Love Story

Dude, you might want to get the hideous back growth removed.

Love Story was the most popular movie of 1970, making it Exhibit X in what is quickly becoming the main thesis of this blog, “People in the 70’s had terrible taste.” Romantic movies typically start with a Meet Cute. This one starts with a Meet Ugly, since the girl is such a horrible person that the banter seems more like it should end with her getting punched, not a date. I would have paid real cash money to watch her die slowly of a terminal illness and oh hey look wish fulfillment. Her death’s not really a spoiler since her sweet, sweet demise is announced at the beginning of the movie and it was made 40 years ago.

The guy isn’t much better, since all he does is whine about how much it sucks to be rich, then how much it sucks to be poor, then how much it sucks that his wife is dying. I think I’m supposed to feel bad for him since his actually pretty nice parents are too rich, but his rebellion makes him seem like a petulant twerp. Both of the main characters don’t have a sympathetic bone in their body. They’re also about the only people in the movie, so you’re stuck with them for the duration. Aside from “young” Tommy Lee Jones anyway. Dude was born forty years old.

At least all this nonsense is completely forgettable. Love Story is just a montage of scenes from other movies. Montage of falling in love, montage of being poor, montage of fighting/making up, montage of being rich, montage of dying, montage of people who made the movie. These aren’t kick-ass 80’s montages either. It’s all people slowly walking around in coats while a piano plinks away in the background. The whole thing is as generic as the title. The only memorable thing is how ugly the girl is. Even for the 70’s she’s homely.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: Yes

Dark Star

Later on, the bean-bag alien uses a lava lamp to solve a puzzle hidden in a blacklight poster.

I made a couple of mistakes when watching Dark Star. My first mistake was deciding to watch a 1974 sci-fi movie about some guys with shaggy hair sitting in a spaceship for 20 years with no outside contact. The second came from the relentless optimism that darkens every day I live. There were two options in the DVD menu. One made the movie last a little over an hour, and one for 80 minutes. I thought to myself, “Surely, you sexy devil, you can handle a mere 80 minutes of film.” No. I couldn’t. I had to fast forward through an extra fifteen minutes. So I wasted an extra two minutes, or one Hot Pocket, of my life.

The story related above is significantly more interesting than the movie itself. There’s dudes in space, nothing happens until the last five minutes, then the movie ends. The Must-See Movie book insists that this is a comedy, which is funnier than anything in the movie itself. It’s a bleak, depressing movie. Not because of the loneliness of space or anything like that, but because someone in the 70’s thought this movie was a good idea. I can’t believe the 70’s happened. I just can’t. The decade is like genies, a good Jennifer Lopez movie, or landing on the moon. It’s never happened.

In this long, drawn out eighty minutes of crap, the special effects deserve special mention. This is the least convincing recreation of space since I suffocated myself with a plastic bag and passed out. An excruciatingly long sequence in the middle of the movie involves an alien that looks like a bean bag with rubber feet. I’m not saying that to give you a rough approximation of what the alien’s appearance. It literally looks like someone strapped a bean bag to a pair of rubber feet. I can see the seams on the bean bag. If the Must-see Movie book is right and this movie influenced a generation of sci-fi film-makers, I no longer have to guess why most sci-fi movies suck so hard. Mystery solved, Scooby!

Rating:  Musty

Did I fast-forward: Yes

Murder on the Orient Express

If you look carefully, you can see chewing marks on the set.

Murder on the Orient Express takes place in 1930, but oddly looks like a bunch of people from the 70’s wearing period clothing.  Oh, hey, it was filmed in 1974!  Everyone has giant sideburns, unkempt facial hair, and there’s that 70’s film covering the camera lens.  God the 70’s were terrible.  They can’t even convincingly portray a time period a mere forty years prior.

It’s easy to be distracted by the 70’sness of it all since there’s little to this movie other than the central whodunit. It’s just a series of interviews led by a detective to find out who killed a train passenger.   Like so much of the production, the victim’s Texas drawl is pretty out of place.  It would probably more at home starring in Dallas than a period drama, so his death isn’t much of a loss.

The interview format leads to a star-studded cast where each star has about five minutes of screen time.  They make the most of those few minutes and overact the crap out of their roles.  Even Ingrid Bergman, the Most Fantastic Woman that Ever Lived, is pretty grating.  The main detective is even worse.  He’s in every scene and does the most off-putting impression of a French person I’ve seen since Gérard Depardieu.

I suspect the whole affair won’t be much fun if you’ve already read the Agatha Christie novel.  Luckily, reading is passé and everything worth reading has been turned into a movie by now.  This one stays true to its book roots by having almost all of the content involve old people talking to each other.  Still, the underlying mystery is pretty good and has an unexpected resolution.  To me anyway.  The last book I read’s twist was that the protagonist did not, in fact, like green eggs or ham.  I just didn’t see it coming.

Rating: Must-see

Did I fast-forward: No.  That’d be like reading the last page of a book first.

Three Days of the Condor

Redford is clearly the best spy, at least based on collar height.

Halfway into Three Days of the Condor, I felt like I was watching a pretty good movie.  I couldn’t believe that a watchable movie had been made in the 70’s.  Then came a love scene that couldn’t be any more improbable if it involved a bear and a shark doing it on the back of a unicorn.  A scant eight hours after finding his girlfriend dead, Robert Redford’s laying pipe to Faye Dunaway.  After kidnapping her at gunpoint.  Right before she was about to go see her boyfriend.  I can’t imagine this ever happening in real life, but then again, I don’t look like Robert Redford.

It’s probably unrelated, but after that moment, a pretty competent spy movie goes off the rails and crashes into the Sensical Plot Development Assisted Living Community, leaving no survivors.  As Robert Redford tries to track down who killed everyone he works with and find out why, we’re introduced to a variety of names, places, motives, and 70’s hairstyles that make no sense.  It’s all hastily cobbled together at the end to leave an unsatisfying conclusion.  It’s not actually complex, just poorly explained.  When someone gets shot suddenly, you can barely muster the enthusiasm to give a half-hearted, “No!  Not….that guy!  Whoever he was.”

I haven’t liked any Robert Redford movie I’ve seen, and I’m prepared to blame him for that.  I was once compared to a young Robert Redford by a senile, partially blind woman, and I now take it for the insult she clearly meant it to be.  Damn you old senile lady!

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: No.