An intolerable movie, this was a noisy affair, so unnecessarily loud, repetitive, wholly unimaginative, and just plain boring.
I hated it and hope you do too.
Death of a Unicorn (2025).
Tag Archives: Cinema
The Score (2001).
The stories were rampant at the time and bloody hell they were amusing: Brando refusing to be directed by Frank Oz for he moonlighted as a Muppet, Miss Piggy to be exact. The lionised thesp apparently took an instant dislike to the bloke, so Bobby De Niro had to take over directing duties, Brando fed instructions through an earpiece.
Frank Oz valiantly played Yoda through all of his incarnations, for fuck’s sake. Give him some slack, Marlon!
Anyway, it’s three generations of method maestros sharing the screen; sadly, none of them chew the scenery and you can just imagine what Michael Mann or someone of that caliber would have done with the material, even if the script is a bog-standard bag of cliches.
A movie completely bereft of style, any Tom, Dick or Harry could have put this together, as it’s as visually nondescript and anonymous as a hundred TV movies from the past 30 years. Only this came out in cinemas and features three quite extraordinary actors.
It’s good enough, but 90 mins of the three of them having an unscripted conversation in a pub toilet would have been more engaging.
Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994).
The Liam Neeson reboot is almost here as the teaser trailer has informed us, so this was an appropriate occasion to give the childish, immature, gleefully daft third entry in the Naked Gun trilogy another bash after a long hiatus.
It’s funny as fuck and I have nothing else to add.
Maverick (1994).
What an enjoyable movie this is, the type that offers two hours of escapist fun with no baggage or pretensions. It’s nothing special and provokes zero thoughts that one would deem as being profound, but then it’s about poker and Mel Gibson’s con man act. Nothing wrong with it at all and when it concludes you’re a wee bit sad there’s no sequel.
That’s a mission accomplished.
Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
“When I was overseas during the war, Your Honor, I learned a French word. I’m afraid that might be slightly suggestive.”
For 1959, this is one coarse, salacious movie, peppered with manky chit-chat and innuendo in a subtle but all-out disruption of the Hays Code, James Stewart’s folksy lawyer our champion. It’s an entirely provocative movie.
James Stewart meeting Lee Remick for the first time, Duke Ellington’s jazz score accompanying the lawyer’s stride, is almost like a soft-core porno scene. I burst out laughing at how self-aware and, well, funny it is. Genre convention is acknowledged and upended in this flick through the art of taking the piss, but it’s also just cool – cool to look at, listen to. Even the poster is cool.
As courtroom dramas go, it grips for every minute. The instructive aspect of the picture ensures its continued significance as a spearhead in movies concerning the legal system, profession, and the court, the fallibility of the human element.
And Joseph Welch, who plays the avuncular but quietly authoritative judge, is the best judge I’ve ever seen in a movie and he wasn’t even an ‘actor’:
Tombstone (1993) is the Val Kilmer Show.
It’s a one-in-a-million movie that shouldn’t exist. But it’s here … with us.
And it’s an utter riot, from Billy Zane with hair to Michael Biehn spouting Latin. It’s indeed a frenzy of quotes, with Val Kilmer’s lines more like witty sayings you gleefully take into life than the casual dialogue of his permanently plastered Doc Holliday.
A perfectly orchestrated yarn and the definitive O.K. Corral flick, it works as elegiac drama and pure entertainment. It’s the kind of Western Martin Scorsese would have made, such is the movie’s vibrancy and the finesse of the direction.
Kilmer is at his most weird and iconic here, his best ever performance. It’s so unlike anything else he did, and I can’t recall many other actors creating such an impression in a supporting role. You think of Doc Holliday, you see Val Kilmer in an instant. Alas, despite the mammoth career he had, it never quite matched his undoubted talent.
His wee swansong in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) was a lovely, heartfelt touch from Cruise, but it’s sad to see. It’s taken on a greater resonance now.
Disney madness.
Wee stroll around Haymarket, Edinburgh, and within two minutes I’m assaulted by an ad for Snow White (2025) emblazoned on the side of a manky bus to Wester Hailes, immediately followed by a vessel to East Craigs with a Cinderella panto gig (starring the redoubtable Grant Stott) draped beneath its windows.
Meanwhile, a lad was carrying a rug over his shoulder into your generic ‘Men with Ven’ and I had Aladdin’s magic carpet in my head.
My mind has been infected by corporations today.
It now functions as a low-rent Disney medley.
Bye for now.
The Offence (1973).
The tackiest, most gimmicky slow-motion sequence opens this stagey, plodding bore of a time. It bombards you with the drab and dreary and seems to have no other purpose.
Connery is powerful as always, vulnerable and domineering both at once, but is wasted on a cruddy premise. And the camera ‘effects’ are so shoddy and unnecessary. It’s like a mediocre play but made even worse with superfluous shots which, rather than heighten the drama, merely draw attention to how dramatically damp everything is.
Heard so much about this movie over the years, the main leitmotif being that it’s a hidden gem. It isn’t.
It’s shite.
The Driver (1978). Watch. Promptly repeat.
It’s certifiably COOL and immaculately framed, from a director who understands framing and why it matters.
Ryan O’Neal is once again in a masterwork in which he’s the only actor you can envisage as the protagonist. No one else did impassive cool like him, and it’s even a cool that suggests dimensions behind the glacial exterior. His career never progressed beyond that ’70s apex because director’s didn’t use him properly, oblivious to the magnetism and effortless insouciance he could radiate within a narrow range.
You don’t need a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue in a movie this visual, which is what movies are, first and foremost. And the verbal exchanges may be minimal, but memorable, nonetheless.
Why is this so stylish? It’s from 1978. Influential is the term.
The Ghost and the Darkness (1996).
Was my fond memory of this movie clouded by nostalgia? Of course it was, but it’s not entirely rubbish.
We have embarrassingly cruddy dialogue exchanges and a bog-standard voice-over which is so nondescript it could be applied to a hundred movies. It runs out of ideas after 45 minutes, but looks and sounds glorious despite all the unchallenged British imperialism on display.
There is a ‘wasted opportunity’ dimension to it, given the highly respected screenwriter William Goldman penned the screenplay, and the Michael Douglas deuteragonist is as multi-dimensional as a Ned robbing Toilet Duck from a Lidl, in broad daylight, wearing a tracksuit from 1977. And Ice Man and Gekko’s methods of snaring this man-eating beastly duo aren’t imaginative and wearily become tiresome.
It’s nothing special; it’s not garbage, either, because it’s kind of funny.
But I don’t think Roger Ebert liked it much.
Even if Alex Ferns, a.k.a. wife-beating EastEnders villain Trevor Morgan, makes an appearance.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 