I’ve had shites that were more enjoyable than The Predator (2018), and one time in 2014 in Tokyo I shat out nothing but green water for 11 straight days. How can you go from peak Arnie circa 1987 to this garbage? I thought right-wing US governments were meant to bring about a seismic change in film discourse? Like, proper satirical stuff masquerading as flag-waving propaganda. Apparently not.
This film was so fucking atrocious I fell asleep for half an hour, spilled Coca-Cola on my £11 Sainsbury’s jeans, and had a dream about Warwick Davis dropkicking Kenny Baker into the Death Star. My movie-watching colleague had to wake me up with smelling salts.
Halloween (1978) is always watched on Halloween in my Gorgie palace of peculiarities. It’s tradition, much like how Jingle All The Way (1996) – the best worst Christmas movie ever – is viewed on Christmas Day with a bottle of hard liquor artfully concocted in a budget supermarket car park. It’s 40 years now that John Carpenter’s revolutionary horror has been kicking about. It has unfortunately spawned an absolute smörgåsbord of pale imitators; almost every horror in a multiplex today uses Halloween (1978) as the template. This is, however, a common theme throughout genre cinema. Die Hard (1988), for example, takes the same role for action movies (Die Hard on a boat, Die Hard on a plane, etc).
The film has the creepiest atmosphere and is just masterfully shot; one gets the feeling that every single frame was storyboarded to perfection à la Hitchcock. There’s a complete lack of gore – it’s not needed, and that old cliche about imagination trumping the visceral is on full display here. And it’s that William Shatner Captain Kirk death mask. Who the hell came up with that? Michael Myers sans the mask just wouldn’t work. Mass entertainment auteur cinema, and the original ‘slasher’ if we place Psycho (1960) in the high-art basket, Halloween (1978) makes Halloween more Halloween.
Where Eagles Dare (1968) surely must have been watched on a loop by George Lucas as he was penning A New Hope (1977) and the expanded Star Wars universe.
Fan art poster.
Hohenwerfen Castle is this movie’s Death Star, the German troops the most incompetent ever assembled in what is the peak Hollywood WWII turkey shoot; Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood mow the fuckers down like Stormtroopers. Reducing a complex military operation to the wits and whims of two ‘superhero’ protagonists, it’s this blasé depiction of war that has young lads all giddy (“chomping at the bit”) en route to army recruitment offices.
The Wehrmacht grunt here is a Stormtrooper sans the Arctic clobber, and by the end one could be forgiven for thinking that Messrs Burton and Eastwood casually take out an entire division.
It’s quite the escapist experience, and its influence is rampant – the Medal of Honor video game series, for example, is an unabridged adaptation of the movie’s aesthetic. In an ideal Pentagon monopoly on propaganda, the enemy is devoid of dimensions and the battle a cakewalk.
War is no messy struggle when you’ve got personality pulling the trigger.
Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World (2018) is quite possibly the most boring film I’ve ever seen. I’d like to apologise to the cat for putting the traumatised creature through it.
Absolute shite. No characters, no drama, nothing to say, nothing to be seen. A film about nothing.
I first saw the unfathomable sensations of Vertigo (1958) on Boxing Day in 2001. I figured Hitchcock this go-to guy for cheap thrills, banal comedic interludes, nonsensical MacGuffins, crop dusters galore, and … trains. Vertigo spoke artistry, something deep and profound (so I heard) from the psyche. Looking at the physiognomy of the great master, one couldn’t help but think he’d spent a career pulling his plonker to his leading ladies; sources inform us, however, that he was no Mr. Miramax.
It’s a deeply unsettling picture, a compendium, in that Mad Men era, of the ‘Male Gaze‘. Novak’s ice-cold beauty is a kaleidoscope onto which John “Scottie” Ferguson projects his hysteria. She’s barely a character, and that’s the point.
A mastery of pacing, understatement, camera placement, and the semiotics of colour, the movie is your psychoanalyst’s wet dream. A narrative so stilted and sedate just builds and builds, unearthing an unblinkered aggression in every facet of the frame. It helps that the most serenely pacific of cities, San Francisco, acts as the melting pot for James Stewart’s warped solipsistic frenzy.
You watch Vertigo and witness every cinematic trope of the 50 years that followed. No Vertigo, no Brian De Palma. In 2012, Sight and Sound magazine voted Vertigo the greatest film ever made. It’s certainly more engaging than Grown Ups 2 (2013).
75 years old today. Pioneer, maestro, legend. Keep the masterpieces coming, bro. X.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 