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The Exorcist (1973)
YOUR MOTHER COOKS SOCKS IN HELL
I didn't see The Exorcist until its re-release in the late nineties, having heard it was one of the greatest films ever made
I thought it was pretty good but never felt the need to watch it again until it popped up on the BBC's iPlayer this Hallowe'en
On second viewing, it turns out this is one of the greatest movies ever made
The most striking thing about the movie is how little exorcism it contains. That whole sequence is 20 minutes of the movie; the first and second acts have three scenes where Regan's possessed
The bulk of the movie is a concerned mum trying to figure out what's wrong with her daughter and trying to find someone who can help. It plays like one of those movies of the week where a kid has a rare disease and doctors don't believe the parents
In fact, I wish the film had played it a little more straight and left room for the possibility Regan was suffering some kind of psychiatric distress. You'd only need to lay off the make-up and one mechanical effect to let the audience walk away with their own interpretation of events
The scenes of Regan being subjected to a barrage of medical examinations really do play like the medieval torture those accused of demonic possession endured in previous centuries
And Friedkin gets as much (more) dramatic effect out of Burstyn hearing noises from the attic as he does from revolving heads and projectile vomiting
And the empathic response to Karris' relationship with his unfortunate mother provides more unsettling moments for the viewer than anything the special effects department cook up
The simple device of an old homeless guys voice - CAN YOU HELP AN ALTAR BOY, FATHER? - coming out of Regan's mouth is unsettling in a way I can't explain
It's all the exact opposite of the maximal approach to film making today, when anything can be shown on screen at minimal expense. What the infinite possibilities afforded by CGI amount to is a net loss, when they mean effects such as this are neglected
And the aesthetics of seventies film making mean the entire production looks ravishing
Everything from the film stock, to wardrobe, set decoration and even the gorgeous cars of the period lend the film an air of sophistication, while the autumnal setting and the architecture of Georgetown create an atmosphere that recalls Rosemary's Baby and Hallowe'en
Sometimes, the greats really are The Greats.
Easy A (2010)
MY V***** SMELLS LIKE SIXTEEN CANDLES
Really more of a commentary on teen and high school comedies of the 20th and 21st centuries, but it's an entertaining and engaging dissection of movie tropes and social mores
Stone's character openly mocks the then-contemporary trend for film-makers to base their teen romances on novels familiar from the US high school syllabus, while appearing in a teen movie based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's weighty set text
As well as having great fun with the idea of lazy students basing their essays about the source novel on their viewing of the awful Demi Moore film adaptation, instead
The central conceit - a lie concerning a sexual encounter spiraling out of control - serves as a strong spine to support the rest of the story, even if it doesn't unfold credibly and how Stone's character feels about the escalation of events isn't always nailed down
The dramatic and emotional stakes are very low, which is maybe a result of Tucci and Clarkson's parent characters - the usual source of stakes and tension in such narratives - being played as very light, glib and quippy
Which is all fair enough - the purpose of the film is to amuse and entertain, which it does admirably.
Minari (2020)
MINARI REPORT
Minari's a very beautiful, low-key drama about ordinary people trying to live very meager, ordinary lives and the titanic struggles, epic emotions, and world-shattering conflicts that involves
The naturalistic tone reminds me of Ken Loach's films
Like everyone else raised on western storytelling, I kept waiting for the villain to arrive. The landlord who swindles the father on his land purchase, the racist locals who shun the family, the big agricultural operators who conspire to hobble his business
But Minari isn't that sort of movie
The dirt-poor locals are friendly and kind, the only person who cheated the father on his land purchase was himself, and his business proves a very, very modest success
Instead, Minari is a film about how life can try to crush you for attempting even the most simple of things: like falling in love, raising children, and trying to provide for them
The titular metaphor is that of a naturally growing wild herb that requires no cultivation, which is contrasted with the father's hard labour and singular pursuit of cultivating both the land he has bought and the business he's trying to build
While he spends a fortune trying to find enough water to sustain his non-native crops in Arkansas sod, the Minari his irreverent mother-in-law carelessly cultivates on the banks of the nearby creek thrive and quickly multiply like the weed the US Department of Agriculture consider them to be
There's a secondary metaphor to be found there about Minari being considered an invasive species, which can't be ignored in a film about immigrants to the US in 2021, but it's not one the film leans into
What the film concentrates on is the contrast between that easy abundance and the tireless struggle of the father and mother to make their relationship work while trying to provide for their family, and all the compromises and conflicts that entails
But, like Star Wars (1977), this story is told from the perspective of the lowest ranking participants, which in this case means the bed-wetting elementary schooler, David, the youngest son of the family
And, in a move that provides the film with a shot in the arm half-way through, David's mischievous grandma, imported from Korea to patch over the holes in the parents' relationship and business plan
Granny's a hoot, teaching David to gamble, swear and disregard clinical advice about placing a strain on the congenital heart defect that's defined and constrained his life to date
Which, again, brings us back to the metaphor of the naturally thriving Minari; while David's mother frets endlessly about his condition, Granny praises his strength and encourages him to take physical activity
I was going to say I won't spoil the ending by telling you how that works out, but it's not the kind of film that can be spoiled. Compromises are made, conflicts resolved, but not in a way that suggests anyone lived happily ever after
Minari's a beautiful film with an involving story, engaging characters and warm humour, which manages to make the small dramas of ordinary life entertaining and illuminating
The sort of story the US and UK film and television industries used to tell on a regular basis, but have abandoned in the pursuit of genre conventions, plot mechanics, and shareholder value.
Dick Tracy (1990)
DICK - THAT'S AN INTERESTING NAME
Beatty directs this like a man who hasn't watched a movie in more than a decade
You know that great quality movies like Raiders and Back to the Future have, where the action of one scene rolls effortlessly into the next, propelling the movie forward and building narrative momentum?
Dick Tracy doesn't have that
Beatty will escape an uninvolving action scene by leaping onto a speeding car, then the next scene will be him cooking breakfast
That kind of transition's been part of movie editing since Eisenstein was in short pants, but because the previous scenes never pay off, the effect is desultory
The whole movie's like that - Pacino's villain outlines a scheme to unite the city's criminals with himself as their leader, but all that amounts to is a scene where he coaches a chorus line
There's a central spine to the movie, a storyline about whether the bachelor hero will settle down to family life - which seems like the kind of thing a canny script writer does when pitching a movie to flatter and appeal directly to the vanity of an ageing shagger like Beatty
But the film has less interest in the action and the main plot than Madonna's moll has in the oyster-slurping sugar daddy Pacino takes off her hands by burying him in concrete
Beatty would rather be making Reds, and it shows
Thanks to Vittorio Storarro's incredibly cinematography and fantastic production and costume design, the movie does actually have a lot to recommend it
The idea of replicating the four-colour printing process of newspaper strips is inspired, abandoning naturalism in favour of a vibrant palette that transforms ordinary scenes into visual feasts
There's one scene of Beatty stepping out of a car where someone's just thrown down a bucket of lurid yellow dye to represent a puddle that transforms something mundane into a spectacle
The film looks extraordinary, developing a unique aesthetic that would have provided a template for how big budget spectacles could have looked in the nineties if CG hadn't come along and disrupted the craft of physical movie making
The effect achieved is actually quite similar to what contemporary films like Dunkirk achieve by pushing a single colour in the grading process, so I suppose Storarro's aesthetic prophesised the future of film making after all
The film's use of prosthetics deserves special attention, too, transforming minor characters, like Flat Top, into the stars of this movie. Al Pacino's latex enhancement is the most subtle as well as the most convincing, making him look like a hybrid of Richard Kiel and Sylvester Stallone
Pacino's performance deserves a mention. It's a commonplace that the villains of this sort of movie is the best role, but Pacino takes what he's given and aims for the back of the stands
His ranting, deformed Big Boy Caprice is a ball of energy that has the inexhaustible manic force of Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop. The script gives him one entertaining rhetorical quirk, of misattributing and misquoting figures from history, which is fun for anyone paying attention
Pacino's serving the same function here as Nicholson in the previous year's Batman - an Oscar winner having fun delivering an over-the-top villain performance and lending the production some kudos
Tim Burton's Batman movie obviously played a huge part in this film being given the green light, and if that wasn't obvious from Danny Elfman being hired to provide the score then the film's thirties setting hammers that home
Films like Flash Gordon and Richard Donner's Superman went a weird never-when feel, where everything was filmed in the real world but felt like thirties origins of the source material
Only John Huston's Annie adopted the comic strip's temporal setting. Burton's Batman was ostensibly set in the modern day, but everyone except Kim Basinger's dressed like they're in It's a Wonderful Life.
