This was rubbish.
Sorry, Clint.
High Plains Drifter (1973).
Quills (2000).
With its soft-focus palette of muted colours, this is a ravishing picture to look at, but the script doesn’t deliver on the talent or the favourable premise – the limits of freedom of expression, the extent to which life imitates art, these addressed through the last days of the Marquis de Sade.
Michael Caine plays it straight as the libertine’s nemesis, with no attempts on his part at scene stealing. He is the best for that, no petty grandstanding from Sir ‘My Cocaine’. Geoffrey Rush is fine, but what could have been a diabolically entertaining performance is squandered by the speed with which the movie descends into repetition and tedium.
It got so lightweight past the hour mark and the Phoenix character’s theological hang-ups served more of a distraction than anything else, shoehorned in with a Kate Winslet romantic subplot that trammeled what looked like a promising showdown between Messrs Rush and Caine.
A wasted opportunity, and it all ends with a whimper.
The Place Beyond the Pines (2012).
The biggest compliment I can bestow here is that Bradley Cooper isn’t annoying for one time only.
In addition to this magisterial feat, it’s a movie about misery that’s somehow captivating, and the third act is rather breathtaking in its audacity.
We have a proper movie on our hands.
Legends of the Fall (1994).
A bombastic scene-setting voice-over braces the audience for a long-haul melodrama of middling attributes.
The poster for this film couldn’t be more ’90s with the leads glaring, almost begging us lot to pay the price of admission. It was Brad Pitt mania so the box-office returns were handsome, just like the movie’s primary stud with his L’Oréal locks that would make David Ginola envious.
Julia Ormond from First Knight (1995) is in it, which was a wee surprise as I thought she was in that solitary film before vanishing like a fart in the wind (sorry, Bob Gunton). Sadly, she is wasted here playing an upper-crust village bicycle who goes through the three brothers like wildfire. And Anthony Hopkins, playing the pops, has another strange accent but that’s his modus operandi.
This is one of those movies that must have been pitched as ‘SWEEPING EPIC’, which it is, with complementary James Horner score, which it has.
But none of it is any good.
Gladiator II (2024) is an abomination.
Pathetic, absolutely futile cinema, I was convinced for a torrid opening 20 minutes that this putrid imitator was an AI … thing. Embarrassingly, it’s a verbatim rendering of the first one, with an added siege lifted from Game of Thrones season four, episode nine.
In what passes for a story, which is an appropriation of better material out there, characters do and say the most trite things; there is even a rip-off of that scene from Ben Hur (1959) when creepy Jack Hawkins licks his lips at Charlton Heston’s oar action.
It’s a fucking ridiculously stupid, cynical, pointless and rubbish film and I can’t believe it was made.
Why does anyone still have dealings with this director? He needs banned from making movies.
Shite.
Chopper (2000).
It’s still incredible and funny as hell. In fact, this may be the funniest non-comedy movie ever.
‘Why would I shoot a bloke – BANG – and then put him in the bloody car and whiz him off to the hospital at a hundred miles an hour? It defeats the purpose of having shot him in the first place. What’s more, it’s bloody insulting, it’s bloody insulting. I mean, am I the only bloody standover man in the country who provides a medical plan for some of these characters?’
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
The original, before Freddy was slapped on plastic lunch boxes – so the popular maxim goes.
No shortage of invention from Wes Craven in this and for even his slasher tripe he usually has a theme or two worth exploring or something on his mind, subtext channeling his psychological preoccupations of the time. On this occasion he is a prurient fellow, teenage kicks punished by a scarred lad with knives for fingers, and in dire need of a personal shopper (that sweatshirt).
The movie is mainly just a laugh, and the set pieces are there to be admired for their ingenuity. Scary? Nah, human behaviour at bus stops is scary. The self-scan in Aldi is scary. The fact that Phil Neville garnered 59 England caps = scary.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).
The most captivating aspect of this asinine waste of celluloid is that it somehow ‘created’ the PG-13 certificate. Apparently it was too violent. The flick has a legacy, as without this story it’s a forgotten VHS. It’s not violent, it’s just a terrible movie.
There is no sense of wonder at all and it’s burdened by so much inconsequential, incessant bickering between the leads that I thought I was viewing one of those candid cameras in an Aldi, two rat-faced porkers going at it over the last remnants of a pack of bog rolls.
Anyway, I’ve never seen an adventure movie so dull. Or pointless.
Every antagonist is a witless archetype, every utterance an insult to dialogue. The pacing is relentless in its monotony.
I was more captivated reading about the production of this slog on Wikipedia than viewing it.
I hate this film.
Avoid.
Dickie’s ‘accent’ in Jurassic Park (1993) is madness.
Presently watching Jurassic Park (1993).
Richard Attenborough’s ‘Scottish’ accent is even worse than Mel Gibson’s and Mrs. Doubtfire’s combined. After a litre of Aftershock between them.
I don’t even know what this accent is meant to be as I’ve never heard something like it before.
This movie is unique.
She Said (2022).
This was deeply uncomfortable to watch.
I know barely a thing about the people concerned but I felt like I was on the inside for the duration of the grisly unearthing of a sordid series of manky acts by one rotten creature. And an industry enabling it.
The movie is accomplished in this regard, though it was a box-office bomb (not exactly a shock) despite the talent involved.
Another example of journalism accomplishing what law enforcement should but does not.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 