Alfred Hitchcock directs Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris and William Devane in this comedy thriller where a dodgy psychic and her part-time detective lover look for an heir to a fortune who may prove a far nastier criminal.
Hitch’s last film is not his best but it has a goofball charm. Almost as if the Master decided to direct a Disney live action adventure and bumped off the kids before the studio logo appears. Some sections work better than others, it is a very laborious yet loose narrative. If Dern and Harris are sleuthing, conning or bickering than don’t go make a cuppa. Their chemistry is palpable and Harris is particularly delightful – full stop. Lower your expectations and enjoy a pleasant afternoon romp.
Céline Sciamma directs Zoé Héran, Malonn Levana and Jeanne Disson in this children’s drama where a 10-year-old gender non-conforming child adopts a new name and doesn’t tell the kids in their new neighbourhood about their birth gender.
Warm, well observed, pastoral. What really stands out is the young, affectionate sibling relationship depicted.
Eugenio Mira directs Elijah Wood, Alex Winter and John Cusack in this thriller where a concert pianist must play an difficult piece perfectly otherwise a sniper will shoot him from the gods.
Not as tight or as luridly masterful as Phone Booth but a nice companion piece. Excellent to see Alex Winter back and he makes for a disconcerting presence here. A lot of the other side characters who populate this are a bit flat so it is a joy to see a long lost face distract from Elijah’s fretting on stage in between passable set pieces.
Sydney Pollack directs Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin and Susannah York in this Depression era drama where impoverished couples sign up for a dance marathon that exploits and degrades them for entertainment purposes.
Fair warning: you are gonna need a stout heart and shielded emotions to make it though They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It is unattractive, depressing viewing. Watching the pointless trials, decay and destruction of a group with people with no options is like being beaten up mercilessly for two hours. You will not be in your happy place afterwards. This is bleak. Stephen King’s The Long Walk and The Hunger Games franchise have their roots in this fertile drama but they are dystopian sci-fi contests… this was based on historical fact. The author of the source novel, Horace McCoy, was the bouncer at these grim spectacles in the thirties. Surely they didn’t last quite as long (months!) as the film suggests… but the film is an allergory for a life in poverty. The limited choices, the pragmatic need to partner up to survive, the loss of freedom and hope a minimum pay check gives you once you sign the contract, the rigged cunt’s trick of The American Dream. They showed this in Soviet Russia as a stark cinematic lesson in what capitalism is like to live under. The nightmare, worst case scenario. Natalie commented it felt like watching a horror movie. A series of murders. Desperation is the slasher. Who is going to be driven mad next by sleep deprivation? Who is going to give in and collapse after toiling for weeks? Who will abandon their hope next and exit a broken loser… or dead? The atmosphere is oppressive, clammy, leering. You give up caring about who will win the prize. You never find out. You get flashes forward to the future that are stylistically now common place in modern TV storytelling. They were groundbreaking then. OK… so it is a forgotten classic and genuinely horrible to watch… it still ain’t perfect. What starts as an ensemble gives way to being a star vehicle for Fonda at the midway point. I think Hanoi Jane is great but you do miss the other cast members when they are demoted from support to background extras. Especially early turns by Bruce Dern and Bonnie Bedilia who do a lot with a little.
Martin Campbell directs Pierce Brosnan, Sean Bean and Famke Janssen in this soft reboot of the 007 franchise that sees Bond unwittingly tracking an old ally in post-Soviet Russia.
I went to see this with my cousin on opening night at the Ealing ABC and I can’t describe how big a release this was in the mid-90s. While every other Hollywood production was experimenting with CGI, EON stuck to their loaded guns….expert stunt, miniature and demolition work. The Cold War thrills were marketed as having been reconfigured for a new era but the joke really was the world had changed but James doesn’t actually need to. The Iron Curtain has been toppled but for our spy is still killing KGB and Russian generals left right and centre with gay abandon. The broken statues of Stalin and Lenin are window dressing for the same old defecting enemies to be dastardly on a global scale, our hero to save the day by the skin of his teeth. The gorgeous girls get to question and tease him even threaten him but much like the shift in geopolitics the sexual politics remain that Bond can be criticised by those he is about to seduce but he still conquers. Business as usual, really.
