Jean-Paul Rappeneau directs Olivier Martinez, Juliette Binoche and Pierre Arditi in this French historical romance where an Italian colonel goes on the run through Provence while the countryside is ravaged by cholera.
In its day this was the most expensive homegrown French movie. I cannot think of any purely British production that matches it in sweep or scale. The first hour is a chase movie, a series of swashbuckling cliffhangers. The Austrian secret police are hot on our trail, death is everywhere, the authorities and the rabble turn into a rampaging lynch mob as pestilence grips. Packed with incidents and a fresh mini drama with each location shift – the first half flies by. Then top-billed Juliette Binoche turns up, things slow. Our deadly pursuers have already been thwarted by plague or pistol. We traverse the country with less urgency. Usually, Binoche is the highlight of any movie but she doesn’t seem to have much chemistry with Martinez. If the attempt was to make a Napoleonic The African Queen or Romancing the Stone then the heat just isn’t there. Two beautiful people who never have a meaningful interlude. The shift in pace wearies you. There’s still plenty of shots of lively animals, gorgeous dresses and bucolic scenery. There are still adventurous moments like when a murder of crows seem to dominate the landscape. Yet it is fair to say the entertainment value is sapped from the drawn out conclusion which again feels like it is out of rhythm with what started so well. As an evening filler though I’m surprised The Horseman On The Roof isn’t talked of more. It gets so much right and certainly feels like a quality release.
David Frankel directs Sarah Jessica Parker, Antonio Banderas and Mia Farrow in this romantic comedy where a woman discovers every happy relationship among her relatives is hiding a tawdry affair.
Plays like a very subservient Woody Allen pastiche. There are bursts of wit and colour but very few moments of originality or romance.
Ben Hozie directs Peter Vack, Julia Fox and Keith Poulson in this New York indie drama about a lonely loser who begins to stalk the dominatrix cam girl he thinks he has made a real connection with.
In a world of creepy flakes, maybe some men are the least worst out of a bad bunch. That’s the sum up of 80 minute’s worth of runtime. I think. For example – so much more could have been made out of the online gambling addiction subplot. It is a very masturbatory piece of work. I applaud its nudity, drab eroticism, frankness. Yet it feels very much like a film that doesn’t care about its audience. Maybe that’s a good thing? I watched for Julia Fox. Interested in what she did next after her visceral debut in Uncut Gems. Her and Vack put in a pair of brave and open performances. Often separate and exploited by their desires and isolation. There’s equal opportunity nudity. Both genders whack off for nobody in particular’s viewing pleasure. Reminds me of Hal Hartley, early Wong Kar-wai and Whit Stillman. Nowhere near as good as those names at their indie peaks. Yet the cheapness, the detachedness, the guerrilla location work, the drained out humanity. Yeah, it reminded me of the festival gems of yesteryear. It might only be costume jewellery itself, paste and wire, worthless, but at least it is emulating a forgotten mode.
Richard Fleischer directs Charles Bronson, Al Lettieri and Linda Cristal in this Elmore Leonard crime thriller where a melon farmer attracts the unwanted attentions of a cheap labour enforcer and a mafia hitman.
Bronson just wants to farm his melons. And if he has to kick every organised criminal’s ass in the state to do it… he will. Bronson is too monosyllabic to truly work as a traditional Leonard anti-hero. The best you can say about his typically stiff acting style is that it doesn’t betray his character’s single mindedness as written. He really just wants to farm those melons. Modern trappings aside, this is as much western as crime thriller. Al Lettieri is good value as the black hat. The big chase finale has some impressive stunt driving work. Hot and dirty and dusty and sweaty – this is my kinda cinema.
John Waters directs Melanie Griffiths, Stephen Dorff and Alicia Witt in this independent black comedy where a struggling Hollywood star is kidnapped by a guerrilla faction of armed filmmakers to be in their next project.
Full of scrappy spirit but after the first half hour finds itself running around in the same circle with nothing new to say or do. Tamer than Waters at his dirtiest but somewhat slicker than even his more beloved later movies. Griffiths is sweetly gutsy, Maggie Gyllenhaal stands out among the dozen of up-and-comers who took a risk being in such a scabrous but haphazard attack on mainstream cinema so early in their careers.
Sam Raimi directs Alison Lohman, Justin Long and Lorna Raver in this horror comedy where a bank employee is cursed by a gypsy.
