I could handle these long films better if they just had Intermissions . why dont they pause for Intermissions anymore?
the theatre is losing money because of fewer possible showings per evening, and they make all their money selling popcorn. Give people a break to take a pee and the theatre doubles its sales on pocorn, win/win!
if there had been an intermission during No Time to Die (another film that needed one) where would it be?
This is a French animated movie with the origonal title "La reine soleil". It's set in ancient Egypt and the main character is princess Akhesa, a 14 year old daughter of the Pharo. She's rebelious and wants to find out why her mother Nefertiti is exiled to an island. She allies with the young prince Tut and runs away from the palace and down the Nile. Her father has made the sun the god of Egypt and rejected the old gods. The priest of Amon are trying to regain power at the same time as the Hettites are attacking Egypt. This leads to an adventure that's a mix of history, action and magic. The visuals are stylised, striing and beautiful. Ancient Egypt has been the setting of a few animated movies, but it's nice to be transported to such an exotic time and place. The kids I saw it with were understandibly shocked when plans of marrying Akhesa with ..... her father became a plot point. The princess herself is also absolutely against the idea, but marriage within the royal family was common because they were seen as gods on earth. French family movies are indeed different from American family movies:
If you're tired of watching the same Disney or Pixar movies for the hundredth time with the kids I can reccoment finding movies made outside of the US and UK. Especially France and Japan make very good family movies. "Princess of the sun" is an example of this.
This movie was directed and co-written by Billy Wilder and stars Kirk Douglas. One would expect it to be more famous. It's certainly good enough. Kirk Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a big-city journalist who has to take a job in a small newspaper in a town in New Mexico. His ego and drinking make sit impossible for him to get any other journalist jobs. He still feels he's too big for the job he has and he makes it clear he's only there to find the big story he needs to get his big-city job back.
When a man in a small and poor community gets trapped in a cave Tatum thinks he's found the story. He uses promises and threaths to get politicians, the sherriff, the engineer and the man's wife to keep the story big and alive. He even makes sure a slow method is used to rescue the man in the cave so the story can last longer. Maybe this is why the movie wasn't a great success: It's so cynical. The plot, ancting and production is excellent. Maybe this is the best acting I've ever seen from Kirk Douglas. It absolutely deserves to be seen more and I highly recomend it.
A lively and diverting heist caper with showgirl Shirley MacLaine and novice burglar Michael Caine out to steal a priceless Chinese artefact.
Filmed completely in the studio by Ronald Neame, Gambit slips neatly into the sixties caper-craze exemplified by The Pink Panther and Topkapi and imitated by numerous others. Made as a vehicle for Miss MacLaine, she plays a worldly-wise heroine who falls for her partner in crime – a story arc picked out when she says “It’s strange the things people get addicted to” while staring intensely at Mr Caine – and subsequently helps him commit his daring theft. She doesn’t speak a word for the first half-hour, a slightly unsettling cinematic ruse which doesn’t really work, although as the movie progresses and we watch the heist go wrong and wrong and wrong again, you can see the screenwriters’ intentions. Caine does his charming best, alternating between the upper class accent he did for Zulu and the Cockney one which graced Alfie. Herbert Lom is eminently watchable as the art collector Shahbander.
Good looking, well made, deftly played, a cute Maurice Jarre soundtrack, Oscar nominated Jean Louis gowns, a nifty narrative which doesn’t disappoint. Perhaps its only downfall is Neame’s merely solid direction. He was just beginning his American sojourn, but he’s left well behind the days of pulsating British drama, stuff like Tunes of Glory, and replaced it with entertaining fluff, like this.
Without any regrets, I enjoyed it. The film probably made money at the time and is accomplished without ever threatening to be truly memorable. I can’t imagine why they chose to remake it.
You'll remember this film for the Oscar nomination our very own Richard E Grant got (he didn't win though). In truth he's not stretching himself as the proverbial Englishman in New York who pals up with a formerly best-selling writer (Melissa McCarthy) who is now down on her luck and increasingly out of pocket due to her managing to alienate everyone with her foul-mouthed ways.
As is revealed in the trailer, she hits upon the ruse of faking literary letters from famous writers and selling them for a tasty profit. Grant plays her drinking buddy who is more or less a partner in crime after a while, essentially you could say it's a tale of Two Withnails, two reprobates skiving off school and playing the system. We are invited to be complicit, though it becomes increasingly clear as the movie goes on that both characters are in a pretty bad way and are hiding behind a front.
Like current release The Duke, you may feel you've seen it all from the trailers. The difference is - though I've not seen The Duke - is that this film seems more gripping, whereas I do feel Brit films of this kind have to twee-ify everything so it feels less real. There's no reason why British cinema couldn't do a movie like this - aside from the fact it's based on a true story and was set in New York City of course - but you kind of know how it would play out. I think About a Boy with Grant's namesake was an exception, but that was directed by Americans. Usually Brit films have to have some kind of Wallace & Gromit flavour to them.
Anyway, I enjoyed this except it gets quite stressful towards the end as the truth begins to catch up with our pair of alcoholic reprobates.
Richard Attenborough made a career out of making biopics about famouse men, and Winston Churchill certainly had a colourful life worth making movies about, This movie tells his story from age seven to his election into parliament aged 26, Simon Ward plays Winston as an adult and portrays him with an early, more moderate form of his famous mannerisms. Ward also voices him in voiceover in full sir Winston Churchill mode. Anne Bankcroft plays his mother and Robert Shaw his father. Winston loved them both, but often at a distance. Maurice Binder made the title sequence, but it's one of his less memorable ones. As a young man Winston experienced warfare in India, the last British cavalry charge in Sudan and becoming a prisoner and then escaping in the Boer war. Winston is portrayed as an upper.class glory hound, but also brave and able. The production values are as high as they should be and it's well made in front of and behind the camera. The weak link is the score. Even back in 1972 the marching music must have seemed decades out of date. What Attenborouogh does well is using letters and telegraphs as narration from time to time. There are also interview scenes were the camera stays on the subject without cutting back to the unseen interviewer. It's very effective. Those are among the scenes that lifts the movie abouve the capable into something interesting. It's still a movie to learn about the formative years of one of the great statesmen and his time, and not because of groundbreaking moviemaking.
Sean Connery shows he can act! This should not have come as a surprise to anyone who had seen The Hill or Marnie or the first four James Bond films. Of course Sean Connery can act. Did critics and the public think he couldn’t?
Sadly, while The Offence is chock full of great performances, it is a deliberately muddled and ambiguous tale which doesn’t provide a clear conclusion and inhabits distinctly uncomfortable moral territory.
Connery plays Det Sgt Johnson, a twenty year veteran whose police career has begun to affect his behaviour, haunted as he is by the images of crime scenes and a sense of unending guilt. Unable to discuss his mental health with any one – not even his put-upon wife, who he confesses to never having loved – he spirals out of control and assaults the prime suspect in a case of child rape. The confusing opening scenes, which replay this moment, are accompanied by nothing but a buzz of electronic sound and lay a template for the following ninety minutes, which chops and changes with increasing unruliness. Day becomes night. Camera angles shift and skew. Conversations are stopped, restarted, rewound.
The audience is living these moments in Johnson’s mangled head. When he finally reveals what led to his offence, the narrative suddenly becomes lucid and we understand why his self-control is so at fault. An unsettling rescue of a teenage rape victim anticipates Johnson’s feelings of guilt, brought into the open by Kenneth Baxter, the suspect who wields an unnerving psychological power to match Johnson’s physical might. The showdown between Connery and Ian Bannen is worth waiting for to catch the two’s instinctive acting. The one between Connery and Trevor Howard’s internal investigation officer less so. The row with his wife [Vivien Merchant] is a mark of a tired man who knows his career is finished, only the arrival of his arresting officers prevents Johnson from committing his own sex crime. The film is a series of one-on-ones and John Hopkins’ screenplay, based on his own stage work, delivers enough power to provide sparks of emotional insight and some revulsion. Sidney Lumet has clearly been inspired by Nic Roeg and creates a landscape of sound and vision designed to deliberately disorientate the viewer.
