Month: September 2022

The Assignment

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Frank Kitchen before gender re-assignment

Hardboiled graphic-novel pastiche is the big idea behind The Assignment, which stars Michelle Rodriguez as Frank Kitchen, a hitman who becomes a hitwoman after his enemies perform some non-elective gender re-assignment (Re-Assignment was a working title, as was Tomboy) on him/her. As you might expect, revenge is served hot and cold, warm and wet. Walter Hill directs. Yes, the same Walter Hill of 1980s hits like Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs and Brewster’s Millions, still in the game, still knocking out remarkably varied movies, still happy to get down and slum it, as he’s doing here – the film was made for very little money and Hill was well into his 70s when it … Read more

Jurassic World Dominion

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Group shot of the cast of Jurassic World Dominion

Going into production, the makers of Jurassic World Dominion knew they had to deal with a raft of problems that most franchises don’t have to deal with. They couldn’t change the villain – one of the key ways that long-running franchises refresh their offering. In Jurassic Park movies the bad guy remains the dinosaur no matter how many crazed megalomaniac humans are injected into the mix. They also couldn’t really change the location. This isn’t a story of a world taken over by dinosaurs but of a theme park (essentially) going wrong. James Bond gets sent to Bermuda, or Brazil, or Baluchistan, or into space orbit or beneath the waves to ring the … Read more

Bedtime Story

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Lawrence and a wealthy widow

Bedtime Story is one of a string of movies produced by Marlon Brando’s Pennebaker Productions, a company run by Brando’s father, Marlon Sr, and named after his mother, Dorothy Pennebaker. They didn’t all feature Brando Jr. 1961’s Paris Blues was a vehicle for Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier and Louis Armstrong. 1959’s Shake Hands with the Devil starred James Cagney. 1964’s Man in the Middle was a courtroom drama set during the Second World War and handed a lead role to Robert Mitchum. You’ve probably not heard of any of them, and apart from One Eyed Jacks, Pennebaker Productions’ hit rate wasn’t astonishing, though the films they turned out did generally feature … Read more

Nope

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OJ on horseback

Nope is what you say when heroics are required but you’ve decided on an impulse that absolutely no way are you going to do what’s required. Maidens to be saved, beasts to be slain or dim passageways to be entered, whatever it is, the answer is no. Nope is also the return to form for Jordan Peele, the actor turned director whose conceptually brillant Get Out – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner done as a horror movie – was followed up by the less conceptually innovative but nonetheless very tidy Us. Nope is Jaws done as a sci-fi, a tale of a big something lurking somewhere out “there” in the sky somewhere and … Read more

Trouble in Paradise

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Lily and Gaston stealing from each other

Trouble in Paradise was Ernst Lubitsch’s favourite of his own films. It’s 83 quick minutes of screwball farce, made in 1932 just as Hollywood was putting its own house in order (before the government stepped in and did it), one of the highlights of the pre-Code era. It’s more sexually risqué than later films, for sure, though that isn’t what got it into trouble when Paramount tried and failed to re-issue it in 1935. Banned for decades, it wasn’t really seen again until the 1960s It’s the story of a conman called Gaston and a thief called Lily who try to swindle/steal each other but instead fall in love. Realising they’re a crack … Read more

Drive My Car

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Yûsuke and his driver Misaki

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi delivered two chunky movies in 2021. The three hour Drive My Car followed hot on the heels of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Both movies are interested in identity and the way humans sometimes make use of lies in order to access truth. It’s a case of the theatre director, his driver, his wife and her lover, with the slightly hangdog Hidetoshi Nishijima playing Yûsuke, the grieving actor-turned-director trying to put on a production of Uncle Vanya with a cast using his celebrated avant-garde methods – different people talking in different languages (including one actor using Korean sign language). It’s a metaphor for the gulf between speech and meaning – language … Read more

The Merry Widow

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John Gilbert and Mae Murray

The Merry Widow. In the 21st century the title creaks and the concepts of merriness and widowhood seem strangely out of step with modern life. And yet, 100 years ago The Merry Widow was quite the thing. The huge success of Franz Lehar’s 1905 operetta is what prompted film versions, which popped up regularly in the early decades of the 20th century. First up was Michael Kertézs’s 1918 version, made in Hungary before the director emigrated to the United States, where a name change to Michael Curtiz and a long career (including Casablanca and Mildred Pierce) awaited. The IMDb is currently describing Curtiz’s Merry Widow as a musical, which is quite bizarre considering … Read more

Nun of That

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Sister Wrath in habit, with gun

A film called Nun of That with the tagline “A blast for you and a blasphemy”? That’s two good reasons to watch right there. A third is that this is a funny (scrappy, admittedly) film wandering all over the dividing line between exploitation and satire. The action gets going in a strip club where a hitwoman disguised as a poledancing nun is shaking her ass at a roomful of appalled gangsters. These guys have all been raised as good Catholic boys and the sight of a gyrating bride of Christ is not helping the spaghetti and meatballs go down. Relief, of a sort, soon arrives, when the nun pulls out an automatic weapon … Read more

To Be or Not to Be

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Carole Lombard and Jack Benny

Farcical Nazis. Nearly 30 years before Mel Brooks had a go in The Producers, here’s To Be or Not to Be, in which Ernst Lubitsch lays down the template. The comparisons are not endless, but in one respect 1942’s To Be or Not to Be does mimic The Producers – it’s set in the world of the theatre, itself a good target for comedy, which is where most of the laughs come from for the first chunk of the film. We’re in Poland, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, where a theatrical troupe is putting on nightly shows of Hamlet while rehearsing their next show, an anti-Nazi piece called Gestapo. … Read more

The Power of the Dog

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Phil on a horse

The Power of the Dog makes it five films in nearly 30 years for Jane Campion, plus a TV series and a handful of shorts. She’s not exactly banging them out. And taken at the level of the individual film you’d never accuse Campion of being in a rush either. It’s Slow Cinema, almost, storytelling done at a languid pace, the power coming from the meditative approach, whether it’s The Piano or In the Cut or Bright Star. Not everyone’s cup of well brewed tea. But here we are, a western, centring on two brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons) who run a massive ranch in the 1920s. The influence of … Read more