This channel is what the Internet was made for (aside from cat videos and staged pranks). The wealth and detail of info in these vids, the animation, the music, the narrator and his redoubtable voice.
Category Archives: Art
The Exorcist (1973). Total garbage.
I desperately wished to like this because of William Friedkin and his mostly fabulous work but it wasn’t meant to be. I absolutely hated it.
It starts with this film-within-a-film narrative and the suggestion appears to be that making movies is a sin and invites possession. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.
There were extended shots of leaves falling in this for no reason and it bothered me, like the leaves were attempted symbolism. Maybe it was an augury for bad things, like how the writing progressed. The most baffling aspect of this whole escapade was the fact you have a wee child on the verge of death in a cushty Georgetown house of a famous actress and not a single cop, nurse, social worker, doctor ventures into it aside from a chain-smoking Priest and his spiritual benefactor.
The horror? It’s not scary, just nasty. You’re merely viewing sadism, with very boring actors and a story so nonsensical there should be a Muppet waltzing in with a musical number. Lighting was terrible, framing something out of a TV show (a bad one), and the sound mixing was crushingly theatrical, but not backed up by anything visually memorable.
Horror is some poor bloke getting stabbed over an argument about football teams or having to work 37.5 hours a week in a supermarket, not this shite.
Pointless motion picture.
Anyone who thinks it is good needs their head examined.
Reds (1981).
What a tragedy this Revolution was.
A mentally unhinged cluster of psychopaths managed to hijack a state and proceed to massacre hundreds of millions beyond their own country, putting their own in Gulags. An ideology which doesn’t even acknowledge its own nonsensical dialectic should be looked at. It’s a religion for the worst.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to the movie.
I have a lot of time for Warren Beatty. He’s a one-man show with proper acting ability. Quite the handsome lad, I would say.
The film:
I fell asleep around the 15-minute mark. Seemed rubbish. Wikipedia informed me how it ends.
Next.
William Friedkin. Maestro.
Now is as good a time as any to watch To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) again. There you go:
The Field (1990).
Was expecting a lot more from this one considering the thesps involved.
It was so dull and grim, the story better left to the stage than the possibilities of cinema. And it’s not much of a story. I was mostly bored and halfway through could see what was coming.
Last year’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) came to mind in its tedium.
Highlight of this is Tom Berenger turning up dressed like Dick Tracy.
Nothing much to add here.
Dragged Across Concrete (2018).
What rubbish this was!
The lines weren’t delivered with any conviction at all. It’s just the writer/director shoehorning his own real-life monologues into every scene. The movie is essentially a rant.
Nice bit of attempted world building but it’s all superfluous. And lots of stoic, emotionless men sighing. Over and over and over.
Worst movie I’ve seen in quite some time.
Watch it if you enjoy shite.
John McTiernan. Someone give him a job.
The Holy Trinity (Predator, Die Hard, Red October) with the Bruce Willis gem at the centre, McTiernan redefined or perhaps created the modern action film, a wee cradle of movies with wit, imagination, state of the art pyrotechnics, and an unnerving ability for shot selection. You can’t lose that talent, despite the Odysseus-long hiatus from a camera-wielding exploit.
He’s back from Shawshank as a model ex-prisoner.
John, just get a camera, sound kit, and a few pals together and make a short your new calling card.
Oppenheimer (2023). Meh.
The Trinity Test is the centrepiece, and what a magnificent, wholly cinematic build-up and pay-off it is, pure controlled mayhem in its visuals and sound.
The rest? I was bored shitless. Most vexing, and this includes seeing the bumbling Tom Conti as Albert Einstein and Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman in two of their most cringe performances to date, was the unbearable reliance on appointment hearings and that security clearance interview, and the incessant cutting back and forth, an overlong spy-chasing vignette which I found mostly tiresome. We all know politicians are vile; there’s nothing especially innovative in showing us all over again.
I craved more spectacle as well as insight into how this deadly weapon was actually made, that and a longing for a Terrence Malick approach to the material. It was so talky but with no memorable dialogue, and I got a bit sick of it – I was genuinely disappointed. As for the eponymous protagonist, I simply found him boring, and every time the camera lingered perversely on his sunken cheekbones a sense of resigned ennui is how I would describe the atmosphere.
A stunning technical achievement though it all is, I didn’t find it particularly revelatory, and I won’t be watching it again.
It also didn’t help matters that I was sadly sat beside a large, rather whiffy individual who breathed like an asthmatic hippo, ate like a gannet, and decided to take his shoes and socks off. I had to endure this for almost three hours.
This is why I rarely go to the cinema.
The Big Man (1990).
This has the most insane sudden shifts in style and tone. It fees like a student movie, and then you have some ludicrous sentimental schmaltz – strong Rocky (1976) pretensions – thrown in the mix. It’s certainly unpredictable and often entertaining, and the confidence of it all is twinned to an actual story with proper societal issues. Visually, it has some impressive and daring scenes, and the physical specimen that is peak Liam Neeson.
But, unfortunately, Hugh Grant turns up. I don’t know what accent he’s speaking in because I’ve never heard anyone talk like that.
I didn’t believe a minute of this movie. But I’m not bothered.
I’m more perplexed as to how and why Ennio Morricone scored this to tunes that sound like the b-side of The Untouchables (1987).
Croupier (1998).
Atmosphere from the gods here.
It doesn’t even matter what the subject matter is – this is ridiculous in that it’s just Clive Owen narrating a few events. It’s so magisterial in its framing, the shot syntax, the subtext of the bare-bones screenplay, that I was kind of engulfed in it all despite not actively being engaged in the story. A brooding exercise in style.
Casino (1995) is the best movie about a casino, but this casino-based film isn’t about a casino; it could be set in a Lidl.
If that makes any sense.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 