Murder on the Orient Express
file under Unnecessary Remake Dept.
the train looks incredible, and I wish Canada's VIA Rail would take note of what passenger rail should look like. Bring back dining cars and bar cars, please. lots of polished wood, art deco, and period jazz in the early parts of the soundtrack
good ensemble cast with lots of scenery chewing potential, unfortunately only Pfeiffer gets more than a few lines before cutting back to Poirot talking about Poirot (also Johnny Depp finally no longer looks like a little girl)
incredible camera work. The shot of the avalanche is straight out of Lord of the Rings (remember in Fellowship... when Saruman casts a spell causing an avalanche as our heroes are struggling over a mountain pass?)
much of the bravura camerawork is quite distracting though, especially the overhead shots in the train compartments while characters are talking ... like SCTV or Mel Brooks parodying pretentious camera angles
biggest issue is Branagh seems to have mistaken Agatha Christie for Shakespeare. Endless philosophical soliloquies for Poirot, yet the chains of logic he must develop to reach his conclusions are entirely left to our imagination. Christie stories are meant to be puzzle plots, with all the pieces fitting together, inviting the reader to solve the mystery before the detective. This script is cheating.
I'd actually not seen this movie before, but for what it was, it wasn't bad at all. Definitely not Hitchcock's best, but even Hitchcock on autopilot is still Hitchcock. However, some of the stuff in Cuba moved a little slowly for me.
Could smell the Bond influence all over this one, and I'm not just referring to Karin Dor... I read that the lead was offered to Connery, and that would have been REALLY strange to watch. Still, this is as close to a Bond movie as Hitchcock would ever make, I guess- just heavy on realism and light on action. Repeat viewing factor fairly low though.
Recommended.
I've never seen this one either. Funny how Hitchcocks films after The Birds never get discussed much. Torn Curtain, from round the same time, with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, is another spy film, but very different than the Bond formula.
I think Hitchcock made many films earlier in his career which anticipate, or influenced the early Bond films. North by NorthWest especially influenced From Russia... And that one is almost an unofficial remake of The ThirtyNine Steps, based on John Buchan, whose spy novels influenced Fleming. Hitchcock did a bunch of spy films in the thirties, and remade The Man Who Knew Too Much in the 50s. Best of all is Notorious, from the late 40s. Usually his characters are normal folks who accidentally get roped into international intrigue, rather than professional spies.
So I had the day off, and I went out to see Justice League. The reviews have been pretty "meh," but I didn't think it's a particularly bad film. In fact, a lot of it is very good, especially with Gal Godot (swoon!) back as Wonder Woman and with The Flash providing some good comic relief. The downside, though, is that the film is almost entirely focused on sequels and spinoffs: so much time is spent establishing who the characters are and getting them together that the plot barely gets started. And then there's the villain: Steppenwolf should have been great, but the filmmakers erred by making him entirely CG. He doesn't look human or alien--he just looks like something out of a video game. They would have done a lot better to put Cirian Hines in Steppenwolf clothes and let him act away. So it's a mixed bag, but there are worse ways to spend your time.
I must admit that I went into this film thinking it was a pointless remake (as so many films are)- the 1974 version was well done, and the 2010 TV version had the definitive Poirot, David Suchet. The less said about the one with Alfred Molina the better.
Also, casting Kenneth Branagh as Poirot didn't strike me as a good move- certainly have him direct the movie, no problem there, and by all means have him play one of the suspects but not Poirot himself (he's not short, fat and bald).
Well, I'm pleased to say I was wrong- Branagh was an excellent Poirot, and carries the film. From the all-star cast, Michelle Pfeiffer stands out. I'm looking forward to a sequel (presumably Death On The Nile).
Actually, Barbel, I am reporting the film to the Advertising Standards Authority.
On the poster, it lines up the all-star cast and the tag-line reads 'Everyone is a suspect'. Now, I very much doubt whether at any point in the film Poirot is a suspect. In which case, that is blatant deception. I'll override this if you can confirm, Barbel, that Poirot is indeed suspected of the crime or in fact did the deed. You can send me a PM if you like.
The poster really is false advertising.
