Jim and Ken Wheat direct Warwick Davies, Wilford Brimley and Aubree Miller in this Star Wars universe spin-off for kids.
Lurch from the Addams Family movies and a Doctor Who spacewitch hunt for the annoying moppet from Caravan Of Courage. Better effects and a lot more battle action. But still some weak ass TV movie fudge with a whiny child protagonist.
William Wyler directs Fredric March, Dana Andrews and Teresa Wright in the post-war drama following three demobbed heroes as they try to settles back into civilian life after WWII.
The first night back home where hard drinking supercedes intimacy with missed loved ones. The crashing reality that all your achievements in battle mean little to department store managers looking to hire cheap or loan approvers. A fiancee is shown the nightly routine it takes to get a man with no hands into bed, this is her chance to back out of her wedding to a childhood sweetheart. A deserved Best Picture winner. Sure it is an unashamed issues movie, and can be just as cackhanded as the worst examples of such a flick at times but it is candid and seemingly untethered by the Hays Code. Alcoholism, bad marriages, prejudice towards disability, PTSD, affairs, even boom time economics are given a judicial kicking. And because you care about the three leads and their extended families, the three hours of running time fly by. It is too hard hitting to be a soap but it pushes those romantic and domestic buttons keenly. It is too slick to be depressing. Handless, non-actor veteran Harold Russell more than makes his mark among the starry cast. His arc is particularly well delivered. To see this kinda preachy narrative be so keenly written and managing to make such flawed characters so emphatic… it is a rarity. I like them all so much I’d wager on rewatch I might score this even higher.
Peter Howitt directs Gwyneth Paltrow, John Hannah and John Lynch in this parallel lives romantic drama where we follow a woman’s year if she caught a tube and also if she didn’t.
Far more grim and morose than its light romcom reputation suggests. I’m not really a fan of any of these leads. It is a decent enough concept given a braver spin than it needs to have but there’s very little warmth or joy here. The one thing Sliding Doors gets accurate is just how much Londoners drink in a working week.
Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson direct Bobby Driscoll, Kathryn Beaumont and Hans Conried in this Walt Disney animated classic adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s play about adventure and imagination.
Captain Hook is a fantastic villain. Even though he is a puffed up buffoon, he seems more sympathetic a character than the little eponymous sociopath we are supposed to root for. Then again Tinkerbell really is a pin-sized psycho sexpot too. I guess that’s what makes this Disney cartoon so exciting. The lack of morality, the sense of danger. The busy plot and all the wonder. Yeah, some elements are now offensive… it is an unashamed product Victorian imperialism… And I’m not about making excuses for how times have changed for the better. I’m pretty sure British literature and Hollywood myth makings ideas about the real Native Americans weren’t set by the tick tock of Peter Pan’s clock. Let’s lose our shadows, fly over London and just enjoy a madcap fantasy for what it is. This is what child’s play and juvenile make believe are all about. “Turn us loose? You mean this is only a game?”
Jim McBride directs Richard Gere, Valérie Kaprisky and Art Metrano in this remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle, where a petty thief and a good girl go on the run.
Lashings of sex and nudity. A slick Rebel Without a Cause for the Animal House generation. Valérie Kaprisky turns in one the worst lead performances in modern mainstream cinema. Found this vapid and unnecessary.
David Lynch directs Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart and Jeanne Bates in this independent art film where a strange man in an industrial hellhole learns he is going to be a father.
The genuine nightmare. Took 5 painstaking years to make. Wrote Lynch’s ticket in independent filmmaking. Is indisputable as uncomfortable viewing. The parts that makes sense are unhinged: a histrionic dinner at the parents, a premature baby driving a couple mad with sleepless nights. Then there are the untethered bits. A sperm squashing stage show behind a radiator. The bookend in the cosmos. This is as much Ed Wood as pure art. The black and white visuals are icky – diseased, derelict. The performances are ungainly, irritating. I’ve watched this twice now. I’m more mature, more awake, I understand the themes and symbolism as well as anyone who isn’t Lynch can. But it is an abrasive experience, very few pleasures reside in it, quite a few feelings linger afterwards that nobody wants living within them. Not many movies can achieve that insemination of dread but I’m not sure what it would take for me to actively seek this out for a third watch.
Brian Levant directs Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad and Rita Wilson in this family comedy where a busy Dad spends the day trying to buy a sold-out toy doll for his whiny son.
The low point in Arnie’s 1990’s peak. Less pleasing than the soft-boiled Junior. More brash and wobbly than even Batman & Robin. There just isn’t a working three act movie here. You kinda wish the lurches into surreal action were as full blooded as Last Action Hero. Arnie’s fight with a crime ring of Santa Clauses or a chase for a rubber ball through a mall might actually work if they were executed with the madcap scale of True Lies. Big ask. But this doesn’t work otherwise. The end result leaves a big R republican bad taste in the mouth despite the miscast superstar importing a lot of goodwill.
4
Perfect Double Bill: The Santa Clause (1994)
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
Renny Harlin directs Geena Davis, Samuel L. Jackson and Craig Bierko in this buddy action thriller where an amnesiac schoolmarm hires a sleazy detective to uncover her past… and ‘her past’ turns out to be the violent life of a top black-ops assassin.
“I’m always frank and earnest with women. Uh, in New York I’m Frank, and Chicago I’m Ernest.”
