A well-structured legal thriller with Susan Sarandon as a rent-a-lawyer hired by an errant child who has witnessed a Mafia suicide and is in fear for his life. A great performance from Ms Sarandon helps immeasurably to keep us interested, as does Tommy Lee Jones playing a Bible quoting District Attorney. Brad Renfro is the kid and while he starts off with our sympathies, it soon wears thin for he is entirely obnoxious. Nonetheless a well-performed and presented thriller that ticks all the boxes you would expect and features a similar number of plot holes. The best scenes are reserved for the various interrogations and interviews that pervade the narrative as legal jargon is batted back and forth like tennis balls and the players spit and scowl at each other. Legal-eagle John Grisham wrote the original novel and I detect his lawyer’s expertise all over those scenes. It’s a great film of little substance; just take it for what it is and enjoy it. Joel Schumacher directs with little originality but much accomplishment.
The plot and the narrative is deliberately dry and functional due to the fact that the film tried extremely hard to follow actual police procedures, car chase excepted. It's a true 'how the sausage gets made' kind of film, showing actual detective work and such. Devoid of the typical Hollywood glamour, the film almost plays as a docu-drama. That's either going to work for you or utterly repel you.
Personally, I find it to be a completely engrossing film.
It didn't repel me @HarryCanyon , I am merely pointing up what I consider are inherent deficiencies beside the good. I appreciate your come-back, although I think you'll find I mention many of your points in my review, albeit obliquely.
I finally got to see Interstellar, at London's Prince Charles cinema.
It's a Christopher Nolan film, so it was a) Intense b) Not really credible, almost deliberately perhaps c) Very moving - though how much was due to Hans Zimmer's score, I can't quite say - I was moved by his score at the BBC Proms showing of sci-fi movie scores two or so years ago, so that was a kind of control experiment d) Impressive e) Not really quite enjoyable for me, kind of harrowing.
A couple of Bond references but no, I wouldn't want him to do a Bond film and it would be beneath him anyway, I guess it would be a Skyfall type thing, which admittedly many regard as Craig's high-point. There are jokes but overall the tone is depressing.
Some of Interstellar I didn't quite 'get' - I thought they were the first ones out there, so what'a another craft doing there? It felt like I'd nipped out to the loo and missed something, but I hadn't. McConaughy's Cooper heads off before even hardly heading home to shave, no refresher course needed for him! All a bit Ad Astra, though that came years later.
On a side note, London seems like a crap hole these days. it's utterly charmless.
One of the finest action thriller films ever made.
Robert Rath (Stallone), an exhausted contract killer is now in the crosshairs of a young and upcoming assassin, Miguel Bain (Banderas)...ruthless, remorseless and soulless.
Behind the scenes, a shadowy contractor controls both men as chessboard pieces.
Their paths intersect again, when a lucrative contract arrives on their laptop screens.
Eliminate Electra (Julianne Moore)...a computer hacker, possessing digital information worth millions.
Rath's worst fears come true, when he realizes that a bounty has also been placed on his head.
This cat and mouse game reaches a crescendo in the Banco Internationale in Puerto Rico, when an old friend returns from the dead to greet Robert Rath.
Directed by Richard Donner and running at 133 minutes, this is a timeless action film.
I've always meant to watch this - and it's Richard 'Lethal Weapon' 'Superman: The Movie' Donner! It got one great review when it came out - it doesn't come on telly that often. I think you'd want to see it without ad breaks perhaps.
An intense boardroom drama that transpires on the 40th floor of the Ramsey building in Manhattan, New York.
Walter Ramsey, CEO of the industrial behemoth Ramsey & Co., has invited a young tiger, an industrial engineer by the name of Fred Staples into the executive suite.
The aim...not what you might think.
An intense vitriol exists between Ramsey and his second in command, Bill Briggs.
Dyspeptic Bill Briggs, a dedicated employee of forty years, who had built this company from scratch with Walter Ramsey's long departed father remains steadfast in his concern for the employees and his old school ways of doing things.
Worse of all, Briggs refuses to retire.
In order to seal his corporate coffin, Ramsey begins the undertaking, one nail at a time.
He divests Briggs from his long trusted secretary, hands over many of his operational commitments to Staples and underscores his corporate suggestions.
The writing on the wall is clear.
Briggs is to be replaced with Staples, as Vice President of Ramsey & Co.
Staples, caught in between his friendship for Briggs and his own personal ambition, is placed in a tight spot.
Briggs, brought to the point of nervous exhaustion in a follow-up boardroom meeting, finally gets his handshake.
Not the golden one, but the forever one by the Reaper.
