More romantic than Arnie, more sensitive than Bruce, wilder than Clint. Here’s an action movie star who always delivered in my teens, whose directorial career is as enviable and unique as any great auteur.
Bryan Singer directs Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin and Ian McKellen in this Marvel superhero adventure that introduces a near future world of mutants with unique powers and the human society that rejects them.
The general consensus on this franchise starter is it is more a prologue used to establish all the players for future entries than a fully fledged movie in its own right. All I know is I’ve had an absolute blast each and every time I’ve watched it. Bizarrely me and my mum went to see it together at the cinema on opening weekend. I think we wanted to go do something while I was visiting back from Edinburgh. The brevity of it all is very appealing. The storytelling is so fat free and confident. The script feels gently wittier and more emotionally astute than its peers. Magneto, Rogue and especially Wolverine are given neatly iconic introductions. Singer does an excellent job marshalling his busy but talented cast and bringing some real world grit to an adaptation that could have easily been a day-glo hyper colour car crash. Instead, with a palette of leather blacks and varnished browns, he pre-empts Nolan’s Dark Knights by 8 whole years. The fantasy bursts come from a fixed recognisable stance, feet firmly in reality. The smaller scale action finale on the Statue of Liberty is only underwhelming if you need every superhero film to close with a world destroying nebulous vortex. Luckily McKellen’s Magneto is up there with Hackman’s Luthor and Nicholson’s Joker as one of the finest big screen antagonists. You don’t need an alien apocalypse if your villain is this efficient and charismatic. So it doesn’t feel epic or OTT… X-Men 1 still delivers a lot more excitement remaining relatively grounded and compact.
Adam Wingard directs Millie Bobby Brown, Alexander Skarsgård and Brian Tyree Henry in this monster movie where the two titans fight when King Kong leaves the safety of Skull Island to lead a group of scientists to the kingdom of Hollow Earth.
When it is massive lizards and grumpy gorillas scrapping or even just going about their day, I’m in. LET THEM FIGHT!!! The human stuff… plot, exposition, character arcs is given a little too much game time. I came for the bunting not the string. Wingard delivers a film almost as beautiful and almost as chaotically exciting as Godzilla: King of the Monsters. It certainly is the neon pinkest movie I’ve ever seen. Kong for Best Actor 2022!
Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz direct Janelle Monáe, Jack Huston and Jena Malone in this suspense movie where modern day black Americans find themselves captured as slaves on a pre-Civil War plantation.
The opening half an hour is genuinely unsettling. We watch the horrors of American slavery replayed and note the few needle skips that suggest we maybe are not in the 1850s as would initially seem to be the case. What happens after we leave the plantation is pretty uninspired. Janelle Monáe is saddled with a character who can’t help but do the wrong thing every time she has a shot at freedom, and eventually her continued survival just does not ring true. It also doesn’t help that Gabourey Sidibe (usually very watchable) is playing perhaps one of the rudest, most annoying characters put up there on screen as ‘hero’ in a long old time. It is a problem when one of your good guys is less sympathetic than the psychotic kidnapping, raping racists. Wastes a potentially transgressive premise by going down the most predictable, fruitless and stupidest route with minimal excitement. The kinda film that feels like its making a statement about black identity and racial politics but really is just wallowing in cartoon suffering. The production values are strong, I’d give Monáe a second chance in a better movie.
Atsushi Yamatoya directs Yūichi Minato, Miki Watari and Noriko Tatsumi in the Japanese pink film where a hitman must find the yakuza who are holding a businessman’s girl hostage and keep sending him films of her being raped and tortured… I think?
Around 15 years ago, the NFT did a season of Japanese exploitation movies that I gobbled up. Atsushi Yamatoya wrote two of the best features I saw in the retrospective; the already famous Branded to Kill and Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter. The former shares a similar plot and vibe as this film; duelling hitmen, fetishes, lurid desires. The latter was a more obvious pink film: featuring nudity and or sex every 10 minutes. Inflatable Sex Dolls of Wastelands is one of Yamatoya’s rare self directed efforts. The plot is near incomprehensible – a kinda wet dream nightmare that pre-dates 8MM and Anomalisa. There are lurches into surreal horror and traditional hard boiled noir. Some of the imagery has genuine flair to it. But at the end of the day it still just a film that mechanically returns to rape and forced nudity every 10 minutes. While you get lost along its strange and artful back alleys you always find yourself back at the same unpleasant crossroads.
Brian Welsh directs Cristian Ortega, Lorn MacDonald and Laura Fraser in this period youth movie where two disenfranchised Scottish teens go to one of the last illegal raves after the Criminal Justice Bill came into force.