If Batman hadn't already proven that retro aesthetic worked with modern audiences, I'm sure Beatty would have updated the timeline a little or gone for a fudge similar to Superman.
Notorious (1946)
THE BONDS FROM BRAZIL
If you've ever wondered how Cary Grant would have worked out as James Bond, here's your answer
The set-up of this movie is the same as most classic-era Bond movies - debonair spy uses his seduction of a beautiful girl to infiltrate the operation of a sinister German industrialist
Grant's spook is more conflicted here about using Bergman for his own ends than Connery ever was, but you can read the slight twitch in Grant's otherwise impassive features when he turns-out Bergman as Craig-era confliction
He's still a *******, but he doesn't feel great about it!
Bergman's fantastic, obviously, even if the film settles for the Predator trick of telling you a character's nationality, rather than asking the performer to approximate the accent of that country
I suppose Swedish might as well have been German to most 1940s audiences, and Rains helps by playing his Nazi villain as English as the Queen - Grant's as American as fish & chips, too
Bergman's drunk acting isn't great and she's as unconvincing as an out of control party girl as you'd expect, but once she becomes a graceful woman with conflicting emotions hidden beneath a glacial demeanour, she's back on home territory and does a great job
If the plot shares similarities with early Bond, bachelor Rains' cold, demanding mother, who disapproves of his relationship with this glamorous blonde interloper, can only remind Hitchcock fans of Psycho and The Birds
It's not just Oedipus that'll interest Freudians in the audience - there's sublimated Father-daughter incest, marital infidelity, secret rooms and stolen keys - the whole business of spy craft is turned into a psychodrama about insecurity, jealousy and paranoia in relationships
All the good stuff
In terms of film making craft and Hitchcock's trademark building of tension, the whole movie revolves around two key scenes, one involving a hidden key and the scene where Grant slowly walks Bergman out of Rains' mansion
The former recalls Nolan's observation that film making has a lot in common with magic - Bergman is literally palming the key then creating mystery as to which closed fist it will be revealed to have been concealed within, teasing the audience
And the second, agonising scene is the best use of v-e-e-e-ry slow action to create tension I've seen since the half-speed car chase in Sicario, even though this film was made almost 70 years before Sicario
Expertly made, great performances from beautiful stars, psychologically intriguing, and it looks fantastic
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Prizzi's Honor (1985)
THE HITMAN & HER
The big curiosity of this movie is seeing Nicholson play a character other than Nicholson
In later years especially, but even in movies such as Chinatown and The Shining, Nicholson was basically projecting aspects of his own public persona
Here, he's dumb, awkward and he's wearing a mouthpiece that gives him a goofy look that suits his slow-witted, ambling persona and halting inarticulacy
It's a very old fashioned movie - the kind where, when characters fly from New York to Los Angeles, the film inserts a brief clip of a jet flying left across screen
And when those characters fly home, the same jet's shown flying right across screen
Angelica Huston's fantastic in terms of her accent and mannerisms, delivering a performance that's a performance of a performance, which deserved an Oscar just for creating such a layered confection
The scenes between her and the truly grotesque, wizened Don played by Hickey are great fun, each of them displaying a great knowing humour and amorality that vies to top the other
Turner's great, too, displaying the great comic talent she'd already shown in Carl Reiner's The Man with Two Brains and would dust off, years later, in John Waters' Serial Mom
Turner's best line comes when when she admits the number of victims she's murdered then reassures a disquieted Nicholson (with a perfectly straight face) that it's not too many people when you consider the size of the population
The film's full of Italian characters, but the only Italian actors in the movie are a twinkling Robert Loggia, who has a great scene reading a ransom note, and Stanley Tucci in a non-speaking, minor role
Nicholson might be some percentage Italian, although nobody (including Nicholson) seems to know the truth of that claim
It's difficult to believe Nicholson made this movie just five years after The Shining - he looks much more like the rotund gangster Jack Napier (Batman, 1989) than Jack Torrance
The film's convoluted plot - a series of crosses and double-crosses - is only really there to let everyone do their turns and deliver funny lines. That's not a criticism - other movies could benefit from adopting those priorities
The film looks unusually cloudy and overcast, making New York feel more like London or Paris and leaving Los Angeles and Las Vegas resembling Blackpool on a sunny day in September
The age of the director is mostly a positive, giving the form of the film a reassuring feel of vintage Hollywood film making, only showing in a negative way via the fumbling of a key action shot
And maybe a coy attitude to sex scenes, which must have been a first for someone who learnt their trade in the era of the Hays Code. If that's the worst someone has to say about a movie, take that as a recommendation
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Doomsday (2008)
THE VIRUS MAKES YOU COPY OTHER MOVIES
This documentary explores what happens when an original and inventive filmmaker is no longer constrained by a limited budget and gives in to their worst instincts
The answer being that they forget everything that made their previous work worth anyone's time and just indulge themselves by homaging every video they rented in the eighties
Which would be fine, but director Neil Marshall's budget isn't big enough to give the film the production design and cinematography it needs and his film making skills aren't up to the action scenes
Or, frankly, the dialogue scenes
The cumulative effect of these various shortcomings is a movie that looks like an early-noughties BBC sci-fi show, with dialogue and action scenes that feel like a student film
I really liked Marshall's first two movies, Dog Soldiers and The Descent, so the universally bad reviews for this movie made me avoid it for a more than a decade
Nobody needs to see their hero with their trousers around their ankles
On a *very* basic level, Marshall's direction is inadequate. A moment where Mitra's character grabs a jailer by the ear is awkward and unconvincing
If Marshall can't handle a simple moment like that, what hope does he have of staging massive action set-pieces? 'NONE', turns out to be the answer to that question
Fist fights are stagey and static, vehicle stunts are underwhelming, and both suffer from poor editing. Which is a problem for an action movie
Rhona Mitra's too gorgeous to be an action hero. Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton are beautiful women, but their hair was made to look awful and they were dressed in unflattering clothing
Mitra looks like she's on a fashion shoot
That's not the actress's fault. Someone in the production chose to prioritise glamour over character, which means everything else in the movie feels inauthentic
Speaking of inauthenticity, this is a film set in Scotland but most of the cast aren't Scottish and most of it wasn't filmed in Scotland. South Africa does a surprisingly good job filling in for Glasgow
If I hadn't looked up the filming locations, I'd have assumed the film was just lucky to shoot during the two weeks of the year when Scotland isn't dark, grey and lashed by horizontal rain
And most of the foreign actors handle their accents as well as lonely Jock cast member Compston does when he's pretending to be English in Line of Duty, so no gripes there
I haven't mentioned the story because it's so perfunctory as to be non-existent. The film doesn't seem interested in its own plot, so I don't see why I should bother
The *premise* is really interesting, with all sorts of potential for Robocop-style social satire within the context of an action film, but Marshall just fancied having a go at remaking some of his favourite movies
The final vehicle chase only makes you realise what a genius George Miller is
Doomsday isn't a *terrible* movie, it's just a pointless waste of time and money that does nothing particularly well and has absolutely zero to offer in terms of originality or invention
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In the Line of Fire (1993)
BEATING JOHN MALKOVICH
The first thing that struck me on this rewatch is how great the film looks
That might be because the last time I saw the movie was two decades ago, on a small TV screen, which means it was a pan and scan version
That means the framing and focus decisions of the film makers - balancing an extreme close-up of Eastwood's face huge on one side of the screen with McDermott off to the other side, in the background but still in (deep) focus, for example - were lost
This rewatch made me realise Petersen and/or cinematographer John Bailley are borrowing Sergio Leone's trademark use of extreme close-ups
The production hired Ennio Morricone to provide the score, so I'm guessing the thrill of landing Eastwood for the lead role inspired a bit of fanboy homaging from all involved
Those extreme close-ups work especially well here because Eastwood's face has become so fascinating to look at; as chiseled as Mount Rushmore but twice as craggy and half as mobile
