Top Gun is an eighties phenomenon which more than any film put Tom Cruise’s star firmly in the ascendence. It was the first of a run of spectacular hit movies which, until the relatively lukewarm performance of Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, firmly thrust the toothsome one into the A-list of Hollywood actors. He’s probably still there, although he perhaps doesn’t command the attention he did as a youthful mid-twenties heartthrob, who in this role with its homoerotic military playfulness appeals equally to both women and men. In fact, the romantic subplot with Kelly McGillis’s civilian instructor is as dull as the battle grey paint on the fight jets. Top Gun is all about the guys.
Cruise is Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, a US Navy fighter pilot sent to the real life Top Gun school for advance combat training. He may be one of the best of the best, but he is unconventional and that makes him dangerous, both in the air and on the ground. Clichés abound among the blazing setting suns, superb aerial photography and knockout eighties synth and guitar hammering soundtrack. The comedy, if it is there, is laboured. There is tragedy, comradeship and ultimate victory. Top Gun is a very American flavoured film, solidly stuck in war and western genre speak, which is one of its faults; the appeal is flawed. It’s very good, on its own terms and is rightly acclaimed for the flying footage and the whiplash editing, sequences that still hold up well today. The narrative takes a dive when everyone’s out of the saddle, like a lot of westerns do, and the rivalries are obvious, the egos see-through and the solutions simplistic. That went down a hoot in the eighties, when nuances didn’t matter so much. I saw this in the cinema, saw it on rented VHS, loved it loads it at the time, the big ballad by Berlin was a shoe in for the last dance at shoddy Croydon nightclubs; so it still has nostalgic appeal.
Top Gun won’t suit every taste, but it is thoroughly entertaining and whether or not you’re a fan, you really can’t deny that Maverick was a star making role for Tom Cruise. He’s spent the next forty years playing variations of the same character.
I may now have reservations, but Top Gun brings back some good memories, so I really enjoyed watching this. A great blast from the past.
I saw this Christmas classic last night. The conditions were perfect: we finally got snow yesterday, the had fire going in the stove and I was drinking hot cacao. Here comes what some may find a little bit shocking - It was my first time watching "It's a wonderful life"! The movie simply isn't famous classic in Norway. it didn't run on TV back in the day, and I suspect this is often the key to classic status. I'm not going to get into the plot since most know it. Christmas movies are often saccharine and sentimental, and frequently too much so. I can't deny that this movie isn't both sentimental and saccharine, but it's also is surprisingly dark. Key plot points are suicide, slums, foreclosures and alcohol problems. Not Hallmark, is it? Especially James Stewart plays a very nice guy with a hart of gold. But anger, regret and frustrations raises their heads from time to time and more violently and frequently as the movie progresses. I realised Stewart had just finished his military service in the Strategic Bomb Command. He had lost a lot of friends and sometimes it must've happened in front of his eyes. He had also dropped a lot of bombs on people. is James Stewart the Hollywood star who has killed PTSD he was experiencing. I also noticed how much of a role religion played in the movie. Some of it through comedy, and Henry Travers as the off-beat angel Clearance is great. But sometimes faith is treated more seriously than what we see in most movies. interesting. he most people in real life? I suspect he is. He may have killed hundreds or maybe even thousands of people, some of them civilians. I read on the internet that he found making this movie cathartic in dealing with the
Not that his character and the film is all darkness. There is a lot of comedy, romance and Christmas cheer here. It's a wonderful movie!
I caught up with Challengers (2024) the highly acclaimed drama about a tennis romantic triangle, made up of Zendaya (she has been in the Dune films), Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor (he was Prince Charles in The Crown and is in the latest Daniel Craig Knives Out movie, someone on ajb has touted him as a new James Bond, I dunno),
Some kind of threesome between the lead characters was touted at the time but - okay I should explain the plot, it's opens with two male tennis players in their early 30s going at each other across the net, it's not a lavish setting and it turns out that a) This is second or third string tennis, one player has fallen from the heights, the other sees this as his big shot and neither can afford to lose b) The two know each other from way back in their teens.
From thereon the time line goes back and forth between past and present but what is well done is that all the leads - the Zendaya character was also a player in the past, much touted and the subject of the two's uncomplicated - at first - romantic attention - anyway they play both young and enthusiastic and older and jaded very well and you are never in question which is past or present. However, the threesome - or almost a threesome - occurs when they are fumbling teens in a hotel room and is curtailed by the female apex of the love triangle before anything really happens. This is not that an erotic film.
It's an engrossing film, a three hander really, and initially you are on the side of the Josh O'Conner character (he does a great American accent btw despite being English) as he is the underdog who has to scrounge cash to get a ticket at the table, however it must be said that the three characters are not that likeable and arguably become less so as the film goes on. There is something to this, the idea that one needn't identify with any one character in the film, so the viewer doesn't over the years subconciously acquire main-character syndrome (the Bond films, esp the 'classic' ones are the extreme other end of that). We learn nothing of extraneous characters like their parents or older family, other friends etc. It depicts the tennis world as bland and claustrophobic, which it probably is.
The tennis is brilliantly shot and exciting - hard to do with sport when we know it isn't real - and it kept me up until midnight but the ending seemed oddly inconclusive with some red herrings plot wise set up in the last 20 mins to build interest, but it seems we are not to know exactly how it unfolds (I am being vague to avoid spoilers). One of the characters does something very nasty in the game and so really, it didn't send me off to sleep with happy, lovely dreams to fall back on.
I rewatched Top Gun a year or two back, I was a bit unimpressed to be honest (the sequel surpasses it in every way) but I did find the unintentional utterly self-centred quality of Maverick to be really quite funny. When Goose dies: it’s all about him, people have to chase after him to tell him how amazing he is(!). When he has his first date with McGinnis he goes on about his parents and his upbringing, asks her not a single question about her life, then gets on his motorbike and leaves! 😁 It’s kind of amazing really.
I never noticed that - but now you mention it, you are spot on! Maybe my mind was frazzled by all the teen memories. I am not sure I have watched the movie since the turn of the century.
Jerry Bruickheimer’s big break as a producer was with Top Gun, which I watched the night before this. Con Air solidifies his bigger, louder, longer, not-necessarily-better reputation which follows on from the quite brilliant The Rock by having its villains escaping captivity rather than setting up house in a defunct prison and incarcerating themselves. Con Air benefits from a cruel bleak and black humour that fizzles on and off beneath the various astounding feats of stunt work and explosions. Nicolas Cage is a bit one note as hero Cameron Poe [Poe-faced?], a former Army Ranger who comes to the rescue of the US Marshalls and the DEA by undermining John Malkovitch’s complicated flight to freedom. Chaos ensues. By the time Las Vegas’s famous Strip has been destroyed by a crashlanding plane [given some recent events, that isn’t as far fetched as you might think] you’re almost too weary to care, but there’s a fire engine chase coda that out-does James Bond in spades. The cast of creeps is long; the best of them is Steve Buschemi’s serial killer psycho who gets to gamble another day. As action flicks go, it ticks all the boxes. The excellent theme song How Do I Live, sung by Trisha Yearwood, seems totally inappropriate for this kind of fare. Look back at how Top Gun unfolds against the yawning of Berlin’s Take My Breath Away, and you can see how Bruickheimer’s making movies by numbers theory works. There are worse films, I suppose.
Murphy's law states that anything that can go wrong...will go wrong.
And surely a lot of things go wrong in this hilarious film starring screen legend John Cleese.
Brian Stimpson (Cleese), headmaster of the Thomas Tompion Comprehensive School has been selected as the chairperson for the annual headmaster meeting in Norwich...a meeting he desperately wants to attend.
A stickler for punctuality and discipline, Stimpson arrives well in time at the local train station to board his train. It is here that a momentary lapse of attention jettisons Stimpson onto a wild adventure through the country side.
An odd one for New Year's Eve, but as I am looking after Dad, you kinda have to go with the flow. Afterwards, we watched Ronan Keating's New Year Party. It was dreadful [not a patch on Robbie Williams, Rick Astley or Sophie Ellis Bextor]. After the midnight firework display, I went to bed and had just about the most peaceful rest I have experienced for months. Hope that's a sign of things to come in 2026.
CRIMSON TIDE (1995)
The team behind Top Gun reunites ten years on for another slice of West Vs East, this time with nuclear submarines and ICBMs instead of jet planes. The formula is obvious; there is even a brief scene of men in uniform singing a sixties classic pop hit. Denzel Washington is the idealistic greenhorn Executive Officer to Gene Hackman’s no nonsense Captain. It’s like a lesser version of Cruise Vs Nicholson in A Few Good Men, only with more brio and testosterone flying about. Basically, Russian ultranationalists have seized a long range missile base and are threatening to unleash nuclear hell, so the USS Alabama is despatched to the Sea of Japan to take pre-emptive action. As communications and orders become confused, Hackman’s grip on the situation is questioned, only his loyal officers do not take to the greenhorn No.2 putting one over their proficient No.1. Tense, but silly, Crimson Tide wiles away a couple of hours. Good special effects. The interiors of the sub are very detailed. Tony Scott directs with a keen eye on the two major protagonists who do their best with the cliché prone and jargon ridden script.
Not my kind of film at all, I was dragged there by a granddaughter who had liked the first one.
Now, I take it everyone is familiar with a jump scare? The director of this incoherent mess certainly is. In fact, it might have been made under a bet to see how many jump scares can be fitted into a not terribly long (although it seems interminable) movie. The first one or seven are bearable, but the next twenty or more suffer from the law of diminishing returns.
There's a sequel hook at the end which I hope isn't picked up on. At least, until I can get out of being forced to watch it.
Porridge the movie suffers from the lack of a laugh track - though some of these small to big screen transfers would have worked in a packed cinema at the time. On the Buses was the blueprint for this I think, as it did so well it outgrossed Diamonds are Forever in the UK at the box office, and with a relatively tiny budget of course. Until then, the thinking might have been, why would folk travel and pay to see the same kind of thing they can see on the box at home for free? Subsequently, there was a Simon Cowell attitude - everyone namely millions knows the characters, you have a massive audience to be tapped here, even if only a fraction go to see the movie. Ironically it was around this time that the Carry On team seemed to have the reverse idea, and were making ropey TV specials such as pantomimes, some of which were shown this Christmas.
Some of these big screen transfers aimed to be a bit saucier or more adult to make it a bit different or enticing - this didn't work for Porridge because there are no women in it, though the woman who plays Fletch's daughter Ingrid pops up as one of the getaways' wives for two minutes.
Porridge the movie is odd for a few other reasons; it slightly aims to be standalone, much like Dad's Army earlier in the decade, where we see Mainwaring recruiting his platoon from start yet again, something he had already done of course in a 1968 black and white episode. (You could argue that Never Say Never Again, on which writers Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais worked, also has that unnecessary sense of being an alternative reality.) We also saw this in the nadir of these kinds of films, Rising Damp, in which Rigsby seemed a different kind of character, perhaps based on Rossiter's successful chinzano adverts with Joan Collins, and the location was different - it also lacked Richard Beckinsale who had died at this point; again the whole thing aimed to start from scratch, with Miss Jones looking for a place to rent - it was kind of an alternative reality, reusing some of the series' plot points.