God, this really rubbed me up the wrong way! I was exactly the same age as these two plum bellends in 1995 and I can pretty much tell you the lives of such mopey eyed, sweaty, pillheaded dickheads ain’t nothing to celebrate. What a bunch of scumbags. “Ooh… I’m sad.” “Oooh… I’m lairy.” “Ooooh… I’m such a great mate.” This movie actually made me consider that no wonder the government brought such a draconian bill in considering all the petty crime, drunk driving and assaults that occur because of their “good time.” If you are not sure about the bill then don’t worry the script explains it chapter and verse about four increasingly boring times. Had exactly the opposite effect of what a youth rebellion movie should… it is no La Haine or Trainspotting or Small Faces. It made we want to vote fuckin’ Tory. Reach for the lasers so I can kill you with them! I’ll be fair and balanced. It is well shot, the moment the film lurches into colour was predictable but well handled. The soundtrack thumps with house classics. Laura Fraser gives a good performance in a minor role. Maybe I’m just too old for this kind of ‘hedonistic wankers being treated as heroes’ tosh.
Joe Johnston directs Rick Moranis, Amy O’Neill and Marcia Strassman in this kids adventure movie where a suburban inventor accidentally miniaturises the local kids and the squabbling bunch must make their way across the expanse of their backyards.
I remember being taken to this in the summer of 1989 and it was so popular we had to queue an hour before around the Ealing ABC. I only ever had to do that for this and Twins. Holds up surprisingly well. The practical special effects marvel, there’s solid family friendly humour and regular lively set pieces. It means there’s never a dull moment. Re-Animator’s Brian Yunza and Stuart Gordon wrote the original screenplay and you can see their sensibilities rustling beneath the more patented Disney elements. The two conflicting influences work exceedingly well together. This is as close to replicating The Goonies as any family film ever got. The Monster Squad and The Lost Boys were just a little too adult. This actually hits its PG remit bang on target.
David Fincher directs Michael Douglas, Sean Penn and Deborah Kara Unger in this mystery thriller where a sad billionaire signs up for a ‘game’,one that starts to impinge on every element of his solitary life.
Can’t believe I’m about to write far, far less words about a movie I’ve always loved because I’ve spent an entire day on fucking Toys!? Premium hokum. Humbugs and nitpickers need not apply. A really sinister masterful expansion on a Tales of The Unexpected. Fincher’s directorial control on this is truly Hitchcockian. Flawless. The highly improbable level of fakery conjured to make ‘the game’’s machinations convince in many ways is a love letter to big budget filmmaking. Set decorators, well cast extras, convincing supports, squibs and stunts. All the tricks of modern storytelling are employed in the grift, making for an unofficial celebration of such Hollywood illusions. Sometimes you realise the dangers Michael Douglas’ Scrooge Meets Gordon Gecko lead is dropped into aren’t really all that life threatening if he stopped to take a breath and just think things through. But as a twisty turning puzzle that holds up to multiple watches, this is still a class act. Just go with it!
Barry Levinson directs Robin Williams, Joan Cusack and Michael Gambon in this satirical fantasy where a military man takes over the family business of making whimsical playthings.
When I first started this blog the intention was to write essay length history and op-ed pieces on projects exactly like this. Follies that struggled to find their audiences. The misguided productions stories, calamitous releases, their place in history – cinematic and personal. Trying to figure out the internal and external forces that nudge an ambitious film into being a cultural bête noire. Return to Oz.Alien3. Last Action Hero. Over the past six years, the reality is this really has become very much a diary of what I have watched each week. Yet I do seem to devote more words and consideration to the big budget stumbles and wilder swings Hollywood made in my youth.
Barry Levinson’s Toys was a dream project over a decade in the making. Its sensibilities reside in the late Seventies when Levinson was churning out spec screenplays with comedian and then wife Valerie Curtin. His background was in writing for comedy variety shows and getting Mel Brooks’ jokes and ideas hammered down into screenplay form. No studio was interested in Toys when the first, second or third draft was submitted. Levinson broke through as a director with a run of down to earth comedy dramas; Diner, Rain Man, Avalon. He had the critics favour, was an annual Oscar shoo-in and his style was grounded in warm, humanistic reality. Killer box office and prestige meant he could make pretty much any project he wanted by 1990. So he blew the dust off one of his and Curtin’s old unproduced screenplays…
Considered in the wake of Batman and Dick Tracy maybe Toys wasn’t that strange a bet. The Fox executive who greenlit a lavish $50 million dollar budget and every single inch of their studio space to Levinson’s vision was at least playing within the current marketplace. Visualist directors who took their audiences into hyper artificial worlds seemed like THE trend after the emergence of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Neil Jordan, Sam Raimi and even The Coen Brothers. The pre-Jurassic Park Nineties are littered with rubbery, cartoonish mish mashes that abandon all claims to verisimilitude. Francis Ford Coppola gave us his ornate and unhinged Dracula. The gothic slapstick of The Addams Family had exceeded all financial expectations. Even Spielberg gave up, gave in and made his poorest blockbuster: the papier-mâché Hook. Yet Levinson had never really made any overtures to be an iconic world builder until now.
