Movies | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Jan 16 2019

The 1999 movie vault is something special and scary.

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1999 produced some truly cracking movies, dare I say two-in-one arthouse entertainments. They were from the sunny prism of the Clinton-era dot-com bubble, but laden with doom, premonitions of a darker age, and concerned with the very nature of reality itself – its comforting distractions of material consumption and conformism. 9/11 changed everything; apathy was suddenly pummeled. The Y2K bug turned out to be fuck all and instead actual shit hit the fan. These movies – American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Matrix – capture that pre-9/11 unease with elan.

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They’re films of their era yet transcend the age because of the superior artistry on display. It’s not exactly fashionable today to laud the acting chops of Kevin Spacey, but he is superior in American Beauty, middle-aged melancholy defined as he squirms his way around suburban hell. The Matrix heralded a new dawn in special effects – bullet time and all that – yet was also one of the first pictures to probe with caution the digital landscape, 20 years before possessing a talking robot called Alexa was considered a normal pursuit.

In Fight Club, peculiarly a flop at the time (the pitfalls of bad marketing, they say) we find an Americana in the throes of an existential meltdown, angst-ridden males looking for something to fight for, a purpose or quest, amidst the dreariness of normalcy. Every generation needs a war.

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Though products of corporations, American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Matrix do not hesitate to bite the proverbial hand that feeds. There is a deep skepticism and paranoia running through them, that of the office as enslavement and deindividuation, the Michel Foucault Panopticon theme quite rampant. There’s also the sanguine at work here, that with mental and physical self-sacrifice and by disconnecting oneself from the cultural hegemony there is light, self-awareness, … happiness.

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Film, Movies, TV, Uncategorized

James Bond is ruined.

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The Jason Bourne films coupled with a mighty dose of political correctness defeated the James Bond films. The rot began at the beginning of the noughties with the near-simultaneous release of The Bourne Identity (2002) and Die Another Day (2002). The former was an ascetic, bare-boned spy thriller sans gadgets and one-liners; the last Pierce Brosnan outing was a Roger Moore movie on steroids. And with an invisible car.

Die Another Day, a 40-year anniversary Bond replete with references to previous episodes in the franchise, riled the critics to no end; even today it’s deemed the ‘Worst Bond ever’ etc. The thing is, it’s not that bad. Bond has always been ludicrous, and that’s the appeal. Roger Moore knew this so played to the gallery. He’s impossible to kill and every shady fucker knows who he is the minute he checks into a hotel.

The custodians of Bond looked at this new gritty Bourne phenomenon and had a lightbulb moment. They did away with the special effects and made Bond a well-dressed Matt Damon – humourless, dour, and more boring than Matt Damon, who incidentally isn’t boring. The whole point of Bond is that he’s meant to be impervious to change, an anachronism spanning developments in the cultural landscape. These days he drinks Heineken, is the subject of psychoanalysis sessions at MI6, and proclaims he doesn’t give a damn if his voddy martini is shaken or stirred. And apparently Generation Snowflake think it would be more inviting if Bond were a woman.

I’d also like to add that Skyfall (2012) is an absolute howler of a movie. It’s as exciting as unblocking a toilet. To top this off the third act descends into a minimalist Home Alone (1990) set in the Scottish Highlands. Bond is fucked. Bring back the gadgets.

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Film, Movies, Scotland, Television, Uncategorized

VHS was/is better.

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I was given a VHS player last month and a big batch of videos. I was always a DVD aficionado but realised something about 70 minutes into Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), this the movie in which Sean Connery plays Harrison Ford’s dad yet is a mere 12 years older than him in real life.

My thought was: I never skip scenes on a movie if it’s VHS because I can’t be fucked pressing the fast-forward button. It creates a whole new appreciative viewing experience, even if the film is pish.

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N.B. The Rock (1996) is a masterpiece. I’m convinced a Michael Bay clone made the picture.

Tagged Cinema, DVD, Film, Movies, Tape, VHS, Viewing

Dec 07 2018

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Britain, Cinema, Data, Mobile phones, Movies, Technology, Uncategorized

O2 outage – premonitions of Skynet.

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25 million customers losing the plot over an ‘outage’ due to “faulty software”. Shit came to a standstill because we can’t function without data.

It reminded me of an episode at Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange when their electronic ‘stuff’ stopped working so they had to add up drinks order prices with a calculator; it was too diabolically stressful for them and the masses were fuming.

The technology ends up, to paraphrase the movie Fight Club (1999), owning us. James Cameron was right and Skynet will be very real. Just wait until O2 becomes self-aware and hacks the nuclear codes.

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Britain, Cinema, Film, First World War, Germany, Movies, Photography, Scotland, United Kingdom, World War One

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) – colourised reality.

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Viewed through the prism of black-and-white, Charlie Chaplin-speed film footage, it’s axiomatic to view actors from the past as otherworldly, alien even, and simply not blessed with the smarts and skills we believe ourselves to possess. We forget they are people of their time using that era’s technology and science and its harnessing of military doctrine.

Then the grainy kaleidoscope of war gets colourised to the max and all hell breaks loose. You’d think this is GoPro stuff sent back to Flanders in a time machine and then propelled back to the future by Marty and Doc, such has been the collective hyperbole over Peter Jackson’s colourised tribute to our great-grandparents.

