Adrian Shergold directs Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine and Tony Pitts in this drama about a working class Northern woman who escapes poverty and violence by becoming a Working Man’s Club comedian.
A Richard Hawley from The Longpigs soundtrack. A setting in the 1970s cabaret scene (before Alternative Comedy and observational stand-up). A lead movie performance from left-wing National Treasure Maxine Peak. There was a lot that attracted me to Funny Cow on paper. I missed it at the cinema due to the only screenings being available in my free time being Mother & Baby exclusive. I’m going to be honest… it wasn’t the film I was expecting. It is grimmer and grittier than you’d ever want it to be, with a couple of later lurches into tragedy bursting the bubble of believability. You’ll know the bit of extremely forced pathos I mean if you’ve seen it. Funny Cow isn’t in any interpretation a feelgood film… it often makes Ken Loach’s similar brand of polemic feel comparatively fluffy and carefree. The storytelling shifts fluidly through time, playfully… but often just to rush us into the next bludgeoning moment of misery. The working men’s club scene is recreated with accuracy. They don’t soft sell the protagonist and pretend she was an original voice or anachronistically didn’t give the audiences the racism they were used to. The victory here is the balls she found to get up on stage and go against everyone’s preconception of her, and women in comedy in general. In that respect the film does not strike a false note. It clearly is a passion project of Peake’s and you do have to wonder what BAFTA were thinking when she wasn’t nominated. She completely commits to a wild, often unsympathetic and abrasive turn. It saves the film from its self pitying urges. I suppose the luvvies have their own reasons and their own darlings. Worth a punt if you don’t want a fun night in.
Jean-Pierre Melville directs Alain Delon, Andre Bourvil and Gian Maria Volonté in this heist thriller where a just released convict, a man of the run and an alcoholic marksman join forces for a big score.
Moment by moment this is a top end crime thriller. The characters are a little too drawn in bold to care about and the obtuse first hour often leaves you lost rather than involved. That is on purpose. This is blunt cinematic storytelling with very little exposition or excess dialogue. The eventual heist is wordless, you have been given no real advance clues of the plan. It is a little too easy to drift away from the film when you are not sure of the stakes or destination. All in all though a solid noir mood piece.
Danny Cannon directs Sylvester Stallone, Diane Lane and Rob Schneider in this comic book adaptation of the future lawman in a wild future mythology.
A neighbour’s older son used to give me his toys when he outgrew them. And then his comics. His 2000AD comics. They were random issues. Full of incomprehensible snippets of plot and violent imagery. Not anything like the tricolour The Beanos or It’s Wickeds I was buying … this was pretty adult stuff… 2000AD had matured with its initial readership who came onboard in the late 1970s and any innocent newbies were thrown in at a deeper end of content by 1991. Some stories had 13 year strong mythologies and the creatives were now experimenting with gore, surrealism and maybe a little nudity in their narratives and art. Dredd was the mainstay – present in every issue and, more often than not, his stories favoured action over pretentiousness and lore.
When I was 11, I bit the bullet and started committing my pocket money to the weekly comic myself… Prog 735. Inside was a hyper nasty thriller about Victorian time travellers heading on a crash course through reality with Jack The Ripper on board that might still be my favourite comic story ever AND a fully painted Mean Machine solo adventure. And Judge Dredd… fascist executioner… Dirty Harry in a lunatic dystopia. I collected the fuck out of those comics… weekly new purchases plus back issues and collected editions. By the time the Stallone film came out, my paper hoard could be stacked higher than me. I had read and reread every page at least a half a dozen times. So yeah… I was into 2000AD but Dredd wasn’t my favourite character. I easily preferred Judge Anderson, Slaine, Button Man, RoboHunter, Shimura… I wasn’t quite as precious about the iconic, almost inhuman anti-hero taking his helmet off, gaining a comedy sidekick and kissing girls in a big budget adaptation. Hollywood gonna Hollywood. I was more excited about an expansive vision of the future that took in Block Wars, The Cursed Earth, Lawgivers, The Angel Gang, clone judges… hell… there was even a fully functional ABC Warrior droid from a different strip thrown in for luck.
