Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead directs Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker and Francesco Carnelutti in this romantic body horror where an American tourist falls for a Lovecraftian immortal.
Before Sunrise meets The Fly. Impossible to pull off but this has a pretty good stab. Good, off kilter chemistry between the complex leads helps. The nasty stuff often takes a back seat to a talky, dishy seduction. But the creature FX when utilised are good. Only the finale drops the ball… the conversation gets bogged down in the pseudo-science of the mutations and immortality of the gorgeous Louise. Not the most interesting way to land an intriguing flight of fancy.
David Twohy directs Milla Jovovich, Steve Zahn and Timothy Olyphant in this thriller where a backpacking couple begin to suspect they are sharing an island paradise with a pair of killers.
OK… you’ve had 10 years but POSSIBLE SPOILERS! A Perfect Getaway is a potboiler a little too self satisfied with its big twist. It is a pretty daring con to pull off and when it does it labours and savours showing the audience just exactly how they were was tricked. Slowing down the action just when the handsome pair we are rooting for finally realise just how much danger they are in. Twohy even bungs a ton of meta hat tips about twists and red herring being on the horizon. But what if you saw the big reveal coming after the second scene? What if you listened carefully to the dialogue and realised a couple of scripted lines were a bit too cute and ambidextrous? Turns out this is still pretty, pretty, pretty slick and enjoyable even if you can see that rabbit pull a mile away. Zahn and especially Olyphant are perfect big screen presences and this gifts them more focus than they often get in grander productions. The location work is gorgeous. And when Twohy stops being pleased with himself and lets the violence begin it becomes a very gripping rollercoaster finale. I personally would have had the chase and deadly stand-offs last a little longer, the toying and secrets and suspicions put to bed by the midway point but… hey-ho. This is a cracking little throwback thriller, one I would have rented the fuck out of in the early Nineties if it starred… say… Anthony Edwards and Ray Liotta.
Nanni Moretti directs Margherita Buy, John Turturro and himself in this drama where an Italian director deals with a troublesome American star and her mother’s terminal decline.
Handsome if unmemorable adult drama. Turturro is fantastic value, as always, as the big name who grinds each day’s filming to an awkward halt with his behaviour. Moretti does his standard melancholia with some unsettling lurches into dreams and nightmares.
Scott Glosserman directs Nathan Baesel, Angela Goethals and Scott Wilson in this slasher mockumentary where a wannabe horror icon shares the tricks of his murderous trade with a film crew.
Neat for the first hour. A good meta, alternative point of view to the tried and tested tropes. It does eventually descend into a bog standard Friday the 13th rip off for the final act and is a lesser film for it. Robert Englund pops up in a silly role but apt role. Baesal’s charming psycho is gifted and keeps you on your toes… shame he wasn’t in much else.
Maggie Carey directs Aubrey Plaza, Bill Hader and Rachel Bilson in this teen comedy where a straight-A student decides to spend the summer before college becoming fully sexually experienced.
A solid vehicle for Plaza where the constant 90s soundtrack and busy cast make up for lack of killer jokes. More likeable than funny, this is praiseworthy for its sex positive message.
Adam Wingard, Ti West, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Tyler Gillett, Glenn McQuaid and Joe Swanberg direct Hannah Fierman, Sophia Takal and Helen Rogers in this horror anthology about a dead man’s collection of macabre found footage tapes.
Every single chapter takes too long to get going then ends abruptly. Populated by some of the most unlikable protagonists ever committed to screen… and no… seeing them eventually devoured has no reward. If the intention was to suggest that only bullying narcissist would continue to film themselves through such strange nights then…. mission accomplished!… but I get the feeling this truism is an accidental by-product of the frequently ill thought out bursts of boredom. I personally enjoyed the creepy moments in Joe Swanberg’s Skype haunting entry “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” but this was Natalie’s least favourite story… so what are you going to do? Avoid.
James Cameron directs Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Paxton in this romantic action comedy where a super spy leads a double life, hiding his world saving career from his family to the point where his wife feels neglected and seeks out her own risky excitement.
“When he said ‘I Do’, he never said what he did!” Arnie’s best performance – nailing both his cover as the dull husband and his day job as heroic force of nature. Jamie Lee getting to do her sexy comedy schtick again, perfected in Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda. Great salty support from Bill and Tia Carerre. Even Tom Arnold isn’t terrible. There’s plenty of blunt force trauma laughs, more than you’d expect from a violent thriller with the grandest budget of its time. A silly OTT script that lunges between old fashioned farce and mega-budget slapstick.