And that’s the thing – as the red, green and blue is blitzed the more we can relate. Yet war today is some distant thing we flick through on CNN or whatever. Fully realised 3D depictions of car bombs and RPGs ambushing armoured personnel carriers we have decided are too graphic, this in an age when students find clapping traumatic. But the carnage of the Somme is somehow acceptable because it’s a centenary old. Weird.

Perhaps we need a WWIII to make reality (people die, war is hell) more palatable to our viewing tastes.

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Cinema, Film, Movies, Uncategorized

Phil Collins is in Hook (1991).

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I am fistpumping like Nadal today because I reached the magic 10. That’s 10 folk to whom I’ve now disclosed the crucial trivia that Phil Collins is the cop in Hook (1991). It took me until the age of 28 to realise this. It was a Saul on the road to Damascus moment.

Phil Collins immediately elevates a film a couple of stars.

Tagged Hook, Movies, Phil Collins, Spielberg

Oct 09 2018

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Cinema, Film, Movies, Oscars, World War Two, WWII

The Thin Red Line (1998) is from another world.

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Fuck knows what Terrence Malick was doing between Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998). Malick goes period again, the slaughter of Guadalcanal complete with a who’s who of Hollywood ‘big names’. One could be forgiven for thinking this a contemporary The Longest Day (1962), a spot-the-star marathon. Malick clearly used these ‘stars’ as a means for making this entirely personal ontological exercise.

The least political war movie ever, the battle starts and ends and the company depart, characters question their place in the grand scheme of things, quite the number die. The cinematography is breathtaking, the score transcendental. It’s the closest ‘commercial’ motion picture to extended movie montage, à la Koyaanisqatsi (1982). There are no stock good guys and bad guys or retreading of traditional war movie tropes.

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Martin Scorsese summed it up quite well: “The Thin Red Line” is so important. You could come in the middle of it, you can watch it. It’s almost like an endless picture. It has no beginning and no end. People say, “Well, sometimes I can’t tell whose voiceover it is.” It doesn’t matter. It’s everybody’s voiceover.”

Tagged Film, Guadalcanal, James Jones, Movie, Pacific, Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line, World War Two, WWII

Sep 16 2018

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Cinema, Edinburgh, Film, Movies, Uncategorized

The Predator (2018) is hell in a cinema.

I’ve had shites that were more enjoyable than The Predator (2018), and one time in 2014 in Tokyo I shat out nothing but green water for 11 straight days. How can you go from peak Arnie circa 1987 to this garbage? I thought right-wing US governments were meant to bring about a seismic change in film discourse? Like, proper satirical stuff masquerading as flag-waving propaganda. Apparently not.

This film was so fucking atrocious I fell asleep for half an hour, spilled Coca-Cola on my £11 Sainsbury’s jeans, and had a dream about Warwick Davis dropkicking Kenny Baker into the Death Star. My movie-watching colleague had to wake me up with smelling salts.

Worst film I’ve seen in years.

Tagged 80s, Arnie, Cinema, Eighties, Film, Predator, Shite

Aug 28 2018

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Cinema, Film, Movies, Uncategorized

Halloween (1978) at 40.

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Halloween (1978) is always watched on Halloween in my Gorgie palace of peculiarities. It’s tradition, much like how Jingle All The Way (1996) – the best worst Christmas movie ever – is viewed on Christmas Day with a bottle of hard liquor artfully concocted in a budget supermarket car park. It’s 40 years now that John Carpenter’s revolutionary horror has been kicking about. It has unfortunately spawned an absolute smörgåsbord of pale imitators; almost every horror in a multiplex today uses Halloween (1978) as the template. This is, however, a common theme throughout genre cinema. Die Hard (1988), for example, takes the same role for action movies (Die Hard on a boat, Die Hard on a plane, etc).

The film has the creepiest atmosphere and is just masterfully shot; one gets the feeling that every single frame was storyboarded to perfection à la Hitchcock. There’s a complete lack of gore – it’s not needed, and that old cliche about imagination trumping the visceral is on full display here. And it’s that William Shatner Captain Kirk death mask. Who the hell came up with that? Michael Myers sans the mask just wouldn’t work. Mass entertainment auteur cinema, and the original ‘slasher’ if we place Psycho (1960) in the high-art basket, Halloween (1978) makes Halloween more Halloween.

Tagged 1978, Cinema, Film, Halloween, Horror, John Carpenter

Aug 20 2018

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Film, Movies, Uncategorized

Jurassic World: Fallen Franchise.

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Jurassic Park (1993) was the Jaws (1975) of the ’90s, another Spielberg game-changer, the apogee of the ‘blockbuster’. We’re five movies into this franchise now and the apple has fallen very far from the tree. I couldn’t believe the shit I was watching in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). The picture gave the appearance of having nine different screenwriters, and all of them penning scenes from a crèche. And it’s made a fucking fortune. And there will be another one released before the end of a decade. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy. Dinosaurs are fairly captivating; they are getting lazy coverage in these movies.

Tagged Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, Spielberg

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Category Archives: Movies

The 1999 movie vault is something special and scary.

James Bond is ruined.

VHS was/is better.

O2 outage – premonitions of Skynet.

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) – colourised reality.

Phil Collins is in Hook (1991).

The Thin Red Line (1998) is from another world.

The Predator (2018) is hell in a cinema.

Halloween (1978) at 40.

Jurassic World: Fallen Franchise.