Popular Reviews
10 December 2012-12-10
Out in the UK this week The Expendables 2 (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Jason Statham helps action OAPs Sly, Arnie, Dolph, Bruce, Jean-Claude and even, god love him, Chuck Norris into their combat gear in a second tranche of lobotomised ass-kicking so ridiculous the franchise might run for ever. The Expendables 2 – at Amazon Ping Pong (Britdoc, cert PG, DVD) Play veteran table tennis and stay limber, sharp and connected to the world – the message of this riveting documentary that works because it focuses on the game and its very elderly players (one a feisty 100), rather than self-empowerment blah. Ping Pong – at Amazon Life Just Is (Independent, cert 15, … Read more
Hitman
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 June First barcode scanned, 1974 On this day in 1974, a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum became the first product to be scanned by a barcode reader for commercial purposes. The so-called Universal Product Code had been in development since the late 1940s, when Bernard Silver, a Pennsylvania graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology had overheard a local supermarket owner bemoaning the fact that there wasn’t a system for automatically scanning items through a checkout. Drexel went to work, first using ultra-violet inks (they faded), then Morse code in which the dots were stretched to become lines, fatter ones … Read more
Cripple Creek
Cripple Creek takes place against the backdrop of the Colorado gold rush of 1892 and is a genre movie with an unusual slant, a western with a secret sauce. It’s introduced by a stern voiceover giving us chapter and verse on gold reserves in the USA, and how smugglers are undermining the American economy by spiriting bullion out of the country. Patriotic essentials duly established, the voice retreats after we’ve been introduced to Bret Ivers (George Montgomery) and Larry Galland (Jerome Courtland), a pair of secret service agents posing as gold thieves. Ivers and Galland arrive in a one horse town they reckon is at the centre of a smuggling operation and have … Read more
Xchange
Here’s one of a number of interesting sci-fi films produced in Canada in the wake of Vincenzo Natali’s Cube. It’s a low-budget body-swap futureshocker with three different actors (Stephen Baldwin, Kyle MacLachlan and Kim Coates) all vaguely playing the same man, a “floater” refusenik named Alvin Toffler. There’s a joke in that name if you’re a dyed in the wool sci-fi fan. Possibly also funny is that in this futureworld if you’ve swapped bodies (that’s the “floating” bit) with someone but can’t get back to your starting position you can park yourself inside a clone while everything is sorted out. Enter Stephen Baldwin as the empty vessel waiting to be filled. So when … Read more
Confess, Fletch
A confession about Confess, Fletch. I was quite a chunk in before I realised that the character of Fletch, played here by Jon Hamm, was the same Fletch that Chevy Chase played in 1985’s Fletch and 1989’s Fletch Lives. Prejudices readjusted, I continued, noting that Hamm’s Fletch is now a retired investigative journalist (Chase’s was still on the job), and that Hamm is trying to dignify the character up a bit. A touch of Cary Grant in his portrayal, or maybe even Gregory Peck – especially when Fletch is riding around Rome on an old-school scooter, Roman Holiday style. From the opening credits – that big blue Miramax ident of yore – and the … Read more
My Name Is Julia Ross
There is some spectacularly bad acting in 1945’s My Name Is Julia Ross but it’s worth a look in spite of that. And at only 65 minutes, it’s not exactly an investment. To sell it a bit harder, it hums with weirdness, is very nicely directed by Joseph H Lewis, who was renowned for spinning straw into gold (or at least gold plate), and it also has some very good acting in it, too, mostly by Dame May Whitty (most famous for being the titular lady in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes). George Macready, who plays her son, is pretty good too. The set-up is this: Whitty and Macready play a pair of fruitloops … Read more
Romanzo Criminale
Translated as “Crime Novel”, this Italian drama follows three childhood friends, Il Freddo (Kim Rossi Stuart), Libano (a brilliantly psychotic Pierfrancesco Favino) and Il Dandi (Claudio Santamaria) as they make their way from smalltime thuggery to bigtime gangsterism. Finally, a film about gangsters made by real Italians, I hear you say. And they’re real gangsters too, the Magliani outfit, who not only hoovered up the drugs business in 1970s Italy but also got involved with the terrorist Red Brigades and the execution of the president, Aldo Moro, in 1978. Moustaches, lapels, chest hair, male jewellery. Being a film kicking off in the 1970s, Romanzo Criminale staggers under their weight in its pursuit of … Read more
Eliminators
It’s easy to get sniffy about films like Eliminators, spam-fisted actioners featuring one lunk or another kicking the life out of some meathead, delivering the coup de grace with a quip that’s meant to be James Bond but is more often than not Steven Seagal. Even Seagal has been known to make good films, so let’s park the prejudices and get down to action. Scott Adkins, a British actor, plays a federal agent hiding out in London on some witness protection program, whose life is upended when three local desparadoes looking for a stash of cocaine break in to his house waving guns about. They threaten his daughter, bad mistake, and are soon … Read more
Ghosts
Ghosts (Gespenster in the German original) is the film Christian Petzold made between Wolfsburg and the one that bounced him more into the international spotlight, Yella. It’s the second of his Ghosts trilogy – Die innere Sicherheit (aka The State I’m In) and Yella are the other two – and like Die innere Sicherheit stars Julia Hummer as a bit of a waif trying to shore up her personality against a hostile world. Here she’s a teenage girl who lives in a home, a shy kid who one day meets her exact opposite, a tough street rat who lives on her wits, largely by shoplifting, and who knows what else. Nina (Hummer) is … Read more
Annie
Annie is the “turn that frown upside down” musical seemingly custom-built for stagestruck kids. But in writer/director/songsmith Will Gluck’s updating, it breaks out of the greasepaint shuffle-step limbo it’s been consigned to and makes a bold dash for the spotlight. Gluck opens with a swerve, showing us a precocious and stagestruck young ginger Annie holding her classmates to ransom with a show-and-tell delivered with weapons-grade winsomeness. Then swivels to reveal that this isn’t the titular Annie, but another one. The Annie we’re interested in is played by Quvenzhané Wallis, the cute kid from Beasts of the Southern Wild. And god is she cute. A bright little button who is the making of this singing, … Read more
In My Mind
In My Mind is a close relative of one of those Nick Broomfield documentaries where, instead of making a film about his original subject, Broomfield tells the story of how he tried, but failed, to get his man or woman (see Tracking Down Maggie, about failing to get an interview with Margaret Thatcher, or Kurt and Courtney, in which he chased Courtney Love, to her increasing irritation). The person in question here is Patrick McGoohan and the film-maker is Chris Rodley, who in 1983 was sent to LA by Britain’s Channel 4 to film some interviews with McGoohan for an upcoming documentary about the cult 1960s TV series The Prisoner, which Channel 4 … Read more
Undine
So, an Undine. It’s a mythical water nymph, mentioned by Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician, but you won’t learn that directly from Christian Petzold’s latest drama, an increasingly bizarre and dislocated story of love suffused with magical realist moments that make no sense at all… unless you realise that the titular Undine (Paula Beer) is a version of the mythical creature who fell in love with a human. This Undine is a pencil-skirted guide to historical Berlin. She’s fresh out of a relationship with a guy she thought was the one, now propelled by fate into another one when a fish tank explodes and she and a man she’s just met (Franz Rogowski) are … Read more
