That meeting got better when the guitars came out…Elvis was learning bass and Macca spent time with him giving him pointers…plus the Beatles roadie - Mal Evans - was a massive Elvis fan, and they got on well…
YNWA 97
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,215Chief of Staff
Finally watched it tonight…I don’t really think I’m supposed to say “I enjoyed it” 🤔 I thought the subject matter was handled very sensitively, and although the questions asked towards the end by the ‘audience’ were naive, the answers were thought provoking…nicely filmed and well acted…excellent.
If you only watch one Norwegian fairy tale movie based on 1973 Czechoslovakian-East German movie this year, watch "Three wishes for Cinderella"! I'm not selling this movie very well, am I? 😂
This is a new twist on the Cinderella story with lots of snow, a more active Cinderella and a family friendly movie that's perfect for Christmas. the lead is played by Astrid Smedplass. She's actually a pop star known under the name Astrid S, but I think she does a good job. She plays a Cinderella who is treated very badly by her stepmother as usual. But Cinderella is very fond of animals and learned archery and riding from her late father, so she sneks out at every possibility. When the prince is forced to invite to a ball a servant is ordered to go to the city and by fabrics for the one sister and the stepmother, the servant asks what Cinderella wants him to take home for her. "Whatever falls in your lap" she replies". as it happens three magical nuts falls from a tree into his lap. The nuts contain outfits or personas for he to use in her fight for happiness.
While I like how Cinderella is active and courageous in the movie, I think the prince is portrayed wrong. He is a immature young man who likes to spend time with his friends and not perform his duties. While this is the same in the 1973 original, their Cinderella was a little more traditional and active too. In the new movie he doesn't seem worthy of Cinderella. Having a strong female lead go up against strong men makes her look even stronger, so I think this is a mistake. Give him something I say, perhaps he should be a better rider than Cinderella?
But don't get me wrong - this is a good fairytale movie and well worth watching with the family.
Soulless exercise in sci-fi with stupendous visuals and a happy ending but a film which loses its head half-way through and resorts to shoot-em-up action when a more measured approach needs to be taken to satisfy the interesting future notions and the moral dilemmas raised. The film carries the same theme of created memory that pepper both Bladerunner and Bladerunner 2049, only seen from a human point of contention.
Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, a tech-engineer nearing the end of a tour of duty on a nuclear obliterated Earth. He shares his work load with the beautiful Vika [Andrea Riseborough] a savvy communications officer permanently hitched to her display screens in one-to-one face time chat with Sally, a bland cliché spouting supervisor who lives on the Tet, an enormous orbital mothership holding remnants of the human race, the only survivors of a planet spanning war with the alien ‘scavengers’. A blissful, if tetchy, existence is disturbed when a rogue interstellar sleep pod is traced and destroyed by the defender drones. Out of the wreckage, Jack rescues a woman, who just happens to be the very beautiful Olga Kurylenko, and whose face sparks latent memories which draw a barrier between him and Vika as well as forcing him to confront his true emotions.
All well and good, except the screenplay throws in unwieldy spectacles like Morgan Freeman as a military bandit, smoking Panama cigars and acting like God, and having Cruise inhabit a sort of back-packers hippy paradise, a place where he escapes the brutal ravaged Earth, where he swims in a lake and chills out to Led Zeppelin and Procul Harum. No, I didn’t get it either. The climax is too reminiscent of Independence Day. Cruise is as watchable as always and he’s given decent support by the two female leads. Oblivion is efficiently directed, but it isn’t going anywhere significant, is riddled with action clichés and even its supposed happy ending is a trifle mawkish, if not downright perverse. Still, entertaining while it’s on.
that artificial memory theme in both those films is coming from the source novel do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and his short story We Can remember It for You Wholesale the source for total Recall, which was a variation on same theme
it appears in many of Dick 's books, and I think films like the Matrix or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are borrowing from Dick 's themes
just wondering, because if you have, I'd be interested in Chrisno1 style analyses of some of his books or in general!
That's not what I'm thinking of.the castle has a red-ish flag, but I doubt it's a hammer and sickle flag. In my opinion the flag might as well be a nazi flag (it isn't!) far all we know because the image is so unclear. No, the mistake is in the foreground of the image.
Paul Atreides continues his quest to survive on the desert planet Arrakis. As he cements his place as the prophesied Messiah of the Fremen he uses that power to seek revenge on the evil Harkonnens, who murdered his father and scattered his family and allies.
Adapting the second half of Frank Herbert's novel, the movie makes a few changes to the text in an attempt to better convey the author's original intentions. Dune was supposed to be, among other things, a cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly following charismatic would-be messiahs, but a lot of people missed that point. To attempt to correct that, director Denis Villeneuve makes a few subtle but important changes to the narrative. The literary Paul struggles with his visions of the future, trying but ultimately failing to stop the galaxy wide jihad that he has foreseen; the suggestion being that it could never really have been averted. The cinematic version of Paul and his mother Jessica take a more cynical approach, using the prophesies and manipulations of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood to their advantage, knowing full well what will happen but going along with it anyway. Chani, Paul's Fremen lover is also fundamentally changed from the devoted follower of the novels to the only voice of reason who tries and fails to warn her people against following a manufactured prophecy.
Selling that twist to the story depends heavily on the actors and they succeed to varying degrees. Timothy Chalamet does a good job of showing Paul's slow gradual change. Rebecca Ferguson is downright disturbing at times in her eagerness and willingness to manipulate the people around her and even her own son to attain her goals. Javier Bardem does a good job as Stilgar, Paul's right hand and a true believer who happily submits to the prophecy. Faring the worst is Zendaya as Chani; she seems capable of only one expression: the disapproving frown, and comes across more as petulant than wise.
Visually the movie is beautiful to look at with its expansive vistas and the action and fight scenes are all very well staged.
Ultimately though, I'm not sure this is the definitive adaptation of the novel. I actually found the 1984 David Lynch version more relatable even if it fully embraced the idea of Paul as a genuine messiah and as a standalone effort it actually manages to tell a complete story. The early 2000s adaptation on the Sci-Fi cable channel remains the most faithful adaptation even if the performances are quite dry and the overall look on the cheap side.
Villeneuve has already confirmed he'll be adapting the follow-up novel Dune: Messiah and I'll be curious as to how he reconciles the events of that story given the changes he introduced here.
********** THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS MANY SPOILERS TO MANY FILMS **********
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)
A cheerful western from George Roy Hill that, along with the bitter and far better Midnight Cowboy, ushered in the ‘buddy movie’ phase of American cinema. It is an enjoyable throwaway of a film, perfectly affable and watchable in its own right, but an experience without depth or an understanding of the genre it represents.
Paul Newman and Robert Redford play two real-life outlaw cowboys who lived at the turn of the last century. They make money hustling at cards and robbing banks. The talkative and canny Butch [Newman] plans to go to Bolivia; money is flush in South America and their career antics and personalities are unknown. The Sundance Kid, a laconic crack-shot gunfighter, wants nothing more than to keep on robbing railroad payrolls. After they commit one too many explosive robberies, an expert and relentless posse tracks them from territory to territory, forcing that move to Bolivia. Life is not much better for the twosome there and miscalculations lead to their sudden demise.
