On the weekly Friday night cinema outing with the family an 8-year old sci-fi mad boy is taken to see FirstMenInTheMoon. With wondrous eyes he sees a present day international moon landing and the explorers discover an old Union Flag and a note claiming the Moon in the name of Queen Victoria. Tracing the note back to a nursing home the UN are told the story of the incredible journey to the moon in the 1890’s. No rocket fuel but a spacecraft painted in gravity defying paint allows three people to travel to the Moon. Fabulous special effects by Ray Harryhausen relate the landing and the discovery of a race of Selenites. Through the eyes of a youngster this was just glorious to behold and his imagination allowed him to recreate this scenario in his games for weeks afterwards. Sometimes it depends on how you perceive your first viewing, for me, FMITM will always be spectacular entertainment, however many times I watch it, but I can also relate how hackneyed it can be seen in today’s cynical adult world, but after almost 60 years, in this old man’s eyes, I still have shivers of excitement every time I see it.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Director, producer and special effects “master” Bert I. Gordon (Mr. BIG) passed away a couple of months ago aged 100. He was from the Ed Wood school of filmmaking, churning out a succession of giant creature movies with largely (heehee) laughable effects. This was released a year after the similar FoodOfTheGods, basedvery loosely on an HG Wells short story. A group of people are invited to an island to invest in a future project to build a resort. Once there they are attacked by a horde of giant ants that have been feeding on radioactive waste. Who will survive the onslaught? Actually, we don’t care, as all the characters are so unlikable or uninteresting that we just hope the ants do their job as fast as possible. Joan Collins headlines the weak cast. By this time in her career she had descended into playing in low budget horror movies and it was only her appearance in the following years soft-porn epic TheStud that led her to fame and riches in TV’s Dynasty. Lucky girl. But, if I like me, you like bad pulp movies then this will pass 90 minutes nicely.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
A bossy Canadian publishing editor risks deportation, so she proposes to her assistant in an attempt to defraud the immigration service. He accepts the deal and the rest is, well, predictable bubbly fun.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, Doris Day made a whole slew of comedies with people like Rock Hudson and James Garner which revolved exactly around the kind of scenario played out in The Proposal. With a few minor additions or subtractions from the narrative, Day would act a strong independent woman brought to her traditional senses by a man who is initially repelled by her overbearing natures. While actresses like Katherine Hepburn received plaudits and awards for being theatrical and nuanced, Doris Day entertained bigger audiences by presenting an ashamedly identifiable slice of Americana and cloaking it in sugar, spice and something fluffy called ‘humour’.
Sandra Bullock is probably the closest modern comparison, a complex and comfortable comedienne who allows her characters to be accessible both emotionally and intellectually. She’s the cinematic counterbalance to all that dreary Meryl Streep stuff. Unlike Streep – or Hepburn – she makes acting and particularly comic acting appear seamless and genuine. Her timing is superb and the interaction with her co-stars is remarkably flawless. Witness here how she reacts to the embarrassing situations Margaret Tate finds herself in: hers is exactly how the audience perceives it. See too, the deftness of the understated, unspoken romance, how her stern expression melts under physical contact with Ryan Reynolds’s Andrew Paxton. Or the moment she recognises her future mother-in-law’s tender-heartedness at a bridal dress fitting. Or the awkwardness of her Alaskan escapades, the stiffness of her publishing house persona, the resignation at the sham wedding.
Bullock is a good enough actress to pull off dramatic roles and action adventure movies too, but her forte has always been romantic comedies, although she perhaps would disagree. In The Proposal, her no nonsense editor displays just enough of a hint of vulnerability to be believable, even if the plot is pure hokum. The script is witty and the cast treat it like the light-hearted romp it is. Thankfully, writer Peter Chiarelli and director Anne Fletcher refuse to rely on smut or obscenities to make us laugh. The movie is warm and tender and thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. The incompatibilities of the central couple are slotted together like pieces of a jigsaw until the final picture is perfect.
I dipped into the depressing film The Remains of the Day which has a couple of Bond stars - Tim Piggot-Smith and Michael Lonsdale - along with some who might have been you feel at some point - isn't the stately home the one in The Living Daylights? Possibly not, but the score is very John Barry at times, quite sombre.
However, I feel @chrisno1 will be leaving his review in due course and I would be incliined to follow his opinion on the matter. I myself feel unable to be of any assistance in the matter, if you will excuse me.
Enjoyed this is a 'not expecting to see an action movie on telly tonight, let's go with it kind of way' but the enjoyment is enhanced by knowing I didn't see it in the cinema or pay to see it. Very routine plot of various public figures being taken out who have a link to an old crime; not sure if the perpetrator were such a kingpin they'd have been in prison the last 30 years and only just been released but go with it. The finale or twist was quite offensive in the way it pans out, the revelation about Will Smith's near assassin. Poorly executed, like the attempt on Smith's character's life. It's fun to read the annoyed reviews on imdb, I didn't have much invested in this not having seen the first two films.
I didn't see THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Hugh Grant has a small role in it, doesn't he?
DUNE (1984)
Fabulous looking but seriously flawed sci-fi epic based on Frank Herbert’s doorstep of a cult novel. Condensed down to a little over two and a quarter hours, director David Lynch cannot do justice to the original author’s multi-layered themes and the result is a heavily edited mess that fails to create a coherent attentive narrative. The universal Emperor is beholden to the Space Navigators, strange slug-like beings who can fold time, generating dimensional space travel. To achieve this feat, the Navigators require ‘spice’ a mineral found on only one planet, Arrakis, a desert world which the Emperor has decided to use as bait in a bizarre feudal civil war. As the Royal Houses fight to the death, the indigenous Fermen are led by a young warlike prophet into perfecting revolution.
The huge cast don’t try very hard, except for Kenneth MacMillan’s horrifically diseased Baron Harroken, a homosexual psychopath of repulsive behaviours. The special effects are alternately marvellous and then marvellously cheap; some aspects of the production design are mindbogglingly enormous, wonderful to look at and splendidly genuine, others crass, bland and makeshift; you do wonder if the project began to run out of money. The script is hard going, but how do you reduce 800-plus pages into two hours? Hint: you can’t. Denis Villeneuve’s recent more successful version split the book in two. Lynch envisaged a three hour film, which goes some way to explain the confused result here. He has though to take some blame. Themes and people are dropped into the narrative without any proxy overview or clarification; hence we spend most of the first half wondering who, what and for what purpose everybody is about, and most of the second struggling with unexplained pseudo-messianic subtexts. The reliance on characters voicing thought rather than dialogue is a dismal, mystifying experiment. A version of Herbert’s chapter preludes is retained, which frame the incidents, but Lynch never introduces the narrator as a character, relegating her to a small cameo at the film’s underwhelming climax. You could argue that explains why we fail to see so much – a whole two years is excised in one sentence – but it’s hardly a recommendation for successful exposition.