But what makes Porridge the movie really odd imo is when you realise it was filmed once the series itself was long gone, with young Lennie Godber (Beckinsale) departing Slade Prison and old lag Fletch being entrusted by Mackay with a newbie in the final episode. So why is Godber back behind bars, was he a recidivist? Instead, it just ignores the issue. Again, what makes it even odder is that the Porridge spin-off series Going Straight, has already gone out, and this dealt with Fletch's life trying to make it in the big wide world and not falling back on crime, it lasted two series and was cancelled.
Going Straight has been reshown over Christmas, billed as Porridge: Going Straight to make the link because this spin-off never entered the cultural consciousness the way Porridge did. The laughs are there - Clement and Le Frenais went on to do Auf Wiedersehn, Pet so they didn't turn bad writers for the hell of it. But it just doesn't work. Why?
Well, most obviously, one half of a situation comedy is the situation, and that has changed here. Ditched are all the colourful, enjoyably acted characters we saw in Porridge, like Bunny Warren, Lukewarm, Mackay, Grouty etc. The latter two were authority figures of sorts but they're not in the spin off and it feels like Fletch has nothing to rail against but his own poor judgement. Beckinsale is back as Godber, but if anything the roles have swapped and his is the disapproving voice of wisdom. So is Ingrid, but she is not a Porridge staple so much, so it's a poor return, her voice grates and she's not such an appealing character.
It's a shame though, because it almost could work. Frasier is an example of a tidy spin-off, from Cheers. It relocates Frasier Crane to Seattle and introduces a load of great characters, essentially the character is transferable but it does seem that when Cheers regulars appeared as guests, they don't quite fit anymore, which can happen in real life, of course. The way Frasier is depicted in the spin-off, it's hard to believe he would have made Cheers his regular haunt however, he would have hung out at wine bars instead.
The reader may experience a dissonance or fission when they realise that Nicolas Lyndhurst, who has an early role as Fletch's gormless young teen in Going Straight, is also in the the recent revived Frasier spin-off, as an English professor.
Lyndhurst is subject of a line later re-used for NSNA re Nigel Small-Fawcett - he tails Fletch for some reason, who later tells how he 'took advantage of the natural cover' by hiding behind lampposts - a joke that makes more sense here given Lyndhurst's lean lanky frame.
But the presence of Lyndhurst in GS makes one wonder - this could almost be Only Fools and Horses, which starred Porridge's David Jason (he played Blanco) as Del Boy and an older Lyndhurst as Rodney, and that was long-running and legendary. That is to forget however that OFAH was almost ditched after just one series, and it was only its reshowing during a strike that saw it gain higher ratings - prompting it to be recommissioned.
That said, GS is depressing in a way that Only Fools is not, as it sees Fletch struggle with life outside prison, such that ironically he seemed less of a loser behind bars than he does as a free man. It also sees him behave out of character - nicking or borrowing Lenny's long-distance lorry to embark on a plan to recover buried loot, a mission that goes on to recall the plight of Horrible Harris - or maybe not him, I think it was Norris, the charmless nerk who tried to swindle poor old Blanco.
Another flaw is that this is John Sullivan territory and he did it better, he always made sure his downbeat protagonists lived within their means - Del Boy and Rodney lived in a high rise Peckham council flat. Fletch seems to be staying with his daughter and future son-in-law in a very nice house, very middle class, I don't know who it belongs to but it doesn't ring true. And as one talking head observed, Fletch seemed to fail a lot in this series and audiences didn't like to see him as a loser, more a winner. It is also true that what is charming and rafish when in jail is less so outside, so worries about him doing a bit of pilfering may introduce a note of jeopardy but doesn't sit right. Del Boy is the sort of character who managed to do a few dodgy deals without losing our sympathies on the whole.
The whole thing feels like that Hancock episode where he meets up with his old Army pals but finds he doesn't get on with them anymore.
Porridge the movie was reshown at the Odeon in Ewell as a tribute to Richard Beckinsale when he died, it also showed Let It Be when Lennon died, two largely grim movies in a grim context of a largely empty cinema as I recall. That said, I do enjoy dipping into Porridge the Movie when it is on telly, it is really only enough for a Christmas TV special plot wise but the whole celebrity football match escape plot works well, plus there's snotty Julian Holloway (son of Stanley), veteran of Carry On and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, offering Barraclough a chance for a rare withering putdown when his 'celebrity' team are kept for questioning: 'We wouldn't have do this if we'd brought Michael Parkinson, would we?' 'No,' replies Barraclough. 'But then you didn't, did you...'
Look our for our own Philip Locke, Vargas in Thunderball, as the older, snooty prisoner who refuses to kowtow to Grouty. So that's another Thunderball connection. It does just occur to me that the stand-off between Bond and M in NSNA is really just Fletch and Mackay isn't it.
Universally panned on release and hacked about by a studio running scared of the feedback from test screening, The Avengers deserves some reassessment. I rather liked it.
Based on the decade running sixties TV series, but especially series four and five which feature Steed and Mrs Peel, this reboot pays due homage to the original by being distinctly wacky and not bothering to explain itself very well. If Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman are poor substitutes for Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, they get marks in my book for not doing impersonations of their forebears. There is a hoot of a hammy villain in Sean Connery’s August de Winter and while the action stakes are weak, I found the dead pan, icy humour quite welcome. Sometimes the writers stray too close to the obscene [“You can get ten inches a night in India,” says De Winter – he’s talking about the monsoon, but you wouldn’t know it] which is unfortunate, but much fun is had in the silliness of it all: the briefing scene where every villainous investor is disguised in a colourful bear suit was hilarious, Mrs Peel’s wanderings around De Winter’s house a bizarre recurring nightmare, Patrick Macnee’s voice cameo as the unseen Colonel Jones [“I’ve been so forgotten, I’ve turned myself invisible,” he quips], Jim Broadbent’s chain smoking apologetic Mother, the “No trespassing” telephone booth, etc. I have the feeling people who reviewed the movie in 1998 hadn’t watched very much of the TV show, because many of those episodes are as peculiar and inexplicable as this.
I won’t bore you with the plot [crazy man controls the weather]. The film is well designed and photographed, the stars look good and I like Grace Jones’s theme song Storm. I’ll agree, it is a bit of a mess, and the editing decisions apparently removed most of the explanatory scenes so it is no wonder audiences left confused. What the film really misses is chemistry between its leads and you can’t magic that. Fiennes and Thurman certainly can’t anyhow. Pity.
Not completely dreadful then.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,316MI6 Agent
edited January 4
I remember taping that film from the TV back in 2001 and enjoying watching it. I made a thread here years ago saying I was surprised that a Bond film hadn't so far involved a plot to control the weather but perhaps it is best left to the likes of The Avengers as it's probably a bit too silly for Bond. Some of this film was pretty wacky, but then so were the Steed and Peel years of the show in particular, as you point out. I recall that Eddie Izzard played a henchman and that there were clones and a scene where robotic things flew about. My abiding memory though is Sean Connery as the villain saying to Fiennes's hero: "Steed, John Steed. What a horse's arse of a name!" As you say, crude, but funny nonetheless. I really need to get a copy of this film now. You've reignited my interest in it with your review, so thanks for that, @chrisno1!
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 30,869Chief of Staff
@Napoleon Plural - I can’t quote your post as the forum tells me it’s too long 🤗
An interesting post with some good musings…I can agree with plenty of what you say - personally I can’t stand laugh tracks though 😡
I enjoyed Going Straight - obviously it’s not as good as Porridge (let’s face it, not much is) but I thought it stood up well enough - and it’s a darn sight better than some current ‘comedy’ shows 🤨
On the Buses was the blueprint for this I think, as it did so well it outgrossed Diamonds are Forever in the UK at the box office, and with a relatively tiny budget of course.
I know this isn't the most important point you make(!) and I apologise for nitpicking a tiny detail but this one's been a bit of a bugbear of mine: I think it's a funny little fact that appears often which isn't strictly fair- it may have outgrossed DAF in 1971, the year they both came out, but DAF was released on December 30th in just one cinema in London. It's not really fair to compare several month's worth of showings across the whole country to two days' worth in one screen! 😁
I'm pretty sure DAF would have taken a lot more than Buses in the UK across their releases. Buses was probably more profitable vs. its budget I guess.
I remember the Ewell Odeon 😊
What kind of amazes me about that is that it means DAF basically came out in the UK in January '72; LALD was released in July the following year, so you had basically 18 months between films!
@emtiem is correct in the On The Buses analogy - and also, DAF only had a London distribution in early 1972, it was actually Easter 1972 before it had a national release in the UK, so only a matter of 15 months between Bond releases - those were the days!
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Re laugh tracks, normally I agree, esp with stuff like MASH - but a laugh track does help jolly up a sitcom, which some of these bleak British shows needed, be it Steptoe or Porridge. So they do seem bleaker as movies. I am honestly never sure which are actually staged and filmed in front of a live studio audience and which have the screened result shown to an audience. The Good Life had its interiors filmed in front of a studio audience I gather, and the notorious episode of Only Fools - Dinner for One, I think - in which Del Boy shows up poor Rodney in front of his posh girlfriend's family, it was never ever reshown and was heavily reedited for the DVD release, suffered it's been said because it wasn't done as usually in front of an audience so David Jason didn't tailor his performance according to the audience feedback and laughs or lack thereof.
Interesting to read about the DAF analogy - sounds great doesn't it but okay I guess it's untrue, I wonder what were the best-selling movies in the UK for that year then? I mean, what else did OTB beat?
It's like we think of Thunderball as 1965 but effectively it was after Xmas so really 1966 - and YOLT was out the following year. Mad, really. 66 a great year for pop, footie and movies however! In the UK, I mean.
Saw From Roger With Love - not presented as a movie in the Radio Times, incidentally. It's the documentary about Roger Moore, voiced by Steve Coogan as the man himself, it sort of grates at first but then they cut to Coogan in the studio doing him and it gets you onside. Not a pitch perfect Moore vocal impersonation though.
And you're not sure which of it Moore would say himself, is his words, or just made up.
It was watchable over a glass of wine and undemanding, relying heavily on anecdotage from his adult - and now late middle aged - kids. Most of it we might have known. No getting around the fact that his career wasn't as interesting as that of Richard Burton or Liz Taylor or Michael Caine or Richard Harris. Relied heavily on his Bond films and totally ignored other stuff like The Wild Geese or his Bond-like cameo in The Cannonball Run, surely worth a clip, or his turn as Clouseau in one of the admittedly awful Pink Panther films. Then again, the narrative was all about Moore's self-made man persona. And it took a rather indulgent attitude to his failed marriages, somewhat unsympathetic to those he dumped, always an excuse at hand for his doing the dirty on them, which even if justified does make you question his choices. It does seem with Luisa that they had a sado-masochistic relationship. I recall a TVTimes article entitled 'The time I saw James Bond get his bottom smacked' in which Rog committed some misdemeanour around a hotel pool and Luisa put him over her knee. The movie has Joan Collins reveal how his wife had the lovely sumptuous bedroom while Moore slept in a cupboard downstairs or something. I do wonder if he ever twigged that he was getting similar treatment to that dished out to his good friend David Niven by his second wife, a woman Moore and others truly deplored, and I wonder what year the bio Niv came out, which contained many contributions by Moore on this very issue - whether this sparked something in him at the time.