The production design and scope for Dredd is epic. Just look at visual artist Chris Hall’s accurate but gruesome realisation of Mean Machine. Or the opening SkyKab tour through a Mega City One. The FX aren’t always perfect – the CGI sequences certainly haven’t aged well – but in their best moments the ambition can keep the company of contemporaries like The Fifth Element or Total Recall. Certainly Tank Girl. There’s a stacked cast… Joan Chen and Scott Wilson and James Remar and Ian Dury and Ewen Bremner have three liner roles that in any sensible production might have gone to nobodies. Any sign of studio interference wasn’t present in the pre-production phase when the hiring happened and the blueprints were approved. Neophyte director Danny Cannon wanted a futuristic Ben-Hur… those initial 60 minutes very much see him deliver.
This watch though I can see the scars of a troubled production. The first hour is a purposeful, busy sci-fi romp… then the last 30 minutes everything putters to a stop. The wobbly last act is rushed, missing scenes, overwhelmed by Schneider’s incessant dumb-cracking and every moment of minor peril is resolved by a side character appearing behind the villain to kill them and save Dredd… just… in… time. What excited me as a teen and was forgivable in my fonder memories couldn’t fully live up to scrutiny on an adult revisit. Still, The Cure recorded a banger of a forgotten theme song for the end credits that smooths over the bad aftertaste from the truncated, bastardised finale. And Joe Dredd would soon return to mete out his own more faithful, more lethal mode of justice in the superior Karl Urban reboot.
Steven Spielberg directs Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Denholm Elliot, John Rhys-Davies, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Sean Connery, Alison Doody and River Phoenix in this action adventure trilogy where a whip cracking archaeologist races around the 1930s globe against the forces of evil to recover magical artefacts.
I’m going to let you peek behind the curtain of doing this blog for five years now. A secret confession. Sometimes I miss a film. Often it is an accident. I watch something like Wish You Were Here and forget to add it to my list to write up. Sometimes my reasoning is more purposeful. I want to write an essay on Last Action Hero, for example… I’m just not ready yet. But what am I gonna do… not watch Last Action Hero for half a decade?! Pffffff! With Raiders, I’ve watched it a few times while committing to review every film I watch. It is a perfect movie. The flawless summer blockbuster. The apex pinnacle of location and studio magic making. An unassailable combination of stunts, practical effects, art direction, cinematography… fucking glorious A-Grade Hollywood tale telling. I LOVE IT!
You don’t want me just writing a 500 point check list of all the eternally brilliant bits Spielberg and Lucas and Ford gifted us during our formative years. And the sequels, while a little looser, hold that unimpeachable quality standard. It truly is the perfect boxset. I’m not gonna bore you by cataloguing 6 jam packed hours of fabulous moments. Not gonna man crush on Ford’s self effacing but rousingly heroic lead turn ad nauseam. Not gonna hum John Williams thumper of a theme tune in your ear.
Below is my solution to blogging about Jones…
Raiders of the Lost Ark – 10/10
Earliest Memory: My Dad was away on a course and my Mum let us stay up late to watch it in our little front room in Hanwell. Way, way past our bedtime late! We had to stay awake through the elongating adverts and the 30 minute interruption of The News At 10 at the midway point. The shot with a shock of lightning illuminating the Well of Souls giant Anubis statue shat me up and the fear has stayed with me. We used to have a shit brown, corduroy settee in that room. I no doubt fell asleep before the ghostly finale on it. I remember watching the sequels on those awful coarse cushions with a Club Orange or Mint Viscount often. When I wouldn’t be caught and told off, I’d clamber over it and bounce around on it pretending to be Indiana dodging traps and Nazis. Probably until I was twelve, when we moved to a bigger house on a nicer street and didn’t need a rough, firm little two seater settee anymore. The new three piece suite was far too precious to treat roughly like Marion’s bar or the boulder chase!
