Elaine May directs Walter Matthau, herself and George Rose in this black comedy about a middle-aged trust fund kid who has overspent to ruin so sets his sights on wooing, marrying and murdering a gawky heiress.
A relatively laughter-free comedy, more Ealing Studios than New Hollywood, that had an hour hacked out of its originally epic running time. While the cuts may make this less patience testing, it obviously lacks structure and pace, somehow the lead performances are still well preserved and very likeable. Both Matthau’s misanthrope and May’s naive botantist are well sketched creations who chafe amusingly off each other.
Walter Hill directs Michael Beck, James Remar and Dorsey Wright in this fantasy gang actioner about a squad of rebel youths who have to fight their way back home to Coney Island over one crazy night.
A movie I have nothing but uncritical, devoted mad love for. One of the first cult films I embraced as my very own as an almost teen. It was the poster on my wall at uni. The film I proudly shared with all my girlfriends knowing they’d love it. But that all makes it a very hard movie to write about. I guess what keeps me obsessed is the glimpses of all those crazy gangs. Their uniforms, their cultures, their turf. The shit your pants ominous Baseball Furies, the military unity of The Gramercy Riffs, the unlikely madness of The Mimes. I mean… imagine The Mimes starting some shit with you on the subway platform after midnight.
Hill dashes us through an alternative universe Big Apple. Rich in comic book detail, yet mostly left intriguingly unexplored. The scramble and fight sequences have a pulse raising, sweat inducing directness. If The Warriors are engaged then they rarely move on without losing a team member, no matter how hard they fight back… they are leaderless from the first act. This message is clear from the off, this night out in the city ain’t just “a trim hunt.” Anyone and everyone is at risk. There’s macho posturing… Remar as the pussy focussed hard man desperate to be in charge absolutely rocks, while Beck has his thousand yard stare down pat, a street tough gallantry wafts from him. The New York they get lost in is a rain soaked wasteland. Deserted apart from the hives of antagonists. Edward Hopper was a visual influence. Figures lost in the shadowy gaps between dead buildings abound.
You get continuous portions of perfection. The messiah-like Cyrus’ rally is convincing stuff. Sign me up. I dig it. I DIG IT! Barry De Vorzon’s pulsating, synthy alarm of a score is a disco infused rattler. The party at The Lizzies makes frizzy haired girls dancing the most foreboding sight you’ve ever seen. The most unsettling moment though isn’t when cops hound the heroes on to the railways tracks or howling packs of skinheads chase them down in a prison van, it is a quiet interlude when the exhausted and filthy survivors share a dawn train carriage with some middle class kids out on a late night date. No one can make eye contact. The underworld strivers and the carefree prom night kids pass each other wordlessly. They can not comprehend the night each other has just had. Then we get David Patrick Kelly’s Misfit instigator and his threatening bottles. “Warriors… Come out to PLLLLAAAAAAYYYY-AAAAAIIII!” And here’s the thing, the second the sun rises and the quest is over and the 90 minutes of cult movie brilliance finishes up on a victorious freeze frame … I want to start it all again. Be bopping with The Warriors right back across all the five borough… “Be looking good Warriors. Real good.”
Carl Reiner directs Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and M. Emmet Walsh in this rags to riches to rags comedy about Navin, a naive white man “born a poor black child” making his way in the big bad world.
Zany is hard to do. This classic makes it seem deceptively easy. Like The Marx Brothers with A Day at the Races, Martin built his debut lead vehicle around wacky routines that had already earned their keep in live shows for over a decade. It makes for one of the most quotable, most intelligently daft movies ever made. A veritable Citizen Kane, in both plot and scope, of madcap. Steve Martin and Carl Reiner’s aim when translating his stand up gold was to have one killer gag per page. And it shows. Unlike Airplane which has a chuck enough shit against the wall attitude, The Jerk doesn’t always pummel you into laugh submission relentlessly. There’s time outs for sweet moments, bleak moments, moments that are tonally bewildering but no less captivating or amusing. Straight faced beachside ukulele serenades sit next to heartless disco vulgar excess. Bernadette Peters helps the off kilter tone. Vapid without being saccharine, wholesome while staying attractive… there’s something palpably unnerving about her Dear John exit, her unavoidable corruption by The Jerk’s outrageous fortune. It is powerful discordant notes like her performance that stop The Jerk from merely being a cash-in on Steve Martin’s cult popularity and raise it above most dumb spoofs. There’s seems to be real heart and risk in the choices made. Candide was an influence, giving us a film that invokes Voltaire but never feels sneeringly highbrow. Which is to say it is never in any way inaccessible to those just wanting fun. It is consistently a rollicking joke fest were Martin dances painfully out of rhythm, chases a runaway miniature railway and Shithead the dog steals many, many scenes. But to accuse The Jerk of being throwaway, its contemporary reputation, is shortsighted. It is a tight comedy with very little waste. Early doors set-ups are revisited for even better jokes entire acts later, in fact there’s a gleeful, ambitious narrative symmetry to the whole endeavour. And Martin as sweet, pig shit thick, greedy Navin is a delight… selling even the stupidest yucks with a breezy assuredness. It is his movie, virulent with his honed comedy persona, and that’s what makes it so unique. High status goof-off heaven.