Nice to see Christopher Walken pop up to say nice things.
Nothing from Michael Caine, perhaps oddly, given it was Moore who crossed the street to say nice things about his performance on TV the previous night when Caine was largely unknown and Moore wasn't, saying 'You're going to be a big star!'
Quentin Tarantino likes this movie. That’s a red flag for starters.
Elvis Presley stars as Charlie Rogers, an angry motor biker come singer who abandons his girl and an engagement at Mother’s Tea Rooms and takes a manual labour post working Barbara Stanwyck’s carnival. His singing skills bring the crowds and the money to the failing fair, but the bright lights of the big theatres steal him away from the carny and his new love, pretty Joan Freeman. Will Charlie mend his arrogant ways and return to the arms of a new found family or will he seize the dollars and stay angry?
No guesses.
Elvis’s career should still have been going places in late 1964, after all he’d just had a big movie hit with Viva Las Vegas. Unfortunately, Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was quite possibly one of the least effective executives in the pop music industry. For every good intention and success the Colonel mustered, there have to be a dozen disastrous decisions, which included interfering in Elvis’s song choices, record production and movie roles, to say nothing of his health, finances and welfare. Nothing got past the cigar smoke and fat belly of that heavy fingered shyster. Hindsight is a horrible thing and when I watch movies like Roustabout or hear such dire ‘studio’ albums as the cobbled together and quickly forgotten Elvis for Everyone, I keep wishing the King of Rock n Roll had employed a manager suited for his moniker, someone who at least cared about quality as well as quantity. For instance, in Roustabout there is a theatre show scene where Elvis sings the Lieber and Stoller song Little Egypt. It wasn’t a new song – the Coasters had recorded it – but Elvis gives it a swanky, cheeky polish. Coupled with a group of keen, saucy backing dancers, Elvis’s delivery creates three minutes of magic which are the film’s musical highlight, even if the King himself seems remarkably blithe. How can there be any of this when Elvis performs such drivel as Poison Ivy League, It’s Carnival Time and Carny Town? The song soundtrack isn’t only short on quality but time too, cutting it at a shade over twenty-minutes. That’s not a lot of return for your dollars.
[As a side point, Little Egypt and its spoken carnival hustler intro were utilised to good effect in the stage-show section of the 1968 NBC TV Special, proving again that Elvis understood a lot more about his music than the Colonel ever did.]
Amazingly, Roustabout was a fairly big hit in the cinemas, recouping its production costs three fold, and the LP topped the US Billboard charts on 3rd January 1965, three months after its release. I have no idea how that happened; the album had no singles released from it and sits in the lower tier of Elvis’s musical canon. Maybe misunderstanding grandparents bought it for their grandchildren at Christmas. The unfortunate side-effect of this dual success was to reinforce the Colonel’s assumptions that more cheap films and even cheaper soundtracks was the fastest and most efficient way to make money. He conveniently forgot, or perhaps he never realised, that it was his client’s skill as a singer and performer which drove those ticket and record sales and that poor quality material leads to a decline in performance and sales. Roustabout is just about as poor as you can get.
Yet perhaps it shouldn’t be. True, the storyline is lumped full of cliches, but that’s no bad thing in this kind of star-driven product. It gains something from a performance from Elvis that is rugged and obnoxious, the kind of showing he offered for the trio of image defining roles in Loving You, King Creole and Jailhouse Rock. What his performance lacks is a decent script to temper and focus his anger. Charlie’s motivations remain submerged in mystery. There is no family background, no future desires, no sense of real purpose. He really is a genuine layabout roustabout, who sings, seduces and cycles his way around the country with no care and no ambition, a drifter of the kind Faulkner or Tennessee Williams might have written, something Paul Newman or Brando might have had a stab at [The Fugitive Kind, for instance, or The Long Hot Summer]. Under the auspices of television director John Rich and work-a-day writers Allan Weiss and Anthony Lawrence, what we get is a lightweight and rather dreary catch-all tale of unlikely redemption, a supposed love affair, some inept fighting both verbal and physical, a few loosely interpreted songs and very little charm. The fact Elvis is desperately trying to do something different saddens the whole affair; his role and the unusual setting has big storytelling potential. But potential alone doesn’t augment success and everything and everyone around Elvis remains at exactly the same level as always, showing up the overall intent, particularly of lazy, aging producer Hal B. Wallis and the Colonel, who both saw the cash cow and forgot to prime the milk. I mean, veteran actress Barbara Stanwyck tries hard, but she has nothing substantial to work with, so too Sue Ann Langdon as a sexy fortune teller, but they may as well not bother as there’s little joy and nothing is developed past detached one liners that pout uncomfortably from everyone’s mouths and seemingly at all the wrong moments. The film flits between location and studio set so regularly it becomes distracting. The echoing audio track gives it away every time. This kind of slapdash detail just demonstrates the slipshod efforts being put in.
On the plus side, the film looks good; award winning cinematographer Lucien Ballard is among the credits. Elvis uses karate for the first time and rides a Honda 305 Superhawk, both of which are kinda cool. There’s an intriguing performance from Patt Buttram as rival promotor Harry Carver whose demeanour, attitudes and business acumen feels as if it was stolen from the Tom Parker playbook. I wonder if the Colonel noticed. Given the film’s homespun carnival setting, I sense his hand all over the story, in part attempting another retell of the Presley-Parker myth, like the aforementioned Loving You. He probably thought the writers were complimenting him on being a smarmy smart arse. Oh, and there’s Little Egypt, of course. That’s about it for the plus side.
A quick note on the cast list: buried among the uncredited performers are Raquel Welch and Teri Garr [college girls teasing Elvis in the opening scene], Beverly Adams as a dancer [she would appear next to Dean Martin in the Matt Helm series] and for us James Bond fans Richard Kiel is the carnival’s Strong Man.
I don’t know. Do I give out stars for potential? Not really. Elvis saves it, I guess, but the whole project is uneven and eventually inconsequential. It was a tough watch. Still, at least Quentin Tarantino likes it.
Priscilla Beulieu was married to Elvis Presley for six years, gave birth to their daughter, Lisa Marie, and in later life saved the King’s estate from ruin, forged a career as an actress and reinvented herself as a strong modern symbol of womanhood. Sophia Copolla’s saccharine movie Priscilla paints a far too easy portrait of her life where luxury is interspersed with the occasional quarrel and the ultimate sacrifice paid for being ‘Mrs Elvis’ is physical intimacy. By the end, although I knew the story, I wondered what was the point of it all. Maybe Ms Beulieu did too, which is why she leftnher husband. Shorn of any interior monologues or any explanatory dialogue to expand on what we visually observe, both Priscilla and Elvis come across as cyphers for any number of tortured uncommunicative lovers.
Lisa Marie hated the film, claiming it misrepresented her father, and one can certainly see her point. However, given Lisa Marie was nine years old when Elvis died and the source novel was Priscilla’s autobiography, Elvis and Me, I think we can safely assume her knowledge of events is skewed and incomplete. That isn’t to suggest Priscilla has it all right either, but we only have her word on things these days, particularly around those awkward intimacy issues. What the film does present well is the male dominated arena of the Memphis Mafia and the egotistical controlling behaviour of Elvis, which rarely ran to violence or harm, but by being so contradictory had a belittling and befuddling effect on her, and one assumes on many of his hangers on also. Priscilla’s difficult relationship with her parents and with her in-laws is hinted at, but not expanded on. Her lack of friends, even before Elvis appeared on the scene is startling. Equally startling is how tiny Cailee Spaeny is against Jacob Elordi’s Elvis. Was she really that small and he that tall?
Snapshots of time. Soft focussed. Good attention to period details. Cinematically poetic. Coppola understands what she is doing, but neglects to tell the audience. So we have snippets of life, hints at the repressed, obscene and the decadent, and not a lot else. Maybe that was how the autobiography spelt it. The cast and producers might have wanted Oscars and award news out of this, but nothing is quite good enough or intriguing enough to merit any more than a passing interest.
I heard a lot about this film, mostly positive, and finally got to see it on a re-run at London's Prince Charles. It's been called 'hard to define', but I'd call it a fast-moving drama with comedic undertones, or overtones. The era in which it's set was publicised on the posters but it isn't quite made clear in the movie unless I missed it and anyway there's a fast-forward a decade in it, I understand it begins in 1975, is that right? It doesn't signpost the time with hits from the day or period photography, so it feels more immediate, especially given the current climate in the US. It's about some urban guerrilla domestic terrorists freeing migrants from immigration camps and also holding up banks with guns and so on. Leonardo DiCaprio is one of these and I didn't recognise his black female accomplice, officer.
The Saturday Times' rent-a-misery Robert Crampton says he walked out of this not long after it began, as he tends to do with all of DiCaprio's films due to their unpleasantness, and I think I know which scene he means, the film did lose me early on not so much because of the brutality but because it seems so wilfully implausible. That said, Daniel Craig - wearing a prosthetic nose - impresses as the American guard in control of the immigration camps, and he gets the chance to perfect the American accent he tried out in another movie some years ago - until I realised it's not Craig of course - another equally famous actor, whose name I only learned from the end credits. He's a kind of Kubrickesque character who might pop up in Dr Strangelove or Lolita, making the film a bit different but also officially not that believable.
It's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so it tends to have these bumps in the road if Licorice Pizza is anything to go by - I mean, you can't really believe its lead in that is a school teenager.
That said, like LP, the advantage of sorts is that you just don't quite know where it is going, it doesn't obey the narrative strictures of Hollywood. I did find myself swept along with the timely goings-on as DiCaprio and his gang are forced to flee their oppressors. In terms of the bigger picture, it seems we are meant to sympathise with the domestic terrorists who are rarely depicted as doing anything that bad or evil, and oppose the US law enforcement officers who are presented here as basically unrepentant racists, but - and it is harder to type this today as opposed to earlier in the week when I was drafting this review in my head - but nonetheless are generally just doing their job. It is not clear what the long-term goal of the insurgents actually is but the film's point of view is loaded one way, I found. That said, if you take a loo break and come back, well, you'll find it hard to pick your moment because there's a lot going on, so I wouldn't advise you have a coffee beforehand, but you may also find yourself thinking, well, due to the break, is the story that compelling? DiCaprio's character is sympathetic perhaps because it's him, the actor - but it might have felt better with a 1970s-style actor; now when Hollywood actors do this role it feels like they're going off grid to impress, that they're day trippers rather than really living that attitude. You an imagine Tom Cruise doing this movie some years ago, before reverting to a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster whereas you can't imagine Jack Nicolson doing Cuckoo's Nest and then popping up in Star Wars.
