Karel Reisz directs Albert Finney, Shirley Anne Field and Rachel Roberts in this British kitchen sink drama about a bolshy factory worker who carries on with his foreman’s wife.
Some stunning location work here of post-war industrial and boozing life. Finney delivers an iconic performance but it is Rachel Roberts’ stepping-out housewife who puts in the best shift. Alan Sillitoe adapts his own Angry Young Man novel, retaining a lot of the tough poetry and authenticity of his writing. That does mean the characters and dialogue can be a little forced and didactic at times but at its freest Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is still stark and vibrant cinema at 60 years old.
Paul W. S. Anderson directs Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill and Joely Richardson in this sci-fi horror hybrid where an intergalactic rescue team board a ghost ship with a hyperdrive that has opened a gateway to hell.
The Shining in space. Hellraiser meets Alien. Event Horizon is full of promise in its lovingly cadged visuals and its potent, eerie set-up. Caring not a jot for originality in a way that actually warms the cockles in its blatant, unashamed pilfering. Anderson makes a genre flick for the VHS generation who grew up on exactly this kinda hardcore world building, fantasy visuals. Yet the extreme dismemberments and mindfucks are far too rushed, Event Horizon is almost subliminal in its deaths and gore. Part of that comes from studio interference. Titanic was delayed and they needed a summer blockbuster. Event Horizon seemed to be the back cover advert for every comic I bought that summer. Paramount knew how to sell it, just not how to allow it to be good. This went from greenlight to released in the time it takes to render a digital floating tooth. Last minute re-edits after test screenings neutered its power. You get stunning FX work sitting side by side with glaringly unfinished CGI shots. You get a peep show glimpse of a very transgressive NC-17 torture-fest. Maybe these extreme shock moments work better when only glimpsed? The acting is variable – Neill and Fishburne are wasted with choppy arcs while some other characters are very jarring late 1990s creations. Event Horizon isn’t better than you remember or worse than its reputation… just an average film with maddening peaks and dips of quality. There’s both a fantastic movie and a terrible movie fighting for dominance.
The Coen Brothers direct Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney and Jon Polito in this gangster drama where Leo, the political influencer in a bootlegging town, finds himself at war with the Italians against the advice of his smarter, younger second, Tom.
Pre-teen Bobby Carroll. I was too young to unravel Miller’s Crossing when I rented it on video. I knew it was good… powerful and mythic… but I couldn’t fathom what I had just watched. Every exchange of dialogue felt like a puzzle, every scene tightwalked in tone between gritty, dense mystery and earthy dream sequence. You could tell the pastiche noir was about more than it was letting on, get lost in that period accurate lingo and see every twist and turn layed out in front of you like a never-ending deck of cards so you pretty early on could not keep up.
So I watched it again the next day before returning it to Selecta Video. Possibly missed church to wander around that distinct corkscrew verbiage and its “Mister Inside-Out-ski” narrative one more time. Even the Coen Brothers got bamboozled by all the threads they started here and at midway point of creating a first draft took a three week break to bang out the script for Barton Fink to clear their minds and steady their typewriting hands. You need obsessions like this when you are young. Films or book you explore until you know every shot, every word. Creatives you support like a football team or a flag. Miller’s Crossing and The Coen Brothers were mine. I listened to Carter Burwell’s mournful Irish lullaby of a score on repeat. I bought the screenplay and picked over the words. I even thought for a little while Gab Byrne was my favourite actor!
He’s wonderful here as the hollowed out soul who plays all the angles against each other. Smartest guy in the room but only just one thought or lie or scam ahead of the deadlier criminals who surround him. They don’t need to triple cross like him, they’ll just take you out into the forest and put one in the head. He spends much of the movie as a punching bag, eating boot or bleeding on the floor… the passion of the yegg. And the whole cast of shopworn faces is fantastic… Finney, Polito, John Turturro, Marcia Gay Harden, Steve Buscemi and J.E. Freeman all breathe life into their off-kilter stereotypes. They relish the old school bandiage and the hinge-like natures of their well attired hustlers and blowhards. Impeccably dressed and gloriously filmed through a haze of whisky soaked sepia by Barry Sonnenfeld. Who wouldn’t want to be playing in this? Every set-up you get your hands on a clanking revolver or a hellraising line! Every varnished surface and polished car looks fabulous. What a world to be invited into. A loving parody of the days of Bogart, Cagney and Robinson.
