And thank you again! As I said in the main Harry Palmer thread, this is my favourite of the series. I could go on at length but you've said it so well that I won't, except to say that I completely agree with your appreciation of Ed Begley's performance.
Fun facts- the voice of the Brain is Donald Sutherland, who can be spotted as a technician.
The postman who gives Harry the parcel that starts the whole plot was Michael Caine's brother Stanley.
The eleven picture deal between Saltzman and Caine wasn't exclusively for Harry Palmer movies- for example, "The Battle Of Britain" and "Play Dirty". The second of these co-starred Nigel Davenport who Caine apparently suggested to Saltzman to take over the Palmer role after him.
But what I questioned at once is your claim that Indy's leading ladies in both the previous movies were weepy. Seriously - Marion Raven weepy
________________________________________
@TwoFour is correct: the two female leads could not be more different. I happened to catch the last half hour of Raiders and the first half hour of Temple this weekend when I was watching cable at my mum's house so the contrast was crystal clear. Karen Allen is introduced winning a drinking contest, she is a ruff tuff self-reliant outdoorsy woman of action.
I don't often reply to criticisms of my reviews; I don't see the point. However, @caractacus potts@Number24 I would refer you to the scenes where Karen Allen is trapped in a laundry basket and screams "Indy! Indy! Indy!" with excruciating regularity. Plus, I don't understand how a woman, or a man, who competes in drinking games for cash can be perceived as self-reliant. Chancer, more like it. She's a quite awful character and is used as the butt of jokes, not the purveyor of them. Still, since I'm mentioning Karen Allen...
INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
It’s not bad, is it?
I really dislike the first two Indy movies. Maybe I’ve been battered into submission. I rather enjoyed this outing, struck through with familiarities and a cast of British thespians. The role reversal of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones becoming the dad to Shia Le Beouf’s Henry Jr worked well and there are plenty of exciting set pieces. I wasn’t excited by the alien skull stuff, which felt like another of Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial fantasies and because of that I wasn’t over excited by the climatic action. It’s an amiable piece which ticks all the boxes without ever stretching the imagination.
Terrible stage play adaptation with Marilyn Monroe looking like a pasty faced mannequin yet managing, just about, to deliver one of her best ever performances. I say just about because she’s all method – looking at the inner self – Stanislavsky and all that – while her beau [sic] played by newcomer Don Murray is of the old school, an outward, loud, no barriers, infantile, play-to-the-back-row-of-the-theatre performance. He was Oscar nominated. How? He is appalling. In the quiet moments, the film works really well, but Murray is so centre stage, much more than Monroe who despite top billing is virtually a support player, he over powers everything. The first half of the movie is virtually unwatchable today. There’s nothing amusing in Murray’s naïve cowpoke, who hollers his lines like some crazed male banshee; nothing holds him in check and he simply tramples on any sentiment. The film barely recovers. Dramatically, director Joshua Logan leaves Monroe all at sea, he hasn’t gauged the material at all and opts for excess where subtlety is required. The narrative is an awkward one which doesn’t sit well with modern morals – did it in 1956? – and isn’t helped by Murray’s shouty, lasso thirsty turn. I was cringing with embarrassment through almost the whole runtime. Sad to say, this was awful, Monroe aside, and the dear girl must have despaired at where her career was headed. The film was shot in cinemascope for no apparent reason. I wanted to like this, but I didn’t. Just awful. Poor Marilyn…
I've had a rough time catching up on some recorded movies. I think I'll take a much earned rest tomorrow.
SOLDIER BLUE (1970)
A controversial, horrible little film which attempts to draw parallels to the behaviour of the US military during the Vietnam war and so ends with an exploitative, bloody massacre of Native American Indians. Unsettling not because of the scenes of decapitation, disembowelment, rape and child killing, nor because it isn’t a wholly accurate depiction of the events before or during Sand Creek in 1864 – for instance the names of all real individuals have been altered, references made to other atrocities are intermingled with this one, it isn’t mentioned that two companies of cavalry refused to take part in the action – but because the film is framed by a soft-focus romance between a white squaw and a cavalry private, who flee across country from a Cheyenne raiding party. Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss are simply unable to carry the heavy load, their characters are unsympathetic and their developing relationship unlikely and eventually mawkish. Even without the benefit of historical hindsight, you sense where this relationship and the unfolding drama is heading. It might have felt ground breaking in 1970, but filmmakers have touched on these barrier breaking relationships in westerns before: Broken Arrow most noticeably, Elvis Presley’s brave failure Flaming Star, and Arthur Penn’s superb Little Big Man among them. They treated the subject courageously and with dignity. Not so here. Soldier Blue is a grim watch from the off. Donald Pleasance provides momentary relief as a nitty gritty gun runner. Extremely popular in the U.K. at release, but rarely exhibited on screen or on television these days. The violence is a black mark against it. The central performances an even darker one.
I’ve watched the Final Destination quintet of movies over the past couple of weeks. Each film features a character who has a premonition of a catastrophe and warns a few others who escape the impending death. The survivors are then killed one by one by Death itself to ensure that Fate is inevitable. The series relies on the inventiveness of the deaths which are bizarre chain reaction accidents.
FINAL DESTINATION (2000)
Devon Sawa has a premonition of a plane explosion and his panicked reactions cause him and a few others to be thrown off the plane which explodes while taking off. Initially he is under suspicion of causing the explosion but when the survivors start to be killed they work out what is happening. The set pieces are very well handled and it’s nice to see that the protagonist is not a deranged serial killer. Lots of well known faces in this that you don’t know the names of.
FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003)
A group of college students going on a spring break avoid a calamitous road accident when the driver has a premonition of a logging truck causing the pileup. The road users who are blocked by entering the road from a slipway are then killed one by one. The accident is filmed and edited to an excellent standard and the killings are up to standard, though it’s all starting to look a bit familiar.
FINAL DESTINATION 3 (2006)
This time around it’s a rollercoaster accident. The deaths are again pretty inventive but it lacks any originality.
THE FINAL DESTINATION (2009)
A premonition of an accident at a racetrack is the starting point to this one. Director David R. Ellis from part two returns to the franchise which was originally released in 3-D but nothing can really save this dreary, predictable effort. Poor CGI does not help it’s cause.
FINAL DESTINATION 5 (2011)
So we come to the end of the franchise and like the PlanetOfTheApes original movie series this ties things up in a wraparound story. This one concerns a disaster on a suspension bridge. Director Steven Quayle successfully reignites the franchise with a series of inventive deaths and the opening disaster scenes are actually tense and thrilling. Well worth watching and a surprise ending that ties the whole series together.
I would rank the films in order as 5/2/1/3/4
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Christopher Lee and Charles Grey go head-to-head as a master of the occult and a Satanist, vying for the souls of Patrick Mower and Nike Arrighi. This Hammer horror picture relies more on psychological shocks, the mystery of deep hypnosis and the audience’s latent fear of eternal torment rather than blood and gore. Well, the satanists kill a goat in an orgiastic ceremony, but to be fair, the film is quite mild and feels a mite out-dated for 1968. Screenwriter Richard Matheson brings a touch of Roger Corman class to the production – he wrote all those Poe cycle films – and adapts Dennis Wheatley’s novel more than adequately. The language of the occult proves somewhat confusing. You have to let that go, as well as a few rash individual character decisions. Director Terence Fisher employs suspense as his main weapon of terror and several scenes are wrought to the palms: Mocata’s mesmerism of Sarah Lawson’s dignified Marie Eaton is the standout sequence, the initial ‘darkness falls’ black magic attack at the elongated climax has some power, Tanith writing in her devilled agonies, the conclusion stumbles a little and ends with another of Matheson’s traditional fiery infernos. Good, committed performances enhance the film no end.
One of Hammer’s better efforts, they virtually remade it as the more sensational To The Devil A Daughter in 1976.
Fans of JW will like this. It's an excellent addition to the JW series, brimming with style. The fight choreography is as impressively balletic as ever, with some creative new twists brought to the combat set pieces. Yet the film has time to breathe, and there is some focus on character (or on genre stereotypes, to put it more accurately).
If NTTD borrowed a little something from JW in terms of a video-game way of doing violence, the influence works in the other direction here - not least in Bill Skarsgard's performance as The Marquis, a lead villain whose vocal style (and manner) seems directly based on Safin's.
As for Wick himself, Keanu Reeves is better than ever in this one, still with tremendous physicality but looking suitably jaded.
