Scott Glosserman directs Nathan Baesel, Angela Goethals and Scott Wilson in this slasher mockumentary where a wannabe horror icon shares the tricks of his murderous trade with a film crew.
Neat for the first hour. A good meta, alternative point of view to the tried and tested tropes. It does eventually descend into a bog standard Friday the 13th rip off for the final act and is a lesser film for it. Robert Englund pops up in a silly role but apt role. Baesal’s charming psycho is gifted and keeps you on your toes… shame he wasn’t in much else.
Maggie Carey directs Aubrey Plaza, Bill Hader and Rachel Bilson in this teen comedy where a straight-A student decides to spend the summer before college becoming fully sexually experienced.
A solid vehicle for Plaza where the constant 90s soundtrack and busy cast make up for lack of killer jokes. More likeable than funny, this is praiseworthy for its sex positive message.
Adam Wingard, Ti West, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Tyler Gillett, Glenn McQuaid and Joe Swanberg direct Hannah Fierman, Sophia Takal and Helen Rogers in this horror anthology about a dead man’s collection of macabre found footage tapes.
Every single chapter takes too long to get going then ends abruptly. Populated by some of the most unlikable protagonists ever committed to screen… and no… seeing them eventually devoured has no reward. If the intention was to suggest that only bullying narcissist would continue to film themselves through such strange nights then…. mission accomplished!… but I get the feeling this truism is an accidental by-product of the frequently ill thought out bursts of boredom. I personally enjoyed the creepy moments in Joe Swanberg’s Skype haunting entry “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” but this was Natalie’s least favourite story… so what are you going to do? Avoid.
James Cameron directs Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Paxton in this romantic action comedy where a super spy leads a double life, hiding his world saving career from his family to the point where his wife feels neglected and seeks out her own risky excitement.
“When he said ‘I Do’, he never said what he did!” Arnie’s best performance – nailing both his cover as the dull husband and his day job as heroic force of nature. Jamie Lee getting to do her sexy comedy schtick again, perfected in Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda. Great salty support from Bill and Tia Carerre. Even Tom Arnold isn’t terrible. There’s plenty of blunt force trauma laughs, more than you’d expect from a violent thriller with the grandest budget of its time. A silly OTT script that lunges between old fashioned farce and mega-budget slapstick.
Then there’s the $100 million blockbuster set-pieces. A lengthy gentlemen’s bathroom brawl where tiles shatter and bullets fly. A horse versus motorbike chase that goes vertical and features The T-800 constantly amusingly apologising. A terrorist camp destructively decimated by one highly trained man and his clumsy wife. An utterly compulsive ticking bomb helicopter chase across the bridges of Florida Keys. A skyscraper rooftop finale involving a rustily flown Harrier Jumpjet, little Eliza Dushku and a rocket-launcher. Action-wise True Lies delivers with excess and elan. Carnage candy! You got way more than your admission price promised back in 1994 and it still is a fantastic afternoon filler on DVD if you can avoid focussing on the very obvious stunt double who fills in for Arnie a little too often. I bet Cameron was glad he kept that Terminator wig from 1984!
The issue most people have with True Lies now is its dubious sexual politics in the middle hour. Excitement takes a back seat and unfaithfulness and marital revelations come to the fore. Have they dated? Are they misogynistic? If you approach it as a muscular, heavily armed man stalking and manipulating his wife through psychological torture for an entire second act section… then yes. But this was crafted as a light, breathless, almost family friendly, crowd-pleasing blockbuster (I went as a teen with my parents the summer of release) and I think the intention is for Jamie Lee Curtis’ frumpy housewife to be given a believable route in to the Bondian escapades. It is a male prescribed female wish fulfilment but not an entirely unattractive one. Helen Tasker gets quite the fantasy to live out. Her husband finally tells the truth and instantly becomes more exciting than the white collar drone she was growing bored of, she gets to be seen as striptease enchantress rather than a homemaker (and that iconic scene is still hot as fuck) and eventually be the action hero who enjoys being lifted out of runaway limos and staking out high end parties.
