I don’t understand this.
Why does Kiss from a Rose (1994) have anything to do with Batman Forever (1995)?
The best tune. The worst film.
For one extended moment in time Nicolas Cage was some kind of god.
It happened somehow – Cage became the best action movie star ever.
He, or a group of wise men, created the Cage Blockbuster Event. Name me a better trilogy than The Rock (1996), Con Air (1997), and Face/Off (1997). He is pure charisma, 100% mental, and in desperate need of a decent bout of hair surgery. These are extraordinary action pictures, repeat viewings, … action art. It’s the Golden Age of Cage.
He makes so many stinkers these days, the same shit over and over again. But just when you think he’s consigned himself forever to the straight-to-video dungeon, he pops up in something like Mandy (2018), away with the fairies, off his tits, barking mad, Extreme Cage. It has to be method. But it probably isn’t.
“In Cage’s hands, cartoonish moments are imbued with real emotion and real emotions become cartoons. Everything – from individual scenes down to single lines of dialogue – feel like they have been embraced as opportunities for creation. Cage is usually interesting even when his films are not. He is erratic and unpredictable; he is captivating and he is capricious. He is a performer. He is a troubadour. He is a jazz musician.” – Luke Buckmaster in The Guardian.
Indeed.
Red Heat (1988). I’m sure it must have (maybe) been a hoot back then. It’s a stinker.
Walter Hill invented the buddy cop action movie with 48 Hours (1982). This is the same premise but with looser plotting, fewer thrills, and zero chemistry between the leads. Arnie is the best thing in it (as he always is) and does a creditable job as a Soviet policeman, but Jim Belushi is hopelessly miscast and it doesn’t help that some of the dialogue he’s given is humiliating. There’s a bus chase of sorts near the end and for almost the entire duration Jim Belushi simply wails at what’s going on in front of them and the general situation. It is the most boring chase in a film I’ve ever seen. The bad guy is almost intriguing and Ed O’Ross does possess a certain charismatic quality. But the movie is simply pointless.
It’s so desperate to be something more than it is that Arnie as a stoic commie cop is its go-to place. Almost every gag, every joke, every line of dialogue between the crime-fighting duo is this schematic clash of cultures nonsense but in a mostly non-threatening way. It’s like the filmmakers looked at Reagan and Gorbachev and the thawing of relations and thought it a good idea to have Arnie as a Soviet rozzer in a shitty movie.
Probably.
The most interesting thing on display here is the cast. It is Kevin Bacon territory. Everyone is in it. I even spotted Kurt Fuller. Who has also been in everything.
Victoria Street, Edinburgh.
A thousand memories abound but the only incident especially memorable in a cinematic way is of a rather short human firing a gargantuan water pistol at a bobby on the beat.
It will have been part of the Edinburgh Festival (or whatever), your annual sub-Lynchian adventure into being and nothingness.
These earlier episodes of The Sopranos – almost the entire first season – are terrible.
The episodes are rammed with so much slapstick comedy you can’t take any of this seriously. The scenarios are frankly ridiculous and there is something desperate about it all with the weak psycho babble.
We also have to tolerate the constant silly references to gangster movies and even have to put up with Silvio Dante’s Michael Corleone quotes which his goon associates (everyone in it is a goon) appear to find rib-splittingly hilarious. It’s not funny on any level. It’s embarrassing watching these actors attempt to act amused.
You’re looking at something made in 1999; I suppose TV at the time was a lot different back then and The Sopranos was a benchmark in terms of onscreen violence and bringing a cinematic feel to the small screen, but the first season is very cartoon-like and childish by today’s standards. The later seasons are a different show altogether, intrinsically more mature and less juvenile. And about something.
Which is for the best.
Touch of Evil (1958) is barking mad.
An entirely and completely odd movie, this one. It is a riot and for 1958 pushes it to the limit. I keep hearing B-Movie but it’s got an A-list cast, a combination of the past and the future. You’ve got a washed-up, bloated (to be polite) Welles looking just dreadful and Marlene Dietrich seemingly popping in and out of an opium haze. I have no idea why she is in this movie but she’s there. As is Zsa Zsa Gabor.
With Welles it’s once again the bravura cinematography and sound design. I always thought of Orson as Howard Hawks with a lot more edge, that within the confines of a bog-standard script he could unearth, indeed inject, a bit of madness and run with it like no other.
The border town here is the seediest wee town. It just defines sleaze. Almost every character is nuts or says something so silly it had to be Welles doing it for a laugh. The roaming camera is an addiction, and there is always something going on at the back or edge of frame. The story is constantly in motion yet we get hints of another narrative kicking off beyond the mise en scène. That’s a talent.
And I did not know until today that the character of Al Schwartz (District Attorney’s Assistant) is played by the same bloke who was the creepy Highway Patrol Officer in Psycho (1960). Take a bow, Mort Mills.
And I’m not the only one who can say that The Player (1992) and Get Shorty (1995) brought me to this wonderful motion picture. Cinema is a land of allusions.
Riot!
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 