Christophe Gans directs Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos and Vincent Cassel in this period martial arts horror mystery about a botanist and his Native American partner who travel to the French countryside to catch the possible werewolf terrorising all the fair maidens.
Handsome outdoors setting and 18th century costumes. Elongated hand-to-hand combat set pieces. Matrix inspired editing and FX. Some nice Hammer style monster stalk sequences. A protracted conspiracy. A movie that tries to just about be everything… succeeds… and then exhaustingly spins its wheels in the last hour. If this were a mere 90 minute blast it’d probably be the greatest film ever. Monica Bellucci as a secret agent hiding out in a bordello and the sweet posh totty Émilie Dequenne cover over a lot of cracks.
Celine Song direct Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro in this romance about two Korean school friends who separate when one emigrates to America only to gradually reencounter each other as social media becomes… a thing.
Pitched as this generation’s Before Sunrise, Past Lives is sweet, intelligent, well acted and faultlessly made. Personally I found it a little too ponderous and inert… but I can see why it has won so many over. I think I might have been the only swinging dick not crying in the multiplex when it concluded.
Alek Keshishian directs Madonna, Oliver Crumes Jr and Warren Beatty in this behind-the-scenes documentary of the pop icon’s global Blonde Ambition tour.
Also known as Truth Or Dare. Also known as the project that very nearly was David Fincher’s directorial debut in features. Also known as the highest grossing documentary of the 20th century. And it is a lark. Glossy, naughty, candid and forced. The staged moments are overdone and stretch things out. The stage performances are epic. The music was always going to be the power. The LGBT representation was revolutionary. The celebrity moments awkward as fuck. And the two hour long peep at Madonna the legend in her prime is heartwarming. Yeah, she has a warped idea of the world… and even her world… but she feels less filtered and parodic than Michael Jackson or Elton John or Prince did at this point. There’s a reason why this documentary struck a cord with a generation… as nutty as Madonna’s life is and as silly as some of her on-camera decisions are, she remains human and likeable. The Pedro Almodóvar party where she hunts for the hot but married Antonio Banderas is pure icky farce and worth the admission price alone. “Neat.”
George Stevens directs Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur and Jack Palance in this classic western.
A pure western. What makes Shane fascinating is also its only flaw. A blatant flaw but also the point of the project. Christ, that kid is annoying. And I know the movie is from his immature perspective. He idolises the gun slinging drifter rather than his equally heroic father. Can’t notice that Shane is suffering from PTSD, can’t even notice when his hero’s way of the gun ends with him dying. Palance’s villain is terrifying in this. Great location shoot. The muddy streets of the small makeshift town predict the revisionist western by at least 15 years. Shane has the genre goods but it is how everything Steven’s does is a little more cautious, begrudging that makes it stand the test of time. The shaking noise of that first, delayed gunshot. Makes you sit bolt upright.
Gareth Edwards directs John David Washington, Allison Janney and Madeleine Yuna Voyles in this sci-fi war movie where a conflicted man must escort an AI child through New Asia while pursued by the genocidal US military and the local robot police.
Went to a Greek mall multiplex to catch this on opening day. The experience was… itchy. Very good projection and sound though. Can’t think of many 20+year old multi screens in the U.K. that have preserved such decent technical specs.
The movie itself is right up my alley. An unabashed blend of early Cameron, mid-career Spielberg, Coppola, Ridley and even Marty’s Kundun. The characters might be a little 2D (though the villains are strong), the action comes in quite short beats and the third act rushes through plot developments a little too swiftly to be completely coherent. But it is exciting. A vision of AI and humanity living together violently that imagines tons of inspired visual wrinkles. As world building goes, The Creator is a gift that keeps on giving, on a par with Blade Runner or The Fifth Element for transporting you into a strange new futurism riddled with details. Calling back to his debut Monsters, here Edwards seamlessly integrates digital FX of a mammoth scale with human actors and real world environments. Nobody else is doing it like this.
