James Mangold directs John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Ray Liotta in this murder mystery where bodies start dropping at a rainswept motel.
What was a really terrific one-watcher back in the day doesn’t really seem to have much else to it on a belated revisit. There’s a top genre friendly cast here, a solid nighttime look and nice kills but nothing really snaps into focus beyond that big reveal.
John Woo directs Nicolas Cage, John Travolta and Joan Allen in this action thriller where mortal enemies, an obsessed FBI agent and a horny terrorist for hire, swap faces and exploit each other’s lives.
“LIKE A PEEEE-EACH!” Joins Ronin and Tomorrow Never Dies as one of the last great hurrahs of the stunts, pyrotechnics and model-work orientated OTT action extravaganzas. Minimal obvious CGI is deployed and the movie has aged all the better for it. The carnage is greedily indulged in some true genre high points of big budget violence and destruction. The reason this (almost) adult blockbuster has stood the test of time though is a committed focus on the dramatic and comedic elements. Woo and the script give unparalleled play to domestic and workplace scenes where these two blurred but opposed characters ease into the other’s life. Much humour, tension and moments of acting weirdness emerge from this immoderation towards the emotional drama of the piece. This surely has to be the most improvised and dialogue heavy release to feature a Humvee playing chicken with a private jet? Who expected a movie where a SWAT team are shotgunned on their abseil ropes like piñatas to have so much Shakespearean import?
Cage naturally runs with the ball, his schizophrenic brand of overacting suiting the mania and unhinged state of whichever part he plays. His unrestrained, fully immersed style turf up so many unforgettable moments of cool, camp and crazed. Travolta holds his own, though his doughy face and unbroken vocal range aren’t quite the match for Cage pumping his performance out of every pore of his body. Woo crowbars his beloved doves, slo-mo, sentimentality and stand offs into the mix. The duality theme of the piece harks back to The Killer nicely.
You do feel a little exhausted by it all. It is a truly overwhelming film. It is so packed with incident that there are awesome moments nobody ever talks about; the erratic teasing editing when a faceless Castor Troy awakes from his coma, the strangely tender goodbye kiss between Nick Cassevetes and Gina Gerson’s sibling psychos. Did Castor intend to shoot Archer’s son at the beginning? Did he really – REALLY – think middle aged John Travolta was just riding a carousel alone on his day off? Makes Con Air feel like Bergman. I’ve sat down to Face / Off many times, in all the differing viewing formats, and never once felt like I’ve ever had the full energy to absorb the big speedboat finale. One day I might just watch that set piece separately and enjoy it in its own right.
Gerald Thomas directs Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey and Hattie Jacques in British comedy where a group of young nurses and male patients butt head in a strictly run ward.
Not the best example of its form but the crisp black and white cinematography and a decade defined air of restraint makes this seem a little more sophisticated than later entries. None of the eventual regulars are given quite enough screen time to steal the show but equally the ropier faces can’t outstay their welcome under this scattergun system. Hawtrey has some enthusiastic little moments as the overly expressive simp enthralled by the hospital radio being pumped through his bedside headphones. Featuring brief appearances from Shirley Eaton, Jill Ireland, Leslie Phillips and the always wonderfully off key Irene Handl.
Clint Eastwood directs himself, Meryl Streep and Annie Corley in this romance where a farmer’s wife and a National Geographic photographer share a brief week in love that defines their lives.
Streep’s Italian accent in this is pretty iffy. She sounds like Bela Lugosi! That aside, this is a gentle yet classy affair.
Peyton Reed directs Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku and Gabrielle Union in this teen comedy about a cheerleading competition.
Surface level – this is just an average teen movie, very much of its era, with enough dirty dialogue for the adults, enough colour and energy for the kids. But it is very, very rewatchable. Dunst is probably the main reason for this – her lead role really plays towards her long since abandoned mainstream star strengths. Yet I can’t think of any movie that gets the unlikely combination of sweet yet salty, sexy yet sunny quite so perfectly blended.
Milos Foreman directs F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce and Elisabeth Berridge in this classic period drama following the one sided rivalry between genius composer Mozart and infuriated court hack Salieri.
Transports you to another world and celebrates everything decadent and groundbreaking about Mozart’s work. Telling his rise and fall from Salieri’s jealous and conniving point of view is the masterstroke – F. Murray Abraham runs with a gift of a role. This is an evocative production that completely enthrals you. Tom Hulce’s central performance is a little too stagey and forced… and the whole shebang is loooong. But sticking with it reaps many rewards. One of the few Eighties Oscar darlings that stands the test of time, Foreman gets the balance right between playfulness and prestige, madness and measuredness.
