@HarryCanyon Agree entirely with your take on ARABESQUE - it would have been great with Cary Grant, or at least better than it is. Not sure he would have got on with Loren though, they had an on-off affair during THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION. It did not end well.
CHINATOWN is one of the greatest films of the 1970s for certain. I am hoping to catch it one day and post a review.
An excellent little number set in an unidentified near future where surveillance is king and the security services hold sway even over Senators and their own employers. A space program known as Groundstar has been infiltrated by a foreign agent, John Welles. Following a devastating explosion at the coastal research facility, Welles escapes with the program’s secret tapes and despite being severely and horrifically wounded miraculously makes it to Nicole Devon’s holiday chalet.
Unscrupulous investigating agent Tuxan isn’t satisfied with retrieving the tape – he wants to know who the foreign agents are, who is paying them and why. His first port of call is Miss Devon, who he ensures receives the full brunt of his interrogation methods as well as his surveillance techniques, which include unwanted tails, phone taps and hidden cameras over her bed. Welles meanwhile suffers months of psychological torture following a long convalescence during which his face and body has been painstakingly rebuilt. He remembers nothing of his life, a severe case of post trauma amnesia. Tuxan decides to prevaricate an escape route for Welles in the hope he may be faking his memory loss. Welles heads to the only address he remembers: the one shouted at him constantly during torture: Nicole Devon’s chalet.
The mystery of the Groundstar infiltration deepens and thickens as the noose tightens around Welles and Nicole, who form an unlikely bond in adversity; both of them sharing a deep antipathy towards Tuxan, who is about as unsympathetic as George Peppard ever got on film. Peppard is brilliantly brutally deadpan in this, delivering his lines with a complete lack of expression, a man devoid of all emotion, driven only by the purpose of the task in hand, all other considerations – and people – are nil. Michael Sarrazin, who never quite made it big, is serviceable as the young amnesiac. After several false starts and cast changes Christine Bedford took on the role of Nicole Devon and comes across as sympathetic, challenging and a source of hope among the gathering gloom.
Conspiracy and counter establishment movies were in vogue in the 1970s and Groundstar is an early entry into the subgenre of thrillers. Like Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes, the film envisions a world blighted by surveillance, where every word and deed can be recorded and reinterpreted. Tuxan’s solution to his problem is as bleak and uncomfortable as the idea he [or any government agency] can be looking or listening not only over a shoulder, but in a kitchen, bedroom, car or on a telephone. Today, perhaps, with the susceptibilities of technology, this may not be so farfetched, but in 1972 it was surely a concerning thought. Tense throughout, Groundstar succeeds by being low key. This is not a ‘future’ where people are visibly disturbed by technology. They accept it, yet those affected by it become wary of its uses and, more potently, wary of those who wield the power to so readily and immorally utilise it. Their lack of empathy is truly frightening.
The film looks good, with startling photography from Micheal Reed [one of ours, of course] and is filmed among the stark cement and marble modernist arenas of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, which make a superb framework for several important sequences including the final confrontation. Unheralded director Lamont Johnson isn’t flashy, but has enough tricks to keep us occupied; the torture sequences are particularly gruelling. Douglas Heyes’ script is nicely condensed from L.P. Davies’ novel The Alien.
I don’t know the commercial or critical history of The Groundstar Conspiracy, but it deserves some reappraisal. Halliwell’s – always a good guide for any film of the last century – says: “Gimmicky but generally compulsive sci-fi mystery yarn with an effective climax.”
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997) with Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, and Kim Basinger. Directed by Curtis Hanson.
After watching CHINATOWN the other night, my wife was in the mood for something similar. I suggested this and she was on board. She hadn't seen it since it was in theaters (hard to believe that was 27 years ago) but remembered it being good.
It was excellent. I think I last watched it 10 years ago and boy does this hold up. Indeed, it makes for a pretty solid double feature with CHINATOWN in many ways.
Fun to see Russell Crowe before he hit the A list. I remember watching this back in 1997 and recognizing him from both VIRTUOSITY (terrible movie) and THE QUICK AND THE DEAD (pretty good movie) and coming out of it thinking 'this guy's gonna be a major star now'. I also thought the same about Guy Pearce and I'm still genuinely surprised he never hit the A list.
L.A. Confidential is a brilliant movie, much better than Chinatown in my opinion.
THE HITCHER (1986)
C. Thomas Howell is driving a friend's car from Chicago to San Diego, as he travels across desolate backroads he gives a ride to a hitch-hiker played by the menacing Rutger Hauer, who turns out to be a serial killer. In some tense scenes Howell is finally able to forcefully eject him from his speeding car. But Hauer isn’t one to give up easily. Howell is then linked to a series of gruesome murders that were committed by Hauer. Of course, the cops are clueless, and nice girl waitress Jennifer Jason Leigh teams up with Howell, but will they be able to stop The HItcher?
Director Robert Harmon ramps up the tension nicely from Eric Red's slyly allegorical script, creating a brooding, surreal atmosphere that’s engrossing to watch.
Excellent.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I've just ordered a box set of the complete movies of Abbott and Costello, featuring commentaries, documentaries, etc. I'm mentioning it this way because I'm not intending to individually review each and every one of them (it would be very repetitive).
So very dated humour, lots of puns, silly slapstick, plus an occasional monster here I go!
An effective actioner from director Michael Curtiz, aided very much by John Wayne who stood in when the ailing Curtiz was too weak to continue work. The movie is less concerned with decent plotting than getting on with the business of entertaining. It meanders all over the place, but thanks to an engaging couple of turns from Wayne and Stuart Whitman the screen never appears empty, not even when William H. Clothier’s cameras hone in on those vast countryside and desert valley arenas.
Whitman plays an effete gambler on the run after killing a man in a duel and being subsequently charged with murder. That seems a bit harsh, especially when a state judge is presiding over the event, but maybe Louisianna hadn’t figured out a decent justice system in 1843. We move on. Whitman’s charming Paul Regret meets the beautiful, enigmatic Pilar Graile on a Texas casino steamboat [Ina Balin looking ravishing] but after a week of love he is arrested by Wayne’s stubborn Texas Ranger, Jake Cutter. An uneasy friendship develops, resolved when the two men come face-to-face with rampaging Comanches and their Mexican gunrunning pals the titular Comancheros, led by Nehemiah Persoff’s paraplegic headsman. Things get complicated when Pilar turns out to be his daughter. Lee Marvin has an eye-catching minor role as scalped ruffian Tully Crow and one of the movies delights is a sequence where he and Wayne get bog-eyed drunk, brawl and play cards. It is Paul Regret’s misfortunate to be dealing the cards.
The film has a stately feel to it, as if it wants to achieve something beyond its means. You can’t fault the production values and the acting is first class, although the script isn’t up to much, favouring cliché and heavy handed humour over clear characterisations and motives. It doesn’t really matter very much. There’s a lot of riding to the rescue, riding with wagons at high speed, or just riding full stop, on horse or mule, all over the place. Lots of shooting too and not a lot of order to the action, which begins to feel repetitive. For all that, an entertaining couple of hours spent in good acting company.
A Harry Alan Towers production directed by Jess Franco, 'Bram Stoker's Count Dracula' boasts Christopher Lee in his signature role, outside the Hammer fold and with a script which Lee felt he could at last get his teeth into. Staking his ground apart from Hammer, Towers announced this film as a true adaptation of Stoker's novel. And so it was, at least to some extent.
Lee embraced the opportunity to play Stoker's Dracula as an elderly figure rejuvenated by blood as the story unfolds; he clearly relished the Count's lines as sourced directly from the novel, especially in his exchanges with Jonathan Harker (Fred Williams) in the Transylvanian scenes of the first part of the film. However, the budget didn't extend to any representation of such highlights in the book as the voyage of the Demeter, or Dracula scaling the walls of his castle. (The latter spectacle was worked quite effectively into Hammer's 'Scars of Dracula', also starring Lee, in the same year.) Faithfulness to Stoker? As Kim Newman has observed, it's unclear why Franco's Dracula would hang an enormous 'f____-off' mirror in a chamber in his castle and then walk right in front of it in Harker's company... but hey! Post-Transylvania there's no Whitby and little sense of London: the film was actually shot in Barcelona, with some location footage filmed in France; it retains a distinctively Euro mise-en-scene and palette.
While Franco's film arguably does remain closer to Stoker than any other mainstream Dracula movie in the cinema, an episodic TV production later in the decade, the BBC's 1977 adaptation starring Louis Jordan, stuck more rigorously to the book. In 1992, of course, Francis Ford Coppola made his own claim of fidelity to the novel with 'Bram Stoker's Dracula'. In fact, Coppola turned his film into a love story, presenting the Count as a tragic hero, so despite the title it was really a case of 'Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula' for a 90s audience leaning towards the romantic end of gothic.
Apparently more money was spent on Lee and Lee's scenes than on anything else in the Towers production; the film often feels lacklustre when Lee isn't on screen. True, Klaus Kinski's dialogue-free scenes as the insane Renfield are fascinating because of Kinski's aptitude for eccentric improvisation. And while Maria Rohm (Mina) and Franco-favourite Soledad Miranda (Lucy) are beautifully photogenic, Herbert Lom (Van Helsing) is largely dry, his appearances occasionally bolstered by Franco's use of camera zoom. As for Jack Taylor (Quincey) and Fred Williams, they'e handsome but rather bland. The three leading men, Lee, Lom and Kinski, all shot their scenes at different times, meaning that we never get to see them in the same frame: this somewhat neuters the Van Helsing/ Dracula conflict and gives the film overall a rather static quality.
Jess Franco was rather scathing about Hammer, complaining that Terence Fisher and other Hammer directors had little taste for horror. I suppose there's a case that Fisher, in particular, had an action-film orientation in the gothic milieu, more than horror per se. Despite his critical comments, Franco nevertheless delivers brief touches of Lee's Hammer-style Dracula in his own film, especially after the Count's relocated: Lee, for example, wears red contact lenses in intense moments; has fangs; snarls when his feeding is interrupted and, in an expressionist gesture, defensively crosses his arms in front of his face as Lom takes him on (in a different frame!)
More of an influence is Tod Browning's 1931 'Dracula'. In addition to the film's generally slow pace, Franco channels Browning in his long-shot staging of the emergence of Dracula's spectral, modestly attired Brides, and by a later scene where Dracula is dressed for the opera in London. As in Browning, Dracula's first appearance is in disguise as the coachman who picks up Harker for the final leg of the journey to the castle (Renfield substitutes Harker in the 1931 version). In the Brides scene, Franco imports from Stoker's novel the notorious 'baby-in-the-bag' idea, though with more restraint than the BBC production which followed in 1977. Franco depicts the infant's mother crying at the castle walls for the release of her child, but stops short of venturing where Stoker goes in having this woman torn apart by wolves.
Relative restraint seems to be the order of the day, perhaps because Towers had an eye on certification and the implications for distribution. Several Franco critics recommend the director's manifestly erotic 'Vampyros Lesbos' as more typical of his sensibility - a film also released in 1970, again starring Soledad Miranda. (I've just got hold of a copy of this on ebay.) It's nevertheless true that 'Bram Stoker's Count Dracula' itself positions Miranda in some disquieting scenes. Playing Lucy undead, Stoker's 'Bloofer Lady', Miranda lures a child into the woods while sporting what might since be characterised as full-on goth make-up, an image enhanced by her - the actor's - Romany heritage: it's a sinister scene. Looking forward to Coppola, a strength of his 1992 movie is the way in which he tributes the entire history of Dracula in the cinema up to that point. In terms of wardrobe, the funeral garb of the 1992 Lucy (Sadie Frost) surely includes reference to the nightdress worn by Miranda's Lucy - with its billowing arms - as seen when Miranda is spectacularly silhouetted stretching out in a bedroom doorway. Reportedly, Lee was at first disapproving of Miranda's casting as Lucy, feeling she didn't have the right look, but after shooting he claimed that of all the women with whom he'd played necking scenes as the Count she'd done the best job.
