@CoolHandBondShenandoah is a near classic, probably McLaglen's best film. The battle and its aftermath gets mentioned a lot in many westerns that refer to the Civil War, which suggest there were a lot of atrocities carried out around that period which have rather gone forgotten, although I haven't done the research to prove this.
@chrisno1 I’ve read a lot of westerns based around the Civil War and although they were fiction a lot were based on real events and indeed there were many atrocities carried out during the campaign, as well as the aftermath with Quantrill’s Raiders causing death and destruction. It was a devastating period in American history.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Let’s make crime glamorous! Well, hardly, but Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde certainly tries to make us believe it might have been. It is Texas, the Depression Era, and young tearaway ex-con Clyde Barrow fortuitously meets bored, young sexually rapacious Bonnie Parker and within minutes their life of crime robbing grocery stores, funeral parlours and banks has taken off, fuelled less by greed than boredom.
Warren Beatty is understated as Clyde, a man confused about his sexuality, but certain of his moment in the sun. “You made me famous,” he tells Bonnie Parker after she’s written the poem The Trail’s End [here renamed The Story of Bonnie and Clyde]. He’s all boiling confidence and cheeky smiles; it is only when he nears the bedroom that his poise deserts him. Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie is quite possibly one of the sexiest villains you’d ever wish to see on screen. Director Arthur Penn starts the film with a glorious close-up of her pouting mouth. She is lying naked on her bed, bored and spiteful of the sweltering Texas afternoon. She speaks to Clyde posing at a window, when she dresses she neglects to put on underclothes. She drinks coca cola as if she’s administering oral sex and strokes the warm barrel of a pistol as if it’s a male appendage. Penn has done his research: he’s quietly mocking the sort of near the knuckle behaviour of the stars in those Pre-Code gangster movies, when sex and violence was being celebrated openly on screen. He also includes dodgy back projection which makes you feel you are watching a revamp of those same Warner Bros classics; you almost expect Cagney, Bogart or Robinson to sneer at you. Even the car chases are dumb, like these used to be, and the retro feel is extenuated by the giggling banjo tune from Flatt & Scruggs named Foggy Mountain Breakdown. [This in fact is from the 1940s, so anachronistic, but the point of theatrical humour is well made.]
However, the movie doesn’t dwell on these homages. Instead, front and foremost, we have Beatty, not so much sneering as maniacally grinning, and Dunaway looking desirably gorgeous. We have Micheal J. Pollard as impressionable simpleton C.W. Moss who joins as a getaway driver. We have Gene Hackman, in the first of his many great performances, as Clyde’s brother Buck attempting to soothe the spikes between his family and Clyde’s. We have Estelle Parsons as Blanche, Buck’s wife, a neurotic preacher’s daughter. Together this incompatible quintet cause chaos through the southern states, always heading it seems to the inevitable road to death.
The film looks wonderful, is solidly made and features a great core of central performances, but there isn’t much of a soul to it. Tremendously successful on release, it was picked up by the counter-culture crowds who believed the non-conformist couple of outlaws shared some of the 1960s more liberated morals. I doubt that was true and I don’t believe the film adequately presents that. What it does do is make you care for these mismatched and desperate people, warts, killings and all, chiefly by romanticising both couple’s relationships and sufficiently ignoring documented truths to make them appear more sympathetic. The relentlessness of the police pursuit eventually defeats them – exactly as it might for black hatted villains in westerns – and the climax is sudden and bloody. The climatic defenceless slaughter certainly give the couple an air of martyrdom even if Bonnie and Clyde show little remorse for their own actions.
Moments of studied quiet bring their situation consistently to light. Moss’s father delivering home truths, Bonnie’s mother saying a last farewell, Buck and Clyde’s uneasy reunion, Bonnie’s own summary of their life: “When we started, I thought we were really goin’ somewhere, but we’re just goin’.” As we know, life was too dark for these outlaw lovers to see it. At the start of the film the titles initially fade from grey to deep crimson, anticipating the movie’s eventual dénouement. Historically, the film is loosely accurate but the final bloody deed is replicated almost exactly as it happened.
An important film which broke down several barriers regarding the onscreen portrayals of sex and violence, but which, like many groundbreaking movies, doesn’t quite seem to live up to its reputation now the decades have passed and new norms and codes have taken root. Still, impressive nonetheless.
THE GRADUATE (1967)
Apparently this is a good film.
Mike Nichols followed up his phenomenally successful and well-observed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? with a totally different type of relationship anguish. This is one is about a socially inept college graduate who returns home and allows himself to be seduced by an older, married, alcoholic woman. Things get complicated when he falls for the daughter. His home life seems to be a recipe for emotional abuse and he substitutes that for emotional blackmail. The adulterer turns into a stalker, chases his beloved to her university and begs her forgiveness. A crass screenplay, heavy handed direction and muddy photography. Simon and Garfunkel sing songs from their back catalogue. The whole movie is supposed to be funny, but it took forty-minutes before I even chuckled.
Dustin Hoffman gives a tiring example of how to act the complete nerd. He is unsympathetic and frequently unrealistic. Twenty years later he tapped into the same monosyllabic and mono-active performance to play Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. There he was outacted by Tom Cruise, who carried the film; here he’s out performed by Anne Bancroft as Mrs Robinson, who exhibits all the spite, self-loathing and manipulative instincts you would expect from an alcoholic nymphomaniac. Her behaviour is only softened by Benjamin [Hoffman] being twenty years old. Imagine the likely age of the woman if the roles had been reversed; makes you stop and think doesn’t it? Thing is, Bancroft doesn’t elicit our sympathies either, eventually becoming the screaming harridan you might expect.
The end of the film is a noisy confrontation in a church. Some critics suggest this is a commentary on breaking the barriers of traditional society [Hoffman swings a cross] but it’s just a messy, too convenient ending. As the young lovers escape on a Greyhound bus, their new life together starting with a few dollars and a ripped bridal gown, it’s hardly surprising neither of them can broach a smile. Life is going to be bloody hard after this complicated beginning. Katherine Ross’s Elaine looks far too smart to be taken in by this malarky; at one moment, confronted with Benjamin’s proposal of marriage, she says: “I don’t understand what’s happening.” Me neither, darling. Is this really how it was in the sixties?
Shoving some folk songs into a movie and trying to make it hip is a rather lackadaisical approach to film making. Whatever The Graduate’s merits might have been in 1967, they sure pass you by in 2024.
Highly rated instalment in the Mad Max franchise, a reboot really because it's not clear if this is a prequel and it occupies a different landscape and world from the first two Mel Gibson films, I think. It doesn't have the windswept, eerie feel of those films, nor the humility or bits of humour - from start to finish we are in a post-apocalyptic world of Hieronymous Bosch brutality.
This is full-on cinema and from the off it lets you know, this isn't going to be fun. It's awesome, impressive but not in my view exactly enjoyable. It's one long chase sequence - resembling the finale of Mad Max 2 but drawn out over two hours, as a tanker with a precious cargo driven by a lean and determined Charlize Theron aims to outdistance its pursuant - along the way captive Mad Max - mostly nameless in this - gets involved - Tom Hardy channelling his Daniel Craig monosyllabic muscleman circa Casino Royale before he encounters Vesper vibe.
Despite the detail, two plot points had be going 'Huh?' - the transfer of loyalties by one of the villain's acolytes which didn't quite seem accounted for in the screenplay, and the 'oh, alright then' finale.
