Popular Reviews
Million Dollar Legs
Originally intended as a Marx Brothers movie, Million Dollar Legs is a comedy with humour verging on the surreal and is set in a familiar Marx Brothers world. Even so it’s probably too mad even for them. It’s so familiar, in fact, that you might wonder if they read Joseph Mankiewicz’s original treatment for Million Dollar Legs and rejected it because there wasn’t enough meat in it for all the brothers but liked its basic outline enough to borrow it for Duck Soup, which came out the following year, 1933. Duck Soup is the one where Groucho is the ruler of a bankrupt country called Freedonia, who goes to war to save his … Read more
13 October 2014-10-13
Home Entertainment Out in the UK This Week Kidnapped (cert 18, DVD/digital) From Spaniard Miguel Angel Vivas a home invasion horror which understands that for the film to work we have to be entirely on the side of the invaded. And also, that we have to feel their shock, disorientation and fear. He achieves both brilliantly in this brutal, relatively short film that takes place over one evening and does a lot with long takes, then switches pace with some excellent split-screen, up-close points of view. It’s the standard family – mum, dad, whingey teenage girl and, eventually, her boyfriend. But it’s far from a standard film. Where Vivas came from, I don’t know … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 20 – School for Traitors
Mrs Gale takes a rest and Venus Smith gets another outing in an episode set at an elite Oxbridge-style university and kicking off with a death (again) before the credits (again). Steed is sent in to find out what happened to the man he was meant to have been keeping an eye on, after a briefing from a different control, One-Seven (Frederick Farley), a ridiculous throwback complete with cigarette holder and winged collar. A much chattier, gamine Venus Smith is introduced early on. Smith just happens to be gigging at the university’s rag week, which is handy for Steed, who has soon also inveigled his way into the grove of academe and is … Read more
They Made Me a Fugitive
Exactly why the 1947 crime drama They Made Me a Fugitive was renamed I Became a Criminal for its US release is something of a mystery. One is more passive, the other more active, yup, understood. But the original title is better, punchier and asks a question – who made who a criminal? Whereas the US title is kind of flappy – so you became a criminal, so what? The irony is that this British movie really wants to be an American one. It’s soaked in the stylings, characters and logic of film noir, with mean streets, a femme fatale and a slightly off-centre Mr Big at the centre of it. Though, this … Read more
Monkey Man
Monkey Man is the latest in a string of John Wick-adjacent movies. Blame Liam Neeson for starting it, with those Taken movies. Or the Incredible Hulk, and his “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” warning. Or even, just maybe, the vengeful God of the Old Testament. You don’t want to get any of these guys riled. It’s Dev Patel this time around, returning to the India of his breakthrough movie role. Slumdog Millionaire made Patel movie-famous after TV show Skins had made him TV-famous (in the days when there was still a big difference). Here he is playing a guy from the streets wangling a job in a high-end brothel so he … Read more
Skinamarink
My parents used to say “Skinnymalink” rather than “Skinamarink”. As affectionate insults go I suppose it was better than one alternative description, which was “long streak of piss”. The dictionary tells us the word has something to do with an old Scottish children’s song, Skinamalinky Long Legs, which (to vary the spelling yet again) went: “Skinny Malinky long legs / Big banana feet / Went to the pictures but couldnae find a seat / When the picture started / Skinny Malinky farted / Skinny Malinky long legs / Big banana feet.” The name probably came from the dialect word “Manikie” a little man (like mannequin) – so a skinamarink is skinny little man. All of … Read more
Sweet Thing
Writer/director Alexandre Rockwell’s Sweet Thing is his 11th film in about 40 years and is a small-scale affair, as you might expect from an indie mainstay, crewed largely by students on the NYU film course he teaches and starring his own family and long-time collaborators. It’s the story of bright teenage girl Billie (Rockwell’s daughter Lana) and her brother Nico (his son Nico) living a ramshackle life with their drunken dad (regular Rockwell presence Will Patton). Somewhere in the wings is their neglectful mother Eve (Karyn Parsons, the kids’ real mother) and her current boyfriend, the bragadocious Beaux (ML Josepher), onto whose mercies Billie and Nico are thrown when dad ends up in … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 13 – Too Many Christmas Trees
Time magazine’s Swinging London issue appeared in April 1966 and made “official” what had been obvious for some time – something was going on in the UK capital. To find out what that looked like at the time, you could do worse than examine Too Many Christmas Trees, the Christmas Day episode of The Avengers from 1965, a very swinging, very British mix of the modern and the antique. Very mind-control-oriented too, the whole thing kicking off with a kitsch dream sequence – Steed in silk pyjamas and bowler hat wandering through a land of fake snow and cutout Christmas trees towards a wrapped Christmas gift with his name on it. A hideous … Read more
The Ladykillers
Now that there’s a new team at Ealing Studios, using an illustrious old name to sell underweight product (St Trinian’s, Dorian Gray, Burke and Hare) it’s a good time to look back at 1955’s The Ladykillers, the last classic of the studio’s golden era. Its director, Alexander Mackendrick, also called the shots on Whisky Galore! in 1949 and The Man In The White Suit in 1951 and would go on to make one of America’s most rancidly brilliant satires, The Sweet Smell of Success. But here the accent is definitely on the sweet smell of lavender water, as a group of robbers, led by Alec Guinness’s caterpillar-browed Professor Marcus, first fool an old … Read more
I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
In I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (originally Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari), Romanian auteur Radu Jude takes on the his country’s treatment of the Jews in the Second World War, as part of Hitler’s Final Solution. The title comes from a speech made by Romanian leader Ion Antonescu in 1941, which effectively initiated the campaign of mass murder on the Eastern Front. Romania was allied with the Nazis at the time. Ioana Iacob stars as a stand-in for Jude, playing Mariana, a Romanian director attempting to put on a show about Romanian wartime atrocities and getting pushback at every turn. Researching … Read more
The Last One for the Road
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Don Quixote, Lost in Translation, Waiting for Godot, The Last One for the Road (aka Le città di pianura) contains elements of all, without obviously borrowing from them. A “state of Europe/Italy” comedy of sorts, it follows two drunken has-beens – smalltime criminals who are waiting for their boss Genio to show up and in the meantime are drinking themselves to a standstill. It’s funny, amused, cock-eyed, nostalgic, a little bit 1990s, a touch Tarantino, and rests entirely on the performances of Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla as Carlobiancho and Doriano. Strange, old-fashioned names for a pair of fiftysomething archetypes who we meet utterly drunk and … Read more
Raya and the Last Dragon
Remember when Disney princesses just lay about in glass cases waiting to be kissed? Raya and the Last Dragon gives us the latest iteration of the new style of Disney female, joining Mulan, Merida (from Brave) and Moana in a kick-butty world of smarts where any obvious interest in looking glasses or clothes is deeply suspect. Disney love the ™ symbol but as I write Raya has not yet been made a part of the Princess Line™. She’s up there with the best of them so it can only be a matter of time. Her film has a driving story with emotional depth, a good voice cast, doesn’t overdo the cutes and there … Read more
