Don Taylor directs Linda Hamilton, Geena Davis and James Franciscus in this TV movie espionage melodrama where young Russian girls are trained to be KGB honeytraps.
So an early crack at the plot of Nikita or Red Sparrow or Anna… but without any of the sex or violence. I guess you are supposed to get caught up in the across-the-superpowers romance. The direction is pretty flat, understandable for a TV production but Don Taylor directed Omen II and The Island of Doctor Moreau the decade before. Canada stands in awkwardly for Mother Russia. I watched mainly for Linda Hamilton but she’s pretty glum here.
Jean-Jacques Annaud directs Everett McGill, Ron Perlman and Rae Dawn Chong in this prehistoric adventure where three cavemen are sent out on a mission to save their tribe by stealing fire.
A genuinely captivating, pleasingly violent romp. Filmed on location in the wildest reaches of the globe, acted in grunts and made-up nonsense designed by Anthony Burgess. This is an epic production where you are intimately drawn into the leads quest, fears, vulnerability, arcs, lusts, desire and evolution.
Jean Cocteau directs Enrique Rivero, Elizabeth Lee Miller and Pauline Carton in this surreal classic where an artist becomes seduced and trapped by his own work and life.
Really just best to let the weirdness and iconoclasm wash over you in cinematic waves. Full of impressive practical effects work, conjuring and rug pulls.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directs Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler and Olivia Cooke in this teen drama where two film nerds befriend a school kid dying of cancer.
Cute… a little too cute. Jon Bernthal lightens things up as the least likely history teacher in cinema ever. RJ Cyler and Olivia Cooke put in really sweet turns. There’s a definite vision here. It is The Fault in Our Stars for yoots who think they are way too smart and too sophisticated for such manipulative fare. I actually prefer the schmaltzier, more mainstream doomed teen romance. The mawk here is a little too try hard, a little to too cool for school! The homemade spoofs of arthouse classics are fun. There’s no way these seventeen year old dorks have better and more expansive moving image tastes than… me. It is a false note like when in other teen movies there’s that precious 14 year old cutie who is into The Pixies and The Stone Roses. It just doesn’t ring true. Let’s make teen movies for the kids, the references shouldn’t reflect the fantasies of middle-aged screenwriters. Desperate that their tastes are still relevant. Gripe aside, this is cute. And sweet. And mawkish.
Ingmar Bergman directs Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann and Lena Nymanin this Swedish drama about a quiet, near suicidal daughter confronting her feckless yet domineering mother when she visits her country home for a rare stay.
More bloody miserablism. Well acted though… especially the still elegant and glamorous Ingrid Bergman in her challenging swansong. Some of the formal experimentation I liked (the background character of the husband’s third person introduction to our lead), some I hated (endless shots of a screaming disabled woman being ignored).
Gus Van Sant directs Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon and Joaquin Phoenix in this indie crime satire where a local weather girl persuades some horny high schoolers to off the husband holding her back from fame.
Like contemporaries The Young Poisoner’s Handbook and Heavenly Creatures, this is one of those mid- 90s ambivalent true crime adaptations that doesn’t want to stand in judgement of the murderers so much as the society that inspired them to commit such awful acts. In all honesty, while the acting is consistent in a deadpan camp kinda way and the direction quirky… I, Tonya pretty much takes the same elements and creates a funnier, darker and more scathing romp. No discredit to anyone involved here but the tales and tone are so similar you might as well just watch the superior version.
Adrian Shergold directs Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine and Tony Pitts in this drama about a working class Northern woman who escapes poverty and violence by becoming a Working Man’s Club comedian.
A Richard Hawley from The Longpigs soundtrack. A setting in the 1970s cabaret scene (before Alternative Comedy and observational stand-up). A lead movie performance from left-wing National Treasure Maxine Peak. There was a lot that attracted me to Funny Cow on paper. I missed it at the cinema due to the only screenings being available in my free time being Mother & Baby exclusive. I’m going to be honest… it wasn’t the film I was expecting. It is grimmer and grittier than you’d ever want it to be, with a couple of later lurches into tragedy bursting the bubble of believability. You’ll know the bit of extremely forced pathos I mean if you’ve seen it. Funny Cow isn’t in any interpretation a feelgood film… it often makes Ken Loach’s similar brand of polemic feel comparatively fluffy and carefree. The storytelling shifts fluidly through time, playfully… but often just to rush us into the next bludgeoning moment of misery. The working men’s club scene is recreated with accuracy. They don’t soft sell the protagonist and pretend she was an original voice or anachronistically didn’t give the audiences the racism they were used to. The victory here is the balls she found to get up on stage and go against everyone’s preconception of her, and women in comedy in general. In that respect the film does not strike a false note. It clearly is a passion project of Peake’s and you do have to wonder what BAFTA were thinking when she wasn’t nominated. She completely commits to a wild, often unsympathetic and abrasive turn. It saves the film from its self pitying urges. I suppose the luvvies have their own reasons and their own darlings. Worth a punt if you don’t want a fun night in.