I'm not sure if Murder on the Nile can be the sequel. It would be nice, but if you remember the last line of this movie it has already happened .... sort of.
I'm not sure if Murder on the Nile can be the sequel. It would be nice, but if you remember the last line of this movie it has already happened .... sort of.
If there is a sequel (depends how much money the film makes) then I'd think Death On The Nile would be their choice.
One should think so, but do you remember the line at the end of Murder on the Orient Express?
A murder has already happened on the Nile, with Poirot in Yogoslavia. If they planned to film Murder on the Nile it would make more sense if the great detective said he would vacation in Egypt.
Justice League
better than it was hyped to be, seems like the entire world assumed it was going to be a disaster
and theyre already declaring it a flop even though it made enough money in its first weekend to end world famine
all the action scenes were as usual, a waste of my time, incomprehensible CGI, and the villain was so poorly defined they might as well have just edited all the action scenes out
what is left is the character interplay, introducing the three new characters and showing us how they interact, and that was all quite funny, if all the stuff with the villain and the CGI were edited out it would be a much better, and much much shorter movie
I think they left Green Lantern out because that movie was such a notorious failure, yet they give us an allnew version of the Flash when there is a completely different Flash character currently on tv ... why not just use this opportunity to introduce a new Green Lantern and correct the mistakes of that film? Cyborg is a relatively minor character in the comics, and there is a black Green Lantern who has been a member of some versions of the Justice League, presuming diversity was an issue when deciding which characters to use
historically, bickering superheroes with welldefined personalities was a Marvel thing, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced that style of superhero comic with the Fantastic Four in 1961. DC on the other hand, always had interchangeable vanilla cardboard cutouts as its characters ... aside from costumes and superpowers, Flash and Green Lantern and Aquaman and the rest all could have been the same person, so it's one of the challenges of the filmmakers to establish unique personalities that do not exist in the source material
quasi-ironically, the poorly defined blink-and-youll-miss-him supervillain was actually a character Jack Kirby created for DC when he was briefly working for them in the early 70s, as part of his New Gods series.
HardyBoy, I see you're keeping up with all these superhero films, are you a reader of the comics, either classic or ongoing?
King Arthur Legend of the Sword - Well it's most definitely a Guy Ritchie film with his usual visual tricks and characters that appear to have walked on from an Eastenders set. it's a dumb film I think I'll stick with Boormans Excalibur.
HardyBoy, I see you're keeping up with all these superhero films, are you a reader of the comics, either classic or ongoing?
I'm mostly Old School. . .I was a big reader of comics back in the 1970s when I was a kid, then pretty well forgot about them for a couple of decades. Now I'm more inclined to get bound editions of classic titles than anything else. Still, I'm a regular reader of The Walking Dead; and I tend to get the trade paperbacks of Green Arrow, Deadpool, and Deathstroke--and I was stoked by his cameo at the end of JL!
I'm mostly Old School. . .I was a big reader of comics back in the 1970s when I was a kid, then pretty well forgot about them for a couple of decades. Now I'm more inclined to get bound editions of classic titles than anything else. Still, I'm a regular reader of The Walking Dead; and I tend to get the trade paperbacks of Green Arrow, Deadpool, and Deathstroke--and I was stoked by his cameo at the end of JL!
you're pretty much like me, even about the same age
I too like collections of the vintage material, Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives and other similar packages Justice League of America was probably the first superhero comic I ever tried reading, after Shazam, because it seemed like good value with all the characters in one story ... that would have been somewhere in the 120s, when their headquarters was a satellite (in "geosynchronous orbit") and Green Arrow was the only one with a distinct personality (mostly he used a lot of slang and was more emotionally volatile than the others). Shortly after, Stan Lee's Origins of Marvel Comics series came out and I learned who Kirby and Ditko were, and became more of a Marvel fan for a few years and more of a comics history geek in general
by the time I reached high school I was into National Lampoon and the underground comics, and the only ongoing newsstand comics I followed was Swamp Thing and other stuff Alan Moore was writing
these current superhero films have such a huge back catalog of history to draw on, they have to decide whether to focus on the classic Silver Age origin stories or more recent storylines that current comics readers are more likely to know ... as far as I know the JLA first got together to fight Starro the Giant Starfish from outer space, but they decided not to go with that origin for the movie
EDIT: looking at the cover of Brave and the Bold 28, I'm thinking the supervillain in the movie was all CGI anyway, they might as well have made it a giant starfish, that would have been more visually interesting
David Fincher's great isn't he? He's the modern Hitchcock, I'm not saying he's the same, he's Fincher, but he's the go-to guy for a certain type of film with a brooding menace.