It’s a hard watch.
The Offence didn’t make any money and United Artists reneged on a deal to produce a second movie of Connery’s choice, something they’d agreed to in hiring him for Diamonds are Forever. While its worth watching, it isn’t going to be one I’ll revisit any time soon, the subject matter is simply too bleak. Sir Sean has done many better films although this is certainly one of his most intense and startling roles
I have been working my way through SC's non Bond films and this was on my list. I had noticed it on TPTV and was able to watch on Saturday.
It is powerful and disturbing and a demonstration of SC's acting ability but, like you, I won't be in a hurry to watch it again.
I had heard of the director but it wasn't until I looked his name up on the internet that I realised he directed 'The Hill'.
BTW I was going to watch the Michael Caine film afterwards but had to be up early on Sunday for work. That sounded like an interesting film, I wonder if anyone saw it?
Though a deliberate attempt to put the Bond role behind him, there are couple of instances that draw one back to his famous role, both from From Russia With Love - at another point it's Connery rather than Shaw to brags about how his opponent will be on his knees, begging for mercy.
Another line seemed to be borrowed for Connery's later picture, Robin and Marion, again the roles reversed: 'I've been fighting people like you all my life'.
This is an involving movie, austere and grim, quite typical of early 1970s British films, Equess starring Richard Burton is on Talking Pictures TV next week, that's another such one. I think they were stage plays, the original title of The Offence was This Story of Yours, which possibly works better, given the unreliability of the narrators.
Even watching this in my late teens, I did get to distinguish between 'Sean Connery, far better actor than that other James Bond, Roger Moore' and 'Sean Connery, great actor'. That said, who knows, Moore might have pulled off something like this given his sweaty turn in The Man Who Haunted Himself, another grim early 70s British film. He wouldn't have done this, though. There's a lot of acting on show here, you could call it an acting masterclass but at times it felt to me like an actor's vanity project. Connery just didn't quite immerse himself in this, he didn't become the character, he didn't assume the role as naturally as you know who.
That said, even his playing in Dr No could seem mannered. I think it was film critic John Brosnan who observed that the Bond persona really came about when the interiors were filmed later. If so this figures, Bond jibing at M, then engaging in 'verbal fencing' (Brosnan's phrase) with Moneypenny, baiting No in his underwater lair, or lighting a cigarette in the casino and picking up Miss Trench - all interiors, all later on in the film, this is James Bond stuff totally while - if this theory is correct - the Crab Key Jamaica filming took place earlier, and in those shots Connery's Bond still has his rough edges, he seems a bit surly, brusque and not quite our man yet. He's almost a bit boorish at times.
So maybe Connery wasn't bedded into his role as the detective in The Offence. He is miscast as a middle-aged, embittered, gone-to-seed officer passed over for promotion. Now, Connery was overweight and balding in this, he had gone to seed albeit from a superior start (actually he was more overweight in Diamonds), he was also embittered about not getting his due from the Bond films financially, and maybe felt passed over compared to other actors such as Burton, Harris, Finney and even Caine in terms of earning capacity. So not wholly miscast, of course, he could do something with this.
But the script didn't quite match Connery's portrayal. At one point he talks about how women don't quite register him anymore, implying his married character has been having affairs, which is a bit incongruous. Connery doesn't cut that figure here, he looks ike the guy one notices when he enters the room, he still has his leading man chops. I don't quite get the sense this man is the loser who once had his chance, he still has presence of a kind. I think Gene Hackman was better at combining star with character actor, contrast his Popeye Doyle with the guy in conspiracy thriller The Conversation - both indisputably Hackman but wholly different in presentation.
I feel that Connery's character should be the big man in the interrogation not least because that's the one time he gets to dominate his opponent, otherwise he tends to feel diminished. The script hints at this, sometimes he says things that sound daft and get ignored by his superior Peter Bowles, but because Connery is doing his leading man role rather than that of character actor, it just seems like the script is not serving him well.
It isn't made clear if the rape suspect brought in actually did it. This could work brilliantly, we could think at first that our hero has his man, then doubts could creep in, and we could change our mind about it, switching sympathies. I'm not sure this really happens. It's not clear either way at any point, so the impression is of being stuck in an interview room with two nutters, neither sympathetic at all.
I think it's been made clear by this point that Connery is a sour case, almost a basket case, so we don't value his judgement much. I don't feel sorry for his character for being goaded into losing his rag, plus if the suspect really did it, at least he's dealt with a child rapist. As it turns out, it's hard to know how one should feel exactly come the end.
But one weird flaw for me is that I mis-recalled the film. It seemed to me that the big revelation in the interview room was that the suspect got from Connery's cop that actually HE was the one who'd been committing these crimes. This really does seem to be foreshadowed throughout the film. In the opener, as the camera shows the next victim heading home, it cuts to Connery looking a bit interested and salacious. From a distance we then see a figure engage with the kid, it could be Connery, we can't quite see. Later, it's Connery who finds the kid, as if he knows where to look, and when she shrinks from him it's as if she might have encountered him before - and actually is the guilty man. He's very keen to get into the ambulance to question her - a typical trick seen from Line of Duty to Breaking Bad when the guilty want first dibs on the evidence against them and want to control the narrative.
It carries on like this, with clips of the young girl pictured sexually alluring as if from Connery's point of view or actual recall. As it is, the big revelation is that he also shares these strange perversions having been afflicted by the trauma of his work (I'm not sure that such trauma can actually invoke paedophilic urges, I don't know, it's another example of stuff that doesn't quite hold together in this film) didn't seem to me so hard-hitting.
It's also unclear how long this interrogation was going on for, I think he only had half an hour, it's not long enough for this stuff to come out.
Ultimately I wasn't quite sure what to make of the outcome. Connery's character seemed glad to have not told his superior anything in his own interrogation into his behaviour - but later recounts it all anyway to a fellow officer, the one who pops up as Del Boy's barman in Only Fools, if I'm correct. So is that not on the record then? Or is it a hangover from the stage play that doesn't really work on film?
I respect Connery for tackling this, I don't think it's as good as his film with Sidney Lumet The Hill which also dealt with the fall from grace of an authority figure and whose downfall is also brought about by a fit of unnecessary violence - though that too was a bit unsatisfactory, as that really came from nowhere now I recall.
I have watched The Silencers for the first time and everything is A-OK! The movie is fun, the women are beautiful and they have never heard of women's lib, the gadgets are silly and the actors are charmismatic, especially Dean Martin. Speaking of silencers: silenced revolvers is something that exists in movies and not in real life. But who cares when the Reversible Gun is used so brilliantly! The action and stunts are unimpressive, but that's not the point. This is a silly comedy and it's a good one. In fact this mus tbe the "reversible" of movies like QoS. I look forward to watching more Matt Helm movies.
Steven Spielberg's remake of WEST SIDE STORY. I was kinda suspicious of this. . .I think the 1961 film is great and it holds up well; I wasn't sure a remake was needed, and I was bothered by talk that this new movie was being made with a lot of sops to "woke" sensibilities. Well, needed or not, it's here, and, damn, I loved it. It may not top the original, but it certainly stands shoulder to shoulder with it. Spielberg wisely opted to keep most of the '61 film's orchestrations, and the musical numbers really pop. There are even a few improvements on the first film, such as some historicization to show that the "turf" the gangs are fighting over is being bulldozed to create the current Lincoln Center, giving more background detail to the characters, and assigning a couple of songs to different characters and giving them new meaning. The best bit of newness, though, is Rita Moreno, "Anita" in the original film and here made into a maternal figure who stands uneasily between the two sides. The movie bombed at the theaters, but it's worth catching on Disney Plus.
