Roland Emmerich directs Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry and John Bradley in this sci-fi disaster movie where the moon begins orbiting towards the Earth causing all manner of gravitational and atmospheric emergencies.
Bad and not even cheesy bad. Just somber then boring. Bradley’s kid’s channel sitcom level acting irritates next to the blank heroics of paycheck players Wilson and Berry. At least he’s trying. Nobody else does.
Terry Gilliam directs Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist and Katherine Helmond in this dystopian fantasy where a civil servant for a fascist regime risks his life and standing to connect with a dream girl whose neighbour his ministry may have incompetently tortured to death.
Brazil suffered at the hands of its American distributor. Infamously held in limbo by Paramount Pictures as they tried to edit it down to 90 minutes and take out lines and shots from the ending so the fantasy Sam Lowry escapes into was less obviously only in his fragile, tortured headspace. Gilliam paid for a full page advert in Variety asking when his movie would be released, bootleg VHS copies of the full length international cut started circulating around LA and the movie stuck in a hack’s editing suite started building up award buzz in its full fat form. So being both a bête noire AND a cause célèbre, Brazil had the reputation as the vision that survived, the battler, the outlier and instant classic of the Eighties. But it is overlong, the tone fluctuates wildly. It feels very much like a MTV promo that never ends, Monty Python’s Brave New Orwell and a hot mess prototype for Bob Hoskin’s hot mess Super Mario Bros movie. A real Kafka-esque pic’N’mix. For every glorious sequence of imaginative squalor and bureaucratic mega incompetence there is another that just plain ruins the gumbo. The middle feels directionless, Kim Griest’s studio imposed dream girl is a personality vacuum. Smaller roles by Michael Palin, Robert De Niro and Bob Hoskins lighten up the nightmare, there are some good laughs. Gilliam seems happiest getting lost in pointless ducts, wire and keypads rather than action, horror or drama. As visions of the future go, Brazil is analogue, with the guts on the outside and happy being the opposite of streamlined. Yet that defiant over-complication really weakened Brazil for me on this rewatch. Maybe somewhere between 90 and 135 minutes would have been a happy compromise?
Lo Wei directs Bruce Lee, himself and Nora Miao in this Hong Kong period martial arts actioner where a student at a Kung-Fu academy breaks rank and avenges his master’s mysterious death at the hands of the Japanese.
Pretty standard, very dated stuff to modern eyes. The fights are often more silly than impressive. There’s at least some neat demonstrations with those naughty nunchaku. Lee is at his best when over emphasising his physicality but he also has out of character larks when he goes undercover as a nerdy phone repairman. It is what it is, a product of the seventies, certainly still watchable if you aren’t too demanding of it.
Leos Carax directs Denis Lavant, Mireille Perrier and Caroll Brooks in this Black & White French indie where a broken hearted boy and a suicidal girl wander the streets of Paris, occasionally recreating shots from movie romances past.
A pretentious calling card. If you asked 12 year old me whether I wanted to watch more Leos Carax movies after experiencing only Lovers On The New Bridge then my answer would have been an emphatic “Yes!” Now I’m actually catching up in my forties the relentless strange over confidence bores me to tears. Good soundtrack.
Steven Spielberg directs Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore and Edward Burns in this WWII epic where a squad of D-Day survivors find themselves on a perverse mission to save just one soldier.
Spielberg’s most explicit exploration of the value human history placed on a life. It is there in Schindler’s List, Amistad, Munich and even AI but here it feels like the lifeblood, the hook, the entire quest. There’s a series of exemplary set pieces – gory, grandiose and gargantuan in scale. That Normandy opener is an overwhelming achievement. Then there’s cast of character actors – compared to the starrier The Thin Red Line which was a cavalcade of A listers in cammo, this finds room for interesting faces like Dennis Farina and Giovanni Ribisi and genuine up-and-comers like Bryan Cranston, Paul Giamatti, Matt Damon and Vin Diesel. I’m not a fan of the bleached out look Janusz Kamiński gives the movie and the script is pretty basic. Away from Hanks, the characters never feel like more than well cast stock roles. For these reasons I remember how much this underwhelmed me on original release and I think this is the first time I’ve rewatched it in its entirety since. I enjoyed and appreciated it far more this time, though that hokiness does hold Saving Private Ryan back. For every wondrous moment of Spielbergian magic big and small, there’s another that undermines the maturity of the endeavour.
Val Guest directs Stanley Baker, Donald Pleasance and Billie Whitelaw in this British policier where a tough cop tries to track down a fugitive who is running riot through the mean streets of… Manchester.
The plot is pretty loose allowing Baker enough room to build up quite the portrait of a humane yet hard bastard cop. The various female characters seem better acted and consistently attractive than the norm and they again are a noteworthy highlight. Every set piece is pretty exciting even when Baker is off screen. The alleyway heist, a tossing tournament, a stalk sequence involving a deaf mute tinker’s daughter and the rooftop shootout finale. Guest knows how and when to make an impact.
Tristram Powell directs Michael Palin, Trini Alvarado and Alfred Molina in this period romance where a stuffy but kind Oxford don’s position at the college is placed in jeopardy when he inadvertently attracts the attention of a visiting mother and daughter.
Based on a piece of family history Palin himself uncovered when looking through old diaries. Not exactly groundbreaking but confident enough to avoid the cosy dead ends of its sub-genre. It is a gentle, unspectacular watch that may struggle to stay in the memory a few weeks later.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 