After his tragic and convenient death, Staples confronts the old snake in his office.
Only to realize that the poison he offers is sweet.
Very sweet indeed.
A tremendous film, written by Rod Sterling and directed by Fielder Cook.
One of my absolute favorite films, probably in my top 5 of all time. It gets better with rewatches.
'what were other crafts doing out there?' You must have missed this part: when the wormhole originally appeared, they sent some probes into it and the signals they received back from those probes indicated that there were 12 possible planets on the other side that might be suitable for the citizens of Earth to move to. 12 volunteers flew into the wormhole to check out the planets with the intention of signaling back if their planet was actually viable. By the time McConoughey and team leave, they have signals from three of those planets. For the other 9 astronauts, it was essentially a suicide mission.
First time I saw the film, I thought it was OK. That was in IMAX. When it hit blu ray, I saw it again and it clicked for me in a major way. I've seen it probably six times now and it's only gotten better. It's the only Nolan film to have any sort of emotional resonance with me. I consider it a legit masterpiece.
edited to add: Hans Zimmer's finest hour. One of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in my life.
An intense and dense thriller from Francis Ford Coppola, made on the hoof between his two Godfather epics and arguably better than either of them. The Conversation concerns private surveillance operator Harry Caul whose decent into Kafkaesque madness is ensured following an operation which leads him to believe a murder is about to be committed.
Gene Hackman is outstanding in a career best performance as Harry Caul, a man unable to communicate effectively because he is obsessed with surveillance and security. This is a guy who refuses to give out any personal details to anyone, not even his on-off girlfriend or his work colleagues; he refuses to give his home telephone number or address to his clients, preferring phone booths and drop boxes. He concentrates solely on work to the detriment of all other aspects of life. He barely eats or drinks, does not socialise and spends his evenings playing a saxophone in accompaniment to old jazz records.
While the film may have had wider implications for those watching in the post-Watergate USA of 1974, it still serves as a timely reminder today that everything is not always as we expect it to be. Given the propensity for social media, historical and personal data to be misconstrued, often with vast implications, and often years after events, there is a lesson perhaps to be learned from Harry Caul’s total immersion in and hatred of his watchful, catch-all craft. Here, a single misinterpreted word deflects Harry Caul’s version of unfolding events; but his realisation comes too late.
The film pitches us immediately into the surveillance ritual and Hackman’s nervy, straight and wearisome Harry Caul is already at centre stage, observing his targets at close quarters while his team photograph and sound record the action. Later on, we watch Harry at intricate work, splicing sound loops to even out the recordings, eliminating noise and amplifying speech. He listens to a recorded conversation between his targets – two young lovers – only in snippets as he works. When he, and we, finally hear the full dialogue it is in a moment of catharsis, when Harry has been seduced by a woman after an abysmal drunken party. Her actions mirror the words echoed by the lovers on the transcript tapes. Harry's own words have been covertly recorded and he recognises he is as susceptible as the man in the street. The party closes with a veneer of motorcycle noise and aimless chatter, emulating the same chaos he eroded from his tapes – Harry’s nightmares have become reality. Unable to bear the strain he attempts confession, the most private of observations, but his troubled mind is not eased even if his soul is saved. Later, in a desperate search for electronic bugs, he destroys an ex voto of the Virgin Mary, metaphorically sealing his lapsed faith.
It is Harry’s own obsessive demand for privacy which proves his mental unravelling, literally turning his world upside down. Unable to take the strain of inadvertent duplicity and conspiracy, he imagines death and murder are coming for him and when all else fails he takes refuge in the saxophone, the music a barrier to his creeping mania. Yet the instrument could well be the seed of his downfall and, even as he mournfully plays it, Harry has not understood how closely his watchers have observed him or how his own peculiarities have marked him.
An outstanding piece of filmmaking from its central and support performers – John Cazale, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and Cindy Williams among them – to Coppola who as writer / director is almost offering a performance all of his own, so closely and identifiably is the film shot, authored and orchestrated. Walter Murch and Richard Chew took control of the brilliant stop-start sound editing while the film cutting is brutal, matching Harry Caul’s absence of warmth. Bill Butler’s photography is grimy when it needs to be, flash when appropriate; the camera seems to peer around angles all the time, rarely is a scene centrally staged. David Shire’s music score is an echoey piano concerto which both anticipates and accompanies the unfolding drama.
1974 was a good year for movies. Along with Polanski’s Chinatown, The Conversation demonstrates that corruption of the flesh inhabits the powerful and that the man at the bottom of the pecking order is helpless to both avoid its tentacles and prevent its consequence. A very fine film on all levels.
