Iro's One Movie a Day Thread

No, I have not. Sounds like I might have to.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

#279 - Nashville
Robert Altman, 1975



Follows a large number of people who are in the titular city at the same time that a political convention is taking place.

The hype is strong when it comes to Nashville. Supposedly Altman's best film, it's not hard to see how it would earn that reputation as it combines just about everything that makes Altman great. The ability to juggle multiple intertwined subplots between dozens of different characters is no easy task but Altman naturally manages it with the help of a collection of well-known and not-so-well-known performers. Setting the film in America's country music capital and having many of the characters be connected to the scene in one way or another mainly makes this film a commentary on the dark side of the entertainment industry, changing things up by relocating somewhere other than Hollywood. As a result, it would be easy to decry the film for recycling a lot of familiar entertainment drama tropes such as the talentless yet optimistic wannabe, the legendary performer whose charming public persona hides a vicious behind-the-scenes true self, the journalist who wants an insight into this world but ends up becoming part of it, etc. Fortunately, Altman and his collaborators give each of the many characters just enough depth and pathos to stop them falling into bland stereotypes.

The music theme also guarantees that there are a handful of numbers to mix things up a bit. Though your general opinion of the songs may depend on your tolerance for country music, there's no denying the power of "I'm Easy", the Oscar-winning tune that makes for one of the film's most memorable scenes. The cinematography is up to Altman's usual standard, with a nice thick grain and the right balance of camera movement - not too static, not too frantic. Performances are generally great and not just when the characters are singing or playing. It's a testament to this film that I can't single out any particular actors above any others as they all have significant parts to play. Though the convoluted combinations of characters and narratives does mean that the film can get a little hard to follow (to the point where I'm sure I'll need another viewing or two to truly soak it all in), the fact that it's intriguing enough to warrant extra viewings is definitely one of many points in the film's favour.

When I saw you had watched Nashville I'll admit I was a little bit scared that you wouldn't like it as much as I would hope, but I'm delighted of course to see a four star rating. Your last paragraph and lines particularly sum up the experience for me, there's an awful lot going on, and not many characters or stories in particular that stand out, but there's something extremely human in watching the whole thing that makes it powerful when it all comes together for me. One of my favourites.

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I've been meaning to see it for years now so I knew that it probably wouldn't live up to the great expectations that had been built up for me in that time, but I was pleased that it at least managed to be a solid film that realised its potential. Time will tell if I decide to up the rating.

Good review Iro, glad you liked it. I think it will grow on you with a second viewing. I also gave it a 4/5 my first time and it became a favorite on the second viewing. I am about ready to watch it again. It is a movie I haven't stopped thinking about much over the past couple years.

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Letterboxd

#280 - Family Plot
Alfred Hitchcock, 1976



Two couples - one a pair of low-rent scam artists, the other a pair of professional extortionists - are forced into a game of cat-and-mouse together when a rich old woman searches for the heir to her fortune.

It's always interesting to watch a director's final film, regardless of whether or not it was intended to be their swansong. Hitchcock's Family Plot ends up being a somewhat mediocre note for the legendary director to go out on, though it's not exactly a bad film in its own right. It does promise some moral ambiguity by having its heroes be a medium (Barbara Harris) whose powers can be credited to her sleuthing boyfriend (Bruce Dern) digging up dirt on her clients to use. When they luck into a rich client offering a large finder's fee for whoever finds the illegitimate heir to a massive fortune, their search makes them cross paths with a pair of romantically involved career criminals (William Devane and Karen Black) whose deeds range from jewel thievery to kidnapping.

For a film that flirts with the two-hour mark, there isn't a hell of a lot going on with Family Plot. It's a fairly bog-standard gumshoe film that mainly follows Dern's attempts to uncover the truth behind the case (with Harris frequently in tow) while also playing a cat-and-mouse game with Devane (who gives the best performance in the film) and Black, whose scheming frequently outpaces his detecting. Despite Hitchcock building a reputation on being able to fill two hours with suspense, this particular affair is a rather dull one where an audience's sympathy for (or even interest in) the heroes is extremely debatable. The aforementioned promise of moral ambiguity isn't even remotely fleshed out - though our heroes do tend to scam people with their spiritualistic business, the film still treats them as being of obviously superior moral fibre to the frequently cold and violent villains and, though it does shake up whether or not our heroes will make it through this thing alive, it does sucks a little of the wind out of an overly long mystery. Not even the occasional grab at cheap thrills (such as Dern and Harris speeding down a twisting mountain trail in a car that has had its brake line cut) is enough to make this a genuinely good film. As a result, Family Plot ends up becoming indistinguishable from other run-of-the-mill thrillers from the 1970s, many of which ironically take inspiration from Hitchcock himself. It may not be the worst way to draw the curtain on a long and tumultuous career, but it does come a little close.

#281 - A Passage to India
David Lean, 1984



In 1920s India, an English woman touring the country becomes embroiled in a scandal involving a prim Indian doctor.

