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Manzzell
Reviews
Away from It All (1979)
Brilliant stuff, but unfortunately any description is a spoiler!
The Astor Cinema in Perth, Western Australia ran "Life of Brian" for something like twelve months. As a 15 year old lad who loved irreverent humour, I think I paid my entry fee (five dollars back in the good old days) about ten times.
This was back in the era when a cinema's main feature was preceded by some boring documentaries about wine making, formula one cars and some French street performer who trained acrobatic cats (no, that is not an exaggeration)!
So, I sat back before "Life of Brian" ready to have my mind numbed by yet another doco named "Away From It All" about all the wonderful sights to see in places I was never likely to go to. However, as things progressed, it started becoming more and more sarcastic and that was when I recognised the dulcet tones of John Cleese as the narrator. As he continued it became clear that he hated these time-fillers just as much as the audience did to the point where it ended with the inevitable climax.
After my first viewing, I looked forward to watching, re-watching and re-re-watching "Away From It All" as much as "Life of Brian". To this day I find it incomplete to watch one without the other. Fortunately, YouTube has saved the day yet again!
True Crime (1999)
Seen it all before
Good suspense mystery but to be honest, it has just about every cliché in the book. The innocent condemned man, the hard-nosed battle scarred journalist with the marriage on the rocks thanks to an affair with a colleague's wife and the condemned man saved from the fatal injection at the last possible moment (perhaps even beyond it). And while I realise Steve's on-screen daughter is the real-life daughter of Clint Eastwood, there is a perception of disbelief at a man looking on the wrong side of 70 having a kid of about 5. Add to that this man who appears to be a nursing home candidate having a wife looking more like a daughter and having a fling with a woman who had a husband in his prime and finally in the last scene flirting with a girl who should have called him "grandpa", the credibility got a little lost. And did I mention the clapped out old clunker of a car held together with gaffer tape in the style of Columbo? Don't get me wrong, Eastwood is a damn fine actor and director but the lead role in this one should have gone to someone thirty years his junior. Still a good story told but in the end, nothing we haven't seen before.