I was in some mood for some anti-Russian propaganda so tuned into this on ITV, a nice print.
This is the kind of movie I'd have turned my nose up at as a teenager, being a Bond fan and an academic at a minor public school, it seemed Bond was the more obvious path to glory, while the jocks would like Rocky and so on, of course later you reassess your tastes. Rocky IV may be dumb fun but as one kid at school pointed out - a Sikh who went on to Oxford and had like me a subversive sense of humour - despite everything it's a feel good movie and when you see Stallone head up to the top of a Russian mountain on his training exploits, the heart sings. And what's this - there's none of that sly Dynasty-style sex games or hints of causal sex or betrayal, it doesn't seem to feature in the films at all, the issue of temptation - a staple in other movies to make them more 'interesting' or give them topspin, doesn't occur here, so who's the better role model, Bond or Rocky?
AVTAK's Dolph Lungren is the Russian boxer - you have to say, had Zorin just hired his character, or if he'd played Necros, it will be game over for Bond, it would be like watching Tyson Fury take on Joe Biden, or Dalton would just be sent back in a body bag, I have to say in Dalton's films and most of Brosnan's they never take on a big physical menace, do they? I think the nearest was Hinx in Spectre.
Rocky IV is simplistic stuff, things go wrong for his mate in the ring, but there's no word of censure from his wife, nor shots of his upset kids, it's all kept smooth and streamlined. The final punch up is utter nonsense of course, slugging it out with punches that would kill in the first round, but there you go, you can't help but be drawn into it.
And the actors are all good in it, I mean Lungren convinces, as does Brigitte Nielsen as his assertive lady friend.
One point about this blockbuster film worth making is the budget/box office ratio. Rocky IV must have been cheap to make, think about it - you've got Sly's salary but aside from that, no A-list stars, many are tied over from the first film and you don't see them much in anything else. No special effects, no spaceships or car chases. They don't really go to Russia, so no shots of exotic travel or of Moscow's onion spires, the location is simply a boxing ring, a gym, a fancy house and a shack in the snow, meant to be somewhere in Russia but probably just North America. It's cheap as chips, all you're forking out for is the extras in the audience. Contrast with the box office returns.
I'll also point out that this is one of those American films where they seem to come up against an alien, superior imperialistic force, and succeed against them by resorting to primitive, back to basic methods, old technology. I'm not sure about this - it's a bit like me facing the new European uncertainties by tuning in to watch Rocky IV again - but we see it in films like Independence Day and Battleships. Also Skyfall. It's ironic because of course, it was what we saw the Afghan or Iraqis do against the US invaders or liberators, depending on your point of view, knowing they don't have the technological might to defeat their foes, they resort to effective basics. It's all a matter of perspective, of course, as to whether one enjoys seeing this or not, but hence we see Rocky beat his superior foe by hanging out in a basic, stripped down hut, doing much the same things as his opponent but with a plough, or chopping wood, or running up a mountain
Rocky IV ends with a note of reconciliation and hope, in contact to what we see today, that said you do sense this is Putin's war and he alone owns it, rather than him being part of some big Soviet cult. That said, if you have a gangster in charge, the effect is largely the same. but you don't sense they have to think the unthinkable to get rid of him, it's more a matter of tactics and 'how'.
@Napoleon Plural I have had the same trouble sometimes. Perhaps it takes longer for Barbel to approve mine as he needs time to take out all my swearing and name calling?!
Again, not a last film seen, but for those in the UK 'The Prisoner' is being shown on the Horror channel. I think it's on every day at 1800 but please confirm this for yourselves.
I don't know anything about this series apart from it is from the 1960s but apparently it has a cult following. I'm sure you have all heard of it anyway so thought I would let you know it is being shown so you can watch it if you would like to.
The Chinese comedy Monkey is being shown on London Live, you're probably younger than me but this kitsch bit of Oriental nonsense was a kids TV hit in the late 70s, that said a) London Live don't promote anything, you have to accidentally catch it and b) It didn't seem as funny as it did back in the day. Anyway, I was surprised to find it on.
Even now, about to post, my post for Rocky IV comes up ready to post again, even though Barbel cleared it and it's up. One does tend to get a bit paranoid, I wondered if it was because of the themes of The Offence meant it had to be vetted, certain words being used triggering an alert. Also, this stuff can happen elsewhere, such as on Twitter, you get 'vetting', I haven't so far, but others complain about it. One sinister element was a piece on my late mother's care home from a year or so ago, I left a lengthy (well, it's me!) Comment below filling in the detail about how awful Surrey Social Services are and what and why they behaved the way they did. It stayed up for a while, but last time I looked it had been deleted and it was impossible to re-sign up to add anything, so the corrupt Surrey County Council most likely had a word with the Surrey Advertiser to have it removed - very annoying. The other local press had its Letter page abolished or cancelled under the cover of Covid, so that makes it even harder to have a voice, previously I had a few letters go in pointing out what was going on, can't do that now.
I think Rocky IV was the original release, the director's cut sounds interesting.
If this happens again, Joshua, please just drop me a line and let me know. Neither Sir Miles or I check the spam queue (which is where these lost posts are usually found) every day so we have to be informed.
And no, I haven't been taking swear words out of your posts!
I was in some mood for some anti-Russian propaganda so tuned into this on ITV, a nice print.
This is the kind of movie I'd have turned my nose up at as a teenager, being a Bond fan and an academic at a minor public school, it seemed Bond was the more obvious path to glory, while the jocks would like Rocky and so on, of course later you reassess your tastes. Rocky IV may be dumb fun but as one kid at school pointed out - a Sikh who went on to Oxford and had like me a subversive sense of humour - despite everything it's a feel good movie and when you see Stallone head up to the top of a Russian mountain on his training exploits, the heart sings. And what's this - there's none of that sly Dynasty-style sex games or hints of causal sex or betrayal, it doesn't seem to feature in the films at all, the issue of temptation - a staple in other movies to make them more 'interesting' or give them topspin, doesn't occur here, so who's the better role model, Bond or Rocky?
AVTAK's Dolph Lungren is the Russian boxer - you have to say, had Zorin just hired his character, or if he'd played Necros, it will be game over for Bond, it would be like watching Tyson Fury take on Joe Biden, or Dalton would just be sent back in a body bag, I have to say in Dalton's films and most of Brosnan's they never take on a big physical menace, do they? I think the nearest was Hinx in Spectre.
Rocky IV is simplistic stuff, things go wrong for his mate in the ring, but there's no word of censure from his wife, nor shots of his upset kids, it's all kept smooth and streamlined. The final punch up is utter nonsense of course, slugging it out with punches that would kill in the first round, but there you go, you can't help but be drawn into it.
And the actors are all good in it, I mean Lungren convinces, as does Brigitte Nielsen as his assertive lady friend.
One point about this blockbuster film worth making is the budget/box office ratio. Rocky IV must have been cheap to make, think about it - you've got Sly's salary but aside from that, no A-list stars, many are tied over from the first film and you don't see them much in anything else. No special effects, no spaceships or car chases. They don't really go to Russia, so no shots of exotic travel or of Moscow's onion spires, the location is simply a boxing ring, a gym, a fancy house and a shack in the snow, meant to be somewhere in Russia but probably just North America. It's cheap as chips, all you're forking out for is the extras in the audience. Contrast with the box office returns.
