John Ford directs John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara and Victor McLaglen in this western romance where a tough cavalry leader’s estranged son joins his unit.
A dry run for The Quiet Man and a rerun of She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and none the worse for it. Action, laughs and romance. How else would you want to spend your afternoon?
Marek Kanievska directs Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz and Robert Downey Jr. in this adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel where a rich kid returns to L.A. over Christmas and casually witnesses his school peers spiral into drugs, degradation and inhumanity…
Only here the vanilla Andrew McCarthy has been cast as the lead and he’s gonna force his friends to “JUST SAY NO!”. Ellis would become infamous for American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction but this is his best attack of writing. Brutal, nihilist and voyeuristic the novel passively flits between a group of unlikable peers as they fuck, snort and witness each other’s downfall to hell. Ominous, cool and genuinely disturbing, the book is a curious project for a major studio to get excited over. There is no hero, most of the violence is sexual, self inflicted or implied at a distance… everyone is bisexual or addicted or callous. Often all three. After 20th Century Fox bought the rights, the studio went through a couple of regime changes. By the time the finished product was released various executives had miscast it and warped the focus into an anti-drugs warning film. The irony of the most coke fuelled industry in its most coke fuelled era turning a seminal work into a crusade against their very own nose blast of choice. Gone is the nude 12 year old strapped to a bed. There’s no sense that a serial killer lurks just beyond pool lights of their mansion homes. Even the coyote makes it out unscathed.
Ellis has gone on record about the blatant miscasting of McCarthy and Getz. Poor Andrew is too suburban, too bland and too unpolished to be a rich kid who’ll dead eye watch his ‘friend’ pimp himself to travelling salesmen. He doesn’t have to be anyway in this version… the script warps his vacant crowd member into a romantic crusader, a saviour for his fallen pals. Getz is surprisingly quite good in the first half… unreadable and manipulative… often given to staring off in the middle distance a little too long after dialogue is finished. By the end she is just a trophy for the good guy to reclaim. She’s pouring a grand’s worth of primo gak down a nightclub sink within 24 hours of McCarthy’s white bread dick sandwich. No. No. No, no, no. Let’s not talk about the cautionary tale tragic ending!
Is it irredeemable? Not at all. RDJ, James Spader and Michael Bowen are all amazingly well cast as different shades of predatory scumbag. The future Iron Man seriously fucks up his life on the freebasin’ and the movie doesn’t shy away from that. He even has some hyperactive larks doing it before he’s forced into motel prostitution and looking like he has terminal flu. I’m not sure what is more terrifyingly accurate though… Spader’s slick hair or Bowen’s muscle? Either way you kinda wanna hang out with these hot tub baddies more, getting their spoilt harem of hooked billionaire babies to turn tricks. White slavers of the MacArthur Park nightclub scene. What a scheme!? What a plan! And the whole thing looks correct. Like a David Hockney painting fucked a Style Council promo. Wow. It looks sharp. Terrible adaptation, O.K. product of its time.
Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage direct Walton Goggins, Alice Englert and Kaitlyn Dever in this hillbilly drama following a pregnant teenager hiding her secret from her snake cult leading Daddy.
Hold a deadly rattler to prove your devotion to God. A strong and likeable cast elevate this unfussy drama. Goggins, as nearly always, is superior to the material. He doesn’t, strangely, even get meaningful screentime with newly minted Oscar winner Olivia Coleman. I would have written a few extra pages on location if I was the directors to make this happen.
Alan Parker directs Madonna, Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Pryce in this musical biopic of a facist’s trophy wife.
Don’t Cry For Me Argentina aside… The songs are awful. The politics are awful. The looping of the lyrics and the mouth movements are abysmal. After 30 minutes of watching a stumbling Madonna half heartedly whore herself into a position of power the movie is left with 90 minutes and nowhere but an interminable loop to go. There’s no romance, affection or agency. There’s no real story. You kinda know there’s a better biopic to be salvaged from Eva Peron’s life, a better use for the sepia and sunlight and seven thousand extras. Yet it would be in the service of celebrating a figurehead for a military dictatorship. The musical it is based on and this adaptation bookend the Thatcher era. Maybe Britons secretly crave the boot on their neck?
Walter Hill directs Nick Nolte, Eddie Murphy and James Remar in the original buddy cop thriller where a white cop springs a black convict from jail hoping to catch a killer on the loose with his revolver.