I get a kick out of watching a craggy-faced Ian McShane relishing his part as Winston in the JW movies, having first seen the actor in the cinema decades ago in Guy Hamilton's 'Battle Of Britain', where he shared scenes with Robert Shaw. A different world, a different cinema! McShane's role in JW4 is well integrated with the story and drama.
Look out for Scott Adkins as Killa, a Flemingesque grotesque of a crime boss, albeit presented with a comic slant.
Lance Reddick, RIP, returns to his recurring role as the concierge for a fitting final performance.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I've never seen these films. Apparently they are very good. I see they've been on TV this week, but I have been at work and missed the lot. Some judicious catching up to do.
I 've watched all of these 'Scream' movies in the space of a week.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin's latest two entries in the series, #5 and #6, certainly have their moments but they're overstuffed and they're fannish in a leaden way, failing to match the postmodern wit of Wes Craven's original and its finely judged balance between horror and humour.
Melissa Barrera, the new 'last girl', simply isn't as good an actor as Neve Campbell. And while Jenna Ortega's opening scene in #5 does justice to the iconic Drew Barrymore sequence of the original, a truly frightening showcase, the mistake is to let Ortega's character survive, knocking around for the space of two movies without material to match her impressive opener.
#6 moves the franchise from Woodsboro to NYC, its best sequence again being its opening (with Samara Weaving), mining contemporary scares from cell phone useage in the context of a blind date in the city, an update to the home landline trope of the original.
The revelation of my rewatch is realising how much Wes Craven's final entry in the series, #4, is underrated. In many ways #4 is as fun and as scary as the first, and it certainly does its 'meta' more successfully than Bettinelli-Olpin's recent convoluted fare.
Legacy characters are no longer guaranteed their survival (Bond fans: "I know, right?!"*) and #6 fills a gap or two by resurrecting Hayden Panettiere from #4. But it's sad to see Ms Panettiere, or rather her character, looking so addled compared with her poise and beauty of a decade or so before. It's sadder still that Courteney Cox's ill advised cosmetic surgery gives her the true 'ghostface' of the latest two movies (especially if, like me, you're nostalgic for the Gale Weathers who became Dewey's sweetheart in #1).
At least #5 and #6 detach the franchise from Harvey Weinstein's name. Knowing what we know now about Weinstein, some of the themes explored for entertainment in the original cycle of 'Scream' movies resonate awkwardly. I haven't seen #3 again in my current re-watch, but I think it's the one that goes to Hollywood; Rose McGowan plays one of the victims in #1. The best that can be said is that Bob Weinstein was reportedly more invested than his brother in the creative side and that - essentially - 'Scream' belonged to horror geniuses Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, director and writer, rather than to any producer.
Minor spoiler:
*In #6, Jasmin Savoy Brown's character, Mindy, even lectures her geeky college chums about how movie franchises these days try to refresh themselves by killing off their central characters: she includes James Bond at the end of her list of examples!
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Last night I watched THE MISFITS. Not the legendary John Huston movie that turned out to be the final film for Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift, but a 2021 heist flick directed by Renny Harlin and starring our own Pierce Brosnan. And oh my God is it bad. It tries desperately to be like a Guy Ritchie movie (isn't one enough?), but has no style or flair... and the acting is downright horrible. Brozzer has never been skillful with accents, but here he does about half a dozen--badly--as he also assumes several disguises. (It's also amazing that a film shot in the UAE and has a number of Arabic names among the producers has so many ludicrous Arab stereotypes.) I get the feeling this was supposed to be a longer movie--it's under 90 minutes, and if this is the best that could be salvaged from the cutting room floor, maybe it should have been trashed.
Monogram Pictures usually made B-movies. After the war, producer Walter Mirisch created a subsidiary company Allied Artists with the intention of producing high quality films. The dream took some years to reach fruition [1956 and Friendly Persuasion]. In the meantime, Allied was happy to continue to make, promote and distribute pictures the major studios wouldn’t touch. This science fiction film noir is one such independent film, produced by Herman Cohen, he of I Was A Teenage Werewolf, and backed with private investment, a sort of ‘crowd fund’ of the 1950s.
The film starts off tremendously strong. A series of empty, silent city landscapes gives way to Nora King’s bedroom. We know she’s a troubled soul: she lies over the covers in her under slip and a half empty bottle of sleeping pills is split on the sheets. Nora’s day starts badly and gets worse. Having failed to kill herself, she discovers the Windy City – Chicago is never specifically mentioned by name – is all but abandoned. Nora’s investigations around her apartment block, the mute streets and the parks are eerily impressive, plenty of silence, natural sounds, shadows and sudden stark bright light. When she discovers a corpse, the moment is startling and effective, even though we half expect it. She suspects Frank Brooks, who is lingering nearby, but as the two form an uneasy alliance, they realise a disaster must have or is about to occur. They fear a nuclear attack. No such luck. It’s an alien army of metallic gleaming robots armed with laser rays. Well, one robot anyway.
While Nora and Frank explore the city further, meeting more disparate refugees, trusting some, avoiding others, the US military has its top scientists attempting to thwart the alien invasion. Quite taut at times, the movie benefits from focussing its attention on the human story and the character dynamics. By virtually ignoring the robot[s], director Sherman A. Rose manages to hold our interest and prevent any feeling of ineptitude. The robot is a disappointment, but I saw worse during my two-year Classic Dr Who marathon.
Katherine Crowley is the lead. Television became her staple outlet and she would spar with our own Roger Moore in several episodes of Maverick. Richard Denning had a decent career, mostly in sci-fi films, so his hero role was not unfamiliar to him. Robert Roark plays an escaped murderer and bagged the role because his father put up a chunk of the production cost. For an amateur, he’s not too shabby as a trigger happy psychopath. The script deals in cliches, but the small cast treats them seriously and the tensions are well sustained.
Taking as its template the doomed romance of Casablanca, Tokyo Joe sees Humphrey Bogart effectively do an impersonation of himself, with Joe Barrett replacing Rick Blaine. Both men own sleazy bars, both have contacts in the underworld and the police and both have moral, sacrificial instincts despite being thoroughly immoral people.
Tokyo Joe is set in Japan during the post-war U.S. military administration. Decorated veteran USAF pilot Joe Barrett returns to the westernised cabaret joint he owned in the pre-war days, hoping to pick up life where he left it, joshing with his business partner Ito and winning back his ex-wife, Trina, a Russian emigree. She’s married to upright and decent lawyer Mark Landis, and in the dignified twosome Barrett appears to have met his match. Tentative inquiries about a startup air freight business lead him into the cold, unwelcoming embrace of Baron Kimura, a Yakuza head who has spies everywhere and seeks to pervert a nationalist uprising. As skeletons begin to drop out of everyone’s closets and the airfreight flights take on life-threatening proportions, Joe becomes drawn ever deeper into the Yakuza conspiracy, dragging Trina, Mark and their daughter into danger.
There’s a little too much moralising about the benefits of American occupation, but that was standard whitewashing for the era. Bogart’s character seems far too worldly to be taken in by the political rhetoric he ends up spouting; far too worldly to deliver the lovey-dovey lines too. He’s best remarking on the waste of war. He makes a tremendously poor early impression, especially when confronting his ex-wife, but the spikey edges soften as the film progresses. That may have been Bogart’s intention – or the writer’s / director’s – but the lack of subtlety jars heavily against his later actions. It doesn’t help that Florence Marly is a distinctly unimpressive heroine. You can’t imagine why Joe is so stuck on her; she’s far too passive. An actress of genuine life experience like Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr would have made a better stab as this worn out burlesque girl hiding a bitter past, pining for a better life, holding a candle for her ex-lover. Marly simply isn’t interesting or good looking enough. Alexander Knox cuts a safe figure as her husband, but like Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo in Casablanca, this just makes him uninteresting.
So Bogart has nobody to act with except his Japanese co-stars. Sessue Hayakawa is creepy as the motionless, soulless Kimura, every movement played for dominant effect. He was a real war hero, working for the French resistance – yes, seriously, look it up – and the film revitalised his career. Bogart deliberately sought him out; his company Santana made the film and the star had a lot of say in the production. Hayakawa’s performance reminded me of Fleming’s description of Dr No as a giant worm, and wrapped in a kimono, head bobbing slowly, he comes across visually in a similar, gaunt fashion. Later on in his career Hayakawa would spar brilliantly with Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Another note for James Bond fans is to see Teru Shimada playing Barrett’s buddy, Ito. Bogart and Shimada make a great double act and it’s a pity their obvious camaraderie isn’t exploited more by the director. Watching the two toss each other around in a mock judo fight was quite something. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched Bogart be so animated, even if it is a stunt double.