I saw this at the Prince Charles cinema in London, after I went to the Waterstones Piccadilly downstairs and clocked the Higson Bond paperback, read the first two pages - it's sort of okay but I don't know, getting a bit bored with all the 'comma of hair' descriptions of Bond, he always seemed easier to warm to in the Fleming novels, it seems to me. You could read it in one sitting down there.
Sluggish thriller from the pen of Joe Esterhaz, who went on to even more crass spectaculars with Basic Instinct and Sliver. Competently directed and performed. A lawyer with a conscience tasked with defending a client who may or may not be innocent. It’s an old tale and you can sense the clichés creeping from under the judge’s hammer. In the forties they’d have cast Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham and got Hitchcock to direct it; now we get Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges. I guess reversing the expected roles adds a touch of spice, but the romance feels half-baked. Very much a 1980s product, all glamour and richness, surface glitter only, very little of interest once you scratch the surface. John Barry’s soundtrack has inverse echoes of The Living Daylights. A decent ending, I suppose.
I vaguely recall this was the first movie I took my first girlfriend to see. She must have wondered what on earth the future held for us. Unlike me – and may I say her, although we haven’t met for thirty-plus years – it hasn’t aged well.
A few weeks back I mentioned the historical inaccuracies present in many biographical movies [I was reviewing The Darkest Hour and The King’s Speech]. There are not just inaccuracies in Cromwell but startling omissions too. While writer / director Ken Hughes is at pains to put Oliver Cromwell front and centre stage, he rather forgets to include the momentous incidents of the English Civil War and of Cromwell’s life itself. For instance, the Battle of Marston Moor, which made Cromwell’s name as a military leader, isn’t depicted or even mentioned. Instead, Hughes concentrates on the spiritual, intellectual and political. So we have Richard Harris’s brooding Cromwell attempting to align his Puritan beliefs to the role of dictator, Alec Guinness’s Charles I brooding over divine right and Robert Morley’s Earl of Manchester just brooding. It’s a talky epic that gets bogged down in its own rhetoric. A good cast is mostly wasted. Of interest to Bond fans would be Timothy Dalton as Prince Rupert, while Douglas Wilmer, Charles Gray and Geoffrey Keen drop into the action. Good production values can’t help the sagging storyline, chiefly because once you’ve beheaded the King of England your story ceases to be of interest. The costumes won an Academy Award. Richard Harris is very good, Guinness less so [is there historical evidence Charles I spoke with a heavy Scots brogue?]. Geoffrey Unsworth’s photography is grand. Direction is slow. The movie is a trifle mundane for such an important and bloodthirsty time in English history.
OK, so it is a TV movie or a TV adaptation, whatever, it lasted an hour and forty-five minutes, which is filmic.
ANNA KARENINA (1961)
Brilliant BBC adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s enormous novel with Claire Bloom and Sean Connery as the adulterous lovers Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky. It is enough to know that the version here excises almost all the extraneous details surrounding the doomed lovers and focusses on their obsessive relationship, one which equally suffocates, infuriates and fulfils. I wonder, watching this, if Anna Karenina isn’t the first instance of a novel featuring a bi-polar protagonist, as Anna’s behaviour is so erratic and unconventional. Claire Bloom excels and is particularly affecting in the single scene with her son. Connery, one year before James Bond, demonstrates already that he would never just be a man in a dinner jacket, smoking, drinking and shooting his Walther PPK. There is genuine steel and also compassion to his performance, although he hasn’t perfected the delicate panther walk yet. He displays more emotions in this one programme than Roger Moore did in whole seasons of The Saint.
Marcelle Maurette’s script is about as good as you can get considering what he’s had to remove. He follows the slimmed down screen treatment used by Clarence Brown in MGM’s 1935 version. It is quite stagey, but you can’t fault the commitment of the actors and the full range of production values attached to the movie. It was a prestige film for the BBC to commemorate twenty-five years of television broadcasting. Rudolph Cartier directs. Definitely a benchmark for all future BBC historical dramas.
I know there's a specific thread for it but I can't find it so I'll post here instead.
AVTAK. Some may groan at the mention of the title but I've always enjoyed it. I remember seeing it at the cinema when it was first released and despite having watched it countless times since, I still take pleasure in watching.
Author of 'An Ungentlemanly Act' and 'Execution of Duty'. The WW2 espionage series starring Harry Flynn.
Once more a sixties John Wayne movie mines the format of an amiable, male only, band of brothers disrupted by the appearance of a strong willed woman. We saw the same plotlines in Hatari, Donovan’s Reef and North to Alaska. The results are similarly hit-and-miss here. The hit is the decent cast who appear to be enjoying themselves immensely and it is great to see Maureen O’Hara sparring her way once more with John Wayne. Batjac, Wayne’s production company, made the movie and McLintock!’s huge success recouped some of the money he lost on The Alamo; it also led to him making a definite change to his onscreen wild west persona, of a more conciliatory, less dark and gun-shot ready a hero.
Micheal, one of Wayne’s sons, produced McLintock! and another, Patrick, co-stars while his daughter also has a small role. Most of the cast are John Ford regulars, so there is some familiarity among the banter which is welcome. Andrew V. McLaglen directed. I almost expected Andrew’s dad Victor to crop up as a drunken Irishman, the movie has that kind of family feel [Victor of course made many movies with Duke, but had died in 1959].
Based extremely loosely on The Taming of the Shrew, the central relationship has Wayne’s benevolent cattle baron warring with his spouse, flame-haired vixen O’Hara, although what has estranged them seems buried in a past of lipstick, quarrels and whisky. Apparently, the filmmaker’s intent was to parody the traditional mores of the western, its depiction of the Native American, the settlers, marriage, political corruption, societal ethics, etc. It doesn’t really succeed because the broad strokes of the comic screenplay seem to address these issues as episodes of outrageous slapstick rather than serious subjects in their own right. For instance, I can’t see how spanking your wife with a coal paddle can be highlighting the effects of marital abuse, or how a big blustering muddy bust up around an illegal lynching can change people’s opinion of Comanches, but there you have it.
Half way fun. Looks good. Horribly dated. McLintock! is not one of Wayne’s best movies.
Good stuff - rather than commit suicide over a romantic rejection, Hardy is encouraged to join the Foreign Legion but - in a manner similar to Jim Dale and Peter Butterworth in Carry On... Follow That Camel, they find it doesn't meet their accommodation needs, and the pay is not up to standard. It's hard to get this kind of cross purposes comedy wrong, and they don't here - the outraged officer in charge is the Italian gendarme ill-advisedly goaded by Eric Blore in Top Hat.
The aerial finale squeezes in all the similar airplane action found in Live And Let Die, Octopussy, GoldenEye, Spectre, not to mention Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
This is an old-fashioned movie. It's a romantic comedy set before ad during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. It has two attractive leads, Channing Tatum as a launch director driven by duty and Scarlett Johansson as a marketing expert with a very relaxed attitude to facts and truth. The moon program is unpopular and short on funding and Scarlett's character is given the job to fix this. The movie could've been made sixty years ago (although there are suspiciously few ex-nazis and many black people at NASA). No modern editing or cinematography, the jokes are probably scripted and not ad-libbed. Ad-libbed lines jokes are great when they work, but with a lot of recent comedies seem like the script said "The actors will probably come up with some good jokes for this scene" very often. "Fly me to the moon" isn't a joke a minute, but the jokes are good enough. There is more drama than I expected and the moon program is put into context with the Vietnam war and the cold war. Woody Harrolson shows up as a shadowy government man. Many scenes are set at the real NASA buildings in Cape Canaveral and the producers even got to film a real rocket launch. This is production value most romantic comedies don't get. But what I remember best is the aesthetic experience of watching Scarlett Johansson walking. She's very good at it and her walking makes me have funny feelings. This is an old-fashioned movie in a good way.