When every line is hissed through gritted teeth and the narrowing of eyes from squinting to practically closed are all the emotional cues an actor's face allows the viewer, those zoom-ins on Eastwood's face during his phone calls with Malkovich allow a slight tension in the muscles to convey a world of meaning, registering when one of Malkovich's barbs scores a hit
Eastwood plays Horrigan - the most Irish cop name in movie history - as so repressed that lighting the veins in his forehead in a way that accentuates their pulsing is the only way to let the viewer know when he's about to lose his temper
But that's fine - Eastwood, at this stage in his life and career - works fine as a monument. There's a moment in the movie where he speaks a line to the Lincoln memorial and it feels like an exchange between equals
Equally, when the art department write Eastwood into US history by pasting his younger self beside Kennedy in a photograph from Dealey Plaza, it rings true - they're figures with a similar cultural resonance
There's a lot of cut and paste going on - the film makers appear to have used footage from real campaign rallies then chromakeyed Eastwood and this movie's fictional president into the shots
That makes for the only ugly shots in the movie, although there are a few other scenes where it looks like characters have been matted into the foreground, which look a little off
Strange decision, because the film really does look great, otherwise. Unlike a lot of nineties movies, the colours are really vibrant and rich without ever looking televisual - no stylised palettes or grading, here
Eastwood's game about making fun of his age, allowing himself to look genuinely knackered and doddery during a scene where he takes a nap after exerting himself physically
But Eastwood looks like he's in better shape at sixty than he was in the seventies, so when he chases a much-younger Malkovich across rooftops, vaults fences and climbs drainpipes, the viewer only needs to suspend disbelief a little bit
Requiring a little more goodwill from the audience is the idea of Horrigan scoring with Russo's character
Just to be clear, CLINT EASTWOOD was probably still a big hit with much younger ladies, but the idea of Horrigan's obnoxious burn-out charming a former Vogue cover model into bed is a stretch
Their unlikely romance does lead to the great scene where the secret service agents prepare for bed by discarding the small arsenals they carry about their persons, which received the ultimate honour of being spoofed in Naked Gun, so I'm willing to let the romance go
Horrigan's a truly obnoxious, insensitive character, so maybe the film felt it needed to show the audience one character liking him, to encourage them to do the same
Normally, that would be the role of McDermott's character, but since Horrigan repays his friendship by endangering his life and treating him like dirt, that's not going to work out
The movie gets extra points for introducing a buddy cop duo where one's a young hot shot and the other's about to retire - someone literally says Eastwood's 'too old for this ****' - but inverting the result you'd usually expect from that dynamic (no plot spoilers)
Horrigan treats everyone else in the movie pretty much the same way as McDermott - he has a neat line in disparaging put-downs and foul-mouthed insults, which is great fun to watch in a movie but would make him the office ***hole in real life
EVERYONE else in this movie is wrong! His boss (a great, slimy turn from Gary Cole), the White House Chief of Staff, even technical experts on topics Horrigan doesn't understand are blithering idiots
Which doesn't actually mean Horrigan doesn't work as a lead character
He's a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy for audience members who think they're hard done by at work and dream of telling their supervisors and colleagues what they *really* think of them without suffering any of the inevitable consequences
Which means the only character in the movie who comes out of encounters with Horrigan holding their own is Malkovich's psycopathic assassin
Malkovich puts in an entertaining, unhinged turn as Booth - up there with Rickman in Die Hard and Hopper in Blue Velvet, swinging between the calm, detached and cerebral villainy of the former and the screaming insanity of the latter
His cat and mouse game with Eastwood's character unfolds as a series of crank phone calls between trolls - Malkovich at first holding all the cards and easily getting the better of Eastwood at every turn
But as the film progresses and Eastwood discovers more about Malkovich's character, the tables turn, culminating in one great scene where Eastwood pushes Malkovich's buttons, provoking a volcanic outpouring of rage
Brilliantly, when Malkovich slams down the receiver after that rant, he instantly switches back to his usual, low-key persona, giving himself a little neck roll to mark his transition back to flat affect and controlled rage
Both Eastwood and Malkovich are aided in their performances by being in the hands of skilled craftsmen
One small example is the scene where Malkovich murders a *very* sympathetic character. You hate him for that, but he leaves without harming the character's dog
If the film had shown Malkovich murdering the dog, the audience would have understood him as a classic movie villain, but that one act of dramatic restraint means we actually sort of believe him when he apologises to his victim for what he's about to do
Meaning you *kind of* go along with the narrative he's pushing in those long phone calls with Eastwood, of an honourable man betrayed, leaving the reveal of Malkovich's true nature to that brilliant scene referenced above
Malkovich's character is built up in parts - when he's introduced, he's literally just a pair of lips on the other end of a phone call, and the film hides him in darkness or shoots him from behind all the way up until his identity and motivation are revealed
Until the film discloses that information, the only times we see Malkovich in full figure or for extended scenes with characters other than Horrigan are when he's sporting one of his many disguises
Which helps the sense the film's trying to create of an elusive character that it's impossible for Horrigan to get a handle on, as well as prolonging the audience's sympathy for his story and sneaking regard for his ingenuity
The film was years ahead of its time in identifying the antipathy many US citizens feel towards the Presidency, both in terms of the office itself and the individual personalities who inhabit it
Malkovich spits out the words that he can't believe an honourable man like Eastwood is willing to put his life on the line for 'a man like that' (the POTUS)
So the film works just as well for voters sitting there thinking how dreadful it would be for another president to be assassinated as it does for the many Americans who would be glad to pull the trigger themselves
The ranks of whom have only grown since the early nineties
In the Line of Fire is the kind of slick, efficient thriller Hollywood doesn't make anymore. If it was made today, it'd be much more of a straightforward action movie, concentrating on spectacle
And if it had been made back then with anyone other than Eastwood and Petersen, it wouldn't have enjoyed the budget and level of craftsmanship that it did - it's an entertaining and enjoyable anomaly
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HHhH (2017)
THE FILM WITH TWO HALVES
The abbreviated version of German history given here feels rushed - if this project had gone ahead a few years later, it would have been made as a limited series, for streaming
Rohm's introduced (briefly) in one scene and murdered in the next - there are entire movies to be made from events that pass by in montages
But that's fair enough - this film's aim is to offer some kind of explanation for why Heydrich was able to do the things he did, not to give a thorough account of his times
The key scenes are those where Pike's character helps him overcome a career setback by urging him to suppress emotion and a later sequence where Heydrick's reviewing footage of war crimes while a screaming Pike gives birth to their child
An impassive Heydrich's viewing is interrupted to inform him of the birth of his child, to which he responds only by asking the sex before returning to his viewing
In the previous scene, Pike's character mistook Himmler congratulating her moulding of Heidrich for him complimenting her children, inviting the viewer to see Pike's character as having given birth to Heydrich and, by extension, the Holocaust
It's at this point Himmler imparts the information that Hitler has bestowed upon Heydrich the title that also serves as the name of the film
The thesis being that by identifying something in Heydrich and, at his lowest ebb, urging him to suppress his frustrated rage and redirect it towards service in the SS, Pike's character created a creature capable of committing atrocities without emotion
Empathic response - or lack of it - is a big concern for this film
Scenes like Hitler's victory parade or the massacre of Czech peasants begin with extended first person shots, placing the viewer right in the centre of events and inviting them to experience events as if they were happening to them
Which is obviously something Heydrich was incapable of doing. Another key scene is one where Heydrich blackmails a general and threatens him with court martial for sexual indiscretion
When the general points out this is exactly what happened to Heydrich, not a flicker of emotion passes across Heydrich, meaty slab of a face
The lesson Heydrich took from his experience was that it's better to be the person doing the persecuting than the persecuted, inflicting his suffering on the entire world through a narcissistic sense of injustice
... and then it turns into a completely different movie!