'Queen Of The Damned' (2002)
Michael Rymer's noughties vampire movie rests on 90s-style cliches of the genre and is largely uninvolving. The Vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend) rises from hibernation to become a nu-metal rock star, locking horns with Aaliyah's eponymous Vampire Queen, Akasha. Apparently Anne Rice didn't approve of how the Lestat of this movie kills innocent groupies for feeding purposes, as we see him do: in Rice's conception of the character, Lestat makes victims only of 'bad' people. Rice had a point: a flaw of the film is that Lestat isn't nearly as sympathetic as the main thrust of the story needs him to be. To give Townsend his due, he turns in well choreographed routines as Lestat performing gothic rock - especially in a snazzily edited music video, sourced for the main titles of the film, where he riffs on the Cesare figure of 'The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari'.
The rather morbid reason why I watched this film back-to-back with 'Bram Stoker's Count Dracula' is that there's a tragic parallel in the fate of Soledad Miranda and Aaliyah, both pop singers as well as actors. Miranda died in a car accident in the same year that Franco's film was released, and Aaliyah died in a plane crash even before the release of Rymer's movie. The story of Aaliyah's short-lived career - and of her grooming and exploitation by R&B musician, convicted racketeer and sex trafficker, R. Kelly - is covered in a chapter in Sarah Ditum's excellent new book, 'Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties'. Sadly, Aaliyah never got to live her #metoo moment. I'd highly recommend Ditum's book, if not 'Queen Of The Damned'.
'The Crow' (1994)
Over a weekend when cinemas are giving a limited 30th anniversary run to Alex Proyas' goth revenge movie 'The Crow', it's a time to remember, too, the loss of Brandon Lee, tragically killed by a firearms accident on set.
Cinematically, Townsend's Lestat is no match for Lee's Eric Draven, to whose image he's indebted.
I'm off to listen to The Cure's 'Burn'...
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I dislike superhero movies and their fey attempts at melding the fantastic with a grounded recognisable contemporary reality. I tend now also to dislike animated films, which tend to ground themselves in some sort of recognisable fantasy, then build a human reality. Neither approach seems to work. The films just end up being ‘busy’ visually and whatever serious point – or jovial statement – they try to make is lost among all the paraphernalia of a CGI so slick the idea of any kind of reality simply explodes on itself, like the climaxes of most of the films. Superhero movies are a subgenre of the adventure movie, a style of film I rather enjoy, allayed to aspects of horror, science fiction and mythology. Ultimately though, the sheer ridiculousness of most superhero or animated films harks back to the era of the comic strip, where the illustrated story is all and, frankly, anything goes. Characters are exaggerated; speech is codified into clipped, astute sentences, often with a witty edge; action can be over the top – to the point of that ridiculousness I mentioned. No-one took comics or ‘the funnies’ in newspapers very seriously because, well, they were not. Even the dark, psychological drama of The Batman seemed to be overrun by the more traditional heroics of Superman. Then along came Stan Lee and Steve Ditka and the rest is history, or something like that.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an excellent animated superhero movie because it places its hero back in the environment from which he came: the comic strip storyboard. Producers, directors and writers [all too many to be listed] have taken time here to consider how to present a fantastic hero within a contemporary framework while respecting the origins of the familiar format. So here we have a ‘cartoon’ Spider-Man, a teenager, artistic, unhappy at school and at home, friendless, but intelligent and perceptive. He’s an identifiable kid. No silly shenanigans at home, at dorm or at school. Miles Morales is just a bit gauche and helpless. Note: he is not called Peter Parker. Vital, I think to clean-break this teenager from all other interpretations. Nor is he wide-eyed with enthusiasm. Miles is as startled by everything around him, retreating into the realm of hip-hop music to calm his nerves. His Uncle Aaron wants to help him adjust, to find himself, and allows him to spray paint an ambitious mural cited ‘Expectations’ in the defunct basement of a New York skyscraper he once worked as an engineer. Miles, like our friendly neighbourhood Peter Parker, photographs the image. A neat homage, but not one that distracts from the events on screen. A pesky radioactive spider pounces, takes a little nip and overnight Miles begins to exhibit some worrying arachnid vices. These do take on a humorous bent – as they must to demonstrate the sudden awkwardness – but this startling discovery leads Miles back to that graffiti art and his future as the new Spider-Man.
And here, the old Spider-Man – good-looking, blonde, blue-eyed American good-guy Peter Parker – dies in a whirlwind of phantasmagorical other-matter created by the hulking villain Kingpin. It falls to Miles to attempt to prevent his world, his New York, from crumbling. He is aided by the appearance of a half-dozen other Spider-Men from alternate universes, plunged from their worlds into ours via the Super Collider reaction tested inside Kingpin’s skyscraper. The story evolves quite brilliantly into a ‘leap of faith’ for Miles, in terms of his function as a superbeing, a friend and a son. The superhero stuff naturally takes precedence. What it doesn’t do, which most live-action [I use the word ill-advisedly] superhero movies prefer, is dwell interminably on the unfortunateness of possessing special powers, how they endanger others as well as the recipient, are misinterpreted and mistreated, exploited and reviled. It dabbles, but not to the point of largess. Instead, the story proceeds briskly and with much comic delight as Miles discovers first a second, despondent, out of shape Peter B. Parker [nice touch that ‘B’], then a pretty female Gwen Stacy, before an extra bunch of alternatives appear, although why they all head for Aunt May’s is a complete unfathomable mystery. May herself is a cheery female version of James Bond’s Q, storing a host of gear in a hidden laboratory and making Miles a customised suit and web-shooters. She even enters the fray with a baseball bat when assorted baddies trash her house. Miles isn’t having as much fun as she is though. Wracked by his insecurities, it is only at the final moment of crisis that he’s able to perform the miracles all superheroes do.
The movie doesn’t over-involve itself with double-clever-talk. It is straightforward, cheerful and appropriate to its audience, by which I mean comic book devotees. The visual nature of the piece encapsulates the joy of the comic strip medium. Several times the animators delve into comic strip magazines to tell a Spidey-Story. Huge ‘Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh’s and ‘Wooooooooo’s are printed on the screen as characters plummet to doom or destiny. Explanatory white-space paragraphs direct action. Punches are sometimes animated with ‘thwack’ or ‘boom’ and the like. Primary colours dominate the pallet, but not to the exclusion of everything else. Into the Spider-Verse is more colourful than many supposed ‘elite’ movies [Avengers, Captain America, Harry Potter 5 – 8, Dunkirk, recent James Bond, I am looking at you], remembering that colour adds depth while contrast only demonstrates confusion. The villains are superbad, from Olivia Octavius ‘Doc Ock’ to the robot Scorpion, and wicked Uncle Aaron as the Prowler. Top of them all is the humongous Kingpin, whose shoulders seem to get bigger and bigger until they dwarf his own head. While Lee and Ditka loved outsized villains, I am not sure they ever created someone so counterfeit; Kingpin has the most unreal appearance of any character in the film. What marks him, other than his gigantic edifice, is a subtext about regret and family, about how despite his horrific gangster history, all he wants is an intimate history. Essentially, he’s after the same solace as Jefferson Davis, Miles’ stepdad, an incorruptible cop, a man seeking the affection of a son. Kingpin’s methods, though, are creepily insane and it takes that corps of Spider-Men to take him and his henchmen down in a second whirlwind of Super Collider mayhem.
As with almost all movies of the genre, Into the Spider-Verse loses its way around the villain’s plot and its climatic resolution, preferring to install tremendous effects which begin to both confuse and excite at the same time. The difference here is that because the medium is animated, because it so positively reflects the comic strip origins of the medium, it doesn’t become tasteless and an exercise in visual one-up-man-ship. The recent contemporary MCU [or is it now a Marvel Comic Multi-Verse?] offerings tend to favour pyrotechnics, snazzy editing and oodles of computer generated foolery to make no statement whatsoever, other than ‘Hey, we can do this!’ Coupled against the obviously modern day background, these fantasies jar spectacularly. The humour too becomes misplaced, because we can’t take anything lightly when our own world is being so haphazardly destroyed. It doesn’t help the actors are so po-faced about it all. Lighten up.
There is genuine poise in the animated characters on screen. I recall a little shrug Miles gives when chatting to the older Peter Parker; or Gwen Stacy’s furtive eye movements; the Alternate Spider-Men eavesdropping on a conversation between Miles and Peter, concern etched on faces; Jefferson’s shaking head as he tries to school Miles on the way to school. Best of all perhaps is an image of the newly advocated Spider-Man: having saved the world – worlds – he stands like a Greek God, fists clenched, legs braced as the chaos of the Super Collider erupts around him; Peter B. Parker falls into the melee and back to his Alternate Universe, this image his lasting memory of his new found fully fledged Spider-Man protégé, a leap of faith assured. If ever there was a moment for animated gravitas, this is undoubtably it.
The voice actors respond in kind with nuances of tone and expression rarely found in Robert Downey Jr or Chris Evans and their increasingly one-note scorings. Hats off then to Shameik Moore [Miles / Spider-Man], Jake Johnson [Peter B. Parker], Hailee Steinfeld [Gwen Stacy / Spider-Woman] and Brian Tyree Henry [Jefferson]. Nicholas Cage has fun as a noir-style monochrome Peter Parker and if the anthropomorphic Peter Porker seems most unlikely [Spider-Ham – oh, come on, a homage to The Simpsons and Spider-Pig! – how clever is this movie???] at least he has the best line: “Do animals talk in this universe? Cause if not he’s in for a shock” said while all half-dozen Spider-Heroes cling to each other and a young lad’s ceiling.
Now, Into the Spider-Verse won’t change my overall feelings towards the superhero genre. Done well, they can be superb entertainment and the best of them choose to remember their comic book origins and treat them with respect and good humour. The original Fantastic Four and Spider-Man managed this, so too the first Iron Man and Thor; going way back Superman 1 & 2, Keaton’s Batman. For unknowable reasons I enjoyed Venom and the camp stupidity of Batman and Robin has to be seen to be outrageously believed. However, from the current, insipid craze, where it feels as if length and convoluted plotting are more important than a sense of genial satisfaction, I can safely tell you all that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is well worth any kind of entrance fee.
GODZILLA MINUS ONE. This turned out to be a nice surprise--it isn't so much about the giant monster as about the main lead, a kamikaze pilot who chickened out (sort of like Tiger Tanaka, only not as brave) and who is trying to find his own sense of honor and redemption. But, yeah, there's a lot of Tokyo-stomping, done now with digital effects rather than a guy in a suit trampling on a model. The effects are good, though, and since this actually comes from Toho and not some Hollywood studio, Godzilla actually LOOKS like Godzilla. A good show.
GODZILLA MINUS ONE isn't just a good Godzilla film...it's a good film period. The major characters all have story arcs and the minor characters are all given at least one good 'moment' to resonate. The special effects (which won the Oscar a few months ago) are uniformly excellent and thrilling, and the sound design is incredibly immersive.
Well done. I'm really kinda meh on Godzilla as a property overall but this one got me. My wife, who only watched it because 'it was supposed to be good', really enjoyed it as well.