Like Carry On Cleo, the look of Carry On Henry was vastly improved by ransacking sets, props and costumes from another film, this time Anne of the Thousand Days, the Richard Burton historical drama which had been filmed in the UK the year before. Sid James returned early from a theatre tour of South Africa to join the cast, robbing us of the potential joy of seeing Harry Secombe in a Carry On movie. He would have played a corpulent madrigal singing version of Henry VIII. James’s version is the same smutty, impatient, griping old geezer we’ve come to recognise far too often over the years. Here, he is surrounded by scheming courtiers who are desperate to please their liege. Joan Sims is a French Queen who loves garlic and Barbara Windsor the chamber maid with a giggling laugh who takes Henry’s fancy. Charles Hawtrey is the King’s effete taster and supplies most of the decent [or indecent] humour, even when he’s being tortured by David Prowse’s silent inquisitor. Kenneth Williams as Cromwell seems miscast. An uncomfortable looking Terry Scott is Cardinal Wolsey, crammed into ill-fitting cloaks, his hands permanently pressed in prayer while his character constantly requests divorces from the Papal See and misinterprets English words; this is possibly Scott’s least effective turn in the series. Our own Margaret Nolan [Goldfinger] heaves her bosom as a ‘Buxom Lass’. Henry is not as much fun as some other Carry On’s. There is something tired in the ‘genre parody’ format by now and something slightly tawdry in the repetitive bed-hopping antics of the plot, although occasionally the film can’t help but raise a fine peel of laughter. Mostly though, the cast, as well as the writer, is simply going through the usual motions.
Cheap looking effects from Ray Harryhausen can’t save a Godzilla-lite sci-fi monster movie from Colombia Pictures, who really should do better than this. A pseudo-documentary style removes the need for narrative explanation. Not very exciting. Mildly amusing. There’s a subplot about a navy sub commander and a marine biologist vying for the attention of a pretty girl, but they are ever so polite about it. The whole thing is a wee bit lame. Obviously of its time, with gigantic atomic poisoned squid monsters attacking San Francsico, but poorly executed at best.
Not the more recent film of the same title starring Liam Neeson. This is adapted from Raymond Chandler's "The Little Sister" updated from the1940s to the 1960s, with the milieu becoming TV rather than Hollywood. Otherwise, it's a faithful version.
James Garner is his usual likeable self as Marlowe, witty and charming but perhaps lacking the melancholy the character needs. Gayle Hunnicutt (almost one of ours - she was shortlisted for Solitaire, and did meet Napoleon Solo.) is our leading lady with a secret, and Carroll O'Connor is the weary cop.
But that's not why this film is famous, and expensive to buy. Playing a henchman is Bruce Lee, displaying his prowess quite impressively in two scenes with Garner. Is he enough to watch the film for? I can't judge, I'm a Philip Marlowe fan and would watch it anyway. Recommended for private eye or Bruce Lee fans.
This was our first visit to the cinema for two years, which tells that the output of current movies are not to my taste. Mind you, after watching this it could well be another two years before I go again. Having been brought up going to the cinema ever Friday night from the early ‘60’s where it was an event - two movies in the programme, Pathe News or a Look-At-Life filler after the first movie with maybe two or three trailers for upcoming releases, sustained with a Kia-Ora orange juice or a rock hard vanilla ice cream tub, cinema going is not what it used to be. We entered the auditorium about 20 minutes before the film was due to start and trailers were already showing and this went on interminably, trailer after trailer after trailer - not one of them made me think “I must go and see this”.
Anyway, onto the film. It’s a remake of the original 1996 Twister movie. The difference being is that in the original there were at least characters that you cared for and actors that you knew with decent performances. I don’t remember seeing any of these actors before (a IMDb search afterwards told me that I had seen some of them in standalone episodes of some TV series that I’ve watched) which isn’t a problem if they project some semblance of acting skill and personality - unfortunately they don’t. When you go to see a disaster movie the most important part is that the action scenes are exciting and hopefully bring something new to the screen. In this case it’s just a rehash of the previous movie and incredibly the special effects are not even as good as the original.
A lot of it was yawn inducing and when you start to fidget in ultra-comfortable reclining seats you know that things are not good. The popcorn was, though.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
The Merc With the Mouth and everybody's favorite X-Man embark on a bromance of an adventure with the fate of the multiverse hanging in the balance when a rogue faction of the Time Variance Authority (think time cops) decides to wipe out Deadpool's universe.
Deadpool and Wolverine dips heavily into the lore of the Marvel movies, going all the way back to the early 20th Century Fox efforts. The movie is crammed with obscure references, easter eggs and cameos and if you haven't followed the Marvel universe you may have a little trouble keeping up with all of it.
Fortunately, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman manage to anchor the whole thing via their incredible chemistry. They bicker, argue, insult and fight their way thru all the crazy shenanigans the movie throws at them, engaging in a few really entertaining action sequences along the way.
Ryan Reynolds once again revels in breaking the fourth wall at every opportunity, mercilessly skewering his old bosses (Fox) and his new ones (Disney) with all manner of gags, jokes, puns and insults of varying degrees of crudeness. In a genre that often takes itself too seriously his irreverence and eagerness to call out some of the more questionable cinematic efforts of the last few years is downright refreshing.
Hugh Jackman gives a surprisingly emotional performance as a Wolverine from a different timeline where things did not go so well for his mutant friends. He mostly plays it straight, the voice of relative reason to Deadpool's mania.
When a movie has so many callbacks and shout-outs it runs the risk of going overboard with the fan service, but it's handled quite well here. We get to see a bunch of characters from the early days of Marvel movies, many of whom got short shrift or never even made it to the screen back in their day. Their contributions to this story are handled as tastefully as possible for a movie like this.
Highlights include a montage of Deadpool traveling thru the multiverse looking for a suitable Wolverine to help him. His encounters harken to many classic Wolverine storylines from the comics. A huge chunk of the movie takes place in a wasteland at the end of time called The Void, which is littered with all manner of relics (I got a good laugh out of a particular movie studio logo that kept popping up). When we get to the obligatory third act action set piece, Wolverine even dons his classic black and yellow mask (something fans have been waiting decades to see in a live action movie) and he looks suitably badass.
The movie, which borrows heavily from the Loki TV show and the movie Logan, has some pretty big plot holes and seeming inconsistencies in its story but in the end it really doesn't matter. The ride is so much fun that you just go with it and enjoy the spectacle of it all and the great performances by two actors who really understand the characters they're playing. It's all silly and crass and goofy and fun, just the way it should be.
With movies like this you pretty much know what you're getting. If you liked the first two Deadpool movies, chances are you'll like this one. If they weren't your thing, this one probably won't change your opinion.
The problem for Orson Welles and his version of William Shakespeare’s Scottish Play isn’t so much that it has a studio-bound and stage-inspired look to it, but that its monochrome castle vistas, murky tragedy and the title character’s descent into madness is also reflected in the more polished British film of Hamlet, starring and directed by Laurence Olivier and ultimately the year’s big critical and Oscar winning success. Macbeth isn’t a bad film – far from it – but it isn’t as engaging as Hamlet and lacks authority in much of the acting, which veers from static and stoic to insanely freewheeling.