Whatever happened to Alison Lohman? Wikipedia says she retired after making a dozen films, a quarter of which (Matchstick Men, Where The Truth Lies, this) feature stalwart lead turns by her. Then nothing. If she wanted to raise a family away from Hollywood then more power to her. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Emma Stone all chipped in some bribe money so she would take an early bow, freeing up the paucity of decent female roles to a smaller pool of talents? She’s dauntless here as the loan officer (Boo! Hiss!) put through the ringer by a demon who is set to take her soul. Raimi is back in his Evil Dead comedy horror element. If he can cover his heroine in gloop or ick, he does so with abandon, pretty much every other scene. Half the production budget must have been spent on slime. He doesn’t lay on the credit crunch poetic justice of the curse’s terms, small print and loopholes too thick but clearly there is some glee in abusing a finance worker so physically, emotionally and bureaucratically. The film isn’t quite as relentless as I remember from 10 years ago and, as good as the set pieces are, nearly all of them are punctured by interruptions of very weak CGI. In the main though this is still a superior ghoulish ride – and because violence is trumped by spraying fluids and shadowy stalking – one that would be suitable for cautious teens looking to dip their toe into horror for the first time.
Lewis Gilbert directs Michael Caine, Shelley Winters and Jane Asher in this British classic where a ‘Jack the lad’ begins to consider the emotional and existential destruction his treatment of many women leaves in his playboy wake.
“Are you all settled in? Right, then we can begin. My name is…”
“My understanding of women goes only so far as the pleasures.”
“But I ain’t got me peace of mind – and if you ain’t got that, you ain’t got nothing. I dunno.”
“Everyone’s entitled to secret thoughts!”
Alfie kind of became a kitsch item in spite of itself. I came to it, and loved it instantly, at the height of Britpop. It clearly influenced the looks and styles of artier pop outfits of my era like Blur, The Divine Comedy and Menswear and was a laddish nostalgic touchstone for that decade’s men’s magazines and programming presented by Chris Evans. The jazzy Sonny Rollins score that paces about like a stray dog sniffing around the posh hounds, the unreconstructed confidence, the slightly unrefined celebration of the finer things and the “cheeky” sexism seemed so vibrant at the time. It felt like 1966 and 1996 shared a nexus point in time and the fashions and attitudes seemed conjoined in a way that meant the three decades inbetween never happened. Chiming with marketing events like Cool Britannia and teeing up the slight more cartoonish rougher male attitudes of Zoo, Loaded, Nuts etcetera. There was something classier and more thought through about Alfie’s mode of gender stereotyping than just boys will boys, suits and shooters, and check out this airbrushed cleavage.
I understand why feminists hate the film, the language, the misogyny, not all of it casual or self aware. But I do feel the movie gets an overly bad rep. For we are seeing Alfie through the eyes and sometimes contradictory direct to camera monologues of a working class boy done good. He treats women as disposable and is only really interested in one thing – representing all us men whether we use tailored three pieces, flash cars, wit, kindness or virtue signalling as our way to entice the fairer sex. The original release was marketed with this tag line “Is every man an Alfie? Ask any girl!” Most of us grow out of this, evolve, but to say the attitude towards women Alfie represents has disappeared or is some musty museum piece will be laughable to most women.
There’s a transgressive quaintness about his sexism – birds, it, mumsy – but these words are chosen not just for their shock humour… he treats women like objects and at the start, can only understand them as such. The gradual change that happens over two hours is the point. As Gilbert and Caine and author Bill Naughton have conjured a caricature of male desire that slowly has his worldview questioned, torn apart, challenged. While Alfie is telling us straight to camera about his angle and armour, we witness his behaviour, reactions and shabby loneliness and they begin to tell a different story. He’s still as happy go lucky by the end, great company for the gang, but you can tell that bluster and treating of women like inferior objects has been punched out of him by close of play. Punched out of him by sharing or experiencing their sadness, pain and rejection but without having developed the emotional tools to deal with these heartbreaks.
Viewers who aren’t paying full attention, those who just see the misogynist seduce and mistreat a series of dolls, what they don’t notice is the extra layer of satire happening by stealth. For just as Alfie never considers the internal life and thoughts of those he takes advantage of, I’m guessing the middle classes who lapped this film up don’t see they are experiencing the views and opinions and feelings of a person they would just dismiss as a soulless oik on the street or down the pub. They only really like their lackeys to have a voice if it is servile, ingratiating or has ambitions to join them on their terms. The Angry Young Man cycle was just finished by ‘66 but it only celebrated over educated working class men who wanted a life less ordinary, a literary ideal of being a superior prole. Alfie stick two fingers up at that – he want the riches’ pleasures and luxuries and freedoms but he doesn’t want to write a book or fuck a French girl to achieve them. He understands how rigged the game is and fiddles it accordingly.