Éric Rohmer directs Emmanuelle Chaulet, Francois-Eric Gendron and Sophie Renoir in this French romantic comedy where two new friends wobble over which handsome man is right for them.
I overdosed a little on Rohmer over lockdown… can’t say though I ever really settled into his painstakingly sloooow rhythm or fully appreciated his low key humanistic sex farces. I know people love his films but with one or two exceptions I’m just not getting it? This was, however, one of those exceptions. A perfectly pleasant gentle, wordy rom-com. Very middle class. Very “new town”. Very C&A. I especially appreciate his commitment to getting beautiful young French ingenues into swimsuits in the shortest amount of runtime possible.
Alan J. Pakula directs Kevin Kline, Kevin Spacey and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in this yuppie in peril thriller where the mysterious new neighbours encourage the boring nice folks next door into insurance fraud… then wife swapping… then HOLY SHIT!
A batshit mental forgotten thriller but not a particularly good time. Nobody behaves or reacts in a way that could be construed as believable. The plot developments jerk forward out of nowhere, leaving you discombobulated rather than engaged. There is so much we are not being shown, or that is given so little screen time, you feel something is being obscured in the service of some ultimate revelation… but eventually it just all sums up to an uzi gun battle. Really? An uzi!? Lessons learnt: 1) That is the very worse way to do a wife swap. Tantamount to rape. 2) Spacey cooks here. Though many of his lines of dialogue have taken on darkly hilarious double meanings since #metoo. 3) This feels like an awful parodic rehash of American Beauty at times, so weird it came seven years earlier. 4) I had to google whether femme fatale Rebecca Miller was Marilyn Monroe’s daughter. She isn’t. She could be. 5) Erotic thrillers should have at least some nudity in them. All in all; A cheesy car crash that I reckon those involved thought might be in the running for Academy Award buzz. Hubristic but never boring.
Martin Scorsese directs Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette and John Goodman in this bleak black comedy where an insomniac NY paramedic can’t seem to save anyone over three traumatic shifts.
A swan song. The very last time Scorsese worked on this kinda claustrophobic urban character study scale. Everything over the last twenty years has been pointedly epic and sprawling. I guess The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street have the same satirical black heart. And Shutter Island is as self contained and geographically limited – but the intention there is very much grander and more baroque. Bringing Out The Dead feels like the last gasp of young punkish Marty who trapped us in his city, his religion, his paranoia, his addictions, his night. No one else harnesses the night like Scorsese – the moon under water becomes the neon lost in a dirty puddle. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver. After Hours. A character study, a working grind, an existential hell. I wonder if he and Paul Schrader ever have a light conversation? Make small talk?
The acting is pretty exciting. All of it coming at you in discordant speeds and volume. Cage is worn out, subdued… we don’t really see him this internalised that often. The Schrader written narration probably is a misstep. A part of the formula from previous successes that doesn’t need to be carried over in this instance. Patricia Arquette feels ethereally out of time with her Catholic schoolgirl look and whispered wails of dialogue. John Goodman, Ving Rhames and Tom Sizemore bring the colour as Cage’s three alternating ambulance partners. Each one tramples over the lead’s neuroses and sanity with their big parasitic personalities. After being set up as such the agent of chaos in his brief appearances before the third act, it feels a shame we din’t get more of Sizemore’s violent psycho, Captain Tom. By that point the narrative is shaking loose its structure to do artier things. The background ensemble has people you’ve never logged doing fascinating work; Afemo Omilami, Mary Beth Hurt and early appearances from The Wire’s Sonja Sohn and Michael K. Williams. A pantomime of bad behaviour.
You could see it as raking over old ground… it was marketed somewhat bluntly as Taxi Driver in an ambulance… ER meets Catch-22. It works best as a very dark comedy. The second half has issues. Scorsese struggles to find anything new to say after a rush of setting up imagery and moods. He ends up repeating motifs until the movie just shuts down and dozes off. But that first hour now feels like a last hurrah. We are running red lights, popping meds and blasting Johnny Thunders. Scorsese might have matured but I haven’t. This is the cinema I want. I’d take the relentless and manic first half over a thousand Kunduns and Silences. You can’t put your arms around a memory!
Paul Thomas Anderson directs Adam Sandler, Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman in this romantic comedy between a lonely man with anger issues and an eye for the loophole in a deal, and the woman who may be stalking him.
