Alex Ross Perry directs Elisabeth Moss, Cara Delevingne and Dan Stevens in this rock drama where a demanding female singer breaks up with her band and breaks down from reality.
A camera sneaks and dodges around the backstages, studios and retreats of a Cortney Love / Kim Deal style figure. We watch her disintegrate over play-length scenes. Moss behaves awfully, often only communicating in thrashing out or Shakespearean soliloquies that barely reflect her current situation. Spoilt, self-destructive, sad. It is not a pleasant or settling watch for at least the first hour. Like the similar themed but very differently formatted Vox Lux, it does circle back to a sorta redemption. Moss sells the panic attack as default setting. More admirable than enjoyable.
Ted Kotcheff, George P. Cosmatos and Peter MacDonald direct Sylvester Stallone, Brian Dennehy, David Caruso, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff, Martin Kove, Kurtwood Smith and Marc De Jonge in this Eighties action trilogy where a Vietnam vet John Rambo can’t find peace and keeps being dragged into wars where he has to be an Army of One.
I was always an Arnie guy from Ages 7-40. Can’t see that changing anytime soon. Contrarily, I wasn’t into Rambo though. I didn’t care for Stallone. Make a Top 10 of my favourite action stars I doubt Sly’d make the cut. For little Robert Carroll, this shaggy haired mope was a lunk, slurry, seemed to have no broad sense of humour (I was wrong) and The Terminator could have turned him into rigatoni. Growing up I definitely watched a few Rockys and Over The Top… the arm wrestling Rocky for kids. I enjoyed Tango & Cash but I would have rented that more for Kurt Russell. I went to the cinema to see Stop or My Mom Will Shoot! He wasn’t helping himself. Then he had an underrated period of good ‘uns that turned me around a bit as I entered my teens; Cliffhanger, Demolition Man, The Specialist, Judge Dredd (I like it!), Daylight, Copland. It wasn’t just sequels to films that had left me cold as a kid. He suddenly had bonafides. So there’s no nostalgic affection for Stallone or Rambo or red bandanas or massive knifes or bigger bows and exploding arrows programmed into me. Time to revisit a trilogy that is more yours than mine.
First Blood is not what you now expect from a Rambo film. It is more like The Deer Hunter or Taxi Driver Meets Deliverance or Standing Tall. That’s a good mix. Sensitive vagabond Stallone wanders muddy North America until a small town sheriff pushes him. Dennehy doesn’t want homeless veterans bringing down his neighbourhood. So he pushes John Rambo. “Why are you pushing me?” Won’t let him stop in town for a warm meal or a gentleman’s wash, arrests him, his deputies torture him like some kinda hippy. This sensitive soul fought for his country. The sensitive soul takes out a whole police station from cells to carpark. He escapes into the wilds leaving a motorbike chase of well orchestrated chaos in his wake. It is a brilliant fast moving extended action sequence. Not a soul dies during the rapid, constant escalation of scale.
And that pretty much defines First Blood. Rambo evades, survives, stalks, threatens. But he doesn’t kill… he might cause a fatal accident… but he isn’t a machine gun blasting death machine… yet! The excellent forest section has the same vibe as Southern Comfort. Or Predator. But Stallone is the Predator. The law and the National Guard are the helpless prey. They just don’t know it. Vietnam is replayed. Guerrilla survives onslaught from better armoured but overconfident invaders. It ends with a finale more suited to a Western. Stallone tears down the town in an act of redemptive vengeance. It is mindless carnage. Mindless carnage would define the future films. Getting bigger and bigger. But as a stand-alone First Blood is still a great action flick.
Not perfect. It is mawkish. Stallone might have been attuned to what cereal box humanity the shitkickers and trailer park video renter wanted in the mid-80s but that was the mid-80s. The stew of tone deaf sentiment and ultraviolence doesn’t sit well. Sure, the local cops were horrible to him but he terrorises an entire community in the final act, risks burning down homes, small businesses, schools and hospitals… all because they voted in a slightly over zealous public official? Then marches out triumphant and patriotic in handcuffs like he is a chickensweat honky Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Troubling. Troubling politics would continue to mar the less sophisticated instalments.
