Informing everyone that Monk is now on Netflix and it isn’t shite.
Monk.
Three O’Clock High (1987). Vile movie.
This is a nasty flick, a proper stinker in all its faux style and messaging.
Let’s get this out the way first: it is replete with pointless POV camera angles so vexing I wished to POV my reaction to the POVS and open up a self-referential textual dialogue, metamorphose into a sub-par De Palma. But thankfully I didn’t.
It’s like a parody of 1987 made by a crappy satirical show in 2007 by your usual cabal of needy British panel show guests, the type of cunts you see reeling off wee jokes about yesteryear.
This film makes no sense. Why would anyone attempt to interview the new student for the school paper? Maybe just leave the alleged psycho alone, nah? This shitter runs with the premise and hits 90 mins. It’s so bad.
Every classmate is a cliché and treats their privileged schooling like a soap opera. Every authority figure is cruel and sadistic. Every human presence in it is horrible to look at and listen to.
And the protagonist is an absolute idiot.
I hated this movie. I hated it beyond hatred.
Because it’s full of hatred.
Michael Collins (1996) is an almost masterpiece.
A stirring slice of still-contentious Irish history masquerading as a thriller, this is a biopic meets The Godfather (1972).
Tywin Lannister is in it. As is Julia Roberts with the worst ‘Irish’ accent since … the birth of cinema. But she doesn’t ruin it; her role is window dressing, a star name to pump up the box office.
Its like the anti-Richard Attenborough biopic, and thank the gods his perfunctory talents were never let near this kind of material.
Oppenheimer also turns up as an assassin. And the poster is sublime.
4/5.
Dersu Uzala (1975).
I’ve never seen Seven Samurai (1954), or Throne of Blood (1957), or Yojimbo (1961), or Ran (1985), though I did own the latter on DVD but lent it to an actor who was in one of my shitty – or sublime if you’d imbibed a gravy boat of amaretto during the viewing – student films and he clearly took it as payment for featuring in something so spectacularly awful/amazing. I bumped into him in a bar years ago and he ignored me. Charming.
This movie, Dersu Uzala (1975), was great, Kurosawa approaching his Indian summer, a proper epic with a soul. It’s long but it doesn’t matter as it’s lengthy for a reason.
Wee treat for you:
Congo (1995). Ha!
For a very long, rotten, and delusional time, I thought this movie was a companion piece to 12 Monkeys (1995). It isn’t. I was confused by the reality of primates featuring in both flicks, and that 1995 was another parallel between them. The ‘similarities’ end there.
Congo (1995) is bonkers because it’s shite, wholly serious, and has a cast of actors you’d never imagine sharing a scene together. This is another one of those movies you wish had a lengthy ‘making of’, tea breaks (or whatever) consisting of grainy zoom shots of the mortified actors hiding away behind the crew and props department, slumped on a stool beside a half-tanned 35cl of Scotch, head in hands, and muttering “What the fuck have I done?” over and over.
One would, if pressed, describe this as an action-adventure film, but we all know it’s just … tosh.
Worth a watch.
Presumed Innocent (1990).
Ford’s haircut, what might feasibly be deemed a Caesar, is the feature attraction but he pulls it off.
You can tell from two mins into this brutal courtroom gig that it was shot by Gordon Willis, his unmistakable visuals a pallet of shadows and claustrophobia; when cinematography had character.
No faffing on your phone during the Caesar Attraction for you must pay attention. And it’s got that genuinely shocking ending that defines the era of the glossy star-powered thriller.
Wildly entertaining, impeccably acted, Raul Julia rocks up and somehow becomes the most interesting character. What an inscrutable face, what a voice.
The last great Alan J. Pakula movie.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022).
It’s middlingly entertaining and daft, and mostly annoying.
His wee recruits were nauseating. We are all sick of flicks overstuffed with talentless bairns possessing the collective acting chops of the cast of the Tweenies on a cocaine binge.
Miles Teller is in this and I cannot stand him. Best thing that ever happened to the needy wank is being the victim of drumstick bullying by the grizzled (also annoying) lad from Spider-Man (2002).
The incessant references to Maverick’s age (old man, pops) by smug WASPS vexed me. I was waiting for the whole pack of them to die.
I was bored. Cruise was wasting his time. It overdoes the nostalgia factor so much there is no point to the film.
I turned it off an hour in and watched Top Gun (1986) instead.
Have a nice day.
The Other Guys (2010).
It’s risky with some of its jokes but they are actually funny (most comedies are joke-free affairs) and stem from the growing characterisation and chemistry of the two leads, and the bizarre credibility of the bit-part players, some of whom appear to have wandered off from the set of Lethal Weapon (1987).
Michael Keaton, eh. He can do no wrong in his Indian summer (I don’t wish to hear of this Batgirl … thing).
For a comedy/satire, it’s well choreographed in its action scenes, even more so than the majority of buddy cop movies out there.
And the late Ray Stevenson pulls off an Aussie accent. X.
Enemy of the State (1998).
Kim Newman in a review decades ago drew parallels between Harry Caul from The Conversation (1974) and this thriller’s deuteragonist (Brill), and the observation inadvertently lifts Enemy of the State (1998) above the generic. That and it’s ahead-of-its-time commentary on domestic surveillance.
Another Gene Hackman powerhouse. And the normally irritating and minimally talented Will Smith is at least serviceable in this, a star vehicle from his pomp years.
It’s got style and is never dull. And it’s funny.
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994).
This movie is the definition of barking mad. It shouldn’t exist as it’s so nonsensical and daft but somehow it is here with us, a remnant from a bygone era. It’s hilarious in moments and would not be made today. There would be picket lines outside Cineworld.
Nothing else to add.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 