Rob Cohen directs Jason Scott Lee, Lauren Holly and Nancy Kwan in this action and romance tweaked biopic of the martial arts legend.
A quite entertaining decision has been made to crowbar a Fist Of Fury style fight sequence into the narrative every 15 minutes. So a game Jason Scott Lee has to take on his co-workers and literally his demons in stunt heavy battles. The more grounded stuff is pretty cheesy, very much the “official” and “authorised” version of a star’s life and loves. If you can get past the surviving family’s whitewash, Dragon still passes an evening nicely in a trashy sorta way.
Hiroshi Teshigahara directs Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida and Hiroko Ito in this Japanese arthouse drama where a holidaying school teacher finds himself trapped in a desert pit with a ready-made wife and ever encroaching avalanches of sand to deal with.
Is it the worst prison in the world? Nothing to do but fuck and dig sand? Obvious parallels to Kafka and the myth of Sisyphus and also clearly influencing future works as diverse as Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance and The Truman Show. There’s definitely an element of the leering ‘Pink Film’ here too. One stunningly horrific sequence sees our protagonist offered a chance at freedom and all he has to do is abandon his last trace of humanity, obliterate the relationship he has built with his inmate, in full view of everyone else who still knows he exists. It is a nasty, disturbing, lingering set piece of psychological horror. Eija Okada excels as an amateur entomologist, his hobby the perfect metaphor for the brutal vivarium he himself is tricked into entering. He slowly sheds his manners and civilisation, becoming as brute and uncaring as a pinned insect. An even more fascinating performance is Kyoko Kishida’s enigmatic widow. Sexually needy, she appears to be a coy domestic honeytrap at first, but just as imprisoned as him, maybe only a bit further along in mindset and understanding of her unofficial sentence. Are we in hell? Or a cynical reduction of the institution of marriage? However you interpret this clearly potent and daring work it has lost little of its power to shock over the many decades since its release. A bleak strangeness buries you.
8
Perfect Double Bill: In The Realm Of The Senses (1976)
Clive Donner directs Peter O’Toole, Alastair Sim and Harold Pinter in this British thriller where a maverick toff decides to assassinate Hitler on the eve of WWII and finds himself with no safe place to hide, from fascists of all stripes, after his bullet misses.
An unfussy meat-and-potatoes adaptation of one of my favourite novels. This was made for TV and often in location and in costumes looks like something the ‘Allo ‘Allo team might have filmed with the ‘short ends’ of celluloid on their tea breaks. Yet the casting aims for a higher standard, more worthy of Geoffrey Household’s perfect anti-appeasement chase story. Every interaction is a classy cliffhanger in the first hour, even now there still is a charged thrill in experiencing Adolf tantalisingly in the crosshairs of a hunter’s rifle. How modern audience will take to the third act – where a ragged O’Toole digs himself a hobbit hole in Devon and literally goes to ground – is anyone’s guess? Even this static, drawn out siege sequence reaches an impactful solution, slyly bringing us full circle to that near-perfect opener. Dated, for sure, but the hook of the source material is so strong you can’t help but enjoy it.
Jack Sholder directs Mark Patton, Kim Myers and Robert Englund in this horror sequel where Freddy tries to re-enter reality via a confused teen boy.
“You are all my children now!”
Dismissed as a half assed cash-in back in the day, this has a pretty blatant gay subtext running throughout it. Making it fascinating to watch and to pick apart. Fred Krueger still retains some of his threatening mystique here and the closer where our final girl (a winning and sympathetic Myers) decides to hug the demon out of the monster is quite dramatic and operatic. There aren’t enough scare sequences though and the wobbly set-piece where Freddy runs amok around a pool party feels like a missed opportunity; given he only really knocks a few hotdog bun packets over. The practical FX are pretty exciting when they happen – tongues emerge from phone receivers, Freddy hatches like a chick from inside a screaming man. While not as full steam as its groundbreaking progenitor 2 certainly is less clownish than what followed.
Paul W. S. Anderson directs Milla Jovovich, Tony Jaa and Ron Perlman in this sci-fi action movie based on a man versus mythical beasts computer game.
Pretty rote. Jovovich and Jaa, after their respective breakout roles, have starred in far more rubbish than decent stuff and this certainly isn’t going to reverse that flow. Yet Monster Hunter delivers on its slight, simple promise and the last half hour certainly aims for the epic. The look of it embraces a grainier, scalier real world heft than most mid-budget video game adaptations. Lower your expectations and its kinda okay.
The Wachowskis direct Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss and Laurence Fishburne in this sci-fi sequel where a god-like Neo tests his powers in a new mission.
Both the best action and the ropiest FX of the series. The freeway chase has to be seen to believed – they built a fake freeway just to achieve this sequence. Monica Belluci appears in a tight dress. The bonkers monologue at the end though is the nadir of the series.