Thematically, tonally, cinematography, use of music - everything about the second half of the movie is *completely* different to the first
The characters are a lot of fun to hang out with, they're good people and sympathetic characters, they fall in love and there's even a dance number!
Imperial ballrooms and stately country houses become humble bedrooms and crowded, cobbled city streets, as characters who have everything give way to characters who have nothing to lose
The film does a great job of conveying the danger and the constant fear in which anyone associated with the Czech underground lived, and the action scenes are expertly handled as well as surprisingly, brutally violent
The final battle scene is particularly effective
I'm sure there would have been a better way to integrate the two halves of the story - Operation Anthropoid chose to tell the story of the assassins alone, so if this movie had told the story of Heydrich they'd have made good companion pieces
The whiplash from the switch from traditional biopic to tense action-thriller is jarring, but if you chose to watch them as two connected one-hour dramas, they both have lots to recommend them in their own right
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Rio Bravo (1959)
THE ONLY RIVER IN THE MOVIE IS IN THE TITLE
Modern day film executives are fixated on the idea of the four quadrant movie - something that appeals to men as well as women and to parents as well as kids
Rio Bravo has John Wayne as well as Ricky Nelson and it has musical numbers alongside gunfights. Hawks even contrives a romance between Wayne and Dickinson, for the lady-folk
Something for everyone, although Rio Bravo finished behind Ben Hur and Some Like it Hot in the box office rankings of 1959, so maybe they should have thrown in a cartoon, for the kids
Howard would Hawk the same basic premise around Hollywood for another two movies (Eldorado & Rio Lobo), so the formula was considered successful enough to try again (and again)
And John Carpenter used it as the spine of two movies (Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghost of Mars); three, if you count the more tendentious example of Prince of Darkness (which I do)
Rio Bravo's creatively and technically more successful than any of those films because it's made by a master craftsman at the peak of his abilities and with a wealth of experience behind him
The film's tense action set-ups play perfectly without dialogue, the film makers' grasp of storytelling meaning it'd work just as well in the silent era, when Hawks began his directorial career
The scene where Wayne and Martin track down the hired goon who murdered Ward Bond's character is particularly effective
It's basically a tutorial in film making - how to communicate the geography of a scene to the audience and when to reveal a hidden threat to create tension
All that and it's a callback to the film's opening scene, using the narrative device of the spittoon to show the progress Martin's character has made and to reverse his humiliation
That's Martin's role, here - to undergo the transformation and follow the character arc the dramatic lead would usually undertake
Because John Wayne is playing John Wayne - super competent and as solid and unchanging as the mountains of the film's Arizona backdrop - the function of the lead character is split into two
Martin performs all the self-questioning, doubt and growth that mark the hero's journey and delineate the three act structure of a screenplay *around* Wayne, who stands solid at the centre of the movie like a monument, unaffected by anything that transpires between mortal men
That's not a complaint on my part or a mistake on the part of the film makers
By this point, Wayne was an untouchable god of cinema. He'd battered Victor McLaglen from one end of Ireland to the other, hunted and killed the Comanche war chief Scar, and won WWII
The idea a bullet could hurt him was ridiculous
Walter Brennan's comedy turn as Stumpy is the obvious highlight; irascible but loyal, a heightened performance so stylised it teeters on the edge of absurdity but never topples over
Dickinson's great, too
Luminously beautiful but animated and humorous in a way glamorous actresses seldom feel the need to be - every bit as good a foil for Wayne as Maureen O'Hara, even if their May-September romance is never convincing
Ricky Nelson's absolutely awful - stiff, stilted and the least convincing cowboy since John Cleese in Silverado - but we don't need to say any more about that
The film's use of Technicolor is absolutely fantastic - stylised to the point of abstraction
The highlights in Pedro Gonzalez's hair read blue and the satin of Dickinson's blouse, the walls of the saloon, and the dusty streets of the town are all the same yellow ochre
It reminds me of Dick Tracy (1990), where production designers tried to emulate the four-colour process of newspaper strips, so that every red in the movie was the same red, every green the same green
Carlos the comedy saloon owner, his spitfire wife, and Bert the Chinese undertaker are either dreadful ethnic caricatures or a surprising level of representation in a film of this era, depending which hobby horse you rode into town upon
Everyone, including a barely 18 y/o Nelson, smokes in this movie, with Dude's inability to roll a cigarette providing a running gag as well as a metaphor for his loss of confidence in the second act
Music's used sparingly in most scenes, so when it does arrive - in the singalong mentioned earlier or when the villain pays the Mariachi band to play a death song to intimidate the heroes - it's particularly effective
The film's finale, featuring a cackling Brennan destroying the villain's lair by throwing sticks of dynamite for Wayne and Martin to shoot in mid-flight, is great fun, even if the heroes never feel in jeopardy
It's a great way to relieve the dramatic tension the film's spent building up during its very long (2 hours plus) running time
Apparently, it was Hawks' daughter who came up with the TNT ending, which reminds me of Spielberg complaining he didn't know how to end Jaws, prompting a friend to tell him the shark had to explode
Worked for the end of Star Wars, too
Rio Bravo's a pure popcorn movie, but it's a fantastically well made popcorn movie and a lot of fun
...