Favourite Moment: Indy fighting Pat Roach’s gigantic German mechanic under a spinning Flying Wing. You could pick any set-piece from the first two films. They all play out the same. Indiana needs to perform a dangerous task. Things escalate wildly out of control but in increments. If he stops for a moment to self- congratulate or breathe a sigh of relief things get a hundred time worse. Ford’s goofy mugging sells these escalations hilariously. Every beat of an Indy action sequence is a riff on that moment when Han Solo chases off a few stormtroopers on the Death Star… only for a battalion to return fire around the corner. This trilogy however contains far more complex tension devices. A small mistake he or a compatriot makes to survive a few steps earlier snowballs into an even bigger threat before the end. Here Indy has to dodge slicing propellers and crushing wheels while punching a man who can’t be knocked out. There is a pistol wielding pilot and a wrench wielding assistant who both pop in and out of play to add bonus threat. Marion enters the machine to blast up some arriving reinforcements but causes a fireball… only to get locked in the cockpit. Then the wing of the unmanned moving plane knocks the lid of a petrol truck off, causing a spill that races towards all our players and the fire. Spielberg’s meticulously storyboarded planning of this sequence mean we know exactly when and how and who any moving part is… it is complex but given to us in such clear and impactful increments, we know exactly what is exacerbating the set piece. It is clean, crisp, masterful direction. Slow when it needs to be nail biting, rushing with triumphant flourish (the score reaches a crescendo) when victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat. A diamond of a mini-thriller that could be a self-contained movie in its own right. A minute before Indy and Marion were escaping the impossible tombs of Tannis and a minute later we are chasing a truck on horseback. Any other franchise would kill for just one of these sequences. Raiders has them queued up. All killer, no filler. Any could have made the top spot on a different Easter weekend.
Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom – 10/10
Earliest memory: I would have been five years old (younger than when I watched Raiders) and at my grandmother’s house. My sister and all the older cousins were taken to go see Temple of Doom but I was deemed too young for its heart ripping, child slavery fuelled, monkey brains tasting delights! Instead I had to watch telly with my Nan playing my consolation prize, hand me down toy. One of those games where you have to patiently roll five little ball bearings into their holes. It was fucking impossible to get two in simultaneously, let alone five. Every other commercial on telly that afternoon was for Indiana Jones 2!
Favourite Bit: I’m going to start this by saying I’m a Marion Ravenwood Guy all the way. I need a woman who can drink me under the table and knock a mercenary out with a frying pan. Kate Capshaw’s Willie Scott is whiny, screechy and causes more problems than she avoids. As a running joke she’s a sexist caricature, a dumb blonde joke. A consistent joke however, that absolutely kills. Indy has it hard enough this adventure what with being poisoned, brainwashed and having the soles of his feet burned off by a runaway mining cart. It is hilarious that the showbiz princess he allows “to tag along” throws away his gun minutes after the front credits roll and gives away their position with every scream. The Five Minutes To Love sequence is so funny. Indy and Willie flirt, then their hubris gets in the way. Even though they both wanna get their fuck on, they argue their way out of a night of passion. The foreplay as argument has the same witty back-and-forth as a screwball romance. Hepburn V Tracy. Bogart V Bacall. Feel the heat and the wit. Willie gives Jones 5 minutes to give up and get in. And then they wait each other out. How frustratedly they wait… Just as times up and he might give in… an assassin appears. Indy is fighting for his life while Willie nags him through the door. “I could’ve been your greatest adventure!” Well Willie, probably not… but it is a tremendously playful, funny, silly highlight. Temple of a Doom is a scrappier film, not as solidly constructed as Raiders but it has more room for crowd pleasing daftness like this sequence or the Busby Berkley credits or the grotesque Pankot Palace banquet. I really appreciate these risky lurches into lunacy, no matter how distasteful and sexist. “You call him, Doctor Jones! DOLL!”
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – 9/10
Earliest Memory: The first one I went to see at the cinema. Though in all honesty I was way more excited about Back to the Future 2 and Ghostbusters 2 coming soon. I remember the brilliant teaser trailer for this. Them showing the production in the desert and Harrison Ford’s trademark fedora keeps coming off during the action thus ruining the take! I don’t love Last Crusade quite as much. The action until we get to the desert feels more subdued and spaced out. We are probably only one big set-piece away from it matching its predecessors though.
Favourite Moment: Minor gripe aside, I adore the iconic final section. Indy trying to solve the deadly puzzles to reach the grail room. I could quote it verbatim. I love the moment of PG-13 body horror when sneaky, slimy turncoat Walter Donovan drinks from the obviously wrong cup and ages a thousand years in 10 seconds. “He choose… poorly.” Fuck yeah, he did old knight dude! The Trilogy has these wonderful bursts of gruesomeness that belong in far more adult films. Practical FX showcases that Craven or Fulci would give their left nuts to be able to afford. Indiana Jones is a franchise that offers family friendly spectacle with a cheeky insert of raw terror. Faces melt as ghosts from the bible swirl, still beating hearts are ripped out, aliens can pop by for a cameo. Anything is possible in the last 10 minutes of a Spielberg / Lucas blockbuster whether you like it or not. “Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory!” I also like to think about that poor old crusader who has to go rebuild and reset his booby traps every time someone tries to find the holy grail. Moving the headless bodies, repaving the suspended letter slabs, brushing the dirt and dust off the leap of faith. Hard job, living forever.