Another final film by a highly acclaimed director, A Passage of India is unfortunately another example of a final film that not only doesn't match up to the director's best (not like you'd really expect it to, especially in the cases of considerably aged directors) but still isn't especially engaging on its own terms. Sure, Lean's capacity for capturing stunning-looking scenery is still fairly solid, but it's sadly anchored to a very dry story about British colonialism (as seen through the eyes of a sufficiently benign protagonist) and the Indian population's attempts to alternately assimilate and resist. The film isn't especially concerned with plot - the scandal that provides the film's central dramatic narrative doesn't start until around halfway through the film's lengthy running time. Instead, the film spends its first half soaking in the landscape and introducing its white British leads (Judy Davis and Peggy Ashcroft) to the locals, most notably an eager-to-please young doctor (Victor Banerjee) and an old professor (Lean regular Alec Guinness, whose dignified talent isn't enough to overcome a rather egregious brownface performance).

The film may look good and raise some fairly ambiguous points about imperialism (plus it does have some decent performances thrown into the mix), but it's still more of an endurance test than a genuinely enthralling film. It is rather understandable given his age that Lean would have been less focused on the sort of grandiose spectacle common to his best-known films and would instead focus on something a bit more meditative in nature, but the end result ends up being a film that is one half travelogue and one half legal drama only without much in the way of fascination or tension (or even a genuinely iconic score by Maurice Jarre).

#282 - Kelly's Heroes
Brian G. Hutton, 1970



During the Allies' campaign against the Germans in World War II, an American soldier learns of a secret stash of Nazi gold and immediately puts together a team of men in order to retrieve it.

It'd be good to see if I could get through this review without referencing a certain other WWII movie about men going on a secret mission that I've watched recently, but it's hard not to when you've even got Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland popping up in this one. Even so, Kelly's Heroes is a pretty dull film. Sure, it's got plenty of gun battles and explosions as would befit such a lightweight war movie, but those do gloss over how the core of the film is extremely hollow. Ostensibly a comedy due to its wacky cast of characters, there's barely any mirth to be had here - there's the odd-couple tension between Savalas and Clint Eastwood, who plays a pretty typical Eastwood character in his role as the titular soldier. I also remember Sutherland being an especially kooky tank commander, but that's more or less all I can remember about the comic element.

The movie plods along for two hours, throws in action when it starts to drag more than normal, fails to establish any memorable camarderie between the supposed heroes of the title, and basically fails to distinguish itself in any meaningful way from a certain other way. Sure, it doesn't seem to take itself too seriously, but that just means that I don't take it seriously either, not even as a basic old-school action movie with comic elements thrown in so people aren't supposed to think it's trying to be the exact same movie as The Dirty Dozen (which wasn't exactly the highest art in the first place either). All in all, it is quite a disinteresting and disappointing feature.

I quite like a Passage to India

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

#283 - Rush
Ron Howard, 2013



Based on a true story about the rivalry between two Formula One drivers - England's James Hunt and Germany's Niki Lauda.

Rush doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel (no pun intended) when it comes to a biopic rooted in a famous rivalry. Credit has to go to the film for at least managing to make Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Lauda (Daniel Brühl) more or less equal as far as protagonists go without one or the other being explicitly more villainous than the other. Both characters embody perfectly opposed personalities - Hunt is a wealthy hedonist who treats racing as yet another vice he can indulge, while Lauda has a dedication to the sport that causes him to buck his own stuffy upper-class background in order to pursue and improve it. Though Hemsworth does bring a certain amount of cocky charm to a seemingly unsympathetic character, it is Brühl who stands out as the film's best performer as he admittedly plays into a tiresome archetype as a socially awkward but determined intellectual (to the point where this movie could just as easily be called A Beautiful Drive). He more or less carries the movie, making sure to sell the relationship he develops with his wife (Alexandra Maria Lara), which makes for a good contrast to Hunt's ultimately pointless marriage to a supermodel (Olivia Wilde - surprises me that she gets top billing despite only having about five minutes of screen-time and almost no relevance to the plot beyond being an embodiment of Hunt's own flaws).

Of course, for a film about Formula One racing the film does feature its fair share of high-speed driving, though it never feels as exciting as it should (save of course for one shocking development that I, not having known the true story, was genuinely surprised by). From there, the film gains a bit more complexity - especially in regards to the relationship between Hunt and Lauda and its effect on both men's psyches and mutual livelihood - but it doesn't quite feel like enough to make this film truly transcend its biopic trappings. Rush is definitely held together by a strong performance by Brühl and a garish tone that accentuates the film's focus on racing in the Seventies, but there's not much more to it beyond that.

Those from the area of Austria where Lauder was from say Brühl absolutely nailed the accent.

I'm a fan of F1 and remember all this happening when I was a child, but I'd only rate this half a box higher than you. I also had a problem with the racing scenes because they looked like cut scenes from a game. Which, essentially, is what they are of course.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Like HK, I give it half a popcorn higher too. Nothing great, but it was solid and interesting enough for me, I enjoyed watching it.

Pretty soon you'll have the most reviews on the site!!!

#284 - Children of Men
Alfonso Cuarón, 2006



Almost twenty years after an epidemic has rendered the entire human race infertile, a shiftless everyman is drafted into the search for a cure.