I was impressed the film takes time to allow its Japanese actors moments to shine. Whole chunks of dialogue are recited in Japanese without subtitles, lending the film a genuine sense of purpose, people and place. Japanese society is treated with great respect by the filmmakers and often, when negative scenes do occur, they tend to be reflecting a western influence, often war related, such as poverty stricken men scrabbling for a half-smoked cigarette. As if to demonstrate the international, outward looking mantra of the Japanese, no person of US military authority can speak a foreign language, but all the nationals and the US civilians are bilingual. In an era when John Wayne was making a series of unashamedly patriotic flag wavers about the Pacific war, demonising the Japanese at every turn, it’s no surprise to find the liberal Bogart providing a more conciliatory outlook, even if the sermonising feels unnecessary.
The film gains tension towards the end. The resolution is smart and worthwhile, featuring another good slice of hand-to-hand combat. Good too are the early location shoots, using a stand in for Bogart’s character, which trawl around the still war ravaged streets of Tokyo. The film was the first western movie permitted to be filmed in post-war Japan. Unfortunately, like Bogart’s character, the genuine footage jars with the studio work. Something more akin to the shadowy city streets of The Third Man might have enhanced the look of the project, but you can’t change what we have got and I expect there might have been numerous permissions granted just to film what we do see.
Despite the good intensions, the movie doesn’t quite succeed. The parallels with Bogart’s Oscar winning classic are too obvious, such as the memorial link via a lounge song, These Foolish Things, and the eventual double-double crossings. When Bogart paraphrases “Here’s looking at you, kid” while talking to a seven year old girl, you know the script has sadly got stuck in a rut of its own making. Not bad, but not great, Tokyo Joe was a surprisingly big hit on release.
I keep meaning to see the John Wick films on telly this week but I miss the first 10 mins and as I figured the whole thing is a revenge movie, those 10 mins are key, otherwise it's just one bloke smashing up a load of other blokes, there's no noble context for any of it. It's like life really isn't it, who are the good guys and the bad guys depends on when you come in.
I haven't seen the JW movies on TV but I do wonder whether they're censored there. SInce they're all about stylised violence, any censorship would defeat the object. They're well worth getting on disc, watching on any streaming service running them or seeing in the cinema (where possible: #4 is just out).
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
This sequel to the enjoyable true-life 2019 movie that tells of the unlikely rise to stardom of a group of singing Cornish fishermen is less successful as it struggles to cope with multiple plot lines. The pressure of coping with new found fame and continuing with their day jobs, whilst trying to formulate the all important second album, leads the singers into turmoil as a Glastonbury festival appearance looms.
James Purefoy is very good as the grizzly lead singer who is not coping with the death of his father and his ensuing affair with Irish singer Imelda May provides some genuine warmth to the movie. Less successful is the media training sequence and the pub landlord “is he having an affair” plot.
The scenery is wonderful but too much of the movie is hampered by the wavering narrative.
Feels more like a Sunday evening TV special than a movie.
5/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
The only slight let-down for me was the unrealistic way the dancers in the Berlin club ignore the gun violence in their midst, or lightly step aside to make way for crashing bodies before resuming their dancing. And then suddenly they all evacuate the club but with the vacant expressions of untrained extras. It's kind of funny but lessens the tension. Good dark techno music, though.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Social commentary disguised as a court room drama.
Humphrey Bogart is excellent as a successful attorney who rediscovers his idealism while defending a wayward young man on a murder charge. The defendant is played by a good-looking John Derek, also excellent. Nicholas Ray directs a tough, no punches pulled script from Daniel Taradash and John Monks Jr, and injects plenty of tough, no pulled punches into the out-of-courtroom scenes, where the depredation of inner city life, the turmoil, aimlessness and petty delinquency is laid bare and open. The characters are well drawn. Even better drawn are the comparisons between the slum existence of young Nick Romano and the relative high-life of lawyer Andrew Morton. Bogart’s persona fits this kind of character exceptionally well: Morton’s pulled himself out of the very same cesspit and is continually at a moral crossroads, acknowledging the societal imbalance, yet ignoring it. At one point, he even resorts to the rough-house tactics he employed as a youth. This is a lawyer who still understands the streets and communicates well with the people who inhabit them; yet he can also hold his own with self-superior doyens of society. Only his understanding partner, a social worker [Susan Perry], seems to draw him back from the ignorant slumber, constantly pricking his conscience. Similarly, it is only Nick Romano’s tragic wife who displays confidence in her disparate lover. Allene Roberts is suitably wispish.
The courtroom scenes are generally effective, but there’s not much you can do to inject genuine tension into these scenes. Instead Nicholas Ray, a fairly inexperienced director at the time, uses intense close ups and sudden cut-aways to produce a modicum of suspense. A closet film noir, Knock On Any Door has all the deep shadows and sense of inevitability surrounding its protagonist, especially in those street-life scenes, where everyone, thing and where seems to be covered in a sheen of filthy darkness. The court sequences are bathed in harsh light; the Judge swelters; the court artist wipes his neck; the prosecutor’s facial scar seems to glow hotter with every scene; the jury flutter fans; the temperature rises with the spectacle in the spick-and-span expansive world of law and order, where society expects people to behave and conform. For the people of the slum, it is a closed in, cold, curtailed existence.
Plaudits must go to editor Viola Lawrence who keeps what could have been a dull series of scenes swift and sharp. She’s more than competent: the opening murder and chase has a nail biting edge to it, an urgency of sound and vision and movement unusual in mainstream cinema of the time. Later on, when Nick and Emma’s marriage is collapsing, she uses similar techniques, despite the confined spaces, to convey the sudden realisations – as an audience, we recognise the similarities and understand that something terrible is about to happen.
Nicholas Ray’s parting shots, of Bogart alone in court, of John Derek walking to the execution chamber, are split by heavy dark shadows and blinding white lights; the two warring parties seeming to come together at the moment of sentence and deliverance. Ray’s telling us these worlds coexist, however uneasily. Bogart’s final speech, from the mouth of the writer’s, tells us they must also work together proactively to prevent a continued failure of society to address an inner city crises. Ray approached the subject of delinquency again a few years later in Rebel Without A Cause. If I’m honest, this film’s probably better. Rebel is good, and it has a smouldering James Dean, but it also features an element of childish make-believe entirely erased from this movie. The poor folk of Knock On Any Door love, live and die with the same misunderstandings and futilities as the rich idle kids in Rebel, yet they do so with even more purpose for they must scratch a living; James Dean and Natalie Wood are simply angry because they can be. When John Derek’s Nick Romano sums up his life as “Live fast, die young and have a good looking corpse” it summed up the next couple of generations attitudes far better than the over simplistic moralising of Rebel.
There was criticism of the film at the time, that it’s approach towards murder was soft and its moralising misplaced. In decades of hindsight, it is clear the film is tackling a wide range of issues in addition to its central core theme of lapsed personal responsibility – including police corruption, prison brutality, unemployment, education and the colour bar – and perhaps this is the major detraction: it touches on too many and resolves none.
Marlon Brando was originally slated for John Derek’s role.
A very good drama, with a cast whose performances are successful enough to disguise the faults. Thoroughly enjoyed this one.
Easy - they're all busy bashing the hell out of protesters!
BTW having not really seen the other John Wicks, could I catch no 4 and get along with it? Is it a standalone - enough - for that to work? Also, @Gymkata
I saw this last night and pretty much agree with everything you said.
Very watchable in a Sunday night kind of way. I'm glad I didn't go to the cinema to see it. Also, I missed Daniel Mays.
On John Wick, I have only just discovered these films too. Absolutely loved them. I recently made my Dad watch the first one and he loved it too. I highly recommend the first one.
Michael Nyquist would have made a great Bond villain. ( He was brilliant in Hunter Killer)
I started reading that thinking, blimey, ajb must have some young members if their dad likes John Wick. Then I see it's Lady Rose posting - her Dad's roughly the same age as mine!
This fact based drama revolves around whether mentally challenged Derek Bentley urged his friend to shoot a policeman or to give his gun up during a robbery on a warehouse. A policeman is killed and a court case ensues. Christopher Eccleston is excellent as the easily led youngster and the injustice of the events make you want to scream out loud. Written by our own Neil Purvis and Robert Wade, this shows that they can write thrilling and poignant scripts.
See it during the day as you won’t want to sleep afterwards.
8/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Excellent adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Time Rice’s rock opera concept album Jesus Christ Superstar. It is not an adaptation of the stage show.