Dune tries to be a sort of Star Wars for grownups, but given many fans of Star Wars were already and had already been grownups, that’s a non-starter. A visually interesting failure, then; too many bells and whistles and not enough chains to bind them together.
Lynch's Dune is a weird one, not quite decent 80s scifi, and not quite what we want from Lynch.
as a Lynch fan I try to watch it for Lynch-isms, and its the weird gory bits, especially the scenes with Baron Harroken, that remind me of the bodyhorror of Eraserhead and the abusive personalities of Blue Velvet. The scenes with the navigators are impressive too. and its nice to see Lynch experiment a bit more with animation, because he would largely drop that skillset from future movies. ultimately the film is most important for introducing Kyle MacLachlan to Lynch's recurring cast.
the last time I tried to watch Dune online, it was some sort of fan edit supposed to make the plot clearer. which meant about 15 minutes of straight exposition at the start accompanied by static images of the characters and the planets. Actually making the film even more of a chore to watch, I'd rather have just been confused.
I understand Lynch was offered Return of the Jedi and for some reason made this instead. what was the kid-friendly Lucas thinking? Can we imagine a David Lynch Return of the Jedi? perhaps the Jabba the Hut scenes would give him something to work with. maybe Emperor Palpatine's makeup. But what would Lynch have done with the poor Ewoks?
@caractacus potts, FYI the 15 minutes of exposition narrated over the static images and art were actually from a re-edited TV version of Dune that aired in the late 1980s/early 1990s and added a lot of cut footage back into the movie. Lynch didn't approve of the cut and had his name removed, with the director being listed as Alan Smithee (a pseudonym commonly used in situations like this). The added footage does include a lot of stuff that is straight out of the book such as Thufir Hawat sacrificing himself to save Paul right before the fight with Feyd but even this version misses the point of the book by making Paul a genuine messiah whereas one of the thematic points of the novel was to be wary of manufactured saviors.
With regard to Lynch and Return of the Jedi, there's a famous interview with the director on YouTube where he goes into detail about how George Lucas tried to explain the story to him and took him on a tour of the art department in an effort to convince him to come aboard, only to end up having the opposite result.
Yes, @chrisno1 Hugh Grant has a small and effective role Remains of the Day. It also has Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, James Fox, Christopher Reeve, one of the snooty posh creeps from Yes, Minister, Peter Vaughan from Porridge in a highly effective role, it's the sort of fiom where you might expect Goldfinger's Colonel Smithers to pop up. I've not seen it from start to finish, I ought to and if you haven't my bit of joking in my brief post might be lost on you!
I thought the producer credit more appropriate than a director one in this case. Pal was the producer of such films as “The War Of The Worlds” (1953 version) with which this film shares much in common. In colour (at a time when that wasn’t a given), no stars in the cast, sci fi, based on a well-known novel- though not as famous as the HG Wells one.
Astronomers find that a star with a planet in orbit will crash into the Earth, causing an Extermination Level Event (in the much later “Deep Impact” those wordshave even more significance). Efforts to convince an unbelieving world begin and eventually a rocket containing 40 people selected by lottery will be built, heading to the planet mentioned earlier. Resemblances to the Biblical Ark story are played up. There’s a token romance plus a pantomime villain in the form of a ruthless billionaire who funds the rocket on the understanding that he will have a place onboard. Naturally things don’t go 100% to plan.
The SFX aren’t bad for the time and it’s not so long that it outstays it’s welcome. The resemblances to much later movies such as “Armageddon” or the previously mentioned “Deep Impact” are plain.
The novel had a sequel “After Worlds Collide”, but that was never filmed.
Nicely understated recent British movie in which Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play a couple who are travelling around the UK a bit en route to Scotland or north at any rate, it might be the Lake District but - it goes a bit Skyfall at the end - in a camper van.
The Tucci character has an illness of some kind, it isn't terribly clear what it is. I thought it must be Aids because I'm a product of that age where lean gay guy with an unnameable illness must have AIds when of course with drugs you can stop HIV turning into Aids; singer Holly Johnson has had HIV for decades now. Later it's suggested it's dementia which is at odds with the advice for blood thinners others offer him, besides he seems pretty lucid for much of the movie. Still, it's nicely done with lots of understated little moments. Firth has done this sort of role a bit before, in The Perfect Man, I think it was called. One familiar face popped up that turned out to be James Dreyfus - the book shop assistant to Hugh Grant in Notting Hill who was in the riotous sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme with Kathy Burke.
This cheap Jaws rip-off made 50 times its budget of 750 thousand USD. A grizzly bear goes on the rampage in a National Forest. Christopher George is the ranger who attempts to kill the bear. Supporting stalwart Richard Jaeckal is on hand to assist. Cue lots of people being killed by the bear in badly edited scenes. Director William Girdler was an experienced hand at exploitation movies and followed this up with the similar themed but less successful DayOfTheAnimals with both lead actors again cast.
Very average. The movie tie-in paperback was a big seller - I will post a picture on the paperback covers thread at some point.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Two women get stuck at the top of a 2000 foot disused TV broadcasting tower when the corroded ladder breaks away, leaving them stranded. Revelations further complicate the situation as they plot their way to safety. Basically a two-hander with small cameo roles for one of the character’s late husband in a prologue, and the brilliant Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Walking Dead TV series) as her father. If you suffer from vertigo then this will seem pretty terrifying, and the suspense is good at first, but it never really gets going and in the end it’s all a bit ho-hum.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
King of the reboot, J. J. Abrams plays fast and loose with Star Trek’s perceived history and thus creates an alternative universe for our sundry heroes to gallivant around, allowing him to promptly forget everything we know and love / hate about the original series and movies.
Like most prequels, the designers have been urged for no apparent reason to scale everything up, so the aura is one of a technologically advanced Federation and a vast singular Romulan mothership out for some kind of genocidal vengeance. But [see above] Abrams has already provided the excuse for that, so we can just forget anything we thought we knew, sit back and… well, yawn.
What Abrams doesn’t do is stop the movie being another version of Star Wars, Independence Day or any other save-the-world-against-all-odds adventure. It’s brash, noisy, looks fabulous, but lacks any kind of soul which, for all their defects, most of the earlier stuff never forgot. It’s a long haul which drags you wearily to an astounding finish.
