This is of course Kenneth Branagh's second Poirot movie. I'm not going to dwell on the plot, the title tells you everything you need to know going in. Instead I'm going to say what I liked and what I didn't like. I think too many scenes were obviously CGI: I don't mind subtle use of CGI to help the story, but this movie goes too far. There is also a backstory for Poirot's famous mustache (!) that I find unnecessary. In recent years there's been a tendency to "blackwash" period movies by casting non-white actors in roles that "coloured" people didn't have at the time and let everyone else in the movie pretend it was absolutely normal. I understand why. One wants to give non-white actors parts according to their talent and people in the audience who happens not to be white someone on screen they can easily relate to. This is the case in this movie too. There's even a scene where a upper-class Englishman who mentions the reasons why his mother won't accept his new love interest. He never mentions that the woman is black! But at least the black characters are (blues) musicians, and it's one of the few reason I can picture rich Englishmen who were unusually broad-minded for their time could treat black people as equals. One of the black character also refers to racism at one point. That's a plus.
What else do I like? the movie has a sense of adventure, drama and fun. it's also nice to look at, especially Gal Gadot and Emma Mackey are fabulous to look at. There are also many really good actors, and again Mackey impresses, A star in the making I think. All in all the movie is an example of star-studded entertainment with action, mystery and beautiful locations. I like that!
Dennis Sanders directed the original cinema release of That’s The Way It Is and I’ve been lucky enough to view that on the big screen where it looked fabulous: Elvis Presley in concert in his post-movie gig prime, swinging those hips and rattling off the tunes with all the gusto he can manage and more. There was a big host of backstage rehearsal footage and a clutch of scenes for fans’ comments. It felt like a prestige event film which added to the Presley mythology by emphasising his natural style and flamboyance both on and off stage. The documentary type footage dragged a bit, but generally I was impressed.
Not so this time out.
In 2001, the movie was reedited. This is the version I watched tonight. More concert footage has been included and many of the rehearsal scenes have been shaved. The movie is shorter by ten minutes, which is unusual for recuts. Thus, strangely, a few songs associated strongly with the movie and its accompanying LP have been excised, most notably I Just Can’t Help Believing. It’s one of Elvis’ better albums, but to be fair, most of the tracks on it are not the same as the versions seen on screen. However, even given that, for me this 2001 ‘remix’ is missing a few highlights. A 2007 2-disc DVD includes both edits, but the original is only in mono not stereo. This messing with Elvis Presley’s back catalogue feels as callous as the treatment meted out on the King’s product by his over-zealous manager Colonel Tom Parker, a man whose good promotional ideas ran out quicker than a chicken on the run. Parker knew nothing about music and interfered nefariously in Elvis’ releases, demanding unnecessary mixes to over-showcase his meal-ticket’s voice, even after Elvis and producer Felton Jarvis had mixed them specifically to sound gritty and earthy.
There is a hint of what some of Elvis’ seventies output might have sounded like in the stage version of Polk Salad Annie which has Elvis slurring and blurring his words – he forgets some and needs a prompt – the bass and drums cracking louder than loud, no choral accompaniments, a driving, rolling, pulsating rhythm; he moves those hips like a demon too. He sounds and acts down and dirty, which is what we and he want. While the over excited chorus of voices does sterling work on The Wonder of You, You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling and In The Ghetto, you do get the impression there’s a competition going on between the high notes of the Sweet Inspirations and Elvis’ roaring emotional deliveries. It doesn’t always work and tips over badly during the rehearsals for Bridge Over Troubled Water. Watching Elvis trying to squeeze a unique harmony arrangement for an already classic song looks and sounds like folly. It’s not a great track on the album and it was one of the smarter moves to edit the live performance out of the new film version.
Lucien Ballard’s photography captures the gaudiness of the King of Rock n Roll standing out under spotlights in his white jump suit slashed to the navel. Set against the dull backgrounds of the Las Vegas Hilton International Concert Auditorium he’s like an angel banished from heaven for misbehaviour. In rehearsals he makes reference to oral sex while singing One Night and tits about bawdily with his entourage. At times, even on stage, he acts the clown and occasionally looks bored by the whole experience. A high-speed traipse through Heartbreak Hotel lacks any of the energy, danger and vigour of 1956 or even the 1968 T.V. Special cut. The forum doesn’t help.
The Hilton’s concert arena is basically a huge lounge bar with tables in the stalls and standard seats in the upper circle. It looks nothing like how you’d envisage a venue for a rock performance in 1970. I watched Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen recently with its warts and all touring chaos and enormous stadium stages, a band out of control and a singer lapping up the fan worship. I’m thinking too of Woodstock and Gimmie Shelter, those documents to the decline of Flower Power and the Tune In Drop Out generation, how those events drew enormous crowds and the performers responded.
Elvis, even while once again producing number one singles and albums, simply isn’t drawing the same audience. He’s still adored. We do see a few screeching women. The moment where Elvis ventures into the audience to greet them face to face is something I can’t imagine most stars doing today or even in 1970. Yet, there’s something old fashioned about the show; something watered down and sweetened. He comes out with swagger and power: the movie credits are played over the medley Mystery Train / Tiger Man and he’s shaking and slithering all over the stage [the 1970 version utilised better footage from the Memorial Coliseum shows in Phoenix, Arizona]; when the concert starts the re-edit emphasises the past and it’s 1950s all the way, sped up and balls of fun, Elvis even clicks his tongue nonchalantly during I Got A Woman, as if he’s back in Sun Studios jamming with the boys. But why is he tied to his guitar through these rip-roaring numbers? The effect the same as watching him play at mannequins back in Girl Happy. He’s so safe, it’s no wonder he gets bored by Heartbreak Hotel.
The once great and founder King of Rock n Roll is now playing to Sammy Davis Jr and Cary Grant, for goodness' sake, men from a different era and style altogether. After the comeback of 1968/69 – in fairness Elvis hadn’t been away, just distressingly poor musically – I’d expected something more extravagant and snarling, something in-your-face, contemporary, relevant and threatening. At the time, Elvis was not much older than the rock stars making and performing ground-breaking pop, soul and rock. As if to demonstrate his contemporary appeal, Elvis seamlessly blends Little Sister with the Beatles’ Get Back and the middle section of the concert is taken up predominantly singing other artists’ material. For all that, there’s something anodyne in the presented footage. The best performances [Polk Salad Annie, Suspicious Minds, I Can’t Stop Loving You] seem to jar because they demonstrate the side we all wanted to see and see prosper following that great ‘in person’ show filmed for the 1968 TV Special. But here, not once does he interact with his band beyond some risible joking about. I’m expecting Elvis to sing back-to-back with lead guitarist James Burton, like Freddie Mercury might with Brian May, or Jagger with Richards, maybe even strum his own six-string while Burton, John Wilkinson, Charlie Hodge and Jeff Scheff rock out with him. There’s nothing.
The King is on his throne and sucking up the adulation, alone and almost bewildered. Several times Elvis looks out at the throng and seems barely able to believe it. He’s almost lost for words between songs and sometimes during them. His asides are strained, even in rehearsal; Elvis doesn’t have any wit – he prefers self-depreciation of the most infantile kind, prat falls and see-through double-entendres. He almost seems lost among the orchestra and chorus, fans and audience. At the end, Dennis Sanders films from the rear of the stage and Elvis is a tiny white figure at the bottom of the screen, arms outstretched Christ-like, absorbing the applause from the multitude, but the curtain is already coming down.
That’s The Way It Is probably takes the award as the best of Elvis’ seventies concert films, chiefly because he occasionally demonstrates his agility and physicality, but I’m not sure the 2001 remix has done him any favours. If you can, find the original edit, it might be better; at least it still features I Just Can’t Help Believing.
Excellently presented footage of Elvis Presley on a fifteen city tour in mid-72 makes up for some of the pedestrian nature of the preceding rockumentary That’s the Way It Is.
