As many of you know, this movie has been nominated for and won several prestigious awards. It is written, directed and is based on the childhood memories of Kenneth Branagh.
Ten year-old Buddy is largely a stand-in for Branagh himself. This movie is full of great acting, but the acting debut of Jude Hill as Buddy is particularly impressive. Jamie Dornan surprises with a quality of acting few expected of him (as the father) based on the Fifty Shades of Grey movies. Caitriona Balfe as the mother is great. I hope to see her as Miss Moneypenny in the future. Ciaran Hinds and our own Judi Dench play the grandparents. We also see at least two more James Bond elements: Buddy gets an Aston Martin DB5 model you for Christmas and the family watches Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the cinema.
The movie shows the street the family lives on as a peaceful community lived in by both Protestants and Catholics, but this childhood paradise is suddenly and violently shattered. The street is turned into the frontline of a civil war. But all is not doom and gloom. We see happy family moments and Irish culture. Except the modern day scenes only movies at the cinema and theatre is shown in colour, showing the joy and escape they give to Buddy/Kenneth. While most of the movie seems realistic and close to Branagh's experiences there are scenes where movies and reality blend for young Buddy.
A cheapish gorefest from Richard Donner which ticks all the boxes and succeeds by being genuinely startling at its moments of horror. Gregory Peck is the U.S. ambassador to Britain whose secretly adopted son, Damien, turns out to be the spawn of Satan. The kid is really creepy. It’s no wonder Lee Remick’s wife and mother wants to disown him. However, even Damien’s outdone by Billie Whitelaw’s fantastically malevolent nanny Mrs Baylock. You rather wish she’d be given more screen time. Instead we get Patrick Troughton spouting riddles and David Warner taking photographs. Horrible deaths abound. A gripping scene in a deconsecrated cemetery is spoilt by being obviously filmed on a studio set. Gregory Peck becomes steadily more crazed as the film progresses, hinting that even the Good have an evil streak. Leo McKern’s exorcist knows exactly what’s happening but doesn’t lift a finger to help, which seems very odd. Luckily the shocks keep us occupied enough to forget the incongruities.
Inventive and influential horror which still holds up well today. Jerry Goldsmith provides a haunting score.
Sibling rivalry is given a murderous supernatural twist in this shock-horror variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous tale from the Hammer stable. It’s not very shocking and not very horrific. Ralph Bates is the scientist Dr Jekyl who, in seeking to cure cholera accidentally discovers a life-giving elixir – only his alter-ego turns out to be beautiful Martine Beswick, who labels herself as Mrs Hyde. The stories of Burke and Hare are relocated from Edinburgh to Whitechapel and the legend of Jack the Ripper is weaved into the narrative. Saucy seductions and suspicious surgeons abound. There’s almost too much going on to fit in. The only thing they left out was a lesbian touch between Beswick’s lascivious seductress and the innocent damsel, played with some distress by Dorothy Alison. Lots of foggy streets on studio sets, cramped English sitting rooms and hardcore sewing. The Avengers writers Albert Fennel and Brian Clemens lent their penmanship to this and busy journeyman Roy Ward Baker directs. A little bit of sleazy fun. Succeeds by being so obvious and by ignoring the flagrantly expected scenarios. Minor Hammer.
Successful shocker which succeeds through its unwavering simplicity. Donald Pleasance is a psychiatric doctor whose lost a psychopathic patient: one Michael Myers who, as a six year old, murdered his promiscuous sister. Fifteen years on, Myers returns to the scene of the crime and for some inexplicable reason haunts Jamie Lee Curtis’ high school swot and proceeds to kill off her promiscuous school friends.
The film does very little but does it very expertly. The film was ground-breaking on release but is now best viewed as an essay on how to make an effective horror film. All the ingredients are there, right down to the inconclusive ending, the inconsistencies in editing and the incongruous behaviour of the characters. Wes Craven’s Scream went on to exploit these conventions for humour, Halloween introduces them for shock value. More a chiller than an outright gore-fest the film works because from almost the first notes of the theme tune, we are anticipating a shock and the anticipation rarely lets up through the entire run time.
Stable performances and a star making turn from Curtis. Very good although the climax is now unintentionally hilarious. You can thank Wes Craven for that…
When I first watched this it was just called The Ghost, as in Robert Harris’s excellent novel, Hollywood seems to have added Writer since. Ewan McGregor plays the unnamed ghost writer to Pierce Brosnan’s former British Prime Minister, who is plainly based on Tony Blair. The ghost writer is despatched to Martha’s Vineyard (home of the movie Jaws) to complete the autobiography of Adam Lang as his predecessor has been drowned in a presumed accident. It seems that someone doesn’t want the book to be published and as the ghost writer delves into Lang’s mysterious past he finds his life is in danger. Kim Cattrall is very good as Lang’s personal assistant and 95-year-old Eli Wallace is wonderful as a local man who says that the previous writers body could not have ended up where it did after falling from a ferry. Roman Polanski shows that he is a capable director by bringing in a very good stylish thriller.
Strange how the hypocritical Hollywood liberal elite forgive Polanski for raping children but Weinstein, Cosby and co. get cancelled, obviously some faces fit and others don’t.
7/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Someone on Twitter pointed out the oddness of Donald 'Blofeld' Pleasance showing up in a film with Mike Myers, while the comic actor Michael Myers creates Austin Powers, in which his nemesis is the Pleasance Blofeld-like Dr Evil. Probably worked better when the Tweeted it...
@CoolHandBond I thought the film was always called The Ghost Writer, it is only Harris' book which is called The Ghost. One assumes this is because producers thought people would expect to see a spooky movie about ghosts if they used the original. If I'm honest, I prefer the movie title. The film is excellent IMO, a very fine understated thriller with good performances and plenty of twists, some unexpected. The closing scene is brilliant.
Re: Polanski, yes, awkward one that, a very fine filmmaker with a difficult history; strange that Chinatown, his best work, shares the subject matter. Is he still 'in favour'? He, of course, has not travelled to America for decades as he fled the country to avoid arrest and would be immediately arrested if he returned. He claims innocence through ignorance, but as that won't stand up in US courts; he'd be in plenty of trouble...
It's thorny, isn't it? The optics aren't quite the same nor is the actuality but I wouldn't mind them all being cancelled. Polanski - and I'm not an authority on this - had his way with an underage girl, I wouldn't quite term it 'rape a child' though legally it passes for that. At the time you had pop stars having their way with underage girls - Bowie himself and the allegations re Bill Wyman are out there, and then there's the issue of the late Jerry Lee Lewis, quite wretched but when all this came out the idea of grooming hadn't really taken hold.