Beyond being a CGI visionary, Edwards’ peerless brand of blockbuster cinema is starting to take real form. He seems to relish a dour pessimism giving way to an emotional connection at the moment of finality. He puts western faces in fantasy peril but the response and cataclysm often takes the form of what a foreign refugee or a survivor of a war torn disaster area might experience in the face of dispossession of their homeland and comforts. With its disabled protagonist and realistic geopolitics, The Creator effortlessly achieves more than most recent movies that wear their sops to diversity on their sleeves as a badge of honour. A suicide mission, a world crushed by fascistic imperialism and an unlikely band of brothers crossing different landscapes to achieve their begrudging goal… The Creator gives us a glimpse of what Edwards pure cut of Rogue One might have felt like. We see a walking humanoid bomb peacefully stopped by something only slightly more human, potentially more destructive in a moment of sheer sci-fi poetry. We see Apocalypse Now with mecha freedom fighters and anime tanks. We see fucking cinema.
Brian Duffield directs Kaitlyn Dever, Zack Duhame and Geraldine Singer in this almost dialogue-free sci-fi thriller where an ostracised young woman evades the aliens taking over her unwelcoming hometown.
Has the goods, with enough quirk at the bookends that it will automatically become a cult item. In all honesty, I am growing weary of the whole ‘Horror as Therapy’ trend but Dever is too exciting an actor to take on a project where she merely hides and runs from the nasty for six reels. A fun movie of jolting escalations.
Mike Nichols directs Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine and Dennis Quaid in this Hollywood drama based on Carrie Fisher’s semi-autobiographical novel about her addiction recovery.
Solid but lacks focus. Streep feels miscast. This needed someone a bit punkier, less vanilla in the lead… Pfeiffer? Rosanna Arquette? Why not Fisher herself? MacLaine as the spotlight hogging mom walks away with the movie ironically. Adds both grit and sparkle. Otherwise it is hard to really care as no aspect (addiction, maternal rivalry, choppy love life) is drilled into deep enough to hit a payload.
Samuel Bodin directs Lizzy Caplan, Woody Normn and Antony Starr in this horror flick where an anxious young lad begins to realise all is not perfect about his house or family.
If you, like me, wished that Halloween III: Season Of the Witch was a smash and every year we got a Carpenter and Hill produced autumnal themed anthology release then Cobweb might be right up your street / a picture from a parallel universe. This is a really sincere, cartoonish, twisty pressure cooker of a mystery, set over the unmistakable last week of the October. The cast sells all the zigs and zags especially a game Lizzy Caplan who gorgeously recreates an early Sixties psychobiddy unravelling to a T. The visuals are creepily indelible, the second half has sequences that will unnerve and blindside you. The movie is smart enough to introduce some deserving victims the moment the cat is out of the bag and the slow burn is allowed to become a murder inferno. As unpleasant 2023 surprises go Cobweb is on a par with Talk To Me. Whereas that release is a little classier, this proves a lot more generous. Only the reveal of “the monster”’s actual form disappoints and that CGI mishmash is merely a few fleeting shots before the close.
Adrian Lyne directs Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson and Robert Redford in this erotic drama where a rich man upturns a happy marriage by offering the down-on-his-luck husband a million dollars to fuck his beautiful wife.
A movie that does grow on me with every revisit. I think back as a young teenager cracking one out to it in my room the flick lost me when it starts out with ludicrous shot of Moore and Harrelson with their braces. These days it feels like the last release of the 1980s, mixing the opulent wealth porn of high concept with the pragmatic harder choices that adult cinema of my preferred decade. Because this isn’t a thriller or a film with an obvious villain (thanks to Warren Beatty demanding rewrites on a part he ultimately turned down) there’s no palpable moment of yuppie catharsis. Watching the plot unknot itself via personal growth rather than knives and rooftops is messy but unpredictable. Unpredictable is growing rarer and rarer so I’m giving Indecent Proposal a glossy if qualified pass. Moore has never looked so on the money.
Dizzy Gillespie, Etta James and Bobby “Blue” Bland star in this video assemblage of footage from the famous Jazz Festival.
A DVD I borrowed from Edinburgh Libraries in the hope it would somehow match the perfect Jazz On A Summer’s Day. This is far less cinematic. Most of the live performances are pretty awesome but often truncated mid song. Which would be just about acceptable if there weren’t also a few painful sequences of the organiser’s awkwardly rattling through dull introductions to fascinating artists. Let the music speak for itself, man.
5
Perfect Double Bill: Ella Fitzgerald – Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 1975 (1975)
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 