A flawless entertainment. It gave birth to a whole sub-genre and gifted Eddie Murphy the most A-List star making movie debut in Hollywood history. Amazingly well cast – beyond the superstar leads such memorable character actors as Jonathan Banks, Sonny Ladham, Annette O’Toole, David Patrick Kelly, Frank McRae, Denise Crosby and Brion James get significant speaking parts. Tough – it has the plot and energy and bloodshed of a revisionist western, only fuelled by the energy of San Francisco’s neon-lit urban nightlife. Action packed – an on-location shoot out around a crowded subway station is rattlingly well orchestrated. Iconic – James Horner’s ominous, teasing score pulls you deeply into the chases and stand-offs. Hilarious – Eddie and Nolte have a perfect mismatched rhythm. Neither willing to give up focus, both itching to have the last jab in their verbal sparring. Is thuggish detective Cates a racist? Yes, he uses his position, privilege, violence and constant verbal denigration to keep Reggie Hammond under his boot. But is the film racist? No… Murphy’s Hammond constantly lashes back or wiggles out of the power dynamic so he maintain equal footing. He doesn’t just proves he’s his unwanted partner’s peer, he forces him to accept the power imbalance shouldn’t exist. Though only when he isn’t trying to get some ‘trim’ before his weekend pass runs out. I’m not going to wax lyrical about the political importance of 48 Hrs. I watch it often and love it as a simple blockbuster first and foremost. There are very, very few movies as purely satisfying and curtly unfussy as this.
Takashi Miike directs Masataka Kubota, Shota Sometani and Sakurako Konishi in this crime caper where a terminally ill boxer saves a hallucinating prostitute who is at the centre of an erupting gangwar between the yakuza and the triads.
A throwback to True Romance or Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead or at least 25 of Miike’s earlier yakuza trips. This has a lotta flamboyant scumbags chasing after a bag full of drugs over one crazy, squib-packed night. Hard to pick a favourite character from the endlessly wild ensemble. The shotgun wielding one-armed Wang? Triple crossing Kase – a super slick eager beaver with a plan way too complicated to ever actually work in practice? The demented vengeance driven pimp’s girlfriend played gloriously OTT by an actress just called “Becky”? The lead girl’s ghost dad who likes to appear in public in his white y-fronts and nothing else? It all, somehow, makes sense within the loopy carnage of the film. A hyper violent Japanese treat.
Miranda July directs Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins and Gina Rodriguez in this crime comedy where a family of very, very low level hustlers take in a new recruit.
“Most people want to be Kajillionaires. That’s the dream. That’s how they get you hooked. Hooked on sugar, hooked on caffeine. Ha, ha, ha. Cry, cry, cry… Me I prefer to just skim.” That is Richard Jenkins’ conman’s philosophy that he raised his daughter to live by. And the perfectly monikered Old Dolio has grown into the master of the minimal profit scam. But what she really wants is love and affection… she just doesn’t know it yet. July’s deadpan, hipster styling aren’t quite as successful here as in her debut Me & You & Everyone We Know. Yet the film is still pleasantly quirky and obtusely heartwarming enough to hit a similar seam. The outsider acting is top notch and all four leads (Debra Winger plays the cold mum) have a wonderful off tempo chemistry. Evan Rachel Wood, in particular, feels like she is splashing around in some untested waters and proves to have a real gift for physical comedy and gawky unhingedness. Even if the obvious slightness of the plotting may rub you the wrong way, do stay for the pay-off. The final sting is sweetly perfect.
Buddy Van Horn directs Clint Eastwood, Liam Neeson and Patricia Clarkson in this action thriller where the trigger happy cop investigates a series of celebrity murders.
Dirty Harry’s last hurrah. Notable more for the sheer amount of before they were famous faces lurking around the smaller roles. Jim Carrey as a junkie rock star (not holding back on the gurning one iota). Guns N Roses as funeral guests. The action is haphazardly plotted but chaotic in the moment. It features a ludicrous chase between Harry and a explosive remote control car. Clint at least has nice chemistry with Clarkson. Lethal Weapon and Die Hard had been released by this point of the Eighties. This tired, now brainless, format had had its day.
Michael Haneke directs Isabelle Huppert, Anaïs Demoustier and Hakim Taleb in this arthouse post-apocalyptic drama where a middle class family find themselves without shelter or comfort in a landscape pushed back to the Dark Ages by some unseen cataclysm.
I was dreading this. It is not like Haneke avoids a pessimistic view of humanity at the best of times. And he isn’t shy of extreme and shocking violence. So choosing to witness what he would do to a family in a lawless world of brutality and scarcity wasn’t exactly the most enticing proposition for a Saturday night on the couch. And if you’ve come for that then I’m sure Time of the Wolf doesn’t disappoint but it was a more palatable, meditative experience than I expected. Unless you are an animal lover! Huppert and Demoustier give affecting internal performances. The depressing vision of a countryside without supplies is convincing. As you’d expect family units and bourgeois beliefs are dissolved in a slow acid bath of relentless misery. But this also seems to be a film about faith. Everyone tries to hold onto some greater idea of how the world works, even when reality suggests a godless and compassionless and rule-free existence.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 