Steve

The Killer

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Chow Yun-Fat as the killer

There’s a remake of 1989’s The Killer in the works, with Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy in lead roles. But can it match up to the original, even with original director John Woo calling the shots. I believe it’s Emmanuel as the assassin in the update/reimagining, but it was Chow Yun-Fat way back when, as the supercool killer motivated to do “one last job” to raise enough cash to restore the eyesight of an innocent singer who got caught in the crossfire of a previous hit. Compare and contrast the relative importance of female roles. Blind singer Jennie, played by Sally Yeh, does not do much more than scream and whimper in the … Read more

My Mistress

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Maggie

My Mistress is the story of a bored, horny teenage lad and the dominatrix he hooks up with, to the ultimate satisfaction of neither. Imagine inserting a character clad entirely in wetlook PVC into the Australian TV show Neighbours and you’re most of the way there. Handsome young Charlie comes home from school one day to find his dad has hanged himself in the family garage. Mum was having an affair with dad’s best friend, it turns out, though why exactly dad did the deed we never quite find out. The funeral comes and goes. Charlie is wracked with grief but not so wracked that he hasn’t by this point noticed sexy older … Read more

The 39 Steps

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Richard Hannay clambering along the outside of a train

In a world where the excellent is often the enemy of the good, what about The 39 Steps? Not Hitchcock’s 1935 classic, but the 1959 remake starring Kenneth More? So often compared to the original, so often reviled – especially in its native UK – the 1959 version is actually a pretty good stab at an adaptation of John Buchan’s rattling thriller and a decent film in its own right. But thanks to the Hitchcock version it struggles to get a hearing. To watch it, it’s probably best to mentally lock Hitchcock’s version away, though there is also something to be said for watching it as a compare and contrast. Same plot more … Read more

Blue Giant

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Dai playing his saxophone

Add Blue Giant to that big long list of Japanese animes about jazz. Yes, precisely. It’s a “how we got the band together” story of good-looking Japanese dudes meeting and becoming a tight jazz outfit, but mostly it’s concerned with Dai Miyamoto, a passionate saxophone player who outgrows his small town and so heads for the bright lights of Tokyo once he hits 18. Though everyone tells him that jazz is doomed Dai remains fired up by its possibilities and is on a quest to become “the best jazz musician in the world”. Once in the big city Dai hooks up with Yukinori Sawabe, a talented pianist, and together they recruit Shunji Tamada … Read more

The Old Guard aka Les Vieux de la Vieille

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Jean-Marie Péjat fixes a bicycle

You might not have seen 1960’s The Old Guard (aka Les Vieux de la Vieille), a charming French comedy of manners of the old school. But you might have seen Last of the Summer Wine, the British comedy currently holding the record for longest-running TV sitcom in the world. Since it ran 1973 to 2010 it’s a record in not much danger of being broken any time soon. They are almost identical in plot, tone and basic premise. Three old codgers, one of whom hasn’t seen the others for many years, reunite to reminisce, bemoan the lack of respect oldsters command these days and indulge in the sort of childish larks that exasperate … Read more

Attica

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Dead inmates in the aftermath of the retaking of Attica

On 9 September 1971 the inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York State rose up, overpowered the guards and embarked on the largest prison rebellion in US history. Five days later, the authorities took back control in a brutal display of force, resulting in 29 dead inmates and ten dead hostages. Director Stanley Nelson is a veteran black producer/director whose CV contains titles such as The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Boss: The Black Experience. So you might expect Attica, his documentary about those events, to be quite partisan, more campaign than chronicle. But chronicle is evidently the way Nelson has decided to go. His documentary turns out to … Read more

The Brain

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The Brain, head titled, with a passer-by

If you haven’t heard of The Brain (Le Cerveau), then you’ve missed the biggest box office hit in France in 1969 and a film that the New York Times described as “one of the freshest, fastest, nimblest and funniest comedies to hit town… in a long, long time.” I’ll just quickly add that the Times is overselling, massively, and that for a good long chunk of it, until it gets into the home straight in fact, The Brain is very unfunny, mostly unthrilling and largely unglamorous. But once it does it miraculously shifts gear, or maybe by that point I’d just given up and yielded to it. The vibe is The Pink Panther … Read more

Brian and Charles

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Brian and Charles look at each other

Feelgood British low-budget whimsy, Brian and Charles‘s only real fault is that it’s taken the maddening decision to tell its story as a mock-doc. “Twee” – a regular criticism – could be lined up as another possible criticism, though I suspect that “fanciful” is what the naysayers really mean. In which case discard the bulk of Hollywood’s output. It started life as a short costing £500 in 2017, which British TV station Channel 4 liked and wanted to convert into a series. That never happened but C4 did put up some of the money for this film, the feature debut of director Jim Archer. Though really the film belongs to its two stars, David … Read more

Chronopolis

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One of the immortals

Avant-garde sci-fi stop-motion animation, anyone? French, as well, or made in France, at least, the only full-length feature made by Polish-born Piotr Kamler. “Full-length” is actually a bit of a stretch as a description. Chronopolis is only 52 minutes long, and the original version was 66 minutes, so hardly The Irishman. The shorter one is Kamler’s preferred cut. It removed a chunk of late action and completely obliterated the narration by Michael Lonsdale, the French-born actor of British ancestry who’d turn up now and again in English-speaking movies, often in villain roles (he was Hugo Drax in Moonraker, for instance). But, as said, no sign nor sound of him in the only version … Read more

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

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Humanist vampire Sasha

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person does in six longish words what Snakes on a Plane does in four short ones – telegraphs a plot and a tone in a title. In the original French (or French Canadian, if you’re being picky), Vampire Humaniste Cherche Suicidiaire Consentant, it comes in one word shorter. So there’s not a lot more to say about the feature debut by Ariane Louis-Seize, except that you should watch it if vampire movies like What We Do in the Shadows (for laddish Ocker humour), or Let the Right One In (Nordic minimalism), or My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (dark US family relations), or A Girl … Read more