Outlaw King (2018)
THEY MAY TAKE OUR LIVES, BUT THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR ACCENTS
Only kidding; Pine and Taylor-Johnson's accents are fine
Despite being an Actual Scottish, my knowledge of Scottish medieval history wouldn't fill a Wikipedia stub, so I'll take the word of all those complaining about dramatic licence
Even if I knew more than the broad brushstrokes, I don't think it'd bother me - the film works fine as a story in its own right
Pine's absolutely fine; he doesn't have a lot to do or too many great moments, but he's the kind of actor who's just enjoyable to watch and likeable enough to sell you on the lead character
Pugh's fine too, although her tiny frame means she looks a lot younger than her 21 years, making the age difference between her and Pine feel a little creepy
But the performances that steal the film are the English
Aaron Taylor-Johnson, playing the Black Douglas as a sort of 14th century Franco Begbie, and Billy Howle, as the sort of guy who loves his famous, powerful dad and desperately wants to win his approval (which only makes his dad despise him even more) absolutely steal the movie
Taylor-Johnson's just great fun every time he appears on screen; whenever you see him, you know he's never far from screaming something incomprehensible (even to Scots) and someone's going to get headbutted or stabbed
He's basically Middenface McNulty, from Strontium Dog
Howle plays Edward II as an upset toddler, desperate to be loved and lavished with parental approval, trapped inside the body of Joe Rogan and trapped beneath the haircut of Moe Howard
Every time you think he's this film's Alan Rickman, delighting in his cruelty and villainy, he's undercut by his dad treating him like Meg from Family Guy
When Howle ends the movie flailing, sobbing, puking and crawling a slow retreat through Scottish mud, the viewer feels he got his comeuppance ... but you're also sort of sorry to see him go, in the same way you felt sorry for Freddy Krueger getting his **** handed to him by yet another wholesome American virgin at the end of every sequel
Kudos to Stephen Dillane for playing Edward I as a convincing hyper-competent, high achieving, practical CEO, rather than a cartoon villain, letting his hilariously dysfunctional relationship with his son clue the viewer into the fact that behind the apparent reasonableness he's actually a colossal ****
That's helped by Dillane's decision to play Edward with a modern accent and speech patterns, rather than falling back on the Cod Shakespearean idiom most actors adopt when playing royalty in tights
Special mention to Sam Spruell's Aymer de Valence, who - despite the Francophone handle - sounds and looks like he should be bursting out of a straining Fred Perry at a Millwall home game
He's playing the Darth Maul role, here - the effortlessly competent, physically imposing henchman of the main villain, who you just know the good guys wouldn't last five minutes against in a straight fight
If it seems like I have a lot to say about the bad guys and not much on behalf of the good guys, that's because the good guys don't really say or do anything interesting
You're just sort of supposed to root for and be sympathetic towards them because their land's been subjugated and the baddies are so very, *very* bad
But because the English are played as moustache-twirlers, casually bad for no reason other than their being the very best at being bad, they're the source of most of the movie's memorable moments
Sweeping shots of majestic highland scenery getting a bit repetitive? Don't worry, here are the English to disembowel a wee girl's uncle right in front of her, for no real reason
By comparison, the Scots are just a bit miserable and dull
I wasn't exactly rooting for the English, but they're the source of 95% of the entertainment in this movie, right up until the final battle, when the Scottish are finally allowed to be ******** and start impaling innocent horses or murdering wounded English soldiers for drowning face-down in Scottish mud without permission
There's probably a more interesting movie to be made about how everyone involved was a murderer and a villain, by most modern standards, but this movie opts for the Braveheart/Robin Hood narrative of usurping invaders (ruling as part of an agreed peace accord) having the temerity to levy taxes and punish criminality
To be fair, it does a pretty good job of being that sort of movie (and nobody paints their face blue), but it's a very traditional swords and tunics romp, considering it's from the director of the truly excellent Hell or High Water
...
The Eiger Sanction (1975)
THE SPY WHO CLIMBED ME
Clint Eastwood plays an Art History professor. No, really
Clint Eastwood also foreshadows Axel Foley's ploy of playing a camp delivery boy to gain access to an event - with less success, both in plot terms as well as performance
The sight of hulking Eastwood at his beefed-up peak, looking like a gorilla in a Members Only jacket, affecting his best Julian Clary is worth a watch all by itself
As is Eastwood trying his best to sound like Dr Niles Crane when discussing art or delivering a witty put-down about a rival scholar's prose style
As Eastwood is usually aware, Clint Eastwood is capable of playing two characters - young Clint Eastwood and old Clint Eastwood - so I'm not sure why Director Clint thought it would be a good idea to ask Actor Clint to exceed his range
I can see why Eastwood wanted to try his hand at being Bond - Dean Martin, James Coburn, Michael Caine, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise and Matt Damon have all enjoyed some level of success supplying Bond movies in the gaps between installments of the main franchise
But Moore taking the role in the pursed lips and raised eyebrow direction that became his signature style seems like the perfect opportunity to offer audiences a film that returned to the muscular brutality of the Connery era
Rather than emulating the camp of the Moore movies
Unlike even the worst Bond movies, the dialogue in this movie is atrocious. That isn't such a problem for an action movie, but the seduction scene between Eastwood and McGee is almost as blood curdling as it is tedious
Nothing like a rape gag to woo the ladies into bed
The set-up for this movie is more contrived than Tom Cruise's spontaneous display of emotion on Oprah's couch - Eastwood has to murder a member of a climbing expedition, but the agency taking out the hit can't tell Eastwood which member of the group he should murder
Okay, I've dragged Eastwood and the movie long enough. I'm a big Clint fan and he's mostly great, here
Young Eastwood was a beautiful man; middle aged Eastwood has swapped swoonsome looks for rugged charm and imposing physical presence, but he's still great to watch ...
... whether that's in terms of action or the trademark mannerisms - small facial ticks and whispering threats through gritted teeth - he'd perfected by this point in his career and which would serve him well for the next fifty years or so
Eastwood drops the (very thin) veneer of sophistication he was trying for as an Art History professor and reverts to his standard movie persona, and the second half of the movie's all the better for that
Similarly, once the movie's inept Bond pastiche section is over and Eastwood starts climbing enormous rocks, it kicks into high gear and basically turns into a different movie in the process
As Tom Cruise would do two decades later, in MI2, Eastwood performs most of the climbs himself, his camera operator keeping the star's face in view so the audience know he's doing this for real
If you're the kind of viewer who spent Free Solo sweating into your socks from second hand vertigo and nervous tension, Eiger Sanction will have your fingernails clawing the fabric of your couch with anxiety
Whether it's Clint preparing for his mission in Monument Valley or the assault on the Eiger itself, all the climbing scenes work beautifully, expertly creating tension through dizzyingly vertiginous shots that still keep the actors large in frame, emphasising the human drama as well as the action
That contrasts starkly with the inept capers of the earthbound scenes which dominate the early part of the movie and, sure enough, when it comes time to wrap up the action and bring the hero down from the mountain, the film can't really think of a satisfying way to do so
The film just fizzles out in a scene where the characters explain what happened in the movie to each other
Seeing something done badly makes you realise the skill involved in doing it well, and watching The Eiger Sanction gave me a new respect for the slick operation that produced the first dozen Bond movies
If EON had purchased the original novel to cannibalise as a Bond movie, the long stretches in the first half of the film where nothing happens would be peppered with action scenes, the jokes would land, and the pace at which the story unfolded would have doubled
And the clumsy approach to sex and female characters makes you realise how deftly the early Bond movies served up male fantasy in the same brisk manner as they sped stunts and spectacle in front of the viewer's nose before rushing unto the next set-piece
As opposed to this movie, where the clumsy come-ons and innuendos are lingered over as if they represent great wit, and where Brenda Venus is required to flash her boobs whenever she's on camera
Nobody would ever argue Bond was restrained, enlightened or tasteful, but, as I say, seeing something done artlessly allows the viewer to appreciate examples where it's done well
Eiger Sanction is rambling, self-indulgent and derivative. It's inept in many respects, but those climbing scenes make up for just about everything else
In terms of mountaineering movies, it's a long way behind Cliffhanger (1993), Vertical Limit (2000) or even Everest (2015). And none of those can top Touching the Void (2003) or Free Solo (2018)
Those movies recognise that the appeal of a mountain climbing movie is the mountain climbing and let most of the action centre on the mountain, rather than testing the viewer's patience with wish-fulfillment romps featuring women of various ethnicities
There's an awful line in the second Dirty Harry movie, where Eastwood tells the Asian girl he's bedding 'this'll be a first for both of us' and this film sees him score African American and Native American off his list
Banging ladies of all ethnicities is clearly a big deal for Eastwood, yet he hands out a beating to a goon who asks him what it was like to bed McGee's character because she's black
Eastwood also uses Brenda Venus' Native American character to reference Shaheen Littlefeather's speech refusing an Oscar on Marlon Brando's behalf, responding to the punishing physical endurance tests she submits him to by muttering 'screw Marlon Brando' and 'I wish Custer won'
I love Eastwood, but he's clearly a confused, complicated guy, and in the Eiger Sanction, he made a movie that reflected all his personal strengths as well as his flaws
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The Rover (2014)
WHO'S A GOOD WAR BOY?