The film looks nice and sounds pretty, but the goings on don’t reflect the brutality of Cassidy and the Kid’s real life robberies or the sheer length of their reign of illegal impunities. Throughout it all the stars remain twinkle eyed and slippery tongued, even to the point of falling for the same woman, although this isn’t physically reciprocated. In fact, Katherine Ross’s role as Etta Place needn’t exist at all in terms of the story on screen; she could just as easily be displaced by Cloris Leachman’s whore, Agnes, Butch’s squeeze-on-the-side. The modern day romantic menage-a-trois, bolstered by a chummy song score, sits uneasily next to the rather filthy and unseemly unlawful historical goings on. While Hollywood has always glamourised gunfighters and even villainous gunfighters, they rarely made them as likeable or as contemporary as this and it simply doesn’t ring true, chiefly because our very modern and savvy ‘heroes’ bear no resemblance to the dusty, crusty, illiterates who surround them – Miss Ross’s schoolteacher accepted. There’s another overtly modern cultural misstep featured as she cavorts and sleeps openly with her lover. Or maybe I’m being overly picky.
For all their bushy tailed antics, Butch and Sundance are self-serving individuals. Unlike most western heroes, they do not have the interests of the community or the family at heart. They are interested in money, how to get it and spend it. They are also ruthless, albeit with good looks and charm. They share more character traits with Henry Fonda’s black kitted killer Frank in Sergio Leone’s magnificent Once Upon A Time In The West, a film that eulogises in epic and operatic fashion the death of the frontier and the coming of civilisation, as personified by the railroad. In Butch and Sundance the future is as jovial and unthreatening as a bicycle. Eventually, industrial civilisation or not, Leone’s version of the dying frontier chooses to have Charles Bronson’s vengeful ‘Harmonica’ eliminate Frank in a classic-style ‘good hat vs bad hat’ gunfight, a grand homage to all things wild west.
So, despite the spaghetti western frippery, …West is phenomenally traditional and understands it. Butch and Sundance is not and does not. It prefers mixing metaphors with the ‘buddy-buddy’ notion and making its protagonists attractive, loveable and sympathetic – all the things they shouldn’t be. This is epitomised by the scene where Newman’s Butch romances Etta to the strains of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, a song and sequence so out of kilter with even this welcoming narrative it jars horridly, good tune or not. Writer William Goldman, director George Roy Hill and composer Burt Bacharach are at pains to make this wearisome menage attractive. If it is, and that’s debateable given both Sundance’s and Butch’s ambivalence and Etta’s non-responsive passivity, it is the men’s friendship rather than the amorous notions which are closest to a romance. However, while the contemporary landscape of Midnight Cowboy doesn’t mark it as a western, its themes of comradeship, love and hopeful faded ambition amid the ‘hustle’ of 1960s street life are exactly the same as those presented by Hill and Goldman. Only in Butch and Sundance we are offered them in a sugar coated existence, the darkness overwhelmed with saccharine niceties. Schlesinger’s modern-day set masterpiece tells us emphatically that sweetness is an untruth. It is significant that in Butch and Sundance the filmmakers avoid the ugliness of veracity; for Goldman and Hill ensure we never see the faces of the pursuing posse, of the Pinkerton’s agents Lord Baltimore and Joe LeFors; they remain unknown and shadowy, as if they are the bad guys and the true villains the heroes. This sits the film uneasily against both …West and Sam Peckinpah’s superlative The Wild Bunch, a movie which also tackles the decline of the frontier and its outlaw history.
There Peckinpah’s anti-heroes are as scurrilous and distasteful as you can get; yet when one of their number is threatened, and even when facing insurmountable odds, they forfeit money and freedom and approach the possibility of death with the same noble heroism John Wayne’s Ringo Kid does all the way back in Stagecoach. The pursuit and eventual deaths of the fictitious Pike Bishop [William Holden] and his macabre crew of misfits are replicated in almost exactly the same manner in Butch and Sundance. [Interestingly ‘The Wild Bunch’ was also the name Cassidy gave to his first bank robbing gang. Peckinpah’s elegiac film preceded Butch and Sundance into cinemas by three months.] The cinematic difference is that while Peckinpah shows the bloody killings in slow motion and in all their guts and grimy glory, George Roy Hill freezeframes his toothy twosome as they sprint for safety, guns blazing, unaware of their imminent massacre. Burt Bacharach’s excellent incidental score reverts to single note melancholy to accompany the obvious funeral. Katherine Ross’s Etta earlier declared she won’t watch them die: “Spare me that scene if you don’t mind.” And as if we too are in love with these characters, Hill spares us also, encapsulating them as forever young, forever alive, forever heroic. Peckinpah knows his characters are not heroes, knows they are fated to die and so Pike Bishop and his men become corpses for crows: exactly how almost every outlaw in American history ended their life. Hill’s lionisation of his bandits – because they are Newman and Redford, I guess, not grouchy grizzly Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates – stinks of a cowboy hat white wash.
It also ignores the on rush of the twentieth century and modern times, a subject broached carefully by both Leone and Peckinpah. In their films, the honourable heroes and villains recognise their day is cast and approach it with eyes open and the expectation they will die. Leone’s ‘Harmonica’ survives, as every hero should, but rejects civilisation, understanding he doesn’t fit into it; he returns home [one assumes] to Mexico and a solitary dust farm, vengeance completed, to whittle on wood: an unassuming existence. The bandito Cheyenne dies alone, but not before he insists the heroine, Jill McBain, embraces the coming New World. The film ends with a sweeping view of the railroad construction, an industry that will join East Coast to West and forever unite the American states.
The Wild Bunch sees armoury and motor vehicles as the future. The horse, the railroad even perhaps the bicycle has had its day. The bleak dying embers of tawdry humanity, played out against torture and depravity, suggest we haven’t progressed much further than the gladiatorial arena and its bloody entertainments. Pike Bishop understands that. He knows he has partaken in his slice of inhumanity and, on witnessing a weakling child suckling at its mother’s breast, he recognises that the new innocents need protection from the on rush of modern inhumanity. Hence he and his men embark on a last battle against the odds, a battle they have been metaphorically fighting through the whole film as a sophisticated, large and undaunted posse tracks them down, even crossing borders in pursuit. The mechanisation of armoury and transport provides Pike’s eventual bloody salvation, redeeming his worst qualities against the horror of modern warfare, a world he neither understands nor embraces.
William Goldman for Butch and Sundance has our ‘heroes’ bicker myopically through the years, a time span which seems like only weeks so badly attuned is the narrative. Butch disposes of civilisation in a muddy creek, throwing away the bicycle with good riddance when the threesome elope to Bolivia. We witness a metaphorical lie as the wheel spins in the sunset, for confronted by the opportunity of a new and innocent life, Butch and Sundance reject it. They can do and see nothing else than their illicit histories. Even when the possibilities are numerous or the odds irrefutable, all they can do is think of robbery and greed: “Take me anywhere as long as there’s a bank,” cries Sundance towards the film’s climax. These two men are in total denial of the future, of modernity. In subtle hands, this might make them sympathetic, such as when George Stevens’s lone gunfighter Shane abandons the homesteaders because he knows they are the future and he is the past. Here, Butch and Sundance just come across like a couple of dunces.
The question, I suppose, is how realistic – or perhaps how analogous – you want your westerns to be. I would suggest that if a film deals with real life subjects in a contextual arena some semblance of the genuine must be presented and, like John Ford’s false history of the O.K. Corral in My Darling Clementine, I am not sure Butch and Sundance offers that. It is too concerned with the jollity of the buddy-buddy friendship. The fictional representations of Leone and Peckinpah offer a much more factual palate, despite their bloodthirstiness and elaborate presentation. In those films, the old west is dying and the old gunslingers die forgotten among it, blood soaking into sand. In Butch and Sundance the old, or not so old, are immortalised in sepia portrait, raffishly and misleadingly so.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is, overall, good natured and unchallenging, if you want you’re your westerns that way. If you don’t, do as I suggest and look elsewhere.
NOTE:
When Butch and Sundance take up legitimate jobs as payroll guards, they provide aliases of SMITH and JONES; the successful western TV show Alias Smith and Jones took its inspiration from this scene.
