Tag Archives: Movies

Oct 08 2024
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Art, Cinema, Crime, Film, Movie, Movies

The Killer (2024). John Woo remakes his own movie.

John Woo in his Hong Kong heyday made the most insane actioners of his time, movies that defied categorisation to the extent that he created a new genre. His pictures were somehow operatic and you could absorb real feeling from them. That and the mayhem, the bullets, the exploding heads, the carnage which seemed to have been concocted by Hannibal (psychiatrist, not conqueror of the Alps).

He ventured into the States and helmed the barking Face/Off (1997) and sadly never topped that, but how could he? 

Now we’ve got a remake, for whatever reason, of one of his indelible HK masterworks. 

It was depressing in its pointlessness, visually as dull as these things come. The scenes are shot and edited just like I would expect from your standard hacks for hire. Not a shred of artistic imprint was on this vacuous yarn. I didn’t think it could get any worse but then Eric Cantona turns up, looking away with the fairies and perplexed, which I found most perplexing. Fabulously talented football player. But he has the acting talent of a Wookie interviewing for the Third Reich.

John Woo, you just disappointed me, pal. 

Shite. 

Watch this instead:

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Oct 05 2024
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Art, Cinema, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

Elizabethtown (2005). This was purgatory in the cinematic form.

Hated this, absolutely with unbridled passion hated it. 

It’s about a shoe designer (of all professions to put in movie) who fouls up. There’s lots of quirky scenes and grating use of obvious songs the director plonks on top of them. It’s Jerry Maguire-lite – very lite. It’s for some reason beyond my comprehension rammed with solid acting talent, but they all phone it in.

Orlando Bloom is the big cheese and not only can he not act, he can’t even summon the internal forces to compose a voice-over without sounding like a wee fanny. He has got to be the worst thespian that has ever been shat onto celluloid, and I’m happy that I don’t have to see him these days on those posters you get on the side of buses. I’ve seen junkies with sob stories and they are more convincing than Orlando Bloom.

The director’s infuriating obsession with a character saying something offbeat and then cutting to blank stares of a group of extras – this was the worst stylistic choice in a movie rammed with suffocating whims. 

I didn’t buy a single moment of this joke of a film which has BIG THEMES but treats them with the facile delicacy of a flick featuring Orlando Bloom. 

It’s even worse than Garden State (2004), and Bloom makes Zach Braff look like that movie’s Marlon Brando 2.0.

Sourced this from IMDB as I couldn’t be arsed typing it:

‘At the end, Drew’s voiceover says, “The motto of the British Special Service Airforce is ‘those who risk, win’.” The unit is actually called the “Special Air Service”, it is a special forces unit and not an air force at all, and the motto is “Who Dares Wins”.’

That defines the movie for me. The cunts who made it can’t even get their facts right.

Hated this film so much.

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Sep 28 2024
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Art, Cinema, Crime, Film, Movie, Uncategorized

Hitman (2007).

This is based on a lauded video game. I haven’t heard of it or played it, so I won’t bother alluding to the geneses of 2007’s Hitman. Timothy Olyphant has been around forever and he’s a fine actor but has never quite hit the A-list. I mind him first rocking up as the zany Mickey (“the freaky Tarantino film student!”) in Scream 2 (1997) and the slimy drug dealer in Go (1999). He’s had decent work ever since, though he was a monotonous ‘presence’ in Die Hard 4.0 (2007), but that’s down to having zilch to work with.

This movie kicks off with one of the most turgid credits sequences I’ve seen, with ‘Ava Maria’ joining in the snores. The lack of originality wasn’t a shock; the entire film being an imitation number wasn’t, either.

It has a bit of visual verve to it, and we have a sympathetic protagonist (Olyphant is good) with more layers than I expected for this variety of trash. The dialogue, though, is so lumpen and stilted it’s like R2-D2 beeped the words and had them translated by a writer on the expired soap opera of mank that was Brookside. “Eat your sandwich, I need to get some sleep,” orders our eponymous hitman to Olga Kurylenko. Profound words. It’s a full 90 mins of this kind of exchange.

To add to the melting pot of the derivative, Dougray Scott (“I coulda been Wolverine”) is also in it with his Received Pronunciation Scottish accent, Sean Ambrose from Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) but as an Interpol agent. The plot is confusing and confused; even the actors seem confused as to what is actually happening and why. The totality of this flick is that it’s Bourne-lite and Luc Besson-lite at the same time. 

Shite, but just shite. It has no pretensions to be anything else, so it receives a 1/5 from me.

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Dec 01 2022
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Architecture, Art, Building, Construction, Crime, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized, United Kingdom

Thamesmead no more.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/30/cockney-riviera-botched-regeneration-brutalist-utopia-thamesmead

Brutalist and utopia are never two words to be used in the same sentence without negative connotations, but it’s a recurring theme with these building projects. We did, however, experience the “aesthetically pleasing” luxuries of A Clockwork Orange (1971) because of these architectural faux pas. 