That kind of voice hadn’t been heard before on the big screen, and as Caine speaks it to us, in a truly fantastic performance, you can tell he relishes pulling back the curtain and showing the pretentious types that Alfie’s attitude towards women ain’t quite so different to the poshos attitude to the workers. If you read those quotes from the script I started off with they prove the nub of Alfie’s message. There’s a dozen more little lines and allusions to the importance of being self aware and processing your own ideas. We all have internal lives, secret thoughts, lies we tell ourselves, moods… it was a rarity for cinema to consider these things from the working classes were worth listening to or even existed. And Alfie unloads two hours worth of that private monologue directly at anyone who cares to listen.
Alfie is all a lot more humorous and sexy and entertaining than I’ve just made out. You can still just watch the classic as a cheeky lark. The first hour anyway. London has rarely looked better, stunning location work. I love it.
James Mangold directs John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Ray Liotta in this murder mystery where bodies start dropping at a rainswept motel.
What was a really terrific one-watcher back in the day doesn’t really seem to have much else to it on a belated revisit. There’s a top genre friendly cast here, a solid nighttime look and nice kills but nothing really snaps into focus beyond that big reveal.
John Woo directs Nicolas Cage, John Travolta and Joan Allen in this action thriller where mortal enemies, an obsessed FBI agent and a horny terrorist for hire, swap faces and exploit each other’s lives.
“LIKE A PEEEE-EACH!” Joins Ronin and Tomorrow Never Dies as one of the last great hurrahs of the stunts, pyrotechnics and model-work orientated OTT action extravaganzas. Minimal obvious CGI is deployed and the movie has aged all the better for it. The carnage is greedily indulged in some true genre high points of big budget violence and destruction. The reason this (almost) adult blockbuster has stood the test of time though is a committed focus on the dramatic and comedic elements. Woo and the script give unparalleled play to domestic and workplace scenes where these two blurred but opposed characters ease into the other’s life. Much humour, tension and moments of acting weirdness emerge from this immoderation towards the emotional drama of the piece. This surely has to be the most improvised and dialogue heavy release to feature a Humvee playing chicken with a private jet? Who expected a movie where a SWAT team are shotgunned on their abseil ropes like piñatas to have so much Shakespearean import?
Cage naturally runs with the ball, his schizophrenic brand of overacting suiting the mania and unhinged state of whichever part he plays. His unrestrained, fully immersed style turf up so many unforgettable moments of cool, camp and crazed. Travolta holds his own, though his doughy face and unbroken vocal range aren’t quite the match for Cage pumping his performance out of every pore of his body. Woo crowbars his beloved doves, slo-mo, sentimentality and stand offs into the mix. The duality theme of the piece harks back to The Killer nicely.
You do feel a little exhausted by it all. It is a truly overwhelming film. It is so packed with incident that there are awesome moments nobody ever talks about; the erratic teasing editing when a faceless Castor Troy awakes from his coma, the strangely tender goodbye kiss between Nick Cassevetes and Gina Gerson’s sibling psychos. Did Castor intend to shoot Archer’s son at the beginning? Did he really – REALLY – think middle aged John Travolta was just riding a carousel alone on his day off? Makes Con Air feel like Bergman. I’ve sat down to Face / Off many times, in all the differing viewing formats, and never once felt like I’ve ever had the full energy to absorb the big speedboat finale. One day I might just watch that set piece separately and enjoy it in its own right.
Gerald Thomas directs Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey and Hattie Jacques in British comedy where a group of young nurses and male patients butt head in a strictly run ward.
Not the best example of its form but the crisp black and white cinematography and a decade defined air of restraint makes this seem a little more sophisticated than later entries. None of the eventual regulars are given quite enough screen time to steal the show but equally the ropier faces can’t outstay their welcome under this scattergun system. Hawtrey has some enthusiastic little moments as the overly expressive simp enthralled by the hospital radio being pumped through his bedside headphones. Featuring brief appearances from Shirley Eaton, Jill Ireland, Leslie Phillips and the always wonderfully off key Irene Handl.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 