Ken Zemke’s split screen editing was overseen by Martin Scorsese; it delivers an energy generally lacking in the King’s performances thanks to multiple angles of Elvis, the band and audience reactions mingling together in a confusion of sound and vision. Sometimes it is difficult to know which image to concentrate on. Luckily, the songs just about hold up to scrutiny. The film probably looks and sounds better on a big screen than a small. The footage was captured with ten hand held 16mm cameras. The film stock was blown up in the lab to 35mm for the split work or 70mm for the full screen. It must have been a painstaking process and it is disappointing to see the results don’t contain any truly vintage Elvis routines. His actual performances veer from the powerful to the laid back to the vibrant. Lots of audience kissing. He seems most at home in the rehearsal theatres jamming out gospel standards. On stage he carries an air of bejewelled yet flawed excellence, disguised under Bill Belew’s sequined jumpsuits and capes.
Directors Pierre Adidge and Robert Abel were reluctant to take on the filmic task. They helmed one of the genre’s best, Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, but didn’t rate Dennis Sanders’ That’s the Way It Is, chiefly because they reckoned the star was faking it and playing up to the camera, both on and off stage. Watching these low key behind the scenes sequences, narrated by Elvis himself from an interview he delivered specifically for the movie, you can see the difference. He’s much less cooperative to the filmmakers, bordering on the introverted. His dark gaudy sunglasses rarely leave his face until he hits front of stage; instead he shuffles awkwardly, nervously between Joe Esposito and Red West, drinking water, fiddling with his sleeves, searching for a scarf. The military entrances and exits to the shows are disturbed by Esposito’s instructions to Elvis in the Green Room regarding the position of the spotlights and the depth of the stage. It becomes apparent the King hasn’t visited the venue, performed a sound check or a lighting rehearsal. That might be a 1970s thing – tours were notoriously fast during the era and not just for Elvis – but it does suggest a slapdash approach the act. Elvis contradicts this lack of preparation by revealing he suffers bouts of stage fright, so incredibly appreciative that people have travelled such distances and spent hard earned dollars to see him, and that it might be the only chance they get, he is almost petrified lest he cannot deliver the best possible performance.
True to the contradiction, the live tracks are a mixed bag. Four shows were taped and none of them replicate the swagger of the 1968 TV Special or even the intimate reverence of the Las Vegas shows. Elvis seems already to have engaged in a parody of his own showbiz character. The misplaced religious iconography of The American Trilogy is a case in point, all those Christ-like arms, the cape floating like an eagle’s wings. At the opposite end, the dreadful Bridge Over Troubled Water – dropped from the reissue of That’s the Way It Is – is included here. Elvis just can’t do the song any kind of justice, bawling the lyrics with little grace; If I Can Dream it is not. He shatters the rhinestone illusion again during a breakneck rendition of Burning Love which he sings from a lyric sheet. During Love Me Tender a montage of kisses from his movie career proves diverting and also hints at what we are missing, a semblance of naughtiness and fun. The clips inserted from The Ed Sullivan Show demonstrate his glorious past and Elvis’ older self compares badly to the younger. Perhaps what the directors catch best is the frightening intensity of the fans. They scream, cry and wail exactly how they did in 1956 and recite whole histories of their ‘love affair’ with the King, listing every moment and item of his career which resonates to them. They are a mixture of women who grew up with Elvis and those who clearly couldn’t, including young teenagers. The number of men in attendance is testament to an enduring cross-over appeal.
Colonel Tom Parker is conspicuous by his absence from proceedings. The Memphis Mafia looks after Elvis on the road. His manager just counts the cash. A planned vinyl double album was binned as the release date of the movie (November 1972) was so close to the televised concert Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite and its own accompanying record (January 1973). Indeed Elvis had already released the excellent As Recorded at Madison Square Garden earlier that year and the soundtrack here encapsulates material included on both recordings: See See Rider, Proud Mary, Never Been to Spain, Funny How Time Slips Away, I Got A Woman, You Gave Me A Mountain [brilliant, but not as good as the ’73 version] etc.
There’s a moment towards the end of the gig when the King lets J.D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet take over the singing. Elvis takes a breather, absorbing the spiritual, bringing back fleeting memories of those impromptu rehearsals which he loves, which allow him to sing and praise without the need to entertain. When the final curtain call and escape run takes him to the waiting limousine, Elvis is crammed into a backseat, handed a glass of water and gloriously congratulated. Not a critical word is said. He stares out the window and seems completely isolated from those around him, perhaps wondering where that spirit has evaporated to.
For £15.50 a matinee ticket, imagine finding that it is filmed in 4:3 square format not just for the opening colour footage of 1950s London but throughout the whole film! As it's visually truncated, you'd think you'd get a price reduction! Mind you I made that point at the Prince Charles cinema when they showed the first three Bonds there - I know @chrisno1 will back me up here - but no dice, had to pay the same!
Honestly!
Anyway, this film is both brilliant and a bit exasperating. It's about a pen pusher for a Westminster Council I guess, head of his team, very much the bowler-hatted umbrella type you see in A Hard Day's Night being goaded by the Beatles and it's that kind of era, well before the Beatles really, Anyway, he has a life-changing bit of news that makes him revaluate things... problem is, the reviews made clear what he does that is key on this and that event doesn't happen towards the end of the movie so you keep wondering - if you've read the review - exactly when it's going to happen.
The film is visually impressive, I follow a Twitter account called Yesterday's Britain, Yesterday's Better that posts all these nostalgic photos of 50s to 80s Britain, old high streets and so on and this film is like living in that. It's almost too authentic, it hurts. Everything gleams.
Nighty is good although the way he is introduced doesn't quite match how the character is when he opens up. I suppose in another movie he'd play a repressed queen who decides to embrace his true self - Nighy would be good at that, I think Christopher Plummer bagged an Oscar for that kind of role didn't he?
What nagged is that it didn't quite ring true a lot of the time and one wonders if it isn't almost deliberate as an emotional ruse. I don't know. Some of it made me tense for the wrong reasons. Some I couldn't understand which was infuriating for a very simple movie in terms of plot. Not much happens so I don't want to spoil it. But Nighy looks like he's 70 or so and I can't figure how that relates with his family, or even if the couple who live in his house are son and son's girlfriend or son and daughter. Other stuff doesn't make sense - he visits Brighton for an excursion of fun and says he 's taken out half his life savings... You spend the time worrying he's going to lose it. Other stuff just doesn't make sense, I won't bang on but if you see it you may agree. Or not.
It's based on a Japanese film I think maybe it translated better there, maybe I'd see much the same stuff in the original and find it more credible then again a Japanese person might then have the same concerns.
It's another of those films that wrong foot you - you think some specific thing is going to happen, then it doesn't. Maybe that's a metaphor for life?
The ending gets you going and it's all very moving so I guess it worked its magic. Reminded me a little of The End of the Affair with Ralph Fiennes.
@Napoleon Plural nice review. This movie was in the LFF this year. I was half inclined to give it a go, but the original is a Kurasawa classic and is so good I couldn't put myself through the potential disappointment. I'm not sure a European film would project the theme of post-war wasted civil loyalty so effectively.
I like movies who shows us a time and place we haven't seen before, and "The woman king" delivers. it's set in West Africa (modern day Benin) in the 1820's. The real-life Dahomey kingdom had an elite military unit called Agoije that was all female. This is the way to have women and non-whites in un-traditional roles in period movies, and not to pretend it was normal when it wasn't!
Viola Davis plays general General Nanisca, the commander of the Agoije. She's plays a military leader with a lot of authority, but she isn't a two-dimensional "strong woman". Nanisca has doubts and fears, and Viola Davis does an impressive job at portraying a multi-dimensional character. Our own Lashana Lynch has found herself a niche playing warrior women, and here she plays a boot camp drill sergeant convincingly.
The movie is honest enough to show Dahomey as a nation involved in the slave trade (as it very much was), but Nanisca realizes this is a dark road. A nation that takes and sells slaves slaves gets richer and gets guns and gun powder to defeat and capture other nations that don't. It's a vicious circle. The general suggests cultivating palm oil instead, but at the same time expanding the Agoije for the threats that are coming.