I'll also point out that this is one of those American films where they seem to come up against an alien, superior imperialistic force, and succeed against them by resorting to primitive, back to basic methods, old technology. I'm not sure about this - it's a bit like me facing the new European uncertainties by tuning in to watch Rocky IV again - but we see it in films like Independence Day and Battleships. Also Skyfall. It's ironic because of course, it was what we saw the Afghan or Iraqis do against the US invaders or liberators, depending on your point of view, knowing they don't have the technological might to defeat their foes, they resort to effective basics. It's all a matter of perspective, of course, as to whether one enjoys seeing this or not, but hence we see Rocky beat his superior foe by hanging out in a basic, stripped down hut, doing much the same things as his opponent but with a plough, or chopping wood, or running up a mountain
Rocky IV ends with a note of reconciliation and hope, in contact to what we see today, that said you do sense this is Putin's war and he alone owns it, rather than him being part of some big Soviet cult. That said, if you have a gangster in charge, the effect is largely the same. but you don't sense they have to think the unthinkable to get rid of him, it's more a matter of tactics and 'how'.
In this age of rising energy costs I spent my electricity on this!
It was just a collection of 'scenes' without any story line. I must admit though I did not watch it to the end as I had had more than enough after 1 1/2 hours of nothingness. There was still 1 1/4 hours to go when I turned off!
I liked the way it was filmed, but that could not compensate for the total lack of story.
I watched the 'Inglorious B**tards' (I am swearing again!) last year and was completely unimpressed by that too. Hours long for no real result.
I too tuned into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood last night, its first showing on British TV.
I'd seen it at the cinema and enjoyed it, not sure if I saw it twice, but I remembered a heck of a lot about it, some scenes really stick in the memory, including the build up and the dialogue and everything, it's very vivid and memorable.
Like many recent Tarantino films I found it highly impressive, hugely enjoyable, overlong, occasionally boring and ultimately infuriating.
The scene were DiCaprio's actor was shown making a low-budget Western was boring, there seemed to be no point to it. Was it to show us the filming process? It didn't, we didn't see any close-ups or cameras or anything. Was it to show that the guy was actually a great actor? I didn't see that either. I felt he might have been modelled on Jack Nicolson who in the late 60s was already coming into his own and becoming a major star when he could have been overlooked, but DiCaprio just isn't in that league. Or was it show he was actually a bad actor? Because I didn't get that either. The scene could have been cut and it wouldn't matter, be sad for the young kid in the scene, but she was too smart to be credible. The scene just went on and on, as if Tarantino was saying, I can do this now.
On the NTTD thread someone asks about the nuggets placed in the new film that hark back to previous ones - a painting of various Ms, for instance - and wonders if it helps or hinders. It reminded me of a review on the Sunday Times a few weeks back, on a book on 1990s pop culture. It wrote how Tarantino had three movies out in one year in the 1990s, True Romance, Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction - only the last directed by Tarantino himself, the other by Tony Scott and Oliver Stone. Tarantino didn't care for those other films, and it's pointed out they were directed by older men, who had a different mindset, who'd either lived through a world war on served in the war. They made films interpreting their real-life experiences and tried to imbue them with a sense of morality. Tarantino's life experience was working in a video store watching lots of films where he picked up his movie grammar. He didn't make movies about a heightened reality, he made movies based on movies he'd seen. Morality isn't an issue, flair, wit and ingenuity is. It's a different genre, you're not meant to believe in it, just go along with it. Morality is not really an issue. One comparison would be hardcore porn, it's not based on real-life love making or even just having sex, it's its own genre. It wouldn't be made better to be made more 'realistic', that would be missing the point.
In the mid 90s we had Bond return in GoldenEye. This too had nods to previous Bonds - the Aston Martin DB5 has no place in a modern film really, but hey. In a way, License to Kill was the last sincere Bond movie, though I feel Spectre came close, the later ones really are more like extended advertisements for the franchise, a bit like those big-budget ads Clive Owen did for a make of car, with big name directors attached. The problem with 'sincere' Bond movies is that if you don't like the angle, it's a non-starter, and this applies to Thunderball, OHMSS, LTK and maybe Spectre. On the other hand, things like GE and DAD which I disliked a the cinema I'm quite happy to dip into on telly, for some humour or a set-piece spectacle and many cinemagoers see a Bond film just to 'dip into' them.
But this may explain why some of us older fans find the older films more emotionally satisfying, even the Moore films with some nakedly preposterous action scenes, rather than the modern Bonds which seem to hark back to others.
Perhaps I was also thinking of the recent film I reviewed, Can You Ever Forgive Me? which is based on a real-life event and has a truthful moving narrative, and a wonderful final scene between the two stars which earns its emotional payoff, it rewards you for paying attention. It's a rare film however nowadays, most seem awkward about asking you to believe in it.
Tarantino seems to be like that. There are great scenes in Ingloroius... but then he turns it in to a joke, one I don't seem to get. At the Prince Charles where I saw it, one young woman was helpless with laughter as the hitherto scary Nazi general mocked Brad Pitt's attempt at an Italian accent, but it's a different film then. I think Django Unchained did something similar. So it is here, the final scenes just become a different movie.
I missed th repoint of it early on I must admit, that it's a film - mild spoilers alert - where things look bad but actually turn out well, hence the fairytale title. It misplays you. This is interesting even if many scenes just don't follow through as you expect, they short circuit, a bit like the action in Never Say Never Again - oh, it's only a training exercise! Oh, he's thrown some urine in his attacker's face! Oh, the bomb was planted in the wrong hotel room! There's only so much of this leading you up the garden path you can enjoy. One scene is brilliantly done - where Ptt's stuntman pays a visit on an old boy either dead or held hostage by sinister hippies led by Charles Manson, who is absent. We fear the worst, but it turns out he's okay and their story checks out. This is fine, but it makes no logical sense - why were they so hostile and defensive then? And later three of them turn up to commit devil-related murder, so they're obviously not nice people.
I didn't understand why Tarantino kept banging on about 'hippies' as if they're all self-evidently scum - history tells us this lot were, but the characters don't know that. Murdering some young intruders who may have lost their way, as if that's okay, I mean forget it, that could end a leading actor's career, not enhance his prospects. It all just seemed a bit weird.
I think the late Sarah Harding of Girls Aloud would have been a better lookalike for Sharon Tate than Margot Robbie.
At times I watched this, thinking, if this weren't a Tarantino film, nobody would give a damn about any of this. @Joshua complains it has no plot, I think if you were watching this with ad breaks as I was it makes it harder, but it's not that kind of film, it's more like Short Cuts where different strands are drawn together. You're meant to know about the massacre of the pregnant Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, by associates of Charles Manson and that it's all building up to that - or not, as the case may be. Otherwise it's like watching a movie about the build up to the sinking of the Titanic and it doesn't show the sinking. But yeah, some great scenes in this, looks lovely, Pitt is great too but... I feel Quentin is making films in the way Woody Allen used to, for the sake of making movies, 'here's my take on the Western, here's a war movie, and - Tarantino here - if I get bored I can always switch it into something else in the final reel, it's my ball and I can change the game if I want to...'
Comments
I could handle these long films better if they just had Intermissions . why dont they pause for Intermissions anymore?
the theatre is losing money because of fewer possible showings per evening, and they make all their money selling popcorn. Give people a break to take a pee and the theatre doubles its sales on pocorn, win/win!
if there had been an intermission during No Time to Die (another film that needed one) where would it be?