Much praise was heaped on Zachary Quinto’s young Spock, but the best turn is Karl Urban’s Dr McCoy, who interprets his forebear brilliantly, even down to the verbal and physical inflections. Apparently Winona Ryder is in it, playing someone called Amanda Grayson. I hope I didn’t doze off, for I have no idea who that character is.
STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS (2013)
An overlong, frantic and frankly incomprehensible sci-fi saga about super star-ships, cryogenically frozen superbeings and a whole load of super special effects which made me feel I was watching something from the Marvel Super Hero Universe, not our universe.
Oh, well, briefly. There’s some deadly dealing among the Star Fleet elite who are chasing after Benedict Cumberbatch, who proves once again he’ll slum it for a big pay check. He plays Khan, returning for another outing as if he was the best villain Star Trek ever produced – I am fairly certain he has some decent competition in that area. The movie commences with a totally inconsequential prologue of immense primary colours that is by turns daft, stunning and engaging. Then the basic terms of the sequence are repeated several times in different clever disguises throughout the film. By the end, it’s so familiar, the action has morphed into a big windy bore.
The problem is, once you’ve established your characters have a conscience, have weaknesses, strengths and differences of opinion and thus intwined character arcs, you don’t have anywhere for your core characters to go. Having revealed all this in ten minutes, director J.J. Abrams is left only with the shining glittery star ships and galaxies, big explosions, interminable laser battles and two hours of shouting. If you like that kind of thing, fine, but Star Trek was always about so much more than violent action: it was about the human soul and that’s completely missing in this deafening epic.
Apparently, the film is a retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Really? Yeh, I don’t believe it either.
to its credit, I liked the way they explained the reboot in-story as an alternate dimension. This would never work in our Bond films, even though we all know its true with the Craig reboot, because we don't want scifi concepts in Bondfilms. But because alternate dimensions are already part of Star Trek cosmology it works, and makes this slightly more palatable.
but then what do they do with it, but substitute generic action blockbuster tropes wherever possible. everyone knows kung-fu and something blows up real good every ten minutes. and Captain Kirk now has the same Secret Origin as Superman! since that happened at the very beginning I was in a foul mood for the next two hours.
what I do remember at the time was a joke headline saying "New Star Trek movie doesn't suck! Nerds outraged!", that was almost witty enough to justify the film
I chose not to see it when it came out, so your spoilers will be my Into Darkness substitute experience. I'm sure i will have forgotten if i ever see the film.
but you can always use the Spoiler tags so others can choose not to read
Ah, I forgot who she was. Was she ever named in the dialogue?
The main problem I had with STID was it is so boring. The TV show and a few of the 1980s films at least attempted to deliver something beyond a fight-fest. They [mostly] had changes of pace and good character interaction. The plots were hit and miss, but showed some originality and a decent sense of wonder and intrigue. All of that is lacking in STID. The film is so relentless it didn't even pause to consider taking a breath. The whole experience felt like an assault on my senses as much as the Enterprise. God knows how I would have coped in a cinema - badly, probably - and how many times has that poor spaceship been blown up or damaged since the film franchise started? There's nothing original in that anymore.
I think I have one more movie to go, but it was on Film 4 last month and I didn't record it, so I probably won't catch it for a a while.
I'd forgotten that detail. is that from the episode where Spock is in heat, so they have to take him back to his home planet, and we learn all about Vulcan?
I've forgotten the title, but thats another key episode every Star Trek newbie needs to watch
@chrisno1 thanks for leading Star Trek discussion. Have we suggested yet what your next teevee show episode-by-episode review thread should be after you get done with The Saint?
the generic action blockbuster tropes that replaced everything that made Star Trek unique, remind me a bit of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which came out round the same time. Remember Burton felt the need to give Lewis Carroll's episodic book a conventional plot structure, so the plot was Wonderland was under threat from the evil Jabberwocky, and Alice was now The Chosen One who was prophesied to save them. and the Mad Hatter knew kung-fu.
@caractacus potts, the episode where we meet Spock's parents (Amanda and Sarek played by Jane Wyatt and Mark Lenard respectively) is called Journey To Babel, wherein the Enterprise is tasked with escorting a group of alien delegates to a world to discuss adding a new world to the Federation. The episode you're thinking about is Amok Time, where Spock gets his 7-year itch (literally) and must return to Vulcan to be with his bethrothed or die.
With regard to the JJ-verse movies, the perceived needs of the movie blockbuster did lead to noisy, busy, often illogical plots. It didn't help that you had hacks like Bob Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof writing those stories. I remember reading that the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness was indeed supposed to be a different augmented superman called John Harrison only for Lindelof to come in at the 11th hour and convince everyone that the villain had to be Khan because of the name recognition the character had and then graft him into the story via that clunky scene in the brig where Benedict Cumberbatch sneers "my real name is Khannnnnn!".
The final JJ-verse movie (so far at least), Star Trek: Beyond, feels a little closer to the ideals of the original show. It still has its share of stupidity but also takes the time to explore the characters a bit more even touches on how the Federation being a more pacifist organization might make some feel alienated. Definitely worth a watch if you've already sat thru the first two JJ-verse movies.
Beyond was written by Simon Pegg who is a fan of the old show. The script doesn't rely on simply moving from one set piece to another so fast that you hopefully won't have time to realize that none of it makes any sense. The characters in Beyond also have a little more nuance and depth to them; they even manage to grow a bit by the end. I could have done without the Beastie Boys song (still don't understand why they have to shoehorn that into every JJ Abrams movie) and the bit with the 20th century motorcycle had me rolling my eyes a bit but overall I still found the the strongest of the three JJ-verse movies.
And yes, JJ's Star Wars movies were abysmal and really showed how he bereft he is of original ideas. Force Awakens is just a bigger, noisier remake of A New Hope and Rise of Skywalker follows a lot of the same beats as Return of the Jedi. He really has turned into a cut and paste filmmaker who just copies storylines en-masse and lifts whole scenes from other, better movies.
The episode you're thinking about is Amok Time, where Spock gets his 7-year itch (literally) and must return to Vulcan to be with his bethrothed or die.
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yes , Amok Time. Dont know how I couldve forgot that title. (channeling Michael Palin) if a person could only watch three Original Series episodes, I would recommend City on the Edge of Forever, Trouble with Tribbles, and Amok Time. whereas the first two explore the tonal extremes of the show, Amok Time contributes to the mythology, introducing some major rules of the universe, particularly what we know about Vulcans, and its a Nimoy showcase. in fact I once showed that exact episode to a friends's wife who had somehow never seen a single episode, and successfully made her a convert. (whereas my snobby friend harrumphed "well its not something I wouldve chosen to watch if I had been asked")
what would others suggest are their choices for three essential Original Series episodes?