It is important here to remember that a rock opera doesn’t feature sung dialogue in the manner of traditional opera. Instead a series of songs or musical interludes are composed to narrate a story. This allows a rock band to effectively play all the roles and as such it is difficult to separate a rock opera from a concept album. For instance, Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick is considered a progressive rock concept album, yet it fulfils the same aims as The Who’s rock opera Tommy. So who is right and who is wrong? Lloyd Webber and Rice’s concept reinforced the landscape somewhat as they chose to cast the album, allowing different voices for the different characters. This provides their soundtrack with a far richer tone than Pete Townsend’s efforts with The Who, whose characters are almost exclusively voiced by Roger Daltrey.
Thus, the 1970 double LP of Superstar was conceived as an album by the writers and used as a test run to persuade theatre promoters to launch the show. The original vinyl cast was a cobbled together mish-mash of session musicians, drama students, pub singers and members of Joe Cocker’s Grease Band at a loose end. Future Deep Purple lead vocalist Ian Gillan bagged the role of Jesus, unheralded singers Murray Head and Yvonne Elliman took on Judas and Mary Magdalene. Paul Raven [future notorious pop star Gary Glitter] played one of the Pharisees. It was less than successful in its intended aims, although the disc did produce one hit UK single and made minor inroads into the LP chart, but these not until 1972 when a West End show finally materialised at the Palace Theatre. On stage Paul Nicholas’ interpretation of the titular Superstar made him a household name. The show had already been given an American concert premiere and begun a Broadway run in 1971, which led to the original LP finally starting to sell. It was a Billboard No. 1 and the top seller for 1971. Rogue amateur shows had been given sporadically until producer Robert Stigwood forced a legal embargo. All this activity was actually preceded by Norman Jewison’s attempt to green light the movie, which he declared soon after the release of his masterful adaptation of the hit musical Fiddler on the Roof.
Why the history lesson, you ask? Only because it serves to highlight the evolving nature of Lloyd Webber and Rice’s seminal early work, how they struggled for autonomy and artistic direction. It’s fair to say that while the film version killed off the Broadway show – it closed on 30 June 1973, a week after the film premiered – it sustained the London run, which lasted for eight years and for a while became London’s longest running theatre musical. Many audiences saw an evangelical message in the music and lyrics, but that was never the composers’ intention. Christians merely seized on a slice of popular culture to reinforce their outreach.
Norman Jewison, without any stage show to steal from, employed a series of screenwriters to suggest scenarios for mounting the rock opera. Eventually he settled on young writer and journalist Melvyn Bragg, whose idea of presenting the opera as a sort of modern day Mummer’s Play bore spectacular fruit. Lloyd Webber and Rice wrote a couple of extra songs, which are now regularly inserted into the stage show, but the overall orchestration was handed to Andre Previn, whose expertise is essential to the emotional impact of the music. It is a little guitar heavy, but that suits the themes and tempos as well as the contemporary setting.
As the Overture plays, a bus load of theatre students arrive in the Holy Land, stop at a Roman ruin, unpack their props and costumes and enact a musical version of the last week in the life of Jesus Christ. The film is packed full of splendid luminous images of the desert. There is no attempt to place the actors in any historical context; they wear modern dress and perform as contemporary actors / dancers / singers within the story’s framework. There is dissention already in the group. The man playing Judas Iscariot watches the happy throng from a distance, his barely concealed contempt bursting out in the forked, vicious opener Heaven On Their Minds. For the disciples and the throng, this is a happy place, basking in Jesus’ light, yet Judas is doubtful. He believes in his leader’s message, but isn’t struck on how the Superstar wishes to achieve it. He dislikes contradiction. He wants to help the poor and the suffering, but can’t see how sermons and prayers will help, when money and good work is required. Judas isn’t a sceptic here, he’s a believer, but he doesn’t agree with the Grand Plan or its publicity method; he is particularly antagonistic towards Mary Magdalene, who he considers a promotional disaster waiting to happen. A series of rock n soul songs propel us through the fateful week. The subtleties of Everything’s Alright and Could We Start Again Please are contrasted excellently against the exuberance of Simon Zealoties or King Herod’s Song, the agony of Gethsemane or Peter’s Denial. The camera work and choreography are well integrated and there is a genuine display of energy and enthusiasm. Only the curious addition of slow-motion and jump cuts mid-song detracts from the success of these numbers. Lloyd Webber’s first great ballad I Don’t Know How To Love Him is framed brilliantly against a swirling tent at dusk, Yvonne Elliman’s Mary easing the exhausted Jesus to sleep.
Carl Anderson’s Judas meanwhile continues to circle the main action, watching how his fellow disciples interact, adore and deny. Carl Anderson is fantastic as Judas, a man pained and eventually torn by the betrayal he feels is forced upon him. Meanwhile Caiaphas plots death, Pontius Pilate has dreams and Herod parties on a floating barge. As Jesus’ moment of death draws near, the music reaches a crescendo of whipping, crashing cymbals and torturous guitars, before the defining title track confirms Jesus’ God-like, unquestioned, photogenic, rock, roll and soul status. Sadly, Ted Neeley simply isn’t a strong enough lead to carry this kind of material. He seems to screech the more passionate lines, which is disturbing.
There is an attempt to reference contemporary angles into the lyrics and story, an intention of Tim Rice’s from the outset. The most notable addition comes during Pilate’s speech to the Jews: “What’s all this new respect for Caesar? / Till now this has been noticeably lacking.” Jewison shovels in a shot of Israeli tanks, which sits at odds to everything else around it, serving more to portray Judas’ conflicted opinions, the Christian ideal clashing as they do with Zionist tradition. British cinematographer Douglas Slocombe is never less than superb with his searing sandscapes. It’s such a pity the music suffers in the second act, is less imaginative and errs to the inconsistent. It’s a mistake Lloyd Webber wouldn’t make again for some time.
The film is a splendid interpretation of a musical landmark and while many critics tend to dismiss it, I believe it is far better than that. Like all films about the life of Christ, it suffers from having to portray a deity, but as a musical it is far more energetic and on point visually, artistically and thematically than a whole slew of supposedly better filmic efforts. I am not a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, but when his music is good, it is very good and there are plenty of examples captured for posterity in this movie. It’s almost tempted me to track down a copy of the soundtrack. Almost…
When members of retired US Colonel John Matrix’s special forces unit are being killed by a former rogue soldier he goes on a killing spree to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Directed in cartoon fashion by legendary pulp film master Mark L Lester, this is the embodiment of all those mens adventure action paperbacks of the dim and distant. The body count is huge as one-man-army-wooden-as-a-picket-fence Arnold Schwarzenegger slaughters scores of protagonists in bloodthirsty ways, always with an excruciating one-liner to emphasise the manner of the killing. OK, no one expects Oscar winning acting in these sort of films but some of it is so dreadful it has to be seen to be believed. Having said that, the film is highly entertaining, and Rae Dawn Chong makes some nice sarcastic comments as the flight stewardess who is drawn into the action.
It’s difficult to rate this with any degree of accuracy so let’s go for 6/10, but 10/10 if you’re just comparing 80’s action flicks.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I saw the D&D movie on Monday and really enjoyed it. This is a type of movie few expect to be good, but this one is inventive, full of adventure and really funny. Since the source material is the role playing game D & D and the other fantasy successes are pretty serious (GoT, LotR), it was the right call to make it much more lighthearted. I did play D & D for years when I was young .... er, so perhaps I found it extra enjoyable. Thre movie is well cast too. Michelle Rodriguez is a standout. I haven't really seen Rege-Jean Page act before, so of cause I paid extra attention to him since he's often mentioned as a James Bond candidate. His character is actually just a major supporting character, or an NPC (non-player character) in role playing terms. He also plays a character who is basicly a humorless do-gooder, so the fun is other people's reactions to him. He doesn't get to be charming and do drama like Chris Pine. Rege-Jean Page is perhaps the only male character who is a really good fighter, but he fights so quickly it's hard to see if it's the actor or a stunt,man doing the fights. He does look great, that's for certain. In my opinion Page should find a drama where he can show EON that he can do emotional and tense scenes too.
Comments
And thank you again! As I said in the main Harry Palmer thread, this is my favourite of the series. I could go on at length but you've said it so well that I won't, except to say that I completely agree with your appreciation of Ed Begley's performance.
Fun facts- the voice of the Brain is Donald Sutherland, who can be spotted as a technician.
The postman who gives Harry the parcel that starts the whole plot was Michael Caine's brother Stanley.
The eleven picture deal between Saltzman and Caine wasn't exclusively for Harry Palmer movies- for example, "The Battle Of Britain" and "Play Dirty". The second of these co-starred Nigel Davenport who Caine apparently suggested to Saltzman to take over the Palmer role after him.