This film answers the question WHAT IF ALBERT CAMUS HAD DIRECTED MAD MAX?
The film's essentially about how we find meaning in life; Pearce's character is mad (Max) that he lives in a world where he did the most terrible thing imaginable and nobody cares
So he fixates on an unimportant sidequest and imbues it with all the meaning necessary to give him purpose in a world where nobody really cares what he says or does
He rages at a gas station clerk who demands payment in US dollars even though currency no longer has any value and he demands to know why a bureaucrat can even be bothered getting out of bed in the morning when what he's doing has no purpose
Pearce's character is truly unpleasant, murdering indiscriminately and using anyone he encounters as a means to an end, regardless of whether they're a threat to him or not
Then into his life comes Pattinson's character, who mistakes a practical decision on the part of Pearce's character as an act of kindness and becomes as loyal as a dog ...
... an observation that will mean more to you after the movie's conclusion
The film's thesis appears to be that the most effective (and dangerous) weapon in an amoral world is an act of kindness or generosity
That's not uncomplicated, though
Pattinson's character returns the aforementioned misinterpreted act of kindness by saving the life of Pearce's character and aiding him in his quest for vengeance, but it doesn't end well
Despite taking the view that black leather's probably an impractical choice for the Australian outback and eschewing Mad Max's Blue Oyster Bar aesthetic, the film looks great
The vivid reds and oranges you'd expect from the setting are desaturated to give the film a cold grey-blue palette, but it's impossible to make the outback look anything other than extraordinary
The score's nothing to get excited about, but there is one memorable use of music, where Pattinson's character's alone in the car, listening to Keri Hillson's Pretty Girl Rock, like a normal kid
Like George Miller's Max series, the film wisely leaves the cause of society's collapse to the imagination of the viewer, so for all anyone knows humanity read L'Étranger, concluded there was no meaning or point to anything, and just gave up
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Elle (2016)
ELLE'S BELLE
Verhoeven builds this film and its central character around the metaphor of the photograph that made her famous as a child, half naked and surrounded by flames destroying everything her family owned
That's how Huppert's character has lived her life ever since, never missing any opportunity to throw a lit match on any combustible situation and actively pursuing misery and degradation
Inflicting that misery and degradation on others, but just as often inflicting it on others, for her own amusement and the entertainment of the audience
If any of that makes the film sound like a chore, that's my mistake - Elle is one of the funniest and most enjoyable movies I've seen this year
I saw Elle this year because I've been avoiding it since 2017, assuming it was a sordid, joyless bid to create sensation and drum up some free publicity - my mistake
Huppert's character is someone who always says what she wants and does whatever she thinks will bring her pleasure, regardless of how that might affect other people
Sometimes that's cruel and sometimes she's just wrong, but it's always interesting and often very funny to watch her bulldoze over other people's feelings, social conventions and basic morality
In her work life, personal relationships and sex life, she's a wrecking ball, leaving chaos and devastation in her wake, demonstrating scant regard for how her words and actions make her friends, family or sexual partners feel
That's most obvious in her response to the sexual assault that drives the film's narrative, which ties back to the childhood experience that formed her destructive personality and forced her to develop a lack of regard for how anyone else feels or how they see her
Again, if any of that sounds like a drag, trust me when I say that one of the film's funniest moments is when the central character's mass murderer father kills himself rather than have her visit him in prison
...
Zodiac (2007)
ARTHUR LEIGH ALIENÂł
Reviewing any acknowledged classic by a revered director is pointless, but here we all are anyway
When I was a kid, the BBC would fill the holes in their empty Summer schedules with cheap trash they'd picked up from the US - TV movies like the Gacy one starring Brian Dennehy, another about Ramirez, and one called The Preppie Murder, with Lara Flynn Boyle
Although I enjoyed them, they were pretty artless things; functional retellings of the established facts with similar production values to Moonlighting or LA Law, but they were given extra value just by the fact the viewer knew they were telling a true story
Zodiac feels like David Fincher watched those TV movies and thought WHAT IF SOMEONE TALENTED MADE ONE OF THOSE?
In that, Zodiac reminds me of the way Kubrick took genres - war movies, horror movies, science fiction movies, and nineties erotic thrillers (proven, effective storytelling vehicles) - and saw what happened when you applied his sensibilities and exceptional level of craft to them
On the level of craft, Zodiac is pretty much unimpeachable. The recreation of the period - America's transition from Mad Men to All the President's Men - is absolutely note perfect
The electronic press kit for the movie included a sequence where a crew member spoke about the director sourcing ceiling lights that were the exact model used in the offices of The Chronicle - the kind of recessed units that are mostly hidden in the ceiling and which are only visible in one or two shots of the movie
That level of obsessive detail extends to every other aspect of the movie; from characters' clothing, to music and to the facts of the real life story the film is telling, too
But the film understands that all those real world details we think we're remembering each time we resurrect our childhoods are interpolated with snippets from family photographs and pop culture
Your emotional memory of visiting the play park with your mother is real, but every time your brain gets to a physical detail it hasn't retained, it fills in the blank with a sweater you remember Meryl Streep wearing in Kramer vs Kramer
So the director's reconstruction of his childhood and other people's lives is pieced together from fragments of pop culture. Dave Toschi dresses like Columbo, wears his gun like Bullit, and his partner is Jim Garrison from JFK
But as time passes, Toschi turns into Dave Starsky and his car becomes a Torino, complete with red roof light
Toschi visits the cinema to watch Harry Callaghan murder Zodiac's fictional analogue, Scorpio, and when the camera sweeps across a fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge, the music cue reminds the viewer of Vertigo and Jimmy Stewart's attempts to piece together a dead woman from broken shards of memory
That impossible shot of the bridge is also a great example of Zodiac's restrained and tasteful use of CGI, something other film makers could learn from
Another impossible shot, sweeping over a period recreation of San Francisco waterfront, opens the movie and a fake time lapse video of the Transamerica Building being constructed is used to illustrate the passing of years between developments in the investigation
They're the kind of thing CGI does well and they're used sparingly
I don't know enough about the investigation to know whether the theories and suspects presented by the film are credible or not, but the way the facts are dramatised is expert and entertaining
Two key scenes - a female motorist's terrifying encounter on the freeway and the slow-building sense of unease during Graysmith's visit to the home of someone with a potential lead - are absolutely *terrifying*, maybe more so than the murders themselves
That's all the more remarkable because nobody is harmed in either scene and, on reflection, the viewer realises they go nowhere and probably don't even relate to the Zodiac killer in any way
They illustrate the power of false leads and dead ends to grip the imagination - which is what happens to Graysmith - and they're testament to the virtuosity of the director, his ability to expertly use the tools of cinema to immerse the viewer in the perspective of another person and make them feel, viscerally, what that character is experiencing
Which, ultimately, is what the entire film is doing
In telling a story that has no conclusion, the film makers realised they had to give shape and meaning to a series of facts that have none. So, for the duration of the movie, they use all the tools of movie storytelling to make you believe in what you're seeing
The recreations of the murders create tension and build the desire for the murderer to be caught. When those murders cease, tension's created from presenting red herrings as if they're murders and suspects are dangled before the viewer in a way that has them desperate for the investigators to find that crucial piece of evidence that will resolve the tension and put them in jail
The film makers give a random sequence of unrelated facts the shape of a story and create a villain out of the blank space left where all those assembled facts don't quite fit together
The final scene between Graysmith and Toschi, where the former outlines the final case for why he thinks his suspect is the killer - and the brilliant scene where Graysmith visits the store where his suspect works - are virtuoso examples of the film makers' ability to create something compelling out of absolutely nothing
As Toschi says, he's not Dirty Harry - he can't make a case out of coincidences and circumstantial evidence, but this film and its makers can, and they do so brilliantly
...