Weinstein and Cosby is arguably on another level - no pretence of seduction here though I am uneasy with the argument I'm making, but it's basically 'both are awful, neither are the same'. W & C were relentless, and the allegations are of a prolonged history though I'm suddenly uneasy writing about Cosby seeing as he's been cleared, hasn't he, on a technicality. Odd to find Quentin's film has as its high point its chief character 'getting in' with Polanski the young film director, given Quentin's association with Weinstein and, I think, what Chris No1 pointed out as some dicy borderline stuff in that very film.
@chrisno1 It appears that The Ghost title was exclusively used in the UK only and The Ghost Writer everywhere else. According to Wikipedia the USA version used tamer language in a re-dubbed version to obtain a PG13 certificate, which I didn’t know until I looked up the title confusion in the opening sentence. I also didn’t proofread my original post properly and misspelled Eli Wallach (the bandit leader Calvera in my favourite film of all-time The Magnificent Seven) I hang my head in shame 😩
@Napoleon Plural As you say it’s all very subjective, which is my point, why are some given an easy ride (Woody Allen being another) and others cancelled?
I could go on with a rant against the cancel culture and wokeness in general, but I won’t.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Oh, well, I don't know to pick this up or not, I mean Woody Allen was accused by one person, his step daughter I think, so it's 'he said, she said'. As one wag pointed out with Cosby, it's more 'he said, she said she said she said etc' namely the sheer numbers of the allegations, and the same could indeed be said of Weinstein. I think Allen has kind of been cancelled, his Annie Hall gets re-shown every so often but certainly not the excellent Manhattan because of course it has him as a bloke in his early 40s going after a teenage girl. None of his other films get resown much in the UK - unless you count Casino Royale! - so I don't know.
Weinstein hasn't been cancelled, he's been jailed and rightly so. The films he produced do get re-shown on telly.
Halloween last night and lots of channels have been showing horror movies all week. It was raining in London, so I managed to evade giving shortbread to trick or treaters and munched it all myself while partaking a recorded double bill of neck-biting horror:
SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES (1971)
Batty take on the vampire movie genre which blends traditional tropes with porno-chic. It’s very well presented. The images are quite startling. Filmed entirely on location – you can tell by the graffiti scrawled on the walls – the castle looks exactly how you’d expect a vampire’s castle to look: gloomy, crumbling, packed full of ancient and modern furniture, twisted passageways, candles, cemeteries, dungeons, heavy curtains. Minus the graffiti, of course. Director Jean Rollin knows he’s making this on the cheap and he conjures ingenious visual tricks to keep our interest. For instance, the succubus materialises inside a grandfather clock striking midnight or out of an abandoned well in a puff of smoke; a dead white dove is placed bleeding on a coffin lid; blood streaks down the castle walls following the death of a vampire hunter; a library becomes a theatre of war. There are many pleasingly stark images of, in and around the castle, plenty of pallid night scenes, shadows and light, an aquarium containing a human skull as a fish house, an octagonal dining room which the camera swirls around as the diners interact. Photographer Jean Jacques Renon works wonders, all things considered.
There’s not much plot to work with. Newly-weds Antonio and Issa plan to visit her cousins, who live in an aging chateau castle. Upon arrival they are informed the cousins have died, but the two comely maid servants invite them to stay anyway. While Antonio has a sleepless night away from his distraught bride, Issa [the beautiful Sandra Julien] is seduced into the world of vampirism by the androgenous succubus Isolde, played with some bone-tingling chilliness by the skeletal model Dominique. The cousins were once great modern day vampire hunters, but they were caught out and, after attempting to stake each other [seen during the peculiar prologue] have become agents for the ‘monster’ of vampirism. They retain their castle and their independence by regularly feeding off the blood of their lesbian servants, who conveniently spend most of their time in the nude, necks and breasts ready bared, as it were. Isolde resents the two cousins, calling them bourgeois vampires, and has been sent to initiate them fully into the dark world. Antonio thinks they are mere intellectual, conceited hippies. Issa grows steadily more in love with the vampirism and decides to complete her own initiation. Will Antonio rescue her on time?
Accompanied by a terrible script, which tries to be clever but just seems funny, and not many genuine shocks or chills, plus a gratingly distracting prog-rock soundtrack from Anacanthus, an audience really only has the visuals to entertain them, unless your partial to women wandering around old chateau in the nude.
Rather good, at its level, I’m just not sure what kind of level it is.
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008)
Set in wintery Stockholm, Let the Right One In is a modern vampire movie which prefers to concentrate on the central seductive and dependent relationship of its adolescent characters, Oskar and Eli. The former is a bashful, bullied twelve-year old boy from a broken home. The latter a two-hundred-year old female child vampire.
Tomas Alfredson directs with genuine class and he’s aided by Hoyte van Hoytema’s fabulous photography as well as a literate screenplay from original author John Ayvide Lindqvist. The film doesn’t veer far from the Centrum housing block Oskar and Eli live in, Oskar’s school and the local bar where the older, bitter residents live. This brings a sense of claustrophobia to the scenes, which are set in enclosed spaces – even the outside space is wrapped in apartment blocks, and the two prospective friends initially play on a jungle climbing frame, a cage in itself. As the film progresses and their relationship develops into one of mutual need, their horizons, rather than broaden, contract. It’s a startling, closeted movie that has moments of emotional power and uncharacteristic grace for the genre. The film doesn’t skirt on shock value either, but the expected horrors come at us in a languid fashion which hints at the dolefulness of an Arctic winter. We are lulled into a sense of adolescent wonder, the fairy tale of snowy landscapes and first love and intimacy, a tranquil balloon burst by sudden moments of violence, which creep out of the semi-darkness, and not all by the vampire either.
Eli has an aging guardian who murders for her benefit and Oskar is frequently attacked by a trio of classmates in a steadily escalating child war. When we first meet the young lad, he’s stabbing a tree with a hunting knife, exclaiming lines from Lord of the Flies, which we later learn are used to mock him by the bully, Conny. Oskar’s abandonment is exemplified by his mother’s disinterest and his father’s homosexuality. He turns to Eli for comfort at the very moment her own guardian betrays her trust. In a telling scene the weary, disconsolate Hakan [Per Ragnar] pleads with Eli not to meet with Oskar – it only becomes clear later that he recognises the relationship which will develop, that the young boy will become his replacement.
The film is beautiful to look at and the two leads are brilliant and entirely genuine. Kare Hedebrant’s Oskar looks old before his time, his eyes wary of everyone and everything, even if his angelic countenance screams naivety. Lina Leandersson is doublely confident in a role which requires a more worldly, mature composition. Sadly her dialogue was dubbed for the director considered her voice too high for the mature role. That does make sense and thankfully, the dubbing is well done and doesn’t affect our interpretation of Eli’s character. The film works best as a romance, a sort of Endless Love for vampires, ‘say goodbye to innocence’ and all that. The relationship which builds, while chaste, is suggestive of deeper feelings and as the resolution arrives, we are drawn into their touching dependence by a shared recognition of circumstance, despite the mounting horror and the obvious improbabilities.