For a film where the talk does a lot of the walk, there are half a dozen eruptions of perfectly orchestrated action too. Finney’s Leo survives a hit through a good sense of smell and some artistry with a Tommy Gun to the strains of Danny Boy. You can see the meticulously planned storyboards come to life. The Coens design their violence like domino rallies allowing chaos and unpredictability to enter what would in other, lesser films just be a loud exchange of bullets. A bar being obliterated in a hail of lead takes on balletic grace under their playful yet dictatorial hands. Their violence is lethal yet slapsticky, cartoonish only in that you chuckle at the neat nastiness unleashed by the human puppets they pull around gracefully and determinedly.
So dozens on dozens of watches later… have I figured what Miller’s Crossing is all about? What does the metaphorical hat blowing in the wind mean? Why did my brain latch on to it so fanatically? It is no longer my favourite film but will always live beloved in my top 10. Is it about friendship lost? I’d like to think so. But as you experience more of the world you can’t discount the queer reading too. Maybe it is all about heart. Heart making the man. Byrne’s sharp, cold Tom is often told how heartless he is… the intellectual in a world of violent men driven by emotional swings. When his best friend Leo walks away through the woods at the end, matching the dream shot of his fedora blowing away, his last truly human relationship is disappearing off screen. What is Tom without the trust and love of his friend? A mouth nobody listens to. A gun for hire who avoids killing. A man who held himself to a higher standard who now has blood on his hands. Jon Polito’s snarling Jonny Caspar starts the film telling us its about “loyalty! Ethics!”. What is Tom now he has neither and no one?
David Gordon Green directs Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch and Lance LeGault in this Eighties-set throwback where two immature men work the roads, isolated out in the Texas wilderness.
Slight and pretentious. There are a couple of nice tremors of magical realism, you chuckle occasionally at the sight of Rudd in dorky tight shorts. These things do not a feature film’s worth of entertainment make. A lowlight for the usually dependable comedy star.
John Ford directs Ben Johnson, Joanne Dru and Ward Bond in this western where a hodgepodge of horse traders, Mormons, whores and thieves journey across the wilds together in search of a new life.
Gentle and poetic, this favours community over violence. When the bad guys force themselves into the burgeoning coterie they don’t just feel like a ticking time bomb to the peaceful cohesion of the travellers but a hangover from the days of Civil War and land taking. Their way of the gun needs to be rejected as an ill of the past. To while the time away until they show their true colours and strike, we have hoedowns and courting. Johnson’s flirtation with Dru is done in fine romantic shorthand. The scene where she has a memorable adverse reaction to his proposal of settling down is a stunning bit of cinema, should really be consider an iconic moment of the genre. But Wagon Master was only recently reassessed as a classic, seen at the time of release as Ford at his most uncommercial.
Louis Morneau directs Jim Belushi, Kylie Travis and Shannon Whirry in this woman caught in a timeloop with a Texan psycho killer she hitches a ride with.