Jean-Pierre Melville directs Alain Delon, Andre Bourvil and Gian Maria Volonté in this heist thriller where a just released convict, a man of the run and an alcoholic marksman join forces for a big score.
Moment by moment this is a top end crime thriller. The characters are a little too drawn in bold to care about and the obtuse first hour often leaves you lost rather than involved. That is on purpose. This is blunt cinematic storytelling with very little exposition or excess dialogue. The eventual heist is wordless, you have been given no real advance clues of the plan. It is a little too easy to drift away from the film when you are not sure of the stakes or destination. All in all though a solid noir mood piece.
Danny Cannon directs Sylvester Stallone, Diane Lane and Rob Schneider in this comic book adaptation of the future lawman in a wild future mythology.
A neighbour’s older son used to give me his toys when he outgrew them. And then his comics. His 2000AD comics. They were random issues. Full of incomprehensible snippets of plot and violent imagery. Not anything like the tricolour The Beanos or It’s Wickeds I was buying … this was pretty adult stuff… 2000AD had matured with its initial readership who came onboard in the late 1970s and any innocent newbies were thrown in at a deeper end of content by 1991. Some stories had 13 year strong mythologies and the creatives were now experimenting with gore, surrealism and maybe a little nudity in their narratives and art. Dredd was the mainstay – present in every issue and, more often than not, his stories favoured action over pretentiousness and lore.
When I was 11, I bit the bullet and started committing my pocket money to the weekly comic myself… Prog 735. Inside was a hyper nasty thriller about Victorian time travellers heading on a crash course through reality with Jack The Ripper on board that might still be my favourite comic story ever AND a fully painted Mean Machine solo adventure. And Judge Dredd… fascist executioner… Dirty Harry in a lunatic dystopia. I collected the fuck out of those comics… weekly new purchases plus back issues and collected editions. By the time the Stallone film came out, my paper hoard could be stacked higher than me. I had read and reread every page at least a half a dozen times. So yeah… I was into 2000AD but Dredd wasn’t my favourite character. I easily preferred Judge Anderson, Slaine, Button Man, RoboHunter, Shimura… I wasn’t quite as precious about the iconic, almost inhuman anti-hero taking his helmet off, gaining a comedy sidekick and kissing girls in a big budget adaptation. Hollywood gonna Hollywood. I was more excited about an expansive vision of the future that took in Block Wars, The Cursed Earth, Lawgivers, The Angel Gang, clone judges… hell… there was even a fully functional ABC Warrior droid from a different strip thrown in for luck.
The production design and scope for Dredd is epic. Just look at visual artist Chris Hall’s accurate but gruesome realisation of Mean Machine. Or the opening SkyKab tour through a Mega City One. The FX aren’t always perfect – the CGI sequences certainly haven’t aged well – but in their best moments the ambition can keep the company of contemporaries like The Fifth Element or Total Recall. Certainly Tank Girl. There’s a stacked cast… Joan Chen and Scott Wilson and James Remar and Ian Dury and Ewen Bremner have three liner roles that in any sensible production might have gone to nobodies. Any sign of studio interference wasn’t present in the pre-production phase when the hiring happened and the blueprints were approved. Neophyte director Danny Cannon wanted a futuristic Ben-Hur… those initial 60 minutes very much see him deliver.
This watch though I can see the scars of a troubled production. The first hour is a purposeful, busy sci-fi romp… then the last 30 minutes everything putters to a stop. The wobbly last act is rushed, missing scenes, overwhelmed by Schneider’s incessant dumb-cracking and every moment of minor peril is resolved by a side character appearing behind the villain to kill them and save Dredd… just… in… time. What excited me as a teen and was forgivable in my fonder memories couldn’t fully live up to scrutiny on an adult revisit. Still, The Cure recorded a banger of a forgotten theme song for the end credits that smooths over the bad aftertaste from the truncated, bastardised finale. And Joe Dredd would soon return to mete out his own more faithful, more lethal mode of justice in the superior Karl Urban reboot.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 