It is very hard to praise this film, a sequel of sorts to the fairly dismal Dracula A.D.1972, which attempts to recreate all Bram Stoker’s and Hammer Picture’s nineteenth century gothic incidents in a 1970s London landscape. So Dracula’s construction company is headquartered over deconsecrated church ground, a descendant of Van Helsing is the prime opposition, a grand mansion houses a coven of devil worshippers, human blood sacrifices, succubuses hidden in coffins, coffins hidden in cellars, victims chained to walls, crucifixes, garlic, hawthorn bushes, it’s all there – it just isn’t presented very well. What really disappoints is that writer Don Houghton [he was excellent for Dr Who] churns out everything you would expect without any idea how to make it original. Instead, everything simply looks, well, odd. And rather bloody.
There is a half decent one-to-one between Dracula [Christopher Lee] and Van Helsing {Peter Cushing] spoilt for half the scene by the Count trying to disguise himself using a fake Hungarian accent. Joanna Lumley is in it. The music score seems to have escaped from out-takes of Shaft. Pretty to look at times and pretty dreadful at others.
Strong performances all round in this second sequel to the original. Basil Rathbone is excellent as the title character, Boris Karloff returns for the final time as The Monster and Bela Lugosi excels as Ygor. The sets are atmospheric and director Rowland V Lee does a good job following in James Whale’s footsteps.
Wolf Frankenstein returns home and discovers the remains of The Monster in the family crypt, and with Ygor’s help reanimates his father’s invention.
It’s a solid entry in the Universal series.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
When a military intelligence officer is found shot in the head, MI5 agent John Neil (Dennis Waterman) is dispatched to investigate the case.
The death of Major Robert Turner, recently returned from the Gulf and currently supervising a military intelligence training exercise, is a cause of grave concern.
An encounter with Jason Sturden, an employee working at Cottrill's Bank in the City of London, sets the investigation on a completely different path.
Neil uncovers a syndicate of international bankers, property dealers and drug smugglers, covertly operating a sophisticated money-laundering scheme.
Was Major Turner involved with this organization?
With an excellent story by Ms. Jill Arlon and featuring a talented cast of actors, Kalon is a well made and entertaining spy film.
Comments
THE CLIENT (1994)
A well-structured legal thriller with Susan Sarandon as a rent-a-lawyer hired by an errant child who has witnessed a Mafia suicide and is in fear for his life. A great performance from Ms Sarandon helps immeasurably to keep us interested, as does Tommy Lee Jones playing a Bible quoting District Attorney. Brad Renfro is the kid and while he starts off with our sympathies, it soon wears thin for he is entirely obnoxious. Nonetheless a well-performed and presented thriller that ticks all the boxes you would expect and features a similar number of plot holes. The best scenes are reserved for the various interrogations and interviews that pervade the narrative as legal jargon is batted back and forth like tennis balls and the players spit and scowl at each other. Legal-eagle John Grisham wrote the original novel and I detect his lawyer’s expertise all over those scenes. It’s a great film of little substance; just take it for what it is and enjoy it. Joel Schumacher directs with little originality but much accomplishment.
The plot and the narrative is deliberately dry and functional due to the fact that the film tried extremely hard to follow actual police procedures, car chase excepted. It's a true 'how the sausage gets made' kind of film, showing actual detective work and such. Devoid of the typical Hollywood glamour, the film almost plays as a docu-drama. That's either going to work for you or utterly repel you.
Personally, I find it to be a completely engrossing film.
It didn't repel me @HarryCanyon , I am merely pointing up what I consider are inherent deficiencies beside the good. I appreciate your come-back, although I think you'll find I mention many of your points in my review, albeit obliquely.
I finally got to see Interstellar, at London's Prince Charles cinema.
It's a Christopher Nolan film, so it was a) Intense b) Not really credible, almost deliberately perhaps c) Very moving - though how much was due to Hans Zimmer's score, I can't quite say - I was moved by his score at the BBC Proms showing of sci-fi movie scores two or so years ago, so that was a kind of control experiment d) Impressive e) Not really quite enjoyable for me, kind of harrowing.
A couple of Bond references but no, I wouldn't want him to do a Bond film and it would be beneath him anyway, I guess it would be a Skyfall type thing, which admittedly many regard as Craig's high-point. There are jokes but overall the tone is depressing.
Some of Interstellar I didn't quite 'get' - I thought they were the first ones out there, so what'a another craft doing there? It felt like I'd nipped out to the loo and missed something, but I hadn't. McConaughy's Cooper heads off before even hardly heading home to shave, no refresher course needed for him! All a bit Ad Astra, though that came years later.
