One might deem it ‘the genesis’, a foundation of style and themes. There’s a sacred quality to the pre-digital age and this is why they are better movies – one had to really think about how to construct the visuals and it wasn’t a case of throwing the camera around and waiting for something to happen. It’s a basic non-point to make but films today are beyond pathetic because they are so far from artistry it’s a 1,000-crewed ‘collaborative effort’. There have been several exceptions but almost everything is identical, every film conforming to the same storyboard.
A time machine quality swirls around this flick. Whether it’s the throwback cinematography that apes Gregg Toland or the peculiar sound recording that could be lifted straight from the seminal Citizen Kane (1941) or merely the endlessly fascinating subject matter – Kane’s production history, its bonkers cast and crew. The movie was a joy to watch. It captures ‘Old Hollywood’ like no other; not that I was there, but it’s how I’ve always pictured the era. The sleaze, the smoky rooms, the shameless greed, the debauchery, the magnates and barons mixing with screenwriters and journalists, a glorious melting pot with movies the rarefied outcome.
It’s not just a portrait of an untouchable epoch, though. The … tribute is married to actual human stories, the individual struggles that inspire and spark creative output, the roman-à-clefs that writers as omniscient as Herman J. Mankiewicz soaked up like a sponge. When you read into types like this – Ben Hecht also comes to mind – you can’t help but admire the way they dipped into Bohemian Grove.
This might also be the most unusual movie David Fincher has made. I will have to view it again for I did not detect any ‘Fincherisms’.
But they ruined him. It’s another example of writing ‘jumping the shark/sofa’. He did a terrible deed – burning your kin is not the best move – and no one believed the sincerity of it for a second. It sums up how appalling Game of Thrones got in its last two pathetic seasons. It was ghastly, infected with bizarre vignettes that went NOWHERE.
The actor Stephen Dillane is the best in the show and he nails the character – absolutely and totally miserable, consumed with hatred. Even if he sat on the Iron Throne I can imagine he’d be bored to death and questioning his life role. That’s my kind of human. His quotes are incredible.
The crème de la crème: “A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good.”
Saw this for the first time in decades and bloody hell is it dull. It’s just so boring, which I find rather mental because it’s about UFOs and all that, and Spielberg is a master craftsman. It’s shot here like a TV movie, its depiction of suburbia painfully tedious. Even when the weird-looking critters arrive at the end it’s underwhelming. The only curiosity to be found is the casual appearance of François Truffaut, who is eminently more interesting than those around him.
Something else bothered me about it. It’s so naive, with government agencies portrayed as even being benevolent. What a weird decision, this just after the twin calamities of Watergate and the American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Never watching it again and I do not understand why it’s lauded.
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.
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’ve said on countless occasions to anyone and no one that the Bourne films easily supplant the modern Bonds in terms of a ‘hyper-realism’ because they are the right spy for this era – dodgy government agencies who are an extension of those governments, expendable employees prone to paranoia and literal identity crisis, a globalised landscape with overlapping institutions all out to screw you/each other.
In recent pictures, i.e., the Daniel Craig shit-bombs, Bond has essentially imitated Bourne, jettisoning some of the more ludicrous gadgets of the later Pierce Brosnan entries and going back to basics. Unfortunately, the filmmakers have missed the point and also lost the plot. Bond is Bond. Bourne is Bourne. Skyfall (2012) and the like are so schematic it’s embarrassing.
But enough about 007. What the Bourne movies did so well was capture that post-9/11 zeitgeist – expanded government powers, loss of individual freedoms for reasons of national security (or whatever), the sense that the rule of law is entirely flexible. They are also thrillingly unpredictable. You actually believe the carnage on display, and believe in the character and his mission to remember yet atone. It’s convincing.
The Bourne Supremacy (2004) is the big one for me. It’s the dazzling city-hopping angle of it, the Berlin centrepiece, the unexpected death of a central character which is ruthless but entirely necessary in motivating the protagonist. And that bonkers Moscow car chase.
These movies are more than mere thrillers; they are as much about a bloke’s weary relation to his time and place as they are his mission objectives. Someone once described the pictures to me as ‘existential’.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 