Richard Benjamin directs Tom Hanks, Shelley Long and Alexander Godunov in this comedy were a struggling couple buy a mansion at a suspiciously low price.
A project worked up to be a Spielberg blockbuster but then cast aside to a lesser director be an Amblin side bet while he made The Color Purple. Early Tom Hanks, peak Shelley Long, Gordon Willis cinematography. A house that self destructs like the world’s most expensive domino rally. We watched this endlessly as kids. Had it taped off of telly on one those Long Play blank cassettes that we had stretched to fit four films on. Four! Imagine it… Fletch, Ferris Bueller, Dragnet and this. Probably even had the ghost of D.A.R.Y.L. or The Naked Gun floating around at the end from a mistimed recording. Or some retro adverts. That’s the only tape you’ll need. Pretty sure we missed the first five minutes of this to fit it on. That didn’t matter (unless you wanted to get the bookending joke?!) What mattered is watching Hank lose it, scramble, howl and deadpan as his investment blows up in his face. Also – Shelley Long is hot in this. I wouldn’t have realised this at Ages 7-13 when I last watched it. But with this and Cheers I reckon I was being programmed. Brainwashed! Plus – the theme song that lays out the plot over shots of New York is a lost banger. The Heart Is So Willing by Stephen Bishop, why you not on ITunes? Lighthearted, silly… but a seminal part of my childhood.
John Waters directs Ricki Lake, Divine and Jerry Stiller in this dance comedy about a “pleasantly plump” 1960s teen who becomes a dancer on The Corny Collins Show.
A blast! Sweet yet edgy. Colourful yet racially aware. Waters tones down his bad taste leanings (only slightly) but retains all the misfit casting, broad energy and loud enthusiasm that makes his back catalogue so rewatchable. Ricki Lake is endearing as Tracy Turnblad, her retro dancing is great.
Robert Altman directs Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi and Whoopi Goldberg in this dark Hollywood satire where a studio executive seeks out the rejected writer who is sending him poison pen letters.
Let’s just take a second to recognise what an unprecedented run of lead roles Tim Robbins had in the 1990s. I doubt he is anyone’s favourite star but his ability to pick a risky project, well written and with a director firing on all cylinders was uncanny in the last decade of the twentieth century. Forget about Cadillac Man and I.Q. Pretty much everything else is enviably gold standard. A half dozen have stood the test of time as ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ classics. His gangly frame and baby face often suggest a dopey oversized innocence yet his instinct frequently draws him to dark tales of injustice and men caught in the grind of a system they don’t fully understand.
The Player is a forgotten masterpiece. Ubiquitous in 1992 but I had to order a DVD in from Germany… the only country where the film is officially still in print. Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a loose suit scumbag who can green light pitches. His power is under threat from a new executive coming in. He is receiving postcards with personal threats on them. And when he investigates who is behind the hate campaign, his life becomes hell. It is The Bonfire Of the Vanities or American Psycho where the murderous yuppie has to carry on with his job. And Griffin Mill is a cold fish… more interested in sabotaging his work rival with an iffy big budget project and seducing his victim’s girlfriend even though it acerbates the attention of the police investigating him.
Altman’s comeback, after a decade in the TV movie wilderness, is his finest film. A Hollywood satire gift wrapped with industry lingo, accurate contemporary backroom deals and A-List stars as extras. The Player is teeming with big names… some playing themselves at pool parties, award shows and restaurant tables, others more traditional murder mystery pieces on the Armani clad Cluedo board.
To be thrown into such an arch hyper reality can be overwhelming. To have a Burt Reynolds and Jeff Goldblum as little more than chattering set dressing convinces we are truly adrift in a Hollywood insider’s life. To be constantly reminded of the mechanics of moviemaking and screenwriting and business compromises makes us question the shifts in tone and plot, leaving no moment unpicked for deeper meaning… even when there is little there. It is a complex trick to persuade the audience THIS IS HOLLYWOOD and also deliver a parody skewering very sausage that comes out of this offal factory. Can we trust a film that avoids the clean and patented methods of formula storytelling when it can afford expensive camera movements and multiple location production values? How are we supposed to take the studio mandated happy ending when we have been left adrift in an independent movie’s style of messy overlapping dialogue and unsympathetic, complex characters? Who is your money on… the maverick creative happy to lacerate the system that rejected him (Altman)? Or the system that put up a decent budget to be caricatured by an artist now reduced to making tourist spot street drawings? Will it open? How will it play with the San Diego mall test audience? Really well, it transpired!
The Player works even better as a neo-noir mystery, as it does a Tinseltown roast. The Los Angeles’s location work evokes straight Raymond Chandler as much as Variety, the walls of the studio backlot are littered with forgotten crime B-Movie posters and Fred Ward is the company enforcer obsessed with Welles’ Touch of Evil… especially its much aped opening tracking shot. Forget the sun and mineral water and brick mobile phones… The Player is cracked spine, pulp thriller in its bone marrow. We have an inscrutable ice queen femme fatale (Scacchi – excellent), a playing possum but whip smart investigator (Whoopi Goldberg – career best) and a mystery man following our every move (Lyle Lovett – distinctive looking, bless him).
