Category Archives: Movies
Crimson Tide (1995).
Crimson Tide (1995) is fucking amazing, and it’s not just for the extended screaming stand-off between Gene and Denzel. It’s a film about an issue, a rather big issue, yet is shot with such electricity, edited and paced as good as any action-thriller, and with a Hans Zimmer score sounding like it was composed when he was conducting an esoteric shite. Even the intermittent pop culture references, weird as they are, kind of work, a way to relieve the unbearable tension.
You have five heart attacks watching this movie.
In the Mood for Love (2000).
Talk about the transcendental. In its artistry and superior articulation of its themes, this really did remind me of the works of Yasujirō Ozu, and Toyko Story (1953) in particular.
It’s also a devastating watch and not something you’d stick on every year as it’s too accurate, too affecting, too profound. The ending is as haunting as anything I’ve seen.
It’s ranked 5th in Sight & Sound’s “Greatest Films of All Time” critics’ poll.
They’re not wrong.
Bull (2021).
This was just your usual shite and defines what’s so crap about British cinema.
I hated every minute of it, from the moment the director films a moving car in the most irritating way. The writing was frankly ghastly, and I despise, again with the vehicle stuff, scenes of characters looking all serious in cars at night with classical music inevitably playing on the radio. It’s the worst kind of writing. It was all pathetic. There’s even a bit in here involving parents arguing about murder as they are gobbling down fish and chips. TV-quality acting as always; these folk should just stick to Corrie Street.
Another disgrace to cinema this. But check it out if you want some torture.
Next.
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
Wow, flawless entertainment. It knows exactly what it is and delivers on every level; it’s so immaculate that you can see hundreds of subsequent movies in its accidental blueprint, a formula before there was one. More impressive, if you don’t exactly get to luxuriate in blood and guts, are the shots framing folk actually dying. It sounds a bit daft, but I wasn’t expecting that for a movie of 1938.
Claude Rains once again runs off with a film. There’s something both immediately accessible and conversely abstract and untouchable about him. It’s the extraordinary voice, the alien demeanor, the coolness, and all of this given the fact he’s awfully short. Not sure if he was ever a protagonist in a movie. He was perhaps better as the svelte creep stealing every scene he’s in.
Anyway, a most gnarly yarn here.
The Artifice Girl (2022).
There’s an interrogation at the start of this, a programmer/designer/whatever given a lecture about the use of deceased actors in contemporary movies, that CGI-pasting which seems to be the new zeitgeist. “Poor dead guy didn’t want to be in a movie.” I’d never actually considered that before, but then this film gets one thinking.
AI is terrifying; this movie was terrifying, utterly risible but scarily real. It’s Skynet from a chat room. Turn off your Wi-Fi, turn off your webcam, correspond in letters written in disappearing ink.
It’s Blade Runner (1982) and Tron (1982) territory. And with Lance Henriksen. Bishop lives.
Top film.
One False Move (1992).
The cutting, the stark directness of the style, the quite astonishing framing, this is a movie that demands your attention. The violence is visceral and brutal, and you get the feeling that anything can escalate out of nothing, which it often does. The cast are are all on the top of their game, Billy Bob Thornton a revelation in one of his earlier roles, and the late Bill Paxton once again proving that he’s incapable of a bad performance. And who on Earth was the very bad lad with the tash? Why haven’t I seen this bloke Michael Beach in anything else?
It’s such an unpredictable drama and grips the whole time. It’s also a horrible movie to watch … but for the right reasons.
And there’s a visual reference to North by Northwest (1959) that is simply magical.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998).
It’s some experience, and not just as a kaleidoscope, a who’s who of ‘lads’ from yesteryear. Worth a viewing aside from Vinnie Jones in his worst performance. One loses track of the sighing at his antics.
To steer clear of the alleged football player, the movie is a gem in places. Not much of a script, premise a bit desperate, but if you mute the pratfall happy-to-be-here frolics of half the ‘actors’ in half the scenes, the rest of the sequences are an inspiration, a compendium of short movies shot like a bloke who studied Scorsese and saw how to use a song for a character intro.
It’s entertaining as hell if you skip 50% of it all. And Vinnie Jones.
Razors from The Long Good Friday (1980) wielding a rubber willy is also amusing.
Hoffa (1992).
Without the performance, this movie would be nothing. It kind of still is a nothing motion picture, but for an intro to Jack, it works as just that. A tedious affair with so much unnecessary fictionalisation – like, what’s the point if it’s a biopic? – needs a bit more going for it than acting showcase material. As for the lad Hoffa, is he really as interesting as the surfeit of films suggest? Not really.
What’s the term, intimate portrait of an empty vessel?
Magic (1978).
This was quite an amusing watch. A performer of sorts mercilessly taking the piss out of himself through his dummy is disconcerting, but then you’ve also got all these crude sexual innuendos with highly colourful vitriol. I burst out laughing three times.
The voice of the dummy has the most vexing dialect, the concoction sounding like a cross between Frank Nitti from The Untouchables (1987) and a blocked toilet. The protagonist is clearly away with the fairies, but then it is Anthony Hopkins with his hand up a puppet. What do you expect?
I got a bit tired of it after an hour. You can’t be carrying a Johnny Cab midget for 60 minutes. But it’s worth it for the crash zooms, the sledgehammer sound design consisting almost entirely of laser noises, and the spectacle that is Hopkins in a cardigan.
Absolute rubbish. But in a good way. And that’s rare these days.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 