Groundhog Day. Triangle. The Endless. More often than not a hero stuck on repeat for 90 minutes makes for pretty glorious popcorn. I’m gonna make a few bold statements. While nowhere near as gold standard as the Bill Murray classic, this is an action thriller variation on that theme which sits comfortably on the silver podium. In my experience the best direct-to-video release ever. I remember renting it from Variety Video in Greenford and it was well worth the £3.50. Sexy ladies, dusty road mayhem, high octane explosions, Outer Limits-style sci-fi trappings. It is a film that marinated in my memory banks as a low budget blast ever since. And half my life further down the line it actually exceeded my fond expectations. A couple of great 90s character actors pop in and out. Shannon Whirry, queen of the VHS Basic Instinct rip-off, here keeps her clothes on for once and is just as hot and unpredictable. Kylie Travis lacks star power but is equally pleasant on the eye, her de-facto heroine making things hella worse every time she gets another shot at trying to make things right. The script evolves the peril and the urgency with neat twists each respawning. But man of the match is Jim Belushi. Yeah… I know… unqualified praise for the lesser Belushi sibling! Often an obnoxious comedy presence in middling fare, he kinda settled into being a DTV big fish with hokey thrillers like Traces of Red and Gang Related once his box office power dwindled. This though is his finest hour as an unctuous man in black, ready to kill and quick to temper. He proves a constant threat for our pneumatic avatar… the kinda villain you love to hate. 88 Films are selling this on Blu-Ray currently and if you like B-Movie carnage of the stamp of The Hitcher or Hard Rain then Retroactive is a tenner well spent. A risk I concede as nobody seems to sing this forgotten gem’s praises but I’ll vouch that it genuinely is a supercool night in!
Richard Fleischer directs Kirk Douglas, James Mason and Peter Lorre in this aquatic sci-fi adventure where a tyrannical submarine captain wants to attack the world into peace.
The original steampunk epic… this is all rivets and rust. It looks awesome… but, a comedy seal and thrilling squid attack aside, it is very dull. How can something designed to be so compelling, turn out to be so trudging? I’d question the logic of making children’s films populated solely by middle aged men for a start.
Jim Abrahams directs Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin and Fred Ward in this comedy where two sets of twins are mismatched at birth – one set from a little town based around a furniture factory, the others from the big city mega-corporation that plans to sell the community off thirty years later.
Hi-jinks ensue. The first half hour is packed with jokes and silly singing numbers but it gets lazy and repetitive long before the end. I’m not even sure the happy ending where everyone is paired off romantically and the town is saved has been earned or is what half of these characters wanted five minutes earlier? Still Tomlin and Midler ham it up even when all the movie has them do is narrowly miss each other in the hotel lobby for the millionth time on an endless loop. By the point you realise the gags have dried up, Midler’s Eighties fashions and mugging have gone into pleasing overdrive.
William Keighley directs James Cagney, Pat O’Brien and George Brent in this WWI drama where a regiment of New Yorker are slowly killed off by the selfishness of one bad apple.
Strange watching Cagney play an out-and-out rotter. His coward here is so unlikable and harmful that when his eventual moment of heroic redemption comes it feels thoroughly undeserved. Aside from that this is a solid oldie.
Griffin Dunne directs Meg Ryan, Matthew Broderick and Kelly Preston in this dark romantic comedy where the jilted exes of a new couple stalk, spy and plot their break-up.
You can see why this didn’t set the world on fire in 1997. Meg Ryan, the box office tyro, is a little too self-consciously kooky here. It is a role that would fit a Lisa Kudrow or a Parker Posey like a glove. America’s Sweetheart though… looks like she’s slumming it. Which is a shame as once she’s got her Mr Toad motoring goggles off she is still an enticing prospect for the wet Broderick character and, more importantly, us to fall for. Dunne’s direction is aggressively cinematic without being intrusive – he pushes for strange angles and antiquated forms of movie grammar. Broderick and Ryan use a camera obscura to watch the happy home across from their squat and he exploits the visual possibilities from this device well. Tchéky Karyo as the pompous but rapacious new lover is a horrendously punchable creation… he manages to essay someone who could steal Kelly Preston from Broderick convincingly but we still relish seeing ruined by the spurned pair of broken hearts. It is a spiky film sold as a saccharine romp. For me it has aged well. Sure… many might see the protagonists as stalkers – dangerous obsessive who try to control and bully two humans who fell out of love with them. But the film is too cartoonish to attach real world hot takes on it. If you are going to condemn Maggie and Sam’s campaign of terror… at least accept everyone is flawed, capable of unhealthy fixation and lashing out. It is how we (eventually) move on from the heartache that is the coda… the creepy bad behaviour here is the larks for the audience and unintentional flirtation for these two loons. Better than you’ve been led to believe.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 