The last great hurrah of the Disney renaissance and an unsung gem in the studio’s back catalogue. A rip roaring adventure and a touching romance told in bold, vibrant strokes. I know it is uncool to say but the Phil Collins songbook is rousing and toetapping. There’s a visual playfulness and smart storytelling, witness Tarzan best Sabor the leopardess, only for us to cut straight to the destructive arrival of blunderbuss toting Clayton. There’ll always be a deadly predator.
Sam Woods directs The Marx Brothers in this zany comedy musical about a cocky vet mistaken for a renowned physician, brought in to save a sanitarium by the racetracks.
A variety show with a plot so convoluted it allows ballet sequences and a gag involving black face, that comes across as sweet rather than hateful…. even if they fit proceedings about as well as a giant’s wristwatch. There are musical highpoints (the Harpo and Chico piano sequence and enthusiastic hymnal number “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm” are standouts) but the movie is at its very best when the brothers are bouncing directly off each other in verbal warfare. They practiced these twisty skits on the vaudeville circuit before filming them, which may explain why the laugh count, in what looks like unbridled insanity, is quite so high. “Thank you… Thank! YO!”
Michael J. Bassett directs James Purefoy, Rachel Hurd-Wood and Pete Postlethwaite in this horror fantasy about a hellbound pilgrim who kicks ass and takes names.
As an action piece this lacks thrill, as a horror it never lets its very well designed grotesques doing anything memorably shocking. Shame really, as the iconography is potent and Purefoy (who rocked as a virile, no nonsense Mark Anthony in HBO’s brilliant Rome) deserved a breakthrough cinematic vehicle. He seems overly subdued by this penitent, reluctant ass-kicker role leaving Rachel Hurd-Wood to do all the eye catching as the sexy in sackcloth, pure as a glass of milk, damsel in distress.
Andrey Zvyagintsev directs Maryana Spivak, Aleksey Rozin and Matvey Novikov in this tragedy about a warring couple approaching divorce, and their child shunted further and further into the sidelines of their battles.
I have been going to movies more and more with as little knowledge as possible about them going in. I’m avoiding reviews and trailers if I know I am going to see it already. I chose this based on Zvyagintsev’s previous grim family dramas. Those showed a relentless state system forcing hardship onto a family unit, this sees the family unit tearing itself apart with the state caring very little about them. It is a very bleak film, with dessicated driftwood and derelict buildings given more favourable lighting than tender sex scenes and middle class homes. A looming ironic eye watches the drama unfold, mocking the adults more concerned about Instagram and retaining their sales jobs than giving any attention to their doomed child. Doomed? The kid is introduced in a sequence that feels like a direct lift from Don’t Look Now, all ominous pools of water, primary red clothes and unsupervised play. Going in blind meant the dark unmapped routes this explores were genuine surprises.
Clint Eastwood directs Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos in this biopic of three Americans backpackers (two off duty military personnel) who subdued a terrorist spree killer on a European train, the heroes playing themselves onscreen.
A neat tribute to three real life John McClanes, there was a lot of audible blubbing in the matinee screening I attended when the survivors received their medals. The final twenty minutes recreating the attack are heart pounding stuff. Clint plays the long game here. He lets three amateur actors reenact the boring humdrum of their lives. There’s little excitement as they become friends, struggle in the military and flirt with other tourists and see the sights. But then in those desperate minutes, when they step up and awkwardly subdue a killer, a eureka moment occurs, akin to the finales of M Night Shyamalan. We have witnessed the very points in their lives when, sometimes only in passing, the essential skills, strengths and mindsets have been acquired. The random tools from their more everyday backstories come into play in those gruelling minutes of vigilantism. Clint makes his heroes ordinary, occasionally fuck ups. But his statement is all people are capable of being heroes, even if much of their mundane existences have led them away from these moments. It feels very much like a Guardian baiting movie; the kids have NRA stickers on their bedside cabinets, God and prayer and Jesus are intoned at regular intervals, the antique humour is that blokey comradely joshing you haven’t seen onscreen since John Ford’s heyday, the acting would struggle to make the final cut of The Only Way is Essex. Maybe Clint is laying out the harsh reality that if you were on that train, and the shit hit the fan, you’d want these average Joes with their untrendy politics blocking for you, rather than a lefty liberal movie star hiding behind his or her stunt double. As Dirty Harry says “Yeah, well, when an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard – that’s my policy.” Politically I disagree, but this a very diverting case study from the opposition.
Lynn Shelton directs Keira Knightley, Chloë Grace Moretz and Sam Rockwell in this romantic comedy about a woman, who has always subconsciously avoided making big decisions, putting off her impending elopement by hanging out with some high school kids.
A female recalibrated Adam Sandler movie where the arrested development slacker embraces a compromise adulthood after leaning hard into sleepovers, park drinking and proms with the cool kids. The jokes aren’t there but the core cast have inbuilt likeability and great chemistry together. You smile enough to forget you’ve rarely laughed.
Krzysztof Kieślowski directs Jerzy Stuhr, Malgorzata Zabkowska and Stefan Czyzewski in this kitchen sink satire on a new father who becomes obsessed with making amateur workplace documentaries after buying a Super8 to film his daughter’s childhood.
A really neat little comedy. Matter of factly lampooning the artist’s struggle against the controlling influences of funding board, distributors, film festivals and award ceremonies at a sweetly micro level. As the initially supportive factory owners give notes and demand final cut and a poker faced Jerzy Stuhr destroys his marriage with his new creative obsession, it is delightful how much humour and truth is retained in Kieślowski’s wry human study.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 