Crikey, I don't remember it going that good, they really talk up the Conquest of Space ! "This will happen before the year 2000 - Witness it now" or something. I think the trailer is better than the film.
A 1955 film, George Pal’s Conquest of Space, provided Kubrick with a sense of direction in his . . . pursuit of this imagery. [For example,] in Pal’s film there is [the center-piece] rotating wheel or earth station that Kubrick adapts to 2001, and he creates a poetic image of it floating and rotating in space . . . .” The goal of this exercise of viewing dozens of earlier science-fiction movies had little to do with plot elements; Kubrick simply ignored Conquest of Space's highly-criticized story line and character development and instead focused on the film's remarkable design.
Furthermore, the genre film authority Roy Kinnard also suggests strongly in his 1979 Fantastic Films article, “Conquest of Space: A New Look at an Old Classic”, that the visually arousing design of Kubrick’s 2001 was influenced by Conquest of Space. He says, “...the most interesting aspect of Conquest [is] its startling parallels with Stanley Kubrick’s epic 1968 production. It is a well-known fact that before he began work on 2001, Kubrick watched virtually every science fiction film ever made, and it is not unreasonable to assume that he not only saw Conquest, but also found quite a bit of inspiration in it.” Then Kinnard points out a number of similarities between the two films (illustrated with photo stills from the movies)—some obvious and others not so obvious. For example, the same space station wheel in both pictures noted by Roman (above) as well as a number of set pieces.
Wow, well thanks for that info @Sonero maybe I'll avoid pithy comments in future. I feel rightly told off. Honestly though, I wasn't dismissing the SFX, or the movie's influence, I just have a memory that it wasn't very well made - but its been 40 years or so since I saw it! Memory plays tricks 😏
The Godfather was not the first gangster movie; there were many great and exciting films of the genre in the 1930s, when the era of bootleg booze and those who exploited the law was still fresh in the memory. What there wasn’t in the thirties, nor subsequent decades, was a film that veered away from the individual, the Cagney, Bogart, Raft figure, battling authority and getting a comeuppance or a redemption. What Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel and Francis Ford Copolla’s adaptation provides is an expanding cultural world for their main character[s] to inhabit. Don Vito Corleone and his sons Sonny, Fredo, Michael and the adopted Tom are all part of a Sicilian Mafia family whose interests extend into gambling, illicit goods, politics and prostitution, but whose roots come shrouded in the civility of servitude, of trust, of honour and respect to the powerful men of Italian immigrant society, the Godfathers or Capos. They have built empires founded on these four pillars and to relinquish them would be to surrender a part of their lives as dear to them as the soil of Sicily, a land they left behind to seek better lives. The Corleone’s enshrine these values, as we recognise from the extended wedding scenes where favours are granted, peace is maintained and union celebrated.
Fundamental to the movie, more than anything, is the concept of the wider criminal ‘Family’ and of its honour code: to be endowed with honour and to offer it in return. This is encapsulated by the film’s opening exchange which begins in total darkness and fades into the snivelling face of the undertaker Bonasera who relates his tale of woe to the watchful, almost doleful Capo, Don Corleone.
‘I believe in America,’ says Bonasera. ‘America has made my fortune. And I raised my daughter in the American fashion. I gave her freedom but I taught her never to dishonour her family. She found a ‘boyfriend,’ not an Italian. She went to the movies with him. She stayed out late. I didn’t protest. Two months ago he took her for a drive, with another boyfriend. They made her drink whiskey and then they tried to take advantage of her. She resisted. She kept her honour. So they beat her. Like an animal. When I went to the hospital her nose was broken. Her jaw was shattered, held together by wire. She couldn't even weep because of the pain. But I wept. Why did I weep? She was the light of my life. A beautiful girl. Now she will never be beautiful again… I went to the police, like a good American. These two boys were brought to trial. The judge sentenced them to three years in prison, and suspended the sentence. Suspended sentence! They went free that very day! I stood in the courtroom like a fool, and those two bastards, they smiled at me. Then I said to my wife, ‘For justice, we must go to Don Corleone’.’
But the Don has no time for this latter day fawning:
‘Why did you go to the police? Why didn’t you come to me first?... We have known each other many years, but this is the first time you’ve come to me for counsel or for help. I can’t remember the last time you invited me to your house for a cup of coffee, even though my wife is godmother to your only child. But let’s be frank here. You never wanted my friendship. And you feared to be in my debt… Bonasera, what have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you’d come to me in friendship, this scum who ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day. And if by some chance an honest man like yourself made enemies they would become my enemies.’
The idea that family is above the law, that honouring one family will allow another to be treated with respect thus creating a spider’s web of interconnecting communities who support and benefit each other, had never been presented effectively on screen, at least not in such stark and detailed discourse. The film which unfolds following this relatively minor scene, stresses the importance of the conceit, one that is initially not shared by the youngest son Michael, who wants nothing more than to settle down with his American girlfriend, schoolteacher Kay Adams.
It is not lost on the keen observer that Kay’s profession is the same as the one so many wild west heroines inhabit, as if the schoolteacher is a desirable profession for the wife of career killers. Intelligence and beauty goes with the territory too, but it is the position of respect a teacher holds in the communities both of the old west and the ruggedness of Sicily that surely pulls at Michael’s heart. As the film progresses and he regresses to the black gangster soul of his father and his father’s associates – like the hulking Luca Brasi, the conniving Tressio or the corpulent Clemenza – Michael morphs into a 1945 version of the black hatted ruthless gunslinger who lusts after the naive, chaste school ma’am. He even wears a black hat for goodness sake!
Gangster movies are not westerns, of course. They miss the pull of the mythic, are too steeped in the American reality of the street. Coppola and Puzo certainly attempt to create a mythology around their characters though, most notably Marlon Brando’s stately, wheezy, aging Don Corleone, a man who has had enough of fighting and killing, who wants better for his sons, yet has sired three men who all reflect aspects of himself: the impetuous, violent Sonny, who takes any slight personally; the friendly and loveable Fredo, who extols the Don’s weaker, kindly virtues; and the scheming, sedate and ruthless Michael. Even his adopted son, Tom, shares his love of tact and ingratiating wordplay. Don Corleone is not wedded to his sword, or his revolver as it were, even if he almost dies by it. He fights his battles insightfully, watching and waiting like a grand poker player, his perception of others being the ace to his winning hand. Late on in the film, Don Corleone dictates to a hood’s council and all the while you sense how his mind is working, or rather how Brando intends the Don’s mind to work, with shifting eyes, small gestures, cracked vowels; not once does he look directly at the man who he realises is the root of his problems: Barzini, a rival of equal manipulative skill but given to extravagant statements and gestures. To do more than the minimum would reveal Vito Corleone’s own knowledge and threaten his survival. Brando’s method acting tricks – and it is a truly great performance – allow us as an audience to witness the personal austerity of a tired, watchful, yet dying man.
The inspiration for this quietude stems from a scene a little later in the movie and a short reprimand Don Corleone gives to his eldest son and prospective heir Sonny. Don Corleone has rejected Sollozzo’s offer to share the spoils of a prospective narcotics business, but during the good-tempered haggling, Sonny interjects in the negotiations, by doing so betraying knowledge that the family is split over the potential deal. Once business is concluded and the deal politely declined, Don Corleone berates his son: ‘What’s the matter with you? I think your brain is going soft with all that comedy you’re playing with that young girl. Never tell anyone outside the Family what you are thinking again.’ Brando must surely have read this line and latched onto it as the core principle of Don Corleone’s nature for his whole performance, other than moments of gentleness with daughters and grandchildren, exhibits this belief. Later on, in discussion with Micheal, he reflects: ‘I hope you don’t mind the way I keep going over this Barzini business... It’s an old habit. I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.’ A lesson, sadly, his eldest son did not learn.
Another intriguing personality trait, one that possibly harkens back to Puzo’s original novel [I have not read it, so I am making an assumption] is how character mannerisms pass through the generations, either through innate instinct or from mimicry. As Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone allows himself to be dragged gradually into the Mafia existence, taking small but passionate steps up the ladder to the role of de facto Capo, he begins to take on some of Brando’s motions, gestures and figures of speech. Most memorable is the line ‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse’ but more profound is a scene in Las Vegas, where the Jewish gangster Moe Greene is being bought out against his will. Fredo Corleone is present at the meeting, having been sidelined to nominally protect the family assets in the gambling capital; he vocally disagrees with his younger brother’s intentions. Once alone, Michael berates Fredo with the line: ‘Fredo, you’re my older brother, and I love you. But don’t ever take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever.’ This line paraphrases Brando’s earlier tirade at Sonny and is all the more startling because Michael was not present at the earlier narcotics meeting. Fredo however was, and the ever excellent John Cazale offers a bluntly gaunt expression of fathomable recognition, just by lowering his gaze and shuffling back a step or two. So we too recognise the fear he suddenly feels as his young sibling becomes the living ghost of his father.
