I’ve never read a more vivid and correct description of a painting:
‘This picture is one single mosaic of boredom, a masterful rendering of the disappointed longing and the incongruities of a dolce far niente [idleness] …. The painting depicts a middle-class Sunday morning on an island in the Seine near Paris. Despite the recreation going on there, it seems to belong more to Hades than to a Sunday. The result is endless boredom, the little man’s hellish utopia of skirting the Sabbath and holding onto it too; his Sunday succeeds only as a bothersome must, not as a brief taste of the Promised Land.’
These lads of course have every right to fiddle to their hearts’ content with pictures they’ve made, but it’s getting out of control now. I don’t even know how many different versions of Blade Runner (1982) there are (I’ve only seen one), I hear there is now another edition of Apocalypse Now (1979), and I was yesterday informed that The Godfather Part III (1990) is now being re-released this month but with a completely different structure and with an alternate title. What is going on?
For me, the art that was produced at a specific stage is what it is (for lack of a better phrase) and all it will ever be. I have no time for tweaking, chopping, changing, re-editing, and periodic revisionism. Stop trying to fix what was at that moment your best or worst effort, move on, come up with a new idea. It’s got something to do with grasping for perfection, but the problem is that the films I’ve mentioned are far from perfect. Even the films I rate as ‘transcendental’ (The Third Man, Vertigo, Lawrence of Arabia) have giant flaws but that just adds to the appeal; I hate to appropriate an Oasis song, but true perfection has to be imperfect.
This terrible movie is just replete with so many clichés I thought it was a joke – within 10 minutes you get the failed dad who never turns up to his kid’s game because of work (I will never understand how kids think this is a ‘thing’). I think I’ve seen that leitmotif in a thousand motion pictures. And here we go again, the sudden white-collar psycho who has suddenly become unhinged!
This is like Falling Down (1993) but without the social commentary or the complexities of that protagonist who had motivation and a character arc, and who seemed to think he was doing the right thing. This is just a portrait of one-note unbridled rage. It’s a pathetic screenplay, something out of a student movie.
There is, however, a kind of life lesson here: never, ever fume at idiots you don’t know because there are A LOT of unhinged folk out there walking the streets; the Travis Bickles, the potential serial killers, the incels, the nutjobs. They don’t act and react rationally and they are capable of anything because they aren’t bound by anything.
Anyway, Crowe is brilliant in this shitter. It’s like he’s back in his Romper Stomper (1992) days before he hit the jackpot. He’s a legit fat bastard now but I guess he’s earned it. He was once on the verge of a sort of magical, era-defining pantheon of films but after Gladiator (2000) he just opted for the middling scripts and the trivial. He’s almost better as a supporting character these days.
In summary, this movie is pure garbage but desperately wants to be relevant. Which is commendable.
Somebody give Russell something to do. He needs a Brando renaissance moment.
Not much of a heroic individual on display but bloody hell is Eric Bana funny here; it remains to this day his best role by a country mile. The bloke is just nuts, so quotable, and yet it’s allied to a singular style that is up there with Aronofsky or Scorsese. You need a dynamic treatment with material like this.
It is now 20 years since its release. I first saw it on DVD around 2005; it still holds up today. Like the best films, they don’t date because they were made in such a way which precludes this. It’s up on YouTube, by the way.
22 November, 2010 and this ridiculous … thing came into the world.
For me, it’s the Greatest Album Ever Made. And I find Kanye West nauseating, an attention-seeking baby who needs muzzled. Not the tunes, though. These are simply glorious, the album track-for-track mastery without equal. It’s the production, the melodies, the bombast, the deepthinking at work. Like all art, you can appropriate the material and line it up with something personal.
The (Stranded in) Belgium Odyssey of December 2010. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, but it was all very life-changing and I’ll never forget some of the epic moments. And no one died, which is also great. This album was played quite literally 125 times in 11 days and every track I associate with an image.
This is hilarious at times, black comedy done as it should be. And as an intro to Edinburgh it’s up there with the best of them. The Hamburg scene is off the charts in its accuracy. I’ve been on that messy adventure, believe me. However, I do feel this movie is a bit of a wasted opportunity. There’s not any kind of overarching message that elevates it into something other than a yarn, and the style is painfully nonexistent. One can only imagine what someone like Danny Boyle would have done with the script.
This blew my mind it was so good. On a simple action-adventure level it’s pure Mann, the framing and the cutting all signature style. What further distinguishes it are the connotations, though, the other world beyond the landscape. Mann always does this, always a subtext in the works. He makes deceptively uncomplicated yarns, but look closer and you unearth what he’s getting at.
This is pre-Revolutionary War (1775–1783) sparked by a Boston Tea Party. Get your head around that. The ending is magisterial, a literal crescendo of dimensions. The last shot – old America, current America, future America. It conveys more about American history than thousands of movies.
On a personal aside, I once synced the incredible Trevor Jones score to a panning shot of Edinburgh taken on a VHS-C camera from the top of Hillend. It was fucking pathetic but we can’t all be Michael Mann.
I mean, look at that fucking poster! Cool as milk, as is the movie. The script is a bit too melodramatic and Schrader is clearly a little too much obsessed with the cinema of Robert Bresson – the ending is almost shot-for-shot Pickpocket (1959). But the movie is pure sleek, art deco deluxe. And to top it off you’ve got Blondie and Giorgio Moroder on soundtrack duties.
Peak Richard Gere. No one plays the narcissist as well as he can.
