Life in dark rooms
Old (or old-ish) films – a two-and-a-half-month update
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A few random old* films that I saw in the past couple of months:
At some point in the dim and distant past (well, December) I saw David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) – gentle if slow road movie in which the elderly Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth, who was nominated for an Oscar in what was to be his last screen role) takes a trip across the US to visit his ailing brother by the only means available to him: a ride-on lawnmower. Not a lot happens on the way (but that could be because I was nodding off – not bored, just tired) but it’s beautiful and heart-warming, if a little slight. (4/5)
Due to particularly bad weather (yes, the snow back in January), I was unable to fly from Guernsey to the UK so I ended up taking an overnight ferry which wasn’t a very comfortable experience. Still on this ferry they showed Pixar’s Cars (2006), albeit with the sound down to almost nothing so as not to disturb my fellow sleeping passengers. It was the only Pixar film I’d not seen so I tried to make out what was going on and I seem to recall I quite enjoyed it. This probably doesn’t count as a proper review and had it been They Will Be Blood or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford then Mark Kermode wouldn’t even consider it watching a film at all. But even I’m not that anal – from what I could make out it was a fairly decent film. (3/5)
I’ve never been a huge fan of Westerns but I seem to recall Kevin Costner getting lots of pats on the back a few years ago for Open Range (2003) and quite right too as it is pretty good. It does seem like the kind of Western they used to make – a troubled gunslinger, a tentative romance, a town under siege, that kind of thing. But this is the noughties (or it used to be) so all this was done with big explosions and lots of bloodshed. (3/5)
Imagine Ocean’s Eleven but with a less starry cast and you have Confidence (2003) – a not exactly groundbreaking heist thriller with its tongue in its cheek that benefits from a great director in the shape of James Foley, who made David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross the taut drama that it is. Edward Burns, Rachel Weisz, Andy Garcia and the ever-excellent Paul Giamatti give it their all, but with Dustin Hoffman as the baddie, they all look like their phoning it in, even if he’s only on screen for a few scenes. (4/5)
David Cronenberg isn’t the body horror maestro he used to be but he still makes good films and Eastern Promises (2007) is no exception. When a Russian teenager living in London dies during childbirth, midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) uses the young woman’s diary to discover her story and finds herself enter London’s creepy Russian underworld. Slower than it sounds, it still has an underlying sense of dread and a great performance by Viggo Mortensen as mysterious driver Nikolai, and is worth a look if you’ve ever wanted to learn about one of the many seedy underbellies of London. (3/5)
* For the record, the reason this category is called Old (or old-ish films) is that I consider anything released earlier than the previous year to be old. So now in 2010, any film released in 2008 is considered old. It’s not particularly accurate but it does appeal to my sense of order.
DVD reviews – a two-and-a-half-month update
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So the last film I reviewed on these pages was over two months ago. Since then I’ve caught up on many of 2009’s finest (and not so finest) DVD releases. Here’s what I thought of them in a nutshell. By which I don’t mean that I thought of them while I was in a nutshell, but rather…oh, you know what I mean.