On a side note, London seems like a crap hole these days. it's utterly charmless.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
ASSASSINS (1995)
One of the finest action thriller films ever made.
Robert Rath (Stallone), an exhausted contract killer is now in the crosshairs of a young and upcoming assassin, Miguel Bain (Banderas)...ruthless, remorseless and soulless.
Behind the scenes, a shadowy contractor controls both men as chessboard pieces.
Their paths intersect again, when a lucrative contract arrives on their laptop screens.
Eliminate Electra (Julianne Moore)...a computer hacker, possessing digital information worth millions.
Rath's worst fears come true, when he realizes that a bounty has also been placed on his head.
This cat and mouse game reaches a crescendo in the Banco Internationale in Puerto Rico, when an old friend returns from the dead to greet Robert Rath.
Directed by Richard Donner and running at 133 minutes, this is a timeless action film.
Peak 90's cinema.
I've always meant to watch this - and it's Richard 'Lethal Weapon' 'Superman: The Movie' Donner! It got one great review when it came out - it doesn't come on telly that often. I think you'd want to see it without ad breaks perhaps.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
PATTERNS (1956)
An intense boardroom drama that transpires on the 40th floor of the Ramsey building in Manhattan, New York.
Walter Ramsey, CEO of the industrial behemoth Ramsey & Co., has invited a young tiger, an industrial engineer by the name of Fred Staples into the executive suite.
The aim...not what you might think.
An intense vitriol exists between Ramsey and his second in command, Bill Briggs.
Dyspeptic Bill Briggs, a dedicated employee of forty years, who had built this company from scratch with Walter Ramsey's long departed father remains steadfast in his concern for the employees and his old school ways of doing things.
Worse of all, Briggs refuses to retire.
In order to seal his corporate coffin, Ramsey begins the undertaking, one nail at a time.
He divests Briggs from his long trusted secretary, hands over many of his operational commitments to Staples and underscores his corporate suggestions.
The writing on the wall is clear.
Briggs is to be replaced with Staples, as Vice President of Ramsey & Co.
Staples, caught in between his friendship for Briggs and his own personal ambition, is placed in a tight spot.
Briggs, brought to the point of nervous exhaustion in a follow-up boardroom meeting, finally gets his handshake.
Not the golden one, but the forever one by the Reaper.
After his tragic and convenient death, Staples confronts the old snake in his office.
Only to realize that the poison he offers is sweet.
Very sweet indeed.
A tremendous film, written by Rod Sterling and directed by Fielder Cook.
One of my absolute favorite films, probably in my top 5 of all time. It gets better with rewatches.
'what were other crafts doing out there?' You must have missed this part: when the wormhole originally appeared, they sent some probes into it and the signals they received back from those probes indicated that there were 12 possible planets on the other side that might be suitable for the citizens of Earth to move to. 12 volunteers flew into the wormhole to check out the planets with the intention of signaling back if their planet was actually viable. By the time McConoughey and team leave, they have signals from three of those planets. For the other 9 astronauts, it was essentially a suicide mission.
First time I saw the film, I thought it was OK. That was in IMAX. When it hit blu ray, I saw it again and it clicked for me in a major way. I've seen it probably six times now and it's only gotten better. It's the only Nolan film to have any sort of emotional resonance with me. I consider it a legit masterpiece.
edited to add: Hans Zimmer's finest hour. One of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in my life.
THE CONVERSATION (1974)
An intense and dense thriller from Francis Ford Coppola, made on the hoof between his two Godfather epics and arguably better than either of them. The Conversation concerns private surveillance operator Harry Caul whose decent into Kafkaesque madness is ensured following an operation which leads him to believe a murder is about to be committed.
Gene Hackman is outstanding in a career best performance as Harry Caul, a man unable to communicate effectively because he is obsessed with surveillance and security. This is a guy who refuses to give out any personal details to anyone, not even his on-off girlfriend or his work colleagues; he refuses to give his home telephone number or address to his clients, preferring phone booths and drop boxes. He concentrates solely on work to the detriment of all other aspects of life. He barely eats or drinks, does not socialise and spends his evenings playing a saxophone in accompaniment to old jazz records.
While the film may have had wider implications for those watching in the post-Watergate USA of 1974, it still serves as a timely reminder today that everything is not always as we expect it to be. Given the propensity for social media, historical and personal data to be misconstrued, often with vast implications, and often years after events, there is a lesson perhaps to be learned from Harry Caul’s total immersion in and hatred of his watchful, catch-all craft. Here, a single misinterpreted word deflects Harry Caul’s version of unfolding events; but his realisation comes too late.
