Latest Posts
The Pawnbroker
The Pawnbroker used to be a prestige movie, both when it came out in 1964 and for decades afterwards. It’s lost some of its sheen over the years, for a variety of reasons. Films referencing the Holocaust are no longer as scarce as they were when the Beatles were first conquering America. Rod Steiger’s star has also waned. Once seen as a rival to Brando, Steiger is now often regarded as a ham using Method techniques to disguise overacting. And the Method itself, of course, also no longer commands the respect it once did. There is still much to admire in the film though, and in Steiger’s performance, which he promised director Sidney … Read more
September 5
Cool rather than hot, and about events not as they happened but as they were reported, September 5 is the story behind the story, of how a sports team from ABC TV found themselves at the cutting edge of a major news event at the 1972 Olympics, when a group of Israeli athletes were taken hostage by a terrorist group, Black September, as 900 million viewers around the globe looked on. Mark Spitz winning seven swimming Gold medals, Olga Korbut performing her Dead Loop on the asymmetric bars, Munich is remembered for many things, but probably most of all for the moment when the German Olympic authorities’ attempt to perform a hard reset … Read more
Eolomea
Considering it’s sci-fi from behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War, Eolomea is an unexpectedly bright, colourful, even countercultural space adventure. Some of it is still brilliant, some of it pretty dated. But it’s entirely fascinating, top to toe – this is how the East Germans were doing it in 1972. It opens unexpectedly, with a shot of a guy running down a beach. I’ve made it, he says (in so many words), the Galapagos Islands! It’s like the beginning of an episode of TV show The Monkees. The soundtrack is surely about to break out into something bubblegummy and poptastic. Apart from anything else it completely confounds expectations. … Read more
Highest 2 Lowest
The least satisfying Spike Lee film I’ve ever seen, Highest 2 Lowest at least has the excuse that it’s Spike Lee in gun for hire mode. Walter Salles, Mike Nicholls and Martin Scorsese were all lined up to direct at various points. It’s mystifying, though, because Lee’s journeyman work is usually better than this. It’s a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, or so the blurbs say. In fact Lee and adapter Alan Fox seem in a hurry to work through Kurosawa’s scenarios, as if they had a more urgent appointment elsewhere. If they did, they’re not telling us what it is. In other words, if you want to see a really … Read more
Riptide aka Une Si Jolie Petite Plage
Seedy atmosphere is Riptide‘s USP. So seedy is it, in fact, that when Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (its original title) debuted in 1949 it was felt necessary to add a little disclaimer up front for French audiences in an attempt to head off complaints. The makers of the film meant no offence to war orphans, it says (in so many words), they are the victims here and do not deserve their bad reputation. Tiny data dump. War orphans lived in state-run orphanages and were often loaned out to local businesses, where they’d work for little or no money. Often horribly exploited, they did the dirty work, in every sense of the word. … Read more
Echo Valley
Constantly on the move, always trying new things, Sydney Sweeney’s advance on the Oscars probably won’t be helped by Echo Valley – she’s just not in it enough – but it won’t be hindered either. And she’s surrounded by the sort of actor the Academy loves. What is it though, this Echo Valley? Julianne Moore and Fiona Shaw are in it, so there’s an expectation of a certain sort of high-tone emotional drama, which is exactly what we get… at first. Moore plays the mother to an abjectly drug addicted daughter (Sweeney). Kate is at her wit’s end over Claire’s regular relapses and yet she continues to enable her daughter because she is a soft … Read more
The Decameron
“The dirtiest great book in the Western canon,” is how the New Yorker once described Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Which made it a perfect fit for Pier Paolo Pasolini when he set out on his Trilogy of Life, three films based on old texts. The Decameron came first, in 1970, followed by The Canterbury Tales (1974) and Arabian Nights (1974). All three were popular, especially with sex-starved schoolboys suddenly interested in subtitled arthouse. Whether they are arthouse at all is a question for another day – in some quarters subtitling is enough on its own to consign a movie to the outer reaches. Which is ridiculous in the case of the Trilogy of Life, … Read more
Sorry, Baby
Sorry, Baby is the sort of film that’s hard to write about. Which is irritating if writing about it is exactly what you want to do. But not giving the whole game away probably makes for a more rewarding viewing experience for anyone intending to watch it. Without letting the cat entirely out of the bag I can say that it’s a coming of ager and an issue drama, though it wraps its issue up in a character study, which it approaches obliquely without being too dogmatic. It’s also a campus drama. The sort of thing you might get from writers like Malcolm Bradbury or David Lodge, Philip Roth or Michael Chabon if … Read more
So Close
Men are largely an irrelevance in So Close, Corey Yuen’s “girls with guns” actioner made in 2002 just as Hong Kong was exiting its glory period. I prompted Google in AI mode to list the key characteristics of the “girls with guns” genre were. It said – Hong Kong, female protagonists, gunplay and stunts, challenging norms and exploitation v agency. We get all of those in the opening sequence, in which assassin Shu Qi’s Lynn, dressed all in white, enters the HQ of a shady Hong Kong megacorporation posing as a techy “angel” specialising in malware attacks. Only to exit shortly afterwards at speed, pursued by scores of security men, many of them … Read more
Juliet & Romeo
Juliet & Romeo is the sort of film that schoolteachers wary about introducing Shakespeare to 16 year olds show to the kids. Sexy young things have key roles, the original language survives only as a vestige and there are songs that use autotune quite a bit. Purists will hate hate hate it, but it has a perky energy and its middle-finger approach means it actually fares a lot better than many a reworking. It sticks close enough to the original plot – star crossed lovers from rival families in Verona. The Montagues and Capulets, headed on one side by Jason Isaacs and Lidia Vitale as Lord and Lady M, on the other by … Read more
The Outfit
1970s neo-noir doesn’t begin and end with Chinatown and The Long Goodbye. Here, for instance, is The Outfit, director John Flynn’s lean adaptation of one of the 24 novels Donald Westlake wrote under his Richard Stark pseudonym. Many Stark stories feature the no-nonsense career criminal Parker and in a mini-festival of Parker adaptations, The Outfit would sit snugly alongside Point Blank (where he’s renamed Walker), the Jean-Luc Godard movie Made in USA (he becomes a she named Paula), Play Dirty (Mark Wahlberg as Parker) and Parker, in which Jason Statham plays Jason Statham. Here it’s Robert Duvall as Parker – renamed Earl Macklin – fresh out of stir and setting off on a … Read more
Elio
In a developed world of plunging birth rates, here’s Elio, a Pixar animation for sad only children. An ET-flavoured tale flipped on its head and with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the mix, it also doffs its hat to the era of Big Science, when the likes of Professor Carl Sagan were still being listened to rather than shouted out of the room. “Are we alone,” the disembodied voice of Sagan intones several times throughout the film, meaning is Earth the only planet in the universe harbouring sentient life? “Alone,” taken literally in the case of Elio, an orphaned kid being brought up by his aunt, Olga, who has given … Read more