First Blood was never made with mega budget sequels in mind. But then Rambo started getting assigned missions. Started trotting the globe. Now, instead of stabbing young David Carusos in the ass and telling them to go home before they killed, he was mowing down hundreds of faceless exotic commies with AK-47s, land mines, M68 Fragmentation Grenades, mini-guns that shoots a 7.62 round at 3600 rounds a minute, explosive arrows, a bazooka AND his trademark knife. He is not at risk during these bulk executions. Only when captured does Rambo 2.0 become skin surface vulnerable. He is tortured. Like an impervious Jesus Christ on the cross. America’s sins are his to be endured for, Johnny Foreigners despotic politics are his to absorb and shield us from. You wanna queue for bread or watch Sly cauterise hit bullet holes with a burning stick and gunpowder? This is slick poster boy patriotism as a gung-ho capitalist passion play.
The only carry over from the relatively small scale and natural survival pic we enjoyed a few summers back is John is a well trained killer and naturally quiet soul, he starts off in a hard labour lock-up for his previous actions, Richard Crenna is still a shadowy Army higher up with soft spot for him and we all feel the government owes an unpaid debt to the vets of Vietnam. In 1985 there were close to 2,500 Vietnam vets still Missing-In-Action. Rambo gets them out of their bamboo cages and flies them all home in a hijacked Soviet chopper. He massacres gormless gooks and slimey Spetsnaz like they are fish in a barrel. Nobody gets a human emotion, only Rambo feels temporary pain. Soft rock soars over the credits.
Regan-era blunt unashamed bad taste and monotonous kill frenzy aside, Rambo 2 is pretty cheap looking. The location work in Asia never seems to venture beyond one rice paddy and a secret camp. The footage has the nasty sepia tinge of Seventies exploitation. Look at Commando… mindless action movies didn’t have to look diarrhoea brown in 1985. And this film was the widest blockbuster release of its year. There’s little to distinguish it in production values from a Chuck Norris Cannon video rental. Very little to distinguish it all. James Cameron wrote an early draft of the screenplay. The military tough guy speak rings true. The final swathe of action stands out; we get a fight on a helicopter and then a duel between helicopters that pretty much reinvigorates a ropey, stale film. Just enough climatic endorphins to rescue an average experience.
This isn’t really a sequel to First Blood. That story and vibes is left back in the States. The character of Rambo loses all perspective. He kisses a helpful local girl, so they kill her off seconds later so that any further romance doesn’t get in the way of juddering pectoids. Rambo’s war record says he killed 59 people during his tours, here he beats that record in one weekend. The film doesn’t even know what to to do with him at the end. He is left floating down river, leaving the homeland were he’d be shunned as a mentally unstable vagrant behind him for a future God knows where…
The polished but soulless Rambo III is that future. John has been working as a stick fighter and Buddhist temple restorer in Thailand. Crenna asks him to help sneak ground-to-air arsenal into the Middle East and assist the Taliban against those pesky Commie fast food and MTV haters. Rambo says no. Nothing to do with the murky ethics of treating the thoroughly un-American Mujahideen like freedom fighters. He just likes the Thai stick fighting scene and in all honesty he’s not wrong. That stick fighting is the highlight of the film. Crenna gets captured so Rambo volte faces and takes on the entire Russian army with a bow and arrow, bandana, some tubes of blue chemiluminescence and an annoying local boy he can’t get rid of. Everything that happens is rote and millions miles from the neat, little anti-war, pro-Veteran survival thriller we enjoyed in the forests of Portland years ago.
At a budget of $63 million this was the most expensive film ever made before Total Recall and T2 made some significant use of a ridiculous production spend. I’m not saying the scale is not all up there on screen. It is a BIG movie. Rambo genuinely faces down the Kremlin’s entire defence arsenal at one point. But there’s very, very little that gets the blood pumping. Like a dusty destruction orgy porno this plays out very much like too many blank eyed nameless studs pumping away for a paycheck. They’ve got the biggest dicks, the most dicks ever put on screen but there’s no heat or chemistry to what they violating and thrusting at. So little personality or intelligent thought… No doubt that cute Jihad kid went on to mastermind 9/11. We have had a better belated sequel most recently… Rambo: Last Blood. And these cash-ins did their job back in their day if you can ignore the inherent one-dimensional racism and dodgy self belief. But that’s about it. Let’s leave them in the past. They don’t have the wit or tension of The Running Man or True Lies. If you must watch Sly on a rampage then please stick to First Blood.
John Hughes directs Anthony Michael Hall, Ilan Mitchell-Smith and Kelly LeBrock in this teen comedy where two horny posh kids make an absolute babe on their computer who comes to life and grants them endless wishes… so they try to swap her for two mindless mallrats going out with their bullies.
