Movie Tab II

I've watched a crapload of movies but I can't sit too long without some pain, so I'll cut back for this group.

Dead of Night (Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945) +



Incredibly audacious and creepy omnibus horror flick which basically invented the genre and set the high water mark at the same time. Mervyn Johns shows up at a country estate and begins to remember all kinds of horrific things which happened before, and although neither he nor the others there can truly remember what's what, his nightmare reoccurs involving every single person there. The highlight of this wonderful flick is the episode with Michael Redgrave as the ventriloquist who may or may not be in charge of his dummy. The actual ending takes that wonderful concept and winds it tighter to make things even more uncomfortable.

The Boys from County Clare (John Irvin, 2003)



Entertaining flick about Irish brothers (Colm Meaney and Bernard Hill) whose bands compete in an Irish music festival. It's pretty much what you'd expect, but then again, you'd probably expect some solid entertainment and you get that. The music is good, the leads play well off each other, and there's some nice romance along with several cliches.

Tristam Shanty: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, 2006)



The film is completely bonkers! It's ostensibly the making of the film of the novel which is allegedly unfilmable. Actors play themselves, their characters and sometimes even people who just seem to wander onto the set. There's a good supply of humor to be found, mostly in the idiocy of what little of the novel's plot we learn about. Steve Coogan does generate most of the laughs but if you don't like him that much, Rob Brydon makes fun of him every chance he gets. The tone is actually quite close to that of This is Spinal Tap.

Lucas (David Seltzer, 1986) +



Beautiful, positive coming-of-age story about a smart, small, intellectually-advanced kid named Lucas (Corey Haim) in high school who's attracted to an older girl (Kerri Green) new to his school. He's far too insecure to tell her the truth about his life, but he does introduce her to nature, classical music and the concept that "making money is superficial". However, she evenually decides that she likes some of the things which Lucas doesn't, plus she loves Lucas but isn't in love with him, so she basically is the first female to break his heart. Lucas has to reconcile his unrequited love for the girl with the concept that being a silly jock might give him a "new" chance with her.

Battle of Britain (Guy Hamilton, 1969)



Enormous British cast recreates the Battle of Britain of 1940 with plenty of old aircraft and exciting stagings of WWII dogfights and bombing runs. Half of the film is a "Look who's playing that role" scenario while the rest is an exciting series of action scenes. Hitler and his inner circle ultimately take responsibility for failing to roll over Britain since they couldn't use their tanks, but the British people's stubbornness and inner strength are presented as an equal antidote to the Nazis' crap planning. Thank God for that.

Four Sons (John Ford, 1928)



Spectacular and popular John Ford WWI epic which shows the war from the German perspective although one of the "four sons" migrates to America and eventually comes back to fight his homeland. Ford had already mastered crowd scenes, camera movement, sentimental family politics and evil villains before this flick but here he uses all of them to maximum advantage and creates what may well be his best silent film. Little-known Margaret Mann is the heart and soul of the flick as the Mother.

Decision Before Dawn (Anatole Litvak, 1951)



Documentaryish WWII suspenser showcases Oskar Werner in his first American film which also shows how some German soldiers daringly returned to Germany near the end of the war to try to make things easier for both the Allies and their own people. There are plenty of near escapes and exciting episodes as we follow the young German who actually has to behave normally even though he's trying his best to help target a specific group of the German Army to help end the war as peacefully as possible. Richard Basehart and Gary Merrill play the American stars but have little to do, compared to Oskar Werner.

Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971)



Wonderful melding of a character to an actor. This is easily the best of the Dirty Harry movies and is certainly the most self-sufficient in its telling of a scary story about a madman murderer called Scorpio (Andrew Robinson) who terrorizes San Francisco while straight-arrow, but fascistic cop Harry Callahan has to break in a new partner (Reni Santoni) and continues to piss off all the city authorities in his quest to save people and clean up the scum of the city. Sure, it's quite topical for 1971, but it's amazingly relevant to our own times where people are arguing about the difference between the rights of civilization versus the rights of the "criminals". Dirty Harry is one of the best fantasy policiers ever made and it honestly makes you question how much of a Bleeding Heart you can actually be in the face of mindless violence.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

saw Lucas as a child. who knew the future then? good movie. nice review mark.

Daybreakers - 4/5
nice little twist on your basic vampire plot. it gets a 4 for being somewhat original in the "viral turning" idea. plus, despite the fact that it was a feel-good / do-gooder type theme, they didnt pull any punches for the viewers on who they rubbed out.