An excellent film which does not dampen with repeated viewings.
I'm afraid you'll have to stop writing movie reviews like this. They are intellectual, thoughtful and gives us new perspective on the movie. The reviews are simply too good and they make the rest of us look stupid. You simply have to learn to write reviews that focus more on action scenes, explosions and hot women. Watch a Michael Bay-movie and write a positive review of it instead of embarrassing us like that!
PPK 7.65mmSaratoga Springs NY USAPosts: 1,253MI6 Agent
Just saw the documentary John G. Avildsen: King Of The Underdogs (2017) on Amazon Prime recently and I quite enjoyed it. While I am not a big fan of documentaries as a whole, I have enjoyed a number of them that focus on subjects I am interested in. As the title shows, it is about the life and times of movie director John Avildsen who famously directed Rocky (1976) and The Karate Kid (1984) among others. I really learned quite a bit about the man that directed two of my favorite dramatic movies of all time. For instance, he grew up around cinema cameras his father was constantly filming the family at various gatherings, and this influenced him to become a film director after he worked in advertising for the Vespa scooter company. He began with some short films and then directed industrial films for various businesses, before he began making feature length films. Joe (1970) starring American actor Peter Boyle was his first successful film, although Rocky and The Karate Kid movies are his most popular movies.
I'll take that as a compliment. I'd like to point out I only review movies in depth when I consider there's something worthwhile reporting on. My review of The Rock, for instance is nice and sharp. Lots of blowing stuff up in that paragraph.
I saw it this on Sunday and I agree with the above review. I'm very glad movies like this are still being made. Smart, plot-driven, funny and playful! I wonder if this movie was green-lit after the success of Knives Out? Amsterdam is due soon and that looks like it's in the same style. The only gripe I have is how the movie makes it look like roughly 5-10% of the British population in the UK in the 50's were black. I'm all for good parts for black actors (and everyone in this movie are good - especially Saorise Ronan), but I'm a history buff too.
This is only a minor gripe. I enjoyed it very much and I can recommend it to everyone.
Leila Slimani’s Prix Goncourt winning novel is given a swift make-over by director Lucie Borleteau who really ought to have left it well alone. Slimani’s novel is a complicated, many-layered psychological drama which begins where this film ends and looks back at the characters’ behaviours and motivations through the eyes of a police investigator.
The film is told in a linear fashion which make sense if you want to a broad audience appeal, but the screenplay ditches the framing narrative and thus it doesn’t do anything new. In fact, the trio of writers [Jeremie Elkaim, Maiwenn and Borleteau herself] remove all of the book’s subtext, which is one of abandonment, and only retains the basic psycho-nanny theme. Leila Bekhti and Antonine Reinartz play a go-getting couple with two young kids who decide to employ a nanny, Louise, a disconcertingly calm Karin Viard, and recognise their folly too late. The subtlety of the novel’s narrative arc is completely lost among the low rent moments of suspense. Without the author’s ability to capture inner thought, the characters come across as very ordinary.
Assya da Silva plays the daughter Mila and she’s the best thing in it.
Finally caught up with this first sequel, I'd looked forward to seeing it as the cinema but was put off by mediocre reviews who said it was a bit out there and tasteless. Not wishing to sound like a stuck record but I'd been hoping to take Mum to see this one - she died in the same year - because the trailer just looked great, all the OHMSS on steroids stuff ( I don't know if that Piz Gloria-style location actually exists.) But I'm glad I didn't - it wasn't just the dubious sex stuff of putting things up women's bums (a bugging device) but there's a truly horrible punishment meted out to one bad guy by the main villain which is kind of X rated and feels especially horrible after the cracking London Taxi chase through the streets of London and its Bond finale. Some of the humour is a bit Deadpool without the satirical fizz.
It's co-written by Jane Goldman and maybe there's the same problem with Kick Ass, which she also had a hand in - the first movie has charm, the second is a bit nasty and OTT. This Kingsman also has a long running time, like the Mission Impossible of around that time.
It seemed odd to have the main guy Eggsy romantically going after the Swedish princess rather than his mate in the Kingsman team - maybe the latter actress couldn't make the filming so got relegated to a virtual cameo?
Tonally it was a bit uneven and they don't seem to have many cast members left by the end of it. I didn't hate the transfer to America - the so-called Statesmen in Kentucky - but the American actors weren't too charismatic or funny in their own right. Odd to see our own Halle Berry join the cast, esp as her Die Another Day had that same stale bombastic feel. That said, I did prefer this kind of movie, it's more comedic yet it still had one excited. Julianne Moore was the villain, again a comedy villain turn like that of Samuel L Jackson, not bad once you realised you couldn't have Nicole Kidman doing the same thing again.
Berry looked great for her age, it's just odd to see her in another franchise after X-Men, esp as in the script it's like she's meant to be late 30s if that, having been passed over for promotion. That said, not sure there's been a follow up to this one. There was a prequel, which I've not seen.
It all exists in a strange virtual reality as the US President in this is not anyone we know. Though it came out in 2017 and pre-pandemic, a lot of it seems highly prescient.
A film which needs little introduction. It is often repeated on telly. I’ve seen it twice in the cinema as well. It is a film whose reputation precedes it, is frequently voted the best musical of all time and regularly features in the top 10 or 20 best film polls of all time. There is of course an iconic dance number. For a very long time, I ranked it extremely highly also. So what was wrong this time out? Something is suddenly amiss in the land of Kelly / Donen / Freed.
Singin’ in the Rain is a quality product, don’t get me wrong, yet on this viewing I found myself wondering if the film isn’t merely a Hollywood located remake of the previous years An American in Paris. Please note. In the earlier film Gene Kelly plays an out of luck artist in Paris trying to extricate himself from a relationship, he takes up with a younger woman, romances her, makes a success of his career and, before winning her heart, imagines his future life against a musical backdrop. In this film Gene Kelly is a silent movie star trying to extricate himself from a relationship, he meets a younger woman and falls for her, helps her career and his as talkies take off and imagines a movie story played out against a musical backdrop.