Sixteen Candles all over again but consistently, stinkily out of date. This has aged like vinegar. I only have vague memories of it as a kid and while I wouldn’t have shared the strangely chaste juvenile male sexual fantasy of it all at that tender age, I definitely must not have found the surrounding “anarchy” funny. LeBrock looks superb and does her best Playboy Mary Poppins impression. Bill Paxton punches through as the one character we are MEANT not to like. To be honest, his aggressively obnoxious bully at least has some goofy humanity and wit. Which is more than can be said for pubescent Brett Easton Ellis characters we are meant to chuckle and lust along with. The soundtrack and SFX are alright. Nah… it had its day.
Neil Jordan directs Robert De Niro, Sean Penn and Demi Moore in this Depression-era crime comedy remake where two escaped convicts pretend to be priests while waiting to jump the border.
Unsuccessful in its day despite being David Mamet scripted and mega-budgeted. If ridiculously overwhelming life-size sets could get laughs this would be a riot. Everyone seems happier when it falls back into the hard edged crime stuff that brackets the “larks”. If mugging alone trumped jokes we’d have a hit. DeNiro mugs like a prizefighter post-knockout. Instead we are abandoned with a very beautiful, dramatically well acted, heavy handed film that struggles to be a comedy under the weight of its own prestige. There’s a rubbish, forgotten Nic Cage / Jon Lovitz film that does this vibe better, the contemporary Nuns on the Run hit more chuckles with zero class. I’m not saying Jordan, De Niro, Penn, Mamet or Moore can’t do comedy. But there’s no lightness or broadness or space to let the wit land. John C Reilly pops up in an early showing as an overly enthused, pious Brother and seems to get more screentime and dialogue than Penn. Guess who understands and demonstrates what this film should have been?
Richard Levine directs Stanley Tucci, Addison Timlin and Kyra Sedgwick in this drama where a college professor risks his marriage when he becomes obsessed with a student’s erotic novel.
We probably didn’t need another film that paints a man in a position of power who has an affair as the hapless victim, his young distractor as the untrustworthy manipulator. Beyond relevancy, this proves a very well acted adult mystery. Timlin impresses as the seductive enigma who drags Tucci’s naive genius to the rocks, while he leads with such authority that you never lose sympathy or understanding of his dangerous actions. Solid, intelligent, mature… just not very timely or spectacular.
Tsui Hark directs Jet Li, Rosamund Kwan and Yuen Biao in this historical kung-fu epic where real life Martial Arts master Wong Fei-Hung is embroiled in a conspiracy between American and British colonial interests, a local gang and a corrupt governor.
Natalie and I have set ourselves a mini-project of watching an epic “Once a Upon a Time in…” movie every Sunday. Don’t worry we aren’t going to beat ourselves up with phony cockney gangster flicks or this particular franchises later sequels. West, America, Mexico and Hollywood are on the docket though. This was my first revisit of Jet Li’s Hong Kong highlight since watching it in my good, good mate Davey’s boxroom in Marchmont years ago. That viewing was no doubt fuelled by a crate of Tennents tinnies and too much takeaway Chinese food. But I do remember it took me a while to get my bearings with who was who. That same slightly lost feeling niggled at me during the first act again. Obviously I know who Jet Li is, and the broad comic relief clowns are easy to separate and identify (although often extraneous and distracting to the plot). But we are introduced to a glut of characters… many of whom have the same severe haircut and dowdy dress… with little idea of their significance to the overall plot. A cowboy adventure would introduce the good and the bad gunslingers in black and white – that coding exists to ease the viewer in whatever their nationality… Hong Kong cinema gives western eyes no such gentle assimilation. By the midway point you know the hapless, slightly misguided Foon (Yuen Biao) is our actual protagonist. He motors the plot, gets involved in a human way and flirts with gorgeous “13th Aunt”. He may be clumsy and find trouble way too easily but he is the narrative’s hero in the most traditional genre cinema sense, and a pleasurable one. Jet Li is left to be unimpeachably worthy while he takes part in epic subplot side fights with rival masters and surprise assassins. These are visually wondrous. The whole film is a joy of production design and the scope and scale of it consistently impressive. The opening credits is a martial arts workout on a beach that is truly iconic, the finale involves ladders and explosions in a way that has never been matched. There is stuff that is awkwardly distasteful to us honkies in 2020. The threat of rape is a little too explicit and drawn out for a family friendly blockbuster, the stereotypical humour at the expense of outsiders is racist in even a 1970s Carry-On sense of the issues. I guess in kung-fu cinema we gwailou are just going to have to accept we’ll be the cucks at the orgy. Overall this is a very enjoyable afternoon of period thrills.