Interesting review of three of my favourite westerns. It’s difficult to compare three separate films even if they are in the same genre - Bunch is a revisionist western, Once is a spaghetti and Butch is a buddy movie, but you’ve done it very well, even if dismissing Butch as somewhat lightweight in what was always meant to be a modern take on the genre. Butch is historically recorded as being an affable outlaw and Newman plays him perfectly. Also interesting is that Butch is the only one of the three to win any major awards. Indeed, I can see that if you’re after a purely realistic western then Butch would be the least of the three, but if you’re after a purely entertaining western, then it would be the best of the three. If I was only able to see one of these films again, it would be Butch.
Incidentally, it is Etta PLACE (real person) and Lord BALTIMORE and Joe LeFORS (both fictional) in Butch.
AliasSmithAndJones was a decent TV series, but they should have stopped when Pete Duel committed suicide instead of replacing him with the inferior Roger Davis, the chemistry was not there afterwards.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Incidentally, it is Etta PLACE (real person) and Lord BALTIMORE and Joe LeFORS (both fictional) in Butch.
Ah, yes, sorry about that @CoolHandBond I wrote that review from memory and got the names badly wrong. Duly corrected.
The BBC also showed a Joan Bakewell interview from 1972 culled out of the BFI archive. Paul Newman seems quite possibly one of the least cooperative and informative interviewees I think I have ever seen. Terrible answers, extremely monosyllabic, no depth or opionion offered, extremely uncomfortable under even the softest inquisition. I had the impression he would rather have been anywhere else than the BFI stage. The brevity of his responses and general antipathy towards his career suggested he would rather do anything but act. He eventually admitted to wanting to race cars instead - which he eventually did, of course.
I’d like to see that interview, I don’t remember him being on the usual television chat show circuit so that must be a gem. He loved racing cars, of course, often competing with Steve McQueen, but never really getting to the high standard that the King of Cool achieved.
i’m a bit of a pedant when it comes to the Old West, I wasn’t trying to sound superior in pointing out the names you used, your review of the films was a most enjoyable read.
And, oh yes, OLD WEST ACTION is an anagram of CLINT EASTWOOD
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
No offence taken - I enjoyed writing it, but I didn't use a crib sheet !
You may like this one also...
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET CODE (1946)
a.k.a Dressed to Kill
Titled as Dressed to Kill in the USA, this was the final episode of Universal Pictures’ twelve contemporarily set films about Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective. As such, it is a little bit lame, but always remains watchable, thanks in part to Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as the titular Holmes and his sidekick Dr John Watson. At times during the series Rathbone appeared quite brusque with his partner, but he seems in a conciliatory mode here. The film involves the sale of three matching music boxes and the secrets they each keep. Made by a long term inmate at Dartmoor Prison, the musical chimes tap out a coded message, but while Holmes understands this, he can’t complete the puzzle because he is missing a box. Meanwhile, the beautiful lady about town Hilda Courtney [Patricia Morison] is using her acting skills to disguise herself and infiltrate the other owner’s houses, stealing music boxes and committing murders [Dressed to Kill, see]. It’s all a bit inconsequential, very rushed and quite enjoyable, even if the cracks in the plot and the sound stages show.
The first two Holmes adventures were made by 20th Century Fox and were set in the Victorian era. Very good they were too. The Universal series was popular, but the modern backgrounds didn’t always work. In this example, the 1940s setting could have easily been done away with. The filmmakers don’t even take much care for authenticity; for instance, the London pub featured in one sequence resembles no London pub you’d ever see in the 1940s, they were drinking by candlelight in a bare brick stable! Or so it looked. It does seem an opportunity wasted, as the screenplay utilised the basic plot of The Six Napoleons, a Conan Doyle short story, as well as an incident from A Study in Scarlet. Holmes name checks himself by referencing the latter as published in The Strand Magazine. All very cute.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,215Chief of Staff
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…for me, Rathbone IS Sherlock Holmes ☺️
I absolutely adore these films…yes, they can rattle & creak…but the tour-de-force that Rathbone is always shines through…as you say, this one is really The Six Napoleons but it’s nicely done…😁
I quite like these ‘updated’ Holmes films…but I much prefer Holmes in his ‘time’…
That crusty old French play about duellist and poet Cyrano de Bergerac is dusted off for an ineffectual musical by British director Joe Wright. I won’t bore you with the well-worn plot. The movie looks good and replaces Cyrano’s large nose with Peter Dinklage’s dwarfism, but it is an empty experience chiefly because all the songs sound the same and trudge about with the same melancholic tempo. I know the story is a sad tale of unrequited love, but it doesn’t need to be this sad. The other problem is, as historical time passes and we venture into the territory of ‘wokeism’, diversity and LGBTQ etc, suggesting a woman can’t love a man who looks or acts differently makes her seem exceptionally callous and rather dim. All the good acting and filtered lights in the world can’t make one like Haley Bennett’s self-absorbed Roxanne. Mind, all of her suitors are vain men as well, Cyrano included. So there’s no barometer of courtly love here, only lust and romantic incompetence. The movie was a box office disaster, which isn’t entirely fair, but the merits of Cyrano are purely in production and performance, the story itself – French poetic classic or not – is always a hard sell and director, author and songwriter haven’t the foggiest notion about how to present it sympathetically to a modern audience, so the thing merely looks good and swans about hoping someone will like it. A bit like Roxanne…
My tuppenceworth - I love the Rathbone/Bruce movies and have watched them many times. Yes, that's not one of the best but that hasn't stopped me watching and enjoying it more than once. On YouTube can be found colourised versions, which I disliked; I always prefer to watch b&w to colourised if possible.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,215Chief of Staff
I have watched a couple of the colourised versions, like you they are not for me…yet. Perhaps in the future when the technology gets better…?…but I do like B&W 🤗
Secret Code is a weak entry in the mainly enjoyable Rathbone series - I think I posted all the posters for the series some time ago in the Movie Posters thread.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
A busy western from Republic Studios that, like Flame of the Barbary Coast, has plenty of production values to recommend it, but is saddled with a ham-fisted script and a clutch of supporting players who really don’t seem interested or capable of sustaining the ninety minute runtime. John Wayne stars as John Devlin, a good-looking, charming, irresponsible gambler who has just married pretty railroad heiress Sandra Poli. Her father doesn’t like the elopement and runs them out of town. Sandra persuades Devlin to detour from California to Dakota, so she can invest $20,000 of her dad’s cash in a land grab and make money off the back of a railroad investment she knows is springing up across the state. They tip up in Fargo, where the money gets stolen by other unscrupulous investors and a canny game of cat, mouse, double deal and confusion entails. I had no idea what was happening, but then I wasn’t over interested in the thing. Dakota is a fairly flat product, uncertain if it is a high action comedy or a low brow melodrama. It falls into a vague canyon in between. Wayne does his best. Everyone else doesn’t.
The heroine is played by the athletically attractive Czech ice skater Vera Hruba Ralston. Critics famously claimed she couldn’t act. That is a trifle unfair, but by 1945 she was married to Republic’s Studio President and was regularly touted as a star in movies like this and regularly failing to put bums on seats. She does have a cute turn of phrase and head, and this vaguely comic enterprise suits her better than it suits John Wayne, at least at this stage of his career. Most of the really bad acting comes from Walter Brennan and his steamboat sidekick Nick Stewart. Vera Ralston made two films with the Duke. Her most successful venture was the skating musical Icescapades.
Quite possibly one of the worst films I have ever seen. It is not part of the infamous Confessions… series of British sex romps, although Anthony Booth does feature in it; producer David Sullivan hoped to steal some cash by association. The film was a flop. The usual cast of desperate TV no hopers waiting for a quick pay day prop up an even more desperate story about an astrologist and 'super stud' who becomes a suspect in a robbery. Mary Millington and Rosemary England get their kit off. Lots. Millington, who was a notorious playgirl in the 1970s, died in mysterious circumstances a few weeks after the film’s release.
