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The Duel at Silver Creek (1952)
The Mysterious Mr Sombrero
Passably watchable old-style Western not quite as bloodless as others of the early 1950s but entertaining enough if one factors in that Don Siegel, never one to shrink from the gratuitous, is its director.
Pleasing to see a disturbingly youthful Audie Murphy again, if only for the nostalgia kick, as well as an emergent Lee Marvin, poised and ready to dominate both the movie and the entire industry.
By contrast, bafflling to see what appears to be a change of actor playing Johnny Sombrero one third of the way through the movie, with. Eugene Iglesias seemingly not stepping into the role until then -- and, to add to the confusion, being repeatedly filmed in close-ups such as to display an uncanny resemblance to a young Kirk Douglas.
Other than that (all of which is actually more than enough entertainment to be derived from just one fillum), 'The Duel at Silver Creek', despite its title's wholly unnecessary definite article, is naively entertaining enough to divert attention from a predictably wooden Stephen McNally performance and the tedium of all those speeded-up tracking shots of galloping horses.
Let Him Go (2020)
Nasty, ugly film-making at its worst
Desperately hyped as a 'neo-Western' by the film's publicists (unsurprisingly, the meaningless phrase has been regurgitated by many a brain-dead critic and commentator) 'Let Him Go' is to the Western what 'Planet of The Apes' is to Busby Berkeley musicals.
Angst ridden, cliche-drenched, it's a pointless rendering on the big screen of a novel which, if the film is true to its literary roots, must have avoided its publisher's slush pile only by the narrowest of margins.
As a movie, it has no purpose other than to depress the viewer and inculcate within it an unhealthy hatred of the ludicrous pantomime villains (the Welboy family, unoriginal homicidal retards borrowed with no hint of acknowledgment from one of Wes Craven's repellent familial excesses.)
Popular with many critics so bereft of critical faculty that they'd worship the clothes of a naked Emperor, the biggest mystery about 'Let him Go' is how two reasonably intelligent artists like Costner and Lake came to associate themselves with it.
Not that Costner does much by way of that association; required to do no more than occasionally grunt, he obligingly complies, whilst Lake does the heavy lifting in a script so ridiculously lazy that it can't be bothered to even attempt a sketch of pivotal character Lorna (played, if that's not too strong a word, by Kayli Carter) daughter-in-law of Lake's assertive Margaret and Costner's mummified George.
Without Kayli and her unexplained conduct, there'd be no book and no film, (sighs of relief all round) and yet in the film version she's almost out of it anyway; we are given no insight into her character nor the slightest reason as to why in the wake of her husband's accidental death she should've wanted to marry loathsome bully Donnie Weboy (another character barely played, this time by Will Brittain.)
So contrived is this blatant daftness that Lake has the unenviable task of being repeatedly required to regale everyone with the film's back story: 'we're looking for our daughter-in-law and her son -- our grandson'. Which indeed they are, Costner dour, almost mute, Lake animated, forceful, articulate, she seemingly more concerned than he about the way Weboy, Lorna and three-year-old grandson Jimmy have suddenly vanished from the locality to God knows where.
It's actually at this point, early on in the movie, that you realize what you're watching is sheer drivel.
Margaret, portrayed here as an intelligent resourceful woman, knows (or should know) exactly what to do. Having witnessed Weboy bullying the little child and assaulting Lorna, she resolves to set off in pursuit of them, taking the mutely compliant ex-Sheriff husband George with her.
Well er, um, yes, that's exactly what would happen in real life. . . Not. Never mind Margaret ringing child protection services; never mind George reporting a criminal assault and prompting a police investigation; never mind anything remotely reasoned, civilized, or credible.
Watch 'Let Him Go' and from this point on you know, with fast-sinking heart, that you're in Amateurville -- as distinct from the kind of Auteurville director/ writer (or co-writer) Thomas Bezucha must most sincerely have wished to appear to be the case.
Instead, 'Let Him Go' is a cheap-jack contrivance from start to sleazily appalling finish, a truncated odyssey -- truncated because its anything-but-ambitious narrative arc goes no further from A than B -- made all the more tedious due to the fact that as presented here on screen, both Margaret and George are semi-senile idiots and that the movie (and for all I know) the original book should've thankfully ended with a single call to the child protection agency. And then we'd all have been spared.
But Bezucha clearly has no idea what is, in cinematic terms, credible and what is fatuous. Determined to showcase his own self perceived directorial talent he has George and Margaret halting in their odyssey at various old Kodak Photo-points so we can admire Bezucha's North Dakota landscape panoramics of wide blue sky and overhead fluffy whites etc.
It's during one such witless Kodak Moment when the couple, so intent on tracking down their missing grandchild that they've decided to act like tourists and take time out to go sightseeing from a cliff edge, that Bezucha introduces us to yet another pivotal character about whom we are told little and care even less.
This is Peter Dragswolf (Booboo Stewart) a Native American who without cause or explanation decides to involve himself in Margaret and George's affairs. That he's merely a plot device is pretty obvious from the get-go; serving no purpose on first appearance, he exists as a character only so that Margaret can have some help at the movie's nauseatingly hilarious climax.
It's impossible not to wish that Lorna and Peter had met earlier, two cyphers with nothing to say and not much to do, and thus spare us from the rest of the dross cooked up by Bezucha as a pretend-recipe for serious film-making.
It's after meeting up with Peter that the couple eventually confront a donkey-faced mouth-full-of-teeth Central Casting grinning moron (Donnie Weboy's uncle Bill), who George, had he been any kind of semi-intelligent Lawman at any time during his Sheriff's career, would've instantly recognized as a potentially dangerous psycho.
But no. Ex Sheriff George discerns no such threat -- rarely has the usually bright Costner played so dumb a character -- and instead allows Margaret to ride along with the lunatic in Bill's truck as he leads the way to his insane sister's home.
At which point, 'Let Him Go', already creaking at the seams with its lack of originality and credible narrative support, really does fall apart. Suddenly, camera and script are so focused in on Blanche, Donnie's mother and mad matriarch of the off-the-grid out-of-their-minds Weboy clan that it's as if some raving lunacy from a Wes Craven blood-fest has been grafted on: an entirely different film on the end of this one, stuck there by a writer/director who has given up trying to cope.
Saddled with so literally unbelievable a role as Blanche, Lesley Manville strives frantically to distract viewers' attention from the unfolding gibberish with a scenery-chewing performance so far over the top that one fears for Bezucha's directorial future -- unable to control the movie's ridiculous plot it now seems he can't even control his over wrought actors.
Ultimately -- but of course! -- it all ends in graphic, gratuitous violence, a series of otherwise unwarranted blood-splattered scenes of sadistic brutality that are nevertheless so badly written and directed that the all-powerful Blanche manages to inadvertently shoot and kill, one after the other, not one but three (!) of her deranged sons until she finally kills Costner's stupefyingly dumb George and, predictably, is shot-gunned to death by Margaret.
Amidst the violence, the screaming and the gore, the three year old grandson looks on, forever to be traumatized by what he's seeing (a discomforting reality way beyond the movie's scope or its writers' non-existent empathy).
And thus 'Let It Go' ends, an unsavory exercise in ineptitude that diminishes its audience by insulting their intelligence and soiling them with its repellent excesses.
VERDICT: Rarely has a movie been as devoid as this of taste and talent. An ugly, nasty little piece of film-making, 'Let Him Go' marks a new low in dispiriting cinematic trash.
Blithe Spirit (2020)
As bad as it gets: dead on its feet 'Blilthe Spirit'
About as dire as the worst of British film-making can be, 'Blithe Spirit' is a joyless, mirthless travesty of Noel Coward's original stage play unredeemed by anything in the way of discernible quality in screenplay or direction.
An aspirant comedy,it provokes hilarity only on the basis that its makers were not only deluded enough to have this drivel exhibited at California's Mill Valley Film festival -- an event not usually renowned for applauding the third-rate and unoriginal -- but also had hopes of a full theatrical release, until COVID19 shut down all the cinemas that might've been unlucky enough to screen it.
One doesn't need a medium to foretell that word-of-mouth recommendations for 'Blithe Spirit' would have been precisely zero.
Without a trace of the urbane wit essayed in all Coward's work, nor much grasp of how Coward was at his most libertarian and subversive in this now sadly-dated play (which it is indeed: dated; a Cowardian capering among the dead, a trivialising of mortality itself to scandalise the last lingering vesitages of Britain's hypocritical Victorian-era preoccupation with the dignity of death and the magnitude of loss), the film relies for what minimal appeal it possesses on an all stops-out performance by actor Dan Stevens that varies from A (Basil Fawlty) to B (Bertie Wooster) and back again, as well as a miserably understated performance by a miscast Judi Dench, evidently brought in because of the latter day misapprehension about Dench's cinematic 'star power'.
Stevens' predictable performance as well as Dench's underplaying, could and should have been picked up on by director Edward Hall, son of the Royal Shakespeare Company's famed Peter Hall.
Unfortunately, although one might've thought Hall to have the art and craft of his calling imprinted in his genes, he here gives every indication of being unable to direct an envelope through a letterbox, still less an entire movie.
The only noticeable momentum in a largely immobile piece is a homage to the John Cleese/Connie Both masterpiece where Cleese attacks his recalcitrant Austin 1100 with a tree branch, only in this instance it's a demented Stevens runnning past the window of a room full of people, waving either a hammer or a mallet in an attempt to strike down the already-dead yet wonderfully animated Elvira (a role thankfully played to the hilt by Leslie Mann: without her, this film would've been dead on its feet within the first quarter hour.)
Snapped up by Britain's Sky TV, a Murdoch company which profits enormously from inflicting the mediocre and often downright awful on its gullible 'Sky Cinema' subscribers by raiding as many remainder bins as it can, 'Blithe Spirit' is another warning of the paucity of talent not merely at the top of Sky TV (home to 'Riviera', the worst TV series ever screened) but also the talent vacuum now so distressingly evident in contemporary British movie-making..
Quite how this version of Coward's beyond-its-sell-by-date work ever made it to the screen is a mystery, seeing as how the three writers that it took to actually 'adapt' Coward's play seem never to have met -- go on, count' 'em: Nick Moorcroft, Piers Ashworth and Meg Leonard -- one consequence of which is that their version of medium Madame Arcati saddled Dench with a car crash of a part that she could do nothing to repair.
Lacking the signature eccentricities of a Dame Margaret Rutherford, so 1,000% gloriously over-the-top in David Lean's typically skillful 1945 film version of the play, Dench brings little to the mess, and as the director can't decide if her character is one to be feared /admired/pitied or scorned, and as the script saddles Dench with mourning for a long dead husband (a cliched pathos Coward himself would've vigorously scormed) it's no wonder that in this offering Madame Arcati, as played by Dench, is a charmless and painfully ageing irritant.
An undistinguished back-up cast -- describing it as 'lightweight' would be a serious over-estimation -- does nothing to help, whilst the movie's idiotic references to a film world of which it itself doesn't deserve to be a part make one yearn for the days when British film making was as good as it gets, compared to this example of what happens when British film making is as bad as it gets.
Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood (2019)
Drivel about a Hollywood Tarantino never knew. And still doesn't.
Woefully self-indulgent film-making from the over-praised, under-talented Mr Tarantino that takes several hours to reach a blood-soaked climax as pointless as it is gratuitous.
A self-styled comedy thriller that manages neither; this sub-90 minute vanity exercise is ballooned to 3 hours by the hot air of a seemingly unending parade of directorial conceits, foremost of which is the patently ludicrous notion that Hollywood's 'golden days' came to an end in 1969 -- hence the need for a movie such as this to commemorate its passing.
Frustratingly for Mr Tarantino though, he wasn't around to witness Hollywood's "golden days" and on the basis of 'Once Upon A Time', hasn't a clue what they were or when they were. (Nor, for that matter, have so many Tarantino apologists on this review thread, but at least they haven't made a movie about it.)
Too young ever to have been invited to a party at the Fairbanks, or a swim in Jack Warner's pool, Tarantino as latecomer can only peep out at an industry borne on the shoulders of past giants and incoherently chronicle, instead, the life and times of an assortment of more recent dwarfs.
If the movie is about the end of anything, it's the end of the existence of any critical faculties in major name film critics, all of whom are bowed in grovelling obeisance to a new-clothes emperor with nothing at all to wear and even less to say.
Some slight consolation is however to be found for those who know Hollywood, and know film-making, in the realization that 'Once Upon A Time' is the 9th movie the Great Tarantino has chosen to make . . . and that as he has promised himself, and the world, not to make more than 10, there's only one more cinematic embarrassment of his to avoid in future.
Condor (2018)
Big Brother Is Watching. Big Uncle is ignored. Welcome to Moronic TV.
Witless TV gets no better (or worse) than this ludicrous hi-jacking of a perfectly good original novel and the entertaining movie version that followed on from it.
Aimed squarely at an audience with the attention span of a goldfish, this runnin' jumpin' shootin' exercise leaves no cliche un-turned in its tale of a 21st Century Man from Uncle (Irons) too stupid to let his conveniently-placed avuncular relative (Hurt) take care of business but instead careens here there and everywhere in search of The Truth About The Evil CIA. (Oooh, that's never been done before.)
Naturally, he's tracked everywhere by public utility CCTV and A Man Sitting In Front of Large Screens (gosh, something else never done before) and, also naturally, he Lives To Fight Another Day / another episode, this despite the pursuit of a Female Assassin (ah: such novelty.)
Material of this nature is always going to require the suspension of belief, and given the genre, that's actually not too much to ask. But 'Condor' also mandates of its viewers the total suspension of any and all critical facility.
Ironically then, on the basis of this fodder-for-the-masses, one has to wonder if there is indeed a plot by Evil Masterminds to dumb down humankind to the point that it'll believe anything . . After which realisation belatedly dawns that yes: there is: at The White House, the nightmare has already begun. (Where is Roy Thinnes when you need him??)
Rated 1 out of 10 but only because zero isn't registered by IMDb.
Fortitude (2015)
Into the frozen waste of time . . .
NOTE: only a very minor spoiler ahead. But you have been forewarned.
Once upon a time, a well-known audio company used to place expensive full page advertisements on the outside back of national newspaper supplements, here in the UK. The advertisements promoted the hi-fi products by direct sell, that is, you filled in a coupon, sent it off, and received the unit on a free trial. If you wished to keep it, then you could purchase it on monthly instalments.
That kind of advertising costs money. A helluva lot of money. It's spent from what is known as a 'marketing budget', something which all companies have for their products. The budget is established as a percentage of retail price and can be whatever the company decides. In the case of that particular company, marketing accounted for a staggering 45% of the retail price. In other words: what you bought was "worth" only 55% of what you paid. The rest of the money you spent was allocated to marketing / advertising to draw in other punters who, like you, had no idea how these things are done.
A similar formula is evidently at work with "Fortitude" where, to judge from the actual product, around half has been spent on advertising hype. Let's be nice. Call it: 40%. The rest? Well, let's say: 30% production costs; 20% actor payroll (inflated by "big names" brought into it for packaging gloss, even though they don't stay around that long) and, um, 10%, writers' fees.
You pay for what you get.
Filmed in Iceland -- the one place you really do NOT want to set up shop when you're peddling televisual rubbish -- "Fortitude" in the duration of its oh-so extended length manages not one minutesworth of the intensity, interest, or believability of Iceland's very own crime show: "Trapped".
The latter's snow-burn realism contrasts so strongly with the former's slow-burn vacuity that you have to wonder if anyone even vaguely connected with "Fortitude" had ever bothered to view "Trapped".
Had they done so, then the story's arc would've sprung from the truly human and all its characters from the very landscape itself. Instead: "Fortitude" decks itself out with palpably laughable back stories and characters not so much sprung from the landscape as 10 minutes' mulling over in the writers' room. "Fortitude" doesn't even seem to know where it's supposed to be -- a fairly significant failure for any drama -- and then compounds that by seeming not to know just what genre it's trying to engage with.
If you want to see a written-in-Iceland, made-in-Iceland, and filmed-in-Iceland crime show series that's a pure gem, then look out for "Trapped". If you want televisual paste instead -- great huge dollops of it -- then the over-hyped mammoth mess that is "Fortitude" should do nicely.
Okkupert (2015)
Television at its most. . . absurd
How on earth $11 million came to be spent on this ludicrous rubbish is something only the Norwegians can explain. Apparently an original idea dreamt up by a leading Norwegian fiction writer, 'Occupied' is about how Norway is led by a half-wit Prime Minister who struggles almost single-handedly against "the EU" which, it seems, has decided that Norway should be taken over by, er, Russia.
Words. . . fail. Fail so much that it's probably a waste of breath to even point out that back on April 4, 1949, Norway was one of the founding partners of NATO, along with the USA, the UK, Canada, France, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and (bizarrely) Iceland.
As a NATO partner, pledged to the defence of the sovereignty of its fellow partners -- of whom there are now considerably more than the original founders -- Norway is an active member whose participation in the organisation has consistently marked it out as a lead nation.
According to 'Occupied', however. . . it isn't. It's a chunk of land Somewhere Up North whose fortunes are to be decided by something called 'the EU', an organisation which has no power in international defense and strategic alliances. Even its Prime Minister doesn't know about NATO.
That anyone could even embark on a TV series 100% devoid of credibility beggars belief, the sheer witlessness of the concept mitigating against just about every word of dialog and every episode plot line. Evidently, the awful reality of just how profound a mess 'Occupied' truly is dawned on one of the original financial backers of the project; it ran for the hills and left the budget with a large hole that couldn't be filled until some new investors came along who've evidently never heard of NATO either.
The embarrassment of it all also led one of the show's principal producers to issue a rambling statement to the effect that ah, well, no, it's not meant to be realistic, it's just, er, stuff about Norway and Norwegians. It's absolutely not about Russia invading anyone or about international politics or even about. . . reality.
Russia rightly complained about the show when it first aired but has since ceased to bother, as aware as everyone else is of how utterly fatuous 'Occupied' truly is. Significantly, neither the BBC nor any commercial company in the UK picked up 'Occupied', leaving it instead to satellite TV to so ill-advisedly fork out for the rights.
I look forward to the next 'original idea' from the creators of this daft folly, perhaps a story of how the USA is re-claimed by the UK and the Pentagon can do nothing against the arrival in Boston Harbor of 300 tea drinking British Redcoats armed with muskets and a couple of cannons. Now, there's plausibility for you -- Norwegian-style, of course.
Verdict: unwatchable.
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Nothing to say. Nothing to sing. Nothing to. . . Enjoy.
Either a vanity project by the famous brothers or a practical joke played on pompous halfwits who'll throw 5 stars at anything if they think someone else might beat 'em to it first. The film makers may well claim it's a serious look at a particular musical era but heigh-ho, they said 'Fargo' was a true story. . . and many people believed that, too.
Plot less, witless, and with neither narrative drive nor the remotest dramatic credibility, the movie fails so abysmally in every area -- and in every achingly boring minute of its running time -- that there really can be but one conclusion: It is a joke. A practical joke.
It's been put together to identify those who slavishly admire The Emperor's New Clothes (of whom, it seems, there are thousands, though principally the industry's award-givers and so-called 'film critics' the world over) in order that the film-makers can have a good laugh at 'em -- fair enough, but I wish it hadn't cost me real money to participate in someone else's juvenile party game.
PS: is there some problem with John Goodman nowadays that either he or his agent can't find a halfway decent script? After the repellent nonsense of his turn as a drug dealer in the awful "Flight", he's yet another drugs-associated fat berk here. Cornering the market in a role is one thing. . . but cornering this market? Sheesh.
PPS: Great performances by the assorted cats in this movie though. And for all the pseudy 'expert' critics out there, there's a lovely nose-thumbing reference to a 1960s Disney movie involving travelling people, travelling animals, which (a) actually had a plot and (b) was a genuine road movie (which this is not) and (c)showed just how good American film-making can be. The contrast with "Inside Llewyn Davis" could not be greater . . .
Hitchcock (2012)
Goes off without a Hitch
Neither a forensic study of the making of Psycho nor an incisive examination of the man himself, "Hitchcock" is a long, rambling, boring essay that serves only to raise a single question: why on earth was it made? Slavish in its adoration of a director who, on a good day, could be amongst the best in the business and on a bad one, just about the worst ("Torn Curtain", anyone?) it plods along without a shiver of suspense nor even a whisper of credibility: "it wuz the wife wot did it, guv", seems to be the writer and director's joint explanation for everything ol' Alfred achieved -- as if Mrs H was in some unfathomable way responsible for her husband's sense of timing, humor, irony and individuality of vision.
What utter tosh. Absent anything substantial to hang onto -- and there's no greater indictment of this dross than that it should feature Hollywood's fattest man yet be entirely weightless itself -- Hopkins does what he can to save being confused with the Hindenberg whilst Mirren plays Mirren in much the same way that Britain's other grand dame is notable for one over-wrought performance after another of Dench playing Dench.
At its daftest when dragging the spectre of the eponymous psycho into Hitchcock's dreams -- the screenplay here is at its most desperate to explain. . . something, anything -- and most boring when purporting to represent a so-what-who-could-care-less liaison between Alma and some bloke whose presence doesn't even register, this really is movie-making of the worst kind: flaccid, fatuous and facile. It may have Hitchcock's name as its title, but of the man himself in the actual movie, there's no sign at all.
Verdict: not worth even 1 out of 10.
Harrigan (2013)
Cor blimey guv. It's grim oop Norf.
Except it isn't. And it never was. Life up north in the 1970s -- and especially, England's Northeast -- was nothing like the monochrome wasteland presented here. Nor was policing like this, either, despite the protestations of those connected with this low-rent low-budget outing.
Absent its premise, therefore, of hard men in hard times in hard places, "Harrigan" is no more than a straight-to-video made-for-TV affair, its simplicities of plot and characterisation conveyed via clichés so stupefyingly banal that one positively yearns for the raw energy of yesteryear's Caine and Hodges in the same part of the world at the same time as this.
"Harrigan" doesn't convince at any level. Stephen Tompkinson has already had a stab at playing a TV policeman -- the leaden "DCI Banks" -- and failed utterly in that role, so why he's here essaying the same kind of grim teeth-gritted stoicism all over again is baffling.
About the only thing that does ring true is the way "Harrigan" -- too close to Don Siegel's "Madigan" for my liking, though it's doubtful anyone involved in this British production will even have heard of that superb US police procedural -- seems to have been shot on a budget typical of a 1970s British TV show.
But that doesn't redeem anything. Unrelentingly drab, dismal, and derivative of a thousand B-Movies that have gone before -- including Westerns as well as copper operas -- "Harrigan" is yet another example, were such needed, of how small-scale British movie making is today incapable of working the crime genre in the way that films like "Violent Playground" and "Never Let Go" did, half a century and more ago.
Still, at least there's some originality in the write-in campaign that seems to be underway where this comment thread is concerned -- a case for investigation by Detective Harrigan, perhaps? Or IMDb itself . .
Poirot: The Big Four (2013)
Abysmal Agatha
The source material is Christie at her most unpublishable -- rumour has it that she was having a nervous breakdown at the time of writing 'The Big Four' -- but that's no excuse for this puerile rubbish. It's almost as though writers Gatiss and Hallard haven't a clue about screen writing, and especially First Principles such as the one relating to the maximising of assets, be they actors or location.
Here, after a lengthy and painful absence, Hastings, Lemon and Japp are all brought back -- yippee!! -- to play a, er, um, well, let's see. . . to play virtually no part at all in the story but simply stand around and do little to nothing in what tedious minutes of screen time allocated to them.
The money would've been good for the actors and one can't blame 'em for signing on to this production but it'd be fascinating to know what Hugh Fraser's agent said to him about the Return of Captain Hastings: hopefully no mention was made of thrills, spills, excitement, tension, logic or drama, seeing as none of that was in any way discernible.
Rated: 1 out of 10 because minus points aren't feasible at IMDb.
The Sentinel (2006)
Once upon a time, in a Hollywood all too near. . .
. . . there was a discussion of how to translate a quite acceptable little novel into a $60 million star-studded movie. It went something like this (note: *EVERYTHING* that follows is a spoiler)
Green Light Person (GLP): So. . . it's a movie about a plot to kill the President and the twist is, the assassins are being helped by an insider in the Secret Service itself.
Pitcher: Yup. It's a zinger. The bad guys set up the movie's hero as the mole to deflect attention from the real mole.
GLP: So after the assassination, the hero is on the run, trying to clear his name. Yes?
P: Oh no. He's on the run before the assassination.
GLP: So how does anyone know there's a mole if the assassination hasn't happened?
P: The assassins tell everyone.
GLP: Er, right. OK. But why raise the very idea of a mole?
P: Well, um.. . If they didn't, then the hero wouldn't be framed. And then he wouldn't be chased everywhere.
GLP: Ah. OK. So. . . the assassins with a mole let it be known they're going to kill the President thanks to help from a mole who isn't actually their mole but a different mole who isn't really a mole anyway.
P: Exactly. Simple as that.
GLP: Doesn't that strike you as, um. . . Odd?
P: Ah, but. . . They're foreigners. The assassins. So they're bound to be odd.
GLP: As well as incredibly stupid.
P: Stupid? Hardly. They're incredibly clever. They spend a lot of time following our hero and use hi-tech surveillance to photograph him and the First Lady getting it on. The pictures, you see, are to blackmail our hero.
GLP: Into doing what?
P: Er, well, we haven't quite figured out that plot point yet.
GLP: O-kay. . . So. They photograph our hero because they know of his affair with the President's missus. Who told them?
P: Well, er, we haven't quite figured out that plot point yet.
GLP: Hmmm. Wouldn't they be better off spending their time on preparations to kill the President rather than messing around with moles?
P: But they don't need to prepare very much, their mole is so well placed, he can organise anything. Like, shooting down the Presidential helicopter with a surface to air missile!
GLP: So that's how they kill the President.
P: Eh? No. He's not on board.
GLP: Their mole screwed up?
P: Oh no. He knew all right.
GLP: So how come they blow up the helicopter when the target is known NOT to be on board?
P: Er. Ah. Well. . . we haven't quite figured out that plot point yet.
GLP: Right. I see. . . Now then, how does our hero find out about the plot to kill the President?
P: An informant tells him.
GLP: The informant is one of the assassins?
P: Heck no. He's a street bum. American as they come.
GLP: So how does a street bum know that foreign assassins are going to kill the President with the help of a mole in the Secret Service?
P: Well. . . we haven't quite figured out that plot point yet -- unless, unless. . . The assassins tell him!
GLP: So these foreigners somehow know a Washington street bum and they also know this street bum is a paid informer working for the Secret Service? D'you think that's, um. . . remotely credible?
P: Well. . . we haven't quite figured out that plot point yet. But, but: it's not just the informant. They murder another Secret Service agent to make it all the more. . . Credible.
GLP: Why? Does he know of the assassination plan?
P: No.
GLP: Then why is he killed?
P: I think, well, put it like this. . . we haven't quite figured out that plot point yet.
GLP: Right. OK. Perhaps we'd better move on. Who're you thinking of casting?
P: Keifer Sutherland.
GLP: Ah! Keifer, running here and there, like in 24, action man, all that stuff. Yes, that'd work.
P: Sorry, no. It's gonna be Michael. Michael Douglas who runs everywhere. Keifer's chasing him.
GLP: Shouldn't it be the other way round -- I mean, Michael's a bit too old now for this kind of stuff?
P: I think, well, put it like this. . . we haven't quite figured out that casting issue yet. But we can always shoot Michael long, convince everyone he's faster and fitter than Keifer who's 20 years younger.
GLP: Ri-ii-ght. OK. That's the plot. That's the casting. What about the ending? Big set-piece, yes?
P: You bet. It all takes place on the back steps of a service stairway inside some building or other in Canada.
GLP: You're kidding me.
P: No. It's definitely in Canada.
GLP: Indoors. On some steps.
P: You got it.
GLP: OK. OK. Let me think about this. . . I don't understand the casting, I don't understand the plot --
P: Hey. No problem. We don't either.
GLP: -- and I can't think why anyone with a single functioning brain cell would want to sit through it.
P: Yeah, but, apart from that. . ?
GLP: I'm not sure.
P: Hey, did I say, we're casting Kim Basinger AND Eva Longoria?
GLP: Wow! So what do they get to do in the movie?
P: Absolutely nothing.
GLP: OK. I'm sold. You're green-lit for $60 mill.
The Sea Wolves (1980)
Almost sunk without trace
Pretty much a period piece when it came out -- not the content, but the style of movie-making itself -- 'The Sea Wolves' is another of those examples of cinematic abuse that make the viewing of the results so disappointing an experience.
A re-tread of just about any and every Brave Brits / Nasty Nazis war movie churned out by UK studios large and small in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the surprise here is that production occurred in 1979 / 1980 rather than 30 years earlier.
What's no surprise, however, is the degree of self-indulgence that infuses efforts like this, i.e., take a true-life story, promote your wares on the back of it. . . but change almost everything in it to fit box office conventions of the day.
Appealingly lethargic at its outset, where the script certainly does map something of the genesis of the Ehrenfals raid, things then rapidly fall apart with the introduction of Roger Moore in a dinner jacket chatting up a villainess in a casino. Obviously nothing of the kind ever happened, and had this been but a minor diversion it may be easily overlooked. However, as the Spy Who Loved Me bit accounts for at least a third of the over-long film, it can't be ignored.
If this inept fiction -- and inept it most certainly is -- doesn't do for Seawolves, then the finale certainly does: writer and director presumably got together and said ah, well, better have a shoot-out here, as if it's the OK Corral they're chronicling rather than a mission to disable a German ship.
Thus it is that several scenes which never occurred in reality unfold with hilarious unreality: never have so many True Brits been shot in the arm, or missed at point blank range, than here, nor have so many really Bad, Bad Germans been mown down only to sneakily turn over after dropping dead and shooting back.
It's rubbish, and annoying rubbish at that.
But where Seawolves truly irks is its sustained deceit to be drama-doc rather than popular fiction. The facts are that the boarding party was detected as soon as it set foot on the vessel and the crew, thinking it was a regular Brit military operation, immediately set off charges pre-installed in the hold and engine room so as to scuttle the Ehrenfals and prevent her from falling into Allied hands.
The ship was in no more than 80 foot of water so sank quickly and obligingly to the bottom, almost dragging the Phoebe with her. There was no gun battle, no hand to hand fighting, and despite SOE's ludicrous claim to have subsequently fooled the Germans into sinking the other two vessels by sending some kind of phony wireless message, the truth is that once the Ehrenfals had gone down, the crews of the other two vessels likewise scuttled theirs.
Ends.
Of course, the ordinary, middle-aged (and older) folks who actually participated in the raid weren't to know that. This motley bunch of solicitors, managers, accountants, jute growers, export clerks and retirees left their homes, their jobs, and their families to freely embark on a venture that could have claimed the lives of every one of them. That took guts. Real, genuine, shining courage.
Seawolves, of course, has no grasp of this kind of truth, so makes no salute to it. Instead, there's one cliché after another, strung together on the pretext that, somehow, This Is How It Was.
When it wasn't.
Worthy of 1 out of 10 on release (for its location photography) it's today worth 4 out of 10 for the screen presence of Trevor Howard, David Niven and Gregory Peck.
Sadly, we'll not see their like again. Rather more happily though, we're unlikely to see anything as embarrassingly bad as Seawolves again, either.
Star Trek (2009)
It's only a movie.
Oh heck. Here we go: another review, with another opening disclaimer, to whit: I Am Not A Trekkie.
But (and it's a big but) I've been watching Star Trek off and on, small screen and large, for 40 years. Often it has entertained. Sometimes it has intrigued. And occasionally it has transcended both budget and genre with work amongst the most dazzlingly original ever to emerge from a TV or movie studio anywhere.
And then there's this movie.
It's slick, it's noisy, it's pretty much incoherent from beginning to end and it has as much to do with the provenance and traditions of Star Trek as it has to do with science fiction.
In other words: nothing at all.
For a couple of hours of passable entertainment value, it's OK though: the editing's good, the production values high, and both script and casting are not without felicities.
But a Star Trek opus it certainly ain't -- not in the sense of boldly going somewhere, of exploring new worlds, of confronting the vastness of space from the perspective of ordinary mortals.
That's because there's no humanity in this Star Trek. At all. Every character could as well be a Romulean. Or even, a dustbin.
Sure, it was always bound to excite passion amongst Trekkies, and that passion is admirable: compare the 'for' and 'against' reviews on here and the most articulate, well-ordered and well-founded are those to whom the movie rates less than zero.
For those of us who aren't Trekkies, however, there's neither pride nor passion.
Just the thought that Star Trek, at its best, really was so uniquely brilliant that nothing can destroy its memory or its reputation.
So although this latest effort, such as it is, may well destroy the franchise, that really doesn't matter.
This Star Trek is just a movie, as glossy, shallow and self-serving as the world from which it has sprung.
The real Star Trek sprang from a quite different world, and if you weren't around then, when traffic stopped and we stood in the streets to watch the live transmission of men landing on the Moon, when Star Trek truly was of its time, well. . .
Tempus fugit.
Sadly.
Seraphim Falls (2006)
All Falls Down
It's not really necessary to look much further than the title to guess that the pretentious and the preposterous aren't going to be far away.
'Seraphim Falls'.
As in: Fallen Angel. As in: The Yooman Condition, because hey folks, aren't we all little angels who may fall from Grace and succumb to The Devil? Well, er, yes. Especially if she's Anjelica Huston, riding around the desert in a wagon, with her name emblazoned on the tarp in the anagrammatic form of Lucifer.
(The writers presumably popped that one in for any audience still dumb enough not to have figured out that what they're watching isn't just an ordinary movie, but A Revelation.) But there's one big problem with this particular Revelation.
It's trite.
It's so trite that even Ms Huston lurching around spouting some of the daftest lines to appear outside a Marx Brothers movie can't redeem it.
Nor, for that matter, can the 6ft 2" Brosnan leaping out from within a horse's 4ft carcass (yeah, you do the math) to commit yet further murderous mayhem do anything other than provoke convulsive laughter.
But Brosnan's character has, by that stage, lost any credibility long since: the scene where an obliging minor character lies on the ground beneath a tree so that Brosnan can drop a knife on his head from 30ft up is, well. . .
Hilarious.
As flat-footed in its tread as it is in its message, 'Seraphim Falls' appears to have quite beguiled an audience as easily satisfied with junk movie-making as it is with junk food.
It's just that the level of intellectual investment in junk food production is somewhat higher.
Rating: ludicrous.
John Adams (2008)
Simply, the best.
Television drama gets no better than this.
Flawless scripting, acting, directing and photography.
It's not about "history". It's not about "America".
It's about people.
And few groups of people, present or past, have ever had their times and their stories as superbly chronicled as here by screenwriter Kirk Ellis, and biographer David McCullough.
The word 'masterpiece' is too often devalued by being hauled out of the cupboard where it should have been left.
Dusting it off though for 'John Adams' is fully justified.
11/10.
Zwartboek (2006)
Verhoeven's Laugh A Minute War-a-thon
A cartoon-strip conflation of half a dozen true stories, Black Book is Showgirls meets James Bond with a bucket of faeces thrown in for good measure.
As it was bound to be: although ageing director Paul Verhoeven did, once upon a time, have something to say, and something to contribute to world cinema, nowadays he's not so much the fiction as the pulp itself.
Crying out for Nestle sponsorship in its testament to the life-saving power of chocolate, Black Book is wartime and post-wartime Netherlands as it never was and Mata Hari as even she could never have been.
That it's brain-dead comes as no surprise given Verhoeven's provenance, though it is surprising that the Netherlands itself seemed so proud of this risible junk it tried to nominate it as a Best Film.
Best of what? Exploitation? Well, yup. Crassness? Definitely a winner there. Utter unreality? Ten out of ten. Immaturity? In a field of its own. Best Netherlands Musical? Very probably: the set-piece of a gallery of screaming crones tipping down a bucket of ordure is like a deranged out-take of a Verhoeven trial-run at Les Miserables.
Though it's sad that something as dire as this should get such high ratings here, IMDb reflects mass audience dumbing down; it doesn't cause it. So those who think it's more masterpiece than masturbatory are entitled to their view and Verhoeven is free to proceed with yet more and bigger buckets of shite to draw in the punters.
Hopefully, actress Carice van Houten won't have anything to do with it.
No brighter international star can surely have been born in such dismal circumstances: the lady has a talent and a screen presence that having survived Verhoeven will survive anything.
Rating: 1 out of 10 thanks to van Houten's performance. Without it, Black Book merits minus 9.
Recommendation: "The Night Porter". It's a movie. That alone distinguishes it from Verhoeven's work.
Flightplan (2005)
Whatever happened to Jodie Foster?
The producers of this epic time-waster must've been overjoyed when Jodie Foster signed on.
Yet although 'Flightplan' is touted as a mystery thriller, the only mystery is how come an actress of Foster's stature finished up being associated with it. Is she too busy to read a script nowadays?
There are some films which insult an audience's collective intelligence.
And there are a few whose makers pray they'll find an audience with no intelligence at all.
Judging by some of the favourable reviews here, 'Flightplan' at least succeeded in the latter.
The Illusionist (2006)
Quality is not an illusion. . .
As joyful a movie as any that have been released in recent years, "The Illusionist" -- in my case, at least -- has come hard on the heels of the vacuous "The Lake House" and the execrable "Poseidon".
Both are relevant here: star-crossed lovers in the former, reality-defeating special effects (or not so special, after all) victims in the latter.
And then comes "The Illusionist".
A movie consistent with writer /director Neil Burger's previous exploration of illusion versus reality, it avoids the monumental daftness of "Lake House" and the moronic CGI of "Poseidon" to instead deliver something of charm and sheer, unadulterated entertainment value.
Yes, it could've been as clunky an exploration of what's real and what's not as "Lake House". That it isn't says much for the original short story (penned by Pulitzer prize winner Millhauser)and even more for Burger: the movie is a parlour trick, no more, no less; it engages because its ambitiousness is concealed beneath its simplicities.
And it works -- superbly -- thanks to some stand-out performances (Paul Giametti and Rufus Sewell especially, though then again, they're certainly given much more to do than Edward Norton or Jessica Biel), Dick Pope's almost impossibly lush cinematography. . . and a film score by Philip Glass not only as original as the screenplay itself, but as romantic, and powerful, as anything penned by Rota and Rozsa.
"The Illusionist" isn't the Greatest Movie Ever Made because it never set out to be. What it is, instead, is gentle. Joyful. Entertaining. And hugely accomplished. A few more parlour tricks like this one, and the magic truly will be back in movie-making.
Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
Take the money. And run with the research.
Here's a great example of Hollywood with a heart! A bunch of multi-millionaire actors get together with a director friend to fund vital research into Extreme Attention Deficit Syndrome!!!
Well, yes.
Though ADS is very distressing, in this, its most severe form, Extreme victims are unable to concentrate for more than 10 seconds. Are incapable of following any kind of discussion. And cannot remember anything of a sequential nature because by the time it reaches Z, they have no recollection of A to Y.
The total number of Extreme ADS sufferers is unknown, and so the true scale of this tragedy has been impossible to determine. Until now.
Ocean's 13, the project put together by George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Steven Soderbergh, Al Pacino, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Andy Garcia, Oprah Winfrey, Shae Wilson and a supporting cast and crew of thousands, represents the biggest investment ever made into this field of medical research.
Presented in the guise of "a movie", it discards the usual conventions of credibility, coherence, wit and originality, and instead prescribes a narrative arc that starts, and finishes, at A.
Nothing in Ocean's 13 makes any sense at all because there is no requirement for it to make sense. The requirement is, instead, to identify the extent of Extreme ADS.
In its original form, Ocean's 13 called for God (played by Catherine Zeta Jones) to be a failed interior decorator friend of the pseudonymous Ocean (Clooney).
God is prevailed upon to visit a plague of locusts on a new Las Vegas casino run almost single-handedly by its owner (Pacino) in an act of revenge for Pacino's thuggish treatment of another of Ocean's friends (Elliott Gould.) The locusts are there to eat all the guests arriving on the casino's opening night. When they've finished, the building is to be toppled by a localised earthquake and then washed away by a Great Flood (localised, of course) this being a Clever Visual Pun on the word 'Ocean'.
Too clever though for Extreme ADS victims.
A good thing, then, that this screenplay was junked on the grounds of credibility: Las Vegas is known to be Godless, so even Extreme ADS sufferers would be unable to accept that narrative proposition.
To make it more credible, then, the rewritten script has Ocean and his friends purchase the world's largest tunnelling machine (last seen in action under the English Channel) which they set up on The Strip whilst nobody notices and then burrow under the earth so as to cause enough vibrations to slightly perturb Mr Pacino's building and cause a few things to wobble and fall over.
Obviously, Irwin Allen this ain't: the special effects cost less than the gravy mix applied to Mr Pacino's face by way of ironic comment on Western contemporary Society's obsession with the cosmetic rather than the meaningful.
(Note: this aspect of the "story" was always going to escape Extreme ADS sufferers. But to be fair, it was put in for the benefit of their carers.)
Ocean's friends also recruit a Morecambe & Wise fan (who they?) played by Eddie Izzard (who he?) together with a variety of others whose talents embrace everything other than an ability to act.
There's someone in Mexico who makes or does not make dice. A man who owns Samsung. An FBI man with acute laryngitis. A man who is arrested and is happy. A man who is arrested and is sad. A man who is British and Does Something. A Man Who Is Not British And Does Something. Another Man Who Does Something Else. A Man Who Has Nothing To Do With Anything. An Oprah Winfrey. And Brad Pitt.
There's also Ellen Barkin, re-united with Al Pacino all these years after Sea of Love. Which was a movie. But of which, of course, Extreme ADS sufferers possess neither knowledge nor memory. After surviving Sea of Love, Ms Barkin here drowns her career in Clooney's Ocean.
The esteemed director Soderbergh is there to ensure that everything is as dysfunctional as its intended audience.
He succeeds handsomely: Ocean's 13 flits from scene to scene with neither logic nor explanation (albeit this again has a deeper meaning: a comment on the way so much of America's mainstream movie output is merely the same pack of shuffled cards set down in a different order without ever adding up to a satisfying hand.
(Well, you know where you are with Soderbergh. The intellectual thrust is never absent from his work, and Las Vegas was always going to be too tempting a subject to resist.) And so Ocean's 13 goes on. And on. And on.
Simple humour abounds, of course, as it must: Extreme ADS victims cannot comprehend anything complicated. Thus, Al Pacino's money-mad criminal is called Mr Bank.
It's a type of rarified comedy that is particularly exemplified in Cheadle's performance, a career-sacrificing turn of unequalled nobility. Though then again, there is Ellen Barkin. Al Pacino. And Clooney. And Pitt.
So the question has to be: just how successful is Ocean's 13 as a medical research project?
The signs are certainly good: it doesn't take long to identify the existence of Extreme ADS in the reviews of those so inattentive that they actually thought this was a movie.
And yes: that's very, very sad.
Hopefully though, treatment will be along soon.
VERDICT: Ocean's 13: a landmark in international medical research. 10/10 plus a bonus point for the late Cary Grant.
You Know It Makes Sense.
The Lake House (2006)
Great packaging. Empty contents.
So OK, 'The Lake House' is harmless nonsense from start to finish.
Regardless of all the amiable drivel propounded by "time-line compilers" obsessed with subjective / objective realities, its tale of two people whose travel through life is irrevocably separated by a distance of two years is no different to a tale of two satellites whose orbital progress is irrevocably separated by a distance of two miles.
The individuals cannot stop time so as to be simultaneously in the same place any more than the satellites can stop their orbit so as to be simultaneously in the same place.
Ignore time-lines then, because otherwise you'll never reconcile the ending with any kind of reality: Mr Reeves goes lonely and love-lorn about his everyday life from 2006 to 2008 in order to be with Ms Bullock in 2008, except in the intervening two years Ms Bullock has gone lonely and love-lorn from 2008 into 2010. . .
Which means that instead of the pair of them getting together, all Mr Reeves can now do is wait until 2010 by which time Ms Bullock is in 2012, so it's necessary to hang on until 2012 by which time Ms Bullock is. . . Bit like pi really. On and on and on.) Better, instead, to focus on what the movie's all about: The Magical Mailbox Wormhole By The Lake.
Which it is. And which the movie should've been called.
On which basis, Mr Reeves' early faith in its remarkable properties is fully justified: hardly has the movie gotten underway, he's not only collecting his mail from it, he's posting mail to others inside it.
Still later, or earlier, depending on what you think the movie thinks a clock actually is, The Magical Mailbox Wormhole By The Lake indulges in happy transmutation, and turns that which only exists in the recipient's future into tangible substance within the recipient's present.
Ah, wonderful. If only we in the UK had such a postal service. All ours can do is take stuff from the past and make it vanish in the present.
Banging on, then, about the plausibility of 'The Lake House' is about as sensible as banging on about the plausibility of 'Brief Encounter': the relationship couldn't happen.
Yet given that this complete absence of credibility is a major self-imposed stumbling block, the movie actually does pretty well.
Yes, it's utterly impossible to care about the characters because it's utterly impossible to believe in them.
But -- and this is, after all, a movie -- 'The Lake House' is by no means impossible to watch.
Bullock and Reeves aren't asked to do overmuch, but what they do is highly effective, particularly in a lengthy one-shot, one-take scene where the playing off each other is handled with considerable finesse, and which alone makes the price of DVD rental worth paying.
Plaudits, too, to the director and DoP: it's beautifully shot, and laced with some delicious visual felicities (notably a sequence where Reeves in one year sits on a bench, Bullock on the same day two years' hence sits on a neighbouring bench, and people are transformed by age and Fate as they track across each different reality.) The script is competent, too, though not especially adroit: whatever subplot was ever intended by the story of Ms Bullock's mother is never articulated, so the screen time devoted to it is a complete waste.
Obviously, it was there to resonate with the subplot involving Mr Reeves' father, but that has as much plausibility as the movie's grasp of the space / time continuum. Still, Mr Plummer is on fine form, even if he appears to have come into 'The Lake House' from a remake of 'The Fountainhead' that won't be made until, er, two years from now.
Finally, there's the soundtrack. It's lovely.
Lovely in the sense of a last bow tied around some beautiful packaging.
Which, really, is what 'The Lake House' is: an empty box, but with a wrapping so attractive there's certainly no harm in toying with it for a while.
Opening it, however, so as to analyse its content, is recommended only to those who admire the Emperor's new clothes.
16 Blocks (2006)
Lost in Transition
Considering that here's a film with a dramatic core that's overtly geographic, "16 Blocks" is an oddity indeed: there's absolutely no sense of topography at all. The remorseless inching, block by city block, of hunted and hunters towards both destination and denouement is entirely foregone.
It's like seeing "3.10 To Yuma" or "High Noon" without a single reference to a ticking clock.
Or having Keifer Sutherland go through an entire 24 hours without consulting his wristwatch.
Quite how so great a disconnect occurred betwixt concept and execution is inexplicable: the director is not inexperienced; the script is not without intelligence; and the actors certainly fulfil their obligations.
So. . . just what happened to "16 Blocks"? Is a new vogue in movie-making about to be ushered in -- a remake of "Phonebox", for example, set entirely on a baseball plate? Or "Field of Dreams". . . set entirely in a phone box?
Baffling.
But then, so too is the movie's rationale: though 'The Gauntlet' remains one of the best Worst Movies ever made, Eastwood's performance was at least fuelled by a palpable adrenaline. Whereas in "16 Blocks", Willis's is fuelled -- if that's the right word -- by nothing stronger than, er, Prozac.
Under-playing, of course, is infinitely preferable to over-playing (unless in a farce) but Willis is here so muted as to be well-nigh catatonic. In theory, this certainly provides a counter-point to Mos Def's infinitely more voluble character, but in practice, doesn't work at all: for a considerable amount of the film's running time, neither the subdued Willis nor the excitable Def are remotely comprehensible.
No wonder that many viewers are going to wonder if "16 Blocks" has taken a leaf out of a quite different tree -- "Some Like It Hot" comes to mind -- and instead of chronicling the aftermath of a massacre in a Chicago garage is chronicling the aftermath of a massacre in a New York bakery.
It's definitely something to do with cakes.
Indeed, it might even have something to do with a mild bout of food poisoning, for Donner's directorial hand is anything but steady and his vision, anything but fresh: the device of the Substitute Gunshot -- where you think someone has been shot by someone else, only it turns out it's someone else who's been shot by someone else -- is OK once in a movie, but twice is pushing it and three times, even more so.
(As for the device of the Substitute Ambulance, well; perhaps Donner really was feeling so unwell that he started fantasising about Medicare.)
Pushing it, too, is the notion of the burnt out NYPD cop. Because it's not a notion but a cliché. And as a cliché, really needs a darn sight more than Willis could ever be expected to provide: he may be good on the sardonic smile, the throw-away line, but if you're going to put substance into a role like this then you need an actor infinitely more capable of the visceral, the angry.
(Yes. I still miss Lee Marvin.)
Sorely miscast, then, Willis does the best he can do, and if on too many occasions seems more on the verge of tears than the verge of shooting anyone, well, that's more likely Donner's fault than his: a director who seemingly briefed his lead to act as though he was going to lash out with nothing more homicidal than a Kleenex tissue has only himself to blame for the outcome.
Donner's treatment of Mos Def's character is, however, even more bewildering: it's as if the sense of disconnection that permeates this movie, and so thoroughly undermines it, has here been taken to its directorial limit, so that in several scenes the character doesn't so much resemble a frightened witness running in fear of his life as an unintelligible half-wit who is entirely disconnected from the reality of people trying to kill him, such is his obsessive preoccupation with recipes for, er, birthday cakes.
It could be post-modernism, of course. But I doubt it.
Even so. "16 Blocks", or "15 Cakes", or whatever it was the narrative arc here embraces, does rate higher than the minus 1 such a filmic mess might otherwise merit.
Clichés notwithstanding -- and oh ye Gods, "people change" stands a good 10ft higher in the mind's eye than even Willis's character -- Richard Wenk's script is actually quite polished. And Mos Def's performance is anything but shabby. The movie also gets a point for eschewing the modish juvenilia of foul language: it's a welcome Mutther Effing free zone.
3/10 then. Though sadly, no candles on any cake for anyone.
White Sands (1992)
Concept concept concept
Pity the screenwriter who thinks high concept is merely about starting with an ending and working backwards.
Pity this one in particular, saddled with a visual of a man running with a suitcase of white sand across white sands.
Then pity any audience asked to watch what the screenwriter comes up with by way of a beginning and middle bit to precede the running man with the sand on the sand.
(Might also be worth sparing a thought for what passes as local law enforcement in this movie, where the Deputy Sheriff vanishes without a word of explanation to his superiors -- and his superiors, even after several days, can't even arouse sufficient interest to find out where he's gone.)
Puerile: a fine example of how a back-of-the-envelope script pitch can turn, if not to sand, then certainly dust.
Poseidon (2006)
Gel Upside Down
Apparently some sort of remake of The Poseidon Adventure for an audience of the brain-dead, Wolfgang Petersen's version does at least add to the standard lexicon of disaster movies by producing some of the most convincing CGI yet seen.
It's therefore not immediately obvious that none of the cast are sentient beings, and that the names assigned to them -- Russell, Dreyfuss, Lucas etc -- could equally as well have been R2 and D2.
Particularly adroit is the way no back story and no characterisation is allowed in even the slightest form: after all, a droid can only do so much with a part; saddling it with motives, emotions or even original dialog would really be too much to ask.
All a droid can do is manage to swim underwater for 10 minutes at a time without breathing (well, they don't need to) and it's this which gives the game away.
Verdict: Well worth seeing if you've given up smoking and thrown out all your ashtrays and need an alternative way to waste money other than by incinerating it.
Airport (1970)
They won't make 'em like that any more
It's not often when you're in a movie theatre that you get a sense of something passing, something ending.
Yet that was the feeling my wife and I both had when emerging from 'Airport' way back when in 1970: that this was indeed a calling card from Old Hollywood,complete with all its lushness and daftness and sheer unbeatable hoky mesmerism.
It may have spawned exactly the phenomenon which was to characterise the Hollywood that was to replace it -- the emergence of the bean counters and with them, the proliferation of inexecrable sequels -- but that's actually an irony made all the more delicious by the passage of time, for 'Airport' depended not on any other's template, nor on CGI, nor the gutter language that passes for dialog in contemporary scripts.
Gloriously preposterous, yet superbly crafted, and drenched in a score that must by any yardstick be one of the best ever penned for any movie, of any genre, 'Airport' was, and is, remarkable for managing to be two things simultaneously: out of date the day it was born, yet never to be past its sell-by date as long as there's an appreciation of, and affection for, Hollywood at its best and glossiest.
We adored it thirty seven years ago. We adore it still.
Helen Hayes. Burt Lancaster. Van Heflin. Dean Martin. . .
C'mon Mr Newman. . . play it again -- and again!