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
TO LIVE AND WANG CHUNG IN LA
A character actually says I'M GETTING TOO OLD FOR THIS ****, although given the vintage of this movie, that might be an example of the cliche before it became a cliche
Lethal Weapon was only two years away
That character's the best friend of the male lead and he's only three days from retirement, so film majors can probably guess whether that character makes it to the final reel
I remembered this as a prime example of the LA cop movie, so I was surprised when this rewatch revealed Peterson's character to be an agent of the US Secret Service
Maybe I'd forgotten that detail because the opening scene of the agents foiling an attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan by a suicide bomber feels like it belongs in a different movie (Team America)
The production's indie budget didn't stretch to an explosion, so the lighting crew flick red gels on and off and Peterson turns his head away to simulate the blast of heat
Once that brief vignette is over, Petersen plays a typical LA movie cop, a maverick who isn't afraid to break the rules to get the job done, wearing tight jeans to emphasise his crotch, heeled boots to compensate for his stature, and a beachfront property that would surely attract the interest of Internal Affairs
Petersen perfectly embodies the pre-boot camp era of movie cop acting: holding his gun in one hand, like he's posing for the movie's poster, and bursting into rooms in a low squat, presumably to avoid bullets fired at head or chest level
None of these techniques appear in tactical training manuals
Dafoe's villain is the kind of counterfeiter who wanders around the rain-drenched streets of LA in a trenchcoat, murdering those who cross him with a silenced automatic and a shotgun
I'd previously imagined high-end forgery and mob hits to require distinct skill sets, but maybe the Graphic Design course Dafoe dropped out of included a semester on Special Weapons & Tactics
Dafoe's art skills provide one of the movie's most compelling sequences, taking the viewer through the reproduction and printing process of an era before scanners and laser printing
Watching Dafoe laboriously produce printing plates, mix ink, and operate a process camera is hypnotic in the same way as watching any craftsman at work commands the attention
Apparently, the film makers brought in professional counterfeiters to ensure the process of manufacturing fake bills that's represented on screen is completely authentic
Dafoe's also the kind of counterfeiter whose girlfriend/accomplice is a member of an experimental dance troupe - the sort of experimental dance troupe who perform in sleazy downtown dive bars
Friedkin has a sort of high art-low life opposition going on, contrasting Dafoe's cultured, considered artist-criminal with Petersen's obnoxious, hot-headed and abusive blue collar cop
So much so that when one character meets their death before the other, the viewer is genuinely pleased
What this movie has going for it is a genuine sense of place, a visual style specific to the period, and a fantastic car chase, which uses crane shots and the flyovers and off-ramps of the LA freeway system to expand the flat, linear plane of the car chase into three dimensions
What this movie has going against it is a *HORRIBLE* lead character, some of the most perfunctory dialogue choices you'll see in a major feature by a significant director, and a limited budget that reveals itself in abrupt edits and scenes that open with characters discussing what happened in the scene that should have preceded it but which the director didn't have the time or budget to get down on film
The movie ends on the most unpleasant note imaginable, with the suggestion that one cop inherits the other's female criminal informant and the abusive sexual relationship in which he entrapped her
It's a complicated scene, following a twist plot development that's the sort of move lots of screenwriters and directors must think about doing but seldom attempt
I can understand why most avoid doing so, since Friedkin doesn't quite pull it off, but he definitely earns extra credit for even attempting such a bold move, as well as the suggestion that one cop's death essentially means he reincarnated in the form of the other, acting, speaking, and even dressing like his departed partner
Like I say, I don't think the film quite accomplishes this tricky maneuver, but it blows it in an interesting way - which is more than you can say for most movies, especially cop thrillers
...
The Mystery of D.B. Cooper (2020)
HAS ANYONE INVESTIGATED SONNY BONO?
Appearing in Airplane II would have been the perfect cover
Cooper isn't as well known outside the US and by subsequent generations, so all this was new information, to me, and the documentary does a good job of establishing the basic facts as well as relating the unfolding events of the hijacking in entertaining fashion
None of the proposed suspects seem especially likely, but the purpose of those segments is to examine the enduring appeal of the mystery as well as why anyone would want to claim a relative or friend was the perpetrator
The most likely explanation seems that the hijacker died as a result of leaping in terrible weather and landing in rough terrain, but the way I initially resisted that conclusion and wanted to believe he pulled-off his elaborate caper made me understand why so many others are so willing to believe theories which don't stand up to much examination
A very thought provoking film
...
8 Million Ways to Die (1986)
FAREWELL MY LEBOWSKI
Some very odd acting and editing choices mean this down at heel detective drama is equal parts great fun and maddeningly dull
Apparently, Hal Hartley threw away the script and encouraged his cast to improvise scenes and dialogue, which explains the hilarious confrontation between Bridges and Garcia in which they try to intimidate each other while enjoying snow cones ...
... but it also explains the longueurs in which Bridges and Arquette exchange profound banalities that might get a pass in a European art film with subtitles but just sound silly when exchanged by beautiful Americans in a slick crime thriller
Maybe the closest point of comparison is The Counselor (2013), with its mismatch of sophomore philosophy and Michael Mann crime thriller visual aesthetics
The third act is a bizarre combination of the two most low-energy confrontations ever committed to film
It's as if the film makers realised they'd blown the finale by creating a ten minute stand-off between a seated Bridges and an otherwise animated Garcia walking slowly towards him ...
... so they gave it a second shot and devised a shoot-out on a funicular railway - the most twee and the slowest form of transportation known to man. Bridges and Garcia may as well have knitted each other to death,for all the tension either scene produces
Compared to the underwhelming finale(s), the first act feels like an on-the-rails burnt out cop thriller, with only Alexandra Paul's bizarre performance adding any sense of unpredictability
It's as if her mad acting choices gradually infect the movie. The scene where she's kidnapped starts off as a standard, competent LA car chase then suddenly pivots to the gonzo aesthetic of Crimewave (1985) as the rear window of the speeding van in which she's held is drenched in so much red syrup it looks like her abductors are making Tizer back there
The production and post-production processes apparently involved lots of studio interference, which maybe explains why the film lurches so sharply in tone between an efficient crime thriller and a bunch of goofballs seeing how far they can push things before the film tips over into absurdity
None of which would stop me recommending anyone tries the movie. Everyone seems like they're having fun, which means the film is usually a lot of fun, even when it doesn't make a lick of sense
..
The Reagans (2020)
SHOWTIME FOR BONZO
As a film fan, I knew nothing about Reagan's career as an actor, and as a European, I knew nothing about his political career before the presidency catapulted him onto the world stage
So the early episodes of this series were an education in both, revealing his political journey as following the same path his party and a significant percentage of his generation took, towards identity politics and adopting the ideology of the market (and its corollary, limited government) as a sort of second faith
Although the insights into how his wife's adoptive father's extreme views influenced Reagan's early political development are illuminating, editorial attempts to cite her taste in decor and fashion as symbolic of hypocrisy when contrasted with the administration's welfare cuts are tendentious
The role of Reagan's wife in his career appears to have been that of most women of her generation - supportive but ultimately passive - which renders the premise of the series as a whole (a biography of the couple, rather than Reagan himself) redundant
Although I'm essentially sympathetic to the criticism of the Reagan administration's idolatry of the market and raising deregulation to the level of a belief system, I can't argue with reviews on this page from politically biased commentators, which describe this documentary as a hit piece
I think it's perfectly valid for film makers to adopt a critical tone when interrogating their subject matter, but this series approaches every single topic with the aim of demonstrating that Reagan was wrong about absolutely everything
Maybe the film makers feel the contemporary narrative around the Reagan presidency is too hagiographic and needs to be countered, but producing an act of propaganda as a counterweight seems an ineffective way to address this imbalance
Since those who most need to hear a countervailing version of history are unlikely to stay with such a nakedly biased piece of propaganda long enough to hear any truths it contains
..