'The First Great Train Robbery' starring Sean C. It's a great boy's own crime caper. I watched the unedited version and I must say it demonstrated how 'sanitised' films shown on TV are. The Hanging scene was shown in full and, although short, was particularly graphic.
SC was particularly impressive when making his way long the top of the carriages of a moving train. I'm not sure how it was permitted to happen but it did, and to great effect. I read somewhere that the train was supposed to be moving no faster than 30mph but the driver later revealed that he hadn't been aware of the restriction and was chugging along at 50!
Author of 'An Ungentlemanly Act' and 'Execution of Duty'. The WW2 espionage series starring Harry Flynn.
An outrageous financial success for a comedy of embarrassment.
Hugh Grant is foppish, foolish, numbskull Charles, probably the worst best man and wedding guest ever, who falls for mysterious American Andie MacDowell during the first of the four titular weddings. They meet on-and-off at the other succeeding social events and between them spur an increasing number of opportunities to say ‘I love you’. If the film had been made in the thirties with Cary Grant, Charles would be a suave sophisticate, with quick witted responses and a sense of baffled purpose that would make him endearingly charming. The 1990s version is all stuttering self-loathing and feckless wonderment. You can’t envisage this Charles pulling one woman, let alone eight as claimed and certainly not American socialite Carrie. I say socialite but I am guessing, as one of the movie’s flaws is the fact we learn absolutely zero about the heroine other than the fact she’s had 33 lovers and jets back and forth between London and New York. MacDowell is a cipher of the most cryptic kind. She doesn’t need to be American, it makes no sense she is, and unfortunately while MacDowell is okay, she isn’t sparkling enough to make you believe Hugh Grant would notice her; nor does she appear whimsical enough to fall for his ‘little boy lost’ act.
The film has a strong support cast of up-and-coming comic actors, most of whom will feature in episodes of British sitcom heaven. Simon Callow shines as a flamboyant queer. There are moments to enjoy, but a film that was once fresh and intriguing has been killed by its own [better?] offspring. The movie feels laboured and puerile. The obscenities feel unwanted. The simplicity of the set-up stifles any character development. It is worth noting that if the American’s role is underwritten, so are the others: we learn next to nothing of these people’s lives, where they work, live, were educated, how they met, their families, past times. Other than one of their number being exceedingly rich, there is nothing more than posh accents to mark them out. Shallow isn’t the half of it, as the paucity of personality eventually translates itself onto the humour and the scenes with the big laughs are stretched further and further apart the longer the thing drags on.
It comes as something to note that the very best scene is the funeral of Callow’s garrulous Gareth, an emotional pull very difficult to resist. Richard Curtis was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay, but you wonder how many voters remembered when they pitched Curtis’s name forward that the appropriately beautiful verses of Funeral Blues were written by W.H. Auden. Mike Newell pulls the strings behind the camera.
Notting Hill, Curtis & Grant’s follow up is better, with clearer defined people and plotting and less infantilised humour, although it does shamelessly repeat the exact romantic formula. Four Weddings… was a big ‘date’ movie back when I was in my twenties. The soundtrack sold millions. Hugh Grant became famous and so did his squeeze Liz Hurley. Cool Britania was just around the corner. Along with Notting Hill and Love Actually, Four Weddings… seems to encapsulate something of my own era, when I too was attending weddings or the odd unexpected funeral, and trying to not fall in love too easily. I’m not sure if that makes the film any good any more, but it still conjures decent [or indecent] memories and that’s probably a fair summation of anyone who has been to weddings or funerals. Like me, I guess, it still works, just, but it is beginning to crack with age.
A lot of the jokes from FourWeddings were nicked from writers Dick Clements and Ian La Frenais, especially WhateverHappenedToTheLikelyLads? I’m not sure if they got any credit for them.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Directed and Produced by Roger Corman, reportedly shot in three days, stars Boris Karloff as a Baron in a castle tended by a lone servant. His lonely life is suddenly disturbed by a French army officer (Jack Nicholson) searching for a mysterious woman he encountered near the castle. She turns out to be the restless spirit of the wife Karloff murdered twenty years before, which Karloff confesses to. More complications develop from there, mostly involving wandering in the family crypt which is eventually destroyed in a pretty impressive scene, regarding the budget.
A witch and an itinerant provide an important plot twist late in the film that kind of straightens out the confusing story line.
Karloff does his best with the material he's given, Nicholson shows his inexperience but manages to pull off a few scenes, and Jonathan Haze turns in his usual fine performance as Karloffs servant. The sets and expansive outdoor photography make this look like a much more expensive production than it actually is. The gore effects were undoubtedly more impressive in 1963, but the final shock effect for the wrap is decent enough.
The finished film is patchy, with a few shifts in lighting and scenes that don’t quite match, but an spectral mood is sustained throughout.
It’s worth a look, especially if you’re a Karloff fan.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
A bit of a cheat as it is a telly movie, but I've reviewed telly movies here before...
INTO THE BLUE (1996)
A mystery thriller based extremely loosely on a bestselling book by Robert Goddard. Harry Bartlett is an older man living in Rhodes as the custodian of a rich man’s villa. He spends his time working in a bar and seducing impressionable tourists. When one of his conquests disappears, Harry is accused of her murder. Using his Irish passport, he returns to London and tries to piece together the girl’s history, uncovering a conspiracy of silence that threatens the career of an ex-politician as well as his own life.
John Thaw looks too old and dishevelled to be playing this kind of role; Harry should be in his mid-fifties, but Thaw makes him appear nearer seventy. The story meanders about a bit and is interesting in the way an episode of Endeavour, Morse or Diezel and Pascoe is, plenty of red herrings and enough intrigue or menace to keep us watching. Too many killings, one feels, but a good enough yarn to keep one occupied. A pity they filmed it in chilly London and therefore a wintery Rhodes. Not very exotic. Reasonably scripted. A reasonable ending. Cast is just about okay without doing very much. Tension almost non-existent. Sloppy plotting. It is a TV movie and they did, and sometimes still do, come across as a bit watery. The title is not explained.
This is a quiet, intelligent western about Swedes and Mexicans being terrorized off their land after oil is discovered. Sterling Hayden comes to Texas and finds his father has been murdered for his property. Hayden’s obsessive demand for justice becomes a rallying cry for those remaining on the oil-rich land. Director Joseph Lewis offers up stark black and white imagery that John Ford would have been proud of. It’s a bit pedestrian at times but the unusual final showdown is well worth the wait.
With shades of High Noon, and the western directorial qualities of Anthony Mann, this is often riveting fare.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Watched Four Weddings last night, I dunno, it's a comedy, it's brilliant, lots of funny set ups and lines, likeable cast on top form. Grant may be described in this as a hapless numskull or what have you, but like calling the cast posh, it doesn't cover it - technically it's a role Ian Carmichael could have played in the 50s (and it's great to see Hugh Griffith, a contemporary of Carmichael. pop up as the mad old man at the weddings) but he wouldn't have been like Grant or anywhere as good. Hugh Grant gives a total star performance - he's a good looking fellow who plausibly plays as if he's not good looking or cocky, which takes some doing.
At the time there was a feeling of diversity in it - the posh folk are inclusive and jolly, Hugh's character hangs out with Charlotte Colman (the only one of the main cast not still around) and John Hannah doesn't seem posh - I mean, I'd just been to Bristol Uni and hated it, so I had every reason to take against it, but nobody saw it like that. Having two main characters as gay and not making a big deal of it, very welcome at the time. Later it's pilloried because there's nobody of colour in it but what can you do? AJB itself only had two black members and they haven't posted lately, same it had just women members and they haven't either.
It was odd that that the two big stars - Rowan Atkinson and Andie Macdowell - didn't impress as much as the others. It's true the Carrie character doesn't quite work - she was written for Darryl Hannah originally and you can see that having her as a scatty blonde might have made her trespasses more forgivable, more charming, whereas here Carrie has two much of the Wallace Siimpson about her, she seems more scheming and insensitive. What is also odd is that I don't really care - the main thing is the relationship between Charles and his friends. Oddly, none of them seem to share a scene with Carrie - you could almost do an alternative film where she is in fact a figment of his imagination.
It is not the sort of film to make it onto anyone's Top 10, though it should be on mine. For me, it's a like a classic Bond in that it's one classic scene after another, nothing to dislike. Like Pulp Fiction of that same year, the playing, the dialogue, it's all excellent. It annoys me that GoldeneEye came out after and superficially has that classic British appeal but the dialogue in particular the jokes were awful. I can happily excuse that the Carrie character sort of doesn't work but I can't excuse the things I dislike about GoldenEye.
There is no kudos in liking Four Weddings. But at a time when Bond had gone AWOL, it was rare to see a Brit comedy that actually worked, and worked as well as this.
PS I watched an older Hugh Grant being interviewed in a show about his life - his whole manner was that of Boris Johnson, it's odd, it's like how Robert DeNero created Donald Trump via his role as Al Capone in The Untouchables, and now hates him - a sort of Frankenstein's monster! Could Johnson have made it to No 10 without Grant's portrayal as a bumbling PM in Love, Actually?
I hadn't seen this action thriller before - except I had, and so have you really. It's the usual fare - quiet, bookish loner, a somewhat older figure, crosses some local hoodlums who take umbrage because What He Doesn't Know is that they're part of a far bigger movement, they're the local mafia. But What They Don't Know is that he's actually an ex military man with 'a set of very specific skills' who is now looking to take them on. Cut Tex Avery style mayhem, as in one pulls a knife, the other pulls a gun, the other pulls a shotgun, the other a howitzer and so on....
To make this work you need a star with a pedigree, it might be Liam Neeson and in this case it's Denzil Washington, around the same vintage and maybe a bit thick set around the waist.
This is highly watchable fare, enjoyable. It is, however, the equivalent of some of the airport novel thrillers I've read lately where it begins credible enough and then loses you a bit, you finish it but despise yourself a bit. What kicks Denzil off is when some pimps abuse a teenage streetwalker played by Kick Ass scene-stealer Chloe Grace Moretz - you kind of hope or expect her to sort them all out herself - but it never reconciles the fact that a) The Russian mafia early on find out who their main enemy is but don't just shoot him dead without ceremony and b) They can also get to their teenage streetwalker given she's in hospital, but she isn't touched.
Washington's nemesis - dubbed 'a sociopath with a businesss card' - is an actor who should have been given more work lately given he's the spit of Kevin Spacey. But this villain does try to explain why they don't just kill the guy - he wants to find out more about him, seeing as he came out of nowhere. Anyway, it unfolds fairly predictably.
Sequel is on Film4 tonight, it's meant to be better and another one was in cinemas in the last year.
Bigger budget, brasher and more expansive sequel - somewhat delayed; four years on and its hero Denzil Washington is still making his way through 100 Books To Read Before You Die - isn't it 1000 Books anyway? He was past 90 in the first film, he must be a slow reader, or maybe he went off and dipped into some sleazy pulp novels.
This is also a dumber film; in the first one there was a linear plot of the kind you get in the Jack Reacher books but here he's more an odd job handyman who works as a cabbie in a bigger city it seems, and does a few beatings up or even killings on behalf of victims, the whole thing is kind of episodic and maybe not unlike the old Death Wish films, only this guy has input from the very top State operatives (the nice ones, natch, not the ones who want to bump off Julian Assange and so on). Washington elects to do this on his own presumably so we don't get to share the vicarious glory.
