Martin Lund directs Jonas Tidemann, Elli Rhiannon Müller Osbourne and Saara Sipila-Kristoffersen in this Norwegian teen drama where a popular boy begins to fall for the troubled outcast at his school.
Well made and with a noteworthy performance from Elli Rhiannon Müller Osbourne. At the midway point she moves out of the foreground and the movie solely focuses on the outwardly perfect Jonas Tidemann’s dilemmas. He’s a wet and makes some awful choices. Imagine if you had to watch all of Pretty In Pink from Andrew McCarthy’s point of view? No, thank you. Shame as there was some real spiky energy in that first half, the snowy setting was particularly eye catching.
Ian Samuels directs Shannon Purser, Kristine Froseth and RJ Cyler in this teen romcom re-wriggling of Cyrano De Bergerac.
Exists in it own light fantasy world, Barb from Stranger Things makes for a sympathetic lead. It is all nice enough, maybe a bit forgettable. But then it shits the bed by making our likeable protagonist do something completely out of character, just for some third act jeopardy that a movie like this really doesn’t need.
James L. Brooks directs Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks and William Hurt in this serious romantic comedy set in the world of television news reporting.
“Network! Only with less ranting and more meet-cutes.” This should be right up my street. Imperfect characters, in a believable jerky love triangle, set in an intellectually stimulating and robust world. The pull between looks and intelligence, sex appeal and connection, sizzle and facts, corporate needs and public service. Yet it is also a bit of a cold fish, people like Hunter’s producer and Brooks’ journalist rarely take centre stage in mainstream Hollywood for a reason. Flinty, capable, arrogantly smart people. People a bit like hopefully you and hopefully me. But that doesn’t exactly mean they fit the frothier needs of a rom-com satisfactorily. I’ve probably seen the even-handed, slightly melancholy little epilogue for Broadcast News twice as many times as the film entire. It is sad, believable, real. And the complete opposite of what any of us desire from a big budget wide release. I’m not saying it ain’t admirable but you do wonder what Jack Nicholson’s up to in the background? Whether you’d rather be watching his flawless seduction of the new network owner or a recently widowed first lady…
6 (But I really want to score it higher every time)
Tay Garnett directs Lana Turner, John Garfield and Cecil Kellawayin thisclassic film noir where a drifter falls for a gas station owner’s wife with murderous consequences.
Both the simplest idea for a plot in the world and the most bonkers treatment of said plot. Anything can happen and often does. Maybe this is more about atmosphere than logic but it makes for a laughably wobbly watch throughout. Cats interrupt, model cars tumble, judge’s have, what can only be described as, a “power saving mode” day. The esoteric title isn’t explained until the final scene, and when it clunkily is you feel like saying “Run that past me again please.” The movie’s strength is three fascinating performances but they all have to prop up a weak central one by Garfield. I’ve seen him be well cast elsewhere but there’s something about the torrid madness of this that swamps him. Cecil Kellaway and Hume Cronyn are really a cut above in their untrustworthy support roles. Yet this is Lana Turner’s BBQ thoughout. She oozes fuckability. Only ever dressed in pure radiant white or deep inky blacks. Iconic, but iconic in a hot mess. James M Cain’s novel has been adapted a surprisingly frequent number of times, this is probably the most famous iteration but also the one least worthy of your two hours.
Paul Thomas Anderson directs Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams in this period drama where a WWII veteran drunkenly searches America for a place he’ll fit, and finds himself taken in by the charismatic leader of a gentile cult.
Choppy. Undefined. A series of fine scenes, and a few pointless ones. Two great performances but in the service of what? PTA assembled this from script ideas he couldn’t find a home for in other projects, great American novels he couldn’t afford to do a whole adaptation of. This bitty nature adds to the characters sense of displacement. Looks fantastic, wastes Amy Adams, compelling in fits and starts. They can’t all be winners, kid. Let’s call it a draw.
