Why was this not rubbish? Why is it a decent movie with genuine scares? A script and crew working in tandem, I guess, and I’m not ashamed to announce that I did indeed shit my pants on several occasions.
Well done.
The Conjuring 2 (2016).
Category Archives: Art
Patriot Games (1992).
Sean Bean is the villain. And he dies. This isn’t even a spoiler as it’s a given, for we are in the ’90s and this Mr. Bean was the go-to bad boy when a thriller needed a bit of Sheffield rough.
He’s actually okay in this, despite his wandering accent.
But Harrison Ford looks bored as hell. Everyone else looks bored. The Irish Peace Process looks bored.
I was also bored.
Boring movie.
The Player (1992).
The master of the slow zoom and the overlapping conversation, frequently several happening at once, Robert Altman’s very amusing, freewheeling thriller is half satire, a director taking the absolute piss and slandering his own environment.
It’s peerless entertainment and one of his most enduring works.
Doubt (2008).
Hoffman keeps this banal, stagy movie together in another supremely layered performance. Streep, however, is rubbish, and this can be added to the voluminous inventory of rubbish that is her CV. She’s not as bad here, though, as she was as Lady Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011), which is a grating, painful experience to watch.
Casting blunders aside, I would summarise Doubt (2008) as a dull portrait of a repressive, gleefully authoritarian institution that everyone is aware of, inhabited by elders who operate as pedantic snores with no hinterland. It gets better after the dire exposition but barely.
A waste of time.
Bye for now.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983).
Just brilliant, absolutely magical scenes, and that score is quite special:
The Conjuring (2013).
I’m always dubious when it comes to horror as there is so much detritus a mere click away; this genre is uniquely positioned to beat a successful premise to death, a running theme for all of celluloid and beyond.
This shocked me (horror!) by not being shit. It was disconcerting from the very start, an expert lesson in how to develop a creepy atmosphere and build chills. The director evidently studied the winning tropes of modern horror and all the usual pitfalls were avoided, as there are genuinely terrifying moments.
Cinemas are suited for fare like this, not a laptop screen smaller than a squirrel. I can only apologise.
Impressive movie.
Why Julianne Moore is almost top billing in The Fugitive (1993) – answered at last.
Thank you, IMDB. This has bothered me for decades:
Renfield (2023).
Cage arrives with the back catalogue assuring us of the inevitability that he would one day be a batshit Count Dracula. No one does barking like Cage
It’s a clever basis for a movie – Dracula and Renfield clocking up the decades, adjusting to the beguiling cultures. Beyond the premise, it’s tiresome, a monster of the week flavour to it, a weak episode of Buffy.
I wasn’t expecting anything remarkable; it’s fun enough as a hybrid of genres, even if Nicholas Hoult is content doing his best version of a Hugh Grant impersonation, having kept all his mannerisms from their time together many years ago.
Master Cage? He’s not in it enough. Maybe just make another Cage-led Dracula movie that’s about Dracula?
Urban Legend (1998).
It’s definitely not Scream (1996). It’s certainly not I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). It’s not even Cherry Falls (1999). This is not good in any way, as derivative and formulaic as they come, a copycat slasher from the late ’90s churn-them-out age. These pictures are meant to scary, or at least attempt to purport to be. This mess isn’t, but remains a peculiarity because tripe like this was once made. And continues to be shat out in great buckets.
The movie’s risible/mad premise is that all these students of a certain university campus sit around chatting constantly about urban legends in a movie called Urban Legend, even discussing urban legends with a class lecturer who looks scarily like Freddy Krueger. How postmodern! With all the urban legend-inspired murders of thoroughly stabbable ‘characters’ played by C-list irritants, there isn’t time for anything else; not a single conversation in this pointless morsel of trash alludes to the wider world, a reality outside of their wee sorority of … urban legends.
Regrettably, Brad Dourif stutters up regurgitating his Billy Bibbit act from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Weird.
I hate urban legends but I hated this movie more.
The Conversation (1974).
With the films of Alan J. Pakula, The Conversation (1974) sits right in the middle of Watergate as a dark inspiration, and you couldn’t get a more clinical, claustrophobic portrait of paranoia.
Hackman is masterful. His character’s job and the perfectionism he demands is his entire life, and once he makes mistakes, succumbing to emotions that compromise his skills, he is at a loss, a petrified wreck, playing his saxophone in a torn-to-pieces-apartment.
It’s one of Coppola’s few original scripts and one wonders at the output if he did more of that. There is so much going on in this film, from the moody low-key jazz score to the extraordinary sound design, and it’s a movie obsessed with the peculiarities of its era.
The twist ending is just shocking and I must confess I never saw it coming.
And Harrison Ford is in it.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 