What I enjoy about this rather manic and foreshortened adaptation is the attempt to visualise the story as a theatrical experience. There are barely a half-dozen sets in the whole movie, one of them an enormous, mountainous ruin of a castle Dunisane, Macbeth’s seat of power, which acts as the setting for most of the courtly intrigue and the climatic battle scenes. This is used as both an interior and an exterior, exactly as one might find on a theatre stage. When Welles moves his cameras away from it, he is either in the even wider created landscapes of a misty Scottish moor [misty of course to obscure the lack of depth in a studio set] or the crushing, claustrophobia of cave-like castle dwellings. The banquet hall, for instance, is wide rather than high, and the walls are the same granite grey as the castle surrounds, sloping upwards and inwards, hugging the atmosphere of dread that hangs over the long tables.
The tightness of the set décor seems to rub off on the actors, who are mostly stilted and slow witted. Their dialogue was prerecorded and rehearsals to sound tapes of each scene were given before shooting commenced; this was a cost economy device to save on film stock and ensure the schedule lasted a mere twenty-three days. Some soliloquys are thus transmitted as ‘thoughts’, which makes sense, while some dialogues occur at distance so we don’t need to see an actor’s lips move. Welles was working minor miracles on his $700k budget, though you do wonder why the money couldn’t stretch at least to a proper kingly crown – at one point Macbeth looks like a black swathed Statue of Liberty.
Dull, or at least restricted, performances aside, there are not many genuine deficiencies. Visually it is perhaps too dark, although Macbeth is the bleakest of tragedies, and the peculiar notion to have the cast speak in Scottish accents doesn’t quite work, especially when at moments of crisis or anger the accents drop. The costumes are no more than passable, cobbled out of Republic’s meagre wardrobe department. Music is overwrought. Jeanette Nolan’s Lady Macbeth is certainly passionate enough, but her madness seems to come on as sudden as Ophelia’s in that corresponding play. I think sudden madness is a recurring theme of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Macbeth never quiet appears mad, but he takes to the bottle to calm his crazed ambitions and even crazier hallucination; this seems entirely appropriate for a man under strain and scrutiny.
Overall, I quite enjoyed the film. It isn’t a polished product like Olivier’s Hamlet or Henry V, or Mankiewicz’s Julius Ceasar, Zeffirelli’s and Branagh’s numerous adaptations, or even Welles’s own Chimes at Midnight, but it has pace and a certain theatrical panache which works well with the doom-laden dour story. Because Shakespeare’s plays were written for the intimacies of a close audience, with a restricted scenic palate, they do not always benefit from ‘opening out’. By keeping Macbeth theatrical, even if by necessity not design, Welles offers a more visually condensed and psychologically intense telling than a director with more money to wave might produce.
Republic wanted to move away from westerns and cheap B-movies and make prestige productions and it was films like this, Ford’s cavalry trilogy and diligent war dramas like Sands of Iwo Jima that eventually gave the beleaguered studio a foothold in the bigtime. Macbeth was redubbed with the actors using their normal voices, re-edited and rereleased in 1950. Out of the shadow of Olivier, it turned a profit, even if the US critics still hated it. As usual with this kind of artistic invention, the original version was lauded highly in Europe. I’ll probably side with the latter. Time has been kind on the Macbeth of 1948.
Sir Kenneth Clark's monumental 'Civilization', a 13 episode TV series, which follows the evolution of Western art and architecture from the Viking invasions to the present age, is a personal favorite of mine.
The TV series was remastered in 1080p for a blu-ray release back in 2011.
Well, I just came across the YouTube page of 'Retro Britannia'.
The gentleman has meticulously remastered the previous version from 1080p to glorious 4K.
An amazing achievement.
What a treat it is to view this magnificent series in 4K on an OLED screen...
Absolutely stunning.
Please find the link below: (All 13 episodes may not show in non-UK territories)
While studying Shakespeare at school we were obliged to watch this. It seemed a good version to me, although I do remember some sniggers from our class of genuine Scots at the accents. Welles seemed to not be operating on full power, perhaps being distracted by his other responsibilities, or perhaps so as not to overwhelm such as the actress playing his wife.
Another in Hammer’s prehistoric cycle that began with “One Million Years BC”, and this time the beauty in the fur bikini is our own Julie Ege who despite being top-billed gets surprisingly little to do. If you’ve seen one of these before you know what to expect- lots of skin, no dialogue other than grunts, and a plot that barely covers the running time. I must admit to being deceived by the title; there are no dinosaurs etc to be seen, just a rather unconvincing bear plus a rubber python that Miss Ege battles near the end. Okay, and some warthogs. Nowhere near as good as “One Million Years BC”.
After the successful string on mid-sixties genre spoofs, the Carry On team returned to modern day shenanigans with two popular hospital comedies [Doctor and Again Doctor] which set the template for a new run of cheeky contemporary storylines. Carry On at Your Convenience was the first of the series to lose money on its initial release, a statistic often attributed to the labour relations narrative and the less than interesting factory floor setting. That’s rather a shame. For a series of films that has always plumbed the depth of lavatory humour it feels more than appropriate to produce a movie based around a toilet making facility, namely W.C. Boggs & Son. This one certainly attempts to be dirty, although the results are mixed.
Sid James had become a little too much of a caricature, his leering man suddenly seeming to be a leering old man, and writer Talbot Rothwell attempts to tap into Sid’s more cheerful persona as the henpecked husband in TV’s Bless This House. Hence the domestic scenes between work’s foreman Sid Plummer and his wife Beattie [Hattie Jacques – outstanding] come across far better than almost all the goings on at the bog factory. In fact, the best laughs come in the scenes set beyond the factory floor: Kennth Cope’s shop steward Vic Spanner arguing with his abrasive mother; Mrs Spanner playing strip poker with Charles Hawtrey’s bidet designer; the non-talking race-predicting budgerigar; Kenneth Williams waking up in his secretary’s bedroom; Joan Sims attempting to seduce her husband Bill Maynard’s travelling salesman: “I know what you women want – Yes, and we know how to get it – What, before tea?”
The film meanders a bit and doesn’t have as many laughs as it might, considering the material available, as it were. The jolly day out to Brighton is just a silly excuse to get drunk and have Sid and Joan wink longingly at each other. The labour relations sections are, well, laboured. They cracked virtually the same terrible jokes a few decades later during the shop-steward meeting in Made in Dagenham, so it feels more like a slice of genuine life than a piss take of it [excuse the pun]. There are plenty of willing performances and enough laughs to keep us happy, but you sense a screenwriter who is writing on empty and whose ideas are heading fast down the pan. Fun music from Eric Rogers.
As a note to Bond fans, Margaret Nolan [Goldfinger] and Anouska Hemple [OHMSS] both have small roles as sexy dolly birds.
Comments
@CoolHandBond Shenandoah is a near classic, probably McLaglen's best film. The battle and its aftermath gets mentioned a lot in many westerns that refer to the Civil War, which suggest there were a lot of atrocities carried out around that period which have rather gone forgotten, although I haven't done the research to prove this.
@chrisno1 I’ve read a lot of westerns based around the Civil War and although they were fiction a lot were based on real events and indeed there were many atrocities carried out during the campaign, as well as the aftermath with Quantrill’s Raiders causing death and destruction. It was a devastating period in American history.
Treated myself to a double-bill from 1967
BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)
Let’s make crime glamorous! Well, hardly, but Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde certainly tries to make us believe it might have been. It is Texas, the Depression Era, and young tearaway ex-con Clyde Barrow fortuitously meets bored, young sexually rapacious Bonnie Parker and within minutes their life of crime robbing grocery stores, funeral parlours and banks has taken off, fuelled less by greed than boredom.