Jim Wynorski directs Kelli Maroney, Tony O’Dell and John Terlesky in this low budget sci-fi slasher where the new security robots who patrol a shopping mall at night break-up a party with deadly force.
Cheapie that does exactly what it says on the tin. The epitome of adequate. Barbara Crampton has a small role, the electronic score is catchy.
The Coen Brothers direct John Turturro, John Goodman and Judy Davis in this period comedy horror mystery about a playwright who sells his soul to Hollywood and promptly gets writer’s block.
This. I don’t know what this is. I’ve watched it pretty much every decade of my life and never fully fathomed it. The closest I’ve gotten to a connection is a scene in an early series of The Simpsons were Milhouse is excited about being taken to see an R rated movie. As the car drives off he and his friends excitedly chant “BARTON FINK! BARTON FINK! BARTON FINK!” It has female flesh, violence and swears. Just not how you want ‘em. Not how Milhouse wants ‘em.
Fink a betrayer. Think – the name of the man, a creative man, an imaginative voice without a creative idea. Ink… he’s struggling to put ink on the page. Turturro’s miserable Barton, wrestling to write a B picture after setting the New York literati alight. A scrawny, needy, unloveable performance. The Coens usually deal in dolts… this guy is too smart. Too smart to do anything but repeat past glories. Does he have anything to say? Norville Barnes has his hula hoop, The Dude can really tie a mystery together. The brains though, the thinkers… he’s like a Tom Regan or a Ulysses Everett McGill – they thought they were wise, they look wise, everyone treats them as wise… until they aren’t and they lose it all. Fink though, he just ain’t for nothing but getting slapped about. Maybe he’s most like a Jerry Lundegaard or a Larry Gopnik – pitiful, his life out of control, mediocrity that got too comfortable being the medium fish in a tiny pond.
Goodman’s Charlie “Karl “Madman” Mundt” Meadows though. He could be anyone. The everyman that Fink wants to be the voice of but can’t be bothered to listen to. When he tries to type he hears jovial Charlie wailing through the walls, when he needs distraction he talks about himself to the verbose man. “And I could tell you some stories…” Maybe if Barton listened he would be lost in a quicksand of sex, alcoholism, murder and writer’s block. But maybe he shouldn’t have sold his soul. Yet Goodman’s everyman remains charismatic even when you think he is hell on legs. Hell, the devil, the Hotel Earle. He-ell. On fire.
All the details are present and correct. Roger Deakins brown palette cinematography. Dennis Gassner, the art director, who builds period worlds. He has time travelled us to whatever decade the Coens or Sam Mendes might have a yen to take us. Strange to think he started out on The Hitcher and Earth Girls Are Easy.
Why do the walls drip jizzy goo? Why is the girl in the picture so distractingly beautiful? What is in that box? What has Chet done to deserve his endless shoe polishing pit? Who killed [REDACTED]? Is it about slavery or the holocaust or Clifford Odetts? Art versus commerce? Some of the answers are so obvious yet the Coens never bother to answer them. It is like a sudoku with all the numbers filled in but still ain’t solved. A crossword in a dead language. A blank page with a deadline and writer who only ever had one tale to tell. I don’t care what it is about. Barton Fink is an esoteric exercise, made as pastiche but without a definitive thought in its head. The word “head” was said 60 times in the original script. The studio owns the contents of Barton’s head. The head runs the studio. The Coens first major studio script hit an empasse. They wrote this easily in a self imposed break to freshen their thoughts. Head. This is exactly where their heads where when writing a tangled gangster pic.
John Carpenter directs Kurt Russell, Dennis Dun and Kim Cattrall in this supernatural action comedy where a blowhard truck driver helps his Chinese friend rescue a beautiful girl with green eyes from a cursed immortal.