There’s no musical cohesion in this film either. In An American… all the songs were by George and Ira Gershwin and the composer’s An American in Paris Suite was utilised for the stylised ballet played out against huge reproductions of French impressionist paintings. For all its dramatic faults, An American… has the feel and verve of a prestige production, that the director, choreographer and producer wanted to create a landmark film, showcasing the talents of its stars and the composers. Gene Kelly had form for this; he was the most forward thinking of musical actors, much more so than Fred Astaire, who was content to parade his work on the studio set. Kelly took the movies into the realm of fantasy by dancing with Jerry Mouse in Anchors Aweigh, reality by location shooting for On The Town, ballet with his stupendous dancing fight scenes in The Pirate, and never once lost sight of a film’s need to entertain. Singin’ in the Rain, while essentially a self-mockery of Hollywood doesn’t deliver anything new because it is primarily concerned with the past. The songs are all from the 1920s and 30s and presented as if from the films of that era, so we have a Busby Berkley tribute, a flapper number, dance routines on movie sound stages and the climatic ‘ballet’ reimagines 42nd Street, The Broadway Melody and Scarface for its musical settings. Gene Kelly bawling ‘Gotta Dance’ over and over while surrounded by images of Broadway in lights isn’t any more original than Ruby Keeler belting out 42nd Street.
The film has an elongated beginning, which I subsequently learnt were the three original draft ideas of screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolphe Green. Unable to decide which opening to use [a party, a movie premiere, a star escaping vaudeville] they cobbled together all three and the approach makes the audience pull back from the action. There are snippets of song and dance, but the montage sequence shows us the relationship between Don Lockwood [Kelly] and Cosmo Brown [Donald O’Connor – excellent] when the film is really about the relationship between Lockwood and Kathy Seldon [Debbie Reynolds – also excellent].
It gets going proper at a post-premier party where Kathy’s Coconut Grove dancers Charleston away to All I Do Is Dream Of You in a cute pre-Bugsy Malone style. This is where Don develops feelings for the heroine, but at the moment he would traditionally [Broadway tradition] sing of his desires, the movie cuts away to him moping about the Monumental Studios film lot. There was originally a scene where Don sang the ballad version of All I Do… while walking and dancing home. Later on, when he’s beginning to get his hooks into Kathy and she’s responding, a scene where she sings You Are My Lucky Star to his image on a billboard was also cut. Losing these character pointers makes Don and Cathy’s romance seem impetuous.
Instead we get Donald O’Connor’s Make ’Em Laugh, which is a tour-de-force routine to the only new song in the film, but it sounds and looks remarkably like Be A Clown from Kelly’s 1948 film The Pirate. This is meant to cheer poor Don up, but we haven’t yet registered he’s feeling blue. Don eventually declares his love during a well-executed romantic interlude filmed on an empty sound stage, but it feels a little late by now and it is only Don who sings You Were Meant For Me; Kathy remains entirely silent.
The film progresses breezily to its climax and is best in the mid-section where, following a disastrous preview of Don’s first talkie, a plan is hatched to make-over the historical adventure as a fantasy musical, including Kathy’s voice dubbing the screechy tones of Lina Lamont [Jean Hagen – deliberately exceptionally awful]. The scheming trio perform the uplifting and brilliantly executed Good Morning [originally a Garland / Rooney number from the brilliant Babes in Arms] among the kitchen and lounge of Don’s mansion. Gene Kelly was particularly hard on Debbie Reynolds as she wasn’t a trained dancer, but her athleticism and ability really does shine through as she holds more than her own against two tried and trusted hoofers such as Kelly and O’Connor. As the lone girl she’s crammed between the two men, centre screen, and your eye is almost constantly focussed on her, which makes the performance even more marvellous. This scene of course is followed by Gene Kelly’s moment of movie history. There’s no real need to comment on a slice of cinematic magic. Find it on You Tube and watch it yourselves.
The film loses its way at the end, or almost the end, as Kelly and Cyd Charisse enact the Broadway Ballet, a crude ten-minute dance number lacking all the subtlety and panache of its forerunner in An American In Paris. While supposedly recreating a big 1930s movie musical sequence, the ballet at times resembles a 1920s silent movie skit, which stretches irony, I suppose. Everything tidies itself up well, but there’s no big finale and the movie ends too swiftly.
Okay. You’ll say I’m being overly harsh on an all-time classic film, but if critics, filmmakers and audiences are going to label something as ‘best’ or ‘all-time classic’ then it must remain open to close scrutiny. The late 1940s and early 1950s was a particularly rich vein for musicals, chiefly because Technicolor film became more widely used and turned dull monochromes into lavish rainbow extravaganzas. But with so many good or great films being released every year, they do imitate themselves a lot. The films written specifically for the screen, like Singin’ in the Rain, often lack a theatrical sense of character and purpose. They are designed for throw-away entertainment and sometimes forget that we as an audience need to be involved in a character’s personal journey; it isn’t enough to expect a few songs to do that if they are not inserted purposefully into the narrative. This is why movie adaptations of stage successes such as My Fair Lady or, in this decade, Carousel, The King and I or Pal Joey, work so effectively, because they are structured to involve and intrigue an audience, taking them beyond what we see on screen and into the hearts of the characters. An American in Paris succeeds in this [the plot isn’t played for laughs, which might help] while Singin’ in the Rain, for all its brilliance, doesn’t.
Best ever? All-time great? Well, yes, probably, begrudgingly, I suppose, but the enduring success and acclaim for the film rests entirely on one or two moments of musical joy and a clutch of willing performances. There’s nothing spectacularly new or inventive about anything on screen; even the sets are humdrum. The film is one of surface depth only, fine as far as it goes, and Debbie Reynolds is absolutely fantastic, but I yearn for so much more.
THAT scene remains brilliant and didn't Kelly have flu when he filmed it? The rest of the film I've struggled to really enjoy. In common with My Fair Lady a lot of it is based around trying to get the leading lady to speak properly which I find grating, in this case there's no 'She's got it!' moment so it seems mean-spirited though following usual tropes it's made clear she deserves what's coming.
I thought Kelly's character was down in the dumps because of his career, not that he was lovelorn.
A strange irony is that while it's all about the unfairness of dubbing, Debbie Reynolds' singing was also dubbed which makes it all rather confusing.
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Belfast (2021)
As many of you know, this movie has been nominated for and won several prestigious awards. It is written, directed and is based on the childhood memories of Kenneth Branagh.
Ten year-old Buddy is largely a stand-in for Branagh himself. This movie is full of great acting, but the acting debut of Jude Hill as Buddy is particularly impressive. Jamie Dornan surprises with a quality of acting few expected of him (as the father) based on the Fifty Shades of Grey movies. Caitriona Balfe as the mother is great. I hope to see her as Miss Moneypenny in the future. Ciaran Hinds and our own Judi Dench play the grandparents. We also see at least two more James Bond elements: Buddy gets an Aston Martin DB5 model you for Christmas and the family watches Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the cinema.