TwoFour said:
But what I questioned at once is your claim that Indy's leading ladies in both the previous movies were weepy. Seriously - Marion Raven weepy
________________________________________
@TwoFour is correct: the two female leads could not be more different. I happened to catch the last half hour of Raiders and the first half hour of Temple this weekend when I was watching cable at my mum's house so the contrast was crystal clear. Karen Allen is introduced winning a drinking contest, she is a ruff tuff self-reliant outdoorsy woman of action.
I don't often reply to criticisms of my reviews; I don't see the point. However, @caractacus potts @Number24 I would refer you to the scenes where Karen Allen is trapped in a laundry basket and screams "Indy! Indy! Indy!" with excruciating regularity. Plus, I don't understand how a woman, or a man, who competes in drinking games for cash can be perceived as self-reliant. Chancer, more like it. She's a quite awful character and is used as the butt of jokes, not the purveyor of them. Still, since I'm mentioning Karen Allen...
INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
It’s not bad, is it?
I really dislike the first two Indy movies. Maybe I’ve been battered into submission. I rather enjoyed this outing, struck through with familiarities and a cast of British thespians. The role reversal of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones becoming the dad to Shia Le Beouf’s Henry Jr worked well and there are plenty of exciting set pieces. I wasn’t excited by the alien skull stuff, which felt like another of Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial fantasies and because of that I wasn’t over excited by the climatic action. It’s an amiable piece which ticks all the boxes without ever stretching the imagination.
BUS STOP (1956)
Terrible stage play adaptation with Marilyn Monroe looking like a pasty faced mannequin yet managing, just about, to deliver one of her best ever performances. I say just about because she’s all method – looking at the inner self – Stanislavsky and all that – while her beau [sic] played by newcomer Don Murray is of the old school, an outward, loud, no barriers, infantile, play-to-the-back-row-of-the-theatre performance. He was Oscar nominated. How? He is appalling. In the quiet moments, the film works really well, but Murray is so centre stage, much more than Monroe who despite top billing is virtually a support player, he over powers everything. The first half of the movie is virtually unwatchable today. There’s nothing amusing in Murray’s naïve cowpoke, who hollers his lines like some crazed male banshee; nothing holds him in check and he simply tramples on any sentiment. The film barely recovers. Dramatically, director Joshua Logan leaves Monroe all at sea, he hasn’t gauged the material at all and opts for excess where subtlety is required. The narrative is an awkward one which doesn’t sit well with modern morals – did it in 1956? – and isn’t helped by Murray’s shouty, lasso thirsty turn. I was cringing with embarrassment through almost the whole runtime. Sad to say, this was awful, Monroe aside, and the dear girl must have despaired at where her career was headed. The film was shot in cinemascope for no apparent reason. I wanted to like this, but I didn’t. Just awful. Poor Marilyn…
I've had a rough time catching up on some recorded movies. I think I'll take a much earned rest tomorrow.
SOLDIER BLUE (1970)
A controversial, horrible little film which attempts to draw parallels to the behaviour of the US military during the Vietnam war and so ends with an exploitative, bloody massacre of Native American Indians. Unsettling not because of the scenes of decapitation, disembowelment, rape and child killing, nor because it isn’t a wholly accurate depiction of the events before or during Sand Creek in 1864 – for instance the names of all real individuals have been altered, references made to other atrocities are intermingled with this one, it isn’t mentioned that two companies of cavalry refused to take part in the action – but because the film is framed by a soft-focus romance between a white squaw and a cavalry private, who flee across country from a Cheyenne raiding party. Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss are simply unable to carry the heavy load, their characters are unsympathetic and their developing relationship unlikely and eventually mawkish. Even without the benefit of historical hindsight, you sense where this relationship and the unfolding drama is heading. It might have felt ground breaking in 1970, but filmmakers have touched on these barrier breaking relationships in westerns before: Broken Arrow most noticeably, Elvis Presley’s brave failure Flaming Star, and Arthur Penn’s superb Little Big Man among them. They treated the subject courageously and with dignity. Not so here. Soldier Blue is a grim watch from the off. Donald Pleasance provides momentary relief as a nitty gritty gun runner. Extremely popular in the U.K. at release, but rarely exhibited on screen or on television these days. The violence is a black mark against it. The central performances an even darker one.
I’ve watched the Final Destination quintet of movies over the past couple of weeks. Each film features a character who has a premonition of a catastrophe and warns a few others who escape the impending death. The survivors are then killed one by one by Death itself to ensure that Fate is inevitable. The series relies on the inventiveness of the deaths which are bizarre chain reaction accidents.
FINAL DESTINATION (2000)
Devon Sawa has a premonition of a plane explosion and his panicked reactions cause him and a few others to be thrown off the plane which explodes while taking off. Initially he is under suspicion of causing the explosion but when the survivors start to be killed they work out what is happening. The set pieces are very well handled and it’s nice to see that the protagonist is not a deranged serial killer. Lots of well known faces in this that you don’t know the names of.
FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003)
A group of college students going on a spring break avoid a calamitous road accident when the driver has a premonition of a logging truck causing the pileup. The road users who are blocked by entering the road from a slipway are then killed one by one. The accident is filmed and edited to an excellent standard and the killings are up to standard, though it’s all starting to look a bit familiar.
FINAL DESTINATION 3 (2006)
This time around it’s a rollercoaster accident. The deaths are again pretty inventive but it lacks any originality.
THE FINAL DESTINATION (2009)
A premonition of an accident at a racetrack is the starting point to this one. Director David R. Ellis from part two returns to the franchise which was originally released in 3-D but nothing can really save this dreary, predictable effort. Poor CGI does not help it’s cause.
FINAL DESTINATION 5 (2011)
So we come to the end of the franchise and like the Planet Of The Apes original movie series this ties things up in a wraparound story. This one concerns a disaster on a suspension bridge. Director Steven Quayle successfully reignites the franchise with a series of inventive deaths and the opening disaster scenes are actually tense and thrilling. Well worth watching and a surprise ending that ties the whole series together.
I would rank the films in order as 5/2/1/3/4
I think we should agree that the other fella is wrong. 🙂
Would love to read your review on part 5 @Gymkata 🙂it’s certainly worth watching - you can skip 3 and 4 with no problems.
THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968)
Christopher Lee and Charles Grey go head-to-head as a master of the occult and a Satanist, vying for the souls of Patrick Mower and Nike Arrighi. This Hammer horror picture relies more on psychological shocks, the mystery of deep hypnosis and the audience’s latent fear of eternal torment rather than blood and gore. Well, the satanists kill a goat in an orgiastic ceremony, but to be fair, the film is quite mild and feels a mite out-dated for 1968. Screenwriter Richard Matheson brings a touch of Roger Corman class to the production – he wrote all those Poe cycle films – and adapts Dennis Wheatley’s novel more than adequately. The language of the occult proves somewhat confusing. You have to let that go, as well as a few rash individual character decisions. Director Terence Fisher employs suspense as his main weapon of terror and several scenes are wrought to the palms: Mocata’s mesmerism of Sarah Lawson’s dignified Marie Eaton is the standout sequence, the initial ‘darkness falls’ black magic attack at the elongated climax has some power, Tanith writing in her devilled agonies, the conclusion stumbles a little and ends with another of Matheson’s traditional fiery infernos. Good, committed performances enhance the film no end.
One of Hammer’s better efforts, they virtually remade it as the more sensational To The Devil A Daughter in 1976.
JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4
Fans of JW will like this. It's an excellent addition to the JW series, brimming with style. The fight choreography is as impressively balletic as ever, with some creative new twists brought to the combat set pieces. Yet the film has time to breathe, and there is some focus on character (or on genre stereotypes, to put it more accurately).
If NTTD borrowed a little something from JW in terms of a video-game way of doing violence, the influence works in the other direction here - not least in Bill Skarsgard's performance as The Marquis, a lead villain whose vocal style (and manner) seems directly based on Safin's.
As for Wick himself, Keanu Reeves is better than ever in this one, still with tremendous physicality but looking suitably jaded.
I get a kick out of watching a craggy-faced Ian McShane relishing his part as Winston in the JW movies, having first seen the actor in the cinema decades ago in Guy Hamilton's 'Battle Of Britain', where he shared scenes with Robert Shaw. A different world, a different cinema! McShane's role in JW4 is well integrated with the story and drama.
Look out for Scott Adkins as Killa, a Flemingesque grotesque of a crime boss, albeit presented with a comic slant.