Anyone who watched Everything Everywhere All at Once this summer will have been glad to have seen the prominent return of James Hong. I say “return” in a guarded tone as he has been unofficially racing against Danny Trejo and Eric Roberts for the malleable title of most prolific Hollywood actor. James Hong has been churning out work in projects small, massive and indifferent. He’s just struggled to find a part quite as iconic as pissy immortal Dave Lo Pan. At least co-stars Dennis Dun and Victor Wong moved onto working in the majestic Oscar winning The Last Emperor straight after making this kooky Eastern flavoured adventure flop. James Hong steals the movie out from under star Kurt Russell. While the always loveable Kurt is doing his best John Wayne in a baseball cap pastiche, James Hong is doing something quite rare. A big bad who is all-powerful yet inept, nasty yet bitchy, spooky yet recognisably human. An absolute hoot.
And protected by quite the cavalcade of henchmen / beings. The Three Storms are the obvious standout. Thunder, Rain and Lightning in their big wicker birdcage hats, their weather related powers explicit even when they are in modern day drag. Add to that a feral sewer beast that looks like fire sale Chewbacca and a floating all-seeing eye monster, whose every surface is either globulous fat or aqueous eyeballs, and you have a range of potential action figures so gnarly and impressive that I still want to collect them. What this all means is an adventure comedy teeming with personified danger. Every new hell our heroes enter, every next door they knock down in their “rescue the princess” quest marvels. Each scenes contains a new shock, a quirky SFX to delight, a well realised design to blow a young boy’s mind. Glowing heads, drifting through walls, whatever lives in that hole below San Francisco.
Chinese Black Magic! Eighties visual lightning. There’s definitely a case that a group of white boys have plundered the Hong Kong supernatural comedy iconography. Plundered everything they know will sizzle the unprepared retinas of suburban audiences. Much like Temple Of Doom, this appears on a surface level like Hollywood exoticism at its most exploitative. That’s the accusation. I don’t agree with it. Unlike Temple Of Doom, the natives aren’t presented as inept, begging or monstrous. The British Empire doesn’t rock up and save the day. There’s no cultural imperialism here. The action in BTILC compared to TOD is goofy and constant. The scale smaller but that allows for everyone on the side of good to have their heroic moments. After all they are the immigrants here, not the set dressing. It helps that the setting is actually western and contemporary. No matter what layer of craziness we travel down or up into, we know the eggshell around it all is the familiar cityscape of a U.S. city. In fact there’s kind of an oxygen rush thrill in the final moments when we snap back into a world of automobiles, billboards and sidewalks in the frantic dash of escape.
And I’m not ragging on Spielberg’s Temple Of Doom (a movie I love so much I can just overlook its dated issues), but that is a period piece, a white saviour narrative and a throwback to adventure movies of Hollywood old. White man’s stories of the Raj reprocessed by wunderkinds with unlimited finances. Carpenter’s Big Trouble is more a love letter to another culture’s low art. An affectionate repackaging of actual Chinese action and horror, polished up for the world market. For the film’s many fight scenes John Carpenter worked with martial arts choreographer James Lew, who planned every scene in detail. Carpenter stated, “I used every cheap gag – trampolines, wires, reverse movements, and upside down sets. It was much like photographing a dance.”
And without getting too deep into “The Hell Of The Woke ReAppraisal” there’s sort of a point to all the orientalism which the short sighted find offensive. The Chinese-Americans in the movie live in a world (and an underworld) marinated in lore, tradition, culture and mythology. The three prominent white Americans are the outsiders, the other, pointedly lacking a developed culture. Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton is without mythology. Sure he talks “American” but his Japanese logo vest, his Spanish cavalry boots and Peruvian sweatshirt all suggest a soul without bearings. His background is pic’n’mix. The anti-union, anti-marriage, anti-corporation swagger he projects as a philosophy is resistant of what few traditions WASP Americans have. He’s a cowboy without a horse, a warrior without a war, a coward without a fight or flight impulse, a heterosexual who avoids the company of women and a pioneer who has reached the ends of the Earth… California…. There’s no more West left. We all know the first draft of the script was set in the Wild West.