Once again: “As we walked along the flatblock marina, I was calm on the outside but thinking all the time. So now it was to be Georgie the General, saying what we should do, and what not to do, and Dim as his mindless, grinning bulldog. But, suddenly, I viddied that thinking was for the gloopy ones, and that the oomny ones used like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid. There was a window open, with a stereo on, and I viddied right at once what to do.”

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Nov 24 2022
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies

James Cameron in the clip of the week/month.

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Oct 30 2022
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, World War One

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) is a terrible movie.

The 1930 original is an exercise in magisterial technique. You watch it and marvel how it was put together.

Whether the technique fits the script – most films fail at this – has always been an issue for your reviewer, and as we’re talking about WWI films, the pointless 1917 (2019) is an infuriating venture into needless aesthetics. 

Sadly, I hated this movie. It was the definition of mawkish and naive, the soldiers wee gullible pups with identikit snarling chops, marching about with big gormless grins on their proposed way to Paris. It was embarrassing to view. NO ONE behaves like this, and indoctrination isn’t that effective.

The score – annoying drums for no reason, interrupting the drama which could have been – was not good at all.

I also found it funny how the teacher looks the exact same as the Wilhelm II verbal-shagger from the Lewis Milestone corker – pathetic!

It’s a truly rubbish movie, a veritable Pick ‘n’ Mix of cliches and embarrassing reworkings of tropes from far superior fare.

I lost a lot of interest in all developments and contemplated my next viewing of Paths of Glory (1957).

Don’t bother with this.

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Jul 02 2021
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

For one extended moment in time Nicolas Cage was some kind of god.

It happened somehow – Cage became the best action movie star ever.

He, or a group of wise men, created the Cage Blockbuster Event. Name me a better trilogy than The Rock (1996), Con Air (1997), and Face/Off (1997). He is pure charisma, 100% mental, and in desperate need of a decent bout of hair surgery. These are extraordinary action pictures, repeat viewings, … action art. It’s the Golden Age of Cage.

He makes so many stinkers these days, the same shit over and over again. But just when you think he’s consigned himself forever to the straight-to-video dungeon, he pops up in something like Mandy (2018), away with the fairies, off his tits, barking mad, Extreme Cage. It has to be method. But it probably isn’t.

“In Cage’s hands, cartoonish moments are imbued with real emotion and real emotions become cartoons. Everything – from individual scenes down to single lines of dialogue – feel like they have been embraced as opportunities for creation. Cage is usually interesting even when his films are not. He is erratic and unpredictable; he is captivating and he is capricious. He is a performer. He is a troubadour. He is a jazz musician.” – Luke Buckmaster in The Guardian.

Indeed.

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May 02 2021
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Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized, Vietnam

I hated The Deer Hunter (1978) so much.

It’s so unnecessarily long-winded and frankly pointless.

I’m struggling to think of a more eclectic display of moronic and wholly unsympathetic characters in a motion picture. Everything about them is annoying; they are smug, boring, stupid, and generally just excruciating. It’s universally described in the reviews of the time as being “epic”. This consists of a few wide-angle shots of mountain landscapes in order to paper over thin characterisation; mountains act as filler.

Yet despite occasional David Lean pretensions it’s so inept from a framing perspective. Every scene is astonishingly horrible to look at, an ugly beast shot with all the artistry of a severely undisciplined student movie; there is no syntax to scenes or reason behind shot decisions. It’s a fucking mess. Vietnam has never looked so anonymous. What else? The score pissed me off. It screams of folk feeling sorry for themselves. Which is the essence of the film.

As for the famous Russian Roulette scene – who cares?

I don’t.

Absolute shite.

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Apr 22 2021
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Crime, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized, United Kingdom

Snatch (2000) is great until a certain former Wimbledon footballer makes an appearance.

This admittedly amusing movie is not about a single thing aside from how the narrative strands collide, and they are loose connections at most. It is merely highly entertaining, brimming with energy and giggles, though we mainly laugh at how stupid and un-self-aware most of the characters are. It’s a lot of fun until Vinnie Jones turns up and sinks the joys. He’s just awful in everything, but especially this.

For some reason he transitioned from being a dreadful footballer to a dreadful actor. I blame that whole late ’90s ‘lad culture’ … thing, the heyday of Loaded magazine and the milder second renaissance of the beer-swigging hooligan. Only back then could someone so talentless be glorified for thuggery. He’s a former football hardman turned hardman ‘actor’ and this is meant to be hilarious. Sigh.

But it’s cracking until he turns up.

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Mar 26 2021
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Photography, Technology, Uncategorized

Robin Williams is so creepy in One Hour Photo (2002) it’s like he never came from comedy.

And this is disturbing – back in the olden days when you took photos to Boots to be developed there will have been someone like Seymour “Sy” Parrish (Williams’ protagonist) inspecting your every shot, vicariously living his (it’s usually a creepy bloke) life through yours. I read a story years ago about some wee creep phoning the cops because he spotted a cannabis plant in the backdrop of a photo. How dignified.

Robin Williams is the business. We all knew he was hilarious yet his ‘serious roles’ really do demonstrate that he was an actor of the highest calibre, though comedy is acting too. He was in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (2002) in the same year and he’s creepy as fuck in that as well. It was a creepy year.

The word of the day is ‘creepy’.

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