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Reviews
Dracula (2020)
Far better than you might expect.
I first saw this on the BBC and I've recently re-watched this as it's on netflix again, and it was just as good as the first time around. Claes Bang is excellent as an old/modern Dracula - I had to look him up as I'd never heard of him and he's a Danish actor who speaks flawless English......just as you'd expect the Count would do and as he did in the book after a few days with Jonathan Harker. To get the best from this version I'd recommend you read Bram Stoker's book first, as although it's very much a modern and Mark Gatiss-ised adaptation it leans heavily on Bram Stoker's original but I imagine it would be rather confusing if you've only ever had a Hammer Horror Christopher Lee Dracula education or seen the Coppola movie - nothing wrong with those but read the book, and only then watch it To my mind despite having a (spoiler here) female Van Helsing it has far more in common with Stoker's original then anything else I've seen, much of which is down to Mark Gatiss who really has a feel for and an understanding of this particular period of literary fiction.
Blood & Gold (2023)
Western with SS villains....
This is pretty much a Western but set in Germany at the end of the war with a desperate bunch of SS troopers and a plot stuffed full of stolen bits of 70's Eastwood/Leone western Movies. This popped up as a recommendation on netflix so I gave it a go. It's actually quite entertaining but don't expect an intellectual outing. Nazis after Jewish gold and a high and messy body count, it's no spoiler to say that everybody who's bad meets an often painful and messy end and (most of) the decent folk make it....by the way, look out for the name on the gravestone. It's not Arch Stanton or anything to do with Westerns but nevertheless it's familiar, and you get to learn a lot of German equivalents to English/American swear words 😂
Giù la testa (1971)
Still as good as it ever was...
This was showing on ITV4 this week, I taped it off the TV years ago, lost track of the tape, and sort of forgot the movie existed. I'm glad to say it was as good as I remember it being, and Morricone's soundtrack is an absolute cracker, one of his best and featuring a lot of choir work, electronic effects, etc. Watching it now, it's clearly a Tarantino favourite and there's bits of it in most of his work. It's probably ignored today because it doesn't quite fit in with Leone's other work of the period- the dollars movies, etc, and doesn't have the usual cast ensemble, but despite his dodgy Irish accent which seems to come and go throughout the movie James Coburn (John) carries it off well, and Rod Steiger (Juan) gets away with it too, despite unfeasibly good teeth in the many close-ups. Highlights? The awesome floating banner appearing above John's head when Juan has the revaluation that he is the key to robbing the bank. The firing squad scene, with the imagery lifted from the Goya painting and combined with the soundtrack and the close ups of Coburn is one of Leone's crowning moments, and the whole movie is probably the best cinematography Leone ever did. Watch it, you won't be disappointed.
Dad's Army (2016)
As I expected.....
Having just seen this, and being old enough to remember the original series, it was, as expected, not terribly good. One of the things that makes the original series so good, the interplay between the cool and elegant Sergeant Wilson, and the pompous Captain Mainwaring. In the real world war two, the original Sergeant Wilson, John Le Mesurier, had been a tank regiment Captain, and the original Captain Mainwaring, Arthur Lowe, had been a ranker, a radar technician, and the role-reversal in the series worked so well..... the little class nuances between the two are completely lost in the film, . Michael Gambon carries off Godfrey to a tee, but the rest of the cast just don't seem to get it. Where was Frazer's gloom and doom? Jonesy a cook in the Sudan? have the producers not seen the 'dirty fakir' episode? Hodges barely gets a look in, no verger, and the vicar appears to have turned straight....there are so many little things in the original series that make it so funny, all those little things are missing here, along with the utterly spot on comic timing of the original time-served cast.
Some of the script writing is dire, with no attempt made to get it historically right, the Godfrey sisters to miss Winters, 'where will you be next, New York, Paris... difficult given that Paris was under German occupation at the time... and a U boat surfacing in broad daylight in the bay? Tank traps on the beach at the bottom of a cliff, but no wire or mines? , wire and mines would have put Corporal Jones right in his comedic element!
And as others have observed, Mrs Mainwaring is an original 'er indoors, never actually seen in the series,It was one of the elements of the original that Mainwaring would do absolutely anything to avoid his wife, why change this?
The biggest problem I had watching it though, was that I kept hearing the lines coming out of the on-screen actors, but in my head I was hearing them coming out of the mouths of the original cast,and it just can't live up to it, it's like a huge shadow cast over the whole film, somewhat akin to the relationship between the TV Sweeney, and the dreadful Nick Love film..timing is everything!