Foul-mouthed December mayhem like only Shane Black knows how to do right. This probably has to be his scrappiest, most incoherent plot ever. But Samuel L. Jackson’s cowardly Mitch Hennessy is a treat. Possibly his most underrated star role. It is an action flick of moments, ones that actually play better the next morning rather than when you are trying to keep a pace with them all. The Long Kiss Goodnight shuffles out pretty randomly, like the final form was salvaged in the editing suite, yet Harlin and Davis move too quick for you to really care how ramshackle the experience ultimately is.
Joe Dante directs Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates and Hoyt Axton in this black comedy where a bunch of deadly critters overrun a small town at Christmas.
I was watching Gremlins before I even figured out exactly what a movie is and how much I love them. It hasn’t fully stayed the course as a seminal favourite. It is not up THERE at the God Tier. It is merely very, very good. Things I love – The Rules, Phoebe Cates, Gizmo, the subversive use of Christmas, the final act of SFX wizardry and rat-a-tat sight gags, Mushroom the dog’s pitch perfect performance, Phoebe Cates’ “the true meaning of Christmas” speech, those mattes. The rest is perfectly fine but nostalgia doesn’t fully carry it all the length through. Best watched once a decade rather than every other holiday.
8
Perfect Double Bill: Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Lady & The Tramp (1955)
Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske direct Barbara Luddy, Larry Roberts and Peggy Lee in this Walt Disney classic where two dogs from across the tracks fall in love.
Begins and ends on Christmas Day. Sue me about the rest not being festive. Two really fantastic scenes (Bella Notte and He’s A Tramp) and a lot of perfectly amiable filler. Sweet, watchable, yet an ever so slight wobble given its immediate contemporaries.
7
Perfect Double Bill: Oliver & Company (1988)
Miracle On 34th Street (1947)
George Seaton directs Maureen O’Hara, Natalie Wood and Edmund Gwenn in this Christmas classic where a department store Santa might just be the real deal.
While every other film in this round-up could just about get away being set at any other time of the year (Jingle All The Way could, with a gentle rewrite, just be about a birthday present) here is movie that feels like its holly and ivy is baked deep into the crust. You couldn’t have a feelgood story about a man believing he was a chocolate shop Easter Bunny! A real charmer, one that mixes post-war cynicism with Hollywood optimism. A string of fine performances – only the splendid Maureen O’Hara feels a little wasted. Nice.
Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske direct Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn and Richard Haydn in this Disney animated classic based on Lewis Carroll’s tale of a young girl who enters a world of nonsense.
The trippiest Disney. Faithful to the source, still child friendly. There’s more material herein than in any 10 line fairytale and that really helps the zany magic to shine. Also the first one of these I can remember that doesn’t have a culturally inappropriate character you have to gasp, giggle and excuse awkwardly. Allegedly also has the most songs of any WD classic, though none are an obvious strength.
9
Perfect Double Bill: The Sword In the Stone (1963)
James Cameron directs Sam Worthington, Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver in this sci-fi epic sequel where the human turned alien, Jake Sully, takes his family to the safety of an ocean community after his insurgency against his old species gets personal.
The marketing campaign made it very, very clear. This is going to be all about gangly, blue, semi-nude, cat-like humanoids. Cameron is doubling down. While there are still live action humans dotted about, very few of them will garner much focus. Avatar 2 is, in the main, a very sophisticated animation that only every 10 minutes or so feels like the uncanny valley has been entered. So if you’ve spent the last 13 years shitposting about Thundersmurfs there ain’t nothing for you here. Even series highlight, Stephen Lang’s megalomaniacal Quaritch, has been resurrected in a Na’vi husk. All hope is lost.
Our lone human protagonist in the busy ensemble is a barely clothed, dreadlocked white kid in a gas mask. A callback to the Feral Child or Newt who risks being a bit overbearingly Scrappy-Doo in the first act. Eventually his presence evens out into something worthwhile, less annoying. Avatar 2’s real strength over the initial instalment is how often Worthington’s dull lead is shifted back to the mid ground and his more potent family of half breeds and outcasts are given valid time to work their own plot lines. It ain’t Altman or PTA but for an action ensemble you do start to care about the wayward kids who populate said action. It is the character work and potential arcs established here that make 3, 4 and maybe even 5 a more tantalising queue of prospects. A seismic shift from where we were at close of play last time. In 1 Cameron built an alien world. Here he propagates a franchise.
And I ain’t coming to a Cameron blockbuster on opening weekend for the hippy dippy stuff. The environmentalism. The being at one with Pandora. The anti-colonialism. The iffily repackaged genocide of the natives by the settlers. White guilt. The second act that spends a lot of time on lonely tortoise-whale therapy sessions. How do you even rate some of the daring-do when it is so pointedly abrasive? We get a future-whaling sequence that is shaped like a kinetic set piece but ultimately leaves you feeling sad rather than pumped. I’ve come for the spectacle. And because I care just a smidge more for the family and the stakes involved this time than I ever did about Sully’s bland interloper last time… the carnage in the third act fulfils its brief solidly, even nostalgically. It ain’t as perfect as the groundbreaking, live action stunt and explosion stuff Cameron delivered in say Aliens / The Abyss / T2 / True Lies but I think we all know, outside of Tom Cruise movies, those days have long since passed for the multiplex. This felt more wholemeal an adventure than Doctor Strange 2 or No Way Home or Avatar 1. It feels churlish to give it the same score of 7 as those movies. But as blockbusters go the improvements and undeniable quality of the craft don’t make this suddenly any more entertaining. And that’s what I’m ultimately gambling 190 minutes of my week on.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 