Makoto Tezuka directs Shingo Kubota, Kan Takagi and Kyôko Togawa in this Japanese musical comedy about a manufactured pop duo who implode at the height of their temporary fame.
An absolute blast of makeshift zaniness and self aware satire. Almost entirely a series of lo-fi pop videos strung together into a rise and fall plot, the cartoon energy never relents and we spoof punk, horror, The Beatles and anime in the breathless poppy abandon of it all. The humour is very Japanese but if you’ve seen a few Beat Takeshis you’ll have your bearings. Man of the Match is Kyôko Togawa’s preternaturally sunny superfan. I’d struggle to think of such an upbeat, smiley character who keeps you enamoured with a throwaway movie no matter what weird and wonderful tangents it disappears off to on a whim.
Nicholas Ray directs Cathy O’Donnell, Farley Granger and Howard Da Silva in this lovers on the run crime romance.
Ray’s first movie displays a mastery and irreverence to the cinematic form. The helicopter tracking shots and overlapping fades might seem old hat now but I bet they blew audiences minds back then with their storytelling flair. The doomed kids trying to survive the dragnet is pretty standard stuff, especially if you’ve seen You Only Live Once, and Granger’s dopey lead isn’t the stuff dream were ever made over. Yet Cathy O’Donnell (a new name to me) gives a wonderfully layered piece of acting as the tough but sad, yearning but lonely Keechie. She feels like a wildly different proposition from the stock femme fatales and simpering good girls and wisecracking ‘one of the boys’ of the Golden Age era.
Roman Polanski directs Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston in this neo-noir detective classic where a private detective investigates the drowning of a man during a drought.
A movie that operates in blazing sunlight, the brightness of the California weather conversely hides the corruption and human tragedy that run deep into this mystery. We spy the most important clue early on, acknowledge we have glimpsed something revelatory but it shines too incandescently for us to fully reconcile what it is. That’s masterful crime writing. Robert Towne’s way with words have never found a better story. Only in the closing moments does darkness descend, all hope is lost and the bravado of the individuals we thought were our (anti-)heroes are swept into the gutter. Jack is as sound as a bell here as the sleazy but capable gumshoe… channeling Bogart and keeping his natural razzmatazz one gear under what you would expect from him. When he is not facing mortal danger or immoral turpitude, his JJ Gittes is completely likeable son of a bitch. John Huston steals the show with just a handful of scenes as the demonic embodiment of capitalist ownership. A pessimistic education in not poking your nose into the gravy train, even if you aren’t exactly riding first class. You’ll just end up with a wounded nose or, worse, losing an eye. The American Dream is a nightmare that operates in plain sight, to reveal its dirty secrets is to doom one’s self. Rightly regarded as one of the high points of New American Cinema.
Roman Polanski directs Harrison Ford, Emmanuelle Seigner and Yorgo Voyagis in this thriller where a doctor’s wife goes missing in Paris and his only lead is a sexy young drugs mule.
Kickstarted the unofficial trilogy where Indy found himself in criminal trouble because of his wife (see also Presumed Innocent and The Fugitive), this is a bog standard Saturday night special. Ford is a great meat and potatoes movie star beaming down from on high over an average espionage mystery, making the most routine moments very watchable. Polanski adds a sleazy strangeness to on location Paris, making the beautiful city seems like a treacherous, sordid underworld. Emmanuelle Seigner is utterly gorgeous as our untrustworthy tour guide on this walk on the wild side. Ennio Morricone turns in a solid bit of scoring, not his best but does the job. This might be utterly forgettable if everyone wasn’t so effortlessly good at what they do even at half power. As it stands, like Charade or Panic Room, there’s a surfeit of indisputable talent elevating a minor pulp concoction.
Bernardo Bertolucci directs John Lone, Peter O’Toole and Joan Chen in this epic following China’s boy emperor’s fate after the Communist Revolution leaves him deposed, exiled, exploited, incarcerated and eventually released.
A genuinely compelling story that peaks at the midway point. The cloistered life of the infant emperor as he comes of age and realises his lack of power and freedom is resonant and beguiling movie making. It almost out epics David Lean, it almost usurps Farewell My Concubine (a movie whose timeline runs parallel to the titular protagonist’s here) for emotional engagement. Once we leave the Forbidden Kingdom and enter a world of coups, espionage and re-education it becomes a harder film to love. Events tumble into each other far too quickly and with less grace, it becomes easy to get lost or grow restless. The characters and the audience get a little left behind in the march of time. Puyi’s adult life as playboy, puppet king and brought down to earth citizen needed an hour’s more space to flow naturally. I would have been happier if this were a two-part four hour event. We as mainstream audiences sometime reject too readily any film that exceeds the three hour limit. Much more interrogative than Scorsese’s later and similar Kundun, this is certainly a life worthy of the grand scale historical biopic format. By following a flawed figure who acts as a dissecting line through the churn of the 20th century’s upheavals we truly witness a verisimilar cross-section of China’s modern history. Bertolucci does however somehow manage to slow things back down and recapture some of his masterpiece’s early strange energy and majestic mystery in the final moments. Certainly an experience.
Irvin Kershner directs Peter Weller, Nancy Allen and Dan O’Herlihy in this sequel to the dead cop turned cyborg law enforcer classic.