The Road - 3/5
there was a lot of fuss over this film, but truthfully i saw it as more of a parent/spouse horror story. horror that your spouse leaves you (in such a fashion) to face the terrors of life alone. horror that you may leave your child (in such a fashion) and cant protect him forever. in the end, it was a celebration of life, really. and for that desperate portrayal, Viggo gets a huge now. i will also say that there were parts of the film that did not gel and seemed quite random - for example, the ending. they did allude to fact that they were being followed, but methinks there was more going on there. makes me want to read the book to fill in the gaps.

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something witty goes here......

I dunno whether The Road disappointed me or, deep down, I wasn't expecting anything brilliant to begin with.

I know there's a lot of guff about 'unfilmable books' etc but the fact remains that I rate Hillcoat as a director rather highly. He's not been exactly prolific but Ghosts Of the Civil Dead and The Proposition were fantastic. Maybe you can't make a silk purse out of a curate's egg?

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

I've been dying to see The Road, but having gotten halfway through the book several months ago, I can't bring myself to watch the film before I finished what I started.

I never want to see The Road again, the more I think about it, the more it sucks.

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I wouldn't say it sucked, but it's kind of hard to recommend, too. I read the book two months ago and saw the movie last week, so both are pretty fresh in my mind. Just might toss a review together, since it seems to garner some interest and all.

I was hoping they would save a bullet for me at the end.


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Bad Lieutenant is a crooked cop movie on crack. Literately. It's unflinchingly disturbing and wierd and I enjoyed every minute of it. Cage was an absolute nut case, and for all the Nick Cage bashing I do, I truly enjoyed him in this film.

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If I had a dollar for every existential crisis I've ever had, does money really even matter?

I hear ya, it just keeps going down down down

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Under-the-radar Movie Awesomeness.
http://earlsmoviepicks.blogspot.com/

Man, so much hate for The Road? What's up with that? I must be one of the few who still gets a kick outta The Matrix Reloaded, too.

Anyways...



Amazing graphics and animation, minus the creepy eye problem. However, WTF is up with the crappy ending and alteration of the original Beowulf story? Seriously, if it ain't broke...don't make it broke.



Definitely one of my most favorite Disney flicks. Highly underrated.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

It's not hate at all, from my end, just a sense of unfulfillment. And not really wanting to see it again - which is a bit of a bummer because it was a blind buy on Blu Ray a couple of weeks ago.

It was kinda Fallout: The Movie, only seemingly done on a budget less than that of the video game and nowhere near as good.

Talking of impulse buys, I nearly bought that version of Beowulf on BD in a supermarket today for 8 quid. Bought a packet of cigarettes and some milk instead...

Let the hate flow through you !

I'm a scrubber not a hater. Or something.

Review Here

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"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

re: The Road.

it being a post-apocalyptic movie, I wouldve watched it regardless, but its a GREAT thing that I read the reviews first - these prepared me for the heavy philosophical bent. less Mad Max, more "life is futile......and then we die." i never figured i would be one to eschew portrayals of social malaise or an inevitable demise of all life, but this movie is truly bleak. and im ok with that, except that it seemed to be missing several small yet important pieces. i imagine that those factoids are contained in the book, so im determined to get a copy some day soon, just to assuage my curiosity. suffice to say, for me, the jury is still out on the author of the book, because im willing to believe that some of his/her meaning and overarching point got lost in translation - it may be that s/he does have some profound point to share that the movie simply failed to convey. we'll see.

beyond that, some have opined that the movie is really a discussion about the existence of God, vis a vis The Book of Eli, which im very interested in seeing next week, if only to compare the two.

A few recent views that I enjoyed:


Battle Royale
In the not too distant future, an entire grade level of high school students are planted on a remote island & forced to either kill each other or defend themselves. A class subject in which the only way to get a passing grade is to be the only one left standing.
Battle Royale is a system of discipline that demonstrates how to respect authority & a method of teaching that could prove to be more efficient than making the kids stay after school, cleaning erasers or detention.
But, in the end, it probably wouldn't be as enduring.
Cuz, well then, y'know....
all the little ingrates would all be dead an' stuff.







Garden State
What do you do when you've been comfortably numb for so long that you're can barely feel reality?
Go back to the neighborhood where you grew up, bump into your friends from high school, start becoming aware of the slightly weird idiosyncraticities in them &/or in their lives, have one of those catharthic big talks with your dad, & most importantly of all (& this is key), start dating Natalie Portman.
Welcome back to the "living".
Welcome to the Garden state.







