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.
Guillermo del Toro directs Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara and Willem Dafoe in this noir nightmare where an amoral carnival worker learns the grift of cold reading people and puts it to nefarious use.
All seeing eyes. Intricate period production design. Beautiful freaks. Monstrous humanity. Portentous monologues. Noses punched off faces. Massive circles looping around to meet their fate. I prefer del Toro’s doomed nightmares rather than his sentimental fairytales. Give me the ornate bleakness of The Devil’s Backbone and Crimson Peak over the slightly sickly sweet and naive Pan’s Labyrinth or The Shape Of Water. People losing their souls and revealing the beast inside… yum! This is probably his most erotic and adult work. There’s no virgin child here. Mara’s fragile Molly might have a sad innocence to her but she’s a more sexualised figure than Sally Hawkins or Spanish tweens ever could or should be. Toni Collette and Cate Blanchett are framed and lit sensually, their immaculate costumes poured onto them like glue. This was greenlit with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead and as much as I love him I’m kinda glad the lumbering Cooper picked up the role instead. Stanton Carlisle needs to be a blank space, a jar with no contents. He barely talks in the first act, anything he says later on is cribbed and rehearsed. It is role for a bulk, not a brain. And Leo already trod similar waters in Shutter Island anyway, an oblivious man being pulled towards an ultimate truth he will not like the weight or look of. There probably should be more circus sideshow stuff throughout but the second half shifts to an urban con that is equally as fascinating. That massive circle motif ain’t playing, it overwhelms. We take a long, unpredictable route back to the start but we know exactly how this will end from the earliest moments, just not how exactly we will get there. Rian Johnson’s house composer Nathan Johnson jumps ship and does a perfect Carter Burwell pastiche which suits del Toro’s mournful vision to a tee. Masterful, elegiac, nasty.
I think I’m not overstating it when I say the film fan community was a little surprised when Quentin Tarantino proclaimed this solid actioner as one of his Top 3 movies of the last decade recently. I mean there’s the Tony Scott connection… there’s the Rosario Dawson connection… and we know he is a self declared fan of both Pine and Speed. Yet most people wouldn’t remember Unstoppable if they were asked to list the best movies of its own release year, let alone for an entire decade. Suddenly Tarantino acolytes were scanning every frame, checking to see if we missed out on subtle shots of ladies bare feet. But… no… this is nothing more and nothing less than a good efficient action movie. The old / young buddy movie arc between Washington and Pine works nicely. The anti-corporate America attitude is not too heavy handed and well played. The whole thing unsurprisingly has a relentless pace. The stunts are decent. It is quite rewatchable. The only negative beyond a lack of ambition and originality is some of the set pieces emerge from left of field with zero set-up. In all honesty, there are far more wanky movies that have been over praised. So why shouldn’t the nippy and utilitarian Unstoppable be part of the “Cinema’s Finest” conversation?
Alain Resnais directs Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada and Bernard Fresson in this French New Wave romance set in a rebuilt Hiroshima.
Full of gorgeous, unforgettable shots. The first twenty minutes are hard going as we are shown documentary footage of the scarred survivors of the nuclear fallout intercut with a pair of naked bodies intertwined. It would be an injustice to say the movie settles after that, it keeps playing with time and memory, but it becomes more palatable. Two handsome lovers, with different lingering but fading traumas from World War II, walk the streets of a city only recently levelled. It is knowingly pretentious for long swathes but the beauty and the psychological grit of it wins out. I’m struggling to think of any other New Wave movie that engages with world history quite so confidently. Some solid stray cat action also occurs between the angst and yearning.
8
Perfect Double Bill: Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Samuel Fuller directs Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley and Michael Grant in this melodrama where a prostitute tries to lead a decent life in a hypocritical town.
A shock every 30 minutes. This has a tabloid frankness and mode. It can be a little histrionic and obvious at times. Towers is a class act and the good girls and bad women who orbit her all look knockout. The darker themes are pure exploitation. Fuller conjures up some fantastic compositions (one involving Kelly’s shadow as she talks about her past is perfect) yet there’s little spoken here that rings true. I reckon David Lynch loves this, it feels very very Twin Peaks / Blue Velvet adjacent.
Gregory Hoblit directs Denzel Washington, John Goodman and Embeth Davidtz in this supernatural thriller where an executed serial killer turns out to be a body hopping demon.
Better than I remember. The visuals are very Se7en inspired, the fantastic hook leads to an alright twist. It feels very mid to late Nineties. Maybe that of-its-era twist ending is what let’s this down slightly. It means the last act is happier moving towards a relatively guessable outcome rather than milking all the tension that the villain’s powers gift it. We only get one inspired chase where Davidtz is imperilled as a conga line of swaps chases her down a busy street. The one second watch bonus is trying to guess when certain characters are possessed. On first watch one assumes the body hopping happens just once to each host but once you know that “Azazel” can move back and forth, and does so playfully, the fun is working in what scenes are we less obviously in the company of the killer. The Rolling Stones “Time Is On My Side” is put to memorable use and there’s a rollicking support cast that includes Donald Sutherland, Elias Koteas and James Gandolfini.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 