@TonyDP I like the way you delurk within seconds when we start discussing something obviously within your range of interest. We gotta think of more topics to keep you posting! I know you know your comics and scifi
Paul Newman’s star was never higher than in the early sixties. Amazing to think he almost never made it in movies – after the debacle of The Silver Chalice – and was thinking of staying permanently on the stage. What he needed was film roles which played to his modern instincts, the ‘method’ and the youthful post-war audiences who were fed up with bland heroes and villains, and wanted to see black, white, grey and all the colours of the human psyche. Marlon Brando famously paved the way, but Newman wasn’t far behind. The Hustler came along following a series of searing roles in movies like Somebody Up There Likes Me, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Long Hot Summer. He’d just filmed Exodus, which must have been exhausting given the end result’s near four hour run time, so the weary, almost permanently fatigued look he displays through The Hustler surely must have spoken from the heart and the body alike.
Newman isn’t a revelation in The Hustler – we already know he’s good – but it is the most remarkable performance among many in his first few years on screen. The camera seems to be lingering on him, even when it isn’t, so magnetic is the turn of his lip, the crease of his eyebrow, the sweat that forms on his semi-furrowed brow. Wallow in the endless cigarettes, the constant drinking, the restlessness, the pointless loveless romance, the forlorn, lost expression that inhabits his features, the cracking of his voice when desperate times call for aggression and pitilessness, the visible and audible signs of a man breaking apart, inch by inch and day by day, until finally he cannot break anymore and reaches his nadir, and everything displayed in studied, shadowy, chilling black and white.
The pool halls of New York are ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson’s domain, but he’s a king with no crown and his kingmaker is no prophet, only a malicious gambler of no morals or scruples. Felson’s nemesis is the aging, but debonair, Minnesota Fats, a man so legendary he no longer has a real name. Felson’s girl is Sarah, a drunken cripple who finds redemption in the broken boy she comes to love, but who is the certain beaten victim in a world of avarice, jealousy and miscommunication. George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason and Piper Laurie give magnificent performances of their own, but Newman bestrides the noirish landscape with a scowl and a shrug, a rolling lip and an unblinking stare. The scene where he opens the window to Sarah’s flat and the audience suddenly witnesses daylight is one of his best, lying on his back, smoking, watching the world turn – we are learning more from Eddie Felson’s silences than we are from his speech: we know he’s found a place with a heart, but does he? Newman’s almost dreamy glance at the outside tells us everything: “I wanted to see what it looks like.”
Robert Rossen only directed ten films and was temporarily black listed in Hollywood as a former member of the Communist Party. Although All The King’s Men won many awards, The Hustler is his masterwork, concentrating as it does on the minutia of relationships, how they rise and fall along with the people who create them and the circumstances which drive them together and apart. Rossen’s screenplay highlights the ambitions both small and large of its protagonists, wrapping them in sundry ills, regrets and hopeless wishes. Life isn’t for living for these people, it is about surviving, not in a financial sense, but an emotional one. The Mephistophelean gambler and fixer Bert Gordon [Scott] cuts to the core of everyone’s passions, wrought as they are and irrevocably intertwined.
There is plenty of shooting pool, but the film isn’t about that, it’s about greed and disgust and waste. Everyone bargains for their benefit, even Sarah who demands Eddie says ‘I love you’ because she needs to hear it, and everyone loses, exhausted by the sheer ugly depression they are living in. “We’ve created this,” she says at one point, recognising her and Eddie’s secret idyl is the most unrealistic of fantasies. The tragedy that evolves rushes upon the couple like an eight-ball swerving for the corner pocket. The Hustler isn’t a happy film, but it doesn’t need to be and shouldn’t be. Eddie Felson might achieve his dream, but he’ll lose something of himself in touching such a monumental height.
Talking Pictures showed this in standard format, which was disappointing as the film was deliberately shot in monochrome Cinemascope, so the pool table fills the screen and the actors – who often sit at the extremes – are noticeable even in a still shot. The shadows fall thick in the background, haloing the central action, drawing us into the character’s intimate experience. The film rightly won awards for photographer Eugene Schuftan. Kenyon Hopkins’ jazz inspired score reinforces the melancholy we witness, a lilting, soft shuffle to the kerbside until the rains can patter Eddie Felson into those hollow, mourning trumpet airs, or the sweaty, ardent tempo of the pool hall.
Paul Newman eventually won an Oscar himself, for playing the same character twenty-five years on, but Scorsese’s The Colour of Money is a shallow imitation of The Hustler and the star’s performance wasn’t Oscar-worthy, not by a long chalk. The Academy likes to make up for its mistakes and frequently looks foolish when it does. They really should have given the award to Paul Newman for this 1961 masterpiece in the craft of film acting. They knew it then, they knew it in 1986 and they damn well know it now.
Ha! Yes, I do lurk around here quite a bit. I don't post as much as I used to but whenever the conversation turns to Star Trek, especially the original series, my ears do perk up.
As to essential Trek episodes, it's hard to narrow it down to three and your choices are all excellent. I'd add the following:
Where No Man Has Gone Before - the second pilot starts laying the groundwork for the show and it's always amazing to me how much chemistry the actors had right out of the gate. It takes some shows a couple of seasons to find their voice but these guys just hit the ground running.
Balance of Terror - a great submarine style, cold-war inspired thriller. Our first introduction to the Romulans and a really great performance by Mark Lenard as the ill fated Romulan Commander.
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield - one of the stronger episodes from an otherwise weak final season. The callouts to racism and segregation may be a bit too on the nose but Frank Gorshin puts in a great performance (I think he was nominated for an Emmy) and the scene where Kirk and Beal play a game of chicken as the Enterprise counts down to self-destruct is some of Shatner's best acting in my opinion.
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On the weekly Friday night cinema outing with the family an 8-year old sci-fi mad boy is taken to see First Men In The Moon. With wondrous eyes he sees a present day international moon landing and the explorers discover an old Union Flag and a note claiming the Moon in the name of Queen Victoria. Tracing the note back to a nursing home the UN are told the story of the incredible journey to the moon in the 1890’s. No rocket fuel but a spacecraft painted in gravity defying paint allows three people to travel to the Moon. Fabulous special effects by Ray Harryhausen relate the landing and the discovery of a race of Selenites. Through the eyes of a youngster this was just glorious to behold and his imagination allowed him to recreate this scenario in his games for weeks afterwards. Sometimes it depends on how you perceive your first viewing, for me, FMITM will always be spectacular entertainment, however many times I watch it, but I can also relate how hackneyed it can be seen in today’s cynical adult world, but after almost 60 years, in this old man’s eyes, I still have shivers of excitement every time I see it.
EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977)
Director, producer and special effects “master” Bert I. Gordon (Mr. BIG) passed away a couple of months ago aged 100. He was from the Ed Wood school of filmmaking, churning out a succession of giant creature movies with largely (heehee) laughable effects. This was released a year after the similar Food Of The Gods, based very loosely on an HG Wells short story. A group of people are invited to an island to invest in a future project to build a resort. Once there they are attacked by a horde of giant ants that have been feeding on radioactive waste. Who will survive the onslaught? Actually, we don’t care, as all the characters are so unlikable or uninteresting that we just hope the ants do their job as fast as possible. Joan Collins headlines the weak cast. By this time in her career she had descended into playing in low budget horror movies and it was only her appearance in the following years soft-porn epic The Stud that led her to fame and riches in TV’s Dynasty. Lucky girl. But, if I like me, you like bad pulp movies then this will pass 90 minutes nicely.
THE PROPOSAL (2009)
A bossy Canadian publishing editor risks deportation, so she proposes to her assistant in an attempt to defraud the immigration service. He accepts the deal and the rest is, well, predictable bubbly fun.
Back in the 1950s and 60s, Doris Day made a whole slew of comedies with people like Rock Hudson and James Garner which revolved exactly around the kind of scenario played out in The Proposal. With a few minor additions or subtractions from the narrative, Day would act a strong independent woman brought to her traditional senses by a man who is initially repelled by her overbearing natures. While actresses like Katherine Hepburn received plaudits and awards for being theatrical and nuanced, Doris Day entertained bigger audiences by presenting an ashamedly identifiable slice of Americana and cloaking it in sugar, spice and something fluffy called ‘humour’.
Sandra Bullock is probably the closest modern comparison, a complex and comfortable comedienne who allows her characters to be accessible both emotionally and intellectually. She’s the cinematic counterbalance to all that dreary Meryl Streep stuff. Unlike Streep – or Hepburn – she makes acting and particularly comic acting appear seamless and genuine. Her timing is superb and the interaction with her co-stars is remarkably flawless. Witness here how she reacts to the embarrassing situations Margaret Tate finds herself in: hers is exactly how the audience perceives it. See too, the deftness of the understated, unspoken romance, how her stern expression melts under physical contact with Ryan Reynolds’s Andrew Paxton. Or the moment she recognises her future mother-in-law’s tender-heartedness at a bridal dress fitting. Or the awkwardness of her Alaskan escapades, the stiffness of her publishing house persona, the resignation at the sham wedding.
Bullock is a good enough actress to pull off dramatic roles and action adventure movies too, but her forte has always been romantic comedies, although she perhaps would disagree. In The Proposal, her no nonsense editor displays just enough of a hint of vulnerability to be believable, even if the plot is pure hokum. The script is witty and the cast treat it like the light-hearted romp it is. Thankfully, writer Peter Chiarelli and director Anne Fletcher refuse to rely on smut or obscenities to make us laugh. The movie is warm and tender and thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. The incompatibilities of the central couple are slotted together like pieces of a jigsaw until the final picture is perfect.
I dipped into the depressing film The Remains of the Day which has a couple of Bond stars - Tim Piggot-Smith and Michael Lonsdale - along with some who might have been you feel at some point - isn't the stately home the one in The Living Daylights? Possibly not, but the score is very John Barry at times, quite sombre.
However, I feel @chrisno1 will be leaving his review in due course and I would be incliined to follow his opinion on the matter. I myself feel unable to be of any assistance in the matter, if you will excuse me.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Bad Boys For Life
Enjoyed this is a 'not expecting to see an action movie on telly tonight, let's go with it kind of way' but the enjoyment is enhanced by knowing I didn't see it in the cinema or pay to see it. Very routine plot of various public figures being taken out who have a link to an old crime; not sure if the perpetrator were such a kingpin they'd have been in prison the last 30 years and only just been released but go with it. The finale or twist was quite offensive in the way it pans out, the revelation about Will Smith's near assassin. Poorly executed, like the attempt on Smith's character's life. It's fun to read the annoyed reviews on imdb, I didn't have much invested in this not having seen the first two films.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I didn't see THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Hugh Grant has a small role in it, doesn't he?
DUNE (1984)
Fabulous looking but seriously flawed sci-fi epic based on Frank Herbert’s doorstep of a cult novel. Condensed down to a little over two and a quarter hours, director David Lynch cannot do justice to the original author’s multi-layered themes and the result is a heavily edited mess that fails to create a coherent attentive narrative. The universal Emperor is beholden to the Space Navigators, strange slug-like beings who can fold time, generating dimensional space travel. To achieve this feat, the Navigators require ‘spice’ a mineral found on only one planet, Arrakis, a desert world which the Emperor has decided to use as bait in a bizarre feudal civil war. As the Royal Houses fight to the death, the indigenous Fermen are led by a young warlike prophet into perfecting revolution.
The huge cast don’t try very hard, except for Kenneth MacMillan’s horrifically diseased Baron Harroken, a homosexual psychopath of repulsive behaviours. The special effects are alternately marvellous and then marvellously cheap; some aspects of the production design are mindbogglingly enormous, wonderful to look at and splendidly genuine, others crass, bland and makeshift; you do wonder if the project began to run out of money. The script is hard going, but how do you reduce 800-plus pages into two hours? Hint: you can’t. Denis Villeneuve’s recent more successful version split the book in two. Lynch envisaged a three hour film, which goes some way to explain the confused result here. He has though to take some blame. Themes and people are dropped into the narrative without any proxy overview or clarification; hence we spend most of the first half wondering who, what and for what purpose everybody is about, and most of the second struggling with unexplained pseudo-messianic subtexts. The reliance on characters voicing thought rather than dialogue is a dismal, mystifying experiment. A version of Herbert’s chapter preludes is retained, which frame the incidents, but Lynch never introduces the narrator as a character, relegating her to a small cameo at the film’s underwhelming climax. You could argue that explains why we fail to see so much – a whole two years is excised in one sentence – but it’s hardly a recommendation for successful exposition.