An effective Joan Wilder style adventure, with an added self-makeover sequence and tons of funny lines. It is the role of a lifetime for Curtis and she sells the twists and turns of Helen’s wake up to the peril her husband survives routinely with full confidence and sophistication. She goes from sitcom mom to 007… Arnie isn’t gifted this arc or catharsis. We take him uzi-ing a cabal of comedy jihads for granted, but a middle aged woman catfighting an arms dealer is a new flavour. The look of real excitement on her face as she performs the thrilling helicopter rescue stunt, like a Tom Cruise or a Bruce Willis would, is one of 90s cinema’s most joyous moments.
Then we get the sweet reconciliatory kiss illuminated by nuclear explosion as the topper to an action comedy that won’t quit. Cameron is all heart beneath the macho banter and demolition derby stylings. If you doubt the intentions behind his sexual politics here, at least recognise that he eventually elevates his female lead to equal with her husband and strengthens their attraction rather than confiscates anything from her. There is no punishment for Helen Tasker’s flirtation with infidelity, no sacrifice required from her to become one of the warriors. How many other directors, male or female, misogynist or feminist, manage such a unique promotion of a female character in the biggest production of their release season? Only ever James Cameron.
William A. Wellman directs James Cagney, Jean Harlow and Edward Woods in this pre-code gangster film charting the rise and fall of a bootlegger from street tough to gang war.
An early gangster film. The pace and purpose of the genre hasn’t been established yet. There are times when this rushes through plot and other times when it idles over hand wringing that slows the action down. The violence is spectacular though… there’s a sequence when a marksman shoots a Gatling gun towards the wall our stars are dangerously near to… for actual reals FFS!… Cagney is so unpredictable here as Tom Powers. A force of nature and a loon. Captivating. Some of the other acting carries the hangovers of silent era. Lots of face twitching, wide eyed reactions and gloopy movements. Cagney’s masculine, simmering, star making turn is something else. A message in a bottle from a shifting era in Hollywood. New stars were being formed, new acting styles became bold and purposeful, internal yet defined by action, unadorned by unsubtle emotional gurning. Cagney was the forerunner of this next generation of star. Though the material isn’t complex, he imbued a hyper humanity into his greedy maniacs that carried over into The Method of Brando, Pacino and Caan.
Ed Perkins directs Alex Lewis, Marcus Lewis and Andrew Caley in this documentary where two twins share their sides of a dark story; one who lost all his memories at 18 in a motorbike crash, the other who helped him rebuild his understanding of their world.
Possible Spoilers! An engrossing documentary that is in turns creepy and emotionally intelligent. Watching it late night, with the lights off, certain sequences gave me shivers as we explore the nooks and crannies of two men’s decaying upbringing. A mixture of talking heads, over saturated photos and a camera drifting around a damp and busy country house, the atmosphere evoked is suffocating. Perkins smartly often only gives us rapid glimpses of the family albums, not allowing us to settle on the principals as they pose in the past. Conversely his exploration of the grim and foreboding family home does linger and there are moments when your own subconscious adds twitches of lurking monsters in the negative space. This watch was on the recommendation of Paul Laight on his The Cinema Fix blog. I’ll be honest, if I knew the full extent of the revelations being dripfed to us I might have skipped this factual mystery. There’s no way content like this can’t be seen as exploitative and I tend to prefer my true crime to be gangsters and gamblers rather than murderers and predators. I won’t spoil what unfolds as one brother realises his protector has redacted a huge portion of the memories that he lost in a motorbike accident. The film churns up some troubling questions about recall and the self and the “right thing to do” in an extreme situation. I personally feel Marcus did make the correct choice by avoiding giving his brother any harmful details about their childhood, trauma that no soul would want to know. Equally as much as as Alex the seeker might want answers, he feels often uncaring to just how painful these answers might be for the brother who still has them within him. Gripping, haunting and complex.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 