First viewing after years of hearing the most scathing reviews, and they’re not wrong.
I thought Brian De Palma was meant to engulf daft, badly scripted projects with his patented style; whatever happened, the movie is that of visual neglect, as anonymous as the work of the next hack.
I didn’t get any of it. Was it satire? Was it meant to be funny? Was there an underlying point to anything?
I didn’t believe a moment of the picture and even the title vexed me.
It’s as shite as they say, and Tom Hanks is as awful here as he has been anywhere else.
Another remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), this neo-western is rubbish and not even in a curious way.
I did have high expectations for the flick as Walter Hill is a top filmmaker and this was peak Bruce Willis, that post Pulp Fiction (1994) era when he would veer seamlessly between actioner and risky movies with a bit more depth to them. This is atrocious, though, from the stupid voice-over to the stupid things every character does, to the stupid framing and the sheer stupidity of the premise, and I felt stupid for sticking with it rather than just watching A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
A surface-level bog-standard thriller with a bit more to it, recalling the gnarly Unbreakable (2000), sans that peculiar score fished from a ghetto’s gutter. It was the James Newton Howard one; he sounded like DJ Shadow with an orchestra back then.
An apparently ‘normal’ superhero (Big Brucie Bonus) doing the legwork and the nitty-gritty, with barely any quips and facepalm-inducing one liners.
And this was pure rubbish but not … that bad. And it’s thoughtful in a way, institutions and their ingrained sordid ways given a bit of the Cuckoo’s Nest treatment.
Bruce is the best as always, and Bruce has been missed. Mace Windu is also here with us, a lad incapable of bad acting. Sarah Paulson runs the ward/show, though, an outwardly reasonable yet diabolically cruel gaslighting specialist. She excels at the Nurse Ratched role.
We also have a preposterous chat between a security guard and a low-level charge nurse (or whatever). It’s so accurate in depicting that moment when a gremlin is spraffing a life lesson to you, stuff you already know, but you are compelled to nod and pretend to be absorbing new information as they are in a position of authority. It’s every job I’ve ever had and you must endure the torture.
I’d recommend this film. The reviews out there are a bit scathing. Don’t believe them.
Classic songs you’d expect in a Scorsese movie ruined by their despairing accompaniment to threadbare scenes of Travolta and Alley mugging it, that’s Look Who’s Talking (1989) summed up.
I don’t get the point of any of it. It’s coarse, crude, cheap, and frankly just a minging watch. How is the interior monologue of a baby amusing? Oh, Bruce Willis does the voice of the critter. What genius!
A movie that can’t decide if it’s family fare or an R rating, it’s somewhere thrashing in the middle, daft and pointless. I suppose this got Travolta through his ‘wilderness years’ as it beguilingly scooped up a fucking fortune. But audiences know nothing.
In the midst of a global pandemic as it grabs peak humanity by the testicles, I sat down to watch 12 Monkeys (1995) again after a decade-long hiatus. And what smashing, thought-provoking, thoroughly enthralling sci-fi it is, a Terry Gilliam movie that isn’t uneven and all over the place, which basically makes it an anomaly. 1995 was kind to movies, and Bruce Willis was at his peak in the year of the Eric Cantona kung-fu kick.
There is a mind-blowing scene in this set on the Western Front during WWI; it is so magnificent that it almost derails the rest of the film. However, the character dynamics and pacing manage to keep it together and build to a stunning denouement, that and the inspired Vertigo (1958) references.
And this is one of the few movies that actually depicts people in ‘mental hospitals’ or ‘institutions’ as actually having meaningful, occasionally profound insights into the peculiarities of the social order.
And seek out its art-farty precursor La Jetée (1962). It’s definitely not shite.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 