Is it a hangover from that early version that all Jack cares about is the dollar. He pushes back against systems of modernity, domesticity and comfort. He expects nothing from the insurance company over the phone. He is primed and ready for the excuse they’ll give for not paying up. “Don’t give me any of that Act Of God crap either!” When the time comes to be a hero he talks a good game. He’s a strong proponent of American exceptionalism. He’s just not a workable example of it. Clumsy, entitled, and rarely aware. When the plot is being laid out to us in a stream of exposition, Jack’s on the phone blustering to an insurance agency he already knows won’t pay his claim. He’s introduced to us gabbling down a CB radio to nobody. He gambles better at the Chinese’s game than he does as an American entrepreneur. He’s a soul searching for something authentic, and you kinda know he ain’t going to find that among his kind. So is he a traditional “white saviour”… not by any real stripe. He comically knocks himself out just as the big culminating melee begins.
Kim Cattrall is more of your traditional meddling do-gooder. Her honky bleeding heart lawyer is openly dismissed as trouble by the Chinatown locals. She even introduces herself like a fusty over earnest 1940’s cliffhanger heroine. More Nancy Drew or Lois Lane than a realistic adult who might offer a solution to the crazy old world dangers we are imperilled by. She does however look wonderful, has an abrasive chemistry with Russell. Their relationship is an intentional foul ball in a movie aching to marry Hawksian directness with shaking the audience out of their safe zone. Carpenter relishes pulling the rug from under us, for just about every cliche he sets up. It is a comfort movie that keeps you constantly on your toes.
The film was infamously released in the midst of studio stablemate Aliens (1986) big ramp up. Fox allegedly pumped all their resources into the guaranteed hit sequel which was released just sixteen days afterwards. However, Big Trouble went on to be a huge cult hit through VHS rental market. Carpenter and Russell felt that the reason the studio did little to promote the film, was because they simply didn’t know how to promote it. Aliens tested perfectly with audiences, was an easy sell. Big Trouble had to create and sell a whole new world for Americans, with a hero who wasn’t really the hero and tone closer to Ghostbusters than Indiana Jones. The marketing department gave up and this proved to be Catpenter’s last studio movie of his most fertile decade.
Too me it is a beloved treasure, there’s a parallel universe where it became the biggest movie ever at the box office. Sure, I know it is scrappier and less slick than Spielberg or Romancing the Stone. But it set my imagination tingling as a child. I pretty much spent my formative years bouncing around on the couch re-enacting movies taped off TV. Setting up the traps in Predator. Turning off the nuclear bomb in Broken Arrow. Catching and throwing a knife into evil Lo Pan’s head. “It’s all in the reflexes.” I’ve written so many big words defending this silly movie. Big words trying to draw out what makes it special. But it really just is an affectionately made entertainment. Over-the-top yet handcrafted. Don’t believe me check out the utterly daft, utterly shameless, utterly toe-tapping theme tune at the end. Recorded by John Carpenter and his regular collaborators themselves. No need for Berlin or Roxette in this crazy little universe.
Olivia Newman directs Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith and Harris Dickinson in this swampy romance where a shy girl who has grown up alone in the North Carolina marshlands remembers her first loves while standing trial for murder.
A very pretty hot mess. Utterly predictable yet the emphasis is all over the shop. For something so handsomely mounted it tells more often than it shows. Both boys in the love triangle are callow waste men, which doesn’t help. Filled a couple of hours as a mindless distraction but needed to get its fuck on or focus more on the court case bookends if it wanted to rise above its bloated reputation.
5
Perfect Double Bill: Midnight In the Garden Of Good And Evil (1997)
Philip Barantini directs Stephen Graham, Vinette Robinson and Ray Panthaki in this intense British indie following a kitchen and FOH team during a particularly fraught Christmas dinner service.
The living legend Stephen Graham on slightly more subdued form. The one-shot gimmick looks like it has genuinely been pulled off seamlessly, without cheats or interruptions. Having worked in hospitality up until quite recently there were one or two things that didn’t ring true… but there were another hundred little details that did. Would be interested to see what Barantini does next.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 