Kelly Fremon Craig directs Abby Ryder Fortson, Rachel McAdams and Kathy Bates in this adaptation of Judy Blume’s revered coming-of-age novel.
From casting to period detail to balance of tone to accessibility, this gets everything spot on. Like a lovely hot bath of a movie, you feel relaxed and rejuvenated after watching it.
Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise direct Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson and Jerry Orbach in this gold standard of the Walt Disney Renaissance where a bookworm falls for a cursed monster.
Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme… Belle is definitely an evolutionary leap as a “princess.” The songs are nearly all showstoppers. The Beast remains kind of a sketched enigma. How old was he when he transgressed and was cursed? 11? Why doesn’t he at least have a beard when the curse is lifted? Gaston is a loveably bad villain. Looks gorgeous, has little explosions of horror and action. But the romance is pure, unadulterated and rockets this high watermark into its very own stratosphere. Lushly iconic for good reason.
10
Perfect Double Bill: The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1996)
John McNaughton directs James Spader, Melora Walters and Bill Murray in this sex farce where an unsatisfied young wife has an affair with her bumbling therapist and then gets embroiled in a salacious legal case.
Stacked cast, a director I like but this cheap indie rarely finds any laughs from its dated but potent premise. Except the scenes with Murray and Catherine O’Hara. They have wonderful chemistry in all respects. Melora Walters grafts particularly hard to make this dog’s dinner work. Plays like National Lampoon’s Sex, Lies And Videotape.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs Barbara Sukowa, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Mario Adorf in this drama about the economics and corruption of a town in post-war Germany.
The central three leads performances are really strong but the movie feels lost in its gilding and metaphor. Most of the action takes place at a fantastically luxurious brothel or concerns town planning meetings. There’s a real poetry here, often quite sensual then equally quite Brechtian and abrasive. There is enough strong, fascinating content to praise but I wouldn’t race to rewatch. I read afterwards this was intended as an unofficial remake of Josef von Sternberg ‘s The Blue Angel… and I’m surprised I didn’t clock that until it was spelt out for me. What do I know, hey? I just get distracted by the pretty period lingerie and endure the cold drama.
Maurice Pialat directs Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu and Guy Marchand in this French drama where a Parisian woman leaves her whiny husband for a violent, petty criminal.
A lot of repetitive scenes carried by two great French actors.
Lewis Teague directs Drew Barrymore, James Woods and Alan King in this Stephen King anthology flick where the stories are linked by a brave little wandering cat who finds himself in the mix with all the creeps.
There’s nothing mind blowing here yet each section is entertaining in its own right, never outstays its welcome and macabre in differing ways. My personal favourite is the dude from Airplane being made to walk the outside of a high rise building by a cuckolded gangster, clinging on with every step by the sweat of his palms. But James Woods’ coming up against an intense Mafia anti-smoking operation is also a dark lark and the Drew Barrymore’s finale involving a troll who lives in the crack of her bedroom skirting is ambitious, takes itself the most seriously. The bursts of practical FX are often bonkers, the cat is a cutie and this has aged somewhat better than the more revered Creepshow as a VHS guilty pleasure.
Hendel Butoy and Mike Gabriel direct Bob Newhart, Eva Gabor and John Candy in the Australian set sequel to Disney’s hit mouse adventure movie.
Rescuers Down Under is notable for Disney as its first sequel proper AND its first traditionally animated film using only the new computerized CAPS process. And whatever that Computer Animated magic is, it makes the hand drawn cels sweep and race around beautifully realised landscapes like no movie you’ve ever seen. The story is simple, the ecological message on point and I got really caught up in this.
Jason Reitman directs Elliot Page, Michael Cera and Jennifer Garner in this teen comedy where a quirky teen navigates being pregnant and not wanting the baby.
Here is an unofficial, utterly unverified fact: I reckon Juno’s soundtrack was the last big selling CD of its type, the one you were never surprised to see in people’s music collection… now on a spinner in a charity shop near you. There’s something about this appealing package that really captured the zeitgeist at the time. The quirky rotoscoped credit sequence, the quirky mixtape of Cat Power, Mouldy Peaches and Belle & Sebastian, the quirky casting of breakout stars Page, Cera and Olivia Thirlby (all never better), the quirky approach to the big messy issue of teen pregnancy and abortion and class in America. Some of that hardwired quirkiness does date Juno massively. What felt exceptional back then got co-opted into the cultural click-and-drag files quickly, cliches of the last decade were born here. But that doesn’t diminish how confident Reitman’s direction is, how brilliant Allison Janney and J.K. Simmon’s are as Juno’s parents and how risky Diablo Cody’s script proved. Her dialogue is a little forced but her worldview is razor sharp. There’s a hardness at the centre of Juno that is surprising. It is tougher and more insightful than a quirky, colourful indie flick needs to be. Cody’s grit and honesty has stood the test of time even if other elements have not.
James Gunn directs Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Bradley Cooper and Pom Klementieff in these Marvel comic book adaptations following a ragtag group of space rejects who band together to save the universe.
Regular readers will know that I don’t hate too hard on the MCU machine, but equally I rarely give it a five star pass just for being mindlessly popular. Kevin Feige has Stockholm Syndrome’d a mass market entire swathe of the ticket buying audience. My enthusiasm for the franchise gently wanes and occasionally spikes with each never-ending open-ended release. First time I grew disillusioned with the quippy conveyor belt was after a series of average yet spectacular introduction stories by 2014, I only bought my ticket on opening day to GOTG1 on some last minute whim. And I was overwhelmed by how much more entertaining and personality fuelled it was (and still is). Largely down to Gunn’s VHS nasty instincts being repurposed for a PG-13 romp. I left the cinema beaming. Yet because one can’t really get away from Marvel at any point in the year these days, I have only made time to revisit the studio’s highpoint once over the last decade in its entirety. If Vol.1 popped up on TV, I’d settle down and watch a half-hour chunk, but those days of a random channel surfing are now a true thing of the past. Yet the film holds up really well. A silly comic book space adventure, whose tone is random and slightly gross, that presses all the buttons I want from a summer blockbuster. Gloopy production design, a palette of slime and nebula, plus perfect ensemble casting. The finale should be tighter but this overarching formula seems to prefer stretching out the temporary conclusions to give some semblance of good value.
2 showed signs of rot and fatigue setting in. Every flaw you could overlook in the origin story felt more obvious and amplified on repeat. And now the long awaited third and ‘final’ entry feels terminal for much of the running time. And don’t get this ‘ole spoilsport curmudgeon wrong… I might pick and choose my superhero cinema trips a tad more judiciously these days… But I was excited to see Drax, Rocket and Gunn’s weird intergalactic new worlds return on the big screen, opening weekend. Disappointment soon hacked my pleasure. How many shots of “the team” walking towards the camera in slo-mo were we going to indulge? Why isn’t the whole thing getting a clip on? Where was the originality? Why isn’t Dave Bautista getting more killer lines? Do we really care about this love triangle? The organic space station, and the wonderful pop art space walk to it, aside, where was the fun?
Rocket’s sad backstory is told at length. A dozen flashbacks to extreme animal cruelty interrupting the more light hearted flow. I found the vivisection and the psycho-Pixar interludes really sapped me, made me too sad, too uncomfortable. Once they wrap up at the two hour mark all we had left in the tank was one of those elongated, uninvolving finales, a few too many teased deaths and then endless epilogues. And now, the one shining star of the Marvel galaxy has been snuffed out on an awkward whimper… Blade?
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 