Popular Reviews
19 November 2012-11-19
Out in the UK this week Arthur Christmas (Sony, cert U, Blu-ray/DVD) After some awful homegrown CGI animations – anyone remember Valiant? – the Brits have made a comic adventure about Santa Claus and family that’s witty, gutsy, insightful and entirely entertaining. A new Christmas classic, surely. Arthur Christmas – Watch it/buy it at Amazon Two Years at Sea (Soda, cert E, DVD) Hungarian miserabilist Béla Tarr is clearly a heavy influence on this artfully artless documentary following a hippie/hermit as he serenely goes about his hardscrabble life. For stressed-out, always-on screen-jockeys this could be the ideal therapy. Two Years at Sea – Watch it/buy it at Amazon Big Boys Gone Bananas (Dogwoof, cert E, … Read more
Dead Reckoning
Dead Reckoning cashes in on the Humphrey Bogart persona big time – a drawl and a rough and ready way with women but beneath it all a courtly gent with a thirst for truth. It was made in 1946 when peacetime mopping-up was the order of the day. War is over. Men are returning to where they came from. Things are going back to normal. Or that’s what’s meant to be happening, at any rate. As we meet Bogart’s Rip Murdock, he’s covered in blood, scared and on the run. If this is a reset then something has gone wrong. With plenty of voiceover from Bogart, and the useful shimmer of an extended … Read more
Sunshine
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 February Galileo Galilei born, 1564 On this day in 1564, the astronomer, mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei was born. He was most famous for advocating the Copernican view of the solar system, which put the sun at the centre and had the planets orbiting about. This was in stark contradiction of the Church view, which had the earth at the centre, and also the Tychonic system (earth at centre, sun orbiting earth, other planets orbiting the sun). Galileo was an accomplished lutenist, like his father, and also considered the priesthood before choosing the life scientific. He had studied medicine before … Read more
Mank
Mank is the story, well known to film nerds, of the writing of Citizen Kane, for many the greatest film ever made. More exactly it’s two stories, one about writer Herman Mankiewicz dishing the dirt on press baron William Randolph Hearst (his model for press baron Charles Foster Kane) and his paramour Marion Davies, the other about director Orson Welles doing Mankiewicz out of a screen credit for his work. Inserted almost as an afterthought is yet another story – about the socialist Upton Sinclair and his campaign to become governor of California, and how his guns were spiked by the movie studios. Installed at a secluded cabin in the Mojave desert with … Read more
The Munsters
Rob Zombie’s The Munsters is a reboot of the 1960s TV show borrowing heavily from the original and dredging it all in a tooth-rotting production design. Rarely if ever has a black-and-white TV show been re-imagined so gaudily. The end product, like Herman Munster himself, is a bag of bits. That’s maybe intentional. Herman Munster was an ersatz Frankenstein’s monster, the original version having been assembled in the good Baron’s laboratory. In much the same way, in the 1960s The Munsters was assembled from offcuts of Universal’s 1930s and 1940s horror movies – Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man etc. This made financial sense. No character rights to pay for since Universal … Read more
Life during Wartime
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 July Earl Tupper born, 1907 Who is Earl Tupper? He invented Tupperware, and was born on this day in 1907, in Berlin, New Hampshire, USA. After studying at Bryant and Stratton University, he went into business for himself, in landscaping and nursery, before the depression of the 1930s made him bankrupt. So he took a job with DuPont, where he found a use for polyethylene slag – a waste product from oil refining – reprocessing it and fashioning it into unbreakable containers. Later, he worked on the airtight lids and in 1938 he formed the Tupperware Plastics Company. The breakthrough … Read more
Dangerous Voyage
Cheap, badly written and not very well directed, Dangerous Voyage (aka Terror Ship) is the classic British B movie, directed by Vernon Sewell, a journeyman who knocked out a lot of films like this. The actors gabble, the plot isn’t particularly convincing and psychologically it never quite adds up. But, if nothing else, Sewell has an eye for a lovely image, and there are plenty of those in a plot that starts on the British South Coast before venturing into the English Channel and then on to France, from where Sewell sends us one picture postcard after another: of Trouville, of Deauville, of Paris, of Honfleur and from many a charming spot along … Read more
Aelita: Queen of Mars
Aelita became a popular name for babies born in the Soviet Union the year after this movie, Aelita: Queen of Mars, came out in 1924. Apart from the devotees of the original novel by Alexei Tolstoy, few had heard the name before, or seen anything like this movie adaptation. It was a sensation, a sci-fi movie about a journey to Mars that also addressed the state of the nation as the USSR sought to consolidate the revolution (only seven years old). There had been sci-fi movies before – 1902’s A Trip to the Moon by George Méliès’s most famously – but this was the first one out of the USSR (please correct me … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 21 – You Have Just Been Murdered
You Have Just Been Murdered is what this episode of The Avengers is called and it’s what’s written on a card left behind at the house of a man who has just been menaced with a gun by an intruder. The gunman returns later with a fake knife, “kills” his victim again, and leaves behind another note – “You have just been murdered… again!” It turns out that Jarvis (Geoffrey Chater) is the third wealthy chap to have withdrawn a million pounds from the bank recently, and Steed and Peel are soon on a case which seems, at first, second and last glance, about keeping the very rich and their money happily together. … Read more
Love and Monsters
I’ve sat through more post-apocalyptic teen adventure flicks – Hunger Games, The Giver, three flavours of Divergent, Maze Runner etc – and not really enjoyed any of them. “They’re not for you,” a mate at work once remarked. And as I whinged some more about one or other of them, she nodded pityingly towards my greying hair. They’re not, it’s true, but even so I loved Love and Monsters, a post-apocalyptic teen adventure flick that gets by without any hat tips to Ayn Rand – rugged individual against the overweening state etc etc – and sets out its stall immediately with a voiceover by Joel (Maze Runner star Dylan O’Brien) explaining that the … Read more
The Sixth Sense
How the mighty M Night Shyamalan has fallen since this, possibly the most barnstorming debut in the past 25 years. I’d have said “except Reservoir Dogs” except that Tarantino’s film wasn’t his debut (the barely seen My Best Friend’s Birthday, the final reel of which got burnt up in a lab fire, has that honour). But then a lot of people don’t know that The Sixth Sense wasn’t Shyamalan’s debut film either; it was his third. Those hugely digressive factoids to one side, Shyamalan’s certainly most famous film to date gave us Haley Joel Osment as a young boy being pestered by unquiet spirits. The boy doesn’t like it and so ends up … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 15 – Intercrime
Twelve high level robberies in the last few weeks “and not one of them the work of an Englishman,” Steed says in the opening minutes of Intercrime, both the title of this episode and the name of a criminal outfit, a dark flipside of Interpol organising nefarious goings-on “all over Europe”. This case for Steed and Mrs Gale, the 15th to be broadcast in the second series – and the first to go out in 1963, the year of JFK’s assassination – is a busy affair, with more than its fair share of ridiculousness. For example, to extract information from Hilda Stern (Julia Arnall), the German representative of Intercrime newly arrived in the … Read more