Dune tries to be a sort of Star Wars for grownups, but given many fans of Star Wars were already and had already been grownups, that’s a non-starter. A visually interesting failure, then; too many bells and whistles and not enough chains to bind them together.
Lynch's Dune is a weird one, not quite decent 80s scifi, and not quite what we want from Lynch.
as a Lynch fan I try to watch it for Lynch-isms, and its the weird gory bits, especially the scenes with Baron Harroken, that remind me of the bodyhorror of Eraserhead and the abusive personalities of Blue Velvet. The scenes with the navigators are impressive too. and its nice to see Lynch experiment a bit more with animation, because he would largely drop that skillset from future movies. ultimately the film is most important for introducing Kyle MacLachlan to Lynch's recurring cast.
the last time I tried to watch Dune online, it was some sort of fan edit supposed to make the plot clearer. which meant about 15 minutes of straight exposition at the start accompanied by static images of the characters and the planets. Actually making the film even more of a chore to watch, I'd rather have just been confused.
I understand Lynch was offered Return of the Jedi and for some reason made this instead. what was the kid-friendly Lucas thinking? Can we imagine a David Lynch Return of the Jedi? perhaps the Jabba the Hut scenes would give him something to work with. maybe Emperor Palpatine's makeup. But what would Lynch have done with the poor Ewoks?
@caractacus potts, FYI the 15 minutes of exposition narrated over the static images and art were actually from a re-edited TV version of Dune that aired in the late 1980s/early 1990s and added a lot of cut footage back into the movie. Lynch didn't approve of the cut and had his name removed, with the director being listed as Alan Smithee (a pseudonym commonly used in situations like this). The added footage does include a lot of stuff that is straight out of the book such as Thufir Hawat sacrificing himself to save Paul right before the fight with Feyd but even this version misses the point of the book by making Paul a genuine messiah whereas one of the thematic points of the novel was to be wary of manufactured saviors.
With regard to Lynch and Return of the Jedi, there's a famous interview with the director on YouTube where he goes into detail about how George Lucas tried to explain the story to him and took him on a tour of the art department in an effort to convince him to come aboard, only to end up having the opposite result.
Yes, @chrisno1 Hugh Grant has a small and effective role Remains of the Day. It also has Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, James Fox, Christopher Reeve, one of the snooty posh creeps from Yes, Minister, Peter Vaughan from Porridge in a highly effective role, it's the sort of fiom where you might expect Goldfinger's Colonel Smithers to pop up. I've not seen it from start to finish, I ought to and if you haven't my bit of joking in my brief post might be lost on you!
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@Napoleon Plural I saw it when it came out in the cinemas, but God knows when that was. Never managed to rewatch it.
PITCH PERFECT 2 (2015)
A one note movie proves so successful they make a sequel. I love Anna Kendrick. Honest. I really do, but…
Pitch Perfect 2 re-enacts everything we already saw in Pitch Perfect.
And for acres of time, it just isn’t funny.
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE Produced by George Pal
I thought the producer credit more appropriate than a director one in this case. Pal was the producer of such films as “The War Of The Worlds” (1953 version) with which this film shares much in common. In colour (at a time when that wasn’t a given), no stars in the cast, sci fi, based on a well-known novel- though not as famous as the HG Wells one.
Astronomers find that a star with a planet in orbit will crash into the Earth, causing an Extermination Level Event (in the much later “Deep Impact” those words have even more significance). Efforts to convince an unbelieving world begin and eventually a rocket containing 40 people selected by lottery will be built, heading to the planet mentioned earlier. Resemblances to the Biblical Ark story are played up. There’s a token romance plus a pantomime villain in the form of a ruthless billionaire who funds the rocket on the understanding that he will have a place onboard. Naturally things don’t go 100% to plan.
The SFX aren’t bad for the time and it’s not so long that it outstays it’s welcome. The resemblances to much later movies such as “Armageddon” or the previously mentioned “Deep Impact” are plain.
The novel had a sequel “After Worlds Collide”, but that was never filmed.
Supernova
Nicely understated recent British movie in which Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play a couple who are travelling around the UK a bit en route to Scotland or north at any rate, it might be the Lake District but - it goes a bit Skyfall at the end - in a camper van.
The Tucci character has an illness of some kind, it isn't terribly clear what it is. I thought it must be Aids because I'm a product of that age where lean gay guy with an unnameable illness must have AIds when of course with drugs you can stop HIV turning into Aids; singer Holly Johnson has had HIV for decades now. Later it's suggested it's dementia which is at odds with the advice for blood thinners others offer him, besides he seems pretty lucid for much of the movie. Still, it's nicely done with lots of understated little moments. Firth has done this sort of role a bit before, in The Perfect Man, I think it was called. One familiar face popped up that turned out to be James Dreyfus - the book shop assistant to Hugh Grant in Notting Hill who was in the riotous sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme with Kathy Burke.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT'S MARGARET? (2023)
See link.
https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/comment/1058564#Comment_1058564
GRIZZLY (1976)
This cheap Jaws rip-off made 50 times its budget of 750 thousand USD. A grizzly bear goes on the rampage in a National Forest. Christopher George is the ranger who attempts to kill the bear. Supporting stalwart Richard Jaeckal is on hand to assist. Cue lots of people being killed by the bear in badly edited scenes. Director William Girdler was an experienced hand at exploitation movies and followed this up with the similar themed but less successful Day Of The Animals with both lead actors again cast.
Very average. The movie tie-in paperback was a big seller - I will post a picture on the paperback covers thread at some point.
FALL (2022)
Two women get stuck at the top of a 2000 foot disused TV broadcasting tower when the corroded ladder breaks away, leaving them stranded. Revelations further complicate the situation as they plot their way to safety. Basically a two-hander with small cameo roles for one of the character’s late husband in a prologue, and the brilliant Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Walking Dead TV series) as her father. If you suffer from vertigo then this will seem pretty terrifying, and the suspense is good at first, but it never really gets going and in the end it’s all a bit ho-hum.
Here I go again...
STAR TREK (2009)
King of the reboot, J. J. Abrams plays fast and loose with Star Trek’s perceived history and thus creates an alternative universe for our sundry heroes to gallivant around, allowing him to promptly forget everything we know and love / hate about the original series and movies.
Like most prequels, the designers have been urged for no apparent reason to scale everything up, so the aura is one of a technologically advanced Federation and a vast singular Romulan mothership out for some kind of genocidal vengeance. But [see above] Abrams has already provided the excuse for that, so we can just forget anything we thought we knew, sit back and… well, yawn.