I thought Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was pretty overrated. Not ‘the Citizen Kane of comic book movies’ like Empire magazine would have had us believe on theatrical release, it is a decent detective story that’s complicated by too many characters and ideas. It does look great but it’s an overblown mess and not as weighty as it thinks it is. But then I’m not a fanboy so I’m not exactly the target audience. (3/5)
I don’t care what people say, Funny People is not Adam Sandler’s best performance (try Punch-drunk Love instead) and the film only serves to prove that writer-director Judd Apatow is not the genius everyone thinks he is. The film is about legendary stand-up comedian George Simmons (Sandler) who is told he has a serious medical condition. Now terminally grumpy and philosophical he hires a newbie (Seth Rogen) to write jokes for him. They become friends then George goes off to make amends with his ex-wife. That’s pretty much it. For two and a half hours. Unfortunately, it’s hard to hate because it’s a decent enough story with enough laughs to keep you giggling along, even if it is dumb ass humour about penises and flatulence. (3/5)
With a director like Michael Mann and a cast that includes Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard, Public Enemies could only ever be great. Telling the story of John Dillinger (Depp) and his gang of outlaws, and FBI agent Melvin Purvis’ (Bale) attempts to catch him, it plays like Mann’s earlier work Heat with a younger generation of superstar. 1930s America is handsomely evoked and the cast is great, with Brit actor Stephen Graham standing out as the terrifying Baby Face Nelson. (4/5)
As a fan of both Jack Black and Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day being my second favourite film), I was always going to watch Year One despite hearing bad things about it. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting – it’s probably nowhere near historically or biblically accurate but what do I care? Put all that to one side and it is entertaining – Christian education with a slight satirical bent (but don’t expect Life of Brian) interspersed with dumb ass comedy. (3/5)
Fourth films are seldom a good idea especially when it’s obvious that it’s a barely considered afterthought (I’m looking at you, Indy), but Terminator Salvation was a pleasant surprise. With none of that pesky convoluted time travel to worry about, McG (yes, the cretin that brought us both Charlie’s Angels films) can have a ball with a variety of terminators in all shapes and sizes in a barren, sun-blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland. Permanently gravel-throated professional tantrum-thrower Christian Bale may make a laughable John Connor (come on, you’re already Batman – put the iconic screen characters down and back away) but Sam Worthington makes up for it. A fairly solid actioner. (4/5)
In a slow week in which there was nothing on the telly and we were after a comedy, there were nowt out so we settled for Hamlet 2, an odd little film about a failed actor turned drama teacher (Steve Coogan with a dodgy American accent) who inspires his loser students by writing and staging an ill-advised but surprisingly popular play: a blasphemous, politically incorrect musical sequel to Hamlet, which features such songs as Rock Me Sexy Jesus. As mad as it sounds, but worth a look, especially if you’re a Steve Coogan fan. (3/5)
‘Based on the true story’ purports an introductory title card to The Haunting in Connecticut. As with many horrors that state such a claim, it should be followed by ‘If you believe that kind of thing’. Even if you do, however, this is still far-fetched nonsense full of creaking doors, shuffling silhouettes and someone-behind-you-in-the-mirror fake outs. A few good scares but mostly derivative and dull. (2/5)
The first 20 minutes of Joe Wright’s US debut feature The Soloist sees LA Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr) scrabbling around for a story. Unfortunately, despite the quite remarkable subject matter, Wright is doing the same thing over the space of almost two hours. Jamie Foxx gives an impressive performance as Nathaniel Ayers, the homeless, mentally ill cello prodigy, but underneath all the Oscar baiting (it wasn’t even nominated for anything) lies a strangely unsatisfying real life drama that doesn’t know what it wants to say. (3/5)
In Harry Brown, Michael Caine does to Jack Carter what Clint Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino did for Harry Callahan: take a notorious bad ass, give him a bus pass, a shooter and a grumpy old temper, and let him loose. But whereas Gran Torino was a gritty drama, director Daniel Barber takes a slow character piece and grows it into a blood-soaked thriller in which Caine’s titular retired Royal Marine avenges the death of his best friend at the hands of a gang of local hoodies. At times wince-inducing, at others air-punchingly-satisfying, it would perhaps make a good companion piece to Eden Lake. (4/5)
There were a few other great films I saw over the space of the last couple of months but so good were they that I think they might deserve entries all of their own. A couple of other recent viewings will be reviewed separately. Nearly up to date.
The shame list – a two-and-a-half-month update
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OK, OK, so I’ve been away for a while but the time I should have spent writing about films, I’ve spent watching them instead which means I have a bit backlog of films to review which due to time and space, I thought it was easier to do as a series of round-ups. First up – here are a number of films I can now proudly say I’ve seen.