But what of Griffin Mill. His increasing paranoia. We are made to feel it by Robbin’s gormless intensity. Is his tormentor still alive? Has he killed an innocent man? Is the woman he is sleeping with involved? Or the studio that employs him? Or the mirror image Vice Executive they are courting to replace him with? Why can’t he, an educated and successful man, bullshit the police like a hero would do in the movies? Why do they hound him and laugh in his face when he can normally get people on that pay grade fired with a casual comment? And why can’t he get the exact mineral water he orders when he orders it?
Why should he have to care about the death of writer? Hollywood doesn’t need them. He sees a hundred of them a day and says ‘No’ 12,000 times a year. That’s his job. He is a no man. He has no talent and no skill. And like all yuppies, as a man without value to the world, he finds himself ill equipped to deal with a hostile takeover when he is on the wrong side of the desk, the needy side of an answer. He doesn’t even have the canniness to wear a different suit (or no suit at all, for fucks sake) to a police line-up. Mill’s only power is to approve a narrative and assign a budget to it. He can commit millions to a project with the right ending. But we have been by his side in his darkest moments, and his most useless flailing wretchedness. We know he doesn’t deserve the case dismissed, the promotion, the girl, the kiss and the swell of strings as THE END appears.
We know he really deserves Thomas Newman’s jangling discordant score that stalks him throughout. The soundtrack rattles desperately like a schmuck rattling his car keys at a valet who is ignoring him. The world owes a Griffin Mill nothing. Let him park his own Land Rover and take whatever water he is given.
Scott Spiegel directs Elizabeth Cox, Dan Hicks and Renée Estevez in this low budget supermarket slasher.
Featuring cameos from The Evil Dead gang and made from short ends (unused off cuts of film) in a gone bust supermarket… And that’s about all there really is to mention. A slasher that takes way too long to get going, delivering a cacophony of uninspired deaths and then seems content with the final girl just running up and down the aisles for swathes of the big showdown. Dull and dirty.
Joseph Losey directs Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker and Jacqueline Sassard in this drama were a married professor falls for one of his students – the one all his friends seem to be fucking.
More lust and frustration on a lazy, hazy afternoon. More destruction of a white, middle class, middle-aged man. Not Losey’s best but colourful and foreboding in his usual doomed pessimistic way. He definitely influenced Nicolas Roeg. Time and colour are playthings, not to be restricted by straightforward storytelling. Also the ensemble here could easily be the Baxters’ from Don’t Look Now’s rotten neighbours. Plays out like an episode of Inspector Morse following the weeks before the detectives are called in.
Philip Ridley directs Jeremy Cooper, Viggo Mortensen and Lindsay Duncan in this Southern Gothic drama where a young lad’s friends begin to disappear just as he suspects his grieving neighbour of being vampire.
Not the film you were expecting. It is too tart to be the movie anyone might want from all it promises. A queasy mixture of beauty and nasty. Loose, busy with backstory, leaving various characters as dangerous puzzles even at close of play. Hard to make a case that this is entertaining or has anything particularly deep to say but it clearly is a well crafted labour of love. Dick Pope’s cinematography captures the heavenly landscapes and the dusty interiors wonderfully. If you like a David Lynch film or a Andrew Wyeth painting then maybe give it a try.
Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson direct Caitlin Stasey, Sianoa Smit-McPhee and Brooke Butler in this horror where cheerleaders come back from the dead… looking for blood.
Very much like watching the first and last episode of a long running CW series. You let it painstakingly set-up its premise and cast, and you see it close down and kill off a whole roster worth of barely explored subplots. What it never does is thrill or relax. Not as sexy or as silly or as gory as it could be. Watch the far superior Jennifer’s Body instead.
Takashi Miike directs Ken’ichi Endô, Shungiku Uchida and Kazushi Watanabe in this extreme farce where a stranger moves in with a very fucked-up Japanese family.
So perverted. So taboo. And somehow with the same emotional arc of Mary Poppins. Sick laughs, corpse-filled feelgood. Do not watch with mother.
Hideo Nakata directs Miki Nakatani, Rikiya Otaka and Fumiyo Kohinata in this sequel to the Japanese cursed videotape horror classic.
Not the stamp of the original. This one gets so distracted investigating and extending the mythology that it often forgets not to be a dry procedural and give us some scares. There are about half a dozen scenes that do replicate the craved for constant creep and dread. These save the film. Told in a stuttering, dry style this solid continuation gives very little to love.
Mark Robson directs Lana Turner, Hope Lang and Diane Varsi in this blockbuster adaptation of Grace Metalious’ scandalous bestseller about the secrets and gossip of a wartime American small town.
Natalie has just finished reading this doorstop sex and shock potboiler from the 1950s. The film version is smoothed off, censoring or only carefully alluding to a lot of the more transgressive elements. It still make for solid afternoon of soap and sadness. Even in this neutered version you can tell just how risky the material (Bastards! Incest Rapes! Abortions! Heavy Petting!) was on release. Our CinemaScope, Technicolor DVD even now has a 15 certification, unheard of for a Hollywood film that is 60 years old. Well acted by Turner (who was riding her own wave notoriety while the film was in cinemas), Varsi, Lee Philips and Russ Tamblyn. There’s a lot of plot condescended here and they prove excellent landmarks for us to find our way around all the glossy pathos. Everyone looks straight-edge immaculate too.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 