Princess of the sun (2007)
This is a French animated movie with the origonal title "La reine soleil". It's set in ancient Egypt and the main character is princess Akhesa, a 14 year old daughter of the Pharo. She's rebelious and wants to find out why her mother Nefertiti is exiled to an island. She allies with the young prince Tut and runs away from the palace and down the Nile. Her father has made the sun the god of Egypt and rejected the old gods. The priest of Amon are trying to regain power at the same time as the Hettites are attacking Egypt. This leads to an adventure that's a mix of history, action and magic. The visuals are stylised, striing and beautiful. Ancient Egypt has been the setting of a few animated movies, but it's nice to be transported to such an exotic time and place. The kids I saw it with were understandibly shocked when plans of marrying Akhesa with ..... her father became a plot point. The princess herself is also absolutely against the idea, but marriage within the royal family was common because they were seen as gods on earth. French family movies are indeed different from American family movies:
If you're tired of watching the same Disney or Pixar movies for the hundredth time with the kids I can reccoment finding movies made outside of the US and UK. Especially France and Japan make very good family movies. "Princess of the sun" is an example of this.
Ace in the hole (1951)
This movie was directed and co-written by Billy Wilder and stars Kirk Douglas. One would expect it to be more famous. It's certainly good enough. Kirk Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a big-city journalist who has to take a job in a small newspaper in a town in New Mexico. His ego and drinking make sit impossible for him to get any other journalist jobs. He still feels he's too big for the job he has and he makes it clear he's only there to find the big story he needs to get his big-city job back.
When a man in a small and poor community gets trapped in a cave Tatum thinks he's found the story. He uses promises and threaths to get politicians, the sherriff, the engineer and the man's wife to keep the story big and alive. He even makes sure a slow method is used to rescue the man in the cave so the story can last longer. Maybe this is why the movie wasn't a great success: It's so cynical. The plot, ancting and production is excellent. Maybe this is the best acting I've ever seen from Kirk Douglas. It absolutely deserves to be seen more and I highly recomend it.
The movie for free on Youtube: Ace In The Hole 1951 - Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Porter Hall, Richard Benedict - Bing video
GAMBIT (1966)
A lively and diverting heist caper with showgirl Shirley MacLaine and novice burglar Michael Caine out to steal a priceless Chinese artefact.
Filmed completely in the studio by Ronald Neame, Gambit slips neatly into the sixties caper-craze exemplified by The Pink Panther and Topkapi and imitated by numerous others. Made as a vehicle for Miss MacLaine, she plays a worldly-wise heroine who falls for her partner in crime – a story arc picked out when she says “It’s strange the things people get addicted to” while staring intensely at Mr Caine – and subsequently helps him commit his daring theft. She doesn’t speak a word for the first half-hour, a slightly unsettling cinematic ruse which doesn’t really work, although as the movie progresses and we watch the heist go wrong and wrong and wrong again, you can see the screenwriters’ intentions. Caine does his charming best, alternating between the upper class accent he did for Zulu and the Cockney one which graced Alfie. Herbert Lom is eminently watchable as the art collector Shahbander.
Good looking, well made, deftly played, a cute Maurice Jarre soundtrack, Oscar nominated Jean Louis gowns, a nifty narrative which doesn’t disappoint. Perhaps its only downfall is Neame’s merely solid direction. He was just beginning his American sojourn, but he’s left well behind the days of pulsating British drama, stuff like Tunes of Glory, and replaced it with entertaining fluff, like this.
Without any regrets, I enjoyed it. The film probably made money at the time and is accomplished without ever threatening to be truly memorable. I can’t imagine why they chose to remake it.
Yes, GAMBIT is excellent, as is another film of that era, KALEIDOSCOPE, with Warren Beatty and Susannah York, which hardly gets any airplay nowadays.
Can You Forgive Me?
You'll remember this film for the Oscar nomination our very own Richard E Grant got (he didn't win though). In truth he's not stretching himself as the proverbial Englishman in New York who pals up with a formerly best-selling writer (Melissa McCarthy) who is now down on her luck and increasingly out of pocket due to her managing to alienate everyone with her foul-mouthed ways.
As is revealed in the trailer, she hits upon the ruse of faking literary letters from famous writers and selling them for a tasty profit. Grant plays her drinking buddy who is more or less a partner in crime after a while, essentially you could say it's a tale of Two Withnails, two reprobates skiving off school and playing the system. We are invited to be complicit, though it becomes increasingly clear as the movie goes on that both characters are in a pretty bad way and are hiding behind a front.
Like current release The Duke, you may feel you've seen it all from the trailers. The difference is - though I've not seen The Duke - is that this film seems more gripping, whereas I do feel Brit films of this kind have to twee-ify everything so it feels less real. There's no reason why British cinema couldn't do a movie like this - aside from the fact it's based on a true story and was set in New York City of course - but you kind of know how it would play out. I think About a Boy with Grant's namesake was an exception, but that was directed by Americans. Usually Brit films have to have some kind of Wallace & Gromit flavour to them.
Anyway, I enjoyed this except it gets quite stressful towards the end as the truth begins to catch up with our pair of alcoholic reprobates.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Young Winston (1972)
Richard Attenborough made a career out of making biopics about famouse men, and Winston Churchill certainly had a colourful life worth making movies about, This movie tells his story from age seven to his election into parliament aged 26, Simon Ward plays Winston as an adult and portrays him with an early, more moderate form of his famous mannerisms. Ward also voices him in voiceover in full sir Winston Churchill mode. Anne Bankcroft plays his mother and Robert Shaw his father. Winston loved them both, but often at a distance. Maurice Binder made the title sequence, but it's one of his less memorable ones. As a young man Winston experienced warfare in India, the last British cavalry charge in Sudan and becoming a prisoner and then escaping in the Boer war. Winston is portrayed as an upper.class glory hound, but also brave and able. The production values are as high as they should be and it's well made in front of and behind the camera. The weak link is the score. Even back in 1972 the marching music must have seemed decades out of date. What Attenborouogh does well is using letters and telegraphs as narration from time to time. There are also interview scenes were the camera stays on the subject without cutting back to the unseen interviewer. It's very effective. Those are among the scenes that lifts the movie abouve the capable into something interesting. It's still a movie to learn about the formative years of one of the great statesmen and his time, and not because of groundbreaking moviemaking.
The movie for free on Youtube: Young Winston (1972) WAR /HISTORY 720p - Bing video
THE OFFENCE (1973)
Sean Connery shows he can act! This should not have come as a surprise to anyone who had seen The Hill or Marnie or the first four James Bond films. Of course Sean Connery can act. Did critics and the public think he couldn’t?
Sadly, while The Offence is chock full of great performances, it is a deliberately muddled and ambiguous tale which doesn’t provide a clear conclusion and inhabits distinctly uncomfortable moral territory.
Connery plays Det Sgt Johnson, a twenty year veteran whose police career has begun to affect his behaviour, haunted as he is by the images of crime scenes and a sense of unending guilt. Unable to discuss his mental health with any one – not even his put-upon wife, who he confesses to never having loved – he spirals out of control and assaults the prime suspect in a case of child rape. The confusing opening scenes, which replay this moment, are accompanied by nothing but a buzz of electronic sound and lay a template for the following ninety minutes, which chops and changes with increasing unruliness. Day becomes night. Camera angles shift and skew. Conversations are stopped, restarted, rewound.
The audience is living these moments in Johnson’s mangled head. When he finally reveals what led to his offence, the narrative suddenly becomes lucid and we understand why his self-control is so at fault. An unsettling rescue of a teenage rape victim anticipates Johnson’s feelings of guilt, brought into the open by Kenneth Baxter, the suspect who wields an unnerving psychological power to match Johnson’s physical might. The showdown between Connery and Ian Bannen is worth waiting for to catch the two’s instinctive acting. The one between Connery and Trevor Howard’s internal investigation officer less so. The row with his wife [Vivien Merchant] is a mark of a tired man who knows his career is finished, only the arrival of his arresting officers prevents Johnson from committing his own sex crime. The film is a series of one-on-ones and John Hopkins’ screenplay, based on his own stage work, delivers enough power to provide sparks of emotional insight and some revulsion. Sidney Lumet has clearly been inspired by Nic Roeg and creates a landscape of sound and vision designed to deliberately disorientate the viewer.