The movie has a lot of good battle and action scenes, my only complaint being that the female soldiers hardly ever use guns. Why not?
I liked the movie and I recommend it because it's well made and shows a fresh story from history. The plot may take a lot of artistic freedoms, but the same thing can very much be said about Braveheart. It's still a good movie.
I hadnt realised The Woman King was about the Dahomey.
The Dahomey featured in the Flashman novel Flash for Freedom, one of the most vivid and disturbing chapters in the whole Flashman saga, one of the many bits where I thought "this cant be real", then looked it up and found it was true, just not history like we prefer it to be told
I’d never heard of this film before but it turned up on the BritBox streaming app so I gave it a go.
Charlie gets fired on his first day at a call centre but colleague Gus asks him to help in blackmailing a local reverend who is using porn sites. They are overheard by a teenage girl who insists on getting in on the action. There’s a background story of a serial killer on the loose which ties into the ending. There are lots of twists and turns as the plot all goes wrong.
David Schwimmer and Simon Pegg are good as the blackmailers. The film tries to be a bit too clever for it’s own good with the multiple twists that occur, but it rolls along nicely in a quick 90 minutes. It takes place in Oregon but was filmed in Canada, Wales and the Isle Of Man, presumably with some film foundation grant.
It’s worth a look f you’ve got nothing better to do at the time.
5/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Flash For Freedom is the best in the series in my opinion. The mixture of fictional characters alongside real historical characters is never better realised in this series as it is here and man’s inhumanity to man is laid open to he bone.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I have enjoyed the Flashman book and may enjoy them again - but I jumped ahead it seems, being 'clever' I read them in chronological order rather than publishing order. So Flashman and the Redskins starts off at one date, then flashes forward some decades - this part doesn't ring true. But what really put me off was that Flashy does something truly despicalble and sociopathic to one squeeze - not simply bounder-ish as we'd expect - and it put me right off the character. Perhaps, being a later book, the author had tired of the character by that point?
Last night on BBC1 I stayed up for my first showing of Captain America: Winter Soldier, no ad breaks so no slog. It was a case of where has this film been all my life - I couldn't believe I hadn't got around to seeing this earlier. I caught the origins story a couple of years ago on telly I think. I sort of recall it, not bad, touch of the Wonder Woman about it, person from the past relocated to the present.
Odd to see this film came out in 2014 and how long ago that was and what I was doing at the time. I suppose one reason I didn't see it was it was the beginning of getting tied up with the care homes my mother was in, it just went on and on so I didn't get to the movies that year much, she nearly died due to care home neglect, luckily she pulled through and the last film I ever took her to see was Spectre at the BFI Imax. But there were other reasons too - I hadn't caught the first movie, and this was a sequel plus the poster (above) doesn't really draw you in or do justice to the sheer slickness of the spectacle - it's like an old-style Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me on steroids.
There are quite a few nods to Bond films in this but it moves along so quickly I can't recall them - however the climactic fight on the satellite dish between two men with a long-standing history is very much GoldenEye, it's just way ahead in terms of scale. The Bonds can't compete with this stuff at all. Lee Tamorahi was right when he said CGI was the way of the future if this is anything to go by, he was just 10 years ahead of his time and in the wrong movie. There isn't much difference one could argue between Die Another Day and this film, save this film is enjoyable and has real charm to it. And wit. And intelligence. And heart. Oh, and they know how to do water CGI this time round.
The Bonds seem to have nicked from this though, the scene where Fury (Samuel L Jackson) is trying to escape in his car but is cornered and machine gunned etc was used in No Time To Die with Bond and the Aston, which isn't so original to me now, even if it is an Aston so has novelty value.
I'm still confused about the Avengers world and who is in it. Deadpool isn't tied up with this is he? That's X-Man stuff because he mentions Wolverine disparagingly. But he might as well be. Spiderman is tied up with it, albeit the recent ones. Wonder Woman isn't though she might as well be - she's in with Superman and Batman, right? They made her film better by borrowing a fair amount from Captain America in terms of vision.
The plot in Winter Soldier pretty good though it's the usual McGuffin - a shadowy organisation within the official State organisation, and bit of Mission Impossible-style hijinks. The last Bond film flirted with this but didn't take it there. The plot does work in this, I think the Bond films of late, struggle to sell their McGuffin. CR was - hey, it's a new Bond! It's Fleming again! It's a Bond Begins story! QoS had nothing. SF - hey, it's Bond again! Q is back - and Moneypenny! Spectre I loved but tbf it's main theme is that Spectre and Blofeld are back, without that it's thin on plot and NTTD is, hey, it's Craig's final film, hey it's been delayed but it's here at last and hey! Bond's dead. I don't think these are great plots that involve us, they' re gimmick-led, as Barbel suggests albeit only for his review of NTTD.
Anyway, I'd far rather sit down with the family this Christmas with a DVD of Captain America and this sequel (though the title is misleading, there's nothing wintery about it) than a recent Bond film. This is all highly formulaic - to a fault some might say - but it works.
I'm still confused about the Avengers world and who is in it. Deadpool isn't tied up with this is he? That's X-Man stuff because he mentions Wolverine disparagingly. But he might as well be. Spiderman is tied up with it, albeit the recent ones. Wonder Woman isn't though she might as well be - she's in with Superman and Batman, right? They made her film better by borrowing a fair amount from Captain Americain terms of vision.
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Wonder Woman's easy, as you say she's with Superman and Batman. They are all characters published by DC comics, and DC and Marvel have been rival publishing companies since the 1930s, litigious over their trademarks, copywrites, and intellectual properties
The others you name are trickier because they are all from Marvel Comics the publisher. The thing here is the comic book company formed its own movie studio to produce Iron Man in 2008, and twenty odd sequels since then including Captain America movies.
Prior to that Marvel Comics the publisher licensed its properties to existing studios like Fox or Sony. Fox had the rights to the X-Men and another series called Fantastic Four, they made those good X-Men movies in the late 90s/early 00s, and Deadpool was a spinoff. That's why Deadpool lives in the same universe as Wolverine.
Sony owns the right to SpiderMan but reached a deal with Marvel that Marvel could include him as a character in Avengers movies but still make a share of the profits and be able to make their own movies. Theres been a couple Sony-made SpiderMan spinoffs that got lousy reviews. I'm not sure who actually made the last three SpiderMan movies, I dont understand the legalities. Hulk is also tangled up in some sort of deal like that.
Marvel has recently bought back the rights to XMen and Fantastic Four. We should be seeing both groups of characters in upcoming Marvel films, though probably rebooted versions.
None of which has anything to do with whether Winter Soldier is a good film. it is, its one of the best Marvel Comics films, and probably most of interest to spyfilm fans. It borrows a lot from the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the early 1970s
But I would say its the first Captain America film that borrows from the old Wonder Woman teevee series, whereas the Wonder Woman film had to revise its context to World War I to avoid comparisons to the Captain America film
I don’t really like Agatha Christie as a writer and I once attempted to read her books, but failed on every attempt. I gave up on Orient Express when I encountered a diagram of the sleeping car where the action purports to take place. It was like reading Cluedo.
Still, Lucy Worsely’s excellent three-part television biography of Christie has whetted my appetite. Have I been too harsh, I am asking myself? At the time, I was reading Marques and Hemingway, Lorca and Auden, Graham Greene and Larkin, so perhaps Christie didn’t fit the frame of mind. So, disappointed by another England football failure, I skipped over the analysis by ITV’s trio of grumpy ex-players and partook of Kenneth Branagh’s entertaining and excellently presented film of one of Christie’s most celebrated novels.
