Tag Archives: Mel Gibson

Mar 18 2024
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Art, Cinema, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

Edge of Darkness (2010).

It’s okay.

Mel is good in everything, a top actor and a sublime filmmaker. Our British Bulldog extraordinaire Ray Winstone also rocks up as an enigmatic spy/assassin with existential predilections, and he gives the type of performance that makes you wish the movie would segue into it all being about him.

However, Danny Huston features, and he is terrible as always. He saunters like C-3PO and has the diction of a constipated android. He almost ruins the movie, as he does most movies he features in.

Bloke needs to be banned from cinema.

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Jul 28 2023
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Art, Cinema, Crime, Film, Movie, Movies, United States

Dragged Across Concrete (2018).

What rubbish this was!

The lines weren’t delivered with any conviction at all. It’s just the writer/director shoehorning his own real-life monologues into every scene. The movie is essentially a rant. 

Nice bit of attempted world building but it’s all superfluous. And lots of stoic, emotionless men sighing. Over and over and over. 

Worst movie I’ve seen in quite some time. 

Watch it if you enjoy shite.

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Apr 26 2023
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Transport, Travel, United Kingdom

The Bounty (1984).

This was verily an impressive motion picture, and it starts with the cast, even though the highly irritating, 100% talentless ‘lad’ from ghastly ’90s British TV series Men Behaving Badly is somehow in it.

The music is pure Vangelis and it suits the story and locales surprisingly well; one wouldn’t expect Blade Runner (1982) stuff to work in this setting. The attention to detail (life on a ship) is necessary, the toils a clear element in the breakdown of the crew, most of them toothless goons who appear to have been press-ganged. You can see the temptation to mutiny. It’s the late 1700s and you’re presented with Tahiti when all you’ve got upon return to Great Britain is living in a cesspool. 

The weirdo Anthony Hopkins does his best weirdo Anthony Hopkins, which is just the right amount of weird.

The Robert Bolt screenplay is a tad disappointing. After the craftily put together exposition, he resorts to homoerotic undertones to explain Bligh’s reaction to Christian’s shagging, which is just lazy writing. And there’s not enough drama on display, which sounds nuts considering the scenes. Not enough characterisation, no scenes exploring a character doing anything outwith the collective, not enough style that grabs; you’re in the hands of a most journeyman director.

But it works despite of its bad handler.

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Apr 14 2021
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Cinema, Crime, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) is the best way to end them.

A thrilling series comes to its end. The Lethal Weapon movies were just so good at balancing the action and the comedy, and the four of them represent the peak of the buddy-cop movie. This is the most fitting finale that they could have come up with; it winds the series down perfectly.

These are actual characters you know and have grown up with. They are strikingly real and the last chapter especially doesn’t downplay their ageing and the toils of time.

And to the epic fight scenes. It’s an overused saying that (‘EPIC’) but these really are. That fight to the death with Jet Li is shit-your-pants time.

There is no point making a fifth one; it would just waste the legacy.

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Feb 19 2017
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Film, Tourism, Travel

The Lumières and Apocalypto (2006).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtXXypztyw
The 50-second silent film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) from 1896, made by Auguste and Louis Lumière.

The apocryphal story continues to do its rounds – people fleed from the cinema because they thought a (black and white) train was fast approaching the screen and in danger of smashing the audience into smithereens, they soon-to-be cinemagoing versions of William Huskisson MP at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

The events of the public screening sound bonkers, but then we often think that our precursors – Luddites and all that – were idiots.

Viewing Apocalypto (2006), a frenzied masterwork in the vanguard of breathless chase cinema, the appearance of the conquistadors at its end (circa 1511) and the utterly perplexed reactions of the Mayans to these alien entities/shapes/unexplained phenomena had me immediately drawing parallels with the Lumières’ screening.

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The jaw-dropping final sequence of Apocalypto (2006), directed by Mel Gibson.

Though the audience of the Lumière picture had of course seen trains before, they had never been subjected to their projections – if not screaming from the cinema I would expect they would be at least baffled, astonished, by the incident. As for the Mayans, I’d like to think the Spanish ships of their time will be the alien spacecraft (or accompanying ‘alien’ object) of ours.

1896 and 2006, documentary and fiction, are fleetingly both linked by this phenomenological dynamic and unsure relationships between subject (Mayans/cinemagoers) and object (ship/train), the questioning of whether what they are feeling is ‘real’ or not.

By all accounts, no one scurried away from a black and white train, but it’s a convenient precedent. These days, for example, we run from the likes of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), not because we question the very being of what we see, but for we seek more arresting phenomena – watching paint dry being one of them.

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