Venom is a more than competent alien superhero movie that mines several Marvel franchise staples while seeming to be entirely original. Venom is the name of a symbiotic alien life form, similar to the one encountered by Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man / Peter Parker in Spiderman 3. This alien has escaped from a broken safety pod and goes rampaging across the world from Malaysia to San Francisco seeking its three evil compatriots, who have all been abducted from their spaceship by Riz Ahmed’s power crazy industrialist Carlton Drake – clearly a thinly disguised Elon Musk. Venom ends up in Tom Hardy’s body. Hardy plays unlucky journalist Eddie Brock; he and Venom share a similar line in bitter commentary and a surprising heart for humanity. You wouldn’t think loser Eddie Brock would be anyone’s kind of hero, but as Venom says: “You are my kind of guy. I’m a loser too.” I guess two loser heads is the equal of one winner. Somehow, I’m not sure how, evil is thwarted, mostly by biting people’s heads off. Enjoyable and frankly bonkers, but unlike most MCU movies it decides not to take itself too seriously – I mean, you can’t when the hero and his alien alter-ego are chatting to each other mid-fight – and is at least a standalone movie unrelated to the huge ‘Avengers’ project. It scores many bonus points from me just for that. Very enjoyable.
VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE (2021)
Well, that was fun.
Tom Hardy returns as Eddie Brock, failed online reporter, who has been infected by the symbiotic alien known as Venom. Between bouts of soul searching, the twosome embark on a series of superhero style adventures, with monsters, basically. A good cast isn’t wasted and with the shoot predominantly taking place in the UK other than some location filming in San Francisco there is a peculiarly British slant to the cast and crew. The great cinematographer Robert Richardson adds some class to the look of the thing, which as with all these superhero numb-skullers mostly takes place at night or in closeted darkness. It is almost pointless to try and explain the plot: Woody Harrelson’s death row serial killer bites Eddie Brock and infects himself with Venom’s venom, morphing into an angry fiery red version of the titular good guy. Cue fights for survival and smashing lots of things up. Like many comic books, it is mostly throw out material but well-presented for a change, occasionally amusing and very energetic. At least it doesn’t take itself seriously like those po-faced Avengers films.
Anya Taylor-Joy provides a solidly affecting performance as Jane Austen’s titular heroine who meddles and matchmakes to everyone’s distinct discomfort. As with all Austen’s stories, we essentially witness a comedy of manners about people who have either too many comportments or not enough and where those supposed least equipped to abide by society’s rules turn out to be the best at understanding human nature and its romantic and social modes. Emma is cheerful and endearingly detailed for the first three-quarters before the romance we saw coming from the opening scenes rears its beautiful and understated head. The film benefits from a mostly non-recognisable cast, familiarity would have bred enormous contempt for such a well-known narrative. Pleasantly directed without prejudice and with no cow-towing to ‘reimagination’ by American Autumn de Wilde, who honours the text only by adding a full stop after the title to notionally remind those who don’t know that this is a ‘period piece’. That is about as modern as you get in this version of Emma. You’d be hard pressed to make a bad adaptation of Austen, but I guess it is possible if you scrap all the fizzy, prudent and knowing dialogues from the original novel. Incidental details spark this retelling to life; the scenes at the girl’s finishing school were particularly chucklesome. Production values are first-rate all-round. Very good entertainment.
THE SUBSTANCE (2024) with Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid. Directed with exquisite skill by Coralie Fargeat.
The premise: Moore is Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging celebrity who is being left behind by the media for being too old. Her producer on her aerobics program, Dennis Quaid, fires her. After getting in a car accident and going to the hospital, one of the nurses there tells her that she'd be a good candidate for 'the substance' and gives her a flash drive. Upon investigation, she finds out that this substance creates a second physical manifestation of yourself. She decides to do it, eventually creating a younger Elisabeth (named Sue) who is played by Margaret Qualley. The catch is that both bodies 'share' the same consciousness and must switch who is the 'active' body ever 7 days without exception. That's the setup...it's off to the races from there.
This is WILD. Without going into spoilers, this thing goes to places I was not expecting. I do not want to spoil anything but I do think it's necessary to give a warning as to how the film progresses: thing THE FLY or THE THING.
Demi Moore won the Golden Globe for best actress on this. After watching this, I can see why, and I really hope she wins the Oscar. She's fantastic in a role that requires a tremendous amount of courage and range. The good news is that Margaret Qualley as Sue is right there with her every step of the way.
I need to cite the direction though. Coralie Fargeat directs this thing with amazing skill and tonal control, even when things go absolutely bonkers in the third act. The film has attracted some criticism for its 'male gaze' (be prepared for copious amounts of nudity) which I find amusing considering it's a female director who is obviously playing with the male gaze. That's the entire point of the film.
Perfect apre-ski or post-Christmas entertainment - lovely panoramic shots of Rome, Paris and Cortina, which popped up in For Your Eyes Only and also in Charade I think, the balcony where Grant meets Hepburn. I'd have preferred this vibe for OHMSS.
The stark, wintery city locations put me in mind of a Twitter account called Yesterday's Britain, Yesterday's Better which posts charming old post cards of the 60s and 70s, pointing out how low the population is, later in the day moving on to more strident Brexit, slightly racist-sounding obersvations meaining I had to unfollow! But yes, a lot of it avoids the noisy busy tourist trap look of today, guess it was all still post-war then.
Pink Panther is not so great for actual Christmas because of the to-ing and fro-ing around hotel rooms, there is often something on the other side more interesting where you don't get bogged down. Part of this remind of Thunderball's Shrublands scenes - you almost feel that might work better as a comedy, which is what its remake NSNA was most probably trying to do. Connery's swan song has that feel about it, you might almost sense a younger man might steal the movie off him, like Sellers did with Niven. Sellers did the dirty again on his co-star a few years later in Casino Royale when he went AWOL on the movie.
The slightly brutal payoff in the final scene may have originated in a film where the audience primarily sympathises with Niven rather than Clouseau, it's said during filming that Niven 'sensed the film slipping away from him'.
A sequel was rushed into production shortly after and you'd expect the same cast, a sunnier clime and locations in Paris, south of France and maybe Venice but instead Edwards opted to adapt another story and made A Shot in the Dark which has nothing to do with the titular jewel of the previous film. Similarly, the Bond series didn't not simply redo Dr No but went ahead with a totally different story, thus strengthening the character and the franchise.
A SHOT IN THE DARK is the best film in that franchise, in my opinion. We did all of the PINK PANTHER films a year or so ago and ASITD really, really stood out from the pack in terms of being consistently hysterical. Honestly, I'd rate it as one of the very funniest films that I've ever seen, period.
Alan Lake was an interesting actor who sadly succumbed to his demons. For example, he was memorable alongside Ian Hendry when they played a truly frightening pair of heavies working for Brian Blessed in the first ever episode (after the pilot) of TV's 'The Sweeney' ('The Ringer', 1975). As for 'David Galaxy', it was a poor man's cash-in on the name of pop star David Essex - and executive-produced by rich man David Sullivan, who tried badly to straddle the line between sleaze and the saucy comedy end of mainstream entertainment.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Comments
That meeting got better when the guitars came out…Elvis was learning bass and Macca spent time with him giving him pointers…plus the Beatles roadie - Mal Evans - was a massive Elvis fan, and they got on well…
Finally watched it tonight…I don’t really think I’m supposed to say “I enjoyed it” 🤔 I thought the subject matter was handled very sensitively, and although the questions asked towards the end by the ‘audience’ were naive, the answers were thought provoking…nicely filmed and well acted…excellent.
