, and starring William Daniels, Katherine Ross, Anne Bancroft, and a young Dustin Hoffman, "The Graduate" took all of that existential angst and wrapped it into a story about a young college graduate so morally and spiritually adrift that an affair with an older woman becomes both a distraction and a crisis, and when that woman's daughter enters the picture, things take several turns for the worse... or do they?

The second film in our pairing honoring the late Raquel Welch is one of the best-loved versions of this particular story. Originally penned in 1844 by French Author Alexander Dumas, 1973's version of "The Three Musketeers" had such an impact on both audiences and other filmmakers that some of the elements it established would go on to become traditions that later versions would honor. Directed by Richard Lester, of "A Hard Day's Night" fame, and starred a veritable "Who's Who?" of talent in the early 70s. The story follows young D'Artagnan (Michael York), who is off to Paris to join the King's Musketeers. Of course, things don't go quite as planned. After running afoul of the villainous Rochefort (the incredible Christopher Lee), he gets to Paris only to find out that he lacks the experience to become a Musketeer. Following several mishaps that earn him three successive duels, he meets up with Athos (Oliver Reed), Porthos (Frank Finley), and Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) who end up becoming his companions for his stay in town. He also meets Conastance de Bonacieux (Raquel Welch), the wife of his inn's keeper, and with whom he falls passionately in love with. The film also features Geraldine Chaplin as Queen Ann, Jean-Pierre Cassel as King Louis XIII, Roy Kinnear as Planchet, and Faye Dunaway as Milady. Plus, the trio reveal the two counter-culture films they show in class that make up the next pairing!

On February 15th, 2023, we lost a member of cinematic royalty, a great actress and one of the screen's classic beauties. Raquel Welch passed away at the age of 82, and we're pushing our scheduled pairing back in order to celebrate her work in film. We begin with a film so accurate in its depiction of human physiology, it was show to in medical school as late as the 1980s. Directed by Richard Fleischer, "Fantastic Voyage" tells the story of cutting edge miniaturization technology being used in an attempt to save the mind and life of the scientist at the core of its creation by shrinking a submarine with a specialized crew and sending them take out a brain lesion from the inside. The film stars Ms. Welch as Cora, alongside Stephen Boyd as Grant, Edmond O'Brien as General Carter, Donald Pleasence as Dr. Michaels, Arthur O'Connell as Colonel Donald Reid, and a couple "blink and you'll miss them" cameos from James Brolin and James Doohan!

The second film in our return to Film Noir moves us ahead two years and offers us a radically different story about an insurance salesman. This time around, it's the instincts of an investigator of the Atlantic Casual Agency that suggest a simple beneficiary payout might be something more than it seems, leading to a story about love, crime, betrayal, and justice! Directed by Robert Siodmak, the film stars Burt Lancaster (in his first starring role in a Hollywood film), Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene, Vince Barnett, Virginia Christine, Jack Lambert, Donald MacBride, and introducing William Conrad! If Double Indemnity poured shade on the role of an insurance man, this film brings the occupation back out into the sunlight! Plus, the cinematic triumvirate reveal which famous big screen actress will be the focus of their next pairing!

We're returning to the 1940s and the style of film made famous during that decade, Film Noir, with two films looked upon as classic examples! First up, the year was 1944, and the story of an insurance salesman who falls for a beautiful but terribly unhappy married woman so hard he agrees to kill her husband so they can be together. Thus begins a twisted tale of murder, lies, betrayal, and ultimately failure. Directed by Hollywood legend Billy Wilder, and starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Byron Barr, Porter Hall, Jean Heather, and Tom Powers, the film unspools with a tale as tawdry and disturbing as any that came from the hallowed halls of Hollywood. The film provided MacMurray, who had made a career for himself playing good guys, a chance to stretch his acting skills with a role of a completely corrupted, unprincipled individual, and cemented his place as one of the great actors of his time.

Our look at the 1930s wouldn't be complete without one of the biggest films perhaps ever! As the decade drew to a close, one film would sweep filmgoers off their feet and transport them, via cyclone, to a land somewhere over the rainbow. In 1939's "The Wizard of Oz," MGM Studios finally found the film they'd been looking for that would rise to the level of Disney's hit "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" two years earlier! Directed by Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Mervyn LeRoy (with a bit of help from King Vidor), the film stars a young Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke, Terry the dog, and the face and voice that would give children nightmares for decades to come, Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West (among other characters)! Add to that, of course, over 120 little person actors, with some surprise technicolor cinematic magic thrown in for good measure, and the first-ever soundtrack of a film released as audio recordings for audiences to purchase, and you have an epic tale that, while straying significantly from L. Frank Baum's original story, nevertheless created a cinematic experience that would be shared generation after generation! Plus, the trio reveal which two film noir classics will populate the next pairing!

We turn to a pivotal decade in film history for this pairing! First up - 10 years after the movies learned to talk. 2 years after the first Technicolor film debuted on screens. The Walt Disney company released what everyone was sure would be a failure, so much so that they called it "Disney's Folly," but it would end up being anything but! Directed by William Cottrell, David Hand, and Wilfred Jackson, and featuring the voices of Adriana Caselotti, Harry Stockwell, Lucille La Verne, Roy Atwell, Stuart Buchanan, Eddie Collins, Pinto Colvig, Billy Gilbert, Otis Harlan, Scotty Mattraw, and Moroni Olsen, the first feature-length animated film hit screens in 1937, and became the highest grossing animated film of all time (adjusted for inflation, of course)! We're talking about 1937's Disney classic "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" of course! So much is yet to be common knowledge about the inspiration, development, and production of this timeless tale, but the Two Geeks and a G.I.T. trio are here to fix that!