Lance Reddick, RIP, returns to his recurring role as the concierge for a fitting final performance.
I've never seen these films. Apparently they are very good. I see they've been on TV this week, but I have been at work and missed the lot. Some judicious catching up to do.
SCREAM 6 (2023)
SCREAM (i.e. 5) (2022)
SCRE4M (i.e. 4) (2011)
SCREAM (1996)
I 've watched all of these 'Scream' movies in the space of a week.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin's latest two entries in the series, #5 and #6, certainly have their moments but they're overstuffed and they're fannish in a leaden way, failing to match the postmodern wit of Wes Craven's original and its finely judged balance between horror and humour.
Melissa Barrera, the new 'last girl', simply isn't as good an actor as Neve Campbell. And while Jenna Ortega's opening scene in #5 does justice to the iconic Drew Barrymore sequence of the original, a truly frightening showcase, the mistake is to let Ortega's character survive, knocking around for the space of two movies without material to match her impressive opener.
#6 moves the franchise from Woodsboro to NYC, its best sequence again being its opening (with Samara Weaving), mining contemporary scares from cell phone useage in the context of a blind date in the city, an update to the home landline trope of the original.
The revelation of my rewatch is realising how much Wes Craven's final entry in the series, #4, is underrated. In many ways #4 is as fun and as scary as the first, and it certainly does its 'meta' more successfully than Bettinelli-Olpin's recent convoluted fare.
Legacy characters are no longer guaranteed their survival (Bond fans: "I know, right?!"*) and #6 fills a gap or two by resurrecting Hayden Panettiere from #4. But it's sad to see Ms Panettiere, or rather her character, looking so addled compared with her poise and beauty of a decade or so before. It's sadder still that Courteney Cox's ill advised cosmetic surgery gives her the true 'ghostface' of the latest two movies (especially if, like me, you're nostalgic for the Gale Weathers who became Dewey's sweetheart in #1).
At least #5 and #6 detach the franchise from Harvey Weinstein's name. Knowing what we know now about Weinstein, some of the themes explored for entertainment in the original cycle of 'Scream' movies resonate awkwardly. I haven't seen #3 again in my current re-watch, but I think it's the one that goes to Hollywood; Rose McGowan plays one of the victims in #1. The best that can be said is that Bob Weinstein was reportedly more invested than his brother in the creative side and that - essentially - 'Scream' belonged to horror geniuses Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, director and writer, rather than to any producer.
Minor spoiler:
*In #6, Jasmin Savoy Brown's character, Mindy, even lectures her geeky college chums about how movie franchises these days try to refresh themselves by killing off their central characters: she includes James Bond at the end of her list of examples!
Last night I watched THE MISFITS. Not the legendary John Huston movie that turned out to be the final film for Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift, but a 2021 heist flick directed by Renny Harlin and starring our own Pierce Brosnan. And oh my God is it bad. It tries desperately to be like a Guy Ritchie movie (isn't one enough?), but has no style or flair... and the acting is downright horrible. Brozzer has never been skillful with accents, but here he does about half a dozen--badly--as he also assumes several disguises. (It's also amazing that a film shot in the UAE and has a number of Arabic names among the producers has so many ludicrous Arab stereotypes.) I get the feeling this was supposed to be a longer movie--it's under 90 minutes, and if this is the best that could be salvaged from the cutting room floor, maybe it should have been trashed.
TARGET EARTH (1954)
Monogram Pictures usually made B-movies. After the war, producer Walter Mirisch created a subsidiary company Allied Artists with the intention of producing high quality films. The dream took some years to reach fruition [1956 and Friendly Persuasion]. In the meantime, Allied was happy to continue to make, promote and distribute pictures the major studios wouldn’t touch. This science fiction film noir is one such independent film, produced by Herman Cohen, he of I Was A Teenage Werewolf, and backed with private investment, a sort of ‘crowd fund’ of the 1950s.
The film starts off tremendously strong. A series of empty, silent city landscapes gives way to Nora King’s bedroom. We know she’s a troubled soul: she lies over the covers in her under slip and a half empty bottle of sleeping pills is split on the sheets. Nora’s day starts badly and gets worse. Having failed to kill herself, she discovers the Windy City – Chicago is never specifically mentioned by name – is all but abandoned. Nora’s investigations around her apartment block, the mute streets and the parks are eerily impressive, plenty of silence, natural sounds, shadows and sudden stark bright light. When she discovers a corpse, the moment is startling and effective, even though we half expect it. She suspects Frank Brooks, who is lingering nearby, but as the two form an uneasy alliance, they realise a disaster must have or is about to occur. They fear a nuclear attack. No such luck. It’s an alien army of metallic gleaming robots armed with laser rays. Well, one robot anyway.
While Nora and Frank explore the city further, meeting more disparate refugees, trusting some, avoiding others, the US military has its top scientists attempting to thwart the alien invasion. Quite taut at times, the movie benefits from focussing its attention on the human story and the character dynamics. By virtually ignoring the robot[s], director Sherman A. Rose manages to hold our interest and prevent any feeling of ineptitude. The robot is a disappointment, but I saw worse during my two-year Classic Dr Who marathon.
Katherine Crowley is the lead. Television became her staple outlet and she would spar with our own Roger Moore in several episodes of Maverick. Richard Denning had a decent career, mostly in sci-fi films, so his hero role was not unfamiliar to him. Robert Roark plays an escaped murderer and bagged the role because his father put up a chunk of the production cost. For an amateur, he’s not too shabby as a trigger happy psychopath. The script deals in cliches, but the small cast treats them seriously and the tensions are well sustained.
Overall, of its kind, not bad at all.
TOKYO JOE (1949)
Taking as its template the doomed romance of Casablanca, Tokyo Joe sees Humphrey Bogart effectively do an impersonation of himself, with Joe Barrett replacing Rick Blaine. Both men own sleazy bars, both have contacts in the underworld and the police and both have moral, sacrificial instincts despite being thoroughly immoral people.
Tokyo Joe is set in Japan during the post-war U.S. military administration. Decorated veteran USAF pilot Joe Barrett returns to the westernised cabaret joint he owned in the pre-war days, hoping to pick up life where he left it, joshing with his business partner Ito and winning back his ex-wife, Trina, a Russian emigree. She’s married to upright and decent lawyer Mark Landis, and in the dignified twosome Barrett appears to have met his match. Tentative inquiries about a startup air freight business lead him into the cold, unwelcoming embrace of Baron Kimura, a Yakuza head who has spies everywhere and seeks to pervert a nationalist uprising. As skeletons begin to drop out of everyone’s closets and the airfreight flights take on life-threatening proportions, Joe becomes drawn ever deeper into the Yakuza conspiracy, dragging Trina, Mark and their daughter into danger.
There’s a little too much moralising about the benefits of American occupation, but that was standard whitewashing for the era. Bogart’s character seems far too worldly to be taken in by the political rhetoric he ends up spouting; far too worldly to deliver the lovey-dovey lines too. He’s best remarking on the waste of war. He makes a tremendously poor early impression, especially when confronting his ex-wife, but the spikey edges soften as the film progresses. That may have been Bogart’s intention – or the writer’s / director’s – but the lack of subtlety jars heavily against his later actions. It doesn’t help that Florence Marly is a distinctly unimpressive heroine. You can’t imagine why Joe is so stuck on her; she’s far too passive. An actress of genuine life experience like Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr would have made a better stab as this worn out burlesque girl hiding a bitter past, pining for a better life, holding a candle for her ex-lover. Marly simply isn’t interesting or good looking enough. Alexander Knox cuts a safe figure as her husband, but like Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo in Casablanca, this just makes him uninteresting.
So Bogart has nobody to act with except his Japanese co-stars. Sessue Hayakawa is creepy as the motionless, soulless Kimura, every movement played for dominant effect. He was a real war hero, working for the French resistance – yes, seriously, look it up – and the film revitalised his career. Bogart deliberately sought him out; his company Santana made the film and the star had a lot of say in the production. Hayakawa’s performance reminded me of Fleming’s description of Dr No as a giant worm, and wrapped in a kimono, head bobbing slowly, he comes across visually in a similar, gaunt fashion. Later on in his career Hayakawa would spar brilliantly with Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Another note for James Bond fans is to see Teru Shimada playing Barrett’s buddy, Ito. Bogart and Shimada make a great double act and it’s a pity their obvious camaraderie isn’t exploited more by the director. Watching the two toss each other around in a mock judo fight was quite something. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched Bogart be so animated, even if it is a stunt double.
