Dragonslayer (Matthew Robbins, 1981)
This is the
Citizen Kane of Dragon movies. It's just quirky and weird enough that you cannot really predict what will happen next, and it's got way too much violence to be considered a kiddie film. The photography is lush, the sound and special effects are quite attention-grabbing and Alex North's bizarre Oscar-nominated musical score really puts you into another world. This world is a confluence where sorcerors, dragons and virgin sacrifices based on lotteries are dying out and the new Christian faith is rising. In fact, the horned, fire-breathing dragon who lives underground is often spoken of as the Devil himself. Ralph Richardson gives a sly performance as the sorceror recruited to slay the dragon, and Peter MacNichol and Caitlyn Clarke make a good team as the younger generation who are doing their best to free their land from the clutches of dragon worship. I recommend watching this on the largest and loudest system you have to get maximum enjoyment of a movie which deserves to have a better reputation.
Requiem for a Heavyweight (Ralph Nelson, 1962)
This is the theatrical version of Rod Serling's powerful teleplay about aging, beaten-up boxer Mountain Rivera (Anthony Quinn) and the struggle between his manager (Jackie Gleason) and an employment counselor (Julie Harris) over Mountain's soul and his future. The manager needs to pay off a gambling debt so he tries to get Mountain to become a wrestler now that he's forbidden to box anymore after his last bout with Cassius Clay. The counselor thinks that Mountain should try his hand helping out boys at a summer camp, and she even arranges a job interview for him. Witnessing this is Mountain's cornerman Army (Mickey Rooney) who has worked with him and the manager for 18 years now. This take on the story has terrific performances right down the line. Listening to Quinn mumble, you can hear where Sylvester Stallone got the voice for Rocky Balboa. The film, which plays out almost as a Greek tragedy, is shot and lit as a film noir to accent all the dark corners of the crooked boxing world. But one thing that Mountain is really proud of is that he never took a dive in the ring. Now the question becomes "Will he take a dive in real life?"
Keeping Mum aka
Mum's the Word (Niall Johnson, 2005)
I'd never even heard of this film until I was channel surfing and came across it. It seemed much more interesting than I would have expected and watched the whole thing. It's both a sex comedy and a black comedy with a strong cast. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Gloria who is married to the local vicar (Rowan Atkinson) who has pretty much lost interest in her physically and is obsessed with writing an address for a clerical convention. This means that he also doesn't understand that his teenage daughter (Tamsin Egerton) is a raging nympho and that his young son is socially-incompetent. Besides that, there's this American golf instructor (Patrick Swayze) who's putting the moves on Gloria. Into this situation arrives new housekeeper Grace (Maggie Smith) and almost immediately much of the family's stress begins to disappear, so what exactly is Grace's secret? What starts out more preoccupied with sex turns into an homage to traditional British black comedies such as
The Wrong Box and
Kind Hearts and Coronets, and it even allows the vicar an opportunity to have both a spiritual and physical reawakening of how much his wife means to him. All in all, a subtle winner.
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Kubrick's three-hour adaptation of the Thackeray novel is one of his most-meticulous films, filled to the brim with his exactitude in visual and musical codes. The first artistic decision Kubrick made was to shoot the entire film with nothing but natural sunlight and/or candles. No electric lights were used at all during the production. The result is that the entire film is gorgeous and many of the shots do indeed seem to recreate Kubrick's intention of making much of the film look like paintings from the period. Then he also wanted to use only music from the period of the film (the second half of the 18th century), and although he stresses one piece each by Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Vivaldi, he does tend to repeat them. This effect can sometimes become mesmerizing while at other times it smacks of obsession. One thing is certain though, and that's that
Barry Lyndon is a very good film. No, it isn't fast-paced, but it is full of incident and even action. Young Redman Barry (Ryan O'Neal as the title character in one of his strongest performances) is a master duellist and there are many duels in the movie, as well as several battle scenes set during the Seven Years War. The film has the inexorable pull of fate as Barry's life is taken to and fro, often through incidents he has no control over. However, the second half of the film where he marries Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson) and treats her shabbily does seem to rest fully on his shoulders even though I wouldn't call him a "self-made man". All of this beauty and suffering leads to an ironic conclusion which certainly is in keeping with those of most Kubrick films. Be sure to watch this one if you've been blowing it off till now.
Blood Simple. (Coen Bros., 1984)
OK, this is the Coens' first movie, and it's always been memorable to me because my friends and I went to see it opening weekend and about 15 minutes in, the film broke and it never came back on!! We had to return the next day (with passes) to watch it straight through. You can read what the poster says and it's accurate in many ways. It's a dusty film noir set and filmed in Texas with a cast of quirky characters and even quirkier situations. I don't really want to give away the "plot", but it does involve cheating lovers, a cuckolded husband and probably an insane private investigator. It is very accomplished on a visual level and the acting is pretty damn fine, especially Dan Hedaya and M. Emmett Walsh. The plot twists are very original and strong too, yet somehow it does come across as a first film. Although it's only 96 minutes long, it probably would have been better if it was either cut down to about 80 minutes or a couple of characters or scenes were fleshed out a little. Don't get me wrong. I certanly recommend this, especially if you haven't seen it or haven't seen it for some time. It still has the power to surprise and even shock. It also takes on added meaning now in the context of
No Country for Old Men. There you go; take a weekend evening and have a Coen Bros. festival starting with
Blood Simple. and ending with
NCfOM. Afterward, get back to me on what you thought.
La rupture (Claude Chabrol, 1970)
I'm in the process of watching the eight films in the Claude Chabrol DVD box. This is the second one I've watched, after
Nada, and I'm very happy to be able to catch up on some of Chabrol's films which I've missed. After Truffaut, he is my fave French new wave director. Anyhow, it's just a coincidence that I watched this after
Blood Simple., but this almost seems like an alternative version of what could have happened in that other film if the story was set in France and told from the outside in. Basically, the set-up is that a man (Jean-Claude Drouot) wakes up one morning, seems completely spaced out, starts beating on his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) in the kitchen and throws his four-year-old son across the room, giving him a fractured leg and a bloody concussion. The wife then beats down the husband with a pan, gathers up her son and runs outside, where one neighbor takes her to the hospital and another one calls the police. Thus starts a contentious journey to and through divorce, although the husband, who suffers from mental problems and takes drugs for it, has a wealthy family who wants the grandson, and Hélène says he'll never be left alone with her son again. It all revolves around trying to get some dirt on the wife, even if Jean-Pierre Cassel as the agent of the rich grandfather (Michel Bouquet) has to resort to porno and child abuse to try to find anything less than saintly about the woman. The film is a weird mixture of the low-key and the in-your-face; in other words, it's pretty typical Chabrol. This one
seems to take a long time after the opening scene to get interesting again, but it did eventually. As with just about all the films in this thread, it resolves itself in a most-unexpectedly ironic fashion, which means that I'm going to rewatch it and change the rating if necessary.
I've also watched
The Reader and rewatched
Straw Dogs and
The Wrestler, but I'm not ready to get into those yet. Thanks for reading.
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