Tag Archives: Images

Catch Me If You Can (2002).

An inconsequential bore, pointless in its totality, and I didn’t buy a word of it. It smelled of a fake movie about a fake man with fake stories, and the stories have been proven to be just that. This is riddled with unfunny jokes, facile attempts at characterisation, and it’s way too long.

A surfeit of irritating bimbos permeate this pathetic farce, and it’s embarrassing to see them swoon over Leo’s facepalm-inducing pick-up lines straight out of the depths of cringe.

What annoyed me the most was Spielberg’s attempts to inject a fake story with a fake father-and-son melodrama, with surrogate dad Hanks and real dad Walken. The latter is fine, the former is not as nauseating as usual but he is still a pain.

The movie was there so I watched it. I won’t be doing so again.

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The Fifth Element (1997).

Another sensommer viewing of this marvellously mental movie (accidental alliteration).

It exists entirely within its own orbit and every frankly daft facet of it works because it’s congruent with the overriding narrative of stylised stupidity.

A feast for the eyes, the ears, … maybe not the brain when Chris Tucker is screaming. There is not a dull moment in this fervidly imaginative slice of peak Luc Besson, the pioneer of cinéma du look.

And Eric Serra should have done more film scores.

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The Odyssey (2026).

Some movies are event movies, such is the dearth of auteur cinema on the big screen today. Christopher Nolan, for better or worse, might just be the last director making epic blockbusters who is able to inject them with any kind of personal stamp and aesthetic idiosyncrasies. 

The Odyssey (2026) is, I am relieved to write, mostly pretty fucking awesome and a technical marvel. The only gripe I have is that the underwhelming denouement consists of the generic battle-infused run-of-the-mill crawl to the finish line that characterises hundreds of these flicks. 

That aside, the good stuff is fabulous, the episodic fantastical elements more then mere monster-of-the-week subplots, instead seamlessly embedded within the recognisable reality of a historical fiction, with its director’s preoccupation with time and fate.

And how does one top Brian Cox’s riotously unhinged Agamemnon in Troy (2004)? You go the opposite way and have him as a mute, full armour-clad beast the size of a Klitschko brother, even his warrior satraps – Odysseus included – quivering at his presence.

And Sleaze of the Year award goes to Robert Pattinson. I read that he based his performance on the redoubtable James Woods as Lester Diamond in Casino (1995). What an off-kilter but apt tribute. 

The Odyssey is the best version of Nolan. 

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Be Cool (2005).

Painful and embarrassing, this is the very definition of one of those movies where no one ever told the people making it some home truths, namely that they were making an epic spectacle … of themselves.

The lack of self-awareness on display is mental.

A truly shocking movie in its awfulness, it’s not cool. It’s frankly uncool.

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The Illusionist (2006).

I hesitate to use the term old-fashioned or old school (‘skool’ if we’re appropriating street slang), but it’s how I’d best describe this charming movie. It has a genuine warmth and innocence about it, a throwback to one of those risible but irresistible fairy tales.

The period continues to fascinate, and the film captures with elan the brittle precariousness of the era. Pre-war Vienna, that gilded pan-European late age of modernism, decadent Austria-Hungary’s last-chance saloon before the Great War and destroyer of empires. Something like that.

And the wonderful Eddie Marsan is in it.

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The Dogs of War (1980).

Walken doesn’t need to explain anything in this one – why should you have an insight into his inner sanctum? He plays chess and that’s all you need to know. He’s an extremely cool lad, even when channelling his evident PTSD through some heavy weaponry in the fictional state of … Zangaro. No-one can do haunted like this actor, yet stay seemingly aloof and in control at the same time. The movie has a clinical, procedural quality about it, that Day of the Jackal (1973) disciplined narrative. The similarity is not a coincidence (Frederick Forsyth).

Fabulous film and it should be more … out there.

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Trading Places (1983).

A comedy with … you know, wits … that even has a bit of a brain. This was 1983, though, when you were allotted a bit of ‘lolz’.

This is a scattershot sociological satire (accidental alliteration), The Prince and the Pauper (1881) meets a raucous, but never annoying Eddie Murphy. The lad was on fire back then, a veritable motormouth meteor on stage and screen.

I ran out of metaphors.

There are spooky harbingers here: one’s dependence upon financial institutions, and how easy one can be ‘cut off’ from access to ‘legit’ money, the speed of the downfall from mansion to slum dwelling.

I found some of it quite disturbing in its foreboding, and the unfunny periods at least have these serious elements.

Top movie.

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They Live (1988).

John Carpenter – and what happened to him? – is almost a student filmmaker with a broad canvas. He makes, or made as he’s seemingly retired from the director’s chair, entirely self-contained movies that are immediately identifiable in their style, and it goes without saying but I’ll say it, anyway – the music. He defines the B-movie and I could never imagine him making anything outside the parameters of the genre.

This is a good one. The social commentary and allegorical play on industrial decline isn’t exactly subtle, but it doesn’t matter. Piper’s sunglasses revealing pernicious subliminal content disseminated by the powers that be – I was almost expecting a Marshall McLuhan cameo, à la Annie Hall (1977).

Top movie. Daft, but with chuckles.

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I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003).

Atmospheric, moody, and highly promising. For the first 15 mins.

Then it’s just a series of badly acted conversations. And Clive Owen is a zombie. For no reason. What else? The dialogue is dire and horrible to listen to. A thriller devoid of thrills, this was a fucking drag.

The entire movie is pointless.

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Blue Velvet (1986).

How to describe this truly spellbinding picture without reeling off every platitude there is?

It’s a movie that is entirely relatable and in the ‘real world’, yet is so divorced from conventional narrative it may as well be non-cinema.

It’s a new kind of artform.

Is that cliché enough?

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