What Abrams doesn’t do is stop the movie being another version of Star Wars, Independence Day or any other save-the-world-against-all-odds adventure. It’s brash, noisy, looks fabulous, but lacks any kind of soul which, for all their defects, most of the earlier stuff never forgot. It’s a long haul which drags you wearily to an astounding finish.
Much praise was heaped on Zachary Quinto’s young Spock, but the best turn is Karl Urban’s Dr McCoy, who interprets his forebear brilliantly, even down to the verbal and physical inflections. Apparently Winona Ryder is in it, playing someone called Amanda Grayson. I hope I didn’t doze off, for I have no idea who that character is.
STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS (2013)
An overlong, frantic and frankly incomprehensible sci-fi saga about super star-ships, cryogenically frozen superbeings and a whole load of super special effects which made me feel I was watching something from the Marvel Super Hero Universe, not our universe.
Oh, well, briefly. There’s some deadly dealing among the Star Fleet elite who are chasing after Benedict Cumberbatch, who proves once again he’ll slum it for a big pay check. He plays Khan, returning for another outing as if he was the best villain Star Trek ever produced – I am fairly certain he has some decent competition in that area. The movie commences with a totally inconsequential prologue of immense primary colours that is by turns daft, stunning and engaging. Then the basic terms of the sequence are repeated several times in different clever disguises throughout the film. By the end, it’s so familiar, the action has morphed into a big windy bore.
The problem is, once you’ve established your characters have a conscience, have weaknesses, strengths and differences of opinion and thus intwined character arcs, you don’t have anywhere for your core characters to go. Having revealed all this in ten minutes, director J.J. Abrams is left only with the shining glittery star ships and galaxies, big explosions, interminable laser battles and two hours of shouting. If you like that kind of thing, fine, but Star Trek was always about so much more than violent action: it was about the human soul and that’s completely missing in this deafening epic.
Apparently, the film is a retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Really? Yeh, I don’t believe it either.
to its credit, I liked the way they explained the reboot in-story as an alternate dimension. This would never work in our Bond films, even though we all know its true with the Craig reboot, because we don't want scifi concepts in Bondfilms. But because alternate dimensions are already part of Star Trek cosmology it works, and makes this slightly more palatable.
but then what do they do with it, but substitute generic action blockbuster tropes wherever possible. everyone knows kung-fu and something blows up real good every ten minutes. and Captain Kirk now has the same Secret Origin as Superman! since that happened at the very beginning I was in a foul mood for the next two hours.
what I do remember at the time was a joke headline saying "New Star Trek movie doesn't suck! Nerds outraged!", that was almost witty enough to justify the film
I chose not to see it when it came out, so your spoilers will be my Into Darkness substitute experience. I'm sure i will have forgotten if i ever see the film.
but you can always use the Spoiler tags so others can choose not to read
Chris, Amanda is Spock's mother.
Ah, I forgot who she was. Was she ever named in the dialogue?
The main problem I had with STID was it is so boring. The TV show and a few of the 1980s films at least attempted to deliver something beyond a fight-fest. They [mostly] had changes of pace and good character interaction. The plots were hit and miss, but showed some originality and a decent sense of wonder and intrigue. All of that is lacking in STID. The film is so relentless it didn't even pause to consider taking a breath. The whole experience felt like an assault on my senses as much as the Enterprise. God knows how I would have coped in a cinema - badly, probably - and how many times has that poor spaceship been blown up or damaged since the film franchise started? There's nothing original in that anymore.
I think I have one more movie to go, but it was on Film 4 last month and I didn't record it, so I probably won't catch it for a a while.
Can't remember, and not planning to watch it again in the near future. I remember Amanda's name from TOS (yes, I'm old).
I'd forgotten that detail. is that from the episode where Spock is in heat, so they have to take him back to his home planet, and we learn all about Vulcan?
I've forgotten the title, but thats another key episode every Star Trek newbie needs to watch
@chrisno1 thanks for leading Star Trek discussion. Have we suggested yet what your next teevee show episode-by-episode review thread should be after you get done with The Saint?
the generic action blockbuster tropes that replaced everything that made Star Trek unique, remind me a bit of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which came out round the same time. Remember Burton felt the need to give Lewis Carroll's episodic book a conventional plot structure, so the plot was Wonderland was under threat from the evil Jabberwocky, and Alice was now The Chosen One who was prophesied to save them. and the Mad Hatter knew kung-fu.
@caractacus potts, the episode where we meet Spock's parents (Amanda and Sarek played by Jane Wyatt and Mark Lenard respectively) is called Journey To Babel, wherein the Enterprise is tasked with escorting a group of alien delegates to a world to discuss adding a new world to the Federation. The episode you're thinking about is Amok Time, where Spock gets his 7-year itch (literally) and must return to Vulcan to be with his bethrothed or die.
With regard to the JJ-verse movies, the perceived needs of the movie blockbuster did lead to noisy, busy, often illogical plots. It didn't help that you had hacks like Bob Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof writing those stories. I remember reading that the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness was indeed supposed to be a different augmented superman called John Harrison only for Lindelof to come in at the 11th hour and convince everyone that the villain had to be Khan because of the name recognition the character had and then graft him into the story via that clunky scene in the brig where Benedict Cumberbatch sneers "my real name is Khannnnnn!".
The final JJ-verse movie (so far at least), Star Trek: Beyond, feels a little closer to the ideals of the original show. It still has its share of stupidity but also takes the time to explore the characters a bit more even touches on how the Federation being a more pacifist organization might make some feel alienated. Definitely worth a watch if you've already sat thru the first two JJ-verse movies.
Beyond was written by Simon Pegg who is a fan of the old show. The script doesn't rely on simply moving from one set piece to another so fast that you hopefully won't have time to realize that none of it makes any sense. The characters in Beyond also have a little more nuance and depth to them; they even manage to grow a bit by the end. I could have done without the Beastie Boys song (still don't understand why they have to shoehorn that into every JJ Abrams movie) and the bit with the 20th century motorcycle had me rolling my eyes a bit but overall I still found the the strongest of the three JJ-verse movies.
And yes, JJ's Star Wars movies were abysmal and really showed how he bereft he is of original ideas. Force Awakens is just a bigger, noisier remake of A New Hope and Rise of Skywalker follows a lot of the same beats as Return of the Jedi. He really has turned into a cut and paste filmmaker who just copies storylines en-masse and lifts whole scenes from other, better movies.
Wow. Emotions running high all round. I am amazed the effect my review has had...
