Latest Posts
Best Wishes to All
What is the price of living an OK life? Best Wishes to All offers a bleak answer to a question few ever really ask. Whether it’s also a funny answer depends on how much grim you can tolerate. Takashi Shimizu, director of Ju On: The Grudge, is its producer, which might give you an inkling as to which way things are going. J-horror: the next generation. All is peace and light initially. A Japanese family eating dinner around a low table. Young parents with their parents and their daughter, who wakes up in the night to go to the bathroom and thinks she sees something – what though? – peering around a door. … Read more
Sweet Smell of Success
Sweet Smell of Success flopped at the box office on its debut in 1957, much as its producer, Burt Lancaster, feared it might. A dirty-underbelly-of-showbiz tale, like Sunset Blvd. and In a Lonely Place, it’s been redeemed by posterity, which often marks it as one of the finest noirs ever made, even though it doesn’t tick all the genre boxes. One reason for the failure was the casting of its star. Not top-billed Lancaster, who put his name at the head of the credits not just out of ego, but also to deflect attention from the real star. Tony Curtis was best known at this point for playing a series of pretty boys … Read more
Snow White
A useful live-action remake of the 1937 animated Disney classic? Or a naked attempt at IP protection and extension? Snow White joins Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Dumbo and The Lion King in the “bit of both” category. It is in other words a decent-enough run-through of an existing story, in a visual style we all recognise, with some star power in lead roles to convince stragglers to shell out all over again. Disney learned how to do this from the record companies, who for a while couldn’t believe their luck when everyone updated vinyl to CD, and then did it all over again with digital. Snow Woke, though. Or … Read more
Yolanda and the Thief
There’s not much wrong with Yolanda and the Thief that a lot more dancing wouldn’t fix. It’s a 1945 Fred Astaire musical, and the first in a run of Technicolor movies that would prove director Vincente Minnelli to be a master of colour and motion. Though it was a flop, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Minnelli’s direction or his eye, or with Astaire, when he’s given the chance. There’s not even that much askew with Lucille Bremer, at whose door most of the blame was laid for the film’s failure. She was producer Arthur Freed’s girlfriend, and he insisted on casting her as the female lead, in spite of the fact that she … Read more
Soul to Squeeze
Hell is someone else’s pubic hair in your bath. WM Weikart’s feature debut hits us with this and other observations – some grimly funny others just bizarre – in Soul to Squeeze, a psychological moshpit of a drama about a guy on a trip into his own unconscious mind. There’s a Red Hot Chili Peppers song of the same title, and Weikart borrows its sentiment – “Insanity it seems/Has got me by my soul to squeeze/Well all the love from me/With all the dying trees I scream…” – to tell the story of a disturbed man, Jacob (Michael Thomas Santos), who opts for a revolutionary treatment designed to rid him of his psychiatric woes. All … Read more
Seventeen Moments of Spring aka Semnadtsat Mgnoveniy Vesny
Watercooler TV from a land without watercoolers, Seventeen Moments of Spring lays claim to being the most successful Soviet TV show ever made. It was commissioned at the command of KGB boss Yuri Andropov. USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev loved it. But the public did too – streets emptied when it was first aired, stripped over 12 nights in 1973. It seems that no matter what Soviet citizens thought of the regime, everyone agreed that the war against the Nazis had been a just one. Sticking it to the Americans was no bad thing either. It also happened to be compelling TV. And it still is if you turn off the bit of your brain … Read more
Tornado
Samurai swords in Scotland in the 1700s. Like his debut, Slow West, John Maclean’s follow-up Tornado is a grand chase movie held together by not much at all. In this case a simple plot about a young Japanese woman on the run from some vagabonds who want their gold back. Simple stuff. Akira Kurosawa is in here, so is Sergio Leone. It’s very elemental. Archetypal, you could say, an arthouse western in an unlikely setting. What the men chasing Tornado (Kōki) don’t fully understand is how skilled this slip of a girl is when it comes to wielding a honed blade, but they will, when they back her into a corner in the … Read more
Desert Sands
Desert Sands tells a few stories but the nuanced drama about camaraderie among French Foreign Legionnaires and the salty romance between a white man and a dusky Arab princess are subordinate to a Zulu-like clash of civilisations – the beastlike many against the civilised few. Paul Newman was lined up for the lead role but asked for too much money and so Ralph Meeker took the part, as the newly appointed captain of a remote fort waiting for his men to be relieved by a new platoon. Instead, they get attacked by a band of wild rebel Arabs and are soon overwhelmed. At which point the legionnaires switch from guns to guile in … Read more
From Hilde, with Love aka In Liebe, Eure Hilde
Hitler without the histrionics, From Hilde, with Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde in German) sets out to do something unusual for a film set during the Nazi era – to lay it all out for us, the everyday normality of it all, the “banality of evil”, to misuse Hannah Arendt’s phrase. But can you make a film about the commonplace without it becoming just a bit commonplace itself? It’s the true story of a resistance group, a handful of young people who spend their nights sticking up bill posters denouncing the regime, and focuses on a young woman, Hilde, who joins it almost by accident – she has typing skills and understands carbon … Read more
The Wing or the Thigh
So here’s the best performing domestic film at the French box office in 1976. The Wing or the Thigh (L’aile ou la cuisse) also did well against foreign competition, coming in second overall to Les Dents de la mer (Teeth of the Sea, literally), as Jaws was called in France. It’s a lively farce set in the world of the restaurant, more specifically the world of the restaurant guide, with Louis de Funès playing Charles Duchemin, the big noise behind the Guide Duchemin, the bible that hands out stars to the aspiring and the established and can make or break a reputation. The Michelin is the obvious idea – the colours and the … Read more
Trading Paint
John Travolta won a Worst Actor Razzie for his turns in Trading Paint (aka Burning Rubber) and The Fanatic (a joy for another day) so you might expect this film to be terrible and Travolta’s acting ditto. But acting awards good and bad often go to the undeserving, which is the case here. Travolta is not bad, nor is anyone in this film, nor is the film itself. It just doesn’t have much in the way of sizzle. It’s a drama about car racing so I’m probably contractually obliged to say “low octane” at some point. That was that point. Travolta plays Sam Munroe, a guy who runs a smalltime veteran race-car outfit. … Read more
Cut Bank
Look at the talent in Cut Bank – John Malkovich, Bruce Dern, Michael Stuhlbarg, Oliver Platt, Liam Hemsworth, Teresa Palmer. And Billy Bob Thornton. Clearly great things were intended. But maybe 2014 was just too early for a revival of the gonzo Tarantino movie of yore. Ten years later movies like Cut Bank were all over the place. Worth checking out, it’s likeable, well done and showcases Malkovich acting for a change, rather than turning in an “and featuring John Malkovich” performance, as a backwoods sheriff trying to get to the bottom of the murder of universally loved mailman Georgie Wits (Dern). The incident was captured on camera, just by chance, by two … Read more