Branagh himself takes on the role of Hercule Poirot and delivers an exceedingly fine moustache. This bothered me less than I thought it would. My main disappointment was the chopping and changing of the investigation, setting Poirot’s interviews in odd locations [he takes tea outside in the freezing cold, for instance] and editing them to the bone, so whatever back story each suspect character has is not sufficiently explained, either to the audience or, more worryingly, to Poirot. When Branagh reveals his solution to the murder of the unlikeable American businessman Samuel Ratchett, he frequently says “I supposed..” or “I suggest” which gives the impression he’s guessing. This Poirot is more robust, more physical and appears to be suffering from a doomed romance as well as a severe case of obsessive compulsive disorder. Trapped on a train with a brood of people he doesn’t like, you almost feel he’s framed them all up.
The big cast enjoys themselves. Johnny Depp, Judi Dench, Olivia Coleman, Penelope Cruz and Willem Defoe are decent, but like all Christie characters, they are essentially stereotypes. The inclusion of a black actor doesn’t bother me as much as the insistence on referencing his skin colour in a historical context, which draws an unnecessary attention to it. Ditto the moments of sudden violence, which are uncomfortable to watch and equally unnecessary. There’s some really poor CGI for the train journey and avalanche scenes. There really wasn’t a need to expand the film in this manner as it’s the claustrophobic atmosphere of the train carriage which provides half the drama.
A decent shout, but the whole thing was better done in Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version, a prime piece of tension filled drawing room detective drama. Branagh’s not cutting any new cloth here and it shows.
Nick Love isn’t what you would call a subtle film director (he also directed Outlaw and the remake The Sweeney) but he does direct with his finger on the pulse. He is the successor to Michael Winner (not a bad thing in my book) in churning out urban thrillers in the pulp fiction style of a Don Pendleton Executioner paperback.
Tommy Johnson (Danny Dyer) is approaching 30 in a dead end job where he lives for the weekend which will involve drug, alcohol, sex, and most important of all, a fight with a rival group of football hooligans. Realising that his life is on a downward spiral he has a premonition of doom and tries to make sense of it all. Dudley Sutton plays his grandfather, a WW2 veteran who tries to get him to mend his ways as he prepares to emigrate to Australia with friend John Junkin. Meanwhile, the football “firm” that Johnson belongs to is planning a major fight with arch-rivals Millwall.
The film is full of plot holes but it does have a raw energy that is surprisingly addictive.
6/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
This is one of those black comedies that I like to revisit every few years. Michael Caine is a veteran executive at an advertising company and unexpectedly he gets overlooked for promotion in preference for a younger man. His spendthrift nagging wife is devastated and continues to berate him for his lack of authority. In a fit of rage he pushes a beggar onto train tracks at the subway and gets away without being noticed. Gaining confidence from this he goes on a revenge killing spree, beginning with his wife…
Caine is excellent as the put upon executive who begins to enjoy the power of getting away with each successive murder. The suspicions of a detective and a female colleague who Caine dates after the death of his wife, add tension to the narrative and the film keeps you guessing to how it’s all going to pan out at the end.
Good fun.
7/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I just watched "A shock to the system" after seeing it recommend here. Thanks! I really enjoyed it. What kind of movie is this? Crime? Character study? Satire? Whatever it is, "A shock to the system" is smart, well acted and entertaining.
She Said about the exposure of Harvey Weinstein - I mean journalistic, ahem!
I think it was @caractacus potts who said he'd read Ronan Farrow's book Catch and Kill about his investigation into Weinstein on my recommendation, so here's a bizarre press clipping that will resonate. Avoid however if you haven't read Catch and Kill and intend to do so, due to spoilers.
I wasn't sure how She Said crossed into the same territory despite it being the same subject matter; it seems to be two women journalists for the New York Post while Ronan Farrow worked for NBC as a TV investigate journalist. Thing is, I felt Farrow's account was thrilling, while this isn't. I feel his account would have worked better, the problem being that he's a 'white saviour' or rather 'male saviour' type, a bit like Attenborough's Cry Freedom being criticised because if focussed on the heroics of the white man rather than the black guy Steve Biko who was central. You'd prefer to see two women bring Weinstein down.
I found the movie dramatically inert and poorly directed, the script very drear. It consists of the two journalists trying to get abused women to talk, either they say they won't go on the record or they hang up immediately. Usually this is a staple in such movies and one gets angry or put out on the reporter's behalf, here it just seems repetitive and you don't hate the characters as they're clearly traumatised and have been shut down by the Weinstein machine. Those protecting Weinstein ought to appear crafty and nasty - another staple of such tales - but here they don't really. It's all rather emotionally uninvolving despite one wanting to sympathise.
Weinstein is not shown except from behind - this is pleasing editorially though I doubt it pleased the actor or his agent. Thing is, films do require a villain. This is all a bit PC, I hate saying this but it has woman director, writer and so on but you want it to punch out a bit more, we see their husbands holding the baby and having nothing else to say at all, not even any comedy moments to speak of.
Actress Rose McGowan has a key role in this but is hardly mentioned at all while in Farrow's book there is a real WTF moment about her, it's brilliant. Gwyneth Paltrow's name comes up but it isn't followed through much. Some actresses who were abused play themselves - Ashley Judd I think, but others like Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle play others. This ought to be okay I guess but it is a bit confusing.
Mention is made of how they can expect their phones to be bugged but no evidence is provided for this, despite it almost certainly being true. Farrow's account dealt with this, and the astonishing reveal that Weinstein had recruited the Israeli intelligence services - Black Cube - to dig up dirt on Farrow and the story doesn't end there. In She Said, one journalist is bumped into in a crowded street and you think - a-ha! a bug has been planted on them, or a tracker device - but no, seems it was just a bump in the street and nothing doing.
Ominous music is made to do a lot of heavy lifting to convey tension and drama. I found myself thinking, all this would be okay as a documentary but otherwise, there is nothing cinematic about any of this.
As few people were in the cinema for the matinee it was ruddy cold too, I mean the homeless used to go in the cinema to keep warm during the winter, they wouldn't with this place especially with matinee showings at £15.50.
At these prices I don't think the local Odeon is doing what it can to win custom, the whole cinema experience has no real allure to it, nothing special to draw you in.
It’s been a long while since I’ve seen this but it’s a terrific film with great performances. And Hoagy Carmichael appears, looking older than Ian Fleming’s visionary version of James Bond.
Whats intriguing me is what other classics do you need to cross off your list @Gymkata ?
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Its hard to believe that this is over 50 year’s old. Originally produced as a made-for-tv film it gained a cinematic release in Europe. Steven Spielberg had directed some television episodes including a Columbo and a segment of the Night Gallery TV movie before landing this thrilling chase movie. Dennis Weaver plays a salesman driving to meet a client who gets embroiled in a terrifying cat and mouse chase with a truck. Displaying a directorial maturity far behind his 25 years of age Spielberg ramps up the tension in Hitchcock style as Weaver becomes more and more desperate in his attempt to avoid death.
A special mention must be made to Richard Matheson who adapted his own short story for this outing. Matheson was a brilliant writer of novels (I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man) and screenplays (The Devil Rides Out, The Omega Man, Somewhere In Time) and a myriad of television episodes including The Twilight Zone. A special talent.
8/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I'm trying to watch all of the Best Picture winners that I haven't seen before as well as a bunch of other notable films that are highly regarded. Ones that come to mind include....
all of these are worth seeing even if they did win the Oscar.
Mildred Pierce is a James Cain adaptation and should maybe be watched as part of a triple feature with the Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity
Comments
Death on the Nile (2022)
This is of course Kenneth Branagh's second Poirot movie. I'm not going to dwell on the plot, the title tells you everything you need to know going in. Instead I'm going to say what I liked and what I didn't like. I think too many scenes were obviously CGI: I don't mind subtle use of CGI to help the story, but this movie goes too far. There is also a backstory for Poirot's famous mustache (!) that I find unnecessary. In recent years there's been a tendency to "blackwash" period movies by casting non-white actors in roles that "coloured" people didn't have at the time and let everyone else in the movie pretend it was absolutely normal. I understand why. One wants to give non-white actors parts according to their talent and people in the audience who happens not to be white someone on screen they can easily relate to. This is the case in this movie too. There's even a scene where a upper-class Englishman who mentions the reasons why his mother won't accept his new love interest. He never mentions that the woman is black! But at least the black characters are (blues) musicians, and it's one of the few reason I can picture rich Englishmen who were unusually broad-minded for their time could treat black people as equals. One of the black character also refers to racism at one point. That's a plus.