@TonyDP said:
The episode you're thinking about is Amok Time, where Spock gets his 7-year itch (literally) and must return to Vulcan to be with his bethrothed or die.
________________________
yes , Amok Time. Dont know how I couldve forgot that title. (channeling Michael Palin) if a person could only watch three Original Series episodes, I would recommend City on the Edge of Forever, Trouble with Tribbles, and Amok Time. whereas the first two explore the tonal extremes of the show, Amok Time contributes to the mythology, introducing some major rules of the universe, particularly what we know about Vulcans, and its a Nimoy showcase. in fact I once showed that exact episode to a friends's wife who had somehow never seen a single episode, and successfully made her a convert. (whereas my snobby friend harrumphed "well its not something I wouldve chosen to watch if I had been asked")
what would others suggest are their choices for three essential Original Series episodes?
@TonyDP I like the way you delurk within seconds when we start discussing something obviously within your range of interest. We gotta think of more topics to keep you posting! I know you know your comics and scifi
THE HUSTLER (1961)
Paul Newman’s star was never higher than in the early sixties. Amazing to think he almost never made it in movies – after the debacle of The Silver Chalice – and was thinking of staying permanently on the stage. What he needed was film roles which played to his modern instincts, the ‘method’ and the youthful post-war audiences who were fed up with bland heroes and villains, and wanted to see black, white, grey and all the colours of the human psyche. Marlon Brando famously paved the way, but Newman wasn’t far behind. The Hustler came along following a series of searing roles in movies like Somebody Up There Likes Me, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Long Hot Summer. He’d just filmed Exodus, which must have been exhausting given the end result’s near four hour run time, so the weary, almost permanently fatigued look he displays through The Hustler surely must have spoken from the heart and the body alike.
Newman isn’t a revelation in The Hustler – we already know he’s good – but it is the most remarkable performance among many in his first few years on screen. The camera seems to be lingering on him, even when it isn’t, so magnetic is the turn of his lip, the crease of his eyebrow, the sweat that forms on his semi-furrowed brow. Wallow in the endless cigarettes, the constant drinking, the restlessness, the pointless loveless romance, the forlorn, lost expression that inhabits his features, the cracking of his voice when desperate times call for aggression and pitilessness, the visible and audible signs of a man breaking apart, inch by inch and day by day, until finally he cannot break anymore and reaches his nadir, and everything displayed in studied, shadowy, chilling black and white.
The pool halls of New York are ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson’s domain, but he’s a king with no crown and his kingmaker is no prophet, only a malicious gambler of no morals or scruples. Felson’s nemesis is the aging, but debonair, Minnesota Fats, a man so legendary he no longer has a real name. Felson’s girl is Sarah, a drunken cripple who finds redemption in the broken boy she comes to love, but who is the certain beaten victim in a world of avarice, jealousy and miscommunication. George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason and Piper Laurie give magnificent performances of their own, but Newman bestrides the noirish landscape with a scowl and a shrug, a rolling lip and an unblinking stare. The scene where he opens the window to Sarah’s flat and the audience suddenly witnesses daylight is one of his best, lying on his back, smoking, watching the world turn – we are learning more from Eddie Felson’s silences than we are from his speech: we know he’s found a place with a heart, but does he? Newman’s almost dreamy glance at the outside tells us everything: “I wanted to see what it looks like.”
Robert Rossen only directed ten films and was temporarily black listed in Hollywood as a former member of the Communist Party. Although All The King’s Men won many awards, The Hustler is his masterwork, concentrating as it does on the minutia of relationships, how they rise and fall along with the people who create them and the circumstances which drive them together and apart. Rossen’s screenplay highlights the ambitions both small and large of its protagonists, wrapping them in sundry ills, regrets and hopeless wishes. Life isn’t for living for these people, it is about surviving, not in a financial sense, but an emotional one. The Mephistophelean gambler and fixer Bert Gordon [Scott] cuts to the core of everyone’s passions, wrought as they are and irrevocably intertwined.
There is plenty of shooting pool, but the film isn’t about that, it’s about greed and disgust and waste. Everyone bargains for their benefit, even Sarah who demands Eddie says ‘I love you’ because she needs to hear it, and everyone loses, exhausted by the sheer ugly depression they are living in. “We’ve created this,” she says at one point, recognising her and Eddie’s secret idyl is the most unrealistic of fantasies. The tragedy that evolves rushes upon the couple like an eight-ball swerving for the corner pocket. The Hustler isn’t a happy film, but it doesn’t need to be and shouldn’t be. Eddie Felson might achieve his dream, but he’ll lose something of himself in touching such a monumental height.
Talking Pictures showed this in standard format, which was disappointing as the film was deliberately shot in monochrome Cinemascope, so the pool table fills the screen and the actors – who often sit at the extremes – are noticeable even in a still shot. The shadows fall thick in the background, haloing the central action, drawing us into the character’s intimate experience. The film rightly won awards for photographer Eugene Schuftan. Kenyon Hopkins’ jazz inspired score reinforces the melancholy we witness, a lilting, soft shuffle to the kerbside until the rains can patter Eddie Felson into those hollow, mourning trumpet airs, or the sweaty, ardent tempo of the pool hall.
Paul Newman eventually won an Oscar himself, for playing the same character twenty-five years on, but Scorsese’s The Colour of Money is a shallow imitation of The Hustler and the star’s performance wasn’t Oscar-worthy, not by a long chalk. The Academy likes to make up for its mistakes and frequently looks foolish when it does. They really should have given the award to Paul Newman for this 1961 masterpiece in the craft of film acting. They knew it then, they knew it in 1986 and they damn well know it now.
A brilliant film on every level.
Ha! Yes, I do lurk around here quite a bit. I don't post as much as I used to but whenever the conversation turns to Star Trek, especially the original series, my ears do perk up.
As to essential Trek episodes, it's hard to narrow it down to three and your choices are all excellent. I'd add the following:
Where No Man Has Gone Before - the second pilot starts laying the groundwork for the show and it's always amazing to me how much chemistry the actors had right out of the gate. It takes some shows a couple of seasons to find their voice but these guys just hit the ground running.
Balance of Terror - a great submarine style, cold-war inspired thriller. Our first introduction to the Romulans and a really great performance by Mark Lenard as the ill fated Romulan Commander.
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield - one of the stronger episodes from an otherwise weak final season. The callouts to racism and segregation may be a bit too on the nose but Frank Gorshin puts in a great performance (I think he was nominated for an Emmy) and the scene where Kirk and Beal play a game of chicken as the Enterprise counts down to self-destruct is some of Shatner's best acting in my opinion.