Renny Harlin directs Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow and Michael Rooker in this action adventure where a mountain rescuer plays a game of cat and mouse over the Rockies with the robbers who are holding his friend hostage.
Easily my favourite Stallone. Shot largely out in the wild, this has an epic sweep and great score to boot. Kudos to composer Trevor Jones. The first two set pieces are absolute nailbiters. Both the harness snafu and the mid-air heist are fantastic sequences. The Die Hard on a mountain that follows in their impressive wake can sometimes feel a little forced. Everyone seems to be making bad decisions just so another pyrotechnic or argy bargy can happen! But if you put your mind out of gear there’s enough boo-hiss villainy from Lithgow to paper over the wobbly plotting. A fine Saturday night in, beer and pizza flick.
Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles directs Sônia Braga, Udo Kier and Bárbara Colen in this Brazilian contemporary Western where a small rural community find themselves isolated from help and resources by a mysterious gang.
***Spoilers Ahead***
Universally praised as one of the best films of the past year this really failed to reach that high standard and utterly underwhelmed me. The first hour follows a township slowly realising they are no longer on the map and someone is disrupting their way of life. There are moments of magical realism and political swipes. A good sense of paranoia. Not quite John Carpenter but the attempt is there. You assume the local or national government or a multinational want to kill them off or drive them out for profit. Then we meet their aggressors. Just a bunch of Westerners, tourists who want to kill third world humans. We spend too much time with these 2D scum. Their attitudes are facile and comic book racist. They are so heavy handed in their portrayal that you can’t take the film seriously. They aren’t a threat so no B-Movie thrills follow. They are too basic and immaturely evil to be seen as good satire. Like meeting a pothead at a party droning on about how awful “the man” is. This is a film for idiots who want their overblown worldview confirmed, it doesn’t work as rhetoric for those of us know geopolitics are more complex. More sinister in reality. The thriller aspects as the village realises they are under threat and defend themselves are fine. If we only saw brief glimpses of the goons hunting them then there’d be a better experience to think over here. Ridiculously, The Running Man has more nuance, bite and emotion.
Paul Michael Glaser directs Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonso and Yaphet Kotto in this sci-fi actioner where a wrongly convicted man has to fight for his life on a gaudy gladiator hit TV show.
A fair few years back I was in a car share with some comedians and one of them said something strange. This wasn’t unusual. These car rides could often be 8 hour round trips, frequently with a mix of people you barely knew. You grasped for small talk or big talk or anything that would keep the driver awake or your mind off of whatever impending shithole gig you were headed to. Most comedians are witty and intelligent people to have a chat with – movies, bands, war stories, other comedians are the main topics to debate around. Others will say ludicrous things you are stuck trying not to think too hard about the for whole evening as you are relying on them driving you somewhere you’ll get paid and then back to (hopefully within walking distance of) your home after midnight. I’m sure I’m as guilty as anyone of saying a ludicrous statement while grasping for words to fill the silence. But none as bad as the one journey that started with an act using the “N” word in a derogatory way before we had even left London. Another moaned for over a hundred miles that charity shops charged too much for the items he liked to resell on EBay for a profit. A now very famous act got into the backseat and told the driver immediately to turn the inoffensive music we were listening to off. As they “did not like music at all”. Blanket statement. That was a long car journey.
The reason for this prelude was once we were driving to Norfolk with the brilliant John Gordillo and a newer act. We were talking about favourite movies. John rhapsodised about Vertigo. I probably pumped for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. The new guy, matter of factly, just said his favourite film was The Running Man. Of all of cinema. Like a 120 years of films. It probably wouldn’t even make most people’s Top 10 Arnie movies! Or Stephen King adaptations! And with no further justification. “I just like it.” It was such an unusual, left of field choice it stuck with me. I couldn’t hand on my heart tell you what my best friend’s or my Dad’s all time favourite is but this guy whose name I can’t even remember will forever be associated in my head with Arnold in lycra killing elaborately costumed henchmen.
I watched it quite a bit as a kid. And even had the Amstrad game. I probably stopped choosing it on a regular basis when I realised I could rent anything at the videoshop or tape a whole world of Moviedrome movies off TV. I probably haven’t watched The Running Man in its entirety since I was 13.