One thread coalesces and ends in a Skyfall-style shootout in the middle of a hurricane in Washington's old home town indeed long abandoned family home - though if he'd supposed to have been dead and under a new identity then how come that home still exists with all its family photos and paraphernalia; also how long ago did his wife die (in circumstances yet to be explained, does that line up in a sequel?) given they had no kids and Washington is knocking on? Anyway, the ruse makes more sense than it did in Skyifall, where Bond was sitting out in a derelict mansion with not too much surrounding cover - or was that supposed to help him?
Some kudos to an American film that takes the unusual step of incorporating the country's mad weather patterns into the storyline. I like Washington in this, I get him as an actor in a way I didn't when he was being the conventional leading man. Don't rate the film much at all and he makes some odd errors given he's also meant to be such a hotshot but there you go.
I'm probably taking it too seriously, there is a nack to enjoying these kinds of films I'm sure. Again, we've seen this kind of thing before in the way it pans out but maybe if you're a teenager of course you haven't.
@Napoleon Plural says - “Bigger budget, brasher and more expansive sequel - somewhat delayed; four years on and its hero Denzil Washington is still making his way through 100 Books To Read Before You Die - isn't it 1000 Books anyway? He was past 90 in the first film, he must be a slow reader, or maybe he went off and dipped into some sleazy pulp novels”
Sleazy pulp novels are more fun than than boring classics, that’s why 😂😁🤪
I liked the first two Equaliser’s - third one is just about ok, they should leave it that now.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
An old-fashioned style movie packed full of great performances and excellent production values that walked off with four big Oscar victories [Picture, Director, Actor, Screenplay] and a whopping great profit of almost $400m. Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech delves into the remarkable true-life friendship between King George VI and speech therapist Lionel Logue. The latter had helped the King to resolve his stammer when he was still Duke of York and was present for many of the monarch’s wartime addresses, offering advice and support.
The screenplay takes some liberties with real events [if you want to know what and how, I refer you to Wiki]. These sort of biographical films always did and will always do. I call The King’s Speech ‘old-fashioned’ because it reminds me so much of the type of biopic they used to make during Hollywood’s Golden Age, when a famous explorer or songwriter, philosopher, scientist or inventor, king or queen, writer or showman, was given a quick dusting off, the key elements of their story unfurled, the writer’s bureau put to task, a decent director put in charge, a big name actor or actress cast, etc. The thirties and forties are littered with them: The Life of Emile Zola, Madame Curie, Swanee River, The Adventures of Mark Twain, Dr Ehrich's Magic Bullet, that kind of thing. They all took major or minor liberties to increase the melodramatic effect, and The King’s Speech is no different. Condensing the action from two decades to a couple of years certainly creates tension, both between the desperate king and his Australian near-nemesis as well as the rising political tensions at home and abroad when an abdication crisis and the threat of Nazism occupy government and regal minds.
Where the film really succeeds is in the performances which are top notch across the board. Colin Firth is an actor I have little time for, but by golly he’s good in this, portraying the contradictions in Bertie’s behaviour, from the sterling, upright, almost constricted public figure, to the sweetness of the intimate family man, to the chain smoking, drinking, angry impatient patient too proud to ask for help. He rightly walked off with a Best Actor Oscar. Geoffrey Rush is marvellously understated as Lionel Logue and Helena Bonham Carter succeeds in bringing aloofness, care and a calm resilience to her portrayal of the future Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Michael Gambon cameos superbly as the dying King George and Guy Pearce is wistfully and wilfully conniving as the lovelorn Edward VIII. A host of lesser roles blend into the main handful with consummate ease and credibility. The only duff note is Timothy Spall’s Winston Churchill, who is a caricature creation; it doesn’t help that Churchill’s inclusion in the action was one of the fictions forced on writer David Seidler, who wanted more recognisable political figures than Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain.
The film has superb visuals. The production values are extremely high, particularly in the costuming and set design. You really feel as if the action is taking place where and when you are being told it is. The photography is good too, no dreary wartime visuals here; it is colourful when joyous, dark and shadowy when cagey. Hooper’s framing is worth noting as it utilises the extremes of the screen to suggest intellectual or emotional distance between characters. When there is a meeting of mind or hearts, invariably the camera moves in for closeups. It happens so naturally, we barely notice, but the emotive effect is unequivocal.
The King’s Speech may not be everyone’s idea of a night out at the pictures, or a night in front of the telly, but you can’t fault the attention afforded the production from everyone concerned. Excellent all-round.
THE KING'S SPEECH gets roundly bashed for being nothing but pure Oscar-bait. While that's absolutely true, it's also objectively a really well made film that's pretty solidly entertaining.
Anyway, in last night's Darkest Hour - also bollocks - there is a contradiction when Churchill is about to meet King George VI (this time played by would-be Bond James Purefoy, not I tell a lie that was in Churchill with Brian Cox, also bollocks) and laments that he never liked him after he sided with that Wallace Simpson woman, but in The King's Speech in a case of foreshadowing Churchill doesn't seem to like her, noticing some lack of etiquette on her part.
Chris No1 is quite right of course about how 1930s films took those kinds of liberties with the plot - The First of Few about Mitchell the creator of the Spitfire and Lloyds of London about the creation of the famous bank in tandem with Horatio Nelson among the others - but here I find it really twee, sort of dumbing down.
Having just watched The King’s Speech and drawn a few notes on the perceived historical liberties taken by that film’s writer, I think it is only fair to point out the two major historical liberties taken by this film’s author Anthony McCarten. Firstly, the role of Clement Atlee’s Labour Party in supporting Churchill against the rise of far Right and anti-socialist parties in Europe is completely ignored; it was not Churchill alone who persuaded his War Cabinet to ignore peace negotiations, but Churchill with the support of the Labour Party. Secondly, loveable Winston never took an underground train journey to conduct a miniscule straw poll of British opinion; if he had done, the idea he would receive unequivocal support from all and sundry is also a fallacy. There are numerous other smaller inaccuracies performed for dramatic effect, many of them shouting matches at Cabinet. What isn’t in doubt is Churchill’s persona and his ability to convince both himself and those around him of the challenge faced and the fortitude required to defeat that challenge. Gary Oldman does a magnificent interpretation of the old Sea Dog, steering clear of the usual cliches to bring something altogether more realistic and sympathetic. He doesn’t impersonate Churchill – that would be too easy to do and make him appear, rather like Timothy Spall in The King’s Speech, as a ham – instead he identifies, perfects and underplays physical mannerisms and speech anomalies that allow us to accept him as Britain’s greatest wartime Prime Minister, although not necessarily as Sir Winston may have really been. Like Colin Firth’s intense portrait of King George VI in The King’s Speech, Gary Oldman quite rightly walked off with a barrage of awards including an Oscar for his performance. It rightly too won an award for Kazuhiro Tsuji, David Malinowski and Lucy Sibbick’s makeup which renders the actor almost unrecognisable.
The film concerns the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940 and the ailing Conservative government whose appeasement policy had become flawed and its leader forced to resign. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlian was a First World War veteran who believed for better or worse in peace at all costs, fearing a return to the horrendous bloodshed of the Great War [Was he wrong? Maybe history will always be unfair on a man so misguided, but he wasn’t that far wrong in terms of the body count…]. Chamberlain's desires are underpinned time and again here, but without explaining his motivations, which makes him the bad guy. Hitler and the Nazis only appear in audio and newsreel footage. The narrative instead treads a fine line between a macabre comic drama as Churchill gets to grips with the reins of power while his new secretary Elizabeth Layton [ably personified by Lily James] gets to grips with him and a melodrama of overbearing weight and grand oration. Any movie depicting Churchill has to run speeches past us and Darkest Hour is no exception. They are well nurtured by Oldman and director Joe Wright.
Good supporting roles are virtually forgotten so dominant is Oldman as the central figure, wringing every fibre of emotion, empathy and admiration he can from the script, transmitting it in spades to his audience. It’s a rare time I’d call a performance riveting: Brando in The Godfather, maybe, Newman in The Hustler, Hopkins in Lambs, Olivier in The Entertainer, Brynner in The King and I, Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind, Streisand in Funny Girl; these kind of acting masterclasses simply don’t come around very often and this one is right up there and deserves all the praise heaped on it. Without Oldman, Darkest Hour simply wouldn’t cut it. As it is, the film creates tension between its characters as well as for the larger picture outside the Westminster wartime bubble. The quiet scenes, such as [another fictional] moment when Churchill realises Miss Layton’s brother has been killed in action therefore have genuine power and those sequences of surprising humour add unexpected warmth. We are always aware that Churchill is a man with a wife and family as well as a duty and a country, that he can talk to peasants as well as Kings, and that – as Lord Halifax admits – he mobilised the English language to the cause of war in a manner no other leader could have done in 1940.
Interestingly, Darkest Hour was up against Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk in the race for Best Picture at the Academy Awards for 2017, a film covering virtually the same time period but from the soldier’s point of view. What Dunkirk lacked was a central focus and performance like Oldman’s; that film becomes an exercise in tale-telling without personality. Here, it is the clash of personalities which makes the exposition suspenseful and ultimately thrilling, despite knowing the eventual outcome. Dunkirk simply misses a strong combative core. Neither film was recognised for their writing, perhaps suggesting voters noted the obvious dramatic cliches as well as the historical inaccuracies.
Let us not dwell too much on that again. Darkest Hour is a fine film, or rather it becomes a fine film by front loading a truly excellent performance. Highly recommended, historical errors and all. Yeh, couldn’t resist a final dig…
I’ve been on a Apes splurge and revisited the original five movies. The original, and undoubtedly the best of the series, sees astronaut Charlton Heston crash land onto a planet ruled by apes. Hunted down and captured, Heston and his two surviving colleagues are subjected to the inhumanities of the ape world, a hierarchical society of orangutans (administrators), gorillas (soldiers), and chimpanzees (scientists), in which mute humans are beaten, caged, and experimented upon. Understandably, Heston’s tall, powerful and seemingly intelligent physique poses a problem for the orangutan leaders as he could be the proof that humans are not the animals they are believed to be. Or worse still, is Heston the possible missing link that unites the modern ape with his primitive human ancestor? The plan is to resort to castration, lobotomy, and taxidermy to stop the secret from becoming common knowledge, a fate Heston narrowly avoids through the intervention of kindly radical scientists Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall, who help Taylor to escape along with a pretty native girl he’s taken a shine to. The famous twist ending is ultimately obvious, (but not to a 12-year old in 1968 when I first saw it). It’s cleverly written by Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and (not our own) Michael Wilson, the once blacklisted writer. Jerry Goldsmith's primal score contributes greatly to the film's atmosphere and director Franklin J. Schaffner’s exciting direction make this a movie not to be missed.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Mind you, there's one interesting part in it - where Churchill realises he's being set up as Halifax - I think - tries to get him to commit to something in writing, in a very sly way. That is a big State thing, I've realised in my dealings with Surrey's Social Services - if something is put in writing it becomes 'true' and if it's not in writing it never happened. It almost works on a cult-like level.
It has been a middling summer so far weatherise so I honestly can't think of anything better than ChrisNo1 posting one of his well-written erudite film reviews and me popping up to 'correct the record' by saying it's bollocks! One has to take one's pleasures where one can.
Sorry CoolHand Bond, seems you're caught in the crossfire!
Comments
@HarryCanyon Agree entirely with your take on ARABESQUE - it would have been great with Cary Grant, or at least better than it is. Not sure he would have got on with Loren though, they had an on-off affair during THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION. It did not end well.
CHINATOWN is one of the greatest films of the 1970s for certain. I am hoping to catch it one day and post a review.
