Bob Hoskins as the criminal parvenu Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday (1980).
A “testicle on legs,” as Pauline Kael once wrote of the lad. An extraordinary performance from a bloke who never gave a bad one despite not a single acting class in his life. He was a born thespian.
Bob Hoskins was quality – even in a Mario Bros. movie.
‘The Yanks love snobbery. They really feel they’ve arrived in England if the upper class treats ’em like shit.’
First of all, let’s get the ‘controversy’ out of the way: the director is correct when he says these critics make no sense. How many actors could fit the comeback story of Brendan Fraser in this? How many obese actors are out there? Haven’t fat suits been around for a long time? More importantly, what is the big overall deal? There isn’t one, just something for folk to moan about.
Anyway, it’s not a brilliant film but it’s worth watching. The performances are fine, and Fraser does a rather sublime job at eliciting sympathy without mugging it. And it doesn’t feel like a marathon experience despite the entire story being set within the confines of a house, the shots mostly of Fraser. It reminded me of Tom Hardy in Locke (2013), a sort of less indulgent and more engaging companion piece. Maybe the latter was more captivating for I viewed it melted on a rickety plane dancing over Siberia.
I must confess that I have expected more in recent times from Aronofsky, but I suppose his mega-impressive triple bill of Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), and The Fountain (2006) are his stylistically expansive works; he appears to have withdrawn into the interior these days. The shackles are back on.
Decent movie, though. It shows what is possible with a minuscule budget and a whale.
How does this even exist? The cast is something out of a piss-up, a charades gone wrong. Sly, Bobby Moore, Michael Caine, Ossie Ardiles, Pelé, Max von Sydow. Erm, what? And to boot it’s made by John Huston.
Less interesting is the movie, a run-of-the-mill affair, the footy action shot with all the imagination of your random YouTuber.
But it still fascinates merely by its existence. And that’s why it hasn’t been destroyed. It’s a testament, a relic, if you will.
__Pledge(1).jpg)
Saw this years ago, a pal lending me it on an ex-rental VHS. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but viewing today, seeing it within the prism of the Indian summer of Jack’s film career, it’s given extra significance, the decade-long swansong exhibiting his craft and cementing his legacy.
The movie sets a grim and melancholic tone straight away, a scene of Jack on his retirement day looking forlornly out of his office window at a bloke on a zimmer, the room adorned with photographs of him in his heyday.
The film carries an air of convincing menace, the isolation of the milieu matching that of the character, the bloke always correct in his hunches but clearly losing his marbles. It’s not exactly an uplifting experience, but if you fancy dwelling in depression for two hours, this is the one for you.
Great.
Let’s get this over with quickly.
Claire Danes’ daft performance is … daft. She just stands and stares, and clearly can’t act at all.
A dreadful antagonist in a movie which is derivative to the max and for some reason mocks itself (lack of any other scripting ideas), even the action is badly choreographed.
The ending is decent. But this is mainly because you’re on fire because the torture is done.
Total shite.
The pull of this being a true story is enough for one to recommend it, but it does have more than that, capturing the fear and suspicion of the time in impressive ways, the claustrophobia seeping from every room. The casting and performances also elevated it above your standard spy fare. The premise appeared ripe for the pedestrian BBC-style treatment, but it was a surprise to see a riskier exercise in the spycraft genre.
The actor Merab Ninidze who plays Oleg Penkovsky. He needs to be in more movies. He’s simply excellent here.
I trust most renowned film critics, so I’m sure the glowing reviews of this are accurate.
I couldn’t make it beyond 30 mins. It was beyond boring. Hopeless filmmaking. Apparently there’s kick-ass action. But I won’t be watching it.
Will win Oscars.
It’s silly and ludicrous and daft and nonsensical but it works because of the music cues and the overarching unapologetic style of it all which screams ‘This is the 1980s’.
But it isn’t. We can, however, pretend otherwise.
The concept is a bit better than the end product but still, this is a movie deserved of revisiting from time to time, despite the inevitable thriller elements that take over towards the denouement. It’s an intriguing premise, what you can achieve when you reduce thinking to its salient elements and get rid of the background noise.
It excels in its exposition and depiction of the cutthroat financial arena as a den of thieves with half of them on some variation of the gear (NZT-48). I hear it got adapted into a TV spin-off that was cancelled after a season, which sounds about right. There’s only so much you can squeeze out of the story.
But De Niro is a gift in this. He always is.
“Don’t make me your competition.”
Early Seagal is almost as ludicrous as latter-day Seagal. The cut-off point is everything after On Deadly Ground (1994), an incomprehensible riot of a shitter which somehow stars Michael Caine.
His Casey Ryback displays no vulnerability, is never once close to losing a violent encounter, doesn’t break a sweat, and appears to give zero fucks about anything going on around him. The funniest motif is all of the other ‘characters’ informing the audience at every opportunity that Casey Ryback is not mortal.
Supremely entertaining movie with quite the catchy score which totally isn’t a rip-off of JFK (1991) ….
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 