Sam Peckinpah directs Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw and Ernest Borgnine in this action road comedy where a group of truckers begin protesting on the roads after getting a raw deal from the cops.
Bar fights. Sexy hitchhikers. Police brutality. This would have been marketed as a family movie back in the day. There’s a certain good ole boy bonhomie that is effective and some truly chaotic vehicle stunts. Feels a million light years away from what kids and adults get spoonfed as blockbusters now. The political and social commentary aspects are done better in things like Being There or The Sugarland Express but at least they are still present… you’d never imagine such a subplot in a Fast and Furious’s movie. Yet for an auteur film based around a novelty country song this is full of spunk and can be surprisingly hard hitting. I hear Peckinpah didn’t fully direct this one (one for them), allowing James Coburn to earn some behind camera experience while he went on coke and booze benders in his caravan. Fair enough, doesn’t show.
Kinji Fukasaku directs Bunta Sugawara, Hiroki Matsukata and Nobuo Kaneko in this Japanese faux documentary following the post-war power struggles of a new generation of yakuza in Hiroshima.
Lurid and relentless. Like watching a “Previously on The Yakuza Papers” recap that lasts a daunting 90 minutes. There’s plenty of violence and some likeable character do somehow emerge from the sprawl. But could I watch 8 further entries of this and keep my bearings at this pace of storytelling? Probably not.
John N. Smith directs Michelle Pfeiffer, George Dzundza and Courtney B. Vance in this high school drama based around the true story of a former Marine who takes control of a class of delinquents.
Gangster’s Paradise by Coolio is iconic. The movie it was attached to is pretty rote and unconvincing. If you want to see this subject matter handled well see Season 4 of The Wire. Michelle Pfeiffer holds her own among the musty, mawkish material but the best scene is where an old black lady puts her sexy “white saviour” ass in its place. A surprisingly profitable hit back in its day.
Mike Newall directs Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett and Ian Holm in this British crime biopic of Ruth Ellis – the glamorous but unstable working class single mother who became the last woman to be sentenced to death in the U.K..
A wonderful central performance by Richardson in her movie debut – sexy, fragile and combative. Newall’s direction shows visual promise making full use of a few seedy sets, an attractive cast and the occasional impactful close-up. Can’t think of anything else he’s done that looks quite this good.
Krzysztof Kieślowski directs Bogusław Linda, Tadeusz Łomnicki and Marzena Trybała in this Polish arthouse fable which shows three different outcomes of a student’s life, dependent on whether he catches the train he is running for.
Yeah I get it. But often overly grim and depressing. Good to know that whichever timeline we follow, a different Eastern European goddess will lower her standards and start sleeping with this unspectacular dude.
Wolfgang Petersen directs Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman in this ensemble thriller where an Ebola-like contagion enters the US and a maverick USAMRIID virologist attempts to track and contain the timeline of the virus.
The deadly monkey movie. I had read Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone the year before and this rival project (of a similar but fictional outbreak) got into production first thus negating a straight adaptation with Jodie Foster and Robert Redford at the time. The basic concept of a disease that liquifies your organs and evolves how it spreads is ripe with cinematic potential. I remember this being an armrest gripping blast back on release. Recent Warner Bros smash The Fugitive and Seventies disaster movies are definite influences in format and tone. However it does suffer from a baggy middle section that doesn’t quite lean into the mass hysteria of such a plague overwhelming a large township. And Hoffman, bless him, is out of his comfort zone as an army colonel. This is a solid man of action role which has Harrison Ford written all over the part. Beyond those niggles, there’s plenty of chases and gleefully unnecessary sprouts of scale. ‘When in doubt bang a helicopter in’ is the movie’s flamboyant creed. Donald Sutherland approaches his reckless general role with relish – a real boo hiss antagonist. And the prominent monkey stuff, the cutest carrier of death on legs, is handled with surprising class.
Ermanno Olmi directs Rutger Hauer, Anthony Quayle and Dominique Pinon in this arthouse parable where a drunken homeless man is lent 200 francs by a pious stranger, under the promise he’ll repay it to a local church when he is back on his feet.
Feels very much like a novella turned into a feature length film. There is a certain simplicity and literary pretension to this that will either lose you or seduce you. I liked this – despite a certain ambient predictability. It is nice seeing Hauer in a serious, full fat role… even if in my heart of hearts I’d much rather see him kick ass and take names in some substandard action B-Movie that wouldn’t even make my top 10 for him.
Herbert Wise directs Adrian Rawlins, Bernard Hepton and David Daker in this horror classic – about a haunting in an Edwardian coastal town.
I was just a little too young and way too horror averse as a child to watch this on its original broadcast on ITV. So it must have been the sole Channel 4 repeat in the nineties when I first experienced this. I’m pretty sure it was programmed then under the billing as something like “the TV movie that terrified a nation”. And though there are minimal shocks and zero gore in this adaptation of Susan Hill’s chilling novella – it works magnificently as an exercise in tension and dread. The few appearance of the titular phantom are impactful, they genuinely shake you if you are engaged with the story. Sure, the restored DVD we just watched somehow imbues just a little too much clarity to Pauline Moran’s spectre. She works better as a grainy shadow glimpsed on a smaller, less defined cathode-ray television screen. Yet the entire milieu of the story is full of paranoia, secrets and isolation. The market town of Crythin Gifford is an inhospitable place where even the kindest souls have been tainted by the tragedy and the curse The Woman represents. Fog rolls off the banks, screams of anguish echo from the past, pathways to safety are consumed by the sea, prejudice informs the callous attitudes of the locals, the children giggle in flocks at funerals. It is an eerie, depressing setting with little sanctuary. Only a brave little hound called Spider seems equipped to handle a week existing there and when he abandons poor Mister Kidd (and us) it feels like the final nail in the coffin for our collective sanity. Even beyond the air of persistent foreboding, there seems to be a greater context of trauma hinted at – the issues of class upheaval and the after-effects of the Great War inveigle their way into the roots of many interactions. This is markedly a society still silently reeling from the shock and violence of the early 20th century and the references to what has occurred in the recent past are tantalising. Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black is one of the great base genre works. By that I mean a work of genre so pure it feels like the definitive text that all other works in a genre are variations of. As haunted house stories go it may not have the twists of The Turn Of the Screw, the mania of The Shining or the relentlessness of The Conjuring but it’s simplicity and traditionalism is matched possibly only by Robert Wise and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting. The book has made for a great West End play and this TV movie… the Hammer / Harry Potter version has its fans… but I very much doubt that’ll be the last adaptation of the great scary story. Every generation surely must spend their own week digging through the secrets of Eel Marsh House.
Clint Eastwood directs himself, Eduardo Minet and Natalia Traven in this road movie where a decrepit but nice former rodeo star crosses the border to kidnap his boss’ son and a fighting cock.
So boring. Slight and with some of the most “functional” acting we’ve seen lurking in a decent budgeted studio movie in years. Please don’t let this gentle muddle be Clint’s last. Let him go out on a Gran Torino or a The Mule.
Paul Schrader directs Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish and Tye Sheridan in this crime drama where an ex-con makes his money edging casinos using the tricks he learned during his incarceration.
The life of an obsessed puritan – journal keeping, extreme behaviour, strict personal code. We are in typical Schrader outsider territory. I notice the marketing materials completely missed out the massive Abu Ghraib subplot – this dominates the movie as it pushes further ahead. You forget you are watching a “The Hustler” style gambling flick long before the close.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 