What else do I like? the movie has a sense of adventure, drama and fun. it's also nice to look at, especially Gal Gadot and Emma Mackey are fabulous to look at. There are also many really good actors, and again Mackey impresses, A star in the making I think. All in all the movie is an example of star-studded entertainment with action, mystery and beautiful locations. I like that!
THAT’S THE WAY IT IS (1970 / 2001)
Dennis Sanders directed the original cinema release of That’s The Way It Is and I’ve been lucky enough to view that on the big screen where it looked fabulous: Elvis Presley in concert in his post-movie gig prime, swinging those hips and rattling off the tunes with all the gusto he can manage and more. There was a big host of backstage rehearsal footage and a clutch of scenes for fans’ comments. It felt like a prestige event film which added to the Presley mythology by emphasising his natural style and flamboyance both on and off stage. The documentary type footage dragged a bit, but generally I was impressed.
Not so this time out.
In 2001, the movie was reedited. This is the version I watched tonight. More concert footage has been included and many of the rehearsal scenes have been shaved. The movie is shorter by ten minutes, which is unusual for recuts. Thus, strangely, a few songs associated strongly with the movie and its accompanying LP have been excised, most notably I Just Can’t Help Believing. It’s one of Elvis’ better albums, but to be fair, most of the tracks on it are not the same as the versions seen on screen. However, even given that, for me this 2001 ‘remix’ is missing a few highlights. A 2007 2-disc DVD includes both edits, but the original is only in mono not stereo. This messing with Elvis Presley’s back catalogue feels as callous as the treatment meted out on the King’s product by his over-zealous manager Colonel Tom Parker, a man whose good promotional ideas ran out quicker than a chicken on the run. Parker knew nothing about music and interfered nefariously in Elvis’ releases, demanding unnecessary mixes to over-showcase his meal-ticket’s voice, even after Elvis and producer Felton Jarvis had mixed them specifically to sound gritty and earthy.
There is a hint of what some of Elvis’ seventies output might have sounded like in the stage version of Polk Salad Annie which has Elvis slurring and blurring his words – he forgets some and needs a prompt – the bass and drums cracking louder than loud, no choral accompaniments, a driving, rolling, pulsating rhythm; he moves those hips like a demon too. He sounds and acts down and dirty, which is what we and he want. While the over excited chorus of voices does sterling work on The Wonder of You, You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling and In The Ghetto, you do get the impression there’s a competition going on between the high notes of the Sweet Inspirations and Elvis’ roaring emotional deliveries. It doesn’t always work and tips over badly during the rehearsals for Bridge Over Troubled Water. Watching Elvis trying to squeeze a unique harmony arrangement for an already classic song looks and sounds like folly. It’s not a great track on the album and it was one of the smarter moves to edit the live performance out of the new film version.
Lucien Ballard’s photography captures the gaudiness of the King of Rock n Roll standing out under spotlights in his white jump suit slashed to the navel. Set against the dull backgrounds of the Las Vegas Hilton International Concert Auditorium he’s like an angel banished from heaven for misbehaviour. In rehearsals he makes reference to oral sex while singing One Night and tits about bawdily with his entourage. At times, even on stage, he acts the clown and occasionally looks bored by the whole experience. A high-speed traipse through Heartbreak Hotel lacks any of the energy, danger and vigour of 1956 or even the 1968 T.V. Special cut. The forum doesn’t help.
The Hilton’s concert arena is basically a huge lounge bar with tables in the stalls and standard seats in the upper circle. It looks nothing like how you’d envisage a venue for a rock performance in 1970. I watched Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen recently with its warts and all touring chaos and enormous stadium stages, a band out of control and a singer lapping up the fan worship. I’m thinking too of Woodstock and Gimmie Shelter, those documents to the decline of Flower Power and the Tune In Drop Out generation, how those events drew enormous crowds and the performers responded.
Elvis, even while once again producing number one singles and albums, simply isn’t drawing the same audience. He’s still adored. We do see a few screeching women. The moment where Elvis ventures into the audience to greet them face to face is something I can’t imagine most stars doing today or even in 1970. Yet, there’s something old fashioned about the show; something watered down and sweetened. He comes out with swagger and power: the movie credits are played over the medley Mystery Train / Tiger Man and he’s shaking and slithering all over the stage [the 1970 version utilised better footage from the Memorial Coliseum shows in Phoenix, Arizona]; when the concert starts the re-edit emphasises the past and it’s 1950s all the way, sped up and balls of fun, Elvis even clicks his tongue nonchalantly during I Got A Woman, as if he’s back in Sun Studios jamming with the boys. But why is he tied to his guitar through these rip-roaring numbers? The effect the same as watching him play at mannequins back in Girl Happy. He’s so safe, it’s no wonder he gets bored by Heartbreak Hotel.
The once great and founder King of Rock n Roll is now playing to Sammy Davis Jr and Cary Grant, for goodness' sake, men from a different era and style altogether. After the comeback of 1968/69 – in fairness Elvis hadn’t been away, just distressingly poor musically – I’d expected something more extravagant and snarling, something in-your-face, contemporary, relevant and threatening. At the time, Elvis was not much older than the rock stars making and performing ground-breaking pop, soul and rock. As if to demonstrate his contemporary appeal, Elvis seamlessly blends Little Sister with the Beatles’ Get Back and the middle section of the concert is taken up predominantly singing other artists’ material. For all that, there’s something anodyne in the presented footage. The best performances [Polk Salad Annie, Suspicious Minds, I Can’t Stop Loving You] seem to jar because they demonstrate the side we all wanted to see and see prosper following that great ‘in person’ show filmed for the 1968 TV Special. But here, not once does he interact with his band beyond some risible joking about. I’m expecting Elvis to sing back-to-back with lead guitarist James Burton, like Freddie Mercury might with Brian May, or Jagger with Richards, maybe even strum his own six-string while Burton, John Wilkinson, Charlie Hodge and Jeff Scheff rock out with him. There’s nothing.
The King is on his throne and sucking up the adulation, alone and almost bewildered. Several times Elvis looks out at the throng and seems barely able to believe it. He’s almost lost for words between songs and sometimes during them. His asides are strained, even in rehearsal; Elvis doesn’t have any wit – he prefers self-depreciation of the most infantile kind, prat falls and see-through double-entendres. He almost seems lost among the orchestra and chorus, fans and audience. At the end, Dennis Sanders films from the rear of the stage and Elvis is a tiny white figure at the bottom of the screen, arms outstretched Christ-like, absorbing the applause from the multitude, but the curtain is already coming down.
That’s The Way It Is probably takes the award as the best of Elvis’ seventies concert films, chiefly because he occasionally demonstrates his agility and physicality, but I’m not sure the 2001 remix has done him any favours. If you can, find the original edit, it might be better; at least it still features I Just Can’t Help Believing.
ELVIS ON TOUR (1972)
Excellently presented footage of Elvis Presley on a fifteen city tour in mid-72 makes up for some of the pedestrian nature of the preceding rockumentary That’s the Way It Is.
Ken Zemke’s split screen editing was overseen by Martin Scorsese; it delivers an energy generally lacking in the King’s performances thanks to multiple angles of Elvis, the band and audience reactions mingling together in a confusion of sound and vision. Sometimes it is difficult to know which image to concentrate on. Luckily, the songs just about hold up to scrutiny. The film probably looks and sounds better on a big screen than a small. The footage was captured with ten hand held 16mm cameras. The film stock was blown up in the lab to 35mm for the split work or 70mm for the full screen. It must have been a painstaking process and it is disappointing to see the results don’t contain any truly vintage Elvis routines. His actual performances veer from the powerful to the laid back to the vibrant. Lots of audience kissing. He seems most at home in the rehearsal theatres jamming out gospel standards. On stage he carries an air of bejewelled yet flawed excellence, disguised under Bill Belew’s sequined jumpsuits and capes.
