I dreaded this viewing as it’s never a splendid idea to revisit a childhood classic.
Imagine my surprise upon enjoying this charming little flick. You know what I liked about it the most?
It isn’t shite.
The Last Starfighter (1984).
Author Archives: Ben Gould
In the Company of Men (1997).
The first entry in a Neil LaBute unofficial trilogy of cruelty – Your Friends & Neighbors (1998) and The Shape of Things (2003) follow – that established the template for stories of bored, financially secure, thoroughly nasty people do thoroughly nasty things to weaker species for their own wry amusement. There are dozens in this sub-genre now, and this is worth the watch just to see the more naive of the two sadists get his just desserts.
The most perplexing of all of this is the fact the director made the frankly batshit The Wicker Man (2006), a remake so unnecessary and atrocious that not even Nicolas Cage can salvage it. Actually, he’s at least a good sport and makes it funny.
Highlander (1986).
A first viewing of this odd, quite daft, and extremely watchable slice of hokum. It’s the kind of script a wee kid would write, and it’s somehow a movie. The camera work was so ridiculous, outrageous in the angles.
The music is also the best kind of cheese.
And Sean Connery has an earring.
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).
Dragged to this and thoroughly did not like it.
Galling one-liners and self-referential in-jokes and dull characters constantly referencing they’re in a multiverse. What else? Superhero cameos galore, and fight scenes set to pop hits (how clever). And Ryan Reynolds and his inability to shut the fuck up for even 20 seconds. I suppose that’s the point, but his voice is too annoying to endure for a full movie.
I waited outside for the last half hour, so I don’t know how it ended.
And I don’t care.
Son of Saul (2015).
Aesthetically perfect movie with a protagonist’s tunnel vision style that works, an actual reasoning behind it – it’s the antithesis of the self-indulgent. Much more than a ‘noble’, culturally significant picture, it’s as honest with its brutality as you can get, and vice versa. It did recall for me One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and uses all the tools of cinematic technique to tell a story so gripping, relentless, and powerful in its immediacy.
A searing portrait of Hell on Earth, this is not a film you’ll forget.
Proper art.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007). Help!
Elizabeth (1998), oh yes. I’d say masterpiece, a political thriller dressed up for marketing intentions as a costume drama, which it is.
This sequel? Oh, it was so BAD. It felt painful, my ears screeching and eyes gouged. This review cracked me up, though:
Michael Gove, MP and Minister/Secretary of Whatever: ‘It tells the story of England’s past in a way which someone who’s familiar with the Whig tradition of history would find, as I did, completely sympathetic. It’s amazing to see a film made now that is so patriotic … One of the striking things about this film is that it’s almost a historical anomaly. I can’t think of a historical period film in which England and the English have been depicted heroically for the last forty or fifty years. You almost have to go back to Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare’s Henry V in which you actually have an English king and English armies portrayed heroically.’
That’s the worst review I’ve ever read. But the unintentional comedic elements of the writing trumps the movie.
It’s a horrible film. Writing this even depressed me.
Prizzi’s Honor (1985).
Yet another doozy from the ’80s starring Kathleen Turner. She is synonymous with the decade and doesn’t exist outside of it in a cinematic sense, a fate shared by a rarefied club of period-tied stars like Burt Reynolds (1970s), a heyday of hits followed by relative obscurity and the occasional flourish. This movie is a swansong of sorts from the great John Huston; it’s a testament to his talents that he somehow made it from the The Maltese Falcon (1941) all the way to this, a career spanning, indeed making, the history of the superlative decades of cinema as we know them.
It’s a fine wee movie, even if the cast have way too much gravitas about them for starring in what is a bit of black comedy fluff. The score by the renowned Alex North is okay, the soundtrack less so. It’s a recycling of tunes popularised in other movies. Why do filmmakers do this? If a musical piece is in a seminal flick, just don’t bother appropriating it again.
Does my tits in.
Jurassic World Dominion (2022). More pish.
The dinosaurs looked ‘lovely’ and I’m positive they continued to be so throughout this motion picture, but the 25 minutes I managed to endure were a pronounced pain in the arse – boring, derivative, pointless, and I suppose scraping a barrel that was no longer there.
News flash: dinosaurs aren’t interesting, people. Spielberg, once upon a time, made them so for 90 mins. And that’s the end of it.
This was shite. The next dozen will be shite as well.
A Beautiful Mind (2001). Dross.
For all the exceptional talents of Russell Crowe, he is simply wasted here in one of the most unwatchable biopics … ever. It’s a painful experience for many reasons, and the lackluster direction doesn’t help proceedings. The script, though, is fucking mince. The bloke here, John Nash, actually has his mental illness explained away with an imaginary pal in the punchable Paul Bettany and a make-believe government spook in Ed Harris.
If this embarrassing writing wasn’t enough to make you desire to gouge your own eyeballs out (or those of one of the muppets on screen), the movie has our resident genius’ mathematical theory put to the test in a bar scenario, with him and his wankpot pals applying their classroom discipline to pulling the local lassies.
Throw in some romantic schmaltz and a supporting cast of mainly irksome ‘characters’ and you have a really tedious, quite pointless, and completely shite movie that should be forgotten about.
Which makes this review seem quite unnecessary.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 