Mike Figgis directs Richard Gere, Andy Garcia and Laurie Metcalfe in this cop thriller about a rookie internal affairs investigator who looks into a murderous uniform cop who has half the department in his stranglehold and his sights set on destroying his new antagonist’s marriage.
A cop thriller that seems more interested in sexual jealousy than shoot-outs and car chases. The action is workmanlike and the plotting perfunctory. Figgis and the actors only come alive when exploring the leads’ desires and jealousy. This makes for a much darker, complex thriller than the one we are sold on but actively at the sake of the simple, easy to deliver pleasures that we bought a ticket for. Metcalfe, as the woman cop in a man’s world, is the best thing in it.
Marc Meyers directs Ross Lynch, Alex Wolff and Anne Heche in this teen drama based on the recollections of a cartoonist who went to high school with true life serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
A look that evokes Dazed and Confused, Freaks and Geeks and Over the Edge can’t save this dull film. We look at loneliness and the psychology of mental disintegration through a filter of pranks and bullying. It is all too slight, never giving its actors anything but the expected motions to work through.
Robert Rodriguez directs Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz and Mahershala Ali in this sci-fi romance where a cybernetic warrior beauty masters future sport, bounty hunting and teenage boys.
Like Bohemian Rhapsody this is proof that you don’t need a good script to make a great blockbuster. The dialogue clunks, the characters have all the complexity of rats in lab mazes and the plot suddenly develops at a rate of knots just when you want it to tie all of its loose ends off in a neat bow. Though, hands up who is buying a ticket to Alita on the promise of well developed leads or tidiness? No… didn’t think so. So let’s look at what this big hulking beast delivers.
For one: a brightly lit vision of the far future. The Manga comic world Rodriguez and producer James Cameron have brought to life is dense and rich. Thick with humans with robot arms, robots with human faces and other automatons bustling about. It is a film busy with visuals that somehow allows the soapy drama and vibrant action to play out uninterrupted in the foreground. As Alita falls in love, upgrades and picks fights, we see queues for border entry, latino street market culture and patchwork fantasy tech just exist in the frame – painting an Earth 500 years away that demands rewatches and detailed exploration.
The movie is pleasingly violent. Though sometimes the action is a little forced (I assume an extended version will reveal why Waltz’s Dr Ido and Jackie Earl Hayley’s Grewishka rock up at the Hunter Warrior hang out together) yet when Alita gets into her swing you are caught up in it all. This is not a franchise starter bothered about preserving characters (four leads die in the last 10 minutes – some not for the first time) and even Alita suffers brutal sustained damage. She’s crunched and severed and sliced up in both the bounty hunting street fights and the impressive Motorball gladiator battles. The unfocused plot does mean we get a little less Motorball madness than really makes sense. Yet the one-on-one face-offs over personal beefs fill that void. Alita’s “Fuck your mercy” comeback belongs in an 18 certificated film, a lot of the carnage does. If you like gory (albeit bloodless) kills and horrifically designed kill machines (Ed Skrien’s Inca roboback… phwoar!) then Alita is the epic for you.
In fact, the biggest part of the fun in Alita is trying to unpick what is Cameron and what is Rodriguez. Cameron certainly brings a sense of wonder owned by him and Spielberg almost exclusively. Alita waking in her new body and wandering Iron City have a relaxed patience lost on most modern filmmakers. Yet you’ve seen these time out moments of amazement and fascination (mirroring the audience) in The Abyss or Titanic or even Avatar. Cameron’s raison d’être is taking his audience and protagonists to rich, new worlds and allowing these strange environments to evolve the characters into new self-determined others. Rodriguez adds the detailing. He might not have been allowed the production scale needed without Cameron’s oversight, so he works diligently colouring in the gaps. The crowds feel like the extras from a Rodriquez flick… X 10000. The costumes, foods and colours of this world belong to the maker of Desperado, From Dusk Til Dawn and Spy Kids. Cameron has never seen a moment he didn’t want to maxisize (admirable) but Rodriguez manages to make the limited courtyard street game and alleyway fights just as kinetic as the grander set pieces later. Neither are creatives bothered about subtlety of dialogue or difficult grey area characters. Their styles and sensibilities chime together nicely.
Do we care about Alita with her mo-capped body and big wet eyes? She’s a strange character. A middle aged man’s idea of what a young woman should be like. For many scenes Alita, with her sexless innocence and memory wiped ignorance of the real world, comes across as THAT GIRL. Crazy! Loco! The kind who stares at you unflinchingly as she holds your hand, climbs into your window to watch you sleep, takes her beating heart out and offers it to you as a gift. When her bland paramour Hugo suggest she could “rip off his arm and beat him with the wet ” (classic James Cameron’s trademark smalltalk), she giggles girlishly yet maniacally at the truth of this assessment. We shouldn’t really like this unguarded, obsessive death machine, should we? The intention is to show a pure heart in a callous, dehumanised world. It works, they get away with it. We want sleek, graceful, lovestruck, awesome Alita to beat all-comers. But Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis and Rodriguez use some pretty strong writing swipes to get us there. There’s a hurried bluntness about Alita that restricts it from being a classic, yet there’s more than enough wow and pow pow to fill a Saturday night.
Paddy Considine directs Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan in this kitchen sink drama about a violent loner and an abused housewife who form a friendship in a community of bullying and aggression.