It is a perfect pre-teen hyper violent illicit actioner. Our innocent but deadly “Butcher of Bakersfield” faces off against a series of flamboyant action figures. One is a Japanese hockey player with exploding pucks and a razorsharp stick. An overweight opera singer who shoots lasers from a suit made of fairy lights. A hillbilly biker with a chainsaw the length of a pool table. Jim Brown with a jet pack, flamethrower and Mister Fantastic’s hair Afro-style. And Jesse Ventura. An 18 certificate movie seemingly targeted at people who can’t even shave yet. The kills are silly. Every moment of violence a set-up for Arnold to deliver a pithy punchline. “Hey! Lighthead! Hey Christmas Tree!!” “Here’s your Subzero, now plain zero.” “Well, I haven’t been in show business as long as you have, Killian. But I’m a quick learner. So, I’m going to give the audience what I think they want.” He fucking does as well.
The gameshow itself has the vibes and production values of a big Saturday night special. Fallacious host. Sparkling dance numbers. Prizes for the audience. Yuppies watch it at cocktail and coke parties. The poor huddle around mega screens in their slums making bets with bookies who surround the display. The Running Man is often criticised for Glaser’s flat TV movie direction. But these glimpses of the near-future world have a real pumping, convincing energy to them. The Fugitive and Under Siege’s Andrew Davis was kicked off production after two week of filming. Are these B-Unit moments his? Or does Glaser’s direction deserve a bit of reappraisal?
The dystopian fascist vision of the future is no great shakes if you’ve read 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. But is surprising how much has been adopted by either reality and other films. Prisons where the convicts have explosives attached intimately to them rather than bars or guards to restrict them. TV shows were normal people are on the run or forced into acts they wouldn’t perform away from cameras. Mainstream light entertainment hosts with more power and control than is healthy for society. Deep fakes. The only thing it really gets wrong is we don’t watch TV programming en masse anymore.
I really enjoyed returning to The Running Man three decades late. It is a blunt, pleasing, gory spectacle. Harold Faltermeyer’s synth score is doom laden yet energetic. It has been running through my head for days now. It moves with purpose. The satire is surprisingly effective. Arnie not just holds the screen with his physique but he has mastered acting, humour and American pronunciation by this point. Whose to judge what anyone’s favourite film is? There’s probably an adult out there whose favourite movie is Avengers: Endgame. And no one gets chainsawed in half from balls to buzz cut and then given the epitaph; “He had to split!” in that very average release.
Richard Brooks directs Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives in this Tennessee Williams drama where a drunk heir, his sexually frustrated wife and a rich plantation owner work through their beefs on a stormy night.
How strange to watch something that was shocking and controversial in its day through modern eyes. Even though every hint that Newman’s Brick Pollitt had a gay romance with his football buddy has been smothered or removed by Hollywood you can plainly tell his life on the down-low is what is eating him up. What other reason could there be not to want to impregnate a peak Elizabeth Taylor? This leads to a whole lotta housebound talk about wills. Shouting, recriminations, some salty Southern bitchiness. If Newman and Taylor didn’t look so sultry it might be a bit of a droning bore, defanged as it is.
Bo Burnham directs Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton and Emily Robinson in this coming of age drama where a quiet, lonely girl tries too hard to fit in.
A bit too raw and painful to enjoy. Brutal. Close to the bone. Like being kicked in the face by a bright bit of marketing. It is admirable that there’s a current film out for smart kids that promotes self-esteem over fitting in. But it ain’t enjoyable to watch a bright and self aware child be fucked around or ignored by the vapidly popular and predatory. Very well made but not something I’d want to sit through again.
Reginald Hudlin directs Eddie Murphy, Robin Givens and Halle Berry in this romantic comedy where a sexist lothario has the tables turned on him when his hot new female boss humps and dumps him.
Critical reputation and vague memories of this meant I was expecting a poor and bland no-brainier half watch experience. But Natalie and I laughed our arses off at this on rewatch. Some of comedy is very broad and most is nicely down and dirty. The support cast is thick with big, showstopping turns… Eartha Kitt, Grace Jones, Geoffrey Holder, John Witherspoon, Tisha Campbell and Chris Rock have all been given the directions get laughs or go home. They kill. Leaving Eddie to seduce the gorgeous ladies, deliver some nicer, subtler jokes and go through a well paced emotional arc. It is glossy and sprawling and full of daft bits. Well worth a second try.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 