Helps that Pierce is the suavest of Bonds… mixing Moore’s debonair bonhomie with Dalton’s romanticism. A hint of Irish brogue, lashings of matinee idol glamour. Comfortable as a pillow with the hurly burly. His run of films were unspectacular but he is almost too good a fit for the role. The perfect Bond to hold the rickety, uncertain enterprise together through its roughest transition. Goldeneye was exactly what was needed in 1995 to reinvigorate the franchise. A string of cliffhangers with just enough self awareness so you could swallow all the old fashioned spectacle, glitz and carnage. Yet still very much the same format and formula the world had grown up with loved for two generations. The press wrote swathes about it being a reinvention, an update and comeback. The fans embraced a return to what they always loved.
In retrospect Goldeneye isn’t gold or even silver standard for the 60 year enterprise. The middle section is adventure-lite and Bond awkwardly takes a back seat. Sean Bean pops in fleetingly to turncoat, seethe and give good trailer footage but proves an underwhelming and unfixed antagonist over two hours. He seems to be going for different readings from confrontation to confrontation. Luckily Famke Janssen’s deliciously evil Xenia Onatopp pretty much steals the show, shifting from evil beauty queen to snarling beast the moment she wraps those deadly thighs around you. Janssen is so outstanding here that you do wish the Brocollis had the common sense to keep her alive and recurr her into another adventure. Good girl Izabella Scorupco though capable, nubile and gifted entire reels of solo screentime didn’t stand a chance. The opening action sequence contains a succession of hair raising stunts. The tank chase through St Petersburg has pleasing echoes the daft excess and building crunching talent of the 70s high points. There’s enough greatness dotted around Goldeneye that you forgive the duller swathes and surplus characters that are hangovers from the old way of making blockbusters.
Employee of the month? Daniel Kleinman’s credit sequence is amazing. Tina Turner thumps out a rousing, hummable torchsong and the images he creates to accompany her epic caterwauling are mind blowing. Sickles and hammer rain from the skies as featureless models slink and swoon in high definition. It is a keen homage to Maurice Binder silhouettes and shimmer opening titles but massively surpasses them. This is a digital cornucopia, strident and inventive. It is the one area where Goldeneye stands head and shoulders above all other episodes. It has strong action and girls and Bond but the credits really do knock it out of the park.
All Bonds meld into one. Even the duff ones now make for a great afternoon on the sofa. Goldeneye revived the series, it deserves its place in history for that, but I’ll always enjoy the less loved but more vibrant, hard edged films that came on either side of it. Whereas this is an exercise in rebranding the old package… Licence to Kill and Tomorrow Never Dies are crammed with array and life. They didn’t have to save a franchise and they are all the more carefree and amusing for it.
Buddy Cooper and John S. Douglass direct Matt Mitler, Ruth Martinez and Connie Rogers in this cheap slasher where a group of co-eds go to one of their troubled fathers’ beach house.
It has it’s own theme song and feels more like a sitcom in tone than a horror at points. Not a good sitcom. The kills are coldly nasty and unconvincing, and the amateur cast can’t be killed nastily enough.
Martin McDonagh directs Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes in this crime comedy where two hitman are instructed to hide out in Belgium.
Here’s a film that rope-a-dopes me every time I watch it. And I revisit it more than most movies of 12 years ago so I’m not sure why I’m consistently surprised at how great it gets.