It’s a hard watch.
The Offence didn’t make any money and United Artists reneged on a deal to produce a second movie of Connery’s choice, something they’d agreed to in hiring him for Diamonds are Forever. While its worth watching, it isn’t going to be one I’ll revisit any time soon, the subject matter is simply too bleak. Sir Sean has done many better films although this is certainly one of his most intense and startling roles
@chrisno1 A very good review.
I have been working my way through SC's non Bond films and this was on my list. I had noticed it on TPTV and was able to watch on Saturday.
It is powerful and disturbing and a demonstration of SC's acting ability but, like you, I won't be in a hurry to watch it again.
I had heard of the director but it wasn't until I looked his name up on the internet that I realised he directed 'The Hill'.
BTW I was going to watch the Michael Caine film afterwards but had to be up early on Sunday for work. That sounded like an interesting film, I wonder if anyone saw it?
The Offence
Though a deliberate attempt to put the Bond role behind him, there are couple of instances that draw one back to his famous role, both from From Russia With Love - at another point it's Connery rather than Shaw to brags about how his opponent will be on his knees, begging for mercy.
Another line seemed to be borrowed for Connery's later picture, Robin and Marion, again the roles reversed: 'I've been fighting people like you all my life'.
This is an involving movie, austere and grim, quite typical of early 1970s British films, Equess starring Richard Burton is on Talking Pictures TV next week, that's another such one. I think they were stage plays, the original title of The Offence was This Story of Yours, which possibly works better, given the unreliability of the narrators.
Even watching this in my late teens, I did get to distinguish between 'Sean Connery, far better actor than that other James Bond, Roger Moore' and 'Sean Connery, great actor'. That said, who knows, Moore might have pulled off something like this given his sweaty turn in The Man Who Haunted Himself, another grim early 70s British film. He wouldn't have done this, though. There's a lot of acting on show here, you could call it an acting masterclass but at times it felt to me like an actor's vanity project. Connery just didn't quite immerse himself in this, he didn't become the character, he didn't assume the role as naturally as you know who.
That said, even his playing in Dr No could seem mannered. I think it was film critic John Brosnan who observed that the Bond persona really came about when the interiors were filmed later. If so this figures, Bond jibing at M, then engaging in 'verbal fencing' (Brosnan's phrase) with Moneypenny, baiting No in his underwater lair, or lighting a cigarette in the casino and picking up Miss Trench - all interiors, all later on in the film, this is James Bond stuff totally while - if this theory is correct - the Crab Key Jamaica filming took place earlier, and in those shots Connery's Bond still has his rough edges, he seems a bit surly, brusque and not quite our man yet. He's almost a bit boorish at times.
So maybe Connery wasn't bedded into his role as the detective in The Offence. He is miscast as a middle-aged, embittered, gone-to-seed officer passed over for promotion. Now, Connery was overweight and balding in this, he had gone to seed albeit from a superior start (actually he was more overweight in Diamonds), he was also embittered about not getting his due from the Bond films financially, and maybe felt passed over compared to other actors such as Burton, Harris, Finney and even Caine in terms of earning capacity. So not wholly miscast, of course, he could do something with this.
But the script didn't quite match Connery's portrayal. At one point he talks about how women don't quite register him anymore, implying his married character has been having affairs, which is a bit incongruous. Connery doesn't cut that figure here, he looks ike the guy one notices when he enters the room, he still has his leading man chops. I don't quite get the sense this man is the loser who once had his chance, he still has presence of a kind. I think Gene Hackman was better at combining star with character actor, contrast his Popeye Doyle with the guy in conspiracy thriller The Conversation - both indisputably Hackman but wholly different in presentation.
I feel that Connery's character should be the big man in the interrogation not least because that's the one time he gets to dominate his opponent, otherwise he tends to feel diminished. The script hints at this, sometimes he says things that sound daft and get ignored by his superior Peter Bowles, but because Connery is doing his leading man role rather than that of character actor, it just seems like the script is not serving him well.
It isn't made clear if the rape suspect brought in actually did it. This could work brilliantly, we could think at first that our hero has his man, then doubts could creep in, and we could change our mind about it, switching sympathies. I'm not sure this really happens. It's not clear either way at any point, so the impression is of being stuck in an interview room with two nutters, neither sympathetic at all.
I think it's been made clear by this point that Connery is a sour case, almost a basket case, so we don't value his judgement much. I don't feel sorry for his character for being goaded into losing his rag, plus if the suspect really did it, at least he's dealt with a child rapist. As it turns out, it's hard to know how one should feel exactly come the end.
But one weird flaw for me is that I mis-recalled the film. It seemed to me that the big revelation in the interview room was that the suspect got from Connery's cop that actually HE was the one who'd been committing these crimes. This really does seem to be foreshadowed throughout the film. In the opener, as the camera shows the next victim heading home, it cuts to Connery looking a bit interested and salacious. From a distance we then see a figure engage with the kid, it could be Connery, we can't quite see. Later, it's Connery who finds the kid, as if he knows where to look, and when she shrinks from him it's as if she might have encountered him before - and actually is the guilty man. He's very keen to get into the ambulance to question her - a typical trick seen from Line of Duty to Breaking Bad when the guilty want first dibs on the evidence against them and want to control the narrative.
It carries on like this, with clips of the young girl pictured sexually alluring as if from Connery's point of view or actual recall. As it is, the big revelation is that he also shares these strange perversions having been afflicted by the trauma of his work (I'm not sure that such trauma can actually invoke paedophilic urges, I don't know, it's another example of stuff that doesn't quite hold together in this film) didn't seem to me so hard-hitting.
It's also unclear how long this interrogation was going on for, I think he only had half an hour, it's not long enough for this stuff to come out.
Ultimately I wasn't quite sure what to make of the outcome. Connery's character seemed glad to have not told his superior anything in his own interrogation into his behaviour - but later recounts it all anyway to a fellow officer, the one who pops up as Del Boy's barman in Only Fools, if I'm correct. So is that not on the record then? Or is it a hangover from the stage play that doesn't really work on film?
I respect Connery for tackling this, I don't think it's as good as his film with Sidney Lumet The Hill which also dealt with the fall from grace of an authority figure and whose downfall is also brought about by a fit of unnecessary violence - though that too was a bit unsatisfactory, as that really came from nowhere now I recall.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
That's a really good take on the movie, thanks, Napoleon
The Silencers (1966)
I have watched The Silencers for the first time and everything is A-OK! The movie is fun, the women are beautiful and they have never heard of women's lib, the gadgets are silly and the actors are charmismatic, especially Dean Martin. Speaking of silencers: silenced revolvers is something that exists in movies and not in real life. But who cares when the Reversible Gun is used so brilliantly! The action and stunts are unimpressive, but that's not the point. This is a silly comedy and it's a good one. In fact this mus tbe the "reversible" of movies like QoS. I look forward to watching more Matt Helm movies.
Steven Spielberg's remake of WEST SIDE STORY. I was kinda suspicious of this. . .I think the 1961 film is great and it holds up well; I wasn't sure a remake was needed, and I was bothered by talk that this new movie was being made with a lot of sops to "woke" sensibilities. Well, needed or not, it's here, and, damn, I loved it. It may not top the original, but it certainly stands shoulder to shoulder with it. Spielberg wisely opted to keep most of the '61 film's orchestrations, and the musical numbers really pop. There are even a few improvements on the first film, such as some historicization to show that the "turf" the gangs are fighting over is being bulldozed to create the current Lincoln Center, giving more background detail to the characters, and assigning a couple of songs to different characters and giving them new meaning. The best bit of newness, though, is Rita Moreno, "Anita" in the original film and here made into a maternal figure who stands uneasily between the two sides. The movie bombed at the theaters, but it's worth catching on Disney Plus.