That all said, I did enjoy most of it and it pulls you along. The final exciting chase scene is resolved with a really neat improvised trick by a lead character, and the use of a classic 1970s US pop record for the playout is expertly done; I myself have daydreamed about that song being used in a movie finale and while my vision was more cinematic (a perky Karoline Leavitt-type in flak jacket on a tank invading a Middle Eastern country) its use in this film is both outrageous and wholly appropriate.
I saw ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER a couple of weeks ago...as I understand it, the novel, Pynchon's VINELAND, begins in the 1960s and takes place in Reagan's '80s. That makes sense, because I thought the politics in the movie--which, NP, begins in the early 2000s (they didn't have cell phones in 1975)--do not seem at all like today's politics. Radicals today are far more performative. That said, it is a good movie and I enjoyed it.
Ta, @ChrisNo1, thanks @Hardyboy . I thought I heard DiCaprio celebrated as one of the 'heroes of 75' in the later scenes or did I mishear? But yeah, cell phones weren't around in that era, even a decade and a half later so I dunno.
I intend to see Sinners next week, so catching up with this year's best.
Billy Wilder’s treatment of Samuel Taylor’s successful Broadway play proves a hit for Audrey Hepburn, who sparkles in her second leading role, this time as a chauffeur’s daughter newly liberated after a two year sojourn to Paris. It’s a miss for William Holden and Humphrey Bogart, who are miscast as a pair of rich brothers intent on romancing her, but for entirely different reasons. Things are complicated by her father being their chauffeur. Slick silliness and plenty of highbrow romance evolves, much of it pleasantly amusing.
You won’t get any belly laughs out of this one, but Sabrina is superbly put together, has a sparkling music score from Frederick Hollander that leans heavily on La Vie En Rose, is chic and sophisticated, set amongst New York’s high life with Givenchy gowns, champagne and trips to the swankiest nightclubs. Pity Bogart looks and acts too old to romance Miss Hepburn. Holden just acts stupid. There is some decent support from a long cast list. Nobody is disgracing themselves except the male leads and that isn’t their fault. Cary Grant was chased for the Bogart role and he would have fitted it like a glove; Holden’s gloves have holes in them. The real issue is that the story itself requires both men to be older, so you never quite believe the love affairs, and there is something distinctly icky about two older men lusting after a woman they’ve seen grow up from a child, through a teen, etc. It probably watched okay at the time. There is also an oft repeated line about Linus’s seduction of Sabrina being “All in the family” which is crass and unsettling to the modern ear.
If you can erase those from your memory, there’s a good slice of entertainment waiting for you. Audrey Hepburn looks gorgeous.
Susanne Collins’s young adult dystopian fantasy novels are a bookselling phenomenon that preaches the same kind of unifying ‘three musketeers’ approach to life as J.K. Rowling’s more child friendly Harry Potter series. In The Hunger Games a nuclear war has obliterated most of the nation of Panem. Twelve Districts remain under the despotic control of The Capitol and its President Coriolanus Snow. Every year each district sends a male and a female adolescent to take part in a televised game of death, where each must hunt the others until only one remains. Called the Hunger Games, these are seen as both an entertainment for the cowed masses and an example of the fate which awaits those who commit treason. Each winner, in some ways, represents hope for their district, a hope which the Capitol routinely dashes with hardline violent repression. Candidates are chosen at a ceremony known as the Reaping and are ferried to the glamourous surrounds of the Capitol, all gaudy fashion, exquisite food and luxury. The candidates are trained for two weeks, gain or lose favour with the public, before being subjected to the murderous Hunger Games in an enormous domed arena.
In the first novel and movie, the mining District 12 sends poacher Katniss Everdene and baker Peeta Mellark to represent them. A lilting, unrequited romance ensues as the killings take place around the twosome in a wooded glade of some beauty. By its end the film, and the novel, have reached a good finishing point, the loose ends are left tantalisingly open, but the story itself has refused to embark on a Spartacus-style revolution, instead retaining the intense condensation of action inside the arena. This is a good thing, allowing The Hunger Games, like most opening gambits in a series, to stand alone as a successful movie [or novel] not requiring the support of sequels. Star Wars: A New Hope retains the same effect, as does Mission: Impossible and The Matrix. Unfortunately, the series doesn’t stop there and a revolution must come for Katniss and Peeta.
Collins admits in interviews that her inspirations came from reality television, Greek myth, Roman gladiator history and the juxtaposition of throwaway TV broadcasting alongside harrowing Iraq war coverage. I’d say the film touches on all kinds of inspirations: Lord of the Flies, Battle Royale, Theseus and the Minotaur, The Running Man, Rollerball, Slap Shot, the Dr Who serial Vengeance on Varos, Deliverance, the legends of Robin Hood and William Tell, Death Race 2000, the sci-fi novel Fury, the life of Spartacus, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, H.G. Wells’s Things to Come, The Most Dangerous Game, the list goes on and on. As such, The Hunger Games is both over familiar and remarkably successful.
Jennifer Lawrence cuts a beautiful dash as the athletic heroine who shoots arrows with the speed of a whippet. There is decent, albeit not outstanding, support from a host of biggish names. There is the same sense of silliness to the proceedings which pervades most of these kind of dystopian fantasies. The poor people are ridiculously poor and the rich are opulent beyond belief being the chief one. The sheer scale of the Capitol makes no sense when the outlying Districts appear to be so small; there’s only a dusty plaza full of teenagers to represent District 12 but the Capitol has a stadium to accommodate 100,000. The stupidity of the Games themselves, especially the age range of the competitors which favours the elder candidates, as well as the manipulation of events by the overseers, makes the premise a tad uninspiring. It is left to the action and the gung-ho acting of Lawrence and an understated Josh Hutcherson to keep us interested, which they do in spades despite both being clearly older than the ages of their characters. The editing is crisp and the photography gorgeously bright, even at night. The action scenes hold the attention well. The story is simple and simply told, if a little weighty at the edges. Director Gary Ross does nothing spectacular. The setting negates the need for stupendous effects. The film operates on tension and intrigue, not on outright thrills. In many ways, it is quite low-key.
I would suggest, watching for the first time a good thirteen years after its premier and carrying a lot of the baggage of time, that The Hunger Games is a very fine movie, excellently presented, but ultimately it is also a very ordinary one. I enjoyed it though, which is unusual for me and this subgenre of fantasy film, so I guess it’s a thumbs up. Two thumbs, maybe, for Jennifer Lawrence’s committed performance.
The Lady Eve (1941) with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda
Highly enjoyable screwball comedy shown over Christmas and then repeated - Radio Times touted it as worth seeing because it hasn't been on telly for years; now why is that. Movies get bought up, I'm no fan of these nostalgic social media accounts; they start off charmingly with old photos of London or your town in the 1960s or so, then as twilight falls the posts turn a bit racist, with comments such as, 'Do you notice anything about the people in this picture?' Quite possibly the accounts come from Putin's Russia. But if a party could get all these old movies back on telly where they belong, and maybe revive Terry's chocolate Neopolitans and fix it so Cabury's taste like it used to, and not use palm oil, I'd vote for 'em.
Anyway! It starts off with a jokey credits with a Disney-type jolly animated snake and an apple - Eve you see - and then some African jungle where a young man, rich from his parents' fortune, is into researching snakes; really I didn't pick up on the snake connection with the title and everything, I think my brain is a bit soft after a winter flue. Don't miss the almost opening scene where con woman Stanwyck and her huckster father are on board the ship looking for their wealthy prey; and in the dining quarter where she uses her compact to spy on other women making doomed attempts to capture the attention of this wealthy heir to a fortune, before making her own approach.
This if Stanwyck's film, and I've never quite appreciated her before. I didn't find her that sexy in Double Indemnity and I'm not sure her films are shown that often, a bit like those of Lana Wood, Virginia Mayo, Edward G Robinson, Mae West. She's got a wry, funny sideways commentary on things, like that woman in All About Eve and High Society whose name escapes me. Women don't get cast like this now, they seem quite bland and they're not allowed to be sexy either, not really. The writer Julie Burchill commented on how the studio system gave women a better crack of the whip back then, they were allowed to be more rounded, stars were cultivated.
That said I don't know if the set-up here is a good role model for marriage, it seems that Fonda is meant to be a bit dumb with the opposite sex and generally and she comes along and sort of saves him - nice in the beginning but not a good dynamic to follow. Fonda doesn't quite have the comic chops in this or maybe it's just hard for a bloke to want to identify with this type; still I think Ryan O'Neal might have done it better with Streisand in What's Up Doc.
Other characters from the era pop up, such as Eric Blore from the Astaire movies - only this time he is a wily conman and not the dim bulb of the musicals. Others you might recognise from a similar film in the 50s, I think it's the one with Monroe and Jane Russell - is it How to Marry a Millionaire or is that the one with Lauren Bacall?
It's good fun but watch it from the beginning - I tried tuning in to the first showing 20 mins in and I couldn't pick up on it, you need to see the establishing scenes to make it work.
I am off to the pictures this afternoon to see Stanwyck in Baby Face, one of her earlier films.
Following on my new Barbara Stanwyck obsession, this pre-Hays Code flick tells the story of a teenage girl who works for her father in his down-at-heel bar, the suggestion being he loans her out to blokes along the way. If this be the case, it's not clear why she takes against one sleazy suited visitor, resisting his advances in no uncertain terms, breaking a bottle over his head.
After this, an about turn in fate sees her leave town with her black co-worker and head for the Big Smoke, picking up a few tips on Nietzche from an avuncular older customer with her best interests at heart.
From thereon, she uses sex to sleep her way to the top of the head of a big corporation. This controversial though we don't see any bare flesh, it's done in a fade out way, like the woman traveller in Carry On Follow That Camel.
Initially it's great to see Stanwyck at play though I realise she's not that original - her delivery is pure Mae West at times. It's great to to see an old film on the big screen, even if the picture is a bit grainy and the noise in the cinema way too loud - I was glad I had some ear plugs on me.
That said, it's a bit one-note. It's just Stanwyck doing her thing, it's a bit repetitive and we don't see anyone else on the staff rumbling her or looking to bring her down, no love rival, Like The Lady Eve, the chance of her falling for her victims seems very much a plot contrivance. There's not quite enough going on there but back in the day maybe there was a supporting feature to pad things out, so you woudl'nt want too much going on in the main movie.
A young John Wayne shows up as one of her exploited, he's not in the film long however and he's cast against type as he didn't have a type back then. The film is worth reading up on as it was heavily re-edited for release, this unbutchered version was found around 2004.
It's good to see an inter-racial friendship in the film even it it's not developed very much.
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TOP GUN (1986)
Top Gun is an eighties phenomenon which more than any film put Tom Cruise’s star firmly in the ascendence. It was the first of a run of spectacular hit movies which, until the relatively lukewarm performance of Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, firmly thrust the toothsome one into the A-list of Hollywood actors. He’s probably still there, although he perhaps doesn’t command the attention he did as a youthful mid-twenties heartthrob, who in this role with its homoerotic military playfulness appeals equally to both women and men. In fact, the romantic subplot with Kelly McGillis’s civilian instructor is as dull as the battle grey paint on the fight jets. Top Gun is all about the guys.
Cruise is Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, a US Navy fighter pilot sent to the real life Top Gun school for advance combat training. He may be one of the best of the best, but he is unconventional and that makes him dangerous, both in the air and on the ground. Clichés abound among the blazing setting suns, superb aerial photography and knockout eighties synth and guitar hammering soundtrack. The comedy, if it is there, is laboured. There is tragedy, comradeship and ultimate victory. Top Gun is a very American flavoured film, solidly stuck in war and western genre speak, which is one of its faults; the appeal is flawed. It’s very good, on its own terms and is rightly acclaimed for the flying footage and the whiplash editing, sequences that still hold up well today. The narrative takes a dive when everyone’s out of the saddle, like a lot of westerns do, and the rivalries are obvious, the egos see-through and the solutions simplistic. That went down a hoot in the eighties, when nuances didn’t matter so much. I saw this in the cinema, saw it on rented VHS, loved it loads it at the time, the big ballad by Berlin was a shoe in for the last dance at shoddy Croydon nightclubs; so it still has nostalgic appeal.
Top Gun won’t suit every taste, but it is thoroughly entertaining and whether or not you’re a fan, you really can’t deny that Maverick was a star making role for Tom Cruise. He’s spent the next forty years playing variations of the same character.
I may now have reservations, but Top Gun brings back some good memories, so I really enjoyed watching this. A great blast from the past.
It's a wonderful life (1946)
I saw this Christmas classic last night. The conditions were perfect: we finally got snow yesterday, the had fire going in the stove and I was drinking hot cacao. Here comes what some may find a little bit shocking - It was my first time watching "It's a wonderful life"! The movie simply isn't famous classic in Norway. it didn't run on TV back in the day, and I suspect this is often the key to classic status. I'm not going to get into the plot since most know it. Christmas movies are often saccharine and sentimental, and frequently too much so. I can't deny that this movie isn't both sentimental and saccharine, but it's also is surprisingly dark. Key plot points are suicide, slums, foreclosures and alcohol problems. Not Hallmark, is it? Especially James Stewart plays a very nice guy with a hart of gold. But anger, regret and frustrations raises their heads from time to time and more violently and frequently as the movie progresses. I realised Stewart had just finished his military service in the Strategic Bomb Command. He had lost a lot of friends and sometimes it must've happened in front of his eyes. He had also dropped a lot of bombs on people. is James Stewart the Hollywood star who has killed PTSD he was experiencing. I also noticed how much of a role religion played in the movie. Some of it through comedy, and Henry Travers as the off-beat angel Clearance is great. But sometimes faith is treated more seriously than what we see in most movies. interesting. he most people in real life? I suspect he is. He may have killed hundreds or maybe even thousands of people, some of them civilians. I read on the internet that he found making this movie cathartic in dealing with the
Not that his character and the film is all darkness. There is a lot of comedy, romance and Christmas cheer here. It's a wonderful movie!
I caught up with Challengers (2024) the highly acclaimed drama about a tennis romantic triangle, made up of Zendaya (she has been in the Dune films), Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor (he was Prince Charles in The Crown and is in the latest Daniel Craig Knives Out movie, someone on ajb has touted him as a new James Bond, I dunno),
Some kind of threesome between the lead characters was touted at the time but - okay I should explain the plot, it's opens with two male tennis players in their early 30s going at each other across the net, it's not a lavish setting and it turns out that a) This is second or third string tennis, one player has fallen from the heights, the other sees this as his big shot and neither can afford to lose b) The two know each other from way back in their teens.
From thereon the time line goes back and forth between past and present but what is well done is that all the leads - the Zendaya character was also a player in the past, much touted and the subject of the two's uncomplicated - at first - romantic attention - anyway they play both young and enthusiastic and older and jaded very well and you are never in question which is past or present. However, the threesome - or almost a threesome - occurs when they are fumbling teens in a hotel room and is curtailed by the female apex of the love triangle before anything really happens. This is not that an erotic film.
It's an engrossing film, a three hander really, and initially you are on the side of the Josh O'Conner character (he does a great American accent btw despite being English) as he is the underdog who has to scrounge cash to get a ticket at the table, however it must be said that the three characters are not that likeable and arguably become less so as the film goes on. There is something to this, the idea that one needn't identify with any one character in the film, so the viewer doesn't over the years subconciously acquire main-character syndrome (the Bond films, esp the 'classic' ones are the extreme other end of that). We learn nothing of extraneous characters like their parents or older family, other friends etc. It depicts the tennis world as bland and claustrophobic, which it probably is.
The tennis is brilliantly shot and exciting - hard to do with sport when we know it isn't real - and it kept me up until midnight but the ending seemed oddly inconclusive with some red herrings plot wise set up in the last 20 mins to build interest, but it seems we are not to know exactly how it unfolds (I am being vague to avoid spoilers). One of the characters does something very nasty in the game and so really, it didn't send me off to sleep with happy, lovely dreams to fall back on.
The acting is top notch.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I rewatched Top Gun a year or two back, I was a bit unimpressed to be honest (the sequel surpasses it in every way) but I did find the unintentional utterly self-centred quality of Maverick to be really quite funny. When Goose dies: it’s all about him, people have to chase after him to tell him how amazing he is(!). When he has his first date with McGinnis he goes on about his parents and his upbringing, asks her not a single question about her life, then gets on his motorbike and leaves! 😁 It’s kind of amazing really.
I never noticed that - but now you mention it, you are spot on! Maybe my mind was frazzled by all the teen memories. I am not sure I have watched the movie since the turn of the century.
CON AIR (1997)
Jerry Bruickheimer’s big break as a producer was with Top Gun, which I watched the night before this. Con Air solidifies his bigger, louder, longer, not-necessarily-better reputation which follows on from the quite brilliant The Rock by having its villains escaping captivity rather than setting up house in a defunct prison and incarcerating themselves. Con Air benefits from a cruel bleak and black humour that fizzles on and off beneath the various astounding feats of stunt work and explosions. Nicolas Cage is a bit one note as hero Cameron Poe [Poe-faced?], a former Army Ranger who comes to the rescue of the US Marshalls and the DEA by undermining John Malkovitch’s complicated flight to freedom. Chaos ensues. By the time Las Vegas’s famous Strip has been destroyed by a crashlanding plane [given some recent events, that isn’t as far fetched as you might think] you’re almost too weary to care, but there’s a fire engine chase coda that out-does James Bond in spades. The cast of creeps is long; the best of them is Steve Buschemi’s serial killer psycho who gets to gamble another day. As action flicks go, it ticks all the boxes. The excellent theme song How Do I Live, sung by Trisha Yearwood, seems totally inappropriate for this kind of fare. Look back at how Top Gun unfolds against the yawning of Berlin’s Take My Breath Away, and you can see how Bruickheimer’s making movies by numbers theory works. There are worse films, I suppose.
CLOCKWISE (1986)
Murphy's law states that anything that can go wrong...will go wrong.
And surely a lot of things go wrong in this hilarious film starring screen legend John Cleese.
Brian Stimpson (Cleese), headmaster of the Thomas Tompion Comprehensive School has been selected as the chairperson for the annual headmaster meeting in Norwich...a meeting he desperately wants to attend.
A stickler for punctuality and discipline, Stimpson arrives well in time at the local train station to board his train. It is here that a momentary lapse of attention jettisons Stimpson onto a wild adventure through the country side.
A delightful film.
(96 minutes - Directed by Christopher Morahan)
An odd one for New Year's Eve, but as I am looking after Dad, you kinda have to go with the flow. Afterwards, we watched Ronan Keating's New Year Party. It was dreadful [not a patch on Robbie Williams, Rick Astley or Sophie Ellis Bextor]. After the midnight firework display, I went to bed and had just about the most peaceful rest I have experienced for months. Hope that's a sign of things to come in 2026.
CRIMSON TIDE (1995)
The team behind Top Gun reunites ten years on for another slice of West Vs East, this time with nuclear submarines and ICBMs instead of jet planes. The formula is obvious; there is even a brief scene of men in uniform singing a sixties classic pop hit. Denzel Washington is the idealistic greenhorn Executive Officer to Gene Hackman’s no nonsense Captain. It’s like a lesser version of Cruise Vs Nicholson in A Few Good Men, only with more brio and testosterone flying about. Basically, Russian ultranationalists have seized a long range missile base and are threatening to unleash nuclear hell, so the USS Alabama is despatched to the Sea of Japan to take pre-emptive action. As communications and orders become confused, Hackman’s grip on the situation is questioned, only his loyal officers do not take to the greenhorn No.2 putting one over their proficient No.1. Tense, but silly, Crimson Tide wiles away a couple of hours. Good special effects. The interiors of the sub are very detailed. Tony Scott directs with a keen eye on the two major protagonists who do their best with the cliché prone and jargon ridden script.
FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDIE'S 2 (2025)
Not my kind of film at all, I was dragged there by a granddaughter who had liked the first one.
Now, I take it everyone is familiar with a jump scare? The director of this incoherent mess certainly is. In fact, it might have been made under a bet to see how many jump scares can be fitted into a not terribly long (although it seems interminable) movie. The first one or seven are bearable, but the next twenty or more suffer from the law of diminishing returns.
There's a sequel hook at the end which I hope isn't picked up on. At least, until I can get out of being forced to watch it.
Porridge the movie suffers from the lack of a laugh track - though some of these small to big screen transfers would have worked in a packed cinema at the time. On the Buses was the blueprint for this I think, as it did so well it outgrossed Diamonds are Forever in the UK at the box office, and with a relatively tiny budget of course. Until then, the thinking might have been, why would folk travel and pay to see the same kind of thing they can see on the box at home for free? Subsequently, there was a Simon Cowell attitude - everyone namely millions knows the characters, you have a massive audience to be tapped here, even if only a fraction go to see the movie. Ironically it was around this time that the Carry On team seemed to have the reverse idea, and were making ropey TV specials such as pantomimes, some of which were shown this Christmas.
Some of these big screen transfers aimed to be a bit saucier or more adult to make it a bit different or enticing - this didn't work for Porridge because there are no women in it, though the woman who plays Fletch's daughter Ingrid pops up as one of the getaways' wives for two minutes.
Porridge the movie is odd for a few other reasons; it slightly aims to be standalone, much like Dad's Army earlier in the decade, where we see Mainwaring recruiting his platoon from start yet again, something he had already done of course in a 1968 black and white episode. (You could argue that Never Say Never Again, on which writers Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais worked, also has that unnecessary sense of being an alternative reality.) We also saw this in the nadir of these kinds of films, Rising Damp, in which Rigsby seemed a different kind of character, perhaps based on Rossiter's successful chinzano adverts with Joan Collins, and the location was different - it also lacked Richard Beckinsale who had died at this point; again the whole thing aimed to start from scratch, with Miss Jones looking for a place to rent - it was kind of an alternative reality, reusing some of the series' plot points.
But what makes Porridge the movie really odd imo is when you realise it was filmed once the series itself was long gone, with young Lennie Godber (Beckinsale) departing Slade Prison and old lag Fletch being entrusted by Mackay with a newbie in the final episode. So why is Godber back behind bars, was he a recidivist? Instead, it just ignores the issue. Again, what makes it even odder is that the Porridge spin-off series Going Straight, has already gone out, and this dealt with Fletch's life trying to make it in the big wide world and not falling back on crime, it lasted two series and was cancelled.
Going Straight has been reshown over Christmas, billed as Porridge: Going Straight to make the link because this spin-off never entered the cultural consciousness the way Porridge did. The laughs are there - Clement and Le Frenais went on to do Auf Wiedersehn, Pet so they didn't turn bad writers for the hell of it. But it just doesn't work. Why?
Well, most obviously, one half of a situation comedy is the situation, and that has changed here. Ditched are all the colourful, enjoyably acted characters we saw in Porridge, like Bunny Warren, Lukewarm, Mackay, Grouty etc. The latter two were authority figures of sorts but they're not in the spin off and it feels like Fletch has nothing to rail against but his own poor judgement. Beckinsale is back as Godber, but if anything the roles have swapped and his is the disapproving voice of wisdom. So is Ingrid, but she is not a Porridge staple so much, so it's a poor return, her voice grates and she's not such an appealing character.
It's a shame though, because it almost could work. Frasier is an example of a tidy spin-off, from Cheers. It relocates Frasier Crane to Seattle and introduces a load of great characters, essentially the character is transferable but it does seem that when Cheers regulars appeared as guests, they don't quite fit anymore, which can happen in real life, of course. The way Frasier is depicted in the spin-off, it's hard to believe he would have made Cheers his regular haunt however, he would have hung out at wine bars instead.
The reader may experience a dissonance or fission when they realise that Nicolas Lyndhurst, who has an early role as Fletch's gormless young teen in Going Straight, is also in the the recent revived Frasier spin-off, as an English professor.
Lyndhurst is subject of a line later re-used for NSNA re Nigel Small-Fawcett - he tails Fletch for some reason, who later tells how he 'took advantage of the natural cover' by hiding behind lampposts - a joke that makes more sense here given Lyndhurst's lean lanky frame.
But the presence of Lyndhurst in GS makes one wonder - this could almost be Only Fools and Horses, which starred Porridge's David Jason (he played Blanco) as Del Boy and an older Lyndhurst as Rodney, and that was long-running and legendary. That is to forget however that OFAH was almost ditched after just one series, and it was only its reshowing during a strike that saw it gain higher ratings - prompting it to be recommissioned.
That said, GS is depressing in a way that Only Fools is not, as it sees Fletch struggle with life outside prison, such that ironically he seemed less of a loser behind bars than he does as a free man. It also sees him behave out of character - nicking or borrowing Lenny's long-distance lorry to embark on a plan to recover buried loot, a mission that goes on to recall the plight of Horrible Harris - or maybe not him, I think it was Norris, the charmless nerk who tried to swindle poor old Blanco.
Another flaw is that this is John Sullivan territory and he did it better, he always made sure his downbeat protagonists lived within their means - Del Boy and Rodney lived in a high rise Peckham council flat. Fletch seems to be staying with his daughter and future son-in-law in a very nice house, very middle class, I don't know who it belongs to but it doesn't ring true. And as one talking head observed, Fletch seemed to fail a lot in this series and audiences didn't like to see him as a loser, more a winner. It is also true that what is charming and rafish when in jail is less so outside, so worries about him doing a bit of pilfering may introduce a note of jeopardy but doesn't sit right. Del Boy is the sort of character who managed to do a few dodgy deals without losing our sympathies on the whole.
The whole thing feels like that Hancock episode where he meets up with his old Army pals but finds he doesn't get on with them anymore.
Porridge the movie was reshown at the Odeon in Ewell as a tribute to Richard Beckinsale when he died, it also showed Let It Be when Lennon died, two largely grim movies in a grim context of a largely empty cinema as I recall. That said, I do enjoy dipping into Porridge the Movie when it is on telly, it is really only enough for a Christmas TV special plot wise but the whole celebrity football match escape plot works well, plus there's snotty Julian Holloway (son of Stanley), veteran of Carry On and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, offering Barraclough a chance for a rare withering putdown when his 'celebrity' team are kept for questioning: 'We wouldn't have do this if we'd brought Michael Parkinson, would we?' 'No,' replies Barraclough. 'But then you didn't, did you...'
Look our for our own Philip Locke, Vargas in Thunderball, as the older, snooty prisoner who refuses to kowtow to Grouty. So that's another Thunderball connection. It does just occur to me that the stand-off between Bond and M in NSNA is really just Fletch and Mackay isn't it.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Oh - From Roger With Love is on tonight (Sat) at 9pm on UK TV - clashes with the Bowie doc on Channel 4, however.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE AVENGERS (1998)
Universally panned on release and hacked about by a studio running scared of the feedback from test screening, The Avengers deserves some reassessment. I rather liked it.
Based on the decade running sixties TV series, but especially series four and five which feature Steed and Mrs Peel, this reboot pays due homage to the original by being distinctly wacky and not bothering to explain itself very well. If Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman are poor substitutes for Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, they get marks in my book for not doing impersonations of their forebears. There is a hoot of a hammy villain in Sean Connery’s August de Winter and while the action stakes are weak, I found the dead pan, icy humour quite welcome. Sometimes the writers stray too close to the obscene [“You can get ten inches a night in India,” says De Winter – he’s talking about the monsoon, but you wouldn’t know it] which is unfortunate, but much fun is had in the silliness of it all: the briefing scene where every villainous investor is disguised in a colourful bear suit was hilarious, Mrs Peel’s wanderings around De Winter’s house a bizarre recurring nightmare, Patrick Macnee’s voice cameo as the unseen Colonel Jones [“I’ve been so forgotten, I’ve turned myself invisible,” he quips], Jim Broadbent’s chain smoking apologetic Mother, the “No trespassing” telephone booth, etc. I have the feeling people who reviewed the movie in 1998 hadn’t watched very much of the TV show, because many of those episodes are as peculiar and inexplicable as this.
I won’t bore you with the plot [crazy man controls the weather]. The film is well designed and photographed, the stars look good and I like Grace Jones’s theme song Storm. I’ll agree, it is a bit of a mess, and the editing decisions apparently removed most of the explanatory scenes so it is no wonder audiences left confused. What the film really misses is chemistry between its leads and you can’t magic that. Fiennes and Thurman certainly can’t anyhow. Pity.
Not completely dreadful then.
I remember taping that film from the TV back in 2001 and enjoying watching it. I made a thread here years ago saying I was surprised that a Bond film hadn't so far involved a plot to control the weather but perhaps it is best left to the likes of The Avengers as it's probably a bit too silly for Bond. Some of this film was pretty wacky, but then so were the Steed and Peel years of the show in particular, as you point out. I recall that Eddie Izzard played a henchman and that there were clones and a scene where robotic things flew about. My abiding memory though is Sean Connery as the villain saying to Fiennes's hero: "Steed, John Steed. What a horse's arse of a name!" As you say, crude, but funny nonetheless. I really need to get a copy of this film now. You've reignited my interest in it with your review, so thanks for that, @chrisno1!
@Napoleon Plural - I can’t quote your post as the forum tells me it’s too long 🤗
An interesting post with some good musings…I can agree with plenty of what you say - personally I can’t stand laugh tracks though 😡
I enjoyed Going Straight - obviously it’s not as good as Porridge (let’s face it, not much is) but I thought it stood up well enough - and it’s a darn sight better than some current ‘comedy’ shows 🤨
On the Buses was the blueprint for this I think, as it did so well it outgrossed Diamonds are Forever in the UK at the box office, and with a relatively tiny budget of course.
I know this isn't the most important point you make(!) and I apologise for nitpicking a tiny detail but this one's been a bit of a bugbear of mine: I think it's a funny little fact that appears often which isn't strictly fair- it may have outgrossed DAF in 1971, the year they both came out, but DAF was released on December 30th in just one cinema in London. It's not really fair to compare several month's worth of showings across the whole country to two days' worth in one screen! 😁
I'm pretty sure DAF would have taken a lot more than Buses in the UK across their releases. Buses was probably more profitable vs. its budget I guess.
I remember the Ewell Odeon 😊
What kind of amazes me about that is that it means DAF basically came out in the UK in January '72; LALD was released in July the following year, so you had basically 18 months between films!
@emtiem is correct in the On The Buses analogy - and also, DAF only had a London distribution in early 1972, it was actually Easter 1972 before it had a national release in the UK, so only a matter of 15 months between Bond releases - those were the days!
Thanks everyone - I do go on a bit don't I?!
Re laugh tracks, normally I agree, esp with stuff like MASH - but a laugh track does help jolly up a sitcom, which some of these bleak British shows needed, be it Steptoe or Porridge. So they do seem bleaker as movies. I am honestly never sure which are actually staged and filmed in front of a live studio audience and which have the screened result shown to an audience. The Good Life had its interiors filmed in front of a studio audience I gather, and the notorious episode of Only Fools - Dinner for One, I think - in which Del Boy shows up poor Rodney in front of his posh girlfriend's family, it was never ever reshown and was heavily reedited for the DVD release, suffered it's been said because it wasn't done as usually in front of an audience so David Jason didn't tailor his performance according to the audience feedback and laughs or lack thereof.
Interesting to read about the DAF analogy - sounds great doesn't it but okay I guess it's untrue, I wonder what were the best-selling movies in the UK for that year then? I mean, what else did OTB beat?
It's like we think of Thunderball as 1965 but effectively it was after Xmas so really 1966 - and YOLT was out the following year. Mad, really. 66 a great year for pop, footie and movies however! In the UK, I mean.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Saw From Roger With Love - not presented as a movie in the Radio Times, incidentally. It's the documentary about Roger Moore, voiced by Steve Coogan as the man himself, it sort of grates at first but then they cut to Coogan in the studio doing him and it gets you onside. Not a pitch perfect Moore vocal impersonation though.
And you're not sure which of it Moore would say himself, is his words, or just made up.
It was watchable over a glass of wine and undemanding, relying heavily on anecdotage from his adult - and now late middle aged - kids. Most of it we might have known. No getting around the fact that his career wasn't as interesting as that of Richard Burton or Liz Taylor or Michael Caine or Richard Harris. Relied heavily on his Bond films and totally ignored other stuff like The Wild Geese or his Bond-like cameo in The Cannonball Run, surely worth a clip, or his turn as Clouseau in one of the admittedly awful Pink Panther films. Then again, the narrative was all about Moore's self-made man persona. And it took a rather indulgent attitude to his failed marriages, somewhat unsympathetic to those he dumped, always an excuse at hand for his doing the dirty on them, which even if justified does make you question his choices. It does seem with Luisa that they had a sado-masochistic relationship. I recall a TVTimes article entitled 'The time I saw James Bond get his bottom smacked' in which Rog committed some misdemeanour around a hotel pool and Luisa put him over her knee. The movie has Joan Collins reveal how his wife had the lovely sumptuous bedroom while Moore slept in a cupboard downstairs or something. I do wonder if he ever twigged that he was getting similar treatment to that dished out to his good friend David Niven by his second wife, a woman Moore and others truly deplored, and I wonder what year the bio Niv came out, which contained many contributions by Moore on this very issue - whether this sparked something in him at the time.
Nice to see Christopher Walken pop up to say nice things.
Nothing from Michael Caine, perhaps oddly, given it was Moore who crossed the street to say nice things about his performance on TV the previous night when Caine was largely unknown and Moore wasn't, saying 'You're going to be a big star!'
Roger Moore 1927-2017
ROUSTABOUT (1964)
Quentin Tarantino likes this movie. That’s a red flag for starters.
Elvis Presley stars as Charlie Rogers, an angry motor biker come singer who abandons his girl and an engagement at Mother’s Tea Rooms and takes a manual labour post working Barbara Stanwyck’s carnival. His singing skills bring the crowds and the money to the failing fair, but the bright lights of the big theatres steal him away from the carny and his new love, pretty Joan Freeman. Will Charlie mend his arrogant ways and return to the arms of a new found family or will he seize the dollars and stay angry?
No guesses.
Elvis’s career should still have been going places in late 1964, after all he’d just had a big movie hit with Viva Las Vegas. Unfortunately, Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was quite possibly one of the least effective executives in the pop music industry. For every good intention and success the Colonel mustered, there have to be a dozen disastrous decisions, which included interfering in Elvis’s song choices, record production and movie roles, to say nothing of his health, finances and welfare. Nothing got past the cigar smoke and fat belly of that heavy fingered shyster. Hindsight is a horrible thing and when I watch movies like Roustabout or hear such dire ‘studio’ albums as the cobbled together and quickly forgotten Elvis for Everyone, I keep wishing the King of Rock n Roll had employed a manager suited for his moniker, someone who at least cared about quality as well as quantity. For instance, in Roustabout there is a theatre show scene where Elvis sings the Lieber and Stoller song Little Egypt. It wasn’t a new song – the Coasters had recorded it – but Elvis gives it a swanky, cheeky polish. Coupled with a group of keen, saucy backing dancers, Elvis’s delivery creates three minutes of magic which are the film’s musical highlight, even if the King himself seems remarkably blithe. How can there be any of this when Elvis performs such drivel as Poison Ivy League, It’s Carnival Time and Carny Town? The song soundtrack isn’t only short on quality but time too, cutting it at a shade over twenty-minutes. That’s not a lot of return for your dollars.
[As a side point, Little Egypt and its spoken carnival hustler intro were utilised to good effect in the stage-show section of the 1968 NBC TV Special, proving again that Elvis understood a lot more about his music than the Colonel ever did.]
Amazingly, Roustabout was a fairly big hit in the cinemas, recouping its production costs three fold, and the LP topped the US Billboard charts on 3rd January 1965, three months after its release. I have no idea how that happened; the album had no singles released from it and sits in the lower tier of Elvis’s musical canon. Maybe misunderstanding grandparents bought it for their grandchildren at Christmas. The unfortunate side-effect of this dual success was to reinforce the Colonel’s assumptions that more cheap films and even cheaper soundtracks was the fastest and most efficient way to make money. He conveniently forgot, or perhaps he never realised, that it was his client’s skill as a singer and performer which drove those ticket and record sales and that poor quality material leads to a decline in performance and sales. Roustabout is just about as poor as you can get.
Yet perhaps it shouldn’t be. True, the storyline is lumped full of cliches, but that’s no bad thing in this kind of star-driven product. It gains something from a performance from Elvis that is rugged and obnoxious, the kind of showing he offered for the trio of image defining roles in Loving You, King Creole and Jailhouse Rock. What his performance lacks is a decent script to temper and focus his anger. Charlie’s motivations remain submerged in mystery. There is no family background, no future desires, no sense of real purpose. He really is a genuine layabout roustabout, who sings, seduces and cycles his way around the country with no care and no ambition, a drifter of the kind Faulkner or Tennessee Williams might have written, something Paul Newman or Brando might have had a stab at [The Fugitive Kind, for instance, or The Long Hot Summer]. Under the auspices of television director John Rich and work-a-day writers Allan Weiss and Anthony Lawrence, what we get is a lightweight and rather dreary catch-all tale of unlikely redemption, a supposed love affair, some inept fighting both verbal and physical, a few loosely interpreted songs and very little charm. The fact Elvis is desperately trying to do something different saddens the whole affair; his role and the unusual setting has big storytelling potential. But potential alone doesn’t augment success and everything and everyone around Elvis remains at exactly the same level as always, showing up the overall intent, particularly of lazy, aging producer Hal B. Wallis and the Colonel, who both saw the cash cow and forgot to prime the milk. I mean, veteran actress Barbara Stanwyck tries hard, but she has nothing substantial to work with, so too Sue Ann Langdon as a sexy fortune teller, but they may as well not bother as there’s little joy and nothing is developed past detached one liners that pout uncomfortably from everyone’s mouths and seemingly at all the wrong moments. The film flits between location and studio set so regularly it becomes distracting. The echoing audio track gives it away every time. This kind of slapdash detail just demonstrates the slipshod efforts being put in.
On the plus side, the film looks good; award winning cinematographer Lucien Ballard is among the credits. Elvis uses karate for the first time and rides a Honda 305 Superhawk, both of which are kinda cool. There’s an intriguing performance from Patt Buttram as rival promotor Harry Carver whose demeanour, attitudes and business acumen feels as if it was stolen from the Tom Parker playbook. I wonder if the Colonel noticed. Given the film’s homespun carnival setting, I sense his hand all over the story, in part attempting another retell of the Presley-Parker myth, like the aforementioned Loving You. He probably thought the writers were complimenting him on being a smarmy smart arse. Oh, and there’s Little Egypt, of course. That’s about it for the plus side.
A quick note on the cast list: buried among the uncredited performers are Raquel Welch and Teri Garr [college girls teasing Elvis in the opening scene], Beverly Adams as a dancer [she would appear next to Dean Martin in the Matt Helm series] and for us James Bond fans Richard Kiel is the carnival’s Strong Man.
I don’t know. Do I give out stars for potential? Not really. Elvis saves it, I guess, but the whole project is uneven and eventually inconsequential. It was a tough watch. Still, at least Quentin Tarantino likes it.
PRISCILLA (2023)
Priscilla Beulieu was married to Elvis Presley for six years, gave birth to their daughter, Lisa Marie, and in later life saved the King’s estate from ruin, forged a career as an actress and reinvented herself as a strong modern symbol of womanhood. Sophia Copolla’s saccharine movie Priscilla paints a far too easy portrait of her life where luxury is interspersed with the occasional quarrel and the ultimate sacrifice paid for being ‘Mrs Elvis’ is physical intimacy. By the end, although I knew the story, I wondered what was the point of it all. Maybe Ms Beulieu did too, which is why she leftnher husband. Shorn of any interior monologues or any explanatory dialogue to expand on what we visually observe, both Priscilla and Elvis come across as cyphers for any number of tortured uncommunicative lovers.
Lisa Marie hated the film, claiming it misrepresented her father, and one can certainly see her point. However, given Lisa Marie was nine years old when Elvis died and the source novel was Priscilla’s autobiography, Elvis and Me, I think we can safely assume her knowledge of events is skewed and incomplete. That isn’t to suggest Priscilla has it all right either, but we only have her word on things these days, particularly around those awkward intimacy issues. What the film does present well is the male dominated arena of the Memphis Mafia and the egotistical controlling behaviour of Elvis, which rarely ran to violence or harm, but by being so contradictory had a belittling and befuddling effect on her, and one assumes on many of his hangers on also. Priscilla’s difficult relationship with her parents and with her in-laws is hinted at, but not expanded on. Her lack of friends, even before Elvis appeared on the scene is startling. Equally startling is how tiny Cailee Spaeny is against Jacob Elordi’s Elvis. Was she really that small and he that tall?
Snapshots of time. Soft focussed. Good attention to period details. Cinematically poetic. Coppola understands what she is doing, but neglects to tell the audience. So we have snippets of life, hints at the repressed, obscene and the decadent, and not a lot else. Maybe that was how the autobiography spelt it. The cast and producers might have wanted Oscars and award news out of this, but nothing is quite good enough or intriguing enough to merit any more than a passing interest.
One Battle After Another (2025)
I heard a lot about this film, mostly positive, and finally got to see it on a re-run at London's Prince Charles. It's been called 'hard to define', but I'd call it a fast-moving drama with comedic undertones, or overtones. The era in which it's set was publicised on the posters but it isn't quite made clear in the movie unless I missed it and anyway there's a fast-forward a decade in it, I understand it begins in 1975, is that right? It doesn't signpost the time with hits from the day or period photography, so it feels more immediate, especially given the current climate in the US. It's about some urban guerrilla domestic terrorists freeing migrants from immigration camps and also holding up banks with guns and so on. Leonardo DiCaprio is one of these and I didn't recognise his black female accomplice, officer.
The Saturday Times' rent-a-misery Robert Crampton says he walked out of this not long after it began, as he tends to do with all of DiCaprio's films due to their unpleasantness, and I think I know which scene he means, the film did lose me early on not so much because of the brutality but because it seems so wilfully implausible. That said, Daniel Craig - wearing a prosthetic nose - impresses as the American guard in control of the immigration camps, and he gets the chance to perfect the American accent he tried out in another movie some years ago - until I realised it's not Craig of course - another equally famous actor, whose name I only learned from the end credits. He's a kind of Kubrickesque character who might pop up in Dr Strangelove or Lolita, making the film a bit different but also officially not that believable.
It's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so it tends to have these bumps in the road if Licorice Pizza is anything to go by - I mean, you can't really believe its lead in that is a school teenager.
That said, like LP, the advantage of sorts is that you just don't quite know where it is going, it doesn't obey the narrative strictures of Hollywood. I did find myself swept along with the timely goings-on as DiCaprio and his gang are forced to flee their oppressors. In terms of the bigger picture, it seems we are meant to sympathise with the domestic terrorists who are rarely depicted as doing anything that bad or evil, and oppose the US law enforcement officers who are presented here as basically unrepentant racists, but - and it is harder to type this today as opposed to earlier in the week when I was drafting this review in my head - but nonetheless are generally just doing their job. It is not clear what the long-term goal of the insurgents actually is but the film's point of view is loaded one way, I found. That said, if you take a loo break and come back, well, you'll find it hard to pick your moment because there's a lot going on, so I wouldn't advise you have a coffee beforehand, but you may also find yourself thinking, well, due to the break, is the story that compelling? DiCaprio's character is sympathetic perhaps because it's him, the actor - but it might have felt better with a 1970s-style actor; now when Hollywood actors do this role it feels like they're going off grid to impress, that they're day trippers rather than really living that attitude. You an imagine Tom Cruise doing this movie some years ago, before reverting to a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster whereas you can't imagine Jack Nicolson doing Cuckoo's Nest and then popping up in Star Wars.
