Ti West directs Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki and Kevin Bacon in this erotic thriller where adult video sensation Maxine Minx tries to break into the Hollywood mainstream while her violent past is stalking her.
A “And then this happened” story. Lots of incident but not a particularly satisfying plot. The ending in particular lacks tension, action and agency for our coked up heroine. Instead of the pure splatter grinder of X’s finale, MaXXXine’s third act has a sense of “will this do” and then a meh gore gag. There is better stuff in the first half. A grimy neon resurrection of De Palma and Giallo that is truly heartfelt. Goth smashing her audition with composure giving way to near feral ambition. An icky sequence involving a gloopy head casting. As a closer to a great horror trilogy MaXXXine is a little haphazard and disappointing. But I would watch again for the always welcome Goth and the VHS sleaze era homages.
Jim Gillespie directs Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe in this slasher where four teens cover up a hit-and-run accident only for their crime to come back to haunt them a year later.
Not a patch on Scream. But then again what is? This has grown on me over the years. Such a strong concept. Buffy is the only decent actress out of the core four but nobody has been cast for their believability. This is a movie where hotness rules the roost. Logic can go take a walk too. A couple more kills are needed but the final three set pieces are all pretty groovy.
7
Perfect Double Bill: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)
John Landis and Mark Molloy direct Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, Bronson Pinchot, John Ashton, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Kevin Bacon in this threequel and long-awaited legacy sequel to megastar making / mega hit original where a Detroit cop solves a crime amongst the rich and shameless of Los Angeles.
John Landis knew the script wasn’t there when he started shooting Beverly Hills Cop 3. Yet he had worked with Eddie twice before and knew his star’s penchant for fast talking improvisation could switch the dud into a hit. Only Murphy turned up on set with different ideas. He felt Foley was older and wiser now. He would take the cartoonish mystery set in a theme park seriously. There’d be less trademark wisecracking. Which leaves us with a Beverly Hills Cop movie where Axel loses various interactions in the first act. Bruv can’t even finesse himself into Wonderworld for free. There’s something so wrong about seeing Foley open up his wallet and pay for something. With Murphy subdued, everyone else ramps up the hammy daftness. The filmmaking style is flat, textureless and the editing way too slow to cover up weak gags and soft action set pieces. Hitchcock always wanted to make a paranoid thriller set at Disneyland. This is the closest we got to that fertile concept. The first half has two decent set-pieces. A sport car falls apart as Murphy chases some bad guys in the Detroit prologue. And then our hero saves some kids from a defective ride, eighty feet up in the air. OK… so the green screen and the stunt work is kinda blatant but this five minutes of thrills is actually pretty ambitious. I reckon if it had one of those classic Harold Faltermeyer themes playing over it we’d consider the rescue a franchise highlight. The movie itself is hard to defend, a half hearted cash-in. Yet as a fan there’s just enough forgivable content that for me it doesn’t stink out the box set.
30 years in the offing Axel F is an improvement. Formulaic and nostalgic as fuck… but made with a slick expertise. Murphy carries everything creaky and unoriginal on his shoulders. He shines. All the returning players get welcome bits of business. Every familiar piece of music associated with the series is resurrected. There isn’t one trademark demolition derby set piece but four. Snow plough, meter maid cart, helicopter AND truck full of statues. Spoilt. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a little wasted as Murphy’s new partner but all in all this had me smiling constantly from studio logo to “Trust Me” freeze frame.
Below are two scores that are the most generous I have given in my near decade doing this diary. Yet in spite of their gaping inherent flaws both flicks tickle me thoroughly, have me laughing gutturally at both Eddie’s unparalleled A-list charisma and the bursts of blockbuster excess. Most Saturday nights, that’s all I truly want from an entertainment.
Michelangelo Antonioni directs Monica Vitti, Richard Harris and Carlo Chionetti in this Italian arthouse drama where a rich housewife is losing her sanity.