Warren Beatty is understated as Clyde, a man confused about his sexuality, but certain of his moment in the sun. “You made me famous,” he tells Bonnie Parker after she’s written the poem The Trail’s End [here renamed The Story of Bonnie and Clyde]. He’s all boiling confidence and cheeky smiles; it is only when he nears the bedroom that his poise deserts him. Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie is quite possibly one of the sexiest villains you’d ever wish to see on screen. Director Arthur Penn starts the film with a glorious close-up of her pouting mouth. She is lying naked on her bed, bored and spiteful of the sweltering Texas afternoon. She speaks to Clyde posing at a window, when she dresses she neglects to put on underclothes. She drinks coca cola as if she’s administering oral sex and strokes the warm barrel of a pistol as if it’s a male appendage. Penn has done his research: he’s quietly mocking the sort of near the knuckle behaviour of the stars in those Pre-Code gangster movies, when sex and violence was being celebrated openly on screen. He also includes dodgy back projection which makes you feel you are watching a revamp of those same Warner Bros classics; you almost expect Cagney, Bogart or Robinson to sneer at you. Even the car chases are dumb, like these used to be, and the retro feel is extenuated by the giggling banjo tune from Flatt & Scruggs named Foggy Mountain Breakdown. [This in fact is from the 1940s, so anachronistic, but the point of theatrical humour is well made.]
However, the movie doesn’t dwell on these homages. Instead, front and foremost, we have Beatty, not so much sneering as maniacally grinning, and Dunaway looking desirably gorgeous. We have Micheal J. Pollard as impressionable simpleton C.W. Moss who joins as a getaway driver. We have Gene Hackman, in the first of his many great performances, as Clyde’s brother Buck attempting to soothe the spikes between his family and Clyde’s. We have Estelle Parsons as Blanche, Buck’s wife, a neurotic preacher’s daughter. Together this incompatible quintet cause chaos through the southern states, always heading it seems to the inevitable road to death.
The film looks wonderful, is solidly made and features a great core of central performances, but there isn’t much of a soul to it. Tremendously successful on release, it was picked up by the counter-culture crowds who believed the non-conformist couple of outlaws shared some of the 1960s more liberated morals. I doubt that was true and I don’t believe the film adequately presents that. What it does do is make you care for these mismatched and desperate people, warts, killings and all, chiefly by romanticising both couple’s relationships and sufficiently ignoring documented truths to make them appear more sympathetic. The relentlessness of the police pursuit eventually defeats them – exactly as it might for black hatted villains in westerns – and the climax is sudden and bloody. The climatic defenceless slaughter certainly give the couple an air of martyrdom even if Bonnie and Clyde show little remorse for their own actions.
Moments of studied quiet bring their situation consistently to light. Moss’s father delivering home truths, Bonnie’s mother saying a last farewell, Buck and Clyde’s uneasy reunion, Bonnie’s own summary of their life: “When we started, I thought we were really goin’ somewhere, but we’re just goin’.” As we know, life was too dark for these outlaw lovers to see it. At the start of the film the titles initially fade from grey to deep crimson, anticipating the movie’s eventual dénouement. Historically, the film is loosely accurate but the final bloody deed is replicated almost exactly as it happened.
An important film which broke down several barriers regarding the onscreen portrayals of sex and violence, but which, like many groundbreaking movies, doesn’t quite seem to live up to its reputation now the decades have passed and new norms and codes have taken root. Still, impressive nonetheless.
THE GRADUATE (1967)
Apparently this is a good film.
Mike Nichols followed up his phenomenally successful and well-observed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? with a totally different type of relationship anguish. This is one is about a socially inept college graduate who returns home and allows himself to be seduced by an older, married, alcoholic woman. Things get complicated when he falls for the daughter. His home life seems to be a recipe for emotional abuse and he substitutes that for emotional blackmail. The adulterer turns into a stalker, chases his beloved to her university and begs her forgiveness. A crass screenplay, heavy handed direction and muddy photography. Simon and Garfunkel sing songs from their back catalogue. The whole movie is supposed to be funny, but it took forty-minutes before I even chuckled.
Dustin Hoffman gives a tiring example of how to act the complete nerd. He is unsympathetic and frequently unrealistic. Twenty years later he tapped into the same monosyllabic and mono-active performance to play Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. There he was outacted by Tom Cruise, who carried the film; here he’s out performed by Anne Bancroft as Mrs Robinson, who exhibits all the spite, self-loathing and manipulative instincts you would expect from an alcoholic nymphomaniac. Her behaviour is only softened by Benjamin [Hoffman] being twenty years old. Imagine the likely age of the woman if the roles had been reversed; makes you stop and think doesn’t it? Thing is, Bancroft doesn’t elicit our sympathies either, eventually becoming the screaming harridan you might expect.
The end of the film is a noisy confrontation in a church. Some critics suggest this is a commentary on breaking the barriers of traditional society [Hoffman swings a cross] but it’s just a messy, too convenient ending. As the young lovers escape on a Greyhound bus, their new life together starting with a few dollars and a ripped bridal gown, it’s hardly surprising neither of them can broach a smile. Life is going to be bloody hard after this complicated beginning. Katherine Ross’s Elaine looks far too smart to be taken in by this malarky; at one moment, confronted with Benjamin’s proposal of marriage, she says: “I don’t understand what’s happening.” Me neither, darling. Is this really how it was in the sixties?
Shoving some folk songs into a movie and trying to make it hip is a rather lackadaisical approach to film making. Whatever The Graduate’s merits might have been in 1967, they sure pass you by in 2024.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Highly rated instalment in the Mad Max franchise, a reboot really because it's not clear if this is a prequel and it occupies a different landscape and world from the first two Mel Gibson films, I think. It doesn't have the windswept, eerie feel of those films, nor the humility or bits of humour - from start to finish we are in a post-apocalyptic world of Hieronymous Bosch brutality.
This is full-on cinema and from the off it lets you know, this isn't going to be fun. It's awesome, impressive but not in my view exactly enjoyable. It's one long chase sequence - resembling the finale of Mad Max 2 but drawn out over two hours, as a tanker with a precious cargo driven by a lean and determined Charlize Theron aims to outdistance its pursuant - along the way captive Mad Max - mostly nameless in this - gets involved - Tom Hardy channelling his Daniel Craig monosyllabic muscleman circa Casino Royale before he encounters Vesper vibe.
Despite the detail, two plot points had be going 'Huh?' - the transfer of loyalties by one of the villain's acolytes which didn't quite seem accounted for in the screenplay, and the 'oh, alright then' finale.
I saw this at the Prince Charles cinema in London, after I went to the Waterstones Piccadilly downstairs and clocked the Higson Bond paperback, read the first two pages - it's sort of okay but I don't know, getting a bit bored with all the 'comma of hair' descriptions of Bond, he always seemed easier to warm to in the Fleming novels, it seems to me. You could read it in one sitting down there.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
JAGGED EDGE (1985)
Sluggish thriller from the pen of Joe Esterhaz, who went on to even more crass spectaculars with Basic Instinct and Sliver. Competently directed and performed. A lawyer with a conscience tasked with defending a client who may or may not be innocent. It’s an old tale and you can sense the clichés creeping from under the judge’s hammer. In the forties they’d have cast Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham and got Hitchcock to direct it; now we get Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges. I guess reversing the expected roles adds a touch of spice, but the romance feels half-baked. Very much a 1980s product, all glamour and richness, surface glitter only, very little of interest once you scratch the surface. John Barry’s soundtrack has inverse echoes of The Living Daylights. A decent ending, I suppose.