Toys even had a bankable star. Robin Williams, the motor mouthed comedian who made the leap from stand-up to sitcom to A-List. He had won plaudits collaborating with Levinson on Good Morning Vietnam. He somehow charmed the world into making a period film about a school pupil’s suicide into one of the Top 10 money earners of 1989. If audiences’ flocked to see Williams in Dead Poets Society, imagine the stampede for him in a René Magritte inspired pop art extravaganza! Williams as a Wonka-esque genius who has to protect the innocence of imagination and play. Sounds fucking marketable!
And the look of Toys is something to behold. Ferdinando Scarfiotti’s (The Last Emperor) Oscar nominated production design creates a factory floor of gargantuan Pez head deities and smooth Italian futurism. The guts of the factory have ducks crossing synthetic rolling hills instead of corridors, school nativity production cityscapes for communal recreation and closing in walls. As the factory changes purpose it warps ergonomically. The dream world is almost too ordered, coded, built to be abused and rewritten to a more authoritarian ideal. The outside world is deep blue skies and high green grass, occasionally we uncover lost elaborate architecture from a child’s imagination. Like toys abandoned in lustrous lawn of a never ending summer’s day.
Trevor Horn assembles a soundtrack to stir up the wonder. The corporate folk of Enya & Tori Amos sweetens us up, hoping to lull us into a childlike state of arrested development. Levinson said in interviews “We were right on the doorstep of turning this into a musical… We sort of kept a bit of the musical stylization without the musical.” I find the happy workers singing along to pumped-in anthems of conformity and subservience slightly sinister and fascistic myself. Like something from a Lang dystopia painted pastel or Leni Riefenstahl documentary babyfied. When war between the toys finally breaks out whispered warbling gives way to a Frankie Goes to Hollywood revamp, the battle charge of aggressive techno. There are a lot of competing voices here cheering on an ephemeral and misguided vision.
In this cacophony of ideas the humans get overwhelmed. Robin Williams is all but on standby for the first act. His character mourning, the focus on his uncle inheriting Zevo Toys sucks all our attention. Eventually they start to genteelly clash. Williams pranks and undermines the new boss. He shows off practical jokes and inventions; a smoking jacket, virtual reality where the headset is what we would now call 4DX, a fake vomit testing room. The latter sequence contains the unfortunate line “This clearly is the vomit of the white man!” Surprised that wasn’t regurgitated in every eventual negative review. Gambon makes an attention grabbing fist of the villain, where Williams idles. Supporting players like LL Cool J’s ever camouflaged head of security and Robin Wright’s spaced out romantic interest struggle in underwritten, miscast roles. I wonder if agents were fired afterwards?
Joan Cusack is the only performer who bests the ostentatiousness of it all. Her character, Williams’ even kookier sister, has the most effective quirks, lands laughs. The movie’s finest but most disposable sequence has the siblings recreate a full blown MTV music video in a corridor to bamboozle a security camera. Slight spoiler, she turns out to be a literal living doll rather than a dolls clothes designer who lives her work. Even though the most artificial character has the most heart and life, the story never stops to consider how she might feel about the toy armageddon that occurs in the final act. Nobody would predict at the one hour mark that Williams and Cusack would be winding up a warehouse of their father’s inventions to fight a war of attrition with the destructive new designs.
Instead the playthings we are supposed to marvel at and cherish are used as cannon fodder in a toy genocide that seems to be the antithesis of everything that has gone on before it. It makes for a sorta spectacular finale but didn’t sit well with me either as a child or an adult. The movie predicts drone warfare a fair few years before it became commonplace but this stems from the practicalities of marrying up toy manufacture with a lovey dovey, out-of-date anti-establishment vibe rather than any prescience. Using toys as guided weapons really is the only satirical option that satisfies the set-up and vague messaging around the film. Both sides, good and evil, succumb. What would Woody or Buzz think? Toys would actually make a neat double bill with Spielberg’s A.I.. The same uncaring need to manufacture and replace creations with emotions but not stakes is here as in there. It just is one of many concepts touched upon but not explored with any serious robustness.
Overlong with an underwhelming start and distasteful finale, Toys doesn’t really conform to any genre. There is an overload of formless concepts. The basement of the factory houses some kind of vicious sea snake… we never see it clearly but it threatens the leads continually in the final act like the mysterious monster in Lost. Were the SFX unfinished or did Levinson want to retain its mystique or was it just too gruesome for kids? Not that it mattered, a few out of place swears and moments of inappropriate horniness meant this was released with a PG-13 rating anyway. Kids didn’t just not go to see it, their parents were persuaded it wasn’t overly suitable.