There is of course a whole raft of scenes which could be discussed in depth to expound how good a film The Godfather is, but for me it is always the scenes of close knit family interaction, where the characters band of trust and honour is constantly put to the test, sometimes fractured, rarely repaired, frequently over a meal or a grappa. Yes, there is some action, but it is understated; basically the violence comes as a series of well-presented bloody assassinations. Yes, there are arguments, political, criminal and domestic intrigues, sub-plots which may or may not be significant, and there is betrayal and there is honour and dishonour. There is also a wonderfully low key, evocative music score from Nino Rota. There is gloomy, moody cinematography from Gordon Willis, a touch of shadowy noir and a hint of chiaroscuro, as if the original Mafia man Caravaggio painted the filmic episodes. There is a mid-film sunburnt sojourn to Sicily where Michael falls in love with a local beauty. There are a series of excellent support performances from James Caan, John Cazale, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Talia Shire, Richard Conte, Al Lettieri, Richard S. Castellano, Sterling Hayden, Lenny Montana, even singer Al Martino, big and small parts alike. There is that wonderful and powerful script. There is Francis Ford Copolla’s bravura direction, framing each shot as if it really was a painting or a photograph, be it a funeral, a busy breakfast table, a wedding banquet, a murder, a walk in the Italian mountains; the attention to detail, the placement of people, the soundscape they inhabit and the colour they bring is extraordinary – look at the vivid moment Sonny beats up his brother-in-law in the street, shot as if through the watchful eyes and ears of one of the kids playing by the gushing fire hydrant, or the poorly dustily coloured wedding party in Sicily, neatly juxtaposing with the movie’s earlier garishly clean New York nuptials. There is superb editing, controlled, vibrant, effortless, as if magic is occurring on top of magic. The set décor and construction, costumes and incidentals are fully redolent of the 1940s. The pacing, which can often kill a ‘family saga’ film is spot on; in fact some of the jumps forward in time take a few minutes comprehend.
There is too the final series of scenes as all Michael’s enemies are wiped out in a pre-planned murder spree, each killing cross cut with close ups of his nephew’s baptism. ‘Do you renounce evil?’ asks the priest. ‘I renounce evil,’ replies Michael and like his father he too now knows all about honour, truth and servitude – it does not come from the church or from god, it is man’s labours on earth that matter. At the finale, Diane Keaton’s Kay witnesses the caporegime kissing her husband’s hand as if he was the Pope, God’s primate on earth, and suddenly she too knows where real Family power lies. The door closes on her in the same manner it opened for Bonasera two hours and fifty-five minutes ago.
The Godfather was wildly successful on release, but wasn’t heaped with resounding critical praise. Some commentators disliked it. A few years on it was compared unfavourably [incorrectly in my opinion] to its monumental sequel, a film that merely repeats what we already saw but includes a flashback sequence to Vito Corleone’s youth; the flashbacks are great, the rest is ho-hum [IMO]. The less said about Volume 3 the wiser. Al Pacino bestrides all three movies. He was oddly Oscar nominated here as only a supporting actor, when he is clearly the lead, above even Brando, who deservedly received [and declined] a second winner’s statue. The movie remains highly influential upon the cinema’s portrayal of gangsters and the gangster world and it is perhaps that legacy for which we must rightly praise and condemn, for fifty years on most gangster ‘families’ feel very Godfather-identikit.
@chrisno1 Thank you for the excellent review on The Godfather.
I recently saw 'Destination Moon', a 1950 science fiction film, produced by George Pal, who also made 'When Worlds Collide' and 'The War of the Worlds'.
Now here is a story of four individuals who fly an experimental rocket ship to the Moon. This is 19 years before Armstrong planted his foot on lunar soil.
I was taken back by the amount of detail put into the film.
Liverpudlian Terence Davies is considered by many ‘in the know’ as one of the great British filmmakers of the last twenty five years. The jury is still out on that, I feel. For me, Davies’s films share common faults of lethargic pacing and static cameras. There are no surprises in a Davies film. He presents, for want of a better expression, staged movies, meticulous in composition but aching for a breath of dissent.
Benediction is his final film and it is a worthy eulogy to his career, a film about a poet struggling for acceptance and recognition by the wider masses, lionised by appreciative but unwelcoming peers and, as a gay man between the war years, leading a life at odds with the norm. Jack Lowdon is brilliant as the intelligent, forthright and self-misguided Siegried Sassoon. Sassoon was a poet, a war hero and eventually a conscientious objector. His talent was enormous. He was never appreciated fully in his lifetime, thrown on the heap of Wilfred Owen impersonators and disciples of Auden’s Thirties Political Poets. He’s better than that in literary terms, and you sense the anger and frustration in Peter Capaldi’s older Sassoon of the 1950s, a man who chose eventually to conform yet found no joy or success in societal acceptance. Sassoon’s poems bridge sections of the film, drawing us through the agonies of the trenches, the long road to physical recovery and the ignorance of the elite. Film footage and still photographs – some of Sassoon himself – accompany much of these verses and emphasise the horror Sassoon battles on a daily basis. Surrounding himself with a cabal of gay men, most of whom, like the theatrical cad Ivor Novello, never even picked up a rifle, Sassoon finds that true camaraderie only existed in those bullet ridden killing grounds – in the suffocating world of arts and artists assassinations are carried out through the intellect and by the tongue. Sassoon is not equipped for it, reverts to expectations and ruins both his life and the lives of his family.
Melancholy and despair set the film apart, a sadness permeates the slow action. We sense through Capaldi’s tetchy and argumentative display that the poet suffered undiagnosed post traumatic stress throughout his later life, unable and unwilling to communicate on a balanced level. This imbalance has affected his son, who is short-tempered and rude, and his obedient, stifled wife, who has become a hushed mouse when she was a joyful shrew. His lovers treat him badly, the best of them abandon him in the same way of the worst. I wondered if it was deliberate that they all look the same, in the way Clive Candy’s do in Colonel Blimp, to emphasise Sassoon’s idealism.
Jack Lowdon’s performance is very good, he pulls at our sympathies. So too is Capaldi, and they have solid support from a mostly stationary cast. There is a true subplot about his conversion to Roman Catholicism which isn’t exploited nearly enough, for Davies prefers the physical over spiritual. Benediction’s problems, if it has any, and there is an argument it doesn’t, comes from the director’s fixed camera points. Davies’s theatrical, closed cinematic style is very much an acquired taste. The Godfather, which I watched the other night, has an equally ‘framed’ look, but Coppola allows his actors and cameras to move through the paintings while Davies’s stay almost motionless. This certainly allows the words to gather importance, but it restricts the flow of the story, which at times becomes slow and awkward.
A very good film, where the simple just about outweighs the difficult, but I say this with some reservations. The poetry was excellent which helps immeasurably.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,316MI6 Agent
That is a creepy film, all the moreso as it's a true story and as it was filmed in the same house that the actual crimes took place, just before the row of houses were demolished. I'll never forget the first time I heard of John Reginald Christie back in 2007 when our rather eccentric Law lecturer did a "story time" segment where he sat down and read from a book he'd written on famous criminal cases. When he got to the bit about Christie having a bald head and spectacles he touched his own bald head and spectacles to great laughs from the lecture theatre. He was a great guy. I recall his line about Christie's back yard at 10 Rlilington Place having "more of a cemetery than a garden." A good line. It's a tragic film and case too as Timothy Evans was hanged for a crime he didn't commit. Miscarriages of justice like that, more than anything else, led to the eventual abolition of the death penalty in the UK in 1965.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
The Destination Moon rocket is based on the V2. So was the rocket ship in Herge's Tintin adventures Destination Moon (!) and Explorers on the Moon. I think the movie won an Academy Award for its special effects.
@CoolHandBond Maybe I could do a Tintin Review series ! I am always up for annoying members with my contrary opinions 😁 I loved Tintin as a kid / early adolescent but he was superceded by Bond ! No surprises there...
A crew of Merchant Navy sailors, adrift in a lifeboat in the Atlantic Ocean, succeed in sending out a Morse code to a shipping vessel, which comes to their rescue.
Unfortunately for them, a U-boat lurking in the area, also detects the signal and now lies in wait for an ambush.
A very impressive docu-fiction movie, filmed in brilliant technicolor.
Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, a homage to the Hollywood musicals of the 1950s, will forever be remembered as the Oscar Winner That Never Was. Having garnered a clutch of lesser statuettes, Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the Best Picture winner; only to have the Academy organisers bundle onstage a couple of minutes later while congratulatory speeches were being said and hand Ms Dunaway a different card – she had been given the incorrect envelope. Moonlight was belatedly announced as the 2016 winner.
Now, I’ve seen Moonlight and I don’t like it. An insufferable film of stereotypes that fails to explain itself or its characters. I’ve seen La La Land three times and find it a joyful and somewhat enigmatic movie, packed full of the stereotypes you would expect to see in a 1950s Hollywood musical, which is exactly the point. Moonlight, for all its social intent, never makes a point, unless its to tell us gay love can happen anywhere and between anybody, and we kind of knew that. What makes La La Land so annoyingly successful is that it does everything you expect it to. There are no surprises. There are no tears. There are no revelations. Best of all are the smiles. Do we care about the grim faced gangsta bro in Moonlight? Not much. Do we care about the starstruck lovers in La La Land? Not a lot. But at least they keep us happy and entertained.
There was some backlash against La La Land in the run up to Oscar week, that it failed to address black careers in the movie and music industry and was implying only white people could have these aspirations and successes. Those commentators miss the fact John Legend plays a forward thinking jazz musician who switches the romantic jazz traditionalist Seb onto soul and jazz funk music because, as he so succinctly puts it: “Those guys are in the past. Jazz is always about the future.” So, yes, Seb is white, but he completely misunderstands the nowness of jazz music, constantly harking back to an era gone, including a famous cocktail club long closed which he wants to reopen with the unfathomably stupid name of Chicken Shack. There is no way Seb can be interpreted as a ‘white saviour of black jazz’ as critics claim.
Similarly, Mia [and Seb] are both white because that replicates the fantasy world of the 1950s musical which is where the film takes place, even if it is nominally set in contemporary Los Angeles the film is realised as if it was the 1950s, all pastel colours, long skirts, trim suits, convertibles, dancing on cars, in parks, and in a long extended ballet sequence. Chazelle steals from the best of them [Singing in the Rain, a lot] and makes the film both familiarly attractive and refreshingly original.
Okay, it would be nice to have a more porous narrative, but the charm of those old movies was in their repetitive nature. Chazelle is clever enough to offer us a sweetly bitter ending, as five-years on from her twelve month affair with Seb, Mia reflects on what might have been, before the final notes of City of Stars draw her back to reality and the silence of the jazz club, the same moment the two mismatched lovers met. In between start and finish we have a whirl of song and dance and romance, with Emma Stone perky and delightful as wannabe actress and fulltime barista Mia and Ryan Gosling stroppy, pushy and dislikeable as jazz piano maestro Seb. They really shouldn’t get on and despite the best of Gene Kelly / Debbie Reynolds impersonations, they kind of never do. We like the nostalgic romance, expect the confusion and smile at the tentative desires. Best of all, we like the look of it all.
What we don’t like, and this is the film’s major undercutting problem, is the singing and dancing. Chazelle suggested he wanted actors unknown for singing and dancing to emphasise the fantasy quality of the genuine romance. That’s nonsense. To emphasise the fantasy you need consummate performers who can take you into that dreamy world of love. Several times I kept thinking how much better Astaire and Rogers would perform the dancing, or Sinatra and Doris Day the singing. It would have taken very little to get Christina Aguilera or someone like her to drop into the role or Mia; maybe our own Billie Piper; Ariana Grande would have been a good fit at the time, the right age too. Justin Timberlake for Seb. Instead we get weak singing and easily choreographed dance numbers that look worse than stuff we see on Strictly. It’s a crime against musicals to not put professional sing and dance actors in your movie and if La La Land should be docked a Best Picture Oscar, it should be for that, not for any slight to the ethnic artistic community.
So why do I enjoy it?
I can’t tell you that exactly. I just do. Perhaps, at a push, it is because La La Land is a happy film which draws us into the dreams and nightmares of Hollywood – the la la of the title – and allows us to escape Scot free, which was what many of those classic musicals did. I rather like that conceit and sometimes I wish moviemakers would lighten up a little and take us on those pleasant untroublesome journeys again. So, I guess I ought to thank Damien Chazelle, bad casting aside, for providing a reminder that movies, and by extension life, is sometimes joyful, colourful and eventually fulfilling.
Directed by Fred M. Wilcox, Forbidden Planet is an American science-fiction film starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis and Leslie Nielson.
The United Planets star ship C-57D, after a year's journey arrives on the planet Altair IV, to investigate the whereabouts of the space ship Bellerophon, which was sent to the planet 20 years back.
Here they discover Dr. Morbius, living alone on the planet with his daughter Altaira and his personal robot, Robby. Morbius informs the commander of the ship, John Adams about a scientifically advanced civilization, the Krell, who mysteriously vanished from the planet 200,000 years back.
Dr. Morbius also shows the team various technologies developed by the ancient civilization, but there is something on this planet that the professor remains very apprehensive about. An entity that lies beyond comprehension...
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An absolute gem of a science-fiction film, with a thought provoking story and commendable special effects.
If you are a fan of Richard Bachman / Stephen King, park the literary version of The Running Man on the library shelf and try to forget this dystopian sci-fi gore fest was based on a book at all. As I understand it, if you want that, go and see Edgar Wright’s remake which is in cinemas now. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Ben Richards a police officer framed for mass murder who is given an opportunity to redeem himself by taking part in a televised game show called The Running Man. Richards has to evade a series of ‘stalkers’ who are armed to the teeth and hell bent on assassinating him. The odds are not in Richards favour. Oh. Except he is Arnold Schwarznegger. Cue violence a plenty, macabre humour and a hefty dose of social comment. Curious casting – people like Jim Brown, Mick Fleetwood and real-life gameshow host Richard Dawson crop up – keep us alert. Paul Michael Galser, he of Starsky and Hutch fame, directs with some aplomb. It’s a hoot. With blood and violence. Don’t take it too seriously. One of the better Arnie films of the eighties.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,316MI6 Agent
This bit always stuck in my head as particularly funny and a good scene to show the duplicitous nature of the host. Richard Dawson was great as the villain in this film. A nice guy in real life.
An impressively mounted, phenomenally convoluted and ultimately depressing sci-fi would-be epic about Humankind vs A.I. It’s a pity the filmmakers didn’t think the idea through as the premise of a world splintered into A.I. and non-A.I. makes good prophetic sense. Nothing here seems to make any sense at all.
Many of us remember the Schwartzenegger version of this story from the 1980s, and it was very "Arnified". The new movie is from what I understand much closer to Stephen King's book. We see a society with a poor majority and a small number of the extremely rich, a large degree of power over government and society by multi-national companies and violent entertainment fueling hatred. Thank God this is sci-fi and not from what we see on the news! 😉
Ben Richards (Glen Powell) has a wife and a small child, and he's very poor. He has ange issues and often stands up for other workers, so he gets black-listed for most jobs. When his child gets sick he goes for trials on TV for reality TV competitions, desperate to get money. He gets chosen for The Running Man, a "show" where contestants who can stay on the run and survive for 30 days wins an enormous prize. They get hunted by five professional hunters, drones and members of the public who do it for cash payment. Unlike in the Schwartzenegger movie the hunt happens around the country and not just in a TV studio.
The modern movie is directed by Edgard Wright, and he's a very good action director. The action is kinetic, inventive and very entertaining. Some of his signature has been toned down, such as the humor, lots of song songs on the soundtrack and a hyper-active camera. This is a smart move for this movie. If he tones those aspects of his style even more I think he could make a very good James Bond movie. Glen Powell is very much a star on screen and I want to see more of him as a leading man.
While there absolutely is satire and sly comments about some aspects of where society is heading (especially in "some parts of the world") I wonder if the movie should've gone further in that direction. sometimes we clearly see the satire, but other times The running Man is pure popcorn. The story would still be a thriller/action movie, but maybe the would be more consistent in tone and have more bite if it was more satirical. I don't know. What I do know is that it's a very good action movie.
I watched two Netflix films, A House of Dynamite and Carry On. Dynamite is good but somehow not as gripping as I expected, and the format of repeating the same 18 minutes but from different peoples' perspectives should be good, but somehow you don't learn much more when you get the new viewpoints; and although I know the idea is to ask questions and shock the audience about the real-world situation more, the ending still comes as rather frustrating. Good but somehow doesn't linger in the memory as much as a film with this subject matter should.