Then there’s the $100 million blockbuster set-pieces. A lengthy gentlemen’s bathroom brawl where tiles shatter and bullets fly. A horse versus motorbike chase that goes vertical and features The T-800 constantly amusingly apologising. A terrorist camp destructively decimated by one highly trained man and his clumsy wife. An utterly compulsive ticking bomb helicopter chase across the bridges of Florida Keys. A skyscraper rooftop finale involving a rustily flown Harrier Jumpjet, little Eliza Dushku and a rocket-launcher. Action-wise True Lies delivers with excess and elan. Carnage candy! You got way more than your admission price promised back in 1994 and it still is a fantastic afternoon filler on DVD if you can avoid focussing on the very obvious stunt double who fills in for Arnie a little too often. I bet Cameron was glad he kept that Terminator wig from 1984!
The issue most people have with True Lies now is its dubious sexual politics in the middle hour. Excitement takes a back seat and unfaithfulness and marital revelations come to the fore. Have they dated? Are they misogynistic? If you approach it as a muscular, heavily armed man stalking and manipulating his wife through psychological torture for an entire second act section… then yes. But this was crafted as a light, breathless, almost family friendly, crowd-pleasing blockbuster (I went as a teen with my parents the summer of release) and I think the intention is for Jamie Lee Curtis’ frumpy housewife to be given a believable route in to the Bondian escapades. It is a male prescribed female wish fulfilment but not an entirely unattractive one. Helen Tasker gets quite the fantasy to live out. Her husband finally tells the truth and instantly becomes more exciting than the white collar drone she was growing bored of, she gets to be seen as striptease enchantress rather than a homemaker (and that iconic scene is still hot as fuck) and eventually be the action hero who enjoys being lifted out of runaway limos and staking out high end parties.
An effective Joan Wilder style adventure, with an added self-makeover sequence and tons of funny lines. It is the role of a lifetime for Curtis and she sells the twists and turns of Helen’s wake up to the peril her husband survives routinely with full confidence and sophistication. She goes from sitcom mom to 007… Arnie isn’t gifted this arc or catharsis. We take him uzi-ing a cabal of comedy jihads for granted, but a middle aged woman catfighting an arms dealer is a new flavour. The look of real excitement on her face as she performs the thrilling helicopter rescue stunt, like a Tom Cruise or a Bruce Willis would, is one of 90s cinema’s most joyous moments.
Then we get the sweet reconciliatory kiss illuminated by nuclear explosion as the topper to an action comedy that won’t quit. Cameron is all heart beneath the macho banter and demolition derby stylings. If you doubt the intentions behind his sexual politics here, at least recognise that he eventually elevates his female lead to equal with her husband and strengthens their attraction rather than confiscates anything from her. There is no punishment for Helen Tasker’s flirtation with infidelity, no sacrifice required from her to become one of the warriors. How many other directors, male or female, misogynist or feminist, manage such a unique promotion of a female character in the biggest production of their release season? Only ever James Cameron.
William A. Wellman directs James Cagney, Jean Harlow and Edward Woods in this pre-code gangster film charting the rise and fall of a bootlegger from street tough to gang war.
An early gangster film. The pace and purpose of the genre hasn’t been established yet. There are times when this rushes through plot and other times when it idles over hand wringing that slows the action down. The violence is spectacular though… there’s a sequence when a marksman shoots a Gatling gun towards the wall our stars are dangerously near to… for actual reals FFS!… Cagney is so unpredictable here as Tom Powers. A force of nature and a loon. Captivating. Some of the other acting carries the hangovers of silent era. Lots of face twitching, wide eyed reactions and gloopy movements. Cagney’s masculine, simmering, star making turn is something else. A message in a bottle from a shifting era in Hollywood. New stars were being formed, new acting styles became bold and purposeful, internal yet defined by action, unadorned by unsubtle emotional gurning. Cagney was the forerunner of this next generation of star. Though the material isn’t complex, he imbued a hyper humanity into his greedy maniacs that carried over into The Method of Brando, Pacino and Caan.
Ed Perkins directs Alex Lewis, Marcus Lewis and Andrew Caley in this documentary where two twins share their sides of a dark story; one who lost all his memories at 18 in a motorbike crash, the other who helped him rebuild his understanding of their world.
Possible Spoilers! An engrossing documentary that is in turns creepy and emotionally intelligent. Watching it late night, with the lights off, certain sequences gave me shivers as we explore the nooks and crannies of two men’s decaying upbringing. A mixture of talking heads, over saturated photos and a camera drifting around a damp and busy country house, the atmosphere evoked is suffocating. Perkins smartly often only gives us rapid glimpses of the family albums, not allowing us to settle on the principals as they pose in the past. Conversely his exploration of the grim and foreboding family home does linger and there are moments when your own subconscious adds twitches of lurking monsters in the negative space. This watch was on the recommendation of Paul Laight on his The Cinema Fix blog. I’ll be honest, if I knew the full extent of the revelations being dripfed to us I might have skipped this factual mystery. There’s no way content like this can’t be seen as exploitative and I tend to prefer my true crime to be gangsters and gamblers rather than murderers and predators. I won’t spoil what unfolds as one brother realises his protector has redacted a huge portion of the memories that he lost in a motorbike accident. The film churns up some troubling questions about recall and the self and the “right thing to do” in an extreme situation. I personally feel Marcus did make the correct choice by avoiding giving his brother any harmful details about their childhood, trauma that no soul would want to know. Equally as much as as Alex the seeker might want answers, he feels often uncaring to just how painful these answers might be for the brother who still has them within him. Gripping, haunting and complex.