I vaguely recall this was the first movie I took my first girlfriend to see. She must have wondered what on earth the future held for us. Unlike me – and may I say her, although we haven’t met for thirty-plus years – it hasn’t aged well.
Well we've only got your word on that @chrisno1 - do you have a photo of yourself.
If you provide a name on your first girlfriend, we might be able to do a bit of detective work...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
My word will have to do 😉😉😉
CROMWELL (1970)
A few weeks back I mentioned the historical inaccuracies present in many biographical movies [I was reviewing The Darkest Hour and The King’s Speech]. There are not just inaccuracies in Cromwell but startling omissions too. While writer / director Ken Hughes is at pains to put Oliver Cromwell front and centre stage, he rather forgets to include the momentous incidents of the English Civil War and of Cromwell’s life itself. For instance, the Battle of Marston Moor, which made Cromwell’s name as a military leader, isn’t depicted or even mentioned. Instead, Hughes concentrates on the spiritual, intellectual and political. So we have Richard Harris’s brooding Cromwell attempting to align his Puritan beliefs to the role of dictator, Alec Guinness’s Charles I brooding over divine right and Robert Morley’s Earl of Manchester just brooding. It’s a talky epic that gets bogged down in its own rhetoric. A good cast is mostly wasted. Of interest to Bond fans would be Timothy Dalton as Prince Rupert, while Douglas Wilmer, Charles Gray and Geoffrey Keen drop into the action. Good production values can’t help the sagging storyline, chiefly because once you’ve beheaded the King of England your story ceases to be of interest. The costumes won an Academy Award. Richard Harris is very good, Guinness less so [is there historical evidence Charles I spoke with a heavy Scots brogue?]. Geoffrey Unsworth’s photography is grand. Direction is slow. The movie is a trifle mundane for such an important and bloodthirsty time in English history.
'Once you’ve beheaded the King of England your story ceases to be of interest'... try telling that to the Met.
It did seem to me that Guinness seems to be mimicking Miss Jean Brodie as portrayed by Maggie Smith.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
OK, so it is a TV movie or a TV adaptation, whatever, it lasted an hour and forty-five minutes, which is filmic.
ANNA KARENINA (1961)
Brilliant BBC adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s enormous novel with Claire Bloom and Sean Connery as the adulterous lovers Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky. It is enough to know that the version here excises almost all the extraneous details surrounding the doomed lovers and focusses on their obsessive relationship, one which equally suffocates, infuriates and fulfils. I wonder, watching this, if Anna Karenina isn’t the first instance of a novel featuring a bi-polar protagonist, as Anna’s behaviour is so erratic and unconventional. Claire Bloom excels and is particularly affecting in the single scene with her son. Connery, one year before James Bond, demonstrates already that he would never just be a man in a dinner jacket, smoking, drinking and shooting his Walther PPK. There is genuine steel and also compassion to his performance, although he hasn’t perfected the delicate panther walk yet. He displays more emotions in this one programme than Roger Moore did in whole seasons of The Saint.
Marcelle Maurette’s script is about as good as you can get considering what he’s had to remove. He follows the slimmed down screen treatment used by Clarence Brown in MGM’s 1935 version. It is quite stagey, but you can’t fault the commitment of the actors and the full range of production values attached to the movie. It was a prestige film for the BBC to commemorate twenty-five years of television broadcasting. Rudolph Cartier directs. Definitely a benchmark for all future BBC historical dramas.
I know there's a specific thread for it but I can't find it so I'll post here instead.
AVTAK. Some may groan at the mention of the title but I've always enjoyed it. I remember seeing it at the cinema when it was first released and despite having watched it countless times since, I still take pleasure in watching.
Author of 'An Ungentlemanly Act' and 'Execution of Duty'. The WW2 espionage series starring Harry Flynn.
It is quite difficult to keep track sometimes @Marker
https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/49302/last-bond-movie-you-watched#latest
@chrisno1 Thank you.
Author of 'An Ungentlemanly Act' and 'Execution of Duty'. The WW2 espionage series starring Harry Flynn.
'The Day of the Jackal'. Like AVTAK, I first saw it in the cinema during the year of its release. It's one of those films that never fails to impress.
As an aside I saw a interview with Edward Fox talking about the film on YouTube and didn't recognise him!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLpm8v3EiyM
Author of 'An Ungentlemanly Act' and 'Execution of Duty'. The WW2 espionage series starring Harry Flynn.
McLINTOCK! (1963)
Once more a sixties John Wayne movie mines the format of an amiable, male only, band of brothers disrupted by the appearance of a strong willed woman. We saw the same plotlines in Hatari, Donovan’s Reef and North to Alaska. The results are similarly hit-and-miss here. The hit is the decent cast who appear to be enjoying themselves immensely and it is great to see Maureen O’Hara sparring her way once more with John Wayne. Batjac, Wayne’s production company, made the movie and McLintock!’s huge success recouped some of the money he lost on The Alamo; it also led to him making a definite change to his onscreen wild west persona, of a more conciliatory, less dark and gun-shot ready a hero.
Micheal, one of Wayne’s sons, produced McLintock! and another, Patrick, co-stars while his daughter also has a small role. Most of the cast are John Ford regulars, so there is some familiarity among the banter which is welcome. Andrew V. McLaglen directed. I almost expected Andrew’s dad Victor to crop up as a drunken Irishman, the movie has that kind of family feel [Victor of course made many movies with Duke, but had died in 1959].
Based extremely loosely on The Taming of the Shrew, the central relationship has Wayne’s benevolent cattle baron warring with his spouse, flame-haired vixen O’Hara, although what has estranged them seems buried in a past of lipstick, quarrels and whisky. Apparently, the filmmaker’s intent was to parody the traditional mores of the western, its depiction of the Native American, the settlers, marriage, political corruption, societal ethics, etc. It doesn’t really succeed because the broad strokes of the comic screenplay seem to address these issues as episodes of outrageous slapstick rather than serious subjects in their own right. For instance, I can’t see how spanking your wife with a coal paddle can be highlighting the effects of marital abuse, or how a big blustering muddy bust up around an illegal lynching can change people’s opinion of Comanches, but there you have it.
Half way fun. Looks good. Horribly dated. McLintock! is not one of Wayne’s best movies.
Caught most of Laurel and Hardy's Flying Deuces.
Good stuff - rather than commit suicide over a romantic rejection, Hardy is encouraged to join the Foreign Legion but - in a manner similar to Jim Dale and Peter Butterworth in Carry On... Follow That Camel, they find it doesn't meet their accommodation needs, and the pay is not up to standard. It's hard to get this kind of cross purposes comedy wrong, and they don't here - the outraged officer in charge is the Italian gendarme ill-advisedly goaded by Eric Blore in Top Hat.
The aerial finale squeezes in all the similar airplane action found in Live And Let Die, Octopussy, GoldenEye, Spectre, not to mention Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Fly me to the moon (2024)
This is an old-fashioned movie. It's a romantic comedy set before ad during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. It has two attractive leads, Channing Tatum as a launch director driven by duty and Scarlett Johansson as a marketing expert with a very relaxed attitude to facts and truth. The moon program is unpopular and short on funding and Scarlett's character is given the job to fix this. The movie could've been made sixty years ago (although there are suspiciously few ex-nazis and many black people at NASA). No modern editing or cinematography, the jokes are probably scripted and not ad-libbed. Ad-libbed lines jokes are great when they work, but with a lot of recent comedies seem like the script said "The actors will probably come up with some good jokes for this scene" very often. "Fly me to the moon" isn't a joke a minute, but the jokes are good enough. There is more drama than I expected and the moon program is put into context with the Vietnam war and the cold war. Woody Harrolson shows up as a shadowy government man. Many scenes are set at the real NASA buildings in Cape Canaveral and the producers even got to film a real rocket launch. This is production value most romantic comedies don't get. But what I remember best is the aesthetic experience of watching Scarlett Johansson walking. She's very good at it and her walking makes me have funny feelings. This is an old-fashioned movie in a good way.