Directors Pierre Adidge and Robert Abel were reluctant to take on the filmic task. They helmed one of the genre’s best, Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, but didn’t rate Dennis Sanders’ That’s the Way It Is, chiefly because they reckoned the star was faking it and playing up to the camera, both on and off stage. Watching these low key behind the scenes sequences, narrated by Elvis himself from an interview he delivered specifically for the movie, you can see the difference. He’s much less cooperative to the filmmakers, bordering on the introverted. His dark gaudy sunglasses rarely leave his face until he hits front of stage; instead he shuffles awkwardly, nervously between Joe Esposito and Red West, drinking water, fiddling with his sleeves, searching for a scarf. The military entrances and exits to the shows are disturbed by Esposito’s instructions to Elvis in the Green Room regarding the position of the spotlights and the depth of the stage. It becomes apparent the King hasn’t visited the venue, performed a sound check or a lighting rehearsal. That might be a 1970s thing – tours were notoriously fast during the era and not just for Elvis – but it does suggest a slapdash approach the act. Elvis contradicts this lack of preparation by revealing he suffers bouts of stage fright, so incredibly appreciative that people have travelled such distances and spent hard earned dollars to see him, and that it might be the only chance they get, he is almost petrified lest he cannot deliver the best possible performance.
True to the contradiction, the live tracks are a mixed bag. Four shows were taped and none of them replicate the swagger of the 1968 TV Special or even the intimate reverence of the Las Vegas shows. Elvis seems already to have engaged in a parody of his own showbiz character. The misplaced religious iconography of The American Trilogy is a case in point, all those Christ-like arms, the cape floating like an eagle’s wings. At the opposite end, the dreadful Bridge Over Troubled Water – dropped from the reissue of That’s the Way It Is – is included here. Elvis just can’t do the song any kind of justice, bawling the lyrics with little grace; If I Can Dream it is not. He shatters the rhinestone illusion again during a breakneck rendition of Burning Love which he sings from a lyric sheet. During Love Me Tender a montage of kisses from his movie career proves diverting and also hints at what we are missing, a semblance of naughtiness and fun. The clips inserted from The Ed Sullivan Show demonstrate his glorious past and Elvis’ older self compares badly to the younger. Perhaps what the directors catch best is the frightening intensity of the fans. They scream, cry and wail exactly how they did in 1956 and recite whole histories of their ‘love affair’ with the King, listing every moment and item of his career which resonates to them. They are a mixture of women who grew up with Elvis and those who clearly couldn’t, including young teenagers. The number of men in attendance is testament to an enduring cross-over appeal.
Colonel Tom Parker is conspicuous by his absence from proceedings. The Memphis Mafia looks after Elvis on the road. His manager just counts the cash. A planned vinyl double album was binned as the release date of the movie (November 1972) was so close to the televised concert Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite and its own accompanying record (January 1973). Indeed Elvis had already released the excellent As Recorded at Madison Square Garden earlier that year and the soundtrack here encapsulates material included on both recordings: See See Rider, Proud Mary, Never Been to Spain, Funny How Time Slips Away, I Got A Woman, You Gave Me A Mountain [brilliant, but not as good as the ’73 version] etc.
There’s a moment towards the end of the gig when the King lets J.D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet take over the singing. Elvis takes a breather, absorbing the spiritual, bringing back fleeting memories of those impromptu rehearsals which he loves, which allow him to sing and praise without the need to entertain. When the final curtain call and escape run takes him to the waiting limousine, Elvis is crammed into a backseat, handed a glass of water and gloriously congratulated. Not a critical word is said. He stares out the window and seems completely isolated from those around him, perhaps wondering where that spirit has evaporated to.
Bill Nighy in Living.
For £15.50 a matinee ticket, imagine finding that it is filmed in 4:3 square format not just for the opening colour footage of 1950s London but throughout the whole film! As it's visually truncated, you'd think you'd get a price reduction! Mind you I made that point at the Prince Charles cinema when they showed the first three Bonds there - I know @chrisno1 will back me up here - but no dice, had to pay the same!
Honestly!
Anyway, this film is both brilliant and a bit exasperating. It's about a pen pusher for a Westminster Council I guess, head of his team, very much the bowler-hatted umbrella type you see in A Hard Day's Night being goaded by the Beatles and it's that kind of era, well before the Beatles really, Anyway, he has a life-changing bit of news that makes him revaluate things... problem is, the reviews made clear what he does that is key on this and that event doesn't happen towards the end of the movie so you keep wondering - if you've read the review - exactly when it's going to happen.
The film is visually impressive, I follow a Twitter account called Yesterday's Britain, Yesterday's Better that posts all these nostalgic photos of 50s to 80s Britain, old high streets and so on and this film is like living in that. It's almost too authentic, it hurts. Everything gleams.
Nighty is good although the way he is introduced doesn't quite match how the character is when he opens up. I suppose in another movie he'd play a repressed queen who decides to embrace his true self - Nighy would be good at that, I think Christopher Plummer bagged an Oscar for that kind of role didn't he?
What nagged is that it didn't quite ring true a lot of the time and one wonders if it isn't almost deliberate as an emotional ruse. I don't know. Some of it made me tense for the wrong reasons. Some I couldn't understand which was infuriating for a very simple movie in terms of plot. Not much happens so I don't want to spoil it. But Nighy looks like he's 70 or so and I can't figure how that relates with his family, or even if the couple who live in his house are son and son's girlfriend or son and daughter. Other stuff doesn't make sense - he visits Brighton for an excursion of fun and says he 's taken out half his life savings... You spend the time worrying he's going to lose it. Other stuff just doesn't make sense, I won't bang on but if you see it you may agree. Or not.
It's based on a Japanese film I think maybe it translated better there, maybe I'd see much the same stuff in the original and find it more credible then again a Japanese person might then have the same concerns.
It's another of those films that wrong foot you - you think some specific thing is going to happen, then it doesn't. Maybe that's a metaphor for life?
The ending gets you going and it's all very moving so I guess it worked its magic. Reminded me a little of The End of the Affair with Ralph Fiennes.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@Napoleon Plural nice review. This movie was in the LFF this year. I was half inclined to give it a go, but the original is a Kurasawa classic and is so good I couldn't put myself through the potential disappointment. I'm not sure a European film would project the theme of post-war wasted civil loyalty so effectively.
was it Ikiru? the plot sounds similar. One of the few nonSamurai films I've seen from Kurosawa, and I think Mifune isn't even in this one either
Looks like it available for viewing on archive.org if you wish to compare
Yes, it is Ikuru. Takashi Shimura has the Bill Nighy role. Shimura played what would become Yul Brynner's part in Seven Samurai
ii.
The woman king (2022)
I like movies who shows us a time and place we haven't seen before, and "The woman king" delivers. it's set in West Africa (modern day Benin) in the 1820's. The real-life Dahomey kingdom had an elite military unit called Agoije that was all female. This is the way to have women and non-whites in un-traditional roles in period movies, and not to pretend it was normal when it wasn't!
Viola Davis plays general General Nanisca, the commander of the Agoije. She's plays a military leader with a lot of authority, but she isn't a two-dimensional "strong woman". Nanisca has doubts and fears, and Viola Davis does an impressive job at portraying a multi-dimensional character. Our own Lashana Lynch has found herself a niche playing warrior women, and here she plays a boot camp drill sergeant convincingly.
The movie is honest enough to show Dahomey as a nation involved in the slave trade (as it very much was), but Nanisca realizes this is a dark road. A nation that takes and sells slaves slaves gets richer and gets guns and gun powder to defeat and capture other nations that don't. It's a vicious circle. The general suggests cultivating palm oil instead, but at the same time expanding the Agoije for the threats that are coming.
The movie has a lot of good battle and action scenes, my only complaint being that the female soldiers hardly ever use guns. Why not?