I was impressed the film takes time to allow its Japanese actors moments to shine. Whole chunks of dialogue are recited in Japanese without subtitles, lending the film a genuine sense of purpose, people and place. Japanese society is treated with great respect by the filmmakers and often, when negative scenes do occur, they tend to be reflecting a western influence, often war related, such as poverty stricken men scrabbling for a half-smoked cigarette. As if to demonstrate the international, outward looking mantra of the Japanese, no person of US military authority can speak a foreign language, but all the nationals and the US civilians are bilingual. In an era when John Wayne was making a series of unashamedly patriotic flag wavers about the Pacific war, demonising the Japanese at every turn, it’s no surprise to find the liberal Bogart providing a more conciliatory outlook, even if the sermonising feels unnecessary.
The film gains tension towards the end. The resolution is smart and worthwhile, featuring another good slice of hand-to-hand combat. Good too are the early location shoots, using a stand in for Bogart’s character, which trawl around the still war ravaged streets of Tokyo. The film was the first western movie permitted to be filmed in post-war Japan. Unfortunately, like Bogart’s character, the genuine footage jars with the studio work. Something more akin to the shadowy city streets of The Third Man might have enhanced the look of the project, but you can’t change what we have got and I expect there might have been numerous permissions granted just to film what we do see.
Despite the good intensions, the movie doesn’t quite succeed. The parallels with Bogart’s Oscar winning classic are too obvious, such as the memorial link via a lounge song, These Foolish Things, and the eventual double-double crossings. When Bogart paraphrases “Here’s looking at you, kid” while talking to a seven year old girl, you know the script has sadly got stuck in a rut of its own making. Not bad, but not great, Tokyo Joe was a surprisingly big hit on release.
I did look up Sessue Yayakawa -what a life! Most of us know him as Colonel Saito in "The bridge over the river Kwai".
I keep meaning to see the John Wick films on telly this week but I miss the first 10 mins and as I figured the whole thing is a revenge movie, those 10 mins are key, otherwise it's just one bloke smashing up a load of other blokes, there's no noble context for any of it. It's like life really isn't it, who are the good guys and the bad guys depends on when you come in.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I haven't seen the JW movies on TV but I do wonder whether they're censored there. SInce they're all about stylised violence, any censorship would defeat the object. They're well worth getting on disc, watching on any streaming service running them or seeing in the cinema (where possible: #4 is just out).
FISHERMAN’S FRIENDS: ONE AND ALL (2022)
This sequel to the enjoyable true-life 2019 movie that tells of the unlikely rise to stardom of a group of singing Cornish fishermen is less successful as it struggles to cope with multiple plot lines. The pressure of coping with new found fame and continuing with their day jobs, whilst trying to formulate the all important second album, leads the singers into turmoil as a Glastonbury festival appearance looms.
James Purefoy is very good as the grizzly lead singer who is not coping with the death of his father and his ensuing affair with Irish singer Imelda May provides some genuine warmth to the movie. Less successful is the media training sequence and the pub landlord “is he having an affair” plot.
The scenery is wonderful but too much of the movie is hampered by the wavering narrative.
Feels more like a Sunday evening TV special than a movie.
5/10
Thanks for that review.
Yes, a very entertaining movie.
The only slight let-down for me was the unrealistic way the dancers in the Berlin club ignore the gun violence in their midst, or lightly step aside to make way for crashing bodies before resuming their dancing. And then suddenly they all evacuate the club but with the vacant expressions of untrained extras. It's kind of funny but lessens the tension. Good dark techno music, though.
KNOCK ON ANY DOOR (1949)
Social commentary disguised as a court room drama.
Humphrey Bogart is excellent as a successful attorney who rediscovers his idealism while defending a wayward young man on a murder charge. The defendant is played by a good-looking John Derek, also excellent. Nicholas Ray directs a tough, no punches pulled script from Daniel Taradash and John Monks Jr, and injects plenty of tough, no pulled punches into the out-of-courtroom scenes, where the depredation of inner city life, the turmoil, aimlessness and petty delinquency is laid bare and open. The characters are well drawn. Even better drawn are the comparisons between the slum existence of young Nick Romano and the relative high-life of lawyer Andrew Morton. Bogart’s persona fits this kind of character exceptionally well: Morton’s pulled himself out of the very same cesspit and is continually at a moral crossroads, acknowledging the societal imbalance, yet ignoring it. At one point, he even resorts to the rough-house tactics he employed as a youth. This is a lawyer who still understands the streets and communicates well with the people who inhabit them; yet he can also hold his own with self-superior doyens of society. Only his understanding partner, a social worker [Susan Perry], seems to draw him back from the ignorant slumber, constantly pricking his conscience. Similarly, it is only Nick Romano’s tragic wife who displays confidence in her disparate lover. Allene Roberts is suitably wispish.
The courtroom scenes are generally effective, but there’s not much you can do to inject genuine tension into these scenes. Instead Nicholas Ray, a fairly inexperienced director at the time, uses intense close ups and sudden cut-aways to produce a modicum of suspense. A closet film noir, Knock On Any Door has all the deep shadows and sense of inevitability surrounding its protagonist, especially in those street-life scenes, where everyone, thing and where seems to be covered in a sheen of filthy darkness. The court sequences are bathed in harsh light; the Judge swelters; the court artist wipes his neck; the prosecutor’s facial scar seems to glow hotter with every scene; the jury flutter fans; the temperature rises with the spectacle in the spick-and-span expansive world of law and order, where society expects people to behave and conform. For the people of the slum, it is a closed in, cold, curtailed existence.
Plaudits must go to editor Viola Lawrence who keeps what could have been a dull series of scenes swift and sharp. She’s more than competent: the opening murder and chase has a nail biting edge to it, an urgency of sound and vision and movement unusual in mainstream cinema of the time. Later on, when Nick and Emma’s marriage is collapsing, she uses similar techniques, despite the confined spaces, to convey the sudden realisations – as an audience, we recognise the similarities and understand that something terrible is about to happen.
Nicholas Ray’s parting shots, of Bogart alone in court, of John Derek walking to the execution chamber, are split by heavy dark shadows and blinding white lights; the two warring parties seeming to come together at the moment of sentence and deliverance. Ray’s telling us these worlds coexist, however uneasily. Bogart’s final speech, from the mouth of the writer’s, tells us they must also work together proactively to prevent a continued failure of society to address an inner city crises. Ray approached the subject of delinquency again a few years later in Rebel Without A Cause. If I’m honest, this film’s probably better. Rebel is good, and it has a smouldering James Dean, but it also features an element of childish make-believe entirely erased from this movie. The poor folk of Knock On Any Door love, live and die with the same misunderstandings and futilities as the rich idle kids in Rebel, yet they do so with even more purpose for they must scratch a living; James Dean and Natalie Wood are simply angry because they can be. When John Derek’s Nick Romano sums up his life as “Live fast, die young and have a good looking corpse” it summed up the next couple of generations attitudes far better than the over simplistic moralising of Rebel.
There was criticism of the film at the time, that it’s approach towards murder was soft and its moralising misplaced. In decades of hindsight, it is clear the film is tackling a wide range of issues in addition to its central core theme of lapsed personal responsibility – including police corruption, prison brutality, unemployment, education and the colour bar – and perhaps this is the major detraction: it touches on too many and resolves none.
Marlon Brando was originally slated for John Derek’s role.
A very good drama, with a cast whose performances are successful enough to disguise the faults. Thoroughly enjoyed this one.
Easy - they're all busy bashing the hell out of protesters!
BTW having not really seen the other John Wicks, could I catch no 4 and get along with it? Is it a standalone - enough - for that to work? Also, @Gymkata
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I saw this last night and pretty much agree with everything you said.
Very watchable in a Sunday night kind of way. I'm glad I didn't go to the cinema to see it. Also, I missed Daniel Mays.
On John Wick, I have only just discovered these films too. Absolutely loved them. I recently made my Dad watch the first one and he loved it too. I highly recommend the first one.
Michael Nyquist would have made a great Bond villain. ( He was brilliant in Hunter Killer)
I started reading that thinking, blimey, ajb must have some young members if their dad likes John Wick. Then I see it's Lady Rose posting - her Dad's roughly the same age as mine!
Roger Moore 1927-2017
LET HIM HAVE IT (1991)
This fact based drama revolves around whether mentally challenged Derek Bentley urged his friend to shoot a policeman or to give his gun up during a robbery on a warehouse. A policeman is killed and a court case ensues. Christopher Eccleston is excellent as the easily led youngster and the injustice of the events make you want to scream out loud. Written by our own Neil Purvis and Robert Wade, this shows that they can write thrilling and poignant scripts.