CARRY ON HENRY (1971)
Like Carry On Cleo, the look of Carry On Henry was vastly improved by ransacking sets, props and costumes from another film, this time Anne of the Thousand Days, the Richard Burton historical drama which had been filmed in the UK the year before. Sid James returned early from a theatre tour of South Africa to join the cast, robbing us of the potential joy of seeing Harry Secombe in a Carry On movie. He would have played a corpulent madrigal singing version of Henry VIII. James’s version is the same smutty, impatient, griping old geezer we’ve come to recognise far too often over the years. Here, he is surrounded by scheming courtiers who are desperate to please their liege. Joan Sims is a French Queen who loves garlic and Barbara Windsor the chamber maid with a giggling laugh who takes Henry’s fancy. Charles Hawtrey is the King’s effete taster and supplies most of the decent [or indecent] humour, even when he’s being tortured by David Prowse’s silent inquisitor. Kenneth Williams as Cromwell seems miscast. An uncomfortable looking Terry Scott is Cardinal Wolsey, crammed into ill-fitting cloaks, his hands permanently pressed in prayer while his character constantly requests divorces from the Papal See and misinterprets English words; this is possibly Scott’s least effective turn in the series. Our own Margaret Nolan [Goldfinger] heaves her bosom as a ‘Buxom Lass’. Henry is not as much fun as some other Carry On’s. There is something tired in the ‘genre parody’ format by now and something slightly tawdry in the repetitive bed-hopping antics of the plot, although occasionally the film can’t help but raise a fine peel of laughter. Mostly though, the cast, as well as the writer, is simply going through the usual motions.
IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955)
Cheap looking effects from Ray Harryhausen can’t save a Godzilla-lite sci-fi monster movie from Colombia Pictures, who really should do better than this. A pseudo-documentary style removes the need for narrative explanation. Not very exciting. Mildly amusing. There’s a subplot about a navy sub commander and a marine biologist vying for the attention of a pretty girl, but they are ever so polite about it. The whole thing is a wee bit lame. Obviously of its time, with gigantic atomic poisoned squid monsters attacking San Francsico, but poorly executed at best.
Marlowe (1969)
Not the more recent film of the same title starring Liam Neeson. This is adapted from Raymond Chandler's "The Little Sister" updated from the1940s to the 1960s, with the milieu becoming TV rather than Hollywood. Otherwise, it's a faithful version.
James Garner is his usual likeable self as Marlowe, witty and charming but perhaps lacking the melancholy the character needs. Gayle Hunnicutt (almost one of ours - she was shortlisted for Solitaire, and did meet Napoleon Solo.) is our leading lady with a secret, and Carroll O'Connor is the weary cop.
But that's not why this film is famous, and expensive to buy. Playing a henchman is Bruce Lee, displaying his prowess quite impressively in two scenes with Garner. Is he enough to watch the film for? I can't judge, I'm a Philip Marlowe fan and would watch it anyway. Recommended for private eye or Bruce Lee fans.
TWISTERS (2024)
This was our first visit to the cinema for two years, which tells that the output of current movies are not to my taste. Mind you, after watching this it could well be another two years before I go again. Having been brought up going to the cinema ever Friday night from the early ‘60’s where it was an event - two movies in the programme, Pathe News or a Look-At-Life filler after the first movie with maybe two or three trailers for upcoming releases, sustained with a Kia-Ora orange juice or a rock hard vanilla ice cream tub, cinema going is not what it used to be. We entered the auditorium about 20 minutes before the film was due to start and trailers were already showing and this went on interminably, trailer after trailer after trailer - not one of them made me think “I must go and see this”.
Anyway, onto the film. It’s a remake of the original 1996 Twister movie. The difference being is that in the original there were at least characters that you cared for and actors that you knew with decent performances. I don’t remember seeing any of these actors before (a IMDb search afterwards told me that I had seen some of them in standalone episodes of some TV series that I’ve watched) which isn’t a problem if they project some semblance of acting skill and personality - unfortunately they don’t. When you go to see a disaster movie the most important part is that the action scenes are exciting and hopefully bring something new to the screen. In this case it’s just a rehash of the previous movie and incredibly the special effects are not even as good as the original.
A lot of it was yawn inducing and when you start to fidget in ultra-comfortable reclining seats you know that things are not good. The popcorn was, though.
Deadpool and Wolverine
The Merc With the Mouth and everybody's favorite X-Man embark on a bromance of an adventure with the fate of the multiverse hanging in the balance when a rogue faction of the Time Variance Authority (think time cops) decides to wipe out Deadpool's universe.
Deadpool and Wolverine dips heavily into the lore of the Marvel movies, going all the way back to the early 20th Century Fox efforts. The movie is crammed with obscure references, easter eggs and cameos and if you haven't followed the Marvel universe you may have a little trouble keeping up with all of it.
Fortunately, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman manage to anchor the whole thing via their incredible chemistry. They bicker, argue, insult and fight their way thru all the crazy shenanigans the movie throws at them, engaging in a few really entertaining action sequences along the way.
Ryan Reynolds once again revels in breaking the fourth wall at every opportunity, mercilessly skewering his old bosses (Fox) and his new ones (Disney) with all manner of gags, jokes, puns and insults of varying degrees of crudeness. In a genre that often takes itself too seriously his irreverence and eagerness to call out some of the more questionable cinematic efforts of the last few years is downright refreshing.
Hugh Jackman gives a surprisingly emotional performance as a Wolverine from a different timeline where things did not go so well for his mutant friends. He mostly plays it straight, the voice of relative reason to Deadpool's mania.
When a movie has so many callbacks and shout-outs it runs the risk of going overboard with the fan service, but it's handled quite well here. We get to see a bunch of characters from the early days of Marvel movies, many of whom got short shrift or never even made it to the screen back in their day. Their contributions to this story are handled as tastefully as possible for a movie like this.
Highlights include a montage of Deadpool traveling thru the multiverse looking for a suitable Wolverine to help him. His encounters harken to many classic Wolverine storylines from the comics. A huge chunk of the movie takes place in a wasteland at the end of time called The Void, which is littered with all manner of relics (I got a good laugh out of a particular movie studio logo that kept popping up). When we get to the obligatory third act action set piece, Wolverine even dons his classic black and yellow mask (something fans have been waiting decades to see in a live action movie) and he looks suitably badass.
The movie, which borrows heavily from the Loki TV show and the movie Logan, has some pretty big plot holes and seeming inconsistencies in its story but in the end it really doesn't matter. The ride is so much fun that you just go with it and enjoy the spectacle of it all and the great performances by two actors who really understand the characters they're playing. It's all silly and crass and goofy and fun, just the way it should be.
@TonyDP Oh, dear, it sounds like I will hate it. Best for me to stay away, I think. Great review though.
@chrisno1, thanks.
With movies like this you pretty much know what you're getting. If you liked the first two Deadpool movies, chances are you'll like this one. If they weren't your thing, this one probably won't change your opinion.