I loved it @Hardyboy and I’ve seen it twice now, I actually think the choreography is better than the original.
Why do my Film Reviews need approval before I can post these days? What's going on?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Rocky IV
I was in some mood for some anti-Russian propaganda so tuned into this on ITV, a nice print.
This is the kind of movie I'd have turned my nose up at as a teenager, being a Bond fan and an academic at a minor public school, it seemed Bond was the more obvious path to glory, while the jocks would like Rocky and so on, of course later you reassess your tastes. Rocky IV may be dumb fun but as one kid at school pointed out - a Sikh who went on to Oxford and had like me a subversive sense of humour - despite everything it's a feel good movie and when you see Stallone head up to the top of a Russian mountain on his training exploits, the heart sings. And what's this - there's none of that sly Dynasty-style sex games or hints of causal sex or betrayal, it doesn't seem to feature in the films at all, the issue of temptation - a staple in other movies to make them more 'interesting' or give them topspin, doesn't occur here, so who's the better role model, Bond or Rocky?
AVTAK's Dolph Lungren is the Russian boxer - you have to say, had Zorin just hired his character, or if he'd played Necros, it will be game over for Bond, it would be like watching Tyson Fury take on Joe Biden, or Dalton would just be sent back in a body bag, I have to say in Dalton's films and most of Brosnan's they never take on a big physical menace, do they? I think the nearest was Hinx in Spectre.
Rocky IV is simplistic stuff, things go wrong for his mate in the ring, but there's no word of censure from his wife, nor shots of his upset kids, it's all kept smooth and streamlined. The final punch up is utter nonsense of course, slugging it out with punches that would kill in the first round, but there you go, you can't help but be drawn into it.
And the actors are all good in it, I mean Lungren convinces, as does Brigitte Nielsen as his assertive lady friend.
One point about this blockbuster film worth making is the budget/box office ratio. Rocky IV must have been cheap to make, think about it - you've got Sly's salary but aside from that, no A-list stars, many are tied over from the first film and you don't see them much in anything else. No special effects, no spaceships or car chases. They don't really go to Russia, so no shots of exotic travel or of Moscow's onion spires, the location is simply a boxing ring, a gym, a fancy house and a shack in the snow, meant to be somewhere in Russia but probably just North America. It's cheap as chips, all you're forking out for is the extras in the audience. Contrast with the box office returns.
I'll also point out that this is one of those American films where they seem to come up against an alien, superior imperialistic force, and succeed against them by resorting to primitive, back to basic methods, old technology. I'm not sure about this - it's a bit like me facing the new European uncertainties by tuning in to watch Rocky IV again - but we see it in films like Independence Day and Battleships. Also Skyfall. It's ironic because of course, it was what we saw the Afghan or Iraqis do against the US invaders or liberators, depending on your point of view, knowing they don't have the technological might to defeat their foes, they resort to effective basics. It's all a matter of perspective, of course, as to whether one enjoys seeing this or not, but hence we see Rocky beat his superior foe by hanging out in a basic, stripped down hut, doing much the same things as his opponent but with a plough, or chopping wood, or running up a mountain
Rocky IV ends with a note of reconciliation and hope, in contact to what we see today, that said you do sense this is Putin's war and he alone owns it, rather than him being part of some big Soviet cult. That said, if you have a gangster in charge, the effect is largely the same. but you don't sense they have to think the unthinkable to get rid of him, it's more a matter of tactics and 'how'.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
It's not you, Napoleon, we've been having trouble with this.
My posts are going nowhwere — ajb007
As you can see, I've cleared your post. If this happens again, just drop me a line.
Nap, was this the new release recut that Stallone put together or the original release?
@Napoleon Plural I have had the same trouble sometimes. Perhaps it takes longer for Barbel to approve mine as he needs time to take out all my swearing and name calling?!
Again, not a last film seen, but for those in the UK 'The Prisoner' is being shown on the Horror channel. I think it's on every day at 1800 but please confirm this for yourselves.
I don't know anything about this series apart from it is from the 1960s but apparently it has a cult following. I'm sure you have all heard of it anyway so thought I would let you know it is being shown so you can watch it if you would like to.
Thanks for the tip off re The Prisoner, @Joshua !
The Chinese comedy Monkey is being shown on London Live, you're probably younger than me but this kitsch bit of Oriental nonsense was a kids TV hit in the late 70s, that said a) London Live don't promote anything, you have to accidentally catch it and b) It didn't seem as funny as it did back in the day. Anyway, I was surprised to find it on.
Even now, about to post, my post for Rocky IV comes up ready to post again, even though Barbel cleared it and it's up. One does tend to get a bit paranoid, I wondered if it was because of the themes of The Offence meant it had to be vetted, certain words being used triggering an alert. Also, this stuff can happen elsewhere, such as on Twitter, you get 'vetting', I haven't so far, but others complain about it. One sinister element was a piece on my late mother's care home from a year or so ago, I left a lengthy (well, it's me!) Comment below filling in the detail about how awful Surrey Social Services are and what and why they behaved the way they did. It stayed up for a while, but last time I looked it had been deleted and it was impossible to re-sign up to add anything, so the corrupt Surrey County Council most likely had a word with the Surrey Advertiser to have it removed - very annoying. The other local press had its Letter page abolished or cancelled under the cover of Covid, so that makes it even harder to have a voice, previously I had a few letters go in pointing out what was going on, can't do that now.
I think Rocky IV was the original release, the director's cut sounds interesting.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
If this happens again, Joshua, please just drop me a line and let me know. Neither Sir Miles or I check the spam queue (which is where these lost posts are usually found) every day so we have to be informed.
And no, I haven't been taking swear words out of your posts!
Rocky IV
I was in some mood for some anti-Russian propaganda so tuned into this on ITV, a nice print.
This is the kind of movie I'd have turned my nose up at as a teenager, being a Bond fan and an academic at a minor public school, it seemed Bond was the more obvious path to glory, while the jocks would like Rocky and so on, of course later you reassess your tastes. Rocky IV may be dumb fun but as one kid at school pointed out - a Sikh who went on to Oxford and had like me a subversive sense of humour - despite everything it's a feel good movie and when you see Stallone head up to the top of a Russian mountain on his training exploits, the heart sings. And what's this - there's none of that sly Dynasty-style sex games or hints of causal sex or betrayal, it doesn't seem to feature in the films at all, the issue of temptation - a staple in other movies to make them more 'interesting' or give them topspin, doesn't occur here, so who's the better role model, Bond or Rocky?
AVTAK's Dolph Lungren is the Russian boxer - you have to say, had Zorin just hired his character, or if he'd played Necros, it will be game over for Bond, it would be like watching Tyson Fury take on Joe Biden, or Dalton would just be sent back in a body bag, I have to say in Dalton's films and most of Brosnan's they never take on a big physical menace, do they? I think the nearest was Hinx in Spectre.
Rocky IV is simplistic stuff, things go wrong for his mate in the ring, but there's no word of censure from his wife, nor shots of his upset kids, it's all kept smooth and streamlined. The final punch up is utter nonsense of course, slugging it out with punches that would kill in the first round, but there you go, you can't help but be drawn into it.
And the actors are all good in it, I mean Lungren convinces, as does Brigitte Nielsen as his assertive lady friend.
One point about this blockbuster film worth making is the budget/box office ratio. Rocky IV must have been cheap to make, think about it - you've got Sly's salary but aside from that, no A-list stars, many are tied over from the first film and you don't see them much in anything else. No special effects, no spaceships or car chases. They don't really go to Russia, so no shots of exotic travel or of Moscow's onion spires, the location is simply a boxing ring, a gym, a fancy house and a shack in the snow, meant to be somewhere in Russia but probably just North America. It's cheap as chips, all you're forking out for is the extras in the audience. Contrast with the box office returns.
I'll also point out that this is one of those American films where they seem to come up against an alien, superior imperialistic force, and succeed against them by resorting to primitive, back to basic methods, old technology. I'm not sure about this - it's a bit like me facing the new European uncertainties by tuning in to watch Rocky IV again - but we see it in films like Independence Day and Battleships. Also Skyfall. It's ironic because of course, it was what we saw the Afghan or Iraqis do against the US invaders or liberators, depending on your point of view, knowing they don't have the technological might to defeat their foes, they resort to effective basics. It's all a matter of perspective, of course, as to whether one enjoys seeing this or not, but hence we see Rocky beat his superior foe by hanging out in a basic, stripped down hut, doing much the same things as his opponent but with a plough, or chopping wood, or running up a mountain
Rocky IV ends with a note of reconciliation and hope, in contact to what we see today, that said you do sense this is Putin's war and he alone owns it, rather than him being part of some big Soviet cult. That said, if you have a gangster in charge, the effect is largely the same. but you don't sense they have to think the unthinkable to get rid of him, it's more a matter of tactics and 'how'.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Taking swear words out of your posts would be too much work! 😁
I think Barbel uses all his time reading the many messages I send him asking for you to be banned!😂
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
In this age of rising energy costs I spent my electricity on this!
It was just a collection of 'scenes' without any story line. I must admit though I did not watch it to the end as I had had more than enough after 1 1/2 hours of nothingness. There was still 1 1/4 hours to go when I turned off!
I liked the way it was filmed, but that could not compensate for the total lack of story.
I watched the 'Inglorious B**tards' (I am swearing again!) last year and was completely unimpressed by that too. Hours long for no real result.
I'll never get banned - I have photos of Barbel! 🤣
😵 Those pics you got from TP???? Dammit, I thought he promised to keep them safe.
Don't worry. As long as I remain a member no-one will know you have the sheet music to Another w ..... I mean another very good soundtrack 😊
I too tuned into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood last night, its first showing on British TV.
I'd seen it at the cinema and enjoyed it, not sure if I saw it twice, but I remembered a heck of a lot about it, some scenes really stick in the memory, including the build up and the dialogue and everything, it's very vivid and memorable.
Like many recent Tarantino films I found it highly impressive, hugely enjoyable, overlong, occasionally boring and ultimately infuriating.
The scene were DiCaprio's actor was shown making a low-budget Western was boring, there seemed to be no point to it. Was it to show us the filming process? It didn't, we didn't see any close-ups or cameras or anything. Was it to show that the guy was actually a great actor? I didn't see that either. I felt he might have been modelled on Jack Nicolson who in the late 60s was already coming into his own and becoming a major star when he could have been overlooked, but DiCaprio just isn't in that league. Or was it show he was actually a bad actor? Because I didn't get that either. The scene could have been cut and it wouldn't matter, be sad for the young kid in the scene, but she was too smart to be credible. The scene just went on and on, as if Tarantino was saying, I can do this now.
On the NTTD thread someone asks about the nuggets placed in the new film that hark back to previous ones - a painting of various Ms, for instance - and wonders if it helps or hinders. It reminded me of a review on the Sunday Times a few weeks back, on a book on 1990s pop culture. It wrote how Tarantino had three movies out in one year in the 1990s, True Romance, Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction - only the last directed by Tarantino himself, the other by Tony Scott and Oliver Stone. Tarantino didn't care for those other films, and it's pointed out they were directed by older men, who had a different mindset, who'd either lived through a world war on served in the war. They made films interpreting their real-life experiences and tried to imbue them with a sense of morality. Tarantino's life experience was working in a video store watching lots of films where he picked up his movie grammar. He didn't make movies about a heightened reality, he made movies based on movies he'd seen. Morality isn't an issue, flair, wit and ingenuity is. It's a different genre, you're not meant to believe in it, just go along with it. Morality is not really an issue. One comparison would be hardcore porn, it's not based on real-life love making or even just having sex, it's its own genre. It wouldn't be made better to be made more 'realistic', that would be missing the point.
In the mid 90s we had Bond return in GoldenEye. This too had nods to previous Bonds - the Aston Martin DB5 has no place in a modern film really, but hey. In a way, License to Kill was the last sincere Bond movie, though I feel Spectre came close, the later ones really are more like extended advertisements for the franchise, a bit like those big-budget ads Clive Owen did for a make of car, with big name directors attached. The problem with 'sincere' Bond movies is that if you don't like the angle, it's a non-starter, and this applies to Thunderball, OHMSS, LTK and maybe Spectre. On the other hand, things like GE and DAD which I disliked a the cinema I'm quite happy to dip into on telly, for some humour or a set-piece spectacle and many cinemagoers see a Bond film just to 'dip into' them.
But this may explain why some of us older fans find the older films more emotionally satisfying, even the Moore films with some nakedly preposterous action scenes, rather than the modern Bonds which seem to hark back to others.
Perhaps I was also thinking of the recent film I reviewed, Can You Ever Forgive Me? which is based on a real-life event and has a truthful moving narrative, and a wonderful final scene between the two stars which earns its emotional payoff, it rewards you for paying attention. It's a rare film however nowadays, most seem awkward about asking you to believe in it.
Tarantino seems to be like that. There are great scenes in Ingloroius... but then he turns it in to a joke, one I don't seem to get. At the Prince Charles where I saw it, one young woman was helpless with laughter as the hitherto scary Nazi general mocked Brad Pitt's attempt at an Italian accent, but it's a different film then. I think Django Unchained did something similar. So it is here, the final scenes just become a different movie.
I missed th repoint of it early on I must admit, that it's a film - mild spoilers alert - where things look bad but actually turn out well, hence the fairytale title. It misplays you. This is interesting even if many scenes just don't follow through as you expect, they short circuit, a bit like the action in Never Say Never Again - oh, it's only a training exercise! Oh, he's thrown some urine in his attacker's face! Oh, the bomb was planted in the wrong hotel room! There's only so much of this leading you up the garden path you can enjoy. One scene is brilliantly done - where Ptt's stuntman pays a visit on an old boy either dead or held hostage by sinister hippies led by Charles Manson, who is absent. We fear the worst, but it turns out he's okay and their story checks out. This is fine, but it makes no logical sense - why were they so hostile and defensive then? And later three of them turn up to commit devil-related murder, so they're obviously not nice people.
I didn't understand why Tarantino kept banging on about 'hippies' as if they're all self-evidently scum - history tells us this lot were, but the characters don't know that. Murdering some young intruders who may have lost their way, as if that's okay, I mean forget it, that could end a leading actor's career, not enhance his prospects. It all just seemed a bit weird.
I think the late Sarah Harding of Girls Aloud would have been a better lookalike for Sharon Tate than Margot Robbie.
At times I watched this, thinking, if this weren't a Tarantino film, nobody would give a damn about any of this. @Joshua complains it has no plot, I think if you were watching this with ad breaks as I was it makes it harder, but it's not that kind of film, it's more like Short Cuts where different strands are drawn together. You're meant to know about the massacre of the pregnant Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, by associates of Charles Manson and that it's all building up to that - or not, as the case may be. Otherwise it's like watching a movie about the build up to the sinking of the Titanic and it doesn't show the sinking. But yeah, some great scenes in this, looks lovely, Pitt is great too but... I feel Quentin is making films in the way Woody Allen used to, for the sake of making movies, 'here's my take on the Western, here's a war movie, and - Tarantino here - if I get bored I can always switch it into something else in the final reel, it's my ball and I can change the game if I want to...'
Roger Moore 1927-2017