Three wishes for Cinderella (2021)
If you only watch one Norwegian fairy tale movie based on 1973 Czechoslovakian-East German movie this year, watch "Three wishes for Cinderella"! I'm not selling this movie very well, am I? 😂
This is a new twist on the Cinderella story with lots of snow, a more active Cinderella and a family friendly movie that's perfect for Christmas. the lead is played by Astrid Smedplass. She's actually a pop star known under the name Astrid S, but I think she does a good job. She plays a Cinderella who is treated very badly by her stepmother as usual. But Cinderella is very fond of animals and learned archery and riding from her late father, so she sneks out at every possibility. When the prince is forced to invite to a ball a servant is ordered to go to the city and by fabrics for the one sister and the stepmother, the servant asks what Cinderella wants him to take home for her. "Whatever falls in your lap" she replies". as it happens three magical nuts falls from a tree into his lap. The nuts contain outfits or personas for he to use in her fight for happiness.
While I like how Cinderella is active and courageous in the movie, I think the prince is portrayed wrong. He is a immature young man who likes to spend time with his friends and not perform his duties. While this is the same in the 1973 original, their Cinderella was a little more traditional and active too. In the new movie he doesn't seem worthy of Cinderella. Having a strong female lead go up against strong men makes her look even stronger, so I think this is a mistake. Give him something I say, perhaps he should be a better rider than Cinderella?
But don't get me wrong - this is a good fairytale movie and well worth watching with the family.
Now a quiz for everyone: A embarrassing factual mistake has been done on this poster. Can you see what it is?
OBLIVION (2013)
Soulless exercise in sci-fi with stupendous visuals and a happy ending but a film which loses its head half-way through and resorts to shoot-em-up action when a more measured approach needs to be taken to satisfy the interesting future notions and the moral dilemmas raised. The film carries the same theme of created memory that pepper both Bladerunner and Bladerunner 2049, only seen from a human point of contention.
Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, a tech-engineer nearing the end of a tour of duty on a nuclear obliterated Earth. He shares his work load with the beautiful Vika [Andrea Riseborough] a savvy communications officer permanently hitched to her display screens in one-to-one face time chat with Sally, a bland cliché spouting supervisor who lives on the Tet, an enormous orbital mothership holding remnants of the human race, the only survivors of a planet spanning war with the alien ‘scavengers’. A blissful, if tetchy, existence is disturbed when a rogue interstellar sleep pod is traced and destroyed by the defender drones. Out of the wreckage, Jack rescues a woman, who just happens to be the very beautiful Olga Kurylenko, and whose face sparks latent memories which draw a barrier between him and Vika as well as forcing him to confront his true emotions.
All well and good, except the screenplay throws in unwieldy spectacles like Morgan Freeman as a military bandit, smoking Panama cigars and acting like God, and having Cruise inhabit a sort of back-packers hippy paradise, a place where he escapes the brutal ravaged Earth, where he swims in a lake and chills out to Led Zeppelin and Procul Harum. No, I didn’t get it either. The climax is too reminiscent of Independence Day. Cruise is as watchable as always and he’s given decent support by the two female leads. Oblivion is efficiently directed, but it isn’t going anywhere significant, is riddled with action clichés and even its supposed happy ending is a trifle mawkish, if not downright perverse. Still, entertaining while it’s on.
@Number24 Now a quiz for everyone: A embarrassing factual mistake has been done on this poster. Can you see what it is?
I am not sure, but is that the hammer and sickle on the flag atop the castle ?
chris said: theme of created memory that pepper both Bladerunner and Bladerunner 2049
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Chris have you ever read Philip K Dick?
that artificial memory theme in both those films is coming from the source novel do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and his short story We Can remember It for You Wholesale the source for total Recall, which was a variation on same theme
it appears in many of Dick 's books, and I think films like the Matrix or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are borrowing from Dick 's themes
just wondering, because if you have, I'd be interested in Chrisno1 style analyses of some of his books or in general!
That's not what I'm thinking of.the castle has a red-ish flag, but I doubt it's a hammer and sickle flag. In my opinion the flag might as well be a nazi flag (it isn't!) far all we know because the image is so unclear. No, the mistake is in the foreground of the image.
Is it that she's holding a crossbow/longbow and they are English weapons?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
No, but you're talking about the right object.
Well, the bow is made of metal when you look up close, should it be made of wood?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
It stringed backwards forwards. The bow should be bent the other way.
Dune - Part 2
Paul Atreides continues his quest to survive on the desert planet Arrakis. As he cements his place as the prophesied Messiah of the Fremen he uses that power to seek revenge on the evil Harkonnens, who murdered his father and scattered his family and allies.
Adapting the second half of Frank Herbert's novel, the movie makes a few changes to the text in an attempt to better convey the author's original intentions. Dune was supposed to be, among other things, a cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly following charismatic would-be messiahs, but a lot of people missed that point. To attempt to correct that, director Denis Villeneuve makes a few subtle but important changes to the narrative. The literary Paul struggles with his visions of the future, trying but ultimately failing to stop the galaxy wide jihad that he has foreseen; the suggestion being that it could never really have been averted. The cinematic version of Paul and his mother Jessica take a more cynical approach, using the prophesies and manipulations of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood to their advantage, knowing full well what will happen but going along with it anyway. Chani, Paul's Fremen lover is also fundamentally changed from the devoted follower of the novels to the only voice of reason who tries and fails to warn her people against following a manufactured prophecy.
Selling that twist to the story depends heavily on the actors and they succeed to varying degrees. Timothy Chalamet does a good job of showing Paul's slow gradual change. Rebecca Ferguson is downright disturbing at times in her eagerness and willingness to manipulate the people around her and even her own son to attain her goals. Javier Bardem does a good job as Stilgar, Paul's right hand and a true believer who happily submits to the prophecy. Faring the worst is Zendaya as Chani; she seems capable of only one expression: the disapproving frown, and comes across more as petulant than wise.
Visually the movie is beautiful to look at with its expansive vistas and the action and fight scenes are all very well staged.
Ultimately though, I'm not sure this is the definitive adaptation of the novel. I actually found the 1984 David Lynch version more relatable even if it fully embraced the idea of Paul as a genuine messiah and as a standalone effort it actually manages to tell a complete story. The early 2000s adaptation on the Sci-Fi cable channel remains the most faithful adaptation even if the performances are quite dry and the overall look on the cheap side.
Villeneuve has already confirmed he'll be adapting the follow-up novel Dune: Messiah and I'll be curious as to how he reconciles the events of that story given the changes he introduced here.
********** THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS MANY SPOILERS TO MANY FILMS **********
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)
A cheerful western from George Roy Hill that, along with the bitter and far better Midnight Cowboy, ushered in the ‘buddy movie’ phase of American cinema. It is an enjoyable throwaway of a film, perfectly affable and watchable in its own right, but an experience without depth or an understanding of the genre it represents.
Paul Newman and Robert Redford play two real-life outlaw cowboys who lived at the turn of the last century. They make money hustling at cards and robbing banks. The talkative and canny Butch [Newman] plans to go to Bolivia; money is flush in South America and their career antics and personalities are unknown. The Sundance Kid, a laconic crack-shot gunfighter, wants nothing more than to keep on robbing railroad payrolls. After they commit one too many explosive robberies, an expert and relentless posse tracks them from territory to territory, forcing that move to Bolivia. Life is not much better for the twosome there and miscalculations lead to their sudden demise.