Kevin Smith directs Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson and Jason Mewes in this classic indie comedy about two store workers shooting the shit, slacking and dealing with unruly customers over a single work day.
I tried to make a no budget movie once. I would have been 17. I wrote a proper 90 page script, formatted and typed up. I “borrowed” some VHS cameras, tripods and lights from our college media department and filmed for one busy weekend at my parents house and the local park. It was about the devil making deals with people for their souls. It starred the other teenagers on my film studies course. I had sent a begging letter to EMI and they had given me the rights to include Radiohead’s High & Dry for free over the credits as long as it wasn’t distributed commercially. The twenty minutes or so of usable footage was poorly framed and amateurish. With the exception of one girl, the acting was dogshit. I cobbled it together into a short film. A short film festival in Coventry rejected it. And rightly so. That was that.
It was fun while it lasted. The mid-90s double whammy of Clerks and El Mariachi were definitely my greenlight for me to try and be a moviemaker with zero budget, training or resources. Robert Rodriquez gave his body to pharmaceutical testing to raise his minuscule budget to shoot his action packed neo-Western. Kevin Smith sold his comic collection, maxed out credit cards and used the actual convenience store he worked at to film his low key, dialogue based comedy. And the end products weren’t just inspirational stories for suckers like me and Hollywood careers for them but really fantastic debut movies. Both have stood the test of time.
You might want to lump people like Spike Lee or Tarantino or The Coen Brothers in with Rodriquez and Smith but their debuts had producers and crew with formal experience and connections plus professional actors. Clerks was made with whoever was available for shooting that day who could remember their lines… or read them in a way that wasn’t too obvious.
It is an excellent showcase for Smith’s true forte. Back and forth repartee. Smith’s writing is rude, caustic, verbose, rhythmic and fucking funny. He understands callbacks and escalation. There are at least a dozen memorable exchanges. Almost a hundred quotable lines. Sure, the acting is variable but the better performers get the most screentime and the drama churned up by a truly crazy but somehow still believable close-open doesn’t demand much more than subtle pantomime responses.
Smith is smart enough to break the action away from the main register often in the second half. And these more vibrant detours (a hockey game on a roof, a drive to a funeral and Randall’s pilgrimage to the extensive adult section of Big Choice Video) have an animated pump to them. The soundtrack rocks with distinctive basement grunge and garage punk. Whereas the static shop scenes allow the hip banter and rude shocks to be the stars, his “action” setpieces display either quick cutting montage or a unique pendulum camera move to take in both principals.
We even get two drug dealers outside whose day is a black mirror of protagonists Dante and Randall’s. Jay and Silent Bob have become the mainstays of Smith’s View Askew universe, very few of his films don’t feature the wayward pair in some capacity. He and Jason Mewes are cult icons among movie fans of a certain age, although less is probably more – cameos… great… entire movies based around them… desperate. Here they are the trenchcoated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the flannel shirted Vladimir and Estragon earning a paycheck indoors. They seem to love their illegal self-employed work, enjoy hanging with their customers, don’t hold grudges and to have life figured out. Maybe this is the key philosophy of Smith’s film… revisited over many encounters… enjoy what you do as what you do is your life. Dante and Randall see their jobs as inconvenient time-outs in the game of their existences. But what if there is only one ball in their games.
Not trying to be too deep about what is a foul mouthed sitcom, calling card cheapie featuring accidental necrophilia and toddlers smoking but Clerks is the best depiction of life in the service industry. An area Hollywood and arthouse auteurs show little interest in exploring despite pretty much everyone having clocked in and wore a name badge at some point in their careers. And his films in this mode (Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Clerks II) all feel like they speak for a class of people who are well educated, well read and relationship orientated but don’t massively care about promotions or 9-5 security. People whose lives are not mapped out by goals and ambition so they are satisfied enough just ambling through jobs. In many ways Clerks is the best encapsulation of the Slacker or Generation X demographic. We care more about Spielberg and Star Wars than global politics or owning property. More about porn and hooking up than settling down or having kids. Maybe one day we’ll grow out of it but that day (26 years later…)probably is already too late. Life has enough drama and incidents without putting effort in to finding more. Best to noodle around with half completed creative endeavours in between work shifts and earn enough to go for “dinner & a movie” each week. And in all honesty, it ain’t a bad way to go about life as long as you don’t whine too much.