Wonder Woman
Princess Diana will kick yo' ass.
While it may seem that she should be a staple in any conversation dealing with femme fatale butt-kickers, IMO, this original superheroine archetype & daughter of Hippolyta has never been fully depicted at the level of the true warrior demi-goddess that she had the potential to be.
Then, I picked up this recent straight to DVD feature, & came to the conclusion, that even though it may not yet be at the point that I, as a comicbook nerd would like to see her at,
it is still a huge step in the right direction.
The Double W may still be in the form of a cartoon,
but in this latest interpretation of the Amazonian wunder, she is finally approaching the bad-ass broad with brass balls (metaphorically speaking, of course) that she should've always been.







Sin Nombre
Take West Side Story, update it by taking out the outdated musical numbers,
then
take Midnight Run, remove the f-bombing humor & cartoonish cadres of law enforcement,
replace 'em with the grit of the deeply entrenched hopelessness of South American poverty,
then
add in some Colors (the movie), but, of course, from the other side of the border,
and finally,
apply some really solid acting with a good story,
sprinkle on some subtitles,
and
what you end up with, once you translate it from it's Spanish title, is a film that is, simply put, Nameless.







Bad Boys
Here's a flick I haven't watched in ages. And revisiting wit' it,
I was reminded that I had a high school buddy who played one of the gangbanging extras in this flick. And so, the way I figure it, on that whole six degrees of separation thing, that puts me only about one degree away from that older brother from La Bamba.
Hell, we practically know each other.







Once
Two strangers find themselves coming together with a shared love for creating music
& ultimately, the end up creating a love for each that they can never truly share.
A nice lil' no frills romance story without the typical cumbersome complications of the...uhmnn, well.....romance.







The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
How does a wife get revenge on her crime boss of a husband?
Confront him with the consequences of his actions & then make him eat 'em.
Literally.
Compliments of the chef.
Literally.
A beautifully filmed movie with some really rough edges. And I mean that in a good way.
Literally.







Layer Cake
mmmm..... cake........

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Right now, all I'm wearing is a mustard-stained wife-beater T-shirt, no pants & a massive sombrero.

Edge of Darkness (2010, Martin Campbell)

2/5

Radiation is, like, really 80s...

I was a little surprised when I learned that one of the greatest of all BBC thrillers was getting the big screen treatment, not least because I had only just bought the original on DVD but also that a quarter century is a long time for such decisions to get made.

As I'd recently watched the BBC version again, my thoughts on Campbell's (the director of the 1986 series too) remake were probably a bit coloured but, hey, it's a cover version so these things are fair game in my book.

On its own, Edge of Darkness is yer standard conspiracy thriller and, to be honest, looks like it belongs in the 90s or even earlier. Gibson is as charismatic (and mumbling) as usual but his rubber-legged shtick is wearing a bit thin. I honestly dunno how good his Bostonian accent was but he sounded a lot less like a sheep than Matt Damon did in The Departed so I guess it's ok. Is it?

A younger Harrison Ford would have been a much better fit for the part of Craven and 1992 would have been much better as a year to produce the film in but I'm not gonna harp on about the datedness any more...

Distilling 6 hours of drama into a 2 hour film was probably quite a job but, even if you're not aware of the entire original story, one gets the feeling that huge chunks of plot are on a cutting room floor somewhere. Ray Winstone's character in particular is introduced to great fanfare, does the square root of bugger all for most of the film then pops up again at the end in a scene which could well have been pivotal in an earlier cut of the movie. Huh?

For those of you who aren't aware, Jedburgh, the character Winstone plays was central to the BBC series and beautifully acted by Joe Don Baker. I love Big Ray as an actor but what he's asked to do here is incongruous at best, plain silly at worst. If his character was fleshed out more I might have seen a point to it but, as it stands, Jedburgh's appearance in the remake is just daft.

Plus points (because there are a few): The action sequences are handled well and kudos to Campbell for including a sprog of a famous director in both versions he has directed - Danny Huston (again, woefully underused and one-dimensional) here and Zoe Wanamaker in the original. Coincidence? Perhaps.

The scenes between Craven and his daughter (especially the daughter as a child) are actually really well handled - Touching, sensitive and hardly ever overplayed by Gibson but all they really succeeded in doing was make me think of Bob Peck and the young Joanne Whalley. Oh well, thinking of Joanne Whalley is hardly what you'd call a chore, is it?