The film looks nice and sounds pretty, but the goings on don’t reflect the brutality of Cassidy and the Kid’s real life robberies or the sheer length of their reign of illegal impunities. Throughout it all the stars remain twinkle eyed and slippery tongued, even to the point of falling for the same woman, although this isn’t physically reciprocated. In fact, Katherine Ross’s role as Etta Place needn’t exist at all in terms of the story on screen; she could just as easily be displaced by Cloris Leachman’s whore, Agnes, Butch’s squeeze-on-the-side. The modern day romantic menage-a-trois, bolstered by a chummy song score, sits uneasily next to the rather filthy and unseemly unlawful historical goings on. While Hollywood has always glamourised gunfighters and even villainous gunfighters, they rarely made them as likeable or as contemporary as this and it simply doesn’t ring true, chiefly because our very modern and savvy ‘heroes’ bear no resemblance to the dusty, crusty, illiterates who surround them – Miss Ross’s schoolteacher accepted. There’s another overtly modern cultural misstep featured as she cavorts and sleeps openly with her lover. Or maybe I’m being overly picky.
For all their bushy tailed antics, Butch and Sundance are self-serving individuals. Unlike most western heroes, they do not have the interests of the community or the family at heart. They are interested in money, how to get it and spend it. They are also ruthless, albeit with good looks and charm. They share more character traits with Henry Fonda’s black kitted killer Frank in Sergio Leone’s magnificent Once Upon A Time In The West, a film that eulogises in epic and operatic fashion the death of the frontier and the coming of civilisation, as personified by the railroad. In Butch and Sundance the future is as jovial and unthreatening as a bicycle. Eventually, industrial civilisation or not, Leone’s version of the dying frontier chooses to have Charles Bronson’s vengeful ‘Harmonica’ eliminate Frank in a classic-style ‘good hat vs bad hat’ gunfight, a grand homage to all things wild west.
So, despite the spaghetti western frippery, …West is phenomenally traditional and understands it. Butch and Sundance is not and does not. It prefers mixing metaphors with the ‘buddy-buddy’ notion and making its protagonists attractive, loveable and sympathetic – all the things they shouldn’t be. This is epitomised by the scene where Newman’s Butch romances Etta to the strains of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, a song and sequence so out of kilter with even this welcoming narrative it jars horridly, good tune or not. Writer William Goldman, director George Roy Hill and composer Burt Bacharach are at pains to make this wearisome menage attractive. If it is, and that’s debateable given both Sundance’s and Butch’s ambivalence and Etta’s non-responsive passivity, it is the men’s friendship rather than the amorous notions which are closest to a romance. However, while the contemporary landscape of Midnight Cowboy doesn’t mark it as a western, its themes of comradeship, love and hopeful faded ambition amid the ‘hustle’ of 1960s street life are exactly the same as those presented by Hill and Goldman. Only in Butch and Sundance we are offered them in a sugar coated existence, the darkness overwhelmed with saccharine niceties. Schlesinger’s modern-day set masterpiece tells us emphatically that sweetness is an untruth. It is significant that in Butch and Sundance the filmmakers avoid the ugliness of veracity; for Goldman and Hill ensure we never see the faces of the pursuing posse, of the Pinkerton’s agents Lord Baltimore and Joe LeFors; they remain unknown and shadowy, as if they are the bad guys and the true villains the heroes. This sits the film uneasily against both …West and Sam Peckinpah’s superlative The Wild Bunch, a movie which also tackles the decline of the frontier and its outlaw history.
There Peckinpah’s anti-heroes are as scurrilous and distasteful as you can get; yet when one of their number is threatened, and even when facing insurmountable odds, they forfeit money and freedom and approach the possibility of death with the same noble heroism John Wayne’s Ringo Kid does all the way back in Stagecoach. The pursuit and eventual deaths of the fictitious Pike Bishop [William Holden] and his macabre crew of misfits are replicated in almost exactly the same manner in Butch and Sundance. [Interestingly ‘The Wild Bunch’ was also the name Cassidy gave to his first bank robbing gang. Peckinpah’s elegiac film preceded Butch and Sundance into cinemas by three months.] The cinematic difference is that while Peckinpah shows the bloody killings in slow motion and in all their guts and grimy glory, George Roy Hill freezeframes his toothy twosome as they sprint for safety, guns blazing, unaware of their imminent massacre. Burt Bacharach’s excellent incidental score reverts to single note melancholy to accompany the obvious funeral. Katherine Ross’s Etta earlier declared she won’t watch them die: “Spare me that scene if you don’t mind.” And as if we too are in love with these characters, Hill spares us also, encapsulating them as forever young, forever alive, forever heroic. Peckinpah knows his characters are not heroes, knows they are fated to die and so Pike Bishop and his men become corpses for crows: exactly how almost every outlaw in American history ended their life. Hill’s lionisation of his bandits – because they are Newman and Redford, I guess, not grouchy grizzly Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates – stinks of a cowboy hat white wash.
It also ignores the on rush of the twentieth century and modern times, a subject broached carefully by both Leone and Peckinpah. In their films, the honourable heroes and villains recognise their day is cast and approach it with eyes open and the expectation they will die. Leone’s ‘Harmonica’ survives, as every hero should, but rejects civilisation, understanding he doesn’t fit into it; he returns home [one assumes] to Mexico and a solitary dust farm, vengeance completed, to whittle on wood: an unassuming existence. The bandito Cheyenne dies alone, but not before he insists the heroine, Jill McBain, embraces the coming New World. The film ends with a sweeping view of the railroad construction, an industry that will join East Coast to West and forever unite the American states.
The Wild Bunch sees armoury and motor vehicles as the future. The horse, the railroad even perhaps the bicycle has had its day. The bleak dying embers of tawdry humanity, played out against torture and depravity, suggest we haven’t progressed much further than the gladiatorial arena and its bloody entertainments. Pike Bishop understands that. He knows he has partaken in his slice of inhumanity and, on witnessing a weakling child suckling at its mother’s breast, he recognises that the new innocents need protection from the on rush of modern inhumanity. Hence he and his men embark on a last battle against the odds, a battle they have been metaphorically fighting through the whole film as a sophisticated, large and undaunted posse tracks them down, even crossing borders in pursuit. The mechanisation of armoury and transport provides Pike’s eventual bloody salvation, redeeming his worst qualities against the horror of modern warfare, a world he neither understands nor embraces.
William Goldman for Butch and Sundance has our ‘heroes’ bicker myopically through the years, a time span which seems like only weeks so badly attuned is the narrative. Butch disposes of civilisation in a muddy creek, throwing away the bicycle with good riddance when the threesome elope to Bolivia. We witness a metaphorical lie as the wheel spins in the sunset, for confronted by the opportunity of a new and innocent life, Butch and Sundance reject it. They can do and see nothing else than their illicit histories. Even when the possibilities are numerous or the odds irrefutable, all they can do is think of robbery and greed: “Take me anywhere as long as there’s a bank,” cries Sundance towards the film’s climax. These two men are in total denial of the future, of modernity. In subtle hands, this might make them sympathetic, such as when George Stevens’s lone gunfighter Shane abandons the homesteaders because he knows they are the future and he is the past. Here, Butch and Sundance just come across like a couple of dunces.
The question, I suppose, is how realistic – or perhaps how analogous – you want your westerns to be. I would suggest that if a film deals with real life subjects in a contextual arena some semblance of the genuine must be presented and, like John Ford’s false history of the O.K. Corral in My Darling Clementine, I am not sure Butch and Sundance offers that. It is too concerned with the jollity of the buddy-buddy friendship. The fictional representations of Leone and Peckinpah offer a much more factual palate, despite their bloodthirstiness and elaborate presentation. In those films, the old west is dying and the old gunslingers die forgotten among it, blood soaking into sand. In Butch and Sundance the old, or not so old, are immortalised in sepia portrait, raffishly and misleadingly so.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is, overall, good natured and unchallenging, if you want you’re your westerns that way. If you don’t, do as I suggest and look elsewhere.