The first act is merely really good. There’s some sparky rude dialogue that matches the foul mouthed causticity of Tarantino but in the unusual timbre of a Pinter play. Gleeson is an ever loveable figure (“Happy in your work?) while Farrell shakes off a decade of bland B-List Hollywood work and starts delivering on his promise to be an alternative movie star. The gorgeous yet ominous setting is indeed “a fairytale fucking town” and we get a few classy continental honeys thrown in to boot. It is a bad taste fine time on the couch – eye candy for everyone, indefensible behaviour, shocking attitudes and some implied violence on the horizon. But then things start to tighten and supersede themselves.
The mordant sense of humour becomes bleakly absurd. An air of doomed fatalism takes over the boozy wit. We get a flashback to the job that got our pair of gun toting Vladimirs and Estragons into this purgatory and it is incredibly cruel punchline. Churns up emotions in a film that has taken pleasures in being cold and arch.
Then Ralph Fiennes’ Harry finally arrives on the scene. We have fair warning he is in the post. A threat filled mention here. An expletive filled telegram there. A long one-shot phone conversation where Gleeson has to walk a verbal tightrope not to incur his unpredictable, unseen wrath. But after an hour he finally lands in the film. Snarling, stubborn, danger oozing out of every pore. Better yet, when you sit down and have a chat with him Fiennes adds just an outline of humanity. He has his own strict code and affections. He’s not so much deranged as utterly intractable. The barking grim reaper for fools who shan’t be suffered lightly. Hands down he is one of the best movie villains of this century. Better than Heath Ledger’s The Joker and on a hallowed par with Sexy Beast’s Don Logan and Inglorious Basterds’ Hans Landa. “You fucking retract that bit about my cunt fucking kids!”
It builds to a finale that is genuinely thrilling. You are never sure who will survive, who should survive and how that is even possible. McDonagh’s dexterous screenwriting keeps the barmy yet succinct dialogue flowing even in moments of significant action. As with most debuts McDonagh has a tendency to tesselate every element introduced. Debut calling card features have a need to make sure everything neatly ties together in a bow, taking too much effort to make sure every loose end is knotted with a flourish. It is a freshman trick that impresses teenagers and people who think Hollywood films are mindless. M Night Shyamalan has never outgrown it. Yet the OCD tidying up of plot points, characters and imagery reaches a nice crescendo here… it feels earned rather than showboating. It is a first film, so I’ll forgive it. It certainly doesn’t dampen a really wild slice of crime genre cinema.
Federico Fellini directs Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi and Leopoldo Trieste in this Italian drama where five men entering their thirties laze about their small town like princes in waiting.
Often very beautiful, with some stand out carnival and caper sequences. I don’t think Fellini likes this bunch of wastrels all that much but even in their lighter and sillier moments it is very difficult to warm to them. They are a bunch of pricks and any affection generated towards them happened in the last century.
Shin’ichirô Ueda directs Takayuki Hamatsu, Yuzuki Akiyama and Harumi Shuhama in this one-shot zombie horror that then turns into a behind the scenes farce.
Shifts from bloodletting to heart warming with minimal fuss. This is a funny, affectionate and gory tribute to low budget horror ingenuity. Moments that feel like wobbles and mistakes earlier are explained later with playful abandon. A treat fuelled by the sweet and game lead performances by Harumi Shuhama and Takayuki Hamatsu.
Ryan White directs Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Susan Brown and Jonathan Capehart in this documentary following sex therapist and Eighties celebrity Dr. Ruth on the build up to her 90th birthday.
A brilliant subject for a feature documentary (she’s certainly lived a full life) although this is more a gentle celebration than investigative exploration of her impact on America’s psyche. The hazy animated flashback to her formative years escaping the Nazis and defending her new kibbutz in Israel aren’t to my personal taste. I did kinda wish there was more footage of her giving sex advice (in the Eighties and now) and a little more of the science and thought behind it. I get the feeling this is very much tailored and targeted toward mature ladies who want an unusual icon to fawn over rather than a more journalistic essay on a very special cultural disruptor.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 