THE GROUNDSTAR CONSPIRACY (1972)
An excellent little number set in an unidentified near future where surveillance is king and the security services hold sway even over Senators and their own employers. A space program known as Groundstar has been infiltrated by a foreign agent, John Welles. Following a devastating explosion at the coastal research facility, Welles escapes with the program’s secret tapes and despite being severely and horrifically wounded miraculously makes it to Nicole Devon’s holiday chalet.
Unscrupulous investigating agent Tuxan isn’t satisfied with retrieving the tape – he wants to know who the foreign agents are, who is paying them and why. His first port of call is Miss Devon, who he ensures receives the full brunt of his interrogation methods as well as his surveillance techniques, which include unwanted tails, phone taps and hidden cameras over her bed. Welles meanwhile suffers months of psychological torture following a long convalescence during which his face and body has been painstakingly rebuilt. He remembers nothing of his life, a severe case of post trauma amnesia. Tuxan decides to prevaricate an escape route for Welles in the hope he may be faking his memory loss. Welles heads to the only address he remembers: the one shouted at him constantly during torture: Nicole Devon’s chalet.
The mystery of the Groundstar infiltration deepens and thickens as the noose tightens around Welles and Nicole, who form an unlikely bond in adversity; both of them sharing a deep antipathy towards Tuxan, who is about as unsympathetic as George Peppard ever got on film. Peppard is brilliantly brutally deadpan in this, delivering his lines with a complete lack of expression, a man devoid of all emotion, driven only by the purpose of the task in hand, all other considerations – and people – are nil. Michael Sarrazin, who never quite made it big, is serviceable as the young amnesiac. After several false starts and cast changes Christine Bedford took on the role of Nicole Devon and comes across as sympathetic, challenging and a source of hope among the gathering gloom.
Conspiracy and counter establishment movies were in vogue in the 1970s and Groundstar is an early entry into the subgenre of thrillers. Like Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes, the film envisions a world blighted by surveillance, where every word and deed can be recorded and reinterpreted. Tuxan’s solution to his problem is as bleak and uncomfortable as the idea he [or any government agency] can be looking or listening not only over a shoulder, but in a kitchen, bedroom, car or on a telephone. Today, perhaps, with the susceptibilities of technology, this may not be so farfetched, but in 1972 it was surely a concerning thought. Tense throughout, Groundstar succeeds by being low key. This is not a ‘future’ where people are visibly disturbed by technology. They accept it, yet those affected by it become wary of its uses and, more potently, wary of those who wield the power to so readily and immorally utilise it. Their lack of empathy is truly frightening.
The film looks good, with startling photography from Micheal Reed [one of ours, of course] and is filmed among the stark cement and marble modernist arenas of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, which make a superb framework for several important sequences including the final confrontation. Unheralded director Lamont Johnson isn’t flashy, but has enough tricks to keep us occupied; the torture sequences are particularly gruelling. Douglas Heyes’ script is nicely condensed from L.P. Davies’ novel The Alien.
I don’t know the commercial or critical history of The Groundstar Conspiracy, but it deserves some reappraisal. Halliwell’s – always a good guide for any film of the last century – says: “Gimmicky but generally compulsive sci-fi mystery yarn with an effective climax.”
I’d go along with that.
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997) with Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, and Kim Basinger. Directed by Curtis Hanson.
After watching CHINATOWN the other night, my wife was in the mood for something similar. I suggested this and she was on board. She hadn't seen it since it was in theaters (hard to believe that was 27 years ago) but remembered it being good.
It was excellent. I think I last watched it 10 years ago and boy does this hold up. Indeed, it makes for a pretty solid double feature with CHINATOWN in many ways.
Fun to see Russell Crowe before he hit the A list. I remember watching this back in 1997 and recognizing him from both VIRTUOSITY (terrible movie) and THE QUICK AND THE DEAD (pretty good movie) and coming out of it thinking 'this guy's gonna be a major star now'. I also thought the same about Guy Pearce and I'm still genuinely surprised he never hit the A list.
Great fun to revisit.
L.A. Confidential is a brilliant movie, much better than Chinatown in my opinion.
THE HITCHER (1986)
C. Thomas Howell is driving a friend's car from Chicago to San Diego, as he travels across desolate backroads he gives a ride to a hitch-hiker played by the menacing Rutger Hauer, who turns out to be a serial killer. In some tense scenes Howell is finally able to forcefully eject him from his speeding car. But Hauer isn’t one to give up easily. Howell is then linked to a series of gruesome murders that were committed by Hauer. Of course, the cops are clueless, and nice girl waitress Jennifer Jason Leigh teams up with Howell, but will they be able to stop The HItcher?
Director Robert Harmon ramps up the tension nicely from Eric Red's slyly allegorical script, creating a brooding, surreal atmosphere that’s engrossing to watch.
Excellent.
I've just ordered a box set of the complete movies of Abbott and Costello, featuring commentaries, documentaries, etc. I'm mentioning it this way because I'm not intending to individually review each and every one of them (it would be very repetitive).
So very dated humour, lots of puns, silly slapstick, plus an occasional monster here I go!
THE COMANCHEROS (1961)
An effective actioner from director Michael Curtiz, aided very much by John Wayne who stood in when the ailing Curtiz was too weak to continue work. The movie is less concerned with decent plotting than getting on with the business of entertaining. It meanders all over the place, but thanks to an engaging couple of turns from Wayne and Stuart Whitman the screen never appears empty, not even when William H. Clothier’s cameras hone in on those vast countryside and desert valley arenas.
Whitman plays an effete gambler on the run after killing a man in a duel and being subsequently charged with murder. That seems a bit harsh, especially when a state judge is presiding over the event, but maybe Louisianna hadn’t figured out a decent justice system in 1843. We move on. Whitman’s charming Paul Regret meets the beautiful, enigmatic Pilar Graile on a Texas casino steamboat [Ina Balin looking ravishing] but after a week of love he is arrested by Wayne’s stubborn Texas Ranger, Jake Cutter. An uneasy friendship develops, resolved when the two men come face-to-face with rampaging Comanches and their Mexican gunrunning pals the titular Comancheros, led by Nehemiah Persoff’s paraplegic headsman. Things get complicated when Pilar turns out to be his daughter. Lee Marvin has an eye-catching minor role as scalped ruffian Tully Crow and one of the movies delights is a sequence where he and Wayne get bog-eyed drunk, brawl and play cards. It is Paul Regret’s misfortunate to be dealing the cards.
The film has a stately feel to it, as if it wants to achieve something beyond its means. You can’t fault the production values and the acting is first class, although the script isn’t up to much, favouring cliché and heavy handed humour over clear characterisations and motives. It doesn’t really matter very much. There’s a lot of riding to the rescue, riding with wagons at high speed, or just riding full stop, on horse or mule, all over the place. Lots of shooting too and not a lot of order to the action, which begins to feel repetitive. For all that, an entertaining couple of hours spent in good acting company.
'Bram Stoker's Count Dracula' (1970)
A Harry Alan Towers production directed by Jess Franco, 'Bram Stoker's Count Dracula' boasts Christopher Lee in his signature role, outside the Hammer fold and with a script which Lee felt he could at last get his teeth into. Staking his ground apart from Hammer, Towers announced this film as a true adaptation of Stoker's novel. And so it was, at least to some extent.
Lee embraced the opportunity to play Stoker's Dracula as an elderly figure rejuvenated by blood as the story unfolds; he clearly relished the Count's lines as sourced directly from the novel, especially in his exchanges with Jonathan Harker (Fred Williams) in the Transylvanian scenes of the first part of the film. However, the budget didn't extend to any representation of such highlights in the book as the voyage of the Demeter, or Dracula scaling the walls of his castle. (The latter spectacle was worked quite effectively into Hammer's 'Scars of Dracula', also starring Lee, in the same year.) Faithfulness to Stoker? As Kim Newman has observed, it's unclear why Franco's Dracula would hang an enormous 'f____-off' mirror in a chamber in his castle and then walk right in front of it in Harker's company... but hey! Post-Transylvania there's no Whitby and little sense of London: the film was actually shot in Barcelona, with some location footage filmed in France; it retains a distinctively Euro mise-en-scene and palette.
While Franco's film arguably does remain closer to Stoker than any other mainstream Dracula movie in the cinema, an episodic TV production later in the decade, the BBC's 1977 adaptation starring Louis Jordan, stuck more rigorously to the book. In 1992, of course, Francis Ford Coppola made his own claim of fidelity to the novel with 'Bram Stoker's Dracula'. In fact, Coppola turned his film into a love story, presenting the Count as a tragic hero, so despite the title it was really a case of 'Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula' for a 90s audience leaning towards the romantic end of gothic.
Apparently more money was spent on Lee and Lee's scenes than on anything else in the Towers production; the film often feels lacklustre when Lee isn't on screen. True, Klaus Kinski's dialogue-free scenes as the insane Renfield are fascinating because of Kinski's aptitude for eccentric improvisation. And while Maria Rohm (Mina) and Franco-favourite Soledad Miranda (Lucy) are beautifully photogenic, Herbert Lom (Van Helsing) is largely dry, his appearances occasionally bolstered by Franco's use of camera zoom. As for Jack Taylor (Quincey) and Fred Williams, they'e handsome but rather bland. The three leading men, Lee, Lom and Kinski, all shot their scenes at different times, meaning that we never get to see them in the same frame: this somewhat neuters the Van Helsing/ Dracula conflict and gives the film overall a rather static quality.
Jess Franco was rather scathing about Hammer, complaining that Terence Fisher and other Hammer directors had little taste for horror. I suppose there's a case that Fisher, in particular, had an action-film orientation in the gothic milieu, more than horror per se. Despite his critical comments, Franco nevertheless delivers brief touches of Lee's Hammer-style Dracula in his own film, especially after the Count's relocated: Lee, for example, wears red contact lenses in intense moments; has fangs; snarls when his feeding is interrupted and, in an expressionist gesture, defensively crosses his arms in front of his face as Lom takes him on (in a different frame!)
More of an influence is Tod Browning's 1931 'Dracula'. In addition to the film's generally slow pace, Franco channels Browning in his long-shot staging of the emergence of Dracula's spectral, modestly attired Brides, and by a later scene where Dracula is dressed for the opera in London. As in Browning, Dracula's first appearance is in disguise as the coachman who picks up Harker for the final leg of the journey to the castle (Renfield substitutes Harker in the 1931 version). In the Brides scene, Franco imports from Stoker's novel the notorious 'baby-in-the-bag' idea, though with more restraint than the BBC production which followed in 1977. Franco depicts the infant's mother crying at the castle walls for the release of her child, but stops short of venturing where Stoker goes in having this woman torn apart by wolves.
Relative restraint seems to be the order of the day, perhaps because Towers had an eye on certification and the implications for distribution. Several Franco critics recommend the director's manifestly erotic 'Vampyros Lesbos' as more typical of his sensibility - a film also released in 1970, again starring Soledad Miranda. (I've just got hold of a copy of this on ebay.) It's nevertheless true that 'Bram Stoker's Count Dracula' itself positions Miranda in some disquieting scenes. Playing Lucy undead, Stoker's 'Bloofer Lady', Miranda lures a child into the woods while sporting what might since be characterised as full-on goth make-up, an image enhanced by her - the actor's - Romany heritage: it's a sinister scene. Looking forward to Coppola, a strength of his 1992 movie is the way in which he tributes the entire history of Dracula in the cinema up to that point. In terms of wardrobe, the funeral garb of the 1992 Lucy (Sadie Frost) surely includes reference to the nightdress worn by Miranda's Lucy - with its billowing arms - as seen when Miranda is spectacularly silhouetted stretching out in a bedroom doorway. Reportedly, Lee was at first disapproving of Miranda's casting as Lucy, feeling she didn't have the right look, but after shooting he claimed that of all the women with whom he'd played necking scenes as the Count she'd done the best job.