NOTE:
When Butch and Sundance take up legitimate jobs as payroll guards, they provide aliases of SMITH and JONES; the successful western TV show Alias Smith and Jones took its inspiration from this scene.
Interesting review of three of my favourite westerns. It’s difficult to compare three separate films even if they are in the same genre - Bunch is a revisionist western, Once is a spaghetti and Butch is a buddy movie, but you’ve done it very well, even if dismissing Butch as somewhat lightweight in what was always meant to be a modern take on the genre. Butch is historically recorded as being an affable outlaw and Newman plays him perfectly. Also interesting is that Butch is the only one of the three to win any major awards. Indeed, I can see that if you’re after a purely realistic western then Butch would be the least of the three, but if you’re after a purely entertaining western, then it would be the best of the three. If I was only able to see one of these films again, it would be Butch.
Incidentally, it is Etta PLACE (real person) and Lord BALTIMORE and Joe LeFORS (both fictional) in Butch.
Alias Smith And Jones was a decent TV series, but they should have stopped when Pete Duel committed suicide instead of replacing him with the inferior Roger Davis, the chemistry was not there afterwards.
Incidentally, it is Etta PLACE (real person) and Lord BALTIMORE and Joe LeFORS (both fictional) in Butch.
Ah, yes, sorry about that @CoolHandBond I wrote that review from memory and got the names badly wrong. Duly corrected.
The BBC also showed a Joan Bakewell interview from 1972 culled out of the BFI archive. Paul Newman seems quite possibly one of the least cooperative and informative interviewees I think I have ever seen. Terrible answers, extremely monosyllabic, no depth or opionion offered, extremely uncomfortable under even the softest inquisition. I had the impression he would rather have been anywhere else than the BFI stage. The brevity of his responses and general antipathy towards his career suggested he would rather do anything but act. He eventually admitted to wanting to race cars instead - which he eventually did, of course.
I’d like to see that interview, I don’t remember him being on the usual television chat show circuit so that must be a gem. He loved racing cars, of course, often competing with Steve McQueen, but never really getting to the high standard that the King of Cool achieved.
i’m a bit of a pedant when it comes to the Old West, I wasn’t trying to sound superior in pointing out the names you used, your review of the films was a most enjoyable read.
And, oh yes, OLD WEST ACTION is an anagram of CLINT EASTWOOD
No offence taken - I enjoyed writing it, but I didn't use a crib sheet !
You may like this one also...
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET CODE (1946)
a.k.a Dressed to Kill
Titled as Dressed to Kill in the USA, this was the final episode of Universal Pictures’ twelve contemporarily set films about Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective. As such, it is a little bit lame, but always remains watchable, thanks in part to Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as the titular Holmes and his sidekick Dr John Watson. At times during the series Rathbone appeared quite brusque with his partner, but he seems in a conciliatory mode here. The film involves the sale of three matching music boxes and the secrets they each keep. Made by a long term inmate at Dartmoor Prison, the musical chimes tap out a coded message, but while Holmes understands this, he can’t complete the puzzle because he is missing a box. Meanwhile, the beautiful lady about town Hilda Courtney [Patricia Morison] is using her acting skills to disguise herself and infiltrate the other owner’s houses, stealing music boxes and committing murders [Dressed to Kill, see]. It’s all a bit inconsequential, very rushed and quite enjoyable, even if the cracks in the plot and the sound stages show.
The first two Holmes adventures were made by 20th Century Fox and were set in the Victorian era. Very good they were too. The Universal series was popular, but the modern backgrounds didn’t always work. In this example, the 1940s setting could have easily been done away with. The filmmakers don’t even take much care for authenticity; for instance, the London pub featured in one sequence resembles no London pub you’d ever see in the 1940s, they were drinking by candlelight in a bare brick stable! Or so it looked. It does seem an opportunity wasted, as the screenplay utilised the basic plot of The Six Napoleons, a Conan Doyle short story, as well as an incident from A Study in Scarlet. Holmes name checks himself by referencing the latter as published in The Strand Magazine. All very cute.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…for me, Rathbone IS Sherlock Holmes ☺️
I absolutely adore these films…yes, they can rattle & creak…but the tour-de-force that Rathbone is always shines through…as you say, this one is really The Six Napoleons but it’s nicely done…😁
I quite like these ‘updated’ Holmes films…but I much prefer Holmes in his ‘time’…
CYRANO (2021)
That crusty old French play about duellist and poet Cyrano de Bergerac is dusted off for an ineffectual musical by British director Joe Wright. I won’t bore you with the well-worn plot. The movie looks good and replaces Cyrano’s large nose with Peter Dinklage’s dwarfism, but it is an empty experience chiefly because all the songs sound the same and trudge about with the same melancholic tempo. I know the story is a sad tale of unrequited love, but it doesn’t need to be this sad. The other problem is, as historical time passes and we venture into the territory of ‘wokeism’, diversity and LGBTQ etc, suggesting a woman can’t love a man who looks or acts differently makes her seem exceptionally callous and rather dim. All the good acting and filtered lights in the world can’t make one like Haley Bennett’s self-absorbed Roxanne. Mind, all of her suitors are vain men as well, Cyrano included. So there’s no barometer of courtly love here, only lust and romantic incompetence. The movie was a box office disaster, which isn’t entirely fair, but the merits of Cyrano are purely in production and performance, the story itself – French poetic classic or not – is always a hard sell and director, author and songwriter haven’t the foggiest notion about how to present it sympathetically to a modern audience, so the thing merely looks good and swans about hoping someone will like it. A bit like Roxanne…
My tuppenceworth - I love the Rathbone/Bruce movies and have watched them many times. Yes, that's not one of the best but that hasn't stopped me watching and enjoying it more than once. On YouTube can be found colourised versions, which I disliked; I always prefer to watch b&w to colourised if possible.
I have watched a couple of the colourised versions, like you they are not for me…yet. Perhaps in the future when the technology gets better…?…but I do like B&W 🤗
I detest colourised versions 🤬
Secret Code is a weak entry in the mainly enjoyable Rathbone series - I think I posted all the posters for the series some time ago in the Movie Posters thread.
DAKOTA (1945)
A busy western from Republic Studios that, like Flame of the Barbary Coast, has plenty of production values to recommend it, but is saddled with a ham-fisted script and a clutch of supporting players who really don’t seem interested or capable of sustaining the ninety minute runtime. John Wayne stars as John Devlin, a good-looking, charming, irresponsible gambler who has just married pretty railroad heiress Sandra Poli. Her father doesn’t like the elopement and runs them out of town. Sandra persuades Devlin to detour from California to Dakota, so she can invest $20,000 of her dad’s cash in a land grab and make money off the back of a railroad investment she knows is springing up across the state. They tip up in Fargo, where the money gets stolen by other unscrupulous investors and a canny game of cat, mouse, double deal and confusion entails. I had no idea what was happening, but then I wasn’t over interested in the thing. Dakota is a fairly flat product, uncertain if it is a high action comedy or a low brow melodrama. It falls into a vague canyon in between. Wayne does his best. Everyone else doesn’t.
The heroine is played by the athletically attractive Czech ice skater Vera Hruba Ralston. Critics famously claimed she couldn’t act. That is a trifle unfair, but by 1945 she was married to Republic’s Studio President and was regularly touted as a star in movies like this and regularly failing to put bums on seats. She does have a cute turn of phrase and head, and this vaguely comic enterprise suits her better than it suits John Wayne, at least at this stage of his career. Most of the really bad acting comes from Walter Brennan and his steamboat sidekick Nick Stewart. Vera Ralston made two films with the Duke. Her most successful venture was the skating musical Icescapades.