MACBETH (1948)
The problem for Orson Welles and his version of William Shakespeare’s Scottish Play isn’t so much that it has a studio-bound and stage-inspired look to it, but that its monochrome castle vistas, murky tragedy and the title character’s descent into madness is also reflected in the more polished British film of Hamlet, starring and directed by Laurence Olivier and ultimately the year’s big critical and Oscar winning success. Macbeth isn’t a bad film – far from it – but it isn’t as engaging as Hamlet and lacks authority in much of the acting, which veers from static and stoic to insanely freewheeling.
What I enjoy about this rather manic and foreshortened adaptation is the attempt to visualise the story as a theatrical experience. There are barely a half-dozen sets in the whole movie, one of them an enormous, mountainous ruin of a castle Dunisane, Macbeth’s seat of power, which acts as the setting for most of the courtly intrigue and the climatic battle scenes. This is used as both an interior and an exterior, exactly as one might find on a theatre stage. When Welles moves his cameras away from it, he is either in the even wider created landscapes of a misty Scottish moor [misty of course to obscure the lack of depth in a studio set] or the crushing, claustrophobia of cave-like castle dwellings. The banquet hall, for instance, is wide rather than high, and the walls are the same granite grey as the castle surrounds, sloping upwards and inwards, hugging the atmosphere of dread that hangs over the long tables.
The tightness of the set décor seems to rub off on the actors, who are mostly stilted and slow witted. Their dialogue was prerecorded and rehearsals to sound tapes of each scene were given before shooting commenced; this was a cost economy device to save on film stock and ensure the schedule lasted a mere twenty-three days. Some soliloquys are thus transmitted as ‘thoughts’, which makes sense, while some dialogues occur at distance so we don’t need to see an actor’s lips move. Welles was working minor miracles on his $700k budget, though you do wonder why the money couldn’t stretch at least to a proper kingly crown – at one point Macbeth looks like a black swathed Statue of Liberty.
Dull, or at least restricted, performances aside, there are not many genuine deficiencies. Visually it is perhaps too dark, although Macbeth is the bleakest of tragedies, and the peculiar notion to have the cast speak in Scottish accents doesn’t quite work, especially when at moments of crisis or anger the accents drop. The costumes are no more than passable, cobbled out of Republic’s meagre wardrobe department. Music is overwrought. Jeanette Nolan’s Lady Macbeth is certainly passionate enough, but her madness seems to come on as sudden as Ophelia’s in that corresponding play. I think sudden madness is a recurring theme of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Macbeth never quiet appears mad, but he takes to the bottle to calm his crazed ambitions and even crazier hallucination; this seems entirely appropriate for a man under strain and scrutiny.
Overall, I quite enjoyed the film. It isn’t a polished product like Olivier’s Hamlet or Henry V, or Mankiewicz’s Julius Ceasar, Zeffirelli’s and Branagh’s numerous adaptations, or even Welles’s own Chimes at Midnight, but it has pace and a certain theatrical panache which works well with the doom-laden dour story. Because Shakespeare’s plays were written for the intimacies of a close audience, with a restricted scenic palate, they do not always benefit from ‘opening out’. By keeping Macbeth theatrical, even if by necessity not design, Welles offers a more visually condensed and psychologically intense telling than a director with more money to wave might produce.
Republic wanted to move away from westerns and cheap B-movies and make prestige productions and it was films like this, Ford’s cavalry trilogy and diligent war dramas like Sands of Iwo Jima that eventually gave the beleaguered studio a foothold in the bigtime. Macbeth was redubbed with the actors using their normal voices, re-edited and rereleased in 1950. Out of the shadow of Olivier, it turned a profit, even if the US critics still hated it. As usual with this kind of artistic invention, the original version was lauded highly in Europe. I’ll probably side with the latter. Time has been kind on the Macbeth of 1948.
CIVILIZATION 1969 - REMASTERED 4K
The greatest documentary film series ever made.
Sir Kenneth Clark's monumental 'Civilization', a 13 episode TV series, which follows the evolution of Western art and architecture from the Viking invasions to the present age, is a personal favorite of mine.
The TV series was remastered in 1080p for a blu-ray release back in 2011.
Well, I just came across the YouTube page of 'Retro Britannia'.
The gentleman has meticulously remastered the previous version from 1080p to glorious 4K.
An amazing achievement.
What a treat it is to view this magnificent series in 4K on an OLED screen...
Absolutely stunning.
Please find the link below: (All 13 episodes may not show in non-UK territories)
This is as good as it gets.
While studying Shakespeare at school we were obliged to watch this. It seemed a good version to me, although I do remember some sniggers from our class of genuine Scots at the accents. Welles seemed to not be operating on full power, perhaps being distracted by his other responsibilities, or perhaps so as not to overwhelm such as the actress playing his wife.
CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT (1970)
Another in Hammer’s prehistoric cycle that began with “One Million Years BC”, and this time the beauty in the fur bikini is our own Julie Ege who despite being top-billed gets surprisingly little to do. If you’ve seen one of these before you know what to expect- lots of skin, no dialogue other than grunts, and a plot that barely covers the running time. I must admit to being deceived by the title; there are no dinosaurs etc to be seen, just a rather unconvincing bear plus a rubber python that Miss Ege battles near the end. Okay, and some warthogs. Nowhere near as good as “One Million Years BC”.
She was one of Blofeld's angels of death in OHMSS - the Scandinavian girl acc to imdb, to save you all looking it up.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
CARRY ON AT YOUR CONVENIENCE (1971)
After the successful string on mid-sixties genre spoofs, the Carry On team returned to modern day shenanigans with two popular hospital comedies [Doctor and Again Doctor] which set the template for a new run of cheeky contemporary storylines. Carry On at Your Convenience was the first of the series to lose money on its initial release, a statistic often attributed to the labour relations narrative and the less than interesting factory floor setting. That’s rather a shame. For a series of films that has always plumbed the depth of lavatory humour it feels more than appropriate to produce a movie based around a toilet making facility, namely W.C. Boggs & Son. This one certainly attempts to be dirty, although the results are mixed.
Sid James had become a little too much of a caricature, his leering man suddenly seeming to be a leering old man, and writer Talbot Rothwell attempts to tap into Sid’s more cheerful persona as the henpecked husband in TV’s Bless This House. Hence the domestic scenes between work’s foreman Sid Plummer and his wife Beattie [Hattie Jacques – outstanding] come across far better than almost all the goings on at the bog factory. In fact, the best laughs come in the scenes set beyond the factory floor: Kennth Cope’s shop steward Vic Spanner arguing with his abrasive mother; Mrs Spanner playing strip poker with Charles Hawtrey’s bidet designer; the non-talking race-predicting budgerigar; Kenneth Williams waking up in his secretary’s bedroom; Joan Sims attempting to seduce her husband Bill Maynard’s travelling salesman: “I know what you women want – Yes, and we know how to get it – What, before tea?”
The film meanders a bit and doesn’t have as many laughs as it might, considering the material available, as it were. The jolly day out to Brighton is just a silly excuse to get drunk and have Sid and Joan wink longingly at each other. The labour relations sections are, well, laboured. They cracked virtually the same terrible jokes a few decades later during the shop-steward meeting in Made in Dagenham, so it feels more like a slice of genuine life than a piss take of it [excuse the pun]. There are plenty of willing performances and enough laughs to keep us happy, but you sense a screenwriter who is writing on empty and whose ideas are heading fast down the pan. Fun music from Eric Rogers.
As a note to Bond fans, Margaret Nolan [Goldfinger] and Anouska Hemple [OHMSS] both have small roles as sexy dolly birds.