Big fan of LEGACY. As a standalone adventure divorced from the BOURNE baggage, it's really quite solid. It's really too bad that Damon came back for a 5th franchise film because I was really keen to get a sequel to LEGACY.
And rounding off this quick subseries of Bourne movies...
Is there a Bourne thread I should have posted these into ?
Needed the DVD player for this one also as the Bank Holiday airings stopped at No.4.
JASON BOURNE (2016)
With a returning star and lead character and a returning director in Paul Greengrass, hopes were high for Jason Bourne. The film mostly succeeds, but by now all the possible twists and turns of pursuit have been exhausted and the fights, chases, surveillances and assassinations are old pat. Newness is provided via the revenge angle previously used in The Bourne Supremacy and reenacted here with Jason Bourne out to discover who murdered his father, an event which proved the catalyst for his recruitment into Treadstone, one of a dozen CIA hit squads, the most active of which is now Iron Hand, a splinter group seemingly at work longer even than Treadstone, Black Briar and Outcome.
We join our hero as he wanders the borders of Greece partaking in bareknuckle boxing matches for cash and desperately, but quite easily, avoiding CIA surveillance. Pamela Landy has gone [disgraced, perhaps, it is not explained] and has been replaced by slim, sexy, straight laced and crooked talking Hannah Lee, played with much cuteness by Alicia Vikander. She isn’t naïve, but looks far too young to have reached such a high step on the ladder. Tommy Lee Jones’s grizzled chief of operations Robert Dewey certainly thinks so, but Scott Shepherd’s National Intelligence Director Edwin Russell is much more susceptible to her charms. So too is Riz Ahmed’s shady tech billionaire and even, we wonder, our hero Jason Bourne. Matt Damon bulks up for the bare chested boxing, but is at his least communicative this time out. Even old flame Nicky Parsons [Julia Stiles] is given short-shift. Vincent Cassel is a single-minded hit man of no compassion and a wild temperament.
It is all mightily effective, but watched on a roll, especially after the clever ‘reboot’ of Legacy, this episode feels out of step with the others and isn’t doing anything very new. There are only so many times you can believe the scenario being played out for us and the pursuits, which seemed to take the hunters at least a day or so or perhaps a few hours of lucky digging in Identity, are faster and so technologically garbled it is impossible to believe. I suppose if you like the movie's idea of Deep Dream, an all-encompassing communications app, you will maybe dream up the flashy stuff at CIA HQ, an intelligence agency who resent being hacked yet seem quite happy to monitor other countries security coms and even, one suspects, hack into their security and surveillance systems usually with bewildering speed. Not a single waiver of authority or permission granted. I can imagine many foreign nations being up in arms.
Athens is in the throes of Arab Spring riots, but it doesn’t stop Nicky making contact with Jason and putting both their lives at risk from a deep cover assassin who travels the world faster than a Concorde jet and is amazingly armed to the teeth at every hotel and rooftop. Berlin, London and Las Vegas each experience shootings, fight and chases, usually of the impossibly bloody kind. It all ends on the familiar note of lonely pessimism.
Jason Bourne tails off the franchise and even if the door was left slightly ajar for another sequel or reboot, one also feels the series has done all it can in cinematic terms to raise the visual stakes of the action thriller. It feels a good place to duck out and, like Jason Bourne, stay ducked.
Agreed on all counts. The film isn't baaaad per se, it's just kinda there. It doesn't feel like it was made with any sort of enthusiasm apart from cashing a check.
The premise: Ana De Armas plays Eve, a girl who gets into action scenes.
The good:
The action scenes are really, really good. While Len Wiseman is credited as the director of the film, the film went into massive reshoots with JW franchise director Chad Stahelski. The amount of the reshoots supervised by Stahelski are in question, but it's pretty much a given that he redid most...if not all...of the action scenes. It shows, as they all pop with the standard JW vigor. There's a particularly noteworthy flamethrower battle in the third act that really, really needs to be seen. Ana also has a few 'found object' fights where she uses things readily at hand vs standard weapons.
Ana De Armas is really good in this. She's very convincing in the film and I never had an issue buying that she could do what she does. It helps that she takes battle damage as the scenes progress, kinda like how Charlize Theron took damage in ATOMIC BLONDE. She's not quite the invincible killing machine that John Wick is and I really think that helps things.
Commercials/trailers have spoiled that Keanu Reeves is in the film as John Wick. The good news is that he's not in it a lot. I'll avoid spoilers and merely say that he's more of a 'presence' than anything else. This is Ana's film to carry.
The locations are well utilized. One of the main locations is a supposed isolated village in Germany (filmed outside of Prague in actuality, it sounds like) which is really beautiful and is well utilized. The use of snow works nicely.
The bad:
It's a thin plot. It's so thin that it pretty much has just one side. It provides just enough connective tissue for the film to hang action sequences on. 'Ana seeks revenge and kills people'. Ana had a more fully realized character in NTTD as Paloma. It doesn't really matter though...most of the JW films are pretty thin on plot, but the character of John Wick himself is set up really nicely in the first film with a decent backstory and character motivations. Ana's character, Eve, gets some of that but not enough to really hang a film on. The film itself really relies on the viewer having a lot of familiarity and goodwill towards the JW franchise itself in order to gloss over any plot or character deficiencies.
Overall, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. If you're in the mood to watch more JW style action, this is for you. That flamethrower battle is really something to see.
I largely agree on Ballerina. There was a lot of action for action's sake, and the risk of getting repetitive is great. They manage to avoid this most of the time by being inventive. I especially enjoyed a scene were Des Armas and another woman are fighting, and many plates end up in a pile on the floor. Somewhere under the plates is a pistol. They have to fight, often using the plates, while searching for the handgun. Very inventive! I think it's clear that whoever gets cast as James Bond has to train very hard to compete with movies like this, but bond shouldn't get this violent. Ana De Armas is impressive! Even after NTTD I didn't expect her to be able to be this tough and brutal.
Somewhere in NTTD and MI:8 is a perfect film, and I appreciate all involved making so much identical thereby reducing the amount of post production time needed in my head.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (2023)
Most movies are a collaborative effort, from writers, producers, designers, directors, actors, etc, etc, all working together to create a moment of art and entertainment that works as a cohesive whole. Sometimes the collaboration doesn’t quite work, the foundations are wrong or the execution poor, the final polish spoils what was once approaching brilliance. You know the kind of thing; we see it a lot with James Bond. What struck me about Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One [from now MI7] after I belatedly first watched it at the BFI cinema last month was how the movie is collaboratively excellent, how everyone knows their role in the set-up, from SFX wizards, to editors, the writers, actors, etc, etc, how the product is tailored exactly for the market it wishes to hit, how the interconnecting bits-and-pieces seem to fall naturally into place, as if someone just threw the jigsaw up in the air and everything tumbles neatly together without a spot of insolence or mismanagement. It is an astounding goodlooking and well-made product.
It is also as joyless, turgid and flat as a flaccid balloon.
Part of the problem is that the jigsaw puzzle nature of filmmaking doesn’t only pervade the visual arena, but it has quite clearly inhabited the minds and creative focus of the producers, director, writers and [quite possibly] the star. MI7 as a surface value product hits the mark every time. Yet each of those marks has a sullen familiarity to it. As a seasoned watcher of thrillers, I saw nothing new in any of the scenarios conjured by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen. If you’ve been watching the endless OO7 repeats on ITV4 recently, you’ll be playing spot the difference from the opening precredit sequence. If you like the Jason Bourne franchise, you’ll see similarities too. Even that slam bang slug fest XXX is honoured during a criminal get together at an elaborate, euro disco party in Venice and the relentless madcap daredevil stunts. There was a feeling of a complete steal taking place, of everyone’s pockets being picked in the same manner Hayley Atwell’s pretty thief Grace and Tom Cruise’s earnest Ethan Hunt keep nabbing an elaborate key off each other and anyone else who happens to pocket the prized McGuffin, a piece of costume jewellery of the highest grade Chubb. To be honest, I gave up on the plot, such as it is. In full knowledge there was a second part to come, I sensed this was just a ‘going through the motions’ exercise with plenty of gusto and no brains and performed merely to introduce the characters, the plot and the background subtext of its sequel. Other than a rather spooky sinking of a Russian nuclear submarine during the precredit whirl, most of the real story kicks off in Final Reckoning. This is just elaborate filler.
As such we trawl around the globe, well Europe mostly, and we learn that all the Impossible Mission Force team members are dodgy types with criminal records, that the ‘choice’ they are always offered is not a choice at all but a bribe to allow them to stay out of incarceration. That’s disappointing. I thought they did it for love of country, justice, freedom and liberty, but no, they just want to stay out of jail like the criminal minds they are fighting. Speaking of criminal minds, there are an awful lot of them in this one. Chief among them is Esai Morales as a psychopath called Gabriel who has history with Ethan Hunt. It isn’t clear if he is working directly for the inventive arch antagonist – an AI virus named The Entity – or whether he wants to manipulate the stealth program for his own ends. Either way he is one of the least interesting villains of the series. I kept hoping they’d get on and explain what past Gabriel and Hunt have, because it is dull in the extreme hinting at it and have nobody talk openly of it. Cards close to chest perhaps, but it is a boring cinematic device and isn’t providing any dramatic tension.
There is some tension in the action stakes. There is a clever reversal of expectations by having the ‘countdown to destruction’ sequence at the start of the film, and latterly the Orient Express is tipped over a blown-up bridge, providing a fey Italian Job moment, or was it one of those Jurassic World sequels, I can’t remember. Good fun, but silly beyond belief. The stand out sequence is an extended car chase through Rome – a Rome as curiously empty of people as it was in James Bond’s Spectre, but then in MI7 Venice and the Orient Express are also at times startlingly hollow. Cruise and Atwell genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves, handcuffed together and driving a Fiat 500 with comic vivacity.
What else? Well, there are returning parts for Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby, and they do their best, but they all look older and can’t bring the glam and bling as they had before. Cruise weirdly looks young in some scenes and ancient in others. If I’m honest, MI7 is way too long and I was bored for most of the train bound climax, again chiefly because we’ve seen this kind of fluff before and there is nothing new in it. However much we applaud Tom Cruise for performing his own stunts, there is nothing so imaginatively gripping as the wire drop in the first movie, or hanging off that cargo plane in another.
Is it any good? Well, probably. Did I like it? Probably not.
DEAD RECKONING is pretty bloated with about 25% more plot than it needs in order to set up a second film (the Part 2), creating an unnecessary burden when it comes to exposition. It kinda sinks under its own weight in order to be EPIC.
That said, I give the film a lot of grace. By all reports, Tom Cruise paid to keep everyone on the crew employed while the film was shut down due to COVID in order to ensure that everyone got paid. This ballooned the budget quite a bit, something that Cruise was apparently OK with (he was a producer) in order to take care of the below-the-line people.
There's some good stuff in there, though. That car chase, as you cited, is pretty great. It's well shot and edited and has just the right amount of tension and humor to it. The cat and mouse stuff, especially in the airport sequence, is also really effective. I was kinda underwhelmed by the train ending sequence but there's no denying that it's very well executed.
We rewatched this before seeing the new entry in the franchise. DEAD RECKONING played much better the second time around, so maybe revisit it in a year or so and you might like it more.
This south Korean movie is directed by Boong Joon Ho, best known for the Oscar-winning Parasite in 2019. Memories is based on the first known serial killer case in the country's history where a killer raped and killed young women on country roads. But this isn't the typical police procedural where smart, experienced investigators use evidence to solve a case. In the 1980's South Korea was a military dictatorship, and police brutality and forced confessions were common police methods. There are three main investigators. One belives he can see if a person is guilty or not. the second one mainly relies on kicking confessions out of people. The third one comes from the capital and has a more modern. scientific approach. He belives documents cannot lie. As the case develops the three start to rub off on each other, becoming more like each other. There is a female police officer working with them too who is smarter then them, but she is often ignored because she's a woman. The male trio goes as far as using a shaman or attending spas to look for men without pubic hair.
More than being a procedural this is more a horror comedy. Some of the scenes are tense and unsettling, and the police are often comically inept. This is a very good movie by a master director, but don't expect CSI. But directors like Tarantino, Michael Mann and Guillimero del Torro are big fans of this movie.
It’s in the cinemas. What to make of this ‘final’ episode in Tom Cruise’s long running eight movie Mission Impossible franchise? Well, in short:
underwhelming, loud, too proud, over indulgent, over written, over confident, daft, worryingly impossible possible plot as if this might really happen, surly, dull, long, never ending, tensionless, stupidly spectacular, packed full of plot holes, unrealistic, more sci-fi than thriller, nice photography, crummy acting, tedious, yawn inducing, flashbacks, sentimental, unexplained, unstoppable, bombs, prison breaks, chases, more bombs, AI villains, a black female US President – who saw that coming? – subterfuge, espionage, masks just once, all strings neatly tied, shoelaces too, pick pocketing heroine, Russians, Americans, sunken nuclear submarines, impossible underwater mayhem of some enjoyment, impossible airborne mayhem of little originality, Pandora’s Box, religiosity, resurrection, deification, no explanations, yawn inducing music, yawn inducing epilogue, yawn inducing dialogue, speeches of interminable self-justification, guns, bombs, chases, murders, enormously long precredit sequence, enormously long end titles, cross cutting several moments of tension all at once, naff obvious editing, humour count almost zero, script up its own backside, Ethan Hunt miraculously carries two parachutes on his person when he had none in the plane, Ethan Hunt miraculously ‘survives’ freezing waters and a bends inducing free dive – he really ought to be dead – I say miraculous mostly because we do not witness how he was rescued, Ethan Hunt is trusted by nobody, Ethan Hunt is a liability who gets every job done illegally, everyone except that French actress playing the karate kicking assassin looks old, way too old (now I am just being mean), nice costumes, good make up, SFX up to par, total nonsense from start to finish.
I ended up not caring if the world got blown up because I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Getting there was the most excruciatingly turgid experience – it is fine to ‘bump’ an action sequence once, but to do it three or four times for no purpose other than delay the inevitable which we all know is coming is indulgence of the most narcissistic kind, who produced this crap?
Oh, Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie.
Look, I like Tom Cruise, I always have done, he is the last genuine movie star, but this one is beyond even his star power. IMO, he should quit making action movies and start trying to be the actor we all know he can be: Jerry Maguire, Rain Man, Magnolia, Tropic Thunder, American Made, we know he can do it. This film does his legacy few favours and the Mission Impossible franchise even less.
To each their own. I thought FINAL RECKONING was pretty great once you got past the clunky first hour.
I do want to call out your parachute comment, though: Parachutes always have a backup in case the first one fails. Also, he gets the parachute while on the plane just before jumping off.
I am sorry if my positive review of Dead Reckoning coaxed you into watching it at the Imax, @chrisno1 as it's not cheap.
A week or so ago I saw Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) at London's Prince Charles. This was preceded by my usual ritual where I get the train from Epsom - my home town, twinned with AVTAK's Chantilly don't you know - to London Bridge from where I walk to one of the last surviving Cafe Rouges in St Paul's for a vegetarian breakfast, a coffee and a glass of French Malbec. This time I visited the Spitalfields market off Bishopsgate but it wasn't as good as it once was, no vintage books or records or posters any more. After that I headed to the Prince Charles, a bit of a ritual I started with the Bond season there.
Les demoiselles de Rochefort isa French musical set in a French port, all pastel colours, a sort of tribute to Hollywood musicals. It's about a travelling group of entertainers, all a bit Cliff Richard, arriving to put on a show and initially you think Cliff and his gang might be a bit more charming. The music by our 'own' Michel Legrand of Never Say Never Again (that should probably read 'disowned') is lively and uplifting, v 1960s ba-ba-ba-ba like the Pearl and Dean advert or the Fourth Dimensions' Up Up And Away song, very much of its time but you imagine the world was heartily received when that fashion passed all the same.
Catherine Deneuve plays one of two singing twins who live in the town and befriend the entertainers, the plot is about the crossing paths of past and would-be lovers over the course of three days. It's better to watch at the cinema because on TV you just might get bored, it's the sort of film to lose yourself in, a bit of escapism. You'd have to be a sourpuss, a crosspatch in fact a loser all round to not get caught up in it and forget about outside concerns of politics and so on. A third of the way through I began to realise that Deneuve looked like the unmissed impassive former Cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt who was wheeled out to backhandedly defend Liz Truss after her crashing the economy, and I fondly revisited my imaginary put down where - as an MP - I would tell her she had a bloody nerve, whereupon when pulled up by the Speaker I would say, 'well, makes a change from Catherine Deneuve' to much hilarity from the House and adulation from the watching media.
It was in the upstairs cinema, my first time, not as good as the downstairs though for this you are looking down on the screen, not up, and the seats are staggered so you don't have to peer over someone's head, other than that it did feel like an old-school cinema, though one is sat out wide in some seats, you can see the screen unimpeded and it feels like old times. One snag, I am not tall so was okay with the legroom but it's not for lanky six footers and one man in the row in front stormed off tetchily after being knocked in the back of his seat by said lanky lad.
Gene Kelly did the dance moves and to my surprise turns up in a small role looking still young-ish and agile, it's odd to see how he suddenly aged to catch up with Astaire for the That's Entertainment films not long after.
The two twins of the title I had to look up on imdb to not make a fool of myself because they seemed very similar, oh also they did seem way too old to be the young ladies of the song, easily in their 30s - in fact I was put in mind of ageing singer Madame Edith from Allo Allo - but it turns out they were both in their early 20s then. The other twin is not Deneuve herself but I was right to check because it was her older sister who was more of a star back then. Imdb throws up some upsets however and it emerges her sister died in a car crash near Nice shortly after this film.
IMDB also throws up one of Gene Kelly's last films, Viva Knieval, which as a very low rating of about 3.1 and has fun reviews.
The film was entertaining, charming - what is odd is that I don't recall if it was songs all the way through or whether it broke for dialogue. Three quarters through there is an odd, unnecessary sub plot about a serial killer of women about town that seems to add nothing to the story and is treated like a funny side note. Quite a packed out audience for such a rare movie but the showing was a one-off
@HarryCanyon maybe I missed that parachute grab - however, that dosen't excuse the 'bumping' of the tension in this scene yet again - will he get the parachute on? has he got a spare? will he plug in the widget on time? how will he do this hurtling through the lower atmosphere and spinning over and over? as I wrote earlier impossible possibles... yawn... maybe my eyes had closed temporarily when he grabbed the chute...
My only complaint about the third act was all of the cuts...unnecessary cuts...to the 'poison pill' hanging around Gabriel's neck in the biplane sequence. Not sure why they felt it necessary to remind the viewer every few minutes where the McGuffin was...
Lorenzo Semple Jr’s teleplays made the Batman television series a hit, as did the willing stars, the camp humour and the silliness of it all, including a comic book visual identity – sloping camera angles to represent the villain’s lairs, pastel single colour décor, the speech bubbles for punches splat, blam, pow! I remember it twice a week on ITV in the seventies, which suited the half hour cliffhanger format.
This movie spin off catches the essence of Batman but misses some of the initial urgency and, by slavishly recreating the expected idioms from the TV show, rather imitates itself and isn’t as successful as you might have hoped. The lack of cliffhangers doesn’t help. Adam West is his amiable self as Bruce Wayne / Batman, Alan Napier is charming as Alfred, but if I am honest I could live without Burt Ward’s over enthusiasm as Robin, although he does have most of the funny lines. Like the later, darker and more violent modern movies, villains are thrust together to give our hero a rougher ride. Penguin [Burgess Meredith, stumpy, ugly, quk, quk…], Joker [Cesar Romero, over the top with giggles of delight, and kitted out exactly like his comic strip character], Riddler [Frank Gorshin, a green praying mantis of a question mark] and Cat Woman [Lee Meriweather, yummy but not Julie Newmar] have designs on killing Batman so he can’t prevent their assault on a United World Organisation’s Security Council conference.
The movie is a gentle assault on the senses, as poorly made as the TV series was and all the more charming because of it. The film is as daft as a brush, lacks suspense and isn’t likely to draw any ethical point scoring. Kids will probably like it, even sixty years on. I don’t really know the history of Detective Comics, but I have an inkling the camp style here reflected more the sixties tongue-in-cheek attitudes to escapist entertainment rather than the comics themselves.
If I am brutally honest, I didn’t enjoy this watch through of Batman very much [it was late and I was tired] but I have good young memories of the TV show and of this film and I am not going to crucify it because, given who the primary audience is, it would break too many hearts.
Even as a kid I realised the Batman movie wasn't quite there... to many villains spoil the broth, they sort of cancel each other out. Something similar happened with Batman Returns, as Tommy Lee Jones' Two Face looked sidelined by Carrey's Joker.
The humour was a bit too obvious too perhaps.
These repeats do make me want to see Burton's Batman though, which doesn't happen often.
This isn't a review as such. Either you know these films well or you're not into this kind of thing, so there's no point in that.
Here's the thing:
At the end of "Dracula" Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing, emerges from behind a stage curtain to give a little speech ending with "There are such things".
At the start of "Frankenstein" in which he played Dr Waldman, he does pretty much the same ending with "We've warned you".
Apparently the above coda to "Dracula" has been lost for many many years and remained unseen yet I can clearly remember it from a UK TV showing in the 80s. Moreover, I remember videotaping the 2 movies on one tape, so that the two scenes above almost ran together. Yet the first one had been lost for years before that showing, apparently. That videotape has long gone.
Unlikely I know, but does anyone else remember seeing the scene described above or am I having a false memory?
This viewing was inspired by one of @CoolHandBond 's Movie Poster posts:
DEATH IS A WOMAN (1967)
A curiosity of some interest from the mid-sixties, a film so obscure it doesn't even have an entry in Halliwell's.
Frederic Goode’s movie kicks off with Trish Noble’s beautiful Francesca framed in half-light as Joan Shakespeare’s theme runs over the credits. Suddenly a light switches on and Shaun Curry’s muscular Joe launches an upper cut to drug smuggler Blake’s chin. The fight is swift, bloody and brutal and at the end Francesca points a revolver at an exhausted, beaten Blake and pulls the trigger.
“I earned every penny,” she later tells Joe as they recline naked in bed, their underclothes strewn across the floor, “He had some nasty habits.” If we wanted the lovely Francesca to have a motive for her merciless killing, that is it; she continues mercilessly: “I didn’t want him to die until I’d seen him suffer like I did.” Her hate-hate relationship with Blake was a convenience for Francesca and Joe, allowing her to infiltrate his heroin smuggling operation and pocket the profits. A wily operator, used to using her allure for gain, Francesca plans to run away with the big lover boy, but in the meantime he has other plans, notably Caron Gardner’s Mary, a bosomy young woman whose morals are no higher than her miniskirts. There is a surprising scene of discreet full frontal nudity midway through the movie, before Mary engages in a bed bound bout of cat fighting with her love nemesis. Francesca does not take being spurned lightly.
Unfortunately for the tempestuous lovers, Blake’s partner in crime is casino boss Marlo. He’s played with some conniving sleekness by William Dexter, and there is nothing Marlo liked better than to watch Blake make love to Francesca using a spy hole he’s had bored through the wall of his casino – or of course watching Francesca shoot Blake dead. Blackmail follows murder follows smuggle. Tied up in this is Mark Burns’s svelte-like posh boy special investigator Dennis Parbury, who is impersonating an aristocrat and losing big at Marlo’s casino. Parbury is a bit of a gambling Jonah, as noted by a fellow punter moving his chips off Parbury’s stake to save his own cash. The casino was well-realised, I felt; no sleek, pretty patterned curtained interiors with cut glass champagne flutes, flickering chandeliers and tinkling pianos. This place is noisy, smoky, bare-walled and bare-faced. Parbury is aided by Wanda Ventham’s efficient assistant, who tails Francesca across Malta while Parbury engages in fisticuffs, interrogates a down-and-out and encounters the black veiled dowager widow who just might be the master planner behind it all.
Everything feels on the cusp of being important but the film never quite gets going, having neither an astute enough screenplay or a cast of competent actors. Bikini’s, tan lines and muscles are the general order of the day for character building. The soundtrack is a pleasant little affair of lounge music offerings; Anita Harris features singing Who’s Foolish while Francesca and Joe celebrate their murder with a swift slow salsa; Dennis Lotis warbles Francesca over the end titles. The later underwater scenes are rather well done, but the film misses an exciting ending. Trisha Noble is not a strong enough actress to make the manipulative Francesca entirely believable, and other than the slimy William Dexter, that rather goes for the cast as a whole. Nice Maltese scenery, mind. While it isn’t any great shakes overall, Death is a Woman has enough points of interest to make it worth a look and it sits on the far side of those cheap James Bond inspired ‘Super Spy’ films of the decade.
For those who enjoy disaster movies such as "Earthquake" (1974) or "2012" (2009), this is an ur-example not far removed from later descendants in plot.
The effects are quite poor even for the time. Contemporary films such as "King Kong" and "The Invisible Man" have effects which just about hold up even today.
It's a pre-code film, and couldn't have been made a couple of years later - extra-marital sex, suicide, mildly graphic violence would have been out.
This film was considered lost for many years and only turned up about 10 years ago. That's the original English version, a dubbed Italian version had been found earlier.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (2025), the live action remake of the 2010 animated film.
The premise: Vikings and dragons are at war with each other. Hiccup, the son of the Viking chief Stoic, is a fairly scrawny kid who wants to join the battle but is kept back by his father to work in the blacksmith shop. There, Hiccup creates a flying net that he uses to successfully bring down a Night Fury dragon, the rarest of all. He goes out to kill it and ends up befriending it.
The original 2010 animated film is a pretty much perfect movie, something that I'd give a rare 10/10 to. If you've never seen it, it's a truly wonderful film with great characters, wonderful action sequences, and terrific emotional and thematic depth. It also has one of the truly great endings. This live action version I'd give probably a 9.5 to, with that slight deduction really only there because this live action film does not need to exist.
The good news is that this live action film successfully replicates what the animated film did perfectly. It really is almost the same movie, with many of the popular sequences recreated shot for shot. A big reason why the live action film works is due to the casting. Mason Thames, the kid playing Hiccup, is fantastic in this. Like, this is a star making performance. I never saw THE BLACK PHONE but word is that he was great in that, and the sequel to that is coming out later this year. Assuming that sequel is a hit, this Thames kid should be red hot. Gerard Butler voiced Stoic in the animated film and he returns here to play the same role...he's great, 110% committed to the role. The rest of the cast delivers too.
If you've never seen the animated film, here's one of the key scenes in it:
It's one of the scenes that was redone essentially shot for shot in the live action version. The good news is that John Powell came back to do the score for this and the sequence absolutely rips. Here's some of it:
A Time To Kill is based on a novel by John Grisham. Apparently he didn’t want to see the book adapted for the cinema, but was persuaded by a $6m fee. Watching this I can see why he was against a big screen treatment. A Time To Kill tramples all over any notions of genuine justice. I couldn’t believe it for a second. This is Hollywood moviemaking at it’s very worst. Stilted characters, lacklustre direction, stupid storylines, horrid situations blown out of all reasonable proportions, everything is wrapped up in a courtroom melodrama of little or no drama, the Ku Klux Klan make an unlikely and stereotypical appearance, the whole thing is emotionally manipulative if you are susceptible to the kind of one-note hysteria presented here. Samuel L. Jackson commits a revenge killing. Matthew McConaghay defends the undefendable. Sandra Bullock looks stunningly sexy. Job done. Other than Ms Bullock, who is always watchable, I’d say the movie is almost 100% rubbish.
Test pilot John Mitchell working for a struggling aircraft company, gets caught in a desperate situation when the prototype freight aircraft he is flying, loses an engine to fire. As everyone else on the plane parachutes to safety, Mitchell tries to land the stricken aircraft on his own and defy the odds.
One can sense a deep desperation in Mitchell, who undertakes this risky stunt as the future of his employment and the welfare of his family depend upon the aircraft coming back in one piece.
Starring Jack Hawkins, Elizabeth Sellars and the Bristol 170 Wayfarer, 'Decision against time' is a well acted and beautifully picturized film made by Ealing Studios.
I was not aware this movie was based on a series of children’s horror short stories – that explains the title with more ease than the happenings on screen which are distinctly not for children. Here, Andre Ovredal directs a keen cast of young actors, including Zoe Colletti, through a series of imaginings that end up resembling the Final Destination series.
It is Halloween 1968 and teenagers Stella, Auggie and Chuck befriend draft dodger Ramon at the local drive-in cinema; they go on an excursion to a haunted house and discover a locked hidden room and a book of horror stories, both supposedly linked to an unfortunate woman who died at the house over 100 years ago. Stella steals the book and that night, while she attempts to read it, the empty pages begin to fill with new script and a real-time murder elapses. Like that naughty video tape in Ring, the book of stories is foretelling everyone’s death and it has the quartet of teens in its sights. The premise is solid horror, and creepingly well done for half the runtime, but the problem the film has is resolving the situation – the friends try to burn the book but typically that doesn’t work, it’d be too easy – so we end up trawling through shock after shock for shock’s sake and eventually reach a conclusion which just about works, although it is left open ended should a sequel be required. In a vaguely political statement, it seems Mexican draft dodger Ramon is the only one of the quartet fated to die, shovelled off as he is to Vietnam.
Scary Stories… delivers the goods, I suppose, but I have the distinct feeling most of these shocks have been done before and done better and nothing was very surprising or very interesting. Decent performances though and you can’t fault the horrific temper of the SFX.
A prototype disaster movie from director Robert Aldrich that features James Stewart’s last great performance. As with all disaster movies, the film spends most of its time concentrating on building and destroying the relationships of the protagonists until we reach the denouement; here Aldrich reverses our expectations and has Stewart’s Saharan transport plane crashing during the opening credit sequence and builds the relationships in the toiling aftermath. That is a burning sun of a couple of weeks as the assorted engineers, pilots, oil workers and soldiers pit their wits against the elements, aeronautical science and each other in an attempt to stay alive and potentially escape.
Good photography keeps us impressed. Editing is crisp. Performances fairly good all over. Stewart in particular shines as a WW2 USAF pilot slumming it in Libya, uncertain of his moral compass and his ability to lead the disparate group. Richard Attenborough is fairly awful as his wingman. Guys like George Kennedy and Ernest Borgnine pepper the cast. Considered an adventure classic today, The Flight of the Phoenix was a relative flop on release.
Renowned space scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass, deeply committed to his moon colonization project comes across a bizarre meteorite, which had fallen in an area 90 miles north of his rocket facility....a place called Winnerden Flats. Earlier, his colleagues had also discovered strange radar signals coming from the same area.
Prof Quatermass decides to explore this site...only to realize a very strange conspiracy at play in this area.
What is going on in Winnerden Flats?
You will find the answers when you see this absolute gem of a film directed by Val Guest and starring Brian Donlevy as Prof Quatermass.
One of the best sci-fi films made by Hammer Films.
Good as it is, the original TV version was better and should be easily watchable on line. The story's less compressed (which can be seen as a pro or a con) and IMHO the main flaw apart from the dated SFX is the central performance. Actor John Robinson was cast at very short notice after the unexpected death of Reginald Tate who had played Quatermass in the first TV story and comes across as stiff and unsympathetic, yes more so than Brian Donlevy, which of course isn’t totally his own fault.
Comments
Big fan of LEGACY. As a standalone adventure divorced from the BOURNE baggage, it's really quite solid. It's really too bad that Damon came back for a 5th franchise film because I was really keen to get a sequel to LEGACY.
And rounding off this quick subseries of Bourne movies...
Is there a Bourne thread I should have posted these into ?
Needed the DVD player for this one also as the Bank Holiday airings stopped at No.4.
JASON BOURNE (2016)
With a returning star and lead character and a returning director in Paul Greengrass, hopes were high for Jason Bourne. The film mostly succeeds, but by now all the possible twists and turns of pursuit have been exhausted and the fights, chases, surveillances and assassinations are old pat. Newness is provided via the revenge angle previously used in The Bourne Supremacy and reenacted here with Jason Bourne out to discover who murdered his father, an event which proved the catalyst for his recruitment into Treadstone, one of a dozen CIA hit squads, the most active of which is now Iron Hand, a splinter group seemingly at work longer even than Treadstone, Black Briar and Outcome.
We join our hero as he wanders the borders of Greece partaking in bareknuckle boxing matches for cash and desperately, but quite easily, avoiding CIA surveillance. Pamela Landy has gone [disgraced, perhaps, it is not explained] and has been replaced by slim, sexy, straight laced and crooked talking Hannah Lee, played with much cuteness by Alicia Vikander. She isn’t naïve, but looks far too young to have reached such a high step on the ladder. Tommy Lee Jones’s grizzled chief of operations Robert Dewey certainly thinks so, but Scott Shepherd’s National Intelligence Director Edwin Russell is much more susceptible to her charms. So too is Riz Ahmed’s shady tech billionaire and even, we wonder, our hero Jason Bourne. Matt Damon bulks up for the bare chested boxing, but is at his least communicative this time out. Even old flame Nicky Parsons [Julia Stiles] is given short-shift. Vincent Cassel is a single-minded hit man of no compassion and a wild temperament.
It is all mightily effective, but watched on a roll, especially after the clever ‘reboot’ of Legacy, this episode feels out of step with the others and isn’t doing anything very new. There are only so many times you can believe the scenario being played out for us and the pursuits, which seemed to take the hunters at least a day or so or perhaps a few hours of lucky digging in Identity, are faster and so technologically garbled it is impossible to believe. I suppose if you like the movie's idea of Deep Dream, an all-encompassing communications app, you will maybe dream up the flashy stuff at CIA HQ, an intelligence agency who resent being hacked yet seem quite happy to monitor other countries security coms and even, one suspects, hack into their security and surveillance systems usually with bewildering speed. Not a single waiver of authority or permission granted. I can imagine many foreign nations being up in arms.
Athens is in the throes of Arab Spring riots, but it doesn’t stop Nicky making contact with Jason and putting both their lives at risk from a deep cover assassin who travels the world faster than a Concorde jet and is amazingly armed to the teeth at every hotel and rooftop. Berlin, London and Las Vegas each experience shootings, fight and chases, usually of the impossibly bloody kind. It all ends on the familiar note of lonely pessimism.
Jason Bourne tails off the franchise and even if the door was left slightly ajar for another sequel or reboot, one also feels the series has done all it can in cinematic terms to raise the visual stakes of the action thriller. It feels a good place to duck out and, like Jason Bourne, stay ducked.
Good, but not as good as the other films.
Agreed on all counts. The film isn't baaaad per se, it's just kinda there. It doesn't feel like it was made with any sort of enthusiasm apart from cashing a check.
BALLERINA: FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK (2025)
The premise: Ana De Armas plays Eve, a girl who gets into action scenes.
The good:
The bad:
Overall, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. If you're in the mood to watch more JW style action, this is for you. That flamethrower battle is really something to see.
I largely agree on Ballerina. There was a lot of action for action's sake, and the risk of getting repetitive is great. They manage to avoid this most of the time by being inventive. I especially enjoyed a scene were Des Armas and another woman are fighting, and many plates end up in a pile on the floor. Somewhere under the plates is a pistol. They have to fight, often using the plates, while searching for the handgun. Very inventive! I think it's clear that whoever gets cast as James Bond has to train very hard to compete with movies like this, but bond shouldn't get this violent. Ana De Armas is impressive! Even after NTTD I didn't expect her to be able to be this tough and brutal.
Also, the guy that Ana fights with a flamethrower in the third act is a dead ringer for Stamper in TND.
MI:8.
Somewhere in NTTD and MI:8 is a perfect film, and I appreciate all involved making so much identical thereby reducing the amount of post production time needed in my head.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (2023)
Most movies are a collaborative effort, from writers, producers, designers, directors, actors, etc, etc, all working together to create a moment of art and entertainment that works as a cohesive whole. Sometimes the collaboration doesn’t quite work, the foundations are wrong or the execution poor, the final polish spoils what was once approaching brilliance. You know the kind of thing; we see it a lot with James Bond. What struck me about Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One [from now MI7] after I belatedly first watched it at the BFI cinema last month was how the movie is collaboratively excellent, how everyone knows their role in the set-up, from SFX wizards, to editors, the writers, actors, etc, etc, how the product is tailored exactly for the market it wishes to hit, how the interconnecting bits-and-pieces seem to fall naturally into place, as if someone just threw the jigsaw up in the air and everything tumbles neatly together without a spot of insolence or mismanagement. It is an astounding goodlooking and well-made product.
It is also as joyless, turgid and flat as a flaccid balloon.
Part of the problem is that the jigsaw puzzle nature of filmmaking doesn’t only pervade the visual arena, but it has quite clearly inhabited the minds and creative focus of the producers, director, writers and [quite possibly] the star. MI7 as a surface value product hits the mark every time. Yet each of those marks has a sullen familiarity to it. As a seasoned watcher of thrillers, I saw nothing new in any of the scenarios conjured by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen. If you’ve been watching the endless OO7 repeats on ITV4 recently, you’ll be playing spot the difference from the opening precredit sequence. If you like the Jason Bourne franchise, you’ll see similarities too. Even that slam bang slug fest XXX is honoured during a criminal get together at an elaborate, euro disco party in Venice and the relentless madcap daredevil stunts. There was a feeling of a complete steal taking place, of everyone’s pockets being picked in the same manner Hayley Atwell’s pretty thief Grace and Tom Cruise’s earnest Ethan Hunt keep nabbing an elaborate key off each other and anyone else who happens to pocket the prized McGuffin, a piece of costume jewellery of the highest grade Chubb. To be honest, I gave up on the plot, such as it is. In full knowledge there was a second part to come, I sensed this was just a ‘going through the motions’ exercise with plenty of gusto and no brains and performed merely to introduce the characters, the plot and the background subtext of its sequel. Other than a rather spooky sinking of a Russian nuclear submarine during the precredit whirl, most of the real story kicks off in Final Reckoning. This is just elaborate filler.
As such we trawl around the globe, well Europe mostly, and we learn that all the Impossible Mission Force team members are dodgy types with criminal records, that the ‘choice’ they are always offered is not a choice at all but a bribe to allow them to stay out of incarceration. That’s disappointing. I thought they did it for love of country, justice, freedom and liberty, but no, they just want to stay out of jail like the criminal minds they are fighting. Speaking of criminal minds, there are an awful lot of them in this one. Chief among them is Esai Morales as a psychopath called Gabriel who has history with Ethan Hunt. It isn’t clear if he is working directly for the inventive arch antagonist – an AI virus named The Entity – or whether he wants to manipulate the stealth program for his own ends. Either way he is one of the least interesting villains of the series. I kept hoping they’d get on and explain what past Gabriel and Hunt have, because it is dull in the extreme hinting at it and have nobody talk openly of it. Cards close to chest perhaps, but it is a boring cinematic device and isn’t providing any dramatic tension.
There is some tension in the action stakes. There is a clever reversal of expectations by having the ‘countdown to destruction’ sequence at the start of the film, and latterly the Orient Express is tipped over a blown-up bridge, providing a fey Italian Job moment, or was it one of those Jurassic World sequels, I can’t remember. Good fun, but silly beyond belief. The stand out sequence is an extended car chase through Rome – a Rome as curiously empty of people as it was in James Bond’s Spectre, but then in MI7 Venice and the Orient Express are also at times startlingly hollow. Cruise and Atwell genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves, handcuffed together and driving a Fiat 500 with comic vivacity.
What else? Well, there are returning parts for Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby, and they do their best, but they all look older and can’t bring the glam and bling as they had before. Cruise weirdly looks young in some scenes and ancient in others. If I’m honest, MI7 is way too long and I was bored for most of the train bound climax, again chiefly because we’ve seen this kind of fluff before and there is nothing new in it. However much we applaud Tom Cruise for performing his own stunts, there is nothing so imaginatively gripping as the wire drop in the first movie, or hanging off that cargo plane in another.
Is it any good? Well, probably. Did I like it? Probably not.
DEAD RECKONING is pretty bloated with about 25% more plot than it needs in order to set up a second film (the Part 2), creating an unnecessary burden when it comes to exposition. It kinda sinks under its own weight in order to be EPIC.
That said, I give the film a lot of grace. By all reports, Tom Cruise paid to keep everyone on the crew employed while the film was shut down due to COVID in order to ensure that everyone got paid. This ballooned the budget quite a bit, something that Cruise was apparently OK with (he was a producer) in order to take care of the below-the-line people.
There's some good stuff in there, though. That car chase, as you cited, is pretty great. It's well shot and edited and has just the right amount of tension and humor to it. The cat and mouse stuff, especially in the airport sequence, is also really effective. I was kinda underwhelmed by the train ending sequence but there's no denying that it's very well executed.
We rewatched this before seeing the new entry in the franchise. DEAD RECKONING played much better the second time around, so maybe revisit it in a year or so and you might like it more.
Memories of murder (2003)
This south Korean movie is directed by Boong Joon Ho, best known for the Oscar-winning Parasite in 2019. Memories is based on the first known serial killer case in the country's history where a killer raped and killed young women on country roads. But this isn't the typical police procedural where smart, experienced investigators use evidence to solve a case. In the 1980's South Korea was a military dictatorship, and police brutality and forced confessions were common police methods. There are three main investigators. One belives he can see if a person is guilty or not. the second one mainly relies on kicking confessions out of people. The third one comes from the capital and has a more modern. scientific approach. He belives documents cannot lie. As the case develops the three start to rub off on each other, becoming more like each other. There is a female police officer working with them too who is smarter then them, but she is often ignored because she's a woman. The male trio goes as far as using a shaman or attending spas to look for men without pubic hair.
More than being a procedural this is more a horror comedy. Some of the scenes are tense and unsettling, and the police are often comically inept. This is a very good movie by a master director, but don't expect CSI. But directors like Tarantino, Michael Mann and Guillimero del Torro are big fans of this movie.
This sounds really intriguing: definitely on the list.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING (2025)
It’s in the cinemas. What to make of this ‘final’ episode in Tom Cruise’s long running eight movie Mission Impossible franchise? Well, in short:
underwhelming, loud, too proud, over indulgent, over written, over confident, daft, worryingly impossible possible plot as if this might really happen, surly, dull, long, never ending, tensionless, stupidly spectacular, packed full of plot holes, unrealistic, more sci-fi than thriller, nice photography, crummy acting, tedious, yawn inducing, flashbacks, sentimental, unexplained, unstoppable, bombs, prison breaks, chases, more bombs, AI villains, a black female US President – who saw that coming? – subterfuge, espionage, masks just once, all strings neatly tied, shoelaces too, pick pocketing heroine, Russians, Americans, sunken nuclear submarines, impossible underwater mayhem of some enjoyment, impossible airborne mayhem of little originality, Pandora’s Box, religiosity, resurrection, deification, no explanations, yawn inducing music, yawn inducing epilogue, yawn inducing dialogue, speeches of interminable self-justification, guns, bombs, chases, murders, enormously long precredit sequence, enormously long end titles, cross cutting several moments of tension all at once, naff obvious editing, humour count almost zero, script up its own backside, Ethan Hunt miraculously carries two parachutes on his person when he had none in the plane, Ethan Hunt miraculously ‘survives’ freezing waters and a bends inducing free dive – he really ought to be dead – I say miraculous mostly because we do not witness how he was rescued, Ethan Hunt is trusted by nobody, Ethan Hunt is a liability who gets every job done illegally, everyone except that French actress playing the karate kicking assassin looks old, way too old (now I am just being mean), nice costumes, good make up, SFX up to par, total nonsense from start to finish.
I ended up not caring if the world got blown up because I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Getting there was the most excruciatingly turgid experience – it is fine to ‘bump’ an action sequence once, but to do it three or four times for no purpose other than delay the inevitable which we all know is coming is indulgence of the most narcissistic kind, who produced this crap?
Oh, Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie.
Look, I like Tom Cruise, I always have done, he is the last genuine movie star, but this one is beyond even his star power. IMO, he should quit making action movies and start trying to be the actor we all know he can be: Jerry Maguire, Rain Man, Magnolia, Tropic Thunder, American Made, we know he can do it. This film does his legacy few favours and the Mission Impossible franchise even less.
Dreadful.
To each their own. I thought FINAL RECKONING was pretty great once you got past the clunky first hour.
I do want to call out your parachute comment, though: Parachutes always have a backup in case the first one fails. Also, he gets the parachute while on the plane just before jumping off.
I am sorry if my positive review of Dead Reckoning coaxed you into watching it at the Imax, @chrisno1 as it's not cheap.
A week or so ago I saw Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) at London's Prince Charles. This was preceded by my usual ritual where I get the train from Epsom - my home town, twinned with AVTAK's Chantilly don't you know - to London Bridge from where I walk to one of the last surviving Cafe Rouges in St Paul's for a vegetarian breakfast, a coffee and a glass of French Malbec. This time I visited the Spitalfields market off Bishopsgate but it wasn't as good as it once was, no vintage books or records or posters any more. After that I headed to the Prince Charles, a bit of a ritual I started with the Bond season there.
Les demoiselles de Rochefort is a French musical set in a French port, all pastel colours, a sort of tribute to Hollywood musicals. It's about a travelling group of entertainers, all a bit Cliff Richard, arriving to put on a show and initially you think Cliff and his gang might be a bit more charming. The music by our 'own' Michel Legrand of Never Say Never Again (that should probably read 'disowned') is lively and uplifting, v 1960s ba-ba-ba-ba like the Pearl and Dean advert or the Fourth Dimensions' Up Up And Away song, very much of its time but you imagine the world was heartily received when that fashion passed all the same.
Catherine Deneuve plays one of two singing twins who live in the town and befriend the entertainers, the plot is about the crossing paths of past and would-be lovers over the course of three days. It's better to watch at the cinema because on TV you just might get bored, it's the sort of film to lose yourself in, a bit of escapism. You'd have to be a sourpuss, a crosspatch in fact a loser all round to not get caught up in it and forget about outside concerns of politics and so on. A third of the way through I began to realise that Deneuve looked like the unmissed impassive former Cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt who was wheeled out to backhandedly defend Liz Truss after her crashing the economy, and I fondly revisited my imaginary put down where - as an MP - I would tell her she had a bloody nerve, whereupon when pulled up by the Speaker I would say, 'well, makes a change from Catherine Deneuve' to much hilarity from the House and adulation from the watching media.
It was in the upstairs cinema, my first time, not as good as the downstairs though for this you are looking down on the screen, not up, and the seats are staggered so you don't have to peer over someone's head, other than that it did feel like an old-school cinema, though one is sat out wide in some seats, you can see the screen unimpeded and it feels like old times. One snag, I am not tall so was okay with the legroom but it's not for lanky six footers and one man in the row in front stormed off tetchily after being knocked in the back of his seat by said lanky lad.
Gene Kelly did the dance moves and to my surprise turns up in a small role looking still young-ish and agile, it's odd to see how he suddenly aged to catch up with Astaire for the That's Entertainment films not long after.
The two twins of the title I had to look up on imdb to not make a fool of myself because they seemed very similar, oh also they did seem way too old to be the young ladies of the song, easily in their 30s - in fact I was put in mind of ageing singer Madame Edith from Allo Allo - but it turns out they were both in their early 20s then. The other twin is not Deneuve herself but I was right to check because it was her older sister who was more of a star back then. Imdb throws up some upsets however and it emerges her sister died in a car crash near Nice shortly after this film.
IMDB also throws up one of Gene Kelly's last films, Viva Knieval, which as a very low rating of about 3.1 and has fun reviews.
The film was entertaining, charming - what is odd is that I don't recall if it was songs all the way through or whether it broke for dialogue. Three quarters through there is an odd, unnecessary sub plot about a serial killer of women about town that seems to add nothing to the story and is treated like a funny side note. Quite a packed out audience for such a rare movie but the showing was a one-off
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@HarryCanyon maybe I missed that parachute grab - however, that dosen't excuse the 'bumping' of the tension in this scene yet again - will he get the parachute on? has he got a spare? will he plug in the widget on time? how will he do this hurtling through the lower atmosphere and spinning over and over? as I wrote earlier impossible possibles... yawn... maybe my eyes had closed temporarily when he grabbed the chute...
My only complaint about the third act was all of the cuts...unnecessary cuts...to the 'poison pill' hanging around Gabriel's neck in the biplane sequence. Not sure why they felt it necessary to remind the viewer every few minutes where the McGuffin was...
BATMAN (1966)
Lorenzo Semple Jr’s teleplays made the Batman television series a hit, as did the willing stars, the camp humour and the silliness of it all, including a comic book visual identity – sloping camera angles to represent the villain’s lairs, pastel single colour décor, the speech bubbles for punches splat, blam, pow! I remember it twice a week on ITV in the seventies, which suited the half hour cliffhanger format.
This movie spin off catches the essence of Batman but misses some of the initial urgency and, by slavishly recreating the expected idioms from the TV show, rather imitates itself and isn’t as successful as you might have hoped. The lack of cliffhangers doesn’t help. Adam West is his amiable self as Bruce Wayne / Batman, Alan Napier is charming as Alfred, but if I am honest I could live without Burt Ward’s over enthusiasm as Robin, although he does have most of the funny lines. Like the later, darker and more violent modern movies, villains are thrust together to give our hero a rougher ride. Penguin [Burgess Meredith, stumpy, ugly, quk, quk…], Joker [Cesar Romero, over the top with giggles of delight, and kitted out exactly like his comic strip character], Riddler [Frank Gorshin, a green praying mantis of a question mark] and Cat Woman [Lee Meriweather, yummy but not Julie Newmar] have designs on killing Batman so he can’t prevent their assault on a United World Organisation’s Security Council conference.
The movie is a gentle assault on the senses, as poorly made as the TV series was and all the more charming because of it. The film is as daft as a brush, lacks suspense and isn’t likely to draw any ethical point scoring. Kids will probably like it, even sixty years on. I don’t really know the history of Detective Comics, but I have an inkling the camp style here reflected more the sixties tongue-in-cheek attitudes to escapist entertainment rather than the comics themselves.
If I am brutally honest, I didn’t enjoy this watch through of Batman very much [it was late and I was tired] but I have good young memories of the TV show and of this film and I am not going to crucify it because, given who the primary audience is, it would break too many hearts.
Good fun.
Even as a kid I realised the Batman movie wasn't quite there... to many villains spoil the broth, they sort of cancel each other out. Something similar happened with Batman Returns, as Tommy Lee Jones' Two Face looked sidelined by Carrey's Joker.
The humour was a bit too obvious too perhaps.
These repeats do make me want to see Burton's Batman though, which doesn't happen often.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Dracula (1931) Frankenstein (1931)
This isn't a review as such. Either you know these films well or you're not into this kind of thing, so there's no point in that.
Here's the thing:
At the end of "Dracula" Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing, emerges from behind a stage curtain to give a little speech ending with "There are such things".
At the start of "Frankenstein" in which he played Dr Waldman, he does pretty much the same ending with "We've warned you".
Apparently the above coda to "Dracula" has been lost for many many years and remained unseen yet I can clearly remember it from a UK TV showing in the 80s. Moreover, I remember videotaping the 2 movies on one tape, so that the two scenes above almost ran together. Yet the first one had been lost for years before that showing, apparently. That videotape has long gone.
Unlikely I know, but does anyone else remember seeing the scene described above or am I having a false memory?
I do not remember ever seeing it, but it may just be a memory failure.
This viewing was inspired by one of @CoolHandBond 's Movie Poster posts:
DEATH IS A WOMAN (1967)
A curiosity of some interest from the mid-sixties, a film so obscure it doesn't even have an entry in Halliwell's.
Frederic Goode’s movie kicks off with Trish Noble’s beautiful Francesca framed in half-light as Joan Shakespeare’s theme runs over the credits. Suddenly a light switches on and Shaun Curry’s muscular Joe launches an upper cut to drug smuggler Blake’s chin. The fight is swift, bloody and brutal and at the end Francesca points a revolver at an exhausted, beaten Blake and pulls the trigger.
“I earned every penny,” she later tells Joe as they recline naked in bed, their underclothes strewn across the floor, “He had some nasty habits.” If we wanted the lovely Francesca to have a motive for her merciless killing, that is it; she continues mercilessly: “I didn’t want him to die until I’d seen him suffer like I did.” Her hate-hate relationship with Blake was a convenience for Francesca and Joe, allowing her to infiltrate his heroin smuggling operation and pocket the profits. A wily operator, used to using her allure for gain, Francesca plans to run away with the big lover boy, but in the meantime he has other plans, notably Caron Gardner’s Mary, a bosomy young woman whose morals are no higher than her miniskirts. There is a surprising scene of discreet full frontal nudity midway through the movie, before Mary engages in a bed bound bout of cat fighting with her love nemesis. Francesca does not take being spurned lightly.
Unfortunately for the tempestuous lovers, Blake’s partner in crime is casino boss Marlo. He’s played with some conniving sleekness by William Dexter, and there is nothing Marlo liked better than to watch Blake make love to Francesca using a spy hole he’s had bored through the wall of his casino – or of course watching Francesca shoot Blake dead. Blackmail follows murder follows smuggle. Tied up in this is Mark Burns’s svelte-like posh boy special investigator Dennis Parbury, who is impersonating an aristocrat and losing big at Marlo’s casino. Parbury is a bit of a gambling Jonah, as noted by a fellow punter moving his chips off Parbury’s stake to save his own cash. The casino was well-realised, I felt; no sleek, pretty patterned curtained interiors with cut glass champagne flutes, flickering chandeliers and tinkling pianos. This place is noisy, smoky, bare-walled and bare-faced. Parbury is aided by Wanda Ventham’s efficient assistant, who tails Francesca across Malta while Parbury engages in fisticuffs, interrogates a down-and-out and encounters the black veiled dowager widow who just might be the master planner behind it all.
Everything feels on the cusp of being important but the film never quite gets going, having neither an astute enough screenplay or a cast of competent actors. Bikini’s, tan lines and muscles are the general order of the day for character building. The soundtrack is a pleasant little affair of lounge music offerings; Anita Harris features singing Who’s Foolish while Francesca and Joe celebrate their murder with a swift slow salsa; Dennis Lotis warbles Francesca over the end titles. The later underwater scenes are rather well done, but the film misses an exciting ending. Trisha Noble is not a strong enough actress to make the manipulative Francesca entirely believable, and other than the slimy William Dexter, that rather goes for the cast as a whole. Nice Maltese scenery, mind. While it isn’t any great shakes overall, Death is a Woman has enough points of interest to make it worth a look and it sits on the far side of those cheap James Bond inspired ‘Super Spy’ films of the decade.
Deluge (1933)
For those who enjoy disaster movies such as "Earthquake" (1974) or "2012" (2009), this is an ur-example not far removed from later descendants in plot.
The effects are quite poor even for the time. Contemporary films such as "King Kong" and "The Invisible Man" have effects which just about hold up even today.
It's a pre-code film, and couldn't have been made a couple of years later - extra-marital sex, suicide, mildly graphic violence would have been out.
This film was considered lost for many years and only turned up about 10 years ago. That's the original English version, a dubbed Italian version had been found earlier.
Not recommended except for the curious.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (2025), the live action remake of the 2010 animated film.
The premise: Vikings and dragons are at war with each other. Hiccup, the son of the Viking chief Stoic, is a fairly scrawny kid who wants to join the battle but is kept back by his father to work in the blacksmith shop. There, Hiccup creates a flying net that he uses to successfully bring down a Night Fury dragon, the rarest of all. He goes out to kill it and ends up befriending it.
The original 2010 animated film is a pretty much perfect movie, something that I'd give a rare 10/10 to. If you've never seen it, it's a truly wonderful film with great characters, wonderful action sequences, and terrific emotional and thematic depth. It also has one of the truly great endings. This live action version I'd give probably a 9.5 to, with that slight deduction really only there because this live action film does not need to exist.
The good news is that this live action film successfully replicates what the animated film did perfectly. It really is almost the same movie, with many of the popular sequences recreated shot for shot. A big reason why the live action film works is due to the casting. Mason Thames, the kid playing Hiccup, is fantastic in this. Like, this is a star making performance. I never saw THE BLACK PHONE but word is that he was great in that, and the sequel to that is coming out later this year. Assuming that sequel is a hit, this Thames kid should be red hot. Gerard Butler voiced Stoic in the animated film and he returns here to play the same role...he's great, 110% committed to the role. The rest of the cast delivers too.
If you've never seen the animated film, here's one of the key scenes in it:
It's one of the scenes that was redone essentially shot for shot in the live action version. The good news is that John Powell came back to do the score for this and the sequence absolutely rips. Here's some of it:
A TIME TO KILL (1996)
A Time To Kill is based on a novel by John Grisham. Apparently he didn’t want to see the book adapted for the cinema, but was persuaded by a $6m fee. Watching this I can see why he was against a big screen treatment. A Time To Kill tramples all over any notions of genuine justice. I couldn’t believe it for a second. This is Hollywood moviemaking at it’s very worst. Stilted characters, lacklustre direction, stupid storylines, horrid situations blown out of all reasonable proportions, everything is wrapped up in a courtroom melodrama of little or no drama, the Ku Klux Klan make an unlikely and stereotypical appearance, the whole thing is emotionally manipulative if you are susceptible to the kind of one-note hysteria presented here. Samuel L. Jackson commits a revenge killing. Matthew McConaghay defends the undefendable. Sandra Bullock looks stunningly sexy. Job done. Other than Ms Bullock, who is always watchable, I’d say the movie is almost 100% rubbish.
DECISION AGAINST TIME (THE MAN IN THE SKY) - 1957
Test pilot John Mitchell working for a struggling aircraft company, gets caught in a desperate situation when the prototype freight aircraft he is flying, loses an engine to fire. As everyone else on the plane parachutes to safety, Mitchell tries to land the stricken aircraft on his own and defy the odds.
One can sense a deep desperation in Mitchell, who undertakes this risky stunt as the future of his employment and the welfare of his family depend upon the aircraft coming back in one piece.
Starring Jack Hawkins, Elizabeth Sellars and the Bristol 170 Wayfarer, 'Decision against time' is a well acted and beautifully picturized film made by Ealing Studios.
Recommended.
(86 minutes)
SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK (2019)
I was not aware this movie was based on a series of children’s horror short stories – that explains the title with more ease than the happenings on screen which are distinctly not for children. Here, Andre Ovredal directs a keen cast of young actors, including Zoe Colletti, through a series of imaginings that end up resembling the Final Destination series.
It is Halloween 1968 and teenagers Stella, Auggie and Chuck befriend draft dodger Ramon at the local drive-in cinema; they go on an excursion to a haunted house and discover a locked hidden room and a book of horror stories, both supposedly linked to an unfortunate woman who died at the house over 100 years ago. Stella steals the book and that night, while she attempts to read it, the empty pages begin to fill with new script and a real-time murder elapses. Like that naughty video tape in Ring, the book of stories is foretelling everyone’s death and it has the quartet of teens in its sights. The premise is solid horror, and creepingly well done for half the runtime, but the problem the film has is resolving the situation – the friends try to burn the book but typically that doesn’t work, it’d be too easy – so we end up trawling through shock after shock for shock’s sake and eventually reach a conclusion which just about works, although it is left open ended should a sequel be required. In a vaguely political statement, it seems Mexican draft dodger Ramon is the only one of the quartet fated to die, shovelled off as he is to Vietnam.
Scary Stories… delivers the goods, I suppose, but I have the distinct feeling most of these shocks have been done before and done better and nothing was very surprising or very interesting. Decent performances though and you can’t fault the horrific temper of the SFX.
THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (1965)
A prototype disaster movie from director Robert Aldrich that features James Stewart’s last great performance. As with all disaster movies, the film spends most of its time concentrating on building and destroying the relationships of the protagonists until we reach the denouement; here Aldrich reverses our expectations and has Stewart’s Saharan transport plane crashing during the opening credit sequence and builds the relationships in the toiling aftermath. That is a burning sun of a couple of weeks as the assorted engineers, pilots, oil workers and soldiers pit their wits against the elements, aeronautical science and each other in an attempt to stay alive and potentially escape.
Good photography keeps us impressed. Editing is crisp. Performances fairly good all over. Stewart in particular shines as a WW2 USAF pilot slumming it in Libya, uncertain of his moral compass and his ability to lead the disparate group. Richard Attenborough is fairly awful as his wingman. Guys like George Kennedy and Ernest Borgnine pepper the cast. Considered an adventure classic today, The Flight of the Phoenix was a relative flop on release.
QUATERMASS 2 (1957)
Renowned space scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass, deeply committed to his moon colonization project comes across a bizarre meteorite, which had fallen in an area 90 miles north of his rocket facility....a place called Winnerden Flats. Earlier, his colleagues had also discovered strange radar signals coming from the same area.
Prof Quatermass decides to explore this site...only to realize a very strange conspiracy at play in this area.
What is going on in Winnerden Flats?
You will find the answers when you see this absolute gem of a film directed by Val Guest and starring Brian Donlevy as Prof Quatermass.
One of the best sci-fi films made by Hammer Films.
Recommended.
(85 minutes)
Good as it is, the original TV version was better and should be easily watchable on line. The story's less compressed (which can be seen as a pro or a con) and IMHO the main flaw apart from the dated SFX is the central performance. Actor John Robinson was cast at very short notice after the unexpected death of Reginald Tate who had played Quatermass in the first TV story and comes across as stiff and unsympathetic, yes more so than Brian Donlevy, which of course isn’t totally his own fault.
The remake with Dennis Quaid and Giovanni Ribisi is pretty decent too.