Ben Affleck plays the guy whose wife disappears on their fifth anniversary and does not put up a very good front on the situation. Rosamund Pike is the gone girl in question, she's gone some distance since that crumby Bond film. That said, she must be getting on a bit as that Bond film was a looooooooooooong time ago wasn't it? Pike is good in this and appears a lot in flashback, as you'd suppose.
It's good stuff but the implausibilities mount up in the final third and the wheels come off. It's one of those film that has to cram too much in and might have worked better as a three-part serial. But it is very good at conveying how much men and women lie to each other, and fall for the dream and get nasty and sour when they see through the facade.
But this is Last Film Seen, not Next Film Seen, TP! Start your own thread!
Viva Zaputa!
Acclaimed bio of the Mexican revolutionary... allowed to be made, one presumes, because he's Mexican and not American. The only American revolutionary they'd allow is George Washington.
Marlon Brando dons the droopy moustache and sometimes darkens up and sometimes doesn't. It's a good performance though, worth seeing. And who's that tall dark, vital and handsome fellow we also see on screen? No... surely not! Yep it's Joseph Wiseman, a full decade before his appearance as Dr No!
This weekend, after raiding my father's movie library (on his PC, not anything funcee), I am going to watch Contact and Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
Before that, on Friday, I'll watch Against all Odds for the first time since I'm only familiar with the title song and its famous chase but if I really enjoy it I may watch Out of The Past which it was the remake of
Perfect timing, Plural. I was only just typing this reply.
I saw Natural Born Killers and if it was a real Tarantino film (which it isn't), it'd be a step behind Kill Bill. (Pulp is 1, Kill Bill Vol 1/2 is 2 and then Res dogs follows suit).
Oliver Stone certainly used some rather original storytelling techniques (all crooked shots, smooth black and white, green/red) and they couldn't find a better supporting cast. (Is this before Downey got into drugs or...)
I had seen No Country for Old Men and wanted to see some of Woody's other work and I'm dissapointed that I haven't seen him in more films.
At the start of the movie Hank (Paul Dano) is stranded on a deserted Island. Just as he is about to hang himself, the dead body of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore. Hank escapes the island by riding the corpse, and the propulsion is Manny's flatulence. This movie is a bit strange )
In spise of being dead, Manny proves very useful while searching for civilization. One example is that his erection always points towards the direction they need to go. Manny also learns to speak again. This movie is funny, moving and very weird.
Recently watched A Ghost Story starring Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck. It's probably the saddest film I've seen since Interstellar. Which is interesting since the two films explore a lot of similar themes like the passage of time, longing, love, and the human connection.
Appointment with death :
Enjoyable enough but I think I prefer the David Suchet version. Also viewed
The Mirror cracked , with a very young ( blink and you'd miss him ) Pierce Brosnan.
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
Comments
file under Unnecessary Remake Dept.
the train looks incredible, and I wish Canada's VIA Rail would take note of what passenger rail should look like. Bring back dining cars and bar cars, please. lots of polished wood, art deco, and period jazz in the early parts of the soundtrack
good ensemble cast with lots of scenery chewing potential, unfortunately only Pfeiffer gets more than a few lines before cutting back to Poirot talking about Poirot (also Johnny Depp finally no longer looks like a little girl)
incredible camera work. The shot of the avalanche is straight out of Lord of the Rings (remember in Fellowship... when Saruman casts a spell causing an avalanche as our heroes are struggling over a mountain pass?)
much of the bravura camerawork is quite distracting though, especially the overhead shots in the train compartments while characters are talking ... like SCTV or Mel Brooks parodying pretentious camera angles
biggest issue is Branagh seems to have mistaken Agatha Christie for Shakespeare. Endless philosophical soliloquies for Poirot, yet the chains of logic he must develop to reach his conclusions are entirely left to our imagination. Christie stories are meant to be puzzle plots, with all the pieces fitting together, inviting the reader to solve the mystery before the detective. This script is cheating.