CONFESSIONS FROM THE DAVID GALAXY AFFAIR (1979)
Quite possibly one of the worst films I have ever seen. It is not part of the infamous Confessions… series of British sex romps, although Anthony Booth does feature in it; producer David Sullivan hoped to steal some cash by association. The film was a flop. The usual cast of desperate TV no hopers waiting for a quick pay day prop up an even more desperate story about an astrologist and 'super stud' who becomes a suspect in a robbery. Mary Millington and Rosemary England get their kit off. Lots. Millington, who was a notorious playgirl in the 1970s, died in mysterious circumstances a few weeks after the film’s release.
VENOM (2018)
Venom is a more than competent alien superhero movie that mines several Marvel franchise staples while seeming to be entirely original. Venom is the name of a symbiotic alien life form, similar to the one encountered by Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man / Peter Parker in Spiderman 3. This alien has escaped from a broken safety pod and goes rampaging across the world from Malaysia to San Francisco seeking its three evil compatriots, who have all been abducted from their spaceship by Riz Ahmed’s power crazy industrialist Carlton Drake – clearly a thinly disguised Elon Musk. Venom ends up in Tom Hardy’s body. Hardy plays unlucky journalist Eddie Brock; he and Venom share a similar line in bitter commentary and a surprising heart for humanity. You wouldn’t think loser Eddie Brock would be anyone’s kind of hero, but as Venom says: “You are my kind of guy. I’m a loser too.” I guess two loser heads is the equal of one winner. Somehow, I’m not sure how, evil is thwarted, mostly by biting people’s heads off. Enjoyable and frankly bonkers, but unlike most MCU movies it decides not to take itself too seriously – I mean, you can’t when the hero and his alien alter-ego are chatting to each other mid-fight – and is at least a standalone movie unrelated to the huge ‘Avengers’ project. It scores many bonus points from me just for that. Very enjoyable.
VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE (2021)
Well, that was fun.
Tom Hardy returns as Eddie Brock, failed online reporter, who has been infected by the symbiotic alien known as Venom. Between bouts of soul searching, the twosome embark on a series of superhero style adventures, with monsters, basically. A good cast isn’t wasted and with the shoot predominantly taking place in the UK other than some location filming in San Francisco there is a peculiarly British slant to the cast and crew. The great cinematographer Robert Richardson adds some class to the look of the thing, which as with all these superhero numb-skullers mostly takes place at night or in closeted darkness. It is almost pointless to try and explain the plot: Woody Harrelson’s death row serial killer bites Eddie Brock and infects himself with Venom’s venom, morphing into an angry fiery red version of the titular good guy. Cue fights for survival and smashing lots of things up. Like many comic books, it is mostly throw out material but well-presented for a change, occasionally amusing and very energetic. At least it doesn’t take itself seriously like those po-faced Avengers films.
There’s a third film apparently. Hmm, can’t wait.
EMMA. (2020)
Anya Taylor-Joy provides a solidly affecting performance as Jane Austen’s titular heroine who meddles and matchmakes to everyone’s distinct discomfort. As with all Austen’s stories, we essentially witness a comedy of manners about people who have either too many comportments or not enough and where those supposed least equipped to abide by society’s rules turn out to be the best at understanding human nature and its romantic and social modes. Emma is cheerful and endearingly detailed for the first three-quarters before the romance we saw coming from the opening scenes rears its beautiful and understated head. The film benefits from a mostly non-recognisable cast, familiarity would have bred enormous contempt for such a well-known narrative. Pleasantly directed without prejudice and with no cow-towing to ‘reimagination’ by American Autumn de Wilde, who honours the text only by adding a full stop after the title to notionally remind those who don’t know that this is a ‘period piece’. That is about as modern as you get in this version of Emma. You’d be hard pressed to make a bad adaptation of Austen, but I guess it is possible if you scrap all the fizzy, prudent and knowing dialogues from the original novel. Incidental details spark this retelling to life; the scenes at the girl’s finishing school were particularly chucklesome. Production values are first-rate all-round. Very good entertainment.
THE SUBSTANCE (2024) with Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid. Directed with exquisite skill by Coralie Fargeat.
The premise: Moore is Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging celebrity who is being left behind by the media for being too old. Her producer on her aerobics program, Dennis Quaid, fires her. After getting in a car accident and going to the hospital, one of the nurses there tells her that she'd be a good candidate for 'the substance' and gives her a flash drive. Upon investigation, she finds out that this substance creates a second physical manifestation of yourself. She decides to do it, eventually creating a younger Elisabeth (named Sue) who is played by Margaret Qualley. The catch is that both bodies 'share' the same consciousness and must switch who is the 'active' body ever 7 days without exception. That's the setup...it's off to the races from there.
This is WILD. Without going into spoilers, this thing goes to places I was not expecting. I do not want to spoil anything but I do think it's necessary to give a warning as to how the film progresses: thing THE FLY or THE THING.
Demi Moore won the Golden Globe for best actress on this. After watching this, I can see why, and I really hope she wins the Oscar. She's fantastic in a role that requires a tremendous amount of courage and range. The good news is that Margaret Qualley as Sue is right there with her every step of the way.
I need to cite the direction though. Coralie Fargeat directs this thing with amazing skill and tonal control, even when things go absolutely bonkers in the third act. The film has attracted some criticism for its 'male gaze' (be prepared for copious amounts of nudity) which I find amusing considering it's a female director who is obviously playing with the male gaze. That's the entire point of the film.
Pretty amazing.
The Pink Panther (1963)
Perfect apre-ski or post-Christmas entertainment - lovely panoramic shots of Rome, Paris and Cortina, which popped up in For Your Eyes Only and also in Charade I think, the balcony where Grant meets Hepburn. I'd have preferred this vibe for OHMSS.
The stark, wintery city locations put me in mind of a Twitter account called Yesterday's Britain, Yesterday's Better which posts charming old post cards of the 60s and 70s, pointing out how low the population is, later in the day moving on to more strident Brexit, slightly racist-sounding obersvations meaining I had to unfollow! But yes, a lot of it avoids the noisy busy tourist trap look of today, guess it was all still post-war then.
Pink Panther is not so great for actual Christmas because of the to-ing and fro-ing around hotel rooms, there is often something on the other side more interesting where you don't get bogged down. Part of this remind of Thunderball's Shrublands scenes - you almost feel that might work better as a comedy, which is what its remake NSNA was most probably trying to do. Connery's swan song has that feel about it, you might almost sense a younger man might steal the movie off him, like Sellers did with Niven. Sellers did the dirty again on his co-star a few years later in Casino Royale when he went AWOL on the movie.
The slightly brutal payoff in the final scene may have originated in a film where the audience primarily sympathises with Niven rather than Clouseau, it's said during filming that Niven 'sensed the film slipping away from him'.
A sequel was rushed into production shortly after and you'd expect the same cast, a sunnier clime and locations in Paris, south of France and maybe Venice but instead Edwards opted to adapt another story and made A Shot in the Dark which has nothing to do with the titular jewel of the previous film. Similarly, the Bond series didn't not simply redo Dr No but went ahead with a totally different story, thus strengthening the character and the franchise.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
A SHOT IN THE DARK is the best film in that franchise, in my opinion. We did all of the PINK PANTHER films a year or so ago and ASITD really, really stood out from the pack in terms of being consistently hysterical. Honestly, I'd rate it as one of the very funniest films that I've ever seen, period.
Alan Lake was an interesting actor who sadly succumbed to his demons. For example, he was memorable alongside Ian Hendry when they played a truly frightening pair of heavies working for Brian Blessed in the first ever episode (after the pilot) of TV's 'The Sweeney' ('The Ringer', 1975). As for 'David Galaxy', it was a poor man's cash-in on the name of pop star David Essex - and executive-produced by rich man David Sullivan, who tried badly to straddle the line between sleaze and the saucy comedy end of mainstream entertainment.