That all said, I did enjoy most of it and it pulls you along. The final exciting chase scene is resolved with a really neat improvised trick by a lead character, and the use of a classic 1970s US pop record for the playout is expertly done; I myself have daydreamed about that song being used in a movie finale and while my vision was more cinematic (a perky Karoline Leavitt-type in flak jacket on a tank invading a Middle Eastern country) its use in this film is both outrageous and wholly appropriate.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Nice review 😀 thanks
I saw ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER a couple of weeks ago...as I understand it, the novel, Pynchon's VINELAND, begins in the 1960s and takes place in Reagan's '80s. That makes sense, because I thought the politics in the movie--which, NP, begins in the early 2000s (they didn't have cell phones in 1975)--do not seem at all like today's politics. Radicals today are far more performative. That said, it is a good movie and I enjoyed it.
Ta, @ChrisNo1, thanks @Hardyboy . I thought I heard DiCaprio celebrated as one of the 'heroes of 75' in the later scenes or did I mishear? But yeah, cell phones weren't around in that era, even a decade and a half later so I dunno.
I intend to see Sinners next week, so catching up with this year's best.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
SABRINA (1954)
Billy Wilder’s treatment of Samuel Taylor’s successful Broadway play proves a hit for Audrey Hepburn, who sparkles in her second leading role, this time as a chauffeur’s daughter newly liberated after a two year sojourn to Paris. It’s a miss for William Holden and Humphrey Bogart, who are miscast as a pair of rich brothers intent on romancing her, but for entirely different reasons. Things are complicated by her father being their chauffeur. Slick silliness and plenty of highbrow romance evolves, much of it pleasantly amusing.
You won’t get any belly laughs out of this one, but Sabrina is superbly put together, has a sparkling music score from Frederick Hollander that leans heavily on La Vie En Rose, is chic and sophisticated, set amongst New York’s high life with Givenchy gowns, champagne and trips to the swankiest nightclubs. Pity Bogart looks and acts too old to romance Miss Hepburn. Holden just acts stupid. There is some decent support from a long cast list. Nobody is disgracing themselves except the male leads and that isn’t their fault. Cary Grant was chased for the Bogart role and he would have fitted it like a glove; Holden’s gloves have holes in them. The real issue is that the story itself requires both men to be older, so you never quite believe the love affairs, and there is something distinctly icky about two older men lusting after a woman they’ve seen grow up from a child, through a teen, etc. It probably watched okay at the time. There is also an oft repeated line about Linus’s seduction of Sabrina being “All in the family” which is crass and unsettling to the modern ear.
If you can erase those from your memory, there’s a good slice of entertainment waiting for you. Audrey Hepburn looks gorgeous.
"The hateful eight" is the perfect movie to watch when it's cold and snowy outside. 🙂
THE HUNGER GAMES (2012)
Susanne Collins’s young adult dystopian fantasy novels are a bookselling phenomenon that preaches the same kind of unifying ‘three musketeers’ approach to life as J.K. Rowling’s more child friendly Harry Potter series. In The Hunger Games a nuclear war has obliterated most of the nation of Panem. Twelve Districts remain under the despotic control of The Capitol and its President Coriolanus Snow. Every year each district sends a male and a female adolescent to take part in a televised game of death, where each must hunt the others until only one remains. Called the Hunger Games, these are seen as both an entertainment for the cowed masses and an example of the fate which awaits those who commit treason. Each winner, in some ways, represents hope for their district, a hope which the Capitol routinely dashes with hardline violent repression. Candidates are chosen at a ceremony known as the Reaping and are ferried to the glamourous surrounds of the Capitol, all gaudy fashion, exquisite food and luxury. The candidates are trained for two weeks, gain or lose favour with the public, before being subjected to the murderous Hunger Games in an enormous domed arena.
In the first novel and movie, the mining District 12 sends poacher Katniss Everdene and baker Peeta Mellark to represent them. A lilting, unrequited romance ensues as the killings take place around the twosome in a wooded glade of some beauty. By its end the film, and the novel, have reached a good finishing point, the loose ends are left tantalisingly open, but the story itself has refused to embark on a Spartacus-style revolution, instead retaining the intense condensation of action inside the arena. This is a good thing, allowing The Hunger Games, like most opening gambits in a series, to stand alone as a successful movie [or novel] not requiring the support of sequels. Star Wars: A New Hope retains the same effect, as does Mission: Impossible and The Matrix. Unfortunately, the series doesn’t stop there and a revolution must come for Katniss and Peeta.
Collins admits in interviews that her inspirations came from reality television, Greek myth, Roman gladiator history and the juxtaposition of throwaway TV broadcasting alongside harrowing Iraq war coverage. I’d say the film touches on all kinds of inspirations: Lord of the Flies, Battle Royale, Theseus and the Minotaur, The Running Man, Rollerball, Slap Shot, the Dr Who serial Vengeance on Varos, Deliverance, the legends of Robin Hood and William Tell, Death Race 2000, the sci-fi novel Fury, the life of Spartacus, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, H.G. Wells’s Things to Come, The Most Dangerous Game, the list goes on and on. As such, The Hunger Games is both over familiar and remarkably successful.
Jennifer Lawrence cuts a beautiful dash as the athletic heroine who shoots arrows with the speed of a whippet. There is decent, albeit not outstanding, support from a host of biggish names. There is the same sense of silliness to the proceedings which pervades most of these kind of dystopian fantasies. The poor people are ridiculously poor and the rich are opulent beyond belief being the chief one. The sheer scale of the Capitol makes no sense when the outlying Districts appear to be so small; there’s only a dusty plaza full of teenagers to represent District 12 but the Capitol has a stadium to accommodate 100,000. The stupidity of the Games themselves, especially the age range of the competitors which favours the elder candidates, as well as the manipulation of events by the overseers, makes the premise a tad uninspiring. It is left to the action and the gung-ho acting of Lawrence and an understated Josh Hutcherson to keep us interested, which they do in spades despite both being clearly older than the ages of their characters. The editing is crisp and the photography gorgeously bright, even at night. The action scenes hold the attention well. The story is simple and simply told, if a little weighty at the edges. Director Gary Ross does nothing spectacular. The setting negates the need for stupendous effects. The film operates on tension and intrigue, not on outright thrills. In many ways, it is quite low-key.
I would suggest, watching for the first time a good thirteen years after its premier and carrying a lot of the baggage of time, that The Hunger Games is a very fine movie, excellently presented, but ultimately it is also a very ordinary one. I enjoyed it though, which is unusual for me and this subgenre of fantasy film, so I guess it’s a thumbs up. Two thumbs, maybe, for Jennifer Lawrence’s committed performance.
The Lady Eve (1941) with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda
Highly enjoyable screwball comedy shown over Christmas and then repeated - Radio Times touted it as worth seeing because it hasn't been on telly for years; now why is that. Movies get bought up, I'm no fan of these nostalgic social media accounts; they start off charmingly with old photos of London or your town in the 1960s or so, then as twilight falls the posts turn a bit racist, with comments such as, 'Do you notice anything about the people in this picture?' Quite possibly the accounts come from Putin's Russia. But if a party could get all these old movies back on telly where they belong, and maybe revive Terry's chocolate Neopolitans and fix it so Cabury's taste like it used to, and not use palm oil, I'd vote for 'em.
Anyway! It starts off with a jokey credits with a Disney-type jolly animated snake and an apple - Eve you see - and then some African jungle where a young man, rich from his parents' fortune, is into researching snakes; really I didn't pick up on the snake connection with the title and everything, I think my brain is a bit soft after a winter flue. Don't miss the almost opening scene where con woman Stanwyck and her huckster father are on board the ship looking for their wealthy prey; and in the dining quarter where she uses her compact to spy on other women making doomed attempts to capture the attention of this wealthy heir to a fortune, before making her own approach.
This if Stanwyck's film, and I've never quite appreciated her before. I didn't find her that sexy in Double Indemnity and I'm not sure her films are shown that often, a bit like those of Lana Wood, Virginia Mayo, Edward G Robinson, Mae West. She's got a wry, funny sideways commentary on things, like that woman in All About Eve and High Society whose name escapes me. Women don't get cast like this now, they seem quite bland and they're not allowed to be sexy either, not really. The writer Julie Burchill commented on how the studio system gave women a better crack of the whip back then, they were allowed to be more rounded, stars were cultivated.
That said I don't know if the set-up here is a good role model for marriage, it seems that Fonda is meant to be a bit dumb with the opposite sex and generally and she comes along and sort of saves him - nice in the beginning but not a good dynamic to follow. Fonda doesn't quite have the comic chops in this or maybe it's just hard for a bloke to want to identify with this type; still I think Ryan O'Neal might have done it better with Streisand in What's Up Doc.
Other characters from the era pop up, such as Eric Blore from the Astaire movies - only this time he is a wily conman and not the dim bulb of the musicals. Others you might recognise from a similar film in the 50s, I think it's the one with Monroe and Jane Russell - is it How to Marry a Millionaire or is that the one with Lauren Bacall?
It's good fun but watch it from the beginning - I tried tuning in to the first showing 20 mins in and I couldn't pick up on it, you need to see the establishing scenes to make it work.
I am off to the pictures this afternoon to see Stanwyck in Baby Face, one of her earlier films.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Baby Face (1933)
Following on my new Barbara Stanwyck obsession, this pre-Hays Code flick tells the story of a teenage girl who works for her father in his down-at-heel bar, the suggestion being he loans her out to blokes along the way. If this be the case, it's not clear why she takes against one sleazy suited visitor, resisting his advances in no uncertain terms, breaking a bottle over his head.
After this, an about turn in fate sees her leave town with her black co-worker and head for the Big Smoke, picking up a few tips on Nietzche from an avuncular older customer with her best interests at heart.
From thereon, she uses sex to sleep her way to the top of the head of a big corporation. This controversial though we don't see any bare flesh, it's done in a fade out way, like the woman traveller in Carry On Follow That Camel.
Initially it's great to see Stanwyck at play though I realise she's not that original - her delivery is pure Mae West at times. It's great to to see an old film on the big screen, even if the picture is a bit grainy and the noise in the cinema way too loud - I was glad I had some ear plugs on me.
That said, it's a bit one-note. It's just Stanwyck doing her thing, it's a bit repetitive and we don't see anyone else on the staff rumbling her or looking to bring her down, no love rival, Like The Lady Eve, the chance of her falling for her victims seems very much a plot contrivance. There's not quite enough going on there but back in the day maybe there was a supporting feature to pad things out, so you woudl'nt want too much going on in the main movie.
A young John Wayne shows up as one of her exploited, he's not in the film long however and he's cast against type as he didn't have a type back then. The film is worth reading up on as it was heavily re-edited for release, this unbutchered version was found around 2004.
It's good to see an inter-racial friendship in the film even it it's not developed very much.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I watched Rear Window on BBC Iplayer. One of my favourite films.
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