Ingmar Bergman directs Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom and Jörgen Lindström in this Swedish arthouse film where two sisters and a child check in to hotel only to be overwhelmed by death, ennui and lust.
Probably the horniest Bergman film I’ve watched so far. Rich with unexplained but easy to process metaphors. The scenes of the boy running amok around the hotel are good. The sexual abandon of Gunnel Lindblom is frankly portrayed and a nice mix of sleazy and classy. Ingrid Thulin does the heaviest work as the sick, alcoholic, needy but ultimately more sensitive sister. Like much of Bergman, this is oppressively overbearing in parts but there’s enough dark magical realism and steamy soap to save it from his pretentious urges.
Sam Weisman directs Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn and John Cleese in this comedy remake where a Midwestern suburban couple find themselves lost in New York.
A bit of a nothing film. The jokes are not really present until the final twenty minutes. Martin and Hawn, too overqualified comedy stars on a downward trend at this point, never really fit as a pair of straight nerds… so watching them lose it in the city that never sleeps at best only brings them to the baseline level we expect from them… EVENTUALLY… by the very end.
Richard Linklater directs Jason London, Wiley Wiggins and Michelle Burke in this gentle feelgood teen comedy that follows dozens of kids on the last day of school in Austin, Texas, 1976.
There’s never been a teen movie quite like Dazed & Confused. Linklater has always played with movie form. His films experiment with real time, rotoscoping, day in the life structures, movies filmed over lifetimes. He’s a director who tries and succeeds in attaching brave, boundary pushing configurations to simple, pure tales. A couple sharing a night, a local hero returning to town, a boy growing up. Key human emotions made feature films. Dazed and Confused trumps them all though. A mosaic of kids at mini-crossroads in their lives. The decisions they make are not earth shattering but they will define their happiness and sense of self-worth over the next few years. And it all feels so natural and unforced. We hang out with thirty or so well defined characters as they smoke joints, drive cars and take spanking and bully initiations rituals a little too seriously. I’m not really into any of those things. The innocent colourful good times presented are kinda alien to my teenage years. And maybe that’s what makes Dazed and Confused the very best teen movie. By setting itself two decades earlier it wasn’t trying to sell its generation of viewers a fantasy. There’s no almost-in-a-mansion set house party with a rock band in the corner. Or Ferrari joyrides. Or Cinderella makeovers / romance. It is just kids being kids with no big consequences or dominating leaders or political comment. Even the nerds are kinda cool… kinda. Some of the cast went on to mega stardom. Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck and Parker Posey make brilliant impressions in smaller roles. I doubt these parts were written as stand outs. Talent wins out. See to: Rory Cochrane’s time lagging pot head. But beyond the great casting, eternal bonhomie, relaxed joking, unmatchable quotability, tight fashions and iconic look… Dazed & Confused has a soundtrack that absolutely punches your head about. It is a non-stop belter of Seventies rock. “Me and my “loser” friends, you know, we gotta get Aerosmith tickets. Top priority of the summer.” Check you later!
Penny Marshall directs Robin Williams, Robert DeNiro and Julie Kavner in this true life medical drama where a doctor proves that the closed-off vegetable patients in his mental ward could still be hidden inside their catatonic states.
An intentionally mawkish and sentimental film but told with such a persuasive cinematic patter that you get carried along. The first hour is a masterclass in bullet point storytelling. In short, cascading scenes Marshall and Steven Zaillian deliver swathes of dry medical information as Williams’ Doc deep dives into the medical anomaly like a detective mystery. It moves at such a persuasive beat while holding your hand with every nimble step of the chase. The final act is little more heavy going as DeNiro goes from a charismatic recovery success story to relapsing back into an unconscious state. Man, he was such a great actor then, even when twitching and gurning like an Oscar Whore in December! This material stretches him but he makes an impact even sitting motionless in a wheelchair. Williams has tooled around in the quirky outsider quack role a lot whenever he was working away from zany comedy. He really was attracted to scripts about mental rehabilitation. He essays a shy man… one who fights his corner only when necessary… whose background patiently observing plants and insects gives him the unique tools to not overlook the written-off patients. He resists quirk except for a few trailer moments and more than matches DeNiro’s more challenging role. While you can see the badgering manipulation happening before your eyes, this still is a good adult weepie. That excellent construction covers up its more inherent exploitative mercenary nature. It wants to make you cry, wants to make you feel, it shows no mercy or restraint in hitting the buttons beneath its sheen.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 