Carry On we just watched as a bit of Friday night nonsense: it's a thriller from last year about Taron Edgerton's LAX customs official forced to look the other way under duress as something sinister gets smuggled onto a plane. Perfectly competently done, nothing really wrong with it and I'm sure plenty of folks enjoyed it as a result, but felt a bit like a waste of time somehow afterwards. Does what you expect but nothing more; just watch Die Hard 2 again instead.
Oh and it's another entry in the list of recent films which have a flashy fight scene done all in one shot (using CG) whilst an incongruous pop song plays in the background. This time it's Last Christmas by Wham. I don't need to see this idea again, I think the last time I saw it was in Gunn's Superman, Gunn's done it in other films before (maybe every Guardians of the Galaxy?), I feel like other Marvels have done it too, it's just not as clever as they think it is. Thinking of Running Man, Edgar Wright might even have started that with the Don't Stop Me Now sequence in Shaun.
A dreadful spin off from a dreadful TV sitcom about a useless teacher and the worst class at a comprehensive school. John Alderton is bewildered as the teacher, Mr Hedges, and all his pupils are played by overage actors and actresses which makes the whole scenario appear oddly perverse, as if everyone is playing at being children doing naughty [read, sexy] things. The best turn is by Joan Sanderson as a school governess. To be brutal, I thought it was rubbish, even worse than the TV show. It was extremely popular at the box office, but they didn’t have much taste in the early seventies, or maybe not much choice. Unbelievably this garbage was written by the same team who later wrote The Good Life.
I was at a school just like this 😂 we were always matching up the real life pupils and teachers to the on screen characters! Yes, it is a dreadful movie, the TV series wasn’t that bad though, in my dim and distant memory.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Director John Schlesinger and writer Frederic Raphael had just had a huge hit with Darling starring Julie Christie. She had also played Lara in David Lean’s gorgeously romantic Russian Revolution epic Dr Zhivago, so both modern and period heroines seemed to fit Miss Christie, but sadly she doesn’t seem a good fit for Bathsheba Everdene, the wilfully independent but vain and indulgent heroine of Thomas Hardy’s best loved novel Far From The Madding Crowd. Raphael’s screen play doesn’t help much, misdirecting the characterisations of Sgt Troy, William Boldwood and Gariel Oak, so all Bathsheba’s suitors are oddly unlikeable. Troy isn’t supposed to be, but you don’t accept his love for Bathsheba or for Fanny Robbin as the script and Terence Stamp’s awkward and unsympathetic playing make him distinctly one-dimensional. Alan Bates as Gabriel, the steadfast hero shepherd is a bore; Bates doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself at all, so neither does the character. Peter Finch comes off best as Boldwood, the obsessive rich farmer, but most of his good work is done in mime. Christie herself struggles against a screenplay which hacks about with her character and despite being almost three hours in length never gives the impression Bathsheba is capable or loveable. Beautiful she may be, but she does not endear herself to any man. Hardy, as writer, cleverly made his heroine both desirable and feckless, but Christie seems caught in two minds and comes across as merely confused. It doesn’t help matters that they darkened her blonde hair into what looks like slate grey, so this Bathsheba just looks old before her years.
The story drags itself along at a snail’s pace. There is some lovely rural detail and many traditional Victorian elements are included which lend authenticity to the thing, but that also means it’s a less attractive viewing. The rain and mud slopped winter is grim; the scrubby, scrappy looking farming classes are a distinctly unsightly lot; even when the summer comes Nicholas Roeg seems to daub his camera lenses in dark shades. Some familiar locations [Maiden Castle, Durdle Door, Clovelly, etc] mark the film in the West Country, and you can’t fault the rundown look of the production design, but Schlesinger doesn’t have the pulse of the story even if he understands the place, it simply isn’t intense enough. Like Christie, he seems caught in more than one mind. For instance, midway Bathsheba is shown tossing corn seed in slow motion, a modern cinematic touch which is noticeably out of touch. Similarly, the sword seduction scene is marred by Sgt Troy seeming to not be simply practicing his swordsmanship, but enacting some strange battle; as Terence Stamp charges up and down Maiden Castle with his daggers out like he’s escaped from an episode of The Monkees, you’re inclined to chuckle. Oddly, this misstep of passion gives way to one of the movie’s better moments: as the couple embrace and kiss, the clouds roll over the sun bathing them in dark shadow; this romance is not going to end well… Later, the storm scene – central to Gabriel and Bathsheba’s eventual emotional connection – is a wet wash out, barely raising an iota of tension.
The problem Schlesinger has is that what was good about the novel – all that attention to rural detail, tradition and a suspenseful build to the story’s inevitable climax – slows down the film. Far From The Madding Crowd is an okay romantic drama, but okay doesn’t quite cut it when you’re dealing with one of the great Victorian novels.
After the brave, well-intentioned misstep of Schlesinger’s sixties version of Far From The Madding Crowd, the cinema seemed to run scared of Thomas Hardy, unsure perhaps of how to translate his rural, almost idyllic prose into box office delight. The BBC pumped out a few Wessex bound serials; Polanski had a stab at Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure got rough treatment; but basically, unlike Dickens and Austen who are constantly reinvented for cinematic consumption, Hardy’s prose has remained virtually untouched. So it is something of a surprise to see Danish film director Thomas Vinterberg giving Far From The Madding Crowd a twenty-first century makeover. To be fair, he doesn’t change very much. Despite shaving a good hour off the runtime, most of the best or important scenes and dialogue remain in some form or other, so I wouldn’t discount out of hand the screen adaptation. The fault in this production lies elsewhere. Casting mainly.
At least Carey Mulligan is dark haired, as Bathsheba Everdene is in Hardy’s novel. The rest of the cast, well, less said. The four leads all seem rather modern for a period drama and seem unable, or unwilling, to enter the spirit of the era. Too much feels too modern, hence there is no sense of time and place. Vinterberg omits some of the traditional rural elements Schlesinger retained for his 1960s version, so we seem to be watching a modern retelling of the tale in period dress. Emotions run too swift and switch too fast for Hardy’s stately prose; this is Victorian drama for the twenty-first century. The novel has a leisurely pace, which packs a lot of punch over its few years of narrative gestation. This film version lacks all of that.
The photography is decent; costumes too; all the technical attributes are fine. The real issue stems from the sword taken to original novel, cut to the bone and leaving little room for nuances. Still, it is a bold reworking of the story and the plight of poor Fanny Robbin always gets one emotional. Nice music from Craig Armstrong.
A box office hit, somehow, but a flawed reinterpretation of the 1933 stop-motion classic. Producer Dino di Laurentiis tried hard to make his King Kong a prestige production, but it lacks everything to make it one. A good, but blunt, director in John Guillerman doesn’t help matters. Jessica Lange is horribly miscast and plays the screaming heroine with all the artifice of a Marilyn Monroe imposter. Jeff Bridges, who can occasionally act well, is just shameful; so too Charles Grodin. The early character establishing scenes on board an oil exploration ship are some of the worst acted, written and directed I think I have ever seen in a mainstream movie. Everyone should be ashamed. I rolled my eyes and started dealing with a pile of ironing when the giant gorilla turns up – and turns out to be mostly played by a man in a monkey suit. Just rubbish. Unbelievably, the movie won a special award for its visual effects [why? I ask, when the main visual effect is so obviously a trick they can pull off better with circus clowns?].
I don’t know what to say about this monster movie which bundles along without any steering, crashing into problems left and centre. The pace is slow. The action badly conceived. Acting over the top from everyone, and I mean everyone, even the bloody gorilla. The makers of the original King Kong must be howling with indignation in their graves. Describing this King Kong as ‘terrible’ probably over sells it.
There is a decent music score from John Barry which feels out of place by being so good amongst so much trash. Other than that, I hated it.
Comments
Funny how The Martian seems to be the same premise decades later but without the slightly on-the-nose title!
@emtiem Indeed.
Byron Haskin also directed another good science fiction film called 'Conquest of Space' in 1955.
A film that served as an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick.
Crikey, I don't remember it going that good, they really talk up the Conquest of Space ! "This will happen before the year 2000 - Witness it now" or something. I think the trailer is better than the film.
@chrisno1
I find the film very unique, from a technical point of view.
Byron Haskin and his team got a lot of things right and this was back in 1955, when people had very limited concepts of zero G environments.
The first American Extra Vehicular Activity EVA actually happened in 1965 by Ed White, which was a full ten years after this film came out.
The film very accurately showed EVA's and many other realistic things like:
They even showed a flat screen television in the film.
And video chat...
Add in other things like accurate depictions of human bodies floating in zero gravity, even the effects of high G loads on human faces.
And last but not least...its influence on Stanley Kubrick, especially the 'Blue Danube Waltz' scene.