Mary Queen of Scots (2018)
MARY QUEEN OF ACCENTS
Fellow reviewers outraged at the idea of a black actor playing a white character must be unaware most of the cast aren't Scottish
Or even English. The leads are Irish and Australian, leaving Compston and Tennant as the only actors who can satisfy my fellow reviewers' thirst for complete historical fidelity
Jack Lowden's a Scottish actor playing English but Ian Hart's an English actor playing Scottish (and doing a great job), which imposture must outrage fellow reviewers yet further
Adrian Lester *is* English, as is the character he's playing, so hopefully that placates the unquenchable desire for historical accuracy felt by some reviewers on this page
The scenery's gorgeous, the production design's first rate, and all of the performances are fantastic
Especially Tennant's frothing, swivel-eyed lunatic take on John Knox - his performance creates a ranting, hate-filled fanatic, up there with fellow black-clad cleric Mullah Omar
If anything, I think the film could have afforded to take a few more liberties with recorded history
Compston's heel-turn reinforces the idea that there were no Good Guys and that Mary made calamitous personal decisions, but the arc doesn't add anything new to the story as a work of fiction and feels like going over old ground rather than advancing the story
But, over all, tracing the different trajectories of the cousins was an effective way of dramatising the fact there were no good outcomes for any woman (regardless of their station) in a time when their worth was reduced to the contents of their womb
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Prey (2022)
LET IT SHOW (the blood never bothered me anyway)
Best Disney princess ever
Naru has a dead parent (check), a cute animal sidekick (check), and the movie in which she appears was neither a great box office success nor an embarrassing financial failure (check)
The two key scenes of tribesmen and French trappers being dismembered, disemboweled and beheaded may make this a hard watch for tweens at sleepovers, but nothing more distressing than watching that awful Buzz Lightyear solo movie
Naru will look fantastic next to Ariel and Tinkerbell in Princess parades, although it'll be difficult to decide whether she should appear with her original raccoon makeup or with the fluorescent Predator blood face paint she sports in the movie's final scene
I enjoyed the movie just fine, but it seemed like a good idea executed imperfectly, to me
The film's sensibilities are those of a Marvel superhero movie - Naru's face paint even looks like a domino mask - so there are training scenes of the hero learning to use their improbable weaponry (Iron Man, Spiderman), even if the improbable weaponry in this case is a returnable tomahawk
And although the action set-ups are well handled, there are *so many* of them - all the tropes of wilderness survival movies are invoked, including the bear fight from The Revenant
But all the classic set-ups rush by so quickly the sense of peril is diminished
Plot armour means you know Naru's going to be the final girl, but the various scrapes she gets into never made me worried she was even going to suffer a broken limb (she doesn't)
It's like watching a movie about a character made of rubber
The difference between Prey and something like Deliverance, for example, is illustrated by the scene where Naru's swept away by rapids
Boorman's close-ups of the raging waters emphasise the power and danger of the natural environment - their power to break the fragile bodies of the protagonists - which pays off in gruesome fashion
But in Trachtenberg's movie, the rapids are just the way Naru escapes one set-up (the bear) and instantly gets into another (captured by by her brother)
The film briefly flirts with the idea of real physical consequences, when it looks like Naru might sever her own limb to escape
For the first time, I was worried for the physical safety of the lead character, but that's undercut with a glib line about being smarter than a beaver ... and then we race off towards the next set-up
Maybe if the film had chosen to concentrate on fewer set-pieces and used the traditional tools of suspense and immersion to emphasise the potential physical consequences of the situations in which Naru finds herself, the film wouldn't have felt so light
As it is, the film is a creditable entry in the genre of films with leads who perform incredible feats without incurring physical injury - mostly superhero movies, but the modern Dad Fantasies of Leeson and Reeves feel similarly inconsequential
In terms of its place in the Predator series, it's a sort of Back to the Future 3 - an Old West remake of the original entry in the series, replaying key scenes and some lines for Leonardo DiCaprio Pointing Meme value
Personally, I wish the film had played its premise more straight than it did
Seeing events entirely from Naru's subjective point of view - treating the Predator as an entirely unknown (and unseen) quantity - would have taken the audience back to Elpidia Carillo's description of what she saw in the original movie - 'THE JUNGLE CAME ALIVE'
2020's Invisible Man shows how that approach - an entirely unseen antagonist - can work in a sterile, domestic environment, so it's easy to imagine how much better it would work in the dense, organic environment offered by the forests of Canada
I think the studio(s) and the filmmakers could have expanded the audience for this movie beyond its established fanbase by embracing the idea of the natural environment as an antagonist
Jeremiah Johnson or Into the Wild, but with occasional glimpses of three red laser dots and weird, croaky laughter
But the movie's servicing the needs of an established fanbase, so it runs through the reassuringly familiar checklist of visual and plot tropes anyone who's ever seen a Predator movie expects
One day, someone will make a Predator movie without feeling the need to include Predatorvision™, but this is not that day and Prey is not that movie - which will make many people happy
The Predator's one of the great movie monster designs, but (like Giger's xenomorph) it's best glimpsed in parts and in isolation
Both are much more effective when the viewer's brain has to join the dots and imagine how the claw we've seen relates to the gaping jaws we saw in another scene and how the resulting whole might be articulated
As soon as either movie monster is shown in full figure, it's just a guy lumbering around in a rubber suit, with a comically large head that looks sort of goofy, and all the mystique evaporates
To be fair, Prey doesn't give Rubber Suit Predator a lot of screen time, but he's much more of a screen presence here than he is in many other movies, mostly in Distorted Light form
Which highlights another problem with making an instalment of a series that hasn't advanced since 1987 in 2022
Even though the technology used to produce that effect and the distinctive Predatorvision™ have advanced considerably in the last 35 years, contemporary film makers can't update their aesthetics without the result feeling like something other than The Predator
Which serves as a useful metaphor for the idea of The Predator as a franchise - everyone's trying to produce something new that feels like something old (and familiar)
New film makers who take up the poisoned chalice find they can only really remake the original movie
Change the premise in any fundamental way and it doesn't feel like The Predator, so all that really changes between movies is the superficial details
Which is why a movie about a teenage Comanche girl in the 18th century ends with her recapitulating Arnie making himself invisible and begging the Predator to kill her
And why the film's dynamic is a battle between two hunters, trying to prove themselves
Hunting must be important to Predator society, but they must do other things that bring them into conflict with other cultures, too - you know, same as humans - war, revenge, football ...
But every bloody Predator movie is about hunting
By the measures of franchise film making, Prey is a superior example - finding a fresh angle on the same premise and executing its action scenes effectively - but assessing the movie on the terms by which you'd judge a completely original movie, it's compromised and timid
Bone Tomahawk is a better example of what an exploitation movie can do with a similar premise and Apocalypto manages to combine the historical points Prey makes with an action-survival narrative in a more original and arresting manner
If you like Predator movies, it's a solid recommendation, but I'm not sure newly teenage girls who grew up on Moana are going to be investigating the history of the series after the Disney+ algorithm suggests BECAUSE YOU LIKED MULAN, YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS.