Wanderings and … wonderings.

This director made some fucking belters, Seconds (1966) and Ronin (1998) your blogger’s personal faves from Frankenheimer’s treasure trove of thriller goodies.

The Train (1964) belongs in the wee basket of bantz. It features a train, didn’t you know? It’s a riot, with sublime cinematography replete with anachronistic experiments that somehow manage not to retract from the drama, the thrills, big Burt Lancaster, the rarely seen Paul Scofield as an art-loving Nazi, Jeanne Moreau, and lots of steam. Good steam.

John Frankenheimer made the type of movies that Brian De Palma couldn’t accomplish.

Interiors (1978) was so ghastly in every conceivable way I almost thought I had turned on a parody of a movie named Interiors, or a low-rent version of a really bad Bergman movie, and there are plenty of those. 

The behaviour of the ‘characters’ – the nebbish, narcissistic blabbering lot with therapists – in this joke of a film had me reaching for the cyanide. The lack of purpose wasn’t what vexed me the most, it was the prevailing smugness, the tightly-wound dialogue so concocted and so unlike how humans interact that it’s immediately begging you to quit. The Brechtian Effect in cinema works when it’s done right, but I don’t think this movie even does it on purpose, it’s that far up its own arse.

Interiors is horrible and everyone in it is infuriating. 

Just horrible. 

But if you want to be irritated, this is the one for you.

Terry Gilliam movies are generally a mess, and with extended periods of boredom, meandering subplots that are entirely unnecessary. Only in cinema could he get away with such self-indulgent behaviour; a novel of his I would use as a coaster at best.

This movie has nothing going for it aside from four fabulous shots.

It’s pointless as a film and is thoroughly infuriating in its Monty Python-ness, which consists of ostensibly serious things happening but characters oblivious to them and faffing around with something else in the frame.

These very non-talented folk made entire careers out of this subset of weak comedy and they are still dining off it.

I hate Monty Python and everyone associated with it. Because it’s not funny, not clever, and defines an era when Britain seems even more cruddy and just plain stupid than it is today.

And that’s not good.

I despised this movie.

Bye for now.

An unsubtle grand metaphor for imperialism and the passing of the torch from one empire to the next, the personal and the political both intertwine in The Quiet American (2002) as they always inevitably do in these world-weary yarns.

It’s a fabulous thriller with all the prerequisite delicate human minutiae, and Michael Caine is extraordinary.

He always has been – even in The Swarm (1978).

The opening credits sequence in this middling, moderately entertaining thriller were so fucking annoying in their aping of the classic Kevin Spacey-free Seven (1995) titles that I almost turned it off out of disgust.

It ends up being okay, if as predictable as it gets. It does take on a certain contentiousness with its theme of domestic terrorism and anti-government radicalism.

Worth a bash, even if Jeff Bridges is rubbish. He’s always rubbish.