Well acted but bloody miserable. A wallow in forced tragedy.
Jim Hosking directs Aubrey Plaza, Jemaine Clement and Matt Berry in this cult comedy about an unsatisfied housewife who runs away with a laundromat Equalizer to watch her ex perform a mysterious cabaret show.
Mmmmmmm…..mmmm! I didn’t bother catching The Greasy Strangler – a film that was released to triumphant reviews that felt indulgently strange and looked off puttingly dank. But then my Dad called up to tell me about it after he caught Jim Hosking’s debut late one night. Full of praise and misquotes. His last movie recommendation was Cockneys V Zombies, to put the conversation into context. The man who fathered me sure has access to late night Freeview, that’s for certain. I decided to give Hosking’s follow-up a try as I liked all the cast and thought the set-up was less grim sounding. And it proved a treat. Natalie and I laughed frequently at its forced queerness. It is easily the best film many of these eye catching performers have been the leads in (particularly Berry, Plaza and Craig Robinson). The visual palette and soundscape is naffly seductive. The performance style is blunt and brazen. It is knowingly obtuse and jarring. Not every joke works, not every slab of weirdness is even intended as a joke, but it gels together as a unique, romantic, chuckle filled piece of low rent quirk. Parking-lot strange. Hosking likes knitwear, hairy fat man tits, bad snacks, shouting, dancing and jealousy – often smashed together in the same scene. Turns out I do to. I’m going to have to attempt to watch The Greasy Strangler now…soon. And this again…sooner. I bet Beverly Luff Lynn grows on me further with repeat viewings. Mmmmmmmmmmm….mmmmmm.
Joe Cornish directs Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Denise Gough and Dean Chaumoo in the British children’s adventure movie about an average boy who draws Excalibur from the stone unleashing Arthurian fantasy into the present day.
This feels very much like six episodes of a teatime 90s CBBC show spliced together into feature length. But what might have been a highlight of “The Broom Cupboard” doesn’t really hold muster in the modern multiplex. The limitations show constantly. The FX aren’t bad but they aren’t awe inspiringly great. The banter isn’t particularly funny, but fits nicely in the kids’ mouths. The performances are a bit guileless but don’t grate. The adventure plods along gently but never gets the heart racing. Sadly the best thing you can say about Joe Cornish rather staid fantasy meets Grange Hill mash-up is the animated credit sequence setting out Arthurian legend is eye catching and wonderous. The film it acts as prologue to is terminally adequate.
4
My Top 10 Children’s Adventure Movies
1. Back to the Future (1985) 2. Stand By Me (1986) 3. The Jungle Book (2016) 4. Back To The Future Part 2 (1989) 5. The Wizard of Oz (1939) 6. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Julien Hallard directs Max Boublil, Vanessa Guide and Carole Franck in this sports comedy about the formation of France’ first female football team in 1969.
A League of Their Own, this is not. Dated attitudes, tropes and jokes. All smother a potentially decent story. Biggest crime of all – the main character is a man, the only character with some shading, agency and arc. The creators intentions are to produce something light and fluffy, the politics behind it betray a misjudged understanding of where the world now is.
Robert Altman directs Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall and Ray Walston in this comic strip adaptation about the super strong sailor and his romance with a whiny damsel in distress.
What a mess! The first 30 minutes are near incomprehensible – the trademark overlapping dialogue, busy ensemble and drab visuals of an Altman work proving completely unsuitable for a kid’s musical. It does improve slightly. There are minor musical numbers and set pieces that, though cack handedly finished, do have some punch to them. The cast all look the part (though Williams’ adult ad-libbing is very inappropriate when discernible) and the full fishing village set is impressive. A production so ungainly and obtuse you stare deeply into it trying to salvage the good from the insane.
Peter Jackson directs original footage of World War I from the Imperial War Museum’s archives to create a rememberance of the experience of going to war in 1914.
A wonderful kaleidoscope of memories and images. Jackson tries to recreate the universal experience of a British soldier in the trenches, rather than getting caught up on specific battles or biographies. The effect is mesmerising and touching, often humorous but decent and respectful. The one niggle (and it is a slight one) is the film isn’t outwardly anti-war. It deals with the horrors matter of factly and skirts over the moral quagmire lightly. Jackson doesn’t want to cheapen a generation’s sacrifice nor exploit it for modern concerns. But you do walk away wondering whether it is retrospective patriotic proganda, normalising hellish conflict and immunising the schoolkids watching it that being blindly taken into a half decade long massacre by political leaders is a boy’s own adventure that should not be questioned. Overall, though, a reverential triumph.
Gianfranco Parolini directs Gianni Garko, William Berger and Fernando Sancho in this Spaghetti Western where an angel of vengeance dogs a robber in the middle of an elaborate insurance fraud massacre.
The first Sartana entry has all the right camera angles, sweaty faces, wailing score and rubbery dubbing. If you’ve come for shoot-outs and our protagonist (“hero” might be a lie) appearing in strange corners of rooms out of nowhere, you’ve come to the right shop. Garko’s gimmick is he has a few gadget guns (like an unshaven 007) but he’s no Connery or Clint. Of its time, bog standard product but a product I enjoy immensely… even if this one’s plot is knotted so rigorously you can no longer see the rope.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 