Another sensommer viewing of this marvellously mental movie (accidental alliteration).
It exists entirely within its own orbit and every frankly daft facet of it works because it’s congruent with the overriding narrative of stylised stupidity.
A feast for the eyes, the ears, … maybe not the brain when Chris Tucker is screaming. There is not a dull moment in this fervidly imaginative slice of peak Luc Besson, the pioneer of cinéma du look.
And Eric Serra should have done more film scores.
Some movies are event movies, such is the dearth of auteur cinema on the big screen today. Christopher Nolan, for better or worse, might just be the last director making epic blockbusters who is able to inject them with any kind of personal stamp and aesthetic idiosyncrasies.
The Odyssey (2026) is, I am relieved to write, mostly pretty fucking awesome and a technical marvel. The only gripe I have is that the underwhelming denouement consists of the generic battle-infused run-of-the-mill crawl to the finish line that characterises hundreds of these flicks.
That aside, the good stuff is fabulous, the episodic fantastical elements more then mere monster-of-the-week subplots, instead seamlessly embedded within the recognisable reality of a historical fiction, with its director’s preoccupation with time and fate.
And how does one top Brian Cox’s riotously unhinged Agamemnon in Troy (2004)? You go the opposite way and have him as a mute, full armour-clad beast the size of a Klitschko brother, even his warrior satraps – Odysseus included – quivering at his presence.
And Sleaze of the Year award goes to Robert Pattinson. I read that he based his performance on the redoubtable James Woods as Lester Diamond in Casino (1995). What an off-kilter but apt tribute.
The Odyssey is the best version of Nolan.
Painful and embarrassing, this is the very definition of one of those movies where no one ever told the people making it some home truths, namely that they were making an epic spectacle … of themselves.
The lack of self-awareness on display is mental.
A truly shocking movie in its awfulness, it’s not cool. It’s frankly uncool.
I hesitate to use the term old-fashioned or old school (‘skool’ if we’re appropriating street slang), but it’s how I’d best describe this charming movie. It has a genuine warmth and innocence about it, a throwback to one of those risible but irresistible fairy tales.
The period continues to fascinate, and the film captures with elan the brittle precariousness of the era. Pre-war Vienna, that gilded pan-European late age of modernism, decadent Austria-Hungary’s last-chance saloon before the Great War and destroyer of empires. Something like that.
And the wonderful Eddie Marsan is in it.
This director made some fucking belters, Seconds (1966) and Ronin (1998) your blogger’s personal faves from Frankenheimer’s treasure trove of thriller goodies.
The Train (1964) belongs in the wee basket of bantz. It features a train, didn’t you know? It’s a riot, with sublime cinematography replete with anachronistic experiments that somehow manage not to retract from the drama, the thrills, big Burt Lancaster, the rarely seen Paul Scofield as an art-loving Nazi, Jeanne Moreau, and lots of steam. Good steam.
John Frankenheimer made the type of movies that Brian De Palma couldn’t accomplish.
Interiors (1978) was so ghastly in every conceivable way I almost thought I had turned on a parody of a movie named Interiors, or a low-rent version of a really bad Bergman movie, and there are plenty of those.
The behaviour of the ‘characters’ – the nebbish, narcissistic blabbering lot with therapists – in this joke of a film had me reaching for the cyanide. The lack of purpose wasn’t what vexed me the most, it was the prevailing smugness, the tightly-wound dialogue so concocted and so unlike how humans interact that it’s immediately begging you to quit. The Brechtian Effect in cinema works when it’s done right, but I don’t think this movie even does it on purpose, it’s that far up its own arse.
Interiors is horrible and everyone in it is infuriating.
Just horrible.
But if you want to be irritated, this is the one for you.
Terry Gilliam movies are generally a mess, and with extended periods of boredom, meandering subplots that are entirely unnecessary. Only in cinema could he get away with such self-indulgent behaviour; a novel of his I would use as a coaster at best.
This movie has nothing going for it aside from four fabulous shots.
It’s pointless as a film and is thoroughly infuriating in its Monty Python-ness, which consists of ostensibly serious things happening but characters oblivious to them and faffing around with something else in the frame.
These very non-talented folk made entire careers out of this subset of weak comedy and they are still dining off it.
I hate Monty Python and everyone associated with it. Because it’s not funny, not clever, and defines an era when Britain seems even more cruddy and just plain stupid than it is today.
And that’s not good.
I despised this movie.
Bye for now.
An unsubtle grand metaphor for imperialism and the passing of the torch from one empire to the next, the personal and the political both intertwine in The Quiet American (2002) as they always inevitably do in these world-weary yarns.
It’s a fabulous thriller with all the prerequisite delicate human minutiae, and Michael Caine is extraordinary.
He always has been – even in The Swarm (1978).
Walken doesn’t need to explain anything in this one – why should you have an insight into his inner sanctum? He plays chess and that’s all you need to know. He’s an extremely cool lad, even when channelling his evident PTSD through some heavy weaponry in the fictional state of … Zangaro. No-one can do haunted like this actor, yet stay seemingly aloof and in control at the same time. The movie has a clinical, procedural quality about it, that Day of the Jackal (1973) disciplined narrative. The similarity is not a coincidence (Frederick Forsyth).
Fabulous film and it should be more … out there.
The opening credits sequence in this middling, moderately entertaining thriller were so fucking annoying in their aping of the classic Kevin Spacey-free Seven (1995) titles that I almost turned it off out of disgust.
It ends up being okay, if as predictable as it gets. It does take on a certain contentiousness with its theme of domestic terrorism and anti-government radicalism.
Worth a bash, even if Jeff Bridges is rubbish. He’s always rubbish.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 