'Queen Of The Damned' (2002)
Michael Rymer's noughties vampire movie rests on 90s-style cliches of the genre and is largely uninvolving. The Vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend) rises from hibernation to become a nu-metal rock star, locking horns with Aaliyah's eponymous Vampire Queen, Akasha. Apparently Anne Rice didn't approve of how the Lestat of this movie kills innocent groupies for feeding purposes, as we see him do: in Rice's conception of the character, Lestat makes victims only of 'bad' people. Rice had a point: a flaw of the film is that Lestat isn't nearly as sympathetic as the main thrust of the story needs him to be. To give Townsend his due, he turns in well choreographed routines as Lestat performing gothic rock - especially in a snazzily edited music video, sourced for the main titles of the film, where he riffs on the Cesare figure of 'The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari'.
The rather morbid reason why I watched this film back-to-back with 'Bram Stoker's Count Dracula' is that there's a tragic parallel in the fate of Soledad Miranda and Aaliyah, both pop singers as well as actors. Miranda died in a car accident in the same year that Franco's film was released, and Aaliyah died in a plane crash even before the release of Rymer's movie. The story of Aaliyah's short-lived career - and of her grooming and exploitation by R&B musician, convicted racketeer and sex trafficker, R. Kelly - is covered in a chapter in Sarah Ditum's excellent new book, 'Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties'. Sadly, Aaliyah never got to live her #metoo moment. I'd highly recommend Ditum's book, if not 'Queen Of The Damned'.
'The Crow' (1994)
Over a weekend when cinemas are giving a limited 30th anniversary run to Alex Proyas' goth revenge movie 'The Crow', it's a time to remember, too, the loss of Brandon Lee, tragically killed by a firearms accident on set.
Cinematically, Townsend's Lestat is no match for Lee's Eric Draven, to whose image he's indebted.
I'm off to listen to The Cure's 'Burn'...
SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018)
I dislike superhero movies and their fey attempts at melding the fantastic with a grounded recognisable contemporary reality. I tend now also to dislike animated films, which tend to ground themselves in some sort of recognisable fantasy, then build a human reality. Neither approach seems to work. The films just end up being ‘busy’ visually and whatever serious point – or jovial statement – they try to make is lost among all the paraphernalia of a CGI so slick the idea of any kind of reality simply explodes on itself, like the climaxes of most of the films. Superhero movies are a subgenre of the adventure movie, a style of film I rather enjoy, allayed to aspects of horror, science fiction and mythology. Ultimately though, the sheer ridiculousness of most superhero or animated films harks back to the era of the comic strip, where the illustrated story is all and, frankly, anything goes. Characters are exaggerated; speech is codified into clipped, astute sentences, often with a witty edge; action can be over the top – to the point of that ridiculousness I mentioned. No-one took comics or ‘the funnies’ in newspapers very seriously because, well, they were not. Even the dark, psychological drama of The Batman seemed to be overrun by the more traditional heroics of Superman. Then along came Stan Lee and Steve Ditka and the rest is history, or something like that.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an excellent animated superhero movie because it places its hero back in the environment from which he came: the comic strip storyboard. Producers, directors and writers [all too many to be listed] have taken time here to consider how to present a fantastic hero within a contemporary framework while respecting the origins of the familiar format. So here we have a ‘cartoon’ Spider-Man, a teenager, artistic, unhappy at school and at home, friendless, but intelligent and perceptive. He’s an identifiable kid. No silly shenanigans at home, at dorm or at school. Miles Morales is just a bit gauche and helpless. Note: he is not called Peter Parker. Vital, I think to clean-break this teenager from all other interpretations. Nor is he wide-eyed with enthusiasm. Miles is as startled by everything around him, retreating into the realm of hip-hop music to calm his nerves. His Uncle Aaron wants to help him adjust, to find himself, and allows him to spray paint an ambitious mural cited ‘Expectations’ in the defunct basement of a New York skyscraper he once worked as an engineer. Miles, like our friendly neighbourhood Peter Parker, photographs the image. A neat homage, but not one that distracts from the events on screen. A pesky radioactive spider pounces, takes a little nip and overnight Miles begins to exhibit some worrying arachnid vices. These do take on a humorous bent – as they must to demonstrate the sudden awkwardness – but this startling discovery leads Miles back to that graffiti art and his future as the new Spider-Man.
And here, the old Spider-Man – good-looking, blonde, blue-eyed American good-guy Peter Parker – dies in a whirlwind of phantasmagorical other-matter created by the hulking villain Kingpin. It falls to Miles to attempt to prevent his world, his New York, from crumbling. He is aided by the appearance of a half-dozen other Spider-Men from alternate universes, plunged from their worlds into ours via the Super Collider reaction tested inside Kingpin’s skyscraper. The story evolves quite brilliantly into a ‘leap of faith’ for Miles, in terms of his function as a superbeing, a friend and a son. The superhero stuff naturally takes precedence. What it doesn’t do, which most live-action [I use the word ill-advisedly] superhero movies prefer, is dwell interminably on the unfortunateness of possessing special powers, how they endanger others as well as the recipient, are misinterpreted and mistreated, exploited and reviled. It dabbles, but not to the point of largess. Instead, the story proceeds briskly and with much comic delight as Miles discovers first a second, despondent, out of shape Peter B. Parker [nice touch that ‘B’], then a pretty female Gwen Stacy, before an extra bunch of alternatives appear, although why they all head for Aunt May’s is a complete unfathomable mystery. May herself is a cheery female version of James Bond’s Q, storing a host of gear in a hidden laboratory and making Miles a customised suit and web-shooters. She even enters the fray with a baseball bat when assorted baddies trash her house. Miles isn’t having as much fun as she is though. Wracked by his insecurities, it is only at the final moment of crisis that he’s able to perform the miracles all superheroes do.
The movie doesn’t over-involve itself with double-clever-talk. It is straightforward, cheerful and appropriate to its audience, by which I mean comic book devotees. The visual nature of the piece encapsulates the joy of the comic strip medium. Several times the animators delve into comic strip magazines to tell a Spidey-Story. Huge ‘Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh’s and ‘Wooooooooo’s are printed on the screen as characters plummet to doom or destiny. Explanatory white-space paragraphs direct action. Punches are sometimes animated with ‘thwack’ or ‘boom’ and the like. Primary colours dominate the pallet, but not to the exclusion of everything else. Into the Spider-Verse is more colourful than many supposed ‘elite’ movies [Avengers, Captain America, Harry Potter 5 – 8, Dunkirk, recent James Bond, I am looking at you], remembering that colour adds depth while contrast only demonstrates confusion. The villains are superbad, from Olivia Octavius ‘Doc Ock’ to the robot Scorpion, and wicked Uncle Aaron as the Prowler. Top of them all is the humongous Kingpin, whose shoulders seem to get bigger and bigger until they dwarf his own head. While Lee and Ditka loved outsized villains, I am not sure they ever created someone so counterfeit; Kingpin has the most unreal appearance of any character in the film. What marks him, other than his gigantic edifice, is a subtext about regret and family, about how despite his horrific gangster history, all he wants is an intimate history. Essentially, he’s after the same solace as Jefferson Davis, Miles’ stepdad, an incorruptible cop, a man seeking the affection of a son. Kingpin’s methods, though, are creepily insane and it takes that corps of Spider-Men to take him and his henchmen down in a second whirlwind of Super Collider mayhem.
As with almost all movies of the genre, Into the Spider-Verse loses its way around the villain’s plot and its climatic resolution, preferring to install tremendous effects which begin to both confuse and excite at the same time. The difference here is that because the medium is animated, because it so positively reflects the comic strip origins of the medium, it doesn’t become tasteless and an exercise in visual one-up-man-ship. The recent contemporary MCU [or is it now a Marvel Comic Multi-Verse?] offerings tend to favour pyrotechnics, snazzy editing and oodles of computer generated foolery to make no statement whatsoever, other than ‘Hey, we can do this!’ Coupled against the obviously modern day background, these fantasies jar spectacularly. The humour too becomes misplaced, because we can’t take anything lightly when our own world is being so haphazardly destroyed. It doesn’t help the actors are so po-faced about it all. Lighten up.
There is genuine poise in the animated characters on screen. I recall a little shrug Miles gives when chatting to the older Peter Parker; or Gwen Stacy’s furtive eye movements; the Alternate Spider-Men eavesdropping on a conversation between Miles and Peter, concern etched on faces; Jefferson’s shaking head as he tries to school Miles on the way to school. Best of all perhaps is an image of the newly advocated Spider-Man: having saved the world – worlds – he stands like a Greek God, fists clenched, legs braced as the chaos of the Super Collider erupts around him; Peter B. Parker falls into the melee and back to his Alternate Universe, this image his lasting memory of his new found fully fledged Spider-Man protégé, a leap of faith assured. If ever there was a moment for animated gravitas, this is undoubtably it.
The voice actors respond in kind with nuances of tone and expression rarely found in Robert Downey Jr or Chris Evans and their increasingly one-note scorings. Hats off then to Shameik Moore [Miles / Spider-Man], Jake Johnson [Peter B. Parker], Hailee Steinfeld [Gwen Stacy / Spider-Woman] and Brian Tyree Henry [Jefferson]. Nicholas Cage has fun as a noir-style monochrome Peter Parker and if the anthropomorphic Peter Porker seems most unlikely [Spider-Ham – oh, come on, a homage to The Simpsons and Spider-Pig! – how clever is this movie???] at least he has the best line: “Do animals talk in this universe? Cause if not he’s in for a shock” said while all half-dozen Spider-Heroes cling to each other and a young lad’s ceiling.
Now, Into the Spider-Verse won’t change my overall feelings towards the superhero genre. Done well, they can be superb entertainment and the best of them choose to remember their comic book origins and treat them with respect and good humour. The original Fantastic Four and Spider-Man managed this, so too the first Iron Man and Thor; going way back Superman 1 & 2, Keaton’s Batman. For unknowable reasons I enjoyed Venom and the camp stupidity of Batman and Robin has to be seen to be outrageously believed. However, from the current, insipid craze, where it feels as if length and convoluted plotting are more important than a sense of genial satisfaction, I can safely tell you all that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is well worth any kind of entrance fee.
Live filmmakers please take note.
GODZILLA MINUS ONE. This turned out to be a nice surprise--it isn't so much about the giant monster as about the main lead, a kamikaze pilot who chickened out (sort of like Tiger Tanaka, only not as brave) and who is trying to find his own sense of honor and redemption. But, yeah, there's a lot of Tokyo-stomping, done now with digital effects rather than a guy in a suit trampling on a model. The effects are good, though, and since this actually comes from Toho and not some Hollywood studio, Godzilla actually LOOKS like Godzilla. A good show.
GODZILLA MINUS ONE isn't just a good Godzilla film...it's a good film period. The major characters all have story arcs and the minor characters are all given at least one good 'moment' to resonate. The special effects (which won the Oscar a few months ago) are uniformly excellent and thrilling, and the sound design is incredibly immersive.
Well done. I'm really kinda meh on Godzilla as a property overall but this one got me. My wife, who only watched it because 'it was supposed to be good', really enjoyed it as well.
'The First Great Train Robbery' starring Sean C. It's a great boy's own crime caper. I watched the unedited version and I must say it demonstrated how 'sanitised' films shown on TV are. The Hanging scene was shown in full and, although short, was particularly graphic.