Levinson recently stated at a revival film festival “I thought, if we do it in these primary colors and it all looks like it’s happy and fun, but it’s really a dark comedy underneath it, rather than presenting it as a dark comedy.” I don’t know? Toys really feels more like a film for adults who want to pretend they are pre-teens again. It has an immaturity that only the wise will understand. I remember renting it as a 12 year old watching it in my bedroom (no one else in the house was interested) and being bored. And I was a pretty open minded kid. There just wasn’t an obvious market for the finished product as handsome and eccentric as it often was.
Williams would probably be the only factor that might have saved it from a box office drubbing. The first trailer shows no footage of the film. It just has Mork in one of the lush fields riffing to camera about what Toys might be about. Alarm bells should have rang there. If the concept of the film is so unwieldy that the star can’t summarise it to his fanbase and the footage from the film is nowhere to be seen, you might not have a hit on your hands. The second trailer tried to up the more comedy orientated moments of Williams performance (there’s at least enough to fill a two minute montage) and some of that grandstanding production design. Maybe that more trad trailer came too late though. Disney’s Aladdin had been released a mere three weeks earlier and had sold itself on having Williams voice the genie of the lamp. Considered one of his finest entertainments, Aladdin has a slickness and confidence that is the polar opposite of Toys misdirected weirdness. Williams even had a stipulation in his contract with Disney that he would not be the focus of a marketing campaign for Aladdin as it was in competition with his favoured release Toys. When Disney ignored the agreement they had to buy the star a Picasso as an apology before he would work with them again. The damage was done for Toys only hope though… the masses had already got their Robin Williams fix that winter.
The critics were accurate and dismissive. Variety in a contemporary review said “Levinson, a director most at home with slice-of-life portraits relating to his Baltimore roots, tries his hand here at a darkly satiric fable and ends up doing an extremely poor impression of Terry Gilliam.” The New York Times found little to praise “very young children would seem to be the target audience, though they won’t have a clue as to what’s going on. Their adult companions will be driven to dreamless slumber.” Word of mouth or Oscar buzz wasn’t going to turn the tide. I’ve scoured the internet looking for the usual snide PR, production horror stories and studio interference but it seems very much like Toys was just stillborn rather than aborted. Fox seemingly did as much as they could with what they had paid for, never impinging on Levinson’s vision.
Toys failed to open at Number One on its release just before Christmas. It ultimately only made back half its budget, grossing only $23 million over its entire US run. It never has had a Blu-Ray release (a strong indicator that the home video market rejected it too in previous formats). In all honesty it wouldn’t surprise me if it eventually got a Criterion Release one day. And if that were to happen we would no doubt cover it on The Worst Movies We Own podcast soon after. Natalie has a nostalgic fondness for it that I certainly don’t but maybe being a few years younger than me she was exactly the right age. And being a few IQ points smarter, the perfect temperament for its esoteric charms? But maybe there’s a good reason it was always available in her childhood Blockbuster when she visited?
A clash of impressive adult world building and pig headed strangeness, Toys caught my attention and frustrated me almost equally on this rewatch. Hippy dippy values reshaped into mass market product made for a generation that never really existed. It reminds me most of those ever so middle class childrens’ event movies we get these days like A Wrinkle in Time or the more pretentious Pixars. Well made films which posh parents might really think their kids should love but don’t have any of the instant gratification or rebellious adventure that cheaper, more mercenary releases naturally have. A kids’ movie should never feel like a museum piece, certainly not on opening weekend.
Edgar Wright directs Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Timothy Dalton in this buddy cop action comedy spoof where a by-the-book supercop is sent to a quiet rural village with a deadly secret.
Does for Lethal Weapon what Shaun of the Dead did for Dawn of the Dead. But you already know that! Just a barrage of relentless jokes for the first hour. Some very smart, some very silly. Embraces the Airplane / Naked Gun philosophy that the more straight faced the traditional actors play their part the better the hyped up parody works. Now the movie gets a little lost in the woods for twenty trudging minutes when Wright spends just a little too long unravelling the conspiracy. He does at least do this in what is traditionally seen as the downtime in a feature length comedy. No matter how good the joke there’s a point around an hour where the audience needs to catch their breath. So its a relief that when the big action finale erupts, it isn’t only a slam bang homage to John Woo, Michael Bay and Tony Scott but it has some of the most exquisite and patient callbacks ever achieved on celluloid. I’m not fanatical about Pegg and Frost’s schtick but this certainly is their crowning achievement, the peak of an enviable comedy run.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 