I think Hitchcock made many films earlier in his career which anticipate, or influenced the early Bond films. North by NorthWest especially influenced From Russia... And that one is almost an unofficial remake of The ThirtyNine Steps, based on John Buchan, whose spy novels influenced Fleming. Hitchcock did a bunch of spy films in the thirties, and remade The Man Who Knew Too Much in the 50s. Best of all is Notorious, from the late 40s. Usually his characters are normal folks who accidentally get roped into international intrigue, rather than professional spies.
I must admit that I went into this film thinking it was a pointless remake (as so many films are)- the 1974 version was well done, and the 2010 TV version had the definitive Poirot, David Suchet. The less said about the one with Alfred Molina the better.
Also, casting Kenneth Branagh as Poirot didn't strike me as a good move- certainly have him direct the movie, no problem there, and by all means have him play one of the suspects but not Poirot himself (he's not short, fat and bald).
Well, I'm pleased to say I was wrong- Branagh was an excellent Poirot, and carries the film. From the all-star cast, Michelle Pfeiffer stands out. I'm looking forward to a sequel (presumably Death On The Nile).
On the poster, it lines up the all-star cast and the tag-line reads 'Everyone is a suspect'. Now, I very much doubt whether at any point in the film Poirot is a suspect. In which case, that is blatant deception. I'll override this if you can confirm, Barbel, that Poirot is indeed suspected of the crime or in fact did the deed. You can send me a PM if you like.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I'm not sure if Murder on the Nile can be the sequel. It would be nice, but if you remember the last line of this movie it has already happened .... sort of.
It's even worse than that:
If there is a sequel (depends how much money the film makes) then I'd think Death On The Nile would be their choice.
A murder has already happened on the Nile, with Poirot in Yogoslavia. If they planned to film Murder on the Nile it would make more sense if the great detective said he would vacation in Egypt.
better than it was hyped to be, seems like the entire world assumed it was going to be a disaster
and theyre already declaring it a flop even though it made enough money in its first weekend to end world famine
all the action scenes were as usual, a waste of my time, incomprehensible CGI, and the villain was so poorly defined they might as well have just edited all the action scenes out
what is left is the character interplay, introducing the three new characters and showing us how they interact, and that was all quite funny, if all the stuff with the villain and the CGI were edited out it would be a much better, and much much shorter movie
I think they left Green Lantern out because that movie was such a notorious failure, yet they give us an allnew version of the Flash when there is a completely different Flash character currently on tv ... why not just use this opportunity to introduce a new Green Lantern and correct the mistakes of that film? Cyborg is a relatively minor character in the comics, and there is a black Green Lantern who has been a member of some versions of the Justice League, presuming diversity was an issue when deciding which characters to use
historically, bickering superheroes with welldefined personalities was a Marvel thing, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced that style of superhero comic with the Fantastic Four in 1961. DC on the other hand, always had interchangeable vanilla cardboard cutouts as its characters ... aside from costumes and superpowers, Flash and Green Lantern and Aquaman and the rest all could have been the same person, so it's one of the challenges of the filmmakers to establish unique personalities that do not exist in the source material
quasi-ironically, the poorly defined blink-and-youll-miss-him supervillain was actually a character Jack Kirby created for DC when he was briefly working for them in the early 70s, as part of his New Gods series.
HardyBoy, I see you're keeping up with all these superhero films, are you a reader of the comics, either classic or ongoing?
I'm mostly Old School. . .I was a big reader of comics back in the 1970s when I was a kid, then pretty well forgot about them for a couple of decades. Now I'm more inclined to get bound editions of classic titles than anything else. Still, I'm a regular reader of The Walking Dead; and I tend to get the trade paperbacks of Green Arrow, Deadpool, and Deathstroke--and I was stoked by his cameo at the end of JL!