According to Wikipedia:
A 1955 film, George Pal’s Conquest of Space, provided Kubrick with a sense of direction in his . . . pursuit of this imagery. [For example,] in Pal’s film there is [the center-piece] rotating wheel or earth station that Kubrick adapts to 2001, and he creates a poetic image of it floating and rotating in space . . . .” The goal of this exercise of viewing dozens of earlier science-fiction movies had little to do with plot elements; Kubrick simply ignored Conquest of Space's highly-criticized story line and character development and instead focused on the film's remarkable design.
Furthermore, the genre film authority Roy Kinnard also suggests strongly in his 1979 Fantastic Films article, “Conquest of Space: A New Look at an Old Classic”, that the visually arousing design of Kubrick’s 2001 was influenced by Conquest of Space. He says, “...the most interesting aspect of Conquest [is] its startling parallels with Stanley Kubrick’s epic 1968 production. It is a well-known fact that before he began work on 2001, Kubrick watched virtually every science fiction film ever made, and it is not unreasonable to assume that he not only saw Conquest, but also found quite a bit of inspiration in it.” Then Kinnard points out a number of similarities between the two films (illustrated with photo stills from the movies)—some obvious and others not so obvious. For example, the same space station wheel in both pictures noted by Roman (above) as well as a number of set pieces.
Wow, well thanks for that info @Sonero maybe I'll avoid pithy comments in future. I feel rightly told off. Honestly though, I wasn't dismissing the SFX, or the movie's influence, I just have a memory that it wasn't very well made - but its been 40 years or so since I saw it! Memory plays tricks 😏
Ah well, on with the show:
THE GODFATHER (1972)
The Godfather was not the first gangster movie; there were many great and exciting films of the genre in the 1930s, when the era of bootleg booze and those who exploited the law was still fresh in the memory. What there wasn’t in the thirties, nor subsequent decades, was a film that veered away from the individual, the Cagney, Bogart, Raft figure, battling authority and getting a comeuppance or a redemption. What Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel and Francis Ford Copolla’s adaptation provides is an expanding cultural world for their main character[s] to inhabit. Don Vito Corleone and his sons Sonny, Fredo, Michael and the adopted Tom are all part of a Sicilian Mafia family whose interests extend into gambling, illicit goods, politics and prostitution, but whose roots come shrouded in the civility of servitude, of trust, of honour and respect to the powerful men of Italian immigrant society, the Godfathers or Capos. They have built empires founded on these four pillars and to relinquish them would be to surrender a part of their lives as dear to them as the soil of Sicily, a land they left behind to seek better lives. The Corleone’s enshrine these values, as we recognise from the extended wedding scenes where favours are granted, peace is maintained and union celebrated.
Fundamental to the movie, more than anything, is the concept of the wider criminal ‘Family’ and of its honour code: to be endowed with honour and to offer it in return. This is encapsulated by the film’s opening exchange which begins in total darkness and fades into the snivelling face of the undertaker Bonasera who relates his tale of woe to the watchful, almost doleful Capo, Don Corleone.
‘I believe in America,’ says Bonasera. ‘America has made my fortune. And I raised my daughter in the American fashion. I gave her freedom but I taught her never to dishonour her family. She found a ‘boyfriend,’ not an Italian. She went to the movies with him. She stayed out late. I didn’t protest. Two months ago he took her for a drive, with another boyfriend. They made her drink whiskey and then they tried to take advantage of her. She resisted. She kept her honour. So they beat her. Like an animal. When I went to the hospital her nose was broken. Her jaw was shattered, held together by wire. She couldn't even weep because of the pain. But I wept. Why did I weep? She was the light of my life. A beautiful girl. Now she will never be beautiful again… I went to the police, like a good American. These two boys were brought to trial. The judge sentenced them to three years in prison, and suspended the sentence. Suspended sentence! They went free that very day! I stood in the courtroom like a fool, and those two bastards, they smiled at me. Then I said to my wife, ‘For justice, we must go to Don Corleone’.’
But the Don has no time for this latter day fawning:
‘Why did you go to the police? Why didn’t you come to me first?... We have known each other many years, but this is the first time you’ve come to me for counsel or for help. I can’t remember the last time you invited me to your house for a cup of coffee, even though my wife is godmother to your only child. But let’s be frank here. You never wanted my friendship. And you feared to be in my debt… Bonasera, what have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you’d come to me in friendship, this scum who ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day. And if by some chance an honest man like yourself made enemies they would become my enemies.’
The idea that family is above the law, that honouring one family will allow another to be treated with respect thus creating a spider’s web of interconnecting communities who support and benefit each other, had never been presented effectively on screen, at least not in such stark and detailed discourse. The film which unfolds following this relatively minor scene, stresses the importance of the conceit, one that is initially not shared by the youngest son Michael, who wants nothing more than to settle down with his American girlfriend, schoolteacher Kay Adams.
It is not lost on the keen observer that Kay’s profession is the same as the one so many wild west heroines inhabit, as if the schoolteacher is a desirable profession for the wife of career killers. Intelligence and beauty goes with the territory too, but it is the position of respect a teacher holds in the communities both of the old west and the ruggedness of Sicily that surely pulls at Michael’s heart. As the film progresses and he regresses to the black gangster soul of his father and his father’s associates – like the hulking Luca Brasi, the conniving Tressio or the corpulent Clemenza – Michael morphs into a 1945 version of the black hatted ruthless gunslinger who lusts after the naive, chaste school ma’am. He even wears a black hat for goodness sake!
Gangster movies are not westerns, of course. They miss the pull of the mythic, are too steeped in the American reality of the street. Coppola and Puzo certainly attempt to create a mythology around their characters though, most notably Marlon Brando’s stately, wheezy, aging Don Corleone, a man who has had enough of fighting and killing, who wants better for his sons, yet has sired three men who all reflect aspects of himself: the impetuous, violent Sonny, who takes any slight personally; the friendly and loveable Fredo, who extols the Don’s weaker, kindly virtues; and the scheming, sedate and ruthless Michael. Even his adopted son, Tom, shares his love of tact and ingratiating wordplay. Don Corleone is not wedded to his sword, or his revolver as it were, even if he almost dies by it. He fights his battles insightfully, watching and waiting like a grand poker player, his perception of others being the ace to his winning hand. Late on in the film, Don Corleone dictates to a hood’s council and all the while you sense how his mind is working, or rather how Brando intends the Don’s mind to work, with shifting eyes, small gestures, cracked vowels; not once does he look directly at the man who he realises is the root of his problems: Barzini, a rival of equal manipulative skill but given to extravagant statements and gestures. To do more than the minimum would reveal Vito Corleone’s own knowledge and threaten his survival. Brando’s method acting tricks – and it is a truly great performance – allow us as an audience to witness the personal austerity of a tired, watchful, yet dying man.
The inspiration for this quietude stems from a scene a little later in the movie and a short reprimand Don Corleone gives to his eldest son and prospective heir Sonny. Don Corleone has rejected Sollozzo’s offer to share the spoils of a prospective narcotics business, but during the good-tempered haggling, Sonny interjects in the negotiations, by doing so betraying knowledge that the family is split over the potential deal. Once business is concluded and the deal politely declined, Don Corleone berates his son: ‘What’s the matter with you? I think your brain is going soft with all that comedy you’re playing with that young girl. Never tell anyone outside the Family what you are thinking again.’ Brando must surely have read this line and latched onto it as the core principle of Don Corleone’s nature for his whole performance, other than moments of gentleness with daughters and grandchildren, exhibits this belief. Later on, in discussion with Micheal, he reflects: ‘I hope you don’t mind the way I keep going over this Barzini business... It’s an old habit. I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.’ A lesson, sadly, his eldest son did not learn.
Another intriguing personality trait, one that possibly harkens back to Puzo’s original novel [I have not read it, so I am making an assumption] is how character mannerisms pass through the generations, either through innate instinct or from mimicry. As Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone allows himself to be dragged gradually into the Mafia existence, taking small but passionate steps up the ladder to the role of de facto Capo, he begins to take on some of Brando’s motions, gestures and figures of speech. Most memorable is the line ‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse’ but more profound is a scene in Las Vegas, where the Jewish gangster Moe Greene is being bought out against his will. Fredo Corleone is present at the meeting, having been sidelined to nominally protect the family assets in the gambling capital; he vocally disagrees with his younger brother’s intentions. Once alone, Michael berates Fredo with the line: ‘Fredo, you’re my older brother, and I love you. But don’t ever take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever.’ This line paraphrases Brando’s earlier tirade at Sonny and is all the more startling because Michael was not present at the earlier narcotics meeting. Fredo however was, and the ever excellent John Cazale offers a bluntly gaunt expression of fathomable recognition, just by lowering his gaze and shuffling back a step or two. So we too recognise the fear he suddenly feels as his young sibling becomes the living ghost of his father.