Most cineastes approach Punch-Drunk Love as a Paul Thomas Anderson project. After making critically lauded ensemble pieces that impressed with their prestigious casts, scope, emotional intelligence and technical mastery he decided to change gears and make a minor romance movie starring the least respected comedy star on the A-List. From Jerry Lewis to Bill Murray, auteurs normally wait until big name clowns reach late middle age and are well past their box office hay day before they begin casting them in their artier projects. Yet Punch-Drunk Love was made at the height of Sandler’s youthful box office ascendancy, at a point when he seemed to represent everything lunk headed and unsophisticated about general multiplex going tastes. You’d struggle to find a critic who appreciated his mode of cinema in 2002. I’m sure most contemporary write ups of this great movie were written through the snide filter of a tyro director utilising one of Hollywood rawer and less refined resources. Slumming it. A quirk. A prank. An ironic self imposed obstruction.
And I call bullshit on that… As someone who enjoyed Sandler ever since Airheads, and concedes he has tasteless duds like Billy Madison and The Waterboy for every comedy success, Punch-Drunk Love plays out a lot more like an Adam Sandler release than it does a PTA work of art. Sandler plays a henpecked, overwhelmed man child barely in control of his emotions and hostility. A veil of forced politeness smothers a bubbling volcano of justified fury in every interaction. The film is at its best when you can see all of his Barry Egan’s button getting pressed and the irritation of other humans not playing by the rules just rip off his mask, a hundred little consecutive unthinking pulls a minute. As with all good Sandler stories he eventually beats the system, gets the dream girl and puts the bullies in their place. It has a cast of quirky comedy insiders and indie darlings; Hoffman, Luis Guzmán, Mary Lynn Rajskub or Robert Smigel wouldn’t seem out of place in the regular ensemble of any Adam Sandler vehicle. The movie has the pleasingly garish colour scheme of a kid’s telly show or a Nineties toy shop aisle. The soundtrack repurposes forgotten songs from the Eighties (OK… I’ll confess…that’s a stretch as Altman, Nilsson and Shelley Duvall’s He Needs Me from the Popeye soundtrack isn’t exactly a dated banger from The Police or Thompson Twins). Sandler even spends a portion of the shoot at a holiday resort and fans know if he can crowbar a tropical beano into the middle act for his family and friends, he’ll definitely pick that script over countless other. The only way this is a departure from the usual Sandler template is that he never looks at camera, a self aware nod lifted from Eddie Murphy, when plot developments break even the broadest borders of incredulity. That, and Rob Schneider doesn’t cameo. The sincerity and magical realism and near psychotic slapstick rages that define a Sandler hit are all here. Present and correct! In 50 years time will people studying his surviving films even see this as such a huge departure or a risk?
Sure… Paul Thomas Anderson plays around with the mix a little, I personally think the director is at his best observing a closed-in anti-romance like here or Phantom Thread. The unresolved mysteries of the harmonium, Barry’s underused ability to fly and the hypercolour sugar sweet moments of narrative blackout all feel like they belong in a Coen Brothers movie or a Paul Auster novel. But if they did happen in a Dennis Dugan or Frank Coraci directed comedy you wouldn’t blink or ask to speak to the manager.
There’s a lot of looseness and openness that makes Punch-Drunk Love fascinating. Emily Watson’s Lena Leonard is an obtuse and mysterious fantasy woman. She shows flashes where she is just as fucked up and touched as Sandler’s Barry. You can imagine an entire parallel film where her whole unseen side of the romance could produce similar moments of primary colour tension, mania and overwhelming idiosyncrasy. Then there are motifs that become more apparent on repeated viewings. Why does so much of the narrative take place in liminal spaces? Alleyways, hallways, lobbies, airport walkways. Why are these characters trapped in spatial limbo, restless without destination? Is that why Barry explodes in toilets, phone boxes, kitchens and warehouses? Is he most dangerous when cornered, always needing an entrance and an exit to keep moving? Does he have to see the loophole? And what’s with all the subtle references to Superman?!
This stood as Sandler’s finest work until the recent, but equally frazzled and beautiful, Uncut Gems. He has so many great films in his back catalogue now ranging from the popular rom coms to SFX blockbusters to the genuinely experimental. Isn’t it time people started to talking about Brooklyn’s most successful funny man in the same conversations as Keaton, Sellers, Martin and Carrey? Or are the snooty middle classes thrown that he still sees the value in a Hubie Halloween or a Murder Mystery when people just wanna have Friday night pleasures? Because I can tell you no matter how put upon and soul destroyed he is here, or violent or deranged his reaction proves, we as an audience member are completely on his side and within his mindset. Every step of the way. Not many actors have achieved that through an entire movie.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 