The movie shows the street the family lives on as a peaceful community lived in by both Protestants and Catholics, but this childhood paradise is suddenly and violently shattered. The street is turned into the frontline of a civil war. But all is not doom and gloom. We see happy family moments and Irish culture. Except the modern day scenes only movies at the cinema and theatre is shown in colour, showing the joy and escape they give to Buddy/Kenneth. While most of the movie seems realistic and close to Branagh's experiences there are scenes where movies and reality blend for young Buddy.
Highly recommend!
THE OMEN (1976)
A cheapish gorefest from Richard Donner which ticks all the boxes and succeeds by being genuinely startling at its moments of horror. Gregory Peck is the U.S. ambassador to Britain whose secretly adopted son, Damien, turns out to be the spawn of Satan. The kid is really creepy. It’s no wonder Lee Remick’s wife and mother wants to disown him. However, even Damien’s outdone by Billie Whitelaw’s fantastically malevolent nanny Mrs Baylock. You rather wish she’d be given more screen time. Instead we get Patrick Troughton spouting riddles and David Warner taking photographs. Horrible deaths abound. A gripping scene in a deconsecrated cemetery is spoilt by being obviously filmed on a studio set. Gregory Peck becomes steadily more crazed as the film progresses, hinting that even the Good have an evil streak. Leo McKern’s exorcist knows exactly what’s happening but doesn’t lift a finger to help, which seems very odd. Luckily the shocks keep us occupied enough to forget the incongruities.
Inventive and influential horror which still holds up well today. Jerry Goldsmith provides a haunting score.
DR JEKYL & SISTER HYDE (1971)
Sibling rivalry is given a murderous supernatural twist in this shock-horror variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous tale from the Hammer stable. It’s not very shocking and not very horrific. Ralph Bates is the scientist Dr Jekyl who, in seeking to cure cholera accidentally discovers a life-giving elixir – only his alter-ego turns out to be beautiful Martine Beswick, who labels herself as Mrs Hyde. The stories of Burke and Hare are relocated from Edinburgh to Whitechapel and the legend of Jack the Ripper is weaved into the narrative. Saucy seductions and suspicious surgeons abound. There’s almost too much going on to fit in. The only thing they left out was a lesbian touch between Beswick’s lascivious seductress and the innocent damsel, played with some distress by Dorothy Alison. Lots of foggy streets on studio sets, cramped English sitting rooms and hardcore sewing. The Avengers writers Albert Fennel and Brian Clemens lent their penmanship to this and busy journeyman Roy Ward Baker directs. A little bit of sleazy fun. Succeeds by being so obvious and by ignoring the flagrantly expected scenarios. Minor Hammer.
I love The Omen films. The first one is the best but I find the other two very watchable as well.
Similar with The Exorcist.
It is! Very underrated. I like George C Scott very much. He was also in one of my other favourite horror films, The Changeling.
Yes, I just got back from seeing it just now.
Brosnan is pretty good in his part (Everyone gives solid performances all around), and the film itself makes for passable escapist entertainment.
One thing I would note, however, is that these superhero movies start to look like each other.
HALLOWEEN (1978)
Successful shocker which succeeds through its unwavering simplicity. Donald Pleasance is a psychiatric doctor whose lost a psychopathic patient: one Michael Myers who, as a six year old, murdered his promiscuous sister. Fifteen years on, Myers returns to the scene of the crime and for some inexplicable reason haunts Jamie Lee Curtis’ high school swot and proceeds to kill off her promiscuous school friends.
The film does very little but does it very expertly. The film was ground-breaking on release but is now best viewed as an essay on how to make an effective horror film. All the ingredients are there, right down to the inconclusive ending, the inconsistencies in editing and the incongruous behaviour of the characters. Wes Craven’s Scream went on to exploit these conventions for humour, Halloween introduces them for shock value. More a chiller than an outright gore-fest the film works because from almost the first notes of the theme tune, we are anticipating a shock and the anticipation rarely lets up through the entire run time.
Stable performances and a star making turn from Curtis. Very good although the climax is now unintentionally hilarious. You can thank Wes Craven for that…
THE GHOST WRITER (2010)
When I first watched this it was just called The Ghost, as in Robert Harris’s excellent novel, Hollywood seems to have added Writer since. Ewan McGregor plays the unnamed ghost writer to Pierce Brosnan’s former British Prime Minister, who is plainly based on Tony Blair. The ghost writer is despatched to Martha’s Vineyard (home of the movie Jaws) to complete the autobiography of Adam Lang as his predecessor has been drowned in a presumed accident. It seems that someone doesn’t want the book to be published and as the ghost writer delves into Lang’s mysterious past he finds his life is in danger. Kim Cattrall is very good as Lang’s personal assistant and 95-year-old Eli Wallace is wonderful as a local man who says that the previous writers body could not have ended up where it did after falling from a ferry. Roman Polanski shows that he is a capable director by bringing in a very good stylish thriller.
Strange how the hypocritical Hollywood liberal elite forgive Polanski for raping children but Weinstein, Cosby and co. get cancelled, obviously some faces fit and others don’t.
7/10
Someone on Twitter pointed out the oddness of Donald 'Blofeld' Pleasance showing up in a film with Mike Myers, while the comic actor Michael Myers creates Austin Powers, in which his nemesis is the Pleasance Blofeld-like Dr Evil. Probably worked better when the Tweeted it...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@CoolHandBond I thought the film was always called The Ghost Writer, it is only Harris' book which is called The Ghost. One assumes this is because producers thought people would expect to see a spooky movie about ghosts if they used the original. If I'm honest, I prefer the movie title. The film is excellent IMO, a very fine understated thriller with good performances and plenty of twists, some unexpected. The closing scene is brilliant.
Re: Polanski, yes, awkward one that, a very fine filmmaker with a difficult history; strange that Chinatown, his best work, shares the subject matter. Is he still 'in favour'? He, of course, has not travelled to America for decades as he fled the country to avoid arrest and would be immediately arrested if he returned. He claims innocence through ignorance, but as that won't stand up in US courts; he'd be in plenty of trouble...
It's thorny, isn't it? The optics aren't quite the same nor is the actuality but I wouldn't mind them all being cancelled. Polanski - and I'm not an authority on this - had his way with an underage girl, I wouldn't quite term it 'rape a child' though legally it passes for that. At the time you had pop stars having their way with underage girls - Bowie himself and the allegations re Bill Wyman are out there, and then there's the issue of the late Jerry Lee Lewis, quite wretched but when all this came out the idea of grooming hadn't really taken hold.