There is of course a whole raft of scenes which could be discussed in depth to expound how good a film The Godfather is, but for me it is always the scenes of close knit family interaction, where the characters band of trust and honour is constantly put to the test, sometimes fractured, rarely repaired, frequently over a meal or a grappa. Yes, there is some action, but it is understated; basically the violence comes as a series of well-presented bloody assassinations. Yes, there are arguments, political, criminal and domestic intrigues, sub-plots which may or may not be significant, and there is betrayal and there is honour and dishonour. There is also a wonderfully low key, evocative music score from Nino Rota. There is gloomy, moody cinematography from Gordon Willis, a touch of shadowy noir and a hint of chiaroscuro, as if the original Mafia man Caravaggio painted the filmic episodes. There is a mid-film sunburnt sojourn to Sicily where Michael falls in love with a local beauty. There are a series of excellent support performances from James Caan, John Cazale, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Talia Shire, Richard Conte, Al Lettieri, Richard S. Castellano, Sterling Hayden, Lenny Montana, even singer Al Martino, big and small parts alike. There is that wonderful and powerful script. There is Francis Ford Copolla’s bravura direction, framing each shot as if it really was a painting or a photograph, be it a funeral, a busy breakfast table, a wedding banquet, a murder, a walk in the Italian mountains; the attention to detail, the placement of people, the soundscape they inhabit and the colour they bring is extraordinary – look at the vivid moment Sonny beats up his brother-in-law in the street, shot as if through the watchful eyes and ears of one of the kids playing by the gushing fire hydrant, or the poorly dustily coloured wedding party in Sicily, neatly juxtaposing with the movie’s earlier garishly clean New York nuptials. There is superb editing, controlled, vibrant, effortless, as if magic is occurring on top of magic. The set décor and construction, costumes and incidentals are fully redolent of the 1940s. The pacing, which can often kill a ‘family saga’ film is spot on; in fact some of the jumps forward in time take a few minutes comprehend.
There is too the final series of scenes as all Michael’s enemies are wiped out in a pre-planned murder spree, each killing cross cut with close ups of his nephew’s baptism. ‘Do you renounce evil?’ asks the priest. ‘I renounce evil,’ replies Michael and like his father he too now knows all about honour, truth and servitude – it does not come from the church or from god, it is man’s labours on earth that matter. At the finale, Diane Keaton’s Kay witnesses the caporegime kissing her husband’s hand as if he was the Pope, God’s primate on earth, and suddenly she too knows where real Family power lies. The door closes on her in the same manner it opened for Bonasera two hours and fifty-five minutes ago.
The Godfather was wildly successful on release, but wasn’t heaped with resounding critical praise. Some commentators disliked it. A few years on it was compared unfavourably [incorrectly in my opinion] to its monumental sequel, a film that merely repeats what we already saw but includes a flashback sequence to Vito Corleone’s youth; the flashbacks are great, the rest is ho-hum [IMO]. The less said about Volume 3 the wiser. Al Pacino bestrides all three movies. He was oddly Oscar nominated here as only a supporting actor, when he is clearly the lead, above even Brando, who deservedly received [and declined] a second winner’s statue. The movie remains highly influential upon the cinema’s portrayal of gangsters and the gangster world and it is perhaps that legacy for which we must rightly praise and condemn, for fifty years on most gangster ‘families’ feel very Godfather-identikit.
One of the outstanding movies of its decade.
@chrisno1 Thank you for the excellent review on The Godfather.
I recently saw 'Destination Moon', a 1950 science fiction film, produced by George Pal, who also made 'When Worlds Collide' and 'The War of the Worlds'.
Now here is a story of four individuals who fly an experimental rocket ship to the Moon. This is 19 years before Armstrong planted his foot on lunar soil.
I was taken back by the amount of detail put into the film.
Another very unique science fiction film.
There's a free stream of 10 Rillington Place on YouTube.
I'm enjoying the acting in it, but it's a very creepy film.
" I don't listen to hip hop!"
Yeah, YouTube (officially) has a not-bad lineup of free movies to watch, it's worth a flick through:
BENEDICTION (2021)
Liverpudlian Terence Davies is considered by many ‘in the know’ as one of the great British filmmakers of the last twenty five years. The jury is still out on that, I feel. For me, Davies’s films share common faults of lethargic pacing and static cameras. There are no surprises in a Davies film. He presents, for want of a better expression, staged movies, meticulous in composition but aching for a breath of dissent.
Benediction is his final film and it is a worthy eulogy to his career, a film about a poet struggling for acceptance and recognition by the wider masses, lionised by appreciative but unwelcoming peers and, as a gay man between the war years, leading a life at odds with the norm. Jack Lowdon is brilliant as the intelligent, forthright and self-misguided Siegried Sassoon. Sassoon was a poet, a war hero and eventually a conscientious objector. His talent was enormous. He was never appreciated fully in his lifetime, thrown on the heap of Wilfred Owen impersonators and disciples of Auden’s Thirties Political Poets. He’s better than that in literary terms, and you sense the anger and frustration in Peter Capaldi’s older Sassoon of the 1950s, a man who chose eventually to conform yet found no joy or success in societal acceptance. Sassoon’s poems bridge sections of the film, drawing us through the agonies of the trenches, the long road to physical recovery and the ignorance of the elite. Film footage and still photographs – some of Sassoon himself – accompany much of these verses and emphasise the horror Sassoon battles on a daily basis. Surrounding himself with a cabal of gay men, most of whom, like the theatrical cad Ivor Novello, never even picked up a rifle, Sassoon finds that true camaraderie only existed in those bullet ridden killing grounds – in the suffocating world of arts and artists assassinations are carried out through the intellect and by the tongue. Sassoon is not equipped for it, reverts to expectations and ruins both his life and the lives of his family.
Melancholy and despair set the film apart, a sadness permeates the slow action. We sense through Capaldi’s tetchy and argumentative display that the poet suffered undiagnosed post traumatic stress throughout his later life, unable and unwilling to communicate on a balanced level. This imbalance has affected his son, who is short-tempered and rude, and his obedient, stifled wife, who has become a hushed mouse when she was a joyful shrew. His lovers treat him badly, the best of them abandon him in the same way of the worst. I wondered if it was deliberate that they all look the same, in the way Clive Candy’s do in Colonel Blimp, to emphasise Sassoon’s idealism.
Jack Lowdon’s performance is very good, he pulls at our sympathies. So too is Capaldi, and they have solid support from a mostly stationary cast. There is a true subplot about his conversion to Roman Catholicism which isn’t exploited nearly enough, for Davies prefers the physical over spiritual. Benediction’s problems, if it has any, and there is an argument it doesn’t, comes from the director’s fixed camera points. Davies’s theatrical, closed cinematic style is very much an acquired taste. The Godfather, which I watched the other night, has an equally ‘framed’ look, but Coppola allows his actors and cameras to move through the paintings while Davies’s stay almost motionless. This certainly allows the words to gather importance, but it restricts the flow of the story, which at times becomes slow and awkward.
A very good film, where the simple just about outweighs the difficult, but I say this with some reservations. The poetry was excellent which helps immeasurably.
That is a creepy film, all the moreso as it's a true story and as it was filmed in the same house that the actual crimes took place, just before the row of houses were demolished. I'll never forget the first time I heard of John Reginald Christie back in 2007 when our rather eccentric Law lecturer did a "story time" segment where he sat down and read from a book he'd written on famous criminal cases. When he got to the bit about Christie having a bald head and spectacles he touched his own bald head and spectacles to great laughs from the lecture theatre. He was a great guy. I recall his line about Christie's back yard at 10 Rlilington Place having "more of a cemetery than a garden." A good line. It's a tragic film and case too as Timothy Evans was hanged for a crime he didn't commit. Miscarriages of justice like that, more than anything else, led to the eventual abolition of the death penalty in the UK in 1965.
The Destination Moon rocket is based on the V2. So was the rocket ship in Herge's Tintin adventures Destination Moon (!) and Explorers on the Moon. I think the movie won an Academy Award for its special effects.
Tintin - now you’re talking! @chrisno1 😁
@CoolHandBond Maybe I could do a Tintin Review series ! I am always up for annoying members with my contrary opinions 😁 I loved Tintin as a kid / early adolescent but he was superceded by Bond ! No surprises there...
Sir Hugo Drax's 'Moonraker' was also based on the V2.