The film pitches us immediately into the surveillance ritual and Hackman’s nervy, straight and wearisome Harry Caul is already at centre stage, observing his targets at close quarters while his team photograph and sound record the action. Later on, we watch Harry at intricate work, splicing sound loops to even out the recordings, eliminating noise and amplifying speech. He listens to a recorded conversation between his targets – two young lovers – only in snippets as he works. When he, and we, finally hear the full dialogue it is in a moment of catharsis, when Harry has been seduced by a woman after an abysmal drunken party. Her actions mirror the words echoed by the lovers on the transcript tapes. Harry's own words have been covertly recorded and he recognises he is as susceptible as the man in the street. The party closes with a veneer of motorcycle noise and aimless chatter, emulating the same chaos he eroded from his tapes – Harry’s nightmares have become reality. Unable to bear the strain he attempts confession, the most private of observations, but his troubled mind is not eased even if his soul is saved. Later, in a desperate search for electronic bugs, he destroys an ex voto of the Virgin Mary, metaphorically sealing his lapsed faith.
It is Harry’s own obsessive demand for privacy which proves his mental unravelling, literally turning his world upside down. Unable to take the strain of inadvertent duplicity and conspiracy, he imagines death and murder are coming for him and when all else fails he takes refuge in the saxophone, the music a barrier to his creeping mania. Yet the instrument could well be the seed of his downfall and, even as he mournfully plays it, Harry has not understood how closely his watchers have observed him or how his own peculiarities have marked him.
An outstanding piece of filmmaking from its central and support performers – John Cazale, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and Cindy Williams among them – to Coppola who as writer / director is almost offering a performance all of his own, so closely and identifiably is the film shot, authored and orchestrated. Walter Murch and Richard Chew took control of the brilliant stop-start sound editing while the film cutting is brutal, matching Harry Caul’s absence of warmth. Bill Butler’s photography is grimy when it needs to be, flash when appropriate; the camera seems to peer around angles all the time, rarely is a scene centrally staged. David Shire’s music score is an echoey piano concerto which both anticipates and accompanies the unfolding drama.
1974 was a good year for movies. Along with Polanski’s Chinatown, The Conversation demonstrates that corruption of the flesh inhabits the powerful and that the man at the bottom of the pecking order is helpless to both avoid its tentacles and prevent its consequence. A very fine film on all levels.
THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)
It is very hard to praise this film, a sequel of sorts to the fairly dismal Dracula A.D.1972, which attempts to recreate all Bram Stoker’s and Hammer Picture’s nineteenth century gothic incidents in a 1970s London landscape. So Dracula’s construction company is headquartered over deconsecrated church ground, a descendant of Van Helsing is the prime opposition, a grand mansion houses a coven of devil worshippers, human blood sacrifices, succubuses hidden in coffins, coffins hidden in cellars, victims chained to walls, crucifixes, garlic, hawthorn bushes, it’s all there – it just isn’t presented very well. What really disappoints is that writer Don Houghton [he was excellent for Dr Who] churns out everything you would expect without any idea how to make it original. Instead, everything simply looks, well, odd. And rather bloody.
There is a half decent one-to-one between Dracula [Christopher Lee] and Van Helsing {Peter Cushing] spoilt for half the scene by the Count trying to disguise himself using a fake Hungarian accent. Joanna Lumley is in it. The music score seems to have escaped from out-takes of Shaft. Pretty to look at times and pretty dreadful at others.
SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939)
Strong performances all round in this second sequel to the original. Basil Rathbone is excellent as the title character, Boris Karloff returns for the final time as The Monster and Bela Lugosi excels as Ygor. The sets are atmospheric and director Rowland V Lee does a good job following in James Whale’s footsteps.
Wolf Frankenstein returns home and discovers the remains of The Monster in the family crypt, and with Ygor’s help reanimates his father’s invention.
It’s a solid entry in the Universal series.
CIRCLES OF DECEIT: KALON (1996) (EPISODE 3)
When a military intelligence officer is found shot in the head, MI5 agent John Neil (Dennis Waterman) is dispatched to investigate the case.
The death of Major Robert Turner, recently returned from the Gulf and currently supervising a military intelligence training exercise, is a cause of grave concern.
An encounter with Jason Sturden, an employee working at Cottrill's Bank in the City of London, sets the investigation on a completely different path.
Neil uncovers a syndicate of international bankers, property dealers and drug smugglers, covertly operating a sophisticated money-laundering scheme.
Was Major Turner involved with this organization?
With an excellent story by Ms. Jill Arlon and featuring a talented cast of actors, Kalon is a well made and entertaining spy film.
(1 hour - 39 minutes)