I liked the movie and I recommend it because it's well made and shows a fresh story from history. The plot may take a lot of artistic freedoms, but the same thing can very much be said about Braveheart. It's still a good movie.
I hadnt realised The Woman King was about the Dahomey.
The Dahomey featured in the Flashman novel Flash for Freedom, one of the most vivid and disturbing chapters in the whole Flashman saga, one of the many bits where I thought "this cant be real", then looked it up and found it was true, just not history like we prefer it to be told
BIG NOTHING (2006)
I’d never heard of this film before but it turned up on the BritBox streaming app so I gave it a go.
Charlie gets fired on his first day at a call centre but colleague Gus asks him to help in blackmailing a local reverend who is using porn sites. They are overheard by a teenage girl who insists on getting in on the action. There’s a background story of a serial killer on the loose which ties into the ending. There are lots of twists and turns as the plot all goes wrong.
David Schwimmer and Simon Pegg are good as the blackmailers. The film tries to be a bit too clever for it’s own good with the multiple twists that occur, but it rolls along nicely in a quick 90 minutes. It takes place in Oregon but was filmed in Canada, Wales and the Isle Of Man, presumably with some film foundation grant.
It’s worth a look f you’ve got nothing better to do at the time.
5/10
Flash For Freedom is the best in the series in my opinion. The mixture of fictional characters alongside real historical characters is never better realised in this series as it is here and man’s inhumanity to man is laid open to he bone.
I have enjoyed the Flashman book and may enjoy them again - but I jumped ahead it seems, being 'clever' I read them in chronological order rather than publishing order. So Flashman and the Redskins starts off at one date, then flashes forward some decades - this part doesn't ring true. But what really put me off was that Flashy does something truly despicalble and sociopathic to one squeeze - not simply bounder-ish as we'd expect - and it put me right off the character. Perhaps, being a later book, the author had tired of the character by that point?
Last night on BBC1 I stayed up for my first showing of Captain America: Winter Soldier, no ad breaks so no slog. It was a case of where has this film been all my life - I couldn't believe I hadn't got around to seeing this earlier. I caught the origins story a couple of years ago on telly I think. I sort of recall it, not bad, touch of the Wonder Woman about it, person from the past relocated to the present.
Odd to see this film came out in 2014 and how long ago that was and what I was doing at the time. I suppose one reason I didn't see it was it was the beginning of getting tied up with the care homes my mother was in, it just went on and on so I didn't get to the movies that year much, she nearly died due to care home neglect, luckily she pulled through and the last film I ever took her to see was Spectre at the BFI Imax. But there were other reasons too - I hadn't caught the first movie, and this was a sequel plus the poster (above) doesn't really draw you in or do justice to the sheer slickness of the spectacle - it's like an old-style Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me on steroids.
There are quite a few nods to Bond films in this but it moves along so quickly I can't recall them - however the climactic fight on the satellite dish between two men with a long-standing history is very much GoldenEye, it's just way ahead in terms of scale. The Bonds can't compete with this stuff at all. Lee Tamorahi was right when he said CGI was the way of the future if this is anything to go by, he was just 10 years ahead of his time and in the wrong movie. There isn't much difference one could argue between Die Another Day and this film, save this film is enjoyable and has real charm to it. And wit. And intelligence. And heart. Oh, and they know how to do water CGI this time round.
The Bonds seem to have nicked from this though, the scene where Fury (Samuel L Jackson) is trying to escape in his car but is cornered and machine gunned etc was used in No Time To Die with Bond and the Aston, which isn't so original to me now, even if it is an Aston so has novelty value.
I'm still confused about the Avengers world and who is in it. Deadpool isn't tied up with this is he? That's X-Man stuff because he mentions Wolverine disparagingly. But he might as well be. Spiderman is tied up with it, albeit the recent ones. Wonder Woman isn't though she might as well be - she's in with Superman and Batman, right? They made her film better by borrowing a fair amount from Captain America in terms of vision.
The plot in Winter Soldier pretty good though it's the usual McGuffin - a shadowy organisation within the official State organisation, and bit of Mission Impossible-style hijinks. The last Bond film flirted with this but didn't take it there. The plot does work in this, I think the Bond films of late, struggle to sell their McGuffin. CR was - hey, it's a new Bond! It's Fleming again! It's a Bond Begins story! QoS had nothing. SF - hey, it's Bond again! Q is back - and Moneypenny! Spectre I loved but tbf it's main theme is that Spectre and Blofeld are back, without that it's thin on plot and NTTD is, hey, it's Craig's final film, hey it's been delayed but it's here at last and hey! Bond's dead. I don't think these are great plots that involve us, they' re gimmick-led, as Barbel suggests albeit only for his review of NTTD.
Anyway, I'd far rather sit down with the family this Christmas with a DVD of Captain America and this sequel (though the title is misleading, there's nothing wintery about it) than a recent Bond film. This is all highly formulaic - to a fault some might say - but it works.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
napster said
I'm still confused about the Avengers world and who is in it. Deadpool isn't tied up with this is he? That's X-Man stuff because he mentions Wolverine disparagingly. But he might as well be. Spiderman is tied up with it, albeit the recent ones. Wonder Woman isn't though she might as well be - she's in with Superman and Batman, right? They made her film better by borrowing a fair amount from Captain America in terms of vision.
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Wonder Woman's easy, as you say she's with Superman and Batman. They are all characters published by DC comics, and DC and Marvel have been rival publishing companies since the 1930s, litigious over their trademarks, copywrites, and intellectual properties
The others you name are trickier because they are all from Marvel Comics the publisher. The thing here is the comic book company formed its own movie studio to produce Iron Man in 2008, and twenty odd sequels since then including Captain America movies.
Prior to that Marvel Comics the publisher licensed its properties to existing studios like Fox or Sony. Fox had the rights to the X-Men and another series called Fantastic Four, they made those good X-Men movies in the late 90s/early 00s, and Deadpool was a spinoff. That's why Deadpool lives in the same universe as Wolverine.
Sony owns the right to SpiderMan but reached a deal with Marvel that Marvel could include him as a character in Avengers movies but still make a share of the profits and be able to make their own movies. Theres been a couple Sony-made SpiderMan spinoffs that got lousy reviews. I'm not sure who actually made the last three SpiderMan movies, I dont understand the legalities. Hulk is also tangled up in some sort of deal like that.
Marvel has recently bought back the rights to XMen and Fantastic Four. We should be seeing both groups of characters in upcoming Marvel films, though probably rebooted versions.
None of which has anything to do with whether Winter Soldier is a good film. it is, its one of the best Marvel Comics films, and probably most of interest to spyfilm fans. It borrows a lot from the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the early 1970s
But I would say its the first Captain America film that borrows from the old Wonder Woman teevee series, whereas the Wonder Woman film had to revise its context to World War I to avoid comparisons to the Captain America film
@Napoleon Plural @caractacus potts Is that the one with Robert Redford in it? Quite good for a comic book if it was.
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017)
I don’t really like Agatha Christie as a writer and I once attempted to read her books, but failed on every attempt. I gave up on Orient Express when I encountered a diagram of the sleeping car where the action purports to take place. It was like reading Cluedo.
Still, Lucy Worsely’s excellent three-part television biography of Christie has whetted my appetite. Have I been too harsh, I am asking myself? At the time, I was reading Marques and Hemingway, Lorca and Auden, Graham Greene and Larkin, so perhaps Christie didn’t fit the frame of mind. So, disappointed by another England football failure, I skipped over the analysis by ITV’s trio of grumpy ex-players and partook of Kenneth Branagh’s entertaining and excellently presented film of one of Christie’s most celebrated novels.
Branagh himself takes on the role of Hercule Poirot and delivers an exceedingly fine moustache. This bothered me less than I thought it would. My main disappointment was the chopping and changing of the investigation, setting Poirot’s interviews in odd locations [he takes tea outside in the freezing cold, for instance] and editing them to the bone, so whatever back story each suspect character has is not sufficiently explained, either to the audience or, more worryingly, to Poirot. When Branagh reveals his solution to the murder of the unlikeable American businessman Samuel Ratchett, he frequently says “I supposed..” or “I suggest” which gives the impression he’s guessing. This Poirot is more robust, more physical and appears to be suffering from a doomed romance as well as a severe case of obsessive compulsive disorder. Trapped on a train with a brood of people he doesn’t like, you almost feel he’s framed them all up.
