Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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That is the beginning of The Formula, an MGM film that opens nationally this week and stars George C. Scott and Marlon Brando. The movie panders to the many who believe that the energy crisis is all just a plot by Big Oil. In this case the energy companies have a formula for cheap fuel, but they are keeping it a secret in order to maintain high prices and gouge the public...
...companies are naturally unhappy about once again being cast in the role of the heavy. Mobil Oil lawyers have met privately with MGM officials to object. Says a Mobil spokesman: "This is not even a good piece of fiction." The clear winner from the film is Marlon Brando, who received a reported $250,000 a day for ten days' work. That is a real formula for making money...
This is not to imply that Flash is an art film. Its adapters had an easier task than Popeye's did, since the comic's creator, Alex Raymond, was the most movieish of illustrators. His space fantasies are replicable on a sound stage, because they consisted largely of art deco architecture, primitive emotions and sexy states of undress. One gets a sense that Production Designer Danilo Donati had fun recreating Raymond's visions, that Writer Semple's script was lettered into balloons, and Director Hodges kept a pile of old comic books on hand to suggest...
Where, in its preparation, the film became mushy misanthropy one cannot tell. It can certainly be said that Popeye will bore children and offend adults who fondly remember the original. It is a travesty to hear Williams warble the classic "I yam what I yam" line in one of Harry Nilsson's many witless songs. "I'm not the man I was" would be a more appropriate lyric. Or maybe, "What have they done...
...idea is not simply to mike the actors and jack up their volume; Breuer says that in wedding the aural techniques of radio and film to the visual images of a stage, he is using conventions the audience already understands but has never seen yoked together. The ancestor of this idea is the film director's voice-over: "It's theater about the way you think. When you think, there's about the way you think. When you think, there's a voice in your head, like someone speaking in your ear, and then there are abstract images...