Paul Verhoeven clearly was the magic ingredient that made the original Robocop such a cult classic. This tries for all the same beats yet misses the mark more often than not. There is action but it feels lacklustre. Gory violence but it feels rationed. Satire but it lacks the same scabrous luridness. The production design is bright but not particularly credible. At least they retain the zany wold upside down future ad breaks. The best moments really are when this feels more like a kid’s action comedy… Murphy being reprogrammed to be “nice” or when he is overwhelmed by the bigger toys. Some of the top notch animatronic work to realise Peter Weller chopped up into pieces is eerily effective. There’s just not a lot of love here for the concept… if there was we’d at least reprise Basil Poledouris’s anthemic score and make sure “I’d Buy That For A Dollar!” was still clogging up the telly networks. This isn’t going to be the most sophisticated diagnosis as to what went wrong in 1990 but it all is just generally shittier by comparison to our 1987 masterpiece. I sometimes get a lot of flak for not loving Empire Strikes Back quite as much as A New Hope or Return of the Jedi. I’m just going to point out both Episode V and this have been fobbed off on the same hack director rather than someone who cares about the follow-up. Robocop 2 filled a Friday night adequately as a nostalgic entertainment but feels indefensible in direct comparison to its progenitor. Stay off the Nuke, kids!
Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise direct Michael J. Fox, Cree Summer and James Garner in the animated sci-fi adventure where a team of steampunk explorers seek the treasures of a city consumed by the oceans.
After Aladdin and Tarzan, Disney attempted a hard lurch into boy’s own juvenile action. The designs are a winning mash-up of Jules Verne, Anime and Mike Mignola… the latter of whom served as a design consultant on the project. Some of the animation is bit rougher than the lustrous 90s’ peaks of the Disney renaissance. The Princess here is genuinely kick ass… but not the focus. There’s no songs or comedy sidekick talking animals. It all feels like an extended pilot for a decent Saturday morning cartoon, only one where lots of henchmen and background characters die. While there’s nothing wrong with that, Atlantis does underwhelm, squandering the event movie magic that the Mouse House had managed to build up in its combo bar with every release since Beauty And The Beast. You can either view it as a quirky experiment or the beginning of the end for traditional hand drawn animated blockbusters.
Damien Chazelle directs Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons and Paul Reiser in this drama about an over ambitious student drummer and his bullying perfectionist sadist of a teacher.
A battle of minds. A thriller with no violence. Psychological warfare over jazz rhythm. The quest for greatness in a world of mediocrity. Featuring two of the finest lead performances of the 21st century (J.K. Simmons’ bastard man Terence Fletcher might just be the finest) and lovely Melissa Benoist’s big screen breakthrough. Every risk, and drawn out moment, and rapid fire character destruction in this is pitch fucking perfect cinema. Tom Cross’ hectoring editing is a wonderment of lean, percussive storytelling. Whether Whiplash is rushing or dragging it is exactly my tempo. One of the few recent movies I can hand on my heart state is an unimpeachable classic.
Darren Aronofsky directs Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood in this character study where an ageing wrestler of fading fame tries to live out his last few matches before his body gives in and the sport is no longer an option.
A bleach blonde resurrection. Eighties Christ juiced on the corner post. Possibly the greatest movie star comeback ever, Mickey Rourke is sweetly amazing here. Almost never off screen, Maryse Alberti handheld vérité camera moves with him, stays on his back like an addiction, tracking him from trailer park to ring and back. From tramp to king. There’s a simple brutal magic to this. A man feels like a god but his living dream is killing him. He’s near homeless keeping up on the payments on a body punishing routine of ‘roids, insulin, fake tan and pumped iron. His aged flesh tortured into some long forgotten myth of macho perfection. Just so he can step into the spotlight and convince in a sequence of choreographed violence. The moves might be planned but the mutilation he and others inflict on him to make the ballet seem true is destroying him. Yet this is where he feels alive, feels like who he truly is. Rourke’s lumbering freak is a good gentle soul out in the cold, harsh every day. We want him to have his dream, just wish it wasn’t fatal. He has been a deer in wrestling’s headlights for too long. He has been too distracted to foster any kind of relationship with his estranged daughter, she has been hurt by being a distant second to the call of the ring too many times. His only meaningful contact with another human is his tentative relationship with Marisa Tomei’s ageing stripper. Both know their time has passed and they aren’t really match fit for their respective games anymore (though I doubt any punter would be disappointed in reality if middle aged Tomei did work their local strip bar). She doesn’t want to be “Cassidy” anymore, doubts whether a romance with a customer is the best leaping off point. What else is there for him but the love of the crowd? They are misfits like him, happy to fill a school gymnasium or decrepit concert hall to see the face and the heel go at it. He only wants to be their Randy The Ram, nobody including him really has any love for the name on his social security card, Robin Ramzinski. Even though it will kill him, Randy has to chose between the heartbreaking chill of reality or celebrated immortality in the ring.
Ruggero Deodato directs Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi and Luca Barbareschi in this extreme Italian horror where a professor leads an expedition into the South American “Green Inferno” to rescue some missing students, what he finds is sacrifice, rape, barbarism and exploitation.
Yeah… no. The horror has no tension, the protagonists are deeply unlikable. Just 90 minutes of unrelenting grimness. A mixture of cheap adventure, mondo fake found footage and animal cruelty. Rather boldly the movie head on addresses white imperialism, the violence of modernity and the viewer’s own “sick” voyeurism. But really Deodato is using academic terms as a wet paper bag, meant to house atrocity after atrocity after atrocity into an acceptable package. Just read the Wikipedia page for 10 minutes to uncover all the lore and legends around the production, what you imagine the film is like will be far more entertaining than the final nasty product.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 