The fruit is ashen grey. The streets are deserted. The countryside littered with factories, plants and technological protrusions. The workers are on strike, the 1%ers rip away the walls from their shacks in futile destructive decadence, disease comes with global exploitation. Sounds familiar. Whatever prescient idea or ideas Antonioni was trying to say in 1964 now comes across as blunt and unsophisticated. Vitti looks stunning but who want to appreciate her beauty in such interminable bleakness. An apocalypse of pretentious boredom.
Roberto Rossellini directs Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani and Marcello Pagliero in this Italian Neo-Realist drama depicting the resistance and suffering of ordinary people in Nazi-occupied Rome during World War II.
I haven’t watched this since my Film Studies A-Level class over 25 years ago. A* btw. It hit harder this time. I could see the poetic humanity in many of the scenes. Made in the ruins of post-war Rome, immediately after the withdrawal of the German forces, with a cast consisting mainly of non-actors. Rossellini invented a sub-genre. Rome Open City is also a movie with a moment so powerful, so memorable, so iconic that you misremember that being the end of the movie. There’s a whole other act of torture, oppression and gentle defiance after the “big scene”. A work of art but also very entertaining. Rossellini knows when to inject some humour and action into all his didactic intent. Immortally powerful for a film made on the fly with scrap ends of celluloid.
James Bridges directs John Travolta, Jamie Lee Curtis and Anne De Salvo in this romance set around the lives of a Rolling Stone journalist and an aerobics instructor.
When I wrote about gritty, sexed up Travolta vehicle Urban Cowboy earlier this year I covered the trend of films based on magazine articles. Well, here is a flop movie about a magazine article that recreates the investigation of the magazine article and is often set around the Rolling Stone magazine offices with a prominent role for the sitting editor playing a composite of himself and again starring John Travolta. And none of that is anywhere near as fascinating as Jamie Lee Curtis conducting crowds of people in DayGlo lycra to thrust their hips for endless workout scenes. These sequences are cheesy and hilarious. But also very sexy. Like Bollywood musical numbers they are a substitute for depictions of hardcore intimacy and physical seduction. And I loved them. Not that the plot looks away from sex… it is a very ribald movie. Just all over the shop about what it wants to say about promiscuity. And also journalistic integrity. But it knows what it wants to say about aerobics. And Jamie Lee Curtis doing aerobics. These things are arousing, cinematic, spectacular. If the movie was just two hours of Wanda gyrating her gusset at a hot and bothered Travolta I might love it. He is the focus though and it isn’t the movie star’s best showing acting wise. Away from the workouts Curtis is strong. She bring a real nuanced, sympathetic performance. Shame that the movie around her great turn is so poorly defined.
Wim Wenders directs Rüdiger Vogler, Yella Rottländer and Elisabeth Kreuzer in this road movie where a German journalist travelling home from New York finds a young girl dumped into his journey.
Like all of Wenders’ oeuvre there actually isn’t a whole lot here. In the blanks you read deeper meaning about parenthood, responsibility, alienation, lost culture, urban beauty. So art in the best way. No explanation, open to interpretation. I think what Wenders does in these road movies, his slice of life musings is a real antidote. A tonic even for a confessed genre slut like me. See also Jarmusch and Hartley.
Kim Jee-woon directs Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun and Jung Woo-sung in this Korean fantasy western where three men go after each other and a coveted map.
Should be right up my street but I found myself easily distracted from it. The action set pieces seemed to go on and on and on. Even though some of the kinetics were very clever it became a bit of a visual din. Will try again at some point.
Chang Cheh directs Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien and Philip Kwok in this martial arts movie where a student is assigned a task by his master to find out which of his five peers has turned evil.
Colourful murder mystery which I did not have the concentration span to follow. Might have caught me on the wrong day but I took very little in beyond an elaborate torture sequence.
James Ivory directs James Wilby, Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves in this Edwardian period drama where gay relationships cross class lines.
Not my bag. The gay content still feels a bit closeted and coy. There’s minimal joy. The acting is very stuffy, though Grant delivers. The whole endeavour feels trapped in aspic.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 