Way back in December I caught up with one of those ultra-hip ‘90s films that I never saw first time around because I was too busy doing much less cool stuff like maths homework and listening to Def Leppard. Of course, I was only 14 at the time, but apparently many of my contemporaries were much more inquisitive teenagers than I was. Anyhoo, the film was the decade-defining satire Natural Born Killers (1994) in which Oliver Stone pulled every kooky trick in the book to make the despicable acts of a couple of psychos (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, the Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway of the MTV generation) look both sickeningly fun and nauseatingly uninviting. Hallucinatory, nightmarish and gaudy, but also a true cultural event – no other film from 1994 looks quite as 1994 as this. (4/5)
Back in the summer of 2009 I saw Moon which reminded me how much I loved science fiction so I decided to watch a bunch of old sci-fi flicks. First up (randomly chosen by the lovefilm people) was Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris (1972) – long and perplexing, but, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s a study in space exploration as philosophy that just couldn’t have fit into 90 minutes. Plus it’s better than Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 remake and benefits from a great ending. (4/5)
Next up was John Carpenter’s debut feature Dark Star (1974) in which the four crew members of the titular spaceship try to alleviate the boredom between destroying unstable planets. It’s kooky, low budget stuff (a slapstick sequence involving a mischievous sub-Doctor Who ‘mascot’ alien is a highlight) with a nice slapdash approach. (4/5)
Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1971) was one of the primary influences for Duncan Jones when he was making Moon. Echoes of its eco-friendly message can also be clearly seen in WALL•E, and Mark Kermode calls it his absolute favourite science fiction film. It’s certainly a good story, but there’s no nostalgia there for me so there’s little to mark it out as particularly special save for an earnest performance by Bruce Dern and some wobbly pre-R2D2 robots, their metal shells controlled by amazing multiple-amputee actors. (4/5)
David Bowie made for a believable alien in Nicolas Roeg’s demented The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) but his acting skills had yet to develop at this point. Although there are social messages about the dangers of the vices of man (Bowie’s Thomas Jerome Newton gets distracted from his mission to find water for his dying planet by booze and sex), it’s played out in such an off-kilter fashion that it doesn’t really back up its argument. The message seems to be: ‘Don’t do drugs or you’ll have a wonderful life of debauchery and look like a young David Bowie.’ Pass the gin. (3/5)
Despite being the lead in one of my favourite films (Planet of the Apes), Charlton Heston’s constantly-looking-livid-while-talking-through-gritted-teeth style was actually quite wearisome. However, it did give him a nice line in defiance for his Detective Thorn in Soylent Green (1973) the twist to which I had already known for many years, which made the final act only so-so. A decent enough thriller though with yet another eco-message. (3/5)
However, the best of the lot was the ultimate B-movie – Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). An efficient thriller, perfectly paced with some great performances (especially from an increasingly manic Kevin McCarthy) and more than a little social commentary. (5/5)
Although it wasn’t on my list, I also saw Philip Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) in which the original’s plot moves from 1950s small town California to 1970s San Francisco. The transition means that a lot of the original’s claustrophobia and everyman panic is lost, and Donald Sutherland never strikes the levels of jerky agitation that McCarthy brought to his counterpart 20 years previously. But it’s still an effective thriller and benefits from a great ending. (4/5)
From science fiction to suspense, I finally got around to watching one of the films in the Alfred Hitchcock box set I was given for Christmas in 2008. Although I am nowhere near the authority on Hitchcock that I’d like to be having seen only his greatest hits and a handful of others, every time I discover one of his films it turns out to be a masterpiece. And so it is with Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock’s favourite of all his films because in it he brought a threat into a regular family in a small town, and he dealt with concepts of twinning and light and dark. Joseph Cotten is particularly devilish Charlie, with Teresa Wright as his namesake niece who uncovers the murderous truth behind her beloved uncle. (5/5)
Finally, I got the chance to watch Al Pacino get his gangster face on again one Friday night when I caught Brian de Palma’s Carlito’s Way (1993) on TV. As the Puerto Rican ex-con trying to go straight despite everything standing in his way, Pacino is on fine form, but it’s Sean Penn as lawyer best friend-turned-criminal David Kleinfeld who steals the show, which is no mean feat against Pacino’s ubiquitous shouting. The final chase sequence through Grand Central station is a highlight but there’s plenty of other stuff going on throughout, not least of which is Sean Penn’s hair. (4/5)
On a final note, when I was a student I worked part time as a cinema usher. One night, a customer asked me whether anybody had ever told me I looked like Sean Penn. I said no, to which he replied: ‘Well, you do. You look just like Sean Penn in Carlito’s Way.’ Ah, I thought. A specific film which I have not seen. Well, now I’ve seen it and I can see what he means. While nowadays I bear a remarkable resemblance to Moby, at the time I was cursed with stupid frizzy hair and crappy glasses. I now can’t look at my graduation photo without thinking I’m going to get shot in a hospital bed.
Shame list total: 1,189 (I think – I might have to do some recalculations)