Weinstein and Cosby is arguably on another level - no pretence of seduction here though I am uneasy with the argument I'm making, but it's basically 'both are awful, neither are the same'. W & C were relentless, and the allegations are of a prolonged history though I'm suddenly uneasy writing about Cosby seeing as he's been cleared, hasn't he, on a technicality. Odd to find Quentin's film has as its high point its chief character 'getting in' with Polanski the young film director, given Quentin's association with Weinstein and, I think, what Chris No1 pointed out as some dicy borderline stuff in that very film.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@chrisno1 It appears that The Ghost title was exclusively used in the UK only and The Ghost Writer everywhere else. According to Wikipedia the USA version used tamer language in a re-dubbed version to obtain a PG13 certificate, which I didn’t know until I looked up the title confusion in the opening sentence. I also didn’t proofread my original post properly and misspelled Eli Wallach (the bandit leader Calvera in my favourite film of all-time The Magnificent Seven) I hang my head in shame 😩
@Napoleon Plural As you say it’s all very subjective, which is my point, why are some given an easy ride (Woody Allen being another) and others cancelled?
I could go on with a rant against the cancel culture and wokeness in general, but I won’t.
I never knew that. Thanks
Oh, well, I don't know to pick this up or not, I mean Woody Allen was accused by one person, his step daughter I think, so it's 'he said, she said'. As one wag pointed out with Cosby, it's more 'he said, she said she said she said etc' namely the sheer numbers of the allegations, and the same could indeed be said of Weinstein. I think Allen has kind of been cancelled, his Annie Hall gets re-shown every so often but certainly not the excellent Manhattan because of course it has him as a bloke in his early 40s going after a teenage girl. None of his other films get resown much in the UK - unless you count Casino Royale! - so I don't know.
Weinstein hasn't been cancelled, he's been jailed and rightly so. The films he produced do get re-shown on telly.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Halloween last night and lots of channels have been showing horror movies all week. It was raining in London, so I managed to evade giving shortbread to trick or treaters and munched it all myself while partaking a recorded double bill of neck-biting horror:
SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES (1971)
Batty take on the vampire movie genre which blends traditional tropes with porno-chic. It’s very well presented. The images are quite startling. Filmed entirely on location – you can tell by the graffiti scrawled on the walls – the castle looks exactly how you’d expect a vampire’s castle to look: gloomy, crumbling, packed full of ancient and modern furniture, twisted passageways, candles, cemeteries, dungeons, heavy curtains. Minus the graffiti, of course. Director Jean Rollin knows he’s making this on the cheap and he conjures ingenious visual tricks to keep our interest. For instance, the succubus materialises inside a grandfather clock striking midnight or out of an abandoned well in a puff of smoke; a dead white dove is placed bleeding on a coffin lid; blood streaks down the castle walls following the death of a vampire hunter; a library becomes a theatre of war. There are many pleasingly stark images of, in and around the castle, plenty of pallid night scenes, shadows and light, an aquarium containing a human skull as a fish house, an octagonal dining room which the camera swirls around as the diners interact. Photographer Jean Jacques Renon works wonders, all things considered.
There’s not much plot to work with. Newly-weds Antonio and Issa plan to visit her cousins, who live in an aging chateau castle. Upon arrival they are informed the cousins have died, but the two comely maid servants invite them to stay anyway. While Antonio has a sleepless night away from his distraught bride, Issa [the beautiful Sandra Julien] is seduced into the world of vampirism by the androgenous succubus Isolde, played with some bone-tingling chilliness by the skeletal model Dominique. The cousins were once great modern day vampire hunters, but they were caught out and, after attempting to stake each other [seen during the peculiar prologue] have become agents for the ‘monster’ of vampirism. They retain their castle and their independence by regularly feeding off the blood of their lesbian servants, who conveniently spend most of their time in the nude, necks and breasts ready bared, as it were. Isolde resents the two cousins, calling them bourgeois vampires, and has been sent to initiate them fully into the dark world. Antonio thinks they are mere intellectual, conceited hippies. Issa grows steadily more in love with the vampirism and decides to complete her own initiation. Will Antonio rescue her on time?
Accompanied by a terrible script, which tries to be clever but just seems funny, and not many genuine shocks or chills, plus a gratingly distracting prog-rock soundtrack from Anacanthus, an audience really only has the visuals to entertain them, unless your partial to women wandering around old chateau in the nude.
Rather good, at its level, I’m just not sure what kind of level it is.
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008)
Set in wintery Stockholm, Let the Right One In is a modern vampire movie which prefers to concentrate on the central seductive and dependent relationship of its adolescent characters, Oskar and Eli. The former is a bashful, bullied twelve-year old boy from a broken home. The latter a two-hundred-year old female child vampire.
Tomas Alfredson directs with genuine class and he’s aided by Hoyte van Hoytema’s fabulous photography as well as a literate screenplay from original author John Ayvide Lindqvist. The film doesn’t veer far from the Centrum housing block Oskar and Eli live in, Oskar’s school and the local bar where the older, bitter residents live. This brings a sense of claustrophobia to the scenes, which are set in enclosed spaces – even the outside space is wrapped in apartment blocks, and the two prospective friends initially play on a jungle climbing frame, a cage in itself. As the film progresses and their relationship develops into one of mutual need, their horizons, rather than broaden, contract. It’s a startling, closeted movie that has moments of emotional power and uncharacteristic grace for the genre. The film doesn’t skirt on shock value either, but the expected horrors come at us in a languid fashion which hints at the dolefulness of an Arctic winter. We are lulled into a sense of adolescent wonder, the fairy tale of snowy landscapes and first love and intimacy, a tranquil balloon burst by sudden moments of violence, which creep out of the semi-darkness, and not all by the vampire either.
Eli has an aging guardian who murders for her benefit and Oskar is frequently attacked by a trio of classmates in a steadily escalating child war. When we first meet the young lad, he’s stabbing a tree with a hunting knife, exclaiming lines from Lord of the Flies, which we later learn are used to mock him by the bully, Conny. Oskar’s abandonment is exemplified by his mother’s disinterest and his father’s homosexuality. He turns to Eli for comfort at the very moment her own guardian betrays her trust. In a telling scene the weary, disconsolate Hakan [Per Ragnar] pleads with Eli not to meet with Oskar – it only becomes clear later that he recognises the relationship which will develop, that the young boy will become his replacement.
The film is beautiful to look at and the two leads are brilliant and entirely genuine. Kare Hedebrant’s Oskar looks old before his time, his eyes wary of everyone and everything, even if his angelic countenance screams naivety. Lina Leandersson is doublely confident in a role which requires a more worldly, mature composition. Sadly her dialogue was dubbed for the director considered her voice too high for the mature role. That does make sense and thankfully, the dubbing is well done and doesn’t affect our interpretation of Eli’s character. The film works best as a romance, a sort of Endless Love for vampires, ‘say goodbye to innocence’ and all that. The relationship which builds, while chaste, is suggestive of deeper feelings and as the resolution arrives, we are drawn into their touching dependence by a shared recognition of circumstance, despite the mounting horror and the obvious improbabilities.