I too like collections of the vintage material, Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives and other similar packages
Justice League of America was probably the first superhero comic I ever tried reading, after Shazam, because it seemed like good value with all the characters in one story ... that would have been somewhere in the 120s, when their headquarters was a satellite (in "geosynchronous orbit") and Green Arrow was the only one with a distinct personality (mostly he used a lot of slang and was more emotionally volatile than the others). Shortly after, Stan Lee's Origins of Marvel Comics series came out and I learned who Kirby and Ditko were, and became more of a Marvel fan for a few years and more of a comics history geek in general
by the time I reached high school I was into National Lampoon and the underground comics, and the only ongoing newsstand comics I followed was Swamp Thing and other stuff Alan Moore was writing
these current superhero films have such a huge back catalog of history to draw on, they have to decide whether to focus on the classic Silver Age origin stories or more recent storylines that current comics readers are more likely to know ... as far as I know the JLA first got together to fight Starro the Giant Starfish from outer space, but they decided not to go with that origin for the movie
EDIT: looking at the cover of Brave and the Bold 28, I'm thinking the supervillain in the movie was all CGI anyway, they might as well have made it a giant starfish, that would have been more visually interesting
An above average Horror with a couple of twists.
David Fincher's great isn't he? He's the modern Hitchcock, I'm not saying he's the same, he's Fincher, but he's the go-to guy for a certain type of film with a brooding menace.
Ben Affleck plays the guy whose wife disappears on their fifth anniversary and does not put up a very good front on the situation. Rosamund Pike is the gone girl in question, she's gone some distance since that crumby Bond film. That said, she must be getting on a bit as that Bond film was a looooooooooooong time ago wasn't it? Pike is good in this and appears a lot in flashback, as you'd suppose.
It's good stuff but the implausibilities mount up in the final third and the wheels come off. It's one of those film that has to cram too much in and might have worked better as a three-part serial. But it is very good at conveying how much men and women lie to each other, and fall for the dream and get nasty and sour when they see through the facade.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
An enjoyable outing but I still prefer the earlier version.
American Assassin :
Great action flick, some fantastic fight sequences.
Death on the Nile (1978) -{ , Evil under the sun (1982) is for tomorrow
evening
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Viva Zaputa!
Acclaimed bio of the Mexican revolutionary... allowed to be made, one presumes, because he's Mexican and not American. The only American revolutionary they'd allow is George Washington.
Marlon Brando dons the droopy moustache and sometimes darkens up and sometimes doesn't. It's a good performance though, worth seeing. And who's that tall dark, vital and handsome fellow we also see on screen? No... surely not!
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Before that, on Friday, I'll watch Against all Odds for the first time since I'm only familiar with the title song and its famous chase but if I really enjoy it I may watch Out of The Past which it was the remake of
Perfect timing, Plural. I was only just typing this reply.
I saw Natural Born Killers and if it was a real Tarantino film (which it isn't), it'd be a step behind Kill Bill. (Pulp is 1, Kill Bill Vol 1/2 is 2 and then Res dogs follows suit).
Oliver Stone certainly used some rather original storytelling techniques (all crooked shots, smooth black and white, green/red) and they couldn't find a better supporting cast. (Is this before Downey got into drugs or...)
I had seen No Country for Old Men and wanted to see some of Woody's other work and I'm dissapointed that I haven't seen him in more films.
At the start of the movie Hank (Paul Dano) is stranded on a deserted Island. Just as he is about to hang himself, the dead body of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore. Hank escapes the island by riding the corpse, and the propulsion is Manny's flatulence. This movie is a bit strange
In spise of being dead, Manny proves very useful while searching for civilization. One example is that his erection always points towards the direction they need to go. Manny also learns to speak again. This movie is funny, moving and very weird.
Another fun romp ( I do love a juicy murder ) with the great detective Hercules Porridge.
Remember the David Suchet version .
Enjoyable enough but I think I prefer the David Suchet version. Also viewed
The Mirror cracked , with a very young ( blink and you'd miss him ) Pierce Brosnan.