SC was particularly impressive when making his way long the top of the carriages of a moving train. I'm not sure how it was permitted to happen but it did, and to great effect. I read somewhere that the train was supposed to be moving no faster than 30mph but the driver later revealed that he hadn't been aware of the restriction and was chugging along at 50!
Author of 'An Ungentlemanly Act' and 'Execution of Duty'. The WW2 espionage series starring Harry Flynn.
Very fun movie. As good as Connery is in it, I want to say that Donald Sutherland steals the film.
FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (1994)
An outrageous financial success for a comedy of embarrassment.
Hugh Grant is foppish, foolish, numbskull Charles, probably the worst best man and wedding guest ever, who falls for mysterious American Andie MacDowell during the first of the four titular weddings. They meet on-and-off at the other succeeding social events and between them spur an increasing number of opportunities to say ‘I love you’. If the film had been made in the thirties with Cary Grant, Charles would be a suave sophisticate, with quick witted responses and a sense of baffled purpose that would make him endearingly charming. The 1990s version is all stuttering self-loathing and feckless wonderment. You can’t envisage this Charles pulling one woman, let alone eight as claimed and certainly not American socialite Carrie. I say socialite but I am guessing, as one of the movie’s flaws is the fact we learn absolutely zero about the heroine other than the fact she’s had 33 lovers and jets back and forth between London and New York. MacDowell is a cipher of the most cryptic kind. She doesn’t need to be American, it makes no sense she is, and unfortunately while MacDowell is okay, she isn’t sparkling enough to make you believe Hugh Grant would notice her; nor does she appear whimsical enough to fall for his ‘little boy lost’ act.
The film has a strong support cast of up-and-coming comic actors, most of whom will feature in episodes of British sitcom heaven. Simon Callow shines as a flamboyant queer. There are moments to enjoy, but a film that was once fresh and intriguing has been killed by its own [better?] offspring. The movie feels laboured and puerile. The obscenities feel unwanted. The simplicity of the set-up stifles any character development. It is worth noting that if the American’s role is underwritten, so are the others: we learn next to nothing of these people’s lives, where they work, live, were educated, how they met, their families, past times. Other than one of their number being exceedingly rich, there is nothing more than posh accents to mark them out. Shallow isn’t the half of it, as the paucity of personality eventually translates itself onto the humour and the scenes with the big laughs are stretched further and further apart the longer the thing drags on.
It comes as something to note that the very best scene is the funeral of Callow’s garrulous Gareth, an emotional pull very difficult to resist. Richard Curtis was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay, but you wonder how many voters remembered when they pitched Curtis’s name forward that the appropriately beautiful verses of Funeral Blues were written by W.H. Auden. Mike Newell pulls the strings behind the camera.
Notting Hill, Curtis & Grant’s follow up is better, with clearer defined people and plotting and less infantilised humour, although it does shamelessly repeat the exact romantic formula. Four Weddings… was a big ‘date’ movie back when I was in my twenties. The soundtrack sold millions. Hugh Grant became famous and so did his squeeze Liz Hurley. Cool Britania was just around the corner. Along with Notting Hill and Love Actually, Four Weddings… seems to encapsulate something of my own era, when I too was attending weddings or the odd unexpected funeral, and trying to not fall in love too easily. I’m not sure if that makes the film any good any more, but it still conjures decent [or indecent] memories and that’s probably a fair summation of anyone who has been to weddings or funerals. Like me, I guess, it still works, just, but it is beginning to crack with age.
A lot of the jokes from Four Weddings were nicked from writers Dick Clements and Ian La Frenais, especially Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? I’m not sure if they got any credit for them.
THE TERROR (1963)
Directed and Produced by Roger Corman, reportedly shot in three days, stars Boris Karloff as a Baron in a castle tended by a lone servant. His lonely life is suddenly disturbed by a French army officer (Jack Nicholson) searching for a mysterious woman he encountered near the castle. She turns out to be the restless spirit of the wife Karloff murdered twenty years before, which Karloff confesses to. More complications develop from there, mostly involving wandering in the family crypt which is eventually destroyed in a pretty impressive scene, regarding the budget.
A witch and an itinerant provide an important plot twist late in the film that kind of straightens out the confusing story line.
Karloff does his best with the material he's given, Nicholson shows his inexperience but manages to pull off a few scenes, and Jonathan Haze turns in his usual fine performance as Karloffs servant. The sets and expansive outdoor photography make this look like a much more expensive production than it actually is. The gore effects were undoubtedly more impressive in 1963, but the final shock effect for the wrap is decent enough.
The finished film is patchy, with a few shifts in lighting and scenes that don’t quite match, but an spectral mood is sustained throughout.
It’s worth a look, especially if you’re a Karloff fan.
A bit of a cheat as it is a telly movie, but I've reviewed telly movies here before...
INTO THE BLUE (1996)
A mystery thriller based extremely loosely on a bestselling book by Robert Goddard. Harry Bartlett is an older man living in Rhodes as the custodian of a rich man’s villa. He spends his time working in a bar and seducing impressionable tourists. When one of his conquests disappears, Harry is accused of her murder. Using his Irish passport, he returns to London and tries to piece together the girl’s history, uncovering a conspiracy of silence that threatens the career of an ex-politician as well as his own life.
John Thaw looks too old and dishevelled to be playing this kind of role; Harry should be in his mid-fifties, but Thaw makes him appear nearer seventy. The story meanders about a bit and is interesting in the way an episode of Endeavour, Morse or Diezel and Pascoe is, plenty of red herrings and enough intrigue or menace to keep us watching. Too many killings, one feels, but a good enough yarn to keep one occupied. A pity they filmed it in chilly London and therefore a wintery Rhodes. Not very exotic. Reasonably scripted. A reasonable ending. Cast is just about okay without doing very much. Tension almost non-existent. Sloppy plotting. It is a TV movie and they did, and sometimes still do, come across as a bit watery. The title is not explained.
Apparently, Goddard hated this adaptation.
TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN (1958)
This is a quiet, intelligent western about Swedes and Mexicans being terrorized off their land after oil is discovered. Sterling Hayden comes to Texas and finds his father has been murdered for his property. Hayden’s obsessive demand for justice becomes a rallying cry for those remaining on the oil-rich land. Director Joseph Lewis offers up stark black and white imagery that John Ford would have been proud of. It’s a bit pedestrian at times but the unusual final showdown is well worth the wait.
With shades of High Noon, and the western directorial qualities of Anthony Mann, this is often riveting fare.
Watched Four Weddings last night, I dunno, it's a comedy, it's brilliant, lots of funny set ups and lines, likeable cast on top form. Grant may be described in this as a hapless numskull or what have you, but like calling the cast posh, it doesn't cover it - technically it's a role Ian Carmichael could have played in the 50s (and it's great to see Hugh Griffith, a contemporary of Carmichael. pop up as the mad old man at the weddings) but he wouldn't have been like Grant or anywhere as good. Hugh Grant gives a total star performance - he's a good looking fellow who plausibly plays as if he's not good looking or cocky, which takes some doing.
At the time there was a feeling of diversity in it - the posh folk are inclusive and jolly, Hugh's character hangs out with Charlotte Colman (the only one of the main cast not still around) and John Hannah doesn't seem posh - I mean, I'd just been to Bristol Uni and hated it, so I had every reason to take against it, but nobody saw it like that. Having two main characters as gay and not making a big deal of it, very welcome at the time. Later it's pilloried because there's nobody of colour in it but what can you do? AJB itself only had two black members and they haven't posted lately, same it had just women members and they haven't either.
It was odd that that the two big stars - Rowan Atkinson and Andie Macdowell - didn't impress as much as the others. It's true the Carrie character doesn't quite work - she was written for Darryl Hannah originally and you can see that having her as a scatty blonde might have made her trespasses more forgivable, more charming, whereas here Carrie has two much of the Wallace Siimpson about her, she seems more scheming and insensitive. What is also odd is that I don't really care - the main thing is the relationship between Charles and his friends. Oddly, none of them seem to share a scene with Carrie - you could almost do an alternative film where she is in fact a figment of his imagination.
It is not the sort of film to make it onto anyone's Top 10, though it should be on mine. For me, it's a like a classic Bond in that it's one classic scene after another, nothing to dislike. Like Pulp Fiction of that same year, the playing, the dialogue, it's all excellent. It annoys me that GoldeneEye came out after and superficially has that classic British appeal but the dialogue in particular the jokes were awful. I can happily excuse that the Carrie character sort of doesn't work but I can't excuse the things I dislike about GoldenEye.
There is no kudos in liking Four Weddings. But at a time when Bond had gone AWOL, it was rare to see a Brit comedy that actually worked, and worked as well as this.
PS I watched an older Hugh Grant being interviewed in a show about his life - his whole manner was that of Boris Johnson, it's odd, it's like how Robert DeNero created Donald Trump via his role as Al Capone in The Untouchables, and now hates him - a sort of Frankenstein's monster! Could Johnson have made it to No 10 without Grant's portrayal as a bumbling PM in Love, Actually?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
AJB had just women members???? 😆
This must've been before I joined.
No, it was when you joined they all left! 😊
Roger Moore 1927-2017
That makes sense ..... 🥺
The Equaliser (2014)
I hadn't seen this action thriller before - except I had, and so have you really. It's the usual fare - quiet, bookish loner, a somewhat older figure, crosses some local hoodlums who take umbrage because What He Doesn't Know is that they're part of a far bigger movement, they're the local mafia. But What They Don't Know is that he's actually an ex military man with 'a set of very specific skills' who is now looking to take them on. Cut Tex Avery style mayhem, as in one pulls a knife, the other pulls a gun, the other pulls a shotgun, the other a howitzer and so on....
To make this work you need a star with a pedigree, it might be Liam Neeson and in this case it's Denzil Washington, around the same vintage and maybe a bit thick set around the waist.
This is highly watchable fare, enjoyable. It is, however, the equivalent of some of the airport novel thrillers I've read lately where it begins credible enough and then loses you a bit, you finish it but despise yourself a bit. What kicks Denzil off is when some pimps abuse a teenage streetwalker played by Kick Ass scene-stealer Chloe Grace Moretz - you kind of hope or expect her to sort them all out herself - but it never reconciles the fact that a) The Russian mafia early on find out who their main enemy is but don't just shoot him dead without ceremony and b) They can also get to their teenage streetwalker given she's in hospital, but she isn't touched.
Washington's nemesis - dubbed 'a sociopath with a businesss card' - is an actor who should have been given more work lately given he's the spit of Kevin Spacey. But this villain does try to explain why they don't just kill the guy - he wants to find out more about him, seeing as he came out of nowhere. Anyway, it unfolds fairly predictably.
Sequel is on Film4 tonight, it's meant to be better and another one was in cinemas in the last year.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
The Equaliser 2
Bigger budget, brasher and more expansive sequel - somewhat delayed; four years on and its hero Denzil Washington is still making his way through 100 Books To Read Before You Die - isn't it 1000 Books anyway? He was past 90 in the first film, he must be a slow reader, or maybe he went off and dipped into some sleazy pulp novels.
This is also a dumber film; in the first one there was a linear plot of the kind you get in the Jack Reacher books but here he's more an odd job handyman who works as a cabbie in a bigger city it seems, and does a few beatings up or even killings on behalf of victims, the whole thing is kind of episodic and maybe not unlike the old Death Wish films, only this guy has input from the very top State operatives (the nice ones, natch, not the ones who want to bump off Julian Assange and so on). Washington elects to do this on his own presumably so we don't get to share the vicarious glory.