The big cast enjoys themselves. Johnny Depp, Judi Dench, Olivia Coleman, Penelope Cruz and Willem Defoe are decent, but like all Christie characters, they are essentially stereotypes. The inclusion of a black actor doesn’t bother me as much as the insistence on referencing his skin colour in a historical context, which draws an unnecessary attention to it. Ditto the moments of sudden violence, which are uncomfortable to watch and equally unnecessary. There’s some really poor CGI for the train journey and avalanche scenes. There really wasn’t a need to expand the film in this manner as it’s the claustrophobic atmosphere of the train carriage which provides half the drama.
A decent shout, but the whole thing was better done in Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version, a prime piece of tension filled drawing room detective drama. Branagh’s not cutting any new cloth here and it shows.
THE FOOTBALL FACTORY (2004)
Nick Love isn’t what you would call a subtle film director (he also directed Outlaw and the remake The Sweeney) but he does direct with his finger on the pulse. He is the successor to Michael Winner (not a bad thing in my book) in churning out urban thrillers in the pulp fiction style of a Don Pendleton Executioner paperback.
Tommy Johnson (Danny Dyer) is approaching 30 in a dead end job where he lives for the weekend which will involve drug, alcohol, sex, and most important of all, a fight with a rival group of football hooligans. Realising that his life is on a downward spiral he has a premonition of doom and tries to make sense of it all. Dudley Sutton plays his grandfather, a WW2 veteran who tries to get him to mend his ways as he prepares to emigrate to Australia with friend John Junkin. Meanwhile, the football “firm” that Johnson belongs to is planning a major fight with arch-rivals Millwall.
The film is full of plot holes but it does have a raw energy that is surprisingly addictive.
6/10
A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (1990)
This is one of those black comedies that I like to revisit every few years. Michael Caine is a veteran executive at an advertising company and unexpectedly he gets overlooked for promotion in preference for a younger man. His spendthrift nagging wife is devastated and continues to berate him for his lack of authority. In a fit of rage he pushes a beggar onto train tracks at the subway and gets away without being noticed. Gaining confidence from this he goes on a revenge killing spree, beginning with his wife…
Caine is excellent as the put upon executive who begins to enjoy the power of getting away with each successive murder. The suspicions of a detective and a female colleague who Caine dates after the death of his wife, add tension to the narrative and the film keeps you guessing to how it’s all going to pan out at the end.
Good fun.
7/10
Hi @ChrisNo1 - yes Robert Redford is in Winter Soldier, also Jenny Agutter of all people.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I just watched "A shock to the system" after seeing it recommend here. Thanks! I really enjoyed it. What kind of movie is this? Crime? Character study? Satire? Whatever it is, "A shock to the system" is smart, well acted and entertaining.
How come I've never heard of A Shock to the System ? When was it made?
It was strange to see the Countess of Grantham in that role. 😂
She Said about the exposure of Harvey Weinstein - I mean journalistic, ahem!
I think it was @caractacus potts who said he'd read Ronan Farrow's book Catch and Kill about his investigation into Weinstein on my recommendation, so here's a bizarre press clipping that will resonate. Avoid however if you haven't read Catch and Kill and intend to do so, due to spoilers.
I wasn't sure how She Said crossed into the same territory despite it being the same subject matter; it seems to be two women journalists for the New York Post while Ronan Farrow worked for NBC as a TV investigate journalist. Thing is, I felt Farrow's account was thrilling, while this isn't. I feel his account would have worked better, the problem being that he's a 'white saviour' or rather 'male saviour' type, a bit like Attenborough's Cry Freedom being criticised because if focussed on the heroics of the white man rather than the black guy Steve Biko who was central. You'd prefer to see two women bring Weinstein down.
I found the movie dramatically inert and poorly directed, the script very drear. It consists of the two journalists trying to get abused women to talk, either they say they won't go on the record or they hang up immediately. Usually this is a staple in such movies and one gets angry or put out on the reporter's behalf, here it just seems repetitive and you don't hate the characters as they're clearly traumatised and have been shut down by the Weinstein machine. Those protecting Weinstein ought to appear crafty and nasty - another staple of such tales - but here they don't really. It's all rather emotionally uninvolving despite one wanting to sympathise.
Weinstein is not shown except from behind - this is pleasing editorially though I doubt it pleased the actor or his agent. Thing is, films do require a villain. This is all a bit PC, I hate saying this but it has woman director, writer and so on but you want it to punch out a bit more, we see their husbands holding the baby and having nothing else to say at all, not even any comedy moments to speak of.
Actress Rose McGowan has a key role in this but is hardly mentioned at all while in Farrow's book there is a real WTF moment about her, it's brilliant. Gwyneth Paltrow's name comes up but it isn't followed through much. Some actresses who were abused play themselves - Ashley Judd I think, but others like Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle play others. This ought to be okay I guess but it is a bit confusing.
Mention is made of how they can expect their phones to be bugged but no evidence is provided for this, despite it almost certainly being true. Farrow's account dealt with this, and the astonishing reveal that Weinstein had recruited the Israeli intelligence services - Black Cube - to dig up dirt on Farrow and the story doesn't end there. In She Said, one journalist is bumped into in a crowded street and you think - a-ha! a bug has been planted on them, or a tracker device - but no, seems it was just a bump in the street and nothing doing.
Ominous music is made to do a lot of heavy lifting to convey tension and drama. I found myself thinking, all this would be okay as a documentary but otherwise, there is nothing cinematic about any of this.
As few people were in the cinema for the matinee it was ruddy cold too, I mean the homeless used to go in the cinema to keep warm during the winter, they wouldn't with this place especially with matinee showings at £15.50.
At these prices I don't think the local Odeon is doing what it can to win custom, the whole cinema experience has no real allure to it, nothing special to draw you in.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@Gymkata Yes. This is a very fine film and touches on aspects of post-war acclimatisation which still hold true today.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I agree. "The best years of our lives" is a great movie.
It’s been a long while since I’ve seen this but it’s a terrific film with great performances. And Hoagy Carmichael appears, looking older than Ian Fleming’s visionary version of James Bond.
Whats intriguing me is what other classics do you need to cross off your list @Gymkata ?
DUEL (1971)
Its hard to believe that this is over 50 year’s old. Originally produced as a made-for-tv film it gained a cinematic release in Europe. Steven Spielberg had directed some television episodes including a Columbo and a segment of the Night Gallery TV movie before landing this thrilling chase movie. Dennis Weaver plays a salesman driving to meet a client who gets embroiled in a terrifying cat and mouse chase with a truck. Displaying a directorial maturity far behind his 25 years of age Spielberg ramps up the tension in Hitchcock style as Weaver becomes more and more desperate in his attempt to avoid death.
A special mention must be made to Richard Matheson who adapted his own short story for this outing. Matheson was a brilliant writer of novels (I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man) and screenplays (The Devil Rides Out, The Omega Man, Somewhere In Time) and a myriad of television episodes including The Twilight Zone. A special talent.
8/10
I can thoroughly recommend The Ox Bow Incident it’s as taut a movie as you will ever see.
"The birdman of Alcatraz" and "The ox-bow incident" are great! I see several movies on your list that I should watch myself.
Gymkata said:
I'm trying to watch all of the Best Picture winners that I haven't seen before as well as a bunch of other notable films that are highly regarded. Ones that come to mind include....
____________________________________________________
from your list, the ones I've seen are
MILDRED PIERCE
ALL ABOUT EVE
CABARET
DOG DAY AFTERNOON
all of these are worth seeing even if they did win the Oscar.
Mildred Pierce is a James Cain adaptation and should maybe be watched as part of a triple feature with the Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity