A brilliant detective thriller that steals a march on the burgeoning ‘blaxploitation’ genre and provides an important crossover hit for the all things ‘black’.
Debutant Richard Roundtree is black private eye John Shaft who has escaped the muggy streets of Harlem and keeps a bachelor pad in leafy Manhattan and a corner office near Times Square. Unable to fully escape his past and wearing a chip on his shoulder as obvious as the natty leather overcoats, rollnecks and slacks he sports like a catwalk clotheshorse, Shaft is drawn back into the seedy world of Harlem by Bumpy Jonas [a shifty, Moses Gunn] a pimp, pusher and numbers runner who has made millions out of the disintegrated aspirations of the poverty stricken Afro-American experience. Shaft doesn’t like Bumpy’s manner, recognises the hoodlum’s appeals as being a charlatan’s act and reluctantly embarks on a search for the big man’s kidnapped daughter.
Antagonism follows Shaft as surely as day follows night. He has fractured relationships with the sympathetic Italian cop Vic Androzzi [Charles Cioffi], militant leader Ben Buford – an old friend whose gone into violent politics – and even gives and gets short shifts from his lovers, who are numerous and nubile. As Shaft reveals the crosses and double crosses he’s been subjected to during his less than discreet pursuit, trawling New York’s deprived ghetto avenues, fighting, threatening, f---ing and passing toothpicks with Antonio Fargas, the film is given a solid grounding in smooth cool by the street level photography of Urs Furrer that bristles with authentic menace and the pumping, glowering keenness of Isaac Hayes’s jazz and soul inspired music score, which deservedly won an Oscar for its main title song.
Gordon Parks directs with one eye on the lack of polish, that gives the movie a disturbed naturality, and another on trying to avoid the obviously political; Christopher St John’s Ben Buford has ideologies clearly inspired by the Black Power movement of the late sixties and seventies and while Shaft may be black and stand up for the downtrodden brother, his aspirations unlike those of the street folk he deals with day-to-day are entirely white. Hence Shaft’s clothes are more Italian than Androzzi’s, his home pad more bijou-chic than ghetto, his tastes and habits more akin to the gentry of Greenwich Village than uptown Manhattan. It is these ‘normalities’ that provide Shaft with such crossover appeal, for while the hero comes from an at-the-time cinematically unrecognised world, and is the most abrasive of private detectives, he comes burdened, or unburdened, with the same identifications of the usual ‘white world’. His dealings with friend and foe have echoes of the crusty relationships private investigators like Philip Marlowe and Tony Rome share with authority and enemy. He even elicits the same weary hatred of the world and its injustices, manifesting itself in both petty gallows humour and an obnoxious impatience with everyone. His enquires are sharp and succinct, yet he pieces together the tentacles of the octopus’s plot as surely as any Hammet, Chandler or Spillane hero will, and with as little definitive explanation.
Does Shaft creak around the edges, given its age and lack of clear political direction? Well, yes, but that doesn’t diminish its importance to American and world cinema. Unlike many subsequent ‘blaxploitation’ movies, Shaft doesn’t attempt to impersonate or redefine the black experience, it feels genuine and in that respect is more in tune with Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs sagas or the comedic police drama of Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St Jacques in Cotton Comes To Harlem. It isn’t as in your face regarding the mythological status of black misogynistic sex as Sweet Sweetback or the violence that inhabits the day-to-day as Across 110th Street or Coffey might be. Instead Ernest Tidyman and John Black’s script allows its people and places to breath holistically.
The film comments through action and voice on the nature of racism, both then and now, and identifies the same heroic and demonic tendencies in its characters. Moses Gunn is particularly effective justifying his criminal activities to Christopher St John’s idealist. There is a neat aside when Ben Buford swears in Ellie’s kitchen and she admonishes him as she would her own daughter and gets a similar response – Mama always knows best, even in lives as grim as this. Another sees an older Mama restraining Buford from violence. There is a cheerful disdain shared by Shaft and the cops, about each other and the situation they inhabit. The women are both available and pull no punches – ‘You’re great in the sack, baby, but your real sh--ty in the morning,’ says one buxom conquest. An attractive white waitress in a slick wood panelled café is the most sullen character in a world peppered with sullen landscapes and faces. Perhaps it is only the portrayal of the heavies that feels stereotypical, the Harlem and Italian Mafia crooks are interchangeable and equally ill-equipped to deal with a man as pumped up as John Shaft. The movie’s visual look is still being impersonated today.
Perhaps best of all is that superb soundtrack that identifies time, place and person so brilliantly and without dumbing down to orchestral expectations, it is at once a slice of smooth lover man soul, tinged with the bitterness of the blues and the melancholy of late night jazz, tender and touching yet also tight and torturous, reminding us all roads to and from war and love are paved with tension.
A collision happens between a satellite and an alien space ship, resulting in the UFO crash-landing in the Arizona desert.
With the presidential elections just around the corner, the authorities decide to cover up the whole event, as it may be too distracting for the general public.
But this action does not dissuade the two space shuttle astronauts (Steve Bancroft and Lew Price) who actually witnessed the space collision and are now hell bent on finding the remains of the space craft.
A well written and decently paced sci-fi film, with good special effects and an engaging story.
Just Yesterday I saw John Wick for the first time. I am usually put off by the modern Zeitgeist of very long close up fighting choreographies, which look more like Tango or a dance, than a real fight. But I had a good time with Keanus Portrayal, the cartoonish Continental Hotel Plot Device, the emotional rage of the Dog Revenge Story, I liked the Fashion and Style and Production Design of John Wick.
The Russians were great adversaries, I would like to see such in a Bond Production. He should not f... Russian spies, but f... around with them!
A series of malfunctions occurs in a lift system in a high rise building in Amsterdam.
The technician Felix Adelaar, can not find anything wrong with the lift, but the malfunctions continue.
The situation becomes very alarming, when fatalities start to happen.
Accompanied by a local journalist Mieke de Beer, Adelaar sets off to investigate the company that makes the lifts.
I am not going to spoil the plot for you, but it is very intriguing.
The film deals with ideas such as autonomous intelligence, bio-chips and machines going against men.
It reminds me off a very fine book I read sometimes back called "Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences" by Edward Tenner.
Fascinating film and a Dutch classic.
I would also recommend that you watch this film in its original Dutch audio with English subtitles.
Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch in a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking story of how a couple meet, fall in love, get married, have kids, before their relationship collapses and basically war is declared.
The stars have undeniable chemistry and I’d like to see them together again in a different kind of story. There are plenty jokes, some hilarious, as might be expected from Roach before the story darkens. Kate McKinnon is a scream as a sex-obsessed friend among a solid supporting cast.
It’s from a novel filmed previously in the 80s with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas but this is the better version.
Edit- The novel and earlier film were called "The War Of The Roses".
Said to be the first Hammer film albeit not in name, this is a period yarn about a trading vessel and a cargo of alcohol and disreputable crew, some of whom have a reason to turn against the vessel, such as being press ganged into working there. The film has a nice eerie feel about it and is a typical weekday morning movie for Talking Pictures TV, great fun if you are taking the day off from school or work. It is interspersed with sailors singing 'Whisky in a Jar' type shanties that puts you in mind of the pirate ship in Walt Disney's Peter Pan, and even if the film doesn't come close on that, you may be grateful it possibly inspired such a movie. It's one of those old films where the lack of any soundtrack means even the silence creaks, Hitch's The 39 Steps was like that, but that looks like Star Wars compared to this.
The fact that the ship in this is called the Marie Celeste gives you an idea where this might be going, but the set up is better than the follow through and the And Then There Were None theme doesn't play out convincingly, with some deaths occurring off screen. It works better when you don't know the resolution, because the resolution doesn't really make sense given what has happened. It's not one for staying in for, but it is one for staying in your pyjamas for, if that makes sense.
This movie gets about 5 on imdb and some lousy reviews including this from one fan describing it as ' a disappointing convoluted mess. It's like a train wreck and a dumpster fire had a baby, then the baby puked and that puke became this movie.' Now, when a movie gets that low a rating sometimes you might ask what lies behind it. It reminds me of reading Charles Higson's On His Majesty's Secret Service which was flagrantly anti-Trump and the Reform Party, to the point where if someone really hates it you might ask yourself, ah, but is that the real reason you hate it?
It's like the Union flags that are currently tacked on to every lamppost on the hight street - I wouldn't mind, but what's behind it? Are they put up by Reform supporters? If so, I don't want them up - but I've nothing against our national flag per se, even if having them up now, when there is no national celebration or anything, reminds me of someone having their Xmas decorations up all year round.
So Wonder Woman 1984 opens with her beating up some robbers in a shopping mall - it's very much seems a bit anti-men, you see one of them holding a baby up over a balcony as a threat, though - to be fair, it seems - the other two robbers are less keen on this turn of events. Wonder Woman isn't doing anything I guess that any male superhero wouldn't do but you see her wink conspiratorially to a young female toddler and it seems a bit, hey, women against men! But it's the fact this occurs to me that also offends me, my own sexism awakened?
But it carries on like this. In fact, for an alarmingly long time there is no admirable bloke onscreen at all, nothing going on here for any bloke to relate to. Then I think, well, a heck of a lot of male-orientated action films would be like that for women in the audience, so...
The villain is a hollow TV presenter supposed mogul and - as this is set in the 80s - seems like Donald Trump - so is this a dig at Trump? Wasn't he up for re-election around this time? It's hard to see this having any effect in fairness as it's a bad movie, you know how Trump would go on Twitter and rubbish any jokes at his expense, well, this film would have deserved his opprobrium - it's a case of Hollywood backfiring again. So is that the reason for the film's low score - a load of Trump supporters?
Well, not really. We don't see our female hero interact with anyone much in her life, though she is Diana Prince we don't enjoy the bluff and subterfuge of her transforming from straight or nerd to top cat like we do with Clark Kent and Superman - though was Prince ever a nerd in the Lynda Carter series? Maybe not. So she seems a bit isolated and pining, npi, over the loss of Chris Pine who died it seems in the first film, set in World War I. It's not clear to me, as a casual viewer, what WW is now doing in the 80s and I guess she never ages, what did she do in WW2? I don't know.
The villain isn't played by a famous name - to me - so he seems like a subsidiary villain, of no great importance. The plot is a bit low-rent, sort of like the tail end of an Indy film, all about some stone that grants wishes and the havoc it can produce. There should be good stuff about WW wishing to live with Chris Pine a bit, all a bit Truly Madly Deeply, but the melancholy isn't really there - candidly I missed that Pine was back because of her wish, I just thought it was a plot point I missed. The finale is not bad in its theme, but the build up to it was dull and there aren't really enough appealing characters in this - Kirstin Wiig plays a doormat who wishes to be like Diana Prince - cool - and then turns nasty, the idea she isn't ready for greatness yet, but this immediately feels like they went straight to Superman III in terms of dorky naffness.
Finally, Gal Gadot celebrates Xmas by saying things could stand for anything you want, and the Xmas star floats up like the Star of David, a nod perhaps to Gadot's Israeli birthplace which won't have dated well for some of us but also makes you think, why so anti-Trump (if it is) given he's the one who recognised Jerusalem as the capital and has little to say in criticism of Nyet Nyahoo's foreign policy.
Anyway, the low rating is because it really is a bad movie all round (though just about watchable as TV tea time entertainment) - Gadot has the distinction of also starring in the notorious Snow White remake which gets about a 2 rating.
It came out in 2020 but you can't blame it on Covid because presumably it was a wrap by then.
I reeled my sister in for her first viewing of Lethal Weapon but she was a begrudging viewer.
I enjoyed it as ever, wished I'd taken Mum to see this kind of stuff rather than the dreary Bond films at the time but then it did feel a bit adult, a bit much with the topless porn star - that said, all soft focus and soft porn, giggling in the showers, not like today's stuff.
How does it fair in the sexism stakes? A good role for Danny Glover's wife, a mousy psychiatrist, a dead ex, girls on film, guess that's it but it's not that bad. At the time it felt progressive and the chemistry between Gibson and Glover - both still alive nearly, what, four decades on? - I'm glad to say - is terrific. But it's mainly the set up and a few comedic set pieces that work, the main plot as Glover's character seems to admit is 'pretty thin'. It's good to see Gibson do his thing - the pointy toed walk, the running through traffic - but the reason the villains go after them - the idea being they might have been told some information by some other bad guy - isn't up to much and given they know were they live, a bullet in their heads wouldn't go amiss, esp as one of them is only in a caravan. No need for an elaborate kidnap. The finale, in which Glover allows Gibson to fight his new nemesis made sense in the cinema to me but now is ludicrous, Gibson wins because it's a movie. It reminds me of a Spencer Tracy movie set in a boys reform school in which he invites the rebel kid to box another and learn respect - he loses, but what if the punk had won the match, what would the lesson have been then? And why do Riggs and Murtaph go out there on their own to do this with no apparent back up anywhere, I mean they make a hash of it. And what threat is Murtaph's hand grenade, it would blow him up and nobody else.
Edit: The film is set at Christmas, like Die Hard, but doesn't seem to get a screening at Christmas - most likely because of the juxtaposition of happy TV Xmas jingles and Riggs being suicidal with a gun in his mouth - not really what you want to see on your telly at that time of year.
These comments were made by a disgruntled sister and I couldn't disagree.
Horridly cheap and sleazy looking slice of 1960s exploitation. Not violent or titillating enough to be successful even as an exploitation thriller. I had never heard of any of the cast. They all act extremely badly, but then they only have a script fit for the toilet and a plot thinner than wafers.
Terrible.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 30,877Chief of Staff
I’ve never heard of the film…but I’m surprised you don’t know at least some of the actors in it…or maybe they had small cameos and you missed them.
Directed and written by Micheal White, the documentary details the monumental intelligence feat achieved by the CIA, when it lifted the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129, 16,500 feet up from the Pacific Ocean's bed in 1974.
The sinking of the K-129 occurred on 24 Feb, 1968, which was detected and triangulated through advanced hydrophone technology.
The challenge was now, how to pick up the submarine from the bottom of the ocean.
For this purpose a massive 63,000 ton ship, the 'Glomar Explorer' was built, containing an inner compartment and clasp style robotic arm, which would be sent to the bottom of the ocean to grab the submarine.
This very fine documentary explains all facets of the mission with detailed schematics and 3D animation.
All in all...an excellent documentary film.
(1 hour 45 minutes)
(I would also recommend Josh Dean's book 'The Taking of K-129', which explores in depth 'Project Azorian'. A very fine book.)
Partick Allen is quite famous, if you are of a certain age…his voice is instantly recognisable - obviously if you know him…he was in adverts for Barratt Homes…
Last weekend I saw CAUGHT STEALING, which is really a lot of fun; offbeat and with a great cast. It's almost like the script was written for Guy Ritchie, but Daren Aronofsky intercepted it... what we get is a comic nightmare that's like something out of Kafka.
Also, a couple of days ago, and just to say I'd seen it, I watched Joan Crawford's legendary final film, TROG. Yes indeed, it is bad, especially with the "troglodyte" that's just a guy running around in a leftover ape mask from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. That said, good ol' Freddie Francis (the great cinematographer) does what he can to keep the film from being totally ludicrous; Joan always takes her part seriously; and Michael Gough adds some fun as the scenery-chewing villain. In the end, not a bad way to kill brain cells.
A rare TV outing for Roland Joffe’s masterpiece of modern warfare movies. The Killing Fields is set in 1970s Cambodia during the rise and the early years of the ultra-extreme communist regime the Khmer Rouge. The Killing Fields of the title are the rural idylls used as collective farms and slave labour camps where even the most minor infringement against orders was met with immediate death. Mass shallow graves were the norm, highlighted in the movie’s most harrowing image of a rice field irrigation dam clogged by decaying corpses washed out of the river.
Putting aside the horrific nature of Pol Pot’s regime, one which compares in 20th Century brutality and with the Nazis, Stalinism and Chile’s far right governments, writer Bruce Robinson and director Joffe create a visceral, frightening and wholly believable landscape of war, helped immeasurably by refusing to use subtitles for when foreign languages are spoken. This disorientating effect, coupled with the shaky, awkward camera angles from lensman Chris Menges, allows the audience never to settle, to remain as uncomfortable and unknowing of the environments as the characters. So when a quartet of journalists are captured and threatened at gunpoint, not us or the western characters understand the dialogues between the soldiers and the Khmer-speaking interpreter. Tension increases dramatically; confusion abounds. We feel as helpless and as uniformed as the people on screen. The effect is repeated time and again in the film, memorably when the heroic protagonist Dith Pram is incarcerated by the Khmer Rouge, and to effect survival he vows silence, never responding to the sentries even when under intense physical assault and torture. For the westerners, there is as much confusion in the French compound of Pheon Peng, where multilingual conversations pepper the background as bombs and bullets erupt in the city.
The film when released was dealing very much with recent history and evoked much sympathy for that. The characters, Dith Pram [Haing S. Ngor, an Oscar winner], the New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, the photographers Al Rockoff [John Malkovitch] and John Swain [Julia Sands] are excellently formed, although Sam Waterstone’s Schanberg seems as repulsive as he is empathetic. One wouldn’t put up with his kind of attitude in today’s workplace, even in international journalism. The film paints an unflattering picture of western military, political, media and social influence on Cambodia, and while the Khmer regime is clearly despotic and horrific, one can’t help seeing history repeating itself in the manner of western support for tearaway rebellions that have created havoc in the Middle East and Africa.
Let’s not get political. The Killing Fields is a great film, well made, superbly photographed and edited and with a splendidly 1980s music score from Mike Oldfield than clatters away in the same manner the machine guns do.
If I threw some shade at Lethal Weapon some posts back, you need an entire power cut for Cobra (1986), a Sly Stallone film.
Cobra preceded LW by only a couple of years and similarly rips off the Dirty Harry franchise but this time to no good effect. The only good effect might be if Hollywood had been so shamed by the product that it decided to do it properly with Gibson and Glover. One star I omitted to mention with LW is the director Richard Donner who manages to be stylish but not showy. The director of Cobra is showy - shots of birds flying off power lines intercut scenes of violence - but it is all so naff. It's said the film was edited down so its basic premise - some kind of shadowy elite looking for a New World Order by eliminating the weak, not sure if it has its hooks into the Govt or not, similar perhaps to Magnum Force - just doesn't hold. You think Sly's Cobra character is going after a lone nutter like in Dirty Harry, then it segues into Magnum Force territory - but you can't have your cake and eat it, it just doesn't work.
I'd falsely remembered Sly's wife Brigitte Nielson as looking like him in this - slick back blond hair, shades - but she's instead big hair and looks pretty ordinary despite being a model, she does put in a decent performance however. Stallone is let down by his own script, it is risible and it doesn't seem to make sense by its own rules. An early shootout in a supermarket allows our hero several clear shots on his target which he ignores in favour of sterile banter with the assassin and to drink from a beer bottle and be a bit cool, in the meantime a customer or two dies.
Perhaps like Craig's Aston Martin DB5, our hero drives an instantly recognisable car with modifications, some of the action it features in is really just an 80s music video... Oh, one time he gets into a petty dispute with some hoods and walks away from his car; in any reality they would key it but no, and the next time he sees them they show him respect.
Cobra is the kind of film that might be written by AI - if AI were in its very limited, early phase. That all said, Stallone looks very cool in it.
Directed by Gisaburo Sugii, the animated movie is based on the hit Capcom video game of the same name and is considered one of the best movie renditions of a video game.
Ryu, a reclusive Japanese martial artist is being tracked by cyborgs sent by a criminal organization called Shadowlaw.
M. Bison, the leader of Shadowlaw is on the hunt for the best martial artists on the planet, who he seeks to enlist in his organization and has sent out cyborgs to track and detail their fighting abilities.
Interlaced into the film are parallel stories of Captain Guile, a US military officer who seeks revenge for the death of a close friend, an Interpol agent Chun-Li and Ryu's best friend Ken Masters, which all converge to an epic battle sequence between Bison and Ryu at the end.
A fantastic film, with top quality animations and a superb soundtrack.
Broad Street debuted at No 1 - I know this because Macca's film got slated so they couldn't use any quotes for the poster to sell it in the newspapers, all they could do was a snap of it being the No 1 movie and superimpose it sort of ringed on the poster in the ads - of course they could only do that for one week until whatever new release came out to displace it, maybe Ghostbusters or Gremlins.
Tbf on Macca it was an odd time for movies. Ferris Bueller is a stone-cold classic but when I saw it at the local fleapit, I sort of enjoyed it but it didn't feel like it was all that, the sun didn't ever come out and it took a long time to get going. A trip to the cinema was always a triumph of hope over experience or the local ambience at least, hope didn't always prevail.
I caught Memory, the Martin Campbell movie last night, with Liam Neeson.
In an alternative universe, Brosnan would be starring, Neeson would have been Bond and now be starring alongside his former squeeze Helen Mirren in some pay to view series.
I don't like Campbell's Bond films, don't like his style, but I liked this so I feel a bit contrary, as it only rates about 5 on imdb. He knows how to make a film look higher budget than it is. Still, you might be disappointed to have caught it in the cinema, it's a good TV watch.
Neeson is a hitman with early onset Alzheimers though it's not that early, he's knocking on a bit now. He's hired to do 'one final job' but it isn't to his taste... the theme is child trafficking around Mexico City which makes it topical what with the Epstein stuff in the news this week. Neeson is actually very good at portraying the confusion his condition brings on though plot wise it's a sort of gimmick really. It's a bit of the duality you get here - the Clark Kent/Superman stuff, the Jason Bourne amnesia thing, Renard being injured in such a way that he doesn't feel pain but gets stronger every day (do we ever see that?) or the superhero who can only heal when exposed to the sun (what happens when Superman gets injured at night then?) Thing is, we can enjoy identifying with Clark Kent, knowing of his transformative powers, we don't enjoy relating to a guy with Alzheimer's though it does evoke sympathy.
The enjoyment comes from not knowing if his memory will fail him or whether he will be the super assassin again, I mean this is staple beer-in-hand thriller where victims usually deserve it and get their heads smashed against a car side window which then shatters.
There is one very good hit set at a gym, nicely filmed.
And most of the bad guys deserve it but it's not clear to what extent the cops are on side with the traffickers and whether they deserve it. It's not a single hander as in a nod to Memento, Guy Pearce stars as a cop trying and mostly failing to stop the traffickers.
Monica Bellucci is the mob boss, in a promotion from her Spectre days, I like her slow, ponderous voice, does she always play it that way in movies, or at home? 'You have no idea... what you have done to me... you have forgotten to buy some kitchen roll.'
A couple of nods to Bond, a misdirection technique from Casino Royale, an action scene in a car park that initially seems like Tomorrow Never Dies.
Either Film4 or ITV4 is showing decent flicks at 9pm, sort of give-me-a-beer movies and last night it was Red Heat (1988).
Now, I don't say this is a great movie and I'd seen it before but credit where it's due - one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and one year after Timothy Dalton's debut as Bond, we have an action film with a fair bit shot in Moscow, in particular Gorky Park and Red Square. It all looks a bit gloomy - when I went there on a school trip actually around the same time, maybe a year earlier, there were terrific blue skies around the Kremlin, it looked terrific. Decades on and no Bond film has filmed in Moscow, not even as a side scene or a backdrop. It could have featured From Russia With Love (in the novel, Klebb interviews Tanya in Moscow, the latter has a poky apartment building with - if I recall - a view of St Basil's Cathedral from her window), it was pre- Dr Zhivago but they could have done that with a phoney backdrop; perhaps it's better they didn't given that Leiter's call to Bond seems to take place in an office in the White House garden, but still...
The Bourne Supermacy featured Moscow heavily, I don't know maybe I'm being unfair, maybe the locals take massive bribes for that to happen and EON don't want to do that. But the Bonds used to really take you to place, under Craig it felt like the same old beaten track.
In Red Heat, Arnie plays a Russian cop who has to fly to Detroit I think it is or is it New York, I don't know some American city because a Russian drug dealer who killed his friend - I think - has fled there. He has to liaise with John Belushi's deadbeat cop who alienates his superiors (one of whom, amusingly, seems to be the actor who played Frankenstein opposite Gene Wilder in the Mel Brooks spoof).
It touches on cultural differences but it's let down by a poor script, it's not funny enough and the Belushi character is given repetitive lines about being knee deep in paperwork and reports. He's not funny or charismatic enough and it's not clear if he's supposed to be an equal as the poster implies, or a stooge. He can, however, run whereas a more comic, boozy, dunkin donuts cop would not be able to do - and this is necessary for a cop thriller as it's clear Arnie really can't run at all. This was also a problem in True Lies a bit (though I seem to recall him running well in Total Recall); one critic carped that the closest he came to Bond was playing Jaws and that's true because he does in some films sort of lollop the way you might when on a pedestrian crossing and the green man stops, you shuffle a bit faster.
Maybe Bill Murray might have been a better choice but the film isn't witty enough for him; the problem is Belushi as an actor doesn't look like he wants bad or humiliating stuff to happen to him, so it doesn't make you laugh. He's kind of a bore, it's one-note.
Lawrence Fishbourn looks good and sharp in a supporting role as a cop.
As the film drew to a close it dawned on me that one problem is that it seems to be a vehicle for Arnie so that Belushi is his sidekick, but that doesn't work in this context, it's like having Rocky take on Dolph Lungren and be his sidekick, I mean I am no MAGA supporter but I would have liked to see the US cop more hold his own. It also feels odd to see Arnie in this, as a State enforcer, because in most of his films it seems to me he's the underdog using his muscle to fight off hordes of attackers like in Total Recall. The final scene in which they swap watches as a token of friendship, only Belushi finds he's got the worse of the deal, just looks like ha ha our Arnie's got the better of him, but instead I was feeling nettled on behalf of our great American ally, which surprised me.
The poster seems typical of that late 1980s era, stuff like Working Girl and Crocodile Dundee.
Yes, but it was probably up against Wot No Pyjamas? It's like complaining about No 1 records - if there's nothing better out there, it will get the No 1 slot.
I made the trip to London's Prince Charles to see The Sting, which turned out to be shown the day after Robert Redford's death was announced. It was at the upstairs cinema which I am starting to like for such 1970s fare, it seems to evoke the decade better than downstairs in some ways.
This 1974 film is set in the 20s or thereabouts, it's about two con men who are unknown to each other but have a personal reason to team up and go after a kingpin grifter called Donnelly, played by our own Robert Shaw, and bring him down in the con to end them all.
Now, I enjoyed this a lot - it's fine, polished movie-making and it looks good. You wonder if the 1970s didn't owe a lot the the past, its homages to the 20s or the 50s, maybe until 77 or so it didn't quite have a style of its own.
Some of the city backdrops are too obviously fake however, too obviously painted although is that the point, to make the whole world a stage, to go with the film's painted interludes announcing ''The Set-Up', The Hook' as if in the manner of old-time silent films.
I did find myself nit-picking - for a conman, who needs to become anonymous real quick, Redford's character doesn't half stand out - his longish blond locks, his dandyish suits, his hats. He falls for a con himself early on that you sense anyone who'd been round the block just the once would know to avoid. It seems Redford is playing younger than his years, his character should be in his early 20s really as he comes across as naive, a bit Jon Boy, and this does seem to be a problem with Redford leaving it so late to make it big: you can say the same for his Gatsby, or maybe the early scenes of The Way We Were, he's just a bit too old for those roles.
Redford was an engaging actor but I'm not sure you ever felt you were him on screen, that magical process didn't occur, you are a third party watching his performance as an outsider, and he seems to need other actors to bounce off.
Some scams don't seem too credible, they wouldn't work in real life. Or perhaps I have a suspicious mind having run up against Surrey County Council's Adult Safeguarding team, who are full of tricks (if you complain about a care home, they can haul you in to a 'Best Interests' meeting to discuss - at their own suggestion - getting your elderly parent back to the family home. Later, you find out it's really a Safeguarding meeting under Section 42 of the Care Act, where abuse has been alleged - and it won't be the care home's abuse but rather yours! The Minutes - which you have to ask for under a Subject Access Request - will not tally with what was said. But you can't complain because at the meeting's outset you signed a Confidentiality Agreement, so can divulge nothing without the approval of the Chairman - who will also be the Safeguarding head! I digress.
That said, I feel I should pass on that the key to the con is to have an unsuspecting victim, to offer them something early on to win their trust (also the trick of reciprocity, the recipient feels obliged, though the offer later turns out to be false) and here's a key point. If the victim is conned in the first 30 seconds, everything that follows can work to the scammer's advantage, particularly if the victim is out of their comfort zone, or in unfamilar territory. Later, the victim will kick themselves because they did notice red flags that gave it away, but ignored them. Because, by that point, any anomaly is attributed instead to the person's learning experience. 'Oh, I didn't know that - but I do now!'
Like, wow this person is kind of young to be a cop - but then I haven't met a cop recently, and it turns out this is how they really are. But it's not a cop.
If I took you to a location you only knew on the map, you'd twig early on that there's a church there that wasn't on the map, and the gradient isn't quite the same, and that river is really a stream - but if you trusted me, and were a believer, you'd see all that and use it not to tip you off, but to instead to almost gratefully update your expertise on the area.
Anyway, back to The Sting. The famous music moves things along, Robert Shaw is a great villain (his first sighting has him playing golf in the Auric Goldfinger's plus fours outfit, perhaps a movie in-joke) but you don't really believe he'd fall for the set-up, it's ike this busy man has no other work to tend to either, to help his regain perspective. It all goes a bit too smoothly and isn't intentionally funny enough for it to be a caper.
Another problem is that while the film repeatedly pulls the rug from under your feet, you stop believing after a while. I recall Never Say Never Again, the opening scene turns out to be just a training exercise, and it carries on in that anti-climactic vein - it's only Bond's urine in the assassin's face! The shark attack causes no peril (were they robot sharks? what is Bond looking at at the end of the scene, do they have a homing device? Still no idea decades later), the bomb turns out to be not under Bond's bed and so on. You can get away with that for a bit, but a film is about believing the artifice, take liberties and you won't indulge it any more.
Here, I did second guess the main big scam re the FBI but I'm not sure the victim in that set-up would fall for it, he might, but you don't quite buy it, or that Donnelly who had bought off the local cops, wouldn't be tipped off, or that Paul Newman's character, who we meet being down on his luck, would have the capital to put his mega Sting into operation.
One unexpected shooting late in the movie still doesn't make sense to me.
That all said, I enjoyed it and am glad I saw it on the big screen. It's been on the telly loads of times but unless you see it from the beginning I think it would lose you, plus it seems shot for the big screen, lots of visual detail. Use on the 'n' word - though the film is refreshingly ahead of its time generally in racial sensitivity - means it may not be tea time viewing these days.
Acclaimed film director James Cameroon documents his quest of reaching the deepest point on planet Earth, "Challenger Deep" located at a depth of 36,000 feet in the Mariana Trench.
From its inception to trial runs...the documentary showcases all aspects of the Deepsea Challenger's (DCV 1) mission and the many challenges the crew face in reaching their target.
I documented on one of the other pages that I am not watching many movies these days. My statement was challenged, so I thought I would do a recap:
Jan 2025 - 14 Feb - 9 Mar - 6 Apr - 9 May - 16 June - 12 July - 5 Aug - 8 Sep (so far) - 4 = 83
Jan 2024 - 7 Feb - 19 Mar - 5 Apr - 12 May - 20 June - 17 July - 15 Aug - 15 Sep (so far) - 6 = 116
Jan 2023 - 7 Feb - 13 Mar - 14 Apr - 7 May - 25 June - 2 July - 5 Aug - 9 Sep (so far) - 6 = 81
So I guess it maybe isn't so bad as I considered it to be. I genuine thought I watched more movies than this, but perhaps all those episodes of Dr Who, The Saint, The Persuaders and UFO have made me think I was watching a lot of films, when I am watching telly repeats.
Anything around about 15 a month is good going, I feel, especially with reading, writing, work and life to contend with.
On with the show:
KNOCKED UP (2007)
Seth Rogan is a loser who manages to tap beautiful TV hostess Katherine Heigl for a one night stand of drunken infamy. Result: pregnancy and all the emotional upheaval entailed. Knocked Up is an old-fashioned rom-com loaded with modern obscenities and a bunch of stoner dudes acting like total twits. Alison Scott [Heigl] and her sister Debbie [Leslie Mann] are control freaks who swear a lot. Paul Rudd is a journalist husband who doesn’t know how well his bread is buttered. The subject matter deserves something a bit more likeable and you can map the movie’s plot with a pencil and line drawing it’s so see-through. Unfortunately, the ‘rom’ is haphazard and the ‘com’ is almost non-existent, except for rare forays into Alison’s television world where appearances mean more than intellectual prowess. Approachable performances from the central duo keep us most-of-the-way interested and it all turns out nicely. Judd Apatow writes and directs with the same eye in the frat pack gutter he had for the rather more amusing, if depressingly sad, The 40 Year Old Virgin.
A relentlessly grim and brutal revenge thriller that stars Jennifer Garner as a widow seeking the gang members who murdered her husband and daughter. Quite appalling.
Comments
SHAFT (1971)
A brilliant detective thriller that steals a march on the burgeoning ‘blaxploitation’ genre and provides an important crossover hit for the all things ‘black’.
Debutant Richard Roundtree is black private eye John Shaft who has escaped the muggy streets of Harlem and keeps a bachelor pad in leafy Manhattan and a corner office near Times Square. Unable to fully escape his past and wearing a chip on his shoulder as obvious as the natty leather overcoats, rollnecks and slacks he sports like a catwalk clotheshorse, Shaft is drawn back into the seedy world of Harlem by Bumpy Jonas [a shifty, Moses Gunn] a pimp, pusher and numbers runner who has made millions out of the disintegrated aspirations of the poverty stricken Afro-American experience. Shaft doesn’t like Bumpy’s manner, recognises the hoodlum’s appeals as being a charlatan’s act and reluctantly embarks on a search for the big man’s kidnapped daughter.
Antagonism follows Shaft as surely as day follows night. He has fractured relationships with the sympathetic Italian cop Vic Androzzi [Charles Cioffi], militant leader Ben Buford – an old friend whose gone into violent politics – and even gives and gets short shifts from his lovers, who are numerous and nubile. As Shaft reveals the crosses and double crosses he’s been subjected to during his less than discreet pursuit, trawling New York’s deprived ghetto avenues, fighting, threatening, f---ing and passing toothpicks with Antonio Fargas, the film is given a solid grounding in smooth cool by the street level photography of Urs Furrer that bristles with authentic menace and the pumping, glowering keenness of Isaac Hayes’s jazz and soul inspired music score, which deservedly won an Oscar for its main title song.
Gordon Parks directs with one eye on the lack of polish, that gives the movie a disturbed naturality, and another on trying to avoid the obviously political; Christopher St John’s Ben Buford has ideologies clearly inspired by the Black Power movement of the late sixties and seventies and while Shaft may be black and stand up for the downtrodden brother, his aspirations unlike those of the street folk he deals with day-to-day are entirely white. Hence Shaft’s clothes are more Italian than Androzzi’s, his home pad more bijou-chic than ghetto, his tastes and habits more akin to the gentry of Greenwich Village than uptown Manhattan. It is these ‘normalities’ that provide Shaft with such crossover appeal, for while the hero comes from an at-the-time cinematically unrecognised world, and is the most abrasive of private detectives, he comes burdened, or unburdened, with the same identifications of the usual ‘white world’. His dealings with friend and foe have echoes of the crusty relationships private investigators like Philip Marlowe and Tony Rome share with authority and enemy. He even elicits the same weary hatred of the world and its injustices, manifesting itself in both petty gallows humour and an obnoxious impatience with everyone. His enquires are sharp and succinct, yet he pieces together the tentacles of the octopus’s plot as surely as any Hammet, Chandler or Spillane hero will, and with as little definitive explanation.
Does Shaft creak around the edges, given its age and lack of clear political direction? Well, yes, but that doesn’t diminish its importance to American and world cinema. Unlike many subsequent ‘blaxploitation’ movies, Shaft doesn’t attempt to impersonate or redefine the black experience, it feels genuine and in that respect is more in tune with Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs sagas or the comedic police drama of Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St Jacques in Cotton Comes To Harlem. It isn’t as in your face regarding the mythological status of black misogynistic sex as Sweet Sweetback or the violence that inhabits the day-to-day as Across 110th Street or Coffey might be. Instead Ernest Tidyman and John Black’s script allows its people and places to breath holistically.
The film comments through action and voice on the nature of racism, both then and now, and identifies the same heroic and demonic tendencies in its characters. Moses Gunn is particularly effective justifying his criminal activities to Christopher St John’s idealist. There is a neat aside when Ben Buford swears in Ellie’s kitchen and she admonishes him as she would her own daughter and gets a similar response – Mama always knows best, even in lives as grim as this. Another sees an older Mama restraining Buford from violence. There is a cheerful disdain shared by Shaft and the cops, about each other and the situation they inhabit. The women are both available and pull no punches – ‘You’re great in the sack, baby, but your real sh--ty in the morning,’ says one buxom conquest. An attractive white waitress in a slick wood panelled café is the most sullen character in a world peppered with sullen landscapes and faces. Perhaps it is only the portrayal of the heavies that feels stereotypical, the Harlem and Italian Mafia crooks are interchangeable and equally ill-equipped to deal with a man as pumped up as John Shaft. The movie’s visual look is still being impersonated today.
Perhaps best of all is that superb soundtrack that identifies time, place and person so brilliantly and without dumbing down to orchestral expectations, it is at once a slice of smooth lover man soul, tinged with the bitterness of the blues and the melancholy of late night jazz, tender and touching yet also tight and torturous, reminding us all roads to and from war and love are paved with tension.
Love it.
HANGAR 18 (1980)
A collision happens between a satellite and an alien space ship, resulting in the UFO crash-landing in the Arizona desert.
With the presidential elections just around the corner, the authorities decide to cover up the whole event, as it may be too distracting for the general public.
But this action does not dissuade the two space shuttle astronauts (Steve Bancroft and Lew Price) who actually witnessed the space collision and are now hell bent on finding the remains of the space craft.
A well written and decently paced sci-fi film, with good special effects and an engaging story.
Recommended.
(Directed by James L. Conway - 97 minutes)
INVADERS FROM MARS (1953)
David MacLean (James Walter Hunt), notices a UFO land on a sand pit behind his house.
His father, a research scientist working on a prototype rocket, goes out to investigate the area and returns back as a changed man.
MacLean also notices a lot of weird things happening in his town. A certain flattening of effect...a robotization of people.
MacLean believes an alien life force has arrived on earth.
No body believes him other than Dr. Patricia Blake, a kind hearted physician.
Eventually with the help of a local astronomer Dr Kelston, the US Army is informed.
What are the aliens doing to the people?
-------------------
A classic sci-fi film, with beautiful picturization and a decent story.
Recommended.
(Directed by William Cameron Menzies - 77 minutes)
Just Yesterday I saw John Wick for the first time. I am usually put off by the modern Zeitgeist of very long close up fighting choreographies, which look more like Tango or a dance, than a real fight. But I had a good time with Keanus Portrayal, the cartoonish Continental Hotel Plot Device, the emotional rage of the Dog Revenge Story, I liked the Fashion and Style and Production Design of John Wick.
The Russians were great adversaries, I would like to see such in a Bond Production. He should not f... Russian spies, but f... around with them!
Actually 007 f...ed one Russian spy in TSWLM, and another in AVTAK. It went really well. 😄
DE LIFT (1983)
A sci-fi horror film, with a very unique story.
A series of malfunctions occurs in a lift system in a high rise building in Amsterdam.
The technician Felix Adelaar, can not find anything wrong with the lift, but the malfunctions continue.
The situation becomes very alarming, when fatalities start to happen.
Accompanied by a local journalist Mieke de Beer, Adelaar sets off to investigate the company that makes the lifts.
I am not going to spoil the plot for you, but it is very intriguing.
The film deals with ideas such as autonomous intelligence, bio-chips and machines going against men.
It reminds me off a very fine book I read sometimes back called "Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences" by Edward Tenner.
Fascinating film and a Dutch classic.
I would also recommend that you watch this film in its original Dutch audio with English subtitles.
(Directed by Dick Maas - 99 minutes)
THE ROSES (2025) Dir: Jay Roach
Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch in a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking story of how a couple meet, fall in love, get married, have kids, before their relationship collapses and basically war is declared.
The stars have undeniable chemistry and I’d like to see them together again in a different kind of story. There are plenty jokes, some hilarious, as might be expected from Roach before the story darkens. Kate McKinnon is a scream as a sex-obsessed friend among a solid supporting cast.
It’s from a novel filmed previously in the 80s with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas but this is the better version.
Edit- The novel and earlier film were called "The War Of The Roses".
The Phantom Ship (1935)
Said to be the first Hammer film albeit not in name, this is a period yarn about a trading vessel and a cargo of alcohol and disreputable crew, some of whom have a reason to turn against the vessel, such as being press ganged into working there. The film has a nice eerie feel about it and is a typical weekday morning movie for Talking Pictures TV, great fun if you are taking the day off from school or work. It is interspersed with sailors singing 'Whisky in a Jar' type shanties that puts you in mind of the pirate ship in Walt Disney's Peter Pan, and even if the film doesn't come close on that, you may be grateful it possibly inspired such a movie. It's one of those old films where the lack of any soundtrack means even the silence creaks, Hitch's The 39 Steps was like that, but that looks like Star Wars compared to this.
The fact that the ship in this is called the Marie Celeste gives you an idea where this might be going, but the set up is better than the follow through and the And Then There Were None theme doesn't play out convincingly, with some deaths occurring off screen. It works better when you don't know the resolution, because the resolution doesn't really make sense given what has happened. It's not one for staying in for, but it is one for staying in your pyjamas for, if that makes sense.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Wonder Woman 1984
This movie gets about 5 on imdb and some lousy reviews including this from one fan describing it as ' a disappointing convoluted mess. It's like a train wreck and a dumpster fire had a baby, then the baby puked and that puke became this movie.' Now, when a movie gets that low a rating sometimes you might ask what lies behind it. It reminds me of reading Charles Higson's On His Majesty's Secret Service which was flagrantly anti-Trump and the Reform Party, to the point where if someone really hates it you might ask yourself, ah, but is that the real reason you hate it?
It's like the Union flags that are currently tacked on to every lamppost on the hight street - I wouldn't mind, but what's behind it? Are they put up by Reform supporters? If so, I don't want them up - but I've nothing against our national flag per se, even if having them up now, when there is no national celebration or anything, reminds me of someone having their Xmas decorations up all year round.
So Wonder Woman 1984 opens with her beating up some robbers in a shopping mall - it's very much seems a bit anti-men, you see one of them holding a baby up over a balcony as a threat, though - to be fair, it seems - the other two robbers are less keen on this turn of events. Wonder Woman isn't doing anything I guess that any male superhero wouldn't do but you see her wink conspiratorially to a young female toddler and it seems a bit, hey, women against men! But it's the fact this occurs to me that also offends me, my own sexism awakened?
But it carries on like this. In fact, for an alarmingly long time there is no admirable bloke onscreen at all, nothing going on here for any bloke to relate to. Then I think, well, a heck of a lot of male-orientated action films would be like that for women in the audience, so...
The villain is a hollow TV presenter supposed mogul and - as this is set in the 80s - seems like Donald Trump - so is this a dig at Trump? Wasn't he up for re-election around this time? It's hard to see this having any effect in fairness as it's a bad movie, you know how Trump would go on Twitter and rubbish any jokes at his expense, well, this film would have deserved his opprobrium - it's a case of Hollywood backfiring again. So is that the reason for the film's low score - a load of Trump supporters?
Well, not really. We don't see our female hero interact with anyone much in her life, though she is Diana Prince we don't enjoy the bluff and subterfuge of her transforming from straight or nerd to top cat like we do with Clark Kent and Superman - though was Prince ever a nerd in the Lynda Carter series? Maybe not. So she seems a bit isolated and pining, npi, over the loss of Chris Pine who died it seems in the first film, set in World War I. It's not clear to me, as a casual viewer, what WW is now doing in the 80s and I guess she never ages, what did she do in WW2? I don't know.
The villain isn't played by a famous name - to me - so he seems like a subsidiary villain, of no great importance. The plot is a bit low-rent, sort of like the tail end of an Indy film, all about some stone that grants wishes and the havoc it can produce. There should be good stuff about WW wishing to live with Chris Pine a bit, all a bit Truly Madly Deeply, but the melancholy isn't really there - candidly I missed that Pine was back because of her wish, I just thought it was a plot point I missed. The finale is not bad in its theme, but the build up to it was dull and there aren't really enough appealing characters in this - Kirstin Wiig plays a doormat who wishes to be like Diana Prince - cool - and then turns nasty, the idea she isn't ready for greatness yet, but this immediately feels like they went straight to Superman III in terms of dorky naffness.
Finally, Gal Gadot celebrates Xmas by saying things could stand for anything you want, and the Xmas star floats up like the Star of David, a nod perhaps to Gadot's Israeli birthplace which won't have dated well for some of us but also makes you think, why so anti-Trump (if it is) given he's the one who recognised Jerusalem as the capital and has little to say in criticism of Nyet Nyahoo's foreign policy.
Anyway, the low rating is because it really is a bad movie all round (though just about watchable as TV tea time entertainment) - Gadot has the distinction of also starring in the notorious Snow White remake which gets about a 2 rating.
It came out in 2020 but you can't blame it on Covid because presumably it was a wrap by then.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I reeled my sister in for her first viewing of Lethal Weapon but she was a begrudging viewer.
I enjoyed it as ever, wished I'd taken Mum to see this kind of stuff rather than the dreary Bond films at the time but then it did feel a bit adult, a bit much with the topless porn star - that said, all soft focus and soft porn, giggling in the showers, not like today's stuff.
How does it fair in the sexism stakes? A good role for Danny Glover's wife, a mousy psychiatrist, a dead ex, girls on film, guess that's it but it's not that bad. At the time it felt progressive and the chemistry between Gibson and Glover - both still alive nearly, what, four decades on? - I'm glad to say - is terrific. But it's mainly the set up and a few comedic set pieces that work, the main plot as Glover's character seems to admit is 'pretty thin'. It's good to see Gibson do his thing - the pointy toed walk, the running through traffic - but the reason the villains go after them - the idea being they might have been told some information by some other bad guy - isn't up to much and given they know were they live, a bullet in their heads wouldn't go amiss, esp as one of them is only in a caravan. No need for an elaborate kidnap. The finale, in which Glover allows Gibson to fight his new nemesis made sense in the cinema to me but now is ludicrous, Gibson wins because it's a movie. It reminds me of a Spencer Tracy movie set in a boys reform school in which he invites the rebel kid to box another and learn respect - he loses, but what if the punk had won the match, what would the lesson have been then? And why do Riggs and Murtaph go out there on their own to do this with no apparent back up anywhere, I mean they make a hash of it. And what threat is Murtaph's hand grenade, it would blow him up and nobody else.
Edit: The film is set at Christmas, like Die Hard, but doesn't seem to get a screening at Christmas - most likely because of the juxtaposition of happy TV Xmas jingles and Riggs being suicidal with a gun in his mouth - not really what you want to see on your telly at that time of year.
These comments were made by a disgruntled sister and I couldn't disagree.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE BIG SWITCH (1968)
a.k.a. Strip Poker
Horridly cheap and sleazy looking slice of 1960s exploitation. Not violent or titillating enough to be successful even as an exploitation thriller. I had never heard of any of the cast. They all act extremely badly, but then they only have a script fit for the toilet and a plot thinner than wafers.
Terrible.
I’ve never heard of the film…but I’m surprised you don’t know at least some of the actors in it…or maybe they had small cameos and you missed them.
AZORIAN: THE RAISING OF THE K-129 (2010)
Directed and written by Micheal White, the documentary details the monumental intelligence feat achieved by the CIA, when it lifted the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129, 16,500 feet up from the Pacific Ocean's bed in 1974.
The sinking of the K-129 occurred on 24 Feb, 1968, which was detected and triangulated through advanced hydrophone technology.
The challenge was now, how to pick up the submarine from the bottom of the ocean.
For this purpose a massive 63,000 ton ship, the 'Glomar Explorer' was built, containing an inner compartment and clasp style robotic arm, which would be sent to the bottom of the ocean to grab the submarine.
This very fine documentary explains all facets of the mission with detailed schematics and 3D animation.
All in all...an excellent documentary film.
(1 hour 45 minutes)
(I would also recommend Josh Dean's book 'The Taking of K-129', which explores in depth 'Project Azorian'. A very fine book.)
I just checked the cast list again - and no, I have not heard of a single one of them.
Partick Allen is quite famous, if you are of a certain age…his voice is instantly recognisable - obviously if you know him…he was in adverts for Barratt Homes…
Plus he was the voice of Protect & Survive…
Which was used for Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Two Tribes…
And Derek Martin was in EastEnders for many years - I don’t watch that, but I recognised he was in it ….the other cast members, not so much 🤗
Last weekend I saw CAUGHT STEALING, which is really a lot of fun; offbeat and with a great cast. It's almost like the script was written for Guy Ritchie, but Daren Aronofsky intercepted it... what we get is a comic nightmare that's like something out of Kafka.
Also, a couple of days ago, and just to say I'd seen it, I watched Joan Crawford's legendary final film, TROG. Yes indeed, it is bad, especially with the "troglodyte" that's just a guy running around in a leftover ape mask from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. That said, good ol' Freddie Francis (the great cinematographer) does what he can to keep the film from being totally ludicrous; Joan always takes her part seriously; and Michael Gough adds some fun as the scenery-chewing villain. In the end, not a bad way to kill brain cells.
THE KILLING FIELDS (1984)
A rare TV outing for Roland Joffe’s masterpiece of modern warfare movies. The Killing Fields is set in 1970s Cambodia during the rise and the early years of the ultra-extreme communist regime the Khmer Rouge. The Killing Fields of the title are the rural idylls used as collective farms and slave labour camps where even the most minor infringement against orders was met with immediate death. Mass shallow graves were the norm, highlighted in the movie’s most harrowing image of a rice field irrigation dam clogged by decaying corpses washed out of the river.
Putting aside the horrific nature of Pol Pot’s regime, one which compares in 20th Century brutality and with the Nazis, Stalinism and Chile’s far right governments, writer Bruce Robinson and director Joffe create a visceral, frightening and wholly believable landscape of war, helped immeasurably by refusing to use subtitles for when foreign languages are spoken. This disorientating effect, coupled with the shaky, awkward camera angles from lensman Chris Menges, allows the audience never to settle, to remain as uncomfortable and unknowing of the environments as the characters. So when a quartet of journalists are captured and threatened at gunpoint, not us or the western characters understand the dialogues between the soldiers and the Khmer-speaking interpreter. Tension increases dramatically; confusion abounds. We feel as helpless and as uniformed as the people on screen. The effect is repeated time and again in the film, memorably when the heroic protagonist Dith Pram is incarcerated by the Khmer Rouge, and to effect survival he vows silence, never responding to the sentries even when under intense physical assault and torture. For the westerners, there is as much confusion in the French compound of Pheon Peng, where multilingual conversations pepper the background as bombs and bullets erupt in the city.
The film when released was dealing very much with recent history and evoked much sympathy for that. The characters, Dith Pram [Haing S. Ngor, an Oscar winner], the New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, the photographers Al Rockoff [John Malkovitch] and John Swain [Julia Sands] are excellently formed, although Sam Waterstone’s Schanberg seems as repulsive as he is empathetic. One wouldn’t put up with his kind of attitude in today’s workplace, even in international journalism. The film paints an unflattering picture of western military, political, media and social influence on Cambodia, and while the Khmer regime is clearly despotic and horrific, one can’t help seeing history repeating itself in the manner of western support for tearaway rebellions that have created havoc in the Middle East and Africa.
Let’s not get political. The Killing Fields is a great film, well made, superbly photographed and edited and with a splendidly 1980s music score from Mike Oldfield than clatters away in the same manner the machine guns do.
Very good indeed.
If I threw some shade at Lethal Weapon some posts back, you need an entire power cut for Cobra (1986), a Sly Stallone film.
Cobra preceded LW by only a couple of years and similarly rips off the Dirty Harry franchise but this time to no good effect. The only good effect might be if Hollywood had been so shamed by the product that it decided to do it properly with Gibson and Glover. One star I omitted to mention with LW is the director Richard Donner who manages to be stylish but not showy. The director of Cobra is showy - shots of birds flying off power lines intercut scenes of violence - but it is all so naff. It's said the film was edited down so its basic premise - some kind of shadowy elite looking for a New World Order by eliminating the weak, not sure if it has its hooks into the Govt or not, similar perhaps to Magnum Force - just doesn't hold. You think Sly's Cobra character is going after a lone nutter like in Dirty Harry, then it segues into Magnum Force territory - but you can't have your cake and eat it, it just doesn't work.
I'd falsely remembered Sly's wife Brigitte Nielson as looking like him in this - slick back blond hair, shades - but she's instead big hair and looks pretty ordinary despite being a model, she does put in a decent performance however. Stallone is let down by his own script, it is risible and it doesn't seem to make sense by its own rules. An early shootout in a supermarket allows our hero several clear shots on his target which he ignores in favour of sterile banter with the assassin and to drink from a beer bottle and be a bit cool, in the meantime a customer or two dies.
Perhaps like Craig's Aston Martin DB5, our hero drives an instantly recognisable car with modifications, some of the action it features in is really just an 80s music video... Oh, one time he gets into a petty dispute with some hoods and walks away from his car; in any reality they would key it but no, and the next time he sees them they show him respect.
Cobra is the kind of film that might be written by AI - if AI were in its very limited, early phase. That all said, Stallone looks very cool in it.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Cobra debuted at no.1 in the UK London box office.
So did Paul McCartney's Give My Regards to Broad Street two years earlier. He won't allow it on DVD now.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
All these crap films... what were we thinking in the 80s ?
Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994)
Directed by Gisaburo Sugii, the animated movie is based on the hit Capcom video game of the same name and is considered one of the best movie renditions of a video game.
Ryu, a reclusive Japanese martial artist is being tracked by cyborgs sent by a criminal organization called Shadowlaw.
M. Bison, the leader of Shadowlaw is on the hunt for the best martial artists on the planet, who he seeks to enlist in his organization and has sent out cyborgs to track and detail their fighting abilities.
Interlaced into the film are parallel stories of Captain Guile, a US military officer who seeks revenge for the death of a close friend, an Interpol agent Chun-Li and Ryu's best friend Ken Masters, which all converge to an epic battle sequence between Bison and Ryu at the end.
A fantastic film, with top quality animations and a superb soundtrack.
Recommended.
(102minutes)
Well, there wasn't much to choose from back then.
Broad Street debuted at No 1 - I know this because Macca's film got slated so they couldn't use any quotes for the poster to sell it in the newspapers, all they could do was a snap of it being the No 1 movie and superimpose it sort of ringed on the poster in the ads - of course they could only do that for one week until whatever new release came out to displace it, maybe Ghostbusters or Gremlins.
Tbf on Macca it was an odd time for movies. Ferris Bueller is a stone-cold classic but when I saw it at the local fleapit, I sort of enjoyed it but it didn't feel like it was all that, the sun didn't ever come out and it took a long time to get going. A trip to the cinema was always a triumph of hope over experience or the local ambience at least, hope didn't always prevail.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I caught Memory, the Martin Campbell movie last night, with Liam Neeson.
In an alternative universe, Brosnan would be starring, Neeson would have been Bond and now be starring alongside his former squeeze Helen Mirren in some pay to view series.
I don't like Campbell's Bond films, don't like his style, but I liked this so I feel a bit contrary, as it only rates about 5 on imdb. He knows how to make a film look higher budget than it is. Still, you might be disappointed to have caught it in the cinema, it's a good TV watch.
Neeson is a hitman with early onset Alzheimers though it's not that early, he's knocking on a bit now. He's hired to do 'one final job' but it isn't to his taste... the theme is child trafficking around Mexico City which makes it topical what with the Epstein stuff in the news this week. Neeson is actually very good at portraying the confusion his condition brings on though plot wise it's a sort of gimmick really. It's a bit of the duality you get here - the Clark Kent/Superman stuff, the Jason Bourne amnesia thing, Renard being injured in such a way that he doesn't feel pain but gets stronger every day (do we ever see that?) or the superhero who can only heal when exposed to the sun (what happens when Superman gets injured at night then?) Thing is, we can enjoy identifying with Clark Kent, knowing of his transformative powers, we don't enjoy relating to a guy with Alzheimer's though it does evoke sympathy.
The enjoyment comes from not knowing if his memory will fail him or whether he will be the super assassin again, I mean this is staple beer-in-hand thriller where victims usually deserve it and get their heads smashed against a car side window which then shatters.
There is one very good hit set at a gym, nicely filmed.
And most of the bad guys deserve it but it's not clear to what extent the cops are on side with the traffickers and whether they deserve it. It's not a single hander as in a nod to Memento, Guy Pearce stars as a cop trying and mostly failing to stop the traffickers.
Monica Bellucci is the mob boss, in a promotion from her Spectre days, I like her slow, ponderous voice, does she always play it that way in movies, or at home? 'You have no idea... what you have done to me... you have forgotten to buy some kitchen roll.'
A couple of nods to Bond, a misdirection technique from Casino Royale, an action scene in a car park that initially seems like Tomorrow Never Dies.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Either Film4 or ITV4 is showing decent flicks at 9pm, sort of give-me-a-beer movies and last night it was Red Heat (1988).
Now, I don't say this is a great movie and I'd seen it before but credit where it's due - one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and one year after Timothy Dalton's debut as Bond, we have an action film with a fair bit shot in Moscow, in particular Gorky Park and Red Square. It all looks a bit gloomy - when I went there on a school trip actually around the same time, maybe a year earlier, there were terrific blue skies around the Kremlin, it looked terrific. Decades on and no Bond film has filmed in Moscow, not even as a side scene or a backdrop. It could have featured From Russia With Love (in the novel, Klebb interviews Tanya in Moscow, the latter has a poky apartment building with - if I recall - a view of St Basil's Cathedral from her window), it was pre- Dr Zhivago but they could have done that with a phoney backdrop; perhaps it's better they didn't given that Leiter's call to Bond seems to take place in an office in the White House garden, but still...
The Bourne Supermacy featured Moscow heavily, I don't know maybe I'm being unfair, maybe the locals take massive bribes for that to happen and EON don't want to do that. But the Bonds used to really take you to place, under Craig it felt like the same old beaten track.
In Red Heat, Arnie plays a Russian cop who has to fly to Detroit I think it is or is it New York, I don't know some American city because a Russian drug dealer who killed his friend - I think - has fled there. He has to liaise with John Belushi's deadbeat cop who alienates his superiors (one of whom, amusingly, seems to be the actor who played Frankenstein opposite Gene Wilder in the Mel Brooks spoof).
It touches on cultural differences but it's let down by a poor script, it's not funny enough and the Belushi character is given repetitive lines about being knee deep in paperwork and reports. He's not funny or charismatic enough and it's not clear if he's supposed to be an equal as the poster implies, or a stooge. He can, however, run whereas a more comic, boozy, dunkin donuts cop would not be able to do - and this is necessary for a cop thriller as it's clear Arnie really can't run at all. This was also a problem in True Lies a bit (though I seem to recall him running well in Total Recall); one critic carped that the closest he came to Bond was playing Jaws and that's true because he does in some films sort of lollop the way you might when on a pedestrian crossing and the green man stops, you shuffle a bit faster.
Maybe Bill Murray might have been a better choice but the film isn't witty enough for him; the problem is Belushi as an actor doesn't look like he wants bad or humiliating stuff to happen to him, so it doesn't make you laugh. He's kind of a bore, it's one-note.
Lawrence Fishbourn looks good and sharp in a supporting role as a cop.
As the film drew to a close it dawned on me that one problem is that it seems to be a vehicle for Arnie so that Belushi is his sidekick, but that doesn't work in this context, it's like having Rocky take on Dolph Lungren and be his sidekick, I mean I am no MAGA supporter but I would have liked to see the US cop more hold his own. It also feels odd to see Arnie in this, as a State enforcer, because in most of his films it seems to me he's the underdog using his muscle to fight off hordes of attackers like in Total Recall. The final scene in which they swap watches as a token of friendship, only Belushi finds he's got the worse of the deal, just looks like ha ha our Arnie's got the better of him, but instead I was feeling nettled on behalf of our great American ally, which surprised me.
The poster seems typical of that late 1980s era, stuff like Working Girl and Crocodile Dundee.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Strange fact which I quote from memory, but wasn't Red Heat a London box office no.1 ? The 1980s, Lord...
Yes, but it was probably up against Wot No Pyjamas? It's like complaining about No 1 records - if there's nothing better out there, it will get the No 1 slot.
I made the trip to London's Prince Charles to see The Sting, which turned out to be shown the day after Robert Redford's death was announced. It was at the upstairs cinema which I am starting to like for such 1970s fare, it seems to evoke the decade better than downstairs in some ways.
This 1974 film is set in the 20s or thereabouts, it's about two con men who are unknown to each other but have a personal reason to team up and go after a kingpin grifter called Donnelly, played by our own Robert Shaw, and bring him down in the con to end them all.
Now, I enjoyed this a lot - it's fine, polished movie-making and it looks good. You wonder if the 1970s didn't owe a lot the the past, its homages to the 20s or the 50s, maybe until 77 or so it didn't quite have a style of its own.
Some of the city backdrops are too obviously fake however, too obviously painted although is that the point, to make the whole world a stage, to go with the film's painted interludes announcing ''The Set-Up', The Hook' as if in the manner of old-time silent films.
I did find myself nit-picking - for a conman, who needs to become anonymous real quick, Redford's character doesn't half stand out - his longish blond locks, his dandyish suits, his hats. He falls for a con himself early on that you sense anyone who'd been round the block just the once would know to avoid. It seems Redford is playing younger than his years, his character should be in his early 20s really as he comes across as naive, a bit Jon Boy, and this does seem to be a problem with Redford leaving it so late to make it big: you can say the same for his Gatsby, or maybe the early scenes of The Way We Were, he's just a bit too old for those roles.
Redford was an engaging actor but I'm not sure you ever felt you were him on screen, that magical process didn't occur, you are a third party watching his performance as an outsider, and he seems to need other actors to bounce off.
Some scams don't seem too credible, they wouldn't work in real life. Or perhaps I have a suspicious mind having run up against Surrey County Council's Adult Safeguarding team, who are full of tricks (if you complain about a care home, they can haul you in to a 'Best Interests' meeting to discuss - at their own suggestion - getting your elderly parent back to the family home. Later, you find out it's really a Safeguarding meeting under Section 42 of the Care Act, where abuse has been alleged - and it won't be the care home's abuse but rather yours! The Minutes - which you have to ask for under a Subject Access Request - will not tally with what was said. But you can't complain because at the meeting's outset you signed a Confidentiality Agreement, so can divulge nothing without the approval of the Chairman - who will also be the Safeguarding head! I digress.
That said, I feel I should pass on that the key to the con is to have an unsuspecting victim, to offer them something early on to win their trust (also the trick of reciprocity, the recipient feels obliged, though the offer later turns out to be false) and here's a key point. If the victim is conned in the first 30 seconds, everything that follows can work to the scammer's advantage, particularly if the victim is out of their comfort zone, or in unfamilar territory. Later, the victim will kick themselves because they did notice red flags that gave it away, but ignored them. Because, by that point, any anomaly is attributed instead to the person's learning experience. 'Oh, I didn't know that - but I do now!'
Like, wow this person is kind of young to be a cop - but then I haven't met a cop recently, and it turns out this is how they really are. But it's not a cop.
If I took you to a location you only knew on the map, you'd twig early on that there's a church there that wasn't on the map, and the gradient isn't quite the same, and that river is really a stream - but if you trusted me, and were a believer, you'd see all that and use it not to tip you off, but to instead to almost gratefully update your expertise on the area.
Anyway, back to The Sting. The famous music moves things along, Robert Shaw is a great villain (his first sighting has him playing golf in the Auric Goldfinger's plus fours outfit, perhaps a movie in-joke) but you don't really believe he'd fall for the set-up, it's ike this busy man has no other work to tend to either, to help his regain perspective. It all goes a bit too smoothly and isn't intentionally funny enough for it to be a caper.
Another problem is that while the film repeatedly pulls the rug from under your feet, you stop believing after a while. I recall Never Say Never Again, the opening scene turns out to be just a training exercise, and it carries on in that anti-climactic vein - it's only Bond's urine in the assassin's face! The shark attack causes no peril (were they robot sharks? what is Bond looking at at the end of the scene, do they have a homing device? Still no idea decades later), the bomb turns out to be not under Bond's bed and so on. You can get away with that for a bit, but a film is about believing the artifice, take liberties and you won't indulge it any more.
Here, I did second guess the main big scam re the FBI but I'm not sure the victim in that set-up would fall for it, he might, but you don't quite buy it, or that Donnelly who had bought off the local cops, wouldn't be tipped off, or that Paul Newman's character, who we meet being down on his luck, would have the capital to put his mega Sting into operation.
One unexpected shooting late in the movie still doesn't make sense to me.
That all said, I enjoyed it and am glad I saw it on the big screen. It's been on the telly loads of times but unless you see it from the beginning I think it would lose you, plus it seems shot for the big screen, lots of visual detail. Use on the 'n' word - though the film is refreshingly ahead of its time generally in racial sensitivity - means it may not be tea time viewing these days.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
DEEP SEA CHALLENGE (2014)
Acclaimed film director James Cameroon documents his quest of reaching the deepest point on planet Earth, "Challenger Deep" located at a depth of 36,000 feet in the Mariana Trench.
From its inception to trial runs...the documentary showcases all aspects of the Deepsea Challenger's (DCV 1) mission and the many challenges the crew face in reaching their target.
An excellent documentary.
I documented on one of the other pages that I am not watching many movies these days. My statement was challenged, so I thought I would do a recap:
Jan 2025 - 14 Feb - 9 Mar - 6 Apr - 9 May - 16 June - 12 July - 5 Aug - 8 Sep (so far) - 4 = 83
Jan 2024 - 7 Feb - 19 Mar - 5 Apr - 12 May - 20 June - 17 July - 15 Aug - 15 Sep (so far) - 6 = 116
Jan 2023 - 7 Feb - 13 Mar - 14 Apr - 7 May - 25 June - 2 July - 5 Aug - 9 Sep (so far) - 6 = 81
So I guess it maybe isn't so bad as I considered it to be. I genuine thought I watched more movies than this, but perhaps all those episodes of Dr Who, The Saint, The Persuaders and UFO have made me think I was watching a lot of films, when I am watching telly repeats.
Anything around about 15 a month is good going, I feel, especially with reading, writing, work and life to contend with.
On with the show:
KNOCKED UP (2007)
Seth Rogan is a loser who manages to tap beautiful TV hostess Katherine Heigl for a one night stand of drunken infamy. Result: pregnancy and all the emotional upheaval entailed. Knocked Up is an old-fashioned rom-com loaded with modern obscenities and a bunch of stoner dudes acting like total twits. Alison Scott [Heigl] and her sister Debbie [Leslie Mann] are control freaks who swear a lot. Paul Rudd is a journalist husband who doesn’t know how well his bread is buttered. The subject matter deserves something a bit more likeable and you can map the movie’s plot with a pencil and line drawing it’s so see-through. Unfortunately, the ‘rom’ is haphazard and the ‘com’ is almost non-existent, except for rare forays into Alison’s television world where appearances mean more than intellectual prowess. Approachable performances from the central duo keep us most-of-the-way interested and it all turns out nicely. Judd Apatow writes and directs with the same eye in the frat pack gutter he had for the rather more amusing, if depressingly sad, The 40 Year Old Virgin.
PEPPEERMINT (2018)
A relentlessly grim and brutal revenge thriller that stars Jennifer Garner as a widow seeking the gang members who murdered her husband and daughter. Quite appalling.