See it during the day as you won’t want to sleep afterwards.
8/10
JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1973)
Excellent adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Time Rice’s rock opera concept album Jesus Christ Superstar. It is not an adaptation of the stage show.
It is important here to remember that a rock opera doesn’t feature sung dialogue in the manner of traditional opera. Instead a series of songs or musical interludes are composed to narrate a story. This allows a rock band to effectively play all the roles and as such it is difficult to separate a rock opera from a concept album. For instance, Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick is considered a progressive rock concept album, yet it fulfils the same aims as The Who’s rock opera Tommy. So who is right and who is wrong? Lloyd Webber and Rice’s concept reinforced the landscape somewhat as they chose to cast the album, allowing different voices for the different characters. This provides their soundtrack with a far richer tone than Pete Townsend’s efforts with The Who, whose characters are almost exclusively voiced by Roger Daltrey.
Thus, the 1970 double LP of Superstar was conceived as an album by the writers and used as a test run to persuade theatre promoters to launch the show. The original vinyl cast was a cobbled together mish-mash of session musicians, drama students, pub singers and members of Joe Cocker’s Grease Band at a loose end. Future Deep Purple lead vocalist Ian Gillan bagged the role of Jesus, unheralded singers Murray Head and Yvonne Elliman took on Judas and Mary Magdalene. Paul Raven [future notorious pop star Gary Glitter] played one of the Pharisees. It was less than successful in its intended aims, although the disc did produce one hit UK single and made minor inroads into the LP chart, but these not until 1972 when a West End show finally materialised at the Palace Theatre. On stage Paul Nicholas’ interpretation of the titular Superstar made him a household name. The show had already been given an American concert premiere and begun a Broadway run in 1971, which led to the original LP finally starting to sell. It was a Billboard No. 1 and the top seller for 1971. Rogue amateur shows had been given sporadically until producer Robert Stigwood forced a legal embargo. All this activity was actually preceded by Norman Jewison’s attempt to green light the movie, which he declared soon after the release of his masterful adaptation of the hit musical Fiddler on the Roof.
Why the history lesson, you ask? Only because it serves to highlight the evolving nature of Lloyd Webber and Rice’s seminal early work, how they struggled for autonomy and artistic direction. It’s fair to say that while the film version killed off the Broadway show – it closed on 30 June 1973, a week after the film premiered – it sustained the London run, which lasted for eight years and for a while became London’s longest running theatre musical. Many audiences saw an evangelical message in the music and lyrics, but that was never the composers’ intention. Christians merely seized on a slice of popular culture to reinforce their outreach.
Norman Jewison, without any stage show to steal from, employed a series of screenwriters to suggest scenarios for mounting the rock opera. Eventually he settled on young writer and journalist Melvyn Bragg, whose idea of presenting the opera as a sort of modern day Mummer’s Play bore spectacular fruit. Lloyd Webber and Rice wrote a couple of extra songs, which are now regularly inserted into the stage show, but the overall orchestration was handed to Andre Previn, whose expertise is essential to the emotional impact of the music. It is a little guitar heavy, but that suits the themes and tempos as well as the contemporary setting.
As the Overture plays, a bus load of theatre students arrive in the Holy Land, stop at a Roman ruin, unpack their props and costumes and enact a musical version of the last week in the life of Jesus Christ. The film is packed full of splendid luminous images of the desert. There is no attempt to place the actors in any historical context; they wear modern dress and perform as contemporary actors / dancers / singers within the story’s framework. There is dissention already in the group. The man playing Judas Iscariot watches the happy throng from a distance, his barely concealed contempt bursting out in the forked, vicious opener Heaven On Their Minds. For the disciples and the throng, this is a happy place, basking in Jesus’ light, yet Judas is doubtful. He believes in his leader’s message, but isn’t struck on how the Superstar wishes to achieve it. He dislikes contradiction. He wants to help the poor and the suffering, but can’t see how sermons and prayers will help, when money and good work is required. Judas isn’t a sceptic here, he’s a believer, but he doesn’t agree with the Grand Plan or its publicity method; he is particularly antagonistic towards Mary Magdalene, who he considers a promotional disaster waiting to happen. A series of rock n soul songs propel us through the fateful week. The subtleties of Everything’s Alright and Could We Start Again Please are contrasted excellently against the exuberance of Simon Zealoties or King Herod’s Song, the agony of Gethsemane or Peter’s Denial. The camera work and choreography are well integrated and there is a genuine display of energy and enthusiasm. Only the curious addition of slow-motion and jump cuts mid-song detracts from the success of these numbers. Lloyd Webber’s first great ballad I Don’t Know How To Love Him is framed brilliantly against a swirling tent at dusk, Yvonne Elliman’s Mary easing the exhausted Jesus to sleep.
Carl Anderson’s Judas meanwhile continues to circle the main action, watching how his fellow disciples interact, adore and deny. Carl Anderson is fantastic as Judas, a man pained and eventually torn by the betrayal he feels is forced upon him. Meanwhile Caiaphas plots death, Pontius Pilate has dreams and Herod parties on a floating barge. As Jesus’ moment of death draws near, the music reaches a crescendo of whipping, crashing cymbals and torturous guitars, before the defining title track confirms Jesus’ God-like, unquestioned, photogenic, rock, roll and soul status. Sadly, Ted Neeley simply isn’t a strong enough lead to carry this kind of material. He seems to screech the more passionate lines, which is disturbing.
There is an attempt to reference contemporary angles into the lyrics and story, an intention of Tim Rice’s from the outset. The most notable addition comes during Pilate’s speech to the Jews: “What’s all this new respect for Caesar? / Till now this has been noticeably lacking.” Jewison shovels in a shot of Israeli tanks, which sits at odds to everything else around it, serving more to portray Judas’ conflicted opinions, the Christian ideal clashing as they do with Zionist tradition. British cinematographer Douglas Slocombe is never less than superb with his searing sandscapes. It’s such a pity the music suffers in the second act, is less imaginative and errs to the inconsistent. It’s a mistake Lloyd Webber wouldn’t make again for some time.
The film is a splendid interpretation of a musical landmark and while many critics tend to dismiss it, I believe it is far better than that. Like all films about the life of Christ, it suffers from having to portray a deity, but as a musical it is far more energetic and on point visually, artistically and thematically than a whole slew of supposedly better filmic efforts. I am not a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, but when his music is good, it is very good and there are plenty of examples captured for posterity in this movie. It’s almost tempted me to track down a copy of the soundtrack. Almost…
He's well into his 80's NP but still loves a good action movie. He's going to get to watch John Wick 2 in a couple of weeks. 😂
COMMANDO (1985)
When members of retired US Colonel John Matrix’s special forces unit are being killed by a former rogue soldier he goes on a killing spree to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Directed in cartoon fashion by legendary pulp film master Mark L Lester, this is the embodiment of all those mens adventure action paperbacks of the dim and distant. The body count is huge as one-man-army-wooden-as-a-picket-fence Arnold Schwarzenegger slaughters scores of protagonists in bloodthirsty ways, always with an excruciating one-liner to emphasise the manner of the killing. OK, no one expects Oscar winning acting in these sort of films but some of it is so dreadful it has to be seen to be believed. Having said that, the film is highly entertaining, and Rae Dawn Chong makes some nice sarcastic comments as the flight stewardess who is drawn into the action.
It’s difficult to rate this with any degree of accuracy so let’s go for 6/10, but 10/10 if you’re just comparing 80’s action flicks.
I saw the D&D movie on Monday and really enjoyed it. This is a type of movie few expect to be good, but this one is inventive, full of adventure and really funny. Since the source material is the role playing game D & D and the other fantasy successes are pretty serious (GoT, LotR), it was the right call to make it much more lighthearted. I did play D & D for years when I was young .... er, so perhaps I found it extra enjoyable. Thre movie is well cast too. Michelle Rodriguez is a standout. I haven't really seen Rege-Jean Page act before, so of cause I paid extra attention to him since he's often mentioned as a James Bond candidate. His character is actually just a major supporting character, or an NPC (non-player character) in role playing terms. He also plays a character who is basicly a humorless do-gooder, so the fun is other people's reactions to him. He doesn't get to be charming and do drama like Chris Pine. Rege-Jean Page is perhaps the only male character who is a really good fighter, but he fights so quickly it's hard to see if it's the actor or a stunt,man doing the fights. He does look great, that's for certain. In my opinion Page should find a drama where he can show EON that he can do emotional and tense scenes too.