6
Perfect Double Bill: The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
A few years back I made a list of everything I’ve loved since the turn of the millennium. I bet that list would look quite different now, what with new additions and certain movies shifting position on rewatch. Here is a Top 100 a little more (yet not completely) set in stone – the movies of my childhood and teen years. Sure, a few have been discovered since 1999 and others appreciated even more as I have matured. Yet nearly all I can remember at which of three cinemas I saw them in, or local videoshop I rented them from first, many were watched with that interruptive News At 10 in the middle of their broadcast or discovered on Moviedrome . And while it is not a list entirely fueled by nostalgia… it is fair to say, given the rankings and my predisposed inclinations to Eighties & Nineties Hollywood, long term love affairs often give many of the movies listed here their unbeatable edge.
Cameron Crowe directs Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Renée Zellweger in this romantic comedy / sports movie where a slick agent has a change of heart and finds himself with only one client; an egomaniacal football player.
If I pitched you Jerry Maguire you’d think I was crazy. You need to care about a sports executive who writes a career-damaging memo for almost three hours. Yet thanks to its whipsmart dialogue, a litany of career best performances (some of them genuine outliers never to be repeated) and Crowe’s acerbic yet sweet sensibilities it emerges as a one of a kind entertainment masterpiece. You can tell Rolling Stone journalist Crowe fully immersed himself into this world before sitting at his word processor. Yet his strength lies in his wit and playfulness. Like Billy Wilder at his finest, every scene sidesteps your expectations, a disruption means you are never actually given what you expect but each moment somehow still flows with a warm, natural energy. There’s so much plot covered here that I doubt three premium telly seasons could do quite so much quite so well, yet each journey reaches a definitive end by the wrap up. Not many other movies have attempted to combine the business of sports with heart on its sleeve romance before (and for good reason) but this unique beast really manages to pull off an intimacy in both fields with neither sub-genre ever feeling like it tips the balance. Epic soundtrack. Tom pushing himself to be his very best. We know he can do a cocky bastard but the desperation he plumbs here is astounding given his stock roles before. And multiple killer quotes that have survived three decades almost. My mum and I went to see this together on release and she still shouts “Show me the money” down the phone at me to this day. But really what this has is “The Quan”! I flat out love Jerry Maguire and it harks back to an age where a great script and the perfect star could make the entire world rush out and watch a movie that wasn’t a sequel / franchise / reboot.
Craig Roberts directs Mark Rylance, Sally Hawkins and Rhys Ifans in this true story of a crane driver from Barrow-In-Furness who notoriously sneaked himself into playing the British Open before he had ever played a round of golf on a proper course.
A real sweetie this. Funny but never mocking of its working class dreamer, recreating his internalised flights of fantasy with a naïve Impressionist tactility. More than a mere quirky sports comedy, this pulls at the heartstrings somewhat viciously and presents the limitations that growing up in relative poverty bring to a life with an unvarnished directness. I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t find themselves caught up in Maurice Flitcroft’s mad quest to win the Open with little proven skill at the game he makes his obsession. In real life I suspect he was a bit more of an intentionally disruptive prankster than is presented here but it is hard not to be seduced by the ever excellent Rylance getting the full big screen spotlight to play such a softly spoken eccentric.
Jacques Audiard directs Lucie Zhang, Makita Samba and Noémie Merlant in this erotic romantic comedy following a trio of millennials making love, fools of themselves and financial compromises in the heart of Paris.
Sexy, funny, messy, visually crisp with sequences of eye-popping overtures and flourishes… and with strong but cutely flawed female characters. This is the quality and type of movie I was expecting when I read all those rave reviews of The Worst Person In the World over the last few months. This is the superior film and noticeably less white, less upper middle class… nobody here sees working in a bookshop as a dead end job rather than a cushy number. Work is dealt with subtly… Audaird frames it as an unavoidable compromise for those who want to continue their studies or live in a city untethered by family (duh!… but few movies acknowledge this as they are made by people from such rarefied background where this isn’t a tangible reality) but he also presents the workplace as one of the few places where people are in regular proximity – in the kind of constant contact that cannot be farmed out to technology like hooking up, masturbating or bullying classmates. There’s also an understanding that fucking can be casual and have emotional fallout. It is quite the astute, non-judgmental essay on modern life considering it is made by an old honky nearing his 70s… albeit an old honky who has made a fair few indisputably brilliant macho movies and is now trying his hand at something softer, more joyous. All his leads are hyper attractive, look stunning in the nude and sell the dialogue with charm and humanity. Lucie Zhang is a real find as the self destructive but sweet Émilie Wong (my kinda petulant fuck-up) and hopefully this will be a star-making turn for her. Pretty much any scene where she is present is electric.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 