It's watchable enough, is Edge of Darkness, but forgettable enough in equal measure. The political intrigue here is tacked on and the fuzzy 'WMD' aspect of it pales in comparison to the background of Thatcher's Britain, miner's strikes, IRA informers, Trotskyite cells, and CIA interference of Troy Kennedy Martin's original screenplay. Transporting the whole kit and kaboodle from England to America fails this film completely.

There isn't even a vibrator in this version.

The Dresser

Based on a play by Ronald Harwood, this film starts slowly but builds up to a great emotional climax. The film is set in the 1940's and is basically about the relationship between Sir, a senile 'grand' actor, and Norman, his devoted but underappreciated dresser (a personal assistant for those who don't know).

The early parts of the film where the cast and crew are dealing with Sir slow down the pace and the luvviness gets grating. However when the film gets into its stride, it proves itself to be quite tragic indeed. Excellent acting from Albert Finney as Sir and Tom Courtenay as Norman saves the film from being a chore but nevertheless it requires a lot from you. Still, it gets 3 because it is worth watching.

Othello (1995)

Othello has had rather a lot of film adaptations, especially with grand white actors playing the lead. The typical image one has of Othello is of an old actor blacked up and roaring away whilst Iago stands as the pantomime villain, cackling away.

This film adaptation is quite refreshing. For a start, it has the first black actor to have depicted Othello on film (Lawrence Fishburne, who acquits himself well). Although Fishburne looks a bit too young and fit, he plays Othello as a gentle hero who was too prone to jealousy.

Irene Jacobs plays Desdemona. Her accent makes some of the lines sound quite strange and puts the emphasis in strange places, but she has the right look of innocence and beauty and doesn't dissolve into whininess or implausible confrontationalness as the part has often been played.

Kenneth Branagh plays Iago as a betrayed friend seeking vengeance. It's a far more sympathstic portrayal of the character and it works very well. You can genuinely see how the characters are taken in by his charm and it seems as if this is what Iago might once have been. Branagh makes a small tragedy out of the part and doesn't try to overshadow the others.

It's quite a modern take on the story- it's basically done as a thriller about desire, betrayal and revenge. It's fast-paced and is one of the most accessible versions of Shakespeare I've seen, especially of a play which can be inaccessible to a modern audience.

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You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never. (The Red Shoes, 1948)

Back to the Future 1985

Everyone but the leads (one a brilliant crackpot) are two dimensional and sputter prodigious lines like "What are you looking at butthead?". The kids in the movie look older than the adults. Time travel is almost entirely abridged.

Good thing the goofball storytelling is warmly embraced by every other element. As suspicious as the characters are, almost every actor rolls with it. Lea Thompson is confidently "world's horniest girl". Thomas Wilson doesn't work as good in his "most deranged rapist bully" role. On a technical level it's beyond capable. The special effects rely a lot more on good photography and real stunts, than cheesy animation.





The Assassination of Jesse James 2007

A methodical and dizzying character study, full of uneasiness and crystalline images. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck keep raising the stakes, telling an entire story behind the story. The biggest bump in the road is when the narrator starts describing people, that guy should just shut up.





Chopper 2000

The only other movie to Jesse James director Andrew Dominik's name. Falling in love with the aforementioned, I figured it fair to check this out. Eric Bana is equal parts insane, violent, and hilarious. The movie works like how an interviewer really meeting this guy would. He's interesting, but I need to get the f**k away from this guy. It's gushing with all kinds of bravura, but not the important kind. Nearing the end you still don't know this guy.





Goldeneye 1995

The next action episode can't come soon enough. Traitor Russians steal an EMP satellite, go get them Bond. Not a single mark to identify it from any other Bond movie.





Casino Royale 2006

Two Bonds in one day. This was my first chance to see Blu-Ray in action. It looks good. Very good. As for Casino Royale, well it's without a doubt the best of the series I've seen and probably ever will. Another movie I've loathed and now enjoy. I'm also giving you the benefit of the doubt you're not filing this write up as "Post-Goldeneye effect".

Disagree. Those voice-overs work VERY well, particularly the first one. They punctuate the silence and turn the film into something of a living storybook, which I really liked.

Famke Janssen. Izabella Scorupco.

Some bits were more sensible than others, towards the end he's narrating stuff as it happens - where as in the beginning he tells you about the characters while they lounge around.