An excellent film which does not dampen with repeated viewings.
1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood is a masterpiece of filmmaking.
I'm afraid you'll have to stop writing movie reviews like this. They are intellectual, thoughtful and gives us new perspective on the movie. The reviews are simply too good and they make the rest of us look stupid. You simply have to learn to write reviews that focus more on action scenes, explosions and hot women. Watch a Michael Bay-movie and write a positive review of it instead of embarrassing us like that!
Just saw the documentary John G. Avildsen: King Of The Underdogs (2017) on Amazon Prime recently and I quite enjoyed it. While I am not a big fan of documentaries as a whole, I have enjoyed a number of them that focus on subjects I am interested in. As the title shows, it is about the life and times of movie director John Avildsen who famously directed Rocky (1976) and The Karate Kid (1984) among others. I really learned quite a bit about the man that directed two of my favorite dramatic movies of all time. For instance, he grew up around cinema cameras his father was constantly filming the family at various gatherings, and this influenced him to become a film director after he worked in advertising for the Vespa scooter company. He began with some short films and then directed industrial films for various businesses, before he began making feature length films. Joe (1970) starring American actor Peter Boyle was his first successful film, although Rocky and The Karate Kid movies are his most popular movies.
I'll take that as a compliment. I'd like to point out I only review movies in depth when I consider there's something worthwhile reporting on. My review of The Rock, for instance is nice and sharp. Lots of blowing stuff up in that paragraph.
😁
'You shouldn't.'
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I saw it this on Sunday and I agree with the above review. I'm very glad movies like this are still being made. Smart, plot-driven, funny and playful! I wonder if this movie was green-lit after the success of Knives Out? Amsterdam is due soon and that looks like it's in the same style. The only gripe I have is how the movie makes it look like roughly 5-10% of the British population in the UK in the 50's were black. I'm all for good parts for black actors (and everyone in this movie are good - especially Saorise Ronan), but I'm a history buff too.
This is only a minor gripe. I enjoyed it very much and I can recommend it to everyone.
A bit like Terrance Malick's movies: beautiful pictures in search of a plot? It's shame if Amsterdam isn't good, because it has great potential.
LULLABY (2019)
AKA Chanson Douce
Leila Slimani’s Prix Goncourt winning novel is given a swift make-over by director Lucie Borleteau who really ought to have left it well alone. Slimani’s novel is a complicated, many-layered psychological drama which begins where this film ends and looks back at the characters’ behaviours and motivations through the eyes of a police investigator.
The film is told in a linear fashion which make sense if you want to a broad audience appeal, but the screenplay ditches the framing narrative and thus it doesn’t do anything new. In fact, the trio of writers [Jeremie Elkaim, Maiwenn and Borleteau herself] remove all of the book’s subtext, which is one of abandonment, and only retains the basic psycho-nanny theme. Leila Bekhti and Antonine Reinartz play a go-getting couple with two young kids who decide to employ a nanny, Louise, a disconcertingly calm Karin Viard, and recognise their folly too late. The subtlety of the novel’s narrative arc is completely lost among the low rent moments of suspense. Without the author’s ability to capture inner thought, the characters come across as very ordinary.
Assya da Silva plays the daughter Mila and she’s the best thing in it.
Read the book. It’s better.
RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (1985)
The second installment of the Rambo franchise, with Sylvester Stallone and Richard Crenna reprising their roles from First Blood.
One of the many "one man army" action films which frequently cropped up during the 1980's.
There's plenty of gunplay and explosions, and Octopussy's Steven Berkoff turns up in a supporting role, playing another Soviet villain.
A film not to be taken seriously (It's got an anti-government stance and questionable politics), but it's a passable escapist thrill ride.
7/10
The Kingsman: Golden Circle
Finally caught up with this first sequel, I'd looked forward to seeing it as the cinema but was put off by mediocre reviews who said it was a bit out there and tasteless. Not wishing to sound like a stuck record but I'd been hoping to take Mum to see this one - she died in the same year - because the trailer just looked great, all the OHMSS on steroids stuff ( I don't know if that Piz Gloria-style location actually exists.) But I'm glad I didn't - it wasn't just the dubious sex stuff of putting things up women's bums (a bugging device) but there's a truly horrible punishment meted out to one bad guy by the main villain which is kind of X rated and feels especially horrible after the cracking London Taxi chase through the streets of London and its Bond finale. Some of the humour is a bit Deadpool without the satirical fizz.
It's co-written by Jane Goldman and maybe there's the same problem with Kick Ass, which she also had a hand in - the first movie has charm, the second is a bit nasty and OTT. This Kingsman also has a long running time, like the Mission Impossible of around that time.
It seemed odd to have the main guy Eggsy romantically going after the Swedish princess rather than his mate in the Kingsman team - maybe the latter actress couldn't make the filming so got relegated to a virtual cameo?
Tonally it was a bit uneven and they don't seem to have many cast members left by the end of it. I didn't hate the transfer to America - the so-called Statesmen in Kentucky - but the American actors weren't too charismatic or funny in their own right. Odd to see our own Halle Berry join the cast, esp as her Die Another Day had that same stale bombastic feel. That said, I did prefer this kind of movie, it's more comedic yet it still had one excited. Julianne Moore was the villain, again a comedy villain turn like that of Samuel L Jackson, not bad once you realised you couldn't have Nicole Kidman doing the same thing again.
Berry looked great for her age, it's just odd to see her in another franchise after X-Men, esp as in the script it's like she's meant to be late 30s if that, having been passed over for promotion. That said, not sure there's been a follow up to this one. There was a prequel, which I've not seen.
It all exists in a strange virtual reality as the US President in this is not anyone we know. Though it came out in 2017 and pre-pandemic, a lot of it seems highly prescient.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
This is going to annoy @Number24
SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)
A film which needs little introduction. It is often repeated on telly. I’ve seen it twice in the cinema as well. It is a film whose reputation precedes it, is frequently voted the best musical of all time and regularly features in the top 10 or 20 best film polls of all time. There is of course an iconic dance number. For a very long time, I ranked it extremely highly also. So what was wrong this time out? Something is suddenly amiss in the land of Kelly / Donen / Freed.
Singin’ in the Rain is a quality product, don’t get me wrong, yet on this viewing I found myself wondering if the film isn’t merely a Hollywood located remake of the previous years An American in Paris. Please note. In the earlier film Gene Kelly plays an out of luck artist in Paris trying to extricate himself from a relationship, he takes up with a younger woman, romances her, makes a success of his career and, before winning her heart, imagines his future life against a musical backdrop. In this film Gene Kelly is a silent movie star trying to extricate himself from a relationship, he meets a younger woman and falls for her, helps her career and his as talkies take off and imagines a movie story played out against a musical backdrop.
