OUTPOST IN MOROCCO - 1940's desert adventure generally done straight with Kubrick veteran Marie Windsor opposite George Raft, who is cast against type as an easygoing French Legionnaire. Raft is quite effective in the part and Windsor is, for once, properly used as the Hedy-Lamarr-level babe she was at that time. The film appears hastily made; they should have taken more time with this one.

RED DAWN - I'll attempt to get past the obvious geopolitical questions about how an invasion of America by Warsaw Pact forces could have happened (books by Tom Clancy have more effectively handled similar questions) and bring up the more serious issue regarding film production: why did director Milius (normally pretty shrewd) try to make two movies at once? It's a predictive version of IS PARIS BURNING? grafted onto SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT. Nobody said it was illegal to try to do either of those things (a war movie and a redneck buddy picture), but there's a reason, you know, why JUDGMENT AT NUREMBURG was not done as a musical comedy: if it's serious, keep it serious. If it's light, keep it light. Mix the two and you only compound the problems you'll have anyway in bringing up divisive political speculations.

LORD OF THE RINGS (1978) - Think that last one was an argument-starter? You haven't seen conflict until you mention this one at a comic convention. The thirtysomething animation bigots will be up on their hind legs in a jiffy. I'm as complimentary as anybody of Peter Jackson's accomplishments and I realize Bakshi ran out of time and money. But with more resources in those two areas, the screenplay and score (both absolutely fantastic) would have been better assisted. Pistols at dawn, fanboyz?

RAISE THE TITANIC - For an allegedly terrible movie, it sported the only performance by Jason Robards with which I can in any way sympathize, as well as a wonderful John Barry score (available in reperformance by the City of Prague Philharmonic). Clive Cussler's adventure yarn posits (as was the popular witness-report-based theory in 1980) that the liner had survived intact and could be salvaged; the model shots for the raising were done with a "small" replica about 60 feet long in Maltese waters and were as good as pre-CGI methods had made possible. The idea perhaps could be (in an alternate history plot) reworked around known intact wrecks such as the West German submarine Wilhelm Bauer or maybe using the never-lost SS United States, now being refitted near Philly. Hopefully, someone returns to the general approach of Cussler, which was to cast a spy yarn around the core sentiments present in the resurrection of a vessel that represented the peace and "elegance" of "a more civilized age" (after Obi-wan Kenobi's light sabre soliloquy).

THE FOUNTAINHEAD - From the novel of, of all things, battling architects (based on that point in aesthetic history at which late-19th-century historicism began losing out to the Prarie School and the International Style), this one's the result of a pretty obvious programmatic problem: suppose you had a production team of Mel Gibson, Charlton Heston and Bruce Willis trying to make THE GRAPES OF WRATH? They might get it done, but their hearts wouldn't be in it. Same thing here. Director King Vidor unsympathetically works against the script by using cartoonish scene overlays in character exchanges, and another problem operates in that the freshman actress Patricia Neal didn't get convincing until about halfway through. A shame, since the seasoned Raymond Massey was better than ever as the newspaper magnate on whom the story turns, a self-made but self destructive man whose soul is pitted against itself.

MOST JAMES BOND FILMS - Read the books. There's less Roger-Moore-period lime green shag carpeting and more leather soles on rainy streets, the way it's spozed to be. It's been awhile since I saw it, but DR. NO offends me the least in this regard, and the Timothy Dalton portrayal was pretty fair as to the grittiness of spydom's daily grind, provided one lives through it.

FATHERLAND - This cable movie with Rutger Hauer was based on a book with a few flaws, but with better matte paintings and other optics tricks (where was the money for John Dykstra or somebody??) the planned 1930's expansion of Berlin seen in realization would have been overwhelming. On the other hand, general knowledge of Albert Speer's work is pretty low; I'm afraid to ask the average teen who won that war. So the market for a remake would seem limited.

THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN - What a waste! I'm considering doing my OWN script for this situation, which not only involved the first incursion of Allied troops onto Nazi soil, but the attempted defense of said real estate with jet planes (Germany had several in the last 18 mo. or so of the war, two models of which, a fighter and a medium bomber, were scrambled to the Battle of Ludendorff Bridge). That's what I said: jet planes in WW2. The braindead buttfucks who run Hollywood have never mined this incredible development. The mentioned film also managed to misuse the superb talent of Ben Gazzara in a part that ponders the morality of robbing bodies in wartime while the Fall Of History's Wackiest Dictatorship To Date looms as potential material. Actual eyewitness books tell incredible tales of the Ludendorff Bridge defense that would make great movies with NO changes.

Guess that list'll do for now.