I still consider Children of Men one of my favourite films of the 2000s, but I think this latest viewing marks the one where I'm starting to notice cracks in the storytelling and its attempt at building something meaningful out of a fictional environment that is intended to be meaningless. It's a credit to Cuarón and company that they manage to prioritise visual storytelling more often than possible in trying to build a world living on borrowed time - whether through the proliferation of technology such as mass-produced euthanasia kits or background details such as nihilistic graffiti and abandoned playgrounds. On this viewing, I noticed that when the film does resort to extensive verbal exposition it does come across as awfully clunky, such as one character ruminating to another on Britain's extremely inhumane treatment of international refugees right as a bus full of them drives past. Of course, there are good moments as well - the entire opening scene where a group of people watch a newscast about the death of the world's youngest person sets the tone of the film perfectly despite it being extremely verbal and straightforward. That's without mentioning how heavily the film will lay on its religious subtext at times - having characters respond to the discovery of the film's most important plot point with an exclamation of "Jesus Christ!" is about as subtle as a flying brick. It's one inconsistency that does give me pause about increasing the rating (and I'm also starting to notice more plot holes with each new viewing), but fortunately the film makes up for it in plenty of other areas.

For starters, there's the cinematography. Emmanuel Lubezki quite rightly won back-to-back Oscars for skilfully capturing long takes with incredible vivacity, which is definitely enough compensation for not winning for his work here. The rough, quasi-documentarian feel of the film goes hand-in-hand with the extended long takes, which also happen to involve action sequences that last for several uninterrupted minutes and are still extremely impressive almost a decade later. The film's soundtrack is good for the most part - though that choral leitmotif isn't all that great, there are some good songs. The performances are uniformly great - Clive Owen makes for a convincingly downbeat and sardonic protagonist who seems to subvert a lot of heroic clichés as he snarks and struggles through the film's plot, while Michael Caine steals the show as an elderly hippie and former activist. With its solid premise and characters, the film manages to craft a plot that's full of twists and turns and convincingly makes it seem like anyone can die, especially during its elaborate setpieces. Though Gravity may have swept the Oscars (and it is a good film in its own right), I still can't help but think that its winning might have been a bit of a sympathy vote for this win-less Cuarón film, which is still one of the best films of the last ten years and will probably still hold up ten years from now.

Damn Iro! The effort you've put in to this in terms of both watching and writing about all these films is amazing. I'll admit I've not read a great deal of your reviews so I don't know about the overall quality. But just based on the sheer quantity I fear for my Best Reviewer Mofie.

And Children of Men is an excellent film I also have a lot of love for.

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Yeah, the problem with balancing quantity with quality is that I can either churn out rush jobs or fall behind in trying to give films the reviews they deserve. For what it's worth, I currently have another nine films waiting to be reviewed (I jumped ahead and reviewed Fury Road for obvious reason) and I'm watching another one as I write this so yeah.

You're watching one while writing that? Well, that ain't watching, is it? Eyes front, Iro!

Whatever,

#285 - Escape From New York
John Carpenter, 1981



In a world where New York City has been converted into a giant prison, an inbound convict is coerced into rescuing the President from inside.

It's interesting how John Carpenter, despite being a huge fan of Westerns, never made an actual Western. However, he did make films that heavily played into the Western mythos, most prominent among them being Escape From New York. There are some sci-fi contrivances to guarantee the plot stays on track such as the loner protagonist being forced to do the rescue mission by getting microscopic bombs injected into his neck, but otherwise it's pretty much a Western filtered through an urban dystopia. Having veteran Western actors such as Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine thrown into the mix certainly adds to that, as does the fact that Kurt Russell's portrayal of the grizzled, myopic anti-hero that is Snake Plissken basically extends to him doing his best Clint Eastwood impression. When it's not borrowing from Westerns, it's borrowing a fair bit from horror films with its shadowy night-time photography, jump-scares, feral cannibals, and so forth.

Of course, this also falls into the category of favourites that I've watched so many times that I can pick apart the problems with the film as well. The passage of the 24-hour countdown, some lack of logic on the part of characters (why do the Crazies run past Snake without attacking him at first but only attack him after a short scene where he hides out with a fellow inmate?), and various other plot problems all become more obvious with each new viewing, but it's a testament to the film's vibe that I can still watch it without serious complaint. It's not exactly action-oriented save for the occasional chase or fight, instead trying to build up a slow-burn thriller packed out with a cast of colourful characters. As befitting a lot of cult classics, if I were to attempt to give it a truly objective rating then it'd probably be a popcorn box or two lower, but as it stands this is one of those films that I couldn't bring myself to rate lower even if I wanted to. The synthesised score is iconic (it still has one of my favourite film themes of all-time), plus Carpenter can still capture sharp urban wasteland imagery and special effects that still hold up reasonably well. It's got a charm that obviously won't endear it to everyone, but fortunately for me I am not everyone.

Good write up Iro . I really need to rewatch this haven't seen it since I was about 14. Are you a fan of Metal Gear Solid?