There’s no musical cohesion in this film either. In An American… all the songs were by George and Ira Gershwin and the composer’s An American in Paris Suite was utilised for the stylised ballet played out against huge reproductions of French impressionist paintings. For all its dramatic faults, An American… has the feel and verve of a prestige production, that the director, choreographer and producer wanted to create a landmark film, showcasing the talents of its stars and the composers. Gene Kelly had form for this; he was the most forward thinking of musical actors, much more so than Fred Astaire, who was content to parade his work on the studio set. Kelly took the movies into the realm of fantasy by dancing with Jerry Mouse in Anchors Aweigh, reality by location shooting for On The Town, ballet with his stupendous dancing fight scenes in The Pirate, and never once lost sight of a film’s need to entertain. Singin’ in the Rain, while essentially a self-mockery of Hollywood doesn’t deliver anything new because it is primarily concerned with the past. The songs are all from the 1920s and 30s and presented as if from the films of that era, so we have a Busby Berkley tribute, a flapper number, dance routines on movie sound stages and the climatic ‘ballet’ reimagines 42nd Street, The Broadway Melody and Scarface for its musical settings. Gene Kelly bawling ‘Gotta Dance’ over and over while surrounded by images of Broadway in lights isn’t any more original than Ruby Keeler belting out 42nd Street.
The film has an elongated beginning, which I subsequently learnt were the three original draft ideas of screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolphe Green. Unable to decide which opening to use [a party, a movie premiere, a star escaping vaudeville] they cobbled together all three and the approach makes the audience pull back from the action. There are snippets of song and dance, but the montage sequence shows us the relationship between Don Lockwood [Kelly] and Cosmo Brown [Donald O’Connor – excellent] when the film is really about the relationship between Lockwood and Kathy Seldon [Debbie Reynolds – also excellent].
It gets going proper at a post-premier party where Kathy’s Coconut Grove dancers Charleston away to All I Do Is Dream Of You in a cute pre-Bugsy Malone style. This is where Don develops feelings for the heroine, but at the moment he would traditionally [Broadway tradition] sing of his desires, the movie cuts away to him moping about the Monumental Studios film lot. There was originally a scene where Don sang the ballad version of All I Do… while walking and dancing home. Later on, when he’s beginning to get his hooks into Kathy and she’s responding, a scene where she sings You Are My Lucky Star to his image on a billboard was also cut. Losing these character pointers makes Don and Cathy’s romance seem impetuous.
Instead we get Donald O’Connor’s Make ’Em Laugh, which is a tour-de-force routine to the only new song in the film, but it sounds and looks remarkably like Be A Clown from Kelly’s 1948 film The Pirate. This is meant to cheer poor Don up, but we haven’t yet registered he’s feeling blue. Don eventually declares his love during a well-executed romantic interlude filmed on an empty sound stage, but it feels a little late by now and it is only Don who sings You Were Meant For Me; Kathy remains entirely silent.
The film progresses breezily to its climax and is best in the mid-section where, following a disastrous preview of Don’s first talkie, a plan is hatched to make-over the historical adventure as a fantasy musical, including Kathy’s voice dubbing the screechy tones of Lina Lamont [Jean Hagen – deliberately exceptionally awful]. The scheming trio perform the uplifting and brilliantly executed Good Morning [originally a Garland / Rooney number from the brilliant Babes in Arms] among the kitchen and lounge of Don’s mansion. Gene Kelly was particularly hard on Debbie Reynolds as she wasn’t a trained dancer, but her athleticism and ability really does shine through as she holds more than her own against two tried and trusted hoofers such as Kelly and O’Connor. As the lone girl she’s crammed between the two men, centre screen, and your eye is almost constantly focussed on her, which makes the performance even more marvellous. This scene of course is followed by Gene Kelly’s moment of movie history. There’s no real need to comment on a slice of cinematic magic. Find it on You Tube and watch it yourselves.
The film loses its way at the end, or almost the end, as Kelly and Cyd Charisse enact the Broadway Ballet, a crude ten-minute dance number lacking all the subtlety and panache of its forerunner in An American In Paris. While supposedly recreating a big 1930s movie musical sequence, the ballet at times resembles a 1920s silent movie skit, which stretches irony, I suppose. Everything tidies itself up well, but there’s no big finale and the movie ends too swiftly.
Okay. You’ll say I’m being overly harsh on an all-time classic film, but if critics, filmmakers and audiences are going to label something as ‘best’ or ‘all-time classic’ then it must remain open to close scrutiny. The late 1940s and early 1950s was a particularly rich vein for musicals, chiefly because Technicolor film became more widely used and turned dull monochromes into lavish rainbow extravaganzas. But with so many good or great films being released every year, they do imitate themselves a lot. The films written specifically for the screen, like Singin’ in the Rain, often lack a theatrical sense of character and purpose. They are designed for throw-away entertainment and sometimes forget that we as an audience need to be involved in a character’s personal journey; it isn’t enough to expect a few songs to do that if they are not inserted purposefully into the narrative. This is why movie adaptations of stage successes such as My Fair Lady or, in this decade, Carousel, The King and I or Pal Joey, work so effectively, because they are structured to involve and intrigue an audience, taking them beyond what we see on screen and into the hearts of the characters. An American in Paris succeeds in this [the plot isn’t played for laughs, which might help] while Singin’ in the Rain, for all its brilliance, doesn’t.
Best ever? All-time great? Well, yes, probably, begrudgingly, I suppose, but the enduring success and acclaim for the film rests entirely on one or two moments of musical joy and a clutch of willing performances. There’s nothing spectacularly new or inventive about anything on screen; even the sets are humdrum. The film is one of surface depth only, fine as far as it goes, and Debbie Reynolds is absolutely fantastic, but I yearn for so much more.
This annoyed me.
Number24 says:
This annoyed me
😁 and 😉 and 🤐
THAT scene remains brilliant and didn't Kelly have flu when he filmed it? The rest of the film I've struggled to really enjoy. In common with My Fair Lady a lot of it is based around trying to get the leading lady to speak properly which I find grating, in this case there's no 'She's got it!' moment so it seems mean-spirited though following usual tropes it's made clear she deserves what's coming.
I thought Kelly's character was down in the dumps because of his career, not that he was lovelorn.
A strange irony is that while it's all about the unfairness of dubbing, Debbie Reynolds' singing was also dubbed which makes it all rather confusing.
Roger Moore 1927-2017