One thread coalesces and ends in a Skyfall-style shootout in the middle of a hurricane in Washington's old home town indeed long abandoned family home - though if he'd supposed to have been dead and under a new identity then how come that home still exists with all its family photos and paraphernalia; also how long ago did his wife die (in circumstances yet to be explained, does that line up in a sequel?) given they had no kids and Washington is knocking on? Anyway, the ruse makes more sense than it did in Skyifall, where Bond was sitting out in a derelict mansion with not too much surrounding cover - or was that supposed to help him?
Some kudos to an American film that takes the unusual step of incorporating the country's mad weather patterns into the storyline. I like Washington in this, I get him as an actor in a way I didn't when he was being the conventional leading man. Don't rate the film much at all and he makes some odd errors given he's also meant to be such a hotshot but there you go.
I'm probably taking it too seriously, there is a nack to enjoying these kinds of films I'm sure. Again, we've seen this kind of thing before in the way it pans out but maybe if you're a teenager of course you haven't.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@Napoleon Plural says - “Bigger budget, brasher and more expansive sequel - somewhat delayed; four years on and its hero Denzil Washington is still making his way through 100 Books To Read Before You Die - isn't it 1000 Books anyway? He was past 90 in the first film, he must be a slow reader, or maybe he went off and dipped into some sleazy pulp novels”
Sleazy pulp novels are more fun than than boring classics, that’s why 😂😁🤪
I liked the first two Equaliser’s - third one is just about ok, they should leave it that now.
THE KING’S SPEECH (2010)
An old-fashioned style movie packed full of great performances and excellent production values that walked off with four big Oscar victories [Picture, Director, Actor, Screenplay] and a whopping great profit of almost $400m. Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech delves into the remarkable true-life friendship between King George VI and speech therapist Lionel Logue. The latter had helped the King to resolve his stammer when he was still Duke of York and was present for many of the monarch’s wartime addresses, offering advice and support.
The screenplay takes some liberties with real events [if you want to know what and how, I refer you to Wiki]. These sort of biographical films always did and will always do. I call The King’s Speech ‘old-fashioned’ because it reminds me so much of the type of biopic they used to make during Hollywood’s Golden Age, when a famous explorer or songwriter, philosopher, scientist or inventor, king or queen, writer or showman, was given a quick dusting off, the key elements of their story unfurled, the writer’s bureau put to task, a decent director put in charge, a big name actor or actress cast, etc. The thirties and forties are littered with them: The Life of Emile Zola, Madame Curie, Swanee River, The Adventures of Mark Twain, Dr Ehrich's Magic Bullet, that kind of thing. They all took major or minor liberties to increase the melodramatic effect, and The King’s Speech is no different. Condensing the action from two decades to a couple of years certainly creates tension, both between the desperate king and his Australian near-nemesis as well as the rising political tensions at home and abroad when an abdication crisis and the threat of Nazism occupy government and regal minds.
Where the film really succeeds is in the performances which are top notch across the board. Colin Firth is an actor I have little time for, but by golly he’s good in this, portraying the contradictions in Bertie’s behaviour, from the sterling, upright, almost constricted public figure, to the sweetness of the intimate family man, to the chain smoking, drinking, angry impatient patient too proud to ask for help. He rightly walked off with a Best Actor Oscar. Geoffrey Rush is marvellously understated as Lionel Logue and Helena Bonham Carter succeeds in bringing aloofness, care and a calm resilience to her portrayal of the future Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Michael Gambon cameos superbly as the dying King George and Guy Pearce is wistfully and wilfully conniving as the lovelorn Edward VIII. A host of lesser roles blend into the main handful with consummate ease and credibility. The only duff note is Timothy Spall’s Winston Churchill, who is a caricature creation; it doesn’t help that Churchill’s inclusion in the action was one of the fictions forced on writer David Seidler, who wanted more recognisable political figures than Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain.
The film has superb visuals. The production values are extremely high, particularly in the costuming and set design. You really feel as if the action is taking place where and when you are being told it is. The photography is good too, no dreary wartime visuals here; it is colourful when joyous, dark and shadowy when cagey. Hooper’s framing is worth noting as it utilises the extremes of the screen to suggest intellectual or emotional distance between characters. When there is a meeting of mind or hearts, invariably the camera moves in for closeups. It happens so naturally, we barely notice, but the emotive effect is unequivocal.
The King’s Speech may not be everyone’s idea of a night out at the pictures, or a night in front of the telly, but you can’t fault the attention afforded the production from everyone concerned. Excellent all-round.
THE KING'S SPEECH gets roundly bashed for being nothing but pure Oscar-bait. While that's absolutely true, it's also objectively a really well made film that's pretty solidly entertaining.
I thought it was bollocks.
Anyway, in last night's Darkest Hour - also bollocks - there is a contradiction when Churchill is about to meet King George VI (this time played by would-be Bond James Purefoy, not I tell a lie that was in Churchill with Brian Cox, also bollocks) and laments that he never liked him after he sided with that Wallace Simpson woman, but in The King's Speech in a case of foreshadowing Churchill doesn't seem to like her, noticing some lack of etiquette on her part.
Chris No1 is quite right of course about how 1930s films took those kinds of liberties with the plot - The First of Few about Mitchell the creator of the Spitfire and Lloyds of London about the creation of the famous bank in tandem with Horatio Nelson among the others - but here I find it really twee, sort of dumbing down.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
As it happens...
DARKEST HOUR (2017)
Having just watched The King’s Speech and drawn a few notes on the perceived historical liberties taken by that film’s writer, I think it is only fair to point out the two major historical liberties taken by this film’s author Anthony McCarten. Firstly, the role of Clement Atlee’s Labour Party in supporting Churchill against the rise of far Right and anti-socialist parties in Europe is completely ignored; it was not Churchill alone who persuaded his War Cabinet to ignore peace negotiations, but Churchill with the support of the Labour Party. Secondly, loveable Winston never took an underground train journey to conduct a miniscule straw poll of British opinion; if he had done, the idea he would receive unequivocal support from all and sundry is also a fallacy. There are numerous other smaller inaccuracies performed for dramatic effect, many of them shouting matches at Cabinet. What isn’t in doubt is Churchill’s persona and his ability to convince both himself and those around him of the challenge faced and the fortitude required to defeat that challenge. Gary Oldman does a magnificent interpretation of the old Sea Dog, steering clear of the usual cliches to bring something altogether more realistic and sympathetic. He doesn’t impersonate Churchill – that would be too easy to do and make him appear, rather like Timothy Spall in The King’s Speech, as a ham – instead he identifies, perfects and underplays physical mannerisms and speech anomalies that allow us to accept him as Britain’s greatest wartime Prime Minister, although not necessarily as Sir Winston may have really been. Like Colin Firth’s intense portrait of King George VI in The King’s Speech, Gary Oldman quite rightly walked off with a barrage of awards including an Oscar for his performance. It rightly too won an award for Kazuhiro Tsuji, David Malinowski and Lucy Sibbick’s makeup which renders the actor almost unrecognisable.
The film concerns the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940 and the ailing Conservative government whose appeasement policy had become flawed and its leader forced to resign. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlian was a First World War veteran who believed for better or worse in peace at all costs, fearing a return to the horrendous bloodshed of the Great War [Was he wrong? Maybe history will always be unfair on a man so misguided, but he wasn’t that far wrong in terms of the body count…]. Chamberlain's desires are underpinned time and again here, but without explaining his motivations, which makes him the bad guy. Hitler and the Nazis only appear in audio and newsreel footage. The narrative instead treads a fine line between a macabre comic drama as Churchill gets to grips with the reins of power while his new secretary Elizabeth Layton [ably personified by Lily James] gets to grips with him and a melodrama of overbearing weight and grand oration. Any movie depicting Churchill has to run speeches past us and Darkest Hour is no exception. They are well nurtured by Oldman and director Joe Wright.
Good supporting roles are virtually forgotten so dominant is Oldman as the central figure, wringing every fibre of emotion, empathy and admiration he can from the script, transmitting it in spades to his audience. It’s a rare time I’d call a performance riveting: Brando in The Godfather, maybe, Newman in The Hustler, Hopkins in Lambs, Olivier in The Entertainer, Brynner in The King and I, Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind, Streisand in Funny Girl; these kind of acting masterclasses simply don’t come around very often and this one is right up there and deserves all the praise heaped on it. Without Oldman, Darkest Hour simply wouldn’t cut it. As it is, the film creates tension between its characters as well as for the larger picture outside the Westminster wartime bubble. The quiet scenes, such as [another fictional] moment when Churchill realises Miss Layton’s brother has been killed in action therefore have genuine power and those sequences of surprising humour add unexpected warmth. We are always aware that Churchill is a man with a wife and family as well as a duty and a country, that he can talk to peasants as well as Kings, and that – as Lord Halifax admits – he mobilised the English language to the cause of war in a manner no other leader could have done in 1940.
Interestingly, Darkest Hour was up against Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk in the race for Best Picture at the Academy Awards for 2017, a film covering virtually the same time period but from the soldier’s point of view. What Dunkirk lacked was a central focus and performance like Oldman’s; that film becomes an exercise in tale-telling without personality. Here, it is the clash of personalities which makes the exposition suspenseful and ultimately thrilling, despite knowing the eventual outcome. Dunkirk simply misses a strong combative core. Neither film was recognised for their writing, perhaps suggesting voters noted the obvious dramatic cliches as well as the historical inaccuracies.
Let us not dwell too much on that again. Darkest Hour is a fine film, or rather it becomes a fine film by front loading a truly excellent performance. Highly recommended, historical errors and all. Yeh, couldn’t resist a final dig…
PLANET OF THE APES (1968)
I’ve been on a Apes splurge and revisited the original five movies. The original, and undoubtedly the best of the series, sees astronaut Charlton Heston crash land onto a planet ruled by apes. Hunted down and captured, Heston and his two surviving colleagues are subjected to the inhumanities of the ape world, a hierarchical society of orangutans (administrators), gorillas (soldiers), and chimpanzees (scientists), in which mute humans are beaten, caged, and experimented upon. Understandably, Heston’s tall, powerful and seemingly intelligent physique poses a problem for the orangutan leaders as he could be the proof that humans are not the animals they are believed to be. Or worse still, is Heston the possible missing link that unites the modern ape with his primitive human ancestor? The plan is to resort to castration, lobotomy, and taxidermy to stop the secret from becoming common knowledge, a fate Heston narrowly avoids through the intervention of kindly radical scientists Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall, who help Taylor to escape along with a pretty native girl he’s taken a shine to. The famous twist ending is ultimately obvious, (but not to a 12-year old in 1968 when I first saw it). It’s cleverly written by Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and (not our own) Michael Wilson, the once blacklisted writer. Jerry Goldsmith's primal score contributes greatly to the film's atmosphere and director Franklin J. Schaffner’s exciting direction make this a movie not to be missed.
Oldman's Churchill looks like Matt Lucas!
Mind you, there's one interesting part in it - where Churchill realises he's being set up as Halifax - I think - tries to get him to commit to something in writing, in a very sly way. That is a big State thing, I've realised in my dealings with Surrey's Social Services - if something is put in writing it becomes 'true' and if it's not in writing it never happened. It almost works on a cult-like level.
It has been a middling summer so far weatherise so I honestly can't think of anything better than ChrisNo1 posting one of his well-written erudite film reviews and me popping up to 'correct the record' by saying it's bollocks! One has to take one's pleasures where one can.
Sorry CoolHand Bond, seems you're caught in the crossfire!
Roger Moore 1927-2017