Michael Powell directs Conrad Veidt, Sebastian Shaw and Valerie Hobson in this WWI thriller where a German U-Boat captain must make contact with a female spy on a Orkney island.
Powell’s first collaboration with Emeric Pressburger is a neat little thriller with twists, turns, sexiness and humanity. Hobson is particularly good as the agent that even we the audience, who surely can see everything, cannot trust. She has bristling chemistry with magnetic German silent film star Veidt. A solid rehash of the Hitchcock’s early talkies but with a plot switcheroo in the middle that will make you want to rewatch it again instantly.
Albert Magnoli and Prince direct Prince, Morris Day, Apollonia Kotero, Cat Glover, Boni Boyer and Sheila E. in this vanity project and concert film both made to promote his latest albums respectively.
Decided to have me a little Prince night while Natalie was away. Not sure why? He isn’t really as Eighties important to my musical tastes (or my definition of cool) as say Madonna, MJ or David Byrne. The highly regarded Purple Rain is a travesty. I’m not sure what people see here. Camp, vacuous and shoddy. Prince is a creepy little misogynist in it. He looks like an utter nerd bombing around scrubland on his puce scooter. The sex scenes with Apollonia (who is credible dramatically) are laughable. The jerky tragedy pretentious. Morris Day gives a spirited yet amateur performance as the silly heel. Are people watching this with a straight face? The music video chunks are undeniably iconic though.
When Prince’s 1987 album Sign ‘O’ The Times underperformed in the stores he decided to make a concert movie to sell the concept experience visually. Footage shot on the European tour didn’t relay his vibe so he shot a fake concert at Paisley Park and this is the result. I care about this track list less (there’s only on or two singles I’d listen to on semi-regular rotation) but the production is grandiose. So much dry ice and strobing colour lighting that Prince and his ensemble of house performers get lost in the gargantuan overkill. Interludes that suggest some Greek tragedy (Hello, Purple Rain) and sets that could come from a million dollar steampunk Brechtian play. So the music isn’t up to his gold standard, the vibe is humping and pumping.
Murray Lerner directs Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon and Pete Townshend in this concert movie of The Who’s appearance at the third (and their final) Isle of Wight festival.
3am and the zonked out hippies are pinging to Fiddlin’ About. What does that do to the brain? You can’t deny the power and the energy of the performance here. Full thrust can’t-give-a-fuck ROCK. Entwistle in a BDSM skeleton suit, Moon absolutely chewing his own face off while drumming. There’s tension when a skin breaks and Townshend keeps the show on the road with an ominous guitar solo. We get a truncated Tommy megamix. Yet the poor angles of the camera crew and the repetitive crowd shots only give you an obscured glance at what a overpowering experience this would have been.
Carter Smith directs Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore and Laura Ramsey in this horror where six young tourists become trapped at a Mayan Temple where death is inevitable.
On paper, there’s much here to like. A decent hook for a horror. Potential for set pieces. Full fat body horror. Nudity. Jena Malone playing against type. The Ruins just doesn’t congeal. There’s no sense of narrative urgency. The dumb kids just accept their fate. Instead of hoping they’ll survive increasingly grim odds you are left waiting for a bunch of annoying characters to just… die. At least they die nasty.
Steven C. Miller directs Sylvester Stallone, Xiaoming Huang and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson in this action sequel where professional jail breaker Ray Breslin’s crew get locked up in a hidden prison.
Dire. So obviously compromised. Dave Bautista replacing Arnie in a barely rewritten role isn’t the killer blow. The calculated lack of him and Sly throughout the story though is. So obviously filmed in a big dark warehouse whether we are supposed to be on the bustling streets of Asia, or in the war zones of Eastern Europe or trapped within that futuristic gaol. Even if cheap, even if the top billed names are rationed out with their runtime… this still shouldn’t be quite so boring,
After the jazzy soulful Out Of Sight came the spiritual sequel, a smooth yet grand orchestral concerto. Visually this owes as much to Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas as it does the Rat Pack era. The suits, the shorthand, the boppin’ David Arnold score. Movie just glides. Everyone gets some decent comedy business… their moment of peril, their desired victory with a twist. 10 men watching a fountain, walking away with ill-gotten 7 figure sums in their back pocket. Beauty. The romance works, Garcia’s villain is surprisingly a hoot. This project, in my mind, accidentally set the mould for the modern blockbuster; deep drill ensemble cast that exploits star power but doesn’t rely on one over paid name, defunct / musty IP resurrected, a self aware tone of sitcommy interaction over genuine danger or resolution. Sure, O11 is superior and maturer than a Marvel episode or a Pirates rehash but the DNA of the current tentpole is here. Certainly for Warner Bros… see any Batman film released post-2001 or Dune.
Bradley Cooper directs himself, Carey Mulligan and Sarah Silverman in this biopic of composer / conductor Leonard Bernstein.
A vanity project where the bold camera choices are declarative. At the the expense of the directorial intention which is often incoherent. Only begins to fix on the central relationship in a tangible way in the third act. By then, I was watching through gritted teeth.
Wes Craven directs Robert Urich, Joanna Cassidy and Susan Lucci in this supernatural conspiracy movie where everyone who works at a tech company signs their families up as dedicated members to an evil health spa.
Pre-internet I always used to be fascinated by letters to film magazines where people would try to find the name of half remembered movies. They watched it late night and fell asleep or the VHS kept taping the next movie or they missed the title card. The details they could recall made these puzzlers sound like the most exciting release ever. They got me wet and hard to see the eventual community gathered answer. Invitation To Hell is exactly that movie. Can anyone remember the TV movie where a glamorous soap star played the devil? All I remember is the gates of hell were below the gym? What film sees a man don a spacesuit to rescue his family from the trippy pits of purgatory? The actual movie is very shoddy. Nothing much happens. But the finale is so out there that someone could easily remake it or rename it and achieve something twice as good as what got churned out here. Jennifer Lawrence as the devil wears shoulder pads, anyone?
Cord Jefferson directs Jeffrey Wright, John Ortiz and Sterling K. Brownin this satire where a middle class African American author invents a “street” pseudonym so he can sell a hot manuscript he wrote as a joke to expose the racist tastes of white run publishing houses.
Funny and that’s the main thing. I’ve heard critics complain there’s too much focus on the family dynamics away from the literary world but for me that was the richest flavour. Exemplary work from Wright and Brown. I’m not sure the messy, uneven final product deserves that sheer weight of prestige laid at its doorstep but as first movies go I do believe Cord Jefferson has the promise of a truly great one in him.
J. A. Bayona directs Enzo Vogrincic, Matías Recalt and Agustín Pardella in this Spanish retelling of the infamous plane crash over the Andes in 1972 where a barely surviving rugby team became gentile cannibals.
It doesn’t have the line “Please eat my sister.” but it feels like all roads are leading there in the first half. You get more of a sense of the gruelling calamity they endured over months than in 1992’s Alive. Still, feels a little sanitised and again uses spirituality as a smock to cover up a clear case of survival of the fittest. I doubt we will ever know the true “true story”. Well made but worthy. I wanna see Tobe Hooper or Rob Zombie’s take on this history.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 