Fantastic novel.
I’m all for a Tintin review thread @chrisno1 and reading contrary opinions is part of the fun.
WESTERN APPROACHES (1944)
A crew of Merchant Navy sailors, adrift in a lifeboat in the Atlantic Ocean, succeed in sending out a Morse code to a shipping vessel, which comes to their rescue.
Unfortunately for them, a U-boat lurking in the area, also detects the signal and now lies in wait for an ambush.
A very impressive docu-fiction movie, filmed in brilliant technicolor.
Recommended.
(83 minutes - Directed by Pat Jackson)
LA LA LAND (2016)
Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, a homage to the Hollywood musicals of the 1950s, will forever be remembered as the Oscar Winner That Never Was. Having garnered a clutch of lesser statuettes, Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the Best Picture winner; only to have the Academy organisers bundle onstage a couple of minutes later while congratulatory speeches were being said and hand Ms Dunaway a different card – she had been given the incorrect envelope. Moonlight was belatedly announced as the 2016 winner.
Now, I’ve seen Moonlight and I don’t like it. An insufferable film of stereotypes that fails to explain itself or its characters. I’ve seen La La Land three times and find it a joyful and somewhat enigmatic movie, packed full of the stereotypes you would expect to see in a 1950s Hollywood musical, which is exactly the point. Moonlight, for all its social intent, never makes a point, unless its to tell us gay love can happen anywhere and between anybody, and we kind of knew that. What makes La La Land so annoyingly successful is that it does everything you expect it to. There are no surprises. There are no tears. There are no revelations. Best of all are the smiles. Do we care about the grim faced gangsta bro in Moonlight? Not much. Do we care about the starstruck lovers in La La Land? Not a lot. But at least they keep us happy and entertained.
There was some backlash against La La Land in the run up to Oscar week, that it failed to address black careers in the movie and music industry and was implying only white people could have these aspirations and successes. Those commentators miss the fact John Legend plays a forward thinking jazz musician who switches the romantic jazz traditionalist Seb onto soul and jazz funk music because, as he so succinctly puts it: “Those guys are in the past. Jazz is always about the future.” So, yes, Seb is white, but he completely misunderstands the nowness of jazz music, constantly harking back to an era gone, including a famous cocktail club long closed which he wants to reopen with the unfathomably stupid name of Chicken Shack. There is no way Seb can be interpreted as a ‘white saviour of black jazz’ as critics claim.
Similarly, Mia [and Seb] are both white because that replicates the fantasy world of the 1950s musical which is where the film takes place, even if it is nominally set in contemporary Los Angeles the film is realised as if it was the 1950s, all pastel colours, long skirts, trim suits, convertibles, dancing on cars, in parks, and in a long extended ballet sequence. Chazelle steals from the best of them [Singing in the Rain, a lot] and makes the film both familiarly attractive and refreshingly original.
Okay, it would be nice to have a more porous narrative, but the charm of those old movies was in their repetitive nature. Chazelle is clever enough to offer us a sweetly bitter ending, as five-years on from her twelve month affair with Seb, Mia reflects on what might have been, before the final notes of City of Stars draw her back to reality and the silence of the jazz club, the same moment the two mismatched lovers met. In between start and finish we have a whirl of song and dance and romance, with Emma Stone perky and delightful as wannabe actress and fulltime barista Mia and Ryan Gosling stroppy, pushy and dislikeable as jazz piano maestro Seb. They really shouldn’t get on and despite the best of Gene Kelly / Debbie Reynolds impersonations, they kind of never do. We like the nostalgic romance, expect the confusion and smile at the tentative desires. Best of all, we like the look of it all.
What we don’t like, and this is the film’s major undercutting problem, is the singing and dancing. Chazelle suggested he wanted actors unknown for singing and dancing to emphasise the fantasy quality of the genuine romance. That’s nonsense. To emphasise the fantasy you need consummate performers who can take you into that dreamy world of love. Several times I kept thinking how much better Astaire and Rogers would perform the dancing, or Sinatra and Doris Day the singing. It would have taken very little to get Christina Aguilera or someone like her to drop into the role or Mia; maybe our own Billie Piper; Ariana Grande would have been a good fit at the time, the right age too. Justin Timberlake for Seb. Instead we get weak singing and easily choreographed dance numbers that look worse than stuff we see on Strictly. It’s a crime against musicals to not put professional sing and dance actors in your movie and if La La Land should be docked a Best Picture Oscar, it should be for that, not for any slight to the ethnic artistic community.
So why do I enjoy it?
I can’t tell you that exactly. I just do. Perhaps, at a push, it is because La La Land is a happy film which draws us into the dreams and nightmares of Hollywood – the la la of the title – and allows us to escape Scot free, which was what many of those classic musicals did. I rather like that conceit and sometimes I wish moviemakers would lighten up a little and take us on those pleasant untroublesome journeys again. So, I guess I ought to thank Damien Chazelle, bad casting aside, for providing a reminder that movies, and by extension life, is sometimes joyful, colourful and eventually fulfilling.
“Thank you.”
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1954)
Directed by Fred M. Wilcox, Forbidden Planet is an American science-fiction film starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis and Leslie Nielson.
The United Planets star ship C-57D, after a year's journey arrives on the planet Altair IV, to investigate the whereabouts of the space ship Bellerophon, which was sent to the planet 20 years back.
Here they discover Dr. Morbius, living alone on the planet with his daughter Altaira and his personal robot, Robby. Morbius informs the commander of the ship, John Adams about a scientifically advanced civilization, the Krell, who mysteriously vanished from the planet 200,000 years back.
Dr. Morbius also shows the team various technologies developed by the ancient civilization, but there is something on this planet that the professor remains very apprehensive about. An entity that lies beyond comprehension...
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An absolute gem of a science-fiction film, with a thought provoking story and commendable special effects.
Recommended.
(98 minutes)
THE RUNNING MAN (1987)
If you are a fan of Richard Bachman / Stephen King, park the literary version of The Running Man on the library shelf and try to forget this dystopian sci-fi gore fest was based on a book at all. As I understand it, if you want that, go and see Edgar Wright’s remake which is in cinemas now. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Ben Richards a police officer framed for mass murder who is given an opportunity to redeem himself by taking part in a televised game show called The Running Man. Richards has to evade a series of ‘stalkers’ who are armed to the teeth and hell bent on assassinating him. The odds are not in Richards favour. Oh. Except he is Arnold Schwarznegger. Cue violence a plenty, macabre humour and a hefty dose of social comment. Curious casting – people like Jim Brown, Mick Fleetwood and real-life gameshow host Richard Dawson crop up – keep us alert. Paul Michael Galser, he of Starsky and Hutch fame, directs with some aplomb. It’s a hoot. With blood and violence. Don’t take it too seriously. One of the better Arnie films of the eighties.
This bit always stuck in my head as particularly funny and a good scene to show the duplicitous nature of the host. Richard Dawson was great as the villain in this film. A nice guy in real life.
This a great fun film…and I’d no idea Paul Micheal Glaser directed it 😱
THE CREATOR (2023)
An impressively mounted, phenomenally convoluted and ultimately depressing sci-fi would-be epic about Humankind vs A.I. It’s a pity the filmmakers didn’t think the idea through as the premise of a world splintered into A.I. and non-A.I. makes good prophetic sense. Nothing here seems to make any sense at all.
The running man (2025)
Many of us remember the Schwartzenegger version of this story from the 1980s, and it was very "Arnified". The new movie is from what I understand much closer to Stephen King's book. We see a society with a poor majority and a small number of the extremely rich, a large degree of power over government and society by multi-national companies and violent entertainment fueling hatred. Thank God this is sci-fi and not from what we see on the news! 😉
Ben Richards (Glen Powell) has a wife and a small child, and he's very poor. He has ange issues and often stands up for other workers, so he gets black-listed for most jobs. When his child gets sick he goes for trials on TV for reality TV competitions, desperate to get money. He gets chosen for The Running Man, a "show" where contestants who can stay on the run and survive for 30 days wins an enormous prize. They get hunted by five professional hunters, drones and members of the public who do it for cash payment. Unlike in the Schwartzenegger movie the hunt happens around the country and not just in a TV studio.
The modern movie is directed by Edgard Wright, and he's a very good action director. The action is kinetic, inventive and very entertaining. Some of his signature has been toned down, such as the humor, lots of song songs on the soundtrack and a hyper-active camera. This is a smart move for this movie. If he tones those aspects of his style even more I think he could make a very good James Bond movie. Glen Powell is very much a star on screen and I want to see more of him as a leading man.
While there absolutely is satire and sly comments about some aspects of where society is heading (especially in "some parts of the world") I wonder if the movie should've gone further in that direction. sometimes we clearly see the satire, but other times The running Man is pure popcorn. The story would still be a thriller/action movie, but maybe the would be more consistent in tone and have more bite if it was more satirical. I don't know. What I do know is that it's a very good action movie.
I watched two Netflix films, A House of Dynamite and Carry On. Dynamite is good but somehow not as gripping as I expected, and the format of repeating the same 18 minutes but from different peoples' perspectives should be good, but somehow you don't learn much more when you get the new viewpoints; and although I know the idea is to ask questions and shock the audience about the real-world situation more, the ending still comes as rather frustrating. Good but somehow doesn't linger in the memory as much as a film with this subject matter should.
Carry On we just watched as a bit of Friday night nonsense: it's a thriller from last year about Taron Edgerton's LAX customs official forced to look the other way under duress as something sinister gets smuggled onto a plane. Perfectly competently done, nothing really wrong with it and I'm sure plenty of folks enjoyed it as a result, but felt a bit like a waste of time somehow afterwards. Does what you expect but nothing more; just watch Die Hard 2 again instead.
Oh and it's another entry in the list of recent films which have a flashy fight scene done all in one shot (using CG) whilst an incongruous pop song plays in the background. This time it's Last Christmas by Wham. I don't need to see this idea again, I think the last time I saw it was in Gunn's Superman, Gunn's done it in other films before (maybe every Guardians of the Galaxy?), I feel like other Marvels have done it too, it's just not as clever as they think it is. Thinking of Running Man, Edgar Wright might even have started that with the Don't Stop Me Now sequence in Shaun.
PLEASE, SIR! (1971)
A dreadful spin off from a dreadful TV sitcom about a useless teacher and the worst class at a comprehensive school. John Alderton is bewildered as the teacher, Mr Hedges, and all his pupils are played by overage actors and actresses which makes the whole scenario appear oddly perverse, as if everyone is playing at being children doing naughty [read, sexy] things. The best turn is by Joan Sanderson as a school governess. To be brutal, I thought it was rubbish, even worse than the TV show. It was extremely popular at the box office, but they didn’t have much taste in the early seventies, or maybe not much choice. Unbelievably this garbage was written by the same team who later wrote The Good Life.
I was at a school just like this 😂 we were always matching up the real life pupils and teachers to the on screen characters! Yes, it is a dreadful movie, the TV series wasn’t that bad though, in my dim and distant memory.
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (1967)
Director John Schlesinger and writer Frederic Raphael had just had a huge hit with Darling starring Julie Christie. She had also played Lara in David Lean’s gorgeously romantic Russian Revolution epic Dr Zhivago, so both modern and period heroines seemed to fit Miss Christie, but sadly she doesn’t seem a good fit for Bathsheba Everdene, the wilfully independent but vain and indulgent heroine of Thomas Hardy’s best loved novel Far From The Madding Crowd. Raphael’s screen play doesn’t help much, misdirecting the characterisations of Sgt Troy, William Boldwood and Gariel Oak, so all Bathsheba’s suitors are oddly unlikeable. Troy isn’t supposed to be, but you don’t accept his love for Bathsheba or for Fanny Robbin as the script and Terence Stamp’s awkward and unsympathetic playing make him distinctly one-dimensional. Alan Bates as Gabriel, the steadfast hero shepherd is a bore; Bates doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself at all, so neither does the character. Peter Finch comes off best as Boldwood, the obsessive rich farmer, but most of his good work is done in mime. Christie herself struggles against a screenplay which hacks about with her character and despite being almost three hours in length never gives the impression Bathsheba is capable or loveable. Beautiful she may be, but she does not endear herself to any man. Hardy, as writer, cleverly made his heroine both desirable and feckless, but Christie seems caught in two minds and comes across as merely confused. It doesn’t help matters that they darkened her blonde hair into what looks like slate grey, so this Bathsheba just looks old before her years.
The story drags itself along at a snail’s pace. There is some lovely rural detail and many traditional Victorian elements are included which lend authenticity to the thing, but that also means it’s a less attractive viewing. The rain and mud slopped winter is grim; the scrubby, scrappy looking farming classes are a distinctly unsightly lot; even when the summer comes Nicholas Roeg seems to daub his camera lenses in dark shades. Some familiar locations [Maiden Castle, Durdle Door, Clovelly, etc] mark the film in the West Country, and you can’t fault the rundown look of the production design, but Schlesinger doesn’t have the pulse of the story even if he understands the place, it simply isn’t intense enough. Like Christie, he seems caught in more than one mind. For instance, midway Bathsheba is shown tossing corn seed in slow motion, a modern cinematic touch which is noticeably out of touch. Similarly, the sword seduction scene is marred by Sgt Troy seeming to not be simply practicing his swordsmanship, but enacting some strange battle; as Terence Stamp charges up and down Maiden Castle with his daggers out like he’s escaped from an episode of The Monkees, you’re inclined to chuckle. Oddly, this misstep of passion gives way to one of the movie’s better moments: as the couple embrace and kiss, the clouds roll over the sun bathing them in dark shadow; this romance is not going to end well… Later, the storm scene – central to Gabriel and Bathsheba’s eventual emotional connection – is a wet wash out, barely raising an iota of tension.
The problem Schlesinger has is that what was good about the novel – all that attention to rural detail, tradition and a suspenseful build to the story’s inevitable climax – slows down the film. Far From The Madding Crowd is an okay romantic drama, but okay doesn’t quite cut it when you’re dealing with one of the great Victorian novels.
Grand, but disappointing.
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (2015)
After the brave, well-intentioned misstep of Schlesinger’s sixties version of Far From The Madding Crowd, the cinema seemed to run scared of Thomas Hardy, unsure perhaps of how to translate his rural, almost idyllic prose into box office delight. The BBC pumped out a few Wessex bound serials; Polanski had a stab at Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure got rough treatment; but basically, unlike Dickens and Austen who are constantly reinvented for cinematic consumption, Hardy’s prose has remained virtually untouched. So it is something of a surprise to see Danish film director Thomas Vinterberg giving Far From The Madding Crowd a twenty-first century makeover. To be fair, he doesn’t change very much. Despite shaving a good hour off the runtime, most of the best or important scenes and dialogue remain in some form or other, so I wouldn’t discount out of hand the screen adaptation. The fault in this production lies elsewhere. Casting mainly.
At least Carey Mulligan is dark haired, as Bathsheba Everdene is in Hardy’s novel. The rest of the cast, well, less said. The four leads all seem rather modern for a period drama and seem unable, or unwilling, to enter the spirit of the era. Too much feels too modern, hence there is no sense of time and place. Vinterberg omits some of the traditional rural elements Schlesinger retained for his 1960s version, so we seem to be watching a modern retelling of the tale in period dress. Emotions run too swift and switch too fast for Hardy’s stately prose; this is Victorian drama for the twenty-first century. The novel has a leisurely pace, which packs a lot of punch over its few years of narrative gestation. This film version lacks all of that.
The photography is decent; costumes too; all the technical attributes are fine. The real issue stems from the sword taken to original novel, cut to the bone and leaving little room for nuances. Still, it is a bold reworking of the story and the plight of poor Fanny Robbin always gets one emotional. Nice music from Craig Armstrong.
KING KONG (1976)
A box office hit, somehow, but a flawed reinterpretation of the 1933 stop-motion classic. Producer Dino di Laurentiis tried hard to make his King Kong a prestige production, but it lacks everything to make it one. A good, but blunt, director in John Guillerman doesn’t help matters. Jessica Lange is horribly miscast and plays the screaming heroine with all the artifice of a Marilyn Monroe imposter. Jeff Bridges, who can occasionally act well, is just shameful; so too Charles Grodin. The early character establishing scenes on board an oil exploration ship are some of the worst acted, written and directed I think I have ever seen in a mainstream movie. Everyone should be ashamed. I rolled my eyes and started dealing with a pile of ironing when the giant gorilla turns up – and turns out to be mostly played by a man in a monkey suit. Just rubbish. Unbelievably, the movie won a special award for its visual effects [why? I ask, when the main visual effect is so obviously a trick they can pull off better with circus clowns?].
I don’t know what to say about this monster movie which bundles along without any steering, crashing into problems left and centre. The pace is slow. The action badly conceived. Acting over the top from everyone, and I mean everyone, even the bloody gorilla. The makers of the original King Kong must be howling with indignation in their graves. Describing this King Kong as ‘terrible’ probably over sells it.
There is a decent music score from John Barry which feels out of place by being so good amongst so much trash. Other than that, I hated it.